Comprehensive Guide to Digital Marketing Freelance Jobs

Introduction

If you don’t like to overwhelm your brain with continuous workplace stress under a boss, then digital marketing freelance jobs can be your best option not only for becoming your own boss but also for earning usually much higher than any digital marketing job. 

In this beginner’s guide to digital marketing freelance jobs, you’ll learn everything related to freelancing in the digital marketing industry including careers, benefits, and most importantly earning possibilities. 

Related reading: Digital Entrepreneurship

But, before we get started with freelancing, it’s essential to know that freelancing is typically an entrepreneurship, and you’ll need to develop an entrepreneurship mindset prior to starting a freelancing journey. 

If entrepreneurship sounds good to you, only then proceed to freelance. Let’s understand what freelancing actually is. 

Table of contents 

• What is freelancing in digital marketing? 
• How much do digital marketing freelancers make? 
• Pros and cons of freelancing in digital marketing 
• Benefits of digital marketing freelance jobs 
• Cons of digital marketing freelance jobs 
• Top digital marketing freelance jobs
• Social media marketer 
• Content writer 
• Search engine marketer 
• Search engine optimization specialist 
• How to become a freelance digital marketer? 
• Final words 

Quick Facts & Stats

Here are some key points about digital marketing freelance jobs in India and abroad:

1. There are currently 72 new digital marketing freelance job openings in India, with companies like Impact Guru Technology Ventures Pvt Ltd. actively hiring.
2. Naukri.com, a leading job portal in India, lists over 34,537 freelance digital marketing job openings.
3. On a global scale, Upwork, a popular freelancing platform, has 947 open remote digital marketing jobs. These jobs vary in terms of requirements, compensation, duration, and employer history.
4. As per Glassdoor’s records, the average annual salary for digital marketing in India is Rs.2,40,000.
5. There are numerous opportunities for freshers in digital marketing, with job openings across various Indian cities like Delhi, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Noida, and Hyderabad.
6. To apply for digital marketing remote jobs abroad, the suggested steps include defining your job search criteria and determining specific countries or regions you’re interested in.
7. Internationally, platforms like Indeed.com have around 5748 job postings related to international digital marketing.
8. The scope of digital marketing in India and abroad is vast. Apart from regular jobs, there are plenty of opportunities for freelancing or self-work.

These points suggest that both in India and abroad, there are ample opportunities for digital marketers looking for freelance work. The nature of digital marketing makes it a field well-suited to remote work, allowing professionals to offer their services to clients around the world.

What is Freelancing in Digital Marketing? 

Freelancing in digital marketing is nothing but selling digital marketing services to businesses or brands independently. You can sell any type of digital marketing-related services such as content writing services, graphic designing services, SEO services, ads creation and management services, and many more.  

As a freelance digital marketer, you’ll be your own boss. Digital freelancing is typically an entrepreneurship where you’re selling your expertise directly to the brands instead of being a full-time employee of an organization and the chances are you’ll earn much higher as you’re the organization yourself.  

But dozens of misconceptions are found regarding this field such as a freelancing career doesn’t have hard work, liabilities, commitments, and bla bla bla…., But in reality, freelancing careers do need these things sometimes even more compared to jobs. 

However, freelancing obviously a better career option compared to jobs in the digital marketing field, but it requires a challenging mindset with a lot of hard work, dedication, proper planning, and most importantly communication skills.     

Top 10 Platforms for digital marketing freelance jobs

Here are the top 10 platforms for digital marketing freelance jobs, according to various sources:

1. MarketerHire: This platform specializes in marketing freelancers and offers a rigorous screening process to ensure you’re matched with top talent.
   
2. Mayple: Mayple matches businesses with vetted marketing experts that suit their unique needs and goals.
   
3. GrowTal: This platform provides pre-vetted freelance marketers who have experience working with reputable brands.
   
4. Upwork: One of the largest and most popular freelance marketplaces, Upwork hosts a wide variety of job categories including digital marketing.
   
5. Fiverr: Known for its gig-based model, Fiverr is a great platform for finding quick and affordable digital marketing services.
   
