Part 1: Questions Your LinkedIn Profile Must Answer if You’re a Freelance Writer
Want to get quality inbound leads on LinkedIn as a freelance writer? You need to have your profile answer a specific set of questions to round out your copy to attract the right, high-paying clients who fit your niches and project types. Lots of freelance writers miss the boat on structuring their LinkedIn profiles in ways that speak directly to their clients so we’re going over exactly what to answer to match up with your dream clients.
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And they're welcome in Linda. Good morning. Thank you for the thumbs up or a little bit late today. This is the best I can do. We all know how that goes. We just have some rough mornings or some other things going on. So here we are. We're going to talk about LinkedIn. We are going to talk about the questions that your LinkedIn profile needs to answer so that you can convert clients. These are the things you need to know when you're running your about section, your experience sections, and just the way that you kind of design your profile to make sure that man, your LinkedIn just looks professional, but also attracts the right leads that are right, the right people to your profile. You know, like all those InMails that you get or connect to requests or emails that people send from finding your LinkedIn profile, we want to make sure those are as targeted and as on-point for your inbound leads as possible. So we're going to go over questions. I have a whole bunch of them. And I don't know if we'll get to all of them in this one. We might have to do a part two on this, but we are going to do a little pup date because it's Friday and they're being snugly. And so we're going to do a quick pup date.
There are being cute.
Let's see if we can get them both. There's a bear.
Oh, barrier awake. Is that you were sleeping for a second. All right. Very you interested in his credo. Good job, buddy. He's awake. Good job. Do you want one? You're so far away. Good girl. There you go. All right. Everybody's getting treated us today. Okay.
Charlotte, you look very suspicious. Why did it look so suspicious? Suspicious,
Charlotte. What's happening.
She's like, I just want more. She's like, I'm just suspicious in Bose wagon. Just the white part of his tail.
All right.
Thank you, Linda. Yeah, I went to Virginia tech, so every once in a while I have to pop in my Virginia tech, my hokey gear and today just, it just felt right. It just felt right. So okay. Let's get to these questions. So while we roll into this, if you have questions that pop up while I'm going through all these LinkedIn questions, if you have questions for my questions, pop them in the chat and I will get to them at the end. So the very first question that you need to think about when you are writing your LinkedIn profile. So when you're writing your about sections are your about section, your experience sections, and then also your tagline is that you need to think about the SEO keywords that your ideal clients would use to search for a writer.
Do you find that your ideal clients might end up using your city more so than your niches? Or do you think that they might end up using your niches, like freelance prop tech writer or for that as healthcare writer? Or maybe you end up using SEO keywords? Like someone's trying to find a prop tech, white paper writer or a combination of different things. So I would think about what SEO keywords, your specific ideal client would use. You can filter these through your, about section in your experience section, but also your tagline. I find that there's a lot of freelance writers who end up kind of like half passing it on LinkedIn because they think that like, Oh, well they'll just find me by my tagline. But I don't think when you look at people's taglines the lot of times people just started, like I help marketing companies do X well, okay.
But that doesn't help someone searching for that. Right. If they're like searching for prop tech writer, which I've gotten a lot of leads off LinkedIn that were like, Oh, we saw that your thing said X, that your tagline said these words. Right. And they're like, so we reached out a lot of times when you see like connections, you may know, or different types of like those little tiny bubbles where they only give you like a few words of someone's tagline. Like if you have a tagline that says like, I help marketing companies, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't show on those little tiny connections you may know, or those little tiny side bubbles, when you're in someone's profile that says like, Hey, here's their title. You have to have something that sticks out immediately. And we have to make sure we have freelance writer in there because we need to know like who we're contacting. Right. So I found that, Hey, Getty, welcome in.
We're glad you're back. Linda says that her cats are being a pain, but they're lovable. Aren't they
All welcome Getty. So it's been a while.
