Building a Career Online

When you are freelancing, you must network. All the jobs that have come to be have been through someone I know. Just because you can get jobs thorough the friend of a friend pipeline, does not mean they come easy or quickly.

There are dozens of places you can meet other freelance writers, bloggers and/or designers. My main two are Twitter and Facebook. Both provide excellent avenues to rub elbows with people who ahve walked in your shoes. Since I am in the early stages of my career building, I lay low when it comes to self-promotion. I like to interact with people on Twitter. I choose to not follow people who do not reply. I also look at the ratio of followers to follows. This tells me how much effort the person takes in developing rapport with others.

So far, it has been working well. I have not been seeking out new friends on Twitter since early summer. Yet, my friends list is steadily growing.  I think most of my new followers come from the person seeing my username pop up in a string of updates from one of there friends who is also my friend. It’s the new form of party introduction.

I am not claiming to be a social media expert. I have only been invovled in this arena for about six months. It has gorwn on me so fast. It is bringing out my inner geek at a rapid pace. I love it.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS