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The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful



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The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful

We've had some great discussions posted lately on Freelancing, being a freelancer and succeeding as one. And it's been some really eye opening stuff! Stuff that even advanced, experienced freelancers can learn from. That's what's so great about the SEOClerks Community Discussion area. In that it's really bringing out the best in the best freelancers and making newbie freelancers better, smarter, more successful freelancers!

But when you are working as a freelancer, or a sole entrepreneur and running a business of any kind. There are some things you should be or would be doing at a minimum, in order to get more sales, clients and business and expand your business and freelanceship.

And in my opinion, these are the 5 minimum things you should be doing to take yourself, or your business to bigger and higher levels of success!
The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful
1. Personal and Brand Name Building

Whether you're doing personal freelance services for other people yourself, or you're doing it as part of a business. You'll need to establish yourself, your name or your business name on the Internet if you are to actually get new clients, sales and business revenue. Fortunately, SEOClerks makes that a much easier process else without it you might need to establish yourself as a solo entrepreneur in other ways. However, there are sites that make it easy for you to establish your presence on other sites like social media sites and Web 2.0 blogs etc. Check out How to do brand name research and build your brand on other sites.

2. SMM (Social Media Marketing)

So social media marketing is a big part of being a freelancer or affiliate marketer or even if you're a business that uses social media sites to connect with people that are interested in your brand or services etc. You wont get rich quick with social media, but it can be very powerful for building your brand name or even establishing yourself on social media sites as an expert in your niche or industry. You'll probably be doing a lot of it which involves regularly posting new updates and your blog posts, services etc to your social media pages and profiles.

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is unavoidable if you are a webmaster or a blogger. And it can involve doing many different things from creating sales and landing pages to blog posts, white papers or eBooks and other forms of content that people can download, spark conversations and conversions. Quite simply, content marketing can play a huge part of being a successful website, blog, freelancer or affiliate marketer.

4. SEO

If you own and run your own website or blog or affiliate site. You'll need to do some form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on it in order to get it ranking higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). There is both on-page which can involve improving site structure and layout, usability and mobile friendliness/responsiveness and adding content etc and off-page SEO which involves building links to your site from other sites. Whether they are related sites/blogs or just high authority sites.

5. Email Marketing

They say the money is in the list for a reason. Because email marketing can cost literally nothing to do and the ROI (Return On Investment) it can provide makes it something you should be doing for that reason alone. If you own your own portfolio or affiliate site or blog, you should start collecting email subscribers from your current reader base and traffic and social media followers which you can then send simple newsletters to which can encourage and promote more repeat visitors and traffic to your site, other social media pages and earn you sales too in the process.
The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful
Conclusion

It's clear to see that these are the main 5 things any freelancer will have to do at some point along the line of their freelancing career. Whether that's doing it for yourself, or doing it for your clients or both! It's pretty much impossible to get away from them and not have to do them at some point along the line. Although some freelancers might not be doing all of them. If you want to see bigger and better success, you probably should!

Do you do all of these things yourself as a freelancer?

What other things are there they must do in order to become bigger, better and more successful freelancers?

Comments

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EliteWriter
I agree with your list. A freelancer definitely needs to make good use of social media marketing these days. Email marketing however should also be used, as I find that there are many who place too much importance on SMM and forget about email marketing, which is still valid in my opinion. Content marketing and SEO are surely a must, and I think we all agree on that The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful All of these will ultimately help in establishing an effective online presence and to make your image or brand more popular. I would also add online advertising methods for those who can afford to.



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Lynne
EliteWriter, I often find that online marketers use one way of marketing and not another. So like you say they will do Social Media Marketing, but not Email Marketing... the way I see it now is that the successful people use all these things together and when that is done it really beefs up everything.



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EliteWriter
Yes Lynne, I agree. It seems that since social media platforms became so popular, many sort of let go of other marketing methods such as email marketing, and focused their efforts solely, or mostly on social media marketing. And I feel that is not the best way forward. A mix of different methods is always better as you can get to gain many more advantages that way.



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Everett
If you have a large social media base, and can get them to subscribe to your newsletters than that would be amazing. However, as I mentioned below that I too had tried this and didn't get the results that I wanted. Perhaps I wanted too much? Who knows.. but possibly sometime in the future I will try this out again, and see if it works for me. I would love to have at least even 100 subscribers that are subscribed to my newsletter, that would be so cool!



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Lynne
Everett it isn't that hard to do in my experience.... I wrote an eBook and give it away to subscribers for my make money online website. It works nicely. I have about 400 subscribers to that newsletter now. Yes I suppose it is a small list to some people but to me it is a good start The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful

For my mommy blog I have about 2000 subscribers, mostly gained through competitions The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful

I have about 10 subscribers to my addiction website newsletter and I never did anything but add a boring subscribe form.

What niche is it for? Content writing?



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Everett
I've tried email marketing in the past and it didn't yield the results that I wanted. However, it'll be great if you already have clients. Just getting the clients to even be part of a newsletter type of thing is hard as many just don't want to.

