What Services Should You Offer? | John Morris | Skillshare
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What Services Should You Offer?

teacher avatar John Morris, I help freelancers get clients.

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome to the Course

      2:48

    • 2.

      Picking the Right Niche is Paramount

      10:14

    • 3.

      WHO Is Your Ideal Client?

      22:51

    • 4.

      What Is the Perfect Service to Offer Them?

      12:52

    • 5.

      How to Package Your Services

      12:31

    • 6.

      What Should You Charge?

      23:24

    • 7.

      Next Steps

      1:16

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About This Class

Hey I'm John Morris. I’ve been a freelance developer for 15 years. I've taught over 5,000 students here on SkillShare. I'm the creator of the #3 freelance class on all of SkillShare. I'm most well-known for building sites for Inc. Magazine, Michael Hyatt, Tim Ferriss and Lewis Howes.

This class is all about figuring what services to offer as a freelancer. So, inside, I’ll teach you

  • the 4 criteria for identifying your most ideal client
  • how to determine if a niche is profitable
  • 4 different types of core services you can offer
  • the 3 elements of a properly packaged freelance service
  • how to determine what to charge

And more. And my goal for you is to then use these skills to create the perfect service offering to your most ideal client at exactly the right price.

This is a beginner’s course. Although, I recommend taking the Beginner’s Guide to Freelance course here on SkillShare before taking this course, so you can get the big picture idea of what we’re doing here.

This course is for freelancers, side-hustlers or anyone looking to build a business outside of their regular 9 to 5. And, what you’ll learn can be applied whether you’re using a freelancing platform, building your own website or simply networking in person.

By the end of the class, you’ll know who your ideal client is, what services to offer them, how to package those services, how to price your packages and be well on your way to building a profitable freelance business that you LOVE.

If you're ready, let's get started.

Meet Your Teacher

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John Morris

I help freelancers get clients.

