Freelancing Mistake #2 - Offering Too Much
The Problem with Soft Skills as Differentiators
What is your specialty? What do you do as a freelancer? What sets you apart?
When I first started out as a freelance web developer, I thought my differentiator would be that I provide THE BEST service and communication. That’s how I’d blow away my peers.
Well, turns out that is exactly what everybody else claims as their differentiators too. Who doesn’t tout their good service? These skills are known as “soft skills” because they can be applied to any industry, and are common on every competitor’s marketing material.
I didn’t want to narrow down any “hard skills” (like limit what type of web development I do) because I didn’t want to limit my pool of potential customers. “I CAN DO IT ALL!,” I’d tout from my website’s homepage.
This didn’t get me anywhere.
The One Trick That Led to Six-Figure Freelancing
Finally I did one little trick that took me to six-figure freelancing: I chose a niche.
I stopped saying that I do all sorts of development and chose the one I did really well and that not every developer touted as their specialty: ExpressionEngine development.
By changing my social profiles, my website, and rebranding myself as an ExpressionEngine expert, I was able to be seen as a go-to guy for that type of service. I even paid for some Google Adwords targeted towards people who are searching for an ExpressionEngine developer, which turned $1-$2 clicks into projects worth thousands.
To sum it up: I positioned myself as an expert in something that people were searching for.
Nobody is an “expert” in everything, so there’s no point in trying to be. When we offer too much as our bill of services, the natural thought process of our potential clients is that we’re not an expert in any of them.
Find Your Niche
So what about you? What do you do better than many others in your field? What is your unique spin on the type of services that you provide? How have others differentiated themselves within your field?
Remember to differentiate on a hard skill and not a soft skill that applies to any industry.
Challenge: Test Your Differentiators
Here's the second challenge of our series:
If you are unsure of a skill to differentiate yourself with, try creating various landing pages using a tool such as Unbounce (30 day free trial) targeted towards various hard-skills that you offer. You can then use Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, or LinkedIn Ads to drive traffic to those landing pages, and see which ones perform the best. At the end of this experiment you will probably have spent $100-$200, but you will hopefully have a few leads for new projects, and will be armed with actual data of what niche will perform well for you as a freelancer.
What’s next?
In our next lesson we’re going to take a look at charging by the hour, it’s pros and cons, and some potentially better ways to charge for our services.
