So you just kicked off your career in freelancing.

You now that gathering contacts and getting the word out about the services you offer can be a challenge. You may have skills that people would pay for. However, finding leads who would pay for your skills is a different story.

This is because, as a freelancer who is just starting out, your network is still very small.

But don’t fret. Getting out from this predicament is not as hard as you think. You just need to use the right tool.

This is where email marketing comes in.

Why do you need email marketing?

It’s simple, really. Email marketing is not just affordable and easy to use. It is also an ideal investment and solution if you’re in for the long haul.

With email marketing, you can do the following:

Grow your list slowly but surely

It’s important to integrate email marketing into your contact-gathering strategy. But you need to remember that it is not an overnight solution. You don’t send out emails today and expect thousands of subscribers tomorrow. Email marketing doesn’t work like that.

Email marketing is a long-term investment. It will help grow your subscriber list and customer base. But it’s going to be a gradual, steady process.

Once you do get more subscribers and prospects, it’s much easier to make them stay.

Foster better and deeper relationships

Email isn’t the same as face-to-face interactions with your prospective clients. Still, it’s a whole lot more personal than paid ads, which a majority of users consider annoying.

People email one another using laptops and smartphones. Despite its cold nature, you can still personalize your emails as if you are talking to the reader directly. Some basic techniques include using the subscriber’s first name in certain areas of the email, such as the subject line and greeting.

Turn subscribers into clients

Email marketing is the perfect medium for showcasing your skills in order to get more clients.

Prove that you are an expert in your field and entice subscribers to hire you. Do this by promoting your best content pieces that provide your audience with valuable insight via email.

Let’s say you’re a freelance writer who specializes in writing informative content centered around tech. Your goal is to reach out to the managers of tech companies who might be interested in your services.

First, you must create a lead magnet about technology

Create something that will interest decision-makers in the tech industry. You may need to do extensive research about tech topics and provide unique insights into the niche. Generic topics about tech that have been done to death won’t work.

Once you’ve produced the lead magnet, it’s time to set up an email form. Ask readers to fill out their name and email so they can receive the exclusive content. In exchange, their information will go straight to your email list.

From here, you can craft a drip email campaign to email subscribers for your writing services. This will only work if the quality of the lead magnet is great. If so, then your chances of converting them into clients are high.

These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can achieve with email marketing. You can accomplish a lot of goals with too—as long as you properly plan and execute your email campaigns.

How to start with email marketing

If you are ready to go on your email marketing journey and want to have a successful career in freelance, then you have to start email marketing the right way. Here’s how:

Find the best email service provider for you

With countless email service providers (ESPs) available, narrowing down the most suitable one for you can be a daunting task. After all, choosing an ESP does involve making certain considerations.

This doesn’t have to be the case, though. You just need to do the proper research in order to make an informed decision.

First, think about your budget.

Email marketing does not have to be expensive. Pricey ESPs work best for companies and enterprise. There are affordable platforms for freelancers on a budget.

Also, don’t subscribe to an ESP just because people are raving about it. It’s best to try out the tool first and form your opinion from there. You’re the one using the tool, so what people say shouldn’t matter.

Some people leave sour reviews about free or cheap ESPs. However, if they work like a charm for you, then use them! There’s no accounting for taste, really.

Next, outline all the features you’ll need in an ESP.

Not a design expert but want to create emails that grab attention? Then you need an ESP that comes with a range of beautiful templates that you can tweak in an instant.

Do you want the ability to analyze and measure email performance on a regular basis? Then you need an ESP that offers useful analytics.

Good customer support is also crucial for freelancers. Your ESP’s customer support team should be able to quickly assist if you simply need help with the service. This is so you can focus on working for your clients.

Looking for an ESP that has all these features and more? Then look no further than Campaign Monitor, an ESP that gives you the power to design beautiful, professional-looking emails, create highly personalized customer journeys, and analyze and monitor email data.

Make it easy for people to subscribe

Your ultimate goal is to gather contacts who you’ll hopefully convert into paying clients. Therefore, make signing up to your email list as convenient as possible for.

