Guest writer Joe Balestrino is a Search Marketing Expert who has been helping business both large and small market their businesses online for over 7 years. Check out his blog Blog on internet marketing.

If you’re a freelancer, you know there’s a lot of competition out there. Regardless of what field you’re in, it’s imperative that you separate yourself from the crowd. Let’s face it, a Fortune 500 company isn’t going to hire just anybody. Something about you needs to grab their attention.

Let’s put aside how you typically win business for a moment. If you met someone in the street and didn’t have a business card or a pen, would they be able to find you based on your name? If you Google yourself, what would you find?

More and more employers turn to the Internet to see what they can find on potential new hires. It usually starts out with Google and then moves over to Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Why do hiring managers and HR personnel go to the net? It’s the easiest and fastest way to find information that normally won’t make a resume, which is a document that the person applying has full control over.

So how can you better brand yourself as a freelancer? Here’s what I recommend:

• Create a website. If possible, yours should be yourname.com. In many cases the domain will rank high in the search engines. Here you can showcase your resume, portfolio, case studies, testimonials and achievements.
• Build a blog. Preferably on your site. Write about your ideas, your experiences and your line of work. I’ll explain later how this content can be utilized for business purposes.
• Join social networks. Linkedin should be the first one you join. Place your resume on it and keep it current. Anyone you’ve done or do business with should be added to your profile. You can then expand your network. Sometimes it’s who you know that gets you more work or a job. Plus, people tend to look in their network to find a freelancer. You can also ask for recommendations for work you’ve done in the past.
• Build other profiles such as Twitter and Facebook and keep it professional. A common problem many people have is leaving these profiles public when they really shouldn’t. If you post pictures of a night out drinking on Facebook and your profile is public, anyone can see them.
• Try to use your real name or an understood variation for all social networking accounts. Using your real name in your profiles will help them to show up in the search engines, boosting your visibility. Most accounts can be linked to one another, furthering any one account’s reach.
• Socially bookmark the content you create on your blog. You can automatically have anything published on your blog sent to your Twitter and Facebook pages, especially if you use WordPress. You can also bookmark your content to other networks like Stumbleupon and Digg for added exposure.
• Write articles about your area of expertise. You can submit your article to free article sites like ezinearticles. Use your real name so these articles rank for your name as well on the search engines. Try adding 1 unique article per site over a few sites each and every month. The more sites you hit with unique content, the more listings you’ll have under your name.
• Get involved publicly in your area of expertise. Request some guest posts or interviews from other bloggers in your field. You’re likely to get a reciprocating opportunity, furthering your exposure to their audience. Even if you don’t, most blogger will link to any off-blog o off-site endeavors they’re involved in, thereby still introducing their traffic to you.
• Try doing a podcast or video segments, which are usually free to post and cost little in the way of equipment to create. Share your knowledge by giving tips and advice.

Doing all of these things will help ensure that when someone searches for your name, they will find an array of information. More importantly, if you’re in marketing, it will help show that you’re good at what you do. As an added bonus, everything you do can be added to your resume and portfolio, making your credentials stand out from the rest of the field. It may seem like a lot of work, but if you do a little at a time and keep at it, your reputation will grow. When I started my podcast I had less then 100 listeners the first month. By then end of year two, I was receiving 10 – 12K in downloads each month.

From the marketing perspective, a blog is not really that different from an “old-fashion” media form. Surprisingly, some people, including your typical business and marketing majors don’t know this. Sure, the medium has changed, but the same marketing principle is still valid. As marketers, we need to strike a conversation with our audience. The tools and knowledge gained from marketing classes can just as easily be adopted to be used on blogs. Below, I have compiled a list of the top 4 lessons that I believe you can take out of marketing class.

1. Market research is crucial
There are so many bloggers out there who really have no idea who is coming to their blog. They may know that all these people are interested in a common topic, but who exactly are your readers? Where are they from? How old are they? Are they male or female? What is their occupation? The list goes on and on.

It is vital that bloggers get to know who their readers are. How do you do this? Well, the easiest way is to just place a survey in a post asking various questions about their demographics and interests, and offer a prize to further encourage readers to fill out the survey. Make it short, sweet and questions optional, just in case someone feel that a certain piece of information is too personal to share.

Knowing who reads your blog will not only help you get advertisers, it will also help you write content that is better suited to your readers and help make sure that your marketing efforts are targeted towards people who are actually prepared to read your blog.

This can be done subtly as well. To see an example of this in action, simply head over to ProBlogger. Darren frequently creates polls and analyzes the results for his readers. While some of these polls aren’t about demographics and are really meant to help bloggers get information about other bloggers, Darren often asks questions like ‘How old are you?’ and more recently ‘How much social networking do you do?‘ This not only gives readers information about the ages of their fellow bloggers, it also provides Darren with valuable demographic information.

2. It is not what you know, it is who you know
In blogging, networking is everything. While you can try to do everything by yourself, writing content and marketing your blog with no help, it is much easier and more fun when you work with other bloggers in your niche. Find other blogs that talk about the same things you do, try to interact and partner with them.

