You are an awesome freelancer who knows your stuff and do your job way beyond ‘the best’; but you don’t know how to attract customers! You are a great Web Designer who excels in designing responsive websites, or an excellent Freelance Writer who can knock down anybody with killer headlines.
Are you getting what you deserve or are you struggling to get clients for your self-made business?
After being all that you are, do you still think you are going wrong somewhere?
In today’s world of online marketing and social media reputation, it takes more than just providing good services. Freelancing is a small business in itself where you are the CEO, CTO, and CFO, along with being an intern and an office boy.
Apart from playing these roles, the biggest challenge would be the role of a marketer, where, you need to focus on building an audience for your business. The audience comprises of your fans, your disciples, and more importantly your potential clients.
In order to gain success with marketing your services, you ought to include audience building as one of your primary strategies because audiences are your:
- Feedback delegates
- Testimonial mines
- Clients treasure
- Alternate money-making source
- Social media sharing hub, and
- Your potential referrals
Taking your offline Freelance business online and building an audience for global recognition could be difficult only if you don’t follow these little tricks for your prospects!
#1 Be a secret father and then disown
Be the father of marketing content and create awesome material that you want to sell to make money. You can create e-courses, e-books, epic guest posts, etc., and then forget that you created them with the intention to sell, now disown and give them away for free.
The greatest benefit of disowning your products and offering them for free is that you succeed in building an audience, and social media fans and boost your income. Even blogs by thought leaders like Moz blog do offer freebies that are actually worth paying for.
While disowning is not a sin, giving away crap just for the sake of it definitely is.
#2 Give it a spin and you can win
It is a well-known fact that blog content marketing is not only cost-effective but also acts as a catalyst to build authority and audience instantly.
But yes, at times you might get stuck and start wondering about your success rate in blogging. Running out of ideas for blog titles in the long run becomes obvious but here is your trick. Spin the titles from other blogs in your niche and get going.
Spinning the titles is risky I agree, but even the giants like Neil Patel of QuickSprout believe it.
Getting inspired by the titles is not a sin in itself but yes if you are not being original with the body or offering your point of view, then it is definitely something considered offensive in terms of ethics as well as in terms of copyrights.
#3 Gamble and make fans
Give and take policy works at its best to build an audience where offering freebies to even sell the stale (!) makes an awesome marketing and fan-building strategy.
The Tricks:
- Freebies for list building
- Offer freebies as part of ‘buy 1 get 1 free along with your freelance products
- The reward for registering for events or courses
- Offer freebies to your clients for hiring services
Freebie marketing not only brings you more business but also helps you build authority in your niche and spread the word free of cost for your business. This is a great marketing trick to attract more clients for your freelance services.
Gambling is bad and a kind of ‘sloth’ but when done for mutual benefit it is more than a trick.
#4 Work less and talk more
Applying the rule by Derek Halpern i.e. 80/20 principle where it makes sense to create 20% content and 80% marketing, I believe now is the time to create less content and talk more about your creation.
Make the most of social media networks, forums, link building, etc., and use every medium to market your content. It makes no point if your quality content is not reached the target audience.
Building an effective content marketing strategy is the key to success. Every piece of content that you create needs to reach your prospects to reap the benefits and leverage the potential market.
#5 Serve the lust if you want to attract customers
People are constantly on the look out for easy and quick tips to succeed. Give them the toughest tips but tell them it is easy to do and they believe. Serve them what they want with a dash of what you actually want to serve.
Getting your audience to believe is the first step towards keeping them interested in your stuff. Serve them exaggeration, give them a shock, or surprise them and they are all eyes and ears. The theory of demand and supply always works wonders.
Undress the power of lust in humans and connect with your audience by offering what they are eager to hear. Quench their lust; yet make them work towards the goal.
#6 Time travel to steal some shoes
Sneak in the shoes of natural marketing advisors and intellects of yesteryears to steal their ideas. One great example of such genius is David Ogilvy. His natural ability to awe the customers is worth stealing (!).
In the highly competitive business world where every single product or service offered has huge competition, mere begin original and creative will not do. It is this era where stealing ideas and getting inspiration makes sense like never before.
Beth Hayden, staff writer of Copy Blogger, says –
Cleverness doesn’t sell products and services. Original thinking in marketing is great, but not just for the sake of being witty or clever. If you aren’t thinking about connecting with your audience, building trust and selling your products or services when you sit down to write marketing copy, you need to reexamine your motivations.
#7 Be a shark and eat the fishes that come your way
Let’s get talking about “creative destruction” and start killing the competition.
Here’s how to go about it:
Live behind your wish to survive in the business and strive to win.
Appreciate and adapt your competitor’s best practices while trying to be more creative.
Kill your competition positively by excelling in the services you provide. Soon you will be surprised to see that you have already started draining your competitors’ audience your way to being the best.
Whether you will be a serial killer or not, just remember that it’s competition that made you better and it’s your competitors who made you think beyond the obvious.
It’s simply good to battle for being the best; it’s bad to war against the best.
#8 Cute and cuddly, pretty and awesome
Being a freelancer it is important to make your social media presence felt and keep your audience engaged.
There is no perfect way to do it than using visual content marketing such as:
- Young and pretty faces talking about your stuff in videos
- Babies enticing your brand with an innocent smile
- Cute little puppies and kittens mesmerizing your fans and followers, and
- Bare chest hunks (remember old spice!) promoting your products, etc.
Hubspot tagged this trick as “shameless marketing…” but it also gives examples where these shameless tactics work well at their best.
While it is not a problem to promote yourself on social media using pictures and videos of innocents, you should be cautious enough to draw that fine line beyond which it is termed as exploitation.
#9 Spy like a detective of your ex
Do you envy your ex or spy on him/her to watch their moves?
If you have answered ‘yes’ then this little trick can be managed well by you! Because now is your turn to spy on competitors too.
Watch with a magnifying glass and study your competitors’ strategies and moves.
Learn not just from their success but also from their failure.
Marketing and building an audience is best done either by experimenting or learning from others.
It is important to keep an eye on your competitors to know what is working in your niche and what isn’t.
Learn and copy from your competitors but paste it with a difference and essence.
#10 Poke your nose in everybody’s business
Poking your nose is extremely important in the positive sense to build relationships and market your stuff. It is an interesting fact that your audience comprises your opponents as well.
- Peak a boo in the comments section
- Disagree with giants
- Make controversial statements
- Write guest posts on your competitors’ blog
- Cry for a social share of your stuff
- Give applauds and praise to others on social media
- Share other’s stuff with prompts even when not asked and
- Lend a helping hand even if it’s your competitor
No matter where you leave your footprints just make sure that you talk sense, make sense, and never annoy others by going overboard.
I am a freelancer myself who ‘blogs for hire’ and hence staying true to my belief of ‘under promise and over deliver’, here is one last filthy bonus for making it this far.
When it comes to marketing and building an audience –
- Look around the web
- Learn from the gurus
- Chase the thought leaders
- Follow the nasty Tweeples
- Binge your appetite on free content
- Get greedy for ideas
- Steal the strengths of your competitors
Grow as big as you can and then be yourself with all these inputs to make your authority stable.
Learning is a continuous process and it doesn’t necessarily be copying as long as you respect the creators and give them the credit they deserve.
Start following these 11 tricks and you will not only succeed in building an audience for your freelance business, but also you will soon start selling your services like hotcakes.
Please don’t poke your nose in my business and do not give a damn to share this post. Also, beware not to make any comments since it is one of the sins explained above!
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