#009: The Surprising Truth About High-Paying Clients — And the Four Assumptions That Keep Writers...

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey everyone, thanks for joining me for episode number nine of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. You can find detailed show notes of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode nine the number nine. So if you're driving, jogging, or just somewhere where you can't take notes today, don't worry, I got your back. These are detailed notes that you can reference later at your convenience. So today we're going to be addressing an issue that I get asked about quite a bit. It's one of the hottest issues out there in the freelance writing community and it's basically, hey, can you still land high paying, paying clients? Can you make a good living in this market considering all the writers that are out there? And the short answer is, of course, yes, you can. I mean, that's what this podcast is all about. But I don't want to just tell you that. What I wanted to do today was give you more detail and some really good food for thought that will hopefully create a mind shift here and show you why you need to look at this issue from a very different angle. Because once you do that, I think you'll realize where the opportunity lies and the size of this opportunity. Now, I think a good place to start is to bring you back to the freelance industry report that I've published over the last couple of years. Because one of the questions that I asked survey participants was, what is the biggest challenge that you're facing today? And 37% of freelancers, and this is, we're talking about 1500 freelancers from all over the world, but mainly North America. These freelancers said, look, our biggest challenge is finding and landing clients. 37% name that as their top challenge. And of course, this is no surprise. I mean, this is something that we've struggled as freelancers for a long time. We've struggled with this issue. But I really do believe that the common view and attitudes about attracting and landing quality clients are just simply misguided. They're based on a limited view of reality. And I find that they're destroying freelance businesses every day. And there is a better way. There are solutions to this pressing problem. And I hope I can share some ideas and insights today in the show that will help put your business on the right track as quickly as possible. So in today's episode, I'm going to explain why this common view and these attitudes about attracting and landing quality clients are misguided. I'm going to discuss why a new view or paradigm about client attraction is desperately needed. And I'm going to show you what this new view and model are all about and why you need to adopt this mindset that comes with it. Now, this client attraction problem is actually far worse and more far reaching than meets the eye. Because when you're having trouble finding and landing quality clients at good rates or fees, you. You end up with a whole host of other problems that create a vicious cycle. For instance, when you have little or no work, you'll often take less than desirable clients or projects. We've all done that right, and we do it just so we could pay the bills. But then you'll start quoting fees that devalue your work or put you in a very tight spot. Because now the client expects you to keep doing more work at that rate or at those levels. So what happens from there? Well, your self confidence starts to plummet. And that shows when you talk to prospects or when you quote a project, or you may even be forced to take on a part time job to make ends meet. These are the types of things that can quickly put you on a downward spiral that's just very, very difficult to escape from. And I know this from personal experience. When I launched my freelance business, it took me almost six months to land even the most meager client. And that's after spending weeks building a website, sending out hundreds of lead generating letters to prospects, doing very focused networking, reaching out to friends and relatives. I mean, you name six months with nothing to show for it. I mean, that was extremely discouraging. But that wasn't the only time I experienced this misery. There have been a couple of other dry periods in my freelance writing business that really shook me up and even caused me to question whether or not I could actually make it long term as a freelance writer. And I described one of those dry periods in episode number seven of this podcast. It happened in the summer of 2008. My biggest client let go of all their freelancers and consultants in what was obviously a desperate attempt to improve the company's financial situation. I got the bad news from my client right before my family and I were about to go on vacation and it almost ruined that trip for me. I was in a really serious funk for months. I couldn't land a replacement client to save my life. And I was quoting projects that I honestly, I had just no business quoting. They were either very low paying or they were for prospects that I knew were a horrible fit for me. But my fear and desperation must have been so easy to see that frankly, not even those prospects were hiring me, even at the ridiculously low fees that I was quoting. Now, looking back at these difficult periods in my freelance business, I now realize that the reason I struggled for so long to climb out of this mess is that I had subscribed to one or more self limiting beliefs and assumptions. And since then I've learned that these are very common attitudes among freelancers and they're especially prevalent