How to Become Freelance Digital Marketer & Find Projects

Learn how to become a freelance digital marketer. This blog post covers everything you must know to get started in freelance marketing—freelance skills, potential earnings, pros and cons, and the steps to pursue this amazing, digital nomad-friendly career. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it might be right for you.

Considering this field’s work flexibility and career opportunities, many aspirants and freelancers are exploring digital marketing career options. Considering the future, most professionals are now going for freelancing jobs as digital marketers.

Freelance marketers are responsible for meeting the marketing goals of businesses and brands that want to reach most of the Internet’s growing population. They help customers develop, execute, and track marketing campaigns to promote products and services.

However, starting freelancing in digital marketing doesn’t demand heavy investment, there are still some steps to follow to build an audience and brand connections.

Hence, if you are looking for a change of pace or a more flexible career option, here’s all you need to know about how to become a freelance digital marketer.

In this article, we’ll explore every step and provide insight into what freelance digital marketing is, typical earnings, helpful tech to use, and how to get started.

Table of Contents

What is a Freelance Digital Marketer?

A freelance digital marketer is a professional with different skills from content and copywriting to social media, SEO, building websites, ad creation, strategy building, and design.

Freelance digital marketers engage in online communities, join conversations on LinkedIn, and share quality content on Facebook. They try to do anything they can to ensure their customers reach their goals (sales, meetings, sales calls, generating leads).

Now, you might be surprised when I tell you that it can be anyone from anywhere.

It can be a 20-year-old at the start of his career or a 40-year-old in technical engineering. Freelancing in itself is a business that anyone can adopt at any point in their life and career, and it matters how and where you do it, not your past, school, companies, or jobs.

The demand for freelance digital marketing experts is on the rise as companies need reliable and proficient marketers to help them reach large audiences and attract the audience. Freelancers are their bosses and make their own office rules, and decide their working hours.

After gaining experience as a freelancer, you can utilize your skills and knowledge to start your business, be it a digital marketing agency or an online business. or getting a high-paying job in a leading firm.

What Does a Freelance Digital Marketer Do?

Need skills and expertise to become a freelance digital marketer?

We have shared an idea of what a day in the life of a digital marketing freelancer looks like. Take a look at the following job duties and responsibilities below that you will perform:

Social media marketing and strategies
Creating SEO-friendly and optimized content, like blogs, guest posts, podcasts, and social media content
Handle email marketing campaigns
Optimize websites for search engines
Building brand awareness and boosting its online presence
Punning PPC campaigns
Analyzing traffic, leads, and conversions using multiple analytics tools
Tracking the performance of marketing campaigns
Prepare monthly reports

To perform these tasks and run your freelance business successfully, you need to develop the following technical and soft skills.

SEO skills
Content writing & copywriting skills
Research skills
Teamwork
Time management
Communication
Negotiation
Willingness to learn

How to Become Freelance Digital Marketer?

First, set your expectations right.

Freelance digital marketers sometimes run in circles multitasking. Occasionally, it gets to situations where everything is out of control – there’s a half-written tweet, some paragraphs of a post, some pieces of design left in the trash, a customer meeting starting in 10 minutes and there’s always something to catch up on.

In freelance digital marketing, there is a lot to learn. You can become an expert in marketing by learning all types of skills or selecting something to specialize in. Plus, always keep an eye on marketing trends.

This step-by-step roadmap will get you on your way.

Roadmap to Start Freelancing in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the fastest-evolving industry, which can be intimidating for aspirants and beginners. Starting freelance in digital marketing can be challenging and hard.

You need to follow some essential steps, like acquiring skills, choosing the area of expertise, making connections, promotions, and more.

Now, let’s understand in detail how to start freelancing in digital marketing:

1. Choose Your Specialization

The digital marketing journey has several niches and processes. You may get confused if you try to provide all the services when starting your freelance career. Plus, it may affect the quality of your services and your credibility.

You don’t try to wear many hats, focus on 1 or 2 niches initially. Hence, narrow down your services and select your specialization based on your main skills and interests.

