Partner with a company (one outside your niche)
There’s much to be gained from having good relationships with those working within your niche, but it can also pay to step outside of this comfort zone and partner up with friends from elsewhere! One major benefit of this approach is that you can help one another without any competition for customers between the two of you. Of course, in an ideal world all networking and partnerships would be based on lifting one another up, but when it comes to balancing the books even competition among friends can become fierce. You need to think outside the box, with one eye on what is in the box. You don’t want to waste your time, but could partnering with a company outside your usual clientele actually increase your visibility to your usual clients? The specifics will depend on what your niche is and where you’re based, but this method can be a great advert for your services.
Start your own blog directly on your site
Yes, there are a lot of blogs out there in the World Wide Web, but this shouldn’t put you off. If anything, this should show you why you need one as well! This might sound easy if you’re a freelance journalist or content writer, but even if your niche has nothing to do with the written word per sé, your insights could still be invaluable! Target people like you, people who call your niche their own. People just starting out will have any number of questions you could help answer! Discuss any types of people you have benefited from working with, the advantages and disadvantages of working on certain projects, or something as simple (or maybe not so simple) as how you organise transactions, invoices, and tax.
If there’s one clear way to showcase your skills, it is by writing clear tutorials. This isn’t just informative to others in your situation, it also advertised your skills to potential clients. These tutorials show how much you know about your business, so much so that you can guide a relative novice through step-by-step. If you can make someone with no knowledge of the area understand, then you must have a secure knowledge yourself!
Write tutorials for others
This relates to the previous point, but branches it out! Publishing posts on your own blog is a great way to attract visitors, but writing posts for other blogs can bring with it exposure to a whole new audience! Some blogs may pay for articles, others will not, but this shouldn’t be approached as a supplementary revenue stream. This should be advertisement and marketing through and through! Include a little bio at the end about you (most blogs will ask for this anyway) and include a link back to your site/blog. Just like the posts on your own blog, these will promote you, your work, and your expertise!
While you can attract new clients through your posts on other blogs, don’t expect to get too many this way. This is one way of promoting yourself while also building new relationships – with those who run the blogs you write for – and shouldn’t be used as your only marketing technique!
Get active on social media sites
With what feels like stating the obvious now, you really need to make the most of various social media platforms! How to do this can vary, and may depend on where you would usually find you clients: Are they active tweeters? Do they post a lot of photos on Instagram? Are they solely found through LinkedIn? Engage potential clients without making your social media account seem solely focused on this; you might also want to try to start (and join) conversations about your industry. Some purely personal use of these platforms is fine too, but try to make sure you don’t say anything that a potential client would be put off by!
