starting Archives - The Freelancer Head Start

FHS 32 Where to Start

Freelancer Head Start — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:00:46 +0000

Listen To the Podcast Now

Where to Start

Most freelancers or entrepreneur start off as moonlighters working on side projects. You can transition into a full-time endeavor when you’re ready to take the plunge. “When” is always up to you, but starting a business may not be as hard as you think. Keeping the business running and operating is the real challenge. But we’ll get to that part soon enough. For now, let’s take things one step at a time. No matter what type of business you want to start, you will need these basic 6 steps.

When you’re just starting out and wondering where to start, your mind is full of tons of ideas that you just want to get out there and hit the ground running. But hold up a minute, we need to start planning this out. We’ll first need to find out who our customers are. We need to research our customers and do what is called “market research”.

Who, specifically, are you going to be facing (niche)
What is the problem that you’re hearing the most often
What are they willing to pay
Is it sustainable
Where do they hang out

Finding your customers, what their pain-points, and understanding the value of your services is going to give you that head start that you’re looking for.

After you’ve got a grasp on who and where your clients are. You’re ready to make things legal with your state, federal, and the IRS. Register yourself will help keep them off your back so you can make transactions happen without having to worry about Uncle Sam.

I have an interview with a CPA about taxes and registering with the IRS to keep them off your back. Check out FHS 3: http://freelancerheadstart.com/llc-vs-s-corp-and-the-tax-man/

During the registration process, you’re able to also get yourself a bank account. You need to keep your personal and business money separate, so go ahead and take care of that now.

Once you’re good and registered with a shiny new bank account, you can move onto getting an online presence. The world is smaller than you think and getting online will help you reach all corners of the earth. Grab yourself a domain name and host to do it yourself or purchase a pre-made package. A better and ideal way would be to hire a professional to take care of and grow your online presence while you work on your business.

When you’ve got a place to shuffle clients to see what you’re about, online marketing can help you gain even more traction. You’ll be able to focus your sales funnel, track engagement, and carry clients through your pipeline. As a result, you’ll be able to have a steady flow of potential clients.

And finally, when you’re look for where to start, always ask for help. Don’t be shy to talk to people about what your idea is or what your planning on doing. Make friends in your industry, reach out to Meetup groups, engage in forums and blogs, and generally “show up”. You’ll be surprised at how many people are going to be willing to help you through your tough times. The second pair of eyes and ears can bring about a new perspective on what you’re trying to do!

How to Get Clients

Finding and getting clients is one of the most common challenge for freelancers and entrepreneurs. There really isn’t a secret to finding clients, you have to put in some social effort and go where they are! To find clients, you need to have something that someone needs and be willing to pay for it. The easiest way to get a client is to show them how you are going to better that client from where they are now. They are essentially investing in what you have to offer to help them 2x, 10x, or 20x their returns.

In order to get your clients rolling in, you first need to work on your client profile. You need to be able to pick your client type, industry, and budget level out of a lineup. If you don’t know who your target client is, you’ll be shouting into the void hoping someone will stop by. Finish this sentence, then you’ll be ready to begin finding and winning clients

“I help __________ to __(single group of people)__ who have a yearly profit of _____________”

What you’re doing is making it easier for you to combine your services or products with the companies or people out there. Finally you can start using that to start looking for clients with laser focus.

Common places to find clients includes

Job Boards
Conferences
Chatroom
Face-to-face networking events
Cold calls
Cold emails
Yellow Pages

If you’re like me, you want to maximize your exposure to potential clients and not a huge fan of shaking hands and kissing babies. Well, there are a lot of online sources where you can find GREAT clients and start to work on your sales funnel. Here is a rundown list of where to find clients and jobs online that I’ve used in the past:

Once you’ve identified your niche, your client profile, and potentially where they’re hanging out, you’ll be able to create a proper sales/client funnel. Where to start is becoming more clearer.

Basic Funnel

Here are the steps that you’ll need to do EVERY DAY to keep your pipeline steady. Take at least an hour:

Visit each site above and filter to find projects.
1. Subscribe to RSS feed or email to get listings automatically
Bookmark or note at least 5 potential
Research each lead
1. Carefully read the description – understand the goal of the work
2. Research the contact person and company. Learn their products, competitors, etc.
Contact the lead through email
1. User verbiage that quick, short, and to the point. Don’t come off as sleazy, rude, or know-it-all. Keep it casual.
2. Include information that you researched
3. Include a simple call-to-action that lets you know they might be interested
Followup with the sent email at least twice, per listing. Once every week.

That’s a basic sales cycle for cold-emails, but it will help get your pipeline steady with potential clients who may need your services. The pattern is similar if you meet people face to face or on the phone. Don’t think you have to stick to one type of client outreach. You can use combinations if you’re comfortable.

