by Varun Mayya
Which do you think sounds like the better bet? In most cases, the choice is pretty obvious. Arun might be good at content marketing, but Kyle has literally written a book on content marketing. Although, it involved no extra work other than maintaining his blog, his work has already delivered tremendous value to Melissa for free. He’s established himself as an expert and an authority on the subject.
First steps
As you’ve guessed by now, the way to get inbound leads is to establish yourself as an authority in your core skill. This sounds scary and super difficult. After all, you might have started learning your core skills only a couple of months back!
There are two things you need to do to establish yourself as an authority:
Be better than the average person in your skill.
Share what you know and teach others.
An excellent book on this topic is Authority by Nathan Barry. One of the core ideas of the book is that people who you regard as ‘experts’ in your field are simply people who’ve bothered to share their work and teach others. Try to think about people you consider experts in their field, and you’ll realize that it’s because they put out content related to their skill and that’s how you’ve heard about them in the first place.
Personal brand
To most people, the definition of a personal brand is a website and a logo for their freelance business. They’re definitely two of the components of a personal brand, but consider this—if no one ever sees your site, does it even exist?
Remember the following things:
To make your brand valuable, you need to put out content.
To make your content seen, you need to drive traffic to it.
To drive traffic to your content, it has to be useful.
To be useful content, it has to teach people something they don’t know or offer a unique perspective.
What, Where and How
The What, Where, and How of establishing yourself as an authority are the key to getting more leads and therefore, new clients.
What Do I Create?
Content comes in many forms. It could be blog posts, videos, infographics, e-books, resources, etc. Teach what you know. Your perspective while just starting out is very different from the perspective of people who’ve been working on it for years. Back in the day people only listened to experts. Today, people want to listen to those who have just started out, people who have an intermediate level of skill and people who are “almost there”, so they can plan their own roadmap.
This is where the concept of authority comes in. Think about your field, and who you consider to be the experts in it. It’s the people creating great stuff and putting it out there. It’s the ones who care about their craft and like talking about it online. They’re usually not the ones who’re working in isolation and keeping it to themselves. In the age of the internet, you might be great at what you do, but unless you put it out there and help others, your presence and impact is nil.
When you create and share content related to your field, it serves a dual purpose. Other freelancers in your field come across your content, possibly learn something from it and are grateful. The next time someone asks them how to do something, they’d rather link to your guide than explain it themselves. I’ve done this multiple times myself, when I’d rather link to a friend’s blog post or tutorial rather than teach something from scratch. This sows the seeds of establishing yourself as an expert.
The other purpose this achieves is that it gives potential clients an entry point to understanding your process, how you work and your skill. By reading what you’ve written, it helps them understand how you approach your work and helps them relate your experiences to their own problems. So before they even reach out to you, you’ve earned their trust.
But What if I’m Not Good Enough?
This is the number one reason that stops people from sharing more online. I get it; it’s scary making something and putting it out there when you know for a fact that there’s so many people better than you. It stopped me from sharing too, I wanted to wait till I got “good enough” before I started to share.
Over time, what I realized was that you’ll never think you’re good enough because there will always be someone better than you. Someone who works much harder, someone who is a lot more skilled than you are, someone with years of experience on you and someone with big brands in their portfolio.
On the flipside, there’s always someone who’s just started and is looking for guidance. Someone who would get started if they only knew where to begin. Someone who’s worked on lesser projects than you have, someone who’s not put in as much time as you have.
Document your learning process in public. The way I started sharing more designs online and more articles about my work was by treating it as a process of documentation, but in public. With fast-paced changes in technology, there’s always a new or better way to do things that established experts in the field might not have considered. There’s innovation happening at the fringes, and by documenting publically, you’re making yourself a part of the tech adoption curve and bringing in awareness.
The selfish reason to put out content is simply that teaching and writing are the best ways to understand something. It forces you to distil abstract concepts into insights and explain it in simple words. Investing in your future this way will contribute to more inbound inquiries.
Where is This Content Hosted?
What’s just as important as creating content is where you’ll be putting it. I mentioned something similar earlier, and it applies here too: if you create content and nobody consumes it, does it even exist?
If you’re creating blog posts, you could create a Wordpress site for hosting it or you could post them on Medium.com.
If you’re creating videos, you could post them on YouTube or Vimeo.
If you’re creating graphics, you could post them on Pinterest, on your blog, or on graphic design specific sites like Behance or Dribbble.
