Make REAL money blogging for hire.
Your dream client is visiting your freelance writer website right now, while you’re reading this.
They heard about you, they think you sound awesome, and their budget is huge.
But what they read on your website puts them off the idea. They don’t pick up the phone. They hit backspace, and they go somewhere else.
Do you want that to happen to you?
Of course not. But it happens more often than you’d ever like to think. So let’s do something about that, today.
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Freelance writing and blogging are terms you know and probably identify pretty strongly with.
But there’s another term you should feel equally close to, even if it sounds somewhat foreign and unrelated to your writing work. Content marketing could save our writing careers, yet far too many of us don’t really know what it is. Here’s what, and why, you need to know.
Content marketing is a marketing style that uses content (blog posts, infographics, e-books, videos, magazines, etc.) to engage potential customers, rather than directly sell a product or service to them.
If this sounds foreign to you, it shouldn’t. You’re more familiar with content marketing than you might think, and one of its earliest forms is something you certainly recognize: soap operas.
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There’s this thing that keeps happening.
Not to you. To me. For once, I’m starting a blog post by talking about myself… but only so I can talk about you.
Yeah, you. The one who says you don’t know what you have to offer a client, or what your specialist expertise might be.
It keeps happening. I have conversations that go something like this:
BAFB READER: I recently started freelance writing and I don’t really feel confident asking for money because I don’t know much about anything. I’m not an expert, I’m just a writer. And I’m scared to send any queries in case I get rejected. Or in case I don’t get rejected. Or in case I get writer’s block after I’ve been hired. Or in case I just can’t handle the pressure of a writer’s life and go crazy like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
ME: Oh. OK. So, um, what did you do before you started freelance writing?
BAFB READER: Oh, I was a professor in advanced examples at the University of Examples. Then I spent a couple of years as an examples artist at the Example Institute for Impressive Examples.
ME [With restraint.]: So… did you ever think that maybe you could get started by writing about… you know… examples?
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One question Be a Freelance Blogger readers ask a lot is: how can I convince a potential client that I’m the right writer for them?
The answer: you don’t have to convince. You just show them, and they convince themselves.
The convention of proof in freelance blogging is that you give the potential client links to 2 or 3 of your most relevant published posts, or to your online portfolio. But what if you had bigger, more powerful proof to offer?
What if you gave them a copy of your book on their niche topic?
Let me give away your potential client’s big secret right here: they’re human, and they’re impressed by the same stuff as anybody else. That means they view you as an expert in any topic you’ve published a book about. Magazine articles and academic publications count for a lot, too, but a book tops the list.
Yeah, yeah, publish a book. Riiiight, Sophie.
I’m not kidding. Self-publishing isn’t difficult; there’s a learning curve, but it’s nothing you can’t handle. And I’ve brought in an expert to give us a few pointers.
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Whether you make New Year’s resolutions or not, you have intentions every day of your life.
The path through this year, for most people, will be paved with good intentions until mid-January, maybe as far as February. After that it gets more like crazy paving.
No matter what you had planned, the universe happens. And your resolutions, your good intentions, fade into the background.
Why? Because intentions aren’t actions. Because resolve doesn’t carry any weight unless *you* make it so. Because it takes more than willpower to change a habit for the better.
Because it takes a special kind of courage to own yourself.
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