Pick your Freelance Services

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Rachel Meltzer (00:29.518)

Alrighty, so today we are talking about picking your freelance services. I will share a little caveat with you. I am personally a digital marketer and I teach freelancers how to run a freelance digital marketing business. So this entire workshop is going to be focused on digital marketing specifically. So if you're not interested in digital marketing, this might not be the right workshop for you.

If you're not sure what digital marketing is, it's anything that involves internet marketing. Content writing like blogs, copywriting like ads, product descriptions, websites, things like that. Paid ads, email marketing, branding, UX, and all that good stuff. Also, I do not teach

journalism. So if you're interested in journalism, I'm also probably not the right coach for you. And we will also not be talking about social media marketing today, despite the fact that it is a part of the digital marketing umbrella. I do not teach social media marketing, nor do I provide it as a service provider. It is to me a lot. It's a lot to keep up with. And it's not something that I have found to

create a sustainable career for freelancers. Every freelance social media marketer I know has burnt out and switched to a different type of digital marketing after just a year. So that's why I don't teach it. And if you're interested in that, there are plenty of other creators who do. So if you're here for the other types of digital marketing I mentioned, amazing, you're in the right place. Let's get started. I'd love to hear where you're tuning in from. So pop it in the chat.

Rachel Meltzer (02:29.966) Feel free to pop anything in the chat anytime. I do have the chat open and I will be responding to it Throughout the workshop, so don't be afraid to use it and ask your questions I always have a hard time like holding on to my questions during workshops So don't be afraid to throw those in the chat But I'd love to hear from you where you're tuning in from and if you're a new freelancer

or how long you've been freelancing, I'd love to hear. I'm going to get started by introducing myself, but keep popping your answers in the chat, I'd love to see them. So if you have not interacted with me much, hey, I'm Rachel Meltzer, it rhymes with seltzer. I'm an adventurous freelance writer and business coach, and I've been doing this for about seven years. I do digital marketing primarily for tech companies and outdoor brands, but I've kind of had like a windy career path to get here.

So before I was a freelancer, I became a certified teacher in the state of Massachusetts for elementary school. I decided I did not want to be a classroom teacher. I found the state regulations to be pretty problematic and also the federal ones as well. I just really struggled with that career path. So I decided to switch to politics thinking that I could like reform education maybe or

go down some kind of public service elected official path where I could actually help people and make a difference. And after many internships, campaigns, and contract jobs, I realized I also didn't want to do that. So I kind of had a life crisis and I threw out the Appalachian Trail and moved into a van and traveled the country for a year. And I found that the only way to sustain those types of adventures were to have some kind of remote.

gig that didn't require me to be in specific places at specific times. So I decided to go freelance and I had no marketing experience before this. So all of the skills I gathered were from my gigs on Upwork at first. I started out in content writing. I find it to be the easiest thing to start out for for most freelance digital marketers. And I was writing in the education and cannabis niches before I randomly got a gig writing for a coding bootcamp review site.

Rachel Meltzer (04:42.67) And I made that my niche because I realized that niching down would make it easier for me to get clients and to offer my service more efficiently. So I switched to getting clients on LinkedIn. Upwork felt like it had an income cap for me. I was really struggling to be able to propose the rates that I needed to make to earn a good living. And I started niching down even further. So I was just doing email marketing and content writing for coding boot camps. And eventually,

I moved on to doing content writing for SaaS and tech companies when I wanted to up my income a little bit more and I felt kind of stuck in a lower income bracket with coding boot camps. And at that time I also started networking more with the outdoor industry and getting more outdoor industry work like email marketing, automations, websites, and those sorts of things.

and I've been able to sort of grow my business from there by moving up to getting like referrals and inbound leads and not just having to do direct outreach. So if you're interested in how I get my clients, I am hosting a workshop about this later this year. You can find it on our community events calendar or on my YouTube page. You can set a notification to remind yourself about that. That's kind of like my windy career path and how I got here. I've offered many different digital marketing services and I think it's important to

remember that your services are going to evolve and change and you're going to be able to upscale. But if you're new to freelancing, starting with something simple like content writing or just picking one or two services can really help you get started and then you can upscale from there. So today we're going to talk about what services, what I mean.

