EP#042: Answers to your top freelancing questions

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.

Thank you for joining me for episode forty two of the high income business writing podcast my name is 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 of this episode by going to b two b launcher dot com episode forty two the number forty two i'm doing something a little different with this episode and i'd like to get your feedback on it by the way before i forget to ask you so i'd love to get your comments once you've had a chance to listen to this in the comment area of the show notes page again b two b launcher dot com episode forty two but i'm doing a q and a session today and a few weeks ago i announced that i had installed a new feature on the site and it's actually not there's no button on it yet but we're going to create a little icon for it so you have quick access to it but i gave you a url where you could go and leave me a quick voicemail message with a question that you might have about growing your freelance business managing projects whatever and in i had seven or eight of you leave me a voicemail with with a question and i appreciate that and what i'm going to do today is i'm going to play those questions and i'm going to go ahead and answer them if you're interested in doing this and if the feedback is is positive i'm going to start doing a q and a q and a episode like this every few weeks and let me just give you that url and again we're going to create an icon for this on the website so you have quick access to it but in the meantime you can go to speakpipe dot com edgandia i'll include a link to that in the show notes but speak pipe is in speak and then a pipe of water speakpipe dot com edgandia altogether so check it out it's very easy once you're there just leave me a quick question all i ask is that you keep it to a minute or under so and keep the question focused and detailed the better the more detailed the question the more focused it is the better an answer i can give you so keep them coming what i'll do is when i get enough for a full show and again assuming that the feedback is positive i'll go ahead and record a new episode with just q and a for that show so let's go ahead and get to it i'm not really going to introduce these i'll just go ahead and play each one individually and i'll go ahead and provide as detail an answer as i can and let's see where this goes.

Hi ed my name is christine parizow www dot christineparizzo dot com c h r i s t i n e p a r i z o dot com my question is what titles am i looking for when i am trying to get in touch with the person who commissions white papers and case studies within software companies because these are the people that i am most interested in talking to and they would be very interested in talking to me so what title am i looking for and what's the best way to approach them is it creepy to dig up their emails by using something like peepmail.

Thank you christine great question and i have a couple of ideas for you first of all when it comes to the title and if you're going after the corporate market the best title to go for is either some sort of marketing manager and there are all kinds of variants of that so marketing manager digital marketing manager marketing communications manager social media marketing manager i mean you name it but you know you'll see the title or you'll see the words marketing and manager somewhere in there the other one would be marketing director and again there are many variants of that i found that over the years i used to go after vps of marketing when i started out but i found that to be especially today kind of ineffective because they're going to be passing that down anyway and even though that could be great so if you contact a vp of marketing it could be great if they pass it down to one of their subordinates you know it carries more weight right if your boss sends you something says check in on this you're probably going to pay attention to it but you're taking a chance that they will pass it down to someone so what i found is marketing managers and marketing directors are the ones who have hiring authority anyway for freelance writers and so they're making their own decisions they're the best ones to contact anyway everything else being equal now in terms of what's the best way to approach them that's kind of a big question i don't know there's a best way i can tell you what my favorite way is and that is email so i have a process called warm email prospecting it's a system that i've developed over the gosh more than ten years really when i when i was in sales i started doing this i didn't know what it was called i just thought it made sense and i've refined it over the years and it works really well for kind of run in the mill standard weekly prospecting so if you're going after if you're working a list of let's say one hundred companies or just little by little right you don't want to do a mass broadcast with warm mule prospecting warm mule prospecting is very personalized is very one on one it's a kind of customize email communication from you to a very specific prospect and basically it's you're pointing out something that you notice about them it's very short the rule of thumb is one hundred twenty five words or less something you notice about them or what they're doing or what they have what they're up to or something that just shows them right away that you are paying attention to them and then this email was written just for them and then you point that out you say well they the reason i'm writing is because you know this is what i do this is why i'm different in fact here's a link to a page tells you a little bit more about me or maybe some of the other companies that i've worked for in your industry would it make sense for us to connect and and you're inviting them to maybe start a little bit of dialogue now you don't want to do everything via email from that point all you want is for them to respond with a hmm yeah maybe tell me more or you know you know can you send me some pricing information can you tell me do you do this kind of work anything like that would be a positive response so i think warm email prospecting works really well for that kind of you know again transactional weekly going after clients it's it really is cold calling but in a i think a more effective way because it's not seen as big an interruption as a phone call and it's i think you have a higher chance of getting through to the person and having them read your information in a cold call the defenses go up immediately and even if you have a great message that's very personalized a lot of people just won't respond well to it now i believe in having a separate list beyond warm email prospecting which again that's transactional i believe in having what i would call a hot list or a strategic prospect list of let's say say ten twenty prospects max these would be organizations that you would love to work for so you've really thought long and hard about this list and this is kind of your you know your dream list right and you want to be a little more strategic with how you prospect to that list so this is gonna isn't gonna be just sending them one email type of thing this is going to be kind of a multi channel multi touch campaign over what could be several months all the way to several years you do not want to automate this in any way and by the way warm email prospecting you do not want to automate either but this is something you definitely don't want to automate this is where you really want to reach into your network you want to be creative and strategic about okay who knows who who can connect me with somebody there who are some of the key people where are they involved or can i meet them in a local association can i you know you really again this is a very manual long drawn out effort but you know it's worth it because these are your dream clients and it's worth spending more time money and resources going after them so i'm a big believer in having two different lists and your hot list or your strategic prospect list is one that it should be much smaller and multi touch multichannel in terms of how you find email addresses i'm going to address that in a few minutes because somebody else had a very similar question and i think you'll you'll you'll like what i have to say there's some couple easy ways of doing that so anyway great question thanks for submitting it let's get to the next one hi ed.

