How To Create An Inbound Marketing Strategy For Your Freelance Business

Content creation and inbound marketing is my favorite part of what I get to do every day. I love connecting, creating, and growing my various projects with stellar content. Whether I am writing a piece for a client or I’m writing show notes for my podcast, I value inbound marketing and content marketing. Let’s talk about what you need to create an inbound marketing strategy for your freelance business.

Related Listening: Content Marketing As A Freelancer

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In today’s episode, I am giving you a step-by-step breakdown of how to create an inbound marketing strategy for your freelance business.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a way to build connections to companies and influential people in your niche by creating valuable, free content. The free content that you produce leads to your services and what you want to offer in the future.

Inbound Marketing Creates your Personal Brand

As you build more content, whether it’s a blog post or a social media update, you improve your brand. Having an excellent personal brand can enhance your life as a freelancer, but it’s not as easy as just cold pitching your way into someone’s circle.

For example, if you want to work with Company A, but your main source of freelance work is inbound marketing, you have to wait and hope that your ideal client sees you when you want them to. If you found their email address and just cold pitched them, though, you automatically improve the chance that your ideal client will find out about you. I am not a big fan of waiting for big things to happen. I like to work at them.

Inbound Marketing Starts Your Marketing Funnel

At its core, inbound marketing starts your marketing funnel. In a simple funnel, there are usually five distinct sections

Awareness: Your potential clients become aware of you through the content you create.
Consideration: Your potential clients consider you as a possible resource based on the content.
Conversion: Your potential clients become “customers” or, at the very least interested by purchasing a low-level product or converting as an email subscriber.
Loyalty: Your clients begin to seek out your knowledge and buy from you again and again.
Advocacy: Your clients love you so much that they begin to seek out ways to connect you with other business opportunities.

Most of your people will drop off in the awareness stage, and you want that to be the case. You can’t work with everyone who was ever aware of you! As your potential clients become clients and advocates, more people drop out of the funnel.

Pick Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing comes in all shapes and sizes. You might want to start a blog, podcast, or even use social media to your advantage.

Blog Posts
Podcasts
- Friend of the show, Sarah Steckler, recently put out a course all about podcasting.
Videos
- Friend of the show, Latasha James, recently put out a mini-course all about video production.
Emails
Social Media
- Latasha James also has a great, free course to help you DIY your social media strategy.

Create A Schedule For When You Will Post

How often will you post? For social media, you might opt for daily content. For something like a podcast, you might choose a weekly or bi-weekly schedule. Pick a timeline that makes sense for your time and ability.

Create The Content

Creating the content is often easier said than done. It’s not always easy to sit down and create content. I’ve gotten to speak with some pretty awesome people about their content creation process on the podcast, so don’t forget about the resources that are already here.

Promote The Content

Now it’s time to promote the content. If you don’t promote the content you produce, it won’t do much good. Now, this may mean that you need to have another content domain. For example, you might promote your blog posts with social media content. Pick one primary way to get your content out there, and another smaller way that you use to supplement and promote your content.

SEO
Social Media
Email Marketing
Sending your content to influential people.
Creating content for other publications in your niche to get backlinks to your website and content.

Conclusion

Creating an inbound marketing strategy isn’t as challenging as it seems. There are some moving parts you need to be aware of, though. I hope that this blog post helped enlighten you and give you some ideas on what move to make next.