Provide visitors with several ways to sign up for your email list. Place CTAs on various pages of your website like your homepage, your blog posts, a dedicated landing page like this one Elna Cain’s website.

(Source)

Make the process simple for your prospective clients. It will incline them to subscribe to your newsletter and learn what you can offer.

Get to know your subscribers

Ask people for information from your subscription forms that will help with your personalization and segmentation efforts. Aside from their name and email addresses, your form should also contain the following:

• The industry that the potential subscriber is in
• Their position in the company? (Junior Marketer, CEO, Business Owner, etc.)
• The type of newsletter content they’d like to receive

You can ask more questions depending on what service you offer. Ultimately, this information will enable you to:

• Personalize your email templates according to the receiver (different templates for different industries)
• Segment your lists and deliver unique content to each list (content for CEOs is different from content for marketers)
• Deliver relevant content that your subscribers want to know.

Automate your emails

Being a freelancer means juggling the work for multiple clients all at once. This will likely leave you with very little time to do anything else. However, your ESP can do the work for you.

Automating your emails saves you time from manually sending emails to each and every one of your subscribers. Set up your email automation once as well as the triggers and rules that determine when to send the email.

If done right, then all you need to do is sit back, relax, and watch the engagement rate skyrocket!

One of the easiest (and most effective) emails to automate is your welcome series. Set up the trigger on your ESP and it will send your welcome email to every new subscriber automatically.

The timing of the email matters too. Research has revealed that it is best to send the email within the same day that a subscriber signs up.

Here’s a simple yet attention-grabbing welcome email you can use for inspiration.

(Source)

Other emails you can automate include:

• Client inquiry emails – Send an automated email to subscribers who inquire about your services or asks for a quote. In the message of your email, tell them you’ve received their inquiry and that you will be getting back to them within a specific timeframe. This will make them feel more valued as clients.
• Thank you emails – Send an automated thank you email whenever you receive payment from a client for services rendered. It shows that you appreciate their business, which builds loyalty and develops your relationship with them.
• Birthday emails – If the subscriber indicated their birth date, you can offer them a freebie or a discount for your services.

So do you know now how to start with email marketing?

This post is by no means an extensive email marketing guide. The purpose of these tips is to simply to help you get the best start you can with email marketing. If you follow the advice above, then you won’t waste your time, effort, and hard-earned money.

Getting a good grasp of the fundamentals will also make improving your future campaigns and strategies much easier for you.

That being said, you have to keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all email marketing strategy that applies to every freelancer. Your strategy will depend on numerous variables such as your budget, the type of service you offer, the industries you cater to, and so on and so forth. This means that your strategies will differ from other freelancers.

There is one thing that will be the same for you and every other freelancer out there. You all need to master these email marketing basics.

Want to receive content like this from your inbox? Fill out the form below to join my mailing list!

A career as a freelance writer can be very rewarding. Getting paid to write is a writer’s dream. But it’s one that requires hard work and dedication.

If you’ve got a passion for writing and you want to turn it into a full-blown career, you first need to learn how to build a freelance portfolio that will generate business. Here’s how.

Build your website

Before you start writing, you’ll first need to a website to display your work. WordPress is the most popular choice for creating an online portfolio, as it’s free and easy to use. But if you’re more tech-savvy, you might find creating a website from scratch preferable instead.

As a general rule of thumb, your freelance portfolio should include:

• About page: be clear and concise with who you are and what services you provide.
• Contact page: this could be a simple form, or you might offer your email address or social profiles.
• Blog: as well as being good for SEO, blogs also display your value and expertise to potential clients.
• Portfolio: a collection of your most recent work, with samples and links to live posts.

It’s important to be discerning when you’re choosing which pieces to display on your portfolio. It can be tempting to post every bit of work you’ve ever done, but as is often the case, quality is better than quantity.

Takeaway tip

Select 5-10 pieces of your very best work and display them prominently. While you can certainly link off to other work you’ve done, ensure your best work is placed front and center.

