Practical advice on pitching, marketing yourself and setting boundaries for your most successful year yet.
2020, despite it all, was my most successful year as a freelancer. I landed more clients, made more money and regularly had five-figure months.
I also made mistakes. After 10 years of freelancing for over 100 clients, I’m realising that the freelance landscape is changing — in many ways, for the better. You simply need to know how.
If you’re considering becoming your own boss, or have been freelancing for a while and want to feel more free, this article is for you. Lessons, practical tips and tried-and-tested advice for 2021.
Let’s make this our best year yet — healthily and successfully. …
The best tone of voice is your customer’s tone of voice
I started my career as a Fashion Copywriter for luxury brands. My days were spent looking for decorative, aspirational words I could use to enhance product descriptions. Everything was adorned, accented, and embellished. It was fun. Plus, I got to know my way around a thesaurus. Synonyms were my savior.
Things changed when I started working for early-stage startups. With the opportunity to meet and personally get to know some of our customers, I realized: the best tone of voice isn’t one that’s built in-house, behind the scenes. …
The *one* marketing strategy I’ve been recommending to everyone lately? Trust.
Yes. Good, old-fashioned brand trust. Honestly? I’m obsessed with the stuff. And if you’re running a business, building a brand or growing an audience, you should be too.
Because somewhere between Fake News, Covid-19 government failings and the Black Lives Matter movement, our world has been hit harder than ever on the trust front lately. As consumers, we’re seriously burnt-out by brands and their thinly veiled attempts at trust. As humans, we’re skeptical about the world at large.
If you can’t trust the government, the news or your social media, how can you trust a brand? …
There’s power in the campaigns we craft and the copy we write. Let’s start using it for good.
You’ve seen the news. You’ve shared the Instagram posts. But what does the police brutality crisis mean for your brand from now on?
The two may seem disconnected. After all, nobody respects a brand that jumps on the latest trend just because.
But this? This is different. This applies to every one of us.
If your brand wants a place in the future, it has to be truly inclusive today.
Inclusivity isn’t a marketing trend or a nice-to-have. It’s essential. And it starts with real empathy.
As a marketer, it’s easy to feel like you should be silent right now. But that’s the *easy* route. The actually difficult, interesting, change-making route is to not only take part in the conversation, but actively push it forward through our everyday work. …
There’s never been a better time to invest in your reputation. Here’s how.
“In a bad economy, the best investment you can make is in your reputation. When all bets are off, bet on yourself.”
This was the basis of a Forbes article I was featured in 2018.
But, woah, hold up…
How did I, a 20-something marketer blogging from her bed in her spare time, get featured in Forbes as a marketing expert?
Three words: intentional personal branding. Consistent, diligent, trial-and-error personal branding.
Yep. Personal branding is often cringeworthy and nearly always uncomfortable. It’s also the reason I’ve given talks at Google, consulted for over 100 clients, and been featured in Forbes. My secret wasn’t being special or connected. It was in showing up. …
Think about your mind on any given day.
I’ll take one for the team and go first: on any given day, on any given hour, I can be found thinking of far-flung destinations, an amazing article I just read, my friend’s upcoming birthday, this weekend’s plans, my growing to-do list, the work drama du jour, all the messages I need to respond to on WhatsApp, tomorrow morning’s meeting…
The list goes on. And on. And on.
Lately, of course, I’m thinking more about the pandemic and it’s crushing my creativity. The cognitive load is real.
Mentally, I’m pretty content, but I’m also spreading myself way too thin. …
Someone I grew up with died yesterday. I had no idea she wasn’t ok.
Someone I grew up with died yesterday.
I’m not going to lie and say we were close. We weren’t. At least not as adults. There was an age gap, and we lived at opposite ends of the country. I’m also not going to say I did all I could, even though I wish I had.
But her life was part of the tapestry of my parents’ lives and therefore interlinked with mine.
I was scrolling aimlessly through Facebook when I saw the news. My heart dropped.
Of course, I’ve seen other people’s deaths announced via social media. We’ve all been online long enough to become accustomed to the odd sad status update. …
Thoughts on hope and starting over, because in the absence of certainty all we have is ourselves.
In the wake of yet another recession, will you start to redefine your relationship to money and societal expectation? With the possibility of unemployment, will you find a new, healthier relationship to your work? In the absence of social obligation, will you use the silence to finally listen to yourself?
I was on the phone with a friend recently, when she branded this era “The Great Stop”.
It makes sense. Life as we know it has all but stopped.
By that logic, we laughed about how the post-pandemic era should be titled ‘The Great Start’. A century ago, we had ‘The Roaring Twenties’. …
People are still paying Amazon. Give them more opportunities to pay you to help them.
Ok, real talk: if you’re a small business right now, COVID-19 is especially exhausting.
Everyone’s talking about offering free tutorials and video meetups and content marketing you need to be doing NOW and… woah.
Let’s stop for a second.
Breathe.
As a marketing and communications consultant, here’s one thing I know for sure: these panic content marketing strategies? They’re too much. They’re cognitive clutter. And, most importantly of all, they’re potentially detrimental to your business.
Now, don’t get me wrong: brand empathy has, arguably, never mattered more. We need to care about our customers more than ever. …
Because creating a better ‘about’ page isn’t about you. It’s about them
“Tell us an interesting fact about yourself.”
Is there a more cringe-worthy question? I feel mildly ill just thinking about it.
And yet ‘about’ pages are the second most-visited on your site. They’re the first real connection customers have with you and your story. They matter more for conversion than ever before.
How you show up matters. How you talk about yourself matters even more. (And the secret is in not talking about yourself much at all… but more on that later.)
In a sea of Instagram coaches and self-professed experts, standing out feels, arguably, harder to come by.
Thanks to Simon Sinek, we all know to start with why. Everyone wants to help others ‘live their best life’. Everyone wants us to join their tribe. …
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