Things that hold you back as a freelancer

Rachel: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives.

Lynne: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: Hello? Hello. We are back with a bit of an unusual episode this week, aren’t we? It’s just the two of us.

Lynne: It is the two of us, and I think it’s a good thing because some of the feedback we’ve got is that people quite like a smaller episode with just some actionable tips from the two of us, and this is what we’re doing.

Rachel: I know. Well, we are doing something, I mean, we’ve both been freelancing for a long time. I think for me it’s like twenty-five years.

Lynne: For me it’s ten. 

Rachel: So, thirty-five years collectively we have under our belts freelancing, so we wanted to do an episode because it’s something we get asked about. Something we see a lot is, what is holding people back from doing better as a freelancer, being more visible, getting better work, better clients. I mean, what are the small little tweaks that you could make in your business that might just propel you forward a little bit?

Lynne: Exactly. Because it’s often the small things I think everyone gets caught up in, oh, I’ve got to redo a website, I’ve got to speak to a developer, I’ve got to save up to do this.  I’ve got big things, but sometimes it’s just little things that you can do, and you don’t have to do everything.  You can just do one thing at a time.

Rachel:  Absolutely. So, we are going to share the thing, the three things each that we wished we’d done sooner. That we think might have really helped our businesses.  Just to see if that’s something that you might want to try in your business. If it might help you, might give you some ideas.

Lynne: For sure. Just easy actionable things.

Rachel:  Okay. Alright.

Lynne: You go first.

Rachel: Okay. I will start. So, the first thing which will make you laugh and everybody else who knows, is that I wish I had done a photo shoot earlier in my career.

Lynne: Yes.

Rachel: Relying on selfies for everything. I was running two businesses. I had a podcast and all the stuff that I put up was basically, there might have been some professional photos in there, but it was mainly selfies and I have you to thank for that nudge kicking and screaming to the studio.

Lynne: And it’s such a difference, isn’t it?

Rachel: It’s such a difference. So, I want to, I think that we should say, so that was that getting professional photos done, that was the big thing I think perhaps held me back. But what has it done for me? I think we probably need to say that as well.

And I think what has doing that photo shoot done for my business. Firstly, it’s made me way more confident taking on speaking gigs. I am talking on a panel for Kirsty Fanton’s, In Conversation in April. And I would’ve been very nervous to do that, and I just think it’s just had this different confidence because of how I’m visible out there, I suppose.  I think, well, Rachel’s List, for example, has been a website since 2012. It has never really had my face on it, but the current version of it is the first one to have my face all over it.

Lynne: So there really is a Rachel in Rachel’s List.

Rachel: So, I’m hoping people stop saying, are you the Rachel behind Rachel’s List because it’ll be really clear that I am. I think that as well, I never would have done that if I hadn’t done that photo shoot. I wouldn’t have gone to that step. But it just was a natural step to be front and centre to be really visible.

Lynne: And it’s worth investing money in it. The photo shoot wasn’t that expensive. It was a bit of an investment, but the difference it made to our podcast as well, having professional podcast images. It lifted our podcast website.  It lifted the actual tile or podcast tile that you see on whatever podcast app you do. It made such a difference. It made it look good and I updated my shots at the same time. I had some that were quite good, but they’re a bit old, so it was good to update them. 

Rachel: I think so. And so, people see that podcast tile, and they think, hey, this is a professional outfit, and they ask you to speak.

I mean, we are both speaking on other people’s podcasts more. And there’s that, but also when I think about where I use those photos, it’s so amazing. I use them in a banner on my invoice, so everyone gets my invoice and they see a photo of me. Again, it’s creating that connection with that client makes them think they know you and that sort of thing.

Lynne: And don’t you think in an era of AI and that’s always behind everything?  Having a person and a human contact, makes a big difference.

Rachel: Especially now. I think that is a really big one. Get your photos professionally shot.

Lynne: Makes a difference. And I would advise that for all my clients. In fact, I do. Sometimes we advise this for our clients and don’t do it ourselves.

Rachel: For sure. Okay. What’s your first one?

Lynne: Well, my first one is, look, it’s a bit of a newbie era. I used a Gmail address for a long time, so it was lynnetestoni@gmail.com. And my name is quite distinctive, and so I thought, that’ll do, it doesn’t really matter. It was actually the Freelance Jungle, which is a Facebook group for freelancers run by the wonderful Bek Lambert.

