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Setting up Your For Hire Page: Do’s and Don’ts

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This is a guest post from @IvanWalsh, a blogger and online marketer with over twenty years of IT experience who has been online since 1992 which is as early as you could BE online. He has skills in all the Internet Marketing Strategies you need to take your business or blog to the next level.

Setting up Your For Hire page: Do’s and Don’ts

Image Credit: Geralt at Pixabay modified with Canva.

Do you rarely get asked to provide consultancy services?

If so, you need to examine your For Hire page. Look at your For Hire page and ask yourself:

  • What do others think of this page?
  • What do I want them to do next?

How can I improve my For Hire page so that passive browsers become active customers?

Why Set Up a For Hire Page?

Why do you need a For Hire page? Because it is one of the top three ways to earn an income from your skills and talents.

There are three ways to make money online:

  1. Products
  2. Services
  3. Advertising
If you want to provide services, such as writing designing and marketing, you need to create a sales page for your services. Click To Tweet

So, let’s look at how to set up a For Hire or Services Offered page and attract more clients.

Before we start. What goes into the For Hire page?

What prospective customers want:

You need to break it out into five sections:

  • Who you are – keep this brief, use a real name (or even a pen name) and include a photo. People like to see who they’re dealing with.
  • What you offer – list three to five services you provide. Don’t write a laundry list. Keep it focussed.
  • Customers – list customers you’ve worked with. If you’re new to this area, discuss who you’ve worked for in the past. If you’re totally new, highlight the sites you’ve guest posted for. It all helps.
  • Credentials – highlight qualifications, endorsements and other types of social proof that position you as an ‘authority’. More on authority later.
  • Contact – provide multiple ways for prospective clients to contact you. I added my telephone number recently and was surprised (read: amazed) that people started to phone instead of emailing.

These are the five areas to concentrate on. If you look at blog superstars, you’ll notice that… they DON’T do this.

Why? Because they’ve already established their authority, you know what they offer and you probably already follow them. And they’re after corporate clients. Maybe you’re not.

With that in mind, develop your For Hire page for the ‘specific’ customer profile you’re trying to attract. This is very important. Let’s look at this for a moment.

Create your For Hire page so that it matches your prospective customer’s deepest:

  • Pain points
  • Urgent needs

People come to your site because they have a problem.
How do you solve it?

TELL THEM!

They need to fix it now – how will you help them do this?

Design your For Hire page along these lines and you’ll get more inquiries.

How to Set Up a For Hire page

The next step is to create your services page. This will take a few drafts until you get it right, so take your time.

Don’t overwhelm readers with text. Write the page to be scanned. Use lots of H2 headings and bullet lists.

  • Summary – identify what you offer in twenty words. Be ultra specific. Remove waffle. Keep it tight.
  • Bio – provide a short pen portrait of who you are and link to your About Us page; include a warm, friendly photo.
  • Services – bullet points for the five services you offer. Link each service to its own dedicated services pages. This gives readers the in-depth information they’re after while keeping your primary (For Hire) services page focused.
  • Social Proof – this means that the reader can see who you’ve worked with, what qualifications you have (degrees, published papers, awards), who recommends you, what sites you’ve written for and anything else that reduces their anxiety, doubts, or concerns.

Your goal here is to reassure that reader that you’re a real person, that others trust you (your testimonials or recommendations) and that you’re an authority in your field.

Another way of looking at this?

The Purpose of your For Hire Page:

  1. Hire meEstablish yourself as a definitive authority (one reason to write a book as it gives your status almost immediately)
  2. Show who else believes this (endorsements, guest posts etc)
  3. How you provide value for money

SEO Considerations:

While we write for humans first, we also need to consider search engines.

  • Page Title – Write a short focused keyword rich title.
  • Page Description – As this will appear in the search engine results, write it as a question. For example, ‘Google Analytics?  Ever wonder what they really mean? Contact us today to… ’ This will get you more visits as it addresses the reader’s pain/needs.
  • Linking – Add links to this page from blog posts. I know this sounds obvious but most bloggers forget to link to their For Hire page. Don’t over do it, but do add links where it makes sense.

6 Mistakes to avoid:

I think you get the idea of what we need to cover. So, what happens if you’re not getting leads?

  1. Authority – have you demonstrated that you’re an expert? If not, why would someone hire you, right? How can you do this? Create very long detailed tutorials that establish you as the definitive authority on this topic. Create a suite of articles (5-7) and interlink them. Pretty soon these will become the most trafficked pages on your site. Then link from here to your For Hire page.
  2. Credentials – how do I trust you? Ask your colleagues, friends and others for recommendations. If you’re new to blogging, look for ways to generate goodwill (e.g. ghost write a set of posts, design graphics, setup Facebook pages for non-profits, etc). People will return the favor in time.
  3. Examples – link to your best work; add logos/badges of sites you’ve written for. If you don’t have any clients, then provide cheat sheets, FAQs, and presentations that demonstrate your expertise.
  4. Social Proof – If you have 300 followers on Twitter, it’s unlikely that others will see you as an expert. I know you can ‘buy’ followers, but try to avoid this. Instead spend 30 min every day building up your network and engaging with others. The fastest way to generate goodwill is to put others first (i.e. big up your friends) and ask for help later on.
  5. Contact – It’s shocking the number of bloggers that don’t include their address on their blog. I don’t mean street address but even a PO Box or telephone number. What’s the worse thing that can happen if you put your telephone number online? Now think of the best 🙂
  6. Drive Traffic – Find ways to drive traffic to these pages. Besides using onsite links, look for ways to create back links from other sites and social media networks. One trick is to ask others to ‘critique’ your For Hire page. You’d be surprised the number of comments you get if you do it right.

