The traditional life of a freelancer can be challenging—from managing sales and client relationships to completing deliverables, freelancers often have a lot of work commanding their attention, leaving limited time to prioritize networking. Even experienced freelance bloggers find juggling their ever-expanding task list difficult when they’re operating alone in a vacuum.
Without others to bounce ideas off of and work with, freelancers often find themselves yearning for community. Despite this desire, many freelancers overlook the vast benefits of joining a community—or simply don’t know how to find one.
But joining a powerful community of tech freelance professionals is an easy way to jumpstart your freelancing career, share your extensive knowledge, and find new work opportunities without devoting extensive time or resources to expanding your professional network. Here’s how a talent network can support a tech blogger’s unique needs.
Bridging the Gap: Why Tech Bloggers Need a Freelance Tech Marketing Network
Often, community members fall into one of three categories within a community: listeners, commenters, and collaborators. Rather than looking for general business advice or asking questions like other writers, these tech bloggers have specific needs where a talent network proves particularly valuable. From growing a professional network of expert resources, clients, and other writers to elevating their skills and expanding their leadership, a talent community can provide myriad opportunities and make a transformative difference for freelancers.
Here are three key ways joining a tech talent network helps freelancers thrive.
1. Discover Learning Opportunities
Not every tech blogger or marketing writer needs to be an expert practitioner; while they might have deep knowledge of technology concepts, there’s often a lot they can learn from interacting with expert professionals. However, many bloggers resist joining a tech community because they don’t feel comfortable contributing to a conversation among techies.
But it’s important that tech marketing writers and bloggers recognize how much tech practitioners can learn from them too! A talent network bridges the gap between marketing and tech professionals, creating new opportunities to learn from each other’s strengths and collaborate.
For example, in a community of tech experts, marketing writers expose themselves to new technologies, brands, IT solutions, and more in a low-pressure, accessible environment. Listening to conversations in a talent network offers bloggers more than one perspective on areas of expertise they are less familiar with. Meanwhile, marketing writers can share their experience to help practitioners understand how marketing content reflects a product. This enables these experts to effectively leverage their skills to position themselves as thought leaders and to help the brands they serve create more compelling tech content that really speaks to the tech practitioners they are targeting.
Plus, online tech communities are a great way for writers and bloggers to find new angles to write about and get fast answers to their questions; according to a study from The Community Roundtable, 75% of people feel online communities deliver faster answers to their questions, while 60% say these communities prompt new idea development. These communities are a powerful way for listeners to expand their knowledge and learn more from vetted, experienced practitioners and tech marketers.
For freelance blogger Tina, joining the IOD talent network helped her expand beyond her existing expertise, learn more about different technologies, and access new writing opportunities. Her participation in the IOD talent network allowed her to explore new topics through the lens of knowledgeable experts.
“There is no question that I have grown professionally through my work with IOD. I have learned a great deal about the fascinating cloud ecosystem,” says Tina.
As you become more comfortable in the community, you can also use a talent network to lend more credibility and originality to your content. Talent networks are perfect for finding expert sources to interview and reference in blog posts. Incorporating expert quotes and real-world case studies into content can be a huge bonus for your clients, lending more authority and credibility by positioning them as thought leaders in the industry. With a robust talent network, those experts are easier to find and contact..
2. Share Your Expertise
A wide talent network offers tech professionals opportunities they won’t find through traditional networking. In most networking situations, tech experts run into two common problems: either the event is too broad and attendees from different industries and backgrounds don’t understand what they do, or the event is too specific and only introduces you to other professionals with similar experience. These types of events don’t benefit tech bloggers, influencers, or expert practitioners because they can’t learn from experts in related disciplines, find relevant work opportunities, or demonstrate their expertise for others who will understand and appreciate it.
Since many tech freelancers maintain remote or asynchronous work schedules, they often miss out on opportunities to meet and collaborate within the wider tech community. But, with a talent network, commenters can ask questions, facilitate discussions, and spread new ideas in an environment where their expertise is needed and appreciated. Now that online community engagement has increased 81% since COVID-19 began, there’s no better time to reap the benefits of joining a talent network.
As a freelancer and independent consultant, Bruno leveraged the IOD talent network to showcase his years of expertise as a practitioner in cloud computing, data, and security. As he shared his knowledge, Bruno expanded his personal brand and discovered new opportunities to help brands create technical blog content geared to developers and architects.
“Clients often value receiving non-biased technical insights and the ability to convey their messaging in a different way,” says Bruno. “As an independent expert, I am adept at sharing fresh perspectives, technical opinions, or insights about their platform. As I build my own content portfolio, this results in a win-win scenario for myself and the clients.”
Ultimately, a talent network offers experts like Bruno a place to contribute their unique insight and experience, solidifying themselves as an influencer or thought leader in the tech space.
3. Expand Your Network
One of the best parts about joining a talent network is sharing your talents with others! Tech freelancers gain new exposure to brands, technologies, and methodologies within a talent network. Ultimately, this gives freelancers new opportunities for work and project collaboration.
Actively networking with professionals across the talent network gives freelancers the chance to showcase their work, foster collaborative relationships, and become a go-to blogger, influencer, or consultant for brands who need their services. Plus, tech bloggers and writers can partner with expert practitioners to collaborate on new projects and help practitioners position themselves as thought leaders in the larger tech industry.
As members of the IOD talent network, both Tina and Bruno found new opportunities to share their writing and expand their networks, giving them more options to pursue meaningful work.
“A couple of years ago, I decided to reduce my work scope significantly, and it was an easy decision to work exclusively for IOD and its customers,” Tina shares. “I also get to mentor writers who are new to IOD, and I love being able to share my methods and experience with them.”
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For Bruno, commenting and sharing his knowledge was only the beginning of his participation within the talent network. As brands discovered his expert perspective, the talent network gave Bruno an opportunity to develop a writing portfolio and become a thought leader within the industry. Bruno’s expertise has helped tech brands bridge the trust gap between marketing and engineering, producing content that accomplishes marketing goals while appealing to the experienced and knowledgeable practitioners who use their products and services.
“I appreciate the ability to connect and work with IOD experts in other domains, such as marketing, copywriting, and editorial,” says Bruno. Our co-creation process ultimately translates into higher quality deliverables and customer impact, which enables me to improve as a professional.”
Building Your Career and Sharpening Your Skills Is Easy with a Talent Network
Whether you’re a listener, commenter, or collaborator, a talent network can make freelancing simple for tech marketers, bloggers, and experts just like you. By sharing your knowledge, learning from tech and marketing experts, and fostering collaborative relationships, you can take the frustration out of finding new freelancing opportunities.
The IOD Talent Network has already helped expert tech bloggers like Tina and knowledgeable practitioners like Bruno find tons of opportunities quickly and easily.
Explore how a talent network can help you grow as a tech blogger.
Join the IOD Talent Network and start finding new opportunities today.
About IOD
IOD serves some of the most well-respected brands in cloud, DevOps, data engineering, cybersecurity, and AI, creating meaningful tech content that strengthens your brand and converts traffic into quality leads.
IOD’s agile teams of vetted tech experts and professional editors work together to build you a rich content library, including technical blogs, white papers, e-books, tutorials, product comparisons, thought leadership, and more.
