Can You Really Make $10k a Month As a Freelancer?

So can you really make $10,000 a month as a freelancer? That's a question that somebody recently asked me. And the spoiler alert is that the answer is, yeah, you totally can. So the key to all this is mastery as well as mindset. If you look at myself as a copywriter, which is how I started out in 2012, I would get paid $149 to write a sales letter for somebody. And today, in 2020, I get paid $50,000 to write the exact same sales letter. So it's a crazy increase. Right? But what happened? Well, I got better at my craft. I achieved mastery. I also had wins for other clients that I leveraged, and I slowly charged more, but it took me a while. I mean, I started in 2012 charging $149 per sales letter, and two years later, I was only charging $497. So it's not a huge increase, although even that can add up. Right. I happened to get a good client who would pay me $1,000 per sales letter in 2014, and that's what started to change things for me. But what I realized over time is, again, then I could charge 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000. If you don't know what a sales letter is, it's like an advertisement. It's like a infomercial script, but it may be with headlines and formatted for a sales letter, or it could be a video script as well. But it's not just copy. Another example I like to think about, I have a friend who is an accountant, and he is one of the best accountants out there. He's really good, and he does work for clients. He doesn't work for a firm. He used to. And a few years back, somebody paid him a million dollars to help them save $10 million in taxes, which might sound kind of crazy, but think about it. If he. This person was obviously very wealthy who paid him, they had a crazy tax bill due of $10 million. And when they asked for his help, he said, yep, give me a million bucks, and I will save you 9 million. And so they did. Right. But another account might be out there freelancing and charging $20 an hour or $25 an hour or something like that. And they might think like, no one ever paid me a million dollars to be an account. And yet, well, if you're good at what you do and you have mastery, it's entirely possible. So the biggest things would be early on, if you're just starting out as a freelancer, I would say you don't need to worry as much about what you're charging. You should get clients, build up a portfolio. You should focus on delivering a lot of value, getting referrals and all that. But once you do have clients, you do have a portfolio. I would start leveraging these things. And I think the biggest thing you should do if you want to charge more and get to 10,000amonth as a freelancer or more, is you need to do something, what I call doing the math for your clients. By the way, my cat is here deciding to meow at me. But so it goes. So what is doing the math? There's two ways of doing this. One is to show an roi, and the other is to show how you can save money or save time, right? So, for example, say you do. You're a virtual assistant, and you're trying to get a client there, right? And you're talking to somebody, and they say, my time is worth $500 an hour. Great. How many hours per week do you spend on tasks that you don't want to be doing that you feel are a waste of time? So they say, I spend 10 hours a week on those tasks. You're like, all right, so that's $5,000, right? $500 an hour, 10 hours a week. So you're basically wasting $5,000 a week, $20,000 a month, right? I charge way more than most virtual assistants. I charge $50 an hour. So that means that for those 10 hours a week, you're going to pay me $500, which is, you know, 2,000amonth. Now, that might seem like a lot, but considering that right now it's costing you $20,000 to be doing these tasks, you're basically paying me $2,000 to get $18,000 back every single month. Does that make sense? And that's a pretty amazing value proposition, right? And not only that, but not only you getting that time back and saving money, but then you can be doing activities that are actually going to generate more profit, revenue, et cetera. So maybe your real return on time, your real return on paying me $2,000 is going to be $20,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 or something like that. So you're doing the math. Now think about that. That's 10 hours a week, you're getting paid $2,000 a week. Let's now look at four weeks, or, sorry, 40 hours in a week. So if you did this for four clients at 2,000 a week each, now you're at 8,000amonth. So you're not quite at 10,000, but you're pretty damn close, right? And from there, it's not pretty. It's not hard to up your rate to 2,500 a week, and suddenly you just made 10,000 in a month, right? Not hard. The difference is you have to treat yourself and what you're doing as being super valuable. What you don't want to do is, you know, you can play in the mud. You can play with all the other people who are doing VA tasks for $10, or you can go soar into the sky and be like, I'm the best in the road at what I do. I charge way more. But here's why you should pay to me. I save you time and help you to get more money, too. So