Quick Tip: Remember to Follow Up

Freelance Switch — a great freelancing blog, particularly for designers — ran a great article about the need to follow up with potential clients (former clients, too) to ask if they have any work for you. This is a great thing to do if you’re having a slow period, but it’s a good idea to regularly keep in touch with prospects even when you’re not hurting for work.

We writers in particular can easily send out a query and never hear anything, or do a project for a client and never work for them again. In both of these situations, following up might not get us more work (at least not immediately), but it does keep us in the mind of the editor or potential client, in case he or she does happen to need something in the near future.

Staying in touch with people you’ve worked with in the past (who you enjoyed working with, of course!) is a great way to get more work, either from that person or through referrals from that person.

Following up isn’t an every day sort of task, but you shouldn’t keep it for when you have nothing else to do, either. Maybe even just a quarterly e-mail to some people you enjoyed working with or an offer to help someone who expressed interest a month after you first talked would be a great way to stay in these people’s minds without a whole lot of effort on your part.

Quick Tip: Broaden Your Horizons

Don’t limit yourself to just one kind of writing. most of us start our writing careers thinking about the glossy newsstand mags, and they’re great, of course, but there are a lot of other ways to make money writing: smaller magazines and trade publications, regional mags, newspapers, newsletters, websites, corporate writing, ebooks, ghostwriting, even poetry and fiction.

Branch out and you’ll likely have more fun and make more money.

Action Step: Getting Your Brand Going

As I’ve been talking about all week, building your online brand or name recognition is an ongoing process with many different steps that you can focus on. But if you’re new to the freelancing world on online writing community, there are a few things you should probably think about doing first.

1. Buy a domain name with your name in it in some way. If your actual name isn’t available, try a reasonable variation (like mine) or, if you have an actual brand name you want to be known as (like the Freelance Coach) go for a domain with that in it.
2. Put up some kind of website. In the beginning, a basic blog will be fine. Some people have quite detailed websites that are basically built on blogging software. Or you can have a site built, either based on a blog (which is really easy to update) or not.
3. Start writing. If your site is a blog, you’ll need to update with new content regularly. If your site is just a place for a resume and clips, which is fine, you’ll still want to be able to drive traffic to the site, which can be accomplished through using the web address in your bio when you’re published and through writing articles you submit to article sites and using your address in the resource box (we’ll talk more about all that soon).
4. Become an online presence. It may not seem like you have time to read other people’s blogs and message boards, but if you could take a little time each day to post thoughtful responses in a couple of places where people who you want to visit your site hang out, over time you’ll get more people looking at your site.
5. Be patient. These things take a lot of time. If you build it they will come is not a mantra to keep in mind when building a website audience. It takes persistent work and effort to get people to your site, looking around and contacting you. I’ll have a lot more advice on this in the future, but for now, the important thing is to take action if you haven’t already done so. And if you do already have a website, take on action today that might encourage someone new to come visit.

More Tips on Building a Brand

After writing the post earlier this week about the need for journalists (and freelance writers alike) to build their personal brand, I came across this article with more tips on building a personal brand you might want to keep in mind if you’re new to this idea.

It mentions that you know you’ve built a brand successfully when someone can Google you and get to your website easily and when people in your field know who you are (both of these take time and work beyond just building a website, of course).

It also emphasizes your credibility in the way you talk about your work. For instance, don’t be vague about dates or suggest that you were a reporter when you were just an intern or that you had a staff job when you were working as a stringer.

Of course your website should include links to your most impressive work, and you should have a resume or summary of your work information that ideally is in PDF and HTML forms and can be read on portable devices like iPhones.

You should have a presence online, too, not just on your own website or blog but as a commenter or guest blogger on other influential sites. This helps get your name out and establishes you as an expert in your field, especially if you’re providing good advice to other people.

Finally, and this is really important and something that a lot of people miss on their websites, it’s vital that if you’re looking for work, it should be easy for a potential employer or editor to find contact information on your website. It can be as simple as having a contact page or it can be included on every page of the site.

I’ve heard from online marketing experts that this is something a lot of us do wrong: we don’t make our information easy enough to find and we don’t provide enough ways for people to get in touch. If you feel comfortable including your phone number, links to Twitter or Facebook, or your instant messaging handles on your website, that makes it that much easier for people to get into contact with you in the way they are most comfortable.

Getting name recognition is one of the most important things you can do as a freelancer because eventually people will start coming to you with opportunities instead of the other way around. There’s also something a little cool about being “known,” even if it’s just in a tiny circle.

Why Writers Need to Build a Brand

I came across an interesting article the other day encouraging students in journalism school to work on building their personal brand, even if they plan a conventional career of working at a newspaper or television station throughout their career.

These days few people have those conventional, offline careers, and it makes good sense to think about building your brand online and establishing yourself as an expert in whatever topic you think you’ll be writing about long before you actually hit the job market.

The Benefits of Branding

Of course branding is even more important for freelance writers and others with a less traditional, old-school media career path in mind. Setting yourself up as an expert and getting your name out there shows editors you’re serious about a particular topic, whether you’re applying for a staff job or querying an article.

These days people follow the career paths and read the articles written by people they like regardless of where they are found; they’re a lot less loyal to the publication and more loyal to the author. That’s great news for those of us who work in multiple niches across different media, as long as we make it easy for people to find us wherever we are.

Having a personal website (including or in addition to a blog) is a great way to connect all of your different interests and places where you are published, as well as beginning to make a name for yourself.

How to start brand building

The article suggests buying the domain name of your name, if it is available (part of the reason I write under the name Sarah E. White is because that domain was open) and that you should endeavor to get your website at the top of the search engines when people search your name (two of my sites are at the top on Google; alas, not this one yet).

Blogging regularly about topics of interest to you is not only great practice, but it shows a potential editor your style and what working with you might be like. Of course you need to remember that this is a professional blog; it’s not for vacation photos and talk about your kids unless you want to write travel or parenting articles.

And while it’s probably a warning better suited to the j-school kids, it bears repeating that everything on your blog or website should be honest and authentic. These days it’s pretty easy to find falsehoods and fabrications when people bother to look, so don’t ruin your reputation even by stretching the truth of your background.

Building a name for yourself online isn’t about selling out (though it is about selling yourself). It’s just another way for readers and potential employers to get to know you before you’ve worked together, and, when you get famous, a way for your fans to find you and connect with your work, wherever it may be published.