Successful Freelancing, Social Media and Career Advice

After private discussions of me laying out copious amounts of solicited advice, I was asked by PM to start a thread about successful freelancing, the role of social media and general career advice for people who are trying to get paid on their own.

So here's how this can work. People can ask me anything about the topic at hand and tangential subjects, and I'll come through and answer a bunch of whatever that's directed to me specifically. I'm also going to repurpose some of my conversations with people to post in this thread about things like appearing to be someone that clients want to hire, how to solicit clients, how to build a reputation and how to borderline automate things like social media that you probably wouldn't otherwise be doing in the first place.

And obviously everyone else is welcome to converse and answer questions and bring whatever it is to the table that they can bring to the table.

But real quick let me say this. I've helped about a dozen people go from 0 to low four figures a month for part-time work in various fields, and I've also helped three or four eventually go from 0 to mid-four figures a month with full-time work by building up a client base for using their respective skill sets. Every single person who has done what I've told them to do for this has added a significant portion of income to their lives, and I pretty much just like helping people in general, so here we go.

Oh and I'm not selling anything.

The Process of Becoming Productive

From the perspective of providing a service or producing some kind of end result for people, the process of becoming productive includes a few key steps. Following these steps in a very logical and straight-forward manner has yielded some pretty good results in my experience.

1. Become proficient at a skill.
2. Find clients who need that skill.
3. Perform that skill for those clients and get paid.

Some people will claim that this is an over-simplification, but it's really not as long as you understand that you have to break down these three steps into a lot of detail to maximize your effectiveness.

In my experience, the main thing that causes people problems when it comes to following the above process is that they're stuck in the old ways of thinking based on what they've been told their whole lives. One example is the traditional college pathway that has been obsolete for at least a decade:

1. Become proficient at a skill by going to college and getting a degree.
2. Find clients who need that skill by applying for jobs.
3. Get one of those jobs and keep it for the long term as a valued employee.

It doesn't work like that anymore, and recognizing the differences between the world now and the world then will help you to apply this process in a much more effective way. That's essentially what we want to do here.

1. Becoming Proficient at a Skill

The bottom line is that the Internet has created a situation where you have no excuse for not knowing something. You can learn how to do just about anything on the Internet, and it's more important than ever to be able to put your autodidact hat on and improve yourself. You simply cannot rely on traditional outside institutions (ie: college) alone to teach you.

Photo editing, web design, coding, writing, marketing and sales are just a few examples of the types of things you can learn primarily through the Internet that can get you paid. If you already have a skill, then great. If not, then you have no excuse.

Example: I have a friend who wanted to learn a lot about Photoshop. She previously had no experience with any type of photo editing or anything of that nature. She immersed herself in tutorial series, instructionals and all kinds of other information. She kept notebooks, and she worked on that almost daily. My friend used her initial set of skills to do enough little work making logos and other piddly shit to purchase a drawing tablet so that she could learn from that angle as well.

We'll get to the other two parts later. It would be nice if someone could find some resources of great places to learn to do different things for free online.

What is your opinion on sites like Textbroker and similar for freelance writing?

Do you think someone's time would be better spent trying to land clients, rather than those content creation websites?

How would you suggest someone reach out to start getting clients?

Thanks for creating this thread, Jesse. Your point about becoming proficient at a skill is SPOT ON. No one is expected to know everything, but the resources are simply too easy to obtain for free these days. Anyone with some self-initiative to learn about a topic can do so.

spoonitnow quote: The bottom line is that the Internet has created a situation where you have no excuse for not knowing something. You can learn how to do just about anything on the Internet, and it's more important than ever to be able to put your autodidact hat on and improve yourself. You simply cannot rely on traditional outside institutions (ie: college) alone to teach you.

Photo editing, web design, coding, writing, marketing and sales are just a few examples of the types of things you can learn primarily through the Internet that can get you paid. If you already have a skill, then great. If not, then you have no excuse.

2. Find clients who need that skill.

You have a ton of options for this. Note that here we're talking about finding clients and not so much the part where you actually present yourself in a way that makes them want to give you work. That part will come next.

You basically have two main sources. First, you can go through some kind of broker/recruiting service. Second, you can solicit these clients directly. We're going to hit a crash course in both of these and what you should be looking for.

Broker/Recruiting Services

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Originally Posted by givememyleg

What is your opinion on sites like Textbroker and similar for freelance writing?

Do you think someone's time would be better spent trying to land clients, rather than those content creation websites?

How would you suggest someone reach out to start getting clients?

