by Mohammad Anas | 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
- Identify a very specific solution of a very specific problem.
- Validate the market for that specific solution
- Create a SOP( Standard Operating Procedure) of your service.
- 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.
- Inbound
- Outbound
Inbound promotion:-
- 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:-
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
by Mohammad Anas | Oct 22, 2021 | Digital Marketing
Do you want to master the art of Marketing? You must have to know the basics and Fundamentals first. In this article I will try to give you an idea about how you can master the art of Marketing. I will share some of my own life examples that will help you to understand the concepts and help you to apply them as well. If you are a freelancer, student or want to learn digital marketing then this article is only for you.
What is Marketing? The simplest explanation
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.
The ultimate purpose of marketing is to build a brand and capture a position in the minds of the customers. Marketing is a game of perceptions. Product is rooted in reality. Never let marketing become more important then a product. A great product sells itself.
Why Learn & Master Marketing?
If you know how to market and sell, you have a very safe carrier. Marketing is the most valuable investment in a business because it gives direct returns. Everything else like production, manufacturing, HR, accounting is an expense that does not give immediate ROI.
Marketing is based on science, not on creativity. Marketing education has a long shelf life because it is rooted in human psychology and understanding the market.
Marketing is a catalyst of any business. If implemented strategically, then it can increase the growth rate of a business. And if implemented without understanding the customer behaviour, then it can destroy the entire growth of a business.
Fundamentals of Marketing:-
I personally believe that these three are the fundamentals of marketing.
1) Networking: This is a very important part of marketing. I will try to teach it with my own example.
I have a YouTube channel name as Hostography. Recently I made a review video on (Coursevania) This is a coupon & deals website that provides coupons and promo codes trough which you can get Udemy’s premium courses for free.
You can watch the video from here.
Then I shared this video with the owner of the website. Recently they had a problem with their coupon codes. So I offer them that I can make a solution video for them. They agreed and I made a video for them.
They had a telegram channel with over 125k members. So it was a great opportunity to get so many new viewers and subscribers for me. I made a solution video and shared it with them. They shared my video on their telegram channel.
That way, they got a solution video for themselves and I got so many new viewers for my channel.
It was a win win situation for us.
I was able to make this happen because I have a connection with the admin of that website.
That’s why I called Networking a very important part of marketing.
2) Communication skills: Good marketing is all about great communication. Good communication does not mean sophisticated English . Good communication does not care about vocabulary or grammar. ‘Am I able to deliver my thoughts to the customer is the effectively?’ is the question to ask.
Take an example of the above example. I chat with the website owner and deliver my offer effectively, that is why I was able to promote my video. I had only 5000+ subscribers and he had more 25X subscribers then me. But I convinced him and he promoted my video in his telegram channel.
That’s the importance of communication in Marketing.
Tips to improve your communication skills:-
1) Write like you talk. Join a conversation in people’s mind. Try to understand the behaviour and mindset of your target audience first.
2) The more you write, the better you can write (and also speak). Writing slows down your thought process and gives you more clarity. A good writer can become a better communicator because he developers the ability to express his thought in a better way among his listener.
3) Watch conversational English shows. I used to watch Anime with English dubbed.
4) Think in English. This will be helpful for you in long term.
5) Practice as much as you can. Implement whatever you learned.
3) Personal brand: A personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies that they run.
Since marketing is the most important process of a business that’s why it can not be outsourced to a marketing agency. That’s why their must be some people available in the leadership of an organisation that have a strong personal brand.
Because people want to hear from people , not from the brand. so it is more important to build a personal brand. The best known will always beat the best.
Read: How to Build your personal Brand
Let’s have an example of some business tycoons that have a strong personal brand.
1) Elon Musk has a bigger following and reach than SpaceX and Tesla in twitter.
2) Sheryl Sandberg – COO of Facebook, has a strong personal brand.
3) Richard Branson also has a strong personal brand.
Upside: A personal brand can give rise to many brands through his influence. Elon Musk is a perfect example of this. If you know Elon Musk then we don’t need to explain about it.
Downside: A personal brand can not be invested in & can not be sold.
Roadmap for Building a Personal Brand (The MassTrust Blueprint):-
- Learn:- You have to learn new skills through concepts, facts, procedures and experiments. Understand the concepts, remember the facts, practice the procedures and do experiments.
- Work:- Once you learn a new skill, put your new found skills to work. Go from practice to implementation. Implementing your knowledge in the real world will give you better understanding. You can do freelancing for your clients, or make your own projects as well.
