 Hello, YouTube. This is Daniel Rosal again on the 18th of March, which means, of course, a day after Patrick's Day. So given that fact, today's been a surprisingly reasonably productive day. But I've been a little bit, I took a few hours off in the afternoon, just around a couple of appointments and something I was thinking about during those appointments that I thought I would share here in a video on YouTube was inbound marketing and how I think that really dovetails really, really nicely with this whole theme of authenticity, which is something I really, really care about and something that I've been working on developing, not connect to business more as a personal thing, you know, for the past, for the past, I'd say a couple of years at this point. I've been on a general trajectory of building up my personal brand starting from pretty much zero. So I moved to Israel here six years ago in three months. So that's quite a long time. And I actually changed my name before moving to Israel a couple of years before I was born Daniel O'Carroll. I'm trying to say that right. It sounds, it almost sounds weird now to say my own name, but that was my birth name. That was my late father's name. And then I took my maternal, my mom's surname before moving to Israel. So I did some writing under my old name. I ran a student news site. I contributed articles to various websites for a number of years. So I had like decent clips. And I had something of a digital footprint of like a web presence. But when I did this name change, it basically set things back to like zero, particularly as very shortly thereafter, I made Aliana and moved to Israel. So for that reason, it's always been, I've been kind of keeping one eye on my personal brand over the last couple of years. And as a freelance writer, I just think that this is so important. And if I have one regress, it would be actually not putting enough time into inbound marketing. In other words, when I got started freelance, so I've been doing freelancing for five years, three years full-time a couple of years as a part-time site hustle, as they call it. And when I started, and I was, you know, trying to find my first clients, my first thought went to cold outbound methodologies, like, you know, your classic cold emailing. I think job posts are also considered an outbound method because, you know, you're applying, you're interrupting. And I think that's the real difference between outbound and inbound. There have been terrific courses, books, podcasts, there's no shortage of material on inbound, the inbound philosophy. But I think at its core, it's, you know, you can look at inbound by talking about inbound strategies like content marketing, social media, or you can look at inbound in terms of just purely directional. Are you going out to advertise, to interject your message into people's lives, or are you going to put out material to the internet that is going to attract people to you? And the first is the classical model of marketing, the, you know, the advertising, in other words, the paid media exposure, the nowadays, the PPC, that's all outbound marketing. And nowadays, there's so much more emphasis on inbound, not only that, but inbound generally is accepted to have a higher return on investment, which makes sense for at least one reason. And that's that it's generally a lot cheaper to do inbound. So there's no such thing as free content. And this is one, one myth for freelancers. I want to dispel the idea that inbound is free. And when you think about your work as a freelancer, your time is your money, right? So you have an hourly rate. And every time you're involved in an activity, like creating a blog post or recording a podcast, you're taking time out of your day that could be spent on other activities. So there's an opportunity cost there. Now, I'm not even talking about, for example, the webcam bought here for a couple of hundred dollars, reasonably good webcam that I'm recording this on, the headset, there's money involved in everything. When you really think about it, both from your time and from the capital expenses involved. But generally speaking, they're pretty small, particularly compared to outbound. When you're talking about, you know, the vast amount of money you can spend on media exposure. So inbound both has a high ROI and it's cost effective. Now what's worked for me. And this is when I was recording the first take of this video, I unfortunately, I kind of lost my train of thought. But what I was talking about was how what I really like about inbound and connect with is the fact that it rewards authenticity and authenticity. This is going to sound super, super cheesy. But authenticity is like the core value I've been striving towards for the past couple of years. And I mean that as like kind of personal development objective. So I think the growing up I for a long time wasn't so comfortable with my own skin. Wasn't so comfortable with sharing the stuff I'm really passionate about and believe in. And quite like hidden. And my goal is just where this is not a business. I am talking about inbound marketing for business here. But this is for me a personal goal. But I can see that the more I move towards this personal goal of being more authentic, being more open, be more transparent, like sharing stuff with people not not being like closed off basically. And that's something as I said I like struggled. I have struggled immensely with. I'm naturally a very, very private person, not necessarily a shy person. But I just have like boundaries and firm boundaries. And I don't think that's helped me actually. There are reasons for it that this would not be the time and place to go into them. But they're not helpful anymore, particularly from a professional standpoint. So inbound is a way that if you are able to share what you're really passionate about, you will be rewarded. And the mechanism is basically that you can't really fake passion. You can't really fake something. If you want to create really exceptional content, whatever type of content we're talking about, whether we're talking about blogs, like I'm recording now, or we're talking about podcasts, or we're talking about blogs, or we're talking about social media, you can fake authenticity and genuine passion. So when you approach a subject, and this is why I think it's really important to think of it strategically about your