Rachel: Love Bek.

Lynne: Somebody asked if it looked unprofessional and everyone said, it does. It doesn’t look professional. And I thought, oh, I’ve been using this for a while, and I changed it to my URL and so now it’s lynne@lynnetestoni.com. And the difference in the professional appearance, it’s a bit like your images.

Because I was thinking, oh, changing your email address is really difficult. Everyone has it, but it didn’t. I still get the emails to the old one and there are a few clients who for ages kept sending it to the old email address but made no difference and I look so much more professional and schmick.

Rachel: Also, you can set up a redirect. Like it’s really not that hard. 

Lynne: I just sort of thought, oh no, it doesn’t matter. But it did matter. It’s all about appearances and having a proper. I mean, we see this with freelancers a lot, don’t we, Rach – people have like, suesmith@hotmail405.com and it’s just not professional. Having a proper email address with your company name or your full name. It makes you look like you’re on the ball, and I think when you’re working in that content marketing space, it makes you look like you’re a professional.

Rachel: I agree with this and it’s funny because we just migrated all the Rachel’s List users over, so I got to see all the email addresses that we’re going over and they all, so many of them are those random Sarah 75 at Gmail.

So, I really agree. If you haven’t got your own domain name and email. Because it’s just a tiny thing, but it can really make a big difference.

Lynne: And the cost is not that no high. I think somehow, we think, oh, it’s going to be expensive. Set up, it costs, ah, it’s hardly anything. It’s like thirty dollars a year or something. It’s nothing. It’s just ridiculous that I didn’t do it earlier. 

Rachel: Absolutely.

Lynne: Okay. What’s your next thing?

Rachel: My second one is not putting, so something I wish I’d done sooner is put systems in place. Which I used to just fly by the seat of my pants a lot. When I started Rachel’s List, I started putting systems in place a lot more, and they became so valuable that a lot of them are now available in the shop.

We’ve got a project tracker, we’ve got pitch trackers, we’ve got contracts that we’re currently reviewing, and all of those things I think made my work life so much easier because it’s just, you can get the grunt work bits done. It’s organised in one place, and I even invested in a project management system recently Moxie, which has become my project tracker and pipeline.

So, it has little forms that you put on your website, or you put on your whatever, and anything that comes through, it comes into your pipeline, and you can kind of track those leads and move them into the client area. And then projects can be assigned to those people and stuff like that. And I’ve even hired someone to help me create triggers so that if someone becomes a client, they get a proposal and that sort of thing. I just think systems are essential and you should put them in place earlier rather than later because you will save yourself so much time and money.

Lynne: Absolutely. And just having organised folders and things like that. With the podcast, I have lots of systems when I upload it, we brief Heidi, who does our transcripts. I have a system, I get the things, I get a folder, I have everything in there. I just do it without thinking. So, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. I’ve got a whole system and programs that help me.

The other tip with that is that I use Trello to track my projects and what I’ve got, and somebody mentioned it and I used and I wasn’t great at it. And then I did, it was so obvious now, I went onto YouTube and I said, how do you use Trello? And somebody had a video of how to set it up and it was a way better way of setting it up than I did.

I spent half an hour redoing the Trello instead of, I had it under clients instead now I have it under weeks and what’s due this week. And I realised I wasn’t using it the way it was meant to be used. And I redid it and it transformed my life and efficiency. And so, I spent, I don’t even think it was an official Trello thing on YouTube, it was just some dude who used Trello and loved it and said, this is how I do it. And I went, that works for me. And I did it. And there were a couple of tips and tools of Trello that I didn’t even know existed and I’ve used ever since and that made my life easier.

Sometimes with these programs you see them and just going on YouTube and having somebody say, this is how you do it. Game changer.

Rachel: Absolutely. It’s really good, isn’t it, when you see something that you hadn’t thought of that somebody uses the tool in a different way. I love that.

Lynne: Exactly. Okay. The next thing that held me back as a freelancer, was not going to conferences and workshops earlier.

Rachel: Okay.

Lynne: And I think that coming from a media background, we were never encouraged to go to anything.  In fact, I never did any training.

Rachel: Cost money.

