How To Stop Being A Copycat Freelancer | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 259 Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome, glad to have you here. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who are trying to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their soul. That sounds like you, you're at the right place. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. Glad to have you. We are in the middle of our Back to Basics series. Nothing new here. We are like nine episodes into this thing. In this episode, I want to tackle something that I think is a plague in the freelance community, and that is the plague of being a copycat freelancer. I want you to be honest with me. If I asked you, why should someone hire you versus the competitor down the road, or the other five freelancer? Why should they hire you specifically? Most people would stare back at me with a blank face. They'd have no answer to that question. And that's because there's nothing unique about what you offer. You are a copycat freelancer. You are offering a service that I could go down the street to get from someone else. Now, I'm not here to shame you if you're a copycat freelancer, but I want to help you get past this massive roadblock that's holding you back from success as a freelancer. If you never break out of this, you're gonna be constantly hit with pricing objections all the time. People can't afford you or you're too expensive. And because of that, you're gonna be trying to compete on price, which means it's a race to the bottom. Just go look at anyone on Fiverr right now. You're gonna have little to no client loyalty because I could just literally go hire any other butt to put in the seat. And there's not much of a reason to keep going back to you, even if I do hire you one time.

And your marketing efforts, the series we're on right now, which is the basis of marketing in this Back to Basics series, your marketing efforts are just gonna be ineffective.

And I want you to think about this kind of mental exercise. It's a paperclip versus a Prada bag.

If you were spending a lot of time, let's just say you're putting together a wonderfully, beautifully crafted marketing campaign for a Prada bag, and you put the same exact effort, energy, strategy behind promoting and marketing a paperclip, which do you think is gonna be more effective? Paperclip versus Prada bag. The answer is obvious. A Prada bag is in higher demand. They're harder to find. They're generally more expensive. And so your marketing effort is gonna pay off versus a paperclip, which I can't think of many things that are more copycat than a paperclip. They're all the same. If I have one paperclip, it's just as good as the next paperclip. There's no differentiation between paperclips.

So trying to market a single paperclip versus a Prada bag is a different experience altogether. And whether or not that analogy really fits here, you get what I'm saying here. If we can create something that is truly unique about you, or at least differentiated, it's called your unique value proposition, or your differentiator. There's a bunch of ways you can say this.

If you can create something that's truly unique about you, you have something that's called a monopoly. If it's truly unique, it's a monopoly. And there's a reason monopolies are illegal in the USA, or they're supposed to be illegal. They're not really, we're not gonna get into that. But they're supposed to be illegal because when you are a monopoly, meaning you own one resource, you control that resource, it means you control the price of that resource, and people can't get it anywhere else.

So there's nothing to keep you from charging the absolute most possible for that resource because you're the only one that controls it. Just imagine if the entire world's internet was controlled by one mega corporation. Imagine what they would charge us just to access the internet. It would be insane. So in some cases, competition's great, in cases like that, but in cases like freelancing, competition is not necessarily a good thing for us. So what can we do to become a monopoly? Now, becoming a true monopoly in freelancing is incredibly rare. So think about it like, how can we become more of a monopoly?