1. Never write yourself off

When I started freelancing I would sometimes write myself off as not good enough for the job. It’s hard not to be sometimes, when the world is full of so many talented people and your work looks mediocre in comparison. Without self confidence in your own work and ability though, you’ll never be able to take off as a freelancer. Now I realize this is a much bigger problem for a designer than a coder, since designing is a much more creative field, but coders can have the same problem too.

In the end, work is hard to come by and the last thing you need is your mind telling you that you wouldn’t be able to achieve a job, and turning it down.

Ways to better your confidence in your ability
Practice until you believe you’re good enough
Rather than concentrating on problems as a whole, look at them individually and sort them out
Don’t compare your work with others. Instead, look at what they’ve done and draw inspiration from it.
Stay positive about your work and don’t degrade it.
2. Have Confidence with clients

Your client (even though temporary) is still your employer. They’ve employed you as you have skills that they don’t have and need your help in an area they are inexperienced with. The last thing they need is you being unsure of what to do.

When presenting yourself or talking with your clients, speak in a confident and polite manner. It’s best to be professional and never shorten or use acronyms when talking online. Try and be sure of what you’re going to do based on what your client has told you. If you’re a designer, explain how what you’ve designed will be beneficial to the user. Most importantly of all, accept the criticism of your client and add their critiques to your design. Never write your client off as not “in the know”. You’re designing for them, remember.

Even if you’re not a naturally confident person, try and put it on. Your client probably has never met you before (most of the time anyway) and won’t know what you act like, so you can put on any persona you want.

3. Make a sweet Portfolio

This almost goes without saying. A good idea is to have a few selected pieces which you think best represent the best of your abilities, and archive the rest of your portfolio pieces. Again, a portfolio’s requirements vary depending on your field. If you’re a web designer, make sure your own design best represents your abilities. If a client sees your design is bad, they will be less likely to hire you.

For writers and coders this isn’t such a big deal, but it’s still good to have an eye catching design that will make you stand out. Testimonials are another important part of a portfolio. When you complete a job for a client, ask them to give a testimonial of your work if they were happy with it. You can have a separate page to house these testimonials, or perhaps a box on the front page showing them.

Other Resources
10 Steps to The Perfect Portfolio
90 Inspirational Portfolios
50 Creative and Inspirational Portfolios
4. Build a Reputation

A good reputation is something that happens over time. It’ll almost certainly help you to get clients more easily, and will overall help your business. This sort of links back to making an awesome portfolio. When clients see your portfolio, brimming with content and experience, they are more likely to hire you.

4.1 Keep your work to a high standard
Building a reputation is as easy as keeping your work to a high standard and employing higher class clients (big businesses for instance). Okay, so that’s not easy, but over time you’ll hopefully be hired by bigger clients, and keeping your work to a high standard is down to you and your ability. Never give up, and keep trying.

4.2 Socialize
Join twitter, facebook, and become friends with the big names in your niche. This is going to be great for your exposure and reputation. When people see that you’re friends with the biggest names, they’ll think that you’re associated with them, and therefore you must be pretty good.

5. Stay up to date with your niche.

This is very important. Imagine if you were a web designer in the 90s and never stayed up to date with what was happening. Your designs would be rather dated, to say the least.

It’s important that you keep up with what’s happening in your niche and community, as this will certainly affect how your client perceives the problem. If everyone else in your niche is using a good (new) technique, it’s not going to pay off for you. People like to fit in (most of the time) and your client will probably want what everyone else is getting (if not better).

How to Stay up to Date
Twitter is an invaluable tool that helps me stay up with what’s happening in the web community.
RSS helps to give you updates on the biggest sites in your niche.
Socializing in the right circles will help you to keep up with what’s happening.
6. Do what you do best.

Pick a field that you think you work best in, and use that. Don’t pick a field you don’t like, or are bad at; the only person this will affect is you. This is why if you’re not good at designing websites you might consider doing more back-end stuff like coding that doesn’t require as much creativity. It’s down to you though.

