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…
In this article, I’m going to open up the kimono and give you an inside look at a conversation I had last week with someone in one of my Mastermind groups. These conversations are typically private, but I asked Jordan if he’d be open to me sharing the discussion we had with all of you,…
There are plenty of ways for freelancers to get project leads: job marketplaces like oDesk or Elance, referrals from past clients, people finding your website through a Google search, and so on. But we all know these acquisition channels vary in quality. Given the choice, I think we’d all prefer a strong referral from a…
Back when I was jumpstarting my fledging agency, I used to attend a lot of events. Between what I could find on Meetup.com and the events hosted by the Chamber of Commerce and our local technology council, I spent at least a night a week chatting (and usually drinking) with local business owners. Most nights…