by Danielle McGaw

It seems like every site you join these days has a profile section that they want you to fill in.  And it can be tempting to skip it and just get down to business but your profile is the place that people go when they want to know more about you.  And if you are a freelance writer that wants people to contact you for work, you need to have that profile filled out!

It is easy to forget that clients often use search engines to find out more about you.  If you would like to have more private clients it can be helpful to have your name easily found on the search engines.  If they find nothing about you, they might assume that you have little to no experience and choose someone else for the job.  If you have control of the information about you that is available online, you can influence their opinion.

Where Should I Fill Out Profiles?

I’m sure you already belong to sites that ask you to fill out a profile so some of these should seem familiar to you:

• Twitter: Twitter doesn’t leave you a lot of room to fill out a profile but it allows you to do two things that you should be concentrating on. You should remember to fill in the url to the main site that you want to refer potential clients to and you should make use of the 160 characters that they provide you to tell people about yourself.  I can tell you that I rarely follow back if the profile is not filled out.  And if you are a writer that wants work, how will people know that unless you say so?
• Facebook:   Facebook allows you to choose what is public and not public.  You may choose to keep your profile private but you can include your website on your public profile.
• LinkedIn:  LinkedIn is very public so treat it as it is intended – a professional profile!  One of the best things you can do is completely fill out your Summary with a well thought out description of who you are and what you do.  Use keywords that you would like people to find you with.  And don’t forget to include specialties – these are like tags.
• YouTube:  Even if you don’t make videos yourself you can have a YouTube Channel to display your favourite videos.  On your YouTube Channel you can include a website, an About Me section, and a title.
• Google Profile: Google profiles leave you a lot of room to share information about yourself – perhaps more information than any of the other social networks.  You can have a long Introduction that includes clickable and dofollow links; you can also include a Link List (that is also dofollow).
• Forums:  Forums are a great place to leave a profile so be sure to fill it out.  You can also create a signature that is included in each post and will also be featured on your profile.   If you participate in niche specific forums that are about the type of writing you specialize in, your profile is especially important.
• Blogger Profile: On the Blogger blogging platform you can fill out your profile with all sorts of details, including links.  If you have Blogger blogs you can include this profile on each one.
• Article marketing sites like InfoBarrel and Bukisa: If you are a freelance writer you probably do at least some article marketing or you might write for residual income on sites; make the most of your profile.  Most sites will allow you to leave links, too, and some of them are dofollow links.
• Profile pages like About.me and MyOnePage.com: These pages are specifically for creating a profile page online.  You have space to write about yourself and space to leave links.

What Should I Avoid Putting on My Profile?

The key thing to remember about profiles is that they should always be professional.  They are not a place to rant and rave about your personal pet peeves or people you don`t like – unless that is a niche that you want to establish yourself as an expert in.  Ask yourself if you would provide the information on your profile in an interview.  If the answer is no, then don’t share it.

The other thing you should remember is that you need to be safe so don’t include the following:

• Phone numbers
• Address of your home
• Addresses of places you work
• Social insurance number/social security number

What Should I Include on My Profile?

Profiles are a great place to sell yourself and your services but you shouldn’t sound like you’re selling yourself.

“I’m the best writer and you’ll never be unsatisfied with my services!  Order today while I still have time!” – this sounds very sales pitchy.

Work on producing tight, focused text that is revealing, attractive, and gives the reader the impression that your goal is purely to help them.  Make them believe that it is to their benefit to hire you over someone else because of the special skills you offer or the in depth client service that they will receive from you.  After reading your profile they should believe that you are the only person that they could hire for the job because there is something special about you.

If you have a small profile space to utilize make sure that you use specific wording that is descriptive enough to pack a punch in the word/character constraints.  You need to get their attention fast and then have a place for them to go.

For example, on my Twitter profile it says, “My words are for hire but the attention to detail and my excellent communication skills are FREE with every order! ” and the link directly under that goes to my professional freelance writer site where they can view samples, see my resume, read testimonials, and contact me, of course.

When you have more room, like on LinkedIn or Google Profiles, it doesn’t give you free reign to babble on randomly about whatever you want.  You should still keep your focus and bring the client’s attention to the things that are most important – in other words, how they can benefit from using your services.

Start filling out your profiles more thoroughly and with more thought and you are likely to experience better results from your activities online.  Social media is only useful for helping you get more writing work if people are aware of the fact that you are a writer and can see the benefits of hiring you.  Other web presences, like forums and profile page, increase your credibility and give you the opportunity to control what people find when they search for you online.

So what are you waiting for!  Get those profiles filled out, writers!

Danielle McGaw is a freelance writer that has been obsessed with writing since she learned how to hold a pen.  She lives in a small town in Canada where she writes daily and goes for coffee a lot.  You can visit her on her blog, The Social Media Freelancer or visit her professional freelance writer site if you would like to contact her.

Improve Your Marketing Success

I’ve advocated marketing to help the writing clients find you as much as possible. By marketing and helping clients find you, you can make more money and reduce your competition instead of focusing all your energy on banging on the same doors as dozens of other freelance writers who saw a gig listed on a job board. For those that have started that marketing campaign to help clients find them, here are some tips to help you get people to query as well as to successfully court those new prospects once they make first contact.

Website Design

There are lots of ways to get traffic to your business website. But when you get traffic to your site, what’s there? Beyond a professional-looking website or blog, make sure your pages correspond to the types of keywords you’re trying to attract traffic for. Analyse your traffic reports regularly to investigate how people arrive on various pages. Does the content on their entry page deliver what they’re searching for and display your skills in the best light possible?  Anticipate your visitor’s wants and needs on that page in terms of content, navigation, and links that can help them delve deeper for the best user experience possible.