right now at a time when so Many, somewhere between 37 and 53% of freelancers are struggling to attract and land quality clients. The first of these dangerous assumptions is that there's just too much competition out there, that there are just too many freelance writers in the market, and that this is bringing down rates and fees and there's just no way to counter this. The second dangerous assumption is that the difficult economy is putting a squeeze on everyone and it's just making it very difficult or even impossible to land good prospects at good rates. The third is that websites such as Elance, Odesk, Guru.com are commoditizing freelance work and that they're doing that by creating an ultra competitive environment. Well, the same could be said about content mills and how they're commoditizing freelance writing services. And finally, there's a belief that clients are just not valuing the work you do anymore, that they're having a hard time justifying paying you the fees or rates that you quote. And you know, these are all very legitimate concerns and they're very common. In fact, I'm sure you'll agree that it's hard to have a conversation with another freelance writer without one of these topics coming up. Well, I'm here to tell you that these assumptions are simply misguided. And they're misguided because they're based on a very limited view of reality. And frankly, it's killing freelance businesses everywhere. It's destroying morale and it's causing people to abandon the thing that they love to do and go out and have to find a full time job. Every time I came out of one of these difficult periods in my business, I took some notes about what had happened and I could only do it after I escaped that bad cycle. Because when you're in the middle of it, you're not in a good state of mind. But afterwards, I took time to analyze the situation and the factors that helped me to finally get out of that downward cycle. And it was through that process that I discovered some very interesting patterns and observations. And the first of these insights is what I call the diversification principle. And the idea behind it came from something I learned in one of my statistics classes back in college. We were at the time discussing sample sizes, and specifically we're talking about how large a sample size you need in order to get a statistically valid result. And one of the students in the class was asking the professor for just a general number that he could use. Kind of a rule of thumb when trying to determine if you had a large enough sample size. And after some waffling, the professor finally said that, look, if you have a sample size of at least 30, that's usually good enough for most experiments. So in other words, if you randomly selected just 30 businesses in the US or in any country, their average performance would closely mirror the performance of the overall economy in that country. Now, there's more to determining sample sizes than what I just described here. You also have to take into account margins of error, confidence levels, the total size of the population you're sampling from, you know, those sorts of things. So this rule of thumb doesn't apply everywhere, all the time. So don't write me telling me, oh, Ed, there's some other fact I get that I understand, but this example is enough for me to make my first point about why these assumptions on landing quality clients at good fees. It's just plain wrong. Here's the point. The performance of your freelance business is not directly tied to overall economic conditions or to forces that are affecting the industry in general. And even when those forces do have an effect on your business, the impact is temporary and can be changed fairly quickly. Now, let me explain this concept with an illustration because I know that's making kind of a big claim there. And let's take a traditional business, say a car manufacturer like Honda. Honda has millions of customers all around the world. So when there's a dip in the overall global economy, their sales are affected. And when there's a spike in global economic growth, their sales are also affected, of course, this time in a positive way. So why is that? Well, because when you have millions of customers, how well those customers are doing from a financial standpoint is a mirror of how well or how poorly all other car buyers are doing. Alright, so let's take a. And we'll work our way down. Let's take a smaller business, certainly Not a very small business. But let's take a good size ad agency or design firm with let's say 30 or 40 clients. Here again, when the overall economy declines, this firm will probably feel the effects. Why is that? Well, because it has enough clients, in this case, 30 to 40. Keep in mind, now we're in that sample size, it's good enough, right? It has enough clients to mirror what's going on out there. Five or six clients could suddenly go out of business, for example, or another 10 may suddenly choose to find lower cost design options or forego design work for a while. Now, let's take a traditional freelance writing business, a business of one. Most of us can realistically work with what, maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 clients tops at any given time. That's a realistic range to keep you booked solid with work. Well, guess what? That's not a big enough sample size to mirror the overall economy. It's only three to six. It's nowhere close to 30. And if you create a client attraction and prospecting system that feeds you with a handful of quality prospects every month or every quarter, and yields enough clients every year to keep yourself booked to capacity, you