Solve Online Marketers’ Most Pressing Needs

As you may or may not know, there are many business entrepreneurs who operate online – and they’re known as Internet Marketers. They operate one or more websites in one or more niche markets.

They grow their business as fast as they can, but working for themselves, it’s impossible to get everything done. So, they reach out to other online entrepreneurs for help – and these people are known as service providers or freelancers.

There are several different types of freelance positions – and you can choose to do one or more of the jobs – whatever your talent and time allows for. Let’s go over a few of the more common ones.

Provide Your Services as a Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant (VA) is kind of like a personal secretary. You handle either one or a wide variety of tasks for the marketer. You can work for more than one person at times, work on a short period of time or work fulltime for someone.

Pay ranges from $10 to 100 an hour – or even more. You can get hired instantly as soon as you start putting out the word, and you’ll either get paid upfront or bill the client for the work you do as you go.

This kind of work is stuff that a marketer is too busy to do. The jobs are commonly known as “grunt work” – the labor jobs that top professionals give up to someone else so they can concentrate on more pressing issues like speaking at seminars, forming relationships with future joint venture partners, etc.

What does a virtual assistant do, exactly? The possibilities are endless – and you should know that every client is unique in what he or she will want you to do for them.

Here are some of the possibilities:

·         Answer customer service emails

·         Conduct research for them about their niche markets

·         Handle blog posts and approve and reply to comments

·         Take care of online invoices – both incoming and outgoing

·         Compile info products and get them set up online (on sites like ClickBank or Amazon Kindle, for example)

·         Make posts to their social media accounts on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus

·         Handle their schedule – which may include travel to seminars or online webinar and product or affiliate launch dates.

·         Transcribe their videos and audio files into text for them

·         Upload pages to their website(s)

·         Hire other freelancers for tasks such as writing and graphics creation and manage those outsourced gigs for them

To get started as a VA, you’ll need to have a computer (with a high-speed Internet connection since you may be uploading and downloading files frequently).

You might also need a fax machine and a printer. Some marketers will want to Skype with you, so you could need a video camera built into or attached to your computer.

If you don’t already have these skills, learn to type fast – the faster the better. Improve on your grammar and spelling, or double check everything you send to the client or put out there to attract clients.

The client will want to know that you’re a stickler for meeting deadlines. The stuff they outsource is usually timely – and since they’re in a rush and have tons of other things to do – they’re handing it off to you, so emphasize your affinity for deadlines.

Where do you find clients? You can sign up for a site like Elance.com and bid on projects, or you can sign up specifically on VA sites like VirtualAssistants.com.

Having a website is easy – you can even start with a free WordPress blog and later up the ante by buying your own $10/year domain and $10/month hosting and set your own site up!

You can advertise your sites online using social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus as well as LinkedIn. Spread the word, too – because your friends online may know of someone who needs a helping hand with their business.

The best thing about being a virtual assistant – besides the extra holiday you’ll be earning – is that your clients will heap loads of praise on you for saving them the headache and the hassle of having to take care of this work themselves.

Be the “Go To Ghostwriter” for Marketers Who Need Content

Can you write at an 8th grade reading level? Chances are, you probably can. That’s all it takes to make it onto the scene as a freelance writer online. These are in high demand but there’s something you need to know.

Breaking onto the scene doesn’t means charging dirt cheap prices for tons of work. In fact, while you may be thinking it’s the best way to get clients without experience – it actually only attracts the wrong kind of client to you.

The clients who look for the cheapest prices are always more demanding and they will nitpick and complain about your work. Someone who is willing to pay top dollar for a good ghostwriter just wants to pass the assignment on to you and go work on other stuff.

Some freelancers go online and start off charging as little as $5 (well, actually, some poor souls write for as little as $1.25 on some sites). This might work in countries where the cost of living isn’t pricey, but it doesn’t work in America or other nations.

At the low end, you should be charging $7 per page. And that can grow into payment of $30 or more for marketers who pay for top ghostwriters. It also depends on what you’re writing.

Payment for an article or eBook might be $20 per page (a page being anywhere from 400-500 words).  But payment for a press release or white paper can be upwards of $100 per page.

All marketers need a ton of content. Not only do they run more than one website, but for each site they might need the following content:

·         eBooks

·         Sales copy

·         Blog posts

·         Squeeze page copy

·         Email autoresponders

·         Articles for directories

·         Viral reports

·         Opt-in reports

You can learn what each of these means if you don’t already know, and be able to meet the demands of your client when they come to you saying, “I’d like a 7-part email autoresponder series on dieting.”

