The Beginner's Guide to Systematic Freelancing

1. The #1 Problem You'll Face as a Freelancer: So let me just start off right off the bat by telling you about the number one problem that you'll faces a freelancer and then the number one skill you need to learn in order to overcome that problem. And when you do that than everything else that you do as a freelancer gets a lot easier. So that number one problem is probably thing that you're thinking about and worrying about right now, which is income inconsistency. And it's a legit thing. When you're a freelancer, your income can go up and down and up and down, and you have to be good at managing that now. The caveat here is that there's a way around this, and so the skill that you need to learn is it's more than just learning how to get clients . It's learning how to build, how to build a system to consistently bring in those clients, and that is something that you can do. It's a skill that can be learned, and you can make your freelance income a lot more consistent. Now. You may not know who I am, but my name is John Morris, and I've been a freelance developer for over 15 years. Now I'm a teacher here on skill share. I've taught over 5000 students. I'm the creator of the number three freelance class on all of skill share. And I'm probably best known for in the freelance world for my work with Inc magazine building out their Business owners Council and probably Michael Hyatt building his platform university. Although I've worked with Tim Ferriss on his four our body, some stuffers for our body, I've worked with Louis House on some of his stuff. I'm married. I have three boys. I live in the Ozarks in Missouri. I'm in the middle of building my forever houses. You can see by the construction behind me. But when it comes to this class, this class is all about building that system for getting freelance clients so you can have a more reliable and consistent freelance income. So some of the things that you're gonna learn inside the class is I'll teach you how to pick a niche and figure out what services to offer and how to really get that right. So when you put your offer in front of a particular group of people, it's a much easier sell. You don't have to work really hard to do that. Ah, where to get work, How to build an audience of potential clients, how to sell your services, delivering like a pro so that people want to hire you again and again. And then the three different ways to go about getting referrals. And my goal for you is to then years for you to then take those skills and build a profitable, consistent and sustainable freelance business. Now, this is my introductory freelance course, so it is designed for the absolute beginner. So if you are new to freelancing and you want to just start out on the right foot from the very beginning, then this is where you should start. Of course, this is for freelancers. Also, first side hustlers or really anyone looking to build a business outside of their regular 9 to 5 job and what you ah, you'll learn can be applied. Whether you're using a freelancing platform, you're building your own website. Or maybe you're just doing sort of all of this networking and person. You can still use these principles. So by the end of the class, you'll know how to methodically build out a secure freelance business that lets you live the lifestyle that you want, and you don't have to constantly, constantly worry about your income on where it's coming from. So if that sounds good, let's get started. 2. Why Freelance?: so it start out by talking about whether or not you should Freelance. Are there good reasons to do it? Is it worth it? Can you do it all those sorts of questions? Because I imagine that sort of the first thing that you're thinking as you dive into this. So let me start off with the first reason why I think you should freelance. And that is because you get to be your own boss. When you freelance, your freelance business is yours and someone's important to me. Is it something you can pass down to your kids? You can help build a legacy for yourself and help give them a head start. Now, I'm not alone in this being probably the number one reason that most people freelance because according to a study by up work and freelancers union, those survey respondents said that that that being your own boss is the number one reason why they freelance and again you get to control your own destiny. You're not beholden to anyone else. You gotta work on the things that you gotta work on. You get a set your hours Freelancers do tend to work a little bit more, but it's not crazy. Crazy hours average freelancer works 46 hours a week, but ultimately you get to decide that. And as you build your freelance business, you can sort of cut that back as as you see fit, which is what I've done over the years. So again, you just aren't inm or control. You're building something for yourself. You're building something that you can pass down to your kids because no matter how good your job is, you can't pass that down to your kids. But you can give them your freelance business. So again, the number one reason to to freelance is you get to be your own boss. You get to be in control of your own destiny. The 2nd 1 is just sort of a more concrete thing, and that is on average, for freelance. Freelancers earn more than non freelance workers now. This is according to a survey, by paying here, and they've done several of these and up work, and some of the other platforms out there do these, and it's pretty consistent over the years. But freelancers, according the survey, or 19% more than non freelancers so globally the average freelance freelancer works 36 hours a week and earns an average of 39,000 year again, That's a globally. And if you compare that to the average income for workers globally, that that number is 18,000 year, which is according to the International Labour Organization. Now, you know, some of these statistics are hard to get. So you know, again, I don't want Teoh to have you just, ah, 100% these air exactly the numbers. But they give us sort of an area, and you can just see the drab dramatic distance difference between global global average income between freelancers and your average workers. So again, on average, freelancers tend to make more. In the United States, freelancers make an average of $31 an hour, which is 19% more than full time employees again, Ah, study done by paying here. So just again, bottom line, sort of a logical black and white thing. As a freelancer, you will likely make more than you will as a salaried or hourly employees. So take that for for what it means to you next one is better job security. So this is actually the biggest fear people have when they start freelancing, but adds, You become a freelancer. You'll actually soon realize that freelancing is more staple, because the reality is is that any company can fold at any moment. The question that I think about and I think a lot of freelancers come to realize as they do this is how much control do I have over whether or not that company fails? And when you work for someone else, you often have very little input into the big decisions being made. So you have very little control over whether or not that company goes belly up. You could do a good job yourself, and that company could still go belly up. And I've experienced this myself, part of a company who I've been part of a company where, you know, in my opinion, and they obviously didn't get rid of me, so I felt like I was doing a good job. But the company was struggling and ran into issues, and that ultimately became a problem for me. One of the reasons why I began freelancing so again it's just a matter of how much control do I have over the situation and with freelancing, you have 100% control over the situation. And that's why, ah, 63% of freelancers who were surveyed by upward believe that a diversified portfolio of clients is more secure than having a single employer. Because if one client has a problem or goes belly up, that's only part of your income. And you can usually quickly replace that with another client, so it having a diverse set of clients ends up being more secure. Ah, then a single employer. And again, that's why freelancers, as they freelance start to believe that more and more, and that's actually up 10 points from just a few years ago. So again, more freelancers are beginning to realize that that's the case. The final thing, then, is just sort of the inevitability of all this, you know. Ah, again. According to a study by up work and freelancers union, by 2027 more than 50% of the workforce in the U. S. Will be freelancers. So by and then over the next 10 years, we're all going to end up moving towards freelancing anyway. And then you know those those trends look to continue that way, even be on that. So we're moving Mawr and Mawr towards a freelance economy. And so there's just sort of an inevitability to this that we're all going to eventually head that way anyway, So why not get ahead of the game? So, to sum it all up, it's sort of to help you make your decision whether or not you should freelance again some good reasons to freelance. On average, you're gonna earn more. You get to be your own boss. Freelancing is more jobs secure. It's inevitable that it's all the economy is sort of heading that way anyway, so you might as well get started. Now build something that that you can be proud of. Build something that you can retire on and build something that you can pass down to your kids and give that legacy to them and help them get a head start. Ah, and again, the best time to get started is now, while all this is a transition instead of waiting toe later down the road and then sort of being behind the eight ball with it. All right, coming up, we're going to talk about how to pick and niche and decide what services to offer may be the most important part of this whole thing. Because once you get that right, everything else is this a lot easier. So we're gonna talk about that coming up also. What platforms? To use their different freelancing platforms out there. You can build your own website, all those sorts of things. We're gonna talk through that a little bit. Then we're gonna talk about how to build an audience of potential clients. Because once you have your services down and in order, then you want to start building an audience around you of people that are likely to be interested in your products and services. We're gonna talk about how to do that, how to make sure and target those people correctly and so forth. All that coming up in the next lessons 3. How to Pick a Niche: the first thing we need to do then once we decide to make the decision to freelance is we need to pick a profitable niche. And if that term is new to you, that's okay. It's somewhat of obscure marketing term, but we're going to get into what it exactly and niches why you want to pick a niche and then how to do that now, real quick. Before we get into this, I'm gonna go through it here in this lesson. But this is a topic we could probably spend hours talking about. And so what I've done is I've created an entire an entire course around just this topic of picking your niche, figuring out what services is to offer, how to package them, how to price them all that sort of thing because it's really key part of this thing. It's probably the most important first thing that you can do and get right. So anyway, if that's something that you're interested in, I'd recommend still going through this whole course first to get the big picture of you. But then you can head on over to my profile page and you'll see that course listed there It's just in my freelancing wanna one Siri's And it's called what services toe offer. So to define what a niche is. The way that I find define it is, I think of. And this is a term I heard. Ah, and I can't remember the author at this point, but a fairly well known ah copywriter. But the phrase that he used is a parade already in progress, and this is essentially people already actively looking for a solution. So the dictionary definition of a niche is denoting or relating to products or services or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population. So if you think of ah market, let's take, for example, the fitness market that maybe an overall sort of large market a niche is a smaller subsection of that. It's a little bit different than a market segment. If you've ever heard of market segments, those tend to relate more to demographics of gender, age, etcetera Ah, and marketing. Generally, the same products are the same kinds of products, just in different ways to those segments, whereas a niche is really about creating different products and services based on what niche you happen to be in. So as you can see here, it says, identifying needs, wants and requirements that are being addressed poorly or not at all by other firms, and developing and delivering goods or services to satisfy them. And the idea here is to be a big fish in a small pond. So when it comes to niches, then the more specific you can be the better. And I think of it as selling cold ice cream to a parade of kids on a blistering hot day. If you just think about that analogy for a second, kids already want ice cream, right? So they're sort of a parade already in progress. There there, people already actively looking for a solution. Now you add the fact that it's a blistering hot day than they really want ice cream, and now you just sell them what they already want. So you're not trying to convince people to buy things that they don't know that they want, or they think maybe they don't want. You're just finding what they already want solutions there already after, and then you give them that solution and so becomes a really, really easy sale and you are able to out compete larger firms by being more nimble and more relevant. This is critical as a freelancer because as a freelancer, most freelancers operate on their own. That's sort of a one man or one woman band, and so and you're gonna be in a marketplace where other people are offering products and services that that solve similar problems are there in the overall market, and you need to be able to be nimble and you need to be able to out compete these firms, and the way that you do that is by being more specific by relating MAWR directly to the problems and means and wants and desires of the niche that you're addressing. So t give some specifics here again, if we go back to the fitness market, you think of that as an overall market and in fitness, there are lots of different sort of little sub markets that you could look at. Someone could be interest in fitness because they wanna lose weight or they could be interested in it because they want they want to be a bodybuilder. Or maybe they like running. There's all these different things that people could be interested in the overall term of fitness about so you start by looking at that. What do you want to target specifically? So let's say that we decide to go into weight loss. Now that's good, and that is more specific than fitness. But it's still not specific enough, because when you're dealing with weight loss, it could be. It could be men that are no battle suffering from diabetes who want to lose weight. Or it could be it could be women who are single moms that air wanting whatever it is, there's more to the story there. And so you want to get to the specific point of being able to say I'm I'm providing weight loss solutions. Four busy moms. That's how specific you want to get. And that's that is, when you get to a true niches, when you're able to identify who, exactly specifically, you are targeting who is your ideal client and what exactly exact result they were after. Right cause busy moms could be not interested in weight loss. There's some busy moms out there who might be interested in what strength training, right. So you have to find who and what that's when you really get down to a niche. So to use an example from my own work, I'm a Web developer. So if you take the overall industry, you would call that Web development. And then I worked with specific ah specific piece of software called WordPress you may be familiar with. And then I worked with a plug in a specific plug in in WordPress called Wish List Member, and what I help people to do was build membership site. So my specific niche was I was building membership sites, four membership site owners who were using WordPress and Wish List member, and that was a very, very specific niche over on up work. I mean, there's hundreds of jobs post posted every day over on up work, which is a freelancing platform. We'll talk about here in a minute, but there's hundreds of jobs freelance jobs posted there on a daily basis on a monthly basis that my niche of wishes member may have had 10 to 15 jobs in a month, so there wasn't a ton of jobs being posted over there. However, the projects that I worked on where 3 to $5000 projects, So I only needed me maybe 2 to 3 projects a month toe work on so 10 to 15 was plenty for me , and I was able to be a big fish in that small pond. So that's that's the idea here. It's not necessarily about getting millions and millions and millions of customers. It's about solving a problem very specifically and very directly. And because you're able to do that, you're able to charge more. You will have better relationships with your clients and everybody's. It's a lot happier. So again, by being more specific, you can more directly address your niches, problems and desires. You know exactly who you're talking to and what they need or want. That's when you know that you've got down to the point of being, Ah, niche. And again, the more specific, the better. All right, so here's some hopefully inspiring but weird examples. I pulled some really weird ones to show you the kind of things that people are willing to pay money for. And the idea here is if these people can sell these products and service and and make a living, then I think you can so one of them is called just for dogs. It's a restaurant, California, that serves on Lee food for cats and dogs, and they don't serve humans at all, and they their estimated annual revenue is 5.9 million a year. So that's sort of, Ah, weird, obscure thing. Yet they do, Ah, a good amount of money and annual revenue. Another one is potato parcel that sends potatoes with messages written on them. They've sold over 70,000 of these potatoes in their annual revenue tops six figures and then the final one, which is really strange, is rent a mourner. And so they hire fake Mourners to attend a loved one's funeral, I guess, for for people who maybe don't have a bunch of people that would attend their funeral, you can rent Mourners and they charge $68 for two hours. So $34 an hour to just go attend. Ah, attend a funeral. So ah, again, those air, some weird examples of things of things that are out there. But the idea is that people are willing to spend money on this type of stuff. No more traditional stuff. Whatever you happen to be doing, there's probably something out there that you enjoy doing. You love doing that people are willing to pay money for you Just got to find it. So speaking of that, then how do you go about finding it? And so it needs to make money. I mean, we're doing a freelance business here. We're making a living. Um, so you need to account for the fact that it needs to make money. I don't believe you should just do something that you love, even if it makes money. I mean, you could do that, but I think there's plenty of things out there that you would love to do that will still make money. So why not make some money doing it, but needs to make money, But it also needs to be something you can win at and that you're willing toe work at. And so the way I look at is it comes down to the nexus of talent, passion and profit. So you want to start off by thinking about things that you are really passionate about. Either something you love to do or it's something that you get fired up about. And you need that because you need that energy. You're going to spend a lot of time thinking about this working on this, just being involved in this in general. So it needs to be something that you're highly interested in your passion about that you're going to spend your time thinking about and working on anyway, So you might as well make it a business out of it. So you need to start with that because that's what's gonna allow you to do the second thing , which is, have it being activity that you are either already talented at or you're willing to put in the work to be talented because you want to try to be one of the best in the world at what you're gonna do so that you can command premium prices and to get to that point. Talent is all just ultimately a function of the amount of work you're willing to put into it in particular when we're talking in a business context. So maybe we can all be NFL or N B A players. But in a business context, most things that you're gonna want to do, you're gonna be able to if you just work at it, hard enough, you're gonna be able to be pretty darn good at it. So you have to be passionate about it so that you can be extremely talented at it. And then the final thing is, is that it just needs to be something that people will happily pay you for and again going back to the weird examples. There's probably things that you might not think people will pay you for that they would. So don't be too quick to dismiss something based off money. Just know that, you know, you have to sort of figure out a way or think about a service that you can offer that's gonna go along with all of this. Don't just completely go the route of I'm just going to do this thing and not worry about the money. You need to think about it from the start. Now. One of the cautions or warnings I want to give you is this isn't a five minute thing, and a lot of people are tempted to skip this step because they want to get into, you know, the platforms and the marketing and the doing, and that all makes sense. But this this takes research, but the amount of time that you put in now is going to save you a ton of time down the line because you're gonna be aimed in the right direction is sort of like the old business analogy. You know, if you put the ladder on the wrong wall, you can go up that ladder as fast as you want, But if you're going up the wrong wall, it's not gonna matter. So you want to make sure here that we're getting the ladder on the right wall and you're you're headed in the right direction. So take some time, do the research and do the thinking. And be honest with yourself. Do the introspection to really make sure this is something you're passionate about. Don't just do it for the money because you'll be miserable and you won't be as successful as you could be. Now there's a lot that we could go into it go on for hours about picking your niche, to be honest. But I created a course called Freelancing on up work where I go into heavy detail about this and specifically I show you how to use up work to do a lot of this research. It is the largest platform freelancing platform on the planet. So it is an incredible tool for research because you're not just we're not looking at Google searches or or guessing you're looking at actual people that are posting projects that they want to hire freelancers for, So it's a really good tool for doing research. So I highly recommend in this research phase. Now, you create an up work account and then you go over there and do some research there. So my freelancing on upward course you can find it on my skill share profile, or you can go toe up work 101 dot com to learn more about that course. But it the first part of that course really takes you heavily into doing the research and figuring out ah, your niche. So if you want to learn more about that again, that freelancing on upward course all right, so to sum everything up again, getting your niche right is the most important step. You're looking for a specific group of people who are looking for a specific solution. Gonna pick something you are passionate about, that you are or will get talented at that. Others are willing to pay you for. And it's really important that you take the time to do the research because more time here will lead to dramatically less time later. All right, coming up, we're gonna get into what platforms to you. So we talked about about up work a little bit more. We'll talk. Are we talked about up working and talk about a little bit more? Coming up? Also, how to build an audience of potential clients is going to be really big. For once you have your services in your niche picked out now getting people to actually pay attention to you and hire you for their service is and how to do that and then we'll get into how to actually sell your services. 