Freelancing 101 for Teachers: How to Start Your Own Business

amazing well thanks for uh pulling the room together daphne we're all here because of you i'm going to jump in and i'm going to watch the chat so i have questions along the way but daphne feel free to jump in if anything if you see anything that you think we should pause and take a look at welcome to freelancing 101 teacher edition today i want to cover a few things i want to cover what it means

to freelance the boring but important legal and financial implications of freelancing potential freelance services that you can offer um instructional design copywriting virtual assistants a lot of them actually i'll call out a lot of options because there are way more options than you may even realize i'm going to talk a little bit about what you need to get started if you choose to get started and we'll end this by talking a little bit about how to

sell without being salesy if this does seem like something that you uh are interested in doing so grab a pen grab a notebook let's dive in i will be sending you the recording of this as well if you want it so if you do want to just sit back and relax and watch you certainly can do that i will send you a recording right after it uploads to zoom my name is jay i'm from ohio i'm

in columbus ohio now i grew up in a farm town of ohio called celina it's where i went to high school i've been spending a lot of time lately as a creator building freelancing school this platform to help people learn how to make a living freelancing i have a podcast called creative elements which is why i have this uh extra mic here and a whole graveyard of mics behind me if you can see it in the

corner and i've been creating courses for linkedin learning they bought lynda.com so lynda.com linkedin learning same thing these days and i grew up in ohio surrounded by teachers my mom was a high school teacher she taught english for almost 30 years my dad taught industrial arts for 36 years i want to say um my older sister katie here on the left she teaches english at the very same high school next door to my mom's room and

her husband he teaches math in the same high school and i'm gonna stop it there but if i went to my aunts and uncles and cousins also all of them pretty much k-12 teachers pretty crazy uh i was a good student i was good at school i was not so good at sports i tried to be good at football uh didn't quite make it as well as i thought i would but i did the school thing

pretty well i was a nerd but i went to school i went to ohio state to learn business instead of teaching i thought that business sounded fun i thought that that sounded more interesting to me and i wanted to follow the money that's what i was doing and i joined a team right out of college we started a company called tixers uh we raised some money this photo is actually just like a wiffle ball tournament that

we won and we got a thousand dollar grant from it because my co-founders were good at sports unlike me uh and that company had some success it was acquired in 2015 meaning another company bought it um we worked for that company for a little bit of time and then somehow i ended up back in the family business of teaching in a way i have seven courses on linkedin learning i've independently produced four of my own courses

three of them on freelancing one of them on podcasting um 11 total courses i think there's a lot of potential to teach online um but i started by freelancing that's how this all got started for me i knew that i wanted to make a living and i wanted to have a lot of flexibility and i wanted to do things on my own terms and freelancing was the vehicle that allowed me to do that financially and last

year as a freelancer generated more than six figures of income which is like the freelancing mecca thing that people love to talk about actually attained that which is great and i worked with some really great clients like atlassian linkedin smart passive income lynda.com at the ohio state university some other clients who have not given me permission to use their logo but are also very legitimate and if you're new to freelancing i want to start by laying

out what this even means what is freelancing freelancing just means to work as an independent company rather than by being employed through a w-2 by somebody else freelancers are self-employed they're often referred to as independent contractors they are hired by other companies on a part-time part-time or short-term basis but they do not receive the same compensation as full-time employees or have the same level of commitment to any particular company and when i say they don't receive

the same compensation i don't mean they're paid less i mean that their employment package just looks different because as a freelancer you are technically responsible for how work is done the employer cannot strictly tell you how work has to be done or they have to classify you as an employee by employing you in a freelance capacity they're also not required by law to give you the same employment benefits like healthcare 401k we'll talk a little bit

more about that later that does not mean that you're earning less it just means that your means of packaging your own employment is a little bit different and just for fun if you don't mind me hopping in here a lot of people have probably heard my story as working as an educational consultant and the majority of educational consultants that you will talk to are independent contractors and freelancers myself included so i have kind of a unicorn

contract that is a yearly contract which is as a freelancer a little bit unheard of but i've been employed by a larger company um year after year as a freelancer as an educational consultant so that's kind of where this hole ties in with me as well yeah i don't have a specific slide on this so i'll hold out there now when you're hired as a freelancer you can be paid in a lot of different ways you

can be paid hourly you can be paid monthly on a retainer you can be paid quarterly on a retainer you can be paid annually on a retainer the beautiful thing about freelancing is the way that you are compensated is in your control and what you can convince or come to a conclusion with a client makes the most sense for both parties which is really really great um for the history teachers in the room who are my

who might be interested about the term freelancing uh it goes back to the 1800s when a free lance was a mercenary who would fight for whatever country wanted to pay them the most and lance was the you know the sword the weapon that they used kind of like jousting i didn't know that until i started doing research on this but it's interesting nonetheless you might hear a bunch of other terms that actually also mean freelancing so

any of these terms i'm about to show all mean basically the same thing contract work a contract job an independent contractor a 1099 a contract consultant contract to hire all these things mean the same thing they all mean that you are being paid independently without a strict long-term employment contract to do work on behalf of a company and be compensated for that effort a few things that i've done as a freelancer i've built wordpress websites squarespace

websites i prepared a podcast launch i help somebody name a company i've written copy for websites written copy for emails i've created email marketing systems i've done coaching i've done innovation consulting the point being there are a lot of things you can do as a freelancer and you don't have to choose just one specific thing it's easier to market yourself as one specific thing but you can actually do a lot of things it really just comes

down to what do people want to hire you for and what do you feel confident that you can provide a result for for the teachers in the room which is all of you these are the things that i think make the most sense out of a list of like 70 plus things that i pulled i started just wanting to save space but there are a lot of options here a virtual or executive assistant project manager researcher

instructional design is a popular one presentation design illustration accounting bookkeeping data analytics brand strategy and analysis copywriting content editing um sorry content writing or editing proofreading grant writing technical writing all these things if you don't already feel like you're really good at these these are also very learnable skills and none of these things require a specific degree sometimes people will get a certification for certain skills and that's something you can get through an online course like

udemy but really most employers hiring freelancers they don't care what your background is or what degrees you have or don't have what they care is that you can deliver the result that they want and really if you know you've been teaching for 10 years but you found yourself really good at social media it's very likely that somebody can see your work on social media and want to hire you part-time full-time to do that for them you

can freelance doing anything and so i think before we move forward i want to talk a little bit more about what employment really means because this is a hang-up that i see a lot of people have in this profession i've seen friends family talk about this where it feels like employment is like a very separate thing from freelancing and i would argue that it's not really because in any sense you're basically selling your time for compensation

and i'm using compensation as like this big umbrella term because it's not just cash it's also health care retirement benefits if we break this down specifically the differences between 1099 freelance employees and w-2 full-time employees freelancers are paid whatever you're able to sell um however many projects at whatever price w-2 employees have a paid salary that's kind of a cap like you're not going to go beyond that salary you might be able to negotiate a raise

every couple of years but when you're freelancing you have no cap on what you can earn as long as you can sell that project and deliver that work freelancers can work as much or as little as they want any time that they want whatever hours you want to work to deliver on the things that you've promised that you can sell w2 employees you know they're typically contracted to work 30 to 40 hours a week there are

some trade-offs as a freelancer you have to withhold your own taxes at tax time because no one's setting that aside for you and that's an important thing to know heading into it uh your employer probably withholds that for you so when tax time comes you actually get a refund because they usually hold more than is necessary if you're a freelancer if you don't hold back taxes when it comes tax time you realize oh i owe money

i need to pay that unless you are aware of this you start saving proactively which you should daphne did you have something you wanted to cut in there oh no i'm sorry i might have made a face on accident no worries no worries as a freelancer you are technically a business owner as a w-2 employee you are federally federally classified as an employee in both cases you will actually just file one tax return unless as a

freelancer you start building an agency and you go beyond yourself which for the scope of this discussion you won't um you will just file one tax return still with a w-2 job you're often provided health care benefits as a freelancer you do have to provide those to yourself if you're freelancing full-time if you don't have a w-2 job that's bringing this in and you can freelance part-time w-2 jobs typically contribute to your retirement and as a

freelancer again that's just something you have to take care of for yourself but you have the freedom to work with who you want when you want as a w-2 employee you usually have contract restrictions with non-competes and you know you can't be employed elsewhere freelancing has a lot more flexibility i bring this all up because the differences here are important but not massive you know like as a freelancer at freelance for several several years i was

able to find my own health care and it was fine i was able to contribute to my own retirement funds and it was fine you know it's it's not that having a w-2 job is inherently paying you more money it just seems that way because they are taking care of things that you don't have to think about or take care of but they're very manageable things that you can think about and you can take care of

and when you freelance successfully you can earn a lot more than your full-time 40-hour salary would allow for yeah if you don't mind me popping in here just from the hiring perspective as someone who has been hiring teachers and former teacher freelancers to work in the business and working with an accountant one thing that was interesting for me to learn about was your salary is actually lowered to compensate for the health care and the taxes so

i'm able to actually pay freelancers more per hour than i would have if i was able to hire them full time and that's not exclusive just to me that's you know across the board when someone's hiring you they lower your actual salary to go with the health care benefits a lot of freelancers that i work with and granted they aren't coming out of uh education most of the time when they put this strategy into play uh

it's possible but i'm not sure if if it works this way in education but a lot of freelancers that i work with will leave their job but in leaving their job tell their employer i'm going freelance full-time i'm willing to give you 20 hours per week of my time at this rate and that is actually typically higher than what they're getting paid as a w-2 employee if you broke it down hourly and a lot of employers

will go for that because it's hard to find somebody new and train them someone who knows the culture who knows your systems it's easier to hold on to that person a little bit longer and that can be a really good segue into freelancing full time if you want to bottom line here is this freelancing is just a less restrictive form of employment your compensation package looks differently but you can figure that all out and you have

