#038: From $5 to a Viable Writing Business: How Nathan Collier Is 'Grouponizing' His Way to Success

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, what's up everybody? Thank you so much for joining me for episode 38 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 the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find detailed show notes for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 38. You probably not going to be very surprised at this, but I am not a big fan of websites like Elance or Odesk. However, I have to say that occasionally I'll meet a writer who's launched a successful freelance business using these services. And I actually have met some writers who not just launch their businesses using Elance, but they've continued growing it using Elance as part of their strategy. And Nathan Collier is a perfect example of this. Now Nathan is still starting out. He actually launches freelance business on the side while he keeping his day job. And he did this last summer. But in just a few months that he's been out there, he has been able to land a handful of decent paying clients using Elance. And here's the really impressive part. He's done this by what I call grouponizing his services. Now he's done this very strategically in that he hasn't groupenized just the first project, he's actually gone beyond that. But he's done this in a very intelligent, very deliberate way that's worked very, very well for him. And this is a really clever strategy that can work when done right. And in this episode, Nathan is going to tell all. He's going to explain how to do this right, how he builds value with a strategy and how he turns basement bargain clients into profitable gigs. So let's go right to that interview. Hey Nathan. Welcome to the show my friend.

Hi Ed, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, no thanks. Thanks for coming on and it really is a treat to talk to you. So as I said in the intro for everyone listening, Nathan contacted me with some feedback. He told me a little bit about his story and I just kept probing. Right Nate, because I thought man, this is, this is awesome what you've been able to do. And you know, you're still working your way up but you've been able to do more than I think most people in that situation and I really want others to hear your story. So thanks for coming on today.

Hey, no problem.

So let's start with the basics, right? Tell us a little bit about what you do, your background, the type of writing that you've been focusing on, that sort of thing.

Okay, just quick background on me. I'm, I'm in my early 30s. I have, I think, probably like a lot of your listeners, varied background in writing. I started my career in journalism about 10 years ago, and about five years ago, I got into. I made the switch from journalism into business. So a marketing role came open, and that seemed like a better career path for me. I've always had an interest in marketing anyway, so it was a good time to make that transition, journalism being what it is. So I've been doing, you know, content writing and content marketing and content creation of one kind or another for about a decade now. And for the past five years, I focused on business writing. So I work for a software company. Right now I work in the marketing department. And we are a. We do like, hardware and some software as a service stuff. So our focus is in the automotive industry. So it's very B2B. So that's where I'm coming from. And that's my skill set. I've got, you know, the requisite English degree, and I just finished up a master's of business over the summer this year, so.

Oh, wow. Congrats.

Thank you.

Big accomplishment. That's fantastic.

It was, it was on my bucket list. It was really nice to get that out of the way.

I bet, I bet the other ones are a little more fun, right?

Yes.

Okay, so you work full time right now?

Yep.

And you, you've. You have the traditional kind of journalism background. You switch to marketing. You write. Well, you know, marketing, writing, marketing, communications. Why did you decide to pursue freelancing? And you're doing what I did, right? You kind of kept your day job. You're keeping your day job and you're building it on the side. Why did you decide to do that?

Well, for me, I think listening to your story, your, your story was that you had a work situation that was going to take you away from your family too much. And so that was the. That was the why that drove you into starting freelancing. For me, it was actually finishing my master's degree. The government has this great program, right, where you can go to school basically on their dime, and for as long as you're in school, it's free. And then after you graduate, six months after you graduate, you get to. You get to pay them back in the form of A student loan payment. And so for me, I'm staring at about a $300 payment that's going to start coming due in January of 2014. So my last class was in July of 2013. So that was what got me thinking about ways to maybe make some income on the side. My day job, I'm really, really lucky. I work with great people in a great company. I don't have any complaints about that. But it was just $300 is not a ton of money, but it's enough that it was going to make a bit of a pinch in our budget. So I started exploring the idea of freelancing on the side because it was just very natural. I already had the skill set, and I learned a little bit about business. Of course, having just graduated with the MBA degree, that's what got me thinking about freelancing. From there, it was just a question of how. How do I do it? You know what I mean? How do I learn how to actually do the freelancing? How do I find a client?

