Systematic Content Marketing For Freelancers

1. Welcome & Introduction: Hey, John Marseille. Welcome to my class turned content into clients. So let me briefly run through what's in the class so you can decide if it's a class that you would like to take or not. So let me start off with kind of the big picture. And it goes back to when I first started freelancing, I really had no idea how to get clients. No, how no plan for how to grow my business. I didn't know what worked. And what didn't. I took any client I could get. I worked on projects I had no passion for. I worked with clients that I couldn't stand. And every month I was sort of terrified of these kind of haunting questions that I always thought about. Where will my clients come from? Well, I make enough this month to pay the bills. Will this always be this stressful? And am I gonna end up going back to some 9 to 5 job that I really can't stand? And then I discovered content marketing and I learned how to build a funnel. I figured out what things to say in how to attract high plain paying clients clients. I enjoyed working with who valued my work and fit my personality projects. I was excited to work on, and I ended up working on projects for Inc magazine, bestselling authors like Tim Ferriss, Lewis House and Michael Hyatt. Really, people I had never imagined I'd get to work with when I first started. But more than that, I finally had a plan in a system. I knew what worked, and I knew how to consistently create content that brought clients in my front door. And I knew how to scale my business to create the lifestyle I wanted. And that's what I've done ever since. So this class is really pretty simple. I'm gonna share with you what I've learned about using content to get clients. So things like how to write yourselves pages creating your lead magnet building Your landing page is coming up with content ideas, how to produce your content, how and where I repurpose my content to get the maximum value out of each piece of content that I create how to post it to social media in order to get the maximum value. What plays well on social media, which platforms to focus on every step to building your marketing funnel on creating content to get clients. And when you walk away from this class, you're gonna walk away with a series of different documents they're gonna help you implement. So my exact strategy blueprint that I use for creating my funnel You're gonna get my exact five step block post formula that I use you're going to use get the exact template I use four creating lead magnets. You're going to get the exact template that I use for how I make my content unique a template for how I create content and ensure it's always valuable. Ah, and so forth. So you're gonna get all of these documents that go along with every lesson that are gonna help you to actually not only learn but actually implement. And the last thing that I want to talk about with this is really sort of the emotional side of it, because this just changed my life. I mean, I'm a nobody. I was a poor kid from a town of 200 in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a trailer home. If you'd asked most my classmates at that time, most of them probably would have told you that that I'd be dead or in jail by now. So when I started freelancing, I didn't have a big network to tap into. I didn't have parents who could help. I didn't have college friends or for a fraternity to leverage. It was just me and my keyboard. And and so I've built everything that I've done from scratch, and that's what I can show you how to do so. And to do it without a bunch of awkward networking, or but doing a bunch of free work without being tied to anyone, platform or network without having to spend 16 hours a day looking for work, wondering where clients are gonna come from, consistently stressed out, worried you're not gonna make it. I'm gonna show you how to do it without all of that. So if you're ready to start and ready to really make this happen, then let's dive into the course and get started. 2. Download the Class Worksheets: real quick before we get to the actual content here. Now, I mentioned that I have a number of implementation implementation documents and worksheets and so forth templates for you toe to go along with in this course and actually put this into action. These air really kind of the core of this course. The lessons were really meant to facilitate these documents and and you actually implementing. So in order to get those documents, just head over to the class Project section. You'll find the documents. They're kind over on the right side, you'll be able to download all of them and you'll see a document for every relevant lesson throughout the class. So get those downloaded and then as we go through, you can fill those out, and that's gonna help you to to actually implement 3. Why Content Marketing?: So the first big question you might have is why content marketing and to be blunt and direct, as I like to do. The bottom line is that your to get more clients and the statistics on that are pretty clear. So let me just run through a few of those If you have heard these content. Marketing gets conversion rates six times higher than other methods, and small businesses with blog's get 100 26% MAWR lead growth and ones without content. Marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and cost 62% less . And when you pit content marketing against paid search, it gets three times the leads per dollar spent. And I could quite literally go on and on and on. There's the Internet is filled with statistics on content, marketing and how effective it is. But it's also one of the things that the entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk says producing content is now the baseline for all brands and companies. It literally doesn't matter what business you're in, what industry you operate in. If you're not producing content, you basically don't exist, and that's a guy who's built $200 million business is on the back of the Internet, so he sort of knows what he's talking about. But more than all that for me, beyond what? What the numbers say, what the guru say, what I really go back to is what it's meant for me personally. And to me, that is the greatest benefit of content marketing is that it's the great equalizer. It's allowed a nobody like me who grew up in a town of 200 in the middle of nowhere and came from a poor family. All that it's allowed me to carve out a career as a living as a freelancer and did it without having a degree or living in a big city without about bunch of well connected friends or fraternity brothers or any of that. I'm just a regular old guy who grew up in a sleepy old town, and I can hang with the big boys and beat them out for clients 100% because I took the time to get good at creating content and using it to market my services so it doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter how you grew up doesn't matter who you know what advantages or disadvantages you do or don't have. Content marketing will put you in the game and let you compete right up there with the big name companies for big name clients and win. So for me, that is the why. That's why I believe every freelancer needs to be creating content strategically to get clients and grow their freelance business, and that's what I'm going to show you how to do in this class. 4. What Makes Content Valuable: So as you start down your own content marketing journey, one of the often repeated phrases that you'll come across is to give value or to create valuable content. And I feel like I was That's like someone saying Here, just read these high roller, fix the answers right there. Early on, I wanted to give value, but every time I created something thinking that it was valuable, the response would either be just crickets or comments like this is trash or boring or just stop that sort of thing. And so again, early on, I struggled to figure out what it meant to give value. Now, fast forward to today, and I make a living creating content. I have over 11,000 students on skill share, 64,000 plus subscribers and 7.4 million views on my YouTube channel. A blogger podcast. This is what I do now, and people seem to enjoy what I create. And in that time, I've learned a lot about what it takes to make valuable content, and in this lesson, I'm gonna focus on what I call the Big Three. So those are educated, entertain and inspire. Now it is possible that you've heard those before, but I'm gonna give you some nuance and a process that I think you probably haven't seen anywhere else. At least I have it. And so it all starts with the creating your content, creating valuable content. All starts with educating now for me. Personally, I was relieved to discover that this was indeed the first step in the core of the content you create because I see myself as a thinker has maybe you'd say wannabe intellectual. But education is what allowed me to go from that small town of 200 living in a trailer home . All that to sitting here doing this, so it's very important to me. But whenever you create a piece of content, you start with what you want to teach specifically what you want to teach your audience how to do. That's important because you could entertain and inspire all you want. But if people don't get results from your content, it's gonna feel empty, and eventually they'll move on. So the key here is to focus on implementation. Even if you're talking about concepts or ideas, think about how you can turn it into a process and create motion, the more you can get your audience to implement the MAWR results, they'll see. And the more they'll begin to trust, trust you. The other thing is to make sure you keep it concise. Mawr is not necessarily better when it comes to content. People are busy, so the more compact package you can deliver the result in the vote more valuable. Your audience will perceive your content to be and the more results you'll see from it. The analogy I like to use is if someone came and told you that they could teach you how to make a $1,000,000 in an hour, and someone else said they could teach you how to make a $1,000,000 in 1/2 hour and you knew both were were legit and would you would actually get the result, which would you choose? I think everybody would choose 1/2 hour. If I can do it in less time. Why wouldn't I? Then that's that's sort of the same idea when it comes to your content. The thing to do is think of quick winds not necessarily big wins, but quick winds that you can give your audience and then build your content around that. So that's the 1st 1 Educate. The next is entertained and I'll be honest with you For a lot of years, I sneered at the idea of making my content entertaining. As a matter of fact. For a long time, I myself refused to even read fiction books and my mind tell it, my mentality was I didn't have time for entertainment. I was on a mission to change my life, and I need to keep my nose to the grindstone 24 7 And I projected that onto my audience. I thought, if if they need to be entertained, then they're not serious, which is I know it's very judgmental. But what I've realized since then is that content is a competition and whether I like it or not, and I'm gonna say that again for anybody out there who was like I was, whether I like it or not. If someone has the choice between my dry content and someone else is entertaining content that covers exact essentially the same ideas, they'll choose the entertaining stuff every time. Now, maybe 1% of 1% won't, but the vast majority will so you want to make your content entertaining. Now, of course, the big question is how. And the nice thing is, you don't need to be a comedian or a world renowned actor to be entertaining. You don't need to act silly and goofy and all that. There is a simple and reliable way to consistently entertain your audience. And that's to tell stories. People love stories, even the bad ones. And if you want to test that out for yourself, head over to Google, play movies or iTunes or Amazon whatever you use and look through the lowest rated movies there and you'll find it's fairly interesting. Most of even the bad movies will get 3 to 3.5 stars. That will be sort of the average. So these air movies that are mutually agreed upon by most critics and most people they're awful, and they're still getting 3 to 3.5 stars and set a one. And then, if you look at the reviews, you will find people who love that particular movie, so they'll be. They'll give a five star rating and they'll say, I don't know what everyone's talking about. I love this movie. So point is, we want to like stories. We hold out hope that they're good, and even if they're moderately well done, we're going to give people the benefit of the doubt. So you don't need to be an amazing storyteller because A you're not writing movies. But more than anything, what you need is to be honest and be willing to be vulnerable in your storytelling and let people in on how you think and how you feel. Do that. And with practice, people on Joe will enjoy the stories in your content. Now that said, tactically, there are two important types of stories that you want to tell one. Creating content first is the transformation story. Second is the discovery story. So the transfers. The transformation story is typically how you're going to lead off a piece of content. Now that this is hard, fast rules, you can be creative and put things together. But if you're just starting in new to this and want sort of a formula, then lead off your content with the transformation story. What it does is it creates context around the information that you're gonna provide, and you're essentially telling your own personal before and after story, which is compelling to people. So you just quite literally tell people your own experience using the content you're sharing, what results you were getting before, and then what results did you get after on? If you wanna see an example of this, just go back to the beginning of this very lesson and you'll see that I did exactly that. Next is the discovery story. So this is used in the individual subsections most commonly of your content again. No hard festivals. But a good example is the beginning of this very entertaining section that I just started. So you'll notice how I let off with how I came to accepting the idea of creating entertaining content. That's a discovery story. Now these stories are gonna winning awards, but the they inject an extra dimension into your content and they help create context around you, which, as a side note, is a crucial part of all of this that will cover. I'm gonna cover that in the next lesson. But for now, just know that the stories you tell are the most important part of your content for you. In fact, your entire purpose for creating content is so you can tell these stories for your readers . It's the education, but for you it's to tell the stories and again on the cover. Why in the next lesson? But what you want to do is just keep it simple, keep it honest, be vulnerable, and you'll be just fine. All right, then. The third thing then that you want to do is inspire. Now for me, this is one I always had, sort of a knack for. In fact, the first positive comments I got on any of the content I created were from people who found it inspiring. And I think the reason why is my my story sort of naturally lends itself to that which, by the way, that's just another natural side effect of telling your story. You can be inspiring and not even necessarily intend to be realize it. But the thing to realize that this is most people don't believe in themselves. It's a sad reality, and I've spent a lot of time trying to attack it and hope people through it. But you can show someone exactly what to do. Give them all the information they need make it entertaining and easy to consume, and still most people won't act on it. And it's not because of you. It's because of them and for you. If they don't act and they don't get results, then they then they don't develop that deep seated sort of visceral trust in you and what you say, which is what you need in order for them to want to invest in your products and services. So it's in your best interest to inspire them into action. So again, the question is, How do you do that? Well, I have a little formula that I use, but the thing is to recognize that it all starts with their own self doubt and fear. So what you want to do is you want to look at what you're teaching them and think about the difficult realities your audience will face in implementing what you're teaching. Openly acknowledge those realities, reassure your audience and then encourage them. So let me use this lesson is example of how I might do this. So I might say, you know, I know some of this stuff might sound scary. Be entertaining. Tell your story. Be vulnerable, inspire others, and it might be easy to think. Well, who the hell am I? How am I gonna inspire others? I'm the one that needs inspiration. Or how am I gonna be entertaining? There's no way I'm not a storyteller. And besides, what will my friends and family think when they see See me doing all of this? And I could go on and on and on, but I'm telling you, me, I'm a kid from a town of less than 200 in the middle of nowhere. Nebraska. I didn't grow up in some big city year wherever I grew up in a trailer home. I was a meathead football player. So to be sitting here, having taught tens of thousands of students, millions of YouTube views like, if I can figure this stuff out, you 100% can too, I promise you. And what I've taught you in this lesson took me nearly a decade to figure out. So you're already way ahead way ahead of where I started. So trust me, you can do this. Just follow the guidance I've given you. Keep at it, work hard, and with time and persistence, you'll get good. So just go for it, Okay? So stepping back then and by the way, I think all that stuff is true. A swell. So but stepping back, if you just rewind what I said, just look for the acknowledgement, the reassurance and then the encouragement. And I think that will give you a good example of how you kind of do this thing. And you could just repeat that. Anything you teach, there's gonna be something. It's not always the same reality, difficult reality. It's always something, maybe a little bit different. But you can always find it if you look. And so that's how you inspire people is you just short use that formula and encourage them . Tell them they can do it because usually it's true. Usually it's the people that just act and do stuff that end up having success and are persistent even when they fail. So again, that's just how you inspire people. And so that's it. Those are the three things to put in tow every piece of content that you create, adding minimum and, ah, and if you just keep working at it, you'll get better and better, and your audience will find your content valuable so again, Just keep working at it. Inject those three things, do the best you can with it, and with time, you're just going to get better and better at it. 5. How to Guarantee Your Content Is Unique: So here's another one that you're gonna run into when it comes to creating content. Is people telling you that you need to create unique content and one of the big problems? And I've had, at least when I first start creating content, was trying to figure out how to make it unique? How do you actually do that? And when I would research a topic, I'd find dozens, sometimes hundreds or thousands of other block posts, videos, podcasts, whatever covering the same topic. And inevitably, whatever you go to create content around, you're going