Yeah. Well we're, we're glad you're back. Okay. Where was I? Oh, so when you're, when you have your, your tagline
And here, just remember that those SEO keywords matter for people's scrolling this isn't that someone visits your profile and then they get to read this super long sentence. Like I help marketing companies or like I help I help small businesses, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, the law. That means nothing. That when it says all of those words, you are using your tagline, in addition to your, about an experienced copy to also talk to the robots. Right? So in addition to the little bubbles that say your tagline, and if it's not right, if it doesn't say freelance writer or freelance content marketing writer, and then your niches are something that, that easily shows, excuse me, you're a freelance writer from the very beginning that that kind of sets you off on the wrong path, but we're also talking to the robots. So your tagline and your about an experience sections need to have those SEO key words, because it helps the robots put your profile in, right.
If someone's Googling something and they say like, for them, it's prop tech, right. Or LinkedIn profiles pop up, like people have found me that way. They're like, Oh yeah, we were looking around in your LinkedIn profile, popped up. Like they weren't even on LinkedIn. They just Googled, you know, freelance hospitality, tech writer or something like that. And it just, boom, it pops up in the Google search results because I put all those SEO keywords in my tagline, my about section and my experience sections, my experience sections need a little work, but as always, your LinkedIn profile is a living document. It always needs to be updated. So that's really important to making sure that we're talking not only to people on LinkedIn, but to the little Google spiders that crawl around and index you into the search results, that's really important. So what, what should it be then?
So your tagline needs to be something like freelance writer, then your niches, or you could do a freelance B2B writer, freelance content, marketing writer freelance. Like if you really want to just go all in, like there's some people who just best specialize in one type of content. They're just like freelance case study writer. And then they have some niches or freelance white paper writer or whatever. You can do that. I've found that, that that's like a very late game specialty. So if you're kind of starting out, I would pick your niches like health or FinTech or you know, Bitcoin or whatever travel. Yeah. You're going to put in there, but make sure you have freelance writer in there. So that's the SEO keyword part. And then you can use different tools. Like I like keyword finder to help me with that.
But I often use SEO keywords, just like I try to pick niches or types of writing or things that my clients would struggle with for, or think about or need help with certain pain points and put those in there. So the next question that you want to think about is what makes me unique as a writer. So you need to think about what sets you apart from other writers, what skills, what types of knowledge, what types of attributes over there set you apart from other writers? So when you're thinking about these things, we have to create our profile, not to say, you just need a writer, hire me. I'm just another writer. No, we want to set up our profile so that it's showing that we understand why we're different than other writers, like what skills we have that are better or different or help more helpful to our niches and clients than other writers, because we're we're still working on this one-to-one principle.
So someone comes to our LinkedIn profile and they want to know that we meet their needs. Like we connect with them on their pain points and that we know that our skills compliment the things that they need help with. So how do we do that? We need to think about, are we a good researcher? Are we really good at taking technical information and making it reader friendly? Are we really good at doing interviews? Are we really good at long form content? Or are we really good at short form content? Think about the types of skills and attributes that you need. Like, are you really good at working quickly? There's a ton of different things that we can have as skills and attributes of writers like as writers. Are you really good at bringing humor or bringing some lightness to heavy topics? Are you really good at taking your full-time experience and translating that into a bunch of different types of work or you have a bunch of experience in marketing, so you can bring that to the table in terms of creating content that helps get subscribers or helps grow their email list, which would be subscribers or helps get more likes or comments or shares.
So think about the specific skills that you have and how those compliment your client's problems. How do you help your clients problems? So you're going to take your skills and what makes you unique as a writer? Like your knowledge, the things that you're excited about, the things that you've completed, projects you've completed that can help set you apart. Because the, the trap that often happens on LinkedIn, especially with newer freelance writers, is that they just get on there. And they're like, I just, I just am a writer now, like, hire me. I'll do your writing work. Like, no, no, we're not a bargain basement, Costco, freelance writer. We're not there for people to buy us in bulk and say like, I want 10 blog posts. And like, you know, or like, I want a hundred blog posts a month. And like, I want you to charge 10 cents for that.
