Freelance Digital Marketing requires mastery of essential skills. Lay the foundation by getting started as a freelancer or set up your own agency with a team of professionals. Learn about the basics by setting up a budget, time management, pricing your services, and invoicing. You will need a contract whilst communicating with your customers and create proposals. Build trust by using testimonials and case studies. Find customers online on freelance platforms eg UpWork, Freelancer, People Per Hour, etc. Handle difficult customers and at times you may have to diplomatically decline offers. Sell yourself as a freelancer by targeting and messaging your clients. Chalk out your daily activities to follow leads and find clients. Use CRM and follow best practices. Seek promoters and get referrals for your freelancing business. Freelancers in digital marketing provide consultancy on their own T&C. Head your own business and develop your own branding.
If you are out to create a personal brand then exhibit your personality and reveal your professionalism. A website and logo would definitely help your branding. A Digital Marketing Freelancer can work on client projects for promoting their services or products online. Reach out and engage with clients’ audiences for conversion to paying customers. Use Affiliate Marketing and pay for conversions.
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Freelance Digital Marketing: Skillset
Digital Marketing Freelancers demonstrate expertise and skills to deliver digital services. These experts interact with online communities and connect with likeminded people for updates that help their clients boost their business. Numerous responsibilities force freelancers to continue the learning process for meeting the demands of their clients. Build landing pages that boost conversions. Learn about the different digital marketing automation tools & software. Possess skillset required to deal with inquiries, write a newsletter, blog post, eBooks, PDFs or a presentation, set up KPIs and digital marketing strategies for clients, design a website, infographics & images, compile case studies, social calendar, and conduct webinars, start a podcast and make videos, improve website speed and conversions, SEO, Ad Creation for retargeting & social media, build links, contribute to sales and connect with clients’ audiences.
Digital Marketing Umbrella of Services are not limited but include
Link Building
Freelancing opportunities for Link Building on eg Guru & Fiverr. Read more by clicking on What is Link Building.
SEO
Customers now search for services and products before deciding on a purchase. Keyword Research can identify a keyword that can target clients’ audiences. SEOs two discrete branches that need to be addressed on a continuing basis are on-page and off-page SEO. To improve your local search ranking consistently post on Google My Business. High SERP factor with engaging quality content and researched target keywords drive traffic to your website. This, in turn, generates leads for your websites that result in conversions. Use SEO tools eg SEM Rush, Ahref, etc to implement various SEO techniques.
If you have a website, rank the posts on Google First Page. Install Google Analytics and Understand the difference between White Hat and Grey Hat SEO practices and how they can harm your clients in the long run. On a WordPress website take advantage of an SEO plugin – Yoast SEO or All In One Pack to optimize content, title tags, alt tags, meta description, URL with https, and internal/ external links. An SEO audit with eg Screaming Frog for your website can help optimize to rank higher in search engines. Read more by clicking on SEO fundamentals.
Lead Generation
Freelancing for lead generation warrants your clients’ expertise in their business or have an established brand. Prospect for customers for your clients’ business and follow up leads by pitching them. Follow up with the lead to conclude and forge ahead. Maintain a profile on LinkedIn and connect with the right people in the industry. Install a LinkedIn automation chrome browser – MeetLeonard & Dux-Soup.
Mobile Marketing
Freelance opportunities for mobile marketing are available for services such as mobile apps, media advertisements, SEO, and video. Visibility of mobile apps is an issue with publishers that call for app store optimization services with appropriate keywords for higher ranking in stores’ search results. Advertising on mobile devices brings in a plethora of opportunities for sales, branding, lead generation, etc. Mobile ads relate to rich media, banner, search, ad extensions- CTC [click to call] or CTD [click to download], Google Offers for mobiles, etc. Local Ad extension provides for a contact number or a link to Google Maps. Mobile SEO optimization of websites targets users on smartphones and tablets. Freelancers can offer online videos and create opportunities on mobile for their clients’ brands. Engage the audience with free apps and send users Push notifications eg Telegram, Messenger on their smartphones whenever new content is published on your site. Supplement your local marketing endeavors with SMS advertising.
Email Marketing
Copywriting skills enable freelancers with email Marketing for crafting newsletters or with a service/ product upgrade. Grow your clients’ business with the help of email Marketing software eg Mailchimp. Adopt a squeeze page, thank you page and an opt-in page to facilitate users subscribe to your services or download promotional content. With GDPR make sure you seek user permissions for sending email messages. A free tool such as Mail Genius can make sure that emails are delivered to the consumers’ mailbox and get opened. SumoMe can help grow your email list.
