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Each of these 3 fields are different, yet they all have crossover.You want to create a done-for-you-service for your clients to elevate above the other freelancers just offering one of these 3.The short answer to this question is “yes, you can do all of them at the same time, but at what cost?”Will you be awesome or just mediocre at allWill you get the best results for your clients doing all 3Will you get the best results for your business doing all 3Will you burn yourself out doing all 3My question to you would be which of the 3 are you best at?Start with that one and then slowly move into the others where it fits and can augment your services that you are great at today.In today's show, I take you through my journey and decision making process to bridge those crossover points to augment and make a more complete service and solution for my clients to get the most from me.

First, walk around town, walk around your city. Find the types of businesses that you want to work with. Take note of their websites.Create a quick 1-2 minute video, using a tool like Loom, showing them exactly what you can do for them. Bonus points if in that video you tell them exactly the steps they need to take themselves. Then send it off to them with a link to the video and a quick note sharing with them what you did.Bonus strategy included with this by way of Justin Jackson in this episode.Second, is a page from a friend of mine, Matt Medeiros. He hosts a podcast highlighting the businesses and business owners of his local market.He has a podcast called We Are Here for the entrepreneurs and business builders of the South Coast of MA.If your local area does not have a podcast, of even if it does, having a podcast and inviting businesses onto it to talk about them, their business, gives immediate wins back to the community and local businesses.These 2 effectively strategies can show that simply by provid

“Hi there, just wanted to reach out and see if you have any questions about the proposal. Don’t hesitate to reply back. Looking forward to working with you.”This is the worst possible thing you can do. It unravels all the hard work you have put in to position yourself as the expert freelancer for their project and business.In today's episode, I'm going to share with you the 3-part email sequence followup I've used for 10+ years and how it keeps your position as the perfect freelancer for the job.

Over the years I’ve learned that what works for someone may not work for me. You’ve heard me say “take it and make it your own” before. The reason I say that is because you have to own whatever it is that I’m sharing with you.I dive into injecting your own personality into the tactics and strategies you hear on this show (or any place for that matter).I also ask you a pretty personal question (about me) that I would really love to hear from you on.

Attracting the large clients is the same as attracting small clients.Know the problem you are solving for them. This is even more the case for attracting larger clients.A much more effective way to land larger clients is to seek them out rather than try and wait for them to come to you.Larger clients are much more difficult to nab, well because they have layers and layers of people in the organization and getting in front of the right person can be much harder.Most of the times with smaller clients, you are working with the founder or owner of the business.Depending on what you do, you’ll need to find the appropriate person to get in front of.You can go to that organization on LinkedIn and find who that person is and see if you have any sort of connection to that person. Ariel Viera leveraged the power of Facebook to get in front of the "right" people with his content just as a bit of marketing, like TV commercials. He didn't ask for a sale, didn't promote, just pushed his content.In this episode I share with

My answer is yes.Sure, you'll get the strange, one-off questions from time to time, but you will be able to engage with someone as if they are walking right into your office.Shy of getting on a phone call or meeting someone in person, live chat gives a lead that availability to ask questions that your website doesn't have answers to.Having that quick chat can mean the difference to landing a gig or not.In this episode, I share with you why I use it and the benefits it's given my business, not just from getting clients.

During that call you are providing your time, experience and expertise to answer questions and/or scope out work.That is time that’s requested by your client of you to be a part of a meeting that they feel is necessary. It could be about your project directly, it could be about a future project, or totally unrelated to anything that you are working on with them in the first place, but they want to pick your brain.As a freelancer you should look at  meetings just like you look at any other billable time. In fact, you should look at meetings as even more valuable because you are getting the opportunity to learn more about pains of your client, learn more about their business, and take notes on those things to become even more of an asset to them.

In order to be successful and build a sustainable freelance business where you can stay out of the famine part of the feast and famine cycle, you need to be able to push through those slow periods and not lose your shirt.An email list is your best asset here.To minimize the work right now, go into your inbox and/or wherever you keep your communication with leads and build a spreadsheet with 3 columns. First Name, Last Name, Email AddressNow after that, do the same with your past clients by just going into your billing system and pulling out all that information.You should essentially have one list with 2 segments Leads and Past Clients.Send an email to each person on that list asking them a simple email. “I’m writing today just to ask you one simple question. Would you like to be included on my email list to receive information about X so that you can Y? Also to stay up-to-date with my services and be first to know about any new availability and offers I may have? If you want in, just reply with ‘yes’ and I’l

But in this episode, I'm going to share how you can do the same.In order to do that though, it will time, but something that can be done once and continue to be a profitable means of getting clients.

In this episode I'll share with you the gear, software and host and give you my 2¢ on each of them and why I chose them.For my mic - Rode PodcasterFor recording - Audacity and ZencastrFor hosting - Transistor.fmThe mic, Zencastr, and Transistor do come with a price. Albeit not too much, but I just wanted to mention that you will need with the gear I talk about, some level of initial investment. As you'll hear in the show, I've got a ton of value and return on that investment that I'm not about to turn back now.

Don't get me wrong here, you don't have to have them, but I think if you are looking to be as successful as you can be as a freelancer, these 6 traits are what you should be aware of.PatienceDeterminationDisciplineCuriosityKnow your strengths/weaknesses and be able to adjustTake imperfection actionI dive a little deeper into each of these with examples and experiences in this episode. 