Lynne: Cost money. They said, oh, don’t want to waste time. Whenever you did anything, you did it on your own time. Back when I did my MBA, they told me I was getting above myself. My publisher told me that. So, I guess that I was not used to spending money on myself or on training or education. And so, it’s been the last few years I started attending paid events and then of course we had the summit, and it launched me into whole higher level. I just didn’t realise that, first of all, when you’re doing a paid conference, and it’s a good one, everyone there invests in themselves. It’s a much higher calibre in terms of the clients and the contacts and the quality of the conversation. I just learnt so much more. It’s so good and I loved it. I just get invigorated by those things. I say, wow, that’s a great way of looking at it. Oh, that’s a different way to run a business.

Sometimes I actually get clients. I’ve got a few, but mostly it’s about the way I think about things. It’s such good investment and I really regret that I didn’t do it earlier.

Rachel: It’s like Collaborate Women, the lunch that we go to. Well, you go more than I do.  But that’s a really interesting lunch, isn’t it? Where you meet people and you might perhaps pick up a client, but it’s more just making those relationships and broadening your network and all of that. That is a big part of it, isn’t it? The bigger your network gets and the more people who know what you do and who you are, the more things can come your way. And we’ve both seen that.

Lynne: For sure. Well, one of the things at Collaborate, that’s where I met Simone, who did our headshots.

Rachel: Yes.

Lynne: Our photography. And so, she was really good. She did quite a few, she does a few of those for other women in that room and I really liked what she’d done. She was great because I’d actually met her. She knew a bit about my business and our business, and then and we used her.

Rachel: We should do a call out to her, Simona Janek.

Lynne: She was great. She did some great headshots, and I think that you learn something new. I spoke to somebody who works at a very large bank, and she’s helped me with my finances, my investment strategy path through retirement things – really good. There’s a couple of interior designers. I’ve got work with some architects. Also Coco Republic which is an interior design firm. I sat next to them, and they’ve been inviting me to all their events, which I’ve used for stories. So, it’s all these, it’s not a necessarily direct thing, but it’s lots of these indirect connections makes such a difference.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Lynne: So, what’s your next thing that held you back?

Rachel: My last one that I think possibly held me back a little bit is because, packaging what I offer or realising what I actually offer because I think I consider myself a generalist, and I think for a long time I really shied away from specialising or packaging things in an effective way. I just took on projects and did them and moved on to the next project. But a couple of years ago, I did brain camp and I started to really see that I had these strengths.

Crazy. Because I’d done so many websites before and I’d done the Rachel’s List website three times, but I started to see I had these real strengths in web copy and project management and strategy behind a website build and I could see things clients couldn’t see and suggest things that made them sit up and take notice. And I’m really used to working with designers and developers, and I have an okay grasp of SEO, but I hadn’t really packaged it up.

So, I did that. We had Kendall Cherry on the podcast, and she talked about the services guide and part that was part of it for me. I created a services guide with my packages in there. And that has been a real game changer. I think it’s an asset that helps people see what you do. It encapsulates everything. It shows what you charge. So, they’re not getting this sticker shock about what they’ll actually be paying for your work.

And also, it really solidifies it in your head, this is what I do, this is what I charge. It’s easier to quote, it’s easier to talk about. I think if you do the same kinds of things over and over, creating packages is a really good thing to do in your business. 

Lynne:  It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think it’s good to also just understand your strengths.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Lynne: As a service provider. I think that’s important.

So, I guess that leads into my next thing that held me back was not increasing my prices. But that’s because I’ve been freelancing, as I said, for ten years, and it took me a while to work out my value and increase my prices at the beginning. But because I charge a bit more than most people, I know within this, I kept staying at that end without increasing it because I thought, wow, I’m already at the top end of the market. I can’t go further. And that’s changed with I guess a lot of the guests we’ve had on.

Every year I just raise my prices a small amount. So, when I used to charge, I think $650 for a blog post, and then I started doing $680, then $700. Now I’m charging $850 and each year I don’t add a lot. Also, I think it was Austin Church, he talked about not rounding everything up. So, I don’t charge $700, I might charge $715.

And once you add GST, it gets to be quite a quirky number and that’s okay. People seem to like that better. That’s one of the tips he gave. I just add five dollars on every time I get a new client and every year with my regular clients. I was really worried. Nobody has noticed, commented, or balked at it at all.

I look what I charge them. I think, how long is it since I’ve worked for them, because I have a lot of repeat clients. I might do say two or three posts for them this time of year. Might not do anything until this time next year and look at what I charged them last year and I think, oh, that’s okay. I could probably charge and I might just stick an extra five dollars on it. Always easy and it just adds up.

