Live Freelancing Q&A

alright hey everybody what is up thank you for joining us on this livestream I hope your weekend it's going well thank you for I'm actually really really tired I haven't trained in a week and like I just did a heavy training last yesterday and so now my whole body is ruined something actually wasted but we're here because over the last few weeks we've been talking a lot about freelancing here I've done a three one-hour sessions you know the intro to freelancing and there were a lot of questions so I want to dedicate two days today's stream just to answer a lot of these questions and I'm glad you're already here in the comments and I can see some questions here so I'll get started diving into these questions that you have here if we'll run out of the questions I have some backlog of questions from previous previous sessions but really feel free to put down your comments in the pathan of your questions in the comments it'll be really fun to you know communicate with you live that's a whole fun thing about live I'll start with mouse question tips on the first meeting with a client alright now so here's the thing there's really two really important things and that's basically the purpose of the first time that you meet or interact with the client the first one is you want to understand if this is a good fit right so ideally you have kind of a an ideal client that you know that you want to work with right so you want to work with a type of client that has certain type of problems or is a certain type of company for example for me I know that I work best with startups usually b2b startups which means they are not selling their product to consumers they're working with other businesses so that means that they have specific problems sometimes more complicated problems and that they raised a certain amount of money which means that the company is at a specific place right now they have specific budget and problems and consideration at that point in their life now now that I know who am I looking to work with I can that first interaction with the client to actually understand if they are a good fit because if they're not a good fit something that would happen a lot of times I will just send them to a friend or somebody else say look I'm probably not the best person to work with you and I'll send them to somebody else that I could recommend that way I can stay available for relevant clients however let's assume that you know you find out this is a good client and you want to work with the client then using the the first the first conversation or the first call you'll do two things first of all you'll kind of start to build a relationship right you want to learn to know them you want to have like a pleasant relationship with them you want to understand who they are you want them to like you in a sense so that's how you start building a relationship right by starting to talk about stuff that can be work stuff but other stuff you know you want to learn about who the people are and the better relationship you'll have before you start actually negotiating or talking about money or specifics it's better because then they'll have easier time if you have a good relationship so usually the first meeting is a lot of relationship building if I'll actually go to their office to meet them you know there's all these kind of tiny interactions that are even outside of the actually talking about the project you know let's make coffee together let's talk about you know where you're from you have a family where your kids are doing all that kind of like small talk helps to build a relationship and understand who these people are because again the better relationship that you have the communications throughout from the negotiation throughout the project the the relationship will be better and then the second thing which is super super important is that you really want to diagnose and understand what problems do they really have a lot of times clients would come to you and say hey I want a logo I need a website or something like that but that's kind of like the solution to an actual underlying problem with their business right they're trying to achieve something and they think that by improving their logo or a website something is going to be improved and getting better results for them and so you want to understand what these things are I want to dive deeper into learning about their business their situation why do they have the problems why did they came to you at this point so and all of this will help you you know come up with better solutions for them and will help you to better present your services because you really understand what drives their business so those are my purposes for the first meeting relationship building and learning about who they are their business and diagnosing their real problems all of that happens though after I do the what's called qualification I see that this is a good fit before we dive into all the other stuff otherwise I don't want to waste my time or their time if they're you know if somebody comes to me and they have no budget at all it's not gonna be useful to spend a lot of time with them so that's what we try to understand in the first meeting asked upon rights to do I have a question I understand that to scale my entrepreneurship as a freelancer logical thing is to start delegating tasks and training people what do you advise the process for finding training hiring people as a team of freelancing projects all right estimate so first of all congrats on having your business at a place where you're already considering delegation and growth that that means that you're probably in a fantastic place the first thing I think that you need to think about is who do you want to delegate what aspect of the business for and you'll probably this is a process of you actually starting to learn about yourself what are your actual strengths and weaknesses in the business everybody no matter where you are no matter what business everybody has strengths and weaknesses and you need to learn about yourself what do you like doing what do you hate doing what are you good at what do you suck it I'll give you an