freelance business, whether that's a freelance writing business or some other kind of freelance business, when you approach it more strategically and you really firm up on what am I actually passionate about. And this is again a process I'm belatedly going through my kind of personal development has kind of come first. And now I'm just really getting the wheels are twisting for me thinking about my business. But once it's worth spending a bit of time thinking about what makes you different from other freelance writers, what makes you different from other freelance graphic designers and what are you really passionate about in the work that you do, because when you confirm up on that, you'll be able to create content to somebody who isn't passionate and isn't being authentic. They're just putting it stuff to fill up some keywords that person would not be able to create it. So something something cool I've noticed is, and this has been the last couple weeks, I've had like such, I've had a few really random things happen just from a new standpoint, a radio station contact me in Ireland, because I've written about actually I'm jumping the gun here by telling you how that happened. So radio in Ireland approached me to do a slot in my hometown talking about emerging from lockdown here in Israel, like the pandemic lockdown. Then a newspaper journalist from like the main newspaper in the country, the broadsheet newspaper called Independent, they got in touch with me and I had to go out and like record myself. Then a couple of podcasts got in touch with me here in Israel, not connected with anything to Ireland and pandemic. And then a TV station got in touch with me about recording. They wanted me so yesterday when I was in a bar here in Israel in Irish bar, they wanted me to record like video clips. So that's going to be on like this big TV show. So these were cool. Now, these are not commercial ops. I actually was will be paid a contributor's fee for the TV. It's not very big. And it's not why I did it. But it just shows you that, you know, financial stuff can come out of it. So the point of this is how did this kind of little PR, if you're looking at it from a PR value standpoint, how did this how did this come about? And the answer is that I wrote things I care about Ireland. I wrote this blog post on Medium called Ireland versus Israel. And I just kind of ran through as an Irish person living in Israel, the way I see the culture as being similar, the way I see them being different, the things I like about living in Israel, the things I dislike about living in Israel. And it was really like meedy, meedy long post 45 minute post. And they just put everything kind of like everything I had into it, like everything I really had to think had to say about Ireland and Israel, I just kind of zoom. And that has ranks, I get feedback about it, not all the time, but like, you know, regularly enough. And the beauty about inbound marketing and inbound generally is that the value of crews. So like, if you do cold contact, as a freelancer, let's let's roll this back to freelancing. If you do cold outreach, so you're doing your kind of mail merges, or you're doing your primarily mail merges by which I mean both a cold email, whether you're using a mail merge program, or you're just doing a one by one, or you're or you're doing LinkedIn pitching is another big one. So adding people on LinkedIn with a little pitch in the contact form, whatever you're doing, the value diminishes, right? So you send out your cold email, you send out your cold pitches, you may get a response, you may not get a response. But once you once you're done, you're done. Once you send out stuff, there's a chance in three to six months, someone will go back to their old emails and respond to you. But it's fair to say that what your results are after one week are going to be going to look very like what your results are after one year, you're getting a pretty good preview for the effectiveness of the campaign. Not so with inbound marketing was inbound marketing, you put up stuff on the internet. And as you grow your personal brand, as you grow your followers, like you think about medium, you write more, or you tweet more, you get more followers. And therefore, each time you're getting a larger and larger audience each time you put it out, there's people backlinking to your blog, to your social stuff. So it's an ecosystem that unlike cold contact, which basically diminishes in value over time, you have actually increasing returns over time. So that's something that is just like incredibly powerful. And I've heard stories of people who wrote one really, really effective blog post. And I'm not talking here from an SEO standpoint, as I talked about in my previous vlogs and on my professional YouTube channel. I'm not really such an SEO guy. I know how to do SEO research. I know to look up keyword volumes, but I'm more looking at stuff from a messaging perspective always from a communications perspective, from a holistic branding and marketing perspective. So that's really the, for freelancers, particularly, that's why I think Inbound is so powerful, because if you take your average medium-sized organization with maybe 500 people in a company, let's say they have a sale force of 20 people. Now let's say your average lead conversion ratio for me is about four to one. So I speak to four people, four leads. One of those becomes a client for me. Now the good thing here is that as a one-man freelancing shop, I couldn't even handle a lot of leads. Like I don't have the bandwidth for if 200 people wanted to speak to me. And I did this once. I did a cold emailing campaign at volume. I got tons and tons and tons and tons of leads. And my time was like monopolized literally for about three months. I was taking calls in the morning. I was practically taking calls when I was in the shower. It was nuts. As freelancers, we don't have, we are the sales force. We are the marketers. We are the executors. We are the project managers. We are the people fixing our IT. So therefore, when we don't have a sales force to outsource the sales work to, we have to basically be selective about our time. And that's where what I find with inbound is I was listed and this isn't an attempt to be cringe-worthy self-promotion. I was listed as a cybersecurity ghostwriter to watch for 2021 by Cyber Crime Magazine. And that's only