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Example Sites: A good example of a broker/recruiting service is Textbroker. This is a website where writers and clients are matched up. The better you are at writing, the higher level jobs you can get, and the better pay you get. Elance and oDesk are good examples of this type of site for a wide range of different skill sets. You can get work for doing anything from creating music to drawing to photography to web design on these two sites.

The main advantage of using this type of site is that you can get a whole lot of access to a whole lot of potential clients very quickly, and that's a pretty big advantage. The two main disadvantages are that the site charges a percentage of your earnings for using their services, and they restrict your ability to make contact with your clients outside of their communication channels so that you can't make a direct deal by cutting out the middle man.

Using these sites allows you to:

• Gain paid experience.
• Develop a portfolio.
• Land a spot on a client's shortlist. (aka gain future work)
• Help you to learn what your services are worth.

However, to get the most from it, you can't just do the work, get paid and have that be it. Instead, you have to actively solicit these clients to give you feedback, future work, etc. On Textbroker, for example, you should send private messages to clients after you complete work for them. Here's an example of a message template you could use after completing an item from the open pool of available orders (note: Direct Orders on TB are from a client to one specific writer instead of to the pool of writers in general):

Quote:

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Hi,

I'm a Level 5 writer here at TextBroker, and I recently completed your Open Order about [topic]. Please let me know what you think about this [type of content] because your feedback helps me to work better with clients.

As far as writing goes, I'm a specialist in the [X, Y and Z] industries. I'm available for Direct Orders if you would like to have me writing for you in the future. My Direct Order rates would save you some money compared to Level 5 Open Orders, and I have fast turnaround times.

Thanks!
[Your Name]

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Getting Sneaky: Try this at your own peril: If you're sneaky, then you can find the client outside of whatever broker/recruiting service you're using and approach them directly. However, don't use the service's communication lines to do this. Search Google for content you've written and look for contact information for the client from that angle. I may or may not have landed numerous clients in this way.


Soliciting Clients Directly

You can solicit clients directly in two ways. First, you can have an online presence (website, social media, online portfolio, etc.) where people naturally find you because they're looking for someone to do the work that you can do. Second, you can approach people directly who are involved in your industry and offer your services along with links back to your website, social media, online portfolio, etc.

Both approaches require that you have the website/social media/online portfolio/etc in place first. I'm going to cover that topic later in this thread. For now, assume that you have those things in place.

Question: Who are your potential clients, and where do they hang out on the Internet?

Here's an example of asking yourself this question and then answering it. Let's say that you're looking to write, design websites, develop WordPress plug-ins, or something like that. Your potential clients are webmasters and Internet marketers. Where do they hang out on the Internet? Forums and blogs (in the comments) for Internet marketers are a couple of easy answers that I'll use for this example.

A lot of forums will have a buy/sell/trade type section where you can offer your services. That's one way to go about it.

Another way to about it is to just participate in the discussion in an intelligent way offering your particular brand of knowledge and know-how while maintaining a professional front. You'll include links to your online portfolio/whatever else as they naturally seem relevant. This will get you attention, help you to "build your brand" and send business leads your way.

You'll have to answer this question for yourself based on what you're doing. If you think outside of the box a little, then you can come up with a lot of great options.

Additional Reading

Getting Clients: An Actionable Guide for Freelancers is an extremely good read on this topic and covers a few other general methods that might be a bit aggressive for the FTR audience.

It's time to build a portfolio and a general web presence. Our goal is to create the foundation for a powerful web presence for the low, low price of zero dollars and zero cents. Here we're going to cover the non-social media aspects of this. Social media comes next.

Your Business Email

You need a different email for your work contacts. Use an email client like Thunderbird to keep your mail accounts all in one place if you need to. I have a Yahoo email that I've used forever as my personal email, and I use a Gmail account for my work email, but you can do it however you want.

Use your name if possible, and try to avoid using something stupid. You're going to look a lot more professional as [email protected] than if you're [email protected]. This is the beginning of an image you're going to be creating for yourself. While you shouldn't aim to seem like you have a stick up your ass, clients won't consider hiring you if you appear to be an immature individual who has no level of professionalism. This also affects the level of pay that clients will feel comfortable accepting.

Creating Your Website

Your website is going to be your central hub that contains all of your shit. Your website will have several components, but we need it to be something that's relatively quick and really easy to work with. To this end, I'm going to send you to WordPress.com and tell you to get signed up there. You'll be http://yoursite.wordpress.com which is just fine for what we're going to be doing. You can graduate to a regular domain name later when you're turning a profit.