by services, what those are, the types of services you can offer, how to pick your services, and then I'll answer your questions at the end and share a few commonly asked questions. I am so excited you guys are joining me in the chat. Hi, Heidi, I love that you're always here to cheer me on. Thanks for being here. Hi, Nicole. Ooh, based in Paris, France, or near Paris, France, nice. All right, cool. Yeah, if you haven't,

Rachel Meltzer (06:51.785) popped into the chat. I'd love to hear from you, get to know you a little bit, where you're tuning in from, how long have you been freelancing, maybe what you're excited about. So let's dive into what services actually are. It's pretty simple. It's just the types of marketing tasks or expertise that you're gonna execute for your clients and get paid for. I just wanna like say a little caveat up front here. The only way to like really know what services are gonna be right for you is through experience. There are plenty of things that I thought

were going to be right for me that I actually hated. I love doing my own LinkedIn content marketing on LinkedIn, writing posts and sharing valuable content and writing posts to share about my events like these and getting to know people and building community on there. And then I tried to do it for clients and I was like, I don't like this as much when I'm doing it for someone else. It has to be really specific. So you might realize that you either don't like the service or maybe you prefer

a different niche for that service. Like I realized I love writing for coaches for LinkedIn content marketing, but I don't really like writing for like thought leader experts when it just feels like empty content to me. I like really helping my clients build a community. So there are little caveats that you're gonna learn as you get your hands dirty with services. And the only way you can learn those things is really by doing the thing, whether you're trying to write a sample for your portfolio or you're working for a real client.

Experience is the best teacher. So just keep that in mind. There's no wrong path. My path was very squiggly to get here, and that's a very normal experience for freelancers. So don't expect a straight line and just be open and curious to what you're going to learn. Hi, Nanad. Nice to see you. Thanks for tuning in. All right, so the types of digital marketing services you can offer, there's a lot, and we'll go through each one.

individually, but these are sort of like some umbrella groups. But basically, most freelancers are going to start with some kind of like content marketing or copywriting, and then they'll work their way up to like more impactful or strategic services like branding and UX and SEO and that sort of thing. But just remember, you know yourself best and your services should align with the skills and interests and business goals you already have when you're first starting out. And then like I said, you can upscale

Rachel Meltzer (09:15.574) to those more impactful or strategic services. So I'm gonna go through all of the potential digital marketing services you might wanna offer just so that you know what people are talking about. There are a lot of like abbreviations and terms in marketing that I think are unnecessarily like veiled or complicated. So we'll run through them really quickly. Hi Shana, thanks for tuning in. I'm also in Massachusetts, so I love that you're tuning in from Massachusetts, hell yeah. All right, so.

Content marketing, I feel like most people have interacted with this kind of marketing the most. It's blog posts, it's content on social media, case studies, website copywriting, that sort of thing. Email marketing is gonna be more like welcome sequences, sales funnels and product launch emails. So that's gonna be like working someone in from barely knowing anything about your company or your product to being ready to purchase it just by writing emails.

newsletters to nurture those email subscribers, those re-engagement campaigns. So that's for people who haven't been opening your emails but have been on your list for a long time. This is to try to get them to interact with your brand again. And you might also offer email tech services. So when I do email marketing for smaller businesses, I'll set up a random coupon code generator and different automations for them. I might consolidate their email technology if they're using multiple different apps. So it doesn't hurt.

to start to get to know different apps or leave yourself room. So every single email marketing client I've had has used different tech stacks, which is how we describe the multiple applications they might use to manage something in their business. And I've honestly just gotten to know them as I work for the client. I'm clear and upfront with them. I've used a lot of email marketing services, but I haven't used the one you're using. They're all pretty similar. I know I can figure it out. Don't worry about that. I'm not going to charge you for it.

And just make sure you have like a time buffer to learn those things. You're basically getting paid to learn. But if I don't know something, I'm not up charging the client to pay me for that learning. I am sort of incorporating it into a slightly lower rate, but just making sure I'm budgeting enough time to get to know it. So email tech can often be a big part of email marketing. I've also designed emails for clients and created assets that they can reuse in emails, just in Canva.

