Presented live on Tuesday, November 16, 2021
How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are (Lesson 1 of 4)
Tutorial Tuesdays are back!
And – drumroll please – they’re mini courses now.
I’m kicking off a four-week mini-course on how to be the most pro freelance copywriter your client has ever worked with.
As in the kind of freelancer your clients actually brag about and call “friend.”
Super pro.
In this first lesson, you’ll see how you can use Packs to:
- Optimize your social “link in bio” flow to generate actual leads…
- Plus how to create a lead magnet quicker than you ever have before.
All of this making you look more pro… in a matter of minutes.
Transcript:
View the lesson pack for this training here: https://bit.ly/pro-freelancer-ch
Lesson 2 of 4 of the How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are series
Lesson 3 of 4 of the How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are series
Lesson 4 of 4 of the How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are series
Introduction [00:00]
Joanna Wiebe: Let’s do something different for Tutorial Tuesdays. It’s like three, four– four years? Five years? It’s a lot of years of doing Tutorial Tuesdays. So yeah, switching it up a little bit with mini courses.
Starting today, we are doing a four-week mini course for freelancers. So if you are not a freelancer, you’re not going to love this. So you might want to take the next 26 minutes back, and we’ll see you for the next course. If you are a freelancer, you should stay because we are going to be talking about how to look like a super pro.
Now, again, this is a mini course. It will stack up. You’ll get training that kind of– it doesn’t depend on you having attended or watched the replay of the previous week. But you’ll get more out of it if you treat it all together instead of not. So just keep that in mind.
OK. I’m going to share my screen. This is recording. The replay will be available in the exact same pack that you already visited when you confirmed that you were going to join today. All right. Cool beans.
Let me share my screen. So you should now be seeing a picture of Carolyn. Carolyn, of course, started as a freelancer in the 10x Freelance Copywriter and Copy School, baller at it, and so we hired her. So much easier as our freelancer example for this title screen.
Now, question– should you be here? Don’t worry if this feels like– you know, just as soon as I put myself on, I was like, this feels like when you’re in a webinar and you know someone’s going to sell to you by the end. Don’t worry. That’s not what is happening here. I just want to make sure that you’re prepared for what we’re going to talk about because, again, this is a mini course.
So you should be here if your desire to grow outweighs your fear of change. I’m going to show you things that you’re not already doing. And it’s cool to have healthy skepticism about everything. But try to suspend disbelief.
You are a longing observer of freelance pros, as in on Instagram, you’re like, oh, Prerna has such an awesome business, which she does. She’s doing amazing. And you’re kind of watching from the sidelines, wondering like, honestly, how do I get a piece of that?
And you use technology. So if you do not like technology, if you’re like– you don’t automatically refresh your screen when something goes wrong, then you might not get a lot out of this because you’re going to need to use technology. And by the way, it’s going to make things much easier, too.
If you have a wait list, if you don’t need more clients, if you’re like, you know what? I already have too many clients, then you can go serve those clients right now instead of continuing to be here. Because this is going to help you see how to attract more clients.
Future installments of this course will help you manage your clients better. But today is all about, what do you do when you’re out there, promoting yourself, and you want to start turning those efforts into actual leads, even customers if you have productized services?
And also, you don’t want to be here if you’re like, I don’t market myself, which is weird because you’re in marketing. So you should market yourself. So hopefully, you’re all over on the blue side, and you’re still here. Cool. I’m just looking to see any of the chats coming in. But it looks like– yeah, Justin is like, if you have too many clients, start a referral network. You know, yeah. OK, cool.
When You Choose to Run Your Business like a Business, It Turns into One [03:45]
So for this to work, just like any training, you have to believe certain things in order for you to even do the work. We have seen– and I am not going to get into the many masterminds I have run with freelance copywriters. The 10x Freelance Copywriter is filled with copywriters. We have worked with so many freelancers.
And the difference, typically, is between those who actually grow and those who do not– the ones who grow really well think of their business as a business. So when you choose to run your business like it’s an actual business, it turns into one. Surprise. It’s the best thing. As soon as you run it like one, it becomes one. It’s amazing.
So we want to make sure that you’re going into this thinking, all right. Even if up until this moment you were like, what? A business? I’m just a freelancer, cool. Now we’re going to make that switch. And you’re going to start thinking of your business as a business because that’s what it is. And business likes to grow. So you will love what happens when you start thinking of your business as a business.
OK, here’s what we’re going to cover over the next four weeks starting with today. We’re going to cover how to pro up, look more pro in social media, in lead magnets, in your research requests. So if you’re a freelance copywriter, you are likely going to be reaching out to your leads and your existing clients and new clients and saying, hey, do you have x? And you need to manage that probably better than you’re managing it today.