7. Understand your Clients needs.

Read the brief that your client has given you and make sure you understand exactly what they want. Never jump to conclusions and try your best to follow what your client wants. They’re hiring you after all.

If you are unsure exactly what they want, don’t forget to discuss it.

8. Discuss, Discuss, Discuss

This links back to understanding your clients. If you don’t understand the clients brief, ask them about it. You’re only human, and discussing with clients is the best way to move a project forward. At every stage of the project ask the clients opinion (if you can) and make sure what you’re doing is moving in the right direction.

Saying this however, you don’t want to want to come across as bothersome to your client, so don’t go completely out of your way every hour to ask your client what they think; they have lives too you know! If you come across as needy (god forbid) your client may not decide to use you again, and reusable clients are a very valued resource.

9. Secure long term clients

Long term clients are clients that wan’t to re-employ you because they believe that your skills are of a grade good enough. Lets be frank; finding a job in the freelance world is very hard. Having a client that wants to re-employ you is very valuable because it means you have one less job to find.

To secure a long term client simply keep your work to a high standard and be polite and confident with them. The most plausible long term clients are businesses. A small time start-up is likely to only hire you one and leave it at that, because they only require your skills once. Bigger businesses with multiple targets and websites are more likely to hire you again, as, well, they need you.

10. Don’t Procrastinate

This is one of the most important rules. Procrastinating is easily my greatest enemy when it comes to productivity. The best thing you can do is to stop procrastinating. The best way I’ve found is to just do everything for a while when you think about it, no matter how monotonous. Don’t get into the habit of saying “I’ll do it in an hour” cause we all know it’s not going to happen.

When you’re stuck to a deadline and you think “Oh I’ve got 5 days”, it can start your procrastination all up again, so just start it straight away, rather than leaving it for a few days. This post is a perfect example of how to battle procrastination. A few weeks ago I probably would’ve left this for a few days, but because I’ve been trying not to procrastinate I tried my best to get it done.

Search engines are an excellent source of high quality web traffic. They don’t send visitors who ’stumble upon’ your website or accidently clicked on an ad banner. Instead, they send you interested visitors who type in a query while fully expecting to find what they need. They are engaged right from the start and ready to buy, browse or read.

If their desire is well fulfilled by your webpage, you may end up getting a bookmark, customer or repeat reader. Added bonus: search engine traffic is consistent and usually cost-free. Ranking well for several relevant keywords or phrases could get you a steady stream of visitors everyday. That’s why some businesses choose to hire SEO firms/consultants.

There are many factors involved in the actual ranking of a site on a search engine results page, one of them being the use of keywords in the domain name. While the use of a keyword or key phrase does not alone promise a high ranking, it does seem to be a factor to some extent, partially because the domain name is often used as the anchor text for links.

Why do I talk about this? Because one way to get more search engine traffic is to build many of what I call ‘mini-funnel’ websites for specific keyword phrase/search queries. All of these slave websites could be designed as pointers to funnel traffic to your master site. Alternatively, they could be used as a stand-alone site to build exposure/accumulate leads.

Let’s do an example. I recently came across ’Is Barack Obama a Muslim‘ a one-page website created by someone to answer that one specific search query. The domain name and title tag consists of the keyword phrase (isbarackobamaamuslim) and the word ‘No’ links to the U.S democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama’s campaign website. Screenshot:

Just in case the user misspells his/her query there’s also ‘Is Barack Obama Muslin‘, a one-page website created specifically for possible incorrect search terms (the usefulness of this is offset by search engine auto-correction). In any case, this page contains 3 links, one to the Wikipedia page for ‘Muslin’, one to Obama’s campaign site and the other to the site mentioned above.

And then there’s the ‘Is Barack Obama Muslim‘ version of the site with the ‘a’ alphabet dropped. This particular one ranks the highest on both Yahoo and Google for the ‘is barack obama muslim‘ phrase, taking the no. 1 spot and even outranking Obama’s own official website. This appears to be the most established version of the three; Yahoo site explorer shows that it has 10,762 incoming links compared to the hundreds for the two other sites.