will not be affected by overall economic conditions. So the point here is that in the freelance world, diversification is not really a necessity. I mean, in fact, it could even hurt you. And that's something you never hear about. I mean, if anything, most of the advice out there says that you should diversify your client base as much as possible. You know what? Not only is that bad advice, it's just unrealistic. Because again, in order to be truly diversified, you would need at least 30 clients. And we've already talked about what happens when now you have that many clients. Now you're really tied to economic activity. Okay. There's another very important reason why much of the prevailing attitudes about landing profitable clients and projects are misguided and are keeping so many freelancers from making a good living. And it has to do with a fundamental misunderstanding about the dynamics of the freelance writing market. To better explain this idea, we need to look at what I call the Freelance Opportunity Pyramid. This is a very important tool and it's loosely based on a model that my colleague Steve Sloan White developed for pricing project based services. Now, I have an illustration of this pyramid in the show notes, so you might want to take a look at that when you get a chance because it helps to see it visually. Here's the premise of the pyramid. Not all freelance work is created equal, and not all clients have the same needs. The same expectations or willingness to pay you good fees. Instead, what you typically see out there are four different levels of client work and fee levels. The first one is the bottom of the pyramid and that's the bargain basement level. As you'll see in the illustration there in the show notes, this is where a big chunk of the freelance work resides. So at first sight it may appear as though this is where you want to compete. Right, because there's so much work there. But the fact that there's so much work here doesn't mean that it's the kind of work you want. The fees and rates at this level are. They're usually deplorable by most western standards. And this is where clients expect thousand word articles for $10 or copy for a 10 page website for 50 or $100, that sort of thing. I mean even the upper ranges of this level are just not where you want to be. As if the fees themselves weren't bad enough, this is also the level where there are more freelancers competing for work than there are projects available. It's completely disproportionate. I mean if you look at the numbers on Elance and Elance used to publish these and I think it was interesting that they removed this from, they had it there for years. But they showed you the numbers of the total jobs posted on Elance over the last 30 days and then the number of contractors available to bid on that work. And I have a snapshot there on the show notes of a couple years ago, I took these and you'll see how disproportionate it was. In this example they showed 48,794 jobs posted. Wow, that sounds like a lot. But you had 473,471 contractors bidding for that work. That's a 10 to 1 ratio. It's completely disproportionate. Now I'm not saying that all the work on Elance is bargain basement work, but let's face it, because of their bid focused nature, much of the work on Elance and some of these other sites is going to be, I mean that's just by default. That's what's going to happen. That's what they're going to attract. Alright, so the next level in the pyramid is the vendor level. Now clients in this space are not necessarily looking for bargain basement work. They usually want better quality and are willing to pay more. But they treat freelancers as just vendors. In other words, they treat them as service providers that are all more or less the same and can be replaced easily or shopped around anytime. So they may not put the project out there for a hard bid. They may not take it out to Elance or Odesky, but they'll reach out to, say, four or five freelancers and ask each of them to quote the work. Then they'll pretty much take either the lowest bidder or one of the lowest. Either way, here's what typically happens in this space. In the vendor space, they rarely take the highest one, even if the highest priced freelancer is much more experienced. The fact is that clients in these levels, in this particular level, the vendor level, aren't necessarily willing to pay a premium for those factors. And as you can see in the pyramid, while there are fewer freelancers competing in the space, the client to freelancer ratio still works against you. There are still more freelancers and clients competing for the available work. Yet a very large percentage of freelancers still choose to compete in the space. And what they don't realize is that by changing their strategy, their approach, their effort, just slightly, not a lot, just slightly, they can land in a much better place. And that's the next level up in the pyramid. And that's called a trusted expert market. This is a great place to work in. And while there are considerably fewer clients to be had here, this is the area, this is the space and the market where you start seeing an inflection point in the client to freelancer ratio. It's the first place in the pyramid where there are more clients than there are freelancers. And that's because the percentage of freelancers in the marketplace that are qualified and prepared to make a very positive impression on these clients is relatively small. This is where you can actually get the fees that you deserve much more easily and where the competition is not really that visible. The biggest concern of clients in this market is is