to find the same thing. It's very rare for you to be able to find something that nobody else has has talked about ever. Um, if you do write about it, but you can't base your entire content marketing strategy around that it's just too rare. A matter of fact. There's, ah, scary statistic for us content marketers. Ah, that I heard once you probably have heard this to maybe you've heard in any way, any way, it says. As a species, we produce more content in two days than we did did in all of human history up to 2003. Now that was the former CEO of Google, Eric Smidt, back in 2010. So nine years ago, I could only imagine what it is now. It's probably a day heck, even maybe an hour that we create that much content. So in that sea of content, then how do you stand out? That can seem like an unanswerable question, but actually, the answer is surprisingly simple. The answer is you and no, this is not some come by all thing. We all love each other. Let's let's have a hug or whatever it really is you, because what is the one thing that no one else can replicate? Replicate you, your experience, your personality. So the more you inject that into your content, the more unique it becomes, even if you're talking about the exact same things everyone else's. So again we get to the question off. Well, how do how do we do this? And I already mentioned the two things. The big things, your experience and your personality. So let's start with your experience. No one has experienced everything you have in the way that you've experienced them. Your successes, your failures, your thoughts, your emotions, nobody else sees the world exactly as you to as you do and going back to the previous lesson. This is why stories air so important they communicate your experience. You could cover the exact same topic with the exact same lesson and still your discovery of it, your experience with it, the successes, the failures, all the little emotions and thoughts and so forth. All of those things are going to be unique to you, whether on their own or at the very least in combination. They're going to be unique. So as an example, take a block post I wrote recently. The title of the of the block post was the top five mistakes all freelancers should avoid. Now, if you Google search that you're gonna find a results page littered with similar block posts, page after page after page of results. In fact, and if you look at the five mistakes that I chose to cover the actual content, you'll find that those same mistakes air on a lot of these posts as well. However, for each one of these mistakes, I told my story of how I came to learn it. So, for example, one of the mistakes was, Ah, not saving your money. And I told the story of the year that I didn't set aside money to pay taxes at the end of the year, how I ended up owing thousands in back taxes and how that affected me and how had toe resolve and so forth. And then what I do now. As a result, in order to make sure that that doesn't happen so nobody else can tell that exact story, it instantly makes my blawg post unique. They might have a similar story, but it's not exactly my story. And it's not exactly how I felt about it, how I handled etcetera, so that instantly makes my block post unique because it's about me and my experience. So again, this is why stories air so important. They guarantee that the content that you write is unique, and you should inject them as much as possible into every part of your content that's gonna help. That's how you convey your experience. The next one, then is your personality, and this really comes down to how you choose to communicate. So the first point here is not toe. Edit yourself so much that you strip out all of your personality from your content. Yes, you should try to cut down on homes and us and, you know, and like and all that stuff. But don't get so focused on that that you end up just sounding like a robot. So to give you another example, what? When I talk, especially when I get really sort of worked up in passion about something, I use my hands to help communicate my ideas. You've probably noticed that now, strictly speaking, most speaking classes or coaches or presenting classes, whatever they would tell you to eliminate that to get rid of it, I've been in those classes. In fact, I majored in communications in college. I've been in a lot of those classes, and they tell you that exact thing. And yes, there's a limit. Like if you're just up here going like this constantly, it's gonna get annoying. But this is who I am, and for some people, it's gonna resonate. Sure, it'll annoy the hell out of other people, but your job as a content creator and ultimately as a service provider is to focus in on the people who resonate with your natural personality. It's Not that you have tow, hate or be mad at the people who don't, right? You don't have toe have any feeling towards that. They're just not your audience. They're not a good fit for you. If they hired you and you let them hire you, there would always be the small little frictions and conflicts, conflicts of personality that make the experience unpleasant. Now again, if if you just need the work, sometimes you gotta bolt, bite the bullet and take it. But what we're trying to do with content marketing is to keep that from happening to get to the point where the people who hire us fit good with our personality, we resonate and get to the point where those of the Onley clients you have Ah, that makes your your freelancing. Ah, a lot more fun and a lot more successful. So again it comes back to your personality and allowing it to show up in your content. That's what makes your content unique. Now, another trick is to use metaphors. This is a fun one that that I love. I'm gonna use some controversial examples here in a second. I just want to make clear like I'm not trying to take sides here, anything like that. I'm using these examples specifically because I know that people have immediate reaction to them. And hopefully you can monitor your reaction and understand what I'm saying in terms of how you can use these. So anyway, again, another trick is use metaphors. Metaphors are great for creating affinity with certain people while simultaneously repelling others. And like I said, I'm going to use some controversial examples that I think will make this clear. So let's say I'm telling a story about how lost I was when I first started freelancing. Now I have several options of how I could say that I could simply say I was lost Born ing not really entertaining in anyway. Just ho hum Whatever. Or I could say I was lost is a Hillary Clinton email. Or I could say to be fair, I was a lost. Is Donald Trump in a barbershop? Now, again, I'm not taking sides here trying to be political. I'm using these specific example examples because it should make it clear how one metaphor will endear a certain set of people while we're piling another and the other metaphor will again do the same thing, but to two different sets of people. So that's the power in metaphor. You don't need to use use politics. In fact, in most cases you probably don't want to unless you feel really strongly convicted about it . But metaphors like this again can create instant affinity and instant repulsion, so you want to inject them into your content. I'm don't overdo it, and I'm not saying be super controversial or anything like that, but at least have one of these per piece of content. It helps reinforce that affinity from your regular readers and so forth, and helps endear them. Ah, do you even more? And it's much more entertaining than simply saying I'm lost and again to reiterate, you do not have to use political examples. It can be if you go out there and just think of, like, cliches and and sayings that people use that air common in your everyday language that you maybe edit out when you're creating content. Don't be afraid to inject some of those back in, you know, if your I'm from the Midwest, so we tend to be like, really bland with our with our language. But, you know, in the south of common phrases, y'all now I'm not saying use y'all every other sentence. But don't be afraid to put to put that in there now and again and help put, uh, portray some of your personality into your content. So again, it's little things like that that can really help inject that personality and make your content unique to you. So again, if we step back and we combine all of these things, relaying your experiences through story, speaking in your natural voice, using metaphors again your content will come across unique and fresh, even if you're relaying the exact same information as everyone else. So that is how you make your content unique. 6. The Content Marketing Funnel for Freelancers: this lesson. I want to talk about the content marketing funnel for freelancers. So when all of when I first started freelancing, all of this was very, very foreign to me. I was lost is I'm not going to do it If you don't get that joke, go back to the last lesson. But I was lost. It was it was really for foreign to me. And I hear people saying things like Lead magnate and funnel, and I, you know, I just It was over my head. I didn't know what any of this stuff met, so I can definitely relate if all this seems a little strange and overwhelming. And that's why I wanted to create this particular blueprint. When I say funnel, this is what I mean. It's a step by step process for attracting potential clients to you and converting them into paying clients. So the basic idea is this. You create content, whether that's a block post, a YouTube video, a link to an article article convening number of things, and you make sure that it's of interest to people who are prospects for your freelance services. Then, at the end of each piece of content. You point those people back to your website and your lead magnet, where they can give you their email address in order to get some piece of valuable information from you. Then, once they're on your email list, you send them emails that sell your services and turn them into paying clients on the marketing world. We refer to this process as traffic leads and sales, and it might seem really simple and like, yeah, right, that doesn't work. But this is literally how online businesses run every single day. How Iran my business is, how most of the clients that I work with run their businesses, big name companies. This is what they dio and and it just works. So then, as you'll see here, you know, for as a freelancer, we also have This is one things that specific and why this is a funnel for freelancers. We have the elements of repeat clients and referrals. Now, we're not gonna be specifically talking about those in this class. They're tied to how you deliver your services to clients and the experience you give them. But do know this the better you get at attracting the right kind of clients through your content marketing the MAWR First time clients will turn into a lifetime clients because there will be a better fit for what you do on, and they'll be a better fit you for your personality and so forth. So content marketing plays a big role in repeat clients and referrals by making sure you're getting in the right people to begin with. In any case, this is the funnel. You're gonna learn how to build in this course, and the thing about funnels is you build them backwards. There's a there's, ah, natural tendency to want to build them from the front first and just start blogging. And then I'll figure out the lead and the services. But actually, you need to build them them backwards. In fact, there's nothing else that you take away from this lesson. Let it be that if that's one thing you're gonna write down, write down that build the funnel backwards, it makes all of this so much easier. So anyway, what that means is that we need to start with building your services sales page, and that's what we're gonna cover in the next lesson. 7. 10 Questions Your Services Sales Page MUST Answer: this lesson, we're gonna cover building your service of sales page. And specifically, I'm gonna cover the 10 questions that you need to answer in order to get a client toe, have all the information they need in orderto hire you. And these are the big questions that your clients are gonna have. And so if you don't answer them upfront on your sales page, most clients they're not going to bother to submit your content form and ask. They're just leave and never come back. So you want to make sure an answer these on? So what? That said, Let's work this run through. So the 1st 1 is, Who are you? And make no mistake, potential clients want to know who you are. People buy from people and people they trust, and this is probably one of the things that has changed most in the time that I've been on the Internet. I start all the way back in the early two thousands, right around 2004 and back then the Internet. There was no blogging. There was no social media, there was none of that. And when it came to the business side of the Internet most of what it was was just one off sales letters. And those would work back then because there wasn't a lot of context for people to go and find there was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. There was no blogger block posts that they could read or any of that sort of thing. They had to go simply by what was on that sales page, And that's so you only had to create a little bit of context there, and then you could could go on about your your sales pitch. Today it's totally different. That's why we're even sitting here talking about content marketing, because clients want to know who you are. And for sure when they come across you and your blawg and your sale services sales page. Or if you're not blogging and they just come across your services sales page, they're gonna look you up. And if they don't find you, they don't see your on Twitter Facebook. They don't see a blawg or any of that sort of thing is gonna make them question. If you're really an expert and know what you're doing, so they want to know about you and a lot of what we're doing just in this whole idea of content marketing is to give them that context you still need to give them. Ah, that context on your sales page. So you know, if you've listen to me for an amount of time or seeing my other courses or whatever, you know, I give relentless of ice about creating content and using that to attract potential leads, helping to build, get them to trust you by giving results in advance so they'll already have some sense of who you are if you're doing that. But it's good to do it here and to give them even more. So. What I like to do is start my profile pages and my services, sales pages, bios and stuff like that with this line, and it sort of changed over the years. But it's generally the same idea. So says, Hey, I'm John Boris. I'm a freelance Web designer of 15 years from Missouri. I'm married with four kids and I'm a rabbit Husker fan. It's not the whole thing. That's just sort of the start of it. But I wanna I wanna use that as an example to point out how you can communicate things, important things and very concisely and in a way that sort of gets under people's radar. So it's simple, but it accomplishes a few things first. I'm a freelance Web designer, communicates that I do what they need. I'm a freelance Web designer. I do this sort of thing and that I'm likely available for hire. Otherwise, why would I say that? I'm that then when I say ah of 15 years, that suddenly communicates. Experience and stability have been doing it a long time. Ah, it's always interesting to me how people will latch onto that without even verifying it. I mean, it's true, but I still is interesting to me that I will find people that will just read it on my profile or wherever and just latch onto it. They never really verified it, but again, I'm not saying make stuff up or whatever, but I'm just communicating the effectiveness of something like that so that it communicates experience. Ah, from Missouri communicates that I'm an American because whether you like it or not, certain people on Li like to work with people from the US and, um, you know, that's true for other places. To people from the UK Sometimes you'll have clients who only want to work with people from the U. K or Canada or whatever, right? So that communicates that I'm from the US So if there's someone that is looking for specifically someone from the US that communicates that without just coming out and saying it, and then when I say I'm married with four kids, that speaks to write reliability on a reason for me to deliver and stick to the project and so forth because I have mouths defeat and then the last one is just sort of a little, ah, little kind of shot, I say I'm a rabbit. Husker fan just gives a little person personality, then also a little bit of affinity. If it happens to be someone else who's from Nebraska is Ah, Husker fan, then it creates that just a little bit of extra Finney. I've actually have about a client or two from that. So again, those are there three simple sentences, but they communicate a lot, and they do it in a way that subtle and likely to get past your clients skepticism radar. So again you want to start off by saying something, or at least includes somewhere in your services sales page, a little bit about who you are and just a little bit of personal information like that so you can accomplish those things. Next is what do you do? And again, specialization is something I harp on constantly. So, for example, if your Web developer and you say, Oh, I know PHP and HTML and CSS and all that stuff most of the time that doesn't really mean much to clients because they don't really know what those things are. And more than that, every other Web developer and Web designer plan is saying that same thing. So it doesn't really help you to stand out in any unique way. Now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't say it. You maybe put it on their line somewhere, but keep it really concise. And don't think that that's gonna be what gets you hired. It's not to stand out. You need to position yourself as a specialist. Now, I wanna make clear what I'm seeing here because I have gotten pushback on this before. I'm not saying that you should Onley learn a very narrow skill set, right? That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you should learn as much as you want as much as you can. But in your marketing you should position yourself that way because when you market yourself as a specialist, there's just a number of advantages. So me run through a few of those. So first off specialist naturally stand out among the sea of of other freelancers that are out there because a lot of people are just saying I'm a graphic designer. O R. I'm a Web developer. I'm a writer. And so when you say you're a specialist and let's say I'm, I'm I I run a Blaga beauty blawg, and I'm looking for someone to write articles for me. And I see writer and I see beauty tips. Article writer like this person is naturally going to appeal. This special is gonna naturally appeal more to me, so you just stand out more to the right people that would be likely to hire you. Specialist tend to get paid more. You can kind of just look across different industries and look at the difference between generalists and specialists. Specialists tend to get paid more their offer often appreciated more for their work because they can do things there. They do something specific that maybe other people don't know how to do. So when you can come in and do this thing that there having a hard time finding anybody to dio, you tend to get appreciated more e because you're a specialist, you're