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Why You Should Start Freelancing If You Want To Start Making Money Online
Freelancing, aka contracting, self employment, or whatever you want to call it has allowed me to work from home on my laptop for very few hours a week. I started out on Upwork.com and now moved to finding clients directly.
My first contract was for a 5,000 word ebook and I was paid 1 penny for it. 8 months later, I am consistently getting $500+ contracts with clients from all over the web that involve very small amounts of work and effort.
I don't know if I would have even found out about Upwork.com if it wasn't for @SinisterLex's thread that you can read here. He showed me this was possible when I started in November 2015, just 8 months ago, but feels like it was only yesterday. And then @Fox talked to me and showed me how to get to the next level with higher end clients. Shoutout to both of these fantastic members.
First off, if you're looking to get into copywriting for clients as I have, I highly recommend you read Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman. It really moved me forward with my skills. Theres a million other books and online blogs/articles you can read for copywriting success too, but the main thing is you have to just start and take action. And I'm going to tell you how I did it.
5,000 words for 1 penny.
Upwork.com was vital for my success when I started in November. I didn't know how or where to find clients, that platform solves this problem by connecting clients with freelancers for all kinds of projects ranging from copywriting, web design, illustrations, software, virtual assistance, and more.
Your success on Upwork relies heavily on your previous reviews from past clients. When you're first starting out you will need to prove yourself with small priced projects in the $10-$50 range. You can search for projects that are higher priced than this, but it's going to take a killer proposal letter and portfolio to convince a client to take that risk as your first Upwork client.
I struggled heavily finding my first client. I knew that if I wanted to shoot for the $100+ contracts, I would need to get a review under my belt. So I searched to do a project for only 1 cent, that's the minimum amount you can go on Upwork. It worked - I got the contract, I did the work, and I got a 5 star rating with a greatly worded review by the client.
I like to think of getting clients, building your skills, and increasing your prices as pushing a car. At first, it takes a lot of effort and work to increase the momentum of the car to start moving, but once it starts moving and gaining momentum, it takes nearly no effort to keep the car moving forward.
My contracts went from 1 penny, to $5, to $20, to $50, to $100, to $200, to $500, and so on. With each contract came a great review. That is how it is for you, if you're willing to put in the effort and not give up, you will eventually create a full-time income from working on your laptop.
How To Convince Clients To Pay You
I've learned 2 things that clients care about. And if you can hit those 2 things that clients care about, that will guarantee you land contracts. That's it, just 2 simple things. Once you sell those 2 ideas to the client, they will pay you.
1. "How much money can this freelancer make me?"
2. "How much time can this freelancer save me?"
"How much money can this freelancer make me?"
Clients care more than anything about how much money you can make them. You're an investment, not a cost. The client needs to believe that you can make more for them than the price it costs them to work with you, in time and in money.
Here's an example for copywriting. If a client pays you $900 to make a sales funnel for them, they want to know that they're going to get a return on there money of well over $900.
You convince them that you can do this in two ways. Show them your previous success with clients that you have worked with in the past, show them the work you completed and how much money it made the client and/or the conversion rate that the copywriting accomplished.
The second option is to do a complete money back guarantee, plus pay them for the time they wasted if things go south. You promise a complete money back guarantee to the client of the full price they paid of the contract, PLUS an extra $xx - $xxx amount of dollars for wasting their time. Always do more work than you’re paid to do. Offering such a guarantee shows the client that you care more that they’re happy with the work than you care about getting paid. This type of confidence in your work and willingness to provide value and comfort to the client is priceless. Something I also offer as a sidenote to the refund is a guarantee that I will work with them until the copy starts working. Either by x amount of sales or x conversion rate.
Also, always offer to write/do a sample for them. Always.
“How much time can this freelancer save me?”
The second most important thing, if not the first, that a client cares about is how much time you can save them. A lot of your clients are very busy. And when they have a successful business, they value their time a lot more than they value their money. They’re choosing you to save them more time because they either a) don’t want to do the work they’re giving you b) don’t have the time to do the work they’re giving you.
This is especially true when it comes to social media accounts and consulting, something I have started to find clients for as well as copywriting. Clients want to do what they see is most important in their business, social media, copywriting, programming, web design, and a host of other stuff are things clients do not consider the most important thing in their business. So they hand the task off to somebody else. And if you can prove you’ll do fantastic work and you’re trustable, they’ll pay you some good money to handle it for them. There’s only 24 hours in a day, they can’t do everything themselves.