not getting bids from five different service providers. They don't really have the time or desire to go out and put this thing out to bid and get prices and quotes from all these different freelance writers. Instead, they choose a freelance writer they want to work with and they typically stick with them. Yeah, price is a factor, I'm not denying that. But it's only one factor out of four or five other key considerations which tend to be even more important to them. This trusted expert level is a place where clients just hand pick service providers who know what they're doing and can prove it. I'm talking about freelance writers who have a track record and proven expertise. You don't have to have A massive track record. And not all of it has to be as a freelancer. And that's a key point here. A lot of that could have been out in the corporate world or out somewhere else in the workforce. They're looking for people who can deliver value, who always submit projects on time and as promised, and who are also a real pleasure to work with. All right, so finally, the very top of the pyramid. This is the rock star level. And as you can see here in the show notes, again, you'll find the illustration there. There are only a handful of clients available, and there are even fewer freelancers who qualify. It's definitely a great place to be, no doubt, but. But 99% of freelance writers in that category got there via the trusted expert route. So keep that in mind. Don't feel bad if you're not there. Very few people ever get there, but they don't get there directly. They get there through the trusted expert market. They work their way up. Now, regardless of whether you freelance full time or part time, your goal should always be to position yourself and to work the trusted expert market. And that's because this is the first level in the pyramid where you can truly maximize your earnings. This is where you can start earning what you need to earn to have more fun, freedom and flexibility in your business and in your life. All right, sounds good, right? Sign me up. But how do you get to this level? How do you get to the trusted expert level? Well, there are four ways you do this. Number one, you develop absolute clarity about who your ideal client is. Number two, you go after hungrier markets. Number three, you develop a systematic way to attract great clients. And number four, you deliver extraordinary service. So let's go through each of these four key pillars. I'd like to call them pillars because they really are foundational points. And let's go through them in more detail. Number one, developing absolute clarity about your ideal client profile. So one of the secrets to having great clients, enjoying your work and earning a really good living is to be very clear about the type of client best suited for you. Because once you know exactly who you're going after, everything else can fall into place. You're going to be able to build a targeted list of prospects that make sense for you and that increases your chances of success. It also allows you to spend more time engaging with prospects who are a good fit and less time with those who are more trouble than they're worth. You're not going to waste time targeting clients who aren't willing to pay what you're worth. You'll also be able to do more fulfilling and enjoyable work and add value to your clients. And you'll earn more as you focus on your sweet spot, meaning the work you not only enjoy, but that generates the most income per hour. Finally, doing great work for clients who appreciate you almost always leads to more and better referrals. But all of this starts by being very clear about who your ideal client is. This could be a person or organization you've already worked for, or it could be a fictitious pie in the sky Persona. Either way, let me give you an example of one of my ideal client profiles. And I have a couple, but this is one of them. My ideal client is a medium sized to large software company. My primary contact has a significant amount of decision making ability. She or he can make copy decisions on her own without resorting to a review committee. She also knows what she's looking for and she consistently communicates her needs and requirements. She values me as a key member of her team, so my fees are not an issue. She sees them for what they are, fair and reasonable. Especially considering the unique perspective I bring to the table as an experienced marketer and sales professional. That's because I spent 12 years in corporate sales. Finally, my ideal client has a steady stream of work for me. She doesn't come to me with just a one time need. When she sees the quality of my work and the results I help produce, she continues to send work my way. Now notice the level of detail in this profile. The more detail the better. Let's go through some of the main elements. First, the contact's job title or position. Right, you saw that. I mentioned that. Then the gender. In my case, it's usually a woman. So I kind of stuck with the she because this is, this is kind of the Persona I'm trying to visualize. The industry or industries are in the size of the company or the organization, important business attributes. So company size, types of products, services, market served, business performance, that sort of thing. Type of work, niche or specialization, their view and opinion of using freelance professionals. So how they think of you and the value you deliver, that's very important. The level of business sophistication, price sensitivity, the type of projects they need help with, the amount of work they need help with. So the workload and the