Rachel Meltzer (11:41.667) That's all you need. It's pretty simple. I do have some, I've taken some like online design classes as I have gone like third year, fourth year of freelancing, just to upscale to be able to offer that service. So I'm not just like running around trying to figure out what I should be doing for design and like fucking it up. It is helpful to have upscale courses to do those sorts of things, but you can totally do email marketing just as a copywriter too, if you just want to write. So copywriting is,

really there's like a million different types of copywriting. You might be doing email sequences. I totally did not update the text for that part. I always make one mistake in my presentations and you guys helped me find it. So copywriting, you might be doing email copywriting. You might be doing websites, advertisements. You could be doing product descriptions. You could be doing package copywriting. There's even user experience and user interface copywriting where you're doing the copy for like the buttons and things like that.

apps. So copywriting is basically how we describe short text that you're writing. If you haven't read the book, How to Write Short, you might want to read that if you're interested in copywriting. And content writing is how we describe longer form writing like blogs, case studies, that sort of thing, longer web pages that are designed for SEO. So LeadGen, LeadGen can encompass a lot of different services as

As as most freelance digital marketers go, you're probably going to be offering white papers and reports, ebooks or downloadable resources and lead magnets. But those are all lead magnets. But LeadGen could also be sending connection requests on behalf of a client to build their network on LinkedIn. It could also be setting up webinars or getting them guest spots on podcasts. So LeadGen, if you're offering it as a service,

can encompass a lot of different things and it's up to you what you feel comfortable including in that umbrella of lead generation. But there is a lot you can do with lead gen and there's a lot of room for upskilling if you find that that service really like suits your personality well.

Rachel Meltzer (14:00.238) So user experience we've kind of talked about a little bit is going to be the part where you write the button copy, the little pieces of text in apps, error messages, calls to action, things like that within an application, whether it's a mobile app, an app for your tablet or something on a website. You can also be called in to do

funnel optimization, so that's where we talked about someone going from knowing nothing about your business to buying or using your product. That's what a funnel is, a marketing funnel. There's different levels. There's top of the funnel, is things like what we're doing right now, free workshops, what you do for lead gen essentially. And then there's bottom of the funnel, which is what copywriters are targeting and certain parts of email marketing and things like that.

So you can learn more about funnel optimization. If you're doing any marketing, I highly recommend knowing about that. And then you might also be called in to do like contract user research. If you're gonna be doing user experience research, definitely, definitely take a class on this to upscale. I do not recommend doing that without taking a class. It's pretty specific and...

It's not that complex, but it's complex enough that you can definitely mess it up if you don't know what you're doing. So highly recommend taking a class to upskill if you want to offer that service. Website creation is another thing you can do. You don't necessarily need to know how to code if you want to use something like Wix or Squarespace. I personally use super.so in combination with Notion. I do minimal CSS design code, but I don't do like.

HTML or JavaScript or anything like that. You don't really need to with these applications and you can create a whole website and design it for clients if that's something that exciting to you. If you are a coder, obviously you can code templates or things from scratch or you could use a platform like Webflow. There's so many options with website creation. You can also just do like website copywriting like

Rachel Meltzer (16:07.064) creating landing pages or auditing someone's website copy to help them make it more on brand or more effective for conversion. We'll talk about that later. You can set up e-commerce shops like Shopify for your clients or membership sites like Circle to help your clients deliver their product without actually having to build it in a web app themselves.

You'll notice as we go along through this, there are so many overlapping skills when it comes to these digital marketing services. So you might be offering multiple different services. You might be using multiple skills across your offerings. There's just so many transferable skills. So it's also a good thing to pay attention to. If you're offering one service and you're like, I know that skill that's in that other service. Maybe I could offer that.

You can always bridge the gap with your previous experience. As long as you position it properly in your portfolio and your sales calls, you'll be able to expand your service offerings pretty easily, especially in digital marketing. Next up is strategy and consulting. Strategy is definitely something you should work up to.

Sorry, I think it disconnected for a minute there. Let me just make sure we are all good to go. Okay, it is. Okay, so strategy and consulting is definitely something you're gonna wanna work up to unless you have previous experience in a full-time job doing digital marketing. This is going to be basically giving advice based on your experience and knowledge and expertise.

in order for a business to succeed strategically. So you could audit existing marketing efforts, you could do competitor analysis and market research, you could consult on their brand, you could create an SEO strategy. There are so many ways you can offer strategy and consulting, but just make sure you have the foundation of experience and expertise in order to offer that service because it is definitely something you can upcharge for, but you don't want to upcharge in a way that is like,

Rachel Meltzer (18:23.296) unfounded. Word will get around that you are offering crappy service if you are not doing a good job as a freelancer. And you want positive referrals. You want people referring you because you're doing a good job, not cutting off your supply to other customers because you're doing a bad job. So just make sure you work your way up to that and you're ready to offer it. SEO and search is just optimizing for search engines. So you might audit somebody's strategy or website to make it show up in search better.