Selling your productized services, delivering those productized services. I was doing website audits as one of the very first ways that I was making money at Copyhackers. Once we started selling ebooks, of course, the next step was to do clients or productized services. We did both, made really good money on productized services. There’s a lot to do there to win really easily. But you have to look pro.
Delivering your work and, of course, getting more referrals. We’re going to cover these places over the next four weeks. I’m going to try to do it in our 30-minute period. However, it’s always going to be difficult. And I always am overambitious with this stuff.
So you want to type in bit.ly/pro-freelancer-ch. That will get you back to exactly the same pack that you have already been in leading up to this. And if you’re like, what are you talking about? What pack, that was in the email that I sent out to you last– I’m going to say last week. So go there.
Uh-oh. Brian withdraws his question, moves to have it stricken from the record. OK. I’m going to have to look at what that question is. But you want to go there because all of these lessons over the next four weeks, including the templates, this deck, the replays, all of it, will live there. So that’s where you’ll want to go. I’ll show you that in just a bit.
Be Honest About Where Your At [06:40]
But before we actually dive into everything, one of the points of resistance– so I mentioned you don’t want to resist tech, for one. Another point of resistance that I see a lot with freelancers is this idea that, oh, I make $80,000 a year. I make $70,000 a year, or whatever.
And what’s typically happening there– when the year ends, they didn’t make $80,000. They didn’t invoice $80,000 a year. Very often, we have this idea in our head. Freelancers love to remember their one best month and then multiply that by 12. And that can get in the way of you actually growing your business.
I want you to be really honest going into this. You don’t have to tell anybody. You don’t have to tell me. You don’t have to chat it. I’m not going to ask you to chat anything about what you make. Don’t worry, Greg. I’ll show you that link in just a second, by the way.
But I want you to think honestly about your business and where it’s actually at. And you can get to better places. But the average freelance copywriter is making about $50,000 a year. We’ve done salary surveys, Kira and Rob. And I think Abby does them with Kira and Rob over at TCC. What does it stand for? The Copywriter Club. There we go.
So we’ve done salary surveys. They’ve done salary surveys. And freelance copywriters typically come out making about $50,000 a year, which is a solid income. But you can do more. There’s way more business out there. So try to be honest about where you’re at so that we can move forward from there. OK? Cool.
When People Find You: Close Them [08:16]
What I want you to do, what I want you to start thinking about, is your job as a copywriter is to close people. Your job as a freelancer is also to close people. So when people find you, those new leads find you, and someone clicks on something that you put in social media, including your LinkedIn bio, it shouldn’t just drive to some passive email collection, “if you feel like it” sort of space. It needs to drive to a place that actually closes them.
So that’s going to be what we’re talking about today. You need to believe you are a business. You need to be real about how much you’re making and how much more you could be making. And now we need to start thinking about, OK, how do we actually close people when we’re out there?
Tools You Should Use [08:57]
So these are the tools. Remember, this is a mini course. So these are tools that, if you don’t have them handy right now, I do recommend that you open another tab, another window, whatever– if you’ve got two monitors, great– and start opening these up. Because we’re going to use what’s showing here to move really quickly through some cool exercises.
Open up your Facebook. If you’re tweeting or you’re on Facebook and you’re posting things, if you’re on Instagram, if you’re on YouTube, any of those places– if you don’t have all of them, that’s OK. You don’t have to. But where are you out there promoting yourself? Where are you out there talking about yourself? And that should be talking about your skills and building your authority.
Also, if you’re in business– and you are. You’re a freelancer– you might have a Shopify site. Maybe you’ve got productized services that you’re selling on Shopify. You might use lead pages.
You might use Calendly as a scheduler. You might be on Podia, maybe even putting a course together. You’ve got a few digital products in there. Mailchimp, ConvertKit, whatever those things that you’re using in your business, I want you to open those up now.
Also, LinkedIn– yes. I don’t often embed things. Sorry, Melissa just ask LinkedIn. Yes. Wherever you’re out there doing this sharing work, all we’re going to want to do is find cool posts that you’ve had and then embed them. So I’ll show you how to do that.
And I’m not going to show you LinkedIn because I so rarely use it. That is just not something in my examples. But go ahead and use it. I just won’t be able to walk you through how to find the embed code. But I’m pretty sure it’s pretty straightforward because it always is.
Also, Packs. So I’ll show you a bit about Packs. Obviously, everything about this is in a pack today. So I’ll walk you through what you’re going to do with that.