only working on certain projects. So you only work on projects you enjoy that you're good at, keeps everything in your wheelhouse. You don't have to worry about getting asked to do crazy things. I do this one thing, and that's it. Specialists can change what they specialize in Teoh to to fit into a changing market. So I feel like you're a little more adaptable because you're focusing on this one thing. If the market changes, you can easily switch this thing over here as opposed to, you know, If you're just sort of generally marketing yourself and the market changes, it becomes more difficult to do that. And then, finally specializing will make your life a heck of a lot easier, because again you're just working on the same project. You're working on things, you know. It just makes everything Ah, lot easier. So in this section of your profile or your bio your services cells Page, what you want to do is you want to talk about your specialty and specifically you want to cover two things. So you want to cover what you dio what seems obvious there is obvious, and then what you don't do and each is equally important. But I often say that I spend more time telling people what I don't do than what I do. Dio So on my own hire me Page, I spent a good portion of my introduction video talking about the projects that I won't work on. And clients actually appreciate it because it lets them know up front that I can't do this thing. You're not just trying to take any in any and all work and then get into something where you're in over your head so that you're telling them I can't do that. And they appreciate that, and it also just sort of positions you a someone who knows what they're good at and does that one thing extremely well. It creates a deeper level of trust than somebody who pretends like they know everything um , clients don't believe that. You know everything anyway, so you just come across as more believable. So again on your the overall strategy of creating your services sales page. But then also on your services sales page. And if you do a video so forth, you want to specifically state what you specialize in. What is the very specific end result that you provide to to clients and then also talk about what? You won't work on eso that clients know clearly what it is that you do and what it is that you don't dio next is what work have you done in the past. So your portfolio is probably the single most important piece of on site sales material that you can have. Clients are almost always gonna look at your portfolio first, and then if they like what they see, they might read your copy. But if your portfolio stinks, no amount of slick copy is going to change their mind. Now, if you're a seasoned developer, Sierra season freelancer with a number of projects under your belt, then you simply need to just put your best work on display. The one the one sort of caveat to that is make sure it's your best work. So volume is not the thing here. It's quality. So because you don't know what what portfolio item a client's gonna look at, they're probably not gonna look at all of them. They're gonna look at one that catches their eye. And if it happens to be, you know, not your best work, then that's what they're gonna judge you want. So you want to make sure everything in there is your absolute best work, and that's all that's in there. So everything they look at is your best stuff. OK, so that's one thing with that. On the other hand, if your brand new and you don't have any clients, you know it's OK. You can still create a portfolio because nothing says your portfolio has to be filled with projects that you did. For clients. Portfolio is a show. It's about showing off what you're capable of. So bull, a bunch of samples that showcase your talent and use those as your portfolio. Now, if you're if you're a Web designer or developer, build websites that you just make up to put in your portfolio or take a existing company existing site and do your take on it. Or a logo designer, graphic designer. Or, you know, if you're a writer, writes stuff that people can sample and take a look at. So just you really need to figure out a way to to get something in your portfolio. If you've got to do free work for friends or family, you know, 45 just to get started, then then do that whatever it takes to get something in there. Something is better than nothing when it comes to your portfolio, as long as it meets a certain threshold of quality. And what that will allow is your client to be able to see where you're capable of, and then make a more informed decision about whether or not you can help them. So the very first thing that I would do before if you're just starting out freelancing before I get it before you get into anything else, is work on your portfolio. It's really the most important thing, Um, and then everything else kind of builds on top of that, all right, The next question need to answer is what do your past clients say about your work. So I would say this is the second most important piece of on site sales material that you can have because clients just don't want to see what you can do. They also want to know what it's like to work with you. So are you pain in the butt to work with? Are you reliable? Do you communicate well? Are you open toe ideas? Can you adapt to change all of those things? These air key nontechnical questions that clients are gonna have about your character and you want to work towards having a testimonial that answers each one of those? Because it's one thing for you to say you're reliable, but if you have a client testimonial that says it, that's much better. It's more proof now. If you're new, you're likely not gonna have these from clients, so you have to be creative. One of the things that you can do is acquired testimonials from people you know or have worked with who can speak to your character. So, for example, I served 11 years in the Army. You think that maybe my direct supervisors supervisors comments about my work ethic during those 11 years would be relevant to someone looking to hire to me, of course, So again, get creative with this And don't be afraid. Toe. Get testimonials from people Maybe you didn't do client work for, but they can speak to your character. Just make sure that you don't pretend these air client testimonials be upfront. Let people know that these air general testimonials and be sure to include the exact context and what which that person knew you and then over time, replaced those with client testimonials. So again you want to have social proof. You want to have comments from other people about your work or your character, that that sort of thing. Something again is better than nothing. Here I next is what are the benefits of your services. So when you step back and think about the context of someone who's viewing your profile of your services page, you'll notice that there are two primary things that you're really selling. You're selling yourself and why they should hire you. But actually, even before that, you're selling hiring why they should hire anybody in the first place and try as you might to get to target as efficiently as possible. Your sales pages will inevitably have people with those two different mindsets. So someone who already knows that they want to hire and they're just trying to figure out who and someone who is still uncertain about hiring anybody versus doing it themselves or just not doing it. But if they found the right person than they would hire them, and I think that men mixes substantial enough, that's worth taking some time to sell The idea of hiring an expert in the first place, and that's what you get into when you talk about the benefits of your services. Um, so here's where you sort of get to hit them with a 12 punch of why they should hire and why they should hire you Now It's good to go look at that question just a little bit. Why should ah, high a client hire professional, take some time to actually think about that on your own? Because it helps you, Mork, clearly see what your actual core value proposition is. How what it is that you're actually giving to clients just in general. That said there. And so you want to get specific with it. But There are a few reasons that I will share with you that tend to be common to to freelance services, so they'll get their project done faster. Your I assume an expert in it and have done it. So you're gonna be able to do it faster than they will. They're going to avoid the potential for serious mistakes, you know, things that they don't, you know, to avoid things that maybe they don't. So they're gonna have that working in their favor. They'll be able to do things that they likely wouldn't be able to do themselves again. You're you're skilled, you're an expert, you have talent. You're gonna be able to do things that they just can't do. They're gonna avoid hassling with all the technical stuff that frustrates them. So no matter what you do, I think there's technical parts to what you do. Even if you're walking dogs right, you could probably get into some technical aspects of how long you should walk. Um, how you should walk that sort of thing. So something that seems like it's pretty simple. You could get into some technical parts of that. Well, they just don't have to worry about any of that. They can avoid hassling with any of it and just hire you, Um, and then the last one there. The last big one is that they also have a recourse if something happens. So if their website blows up or you know their logo doesn't perform the way they wanted to or whatever, have someone that can go back to and ask questions and have them look at it and see if they can figure it out and so forth. So they have some recourse of something goes wrong. Now there's plenty of others, but the key here is to speak to benefits, not features. So notice I didn't say anything about a CEO or optimized code or responsive design or white space seeing or any of the buzzwords that you'll typically find in an industry. That's because those things don't mean much to potential clients. For every one of those buzzwords that the client's gonna ask themselves, What does that mean? So instead of making them ask that question, just skip the middleman and answer the question the first time by focusing on benefits. Now, once you've sold them on hiring anybody, then you can sell them on hiring you. And again, you want to stick to benefits, not features, and you want to look for things that make you unique and better. Now the thing to keep in mind here is every freelancer is going to say I'm talented, I'm reliable. I communicate well. They won't necessarily say it that way, but that's what they're basically communicating eso and a number of other things. They're all going to say that so saying those things alone is not going to make you stand out. You need a way to distinguish yourself on. One technique that I like to use goes back to what we talked about with personality and using your own voice and so forth. I call it the weird personality trick. So instead of saying I'm reliable on my actual hire me page my services sales page, I said Blame my 11 years in the Army, but I have this thing about doing what I say I'm going to now that stands out a little bit more because a it's set in a unique way. I'm not just saying I'm reliable, but it also speaks to my own experience and incorporating that into it. How many other developers spent 11 years in the Army? Probably some, but not many. And beyond that, people sort of naturally associate reliability with the military. So it bolsters the can claim now another way that I did this, which may be a little bit controversial, but I certainly wasn't trying to ah, offend anybody just saying it in a way that was a little bit more entertaining. But instead of saying I'm detail oriented, what I said is I'm a bit o c d. So, yeah, me and details were like this. I said that on my hire me page again. It adds personality, and it gives a subtle element of proof. Um, you know, someone who's o. C. D obviously pays attention to details. Ah, and again, these things alone aren't gonna win you clients, but they're just enough to set you apart from what everyone else is saying. And when you couple these things, these small things with great portfolio testimonial sales copy. It's all these little things that add up to make a difference on your service sales page that make people want to hire you over somebody else. So you want to stack all of this stuff in into your your sales page. All right. The six question you need to answer is how much does it cost on the first thing that I'm gonna say right off the bat is toe own your pricing. Never put yourself in a position where you feel ashamed of your pricing. You're worth it. Not only will it show to your clients and cause them to get antsy about working with you, but if you're charging people more than you think you should, you're gonna start to feel really guilty, and it's gonna kill your productivity. So either lower your prices or own them. Now, that said, chances are you're probably not charging enough. It's a major problem in the Freeman's community and mainly because freelancers aren't sure how to market themselves. So they just lower their prices in order to get clients. And I just let me state this unequivocally so there's no misunderstanding my position on this Never, ever compete on price. That doesn't mean that there aren't things you can do with price, but don't compete on price. As long as you're a freelancer. Don't do it. It rarely works, and it will make it's gonna make you miserable. So with all that said, then how do you figure out what the right price is? And I keep it simple, asked myself. Two questions. What's everyone else charging and what's it worth to me? So you do need to have a sense of what the market prices for everybody else is charging $3000 for, Let's say, a website and you're charging 5000. Unless you're bringing something compelling to the table that set you apart and shows you're providing extra value, then you're gonna likely struggle with that. So you want to know what the market prices easiest way to do that is. Just go on Fiverr or up work, or just Google other people who offer the same services. You and look, don't look at one look at a bunch dozens, and you'll start to figure out a range of what people charge for the service off times. You'll also be able to see what they include. The exact features they include in their offering. That's gonna give you some sense of okay if I want to charge this, I need to offer all this stuff if I don't want to do that, then I'm only gonna be able to charge this and you'll get some idea off what you're ranges and then just look and figure out where you want to be. So what is it worth to you? And then what do you need to offer? What he willing to offer in? In order to do that? I've turned down plenty of projects because the rate for them wasn't something I was willing to accept for the work. So that's fine to do. But you need to find in a range where you can can feel comfortable. And ultimately you want to go in knowing or being confident in your pricing and that it's a good price. It's a fair price, so that when clients start toe, try and and get you to lower your prices and this and that that you're confident in what you're doing. Um, and you can be confident in telling them no. All right, The next thing, then the next question need to answer is how is it delivered? So one thing to think about, I assume you've probably bought something online at some point, Um, and especially what you want to think about is out buying something outside of the trust and marketplaces like Amazon or wherever. Maybe it's some obscure site or a cellar you don't know on E Bay. And just think back to that and you remember what it was like I got. I remember the first time I bought something from this site called No More rack dot com, which is They had commercials on TV. I don't know if they're still even around at this point, but back then they were they, you know, I had come across them and seen him in a number of places, and it's a legit site. They were a Google trusted store, but when you look at the site, it just looked like a rip off waiting to happen. And but they had something I really wanted. And so I obsessed over every detail of their terms of service. I checked all their security badges. I read every detail of how my purchase is gonna be delivered and all that, and I'm guessing that you may have experienced something similar to this before. So keeping that in mind now, put yourself in your client's shoes. They found somebody who says that they can do what the client needs done, but they know nothing about who you are or any of that, and they're about to drop several $1000. And it's not only the money, but they're gonna have you build something that to them is very important. It's It's kind of like their baby for a lot of clients. So there's a lot of anxiety and fear and uncertainty about this whole process. So you need to tell clients exactly how you're gonna deliver. You need to lay it out in detail. Tell them step by step, don't make it 17 steps kind of make it macro steps, but tell them how the process will go. Show them what it's gonna look like when they hire you. So they have some sense, like the biggest fear that people have or one of the biggest fears is fear of the unknown. So don't leave that just hanging there, get rid of the unknown, make it known. Tell them how you're gonna deliver so that they have a sense of what's gonna happen. They need that reassurance, the more detail, while still keeping it concise that you can give them the better and then just make sure that you actually do deliver in that manner. Otherwise, they're not gonna become a repeat client. They're not gonna become a referral or somebody that were first somebody to you, so Ah, that ultimately is in the end, what matters, right? Next is how our payments made. So I'll tell you what I do. So I charge a 10% nonrefundable free fee up front before I start doing anything. So if a client contacts me about a project on day, agree Okay, I'm gonna hire you 10% before I do anything nonrefundable. The then it's 60% and I'm a web developer. So I build websites. So once I have it built and I I build it on my servers and and do it in a way where they consistency it. But it's on my servers once they want it, they say, OK, looks good. I wanted on they wanted on their servers 60% before I move it to their servers. And then once I get it all set up and everything's done and they're like, OK, it's all good. 30% final payment. So that's what I do. The first thing is just to make sure to always have a contract. Don't do anything to you, have a signed contract and then still again, Don't do anything until you get that 10% down. If you're going to do it this way, I recommend you strongly highly, you know, tap my foot on the floor as hard as I can recommend that you get money up front. I did not start anything until I got that 10%. There's way too many people out there who don't have the money. No, they don't have the money and they're just trying to get as much as they can out of you, and they will waste your time if they're serious. They have any client who's ever been serious about. Project had no problem paying that 10% up front. So I don't care what they tell you. If a client won't pay you 10% up front, they're not serious. Move on before they waste your time. Another thing here is I never give the client of full version of what I'm providing until I get paid. So the thing to keep in mind is, once it's in their possession for in particular for me as a Web developer. Once I put it