Freelance Confidential - Amanda Hackwith [20]
Diversity really is an overall approach to your business—it is difficult to diversify in any one area without working on the others as well. With all that in mind, here's a holistic approach to building a more diverse business:
Be realistic. Take a hard look at the clients and jobs you have now—go ahead and try to classify them. Is there one client, one skill or service that is the lynchpin holding your business together? What would happen if something disrupted that?
Identify complimentary skills. Identify complimentary skills and services that your existing clients might be interested in. Don't worry about brand new clients right now—focus on what you've got. Is there something you have to outsource that you have the capability to do, or to learn how to do better? Think of services that could be easily added on or built into your existing service.
Improve those skills. Educate yourself! Many technical skills can be learned through online resources or books, but you might benefit from taking classes or working with an expert.
Prove those skills. While some new skills might be able to piggyback on the strength of your established services, some skills, like design or illustration, are going to require a strong portfolio of previous work to prove you have the chops. That can be difficult to attain when you're just starting to add the skill to your repertoire. Consider donating work to your favorite charity organizations, creating dummy projects for fictional clients, or creating materials to sell as stock (and hopefully generate some passive income! See the chapter Expand with Passive Income on how to get started.)
Sell new services to existing clients. Once you are confident in your skills and have completed projects to prove it, approach your existing clients. You already have credibility with them—they know you're a reliable and trustworthy professional from your past work—and they are much more likely to be receptive to expanding your work to make use of your new services.
Expand your business with new clients. You have the skills, you have the portfolio, and you have the happy clients. Don't be content to keep your new services as an unadvertised sideline. Once you're confident in your service, identify new clients and expand your business.
Just Get Started!
Whatever skills, projects, or clients you decide to go after, the important part is to get started! Linda Formichelli helpfully reminded me of the power of action:
It's all about action. I mentor writers, and many of them are stagnant because they're too afraid to actually get started. They feel they can't start pitching and building relationships with editors until they have every piece of possible information or know how to do everything perfectly—which will never happen. One blogger I like subscribes to the "ready, fire, aim" philosophy. Instead of doing "ready, aim, aim, aim," you take action right away and then correct course as you need to. In other words, you take action and learn as you go along. The freelancer who takes imperfect action has an infinitely better chance of succeeding than the freelancer who waits until she can do everything perfectly.
Too often, we put off new endeavors in favor of the same, old, familiar routine. There's power in making your best preparations and going for it. Short of brain surgery or skydiving, you'll find most projects can be revised and improved while you're in-progress, and contextual learning is the type of learning that will best stick with you for future jobs to come.
Expand with Passive Income
"Passive income" is a term for a broad variety of activities that can generate revenue for you even when you're not directly working on them. Creating these alternate sources of revenue is a great way to diversify your business, which can get you over that plateau and create added income and security.
We'll take a brief tour of passive income opportunities and take a look at:
Selling products as stock.
Selling products directly.
Building your blog into a brand.
I'm always striving to earn