The more I read about the economy the more relieved I feel for having my own business. Hasn’t the economic downturn affected my online writing business? Sure it has, but I’m not worried about losing my job. I just need to market more, I just need to put more relevant content on my website, and I’m already doing this and it is already showing positive results. In fact, although I won’t say it’s good that it happened, the economic downturn has been a blessing in disguise. I realized it was not possible to survive within the current format of my work. I needed to expand.
A good thing about doing business online is that if your business is low, have more traffic to your website. Does more traffic mean more business? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t; it depends on the type of traffic you are able to generate. Even if you are getting one query per week (actually, this happened 4-5 months ago), it shows there’s some business out there you can get. For instance, if 30 unique visitors per day get you one query per week, 60 unique visitors surely must get more, and so should 90 or 100 visitors per day. What about 200 visitors per day? Am I building castles in the wind? I certainly am if I’m generating random traffic for my website. I have to increase targeted traffic, not just any traffic.
My website’s conversion rate is quite good, for me, as an individual freelance content writer. Even with 30 unique visitors per day I was managing (still do sometimes) 1 query per day. Agreed, not every query turns into business, but for me, even if 2 queries turn into business every week, I was quite happy and satisfied. Of course these days I’ve managed to generate more queries because I’m regularly outsourcing my work. I’m getting more queries because I’m increasing my traffic.
In order to survive in tough economic condition, I had to rethink the way I was promoting my business, turning in the assignments, and taking care of the generic infrastructure. I was already spending good 10-12 hours on my business, and just couldn’t afford to put in more hours given my singing practice and the needs of my family. Whatever I had to do, I had to do within these hours. In order to maximize my potential I had to do more of what I was good at and do less of what I was taking longer to finish.
Ironically, the biggest hurdle on my way to increasing my business was my work. What the heck are you talking about? you must be thinking, aren’t you here to do work? Sure I am and I definitely want more work. But the problem was, I was doing work almost all the time and there was no time left for promotion, marketing, brand building and networking: all these activities are needed to not only increase your business, but also to get more decent, high-paying projects.
Although I’m a good writer, I’m also good at getting work, at convincing people to give me work. As I mentioned above, I’ve been making a decent living by just getting 30 unique visitors to my website every day. But this is not a good way of working. I’ve been active on the Internet, first as a web designer and developer and then as a content writer and copywriter for almost 9 years now and people hardly know me. I haven’t able to create even one marginally successful blog, and I started blogging when people used to manually add pages to their manually-managed blogs and hardly 200 people knew what the strange-sounding word meant. In order to increase my workflow, and change my freelance work into a proper business, I decided to change all this.
These days I’m focusing more on getting work. I’m increasing my search engine traffic, I’m adding content to my website with greater speed and regularity, I’m trying to improve the quality of content on my website and I’m becoming more socially active on the Internet by interacting on social networking websites and blogs. And the work? Fortunately, I’ve found some really good writers; in fact, some of them write better than me. I’m not outsourcing 100% work yet, but if they continue to write high-quality stuff I might soon. Getting other writers has also given me an opportunity to take on assignments I wouldn’t touch previously: lesser paying assignments from Asia, especially from India.
All this happened because I owned my work, my business and I was free to make changes my business needed first, to survive the economic downturn, and second, to grow. I’ve achieved the first thing – surviving – and now I’m focusing on the second. What are you doing to survive and thrive?