on their servers, their servers air their property. If I go on there and remove it, I'm removing something from their property. And I could be held liable for that so you can't legally remove it without their permission . So that's ask. You're just asking for disaster if you do that, or if you give them the full version before the, uh, the they pay you right, that is just your asking for disaster. So again, you know, if your developer build on your own servers and just let them access it if you're delivering something like ah, logo or give them reduce size virgins with watermarks, if you're writing, our goals may be only send them snippets or just like screenshots. So if they really wanted toe toe rip it off, they'd have to type it all out themselves and sort of defeat the purpose. But ultimately, I think you get the point. Never give the full version until you get paid, and the other thing about that is because you're allowing them to see it. They're gonna be more comfortable because they can see your actually doing it. Honest client is gonna be perfectly OK with that. Um, they can actually see that you're doing it and creating it, but you'll eliminate the risk of them not paying. Um And then, like I said, they pay that next 60% in order to get the full Herbert versions. Then once that's painted made, a payment is made you they give you the next 60%. Now, if you're doing something like delivering ah, logo and you giving it to them is the final thing, then maybe charge a little bit more up front and then, um, make them give you the full final payment before you give them the fuller version. But in my case, because I have the three different natural breakup, I could I could do it like this. And then what I would do is I want, like I said, I would help him with the set up. I get it all installed on their, um their servers and once was all done and everybody was like, Come by. Ah, it's great. Then I would ask for her, I'd get the final 30%. Now I have had clients who I sent the full version. They paid the 60%. I sent the full version two, and I never heard from him again. Yeah, it's not ideal, but getting 70% of the payment was better than getting, you know, zero or 10%. So, no, I've had that happen. But one thing I've never had happened is someone who they had me moving onto their servers and had me do the full set up and all that sort of thing and then then didn't pay me after I did that. So I've never had that happen. Usually, if they're gonna run, it's going to be after they get the full version. Which again is why you don't give him that till you get paid the final thing. This, then, is whatever you decide on your payment schedule. It should be in your contract on if you don't have a contract written up, there's a template called the Contract Killer in easily. Search on online by just searching for contact Killer. It's a great one. It works really well. It's what I've used as my template, and it's it's really good, especially for digital stuff, right? Next, you want to answer the question. What happens if something goes wrong. So at some point in your career, something's gonna go wrong with one of your projects and maybe your fault and maybe your clients. But ultimately it doesn't matter. You wanna have a process and peace for handing those issues? Course, we use the payment terms that I just laid out. It's gonna eliminate 90% of your problems because client backs out. At any point. You're gonna know where you're at in the process and whether payment is doing all that. Um, so again, that eliminates a lot of problems. But that said, you want to make sure you explicitly address how you handle issues you can sort of think of . This is your guarantee. But you know, what do you do? What do you do if something happens while you're building the project after it's on their servers months after the project is complete, you wanted address all these scenarios maybe in an f a Q or a guarantee section and specify you're how you're gonna handle those scenarios so you can alleviate those fears upfront. For example, one of the things that I did is I offered a 60 day guarantee on the websites I built. So for up to 60 days after we got all done, then they made their final payment. They could come back to me if something broke or wasn't working or something with what I did. Um, just stop working or was broke or whatever. They could come back to me, and I would fix it for free ID exceptions for if they made a bunch of changes or installed a bunch of stuff or they were secretly trying to get a new feature out of me like I wouldn't do any of that stuff. But by offering that guarantee a leave it a lot. A lot of the pressure on that last payment. They weren't so scared that when they made that last payment, then they would never hear from me again. If something broke and they were just out of luck, I they had that 60 day period. Also put a nice finite time limit on it for me by specifying that up front they knew they had to come within those 60 days on. And so I didn't get, you know, calls or emails. Three years later, from a client's a name, I you know, I updated. Ah, word 17 WordPress versions later, and it broke. Can you fix it like And they They knew there was a time limit. So again, just address all that stuff up front. The final thing then, is how do I get started? So you just want end off by telling your client exactly what they need to do next. And don't think this is obvious. A lot of for a lot of people, this might be the first time they're doing this. Ah, are just something that they're just It's not obvious to them. So you need to include language on your services page that tells them exactly what to do. Fill out the quote requests below. I'll be in touch with you and x amount of hours. The project is a good fit. Then we can jump on a phone call and talk it through, and you can decide if you wanna go ahead and with hiring me at that point. Okay? Something like that. Now, like I said, oftentimes this is going to include a client sending you some sort of quote. Request one thing without it. Just make the quote request form simple, especially at first like I just had, like, name email and message something simple along that and told him toe describe their project a little bit to me. Um, I wanted to get the submissions, especially early on. If you're new, you don't want it to be like crawling all over hot coals with shards of glass and orderto get people to contact you. You want to make it as simple as possible as you go and you get more work coming in and maybe you're getting work. That's not a good fit for what you do. You can add certain questions that will eliminate some of those people so you can make your form a little bit more difficult to fill out. That's gonna put a few more roadblocks for somebody who is just filling out a form or whatever, not paying attention. Um, so that's something that you can think about as you go, but starting off initially, I'll just keep it as simple as possible so you can get those people in. You can see what you're getting that's gonna give you feedback about what people want to hire you. Maybe you'll change the services you offer her the very least. Once you start talking to him on email, people just tend to believe more what you say when it's going back and forth in an email. So it's actually a little bit easier to sell at that point. So getting ultimately your your goal is to get submission, so keep it simple, all right. So, like I said, that was long heightening and take a deep breath. But again, I know it's a lot. But if you include these things on your services sales page, most freelancers don't you're asking, answering a ton of questions, concerns and fears that clients have up front. Um, and so they're just gonna be a lot more comfortable with submitting that quote crust form and also, when they come in a lot more ready and a better fit for what you do in your personality on so forth. So you should see an uptick in the amount of quote request you get because you've made them comfortable enough toe make that leap of faith and contacting you. You should also see clients that are a better fit for what you do. So again, that's your services sales page. Ah, one thing I would recommend here in terms of the actual building of it is keep it simple. There's there's templates out there. They're services like lead pages out there that have some of this stuff built for you. I use WordPress, and so I use L. A mentor. Elementos a really easy page billing, too, and they have a lot of templates built into it. On that you can then tweak and so forth, so don't you don't have to reinvent the wheel, make it look nice, make it organized and just make sure at some place in there you answer all 10 of these questions and you'll be just fine. So that is how to build your services sales page. 8. Create a Lead Magnet: this. Listen, let's talk about how to create a lead magnet, and with this you're sort of in rare air, so to speak. What I mean by that is by hunkering down and cranking this out, creating a lead magnet, you're doing something that most freelancers simply aren't going to do. So if you want an easy instant advantage over every other freelancer you're competing for clients against, just do this and that's it. So let's start this off by talking format. And the reality is you can do any format that you'd like audio video written graphical. It's really up to you. But these formats do tend to have different, instant perceived value. So the hierarchy, from best to lease, goes like this video first graphical audio, then written. Now that's a general rule, so maybe it doesn't apply in 100% of markets, but usually that's gonna be the case. So if you can do it video great. Do it as long as you condone it well. But if not a written pdf can be just fine to what it really more comes down to is the content than the format. So with that said, let's talk about that. So when it comes to the content, the first thing is to think quick. Win, not big win. And what I mean by that is, if you create a 50 page e book called The Definitive Guide to Creating the Perfect Logo, nobody is going to read it, at least not your clients, and you might have other designers, but they're not your target market. They're not gonna hire you for your services. So instead, something like a one page logo checklist. Four non designers things that they can go through and check their logo and see if it's a good logo. How many of the things that it hits? Matter of fact, I would probably don't know that right now today if you created it. So that's something that could be, ah, good value for someone who's a non designer and allow you to get people who are a good fit for your services. So again make it something that gives them an easy win. A one page checklist is far easier to consume and use than a 50 page e book, even though you may think the e book is more valuable. If I never read it. It doesn't matter. All right, The next up then, is strategy. So there is this. I'll call it insidious idea that exists in the marketing world. And it goes something like this. If I just focused on giving them value the like what I do and hire me. And I did that for years. I fell victim to that for a number of years. And that approach, will you get you some clients, but not near as many is if you use a little strategy and accept that the entire point of your lead magnet is not I'm gonna sit again, is not to make people like you, it's to establish authority and credibility. It's to make people trust you. Those are two very different things. So, understanding that then you wouldn't just create a one page checklist like I mentioned above it actually be two pages and the first is the checklist. But the second is an info section about the checklist. And this is where you get the chance to build your credibility and introduce your services . She might say something like, I developed this checklist when creating the logo for Inc magazine. Right? We're Where were speaking to credibility here who is an important project. I want to develop a system for nailing my logos every time. And this is the result. See how this sort of sounds like an about about the document. You could almost include this on the first page and then have the second page be the checklist. It seems like we're talking about the checklist, but in reality we're building credibility. And I said, This is the result. And of course, they love the logo. I've used it ever since for all my clients, and it's never failed. Of course, it's one thing to know what to look for. It's another to actually create a logo that meets all these criteria. So if you check your current logo on finance falling short on some of these items, don't hesitate to get in touch. I'd be happy to redesign in a way that checks all these boxes. So you see the difference between that, including that and not including that. And how that actually, um, you're not just putting out a checklist and hoping you're giving the clients a reason to hire you. That's what you have to dio. All right, finally, then, is the What? What should your lead magnet be Now? This one is a little bit tricky for me because I don't know exactly what freelance services you offer, what business you're in so forth. So it's a little difficult for me to get specific. However, I can give you one framework that tends to work in most markets and four most services. And so the the template looks like this. The top X mistakes insert name of target market make when hiring a insert what you are. So to give you some examples, you might do the top 10 mistakes memberships I owners make when hiring a developer or the top 10 mistakes business owners make. When hiring a logo designer, you could do website owners the top 10 mistakes dog owners make when hiring a dog walker. So hopefully can kind of see the formula there, and this works incredibly well for several reasons. First, the only people who were gonna be even interested that about that lead magnet are people considering hiring somebody. There's no reason to care about if you're not considering hiring somebody, so you immediately target and attract the exact kind of leaves that you're after, which is probably the best benefit of this. Overall, it's the most important thing. And then when you look at it from that perspective, for those people, it's a really hard topic to ignore. So they might be like, Well, wait, what mistakes? Um, I doing this right now what's gonna happen? Dang. And I better check this out and just make sure that's the essential conversation that they'll have. And that's the conversation. You want them to be happy. The third thing then, is now you get to set the criteria for how they evaluate the person they're going to hire. Ah, again, If there's one thing that you take from away from this lesson, let that be it. They don't know the criteria, right? They they don't know most people when they're hiring somebody, they don't know what criteria to evaluate somebody by. So if you give them the criteria, they're probably just gonna go with it. And since you're the one that gave them the criteria, they're more likely to hire you anyway. Oh, and yes, conveniently, you're gonna fit those criteria. Okay, so your lead magnet should essentially you be saying you need to make sure that your free units or does has, is whatever this, this, this and this, and you're just listening the criteria for what makes someone a good person to hire. So a simple example might look like, um, and using our same mistakes. Example Here. Mistake number one. Don't properly evaluate a portfolio, I might say a logo designer who doesn't have a robust, visually comparing, compelling portfolio is a big red flag. They really are good at what they do. They should be dying to show off their work. And even if they're new and have a hand in clients yet, they should be able to make up some logos just to show you what they're capable off capable of. They don't run, of course. That's why my portfolio includes over 50 samples. Of all the different work I've done. You get a clear picture of the kinds of work I'm capable of if my logo design services are a good fit for your needs. If you haven't yet feel for you to check out my portfolio at Loblaw dot com. So it's not just giving value, it's always tying it back to you and selling you in your services. That's what your lead magnet should do. And this kind of mistakes approach is a simple way to accomplish that. So that's that's creating the lead magnet. Ultimately, it's just a matter of sitting down and figuring out and writing it out or recording the videos or whatever and just knocking it out. Like I said, at the very beginning, most people aren't going to do this. So if you want an easy instant advantage, it's literally about whether or not you're willing to do the work. If you are, you could have this advantage on have it working for you. And if not, then you just got to work harder everywhere else. So again, just really strongly recommend that you sit down, knock this out, come up with something. It doesn't have to be 1700 pages. That can literally be a one page checklist, Um, or something like that. So anyway, that's creating your lead magnet 9. The 6 Elements of a High-Converting Landing Page: next up is getting people to download and consume nearly lead magnet. So the standard process it goes like this. Visitors come across your content, which could be a block post YouTube video podcast. Whatever that content points them at the end to your lead magnet. The visitor goes to that. You are l that you tell them to, which is called a landing page. They enter their name and email address. Usually they're gonna be asked to confirm their email address by clicking and email in a link that you send to them. They click the link in, their email is confirmed, and then you send them the lead magnet or a link to it via the email. Now I might sound a little involved, but it's actually a lot more simple than it sounds. Because your auto responder service, which is stuff like mail chimp, a Weber drip, etcetera. It does most of the work. It's going to send the confirmation email. It's gonna give you the opt in form or the people under their email address. It's it's gonna do all the confirming, and you can set up to send ah, the lead magnet. Once they're all confirmed and so forth. So it really handles all of that. Your big project in this is to build your landing page and make a landing page that is going to get people to actually want to download your league lead magnet subscribed your team a list and so forth. Now, the good news here is that if you get the topic of your lead magnet right, it virtually sells itself. So that's gonna be the biggest thing. And if you can get that right, you've won 90% of battle. Of course, we still want to create a landing page that does a good job of selling our lead magnet. And a good landing page has six elements. So those are the headline, the sub headline, the bullets, some sort of graphic or video subscribed form and then the proof. So I'm gonna pop up a example of one of my very own landing pages. You see, this is for how to pick a profitable niche. May even have seen this, and that's why you're here. And you can see on this all six elements there, and it really doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. That landing page converts just fine. People sign up to it every day, and so it again, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. So let's go three through each element. I'll tell you some of the important things about each one. So the 1st 1 is the headline. Now, in most cases, this will be the only thing that your visitors to the this page actually read. People are