The more I read about the economy the more relieved I feel for having my own business. Hasn\u2019t the economic downturn affected my online writing business? Sure it has, but I\u2019m 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\u2019m already doing this and it is already showing positive results. In fact, although I won\u2019t say it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t; 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\u2019s 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\u2019m generating random traffic for my website. I have to increase targeted traffic, not just any traffic.<\/p>\n
My website\u2019s 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\u2019ve managed to generate more queries because I\u2019m regularly outsourcing my work. I\u2019m getting more queries because I\u2019m increasing my traffic.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Although I\u2019m a good writer, I\u2019m also good at getting work, at convincing people to give me work. As I mentioned above, I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
These days I\u2019m focusing more on getting work. I\u2019m increasing my search engine traffic, I\u2019m adding content to my website with greater speed and regularity, I\u2019m trying to improve the quality of content on my website and I\u2019m becoming more socially active on the Internet by interacting on social networking websites and blogs. And the work? Fortunately, I\u2019ve found some really good writers; in fact, some of them write better than me. I\u2019m 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\u2019t touch previously: lesser paying assignments from Asia, especially from India.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve achieved the first thing \u2013 surviving \u2013 and now I\u2019m focusing on the second. What are you doing to survive and thrive?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The more I read about the economy the more relieved I feel for having my own business. Hasn\u2019t the economic downturn affected my online writing business? Sure it has, but…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15],"tags":[60],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-development","category-personal-growth","tag-business-growth"],"yoast_head":"\n