4. Pick a Freelance Platform: next, we need to talk about picking a freelance platform because there's so many different options out there with all the different freelance sites and your own website, all these different options, you can be a little bit confusing to try and figure out what is the best route to go. So I'm gonna tell you the difference between a lot of these different options, and I'm gonna give you my recommended strategy for how to approach this. So the first thing you have to think about is platforms versus Yao's, which houses my unfunny way of saying your own website. So the question is, should you build a profile on a freelancing platform or should you build it on your own website? Now, if you're brand new to freelancing, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you start out on a platform because a platform gives you mawr immediate access to potential clients. Building up your audience and building up your website and getting traffic and all of that stuff is a whole another part of this that will talk about. But there's a sort of separate and there's a lot of work involved with that compared to just understanding freelancing, understanding your client, understanding how to deliver the actual business side of things when it comes to delivering and getting paid and so forth. You have to figure that out really first, before you can get into the marketing and the platform is nice because it does a lot of that work for you. It brings the clients to the site for you, and now you just have to figure out how to get them to hire you. And so again, it gives you more immediate access to potential clients. You can much more quickly test your idea because we talked about picking and niche. Well, maybe it's not perfect right off of the bat, so you can throw it out there, test out different services. You can get to know your your your perfect or your ideal client. Get to know your niche, get to know your audience and start to figure out what they want. And so forth can learn how to just freelance. In general, it's a skill all in on it all of its own, including from how to market all the way to how to deliver how to get referrals. All that sort of thing. It's a skill that you have to learn, and you could do that much more quickly and directly on a freelance site. And then you can build up your portfolio, establish a client base, learn how to compete and and learn a bunch of things that you're gonna need that will serve you when you then do decide to go solo. So again, if your brand new, I strongly recommend using a platform and digging into it that it doesn't mean you're gonna have immediate success on one of these sites. You have to learn the site. You have to learn your audience. You have toe put in a decent amount of work, but it's gonna be easier generally than trying to do it off of your own website. That said, if you already have clientele on a good portfolio or you have some sort of, if you have some sort of background that you can already leverage, then you'll generally are going to make more money on your own website. So that leads to the caveats. All of this is that all freelancers, I believe, should eventually or ultimately be striving towards building and getting all the work from your own website because it's gonna be less competition. You're gonna be able to control things a little bit more, and generally you're going to get paid more because you're not competing with ah, 100 or 1000. Or however many other freelancers there are on a platform. So again, you should always be striving towards that. So that's that's sort of the my thoughts on platforms versus using your own website again. If your new I would recommend highly recommend that you start out on a platform next you have, you'll probably hear about two different types of platforms. You have open platforms versus curated platforms, no upward open platforms. Let almost anyone in, whereas curated, are strictly limited on who they let in. So you have to go through generally a rigorous application process. So what's the difference? What should you preserve? Which one should you pursue? Etcetera. So open platforms include things like up work. Freelancer dot com fiver believe guru dot com I've never actually used google dot com myself, but I believe it is an open one. I don't think they have ah strict application process of maybe put a Asterix by up work because up work has generally been an open platform. It's still pretty open, but they do have a little bit more of a stranger application process now, and they evaluate your skill set and they don't let just everybody in. I believe freelancer dot com still just lets anybody in fiber still just lets anybody in. I believe so. Those are examples of more open platforms, whereas you have curated platforms like Top Tao Top Towel. It's sort of claim to fame, or its slogan is that it lets they only let in the top 3% of freelancers. And I can tell you, just from you know, the people that I've heard from on top town so forth. It's pretty strict. It's it's pretty difficult to get in. It's no, they don't let just anybody in. So that's that's more of the curated type. On site is another example, So the difference between the two is and the way to think about them as open platforms are generally easier to get into. But once you're on there, it's often harder to get work because they let anybody in. So you're competing with anybody and everybody, so there's just ah lot more competition, whereas curated platforms are generally harder to get on. Once you're on the platform, you're in a very much smaller group of people, and it's usually easier to get work, and oftentimes you're probably going to make more per project or per hour. However you get paid on a curated platform simply because you're not again. You're not competing with all these other freelancers, and they sort of market themselves as being kind of a premium freelance sites. So you're getting clients who are willing to generally are willing to pay more for your services so you can get in on a curated platform. Then it can usually be a big boon to your business. It's not 100%. I've seen people who have got in on, say, top Thailand stuff and didn't necessary get a bunch work. But most people who get in I tend to do really well on those sites because it's so hard to get in. All right, so what's my recommended strategy? Well, I I sort of recommend this across the board. I don't think you should put all your eggs in one basket, and you should always keep an eye towards the future. So I actually think that you should diversify this and you should do them all but just in a specific order. So start with the open platform because to be in the freelancing game, you need to get in the game. So getting accepted on one of these sites, getting in a profile, built and so forth just kind of get you in the game. Now you're playing. It's sort of like getting a seat at the table of a poker game. So just get into a platform, start with an open platform, get started, get started trying to get work on one of those sites and start learning how to compete again. You're gonna have to learn things about how to build your profile and so forth. And so you just need to get into those, um, and start that process. Then when you're ready. Ah, and you think you're ready. Teoh, take that next step. Start applying to curated platforms because you're gonna make more. You be able to get work easier. And if you can get into one and hopefully you've got some clients at that point and you'll be more comfortable delivering and so forth. But once you can get into one of these curated platforms, a lot of times that can send you a lot of work and maybe be the thing that you just do. From that point forward, I know a lot of people who just, for example, top town we get on top town. That's all they do because they get enough work from it. So again, once you already started playing to the curator platforms, and all the while while you're doing this, I would be working on your own site. So start working on building your services page where you sell your services. Start thinking about you as you work with clients on one of the other platforms, taking those testimonials, taking what they say about you and putting them over on your your website so you can start building that out, adding those projects to your portfolio, etcetera. So all the while be building your own site so that you can when you're ready to make the switch to your own site. You you already have it done. You're not having the to go in and build it all in one big shot, now a pro tip here is get a domain name, go out and buy a domain name that forwards to your freelancing profiles so that when you move to your own site, you can just changes the redirects. So, for example, this isn't a site that I have or anything, but, ah, an example of it might be hired john dot com slash up work, and that would redirect my up work profile and no higher john dot com slash freelancer. Maybe point to my freelancer account or profile. So that and then you when you point people to your services, you use this link this higher john dot com slash up work or freelance or whatever. Use that link so that all those links are still valid. When you decide you want to move off of up worker, you want to move off of freelance or whatever and go to your own site. You can just were now redirect them all to your services page on your site. So again, that's keeping an eye towards the future. One other thing that I would say here is I don't depending on what sort of results you're getting. You know, I wouldn't necessarily don't think that you have to go out and apply to every one of these sites so you don't You don't have tohave Ah, profile at up work and at freelancer end at fiber. You can if that's what you'd like to do. And you your find managing that. But having those multiple profiles like that can sort of sort of diffuse your energy a little bit. Ah, and maybe make it a little bit harder. Now, if you try up working and not having success than maybe give freelancers or try or give fiber, try some. Some platforms are gonna work better with different products and services and just different people. So if you're not having success with one, try another. Ah, and and And don't be afraid to do that. But I also don't think that you have to go out and apply to every single one of these that can get a little bit overwhelming. All right, so just to sort of sum everything up again, figuring out what platforms to use can be confusing. But the big thing is, don't let it stop. You start simple, start with one and then just grow from there as you get more comfortable. And as you work with these sites and so forth and start working with clients and trying to market and all that stuff, you're just going to get better at it. Just for a lot of people, it's something they've never done. So don't go into it thinking you're just gonna be good at it, right off the bat. It's hard. It takes work, but it's absolutely worth it. And if you can sort of get over that hump, then my world sort of opens up to you and, ah, the rest of your life can become, ah, lot better. So think of this as maybe a 1 to 2 year project, which I know a lot of people like Oh my God. But think of it as a won t two year project or investment for the next 30 years of your life. Ah, and I think if you take that approach will have a lot more methodical, sort of sane approach to it. Ah, and you'll be able to take those rights steps and methodically build this so again, when it comes to picking a platform, start with an open platform. I would recommend up work just because it's the largest freelancing site in the world. There's tons of work over there. Have some. Their algorithms. Algorithms are very sophisticated for matching freelancers with clients. So if you get that, figure it out. Ah, it can sort of have sort of, ah, snowball effect that turns towards you and can, ah, start toe almost become a little bit overwhelming. At one point, I had 30 different people. 30 different invites to jobs over on up work in one month. So I was getting I mean, that was way more. I could do wonder to projects a month. I was way more than I could could do, so that that can happen over there. You just got to figure it out a little bit and again, you know, if if you haven't yet, I would recommend checking on my freelancing on up work. Course I about five hours worth of showing you exactly how up work works, how to build your profile, how to build on jobs, etcetera, etcetera. So you want toe. If you're thinking about using up work and you want toe, understand how it works, check that out again. You can go to my school share profile. Or you could go toe up work on a one dot com to learn more about that. All right, once you've done the open platform, then started playing for curated platforms. And then, as I said, always be building your own website. All right, coming up. We're going to talk about how to build an audience of potential clients. This is I sort of call this the trump card because a lot of people, when they get on freelance platforms, they sort of just focus on the platform and don't go outside of the platform to build an audience on their own. But if you look at what most online businesses do that aren't freelancing, their their primary way that they get work or they get business is through building an audience and doing all of these other things. And so I'm gonna show you how to do that and then apply that to Ah, you're your freelancing and your profile and so forth. And when you combine the two, it can be really, really powerful. So again we're gonna talk about how to build it. I, its potential clients how to sell your services so If you're a little uncomfortable with the selling part, we'll talk about that. And then we'll get into delivering how to deliver like a pro, so that you come across as a professional freelancer that your clients want to hire again, which is really, really important, and they want to tell their friends about so you can get referrals. So all that coming up in the next lessons. 5. How to Build an Audience: Now let's talk about how to build an audience, and this is where we really transition into building a real, sustainable business, the kind of thing that you can hand off to your kids and sort of build a legacy with and real quick story for. Get into this. My older brother at one point had got into doing insurance, and one of the things that is pretty common in the insurance business is when a particular agent decides that they want to retire, the insurance company will find their replacement and then that that agent will hand off their book of business to that new agent. And that book of business is a very highly sought after thing in the insurance business. And so if you can come in as a new agent and you're able to get with a company that does that and you're able to get a a book of business, you can often go from brand new making nothing in the insurance business to suddenly making a very substantial income in a very short amount of time. And a lot of insurance agents try to get their kids into it, and they hand their book of business off to their kids and so forth. So again, when we talk about building a legacy, your audience is part of that. Your book of business, your clientele, certainly is a big part of that, but also your audience. And so these air real assets that you're building long term Ah, lot of times when companies air sold the email list, for example, of that company is a part of the valuation. Because businesses no, those are real value when it comes to a business. So again, this is just I want you to think longer term about this and it being again building a real sustainable business. Do this and that your audience is a part of that. Now, just to sort of hammer home the point here of an audience because you might be wondering, Well, why why do I need to do this? What's the point of this? And this is Ah, this is ah, quote from Gary Vaynerchuk, really more than a quote. This is something that he hammered away at on his videos and block posts and speaking engagements for a number of years. I happen to believe is true, even if you don't know who Gary is or necessarily like who he is. I still think this happens to be true and we'll talk about some numbers that sort of back it up. But one things he said, is whether you like it or not. Every person is now a media company. The tools are easy, free and everywhere. More importantly, 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 like I said, there's there's numbers that sort of backed this up and when the way I look at it is content, marketing essentially is online marketing. These days, Creating content is simply the cost of doing business. So looking at these statistics, Ah, and I'll just sort of run through these so small businesses with blog's get 100 26% MAWR lead growth than small businesses without it, and again leads are they could be different things in different industries. In our case is essentially gonna be names and email addresses, but those things are valuable for their valued in a business. They've been coming real assets 126% more. Lead growth is a big deal. Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and cost 62% less. So content marketing viewed is a form of inbound marketing where you're trying to attract leads into you to contact you. Um, whereas outbound marketing, where you doing outbound sort of advertising or telemarketing? You're going and putting yourself in front of them. And so again you know it. Content marketing As an M bar inbound marketing strategy gets over three times. Main leads at 62% less. So it's again a big deal. Populating websites with blanc block content is how you end up with 434% mawr search engine indexed pages and other business sites that don't publish content. So if you're thinking about Seo at all when it comes to your freelance business, the way that you do s CEO is through creating content of the days of putting up a sales page and, you know, linking it in a bunch of directories and and that sort of thing, those days are pretty much long gone. Ah, you need to be creating content in order to get ranked in the search engines. Next content marketing rakes in six in conversion rate six times higher than other methods . Finally, content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent compared to paid search. And I think probably the bigger thing here is when you're first starting getting into a freelancing. This is a new thing who maybe you have a job and you have some income you can. You can spend on ads, but a lot of people don't or simply don't want to. And creating content is a simple freeway that you can start advertising your business and get going and sort of build this methodically over time without having to event, invest a bunch of money into ads and not know whether your your sales page, your services page is gonna work or not. So again, it's it really is. Content Marketing has become online marketing. If you're not creating content, I mean, Gaby said it perfectly. If you're not creating content, you basically aren't in business online these days. So when we talk about building an audience were talking about building an audience around our content. We were talking about building an audience of people who are perspective clients, so we have to build it in a very specific way. So let's talk about the funnel. So the funnel is essentially how you're going to attract these people on. Ultimately sell them on your your services so you attract new potential clients with content. You convert them into qualified leads, and then you sell them your services. So the way the three things to remember when it comes to the funnel is traffic leads and sales. So traffic is kind of what you would think. It's blogging. It's YouTube. It's podcasting that social media can be paid advertising. It's essentially getting you in front of eyeballs and getting those people to then go to your website and where you want them to go is to your lead capture page. So that's the second step here, which is you create a league magnet to capture email address is at a minimum, probably name and email addresses, so that you can then follow up and continuously contact and sell those perspective clients . Now I email on a daily basis a and every email I send. I sell my my products And so since I've done that, my business has grown probably 45 times what it was when I wasn't doing that. So it's really a pretty simple, a quick equation. The more people you can get on your email list and the more often you email them, the more money you're gonna make. And so that's a simple idea. Here, put up some piece of content on Let's say, for example, YouTube at the end of the video pushed them towards Ah, push them towards your your lead magnet, whatever one you have. Or if you have multiple ones that make sense and then once they're on the email list, you just relentlessly follow up and sell them on your services. It really is that simple and straightforward, and the better you get at it, the more you do it, the more you're gonna get clients more gonna make etcetera. And so, as I've started already covered here, the third step, then is your sales, which is your sales pages. So your services page your emails on ah, hopefully daily basis, and then any sort of content that you might create that's designed to sell them. For example, I take my emails and I cross post them onto my block. So technically, that's not an email. When someone finds on my block, it's a block post, so it's content, but it does the same thing. It sells my products. So again, that's the funnel, those air sort of the basic steps. We'll talk about sales in the next lessons. We'll get into that a little bit, but I won't talk. Talk about traffic and leads here because this is your audience were talking about building an audience. This is what you're doing. When it comes to traffic, you want to create relevant content to attract potential clients. The big thing I want you to understand here is you need to again. This is why going back to picking an inch is so important doing the research, understanding your market because you need to know what their needs and their wants and their problems are. If you know that, then you can start to create content around that that provides solutions to those problems . So the steps in this, our first identified problems your audience is facing and then create content to solve those problems. So, for example, now I have I sell a PHP course, one of the best selling pieces of content that I have for where my PHP course is a blawg post on my website where ah, I talk about how to create Ah, log in Ah, log in former logging system using PHP. Now, this is a little bit more attack, maybe technical advanced stuff, but this is a problem. This is a big thing that people want to know how to do with the coding language. PHP who created ah block post where I show how to do that but and so I I've found a problem and I've created a solution. But then I did the second thing. I made it useful but incomplete. So in my course I go through in detail about how to build this log in system all the way out, and I again just show it in detail, go through every line of code, explained everything in the blawg post. However, I just take out sort of the big chunks of the big sort of steps that you have to take and I show a little snippets a code. So if in my course the the total code to do this log in system, let's say, is 100 lines of Kodi. Maybe put 25 lines of the code in the block post and then the end of the block post. I say, if you want to take the full course and learn how to do this, then take my course so it's useful, but it's incomplete. It shows them some of it, but not all of it. And that block post gets the most traffic of any block post on my site, and it sells a lot of that particular product. So this is the kind of thing that you want to do. Now. I I sort of play around with things. Sometimes if you go to my site, you may see this, so I figure out address it. But sometimes I point them to the lead magnet. Sometimes I point them directly to a product or service in my block posts or my YouTube videos on my podcast. Whatever the reason I do that is because I already have built up a substantial email list. So I'm not in this phase of just trying to build this massive email list. I'm more in the stage of creating customers and so forth. When you first start out, I highly recommend that you point them to your lead magnet. And the reason that is is because you are likely not going to be very experienced in selling people on your products and services. So the way the sort of the the catch all or the way that you deal with that the trump card , so to speak, is that you get him on your email list and then you can follow up with them over time and you get multiple shots at it. Okay, I've been doing this for almost 14 years. I've done it for quite a while, so I have a pretty good sense of how to sell my products and services so I will do that directly on my block post. But really, the best way to do, especially if you're starting out, is just Teoh. Point them to your lead magnet at the end of your content, and so what you do is you create a piece of content. I'll just tell you my what I do. So every day I write an email and in that email at the end of the email. I will promote a particular product or service. Then I will repurpose that and I will post that on my block when I post on my blogger gets auto posted to my to my Facebook. Ah, to linked in There's a link created on Twitter. I sort of automate that stuff. And then I will also record a YouTube video where I essentially just sort of read through that blogged or that block poster. That email all create a little bit of a presentation, either with slides or some Web Web pages that I'll click through as I go through it. But I'll essentially be going through the email that I wrote. I will upload that to YouTube. I also output an audio version and upload that as a podcast. So every day I have une email that goes out, have a block post that goes out. I have a YouTube video that goes out. I have podcast that goes out. It also gets posted a medium dot com, and all of that stuff gets shared on my social media. So I'm hitting everything every single day, and it's with the exact same piece of content. So wherever somebody follows me. They're getting the message. They're not going to miss it. Sure, some people be on your email list and on your YouTube channel, maybe even list your podcast, whatever. They'll get it multiple times, but they can then decide how they want to consume it. So it's not a bad thing. And I've literally never had anybody say to me or get upset. Hey, why do you do this? I think I maybe had one person asked. One time I explained in there like, Oh, that makes sense. So again, you want to get it out into a many channels as you can, but you can use the same piece of content. You don't have to create 10 pieces of content every day. Take the same one and just repurpose it and again at the end of it at the end of the bog post at the end of the email at the end of the YouTube video podcast cetera point them to your lead magnets. Say, if you want to learn more, you want to take the next step. Go to blah, blah blah dot com and get my free whatever. Okay, we'll talk a little bit more about your lead magnet here in a second. But that's that's how you create this system of attracting people to you and then capturing them onto your email list. And that's what's gonna help you build your audience, because you can not only promote your products and services on in your email list, but you can also now and again promote your YouTube video, promote your podcast, promote your blawg, and now that becomes traffic from your email list to your blog's or YouTube, etcetera. So this is how you grow your audience. All right, so that's traffic Now we're quick before we jump into the lead section here. One of the things that I find confusing for a lot of business people and freelancers is social media marketing because you get a lot of advice out there and you see a lot of people of the way that they do their social media and they talk about building up followings and getting comments and shares and likes and all that sort of thing. And when you follow that advice, you may grow an audience and then have success and so forth. But it doesn't always necessarily lead to actual results for your business. And then when you try to go the other way, promote your products and services and so forth, it's hard, much harder to grow following. You can kind of feel like a bit of an outcast on these These, ah, these social media sites and your posts don't really get much traction, and it just doesn't ever lead to anything for you, business wise. And so what I've done is I've created an entire course just on social media, marketing four freelancers and talk about what I call the strategy, which is something that I learned all the way back in the days of my space, about using social media specifically for business without being a pariah on these social media sites. And there's a very specific way to do this. And so if you're someone who really wants to dig into social media marketing in particular the strategy part of it, then I'd recommend checking out that course. So if you just go to the about section of this class, you click on my little profile picture or my name that will take you to my profile and you'll see in the list of my freelance courses there. It's part of my freelancing. Wanna one Siri's? You'll see it. It says Social media marketing on there. And you can kind of dive into that and learn the strategy that I've been using for over a decade now for using social media specifically for business purposes. And then the next step, of course, is leads. And so use lead magnets to capture leads. Now you may not be familiar with what a lead magnet is. Essentially, the idea behind the name is it is a It is something that will attract leads to you, so the way to think of it is it is a kind of magic bullet for your audience. It's something that, or maybe you want to use the word magic pill. If you've ever seen those the hoses diet pill commercials where it's like, Hey, just take this pill and do nothing else and you'll automatically lose way and be ripped right. That's that's a magic bullet. It's It's the exact thing that they want without them having to do just a ton of work. Now. I'm not. I'm not suggesting that you lied to people or make things up or whatever. But the point is, is that you want to find something that they really want badly and make a lead magnet around that. So ah, good example for, for me, a source code at being a developer, being a coder, someone who creates websites. One of the things that people in my industry want this source code instead of me showing them how to do it in them, learning how to do it, they just want the code to make it work. That's a magic bullet for them. So when I first started creating content, I would put that out on my block post. What I learned over time was that source code is a really powerful way of selling. Products, and services are getting people on your email list, so I moved it behind my email list. Eventually, you know, you'd have to subscribe to my email list in order to access to my source code, and eventually I moved it solely into my products. There's some that's still out there, but for the most part, if you want to get access to my source code, you have to buy my products, and that's because I know it's a magic bullet. So again, creating a lead magnet around something like that again, this is gonna take thought. It's gonna take you knowing your market. This is again. Why picking a niche and doing that research back there is so important, because when you know your audience, you're going to know the answer to this. You're not gonna have toe rack your brain trying to figure out it's gonna be obvious to you . So again, you want to create a lead magnet around that. The other thing you want to make sure you do with it is make sure it's a quick win, one of one of the the the natural reactions that you might have when you hear this is oh, I'm gonna write 100 page E book that answers every single question and tells them everything they could ever want to know. And if you I'll just tell you from experience. If you do that, your lead magnet will be a flop because people just don't have time for it and they're not sold on you enough yet to do that. So if you have 100 page e book, they might read five pages than and then give up on it. You've got to give them something quick, something that they can read and 1/2 hour or something really cool, or watch a video or whatever it is that they consume very quickly, and from that they can get a certain result. They don't have to get everything 100% but get some sort of result. And then it's your service. That is the big win, that you're gonna create this whole thing for them and you're going to do it and they don't even have to do anything. So to give an example of all of this when it comes to lead magnets, I'd recommend taking look at John's free toots dot com. This is a free tutorial site. Essentially, what I've done is I've taken lessons from my paid courses, and I made them available for free over on this site behind, of course, a subscription. So if you subscribe to my email list, you get access to lessons from my PHP course or you know, my upward course or any. Most of my courses are over there this way, and then what I do is, for example, with my PHP course, I the first sort of portion of my PHP courses. 