How to: 10 steps to bootstrap your freelance career

Written on Friday, May 16th, 2008 | How-To | 8 Comments

Growing your business has never been this easy. Knowing what to do ahead of time can greatly increase the chance of success with your new business venture. In any freelance career you choose, bootstrapping can greatly increase your chances of profiting and growing your small business as large as your wildest dreams. Bootstrapping is essential to every freelancer and an avenue you should not overlook. I know every freelancer reading this article right now can say yes to the following question: “Would you like to grow your business at little to no cost?” Well, bootstrapping is your answer.

In essence, bootstrapping is building your business with little to no start up funds. I’m sure we’ve all been there or are currently in a place to want to grow your freelance business but do not have the funds to flourish like you would want. Below I will outline ten steps to bootstrapping your freelance career that will definitely get you going on the right path.

1. Study Your Market - This might seem like a no-brainer but most people skip this entirely and find out weeks or months down the road that they’ve missed out on a chance to learn ahead of time if their market is going to work or not. Why spend your time and money building a product or service in a market where it’s not needed or wanted? You also need to study the habits of your potential clients/customers. What are they into right now? Where do you normally see them or is there a place you know you can find them? These are key elements in your market studies. Don’t be lazy; take your time and make sure you’ve got a solid outline here.
2. Study Your Competition - This is one thing I made sure of when I started my blog design business. Looking at what your potential competition is doing right can let you know what you should be doing. Alternately, finding cracks in their marketing or their business in general can really give you a heads up on how to make your business stand out. Use key points from your competition and build on it to be one step ahead of your competition.
3. Outline Your Plans - This is by no means supposed to be a business plan in the sense of sitting down and writing 200 pages on what you’re going to do, how much money you’ll be making 10 years from now and so on. This should be a simple paragraph or two at most that outlines the following: the purpose of your marketing, how you’ll achieve this purpose, your target market, the marketing weapons you’ll use, your niche and your position and what you stand for, the identity of your business and your budget which should be displayed as a percentage of your projected gross revenues.
4. Get A Website - If you’re an on-line business or a business that functions solely off-line, it doesn’t matter. You need a website. In my Small Business Blogging article, I mentioned how on Duct Tape Marketing they discussed and posted an audio tape of an interview they did with a company selling Fishing Lures who used the power of the web to jump leaps and bounds ahead of their competition. The owner credits the website to changing the way people find out about his business. It’s such a powerful statement, I had to mention it again here.
5. Get Promotional Materials - You’ve got your marketing plan together right? I mean, it was step #3 so I hope you do! Now you’ve got to gather the promotional materials it calls for. Anything from business cards to flyer’s, t-shirts and web banners. These are your weapons and without them you will never win the fight.
6. Call Call Call - If you’re selling a product, calling potential customers is the perfect way to find out if they’re interested. You don’t need to sell anything on the first call (or maybe you will) but getting your voice out there and making yourself accessible to the potential customers is desperately needed. Estimate around 100 calls per day because out of those 100, a seasoned bootstrapper who knows how to sell should make 10 sales.
7. Email Email Email - So you’ve got a business that functions on-line? Well, make sure you email around 100 people per day. It is not that hard. If you’re targeting a specific service, (for this example we’ll use my blog design company) you can go to Google and type in “Fishing Blogs”. Replace the word fishing with any other word and you’ve got an infinite list of blog owners you can email about designs or redesigns. It’s that simple.
8. Delegate - So you’ve got the point now that you’re a selling machine but you can’t find the time needed to create your products or deliver your services properly? Pass the selling aspects of your business along to someone else. DO NOT do this until you’ve become a selling machine yourself because if you can’t sell your product, how can someone else?
9. Expand - Anything from office space to employees. This goes hand in hand with Delegate at #8 but is a vital aspect of bootstrapping your business. You’ve got to know when it’s time to expand. You can’t be a one man/woman show forever. You can’t work out of a 6×6 space in a spare bedroom forever. Give yourself room to breathe and your business will flourish.
10. Reward Yourself - So you’ve been working your fingers to the bone for almost a year now? Give yourself time to relax, spend a little bit on “you” and not your business. Go ahead, you deserve it!