Throw out the rules you learned in high school or college. The stuffy, grammatically perfect writing you did for college professors isn’t what your marketing client is after.

They want conversational content – just like this eBook – something that’s easy to read. They don’t want you to specifically use big words to try to make them look more intelligent.

Those who have a strong background in college level English might even find it hard to work as a freelance ghostwriter online – since they have to let go of every rule they were previously taught.

The most important things to a marketer looking for a freelancer are:

·         Someone who can stick to a deadline (ghostwriters are notorious for being late)

·         Someone who has a strong command of the English language

·         Someone who understands how NOT to plagiarize other people’s work – and that includes knowing not to copy, paste and rewrite

·         Someone who already knows what the Internet Marketing lingo means. If they ask you to create squeeze page copy, they don’t want to have to first educate you about what a squeeze page is – so do your homework and look it up online.

Being a freelance writer is easy. You want to give yourself a nice cushion of time to get the deliverables to your customer. You might start out getting assignments for a single article that’s only one page, but if you do a good job, your marketers will hire you for their big projects – like full eBook packages with bonus books to go with it.

Some marketers will not only hire you to do the work, but they’ll order research materials for you and send them to you (or pay you extra to buy them yourself). Not only will you earn a lot of extra holiday cash (with payment upfront or upon completion), but you’ll also be getting a great education in how things operate behind the scenes so that maybe you can launch your own online empire in a niche of your choosing.

Create Gorgeous Graphics for Those Who Lack Talent

Becoming a freelance graphics designer is a great way to generate an obscene amount of money. Marketers pay top dollar for graphics packages, but not the cheap amateurish kind.

If you have professional skills, then you can easily get so busy that you’re turning away business at top rates. It pays to learn what marketers are looking for, so let’s go through some of their graphics needs.

Minisite packages are one of the hottest things that a graphics creator can design. Marketers who are in multiple niche markets use minisites to sell their eBooks and eCourses online.

They do the sales copy, but they need someone with a creative eye to handle the graphics. The best thing you can do is learn what kind of graphics they want – so take a stroll through a site like the ClickBank.com marketplace and look at the graphics that are found on those sites.

Here’s a list of some of the elements of a minisite package:

·         Header

·         Footer

·         Background

·         eBook cover

·         Bonus covers

·         Order graphics

·         Testimonial graphics

You can set up a variety of graphics packages, like the header, footer, background and one eBook cover as a basic package, or add on testimonial boxes, bonus covers (like a spiral notebook or DVD box) and banner ads for a premium package.

Squeeze page graphics are necessary for marketers because they need to build a list. This is the page where they promise something in exchange for the visitor entering their name and email address in a box.

The marketer might want a simple squeeze page with opt in graphics – or they may want a video skin, where you’re “wrapping” their video in a frame of sorts to give their creation a professional appeal.

Kindle cover graphics are huge right now. Kindle is a free self-publishing platform through Amazon.com. Anyone can upload their fiction or non-fiction books to be sold on the site.

One thing that every Kindle publisher needs is a book cover. The amateur covers that some people create aren’t enough to generate interest in those Kindle books.

Publishers are working with a simple thumbnail to try to attract readers, so the cover graphic is highly important. The text has to be readable in such a small area, and it needs to reflect the tone and style of the book.

Facebook headers for fan pages or groups are another graphics need marketers have. Social marketing is strong free traffic method for many marketers, and they need to have nice graphics that help brand them professionally on these sites.

Twitter profiles are where they also need graphics. They include background images – which often showcase their ecourses and domain names – as well as header graphics

Banner ads that affiliates can use to promote a marketer’s products (or that they can use when they buy ad space on someone else’s sites) are popular with marketers.

You’ll need to know how to create a variety of sizes when it comes to buttons and banners. You’ll also need to know how to create animated banners as well as static ones.

This business really lets you tap into your creative vein – so if you have a passion for coming up with designs and themes, this might be something that you would excel with.

You will have to deal with clients in this business, though. Sometimes they can be picky and have you do revisions, so it pays to have some rules set up so that you’re not stuck doing endless revisions for no pay.

You can find clients through the creation of your own site, or sign up at a freelance site like Elance where they have a graphics category you can place bids in and win new clients!