Nick Usborne

You can achieve freelance success if you really WANT it. Discuss.

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Talk to almost any freelancer and he or she will tell you they really want to succeed.

But there are many different degrees of “wanting” something.

As a coach, working with freelancers almost daily, I often hear about how badly people want to succeed.

But the word,”want” is inadequate to the task of expressing what it really means to want something.

I want some ice cream for dessert.

I want to go away for the weekend.

I want my children to grow up healthy, happy and wise.

The degree to which I want ice cream is insignificant compared to how much I want my children to grow up healthy, happy and wise.

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Beating my drum again about Dead End Content.

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young drummer boyIf I look back over the years and try to identify the recommendations I have shared over and over again, ad nauseam, I bet #1 on the list would be my rant about dead end content.

What is dead end content? It’s when you write a page of content for your site, or a post for your blog, and fail to provide links to further reading at the end of the article, review, guide or post.

Some webmasters and writers shrug this suggestion away, confident that their readers will scroll back up the page and find a new link to click on.

Good luck with that. Not going to happen.

If you want to keep your readers on your site for longer – and you do – you need to maximize the number of readers who visit more than one page.

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If your freelance business website looks old, it will damage your brand.

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nick usborne's freelance websiteLast year’s fashions look old. Last year’s smartphones look old. And last year’s websites look old.

OK, I’m exaggerating a little. Let’s make that 5 years.

Whatever the exact timeframe, there is no doubt that any given look and feel for a website eventually grows old.

As a freelancer, or for any business, you can’t allow that to happen. You can’t have a website that looks like it was last worked on back in 2005 or, even worse, 1998.

In some ways it’s odd that website design should be so susceptible to changes in fashion. If a particular look and feel works, why change it?

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When creating web content, be sure to accommodate different learning styles.

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address different learning styles with web content

The science of learning styles is based on the presumption that not all of us learn in the same way.

There are various systems or models out there, including David Kolb’s model, Honey and Mumford’s model, Anthony Gregorc’s model, the Sudbury model, and Fleming’s VAK/VARK model…and more.

Each model breaks down the ways in which we learn into different learning styles. Some models were created to address the needs of the educational system, while others are better suited to business.

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The key to writing anything well is to look your reader in the eye.

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always maintain eye contact with your audience

always maintain eye contact with your audienceLet’s start with an analogy.

You are giving a presentation to a group of people in a meeting room. You have a PowerPoint presentation on the screen.

During the course of that presentation, part of the time you will be facing your audience, looking them in the eye, and talking directly to them.

At other points, you will turn your back on the audience and speak to a slide on the screen. You might be pointing to some figures, a chart, or some bullet points.

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Are your freelance copywriting services perceived as an expense, or as an investment?

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cash registerMaybe you don’t think about your services in this way.

But your clients and prospects do.

As a prospective client looks at your estimate, she will perceive it in one of two ways.

“This is going to take a chunk out of my budget for this quarter. I wonder if this is really the best use of my dollars.”

Or…

“This is going to cost me a few bucks, but it’s going to generate a truck load of extra sales.”

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