busy, they don't read all that much. And so the headline is big and bold, and that's probably going to be one of the few things that they act actually read. So you want to make sure it counts. The big thing with this is just to make sure you're clear and direct. Don't get too cute or flowery. O. R jam. A bunch of sales speak into it. I just want to keep it clear and simple and direct. Now, a common formula that I've used and people tend to use is the combination of a benefit, curiosity and proof. So to give you an example of that, you might have a headline that says the weird way doctors here they're cold, so the benefit would be carrying the cold. The curiosity would be the weird way. And then proof is this implied idea of doctors curing some sort of medical problem. So that kind of speaks to the built improve for implicit proof. Now, if that resonates with you and you feel comfortable taking shots at creating something like that, then go for it. But if not, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Really. If you want a simpler approach to it, just speak to the main problem that your lead magnet solves. So if you look at my my example from my own, uh, my own landing page, the headline is, Is your niche profitable? Find out. So it's pretty straightforward, pretty simple, and it converts. So I simply took the main problem that the lead magnets solves just finding a profitable freelance niche and turned it into a question. So if you're lead magnet, where the top X mistakes approach that I mentioned in the last lesson, your headline could be a simple as are you making these mistakes when hiring a blank and whatever it is that you a developer, a graphic designer, whatever. So it can really be that simple. Another headline that's worked really well for me is this template. So don't let another insert what you do ruin your and then insert the delivery herbal. So ah, some examples of that might be Don't let another developer ruin your membership site. Or don't let another graphic designer ruin your logo. Or don't let another dog walker ruin your puppy. So all of these are nearly impossible to ignore. If you're someone who is looking to hire service provider like this so you don't have to really reinvent the wheel and try to come up with something super creative, you can stick toe tried and true what works and and these are all gonna be compelling enough to get people toe pay attention. Now, the other good news here is most of the time. This is all you really need to get right to have a landing page that converts at a high rate because, like I said, this is often the only thing that people are going to read. So if you get the topic, you get the headline right, you're gonna get people who sign up so again you don't have toe overthink it too much. Now of course, we want to squeeze every last conversion out of this that we can, so we'll move on to some of the other elements. The 2nd 1 is the sub headline. Now, sub headlines get used for, or a lot of things and sales pages. But in this particular scenario, we're just using it to tell her prospect what to do and really to sum up the transaction that we're after as succinctly as possible again, if you look at mine, my example, it says, Enter your email address below and I'll send you the tutorial. So that really sums up the transaction. Any email, get the tutorial, and it really could be a simple is that Ah, of course, if there's any other steps that they need to take in order to get access to the lead magnet than explain those. But really, you should keep this as simple as possible. All they should really have to do here is enter their name and email, and even the name can be optional. You notice that mine doesn't include ah, the name on it, and that's because I'm making it a simple as possible as least overhead as possible for them to get signed up. Andi, that's what I want. So again, keep it simple. Keep the transaction simple on you'll get more people who who sign up. All right. The 3rd 1 then, is the bullet. So the bullets are where you do any sort of extra selling. If you feel like your headline isn't able to do all the selling you need it to. You can't fit everything in there that you want or, you know you're in a hyper competitive niche where you really neat need to persuade people to sign up. Bullets are are where you're going to do that now. I would include bullets no matter what. But in those particular scenarios there especially important, those are going to kind of push you over the top to getting people to sign up toe. Get your lead magnet. Now, a simple formula that I use four bullets is what I call feature advantage, benefit or fab. So the feature is the tangible part of your lead magnet. That process a magnet that prospect sees and interacts with the advantages Thea Vantage is of this feature compared to the alternatives and the benefit is what all that means to me is the prospect. Now I learned this particular technique, actually doing face to face sales. So I've sold cars, have sold shoes, I've sold knives. I've sold tools. I've sold a lots of things early on in in my life was pretty good at it. And whenever we were trying to build up the value of something, we used this featured man advantage benefit technique. So to give you an example from a shoe that might make a little bit more sense now when when you're selling a shoe, different shoes, they're gonna have different outsole so they might have a rubber soul. They might have a polyurethane soul. And so, if I were selling a polyurethane soul, right first, I would point to the polyurethane soul. I would tell the person, Look, the customer who's thinking about buying the shoes. Hey, so this you has a polyurethane outsole? That's important because it's something tangible they can see. It's always important to start with something as real as possible. It's a little harder with digital stuff, but you can still do it anyway, something riel intangible that you start with. So this is a polyurethane outsole now What's nice about a polyurethane outsole is it's lighter weight than rubber, and it's gonna be a lot more flexible than rubber without losing a ton of durability. So those are the advantages. It's lighter weight. It is more flexible, and it's still fairly durable. Okay, so those are advantages. A lot of people stop there, right? But you actually want to go to that next step and talk about the benefits. So what does that mean to me? Is the prospect. So then I would say so. It's lighter weight. It's more flexible. It's more durable. So you're not gonna feel like you're carrying around bricks all day on your feet or have the super stiff shoes that rub your toes raw. But yet you don't have to worry about them falling apart in two months because you use them a lot. So those air taking the advantages from that one feature and making them speak to the individual customer so that they understand what this actually all means to me. So that's the trail feature advantage benefit, and when you do that, you start with something riel, and then look, you point out advantages that they can see like you can show him how much more flexible is They can compare the weights of of the different rubber soul and the and the polyurethane soul, right, So they know you're telling the truth. The benefits then, are much more believable. And if you as you start stacking that up right, we would talk about the soul of the outsole. We talk about the upper leather up or whatever it is we talk about. The insole might talk about the stitching, etcetera, like you're building up the value as you do that you're piling on more and more benefits in their mind. So it's really a great teak technique for doing that. Now you have to take that and you have to transition that to the digital world. So let me give you an example of ah, more digital now that you have that concrete example so something I might say is I am I am I li magnets, I might say I'll show you a popular website that has tons of real world data on freelance niches and will show you exactly which ones are making the most money in which art so you can look for your niche and know if it's going to be profitable and avoid wasting a bunch of time. Now, as I read through that, hopefully some of those things stuck out to you. But I'm gonna go through them. So the feature is a popular wet websites. I'll show you a popular website. That's the feature. That's the real thing. That they can go and see right is that website. Some of the advantages has tons of real world data. We'll show you exactly which ones they're making the most money. Okay, So those air advantages of that website that make it different from other websites than the benefit is you'll know if you're niches profitable, right? So certainty and then also your avoid wasting a bunch of time tryingto come up with services that you don't know for. They're gonna be profitable or not. Okay, so that's how I would market me talking about this particular website, which is something that I'm gonna I would cover in my lead magnet. Now, if you're wondering, the website is fiber. Um but that that's how I sell the lead magnet in the information in it. Okay, so that I want to make that distinction in the lead magnet. We're not telling them what the answer is. I'm not telling him than it that it's fiber. I'm purposely not telling them to create curiosity about what's in it in the lead magnet and then in the lead magnet. I will tell him what it is, and then I'll use that to Then go and tell my services. Okay, so what you want to do is you just want to go through your lead magnet and pull out all of the features. So again, if you're using the top X mistakes approach, each one of the mistakes is a feature that you then want to take over and use the fab technique on it to create your landing page. So to give you one more example toe, hopefully sign drive this home. We will take our example from the previous lesson where I talked about the mistake Mistake number six, which was to not properly evaluate a portfolio. That's the answer. That's what's in the lead magnet. We have to now sell that answer on our landing page. Okay, so we're not going to tell them that that that that is what we're gonna talk about? We're not going to say, Hey, I'm going to tell you why a portfolio is important. You've just given away the answer. Instead, you might say something like this. So I'm gonna tell you about mistake number six. And that is the proof a seasoned logo designer will always have. If this is missing, it's a huge red flag, and you can safely avoid a costly mistake. Plus the key criteria to look for to separate the pros from the wannabes. So you can be confident your logo designer will deliver you a great logo. Okay, so the feature is mistake number six, which is the proof now in the lead magnet. We know that's the portfolio, but we're not telling them that. Here, OK, we want to create curiosity. What is this proof? And then we reveal it in the lead magnet. Next, the advantage is it allows you to identify a huge red flag and then the benefit safely. Avoid a costly mistake. Okay, so that is the first actual sentence. I didn't do the second sentence because I want to leave that for you to try. So look at that second sense it and see if you can pull out the featured the advantage and the benefit. All right, so those are the bullets. Next is the graphics and or the video. Now this is similar to what we talked about when we talk about format for your lead magnet , it's a good, better best scenario. Truthfully, you could even potentially leave this out. I've done it where I I didn't include a graphic or video, and they still converted. But it's better to have it if you can. And it's best to have a video if you can, as long as you can meet a certain threshold of quality. So again good, better best if you're doing a graphic. The big thing is to make it look like whatever they're going to download your the grab. The whole idea behind the graphic is to make the thing tangible as possible because we're talking about digital pixels, so you want to try and make it tangible if you can. So if it's a checklist, the graphic should look like a checklist. If they're getting access to video, the graphic should look like a video etcetera. Now, if you can, I recommend hiring someone to create this for you unless you're a graphic designer. And you know how to do all this stuff than by all means. Do you think? Um, but there are some reasonably priced gigs on Fiverr that'll do it for you. Ah, so that's that's something that I would look at, what you really want to have. Someone who knows what they're doing. Create this. If you just can't do that or don't want to do that, then there's a free you can use a free tool like Canvey dot com. Ah, that's what I use because I'm not a graphic designer. My graphics pills a. So camba dot com actually has a bunch of different pre built designs, and it that book covers. They have, you know, video thumbnails on all that sort of stuff. And so it helps you to have a something you can start with and then sort of tweak that, you know, already kind of looks good. So I would recommend using something like that. There's other alternatives out there as well, so you can use whatever you prefer, but something like that, Um, if you're doing video, it's actually pretty simple. It's a lot simpler than you might think. You just use the landing pages that you're building as an outline. So you convert the headline supply headline into an opening sentence or two. You read through each bullet and then tell them to enter. Their information will form and you'll send them the lead magnet. So if we're looking at my landing page from before, I might say something like this. Is your freelance niche profitable? Do you know for sure you could make money offering the services you're offering? If not, why not find out for sure? When you enter your email address below, I'll send you a free copy of my how to pick a profitable niche online tutorial. Inside, you'll learn. And then I would just go read through the bullets you spent all that time doing fact technique. Use it here, redo the bullets and then finish with again. All you need is to enter your name and email address in the box is provided, and I'll send their tutorial right over. I'll see you over there. That's it. You know, it's really nothing special on. You can create a video that that easily, so as long as you can get the audio quality in the production quality to a certain threshold. Um, that's a really great way to go. And you've already got all the content. You've already got your script written by creating your landing page. All right, Next up is the subscribe form. I mean, this is the most self explanatory. You need a form for them to enter their email address. But there are two quick things. First off, this will be given to you by by your auto responder service provider. Now, if you don't have ah service provider like this, then then you need to get one. It's beyond the scope of this class, but I would just take some time toe, look at different ones and figure out which one is a good fit for you. But if you're doing Lee generation, you need one. But please don't try. I know I got developers in the in the audience, so please don't try setting something up manually on your own machine or anything like that . It's just gonna be a nightmare. You'll be miserable. You have all kinds of problems with deliver ability and that sort of thing. So unless you just know this sort of thing email, deliver ability and all that stuff inside and out. Just use the service. They're not that expensive. That's what their entire job is to do is get your emails, wait listed and provide all the features and all that sort of stuff just is a lot easier. So again you want to use on auto responders service. Now I use a Webber Webber used to kind of be the king in this space, but there's been a lot of competition that has moved in, and it's sort of kind of fallen off a little bit. But they lately have added some more features to keep up, and they're really reliable when it comes to email deliver ability on. I've been with them for over a decade, so that's sort of why stick with him. But there's also mail chimp, drip, get response and just I mean, there's a ton others, so you just have to kind of look it up and figure out what works for you. That's the first thing the second thing I kind of already alluded to. But you just keep the form simple. Like I said, my mind only asked for their email address. The less information you asked for, the higher the conversion rate will be Now. The one caveat with that is the less information you asked for, The less qualified, they'll be as well. So ah, you know that there's a trade off there. But if you're just starting out, I think going simple is the way to go. And then later on, when you get really good at this and you're a master, then you can decide if you want to ask more information in order to better qualify your leads. Okay, But, you know, let's down the road. If your new don't know exactly what you're doing, it can get off track pretty quick. So I would just stick with keeping it simple on then kind of go from there, all right. The final thing, then, is proof and just a little funny side note for me. I think it's really strange. It's interesting, I guess. How little proof you need to get people to sign up for things on the Internet. People are actually pretty sort of open minded in general and so forth. Um, you know, because if you have, you never done this against thing like you need a mountain of stuff and for some things you do. But not for this, like I've had. I've had landing pages where I had no proof. I still got very high opt in rates. That's why I say, If you get the topic gray and you get the headline right, some of this stuff you can get away with not having it. That said, if you do put some some form of proof on your landing pages, you will see an increase in people who sign up. So if you have it, you should add it to get as much out of it as you can. Now. The simplest former proof is a testimonial, which is exactly what I use on my landing pages. So if you could get testimonials from from current students or from current clients and put him on their current readers of your lead magnet and put it on there, then that's even better. Another one is logos. So will pop up an example from the home page of my website, and you'll see that I have these logos here of these logos. They mean certain things to different people. Certain people know who these are these actually targeting some very different specific industries, and so you know, when they see those, that's just an element of proof of always worked on projects for these people. So you know, that just helps to add credibility, to tow what I do and what I have to say. That said, by far the best kind of proof that you can get is what I call social authority. So what that is is it's a testimonial from someone who has authority in your niche. So if we take a look at the logos right, I've worked on projects for Inc magazine and Michael High and so forth. If I had, I do have testimonies for some some of these, but they're not, ah, 100% relevant, which is why I don't include them. But if I had a testimonial from Michael Hyatt that said, I've taken John, I've read John's tutorial. His territorial is he's going to send you right here, and it's the most amazing thing ever. People who know Michael Hyatt, people who read his blawg people who follow him etcetera like they would be much more likely to just go ahead and often er, people who at least know who he is. So that kind of proof, that kind of credibility is getting an established figure like that to vouch