What Your Freelance Running a blog Portfolio Says About You: How Prospects Select Who To Rent

Does the thought of a prospect reviewing your freelance blogging portfolio make you so nervous that you get hiccups?

When you work freelance, your portfolio is one of your greatest assets. They can be hired straight away or thrown onto the pile of immediately forgotten applicants who didn’t impress.

So let’s ask the obvious question: What does your portfolio say about you?

It’s a tough question to answer for yourself, and there isn’t always someone qualified to provide a second opinion. (Your parents and friends will always tell you that your freelance blogging portfolio looks great – that’s their job!)

Only your prospects and blog editors really know what is on their mind when they look at your portfolio.

And the biggest problem is You don’t often get feedback from people who have chosen not to hire you. So you will never know why they made that decision or how you could have used your portfolio to win the dream gig that escaped.

Let’s find out what you can do to make your portfolio more impressive.

This is how you look now to your potential customers:

The blogger without a past

If you don’t have a portfolio at all, you look inexperienced and unprofessional.

Don’t expect to win a high-paying gig without proving that you can deliver what your client wants!

Here are your best choices to increase your chances of getting great blogging posts:

1. Find yourself blogging work for clients in your target markets or niches, for any pay (or even as free experiential work)
2. Set up a portfolio page on your freelance website, or use a service like LinkedIn or Contently to manage your portfolio if you don’t already have a website of your own.
3. Every time one of your posts goes online, add it to your online portfolio.
4. The next time you query an editor or answer a blogging job posting, invite them to review your portfolio and give them the URL.

The broken English blogger

Regardless of what language you want to blog in, it helps if you give your readers some meaning!

In the global economy, it’s kind of a downer to realize that while your skills may be insane compared to the people who live on your block, it’s just one more blogger in a world of millions.

Clients are in control of their business by shortlisting freelance blogging candidates.

They don’t care if you are a great listener with a friendly personality and a cute pup. They don’t care that you reached the top of your class in English in school. If they look at your portfolio and see too many grammatical errors, typos, sentence fragments, and garbled metaphors, they run into the mountains.

If you blog in English and it is not your first language, try to find a fluent English reader who can review your writing before submitting it! You need to fill your portfolio with your best work and demonstrate the same high standard of English as your blogging competitors.

Even bloggers born and raised in an English-speaking environment don’t always use the language as well as they could. If you suspect that your English language skills are failing you, have some of your writing checked by a professional and take a writing class to improve your blogging skills.

The hobby blogger

Do you use your own blog as a portfolio?

Your posts on your own blog can be great writing examples, but something is missing: You have to prove that you can work with editors and clients.

As a freelance blogger, you can be expected to come up with ideas for approval before you start writing, or your client can specify a topic and title to work with.

You work on someone else’s mandate and deadline instead of choosing your own path at your own pace. And your customer must be satisfied with the results, otherwise you lose the chance of winning repeat work.

When your prospects find that your own blog is the only place you’ve been published, it will leave them questioning your professional status. You don’t want to be the first to hire because newbies to freelancing tend to make mistakes in their first jobs.

So what do you do when you’re just starting out as a freelance blogger and haven’t posted anywhere else? Well you get some published!

If you don’t already have paying customers, get some clips by guest posting on other blogs relevant to your target markets. Guest blogging is a lot easier than you think and gives you more credibility as a freelance blogging candidate.

The freelance blogger

Yay!

Do you already have an online portfolio? Is it good looking, easy to navigate, and filled with great blog posts that clients paid you to write?

Great! Then I don’t have to tell you that you rock.

A good selection of posts from paying customers and popular blogs goes a long way. It gives your potential clients confidence in your skills and professionalism, showing them the topics you cover and the types of projects you are working on.

The only thing you might have neglected is to Customize your portfolio to suit the clients and projects you want.

If you’re bored of blogging about hair care and want to find work for gadget blogs instead, make sure your portfolio highlights your best technology blogging and hides all of the hair care products. Sounds obvious, but a lot of writers just toss every piece they’ve ever created into their portfolio, leaving potential clients to dig through the heap!

When you’re ready to develop this concept further, break your portfolio down into a selection of sub-portfolios, each targeting a specific type of project or client. Once that’s done, you can direct your leads to the portfolio page that is most likely to appeal to them.

Even for freelance bloggers, there is one more thing to consider if you think you have your portfolio ready:

Your other portfolio is the internet

Yikes Too late to delete it now!

Remember, your work samples are not limited to the collection that you have carefully curated on your own website.

Your prospects can choose to build a rough portfolio of your work simply by searching the internet for your name and other keywords.

Go straight ahead, Google yourself now. I’ll wait. What does the first page of search results look like?

If you don’t see yourself anywhere in the first few pages, even if you search for something like “Your Name Freelance Blogger”, you need to increase your web presence.

If you see your own work on the first or second page, which posts have the best rankings? These are the ones your potential customers are most likely to visit when they look you up on a search engine. Take a look at the image results during your stay – sometimes the most surprising photos come up during the image search!

There is another type of online portfolio that you may not have considered either: Your social media portfolio.

Freelance blogging clients may want to do more than just write examples when looking for a blogger with a pre-made digital audience.

Some of your prospects want to know how many social media fans and followers you have, and how much you are promoting your freelance blog posts on your own social profiles. A large and active fan base can help you get better blogging sites for higher wages!

Whether your portfolio presents you as a professional or an amateur is your job.

It is your portfolio. Take control and make it work for you.

Images: dantaylr, eyeball, jmoneyyyyyyy, bigyahu, Sophie Lizard

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