Actually, this is an online marketing guide for everyone, but it should be used extensively by freelance writers as well.
If you know anything about online marketing, SEO, or social networking (social marketing, to some) you know that there are tons of sites out there and even more ways to use those websites, services, and the like to market your freelance writing business online. In fact, there are so many different things that you could do that to learn about all of them would take so long that you would never have any time to actually earn money writing.
On the other hand, if you don’t do some of these online marketing things, you are taking the long, hard road to building your freelance writing business. Worse, you are setting yourself up to eventually be passed by newer, savvier — but not necessarily better — writers who do skillfully use online marketing methods.
Avoiding this Catch-22 is not easy and doing anything with half-effort can do more harm than good.
How to Market A Writing Business Online
Right now over at the SEO website SEOMoz on is a post called The Noob Guide to Online Marketing. It is without a doubt the most comprehensive and easy to understand look at the full field of online marketing and how the individual pieces worth and compliment each other. As an added bonus for visual learners, it also comes with an enormous infographic (900 x 4246) that you can use to help manage the pieces that you bite off as you go.
Starting at Step 1 and marching on until you have reached the end is a good way to use up all of your writing time, so I don’t recommend blindly following through the entire way. However, thanks to the layout of the article and the quality of the infographic that accompanies it, it makes for a useful roadmap to marketing your business online by yourself. Best of all, these same qualities make it easy to start, stop, do freelance writing work, then come back and pick up on your online marketing plan.
Follow the link. Save the infographic to your hard drive. Use Zotero to take a snapshot of both webpages. Print it out.
Do it now.
This is the kind of article that people find out is worth something and it suddenly disappears or becomes available only to those who register or sign up for something. That day is likely fast approaching so you want to have your own permanent copy that you can reference forever no matter where the original goes.
Happy Tuesday. Write well.