been online for a day. And I got a query two days ago. Sorry, yesterday. Literally yesterday. Somebody asking me, oh, I saw you were, sorry, they didn't mention this, but I can't think, I can't think really how else that they would, it just seemed way too coincidental. Yesterday I got email asking from a marketing agency saying, we need cybersecurity content. We've come across you. Can you send your rates? Now, there's only a one in four chance based on my previous experience that that will become a customer. But I'm already starting, I find, typically, from a much, much better standpoint, they've come to me and that it's maybe it shouldn't be like this, but it always makes a difference in terms of the psychology of the relationship. They come to you. You're in a relative position of power. You go to people. I always feel like there's an element of kind of begging for work in the background there. So there's that. They should know, by virtue of the fact that they've come to you, they should have done basic due diligence on your website. If you've got a rates chart there for your freelancing rates, they should have looked at that. So there's a lot of pre-screening done and that's another thing in sales managing freelance sales funnels that is worth talking about. And that's the lead qualification and how to do effective lead qualification through the Bant methodology, which is what I use, assessing for budget, assessing for authority, Bant, budget, authority, needs and timing. So there's a lot of that. And there's another really, really, really, really important thing about inbound. And that is with inbound, I've had people come to me from big marketing agencies, like global marketing agencies, with like 20 offices worldwide, right? Now, for me to get that work through cold pitching would be so, so difficult. You know, an agency with like 300, 400 people worldwide locations, where do I even start? Who would I even find to pitch there? So that kind of client, which is a highly desirable client because they're big and they're established and whatnot, and they work with decent brands, that would be really, really hard for me to reach through outbound, very, very difficult. And inbound, because I wrote on my website, I am a Linux writer, I created a page and I set and going to list everything I write about. And one of the things I write about, and this is because I use Linux, is I write about Linux, I've written for Linux magazines, I've written client work for Linux, I write about Linux. So I just create a page saying Daniel Rossell is a Linux freelance writer, was experienced writing about Ubuntu and different Linux distros. And I wasn't just trying to stuff in keywords, but I was, you know, going through what I, what I write about. And that's how these people find me. They Google the Linux writer. And because I targeted a relatively small niche, there aren't a ton of writers out there who use Linux and know about Linux. I was able to rank well on that search engine result page, that SERP. So again, I'm not a SEO guy. I'm just a marketing guy that tries to use logic. And that was logical to me. If there's a shorter queue, let's get content up about, about me being a Linux writer. And when people find look for Linux writer, they'll find my website. So I'm always adding internal pages to my website based on either new things I've written about new clients I've written for something I have seen people do is put their portfolio on their on their website. Now, what you'll do there is if you put a portfolio with hundreds of your writing samples, you will add lots and lots and lots of keywords, because they're all getting indexing. So my portfolio is robot.txt disallow. I don't allow the Google bots and the search engine bots to index the directory. So those don't go into my results. Now that's what I currently do. I like to keep, I like to keep control of walkie words and text I'm adding into my site so that I can be strategic about it. And if I just dump everything in writing, that's my reason not to but others may feel differently. Anyway, so the freelancing is in-bed marketing rather, I should say is something I think is really cool because as I'm developing as a human being, becoming more authentic and more transparent and more comfortable talking about things and just what I'm passionate about, you know, just ideas for content just come out to me. And as I said, you never know in general when you're writing, when you're doing in-bed marketing, you want to be strategic, you want to come up with an editorial calendar, you want to come up with keywords to use, you don't want to just do it on the fly. But even if you do it on the fly, like I largely have been doing this, and even if you write about personal topics, you'd be surprised whatever you put out through into the internet, whether that's through medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, but especially through medium and written sources, whatever you put out, you create a funnel. And even if you write about something personal, like I wrote about Israel and Ireland, you will attract keyword traffic for Israel Ireland and the intent behind those searches may not always be purely personal. It could be a TV station, and I didn't expect, as I said, to get a contributor's fee, but that's what ended up happening. And you know, there's certainly also advantage for me as a freelance writer and journalist to have a clip of a package I sent in for a national broadcaster in Ireland, that if another TV station comes to me, I can say, yes, I've done this before, please check out this YouTube. So it's a cycle that one thing leads on to the next thing. So that's basically why I think that inbound is really, really powerful for everybody. I think it's a hugely powerful philosophy, but I think it's particularly powerful for freelancers and small businesses, because with their very, very small sales resources, they can do a lot more and they can tap into a source of lead generation that is actually increasing rather than diminishing in value as time goes on. So that's why I think inbound is really, really cool. Thank you guys for watching. Anyone who would like to get in touch, Daniel Rosa, I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn, TheInternet, Medium, various platforms, drop me a comment slash message with any thoughts you may have. Thanks for watching another video blog.