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Welcome to the Course: Hey there. I'm John Morris, instructor for this course. Now, if you don't know who I am, I'm a freelance web developer. Have been one for about 15 years now. Also, an instructor taught over 3 5000 students here on skill share. The creator of the number three freelance class on all of skill share. But I probably most well known as a freelancer for sites I built for Inc magazine and Michael. Hi, Tim Ferriss Lewis house. Those sorts of people. Um, I'm ah, husband, father of three sons. I live in the Ozarks and Missouri, and my wife and I are actually building our forever house right now. You can see by some of the construction in the background here, but when it comes to this class with this class is all about it's figuring out what services to offer as a freelancer, which is critical, because when you can get the right offer in front of the right people, it makes freelancing easy. And so that's what I want to help you to do in this class. So inside I'm gonna teach you the four criteria for identifying your your most ideal client person. You are best to work with. How to determine if that Mitch is profitable The four different types of course services that you can offer the three elements of a properly packaged freelance service. So how to package them in a way that makes it easy for, ah, potential clients to say yes and then how to determine what to charge and how to price your services on more. So my goal for you is for you to then take those skills and create the perfect service offering to your most ideal client at exactly the right Platt Price. If you can do that, freelancing is gonna be a heck of a lot easier for you now. This is a beginner's course, so you don't need to have a ton of freelancing knowledge in order. Take it. Although I do recommend of your brand new to freelancing first, taking my Beginner's Guide to Freelance course before taking this one just so you can get a big picture idea of what we're doing here. I talk about that a little bit, talked about this a little bit in that course, and then we go into detail in it in this one. Now, if you're already a skill she remember he just go to my profile and you'll see the course there. Otherwise, John Morris online dot com slash freelance has all the details. Now this courses for freelancers. Side hustlers are really just anyone looking to build a business outside of their regular 9 to 5 job. And what you what, you what you'll learn could be applied whether using a freelancing platform, you're building your own website even if you're doing in network Ah, in person networking, this is all gonna work. Regardless of that from by the end of the class, you'll know who your ideal client is, what services to offer them, how to package those services, how to price your packages. And I believe, well, on your way to building a profitable freelance business that not only makes you money, but that you actually enjoy and makes you happy, which is key thing for me, right? So if that sounds good, then, uh, let's go ahead and dive into the course on get start with this 2. Picking the Right Niche is Paramount: I want to start off this course by underscoring the importance of what we're doing here because I've been doing this now for just about 15 years, and I am constantly reminded in my own business and what I do, but also the people that I work with, all the students and so forth that come through my courses and so forth that picking the right services to offer picking the right niche, however you want to say it, this is the key to freelance success. It is Dean most important thing that you can do. You can put in the time you can put in the effort, and if you get it right, then you're freelancing. Career is going to be a heck of a lot easier, so I just really want to underscore the importance of what we're going to do in this course and really encourage you to put in the time and effort to follow through with the things that I'm going to show you and figuring this out and do the thinking work. It's going to save you a ton of frustration a ton of time later on, and I can sort of speak from my own experience. When I first started freelancing, I did a lot of things that I really didn't want to do that I hated doing I There was a time where I was making PdF's for people using PHP, which, if you've ever messed with, is really convoluted and kind of difficult. At least back when I was doing it, it was, and I really hated doing it. I was doing a lot of sort of straight PHP work. Building built an e commerce is weird e commerce site for a guy, and I really did enjoy it. So I did a lot of things that I really didn't enjoy. And what happened as a result of that is I would procrastinate very, very badly, and that led to a lot of issues with my clients because I wasn't getting the work done. I wasn't getting it done on time, and I ended up actually ended up having to refund two of my very first clients I refund of them and then sort of gave them all the code that I had written up to that point because I just couldn't bring myself to finish those projects. So again, picking the wrong Mitch will either leave you feeling miserable because you're doing things you hate or you might be doing something you enjoy. But you're not. You're not making any money doing it. So there's a fine line between all of that. And the number one reason most freelancers fail is because they don't have a good service to market match. So they're either serving a market that they're not passion about or they're offering their market services that they don't really want. And so the sort of the trick to all of this is finding that nexus is where you can kind of find your perfect niche, and it's at the nexus of talent, passion and money. So it's something that you're passionate about and you love to do. And I know a lot of people these days love to brush that off, and it's sort of become a thing to say, Well, this doesn't really matter. I absolutely believe it does, because the amount of work that you're gonna have to put in when you first start, if you really don't. If you really not passionate about what you're doing or love, what you're doing is going to be very, very difficult now. The caveat to that, I would say, is that the people that often say this, what they love to do is build businesses, and so they don't really care if the topic is something that they enjoy. Their passion is building business. So you have tow. You have to analyze that for yourself. You do love building businesses. Then you can probably build it around the topic that you're not his passion about. It will be okay. If that's not really a thing that you're into, then you know, business building isn't. Then you really have to build around a topic that your passion about So you gotta have one of the other so passionate something your past amount in love, to do something that you're talented at or you're willing to get talented at. The idea here is you pick something very specific that you can push towards being literally the best in the world at, and I can give a quick example of that. There is a moment in time when I was building membership sites. It's not this way now, but there's a moment in time when I was building membership sites I was using WordPress. I was using a very specific plug in called Wish List member. That was really popular at the time, and there was a moment, and I that that company was a client of mine. I actually wrote the A P I for wish list member, the AP myself. But there's a helper class for the FBI that I actually wrote for the company. And so there was a moment in time where if you wanted a membership site built with Wishes member, I was the best person literally in the world to build that for you because of just the way the situation work. I taught there Certified Developers Program. So I was the one teaching all of the developers that they were certifying as people who knew how to use this piece of software. So for that moment in time, I was literally the best person to hire in the world. And that's what you want to push for. Okay? You want to try and find something specific enough, and it wasn't because I was the greatest developer in the world. It was I was the greatest had this very specific thing. I narrowed it down to a point where I could be the very best. So that's what you want to really focus on. And when you could do that, that's when you command the higher fees. So again, talented, Are you willing to work to get talented at and that others will pay you well to do it for them? So for me, so I was earning a minimum of 3 to $5000 per site for the membership sites that I built. That was more than enough money for me to run a business off of. I could do two or three projects a month. I was quick enough with building these to be able to deliver on two or three a month, and so I could pretty much make a much money, as I wanted to in that. So again, that's that's sort of the nexus that you you want to find it when when you do that, that's when everything becomes really, really easy. So I want to finish this off by sort of opening your mind to some of the possibilities that out are out there because a lot of people really tend to sort of focus into maybe get a little narrow minded in terms of what's actually going toe work. So I want to show you some crazy sort of Mitch is and companies that people are making money and to hopefully open your mind to the possibility of what you can do with this. So these are business ideas that should get you excited because there really were weird niches. So the 1st 1 is just food for dogs. Every time I tell someone about this, they're like, Oh, a restaurant where you can bring your dogs in and they'll you know, you they let your dogs come in some people. So a restaurant where you could you and your dogs and go eat? No, It's a restaurant that only serves food, two cats and dogs. It doesn't serve food to human beings, so it's just for cats and dogs, and that restaurant does 5.9 million per year. So that's a really crazy niche that somebody's making a ton of money off of. Another one is potato parcels. That's a company that sends potatoes with custom message messages written on them. Sounds like the weirdest thing in the world, but that company, they don't give out exact numbers, but it's a six figure your company doing that? So again, that's a pretty weird one. There's Rent a Mourner. So what this is, is you get a UK company. You can hire fake Mourners to attend a loved one's funeral to make it look more well attended. And the company charges $34 an hour to do this. So you know you think about I get a lot of because I work a lot with Web developers. You know, I get a lot of Web developers are like Oh, charging five or 10 or $15 an hour and are worried about raising their prices. This is a fake mourner at a funeral, and they're charging $34 an hour. So if you're good, you can certainly raise your prices above where you're at with whatever you're doing, and the last one here, then is called poop Centers. So they made male different kinds of poop, so they have, like elephant poo cow poo gorilla poop. At least that's what they have listed. They don't tell you if that's actually is that if it's just some concoction, they make up these air different things that they have listed for sale, and they'll melt them to people as a gag. So you can basically go on there and say I want to send you know, my buddy Ryan some gorilla poop and they have they charge up to 44 95 for a pack of poop to send to somebody, and they've been in business since 2007. So obviously they're making some money doing it. So again, those are all really crazy, weird business ideas that people are making money off of. So if you're doing something more standard, like Web development or you're doing some sort of business coaching or you doing S CEO or you're walking dogs Now all of these sort of standard things that I think people think of photography writing, whatever it is, whatever your niche happens to be. If you're good at it and you market it properly and you pick your niche correctly, you could sort of make money doing it. So I don't want you to go into this thinking