6 Website Tweaks That Will Ensure Your Content Marketing Success

Add these simple tweaks to your to-do list to turn your website into a client magnet.

By Natasha Khullar Relph

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Are you ignoring the potential of your writing website? If you are, your content marketing success is at stake.

For most freelance writers, their website acts as a showcase of their work. It’s for clients who want to see it, not a tool they actively build to become a money-making client-pulling magnet.

Yet, I can tell you from experience that no matter the meager amount of traffic you get, if you spend about an hour or two making some very simple website tweaks, you’ll find both your client list and income increasing, guaranteed.

If you have a website and would like larger numbers of clients to find you instead of spending all your time marketing, here are six simple tweaks.

You’ll be overbooked before you know it.

Tweak #1: Highlight your areas of expertise

(Time taken: 10-15 minutes)

Something you’ll hear me say repeatedly both on this website and in my book The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Content Marketing, is that you need to specialize. Content marketing success is about optimizing a niche. 

One of the easiest ways to do this is with your website.

We’ve talked about how specializing can bring you more work and enable you to do it in less time, so don’t worry about losing clients and don’t make the mistake of having your website be too generic. Make it clear what topics interest you and where you have experience. More than anything, that will help you stand out and land the top assignments in your chosen specialty.

Tweak #2: Showcase your content marketing experience

(Time taken: 5 minutes)

If you’re a journalist, go read this article in which I talk about the ethical minefields you’ll need to avoid as a journalist who moonlights as a content marketing writer.

Done? Now you have a decision to make. You’re either going to keep feeling uncomfortable with content marketing and not do it at all (which is fine) or you’re going to learn everything you can about toeing the ethical line, become comfortable with it, and then proceed without feeling the need to hide anything.

And this includes on your website.

You can’t reasonably expect to get content marketing work if you try to hide the fact that you do content marketing work. That would be silly, right? Yet, so many journalists I know try to cover up the fact, like it’s a dirty little secret. If it’s a dirty little secret, you either have mindset issues or you’re crossing ethical boundaries. Go fix that problem, then invest the five minutes it will take to update your website with mentions of your content marketing experience.

If your specialties in content marketing and journalism are polar opposites of one another and you have clearly demarcated work and clients, consider having a separate website for content marketing. That’s overkill for most writers, but it will help you streamline your clients if you find that most of your work comes through Google searches or recommendations.

Tweak #3: Tighten up your niches with keywords

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Niche down your niches! Are you a technology writer? That’s not specific enough. Tell your potential clients what kind of technology you specialize in. Finance? Is that personal finance, the stock market, or start-up capital? Maybe it’s all three. That’s great. Mention it. Be specific. Not only does niching down help potential clients understand what assignments you’ll be good at, it’ll also help optimize your website for specific keywords that clients might be searching for.

For instance, an agency client pegged me as an international development writer and left it at that. Soon after, I was hired to work on a project on agriculture in the developing world. Another editor must have added “agriculture” as my specialty because suddenly I’m getting tons of agriculture-related projects for clients that are both US-based and elsewhere.

Tweak #4: Mention the brands you’ve written for

(Time taken: 5 minutes)

Again, if you have a content marketing page (or an entirely separate website) don’t forget to mention which brands you’ve created content for, be it small-scale businesses, non-government organizations, multinational corporations or even governments. If you have a wide variety of clients in your resume, this can actually help you because it shows that you understand the content needs of both big and small businesses, and have the ability to customize based on need and not only subject.

Tweak #5: Add clips that showcase previous content marketing success

(Time taken: 10-15 minutes)

Like with everything else, this is a super easy step if you have content marketing clips. Just add them to your portfolio. I’d organize them by category, but many people organize it into a separate “content marketing” header. If you don’t have content marketing clips yet, make note of whether you’ve ever done guest blogging for a well-known website or sold anything through your own blog. You may have content marketing experience and not even know it.

Tweak #6: Optimize your website for relevant keywords

(Time taken: 15-60 minutes depending on experience)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO isn’t the sexy stuff freelancers get into writing or journalism for, but it can be the essential bit that keeps the business ticking. Like with accounting, marketing and other less pleasurable aspects of your business, SEO is increasingly the key to being found by clients in your areas of your expertise. Sure, you’ll be marketing your ass off (and in my book, I guide you through every step of how to do so effectively), but making sure your website is optimized and primed for success is a very simple and effective way to generate a lot of revenue with no additional work. Who doesn’t like that?

So, those are just some of the basic things you can do to ensure content marketing success. In The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Content Marketing, we’ll go a whole lot deeper so that your website can become a sales tool for you, bringing in the clients and work while you focus on the writing.

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