If you’ve been following this series of blogs you may have tried bidding sites as a way of finding your first few projects. You may also have created an online portfolio to showcase your work.

Now that you have taken those steps, how do you continue to attract new customers? Furthermore, how do you attract customers that pay better rates than the rates paid by most of the companies on bidding sites? These tips should help you to find more ways of attracting customers:

Your Website 

If you want to reach out to new customers it’s essential to have your own website. This shows potential customers that you’re a serious copywriting professional and not just someone who wants to make a bit of extra money in your spare time.

Apart from displaying your portfolio on your website, you can tell customers more about you and your business. This often helps potential customers to make a decision as to whether to engage your services. Customers will be looking for someone who is reliable and has the skills and experience to provide a high level of service at a competitive price. Here are some example questions that customers may be seeking the answers to when they visit your website:

–       What specific writing experience do you have?

–       Do you write in any niche areas?

–       What is the depth of your experience in these areas?

–       Are your other clients happy with the projects that you have completed for them?

–       How can clients get in touch with you?

–       What level of service can clients expect?

–       Why should customers use your services rather than those of another copywriter?

As well as displaying your portfolio on your website it is useful to show some testimonials from satisfied clients. New customers are always impressed by glowing feedback regarding your services.

When writing your web copy you should try to sell yourself. AIDA is a useful technique for writing sales copy:

A = Attention – try to grab the reader’s attention from the outset.

I = Interest – once you have got his attention you need to keep him on the website.

D = Desire – this is where you create a desire in the reader to take further action e.g. ask for a quotation.

A = Call to Action – this is very important as you need to make it as easy as possible for the customer to contact you. You should put your phone number and email address on every page of the website as well as full contact details on the Contacts page.

You should also think about any unique selling points (USPs) that your copywriting business has as these can encourage customers to use your services. For example, do you have a great deal of knowledge on a specialist topic?

Optimising your Website

Once you’ve developed your website you need to make sure it gets noticed and this is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in. The two areas that you should focus on are onsite optimisation and offsite optimisation.

Onsite optimisation refers to the content on your website and the metadata. As well as inserting keywords into your web copy you should keep refreshing the content. The continual introduction of new content on your website is an important factor for search engines and this is where having a blog can help. Metadata refers to data that isn’t seen on the page, but is nevertheless essential as it provides valuable information to search engines. A good web development company should be able to help you with this.

Offsite optimisation refers to the practice of creating links to your website. There are many ways to do this e.g. guest blogs, article marketing sites etc. Basically, the more good quality incoming links your website has, the better chance it has of increasing its rank with the search engines. Articles and guest blogs have another advantage in helping you to share your knowledge and therefore set yourself up as an expert in your particular field.

I won’t go into great detail about SEO since it isn’t my field of expertise, but there is a lot of information available on the subject through the Internet. If you have the funds to employ an SEO company, I recommend www.reallysimpleseo.co.uk. On the other hand, if you can’t afford to employ an SEO expert you can still find lots of useful information at the really simple SEO website. A guy at this company gave me some advice which really helped me. My website is currently ranked 0, basically because I haven’t had the time to create more incoming links. Nevertheless, I still manage to appear at the top of Google for certain keyword phrases thanks to his help.

Social Media

Social media is invaluable for getting your name out there and it’s definitely becoming increasingly popular. Every time you publish a blog on your website, link to it from social media by using words that tempt people to want to read more. If they’re interested in finding out more, they will follow the link to your blog and hopefully explore the rest of your website. Your blog is a chance to demonstrate your expertise and bring visitors to your website so you should put it to good use.

Social media can also prove valuable without even having to draw people to your website. For example, Linked In is widely used by professionals and gives you the opportunity to enter a profile about yourself and the services you offer. There are many groups that you can join on Linked In, which enable you to provide your expert opinion on different topics. You can find out a lot of useful facts from other members of groups too, as well as sharing ideas.

Linked In works through a system of connections. The more people you connect to on Linked In, the wider your network is. This enables people to find you more easily when they search Linked In for particular services. This often happens and I have gained a couple of new clients on the basis of being on Linked In. Apart from connecting with customers you can also connect with other members of groups so it’s easy to grow your network.

Contacts

Once you start to build up some valuable contacts you should make sure you keep in touch with them as you never know when they might need your services again. We covered ways in which to keep in touch in part three of this series of blogs, which you can access from our Blog Archive at: http://www.dianemannion.co.uk/blogarchive.html if you want to recap.

Business Directories

Customers can sometimes find you through business directories. There are many free directories available, some of which are more useful than others. One I particularly like is the Free Index at: http://www.freeindex.co.uk/  as you can also list feedback from clients. If you manage to get plenty of feedback, you rise higher up the listings, making you more visible on the site.

Directories can be useful if customers are looking for local services as some of them display quite prominently in search results for location specific keywords e.g. “Copywriters Manchester”. Directories can also help with SEO as they create those all-important links back to your website. However, they don’t carry as much weight with the search engines as some other methods of link creation such as guest blogs that produce links from highly ranked websites.

Jobs Boards and Bidding Sites

You may be able to find freelance copywriting projects through jobs boards, which you can find by entering the term “freelance copywriting jobs” in an Internet search engine. I haven’t personally found any projects using job boards but this is mainly because the bulk of projects posted on jobs boards require you to work onsite and I prefer to work from home. However, there are occasionally jobs that allow you to work remotely so it is worth exploring this avenue.

If you’ve had success through bidding sites then you may want to continue using them. I have found a few clients this way but in the main the rates are poor unless you are writing about a niche topic.

The Direct Approach

Another way of finding new customers is to take a direct approach through mailshots etc. This is a method I have used in the past but success rates are generally quite low and postage costs can soon add up. With the increasing move towards online marketing I find that it is generally easier and more cost effective to market my services online.

This is the fifth in our series of blogs about becoming a freelance copywriter. You can find the previous four articles in the series through our blog archive at http://www.dianemannion.co.uk/blogarchive.html, which also contains a lot of other useful information about the writing industry. The next article in the series will be about retaining customers.

If you have found this article useful, or you have any questions relating to this article, please let me have your feedback comments below. You can be notified about future articles by following to this blog using the box to the right of this screen.