I've sometimes even bought emails within my genre, and that didn't work either. Usually you'll get the "can you unsubscribe me from your list" emails which are depressing. :/

However, what methods would you suggest to gain newsletter subscribers, and to make them not want to unsubscribe from the newsletter?



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Lynne
For my mommy blog I did competitions which worked really well, especially baby photo competitions. The moms chomped at the bit for these competitions... which reminds me, maybe I should do another one The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful

Then for my online marketing website I wrote an eBook and I give it away to new subscribers and that is working really nicely.

I am going to also write an eBook for my mommy blog and my addiction blog but I just need to find the time! I'm struggling to come up with ideas for the eBook for my mommy blog though...



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CryptoGuru
i can agree with that a lot of people do seem to forget that email marketing is an option, but it is just as you said too you know "make good use of social media marketing these days" and i can be honest that is really were people focus there attention social media is pretty much an outlet to everything especially if your looking to make sure you get connected as there are pages and groups you can join online were people share the same interest so i believe you are on the right track there elite writer i really do



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Lynne
YAY I am well on my way to success then because I am doing all of these!

I would definitely add in video marketing. Some people have told me that video marketing (Youtube) goes under the Social Media Marketing side, but I think it is a whole section on its own The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful



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Everett
People have a lot of success with video marketing. Typically for me, I don't want my face in a video, nor my voice. I'm just weird like that.. lol I have tried, and tried to create videos, and content with either my voice or myself in the video and I always delete it. Maybe I'm too critical of myself?



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CryptoGuru
hey man you might just be a little too critical and that can be both good and bad , i understand you know you do not want to throw yourself out there too the wolves i get that but sometimes life is about taking risks life's too short to have those what if moments especially if it involves something that could possibly help you, think about vines if you ever feel your material might be awkward think about all the stuff on the web that people flat out embarrass themselves with lol you and just shake off those vibes try it out, whats the worst that can happen you fail ? its not failing if you tried cause you learned its only failing if you dont try cause you have not learned nothing take it easy best of luck



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Lynne
Well it is quite intimidating isn't it? The Top 5 Things Every Successful Business or Freelancer Needs to Do To Be Successful

I think you are too critical. You need to get out of your comfort zone to really make a success, well that is my thinking anyway, take some risks - show your face, add your voice!



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EliteWriter
I am like you Everett, I would not want to be a part of a video for sure. I guess it is all about self confidence of having so many people see you lol, and that is not something for me. However if it were just the voice I might do it. I think it depends on various things, such as how fluent one is if he is not a native speaker, and how 'nice' the voice sounds because you do not want to bore people.



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CryptoGuru
yea i can agree i do not really view you tube as a from of social media but as far as marketing it can most definitely be used as a tool too progress your self videos are always great it is always good to give visuals when trying to market , so you make a great point i feel as if using you tube as a tool with your social media as promotion for the said video, you know it can result in to great things and who does not love a happy ending right? Lynne keep up the good work always a pleasure hearing what you have to say



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CryptoGuru
i am going to have to say this is really well put together, i like that you took the time too make marketing a point in bold i feel as a freelancer one of the most important things you could ever do for your self as some one who works for them selves is make sure marketing and staying on top of , you know you got to really step out your comfort zone and branch out too reach people broaden those horizons i work from home of course but i always love making appearances and using that too my advantage to potentially get new clients



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vinaya
Establishing your brand is very important. In order to establish your brand, you must have your website or a blog. Your social media presence is also important. It is not possible to join and become active on all social media, however, you can choose the most popular social medias and become active. You must have an active online presence, for instance, you need to publish your content regularly and share on social media regularly. Publishing and sharing are not enough, you also need to interact. Interaction means you respond to the comments on your post. You must also use social bookmarking sites to market your business.



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Corzhens
I think social media is the most fertile venue for marketing your business. What’s good in social media is that you can create your own network so when you promote something, you already have some assurance of a good response. Especially with Facebook, you can create a Facebook Group or a Facebook Page for your business concerns that will leave your timeline for the personal posts. And if you are creative in your marketing technique, your promotion will bear fruit.



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AlaaAbdelsamie
It seems that since social media platforms became so popular, many sort of let go of other marketing methods such as email marketing, and focused their efforts solely, or mostly on social media marketing .



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DenialSom
I would add that you should always automate your business processes. Custom forms, reports, and billing can simplify your days if done correctly. I'm talking about serious business, when you are not just a freelancer with a salary of$ 100 a month - but when you build your agency and increase turnover. Tools and solutions like fluix, trello, slack, and github can help you simplify many processes



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xosta
Can you tell me more about business optimization?



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WolframW
I think that if you want to learn more about business optimization, you should read articles about how to improve the jira experience, for example. I think the power bi jira connector might be a good example for you. This site has a lot of detailed information about this kind of business solutions. I advise you to read more about the power bi article in particular.



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