for what you do. Effective, it can be very mind boggling. It's very effective. So if you can get that, do it and use it because it'll work wonders for you. All right, so there you go. Those are all the different elements of your landing page. The six things that a good landing page has. Big thing. Don't overcomplicate building it. You know, I'm a develop murdered myself. I sort of mentioned this earlier, but I still use WordPress and L a mentor because there's little reason for me to code all of this stuff from scratch. It's not going to improve. Uh, my my opt in rates. So make it easy on yourself and just get it built and functional. WordPress l. A mentor lead pages. Any of the other services that click funnels any other ones out there that do this kind of thing for you? You know, use something like that and just get it built and focus primarily on the content you're putting into it. Make the design functional, but you're not going to get just dramatic increases in in conversion by, you know, having a blue background versus a gray background. Necessarily. Okay, just really focusing on the content, keep it simple, and and and then go from there. So again, that's that is creating your lead magnet landing page. 10. My 5-Step Blog Post Formula: this. Listen, we're gonna talk about how to post content to your blogger. We're gonna be talking about really the nuts and bolts of creating the content. So your funnels now set your sails page lead, magnet landing page. Now, you just need to start creating content that attracts people likely to hire you and gets them to sign up to get your lead magnet. And this is the thing that you're gonna be doing on a regular basis. So I'm gonna go throw it through and show you what I dio. So it all starts with one core piece of content each week. Now you can do this daily. In fact, if you've seen some of my other courses or follow me online for any amount of time, you'll see me recommend that. And I think it's a good idea to work towards that. How, If you're brand new to content marketing, I recommend starting out once per week because it gives you time to think through each part of this each piece of content and take the time to get it right. And then as you get used to the process and get comfortable with it, you can up it toe twice a week, three times a week every day, etcetera. So with that said, Let's go ahead and break down. How to create content that is gonna attract the right people and also so your services air sell people on signing up for your lead magnet. So the first thing is the topic and title. Now again, as with the lead magnet, this is the most important part. If you get the topic right, you've won 90% of the battle. So the the and Really, that's because the topic is how you target. It's how you attract the right people who are likely to hire you for your services, so to work. Through an example, let's say I write a blogged post titled How to Make Your Own Own Dog Food on a Budget sounds like a perfectly, perfectly reasonable title. But if you think about it, who is the most likely? Who is that title most likely to attract the attention off? So you'd have passionate dog owners for sure, because if they're wanting to make their own dog food, they would we would assume they're passionate. Do they want to make homemade dog food as opposed to commercial dog food. Yes, Do they have money to spend on homemade dog food? Maybe not. If they're interested in a block post on how to make it on a budget. Are they willing to pay a premium price for homemade dog food again? Maybe not. If they're, they're attracted to this budget conscious title. Now. If what I'm selling is higher priced premium homemade dog food, then I'm not really attracting the most ideal people with that title and topic. And so while lots of people might like that post, it's less likely to lead to a bunch of sales of my dog food because it's not targeting the right people now. Instead, I might try something like the best ingredients to use in your home a dog food. Now that headline is more likely to attract people who just want the best dog food, regardless of the price. So the point is, the topic or title you choose will naturally appeal to certain people. So you want to make sure you're always appealing to the people that are your ideal clients , and you need to know who that is. But that's why this is the most important part, so really think it through. What I recommend is you take a week and figure out 52 topics. Entitles That's one for each week of the upcoming year. Don't start writing content until you have all 52 figured out. Put them into a spreadsheet or a document, so you have your entire next year's worth of content planned out. Getting that off your plate is a huge stress reliever, so you don't have to sit there and constantly come up with content every week. You've already got it all planned out. You've done the research, and now it's done. And I'll talk a little bit in a later lesson about a way that you can do that based on real world data. So you know that the topics you're picking are ones that are are going toe work, are there. They're highly likely to work because it's been researched. But again, we'll get to that in a leader lesson. So again, just think of your ideal client and all the problems they face and getting the result they're after. Keep your topics problem focused, and you'll generally gonna be okay. Teach people how to solve them and you'll usually stay on the right track. You can use Google. You can look at other bloggers in your niche. You can look at books on Amazon. There's a ton of sources for content ideas out there. You just sort of have to dig in. And like I said in the later lesson, we'll talk more about that. All right. The second thing, then, is the framework. So this is the framework. What? You have the topic in the title now. This is the framework of how you actually create the content. Now I have an analogy that I use here, so ah, you know that some of the best home run hitters in history of baseball also have some of the highest strikeout percentage is. So if you take someone like Babe Ruth, who is by most people, considered one of the greatest hitters of all time, he also led the American League in strikeouts five times, so as one example. So when it comes to your content, what I'm getting at is we're not looking for home runs, right? If that happens, great. But we're not trying to go viral or anything like that. We're looking for consistent base hits. Consistency is king when it comes to content marketing, and that's why I use a framework for all the content and create helps me be consistent in creating content that is of a sufficient quality. Is problem focused, solves problems, attracts the right people and ultimately leads people further down into my freelance funnel . All right, so the framework that that I use has five parts to it. So the 1st 1 is the plot problem solution intro. The second is the story. Third is the lesson point or opinion that you want to get across. Fourth is the inspiration. Peace and five is the pitch, so we'll start with the problem solution intro. So you want to introduce the problem you're addressing and reference the solution you're offering. And the big focus here is Why? Why should the reader read this post at all? So let's take our earlier dog food. Example. The best ingredients to use in your home. A dog food. I might start that post by saying, Did you know that certain foods are bad for your dog, no matter how high quality they are and what not obvious things like sugar In fact, there's a strict list of ingredients and Onley these ingredients you should use to ensure the best possible health outcomes for your dollar. We'll show you what those ingredients are in this post. So I've introduced the problem right. It's this idea that there certain ingredients that may not be obvious to you that are bad for your dog. The solution is this ingredients list that you know it's safe. Okay, that's straightforward enough. But it's important to stick a paragraph like that at the beginning of your contents. You hope readers in and give them a compelling reason to read your post. You have to give them reasons why they should read. Next is the story. So I talked again a lot about ah creating content and its importance in in content marketing, Irian, creating context and all that. But just to reiterate, never forget that content marketing is about creating context. It's about getting your readers to know like and trust you. And you can Onley do that by telling your story and letting them inside your life in your dirt and your journey. So always make sure to include the story. Now, as I mentioned in previous lessons. You have the two stories of the transformation story and the discovery story, and you can sort of massage. Those as you want in this case will go ahead and use the discovery story, and we're gonna talk about how did you figure out and or discover the solution? So let's take our dog food ingredients list. I'm a might say something like this all started for me when my little Fluffy started acting funny. He's normally energetic and fun loving, but for two days in a row, we just laid around all day, slept way more than usual and was consistently having am Norrell abnormal bowel movements. So I started doing some reacher research and discovered, So I'm leading into the content by telling the story of how I discovered this again. This is really important for you to create that context, to get let them know that you have a dog named Fluffy, even show a picture of your dog named Fluffy, Right? That's a thing that dog owners like to do is share their pictures and so forth. It helps create affinity. It helps then get to know you and like you and trust you more so again, you really want to tell these stories in your content. It is the point for you. That's how you build the context. So by the time they get to your sales page, they know your dog fluffy. They, you know, maybe know your your spouse and your kids. If you have that, they know you know a little bit about how you grew up on DWhite, you believe and what you value in all of these things. All of that's gonna lead to the point where by the time they get to your sales page, they already trust you, and then yourselves Page becomes an afterthought. So again, these stories air really important and so falling on from then how I started that you just flesh out the story and how you discovered ingredients list. So, as I've sort of mentioned, this does a ton of things that makes the post naturally entertaining. It demonstrates that you can relate to the problem and makes people trust you more, gives your solution instant credibility. It turns it your solution into a discovery. That's exciting because it's something like we like adventure. We like discovery, so it turns your solution into to that and again, as I've harped on it gives you cup gives context about you and your life, which breeds trust. So it's really important that you include these stories. Ah, yes, you want to sell your services and get people to sign a fear, lead, magnet and all that. But the way you do that long term is to build a relationship with your audience. You may have heard people talk about Hey, you need to build a relationship with your audience or you need to build a relationship with your your mailing list. The way humans build relationships is through stories, so and it doesn't have to be anything riveting, necessarily. Just think of all the times that you've met someone in your chatting face to face. You still share stories about your life that are relevant. Whatever topic comes up, none of the stories their blockbuster movies per se, but there enough to help you both feel some kinship. That's what you're after. So don't make up a story. Don't try to overproduce a story. Don't think there isn't a story. There's always is. You felt you figured this stuff out somehow, so there's always some sort of transformation or discovery story. Just tell the story of how you did it. Keep it simple, and it will be believable. Next is the lesson, opinion or point. So this is the again, the lesson or the opinion that you want to share. This is what people usually refer to as the meat of the content. It's the actual content in your content, and again it's important. It's what makes your post informational. It's what you're really is, what your readers want or think they want, and it makes people feel like they got something from it. But you also don't want to be labor the point and extend this this part out too long because it's easy for this part to become the most dry part of your content and you actually lose people. Fact. You should deliver this part of your post and as tight a package as possible. That's something that's easy for readers to consume. They get value from an implement. You spend too much time going through this, you're just gonna lose people now. One caveat on all that is, if you ever done line, get into creating content for say courses like this and so forth to different context. People come into courses with the mindset of their going to sit down and learn something, so it's a little bit different. So if you if you decide ever create products down the line where you're doing information products, it's okay to get a little bit more into this stuff, cause there in that mindset of going to school, although you definitely still want to include all of the different parts of this, so but again, if you spend too much time on this in your post, you're just gonna lose people. They'll never get to your pitch then, and they'll just eventually stop reading. So using our dog food example, we just list the ingredients that we mentioned at the beginning, maybe a paragraph or two on why these ingredients and that's about it. We just give him the list. Ah, and that then that's it. We don't belabor it too much. Now we'll talk a little bit later because you may have heard from other people who talk about content marketing that you're not supposed to give away the answer. In your post, you're supposed to supposed to use your post and the answer would be in one of your products. I'm gonna show you why it's different or talk about why it's different. Four freelancers in here in a little bit, but again, in our example, we would just give away the the ingredients list. All right, The next part is the inspiration piece, so I really kind of went into this in an earlier lesson. But it is. This is where we include it in our post or in our content here. Ah, and so again, it's just about youth. You looking at someone implementing what? What you're asking them to do the content that you're sharing with them and figuring out OK , what are the difficult realities of this acknowledging that reality, reassuring them and then encouraging them to take action? So we're talking about the dog food example here, you might say something along the lines off. Hey, look, I know that getting into all of this a lot of this stuff can be overwhelming and so forth again. It seems like there's so much that you have to do to really take care of your dog, but I just want you to know that. You know, you're you're trying. You're doing the best that you can, and you're doing more than a lot of people do. So don't Don't be too hard on yourself. Keep trying to do the best that you can. Ah, and you're gonna be just fine. You're gonna be doing right by your dog or or by your pet on. If you just keep doing that, then then you're gonna be OK. Okay, so, you know, it's a little bit of a weird example, but that gives you some idea of how you can can use that to how you can use that inspiration to encourage them and get them into action and so forth. All right, The nice thing to about doing this this framework this way is that the the the pitches isn't it's. There's a nice segue way between the inspiration peach peace and the pitch. Because if you really sit back and think about it, right, the problem that they're having the overwhelmed them, they might feel the difficult reality that you just acknowledged. That's sort of what your services are there for, right? And so it just creates sort of a natural. Ah, lied lied. And now this is what I mentioned earlier where I was gonna talk about this. This gets a little nuance and technical and why it's so important that we specify that what we're doing here is content marketing four freelancers Because most content marketers you'll get advice from our selling information products. And their advice would be not to give away the solution that we just gave away. Ah, in the previous section in the section earlier. Instead, they say that that's what you're in for products be your your your pitch should be for them to buy your stuff that solution so forth. That's the typical sort of content marketing approach. Otherwise you're just not giving them a compelling reason to buy. You've given them the answer. So all that is true if you're selling information we're not. We're selling services and so are compelling reason. Toe hire us is always the same. The problem our services solve is always the same will do it for them so I can know how to make homemade dog food. But actually making it is still a lot of work, and maybe I don't always do it right. Or maybe I just don't want to do it. So the cell is to solve that problem. The doing it for them. Problem the doing it right problem, the saving them time problem, the potentially saving them money problem so you can give away the how is a freelancer, which is a huge advantage for you and your content marketing. So once you've done that, it's simply a matter of Segway ing into introducing your services. So continue higher dog food. Example. I might say something along the lines of following on from the inspiration. Hey, you're doing a good job. Do the best you can keep at it and so forth. And by the way, I'm here to help. Because you and I both know knowing the ingredients to use is one thing. Actually, making the food and keeping it affordable is another. That's where I come in. I make homemade dog food for dog owners. Whether you're simply too busy or just not interested in doing yourself, I can help, and usually I can do it for cheaper than if you did it on your own, because I sort by so much of these ingredients I get both discounts anyway. If you want your dog to eat the best food possible, but don't want a hassle with making yourself. Give me a shout and I'd be happy to do it for you. You can get all the details on what I offer. A blah, blah, blah blah dot com. Okay, she can see how there's a natural lead in from the inspiration piece into the pitch. It's your just basically saying, Hey, I'll help you with this difficult reality that that you're facing So you want to keep this short? You want to keep this simple? You don't want to over sell here. It's a soft sell. It's just merely an introduction to your service is not a full on cell of your services. You do that on your services sales page. So all you're after here is getting them to click through, and then you let your services sales page do all the cells work from there. Now, one of these things, you know, post like this isn't gonna you know I'm gonna make you 1000 sales. It's the Coleman nation of doing this week after week after week for months and years and so forth. That adds up And in my experience, if you do this consistently, it eventually becomes just a river of incoming work that you really couldn't stop even if you wanted to. Because you have so much content out there. So that's the second piece. That's the framework again, just toe to sort of recap. Everything's I know That was a ah, little bit of a long section. It's the problem solution intro, the story, the lesson or opinion or point inspiration piece and then the pitch. And that's it. And you can literally just do that over and over and over with every single one of your posts, just changing the topic and talking about different things, all right. The final thing, then, is the format. So you know, thus far, I've referred to every all the content. We're talking about his posts, and I was just mainly for the sake of brevity. And in doing this. In truth, though, your content can be whatever format it can be a block post and be a YouTube video could be a podcast episode. It's actually even better if you do all three. In fact, that's exactly what I do. I write the blogged post first and then now for me, this helps toe clarify my thinking and get what I want to say into a cohere format. It forces me to edit and stay on topic, and I can ramble and go off. One changes pretty easily, so that's important for me. But I write the post and then I record a video, and I mostly stick to what I wrote, but I don't necessarily read it Word for word. I don't know. I don't want to sound robotic. I want to sound natural, not just like I'm reading in a monotone voice. Plus, once I start talking, I usually want to add a finger into as I go along. So I do that. I allow myself to do that, but I mainly stick to what I wrote so that I stay on topic and don't ramble too much. And then that video gets edited and uploaded a YouTube. The audio of that video gets ripped and then mastered and uploaded as a podcast episode. So now that one bog post has become three pieces of long form content and then long form content, not a too little too minutes snippet videos for me a lot of this stuff is 10 15 20 minute videos, so it's a long form content, three pieces off of one writing that I did. So that's what I recommend that you work toward. Now, if if you're just starting out, you're not willing or able to do that right off the bat, that's fine. Get the writing the block post down and start with that. That's better than doing nothing. But you really do want to work toward repurpose ing your content and working towards being able to do all three overtime. You just get more exposure, more audience and ultimately, more clients, right? So that is posting the content to your blawg and, as a subsidiary, YouTube and all the different places out there and so forth. 