In this episode, Zach talks to Calista from nimblecrafted.com about how she went from relying on low-paying referrals to building a confident, repeatable system for landing freelance clients. Over the past five months, Calista has transformed from a burned-out developer stuck in commoditized pricing to someone with real control over her business—without sacrificing her desire…
In this episode, Zach dives into how developers can escape commoditized pricing by aligning their skills with high-value business problems. Learn how positioning your expertise around solving specific problems can help you stand out, charge higher rates, and attract better clients. You’ll discover how to shift from being a “keyboard for hire” to a problem-solving…
In this episode, Zach talks to Laura Elizabeth, co-owner of Double Your Freelancing and creator of Project Pack. Laura is talking about how she does “paid roadmapping” for her clients, often charging upwards of $6,000 for ONE roadmap. In this episode, we’ll discuss what paid roadmapping is, why freelancers should consider doing it, and common mistakes…
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…
Long before I got into consulting I used to sell leads to mortgage brokers. (If you want to talk about shady, look into generating and selling leads for mortgage brokers. Sheeesh.) We sold leads for about $100 a pop, which was about 20x more than most other lead providers were charging. Companies like LendingTree would generate…
I want to share something with you that I haven’t made public until now. As you know, in about 2 weeks I’m opening up the 2016 enrollment window for Double Your Freelancing Clients, a course I offer only once a year that teaches you how to build a system that will reliably bring your business in high-quality and…
If I were to distill down every article, podcast episode, course, or what-have-you that I’ve ever created into a mission statement of sorts, I think it would be this: To turn talented freelancers into savvy business owners. Sometimes, readers of mine look a bit too far into this statement… Am I advocating that people stop getting…
One of my first marketing experiments after opening up my agency’s office in downtown Norfolk, Virginia was to setup a Facebook ad campaign advertising our web design and development services. Fast forward a few hundred dollars in budget… and you can probably guess what happened next. I shut down the campaigns. The clicks we did get (which weren’t many)…
Over the last few years, I’ve been on a lot of podcasts (for a complete list, see here). When I’m interviewed about freelancing and consulting, I inevitably get asked the following question: If you could start over… with no network, no “name”, nothing. Just a laptop, and maybe $1,000 in seed money… what would you do? Usually this…
Cole tweeted a great followup question to Episode 23 of the podcast: https://twitter.com/colehooey/status/590999273048670208 Whenever any discussion around niching or breaking free of general purpose commodity work comes up around here, I almost inevitably get questions like Cole’s. So rather than trying to answer the question in bursts of 140 characters, I told Cole I’d think through my…