a lot more flexibility when you work where you work who you work for who you work with it's just a lot more expansive and within your control and i know some of those differences of health care of retirement may seem scary but you just need a few simple systems you need to be aware of them you need to put some systems in place and you'll be fine so i want to go through kind of a nine

step starting to freelance checklist to understand like from here if i'm starting from zero what are the things i need to do to start freelancing successfully i'm going to go step by step starting with defining your goals for freelancing you need to be honest with yourself from the beginning what is your goal here do you want to freelance full-time do you want to replace your full-time income freelancing part-time or as a side hustle is a great

place to start there is less pressure to generate income immediately you can be more thoughtful with the type of work that you want to do and the clients you want to do it with when you remove too much financial pressure from it you can start in the way that you want to start working with who you want to work with and it's a lot more comfortable this is how i recommend a lot of people get started

because it also gives you a chance to learn the ropes and learn how you feel about it do you enjoy doing this is that something you could see yourself doing to a higher degree so i would think that freelancing before you even feel like you need to is a good idea because you need to build relationships you need to build trust with people in those relationships that trust takes time to form the good news is you

probably have actually all the creative skills you need to freelance successfully for somebody to pay you for doing work for them directly i would venture to bet that everybody in this room has a skill has multiple skills that people would rather pay money to let you do for them than to take the time on their own to learn that skill and try to implement that outcome your business as a freelancer will be built around the unique

skills that you have to offer so you need to choose which of those skills you want to leverage and you choose that based on what feels valuable but also like sustainably what feels like fun and like something that you want to do especially if you're thinking about a career change you owe it to yourself to change into something that you're excited about and that you want to do so step one is identifying the different skills you've

built over the years that other people may not have would pay you to use you can start by thinking about the skills you've been explicitly paid to leverage you know if you're an english teacher chances are you're a great writer you're a great editor you're great at proofreading that may be obvious but there are also skills that you've probably implicitly learned through the course of that work like maybe in doing your lesson plans you've gotten really

good at creating presentations in powerpoint that's actually something that people are excited to pay for in a lot of a lot of places and then think about things that you've learned as a hobby what are some of your interests that you've just learned to indulge and get interested maybe because you enjoy social media you've learned how to use canva really really well awesome there's a lot of space for you to help people create graphics to do

social media that's just amazing if any of these roles if any of these skills required creativity or the use of a specific software that's a really good place to start too because that's even more likely that someone's willing to pay you rather than take the time to learn that skill or learn that software step three is define your target clients the people that you want to work with think about the skills that you've chosen to start

a freelance business with in that previous step what type of person what type of organization what type of brand might need that type of assistance and who would you want to work with because again you owe it to yourself to be thoughtful and intentional with what you want to do and who you want to work with i encourage people to create a client avatar like create a fictional representation of the person or company that you want

to serve and then turn that into real people real companies who fits that avatar who are the people who are the companies who are the brands that i might actually want to work with and put them in a spreadsheet like this is the beginning of making these things true is believing that they can be true laying out exactly who you do want to work with anything is possible but only if you believe in yourself and work

towards it do you mind if i stop you here for just one second one thing i know you've been talking a lot about like business to business kind of freelancing and it looks intimidating where people might not even really realize that they've worked with freelancers themselves you might have been a target client i personally and i think jay you and your fiance are probably planning your wedding as well oh yeah we are working with wedding planners

photographers we're working with all these different people who are freelancers themselves and maybe you know a vegan caterer is looking specifically for us as their ideal client like you can you can create something that works in your schedule and it doesn't have to seem intimidating it can be a client like a wedding guest totally um and to take that a step further my fiance is a realtor and she is still a 1099 independent contractor it's the

same type of work she works with individuals she helps them find houses all of this applies to her in the same way though i do typically speak to businesses organizations because a fact of life is it's easier to sell to people with money and businesses have that more than individuals do in most cases businesses understand the concept of investment they understand the concept of uh if i invest in this person to do this work i can

quantify why that is to my benefit but people can do that too um i'm doing that right now as daphne said with photographers for our weddings uh for our wedding we know like i know if i hire this photographer as expensive as it may feel right now i'm gonna do this one time these photos are gonna last a lifetime i'm doing the same adjustment in my mind and you can work with individuals on this stuff too

once you've kind of figured out these skills that you want to leverage now you need to package your skills into a service offering because people buy solutions we buy outcomes we don't buy skills and we don't buy services and that took me a while to understand myself but if you go out and you say i'm a copywriter who wants to hire a copywriter you're not going to get much of a response because people don't necessarily know

what that means whereas if you go out and you say hey i'm really good at helping you write the words that go on your website that becomes something that people understand that they want and need because they probably staring at the website like this does not tell my story this about page is not good and if you say i can help you write an about page that really tells your story in a compelling way i'm listening

