This is Day 26 of 31 Days to Start a Freelancing Business (or Make Yours a Better One). If you want to catch up, click here to read Day 1.

Yesterday, I gave you ideas for websites that will allow you to publish your work for free, and possibly even get paid for them. Today, let’s focus on what you should be putting out there, to form part of your freelancing portfolio.

Begin with Keywords

Because we’re talking about your “online” portfolio, rather than the traditional physical portfolio – you know, the big, black folder with your physical samples inside it – then we have to make sure that your potential clients will find your sample works online.

To ensure this, you must begin by doing keyword research. That’s essentially finding out what your target clients are typing into Google or other search engines when they’re looking for solutions to their problems. You know, the solutions YOU provide.

You’ll find tons of tutorials on how to do keyword research on the Internet, but my favorite one is by one of my Internet marketing mentors, Lynn Terry. You’ll find her step-by-step keyword research process here. By following Lynn’s process, you can find a set of keywords within 10-20 minutes!

Use Lynn’s tutorial to come up with a list of keywords for your online content. You should have at least 10 keywords or keyword phrases. And then..

How to Use Your Keywords

If you’re blogging or writing articles for your online portfolio, then use those keywords as your blog or article topics.

Otherwise, use the keywords as your guide for what work samples you should develop. For example, if you’re a graphic designer and you discovered that the keyword phrase “green logo design” gets a lot of daily searches, then you should create a number of green logo designs for fictitious companies. You can come up with different variations to fit various types of businesses, and post these in your blog or a third-party website you found yesterday.

How to Optimize Your Content

Your keywords remain important when you publish your content. The keywords should definitely be in the title of your blog post, article or work sample. So when you upload your designs in Envato, for instance, you would label it “Green Logo Design Ideas,” or something like that.

If the site allows you to include a description, tags and keywords for your work, then those should include your target keywords as well.

You should also always use the same keywords when you link to the actual content. Let’s say you’ve uploaded your design in Envato and decide to write a blog post about it. Then, in your blog, when you link to your product page on Envato, you’ll use the phrase “green logo designs” as your anchor text, so that the sentence in your blog might look like this:

“I just created a set of green logo designs for different types of eco-friendly businesses.”

And when you reader clicks on “green logo designs,” the Envato page with your green logo designs will open up.

(Boy, if that was incoherent, please let me know by posting a comment and I’ll try to make it clearer.)

That’s it for today. These are your tasks:

• Do keyword research to find at least 10 keywords or keyword phrases to create work samples on.
• Start creating your work samples.

Tomorrow, you’ll be going outside your comfort zone to get even more exposure online. Watch out for it!

In the meantime, if you have any questions whatsoever, please post them in the comments below. Thanks!

Lexi

photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal

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