Validate an Idea

So you’ve got a big idea or service that you think will change the world, but you don’t know if it will fly or where to start. Do NOT pursue an idea or product unless you have a little glimpse of proof that you wont be wasting time or money. Sometimes the market is not ready, sometimes you may need to tweak something, sometimes you’ll find something WAY better. Validate your ideas or products with market research. A little goes a long way!

Market Research is a technique you can use to validate your idea. Market research also will help you find that group of people that your product may be interesting to. You can break market research (finding and researching your customers) into two sub tasks; finding customers and reaching customers.

You’re going to want to do what is called “market research” to help validate your idea

Who, specifically, are you going to be facing (niche, market, clients, customers)
What is the problem that you’re hearing the most often
What are they willing to pay
Is it sustainable
Where do they hang out

I talk with Patrick Selby about how he focused on the “What” with a few pointers and what he learned from his mistakes. Check out FHS 19: http://freelancerheadstart.com/fhs-19-market-research-building-product/

Additional Sources

http://www.reddit.com Sub-Reddits specific to your industry
https://stackexchange.com/ – A list of communities where people ask specific questions. Perfect for collecting common, popular, and hot problems.
https://feedly.com/i/welcome – Feedly is an aggregator of websites that funnels everything into a single dashboard. You can subscribe to a bunch of websites that give you up to date content that you can consume in a single location. You will get a better understanding of what is commonly being said across your industry.
Mailing list – Create or join a mailing list to collectively gather people who will be your potential clients/customers. You can then interact with this gold mine to get ideas or questions answered.
Conferences/Tradeshows – You can’t beat the ‘heard it from the horse’s mouth’ effect. Hit the pavement and attend shows or conferences that are specific to your niche. You’ll be able to rub elbows with your clients and get a direct quote of what their problems may be.

I would honestly spend about 40-60 hours of effort to find and research your customers. If you can understand what your audience is thinking, what their pains are, and a way to help, you’re ready to position yourself as the expert!

Running your Business

Running your business day in and day out may be the easier part of being a Freelancer or Entrepreneur. You’ll get into the rhythm of things and do a lot of your processes automatically. You’ll also get to a point where you can use tools to help take care of the lower-hanging fruit for you. Such as your invoicing, email marketing, contacts, client on-boarding, and other task.

The main rule for being self employed: 1/2 your week is finding clients/work and business admin tasks…the other half is active work

Don’t think that you’re going to be up to the ceiling in client work. You have to keep your machine running and clients coming in. You have to make sure the bills are literally paid, your emails are sent, and your plants are watered. This goes outside of physical client work and we sometimes forget that part of working for ourselves.

Plan your day (or week) where you work on your business and yourself. Don’t overestimate the amount of work you’ll need for client work and pace yourself.

Don’t Forget about Yourself

When you start down the road of actually servicing clients and producing contents or widgets, you’ll slowly start to forget to work on yourself. We get caught up in servicing our clients and customers with 100% of our efforts, we don’t think we need the same amount of effort or services for ourselves. We think that since we’re the experts, we don’t need our own help.

Candace Schilling and I chat about ‘minding your own business’ and working on ourselves. Check out FHS 24: http://freelancerheadstart.com/fhs-24-minding-your-own-business-ft-candace-schilling/

When I, myself, was starting out I slowly noticed that I was polishing my clients websites more than myself. I was putting it a lot more effort into their content and website rather than my own….. We’re the experts but sometimes we need to look internally at our business or ourselves to make sure that we’re using our own talents. We sometimes forget that WE are the experts! Don’t forget to turn our own skills on ourselves

Take a Time Out

Leave time in the week and the day for yourself. Unwind and de-compress. Your business is mostly you and its WILL suffer if you overwork yourself. Make it a priority to take an hour a day to do nothing. Have lunch outside of your work area. Go see a movie. Walk in the park. Play a level of your fave video game. Whatever it takes, make sure you pause your work day. Where to start will depend on your personality, but allot time out of your day to take a breath.

Use tools to your advantage

It’s 2018….don’t fight the digital age! Adopt a few and simple tools that are going to make your everyday work easier. Since we’re in the digital age, we’re also able to work online with most of our content and tools. Here are the two main tools that I use almost daily to run my business:

Dropbox – Free for 2GB. Up to 1TB of space on paid plan

Dropbox is a dynamic synchronizing file stored on your devices. It automatically back things up to the cloud and allows you the ability to access the files and content from anywhere you want or need with your freelancer tools.

Dropbox is my main work space because it allows me grab files, share content, and move things around multiple machines whenever i need. I also use Dropbox to allow my clients a quick and easy way to send me files if needed.