11. Syndicate Your Content For Maximum Reach: Now we're gonna talk about syndicating your content if we again take a step back and look at what we've done. Up to this point. The thing to keep in mind is quality. Long form content is actually correct. Court. Quite rare. You know something that can hold your attention for 4 to 5 pages, or 10 to 20 minutes. That's entertaining, informative, inspiring and also sells your stuff that's fairly uncommon. So when you do hit that sweet spot just right, you want to make sure you get as much value out of it as you can, and it reads, reaches as wide an audience as possible. And so there's three keys to doing that repurpose, repurpose and ready purpose. Ah, and I really do mean that I'm kind of joking, but it really is that important. So we already talked about producing your content and more multiple formats block post video podcast, etcetera. Another way to re purpose is to syndicate now. I first heard about this concept in relation to radio so many of the most popular morning radio shows Air syndicated. You might know this, but the show creators do one episode of the show, but it gets played on radio stations all over the country. So one example is the Elvis Duran show is a show I listen to, and they were sure they record the show in New York City. But I listen to it on my local radio station in Des Moines, Iowa. In fact, they're syndicated on 75 markets around the United States, so it's create once, and then it gets played and syndicated everywhere, and what they're really doing is they're meeting people where they're at. If his show wasn't syndicated, yeah, I could probably download an app or purchase some service toe. Listen to it. But most people aren't going to well, just listen to what's on their local station. So they're putting it in front of people on meeting them Where they're at. That is the idea behind syndication. That's what we want to dio. So what I do is I take my block post that I published on my own website, and I republish it on medium dot com, linked in, and then ah site called dev dot to, which is a niche specific site for me. Um and then I include a link at the to the original article at the bottom of each one of those that says This was originally published on John Morris online dot com, and that's it. So it's exactly the same. Post has just add the little link that links back to the original original article, and I post the exact same content, the exact same featured image, all of that stuff on all these different sites. Ah, now, yeah, people could find my blawg, But there are audiences on all of these different states that I want to reach, so I make it easy for them to find. I goto where they're at. I do the same with my video recording uploaded to YouTube, Facebook and ah, I G TV if it's under 10 minutes, although I have started splitting them up actually recently, so that I can put it on there if there longer in 10 minutes now, I could post links on all those different places to the YouTube video and get try to people get try to get people to link through to the YouTube video, but it's just gonna get less traction. People don't like doing that for the most part, so if you just posted natively. It's just gonna get more traction. I also have my podcast. So that gets submitted. The iTunes Google play stitcher tune in, and they're several over others that in a 100% remember. But that's all sort of set up automatic. I just apply low my podcast to Soundcloud and everything set up toe. Read that RSS feed and away we go. So again, it's simply about putting your content in front of his many people as you can now. One thing that's interesting about this, and another reason why you want to do this is that sometimes the same article were performed different on different sites that might crash on, linked in but blow up on medium or vice versa. But if you never post it there, then you just never know that. So syndicate your content, all the platforms that makes sense for your target market, spend some time researching and figuring out where they hang out. No dev dot to is a great example. And for most markets, that would be completely useless. But for me, it's a perfect place. It's, ah, high traffic site. There's a lot of good people there, and I'm frankly, in a little bit early on the site. So Ah, that's a really good example of a niche site that you want to try and find in research relevant to what it is. Ah, that you do. So again, syndicate your content get is front of as many eyeballs as you can. And don't be stingy of about just keeping everything on your site. One other thing, just to mention I know some people might wonder about duplicate content, so most of these sites that you post on I know dev dot to medium. Um, I don't don't necessarily know about linked in, but most of them. When you post it, you can put in what's called a canonical u R L. So just look for that. Sometimes you have to hit the advanced settings or so forth where you have to post it through another service, like when I post a medium actually use Appier toe automatically posted over the medium. And when you do that, you can specify the canonical Earl. Essentially, what that does is it tells the search engines that this was originally posted on my site so that I don't have any issues with the duplicate. You are the duplicate content so forth. The other thing is, is that, you know, all my stuff is time stamped and my stuff it was post on my site first, and I include the link at the bottom of all those other places that says this is originally published. Search engines were smart enough to know that people republished content all the time and and and do this sort of thing, so they're smart enough to figure that out. I really don't worry about it at all in that sense, so just do those couple things and you'll be good to go. 12. How & Where to Post Your Content on Social Media: next, let's talk about posting to show social media. So I've shown you two different are only two ways to repurpose your content. This is the third, so the next What we do is we chop up our long form content into smaller, more concise chunks, that air gonna generally play better on sites like Instagram and Twitter and so forth, and we post them to these sites. So specifically, I take my YouTube videos. I pull out sort of key moments and insights or things that I think you are going to play well, and I create several little clips all less than about two minutes long. And then I post these clips like I said, the instagram, Facebook, Clinton Twitter each day. So to give an example what my posting schedule look like on Monday opposed the long form block posts, and I published that my block and I syndicated like I mentioned. Then on Tuesday, I I post the YouTube record the video on Monday and do all the editing videos all ready to go but actually uploaded that night. But then I on Tuesday actually publish the video on YouTube on the podcast and syndicated on the different places as I mentioned so that the video goes up on Tuesday, Wednesday. Then I take the first clip that I've created, and I post that to social media. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etcetera. Thursday is the second clip. Friday is the third clip you know, if I don't typically post on weekends, and that's not because it doesn't work it. In fact, you can often get more traffic on weekends because fewer people are posting. But for me, it's just a personal thing. I spend that time with my family and so forth, but you can absolutely create more clips and post those on the weekends if that's something that you want to do. If you do post on the weekends, Sunday evening tends to be a good time, so just that's a little tip for you, at least right now. Um, Bo. That said, What I want to do is on a hop over to the computer on a show show, show you some of some examples of how I cut up this content and how it flows from my long form content so four so you can see some real world examples of how to do this. So let me run through a few examples of cutting up your content and putting it on social media. And so what I'm going to start with is actually the full the full post here, the long format content. This is a YouTube video that I created. I uploaded it here and here Towards the end. I have a little snippet that I took and I I cut out. I'm gonna play this real quick being what's important? One starting And this this, frankly, is a pet. People mind when with business in general, not just sort of freelancers, because I watched family member after family member of mine do this while I'm sitting there telling them not to do it and I've watched is their businesses. Businesses have failed because they didn't recognize what matters most went starting, which is revenue. Now, that might sound obvious, but okay, so I go on for another minute or so on where I make this point about the most important skill that you can learn is as a freelancer is how to sell your services. Okay, so I took that little about a two minute snippet, and I cut it out, rendered it in in my I used temptation my my software. And then now I come over here and has posted here on Instagram the most important skill to learn as a freelancer. It's that two minutes snippet I come over here. It's posted here on Twitter. I come over here on linked in, and it's posted here on linked in Come over Here to my Facebook page and has posted here on my Facebook page. So I took 12 minutes section of about a 15 to 20 minute video, and I clipped it. And now I posted across all of my social media sites. And then I'll take another clip and I'll create. Render that, and I'll post it again the next day and the next day and the next day. So this is how you take your long form content. You clip it out and then post it on all the different social media platforms, those little small clips. They play better on all these sites. They get people toe Teoh to see who I am to get them to follow me in all these different sites, and you'll notice that the bottom here I say get all my free tutorials at johns free toots dot com, and I'll just tell you that whenever I do this the you know, someday I'm human. Some days I'm lazy and I don't post there. I get busy and I don't post eso will be honest about that. But the days ideo I get more email subscribers on the days that I don't think it's consistent. So again, when you do this, you know, it just it's going to get you more subscribers, more people paying attention to you and ultimately more people Ah, that are going to purchase your services or invest in your services. And one of the great things about this is if we come over here to Instagram, let me go and click this up here. You know, you might think Well, I don't have a big following here, but I Honestly, I don't have a big following on. I mean, I got 64,000 YouTube subscribers like 7000 or some on Facebook and etcetera. I have, like, eight or 900 on Instagram because I just didn't do it for a lot of years. So I'm in the process of building it up. But the thing is, is these Hashtags You can put your content on those hashtags they're going to show up in the latest People are going to see them. And if you put out good content, people are gonna like them and it's going to become popular. And now it's gonna be listed at as one of the top posts for that hash tag. Some of these hashtags get millions of views. So you can right now, today create a piece of content, put it on social media and start getting people viewing it. You don't need to build up the following. These things are designed to surface content, using hash tags and keywords and so forth. So ah, again, you don't have to spend ah, ton of time building of falling or have a huge falling to do this. You can do it right now today. So anyway, I wanted to show you an example of how you would take your long form content, clip it up and put it on the different social media sites. So there you go. OK, so seven back over here. If you look at all of this, what we've done is we've taken one piece of written content and turn it into an entire week's worth of content. And we're publishing every day across multiple Platt platforms syndicated in all these different places. So the bottom line is, you're gonna reach as many people as you absolutely can. The people who want to consume your content are they're not going to miss it. It's gonna be everywhere. And then, of course, all of this content points back to your lead magnet and ultimately your services. So hopefully you it's a lot easier to see now how over time, if you're doing this week after week after week after week, it's all gonna snowball. You almost can't lose as long as you're following the framework and getting the topics entitles right and are producing semi decent quality content, it's gonna snowball on you, and you get better at it as you do it. So you just got to keep at it and be as consistent as you can, and you're gonna build up this huge cachet of content, all sorts of way for Pete, ways for people to find you and routes for you to get hired and so forth. Your problem is not gonna be that people don't know about you or can't find you right. So that's really the big secret to using content marketing. To sell your services is just overwhelming the system with the amount of content that you're creating. But actually, it all just goes back toe one piece of written content. You only have to generate it once. And then you just repurpose it syndicated and so forth to the max. So that's the big idea again. Hopefully you can see now that just how effective this convenient, how you can use this to really get your name out there on sell your services. 13. Data-Driven Content Ideas: this lesson. I want to cover how to come up with content and he is an in particular contract or data driven content ideas. And to do that, we're going to use this tool called uber suggest, so you can just search for it and Google uber suggest, and then just click on this top top link here. So this is a tool created by a guy named Neil Patel, who is a guy who hopes teach people about getting traffic and so forth. And he has this tool on this site, which is very useful. So the first thing that we're gonna do is I'm just gonna enter a keyword and I'm gonna do something like this. I was in the membership site niche. So we'll just go ahead and type in membership site and what this is going to do Is this going to give you an idea of search volume? Ah, it will also give you some other key word ideas. So, for example, for me, membership site for WordPress might be something that I would pay attention to membership site WordPress membership site in WordPress because that's where I I I built my membership sites and just get a sort of an idea of of the content here. Another thing that you'll see down here, which is important, is thes these air sort of some of the top post for this. Now, one thing we can do is to expand. That is being click on this content ideas tab over here, this menu item over here and what that's going to do is is going to take us over to the content idea section. And now this is gonna give us a bunch of content ideas, and it's gonna show us, Okay, 2400 Facebook likes. So, you know, this is something that on the social media played very well. Now you see estimated visits and back wings here. Zero. What I've noticed with this tool is that when you're doing, you're doing keywords. This tends to be a little bit off May, probably because they might not be able to pull the data from this particular blawg because it doesn't have. I think this data probably comes from Google analytics, and so this site might not have that installed, and so they can't figure out what the visits and back wings are. and so forth as my guess. But I've noticed when you do keywords, it's it's a little bit off, but you can still get some idea of the the interested generated from social share. So this one complete guide to build a profitable membership site has 2400. How to create a membership site using square pace space 1700 pins on Pinterest. No, this is not really related. How to create a subscription based membership site. So all these things are things that I would write down as ideas for content that I could create to attract people who are interested in building a membership site. So a guide to building a profitable membership site that would bring in in people how to build a membership site using square paid space might not work for me because I build amusing WordPress. So I would maybe not do that one. How to create a subscription based membership site using WordPress right up my alley. So this is one. I would definitely right down and so forth and just sort of go through this list. This has two pages, and you just find anything that's relevant and write those down this could start to become one of your 52. OK, so that's the first thing. Another thing, then here, that that I would do is I would look at some of these domains here. Okay, so let's take this code and WP right here. So then what I would do is that come in here and I go in code and WP dot com like that and I would look at OK, this site gets a lot of traffic, has a lot of key words that ranks for and so forth. And you can get an idea of some of the the keywords they rank for and and so forth. But then you also have this right here top s CEO pages. And in fact, if we come over