example for me for example dealing with the finances and again this is non negotiation or client relationship but dealing with finances such as managing my cash flow you know tracking invoices tracking expenses all of that stuff I hate that stuff right and I because I hate it I'm also really bad at it and I make mistakes and so dealing with that part of my business was really frustrated to me I had put in the time I knew that I could do better things with my time so either I wouldn't put in the time which caused serious business problems for me or I would do this but really hate doing this so actually managing the finances of my personal business was the first thing that I delegated in in my specific case I was fortunate enough to delegate this to my wife who later on you know started working with me but that could also be delegated of course to our accountant or bookkeeper or just hire somebody else for that so key number one is to really understand what are you what is it that you want to delegate because there are aspects that if you that somebody else can do actually better than you because they're better suited for the work in in this example for example finances and then there are things that if you will try to delegate them too fast you'll get poorer results for example for me I know that a lot of the value that I bring and my strengths is how I relate and handle clients throughout the process from the sales process and to the actual you know management throughout the project and working together with them if I would the first thing that I would try to hire for is somebody for sales for example that will do the sales instead of me that will require a lot of training that's probably somebody that you know I'll have to train a lot and maybe the results will be the less ideal than if I would do this myself and so I'm not saying that you shouldn't hire for that role just maybe start with the easier things to delegate things that you are actually not that good or so that you can focus on the thing that you are really good at same with design for example I am really good with the first initial heavy lifting of design so when we start the project like let's structure it let's build a visual language for that I'm good at that then when it comes time to design page number 10 and you have to design these small icons in page number 10 for me I get bored and if I'll get bored again I'll probably do a less than ideal less than ideal work and so I found designers that I can outsource that are they love the details and they love doing the execution work so it's kind of a complementary complementary you know relationship where they do what I don't like word want or good at doing and for them it's ideal in terms of how to find these people well obviously you're gonna find designers and accountants or o or something like that in different places but you always need to kind of build a network or a circle of highly trusted people that you'll be able to work with them I feel this is true by the way not just for your business but for your life you know you want to have a trusted doctor you want to have a trusted trusted lawyer you want to have a trusted whatever handyman that can help you fix things in your house so you want to have these kind of trusted people that you can work with and in the design space you know we see people depending on where you spend your time i right now spend most my time on Instagram and so that's where I see other and interact with other designers when I'll see a designer that I like I'll follow him I'll save some of those posts and you can create an Instagram collection so I'll have 3d freelancers collection web designers collection and I would put people that I find interesting in one of these collections I'll start reaching out to them and develop relationship with them so I'll send them direct message or something like that so that way we can start interacting and building relationship then at some point I might want to hire one of them so that's how I kind of build a network of people that I might end up hiring at some point I hope that makes sense oh wow two tons of tons of questions at this point all right it's looking for the next question - drew all right question from Abdullah my question is why freelance marketplace is best for long term projects or which freelance marketplace is the best for long term project and also for big budget projects hmm that's interesting I don't know that the that the the marketplaces are good for long term processes the reason is just basically the business model because up work for example they're taking a percentage of what you pay so if the price for you is $100 the freelancer I think only gets like $80 or something like this so it might be good for an initial project but on a long-term you don't want them to eating up so much you know Commission for a long-term relationship however what I found that happened to me is I would hire somebody on up work we do a project together and because this project was successful will kind of build long-term relationship and then move out of up work and continue our relationship in a different format and that happened to me with multiple kind of vendors and so for me again I hire on up work so if I would try to get started I would try to get started on up work just because again that's that's the one of the products that I use there are other categories of marketplaces they're even more let's call it premium marketplace my favorite one is called working not working and working not working you can check out the website later it's kind of a really high-end freelance marketplace you can't just join there you have to be invited and it's really like this is let's say we're Nike when they need an illustrator to draw their poster or something like that they hire on that platform and it's kind of a closed circle so that might be another type of you know there are marketplaces which you can find high paying clients for but it's different it's difficult it's easy much harder to get into them them but to answer the question I think that you you use these platform to get the initial traction to build a relationship but in freelance freelance