The Pitfalls Of Freelancing

Over the past few years, I have been actively seeking a living as a freelance writer and webmaster. For the most part I have been successful in making enough money to pay the bills and avoid returning to the workforce during these rather uncertain economic times. During my short freelancing career, I have had a few occasions where I ended up learning some lessons the hard way with dishonest or unreasonable clients. If you’re embarking on a freelance career of your own, here are some pitfalls you may want to look at before accepting work from others. Continue reading “The Pitfalls Of Freelancing”

Is a Groupon promotion really a great marketing strategy for your company?

So many companies are flocking to Groupon and other group buying discount websites, thinking that they are the be all and end all of promotion. It’s a proven fact that these sites can send quite a large quantity of customers to your establishment but its also a well known fact that you’re going to lose a lot of money in order to do that. I was talking to a restaurant owner earlier this week that had recently offered $30 in meals for $15 on a local group buying site. Out of the $15 collected, they will receive $6.80 per purchase. The site did manage to sell 268 coupons in two days meaning this particular restaurant will be offering potential customers $8,040 in meals for $1,822.40 in revenue. Continue reading “Is a Groupon promotion really a great marketing strategy for your company?”

Does article marketing still work?

Earlier this year I started moving away from article marketing, both to promote my services and on behalf of clients, due to the Google Farmer and Panda updates. When the Farmer update was first implemented I wrote about it and pondered whether or not it had killed the benefits of article marketing. One of the big changes to their algorithms was how they treated sites that they deemed to be “content farms”. Unfortunately for the popular article directories that I regularly submitted to, they were considered a content farm Google and saw their traffic plummet by 30 to 40%. Additionally, the general consensus amongst the SEO community was the valued backlinks from the better directories would now have lesser weight then they once had. Continue reading “Does article marketing still work?”

Tips on selecting a freelance team

Over the last couple of months I have not only been completing freelance writing tasks, I have also been helping a client with a few development projects. I have been responsible for putting project guidelines together, posting projects at various freelance services and finally selecting the individuals or teams that I wanted to work with to complete the job. There have been some positive and negative experiences so far and as a result I have developed a few rules that I will follow in the future in order to make the process run much smoother when searching out freelancers. Continue reading “Tips on selecting a freelance team”