11 lessons, I believe. And it all builds up to the 11th lesson where you build a contact form. And so I put that entire first segment available for free on the site. And so, people, when they go there, they go through the lessons and they actually build something. And they build this contact form and they come away from that going. Hey, I actually learned some code, and I built something real there. It's a quick wind. And then if they want to take the rest of the course, it which is, Ah, 23 more modules, something like that. Then they have to go to to the paid part of it and take that course. And so it gives them a quick win and at the same time promotes the big win. And just one more example of this. A quick win. Ah, for me would be, Hey, build the contact form, right? That's the quick win. The big win is learning how to code PHP, and that's what you're going to do in your course. So just to hopefully make that clear, you want the quick win in your lead a magnet, and you want to make it a magic bullet for me again, like a log in form or a contact form. Those are magic bullets for my audience, those air things they really want to learn how to dio. And so I make those in my lean back lean magnets and those lead magnets get a lot of people that sign up and then ultimately sells my, uh, product as a result of that. So again, that's what you want to do. Get them on your email list so you can then follow up with him, right? So, like I said, we'll get into selling your products and services in the next lesson. This when I wanted to talk about building audience, but just to summarize again. You want to create contact that attracts perspective clients to you. You want to create useful but incomplete content that attracts potential clients. And then you push your readers, viewers, listeners, whatever your lead magnets in every piece of content, and then you sell those people that are your leads now on your services, and that's what we're going to talk about next. All right, so coming up. As I mentioned, we're gonna talk about how to sell your services. Then we're going to get into how to deliver like a pro and make your clients happy so that clients see you as a professional freelancer and they feel comfortable hiring you again and recommending you to other people, which is a natural leader. And what will get into after that, which is how to get referrals and just to say now so that you'll stick around for that lesson. Getting referrals, Any service into business, which freelancing is a service business. Any service business referrals are the life blood of that business. So everything we've done up to this point is designed to get to the point where when someone works with you, they will. You will get referrals from that person. That's what's really ultimately going to make your freelance business successful, so you'll definitely want to stick around for that lesson. 6. How to Sell Your Services: Okay, so let's get into the big one about how to sell your services. And you noticed my little note down here. You want to sell your services like you've got the cure to cancer. So we're gonna talk about that a little bit. In fact, I'm to start off right away and address that and sort of the elephant in the room. And I really like the way then settled talks about this. If you don't know who Ben several is, he's a pretty well known copywriter, very successful copywriter. And I've learned a ton from him and really ah, coming cross his stuff. And what he has to say about email marketing and so forth has really changed my business and a lot of sort of my approach to things that I'm going through with you, um you know, was started by what I discovered with him. But the thing that he says is he says you're not doing any favors by hiding your products, we can truly help them. In fact, I've said this a lot. It's your moral and ethical obligation to tell people your product at least exists every day. If you really care about your market, you're gonna want them to at least know about what you have. And I really want to put the emphasis emphasis on the if you can. If it can truly help them. And we're talking about services, it's if you can truly help them. And I know a lot of people sort of a little bit shy, maybe about selling, or maybe have some heartburn about doing it or just feel a little, maybe sales or slamming or whatever. But the way that you get through that is to make and create a service that really, truly does help people. And one of the analogies that that Ben Subtle uses not quoted here, but I've heard him use it before is It's like if you have the cure to cancer and imagine if you did have the cure to cancer and you have a family member even that had cancer, would you not? And you knew it 100%. This was a cure, like you knew for sure. Would you not on a daily basis, be aggressively trying to get them to to try that Kirk, your especially imagine it was a spouse or a child would you not be in their face every day trying to convince them to take that cure. I mean, I think the answer that is obvious. And so when you have a service or a product that truly helps people that you truly believe in, it gets really easy to be really aggressive with your marketing because you know, when people consume that product, that is really going to help them with the problem that they have. And so if you're feeling shy about selling your feeling uneasy about selling, the answer to that is to really go in and dig deep on your your service and get it to the point where you are, Ah, 100% confident where you know, Ah, with all your heart that if someone takes you up on your service, they're going to be better off as a result of it. And when you do that on, the more you do that, the easier it's gonna be for you to be aggressive and being aggressive and selling is really, really important because it will dramatically change your business. All right, so I just wanted to address that right off the bat before we get into selling because I know sometimes people come to this with different points of view when it comes to sales. But ultimately again, if you get to that point where you truly believe in your product and service than being aggressive, it just again. Like, he says, you sort of have a moral, ethical obligation because of a go on their lives without solving the problem, because you didn't tell them about it, and you could have told them and they could have consumed it and they could have got the problem solved them continuing toe have that problem is a little bit your fault because you failed to tell them that you have the cure, so to speak. All right, so what? That said, let's go into some of the mechanics here. So the first, the first sort of main piece of sales material that you need to create and the one that you should do first is your services page and or your freelance profile. So again, going back to talking about platforms a little bit, obviously going to start off with your freelancing profile, you're going to do as much of this as you can over there. You're gonna fit it in depending on what? Ah, freelance platform you use. Then you know you're going to to fitted these things in where you can and of course, along the way you're gonna be building it on your your services page on your own website. But this is your hard sell pitch. This is where you you you sort of come out and really hit him hard with with all of the sales stuff that you would normally think of. So what I'm gonna do here is go through the must haves on the services page. From my experience, these are the things that when I got right, my cells pages performed really well. So the first thing is a compelling headline, and the reason that is the headline is the add for your ad people. I got to read the rest of your services page. If you don't have a headline that's compelling enough to get them to do that. So you need something that's compelling and you want to speak to the emotion of their most pressing problem. So, for example, my headline on my services page for a long time was finally get your membership site launched, and again I help people build membership sites using specific pieces of software. But what I noticed as I started working with people, as a lot of them had been trying to get their site built for a long time. Um, mainly a lot of them were trying to do it on their own without hiring a developer, And they had finally got frustrated to the point of deciding that they were going to hire a developer. And so they were really frustrated with how long it was taking and all the technical stuff that they were having to deal with. So the headline finally, get your membership site launched in the sub headline was Without all the technical headache spoke directly to the problem that I had identified in the emotion behind it actually put the word finally in italics to sort of emphasize that that emotion. So that's what you want to do with your headline again going back to picking your niche. If you know your market, you listen to your clients as you get feedback. This is gonna become more and more clear over time. What's gonna be a compelling headline? Next is proof. Okay, you need to prove you need to go beyond sufficient. Okay? A lot of people just want toe when they when I say proof they think of, Well, I just have to prove that I know what I'm doing. It's amore than that you have to really with, especially with niche marketing. You really need to prove that you are the authority in your niche. So it's not just that you're good enough to hire its that you are the number one person. You are the big fish in the pond, and the way you do this is through examples, not claim. So what a lot of people do when they write their services page or they write their freelance profile. They might say something like, I am reliable or a better. One easier example would be I am experienced. That's something that you might hear a lot. Well, that's a claim, right? You're not. You're just saying that that doesn't mean that it has to be true. You could just be completely making it up. And so the way that you go from making a claim to use an example is you talk about stuff that you've done and So you use examples. For example, you may sit Say something like, I've been a developer for 15 years. That is a fact that you can point to that speaks to your experience. But it's not you actually saying you're experienced or you could say I've built ah 100 membership sites, for example that again speaks to your experience, but it does it with something that is provable, not you. Just making that claim. Okay, so you want to go beyond simply making claims into actually providing examples things that you've done Now, if you're in a spot where maybe you don't have a lot of those things than that's that's sort of your thing to do is go out and and create those things. Make those things so that you have them to talk about. If you have to do a little bit of free work at first to get that done, then by all means do what you gotta do. But having things that you can point to that you've done is how you go beyond and actually prove that you're an authority. Next is your portfolio. So as you talk to start talking about the things that you've done in, Ah, overview. Our sales page, etcetera. Then people are going immediately go to your portfolio cause they're gonna want to see those things. So let people see what you can do. Put up your your best examples. This is one of things. Ah, lot of people, Just that they're gonna take every project and put it in their portfolio or they're going to, um, you know, they're there. They're going to think that volume is what matters. Volume isn't really what matters. Because the reality is most clients probably aren't gonna look through everything, especially if you have 100 different items in your portfolio. Instead, they're gonna they're gonna look at one or two or three. Will you need to make sure that the ones that they look at our examples of your best work, so you need to Onley put your best items in your portfolio. Having five of your best items in your portfolio is better than having 10 in the last five being so so because those may be the ones they click on toe look at and now they're not impressed because those air sort of so so item so Onley put your absolute best work in your portfolio. And always remember, visual appeal counts. It doesn't matter what you do. You're a writer, your back and developer. You're a dog walker. Whatever it is, you need to find ways to make your your portfolio visually appealing. Cause is just going to catch people's eyes and is going to have this air of credibility to it. The 4th 1 that is testimonials. I think it's pretty self explanatory. As you work with clients, you're gonna want to get feedback from them and put that on your services page. Anything that good that your client say that just helped prove Mawr, that you're someone that's good to work with these to work with reliable, etcetera. And then the last thing is, always ask for the sale. Always tell them what to do next. To get started directly. Tell them I used to do face to face sales. I used to sell shoes that Ah, and it was actually a sort of high pressure commission based store that I worked in. And the number one thing that I always had to train new employees on the hardest was asking for the sale. People are just they have a hard time doing it. Get nervous, that sort of thing. But you need to ask for the sale. It's the I can't remember the numbers exactly. But we talked about it all the time. And the difference between when someone asked for a cell and when they don't don't is dramatic in the amount of sales that they make. So always ask for the cell. You do that by telling them what to do to get started. Okay? So those air sort of the must haves that you need to have on your services page and or your freelance profile again with your free grants profile just fit him in where you can, depending on ah, the site. And if you do those things and you really focus on proving and giving examples on and establishing authority, then I think you'll you'll have good success with your your services page. All right, so now, once you have that in place, you're gonna be pointing people to that. Now you need to go beyond that. You don't just put that page up and let it go. Now we get need to start getting into daily. I would highly strongly recommend daily content, and we'll start off with written content. So this could be an email block post Facebook status. I recommend sort of automating it and having all of the have well, it posted all those places. So write an email and copy and paste over into your blogged if you have to copy and paste it over into Facebook. Linked in there's a neat service called zap e er z a p i e r dot com that will allow you to sort of hook all these different things together. So when you post the wanna gets posted, the other that can help you automate some of this stuff, but you want to distribute, it is as wide as possible, and you want to do it on a daily basis. And this is you know, a lot of people want to sort of go into hard content and hard teaching. And the reality is these people are so overwhelmed with content that that if you have a 3000 word block post, I mean, how many of those have you really read lately? If you just look at your own sort of content consumption habits so you want to keep it short, you want to keep it quick? You wanted to be useful. You wanted to be entertaining, but you don't want it to be so thick that they don't actually read it. And so I have a pattern that I sort of use. And that works really, really well. So the first part of that pattern and this isn't formulaic. You can weave these together sort of. However, you want to actually usually start off with a story to and then point out what the lesson is. But, ah, when I'm thinking about it, I sort of start with the lesson. So every email should have some sort of lesson or point that you want to make. So there's needs to be a reason why you're sending this them now them this email or this block post. I wanted to tell you this, or I wanted to talk about this so there's always a point to it, and I would tend towards deeper life lessons because deeper life lessons tend to connect on a deeper emotional level. And when you do that on a consistent basis, that's going to generate Mawr Trust, and I can just tell you from my own experience, when I talk about those things are, the more I talk about those things, the more I get people emailing me and saying, You know, I really love listening to you. I really trust you like that's how you build trust. So you want to tend towards deeper life lessons, although, you know, every now and again doing some no, I I obviously do do maybe less or more shallow lessons where I talk about a specific technique or tactic around something. Maybe it's up worker, it's code or whatever. But the way you really generate trust is with those deeper emotional levels so tend toward towards those deeper life lessons, then I use a story to illustrate the point. Our lesson. So the reason that you want to do that it's stories air naturally and entertaining, and they're gonna keep people's attention. So this is how you get them to actually read the email or consume the videos by telling a story. I like to start off with the story because by starting off with the story sort of gets people hooked and into it, and I haven't point out the lesson yet, so it has, ah sort of element of curiosity to it. So that sort of keeps them engaged as well. The story, along with the curiosity of like, Why is he telling me this? And I like to sort of tell random stories up Don't immediately necessarily make sense because it's like, What is he telling me this and then it sort of parlayed into a deeper life lessons where they go, OK, that makes sense. But if you could do that on a consistent basis, you really gonna be able to cultivate a strong audience around what you're doing. So again have some sort of story that illustrates the point of the lesson, and then you have the sale. So you transition into how this lesson or how this point relates to your product or service . Now the easy way to do that is to actually start with your product. So whenever I write an email and then transition that into other content, always look at my products and and I think about the first thing I think about is which product do I want to promote today what I want talk about that's related to that product and I actually pulled from the product to help me understand, then the lesson that I want to to talk about related to that product. And then I develop a story from that. So that's sort of the pattern, because at the end of the day you're selling, and so it makes sense that you would start with what you're going to sell instead of trying to just make that up at the end. Every now and again, I'll just have something I want to talk about and all kind of just halfway transition it into a sale. And when you're emailing on a daily basis, you can do that. Sometimes the performance. Sometimes they don't you'll you'll sort of realize, as you start to write and do this more that sometimes you just want to say stuff and so go for it. You know, that's the beauty of being of doing it on a daily basis. With that, the last thing here then that I want to talk about is what I call the 99 1 principle, and it sort of goes hand in hand with everything that we've talked about here, but the ideas you're giving them 99% content slash entertainment, 1% pitch. Okay, so you don't need to make your pitch this long, drawn out thing. You don't need to go into this deep sales pitch. In fact, I've found that them. When I do that, that actually hurts sales more than it helps in most cases. So keep it to a sentence or two. Essentially, you just tell your story and you illustrate your lesson. If you're focused on a problem, you can sort of right out the problem and the story of what you went through and all this and then just sort of like at the end, be like and how I cured it was X y Z, and that can work really, really well, so you don't need to go into this deep sales pitch. That's what your services pages for. It's going to do all of that stuff for you. So this should all be soft cell type stuff, a sentence or two at the end to sell, ah, to sell your product or service or to pitch your product or service on bats It So that's the 99 1 principle, right? So that's the written content Now it's the audiovisual content, and this is really just about repurpose ing. And the big thing here is what's big and bold. Here's don't make it hard, right. You don't have toe. You don't have to go over the top with this. Okay? The power of this is going to be the story. You tell the deeper life lesson. It's not the visual content per se. I mean, that helps a little, but it's really more about the story, so don't make it harder than it has to be. When you start out, just read your written content with you. Give yourself permission to ad lib. You don't have to read it necessarily word for word, but have it on the screen right in front of you so you can go through it. And if you do have to read a word for word right off the bat, when you first do this, do that. That's better than then. Homing and all ing your way through stuff, okay. And as you do it, you will get less robotic with time, and so that's gonna help it sound more natural and come out better. So again, don't make it hard in that regard. Then add simple visuals that add meaning to to back up what you're saying. So proof elements are a really good thing or something, maybe a picture that illustrates a point. Or if you have to just turn on a webcam and do a talking head where you have your computer screen behind you that you're looking at and sort of reading from, and you have your webcam facing you, recording you. I've done plenty of those. Ah, and those work just fine. So again don't make it harder than it has to be. The third thing, and probably the most important thing is the audio. The most important part of video is the audio, and it's been proven. Study after study after study that people will click a quick click away faster for bad audio over anything else. So if you're going to invest money in something, invest money in a microphone in or time and learning how to edit and edit out background noise and that sort of thing. Spend your time in your money there on the audio because that's going to be the most important thing, especially if you're distributing it into a podcast and so forth. That's all they're going to get, so the audio quality is gonna be especially important in in those distribution channels. Next is then distribute everywhere and put it on YouTube. Put it in a podcast. You have the audio there already, so why not just put it into a podcast so people can listen to it while they're driving? People really love. Some people really love to do that, and that's the only way that they'll consume my content. So distributed as far and as wide as you can upload it wherever you can. You will just want to get in front of his many eyeballs as you can. Over time, you'll start to figure out where your audience tends to congregate, and then you can maybe trim that back a little bit and focus on the ones where you're getting the most traction. The final thing here, then, is just a word of warning. You're not a youtuber, right? You are a freelancer using YouTube as a marketing mechanism. There's a 100% difference. In fact, I would say most of any of the YouTube tips that you might see out there I would ignore most of them because you're doing something completely different. Unless you're talk you're listening to someone who is doing the same thing is you. They're selling products or services. Most of the other stuff I would ignore because there's a totally different thing there. Their whole thing is based around views and getting as many views as possible you for you and people Pocket is they give me a hard time about this every time I talk about it. Views more views does not equal more sales time after time after time after time, that's been proven. And there's sort of an inverse relationship between appeal like mass appeal and the persuasiveness of what you've written or what you've recorded. So the more mass appeal it has generally, the less persuasive it's gonna be, the less mass appeal that has the MAWR persuasive, persuasive, it's gonna be. And this goes back to what we talked about when it when we talked about niches, you're able to more directly talk to that person's problems, needs, wants desires, the more specific you are. But that's not gonna appeal toe a whole lot of other people. If you're making content for weight loss for busy moms. That's not gonna appeal to bodybuilding. Dad's okay, so again you have to You have to ride that fine line Every now and again. You can find something that has a little bit more mass appeal, and it's still persuasive. But you can't run your business based off of that. You you need to hit base hits. You need to hit ground balls and get one base of the time instead of trying to swing for a home run every time. So just remember you're not a youtuber. You're not trying to go viral. You're speaking to a niche audience in your you're addressing direct problems. So don't get too caught up in the YouTube podcast thing. And I'm just telling you that from my own personal experience having done it, it will hurt your business when you do that. Alright, so I've mentioned this before. I just want to make sure and harp on this and really strongly encourage you daily, daily daily The my business has grown 4 to 5 times since I started doing this, and it just if you really step back and think about it, it makes sense, you know, going out and aggressively selling what your product or service on a daily basis. Why wouldn't you do that? Why would you limit yourself arbitrarily to one once a week or once a month or whatever it ISS again? If you truly believe in what you're selling, get out there every day and try to sell it. And that alone. If you just do that, it's really, really simple. If you aggressively sell what you have to offer every day, you will do more business than if you don't pure and simple. And so get out there every day and do it. And the other side effect of that is, as you do it on a daily basis, you just get better at it because you do it more. I One of the reasons I'm better at email than a lot of my counterparts is cause I email every day and they email once a week. So I've written three and 60 some emails in a year for about 34 years now, and they've written No. 52 for however long, so you just get better at it when you do it on a daily basis. All right, so to summarize again, as I mentioned, aggressively sell your services on a daily basis. The keys to success if your service will truly help people GIA moral and ethical obligation to let your audience know about it on a daily basis. Create a simple services page based on proof, really focus it around proof and believability. The biggest thing you have to overcome a skepticism. So focusing on that and then email slash post. Whether it's a video podcast or block post whatever on a daily basis and you're just gonna have a lot more success. All right, coming up. Next, we're gonna get into how to deliver like a pro and make your clients happy. So your client see you as a professional freelancer that have no problem hiring you again or recommending you to their friends. Also talk specifically about how to get referrals, and then we're gonna go ahead and wrap up the course with the conclusion 7. How to Deliver Like a Pro: Now let's talk about how to deliver like a pro. And as I've been saying all along, you want to get to the point where your clients see is that you as a professional in what you do? And they feel comfortable recommending you toe other so you really have to. If you think about it, you really have to reach a certain threshold where someone's gonna feel comfortable to recommend you to someone else. So again, you wanna while them to the point that they naturally want to tell others about you. Now, before I get into this, I just want to say the tricky part about this is maybe the most important part of this whole course. But the tricky part about this is this is sort of a generic general freelancing course. I'm not specifically talking about any one thing. I happen to be a Web developer, but I know a lot of people do other things, so I don't actually know what you do as a freelancer, so it's a little difficult for me to get specific. However, I'm gonna give you some general principles that you can follow here that I believe and I sort of seen that no matter what you do, these things air gonna matter to clients. And if you do these things and apply them to you what you do specifically, then you're gonna be in a lot better shape. So that said, Let's get into this. And first off, I want to just talk about the whole idea behind repeat clients. Why this isn't so important. Repeat clients are really