and you may you may still identify as a copywriter but we're not looking for the skill or the service we're looking for the outcome katie says in the chat perhaps i should wait for the q a to ask this but if you do work with individuals as clients how do taxes work since you wouldn't receive a 1099. it would be the same way you would recognize that revenue as income you they should actually still send you

a 1099 from their accountant it's not um there's no like legal problem if that doesn't happen but any income you receive uh you should be tracking as income and your taxes are going to work the same way it's just going to be business income even if you work with individuals instead of businesses so from here i want to talk quickly about kind of my overarching favorite sales strategy in a way that is not salesy in a

way that i think you can get behind and i put it into an acronym which i call the eyes and ears method which is both an acronym and a philosophy like you can i'm kind of intuit what it means to have extra sets of eyes and ears for your business if you break it down as an acronym eyes means establish your elevator speech and ears means empower advocates to refer sales i'm going to break that down

piece by piece establish your elevator speech your elevator speech or elevator pitch elevator pitch is said more frequently but it doesn't fit into the acronym as nicely so i said elevator speech is a short description of what you do the goal is in one breath you should be able to tell someone who you help and how you help them it needs to be memorable and the shorter and more specific it is the better i like the

framework i help x do y i help this type of person solve this type of problem and if you use that framework some examples here i help creatives make money freelancing i help b2b sas companies write better emails i help brides capture their weddings i help podcasters grow their audience it's very clear what you're offering and to whom here and we remember these specific terms but our memories are not very good so the shorter you keep

this the better notice that in all these examples there's no and there's no or if you're introducing ands and ors into this pitch it's probably a little too long so when you help x do y make sure you're solving an actual problem for that person and when in doubt most solutions for especially businesses this is going to be a little bit different on the individual side because the individual is probably purchasing things emotionally in like the

wedding photography example but for most people for most businesses if they're investing into help from somebody else it boils down to they want more customers they want more clients they want more subscribers they want more followers they want to increase their profit which means increasing revenue or decreasing cost or they want to feel better about themselves and it's kind of a vanity thing to be honest but if you can show how hiring you and spending a

dollar with you today becomes two dollars tomorrow you're gonna find people who will hire you all day you know and most the time this math equation is pretty clear if you ask the right questions you need to find out why are they hiring you to do this thing and if you ask these questions why why do you want a better about page on your website well we think a better about page on our website means that

more people will go to our contact page and ask us about a quote why do you want that well more people who ask us for a quote means more people turn into clients oh okay so you're equating having better words on your website with having more clients making more money great so if hiring me is going to get you more money let's talk about how much it costs to hire me and how quickly that will pay

off based on how many more clients you're going to get from this work step 5 would be to legally incorporate your business this comes with the disclaimer that i am not a lawyer this is not legal advice i have personally chosen and often tell people they should consider filing an llc because having a business entity protects your personal assets if for some reason you are a wedding photographer and something goes wrong at the wedding and somebody

wants to take legal action and this is a total edge case i have never heard a freelancer in my sphere getting into legal action whatsoever but if that did happen your personal assets are protected they can only um pursue [Music] action against the business itself having an illegal entity also allows you to create what's called an ein an employment identification number so that when you're doing contracts and documents and official things like that as a business

you don't have to put your social security number on things you can use your ein instead which is nice from like a peace of mind identity standpoint and with an llc and ein that means you can now open a business bank account at any local bank to do this to file an llc you need to choose a name for your business most states will actually allow you to do this all online i think there are only

a handful of states that don't allow you to do it online at this point they also typically let you do a name search in that same portal so you can find out is anybody else operating under the same name and it will usually warn you like hey there's already a name for this llc in the state maybe you should consider a different name but most states let you file that online for like 75 to 120 dollars

if you don't mind me adding also with the ein the ein should be free if you type in i'm making an ein you're going to get google search ads at the top that are going to try and charge you money it's like a company doing a third party service the ein process is totally free just make sure it's like through the irs i think i have i'm putting this in the chat i think freelancing dot school

slash ein redirects to the irs website where the eir ein is free and almost immediate like it literally just happens like here you go now you have it but you have to have the llc first jamie asks do you have a printable checklist i will send the slides with the replay in the email after this jamie next i would advise you to create a portfolio because portfolios allow you to show what you're capable of instead of

just tell me that you're a great photographer how many photographers are you going to hire because they tell you they're a good photographer probably none you want to see their work same thing goes for really any type of freelance work that you do your portfolio works samples should align with the services you're offering if you're saying hey i'm a freelance photographer here's my portfolio it's full of writing examples it doesn't make a lot of sense right

even if even if you do have multiple skills you can indulge you either want to have a portfolio with like sections saying like here's my writing work here's my photography work here's my marketing work or you want your portfolio to be really speaking to um like the aspirational work you want to do the most so that the people who see it are more likely to hire you for that type of work if you don't have a

portfolio of work yet that you can display publicly consider doing some spec work or practice work uh there's an example i like to share there was a woman who was a ux designer a user experience designer and just for fun she did a complete redesign of what she thought instagram should look like to be better than it is and she just published that on her blog it's like here's what i think instagram should do differently it

