You’ve seen the snaps of freelancers working while gazing across Bali’s most beautiful beaches; you’ve heard about writer’s who set their own hours and live where they want. Only one question remains: how do I do that too?
The digital nomad lifestyle is an attractive dream for many, but it’s not that hard to make it a reality. You don’t have to be a writer, endless online job opportunities exist, such as:
- Programming/coding
- Virtual assistant
- Graphic design
- eCommerce
- and many, many more.
Whatever career path you chose to take, there’s one tool that will help your business growth exponentially. Having a website is an essential pursuit for any online freelancer.
Here’s why:
Diverse Marketing Hub
If you’re a freelancer, you may have had the following problem when constructing your résumé. With so many projects in short spaces of time, how can you present your achievements without producing a veritable novel for your employers.
Having a website is a modern solution for a modern problem. It allows you to showcase all of your work in a fun, aesthetic, and interactive way. A prospective client is much more likely to click through numerous pages of a site, than they are to leaf through several pages of a résumé.
Here are some tips for creating a marketing hub that grabs attention:
- Create a brand personality, with color scheme, logo and cohesive font choices.
- Use multimedia to avoid banal, repetitive pages.
- Give your proudest projects the prime space (i.e. on the homepage)
- Create a logical navigation system to find your way around the site.
- If any of your work occurs offline – e.g. events – create blog style posts documenting the experience.
Centralize Social Media Correspondence
Social media is a powerful promotion tool. In fact, most freelancers find clients via this method. The problem is that not all social media is created equal; audiences differ massively, and it’s worth targeting them all.
Consider these statistics.
- 68 percent of users prefer Facebook as their primary social network
- 35 percent prefer Instagram
- 29 percent use Pinterest
- 24 percent use Twitter.
This doesn’t even begin to cover job-specific social media, such as LinkedIn, Upwork and Fiverr. Maintaining accounts on all these sites so they actually benefit you is an incredible time investment. You have to be active, platform specific and relentless to grow your following.
The benefit of having a website is that it can act as a central resource to which all your social networks point. Instead of providing in-depth content on every platform, you can include short snippets and links to your website. This way, you can target a wider audience while streamlining your workload.
Establish Online Presence
Finding clients online is largely down to being visible. While social media provides you some visibility, it only really promotes your services to those in your network. Having a website gives you the opportunity to pop up in Google searches.
By creating relevant articles and posts around keywords in your industry, then you can target your content to search engines. This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is a tactic used by most website to increase their visibility.
Creating articles is also a way to demonstrate your authority on a topic. If a potential client reads a in-depth post written by you, which shows you understand their niche, then they’re more likely to trust your services as a freelancer.
Establish Trustworthiness
While visibility is important, it’s not the only factor for securing new clients. Employers need to know that they can trust you to produce high-quality work in a timely manner. One of the best ways to establish this trust is through reviews and feedback from past jobs.
On your website, it’s easy to set up a form where happy customers can leave their thoughts on your experience. Alternatively, you can copy and paste feedback you receive on other platforms – like Upwork or Google – and link to the original source.
Jumpstart Your Freelance Career Quickly
According to FreeTrain, over one billion hours of freelance work was completed in America per week this year. If you want to get a slice of this pie, then you need to establish your position as a trusted, well-known remote worker.
Having a website comes with numerous benefits, including:
- Marketing your skills and abilities
- Streamlining your social media correspondence
- Promoting your services in Search Engines
- Proving your legitimacy
If you are yet to create your own website, now is the time to start.
2018 · 