Marketers break grammar rules with catchy slogans and tag lines all the time. Unfortunately, those creative liberties have a nasty habit of bleeding into social media posts and updates – a place they simply don’t belong.
How Freelancers Can Keep Their Socials Professional
By now it should be clear to us all that one of the benefits of social media — widespread accessibility — can also be a burden. Anything you post on the internet unless in private spaces, can be viewed by people you may not have intended to be the primary audience. Not only that, but there’s also a degree of permanence to it. Even if you go back and delete posts you might later regret, there’s a chance that someone could have screen-grabbed or shared it. [Read more…]
Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter: Which is Better for Freelancers?
Social media is a marketing powerhouse, and no matter what platform you want to use, there are benefits all the way around. Put simply, the short answer to “which is better for business?” is that you should be using all three; but for the sake of this article, we’re going to compare Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter in terms of marketing benefits, company growth, and the ability to help brands reach a wider audience. [Read more…]
4 Tips For Building a Following As a Freelance Writer
The freelance writing life is a hustle. Though some writers focus on content work, building a freelance business, many others spend their careers chasing down jobs at an array of different publications. It’s a lot of additional work on top of writing, and if you’re going to make it worthwhile, it’s important to keep your readers connected to your work – no matter where it appears.
So how do you build a loyal readership as a freelance writer? These 4 strategies can keep everyone on the same page, and make your work more appealing to publishers by promising them a pre-formed audience.
As a freelance writer, you need a solid following. Here's how to build one. Click To TweetGet Through Hump Day With These Writing Prompts From Twitter
While Wednesday is traditionally a low day for workers – who wants to be stuck in the middle? – it doesn’t really have much of an effect on many freelancers, does it? For some, however, weekends are sacred. It is time for family. It is “me time”.
For the latter group, then, Hump Day certainly exists. Since I try to keep the weekends free for things I don’t get to do during the week, I usually experience the blues on Wednesday (even though I end up doing some work on the weekends).
The result?
Words don’t come easily. My fingers are so uncoordinated I can’t type without making a mistake every 30 seconds. My mind wanders as if it were a leaf being blown by the wind. [Read more…]
Protect Your Facebook Account From Hackers By Knowing How They Operate
Last week, I shared a meme on Facebook that was a big hit – understandably so. In case you missed it, here is the image again.
It’s funny, sure. But I say it’s all fun and games until your Facebook account gets hacked for real. [Read more…]
6 Social Media Habits That Will Kill Your Freelance Writing Career
So we all know that what we post on social media can kill your chances of landing — or even keeping — a great job. We’ve all been admonished to keep the photos of drunken exploits off Facebook, to lock down our privacy settings to avoid being tagged in unflattering photos, and to be careful about what we say and do online.
As a freelancer, you might think that you’re exempt from those warnings. When you work for yourself, you can do what you want. Think again. Plenty of freelance writers inadvertently torpedo their own careers by the way they communicate and interact online, even if they don’t post photos of themselves doing naked keg stands.
Since social media is so important to building and sustaining a brand, before you post your next pithy status update, make sure you’re not making any of these mistakes. [Read more…]
The No-Brainer Correlations Between Blogging and Social Media
Editor’s note: This post was written by Aby League, a qualitative researcher and a passionate writer. She is an innovator and technology enthusiast. She has been writing about health, psychology, home improvement and technology. You can see more of her articles on Elite Daily. To know her more, follow @abyleague on Twitter.
Today, blogs and social media platforms are doing wonders for the business community. They allow businesses to promote their brands across large audiences, as well as help them build brand identity and trust among customers. However, for this approach to be successful, business owners and/or freelance writers like you must learn to use these two tools in a way that they’ll effectively complement each other.
Image courtesy of Christian Schnettelker via Flickr, Creative Commons
Social media holds great potential in driving readers to your blog.
