5 Steps To Getting More Traffic To Your Freelance Writing Website

By Dan Smith

Every freelance writer wants an active website or blog. When you’re first starting out, it’s often seen as a sign of competence — if you’re talking about freelance writing (or in fact, any topic) on your website and people are reading and responding, simply put, it makes you feel great.

But getting to that point can take many months.

Although there are various techniques you can utilize to increase your website’s traffic, the following five are what I would consider to be the staple of any traffic building campaign.

At this point, I need to say that I no longer practice everything I’m about to preach. All of my work now comes through recommendations or is a regular gig and so I’ve had little need to increase traffic to my website for months. All of the below techniques I still recommended to friends, family and colleagues (and did previously use myself), however and feel confident in saying that if implemented, they will all help increase traffic to your freelance writing website.

1. Teach yourself the basics of SEO

Whatever career path you choose, if it involves having a website or working online, you need to know the basics of SEO.

There are plenty of free resources out there to help your learn SEO, but just make sure you’re reading relatively recent pieces. SEO techniques change regularly and so although, for example, two-way link exchanges were once a great technique, they have very little benefit today.

Oh and make sure you implement what you’ve learned. Sounds simple, but there are plenty of people who don’t put into practice what they’ve learned as they don’t believe they have the time — if you learn the basics properly, you should be able to incorporate numerous techniques into your writing naturally.

2. Interact with others

This is the one point I wish I’d started to do earlier in my freelancing career. I spent far too much time reading websites and blogs on how to be a freelance writer and never interacted.

Yet as soon as I did start to interact, traffic to my website started to increase, comments started to be more frequent and the website simply a lot more active.

I always recommend that new freelance writers read websites and blogs on the topic, but whatever you do, don’t just sit in the shadows. The freelance writing community is extremely friendly and sociable and you shouldn’t have any qualms about asking a question or raising an issue, no matter how simple you may think it is.

3. Don’t be afraid to use old techniques

For many clients, I still create articles and submit pieces to article websites (albeit only a few, high quality ones). Similarly, I still use StumbleUpon and Digg.

Some find these techniques to be outdated and no longer bring them a considerable amount of traffic.

However, I’ve found that a few good quality articles produced every month and submission to StumbleUpon and Digg (and some time spent developing these accounts) still generates daily traffic — nothing substantial, but it keeps the website ‘alive’ and assists with SEO.

4. Consider PPC

I’m not a PPC (Pay Per Click) guru or anything like that, but I’ve had the opportunity to work with it before and I’ve setup a few basic campaigns for clients.

While it does take some time to setup and the traffic you receive isn’t permanent, you can generally get a good ROI if you target the right keywords — even on tiny budget.

My advice here is unless you’ve got the money to, don’t outsource the development and management of your PPC campaign. It might mean you have to teach yourself the basics, but unless you have the money to work with an agency or freelancer (which if you do, I’d strongly advise it), it will be a lot more financially viable in the early stages — as long as you’re willing to put the effort in.

5. Shout about yourself

A lot of people find it difficult to talk about themselves in a promotional way and for many years, I was one of them.

The problem is, if you don’t shout about yourself, who else is going to?

You don’t have to constantly be telling people what you do and how good you are, but it doesn’t hurt to first ensure your friends and family know what you do and then discussing your skills with colleagues / ex-colleagues, followed by your peers.

A lot of my work comes from recommendations / word of mouth advertising and I don’t spend hours every day getting my name known — I just ensure that everyone I know understands what I do and where I get the opportunity, without it being forced or unnecessary, I give people a brief explanation of my services and my contact details.

There’s so much to talk about when it comes to increasing visitors to your freelance writing website — I’ve only very briefly touched on the topic.

If I was to just give one piece of advice, however, it would be that you should never be afraid to ask for help. I’ve been freelancing for several years now, but I still ask for advice (Sharon is more than aware of this!). It doesn’t matter what the topic is — increasing website traffic or not — everyone has to start learning somewhere.

Image: Christi Nielsen (Flickr)