Find your writer’s niche

Most freelance writers, while certainly talented enough to do so, don’t write for any and every industry out there. Instead of casting a wide net, you can catch more fish by being super-specific with the kind of work you do.

Finding your niche is important because it helps potential clients determine whether or not you’re a good fit for them. Zeroing in on a specific industry show that you’re authoritative in your subject, rather than possessing only a shallow knowledge.

Potential clients will often want to see an example of your previous work before signing you up. For example, providing a healthcare brand with a sample piece on digital marketing (no matter how well written) won’t cut the mustard.

Takeaway tip

Once you’ve identified your niche, do some keyword research around it and optimize your site accordingly. This will help your portfolio appear in search queries from clients looking for writers in your niche.

Editor’s note:

Deliver authority and value

Potential clients will view dozens of writing portfolios as they search for a freelancer. To make your freelance portfolio stand out from your competitors, you need to go the extra mile.

As well as displaying a collection of your best, most recent work, consider offering something extra that prospective clients won’t find anywhere else.

Every portfolio should include a blog. It’s a chance for you to pass on knowledge and convey your authority on a subject. But go beyond the blog and offer something no-one else does.

For example, you could set up a basic e-commerce store and sell an online course or product related to your niche through it. Alternatively, buying an existing business and revamping the stock is a simple trick to save you time. Or you could host webinars on your chosen niche and charge a nominal fee for attending.

Integrating these with your portfolio doesn’t just provide you with an extra source of income. It’s also a chance for you to display industriousness and authority in your given industry too.

Takeaway tip

Go beyond simply displaying your work on your portfolio. Dazzle prospective clients by offering value and authority to make your portfolio stand out from the crowd.

Related: 5 Things Your Freelance Portfolio Website Should Include

Implement a guest post strategy

Perhaps the easiest and most popular way to build up your portfolio of written work is through guest posting.

In a nutshell, this involves emailing websites, blogs, and digital publications and asking if you can write for them. You might already have some sites you want to write for in mind already. But if not, a quick Google search can help you find potential opportunities.

Simply enter your industry keyword and “+ write for us”, and you’ll find dozens of possible options:

Before pitching your ideas, read their guidelines and existing content thoroughly to get a feel for the kind of thing they want to publish.

Regularly writing for sites in your niche doesn’t just build up your portfolio either. Getting your name in industry publications helps build visibility for your work and your services too.

Takeaway tip

With guest post outreach, it’s important to be open about what you want. Politely request a backlink to your portfolio to help potential clients find you. And for outreach at scale, use email automation to coordinate your efforts with ease.

Editor’s note: For guest blogging outreach, I suggest you use Ninja Outreach*. You can find relevant contacts of bloggers, create a drip email campaign to submit to  them, and automate the sending process so you can just wait for their replies.

Did you learn how to build a freelance portfolio?

Going freelance as a professional writer is a big step, and requires enormous effort and commitment — but it’s doable. Create and build up a strong online portfolio, and put a regular guest post strategy in place. In doing so, you will get visibility for your work and your services. You’ll soon build up a strong client base that will form the basis of a successful career as a freelance writer.

Victoria Greene

Brand Marketing Consultant

I love working with brands and businesses, as well as running my own ecommerce stores. Big advocate of social media storytelling, and I’m also a huge animal lover.

We all know just how important email newsletters are for businesses these days.

Even if your company is just made up of yourself working from home, sending out regular newsletter campaigns is a great way to engage customers back to your company. It’s also a fantastic marketing strategy as well! Readers who enjoy your newsletter will no doubt forward it onto their friends.

Even for freelancers, it’s crucial to build an email list if you want to engage with your blog readers and filter through the list to find potential clients. During the middle of this year, I’ve made more effort to send out regular emails and grow my list during different tactics.

To be honest, the jury is still out whether this campaign will rake in more money to my business in the long run. But looking at the trend so far, a more profitable freelancing career via email marketing is still on the horizon.

However, your emails won’t be as effective if they aren’t written well. There are also important elements and features that you need to include in your newsletters. If you forget, the ones you send out might not bring you the benefits you expect.

