Increase your side income by selling your expertise. By Ryan Robinson Updated February 17, 2016 Since I started brandi...
Increase your side income by selling your expertise.
Updated
February 17, 2016
Since
I started branding myself as an authority on content
marketing last
year, I've experienced a rapid increase in clients for one of my
side businesses: freelance content marketing.
In
the last year alone, I've gone from zero clients, to writing for the
world's top business publications, working with high-growth
startups, and NY Times Bestselling authors, helping them grow their
online audiences.
Even
more impressive is that I’ve never been in a position where I had
to negotiate for the premium fees I command for my services.
It
definitely didn't happen overnight, though. My quick rise to
becoming an expert within my industry, while only working on my
freelance business part-time, is the result of careful planning,
hours of hard work, and meaningful relationship building. If you're
still looking for the right business to get into, check out these
fifteen side
business ideas that you can launch this weekend.
Here
are my eight steps to becoming a highly paid expert, while you still
keep your day job.
1.
Start in a Small Niche.
If
you hope to become a sought-after expert within your industry, you
need to start small, be specific, and be thoughtful about how you go
about choosing your first set of clients.
Instead
of being a marketing consultant for small business owners, take your
approach to a much more hyper-targeted level.
Aim
to become the absolute best social media marketing expert for
dentists. If you specialize to this degree, you'll be able to build
a portfolio that shows your impressive experience helping other
dentists acquire more customers for their business. This will serve
as valuable ammo in your pursuit to bring on new clients.
After
you've created some credibility for yourself within the community of
dentists, you'll be able to leverage your positive customer
experiences to move without as much friction into the broader
healthcare industry.
2.
Constrain Your Service Offerings.
Decide
right now what you do, and what you don't do.
Being
ultra-specific about the exact types of services you offer (and to
whom) will help you brand yourself, better control the way you're
perceived by potential clients, and will afford you the opportunity
to continue adding more helpful relevant client work to your
portfolio.
3.
Know Your Target Clients.
Naturally,
before you become an "expert," within your field, you need
to start by working with a very specific set of clients. As we
covered in the example above, making big distinctions between what
you do and who you do it for is essential to pitching
your services and
winning high-value clients.
Ask
yourself these two questions, in order to define which types of
clients you should be going after:
-
Which problems do my services solve? (Be specific).
-
What types of businesses have the problems I'm best at solving?
Defining
a very clear target customer and positioning yourself to stand out
from the crowd to them, is covered extensively in
CreativeLive’s
4.
Build a Website.
There's
no clearer way to say it. If you don't have a website that tells
prospective clients about you, how you can help them, and shows
examples of how you've helped similar clients in the past, you do
not stand a chance of being perceived as an expert in your field -
even if you already are.
If
you don't share your expertise with the world, how can you expect
people to otherwise acknowledge your work? Having a
high quality portfolio site is
a must. With your website, be sure to communicate:
-
What you do and who you do it for.
-
Past (relevant) work for the type of clients you want to work with more.
-
Your personality and brand image.
-
Your contact information.
One
more thing: Please have a quality head shot of yourself. Clients
want to know who they're reaching out to, before they strike up a
conversation. They'll want to know if you're going to be a good fit
for their brand.
5.
Improve Upon Your Most Valuable Skills.
Becoming
an expert means doing one thing and doing it very well (at least as
a starting point). You'll need to stay very close to what's trending
in your industry, push yourself to learn new skills, techniques,
strategies, and forego opportunities that won't help you continue
building your core skills.
Don't
confuse this with having to go back to school. Depending upon your
field of interest, there will be a multitude of online learning
opportunities like a Skillcrush
Blueprint or
CreativeLive business
classes that
can accelerate your skills on your own time - for a significantly
smaller financial investment than traditional higher education.
6.
Set Your Prices.
Making
the call on how
much you're going to charge for
your time and services is a big decision. It tells potential clients
what your perceived value is, so you never want to price yourself
toward the bottom (or middle) of the market if you're branding
yourself as an expert.
In
my experience, the type of high-value clients that recognize the
benefit of hiring skilled experts, will not hesitate to pay higher
rates, if it means having that much better quality of an end result.
Experts don't compete on price, they compete on value. In the
situation that a potential clients tries to negotiate lower prices,
flip the conversation around and instead focus on adding more value
- and further explaining the value you'll be delivering.
7.
Use Your Relationships.
From
pitching friends at your target companies, to leveraging former
co-worker relationships to get your name in front of the
decision-makers at the businesses you're going after, using
connections to make warm introductions is a great alternative to a
cold email.
Whenever
I discover freelance content marketing opportunities, I'll first
check on LinkedIn to see if I have a contact at the company, or if
there's a mutual connection that'd be willing to make an
introduction. When your first impression is endorsed by reputable
source already within the company, you're all but guaranteed to at
least be considered.
8.
Perfect Your Pitching.
Until
you've established a huge brand name for yourself, the reality is
that you're going to need to sell yourself. Becoming a pro at
pitching your services and effectively landing contracts is a major
part of being a freelancer. I actually built an online course
about winning
freelance clients,
and I even give away my freelance
proposal template completely
free.
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