As a Freelancer you do your best to provide exactly what your clients require at the most competitive prices.
Your main aim being of course is to secure ongoing work from your clients and enjoy new business that comes as a result of the positive feedback (hopefully).
But you cannot just sit back and hope that others will pass around the news of the good work that you do or you will most likely be flat broke in no time at all.
So, with that in mind here are five steps to take to ensure that your online public relations are in order for your Freelance business:
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that allows you to build an online presence and maintain a list of professional contacts in your profile. This is a great online tool where you can form ‘connections’ with satisfied and repeat clients. LinkedIn also allows you to obtain recommendations from your connections which will add weight to new clients making the decision to provide you with their business.
- Facebook – Social Media is a very important business tool these days. Major corporations like Coca-Cola who were established in 1886 now have Facebook Fan Pages. It is important to ensure that if you are using your personal Facebook account for business that there is no unsavory photo’s or messages that will turn-off potential clients. Alternatively create a Facebook Fan Page which you can use to create a social interface to clients.
- Twitter – You could probably add Twitter in with Facebook under the Social Media banner, however even though Twitter has been around for some time and many businesses have already joined in on the phenomenon, Twitter is still a great medium to utilize for not only online public relations but also traffic generation purposes.
- Personal or Business Website – This one is probably a given, however I see many freelancers who either do not have their own website or have websites which look like they have been recently created or not updated in several years. You do not have to spend thousands of dollars on a website and with great CMS products available these days like WordPress you’d be simple wasting your hard-earned if you do. Creating a personal website, or even better a web log (blog) will allow you to publish frequent content which will continue to build authority and increase the ranking of your business website.
A great thing about these online public relations tools is that they also rank very high in search engine results.
If any potential clients are doing some homework on you (which I am a firm believer in), the profiles that you have created in these sites will most likely be the first to show up, so it makes sense to utilize them to their full potential.
Taking online public relations steps for your freelance business makes sense when you look at the return on investment. Taking a little time now to setup and maintain such online public relations tools will yield many benefits for years to come.
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