3 Top Strategies for Building an Audience for Your Freelancing Business

When you’re first starting your freelancing business, it’s hard to build an audience that’s ready to buy. Even if you have an audience, it’s always good to find ways of increasing your reach. It’s often tempting to build a product or service and expect people to flock to it (“If you build it, they will come.”), but it often doesn’t work that way.

The best way to attract attention to your business is by providing value for those that you want to serve. There are many ways of doing this, but in this post, I’ll look at three:

1. Answering Questions
2. Guest Blogging
3. Giving Away Something of Value

Answering Questions

Answering questions around the topic of your business can have a few positive impacts. Answering questions helps:

1. Showcase your expertise.
2. Provides valuable information to your audience.
3. Offers enough information to display the complexity of what you offer, often showing that your product or service is needed.

If you think about how Google search works, you know that most searchers ask a specific question. If you craft a detailed response to that question, you have a good chance of showing up in the search results. The quality of your answer can help direct more traffic to your website.

An added bonus of answering questions for your potential visitors is that you might get your content displayed as a featured snippet within Google’s search results. The image below is the featured snippet that came up when I searched for “how to get a featured snippet on google”.

To increase the possibility of getting your content displayed as a featured snippet, format your answer as a list of steps that answer the question.

Answering questions is a great way to serve your audience and increase that audience while increasing your authority on the subject.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging should be mutually beneficial. It helps the site you are posting content on because sites are always looking for quality content but don’t always have the resources to create it. Guest blogging helps you by getting your content in front of a possibly larger audience or a new audience that you don’t currently have the attention of.

But you need to be selective with the site that you post your content on. Don’t just place your content on any site that will accept it. Be sure that the visitors to the site are an audience that aligns well with your business objectives. Before deciding to submit some content to another site:

• Review the content currently on the site to ensure your content would fit well with it.
• Check out comments on previously published content to look for alignment with your business.
• Ensure that the site has a good reputation.

Whenever possible, include a single link back to your website within your submission, so visitors can find you and all of your content. But request that the link contain the “nofollow” attribute to help avoid a Google penalty.

Keep in mind that when you submit content to another site, it should be unique content. Also, be aware that you should not post the same content to your own website. Posting the same content to multiple sites can cause issues with duplicate content. And Google gets to decide which content is the original content and gets the credit for the content.

Giving Away Something of Value

People always love to get something for free. Giving away some content on your website to attract visitors can be beneficial or can backfire if you do it wrong.

When you give something away, you want to be sure that what you give away is something that the audience you want to attract would be excited to receive and ensure that it’s related to your business. Just giving away an Amazon gift card as part of a contest has the possibility of bringing a lot of traffic to your website, but the traffic may just be coming to get the gift card and isn’t interested in your business.

However, if you give away a resource that has value relevant to your business, you will attract a much more qualified audience, one that will be interested in what you have to offer. For example, if you had a tax accounting business, a possible giveaway could a tax law guide for the upcoming tax year. This type of giveaway will attract people who want to know what changes are coming up to the tax law. The giveaway may also highlight the complexities of tax laws and that the visitor could benefit from the services you provide.

You can use a giveaway as a way to get people to signup for your email list. Email addresses are a valued piece of personal information that people don’t like to give away unless they feel like they are getting something valuable in return for it. The nice thing is that you have direct access to communicate with them; just be sure that you continue to provide them with valuable information, so they’ll want to remain on your list.

Another great thing about giveaways is that if the recipient finds them valuable, they’ll want to share the details with others. This will attract even more people to your site.

So, what are some things you can give away? Here’s a list of 10 ideas to get you started:

1. E-book.
2. Exclusive video content.
3. Free trial.
4. Coupon code.
5. Reference guide.
6. Checklist.
7. Case study.
8. Cheatsheet.
9. Free sample.
10. Webinar.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to start attracting and continue to build an audience. In general, providing something of value will get you much further in attracting and retaining those people than any other strategy. Remember to keep the visitor in mind and what they would most benefit from to keep them coming back for more and encourage them to become ambassadors for your brand.

Have you tried any of the strategies in this post? Are there other strategies that have worked well for you, especially when starting out as a freelancer? Post your comments below so we can help each build an audience.

For more tips on building your freelance life, check out these articles:

10 Must-Haves for Landing Pages That Convert

4 Critical SEO Strategies for Your Freelance Portfolio Website

3 Ways Excel Can Help You Track Your Freelance Income And Expenses

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Brenda Keller is a software coach who helps people feel comfortable with and learn how to use software. She has been an Excel user since it was first introduced in 1985 and has taught the program in various settings. Her new Microsoft Excel: Quick Start course was designed to help those new to Excel or those wanting a refresher to get a handle on Excel’s key features quickly. Check out her course on Udemy here or view her YouTube channel here to get more help with Excel. To learn more about Brenda Keller, check out her official website here.