was beautiful and anyone hiring a ux designer can look at that and say wow this person is really good at this and start to intuit what they can do for them you can do that in a lot of different formats but the point being if you don't have work to show that you've been paid for in your portfolio do some examples that are interesting to you that still illustrate the skill even if it wasn't purchased and

there are a lot of places you can display this portfolio you can put it on social media like instagram if you are a visual artist or creative of some kind you know if you want to do photography instagram's great if you want to do design instagram's great otherwise you can just put it on your website with squarespace or wordpress or card or webflow carla i see your question in the chat about advance advice for healthcare options

if you could expand on that in the chat i'd be happy to answer that but i'm not exactly sure what you're asking step seven develop a strategy for finding clients so here's something that took me a while to learn that i think is really really important there are essentially three channels for finding clients for finding paid work when you are freelancing or contracting you can do direct to client where you meet the client you communicate with

them you work with them directly to create the outcome you can subcontract which basically means there are other organizations who are selling the work to the client and they're hiring you to fulfill part of it this happens a lot with creative agencies where maybe i'm a really great website developer as a firm but this client also wants lifestyle photography as part of their website so i might hire a photographer on our behalf to go take photos

for us so we can put it into the website and give that to the client and your pay and that situation would come from the firm that is subcontracting to you and then there are marketplaces places like upwork fiverr freelancer.com these places can be really good because you don't have to really very actively sell yourself once you build a little bit of a reputation up on the platform but it does take some work to build a

reputation on the platform it's a little tough to get started but the people who are consistent and tenacious on upwork and really want to make that work for them it can be a great place to just have this stream of client opportunities without having to meet people or way find your way to opportunities for the purposes of the rest of our time here i want to focus on direct-to-client because i think that is long-term if you

want to build a freelancing business the best place for you to go because this is the most defensible this is like how you build your own brand you build um demand for your work specifically it's just long term more sustainable you can charge higher rates so let's let's talk a little bit more about this so to do that i need to teach a little bit of selling 101 as part of this freelancing 101 uh but selling

is really important so i know it feels scary but please hang with me here for a moment this is what's called a sales funnel and the concept here is when you have conversations with potential clients most of them do not become clients you may have 10 conversations with people who seem like they might be clients and by the time you get to the point of them deciding am i going to hire you that may turn into

five people who actually want to hire you brenda says you didn't mention wix when you're talking portfolios any reason for that no which is fine too which is a great great option so in these four steps you first have to make somebody aware that you exist i can't possibly hire you if i don't know that you exist once i know that you exist i have to have some level of interest in working with you once i'm

interested in potentially working with you i have to make the definitive decision that i'm going to work with you and then once i make that decision i still actually have to take some sort of action like signing a contract sending you a deposit paying you something like that so most of the time you have to start the top right you have to make sure that people know you exist and you have to get them interested in

working with you if they're ever going to become clients you work really hard getting all that attention trying to create interest and then inevitably a lot of them fall off anyway it's just that it's just the way the math works so wouldn't it be really great if you could skip those two steps entirely and just focus on the most efficient uh highest impact part of that funnel that's what referrals do that's why people love word of

mouth that's why people love referrals because referrals are doing the work of making somebody aware that you exist and getting them interested in working with you they are being an advocate on your behalf life as a freelancer is easy when you have high quality inbound leads coming to you leads like that people coming to you that comes from word of mouth but what are these words and where are these mouths the words are nice things about

you and your work and are coming from people who know like and trust you already and i call these people your advocates the more advocates you have for you and your business the more referrals you'll receive this just becomes a numbers game at some point the more people who already know like and trust you the better the odds that there's someone out there at any given time who is saying nice things about you and sending people

your way this is probably obvious but i'll say it anyway somebody else recommending your work is so much more powerful than you recommending your work you're super biased they're a little biased too but it's still a lot more powerful coming from somebody else that what you do is great in that somebody should consider working with you okay so we left off a little bit on the eyes and ears let's say you have your elevator speech next

empowering your advocates to refer sales once you have that elevator speech that i help x do y you need to start sharing it with your advocates of people who care about you memorize it use the same phrase every time i help creatives make money freelancing over time that sticks in their minds those phrases creatives freelancing it sticks in their minds if it is short and specific as you create more advocates the more likely it is that

any one of them is referring you at any given time and you should align this i help x do y with your social media profiles too if you are interested in marketing yourself through social media step 8 tap into your existing networks of people which brings me back to the concept of advocates this is a quote from a book on um it's from a guy named robin drake i think he's a former fbi agent his book

is called the code of trust he said a tenet of evolutionary psychology is that people are hardwired to enjoy offering assistance not only as a mechanism to receive assistance themselves but also to satisfy the innate human drive for altruism why do i care about that well you already have advocates former clients former co-workers friends and family people who admire your work every day those people are talking to other people and often that conversation touches on a

