Freelance Digital Marketing & SEO — What You Need To Know
I have been doing freelance digital marketing and SEO for over 2 years now, and I can tell you that it has been one of the best decisions of my life. Freelance marketing allows me to have the freedom to work for myself, and try out ideas on a global scale, with very little startup capital. Not to mention the fact that there is pretty much infinite scalability with it. It is the perfect place for those who have ideas and the work ethic to implement them. That being said, achieving success with it took me awhile and was not as easy as I thought it would be. An important key to your success in freelancing is making sure that you love the journey because I can tell you right now that it won’t always work out exactly as you expect it to. It will be a rollercoaster and you need to be prepared for this.
Keep Your Day Job (At First)
I made the mistake of giving up on my job search assuming that my freelance digital marketing income would be immediate and could provide me with decent financials. But unfortunately, I was wrong. It took me a whole year before I was able to consistently generate income online, and so I lived broke for quite a while, like a starving musician with a dream and work ethic to make it big. This decision also slowed me down because being broke made me resort to quick cash solutions instead of focusing on long term assets. It also was more difficult to scale my business with limited capital. Therefore, I recommend keeping your job or at least working part time until you can consistently make at least 4–6k per month online.
Now that that’s over, let’s get into the actual methods for how to earn income with freelance digital marketing from home or anywhere else.
How to Become a Freelance Digital Marketer
When I started out, I realize I hard to put together a freelance marketing plan, but I didn’t know exactly where to start. I was constantly looking for ways to earn income, but it was hard to find ones that actually worked right off the bat. I watched countless make money online “gurus” who all pointed me in different directions. One told me that I needed to start a freelance advertising empire on Facebook, another guided me towards building up Instagram influencer accounts, and yet another spoke of email marketing. People like Gary Vee (even though he is great for motivation and mindset), in my opinion, are some of the worst people to get practical advice from because they are so vague and general.
Now, after trying various methods, what ended up working well for me? Three letters: SEO (search engine optimization). If you don’t know SEO, I highly suggest you learn about the basics at least. Even if you don’t succeed as an online marketer, the skills you learn can help you land a job.
I already had some experience with this field at my last job and the time I spent SEO freelancing, but I didn’t really know how to monetize it on my own other than by working for clients. Which leads me to my next point:
Do Not Work for Broke Clients
I learned this the hard way by not getting paid often. Keep in mind that most people do not have your money.
If you want to get paid, you have to consider that Joe the handyman is barely making a living for himself. How is he going to be able to pay you for your hard work? The answer is that getting paid will be a hassle for you every step of the way.
Other Reasons Why Client Work Sucks
I started off as a freelance digital marketing consultant focused on serving clients as my main business practice. After signing a few clients, I noticed that working for them was not that far off from working for my old boss. The main difference was that it came with only part of the stability and none of the benefits. I essentially had 6+ bosses at once!
It should also be noted that there are still quite a lot of people out there who are skeptical of internet marketers, and the competition is somewhat big for client work. I once heard a local business owner refer to SEOs as Nigerian scam artists!
Affiliate SEO Freelancing
Do various types affiliate marketing like pay per call, pay per sale, revenue share, etc. Just make sure the company paying you on the other end makes large amounts of revenue. That way, you will rarely, if ever, have to worry about getting paid.
Where to Find Good Affiliate Offers
There are plenty of affiliate offers in just about every niche you can think of. Simply go to offervault.com or clickbank.com and you will find several. Alternatively, you can simply Google “your niche or service + affiliate program” or “your niche or service + referral program”. You can also choose to promote e-commerce products on websites like Amazon, Ebay, or Etsy.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
How affiliate marketing works is that a company with a product or service is willing to pay you to help them promote their product or service on a CPA (cost per action) basis. Most commonly that action is a cost per lead (call or contact form submission) or cost per sale (a percentage of the final sale or a flat rate). You don’t have to love the niche, but you should be willing to create content around it, or to buy the content. If you are just starting out and creating your first site, I would recommend working with Amazon Associates to start.
How to Promote Your Affiliate Offer
Remember this formula:
SEO/content strategy + high quality content + good products = cash
What Do I Mean by SEO and Content Strategy?
SEO means a lot of things, but the most important concepts are content strategy and keyword research. These are super important and you will probably fail if you can’t do them properly. When starting out, you want to make sure that you are targeting good keywords/topics with your content. Good keywords and topics are determined based off of many factors, such as search volume, CPC (cost per click), commercial intent, SEO competition, and more. You can use our longtail tool to help you find article topics.
Potentially, the most valuable skill you can have in SEO is learning how to do proper keyword research. I am not going to go super in-depth with this here, but if you have no idea how to do keyword research, I suggest you take a beginner’s SEO course like this one, or hire a content strategy consultant like ourselves to help you develop a digital marketing strategy, you can learn more about our content marketing services at this link. Regardless of how you do it, you want to find out what information people are searching for and where there is a “gap” in provided content. This will make your path to success way easier. Without it, it will be hard to get high quality SEO traffic.