These mini-sites were created to provide answers to a specific question, one that is rather popular because rumors of Barack Obama being a Muslim have been circulating through viral emails or blogs. The goal of these two sites is to debunk the rumors by funneling traffic to Obama’s official site, which provides a clear explanation on the topic.

So the strategy is pretty clear-cut here. Create websites to answer specific search queries or deal with specific topics. Then use them to generate leads or send traffic to your home base.

Here are some elements which I think would really make these mini-sites work:

1. Single-issue. Deal with too many topics or questions and your webpage will lose its immediacy. It also makes sense, especially if you’re using a keyphrase domain name.
2. Reference-friendly. People link to Wikipedia pages because they provide an overview or in-depth info on a specific topic. A way to make your site more linkable is to make sure that it covers the issue in full, through original content and external links.
3. Novelty/Simplicity. A single-page website is easily digestible. Two or three more pages may be fine. Use up too many pages and you’ll end up losing the novelty factor and becoming a full site. You don’t have to just use black text on a white background. Clean, unique and topically relevant site designs will always help.
4. Viral components. To make people spread the word, encourage them by providing sharing options like an email-a-friend feature or link-to-me banners. Favorite tools that marketers have used include quizzes, videos and polls. Anything interactive.
5. Sell elsewhere. The funnel-site is not the place to make money. The injection of a commercial motive might make it less linkable, novel and appealing. Remove or obscure commercial intent by not putting up ads and selling elsewhere (email list or master site).

The Obama examples given above use the exact keyword search query as the domain name/title tag, which encourages people to link using the same words. You don’t have to stick to keyphrases; brandable non-keyword domain names are OK too, although I think its best to at least have some keywords in the title tag, since you’re going after visitors from search.

But then again, search engine algorithms can be unpredictable. Such a site might fall out of favor for some reason and lose its rankings. That’s why its important to give it a good push at the start by promoting it on social media channels to make sure that it serves its purpose as a lead generator/traffic funnel. The resulting links might also help your site develop trust.

So, what do you think of these mini-funnel websites?

After yesterday’s post on marketing without search engines, I decided to follow up with a strategy you can use to get quality free traffic. One of the easiest ways to get visitors to your web site is to spend money. Nothing is more effortless then paying for traffic. But if you can’t afford it or don’t want to pay, there’s an equally simple but free way to get traffic: ad swaps.

An advertisement swap or ad swap is simply an arrangement where you agree to put up someone else’s ad on your site or email newsletter in exchange for them doing the same.

The goal of an ad swap is mainly to get exposure for a specific purpose, such as selling products/services or improving awareness of your brand/site. This is different from a link exchange because you are not seeking to improve your search engine rank.

The link value doesn’t matter at all. What matters is getting visitors into your web site.

Four Pre-Requisites for a Successful Ad Swap

Image Credit: Erik K Veland

For an ad swap to be successful and fair, there are four pre-requisites to be fulfilled:

1. Equal traffic and exposure: Both parties ought to have websites that receive a steady amount of visitors everyday, or an email list with a decent amount of subscribers. Otherwise, there is no meaning in setting up an ad swap in the first place. Ad swaps are most agreeable when both parties have an equivalent audience reach/traffic count.
2. Fair and Good Ad placement: Traffic flows more easily to you when your ad is displayed in a spot which is easily viewable and accessible by visitors. While site designs may differ, both parties should endeavor to exchange ads that are displayed in a similar fashion. A pop-under does not capture visitor attention in the same way as a site-wide banner, so seek to use equivalent ad formats too.
3. High Relevancy: In the best scenario, an ad swap should occur between websites in the same niche, as both parties would benefit from a trade in visitors with an already established interest on the same topic. But it is possible for trades to occur for sites in different niches. The essential point to remember is that your ad/message MUST be relevant to the page or site where it is placed and vice versa for your ad partner.
4. No Conflicting Purpose. If you’re a merchant selling a product or a firm offering a service, you should not do ad swaps with competitors (other merchants/firms in the same niche). However ad swaps can be done for joint promotion of a specific event or shared project. You also should not do an ad swap with a site that contradicts your brand’s ethos or image (e.g. PETA doing an ad swap with Kentucky Fried Chicken).

