33 marketing tactics to grow your freelance business and why I recommend you use none of them
How would your life change if you were able to add just another $1,000 to your monthly income? Mine changed a lot…
I used to constantly worry about whether I’d be able to pay the rent next month, if I would be able to pay off my debt and whether my income would be stable enough to soon start a family.
Like most freelancers, I struggled with the inconsistent income and I seriously thought about sending out resumés and just get a “real” job again.
My head was filled with counter-productive thoughts and I felt paralysed.
Maybe I needed a vacation? Some time away from all this pressure? Will a vacation really help me solve some of my crippling worrying and inconsistent income? Not really…
No, the only solution to my problems would be to grow my income by landing more clients.
So I did what most of us do.
I opened Twitter and had a look around…
Then I opened Google in a new tab and quickly found 10 article with a combined 33 different marketing tactics freelancers HAD to use.
I took a quick look…
According to the articles, I had to:
- Create a Facebook page and run Facebook ads
- Start a Facebook Group and grow a community
- Create interesting infographic to share on Pinterest
- Start vlogging
- Start blogging
- Start guest blogging
- Focus on SEO
- Write an ebook and publish it to the kindle store
- Start blogging on LinkedIn.
- Start following and interacting with potential clients on Twitter.
- Cold call potential clients
- Go door to door.
- Send out letters
- Start a podcast
- Etc…
Needless to say, my next big action step was to open my Facebook newsfeed and see what had happened in the world in the last hour.
Now, being a digital marketer, I knew of a lot of strategies beforehand and when it came to clients, I knew exactly what to do to grow their business.
When it came to myself, I was paralysed. I couldn’t stand being so worried all the time. I needed a strategy that would land me clients fast so I could get over my worrying and start breathing again.
I could start blogging, but it could take ages before I would get any result from that. I could also start following people on twitter and start conversations with them, but what if it didn’t work?
Every one of these 33 tactics could land me more clients eventually, but which one should I go with?
I decided to do try several of them and four weeks later the results were in!
I had started a Facebook page, written two blog posts, followed a dozen people on Twitter and grown my business by… 0 percent.
The solution to my problem
I was devastated. Partly because of my lack of effort and obviously because of the results.
It got to the point where my wife told me to seek out a coach or someone that could help me.
Being the good husband that I am, I obviously followed her commands.
So I got a coach and we started talking.
Our conversations span from what I was feeling to what I was pursuing and why.
Then she asked me: “How do you help your clients?”
Easy question… “I work with SEO so I always follow a specific working order. It’s the same game-plan, more or less, for all of my clients.”
Her: “Why are you using that one strategy? Aren’t there other things one could do?”
Me: “Sure, they could properly get customers through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, getting exposure in magazines, running Google Adwords ads etc. But I can’t do it all. That would be a waste of time. I’d be able to deliver a bigger result by focusing on one strategy at a time rather than spreading my efforts out.”
Click… The light bulb turned on and a few more minutes of talking went by.
Her: “What one thing can you do to get more clients and what will you have done to next time?”
Me: “I will email 20 companies till next week”
The result?
One additional client and another $950 a month.
The aftermath and what I learned
Landing that one additional client was important to me. First of all the $950 a month was a game-changer at that time, but what really impacted my life, was learning to focus on one thing. It freed up my mind instantly.
I’ve done some additional thinking over the years and what I’ve learned is, that any tactic can be used to achieve your result.
I started seeing it like a map.
I’m at point A and I want to move to point B.
Between point A and point B, there are many roads I can take.
Some of them are longer, narrower or more jammed than others. I might even get lost on some of them. But no matter which of the roads I take, I’m always able to find my way to point B.
Sure, some roads are far quicker and easier to drive, but as a freelancer or business owner, it’s not always clear which road it the quickest. We’re navigating in unfamiliar terrain.
What I did, and what most freelancers do, is that they set out on a road only to start doubting whether they chose the fastest one.
So instead of just following the first road, they chose to go back to square one and follow another road and after some time, they start doubting themselves again and starts over again.
The point is, that when we try to do several things at once we rarely get anywhere.
No matter what you’re trying to achieve, you need to put a lot of effort into it. You can’t just tweet three days in a row and expect to find new clients. The same goes for blogging. You’ll most likely have to write a lot and do a lot of outreaching before you’ll start to see any result.
You could do several things at once, but you’d be spreading your effort thin. Let’s say you have 10 hours a week to work on your marketing strategy.
If you focused on one marketing strategy, all your 10 hours would be used for that task and you would have a 100% impact every week.
If you focus on two marketing strategies you’d, in theory, have 5 hours to impact each strategy BUT when calculating the time you need to start up, get going and slow down, you’d actually only have somewhere around 4–4,5 hours of full effect on each project.
So by having two marketing channels, you’d waste around 10–20% of your potential output per week.
Not only that but by separating your efforts into several marketing strategies, you’re only moving at half speed. It’ll take you twice as long to reach point B compared to if you had only focused on one of them.
Still today, I only focus on this one and simple marketing strategy. First of all, it’s simple and it has become very effective for me. Second, I don’t have to spend time thinking about other ways of doing things.
I still read a lot of marketing related advice/research due to my work, but no matter what exciting things I read about, I’m not changing my approach cause it’s working the way I need it to work and I’m not going to use my vulnerable brain cells trying to find a new approach.
Sometimes you just need to make a choice and go with it.
I urge you to try it out. It’s amazing what results you can achieve focusing on one thing only.
Over to you — If you found this post useful, please recommend and share it. Thanks.
