When Is It Okay For Freelancers To Work For Free?

I’ve completed free freelance work in three scenarios (that I can recall):

• Guest posts that will benefit me in the short or long term.
• Favors for friends that might one day return the favor.
• Community projects that make me feel good.

With guest posts, some freelance marketers might think this is something you only write for clients to help improve their SEO. But there are tons of benefits for guest posting when you’re building an audience or raising your own profile.

I’ve included a guest post later in this book that I wrote for Superpath, a community for content marketers. I did this for free for several reasons:

• I love the community and enjoy giving back.
• I was going to repurpose it in this book so it was time well invested.
• Writing such a post would increase my potential audience for products and services.

When you think of free work as genuine marketing, the “free” element becomes okay. As long as it’s relevant to the niche, community, or industry you’re in. This does mean, however, that you should be selective with free or guest posts. For example, writing a post to get a backlink to your site from an unknown site is almost worthless. But posting in a…