Yeah, yeah, you already know how to do the work. Now it's okay, great. I need some clients.

Exactly.

You started down a path that a lot of people choose, especially if they're really busy, they have a day job, and they just want to start generating clients quickly. You started with Elance, I believe. Right?

I did. For me, I was really trying to answer a question, and that was I knew I had the skill set to be able to do business writing because that's what I do in my day job job, but I didn't know whether or not I could actually go out and convince somebody to pay me money to do it on the side. So I was just trying to answer the question, was it possible for me to go out and find a client? That was the only question I was trying to answer. So I wasn't going on Elance to try and start a career or I'm not trying to build a career out on a place like Elance, But I got on there and I made a profile and I started doing some searches for people who were looking for some help with their writing. And specifically, my strategy was I focused on people who were. Who already had content of some kind, but they had some, you know, some phrase in their job posting that said that they needed it to be rewritten or that they weren't a good writer or that they just needed something of a higher quality than what they had. So those are the type of people that I was looking for. And if I could find them and then if it looked like they needed some help long term. Specifically, those are the two things I went out and tried to find in the search fields and that gave me plenty of people to choose from.

So tell us about that. How long did it take for you to, when you got started, to at least engage in a conversation or discussion with your first real prospect?

Yeah, I started in mid August. That was when I first started putting out proposals. And a proposal on Elance is nothing like a proposal, like a formal business proposal to a company. It's more or less just a field on the right side of the job description. It's more like writing an email, just responding to someone in email than it is writing a formal proposal. So when I say I wrote proposals on Elance, it isn't at all like I wrote a full blown multi page formatted persuasive proposal. But I started, I set up my profile one day and I was putting in proposals the next. And within two weeks I had somebody who was talking to me about doing some work.

How did you find the process in terms of the pricing pressure?

Yeah, that's the big question with Elance. Right? Is on Elance you're competing against the entire globe. There are people from the Philippines. Philippines and just all over the place who are able to quote just crazy low prices. And when you first go out there, that looks really intimidating because you have people who are bidding $3 for a 300 word blog post. Those kinds of things, just completely unreasonable prices for me because I wasn't. My first goal wasn't trying to make money. My first goal was could I get somebody to hire me. So the strategy that I used was rather than try and bid on a full project. And I'll just give you the example of the person who eventually hired me first. His posting was he was looking for somebody to rewrite some job description. So he's a recruiter, he pairs some high end accounting people, he pairs the potential employees with new employers and he does this all over the country. And so he needed somebody to rewrite like job descriptions, like the things you see on monster.com, those kinds of things. And he needed about 15 of them. And there were probably 20 people that put in proposals. And you can see who puts in proposals, but you can't see what their actual dollar amount was or you can't see the proposal itself. But instead of responding with a proposal for all 15 of those, what I did is I came back and I said that I would do three of them. And I said I'd do three of them for $5. And that if he liked what I did, then we could go on and we could talk about doing the remaining 12. And that, I think, was the thing that set me out, set me apart from the other 20 people. So I promised to do it fast, and I promised that I would do it well. And if he didn't like it, he was out $5. So I tried to make it as. As to where he didn't have anything to lose by. By trying me out for three of them. So.

Okay. And yeah, and I can see you had a little bit more freedom because of your goal. Right. Your objective wasn't, well, that's. I'm going to lose money on this. Your objective is can somebody. Well, somebody actually pay me.

Yeah, exactly. And when you're new, you don't have. It's not like I had existing clients that it cost me billable hours. All of my hours were billable at that point. So the only question I was trying to answer was, would somebody hire me?

Yeah. Okay, so you went ahead and submitted that, and obviously this went well. Tell us about the process, how he reacted and what you guys agreed to.