that you're limited to this narrow range or that being too specific is going to be a problem. I mean, I don't know if you can get more specific than just food for dogs and cats. Like that's about a specific of a niche is you can get and they do 5.9 million per year. So again, don't be afraid to be very, very specific with this and then work towards being the best in the world. You do that, you'll make the money. Okay, The money will come from that. All right. So again, just want to underscore the importance of this part of it. Obviously, through the rest of the course, we're gonna go through, and I'm gonna show you how to figure all of this out for yourself and how to find the right niche for you. But again, one underscore the importance of doing that. 3. WHO Is Your Ideal Client?: let's start here, then, by figuring out the who. So here's what you're gonna learn this lesson. First off, we're gonna start for the fact that it all sort of starts with you. So what I'm teaching you hear is about more than just building a business is about a lifestyle. It's a business that you care about that fits with how you live working with people that you truly care about. So it's more than just what's gonna make me the most money. I kind of I know some people won't like this, but I kind of refused to just do that for two reasons. One, I don't think that's what's gonna long term make you happy. I pretty much know that, but also to I think the best chance you have for making the most money is centering your business around something you truly care about. And again, I know a lot of people that's become cliche to sort of disagree with that. But I've been doing this a long time, and I still believe that that happens to be true because there's so much work that has to be done. If you don't really truly care about it. It's gonna be hard to get through all that. So it's about more than just money. It's about doing something that makes you happy. So it all sort of starts with you. And then again, that's going to give you the best chance to make the most money. Then we'll talk about who can you help? So there's lots of people that you might want to help, but who can you actually help? We'll talk about some criteria for really self assessing and being able to understand if you actually can help these people, because if you can't there's no reason trying to build a business around it. Then we'll get into can these people pay so it it is still a business. So you have to work with people that have money that will actually pay for these services again. There'll be lots of people you want to help. But can those people actually as a group sustaining business? And if they can't again, it's pointless to build a business around it, and then we'll kind of look at all of this will do a breakdown of the company, just food for dogs. I pulled some stuff from their website and so forth and will break down their story and sort of go through how they answer these questions and why. I think it's such a successful business based on that, So that's what we're gonna get into in this lesson. So let's go ahead and dive in. So the first thing is there's four elements to know if you've got the right who and it's sort of like I said, it starts all with you and self assessing. So the four elements are values, passion, vision and emotion. So when it comes to values, are these people or the thing that they're doing important to you doesn't really matter to you. And I could go back to myself in his example. When I first started teaching courses was over a decade ago, back then, there was not There was no you. To me, there was no Linda. As a matter of fact, when I first started, there was no YouTube, and so the only real written coating your only cook coating tutorials out there were written tutorials and, you know, for the time they were good. But if you look back on him now, ah, you know you would obviously see that there was a lot to be desired. And so I just didn't think that there was a lot of good information out there about for people wanting to learn how to code. And so that was the whole spark of meat, even starting to teach. And it was really, really important to me because, you know, I felt like and I think this is proven true and it was sort of obvious. But I felt like the that coding and technology was sort of the future where everything was headed on this little planet of ours. And I felt really passionate because of the struggles that I had gone through. Ah, toe help people get through that. So it was really, really important to me. So that's sort of how you assess it. When it comes to value, Does it really matter to you? The next thing is is passion. So it is helping these people feel like work. Do you get satisfaction from helping them, or is it just something you kind of kind of gotta grind through? And again I can give an example from my own sort of business from this again I start off first. Helping developers and what I noticed is with time my passion for hoping developers waned a little bit. And the the reason why is because we went from a scenario of there being very little good information on how to code to. Now there's just a ton of it. There's so much out there that I don't feel like there's a big gap. There's plenty of people that are really good teachers out there teaching this stuff, and so my passion for it sort of waned a little bit. And but what grew was my passion for helping freelancers because I've noticed that now we're in a space where there's not necessarily a ton of good information up out there when it comes to freelancing, and there's a lot of people out there who they'll learn how to code as developers, and then they'll sort of get stuck with, Well, how do I make a living out of this part of it? And they don't want to work a 9 to 5, which I very much relate to. And so when I'm teaching people how to freelance like I'm doing right now, this doesn't feel like work to me, and when I see people go through my courses and half success and so forth, I get satisfaction from that. So you gotta have something that you're passionate about. When you're thinking about who you want to help, it has to meet. This criteria is important. Do you really get satisfaction from helping these people? Does it not feel like work at all? And it's something you just really enjoy doing the 3rd 1 And this may be the most important one, actually, and that is vision. So it's not enoughto want to help or to feel like it's important. You have to have a vision of a better way or a better future for these people. So when I first started doing coding tutorials, I there most of the stuff. The time was written tutorials, and I was like, I hate learning that way. I'm going to start doing video tutorials And back then, video tutorials were difficult to do. This was still back when when YouTube first rolled out, they had the 10 minute time limit and that had to be very specific, formatted or rendered a very specific way and file sizes and all that's video is still very , very hard back then. But I just felt like it was a better way. Uh, toe learn how to code. And so I had sort of a vision for that. So you gotta have some sort of vision. And if you're really passionate, I believe if you're really passionate about a particular group of people or particular topic where you want to see things better, you already have that vision. As soon as I see that, you feel like you think about it and you'll be like, Oh, yeah, like this thing I see. I get angry when I see this and you know, I know there's a better way and I want to show people or help people with a better way. You have to have that that spark of that vision so that you can actually lead these people in a particular direction because as a freelancer, as a service provider, ultimately that's what you're doing. You're leading them in a better direction. So do you have that vision if you if you don't if it's lacking, you really don't care about trying to figure one out, then that's an indicator that you may be going down the wrong path, and then the final one is emotion. I've sort of alluded this, but when you think about these people or this particular topic, do you get angry? Do you get sad? You get emotional in some way. Do you care enough to the point where it makes you emotional? And again, I'll use myself as an example when I sort of as I transitioned from helping developers to caring more about helping freelancers, the thing that really stuck out to me there's actually there's an individual. I won't name her name, but there's an individual comments on my YouTube videos and has told me some of her story. And every time I make one of these courses or talk about freelancing, I think about her in my head because she's a single mother. She has a number of kids and I just think about her in that scenario. Freelancing and I really want to help that person and the reason why is because that kind of relates to my mother Now. My mother is not a single mother, but my dad was in a car accident when I was eight years old and he's been a paraplegic ever since. So my mother was sort of a de facto single mother. She went from caring for us and being housewife to now having to also be the main breadwinner for her family and take care of my dad along with us. And so I get really, really passionate when I see other single mothers or other people in that position, and that's in my mind who I think of. I get emotional. I get, you know, I really want to help them. So that doesn't mean that this isn't hopeful for other people. That doesn't mean that I don't take on other people. But when I actually sit down to do this, that's who I think about in my mind, cause it puts me in the right mindset on it gets me in the right emotional state. So it has to be something that that you get emotional about. So those are the four elements and you need to go through and check these. These are the things that are going to indicate to you that you're on the right path, and if you can check all four blocks of these about a particular group of people particular topic, particular activity that can be turned into some sort of service. That's how you know you're on the right track and that you have the right who and you'll be properly prepared to to create a business. That long term is gonna make you happy, and it's gonna give you the best opportunity to make the most money, and I truly believe that. All right, so that's the who next is. Can you help these people? So, do you have a service you can offer them that you know will help them, Ah, and and make their lives better? And this goes something back to something that I talked about in My Beginner's Guide to Freelance course. If you're on skill share, you can just go to my profile and see that otherwise and go to John Morris online dot com size freelance for that course. But if if you don't truly believe that you have something that is going to make other people's lives better, it becomes really, really difficult to sell it. If not, and this is something that I learned from Ben subtle about this idea of If you do have something that will make people's lives better. You have a moral obligation to go out and sell it aggressively. The analogy uses is a cure to cancer. If you had the cure to cancer, you knew it worked 100%. And you had a family member that had cancer. Would you not be aggressively sort of in their face everyday? Like Look, I have your cure. Come take the cure and just be constantly trying to persuade them. That's sort of the the position you want to be in when it comes to your product and products and services. When we get to just food for dogs will talk about how this can really apply, even in something that seems as obscures. Dog food will talk about how this is, I think, a big key to their success. So do you have something that you can truly help them? Are you willing to put in the work to create it? Do you want to again? We've sort of talked up, talk about this, but I'm gonna I'm gonna harp on this as we go throughout this because it's much more about you than it is anything else. If you get the you part of it right and doing something that you want to dio. Then the rest of it becomes easy. So you feel motivated to make