is of those relationship business so if you invest in the relationship you'll see the return on the investment in the relationship in the long term because you'll get more projects from the same client it'll be easier to get project from the same client the clients will trust you the client will be willing to pay you more and so that's that's how the investment comes back kind of long-term so I would use the freelancing platform just to kick off kind of mice my initial traction with some clients and again which is best I don't know I use up work and so but I never worked there as a freelancer I'm only hiring there I think it's important to say Josh hello from California is it probably still yesterday for you I don't know alright just how to manage contacts contacts more simply well I basically use kind of a CRM so and not really like a CRM stands for client relationship management and initially I would have a very simple Trello board I hope you know Trello where actually you know what let me try and show this to you let me show you I'm just not sure that I'm wondering if I have like real clients name there and it's not ideal for me to show well let me show this just because I'm not taking clients right now this is kind of a little bit older but let me show you alright so this is basically how I would structure my CRM now I moved its Dakota but I used to do this on Trello so I would have these kind of that's basically the pipeline right these are the steps that you need to go through from a lead then you know you go an email and everyone that you know connects you then you move them to email then you move them to a call then you move into a meeting or that's how it goes until a proposal negotiation you won or lost or something like this so this is basically how I know who I need to contact with at each each point I hope I mean there were some emails there in personal names so you know be decent and don't don't like contact people out of the blue that's how I handle this we take how to pitch clients effectively well the thing about pitching is that you need to really really really do your homework with research right you need to really know what do they need right now where they are right now how you can add value to them and that's by really really doing research do not just email people hey I'm a web designer can i redo your we do SEO so I get these email all the time I don't even bother reading them before I archive them because there's no context there's no personal you know research or anything that goes into it you need to really understand what do they need like who they are as people you know where they are right now how to get them to interact with you so you'll have to write a really good crafted you know peach email that shows why you understand them who you are you have any kind of credibility why would they even trust you if they don't know you then you need to create something that some kind of a value proposition that's highly highly targeted to them and give them a really easy call-to-action and add some proof that you can actually solve the problem right so maybe attach something an example that you did for them or for somebody else but give the proof that you can actually help because there's just so much out there from people who are you know a please work with me why why would I work with you I don't know you have no trust or context about who you are so you need to be super super smart when reaching out to people cold all right I wish like how does one find more startups who need to build a proof of concept I'm a full stack dev with design I mean any startup I think needs to build a proof of concept it goes back again to here doing research I think it startups it's relatively easy because it's very very public I mean you can see who's raising money right now on websites like angel list or who just raised money or so you can see those people who interact right you can go to the website of the startup incubators where these companies are still working right now on their prototypes and you can see who's listed there and then maybe you can contact them but I think it specifically just because most startups are very well versed on the Internet and are very active on the Internet it's easy to see them and engage in all the startups ecosystem you know directories all that kind of stuff hello from Paris I wish I was in Paris right now how to pitch your clients who is not sure if they need a website what is the benefit to tell potential clients to lock them in so again Kevin this goes back into you don't pitch a website to somebody who doesn't need a website right but what you do pitch is may be an opportunity right if you don't do this I mean right now let's let's take the current situation where you know because of the coronavirus a lot of restaurants needed to go online and enable deliveries of food in that kind of case they don't want a website but they want to they want to keep running their business so what is the cost of not having a website right now it's pretty obvious you need to have this another example would be you know your website is not accessible and we've seen a lot of people in your market being sued because their website is not accessible right so I know that you don't want to you don't care about a new website but you do care about protecting your business so you need to frame this at either like what is the opportunity or what is this threat here then maybe you weren't aware of that it needs that you need to take action on again the website is just the end result right but you need to talk about the opportunity or the threat to their business to do two to two Maximillian about the course will you cover the best ways to find clients and how to approach them so I guess you're referring to the new six-figure freelancer program and we do talk about all the different marketing channels right there they're the what you want to do is build a systematic marketing channel that you know that you take certain actions every day and you know that every week you know or a month you'll get certain amount of leads that you can talk to and you can sell your services to and we do cover the different