problem or pain point that one of those people are having because we love to talk about our problems and as robin drake noted your advocate if they hear somebody talk about a problem they're probably going to try to solve that problem because this innate human thing of solving problems for people that little bit of altruistic integrity that we have you want to be the first person to mind when one of your advocates is trying to solve

a problem for somebody else because we often try to solve problems by throwing people at it we say you should talk to daphne you should talk to jay and they'll make an introduction and that is where word of mouth referrals are originated if you have this mindset if you're saying i want to create new clients through referrals through my advocates you don't have to worry about finding clients anymore you can let them find you instead of

finding clients you focus on creating clients identifying opportunities that turn into projects around you naturally without looking too hard for them to create clients you need to start with relationships you don't focus on trying to make clients you try to make friends you just try to create more genuine kind relationships and friendships around you and you treat every conversation you have with somebody as like an empathetic fact-finding mission where you're focusing on that other person you're

asking them how they're doing you ask them what they're struggling with you ask them what's hard for them right now and you see if you can solve that problem for them if they tell you a problem that they're facing and it's something you can solve you say hey i would love to help you with that here's what that would look like if you can't solve that problem for them but you know someone else who can then

you should refer them to that person and that's continuing to build more relationships to build more people around you who are looking out for you if they start asking you you know what are you doing what are you up to these days you can say you know i'm actually really excited i'm starting to freelance part time i'm helping axe do why i'm helping brides capture their wedding day i'm helping people build better presentations i'm helping other

teachers with their instructional design you know you can start to throw out these specific terms and now people around you know what you're doing and they can be productive advocates for you i'm gonna pause here i see jacqueline has a question if you help someone with editing a cover letter resume etc would you post an example of that in a portfolio on your website or have that person write a short testimonial or recommendation ideally both jacqueline

because if you post the the letter itself that's like a part of your portfolio especially do kind of like a before and after but if you get a short testimonial recommendation one you should always try to get a testimonial from people that you've done work for two now you can wrap this whole thing together into what's called a case study where not only are you showing your work but you're giving people a behind the scenes of

your process and you're saying hey here's where this started here are our goals here's what we decided to do as a project together here's my process here's the finished product here's what that client said it becomes this wonderful packaged compelling story about what it's like to work with jaclyn and then last step once you have all this in place you know your skill you know what you're trying to do you've got it packaged up you're helping

x do y then it just becomes a game of creating more advocates because who do we hire people we trust do the job and people that we like so ask yourself who already trusts you who already likes you and it's your advocates it's the same people because your advocates will either tell people to hire you or they'll hire you themselves so you should spend your time actively creating new advocates reconnecting with existing advocates and you don't

have to do any like hard or salesy selling you're just forming relationships you're making it known what you're doing who you can help and you're waiting for those referrals to come in this is another reason why starting this all part time makes a lot of sense to me because this takes time this process if you don't want to push sales on people if you want people to come to you it takes a little bit of time

to ramp that up you can be more active you can be more uh active and asking people hey who should i talk to i'm trying to help xdy who who in your network is that that i can talk to and that's okay but if you don't feel comfortable doing that you just gotta keep making friends you gotta keep telling them what you're up to showing that you're doing the work and taking it day by day statistically

speaking most conversations you have with people will not become projects because think about when i had my most successful years of freelancer last year i probably worked with a dozen clients how many conversations do you think i had last year like hundreds thousands so statistically speaking most conversations will not become projects don't put that pressure on yourself any conversation can yield new advocates though any conversation can make somebody like you and want to be an advocate

for you and your business because advocates create referrals so i think about this as just like a simple abc advocate before client every conversation i go into i'm thinking i'm gonna make this person an advocate they have to be an advocate before their client even if they advocate to themselves that they want to hire me some people will say no that is expected that is okay uh a good like closing rate in the sales world is

like 20 so if two out of every conversation two out of every ten conversations that feel like they could be a project turn into a project you gotta be uh ready to hear no and most no means not now you know it doesn't mean never it means not now that's not something i can pursue right now and that's okay what you're selling your service this package is not for everyone but when you know who it is

for you should offer it to as many of those people as you can because you're actually doing them a disservice if you don't if people want to hire somebody to solve a problem for them and you can solve that problem but they don't know that you can solve it for them you're actually slowing down their ability to have this problem solved which is a problem it's a disservice there is a really good question in the chat

from emily right now also any advice on leveraging a mailing list to help you get the word out i have a pretty sizable mailing list but i worry about how to share freelancing info with folks and coming across as too salesy think about you're never selling anything to anybody if you're just letting them know what you're doing and saying if you want to talk about this i'm open to talk you're making an offer you know i

like to get people thinking about going to starbucks when you walk into starbucks you look at their menu you buy what you want to buy and no one's forcing you to buy anything you leave happy and you're glad that you traded that money for that coffee it was worth it to you same is true for selling services if you do it right you make people know what you're able to do for them what the price is