these people's lives better and put in the work? Or does it seem something like it's something that's daunting? And again, I can go back to my own? You know my own example. I reached a point with coding tutorials where it started to feel daunting, and I still do coding tutorials, but I do them when I feel really passionate about some a particular topic, or I really want to do a particular topic, right? So I made that transition to doing freelancing Teoh courses, because when I do these courses, they don't feel daunting at all. I could do this all day, but when I sit down to do according to tutorial, it does. And that's just because my passions have changed because sort of the market has changed. Finally, is, can you do better? So do you actually have something better to offer than what's already out there and then be specific? Why is it better? And can you demonstrate that it's better? Okay, this is all the core of creating a product and offering services that are obvious to other people. And a lot of lot of freelancers just simply aren't gonna do this. And they're not gonna put in this effort. They're not gonna put in this work. If you do, you'll have a much better service to market match. You'll be a lot more passion about what you do. You work harder. That's what's gonna lead to success. There's no secret here. Okay, so that's why we're going through this, all right? The next one, then is do they have money? So it's still a business, right? So we still have to assess whether they actually have money or not. So do they have does your potential client that you're thinking about creating, ah, business around? Do they have potential, or do they have disposable income to spend? And we'll talk about the research here in a second. But this is just a question that you have to ask when you're analyzing it. So the do they have disposable income. Next, are they willing to spend that money on the service that you would provide? Some people may have disposable income, but they're not willing to spend it on this particular service. Now a good sort of shortcut. To figure this out is to just look at others in the market. Are there other service providers on the market? What are they charging? How long have they been in business? You know? Ah, we go back to I think it was poop center dot com. You might look at that and go. Okay, Yeah, but that's a fly by night thing that's a flash in the pan is gonna go away. Well, they've been around since 2007 so that's over a decade. So that gives you an indicator that there's enough people out there whether you agree with that or not that that that want to do that so and they're willing to spend money on it because this company has been in business that long. So look at others in the market as an indicator. If if these people are willing to spend money on a particular service, another way to analyze it is looking at segments. So maybe if you look at the market as a whole, you might not think there's a bunch of money in it, But maybe there's a very specific segment of the market that has money versus one that doesn't. And a very good example of this in my book is again just food for dogs. So if you look at whether it's a restaurant in L. A. Okay, so a restaurant in L. A. It's sort of an upscale dog restaurant there, and they're attracting people who really care about their dogs that are better wealthy and have money, so that works there. If you took that same restaurant and you put it, say, where I live in Shannon County, Missouri, Shannon County is the poorest county in Missouri, so there's not a lot of people with a lot of disposable income here, and they don't really care too much about their dogs. In fact, it's kind of an epidemic around here of people just leaving their dogs on the side of the road and so taking that exact same business that is very successful. This 5.9 million year in L. A. And putting it in Shannon County, Missouri, Shannon County, Missouri. That business would flop. It would not do very well. So again, you have to look at demographics and all these difference different ways that you can segment the market. And maybe there's a small segment that you confined that does have money that is willing to spend it. Ah, that you can be a service provider for And it doesn't take a big market. As we've seen with some of these companies out there, it doesn't take a big market for you, too. Teoh have a successful business around, right? So the last thing that I mentioned is research. So again, spend the time to do the research. This is your leg up. You want an advantage? You want a guaranteed way to out compete other freelancers toe to make sure you're on the right track. All of that do the research because so many people won't go. Just think of it all in their head and try to make it up in their head and they'll be off base because you just don't know now some tools that you can use for this. This isn't a full on sort of research course. Maybe we'll do that at some point, but there are some tools that you can use so up. Work is a really good tool to use because you can actually see projects being posted on there, and you can search for a particular kind of project and see if people if if people are actually posting and what they're paying and so forth. So it's the largest freelancing platform on the planet. So as a freelancer, even if you never plan on trying to get work from there, it's a really great place to have an account on, do research and see what kind of project, uh, services people are are putting up their what they want, how much they're paying all that sort of thing. Another one good one is Facebook. So it has the audience insights tool that you can use their, and it will allow you to look up. No demographics. This is really good for segmenting so you can look up single mothers that live in L. A. That have dogs that have you know, that follow X pages or like you can get really detailed. And you can see you know what kind of numbers there are, how many of those people fit this very specific criteria? But what are some other things about them that maybe you didn't know, like, do they own a home. Do they tend to have iPhones or Androids? And what pages do they follow on Facebook? That might be places that you could advertise later on, etcetera. So doing all of that researchers and give you a bunch of insight into those people give you the answers to these questions. Of course, Google's another one. Google has a lot of data in terms of the terms of search volumes and so forth. So you can see if people are searching for information, searching for services and so forth. But take the time to do this research, and you're gonna have ah, big leg up over over other freelancers, right? So last but not least then I want to do a breakdown of just just food for dogs because it seems like you're probably a really obscure sort of niche. But again, this restaurant does 5.9 million a year, so there's, I think, a lot to be learned here. So if you go to about Page, they have a slide show there, and I would just want to go through some of the things they say. They're so one of the slides that says they have a single objective to increase the quality and length of life for as many dogs as possible through a balanced whole food diet notice that says nothing about money, about how much money they want to make. Now you might be a little jaded and say, Well, OK, that's what they're going to tell us. But I think is you hear the story. You'll find that maybe that's not the case. So the founder, Sean Buckley, I had two dogs and he got curious about the food he was feeding his dogs. And as he researched that, he found the oldest process stuff, all the different types of things that they were putting in there, and he got disgusted by it. And he vowed to never feed his dogs commercial dog food again. So I want I want to make this clear. This started not with him sitting down and going G. How can I think of a business that will make a bunch of money? It actually started with something that he cared about his dogs, and he first vowed to never feed his dogs commercial food again. He didn't start with Oh, I'm gonna build a business, right, so he made a personal choice. So obviously this is something that's important to him. Obviously, it's something that he's passionate about, so that that's the core of what just food for dogs is. That's what needs to be the core of what you're doing. So from that point on, because he found vowed to never feed his dogs commercial dog food, he then focused all this time and effort, learning about dog food and started making home cooked meals for his dogs and some friends . So it started with him just learning how to do it for his dogs because he had made this discovery he was discussing. He's like, I'm never doing that again. Well, now what am I going to do now? We had a problem, so he started doing all the research. And again, this is why passion is so, so important. Do you really think that Sean Buckley has this great interest, or at least back then had this great interest in dog food? Like if he wasn't passionate about it, would he have spent the time reading all the stuff that he read and doing all the research that he did in order to create home cooked meals for his dogs. If he wasn't passionate about it, probably not. So again, this is why passion and values and all this is is so important. So I started cooking home meals for his dogs and some friends, and he realized that others were passionate about their dog as passion about their dogs. He was, so he decided to open a restaurant to serve them. And the point, the whole big point I want to make here is that the business was secondary. He started off with something he was passionate about, something he cared about. And then the business came along later, sort of a natural extent extension of, you know, Hey, this is this thing I care about. This is the thing I'm doing. Well, there's a lot of other people out there that feel the same way as I do. Let me make this thing that's gonna make it easier for them. So that's really should be the story of your freelancing business. And what you do is a freelance or not starting with Well, how can I make the most money right that you're gonna be miserable and you're gonna be chasing ghosts doing that. Start with something you yourself care about something you yourself are passionate about. And the big thing is, is hopefully showing you these examples of all these weird things that people make a bunch of money off of. When you think of that, you won't go. Oh, well, that's not possible. Nobody will pay for that. They're willing to pay for this. If they're willing to send potatoes, they're willing toe sent poop there will willing to rent a fake mourner for a few. Like if they're willing to pay for that good chance they're willing to pay for what it is that you want to do So and then the last thing just on the money. I kind of covered this. But now he ah, he went after wealthy dog owners in L. A. Who were as passion about their dogs is him and willing to pay for high quality food. So there's some assessment of the market there. I'm not saying throw that completely out the window. You just have to. This is what I'm passionate about. Now how can I turn that into a service that people who have money will pay me for so you just I sort of have to tweak it and make it fit. So again, that is the who When you go through this and do this thinking and do this, this sort of self assessing on research and so forth is going to give you a lot better idea of who your people are, what they care about, what they want from a service provider, the things that matter to them and how and why and what they're going to be willing to pay someone to do. That particular thing for them that's going to give you a huge advantage when you actually sit down to think about what services and I'm gonna offer, How much am I going to charge? How am I gonna market it, etcetera? So again, do the research like harp on this throughout this, do the research, do the research, do the research. It really is going to give you a leg up when it comes to all of this 4. What Is the Perfect Service to Offer Them?: in this lesson, we're gonna dive into sort