There is one more important factor and that’s networking. Webmasters and bloggers are often inundated with requests for link trades: they have a defensive barrier against requests from strangers. Unless your site has some reputation or authority in your niche, ad swaps usually need to be prefaced with an established relationship.

People are far more likely to do ad swaps after they become more comfortable with you, when they don’t see you as a leech but a potential benefit. So keep this in mind as well when you aim to fulfill the four other prerequisites.

Seek Quality Ad Partners, Don’t Settle For Anything Less

Image Credit: andy frankwick

You may be familiar with the traffic exchange networks of the past (and present), places where webmasters can go sign up, submit their site and browse through each other’s websites in order to earn viewing credits that can be converted into pageviews for their own site.

It’s all about trading incentivized glances in a merry-go-round of self-interest. You look at my site, I look at your site. Everyone is happy. And it goes on ad nauseam.

Even though these pageview-trading rings are called traffic exchanges, they aren’t useful because you don’t get truly targeted and interested viewers, people who click through to your site because they were honestly compelled by curiosity or desire, not because they want more hits to their own website.

I bring up the topic of the old-school traffic exchanges to emphasize the importance of having a quality ad swap. One should carefully select ad partners because you need to maximize your returns with a limited inventory: you only have that much ad space to trade.

Your goal is to get the best quality visitors from your ad. To achieve that, you must try to only trade with websites that have a quality audience. Don’t do ad swaps just because someone asked you to, it could end up being a waste of time and ad space.

You probably know how to find quality ad partners already, as you should be familiar with your niche. If not, find them by doing a Google search for your site’s keywords.

If you can’t set up a good ad exchange because your site doesn’t get enough traffic, try again after you’ve developed a greater audience. Or you can negotiate with more popular sites by reducing the display length for your ad against their ad, although even that may not work.

Types of Ad Swaps You Can Set Up

All ad swaps can be measured with tracking links and analytics so both parties can compare how many hits they received with the clicks they sent out. If you’re doing an ad swap with a friend or prefer a looser agreement, you can forgo click data and stats altogether. The choice is up to you. Here are some ad swap formats you can use.

• On-site Banners and Text Links. This includes banners of all sizes and text links on a site-wide basis or on specific webpages. Includes blog post promos.
• Email Newsletters. Involves inserting a mention of your ad partner’s website or product/offer. This can be accompanied by a personal endorsement or not.
• RSS Feed Ads. These are either text links or image banners placed within an RSS feed.

Some Extra Tips and Recommendations

One guideline I follow is to never send traffic to my homepage or any page that is unoptimized. A custom landing page must be created for each ad swap. I can design it for the purpose of capturing leads (freebie + opt-in) or set it up so that it becomes a welcome page (’Hello, visitors from Site A!’) with a short introduction and deep links.

I also pay special attention to the ad banners used. Banners that reference your partner’s site name or brand tend to get better click throughs, although you should get permission first. Sometimes they do not want to appear as if they were endorsing your site, although they are already implicitly doing so by having your ad up.

Ad Swaps Aren’t Hip Now But They Still Work

While it’s a common email marketing practice amongst internet marketers, I don’t often read about ad swaps being recommended as a traffic strategy for bloggers or webmasters. There were a few ad trading networks around but none of them really caught on for some reason.

Perhaps it sounds archaic and boring compared to all the super cool social media viral marketing buzz building tactics being promoted right now by all the experts. Yes, ad swaps may sound dull but they still work if you know how to do them right. If you’ve got ad space you can’t sell, why not give it a shot? You have nothing to lose at all.