Every single week, someone asks me “how did you get started as a freelancer. More to the point, the question is really, “How can I get started a s a freelancer.” So what I’m going to do is demonstrate what I do to make a kickass living, and grow a business, mostly for a twitter friend of mine.
Getting started as a freelancer is sales focused first. You have to sell yourself, build up your personal brand, in order to be where you want to be. You have to have a real simple widget to sell and deliver…all while not over-analyzing or over thinking things. I’ve talked about the “daily number” before, which is to say the number that you gotta make to stay in business each day. You gotta know that number COLD.
Then, specifically, you need to have something to sell. Offer insane value for what you’re selling. Make it a product that doesn’t have flexibility, and make it cheaper than anyone else’s. (Think: Blue Ocean Strategy). Don’t overthink the deails of your product–I’m going to give you an EASY one now. Keep all the points of friction to a minimum.
Make it something that you can grind out quickly–in a day or two. Don’t take big long projects. Make it prepaid, always. Pass on clients that want freebies–find more by using Twitter, your blog, the phone book.
What I’m offering, How I’ll make $7,000 next week.
Brian Clark and Chris Pearson created and marketed a WordPress theme called Thesis. It powers my blog. It powers my e-book sales site. I was charging clients $1500-2,000 for setting up and going with a thesis blog. I don’t need to charge that much anymore, I can do it in my sleep, and I can make the training outsourced.
#1: I will sell the Thesis Theme blogs.
I have used the Thesis theme in about 60% of the blogs I’ve delivered. I’m going to do so in 100% for the moment. One of the things that I’ve built is a bunch of thesis designs. I can reuse those pretty much at will now.
#2: I will make it cheap. I was charging people up to $2,000 for WordPress blogs one on one training and thesis blogs. That’s too much, even though they felt like they got vlaue. It’s too much because when someone pays you $2,000 they think they own you. And to a point, they do. We need to make it way cheaper. $750 for the basic blog, $250 more for a year’s hosting on my hostgator server. That’s it.
#3: I will add value. I have a good list of things I do with every blog. I have a lot of things that I do and so I can make this work by making screenflow screencasts. I can do 3-4 screencasts a day this week and have ‘em organized properly to teach people what to do. (Camtasia has a 30 day trial, screencast-o-matic works, so does snapz and screenflow)
#4: I will deliver fast. I have 3 capable designers that have done Thesis blogs with roughly equivalent quality. I’ll be able to do this in 48 hours, 100% of the time, with instructions to get into the training site immediately with videos delivered. (use google docs to orcistrate all that you want to do)
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Fast wins. So here’s what I’ll be able to do: $750 per blog…I’ll pay out $40 to the Thesis designers (they have an affiliate program). I’ll pay roughly $150 for design (probably average lower). That’s $560 left for me. Lose $25 for merch. services, and I’m making $535, and I can do this 3x a day and more. This creates immense value for people.
…and it gets clients in the door and used to paying me. A secret I’ve learned is that in my practice, I can count on all of my clients paying me about $375 in profit per quarter, if I maintain them properly. So if I get 20 clients in 2 weeks…ah, that’s another $30,000 a year in revenue.
It’s a modest way to begin, but it works for me, and it works for others. I’ll show it off next week…and you’ll have a blast.
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