6. Freelancer.com: Another popular platform, Freelancer.com allows clients to post projects that freelancers can then bid on.
   
7. PeoplePerHour: This marketplace is ideal for short-term and smaller projects, with a focus on freelance work by the hour.
   
8. Guru: Guru provides a flexible and cost-effective platform for businesses to find and hire freelance professionals.
   
9. Contently: Contently is a content marketing platform that connects businesses with high-quality freelance writers, designers, photographers, and videographers.
   
10. SEOClerks: This marketplace focuses solely on SEO services, making it a perfect platform for freelance digital marketers specializing in SEO.
    

Remember, the success of your freelance career depends not just on choosing the right platform, but also on how effectively you showcase your skills and communicate your value to potential clients.

How Much Do Digital Marketing Freelancers Make? 

Digital Marketing Freelancer Salary:

Since freelancing is a service-providing business, there’s neither a so-called fixed salary nor any limit of earning. You can earn as much as you want with your expertise level and experience. 

As of 2021, according to a recent report of PayPal, there’re around 10 million (1 crore) digital freelancers in India. The average earning of these freelancers is around INR 20 lakh per annum. And out of this 1 crore freelancers, 23%, that’s 23 lakh freelancers earn around INR 60 lakh per annum. 

Crazy right? Yes, it’s fact. I think this data is enough for you to understand the earning scopes and opportunities of digital marketing freelancing. 

But you may need to start your freelancing journey with a low price, and with advancements in your experience and expertise, gradually your earning will grow over time. 

Source: Business Today

Pros and Cons of Freelancing in Digital Marketing

As every coin has 2 sides, digital marketing freelance careers also have some pros as well as some cons. I think it’s essential to know both pros as well cons of digital marketing freelancing before making a decision so that you won’t have to experience any regrettable situation in the coming future. 

Here’re some benefits of digital marketing freelance jobs 

Benefits of digital marketing freelance jobs  

• You don’t have to bother any boss as you’re your own boss. 
• You’ll have complete control to make your decision whom to work with or to choose your clients. 
• Your tie-ups with digital marketing professionals will enhance over time. 
• You can earn as much as you can, there’s no limit. 
• You don’t need to worry about any location barriers, you can work from your home or from anywhere in the world, just you’ll need a laptop and a strong internet connection. 
• You’ll have a chance to choose your passion as a profession. 

These are some most common benefits of digital marketing freelance jobs, but not limited to. You’ll find out a lot more pros when you’ll enter the field.

Let’s have a look at some common cons of digital marketing freelance jobs. 

Cons of digital marketing freelance jobs 

• Since digital marketing freelancing is a type of business, there’s no guarantee of clients. You’ll have to find out your clients on your own. 
• There’s no guarantee of any fixed income, you may earn up to 5000 US dollars in a single month and only 100 US dollars in the next one. 
• Since the digital marketing industry is continuously evolving, you’ll have to always learn new things, you won’t survive in the market unless or until you continuously upgrade yourself. 
• The freelancing market is growing day by day and the space is becoming crowded. Therefore, you’ll have to always compete with other freelancers to stand out in the crowd. 

These are some of the cons of digital marketing freelance jobs. But the pros of digital marketing freelance jobs are huge, whereas cons are very limited and these challenges are often associated with almost all high-income career options. 

Therefore, digital marketing freelancing is obviously a great option for people who want to create an independent and highly successful career. 

Top Digital Marketing Freelance Jobs

There’re various different fields within the umbrella of the digital marketing industry you can choose from. You’ll need to learn the skills in an in-depth and practical manner to become a specialized freelancer. 

Some of the most sought-after digital marketing freelance jobs are stated below.  

Social media marketer 

Social media marketers take over the clients’ social media profiles and handle them in an organized way by posting relevant content, creating social ads campaigns, and optimizing social media performances to increase brand position as well as profit. 

Though social media managing jobs seem to be very simple and some people think social media jobs do not require many skills, in fact, they do require many necessary skills such as content creation, designing, copywriting, analytics, and many more. 