How to Use Your Existing Content [10:45]
Now, what I want you to keep in mind is it can often feel really difficult for freelancers to put together landing pages and web pages and lead magnets and things like this. And it feels like there’s so much to do. But chances are really good that you already have a lot of content out there.
You might be worried about your content’s not rich enough. You don’t have really long posts. You don’t have a huge YouTube presence or something. Don’t worry about it. You have existing content out there already. All we want to do is take it and put it into a space that’s going to help people see why they should work with you or why they should buy things from you.
Embed codes are going to go a long way here. And they make things look dope without you having to do much work. So we’ll see all about that.
How to Use Packs [11:35]
Now, just a heads up because you probably won’t be too surprised by this, but this four-week mini course is actually brought to you by Packs. Packs is like a visual online drive. You can add links. You can add text. You can embed content. And then you can share that pack. So we’re going to be using it today.
You can, of course, use Packs for free. Go to packs.co to create an individual account. Then hit Create Pack for each pack that I teach you to make or duplicate the one that I’m going to share with you and start from there. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. But this is what you want to use.
I know I can hear people going, can I use this? Can I use that? I’m not going to show you other ways to do this. And the reason Packs exists is because there aren’t easy other ways to do this. So I’m going to show you how to do it the right way, the easy way, the fast way, and the free way. You choose to do it different ways if that’s what you want to do.
How to Close Visitors Who Find You In Social Media [12:35]
We’re going to start. 14 minutes left in today’s Tutorial Tuesday. We’re going to start with working on how to close more of your visitors who are finding you in social media. If you have any social media presence, you have a bio associated with that social media presence. And in many, many cases, you’re going to have a single link that you’re working with there. It’s called a “link in bio.” You probably already know that if you’re involved in social media at all.
You might be using something like Linktree. Or you might not be using anything. You might just be driving to your home page or some About Me page on your site. And so we’re going to work on that. Those are those passive links we don’t want to default to. We want to get active. Treat this like a business. Spend a couple of minutes working on this.
Product of the day– that’s interesting. OK. I’m sorry. I got chat off to the side. And I know in watching the replays, people are like, what are you doing? Sorry if you’re watching the replay. There’s chat off to the side. And I keep looking over at it.
So here’s an example– Prerna. Love Prerna to death. I have not had a chance to talk with Prerna about using Packs. But here we have– you can see a link right here. It says contentbistro.com/readytosell-waitlist. That’s one place. There are other places to get to other parts of your site and things like that.
But we really want to work on your link in bio. And now, ready to sell waitlist leads to this. It’s a waitlist. It’s a long-form sales page that has collection on it for your emails, just a lead generation thing. However, it’s actually just a landing page. And it’s not actively showing me why I should sign up for Prerna’s list when Prerna is extremely gifted and talented.
And all I see is this sign-up for a course I don’t know anything about. And I’m on social media. Am I actually ready to read through your long-form sales page and then say, yes, put me on your waitlist? So this is a little bit of a passive approach rather than what we want to do, which is far more active.
So what we’re going to work on first is your link in bio. That’s the very first thing to do. What is the link in bio there to do? Establish your authority. That’s what we’re doing here as freelancers. If you had a link in bio just for your personal Instagram account, then you wouldn’t have to worry about this. You probably wouldn’t even have a link in your bio. Because what would you drive it to, back to Instagram?
But when you’re talking about for your business, for getting those leads in, if you’re posting on Instagram or you’re tweeting or you’re on LinkedIn or wherever, then you should make sure that people are identifying that you are an authority. So that link in bio is meant to drive to a page that establishes your authority, helps to build your brand. Again, we’re really typically dealing with people who are newer to you when they’re clicking through on that. Invite people into your community. And then do a thing.
Now, it’s up to you to decide what that thing is to do. So you can either– if you want to generate leads, you want to drive them to a free whatever to download, if you want to generate customers, you want to drive them to a productized service to buy. And if you want to schedule or to generate clients, then you want to drive them to wherever your scheduler is, like your Calendly link.
So there are a few things to do. You’re going to get these slides, and you’re going to get a template to fill in. So don’t worry about screenshotting this or anything. We’re going to show you how to do it.
So this is basically a table that you’ll want to fill out. I’m going to pop out of presentation mode right now.
Link in Bio Template [16:03]
This is what you’re filling in. So you’ll see that in the pack, I’m going to pop around– again, it’s a live mini course. So I’m going to pop through a few different things on the path toward showing you exactly what to do.
When you sign into that bit.ly that I showed you earlier, this is where it will drive to. So I’m going to share this pack with you. Sorry, that went to hosts and panelists. I need it to go to everyone. So you can go straight there.