Cause I just need a writer. And you often get these inbound leads where people come to you and they say like, Oh no, like I could do it myself. I just needed a writer to make it sound better. Or they're like, you get into that trap where someone basically thinks, because they can write an email or because they tried to do this writing project themselves and failed. They're like, Oh, well I could do it, but I just don't have time. Or like, Oh, I could do it. But you know, I'm doing all these other things or you, you attract these people that don't understand that writing is a special skill. That's something that kind of is a hard part about being a writer is I found that now that everybody's on their phone and everybody has like, lots of people have smartphones in the world and lots of people have computers in the world, not everybody, but lots of people.
And that means that they're typing all the time. They're typing text messages or emails or comments, or they're on social media, like doing their own posts or their, they have their own little blog on the side that they're running or they're doing all these different things right there. They're typing and typing and writing all the time or they're doing annual reports or something that they have to do as part of their job. But they don't realize that making the writing really work, like maybe it actually readable and fun to read and making it fun for other people to read is a very important skill. And it's that it goes back to that phrase that I always try to tell writers. It's like, it's not that you just write it. It's the right words in the right order, giving the right message at the right time.
Okay. Remember this it's the right words in the right order, giving the right message at the right time. That's the whole part where you get these prospects that say, I just need a writer or like, Oh, I, you know, you're a writer. So it took me three hours to try to do this. But it should only take you one because you're a writer. No, no, no. That's crazy. That process that I just told you takes a while. It takes a while to put all those things together and we want to attract people who understand the value of that. They understand that not everybody can write. Yeah. I'm sure you can type on a keyboard. I'm sure you can do that, but I don't think you can write. I don't think there's that many people out there who really have the qualifications, like us writers to do stuff.
I'm sure they can create a report and I'm sure it's boring. I'm sure it's hard to read. It's like looking at sponge. Well, like gross. It's just really boring and we've all read those things, right? Someone passes you off a project and I'll get to your comments in a second. Linda, I see them popping in. So everybody we've all gotten those projects. We've all gotten people that are like, here's how I started. And you're like, Oh no, this is so bad. Like it comes in your inbox. And they're like, I worked really hard and this is just start with this. And you're like, Oh God, I have to start over. Like, you know, like burn the building down. We have to start over. And it's just that, that misjudgment essentially this, this like failure and judgment of like what they have and what it could be or what they have and what a writer would actually make.
It it's just like so far off. So what we want to do is build our copy where we're explaining our, what makes us unique in our skills as a writer, into something that attracts people that are like, I can't do what this person can do, right? It's we want to attract the people who understand the value of good content. People who understand the value of having a qualified writer in their niche who's has experience, or at least can do a better job than they can. We want to attract people who understand the value of quality content for their audience. It's not about turning and turning and turning and putting out content, right? There's a lot of places that are just like, yeah, you should create content. Now you should create videos. Now she started a podcast managed to start a video show, right? Look at all of, and get all the content out.
Right? It's not really about that. The reason that there's a lot of people who create a lot of content and it works for them is because it's actually quality content and they're creating it at a very high level with lots of qualified, lots of qualified people doing that. So we want to make sure that our LinkedIn copy tells them about the skills that make us unique, but that those skills compliment like solving their problems that they, that they identify like, Hey, do you not have time? Here's how you get it back? Or are you really struggling with converting things? Are you really struggling with getting your copy to you know, show people that your product has specific benefits and not just features like it has like 10 buttons and 75 things like actual benefits that show them at works. So we want to put those in there because man, we want to put them in our about section and our experience sections.
Because each time we add a client in our experience section, that's an opportunity for us to explain why our were unique, what skills helped that job. And then if someone scans it and they're like, Oh yeah, like they worked for this company. They're a competitor of ours and Oh, look, they did all these things and Oh, they're not working for them anymore. I want to reach out and see if they'll work for us because they already know our niche and our content. And maybe they can help us, like they help this person. And that's really important. All right, Linda, let me get to your stuff.
Okay. Let's see. Yeah.
So Linda says that she's not doing resumes anymore, so yay, Linda. But she's pivoting to health care, health, fitness, pet, healthcare, and HRS. Yeah. So when you're doing these things and you're in like a pivot area, I still think it's a good idea to change your tagline to something more aspirational. So that way you can already start. I have a little friend here. I'm going to give her a little treat. Here you go. That way you can already start attracting those leads to you. So that means that you can end up getting people. Here you go.
