Key Takeaways for you
| – Don’t start freelancing immediately, wait till you have enough financial cushion – Freelancing is working as an independent self-employed individual who is not committed to one employer – Positioning yourself while freelancing is extremely critical to stand out – When you start always productizing your service to help a people with a specific solution to a particular problem – Inbound and Outbound are two ways to promote yourself – There are two ways to cost your services which are cost-based and value-based |
Do you want to do what you love? Do you want to follow your passion, your true calling to start something on your own?
Let me offer you some unsolicited advice if you said yes to the above questions.
I say DON’T!!
Don’t follow your passion unless:
- You are having a huge bank balance or you have a partner or family earning enough without you adding to the income.
- You don’t have people depending on you to run the family,
- You are ready to fail and fall.
- You are ready to invest the time – at least a year.
Let’s face it. You will not have a steady income at least in the beginning, and money will not flow in as you wish it would.
What you earn would barely meet your own expenses, let alone spare some for anyone else. So, unless you have somebody who is okay with providing for you and the rest of your family, don’t jump into freelancing.
If you are by any chance, chasing after the so-called “overnight success”, forget it! It’s not happening.
You will not get all the clients you reach out to, you will be rejected repeatedly. And you are inevitably going to burn your fingers and your whole self if you are not careful enough! Heck, you cannot be too careful!
It is going to take a lot of planning, learning, making mistakes, and adapting before you go steady with a regular client base and steady income which you can possibly call success.
Why listen to me in the first place?
I must be the umpteenth person giving out free unsolicited advice on the internet. Everyone is preaching. So it is natural that you question me for who I am and why you should even be listening to me.
Let me share my journey in freelancing.
I have been in the blogging and digital marketing space for 12 years now. I started way back in 2009 when I was just 19 years old.
Actually, my journey started in Bangalore when I was 17.
One of my college friends told me about how he was trying to make some money on the internet. Being a broke college student, this was an easy decision to make. So, I set off on a journey to tame the internet.
I did not even have a computer or an internet connection, but that didn’t stop me. I spent almost all of whatever little pocket money I used to get on internet cafes, and the rest was for my food.
I still remember how I turned off the ignition of my Kinetic Honda when I was going downhill just to save some money to spend more time at the internet cafes.
After 2 years of frequenting internet cafes every day, I came across the term SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and learned and understood more about it.
I noticed that there were a lot of projects paying top dollar on freelancing platforms looking for SEO services. Driven by stupid courage, I started bidding on these projects. Obviously, I did not win a single project and quickly realized I was doing it all wrong.
That’s when I had an idea:
What if I post a project looking for SEO services to see what kind of proposals these professionals are sending and imitate them?
And that’s exactly what I did.
As soon as I posted the project, I started receiving proposals from many top-notch freelancers and agencies. I went through all the proposals, took the best parts from each of them, and made a fantastic proposal of my own.
Once I was confident that I had a great proposal, I then went and looked for some SEO projects and started bidding on them.
Believe it or not, I won the first project that I bid on!
Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing, what I had promised, and how to deliver what I had promised. But I slogged it out and delivered the project successfully and made my first ever $400 on the internet!
Boom! I was ecstatic!
When I look back at this moment, I now realize that I wasn’t happy because I made money.
I was happy because I had achieved something – on my own.
I wanted to prove a point to myself that I can do whatever I put my mind to and that $400 was proof of that.
After two whole years of continuously failing, I finally succeeded.
Realizing the potential for growth in this industry, I set up an agency that was operational in Bangalore and Singapore. I ran this for about 4 years before better sense prevailed.
I quickly realized not only do I have a lot to learn about SEO, but also about running a business.
So, I started hunting for startups to work for and chanced upon a startup called Thrillophilia. This is where I truly experienced the power of SEO and blogging at scale.
When I joined, they were getting about 500K visitors to their blog, and by the time I left the company, we were hitting 1.5 million visitors per month!
It was a spectacle to watch.
But I was not convinced.
I wanted to be sure whether what I learned and experienced in Thrillophilia is repeatable because if it was not, it would mean I just got lucky.
