How I would pitch my social media services to prospective clients.

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social media fire hydrantI don’t offer professional social media services.

But if I were at a different stage in my career, I would. In fact, I would be all over social media.

Why? Because every successful freelancer fills a need on the client side. If you want to be a highly paid freelancer, you need to offer a service and skill set that companies desperately need. And right now I see millions of companies that desperately need help with social media.

Putting aside the tiny percentage of companies that are being really smart and successful with their social media marketing, I would address the other, much larger group.

These are the business people who feel like they are trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Information about social media and how they should use it is hitting them from every direction at an impossible speed. They feel battered and confused.

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Differentiate your writing services with an area of technical expertise.

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precise skill set working with watch repairIf you are a freelance writer or copywriter, you probably have a fairly broad skill set.

If I asked you what you did, you might say one of the following:

“I’m an online sales copywriter.”

“I’m an online content writer.”

“I’m a social media writer and marketer.”

There is nothing wrong with those descriptions, in so far as they describe a general area of expertise. Behind that claim you could have a ton of training and professional experience.

The limitation of describing your value in these broad terms is that you will find yourself lumped together with thousands of other people who describe themselves in exactly the same way.

For example you could be a terrific online copywriter. But when someone hears you describe yourself with those words, they might think, “Yep, you and a thousands of other people like you.”

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If Google was in charge of your local library…

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google libraryThanks to my nifty NSA-Lite smartphone app, I was able to record the following conversation between two Googlebots as they set about reviewing and reorganizing the books at my local library.

(Don’t worry, after this short, light-hearted detour I’ll get back to my usual posts on writing for the web and freelancing next week. And yes, for the technically minded among you, I do know the Googlebot doesn’t judge the quality of the web pages it finds and indexes. Poetic license.)

Googlebot 1: Unbelievable! It must have been literally months since anyone last checked out the contents of this library.

Googlebot 2: I hear you dude. How can they possibly maintain quality without checking for what’s new at least once a day?

Googlebot 1: Agreed. The whole place looks like a pretty sad dump to me. Anyway, let’s get started. Here’s a dusty-looking volume: 1984 by George Orwell. What have we got on this?

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What I hate about web content. And how to make it better.

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most web content is noise, not signalI hate the race…the pressure to add more and more pages of content at an ever-increasing rate.

A few years ago millions of rubbish pages were being uploaded to the web every day. Then Google put a big dent in that approach with its Panda updates.

Unfortunately, the race is still being run, but with a slightly improved quality of content.

It’s still a race.

And I hate that.

I want to publish content according to my own calendar, not because I feel I have to compete with everyone else.

And I want to publish content that has a purpose, not simply because “more content is good”.

And that’s the nub of it. It drives me nuts when companies and individuals upload content simply because “more is good”, and “fresher is better than older”. There is an element of truth to both of those reasons, but the downside is that everyone gets into a race to upload truck loads of content that is just “good enough”, and created simply to satisfy the call for “more content”.

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4 Weeks to Content Marketing Mastery with Brian Clark

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Nick Usborne and Brian Clark talking about content marketingAlthough I don’t usually promote other people’s programs on my site, I’m happy to make an exception with Brian Clark and his program on Content Marketing.

Why? For a couple of reasons.

First, although I have written a couple of ebooks on the topic of content marketing, I have never written a full program on the subject.

Second, if you were to ask me to name the most knowledgeable practitioner of content marketing online today, I would immediately point to Brian.

I have known Brian Clark for a long time now, although we didn’t meet face to face until about three years ago. And it wasn’t until earlier this year that we actually got to sit down together and talk to an audience about writing for the web and content marketing.

During a break between my own presentations, I sat down and listened to Brian give his talk on content marketing. From the outset it was pretty clear to me that he was sharing the core secrets behind the phenomenal success of his own business, Copyblogger Media, which now generates $7 million in revenue a year. It was an amazing presentation.

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If fate doesn’t disrupt your career path, you should do it yourself.

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disruption in the freelance lifeI guess many people prefer at least the idea of a career path that doesn’t get disrupted.

I’m not one of those people. I’m a big fan of disruption.

Sometimes fate hands me a huge and unexpected change in direction, like when I moved from the UK to Canada.

At other times, when I grow tired of waiting for fate to step in, I engineer a dramatic change of my own…like when I shifted from being a direct mail copywriter to being an online writer, at midnight on December 31st, 1997.

When I look back, even to when I was a teenager, I was a big fan of stepping sideways at precisely the point when the direct way forward was most clearly illuminated. (Got a place at Cambridge University in 1975. Decided to get a job in a stone quarry instead.)

How come? Why do I insist on disrupting my “way forward”?

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