There's also SEO and search services for specific apps. So you can do SEO and search strategy for YouTube, for TikTok, for Pinterest, for all different types of search. You might be doing keyword research. You might be creating briefs based on that keyword research for someone else to write blog posts. You could also do content writing.

to your keyword strategy for this client. You might be doing on page optimization, which is updating the copy, the website copy on a specific webpage to make it work better for the search engines. Or you could be doing backlink outreach, which is just reaching out to other websites or blogs and trying to get your website linked in their content, which increases the trustworthiness of your site basically to search engines.

All right, last options I'm gonna present you with here. There is other stuff outside of these 12 options that I am sharing with you today, but this is really the most popular, easiest to get into digital marketing services, in my humble opinion. So next up is paid media and performance. So performance marketing is really data-driven, so you're gonna be doing the management of like,

different types of ads, whether that's Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. You might be doing retargeting ads, which is sort of similar to the re-engagement emails.

Rachel Meltzer (20:28.642) Sorry, my cat really likes to make noise when I'm webinars, classic. So ads, you could be doing the copywriting for ads, you can also be doing the actual running of ads, which does involve spending your client's money. So that is something that does come with a little extra responsibility if you're gonna be doing the management of the ads, just consider that. Definitely.

We'll be doing a lot of testing, A-B testing and data analysis to make sure you're doing your job well. And I would say paid media and performance is one of the highest paying digital marketing services you can offer. It is also some of the highest stakes. So keep that in mind if you're going to offer it as a newer freelancer. It does help to have some experience in it, running some experiments or in your previous full-time job if you have that experience.

Sales and conversion can cover a lot of different things. It can refer to copywriting. It can be making a funnel strategy. So showing a client how you're gonna get someone from not knowing anything about their brand to engaging with their app or buying their product. A-B testing, which is just putting two versions of something up for people to see and figuring out which one gets the most clicks or which one gets the most conversions.

That is sort of a large portion of conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization is just trying to make sure as many people as possible are clicking, seeing, buying, or taking some kind of action towards your client's products.

And you might also be creating sales assets for sales and conversion. if a company has a sales team, someone has to create the materials that help them sell the product well. And a lot of times freelancers can be tasked with that at smaller companies or startups. Courses and memberships is really just like creating course materials or setting up websites or web apps for a

Rachel Meltzer (22:39.128) coach or someone who is creating the coarser membership community. It could involve some UX writing, some funnel optimization, some research, some copywriting, some tech setup, curriculum creation, script writing for that curriculum. But basically, it's a bunch of little parts of all of the services we talked about offered specifically for the application of courses and membership communities. Lastly, branding.

Branding, would say, aside from paid media, and well, know, sometimes strategy, is one of the other biggest high paying, high stakes options. Brand messaging and positioning can be really important. Your brand voice and style guides. I've created a lot of style guides and brand voice guides, complimentary for some of my smaller clients who don't have that stuff. It really helps writers do their job well.

Designers will also create guides like that to show how the visual design of a brand is created. Visual identity consulting for designers, or designers typically offer this service, helping create logos, typography, colors, personal branding, and rebranding strategies. Those are all under the umbrella of branding.

Sometimes branding will also be tied into advertisement copy or just as a general, you could do it like a brand copywriter if you don't want to create an entire brand or brand asset for somebody. So those are the types of services you might want to offer. Now, let's talk about how to pick your services. But before we dive into...

picking your services. If you haven't already, there is a link to a workbook you can download in the description of this YouTube video. I can also pop that in the chat for you guys.

Rachel Meltzer (24:34.798) In the workbook, there is a quiz that you can take if you are struggling to pick your freelance services. It will ask you questions about the types of tasks you like and the type of style you like working in in order to help you choose the best services for you. And it also has the descriptions of all of these services options that I just showed you if you want to refer back to them and a little planning section so you can pick your services.

