Before I started taking freelance writing work online, I spent about a year working on my own blog, freshinfos.com, creating content regularly on latest Apple releases, social media, and everything related to technology. By the time I registered with a freelancing site, I was already a seasoned writer with quite a lot of experience and knowledge on everything that’s going around the web.
This awesome qualification helped me land almost every job (3 out of 4) that I pitched to on Elance. Some contractors even contacted me personally via email to hire me for work. Just mentioning my background and my website on the profile was enough to get invited to a whole lot of jobs every week.
Needless to say, establishing your background and reputation is one of the most crucial elements of starting a successful freelancing career. Of course, you may have already figured that out by yourself.
My website and the experience I gained working on blogs and articles certainly helped me easily land a lot of clients. And you can use the same technique to lure in more clients too. The best part is you don’t even have to spend years developing your own blog to show your clients because there are plenty of well-established websites that already allow you to publish your articles for free.
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What Is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging is simply a method that you can use to gain free publicity and recognition for your work. You write an article on behalf of a website, in return they will publish it for you for free with an author byline containing links to your website and social media pages. Here’s how the process works:
- You contact a reputable blog that accept guest posts, like Mashable or Entrepreneur.com
- Pitch your idea for a great blog post to publish on their site.
- Once you get their approval, send your article with an author byline explaining what you do and links to your social media profiles.
Quick Sprout blog has a highly detailed guide on guest blogging. It will give you a better idea about what you can achieve through writing for other blogs, how to write a guest post, and pitching to a website.
Many bloggers use guest blogging as a method to bring more traffic to their websites and build backlinks to improve search engine ranking. But, freelancers can also use guest blogging to increase their reputation and get more clients by showing off their skills.
How it Helps to Build Your Reputation
In return for sharing your expertise on these websites, you will not only get a ton of traffic to your social media pages or your personal website, you will also be able to increase your reputation online. So that next time when a client asks to see your previous work, you can simply send them a link to your article on Mashable, which will knock their socks off.
Most freelancers who pitch for jobs on sites like Upwork and Freelancer.com doesn’t have any credible experience or proof of their work. This obviously leads to lower confidence and lower pricing rates.
If you can take the time to at least publish 3 or 4 guest article on a couple of reputable websites, you will have an incredible advantage over rest of the cheap freelancers who are just waiting for clients to fall out of the sky.
Remember to write an eye-catching bio explaining your skills, profession, and where people can hire you for work. If you have a personal website, link to it as well. Some website features a photo of the contributor alongside their publishing, so send them a great photo to go with your article as well.
Believe it or not even some of the millionaire entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, and Neil Patel often publish guest posts on popular websites to gain more exposure for their businesses and products. So why shouldn’t you use the same trick to double your earnings?
Research also suggests that writing regularly can improve your creativity, the ability to think, and build your personality. As a freelancer writer, I can personally vouch for that fact because to this day I still enjoy doing work as a writer.
How to Get Approved by A Great Website
Getting approved by these popular websites is not going to be easy because they receive these requests every day. The trick is to keep your pitch short and sweet and pitch a unique article idea that they can’t resist.
More importantly, don’t write your email to these sites like a robot. Get personal. Find the name of the person in charge if you can and address them by their first name. My freshinfos.com website receives over a dozen guest blogging requests every week and I ignore most of them because some emails sound too robotic. As if they have sent the same email to 100 other websites. So, don’t make the same mistake.
Here are a few great websites that accept guest posts.
- Mashable
- Entrepreneur.com
- Inc.com
- Huffington Post
- Read Write Web
- Copy Blogger
- Social Media Examiner
- Web Design Ledger
- Shout Me Loud
- Write to Done
Need more sites to publish guest posts? Here’s a list of 300+ websites for you to guest post all year long. This list contains different sites from many categories so you can choose a site that’s more suitable for your line of work.
As you can imagine, the editors at these sites are the busiest persons on the web. They receive hundreds of emails every day and they ignore most of them to save time. So, write a great title and a pitch for your suggestion to grab their attention.
Be bold, be brave, mark your name in digital ink on the World Wide Web, and wait for all the clients to start pouring in. Don’t stop at one article, keep publishing more and more content to generate more traffic and increase your reputation higher.
There are a few great tools to outreach for guest blogging. If you add those in this post, it will get even better and more informative. Thanks for sharing.
Fantastic post.
Really enjoyed reading it and it held my attention all the way through! Keep it up.