of the nitty gritty of figuring out what exact services you should offer now because I don't know exactly what you're niches, and this course is made for you. Whether you're a Web developer, you're walking dogs, you're doing photography. There's all sorts of different markets and niches and services that you could be offering. Since I don't know what that is, I can't get into specifics of exactly what you individually should offer. But I can. What I can do is give you four of the sort of main different approaches to figuring out what services you should offer by analyzing your market and and figuring out what is the best approach for you based on what you're doing. So we're gonna go through four different ones seem but better gaps in the market, more honest, last, transparent and brand new. And I'm gonna give you examples of each to hopefully make it clear how you can sort of look at your market on, figure out what it is that you want to do so with that said, let's go ahead and type in. So the first approach is same, but better an example I like to use because it's really close to what I do is a guy named Bill Ericsson. Now Bill Ericsson is a WordPress developer, so he does something that thousands of other freelancers do, so he's not. You know, he didn't come up with some brand new offering. He didn't, you know, he didn't create something that's totally different. He's just doing what ah bunch of other people do. However, he made a name for himself creating Genesis Dean code snippets. Which Genesis Steam is a proper popular theme framework for WordPress, and there's a lot of different ways you can hook into it and so forth. And he has a website that has a bunch of different code snippets. I used to use a lot myself back in the day, and he sort of made a name for himself with that and then building sort of clean s Seo friendly WordPress websites. That sort of led him in to be able to do speaking engagements and and he became known for building really good WordPress websites, so clients go to him when they want to. They need to ensure that their WordPress site is built right, it's the code is clean. It's upto related standards on so forth. So his again his offering is the same. It's just simply better. And that's one approach that you can take right. You don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel. I think that's maybe a mistake. A lot of freelancers early on or new freelancers make us think that they have to come up with something that's just completely different from what everybody else is doing and nobody else is doing. Ah, this particular thing and that's what I need to do when in fact, it's often usually a bad sign if nobody's doing what you're doing, because probably someone else has thought about it. And they tried it and it just didn't resonate with the market. And that's why nobody's doing it. Not always the case, but usually that's ah, pretty good indicator. So again, the first sort of standard approach is just do the same thing. Just do it better than other people and that maybe that maybe all you need right you don't necessarily need to doing these other things that may be all you need. You don't have to think much more about it that said, there are a couple of the approaches that we can take, so the 2nd 1 is what I call gaps in the market, right? So there's there's there's, ah market of people who want a particular service. There are companies right now that are currently filling that service. However, when you look at it, you sort of look at it and go OK, but they're not providing this particular thing, which would be better or this particular group of people wants. There's sort of a gap in the market where there's not really any good service provider providing that service, so just food for dogs will use that example again is a really good example, because there are plenty of companies that make dog food. But Sean Buckley, the founder, saw a gap in the market. Nobody was making high quality whole food for dogs and cats, so he created a restaurant in L. A. That did just that. So it was a gap in the market that he filled Whole Foods is sort of a similar thing. There are plenty of grocery stores out there, but most of them compete on price and Whole Foods became known for providing really high quality whole food for people. And it was aimed at people who wanted to eat healthier, which has become a big thing, is sort of a trend right now. So they kind of capitalized on that trend and filled that gap in the market. Ah, and have a very successful business as a result of it. So again, you can look for things in the market where service providers are already providing something they're just not providing in a particular way that a certain segment of the market might want. You can fill that need, Ah, and orient your business around that. So that's the second approach that you can take. The next one is what I calm or honest or transparent. So progressive is a really good example. They sell insurance, and there's not a lot of difference in the products that insurance companies offer. My brother was an insurance for a while, and I didn't know this when I wasn't in it, but basically you can get the same coverage from pretty much any company, right? They all they all package him a little different. Try to show you those prices and commercials or ads or their websites or whatever. But actually, if you have all the same features in a particular insurance plan, you're probably gonna sit pay roughly the same price no matter what company you go with. So you can get any coverage you want from pretty much any insurance company at roughly the same price. So it's really hard to differentiate in that way. So one of the ways that progressive differentiates itself is drew transparency, and they ran a bunch of ads and sort of gained a little bit of popularity because they had their compare. They had a name for compare your price tool or something like that, but they would they would you would enter your information, and they have actually give you the quotes of them, but also some of their leading competitors. And so they were operating based off of price transparency, and the fact they were doing that just made a lot of people want to go with them, even if maybe they were paying Mawr or at least allowed them to show that they were a little bit cheaper than all of these other companies. So again they were competing by trying to be more honest, orm or transparent. That's how they're trying to set themselves apart. So that's an approach you can take. Sam ovens. You may not have heard of him, but he runs a site called consulting dot com. He does something similar. C offers training for consultants, which is super super common, but he positions himself as the guy who isn't going to over market to you. So he spends a lot, a lot of time talking about how all these, all these people, all these online businesses and stuff spend all this time marketing and started yelling at you and so forth. And he focuses more of his time on just building better products and is gonna let the product shine and and so forth. And so his kind of basic pitches. Just try your stuff, and if you like and we're sure you'll like it, so then you can buy it. So he's kind of taking that tact, er, positioning self as being a more honest or more transparent company. So again, that's an approach you can take your basically offering the same thing. You're just offering it in a different way. You're doing it in a different way right then the last one, then is sort of is offering something brand new. So Potato Message is a good example. They came home with something brand new. A, so far as I know, did not exist before them, and it turns out that a lot of people wanted wanted to do it. Now, this is more risky because you're not going down a beaten path when you're going down the beaten path and taking one of these other approaches, you know there's a market for what you're doing. But potato messages there. I don't know how they would know that there was a market for that. It was simply a guess. And it turns out that people did, and they sort of got lucky, huh? I wouldn't necessarily say lucky, but no, it's the favor sort of favored them, so our fortune favor them so again it's more risky. But if it works, it can be very highly profitable because now you become the the soul service provider and if you hit on something that a lot of people really want now you're the sole provider of that on do you can sort of take in everything ever gonna be business is playing catch up for you and and so that could be very, very popular. Very, very profitable. Oops. Centers, of course, is another example now, Had that idea been pitched you before you knew it was successful, you'd probably think they were crazy. But like I've said, they've been around since 2007. So it worked. So and that's just another sort of approach you can take to. It is coming up with something brand new. Now I want to go back and just reiterate one last thing before we end here. This all goes back to the service to market match. It's a about matching the services to the market that you're in. And to do that, you really have to know and understand your market. You have to understand the market as a whole, understand all of the different segments, the niches within it. What are the differences between what people want in terms of products and services? What are the differences and expectations, what are the differences and how much money they make and all that, And the only way you can do that is by doing the research that we've talked about. And this is again why? If you do the research, then you're gonna be ahead of your competitors. And the tough part about research is there's no sort of proven formula, right? There's for every different market that's out there. It's going to be a little bit different. You just have to kind of start looking. And as you start looking, you'll catch a threat and you just keep falling that threat. But you have to have sort of the commitment to doing that. But if you do, it's gonna pay. Dividends is gonna make it obvious to you whether you there's a gap in the market, whether you should just do same. But better, where there's something brand new you can come up with, whatever the approaches, all of that's gonna be answered by getting in there and doing the research. And, like I said, up work, Facebook, Google. These are all good places to start to start doing the research Ah, and figuring out what it is that you're market wants, who your market is, what it is that they want, what they're willing to pay all of that sort of stuff, and you just try and help you even more of the service to market match. I can give you an example from my own career, which was back when I built the platform university membership site for Michael Hyatt, which may or may not. Nobody is fairly well known online, and I built that site for him. And after I got done, I had a lot of people who started contacting me, wanting need to build a site similar to his for them. You got to the point. I ended up putting an official service on my services page for it called a clone. Ah, where people, I just sort of said, if you were looking for this, this is the one you should should buy here, Whatever's. And I ended up doing a ton of those for people. They were really easy for me cause already had all the theme. I had the code charging $3000 for him, and so I made ah good amount of money building those four people, and it was a very particular service at a particular time. Be stuff a very specific event, like if you were to sit outside of a market and try to analyze this and figure this out. It would be very difficult to do but just simply paying attention to what was happening on and adjusting to that based off of what I was seeing. I was able to capitalize on that, and so again, just having I mean, I almost I did almost nothing to sell these. It was simply based around the fact that I had done this for this guy and people were finding out about it. And so when you have a service to market match like that, that is that good. You almost don't even have to sell your services because people just come to you already wanting to hire you. And so again, I just want to underscore this this idea of service to market match and it's based off timing can be based off events. It's based off of different segments in your market. There's all sorts of factors that sort of go into it, which is why learning how to research and and having the commitment to doing the research is critical to being able to create the kind of services that people really, really want. And when you could do that, you don't have to work near is hard to market yourself or sell your services. So hopefully that gives you an example of what I mean when I say service to market match Ah , and how effective it can be. And if you do that, you're gonna have a leg up over everybody else who's just sort out their guessing. So service to market match. 