repeat kinds, and referrals are really the lifeblood of any service industry. And so here's some stats that I pulled that I thought were interesting. These actually come from this Article 75 customer service, fax, quotes and statistics from Help Scout. And this is a survey that they do appear. Ah, study that they do periodically. So 1st 1 is 33% of Americans say, though concerns switching companies after just a single instance of poor service. That's how important the experience is. Next is increasing. Country customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25 to 95%. So again, just holding on to the clients or the customers that you already have can help you make a lot more money next it's anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one. And, you know, with freelancing, this could be especially true. It can be five times more expensive monetarily, it can be 5 to 25 times more expensive effort wise. So it's a lot easier once someone's worked with you for them to trust you enough to hire you again if you do a good job. So the way that you are ultimately going to make a good money in any service industry. But particulars of freelancer is by getting clients that you work with to hire you again and again and again. So it's really, really important last one. When it comes to making a purchase, 64% of people find customer experience more important than price, so most people are willing to pay more for good service. So again, it's not only that those people are gonna hire you again, it costs less to get them back. They'll be willing to spend more with you. They'll be able to go with you as you raise your prices. If you're doing a good job, if you're giving them good service. So again, I just want a hammer home. This point that repeat clients is huge here, and this is you know, sometimes I hear freelancers who will tell me that one of the things they don't like about freelancing is that, you know, they they sort of feel like they're always in in a rat race, trying to get new clients and often times when I dig into it. What I find is that they're not necessarily, Ah that they may be doing a sufficient job when it comes to delivering for clients. But they're not just wowing their clients to the point that they get. Those clients want to hire them again and are willing to pay them or in order to work with them exclusively. That's the key. When you get to that point freelancing, you start to get to the point, weaken right, your own checking it becomes a heck of a lot easier. So again, I just want to stress how important this is. With that said, let's talk about how to actually wow clients on a consistent basis, and then that's the big thing behind this Doing it client After client after client after client to now you have a group of clients who don't want to work with anyone else. So as I mentioned, I don't know what you do and so getting super specific with this could be a little bit difficult. But I can tell you there are some principles that you can follow that if you if you pay attention to these things, then you're gonna have a lot better luck and you're gonna be on the right track. So the 1st 1 is the obvious one, which is quality that simply how good of a job you do. If you say go to a restaurant, it's how good the food is. OK, but how good the food is isn't the only thing, right? Next one is speed. So how quickly you can deliver for me is a Web developers how quickly could build the website. And if you go to a restaurant, it's how quickly the food shows up. If you look at ah, a restaurant like Jimmy John's, their whole thing is built around them, delivering freaky fast, and they really do deliver freaky fast if you've ever ordered from there. And that is I mean, the food is you know, it's sufficient, but it's when you want to eat very, very quickly. You call Jimmy John, so speed is something that's very important and could be sort of a Trump Carter and X factor. This is one of the things that really helped me when I was freelancing, as I could build sites really, really quickly. And so a lot of people stuck with me just because they knew if they need something done fast, I could get it done. And you can also think of you know, the pizza delivery on 30 minutes or less. The There's a lot of pizza places that did or still do sort of run on that. So again, speed is something that's very, very important. Finally, is communication. I'll just go back to the restaurant example. Let's say something does get messed up. A lot of people are willing to deal with that if they're told what's going on. And so when you have a restaurant, you have a waiter or waitress who may be your order, got messed up or things are a little slow, and they are constantly communicating with you telling you that then you appreciate that and you're willing to maybe deal with a little bit less in terms of speed or quality, because they've been so proactive in their communication and just to pull out a statistic here. From that Help Scout study again says the majority, 66% of adults feel that valuing their time is the most important thing, and company conduce to provide them with good online customer experience. So listening to them understanding them if something's messed up, working with them and being respectful of their time. Ah, even if there's some sort of issue recognizing that, you know Hey, this is I know this is wasting your time. We're going to get a fixed. We're going to get it done right, etcetera. So again, I think if you look at those three things and you focus on those three things is obviously they'll a lot more. And as you grow in your specific ah, niche and what you're doing as a freelancer, you'll learn some of those other nuanced thing. But to me, these air, the big rocks have you get these three things nailed right off the bat, you're gonna be in really good shape for wowing your customers, getting repeat business, getting referrals, etcetera. So again, the thing here, though, is how do we do this on a consistent basis? What can you do to make sure that you're you're doing these three things? So the 1st 1 that I recommend is what's called a delivery road map, and this is an outline of how and when you're going to deliver. And this, to me, takes care of the first tour is a big step towards taking care of the 1st 2 which is quality and speed. So you want to build a delivery roadmap for you and your clients. Now, the very first time you do this, If you've never done this particular thing that you're gonna do when it comes to freelancing, then you just want to You're gonna have to guess it this a little bit. But it's better to have some sort of vague plan than nothing at all. Okay, so you want to drop an outline of what you believe are the key milestones and delivering the final product your client. So again, as a Web developer, I might say now ah ah, get the domain name upload Ah, wordpress to the site. Installed the plug ins, get the theme. Tweet the theme. Like I could outline several steps along the way that I'm gonna have to do in order to build that website for them. If you walk dogs, it could be maybe a little, a little bit simpler. But you could outline something like show up to get dog 15 minutes early or 10 minutes earlier. Five minutes early. And you may over time, figure out well from 15 minutes early that a lot of people don't like that. But if I'm five minutes early, they really appreciate that. So you tweak your this as you go, but have some sort of plan of making sure I always show up five minutes early. And then you you move that into how you schedule things, um, and said just sort of winging it so And then, you know, make sure be back five minutes before the owner says that they want their dog back or whatever. It could be very, very simple. But you want to have an outline of how you're going to deliver and then put timeframes timeframes on those milestones. How long is this going to take s so that you can then start to build sort of a schedule of your actual delivery. So again, for me is a a Web developer, I may say, Hey, getting the domain name, installing WordPress, uploading the plug ins, installing a theme that's all going to take me a day. And so now I have a day and they can look at that and say, after a day, I should be able to see this much progress. And if they go and they see that much progress than they feel comfortable, if they don't, then they may feel uncomfortable contact. You can talk to them exception. We'll talk about communication a second, but just put time frames on it. Now, the big thing with Ah, the timeframes is you want to make sure and put in lag time because things will often take longer than you imagine they will in your head when you're planning stuff out and again as you as you work with this. And as you do this, you're gonna get more specific with those times. But, you know, I had ah ah developer sort of mentor of mine. Whose advice was you know, I think Ah ah. Determined how much time you you think it's gonna take to do something and then times it by three. And and I found throughout my career that's been been, ah, pretty accurate because things just tend to take longer. So building foot fudge time also, key decisions should be a part of the milestone. So it's not just things you're gonna dio. That's also decisions that the client has to make. So for me it might be artwork, or it might be what theme they want to use or what plug ins they want to install. What the domain name, they what they want it to be. You need to build those key decisions in so that they can see what decisions they have to make. They can start planning that stuff ahead of time, so they're ready for you, and you don't get bogged down by them having to make a decision that they weren't prepared to make her. That's gonna take them some time to make and depending on, especially as you work with bigger clients, maybe enterprise clients or corporate clients. A lot times those decisions have to go through an entire approval process. So if you just keep dropping them on them as it comes up, that's going to slow down the process. And, you know, it may be on them to make the decision, but they're still gonna look at the overall timeframe. And if it's longer than what? What they were hoping or imagining, they're gonna get frustrated, and that's gonna lead to them. Not necessary. They're gonna blame you regardless. Is why the ultimate what I'm getting at. So you want to make sure that they can make those decisions ahead of time. And then again, as I've said, refine it As you work with clients, get more specific. This is the nice thing about working in a niche. Is your sorted You sort of doing the same thing over and over again? If you're walking dogs walking dogs over and over again, you know, walking dogs one day and then cutting people's hair the next day and you doing the same thing for me. I was building membership sites over and over, so I got really specific and really good at it, and then the last thing give this to your your new clients so they can see what it's supposed to look like. And again they can see what decisions they have to make. This helps alleviate a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety because they see exactly how its planned out and they can follow along as you go. And if there's delays, they can see how long it's going to delay the overall project. They can plan for that, etcetera. All right, next is a communication schedule, and the big point here is you want to be proactive in your communication, right? It's not enough to be responsive. And when they email you or call you, you respond. That's good. That's sort of a baseline. But that's not enough toe wow them You want to be proactive, and the best way to proact be proactive is to schedule it. So we've just talked about a delivery roadmap. Now you can look at that road map, and you can identify key communication points within that road map. So milestones that you want to report to them decisions they need to make. Depending on what you do, there could be others, but you want Teoh identify key points where you you need to communicate with them, and then you build for yourself, not for them. This you don't give to them. Based on your delivery roadmap, you build a communication schedule, outlining when and how you're gonna communicate with them. So I'm gonna communicate with them after I get the domain name Ah, picked out and the WordPress install done, I'm gonna communicate with them. Let them know that, son, I'm gonna do it via email over here. I need them to make a decision about their theme. I know that Maybe they're not exactly sure what they want to do, So I'm gonna schedule a call with them to talk them through that. And then we can decide on which team they want to give. So it's not just when it's also how and you want to be. You want to be smart about how you do that, uh, in terms of using email versus using phone and so forth. If you know it's a decision, that's gonna be difficult for them. It's probably best to schedule phone call. But if it's something quick and simple, then you can just do a via email. That way you don't have to waste a bunch of time with it. The more you take control of this process, the less you're gonna have to deal with the Sunday night at 11 p.m. Phone calls or the hey , you got a quick second to jump on and chat, etcetera. The more you control the communication, the less you're gonna deal. Have to deal with that sort of spontaneous communication, and it's gonna make your life a heck of a lot easier. If there's one thing that you do to make your freelance life easier, it's this. Take control of communication, be proactive. And if you do that, your client will. As you work with them, they'll start to understand, especially if they become a repeat client. And you've sort of set the boundaries and set the expectation they're gonna They're gonna become a lot easier to work with. So ultimately, it's on you to make your client easy to work with, which I know a lot of people's heads explode. A lot of freelancers had explode when I say that, but there are things that you can do to do that, and this is one of them, as it says here. Don't rely on spontaneous communication The big thing to understand is if a client has to constantly drag updates about their project or what you're doing for them theft to drag updates out of you that's gonna ruin their client experience and the easiest way that you can think of this. I assume you probably been to a restaurant at one point or another, and you've probably been toe one where the waiter or waitress is very attentive. And let's say you have a drink and you know, every time that drink gets about half full or half empty, they grab it and they fill it up and you're drink is literally, always full. It never goes empty. And then you compare that to someone who you know, a waiter or waitress where you literally will sit there for 5 to 10 minutes with a drink empty. You've gotta, like, wave someone down. Sometimes it's not even the person that's serving you with someone else. You have to like, constantly dragged them, filling up your drink out of them and how frustrating and annoying that is in the difference between those to those to customer experiences are for your client. Communication is like that drink you need to constantly keep it full. You need to constantly be updating them. And if they have to drag drag updates out of you, it will ruin, no matter how good equality, you know, how matter how good a speed. The lack of communication can ruin the entire experience for them. And that's gonna lead to less repeat business and less referrals. All right, so to sum all this up, then again, you want to The keys to success are repeat. Business is the life blood of any service business quality, speed and communication are how you constantly wow, clients. And the biggest thing about all of this don't leave it up to chance. Plan it all out. You do that and you're gonna be on a lot better spot. All right, coming up. We're gonna get into coming in the next lesson. How to get referrals. We've talked a lot about this. At this point we've talked about, ultimately, you need to have a good delivery, a delivery that wiles clients, that's sort of the basis. But we'll talk about some specific things you can do to generate referrals proactively. And then we'll get After that, we'll get into the conclusion of the course 8. How to Get Referrals: Now let's talk about how to get referrals because long term referrals is how you're going to ultimately succeed as a freelancer. And again just wanna go through some statistics that back this up. So this is from a believers a Nielsen study. Ah, and these were, uh, collected over on a site called Extol. So let's just go through these. So the 1st 1 when referred by a friend people are four times more likely to make a purchase . So it's gonna make you getting people to hire you a lot easier if they were referred to you by someone that's a friend of theirs. Next referred customers. LTV, which is lifetime value, is 16% higher when compared to non referred customers. So not only is it gonna be easier for you to get hired, they're actually on average, going to spend more with you when they're referred, versus not referred. Customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate, which is related the next one, which is referred. Customers have an 18% lower turned and customers acquired by other means, so they are more likely to stick with you and hire you again when they're referred by somebody as opposed to when they're not. And you can expect at least 16% more in profits from referred customers. So you're just gonna make more money. So again, referrals are really again long term. It's how you're gonna win, getting to the point where you're getting referrals. They're not having to go out and just get every single client that you get now. This is a little There's sort of a little bit of a caveat when we talk about this in relation to freelancing platforms, because the platform itself is going to show your job history. It's going to show what other people have said about you, and that's not exactly a referral from a friend, but that's going to play somewhat of a similar role to referrals. And again, those rankings and ratings and so forth are going to play a big part in how you show up in searches and suggested freelancer lists and so forth. So there's an element of this built into the freelancer platform itself, but it's also outside of that. You just sort of getting these on your own. So we're gonna talk about three different kinds of referrals and what you need to do to get each one and they sort of build upon each other. So the 1st 1 is the most obvious one, which is natural referrals. So this is the most important, and it is sort of the baseline. And these are referrals that you don't ask for the clients is make them on their own. Without your encouragement, they just go out and tell somebody about you and again. This is the baseline. You need to be getting thes before any other kind of referral can really work. Because people, you know, if you ask people for a referral or you even go to the point of paying them for a referral , they're not going to do it. At least not enough people. Most people aren't going to do this. They won't refer people to you if they don't trust you, no matter how much you give them. And this is especially true as you get into higher and higher priced or more more and more premium kinds of freelancing. So again, for me is a Web developer, the more the sort of higher quality client client, so to speak, the more they were paying me to build a site, the less likely they were to refer someone to me if I didn't absolutely just knock them off their feet. So again, you have to really be focused on those natural referrals and getting these kinds of referrals before any anything else. And as I've mentioned, it goes back to delivery. You have tow wow, your clients and communication quality, speed all of those things or what's going to do that. So that's the baseline. That's where you have to start. You really need to be getting these kind of referrals before you get into anything else. The next one is solicited. This is simply asking for the referral. This is a staple of many service companies again. My older brother was in the insurance industry. This was just a part of what they did. After they would work with the client. The client would get in Ah, plan or whatever they ultimately got with the company. They would just a part of their sales process, really was asking for referrals afterwards. And he, you know, the first probably year or so that he was in insurance he built is entire business almost primarily based off of referrals. So it's very, very important. It's not anything new toe to do this and ask for. I used to sell cut code knives way back in the day. Any sort of similar ah company like that. That's again the same thing. It's just a part of the process. You just asked for referrals. So it's something that businesses do. It's something that people are sort of used to in a solicit furloughs. You simply asked them for the referral. You ask them to write down anyone they know who would be interested. Ah, and if you could do a good job and they know someone, they'll be happy to refer others to you. It almost will be like they're doing a favor for that person because they know that person needs now whatever it is that you do. And so now that they'll get the opportunity to to share you essentially with this person who needs the same thing, and so they will be happy to do that Now, when it comes to this sort of thing, it's a numbers game, Okay, there's not. Everybody's going to give you referrals, Um, and you need to get to a certain sort of number. It's kind of different every industry, but every client that you get out of, let's say, 10. You need tohave five that are giving you, you know, three referrals or whatever it is. For every industry, it's a little bit different for me. Web development It was a lot lower, uh, necessary just because of the nature of what I did. But it's ultimately a numbers game, and the way that you tip that numbers game into your favor again, it's about wiling clients. It's about how you deliver. So I'm gonna keep harping on that, but it really does come down to that. But you then again, need to add on top of that, making sure you ask for the referral, right? Don't just do a good job and then don't ask for the referral. That sort of short changing yourself. The last one, then, is what you might guess, which is incentivised, which is where you pay for the referrals and just a statistic I sort of threw in here. Related. This is 80% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands that have reform reward program, so people like doing this again. If you're giving good service, then that will be happy to do this. And they'll appreciate it because now they're not only give being able to give the gift to somebody, they're getting paid to do it. So it's Ah, double win now. The way that I would do this is I would take $1000 off someone's next website. If they referred someone to me. And, you know, I was working with 5000 for 34 $5000 websites I was building, so taking $1000 off was a a lot for them. B Not necessarily a lot for me. I mean I mean, yeah, it's $1000 but it was absolutely worth it if I got that guaranteed and I had a stipulation that the person had to hire me and complete the project, so I had to have a whole new project and get paid on that for it to count but on, and that's where the $1000 would come from. But ah, you know, it was it was really simple to do, and, you know, I'd get both a repeat client and a referral out of it if it worked out, so you can sort of set it up. However you want to just make sure you're very clear and specific about how it works. Make sure you outlined the caveats and the conditions and so forth. You wanted to be hard high R A y For the client, you know, $1000 again is is a big deal to a lot of clients. So that was very it was a good incentive for them to one of her for people, and again just to point out, it will come back down to delivery. They're not going to do this if you don't deliver. Well, if they don't like your service, they're just not going to do it. Not enough to make it actually work to get you over that tipping point where you start having more people contacting you and wanting to hire you than what you can actually service. That's the position you want to be in. So those are the different three different kinds of referrals again just to sort of sum this all up. This is how you're gonna win long term. You have natural, you have solicited and you have sent. If ized, they they sort of build upon one another, and it all goes back to delivery. That is the foundation of all of this. All right, coming up. We'll get into the conclusion of the course and sort of wrap everything up. 9. Conclusion: Well, you made it here we are in the final lesson here, and the conclusion here just wanted to sort of come back through. I know I've thrown a lot at you, hopefully learned a ton. You've The main thing is, if you've found some confidence to go out there and do this and get started with this, that's the big thing that I wanted toe toe do with you do for you with this courses give you confidence to go out there and tackle this. There certainly are. Still more things toe learn, but hopefully this gives you the big picture view of what to do and how to have success. So I just want to run back through all of that real quick to sort of wrap this up before I do get into that, I would appreciate if you enjoyed the course. If you would leave me a positive review of the course, that would really help me out also. Ah, if you would head on over to my skill chauffeur profile and give me a follow there as well , I would appreciate that. And that way you'll get notified of any new courses that I release a swell. All right, So what? That said, Let's go ahead and jump into this. So just to wrap up freelancing is one of the best and quickest ways to start a business and be your own boss. When went through a lot of statistics that showed how everything is sort of moving towards freelancing, it's sort of inevitable. And if you're someone who just wants toe to get out of a 9 to 5 job that maybe you don't like or you don't ever want to get in tow one or you just are really passionate about doing something you love. Freelancing is there's lots of businesses you could start. But freelancing is is probably one of the easiest and quickest, because providing services for people is something that is it. Zvehr e riel and they can see and they can feel. And you're not trying to sell them something, you know, like information or whatever. So you could be one of the quickest ways to start a business and start being your own boss . Now, the first thing that you need to do the most important thing is pick a well defined Mitch and then know that niche better than they even know themselves. And we talked about different ways that you can do that. Different tools that that you can use again. I recommend fear. When we got to the platform part, we talk about up work. If you're gonna use up work as a research tour, you're gonna use as a tool for getting work again, checking out my freelancing on upward course. I'm not trying to harp on it too much, but I really do think that's gonna help you, too. Ah, really dominate over on up work. So again you can find that on my Scotia profile. Or you could go toe up work one on one dot com to learn more about that next you want. Once you know your market. No, no, your niche. You want to create services that solve their exact problems in exactly the way they will they want. And one of the examples we used his weight loss for busy moms. So it's not just about, ah, the service you're providing. It's how you're providing that service. You're providing it anyway where a busy mom can actually take advantage of it. It's not a headache for them to have to deal with your making. Contacting you are interacting with you or or or asking you to come out and provide ah repeat business. You making all of that easy for someone who is a busy mom to be able to take advantage of that. So it's not just what it's also how, then you want to start building an audience around what you do. As Gary V said, If you're not creating producing content online, you basically don't exist. So you need to start building an audience to build a a long term, sustainable business, an asset that you can either one day sell or you can pass on to your kids and grandkids and so forth. And then the big thing through. All of this is deliver, deliver deliver. Ultimately, your long term set success will come down to your ability to deliver and price. Provide good quality service for your clients. Quality speed communication. If you focus on those three things, you're gonna be just fine. And then in the long term, in terms of building your business, you really want to focus on getting repeat clients and getting referrals. That's gonna be what sustained you for the long term and turns your business into a true asset that you can either sell or or pass down to your kids. And then the last thing through all this. We've been pretty serious, but try to have some fun. This is supposed to be fun. This is, you know, the one of the reasons why a lot of people want to get away from a 9 to 5 job is because it's boring. It's not fun. It's not exciting. Tryto have fun doing this because ultimately that's the point. You've got one life to live. You might as well have fun doing it. Be aggressive, take calculated risks and just go for it. Really? Get out there and just go after it. You can do it. I mean, I'm I am a ah, I'm a river rat kid from the middle of nowhere in in Nebraska that never thought that I would ever have a chance to do anything with my life. And, you know, here I am, having worked from home for over eight years now, consistently doing what I love like I never could have imagined this kind of life, so I just I know it's cliche, but I just feel like if someone like me can make this happen, I feel like you absolutely can. You just got to go for it. You just got to do it and put in the work and again, have fun. Enjoy it. It's supposed to be fun. So that will do it for for the course again. Hopefully, I enjoyed it. If you did, I appreciate if you'd leave me a review If you want to be notified of future classes, be sure to also, um, follow me over on my profile and I look forward to talking with you. And here in your success story, thanks again. 