Mistakes Freelancers Make That Hurt Their Income

You are going to learn four simple but powerful steps that are going to help you raise your prices and keep your clients longer.

If you’re a freelancer or social media manager looking to start and grow your business, please make sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified each week when we post new videos.

Hi, my name is Kirsten Graham with Six Figure Business Coaching. I work with my clients to help them make very easy changes to their business that can often result in 50% gross revenue growth, and we’re going to share some of those same ideas with you today. Before I get started, I want to focus on the definition of freelance and Freelancer freelance working for different companies at different times. Rather than being permanently employed by one company, Wikipedia, freelance. Freelancer and freelance worker our terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed, and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long term.

The way I see you, as a freelancer, I see you as a business owner, if you start seeing yourself as a business owner, others will as well that’s going to allow you to raise your prices. It’s going to get your clients to respect you more, and it’s going to put you on an even playing ground with your clients. And I’m going to tell you how and why.

So step one is you really need to brand your business people think freelancer, they often think side hustle, they think of someone who’s just trying to make a little income on the side. And because they see you that way, they often think that you should be very cheap that you shouldn’t charge much for your services, because you’re not really a business owner. You’re just trying to make a little money here and there. By building a brand for your business. You start to show others that you are a business owner, you are there equal.

So building a brand entails First of all, naming your business, buying the domain name so that you can have a professional email address. So in other words, ABC freelancer.com. So Sally at ABC freelancer.com, a professional email opposed to a Gmail account, you could also set up a website to showcase your portfolio to put testimonials from your customers, again, letting people see what services you offer an About Us page so that they see you as a business owner. And they’re equal. And they don’t think of you as a little side hustle and someone that they can always try to talk down on their prices.

The next thing you can do to brand your business is social platforms. Make sure you’re on all social platforms that you think your clients are on. And you want to post regularly to show that you are business that you’re taking your business seriously and to showcase that you know what you’re doing. If your business to business, you may want to consider LinkedIn. In the past, LinkedIn was considered a job board. But now it’s really a social platform. And what’s really cool about it is a lot of people are not posting on LinkedIn. This gives you a fantastic opportunity. Because there’s not a lot of competition by consistently posting on LinkedIn, you have great chances of picking up new clients.

So step two is building an email list. It’s very important email marketing has won the highest ROI in the industry. And I’m always surprised when freelancers don’t choose to build an email list. Every business owner that you come in contact with could eventually become a client. Just because they don’t need your service when you meet them, doesn’t mean they won’t need you in the future. But if you’re note mail marketing to them, they’ll forget you And find someone else. It’s also really important that you have an opt in on your website. This allows people to get something fabulous and free from you while you get their email address. Now you can email them consistently showcasing our business talking about things that you could do to help them grow their business. It’s a great way to stay in touch with people who land on your website. Don’t forget You can also have call to actions and your social media posts. And these call to actions again, can go to an opt in something free that you’re giving them so that you can capture their email address and start building that relationship. Start nurturing that relationship. And that’s really what email marketing does. So please make sure that you take advantage of email marketing is extremely affordable.

There’s all kinds of great services out there, there’s constant contact Mail Chimp, and we use a company called ConvertKit. I’ll put links below so you can check those out. But please make sure your email marketing to your clients again, you want to showcase that you’re a business owner, that your professional that you’re in the same league they are. And when they start seeing that you’re emailing them consistently, they’re gonna think, wow, this is a person that’s on top of their game. This is a person that I can trust. They show up consistently in my inbox. And this is a person that I feel like I will hire because through email marketing, you’ve built a relationship.

Now the third step, I think is often the hardest step because it can be a little challenging. If you do not know what to do, and that’s using contracts, it’s really important to always use contracts when working with clients, new clients, clients that you’ve been working with for years. Because again, it showcases that you’re a professional business owner, you’re taking what you do very seriously. It lays out the terms and the conditions for the work that you’re going to do for them. And by having that in writing, it’s really easy when a client calls you and says, Hey, do you mind doing XYZ for me? You can very easily say, Yeah, no problem. I’ll put a proposal together and send that over to you. And if you want me to do that, update our contract and send that to you as well.

Our clients don’t think twice about asking us to do additional work for them. But by offering a proposal and talking about putting it in the contract, it makes it very clear to them that you’re not doing this for free.

We’ve had clients trying to sneak in additional work for us. And trust me, it’s a difficult conversation to have if you consistently use a proposal in a contract there. Never confusion. And there’s never hard feelings between you and your clients. And this is the number one way you can keep your clients happy long term communication is key. In our contracts, we offer credit card processing. If you don’t offer credit card processing now, I highly recommend that you do.