huge difference, right? So that's one way we can do the math. Another way we can do the math is by showing direct roi. So, as a copywriter, if somebody is going to say, pay me, say I charge $50,000. But that's correct. Let's just say you want to charge $5,000 to write something for somebody, right? And the way I would do it is I'd be talking to them. I'd ask, okay, hey, what is your goal? Like, how much are you hoping that this is going to gross? Right? How much are you going to make from this material that I'm creating for you? Let's say that they are going to. I want to make $100,000 gross revenue. You're like, all right, perfect. And out of that, what do you think your net profit margin would be? It's probably going to be 20%. Do you think that's a fair profit margin? Usually people are going to say, no, I think it's going to be 50%. Let's just say they say that great, but let's say it's 20%. Okay, awesome. So 20% of 100,000 is $20,000 net profit. I charge $5,000. And basically you should do that because I have a track record. Here's my portfolio. I've helped other people to achieve similar results, and nothing's guaranteed. But given that this is my track record in my portfolio, I'm pretty confident I can help you to get to that $100,000 mark, which means you'll net $20,000. You're gonna pay me $5,000 to do that and get a 4x ROI on your investment, right? So you're paying me 5,000 to get 20,000 back. Now, if you could go invest in the market today, you. And for Every dollar you put into the stock market, you got $4 back. Would you do that? Absolutely. Same concept here. And really, let's think about it this way. Do you really think it's only 100,000, or do you think there's a chance that this could do, like, a million dollars? Well, I think it could do a million dollars, right, Is what they'll normally say, like, well, perfect. So I did that at 20% profit margin. That's $200,000. In that profit, you're paying me $5,000, which means on that $5,000, you have a chance at a 40x ROI. Now, if I could say for every dollar I put in the stock market, I'm gonna get $40 back, would you do that? You would do that every single time. Right. And that's what you get the opportunity and the chance at when you work with me. And that's why I charge what I charge. There are other people who will charge way less. There's other people who charge more. This is what I'm charging. But I'm telling you, like, you're doing it because of the roi. I am an investment. And that's a really big key, too, as you get to charging. Making $10,000 a month or more as a freelancer is that you want to treat. You want to look at it not as the client. You're asking a client to give you money. You're asking the client to invest in you so you can make them money. It's a huge mindset shift, but it's crucial, and that's what doing the math is all about. But say you do that, and they say, yeah, okay, $5,000, it maybe takes you two weeks to write the copy, to do the stuff that you're going to do for that client, for that marketing material. Awesome. Do two of those in a single week or start in a single month, and you just made $10,000. Right. So it's not hard. And you can do this for almost anything. You do voiceover work, right. And maybe you do it on fiverr and you get paid a couple hundred dollars per gig. All right, let's figure out how to, like, up the charging, how to charge more, how to demonstrate an roi, how to demonstrate that you'll save time, whatever it is. Like, the best voiceover artists in the world are making $50,000, $25,000 for, like, a single radio spot or a commercial, things like that. So why can't you? Almost anything that you do and you want to do as a freelancer, people are making an absurd amount of money at the very top of their game. So your goal is to just get to the top of your game. It's not to just sort of sit around and hang out in the status quo and love that. Because who wants to be in the status quo? Who wants to be part of the status quo? That's boring, right? We don't want to be boring. We want to be at the top of our game. So given all of that, it's entirely possible to make $10,000 a month, or frankly even 20, 30, 40, 50, 100,000amonth. As a freelancer, I personally make. I don't know what I made specifically with freelancing income, easily 10 million if not more. And of course my copy and things I've done gross hundreds and hundreds of millions, close to a billion dollars in sales. But I still freelance because I love it and I love teaching about freelancing because I think it's so important. So I wanted to shoot this video and just kind of clear that up because I think too many people put too many self limiting beliefs on themselves and I don't think you need to do that. So hopefully this helps. If it does, make sure you subscribe and go out there and make that money. Oh yeah. And I mean, follow me, go to StefanPaulGeorgi.com, check out my website, get on my email list because I talk about this stuff all day long. Subscribe to YouTube if you want to learn how to write copy. Check out thermbcmethod.com, share this with people. Do all that because I think it's really important, really valuable. So thanks.