- Blog:- Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work . When you write what you have learned, your concepts get clear and you get a deep understanding about the concepts. Along with your blog, start building your personal brand as well.
- Consult:- Now that you have a personal brand through your blog, have work experience and you have learned the fundamentals, start consulting other businesses instead for working for them. You will suggest what a company or organization can do to get better.
- Mentor:- Mentor others who want to become like you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level. Mentoring is completely a new experience. You will get to see how your knowledge and experience will help others.
- Start-up:– Start your own product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, the problems and your skills. That way you reach out to the new level.
Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing
Traditional Marketing :-
Traditional marketing refers to a form of promotion that reaches wide range of audience. Companies use marketing channels such as print, broadcast, telemarketing, TV ads or direct mail to engage their audience and broaden their reach.
Advantages of Traditional Marketing:-
- If a product is generic with a very wide targeting- TV ads can reach millions at low cost. For (example- Mobile phone ads)
- If we talk about India, out of 298 million homes , 197 million homes have TV in their homes. With an average of 3 to 4 members per household, TV has a reach of 800 million to 1 billion people. The reach of digital marketing is nowhere close to TV based on numbers alone. ( Source- Wikipedia)
- If a company is selling low consumer grade products, then Traditional marketing is the best option.
- Traditional marketing is the best way to reach millions of people and build brand awareness.
Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing:-
- Traditional marketing can be used for brand awareness, but we can not track it.
- Lead generation is tough in traditional marketing as compare to digital marketing.
- We can not do deep marketing and natural sales using traditional marketing.
- We can not personalize to communication in traditional marketing.
Digital marketing:-
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel. Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it’s digital marketing.
Advantages of Digital Marketing :-
- Digital Marketing is the best way to reach out your target customers at a very low cost.
- Unlike traditional marketing, we can track our marketing campaigns and generate more leads.
- we can convert more leads into customers by retargeting them via email, facebook ads or google ads.
- We can do personalize communication to our customers using digital marketing.
- We can do deep marketing and generate natural sales.
- There are lots of digital marketing tools available through which an individual can easily operate and do digital marketing.
Disadvantages of Digital Marketing:-
- Without proper guidance, Digital marketing is really difficult skill to learn and implement.
- Since you can target global audience via digital marketing, you also have to compete with lots of digital marketing.
- You have to be very careful about your customers. Your only one mistake or a bad customer review can destroy your entire brand.
- There are a number of legal considerations around collecting and using customer data for digital marketing purposes.
Direct Response Marketing:- Direct response is a type of marketing designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take specific actions. We can combine direct response with both digital and traditional marketing as well.
Examples of DIRECT RESPONSE marketing:
- An ad in a newspaper with a phone number to call
- A late night infomercial with a phone number to call
- A poster ad with a phone number to call
- An Ad lending to the landing page with a lead form
- A sales page with a product and a link to purchase the product
Read How to Start your own digital marketing agency?
The CATT marketing Funnel:-
[wealth = n^CATT]
[n] Niche:- Your success and wealth depends upon the niche that you choose. If you haven’t found it yet, then try to find it as soon as possible.
[c] Content:- Create useful content that attracts people from your niche. you can use Blog posts, youtube videos, lead magnets and live webinars etc to get organic leads.
[A] Attention:– You have to drive your audiences attention using your content, SEO, social media, paid ads & referrals. Always remember, ‘ Attention is the new currency’.
[T] Trust:- Build trust with your existing and new audience by retargeting, free content and marketing automations.
[T] Transactions:- Convert your leads into customers with natural sales method.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Integrated Digital Marketing is basically a combination of all the different Digital Marketing methods. Some of the top methods are:-
- SEO (Search engine Optimization)
- Email Marketing
- Social media marketing
- Content Marketing
- Paid Ads
Framework:
This is the Integrated Digital Marketing framework.
It is divided into three parts:-
- Generate Traffic:- We have to create quality content and generate traffic via SEO, Social Media and Paid ads
- Lead Generation :- In this step we used to get the email id of the traffic and building an email list of our target audience.
- Sales:- Last but not least, We have to retarget our leads via quality content, live webinar special discounts and we have to generate sales.
Conclusion;
All these information are valuable and these are the Law of marketing. You have to follow the fundamentals and do your own experiments as well. Thereafter you will be able to master the art of marketing.
If you like this post, please comment the best part of this post. It motivates me and I get a deep understanding about my content as well.