Conclusion

Let’s wrap up. One a scale of one to ten, how important is your For Hire page? It should be nine or ten, right?

Set aside an hour this week and review your page… through the eyes of a prospective customer. Look at other sites in your niche and see what works best. Don’t be shy about asking for help. Reach out to trusted friends and ask for their opinion.

Remember, this is the one page on your site that has to convert.

Over to you.

What’s the most important thing to put on the For Hire page? What mistakes do you see others making?

If you enjoyed this post consider following Ivan on Twitter @IvanWalsh, on Facebook and on LinkedIn. See his contact page for direct links.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR FREELANCE INCOME:

NOTE from GAIL @GrowMap: Working with someone with experience – someone who actually MAKES MONEY ALREADY and has a vast business background – are the most important attributes needed for success.

When you’re in the market for a social media marketing consultant or mentor, put Ivan on your short list.

Disclosure: Originally published 10/11/11; updated and republished 1/22/17.

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Ivan Walsh

Technical Writer
Ivan Walsh is a blogger and online marketer with over twenty-five years of IT experience who has been online since 1992 which is as early as you could BE online. He has skills in all the Internet Marketing Strategies you need to take your business or blog to the next level.
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Comments

  4. Thanks for the blog…..really interesting and helpful….you explained everything about hire page……thanks for sharing…..very knowledgeable and learning…………

    Reply

  5. Hello,

    Really like to reading your blog. Thanks for sharing such a great information. you described everything very well..really liked it.

    Reply

  6. Thank you for sharing this post. This post helpful and useful for many people who don’t know about this. In this post gave good explanation that helpful for easily understand. In this post explain some points in detail. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.

    Reply

  8. Remarkable post!

    These are great lessons and I agree with all points. I totally agreed with everything you wrote here. I really learn many of things about hire page.

    Thanks for sharing!

    Reply

  11. Hello,

    This is really informative post and I was planning to add hire page on a blog. You have shared all the important points to consider while creating hire page.

    Thanks

    Reply

  12. When creating a hire me page you let people no not just who you are but also what you can do help them and how can your service resolve their problem.

    Reply

  13. Credentials and Work samples are two important things I used to consider when hiring somebody or whenever I apply for any kind of work. As we all know, clients are after of these two no matter if you’re apply online or offline, so they could decide whether they could trust you for any of their business operations.

    Reply

  14. Good tips. In this case, we are the ones that should make the adjustments because honestly we need them way more than they need us.

    I think your tip about putting our telephone numbers on the site is really great. Not many people do it. The pros definitely outweighs the cons on this one. The worst that could happen is we get a few prank phone calls but I’d take that any day because of the better chances I get from a potential client calling me up.

    Reply

  15. This is a great post. Relatively related to my line of work. I agree on all the don’t. I have some disagreement on some dos but then they are still reasonable so I will just shut up. 🙂

    Reply

  16. Great post “IvanWalsh” . I really like this section “What prospective customers want:”. Great to find all the tips in one post

    By Devashish PSD TO HTML Developer

    Reply

    • Hi Devashish,

      I was 99% convinced this comment was going to be auto-generated and it came a hair width from being deleted as spam until I did not find any others using that specific wording in search.

      When you comment you are doing TWO things that will get your comments deleted:

      1) Adding a link in your signature. I would understand why you would want to do that in blogs that do NOT offer KeywordLuv but we do and two links to the same place with the same anchor text provide little or no additional SEO value. In blogs that offer KeywordLuv use it and do NOT add another link in the comment to the same landing page using the same anchor text.

      [If I don’t delete the comment I usually edit those out, but I left it this time as an example.]

      See How to Use KeywordLuv. It is also better if you use a first name in the name field. If you do not wish to use your own, choose a first name for each site you comment for and be consistent about it. [Write them down – save them in Tomboy Notes (free keyword searchable notepad app) or whatever you use.]

      2) A comment that looks like you had a computer program fill in the blanks. I really like this section: _________________ looks computer generated – and maybe it is and you copy and paste it in?

      No blog is more small business friendly or better understands the challenges of assisting them in getting more visibility on the Internet. Working together wisely, we can improve the discussions, build relationships and build beneficial links. See the link I put in CommentLuv in this reply and my post on How CommentLuv Grows Businesses and Blogs.

      growmap would love you to read ..CommentLuv Your Way to Business ProsperityMy Profile

      Reply

    • Good stuff for small business owners everywhere. Blogs are as powerful a marketing tool as anything I’ve encountered.