 

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Better your business with customer feedback

Written on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | How-To, Small Business | 1 Comment

If you never knew you were doing something wrong, would you change? If you thought for your entire life that the way you conducted yourself and your small business was the proper way, would you consider that you might be wrong? Odds are you wouldn’t, but feel free to let me know in the comments section how you would handle yourself in that situation, I’d love to talk with you and see how we all would handle that situation.

Customer feedback is essential to your business; but why? If you’re customer feels great about your business and gives you a testimonial to showcase on your website, in your brochures and other print material, doesn’t that show you that you’re doing something right? Well, that is the perfect scenario but the majority of the time your customers won’t give honest feedback unless they’re asked for it; so ask.

Why asking the general public won’t work

There are many people out there that will tell you that you need to stick a ‘feedback form’ on your website and leave it at that. Or maybe they suggest that you send out a mass email to every client you’ve had or every email on your list. Doing the latter would result in 100+ emails being sent out all titled “Dear Valued Customer”. This is the absolute WORST way to attract attention to yourself and will undoubtedly result in 100+ emails being deleted. Generalizations just won’t work.

People want to feel like they’re part of a relationship with your business, like their opinion is truly valued and appreciated. In doing this, you’re catering to their ego’s and ensuring that they’ll give you a 100% honest review of your product or service. Without the personal attachment, they could care less and will throw your letter away or delete your email or totally disregard the big “GIVE ME FEEDBACK” button your website is now showing.

A simple solution to personalization

The easiest way to instill the personalized touch to your customers is with a hand written letter. Yes, you heard me right, hand written letters. I know you’re thinking it sounds crazy, but if a bootstrapper knows one thing, its how to maximize your productivity in a short amount of time to ensure you get the most out of your time. What does this mean for you? Simple; you’re going to see exactly how to streamline this method while keeping the personalized touch you need in order to get the customers attention long enough to get their honest opinion.

If you remember a while back in my The art of the email: Long emails are better for business article, I talked about a firefox plug-in named “Signature“. Well, we’re going to try something similar, but with handwriting. How you ask? Get a sheet of your stationary and get a pen; once you’ve got this far, you’re half way there. Now, write out a letter like you would to any client or customer you’ve just done business with except you need to leave out the introduction line and salutation.

So, you’ve got the entire body of the letter wrote out explaining how you valued their business and loved working with them on their project right? You’ve signed the bottom and you have everything setup except the welcome note at the top. Great! Now take this piece of paper and photo copy it 100+ times (1 sheet for every client you’re going to mail). On each sheet, now you only need to write out their name and a brief introduction paragraph to ensure that you’re giving that personalized touch that reaches their heart

The final step - lick the envelope

Well, not literally, but if you’re into that kind of thing, go for it. Personally, I use a sponge thats slightly damp to close my envelopes. The main thing to do during this process is to HAND WRITE the name and address of the person you’re contacting on the envelope. You might even want to write “Thank You” on it down towards the right or left of the envelope, just to give it that extra pop. Seeing a hand written letter gets a drastically higher open rate compared to a printed piece of envelope with a bright red “OPEN” sign on it so take advantage of this.

This post was inspired by an article I read at another website recently: How to seek feedback and I just wanted to expand on it. If you’re not a reader over at Trizle yet, I’d highly suggest checking the site out. Andrew is a great guy and someone who knows a LOT about business; and constantly is posting about it.

