📅 Q3 planning for freelancers

Author

Jim Hamilton
June 30, 2023

Happy Friday! This is The Freelance Gig. Welcome to the last day of Q2 and the halfway point of 2023.

Discussed in today’s newsletter: Workfree, YouTube, employees, pay satisfaction, and programmatic ads. Plus one sales-killing mistake and how to avoid it, and quarterly planning for freelancers.

Read time: 3 minutes and 48 seconds

Together with The Average Joe

Is it really possible to get a 560% return from ONE stock?

Which investment would have given you a return of 560%+ over 10 years between 2011-2021?

The answer: The Invesco QQQ Trust ETF — a passive exchange traded fund (ETF) with a big weight towards technology companies.

Why? Technology is taking over and as an investor, it’s better to be on the right side of history. An investment in QQQ gives investors exposure to this growth diversified in over 100 non-financial companies.

But what else? Discover more trends by signing up to The Average Joe, a free 3x-weekly newsletter covering the latest market trends and stocks.

Become a better investor by reading their 5-minute, jargon-free stock market newsletter — covering only the relevant financial news for everyday investors.

Subscribe to the free newsletter and join 19,000+ investors discovering the latest market trends.

Making the Rounds

  • New freelance platform offers equity to users. Workfree dot io, a new freelancing platform, charges no commissions to clients or freelancers and is planning to award 1,000 lucky freelancers with equity in the company in September.

  • Battle lines drawn over in-office Mondays. Employers are having a hard time getting employees back into the office at the start of the week. Go figure.

  • YouTube announces split-testing for video thumbnails. Creators will soon be able to split-test one of the biggest levers on video performance: the thumbnail. The new feature is still in the early stages, but set to roll out wide sometime next year.

  • Freelancers top pay satisfaction survey. Recent findings from a survey of 2,500 American workers revealed having control over where, when, and how much you work is a bigger factor in pay satisfaction than total compensation.

  • Clickbait sites suck up wasted ad spend. A new study from the Association of National Advertisers says 15% of programmatic ad spend is wasted on crappy sites from “made for advertising” publishers. Woops.

Working With Clients

Don’t Make This One Sales-Killing Mistake When Pitching Clients

What’s the #1 sales-killing mistake freelancers make when pitching clients?

A) Charging too much
B) Not turning your camera on
C) Not sharing enough testimonials

Answer:

None of the above.

The #1 sales-killing mistake freelancers make is being NEEDY.

Nothing kills attraction faster than neediness.

So, how do you avoid being needy on sales calls and when dealing with clients?

Maintain a healthy pipeline of prospects.

The more prospects you have, the less you need any one sale to close.

Because you know there’s another one right around the corner.

And that confidence is magnetic.

It makes more people want to work with you.

So if your lead flow is dwindling and struggling to close deals, ramp up your lead gen efforts.

Stop being needy and you’ll have a much easier time getting clients to say yes.

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Working For Yourself

Quarterly Planning For Freelancers

Q3 is right around the corner.

And whether your freelance business is a side hustle or your main gig…

It’s worth carving out some time to plan for the next 90 days ahead.

Here are 4 questions to get you started:

  • What learning lessons & corrections came from last quarter?

  • What wins did I have last quarter?

  • What are 3 big wins I can achieve this quarter?

  • Will my current actions get me there? If not, what changes do I need to make?

Make sure you extract any lessons or takeaways from the past 90 days first.

Then identify exactly where you want to go…

And how you’re gonna get there.

Tool of the Week

Bulletproof Ad Tracking to Skyrocket Your ROAS

If you or your client are running paid ads…

There’s one big hurdle you have to overcome if you want to scale.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re running on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, or Google…

What is it?

Attribution.

In other words, you need to know which ads are working and which ones aren’t.

This sounds simple enough…

But there a ton of things that can throw a wrench in your ad tracking attribution:

  • Privacy browsers

  • Ad blockers

  • iOS 14

  • VPNs

Not to mention most people will opt-in for a freebie with a burner email, then purchase with a second email.

So what are you supposed to do?

Simple — just use Hyros.

Their print tracking model delivers up to 50% more attribution than native platform tracking, and can even reconcile multiple email addresses.

That’s why big-time advertisers like ClickFunnels, Mastermind, Billy Gene, and Tom Bilyeu use it to track the performance of their ads.

So if you’re serious about making your ads (or your client’s ads) pay…

Bonus Points

📈 Productivity: How to gain energy, focus, and clarity (link)

🧠 Mindset: 5 mental models to develop thick skin (link)

🤝 Work: 7 steps to make your value irresistible to employers (link)

✍️ Copywriting: 3 steps to writing a brand story made for Hollywood (link)

💲 Business: Doing business is impossible w/o this ONE skill (link)

Gig Alerts:

Looking for clients? These freelance jobs were posted on Upwork in the last 24 hours:

NOTE: We only share job postings from Upwork. We’ve found it to be the most trustworthy platform with the highest-quality clients.

Furthermore, job postings must be for high-income skills like copywriting, media buying, funnel building, graphic design, remote closing, etc in order to qualify.