Key to making your email campaign work is to learn how to make email newsletters that people open. Therefore, make sure to implement the features below the next time you launch an email campaign.

How to make email newsletters the right way: 8 tips

1. Use a reliable email platform

I know most of you would claim their love for MailChimp. After all, it’s one of the most trusted email tools with an easy-to-use interface and drag-and-drop email and landing page builders. Most importantly, you get to enjoy its core features for free (until you hit the 2,000 subscriber count).

I have been using MailChimp for years to build my list. It’s been a fun ride and helped me collect emails from interested readers and client. However, I feel that I could do better with my email strategy.

The thing I liked the least about MailChimp is how it’s more geared towards e-commerce than bloggers and content creators like myself. I appreciate that they offer Google remarketing and Facebook/Instagram ad features, as well as abandoned cart emails and more. However, they don’t apply to my business. While MailChimp’s core features remain useful, I still feel the need to find another platform to help me with my email needs.

And I think I found my platform with Kit*.

As an email platform, Kit is what I wanted and needed from the very start. It’s arguably more intuitive and easier to use than MailChimp thanks to its effortless UI and UX. However, below are the reasons why I chose Kit over other email tools I’ve tried so far:

• Beautiful forms – Build high-converting opt-in forms and customize its behavior. Make them appear before visitors exit your page or after their scoll up until the certain part of the page. Track the conversion rate on the dashboard and find ways to improve its performance.
• Ability to create incentive emails – From the form, you can attach content upgrades that people will receive after filling out the form and confirming their subscription. Incentive emails makes list building much easier because it gives them a good reason to sign up to your list in the form of a freebie.
• Tag-based subscription – You can append tags to each of your subscribers to represent their interests. Refer to the tags to send them emails they want to read, thus decreasing unsubscribers and increasing engagement.
• Easiest marketing automation for me – Build an automation workflow from the campaigns you’ve created using its visual builder. Send emails to subscribers automatically and engage with them even while you sleep!

Now, I’m not saying that you should go for Kit. My point is you need to find an email platform that you’re comfortable using. Whether that’s MailChimp or some other email tool, the important thing is to find one that works best for you. The email tool will make your job much easier so you only worry about the message you want to impart to subscribers.

2. Write a click-bait headline

You need to ensure that everyone who receives the email in their inbox is going to click on it. There’s one way to make sure they are persuaded to click on it – you need to add an enticing subject. Ideally, the subject needs to be punchy and, if possible, include a very short summary of the subject of the newsletter. To try and be even more persuasive, you might even want to add something that is click-bait-y, such as a pun or a cliffhanger that will be answered when the reader checks out the email.

I’m not the biggest fan of click-bait headlines, but if it’s part of the bigger message you’re trying to communicate to readers, then might as well use it.

For example, I used the headline “”I’m tired of f*cking writing for you.”” to share my experiences of writing for clients and that I need to create different revenue streams for me so I won’t feel overworked all the time. In hindsight, it was a very risky headline that will offen some of my clients who subscribed to my list. But I sent it anyway, just to see how it works.

To my surprise, it’s my highest converting email so far among my newsletters:

As mentioned, click-bait headlines have its pros and cons. Therefore, you need to weigh all those factors before clicking the “Send” button so you know what you’re doing.

3. Communicate a clear, singular message

There needs to be a clear focus to your newsletter, such as a topic or subject that is discussed in it. If you don’t have one, then the whole content might not seem to have any real purpose and the reader might come away frustrated that they didn’t learn anything or receive any benefit from reading the email. So, make sure the email has an overall theme and a specific purpose that will be beneficial to all readers.

A great way to start is by coming up with a single call to action. For instance, if you want people to click on a link, then make sure it’s the only thing people can click on the body of your email.

Below is the email body of my “”I’m tired of f*cking writing for you.”” newsletter:

4. Write engaging copy

Next, you need to concentrate on the actual words you use in your newsletters. Your copy needs to be interesting and engaging or else your readers will simply switch off and they won’t take away the message that you have for them.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The reason they signed up to your list in the first place is that they liked what they read from me. By simply maintaining consistency in your writing, you will be able to build better relations with them.” quote=”The reason they signed up to your list in the first place is that they liked what they read from me. By simply maintaining consistency in your writing, you will be able to build better relations with them.”]

