Guerrilla Freelancing » Blogging

Why Better blogging equals better business for freelancers

Mike Smith — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:00:02 +0000

Lets skip past the topic of “should a freelancer have a blog” for a moment because we all know the answer (yes). I believe the real question we should be asking is ‘how can I get more out of my blogging for my business?’ – and the answer is simple; better blogging equals better business. But why?

There are a few reasons why blogging is good for your business, but there are even more reasons (if we dig deep enough) that shows why better blogging equals better business for freelancers. I want to look over a few of those reasons in today’s article. Feel free to leave your thoughts at the end of the article – I’d love to get your input on the topic at hand.

Open discussions with potential clients

If your freelance business is design related, by running a design blog that runs articles on the importance of great designs or articles that allow your readers to ask questions and ignite conversation, you’re instantly building a bridge between you and an entire world of potential clients.

Instead of having to send cold-emails to countless numbers of people, you’re able to reach hundreds, if not thousands, of people who just might be looking for the services that you offer. If your blog is receiving a lot of traffic from the design community and not a lot of potential clients, don’t worry, because those freelancers who are always reading your blog just may need to outsource their work and if they’re seeing you answer questions and engage with them on a regular basis, who do you think will come to mind first?

Increase traffic and search engine rankings

By being a better blogger, you’ll gain more traffic through social media outlets where people share your articles and you’ll also see an increase in search engine traffic from the people who link to your articles from their blogs. There’s a reason that people like Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin receive countless links, tweets, wall posts and emails promoting their articles – they’re all amazing bloggers.

Build your readers trust in you

One of the benefits of running a better blog is that you will build the trust between you and your readers. This can benefit you in a lot of ways. One way being, you will find it much easier to link out to affiliate products you believe in, which in turn will be clicked and purchased by more of your readers because they trust your judgment.

Another reason why building the trust of your readers up is something you should be doing is because at some point, you may have an offer of your own that you want to promote, or a site you want to launch – by being a better blogger and building your readers trust, you’re able to promote your product/service/website without fear that you won’t get a healthy return from the promotion.

Showcase your knowledge to potential clients

This is one that I’ve personally seen be a powerful reason to become a better blogger. For those who don’t know, I’m a regular writer on Spyre Studios – a design blog run by Jon Phillips (we interviewed him here a while back). By blogging on his website, I’ve actually had people visit my site and hire me because of the articles I’ve written there.

Not just because they seen my post, but because they found value in the articles I wrote and because they realized that I knew what I was talking about. So, build a blog that will showcase your knowledge of a specific subject – maybe write articles debunking topics that your client base generally isn’t too knowledgeable about. They’ll thank you for it.

Showcase your talents to potential clients

So, you’re a copywriter? What better way to give out a resume of what you can do and what you’ve previously done than by running a well written blog? The same goes for designers. Be a better blogger and build up a solid reader base that you discuss design topics with, but also make sure that you’re showcasing your own talent in the blog – design your blog better than you’ve ever done any other website before, make a weekly round up of cool designs and include yours, showcase a case study of a design you’ve done from start to finish like PSD Fan does.

Shamelessly self promoting will turn off your readers, so make sure you’re adding value to what you’re saying and you’re not just using your blog as a bright and flashy billboard for you and you alone.

Showcase your generosity – give selflessly

The other day, I read an article by Chris Brogan where he talked about how much he charges for a day of his time and then seen a follow up article where he talks about the negative comments from his previous post. I didn’t understand why someone who gives away free content on his blog every day, releases free ebooks and has many other low cost items you can buy would get grief about a price he charges for a day of his time.

Regardless of how this made Chris feel, he’s still pumping out amazing content and giving it away for free. He’s generous. He’s not in it just for the money. The articles he writes are published because he loves blogging. It just so happens that by giving selflessly, he’s able to charge $22,000 for a day of his time, release best seller books and run a successful company.

How to Run a Profitable Freelance Business Through Your Blog

Skellie, from Skelliewag and Tutsplus+ fame has recently released an ebook on how to run a profitable freelance business through your blog (affiliate link). It’s an ebook with amazing value and it will definitely help you better your blogging efforts and turn your time into money.

Coming from someone who turned her blogging into a machine that launched her into being the manager of the tutsplus+ network from Envato, I’d say that she definitely has some authority on the subject of turning your blogging into a business. I linked to the affiliate url above for her ebook, but you can also follow straight to the article here (no affiliate link).

A few words about me, you and this blog

I don’t want anyone here thinking that I’m trying to make money off of you by including an affiliate link or two in my posts (I’ll always include the non affiliate link as well), it’s not what I’m here for. I write Guerrilla Freelancing to share my knowledge, help out the freelancers who are still in the trenches like I am and also leave a trail of breadcrumbs along the way so that one day, I can look back and remember where I came from.

Hopefully you’ll all be there with me at the end of that road and hopefully you’ve found value in this article and the future articles I write. I try to ensure that there’s value in anything I write – and if I don’t have anything valuable to say, I won’t write anything. You deserve better than a bunch of bullshit thrown together in order to keep up a blogs post count.

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Curious to know what the top 25 design blogs make from ad sales?

Mike Smith — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:00:13 +0000

Any person reading this blog right now that is in the design field has probably wondered this very exact question: What do these design blogs actually make in ad revenue and is it possible for me to make money with my own design blog? Hopefully, by the end of this article you will walk away with answers to that question.

I’ve been pushing around the idea of starting my own design blog for months now and decided to do a bit of research to see what the top design blogs actually make in revenue. Since I know that the blog will be focused on ad revenue and not just pushing my web design business, I wanted to gauge what types of money could be made with the blog and how much traffic I’d have to hit in order to get to certain cash milestones.

The trend I see in a lot of the top design blogs out there are the use of the service Buy Sell Ads – we even use it here on Guerrilla Freelancing (our listing is here). It’s a great service and it allows advertisers to find the sites they’d like to buy ads from, get approved and placed in front of millions of people.

The beauty of it for the site owners is that they don’t have to manually ad the codes in each time a new ad is purchased and remove them once the month is up. As a publisher, you earn 75% of the ad revenue, so you’re getting a great deal (in my opinion) because you no longer have to focus on selling the ads, managing them and so on.

Please bare in mind that these stats are only for the publicly sold ads on their sites and do not reflect their earnings from private advertising purchases, reviews and other forms of advertisements like feedburner links/ads, google adsense, and so on. So, lets get to it – what do these blogs actually make in revenue?

PSDTuts+

Estimated Impressions: 6,230,000
How many ad spaces?: 12
Total ads sold (as of 01/28/10): 9
Revenue: $9,893.25

Guerrilla Freelancing » Blogging

Why Better blogging equals better business for freelancers

Open discussions with potential clients

Increase traffic and search engine rankings

Build your readers trust in you

Showcase your knowledge to potential clients

Showcase your talents to potential clients

Showcase your generosity – give selflessly

How to Run a Profitable Freelance Business Through Your Blog

A few words about me, you and this blog

Curious to know what the top 25 design blogs make from ad sales?

PSDTuts+

Abduzeedo

Hongkiat

Nettuts+

Creattica

Vectortuts+

Web Designer Depot

Smashing Apps

Six Revisions

Web Design Ledger

Instant Shift

Vandelay Website Design

CSS Tricks

1st Web Designer

Speckyboy Design Magazine

Tutorial9

Bittbox

DesignM.ag

Web Resources Depot

Web Designer Wall

Blog.SpoonGraphics

Naldz Graphics

Marcofolio

GoMediaZine

Spyre Studios

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