Inexpensive but Effective Marketing For Freelancers

February 22, 2009

When most people set out to do freelance work, the most difficult obstacle is how to find the first few clients. Once you’ve got a client or two under your belt, the challenge becomes bigger – since the only way to sustain a successful freelance career is to learn how to generate consistent income.

One of the easiest ways to obtain consistent income is through repeat clients, since you aren’t required to continue the tedious and time-consuming task of marketing in order to get more work from an existing client.

Until you reach the point of consistent income through a steady client base though, you’ll need methods of connecting with clients who are looking for the services you provide. Here are a few inexpensive, but affective marketing methods for freelancers who have a small budget for advertising:

A Blog

Even if you don’t know anything about HTML or setting up a website, you can set up a blog in a matter of minutes, thanks to services like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com. Both of these services (as well as many more) give you a free domain name and hosting to start your blog.

Once you set up your free blog, you can use it like a website with static pages of information about your services and how to contact you – or you can use it as a blog and write new content regularly. No matter how you decide to use your blog, you’ll want to make it possible for people to contact you about your services.

Article Marketing

It’s not good enough to have an online presence, you have to also bring traffic to your blog or website. Without internet traffic, no one will know your site exists. Write articles on topics related to the service you offer (graphic design, web design, writing, etc) and submit them to directories like EzineArticles.com, isnare.com and goarticles.com. Set up your profile with these sites to include a link back to your blog or website.

When you publish an article on one of these directories, your blog or website receives an incoming link (good for SEO purposes). The purpose of the directories is to provide reprintable content to other website owners and newsletter publishers – so each time your articles get picked up and published on another site, you receive another incoming link. Links help with search engine optimization and can help people find your site easier.

Writing and submitting regularly (once a week, for example) will bring you better results over a longer period of time than writing and submitting 40 articles all at once and then giving up on article marketing.

Blog Carnivals

If you regularly update your blog with informative articles, you can then submit the blog posts to various carnivals. Blog carnivals are another way to receive incoming links. If the articles you submit to the carnivals get linked to from the carnival host blog, you get the incoming link, and will usually receive readers as well, as they click through to read your article.

Form Strategic Partnerships

When you partner with companies who have customers who are also likely to want the type of services you offer, both people/companies benefit. For example, freelance writers can partner with web developers. Web developers create the websites for their clients, but most do not also write the content that goes on the web pages. The freelance writer can provide the content for the web developer’s clients; and a freelance writer will work with clients who are likely to need web development services – so the collaboration is beneficial to both parties.

Marketing does not have to cost a fortune to give good results. The key to marketing that will bring you results is to establish a system and use it consistently.

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