Right. Well, he sent me over, you know, the information that he wanted me to work on. I turned it over within 24 hours, sent it back to him. He was really happy with the result. He sent me the remaining 12 job descriptions. I did those, turn those around within 48 hours. And I built him at $5 apiece for the remaining 12. So in total, that brought me up to $70, which was my first freelance job. And he was really super happy with it. He was really happy that I was responsive. He could tell that the work was high quality, and that was it. I mean, that was as far as it went on that one.

And yeah, so obviously he spent. I don't know if he tracked it, but you spent some time. If you look at just this transaction, this wasn't an extremely profitable.

No, not at all. Not at all. But it accomplished what I was doing, setting out to accomplish, which was just answering the question of whether or not I could get somebody to hire me.

Exactly, Exactly.

It took me about two and a half hours to do all the work, all told.

Okay, okay, so. And you said it ended there. Right. Was there any additional work? Any. Did you guys talk about any other.

Ideas at that exact moment? There wasn't any additional. Any additional conversations about future work? The final email I sent to him was just, thanks for. Thanks for the opportunity to do this work for you. If you have anything else that you'd like, you know, that you'd like me to do. Please just let me know. And that was the end of it.

Okay, now I'm curious before we move on to what happened next. What went through your head as you're doing this work? And it wasn't a long time, two and a half hours, that's fine. But did you start doubting yourself? You know, did you start wondering, what am I doing? I know this is my objective and I've accomplished it, but is there a future to this? Because obviously this is not sustainable.

No, not really. I knew that there were other ways to land clients and I knew that Elance probably is not going to be the most profitable way to go about building a freelance side business in my case. But I mean, for me, it really was just as clear cut as that. It's like, would it be possible for me to get a client? And I was just thrilled. I mean, for me like that first three jobs, he actually paid me twice. He paid me the $5 and then he paid me $65. And so I actually saw the $5 come through. And if you take out the transaction fees and Elance takes a piece of it too, it turned out to $4.36 was the profit. And that was the sweetest $4.36 I have ever made.

Without a doubt, your first $4.36 doing self employed work, doing freelance work, it is.

And it was just, it gave me a taste of what it means to do work on your own. You know what I mean? Once I got a taste of it, it was like, oh, okay, I see now what it means to have a client and what it means to serve a client. Because doing work for $5, once you get past the price, the work itself is really no different. Whether you're charging $5 or $5,000, you still have to treat the client well, be responsive, do good work. For me, it wasn't about the money. It was about going through this process and learning what that was like. And so for me, it was worth way more than the money itself. So no, I didn't get discouraged at all. It just gave me a taste of what might come in the future.

And you know, I couldn't agree more. I remember my first paid assignment and it was more than that. But you know, I want to say it was maybe $300. It had nothing to do with the amount. You're right. It's the fact that somebody paid me. It could have been a dollar.

Yeah, it was.

It was awesome at that Point, you're officially a freelance professional. You know, I think the big leap is going from zero to a dollar.

I couldn't agree more.

So let's talk about what happened after that. So you got that. You've proven that to yourself. Where did you go from there?

Well, it was interesting because I was, you know, in the background. I was continuing to put in proposals on Elance, and then I was also sort of starting to. I was starting to do some networking, starting to do some other things to where I was hoping to get some business, you know, not just on Elance, but as I was doing all those things. A couple days after I completed the job for my first client, I got another email from him and turned out he had some sort of standard email templates that he uses. So when a client will contact him about, you know, if somebody comes to him and says, I want some help finding a new job, he's got 10 or 15, like standard email replies that he'll reply back with. That way he doesn't have to type them out every single time. You know, very common thing. I do it in my job. And he wanted me to rewrite those for him. So I did the same thing. And I charged him five bucks again, $5 each again. It took me about two and a half hours to do the work, and I had a happy client. And over time, over the next few weeks, I kept getting little things from him. I did a little bit of website copy, did some more emails for him, and that's what led to about a month. I think it was about a month and a half after I did that first job. I got an email sort of from nowhere, from, you know, same guy. And it described. The first line in the email was, hi, Nathan, I want to hire you too. And then he went on to describe this sort of newsletter autoresponder strategy that he'd been using, and he wanted me to take it over for him. And this was more than just rewriting an email or rewriting a job post. This was. He wanted me to do the research, put together the original drafts, work with him to make sure that it was appropriate for his audience, and actually load them into his email tool and send them out. So, you know, at this point, like, now I've got a real job on my hands because this was going to be a monthly thing. This is something he does every single month. And at this point, I knew that I was just in perfect position because I was the only one that he was talking to about doing this job.

