Many of our bloggers have touched upon the importance of building your own brand as a freelancer. In summary, it helps boost your expertise and get better clients. As a bonus, it helps you find ways of making more money.
One way in which you can build your own brand is by having your own blog within your target niche. For example, I not only write content for clients within the business and personal finance space, I also have my own website where I publish content on those topics. I’m sure you’ll find the same is true for many of the Due bloggers.
Quite frankly, it’s been building a blog that helps me land the high-quality clients that come my way now. It’s also led to other income opportunities – like marketing consulting for companies who are trying to understand millennials as consumers.
Here’s how you can use your blog to build your credibility and get better freelance writing clients.
Start a podcast.
I started a podcast on a whim a few months ago. Okay, it wasn’t entirely on a whim. My readers were interested in me starting one and I knew podcasts were effective in the personal finance industry.
The cool thing about a podcast is that you can build your credibility quickly. I’m currently interviewing some of my editors who are experts at federal student loan repayment, chatting with colleagues who’ve published finance books and sharing some of my own insights with my audience.
Podcasts are a win-win all around. You build your credibility, help others with their marketing efforts and help your audience all at the same time.
Review services or products.
According to the marketing intelligence agency Minktell, 70% of people seek out opinions on blogs before making a purchase. You can bet your bottom dollar this includes blogs!
That’s why if you want to build your credibility, you may want to consider using a blog to review products and services in your niche. This works for building credibility because you are simultaneously showing your expertise while helping people decide whether or not to purchase something.
As an added bonus, you may qualify for affiliate programs where you can make a commission off the products you recommend. Just make sure to always disclose this relationship and not let it affect your opinions.
Write helpful blogs.
When I first started blogging many years ago, I always made sure to publish helpful content. For example, I’d blog about how to get out of debt, how to create a budget for the first time and how to negotiate. At the time, I didn’t realize this was a rock solid way to build your credibility as a blogger. To be honest, I was just trying to educate myself and figured I should hold myself publicly accountable.
However, once I realized the power of blogging as it pertained to wanting to run my own business as a freelancer, I started taking it much more seriously as a tool to build my credibility. I became far more strategic about content and started surveying my audience more often. This alone has helped me publish content that gets me hired by companies who need content marketing done.
