Why you should have a blog as a freelancer?

Why you should have a blog as a freelancer?

This article will tell you everything about why you should have a blog as a freelancer. But let me start with my story, back in the years when I learned about blogging.

I have been blogging ever since 2005 or should I say, “attempted” to blog. I remember I read this “bootcamp” site to start blogging in blogger and start Adsense for monetization. It was so simple then, I got approved in Adsense within a week by just writing 5 articles, with 300 words. If I can remember it well, I used an already existing article and just rephrased some of the sentence.

So I started blogging, and search a lot of ways to earn money online and put it on that blog. And to cut the story short. My Adsense account was TERMINATED because of all those shit. And now as much as may want. Google refuses to reinstate my Adsense account. Because of this I started freelancing. Mixing it with my bitter experience in blogging, I learned something valuable. 

My early years of freelancing

I have earned a lot thru freelancing and online jobs. Though most of my works are fixed price or project based. The income is not that steady. I had some gigs in oDesk (now known as Upwork) and Freelancer.com. But these sites had major changes as the competition among freelancers grew, and they have a lot of fees, that chops your supposed to be income, that went to a lot of bargain from the clients.

So to cut the story short, I become less active on online freelancing and have some gigs at the outside world. Though I still have some small gigs online, and constantly learning the ropes of the trend. How do I maximize my earning online through both of these world? Blogging and Freelancing. Here are some of the things I have carefully thought about and eventually decided why I build this blog which you are reading now. And also, I have included some things that we can do to achieve success in blogging and boosting our presence as a freelancer. More details on these on the latter part of this article.

Multiple sources of income

Though it may be tempting to try every earning opportunity online, it is advisable to focus on a few. Trust me on this, not because I’m not an expert, but because I am a failure. If you want to build reputation online, stay away from those Paid to click, Investments and Auto-surf. You may earn some in there, but it will be just in a short time. Especially, when you are working on a website or blog, your reputation in the internet will fall, and just like me, you will be banned in other opportunities that you should have privilege on. Some other source of income may not be confined on online opportunities. Since you have an established online presence. It can go through some more opportunities.  Your blog or website can be a showcase for your skills and talents that your clients need at the same time a platform where you can build a following, for more income opportunities like promotions and endorsements.

You have your own identity on the web far from your competition

If you stay only on the social media platform, you still cannot express yourself and jump out the trend with your own identity. Standing out among the rest is very important if you want to have less competition and really show your uniqueness and special qualities. Having your own website or your own blog, is like having a house where you keep your visitors warm and cozy. When your visitor is here, he or she will be far from the thought of your competitor and more focused on you. This is your excellent time to build rapport and pitch your services and product. This is not confined with you and your clients, but also customers who trust you and would love buy products from you.

The Clients will contact you instead you driving through a long list of competitors

If you have set your website or blog well, this will eventually make your potential clients or customers your value. If you are a freelancer, you can pitch your skills and services well passively. That is, all they have to do is scan your site, look for what you can do, and find your contact and send you an email for inquiry. This has been my case in this early stage of building my blog. I just started this for only 1 month, and still I don’t have the results I want. But I do have benefits I don’t have back then without my own blog. Here are some examples of unsolicited inquiries from potential clients:

You get most of the social media and search engine

Promoting your service as a freelancer on social media can be tiresome, because of the task of keeping up on the trend. You will easily be left behind if you don’t update constantly. But, in a way, it can be beneficial, since it is a direct communication with your potential clients. If you archive all useful and informative facts in your blog, you can easily share it again. But more to that, if your blog has sharing buttons, your followers can share it also if you find your article useful. This would double your results without exerting more effort. After all these, if you have a healthy and engaging blog. It will eventually be discovered by search engines. It’s really hard to gain authority for search engines, and speeding up the process or cheating it could hurt you more than starting small.

So how can we help each other?

Don’t blog for robots! Blog for real people!

As I have realized, a REAL reader and a blog follower is more important than thousands for robots crawling to your site. Simply because, robots can’t pay you money, and can never help you grow as a person. Socialization is still better. But why not take advantage of these two. Socializing can give you active income (no work no pay) and search engine authority can give you passive income (no work, more pay).

Exchanging knowledge with other people can help you in a lot of ways. Sometimes, the benefits are more valuable than money.

When like-minded people gather together, opportunities are endless

This is my stats for my one-month blog. Although the views and followers are very little to none, but I have gathered a total of 81 comments.

And not just spam comments. They are really juicy comments from real people.

From these comments, you can learn a lot already. It can also really add up to your blog authority. And it will not be considered “cheating” by the search engines and save you from penalization. This may have a small effect on search engine and would give little to now income from direct sales, but it will give you a boost of morale because of the useful comments from like-minded people.  

As I have stated and I cannot stress it enough: “A real reader or a follower of your blog is more important than thousands of robots crawling”. Better to have them around as you work your authority in the search engines.

Google’s eyes are slowly rolling to Social Media

Google is continually changing algorithm, and it slowly favors blogs and websites that are engaging in the social media platforms. And it greatly favors its own, to name a few are YouTube and Google plus. If you are doing well in these social media, most likely Google search engine will favor your site more. And come to think about it, it is really a long process to rank in search engines. The link building I’ve done for the last month is, undoubtedly, not yet really that effective.

If I can recall, I have already done more than a hundred comment links. But as I check on my SEO profiler, it registers only 22 backlinks, 95.5% of them are No-Follow links and link influence is only 2%. This is but normal for small and starting blogs, the effect usually shows on 3^rd month to 6^th month if all efforts are exerted to maximum.

It is quite a good decision to build your following first in social media, and let your search engine authority work itself naturally. Which is, actually really wants, NATURAL ENGAGEMENT FROM REAL PEOPLE. Plus, while doing this, as I have stated, you can earn more clients while building your site for the Passive income that you want in the future.