Yeah, it's Just a great place to be. And so you have leverage, basically. You have leverage.

Well, and more than that, I had trust, you know, like, he trusted me based on the work that I had done before. He trusted me that I was going to be able to do this work for him in the future, because this was a project that had he had gotten into over the last year that for him, if you think about the business of a recruiter, they have people that come to them and say, I want you to help me find a new job. But they also have people who. That they build relationships with that may not be ready to make the job switch yet. But if the right opportunity comes along, they would consider it. So he needed a way to stay in contact with that second group of people, those people that might move if the right opportunity came up. So he had this email list that he'd been building over the past year, and he had started to see some success by sending them these sort of monthly touchpoint things where he was just sort of reaching out and doing the networking thing where he's trying to offer something of value, and he would send them a salary report, or he would send them some sort of inspirational video that he had found or something like that. So for him, it was a very important piece of his business, and he chose me because he trusted me to get it right.

So let's talk a little bit about your quote. So at this point, you realize, okay, now this is a whole different animal. How did you approach it?

Well, on this one, all the other ones in the past, I had just said, sure, I'll be happy to help you. We'll stay with our, you know, the $5 per email or per job posting. But on this one, I wrote back and I said, I'd be happy to help you with this. Give me a couple days and I will put together a proposal and I will send it to you. And so rather than coming back and saying, yes, I'll start right away. I. I guess I was disciplined enough to stop and take the time to put together a full proposal. And I had never done a proposal. I didn't have a template for a proposal. I had no idea how to do, like, an actual full proposal. And this is where the resources that you shared in the podcast, over time, it really came in handy for me. I had listened to. I found your podcast in July around the same time that I got done with my mba. And I remember I listened to the very first one. First, the one where you talk about pricing your projects. And that one, by the way is the one that really got me down the path of exploring freelancing. Because I remember when you started reading the rates off of your standard fee schedule. And I was in my car on my way to work one morning, and I was getting off the freeway. I remember exactly where I was. And you said, white papers, 500 or 5 to 10 pages, Microsoft Word, 3 to $6,000. That was what you charged. And I remember just being completely shocked by that number. Like, three to six thousand dollars for a white paper? You got to be kidding me.

Whatever.

I know. And you went on to talk about blog posts and $1.50 per word and just all this stuff that, like, I either do in my daily job or I am, you know, very qualified to be able to do if I wanted to. And it just. That was when it became like, okay, we're not going to talk about freelancing anymore. We're going to see if. We're going to see how to get into this. So that was what got me started. But the podcast number 20, the one from Kathryn Andy's, where you guys talked about hourly pricing versus flat pricing.

Yep.

Somewhere in that podcast, she talked about what she had was her Email of understanding. And I love what she said where she said she was a small business and if she got into some sort of contract dispute, she wasn't going to be able to hire the lawyers or whatever to fight it out in court. It was just going to be a losing financial battle either way. What she used was this thing called an Email of Understanding. And you guys included a copy of that on your show notes?

Yeah. She was very, very kind to allow me to share that. And I'll include a link here to that.