If you like writing, you can offer content creation services or if social media is your forte, go for social media marketing. As you gain more expertise, you can expand your services. Here are some specializations to offer freelancing in digital marketing:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Social media
Content creation
Email marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC)
Mobile
Affiliate marketing
Marketing Analytics
YouTube marketing

Master the choosing digital marketing field by learning theory in the beginning by reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube tutorials. Apply acquired knowledge to your website and learn multiple techniques.

2. Develop Necessary Skills

A successful and amazing freelance digital marketing career is impossible without acquiring essential practical skills and knowledge. There are many methods to develop basic skills. You can take free online YouTube videos, join local workshops, listen to podcasts, read books, or find help from a friend who already has an expert in the industry.

The next beautiful step is to develop your marketing skills. Fortunately, you have thousands of digital marketing resources online available. It’s the reality many digital marketers learn independently using tutorial videos and success in their hands.

3. Gain relevant experience

For a skill-based profession like digital marketing, you need the expertise to develop your skills and build your website. Many beginners try their freelancing career without working for any agency or company. You need to learn how the industry works and get insights into the field to become a confident and skilled professional.

Volunteering is a great option for improving your skills and gaining experience.

4. Build Your Business Website

While building your digital skills, you should also begin a website for your freelance digital marketer business.

This is a crucial step and something that many freelancers either skip or do not give the essential attention to.

Your website is the core point of your business. It’s the place to display your achievements, describe your services, and the medium for customers to contact you. This should be easy to use, optimized for SEO, and professional.

Personal or business website?

At this point, you must decide whether to make your site personal, for example, habibamirza.com, or business-oriented.

If you make it personal, it will be easy to promote in the starting since your name will be your brand, but it will not be a great fit if you decide later to turn your freelance business into a digital marketing agency.

Hence, before making a final decision, spend a few minutes brainstorming about the future. Five years from now, what do you hope to accomplish?

Consider that as your freelance digital marketing business grows, you’ll reach a point where you won’t be able to handle all the work yourself and will need to hire employees.

Plus, in the future, you might consider forming a business partnership or selling your business, and this would be easy with a business-oriented site rather than a personal brand.

5. Start a Digital Marketing Blog

Regardless of what you select, blogging is something you must do from day one before taking clients.

Start a digital marketing blog and publish posts to help your potential clients understand how you can help them with digital marketing.

With blogging, you can eliminate the need to advertise your services using paid ads and save lots of time trying to seek customers in job portals.

When writing posts for your blog, try to cover topics closely related to your freelance services.

The secret of using your blogs for lead generation is showing your potential clients that you understand the problems and issues they face when running digital marketing campaigns.

When you explain it in detail, they can easily trust you as a possible solution provider.

In addition, when you gain your blog traffic to a decent level, you can use the content for affiliate marketing purposes and earn money by recommending products to your readers or eventually selling your products.

6. Build Your Brand

We live in a digital world where branding is everything. Hence, if you want to do freelance digital marketing, you must build your brand and promote it across social networks and various websites. Customers usually prefer freelancers who are credible and well-known in the industry.

Therefore, even if you decide to have a business name, you need to establish a personal brand to drive traffic to your site and bring customers to your door. You need to post consistently on different networking platforms and expand your network.

Plus, you must create a website to increase your online visibility. Although, it’s not a cup of tea to get published on big websites, especially for beginners. You must invest time and be patient to get your content approved and prove your expertise. You should at least create your portfolio by working on digital marketing projects.

You can use the below following two effective ways to build your brand as a freelance:

Publish your content and write-ups on high-traffic and high-authority websites and platforms. Content must be related to your freelance services and well-researched and structured. This can lead to different benefits. which add:

When potential customers see your guest posts and articles on Google search results, it can work wonders for your reputation.

This is part of your off-page SEO, which boosts your website rankings.

Leading and reputable sites have strict policies when choosing articles for their websites. When your content makes it to their platforms, it establishes you as an industry expert.