My name is prabhu i'm from india i would like to know about your process to follow up with clients after the project is over thank you very much have a good day thank you.

Prabhu that is a great question because i'm a big believer in following up with people and i'm assuming your question really is more about you've wrapped up the project how do you stay in touch with them not so much following up on how they liked it and revisions and all that i think it's that goes without saying you should follow up make sure that they're happy make sure that we can close out the project but what most freelancers don't do and by the way i've been very guilty of this what most freelancers don't do is to stay top of mind if you will with their clients and with their prospects they don't follow up and when they do it's more like you know several months later a call or an email saying hey do you have anything for me do you have any projects i can help you with and you know that's okay but i think you can do much better and you know what you really want to do is create a situation where you stay in touch in a relevant and value added way without asking for anything you're adding value that way first of all you'd be the first freelancer they think of when they need some writing that you can help them with and also so it doesn't feel like you're always just asking for work and all you care is about yourself plus it's a very professional thing to do so what happened was and i kind of stumbled into this in my last sales job i was keeping track of my numbers and my metrics and what i found is about thirty percent of my new clients every year were coming from my longer term prospects list and bear with me because i know prabhu was asking about clients but this is and now i'm talking about prospects have never been clients longer term prospects were people who contacted me they were interested we engage in some dialogue either via email or in conversation we may even have gone as far as you know demoing product getting a proposal out all that stuff but they never became a client and what i found was that it was really just a timing issue and kind of the standard approach there was to just kind of move on you know we just my company felt that there was no time to deal with those people just move on and keep going after new prospects and i said you know what time out i'm going to go ahead and try to stay in touch with these folks in a value added way and do it a little bit differently and what i'm going to do is every couple of months i'm going to send them an article or something of interest that you know it's not me just checking to see if they're ready to buy it's just sending them something of value and i'm going to alternate between sending an email sometimes i'll leave a voicemail or place a quick call with just an idea or a thought or just to check in and then i'm also going to do it via mail snail mail i'm going to clip an article print out an article send out a case study of someone we help that's in their industry something along those lines but i want something physical via snail mail and what i found was that when i started doing this i was seeding if you will these prospects i was planting seeds and what i wanted was when the timing was right i wanted them to think of me and to call me and sure enough it was working again thirty percent of my new clients or customers every year started coming from that list of people that i was staying in touch with via this method i just described here's the cool thing i didn't have to start from the very beginning right i had already done most of the heavy lifting i had already done pricing i had already demoed the product i had already addressed a lot of their objections i had already talked to their people met with them and now they were ready in many cases to make a decision right there and then so i learned my lesson that it pays to stay in touch in a way that most people don't stay in touch which is did not just call every two months and say are you ready do you have something else for me but just to send something of value with a quick handwritten note just saying hey you know thought of you thought you find this interesting and i think it's worth doing this with clients i believe that there are so many opportunities for freelance writers out there and freelancers in all professions really to get more work from clients you know you've already done the heavy lifting you've already paid the price of establishing trust and credibility and landing that account that client and yet you only do one project for them and i think that's a bit big mistake because anything you can do over that you don't