Freelance Content Marketing is a very lucrative profession to be in, in today’s times. It does not just help you to follow your passion but also enjoy the luxury of a flexible work schedule. As a freelancer, you are on your own and you can learn a lot more from your experience and everyday challenges. But at the same time, you’ve got to be disciplined and focused.
It is essential to keep your clients happy and get new ones. As a Freelance Content Marketer, your goal should be to help your clients achieve their business objectives. If you can consistently manage it, I can assure you of an extremely gratifying journey. In fact, you don’t have to see yourself as a freelancer looking for short-term projects. When working as an independent Content Marketer on a variety of projects you’re actually a solopreneur or a small business owner.
How to Start a Freelance Content Marketer?..
The best way to start as a Freelance Content Marketer is to start doing Content Marketing to promote yourself. Having a writing portfolio is one of the primary ways of doing it. To build up a portfolio you can pitch your Content Marketing story ideas to some of the high authority blogs in ‘Content Marketing’, ‘Marketing’ or ‘Business’ domain. The strategy will help you to you showcase your skills as a Content Marketer as well create a portfolio of your own writing. You must also create a website and a blog on a platform like WordPress. Blog about Content Marketing on a regular basis. It will help you to stay updated on the latest in the field.
How and Where to Find Clients?
Well, there are quite a few freelancing sites that can help you to find short-term gigs as a Content Marketer. Some of them in include the likes of Upwork, Freelancer, Guru, and Fiverr etc.
I would not suggest you rely completely on these sites as they will not help you to get valuable long-term projects. You would always be better off building a reputation for yourself as an expert Content Marketer. Publish blogs and Guest blogs on a regular basis. An effective technique to attract new clients is to be active on platforms like LinkedIn and Quora. You can publish short hundred word case studies on Content Marketing, as updates on your LinkedIn profile. You can even create simple informative graphics and add them as updates on LinkedIn and other social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Another strategy that works very well on LinkedIn is to follow your prospects as well as key influencers in Content Marketing. Don’t just stop at that, work on actively building a relationship with them by liking and sharing their updates. The strategy will help you get noticed and may even get you leads for your freelance business. Similarly, you can be active on Quora by repurposing some your in-depth blog posts and summarizing them as Quora answers. You can link your answers to your blog posts and attract relevant visitors...
Besides having a solid web presence, you can reach out to your friends and colleagues. You can offer to help them with their Content Marketing requirements. You can attend local business networking events and meet new people who may be looking for Content Marketing services.
As long as you are consistently sharing knowledge with the business community, you will not need to resort to cold emails, calls or direct messages to reach out to your prospective clients. They will reach out to you. If you are able to achieve this goal successfully, you are on the right track – if you can do it for yourself, you will surely be able to help your clients replicate the strategy and get ahead of their game...
Role of a Freelance Content Marketer..
As a Freelance Content Marketer, you will be designing and executing Content Strategies for your clients. Remember, the strategy for B2B clients and B2C clients will differ completely. You can know more about it in this post on B2B vs B2c Content Marketing. You will have to ensure timely execution of those strategies so that your clients achieve the best possible results. You can either hire freelance content creators or supervise an existing team that your client has hired. You will have to monitor what your client’s competitors are doing along with the results your current campaigns are fetching. It is essential to understand and build a target audience persona for your client’s business. Immerse yourself in your client’s brand and know about its values and mission, so you can create an apt Content Marketing Plan for it. You would have to develop editorial and image creation guidelines for your content team to follow.
Don’t forget to enlist the interactive content formats like – quizzes, contests, and polls as a part of your strategy. These type of content formats are becoming very popular nowadays and will help you get better business outcomes. It would also be your responsibility to create a list of critical metrics at the beginning of your project. One of the key metric to measure is audience growth. It can be measured using metrics such as the growth of blog subscribers and social media followers. Web traffic is not a very accurate measure of audience growth but may still wish to track it and analyze it along with bounce rate and traffic channels. Social media engagement and shares is an important metric to track. Finally, you should be tracking growth in website rankings and overall growth in leads from Content Marketing activities. You must include reporting formats and deadlines in your strategic action plan...
How to Structure Client Engagements?
As a Freelance Content Marketer, your goal should be to help your clients achieve their revenue goals with the help of precise Content Marketing programs. It is always better to decide on the goals and milestones you are going to achieve for your clients. You can work for clients either on a project basis or on an hourly basis or based on the activities and campaigns you will be doing for them. The type of engagement would depend on the client requirements and comfort level with a type of engagement. You must decide on the date of invoice and payment while kicking off the project. Communication tools like Viber and Google Hangouts are great for setting up meetings and calls with your clients.
How to Charge Clients?
You can charge clients on the basis of your experience level, your portfolio and the type of projects you have done in the past. You can also browse through sites like Payscale to get an idea about how to charge your clients. For example, the average salary of a Content Marketing Manager in a city like Delhi is around INR 5.5 lakhs per annum and in San Francisco, it is around $86000. You can break that up into a monthly project cost or an hourly price. You can charge your clients on the basis of their location and the going rate there. You can also browse through profiles of Content Marketers on Upwork and Freelancer to get an idea about how much to charge. You can use a free invoicing tool like Wave to send out professional invoices to your clients.
Closing Thoughts
As a Freelance Content Marketer, you have the opportunity to learn and grow in your profession. You should constantly work on your skills and strive to get projects that fulfill your aspirations as an expert in the field. Focus on providing quality services to your clients so they can recommend you to others. Don’t think of freelancing as a way to earn a quick buck or have a favorable lifestyle. Having a long-term vision to grow your freelance business will always be more satisfying for you as well as your clients. If you work diligently then Freelancing can open up new opportunities for you. It can help you find speaking and training assignments in Content Marketing. As you grow you can build up a team and run a full-fledged Content Marketing Agency. For all of this to work, you must have the right attitude towards the profession...
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