Now that you know what services you’ll provide, what equipment you’ll need and how much you’ll charge it’s important to understand how to market your business. After all, if no one knows about your business, you won’t get any clients.
Your Website
In the online world, it all starts with your website. You will need a professional looking website that displays your skills and creates trust within your target market so that they want to buy from you. That starts with the copy on your website, the look of your logo, and the copy in your tagline. Take the work here regarding your website seriously. If you don’t project a professional image people will be unlikely to hire you.
How your website looks will depend on what services you’re offering. If you offer Graphic Design services your website should reflect awesome graphic design and show a portfolio of work that you’ve done. This will give your clients a good idea of what your style is. If you provide copywriting services, the copy on your website should be above average and demonstrate what you can do. Showing some before and after rewrites would be a great idea too.
A few tips that will help you create a great website:
A Great Layout — Your website should have a pleasing layout. Try not to be old fashioned with the way your website is laid out. Gone are the days with the top banner, two side bars, and middle content but try to avoid flash and strange entry pages.
There are fabulous layouts to chose from that look beautiful and allow the content to be presented in its best light. The best system to use is WordPress.org, there are a variety of free and premium templates and themes that you can use that will offer perfect layouts to choose from.
Informative Content — Still the lifeblood of your website, your content should be informative, interactive, instructional and inspire your reader to act. When writing content for your website never forget to have a purpose for the content, and a call to action for your readers.
User Friendly Navigation — When a potential client clicks through to your website if they cannot figure out how to get around your site they will leave. You have mere seconds to impress them, so don’t make it confusing. Have navigation above the “fold” as well as at the bottom of very page.
A Telling Domain Name — Try not to choose hyphenated domain names, and also choose domain names that are full of keywords. It will make it easier for your potential clients to find you if your domain name has keywords in it.
Revealing About Page — People like to buy from those they know, like and trust, and your about page is the place to encourage these feelings. Be honest, be clear, include a nice picture of yourself, and be professional.
Contact Information Clear — Nothing is worse than going to a website and never being able to figure out how to contact the owner. Ensure that not only do you have a contact page, but you have links to the contact page on every page in the bottom navigation.
Newsletter Sign Up — One of your best marketing efforts can happen via your newsletter. Offer a free give away such as a report, or a checklist in exchange for collecting email addresses. You can send out newsletters as well as new product announcements.
Sitemap — A site map isn’t only for the computer bots to spider your site, it’s also for the human. If you create an excellent sitemap some people will click on “sitemap” to find everything they need. But, it’s also for general indexing for search engines.
Search Engine Optimized — You want organic traffic to your site, so use the tools you have such as all of the above, “on page SEO” and include some off page SEO by guest blogging, article marketing, and creating social media accounts.
Mobile Friendly — Today, you never know where someone is looking at your website from. We are a mobile society and it’s rather easy today, especially with WordPress to build a mobile friendly site.
Analytics — This is for you, but install analytics on your site so that you can see what pages and what content are working best to keep readers reading, and to attract organic search engine traffic.