 

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Bootstrapping Your Business part one

Written on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | Bootstrapping Tips, Entrepreneurship, How-To | 3 Comments

This is a series I am going to be putting on here for the next couple days, regarding bootstrapping your business. The main focus of this series is going to be strategies for the bootstrapper and how to do it successfully. For those who do not know, Bootstrapping is the act of starting a business with little to no external funding. Many people have gone through the process of bootstrapping and now run multi-million dollar companies like:

1. Printingforless.com
2. iClick
3. Aromasys
4. eBags.com

There are many more to list; too many to name her actually. So, with all of that out of the way, here is part 1 of 2 in my Bootstrapping Your Business course. The second part will be posted soon, so make sure you subscribe to the feed to be informed instantly when it’s posted.

Find the Right Product or Service

Before any bootstrapper starts his journey to success, he has to ask himself/herself a question:

How are you going to make the BIG money thats out there?

The internet and world alike are full of small time money making endeavors but a real bootstrapper will know how to pick his way through those and find the gem that will put himself/herself over the top in business. Can you come up with a million ideas for different business models, but can never decide which one you want to do? Well, its a harsh truth, but you will probably never become successful if the hardest thing for you to do is decide what to do.

A bootstrapper will only find out what business is successful by doing this: Talking to customers to discover what the industry REALLY NEEDS, and not what you WANT TO GIVE. Understanding this will put you at a huge advantage in generating a successful business.

Think about it like this, if you are selling a product that NOONE WANTS, what is the probability that your company will succeed? Very low. Now, think about KNOWING what the customers want, before you even step foot into the business. You will have one leg up on everyone competing against you because you will know the exact needs of the customers.

Once you come up with your business idea, you will want to contact as many potential clients as possible. Even before you have your product or service ready. What? That sounds crazy? NO! Its not crazy, its SMART! There is a difference. If you contact 50 people, and no one wants your product, the most you wasted was a little time, and some phone bills. Compare that to the 1,000+ you might have spent in creating everything needed for your company to start, and you will have saved yourself a big headache.

Immerse Yourself

This strategy is pretty simple and straight forward for anyone who knows anything about getting a business off the ground. In the beginning of your business, doing the many phone calls and emails might seem too time consuming, but they are all worth it. They might cost a little on the time side as well as a small phone bill, but they are all well worth doing.

You will also want to take the time to figure out what companies in your field are currently doing right and also doing wrong. Knowing what companies are doing right is self explanatory; you can follow in their footsteps. The process of finding out what they are doing wrong is where the real key is. By figuring out what their current clients do not like about their services, customer service, website look and user interaction, you can then capitalize on this and create your business model to become better then the competitors.

Trial and error is a big part of immersing yourself in your business. You need to learn how to run a successful business in order to make money, and in order to learn what will work and what will not, you need to work. If you want to know how well your meals are that you are preparing for the local hospital staff after their cafeteria closes, then you need to sell some of those meals to get the customers reactions. Hell, offer them their first meal for free. (Who knows, they might like it and since you already have given them a meal for free, they will be more willing to buy a second meal) If they do not like the first meal, well, you wasted 10-20 bucks on the meal.

Become the Expert Yourself

The title means what it says; become the expert yourself. In too many cases, people will fall victim to someone claiming to be the smartest person in business and life in general. You’ve seen all of the e-books floating around claiming to make you rich while sitting on your couch and so on. These are a reason why becoming the expert yourself is key in bootstrapping your business.

There are many people who will claim to be experts in their business field, but the majority of the time, these guys/girls are fresh out of high school or college and only follow google trends, or other trends that makes them believe they know what is hot. The beauty of being a bootstrapper is that you can look past what is hot now, and look forward to what WILL BE hot in the future and capitalize on it now before the competition gets too large.

Even with a marketing expert or business expert and all of the knowledge they claim they can sell you, or sell their time to give you, you can find online or locally for free. Doing research is what will put you ahead of the game and make you the expert in your field. I would never pay someone to give me a consultation unless I knew for sure they were millionaires, and even then I would be skeptical because what works for them might not work for you.

