Digital Marketing

3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Freelance Marketing Career

When I started my freelance marketing career, there were a few things I wish I had known. In this video, I'm going to share with you three of those things so that you can avoid making the same mistakes I did!

Don't make these freelance marketing mistakes

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If you're thinking of starting a freelance digital marketing career, this video is for you. I'm going to share some things I wish I had known before I got started. So you don't have to make the same mistakes. I did.

Hey everyone. This is Rich Ux. And in this video, I'm going to be sharing three critical tips that I wish I had known. When starting a freelance, digital marketing career, I think these can save you time. I think these can make you more money. I think these can prevent major headaches for clients. So make sure you watch until the end and get all three tips.

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Always be prospecting and filling your pipeline


So number one is you have to be continually prospecting for new clients. All the time. And there are a couple of good reasons for that. I think a lot of freelancers make the mistake of getting into the business and they think the work is all about marketing. All they have to do is deliver, create funnels, create content, write, and copy, but as an independent business owner, as someone who wants to work on their own, be their boss, have that remote freedom.

You do have to generate your clients. And I think this can be a bit of a tough element for some people. But when I got into this game, I hadn't known how much that was going to play a role. And it's not so much that it's hard to prospect. It's not so much that it's hard to find new leads and find great clowns.

It's that if you let your pipeline run dry if you don't have anyone on a waitlist or waiting in the wings, your active clients start to get leverage against you. And it can be a very subtle problem that starts to creep up on you. Let's say you have no clients waiting for you and you currently offer services to two or three freelance clients.

Maybe you make two to $3,000 per client per month. You're on a retainer. Let's say. If suddenly one client is giving you some trouble, becoming a bit of a difficult client, maybe asking for too much or demanding too much, maybe they're slow on there, and maybe they're holding you up. You don't have a lot of recourse, but to accept their poor behaviour.

Whereas if you have clients waiting in the wings if you have a waitlist if you have demands. Your existing clients can be fired. You can get rid of them. You can start to bring in your new clients and stop working with the problematic clients. And that's all about leverage and who has the leverage and the freelance, or gets a lot of leverage if they're able to keep prospecting.

Now, I think if someone asked you to go find a hundred new leads, it might sound pretty boring. It might sound like something you don't want to do. For me. What I like to do is just spend a lot of time researching the marketing industry, researching relevant technologies and marketing SAS. There are over 10,000 marketing technology companies out there.

All those companies are great opportunities to work with them. It's great to work in the marketing industry directly as a marketer. You're going to work with people who understand what it is you're trying to do. Now. Of course, you can go outside of that. You can go into medicine, you can go into legal, you can go into B2B services, and you can go into construction or manufacturing enterprise.

You can go to clinics. You go to small business coaches. Endless places to go with your services. But what I just like to do is spend a lot of time just looking at websites and enjoying the process of analyzing a website just quickly, going through a couple of pages, scrolling it, and putting that website in an Excel spreadsheet.

See if I can find any contact data. And this just helps you get in the mood to do more prospecting. If you're always looking at websites if you're always hunting, what's new in the industry, who's out there. You just get into more of a rhythm. I think it's easy for the freelancer to ignore that together.

And so it always feels foreign and uncomfortable to them. When they start trying to do some prospecting, they won't have a rhythm, they won't have a process, and they don't have any resources. So I think it's important to just enjoy the process, and build a list of potential clients. And of course, doing cold outreach is so prominent today.

Having a great offer. Maybe it's performance-based. Get you lots of clients on the phone or a Zoom call. You'll have any problems closing these deals. If you have a great offer. And most of all, you're going to create the leverage you need as a freelancer by having prospects, waiting to work with you, or always building up that demand to work with you.

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The higher you charge, the better clients you get.


And that leads to the second mistake that I made or didn't fully understand when I started 5, 6, and 7 years ago. Is that the more you charge, the better the clients you will get, but also in some cases, the more you charge, the better your business will operate and the better outcomes you're going to get.

And the client might even perceive. As more valuable. A lot of people try to do work for me for free. They know I have a YouTube channel. They want to help me. And what I always find is when someone offers to do something for me for the free or low cost I don't get very emotionally invested. And when your clients aren't emotionally invested in your work, they're not going to care as much about the outcome.

They're not going to feel it's as valuable. They're not going to perceive that it's going to be a successful project. This is a bit of a counter-intuitive idea, but if you're only charging, 250 a month, 500 a month it's very likely that your clientele is going to bring you more problems than they do money.

And so one thing you should recognize is that when you charge more Clients are going to perceive it as a better service, even if it's the same service. There is like a blind taste test done for people drinking wine and everybody who tasted the three wines. All three were the same wine.

But people always found that the most expensive one that they were told, they thought that one was the best. So people always find things that are expensive to be better naturally. But I think also what's important is, if you want to charge a rate that is going to be commoditized and people see you as just another freelancer that they can compare to on prime.

