Like it or not, no matter what business you’re in, marketing is going to be a part of it.  The problem is that there are so many different types of marketing out there that it’s impossible for anyone to do all of them, let alone do them well.  Depending on your business, your marketing approach will decide how effective you are at finding new clients (or getting them to find you).

Ask yourself these questions and it will get you started.

“Where do your potential clients spend their time?”  If they spend their time on Facebook, then that’s where you need to be.  If they are reading Vanity Fair Magazine, then that’s where you need to be.  If your market is local and these clients spend their time in specific places, then that’s where you need to be.  Your marketing needs to be where the people you are marketing to are.  Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and money.

“What do my potential clients want to hear?”  Note that the question isn’t “what do you THINK they want to hear,” but rather it’s “what do they want to hear?”  That’s important because a lot of freelancers go about their marketing thinking in terms of a freelancer wanting to get a client.  You need to aim your marketing at your client, so it needs to appeal to them, not appeal to you appealing to them.

“What marketing am I doing now that is working well?”  You’ve likely done some kind of marketing up to this point and some of it has probably paid off.  What was it?  Why did it pay off?  Can you repeat it?  Once you find what works, stick with it.  Feel free to explore new things, but do that exploration after you’ve maintained the fundamentals that are proven to be working.

In fact, that last one is the most commonly overlooked aspect of freelancer marketing.  Once you’ve found a way to find some freelance clients, stick with that plan and keep it working for you.

To make money freelance writing, you’ll first need to be sure you have the skills to prosper.  Can you write coherently, edit yourself well, and produce quality, ready-to-print material?  If not, you should spend the time now, before your professional reputation is at stake, perfecting these skills.  It takes time, effort, and know-how to be a good writer.

Next, you should begin looking for work.  Often, in the beginning, you’ll have to “pay your dues” with low-paying jobs that require a lot of work for little financial reward.  This is the world of freelancing, no matter what your profession, and is required in order to build both a reputation and a portfolio to increase your appeal to prospective employers.

Finding jobs can take place locally, nationally, or internationally.  Usually a combination of all three.  Locally, you likely have newspapers and other publications that are always looking for more input from quality talent.  These are often the foot-in-the-door jobs for freelance writing and journalism.  Gather up your best work so far and just walk in the door to talk to them.  Smaller papers usually have a small staff and the editor is often readily available.

Nationally, look for work on national directories and website freelancing pages to find work.  This goes for international work as well.  To make money freelance writing, you’ll need to know what is people are asking for before you can bid, so be sure you know exactly what it is they’re after before you bid on a job.

As your reputation grows, so will your income.  It’s not easy to make money freelance writing, but it is very rewarding and, with time, freelance writing can really pay off.

This World War II collection includes tons of photos taken during WWII.  These photos are priceless.  What a great way to see what our soldiers did during this war.

Footnote World War II Collection

In addition to this awesome WWII photo gallery, Footnote has collected over 8.8 million pages that they title “Hero Pages.”  Each of these pages describes a soldier and shows what they did during the war using a really cool interactive timeline.

You can also create your own Hero Page of someone you know who served in World War II.  You can easily upload your own photos, create a timeline and a biography for your hero.

This is truly an awesome way to preserve this history.  I think that it is going to be a great tool for teachers and students.  So go check out the Footnote World War II Collection.

The TDC Submission tool can really save you a lot of time.  If you have ever done this manually for your blog, you know how long this can take.  But, the Thirty Day Challenge RSS Submission tool will do it automatically for you.  This should save you a lot of time.

So, how can submitting your blog to RSS feed directories help you promote your blog?  Each of these directories will register a link to your latest blog posts.  This will help you to get your new articles indexed by Google quickly.  The more links you have on the Internet the faster Google will find one and follow it to your site to index your article.  Additionally, if you have a catchy title and a good opening paragraph, people will see you article on the directory and come to your site directly.

The first thing that the gurus complain about is the number of people you have to compete with.  This is very true.  There are currently over 12 million competing pages indexed by google for “make money online.”

The second biggest complaint is that the market is not that big.  Well, this is half true.  The market is pretty big.  According to Wordtracker, 953 searches are done a day for “make money online”.  953 searches a day is nothing to shake a stick at.

The third complaint is that those who are competing in this niche are all really good at SEO.  This too is true.  If you want to rank for “make money online” you will need to compete with a lot of great Internet marketers who know a lot about search engine optimization.

But, does the make money online niche suck?

If making money online is a terrible niche, why do so many Internet marketers try to rank for the “make money online” keyword?

Hungry buyers is the answer!!

While the market is not huge, people who are looking to make money online are hungry buyers.  They are the best type of traffic that you want to your site.  They are desperate to learn how to make money online.  And, they are willing to pay a lot to learn how to do it.

That is the secret that the make money online gurus are not telling you about.  While it is a difficult niche to compete in, the make money online niche is great.  So if you want to make money online, find a micro niche within the make money online market and you might be able to tap into a less competitive market and still make lots of money.

Clicking the link above will get you 250 free online business cards.  Think about this, if only half of those people visit your blog that is 125 new visitors to your blog.  This is an excellent, but overlooked way to do blog promotion.

Why don’t people focus more on offline blog promotion?  I believe that the biggest thing that keeps people from promoting their blogs to friends, family and acquaintances is shyness.  Bloggers are more comfortable promoting themselves in the secluded online world.  There is a distance that you can maintain in the online world that is non-threatening.  Bloggers are embarrassed to tell others that they have a blog.  You need to get over that right now.

Don’t miss this opportunity to get your 250 free online business cards.  Start marketing your blog offline today.

After installing this plugin, you can easily add Flickr photos to you blog posts.  This plugin allows you to search for Flickr photos right from you WordPress Post Writing dashboard.  It is so simple.  Watch this, I am going to search for photos of American Idol contestants

Photo of American Idol Season 7 Contestants

photo credit: Project M·A·R·C

Or, photos of Kellie Pickler

photo credit: minds-eye

photo credit: caswell_tom

This plugin really makes it easy to put photos into your WordPress articles.  I only wish that you could crop them and target your specific Flickr albums.

While I know that taking a few weeks of holiday is not good for a blog, it was necessary in this case. I needed to determine where I wanted to take Newest on the Net. Sometimes every blogger needs to ask themselves, what is this blog’s purpose?

Don’t get me wrong, this blogs focus is not changing dramatically. No, I think that these areas have always been the focus here.

• Blogging
• Internet Marketing
• Social Media
• Internet and Web Application News

Ok, so what has changed? Well, with respect to blogging, I am going to try to maintain my focus on helping beginner bloggers. Now for us intermediate bloggers, don’t panic, I will still talk about more advanced topics, but I really feel that my bread and butter is with new bloggers.

For those of you who like to hear about how the Internet is changing, Newest on the Net is not really changing very much. I will continue to provide news and commentary about cool new Internet sites and web applications.  I really like this part of Newest on the Net.  Do you?

Hey Fred, what about social media?  I will still provide lots of information about social media.  The focus here will be how can bloggers use social media to promote their blogs.

This leads me to Internet marketing.  I do not want to fool you into thinking that I am a make money online guru.  So let’s just state this right up front.  I AM NOT VERY GOOD AT MAKING MONEY ONLINE.  However, I have been focusing a lot of my free time on it.  I have been focusing on niche blogging, squidoo, BANS and affiliate marketing.  I am definitely going to be sharing more of my journeys in these areas.  I hope that you will like my tales.  I am also getting quite good at creating squidoo lenses that make money too.

S, I am sorry about long holiday that I took here.  But, as I said, it was very much needed and now I am back in the saddle.