SEO Copywriters: 3 Skills Guaranteed to Increase Your Freelance Writing Income
If you’re an SEO copywriter, following are three skills that can exponentially increase your freelance writing income.
The Ability to Spot Trends: To illustrate by example, right now Twitter is all the rage. This is a social media marketing service that many clients of SEO copywriters can use. However, many don’t understand how it can benefit their business. It can be another income stream for your business, but how do you sell it?
How to Sell the Trends You Spot to Your Clients
Write up an explanatory, FREE, downloadable e-pamphlet that explains it. Use this as a marketing tool. Once clients understand how it can help their business, they are much more likely to order it. And, if you’re the one that explained it to them, you’re the SEO copywriter they’ll hire to manage it for them.
Tip: To get immediate business from trends, don’t just post it to your site and wait for clients to inquire about it. Send out the e-pamphlet to your entire database immediately, as well as new prospects. I did this with a free report I wrote for my internet marketing and outsource firm, New Media Words (http://NewMediaWords.biz).
The report is entitled SEO & Internet Marketing 101: An SEO / Online Marketing Tutorial for Those New to Internet Marketing. It’s 21 pages and gives insight into what SEO is all about, how search engines work, which internet marketing methods work for all businesses — and more. As I tell new prospects, “It takes the guesswork out of internet marketing.”
I wrote it last fall and still get calls and jobs from it. Within 48 hours after writing it, I landed two new, high-end clients. One has commissioned me to write for their firm on a weekly basis, and I’ve written to e-books for them to use as marketing tools. That’s how well this form of marketing works!
The Ability to Anticipate Client Needs: Clients will tell you what they need, directly and indirectly. Of course, direct SEO copywriting requests are easy to accommodate. It’s the indirect ones that can be hard to ferret out.
For example, let’s say a client contacts you about writing some SEO articles for their site. They also mention during the course of normal conversation that they have a blog that they’ve been meaning to start, but just haven’t gotten around to it.
This presents an excellent opportunity for you to offer weekly blog posts, for example. In order to boost your chance of making the sale, offer a discount if they order “x” number of posts on a monthly basis.
This works in your favor because it stabilizes your income as a freelance writer (something almost all freelance writers crave). Imagine having 5, 7 or 10 clients who have standing monthly orders with you. You can spend less time marketing for freelance writing jobs, while still making the same amount of money.
The Ability to Evaluate Talent: At some point as an SEO copywriter, you’re going to get too busy if you market consistently. In this case, you must learn how to evaluate freelance writing talent. For SEO writing, you definitely want to hire writers who know what this type of writing is all about – at a minimum. Ask for samples and for references.
To gain more insight on cultivating this ability, read the post Online Writing Jobs: What to Do & What NOT to Do When Applying Online for Freelance Writing Work.
SEO copywriting is a very lucrative freelance writing niche – even for newbies. If you have the skills discussed here, it can be that much more so.
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Copyright © 2009: Yuwanda Black for SEO Writing Jobs. This article may not be reproduced or redistributed without the express, written consent of the author.
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Yuwanda, I LOVE this new blog. These tips are spot on - I wrote an eTutorial after convincing a new client to use Twitter to promote their business. I also sent it to my entire client database. It has sparked conversation with clients I hadn’t worked with in a few months which I think is a good thing.
Kimberly I’m so glad you like the site. And you’re right, there’s nothing like a tutorial to get business flowing in. It’s more upfront work than sending out emails, but it works so well that you actually can market less and still make the same — or more — money.
I haven’t really marketed that much at all since I wrote the internet marketing tutoriall for NewMediaWords.biz back inthe fall. And, I’m still getting clients b/c of that.