Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

Running a business is a trust game – if someone doesn’t trust you, they sure as heck are not interested in giving you their money for your products or services. Would you go into an electronics store where every item was sold out of box for retail price? Probably not. But, building trust offline is entirely different from doing it online – you don’t have a store front to put a face to your business. You have a website – and websites are notoriously bad at conveying any kind of emotion or human face of your business. That’s why you hear constant reminders to do the little things. Put peoples’ pictures on your site, write a blog in a casual tone and send out personal emails to stay on a friendly tone with people.

It’s all part of the way in which people deal think about what they’re going to buy. So, what does this all have to do with the post title, or freelance writing for that matter? When you start talking about freelancers, you have a very interesting dilemma.

First. freelancers are by nature floaters. They go from project to project building reputation and using that reputation to get bigger, better projects. They don’t have a solid location or image to cling to – they are amorphous – it’s how they survive. 

But, people don’t trust the amorphous. They want stability, experience, and quality all at once. So, how do you convey those qualities without actually opening a store front or plopping down a few thousand dollars on websites, advertising and everything else a good “stable” business needs. 

You start by creating the “image” of a stable business. A few months ago, I worked on a project for a client that needed a book about local search. I create a fake plumber and added his name to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Live Local, and a half dozen yellow page and directory sites so I could take snapshots of everything. Of course, you need a phone number to verify those listings and I had to use one I could answer. Suffice it to say that in the three days before I turned all of those accounts off, I received 54 phone calls for my imaginary plumber all based on the illusion of a stable business. People see an address and a profile that appears in multiple locations and they assume you are worth trusting. 

Toss up a Google Maps location, add yourself to local directories, and put as many business references as you can up online and you will get more business – I can almost guarantee that. If someone sees “Joe’s Writing Services” and Google’s the name to find 14 listings in YellowPages, Yahoo! Local, and Citysearch among many others, they assume you’re legit…even though you wrote them all yourself. 

Quality writing doesn’t always get the job done for freelancers in these economic times, so you’ve got to think outside the box – build up your profile across the next in multiple niches and be where your potential clients will look for you.

Freelance Lifestyle business planning, freelance writing, growing business, make money online