Ask Rezzz

As a part of the GDPR, all customers or users will have the right to request the data held on them, the right to have that data deleted if its original purpose has ceased, and the right to have that data transferred to a different provider.

Which means to provide an individual with the right to request, delete, or move their personal data, the individual must be aware that you as a company have the data to begin with. Without their awareness of you using their data, they have no actionable right. So the use of user or customer data through third party providers is likely to become quite complicated.

This would fall under the right-to-be-forgotten laws.

As you can see from the previous 5 sentences alone, there are lots of room for interpretation and questions to be answered. So best to consult your lawyer.

I can’t tell you how to make your business comply with GDPR because there are still so many gray areas (in my opinion) for the EU, that outside of the EU it’s even a darker gray.

What I can tell you is that if you are “doing right” by your email subscribers you are well on your way to being compliant.

What’s “doing right” mean?

It means that:

• you are doing double opt-in
• you are allowing folks to unsubscribe from every email
• if you are sharing email addresses via JV webinars, online summits, partnerships, etc with other businesses, you are sending transitional emails to those subscribers letting them know what you are doing with their email address and giving them an option to opt-out
• you share who else has their data and make sure that you understand (even sign, in some cases) what they are doing with the data. This includes 3rd parties such as Google, Facebook, etc.
• you aren’t selling your email list

In short, you are doing good business with good intentions.

You may also want to update your privacy policy on your website after the conversation with your lawyer.

Further resources:
12 Steps to take now
GDPR Requirements in Plain English

Action Items

1. Update your Privacy Policy
2. Add a checkbox to any lead magnet form and have the subscriber acknowledge what you intend on doing with their information after the lead magnet delivery
3. Find out what else you can do from your own email marketing service

In Drip and ConvertKit, you can segment your list to find those that are within the EU, add in GDPR specific settings into forms, and take actions to comply with the GDPR in other ways.

Here are some other platforms and how they are handling GDPR:
MailChimp
ActiveCampaign
HubSpot
AWeber
Constant Contact

In episode 36 - How to work from home effectively, I dove into 4   tips and discipline was the very first tip.

Then in episode 45 - How does the house run with 2 stay at home, freelancing parents, I shared 3 tactics that help the house to run smoothly while maintaining a high level of quality to our work.

Aside from those 7 tips, I want to answer you with something that I didn’t mention in those episodes.

That’s self-awareness. Let me explain what I mean in this episode.

Think about your own buying habits. Think of how others buy. Folks are tied to Apple products like it’s the only option out there, right? And to think they started by building computers that really couldn’t compete in the market. Then launched the iPod and took off. A tiny music player that folks could download music to and didn’t need to carry around CDs anymore. Now we’ve got iPhones and MacBooks all over the place right?

I was an early adopter of MP3 players and most of them sucked. Until the iPod. It was a very tiny niche (almost to say that it wasn’t even a niche). And it essentially revitalized a company.

If the niche is narrow and there are folks really looking to scratch that itch, they will pay for it and you’ll have raving fans for life.

I wrote a more in-depth blog post called the Definitive Guide to Start Freelancing Successfully that dives much deeper into each of the steps I outline here. 

Most freelancers don’t do the work that it takes to run a successful business, that’s why the term flakey freelancer exists. It’s why you hear freelancers talk about the feast or famine cycle all the time.

Following these 6 steps will set the foundation for you, in order to really level up your game to specialization and recurring revenue.

You’ll see patterns and gaps in the market that you can fill. You’ll become that goto person that people talk about when it comes to the service you offer. And bottom line, you’ll stay out of the famine and live in the feast.

If you are starting out in your freelance business, you probably don’t have a daily budget to run ads. Focusing on answering your clients questions, and being able to convert those visitors into leads on your site would be the better use of your resources.

SEO isn’t an overnight thing though. It takes time, it takes optimizations, for Google to start pulling you up in the ranks.

On the other hand, if you want to run an event, unless you have a large following, paid ads would make sense to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

I talk about folks doing creative things with Facebook Ads which you may want to take a page from if you are looking to attract a certain type of person or company.

But if you’re looking to keep that pipeline of leads full, looking to establish yourself long term, then your best bet is to concentrate on SEO, answer your client’s questions in the public forum of your blog to attract those leads who are asking Google those same questions. 

The number one thing would be to learn the language of your clients.

If you can understand what they mean when they are saying certain things to you, then can echo back to them, you instantly create that connection with them and build trust.

Number 2 is don’t wait for them to ask for an update.

Be out in front of them. You know you are doing the work, they know you are doing the work. But they don’t know where you are in the process. So shoot them off a simple email, maybe once or twice a week to let them know what’s going on.

Number 3, make memorable moments. Celebrate the wins.

Both you and your client work hard. Way too much we wallow in the bad things that happen and often don’t celebrate the wins that happen over the course of a project.

Your business is important. Not just for you, but for your clients. If you don’t make your business important and set that time aside, you won’t be around very long for your clients, right?

Here are 3 tips:
1. Wake up one hour early/or work one hour later if that’s more your speed and only work on your business tasks. This will not take away from your client work at all. In fact, you’ll be adding one more hour to your work day, but solely meant for working on the business, not in the business.
2. Plan your week in advance and set aside time in every single day to work on the business. If that means juggling around client work to make that happen, then do it.
3. Set aside one entire day for business tasks. This is usually hard for most people, especially if you are asking the question of the day here. But by doing so, you know that you are doing what you need to continue with the business moving forward. If you don’t need a full day, make it a half day. Even tell your clients that during that specific day you aren’t taking any phone calls or meetings.

