Like with any job, freelancer marketing is not all unicorns and rainbow. If you’re looking for a career change and are considering freelancing, I’ve compiled 22 things I’ve learned throughout my freelancing journey to help others understand the peaks and valleys.
Author: Michelle Urban
Michelle Urban is the founder of Marketing 261, a digital agency for startups. With a hands-on, get-it-done attitude, she and her team focus on executing measurable plans to get real results. For over 15 years, she’s built scalable marketing programs for demand creation, lead generation, customer advocacy, and engagement. She’s also a wanna-be writer and weekend windsurfer who occasionally binge-watches Netflix. Ask her about the time she danced with Oprah and Beyoncé on live television.
Getting the Most Out of a Ghostwriter: Use This Free Content Brief Template
A content brief helps you get the most out of your ghostwriterAccess your free content brief template >> There are many reasons business professionals and marketers want to publish content on a company website. It has a direct correlation with stellar SEO. It’s great for increasing brand awareness as a thought leader. It even works… Continue reading Getting the Most Out of a Ghostwriter: Use This Free Content Brief Template
6 Time-Saving Marketing Templates for SaaS Marketers [Free Resources]
For startup marketers, sometimes the most intimidating part of the job can be starting a new project with nothing but a blank document. Whether it’s creating a lead-generating email or writing a brand new blog post, it’s hard to start from scratch. While there’s no secret sauce to mastering every type of marketing initiative, there… Continue reading 6 Time-Saving Marketing Templates for SaaS Marketers [Free Resources]
8 Notable Work Notebooks Worth Trying
Yes, our laptops and phones have apps for note-taking, but sometimes you need an escape from digital devices. As a marketer, when it comes to jotting down quick notes, sketches, and concepts, I find notebooks far superior. To make your selection easier, I have compiled a list of the seven best work notebooks suitable for all unique preferences.
A Creative Design Brief That Will Make Your Designers Swoon [with template]
Marketers, be warned! Instilling a design brief process can make or break your project. This free design brief template is a simple yet effective tool in any brand’s arsenal. It’s the best asset for sharing the intricate details that take a concept to a final product. Get the free creative brief template >>
How to Build and Optimize Your SaaS Conversion Funnel [template]
To help you grow from awareness to mastery where your SaaS conversion funnel is concerned, Marketing 261 prepared this step-by-step SaaS Conversion Funnel template listing all critical steps of building and optimizing a SaaS conversion funnel. If you’re unsure where to begin, this template is an excellent starting point – download or make a copy and complete all the sections.
A Token of Love for Your Work Bestie
During these crazy (and depressing) times, it is important to remember your workie best and reach out to them in the best way through gifts. So, surprise your work BFF and remind them of good times, when things were still normal, by giving them a special gift.
How to Communicate an Idea Over Slack
2020 has presented its fair set of challenges for businesses everywhere. While promoting normalcy in the workplace is difficult, it is not impossible — thanks to Slack.
Shift Happens! Making Adjustments to Your Marketing Budget
Sponsoring trade-shows gave us thousands of qualified leads. This year, lead gen has been challenging. Here are some lead gen ideas if you need to quickly shift strategies.
6 Advantages of Hiring a Marketing Contractor
A good marketing contractor act as an extension of your team, regardless of being a full-time employee. It is vital to work with someone that can think out of the box to drive brand awareness, increase your lead pipeline, and convert users to repeat customers. Their success is based on your success.
Open Graph and SEO Meta Tags for Your Website [template]
When there are several people across varying departments writing, editing, approving, and implementing website pages, using a format like this template gives your SEO and OG meta tags a uniform structure and documented process that everyone can follow.
Marketing Predictability: Flip Your Marketing Funnel On Its Head
When you have business leaders asking for leads, and a sales team that is hungry to bring in revenue, it’s time to reverse engineer your marketing funnel and put a plan in place that highlights both leads AND revenue. Check out this example for marketing predictability.
From My Tribe To Yours: A Holiday Gift Guide For Working Moms
To help lift the stress and ideally bring more joy to your gifting experience, we’ve crafted a thoughtful list of gifts that will bring ease, delight, and add a touch of luxury into any working mom’s lifestyle (and dads too!). The products mentioned in this post have been used, loved, and enjoyed by me or recommended by my tribe of working parents.
How to launch a Newsletter That Drives Engagement [Newsletter Strategy Template]
When done right, email marketing is a powerful tactic to engage with your prospects, nurture relationships, move them along the sales funnel, and increase sales. To help you focus your time, we have put together a step-by-step newsletter strategy template that lists out all the critical steps for executing an engaging email.
The Best Podcasts for Business & Pleasure
If you have spent any time with me, you know that I will, without fail, ask you what you’re reading and what’s your favorite podcast. Most of my recommendations have come from my friends, colleagues, and even strangers.
Everything You Write Is Your Brand….Everything!
Content isn’t just blog posts, whitepapers, and other marketing content that contributes to this story. Think of sales emails, social media, voice messages, support tickets, API docs, ads: Anytime something is written down and delivered to the outside world, it is helping advance your brand story.
Traffic and Clicks Don’t Matter: Why It’s Time To Change How You Measure Marketing Success
In a larger scheme of your marketing ROI, clicks and traffic only offer a limited view into your digital marketing performance. If you want solid answers on what you’re doing right and where you can improve, you’ve got to move beyond the click and embrace a new method of customer measurement.
Keep the Story Alive: How to Repurpose Your Content
Make content repurposing a part of your strategy from the beginning. By dedicating a few hours each month to repurposing, you’ll breathe new life into older content and save valuable time and resources. Here’s 5 benefits you can expect to see from repurposing. Along with insights from some of the best content marketers.
Give Your Blog a Personality……Create a Blog Style Guide
A blog style guide is a brave declaration of your company’s vision and personality. It’s a must for companies in which multiple employees contribute to the blog; even handier for companies that hire outside freelancers to write posts. Here’s how you build a blog style guide for your organization.
Revenue Is The Only Marketing Metric That Really Matters
An inbound marketing campaign that increased lead generation by 2,000%. With that kind of result, you would think I was popping open the Champagne and celebrating. Not exactly. If I could go back, I’d do it all differently. Here’s the marketing campaign breakdown.
When Your Content Isn’t Getting Any Love
You can’t launch endless amounts of content in hopes that it will catch fire. If you’re creating content consistently, but failing to get the results you want, it may be time to reflect on your content marketing strategy. We’ve create a free template to get you started.
Productivity Apps and Why They Don’t Work
There’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to productivity apps and I’m pretty sure you’d hit it way before you download the 115th one. When you have a relentless craving to get things done, which system is going to work the best.
How I Made a $30K Marketing Automation Mistake
How do you know if your marketing infrastructure is ready for automation? There are several elements that factor into a decision to launch a marketing automation solution. I encourage marketers to do this mental inventory before they even think about implementation.
A Content Marketing Guide for Using Trello
From brainstorming to writing the first draft to design, edits, and publication, there are a lot of hands involved in getting an article blog-ready. That’s a lot of collaboration. So what’s a content marker to do?
Marketing AMA: When You Need A Little Boost
Today’s marketing involves creating relevance for your brand, building awareness of your product or service, developing compelling validation for your solution, and taking the right mitigating actions along the path to purchase. And there comes a point when you just need to know you are on track and doing the right thing.
What Startups Get Wrong About Their Marketing
A startup can have great products, great engineers, and strong leadership, but it’s hard to cut through the competitive noise without a solid marketing strategy in place. Here are four marketing mistakes startup leaders are likely to make.