ones you know there are you know the social media there are ads there are events referrals there are all kinds of them each of them has different pros and cons and are a good fit for different people you know what worked for somebody else and with a different person who works in a different market might not be a good fit for you so the thing is to realize what do you need to do rather than oh this guy is doing this seems like it's working well for them let me try and do that all right he's got a big following on Instagram let me get it good big following on Instagram but it doesn't maybe its Instagram isn't totally not relevant to your market and maybe Instagram is not something that you enjoy doing and so you need to we do go through the different options that you have and how to think about them in terms of your strengths as a person and what where do your actual target audience or potential clients hang out does it even make sense to go on LinkedIn or it go on Facebook or to go on Instagram or or whatnot I'll show you how to find out bad clients early well there are some red flags that you need to be aware of some of them are you know around so a lot of this is I don't think that there are a lot of bad clients per se I think that for for a lot of the times it's just misaligned expectations you thought that you want to do something like this and they thought that maybe you thought that you want to have creative freedom and they thought that you should do exactly what they said so this is not a bad client it's just misaligned expectations a bad client would be somebody that the only thing that I can really think about is either their a promise to pay and they're not paying or they're treating you wrong in a sense of the way that they speak to you or you know something like that other than that I don't know what is a bad client so you need to think about how to mitigate that risk in the in the sense of payment that's why we charge upfront payment if the client is not willing to pay upfront payment which is kind of a business standard that everybody's doing that's that's a red flag you would say if he's not willing to pay right now maybe he won't pay later right but if he did pay right now he's kind of invested he will want to make sure that he's betting getting the best out of the project and that kind of reduces the chances that there'll be problems later on not that it's impossible but it will reduce the chance which is what you're looking to get in the sense of you know treating you bad in its how they speak that's why I was talking about you know building a relationship up front and spending some time for them so that you can get the sense of what kind of people they are however there are you know you you always need to align expectations also in terms of you know the proposal or something like this that if you know if they misbehave or if you misbehave you know the proposal and contract should protect both of you each person can call it off and here's the structure where it's being called off you know do you refund the the upfront payment do you get paid do you not get paid you align the expectations around what happens if things go wrong and it's it's smart to align that when things are okay let's talk about what happens if this doesn't work out look what happens if you don't like any creative idea I present to you so you align these expectations and then the chances are that you'll be hitting a bad clients are are highly reduced Dutch people hate small talk they dive straight to the point all right this is from the decent try deal I don't know how to say this dot but okay I mean I'm pretty sure that there are different cultural contexts but I also am sure that there's a lot of business going around in you know in the Netherlands and I do know that at the end of the day - struck any kind of deal you need to have some kind of a relationship and Trust so I would ask how do people in the Netherlands are building relationship maybe it's not smoke dope maybe it's something else you know maybe through talking about the business itself I don't know but you need to there is probably a way for building a relationship and I would think try to figure out what it is you know in your local contacts Paul hey Ron Congrats on the freelancing course thank you I've been freelancing for 13 years but I think I can still improve the business side of things I'm a motion designer is the course still relevant for me yes Paul I mean the course is a business principle course so while you know I built it for designers or maybe graphic designers or web designers in mind so maybe the examples are from that world the business the business principles that were covering right marketing finances negotiation management all these principles are business principles and they apply in in any business and it's basically it's not that I invented them right I bring out what is basically the standard business operation for any business but I break it down from my perspective on how to apply that within freelance but you know marketing a negotiation relationship all that kind of stuff pricing those are general business practices yeah Kevin when you first start is it okay to take on anyone even if they're a bad client well Kevin yeah for when you're just starting out you will experiment with different clients because you're not really sure what's a good fit for you and your standards are probably lower and so is your price and so you'll probably experiment and you'll probably learn from your mistakes like a lot of people are however like I like I mentioned earlier you can learn from my mistake or you know from what is a good business practice to reduce the chances what I think is you should experiment with with different maybe niches or types of clients but you should always try to work with good people right you you don't want to necessarily on purpose work with bad people that doesn't make any sense so you can still use the you know process we talked before to reduce the chances of working with with bad people for a web desert willow clients that the comments here just jump out of these things so I lost track where I was but I have here gills or gills don't