So I just wanna remind you before we dive into picking your services that it's not permanent. You do not have to offer this one service for the rest of your life or your business. don't have to like, nothing is off limits. You can refine your services, you can specialize more, you can niche down, you can pivot. The goal here really is just to get started with.

something, at least one service, I would maximum three services if you're a new freelancer, test it out, see how it goes and evolve. You can evolve by upscaling, you can evolve through just the experience of working with clients. There's so many different aspects of offering services as a freelancer and like I said, experience really is the best teacher. So step one to picking your services. yeah, if you offer a service already,

Let me know in the chat, it seems like quite a few of you have already been freelancing for a while or for a short time. So let me know which services you've already tried offering in the chat. I'd love to hear from you. But first step to picking your freelance services is figuring out what your strengths and your interests are. You might want to decide if you prefer...

writing long form content, short form content, if you like strategy based work, if you like doing data analysis, you might like doing research more than persuasive writing, you might like editing and optimizing something that already exists, you might like building relationships. But really, if you're leaning more towards analytical or creative or a mix of both can help you pick

Rachel Meltzer (26:55.266) the right services for you. And the quiz in the workbook is designed to help you do that. So don't be afraid to take advantage of it. But I'd love to hear from you in the chat. I would love to hear three skills you already have and three things that you really enjoy doing that you would love to sell as a freelance service. So I'm going to give you a few minutes to think about these options and

popular answers in the chat. And if you have any questions about this part, let me know in the chat.

Rachel Meltzer (30:53.226) Alrighty, I hope you guys found a little bit of time to think about these questions and your skills What you enjoy doing what you don't enjoy doing perhaps and I loved hearing from you in the chat. It seems like Business strategy always wants us to be like one specific thing and narrow it down Which does work well for sales and streamlining your business, but we're all multi-dimensional

human beings and it seems like we all have some mix of analytical and creative or, it's kind of a spectrum of the traditionally thought of left brain, right brain stuff, which is not necessarily a true perfect binary, but it's kind of a spectrum. And I think it's also one of those things that's important to nurture creatively.

outside of work too. So I used to want like my freelance gig to provide the enjoyment of creativity in all aspects of my brain. And when I realized that it actually makes more sense for me to sort of compartmentalize it and start having hobbies outside of work, my work became a lot more enjoyable. And I also started finding hobbies and making friends that I really love.

that really enriched my life and it reduced my burnout significantly. Like I used to write for the outdoor industry about all of the adventures I went on, backpacking, van life. I used to make content on Instagram for brands when I was a sponsored rock climber and it kind of made it so that like I actually hated rock climbing. I don't even rock climb anymore because it just became work and I got super burnt out on it and when I wasn't like my

When I wasn't the best at rock climbing, was just like, well, crap, this isn't gonna go well for me and my employers. I definitely recommend finding some work life separation. Sometimes freelancing can really take over your life if you're not careful, and it's okay to be excited and dedicate a lot of time and energy towards building your freelance business, but it's also important to nurture your creative self outside of work. And if you're having a hard time doing that, I found the artist's way.

Rachel Meltzer (33:10.03) It's like a book and a workbook. I think the workbook is great. I think the book is a little extra long for it, a little too long for it personally for me. But the workbook was incredibly helpful when I needed to get out of burnout and find my creative self again. So I highly recommend that if you're struggling to find that balance and being a whole human being. All right. So let's talk about step two, demand and profit.

Freelancing is a business. You're running a business, you are a business owner now, you are the CEO, if you will. It's really important to treat it that way if you want to be successful and have a sustainable business long term. So it is also important to consider which services the businesses in your niche are actively using and paying for.

If you don't already have a niche of some kind, you might wanna go back and watch the last free workshop I did. It's on my YouTube page. If you're already on YouTube, you can find it pretty easily by clicking my profile picture, or you can find it on my website on the Get Started freelancing page. Just type in melzerselter.com slash free to find it. But you wanna figure out like what is working in your niche and what people are actually using. There are plenty of niches that don't really do paid ads that just rely on SEO.

