Web writing: Brand yourself as a Web writer and get more clients than you can handle

« « Web writing: blogging - make your clients profitable, and you’ll profit too | You can become a Web publisher too » »

Saturday, April 21st, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

One of the challenges you face when writing Web content for others is anonymity. Your name isn’t on the Web content, articles, or Web sales pages you write. This means that you’re constantly in the position of proving your credibility to new clients. You need do this unfortunately, because content buyers have been burnt once too often. There are many people at the out-sourcing sites and elsewhere online calling themselves “writers”, who disappoint their clients, and these clients pass the word around about these “writers’” incompetence, making it hard for all unknown writers to get work.

This is where branding comes in. You need to build your name online.

Branding gives you credibility online

Here’s what I wrote in an email to a writer recently:

The more information online about you the better: it’s definitely Show And Tell. So set up a portfolio Web site to “show” - the site will make money for you; it gives you branding and credibility. There are many “writers” on the out-sourcing sites who parlay their experience (usually zero) into the realms of fantasy. So when you show your credits and portfolio, clients will go with you, rather than someone who’s cheaper. Clients want someone who knows what they’re doing, so you have to SHOW them.

I just typed “Angela Booth” into Google, and came up with some 54,000 pages which reference those words. I added the quotes, to make sure that Angela AND Booth were both on the returned pages. This is instant credibility via branding.

You can brand yourself too - spread your NAME far and wide

You can do exactly the same thing. Brand yourself. I pass on clients to writing colleagues every week, because my Angela Booth domain and Web site at http://angelabooth.com/ gets me more work than I can handle. All these potential new clients find me via that one site.

Purchase the domain for your name, and start getting yourself known via sites and blogs online. It saves you time in the long run, because rather than constantly hunting for writing gigs, people can find you can contact you when they’re looking for a Web writer.

When I ask writers why they don’t have a site or blog, they say they’re too busy. But if you’re serious about writing, and want to make money at it, you need to brand yourself in exactly the same way all businesses do, by becoming known. Although it takes time to create sites and blogs, in the long term it saves you time and energy hunting for work.

Start building your own Web writing brand today.

[tags]Web writer, writing, freelance writer, content, articles sites, branding Google[/tags]