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Creating an online business card for your freelancer business – 4 options
22.08.2014
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FREELANCER TIPS

2. 22.08.2014
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Promotion is key!
It is no secret that the first step towards building up your freelance business is to promote yourself. You have to put your name out there and the ways to do it are many and with varying success rate. Communicating with your professional network, having a social media presence and joining a freelancing community in your region are all good ways to do it.
This article, however, focuses on a more old-fashioned approach for promoting yourself – business cards. They no longer have to be printed out, carried around and given out to anyone you meet though. Having an online business card can help your potential clients to find you and all of the basic information they need at a single glance. Here are a few options for creating your digital business cards.

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1) LinkedIn, Xing and co.
First and foremost, professional business networks and their profiles function very similarly to business cards. Potential clients can see what you offer, what your previous experience is and maybe your goals or quotes which describe the way you like to do business. You might say that’s not really a business card and you would be right in a way. On the other hand, it has the exact same goal with a bit more information contained in there, which you couldn’t fit on a business card. For clients, having an access to a big database of employees is much easier to use and search through than digging for individual sites. Often times if you are not on those databases it might mean that, for a lot of clients, you’re out of the equation before they even start looking. Making a Xing or LinkedIn profile is not time-consuming and is definitely worth it.

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2) About.me
You’ve probably heard of this one as well, but if you haven’t you should check it out. About.me is a site that allows you to promote your personal brand. You can include a large image of yourself and tell a short story about your business. The site also allows you to embed links of various social networks on which you might be active, making it as simple as cake for clients to contact you. Here’s one of the recently featured About.me profiles - http://about.me/JSLouis.

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3) Zerply
Zerply is another service that allows you to create business cards online. It is not as colorful as About.me and looks a bit more clean and professional than the above described service, if that’s what you’re looking for. It does also allow for quite a bit of creativity, as it markets itself as “the best professional network for creatives”. Here’s the profile of its CEO to check out what Zerply can do: https://zerp.ly/ckarltorp.

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4) Skillpages
Another interesting service that looks from things for a different perspective is www.skillpages.com. The site aims at helping people to find others with particular skills they are looking for. The focus is all on what you can provide so the client can search for a keyword, for example “comedy writer”. Doing this, you’ll find all people, registered on the site, who have the skill to write comedy. Looking for people in your region is an option as well. The site boasts over 24 million users and really has a unique idea behind it which distinguishes it from most other online marketing services, making it a useful tool to have in mind.

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22.08.2014
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