Freelancers: Sell yourself cheaply and rake it in

Show the value of your freelance work so customers have something concrete to judge you on. In this 2011 video, I describe two very different experiences of finding work through Amino Freelancer.

Show the value of your freelance work through experience

One freelancer was frustrated by low prices and competition from people doing jobs alongside another job. I could understand that.

Another told me she’d done her first logo jobs cheaply and put a lot of work into quality. According to her own account, it led to good feedback and more enquiries.

She saw that initial effort as a way to make herself known. That’s her story as I retell it, not evidence that low prices always bring more customers.

A qualification doesn’t tell the whole story

I also encountered new consultants who were professionally capable but lacked networks and examples from real assignments.

My point was that a concrete case study can make it easier for customers to understand the value you deliver. It can also give you more confidence in your own work.

The first price doesn’t have to be the last

I explain that my own talks began with very modest payment. Later, I charged different prices as my experience and demand grew.

The prices and platform terms in the video date from 2011. They aren’t current pricing suggestions.

My central advice was to build something that shows what you can do. An early investment in experience needs to be assessed individually; it doesn’t in itself promise later earnings. I discuss my own experiences of getting started and building a business in Iværksætter til jeg dør.

Also read about thinking long-term in your career.

Can you have a good choice?

Two freelancers, two completely different experiences

A freelancer wrote to me because she was very upset about prices on Amino Freelancer. She felt they were being pushed too low. As a professional, she had to pay her rent from the work, while others could do freelance jobs at weekends alongside their ordinary jobs and therefore charge less.

I could easily sympathise. But the day before, I’d met another woman at the Iværk & Vækst fair. She came over and said: Martin, I feel I’m taking advantage of Amino.

At the time, she paid DKK 99 a month for Amino Plus and felt she got so much work through Amino Freelancer that she almost felt guilty. That was lovely to hear. I also got emails from people who thought there could be more work, so I wanted to know what she’d done.

The first logos as a marketing expense

She designed logos. Her strategy had been to do the first ten or fifteen very cheaply while delivering high quality. She knew she was good and wanted customers to feel they got enormous value for money.

I used the example of a logo you’d normally pay three or four thousand kroner for suddenly being made for five hundred. That could feel overwhelming to the customer. I compared it to buying ordinary liver pâté and coming home with foie gras: When someone then asked if the liver pâté was good, you’d probably be very enthusiastic.

She saw the effort as marketing. I imagined a logo might take ten or twenty hours. That was my guess, not a time sheet she’d given me. Three to five hundred kroner obviously wouldn’t be much for that effort. But the difference could be seen as the marketing expense she’d otherwise have spent on Google AdWords or phone directory adverts, for example.

She sowed something and let it sit a while before harvesting. That was the idea I found interesting.

Good ratings and jobs outside the bidding system

When I met her, according to her own account she’d made around twenty or thirty logos and averaged five out of five. People looking for a logo designer on Amino Freelancer could find her page and read the good feedback.

She said that every time she won a job through the bidding system, she got about nine other jobs directly. We couldn’t see those in the system because they weren’t registered there. As an Amino Plus member, her contact details were displayed so people could call or write to her directly.

I also imagined a customer Googling logo design and landing on her profile. It said what she did, lots of people recommended her, and her phone number and email address were right there.

She was flooded with work and now got her usual rate. The first freelancer almost never got jobs and didn’t think she was paid enough for the ones she did get. The second had invested over time and created a market for herself. That was the difference between the two experiences I wanted to highlight.

The qualification needed something you could show alongside it

At the time, I taught about once a month on an entrepreneurship course for newly unemployed people. I rounded off the programme with a pep talk and discussion. Participants described their business idea one at a time, and I coached them based on their questions.

They were often capable graduates. They had impressive qualifications but lacked business experience, networks and credibility in the market. In my opinion, a qualification wasn’t enough. They also needed to prove what they were good at.

One wanted to work with horses and riders. My suggestion was to visit riding schools, find riders and run some programmes. Make a good website and show case studies with video, pictures and documentation: Where was the rider before, and where were they after the programme?

I suggested doing it for free at first and seeing it as both marketing and a free MBA. You could have a cleaning job or another weekend job while building experience. The point was to show what you could do before expecting the market simply to believe it.

Success also gave you something to build on yourself

Another participant wanted to work as a health coach. My suggestion was to find ten women in the target group and offer a free programme in return for being able to document it. That was my example of building case studies, not an account of a completed programme.

I imagined that if several participants subsequently got the results they wanted, she could show them and explain the programme. The various weight-loss figures I mentioned in the video were hypothetical examples. What mattered to my point was being able to show a real difference.

It was also about proving it to yourself: I can do it. I’ve had a success. Success breeds success. Then you had more than textbooks from your course when someone asked what you could do.

From three bottles of red wine to a very different fee

If you felt your business hadn’t really taken off, my advice was to select people in your target group and show them, yourself and the world that you could deliver value worth paying for.

A low price at the start didn’t have to lock you in. I used the example of starting at DKK 299 for something and raising the price as you improved.

My own talks began with three bottles of red wine as payment. For a talk I’d just given, I said in the video that I charged DKK 40,000 plus flights. Those were my prices back in 2011.

Nobody came along saying that a few years earlier I’d got three bottles of red wine, so why should I now get twenty or thirty-five thousand? People considered the value they expected me to give them.

They could see newspaper articles, case studies on my website and happy people I’d given talks to. Then they could compare the price with the expected value and judge whether someone else could do it just as well and more cheaply.

My closing message was to get out and get things going. Show yourself and the world you’re good at what you do. The first payment wasn’t the only thing that counted. Treat the experience as a free MBA and go for it.

De bedste hilsner

Martin