There’s a ton of bad advice when it comes to entrepreneurship and freelancing.
I understand where a lot of it comes from, but even so, it doesn’t mean it’s helpful—or that you should follow them.
Instead, I had to learn these brutal lessons the hard way. I had to realize that even though something might sound nice, it doesn’t actually work well in reality.
If you’re thinking about starting your own business—or you already have one—these lessons will save you years of mistakes and bad advice. Let’s jump right in:
Marketing Isn’t Important
There’s a common business lesson where people say: “Don’t do marketing; just focus on making a great product and the rest will take care of itself.”
That is pure bullshit.
Marketing is always important.
In fact, marketing is often more important than the product itself. (After all, we can all think of tons of crappy products with great marketing.)
Look, I understand where this advice comes from. The underlying message is to focus on offering products or services that are so good that people will share them, which, in turn, will help market you. (This is called “word of mouth” or WOM.)
And there is some truth to that. Because, yes, you do want to offer great services that make people thrilled. (So don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that you should have a crappy product—you should still do great work in whatever that you do.)
But…
…your goods do not market themselves.
You have to market them.
For example, I see articles on Medium.com where people claim they don’t do any marketing, but because they do great work, they still get cool opportunities because people like what they do.
But if you read between the lines, you’ll notice some “interesting” stuff.
First, even though they claim they don’t “do” marketing, they write on Medium, which markets their articles for them!
In fact, on Medium, they have access to over 100 million monthly readers, which, uh, sounds an awful lot like marketing to me.
But if these same people wrote on their own blog and did zero marketing (like they recommend), I guarantee they would get none of those opportunities. (In fact, I wouldn’t have even seen their article because I wouldn’t have been able to find it.)
Second, this advice is rife with “survivorship bias” where you only focus on the success without considering the failures. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of writers on Medium who write “good” articles yet don’t get any opportunities for business deals, columns on major publications, etc.
(It could be as simple as the niche that they write or it could be as odious as them not having good looks or a pronounceable name.)
Third, their advice isn’t repeatable. There’s no system or strategy behind it. You just have to hope and pray that you get something from your hard work.
The reason why it’s so vital to understand this is because I want you to avoid the “starving artist” syndrome, where you believe that good art—by itself—is good enough. (i.e. you believe, “If you built it, they will come.”)
It isn’t.
You must focus on your marketing too. You must focus on getting people to find out about you. Whether you send cold emails or buy ads, dedicate some time to “getting the word out” and your odds of success will be much, much greater.
Give Freebies
When I was starting out, I saw a lot of advice telling me to offer my services for free in order to get testimonials, referrals, and more.
I had to learn the hard way that this lesson is rubbish.
In all my years of doing free work, it led to absolutely nothing except horribly devaluing my contributions.
With very few exceptions, do not offer anything for free. Even if you ask them to buy you a coffee, ask them to buy you a coffee. Even if you ask them to donate to your favorite charity, ask them to donate to your favorite charity.
You must get them to pay something.
People do not value things that they don’t pay for.
Giving free trials and freebies is not a business model I recommend when you’re starting as a freelancer. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 because you want to build a portfolio, but because you’re new, you don’t have a portfolio.
So you think, maybe by doing things for free, you can build one.
But the problem is, when you get bargain hunters, you’re usually going to get the worst clients. And worse, you might get screwed a couple of times because they’re not going to give you a testimonial (or talk to you ever again).
There are several reputable people (who you’ve heard of) who I did free work for and they ended up ghosting me. (Sad, but true.)
That’s why it’s so critical to make them pay something and commit. Because even if you don’t have experience, you still have to value your own time. You still have other things you want to do in life, right? You still have your day job (probably). You still have your family life and your social life. You still have your responsibilities and tasks.
If you’re devoting your energy and effort to help someone else, the least they can do is compensate you in return.
There are a few exceptions to this rule. One is if the person that you’re dealing with is a big player in the industry and is well connected, and you create an agreement that, after your first free project (and if they like your work), you transition into a paid project.
In that case, it might be worth the risk of them screwing you. (And yes, they still might screw you.)
Another is if you create a product (or a business model) like an app where it’s better to get tons of free users who eventually might become paid users. Or you sell a loss-leader because you can upsell them on the backend. (These are far more sophisticated strategies so I wouldn’t worry about them.)
But I promise you, whoever pays will be a much better client.
“It Couldn’t Hurt”
When you’re just starting out—whether you’re offering a service or a product—there are countless different options and possibilities.
You can do social media, you can go to events, you can make business cards, you can make an app, you can do cold calling, you can sell on Amazon, you can sell on Etsy, and much, much more.
Oftentimes, when you’re thinking about doing something new—like affiliate marketing, for example—you’ll say it yourself, “It couldn’t hurt.”
In other words, it can’t hurt to try doing something different in order to grow your business.
But the hard truth is that it can hurt. (And it often does.)
Why?
Because it takes you further away from what you really need to focus on. It makes you scatterbrained. Rather than doing a few things brilliantly, you spread yourself too thin across many little things and struggle to get results.
Trying all kinds of shiny new tactics in the hope that something works is time-consuming and frustrating.
Instead, you need to simplify and focus, especially when you’re starting out.
Remember: Your attention is all you have so be very judicious with how you use it. (When you’re making millions of dollars and you have a huge marketing budget, then yeah, try a bunch of different things and see what sticks. But until then, make things easier for yourself.)
Focus on the one thing that you want. Is it more sales? Is it more customers? Is it more emails? Is it more followers? Is it more referrals?
Then, when you find out what’s most important to you, you can work backward and focus on what’s going to get the most results.
As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Simplify, simplify.”
I hope this helps.
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