Freelance Digital Marketing - The Ultimate Guide 

But for now, here’s a quick outline of the 6 most common types of digital marketing:

• Paid Advertising: Paying to display an ad on a platform. Examples include: Facebook ads, Google Ads, Quora and Reddit ads, Amazon PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads and Google AdSense
• Social Media Marketing: Utilizing social platforms to organically reach new customers and nurture existing fans. Examples are Instagram and Pinterest accounts.
• Content Marketing: Creating valuable content in a way that draws search traffic and adds value to a brand, website or chosen platform (YouTube, Instagram etc.). This can be done through blog posts, videos, images, or any other form of ‘content’.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Optimizing content, websites and/or other platforms to increase the chances of showing up at the top of a search result page from a search engine (e.g. Google) query. 
• Conversion Marketing: Digital marketing doesn’t just stop when people arrive to a website or online platform. Conversion Marketing takes the wheel at this point, optimizing everything from what a visitor first sees to encouraging a specific conversion goal, with the end goal of improving conversion rates (the percentage of visitors that take a valuable action) throughout the marketing funnel. Usually conversion marketing focuses on lead generation (i.e. email list building) and product sales. Conversion marketers specialize in creating landing pages, opt-in forms, sales pages, email marketing campaigns and webinars. 
• Affiliate and Influencer Marketing: Refers to putting a reward system in place for those who refer or recommend a certain brand or product. Affiliates usually get a percentage of the sale, while influencers usually get a once off-payment or free product.

Examples of digital marketing specialties are:

• Copywriters: Persuasive writing specialists that craft text (also referred to as ‘copy’) to get readers to carry out a desired action or conversion goal.
• Paid Ads Experts: Paid advertising campaign experts that usually specialize on crafting & monitoring ads for specific platforms (e.g. Facebook ads, Google Adwords, Amazon Ads, etc.). 
• Affiliate Marketing Managers: Experts that manage affiliate marketing programs for brands, products or services. These managers focus on signing up new and influential affiliate partners who have large audiences, handling current affiliates and keeping them happy, as well as managing the platforms that track affiliate sales and pay out affiliate commissions. 
• Email Marketing Specialists: Email marketing specialists that create email campaigns and sales funnels. The campaigns are focused around a series of persuasive emails designed to achieve a specific conversion goal, usually a product purchase.

Here's a few examples:

• Generating New Clients: You will need to implement and maintain strategies to consistently find new clients.
  
• Calls with Clients: Communicating regularly with clients to get the specs of a project, talk about changes, give updates on your progress and demonstrate your measurables are all part of the job description.
  
• Reviewing Your Campaigns: Analysing and reporting on the success of your campaigns is critical to conveying the impact your work is having.
  
• Implementing Campaigns and Projects: (A.K.A doing the actual work!) No matter what you specialize in, most of your time will be taken up delivering on your speciality, whether it be setting up ad campaigns, writing copy, contacting influencers, etc.
  

Depending on the complexity of the service you offer, you can either:

• Start offering the service straight away and learn as you go - suitable for low complexity offerings such as social media management.
  
• Or, train yourself to become an expert in a topic/subject/service, then start taking clients - suitable for high complexity offerings such as customer attribution management.
  

Here are the 6 most important mindset shifts you’ll need when starting a freelancing career:

1. Be prepared for hardship and setbacks - they’re how you learn and grow. Taking it personally and beating yourself up doesn’t help the situation. Instead, figure out what you can learn and put systems and solutions in place to prevent the issue from happening in the future. Doing this means you’re leveling up your freelance business each time you make a mistake.
2. Choose your mentors and sources of information carefully. Your inputs, who you listen to and who you learn from will determine your outputs. A lot of online courses out there are over hyped and designed to sell the course, not get results for its students. We’ll go through how to choose your sources of information in the What to Specialize In chapter.
3. Take a long term approach. You must be willing to grow slow. This is not going to be a cash-cow from day one. You’ll need to spend countless unpaid hours creating systems for yourself and experimenting. You’ll also lose money on mistakes such as misjudging the scope of work and promising too much for too low a price. You must see these costly missteps as investments in your freelance business, rather than confidence shattering roadblocks.
4. Accept that it’s not going to be easy. Any niche, field, or business model that has a low barrier to entry has cut-throat competition because everyone and their dog is setting up their own freelance business in that field. Set yourself apart by investing the time necessary to learn and master your niche. Engage in research, free work, courses and peer learning to ensure you’re the best you can be in our given niche.
5. Focus on building systems. This is the key to growing and scaling your freelance business. Optimizing everything from invoices to client updates will ensure you have more time to deliver more work to more clients. Systems, systems, and systems are the only way to scale.
6. Overdeliver: It’s essential that you focus on not only providing value to your clients, but over-delivering compared to the final product they expect. This will not only get you rehired, but will amass you raving testimonials and word-of-mouth referrals that will skyrocket your business.

