We all want more freedom and more space to do the things we most enjoy in life. If you crave breaking away from the 9-5, and writing is your thing, setting up a freelance writing business could be your dream. It can offer the flexibility of working the hours that most suit you, from any location you choose. However, when you go freelance, you’re going into business – and if you hope to succeed, you need to be business-like in your approach from day one. Here are 6 tips to help you turn your freelance pipedream into reality. 1. Prepare financially Switching to a freelance career or not, everyone should know their basic cost of living, or the minimum needed to cover the bills and food each week. If you are contemplating leaving a salaried job to start freelance writing, set aside extra savings (if you can) that will cover your living expenses for a period of time once you leave your job. Alternatively, if it won’t cause issues with your employer, start your business and begin engaging in activities to build your client base before you take the leap out of employment. There are multiple avenues for finding regular writing work – we cover this topic in-depth in our freelance course, Build Your Freelance Content Writing Business. 2. Set your business up correctly so you’re ready to trade These are a few things to consider when setting up any business. If you’ve only ever worked as an employee, you’re likely to need to: Register an ABN (Australian Business Number) If you want to trade under a business name...
Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates three times the amount of leads. Source: Lyfe And one of the best tools in your content marketing armory are blog posts. Blogging is an essential part of driving conversions in your B2B marketing funnel as the right kind of content can strike a chord with your target audience and effectively cultivate customer loyalty. That’s because well-researched blogs have the potential to drive strong emotional connections with target customers. The more authentic the brand, the stronger its brand recall and loyalty. 91 percent of consumers say they recommend the brands they trust to their friends and family. But before you dive into blogging, it’s important to find blog topics that can drive organic traffic. How do I Find Blog Topics? Source: Slideshare 1. Spend Time Getting to Know Your Customer What’s the point of writing in-depth blog posts if no one’s searching for the them? If blogs aren’t attracting marketing qualified leads, then tracking metrics such as increased page views and engagement won’t do much to enhance your bottom line. One of the ways you can cut through all the noise is to home in on your target consumer and understand their problems. Here are a few factors you should take into account: Biographical information: What’s your consumer’s age, gender, income level, and profession? Life Aspirations: What do they want to achieve in the medium term? Problems: What keeps them up at night and how can you help? Content: What are their go-to sources of information? Before you get started, however, dive a little deeper into business...
You needn’t be a professional copywriter or experienced marketer to write business blogs. To improve your blog posts, you just need to know how to use them to your advantage. Whether you can knock out a quick article in under 30 minutes, or spend hours agonising over the right opening line to snag your audience, the most important thing to remember is that you know your business better than anyone else. Couple that with these four essential steps, and you can improve your blog posts and increase your chances of converting readers. 1. Choose the right topics Content marketing agency professionals spend years honing the craft of topic ideation and delivery – it’s why they’re so good at taking businesses large and small to the next level. But you don’t have to be a content marketing expert to recognise the importance of choosing the right topics. After all, without an interesting topic, no one is going to read your blogs. And if no one reads your blogs, your online presence will suffer greatly. So just how do you choose the right topics? Start by asking yourself the following: What are you passionate about? If you’re not interested in the topic, or it’s not relevant to your business, that will seep into your writing and turn off the reader. Who’s the audience? As a business owner, you likely cater to multiple demographics and have more than one target audience. Do your blogs appeal to everyone, or are they niche topics where you can drive readers towards a particular product or service? Is it evergreen? An ‘evergreen’ blog is one that has long-term appeal. It’s...
One of the questions I’m asked most often by SME owners and marketing managers is: “How often should we publish on our blog?” There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. If you’re just starting out, my advice will normally be: publish one or two articles a month until you’re able to see that your strategy is working, and your articles are reaching and resonating with your audience. On the other hand, if you’ve been publishing articles for some time, but aren’t getting the desired results, I’d recommend reviewing your content strategy before you worry about the number of articles you’re publishing. Some people are surprised when I recommend publishing so few articles. Once the decision is made to start publishing, they want to maximise the result, and are often considering a blog publishing schedule of 8+ articles a month. The problem with this, is that if you’re publishing quality in-depth articles and paying a blog writer or a content marketing agency to create them, that’s a substantial outlay. And it will be wasted if your articles aren’t finding an audience or aren’t resonating well with the desired audience. You can’t maximise the result until you know you’re getting one. The good news is that once you are confident your content is working and contributing to your bottom line, you’ll be able to review your content budget and turn up the dial to increase those results. The key to getting results with a business blog There are two key factors I find are often overlooked by businesses just starting out with their blog. When one or both are missed, the...
It’s a common challenge. The content team at US headquarters pumps out volumes of great content, and the US or global marketing director doesn’t understand why you want to engage an Australian content marketing agency to create localised content. Can’t you just tweak it? Maybe, you reply cautiously. Some pieces of content can be easily touched up for an Australian audience. Other pieces will have so many issues you don’t know where to begin – or how to explain the problem to someone who might not understand how delightfully different we are Down Under. Aside from the Australian English versus American English issue, there are other factors that come into play, like differences in buyer motivation, cultural attitudes and the suitability of examples used in American content. Here’s a handy guide to help you identify the issues involved, or perhaps to more easily explain the scale of the content localisation problem to US HQ! How are we different? Let us count the ways: Spelling – American English vs Australian English Back in the 18th century, English spelling was somewhat inconsistent. Two influential chaps decided to put an end to that, and each published a dictionary. Unfortunately, they were different. The English began to favour one dictionary, but Americans favored the other, so now we have inconsistency on a global scale. Australia followed the English, as we often do. A few examples: OUR (AU) versus OR (US): Our Aussie humour can be a little colourful. We’re sure American humor can be colorful too, even if we don’t find all of it funny. ISE (AU) versus IZE (US): That wouldn’t stop...
Would you like to create the kind of content that draws in a crowd, generates engagement and results in new connections and opportunities? Of course you would! But how do you go about it? When you want to be a champion, one of the best things to do is to look to the real champions, and check out what they do and how they do it. Naturally you don’t want to plagiarise, but imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, and there’s nothing wrong with picking up a few tips from the high flyers! CEOs who pull this off really well often have these things in common: They courageously tell it like it is – or at least how they see it. They use descriptive language to tell stories that people can relate to. They are generous in sharing their thoughts, ideas and experiences without asking for anything in return. They bring their personality with them so that you get a glimpse of it through their posts. To demonstrate, let’s turn to LinkedIn Pulse and look at three very different business owners who do this well, each in their own way – Mark Bouris, Moby Siddique, and Thang Ngo. Before we dive in, let me point out that Moby and Thang don’t yet have massive followings on Pulse, but they’re on the way with over 1200 and 1700 followers respectively, and if they continue to publish content with heart, (and in Moby’s case a little more often!) their followings are likely to grow substantially. As you might expect, with the advantage of being well known, Mark Bouris...