What if I don’t want to do freelancing forever?
That’s fine because I don’t plan on doing it forever either. It’s nothing more than a stepping stone for the next move in my entrepreneur journey. The point of freelancing should be to learn new skills and have people pay you to learn them. The goal is to have freelancing fund your real ventures and business. Not only will you eventually make more than most regular jobs could pay you, you’ll also learn new skills that will be directly applied to the business you plan on launching or already run, as well as free up your time so you can work on your real business. I hardly work that many hours anymore, I get paid by clients more than I would any normal job for less effort and time that it would cost me at a normal job. I’m free. I don’t have a boss. I don’t have an alarm clock (but I still wake up at 5am), I’m location independent, and I’m learning new skills.
Some of the clients you work with may even become your mentor(s).
How do you get the higher end contracts?
Short answer: Find the higher end clients.
Long answer: You can’t get a $500 copywriting contract from a person/business that is penny pinching. After you work on building your skills and portfolio with the smaller end clients, you can move up to the higher end clients with a proven history and you will likely be pretty well skilled.
Eventually you will get to the point where you’re going to avoid clients that try negotiating you over $20. There are 2 reasons for that.
1) You confident in your skills and know what your time/effort is worth. You have the skills, the knowledge, and the experience to really help your clients. You've worked with clients that don't blink an eye at over $1000 contracts, and you know you can get one of those clients in 2-3 days of prospecting. You're not going to waste time with someone haggling over a small amount of money.
2) You know that clients that have a low budget are not the kind of clients you want to work with. They will give you quite the hassle and are often unprofessional compared to the higher end clients. Because they’re low on money, they find it harder to break apart from their hard earned money and thus are overthinking if your work is worth the money. They will usually want to see a ton of samples, and portfolio, and other things because they can’t really make up their mind. More work and revisions are usually involved for a low sum of money, and it’s not worth it if you’re no longer a beginner/intermediate.
I avoid those clients now. On Upwork you can see how much clients have spent in the past. So I send proposals to clients that have already spent a couple thousand of dollars on freelancers. These clients are usually a joy to work with, they know what they want, they know how to give clear guidelines, and know what good and bad work looks like. I work with clients that don’t blink an eye at spending $1000. That’s the kind you want to work towards too, once your skills have grown and you’ve shown success in the past.
I don’t see my work as a commodity. I don’t charge hourly, or a fixed amount for a certain amount of words. I charge based on how much value I know I can provide to the client. If a client wants to price my work as a commodity, they can find another freelancer, no harm done on either side.
Some tips:
Always call the client after closing the deal on Upwork. Ask for their phone number or Skype and talk to them about what they can expect in the next couple of days from you, and this is also your time to ask them to go over everything so there is no cloudiness in what’s expected. Miscommunication between you and your client is the number 1 cause of problems I think. Don’t let that happen, make everything as clear as water over a phone call. (Some clients don’t always want a phone call though, especially on smaller projects.)
Don’t stay on Upwork forever, the new increase in fees (20%) is very ignorant for everyone involved to put it nicely. You don’t want a middle man taking 20% out of your income every time you get paid (that’s why you want to do this instead of working a job right? Haha). Also - work on Upwork is looked at as a commodity, especially in the programming/web design side. Get to a point where you have the networking and sales skills to find clients outside of Upwork or any 3rd party freelancing platform. Fiverr included. You will be able to charge what you’re time and effort is really worth.
Clients appreciate fast communication/replies and fast turnaround time. Too many freelancers put clients and projects on hold for other things as well as miss deadlines that were promised. Don’t be this kind of freelancer.
Always provide more value than you’re paid to do. That includes taking the time for a great proposal even it takes a lot of research and writing. Always offer to do a sample. Always over deliver on the project.
The customer is not always right. Especially when it comes to copywriting. Copywriting is an art. A lot of clients won’t understand why you wrote something the way you did and might want you to change it. You have to be confident in your work and success that you can explain to them why you wrote something the way you did and why it works. However this is a case by case basis, some clients will know MUCH more about copywriting/whatever industry you’re in that you do. Everything that involves clients goes on a case by case basis and not a fixed rule.
I hope this will help somebody out there as much as @SinisterLex’s thread helped me. I’ll try to answer any questions about freelancing or copywriting you have.
Once again, thank you to @SinisterLex, check out his freelancing thread here. And thank you to @Fox
Check out Ca$hvertising on my blog here.
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