That’s when I joined Explara, an event ticketing and registration platform.
Here, I set up a blog from scratch and took it to 1,00,000 visitors in just six months!
In fact, we managed to get one of the blogs so viral that it got us over 500,000 visitors in less than a week and almost crashed our servers! (My COO was extremely pissed off with me).
That’s when I knew I had a repeatable process and had managed to understand both the art and science of blogging.
Eventually, in 2017, I got back into entrepreneurship, and I co-founded PixelTrack Digital, a digital marketing training and services company.
Since then, I have helped companies from across the board like Mercedes Benz India, Nikon Lenswear, Yourstory, Scripbox, HDFC, and many more companies to harness the power of blogging and content.
I am also lucky to be a part of the Digital Master’s Alliance, a group of 9 digital marketers from around the country. Together, we conduct the Digital Masters Conference, where we speak and share our knowledge with business owners and help them go digital.
We do this in collaboration with SuccessGyan, a revolutionary training company that has worked with speakers like Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, Jack Canfield, and many more.
Now that you know a little about my journey, I hope you will be more open to hearing me out!
What is Freelancing, and why does one choose it?
Freelancing is working as an independent self-employed individual who is not committed to one employer. You cannot exactly say they work for themselves because they would be working for their clients. But it gives them flexibility and control over the work they do.
There is a risk, there is uncertainty, and there is fear. Yet a lot of people are choosing the freelancing line. But why?
Freedom
What, according to you, is freedom?
If freedom according to you means you want to choose what you want to do, however, you want to do it, and whenever you want to do it. Can you do it as a freelancer? I would say yes and no.
If the above sentence means you will go on a vacation as you like, and work as you like without being answerable to anyone, without any responsibility or any accountability, it is NOT freedom. It is not going to bring you any satisfaction, or any sense of achievement.
You may not have a boss per se. But you are going to have clients with whom you would have entered into a contract whom you would be answerable. You may choose what you want to work on, but you constantly need to keep getting work. You cannot always be lucky when you have bills to pay.
The world is changing; FAST!!
The internet has changed the face of the global market. Gone are the days when people were stuck to one job or employment with at least 35 years of service with their employers.
You can now work for more than one person, and the employer will have no way or reason to restrict you from doing so, except maybe fire you if you do not deliver on time.
The loyalty to one company is slowly eroding away.
It is not just about focusing on how I can improve myself for my dream job anymore. The best opportunities are available more than ever before to create that dream for yourself.
No cost to get started
Many freelancing jobs barely incur any costs or investment to get started and are remote. All you need is a laptop and a good internet connection and the skill to trade.
A great first step into entrepreneurship
A freelancing career paves the way to entrepreneurship or what is now turning into solopreneurship. People are more converging towards doing things on their own, and having businesses of their own.
How to position yourself?
Positioning means how you are perceived by your market. 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Reis talks about category leadership. You need to pick one category you want to work on and become the best in that field so that, you define that category. Whenever the category is mentioned, your name will be associated with it.
If I talk about the best brand of shoes, what are the odds of you thinking of Nike?
Here are a few tips for positioning yourself in the market:
Don’t try to please everybody
You can’t! When you try to please everybody, you will please nobody, and you will be miserable.
Niche down
Pick a highly specialized skill within a larger skill. Choose an industry and provide services to only that particular industry. Be the best in that one category.
Competition is not always a bad thing
For one, it validates your market, and two, you can replicate an existing business in your own way by making it more efficient and cost-effective.
Don’t try to be someone who is just exchanging time for money
You need to focus on providing valuable deliverables. If you are more result-oriented and less money-oriented, money will flow inadvertently.
Learn to say NO
You do not have to do everything that your clients ask for. Be decisive and assertive about what you are going to do so you have a comparative advantage over other things you might do. It is when you are able to do one thing most efficiently as opposed to other activities you may do that have an economic advantage to you.
Productizing your service
What do you mean by productizing your service?
A service designed with a specific scope, purpose, and price that intends to give a specific deliverable. You focus on the deliverable rather than the result itself.
