Last time I told you how I used inbound marketing for the first few years of my business.

It was supplying me with a steady trickle of clients, enough that I was busy. But not enough that my business was growing how I wanted it to.

That’s the disadvantage of inbound marketing compared to outbound. Inbound takes longer to get started. Once it does, it’s a steady drip of leads. With outbound, however, once you get over the learning curve, you have more control over how many leads you get.

Running low on clients? Start another campaign and fill up your availability.

Want to take it slow during this winter? Throttle it down.

Outbound marketing encompasses several different forms of marketing but the main one that works for freelancers is called direct response marketing (a.k.a. direct marketing).

Direct marketing grew out of the mail order catalog industry in 1960s, though its history goes further back than that. For our purposes though, we’ll only cover the basics.

With a direct marketing campaign, you target a specific set of customers with a specific offer.

That means you might target WordPress theme designers with an offer of "WordPress Theme Security".

The offer could be your service (and it frequently is), but it could also be an incentive. An incentive is something that you create and give away to people for taking an action.

Maybe you want to grow your newsletter so you offer subscribers a free checklist of common WordPress security mistakes.

Or maybe you are wanting to find leads so you offer a 20% off coupon for your WordPress Security Audit service.

The key is that you’re using something specific for a specific group. You’re not offering "programming" to "small businesses".

For us, especially working online, the most practical application of direct marketing is paid advertising. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) using Google Adwords is one of the largest networks out there and it can allow you to really target the specific group you need to.

What I personally like about direct marketing (and outbound marketing) is that I’m in control of the results. With other forms of marketing, you put something out there and wish/hope/pray that something happens. You won’t know until the end if it worked or not.

With direct marketing though, you can see the results much quicker. Either the campaign worked or it didn’t. You’re in control and you get to decide if you want to try to get better results, scrap it, or whatever else.

Eric Davis