Check it out here: https://db.tt/i1gKYQepsg [Referral/affiliate link]

Get Harvest – http://try.hrv.st/1-294321 (Free for 2 project OR $130/year for unlimited)

Harvest is my go-to for invoicing. It definitely pays for itself with your first client. You can send out an invoice and give the option of 2 payment routes: PayPal or Stripe. Invoices get sent electronically either with a PDF, link, or an email where the clients can pay online directly. You get reporting on who is late and who paid on time. The invoices also have automatic reminders that are sent out at specific intervals.

You can also use Harvest to keep track of time to bill hourly (which is what I use daily), keep track of projects, and keep track of expenses. Reporting is not bad. It won’t tell you categories in your spending like Mint does, but it will let you know if you’ll be pretty close to blowing your budget out the water in overspending. If you have a team of more than one person, you can also keep track of spending and income per-person or per project.

Conclusion

Working for yourself is a fun and exciting challenge and is full of different paths on where to start. You’re the boss and you make all the decisions…good or bad. It may not all be roses and peaches at the end of the rainbow, but for most, its SO worth it! This shouldn’t discourage you from starting down the path of becoming self employed.

To sum it up, these are the 6 starting points when you wanna work for yourself and where to start.

Don’t think your idea or product is stupid one. You never know what you’re going to find with market research and validation.

Start by finding clients online and create a basic sales funnel. From there, you can refine what works for you and where your niche clients are hanging out.

Take time out of the day and week to take care of yourself and that business admin work. There are tons of tools out there that you can use to make your day-to-day easier. Don’t push yourself to the limits and burn out. Its too easy to do that in the beginning.

And lastly, don’t forget to work on your own business! We sometimes forget that we need our own help. Take a look at your own processes and look for ways to improve or change it.

Once you go down the route of becoming your own boss, yes, you’ll com across a lot of obstacles. But I promise you that it only looks like a mountain from where you’re standing. Take that first step and you’ll realize you’re only on a small hill.

The post FHS 32 Where to Start appeared first on The Freelancer Head Start.

FHS 1: Starting Off Right

Freelancer Head Start — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 06:12:15 +0000

Listen To the Podcast Now

Have you ever wanted to be your own boss but didn’t know where to start? Ever wondered how to start your own business or get your ideas off the ground? Do you feel stuck and overloaded in today’s tech savvy world? Do you shake your fists at these new fandangled websites and gadgets? If you said yes to most or all of these questions; this show is for you! The Freelancers Head Start podcast helps with just how and where to take that first step.

Starting a business may not be as hard as you think. Keeping the business running and operating is the real challenge. But we’ll get to that part soon enough. For now, let’s take things one step at a time. No matter what type of business you want to start, you will need these basic 6 steps.

1 Research Your Customers

Who are you trying to attract to your goods and services? Just because you have an idea, does NOT mean that people are willing to buy. You should test the waters before you dive in. Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT skip this step. You will sink time and money chasing a dream and eventually burn out.

You’re going to want to do what is called “market research”

Who, specifically, are you going to be facing (niche)
What is the problem that you’re hearing the most often
What are they willing to pay
Is it sustainable
Where do they hang out

Finding your customers, what their pain-points, and understanding the value of your services is going to give you that head start that you’re looking for.

Click Here to Read More

2 Register Yourself

Once you’ve identified your customers and audience, you can then focus on registering yourself. You’re also going to be working on what you’re going to call yourself. You can name your business almost anything you want. Registering your business provides legal protection for yourself, your goods/services, as well as your assets.

Work on a name for you business that mixes creativity and the market research you just performed. Right now, we’re not going to focus on if it’s already been used. You want to just have a brain dump of possible business names.

When you have a few names that you want to use, sleep on it. See how you feel the next day. Once you’ve honed in on a single name, it’s time to register. Each state has different requirements on registration.

You’re going then circle on a Business Structure for your business. They vary on what your goals are for the business, how much risk you are comfortable with, and what tax benefits are you after.

Most people choose either LLC or S-Corp. In a nutshell, LLC separates your personal assets from your business assets. This is good in case your LLC faces a lawsuit or bankruptcy. There are also tax benefits, profit/loss benefits, and legal benefits that may be attractive to you.

An S-Corp is a special type of Corporation that has a whole different range of tax benefits, profit/loss structure, and legal standings. Your business can also take on shareholders and other tax havens with an S-Corp. All of these are specific to each state

During registration, you will be notified if your name is already taken. Personally, I would check to see if the domain for you business is already taken THEN check your state’s Entity names. Quickly put in your business name into a search engine and see if a website exists. If you’ve found that both the Domain Name and Entity Name are available, go ahead and register!

Congrats! You’ve just made yourself legal. Let’s talk about getting your finances lined up to start taking in payments the right way.

Bonus Interview: LLC vs S-Corp and The Tax Man

Click Here to Read More

3 Finances

Once you’ve finally registered with your state, you’re going to then hop over to the IRS and grab yourself a unique Tax ID. Why do you need a Tax ID? Well, because you’re going to reach a point where your business is making some decent money and you don’t want the government to come in and seize it all. Al Capone didn’t go down for drug charges…..i’ll just say that.

