Recently I published a new course for online content writers and copywriters.
It’s called Web Content Optimization.
It’s a short, video-based course at a very low price point. And that means a lot of people not only got the course, but also completed it within two or three days.
And here’s the best part. People are already using what they learned to reposition themselves as optimization experts and charge higher fees.
Here’s what Steve Maurer had to say…
Go to Freelancer.com and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of freelancers competing for millions of projects.
It’s a free-for-all marketplace, and there is a lot of downward pressure on pricing.
Companies know there will be a lot of people wanting to work on the projects they post, so they can sit back and wait for the right writer at the right price.
In many categories this becomes a race to the bottom, because freelancers know the only way they can compete is to keep their prices low.
One of the categories hit hardest by this downward pressure is content writing. And this pressure to write for peanuts isn’t confined just to sites like Freelancer.com. It’s industry-wide.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines self-respect as:
1: a proper respect for oneself as a human being
2: regard for one’s own standing or position
I come across the term myself most often when I’m about to set off on some chore or other and my wife asks, “Are you going out like that? You should have more self-respect.”
She has a point. I’m sometimes a very scruffy dresser, particularly at weekends. My most comfortable clothes and shoes are generally old. Sometimes very old.
Last year a young man at a local store stopped scanning my groceries half way through, just to check that I had enough money to pay for them. I’m guessing it was because, judging by my scruffy weekend clothes, he thought I was down to my last few dollars.
That said, I don’t make the same impression professionally.
Social media can be a wonderful tool for freelancers. But it can also be a time sink.
It’s all too easy to spend hours a week feeding the social media beast, without getting any measurable value in return.
All too often we focus on numbers. We want more friends and followers. We want more clicks and more positive feedback.
Once things start rolling and our numbers start rising at a healthy clip, it’s easy to develop a minor obsession. All of a sudden we are spending more and more time finding ways to increase the size of our social media audience.
If this is happening to you, you should press the pause button, sit back and ask yourself this simple question: “Who are these people?”
Visit a handful of online marketing websites and blogs and you’ll get an idea of the emphasis being placed on the various activities near and dear to marketers’ hearts.
You’ll find a lot about search engine optimization, in spite of the howls of people who say SEO is dead. (They’re wrong.)
You’ll find plenty about the benefits and rise of social media.
And you’ll find tons of information on content marketing.
But you can go for quite a while without finding a meaty page or post about link-building.
Content marketing is a hot topic, and for good reason.
Content is the lifeblood of most websites, blogs, video channels and photo apps.
A constant flow of new and compelling content gets visitors hooked and keeps them engaged.
What is content? Often it’s an article or a post. But it could be a review or a buying guide. It could be a video, a photo essay or a slideshow. Or an ongoing series of photos on Instagram or Pinterest. Or a podcast or a vlog. It could be a multimedia mashup.
Add together all those new pages, posts, videos, photos and podcasts – plus all the tweets and Facebook updates that are created – and you have hundreds of millions of new pieces of content uploaded each day.