Consequently, a blog can support your social media account by leveraging credibility and substance. However, you must be careful to strike a balance between the two. If you’re just starting to build your business’s web presence, you must first learn the basics of blogging and social media: what they do, what they’re used for, and how they can help move your business forward.
See, blogging and social media work differently.
A blog is ideally used to share a business’s expertise and knowledge on industry-relevant matters. It provides a conversational approach in discussing various topics that do not just promote the your brand, but also genuinely provide interesting information that readers will truly benefit from. On the other hand, social media platforms allow you to reach a larger community—since everyone these days are either logged in on Facebook, scrolling through Twitter and Instagram, or looking for creative ideas on Pinterest.
Blogs and social media serve two different purposes—but when used together, they provide a great chance of building a powerful and influential web presence for virtually any type of business. Whether you want to drive a steady stream of readers to your blog, or make people want to share your blog content on Facebook and Twitter, here is how you can use blogging and social media to your business advantage:
- Use social media to grow your blog’s traffic. A blog entry will not be able to promote itself unless it is shared across multiple social media platforms. However, building blog audience through social media can be quite tricky. Keep in mind that the key to grabbing attention on social media is to create short but interesting content. When sharing a certain blog entry on social media, put effort in making fun and creative captions or visuals that would entice social media users to click the link to your blog. How a social snippet looks on social media is almost as important as what it says.
- Make your blog entries “shareable” across all social media platforms. It’s one thing to share your own content on social media, but it’s another to be able to make it easy for readers to share your content on their social media accounts. It’s the online equivalent of advertising through word of mouth. Include share buttons on your blog so that readers can easily share or recommend your brand through your interesting blog post. Also, make sure that your buttons are up-to-date, as social media icons tend to change really fast.
- Take advantage of Analytics. If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, you are probably missing out. This tool allows you to monitor the activity on your website or blog by counting how many people are actually clicking your outbound social media links. If the numbers are low, you can re-examine if your social media buttons are in a strategic position on the page, or if you’re writing about the wrong things on your blog. Either way, let the numbers help you improve what needs to be improved. You can also use Avinash Kaushik’s social media metrics as a guide to gauge your social media performance.
- Write about things that matter to your readers. You can share your blog posts on social media all you want—you can even put social media buttons all over your page, but readers won’t share your content if it gives them nothing worth sharing. As such, write about topics that are socially relevant. Blogging must be creative and informative, and not aggressive, hard sell writing. Remember that you want to educate and empower your readers so that they keep coming back for more.
Image courtesy of Robb Sutton via Flickr, Creative Commons
- Showcase your social media content on your blog. While blogs do allow more depth than social media channels, social media can still showcase unique content that doesn’t need a blog entry of its own. If people engage with such posts on social media, consider featuring these posts on your blog. For instance, if your Tweets get a lot of Retweets and replies, it would be a great idea to integrate your Twitter feed directly on your site.
3 Essential Tips to Stand Out as a Writer
Editor’s Note: This was written by the Ebyline staff, a site that connects publishers with the right freelancers for their work. Check them out on twitter: @Ebyline and on Google+.
You’re a good writer, and you know it. If given a keyboard and Internet connection, you could craft ingenious articles in no time, but the only problem is –you’re not getting the work you need. Sitting in front of your computer all day, twiddling your thumbs, checking Facebook, and getting lost on the ‘top 10s’ of Buzzfeed isn’t going to pay the bills! You need to get your name out there, and start standing out.
It is easy to doubt whether or not it’s possible to make it as a freelance writer, but the fact of the matter is that it can be done. In fact, freelance writers are more in demand today than they have ever been, because of social media networks. There has never been a better time to become a writer, and if you’ve got the skills, then all you need to do is get your name out there and start marketing your services. [Read more…]
Patience and the Long-Distance Blogger
(Photo credit: francescopozzi)
Blogging offers writers great rewards. We get to share our words with others. We educate and entertain. If we’re really lucky, our blogs generate income or interest from book agents. To do any of this, however, you need readers, and in the early days of any blog, readers are hard to come by. [Read more…]
