Are you standing in your own way? Truly, do you wait to be told what to do, or make excuses for when things don’t get done?
Let’s touch on the one big way your freelance marketing could get nipped in the bud before it even gets off the ground:
Excuses
This sounds like:
- I’ll do it when / if
- I’ll get to that tomorrow
- What if I get too much work?
- I have to do <personal thing> first
And if you are saying to yourself, “That’s not me! I work really hard,” here are a few symptoms of freelance marketing woes:
- Your income is yo-yoing; you go from overworked, to little work
- You’re not excited about your work
- You don’t know your opt-in list numbers, and how they’re growing
- You waste lots of time on social media with little results
- You just can’t get stuff done. Why?
Getting Freelance Marketing Results
I am working with a team to help them improve their SEO blogging and conversion rates for webinars. Most of the team are employees, with myself as a freelance marketing professional who was hired by the CEO (an entrepreneur himself.)
I suggested that the number of field in their opt-in form was too high; eight currently, to be exact. (Will you give out your address when you sign up for things? How about phone number?) The sales people insisted, that’s the information they needed.
They compromised and cut down to five. However, a study by Hubspot of 40,000 hits to a website showed that the optimal number of fields was two. In fact, when a sign-up is taken from three fields to two, the conversion rate jumped by 40%. Wow.
After presenting my idea, to cut the number of fields down, and a solution of how they could get around few of the fields (i.e. look at the email address to determine where they worked) I started to hear some very interesting feedback from the employees of the company:
“That’s more work for me.”
“Our industry isn’t like selling magazines.”
“I don’t have an assistant to help.”
“Our niche market doesn’t work like that.”
These, my friends, are excuses. They are objections to change that will be limiting to your freelance marketing in a way that keeps you from being successful. As an entrepreneur, you cannot afford to think like this. Ever.
When you are responsible for your own income, a business owner, you have to try to stay two steps ahead of the market. You need to make changes in a bold, daring way so that you can maintain a consistent flow of business, yes?
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Let’s turn around the fear into a big-picture outlook, like an entrepreneur should:
What if every event increased attendance by 40%?
What if you had 40% more business – wouldn’t that warrant an assistant?
What if we just tried it, what’s the worst that can happen?
The reality is that we owe it to ourselves to keep testing the waters and stop being afraid. Great things are not accomplished by making excuses – of having an employee mentality – they are accomplished by saying, “Ok, let’s try it.”
Simultaneously, because this is the way the Universe works, a client decided to challenge me beyond my limits. She said, “Let’s do a contest.”
I think my stomach tied several knots just hoping I could get this right for her…and I was scared. “I’ll get fired if I can’t perform to her expectations,” I thought.
Do you know what happened instead?
She got 372 hits onto her page – about 65% based on my exclusive efforts to bring traffic to her website (about 100 came from a newsletter blast to over 1,000 subscribers.)
And I found myself being thankful for the challenge. And I saw that I, too, had developed an employee mentality full of too much objection for a freelance marketing initiative a client wanted. But the results, clearly, speak for themselves.
Elspeth Misiaszek uses her writing and online marketing skills to help vegan businesses, coaches and entrepreneurs increase sales on their websites and blogs. Is it SEO? Get our FREE blogging resource today.