Nine years after I started my freelance career, I’ve become an overnight success. In the last two weeks, these leads all came my way: “I was a participant in your writing workshop a few years ago, now I want to do one for my own department.” — Executive at Fortune 50 firm. “You edited my…
There are three sources of business for a freelancer: repeat business, referrals, and leads. Repeat business is great, referrals are very good, and leads are problematic. How do you want to spend your time? Here’s a definition of a successful freelance business: Spending your time doing what you do best for people who appreciate it,…
When you’re a freelancer, leads are your lifeline. Where do they come from? Five years experience at this has taught me that while content marketing works, tone is just as important as content. Back up a bit. I have had six full-time jobs in my pre-freelance career. The first five of them I got through…
There are three basic ways for a freelancer to get business: inbound queries, referrals, and community participation. They have one thing in common: being nice pays off. Inbound is effective, but expensive Inbound marketers would have you believe that if you create awesome, SEO-enabled content, leads will roll in. They are right, but it is…
My non-profit needs to build an online community with some very specific requirements and a completely new Web site. So I posted for help on Facebook. I got some great responses and some awful ones, which revealed a lot about the business netiquette of social media. While messages on Facebook are informal, they succeed only when they’re…
I thought Facebook would help me sell books. Instead, what it has done is to boost my brand among a big group of influential people and give me opportunities to get paid. As a result, I can see how it’s assimilating many Web functions, a trend that worries me. I’m a mid-level business author. While my…