Copywriting

Forum posting. A 10 minute investment in your marketing.

You'd love your site to be on the first page of Google for your key searches.

But it isn't going to get there all by itself.

If you're big enough your best bet now, with SEO being both time consuming and complicated, is to hire in an SEO company.

If you're not quite in that league yet, though, but would like to do some things to help yourself, you'll be amazed by how much good you can do by investing the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee every day into a little homegrown SEO.

Here's one to start you off. Find 2 or 3 forums that deal with the business sector you're in.

Sign up.

Set up your signature (the bit that will appear automatically each time you post) to include the URL of your site.

Then go to one or other forum each day and post. Either add a reply to something someone else has posted, or post on a completely new but relevant subject. The only thing you should avoid doing, as it just tends to irritate other members of the forum, is overtly 'selling' your products or services.

The point is that each time you post, you will generate a new backlink to your website.

(A backlink is a link from another site to your site.)

Google's web crawlers love them: the more you have, the more 'important' Google deems you to be.

The more important Google deems you to be, the higher you go up the search results.

Free. Easy. Effective.

Why we work freelance

My neighbours leave for work at 8.30am.

At 8.49 this morning, having worked late last night, I was heading for the shower when I glanced out of the window.

There, in their garden, was a grey heron.

A beautiful, slender creature, 3 feet in height, helping himself to a carp out of the little pond in their garden.

I grabbed a camera and photographed him as he stood over his prize, flip-flapping for its life on their back lawn.

Then he picked it up and shook it.

And then he thrust his razorbill beak upwards, extending neck and head to the morning sky, and swallowed the carp whole, standing quite still as his throat expanded to allow its doubtless still wriggling form to sink to its final resting place in the juices of his stomach.

The point of the story?

Stay home and work freelance. You'll never know what happens in your back yard while you're sitting in that traffic jam.