You're going to have trouble going from freelancer to agency. You're going to have trouble taking your business to the next level. You're going to have trouble hiring people. You're going to have trouble starting to make money from advertising your profits. Just isn't going to be high enough.

And what's problematic is you might end up just having. Three clients or worse three jobs. You want to be building a business eventually. I'm sure in your first year, it's not going to be that way. But as you get into your third, fourth and fifth year, freelancing is a stepping stone towards a scalable business because you've mastered the skillset.

Now you want to start taking on more clients, maybe hiring a small team. And that's going to be only viable if you charge enough to create that margin. So that brings me to the third point.Β 

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Clients don’t just value the specific deliverables you bring them.


Don't burn out and try and raise your price by offering so much, that's not the only way to charge more.

People think that if they want to charge more, they have to increase the value of their work and in to increase the value, they have to do more things. And that's also a common mistake is you don't have to do more. There are alternative ways to bring added value to your client. First of all, you can go faster.

You can be one of the faster providers out there for your service. So instead of a 60-day turnaround, maybe you have a 10-day turnaround or a 15-day turnaround, that's beneficial, that's valuable. You can make it more hands-off for you. Let's say before you charge $4,000 for some strategic consulting or a funnel or a lead magnet design, and you tell them to go interview their clients and they have to go ask their clients these questions or their customers, these questions to gain market research.

Maybe you can do that market research on their behalf, thereby making it less work for them, less effort and sacrifice for them. And so they will value your service more because it's more hands-off for them. So they're emotionally invested because of the higher price point, but they're not physically in time invested.

Because you're going to do more of the work. Also, as you charge more, as you get clients, who perceive your product and service to be better, they will believe. And hopefully, it's true. The risk of failure is lower. If you're getting good at offering what you offer, hopefully, clients can trust that it's going to work out well.

And so I think that the more case studies you get, the more successful projects you've completed, and you can reveal to your clients the type of success you've had. And they're going to value that a lot. You could raise the price purely on having a new case study because people. I don't want to waste time working with someone who might not even work.

So if you can convince them that you're going to be able to bring the outcome, a guaranteed outcome, even people are going to value that a lot. And that's a that's another option right there is that you could guarantee your own. You could probably charge double, right? Because it's not that people think the work is worth more.

It's that they'd rather just do the project once instead of having to do it over and over. And so they often say you get what you pay for. And if you pay too low, it ends up just having to redo the project. So keep that in mind to charge more. To bring more value. You don't just have to do more work.

You don't have to offer more. And I think a lot of freelancers who take that approach, they might run out of energy. They might be swamped. They might be burning out. So charge more, go faster, and do a better job. Take work off your client's hands, and make it easy for them. And. Increase the likelihood of success, like really master your process, and get some case studies that prove the results.

If you build and install funnels for clients, how many more leads per month did they get? If you create content for clients, how many more followers, traffic, and leads did they get? If you do conversion optimization for a sales page, what is the average increase in conversion? And document all that from the get-go and reveal that to the clients.

And you're going to be able to charge a lot more. You're going to get better clients and it's going to even improve your prospecting because your offer is going to be more clear. You're going to be stronger in selling and persuading because you have those case studies. It's all one big cycle of success.

So I hope that helps you start your digital marketing career on the right foot. You still have to build the skills, and if you haven't built the skills, you can always take the digital marketing master class at Rich+Niche. That gives you four core skills. The funnel, building lead generation skills, mastering that customer journey, digital advertising skills, how to do a creative brief, how to plan the media and how to set up your campaigns and optimize them.

Of course also. General content creation, how to maximize repurpose for multiple platforms. That's a great service to offer on retainer when you're brand new. And also we have the module on web development. We have a new module on Google marketing, as well as just make sure you understand some of the newer Google apps such as Google tag manager, and Google optimize.

Just making sure that when you complete that course, those modules, you have a lot of confidence going forward with your skills and that building and running a freelance business doesn't seem so scary anymore. And if you want to accelerate your freelance, digital marketing career, you want to learn more about the things I'm talking about in this video, learn about how to make a grand slam offer.

Get your website set up. That's when you're going to want to invest and look into it. Full-stack marketer freelance lab. That's a 24-week program. We can transform anyone into a freelance marketer, help you start your business, help you start acquiring clients, and ultimately give you confidence in all the procedures and processes.

That's been a fun program to start running, really proud of that. If you have any questions about the. The things that you need to know that I mentioned in this video, please just leave a comment below. I'll answer the questions. I answer almost all my comments if you haven't already done. So give this video a like subscribe.

So you don't miss any of our future videos on digital marketing and building a great career in digital marketing, but that's going to do it for me today, guys, Rich Ux signing out. Don't forget, you can follow me on Instagram, average and niche for other content as well. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video, have a great day and go out there and do some more.

See you next time.

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