Clients Archives - Kenny Soto

When You Lose A Client

You Lose More Than Just Money

Losing a client can sometimes come as a necessity. Perhaps the expectations at the beginning of the project weren’t set correctly, or the working relationship began to deteriorate because of miscommunication, or the client found another competitor to replace you.

Regardless of why it happens, it’s important for us to consider what happens after you lose a client.

When a client is lost, your bottom line isn’t the only thing that suffers. There’s an opportunity cost incurred when you lose a client, for they could have been a potential avenue to gain referrals to new clients. And when you lose a client, you miss out on all of the knowledge that would have been gained through future work with them.

Working with clients gives marketers the opportunity to consistently challenge themselves and grow their skillset—as new problems that need solving arise consistently in marketing. When you lost a client, you lose an opportunity to grow.

Again, sometimes you can actually benefit from losing a client if it is clear that much wouldn’t have been gained if the working relationship continued. Yet, when you lose a great client, it can be tough to recover from that loss.

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The Next Time You Come Across An Opportunity

Sometimes it is better to share a would-be client than to simply deny extra work

If you find yourself in the advantageous situation of having to say no to working with new clients, you have a great opportunity. Instead of telling the client that you don’t have the bandwidth to help them at the moment and adding them to an impersonal newsletter to “nurture” them and have them convert at a later date—point them to someone else who can help them.

Part of a good business strategy is to deploy kindness at every chance you get.

Just because you can’t help the client doesn’t mean that you also can’t help them find someone else who is just as capable as you are at getting the job done. Even if you miss out on more revenue for your business, you don’t necessarily need that client to pay you in money to help you out.

If you refer another consultant or freelancer to a client you can’t help at the moment, they will definitely remember your kindness. You can then leverage that favor you did for them in the future, for a potential referral to someone in their network, who may need your help.

Business at the end of the day is in large part based upon who you help the most. Sometimes you don’t need to help a client directly in order to grow your business.

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Don’t Hire A Freelance Digital Marketer If They Can’t Do This

If a marketer isn’t organized, run away

When hiring a freelancer marketer, you have to ensure that you are hiring someone who is reliable. The organizational skills directly correlate to how reliable they are.

If they can show you campaign reports and data, create a system for file management, manage naming conventions, and create and manage your processes—you’ve found a winner. Yet, it is difficult to showcase this organizational ability without references.

Case studies, a resume, and a portfolio won’t be able to show you if the person you’re about to hire is organized. Even references can be skewed. Also, the previous client’s overall knowledge can be limited and they can also be unorganized. People tend to remember how they felt at the time, rather than the specific daily details that occurred when the services were provided.

This can paint the wrong picture on the quality of a marketer’s performance.

You can only test a marketer’s organizational skill in the moment, during a probationary period. Notice how they send documents, how they manage their calendar, how they provide access to documents and folders. If they seem to be all over the place in one interaction, a pattern may be hidden underneath. If you’re paying for quality, make sure they’re organized.

Related: How To Fail As A Freelancer

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Do You Want To Get Paid For Your Writing Services? Here’s What You Need To Know

Business owners still need writers for their marketing

The first step in getting paid for your writing services is understanding that people will pay you. There are clients out there who want to save time and hire a professional writer to create content and sales copy. Video creators, graphic designers, and other freelancers certainly have it easier when starting out because their work does require the use of more tools and seems more difficult than simply writing.

Some business owners do believe that they don’t need to hire a professional writer—that they can just do it themselves. Just remember that these business owners are never going to be your clients.

The clients you are searching for have already acknowledged that they need to hire a professional if they want their marketing to be optimized and effective. The real challenge that you will have is figuring out where to find them. Once you do that, then all you need to do is sell yourself.

I suggest using these places to find your first set of clients:

Facebook Groups
Craigslist
AngelList
LinkedIn job search (and hashtag search)
Monster
Ziprecruiter
And good ol’ Google

There are a ton of websites and platforms online that provide job postings for freelance writers. You may need to do some spec work in the beginning, either working for free or taking on writing gigs that pay $0.03 per word just to start building a portfolio. However, after four to five assignments you can definitely start charging by the project or by the hour.

What you don’t want to do is start searching in the wrong places. You definitely don’t want to focus your efforts on finding work through platforms like UpWork, Fiverr, or Guru. Although these platforms make the search for clients faster, they incentive that you price your services as low as possible. They also take a cut from what you make. The better approach is to do the hard work yourself and create a dedicated time in your schedule to manually search for clients.

“But what if I just can’t seem to get clients? I have no experience.”

The best way to showcase your writing style, even without a portfolio, is to create a blog. By creating a blog, and ideally an entire website, you are not only showcasing your ability to write clearly and persuasively—you are also showcasing your ability to promote your ideas. Clients want to see that you can provide more than copy or content writing, your competition definitely has more to offer than that.

It’s important to write as much as possible, as websites that publish 16 posts a month get more traffic than those that post weekly. Writing every day is a great strategy as it pushes you to explore more topics and creates a set schedule for you to practice your craft. Your prospective clients can use your blog as an alternative to a portfolio, especially if the client doesn’t need you to have years of writing experience.