5. How to Package Your Services: in this lesson. We're gonna talk about how to package your services now. And there's three sort of main things that you're gonna want to do. And I'm gonna show you some examples of this. This is where we're moving from, sort of more the conceptual stuff that we've been going through now into the more practical . You're also going to get kind of a first look at how to do some research and how powerful it can be also to point that out as we go along here. So when it comes to packaging your products, the street things that you need to do first off you want a package, your service as a product. You want to make sure that when you create that package, it's a well rounded package and then within it, you have smart up cells and let me just give you Ah, quick, look at what the sort of the end goal of something like this might be. And this is kind of an extreme example. You see here this is a site that selling sort of website packages website building packages union, see, they start off with no a package around $244 then they have first off their packaged. That's the first thing they're package more as as products. And then you can see they just have kind of smart up cells within here that ultimately get up to the point of $3000 Here. Now, one of the things that I would say that isn't necessarily be done as well. Here with these packages is the being well rounded part. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but this is kind of the end goal of what we're trying to get to. But I have started referring to this as the fiver method because I think fiber is a really good tool for showing, showing you how this is done and going from a service to sort of a product here. And the reasons why you want to do that is it's it takes your services from being something intangible to make them more tangible and intangible. Things are easier for clients to to understand their easier for you to sell, and it fits better of what the claim is actually thinking. And if you sit down for a second, think about what someone even you when you go to hire someone, what you actually want, What you want is the product, but you go to a service provider, so it it puts it more in line with what decline is once again. A good example. We could use his photography right When you let's say you're doing senior pictures, you go to the service provider. But what you ultimately want is what they're going to create you, which is the senior picture. So you want the product, but you're going to a service provider to provide it. Even so, it's a housecleaning. What you want is a clean house, but you're going to someone who's a house cleaner in order to do it. So the more you can put package your services in a way that fits with what clients are already actually naturally looking for, they'll understand it better. It makes it more tangible, more really and slide easier for you to sell your services. So with that said, I want to go through and look at this with some examples here, we'll start right off the bat with photography. Here we're here. I've just done a search over on fiber for photography, and fiber kind of forces you into this. They push people this away, and that's why it's a really good example. So you can see some of the These are the best selling a list of the best selling products over on fiber, and you could see the number one here, as of right now, is Amazon product photography. This one is Prada. Artistic product photography. This one's related to Amazon. Amazon lifestyle product photography Amazon professional PRODUCT doesn't SAY AMAZON Okay, so what you're seeing here is you're getting the in a lot of these you're getting. If something very specific and something very tangible, I will take pictures of your products for Amazon's. What you're going to get is pictures of your Amazon products or products that you can put in the Amazon and e commerce site and so forth. It's not I'm a picture taker, okay? So just the fact that these are even broken down into that is the first thing that I want to sort of point out here. Ah, and just another going back to the research thing I mentioned. I'll point this out now when you start doing research like this, certain things will start to become obvious to you. So if you're a photographer and you're sitting there wanting, well, what services should I offer? And you come here and you start just looking at this and you sort by best selling and you see Amazon product photography, product photography, Amazon product photography, AMAZON PRODUCT photography products like it starts to become obvious. Hey, maybe I should do product photography. Maybe that's something that a lot of people are gonna want, and I'll be able to add that as sort of a core service. So just Teoh push sort of hammer that point home about the research. These sorts of things become obvious when you start doing it. And had you sat down beforehand to try to think of stuff toe offer as a photographer, I don't know. In my mind, at least, I don't think Amazon products or product photography would have been the number one thing that I thought of. But here it is 1234 of the top eight, at least, and I think product photography is six of the top eight, so that gives you a really strong indicator that that's something that you may want to consider if your photographer all right, next, we'll come over here and we'll look at graphic design. So again you can see here just the way that these are set up. So ah, logo design, logo design and editing product pictures and design for graphic images graphic. This is sort of a little bit more generalised. Ah, any kind is a little bit more generous generalists. So these tend to be a little bit more generalised in the graphic design area. But still you have you have quite a few that are our product ties their their their position to more as products, logos and and that sort of thing go over here to writing. So writing is probably the most sort of ethereal of all of the things that we're covering here can cover a lot of things. It's could be very vague. You see here that almost all of these are articles. I will write you an article because writing could be anything these they're offering a specific product. I will write you an article and you notice up here. I didn't do article writing. I did writing and still are writing an article. Right? You in our call. Write your own article. Write your own article s CEO friendly, blogged posts. You know, some of these get really specific of travel articles, etcetera. So they're all product ized, and that's what I want you to see from this. So selling your service as a product makes it easier to sell more tangible. All the things that I talked about and that's the first step. So start thinking of how can I make my service Morva product instead of just saying, Hey, I'm a Web developer. You can hire me for all your Web developer needs No saying Hey, I build, you know, WORDPRESS powered membership sites or I Bill Woo commerce powered e commerce sites or, you know, I I fix problems. You know, if you have a problem with your WordPress cider, I fix PHP problems, right? Right. Whatever it is, how can you turn your service into more of a product? Okay, now, the next thing is having smart up cells in here, and I wanna show you a couple of these. There were one of these that does a good job of that on fiber. You'll see this a lot if you come over here to do this research, you'll see that when you when you see their listing, it will say $50 for it or whatever. But you'll come in here and you'll see that they have different packages. And so the packages tend to be very smart up sells things that naturally sort of makes sense. So the basic package you get, Ah, and this is for WordPress speed optimization. So you get a low resize your photos and then browser cashing. So for the basic so standard, then they'll go into unification. And then for the premium, they'll do database optimization. So if you're someone who wants to speed up your website right, these these up cells make sense. It's just pushing that further and further and further to sort of eventually get the full package. And so that when I talk about smart up cells, that's what That's what I'm talking about when you're again getting back to looking something like this where you offer multiple packages and by the way, I don't I don't recommend you have quite this many. I mean, three, 3 to 5. I would probably stick closer to three packages like this, but in between those packages having those smart up cells where what you get in the basic what you get in the next and the next sort of makes sense. Why it would be more why it costs more. So just when you're your potential client sees it, it just makes sense. All right, then. The last one I want to talk about is then being well rounded. And no, there's not a lot of people that actually do this very well. But I found one that does that I want to show you. So this site here is about again building websites for people you could see. This is sort of the layout of their core offering here on they're gonna build a website, but then if you come down here, they do a good job of okay, Yeah. You get easy to use Dragon Drop editor, but now content, strategy and copyrighting. So if I'm creating a website, there's a purpose behind it. Usually I'm gonna build a blogger. I'm gonna build some sort of business around it. So now they're gonna help me with my content strategy. So what this does is when you're creating a more well rounded prat a product or service as a product. What you're trying to do is one. You're trying to help them with the overall total result that they're after. And you're also trying to answer objections. Usually those two things go hand in him. So if I want a website, one of my eject objections might be Well, why would I spend $3000 to get a nice fancy website Bill when I really don't know what I'm gonna do for my content strategy? I don't know how I'm gonna, uh, monetize it. I don't know how to copyright. You have all these things you can say. Well, I don't know how to do this on. I don't have that. And I don't have this. That could just It's not that the service provider themselves is bad or anything like that . It's just you have all these other things that you got to do as a part of it to get the ultimate result that you want. And so, as a service provider, you want to sit down and think about that and think about what is the total results. Someone is after my ideal client. We spent all this time thinking about our ideal clients. What is it that they ultimately want? And I may offer the specific service. But what other things that I could do around that to help them to get that total result to make my package more appealing. So again, content, strategy and copyrighting. No custom designs. A professional graphics for your message. Launch training. So how to launch your Web site? There Could Be S CEO could be a thing that's a part of this. You know, you could add on to this Facebook ads or how to create a YouTube channel to promote your site. Etcetera, etcetera. There's all these different add ons. You could put around it to help them be able to get the total results and also answered those objections that would stop them from from getting your services, because there's these other things that they're not going to do. The word that often gets used in relation to this is turnkey, meaning someone can come into your service