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How to Start your Freelancing Journey today

by | Nov 30, 2021 | Digital Marketing

Do you want to become a Subject matter expert on a special skill? Do you want to start your carrier as a Freelancer? Then you’ve come to the right place. In this blogpost, we are going to share you the step by step process on How to Start your Freelancing Journey today.

In this Article, you will going to learn about:-

  • How to position yourself so that you are perceived as an authoritative and credible freelancer.
  • Why productising your service is critical in getting high-value clients.
  • How to promote yourself and get your first client.
  • The most important ingredient of freelancing that most people completely ignore.
  • Why your pricing strategy sucks plus the easiest way to increase your revenue.

Keep Reading.

Freelancing for beginners

 

Before we dig deeper into the concepts of freelancing, the tips tricks and strategies and frameworks, I want to ask a very simple and basic question to you. The question is

Why Freelancing?

This is the most important question to ask before starting out. Are you a fresher in the industry who sees freelancing as a carrier? or Are you a person who is fired from his job?

The reason why people choose freelancing as a carrier.

  • Freedom: As a freelancer you get freedom in your professional life as well as in your personal life. You get the freedom of discipline and Freedom of choice. You are the real owner of your life. If you are a subject matter expert then you can set the price of the value that you are providing by yourself. You don’t need to work under a boss or an organization. But the clients will work and consult with you. This is a Freedom of Ownership.
  • The world is Changing Fast ( So the Jobs are ) :- We are living in the information age not the industrial age. The jobs structure are changing along with time. Companies want entrepreneurs in the place of employees. College degrees are not as important to get your dream job. You don’t need to pay Thousands of dollars to learn a specific skill.
  • Low Investment: You don’t even need a lot of money to get started as a freelancer.
  • Freelancing is a great first step towards Entrepreneurship. You can actually start as a solopreneur and later scale your services as a business and become an entrepreneur.

How to Position Yourself?

If you fail to position yourself, your competitors gonna grab all your profits. And despite having lots of skillsets, you will have a lot of trouble to find high paying clients. Positioning is the first important step of your freelancing journey. You have to position yourself as a subject matter expert of your niche or industry. Here’s how to do it

  • Pick a Highly specialized skill within a larger skill( eg: Local SEO, Keyword research, Copywriting, Outreach services, technical SEO etc)
  • Choose a specific industry and provide your services to only that industry. Do not try to please everybody.
  • You can also merge both if you want your niche down further or if the space is too competitive.
  • Don’t try to be someone who is just exchanging time for money.
  • Remember that competition is not always the bad thing. Too much competition is bad.
  • Always learn to say no

If you follow all the above steps, then you will create a strong positioning in your niche.

Productising your services

Now what do I mean by productising your services? & What is productising?

A service designed with a specific Purpose, scope and price that is intended to give a specific deliverable is known as productising.

“Productize” refers to the process of developing or altering a process, idea, skill, or service to make it marketable for sale to the public. Productization involves taking a skill or service that has been used internally and developing into a standard, fully-tested, packaged, and marketed product. (Source : Investopedia)

Productising will help you to shift your focus on the deliverables rather then the result itself.

You are helping your client to reach from point “A” to Point “B”. Point A is the current position of your client and point B is the desired position of your client. Once you productise your services, then you will be able to provide them the right services at the right cost.

Productising your service will make your price a no-brainer and it is designed to get the customer’s foot in the door.

Why should you productising your services?

As we mentioned earlier that productising will help you to create a no-brainer offer for your client. But there are few more advantages of productising your services.

  • It gives you the ability to invest in customer acquisitions.
  • It will help you to create a process and outsource it easily.
  • You will be able to scale your services faster.
  • It will help you to gain a predictable, reliable and recurring income.
  • It will help you to build trust and gain retaining clients.

How to productise a Service?

There are few steps that you have to follow while productising your services

  1. Identify a very specific solution of a very specific problem.
  2. Validate the market for that specific solution
  3. Create a SOP( Standard Operating Procedure) of your service.
  4. Set terms of delivery of your service.

Once the productising of your services complete, then comes the promotion of your service.

How to promote your service?

There are two ways of promoting your freelancing services.

  1. Inbound
  2. Outbound

Inbound promotion:-

  1. Run ads of your productised service> Get customers

This is the most simple methods that most of the freelancers or SME(Subject Matter Experts ) apply to get clients. They simple create a portfolio website for themself and run lots of ads to get more clients. But this method is not so effective for newbies. If you are a beginner in freelancing then I don’t suggest you to follow this method.

    2. Lead magnets> Email sequence > Free Consulting > Close the deal

This is a very popular method for freelancers to get new and high paying customers. If you have your own portfolio website, then you can follow this method very easily and get hundreds of high paying clients without even spending a single penny to ads.

What you have to do is, you can create your freelance portfolio website using WordPress. Then you can write a few article or blogposts about the services that you are gonna offer to your clients.

As a pro tip, mention that how your services can help your clients to reach from point A to point B.

You can share those articles on social media, LinkedIn, Quora, reddit or where ever you can.

If a person will get interested about the services that you are offering, then he will try to contact you via the contact form on your portfolio website. Then you can send them more specific information about how your services will help that particular client.

     3. Free webinar> Free consultation > Close the deal

This is the best method for a beginner freelancer to get high paying clients. If you have confidence to present your idea in a webinar, then you can apply this method for high paying clients. What you actually have to do is, you have to organize a webinar to your leads, then you have to present your services in the presentation in front of your leads. You can tell them individually about how your services will help them to get the desired result in the live presentation.

This method will help you to build trust with your other leads as well. You can share the webinar reply to your clients as well.

Outbound Promotion:-

  1. Cold calling/Emailing: You can generate leads from business listing sites, google or other sources. Then you can simply call or email them and ask them if they want their service or not. Try to get a time for a detailed meeting where you can explain them how your services can help them to reach their desired goals as soon as possible.
  2. DM on social media: You can directly message your target clients on social media. And you can explain them how your services can help them to compete with their competition.

Remember, it is a game of number. The more leads you generate, the more clients you will get, even if the conversion ration is minimum.

Last but not least, we have to set the price of our service.

How to set price of your service?

Most of the freelancing works are skilled based work. You will not get paid for the time you spend on a particular work. Instead, you will get paid for the service and the quality of the service you provide. There are many many ways available through which you can charge from your clients. You can choose the way which is best for you.

  1. Percentage Based pricing: Imagine you are a digital marketer who is running Facebook ads for his client. Instead of charging a specific amount from your clients, you can charge 10 to 20 percent of the total ad spend from your client. 
  2. Monthly retainer: Imagine you are a digital marketer and you are doing email marketing for your clients. You can charge a fixed recurring income from your clients on the monthly basis. 
  3. One time payment: Imagine you are a WordPress developer, who creates websites for the clients. You can ask them a specific amount for the service you provide. 

If you still have confusion about what price you should charge for your services, just analyze you competitor and set a price accordingly. 

The most important Ingredient of Freelancing……

After reading this blog, can you tell me what is the most important ingredient of Freelancing. And you should always focus on this ingredient every time you go for a deal. This ingredient is…

Positioning. If you want to become successful in your freelancing journey, then you must have to know how to position yourself. 

Never position yourself as a Freelancer. Always position yourself as a subject matter expert. 

Implement all the strategies and frameworks, and you will thank me later.

Cheers,

HostoGraphy