By “you” focus, I mean that you want to make your emails about the other person, not about you, your business.Kai Davis wrote an amazing piece around this on and I’ll link that in the show notes. He shows you exactly how to write a You Focused email.Here is the simple 4-step process I dive into for cold emailing for freelancersCompliment themSpend time researching for a quick win to provide themProvide them a resource to find out more about that quick winShare with them the benefit of your serviceBy going into cold emailing with the intention of educating and serving the recipient first, you’ll be way more successful in the end.

These 4 things for me are critical to the success of the project.In order to land higher priced projects, clients need to understand and be willing to pay those prices. Remember price is subjective, you want it as high as possible. Whereas the client wants it as low as possible.To make the pricing conversation steer clear of other suitors, you and the client have to be a fit for each other. Premium freelance clients will have thought about their project and what it means for their business for more than 30 minutes after having a conversation with a friend at a BBQ.Premium freelance clients will also understand the value someone  brings to them because they’ve thought about an ROI to the project that’s acceptable to them. They realize that by putting $X they hope to get $Y back.In this episode I'll explain how you can do this effectively so you’ll diminish or remove altogether, the gap between your high price and their low price.

This question came by way of Scott inside of Feast - the membership community for freelancers looking to specialize their business and build recurring revenue inside their freelance business.I asked him why he was asking me this question. He simply said that since I do perform services work, run the program, produce all sorts of free content, and then still have time to be with the family, how’s that possible?So I had to think about it and to be quite honest, it’s just a matter of making things a priority.I share with you my process and how I get things done I want to get done.

There are 3 points I want to make here to help you on the path to shifting your business into recurring revenue.You must nail down your offer and solutionKnow exactly who you are talking to and talk in their own languageYou have to stick to your gunsIn Episode 6 - What’s the best way to pivot if you are serving a new niche? I shared with you a bunch of tactics that would apply to this question to, so definitely go have a listen to that as well.

Your skills are advancing and you want to be able to grow the revenue accordingly. What will happen though is that your growth of revenue will start to plateau and hit a ceiling.If you haven’t already, you need to niche down or specialize your business. Start to figure out what problems you are solving for your clients over and over again.Start figuring out which clients of yours that you work with the best.Start figuring out an industry or even technology that you are working with to deliver the solution.By doing this, you can start to build and increase your profitability.You’ll start to deliver the solution quicker and more effectively. You’ll start to be able to anchor your price to the value of the return the client gets, not to the time you are actually billable. Your client sees a price that is a no brainer for them to spend when the ROI on that investment is proven time and time again.

My suggestion was for her to take a look at their website, check out their forums for both opportunities where their customers were struggling with the plugin, but mainly for websites where her services as a translator would help.Another thing I suggested to her was to reach out to the makers of the plugin and see if you can get onto the radar of their support team as a translator.Look around online using a tool like builtwith.com and search for sites using WPML, and build up an outreach list of sites that have poor translations.She emailed back to me last week and told me that she’s landed 8 gigs and 3 of them are recurring. She’s now looking to move up a bit and become an exclusive freelance translator for 5 clients on a monthly basis. You go get ‘em Mia.If you are looking to start out or break through a particular industry, look within that space and see what the top vendors are and make friends.Even if the opportunity to make friends isn’t there, no doubt you can find other businesses using those top vend

Though on the business side is where you differentiate yourself.Your organization skills, follow-up, how you document aspects of the project, how you deliver on whatever it is that you are doing, and the customer experience.All these things matter in creating a buzz around how you do what you do and create a word of mouth to other folks around what you do.The best suggestion I can offer here is to get yourself into a great community of other freelancers. Go to events and network with other business folks.Online communities are a plenty for sure. But there are a handful that are outstanding for freelancers to learn to hone their craft. WP Elevation is amazing if you work with WordPress.CMA, or the Content Marketing Academy is great if you are a writer.If you are looking to remain a solo freelancer, Feast, which is our online community, will help you niche down and build recurring revenue.Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing only happens when you don’t learn from your stumbles.But that’s what I’m hear to try and he

The caveat here is that what works for me, may not work for you. Every business is different. How you work is different than how I work. But I’ll try and explain why I enjoy using each of these tools.My mindset is that the tool should get out of the way of my every day. If I have to remember to use it, or it’s something where I have to turn my business around to use, it’s not for me.The 5 tools that I use every day in my business that keeps me sane, keeps my clients happy, and serves my business. Sure I have a bunch of others, but these are the ones that get out of the way of me doing business and have solved so many hurdles and manual processes for me. 

At the end of episode 63, I no doubt left you thinking 2 questions which I’ll hope to shed some light on for you.Why did you talk yourself out of $12,500.I looked at an opportunity to make more than that. It comes down to simple math really.If I spend 10 hours working on solving a problem for a client and make $2500 on that, my effective hourly rate is $250 per hour. It lowers my risk to work with this client, and the opportunity of them being happy much faster is much greater.On the other hand, if I spend 6 weeks and roughly about 30 hours a week doing a complete redesign of their website, my effective hourly rate is $83.The risk is high on both sides from both a cost and time perspective. The risk is also higher because we don’t fully understand if the redesign will result in the goal the client has.What if I don’t do ecommerce, how can I quantify the value for the client?In content marketing, design, writing, social media and many other types of projects, it’s often hard to quantify the ROI a client will h