10. BONUS: Contracts and Getting Paid: Okay, so let's talk about contracts and getting paid and never letting a client fake on your payments. And this is sort of an odd thing for me because I've never actually had a client do this with me, and I think it's because of the process that I had from the very beginning. But I get people who email with me all the time with the all kinds of horror stories about this. So I want to make sure and go through this. This is something that you don't know that way from the very beginning. When you start freelancing, you can have this taking care of, and it's something that never happens to you. And you don't have to worry about whether or not you're gonna get paid and all that. And I think once you see the method that I use here, you'll see how it's pretty much guarantee that you're going to get paid. So that said, let's let's dive into this. So the first thing is the contract. Now I think too many people put especially freelancers put. They put too much on the contract, right? They think, Well, I've got a contract. It signed by the client. And so that's all I really need. And the reality is, is that all the contract really is? Is your legal fall back? So if you do have toe sue, then you have a signed document that you can show a judge. And for the most part, unless you've done something wrong, that's probably going to fall in your favor, and I use one call. It's called Contract Killer is an open source contract. I've put the link here. It's just stuff and nonsense dot c o dot UK and then projects and then contract dash killer . But there's no I wish there was an easier link for that, but there's not. So that's that's just the link. But the thing to keep in mind is that the contract is not the end all be all because ultimately lawsuits are expensive and a lot of cases you might end up paying more to bring the lawsuit. And I know in certain situations, you know you can get your legal fees recouped to you, but oftentimes you still we're gonna have to pay those up front, which makes it something that's not even possible for you to do It's still really just a big pain in the butt toe. Have to go through all that. So we really want to attract. Try to avoid a lawsuit, and the only thing a contract really helps us with is the lawsuit. So the contract is not the end all be all for getting paid. And there are plenty of clients out there who will happily ignore a contract and do all sorts of shady things. So that is why I have a payment process Now. I just want to make sure, in reiterate, have the contract. You need to have the contract, but that's just the first step. That's not going to ensure that you that you get paid. Ah, and it's not gonna, you know it's not gonna keep clients from being shady. So have it. But realize that that's just a last resort. It's not the thing that you're doing primarily. So the thing that I do is I have a three step process for getting paid, so the first step is a 10% nonrefundable fee, so this helps me sort of weed out people who aren't serious or just trying to get free advice or whatever and it it's pretty straightforward. Whatever the price of the project is, you could attend you. They have to pay a 10% fee up front before I do anything. So when I was doing $5000 custom sites for people, they'd have to pay me $500 before I would do anything before I would install WordPress before I'd get a domain. Whatever the first steps were, I did nothing and I would quite literally sit there and I had client who would sort of test it and see. And I would do nothing and they would email me and say, Hey, come and go ahead and get this done while no, I when the nonrefundable fee comes through, then I will start, and you really have to be that hard knows about it because, client, there are some people out there who will just sort of push and take every inch, every inch you give them. If they're not willing to give you that 10% up front, then Neil, there's a why are they going to give you the rest of it like it's not gonna happen. It doesn't happen so again, 10% up front. It's nonrefundable. I stress that with them because that is what Pete weeds out. The people who are not serious because now it becomes a risk to them. And so someone who's not serious is not gonna give you $500 for free. And so it really makes them commit to the project by making it nonrefundable. Ah, and it also just let you know that they have the money. So, you know, it's it's not 100% certain that if they can pay 10% they have they have the other 90. But most people are not willing to lose that 10% because knowing they don't have the other 90 and then they're just gonna give you $500 then they're not gonna be able to pay the rest . And so they're just losing their money. They're not going to do that, especially people who are trying to sham your or whatever they're not gonna. They're trying to avoid risking their money. So this works really, really well. I see some people leave this out. They've heard me talk about this before, and they leave it out. Um, and it can lead to problems, so it's really important. It's the hardest thing to do. But it's really important because then you're only working with serious people about money and compare you so 10% nonrefundable fee up front XT is 60% on delivery. So essentially, we're not giving them anything until you have you have most of your money and this is really the most important step. Now, some of this is a little specific to me as a Web developer, and you're gonna have to figure this out for what you do because I build websites. It was easy for me to build those websites on my own server on my own development server, and I could let the client see the finished product. I could give them a u. R l. I could let them see the finished product product. They could click through it and see everything, and we could go back and forth and work on it, but they didn't actually have it yet. It was on my servers, and so then once everything was good and they actually wanted it on their servers. They had to pay me 60% to get what I built, and this is very important because this is this is sort of the tit for tat when it comes to this is they want to see before they pay. But if you give it to him, then you're gonna have clients who will just take that and not actually pay you. So this is the This is sort of the head that moment in time where everything's a little bit tricky and you really have to stick to your guns here. Now, the thing to keep in mind with this is possession really is 9/10 of the law. So for me is a Web developer. If I built something and I built it on their servers and then they didn't pay me and I went back into their servers and deleted what I built off of their servers without their approval, I could get sued. And a lot of Web developers don't understand that. Um so it's important to remember that if you give somebody something and they now have it, if you go back and just take it from them, whatever service you happen to provide you will be the one who gets in trouble. That's theft in the eyes. of the law. So you have to go through Ah, entire different legal process. And that's where the lawsuit in the contract all comes in. So get your money before you give them anything but have a way to show them that you've completed it so that they're comfortable to pay you the money. But yet you're not actually giving them, so it is tricky. So some examples for common people that contact me about this right? If you're a photographer, you know, maybe you put a big old watermark in the middle of the photo. I know a lot of photographers have put him in the corner, and that's just how they give him three people I'm talking about. Put a big one right in the middle, sort of like you see with some of the photography sites that are out there like shutter stock and whatever they put a bagel watermark across it. So it's not really usable. Uh, until you know, you remove that and give it to them. So that's one example. Or if you're a writer, right, that that one can seem pretty difficult. Oh, but maybe instead of giving them the written document to show them. You take a photo of it now, Yeah, they can read through it, but if they wanted to steal it from you, they'd have to actually sit there and type it all out. And so if they're going, if they're going to be willing to go through all of that work there, you know, that's why they were hiring you in the first place. So it's you're not giving them something that's easy for them to steal. It's not like it's impossible, but it's not gonna be easy, and it be easier for you to just pay them. Ultimately, what you're doing is keeping honest people honest, shady people are gonna just be shady, and that's what the nonrefundable fee thing is for. But now you're at the point of making sure that honest people stay honest and actually pay you and so forth, and so come up with some way, whatever you do to be able to show them that you've completed it and they can see it and they know it's done. But they don't actually have it and would be really inconvenient and difficult for them toe to steal it from you. So whatever that is for what you do. Come up with something like that and then just stick to your guns so that you get your money before you actually give them the final product. The last thing then, is the final 30% on set up. So for me, it was Hey, you know, I've built this thing on my servers. Here's what it looks like You're all good with its all approved. Now I'm gonna move it to your servers. They pay the 60% and once they pay the 60% now, I actually put it on their server. I set it all up. I get everything working. It's on their server, working exactly how they want it toe work. They've gone through it. Please. Okay, it's all good. And that's when they pay me. The final 30% is after that. So if you look at this process, it's actually this is the only money that you risk is this final 30%. But they've paid you 70% up to this point. So there's two things about that. One is you've got 70% of your money. So if they do flake at this point, you're not completely out. At least you got the majority of the money. The second thing is, is if they paid you 70% they're very unlikely to be the type of person who's not gonna pay you that last 30%. And to that point, I've never had someone who we got to This point. A lot of people will explain this to them. They think, Well, everybody will just flake on that last 30%. I've had never had anybody do that, so it's very, very unlikely. The person who's gonna pay you 70 won't pay you that last 30% and especially they've kind of gone through the process. And you've got two payments now from them. You know, they're kind of just in the mindset and have the mo mentum of paying you for your work. So again, I've never had anybody not pay that last 30%. Ah, The other sort of side benefit of this is there's actually less pressure on the final approval because they've already paid you most of the money. One thing that can happen with freelance clients is that you know, when you get to that, that that sort of final moment where It's like, Okay, you have to approve it. And then they're gonna send you this big chunk of money if you if you're not doing the process I described here, they can start to get a little nervous, right? Because they're like, Oh, once you get your money, you're gonna cut and run. And so there could be a lot of pressure when there's a big chunk of money that's involved with the final approval. Well, with this process you've already paid, they already paid the big chunk of money you've already got past that point. Um, and you had a built in incentive for them to get past that point, which is toe, actually get the thing that you built. It's so it just takes a lot of pressure off of this last final approval. And I found that when I do this, I actually have a lot less difficulty getting sort of the final approval, the client saying they want to move on and all that sort of stuff. So ah, that's sort of Ah, nice little side benefit here so that that's the process. That's the system. The method for for getting paid in all the years I came up with this. Like I said, growing up the way I did, I probably had the mindset already was in the mindset of I'm not going to risk not getting paid. Ah, And so I came up with this kind of right at the very beginning when I first started freelancing. And in all the years that I've done it, I've never had a client not pay. So it's worked really, really well for me. And I think if you if you do this and, you know, depending on what you do, you may have to do some thinking and figuring out how it's gonna work for you. But if you do something like this ah, you're just never gonna have to worry about it. And you always have the contract. Then as I fall back, if you really, really need it, so that's the method. That's the system. Hopefully that ah, that works for you and helps you figure out how to get paid and so forth 11. BONUS: How to Charge More For Your Services: in this lesson, we're gonna cover how to get paid more, how to charge more for your services. And I think be able to easily at least be able to charge triple what you are per hour. And let me just tell you really quickly where I discovered this because I think I hope illustrated a little bit. So is right after I had built Platform University for Michael High, and he has a massive following along online. I don't know if you know who he is, but he has a very big following online and a bunch of no his followers after they saw that site need did the whole launch and everything. They wanted a membership site just like his. Because he teaches people how to build. He calls a platform building. It's essentially sort of building its content, marketing its online marketing so forth. So they wanted to cite like his, And it turns out that I was one of two people in the world that could build it for them, and the other guy wasn't taking clients. So I started getting a ton of quote requests for a clone of his sight and eventually started offering that is an official service because I got so many of those and I charged $3000 apiece for these sites. But I had written Got that theme from scratch eso I had all the code. I knew how it was written. I knew how to tweak it, set it all up. Ah, and because they were sort of coming for me, like seeking me, right? I wasn't necessarily seeking them out. They were trying toe toe hire me because I was the only person in the world that could do this for them. I had a little more control and so I just didn't allow for very many. Custom is ations. I would just say no. And they really didn't have much choice if they wanted the site built and I had enough people asked me to do it. Ah, that I could do that. And so all of that meant that each one of these sites on Lee took me a few hours to build is usually about 4 to 5 hours at most is what it would take me to build one of these sites . So my hourly rate, if you kind of do the math on that went from I think I was charging around $100 an hour than two up around 6 $700 an hour. You know, maybe a little bit last 4 500 depending on how quickly have wanted to move on. And so you can see my rate went up quite a bit. Now when you hear that, you might think, OK, great. But you know, that was the super unique thing, and there's no way that I can replicate that, and I would beg to differ. In fact, I think it can be easily replicated once you understand the dynamic behind it and why it worked. I think replicating it is simple, and I've done it numerous times sense. And it's not always 6 to 7 times the rate, but 3 to 4 times the rate if you're doing hourly now, making 3 to 4 times what you're charging eyes pretty easy to do. And so there's three components that go into making this work, and the more you get each one of these right, the more you'll see your rate per hour go up. So that's what we're gonna cover in this lesson and the first component is moving from hourly rate to fix price projects, and you may have heard this before, but I can't stress enough how important this is. It's just easier till deliver, and you're gonna make more money doing it. It takes a little work thinking it through, but I I can't tell you how how worth it. It is to do that. So instead of just offering X Y Z services at an hour hourly rate, whether it's Web development or photography or whatever it is you do writing, etcetera, you wanna offer turnkey solutions to problems. So if you're a Web developer, instead of just offering sort of generic Web development services offer something specific for me, it was membership sites, you know, maybe it's woo commerce. Or maybe it's I don't know any number of things that it could be out there but move from doing generic sort of services to something very specific. Ah, if you're doing photography, were really popular thing over on fiber right now is Amazon product shots. If you look a in the photography category, something like five of the top six or five of the top eight, uh, projects or gigs over there on fibre are Amazon product shots. So start offering that a lot of people want it. And once you figure out what it is and how to do it, it becomes easy. You know, probably you'll get a lot more efficient at it writing. And so just offering writing services maybe could offer 1000 word beauty tip articles again over on fiber fashion, beauty, fitness Those sorts of articles are all really, really popular. So again move from something that is generic and vague and intangible to something that specific, tangible, clear, etcetera. It makes it easier to sell easier deliver and so forth. And the analogy I like to use to try and really bring this home is the cow slaughtering versus steak. And forgive me if I offend any non meat eaters out there. But if you think about it, what what ultimately is happening when you go to the supermarket and buy it? Ah, hunk of steak is someone went out and they raise the cattle. They slaughtered the cattle, they butchered the cattle, and then they put it in a package for you to be able to buy. Now they could offer you their cow slaughtering services, air, cow raising and slaughtering and so forth. And if you think about that, you think, well, that is kind of weird. It doesn't make sense like it seems strange, but going and buying the actual end product of their service is a steak. So ultimately, they really are just providing a service. But they've packaged it anyway, to where it's now a product, and it makes sense. It's clear, and it's actually what you think about in your head that you want. You don't want the cow slaughtering service. You just want the steak or, you know, if it's vegetables, you don't want the gardening service right. You want the kale. So that's the mindset that you, the shift that you need to make and ultimately what you're doing as you are detaching the price from the hours. That's the big thing. You need to make it so the client doesn't even they don't even care about the number of hours because that's not what is in their head that what's in their head is the end product , and the reason that you want to do that is so that as you become more efficient because you're delivering on the same thing over and over, you're gonna become a lot more efficient at it. You're gonna have a lot of the resource is for me as a coder. I had a lot of code already written. You're gonna have all that stuff in place where you can deliver on these things very, very quickly. If you're charging an hourly rate, it's literally going to cost you money. So you detach the price from the hours so you can become more efficient. And now you can make more per hour without necessarily actually charging the client anymore . It's just about you becoming more efficient. So that's the first thing is fixed price projects. The next thing, then, is to putting those into packages. And so you want to create 3 to 5 packages because if you offer one package, clients are you could just constantly deal with people. Asking about custom is ations now. They're still going to do that anyway. But if you create different packages, that's your customization. And so you've added in the variety right up front, and you sort of implicitly communicate that there are no customers ations because custom is ations are the thing that will kill efficiency of fish if becoming more efficient is how you're going to make more customization. Zehr What's going to stop you from being able to do that? So you need to deal with these right off the bat, and you do that by adding variety and what you offer now. Those packages could be kind of, however you want to set him up if you want a lot more in depth on this sort of thing. In my freelancing wanna one Siri's. I have a course on what services to offer. I actually go through over on fiber and some other places and show you different packages and how different people have have set up their packaging and so forth. So she want to see something specific like that. Just head on over to my profile on skill share on and and you could. You'll see that course there and you could check it out or you go. John Morris online dot com slash niche toe More about that course, but again, you want to package these things eso that you you don't have to deal with the custom is ations and again the analogy, I would use what would be when you go to the supermarket and you buy that stake. Do you ask the supermarket to customize your steak for you? Ah, not really, because they have different ones. They have different cuts, have different sizes. It's already there, packaged. And that's just what you choose from. And you know you could. You could go to the butcher on and in the air, the meat shop in there. Ah, and do that. But how many people actually do that? Probably very few, because the packages are already there. So another example is when talking about chefs, My love. My wife loves to watch the cooking shows, and I don't know if you've ever seen the Hell's Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay. But the best chefs. They tell their clients how their food will be cooked and served. They don't ask if you've ever watched that show. You know, if something it's made for someone in that restaurant and it's supposed to be medium and it comes back well done and the guest says something, then Gordon Ramsay will look at and go. Oh, yeah, this is wrong. And he'll yell at the chefs But if they say Hey, I want it medium rare And the customer says, Hey, this isn't medium rare and he looks at and goes medium rare. He will chew the butt of the customer, right? He'll get after them and say, No, this is medium rare. No, you moron. You don't know what blah, blah, blah like. He is not afraid to do that and tell them so. He's the expert, nobody else. And so he knows what is to be offered and how things are going to be. And you know, there's no substitution. Zor customization is on his meal. I'm telling you what's good, and that's sort of the mindset that you kind of want to get to. You obviously don't need to be that aggressive with it, but again, but doing that and putting them into his packages, you'll limit that customization stuff which is going to kill your efficiency, all right. The third thing then, is offer stacking. This actually comes from ah, friend of mine, who kind of told me this analogy. But that analogy goes like this. If you have iPhone and you're looking to sell your iPhone, your old iPhone or whatever and you might go out and you put on eBay or put it on Facebook , mark place or whatever and sell it and let's say you can get $500 for it. Since it's used, it's not brand new. You can get $500 for for that iPhone doing it and selling an iPhone like that makes the iPhone a commodity because it's just like any other iPhone. There's probably 10 other people on those sites that are selling similar iPhones, and there's no real difference between them. That's sort of the actual definition of a commodity, as you can get a similar type of product from any vendor. OK, so if you just go out and sell an iPhone, then that's what you're doing. You're selling a commodity, but imagine if you know your your particular iPhone had no Mark Zuckerberg's phone number on it, or you know somebody somebody, super famous Amat demons phone number on it. And as a result of you having that iPhone, you could call him whenever you want it. Well, that would make your iPhone different. Or what if you had, you know, a bunch of of e books or Amazon you know, Amazon Kindle books on there, and they were all related to to a topic that you were highly interested in, right? So you could go through all of these things that are special and unique about your particular iPhone that a normal regular iPhone doesn't have. And that's how you it goes from being in commodity to something that you can charge a premium for. And so you do this through offer stacking. And so the idea is you have your service that you're going to offer, which is the core thing. I'm gonna write articles or, you know, I'm going to do photography. I'm gonna build websites or whatever. But now what can I add to that as sort of a bonus that makes it unique, Right? So if I'm, for example, with me with with membership sites one of the things that I always mentioned when I was selling my services says, Hey, I've worked on, you know, membership sites for Michael high it for Tim Ferriss for Inc magazine for yada yada yada on down the list, and I've seen how they market them, how they do their content strategy, what they think, think about in terms of retention and keeping members all of these things that people is information that people who are building membership sites are after and they want to know. And it's from these people who are really successful at doing what they want to do. So thou I'm not just offering membership site services. I'm offering something that Onley I can offer. Nobody else can tell that same story because nobody else has done that exactly like I did it. Okay, so it makes goes from it being my firm being website services to my website services that are unique. When you do that, you can almost charge as much as you want. Because if someone wants to know what Michael Hyatt or Inc magazine or Tim Ferriss thinks about building and running a membership site, there's not a lot of places they could get that. And so I can pretty much charge whatever I want if they really, really want it. So again, that's when you're when you're thinking about your packages, you set up the core services, but now what can I add to it as ah developer or ah, writer or a photographer or whatever it is that you do. How can I build this out and add something to it that nobody else is offering that makes it unique and again stack the offer? You do those three things, then you're going to have a very compelling offer and set of packages that you can very easily deliver on. You'll get more efficient with, and you'll be able to charge a lot more for that fixed price project and you'll be able to deliver a lot quicker and you'll just see the gap between hours it takes you to deliver and what you're making. It will just start to separate on and you'll see that you could make quite a bit more. And that's why I say, I think 3 to 4 times what you're charging now is probably pretty easy once you once you start doing this. So anyway, that's Thea. That's the technique, or that's the strategy there. That's the method for being able to charge more for what you do 12. BONUS: Boring Sales Tactics That Work: this lesson. I want to talk about what might be considered bore boring sales tactics that actually work in a some stuff that I learned from an insurance agent who happened to be my brother. So just to give you a little bit of the kind of spiel before I get into the actual tactics my brother at one