      Reply

  17. great post, i really like the mistakes to avoid section. It can really help people keep on the right track when offering their services to the world.

    Reply

  18. Hi Ivan,

    thank you for the post. yes, it is really important to have Hire Page for Freelancers in order to show some of your best work. I am not sure whether you should mention anything about the price. The price may give different opinions. If the user perceives the price as too low or too high, then that would be an issue.

    Reply

  19. Great guide. Takes time to set all these in motion, but the benefits can’t be denied.
    Truth is people don’t put enough work in their hire page, they take things for granted.

    Reply

  21. Wow! This is a great and timely resource I’ve found on the Internet. My blog is only earning from advertising. I’m a licensed professional but have not yet started to create my for-hire page. Now I just got a great idea. A photo, address and contact number is really important to the page to show that you are trustworthy and reliable. I also prefer to put testimonials from people aside from certifications.
    Vic would love you to read ..How to Innovate and Revolutionize Your BusinessMy Profile

    Reply

  22. These are some very useful tips. I’ve been thinking about getting some freelance work as a web developer but wasn’t sure how to advertise my services since most of my work was private in-house projects that I can’t publicly share but this really helped me figure out what to do.

    Reply

  23. I think it is really important for any service provider to have their contact info easy to find. I personally get frustrated if I can’t find the contact info right away and have to search for it. There are probably other providers out there offering the same service so it is easy to go somewhere else.

    Reply

  24. Well, it is great and I feel that you really have experience in the sphere. Your tips and explanations are really excellent and they promise great success if we follow all of them. Thank you very much!

    Reply

  25. These are great tips Ivan especially on being direct to the point. I realized that customers need answers quick and I need to provide a content that would tell them right away what my services are all about.

    Reply

  28. Great tips! I’d like to say, keep it short and interesting so that people want to read it and “get it”. Add examples where necessary that make them remember you so you will stand out from the rest. If you’re an seo expert it’s always easy to prove what you’ve done before by providing potential customers with some examples of search engine rankings.

    Reply

  29. Great tips, most people build a blog in the hopes that they’ll get more clients for their small business, so this is definitely a must read.

    Reply

  30. These are some really useful tips, especially for beginners. Now I’m trying to review my page in light of your tips. Hope it will help me optimizing my page.

    Reply

  32. Hi Beth,

    I use CommentLuv community to refer either to all blogs using CommentLuv OR a specific community = all the people who interact in each other’s blogs. There are regulars who comment in the same blogs and they become a subset of the greater CommentLuv community.

    For CommentLuv to really work well for you the best thing to do is seek out other blogs related to each of yours to comment in and also comment in blogs like this one that attract bloggers from all niches.

    Bloggers need to create two kinds of communities within CommentLuv:

    1) Communities of blogs in the same niche. For example, if you have a golf blog you should spend most of your time in other golf related blogs.

    2) Communities of blogs in the same geographic area. See Blogging Collaborations and Best Practices for details.
    growmap would love you to read ..Blogging Ethics: Time to ChooseMy Profile

    Reply

  33. I think another piece of information that could be useful to include is the price or something about price terms in general. I know most people want the customer to make contact first but I think the price can often help.

    For example, I was shopping for SEO services today and I got in touch with those that were transparent about their prices from the start. Those that make me jump through hoops beforehand quickly force me to move on. I want to know what I’m getting straight up to save time.

    Another thing that made me jump off a few sites were the lengthy questionnaires just to get in touch e.g. company name, a mandatory contact number field, etc. Keep it simple.

    I guess split testing is something that would help determine what’s truly useful too
    Sandip would love you to read ..Best Cash Back Credit CardsMy Profile

    Reply

    • Hi Reamona,

      Welcome to GrowMap. I hope you won’t mind a few tips on commenting in blogs:

      • Every comment should include wording that makes it VERY obvious that you did indeed read the post. Your comment is so generic that almost every other blogger would have just deleted it. Any comment that would fit in any blog post will usually be deleted as spam.
      • Pay attention to whether a blog uses KeywordLuv or the new CommentLuv Premium keywords feature (as this blog does) and use that when offered. See How to Use KeywordLuv for details.

      There is a fine line between commenting and spamming and no one really knows where it is; however, what I wrote in my post about How to Use CommentLuv can be beneficial to bloggers, commenters and businesses seeking to raise their visibility online.

      There is additional information in the post I’ve put in CommentLuv in this reply that explains why supporting small businesses is the solution to economic decline.

      growmap would love you to read ..CommentLuv Your Way to Business ProsperityMy Profile

      Reply

    • Hi Ivan,

      I’m always happy to publish quality content from someone who has decades of experience. If you’d like me to change the anchor text on this post let me know.

      Any chance we could convert you to CommentLuv and make you part of our dofollow CommentLuv community? If you’d like to discuss that meet me in Skype.
      growmap would love you to read ..CommentLuv Your Way to Business ProsperityMy Profile

      Reply

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