You can use your social media to build your brand. Build your portfolio on popular websites, like LinkedIn and Twitter, and stay active on these networks to connect with other professionals and potential customers. Ensure that your profile states who you are and what you do, and keep posting interesting content on your page.

7. Expand Your Network

Customers and marketing leads rely more on referrals from trusted sources than job portals and postings. Freelancing in digital marketing is all about networking, which determines how you set your pricing. According to a recent study, around 42% of freelancers get high-paying gigs via referrals, especially word of mouth.

Use platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn to know what other digital marketing freelancers are doing. Connect with them, discuss the industry, and build the network. Here are a few tips you can try:

Attend meetups
Join communities
Build relationships with other freelancers in your industry
Take part in webinars and online discussions about marketing

8. Build a Strong Portfolio and Online Presence

One key piece of advice experts give to beginners asking how to become freelance digital marketers is building a portfolio. Irrespective of your digital marketing specialty, you would need a portfolio or website to display your skills, knowledge, and expertise. If you have an active and strong LinkedIn profile, that would suffice. It will help you promote your services as a freelancer.

A website or LinkedIn profile proves you are well-versed in your job and can handle a project professionally. You always post your work, testimonials, challenges you faced, solutions you provided, and skills used. Include a biography or ‘About Me’ section to share your academic and professional background. Mention your degrees and certificates, knowledge, experience, companies you have worked for, projects you have managed, and other relevant details.

Make sure the portfolio is precise and insightful at the same time. Show your work samples and digital marketing projects, to grab attention. Mention the place of your expertise so customers know what they can hire you for. Plus, your work samples should be appealing, which means formatting must be in place. Include your contact details and other essential links.

You can also start writing blog posts to grow your brand. Write your success stories, build informative content, and watch customers roll in.

9. Set Your Pricing

Freelance digital marketing pricing models

The firstly question clients ask is, ‘What’s your price structure?’ or ‘How much do you charge?’. So, a self-employed digital marketer must have a clearly defined pricing structure. This can be project-based, hourly, by a retainer, or a combination of any two. Many freelance digital marketer professionals opt for an hourly price model as it’s hassle-free and effective.

You can select from the below pricing model:

Per project
Per hour
Per month
Combination of more than one

It’s better to allow clients a little flexibility so they can seek your services according to their business requirements. Hence, you are beginner-level, your prices may be lower than your set standards, or you can offer certain deals or discounts when customers ask for multiple services or hire you for a large project.

10. Promote Your Services

Moving to the next step of how to become a freelance digital marketer, it’s time to promote your business and website. This is your forte, hence you need to do it right. A big part of your marketing will be via your website and LinkedIn profile. Email marketing can be useful when done effectively.

Offer quality services to your clients so you can ask for customer referrals. If you are dedicated and honest to your work, your clients will be happy to refer you to others.

Below are the two ways to help you promote your business:

Many companies seek freelance digital marketers but don’t know where to seek one. That is where the cold pitch comes into play game. It means reaching out to marketing leads and clients in your industry and pitching your services to them. As you pitch your business, research how you can help them, what skills you must boost their website rankings, and what strategies you can use to grow the business.

Working for free of cost should never be an option as it’s your job, and you deserve to be paid for the work you do. Although, sometimes, it’s the way to gain experience and establish yourself in the industry. You can do unpaid internships, submit guest blog posts, or barter your service to another freelancer.

11. Register Your Business

It would help if you made your business legal before we learned how to get a freelance digital marketing project. As your freelance company takes off and grows, get this registered. It’s a crucial step to get paid for your services.

Hence, register your business, get a tax ID, and track income and expenses before filing taxes. Plus, you should acquire business skills to handle clients efficiently and send them invoices. Ensure to use a contract for every project that states all the terms and conditions clearly, along with the payment terms.

Here are some things to do to get your company registered and get paid:

A bank account
An invoice processing system
An account with a payment provider
Legal business for tax purposes
An accountant

If you don’t have a legal entity as you accept payment from clients, you will face issues with tax authorities and get in trouble. Hence, it’s good to do things right from the beginning.

