Carol Tice’s tips for freelance blogging
Recently, I discovered Carol Tice’s website Make a Living Writing. Carol has written many ebooks, blog posts and courses about how the make a living as a freelance writer for niche blogs. Last week, she organized a free webinar about the top 7 mistakes of freelance blogging. Some were a real eye opener to me! I will give a summary of her webinar here so that you can profit from this information as well.
1. Targeting prospects for freelance blogging
Carol explained in her webinar that many newbie freelance bloggers target the wrong prospects. They get rejection after rejection or are ignored completely. Not very motivated.
Businesses with abandoned blogs
According to Carol, the wrong prospects are businesses without a blog. It might seem tempting to reach out to these companies since they are missing out on a valuable marketing tool. But when they don’t have a blog, it will likely take months before they put one up. You need gigs now, not in a couple of months. So only target prospects with a blog, and especially those with an abandoned blog.
Don’t target ads
Also, don’t target ads. These are highly competitive, and you don’t want to waste time on this rat race.
Target successful businesses in complicated niches
You want to target successful companies. They have the money to pay you, so you should search for medium and large-sized companies (with more than 50-100 employees). A big plus is targeting businesses in a costly and complicated niche such as:
- technical
- finance
- medicine
- construction
2. Pitch with the right blog ideas
You should always (!) pitch with blog ideas. Always. Remember that most companies stop with blogging because they ran out of topics. If you provide them with good blog ideas, this is a win-win for both.
Don’t pitch with “salesy” blog ideas
Blog posts need to be about useful information and not about selling a product or service. So come up with blog ideas in which you give valuable information to built authority for your client. Therefore, you should put some effort in coming up with surprising blog ideas. Don’t go for the easy topics. Do some research, do interviews, get to know the potential client and niche and find a few interesting ideas.
3. Analyze the strategy of your potential client
When you do your research, you should focus on getting the goals and business plan of your potential client. Lots of information is probably on their website. If you cannot find enough sources, this can be a sign as well. Try to improve their goals and plan to show your expertise.
Stay on top of trends
To come up with an improved strategy to help a business expand their results, you need to stay on top of trends. For example, follow marketing developments via:
4. Plan for growth
You cannot always stay a newbie freelance blogger, so you need to plan for growth. Build relationships with your clients and become an expert on a certain topic or niche. Your fee needs to grow with your level of expertise and experience, so charge more.
Great tips right?! Especially the one about pitching abandoned blogs was an eye opener for me. What tips are you going to use?