You can also offer to have automatic bill paying. Jeanne’s company. My business partner, she owns a company called Markbeech Marketing, which has been around since 2007. And she has clients that have been with her for 7,8.9 years. And these clients are on contracts in each month. They’re on automatic bill pay. We do this through PayPal very quick, very easy. And usually what I recommend is when your billing starts to take you more than an hour a month to do, it’s a good time to move to paypal auto billing because they charge $40 so if it’s taking you an hour, you can earn more than $40 an hour it makes sense to use something like PayPal to go ahead and process you’re your monthly payments, it makes it a lot easier for your bookkeeping. And it really can save you a lot of time, we also have a video on how to get your clients to pay up front. And if you’re doing project work, we highly recommend that you get 100% or a minimum of 75% of your money upfront. And I’ll link that video here here. Which side is going to show up on but we will leave that video for you.

Okay, so our fourth and final step today is leverage, using leverage is the easiest way to take your business to six figures. And I want to talk about leveraging technology and leveraging people. First of all, how do you leverage technology? Well, I already gave you one example and that was PayPal auto pay. So having your clients monthly billing done consistently, without needing to call them or send them an invoice can make your life so much easier and it can save you a lot of time. That is one form of leverage. Another form of leverage is using something like a project management software. We use Asana and I’ll put a link For that below as well. Asana allows us to consistently get our work done in a timely fashion. Remember, you can only do so much work, you’re one person, we all have 24 hours in the day. So the more efficient you become, the more client work you can do. And that’s how you can really scale your business.

Another example is a scheduling software. So for example, you can schedule your social media posts, we sit down once a month, create all of our posts, and then we schedule them to go out. This really helps. Because when you’re batching, your work, meaning you’re not stopping and starting at 10 different things each day, you can get so much more done by using a scheduling software for your social media post. You don’t have to stop and think oh my gosh, did I send post out today? What am I going to send out tomorrow, it makes you way more efficient, and that saves you time, allowing you to do more client work. Another example of a scheduling software is I use a scheduling software to book all of my client calls. So whether it’s a discovery call with someone like you who’s new and wants to learn more about what we do Or whether I’m scheduling my monthly coaching clients, I use a software called schedule once. And that’s really helpful to think about how often you go back and forth and back and forth via email trying to book an appointment. You know, can you do Tuesday or Thursday? Oh, I can’t do that. Can you do Wednesday? No, no, I can’t do that. It just saves so much time by sending them a link and saying, Hey, here’s my schedule or book an appointment that’s convenient for you. So again, that’s how you’re leveraging technology to help you grow your business so that you can do as much client work as possible. So you’re earning the big bucks.

Once you start getting more client work than you can do. That’s the time to leverage people. This is when you start outsourcing things, or you hire help. And I’m going to give you a couple examples of how we leverage people in our business.

First of all, I’ve got a fabulous video editor. So we pay him every month to edit all of our video. And it’s a win for us because it saves us time to do more client work and to produce more videos. So that’s a great way to outsource finding someone who has a skill that you do not have, or a skill that you don’t want to develop or a task that you simply do not have to do and pay them to do that for you. Another great example is we have a full time person in the Philippines. She’s been with Mark beach marketing and six figure business for a little over two years. And she does alot of work for us. And it’s fantastic because again, she’s a full time employee with us. So we pay her every month so she has a full time job. And she consistently helps us with client work and our work. So again, when you get to the point where they’re just not enough hours in the day, you need to hire some other people. We have a part time person Her name is Lindsay and she helps us with our email marketing, as well as our clients email marketing. We do a lot of email marketing for our clients. And Lindsey kind of spearheads all of that for us. We also have Josh Josh is in the US. He helps us on some of our website projects. If we get an a ton of websites from our beach marketing, we hire Josh to help us take on the workload.

So again, it’s when these people need work, and we need help. So when you get busier, you can leverage people as well. There are other ways to leverage people things like if you don’t enjoy doing your bookkeeping, hire a bookkeeper, that’s when that person gets to do the work that they love, that they’re great at, you get your books in order, and you don’t have to stress over it. So there are many ways to create leverage in your business with technology and with people, I highly recommend that you think about the big picture. Where do you want your business to go? Now, if you’re just starting your business and thinking about hiring people seems completely overwhelming, or hiring people is something you just never want to do. That’s fine. We have tons of clients who built six figure businesses all by themselves.

It’s really just a matter of what you see for your future and what you want out of your business. And sometimes those things change sometimes you start Thinking it’ll just be me. And before you know it, you’ve built a fabulous team. But there’s no wrong way for you to grow your business.

We’ve talked about a ton of resources. And they will be in the description below, we actually have a list of all the tools and resources that we use, you can get that we also have a guide to email marketing, I’ll link that below. We also have a fantastic course on how to brand your business, and I’ll put a link for that as well. I will also put a link to my scheduler below because if you’d like help growing your business, I’d love to jump on a call with you and find out if it’s a good fit for us to work together.

Also, make sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified each week when we post a new video.

And until I see you again. Dream Big