frequency, that's important to me. The level of involvement in the organization. So in other words, how strategic or tactical a resource you are to them. And again, you don't have to have just one ideal client profile. You could have two or three that's fine. I have two. Having said that, I think it's important to note that this clarity exercise can be valuable for really any freelance writer, but it can be particularly valuable for those of you who have been freelancing for a while, and specifically two or more years. If you're just starting out, it's going to be difficult to create a very accurate ideal client profile. And that's because you still haven't gone out there and experienced some of this for yourself. It's like declaring a college major when you're 18 years old. And sure, you can do that, but at 18, most kids have no idea what they want to do with their lives. And even if they do, it's not based on experience, it's based on other factors, such as what their parents expect of them, what they've read, what other people have told them, et cetera. So if you're new to freelancing, I would still run through this exercise. Absolutely. But you may want to come back to it after you've been out there for a few months, a year, two years, and see how your view of your ideal client has changed and evolved. Alright, the second pillar, going after hungrier markets. Before you go too far with this ideal client profile exercise, I want you to think about where you're currently marketing your services and what other markets you should explore. Specifically, I want you to look for hungrier markets that you could serve. And by hungrier markets, I'm talking about markets that would be willing to pay more for your services. In many cases, offering the same or similar services to other audiences can double or even triple your freelance income. And that's without working any more hours than you are today. So let me give you a couple of examples so you can see how powerful this slight shift can be. And I'm going to kind of take it a little bit outside of just pure freelance writing, because I think it will help you see this a little better. So a couple years ago I was reading an article in Forbes magazine about this lady. Her name is Pat Baird and she's a registered dietitian who has worked on her own for 23 years. Rather than struggling in the traditional dietitian and nutritionist markets with her colleagues, Pat made a decision to position herself in hungrier markets, and the strategy worked. What she did is she shifted to a market that's willing to pay higher fees for her talents and her skills. And today she earns a very nice living working for major healthcare and pharmaceutical companies and the PR agencies of those companies. So rather than providing the traditional nutrition services to consumers. She does consulting work, she writes white papers and web articles, she makes speeches, she produces TV segments and she serves on advisory boards. And she also teaches nutrition at a couple of different colleges in her area. So you know she's made a huge shift. It's using the same set of skills, but in a market that's hungrier, that's willing to pay more for those skills. And guess what? She's thriving. If you're a journalist struggling to land work with magazines and trade publications, which is a, as you know, a rapidly dying market, how about going after case studies and white papers in industries or topics that you find interesting? There's plenty of that work out there. Or if you're a copywriter who typically goes after small local businesses, how about shifting some of your prospecting towards mid sized corporations that already have budgets for content marketing projects? In both of these examples, you'd be shifting your focus towards markets that already get and understand the value of a good business writer or copywriter. And you'd be pitching projects they already know, understand and need. They've already identified. They know they need this and they're looking for someone to help them. Okay, sure, Ed, but where do you find these markets? Well, I'm glad you asked, because before you start looking, you need to first understand how clients prioritize their budgets and how their shifts in budget priorities impact their demand for your writing services. So the trick to finding hungrier markets is in identifying shifts in budgets and priorities. And specifically you need to find out where are your clients or prospects spending their time, their attention and their money, and how do shifts in strategy and budget affect what you do and what you can offer? Well, let me help you there. Most clients prioritize their internal projects on some sort of scale. And each specific project, whether it's a web refresh project or a series of white papers, or a lead generation campaign, whatever. It's either going to be nice to have important or urgent. And I'm not saying that they specifically use this terminology, but in their minds, internally, they have these categories. When the economy is strong, people and organizations spend money in all three categories. Nice to have important and urgent. But when conditions deteriorate, priorities change very quickly. Budgets become more focused on important and urgent items. That should be no surprise, right? Nice to have projects are either put on hold or they're scrapped altogether. And here's the bottom line. In a difficult economy, freelancers simply cannot afford to go after projects that are not considered urgent or important by their clients. In a Tough economy, you have to go after urgent and important projects. And I came to this realization in 2008 when the economy