by Emily Esposito | Apr 11, 2018 | Content & Inbound Marketing
I’ve heard many times that as soon as you start getting paid for you work, you’ve officially “made it.” That once you have your first client, everything will fall into place and get easier. While both those statements are true, they don’t do anything to help encourage...
by Emily Esposito | Aug 11, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Social media, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, PPC — the list of digital marketing tactics go on and on. And on top of that never-ending list, it always seems like there are new marketing strategies popping up every month. With all the different choices,...
by Emily Esposito | Jul 22, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
After months of trial and error, your website is finally getting a couple extra thousand visitors every month. You think, I’m doing something right! Break out the champagne! Not so fast. While an increase in website traffic is definitely something to celebrate, you...
by Emily Esposito | Jul 18, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
No one wants to be a show-off. But as a freelancer, you do need to brag a little bit. One of the best ways to land a new client is to showcase your past work and success. A user story, or case study, clearly outlines what you can accomplish based on real results....
by Emily Esposito | Jul 13, 2016 | Resources
Being your own boss is one of the biggest perks of freelancing. However, that also means you have to do the not-so-glamorous work, like being your own contract manager and accountant. While you’ll spend the majority of your time in your element, you’ll inevitably be...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 22, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
You write two blog posts a week, you send out a couple tweets. Your content strategy is good to go, right? Unfortunately, too many marketers confuse blogging with content strategy. While blogging is an important part, it is just one of many tactics that revolve around...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 20, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
The big brands have it easy. They start a blog and boom: millions of people read their posts and share them with their friends. They instantly have a blog audience. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come that easy for all of us. Most of us have to build our blog audience from...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 15, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to enjoy positive ROI. Basically, if you consistently blog, you’re more likely to reap its benefits. But let’s say that’s old news to you. Let’s say you already knew that blogging is one of the best things you...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 7, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
We all remember the basics from elementary school: every story should have a beginning, middle, and end. Unfortunately, in today’s content-saturated market, that just won’t cut it. An amazing blog post needs to catch readers’ attention as they scroll through a...
by Emily Esposito | May 17, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Eighty-eight percent of B2B marketers are currently using content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute. There’s no question that we all understand the value of content marketing, but not many of us truly understand what that value is worth; what the...
by Emily Esposito | May 13, 2016 | Agencies & Brands, Leadership
There comes a time in your freelancing career when you realize that the money just isn’t worth it. The money isn’t worth putting up with a bad client. Sometimes, it’s better to just walk away. As a freelancer, it took me a long time to realize I don’t have to accept...
by Emily Esposito | May 11, 2016 | Pursuing Your Passion
When you first start out as a freelancer, you find complete joy in cutting out a commute and wearing whatever you want during the day (even PJs). However, after a couple months of wearing lounge-y clothes during the day and answering work emails at night, you may find...
by Emily Esposito | May 9, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
What do you think about writing 500-800 words every day? I’m not talking about sending 25 emails or dozens of tweets. I’m talking about cold, hard words on paper. If the idea of writing every day scares you, that’s totally normal. It’s hard to write every day! But the...
by Emily Esposito | Apr 21, 2016 | Resources
Webinars are one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience and give them high-quality, educational content. When customers see your face or even hear your voice, you go one step further in building a strong relationship. While webinars require less time...
by Emily Esposito | Apr 5, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
How many times have you inadvertently allowed technology to hurt your productivity, rather than help it? Do you subconsciously check social media every hour? Are you addicted to Google Calendar and find yourself scheduling back-to-back meetings for weeks on end? Do...
by Emily Esposito | Mar 29, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
As content creators, we’ve been ingrained to focus on web traffic. We write BuzzFeed-inspired titles in the hopes of getting more clicks and constantly bombard our social media following with messaging promoting our newest piece of content, all to get more...
by Emily Esposito | Mar 22, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
With a strong social media and content strategy in place, getting visitors to a page can be simple. The tough part comes after that, when you want to subtly direct someone to perform a very specific action on that page. A landing page is all about one thing:...
by Emily Esposito | Mar 15, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
As a freelance writer, I’ve worked with more than a dozen companies. From startups to agencies to lifestyle brands, I’ve seen (almost) all of it. I’ve worked with some amazing clients, and some not-so-amazing ones. I’ve seen the right way to hire a writer and the...
by Emily Esposito | Mar 10, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Content marketing has had a great year. It was the most important digital marketing trend in 2015 and 70% of content marketers created more content last year than in 2014. You may have dabbled in content marketing with blog posts, videos, or infographics, but let’s...
by Emily Esposito | Mar 8, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
When you’re doing everything you can to generate conversions and revenue from your website, the last thing you think about is spending money to make money. If you just wait around and hope that your target demographic will stumble upon your website and magically...