and they get everything that they need to get the result that there after its turnkey, I turn key in it and it goes, and so that's as close as you can get to that, that's what you want to do. So again, those air, the those air science sort of the three big things that you want to focus on, what? Packaging your service. Your service is a product making sure it's well rounded to answer all objections and then having those smart insult up cells in between packages. And that's when you can get back to it looking something like this. Or maybe you have something like this. This is for S E O. You see these sort of smart up cells in here? Ah, that's a different one here. But you have these smart, smart up cells in here and having your packages look like that. So that's what we're getting towards. That's how to do that. And again, you just got to get out there and do the research fibers. They really get great place to do that up work. You can do some of that there as well, but if you're starting out doing this, I would just go look at fiber. And I think that ideas will start to come to you because you'll see all of the different kinds of packages and services and how people are doing it over there, and it should give you a ton of ideas 6. What Should You Charge?: in this lesson, we're gonna go through pricing, and this is often one of the most difficult things that freelancers deal with because it's not something that's sort of natural or intuitive or easy. And so what I want to do is I want to go through first. Conceptually, the 44 main factors affecting price for freelancers. Talk about what those are give you some examples so you know what to analyze and look at. Then we'll talk about where you could do some research in terms of figuring out your particular nature, your particular market and what the market price sort of looks like there. And then we'll finish up by talking about pricing strategy some different strategies that you can use when thinking about what you're gonna charge. So starting off with the four factors affecting prices are perceived quality. They are competition, their supply and demand on then differentiation. And so when we start off talking about perceived quality, perceived quality is it's not just what the actual quality of something is, but what your your client, your customer, perceives that quality to be. Now I'm on the Nissan Motor Corporation site just to sort of make the point here. If you look at their quality initiatives that they have listed here, they have three main ones, and of those perceived quality is one of them. And I think it's particularly notable because I think most people were at if they were asked about quality product quality, and sales and service quality would be things that would be kind of obvious and would probably come to mind. But I think it be a lot fewer people who would name perceived quality perceived quality for we Ah, click through here and look at this. This is you can see. They say the term perceived quality refers to the quality that the customers acknowledge now for their car company. That's via the look, the touch in the field, the car. But the important point here is for what we're talking about is that the customers acknowledged, so it's what they perceive the quality to be. And there could be large discrepancies between actual quality and perceived quality. And that's an important thing to understand is a freelancer. So to get a good example is the BMW seven series. This is Ah, BMW cars, a luxury car that sells for 84,000 and $95 you compare that to the Rolls Royce Ghost Siri's , which sells for $308,000. Now what people in the car in history will know its changed here recently, but for a lot of years, the BMW seven series and the Ghost Siri's were built on the exact same platform. So it was when it came ultimately down to it. It was pretty much the exact same car. Just the outside was done a little different. And then they added some stuff on the inside of the car and so forth. But overall, the car was pretty much the exact same car, but one sold for almost four times as much as the other one, and it simply comes down to the name Rolls Royce on the perceived quality of that particular car. So again, perceived quality is highly important as a freelancer, because even though we're trying to make our services mawr like products or trying to make them as tangible as we can, they still are in a lot of ways in tangible and so there's a lot of wiggle room for perceived quality. If you're not If you're not putting in work and doing a good job of getting potential clients to see you having high perceived quality, the chances are they're probably going to see Hugh as having low perceived quality. And that's gonna cause you to get paid less than you want and so forth and not be able to price the way that you want to. So again, perceived quality is an important factor to to sort of look at now. What do you what are some things that matter with that will? Ultimately, it's any and every sort of interaction that you have with a potential client. But some very important things are, I would say, first and foremost your portfolio is why I tell people all the time. The visual appeal of your portfolio, no matter what you do, is maybe one of the most important things that you could do is a freelancer. Even if you walk dogs takes really good pictures of the dogs, you walk and put those in your portfolio, the better your pictures Look, it's just going to give you a leg up, even though someone else who may have taken ugly pictures might be 10 times the dog walker . You are, uh, you having better looking pictures is gonna just naturally sort of attract people is going to give the higher perceived quality just the way people work. So your portfolio making sure it's very it's visually appealing, and you put on Lee your best stuff in it. That's one of the things that you can dio. If you have a website than making sure that your website no looks good is up to date. It functions correctly. All those sorts of things someone goes to your website on it looks awful. Or there's a bunch of errors or, you know, it looks terrible on a mobile phone, etcetera. That's all going to diminish the perceived quality of of what you do. Another big one for freelancers that I think a lot of people just sort of gloss over is your profile picture. Like it or not, people judge a book by by its cover, And so if you know they look at your profile picture and it's like you at three AM in the morning at a New Year's Eve party in your eyes or half open, then that's not going to give a high perceived quality compared to someone who takes the time to do a professional photo. That little thing can make such a difference. So your marketing material, how good it looks, you know, if it's full of typos and all that sort of thing, then that could be problematic and so forth. Your content quality. If you're producing content than how good a content, you're producing all of these things, there's there's lots of different things that people are gonna interact with you and your business so it's any and everything that they can interact with. But I would say those are some of the top ones, the main one so you can deal with as a freelancer, so always focusing on, no matter how someone interacts with you that they're getting a they're getting a very high perceived quality of what it is that you do that's gonna push you to that range where people are gonna be willing to spend more money with you and you can raise your prices. So that's the first factor. The second factor. Then it is competition, and I sort of like to look at the the ads over Hunt, Google and the competition that happy happens here. You can see sort of how people are competing. So this one is $24 an hour and I think they're 2200 month. This one here is now competing with that same $12 an hour 1800 a month. If you come down to the bottom here, $219 professional with designed to earn $44 custom website design thes air. All this is all data that when a client of yours is searching for someone to hire and they're looking around and so forth, they see all of this stuff. They mean not see these Pacific exact things. But they see data like this. Ah, and they take that in and that helps them inform where they're at price, right price wise and again, we're What we're doing now is looking at the market rate. We're trying to figure out what the market rate for services it is. OK, so the big things when it comes to competition is to recognize that there's an upper limit . You can be the best freelancer in the world. You can be the best graphic designer in the world, but most people are not gonna pay you say $10,000 for one Amazon product shot when there are 17 other people that will do that same thing of a similar quality for 100 bucks. OK, so there's an upper limit and so you have to just be aware of that. The other thing is, if you are going to charge more, you need to know that you're charging more and you need to have a good reason why and be able to explain that. So it could be that you're offering them something Mawr. They're just getting more with you. Like, you know, the person over here is going to give you Ah is charging $1000 for their website build and you're charging 2000. But you're also doing S CEO. You're doing content strategy, doing market strategy, and they're not doing any of that. Well, that's a good reason why. To pay you more. Ah, and so people will see that and go. That's why that's more. All right, so those are the two things when it comes to competition, you sort of have to have an understanding, an idea of what your competition is. charging. So, you know, if your over you're charging Mawr and then you can explain why and so forth, all right, the next one, then is supply and demand, and I This is probably my favorite example of this. This is a book called Ego and Hubris. The Michael Malice Story, which you have probably never heard of. You may have heard of Michael Malice. He's kind of a political guy, but the politics of it aside, this book you can see right now 20 22 used in New from $84. This book costs at a minimum $84 now, and they're six new from 170. Ah, book you've never heard of possibly Ah ah, character main character you've never heard of from a guy you may have never heard off on author Harvey Pekar. So I you know, I had never heard of Harvey. I've heard of Michael Malice, but again, it's just sort of weird. Why is this book cost this much? Um, and you know, there's not necessarily good explanation other than there's just not a lot of them out there. There's not a ton of them out there. So Michael malice has become more well known, appearing on TV shows and so forth since his book has been written in. When there was originally written, there weren't a bunch of them that were made. And so, since he's become more well known now, the price of this book has gone up. This sort of weird autobiography about him. The price of this book has gone up simply due to salt supply and demand. So the more scarce something is. If there's of the demand stays the same and the supply goes down, then generally the prices is going to go up. So supply and demand of affect price. Another example I can give you from my own career is I'll go back to my sort of my Michael Hyatt story. So after I built the site for Michael Hyatt again, at there suddenly was a demand created of people who followed him. People were part of his membership. He's got a a fairly sizable following, so it was a decent, decent size demand that was created of people who wanted to build something just like what he was building. But the supply was really, really low in that I was I was. I would say it was probably the only person. At most I was one of two people in the entire world who could build that website for those people. And so Ah, and the other person actually worked for Michael and wasn't gonna be doing it, so Ah, I was pretty much the only person in the world that could do that. So the demand was wasn't necessarily millions and millions of people, but it was dozens of people and there was one person that could do it. So I was able, even though these these sites took me me a couple hours to build at most