Marketing Your Freelance Business

When you look at a zebra you don’t think of camouflage, do you?

There stands the zebra with those incredibly contrasting stripes, and it seems to stand out like a sore thumb.

That’s not the way predators see the zebra.

Those stripes that we think are so conspicuous are extremely hard for predators to spot. Human eyes are exceptionally good at seeing detail in daylight. However, their main predators, lions and hyenas, have eyes with a far poorer resolution by day. In studies done by the University of Calgary, the zebra stripes could only be seen by predators relatively close up. This means that what seems more than obvious to us is almost entirely camouflaged.

Our marketing message appears to have a similar camouflage.

If you’re a freelancer pitching for a project, you’re pretty clear about what you stand for, and what you can do. The moment you have to explain your point of difference to a client, your message falls into a camouflage-trap. You use a tagline or just about any line that doesn’t cause the client to sit up and take notice. And you know what’s worse? Imagine you’re just one of many suppliers pitching for the same project, there’s a pretty good chance your message is going to get lost in the jargon.

Clients judge your emails in a split-second. This article will show you what they look for when they’re deciding to hire you.

When you send a bad email you’re telling a client you can’t be bothered to figure out how you’re valuable.

You’re saying you can’t solve the problems you’re getting paid to solve.

This makes clients have to figure it out for you. Sure they tell you they’ll give it some thought and get back to you.

But. This. Never. Happens.

Your once hopeful email seeps to the bottom of their inbox. It turns cold, dusty, and gray. Weeks or months pass. Occasionally, the client sees it and thinks, “Oh yeah, that email.”

Eventually it begins to chafe away at them. It bugs them. Every passing day the question looms, “what do I think?” Until one day they shrug and click delete.

They exhale and never think about you again.

This is why emails are important.

(This is a guest post by Liston Witherill, a speaker at the upcoming Double Your Freelancing Conference. Don’t have your ticket yet? Buy your ticket while they’re still available and join Liston and 13 other speakers in Norfolk, Virginia, this September 16th – 18th)

Their conversion rate was way too low.

The business provides a very valuable service – the kind that actually makes dreams come true.

You see, they help their clients immigrate to a new country by knowing immigration laws and strategically completing visa applications.

But they had 2 really big problems:

1) they weren’t doing anything to nurture lost leads or turn web visitors into leads, and

2) they were really bad mind readers. More on that in a second.

To solve the first problem, we quickly put together an educational email sequence. This recovered lost leads and created more engaged prospects who emailed or called in to start a sales conversation. Simple and straightforward. Check.

(This is a guest post by Mojca Mars, a speaker at the upcoming Double Your Freelancing Conference. Don’t have your ticket yet? Buy your ticket while they’re still available and join Mojca and 13 other speakers in Norfolk, Virginia, this September 16th – 18th)

“I’m afraid we can no longer keep you on as an employee,” said my boss at the advertising agency I worked at for more than a year. It was a nice way of saying I was … well, fired.

I had 0 connections, no knowledge of business, I just knew 1 thing – I wanted to create something of my own. I had absolutely no clue how, so I did what I do best – use social media to build a business. And boy, what a wild ride it was.

(This is a guest post by Kurt Elster, a speaker at the upcoming Double Your Freelancing Conference. Don’t have your ticket yet? Buy your ticket while they’re still available and join Kurt and 13 other speakers in Norfolk, Virginia, this September 16th – 18th)

A year ago I was in the same position as many freelancers and agency owners. My professional life was a roller coaster of worrying if I could bill enough this month and then worrying about delivering on time the next. The worst part was that I, like many of you, had accepted my situation as the nature of the business.

Today things are quite a bit different. I get as many as ten new, qualified leads every day, on top of selling consistently to existing (and happier than ever) clients. And the best part is it happens almost entirely without me.