There has never been an easier way to start a freelancing side-hustle or make it your full-time business. But at the same time, it has never been easier to get so overloaded by all the information out there.
Whether it’s the process of building a brand, finding freelance clients, or making them return – where do you even start?
Good question.
That’s why this article will walk you through a step-by-step process that will help you:
- Build connections with prospects and clients
- Demonstrate your value to them
- Get them to try your services
Sound good? Let’s jump into the tutorial.
Note: We got all of this info and process from real freelancers and influencers who are using it – so you can be sure that this works.
10-Day Kickstart Your Freelancing Career Challenge: Win FREE Social Media Exposure
Besides winning yourself some clients and a kickstart to your career – we also wanted to offer an additional prize for completing the challenge: FREE Social Media Exposure.
If you manage to complete the challenge and get yourself some clients – you can share the results in the Legiit Facebook group.
Not only this but we will share your results across all of our social media channels… which ultimately leads to even more exposure and potential clients for you.
10-Day Kickstart Your Freelance Career Challenge
Before we dive into the challenge, there are a few steps you need to take beforehand.
Before We Start: Choose Your Skill
There are endless skills you can monetize. But for freelancing, it’s best to focus on skills that serve businesses – as they can pay you more.
Some excellent examples include:
- Freelance writing
- Graphic design
- SEO
- Advertising
- Email Marketing
- Web Design & Development
If you haven’t learned one of these previously, we suggest learning it through educational material on YouTube or purchasing a course.
Before We Start: Keep Track of Wednesday Round-up Post
Round-ups are enormous opportunities that will let you get a lot of visibility on your services. Keep track of them because they are every Wednesday, which is why we could not build them onto a specific day of the challenge.
So just make sure to keep an eye out for them while you go through the challenge.
Day 1: Sign Up for Legiit Account & Create a Seller Profile (Logo, Description)
Let’s go easy on day 1, and build up from there. Today, you only need to sign up for your Legiit account and create your profile.
What is Legiit?
Legiit is a freelancing platform that allows you to sell your services while connecting you with business owners worldwide. It’s free to sign up, and you only pay a fee when you sell your services.
Here’s what you can do with Legiit:
- Have your own seller profile with several services
- Sell your services and bill clients
- Show your services to thousands of businesses worldwide
- And much more…
Signing Up For Legiit
To sign up for Legiit, just click the button below, and you will be redirected to our sign-up.
Sign Up For a Free Legiit Account
This process is pretty easy, and most of the fields should be self-explanatory.
Once you have signed up, go to your settings, and make sure to activate your seller account.
Creating Your Profile
Besides the services, an excellent profile features:
- A catchy or professional username
- A detailed and easy-to-read description of what you do
- A clear and friendly headshot of you OR a logo (although a headshot is preferred)
A Catchy and/or Professional Username
One of the most critical components of your seller profile is the username
It’s what your customers will use to:
- Remember you
- Use to send you referrals
- Find you via the Legiit or Google search engine
This is why it’s so essential that you don’t have a really long name that’s hard to spell out.
Ideally, you should go for a clean brand name that’s easy to remember or your personal name.
Again, we also included some screenshots from other sellers down below to help you get an idea.
Headshot
Ideally, you should be using a headshot of yourself as your profile picture. Why?
Our data proves that most of the top sellers all have headshots as profile pictures… And data across the internet also does the same. For example, studies show that people are attracted to faces.
Therefore it’s likely going to increase your sales, as it’s more likely going to get people clicking on your profile.
However, if you don’t have one or just don’t feel comfortable using a headshot – you can also use a logo.
For this, you can either use Canva to create one or hire someone on Legiit.
A Detailed and Easy-to-Read Description of What You Do
Your profile description is all about explaining what you do – and connecting with your ideal customer.
While you don’t have to specifically call out who you want to help – they should get an idea by reading it.
So focus on explaining what you do and what results in you provide.
This will then make it easier to recognize that you might be someone they should follow – which will make it easier for you to make sales to them in the future (we will go through this later on).
An excellent service description includes:
- Services you provide/how you can help
- Experience/Past results
To give you an even better idea of the process, we went out grabbed some of the descriptions of top-performing sellers. This way, you can somewhat imitate them or use them as a template.
Day 2: Plan Your Services & Research the Competition
Today is the day where you’ll really get an idea of WHAT you will sell – as you will be collecting ideas and looking at the competition.
In the beginning, we spoke about YOUR skill.
Today, we’re going to look at your competition, get inspiration from some of their best-selling services and come up with our own.
Finding The Competition
For this example, suppose we are trying to sell graphic design services.
Head over to the graphic design category and scroll through the first page. You’ll see a range of different services that you can sell.
- Logos
- Business Banners
- Image Editing
- Social Media Post Design
Boom! All of these services are on the first page of Legiit – so you know there’s demand. Besides this, you can also dig deeper – for example, YouTube thumbnails is a fantastic graphic design service because the customer will keep coming back every day.
And looking at the reviews of someone who offers thumbnails, that is confirmed.
Day 3: Create Your Services
Today it’s time to create your services and their sales pages.
To get started, in your Legiit dashboard, go to “selling” than services. From here, click create new.
You will be asked to fill out some basic information as shown in the screenshot below – like title, etc.
After you jump through the self-explanatory stuff, you will eventually get to the service description – arguably the most important part of your service… since it convinces your visitors to buy from you.
For this, I recommend including:
- Critical information on how you help your customers + what RESULT it will lead to
- Why your service is different from the thousands of others offering it, i.e., your USP
- Your past experience (results, why they should trust you, etc.)
- Social proof if you have any
We also recommend reading our conversion checklist for your Legiit Service pages. That will give you everything you need when creating your service pages.
Day 4: Social Media Accounts + Content Calendar (Optional But Recommended: Blog/YouTube)
Social media is crucial to finding success as a freelancer because you build connections that drive your business.
The essential platforms we recommend as a freelancer are (in order):
- Twitter and/or LinkedIn (joint second)
We recommend you sign up for these platforms and use the tips we covered earlier for your Legiit profile to fill out your profile information. From there, start following and engaging with people in your community.
For example, if you’re a writer, web designer, or offer SEO services, you could follow a lot of SEOs and affiliate marketers on Twitter. Or business owners in your niche.
If you’re a graphic designer, you could also consider typing in words into the Twitter search engine like “Need graphic designer/banner/logo,” and you should find a ton of them.
Of course, this can also work for other types of services, but the graphic design seems to be the most significant opportunity, as Chris points out in his Facebook post.
Optional: YouTube and/or Blogging
The thing about YouTube and a Blog is that they can actually drive more business than the platforms we mentioned earlier. However, they are a lot harder to grow initially, and the ROI may take a lot longer in the beginning.
If you do want to start a blog, or YouTube channel – make sure to check out some of the guides below.
How To Start a Blog by Superstar SEO
Our YouTube For Freelancers Guide
Creating Content
Here are some content ideas for your social media:
- Share valuable tips that will help your target audience
- Share relatable memes
- Share tutorials or threads
- Share Entrepreneurial quotes
You can also check out some other accounts in your industry to see what’s working for them. Then do something similar.
Day 5: Schedule Your Content for a 1-4 Weeks
Today is time to create & schedule your content.
This allows you to put your time into other tasks without having to come up & create new content every day. For Twitter, I recommend just using TweetDeck initially, as you won’t need a paid tool in the beginning.
On Facebook, it’s a little harder as you will be using your personal account, so there scheduling won’t be possible. For LinkedIn, you can use Oneup, which is free.
Day 6: Engage in Relevant Communities
People aren’t just going to find your profile by accident.
You need to plan the process and increase the probability of your customers finding you. Below, we’ve walked you through the steps for each individual platform.
On Twitter, one of the best ways to get in front of people is to engage with large accounts that have your ideal target audience. The cool thing about Twitter is that you can find big accounts quickly simply by searching for standard industry terms.
For example, if I look for SEO on Twitter now – I will not only find a list of big accounts like Craig Cambell, Chris M. Walker, and many others…
But I will also get top tweets of influencers that are likely to create content that would attract my target customers.
And here’s how we get in front of their audience:
- Comment on their tweets with VALUE – not self-promo
- Quote Tweet their tweets with value
When you quote tweet them, they will often retweet you because it helps their visibility by getting into their own followers feed an extra time. But the cool thing is that you get into the feed as well.
From here, create two lists.
This is basically a feed where only people you add to the list are shown.
List 1 – Big Influencers
List 2 – Other Users in Your Niche (Small Accounts)
At any time (ideally once or twice per day), you can open these lists and start using our engagement tactics explained above. This will do to get visibility from the large accounts, and the small funds are likely going to return the favor…
MEANING: BIG VISIBILITY FOR YOU.
On Facebook, the quickest way to find your target customer is by joining groups they’d be in.
The first one we recommend has to be our Legiit Facebook group, as this one also has a range of promotional opportunities .
Besides, this we also recommend general business owner/Entrepreneurial groups such as:
- Small Business Owners United
- Small Business Owners Supporting Eachother Group
- Superstar SEO
- Etc.
Plus, you can also join hiring board groups that are for your skill, such as Cult of Copy – which is a writing one.
In the hiring board groups: Post your offer
In the general business owner groups: Add lots of value by sharing insights to help your target audience.
LinkedIn’s all about making connections and putting out valuable content that builds trust between you and your audience. We recently created a more detailed guide on this, so feel free to check that out here:
Day 7: Message One of Your Followers to Offer Them a Review Copy
Today is easy-going but still crucial. You need to message one of your followers to provide them a review copy.
1. What is a Review Copy?
A review copy is a copy of your service that you sell for a discount or free to get a review. This helps your social proof and will show future customers that you do a good job.
2. How To Create a Review Copy?
Go into your service editor, and under the regular pricing – you should see a switch for “Review editions”.
From there, you can configure the discounted price – or leave it at 0.
3. Messaging Your Followers
Ideally, you’ll want to message a warmed-up follower who knows what you do and has engaged with your content.
So go through some of your social media notifications, and look at who engages with your content.
From there, reach out to them and offer them a free review copy of your service.
This is what you’ll use for social proof.
Day 8: Complete the Project(s)
Day 8 may be another easy-going day – depending on the size of the project. But today, the only real task is to complete the project(s).
The only other things you need to do today is:
- Engage a little on social media
- Track how long it takes for you to complete the project
The second point will help you work out your hourly rate as a freelancer. This will be crucial down the line when you want to earn more – as you need to know how much you are making per hour to hit that income goal.
And of course, it goes without saying that you should do everything in your power to leave your client looking like this… :
Day 9: Post the Review in the Legiit Facebook Group & on Your Social Media
Now it’s time to show off that work you put in.
In the Legiit Facebook group, we allow you to share your success. So you can share a review in the group and let our group members know which service you got it.
This will enable you to get a little more known in the Legiit community, leading to an increase in sales.
We also recommend sharing it on your social media channels to show off what you can do to your followers. Of course, don’t forget to mix it in between the value posts discussed earlier.
Day 10: Offer a Discount on Your Social Media Accounts
On your social media accounts, your followers now should have an idea of the value you can provide. Firstly they have seen your valuable content, and then they have also seen your social proof.
Now you have built that initial trust you can share some discounts – and your followers are much more likely to bite. And from here, it’s all about building repeat business.
Incentivizing Your Social Media Followers To Follow You on Legiit
Legiit recently introduced the feature that allows users to follow sellers. Why is this useful to you?
Because whenever you post a discount, ALL of your followers receive an email into their inbox… (Your name) just posted a new discount.
Yep, done for you email marketing.
So, how can you get users to follow you on Legiit?
- Offer a specific discount for Legiit users
- Offer a lead magnet for following you
- Let users know they can get exclusive users to your services by following you.
Final Thoughts
That’s it!
What you should have after completing this challenge is:
- A list of growing followers that are interested in you and your services
- One to three customers that have tried your review editions, and will return if you do a good job.
- A complete ready-to-go freelancing business in your Legiit profile that just needs more eyeballs.
And luckily your growing followers will provide you the eyeballs that you need to get more clients.
Don’t forget to show off your results in the Legiit Facebook group to get even more exposure.
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