know if this topic is covered already but how do you manage payments for starters do you create PayPal invoices how about delivering the work so that really really depends on where you work and what kind of clients you work with because different countries have different standards where I work and I work mostly with local clients in Israel we do wire transfers so that's the easiest thing to do with my clients abroad so I had clients in Switzerland that I worked with for a long time and they were doing wire transfers as well because there was a big sums of money when I had a client in United States which we did a PayPal transfer because it was easier for them with PayPal so I think it really depends on the client in the context and what is the cheapest and most efficient way to get money I know that in United States a lot of people can just open up stripe account and then their clients can pay them using credit cards so there there are different solutions I really think it's depends on where you are in terms of invoicing the invoicing is also kind of a function of where you live I know there are countries I think in Europe where you can just you know create an invoice in your you know Google Doc and send it and it's valid where I'm working in Israel you have to work with a legal kind of invoicing system so I use a local tool that generates invoices that are compliant with the Israeli law I know all these other tools like zero fresh books that work in the US and so I would suggest working with them I see I think there's also a benefit of when you work with this invoicing software you get all the stats you got all the trends of your revenue and so it's good to commit to one software and from by the way from my experience in the US I think fresh book looks great again I I don't have too much experience with it but fresh books looks pretty solid all right let's try to find to do to do another question all right logo type design all right that's not a question Cedric how is your view on being an expert in building web shops demand specifically building web shops for small businesses increase deliver is well absolutive enough for eco all right so expert for e-commerce I think that's an amazing amazing niche that's highly growing right now a lot of people are starting you know online shops and I think there's a demand high demand for experts in that niche so I think it's really great niche in terms of is web flow a great solution for e-commerce I think it really depends on what that shop is what are they selling are they bigger I mean because there are and to be like super transparent I'm not you I'm not I don't have that big of an experience in e-commerce and I know there's a lot of features that sometimes shop if I might have and web flow doesn't have at this point although they're releasing and even in the last month they've been releasing tons of e-commerce features so I think it's being improved it's being improving rapidly however that really depends on what your clients needs because if they need a feature like I don't know I think they have coupons right now but maybe what I don't know different currencies so if they need something that web flow doesn't have obviously you'll have to figure out a different solution alright alright what else do we have here how do you think about finding clients on be Hanes well to be honest I think it's possible right because people go there and they look for specific you know they might look for hey let's see a web designer maybe in the health space and they'll see who comes up and maybe they'll contact them but I think it's highly highly competitive I think it's very biased towards people who have been there long and have a lot of followers and have been you know already getting a lot of attractions and every every project that they put out is being you know automatically it's trending and it's getting views and if you go there and it's gonna be tough to just get started now if I would do this I would really think about this in terms of kind of like search engine optimization right I would think what would my ideal client look for so as we said maybe they will look for Web Design in the health space so let me just publish all these projects in that space and try to hijack what's going to happen when people are going to look for that but as I said I'm not sure I'd I never done that before I don't even know if that's possible I think it's very hard and competitive when you know you you are competing against tens of thousands of other talented people it's really hard to stand out and be unique and also it kind of commoditized a little bit what you do right because they're just how are they gonna judge on who's the best designer right you can't really sell yourself properly they're only looking at the work and they might think this is more beautiful than this but they have no context they don't know what was the process they don't know how working with you is different than working with them so the only thing they can you know compare is either the number of likes and views or something like that or maybe when they talk to you maybe the price but so that's why I would ideally funnel people in to use different channels to bring people in to my own website however that's possible and if you already have some traction there maybe it's a really great place for you to be how can I add a database in web flow website beginner in web flow shoe huh all right no need to copy/paste your question like gazillion times well the way that you add a database is you use the CMS the CMS is basically a database that you structure however you want and so you add a CMS you create a collection you define its collection is basically the name of a database and then you you define it you know you define the fields and that's basically how it is to do - - alright hey there I got my third project which has 10 18 pages phone food up how much do I charge Arian well it really depends because I had know nothing about your clients who are they how much money do they have where this app is going to be who are you what market are you working with how did the clients get to you I mean all these questions are super important