Freelance Writing for Nonprofits

Being self-employed means you often have to take responsibility for tasks outside your areas of expertise. You become an accidental computer technician, bookkeeper, advertising executive, and, if you have a website, search engine optimization expert. It can all be very overwhelming.

To make at least one of these jobs — online marketing — a bit more manageable, here are seven extremely easy ways that writers can market themselves online.

Comment on blogs. Most bloggers accept comments on their posts. Read blogs related to writing or your areas of expertise and submit comments on the posts. In most cases, a link to your website or blog will be included with your comment. You can search for blogs at technorati.com. For nonprofit blogs, see the Nonprofit Blog Exchange.

Join e-discussion lists. Participate in email discussion lists (sometimes called listserves) to become well-known as an active and knowledgeable writer in your area of specialty. Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups are good places to start. For nonprofit lists, also check out N-TEN’s Affinity Groups.

Spend time on your website page titles. Page titles are used heavily by search engines to determine the relevance of your site. Spend some time making sure they are full of keywords, not just your website name.

Use search engine friendly URLs. Search engines also look at the actual names of your files in your website. Place keywords in your file names to improve their rankings. For example, nonprofit-writer.htm is a better file name than aboutme.htm.

Create an email signature. Every email you send, especially those to e-discussion lists with archives online, should include an email signature with your contact information and a bit of information about the kind of writing you do.

Keep family and friends in the loop. Word-of-mouth referrals are a big source of work for most successful freelance writers, so when you communicate with friends and family via email, be sure to give them an update on the work you are doing and the kind of work you’d like more of. Just about everyone has been involved with a nonprofit for some reason at some point in their lives, so you never know where that next referral could come from.

Recycle your articles. Take something you’ve already written and repurpose it as a marketing piece by submitting it to an online article directory like EzineArticles.com. People can download and use your article for free, but they must include your author information which will naturally include a link to your website.

I’m offering more online marketing tips like these in “25 Easy and Low-Cost Ways for Writers to Market Themselves Online,” which is a free download when you claim a keyword at 500Writers.com.

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