1. Market research is crucial
There are so many bloggers out there who really have no idea who is coming to their blog. They may know that all these people are interested in a common topic, but who exactly are your readers? Where are they from? How old are they? Are they male or female? What is their occupation? The list goes on and on.

It is vital that bloggers get to know who their readers are. How do you do this? Well, the easiest way is to just place a survey in a post asking various questions about their demographics and interests, and offer a prize to further encourage readers to fill out the survey. Make it short, sweet and questions optional, just in case someone feel that a certain piece of information is too personal to share.

Knowing who reads your blog will not only help you get advertisers, it will also help you write content that is better suited to your readers and help make sure that your marketing efforts are targeted towards people who are actually prepared to read your blog.

This can be done subtly as well. To see an example of this in action, simply head over to ProBlogger. Darren frequently creates polls and analyzes the results for his readers. While some of these polls aren’t about demographics and are really meant to help bloggers get information about other bloggers, Darren often asks questions like ‘How old are you?’ and more recently ‘How much social networking do you do?‘ This not only gives readers information about the ages of their fellow bloggers, it also provides Darren with valuable demographic information.

2. It is not what you know, it is who you know
In blogging, networking is everything. While you can try to do everything by yourself, writing content and marketing your blog with no help, it is much easier and more fun when you work with other bloggers in your niche. Find other blogs that talk about the same things you do, try to interact and partner with them.

Feature the content of other bloggers on your blog. This not only provide your readers with relevant information that they might be interested in, but also would sometimes encourage other bloggers to do the same to your content in a phenomenon we call ‘link karma’. (See Link Karma: How Linking to Others Can Get You Lots of Links in Return for more on ‘link karma’).

Guest posting is another great way to grow your blog, as by doing so, you can expose yourself to a whole new audience of another blog. Networking will help your blog grow quickly. When I first started out I didn’t take the time to make connections with other bloggers and while these blog grew at a fairly steady pace, the amount of traffic these blogs received absolutely skyrocketed when I start partnering with other blogs in my niche.

3. The Best Advertising is Free
There is no doubt that word of mouth marketing, or in today’s web world, viral marketing, is the best and most cost effective way to generate traffic for a blog. Write a post that others will find interesting, whether it means making a list like this one, taking an unconventional stance on an issue, or breaking some important piece of news. If your content is good, people will talk about it and it can spread virally. Use social media websites like Digg or StumbleUpon to help get the process started.

However, one must not confuse the viral marketing and word of mouth marketing as they are not the same. Fundamentally, they have different dynamics. Jennifer over at SearchEngineGuide has written a very nice article explaining this in more detail, Viral marketing is not the same as word of mouth.

4. The Importance of Public Relations
Public Relations is crucial to any marketing campaign and is very important when coming to building brand awareness and reputation for your blog. The quickest way to gain credibility is get credible sources talking about you. As Maki of Dosh Dosh puts it, ‘to influence the influencers’. While getting your blog covered in the New York Times is an arduous task, it is far easier to get your name out there through guest posting on blogs and news sources that has authority.

Many of the most popular blogs in your industry will likely accept guest posts (like this one), and the same holds true with newspapers and magazines (especially their online sections). Call or e-mail the editors and writers of some of the authority media properties in your niche and see if you can guest post on their website, magazine or newspaper. This puts your voice in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people. Press releases are also a great tool that bloggers can use. For more information on how bloggers can use press releases, read a guest post I made on JohnChow, How to use press releases to your advantage.

Do you use other principles of marketing with your blog? Let us know in the comments.

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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