There are ways to get exposure

What if you want your clients to come to you? The best way to start getting projects coming into your email inbox or LinkedIn messages is to collaborate. Guest posting is a sure-fire way to get people’s attention. If you have publications that you’ve written for on your website, it validates you as a professional and it makes you more attractive to clients.

It is difficult to start guest posting for websites like Forbes, FastCompany, Wired, or Mashable but, it is not impossible. I’m personally going through this stage of my freelance writing journey myself.

I have to note that it is best to start with guest posting on small publications that can be found on Medium. At the very least, even if you don’t immediately get incoming leads for your services by guest posting, it will increase the overall traffic that you get on your website.

Save yourself time by learning how to structure your business

As a freelancer, you run a business. You will have to be responsible for every aspect of that business, from how to get your clients to how you charge them. One thing I definitely recommend you do is to create a client questionnaire to ensure you understand the scope of work before taking on any project—especially your first project.

A client questionnaire can help you understand what is required of you and it can help you know if:

You’re qualified to take on the work,
How much time you’ll need to dedicate to the project,
If this client is worth your time,
And if you will benefit from the experience.

I put a list of questions I ask my prospective clients below. I don’t ask them all of these questions during the first interaction but, I make sure that all of them get answered before I begin tackling any project.

Questions to ask before submitting a bid or proposal

What are the specifications of this project and when do you want it to begin?
What is your preferred method of communication?
What is your payment method?
What are the hard deadlines for this project? Do you need me to set up the specific dates for each deliverable?
Have you worked with freelance copywriters before?

Questions to ask before the work begins

Can you describe your business in 50 words or less?
Who is your target customer (age, gender, location, job role, etc.)?
What do you want people to do when they visit your site? What is the #1 thing?
What are the key features of your product or service?
Describe your current process for making a sale?
What are your current content assets?
Do you have direct competitors?
Can you list any pieces of content, websites, or profiles that are similar to what you are hoping to achieve from this project?
How many people from your team will be involved in the feedback process for my copywriting?
If the copy/content is published online, may I get a live link to my site?
Will I be allowed to use this piece as a sample in my portfolio?

And let’s not forget the documents that you will need to make to make sure you get paid without any hassles. Most contracts, invoices, and other freelancer necessities can be found online as templates. You do not need to (nor should you) make anything from scratch. Just Google “Freelancer contract/Freelance invoice/Freelance proposal/etc. template” and there will be a ton of sites that provide them for free!

There will be a learning curve

If you feel like you aren’t confident enough to write content or create sales copy for a business, there are many resources available so that you can start learning. Youtube is my favorite resource, as there are hundreds of copywriting and content writing professionals who are promoting their expertise by teaching other writers.

There are obviously books that can also help you too, my favorite being On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King.

Whichever resource you use, just know that you shouldn’t use the fear of being too inexperienced as an excuse to not get started. I blogged for five years before ever getting paid for a word I wrote. Yet, those years of not getting paid taught me and I am certain your learning curve will be much faster than mine.

If there is anything that you take from this article just know that you can get paid for the words you write—you just have to use the tools and advice from other successful freelance writers and take action.

If you simply start by setting up a blog (you can start writing for free both on LinkedIn and Medium), you’ll be well on your way to becoming a professional writer.

To give you some extra help, here’s a list of resources I use to keep my skills up-to-date and to help me grow as a freelancer:

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Sprezzatura & Client Retention: Giving Your Clients Peace Of Mind

Draw Inspiration From Italy

Sprezzatura is an Italian word that I discovered while taking a music history class in college. Sprezzatura was first coined by author Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 and it means, “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”.

Sprezzatura could also be defined as the reassuring impression we give off that helps us successfully acquire and retain clients. It is a special kind of confidence. Sprezzatura could also be seen as a purposefully designed representation of how skilled we are.

Who would you rather hire, the person who says they can do something for you and visibly struggles to get it done, or the person who seems like they have solved this problem 1,000 times before? Sprezzatura marks the difference between an amateur and a professional—the professional can design and show their Sprezzatura at will.

Part of our job is to ease stress and to bypass hesitation

When selling anything, there is a certain threshold of hesitation from the side of the client that we need to overcome. If we aren’t able to provide a sense of security, if we can’t make the decision-making process easier for our prospects, we won’t be able to get them to hire us.

Our potential customers are always trying to find the best solution to their problems. When we sell to them, we are showing them that we are the best at what we do. Expressing yourself as an expert and consistently proving it, is why clients hire us. We also have to focus on ensuring that we showcase our Sprezzatura for as long as possible.

It is okay not to be perfect, but you have to get the job done

Even in moments when we don’t have the answer to problems, when we have to push a deadline, when we have to explain a failure, we still have to show that we are able to solve the problems we were hired to tackle.

If you don’t have the answer, you still have to prove that you’re the best person to figure out. If you push a deadline, you have to then deliver beyond expectations. And if you failed, you better provide revisions and improvements as fast as possible and ensure that it never occurs again.

Much of what our work tends to be just reassuring our clients that they made the right decision in hiring us. We have to always fulfill the promises that we are presenting in our marketing. Our clients will continue to exchange their hard-earned money for our stellar services and products only if we can give them peace of mind.

The moment you stop showing your Sprezzatura is the moment you have truly failed yourself and your clients, for they will go elsewhere. To someone else who can consistently show Sprezzatura.

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