That was what I used. Like, I went to the show notes, I downloaded that, and I put it on my computer, on one side of my computer, and then I wrote the proposal on the right side of my computer using all the same subheads and all the same formatting that she had in hers. And that became my proposal. And it was, I think, three pages is what it turned out to be. And it went through all the things that you talk about. Like, it's more than just. I'm doing more here than just writing something for you. I'm doing research, I'm doing communication with you. I'm doing some revisions if need be. I'm doing the actual distribution of it. And so I sort of tallied up what I thought, an estimate of what kind of time it would take me. I gave some standard freelancing kind of Rates that I had found on the Internet, linked to what, where those were and just sent it off to him. And the quote was for, he wanted me to do four emails per month. And I think I quoted him like $550 or something for it. Now, remember, to this point, I'd done like 150 bucks total in work for him over about two months. And so he had a little bit of sticker shock.

Yeah, because he thought you were like the dollar store where everything's the same price.

Exactly, exactly. And I knew that was going to happen, but I also knew that this wasn't a project that I could jump into for 20 bucks a piece. You know what I mean? I knew that at this point this was a significant time commitment. I wasn't going to be able to do it for the prices that I had been doing them before. So I quoted him what I thought was a real price, which is still way low compared to, to some of the people, to what you would charge or what some of the people that you have on would charge. But for me, it was a big number. And he came back and he said, hey, that's a lot of money for me. But he didn't argue with my price at all. What we did was we halved the amount of work and then halved the price. So we ended up doing 275amonth for two of the emails instead of 550 for four.

I think that's brilliant, by the way. Let me just pause right there. I'm a big believer when you get into this discussion, let's call it a negotiation, right? You should never agree to a concession request without asking for something in return or without proposing something that's a give and take. So many times you could say, well, I can cut that, but, you know, you have to give this other thing up or you have to allow me to do this, or, no, I can't cut that. However, I can add these other things, you know, what you're going to need anyway, or in your case, what I call doing less for less, which I think is brilliant. So you're not cutting anything, you're just saying, well, that's over your budget, that's fine. How about this? You won't get the full thing, but let's start with that.

Yeah. And he had, of his four lists, he had two of them that were the most important to him. And those are the two that we're working on. So, you know, maybe in the future we'll move up to all four of them. If he, you know, thinks that it's financially a good thing for him to do, but, you know, at the moment, that's where we're at.

That's awesome. So you did. You're doing two a month. And by the way, the great thing is here, again, you're kind of giving him an opportunity to test this, right?

Yeah, exactly. There's room to grow here.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So you mentioned something in our email correspondence that this is going well and this is a great next step. This is a perfect example, guys. And what I talk about when I say stair stepping your way to success, it's not about how fast you get somewhere. It's about taking baby steps. And this is a classic example of taking baby steps. You started at the five dollar level. Okay. And you've been able to take that and gradually work from there into other opportunities and into bigger paying opportunities. And, you know, this is a journey.

Yep.

You will eventually be at that professional level. And by the way, that's the kind of quality you deliver. I mean, you're a trained professional. You do, you know, so you have it in you. So let's talk about kind of where you're going from here. You mentioned something about getting some referral work.

That's right. So I can't remember who was somebody on your. In your podcast at one point said, work leads to, like, work or, you know, when you do good work, it leads to similar kinds of work from other clients.

Oh, yeah.

