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All posts by Peter Marino

3 Ways To Make You A Better Freelancer

Self-employed, SEO, Small Business Marketing

 

the joys of working from home

Are you finding it hard to attract new customers as a freelancer? Do you feel like you are being held back by low paying jobs? If the answer is yes then you need to change direction as a freelancer and find new ways to improve your career.

Here are three very simple and very effective ways to boost your freelancing career and help you become a better freelancer.

Learn To Deal With Weaknesses And Strengths

Being a freelancer isn’t easy and it actually puts you in a very fragile position. You are under scrutiny a lot and sometimes the criticism might make you feel really bad. But don’t ever crumble under it but learn to use it for your own advantage.

A lot of the times, though unfortunately not always, people can provide you criticism that is only going to help you improve your work and might actually even be a fair point about your performance.

Just by knowing how to take criticism you can also improve your own understanding of your strengths. And knowing what you are good at will help you redefine your work and direct you towards the right career path.

Learn To Pick The Right Jobs

At the start you had to do a lot of jobs just to get some money coming in and to build yourself a reputation. But you don’t need to keep accepting every single job offer you get for the rest of your life. This is going to drain you out of energy and it will not often benefit your career at all.

You have to know how to select just the right jobs for you. If you are browsing for job posts at Odesk or Elance, for instance, think if the job description is something that will help you direct your career to the right direction. If you feel like it isn’t than don’t take it.

Saying no is also something that you have to learn to do. There is a brilliant article at the Freelancery about when to say no and it is something worth reading if you feel guilty about turning down work.

Learn To Market Efficiently

You also need to understand that as a freelancer it is essential to know how to sell yourself to the clients. A lot of freelancers feel out of their comfort zones when they have to try and market themselves.

They might be really good at what they do but when it comes to finding new customers they are unsure of how to act.

The first thing to solving this problem is by improving your online visibility. Just by learning the tricks of using SEO you could transform the way clients find you. With an appropriate SEO agency help you can ensure that just the right kind of traffic is directed to your website.

The second thing you need to focus on is naturally your self-confidence. You have to learn to understand that you are good at what you do and display this emotion to your clients. You don’t need to be cocky but you have to know what you are worth.

This article was sponsored by BoughSEO.com.

How to Get More People to Read Your Articles on Social Media

Blogging, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Traffic, ,

social media Social media is a wonderful tool that helps expand the networks of a lot of people and businesses, and it’s especially great for people who want to share information. If you write a lot of articles and want them to get more attention, then there are a lot of things you can do to make this happen. If you’re not sure where to get started, then take the tips that are listed below. These can help you make the most of those articles you work hard to write so that they get more attention and you see more traffic through your social media sites.

1. Use Stumbleupon

This is a great tool for driving a lot of traffic to web pages because it finds content and then recommends it to users. It gives even smaller social media accounts the chance to get noticed, so it can be very useful if you’re just getting started. In fact, many users have had their sites get tens of thousands of hits just because they used Stumbleupon to drive traffic to an article they wrote. The best part is that if people like what you wrote, they are likely to follow you or bookmark your site for future use.

2. Use Your Connections

It never hurts to use your friends, especially when it comes to social media sharing. Get some of your friends who have popular accounts through social media. Ask them if they would be willing to share your article with the audiences that they have. Their sharing (and linking back to your websites) can result in a lot of traffic to your site and an incredible amount of exposure to your article. Tell your friends that you will share their articles as well, especially if it’s related to content you already have.

3. Submit to Editors

Article publishing is becoming much easier than it ever was before, so it’s something you might want to try out for yourself. As long as you don’t have a piece that is a complete ad for your products or company, you may be able to get it published. There are tons of websites you can find by doing just a simple search online for editors looking to publish articles. Send it out along with information about yourself so that the editor knows more about you. Also make sure you only send a portion of the article as a teaser, and so your content doesn’t get stolen. If you have a great article then it can easily lead to exposure through publications you may have never considered!

4. Publish it Online

If you only save your article on your computer and send it out as an e-mail, it is never going to get noticed. Instead of just sending it out to a few people, mass market it! Publish your article on your most popular social media site and then link back to it on all of your other accounts. For example, you could post your article on your blog and then link to it through your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other accounts. This is basically free advertising and can lead to thousands of people seeing your article without you have to do more than link to a page!

5. Use Digg

The website digg.com is a great website for people who are looking to get their interesting articles written. It’s packed full of great articles about political issues, science, the internet and so much more. You can submit to them a link for your article and see if it gets approved. If it does, then you will soon get a ton of traffic to your page. This can lead to a lot of views, but also a lot of loyal followers, if they enjoy the information that you write.

6. Keep at It

Don’t let one unsuccessful article ruin your writing for good. Keep doing it and you may find that your future pieces are more popular than you could have imagined. You never know what topics are going to gain the interest of the masses and get you more popularity on your social networking sites. Just make sure you still write articles that look nice and have good content, or else people may not want to continue reading them as you release them.