You’re also going to be using your Tax ID to open up a business bank account. This is your new financial operating point of your business. Head down to your favorite bank and ask them about the details of their Business Accounts. Some banks have yearly fees, or minimum amounts, or other special requirements. Go ahead and create an account with an institution you feel comfortable with.

The other reason that you will want a Business Bank account is because you will eventually get to a stage where you may need to take out business loans or other credit-required actions. Even if you think you will never take out a loan or borrow money, you want to set yourself up now for future in-case situations. Building a relationship and credit with your bank will help in the long run.

Make sure you only spend or receive money that is specific to your business. DO NOT MIX YOUR PERSONAL MONEY WITH THIS BANK ACCOUNT. You will screw yourself over royally because you’ve just created a DIRECT path to all of your personal assets. Which will-be and can-be seized if you’re ever faced with a lawsuit or bankruptcy.

That Tax ID can also be used when purchasing bulk or wholesale items. You’ll be doing taxes at the end of the year (or quarterly) with that specific Tax ID and will be tied to your profit/losses for your business.

Now that you have everything registered and set up to take in money, let’s get you online!

Click Here to Read More

4 Get Online

When you registered with your state and federal level, hopefully you found that your business does not exist as a website. Hop over to a domain registration website such as WhoIs.com or domaincheap.com. From there, you’re going to register your website name. A website name is basically an online address that tells browsers and device where to go when people pop in your website name. They’re relatively cheap and should run you about $10-15/year.

After you’ve registered your domain name, you’re going to then want hosting. Hosting is the space for you physical files that live on a server. This will be your images, text, files, and content that live on your website. Based on your business, your hosting can fluctuate in price and complexity.

You can use all-in-one solutions such as Squarespace or Wix. You can also hire a professional to take care of all of this for you. Choosing an all-in-one solution may box you into a product that limits what you can and can’t do with your website. A professional developer will be able to develop a solution for you that will match your business goals and online platform you need.

You’re almost done with the basics. Next step is to get the word out about your business.

5 Marketing

Marketing is one step that a lot of freelancers and entrepreneurs tend to skip or gloss over. Marketing does not mean that you have to have that 50’ billboard on the main highway. You can start off small and grow to needing a second blimp during the Super Bowl.

There are essentially 2 different routes to marketing; organic and paid. Each route requires you to have already done research on your customers. We need to know where they hang out, what problems they are having, how you can solve it, and what they’re willing to pay. If you can answer these questions, then you can easily market.

Organic marketing is using free tools such as word of mouth, referrals, social media, emails, and your website. The cost for organic marketing should be low to none since you’re relying on people naturally finding you. Expect to see slow but steady response if you’re consistent.

Paid marketing is a combination of banner ads, search engine ads, or video ads that are created. You would then create rules about where, when, and who sees the ads to ensure maximum ROI. The larger the audience and the longer the ads, the more this route will cost. You will see the quickest response with this route, but it may not translate into a direct sale every time.

Start off with organic marketing to get a rhythm going. Once you start to get a stronger and stronger following, you’ll be able to maximize the effectiveness of a paid advertising campaign.

Click Here to Read More

6 Get Help!

There is not a single organization or company that has been successful by itself. There are is a mountain of resources and help out there that you can take advantage of. Do not be afraid to reach out and just ask. You’ll be surprised to find that a lot of people are very willing to help with what you’ve got going on. By you asking someone for help on a particular topic or piece of your business, your telling that person that you value their opinions and view them as an expert. How can they NOT be flattered?!

Do not think you have to do this alone. Join a local Meetup.com group. Go to a local Chamber of Commerce event. Talk to people who are in your industry. You want to always be talking about what you’re doing and what you want to do. You never know who you’re going to meet that will help you get over that little hump to tackle the next big thing.

There are so many different avenues for getting advice or help in your business. Social media is possibly one of the easier platforms to raise your hand for help.

You will also need to be open and willing to take a step back and let the expert handle things. Hire help, consultants, and other freelancers when you are moving into an area where you are out of your depths. Do not take it all on; you should build a team of people who you can off load tasks or actions for you business.

Conclusion

Getting a head start as a freelancer or entrepreneur can be daunting at first. But once you start down the path of getting that first client, it becomes easier. You’ll find your stride and identify what does and doesn’t work for you. Don’t think that you have to eat that elephant in one bite!

In the next few articles we’ll be diving deeper into the different aspects of starting down the path of being a freelancer or entrepreneur. The different tech, tools, and advice that will be covered can give you a leg up in your business. We’ll also be talking about challenges and pitfalls that some people face in their own journey.

The post FHS 1: Starting Off Right appeared first on The Freelancer Head Start.