When you first start selling your services, it’s common to hear yourself saying “I can do that!” to anyone with a dollar in their hands. Anything to bring revenue in the door. You position yourself as the solution, even if you've never provided that particular service before. It's easier to get sales when you can provide all things to everyone. Deals that bring in a modest little side-income. Momentum so you can finally quit your day job, and pursue providing services full time.
It's what I did for years. I said yes to everything and came away with all kinds of experience.
To begin my freelancing career, I did the following gigs to make money:
- Designed and programmed a website that provided NFL mock draft results
- A campaign manager for direct mail campaigns sending baby formula coupons to expectant mothers
- Manually added/removed contacts from a marketing automation system for a home-exteriors company
- Scraped HBCU college listings from a website and built a better, search optimized version to sell AdSense ads
- Took photos for a restaurant with my crappy point and shoot camera, and used them to create a custom-programmed 7-page restaurant website
- Generated 100 variations of a landing page with keyword-specific URLs to try and drive favorable local Google AdWords results (i.e., domain.com/replacement-windows-st-cloud-mn.html)
- Submitted sites to directories from my .edu email address, trying to game Google's system. I took on the persona of "concerned college student" who just happened to be surfing the Internet one day and noticed a link to website A, and thought that a link to website B might be "relevant to your audience" as well. I was three years out of college by this point.
And those are just the things off the top of my head that I remember doing in my first six months as a freelancer. $250 here, $500 there. Occasionally my gigs would reach 4-figures. Spending the money in my head before the checks arrived.
Turning your freelancing jobs into a business.
After a year of this type of freelancing, I decided I wanted to build a "real" business with employees and cool office space. That meant specializing in the services I offered and focusing on services that generated a profit.
That meant building a reputation and a team of individuals to deliver the work. It was a lot of hard work, but eventually, I got there.
In this course, I share what I learned during my journey from Freelancer to Agency owner. Enjoy this free course!
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