There are plenty of businesses that do lead generation magnets and plenty that don't. So figuring out what services are actually in demand in your niche is going to be pretty important. And you also want to consider which services are going to have long-term demand and growth potential, both in the marketplace and for you to upscale. You might also want to think about scheduling. So do you want to offer one-time projects?

like redoing a website or ongoing services like email marketing, SEO, content writing. I personally like to have a mix of both. I like to have two or three anchor clients that are consistent, ongoing services, and then one project per quarter that's like a one-off. Sometimes I take two projects per quarter, but it just makes your income a lot more stable unless you have a perfect system that is

Rachel Meltzer (35:22.194) making it so your service offering is exactly the same every time. It also makes it more predictable and it makes your schedule easier to create. You don't have to do as much legwork to go out and get clients when you have ongoing services. So consider that ratio mix as you're picking your services or just during your first year or two of experience. How is your schedule feeling? Are you making enough money? Are you

feeling comfortable with the services you're offering, are there lulls, are you on a roller coaster, is the feast famine cycle eating you up? It might be time to reconsider your service offerings so that it can support the type of business you actually wanna run rather than being sort of a submissive to your services, if you will. You have the power to change your services at any time if you want to. I will also say,

Pro tip, long term thinking here, the services that are gonna directly generate revenue for businesses like sales page ads, SEO, product descriptions, email funnels, they tend to be easier to sell and price higher. So that's something to consider as well. But I'd love to hear from you in the chat, I'm gonna give you a few seconds to.

Rank your potential services by how excited you are to offer them. If you're already offering services, you can think about the services you might wanna offer in addition or instead of, or the services you are currently offering, totally up to you. And then think about how profitable and in demand you might think they are. If you're struggling to figure out the second part of that, you can always ask ChatGPT, do a little Google research. ChatGPT.

has been really helpful for brainstorming things like this. And if you're not sure, if you need to like see the services again, so you can rank your potential services, they're all listed out in that workbook that's in the description below. It's free and you can check it out. You don't even have to duplicate it to your own notion if you want to just look at it. And if you're struggling to fill it out, you just need to duplicate it to your own notion. There's two overlapping squares in the top right hand corner of your screen that will

Rachel Meltzer (37:37.583) allow you to duplicate it, you will need a free Notion account. It will prompt you to make an account if you don't have one already in order to fill it out. It's super easy, it's all free. And then you can save the workbook and your answers for later if you want to. So I'm gonna give you three minutes to think about ranking your potential services and how profitable and in demand you might think they are and share it in the chat. I'd love to hear from you. And if you're not sure or you have questions about how to answer this,

Don't be afraid to ask your questions in the chat as well. I'm here to help.

Rachel Meltzer (41:10.934) Alrighty, so I just popped in the chat what I love offering. Personally, for me, website and brand creation are my favorite things to offer, but I also offer email marketing and content writing. Honestly, my content writing is typically the most profitable because it's so steady. usually do two to four blogs per month per client, so that profit from each blog tends to add up over time.

I think at least half my income this year is coming from content writing and it's also the least amount of effort for me. It feels like the easiest thing for me to offer. However, the fun stuff for me is the website and brand creation and the email marketing. That's where I really get to be creative and do things differently. There are one-off projects. It's kind of important for me to have that stable content writing base and then have those other offerings on top in the fun, exciting way.

Um, all righty. So lastly, step three, pick one to three services. Um, I say one to three services because I think it's important not to overwhelm our potential clients with the amount of services we offer. I do offer more than three services, but I never present them to each client. If that makes sense, I try to find out what the client is looking for and then I just offer them two or three package options. Um,

And my website is pretty much just like three services simply laid out. If somebody asks for more or if we're talking and they want something different, I offer it, but I'm pretty much just advertising one to three services. This really helps you streamline. When I first started out, I only offered content writing and it really, really helped me. I became a very good content writer. I was able to write well to a brief, write SEO very well, incorporate keywords.

And it also made it so that my whole workflow was the same for every client. Like you start with a brief, then you make an outline, then you get their style guide, then you write the book, and you do the research. It was all a very streamlined workflow. I knew exactly how long each assignment was gonna take. I knew when they were coming in. So it just made my business much more efficient. It helped me get really good at my craft. And then after that, like first couple of years, I was able to then up-skill.

