Day 29: To Find Clients, Give Away Useful Stuff

This is Day 29 of 31 Days to Start a Freelancing Business (or Make Yours a Better One). If you want to catch up, click here to read Day 1.

If you found yesterday’s freelance marketing strategy (cold calling) hard to swallow, you will find today’s task much more palatable. You’ll still be promoting your services. But you’ll be doing so much more subtly. And, you’ll be giving value first before asking for something, possibly, in return.

What You Get When You Give

There are many benefits to being generous with your talents. By giving away useful stuff, you:

• demonstrate your knowledge, skills and expertise
• generate goodwill from your prospects and anybody who finds your free stuff useful
• give people a reason to spread the word about you

By the way, by “free stuff,” I mean something you give away with no strings attached. You won’t even ask for people’s Email addresses in exchange for your freebie. It’s a total gift.

This is what “content marketing” is all about – using freely available, useful content to generate leads, subscribers and sales. Or in your case, clients.

As an example, I recently completed and gave away a special report about video marketing.

What to Give Away

You have plenty of choices when it comes to freebies. It could be a:

• special report
• white paper
• video
• website template
• WordPress theme
• checklist
• action guide
• flowchart
• resource list
• audio recording
• webinar recording
• special pages on your site/blog

Really, your imagination is the only limit! Of course, you should keep in mind what format your target clients are most likely to consume.

And what about the content of your freebie? Well, it should be related to the services you offer. Your freebie could be about:

• the benefits of something (such as a service you provide, or a software you know how to use) – demonstrate benefits with case studies
• how to do something
• how not to do something – mistakes to avoid
• myths and misconceptions – and what the truth is
• lessons learned

The reaction you’re looking for is, “Wow, I really need this to make more money from my business/have more free time/enjoy life more. But it looks like a lot of work. I better just hire this person. He/She knows what he/she’s talking about.”

So remember to put a soft-sell offer for your services. For example, you could put this at the end of your report:

“If you need help with your article marketing efforts, I offer a complete article marketing solution for small businesses of different budgets. Contact me at me@mydomain.com or 212-1234567 so we can discuss which article marketing package is best for your biz.”

Now, that wasn’t hard, was it?

Selling Your Freebie

What?! Did I just say “sell”? Well, ya! You still have to sell your freebie even if you’re not asking for anything else in exchange.

You need to spread the word that you’ve got this really useful stuff available for anybody. Here are some ideas:

• Email everybody you know.
• Remember the forums you joined on Day 21? Go there and post a link to your free stuff.
• Promote it on all the social networking sites you joined on Day 22
• Publish a blog post about it
• Link to it when you guest post on other people’s blogs

And keep promoting your free stuff. You shouldn’t be ashamed to do so. After all, it’s free and it’s really good – you will make it really good, won’t you.

Here’s an excellent example of free stuff. It’s in the form of both a PDF and a website. And it’s all about what we’re trying to do today, which is build up your authority in your field. Click here to read all about how “Authority Rules.”

Got any questions? Additional ideas? Post them in the comments section below. You don’t know just who may benefit from your wisdom.

Thank you!

Lexi

PS: You might be thinking, “But if I show people how to do something, won’t they just go ahead and do it themselves – instead of hiring me?” Yes, some people are do-it-yourselfers and they have more time than money on their hands. Don’t worry about them; they’re not your ideal clients. But they just might refer you to those who are.

photo credit: kalandrakas

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