To become a well-paid social media marketer, you’ll need to enroll in a practical-based social media marketing course to learn all the necessary skills practically in an in-depth manner.    

Content writer 

Content writing is one of the most demanded jobs in the digital marketing industry nowadays. Content writers are required to write different types of content such as articles, blogs, landing pages, emails, eBooks, newsletters, white papers, case studies, and many more. 

A large number of skills are involved in content writing like language skills, internet skills, research skills, typing skills, and SEO skills (on-page) among others. Besides, for creating a successful freelance career in content writing, you’ll need additional marketing skills and management skills as well. 

To become a successful freelance content writer, you’ll need to enroll in a professional content writing course that will cover writing, marketing, and management skills altogether.  

Search engine marketer (SEM) 

Search engine marketing helps increase the visibility of businesses on the search engine results page (SERP) through paid marketing methods like PPC ads. PPC is a form of Google ads where brands pay per click for the campaign. 

PPC advertising is one of the most demanded marketing strategies for businesses especially for those trying to enhance the return of investment (ROI) by boosting sales in a short amount of time. 

You’ll need to complete the Google Ads course to become an expert in search engine marketing.

Search engine optimization (SEO) specialist 

Search engine optimization involves a set of practices to rank a website or web page on the search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing without spending money on advertising. 

SEO involves various different skills such as keyword research, topic research, on-page optimization, and many more. Business organizations hire freelance SEO experts to increase visibility as well as revenue in a cost-effective manner.

Though SEO takes a certain amount of time, but the process is very popular among businesses across all industries due to better stability and lower costs compared to paid ads. 

You’ll need to join an up-to-date SEO course that covers both in-depth fundamentals as well as recent updates to become an SEO expert in the always-evolving digital marketing field. 

These are only a few of the most sought-after freelance digital marketing jobs, but they’re a lot more options you can choose from the digital marketing industry, including – 

Web developer

• Graphic designer 
• UX designer 
• AI specialist 
• Copywriter 
• Email marketer 

How to Become a Freelance Digital Marketer? 

Till now, we have covered what digital marketing freelance jobs are, the benefits of becoming a freelance digital marketer, and different types of freelance jobs categories. 

Now, let’s have a look at the most asked question as well as the most important part “how to become a freelance digital marketer?” 

Here’s a complete step-by-step guideline for becoming a digital marketing freelancer. 

Step 1 – Evaluate your talents 

The first and foremost step for becoming a freelancer is evaluating the talents you already have. Since everyone has certain talents and capacities, you will need to find out your own capacities. 

To figure out your inner talents, you can explore your experience, expertise, educational qualifications, and your previous achievements. Pen down your talents and create a list of the fields you are really good at and comfortable to learn more necessary skills required for the fields. 

Step 2 – Choose a niche 

Digital marketing is an umbrella term and it’s a huge industry involving diverse kinds of specific facets. Therefore, as a freelance digital marketer, you will need to be very specific about what kind of services you are going to offer to your clients. It can be anything related to digital marketing such as Google Ads service, content writing service, social media management service, or more. 

But you will have to choose your niche according to your talents and capacity. The niche should be such interesting to you that you can work on your niche for hours after hours without feeling exhausted. To become a super-succeed freelancer, you will have to convert your passion into your profession. 

Step 3 – Develop your core skillsets

Once you have chosen your specific niche, you will have to learn all the necessary core skills required to offer a professional service to your clients. For instance, if you will choose SEO and want to offer SEO services to your clients, you will have to learn SEO skills by joining advanced SEO courses. 

Before you make a decision for joining a course, make sure the course is conducted by industry experts who are practically doing things on a daily basis. You can consider joining our advanced digital marketing specialized courses to learn specific skills like search engine marketing or PPC, social media marketing, and content writing from industry experts who are working in the fields practically. 

Step 4 – Create an authority on the niche 

Creating authority in your niche is the most important factor for your growth as a digital marketing freelancer. Unless or until you develop your own personal brand, clients especially those who want quality jobs don’t trust you.