That
Means you can end up getting people who are in those niches to already start contacting you while you're still making the change. And it also helps you get indexing points, right? So we're already getting the Google people to start picking us up because that takes awhile. Like that's why SEO and other things they take like months, right? Or sometimes years, if you really want to be solidified as the top person, basically forever. You know, the SEO strategy has to take a while for like you to build up buzzer on that. So for, if you're in the middle of a pivot, I still recommend changing your tagline and stuff, so it can start getting indexed in there. So,
So yeah,
I think this is a good thing, Getty. So he says, I don't really have any deep history as a freelance content writer, but I otherwise have seasoned knowledge and experience in my niche areas. I'm a published author in academia, but it's not ideal. So here's the thing. Even if you don't have a ton of experience as a freelance content writer or a freelance content marketing writer or whatever thing you want to put in there, if you have knowledge and experience in your niche areas, play that up. We don't have to necessarily slant our stuff to be like, I have a freelance writer with like 10 years of experience in these niches, you can say, you're, you can say like I'm a freelance writer. And I spent X amount of time in academia, in these niches doing all of these things. And all of those things should be your skills and attributes.
And what makes you unique, like researching these things or learning about this technology or whatever. So the whole point here is that we want to make sure that we are don't sit on him, that we are slanting ourselves in the right direction. We don't necessarily need to always focus on the freelance writer part. That is an important part. But when you're first starting out, you want to make sure that you're emphasizing the the parts that make sense for your clients. Maybe that, you know, that's your academic experience. Maybe that you've got a published work that is about these niches, but those like that's a skill and experience, right? That you wrote a book and you know, a lot about this topic. So we want to play that up. Want to play up the knowledge about the topics, the niches, like that's a very easy way to go in there and say like, I know how hard it is to do X because when I was writing my book, why I learned ABC and these things can all tie into your client pain problems, you could explain them that way.
But honestly, it's just the, the interesting thing about LinkedIn is this is going to be marketing copy, right? This is marketing copy. So we choose the slant and the slant changes over time. Remember our LinkedIn profiles are living documents. They live forever. We change them all the time and like telling you right now that mine needs an update. It always needs it update. Even if I go in there right now and give it an update in like a month, I don't need an update. So this kind of stuff, what your slant is now and how you do that now is going to be different than how you do it. Once you get a few clients and you understand their needs better, and you have a few calls and your potential clients say the same thing on every single call, we need help with X. We are trying to do, Y our goals are Z, right? These kinds of things you build over time, but where you are now, you have to use what you have now to just get some people in the pipeline. Right. All right. Let's hop to what Linda said. Linda said
Yeah, this is another thing too. So Getty, if you're good at pitching and marketing for other people, just try to, this is what I used to do. This is, this might sound silly, but yeah.
Oh, thank you, Charlotte. Why do
You have to two on a live stream? Charlotte? Why, why do you have to do this to me? And you have to sit down there and be a pain in the butt. All right. This is just our Friday live stream, everybody. All right. So Getty, if you're good at pitching and marketing for other people, this is something that I used to do. That might sound a little silly, but I used to pretend I was another person. Like if I was writing that copy for another person, you know, get a sheet of paper or make a list and say like, what, what do I know about this other person? Write all that stuff down. But the other person is you write, write these things down and pretend that you're writing the copy for someone else. That is you. Okay. So this helps us kind of get out of our own heads and stop getting like trying to make the copy all about us and trying to make it like, it becomes too close.
But if you pretend you're another person and you're writing your web copy, or you're writing your LinkedIn profile about somebody else, like, and you just happened to use the word I, or my skills that kind of separates you a little bit and allows you to do basically like marketing copy for yourself. So, okay. Yeah. So Linda says, yeah. So you can also use something like what Linda says in the chat is like, you're a seasoned freelance writer, right? So once you kind of get some years under your belt, or you have like a ton of clients, like what happens sometimes is people start their freelance writing business, and then it's like crickets and no one gets back them. And then like six months in, they have like all of a sudden, all these people get back to them. They have a bunch of clients.
