How To Sell Your Services As A Freelancer - And Earn Darn Good Money Doing It

Reading time: 8 – 14 minutes

Selling your services as a freelance writer, graphic artist, web designer, programmer, or consultant is a great way to take control of your future. But one word of warning – you’ll never get anywhere near earning a professional-level income freelancing on the cheap – and on the internet, cheap is the price many clients want to pay.

I’d going to share key methods of growing any kind of consulting or freelancing business using the internet to promote your skills – and do it profitably.

• Why “paying your dues” and “working your way up” by slaving away for tiny payouts is a load of horse manure – and why you should start saying NO! to the prospective clients who want to hire you for chicken feed.
• How to make your name “Google-able”, and why this is important to prospering as a freelancer.
• 4 key marketing habits 90% of online freelancers don’t have which makes you visible as a provider of skilled services.
• Why online freelancing “the obvious way” will trap you in just another version of the rat-race – and why it will mostly yield low-paying clients and dead-end projects.

In the last year and a half by business focus has shifted away from promoting “make money – anybody can do it” stuff to growing my copywriting and consulting skills and clientele. In the new economy of today making money online isn’t as easy as it used to be – there are a lot more buyers, but also a lot more sellers.

I’d like to acknowledge what nobody promoting any how-to courses with names like “The Easy Way To A Six-Figure Freelance Writing Income” doesn’t usually mention in their promotions – that the freelancing market is competitive and clients will usually try to find freelancers who are cheap.

Here’s the truth, Bubba.

“You’ll never get anywhere near earning a 6-figure income freelancing on the cheap. You have to find clients who both have the desire for a skilled freelancer, who has his or her shit together, and the ability to pay you.” – Loren Woirhaye

The idea that somehow the marketplace will magically appreciate that you’ve paid your dues after working for chicken-feed for awhile is false. Perhaps if you worked in a J.O.B. and started in the mail-room you could work your way up, but in freelancing you’ll only ever get what you ask for and you have to learn to say “NO!” to work that just doesn’t pay well enough.

Clients who want the work done cheap will always tell you things like “there’s more work on the way and you’ll get it and the money will be better,” yet that work seldom materializes.

This article began to form in my brain when I read a blog post by well-known freelancer and author Bob Bly – who has some great ideas for more old-school methods of promoting yourself, like doing a lot of public speaking, publishing books, writing a regular newspaper column and so on. I’ll not debate that these are useful, but if you’re just getting your freelancing career going you probably aren’t anywhere near ready to crank out a book or two and maybe you just want to get some paying jobs, not become an instant guru-type by speaking at business luncheons.

“What if you’re just starting out and don’t have raving fans, well-known clients, an established newspaper column, books in print, and so on?”

Well, there’s good news, because while some of that old school stuff was really the most effective way to build a consulting business 20 years ago, these days web marketing can be done cheaply – and since a lot of your clients might expect you to know something about it, competent self-marketing online demonstrates your own skills while it wins you better clients too.

Unless your prospects are senior citizens (a good group to market to, incidentally, just not so much online) chances are they have at least a little internet savvy. Whether they’ve run across your name online or offline, if you have a website or claim to know a thing or two about business consulting or marketing your prospects are likely to “Google you” at some early stage.

In fact, your prospects may be Googling you before they even make you aware of their interests – so what they find when they “Google you” forms part of their early impressions of your skills and competence.

The old-school way of getting into print publications is likely to bring anemic Google results, you can puff-up your own “Google-ability” with easy online self-publishing.

Whether or not you “own” your own name as a “Google-able” phrase is a matter of luck to some extent. If you share a name with somebody who is famous or prominent you’ve got a problem… but if nobody else is making an effort to “own” the name online, you’ve got options. I write from experience because I completely “own” my own name online, owing to its uniqueness.

If you don’t have a unique name you may wish to add one or two middle initials and use these to differentiate yourself in terms of search engine visibility (”Google-ability”).

As far as content publishing you’ll want to publish under the name you will promote yourself as (your “Google-able” name”) – so if your name is “John Smith” (unfortunate) – you might want to promote yourself as “John J.J. Smith” in order to differentiate yourself from the teeming hordes of other John Smith’s.

