How to Start Selling Social Media Marketing Services
The desire to work from home, set your own hours, and still make a living is constantly growing and it’s making freelance work a popular choice for many.
However, freelance work won’t get you anywhere if no one is hiring you and the first thing that prospective clients look at when deciding whether you are the one person out of thousands of options that they want to choose is your profile.
Below are some of the best tips I’ve found for making your profile work for you.
Work on Your Online Reputation
Your personal brand is what will ultimately allow you to sit back and watch clients coming your way. You may not be now yet, but you need to work on your online reputation from day one, simultaneously with your client work.
Treat yourself as one of your own clients: Put yourself on your schedule and do at least something for your brand daily. Here are a few steps to start:
- Set up your own website. No need to invest too much in that yet but you need to lock your name as a domain name and start building up some content to get some trust flowing. Here’s a good clutter-free guide on making a personal site
- You’ll need to figure out some technical stuff too. The first two essentials are registering a domain and choosing a hosting. The above guide gives good info on both. Additionally, here is what people are saying about their hosting plans in real time. This will help you make a good choice.
- Set up your social media accounts and do some basic customizations: Profile pics, contact info, header images, “About” sections.
- Start marketing your online presence. There’s too much to be said about online marketing, so I’ll write a separate article on that. So far here are a few helpful resources to subscribe to and start self-educating.
Sell Yourself
First and foremost, you can’t be afraid to make yourself look good. Talk about any of the experience that you have had in the areas you want to work in. Also make sure to focus on what you are best at and what skills or traits you have that make you stand out from everyone else.
Your client is going to want to know why you are better than the next person they might hire. This is one of those few times where bragging about yourself is a good idea, so make sure that you do.
Be Professional
This is now your business and your livelihood and it needs to be treated with that level of care and professionalism.
Your profile should be free of grammatical and spelling errors. It should be written clearly and in proper format. You don’t want to use slang or foul language when trying to promote yourself. Be mature, show your clients that they are working with an adult.
Define Clear Expectations
You need to know what you can expect from your clients, as well as what they can expect from you. Having unreasonable expectations will make people turn in the opposite direction.
You should have a good idea what your services are worth and price them accordingly. It will steer people away if your rates are too high (or too low, since too low of a rate looks like you don’t know what you’re doing) or if you demand more than is reasonable of your clients.
To manage your salary expectations properly, try found this site that offers a tool allowing you to estimate your online income.
Show Off
In the beginning you simply talked about why you were the best choice, drawing the potential client’s eye in a way that hopefully gets them to read further. However, this is where you want to show them that you can back up everything you said. Include clients’ testimonials if you have them.
If you don’t, get them by asking clients for a sentence or two about their service with you. Also include samples, link to anything you have that shows how good you are at what you do such as blogs, websites, work you’ve done, and samples.
Guest blogging can be a great way to put your name out there. If you want to build a brand in your industry, go ahead and try MyBlogGuest, like I do!
Stay Current
Image source: justfunnies.com
It is far too easy to get your profile looking exactly how you want to look and then to leave it alone and forget about it. When you haven’t updated your profile in months, or even years, then it makes potential clients wonder if you’re still working or if you haven’t been doing much lately. Keep fresh information, samples, and testimonials on your profile and show that you are actively taking care of the business that is you and your work. A regularly updated profile says a lot about a freelancer.
Participating in Twitter chats is a great way to (1) be up-to-date with the recent trends and (2) grow your name and following. I am using this app for that.
What are some of the methods you use to keep your freelance profile looking great and keeping ahead of the rest? Comment below and let us know!
Featured image: Creative Commons image source