because I had all the code and all that that already written, I was able to charge $3000 for one of these sites that I could build in, like a day or two now. And that was simply a function of the supply and demand. So supply and demand is another factor. The last one that is differentiation. And we've sort of talked about this, but you know, if you can just be different in some way better, more honest, we've sort of talked about those on other lessons here, but somehow of differentiating yourself. This is a funny example to me. So this is a six pack of toilet paper that costs almost $20. Now most tour that that So let's just a little over $6 a roll. Where is most toilet paper costs about a dollar a role. And you would look at this and you're like, Why? Why is this cost, you know, almost three times with other regular tour that paper costs? And you know, there's actually not a ton that they talk about in terms of, you know, sort of the quality of this being much better, anything like that. But if you look at the reviews, look what people say. I love the color. Very durable paper towels, not over the sin. Thin Love, the colors. Just a front fund Christmas gag gift. It's blue, and it works very fun. Accent for a powder bath. It's all based around the color, like these reviews. Are all people just commenting about the color of this toilet paper? And there, Pete paying three times the price for it Now, you know, if you were jaded, you might say, Well, that's dumb, but it's still a reality. Just simply being different can cause people to want to To go with you, choose you to pay more money, spend more money with you. So differentiation is something that you can do Teoh are a factor that affects price. Okay, so those are the four factors that gives you some data to sort of start working with. In some ways, you can analyze your pricing now in terms of research will go back to some of the places that we've talked about. So I would start your research with fiber simply because you're gonna need to do it when it comes to how you're gonna package your services and so forth and come over here and just do a search for And, uh, let me just do WordPress website. That might give us a better idea here. WordPress website. And I'm gonna do this by best selling. I always like to do it by best selling. So I want to know who's who's being successful and so you can see sort of in here. You've got a range $10.50 dollars, $200. I bet if we click these and we look through here So this one goes up to 80. Um and this is for customization. So that's not quite actually building a full on WORDPRESS website. I will create a wordpress website and then if we come in here and click it, click on this 1 20 8100 and 20 and you go on down the list and you can. The big thing here is to see what air they're charging and what are you getting? So if you are providing a custom WordPress theme build from scratch and this person in here is providing, you know, they're just gonna install WordPress and install a premium theme, and they're gonna kind of set everything up for you. Those things, they're two very different things. And so you're not necessarily going to compare yourself yourself to them price wise. But if they are doing something that's very similar to you, then that's going to give you a sense of again. This is all data that your market is taking in that informs them on what your price should be. And so if you need to know what it is that the other people that do what you dio are actually charging on these websites. So you just go through here and you look and you just take the time to do the research, okay? And that will start to give you help. You determine a range now fibres a particular kind of website. It's probably got the lower pricing of anywhere you're gonna look. So take that with a grain of salt, but it's still going to give you an idea. Another one I always recommend, you know, if you are even if you don't ever plan on getting work from up work, created an account there, so you can go and do some of this research. So if we do again WordPress website when we come down and you can look through all of the different jobs here, So this one's an hourly. Ah, this one's a $2000 fixed price hourly tour and 50 except you can do that. But what I like to do actually is come in here and click down on this filters right here. And I just like to look at the budget section and just sort of get a sense. So there's There's a total of 8746 jobs right now, so 1300 of are less than 100. 1800 are 100 to 500. There's 559 that air 500 to a K, and there's 552. They're 1000 to 5000. That's actually the fact that 500 to a K and a K 251 K 25 k are actually similar numbers is a good sign, because normally these sort of just go down. So that means that what that tells you is there is actually sort of an over abundance of of projects on up work for WordPress website in the one to K five range, right? This number should be actually significantly less ah than than this one here. But it's not so that that's sort of an anomaly that you want to pay attention to. So and click on this and click on fixed price. Here, get to these 5 51 Now you have essentially a list of people who are willing to pay you what might be your price range one K 25 k They're willing to pay that price, and it's going to give you a sort of a run down of what, exactly it is that they're looking for. So these is this is 551 people that are willing to pay $1000 to $5000 for something. Well, what's that? Something, right. So go through and look at thes. And the more you read these, you'll start to see trends. You'll start to see common denominators. Ah, and you'll be able to go through here and you and slowly start to figure out or get some idea of what you can charge for what it is that you dio. Now I'm sort of focusing on website and what developments. But this is true for anything. Writing, photography, graphic design, dog walking, whatever it is that you do, you article, right, whatever, Whatever it is that you do, go through and do this sort of research. Ah, and try to figure out where you confined sort of anomalies like this or get a list of people that of projects that are in the price range you want to charge and then see what those people are wanting and see if you're gonna be able to deliver on that. And if you're not that maybe you need to lower your price or if you are, or you could add more than you could charge more. And that just gives you a sense of where you at of where you at, where you're at. There's no there's no hard fast. Okay, this is what you should charge. You got to do the research, all right. The last thing then that I want to talk about is pricing strategy. So there's three different pricing strategies that I'll cover here. There's probably more out there, but I think these are the three main ones, so the first probably seeing strategies with one that you're probably most familiar with that would maybe immediately come to mind. For most people on, that is cheaper, right? You confined what you think the market rate once you've kind of determined what you think. The market rate, which is everything we've talked about in this lesson up to this point, is again figuring out what the market rate is roughly the range. Once you have that, now it's time for strategy, and you can say, OK, I want to go cheaper. That's one strategy, so you offer the same thing um in terms off the the actual and product, you just charge less for it, so that can give you an advantage. Now you've got to be careful because competing on price often becomes a race to the bottom because your competitors will notice that, and now they'll start charging less. And then you start charging and you go back and forth. So you got to be careful of that. But it is a strategy that can work if someone could get the same thing as they came from someone else. But they can get it for cheaper from you That gives them a compelling reason to go with you . 2nd 1 is high end, so it's sort of going the opposite instead of competing on price, you're competing on value on. And so what you're saying is I'm gonna charge actually quite a bit more than the market rate. However, they're going to be very solid reasons why No, I'm offering something Mawr. I'm just a much better quality. You know, there's some sort of of supplying demand things scarcity thing that I that I can rely on something along those lines or you just have a lot better quality of service. And so you're giving a high end service experience, and that's going to allow you to charge more. Um, but again, if you're going to do that, you have to have really solid, really compelling reasons why and you need to be able to prove them. You need to be able to show people that you are legitimately worth more. The last one that is probably my favorite one. And I think probably the easiest one, which is what I call it same, but more and essentially what that it is, is you're gonna charge the same prices. Other people, you're just going to give them more. And this is actually what the way that I operated for most of my freelance career and was very successful for me, and so I would I would charge the same as other membership site builders. I would charge roughly the same price. However, what I would do is not only would they get me to build the site with them and so forth, but also they were gonna get access to my very unique experiencing, Having worked with Inc magazine and Tim Ferriss and Louis House and Michael High and I would help them with the marketing part of of their membership site, and that was something. The reason I like to doing that is because it was something that I could offer that nobody else in the world could offer. And nobody else could tell them the story of Platform University and Michael Hyatt or the Four hour Body and Tim Ferriss or the Business Owners Council on IK magazine. Nobody could do could tell those stories on Lee. I could tell those stories, and they didn't have to pay more for it. And that's ultimately what led to me. Getting a backlog of clients is I had people who were literally willing toe weight toe work with me because they wanted to be able to talk to me about those specific things they wanted to know. What were these people doing? What were they thinking? What were the conversations like with those Pete these really successful membership sites? And then they wanted to take that to use that in their membership site, so that could be a really effective method that will allow you to continue to compete, and it makes it really hard for a competition because you're charging the same price. But you're giving them something your clients something that they can't literally can't get from your competition. So I really like that particular strategy. But whatever strategy you decide to use, they can all work. You just have to understand, uh, how you need to put them together. And so that's that's really it. That's that's pretty much everything that I can give you from 15 years of doing this when it comes to pricing. I know a lot of people just want me to tell them what to charge, but I literally cannot do that. It's something that you have to figure out on your own, and you have to be doing you a disservice anyway, because you're gonna have to continue to sort of figure it out as you go throughout your career, because all this stuff changes and fluctuates and so forth, and I will just go back to the point that I'm have been hammering home this entire course in this lesson research, research, research. That one thing is what's going to give you the advantage. It's the thing people are just simply not willing to do, is watching a video from Tim Ferriss today, and he said, most people, she said, this exact line. Most people should not be entrepreneurs simply because they're not willing to do the pre planning and the pre work on the research that it takes to be successful as one that that's 100% true. That's the biggest thing that I see. The holds people back is our unwillingness to do their necessary research. So do it and you'll have that leg up. You'll have answers to a lot of these questions on you'll know how to move forward. 7. 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.