I hate to break the news, but there isn’t a hack here.

This takes time, effort, consistency, and most of all, doing good work.

If you were to take several names of those “freelancer profiles” that you respect, what do they look like?

Have they been in the game for a long time?

Do they market themselves effectively?

Do they work with some of the best names?

How do their clients talk about them?

and maybe the most important aspect of their profile is…

What sort of focused solution are they providing? 

The reason this is important to pay attention to is that I guarantee you that every single person you respect, has invested a great deal of time to hone their craft. 

They aren’t jumping over to the newest shiny object in web development every 3-6 months.

They get great at one thing and evolve with that. They become the goto person for that particular technology.

That’s not to say that they didn’t start by being a general web developer. Most have in fact. But they quickly realized that they were great at one thing, or enjoyed working on a specific platform, or even found themselves working with some of the best companies in a particular industry.

By focusing on that, it allowed them to focus the time and energy on that thing and not all the things.

They then rise quicker through the ranks, or as you said, build a good freelancing profile, because they are providing value in ways that generalist developers don’t. 

The companies and people they work with spread the word among their colleagues.

Their street cred rises and things like testimonials, projects, and even rates begin to stack up.

There are other ways in which to market yourself to help boost your profile too.

One of which is through podcasting.

Let me explain what I mean by this. 

When I first starting down the road of becoming a WooCommerce developer, I was coming from a Ruby on Rails and custom PHP development world. Very much a generalist.

I wasn’t known in the WordPress space at all. But I did enjoy listening to podcasts and talking geek with other developers.

Through the socials I had a conversation with another dev who was building a business as well and as we were sharing experiences, we both had toyed around with the idea of starting a podcast.

A month later, we did just that. It was a round table like discussion talking about any and all things WordPress with myself, him and we’d bring on another dev or 2 to join in.

The podcast itself only lasted 19 episodes, but his company wound up being bought out by a very premium WordPress agency and I become known in the WordPress space as the WooCommerce guy.

Maybe a year or 2 later, I would be talking with Troy Dean, founder of WP Elevation, an accelerator course for WordPress consultants and very well know in the WordPress space. 

He had mentioned that his business mentor said to become one of the top 20 people in your space, you need the top 20 people in your space talking about you.

So Troy said, well if I have a podcast and invite the top 20 WordPress people to come on my show, then they’ll be sharing out the podcast and talking about my show.

And that’s what podcasting can do. Very quickly you can build up marketing around what you do. You can definitely get a lot of people aware of who you are and your profile.

But you still need to deliver value and show up each and every single day. There’s no fast path to having a great reputation, but there is a fast path for destroying that reputation.

If you show up each and every day, do good work, and genuinely care about who it is that you serve, the rest will fall right into place.

This question is inspired by 2 people, one is Scott, a Feast member, who sent me an email yesterday that said “I don’t know how you find the time to do all you do.”

Then another person who I’ve known for some time through Twitter, Amber Turner. Go check out her site and amberturner.com. She posted a great article talking about her life transition in both her freelancing and personal life.

In this article she talked about and I’m paraphrasing a bit here, on how the content around freelancing talks about things that other freelancers have done in the past, but are out of touch because they no longer do freelancing. 

Or content that’s focused on the business end of freelancing. This content even talks about how freelancing can give you the life you want, yet doesn’t talk about the life part of it, or the journey as they walk through it.

You aren’t alone Amber. I’ve noticed both of these types of content a lot lately too. Freelancing has been around for a while now and I feel that if you are a few steps removed from your last freelance gig, then you may also be a few steps removed from what’s working today.

I also talk about living the kind of life you want a great deal. I try to mix in what’s going on in my life with the house, family, friends, etc, but I know I could provide a bit more of an insight as well. So that’s the inspiration for today’s show.

My wife is a newly minted freelancer, and she’s doing that so that she can be home with TJ, our one year old son. She has some clients and so has some work to do, but is able to manage them during naps, waking up before TJ does and breaks during the day.

Since I’m more established, I tend to work full long days and the majority of the income for the house.

One thing that we both want though is to be home for TJ, take him to things like Gymboree and swimming lessons, spend some time in the yard because it’s an awesome and sunny day.

In order to keep us both on the same page so that we can get stuff done, we coordinate our calendars at the beginning of the week. We make sure that if one of us has calls to take, that the other blocks that time off in case TJ is up and about (which means that we have to chase him down from playing with cabinets and cat food).

Another thing that we do is make sure that we each get time to our selves. Whether than means getting out of the house to meet up with friends for an evening, or if Grandma comes over to babysit for a little bit while we get out for a nice quiet dinner.

A final thing is that if one of us has a deadline or some high priority work, the other makes sure to block off, even change around their schedule so that there’s TJ coverage. May even be that to ensure a quiet house, a store run with TJ happens.

Communication is key here. Let’s be real, the house wouldn’t be in order if it weren’t for Joanna. She really is the glue that holds it all together. And she deserves all the credit.

So thank you Scott and Amber for today’s inspiration. 

I hate to answer a question with a question, but are you focused on local businesses?

If so and the size of your market can't support your business then focusing on a specific industry may be too restrictive.

For more on exploring your market and the industry head on over to read, listen and explore the Step By Step Guide to Specialization
 
On the flipside, if you can have a handful of outstanding, recurring, residual clients in a specific industry that support your business, you can charge a premium for those services.