Choosing the right service to offer in a profitable niche at the very start of your freelance journey will save you countless trips back to the drawing board.

If you already have a digital marketing freelance service and find you’re aren’t gaining traction, or you’re just getting started and not sure which niche you should focus on, then this is the chapter for you.

By clearly defining your niche, deciding on the exact services you offer and identifying who you are offering them to, you’ll find that your workflow, marketing, and systems will build on themselves. Offering the same thing to the same people also means you can make use of the work you have done in the past to get new client work done faster.

Although it can be tempting to offer everything under the sun, you’ll end up doing a disservice to both yourself and your clients. Avoid falling into the jack of all trades - master of none - trap.

Rather than reinventing the wheel every time you take on a new client, sticking with one service for one niche allows you to:

• Become an expert and authority in your niche
• Find clients more easily since your services are so targeted
• Systematize your services since you’re focusing on delivering the same offerings to multiple people, rather than doing something new for each and every new client

Pricing is one of the most complex parts of a freelance business, so if you’re wondering how much do digital marketers make, this chapter will answer every question you have around pricing your freelance services.

Working out which pricing model to choose for yourself, how much to charge and how to quote accurately can be a huge source of anxiety for even the most experienced freelancers.

This chapter is going to be your go to guide on everything freelance pricing.

So you’ve chosen your niche and are raring to go… but there’s one small detail missing.

Clients!

In this chapter we will show you how to get freelance clients.

We’ll also take you through how to win a client once you’ve gotten their attention, by creating can’t-say-no proposals. 

Does ‘haphazard’ come to mind when you think about the way you’re running your freelance business?

It can be so easy to get stuck in putting out day to day fires that you never establish the systems needed to run your freelance business efficiently (let alone in a way that’s possible to scale and grow).

In this chapter, you’ll learn best practices for running the day-to-day operations of your freelance business.

We’ll cover task and time management, important rules to remember, and the best apps and tools for your day-to-day operations.

Get ready to finally experience a little order in your freelance business. 

Start Chapter 4 Now →

One of the best things you can do to grow your freelance business is to keep your clients happy, and that requires a strategic focus on client retention.

Operating a steady and successful freelance digital marketing business is a lot easier if you have two things: long term clients and happy customers leaving you both testimonials and referrals.

Keeping your clients happy and keeping them informed of the results you have delivered will ensure you always have a steady stream of work.

The Client Retention chapter is all about retaining clients and keeping them happy. 

Let’s imagine the best case scenario and your freelance business is growing by leaps and bounds...

Eventually there will be a point where you hit a ceiling.

Essentially, your schedule is so full you start turning new clients away. From here you can raise your rates, get super picky about who you work with, or move into an agency model - allowing you to provide the same service to even more clients.

We’ll take you through how to know when it’s time to scale your services, and what steps to take in order to move forward and grow your business.

Conclusion - Ready For Your Freelancer Career?

“Going freelance,” is a big decision, and working alone comes with its own challenges and benefits, but ultimately can be one of the most rewarding experiences of anyone's career.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for ways to scale or fix client retention, this ultimate guide has something for every freelance marketer.

While you’re here, scroll down to the comments and leave us your feedback and tell us exactly where you are in your freelance career, or one BIG thing you could use help with in as a freelance digital marketer.

P.S.: If you’re the type to skip to the end of a post looking for the TLDR; here it is:

In this mega-guide on freelance digital marketing we’re going to show you everything you need to know about starting, running, growing, and scaling a freelance digital marketing business. Now scroll back up and dive in!