Are you considering leaving your 9-to-5 job behind and becoming a freelance writer?
The challenge is to get your foot in the door.
Since you don’t have any references, most people won’t hire you.
Yet without projects, you can’t get any references.
It’s a conundrum.
If you are self-employed, you know the feeling — some days, you wonder if it’s ever going to get better.
The 200 emails in your inbox. The constant fires you have to put out. The long backlog of projects that just keeps getting longer.
The solution — you should work on your business, not in your business.
Many businesses struggle with one simple question:
“Why should people buy from us?”
To know the answer is to know your key differentiator. It is what sets you apart from your competitors.
Nowhere is more business lost than by ignoring lead flow.
It’s the same old problem — the marketing people only care about top-of-the-funnel activities, like getting more traffic.
Meanwhile, the sales people fixate on bottom-of-the-funnel activities, like making more sales calls.
But what about in between?
I work in marketing and sales. One of the first questions I ask new clients is, “What are you selling?”
As to be expected, they name whatever product or service they list on their website.
And while this answer is technically correct, it doesn’t go deep enough. It doesn’t consider the emotional benefit the product is providing to the customer.
Right after I graduated from high school, for the first and the last time in my life, I worked a 9-to-5 job.
The job was at a hospital, where I did everything. I worked in the administration. I worked in the warehouse. I even worked as a substitute nurse.
It was the greatest waste of time I have ever experienced.
Half of the things we did, didn’t need doing. The other half could have been automated and done in half the time.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. The people were. They had adopted a zombie like mindset. They would sleepwalk through the hallways, devoid of any initiative, just fantasizing about the end of their shifts.