Author Bio: Joe Laden is the owner of WBTutorial.com where he reviews the best website builders and writes helpful tutorials like this Weebly tutorial.

Benefits Of Using High PR Social Bookmarking Sites

SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

What are social bookmarking sites?

Social bookmarking sites are sites that offer centralized online service in which, people can add and share their favorite bookmarks. The first social bookmark site was introduced in the year 1996 and it was only in the year 2003 that it started to gain popularity after the site Delicious was started. This site made the term social bookmarking popular and also introduced people to the term ‘tagging’ which is considered to be a very important facet of social bookmarking. Through tagging people can organize their bookmarks in the site and can be done in a very flexible way. Folksonomy is social tagging that is a process using which many users of the site can add metadata that are in the form of keywords enabling them to share content easily.

Uses of social bookmarking sites

By using social bookmarking people can promote websites and is now considered to be a very powerful tool that can be used to share websites and webpage that you like with your friends and family. A social bookmark site is not just a place to save your favorite webpage’s or websites and share them with your friends; it is also a great way to look at what other users have tagged and this can allow you to find pages or sites that might interest you. By using high pr social bookmarking sites you can promote your website by using social tagging and thereby drawing traffic into your website. Social bookmarking sites are now a great platform for backlinks and are used by many website owners to promote their websites and products.

Advantages of using high pr social bookmarking sites

  • High pr social bookmarking sites are often very popular among people and therefore you will be able to use them as a great source for traffic.
  • These sites are known to be gold mines when it comes to traffic and you will be able to drive decent traffic to your site.
  • These sites are also great to develop backlinks and by developing backlinks, you can generate traffic to your site.
  • The ranking of your website can greatly increase when you use backlinks in high pr social bookmarking sites as they are considered as quality backlinks and therefore help in increasing page rank.

Finding high pr social bookmarking sites

Using social bookmark site that has a Pr rating of 6 or more will be ideal for the purpose of generating traffic to your website and to place backlinks. The top PR ratings of such bookmarking sites tend to be 8 and any site that has the ranking of 6 and above will be able to do the job. It is easy to find websites that have reviews and ratings of social bookmarking sites online. Therefore, you have the option to go through the reviews and ratings to identify the sites that you need to target. Only if you target social bookmarking sites that have good PR rating, you will be able to see the benefits of your social media marketing campaign.

Matthew Anton is a Twitter marketing consultant. He has extensive experience and expertise of handling successful Twitter backlink building campaigns.

Protect Your Website Against Google Algorithm Updates

Hummingbird algorithm, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing,

google hummingbird updateChanges in Google algorithm updates can put the fear into even the most successful of affiliate marketer. The changes can affect search engine optimisation ranking, and can mean the difference between obtaining healthy traffic volume to a site, or not at all. Here’s all you need to know to ensure your website is as protected as possible against future Google algorithm updates.

Make your content unique

It’s been no secret that Google has been waging war with websites that produce low quality content. What this means as an affiliate marketer is that you really need to ensure that the content you provide on your site is meaningful, interesting and unique. Don’t copy from any other sites, and always try to think about how you are adding value to what you produce. Consider using a tool such as Copyscape to check your work isn’t duplicated.

Manage your links

Google has also taken it upon itself to penalise any websites with cheap inbound links that smack of spam. If you want to protect your website, then make sure that your link profile is as natural as possible. What does this mean? Try to create relevant and engaging links on your affiliate site. Incorporate your brand name into most of your anchor text. Use generic anchors such as ‘click here’ and ‘learn more’. Avoid the use of automated link-building software. Have a mixture of do-follow links and no-follow links.

Don’t over use keywords

Previous Google updates have penalised affiliate marketing websites that have been keyword heavy. Don’t over use keywords, but focus on the most important phrases only. When you do use them, make their use as natural as possible.

Engage in social media

It’s something that every affiliate marketer should be doing anyway, but to make sure your website is protected as possible against Google algorithm updates, you should be paying even more attention to social media. Google will view your website favourably if you can show that you have an active social media presence, so make sure you have a Facebook or Twitter account. Make use of Pinterest if you produce unique images, and install social sharing buttons on your pages.

Keep your site current

Again, it’s probably one of the biggest golden rules of affiliate marketing, but if you’re not keeping your website current and up to date, then Google could well penalise you in its next round of updates. So, as well as adding as much unique content as possible, keep reviewing it and make sure it is current.

Build a mailing list

One of the best methods to protect yourself from any future Google updates is to get building a mailing list. Your list should be made up of your targeted email subscribers and all of your customers and contacts, etc.

Get people visiting your site

Google seems to favour those websites where visitors like to frequent, and stay there. So, you need to protect your website by drawing traffic to your site and giving visitors sufficient reasons for them to hang out there for a good while.

Anytime Google changes is heard it worries even the most successful of people. Clicksure, the author of this post, does everything they can to make sure we prepare you before and after the updates.