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10 Feb 10 Freelance writing – Have You Read Your Job Description?

If you thought by choosing freelance writing as a career you will just write, write, and do nothing else then let me prick the balloon. Your client wants many more things from you. Do not get scared, you will not be asked to do any fancy stuff like coding, scripting, PPC campaigns, and all.

Then what other works a client will demand?

Basically, you will be asked to do stuffs related to writing only. And in my career, primarily I have been asked to do following types of work (other than writing):

  • Many clients have asked me to do like keyword research, for writing purpose only. This actually is not all that bad. It helped me conceptualize the article or press release while researching.
  • At times, clients also asked me to submit articles to various social bookmarking sites. I helped my clients with 2-3 submissions, at max. I do not think I would have agreed to submit an article to 100 or so social bookmarking sites. It would have been waste of time for me, but for 3-4, I never said no.
  • Clients may also ask for content suggestions, and about other things he can do to meet his goal. This in fact is an opportunity in disguise to cross sell other services that you offer. If you are writing only articles for your client then you may suggest him to use press release to get some link juice, or may be forum posting and all.
  • I have also given some marketing and SEO suggestions to my clients. Depending upon your background (I have my background in marketing), you can either say yes or politely say no.

Word of caution

Do not say no to your clients’ request, at least not directly, if you can help him. And also do not ask for money for every suggestion that you offer—I know people who do so—because it looks cheap. For that work you may get paid, but it will reflect badly on your professionalism. You may lose the client.

If the work is going to take hours of your work then say this to client, and if it is going to take hardly 10-15 minutes then do not bother. It also depends upon your relationship with your client.

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14 Jan 10 Twitter Tools To Help You Succeed

Using Twitter and building an audience are two things I’ve written about before.  But keeping innovative to maintain that audience is just as important.  Keeping people involved in your page isn’t always enough.  The mass audience tends to forget fairly quickly, so if you don’t change up your tweeting often, you can find yourself being ignored very quickly.  Changing with the times, and updating your account as often as possible are key to staying on top.

One of the best tactics to do that, is the use of sites like tweetlater.com, which allows you to set up tweets at any future date, time, etc that you choose.  Sites like these are a great tool to keep your tweets regular.  So if you know you’re going to be busy later, or if you have a great idea now, you can always save them to use at a different time.  Keeping your tweets coming regularly, and keeping them all stellar, is the best way to keep interest.

Other tools like Twazzup lets you track hashtags, allowing you to see what’s going on in relation to your tweets.  This is extremely useful so that you can see who is re-tweeting your hashtags, and what context they’re being reused.  This can help you formulate strategies by sticking to campaigns that tend to be more successful than others.

Don’t forget to make use of tools that asses the market you’re trying to reach as well.  Services like the Forrester Profile Calculator help you find where and how potential customers are looking for information.  Making use of these can really help you grow your page, because you’ll know just how to target that demographic that’s most important to your page.

Finding them is easy enough, but remember that you have to keep writing interesting and engaging tweets to keep them there.  Holding attention in the long run is much more difficult that gaining attention at first.

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