and if they want that outcome they will pay you and they'll be happy about it you're not forcing anybody to do anything so i would encourage you emily to just talk about why you're doing this show them the work that you've done show them what you're capable of and just invite them to start a conversation it's really hard to just say like hey do you want to hire me press this and send me 200 on paypal

like that's not going to happen it all starts with the conversation so just talk about what i'm doing why i'm doing it and if you want to talk hit reply and we can talk more about it so a couple things in conclusion and then we'll get to um uh some more questions if you have them so feel free to put them in the chat now you can start freelancing part time and i would encourage you to

test the waters and do that if this is calling to you as something interesting you probably have all the creative skills you need to start monetizing or leveraging some of them people buy from those who they trust and who they like so start with people who trust you and like you those your advocates you don't have to push anything on them you don't have to force them to buy anything you just have to let them know

this is what i'm doing and why i'm doing it and they're likely to become an advocate for you have conversations with these people who know like and trust you already treat them as empathetic fact-finding missions ask them some questions create your freelance brand build your website put your portfolio up put on your social media and don't give up because it only gets easier over time as more people know about you as more people work with you

as you build some social proof it only gets easier so some things you can do to take action on this immediately dial in your elevator speech think about the skills that you want to offer package them up into a service offering i help x do y um think about the price that you want to charge for that that just becomes i help x2y for this price reach out to 10 of your advocates and schedule time to

talk and make sure your social media and website messaging is aligned with that before i get to questions i did want to say this presentation which i whipped through a ton of slides this is three of 38 lessons inside of my freelancing school course bundle it's three courses business for freelancers marketing for freelancers selling for freelancers those courses each have a full curriculum um well let me skip through the curriculum first a full curriculum of you

know here are the lessons here's what's inside there templates proposal templates invoice templates budget templates email scripts that i've used uh downloadable slides for each lesson the checklist that somebody talked about in the chat how to file an llc in your state how to get your ein is all step by step inside business for freelancers marketing for freelancers is all about making you feel more confident and comfortable marketing yourself um because you're going to get to

a point where you know you do great work but you just wish more people knew about it and you could get your name out there so that's my medius course in terms of videos 20 lessons sorry 20 videos 18 lessons there are a couple bonus workshops a lot more scripts for emails and things in there and then selling for freelancers is all about selling more projects asking for higher rates for your projects there's a template for

a crm which helps you manage your relationships with potential clients and advocates there's a whole lot here and all of this i'm putting on sale uh through this for 25 off i typically only offer up to like 20 um but i want to make this as affordable as possible it's at freelancing dot school slash tcc for teacher career coach i'll put that in the chat that'll be available for the next week if you want to take

me up on it and you certainly don't have to i just wanted to make the offer available to you if this is something you want to go deeper on and learn a lot faster this is what one of the proposal templates looks like okay because we're low on time i'll just skip over to the question slide uh and i'll answer any questions that you have and i see a couple in the chat here so let me

read a couple of these yes uh lisa the lessons are self-paced if you did enroll in those courses you'll have access this courses forever um any updates that i make i make to those courses and you get them in real time there are examples of portfolios there as well um uh brenda okay sorry i'll break a couple things down because i spoke kind of quickly those courses are typically 99 apiece 25 off means each individual course

is 74 and some change now the bundle is typically 249 at 25 off that comes down to 187 for all three courses which is a 65 discount uh where to find examples of freelancing portfolios that's a good question um a good place to start would probably be going to upwork and looking at some of the people who are selling on upwork actively and looking at their portfolios a lot of people will upload their portfolio to a

site called dribble with three b's it's d-r-i-b-b-b-l-e dot com i do have examples in the courses as well um as well as examples on how to do case studies and testimonials really well how to build your website how to choose what website builder to use how to choose where to spend time on social media if you should create content how to have conversations with advocates and potential clients alexis says any tips for figuring out your elevator

speech i feel like i have a lot of areas i'm interested in working in i've taken coursework to learn content creation and ready but i'm not quite sure how to narrow down my focus to find my clients yes you should be aspirational because the thing about client work is the type of clients you work with will determine the future clients you work with because people are in similar circles so if you work with a non-profit it's

likely that when they refer you to somebody else they'll refer you to another nonprofit which can be great if you want to work with non-profits it's not great if you want to work with other types of organizations because they're going to look at your portfolio and say oh this person works with nonprofits this is not the type of work that i do so you want to be aspirational with the type of people or organizations you want

to work with the type of work you want to do because the type of work you get started with what you start building your portfolio into is what ultimately you'll get more work to do if that makes sense so again in your elevator speech that does not preclude you from doing other types of work what it does is it becomes kind of a magnet for the work you do the most of so think about like in

my elevator speech what is the type of client i most want to appeal to and that's what i would use your elevator speech for it doesn't preclude you from someone else coming and saying hey can you do this for me instead and saying yes and creating a contract for it but it does help be a magnet for the type of work you really want to do long term connected to rates how do you set project expectations