point it became an insurance agent, and when he started, he kind of went through this whole training program. He had a regional manager and all these people that it was sort of working within their teaching them what to do and so forth. And, of course, the big thing, as I kind of harp on when it comes to freelancers or anybody in a service industry, is they? They really spent a long time with teaching him how to get new clients. There's a whole back end of getting, you know, getting doing all the testing and how to service your clients and all that sort of stuff. But first and foremost, they would spend a lot of time teaching you how to get new clients, and because you can't do that, then you really just can't be in one of those industries and they're super super competitive. There's some of the most competitive industries on the planet. Ah, and so they're really doubt in when it comes to some of this stuff. And so you know him and I would talk a lot. I run my own business. He was running his own business. We talk a lot, and he told me a lot about what they were having him do and so forth. And so I learned a ton from what he was doing and just how Dowd and everything was with them. So these tactics sort of come from that. I'm not saying these air end all be all but a lot of these are things that you would immediately here. And I think this is the mistake people sort of make with this stuff is if it doesn't sound exciting or sexy or it sounds like something that might be hard for you to do, then people just sort of immediately brush it off and assume is just not gonna work or whatever, but again, these air, the most competitive industries on the planet and they're having their their new agents do this sort of stuff and I found from my own experience the thing different things that I tried actually worked pretty well. And the big thing is, you know, a lot of us want to stick to online tactics, and what we're talking about here are offline tactics. And the reason that they work so well is because so people are are unwilling so many people are unwilling to to do them on. So if you're the one doing them, you just you sort of stick out and you have an advantage. And person to person in face, sort of contact is always better than over the Internet or whatever may not scale as well. We're being a lot more effective. And so getting those first few clients and so forth, this could be the easiest way to do that. So just to cover some of the things that they had him do so and I've actually seen this both with him and insurance financial advice, which is very competitive industry real estate. I've seen people do this now that I've seen these tactics and kind of notice them. But one of the things that they had him do is they just had to make a list of everyone that he knew and mail them a letter announcing that he had started doing insurance and if you know, they needed that, any insurance needs to get in contact with him, and that is how he got his first few clients. Most of his most of them were family or friends that he had mailed or he talked to directly in person. And then from there, you kind of get the ball rolling. You get people talk like I used to talk about all the time, how much money he saved me and that got him. Other people that would then that then other family members of ours that would then have him at least do a quote and they find out they were saving money. And so it just sort of snowballed from there. So you get the ball rolling and then you get those referrals, which is sort of the lifeblood and the big thing. But you've got to start somewhere, And so depending on what you do, family and friends could be a really good one. It's not always comfortable. You don't have to be like super aggressive. You could just say Hey, you know, I'm doing this now, So if you need this thing, you know, come to me first. On a lot of times, your family and friends will do that. Another thing that they had him do was post fliers around town, and he ended up just hiring my kids paid him, like, eight bucks an hour, and they went around and they have this little bag and they had a flyer and some other stuff in it. Um, and the company that he was worked for had all of this stuff already resource for him. So he didn't have to come up with on his own. They basically told him, Hey, here's the Flyer. Here's the package. You just have to pay this amount. They got it at, like, really good wholesale prices. Um, and then they had the pack. He had the packages show up at his office, and then he had my kids paying like, eight bucks an hour to go around the neighborhood and just blanket the neighborhood in him . And no, he didn't get hundreds or thousands of clients doing that, but again, he got a few clients as a result of that, and now. These were non family members. These were new people and they had their own networks that were basically untapped. Ah, and again he got a few clients as a result of that. And then he was able to get referrals, and it's just sort of snowballed from there. Another one that I've seen that he didn't he didn't necessarily do. I mean, he kind of did this. He always He's a very social person, so he's kind of always doing this. But one. We had a new of financial advisor that moved into our neighborhood and, ah, he went around and just started introducing himself said, Hey, I just moved into the area. No, we live over such in such area, and I'm in a financial advisor. If you need any ever need anything in that regard, just let me know. When he gave me a brochure, his, uh and and And that was it. And I didn't end up taking them up on the offer, but I know I talked. A few of the neighbors and a few of the neighbors did end up going and talking with him in his office, so he was new to area And that was how he got a few of his first few clients and then again , really pounding on the referrals after that point. Now, when I say neighborhood our neighbors, he actually lived several blocks away from us. So it wasn't like he was just going around his block. He kind of went in. We lived in this sort of housing area, Um, and it was a fairly big there were I probably several 1000 houses in ultimately and the whole sort of housing district. Um, and he kind of was going around to all of them. So, um, again, in that that the word neighbor or neighborhood can be pretty loosely defined. So that's another thing that you can dio, but the most effective one I want to talk about before I get into that. The other thing about all of this, a lot of this is a face to face type stuff. The big thing here is it's not just getting the clients, but it's actually learning how to sell people face to face, because I was introduced to that early on in my life doing shoe sales, and I learned a ton from it. And sure it is nerve wracking and it can be difficult and so forth. But I learned a ton and it served me in everything I do sense. And so a lot of the reason why they cut these industries have their new agents do. This isn't just to get the business, it's to teach them how to sell their services, any face to face manner and do this kind of outbound marketing like this so that when you start doing some of the other stuff and you have people contacting you, you can close. You've done the face. You've done the hardest kind of sale you can do, which is going outbound, going to people, interrupting them in their homes and this sort of thing, if you can make a few sales that way Now, when people are coming in, you're a lot better at it, and you could make those sales. And so ah, that's one of the big reasons why they have them do this. So if this is stuff that you look at and you're like, I don't know if I can do this, this is you know, this is nerve racking and so forth. Don't get so wrapped up on the results. Just think of it as a challenge of as a learning opportunity and something you can do to make your selfie better, Better cells for person. Because as a freelancer, you know, whether you like it or not, you have to be able to sell yourself. You have to be able to sell your services. You're ultimately a sales person. You're your own sales person. So, um, again take it as a challenge to learn how to do that. But again, like I said, by far the most effective sort of tactic that I saw that he learned that that they had him do was local business meet up groups. And I went to a lot of these with him. He kind of introduced me to it none Soon as I sort of heard the idea, I was like, Okay, that kind of makes sense. I didn't think it would be what it ended up being, but virtually every meeting that I went to, I got some sort of lead towards a new client or a new project or whatever. Not all of those turn into actual clients or whatever, but there was so many of them that it just It was crazy, the amount of leads that I was getting an ultimately clients as a result of that. So these these are very, very effective. And the big reason why is because that's what these meet up groups are designed for. They're made for you to have other professionals in your area and them to know people or have people or whatever and to help the people in their group get lead. So you're all sort of helping each other. Ah, and so it works out really well. Now I'm gonna tell you a few things that you can do to make it even more effective. That made it really work for me. So the first thing is I would recommend picking smaller groups because when I've done the bigger groups, when you get in the bigger groups, often you just sort of get lost in the shuffle. People don't really know each other that well and on a personal level. Ah, and so it's not near as effective. You don't have near the connection on and so forth a smaller group. You really get to know people by smaller group. I mean, I think we had 20 in the one group that the primary group that I was in, Um and so it wasn't huge. And there was a cup. There was another one that I was in. That was several 100 in that area and there was thousands nationwide. It was kind of a nationwide network. I still got leads from that, but I really didn't like most of people I didn't know. So it was always sort of awkward. But the smaller group I was more comfortable over time on mawr invested in them and them invested me and so forth. He also become a little bit of a big fish in a small pond. So not often. When you're in the bigger groups, they don't stick to the one industry per group rule, which is that sort of the next thing you want to do. So they have the smaller groups. Have one realtor, one insurance agent. For me, it was one Web developer, etcetera. Where's the bigger groups you're gonna have? You know, they're gonna have more than that. And so now you're kind of back in the same boat of competing with other people, and they may know people better. They may have been in it longer, all that sort of thing. So smaller Group one industry per group. And then the big thing is a group of people who would hire you themselves. This is probably why it works so well for me is being a Web developer. I was in a group of other professionals who real estate agents and people like that. We're not very technical, but still knew that they needed websites. And so a lot of the people that would come to me for business where people in the actual group. So if you can kind of plan a way to make that work for you, Um, it's not necessary, but will be a lot more effective if you could do that. Now, some things to make sure that you have business cards, Get your business cards, get him looking right. Get him all squared away so you can hand them out. Everybody's going to ask you for one of these, so make sure you have that in order. Um, your elevator pitch. You need to be able to tell people what you do and how it would benefit them in 30 to 60 seconds. Ah, lot of times you'll do that at these meetings. But even when you meet someone, they'll ask you, what do you do? And you need to be able to give them an effective answer. So sit down. Think about it. Write it out. Think about the things that matter. Ah, and then memorize that speech. And over time you get better delivering it and and that will help you. The last thing that I would recommend is if you can take with you, always have some sort of briefcase or something you can take with you, and you have four or five portfolios, so make out print out portfolios. If you have pictures of the work that you do or whatever print those out, make up a portfolio they can hand out to people because you know that that's gonna be something. That's the biggest thing that you can do to sell your services. And so you want to make sure you have those available. If someone says, Oh, well, I know someone, So over here, I'll tell him about you. Whatever you can pull it portfolio in, say, Hey, here's my portfolio. You can give this to them or whatever. If you don't want to do that, at least have something you can send them in an email. So if you're a Web developer like me, then you can send them to websites that you've built or you have a portfolio page online that you've built photographer, right or whatever. You wanna have examples of your work that you can give to people on hand out to people so they see what you're capable of, and that's going to do most of the selling for you. So you don't have to feel like in all these groups you can just kind of go and interact. And and it's natural in these groups for people to try and share business and so forth, and you can let your portfolio do most of the selling for you. So again, like I said, local business meet up groups, by far are the most effective things that I found. And if you don't have any in your area, you can just look up online. There's there's usually pretty easy to find, um, or, you know, go find a realtor and insurance agent in your area and ask them if they're part of one. They probably are, and see what? Then get names of the groups and see what you need to do. Enroll all that, Um, or if there's none, you know, consider starting your own right. The, uh it could be something. If you're the head of the group, there's a lot more attention focused on you and could lead to even more business. But like I said, the most effective method in sort of in person method that that I came across in doing all that stuff as my brother went through that process. So take that for what it's worth, hopefully can help you to get some more clients either your first few ones or ongoing as you as you're going through Ah, your career and building your business. 13. BONUS: My Best-Performing Services Sales Page: this lesson is specifically for my freelance web developers who happen to be taking this course. I gotta get a little special affinity for you all, Since that's what I've done for about 15 years here. I also have some insights that I think can apply to you specifically, And I kind of want to share those with you. Although if you're not a freelance web developer, you could sort of a take and apply this. Ah, you know, if you can kind of get the concept you can taken, apply this to whatever you do and I'll talk a little bit about that at the end here. But what I want to specifically talk about is writing a services page, and I want to talk about the services page for me that by far perfect form the best. I want to talk about sort of the psychology behind it on, then how you can kind of duplicate this. So I want to start off right off the bat by talking about this headline here. And the headline is Read this before you let another developer ruin your website and a soon as I say that I can imagine that Ah, lot of you even watching this. You sort of perk up. And I could just tell you from my experience using this clients are the exact same way because it really speaks directly to exactly the fear that clients have, which is that they're gonna hire developer, that developers not going to know what they're doing and they're going to ruin their website. And so I just really catches the attention of a client and forces them toe to read what you have to say, at least start to read what you have to say, which is 90% of the battle. The very first thing that you have to do is get their attention. And this headline does that very well by really going directly at the biggest fear that they have. So the first thing that I would say with this is you can almost verbatim use this whatever kind of Web developer you are, you almost verbatim used this headline. Now, your strategy from here and what you write from here is going to change. Um, because it sort of depends who you are. It depends what technologies you're going to use and so forth and sort of the approach you take to developing, but the headline itself can pretty much stay intact. Okay, so that's the first thing. First thing next, then the first, the first paragraph. After that, we've got their attention. Now we really need to hook them in. And so what I say is with Inc magazine, they spent two years trying to get their site built. None of the developers they hired could get it done with Tim Ferriss is for our body. They had a forum built, but it couldn't keep up with all the traffic. Michael, Hi. It had a developer, but he didn't specialize in membership sites, and Michael wanted it done right from the start. So there's a few things that are going on here. First off, I'm establishing authority of a stat. I'm establishing that. I've worked with these people. That sort of implied in what I'm saying here and then I'm also sort of kind of digging in on the problem that I stated in the headline, which is in the way that I'm doing. That is by talking about all these really well known people who have successful businesses , have successful membership sites who had real legitimate problems with building their membership. Say so. The conversation that someone starts toe have when they read that is Oh, my gosh. Thes people are having problems. Like what? What do I not know? What am I in four. And so you're just sort of really digging in even further in on that problem. So again, you want to try to establish authority right up front. You also want to try and kind of digging deeper on the problem that you stated in the headline Now for you what you write here and this is the thing I really want to stress. As we go through this, try to get the concept. This is why I'm doing this in a word document. Not on a page. I don't want to get wrapped up in formatting. I don't I don't want you to just take what I say here and then copy it verbatim. It wouldn't work anyway because you haven't had these people as clients really want you to get the concept behind this. Okay, So we stayed a very clear problem in the headline about letting another developer ruin their website. Now, here you could go into examples of people. Basically, you're telling a horror story, okay? And this could work for anything, right? No matter what you do, so let me just sort of take unexamined. That's kind of not development that sort of off the beaten path. Let's say that you're a writer and you write articles for people, right? That's what that's what you dio. So maybe your headline should be read this before another writer gets you slapped by Google . That could be your headline. And then you could go into your horror story in the beginning, and you could use a horse story of someone who hired a content writer. And that content writer ended up just spinning a bunch of articles and putting them out and presenting him them as if they were original. And then, three months later, the website owner got slapped by Google for duplicate content. I'm sure there's tons of those stories out there like I know there's JC Penney several years back had hired, um, some company to do their Seo for them. Turns out that company was doing a bunch of shady stuff, and J. C. Penney ended up getting slapped, basically wiped off of Google for a while. I don't know if they've recovered, would assume, but ah, now there's though all of those sorts of horror stories. They're out there. They don't have to be clients of years. They don't have to be related to you. They could be anything. You're just telling a horror story that makes the headline that you've stated here riel, right? It makes it something legitimate came next. I go and I say I could go on and on down the list of website owners who tried either on their own or through hiring multiple well developers to get their membership site bill and couldn't and wasted months, even years, of time and money. So we're digging in even more on the problem. You make it. You ultimately tie it to an ultimate benefit, which is wasted time and money. So the benefit to them is that by hiring the right kind of developer, they're going to save time and they're going to save money. So you're trying to it tying it to an ultimate benefit and started setting up your transition here. So they say, Why not just have it done right from the start and then we go into this is a really key point of this. So now that you've set up this sort of this horror story and this address, this very specific problem, this big fear that they have and you brought it to the forefront. Now what you need to do is you need to give them this section has to do a couple things. One it needs to give them something of value. You want to make your ad in and of itself valuable because, well, ultimately makes this work really well is someone will read this and I go, Oh, my gosh. And they'll send it to a business partner or they'll send it to a co worker, an employee or a friend of theirs or whatever. Go. Oh, my gosh, Read this. We need to make sure we're doing this. And you could just look on Facebook ads. If you're on Facebook, look on some of the ads that have a bunch of comments and go through there. You'll see people that do that. Hey, they'll tag someone and they'll say, Hey, we need to look at this or Hey, check this out or whatever, Like people really do do that. And if you create this ad the right way, that's what people do with it. So you need to do that. So you need to give them something valuable in terms of content. You also need to established the criteria by which they are going to evaluate you. And you do that by establishing the criteria by which you have saying that they should evaluate any developer. Okay, so you're sort of stacking the cards in your favour by telling them how they should evaluate. And then they're gonna use that to evaluate you, and you're gonna show them how you meet all of these criteria in spades. And so that's what we do here. So here's the three things you need to watch out for when hiring a developer. Now, you can't just make these up, right? These need to be logical, toe the client. But the 1st 1 is reputation. Who have they worked with what those people say? How long have they been doing it? Are they just breaking into well development or the a seasoned vet? Would you really trust your business to a rookie just because they're a bit cheaper? I want to address that line. Specifically, I've done trainings like this before and people will say, Well, I'm new. It seems like you're ragging on, you know, new developers or new freelancers or whatever, and that's not really the case. What I'm I'm using this line here because I've been doing it for 15 years. So my play, my angle is being a seasoned vet is someone who's done it for a long time. If your new brand new to this, that's not your angle. So then you need to you need to flip it. So then you would say something like, Do you really want to trust your business to know an old crusty veteran who doesn't know the latest technology or whatever, however you could think of to spin the fact that your new versus someone who seasoned you got you have to spin it that way to to sort of fit, uh, who you are. That's why I say this. What you write from that headline on kind of depends on who you are and your technology stack. Okay, so that line in particular is one of those places. And really all of those lines and the fact that I I said reputation, right? You might not say reputation if your brand new because you don't have a reputation, So you're not going to say that's a criteria because that's just going to disqualify you from getting hired. Okay, So again, you gotta sort of think this through, But But you're establishing those criteria here. Okay, so the next thing is specialty. So do they specialize in the Zach saying thing you need done or they a jack of all trades, but master of none, I'll just tell you that the intricate balances of technologies that need to come together to build a successful and sustainable membership site You don't want someone who's never done this before or it's one of the many services they offer. You want a specialist now? I think most freelancers most developers could pretty much use that section almost verbatim . You need to change it a little bit, but you really want to position yourself as a specialist. You should be doing that anyway. And so that one sort of really just fits. The 3rd 1 then, is technology stack. Are they using Ah, well tested, supported technology. Are they trying to bloat their ego by rolling their own. Do you really want your entire business resting on software bill and tested by one developer used on one site that if anything goes wrong, there's only one person you can go to for help? Now, this again goes back to my specific technology stack because I'm using WordPress. I'm using a series of WordPress Prague plug ins, which we'll get to later. I'm saying that that is the best way to do it, which I happen to believe if you're someone who is rolling your own and custom building everything, you wouldn't say that same thing, right? You might say something like, Do you really want, you know, to trust your business to software that everybody else is using? They're going to give you a cookie cutter website the software that's been hacked, you know, x number of times and has no hackers from all the world over the world trying to figure out how to crack it, like you would position it a different way. But the thing that I want to point out here is your technology stack is really what drives everything here because that that ultimately is going to be your angle. So depending on what your technology stack is and how you're doing it, you probably have that technology stack for reason because you think it's the best technology stack. Okay, so now you have to think about Well, why is this the best? And why are other things not as good? And so everything that we've talked to up to this point all the horror stories and everything that I I've mentioned as we go through this it comes from me looking at my technology stack and going, Why do I think this is the best? Why do I think other things aren't as good? Now those are the things that aren't as good about those other stacks. That's what I'm gonna talk about in my sort of horror story section. Okay, so you really have to look at what your technology stack is, and then kind of reverse engineer and think backwards from there to figure out. You know what the horror story is? What the biggest fear is all that sort of thing. Okay, so now that we've done that, we've set up our criteria reputation, specialty and technology stack. And now we go in and just show how we meet these. So then I kind of make the transition here. So what my clients say about me, right? If reputation is important, well, what my clients say and then I go into syriza testimony. Also, Louis Schiff, Who is House Ray Edwards? Ah, these were all sort of real testimonials. Here. Come here. Bob Patterson. John Magnano. Right. So I just sort of layout testimonials. Um, the big thing here is that you know, these air from people that are probably fairly well known. Eat magazine, at least is who is house in certain circles, Ray Edwards definitely is, um, and then some of these other ones in certain circles. And also just to add sort of volume to the testimonials here. So you really want to hit them over the head with I have a good reputation. And so really hammering home that that authority Next, I say I specialize in memberships. Right. Specialty is a thing here. I say built over 100 membership sites using WordPress and wish this member. I don't know if I have or not. I actually don't know what the number is, but I just 100 sounded good for? For the purposes of this, it's probably not far off, but, um, Anyway, I'm using volume as proof, right? Build over 100 membership sites That sort of again establishing my credibility. I built that many sights I've worked with clients is well known as a magazine and Tim Fair . So again, I'm hammering that authority that built complex membership sites Will awesome custom code down to very simple 2 to 3 page membership site. So that is authority by variety. All right, I've worked on this, and I worked on that. I've worked on this, and I worked on that. I've done it all when it comes to this particular thing. I'm an expert in this. This is what I do, right? So you really wanna have hammer that home, find the things about you and what you've done that you can insert in here, And then the last thing is my technology stack. And so again, this is where it all sort of comes from. So I build membership sites using these technologies WordPress, which dismember elemental or layers for elementary theme, etcetera. Now, the thing I don't want you to get caught up on is I don't want to get caught up on what my technology stack is, right? It doesn't matter. Like I don't know. I don't wanna argue. Sit here and argue about Oh, I should be doing this or doing that. That's not something point of all of this. Whatever your technology stack is, you have to put your best foot forward and explain why you think that's the best stack and why people should hire You came. So I say WordPress and I say it powers. 