here, we can view all of the top pages for the site. So now we can see when we type in the site 71,000 estimated visits this month for this post 44th out, 44 things I wish I knew before starting a block. That would be a content, an idea that I would definitely write down six key steps to ensure GRP complaints and the one thing is is you don't have to be exact right. You don't have to write a block post. That is 44 things you could write one. That's 10 things. If you search for this things I wish I knew before starting a blawg, you're gonna find all sorts of post 44 10 15 30. Some won't include numbers and all. So it's not like this is the only block posts. And if you write a block post about the same topic like you're going to just stick out like a sore thumb like you're copying content like tons of people have written about this this this topic. So you don't have to worry about that part of it. And it's something that you know can get a lot of traffic. So, you know, you just want to write it down. As you know, I usually put I don't clue the number. I put X things I wish I knew before starting a block. Then when I go to write the post, I just come up with many as I can, and then, ah, that's the number that I pick. Ah, six steps 30 plus best free one page WordPress themes, etcetera, so you can go through an analyze keywords. You can also go through an analyze different actual domains. Another thing you could do is you can search no se membership site or graphic designer or whatever. You can search that he were term and Google, whatever your service is. And then you can look through the different domains there than people that actually sell the service services that air similar to yours. You can put their domain in here. This is your competition. You could see all the keywords their ranking for and now you're a and all the top pages and posts and so forth. And now you can get idea of the content you need to create to compete directly with them. So this is a really handy tool for coming up with content ideas. And then if we fall back on what I talked about before about making your content unique so you can go, let's say we're gonna do this. 44 things I wish I knew before starting a blog's. So let's just go to Google over here. I've put it in and let's actually just change this two things I wish I knew before starting a blawg. I'll get rid of the 2018 and go like this. So what I might do is go into these posts and and see what they wrote. See what this person wrote. See what this person wrote. Look at each one of these and see what they wrote on the topic. And then look at some of those and go Oh, yeah, that that I wish. You know, that's something that I can relate to pull out all the things that you can actually relate to and that you can tell a story about And now you can go through and create your own post . Maybe your listing some of the same things. But you're telling your own story and your own experience of how you can relate to this. And that's what makes it unique. Your your stories, your experience, your personality So you can sort of fall back on that. And so again, just just the idea of coming up with content ideas. How do you consistently do this? Sit down here, go through this Reach research keywords related. What you do really research other sites, and again, you can very quickly come up with your 52 topics and titles based on real data are. In fact, I sat down. This sat down into this one day I came up with 2 52 topic lists. One for me, one for a client of mine. I did it in probably about two hours. So you can certainly come up with one over the next day or so and get all your topics planned out for the year. They're based on data, you know, they can work now. It's just a matter of you getting in there and actually writing the content, making a good telling your story, showing your personality, etcetera, etcetera. Such a everything that we've talked about and Oh, yeah, at the end, linking to your lead magnet. So if you're worried about coming up with content ideas, this is this is your solution here. Ah, great tool. You could do this in, you know, maybe in and Google AdWords and check keywords. And and maybe there's some other tools that are similar to this, but this one is really the one that I found to be the easiest, the most straightforward and simplest to use. So there you go. 14. Quora.com: this lesson. I want to talk about cora dot com, and I'll be honest. I'm a little I'm a little ah, leery of giving this out. This is sort of my secret weapon, but I want to give you guys everything that I know about about getting your content seen. But cora dot com is super underrated. I don't know that I hear a lot of people talk about it, but it is one of the simplest ways to get your content scene because it's really not about your content. It's actually about the question that was asked and other people's answers, and you can quite literally piggyback off of that, Um, on core dot com. So here's what the idea is. Uh, this is this is a question that was asked over on core. And actually, I click here into the question. You'll see here that there's multiple answers here, right? I'm not the only one that that has answered. This question has been answered. I think it was 70 some some odd times. Ah, guess I don't know exactly your 20 answers on this. This Okay, so if we come back over here, toe my answer and come down here. I answered this about three days ago is when I posted the answer. 4.4 4800 views, 77 up boats to shares re shares. Like in just a few days. I've gotten mawr views of this answer than I would've ever get on my own blogger or YouTube or anything like that. Okay? And it wasn't because of my hand, sirs, because this was already a popular question, and I provided a good answer. Now, if you look at this, you'll see that this is five mistakes freelancers make. I just wrote these are my top five and wrote them out. Well, where did I get that from? I got that from this block post that I wrote. So I wrote my my block post. And then what I did is I went over to Cora, and I just searched for mistakes. Freelancers make like this. Okay, And you're going to get this one right here. What are the most common mistake freelancers make? You're going to get something like this. This isn't the question that I just did. And then you're gonna look how many people are following it. Oh, there's 20 Okay. What? Let me look how many up votes. Well, that's got one that's got non. Okay, so this may be, isn't it? So maybe all come over here and I'll look in some of the related. Or maybe I might change my search and go freelancer mistakes like this. And so I'm gonna look through here. Okay. Four answers. Four answers, 20 answers. Okay, let me look at this one. And I believe this is the one that I answered. Yeah, this is the one I answered. Say OK following 24. Let me look here. Okay, 80 up votes, eight. Okay, So this one's getting a little bit more traction, and you just go through and you look and see, OK, try and find the biggest one on there that you confined that's related to what your topic is, and then you'll notice I clipped off the beginning, right? Because the beginning of my post, I was like, in my 15 years as a freelancer. I'm doing that on my block post toe. Sort of introduce the topic here. They already asked the question, so I just I just snipped it off like I didn't, um you know I I didn't worry about doing any of that. I just put these are my top five and then list of them out. Now, you also notice down here I included my call to action. Now, I changed it up a little bit so that it was a little more subtle here. But I said, In any case, if you're interested, I do have a free tutorial for freelancers that teaches there the fundamental of selling yourself This links to my free tutorial site, and it links to my my lead magnet page. Okay. And I'll just tell you, when I did this, I saw probably about for days. Probably saw about four times the amount of options as I normally get to that particular lead magnet. And then the next day was about double. I haven't checked it since, but I see I saw a an increased directly related to posting it on here. So this works. It gets your content in front of eyeballs where you don't like again. This is one of those things you don't need a big following. You can go on Cora right now today and do this. Okay, um, and it also leads to opt ins, people click through and opt in. So this works really well again. You do this on a consistent basis every week, or even if you go in here more often that than that, and then just answer questions. Maybe you're not creating you. Don't do it around your content. You just interact right here on Cora the rest of the week. And that gives you hopes. You practice your writing skills. It gives you ideas for content that you want to create and so forth. And you still linked to some of your lead max and stuff where it's relevant. You don't have to link every time, but you're gonna then build up a following on here. And when you answer questions, those people are going to see your answer, and they're gonna be more likely to vote your stuff. It's gonna show up higher and the answers you're gonna get more views, you're gonna get more click throughs. You're gonna get more opt ins, etcetera, and you could start doing that all right, now, today, without needing to to have a big following or a bunch of traffic to your blawg on and so forth, so This is a really sneaky way for you to go about getting traffic. Just go in there, search terms that are related. What you do find questions that are popular, that a relevant that you can answer that can tie into something that you do with with your lead magnate of your services there so forth and just start going, so that is cora dot com. 15. Class Project: Implementation: Let's talk now about the class project and and this is it's such a crucial part. I know I've mentioned this couple times, but it's easy at this point Toe have gone through this and feel like you've learned everything. You kind of know it and then just sort of move on or say, Oh, we'll come back to this later and and do it a different time. But the reality is is that when you do that, it's very rare that you actually come back and and do the implementation, and the big point of all of this is nothing happens until you implement. So I really want to encourage you while you're here, doing this to jump in and at least get started with something in terms of the class project in implementing. So you get that moment. I'm going. I want to get that moment. I'm going. It's a lot easier. So in order to find the class project head on over here to the Project and Reese Sources section again, The very first step here that I have is to download the implementation worksheets. You'll see them right here on the right hand side, so go ahead and download those if you haven't already. The next thing that I would like for you to do So Step number two is to post a comment into the community tab. So you see the community tab right up here and I'd like to know if you currently have a blawg and and are posting regular content or not. It's not. It's not a big deal If you are you aren't I just it I would like to know that and get some of that feedback. And then also for you, it will kind of help you to start sharing and so forth inside the class. So if you can post a comment in the community Tabin, let me know whether you currently have a blogging your regular posting, content to sell your freelance services or not. Third step then, is to post your lead magnet idea, and this is really such an important one because, as I mentioned in that lesson, being creating a lead magnet, you're really sort of in rare air at that point. So this is such a big, crucial part of me. I almost considered making the entire class project just about your lead magnet because it's that important. It's gonna make that that much of a difference in selling your services. So I really want to encourage you to create this lead magnet. And so, in the project section, tell me what ideas you've come up for for your lead magnets so I can give you feedback. I can hope you and I could help you refine it if necessary. Annual under here in the project and resource is, you'll see a button at the top that says Creek Project. Just click that and you'll be able to then create your project and go from there so really , really important. I want to emphasize Step number three year from there. Step number four is to post the outline for your first block. So once you've gone through the five step block Port Post formula worksheet for your ah first block post you've come up with in a content idea, you've done the data driven research. You've got at least one content idea. You filled out the formula again, post that in the project section so I can take you, take a look and let you know if you're on the right track. There's anything you could refine and so forth. So that's one of the things that I really want to do with. This course is sort of be here to help you and give you feedback. So I know this is scary for a lot of people, so he can post that in the project section really want encourage you to put it in the project section. It helps kind of keep the community a little bit clear so I can keep that focused on questions and so forth. And then the project section focused on giving feedback to this sort of thing. So definitely put that in the project section. Step number five, then is once you've posted your first block post than than publish post a link in the creamy section. So we're gonna take a look and again give any feedback and so forth, and then finally, step Number six is we want to celebrate with you. So when you start doing this and you get your first client post that in the community tab as well, so everybody. It's nice for us to be able to celebrate with you, but also encourages other students to really start taking action on this on getting those results so would really appreciate if you do that as well. So those air kind of my six steps for the class project. I think if you do those things, it's really gonna put you into motion and get you implementing on and get you some feedback when you need it, get you some some cheers and some celebration when you when you burned it and so forth. So that is the class project for this course. 16. Now What?: Now what? That's probably a question that you might have at this point, because this is a very specific treatment of content marketing for freelancers, using content to get clients and so forth. But there's a lot of other questions that you might have skills to learn when it comes to freelancing. So I'm gonna run through Ah, a couple of different classes that I would recommend for you at this point if you're new to freelancing or still have some questions that you need answered. So in order to find those first off, just scroll down here on the about section and you'll see my profile here. Just click into that. Now, if you wouldn't mind giving me a follow on here, I would I would appreciate that. That helps you get notified when I put post new classes and so forth. So I appreciate that. But if you scroll down here, you'll see all of my freelancing classes listed here, and the big one that I'm gonna recommend to you. Is this beginners guy to freelance? Because this is where I'm gonna kind of go back big picture wise and answer a lot of those questions about you know how to figure out what services you should offer, how toe what platforms you should be on. How do you get paid All those sorts of things All sort of the common question when it comes questions when it comes to freelancing, that's what you're gonna find in here. And I'm gonna show you how to build a real business as a freelancer. So this is my big recommendation here. If you're new to freelancing, you still have questions. This would be my big recommendation. Another one that you might look into. Is this one here? Are you offering the right services? So this is part of my freelancing. Wanna one Siri's? I'm just going to take a much more in depth treatment of what services, how to figure out what services you should offer and how to build your service packages and so forth. So you really want to nail down your service offerings? This is the course to take if you like to Social media part of the current course, this is a much deeper dive into that part. It shows you a lot of detail in exactly how to post your content to social media and so forth and just using social media in general know how to fill out your profile, how to post what platforms to be on all that sort of stuff. So this is a really specific treatment of that. And then, of course, my most popular courses. My upward course. If you're planning on using up work for forgetting clients, I definitely recommend this. It's going to clear up a lot of confusion, give you the right mindset in the right approach going in so that you don't go through what a lot of people do, which is struggling at first and having a figuring out and all that sort of thing. I'm just gonna kind of show you what to do in that course. Course this this course and this course down here are still good courses. This productivity course is sort of a low key. One of my better courses. Ah, it's really what I do to stay productive and keep freelancing, producing courses and so forth. So something that that I would definitely recommend if you're struggling with productivity or procrastination and so forth, and then this one here is my guerilla marketing tactics for freelancers. It's not for the faint of heart. But it's how you can really grind out Ah following and get started getting clients from absolute scratch a different take on some of the other stuff that I teach even different than what I teach in, Ah, the content marketing stuff. So you talk about Facebook groups and some other things in that class, so if you want to learn about that than I would recommend this. So that's kind of the the full offering of freelance courses I have for you at this point again, I want to highlight this one. The Beginner's Guide to Freelance would definitely recommend taking that one. Ah, at a minimum so that you get a lot of the questions that you have answered. So they go. Hopefully that gives you some Pat Forde and things that you can go go on learning and what you can do from this point 17. Next Steps: I'm honest there's no more. So online.com, so little housekeeping to finish up this course. If you haven't yet, be sure to head on over to the class area. There is a class section for some, some steps for you to walk through for this course. So be sure to head over in that it's under the discussion in Projects tab that you'll see on the course. Also, if you head over to my profile, be sure to give me a follow on my profile here so you'll be notified when I release new courses. And I also have an ongoing sort of weekly podcast style course called Let's Talk freelance. So if you would like to have sort of access to ongoing training regarding freelancing and online business and so forth. Be sure to check out that. Let's talk freelance course as well. And finally, I do have a daily tips newsletter on my website at John Morris online.com. If you head over there, you can sign up to that mailing list. You will also be put into my own, my very own mobile app, or you'll get access to over 78 hours of free content at the time of this recording related to freelance and so forth as well. So if you're interested in that, BD sure to check that out as well. Again, that's John Morris online.com. All right. Thank you for taking the class. If you enjoyed it, I appreciate you for You. Leave me a review and we'll see you in the next course.