tanked and I lost that big client and I was in this funk and I started recovering and I had time to look back and say, you know what went wrong here? How can I fix this so this doesn't happen to me again? And I began a concern concerted effort to go after content writing projects directly tied to my client lead generating activities. Because budgets for these type of projects tend to remain strong even in tough times. Now, in many cases I'm not writing the actual lead generating copy, but I'm writing the white papers, the case studies, the articles, and the other content that supports the company's lead generating efforts. Now there's a second part to this formula and that is that in tough times, freelancers cannot afford to go after prospects that provide primarily nice to have services to their own customers. So note that I'm talking about the products or services that your prospects or your clients provide to their customers. Today all my clients sell products and services that tackle urgent issues for their own customers and target markets. And as a result they're relatively recession proof, which in turn helps keep my own business relatively recession proof. So let me give you some examples. One of my clients helps their customers increase sales, reduce costs and minimize risk. All of which I hope you can agree are urgent goals today. Another one helps their customers reduce equipment theft and unnecessary equipment purchases. Here again, urgent, urgent item. Another helps their customers reduce the risk of losing millions of dollars and losing market share in the event of a product recall. That's a huge item. And yet another one helps your clients drastically reduce healthcare cost as well as employee absenteeism and productivity. So as you can see, all these are either important or in many cases urgent priorities to my clients customers. Again, if you're going after clients that are still selling products and services in the nice to have category, you're going to have a very hard time landing quality work at good fees. And that's because those organizations are going to be too busy trying to figure out how to stay afloat in this environment. So you need to go where they already understand the value of a great business writer or copywriter. Go where there is an existing strong demand, where they truly value the types of pieces that you write because it impacts their business directly. So in other words, you need to go where they're starving. Alright, so far we've talked about identifying your ideal clients and going after hungrier markets. The third pillar to this formula is to Develop a more systematic way to attract better paying clients. And you do that a couple of different ways. Number one, by using proven and reliable marketing tactics that give you disproportionately high results when compared to the effort, the time and the money required to execute them. And number two, when you get into the habit of using these tactics by making your marketing efforts practical and doable. One of the biggest reasons marketing efforts go nowhere is that most freelancers don't have a systematic way of approaching their marketing. Most people use kind of haphazard and reactive approaches to generating leads. These produce limited results with plenty of wasted effort and frustration. The problem is that there are just too many choices for marketing yourself, right? I mean, it's completely overwhelming. So most people do either nothing or they do a lot of something and then burn out. What's needed is a framework for making smart decisions about where and how you spend your limited resources. And that's where the marketing Effectiveness matrix comes in. The Marketing Effectiveness Matrix, which I cover in detail in the book I co wrote with Steve Sloan White and Pete Savage, the Wealthy Freelancer, it classifies the most common marketing tactics by how effective they are and how much time they take to develop and execute. This matrix is going to help you make lead generating and prospecting decisions based on your specific goals and your unique situation. And as you'll see, and you'll see an image of this in the show notes, it's divided into four quadrants. So quadrant one contains prospecting tactics that tend to be highly effective and very time efficient. Quadrant 2 contains tactics that are also very effective but require a little bit more time to develop and execute. Now, regardless of your goals, most of your efforts should revolve around these first two quadrants. Quadrant number three contains tactics that could work well, but you have to be very selective because these tactics are often less effective than the tactics in the first two quadrants. And finally, quadrant number four contains mostly wasteful tactics. They take too long to carry out and they also deliver questionable or even very little value. Amazingly, many freelance writers spend an inordinate amount of time in this quadrant. So once you understand how these tactics are classified, you can then use this matrix to make prospecting decisions that work best for you and that suit your goals, your skills and your personality. But again, I try to stick to marketing tactics in quadrants one or two. These are going to be the ones that are going to give you the best results for your time and effort. Finally, it's important to carve out time to implement your marketing system. Don't make the mistake of picking a series of tactics and then hoping that you'll get them done. Make the time and the best way to do that is to schedule time for your prospecting. So treat your prospecting as an actual client project. In fact, it's a project