Choose your website name wisely. Using your name is fine, but like with the business email address, it needs to be something reasonable. Now I'm going to walk you through step-by-step how you should set this up to begin with, and then you can play with it once you get a feel for what's going on since I know a lot of people have never used WordPress. Our example site is going to be https://spoonexample.wordpress.com/ that I'm going to leave up after I walk through these steps with you.

1. Pick a theme that looks clean without a bunch of clutter. Don't get too caught up on this because you can change it later.

2. Just choose the free options when you sign up. You're not going to need something over-the-top fancy for this to work well.

3. Once it's created, go to the /wp-admin/ folder like https://spoonexample.wordpress.com/wp-admin/ but change it to whatever you named your site, etc.

4. To change your theme, go to Appearance -> Themes and click the "Free" button on the top-right to filter for free themes. You can filter for other things if you want, or you can just click the "Popular" tab and pick one. Try to go with a light background with dark text because this isn't picking a super rad MySpace layout in 2004. Again, it's an image of professionalism. You'll get your chance to shine as an individual and express your individuality and all of that crap soon enough.

5. Go to Posts -> All Posts and send the "Hello World!" post to the trash.

6. Go to Pages -> All Pages and send the "About" page to the trash.

Note: Make sure to save your changes via the blue "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the screen with the following few steps.

7. Go to Settings -> General and set your title (spoonexample's Widget Painting), tagline (Git r done) and time zone.

8. Go to Settings -> Writing and turn off emoticons. This makes you look like an idiot when you actually do one in the middle of something and don't realize it.

9. Go to Settings -> Reading and uncheck the "Scroll Infinity" option. Scroll infinity does not work on all devices, and it's just a pain in the ass in general.

10. Go to Settings -> Discussion and uncheck all of the "Email me when" options. Also activate the options for "Comment must be manually approved." Then uncheck the following from the "Default article settings" at the very top of the screen:

-- Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
-- Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)
-- Allow people to post comments on new articles

This isn't your personal blog. We don't want comments.

11. Go to Pages -> Add New. Type "Home" for the title of the page and hit the blue "Publish" button.

12. Go to Appearance -> Customize to bring up a new menu. On the new menu on the left:

-- Click on "Static Front Page"
-- Change "Front page displays" to "A static page"
-- In the drop box under "Front Page" make sure to choose "Home"
-- Click the blue "Save & Publish" button at the top
-- After it saves, click the X in the top-left corner to go back to the previous set of menus

13. Go to Appearance -> Widgets. Drag the "Pages" widget over to the sidebar group on the right. Make sure that this is the only widget in that sidebar. Press the blue "Save" button.

14. Using the process in step #11, create new pages for "Contact Me" and "Portfolio."

15. Go to Pages -> All Pages. You should see the list of pages for "Contact Me," "Home" and "Portfolio." Hover your mouse over one of these and click the "Edit" link to go through to the page editor. Now I'm going to cover what you should include in each of these pages to start off. We'll play around with this more as we develop our online presence.

Home Page

-- Your name, what you do and a very small bit about yourself. This is not the time for your life story.
-- Encourage people to contact you with any questions, comments, inquiries and feedback of any type.

Contact Me

-- Include your name and business email first
-- Include your social media links (and Skype if you use it and have a decent/moderately professional-sounding screenname, which you should) after that
-- If you want to, you can click the "Add Contact Form" button and make it easy on people to contact you

Portfolio

-- This depends on your specific discipline, but include examples of your work
-- This might include linking out to other pages like GitHub if you're involved in coding or specific websites if you're a web designer
-- If you've done paid work for a client, always ask for permission before including it in your portfolio and don't just assume that you have the right to link to it because it can seriously damage your reputation and make people not want to work with you

Going From Here

Now you have a website that serves as a central hub for everything about you and your work. You can play with settings and all of that shit now that you've figured out how all of this works, and you can add/subtract from your pages now that you've gotten a feel for it. You can add a PDF of your resume and all kinds of other cool stuff like what degrees and certifications (if any) that you have as long as you don't come across as a try-hard.

We're going to need this website for our future steps.

If you want to see the end result of my example using a really boring theme, it's available at https://spoonexample.wordpress.com/.

Now we're going to set up our social media profiles. We're only going to do the main ones that matter for what we're doing, and we're going to do them in a very efficient way using a smart combination of tools to keep everything in one place.

Do not underestimate the power of setting up these profiles. Following this process will drastically increase your value through social proof and interaction with others in your industry.