This is what you’ve already seen. When you clicked through to sign up for this, you landed here. You saw this Add to Calendar. We’re on lesson one right now. These are the slides that I’m showing you. This is the template for your link in bio plan, which will drive you here.
So this is what you’re going to want to fill in. You have to figure out what your goal is as a freelancer on social media. Why are you there? If it’s to generate leads, cool. Fill in this top one. If it’s to generate revenue, cool. Fill in this middle one. And if it’s to acquire new clients, cool. Fill this in.
You don’t have to worry about the other ones. All you want to do is then fill it in with existing content that you have. You don’t have to create anything new, which is the beauty of it. But you do need to be intentional. A lot of times, we just don’t know what to put in our link. I don’t even know.
And then you’re thinking, I’d have to build a whole page. Do I want to build a whole page? You don’t. No, you don’t. I don’t, and I do it for a living. You might be an email copywriter. You might not even build pages for a living. I do, and I don’t want to do it. So we’re going to build Packs instead and make it really, really easy.
So you’ll want to say, what link do I have that helps me establish my authority? What video do I have that helps me build my brand? And if you don’t have a video, put a loom together. Talk into your camera right front and center. Or do a quick teardown of something where, again, you’re on camera doing that loom. And then make sure you’ve got that handy.
This doesn’t have to take a long time. In fact, if it’s taking a long time, you’re probably doing it wrong. You don’t have time as a freelancer. It’s what you’re typically selling. So you can’t spend too much time fiddling with things and making the perfect thing. And in social media in particular, nobody really expects that either.
If you want to invite people to your community, you might want to embed something like a form or a tweet or something else that gets them from Instagram to go over onto Twitter and follow you there and like you there and things like that. And I’m going to show you an example right away. Actually, I’m going to do that right now because of time.
This is an example of when you actually fill this in. You’ve got these links. You’ve got et cetera. Then this is a sample pack that you would use as your link in bio– so how a pro copywriter finds the brand’s most compelling voice. Let’s say you’re a pro copywriter who works on brand voice. This is something you would put together.
Any existing content you have– in this case, we have a few YouTube videos that I pulled up here. All I had to do was open up our Copyhackers videos on YouTube, go through them. Frankly, I was surprised we had so many. Mike is doing a bad-ass job producing these without me ever seeing anything.
So we can go through this and pull a bunch of those in here and just paste the embed code, and that’s it. Paste the link. And switch to embed, which is something when you’re– I’m currently in view-only mode. So I’m not going to do that here.
And then we embedded a Facebook post about brand voice and acquiring customers. And then at the end is this Calendly link. OK. And it’s all just embedded. What we’ve created here– and I’ll show you how to do this really quickly. This is like when you’re watching a cooking show, and you have to see the final product in order to know what you’re working toward.
All this is a series of links and things I’ve done. And this is put together in about four minutes. And those four minutes were really spent looking through what I have going on. What can I put in here? What do I have?
If you’re selling productized services, if you’re doing that on Shopify, let’s say, then you can also just copy over and embed anything that you have over on Shopify. So for the purposes of time, I’m not going to walk you through all of those things. What I do want to show you, though, is how to put this together where the point is put it together really quickly.
Don’t feel you have to add a lot of stuff. In fact, everything I have in here might be more than you need to add in here. So don’t get overwhelmed in any way because it’s actually– once you start using it, Packs is like the antioverwhelm tool. It’s the exact opposite. You’re basically right-clicking and pasting things or just hitting Command– what is it, Command-V, Control-V on a PC?
So we’re going to show you how to do this right away, how to go through and put this together. But the point is that you need to really work through strategy. And this is the strategy. This is it. You just figure out what lengths to put in there. Voila. You put the links in there, and that’s your whole job.
How you’re going to do that is open up Calendly, Shopify, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp. Open your social media, as I already mentioned to you. And then do a vanity search. Search your name or search your brand name, and see what content comes up. That’s typically how I go through it and do a content audit.
What do we have on x? Or who said what about us? I just search “Copyhackers” or I search Joanna Wiebe, and that’s where I find most of our links, which might sound crazy. Why do I do that on our site? Well, it’s just because there’s going to be other people talking about us. So just go ahead and do that.
So open those up. Open Twitter. Do that vanity search. And then in that pack that I shared with you, this one, you’ll be able to– oh, wait. Where do we have it? Oh, no, in the link I just shared with you, sorry. We have got this one.
Let me share it again as soon as I am in the right view. Sorry. Let me pause my view for a second because you’re about to see my 104 Packs. All right. We’re going to go and… Just talk amongst yourselves.
OK. You should be able to work with that pack as a starting point. You just have to make a copy of it. You just have to go into Duplicate and then make your own. So I’m going to resume sharing here. Or just go ahead and create a pack. So even up at the top, you can hit Create Pack. And then just start pasting things in.
And all you want to do is go over to whatever you find. And instead of just like– you can paste links, and that’s great. But you can also hit Embed. That’s the thing to do. As soon as you hit Embed, let’s copy that. I’m going to put a new pack together right now so you can see how easy it is. Let it just– things have to catch up.
All you want to do– that code that I just put there– I just hit Command-V, and it appears here. You title it– Jo’s sample– right there. And voila, that’s the beginning of embedding this stuff and anything that you have. You just go through and either paste a link– hopefully you heard that. That was an ad. It was a really awesome ad. You can paste that link in here.
And really quickly, if you choose to embed it so people can see it, you can show it that way. Or you can show it just as a link. But this is how you quickly put together a page. Pop your Calendly link in there. Voila, now you have a link in bio that actually makes sense for your business. It’s not just three or four links and things like Linktree, which have their own use but not for business purposes, particularly not for freelance businesses.
So I know we are at the end of our time. And I want to challenge you to do what’s next here. What I want to challenge you to do is take everything you just did, everything that you probably watched me do and didn’t do yourself, here in this. And although this is great for your link in bio, it’s also really, really great for making your own mini course on something.
Using Packs to Create a Lead Magnet [24:49]
So you can take the exact same tool that we have here that’s showing on the screen right now. And you can say, OK, my social, my link in bio is going to be about lead generation. But my actual lead magnet, which is the next place that you want to start optimizing this stuff, the lead magnet as in what you deliver when people sign up for your email list– what is the thing that comes to them?
Now, a lot of times, people, freelancers in particular, are like, I don’t even know what to make as a lead magnet. I have no idea. So you can take everything that you’re doing here and instead call it “lead magnet” as a placeholder headline. And find anything that you’ve written or created on a subject.
You can even duplicate the existing link in bio that you might make. Duplicate that, and then just add more stuff to it. Because I guarantee, unless this is your first day of freelancing and you’ve never shared, you’ve never posted about anything, you’ve never really done anything, chances are good, if that’s not you, you’re going to have an internet filled with things that you can pop into a pack that really fill it out on a single topic.
So you can go into your blog and search for like, OK, well, maybe if you did a post on writing Facebook ads. Maybe you’ve tweeted about writing Facebook ads. Maybe you’ve written Facebook ads that you want to embed. Go ahead and start embedding things. And stop creating pages from scratch.
I’m looking at some chats here. I know we’re at the end of our time. I don’t see any open Q&A. So what I want to do– yes, it’s a minimum viable authority page, as Harry put it. Yeah. So the reason that Packs was first created was simply because it’s hard to put a link and a document together in anything. So that’s like the starting point here.
So you can control the narrative better this way. And you can upload files. If you have an ebook, upload that. If you have, again, tweets for other things that you can just embed, go ahead and embed them.
But the point, what I want you to take away from today’s session, which is now coming to an end, is that all you need to do– all you need to do– is just be deliberate. Fill in that Google Doc that’s shared with you. And then go ahead, make those packs, and then share them as your link in bio and as your lead magnet so it’s the thing that gets delivered after someone signs up for your email address.
Make sure in those you are embedding either your Calendly to actually turn people into real leads for you. If you want to sell productized services, then do make sure you’re embedding that Shopify Buy button or wherever else you’re doing. And if it’s, again, Podia, you can embed that right inside your pack. So I don’t have to click to another space. I can actually just buy the thing right from your pack.
Any of those other things you want to do, you just need to make sure you’re starting here and keeping it this simple. Start with just four pieces that you add in there. And then just make sure that they look dope and that the best– that the thing you want people to do is easily done instead of a world of links and bios that drive to God knows where on your site. You didn’t think it through. You just needed a link in bio, so you did it. So you put whatever page there.
Your lead magnets– if you don’t even have a lead magnet because you’ve been so intimidated by making them, stop. Open up all of your social. And just go in and start embedding things in there. You can make a mini course pretty quickly just by pulling in five, six, seven different things that you’ve done on a topic and calling it your mini course, which it will be because it’ll be curating all of that content for people.
All right. Hope you guys enjoy using it. And we shall see you next week for part 2, where I will scale things down and not have to introduce Packs so much so it’ll go slower and more deliberately instead of me hauling ass through this live one. But I hope you guys like the beginning of mini courses and Tutorial Tuesdays, and we shall see you next week. Have a good one. Bye, everyone.