i recently completed my first copywriting freelance gig and charged on a per project basis there are so many unexpected parts of the project that i ended up making very little per hour how do you anticipate that great question um this comes setting expectations is one of the most important things you can do when you're doing client work this gif is throwing slowing down my video so i'm gonna go back over here um setting expectations is incredibly

important because in your proposal this is why a proposal template is really helpful you want to create what is called a statement of work or like a project scope for the project to say this is what i'm charging and these are the discrete deliverables that i'm promising or the number of hours that i'm promising so that if someone comes to you and starts adding all these different things you can say sorry that is out of scope

it's called scope creep in this world where people usually with good intentions non-malicious intentions just think they can keep adding on and if that's not in the proposal if that's not in the contract then you can say hey i would love to do that but because this is out of scope it's going to cost this much money and take this much time and that's how i fight that that back i do like pricing things generally on

a project basis or a value-based pricing basis where you say hey let me ask you some questions as to why you want to do this project and what you're expecting this to become for you because usually you know they're going to articulate i want more clients i want more business i want to increase revenue on a lower cost and that helps you say okay if you think that our work that we're going to do together is

going to end up making you 5 000 over the next month then i'm going to price my project at two thousand dollars four thousand dollars something less than that so i can just say hey if this works the way we think it well this will pay for itself in a matter of a month two months whatever it is um project-based pricing is really good because if you price hourly it encourages you to take more time on

the project and encourages them to want you to spend less time so you work slower and you either work slower to make more money or they push you to work faster and the project is less good a lot of times so hourly pricing is really hard to do well any tips for working with companies based abroad worth it when it comes down to taxes i'm not a cpa and i've only worked domestically personally if i were

to work with companies abroad i would talk with a cpa about what that means to make that decision based on what that agreement looks like to you because i'm sure there's a threshold like below a certain price or below a certain level of revenue it's not worth it and then above that it is really worth it that's what i would anticipate the the trade-off to be so you should really talk to an accountant about that um

i have not i don't anticipate that there's any reason not to like you'll still have to claim the income there's there might be like an exchange of currency that creates a pain point of kind but it shouldn't be a problem i'm currently a sole proprietor says katie is there a reason an llc is better i like an llc because it does have different protections as a legal entity in both cases you're going to file one tax

return you can operate as a business as a sole proprietor but a single member llc is virtually the same as a sole proprietor with some additional protections and i think even ability to do things on a banking side but i'm not 100 daphne says from a hiring perspective are there good and bad portfolios you'll find in upwork i would look oh there are good and bad portfolios upwork i look for those with great reviews yes agree

uh lauren jeffnoff thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thanks great great great uh much thanks i see a question about learning a new language as a freelance teacher like doing um like some sort of dual language or i would say probably translation like translation services for businesses is probably something huge for their human resources companies or for their human resources departments um anyone who needs to translate materials that might be somewhere to

look yes uh i would agree i'm sure there is a market for um tutoring as a language tutor i think that's definitely something that's an option um you'll be working with individuals probably uh and you know you just have to find people who are interested in learning that language there might be a marketplace for that on upwork uh i would avoid fiber to be honest i brought up fiverr earlier i would really avoid fiber and focus

on upwork more and more but to daphne's point there are a lot of companies who do translation of their products of their materials and somebody who can help do translation into other languages is uh useful and specifically from an educational standpoint if you look at educational companies that might be trying to make things in multiple languages to merge into new markets they might just want to do a consulting um service with you for that maggie says

in regards to the llc important to have your name in the name pros cons this recommended to have a skill in the name i'm thinking about making a name not too specific but not too random either so you can be really flexible on this i don't i tell people not to let this slow you down because your specific llc name doesn't have to show up in your branding on your website it doesn't really matter and if

you find that you eventually you want to use a different name you just file basically an amendment on that llc called a dba a doing business as so that it operates the same way under that llc with a different name so you could just use your name like i could say jclaus creative llc and that's an easy thing for me to spin up and it makes sense and if i put it on an invoice it makes

sense so i wouldn't make it like too crazy or cute if you don't have like a clear reason and story and brand behind it that you want but really don't let it slow you down hey thank you kim for the coffee i appreciate that uh great i don't have a hard stop so if people have more questions i'm happy to hang on here for a little bit longer otherwise like i said i will be sending you

guys this video via email i'll send you the slides as well i have this link here as well if you do want to join the courses it gets incredible feedback i've had literally tens of thousands of students on linkedin go through these courses and it's really highly rated so if it is something that you want to take seriously and you want to invest in it's there and this is the best way to do it thank you

says maggie thank you says christina thank you says l lexus awesome you guys are great thank you um i'll cut it there seems like we covered everything we needed to cover if you have any questions uh after this feel free to follow up erica says when does a generous pricing offer end erica that is a week from today i gave it a week awesome great guys uh follow up with email if you want daphne thank you

for co-hosting thanks for making this happen thanks for bringing people together thanks for having us so i i'm so grateful i've already got a couple dms on instagram of people saying how great it was oh good okay great uh awesome guys well thank you and i hope we'll be in touch