Perfect example of an expert who blows smoke up your ass: THE RICH JERK! We all know about his e-book and his asshole attitude, but what you might not know is that he is currently being sued by a lot of people. Not the people who bought his e-book though. Remember the cars and planes and mansions on his main page? The rightful owners of those images are suing him. He owns none of what he portrays. He just made people believe he was an expert and so many people bought it.

I am not saying to become and expert in the field of business you are going into and then blow smoke up other peoples asses about what you can do for them, but just learn it for yourself. You might spend more time on it, but never more money. Bootstrappers know why saving money and not spending it unless you have to is key.

Think in Black and White

When I say this, I do not mean to think racially so get that out of the way right now. Thinking in black in white is the basic idea that the world can be filled with a lot of hazy lines and gray areas, but thinking in black in white is a huge time saver. In the past strategies, I have mentioned some things that require some time and effort, so anything you can do to save time, is good.

Think in black and white and you will weed out a lot of the dumb ideas that get tossed at you from people who know nothing about what you are doing, or want to do. It will also help you realize the great ideas in the midst of those that are not as great. Myself, I get caught up in a lot of things when I am working, and I know I shouldn’t. I watch videos, I listen to music, read message boards, and so on, but as of right now, I am taking a Think Black and White Stance on everything.

If it doesn’t make money, then it probably isn’t worth it. Remember that when you are surfing myspace, or looking at dumb kids on youtube when you should be creating another website for your portfolio, or writing up your business plan. You will thank me later.

Distractions will come up in any part of your life, but learning how to balance your time and not be distracted by the middle area of the color spectrum will help you profit a lot sooner then you would if you were playing with your playstation 3 and drinking beer all day. Theres a time and place for those things, and if you cannot figure out the time, then time might just come back to haunt you. Its not really that complicated:

Do what you need to, when you need to. Do what you want to, when you have time.

The bootstrapper should know how to judge what is good for business and bad for business really quick. Its something you are either born with, or you work really hard to obtain. If you do not want it or do not think it is important, then do not worry about being a millionaire like the rest of us are doing!

* Please remember to stick around and subscribe to our feed to keep up to date on the sites articles and to make sure you don’t miss part two to this series which will touch on 4 more major points of Bootstrapping Your Business

 

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The one hit wonder: Why opening statements are so important

Written on Monday, May 5th, 2008 | Bootstrapping Tips, Entrepreneurship, How-To | 5 Comments

I design websites that increase a companies profit and branding.

The above sentence is the statement I give all of the people that I meet face to face and ask me the question “What do you do for a living?”. After that introduction, I instantly have them hooked and am followed up with a “How” or “Wow” in which I then proceed to explain in a bit of further detail some of the specifics of my blog design company. If you run a business, a sentence like this is priceless to your profitability.

When I say “one hit wonder” most will think of a musician who releases one great song but is never seen again. That is the complete opposite of what this introduction can do for you. This one sentence can make or break many deals. Time is money, and attention spans are increasingly small today so anything you can do to instantly grab the attention of the person across from you, your computer screen or promotional materials puts you far ahead of the pack.

Get your company and your opening statement reviewed

What I’d like to do is have anyone reading this to leave a comment letting me know what you do for a living and a possible one hit wonder sentence you use or could use and I will go through them and list everyone’s replies in a future article along with my thoughts on each; what the positives of the sentence is or what could be done differently.

 

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How To Lose A Potential Customer In One Easy Step

Written on Monday, December 10th, 2007 | How-To | 3 Comments

No matter what you do, or how hard you try to sell to a potential client, there is one thing you can do that will instantly cause them to leave; and never come back. I bet you’ve all seen it happen before, and I can almost guarantee that over 70% of us have dealt with it at one time or another in our business careers. It’s something that I doubt you’ll think of instantly, but when you hear it; it clicks.