If you struggle with writing engaging content, you might want to outsource this part to a professional copywriter. There are some easy ways you can improve your writing and make it jump off the page, such as by writing in the active voice and talking directly to the reader.

Personally, it works to just be yourself especially since you’re already a writer. The reason they signed up to your list in the first place is because they liked what they read from me. By simply maintaining consistency in your writing, you will be able to build better relations with them.

5. Add a link to your site (or any site)

This is a very important part of any email newsletter. If you don’t include a link that takes readers back to your site, you might find that your newsletters don’t convert many leads into sales. That’s because readers won’t be that likely to try to get to your website manually

So, make sure you add a link to your target page. It all goes back to having a clear focus on your email newsletter. By establishing your purpose which in this case is getting subscribers to click to your site, you can maximize the number of clicks to it.

I advise having more than one link to the same page on your email. This way, you can get more people to click on it too. Just make sure that the anchor text inspires action, i.e. “click here,” ” read more,” “visit this page.”

I personally don’t advise any other links outside your call to action on your email. Some would include links to their social media pages and whatnot. Doing so takes away the attention to the focus of your email, thus potentially lowering your click-through rate. Also, having lots of links may cause deliverability issues to your email. There’s a chance that some of your subscribers won’t see the email because it went straight to the spam folder, no thanks to the volume of links you included.

6. Add your business contact information

Don’t forget to also add all of your business contact information. This should include your phone number, email address, and physical address. Most email marketers place this at the bottom of the newsletter. Then, if a reader wants to contact you for any reason, they have easy access to all of your information and don’t have to go to the brother of navigating to your website for it. As a result, they may be much more inclined to contact you.

It’s also a good idea to allow replies to your newsletter so that readers can email you directly. After all, they might have something trivial that they want you to know, but don’t want to go to all the bother of calling your business about it.#

Also, you might want to leave an option for readers to leave you feedback. You can always use net promoter score software to add a survey to the end of your newsletter. You can edit the survey so that your readers can leave you feedback on a range of topics, such as how informative they thought the email was. Using all of the data that you collect from these surveys, you can then make necessary improvements to keep your customers happy.

7. Bullet points

When writing your email content, it’s usually a good idea to try to break the content up as much as possible. Writing short, one-liner paragraphs is one way of approaching this.

Another is to use bullet points.

Some of your readers won’t have much time on their hands and will only be able to skim-read your newsletters. Formatting them in bullet points makes it much easier to skim-read as all of the important information is easier to pick out. You will probably find that more people are inclined to read the newsletter in full too, as bullet points aren’t quite as daunting as large chunks of text.

8. Incorporate Mixed media

One further way to make your email newsletter as engaging as possible is to format them with plenty of images and photos.

These can help to illustrate your points and can be used to break up all the text. However, you shouldn’t stick with just photos. It’s advisable to use as much mixed media as possible, as this will make your emails even more interesting. You’ll be able to embed videos from YouTube, as an example. Or, why not go one step further, and start filming your own videos!?

Do you now know how to make emails newsletters the right way?

Let’s face it -writing effective emails are hard as nails. It’s one thing to get subscribers to click on your email from their inbox. It’s another for them to read your email and commit to your call to action.

To ensure that they follow through with your call to action, you need to ensure that all parts of your email are firing on all cylinders. Not to mention, all elements should act towards a single focus to squeeze the most engagement from your emails.

Therefore, including all the elements mentioned above may not be enough to encourage people to engage with you via email. You must use the elements that will produce the most value for your subscribers consistently. From here, they will seek out your emails over time so you can engage with your readers and clients in the way you want them to!

Thanks for reading my post about how to make email newsletters! Please feel free to comment below if you have questions or reactions about the post you want to share. Also, if you like to receive more of these articles straight to your inbox, please fill out the form below.