Archive for October, 2011

Freelance Web Design Tips – Effective Self Promotion

October 23rd, 2011

This might seem obvious but it’s important: no one knows you’re a web design expert before you tell them. Like I pointed out earlier, you have to be outgoing, and willing to talk about the services you are offering. Here are some tools that will help spread awareness of your freelance website design business:

Elevator pitch

If you only had 30 seconds to a minute to describe that which you do, could you get it done? The elevator pitch, named for that practice of pitching company execs while riding together about the elevator, is the most basic explanation of how you can help a person’s business. Practice selling yourself, and timing it, you’ll also find a quick and easy method to introduce what it’s that you can do for individuals.

Business card printing

Obvious, but extremely necessary. Once you have adopted your brain set that you’re indeed an expert, you’ll learn how to tell everyone you meet that you are a freelance web design service. Once you’ve introduced yourself and given them your spiel, you’ll want to leave them you’re card. Guarantee the design of your card reflects your individual brand. Have you been easy and clean? fun and retro? grungy and edgy? Anything, remain consistent. And also have them printed somewhere like Vistaprint or Overnight Prints.

Portfolio site

Whether you utilize a totally free service, professional help, or your personal custom site, you’ll want an online portfolio with screenshots and links to your work. Your company card should point there, as well as your email signature. If possible, provide details about each project, describing the situation and how your design helped overcome the issue.

Blog

Being an expert, you should have a place of view about web design an internet-based marketing in general. Your blog is the best way for you to demonstrate your understanding from the field and to convince potential clients that you do indeed know what you’re talking about. Get started with a totally free service like Blogger or Tumblr to develop your look, and move to a custom WordPress blog, especially if you actually want to learn WP programming and design. Using a blog has got the added advantage of encouraging you to stay on surface of industry trends, and in addition it gives you content to promote on Twitter and LinkedIn

Twitter

Again, you’re a freelance web design expert, so hanging out on Twitter can help reinforce that notion. Create and account with a custom background. Look for people in your area within Twitter itself or with a tool like Twello. Tweet relevant industry news and tips of your own. Once you have your blog up and running, you can provide links out of your Twitter account for your articles. Follow industry leaders and learn what’s going on.

LinkedIn

This social network is essential among professionals, and having an up-to-date profile can help give you credibility in those circles. It shows that you’re aware of this avenue, and it provides more traditional professionals, including people who avoid using Twitter, the opportunity to get to know you and vet your experience before connecting in person. Keep your profile current, and solicit recommendations from clients you’ve successfully completed projects for. And when times are slow, watch the LinkedIn answers section to see if you are able to help a person with their web designer challenges.

Facebook?

Facebook could be a decent place for sharing recent site launches and new portfolio work, however the tone of Facebook is much more personal intimate, and self-promotion is less welcome here. Use with caution when promoting your freelance website design business.

Blog Design – Make Navigation Simple for New Readers

October 23rd, 2011

Picture the scene. Visitors lands on your blog’s webpage from the internet search engine query or visiting a link in an article. Chances are that the post most relevant for them has moved. A fast glance down the webpage doesn’t reveal the answer, now what happens?

Answer – they leave your website. No RSS subscription, no further page views, no bookmarking to come back at a later date. This is a disaster.

So check out your blog’s webpage. Should you be that visitor, what should be there to help you find the posts that you want.

Make it loud, allow it to be proud
I have used most popular post and related post plugins on my small blogs for a long time. They certainly do help – you can see that traffic is navigating round the site with such. However, they are small and sometimes hard to see. So start off with something that new readers will not miss.

And that’s a sticky post.Write an article and stick it to your house page so that it is always the very first post that readers see. This way, if some posts are a little off topic it doesn’t matter. The sticky post is what they see first.

But what adopts that post? Well just review the posts that have been browse the most during the last couple of weeks. You do not need this to be exact and you could tweak their email list just a little to push readers to key posts. Just talk about the post after which connect to it. I did this and my pages per visitor jumped up by over 20%.

Guide visitors around your website
Which means you used a sticky to obtain a reader to a key post, now what? Well are the elements of that discussion handled in greater detail in other posts? Maybe it is a high level list of tasks, each of which is described in detail elsewhere?

If so, link straight to those posts in the relevant paragraphs. For those who have readers hungry for information, show them where to get it in your site. Search engines will also love this ability to delve deeper. Whilst you are in it, review your most popularly read posts and apply this trick for them all.

Automate the process
They may not work as well as manual links, but they can continue to assist with traffic. So install a most popular posts plugin and replace the most recent posts list with this particular list. Show readers your very best and most popular work.