Trying to con your client will immediately make the potential client lose all respect for you as a business and as a person. I know because I had this happen to me today while doing some Christmas shopping. If you run a business and you try to swindle your potential customer out of money and they realize it, you’re as good as dead to them; at least that’s how I felt today. How would you feel if it happened to you? Probably as furious as I got today. Here’s what happened:

I went today to a trade show to find some good deals on Christmas gifts for my family. I came to a booth that was selling hats and t-shirts with Christian phrases on it and since my father is a Christian, I decided to look and pick out a t-shirt and hat to give him. The total price came to $23.00 and I gave the guy $40.00 expecting $17.00 back in change. Key word; expecting.

When the cashier realized he didn’t have the change on him and only had $15.00 instead of $17.00, I told him I had two singles and that I could pay $22.00 instead of $23.00. He then proceeded to ask for the $2.00 and gave me the $15.00 back as if that was my change. Now, if you’re adding, I gave him a total of $42.00 now and was expecting $19.00 back in change at this point.

The guy proceeded to try and explain to me what he was doing, and handed me back $17.00 which was the original change amount. Problem was, the $2.00 extra he has now is MY money. I told him that this wasn’t right, that the $2.00 as mine and he replied with and attitude: “Calm down”, like I was supposed to relax when this guy was trying to run a scam on me and steal my money. Yes, it’s only a couple bucks but its the principle behind it.

Now, I had the $17.00 in my hand and he had my $40.00, so I gave him back the $15.00 and asked for my $40.00 back and told him that he just lost the sale totally and because he wanted to try and get an extra couple bucks out of me, he’s not getting ZERO. I was so angry I had to walk away before I said or did something I didn’t want to.

If you look through the story, you can see a couple things the guy did wrong and you can see how it progresses from bad to worse in a matter of seconds. Let me break down a couple things he did wrong, and how you can avoid the problems in your own business so you don’t end up with an angry customer like I was today.

First, the cashier seen that I had $22.00 instead of $23.00. He also knew he didn’t have proper change for the $40.00 I paid with, which is technically his fault. Now, if you’re ever in this scenario, the best thing to do would have been to let the customer slide on the extra dollar. What this would have done was canceled everything out that happens next, as well as had the customer leave happy, and ready to tell someone about  how they saved a dollar because of the nice cashier at that shop. Again, a dollar might seem like a small amount, but a lot of people count pennies to do shopping, so imagine how far that dollar could actually go with them!

After this happens and the cashier sees that he doesn’t have proper change, he could have easily asked me if I minded going to another booth to ask for change or he could have went himself while I waited for him. The booths are so close, he could have leaned over and asked the person next to us but he chose not to. I would have gladly went to get change from another vendor, or bought a pop from the food stand in order to get the proper change, but he never asked.

When the story gets to the point of him trying to rip me off the $2.00 and then taking MY two dollars and giving it back to me like it’s the proper change, he immediately sets off tons of triggers in my brain and I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs at this guy. I know a lot of other people who would have done just that; I’ve seen it happen many times when I was there. Don’t ever try to rip your client off, even if you’re jacking up the price an extra $20.00 on a service you’re offering just because he/she doesn’t know your exact rates. It’s wrong morally, and if/when the client finds out, you’re in for a heap of bad reviews and word-of-mouth from that person will do nothing but harm for your business.

Keep your customers happy, and they’re return to you or send people to you. It’s the best way to not put yourself in this position. If you want to lose a customer in one easy step, rip them off. If not, do everything in your power to make the customer happy. Who knows, that one dollar you let them slide on might be the conversation piece that customer has with a friend who is looking to spend big money!

Do you have a story similar to this? Maybe something happened online with a business you were working with? Feel free to drop a comment and let me know. I know I can’t be the only one this happened to before.

PS - Please take a second to stumble or digg this article if you like it. I’d really appreciate it if you could. Leave a comment if you stumble/digg mine and I’ll check out your site and stumble/digg an article of yours! 

 

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