During current economical times, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find and secure good clients. A “good” client is one who plays on time and presents his/her needs in a precise, and efficient manner. That’s why freelance designers need to work on their marketing a bit more to secure better clients, and this is where blogging comes into the mix.

Many designers today have the misconception that blogging doesn’t do much, but in fact, it’s almost the complete opposite to that.

1. Build Authority

The main role of blogs is somewhat different. Blogging is all about building authority and respect. It’s all about establishing yourself as a market leader in what you do, a pioneer if you will. The end result is that if you’re an authority and leader in your field, then you have the opportunity to get more clients, and charge more for your work as well.

2. Actively Market Services

Other than getting requests from simply blogging about issues within your field, you can also leverage a blog and actively promote your services on it. For example, every month you could write-up a case study featuring some recent work, and how you went about tackling the project at hand.

3. Share and Innovate

Blogs are great platforms for communication to other people in your chosen field. You can view ideas from other people’s blogs, build on them, and present them back to the public. You can forge friendships and work relations, and build up that all-important contact list.

4. Make Additional Income

If you’re lucky enough to have developed a strong, popular blog, then you have the option of offering advertising plans to anyone who may be interested. This could prove to be a very nice bonus at the end of each month depending on how much you charge for the advertisements. Remember not to go overboard with ads though, as it could prove detrimental to your traffic rates and returning visitors.

5. Announce Other Products/Services/Websites

If you own and run a popular blog, then you’ll be able to leverage it further by announcing new products/services/websites you may start-up. This gives you a better platform to generate traffic quickly and effectively on your new project instead of having to go through months of content production like you had to with your first blog to get any decent amounts of traffic.

6. Helps You Know Your Clients

If you’re a web designer, then running a blog will help you with project logic when it comes to designing for a client. When you design for your own projects, you’re directly putting yourself in the shoes of your client, and it can really prove to be a worthwhile experience. You’ll think of layout, style, and image – things which the a client would usually try to portray to you during the early stages of a web design project.

7. Develop Design Skills

If nothing else, creating a blog will help you further your design skills with some extra practice so you can experiment with what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blogs. You’ll also become more familiar with blogging CMS systems such as WordPress so you’ll also be developing your skill-set in the process.

Conclusion

Blogging has massive advantages for you and your business and is a slow and steady process. You can’t expect over-night success with your blog (you can’t even expect “over-month” success). In the end, blogging is a very good way to release pressures and stress built up during freelancing or any other work, so if you don’t want to use it for the reasons mentioned, blog to reduce your stress levels.