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by Emily Esposito | Mar 1, 2016 | Agencies & Brands
We spend so much of our professional lives fearing that we’ll get fired from our jobs that when the tables turn, we have no idea what to do or say. Becoming a freelancer, consultant, or owning your agency means that you have the power and flexibility to take on...
by Emily Esposito | Feb 25, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
You don’t need to forgo a night’s worth of sleep to create quality content. Nor do you need extra caffeine or superpowers. The secret to creating a ton of quality content in a short amount of time is to repurpose existing, successful content. This saves...
by Emily Esposito | Feb 23, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Twitter makes our lives easy. We know that our posts have to be 140 characters or less, and if we include a picture and a hashtag or two, we should be good. Effective long-form content is ~2,416 words. Daunting as it seems, it is achievable. Click To Tweet If only...
by Emily Esposito | Jan 27, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
There are the best and worst ways to do everything. There’s the best way to write subject lines, there are the worst ways to use Facebook, and there’s the best way to design a homepage. But what are the best and worst ways to generate leads? It’s easy to invest...
by Emily Esposito | Jan 18, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Exercise more. Eat healthier. Take control of your finances. A New Year always signals the onslaught of personal resolutions (some kept, some quickly forgotten), but have you made the time to come up with some professional New Year’s resolutions? The beginning of the...
by Emily Esposito | Jan 13, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
It’s easy to attribute increased web traffic or social shares to content marketing. The tricky part is connecting cold, hard sales with a blog post or e-book. It’s a common misconception that content marketing is only good for brand awareness or boosting traffic, but...
by Emily Esposito | Jan 11, 2016 | Social Selling
As soon as you start investing in a social media strategy for your business, you’ll run up against the challenge of proving its value. Stakeholders will inevitably ask you how to measure success on social media, and they’ll want to see numbers and graphs illustrating...
by Emily Esposito | Jan 6, 2016 | Content & Inbound Marketing
“Staying organized” is one of the most popular business resolutions. Whether it’s as simple as decluttering your workspace or as complex as revamping an existing process, improving organization can save you time, reduce stress, build confidence, and...
by Emily Esposito | Dec 28, 2015 | Social Selling
In the world of social selling, LinkedIn can seem like a no-brainer. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn was designed for networking professionals. It was built to facilitate the sharing of personal work details and helps users target very specific types of people....
by Emily Esposito | Dec 9, 2015 | Agencies & Brands, Content & Inbound Marketing, Social Selling
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could automate all your emails? And never have to type out another introduction email or thank you email again? Well, now you can. Sort of. Marketing automation can be intricate, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Click To Tweet With...
by Emily Esposito | Dec 2, 2015 | Agencies & Brands
We’ve all been there. Your client emails you three weeks into a project and requests a major change. This isn’t the kind of change that requires some minor copy edits or design tweaks. No. This is the kind of change the necessitates a complete redesign or a total...
by Emily Esposito | Nov 9, 2015 | Content & Inbound Marketing
With a 140-word maximum, social media sure seems like it was designed to be quick and easy. You can write a message and upload a photo to Facebook in under 30 seconds, or craft a blog post and immediately publish and promote it to your followers on LinkedIn Pulse....
by Emily Esposito | Nov 4, 2015 | Social Selling
The average person receives 85 emails per day. And we only spend 15-20 seconds reading each one. With numbers like these, sending a cold email to prospects seems frightening. How do you make sure your email doesn’t get lost in a sea of newsletters, personal...
by Emily Esposito | Oct 28, 2015 | Social Selling
If you could say anything to a potential customer, what would it be? Now, what would it be in 140 characters? The distance between a prospect and a business can be crossed with a simple “@” sign. #socialselling Click To Tweet Today, the distance between a...
by Emily Esposito | Oct 22, 2015 | Agencies & Brands
Zero commute, working in your PJs, doing your laundry during the workday — freelancing sure sounds appealing, doesn’t it? But then you think about happy hour with colleagues, learning from incredibly smart, experienced colleagues, and working with big, national...