Contact Page

Instead of hoping prospects will dig for your e-mail address, provide a contact page. Most website templates have this feature built in and it saves you from having to publish your address on the site, which leaves you vulnerable to spammers.

Initial Response

When someone touches base, I often use a new client questionnaire that I’ve developed to help me with their initial project. It also helps them see that I am professional in my approach of trying to find out how to best help them. The questionnaire should help you understand the scope of the project for quoting and researching purposes as well as help minimise crossed signals and rewrite requests. Questions on your questionnaire can relate to target audience, call to action, SEO keywords, and more. Another thing I like about the questionnaire is that it gives me an opportunity to indicate my terms.  My questionnaire has a blurb about my payment terms, details about copyright, and info about my revision policy. It helps set expectations up front.

Next Steps

If the prospect doesn’t make the next steps clear, don’t be afraid to ask. I give people time to absorb the info included in my quote and if I am interested in hearing back from them but  don’t hear back within 2-3 days I do a follow up to find out if I can provide further info to help them make a buying decision.

Additional Tips:

1. Try to anticipate potential questions when laying out your website and answer those questions. List samples, list your specialties, and demonstrate your expertise. If you do, chances are that by the time people contact you, they’ve already decided you’re someone they’re seriously considering hiring and this can shorten the pre-sales process as well as save you time during client courtship.
2. Don’t be afraid to decline potential business. Just because someone approaches you doesn’t mean they are the best client for you. In some cases it takes an attempt to help you both decide if the relationship is symbiotic but if something doesn’t sit well, trust your instinct and decline.
3. If you’re not peckish due to a workload famine when you get a new query, price on the high end of your price list. I have two sets of pricing and if I don’t need the work, I price at the high end. I have nothing to lose and they’re already interested in me so it doesn’t hurt to try to boost earnings. Plus, while I don’t generally deal with hagglers, quoting high gives you wiggle room….if you want to wiggle.
4. Make a questionnaire template and save each completed one. I have some clients who’ve given really valuable info in their questionnaire that I come back to later in the relationship and in some cases, that detail can help me adapt to their tone and style.  I also save my initial quote so that I’m consistent with them if they come back later.
5. If you are quoting during a famine, don’t pigeonhole yourself into a certain price point permanently. To help prevent this either in feast or in famine mode, I typically put a disclaimer on initial quotes or on my questionnaire that states I review pricing every six months. That way, I’m not locked into the initial quoted pricing forever and clients (hopefully) won’t be indignant pricing goes up later on (after proving my worth).

Do you have any tips for courtship with a new client? Please share!

(photo: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/duchesssa)

When you work as a freelance writer, job hunting can be a big part of your day and because time is money, doesn’t it make sense to handle it in a way that saves you time and increases your income? I try to handle job hunting in the same way as making passive income. Here’s how I do it:

A lot of writers augment their income with passive article writing sites like eHow, Askables, InfoBarrel, and HubPages. If you’re making time to do that, you can also make a little time for self-promotion —  which can be an even more profitable way to increase your income.

Passive Income Benefits

When working for passive income streams, actions done today can pay you back repeatedly. I know people making $1,000+ a month cumulatively on articles that they wrote last year.  It may take time and effort now for payoffs tomorrow but it might pay you tomorrow and the next day and the day after that as well.

So, why not perform an action that can get more results more than once with respect to hunting for writing jobs?  With passive writing income sites, you can write once and get paid many times. Consider promoting yourself online with actions that you take once but that can lead to repeated results. Let’s call this…passive job hunting.

How do you do this? Self-promotion.  Self promotion for writers is vital in terms of building your brand so that clients come to you. Self-promotion can take time and cycles now but can pay you off repeatedly in the future. Some freelance writers spend an hour a day querying and applying to jobs and while you should continue to keep your eyes and ears open for great job opportunities, doesn’t it seem easier to try to have people also come to you because they’re looking for an expert at a specific niche or writing style and found you listed as an expert somewhere?

Google – A Writer’s Best Friend

Google can be used to build you up as an authority by telling people who search for a press release writer, white paper writer, legal blogger, or (insert your specialty here)_____ writer, that you are the most relevant result. Because most web writers, through writing for clients and content factories, get to pick up a thing or two about search engine optimisation and social networking, they can do a great job of promoting themselves by applying the principles they use for clients to their own promotional efforts. If you’re helping your clients rank as #1 for the widget they sell, you should be able to help yourself become #1 in the SERPS for the widget that you sell.

Here are three tips to help you do that:

1. Start a website. Create a professional-looking business website. I started mine at Hostgator for $45 ($35 for 3 months of hosting and $10 for my URL) two years ago and it has done wonders for me! The site builder made it easy to set it up and I did it over a weekend.

2. Write articles for article directories and link them back to your site. Optimise them for the keywords you want to rank for.

3. Social bookmark your articles on places like StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, etc.

4. Repeat steps two and three each and every week.

Even one article a week over time can help you. Instead of having to troll job boards every week to fill up your schedule for the following week, you’ll eventually begin to get a steady stream of queries from clients who find you online. Your one application for a job gets seen once. But your self-promotion efforts can result in articles and your site being seen by many.

When people find you, it’s much easier to land the job. They’re already partially convinced that you’re right for the job and you can often make even more money this way because you set your own pricing.

You spend time every day searching for jobs and reading the blogs you love to read so why not take an extra few minutes and write a self-promotional piece for yourself?