And so my first client, I don't know if he was at a family gathering around Thanksgiving or what, but he emailed me and he said, hey, I have a family member who's a realtor who probably needs, you know, you guys need to meet. And I said I'd be happy to meet him. And so he did one of those, like, emails where he says, you two need to meet here. Here's both of your emails. And so in that way, I got a referral to my second client, who is. I don't know if he's. I'm not sure how the two of them are related, but they both live in Michigan. That's all I know about their relationship. But I started doing some work for this realtor as well, and that continues to right now. So for him, I did the same strategy. He had had a blog that he had started about a year ago, and he had somebody who was doing posts for him, and they were doing them for $10 a post. And so I got on the phone with him and started sort of talking about what his needs were and what he wanted to do. And I could tell pretty right away that he wasn't going to react well to. If I had given him a professional rate for a blog post. So what I did is I said, well, let me do this. And I quoted him $10 for the first blog post. I said, let me. I'll do one for you for the rate that you. That your other freelancer did. And maybe there's something going on to where. I don't realize, I don't understand yet, that there's. That it's not as much work as it might otherwise be. And so that's how I started with him. And I did the first blog for $10. And then I got to the point where I realized that doing one of these for him on a regular basis was going to be about an hour and a half of work. And so I did the one, and I gave that to him for $10. And then I said, look, it was great. I'm glad that you let me do this work for you. I was happy to do it, and I'd love to do more work for you, but in the future, if you want me to continue to do this, it costs me about an hour and a half of my time, and the price is going to be $60 a piece. And he had a little bit of sticker shock about that, but at the same time, he wants it. He wants the blog to continue. So I've done two more of those for him at $60 a piece. I've also rewritten his about page for him, and I did that at an hourly rate of $45 an hour. So that one took me about two hours to do.

Oh, that's awesome. You know, I just thought of something. You have essentially grouponized your work.

Yeah, it is. It's the. It's. It's very much the sort of like. I don't know if you'd almost call it like a freemium, you know, plan or something like that, or a trial offer, those kind of things.

Yeah, but I like the Groupon concept here. Because it's not free, right?

No, no.

You're losing money on the first transaction in order to prove yourself into. You're really. Okay. There's two things you really focused on lifetime customer value here. You know, you know that there's more work down the road. You're. You were very selective from the beginning in going after people who had more than just one project.

Right.

With a potential for more than just one project. And you also know enough about yourself and your Skills that if you get in the door, you're confident that you can grow that. So I think it makes sense to grouponize in those situations, especially when, you know, you don't need to feed a family of four. On this alone. Thank you.

Not on this alone, no. And I mean I have my full time job and that pays those bills. The work I'm doing on the side is to achieve a specific goal. And yeah, in that way I think if there's somebody out there who's a full time, has a full time job and is thinking about doing the freelance thing on the side, that in my opinion has been a great advantage for me getting started. Not a, not a drawback because I don't have to worry about health insurance and those kinds. I have that through my job. So it gives me the freedom to, to do these kinds of things.

I love it. And I think it's definitely a viable strategy that people who work full time should consider because this, the psychology that happens right when you get that first paying client, as we talked about, is massive. The shift in your thinking and how you feel, look at yourself and you know how you feel about your skill and its value. You can't put a price on that.

Nope. And I can't even. I mean, for me it was just a few months ago, so. But if that's a moment I'll never forget, when I saw that the $4.36 come through, that was just. It was amazing. There's no other way to describe it than that.

So before we wrap up, I'm curious, so what are your plans? I mean, how do you or how are you planning on growing this?

Well, I intend to continue to make these two clients that I have as happy as I can make them. I think as a new freelancer, the next step, now that I've proven to myself that I can go out and find people that will hire me, I need to build the things that established freelancers have and that they rely on. The things that you have going for you are references, referrals, testimonials, and a portfolio. Right. Those are the things that when clients consider whether or not they want to hire a freelancer, particularly when they're making a choice between two different freelancers, they're going to look at those social proof things to determine whether or not the person is capable and whether or not they're worth the price that they're going to have to pay. So that's the next step for me is building out those social proof pieces. So I've Built now a website for myself. And now I need to build out those social proof pieces so that when I get to the point where I can charge a professional fee, that those things will be in place and I won't have to. I won't have to just tell people, hey, you should trust me. I'm really good. I'll actually have other people who can vouch for me.

So I think your whole advice here has been very clear in straightforward. But if you can encapsulate kind of the core idea here, somebody listening who's got a full time job, they're not really sure where to start, but they really want to create something in 2014, what would you advise them to do?