So seasoned freelance writer, doesn't always mean years of experience under your belt. It could mean that in your first year of freelance writing, you ended up having 50 clients. Like you ended up just having a ton of clients for some reason, and that makes you seasoned. Right? You have a lot of experience. Now you've worked with a lot of different companies, a lot of different types of people a lot of different publications. And I think that really helps. That really helps too. It helps kind of, you know, get your frame of reference of what you can say in your profile to slant yourself as someone with experience. So, all right, our next one, we're not going to get to all of these questions today. We're already running out of time, but we're going to get to a few more. So the next question that we need to add, can you go back to your hot, a hole, just sitting here, staring at me.
I see you. I see you down there. Okay. Our next question that we're going to answer is how does my specific experience or knowledge or niche expertise help my ideal clients succeed? So in addition to our skills and attributes, like what things make us unique and what things we're really good at, how do we then take those things and help our clients reach their goals? So we kind of covered this a little bit, but how do we do that? Well, what it's, it's kind of the trend, the transition between what do we do now? We're going to, how do we actually it, so that, that comes into client research, okay. That goes down to client research. So we need to go look at what our clients are struggling with. That means reading their websites, reading their LinkedIn pages, seeing what types of content they're creating, see where their holes are, where, where are they could get better content.
That means like they're competitors or doing a lot of eBooks and they're not doing any and eBooks seem to be working really well for them. We need to look at all those things and say like, what skills do the projects that they're working on, you know, need? And then how do I kind of reach their goals? Right? So they need research and interviews and design. Maybe let's say, we'll just stick with eBooks. And let's say the ebook is going to be like, you interviewed someone at their company to create this little ebook featuring them in their quotes. And you're going to put it together in Canva, put design together. So what experience, knowledge and niche expertise helps you get that done right? While we're going to talk about that, you're really good at interviewing, you know, the questions to ask. You've written eBooks before.
And even if you haven't written any books, you can say like I've written other research content that helps me hear. So that's knowledge and experience, and then niche expertise. Let's say you have those five years in academia. And you're like, I know this topic really, really well. And then to help them reach their goals, you combine all those skills and attributes together to help them reach their goals. Plus you understand the value of the ebook. So if you explain the value of the content and why they need it, like their competitors have it, it grows their email list. It helps them make more sales. It helps them further along the know, like, and trust little landscape there. And we're going to write all these things out. So when you're thinking about how does my specific experience, knowledge and niche expertise, help my client succeed, you have to go from their goals and pain points to how you help solve those.
So their goals like different types of niches have different goals. They could be, you know, every, the very basic one is like, they're trying to make more money, right? They're trying to get their, their product in more hands to help more people with things. Oh man, you guys are so active in the chat side. It's hard for me to keep up. So that's a very basic one, but sometimes they want to get more people on their email list. Sometimes they want more people to share their content. Sometimes they want a bigger presence on LinkedIn. Sometimes they're trying to get more investors. Sometimes they're trying to get attention for their brand because they want people to invest in their startup. There's a lot of different things we need to look into here. And then we need to figure out how we can do that.
Like how can we help them reach those goals? What types of content work? Why do they work? How do we know how to do them? How do we put them all together? How do we have experience to do that? And we can explain that in our, about an experience section. So we're thinking about this question specifically that how does my specific experience, knowledge, niche, expertise, help my client succeed. These are for both your rubbed out and experienced section. So your about section is going to be a lot shorter than your experience section. So you'll get a little bit more of an opportunity there to, you know, expand in the experience section. But the about section, we want to pick the highlights. So pick the things that you think have been most important, most useful, the biggest pain points for your clients and put those into your about section.
Hello.
I've been, I mean, stock today. Hold on. Can you go back to your habit hole
The back of your hand? The whole, no. And you've got to go back to your Hobbit hole. You know, you
Can't hide under there. Charlotte,
Go back. Let your have a hole. There we go. We did it. Oh, she's not, she's not there. Good job, Barry. You're doing great. All right.