Rachel Meltzer (43:35.567) and start offering other services as well. But it also made it much easier for me to get clients because my whole title was just content writing for coding boot camps. It was so easy for people to search for me. I was the only person who would come up in search if someone wrote like freelance content writer coding boot camps on LinkedIn. And it got me a lot of referrals too. So it can really help to become known for one single thing at first to get momentum in your business and make

easier to manage your business. Like if you're a new freelancer, this is the first time you are your own boss. This is the first time you are having to do sales. This is the first time you're having to do bookkeeping and accounting and taxes. This is the first time that you're having to master your own workflow, master your own schedule, be your own boss, manage your own personality and so many other things. So if you're not giving yourself too many things to juggle, it can be a lot easier.

to manage. That's not to say you can only offer one service or two services for the rest of your career. It just means that you might want to start simple to make it easier to get started. It also makes it easier to create your portfolio pretty quickly. So in order to figure out which services you really want to start with, you're going to take that list that you just made of ranking the services you're excited to offer.

and figure out what's the easiest service for me to start offering today if you're a new freelancer. What skills could you develop further to expand your service offerings? So you can make a quick list of those skills that you want to expand so that you can then offer those other services later. So for me, I started with content writing and then I upscaled to email marketing and then I upscaled to email, to website copywriting, so on and so forth.

And you could also consider the types of projects that are going to help you build a portfolio and attract more clients. So I wrote a few blogs and I tried to get them ranked in search as much as possible for my website, my own personal website to attract more clients. I had one blog that had more than 8,000 shares that I wrote for free for the track, which is a

Rachel Meltzer (45:48.687) like conglomerate blog of a bunch of like through hikers, most of the writing on there is unpaid. But it got me a really great byline and a bunch of shares, a really great stat. And then I also wrote a blog on my personal website, a backpack review that still shows up on the first page of Google search for an REI backpack. And those things allowed me to create portfolio pieces that were attractive to my ideal clients and showed

that I did have the skill to be doing the gig. That's not to say that you need to have those things in order to get your first client, but it can certainly help, and it does give you practice and experience in offering that service. So I'd love to hear from you in the chat. Which services do you think you're gonna start with, and what are you excited about? In the chat, I'm seeing stuff.

Nicole, hear you. Chat GPT is becoming a pervasive annoyance. Some companies are just never going to pay for a real writer's services, unfortunately. Those are not your ideal clients. I definitely recommend looking at something like Crunchbase, and we'll talk about this in the Getting Clients workshop I'm doing later on this year. I also have lessons on how to use Crunchbase, the free trial. You don't need to pay for it.

inside Pop Club, my membership community, which I'll talk about at the end of this workshop. But it can be really helpful way to find companies that actually have the money to burn for growth and case studies and things like that. Because they're getting growth funding specifically and they need to use it for that. So that's a good option if you're looking for ideal clients elsewhere. Shana said, I think my ranking is the same as yours.

don't really offer SEO services. Most of the blogs that I'm writing for my clients, they already have a strategy and I'm just doing the execution of the strategy or I'm doing content writing for communities. So I'm drumming up community engagement instead. So it's not actually a search engine optimized writing. I did used to offer SEO strategy. I mean, I still offer it, I don't, haven't.

Rachel Meltzer (48:06.766) had anyone buy that package in a while. It's not my favorite thing to do. I can do it, I know how to do it, but it's not something that I'm excited about. tend to dread doing it, to be honest. Oh, good, Nicole, I love that you've played around with Crunchbase. That's one of my favorites. It never hurts to return to it. It always has new stuff every time I go. And I just use a different email every time. Oh yeah, so yeah, pop in your services in the chat if you haven't already. I would love to hear from you.

about which services you wanna offer. And as we do that, I'm just gonna run through the FAQs real quick. I think we talked about this, but I always get asked how many services is it okay to offer? And I always say try to just pick one, maybe two, definitely no more than three, just so that you can hone your skills and you won't feel so overwhelmed and you can price your services properly through experimentation and it'll just make your business more efficient. But I'd love to hear from you.

what questions you have about picking your services, what types of services you can offer, the skills that you might need, anything like that. I'm happy to answer your questions. Or if you don't have any questions, you can share the best thing you learned during this workshop in the chat. I would love to hear that from you too.

Rachel Meltzer (49:39.512) And if you don't have any questions, yeah. What are you excited to offer?