12. Choose Your Tools

Digital marketers must have the tools to perform their work efficiently. There are so many metrics to track and monitor and so much data to analyze that it is not possible without the help of dedicated tools.

Digital marketing tools cost a lot, and as a freelancer, you must keep your monthly expenses to a minimum, so you need to select your tools wisely.

For freelance online marketing professionals, I recommend the tools below:

Semrush – The best digital marketing platform. This is the only platform you’ll use for all the technical and reporting tasks you’ll have to perform.

You can use the Semrush tool to do keyword research, track your rankings, spy on your competitors, optimize your PPC and SEO campaigns, monitor the performance of your social media account, and many more.

Optinmoster – A great tool to grow your email list and increase conversions on your website and client’s websites. Optinmonster makes lead generation tasks easier and is one of the most valuable tools you’ll use daily.

MailChimp – It’s one of the reliable options to create an email list and run email marketing campaigns.

Google G-Suite – Google G-Guite is a platform for email, document management, reporting and collaboration, meeting platforms, spreadsheets, etc. It’s a cost-effective platform for freelancers.

Grammarly – The last thing you want is to send proposals with spelling & grammar mistakes. Grammarky integrates well with Google G Suite and is affordable.

Besides the paid tools, you should also learn how to use the free tools:

Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Bing Webmaster tools

13. Time to Find Clients

Once you reach this step on how to become a freelance digital marketer, you’re ready to begin offering digital marketing services to clients. You have built the necessary skills, built your processes, registered your business, and know how to use multiple tools.

Now comes the hard part: How do you get clients? Where can you seek leads, and how do you turn those leads into clients?

There are three ways you can get customers as a freelancer:

The first way is via your blog. As explained above, blogging is the most powerful way to get new clients, but if you’re starting now, it will take several months until you have good traffic on your blog. Hence, while this is a great method, it won’t work initially.

The second way is to apply for digital marketing jobs on freelance sites. I will explain below which portal to use and how to increase your chances of being considered for the job.

For beginners, the main problem is that it will be difficult for new customers to trust you without a portfolio or a few success stories to share.

The third way is to begin offering your services for free to chosen clients. This is my recommended way. I know it sounds foolish, but let me explain how it can help you boost your business.

Becoming a digital marketing freelancer is hard. Now, no matter what you have read or what expertise you have gained working as the assistant of others when you begin doing this as your ‘real job’, it’s a completely different story.

Even if you manage to secure a few paid clients from the start, there is a chance that you’ll get lost, get stressed, and unsure of what to do.

Everything in digital marketing is measured; hence, it’s not a matter of doing things correctly; it’s all about results. Clients expect you to deliver real, measurable results, and if this does not happen in a relatively short period, they will move on, and you’ll have to begin over again.

Therefore, instead of rushing to get your first payment, you can give yourself more time to adjust to the new reality by working on projects you select, refining your processes, and creating a small portfolio.

A great way to do this is to contact family, friends, relatives, or friends of friends who have a business (local or online) and offer to help them for free.

Nobody will refuse such an offer, and you’ll get a chance to work on the project without the pressure of time or the must to deliver results quickly.

This way will help you improve your process, learn from your mistakes, and create a small portfolio, making securing your first paid client much easier. This period doesn’t have to be long. You can do this for some weeks until you feel confident that you are ready to take on new challenges.

14. Organize Your Time Wisely

Now you become a freelance digital marketer, when you begin freelancing, everything will be exciting at the start, but soon enough, you’ll reach a point where you’ll be running out of time.

As you grow your portfolio, you’ll have a lot of work for your clients, more emails, to reply to, more invoices to handle, etc. If you don’t learn how to manage your time punctuality, it will become difficult and stressful.

A few tips that worked for me (and still do) are:

Spend more time on tasks that will generate money for you (billable tasks) and minimize the time spent on non-billable tasks. Do you need to be on Facebook for more than 10 minutes every day? Do you have to reply to each email you get from strangers? Do you need to follow 15 blogs per day?