in order to come up with a price and and also you need to have kind of a pricing strategy right why would you price it X versus Y depends on are you trying to get as many clients and testimonials as possible which is what we would call you know and penetration strategy meaning that you lower your price just because you try to penetrate a market and so there's a lot of questions that would go into a question about how much to charge for a client a project Jonathan are you using some platform to get new customer well so for me right now my freelance is on hold I'm not taking new clients at the moment just because I'm working on the courses and on flux Academy but at this point the way that I built my experience was basically just through basically 18 years of network getting referrals and working with clients who recommended other clients and so at this point or at least you know in the previous five years of me freelancing I honestly I didn't have to take much actions to develop marketing challenges because I had so much inbound I would though support all of my networking by going to events by following up with people by meeting people by taking them out to lunch and so all these kind of actions were being take on to build and create my my network so that I will have clients flowing my way if I can design a website Nikki if I can design a website with Adobe XD WordPress am I ready for design and web flow because I've heard that web flow is for pro designer wall Nikki yes I mean basically if you can design something in Adobe XD then either you build it with WordPress or you build it with you know web flow or whatever and so I think that web flow is a better solution that gives you more flexibility than WordPress at least from the perspective of a designer and so yeah I think that you're probably ready sounds like you're ready a nice hi Ron does multimedia engineering course is same with multimedia design if not can a multimedia engineer student become a web designer I don't really know what a multimedia engineering course is I have no clue what that means but I do believe that anybody can become a web designer if you invest the time to learn the process of design and how to work with clients and how you know using the software but you can you learn that by yourself Birbal is a state market hotel industry good niche I'm wondering if a state was real estate or hotel industry is a good niche basically I would say yes for both of them right now though just because of the current global situation that were in hotel industry is pretty pretty was hit pretty bad tourism in general and restaurants obviously took a pretty bad hit and so in the short term I would say this is maybe not ideal but in general and long term yeah I think hotel industry or what's called the hospitality industry I think those are great niches fyz what skills do I have to learn to start freelancing well so first of all you need to have the skill to deliver a service that can solve their problem that can be anything right that can be from branding from creating a logo from creating a website as long as you can solve a client's particular problem that's the first skill right of course you know web design or design in general is built on a lot of micro skills let's say but let's say the first thing is you need to know how to deliver value okay so that's value delivery then the next thing would be to learn the basics of the basics of business right because you need to get to some kind of a deal so you need to have negotiation skills and you know being able to come up with a price and create a contract or a proposal and send it to now most people do this without you know they they have this basic skill because we all negotiate with each other without even going to business school right we negotiate with our partners we negotiate with the hey with our friends I want to see that movie no I want to see this movie we know how to handle conflicts of interest and how to negotiate so you have these build skills built in however when you freelance you'll want to improve them because obviously you want to play the game better but the business skills that go into this are probably marketing which is getting people to know you and like you and trust you and bring them in and then sales how to convince them to work with you and then negotiation you know how to reach an agreement finances understand where how much money comes in how much money do you need to pay to be sustainable to be profitable so these are and of the basic business skills that you'll need I would say do it if I what do you think about you I and you axe boot can't run well I wish there were something really good I don't know we'd love to hear your kind of recommendation I never did one online I heard I heard mixed reviews from people about off lines and online reviews some people really liked them some people maybe less I don't know because I never did any of them so I don't I don't have like a proper opinion what do you say is webflow good for and what not right Tony so I think web flow in general I think it's amazing for building websites a lot of people are approaching me and having a very complicated more like app interaction where you know they want to create databases and logins and people uploading stuff and stuff like that and while some of that can happen on web flow sometimes it's just it makes it makes it very complicated and not easy and not maybe ideal so I would say if you want to build a business website the best ideal use case is a business website a website needs to tell its story right needs to sell needs to make an impression and a business website 100% the ideal use case of course now they're trying to build the e-commerce so ecommerce is also a function blogging platform but for more complicated interactive app right now still it's still pretty hard and maybe not the ideal thing Jonah what's up what would you answer if potential clients would ask you why should he need your services if he can use website builders by himself well Joanna I think if somebody said I I wouldn't answer the question I mean I would answer the question such as I would love for you to build your website yourself