My Suggested Process

1. Get one picture of you that's going to be the face of your social media. You're going to use this as the default picture (and only picture) on these social media accounts so that there's a unified front. Anything where you look like a normal person is fine. Don't get cute go for something other than a picture of you like some kind of avatar or whatever because that looks dumb and unprofessional. If you use a selfie, don't use one where you're in the mirror and can see you standing there with your phone. On the other hand, don't try to look like you got professional pictures done and have a stick up your ass either. You just want to be a regular guy (or girl) without looking like a slob.

2. Have your website URL ready (see the previous post).

3. Sign up for accounts at HootSuite (https://hootsuite.com/) and IFTTT (https://ifttt.com). These are free tools that we're going to be using. Make sure to use your business email from above.

4. Create accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn using the following guidelines:

-- Sign up with your real name and information. Add your website URL, and add your picture from #1 above. Add in the usual shit like a bio or whatever. Type one out ahead of time if you don't want to come up with new shit to say and just copy/paste it in.

Note: Also create an account on GitHub if you're doing anything with coding.

5. Log into Hootsuite. Add your Twitter account. This tool will allow you to schedule posts ahead of time (up to 90 days ahead with a free account). It also gives you better views of things like mentions and DMs. You're going to use Hootsuite to manage your Twitter account instead of logging into Twitter itself.

6. Log into IFTTT. Create a recipe that takes your Twitter posts and puts them on your LinkedIn account. There's a pre-made recipe for this, and it's not hard to figure out. The point of this is that now you'll never have to make posts on LinkedIn.

7. Flesh out your LinkedIn profile by adding people you know, add any clients you get and any other contacts you make in your particular industry. This is important because they can vouch for you which ups your stock (social proof is powerful).

8. Optional (for coders and similar only): Flesh out your GitHub profile and add a recipe in IFTTT that adds your Twitter posts to GitHub.

9. Go add links/social icons to your website for your social media accounts. Now you're starting to look more human.

10. Now all you have to do is go into HootSuite, which allows you to schedule tweets out for the next 90 days with a free account. I don't really recommend that you do that, but you have the option to do it now. You can go through and add an inspirational quote twice a week on a schedule or something for the next few months for the hell of it or something like that. It makes you look active and professional and like you're motivated and the shit and whoo hoo let's go do some shit in MATLAB or whatever.

11. All you really have to do to maintain your little system at this point is hop on HootSuite and tweet random stuff related to your industry once in a while. Schedule it out if you want so that it's not all at once (five posts a week is sufficient), but include links to news relevant to your industry a couple of times each week as well so that you're providing value to followers. Do not go on any rants, and do not post anything inappropriate. If you wouldn't show your future employer what you're posting, then you shouldn't post it on your business accounts.

So What's the Point?

Many people are going to want to skip this or think that there's no real point. To them I would answer that you're establishing the right image needed to maximize your success which is extremely important. You can be the best in the world at what you do, but if nobody cares about who you are, then you're not going to be able to make very much money.

A long-standing FTR member emailed me asking for advice on advertising and gaining clients for his budding photography business. Here's a modified version of one of my suggestions just to show that offline methods can still work really well even for people who aren't super established:

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I'm not sure if this is the case where you're at, but in the United States, most schools/colleges/universities have bulletin boards in the halls where people can add fliers/paper adverts for services related to student activities. If you were allowed to do this, I think it would be a low risk/high reward option for getting exposure, especially for the [redacted] students you seem to be targeting.

There are two factors that come into play with the effectiveness of paper fliers: catching someone's attention and having them get your contact details. If you maximize both of these, then you'll have a pretty decent return on your time/resource investment of putting these fliers up.

First, you can design your flier in a way that will catch someone's attention by putting a very attention-getting photo you have taken of [redacted]. I think the 7th one on your home page slider with the reflection inside of the [redacted] would work well for this, but obviously it's up to you.

Also, here is a list of free templates for use with Microsoft Word that should make it easier to get started: https://templates.office.com/en-us/Flyers

Second, you can get a better rate of return by making it easier for students to grab your contact information. One option is to use a tear-off with your contact information like this:

http://img3.meetupstatic.com/img/428...GroupLarge.jpg

Another option is adding a QR code to your flier that acts as a link to your website for a smartphone app. I attached a picture of the QR code that will link to your website since it takes like 2 seconds with a tool you can find online.

One more option that my marketing friends have suggested for paper fliers is posting a line somewhere on it that reads something like, "Take a picture of this so you don't forget!" The idea is that even if they take the picture and forget about it, they'll be going through their photos on their phone later and see it to be reminded which increases your effective exposure.

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