have the sales costs or the acquisition costs anymore they already like you they already trust you they're already buying into you so anything any additional projects you can do is gravy not only that but especially with writing you already understand their products you understand their company you understand their competitive landscape their you know who their customers are and all that good stuff so the more you do any incremental project you actually it becomes more profitable because you don't have those that overhead if you will those hard fixed cost of learning all this other stuff so all that to say yes stay in touch i think every couple of months is a general good rule of thumb unless you know something about them that would really where it would make more sense to follow up more frequently or less frequently keep records i think this is where a good contact management system can can help doesn't have to be anything very involved something like highrise highrise i think it's highrise hq dot com hq is in headquarters so highrise hq dot com contactually dot com is another popular one i use salesforce dot com which you know i don't think it's everyone's favorite i was already very familiar with it for my sales job so i went ahead and implemented it zoho z o h o dot com is another one that's fairly popular easy to use and all these reside in the cloud by the way meaning that they don't the data is not in your computer which is great because you can access it from anywhere so if you happen to be working off site it's great to have access to to to your record so every couple of months keep records alternate the medium i think that's important and don't try to automate this a lot of freelancers really want to automate this process they want to make it more efficient resist the temptation this works best when it's manual when it's done sincerely and when there's a personal touch there so try it out if you haven't done this before i'm telling you it's going to work really really well for you maybe not overnight but over the course of a year it will make a huge difference all right let's go to the.

Next question hi ed thanks for the q and a i'm diane from a dashunate dot com my question regards researching the people to whom i want to target my marketing i find myself spending a lot of time searching for their emails and phone numbers do you recommend paying for linkedin subscriptions do you feel the cost is worthwhile or do you recommend another source whether it's paid or free thanks a lot.

That is a great question and so let me make a distinction here i think linkedin is a first of all a wonderful resource you need to be in linkedin no matter what but i find that it's linkedin is better suited for research and maybe as a backup contact channel so i wouldn't necessarily use linkedin as the vehicle for sending out prospecting notes or emails or private messages i would if i just couldn't get the email address elsewhere or if i'm just not having luck with email but really linkedin shines when it comes to research because of the advanced search features that are built in and you know all the research you can filtering you can do when you're searching for someone now in terms of is it is it worth paying for premium membership well so that what linkedin has done is you can do you can do quite a bit with a free version but there's some great features of the of the paid version but unfortunately they've made it they've kind of raised the bar they've made it difficult to get in because even the lowest level of premium membership is pretty expensive and i want to say it's twenty or thirty dollars a month which listen if you're if you're serious about this that's you shouldn't even think about it it should be a no brainer however there are some options that that are very cost effective and i wanted to let you guys know about it because this is huge and a lot of people aren't aware of of some of these options so there's a way you can get a free year of linkedin executive level membership and listen executive level membership is the highest level they have it's something like seventy five dollars a month and you can get a full free year of it and there's there's really no catch so let me tell you how you do it it's actually very simple there's a group in linkedin called linkedin for journalists so go to the search bar make sure to select groups so you're searching within the groups area and typed in linkedin for journalists okay you guys as freelance writers are essentially journalists to begin with okay so i don't feel bad in telling you about this because you really fit this category so there's a search tab or link you'll see.