Ask Rezzz

Don't get me wrong here, you don't have to have them, but I think if you are looking to be as successful as you can be as a freelancer, these 6 traits are what you should be aware of.

1. Patience
2. Determination
3. Discipline
4. Curiosity
5. Know your strengths/weaknesses and be able to adjust
6. Take imperfection action

I dive a little deeper into each of these with examples and experiences in this episode. 

By “you” focus, I mean that you want to make your emails about the other person, not about you, your business.

Kai Davis wrote an amazing piece around this on and I’ll link that in the show notes. He shows you exactly how to write a You Focused email.

Here is the simple 4-step process I dive into for cold emailing for freelancers

1. Compliment them
2. Spend time researching for a quick win to provide them
3. Provide them a resource to find out more about that quick win
4. Share with them the benefit of your service

By going into cold emailing with the intention of educating and serving the recipient first, you’ll be way more successful in the end.

These 4 things for me are critical to the success of the project.

In order to land higher priced projects, clients need to understand and be willing to pay those prices. 

Remember price is subjective, you want it as high as possible. Whereas the client wants it as low as possible.

To make the pricing conversation steer clear of other suitors, you and the client have to be a fit for each other. 

Premium freelance clients will have thought about their project and what it means for their business for more than 30 minutes after having a conversation with a friend at a BBQ.

Premium freelance clients will also understand the value someone  brings to them because they’ve thought about an ROI to the project that’s acceptable to them. They realize that by putting $X they hope to get $Y back.

In this episode I'll explain how you can do this effectively so you’ll diminish or remove altogether, the gap between your high price and their low price.

This question came by way of Scott inside of Feast - the membership community for freelancers looking to specialize their business and build recurring revenue inside their freelance business.

I asked him why he was asking me this question. He simply said that since I do perform services work, run the program, produce all sorts of free content, and then still have time to be with the family, how’s that possible?

So I had to think about it and to be quite honest, it’s just a matter of making things a priority.

I share with you my process and how I get things done I want to get done.

There are 3 points I want to make here to help you on the path to shifting your business into recurring revenue.

1. You must nail down your offer and solution
2. Know exactly who you are talking to and talk in their own language
3. You have to stick to your guns

In Episode 6 - What’s the best way to pivot if you are serving a new niche? 

I shared with you a bunch of tactics that would apply to this question to, so definitely go have a listen to that as well.

Your skills are advancing and you want to be able to grow the revenue accordingly. What will happen though is that your growth of revenue will start to plateau and hit a ceiling.

If you haven’t already, you need to niche down or specialize your business. 

Start to figure out what problems you are solving for your clients over and over again.

Start figuring out which clients of yours that you work with the best.

Start figuring out an industry or even technology that you are working with to deliver the solution.

By doing this, you can start to build and increase your profitability.

You’ll start to deliver the solution quicker and more effectively. You’ll start to be able to anchor your price to the value of the return the client gets, not to the time you are actually billable. 

Your client sees a price that is a no brainer for them to spend when the ROI on that investment is proven time and time again.

My suggestion was for her to take a look at their website, check out their forums for both opportunities where their customers were struggling with the plugin, but mainly for websites where her services as a translator would help.

Another thing I suggested to her was to reach out to the makers of the plugin and see if you can get onto the radar of their support team as a translator.

Look around online using a tool like builtwith.com and search for sites using WPML, and build up an outreach list of sites that have poor translations.

She emailed back to me last week and told me that she’s landed 8 gigs and 3 of them are recurring. She’s now looking to move up a bit and become an exclusive freelance translator for 5 clients on a monthly basis. You go get ‘em Mia.

If you are looking to start out or break through a particular industry, look within that space and see what the top vendors are and make friends.

Even if the opportunity to make friends isn’t there, no doubt you can find other businesses using those top vendors that could be struggling with something that you can help with.

Being a freelancer is about solving problems. Go ahead and seek out the problems that you can solve, show how you solve them and you’ll be successful at business and ultimately a freelancer.

Though on the business side is where you differentiate yourself.

Your organization skills, follow-up, how you document aspects of the project, how you deliver on whatever it is that you are doing, and the customer experience.

All these things matter in creating a buzz around how you do what you do and create a word of mouth to other folks around what you do.

The best suggestion I can offer here is to get yourself into a great community of other freelancers.

Go to events and network with other business folks.

Online communities are a plenty for sure. But there are a handful that are outstanding for freelancers to learn to hone their craft.

WP Elevation is amazing if you work with WordPress.

CMA, or the Content Marketing Academy is great if you are a writer.

If you are looking to remain a solo freelancer, Feast, which is our online community, will help you niche down and build recurring revenue.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing only happens when you don’t learn from your stumbles.

But that’s what I’m hear to try and help you with, right? To help you get past the bumps in the road or as many of those bumps that I hit along the way.

The caveat here is that what works for me, may not work for you. Every business is different. How you work is different than how I work. But I’ll try and explain why I enjoy using each of these tools.

My mindset is that the tool should get out of the way of my every day. If I have to remember to use it, or it’s something where I have to turn my business around to use, it’s not for me.

The 5 tools that I use every day in my business that keeps me sane, keeps my clients happy, and serves my business. 

Sure I have a bunch of others, but these are the ones that get out of the way of me doing business and have solved so many hurdles and manual processes for me. 

At the end of episode 63, I no doubt left you thinking 2 questions which I’ll hope to shed some light on for you.

Why did you talk yourself out of $12,500.

I looked at an opportunity to make more than that. It comes down to simple math really.

If I spend 10 hours working on solving a problem for a client and make $2500 on that, my effective hourly rate is $250 per hour.

It lowers my risk to work with this client, and the opportunity of them being happy much faster is much greater.

On the other hand, if I spend 6 weeks and roughly about 30 hours a week doing a complete redesign of their website, my effective hourly rate is $83.

The risk is high on both sides from both a cost and time perspective. The risk is also higher because we don’t fully understand if the redesign will result in the goal the client has.

What if I don’t do ecommerce, how can I quantify the value for the client?

In content marketing, design, writing, social media and many other types of projects, it’s often hard to quantify the ROI a client will have.

Reflect back on the 3 buckets of saving time, making money, or making money faster. Find which bucket your client falls into. In these cases it’s often that time matters to the client.

They’d much rather use their time to work on the business or on sales calls or building business relationships. 

In this episode you'll learn about a tactic that I have used and others have used to really connect with the person you are meeting with, without saying a word.