Usually, the price is a no-brainer and is designed to get the customer’s foot in the door.
If I have to explain it to you with a relatable example, think of a beauty salon. What is the specific service they are delivering? Haircuts. That is what a customer would normally go for.
But once you get that done, you find yourself invited for further services like eyebrow shaping, facials, hair coloring, waxing, and so on.
And all you go in for is for a hair cut which is what getting the customer’s foot-in-the-door means.
Why you should be productizing
- It gives you the ability to invest in customer acquisition. Suppose you sell the product for Rs.100, you have Rs.100 to spend on acquiring more customers.
- Scalability. With a small input, you can achieve greater outputs.
- Easy to create a process and delegate. You have the specifics in mind and can work on creating a process to simplify your work.
- Predictable, reliable, and recurring income – are the holy trinity of revenue generation for marketers. It would be that one product that is your regular source of generating income.
- Easier to build trust and then convert it into a retainer. By doing that one product right, you can earn the trust of your customer and then offer them more services to retain them.
How to productize your service?
- Identify a very specific solution to a very specific problem. You also need to see if there is a demand and how much demand there is.
- Validate the market for the specific solution.
- Create a standard operating procedure for the service. Document everything from the start to the end of the process.
- Set terms for delivery. Make sure you talk terms for how, when, and what for the deliverables so that there are no loopholes in the end. The communication needs to be complete.
How to promote your services?
There are two broad categories for promoting your services.
- Inbound
- Outbound
Inbound promotion
It is when the customers come to you or you make them come to you through different ways like:
- Run ads to the productized service -> Upsell a retainer
- Lead magnet -> Email sequence -> Free consultation -> Close a retainer
- Free webinar -> Free consultation -> Close a retainer
- Content on social media -> Free consultation -> Close a retainer
- Fiverr/Upwork/other platforms -> Free consultation -> Upsell a retainer
Outbound promotion
It is when you go out and approach customers to sell.
- Cold calling
- Cold emailing
- DMs on social media
Remember it is a game of numbers. If you reach out to 100 people, 10 might respond and barely 2 may become your customers. But it is important that you persevere and persist until you get steady customers.
Once you build that trust, it is going to build further through word of mouth!
How to price your services?
There are two models available – Cost-based and value-based.
Cost-based is the normal approach you take as you begin. You look at the market and the general rates out there and fix an average rate. But the only catch here is, how do you know the competitors are charging, right?
You know, I once copied from a classmate in a maths exam. Both of us failed. How would I know if he had written the right answers? The same would apply when you try to mimic others in the market.
Value-based is when you define your own value and fix the price accordingly and stick to it no matter what others are doing in the market. This would come with time and experience in the field.
Either way, you learn to price your services by experimenting with the numbers. The most definite way to increase your revenue is by increasing the price.
5 mistakes I made when I started Freelancing
- Worrying too much about compliance. Getting a GST invoice in your name, registering your company, and making your business card are all essential though your initial concerns should be on how you are going to get your next client.
- Getting an office. Do you want to pay rent before you have your first cheque on the table? No, you don’t. Try to work without an office. Minimize your expenses at least until you start getting fat cheques.
- Hiring employees. Do you need them? Can you afford them? Don’t get them until you do and you can.
- Too much focus on the output. This may sound repetitive. But I cannot stress it enough. Be more result-oriented and not money-minded.
- No process. Don’t start anything without a process. Have a clear-cut process from the moment you get a client until he pays, and let it all be recorded, documented, saved, and backed up!
Conclusion
Amidst the whole uproar of the Great Resignation on a global scale, I would like to think of it as the uprising of the freelancers/solopreneurs in disguise. Freelancers can sell like hotcakes or like anything they choose to for that matter.
Let my last thoughts in this article be lasting thoughts for you as I give away the most important ingredient of freelancing. That is TIME!
I may have given you some tips and lessons from my learning experience as a freelancer through my journey of 12 years. But you cannot circumpass the learning curve however you see it. As I already said, there is no “overnight success.” It may happen overnight after years of tough grind.
Are you ready to face the journey to be a freelancer?
Let me know in the comments.
