Freelancer’s Intro to Inbound Marketing

It’s always a good day when Jennifer Mattern shows up on the blog.

Jenn, who runs All Freelance Writing and Freelance Writing Pros, is one of the most business-savvy freelancers I know.  She’s a no-BS blogger who tells you what you need to hear, but does so with the intent of helping you improve your freelance writing business. You want to make money freelance writing? You’d do well to follow her advice.

So when Jenn volunteered today’s post, I had to contain the dancing. I knew it would be a good post. And true to form, Jenn delivers a primer for getting the most out of inbound marketing.

The Freelance Writer’s Introduction to Inbound Marketing

By Jenn Mattern

When it comes to finding freelance writing work, I’ve long been a proponent of what I call “query-free freelancing.” It’s a pitch-free strategy that works especially well for copywriters, bloggers, and others who set their own rates. And, at its core, query-free freelancing is a combination of PR and inbound marketing.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the second element. Let’s explore what inbound marketing is and how you can use it as a freelance writer to land more clients.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing (also known as “pull marketing”) is the act of attracting clients to you and keeping them coming back.

It’s unobtrusive. You don’t insert yourself in someone’s path against their will (think advertisements and mailers no one asked for).

It’s not about actively seeking gigs. It’s not pitching. It’s not applying to advertised jobs. It’s not going on social media with pleas for work when you have un-booked time in your schedule.

Inbound marketing is about building a presence or platform that attracts a steady stream of prospects to your door without you having to seek them out.

Perks of Inbound Marketing for Freelance Writers

When you use an inbound marketing approach to promoting your freelance writing business, there are several benefits. For example:

• You eliminate as much of the pitch-rejection cycle as you want.
• Once you’ve built a solid base, you’ll rarely, if ever, struggle to fill your billable hours (successful inbound marketing should attract more viable leads than you can take on).
• By attracting more than enough leads, it allows you to be choosier about projects.
• Inbound marketing will lead you to prospects you otherwise never would have known about (and therefore never would have pitched in a push-marketing effort anyway).
• The trust inbound marketing builds can help you build a waiting list and keep clients coming back for more.

Essentially, inbound marketing puts you in a position where prospects already know they want to hire you – specifically you – before they even contact you.

How Inbound Marketing Relates to PR

Inbound marketing and PR have a lot in common. They even use many of the same tools (which I’ll detail below).

The two are often used in conjunction, but they have slightly different goals.

• PR focuses on things like awareness, visibility, trust, and reputation.
• Inbound marketing then takes those things and aims to convert them into a business relationship, usually with direct financial benefit (such as a new freelance writing client).

Let’s look at some of those tools and tactics you might use in an inbound marketing effort, or in a broader query-free freelancing approach combined with a PR strategy.

Inbound Marketing Tools & Tactics

Ultimately, your inbound marketing work breaks down into three key areas:

1. Content Strategy
2. Social Engagement
3. Search Engine Optimization

Let’s break each of those down into the specific tools or approaches you might take to attract freelance writing clients.

Content Strategy

Content is essential to a strong inbound marketing strategy. This is how you showcase your skills, your personality, and your expertise.

Content is largely how you keep prospects’ attention even if they aren’t ready to hire you yet, so they’ll keep coming back and think of you first when they are ready to bring in a freelancer.

Here are some examples of the kind of content you might release to help prospects find you, get them to see you as a trustworthy authority in your specialty, and ultimately convince them you’re the right writer for their next gig:

• Blogging
• Book & e-book publishing
• Research reports
• White papers
• Email marketing (opt-in only)
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Presentations & public speaking opportunities
• Courses

For the most part, when this content is created for inbound marketing purposes, you’ll release it for free. It’s about building a library of content that sets you apart from your competition.

But that isn’t always the case. Some forms of inbound marketing can also be revenue streams in their own right, such as publishing a book in a topic area of interest to your target clients.

Social Engagement

Social engagement is another important area of inbound marketing. But things get a little trickier here because it’s easy to use social outlets to slip into push-marketing as well.

It’s OK to use both, but you’ll want to understand the difference in order to find a balance that doesn’t come across as obnoxious to those you engage with.

Here are some of the most common areas where social engagement plays a role in inbound marketing.

• Social media
• Commenting
• Forum or community participation
• Relationship marketing
• Networking

Social media, in particular, offers a lot of flexibility. But the parts that fall under inbound marketing specifically would include:

• Posting content of interest to prospects
• Commenting on updates from prospects
• Weighing in on news related to your specialty area
• Sharing information from other sources (trusted curation can be as important as your own content)

Where social networking crosses into outbound / push marketing would include:

• Directly asking people to hire you or buy something from you
• Seeking or posting responses to job ads on social networks
• Directly pitching editors on social media
• Constantly promoting the same product or service for quick money over building a reputation

Again, you can use tactics from both these groups, but you’ll want to find a balance. One makes you look like someone people want to hire. The other can make you look desperate (not how you want to begin any working relationship).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another huge part of inbound marketing, and I know plenty of freelance writers who hate to hear this, is SEO.

You would be hard-pressed to find any better source of warm leads than search engine visitors literally searching for a writer just like you because they’re ready to hire.

When prospects are in that position, you want them to find you, not someone else. And that requires putting real effort into improving your search engine rankings.

I won’t get into the details of what that requires here because I’ve already written an entire post for Lori on this topic. If you’re new to SEO, you can find it here:

SEO 101 for Freelance Writers

You can get many types of content to rank well in search engines. Blog posts are the most obvious example. And each one you write should target specific keyword phrases (or search queries) your prospects might search for. (Tip: Make those targets all different so you don’t cannibalize your own results!)

But even when you use content types that might not directly turn up in search engine results (think a book for sale or a white paper locked behind an email list), you can still build search engine visibility for them.

How?

Create landing pages for those products, then optimize them for better rankings.

Once you bring in those visitors from search engines, your landing page can work on converting them to clients, book-buyers, email subscribers, or whatever else your end goal is for that content.

Chances are, you’ve probably already done some form of inbound marketing.

But by making a more conscious effort to incorporate these tools and tactics into your larger marketing plan, you’ll slowly grow a platform that continually serves your freelance writing business every hour of every day, catching the attention of new prospects even while you sleep.

Jenn Mattern is a freelance business writer and professional blogger with 20 years of experience. She’s helped new freelance writers for the last 13 years at AllFreelanceWriting.com. And she recently launched FreelanceWritingPros.com, featuring advanced marketing and business tips for more experienced freelance writers. If you want more advanced SEO tips for your professional website, sign up for the weekly Freelance Writing Pros newsletter so you never miss an update.