Why Is Search Engine Traffic so Valuable?
Think about this: Google is a massive company, right? About 80% of their revenue comes from selling Google ads primarily on search. Some advertisers in industries like water damage restoration or law are paying upwards of $70 per click to get traffic to their websites from Google. How are they able to get away with charging so much, while platforms like Facebook are not? Primarily because of searcher intent and timing. Instead of interrupting people who may not be interested in what they have to offer on their Facebook or Instagram feeds, why not answer the people when they are looking for you. For example, when someone searches for “best web hosting service”, chances are many of those searchers probably need a web hosting service. Therefore, you want to be there to provide them with high quality information that meets their intent.
To target this keyword, you can write an article like “10 best web hosting providers voted by the pros”. Web hosting affiliate offers pay something like 40% ongoing commission to their affiliates, so this is big money. Neil Patel discusses in a black hat SEO article about how he made 100k per month in affiliate commissions by ranking for the keyword “web hosting”. He eventually got penalized for the methods he used to do this, but the point is that there is big money to be made if you can rank high in search engines.
With that being said, the best ways I have found to promote affiliate offers is with SEO on Google, YouTube, and Bing. If you are just starting out, I recommend that you do not use your own website. Rather, I recommend using barnacle SEO. That means leveraging a high authority website so that you can rank easily.
What Do I Mean by High Quality Content?
You want to completely outdo your competition. For example, if your biggest competitor in the search engines has an article about 10 of the best tips for building backlinks, your article can offer 40 tips. Also, you want to use catchy titles and make your articles entertaining, easy to digest, authoritative, and informative.
We will use YouTube as our target search engine for our next example, but the same concepts work with blog posts in Google and Bing.
First, make a video. You can do this yourself or you can get someone on Fiverr to make a video for you. The video should be genuinely helpful and answer the “question” or “problem” that the searcher is searching for when they type in your keyword. For example, to target the search “How to properly clean Nike Air Jordans”, the video can show how to clean the shoes using specific products that are genuinely helpful for doing so. To achieve higher rankings, make sure to say your primary keywords out loud in the video, and try your best to retain the visitor for as long as possible. Remember that the user typed that search term in to find an answer to their question, so give it to them. Make sure to edit your video so that it cuts straight to the point without too many mundane interruptions. Then, simply mention to the viewer that they can find a link to the product in the description of your YouTube video. You can use a URL shortener like Bitly to mask your link in a more concise format. One of the main benefits to using a URL shortener is that they will provide you with analytics on who clicked your affiliate links.
Run YouTube Ads
YouTube discovery ads are some of the cheapest ads currently out there and as long as you can retain your audience well and get good user engagement, they will help you rank higher in YouTube. YouTube currently still counts user metrics (likes, comments, watch time, etc.) gained on your video from ads, even after they are turned off. Also, you will want to make sure to create a catchy thumbnail, title, and meta description so that you can increase your click through rates.
Build Backlinks
If the steps above do not get you to number 1 on YouTube, build backlinks and video embeds to the video.
If you don’t know what a backlink is, it is essentially a link or embed of your video from somewhere else on the web. This is one of the methods that search engines use to determine who should rank highest. If this is the first time you are hearing about backlinks, I recommend learning more about them, using our service to do it for you, or partnering with another SEO expert. Sometimes videos on YouTube will rank on their own, but other times they will need a little boost.
Building Authority
Once you have ranked a video and it is getting a decent amount of views, you’ll probably start to notice some subscribers joining your channel. In all of your videos it is a good idea to ask the viewer to like, comment, and subscribe as well as to hit the notification bell if they found the video helpful. Keep creating videos on the same channel and within the same niche if possible so that you can start to build a brand and authority around your topic. Once you have several videos, and most of them are ranked for big keywords, people may start to see your channel/brand as an authority in the niche and therefore they will feel that they can trust your suggestions. You can even start to monetize your audience in different ways if you choose to, with things like courses, coaching, Adsense, and/or services.
Keep in Touch with Your Audience
Part of the authority building process is keeping you and your brand on the consumer’s mind. You can do this by funneling your fans into a (somewhat) controllable asset, like a Facebook group or email list, allowing you to continually remarket to them. Keep in mind though that in some cases, like that of Facebook groups, the platform you use may have control over your viewership to some extent and they can adjust your reach/appearance. Facebook did this a few years ago with Facebook pages.
That’s all you need to have to be successful with freelance digital marketing from home or anywhere else you choose to do it from! Rinse and repeat, and watch your efforts should snowball over time. If you have any questions or would like to continue this discussion, feel free to post a comment below or join our Facebook group found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/126190751618004