When you’re freelance, your blog is an important marketing tool. It raises your profile, it positions you as an expert in your niche, and it helps to drive traffic to your website. But, truth be told, most blogs don’t make it past the first six months. That’s because it takes hard work – and a lot of time – to post regular articles and build a loyal following.

So, if you’re struggling with your blog or want to get your first blog off the ground, here are my three recommendations:

1. Blog Profits Blueprint

About a year ago, I downloaded a 50-page, free report from the Australian blogger, Yaro Starak. Called the Blog Profits Blueprint, it’s packed full of invaluable information on how to become a successful blogger. It covers everything from how to create great content, to how to market your blog, to how to make money from blogging.

I received an email yesterday from ‘The Wealthy Freelancer’ with information about their first-ever International
Freelancers Day on September 24 and 25. (Mmm, technically, that’s two days..)

In the UK, we have a National Freelancers Day on November 23 but obviously the international day is different.

Their email said that this two-day event is the biggest-ever free online conference and it’s exclusively for solo professionals like us. It will feature 25 high-profile speakers, including industry thought leaders such as David Meerman Scott, Brian Clark, Mari Smith and Liz Strauss.

12 hours of free videos

In an ideal world, we’d be kept busy with client work every hour of every day and send in lovely big invoices at the end of the month.

But how many days’ work do you actually need to do in order to earn a salary you’re happy with?

The figures I’m using here are hypothetical but, say, you wanted to earn £3,000 a month and your hourly rate is £50, it doesn’t take a mathemetical genius to work out you need to bill 60 hours a month.

Two weeks a month

If you aim to put in six billable hours a day (don’t forget the distractions you’ll encounter and the procrastination), you’ll only have to work two weeks a month to earn £3,000. FANTASTIC, I hear you say. That’s the same salary as I was earning as an employee, yet I only have to work half as much!

Twice I’ve been owed a few thousand pounds by a client. Both were seriously dragging their heels about paying me and I realised that the only way I was going to see my money was if I took them to court. In both cases, as soon as they saw the official letter, they paid me straightaway so it never got to court. Of course, that was the last I heard of either company but, to be honest, I wouldn’t have wanted to work for them again anyhow.

So what’s the procedure if you are owed money by a client and you really don’t believe you can recover the sum in any other way?

Please note the following information applies to England and Wales only.

There are three routes:

Small claims track – for claims with a value of up to £5,000.

“I love the sound that deadlines make as they go whooshing past.”

If you can cure the procrastination problem that I talked about in an earlier post, you’ll free up a considerable chunk of time every day, so you’ll be much more likely to hit your deadlines. But what if you have a ‘to do’ list with 15 things to get done by the end of the day? There’s no-one to delegate stuff to, so how can you get everything done?

Tip 1. Start by doing two or three small tasks that really are easy to complete. It might be something as simple as paying a bill or making a quick phone call.

Tip 2. The next thing to do is look at your list (you have made a list, haven’t you?) and prioritise your activities. Are there any items on your list for today that you could get away with doing tomorrow, or even later in the week? Not everything is screamingly urgent so take all the non-urgent actions off your ‘to do’ list for today.

1. Work out a strategy: just as your freelance business needs a clear marketing strategy, so does your Twitter activity. So take some time to work out who your target audience is, what your usp is, and how what you offer can help address the problems and issues your audience is facing. Then work out what your message is going to be. Random activity and following random people will not build your business.

2. Make your bio interesting: make the most of your 160 characters in your bio. People will decide whether you’re interesting enough to follow on the strength of this. And don’t forget to include the url of your website or blog in your bio.

3. Position yourself as an expert in your field: set up searches for your key words (www.Search.Twitter.com) and see what people are tweeting about. If you find a lot of people are experiencing the same issue, write a blog post that addresses this problem. Then @reply the next person who has this same problem, and include a link to your blog article. It’s a great way to position yourself as an expert, to be seen as helpful, and to build your brand.