Everyone with a blog, please raise your hand.
Alright, those of you with hands up can leave the classroom and hit the bar early. The rest of you, stay here, because this lesson is important.
Lets start with the quick summary of what a blog is. Short for Weblog, a blog is a website that displays posts by the author in chronological order. Their popularity is immense since most blogging platforms make it insanely simple for anyone to publish their thoughts on the web.
You’re reading one right now.
But why do freelancers need one?
It’s an extension of your portfolio
First and foremost, a blog is yet another place to show off your writing, design, photography or coding skills.
As such, it’s another place for potential clients to find you.
The ideal freelancer’s blog should be another part of his or her portfolio site (you already have one of those, right?)
But a key difference is showing off a little more personality on the blog since I’ve found most online portfolios to be a little on the sterile side (I’m just as guilty on that front.)
Along with a different method of posting from a more traditional portfolio site, most blogging platforms allow readers to leave comments giving you quick feedback on what you’re showing off (once you have readers, more on that later.)
Networking and marketing
One of the biggest advantages to having a blog is being able to build relationships with fellow freelancers who also blog by linking out and leaving comments on each other’s sites.
I’ve met people who’ve expanded their business into other countries thanks to relationships they’ve built up through blogging.
Now start one!
Getting a blog is easy and for the most part, free.
Go to one of the major blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress and sign-up for a blog. If you can’t think up a clever domain name, just go with your own name.
Using one of the free providers by default will give you a .blogspot or .wordpress domain but both providers support domain mapping (Blogger does it for free, Wordpress charges $10 per year though for $15 they’ll deal with registering it as well.)
Many people suggest that having a stand-alone domain makes you look more professional, but personally I don’t think it’s that big of a deal — especially since I’ve met company CEOs who have .blogspot.com domains.
Blogging away
So, now you’ve got your own little soap-box on the web that can be updated quickly and easily, what do you do with it now?
Well, an introduction post is usually good. Who are you and what are you doing?
Since we’re looking at this as a marketing tool, after that you should be writing about your field of work. Write with authority and establish yourself as an expert on what you do.
Post sketches and doodles of what you’re working on (or the equivalent in whatever you do) to show off your work.
As an example, I tend to use mine to post material that my current roster of clients aren’t buying but I still feel like writing. These days my bread and butter comes from monthly publications so I’ll also write up topics that will be stale by deadline which kind of brings back the feeling of being a daily newspaper intern (it even includes the glorious feeling of not getting paid!)
I’ve known programmers who’ll post about whatever platform they’re currently coding on along with whatever they love or hate about it along with giving progress reports on various projects. There are lots of possibilities.
Most important of all though, inject your personality into it. This should provide a good opportunity for potential clients to get an idea of the person behind the work.
While blogging isn’t a form of passive marketing, it also doesn’t need to take up that much time. Generally, it’s best to aim for one post per week at a minimum and try your best not to let it go stale.
Promotion
Finally, having a blog is pretty useless if the only one reading it is your mother, so let’s talk about promoting it.
Now, we’re not trying to build the next big web publication here, so there’s no need to go into all-out spam mode. Adding the link to your e-mail signature, your business card and leaving it when you comment on other blogs (most of them have a separate field to do this in the comments) should suffice to build a moderate readership.