Experiment with where you host your content and how it affects traffic. For example—if you create a blog on Wordpress, nobody will read it unless you drive traffic to it. On the other hand, if your blog is on Medium, it will be seen by their users, thanks to their inbuilt distribution.
Our approach to this was simple—we built websites for ourselves but also experimented with external platforms. You can check out abhinavc.com or varunmayya.com to see our public websites. Most of our inbound traffic and projects come from here.
The 48h Guide to a Personal Website
There’s two things you need to figure out to create a personal website: what you want to communicate, and how you will communicate it. The best way we’ve found to get a jumpstart is to create version one of your site within 48 hours. Putting this time constraint in place forces you to focus on getting something out there and not succumbing to procrastination.
The three essential sections your website needs to have, with screenshots of our personal sites
I get it; you want to put the best impression out there for potential clients and anything sub par doesn’t do justice to your skills and personality. But recognize that your quest for the perfect website will get in the way of having a website at all.
Content
Start with a pen and paper, and write down what you want to communicate. The three sections you need to focus on are:
Introduction: As soon as someone lands on your page, what is the first thing the need to know to set context for the rest of the site? This is your opportunity to sell yourself and set the right impression. It usually involves your name, what you do and what your skills are or just a bio. You can get creative here and experiment to find out the best way to communicate.
Your work: Show samples of your work and talk about what you did for that project. If you worked on the back end for an app, talk about the app, the challenge you faced and how long the engagement was. You can even go one step deeper and write case studies for each of your successful projects, wh
ere you mention the problem statement, how you approached it with your proposed solution and what was the outcome.
It is also a great idea to include links to your blog and other content in this section to get people to read further and get to know you.
The way to contact you: The final section, also called the Call To Action or CTA should be an easy way to get in touch with you. This can be your email address, a contact form, your phone number etc.
Design and Development
If your Pyjama Category is web or graphic design, this is an additional great way to showcase your skills. If not, that’s okay too, you have a couple options to create one quickly.
Webflow/Squarespace: This is an amazing web design tool that you can use if you’re a designer but don’t want to hand code your site. They also have templates you can use. These two options let you buy domain and hosting along with making the site too.
webflow.com
squarespace.com
Bootstrap/Wordpress themes: There are some great free and paid themes that you can customize with your content and host online.
Web hosting and domain
A domain name is the address clients will enter into their browser to access your site. Web hosting is the server that will serve your web page to their browser. Pick a domain name that is easy to remember and type. We’ve picked abhinavc.com and varunmayya.com, you can pick what you like depending on availability. You can buy the domain on a domain registrar service like Namecheap or Godaddy for an annual fee.
How Do People Find It?
Be sure to include the link to your personal website everywhere people might discover you. This includes your Upwork profile and also your Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Medium, email footer and so on.
Posting your website to social networks is the best way to get people to visit it. But, keep in mind that doing so just with the expectation of getting views can get too self-promotional Creating new content is a way of creating new touch point that will eventually lead back to your site.
For example, a blog post you write might get a lot of views, and some people might in turn check out your website.
Promoting your content
The most obvious way to promote your content or website is to post to HackerNews, Reddit, Quora, Facebook, Facebook groups, Twitter and other places where it can get discovered. But relying only on this will lead to two things:
Saturation: Your Facebook friends will click the first few links and then stop. And that’s okay; they’re not your target audience anyway.
Spam: Posting your own stuff on HackerNews and Reddit every week will either get you banned from the subreddit or gather negativity in the comments for self-promoting.
So what do you do instead?
Whenever you are posting your own content, be mindful of the rules of the community you’re posting in. Some are open to self-promotion, but others will ban you immediately.
Try to join the communities and make your voice heard. Genuinely contribute to discussions, questions from other members and things people need help with. When someone asks a question, help them out and link to your own content only when it is relevant. Use these topics of discussion to come up with content ideas to work upon.
The second step is to convert casual readers into a dedicated, recurring audience. Offer them a reason to sign up for your email list and use this to send them new content regularly. Without an email list, it’s like you’re hitting the refresh button on your audience and starting from zero every single time you post something new. Social media helps with audience building too, but it’s not as powerful as email because social updates are usually seen only by 10% of your followers depending upon the time of day and how news feed algorithms work. Email, on the other hand, can have open rates of up to 70% and is a 1:1 way of reaching out to your audience.
Let’s recap. The right way to build a personal brand is:
Work on enough projects and gain references to be notable in your field.
Create a personal website, Wordpress or a Medium blog.
Post original content that you’ve written on a regular basis. Pick a regular schedule, and stick to it, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly.