Do the crucial tasks in the morning and leave administrative tasks for the afternoon. For many people, the morning is the productive time of the day. Use it to work on client tasks and leave administrative and meeting tasks for the afternoon or night.

Keep a to-do list for every client. The secret to becoming a successful freelancer is to create a pool of repeat customers. Working with an existing client is faster and more efficient than looking to seek a new one.

You must suggest new tasks and activities for their online marketing campaigns to keep clients coming back for services. One method to do this is to keep an internal to-do list for each client, recording ideas you can introduce to them once you finish a particular task.

Make time to work on your blog. Once you begin working on client projects, it’s easier to forget to work on your blog, which is a large mistake. Your blog is the most crucial asset of your freelance business and something you must work on daily.

Hence, ensure you pre-book one or two hours every day of blogging in your calendar. It’s a good investment you can make for your business, don’t forget this.

Perform tasks in many batches. It’s easy to execute tasks in batches rather than trying to do multiple tasks on the same day. A great method is to book your calendar dates for tasks. For instance, Tuesday is for client A, Wednesday is for client B, and so on.

Allocate time for more training. As mentioned above, you’re responsible for your training and development, hence ensure learn new things and follow the changes made in the digital marketing industry.

Allocate time to relax and rest. There are no formal working hours for freelancers. If you’re passionate about your business, you can work long hours without complaining (and enjoy it).

Nevertheless, you should set aside time for rest and relax. It doesn’t have to be something official (such as leave), but some hours during the day to clear your mind so that you can focus on your work and avoid job burnout.

Find The Best Freelance Digital Marketing Jobs.

Until you’ve created your blog and reputation and get to a point where clients will come to you and ask for services, one of the fastest ways to find a job as a freelancer is via portals.

There are lots of digital marketing jobs you can apply to by monitoring the job postings on these websites:

A few tips to help you during the application process:

Prepare in advance — Visit the above website and look for some job postings you think would be a great fit. Take note of their requirements and try to build a couple of templates you can use to send your application. This will save you time than trying to do this for each job application.

Submit your application fast — A typical job posting may receive fifty to sixty applications in hours. People looking for services may not go through the full list but choose the first candidate who is a great match. Hence, it’s crucial to submit your application as fast as possible.

Personalize your application — Once you have your templates ready, try to personalize every application to match the requirements of the specific job. It probably won’t be considered by employers if they realize it’s a template-based reply.

Read the requirements carefully — One core trick employers use to help them with the screening process is to ask specific questions in the job posting. Applicants who don’t respond to their questions are not considered. Hence, before submitting your application, make sure it answers all your questions and concerns.

Keep your rates low — At the starting level, you’ll have more chances of getting a project if your rates are low. Ensure that you mention in your application that your rates are negotiable. Once you begin a conversation with a client, you’ll get a chance to convince them that you’re the right person for the job and secure a good rate.

Pros & cons of becoming a freelance digital marketer

On surface evaluation, freelancing can seem like more freedom—and it is in a few ways. But from my experience, I can tell you that there are other aspects to think about first. There are also pros & cons of freelancing.

Pros

👍Freedom to select your work projects, specialty, and clients based on your independence
👍The flexible work schedule
👍Ability to scale your business and revenue as desired
👍You get all the credit for your hard work
👍Profits from the business belong to you

Cons

👎Unpredictable revenue
👎You’ll need to wear many hats and market your business
👎Work-life balance can be challenging
👎There are no health or other benefits offered by the employer

Key Takeaways

As a freelancer, you will be your boss. It’s a lucrative career option, and you can choose the projects and tasks according to your interests. It’s an amazing and exciting job that will always keep you engaged. Although, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Freelancing in digital marketing demands continue motivation and high confidence.

Build the necessary skills to offer top-notch services to your clients and achieve experience in different areas. This would require regular effort, but you will get there gradually. Take one step at a time, build a strong portfolio, keep learning, and enjoy your freedom.

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