Good Morning, Afternoon, Evening whatever your state of play is right now, Welcome to The Takeover Strategy, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome.
Freelancing is an interesting topic because I have friends who are freelancers in different industries, freelancing covers a whole variety of careers and niche products, it is a good career, you are the master of your industry or niche and people come to you for your knowledge. Not only is it a good thing to do for your career or business, but it’s also a great thing to do from a personal well-being standpoint. Being a Freelancer allows you to live a more fulfilling life, you work as hard as you want, you work when you want, and you can come and go as you please, not only that you can live anywhere in the world, so if your single or maybe your not single and you set up a successful freelancing business, why not pack your bags and live where ever you want you can pretty much live the life of your dreams. However, you do need to work, too many freelancers get caught up in the passion of living a life and forget the hard work they will have to put in to get there, I have seen it firsthand, you concentrate on the golden goose, but she hasn’t laid the golden egg yet, not enough patience, not enough focus, not enough drive. You can live the life of your dreams, absolutely you can, but you’ve got to put that hard work in, you have to sacrifice life, so even if you do travel in freelancing, you will still need to put the hours in, otherwise your trips will be short-lived.
I have two friends that are freelancers, both very successful, both don’t live in the UK! One settled in the South of France, and the other is still traveling, I believe he was in Columbia last time we spoke. Both work online, one is a programmer the other is Web Developer, but as I mentioned you can freelance in anything. As we go on through this blog I shall explain how you can live the life of your dreams being a Freelancer, as I mentioned it’s not all rose petals.
Freelancing is based on huge self-belief, it’s that simple, if you don’t have huge self-belief in yourself, you will never take the risk of being a freelancer, it takes guts and a belief not everyone has. You must remember that being a freelancer is a RISK you are not dependent on a business paying you every month, you are in control of your destiny, and you have to make your own money and pay your bills with the money you make off of your own back, hence me saying earlier, just because you go off traveling don’t think for one minute you won’t be working, because you will, and you will be working hard, however, when you finish working hard, you have a beach and the sun to enjoy, hot or cold if you like working in that environment is a game changer, it raises your vibration, you will work harder, but you will be able to play hard too.
There isn’t any difference between many Freelancers, to be honest, they’re all built the same in my opinion, however, the best ones stand out as MILE, do you know why? Because they will work that extra hour or two or at ridiculous times in the morning, when other freelancers are sleeping, they are working. The main focus of being a freelancer is loving what you do, you’ve got to learn it, love it, and live it!
So when you start freelancing or you want to start freelancing, you need to have a niche you love or you something you can get enjoyment out of, don’t pick something that you will be bored of in six months, because you will forever be changing your mind and building then stopping and then building again, getting nowhere. I suggest you do lots of research into your niche before you start, get a pen and pad, and write down a list of niches you enjoy, then research the market to see what the market is like, and how much market share is there available. What money can you make in that niche? How much competition is in that niche? What are the top players doing in that niche? How much money are they making? and so on. Now, don’t look at your competition when you find a niche and think “Oh man I will never be as good as them” Remember they started where you are today, they had no idea! Now researching a niche should take about a week, you need to write loads of questions that you need answers to to enable you to know whether it’s worth going for, once you feel you have got enough information, you then need to write sub niches off of that niche for example if you chose the fitness industry, you would make a list which would be things like protein powder, gym gear, weights, food, fitness tricks and tips and so on, having sub-niches will give you other topics to research and they will also give you writing material if you were to start a blog or create posts or email marketing.
Once you have a niche and your sub-niches you need to focus on your offer, so what is an offer? An offer is something skill related to what your niches or sub-niches are, so for example, if you wanted to be a web developer, your sub-niches would be something like design, development, websites, pages, landing pages, funnels, and flyers these would be your skills, you have skills in these sub-niches. The skills/Sub Niches are the foundation that builds your Freelancing business, without skills you can’t be a freelancer, but you can learn any skill, as I have touched on in the past, you can learn anything, as long as you are persistent and turn up every day even if you feel like rubbish, learning isn’t simple, but you can make it simple by trying to be successful.
SOP Frameworking:- What is an SOP Framework? Although it doesn’t fit the industry of Freelancing, it is an important part for you to use, the SOP Framework in your freelancing business. An SOP Framework based on a Freelancing career would include things like Planning, so you would identify specific tasks that you as a Freelancer would have to do every week for example Prospecting, Planning Social Media Posts, Invoicing, Research, using your skills to fulfill projects, project management, Direct messaging, Networking, Connecting. With this, you would plan out your days, weeks, and months making sure you had the right procedures in place. Time management is also an important step in SOP, but truthfully it’s important in any business structure you may put in place, time management brings with it structure and structure is good for anything you do in your life, you need to be organized. With Freelancing you need to be working to deadlines, so being organized and structured is a massive aspect to consider, you must give your customers a clear deadline in completing the work, bearing in mind you have lots of other tasks to uphold as mentioned above, so you need to be making time for everything. And don’t sell yourself short, be mindful of your time and how much it costs, some people get scared to charge too much because they don’t believe in what they can offer, be honest, upfront, and speak from the heart and you will be fine. You also must remember when setting deadlines that you might get issues, so you need to bear that in mind, or you might have a problem with something else you are working on, however, if you are working to daily time scales on projects and you have all your days worked out to the hour, you have to have the will power to leave something and move onto your next task, knowing you will come back to this task tomorrow, this is why when I said you need to be structured is important, if you’ve planned you are already prepared and preparation is key.
Prospecting:- You will be doing a lot of prospecting, and direct messaging, again you need to leave time for this in your daily plan. How I work my days is I will have my day broken down into hourly slots, sometimes two hourly. Say I have a project that I know will take me 10 hours, I’ll break that up to two hours a day. You will find by the end of the week you would have completed 6-7 projects by doing a little bit every day, who won the race? The turtle or the rabbit? The turtle, because he walked a little bit every day, the rabbit got knackered and slept for three days and the turtle won, pace yourself. TIP Prospecting, so many people get drawn into sending DM’s saying, for example, if you’re a copywriter ” Hey, I have noticed you have good posts, but I could write them much better for you?” What do you think? I’d think, No, do one! What he or she should have said was ” Hey, hope you are well, Just wanted to reach out to you as I recently helped 17 clients in the same situation as you” Send them a screenshot of something you have done, then send then them five bullets points of something they could action and ask them to contact you if they are interested. Now, don’t go giving the game away here, intrigue them, so think to yourself what would float my boat in this situation? What would make me think I could do with a hand here? Then tailor your bullet points about that or them, but don’t give them all your secrets, give them a little bit of value, and get them coming back to taste more value from you. You could add this in bullet points ” Let me write three emails for you a week for one week and see what responses you get. I will do it for free for five days” Now I wouldn’t do this with everyone, but I would offer it to BIGGER customers, I’d also ask if you could re-write them a landing page for free and improve it! This defiantly works, but don’t fill your time up doing things for free too much. But what I will say is companies love freebies, and if you make a mark on their sales, they will come running back with open arms, at that point, you tie them into a 3-6 month contract. I know for a fact this method does work, I have done it and my freelancing friends have done it too. One of my friends would do it for two customers a week in the beginning, he has a 6-7 figure freelancing business now, as I said I wouldn’t offer this to smaller businesses, but to businesses with a large budget yes, saying that you could offer it to smaller businesses, it’s totally up to you.
OK, well that’s it for today folks, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog and our social media channels, it would be great to see you again.
I wish you lots of love and light
God Bless you all