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by Emily Esposito | Sep 3, 2015 | Leadership
How many “Do you want to grab coffee sometime” emails do you get each week? To clarify, these are not the fun, catch-up sessions over a hot cappuccino. These are the “do you want to meet for coffee so you can give me free advice about my...
by Emily Esposito | Aug 27, 2015 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is like a cat-and-mouse game between Google and content creators. Writers are always trying to meet Google’s search algorithm to make it on the first page and Google is always changing its algorithms to ensure that only the best...
by Emily Esposito | Aug 17, 2015 | Content & Inbound Marketing
Big data, native advertising, vlogging, content marketing. With new buzzwords cropping up every week, how do you know which new marketing strategy is actually worth pursuing? And which ones will just fizzle out and die, à la MySpace? While you don’t have to...
by Emily Esposito | Aug 13, 2015 | Social Selling
Who are you? And who do you want to be? This is no ordinary existential crisis. This is a 21st century question we should all ask ourselves. Who do you want to be on social media? What is your brand? What do you want to broadcast to millions of people over the...
by Emily Esposito | Aug 6, 2015 | Leadership, Social Selling
Networking is not easy stuff. You’re constantly putting yourself out there in potentially uncomfortable situations, meeting strangers for coffee or amping up your small talk game at a conference or networking event. Then, you finally break through and meet that one...
by Emily Esposito | Jul 27, 2015 | Pursuing Your Passion
What if you could get the inside scoop about your passion from someone who has years of experience? What if you could learn the challenges associated with your passion ahead of time and prepare yourself? What if you could get connected to a whole network of people in...
by Emily Esposito | Jul 23, 2015 | Pursuing Your Passion
What’s the difference between a passion and a hobby? They can seem very similar — both are what you enjoy, what you spend a lot of time doing, and what you would do even if no one paid you. But, how do you know if you are a recreational blogger or if you should...
by Emily Esposito | Jul 16, 2015 | Pursuing Your Passion
“I Quit My Six-Figure Corporate Job to Pursue My Passions.” “How I Quit My IT Job at 35 to Pursue My Passion.” “How I Quit My Job and Found Myself.” We’ve all seen the headlines. Someone making great money quits his job to follow his passion. And, lo and behold, he...
by Emily Esposito | Jul 9, 2015 | Pursuing Your Passion
You’ve already done the hard part. You’ve identified your passion. You’ve experienced that euphoric high when you’re in the zone and love what you’re doing. And, let’s be honest, as soon as you pinpoint that passion and let your mind wander to your dream job, there’s...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 25, 2015 | Social Selling
We all crave social validation. When we want to try a new restaurant, we instantly turn to Yelp and read the reviews. If a restaurant doesn’t have any reviews, we probably won’t go there. The same goes with clothes, technology, outdoor equipment and...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 18, 2015 | Social Selling
When social media became a “thing,” companies scrambled to create Facebook profiles, Twitter pages, Google+ pages, Pinterest boards, and LinkedIn company pages. Why did they do that? What was the reasoning behind a B2B company creating a Pinterest board or...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 15, 2015 | Social Selling
How well do you really know LinkedIn? Yes, you can join groups, publish on LinkedIn Pulse, and customize your profile, but that’s just scratching the surface. The majority of LinkedIn users do the bare minimum. They add their resume to their profile, upload a...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 4, 2015 | Social Selling
What’s the last group you joined? No, I’m not referring to a weekly running group or Spanish language group. I’m talking about LinkedIn Groups. As every marketing professional knows, one of the biggest challenges we face is finding “our...
by Emily Esposito | Jun 1, 2015 | Social Selling
Anyone who has written a blog post or guest article knows that writing the actual piece is only half the battle. The real challenge is getting your post in front of your target audience. Sure, you can post the article on social media and send it out in an email, but...
by Emily Esposito | May 21, 2015 | Social Selling
With more than 360 million professionals registered on LinkedIn, it can feel like you struck networking-gold. After just a couple keystrokes, you can find dozens of potential clients in a certain city, with the right title and at the right kind of company. As an...
