Embracing the freelancing life seemed like an appealing idea at first. But you’re not several months in, and nothing is happening. Oops. And I don’t mean “oops, you’d better invite your friends over for a cup of tea because you need comforting”. I mean it’s time to kick your backside and get things working the way they should. There are 4 main reasons why your freelance business hasn’t taken off yet. Okay, to be perfectly honest with you, there’s only one reason why things aren’t working yet, and it’s you. You’re doing something wrong. But the reasons for an inactive business, as listed below, will help you to figure out what you need to change.
Freelancing
#1. You treat it like a personal blog
You might be an enthusiastic blogger, and you might have held a personal blog in the past, but your business website is a different thing. A blog consists of posts or regular articles that will be published as often as you choose to. What this means is that your blog content is regularly updated. A website consists primarily of pages, which are static and need to be informative and SEO-compliant. Contrary to blog posts, your pages can’t be all surfing on the trendiest keywords. Therefore they need to be optimised so they can be found easily by search engines. Additionally, websites can compile personal data and therefore require a managed IT service firm to ensure that they offer a safe infrastructure and data services to your customers. To put it clearly, blogs don’t get hacked because they don’t hold any valuable data. Websites, on the contrary, can lead to bank data or personal addresses. If you handle your website like a personal blog, it’s likely that your potential users will not feel confident about your professional services.
#2. You don’t advertise it
It’s a business. Do you know how many new businesses are launched every day? If you don’t create a buzz around your brand, how do you want your audience to notice that you exist? You need to advertise your business to bring visitors to your website. Contrary to what most people think, you can run perfectly successful advertising campaigns for less than £50/week if you work with Google Adwords. Google Adwords is not an advertising tool that is dedicated to large companies. As you are the one in charge of your budget, you can run campaigns for £0.01 per click. For a few pennies, you could gather some attention around your business and boost its presence online.
#3. You haven’t defined your services
You need to know what you want to offer to attract clients. If you don’t define your product or service offering, you can’t establish your USPs and target your audience. In fact, you can’t expect people to notice your business and get in touch until they know what they could get from you.
#4. You don’t invest enough time on it
If you don’t drive your business, you’ll be driven out of business. In other words, if you don’t work on it, it will never work. It’s not an organic material that can grow from the sun and fresh air. It needs human sweat to develop, yours to be precise.
From not treating your online presence as a professional website to not investing sufficient time in your business, all the reasons why things don’t work out revert to the way you manage your business. Sometimes, it’s good to make the most of the slow time to rethink your strategy and improve your approach.
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