Besides, developing an authority will help you stand out in the crowd of freelancing. You can set your price comfortably and earn a serious amount of money through freelancing. But it takes time and you will have to stick on the same niche for a longer period of time to make a fortune. 

Step 5 – Develop marketing skills for grabbing clients 

Since freelance jobs are like a business, the major goal is to acquire clients and sell the services. And freelancers require to do their marketing on their own. This is the major reason why most people do not choose freelancing, instead prefer jobs.  

But freelancing is obviously a better and promising career option for people who want exponential growth in their careers. As you are offering a specific category of service of the whole digital marketing field, you might feel uncomfortable with overall marketing strategies and you might need to learn some marketing skills separately to market your own service. 

But if you take a freelancing course conducted by industry experts, you will learn each and every skill you need to make a successful career in freelancing. 

Step 6 – Set your pricing 

Pricing is another major factor for a freelancing career in the digital marketing field. In the early stage, you might need to offer your services at lower costs. Once you have completed 5 to 10 projects, you can showcase your achievements in a portfolio and increase your changes gradually. 

Your authority and credibility in your niche will also play a vital role in your pricing. So, start your freelancing journey with a nominal price and develop your personal brand gradually. The more credibility you create, the better price you will get for your freelancing service.  

Step 7 – Develop necessary management skills 

Again, as a freelancer, you are a solo entrepreneur and you will have to manage everything on your own. You will have to manage your marketing strategies for grabbing new clients, manage chronology for current jobs, create invoices and worksheets, manage finances and taxes, and many more. 

For managing your freelancing jobs, you will need to learn some more skills such as invoice creation, payment gateway integration, records management, and more. 

You might feel overwhelmed initially, but once you start your journey and learn freelancing step by step, you will be familiar with all the hassles and will be habituated in these things within a very short period of time. 

Step 8 – Scale up your skillsets and increase earnings 

Scaling up is the final and always evolving step of a freelancing career. But it’s not for the initial stages. Initially, you will have to survive first in the freelancing field. Once you become stable in the digital freelancing for making a living, then you can think to scale your freelancing business.   

For scaling up your freelancing business, you will have to create a continuous learning and implementing process. You will have to learn new skills associated with your niche and have to add the skills to your freelancing services to increase your prices. 

For example, if you are offering Google Ads services, you can learn Facebook Ads and offer both Facebook Ads service along with Google Ads service and charge almost double. In this way, you can scale your earnings gradually.  

Tips for Freelancers to Do Effective Communication with Clients

No matter what the nature of your job, you want to make sure that you keep in touch. Disappearing freelancers are more common than you would think, and the slightest lapses get your clients worrying about your being a scammer. So at every point that you have a chance to touch base with your client, do so without fail. Some important point of contact that you don’t want to miss:

Effective client communication etiquettes

• A welcome email thanking your client for the gig, immediately after you land the job.
• An introductory email clarifying any details that you need, and reinforcing the details of your project, especially the details of cost and timeline/milestones.
• When you are stuck because you need a detail from the client, get that request to them right away.
• When you have an update or a clarification, send an email.
• Send update emails at the end of every milestone, along with any deliverables that you had promised.
• If you anticipate delays, send a notification right away! You don’t want to leave your clients wondering. Especially, for instance, if you are traveling and will be away from internet access for a while, you want to definitely let your clients know. If you call in sick, go ahead and be upfront about it! Avoid delays like the plague, because clients experience them way too often – but what’s much worse than a delay is your behaving as if nothing has happened.
• Payment  reminders  –  if  it  is  time  for  a  payment,  then remember to ask for it. If for some reason you don’t get a timely response, send a gentle reminder. If you are not paid on time, and don’t hear from your clients despite reminders, you have the right to suspend further work until a payment is processed.

As you can see, communication is key to success. Get in touch as often as you need, keep your clients in the loop, solicit feedback at every stage, and you should sail through the project!

An important note about payments. 

The one advantage of working off freelance marketplaces is that payments are less of a headache, even though there is a commission that you have to pay the marketplace. Usually the fee is worth it, because typically in exchange you get access to an escrow mechanism for managing your finances.