having that question just means that this is not my ideal customer because to be honest my ideal customer would never build their own website themselves okay they don't have time they need a professional to do it for them they want some they want to look beyond what's even possible on these platforms and so they wouldn't even probably consider this and so if somebody you know consider this they're probably not a good fit for me however you know for a lot of clients I would myself you know if somebody comes to me alright I really really want to hire you but I only have two hundred and fifty dollars I would say don't hire me go build your website on Wix you know I would just tell them to do this not because it's just not not a good fit for me all right ah guys please do not copy paste copy paste copy paste so much to hijack the comments it's a little bit annoying Lubang for a web design project what's the right what to get the website content from clients you have a template to share so I do not have a web a template to share I think that's a process the process usually works that at the beginning of the project were kind of outlining the content that we want to and need what I would do is I would write some kind of a dummy mock-up text and content to use and I will show it to them and I'll say now it's your responsibility to replace it and of course we have kind of due dates and in milestones built in the contract and the proposal that says they need to deliver it by X date otherwise we cannot progress and and so we built this kind of systems in place to ensure that everything happens in the right time but to answer your question I try and do the heavy lifting myself so that at the end they either just need to replace some text or maybe just improve on what I've already created because ads from my part is just part of the service that I create I try to help as much as possible perhaps I'll maybe even bring a content writer to do the you know to do the the work Kevin have you sent cold emails to get clients if so what was something you put in the email that catches the person's attention well Kevin I sent a lot of cold emails specifically not to get clients but a lot of time to get other people that I care about interested in me and work with do something else with me the last example was I did this in the pimp and my website pimp my website where I sent this bigshot investor a website that I designed for him and I sent it to him on the email and I actually showed the email that I wrote there and how I got his attention a lot of times it's by the first of all if you can get some kind of social proof okay so I touched upon this a little bit earlier when we talked about pitching so social proof means why would I even listen to you in the case of that specific investor I saw that on Twitter he was either following or in touch with somebody that I used to work with in the past so one of the first things that I mentioned on the email was that I worked in any do any do is the name of the startup and I saw that he was engaged with the you know founder of the CEO of any do so the first thing that I mentioned is hey my name is Ron I used to work in anything so the first thing is grab his attention with a mutual mutual contact or a reason to believe that I'm not just a random person from the internet who's got nothing to do with him so I would think about the social proof and social proof can be built in in many different ways but you'd probably want to use some something like that too grab attention all right journey with JJ when starting web design business should i target one category of clients like health coaches or should i go for all categories or industry well here's the thing it your life would be much much much easier if you'll focus on one category or a niche like you've mentioned a lot of people start out they are not focused and they will take any kind of clients and maybe that's okay for starting out however it makes your life much much difficult because you don't know where to look for these clients you don't know who to talk to you don't know what should you put on your website to help differentiate yourself from any other designer out there and so if you make that decision I think it will help you build your business much much faster hey why'd you slave-like probably mispronounced your name I'm just here to say thank you thank you I appreciate that glad you could drop in hey Andy what's up what do you recommend to help a new freelancer to stay calm and excited during the storm of building a client base that so that hard days feel a little easier to do - - I'm not sure why there is a storm when you're building a client base Andy but um in general I mean to stay calm and and stuff like that I personally I meditate like 10 minutes per day using an app I did it for years using headspace I love that now I'm trying a different app that's called waking up by Sam something sam harris or something like that i find it helpful and as I get started I do this here when I come to the office so like 9:00 in the morning I get here before I open the computer and emails I sit for 10 minutes kind of helps me usually I come from the mess of kids in the morning and everything is hectic it kind of helps me to calm down and start they more calm but in general you know do what works for you find something that you enjoy you have to put in some something fun in the middle of the day for me it's either this meditation a lot of time my lunch break is time for me to relax either I would go and meet a friend and hang out for lunch or one thing that I've been doing lately before pre coronavirus where all restaurants were shut down I would go into a lunch like for a restaurant just with a with a book with a fiction book got nothing to do with work and I would just read you know I read on my Kindle so I can keep reading the book on my iPhone that I have back home and that would kind of it in the middle of the day just distract me from work and put me in a completely different world for an hour and then I come back I'm much more relaxed and and have perspective and so for me that that what works for me and this may I know your study path on