Rachel Meltzer (50:26.862) All right, while you are typing your answers in the chat, I'm just going to share with you real quick. I do have a promotion running right now. anyone who comes to the Get Clients, I mean, sorry, the Get Started Freelancing Workshop Series gets 20 % off the majority of my products and services as a coach. So if you're interested in my membership community for freelancers, I think I mentioned it before. It comes with the Freelance Resource Library. It has a bunch of tutorials on

how to find your ideal clients, how to get clients, how to create your portfolio, basically everything you need to know to get started as a freelancer. And we also have one new workshop and two office hours every single month. The office hours you can come to and ask me absolutely anything. There's a sampling of what office hours are like coming up soon on the community events calendar as well if you wanna like.

get a taste for it. We also have co-working every single week and weekly accountability. check in with every single person in Pop Club every single week to make sure you're on track to your goals. And this month our workshop is the getting clients routine. So how to establish a routine to consistently be getting clients and getting your marketing done on LinkedIn in just 30 minutes or less per day.

So I also offer one-on-one coaching. Right now I actually do have long-term one-on-one coaching. My 10 call package is called One-on-One Express. It's about three months of one-on-one coaching. So if you wanna see me, just you and me, every week for three months to start your business, revamp it, get back on track if you wanna get clients fast or you're struggling to make enough money, it's definitely the fastest way to get results.

You can also just do a one-time, one-on-one intensive for 175 if that's something you're interested in. And again, you can get 20 % off of both of these products on my website if you choose to sign up. And the links will be in the follow-up email that you'll get after this if you sign up on our community events calendar or they're in the description of this.

Rachel Meltzer (52:28.834) workshop on YouTube. I also make websites for freelancers if you're struggling to get your website done, you've been procrastinating putting it off, or the tech is just overwhelming for you. I literally just charge my hourly rate of $100 an hour to make those websites for freelancers because I know every freelancer is on a budget. So if you need help getting your website done, there are multiple options for you starting at as little as $500 and you can check those out. The Freelance Resource Library you can buy alone.

but it also comes with all of my paid coaching options. So that's always an option, it's 20 % off right now. I also offer a done for you service. I literally log into your LinkedIn to get clients for you. I try to make it as efficient as possible in three months or less. So if that's something you're interested in, the majority of my clients are either single moms or people who hate selling themselves. So if that's something you're interested in, don't be afraid to ask questions, let me know, or you can literally just.

sign up for a free discovery call on the website to make sure we're the right fit. And I also offer LinkedIn profile critiques for only $25. If you just want to revamp your profile and show up in more searches, that's always an option. And then these are all of my free resources. There are so many. I have a weekly newsletter, weekly podcast, templates for Notion if you like using Notion, the free community events, which this is a part of, and...

much more. If you have any questions about that, let me know or any of these products. Don't be afraid to reach out and let me know. Let me answer some of your questions. Shawna says, one other service you're curious about is providing marketing automation specifically with email and website forms. Have any clients asked for this type of service before? Yes.

Definitely Shana, most of my smaller business clients ask for this because they have such a small staff that it's hard for them to manage things without automations. So they'll just end up like not doing their marketing at all. They're like, why am not succeeding? I don't have time. So a lot of my small business clients do ask for this. The majority of my email marketing clients are three month packages where I go through and I create new welcome series automation, abandoned cart.

Rachel Meltzer (54:45.038) re-engagement campaigns and then templates for their newsletters and then I set up bunch of automations for them within their email marketing server so they don't really have to worry about it and everything's sort of on autopilot except for the newsletter. And I've also set up forums where like you can submit your information to get someone's pricing guide, things like that. So yeah, it's definitely a popular service especially for smaller businesses so it's a good idea.

I'm happy to answer any other questions if you guys have them, but it seems like most of you do not have any questions. If you find you have questions if you're watching the replay or you have questions later, don't be afraid to contact me. You can just go to melzerselter.com slash contact and there's a form you can fill out that will go directly to my personal email and I will answer it as soon as I can. I'm always happy to answer questions.

I'd also love to see you over on my LinkedIn. That's where I do the majority of my marketing and interacting here on the internet. So don't be afraid to shoot me a connection request over there if you're watching this or just follow me. I love getting to see you guys on different platforms, not just on YouTube. And if you're watching on YouTube, I'd love it if you would subscribe to my channel. do workshops like this live every single month. And I also post my podcast here and a bunch of other good freelance advicey tips and stuff. So, I will see you all on the next one.