Build a recurring audience by creating a newsletter and sending out emails with this content.
Once you have more inbound projects coming in than outbound, you can wean off freelancing platforms and use them as only a secondary source. In the freelance community, you have now “made it”.
Chapter 8
The Art of the Cold Email
“You do whatever, and I mean whatever it takes to get a potential client on a call. Then you do whatever it takes to close them.”
—ALEX GONZALES
Cold to warm
Building a pipeline of projects by investing in your personal brand is a great option. But sometimes that might not be enough, and you might want to do better and take matters into your own hands, rather than wait for clients to reach out to you.
This is where your outbound strategy comes in. There are millions of freelancers who probably do the same things as us. How is it that some make money and get recognized, but many are struggling for clients? How do you use outbound strategies to keep a steady pipeline of client leads coming your way after Upwork?
Both of my questions were answered last year when I met one of the smartest salespeople I’ve come across in a long time— Alex Gonzales. Now Alex works for a multi-billion dollar company and we met on a forum for software tools on the social network, Reddit. Eventually we got talking about working together on a new idea, a sales tool for entrepreneurs like you and me. During that conversation, he taught me a very cool technique that several salespeople use on an everyday basis that I was missing out on. It uses a combination of tools and methods to achieve results, but when we put it into practise on some of the businesses we were running, I was astonished by how well it worked.
Sales is an integral part of the freelance game. If you can’t make a sale, it doesn’t matter how good your technical skills are. You’ll never land clients and you’ll get demotivated very quickly. So I’m going to lay out the exact technique used by every single successful software/services company out there, right here in this book. You don’t need another digital sales guide if you’ve absorbed this.
The general process of closing a sales prospect works something like this:
You find a list of prospects that might be interested in your freelance services.
You find their emails.
You send them personalized emails (or a generic email that seems like it’s been personalized).
You hop on a call with the potential client if they reply to your email.
You figure out (depending on their purchasing power, their requirements and your financial status) if there’s an opportunity to work together.
You close a deal and sign a contract that you will provide to the client.
What you’re actually doing is sending out cold emails to relevant potential clients and turning some of those cold prospects “warm”, that is, you’re trying to form a connection with these potential clients. You’re not selling up front, but rather having a chat with the prospective client on how you guys could potentially work together.
Let’s run over each step one by one. They’ve worked so many times both for me and others who have used these techniques that it just doesn’t make sense to me that there are people out there who don’t use them at work.
Step 1: Prospecting
To send out cold emails, we’re going to have to generate a relevant list of prospects. If you just send emails to thousands of people that have no connection to what you’re doing, then you risk being marked as a spammer and having your email id banned. We don’t want to spam people; we want to find clients who we can form a personal connection with.
For what we’re about to do, you need an account on the social network for professionals, LinkedIn. After logging in to LinkedIn, you click on the Sales Navigato
r tool and activate a one-month subscription (it’s free for the first month). Once you enter your details, click on the top right link, the Sales Navigator button. If you are a freelancer working in any of the Pyjama Categories, you want a prospect list that has decision makers of small-to medium-sized businesses that need your help. On Sales Navigator, key in the following details using the search function:
Demographic: United States (For this experiment, we’re going to target a country with a high Big Mac index.)
Industry: Marketing and Advertising, internet, Events Services, Information Technology and Software
Title: VP, CXO, Partner
Company Size: 20–1,000 employees (Any lower than 20 employees and the company probably cannot afford you yet. Any more than 1,000 employees and the company is too big for you to quickly close a freelance gig. It takes months to close a big company on a freelance gig – there’s better use of your time.)
Hit the Search button and wait for a relevant list of leads to show up. Now create a new excel sheet with the following structure:
The supplementary skill of data entry comes into play here.
One by one, we’re going to record the first name, last name, and company domain (eg: Microsoft.com) of each person we found on the LinkedIn search. For now, leave the email id blank. We’re going to use a very smart tool to figure out each person’s email id.
Fill in at least 100 rows so you don’t have to keep doing this again and again. There are several tools out there that speed up the task of saving details from LinkedIn to Microsoft Excel, but for now, we’re going to do it manually.
Step 2: Finding Emails
If you’ve followed Step 1 successfully, you now have a list of 100 decision makers from various companies across the United States. What we’re going to do now is find their emails using a tool that I stumbled upon in the initial days of Jobspire. To do this, we need to use EmailMatcher (http://emailmatcher.com/). There are several tools that do what EmailMatcher does, but for the purpose of this book, we’re going to stick to this one.