Okay. Any other questions? Any other questions so far? So if you found this helpful so far, give it a thumbs up. If you feel like you want to learn more about how to be a better freelance writer, make sure you hit subscribe below. They're talking about the weather. Linda says, Linda says, okay, people like my experience, but it doesn't seem to translate to possible new clients. I bet it does Linda. I bet it does. You just have to think of the slant instead of thinking about like, let yourself do like a brainstorm and think of all the possibilities. So I think this is often what happens with changing niches or changing project types or changing the flow and direction of your business is people think that they, they only have like a they're like here is this box. I live in box a, how do I get to box B?
It's not really like that. It's kind of like a finger painting. So a is on this left side of the paper and B and B is on the right side and they merged together. So you gotta think about how they merge together. They overlap for sure. And this is the part that we're talking about with marketing copy, right? This is the part that we're talking about where we are thinking of the slant of our stuff. So there's lots of times where I've taken my experience and slanted it in a certain way for different clients or different niches that I'm trying to move into. And the whole point here is that we want to, we can't give the same answer to every client because that's not how it works. Like if we did, we wouldn't be showing them how we can help their problems.
So if I, if I gave this same spiel to my travel clients, that I did my real estate clients like that wouldn't work, they're two totally different with two totally different needs and two totally different problems and goals. So we need to think about slant and you'll have to do this all the time. It's not, it's not slanting. As in, you're like lying about your experience and like over-exaggerating everything and being wild about it. We're just saying like, instead of focusing so heavily on this stuff, we need to focus heavily on this stuff. It's still stuff that we all have, like attributes and skills and what makes us unique. But that industry focuses on these things. This focuses on these things. We need to be more over here. So my guess is your experience is a lot more. It can translate to new clients a lot better than you think. And sometimes what happens is people get way too granular with it. And they're like, Oh, my experience is this very specific, like granular, only five different things. But if you get bigger about it and get a little bit more general, like not overly general into like, I just needed a writer, but if you get a little bit more general, I bet you'll see some overarching trends. You'll see some things that match up. And so some things that make sense together that you can use to get new clients.
Okay.
Any other questions? Any other questions as we hop off, we only did a few today, so we'll have to do other questions later on. We'll have to do another one of these, where we go over different questions. We need to answer in our LinkedIn profiles. Cause it's really important. It's really important that our LinkedIn profile answers these questions because a lot of writers don't do a great job on their PR on their profiles that makes you lose. A lot of clients makes you lose a lot of experience and projects and money. But having your LinkedIn profile in a state where like you can attract quality leads is really important. It's basically like an inbound machine. That'll just keep running for you as you update it. So as long as you get it in a place where it's in it's strongly addressing your clients, your niches, their pain points, how you help, why you're different than other writers. That's really good for attracting the right types of leads. And if you're still getting the wrong types of leads, my guess is you need to update your copy because it's saying things it's using phrases like quick turnaround or fast writer, or like I can write in any niche, right? Like it's using some phrases that are attracting people who aren't seeing the value in the content, or aren't seeing the change or transformation that they can get from working with you.
Do do, do do. Alright.
I have more questions that I'll get to next time. We'll do another one of these. Let's do one last puppet. Oh, you're still under there.
Get out of their shell. You have to go back to your Hobbit hole. Come on, Charlotte trolley. There you go. Okay. Go. Bye.
Good job. Now we're on camera. We did.
We did it. The job fair. Been good the whole time.
You've just been hanging out in your own little area. Good job. You guys look cute and adorable and I love it. All right. I hope this was helpful. We'll do another one with more questions. I have like five or six more questions that we need to address in our LinkedIn profiles. So we'll do that on another one, but yeah, if you have questions that didn't get answered on this, on this live, make sure to pop them below in the comments. If you feel like this was helpful, give it a thumbs up or subscribe. And I hope you guys have a great weekend and that the weather is good for here. It's going to rain. Like we're going to have a nice day today, I think. And then it's going to rain for the foreseeable future. So hope you guys have a great weekend and I will see you next Friday. Bye.
________
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