The way this works is that the client pays for the project in advance to a third-party (typically the marketplace, like Elance, for example), and the third-party keeps the funds safe and releases it to you once you complete the job.

With a trusty third party, both the client and the freelancer are safe about the funds, if the client has a freelancer trying to cheat on them, then the funds are rolled back to them, and it’s not possible to cheat diligent freelancers, because even if the client claims that the job is incomplete, the freelancer simply provides evidence of completed work and get their payment as originally agreed.

When working outside the escrow system, make sure to get an advance payment – usually 50% before and 50% on completion is the standard split, but evaluate your situation and your client before you determine an split, and if you are working without escrow, make sure you do your research!!!

Just as clients research the hell out freelancers before hiring them – freelancers should research the hell out of clients too! You can have fraud clients just as much as you can have fraudulent freelancers, so make sure you look up their public profiles and glean as much information as you can to come to the conclusion that they mean business.

Firing A Client

I do hope this never happens to you, but given the way the world just happens to be, you might end up encountering an unpleasant experience. When you get the first hints that a client:

• Is being unfairly demanding (going beyond the scope of the project without discussing or wanting to discuss appropriate pricing amendments)
• is not paying you as scheduled and avoiding your reminders
• being rude and unprofessional
• disappearing every now and then…

The best you can do is to minimize the extent of unpleasantness that you have to put up with. Move on from the project as quickly as possible, even if that means that you lose some money – keeping your sanity and peace of mind should be your top priority.

Be firm and professional – if you have had no payments at all, then you are not obliged to release any deliverables. If a partial payment is made, submit a suitable proportion of your work.

Whatever you do, never resort to being rude or improper yourself – maintain a sense of dignity and professionalism right through. Never write an email when you are in a terrible mood – apply the “24 hour rule” – make communication only after a 24-hour period has elapsed, after which you are likely to have calmed down, and will be more reasonable.

If a lot is at stake consider getting legal advice, and at this point remember that you are in a stronger position if you had your initial contracts in place. There is a middle ground between the extremes of acting on your impulses and hiring a lawyer – and that is to seek consultation from a person or community that you trust.

It is not feasible to cover every possible situation in a book, so I strongly recommend that you make a place for yourself in a community of like-minded people that you can fall back on for advice in a specific tricky situation. The communities built right into Elance and Freelance Switch are great starting points.

Damage Control

Well, the client isn’t the only side that creates trouble, much as freelancers would like to believe that’s the case! Sometimes, it might be you who has made the slip, faltered, or made a mistake. In this case, keeping a good relationship with your client and giving them absolutely no reason to complain should be your top priority. So, if you have made a mistake in the project, or suffered a delay, then – don’t kill yourself over it – life gets in the way for all of us and most reasonable people would understand.

However, you need to fix the situation by taking some additional measures yourself, and here are some tips for recovery:

• If you have delayed the project considerably, offer a discount on the original price.
• If you have made a mistake in executing the project, fix it, and if necessary, also offer a discount or a (related) bonus service or product. A relevant product is easier, but do make sure it is relevant (and preferably your own brand) so as to not come across as looking cheap!
• You don’t have to be over-apologetic or defensive, but at the same time, be upfront and don’t hide or pretend as if nothing as happened.
• If you are met with unwarranted rudeness despite your best and sincere efforts to patch the situation, then everything in the previous section applies.

Final words 

So you have come to know about digital marketing freelance jobs. Freelancing is the most potential career option in the digital marketing field. You can make as much money as you can with your digital marketing freelance jobs and achieve your career goals at your own pace. But it requires a challenging mindset along with a lot of hard works.

However, if you want to make your fortune in the fastest way on your own, digital marketing freelancing can be the best field for you. 

You can learn everything about digital marketing freelance jobs by enrolling in our instructor-led online digital marketing diploma course which is conducted by only industry experts who practically operate digital marketing freelancing businesses on a daily basis.  

For any further clarification, you can connect through [email protected], or call us.