becoming a web designer all right so I think I share this in a few of the videos but I started out well it's a website well I started out freelancing we talked about this in the first like intro to freelancing I started freelancing back in high school and did website and stuff like that I nobody taught me anything because there was no kind of a guide back in the time so we just looked at what other people are doing and tried to do our own take on it yeah learning you know maybe HTML and CSS from a book or something like that but basically that's how I got started so I've been working so I did my high school and then in Israel we have to go to the military service for three years so that's kind of a break after high school so I took that break came back and actually got myself a job like a full-time job as a designer and online gaming company in gaming you should know is gambling so I was working in this online like casino company doing I don't know if to call it web design probably not web design like I was doing email templates and banners and all that kind of stuff but I was still doing freelancing as a web designer back at the time then then I went to work in an advertising agency so I was rolling from work to work again it and I was doing always doing website and always doing other things and after after a few years I ended up going to a design school to learn graphic design and that was a big help so I was designing web site I I never fully learned web design because there was nowhere to learn it from however I did learn to use the tools a lot you know from lynda.com and courses like that and general design principles most of it was at design school and then all of that was just applied to web design if that makes sense JJ according to you how copy 19 will affect web design business will and will businesses stop investing in websites or will they invest more I said that's it that's a good question I think some businesses will something so there's two sides to this one some websites some businesses that did not plan to have web sites definitely understand that they have to have a website and they will build website some companies that were planning on building web sites now maybe don't have a budget and so maybe they'll do it themselves and so there'll be less work however maybe some some other companies were planning to work with big agencies and planning you know I'm spending $100,000 on a website now they might say to themselves well how can we save and maybe instead of this fancy agency maybe we'll give it to a freelancers for you know 20 30 thousand dollars so big loss to the agency however kind of a win for a freelancer so there'll be ups and downs some people it's gonna be tough on them other people are going to benefit from it so as always it really depends on how you got into it and and what skills do you have and yeah and what you're gonna make of it I think Jim hey Ron I hope this one doesn't get buried like my previous question sorry Tim do you prefer if clients registers domain and by the hosts on their own or do you put it on their behalf alright Tim so most of my clients come to me when they already own a domain just because I think now for most companies part of their you know when they're just starting out the company the first thing they'll do or one of the first things they'll do is buy their domain name because probably when they just brainstorm the name of the company you know they they picked out the domain already so most companies will come to me when they have a domain sometimes when I work with companies on renaming I'll do the you know the research if a domain is available but most of them already purchased it and then they they usually don't purchase hosting because they don't have the website yet but they expect you to tell them what to do or we own the domain what to do with it or they set up something in the meanwhile so usually for me because I build website with web flow I would you know set up the web flow website and then I'll move it to their own account they'll pay for the hosting and I'll help them connect the domain with the hosting so a lot of times they'll just give give me the credential so that's how it usually works Michael Michael Fred Alvarez or Michael here's just a thought before coffee aid the market was open to build client website after the market shifted to a new demand all right so it's not a question to do - - all right wow we're almost an hour here so let's do one last question before before we're we're gonna end this fun fun stream all right Sarge LLL do you think the AI industry is a good niche for UX designer when it comes to freelancing hmmm it's interesting I don't know one if there are enough companies in the AI space to do they have specific problems when it comes to design for the AI industry but the truth it I don't know it might be a valid it's probably a growing industry so yeah I think it's valid to do the research I don't know the numbers I usually do the research I would want to see how many companies are in the world and do you think there's at least ten thousand companies in the world that are in AI it's possible if there are it's probably a good niche if not if there's like 200 or 500 I would say it sounds like a small niche because you're probably not gonna get all these 500 and so you know long term thinking about this long term maybe this issue is too small but I don't know I would do the research it does sound interesting all right Jacob any tips on how to grow your Facebook page we said that was the last one this will be the last one Jacob on Facebook what do people like they like good content and they like to interact with people so put out good content and interact with them be relevant to the niche that you're trying to approach to and hopefully in the long term this will work alright everybody thank you all for coming and spending an hour with me I loved hanging out with you see you on the next one and have a fantastic day bye bye

Channel: Flux

Views: 4,843

Rating: 4.8993711 out of 5

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Id: 47Zm2ficv50

Length: 56min 43sec (3403 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020