It just keeps moving that baseline a bit higher and the reality is that inflation’s running at least five per cent. So, it’s covering my costs all. All our subscriptions, things like Trello, everything, they’ve all gone up by more than five per cent, so it helps cover my costs. Otherwise, you’re basically starting to lose money. So, I think that it makes a big difference.

Rachel: I think we should do a caveat here though, for people who, whose main income is through pitching stories. Because in those cases you can ask for more and you probably should ask for a bump on your word rate. And I think some editors can pull from other budgets if they really want to keep you and they want your stories and like your work, they will do that. But you’re really at the mercy of what the editor wants to pay you, aren’t you? And whether you say yes to that.

Lynne:  I guess so. First of all, there is more wriggle room, I think even from editors then they let you believe. But yes, to be honest, I still do some journalism and some of it doesn’t pay as well sometimes. I get rewards in other things. I do find; I actually consider them to be lead magnets.

So, most of my clients, because I write for Home Beautiful and Better Homes and Gardens mostly, my clients like that. So, I use them as lead magnets; they’re the ones I share on my social media more, and it does seem to make a difference. So, I don’t treat them like regular work.

My clients think it’s great that I write for glossy magazines and the clients are the one that pay that, and that’s expected in the industry. I don’t say yes to all the editorial work if I can’t afford it, but I do try and do some regular work with them. And I also do more of the content work, or what do they call earned media, not earned media what’s the word – well basically what we used to call advertorials and that has a higher rate, so I do a bit of that as well.

Also, I do find that the editorial work is easier. I get less rewrites because with the corporate stuff I usually have two or three rounds and it’s not that they have a problem with my work, it’s usually for a business reason. Making sure that the focus of the story is this. They’re not as good at briefing, whereas mostly the editorial work comes back – it’s pretty rare that I even get a note to say, great. It just goes in. 

Rachel: And also, what you were mentioning about how you, I thought that was really interesting, that point you just made about how your editorial work becomes a lead magnet for corporate work, right?

 So, I have just mentioned that in the new e-book that I wrote for Rachel List. 101 Ways to Land Your Next Writing Gig. And it was about, if you do editorial work, make sure you put it on LinkedIn because that’s where the corporate clients are hanging out. They love that, don’t they?

They love to see that you’ve written for glossies and all of that, and it can lead to work. So, it’s a really good point to make sure you’re sharing that it’s and looping people in and expanding your network again. 

Lynne: Some of the deals, I get paid obviously regularly from the magazines, but the other thing is that I make sure I get PDFs of the stories that I can share and I send it to all the experts that I quote. That highlights them and some of those experts have got me to do their content work.

I’m doing a lot more of that content work. And also, I’m doing a big project for one of the magazines because there’s a client involved and they know I’m good with clients and it’s a client I’ve even dealt with before. 

Rachel: So, we’ve gone on a little bit of a tangent from raising your rates, but still, it’s all really good information for people who might do a mixture of corporate work and editorial work.

Lynne: I think can do a mixture. Years ago, you couldn’t. The prices that I raise are my corporate work, and I had a couple of clients that very, sort of screwed me down right at the beginning. I thought, do I want this work? And I said, yes. And over the years, I’ve just increased my prices by five or ten dollars apiece or an hour or whatever it is. And now of course, they sit there with the rest of it and everyone’s happy. Once I’ve proven my worth, it’s been good.

Rachel: Amazing. Well, that brings us to the end of the episode. We’ve given you six ideas to think about.

Lynne: That you can do straight away.

Rachel: Little experiments to propel your business forward and make more money and be more visible. And all the good things.

Lynne: All the good things.

Rachel: We’ll mention all the things that we have talked about in the show notes, so you can go and check them out, and we’ll put Simona’s details in there if you’re in Sydney and want to do a photo shoot. She’s definitely worth having a chat to. We’ll put her details in and anything else that we mentioned as well.

Lynne: Fantastic, and we’ll see you all next week.

Credits:

The professional photographer we mention is Simona Janek: https://simonajanek.com.au/

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au

Thanks (as always) to our sponsors Rounded (www.rounded.com.au ), an easy invoicing and accounting solution that helps freelancers run their businesses with confidence. Looking to take advantage of the discount for Rachel’s List Gold Members? Email us at: hello@rachelslist.com.au for the details.

Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co