Common questions I get as a full time freelancer

Common questions I get as a full time freelancer

I always get people asking me what I do, usually when we go out with friends and they have new people with them. Below are a few of the questions I've gotten and my responses to them


Questions

How much money do you make?
People will usually ask this because they want to see if it was worth it for me to get into this field. They also want to know because if the number I say is high enough, they'll try to crack into it as well. My response to their question is normally "I make enough to pay my bills, put food on the table, go see a movie or two and have some left over for savings" I won't usually answer this with an actual number unless the person is pissing me off by flaunting how much they make and is a complete annoyance.


What exactly do you do?
Now I don't answer this question thoroughly because I work in the Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Web Design fields. But the most basic answer I can give to explain what I do is this "I do online marketing. Basically people who own websites will come to me if they want to make more money online and I will help them generate traffic through the search engines or optimize their pages in order to increase their rankings in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Higher rankings means you get a flood of traffic and sales."


What is search engine optimization?
I usually get this after the "What do you do?" question because people haven't really heard of SEO if they work a 9 to 5 job for a company. I'll respond to this by saying "It's the act of building links on third party websites to get the search engines to notice them. When a search engine follows through the link they will see that end result website and give it credit for the link. This increases their rankings slowly and once they get to the first page they will get a load of traffic. I will also optimize their pages so they are following the guidelines set forth by Google."


How did you get into freelancing and online marketing?
My response is always "I kind of just fell into it. I was trying to put up a website of my own because I heard you could make money from posting ads on your page. But then I found out you don't make money from those websites unless you have traffic. And that's why I started learning SEO"


Is it easy to do?
Sometimes I laugh when I hear this question lol I'll typically respond to this, after I'm done laughing, by saying "No it's not. It's a tough job and that's not just because it's difficult to learn, but if you're freelancing you have to be diligent and stay on task otherwise you'll fall behind very quick." this is where they always say "oh that's not a problem, I can stay on task" but they've never done anything that wasn't scheduled for them lol



Well those are a few of the basic questions I get each week when talking to new people.

What questions do you get as a freelancer?



Thanks,

Razzy