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I wrote in a previous post on how freelancers could go about marketing their portfolio to potential clients. The first point made was that freelancers should try starting a blog of some kind which could include tutorials, resources and articles to attract people to visit in order to increase exposure. Without content, there is no reason for your portfolio to come up for the search terms you’d like on Google, less you look into SEO and do a bit of link building - although link building itself is useless without decent content, but more on that in another article.

Going back to the title of the post, the simple answer is yes, because there are a whole plethora of benefitting blogging could bring in terms of marketing to a freelancer’s portfolio.

I’m going to go into detail on what freelancers could potentially do with a blog if they choose to start one as an attachment to their portfolio.

Social Drizzle

If you like, you could take the path of total non-related drizzle. Meaning you could talk about your daily antics in the form of a blog. I know a lot of freelancers who do this, although in my opinion it should NEVER be an attachment to your portfolio. Instead, it is a blog outside of the working realm - which is where this kind of blog belongs. I’ve seen some freelancers who look to start a blog alongside their portfolio, only to realize that posting about what they ate last night isn’t going to get them anymore clients, it actually does the opposite. So I’ll re-iterate, if you’re looking to make a more social type blog, do not associate it with your portfolio.

Tutorials/Resources/Articles

At first, including a bunch of tutorials and resources on a blog which is related to your portfolio seems like a good idea, but it all depends on who you target with that information. If you’re targeting other web designers, writers, programmers etc. then it’s hardly going to bring in any new leads as they are people much like yourself who are looking to do work for other people. If you’re going to create tutorials and distribute resources of some kind, make sure you keep in mind the demographic you want to target.

For example, if you’re looking to attract web entrepreneurs to your website because you like working on creative websites, then you would probably want to distribute certain resources such as articles on the law of web business, or managing web businesses on your blog. When following such an example though, you must also keep the issue of relevancy in mind. Will someone come to a freelance-designers blog to hear about cooking? No, so a way of fixing this issue is to create a blog seperate from the portfolio on another domain, and instead advertise your portfolio on that blog.

Freelance-Related Blog

If you really want to create a relevant blog on your portfolio, then there should be nothing stopping you - after all, any new exposure, whether targeted or not will benefit you in some way or another. Maybe it’ll help spread the word about your services via ‘word-of-mouth’? Even if it doesn’t, it’s always going to have some positive effect. That’s why it could also be a good idea to produce a freelance-related blog. You may want to blog about the issues that freelancers go through daily (much like Freelancer Magazine here) and then do a few link exchanges with other well-known people in your field for that extra authority and exposure. The great thing about creating a blog like this is that there are a whole ton of ways you can market them and really get traffic coming into your blog and therefore looking at your services too.

Think out of the box

Also, when thinking about marketing techniques for your portfolio, or for yourself for that matter, then do not stay within the realms of the norm. Try to think of new and creative ways to bring in your clients, that way you could find a solution that you could execute easily and works wonders for you. Also, carrying out the usual methods of marketing can sometimes be a drag, and very repetitve so diversify how you gain traffic and exposure.

Conclusion

You’re thinking of freelancing or you’ve become a freelancer because you want to get away from the norms of society, so why not replicate this in your marketing techniques also and come up with some new and creative forms of marketing your portfolio!

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