Feature the content of other bloggers on your blog. This not only provide your readers with relevant information that they might be interested in, but also would sometimes encourage other bloggers to do the same to your content in a phenomenon we call ‘link karma’. (See Link Karma: How Linking to Others Can Get You Lots of Links in Return for more on ‘link karma’).

Guest posting is another great way to grow your blog, as by doing so, you can expose yourself to a whole new audience of another blog. Networking will help your blog grow quickly. When I first started out I didn’t take the time to make connections with other bloggers and while these blog grew at a fairly steady pace, the amount of traffic these blogs received absolutely skyrocketed when I start partnering with other blogs in my niche.

3. The Best Advertising is Free
There is no doubt that word of mouth marketing, or in today’s web world, viral marketing, is the best and most cost effective way to generate traffic for a blog. Write a post that others will find interesting, whether it means making a list like this one, taking an unconventional stance on an issue, or breaking some important piece of news. If your content is good, people will talk about it and it can spread virally. Use social media websites like Digg or StumbleUpon to help get the process started.

However, one must not confuse the viral marketing and word of mouth marketing as they are not the same. Fundamentally, they have different dynamics. Jennifer over at SearchEngineGuide has written a very nice article explaining this in more detail, Viral marketing is not the same as word of mouth.

4. The Importance of Public Relations
Public Relations is crucial to any marketing campaign and is very important when coming to building brand awareness and reputation for your blog. The quickest way to gain credibility is get credible sources talking about you. As Maki of Dosh Dosh puts it, ‘to influence the influencers’. While getting your blog covered in the New York Times is an arduous task, it is far easier to get your name out there through guest posting on blogs and news sources that has authority.

Many of the most popular blogs in your industry will likely accept guest posts (like this one), and the same holds true with newspapers and magazines (especially their online sections). Call or e-mail the editors and writers of some of the authority media properties in your niche and see if you can guest post on their website, magazine or newspaper. This puts your voice in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people. Press releases are also a great tool that bloggers can use. For more information on how bloggers can use press releases, read a guest post I made on JohnChow, How to use press releases to your advantage.

Do you use other principles of marketing with your blog? Let us know in the comments.

BidHire is a system build to connect small businesses with freelance professionals all over the world. This new service is much like the popular services provided by eLance and Guru, with the major exception that it is free for freelancers to use. There are no monthly service fees for listing, and no project success or commission fees. Whether you’re a part-time freelancer or a full-time consultant, connecting to the business world has never been easier.

The site allows freelancers to bid on as many projects as possible without the hassle of signup or account upgrade fees. You are protected by their escrow payment system, and you can withdraw funds the minute you are paid. Go ahead and build a profile to find Jobs for Freelancers today!

Please visit BidHire, who sponsored the post above.

If you have worked in any corporate environment, most likely you were using a Microsoft Exchange powered e-mail solution. The powerful service is used in the vast majority of the businesses today, and many of these servers are administered and maintained by the company I.T. department.

Hosted Exchange is a viable option for those individuals and freelancers that want to harness the power of an Exchange server but don’t want to pay for a full server license, buy the appropriate hardware and deal with the maintenance. Much like the web hosting industry where a company bundles many customers on a single web server, Hosted Exchange is a cost-effective option for individuals. The Exchange service provider bundles many customer mailboxes on a single Exchange server for a monthly or yearly fee.

A hosted Exchange plan typically costs between $10 and 20 USD per month. That cost typically includes a centralized e-mail server that stores email, contacts, appointments, notes, and tasks all in one place. You can have this information synchronized (via Direct Push synchronization) with multiple mobile devices, as well as your Outlook client or directly through an Outlook-esque web interface. When traveling as a freelancer, this is an especially nice feature and the increase in mobile productivity may be worth the price all by itself.

When working with on projects with external clients, you might also benefit from Sharepoint capabilities that are often bundled with hosted exchange. SharePoint combines a centralized document repository with collaboration, project tracking, and content management tools. Using SharePoint, you can easily and efficiently manage projects and enhance the flow of communication in your business.

Even today in our virtual world of telecommuting, Skype, and home offices, freelancers still have to get professional materials printed on occasion. As an independent web publisher, I have to admit that most of my working relationships are virtual, but I still find value (and contracts) in local networking and industry events. Handing out business cards and logo-laden freebies is a tried-and-true method for leaving good impressions in face-to-face situations.

Online printing services like PSPrint.com are great for saving time and money, while maintaining quality. Their digital printing methods allow you to reduce both cost and waste with small-quantity orders. Also, those methods don’t involve as many steps as other printing processes or technologies, so less time is needed in producing your prints and the turnaround time is quicker.

Sure, you can say that many digital printers are using similar (if not the same) printing technologies. But the reason I chose PSPrint specifically, is actually the same reason why many freelancers can have lasting success. It’s due to their reputation for offering excellent and attentive customer service. In a world of comparable technologies, what better differentiator for success can a company have than to truly pay close attention to their customers’ needs?

Founder of the Freelancers Union Sara Horowitz explains why the self-employed are a bigger factor in today’s economy. Check out this video from CNNMoney: