The Getting Clients Routine

Hey Joanna, how's it going? Hey, how are you? Good, how are you? Doing pretty well. Hell yeah. Just gonna wait for people to trickle in here.

Sounds good. I'm still gonna be like doing some kind of busy work stuff, so I'll be like half around, but... That's fine, don't worry about it. Sometimes it's nice to just listen.

Yeah, exactly. And I think like this specific like workshop isn't quite like towards me at this moment in time. Yeah, yeah.

So, more like half listening for future things, but yeah. Totally, no worries. Hey Taylor, how's it going? Hello, I'm good.

How are you doing? Good. Alrighty, just stay off camera and I can't stay the whole time, but I wanted to pop in for just a little bit to hear the updates and then I'll catch the replay on the rest. Cool, no worries.

Just gonna wait for a few more people to trickle in. We had 10 RSVPs, so we'll see. See how many people show up.

Hey Kate, how's it going? Perfect, Joanna. Hey Brad. Welcome, welcome.

Awesome. Well, let's get started here. Just a reminder, if you're not wearing headphones, just make sure you're on mute.

If you are not actively talking so we don't get the echo effect. If you do have a question throughout, don't be afraid to unmute yourself and let me know or just pop it in the chat. I do have the chat open.

You can also raise your hand if you don't want to interrupt. There's a little like hand looking symbol at the bottom left hand corner of your screen if you feel so inclined. But yeah, you do not need to like hold your questions until the end.

If you have them, don't be afraid to ask them. I'm like the worst at remembering questions later, so I totally understand. But without further ado, let's dive in.

Today we're talking about the getting clients routine updated for 2025. A lot has changed on LinkedIn in the past year alone, which is kind of crazy. It's definitely becoming a more popular platform to use for getting clients.

So making sure you're sticking to the new etiquette is very important. If you want to see results and also be viewed as like a respectful freelancer that people actually want to work with. So these are all things that you can implement.

We will be going over some of the basics of getting clients on LinkedIn and email cold pitching. But if you want more in depth on that, there are videos specifically for those things in the freelance resource library. So I'm not going to go super deep into those things.

Today is really just about creating a sustainable system and routine for yourself so that you can consistently get clients and get out of the feast famine cycle. Not so much like every single little step that it takes to get clients all the time. So this is what we're going to talk about today.

The things you need to get set up before you do this routine, what the routine itself actually looks like, what sort of benchmarks you should be aiming for and what percentage conversion rates you might be able to expect from these efforts. We're going to have a mindset moment. There are like three really key things for mindset here.

Honestly, I could go all day about mindset. I think it's a really important foundation for getting clients and your business in general. So we'll talk.

There are so many other things I can talk about with that, but I at least want to touch on some of these basics because getting clients can be a rough feeling for your brain. And then we'll dive into your questions if there are any that I didn't answer during the workshop. So first things first, your niche and your ideal clients should already be defined before you start this routine.

You can change your niche or change who you want your ideal clients to be. But if you don't have those things, if you don't have an ideal clients list, if your LinkedIn profile isn't optimized and all that stuff, it's going to be really hard for you to do this routine. If you need help finding your niche or creating your ideal clients list, there are resources in the freelance resource library.

They'll be in the links in the comments of this workshop replay on the like event posting if you need those. Or you can just search. You don't even have to be in the freelance resource library to search.

If you're just like anywhere in pop up and you click the search bar, you can type these things in and the lesson should come up. So those are things you're going to want to reference before you start this routine. If you haven't done these things already, they're very important.

So the routine itself is a strategic way to very efficiently get clients. Emphasis on efficient. So before you dive into this, after you checked out those resources, you are going to want a way to track your ideal clients.

I personally use the I use Notion and there's a template for that in the resource library that you can use if you want to. I used to use Asana or Trello works as well. If you prefer those tools, whatever you use, it needs to be able to notify you and a need to be able to set due dates so that you don't forget to follow up with people.

Or even if you miss those due dates, you have a list of who does need to be followed up with that you haven't already. If you don't have a notification system, things will get lost in the sauce and it is almost impossible to get clients without doing follow ups. Follow ups are going to be the most important part of this routine.

So just make sure that you're tracking everything. And I will show you examples of what the tracker looks like when I use it and how I use it. I'll walk you through all of this in a minute.

I just want to make sure you guys have something set up for that. And then the get clients guidebook. I pretty much open it every time.

I've actually copy and pasted the whole guidebook into chat. So I was like, you have my templates. You have the ideal clients I'm looking for.

Here's more information about me. And then I just copy and paste the name, title and company of the person I'm reaching out to. And if they have like an about section or their job experience is relevant, sometimes I'll type that in, too.

And then it will spit out letters of introduction for me now, which is really nice. I used to have to like write them by hand and it would take kind of a while. It definitely saves a lot of time to just use chat GPT because you're literally just filling in the blanks of templates while you're doing this.

So that's always an option if you're like into that and you can customize the templates that are in the guidebook. So it makes it faster for you to get through this process. So the getting clients routine.

If you've seen this workshop before, the things that have changed are step two and step three. So pay most attention to those if you're already seeing this and you're watching it for the second time with the update. So the first step is turning our ideal clients into connections.

So you're going to go to your ideal clients list, pick a company. And either on LinkedIn, head to that company's page and find the right people to connect with or find their email addresses. You can use Hunter.io. You can find them through LinkedIn or you can use another lead generating software if you want to, like Octopus or something like that.

And basically, you're just going to send them a connection request or if you're doing email, email cold pitch. And there are templates for email cold pitches in the Freelance Resource Library if you need those. If you're sending a connection request, I no longer recommend adding a note.

And I never recommend using in-mail if you do have that capability on your LinkedIn subscription. So step three, you're just going to like wait a while. Usually what I do is set a notification for two weeks later for the company when I reach out to them so that I can remember to go see if they accept my connection request.

Once they accept my connection request, I send a thank you note and a letter of introduction. And there are templates for letters of introduction in the Get Clients Guidebook. And there are even more templates in the Freelance Resource Library if you want to like get more personal about it.

There are templates for like people you have a connection with, people you don't, people who are like peers, people who are in your niche. There's so many options in the Resource Library and the personalization can sometimes really like take it the extra mile. And like I said, you can just copy and paste those templates in a chat GPT and it will literally pick the right one for you based on the information you give it about their profile.

So that was a fun discovery for me this week that I realized I could do. You don't even have to be like, please use this specific template. You can just be like, based on the templates I gave you, please write it for this person.

So that's really fun. If you're doing email cold pitching, don't do step three. It is unnecessary because you've already sent them a pitch and introduced yourself.

So step four is waiting two weeks. So you'll wait two weeks from the date that you sent them the letter of introduction, not the date they accepted your request, because like sometimes you'll see it and then you'll send them the LOI. Sometimes you'll see it like a week after they accepted and you want space between your letter of introduction and when you start the next conversation with them.

If they continue the conversation from your letter of introduction, dope. Just like keep talking to them. Obviously don't force it, but just like naturally chit chat with them.

If you can continue the conversation, like 90% of people are not going to respond to your LOI, but they'll probably read it and that's fine. It doesn't mean anything. It's just it just is what it is.

Sometimes I don't even try to start a conversation with the LOI. I'm just like, hey, here I am. It is a letter of introduction.

It's just meant to get your foot in the door. It's not like a pitch. It's not trying to convince them to talk to you.

You don't need to force it or make it weird. You just need to let them know who you are and why you connected with them, basically. So step four, like I said, waiting two weeks.

Usually after two weeks, I ask them, hey, do you ever work with freelancers? If you don't like calling yourself a freelancer because you do more of like a consulting thing or you want to position yourself as like a fractional CMO or something, then you can use that term instead or find a way to phrase it that feels better for you and the service you're offering. It doesn't have to be exactly, hey, do you ever work with freelancers? You could use the word contractor as well if that feels better for you. Step five, you're going to wait two more weeks and let them know what your availability is, whether they responded or not.

If they've been in conversation with you or they did respond to whether they work with freelancers or not, you are going to continue that conversation. Usually that's when I say, oh, amazing. I'm a freelancer in this niche and I have availability coming up.

These are the services I offer or sometimes I'll ask them like, oh, what services do you work with freelancers on? Or like, where is there space for me? Like, try to continue that conversation, figure out what type of freelancers they work with and if they could possibly work with you. But most people, I will say, are probably not going to respond to whether or not they work with freelancers or they'll just say yes or no. It's not going to be like a full conversation.

That's completely OK. Even if they don't respond, you need to follow up with them again two weeks later and let them know, like, this is when we're pitching. Step five is the pitch.

This is, hey, here's what I do. Here's when I'm available. I'd love to work with you.

Kate says, do you mean availability for a discovery call or availability for work? Availability for work. Usually I say I have availability coming up in my schedule for whatever my service is, for whatever type of clients you're talking to. I'd love to talk to you more about working together and then I'll give them my discovery call link.

There are templates for this in the Get Clients Guidebook as well if you need them. And there are also more options for templates if you really need them in that more LOIs templates lesson in the Freelance Resource Library. So whether they respond to that or not, we're going to follow up with them again quarterly.

So basically those first two messages are kind of a lot of people call figuring out if a client is right for you prospecting or validating a lead. That's the validation. That's the part where you make sure that they're a potential client.

Even if they don't respond, they could still be the right fit for a potential client. But these questions and pitching can help you get further in your process of turning them into a client. If they don't respond to those two messages, we're not going to follow up with them until three months later.

This is because businesses typically make decisions on a quarterly basis. Nothing is going to change in two weeks. Just like for you, like two weeks from now, most likely you're not going to be able to afford something that's $1,500 any more than you could have two weeks before that.

Typically, it takes time for decisions about finances to be made and decisions about hiring help and things like that. So your goal with direct outreach is really to show up in their inbox at the right time. You want to show up in their inbox when they're considering working with a freelancer, before they're thinking about working with a freelancer, and when they're ready to make that decision.

They're not going to be any more ready after those first four weeks, one week or two weeks later after that. They're going to be more ready the next quarter. And even if they're not ready that next quarter, they might be ready the quarter after that or the quarter after that.

But basically, our goal is like we don't want to annoy them, but we do want to stay top of mind. So until you get a response, you're now going to follow up with them quarterly. And usually I just keep using that same availability message.

I'm available on this date to start this type of work. Would you be interested? Here's my link if you want to chat. Some people do a questionnaire instead of a discovery call.

I know Polly does that. So if that's more your style, you can do that instead. But basically, you're going to follow up with them quarterly at least five times.

So total, you'll have messaged them the letter of introduction, the two week, do you ever work with freelancers message, the four week, here's my availability, and then five more after that. So eight total. So this is like if you actually exhaust all eight follow ups, a two year process.

And I know that sounds like a really long time, and it might sound frustrating, but you're essentially layering to get coverage. So like, let's say you have a piece of tissue paper and you paste it to a piece of paper. That's not going to cover the paper.

But if you keep pasting little pieces of tissue paper all over the paper, eventually it will be completely covered. That's sort of what you're doing every time you log into LinkedIn and do your getting clients routine. You want to cover that paper.

That is like the foundation of your business. Like if you go to the arcade and you play one game, you're not going to have enough tickets to get a prize. But if you play like 20 games and you go every week, once a week, then eventually you're going to get like the giant unicorn stuffed animal that's like 20,000 whatever tickets or something stupid like that.

You need to basically act like this is a piggy bank that you need to fill up. I don't have $2,000 in my savings account right now, not because I didn't put a full $2,000 in there, but because I wasn't putting in a dollar a day for however long that would take. These are the things that are going to build on top of each other.

And it makes it so it doesn't take you two years to get a client. It takes you two weeks because you have enough people to follow up. You're almost never going to get a client from step four.

I think it's happened to me like maybe twice, but you will almost always get a client from step six. It just sometimes will take two weeks. Sometimes it will take a month.

You don't know how long it's going to take because it's impossible to read people's minds and see into their business without their telling you what they're up to. All you can do is your best educated guess at being there at the right time so that they remember you and are excited to reach out to you. This is a routine like we talked about.

You're going to keep going through this over and over and layering up. When you first start the routine, you're literally just doing steps one through three for two weeks. And then once that two weeks passes, you can add in step four.

And then once four weeks has passed, then you can start adding in step five and so on until you're sort of doing each part of the routine every day. And I'll show you how that works next. But does anyone have any questions about the routine as a whole? One question I had is about quarterly follow ups.

Do you find that most industries follow the same business quarter? Because I've just been doing mine based on like three months from when I started or is that specific? Yeah, I do three months from the first time I pitched to them. And then three months from the last time I followed up with them. So it's every three months from your action, not necessarily like perfect business quarters.

If you want to, you can do business quarters, but you're just trying to be there. You know, that makes sense. That's what I've been doing.

OK, cool. Perfect. Yes.

So the I have done this with agencies like small agencies asking if they use subcontractors and I've had a lot of success. But I kind of I think that now that I'm going to find clients and it would be like small businesses or like solopreneurs or like new people new to the market and they are just setting up marketing. I kind of feel like if I say to be a freelancer, it would have them in the mindset of being like, no, I don't think so.

I think I have to tell me if you agree. I feel like it has to be. Have you thought about your marketing yet or do you ever work with Judy? I mean, like, because I don't think they've even worked with anybody yet to know if they work with.

But but it's like it has to be kind of like question or set up differently, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think it really depends on the type of business. This is really designed for like larger businesses.

When it comes to small businesses, the best thing that I've noticed works is content marketing, email marketing, like things that keep you top of mind regularly and deliver them value because a lot of solopreneurs and smaller businesses are trying to bootstrap. Like they're trying to do this stuff themselves so that they can save money. But when you can show them like, hey, you're swamped, let me help you or what you're doing isn't really working.

Here's what would and I can do that is usually going to work better. But you don't want to come across as like criticizing them in their DMZ. So there's kind of a middle ground.

You can definitely reach out to them with a more customized message. That's like, hey, I offer this for this type of person. If you're feeling like swamped or like this thing that you're doing isn't effective.

I'd love to chat with you more about how I can help you. You know, you can definitely like think about it from their perspective if you if that's your demographic. Well, I think it's hard to like have a prescriptive thing that works for everybody because nothing is going to work for everybody.

It's always important. Like when you learn a system from somebody else to make sure that you're customizing it for yourself and your audience, for sure. Sorry to take time.

I didn't have like my thought is that like for something like that, for like solopreneurs or whatever, it's almost like it could be better to like connect with them on LinkedIn and then like comment on their stuff if they're active. So that when you do DM them, they're not like, who the heck are you? Yeah, I think also a good first step is just offering a coffee chat instead of a discovery call being like, hey, I do. I am a digital marketer.

I saw you're in my niche, even though you're not a digital marketer. I'd love to like chat with you about like the industry or whatever, you know, like get a coffee chat on the books. It can feel a lot more approachable and like this is my pal who does marketing.

And then when they do need marketing help, they're like, well, Amy would know what to do. You know? Yeah. All right.

So if you want to implement the routine, typically what I recommend doing is about an hour a day. And we can talk about benchmarks later for like how long you need to do this. If you don't have an hour a day, 30 minutes will also work.

You just need to make sure you're prioritizing in that 30 minutes. So steps one and two are the most important. If you do not have time, if you don't have more than 30 minutes, definitely don't even bother with steps three and four.

It's not necessary. But basically what I do when I log on. Obviously, in the first two weeks, you can't do this because you won't have any follow ups to send.

But so for the first two weeks, you'll just start with step two. But what I personally do is I literally set a timer. I have.

Sorry, it beeps a lot, but this is my I have a timer. It has like intervals already set on it. I can share the link if you want.

It's like ten dollars on Amazon. You can also just use the clock app on your phone or on your computer, whatever. There's a Google timer.

It doesn't matter. Set a timer. Make it easy for yourself so that you don't go overboard, because it's really easy to like get lost in the sauce on LinkedIn.

I set a timer for 15 minutes and I just send follow ups to start. So I go to my ideal clients tracker and I send those follow ups. So the first thing I usually do is go to my connections and see who's what new connection request acceptances I have.

And I'll DM them my letter of introduction. And then after that, I'll go through and check all my due dates and see who I need to follow up with, like send my availability. Or if they've been in conversation with me, follow up them, be like, hey, did you want to send that to schedule a discovery call or whatever? And again, if you don't have follow ups to send, you can start with step two or you can go through the connections you already have.

If you have any that are relevant, keyword relevant, they should have a job title that could hire you. If you're not sure what job titles to look for, there's a bunch in the get clients guidebook that I've suggested. You can also feed your services and niche to chat GPT and it will tell you what job titles to look for.

You can always reach out to people who you're already connected with and try to catch up with them. There are templates for that in the resource library as well. Once you've done your follow ups or reach out to people you're already connected with, you're going to set another 15 minute timer and try to connect with as many relevant people as possible at least one company.

Usually I can get three to five companies done in this time, usually like five to ten connections. Again, we're not like adding a note or doing email. You just need to find the right people at the right company.

So it's usually relatively quick. And if you need a step by step for that, it's inside the get clients guidebook. Once I've done those two things, sometimes I'll like extend my time for those and just do those two things for the whole hour.

Sometimes I will try to get some posts scheduled. There are ideas for posts in the get clients guidebook. I'm also working on a newsletter that's going to go out not this week, but next week with prompts for your LinkedIn content if you need that.

And then I'll also try to interact. Sometimes I will go through my ideal clients tracker, the people that have accepted my connection request and try to interact with their content specifically. You can also just interact on your home feed or you can keep a running list.

I also have a notes app note that has a list and links to all my favorite people who do create content specifically for LinkedIn. Interacting just shows LinkedIn that like you're a real whole human being. And it also makes it so that anything you post is going to go a lot further because you're actively building community on LinkedIn.

I always recommend interacting around the same time that you're posting. So I schedule all my posts for 930 because I usually log on between 930 and 10 a.m. to work in general. And I always do my LinkedIn first to get it out of the way so that I know my business foundation is secure.

So I interact around that time and that makes my posts do really well. If you're not interacting around the time that you're posting, it's like fine. The posts will still like do their thing, but you'll get a lot more impressions and engagement and like actually build real community if you're interacting literally with anything.

It doesn't have to be your own content around the time that your post goes live. So content marketing isn't necessary to get freelance digital marketing clients. I want to be clear about that.

You do not have to or need to be posting. The nice thing about LinkedIn, though, is you can schedule your posts and most people only go on on weekdays, mostly. So you can literally create like 20 posts and you can repeat like half of them or make them similar to each other.

You could do two versions of the same post pretty quickly and just schedule them all once a month if you want to. I do that like pretty much twice a month. I schedule the majority of the posts that I'm going to post for the whole month.

So it makes it a lot quicker and easier. But again, you do not have to post. It is optional.

The things that matter the most are following up and making sure you're sending new connections. Does anyone have any questions about spending 30 to 60 minutes on LinkedIn per day? You can also, if you prefer, just spend like two hours on a Friday or something like that. If that's more your speed, you can do it all at once.

It doesn't have to be like a daily thing. I just like doing in small chunks per day because that's my choice. So as far as tracking goes, I've gotten a lot of questions about like, how do you actually use the tracker? I personally will create one card for each company.

And then within that, I paste the name and title and links to all the people that I connect with there. And then I put an emoji checkmark next to their name once they've accepted my connection request, if they do. So I can like see that and I can easily follow up with people.

And then I will like put a due date on them once I've sent the connection request. Put a due date on the whole company so I don't forget to check. But I also check who's accepted my connection request every time I go to do my ideal clients process.

So one way or another, I'm going to see that they've accepted my connection request. But really, you can do whatever works for you. You don't have to use the Notion template.

You can track over you want. You can put individual people into your tracker. You can check on it more often than two weeks.

It's totally up to you. So before we go into like benchmarks and conversions, I'm just going to show you what I would normally do when I log on to do the ideal clients. Sorry, the getting clients routine.

And I'm actually going to show you one of my clients dashboards. Because I've been doing the clients routine for other people. So basically, this tracker looks very similar to what mine looks like.

It's just more up to date because I just went through it today. So I felt like it would be a good example. So she just started her routine two weeks ago.

So now we're starting to move into actually doing follow ups. So the first thing I did was create her ideal clients list in this ideal clients column. As you can see, there's one card for each company like I talked about.

And there are notes for some of them in there because she gave me notes. So we have in this column, everybody that she's pitched via email. This is everyone we've sent connection requests to on LinkedIn.

And like you can look in here and see who she's connected with at these companies and what their titles are in the links. And then once they've accepted her connection request, I move them into responded. And I check off who actually accepted the connection request.

So when I go to do the follow up, I can easily just click on their name and it goes right to their profile. And then I can message them right away. So that is the easiest way to do it, in my opinion, because your end goal is getting that specific company to work with you, not necessarily just individuals.

Joanna asked, does doing it for other people sometimes feel less genuine or personal or are you just helping them track things? I keep it personal and genuine. The onboarding for this is really lengthy. So she gives me all the information about how she likes to speak, the words she likes to use.

I don't do the whole conversation for her. I just send the connection request, the letter of introduction, which is customized in her voice. It's the same templates that I use for myself, but I've adjusted them for her brand voice and what she likes to call herself.

And then I do the follow ups based on her availability with her link. I use a template for myself anyway, so it's not really that much different. And I do personalize it for each person that she's connected with based on as much information as I can find from their profile, which, again, is the same thing I do for myself.

And then I hand it off to her. So anything that's like her actually scheduling the discovery call, answering questions, sending pricing, having a full conversation with them. I send her a report every week that's like, hey, you need to message these people back.

This is what I've done for you. So it's not it's the same amount personal as what it would be. Yeah, she did it herself pretty much if she used my templates and did my process.

Yeah. So I will show you an example of basically when I log on to do my getting clients routine. The first thing I'm going to do is go to her profile and I will check to see who's accepted her requests.

LinkedIn now shows you what date they accepted your request on so you can tell. So it's easy to see, you know, who who accept your request and who you need to follow up with. If you literally just go to your profile, I'll show you on my profile.

You just go to the connections on your profile and it will show you who recently accepted your request. If you sort by recently added specifically. So it says like connected 34 minutes ago, connected one hour ago and it goes in order.

So like if I know I followed up with like Alyssa last time I started my process, then I just go from there up and I'm like, OK, these are all the people I need to send a letter of introduction to basically. So I'll go through that and send the letters of introduction and thank yous to anyone who recently accepted my connection request first. Then I'll go into follow up number one.

No, sorry. I'll go into the last follow up. There's five follow up sections in my tracker.

But this person currently doesn't have anybody in their follow ups. So then they move on to the next step. If I did have people in my follow up section, I would go and do those follow ups first.

Working backwards from the number. So like if they're on their fifth follow up, I want to do them first because they're more likely to be a warm lead who's actually going to convert into a client quickly. If you don't need clients right now and you're just doing this to like cover your bases and have a foundation, you do not need to do those availability follow ups because like then you'll be overbooked, obviously.

So keep that in mind. Only do those availability follow ups when you do have availability. You don't want to like obviously lead people on or waste each other's time.

So once those follow ups and letters of introduction are sent, then I'll go through and I'll pick a new company to start connecting with. So let's say I wanted to connect with Zumba. I go to the homepage because it clears the search and I'll just type in Zumba.

And I will look for their company page. If it doesn't pop up at the top, you can click companies up here and it will bring you to only the search results that are companies. So I go to the company's page and then I click on where it tells you the number of employees.

And then personally, I just scroll through the first like five or so pages to see if there's anybody who matches the job descriptions I'm looking for. Typically, LinkedIn will learn who you like to connect with and it will suggest them first. So like we have a newspaper editor and she lives in New England.

LinkedIn knows who I look for, you know, but if you're not seeing who you're looking for, you can also click all filters and scroll down to type in titles. I like to search for like content, editor, growth, marketing and those sorts of things. If I don't see people in my first five pages of results, typically I just try to reach out to as many relevant people as possible, but I try to keep it as quick as possible as well.

We're not here to like be perfect and find every single fucking person in this needle in a haystack situation. We're just trying to find like a handful of people to cover our bases. You want as much like surface area as possible, but you don't need to like go overboard or be perfect or be obsessed about it.

It just like like do your best really is all it is. So I would look for the job titles that are most relevant for me. You can find job title examples, like I said, in the Get Clients Guidebook or just ask ChatGPT.

Sometimes if I'm not sure, like some companies use like weird job titles or things that I've just like never seen before. I'll just DM ChatGPT and be like, yo, yo, yo, does this make sense for me? Should I connect with this person? Because you only have so many connection requests with LinkedIn. If you're on a free profile, even if you're on premium, they still limit your connection requests.

So you want to use them wisely, but like don't be anal about it. Just again, do your best. So for each person I connect with, I will go to their profile and copy and paste their name and title.

If it's not an accurate title to like what's up there and it's down here, obviously you can just use their name if you want to. It's up to you. I copy their name and job title and I paste it in here.

And then I copy the link to their profile and I paste that over their name just so that I know who I've connected with and I can find them easily. And then I just move on. I just do it as fast as I possibly can.

And you'll end up with a big list like at Viory, like I connect with all these people or like Les Mills connect with all these people. Right. And I would say like even iFit, which has like a shitload of people.

I think it maybe took me three or four minutes to get all these people connected because I just go through the list and I open each relevant person in a new tab. I'm like, OK, job title I'm looking for, job title I'm looking for. And then I go to their profile, click connect, copy, paste, copy, paste.

Done. On to the next one. The sending the initial connection request should be super fast.

You do not need to overthink it, even if they're not the perfect person for you. If they're at a company you want to work for, it looks good. It just is fine.

Like, don't worry too much about it. Just do your best to be quick and as relevant as possible. Then once you've done those new connection requests and you've updated your tracker.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to say when I put some a new company in my tracker, I will add I'll change their follow up date to two weeks from now. And then I will move them to sent connection requests on LinkedIn and delete the tag.

I do clients, so they move to the proper column. I'm not going to do that because obviously I didn't actually connect with anybody today. But you get the gist.

You can also click and drag if that feels better for you. So just to make sure you don't forget to like go see if they accepted your connection request and they're in the right place. I also like to visually see the numbers up here and you can turn that on.

There's like little options if you click the three dots, if you're in Notion. And that will show you like how many people are in each category. So I personally feel most comfortable as a freelancer when my tracker has like at least a dozen people in each follow up category and like open to future pitches.

Basically, 12 is like my minimum threshold to feeling comfortable. So I have enough people to follow up with. Does anyone have any questions about like actually executing the getting clients routine, using the tracker, sending connection requests, LOIs, things like that? No.

OK, cool. So now that you know what the routine is, how to execute it, I think it's really helpful to have a goal. Personally, my goal is just like when I first started were numbers based.

So I was full time when I first started freelancing and I always had a goal of 100 connection requests per month. If you can do 100 connection requests per month, that is 1200 new connection requests per year. That works pretty well.

That's a really good foundation. I would recommend doing that for your first year if you're trying to be full time. I think today I spent an hour.

Actually, I can tell you in real numbers because I keep track for Lauren. I spent an hour on Lauren's LinkedIn today and let's check. I sent 57 new connection requests and 11 letters of introduction.

So obviously, I'm pretty quick at this because I've been doing it a while, but it gets faster every time you do it. And these are totally numbers that you can achieve. So I could have literally just gone on for 30 minutes a day and gotten at least 100 connection requests sent this week.

It's not your goal is not new connections accepted. It's new connection requests sent. OK, so that could be an hour.

That could be two hours a week. That could be 30 minutes a day. Whatever feels comfortable for you.

You can set a time limit. You can set a numbers limit. Again, the goals are up to you.

But I recommend trying to create a really good foundation for yourself. So that you have people to follow up with. You need to have at least a dozen people to follow up with at any given moment to get a client within two to four weeks.

That's typically the threshold I personally have noticed for myself and the clients that I do this routine for. It could be different for you. These numbers are from a very small data set.

I haven't surveyed every single person who's ever used this method. Despite me trying, people do not want to answer surveys. So this is the best data I have for you.

And it might look a little bit different for you. But again, it's really important to set a goal so that you're consistently doing this in a strategic way. If you prefer email cold pitches, you can use the same routine to do your email cold pitching, obviously removing step three.

And that could look like 50 email cold pitches a month or at least 20 if you're part time. And again, if you're like part time freelancing, these numbers can be shorter, smaller. So like 40 connection requests per month, part time on LinkedIn.

All of this is coming from your ideal clients list. You need to make sure that your ideal clients list is big enough to support these goals. That's why I always recommend starting with a base of at least 200 potential ideal clients on your list.

If you're struggling to make your list that big, let me know. I look at the getting client. I look at your ideal clients list as like shopping, like shopping for your dream.

I think it's fun to make. So if you need help, let me know. I'm happy to help you.

But I would definitely set a goal for yourself. And if you need help with that goal and like staying on top of it, don't be afraid to use the Accountability Buddies channel. It is there for a reason.

And I'm happy to help keep you accountable. I think we already talked about this, like connecting with as many relevant people as possible. But basically it's like multiplayer mode.

You have a much higher chance of getting the right person who's going to actually hire you. If you reach out to as many relevant job titles as possible when you're networking with a specific company. And if you're struggling, again, with which job titles to reach out for, don't be afraid to ask chat GPT about an individual job title or to give you a list of job titles.

It can be really helpful to just like have it there telling you you're doing it right. Like it's like a little, you know, cheering you on like, yeah, this is a good person, you know. But there's never a wrong, like a super wrong connection in my humble opinion.

Any connection is a good connection if they accept it. I also forgot to delete this. Sorry, guys, this is from a different presentation.

I recommend learning both LinkedIn and email cold pitching. It's really important to understand that we do not own LinkedIn. We don't own our contact list on there.

We don't own our content on there. It is not ours. It can be taken away at any moment.

They can ban you. They can decide you have to pay for it, whatever. It's up to them.

So make sure that you have a backup plan and you at least know how to do email cold pitching and find people's emails without using LinkedIn just to cover your bases in case you do have to switch. Some industries are also not going to be very active on LinkedIn. So it can help to have that in the back of your pocket.

But I personally, 90% of the time, am using LinkedIn. A lot of people are worried about, like, why aren't people accepting my connection request? And it sometimes can feel overwhelmingly like your connection request is not being accepted. It is completely normal for people to not accept your connection request.

I think like 75% of people are not accepting my connection request. I can show you my pending connection request list. It's massive.

You don't need to go through and like revoke those connection requests. LinkedIn doesn't care. It's not going to change anything for you.

But it is it's very normal. About 25% of connection requests actually get accepted. And then of that 25%, your success rate for conversion is going to differ wildly, but it could be anywhere from 25 to 50%.

And by 50%, I typically say see 50%. And by conversion, I mean becoming your clients within the next two years, like within the cycle that I recommend. Yeah, Amy said, I've also had some people accept my connection request months later.

That's so true. Some people aren't super active on LinkedIn. I'll have people accepting my connection request like six months later.

You never know. And this is why I don't like recommend revoking connection requests. You don't know how active people are on LinkedIn.

Some people are some people aren't. But I do still notice that is the most effective way to get clients. Email cold pitching is usually about an 8% success rate.

Content marketing is only a 2% success rate on average. So it is still like 25% is actually a really high number for conversion. It just doesn't feel like it when you're used to the world.

You know, like a C average is 60%. Like it feels like it should be that high. It's not realistic to expect.

Like these are the hard number data and there's nothing wrong with 25% of people accepting your connection request. That's actually really fucking good. So just like try to change your mindset about it.

That's the only thing you can do. It's just like how email marketing like a 30% open rate is really good. But people want to see higher numbers.

You know, it never feels bad to see a higher percentage of people trying to read your emails. Sure. But industry average is 35%.

So you're like you are doing well and you need to be able to see that number as you doing well and not as a failure in order for you to succeed. It has nothing to do with you. It is not personal.

Some people just don't go on LinkedIn that much. Some people don't connect to people they don't know. Some people don't have the authority to hire you and aren't going to bother connecting with you.

You don't know why they're doing what they're doing. So don't try to like make it anything but neutral. It just is what it is.

I will also point out you only need like three clients to have a successful freelance business. I have three clients right now and I'm making I'm on track to make $90,000 this year. So you can be fine with three clients.

You don't need to go crazy. My first year I got 12 clients at one point all at once and it was absolute hell on wheels. I do not recommend it.

I was so burnt out. I couldn't juggle it all and I had no idea what I was doing. So like 25% to get three clients is pretty good.

If a quarter of people accept your connection request in a month, that's 25 people. That's more than enough to to get clients. Does anyone have any questions about like benchmarks, setting goals, results that they can expect before I move on to mindset stuff? Okay, it's pretty good segue into mindset.

We just talked a little bit about being neutral. It's really important to teach yourself how to react neutrally to things and see situations as neutral. Just because someone doesn't accept your connection request or doesn't respond to you doesn't actually mean anything.

Like they're not thinking about your portfolio. They're not thinking about responding to you. It's not that like no one's going to hire you because you only got a few responses.

Typically this all becomes a lot easier if you can get more neutral. Usually a lack of response has nothing to do with you personally. Business is not personal and even a rejection isn't personal.

It has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with business. Lack of response might mean that they're not hiring.

Maybe they're busy. Maybe they're not on LinkedIn very much. Maybe they're not sure what they need yet.

Maybe they don't have the money. You don't know and you can't know without them telling you. You don't actually have enough evidence to determine whether the market is good, whether you're doing good enough, whether these people care about you.

You just have to keep going. At some point, like three to six months in, if you're still not seeing results, it's okay to pivot. And don't be afraid to ask me if you're like, I think maybe I should pivot.

This isn't working. I'm happy to talk to you about it and sort of like analyze your situation. I just had somebody reach out to me today who was like, I've been doing health and wellness market.

I've been trying to get health and wellness clients for three months and fucking nothing's happening. What should I do? And I was like, yeah, it's pretty oversaturated market. It can be challenging.

Is there anything else you want to offer? And she was like, well, I don't know. I guess I could offer like something related to education, but I don't know what to do. And I was like, girlfriend, let's make you an ideal clients list right now.

There are so many options. I have so many ideas. So if you need help, like it is so easy for me to go from like abysmal situation to positive situation.

There is always a way out of whatever situation you're in. A lot of people call it the third door. There's always another way around things.

If you get stuck in the why can't I mentality, why me mentality, I can't mentality instead of asking why can't, how can I, you are going to remain stuck. You need to always be curious about how you can keep going or how you can do better or how you can change things in order to find success. The most successful freelancers are not the best at their services.

I am not the best writer in the world. I can tell you that for free. I get plenty of feedback from my clients.

However, I am persistent. I am insanely persistent and people like literally thank me for that and the DMs on LinkedIn when they go to hire me. You are completely capable of being persistent and there are going to be days I've had them, trust me, where you're like, I don't want to be persistent anymore.

What am I? What the fuck am I doing? Every single time I've wanted to give up and quit freelancing, the next week is when something amazing happened. So persistence is going to be key and you are completely capable of being persistent and thinking neutrally about a situation. I like to consider the 80 20 rule like my rule of life in general.

But the 80 20 rule is that 80 percent of results typically come from 20 percent of effort. This rule makes it feel like I don't need to be perfect. And I think it's really important to not hold yourself to a standard of being perfect.

You're not always going to spend two hours a week on LinkedIn getting your clients. You're not always going to follow up with people on the due date that you set yourself to follow up with them. You're not going to be perfect, but 20 percent of your outreach is what's actually going to bring you 80 percent of your leads.

It's not all the outreach you've ever done has to be perfect and it's going to bring me all my leads. You literally just need to do 20 percent right. That's not even a fucking C average.

You guys like you are fully capable of getting clients. You should see my personal ideal clients tracker has so many overdue follow ups and it's fine. You just need to like come back and start again.

Like my voice sounds calmer just talking about it. If you can be OK with just starting again wherever you left off, even if like in like even if you feel like a failure because you didn't continue on perfectly persistently, you will be fine. It's OK.

Like only 20 percent of your routine is what's actually keeping you in motion. So keep going. Keep that momentum going.

It will build and you will find find clients. Does somebody have a comment? I thought I heard someone on mute. No.

OK. Yeah. If you need permission not to be perfect, the 80 20 rule is really where it's at.

So if we apply that 80 20 rule and the typical conversion rates from LinkedIn to actual like work. What it's going to look like is pretty much this graph. These green bars are the connection requests you'll have sent and the blue bars are the connection requests that get accepted.

And the orange ones are the people who have converted into clients. This is what a successful business looks like. Look at how small the little orange bars are.

It's not the conversions that matter. It's the follow ups and the amount of connection requests that you're sending. Obviously, the conversions are you need them to get clients.

However, the things that are going to get you clients and become a profitable business and get you out of fee stamine and make you successful are the activities that are not giving you the validation and feedback that you're looking for. Like literally, you should be so excited that someone accepted your connection request. Them responding to your message is nice, but it doesn't mean anything unless they've converted into your client.

Like every little thing is a win. If you've sent a hundred connection requests this week, you should be so fucking proud of yourself and you should celebrate that because that is a hundred more connection requests that you sent than two weeks ago you or a month ago you. When you get these requests accepted, that's a big deal.

Like that is very meaningful. You are actively building your network. And when they convert, obviously, it's even bigger deal.

But like every part of this is important. And then sending the first connection request and actually following up is way more important than anything else. That's what actually gets you somewhere.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. You literally just need like three clients. So it might take time to convert, but over time, everything's going to overlap.

You'll also get more referrals and clients coming to you the more you're doing these activities because you're networking. You're not just connecting it like this one random person, this one random person, this one random person. A lot of these people know each other and will refer you to each other.

Every single outdoor industry client I have gotten in the past three years was from a referral from one guy. One single guy who I met for five minutes before he hired me. It's not like, yeah, I did a pretty good job for them.

Sure. I like to think that. But it's not like you need to be the most amazing person ever.

You just need to do your best to get like a couple of people interested a month. A couple. One person to be excited about what you're offering.

And everything will build momentum and come back to make you successful over time. There's one last thing I forgot to put in this presentation that I always like to mention, which is like the sneaker store analogy. I used to work at the Nike outlet in North Conway, New Hampshire at Outlet Village Plus.

And the things that I learned there are exactly what I apply to getting clients on LinkedIn. It's the same thing. You want to be there when people need help without pestering them and shoving products down their face.

Like when someone walks into the store, you're never going to be like, oh, my God, we just got these new sneakers and you have to buy them. This is our sale. No one fucking wants that.

You want to walk into a sneaker store and have someone say, hey, welcome. Is there anything you need help with? And if you say no, you want them to leave you the fuck alone. And then they'll come back.

We were always taught to come back like 15 minutes later. I call that like two weeks in the online world. And ask them if they need help again.

If they still say no, fine. But if they're still there half an hour later trying to find something, I'll usually go over and be like, hey, you sure you don't need help finding anything? And they're almost always ready for help after that extra half an hour. And that's what that like extra three month follow up is.

So give people time to ease into your help and let them know that you're there to help. And think about it like a real storefront. Like the internet can be so dissociating and unreal sometimes because you're not like standing in front of a real fucking person.

But if you treat them like a real person the same way, they will be able to like see that you're a human being and actually talk to you like one. And I think that it's really important to maintain that human element even though you're on the internet. So that's all I have to say today.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat or unmute yourself and ask. We do have time or I do have time if you have to type out your question for a little bit. Kate, you had a discovery call with someone you hadn't interacted with since September this morning.

Yeah. Sorry. Anecdotally, she reached out to me.

It was a museum niche, which I had like plugged when I started. And then I've kind of given up on. So, yeah, just to say that I like the perfectionism thing is real.

And I've seen it start to work, this routine, like really work in the past couple of months. So thank you. That's so exciting.

Yeah. It takes time to build. The worst part is like you're just about to give up when the routine actually starts working.

So you just have to keep going, even though sometimes it doesn't feel like it's going as well as you'd hope. Amy. Let's say you send out a message that you usually convert after you actually send a proposal.

Your voice cut out a bunch. I wonder if your computer is trying to noise cancel or something. Do you want to type your question in the chat? Okay, sorry.

My cat's like meowing for her dinner over here. Okay. Amy said, let's say you sent out five proposals.

Do you have any stats on typical conversion rates for when you send an actual proposal? Honestly, I don't have stats for that. It really depends. I've had a lot of proposals that I sent out that just like never got a response.

I've had some that are like, they came back a few months later. But the majority of my proposals, I go through to become a client or at least tell me that they don't want to be my client. But yeah, unfortunately, it really depends.

I definitely recommend following up. If I've sent a proposal, I follow up like every five or so days for two or three follow ups. And then if that doesn't work, I will switch to following up with them again quarterly.

If someone didn't accept a proposal or didn't respond to proposal, don't be afraid to keep following up with them quarterly either. Because like, how long does it typically take to receive answers on a proposal? Usually for me, it's only like a couple of days. And if it's more than a couple of days, I follow up and they usually say like, oh, yeah, we just need like more time.

And sometimes they can give you an estimate. Sometimes they can't. If they don't give me an estimate, though, I'm like, oh, they're probably not going to come back for a while.