I would say that, you know, I did it on Elance. You can do it anywhere. But go get your first client, charge them $5 if you have to, and I would say go get your first paying client. I'd done a little bit of work for free as a way to build my portfolio, but it didn't have the same emotional lift piece to it. It was cool. I've got stuff now that I can show people that I've done. But the feeling that you get when you land that first paying gig, when you see that first little bit of money come through, that is what I mean. It's. If you're looking for something to motivate you, I don't know of anything better.

That's great advice. Well, Nathan, again, thanks so much for taking the time to share this with us. I really appreciate it. This is a great story.

Hey, Ed, thanks. I mean, your podcast is where I got the tools to do a lot of what I did. So if anybody needs to thank anybody, I need to thank you for putting this together. So it's been an honor to come on and share my story.

Oh, wonderful. All right, talk soon.

Thanks.

Well, folks, there you have it. Proof that you can, after all, launch a viable freelance writing business using sites like Elance. Now, I hope you picked up on some of the nuances of what Nathan is doing and how he's approaching this whole thing. Notice that he didn't approach this in a state of desperation operation. He knew exactly what he wanted to get out of this. He knew what the limitations of these sites are. He knew what the risks are, but he had a very specific objective in mind. He followed through. And he also knew when he needed to step in and try to grow that opportunity, that client, into a viable, sustainable client opportunity. So a lot going on there. Again, I hope this is helpful for you especially if you're at that stage where you're trying to figure out how you're going to launch your business and you thought about using sites like Elance, but you weren't really sure how to do it. Or maybe you're already there and you've tried this and haven't had much success. Hopefully some of the ideas that he shared with you will help you in that effort. So as a reminder, you can grab the detailed show notes to this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 3008 these are detailed notes and make great reference material, and I wanted to ask a couple of favors. One is if you've enjoyed this episode, if you think there's value here, I would be very grateful if you shared it with friends and colleagues who may benefit from it. And you can do that very easily by using any of the social media sharing buttons on the Show Notes page. Or you can go to b2b launcher.com love also, if you're getting value from the show, I hope you'll consider leaving me a quick star rating or a brief review. Only a sentence or two on iTunes that really helps bring up the visibility of the show and ensures that people who haven't heard of it will come across it. So that's it for today's episode. Again, my name is Ed Gandhia. 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.com.

Story hey Ed, I mean, your podcast is where I got the tools to do a lot of what I did. So if anybody needs to thank anybody, I need to thank you for putting this together. So it's been an honor to come on and share my story.

Oh, wonderful. All right, talk soon.

Thanks.

Well, folks, there you have it. Proof that you can, after all, launch a viable freelance writing business using sites like Elance. Now, I hope you picked up on some of the nuances of what Nathan is doing and how he's approaching this whole thing. Notice that he didn't approach this in a state of desperation. He knew exactly what he wanted to get out of this. He knew what the limitations of these sites are. He knew what the risks are. But he had a very specific objective in mind. He followed through and he also knew when he needed to step in and try to grow that opportunity, that client, into a viable, sustainable client opportunity. So. So a lot going on there. Again, I hope this was helpful for you, especially if you're at that stage where you're trying to figure out how you're going to launch your business and you thought about using sites like Helance, but you weren't really sure how to do it. Or maybe you're already there and you've tried this and haven't had much success. Hopefully some of the ideas that he shared with you will help you in that effort. So as a reminder, you can grab the detailed show notes to this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 38 these are detailed notes that make great reference material and I wanted to ask a couple of favors. One is if you've enjoyed this episode, if you think there's value here, I would be very grateful if you shared it with friends and colleagues who may benefit from it. And you can do that very easily by using any of the social media sharing buttons on the Show Notes page. Or you can go to b2b launcher.com love also, if you're getting value from the show, I hope you'll consider leaving me a quick star rating or a brief review. Only a sentence or two on iTunes that really helps bring up the visibility of the show and ensures that people who haven't heard of it will come across it. So that's it for today's episode. Again, my name is Ed Gains. 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.com.