30% of all websites been around for 10 plus years. I think support of a multi $1,000,000 business, thousands of open source developers. Again, I'm just giving proof. I'm hammering them with proof and reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing and why I'm using this stack. Next. One is wish this member. You know, it's one of, if not the longest standing membership plug ins for WordPress. It's was one of the very, very first ones has been used on sites by Mike I lose housing magazine mixer G thousands of others 96,156 sites as of today, anyway, uh, so again, credibility proof. Reasons why etcetera. L a mentor to page building Play Plug in So you're not tight to me for minor updates and tweaks to your sites The Dragon Drop interface builder use on over one million site. So I'm speaking to a benefit. You're not gonna have to come back. Pay me hundreds of dollars to make minor tweaks to your site. You can do that yourself. It's also reliable use on over a 1,000,000 sites and then layers for elementary theme. We're pressing, developed by the makers of Elementary. That's kind of a proof element. Adds even more functionality to your site outside a page building, speaking to benefits, etcetera. OK, so giving reasons why the entire time This is my technologies. This is why I use it. This is why I think it's better. This is what can happen if you don't have a good technology stack. This is what I specialize in. This is why this is why that matters, etcetera. This is who I've worked with. It's all proof. It's all reasons why it's just hammering over the head but doing it in the context of a real problem and riel fear that they have so byte ultimately what you're doing? Is you positioning you and your services as a way for them to solve or get rid of a really major fear that they have. That's why it's important that back here, you really hit home with this fear. And then, like I said, as a developer, you can pretty much copy this verbatim because I'm just telling you call. That's the biggest fear. Uh, clients half is that they're going to give their site developer and they're gonna ruin it. They're not gonna know what they're doing. Okay, from here, we just get into ah, little bit of kind of just wrapping up on logistics, actually gonna go back to reading the document because I wanted to add something in here, and I forgot. So right after we do all of this, there's you always want to try to add something. Sort of, uh, I'm gonna call this unique angle, and I'm gonna give you this document, so you want to have some sort of unique angle. So the thing that I always said is I would say something along the lines off and yes, by the way, I will share with you all the marketing, retention and content creation strategies. I learned working on these super successful membership sites. Okay, so you wanna have something that makes you especially unique and you don't have to write unique angle like that, like here, but just to give you an idea of what that is, But you want to have something like that so that that really set you apart. That makes it so when they go through the criteria and you say, Oh, I meet all the criteria and so forth it's like, OK, but I could go find another developer that meets those criteria, But I can't find anybody for this. I can't find anybody who's worked for no on on sites for Tim Ferriss and Louis House and Inc magazine. All these things like this, this is unique to me. So you always want to try and find something that's unique about you that own someone can Onley get from you. And if you you know you can't find that, then you want to try and create it. Um, you want to try and do something or create something or come up with something that's true but also makes you unique. This is what's gonna put them over the top right here. If you've done everything up to this point with the the fear and then all of the proof, they're gonna be sort of right there. But then this unique angle is what's gonna put them over the top. Mago. Well, I gotta hire this guy or this cow. Okay, Next we just going to sort of some logistics. So how we work. So once you submit your quote, cross below, look it over and he was a good fit for my skill set and respond back within 24 hours. If it is a good fit, I'll schedule free consultation with you. So there's two things to that one is submit your quote request, and I'll see if you're a good fit. It's sort of like positioning it like they're submitting an application and you have to approve it, right? And that's always that's a good position to be in. So now they're trying to qualify themselves to you, And I would do this and I have people that write mean like, three paragraphs of why you know they're there, someone and I wouldn't say, Hey, qualify yourself to me. I would just say it just like this. But they would feel that right. If you've done a good job establishing authority up to this point, they're gonna feel like they need to explain to you why you're someone that there there's someone that you should work with, right? So that's how you know if you've done a good job of this. If you get people saying, Hey, here's why you should work on my project and trying to sell you on them essentially and that sort of flips the script. The second thing is free consultation, Cole. Now, you may or may not want to do that. I didn't mind doing that. I like doing that. It it actually makes it easier to close the sale because when people get face to face with you, I did a lot of face to face cells, so it doesn't bother me. And other people are nervous when they get on the phone. And so if you get him on the phone ah, and you quote him a price, like a lot of people have have a really hard time saying no. Okay, so it makes it a lot easier for you to actually close the sale because they're just nervous in general, being on the phone and just freaks people out. So anyway Ah, that's why I would do that. It's easier to close a sale. I just say I walk there. Any questions? Plan for building site timeline price and anything else we need to cover Which point you decide. Tommy, build your cider non. Ah, and then I would always do this. I've talked about this in another sort of bonus lesson, but required 10% nonrefundable fee to get started and helps me weed out tire kickers and people who aren't serious. That again is sort of putting the pressure on them. Right? Of the only contact me if you're serious, cause I'm gonna have you do this thing. If you don't do this thing, I'm not gonna I'm gonna be able to work with me. Okay? So that helps just get rid of Ah, a lot of the riff raff. And if that all sounds good, seven. Your quote request below name, email, phone number, and tell me about your site is all I really ever did. You can do more if you want, but I like to just get a little bit of information and the girl on the phone and really sort of hash it out cause it's just a lot easier. I found. All right, so that's sort of the the overall document. And like how it would look and again this I just want to sort of hammer home. The strategy here is attacking that that deepest fear and then really, ultimately setting up the criteria for how they're going to evaluate you and then showing how you meet those criteria works really, really well, this was by far the best services sales page that I ever used when I do a lot more freelancing. So, um, just wanted to share that with you. Now, if you're not a developer, you again. You can do this, and this could be applied to to any number of things. I talk about writing, but let's just take something crazy like dog walking. She could say, Read this before you let now, before you let someone ruin your dog, or before you let another dog walker ruin your dog. And maybe you can find something some horror story online about how you know someone hired a service to walk their dog and the dog got stolen or the dog came back and it just it was mean and never acted the same after that. Or it was missing all of its hair. I'm sure you can find some horror story out there related to that is something. Ah, as sort of simple, I guess is as dog walking. Um, Or maybe you're someone who does like a transcriptionist. So read this before you let another transcriptionist ruin your video transcriptions. And then you could tell a horror story about how, uh, so this person had hired a transcriptionist transcriptionist? Ah, was, I don't know, had a bad day. And so they put a bunch of curse words and like the middle of the transcription that the person who bottom was never gonna they were gonna read through him all that close because it was a for a 40 minute video. So now people were watching the video. It's all of a sudden there's f f f f f in the middle of the transcription or something. I'm sure there's a horror story that you confined related to that. So again, attack that biggest fear in the headline make it real with the horror story in the next section and then transition into content about how they can avoid it by making sure that their freelancer meets these criteria. Then show them how you meet that criteria. Have a unique angle. Then you just go into the logistics off. Here's how I work. Here's how to get started. Okay. So hopefully that gives you, ah, riel idea of how to build this page again. Don't just copy what I say here verbatim. Okay, That's not gonna work. If you do that, you really need to think about you. Your technology stack what your unique offering is. Ah, and tweak this to be able to do that. All right. Like I said, I'll make this document invaluable to you so that you have it. It'll be in the class project section on the right hand side. You'll just see thing over there for you. Toe with attachments for your belt downloaded. So all right, that'll do it for this lesson. Thanks for watching 14. BONUS: The 5 Elements of a PERSUASIVE Freelance Profile: this lesson. I want to talk about how to create a persuasive freelance profile, in particular the five elements of a freelance profile that self So these air five things that I really believe that you need tohave on your freelance profile. And I want toe highlight the idea of freelance profile really quickly because you could do this on a services sales page. But the context between a freelance profile and a serval services sales page is really quite different of services sales page you don't know necessarily if someone has landed on it and they're just ready to hire somebody, they may still be in the looking phase and all that sort of thing, whereas when you're dealing with a freelance site, they pretty much there because they know they want to hire somebody. It's more just coming down to who Ah, and so you really want to, Like with the services sales page? You know, there's the whole idea of telling a story and all that sort of thing that you want to do that there. But if you do that on freelance profile, you're probably gonna lose a lot of people because they're like I'm beyond that I'm not here to just tell me about you. Okay, so you got to be a lot more direct and you really have to get to the point. And then there's just a lot more competition. So this really is specific to a freelance profile. So with that said, let's jump into this. So the first thing that you need to do right off the bat and this needs to be first, and then all these things need to go in order. First thing you need to do is establish credibility, because if they don't believe you, they're not gonna listen. And if you think about that, it's sort of obvious. You can talk about how great you are and all the things that you can do and so forth. But if they don't believe you, it doesn't matter. It's just going to sort of fall on deaf ears. So you need to establish credibility right off the bat. And there are five what I would call credibility triggers that you need to try and work into this as quickly and concisely. Ah, as possible. Now, you may not be able to get all of these, but just know the more of these that you can fit in there than the better, the more credibility you're going to be able to establish a colony. Is that gonna help you To be able to get jobs more easily? You'll be able to charge more. But you also have mawr authority when working with the client, where they'll actually listen to you and ask you for your input and so forth. It just makes the whole concept or the whole activity of freelancing a lot easier, right? So these five credibility triggers that that you need to have in their Ah, at a minimum, the 1st 1 is social authority. So the idea here is that you're leveraging other people's authority and you're projecting it onto you. So the example that I ve all uses when I propped I've used you know quite a bit. And that is the fact that I've worked on Projects for Income magazine. Tim Ferriss, Lewis House Michael Hi, It all of these sort of well known people in specific industries, each one of those people is really well known. And so when people see those names, the conversation that goes on in their head is Well, if that person trust trusted him with their site, why wouldn't I? And that's sort of the conversation that you wanna have. So if you've worked on projects with big name clients or companies, you want to make sure and mention those and the big thing, here's be specific. Don't be afraid to name drop. You don't get cool points. You don't get brownie points or any of that for not name dropping. You need to name drop it. It's sort of counterintuitive to how you think when it comes to dealing with with people. You don't like your friends and stuff, but you need to name drop. Clients need to know who you've worked with, so don't be afraid to be specific name the company is unless you've signed some sort of nd a or something. Ah, the next one, then is authority. So title credentials, those sorts of things. If you have any of those you're certified in this that or the other. Whatever it is you want to make sure enlist those so example that you might see people use Alatas. Number one New York Times Best selling author. If you actually know anything about that It's not quite as hard to get that title and as you might think, and there people out there companies out there that will actually, they guarantee that if you hire them, they will get you that, Ah, that title with your book, no matter what your book is, what they have a process to do it. So it's not as big of a thing as you might think. But putting that on somebody putting that next to their name has some sort of credibility. Now that may not be the thing that you have, but that's an example of of authority or through title or credentials. So if you have something like that, your Cisco certified or you know, whatever you want to make sure and include that next is authority or credibility through volume. So it's sort of conveying experience via numbers. So maybe you've been a freelancer for a year. But in that year you've worked on 50 different websites or you've walked 300 different dogs or, you know you've done had 17 year. Were this 150 different photo shoots or you've written 500 articles, right? That number has it conveys meaning and it conveys in a sense of credibility and a sense of experience and authority. So again, it's experience V in numbers. Now the thing here is precise numbers or more believable. So don't say, Ah, 100 plus, say, 117. If it's 117 I don't don't say Ah 1000 arm or, say, 1000 372 right? The more specific you are with the numbers than the more believable it's going to be. And then the more that's going to work in your favor to establish credibility, the fourth thing and then is to qualify. And this is sort of an an implicit way of establishing credibility is not necessarily you saying anything that says, Hey, I'm credible, It's Mawr, just the creating a context of credibility, And it only works if you're doing some of these other things, so you can't just do this one. But if you've established social authority and authority and volume, then when you go into qualify, now it works because you have some clout to back that up. So what you want to try and do is make them sell you. And so the thing that I would always do is, I would say, I know I've worked on PHP projects in this, that the other, but I really only work on WordPress membership sites and specifically cites using Moistness Member, which is a membership site Plug in that I used. And so I would tell people that I really only work on those sort of sites. And the reason that works so well is that you kind of come across his anti self interested . You're telling a certain group of people not to hire you so it just comes across, is more honest, more believable on that helps you to establish more credibility and what it has. The dual effect of doing is that when people do send in a quote request and want to hire you, they will sell. They will sell you on why you should let them hire you, which is a good place to be. That's a good context to set from the very beginning. So again, making them qualifying them and making them sell themselves to you is another way to establish credibility. The final one here, then, is knowledge, and the big idea here is you have access to information that others simply don't. So the example that will use here is that I built the A P I rapper for the wish list member Plug in. So the wishes remember, Plug in, I guess, as a membership site. Plug in. It works with WordPress. It has an A p I that that you can interact with, but that a p I is you know, unless you're even for a coder, it's sort of difficult to understand. What I did is I went in and wrote in a P I rapper, where you could use WordPress style functions with a lot of people refer to him as template . Tax doesn't matter of any of this makes sense, But for people in that particular market, in that niche, it makes sense. And so I'm the one that wrote that. So I know knew that thing inside and out. And so, for the kind of sites that I was doing which were custom builds, there were a lot of people who were wanting, you know, interactions with that, a P I. Well, I was the one that wrote that rapper so, and it's included in the plug in, so it's not something that I do on the side. It's included in their product, and I wrote it. So that's access to information that others simply don't have access to. Nobody knows that a P I rapper inside and out like Ideo, and maybe there's probably only one other person in the world that knows the a P. I itself better than me. And that's the guy who wrote it. But ah, again access to information that other people don't have. So again, that's establishing credibility. Those air five sort of triggers the mawr of those that you can add into your profile and establish right up front the more believable you'll be. Memorial. Establish yourself his authority, them or clients will want to hire you. If you don't have these things than the thing to do is go out and get him right. These are the things to focus on. This is the first thing you should do when you start. Decide you want to start freelancing. You need to figure out how to establish authority Ah, and create credibility. So this is what you need to do before anything else. So if you don't have it, go out and do it figure out some way to make these things happen, right? Next is trust through specialization. So now that we've laid out our credibility and we've said, I've done this and I've done this and I've done this and I've done this and I've done this now what we want to do is we want to talk about how we specialize. The reason why is people just automatically trust specialist more. It's a form of automatic or implicit trust, right? You still got to be honest. You still got to be believable all those things. But when you position yourself as a specialist, you're just automatically more believable, more trustworthy. And the reason why is people don't believe that you know everything about everything. And if you say that you do, they think you're either lying or that you're delusional, neither of which is good for you. So even if you do know everything about everything, you don't want to say that to people because it's not going to help you. It actually works against you, even though in your head you might think it doesn't, it does. So you want to position yourself as a specialist from a marketing perspective. I want to make that clear. You can know all sorts of things me and Jack of all trades when it comes to what you actually do. But when you go to market yourself, you need to market yourself as a specialist. And if you want to get really fancy, you can market yourself as a specialist in several different areas, right? And just make sure that you're sending proper traffic to those things, and it's not that big of a deal. But again, they don't believe that you know everything about everything. Now the way to sort of say, this is you know, you may have heard people say this Use this phrase but you can say I'm a bad at a lot of things, but I might be the best in the world at this one thing. When you say it like that, it automatically is more believable. It's He comes across is more honest because you're admitting ah, limitation. So if you're willing to let ah admit a limitation which is often hard for people to do so, they feel like you're being honest by limiting admitting this limitation. Now when you say I might be the best in the world of this thing. That also that the honesty that comes along with that admitting limitation gets attached to now the claim, which, actually, if you look at it, has no, it has nothing to back it up. You're just saying it's just purely a claim, but it's a more believable claim when you say it the right way, and I wrote this down. But self awareness equals believability, the more self aware that you can demonstrate to people that you are, they're not gonna think you're delusional or that your narrow minded and they're going to trust you Mawr because you're someone who can analyze yourself and knows your shortcomings in your limitations. And you can still deliver because you delivered. Going back to step one for this person and this person on this project in all these hundreds of projects, despite your limitations. So it's not gonna be a big deal here, so self awareness equals believability. Now, sort of. The next level of this, then, is taking your specialization and actually making it. It sort of worked for you. So you say something like, I've worked on every kind of say you can imagine, because I'm a specialist. I've seen things others haven't. And so I can certainly handle your project. So again, this is one of the values of being a specialist is you haven't worked on, you know, all these different things. But you've worked on this one thing in all these different sort of context. And so no matter what happens in that that person's project, I'm gonna be able to figure it out because I've done it over and over and over again. OK, so you make sure and add that in there as well, Right? Number three, then is desire through uniqueness. This is where you really want to take people. So credibility and specialization are almost think of them like a hedge, right, cause people come in naturally skeptical. And so you're just really just dealing with that natural skepticism. Ah, and and often times just getting rid of that is 90% of the battle because so many other freelancers air doing it so that alone could get you hired. But you don't want to stop there. You want to keep stacking every chip for every card in your favor. And so this is where we turn from just sort of dealing with negatives to now focusing on positives in our favor. And so the question I ask is, why are you the only person they can hire? So what you want is you don't want them to see you as one among many options, because when they see was one among many options, they just see you is replaceable will have no respect for you. They're not gonna be willing to pay you more. They're probably not gonna listen to your ideas or opinions. They're just gonna order you around like an employee. That's a bad place to be. And it makes it will make you miserable, is a freelancer, and you're not going to get very much money doing it either. So you want them to feel like you are the only person that they can hire. You are so far in a way better than everybody else. You're so much of a specialist, you have something that they can't get anywhere else. When you do that, they'll be more respect, more control, and you be ableto to charge more. You'll make more money so forth. Now, the way that I've done this, that has worked incredibly well is to give them access to something that no one else can give them. And I've used this example quite a bit. But it's just such a perfect example. When I built Platform Music University for Michael Hyatt, No, there were two developers that worked on that site. One was his in house developer, and the other one was me. Well, his in house developer worked for him, and he just sort of helped out. I actually was the one that wrote the theme from scratch. He helped with some stuff and there was some responsive stuff that he was a little bit better at that. He helped us. I don't want to shortchange him, but ah, he so he helped. But he was there in house developer, and he wasn't out aggressively seeking clients. I think he did take clients, but he was just wasn't out aggressively seeking clients like I was. And so there were a lot of people after that site was built that wanted a site that looks similar to that. Well, I was the only person besides this other guy, but I was really the only person that they could get it from. So by going with me, they were getting access to something that they could not get access to anywhere else, literally. They could have someone look at the site and try to rebuild it. But if they just wanted the person who actually built the thing in the first place, then they had to hire me. So again, access to something no one else can give them. Another example is having worked on all these projects. You know, with Tim Ferriss. Michael Hiding, Maisie, etcetera. One of the things I got asked about a lot was, Well, how did they build their membership side, or how did they run their business? What was their content strategy? How did they deal with retention? Well, those are questions that nobody else in that unique sort of context of those specific people. There's nobody else that can answer those questions like that because I was the only one who had worked with those sort of specific people in the membership site context. I mean, Michael, hi. It has Well, now he has to, but at that point he had one membership site. Ain't Eat magazine has one small business owners Council There's only one person that built those sites. So again there was It would be very difficult for them to get access to that information anyway anywhere else. And so, like I said, I always got asked, How did they build their membership sites? Now, you might be saying, Okay, great, that works for you. But, you know, I don't have those clients. Well, you might have other clients, right that aren't necessarily, you know, necessarily have these huge names. But there's something about them that's unique. You've got to get creative and you got to really dig in. And don't just brush it off right off the bat. Actually think about it. And I bet if you think thought through your clientele a few if you have a A past client history, I bet if you thought through it you could find some clients. There were some things that were unique about that would be appealing to potential clients , that you're the only one that knows them. Another thing that I you know would throw out there is the fact that I was in the army for 11 years. I did a tour in Iraq. People hate that you know some people love it, but there are things about that experience that you know, someone who's a developer, right? There's how many of people that are developers out there were also in the Army. Also did a ah tour in Iraq, also specialized in membership sites and then also now had built these sites for all these . Like you start to stack it up and you could see how people would see me as the only option . No, and then the fact that I'm building a tiny house now, let's another thing that people are intrigued by that I get asked about a lot while again. It's just another thing that makes me unique. Teoh Talk about No, In all these things were things that aren't not know, maybe the clients or super hard, like I was fortunate to get in with with some of those clients, but everything else? Not necessarily. So you just need to be creative and think through ways that you can. You can be unique and a big way to do that. Just tell stories about yourself, and people will tend to find the uniqueness in it, and then you'll people will talk to you as they become your clients and they'll ask you questions. You just pay attention to what they're asking about. I got lots of people have asked me about the army. I got lost of people that asked me about my place past clients. I got lots of people that asked me about my tiny house seven building. So I pay attention to those things and now I go, Oh, well, people are interested in these things. So let me somehow work these into what I'm talking about to make myself more unique. All right, next is logistics. So this is where we've we've kind of sold them on us. Now it's like, OK, let's let's the rubber meet the road here. So the big thing with logistics is people are terrified of the unknown, so you have to give them some sort of understanding of what the what the future's going to look like. So it's not so unknown. So the big 33 big things that you need to cover are how the delivery process works, right? So explain to them it doesn't have to be in super great detail, but explained sort of the big steps along the way. Like if you're building websites, then you might say OK, well, first jump on a call for me to understand you know what you want and so forth and see if it's a good fit and then you can decide if you want to hire me after that. You know, once that's done, then I'll build out a mock up on you know, my deaf server. You'll be able to log in and see it and use it all that stuff. If you're good with that, then I'll upload that to your site and etcetera, etcetera, Right. Just explain in sort of the big rocks of how the delivery process works. So they have some idea. So that's the first thing. Second thing is how payments are handled. So there they know they're gonna be paying money. They want to know how that's gonna That's gonna be one of things that they're really nervous about. So you need to talk about it now. I recommend what I call the 10 60 30. Ah, way of doing this. I have a lesson in this course of bonus lesson. Ah, contracts and getting paid, I think, is something along those lines. I explained that entire method in that lesson. So if you haven't watched that lesson yet, I just recommend going and watching that. I won't repeat it here. But it's all in that lesson. So then the third thing is, what happens if something goes wrong? This might be your guarantee or just explaining to them they're gonna want to know. Well, if the worst thing happens and something goes wrong, like, how are we going to deal with it? So figure out how you're going to deal with it up front, which is good for you to do for yourself. But then also now you can tell them that, So we'll have an idea and they'll be ableto toe Look at it and it's You don't have to get too caught up in what it is, right. They just need to know it's more about the unknown than it is. What the known is, if that makes sense, but just getting rid of that unknown for people, no matter what it is, we'll often that's all they really want. They just want to know where they stand more than anything. All right, the final thing that you need to do then, is your call to action. You need to ask for the sale. You've heard the cliche line. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take while you lose 100% of the sales you don't ask for, even if you get him. Because you didn't actually get it, that when I did face to face sales, that was one of the things that my manager and actually is my regional manager, who was. And that guy was Doggett about sales that he hammered home to me. He said, If you don't ask for the sale, you still lost the sale because you didn't actually get it. You got lucky and they just said, OK, they're the ones that sold themselves. You didn't sell them, and he was very sort of militant about that. But it's true, right? If you don't ask for the sale ah, than the the statistics are dramatic for from when you ask for sale. And when you don't any every study I've ever seen, it's dramatic. If you ask for the sale, you're a lot more likely to get a yes than if you just never do so. Call to action. So do it. No matter how awkward it is. It's kind of awkward in a freelance profile setting. Do it anyway. Now there are a few sort of closes that I've used and face to face sales over the year that can work. So one is that if then, right, so you just say, If that sounds good or if you're ready to get started then and then you tell him what to do . Click the been big green button that says, Invite me to job if it's like up work or whatever or hire me button etcetera. So you just do it if then like that. Another one is questions. You may have seen this one, but says so if that sounds good, why not hire me? If you agree, click the green button up here. Or why not get started today? You probably seen that one, and it can work pretty well. The final one is a sump tive, so you just sort of assumed So you get done with with everything and you say so let's get started. You don't ask. You sort of tell, Let's get started. Click the big green button to invite me to your job. All right. Just make sure and tell them what to do. Teoh, click the green button to fill out the form or whatever it is for the site that you're on. Tell them exactly what to dio. Um, and again, the more the more you do that, if you do that, you're just kind of a lot. Ah, better chance of them actually hiring you. So those are the five things that you need to have on your freelance profile. And if you go through those things again, it's not. There's no magic bullets in freelancing. There's no Hey, I do this and I suddenly just get an avalanche of jobs. But when you start stacking all of these things up in your favor, that's when you know you start to see the ball, get rolling and start to snowball a little bit. So this is one of those things. Just go through your profile, do as much of each one of these things as you can, um, write it down and put it in there and then be done with it and move on. And then as you accomplish more things and do more things and learn more about what people are interested in. Then go back in and, ah, and tweak it. But doing it versus not doing it is really the name of the game here. If you go look at a lot of freelancers profiles, you'll see at least one, if not multiple, of these missing. They still get clients. You see really successful profiles that get clients. But if they were doing this, it would work even better. So again, doing it was not doing is the name of the game here, anyway, That's it for the lesson. Hopefully, enjoyed that. Thanks for watching. 15. BONUS: Scope & The Fear of Failure: So one of the big questions that comes up whenever I talk to freelancers is this idea, the fear of failure. And this sort of came back to me recently because I got a question from Quentin and I kind of want to read through this and then just so sort of go through my own experience with this and then some of the things that you could do, and we'll talk about it in relation to scope. So the question one from Quentin was my my major fear is I fear that I might land a client but won't be able to deliver on their specifications and what would Ah, and that would earn me a bad review. This fear of my lack of competent competence exists because when I take on personal projects, I end up not being able to follow through to the end because of some bug I couldn't fix, and in turn I get too frustrated to continue. This makes me wonder if the same daunting situation would rear its ugly head when I failed . When I finally land a client, So this is a really big one. I think this stops a lot of freelancers are a lot of, you know, potential freelancers from actually becoming freelancers. Is this idea of fear of failure? Ah, And again, I can sort of relate to this because when I first started freelancing, I refused to do paid work, and I justified it in my head somehow. But the truth was, I was just terrified that I was gonna fail. Ah, And then I finally did take putt paid clients, and I fail to deliver on my 1st 2 paid projects that I did, and that was pretty soul crushing for me. It kind of threw me for a loop. I wasn't used to that Ah sort of thing in my life. But I learned a few things from that. And the big thing I would say is, you know, after those two projects, guess what happened? Nothing. There was no big explosion. The client didn't really throw. Neither one of the clients threw a big fit. They didn't tweet out to all their followers or write some bog post or make a video about me being a fraud. They didn't go around telling everyone that they knew not to hire me. Ah, and my career wasn't ruined before you ever even started. Like I had imagined all of this stuff in my head and it all sort of came and went pretty uneventfully. And then I got 1/3 client and on that client I delivered and Mike freelancing career was sort of off to the races. So the very first thing to say is that this idea of this fear of failure isn't as big of a monster as you imagine it to be. It's not that it's not possible. It's just all the things that you automatically you're gonna soon assume are gonna happen as a result of that don't necessarily follow. They're not necessarily gonna happen. In fact, it's pretty rare and unlikely that they're going to now. That said, I did change some things between my second and third project that made all the difference s so that when it went to when it came to my third project, I knew without any doubt that I could and would deliver for that client. I didn't have to worry about something coming up are being asked to figure out something that I couldn't I knew that that wouldn't happen. And it was a big weight off my shoulders and also gave me a lot more confidence going into that project. And so that's what I want to talk about in this lesson. So the big thing that I learned was about scope and scope is really the cure for fear of failure, and it sort of works this way. You start off by and I've talked about this before, but I want to talk about it. Relations specifically to this. You start off by an offering end products, not services. Okay, so you offer very well defined and products and doing everything I've taught you in the course. You should already be doing this. That's 90% of the battle. So you offer something like a membership site, a beauty tip article, etcetera. Something that that has is well defined. And it has a set scope. If you offer open ended services, you are setting yourself up to eventually face something that you've never done before. That means you're gonna have to figure out how to do it. And if that's the thing that's keeping you from even starting, the point I'm making is don't ever put yourself in that situation to begin with, and the way that you do that is by offering well defined and products and having a set scope for those products. So if you're building websites, it's AH, five page website, five page website that includes these exact things. Or it's a WordPress install with a premium theme and these exact plug ins I go through and figure out specifically what it's going to be or it's no. I'm going to write 10 beauty tip articles. I'm going to do this very specific, well defined thing and keep that scope nice and tight. Okay, so that's the first thing is to just make your offering in line with you being ableto deliver on it and not setting yourself up for things that could trip you up. The second thing is to set expectations step state up front that you will not accept customer quests, and I very specifically did this and matter of fact, the video that I had on my freelance services page for ah, long time in about the 1st 5 to 10 seconds, I said before I tried to sell people on. You know what I could do? I was all that sort of stuff I said I accept these kinds of projects. I do not accept these kinds of projects, and I will turn down your project if it doesn't fit well with my skill set. Don't be afraid to do that. People appreciate that. They don't want you getting in over your head. They don't want you to fail on the project, so they want you to know your limitations and then they want to give you. They want you to give them on. Offering that you can do that is within your skill set. Okay, So against set that well defined scope in the end product but also set those expectations from the very beginning, it almost works better in selling people. When you do that, then if you try to go out there and say, Why could do all this stuff and it's counterintuitive. You think you have to go out there and tell everybody all the cool stuff you can do. But the reality is his clients know that they know that that's B s. They know that that you're not gonna be ableto, uh, deliver on absolutely anything and everything unless you're somebody who's been doing it for 20 or 30 years and you've seen everything on his son, then maybe it might be believable of your brand new they know. So if you're self aware enough toe set limitations and then set expectations and tell them what you can and can't do, they'll be more willing to hire you. So set those expectations from the very beginning. Third, that I've kind of alluded to all of this. But don't over. So I don't promise the world if you can't give the world so don't go into your whatever sort of sales picture doing whether it's a freelance profile or services sales page, whatever it is, don't go into it thinking. I need to just promise everything. Even if I can't do it, I need to promise way beyond my limitations. No, you need to just clearly state what it is you can do. Ah, and why you're good at it and then and and just show them that you can do this one very specific thing. Ah, and that's gonna be what a client needs to see in orderto be able to hire you. So once you have that all set up, then the third thing is before you ever tell people about that page before? Ever you make it live or whatever? Go practice this thing. Go make a bunt bunch of these. Now, this has the dual sort of effect that as you're making these to practice, these are also things you can put in your portfolio. Which is why I encourage people to do that. So get out and practice making these end products are doing these end products and also take those things and put them in your portfolio. Said that by the time you ever get to taking a paid client, you've built this or you've done this, whatever your your services, you've done it. 5 10 15 20 times. You know, without a shadow of a doubt that you can deliver on this specific thing, you may not be able to deliver on all these other crazy things that they might want. But you're also not get offering those things to them. That's just not on the table. You do this thing, this thing alone, you know you can deliver on it. You've done it multiple times now. So now you go in a lot more confident. The fifth thing then, is tools or resource is or other services, right? Don't think that you have to build or do everything from scratch yourself right? Use available tools toe to get things done. So for Web developers, for example, I tell, what voters all the time. There's no reason not to use something like WordPress. A lot of your clients are gonna want to, anyway. And that system. Despite what a lot of developers might say, it's got a much larger community of a lot, much larger support base, a much larger user base. It's more well tested than anything that you could ever write on your own. Okay, so why not use it? Sure, it might not be a perfect 100% perfect fit for what you need to do, but if it's close, you might as well use it because it's gonna make it easier for you. And it's going to be better for your client because they're getting a A system that's more tested, more supported on so forth. So don't be afraid to use tools. Clients care about the end result, not the route that you used to get there as long as the route that you used to get there isn't something shady or just completely off the map, but you know, using tools to do it, To be honest with you today, for my websites for membership sites, I used to do a lot of custom coding, but the tools have got to the point where it's just not necessary. I use WordPress. I use L. A mentor, and I use. There's a couple different teams I use depending on the site that are built for L. A mentor. I use L. A mentor, and I use a series of other plug ins I install on pretty much every site that I build. I and I rely on those tools, and then I just build everything inside of there. And yes, clients still will hire you to do that sort of thing because it's they're not hiring you because, ah, you know they can't do it. They're hiring you because they don't want to do it. They don't know how to do it. There's still a lot that goes into building sites that even if you have a page builder that a client doesn't necessarily understand, there's a lot of insights that you can have just speaking from sort of a developer perspective, and this is the same. That's true for any sort of service. They hire you for your wisdom and your expertise if you're doing it right. Not necessarily the fact that you know how toe some technical thing that you can dio. Okay, So again, don't be afraid to use tools to help you, right? So if you do those things, you just in a lot better position. The other thing with that is, if you look at it, it's also going to help you get going a lot faster, a lot of especially in the web development world. You know, people think that well, I've gotta learn a smell and CSS and JavaScript and all these different programming languages before it can ever think about freelancing when the reality is is you could go learn WordPress and L a mentor and some themes and plug ins and maybe a little bit of those languages and probably get going now and then be ableto as you learn those development languages be able to. Now you can write a customer element for L a mentor. You can write a custom plug, and if you need to or or this or that. Those are things you can add on as you go. But you can get started almost immediately just by going in and learning some tools and having a set and scope and setting expectations. So it's not just about failure. It's also about speed. You could probably get started a lot faster and again, this all applies. Whether you're freelancing as a developer or something else, right, these principles still apply, right, so that's scope. The second part of this is the simple the thing to do when it comes Teoh failure is if it does happen right, we talked about how to avoid it. But let's say it does happen. You just do right by your clients. And that's how I ultimately escaped those two failed projects. I said from the very beginning, I was honest From the beginning I said I was new and that my price was a reflection of that . So there was an expectation set there in the client's mind. They sort of knew they were taking a risk, but they were also getting a lower price as a result of that. So I said to act that expectation from the beginning. When the problems came up that I ran into, I communicated openly with them about the problem and why I wasn't gonna be able to fix it in a timely and cost effective manner. And that was really the conversation I had with them was not that I couldn't ever figure it out. But it was going to take me a while and they were on a timeline and it was gonna be timely . And it wasn't gonna be very cost effective for me to figure it out for them. And so it just wasn't smart for me to continue to be the one to work on this project and figure these particular problems out, right? So I just communicated openly and honestly about that. I didn't try toe, you know, figure out some tricky way out of it or just disappear or any of that stuff. I communicate with them, I let them know. And when you tell a client I mean that you're not gonna be able to finish on a project, and you you say that most clients are not gonna come back to you and try and beg you to finish it just you saying that that that's already gonna put enough in their mind where they're gonna be like, Okay, they're just going to accept it. They're gonna appreciate that you told them. All right, So if you have a client that goes off the rails and does start doing something crazy, if you're doing right by them, all you have to do is tell your side of the story. And most other people around the that that person are gonna be on your side. Okay? So if you just do right by people, you're always going to be safe. Okay, The third thing, it is a refund in the mother money they'd had, they dumb Ah, giving me some money to get going and so forth. I've always done earnest money like that. I refunded them all over their money, so they didn't lose any money on the project. I also gave them the source code of what I had up to that point. So now not only they not lose money, but they also got the code. So you know, they didn't lose as much time as if they had toe go hire someone, start all over again. So I gave him the code that they could take to another developer. Now a lot of people might look at that and go Well, you know, you just kind of got shafted. Well, it was my fault that I couldn't deliver right. And at the end of the day, your reputation is more important than anything else. That's the thing to always remember. It's more important than the money that you might get. It's more important than whether you're getting screwed over or not, or whatever like it. Your reputation trumps everything else. Okay, so it was far more worth it in terms of reputation than it was the money or the time that I had put into it. And that's a big reason why they didn't go in say anything. They didn't go full fly off the handle. They didn't tweet or write a block post or tell everybody they knew right, because I ran into a problem unforced seen circumstance. I let them know a refund of the money I gave them like I did everything I good could to do right by them. And if you do that, that's gonna earn you more trust with with a client in the long run. Then if you just did the project and you actually succeeded and there were no issues and you sort of went went forward from there like they might not know how you would react in a bad situation, whereas when they see you react in a bad situation and still do right by them and try to take care of them, that often will earn you a lot more trust. So again, just don't be afraid of it. Do what you can to keep it from happening and setting scope, but also just do right by your clients and realize your reputation is D most important thing and always protect that. Ah, and in the long run, you'll be fine. So those are the things that I've learned going through those 1st 2 failed projects. Hopefully, that gives you, ah, some motivation or some confidence to get out there and tackle this, even if you still it's not like the fear failures ever gonna go away. I am. I have been doing it 15 years and they're still time there. Every project. There's still a moment where I'm like OK, can I do this So it doesn't ever go away. But if you if you do these sorts of things, then you know it. It really lessons. And you can keep moving forward and keep making it happen. So anyway, hopefully that helps you. Thanks for watching. 16. BONUS: Task Management the Inc. Magazine Way: this. Listen, I wanted to show you a really effective way that I learned for managing projects. This specifically is kind of when you get past the initial build sort of phase one things that I was never really good at was sort of long term maintenance. And one of the reasons why is I didn't have a good sort of approach toe dealing with those sorts of things. But this particular approach I actually learned when I was working on a project for Income magazine. So the guy that I was working with, his name's Louis Schiff. He's pretty, pretty smart guys, a best selling author. I think he's sort of sense left in CA magazine and kind of went out on his own. But he's pretty high up there and executive director Ah, and he showed me this was actually his idea to do this. And when we start using, it started working really, really well. And really, the big thing about this is it gets you and the client on the same page when you agreed to do this. It's sort of it kind of has this implicit agreement sort of vibe to it that that both of you are sort of making a compromise. Ah, and so that you can get on the same page and work on the things that you can work on. And it helps you to really focus on the things that are high priority that you can really knock out quickly. And then some of the stuff that's good either gonna take longer is not his priority can be de prioritized a little bit. And so it's really, actually pretty simple. Um, but it is also really effective, so don't let that fool you. So the idea here is over on the left hand side, you're just gonna list you're going to sort of go through in list all of the tasks that that you have left or that you come up with and as as task come up, you're gonna add them to this list. And so you have sort of this ongoing list of tasks that need completed and again, Like I said, this sort of works best after you've done any sort of initial builder initial delivery. Let's say a website, because when you're building the imminent initial build, you know there's there's sort of a process you have to go through. But after that, when you get to sort of the time when you're doing a punch list of Well, I found this on the site and I found that on the site. This is when this really comes in handy and can help you to really knock and get through these quick. So you list out these task, that's the first thing, then you're going to set a priority for them and a complexity for them. And so the best is to keep it simple. So when we did it with ah, within Greg a scene we just did one through three. So one being the highest priority three being the lowest priority. And this part is actually set by the client, right? So this is what sort of makes them happy and gives them some input. They can go through and tell you what the priority of a particular task is to them. And that's really important because you're getting sort of their their input. And that's where you sort of get their agreement with this. They're telling you this is what's most important to me. This is good for you to know, but also hopes with client satisfaction. So they might come through here and say one, 3211 Something like that. Okay. And it and you let them put whatever they want. You don't really, You know, you don't really have much saying them setting the priority. Now, you come through here and you set the complexity, so you might say, OK, this is this is a three. This is a two. This is a one. This is a one. This is a two, right? So you look at what the task is and you just try to assess difficulty wise what it iss. So now that you've said the priority, each of you set your priority complexity, the last thing they were going to do then is we're gonna come through it. I'm going to do a a score here. Okay, so this is just going to equal the sum of this of the priority, plus the complexity. Okay, so we'll do that. And that gives us a score four and then weaken. Sort of Just copy this down the rest of these. And so now we have a score here. And so then we're gonna come through, and we're gonna select all of this. We're gonna go to data. This is in Google sheets. It might be different for your software they're using, but we'll go to sort range. And now we're going to sort by our score, which is calling F. So we're gonna sort by column f and we'll sort this way. And now you can see the score here. And so what this does is it gives you this is the thing. This task is really high priority. It's also really low complexity. This is what we should do first, because it's something that's really important that we can get done easily. And then as you move down these they're either going to drop in priority or raise and complexity or both. The where you get to the last one that has a low priority. But it has a medium complexity, and so this again helps you to organize Tass in a way where the most important things are getting done, but also the things that can be done quickly and easily. And it helps keep sort of Ford Motor more Menem and progress So you don't get bogged down by something like this. That's low priority, Higher complexity. When you still have something like this on the table, and I'll just tell you when you do this, you're just going to see your client sort of get happier and happier because you're executing on things that are important to them. It's also gonna make your life a lot easier because you're executing on things. Ah, that that you can get done quickly and you're seeing them get happier. It just makes everybody feel better about the entire process. Um, so again, it's It's a small thing. But this has worked really, really well for me over the years and has led to a lot of repeat business and referrals and so forth because clients are really happy as you go through this. So there you go. Take that. For what it's worth, hopefully that helps you in managing your projects, going forward 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.