Yeah, it really varies. I've also noticed like you will gain a skill for being able to tell when people have their shit together and when they don't. Because I've had a lot of clients that are like, like earlier on in my career, they didn't exactly know what they wanted, but they knew they needed help.

So they'd hire me anyway, but then because they didn't know what they wanted, it would like take a while for them to accept my proposal or refine the proposal or they'd like would take forever to get me an assignment or something like that. So I kind of look for those red flags now. And you really have to be choosy about when you're willing to accept those things.

Like one of my clients is a total mess and they told me they wanted to work with me again in 2025 in like October of 2024. And they didn't get me the contract until February of this year. And they want me to do like one article a month, but they want me to do 12 articles.

So I'm already behind by two months. And then they want me to interview people from their company. Those people never got back to me.

I basically just like wrote all these articles without the interviews that they expected, used other sources for the interviews. And they were like, oh, my God, these are so good. Thanks for doing this.

But it's also like y'all are a fucking mess, you know, and they always pay me. So it's like not a big deal. So I accept that from them and I just don't rely on that payment coming in at a specific time.

But there are other clients that are a total mess that end up like completely going over your scope of work or like don't pay you on time or think they want to work with you and then cancel. Like I had someone start a retainer last year and I knew they didn't quite know what they were doing, but they hired me for strategy. So I thought I would be fine.

But after like a month, I literally got their materials, got into their workspace. It took like two weeks for us to get them onboarded. And then as soon as I started doing work for them, they emailed me and were like, actually, I think I'm going to cancel our retainer because I have other things going on and I don't have time to answer the questions you have for me to execute this.

So sometimes that does happen. That client I didn't really want to work with. The client before that, the one that took forever to get me the contract, I did want to keep working with because they're a Fortune 500 company and they look good in my portfolio.

And the content's really easy. Like it takes me two hours to do a blog for them. And I charge them like $700 a blog.

So it's worth it. But it is bullshit. But the first client who's charging me like $100 an hour barely to do marketing strategy.

I'm like, well, if you don't have your shit together, that's not my fault. And I still made them pay like the first month of our retainer's invoice. And they were like, well, I didn't get anything out of it.

And I was like, well, you signed a retainer. You're paying to reserve my time. Like this is how retainers work.

So sometimes you do have to like educate people on what they're paying for, too, unfortunately. All right. Does anyone have any other questions before we go? Yeah, Brad.

Can you could you show us your client tracker again where like I was taking notes, so I may have missed. But I think you said like for each card, you might put several different individuals on that card that are working for the same. Yeah.

So I usually I have one card per company. So the card title will be the company. And then inside that I put.

Oh, OK. That I connected with on my personal one. I don't put the job titles, but on the ones for my clients, I do, because for some reason they feel relevant.

And then once they accept, you can like highlight them a different color or put an emoji next to it or whatever. I usually just do like a checkmark emoji. OK, I see how to do that now.

Yeah, I was like. How can I do this myself without making it more cluttered? But that actually looks easy. Yeah, it's not bad.

And it's literally just like copy paste. Like it's pretty quick. On my personal one, honestly, all I do is copy and paste the LinkedIn link like.

OK, yeah, I've done some of that. I just have like one contact person for. And I just turn it into a bookmark.

I do it for like each person. I just paste their LinkedIn link because it's faster than doing their name. And then when I when they accept my request, I just color it a different color.

So I know that this one's accepted because like you'll know their name by clicking on the link, you know. But for my clients, I put their name and title because it looks a lot more clean. But it's up to you.

I'm a messy bitch. OK, yeah, I'm messy, too, but I try not to be. So I'll see how it works.

But now, yeah, I was worried it would get too messy if I wasn't sure how to put several people in the same car. But it actually looks easy. That's all.

Yeah, I think also. So like on mine. Don't mind all my like outdated follow ups, but on mine are literally like this is how mine looks personally.

And I like, yeah, if this person connected, I just changed the color of it. I'll literally put any fucking color to like I'm busy. Like if my last used color is just up here, I'm just like, well, I guess they're yellow today.

I don't know. Basically, you know that if if it's highlighted, then they've connected. And if it's not highlighted, then they have.

OK, it's like literally anything or like this person's not active on LinkedIn. So I just like wrote a note, put their fucking email or like these ones. I didn't even highlight who accepted.

I don't know who I'm following up with here, but like it's better than nothing. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

To me, it's like. Done is better than perfect. Yeah.

So you can figure out from clicking these links like who actually accepted your connection request. You know, like if I click on this, I can see like, oh, did they accept my connection request? Did they send me a message? You know, and you can totally. Yeah.

Yeah. I just I wasn't sure. I was like, if I do this, am I going to have several different cards for each company, like one per person? So I wanted to see how you were doing it.

Yeah. Because I was like, I needed to see how you did that. And now it's like, oh, OK.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you need to think about your goal to like.

So my goal is to get that company. My goal is not to get that specific person, you know? Totally. Yeah.

Because also there's a lot of turnover. Like there are some people I reached out to last year that no longer even work at that company anymore. So it's like, OK, now I have to get a different person.

And if I had just had the person as a card, then I'm like deleting a whole card. But like I did already reach out to that company. You know, it's like there's some gray area.

I got you. And you save a lot of time by putting everyone in a company on the same card. Yeah, totally.

I'm all about like efficiency. Keep it as fast as possible. Copy paste.

Let's go. You know. Excellent.

Drink a lot of coffee before you do this, guys. Like this is why my cup is this big. All right.

Awesome. Well, if you have any more questions about this, don't be afraid to comment on the event or obviously shoot me a DM or, you know, there are a million ways to ask your questions. I will put the link to this presentation in the comments of this event in circle.

So it's easy for you to like find everything that I mentioned, all the resources and stuff. But yeah, I think that's all. I do have some free events coming up.

So don't be afraid to check the community events calendar. Also put it in announcements when they're happening. But there's like free office hours and things like that coming up if you want a little extra dose of me.

And yeah, thanks for coming, Joanna. I think that's all I have to tell you guys. If you have questions, let me know.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Bye, guys.

Thanks for coming. See you.