for your most important client. When you think about it, it's for you. You're your most important client. Also, keep in mind that not all this time that you dedicate to prospecting will be used for very active outbound prospecting. Much of that time could be spent on creating marketing materials, on creating campaigns and other internal elements of your marketing efforts. So when I say spend X number of hours every week prospecting, I'm not just talking about spending that time making cold calls or sending out warm emails or going to networking events. But at a minimum, here's what I'd ask you to do. Commit to spending 10% of your work week on prospecting activities. Do that consistently and you'll quickly gain the critical mass you need to attract all the business you want. Alright, the fourth and final pillar of this formula is to deliver extraordinary service. Here's the universal truth. Everything else being equal, the freelancer who's the most pleasant professional and just a real joy to work with will land and keep the client. He or she will also get more referrals and get invited to more opportunities. So how can you become easier to work with? Well, here are four tips I've gathered from studying the behavior of successful freelancers. First, act professionally at all times. Clients expect a certain level of professionalism from the people in the businesses they work with. They expect clear and professional communications from their vendors and their freelancers. They expect to be kept abreast of their progress on the project. They want to deal with people who are pleasant both in person and on the phone. And they want to work with folks who have a cheerful can do attitude. Number two do what you'll say you'll do. So clients also want to work with freelancers who don't require babysitting and constant hand holding. As a freelancer, this means meeting all your deadlines and always doing what you say you'll do. Now, of course, this also means you'll have to set the right expectations on every project. But once you make a commitment, you must keep it plain and simple. 3. Be flexible. The project plan will not always be perfect. You might be a bit delayed because someone in the client's office is unreachable, or a certain phase might get pushed back, or the scope might change considerably after the project has begun. I mean, those things happen. And that's why you'll need to be very clear in your contract about how you're going to handle these types of contingencies. However, the difference between average and top earning freelancers is that the true professional will take all factors into consideration and always come up with a creative win win situation rather than complain or threaten the client. And finally, number four, Take an active interest in your clients businesses. I love my clients and because of that I take an active and sincere interest in their businesses. I want to learn more about what they do and why they're better than the competitors. I also enjoy getting to know their people, their history, their culture, their goals, their strategic plans. Not long ago I was talking casually with a client about some of the big accounts he and his company were trying to land that year, and as I listened to him I realized that I personally knew someone who was an 18 year executive in one of those target companies. So I called up my friend and set up a conference call. And in that call my friend was able to provide my client with invaluable insight into that target company, including the names of some key decision makers. I don't need to tell you that my client was very appreciative of this gesture. They recognized that I had gone above and beyond for them and they show their appreciation and their loyalty over the next few years. Yes, working on your skills, certifications, other such factors, that's important. But I truly believe that what clients really want is to hire competent freelancers who are easy to work with. If you're unsure how your clients would rate you in this department, start working on becoming the consummate professional. And I think what you'll notice is that there'll be a big difference in the quality of clients you'll start attracting and in your pocketbook. I hope this discussion was helpful. I hope it gave you some good food for thought. Again, I have some great notes and illustrations in the show. Notes b2b launcher.com these are detailed notes. They make great reference material, especially if you've been listening to the show in your car or at the gym. And before we wrap up, I have a couple of quick announcements for you. If you enjoyed this episode. I would be very grateful if you shared it with friends. And the easiest way to do that is go to b2b launcher.com love this will pre populate a tweet for you which makes the sharing of the podcast a lot easier. There's also some social media sharing buttons right on the page with the show notes. Also, it would mean a lot to me if you gave the show a quick rating or review in itunes. The easiest way to do that is to go to b2b launcher.com iTunes. You'll see a blue view an iTunes button on that page that will launch itunes and take you straight to the show page, where you can then leave a star rating and a sentence or two if you'd like to. By giving the show a rating, it increases the visibility of the show and it helps other people find it who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it. So this brings us to the end of the episode. I'm your host, Ed Gandia. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you have an awesome day.

The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher dot com.