How To Pump Up
Your “Google-ability”

1. Write a blog under your name – you can publish basically the same blog on different free blogging platforms: WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Weebly.com – just a few – but you should early on get a domain name and have your own unique “Dot Com” and a hosting account (about $10 a month) with which you can have your own personal blog.
2. Write articles and publish them to article directories like EzineArticles.com – your purpose is to “brand” your name in as many online resource-websites as possible, so don’t go overboard and submit 100 articles to one directory and ignore the 100s of other directories.
3. Comment relevantly on blog posts, linking back to your own website or blog, using your name as your “anchor text” when possible.
4. Use press releases. There are dozens of press release directories, so do spread your releases out on several of them. Most of them aren’t all that fabulous, but many are pretty good for name visibility in Google, and many yield decent quality backlinks.

The stuff I’m explaining here is SEO (search engine optimization) for dummies. These are not tricks or ways to “game” the search engines. The above four methods should be habits you integrate into your daily and weekly marketing activity to build credibility around your name. The number of references to your name will build up over time – even if you are the only one writing about yourself – and pretty soon prospects will be Googling you and thinking you aren’t a total idiot… and they will call you and say “I Googled your name and you seem to know something about marketing yourself” – which is a compliment and an indicator of interest in doing business with you.

The WRONG Way To Get Paid Decently For Your Services

A lot of people decide they want to be freelancers these days – after all, corporate jobs are drying up and a lot of skilled people are out of work. The cost of getting started as a freelancer is generally pretty darned low – mostly you just have to declare your intentions and go looking for clients.

The most obvious place to get clients as a freelancer is on the freelance sites like elance.com and getafreelancer.com – these sites are great if you want to work really hard and get paid poorly. The bidding competition is fierce for any freelance project that pays more than perhaps $10 an hour, so if you’ve got a plan to be a $100/hour freelancer, you ain’t never gonna get it on those sites… unless you’ve got some extremely specialized skill like programming – but even if you are a highly skilled programmer I doubt you’ll land many jobs on those bid sites paying so well.

Most of the freelancers who work on those sites are working hand-to-mouth and trying to do a lot of work at cut-rates. Most people starting their own businesses don’t really understand the mathematics of profit. They don’t understand that to build a clientele who will help yopu grow, you need to offer something other than low prices.

In order to sell at higher prices you, the freelancer, need to take control of the selling conversation. The freelance bid sites are designed so the people looking for freelancers can make their selections based basically on lowball pricing. If you bid on such jobs you’ll probably only get a phone call and a real chance to sell your services and the value you bring to the table if your price was real low to start with.

Situations like this are toxic to building a legitimate business in my opinion, but the people using them to hire help like the arrangement because it gives them a lot of perceived power. The fact that when they pay cheap prices they generally get cheap work tends to escape many of them – just read some of the job listings and you’ll see entrepreneurs complaining that they haven’t been able to find a freelancer who can write a decent 50-100,000 word book for a $1000. I wonder why?

Get it? The freelancing sites are basically meat-markets. There are so many freelancers willing to underbid the work it gives the people doing the hiring warped ideas about the value of freelance services.

My opinion may be strong and you don’t have to agree with me. If you think you can build a freelancing business bidding against smart people in India who will work for $2 an hour, I’d be happy to hear of your success. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that there are, in my opinion, easier ways to get ahead freelancing. All it takes is the attitude that you are a marketer, not an employee.

While bidding on those sites may seem like a good idea to build your portfolio and get referals I’ll argue that it’s probably not. People who hire you cheap will only refer you to their other cheap friends, so the value of the kind of referrals working at rock-bottom prices will get you is dubious.

The other problem is that people who hire cheap freelancers are often running “mickey mouse” business operations and are undercaptitalized. If you write good copy for them they may change it around themselves and mess it up. They may never promote their “mickey mouse” websites, and so forth.

While it is somewhat instructive to work to other people’s specifications, often the cheaper the client, the more clueless they are and the more likely their specification will lead in a moronic direction.

My bias here is as direct marketing copywriter – most people are pretty darned ignorant about how effective direct marketing works – the ones that “get it” are the good clients who will pay you what you’re worth. The ones who don’t “get it” are the ones who shop on price… because to them, writing or website design or graphic art is a commodity to be bought mostly on the lowest-price criteria.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.