I honestly should have started this project the second I started freelancing. Being a new freelancer though, I had to work my way through a lot of weak assumptions and mistakes before I found a plan that genuinely connected with what clients actually wanted.
I’m going to share a few of those with
you today and I want you to see if you’ve been doing anything similar with your business. Remember…as much as you might want to get started right this second, these issues are important to identify because they’re clues to refining your own version of this project — You want your version to work as well as possible for your freelance world. The BlackFreelance Academy is all about getting you over these hurdles as quickly as possible, so keep in mind, a little time-investment here can
pay off big in the long term.
- I assumed major client pain points were bigger than they actually were: I looked at healthcare and saw a desert of bad content. I decided I was going to fix it with massive blog series, sprawling content libraries, and piles of case studies. Turns out, what most of my clients were most bothered by (and willing to pay for) was much more simple…things
like dead blogs, boring service sheets, and ineffective websites.
- I focused too much on selling what I liked doing: I love writing case studies…they’re like telling stories, but with numbers and a specific goal. They also pay really well in my industry ($750+ per page). I pushed those and even made a spinoff site. I do get them occasionally, but they tend to be rare and I haven’t figured out
how to best nail down the companies looking for them, at least not without burning a ton of time digging. I’m getting much more consistent results getting people going on blogs (which is actually a good way to kick off a simple relationship that can grow into that case study business.)
- I didn’t connect my blog solution to actual client goals: I’m a writer. I’ve always offered blogging. These clients have always needed blogging. Problem
was, that I wasn’t framing the description of my blogging in a way that told them why it would help them. (I also wasn’t packaging it boldly in a way that made it seem like something they couldn’t necessarily do in-house, but we’ll talk about that more in the future.)
- I blew right past simplicity: Blogging isn’t fancy, so I figured nobody would care. I was wrong. It’s so simple that almost everybody wants to do it, and they
want to do it right. Doing it right is what I’m selling.
Look at the services you offer now. What assumptions are they based on? Are they targeted toward the problems your clients/publications have, or are they centered around what you want to produce? How can you change that?
Let me know what you
think.
Next week, we start talking about the process:)
Megan.