Penalty Recovering Services
Freelancers who understand the type of penalties and are familiar with updates can offer services to their clients for recovery from such penalties. Levy of Google Penalties if any can be viewed under ‘Security and Manual Action’ in Google Search Console.
Content Marketing
Freelancers can solicit work from their clients’ w.r.t planning content and finding what content types would go well with the audience? Opportunities exist for specialization with eBooks, Whitepapers, blog posts, landing pages, SEO optimized content, etc. Video content can be embedded in a blog post or landing pages or shared on social media. Freelancers should leverage their Viral Marketing skills to create short content types eg a post, video, meme, that goes viral on the web. Read more by clicking on Content Marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Promotion of clients’ blog content for driving visitors to their websites using techniques such as automated posting to social media (buffer), content syndication, etc. Read more about by clicking on SMM. Use Influencer Marketing for your freelance business. Discover Influencers and maintain a pool of influencers for selecting a suitable match for your clients. Connect with Influencers for running campaigns and leverage their presence.
PPC & Display Advertisement
Ad Campaigns, especially for eCommerce websites, require optimization on a continuing basis. These sites run Ad promotion during vacation, festivals, and special occasions. PPC Advertising helps increase revenues eg Google Ads or Bing Ads to boost the visibility of your clients’ websites.
Video Marketing
The essentials for freelancing in video marketing call for skills such as Storytelling /Scriptwriting, Production, and Editing 2D or 3D animation, Video Graphics & SEO, YouTube Marketing, etc. Reach out to clients’ audience by optimizing their video advertising campaigns that make the most of their video investment. Freelancers need to be familiar with software that uses AI for producing different types of videos.
Web Design & eCommerce
Toptal is a freelancing platform common with Web Designers. Freelancing opportunities in this category call for skills needed to build a website with eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, multivendor marketplace, Websites for Contest, Directory, Classified, Membership, and Subscription, blogging & PHP, theme installation, newsletter software for WordPress websites, Logo, Logistic tracking, Squarespace SaaS, Graphic Design & ClickFunnels, etc. Craiglist is an example of a classified website where users can post ads and sell their services or goods. Wix can help easily create websites. Read more by clicking on Website Development.
Freelance Digital Marketing: Pricing your services
Entrepreneurs & SMBs hire freelancers mainly for Content Writing, SEO, SMM, and PPC. Determine what you are to charge by conducting research on the various freelancer platform. One can conclude the average hourly price or fixed pricing for different digital services by understanding how other freelancers charge for a similar service. Clients normally pay for the value they get and not a merely hourly wage. After having decided on the pricing make sure you protect yourself by charging 50% upfront and the balance after completion of the project.
Get an idea of the prevailing Digital Marketing Salaries fig1 in India. The payment model is fee-based for project contracts for freelancers. Agencies charge on a monthly retainer fee basis. Go through the list of Popular freelancing platforms by clicking on Freelance marketplace websites. These sites provide data on fees charged by other freelancers. In online freelancing, a client posts a job listing eg Amazon Mechanical Turk describing their projects on these sites with their expectations and the budget price of projects for the freelancer. Then freelancers respond by submitting bids for projects they would want to engage with.
Market Yourself as a Freelancer
Market yourself as a freelancer by creating a profile to attract new businesses when you start looking for Gigs. The profile you build on any online platforms eg Flex Jobs, WeWorkRemotely, Truelancer, etc is similar to a resume. The freelancing profile you create will help you with an interview and make you shine in the crowd. For getting paid, freelancers need to familiarize themselves with invoicing apps or tools eg Wave Invoicing Software. But with platforms such as Fiverr the transaction is handled by the online portal itself. The earning potential of a freelancer depends on the work and the level of expertise and skill one has.
The bid proposal should be presented to prevail upon the buyer so that the project work is finalized in your favor. A freelancing interview is similar to a job interview and it is up to you how to win contracts and make money online? You have been hired by a client for providing solutions and meeting deadlines. Reliability & Consistency are assets that a freelancer can never compromise. This could be the only way to land more contracts and increase your rates. After the freelancer completes the contract through any online platform the buyer has an option to leave feedback. Getting referral clients is the best way to ensure that your order book remains full at any given time. After you have established yourself as a successful freelancer, it is time to scale your business. Hire support staff or subcontract your work to other freelancers and open up new avenues to revenues for your business.
