The Freelancer's Guide To Automating Your Business | Part 2

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 272

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Hello and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, hi, hey, hello, welcome. Glad to have you here. This podcast is for creative freelancers who offer services and they want to earn more money from their skills without selling their souls. If that sounds like you're in the right spot. For my returning listeners, this is a part two episode. Also for my new listeners, this is part two episode. So you want to go back to last week to get the entire spiel of what we're going to talk about today because we are literally picking up where we left off last week. Last week, we talked about getting started with automation. I talked about why you want to get started with automation, which is because you want to do the boring, tedious, repetitive stuff less often. You want to maybe earn more per hour for those of you who are on flat rate pricing, or you just want to get rid of the crap you hate doing if you're on hourly or day rate pricing for freelancers. And you want to make sure the things get done that need to get done that you might be forgetting to do or avoiding to do because if we're being honest with ourselves, we avoid, we don't want to do something, especially us creators. We're like, I could do that later. I'll do it later. I'm not going to do it later. I forgot about it. And then it never gets done. So automating certain tasks that you're forgetting to do or avoiding until you forget to do is a wonderful thing. So last week, I went over all the tools of the trade, the different automation tools that help with these different things. And we talked about automating the fulfillment process. What in your fulfillment process as a freelancer, meaning the services you're paid to do, what of that can you start to automate? I gave a bunch of ideas around that last week. Hopefully, you got some takeaways from that. That episode hasn't aired yet as the time I recorded this. I did two this week because it's a two-parter. So I don't know what the feedback is yet. Hopefully, it's positive. So this week, we're going to talk about automating marketing. We're going to automate some of the marketing tasks in your business. We're going to talk to this in what I feel like is a logical order of discussion, from when someone first finds you to the second they hand over their hard-earned dollars and become a client, and then you start the onboarding fulfillment process, which I covered last week, so we're going to do this in reverse. Last week, fulfillment. After you get paid this week, marketing, before you get paid. So before I get into the specifics of automating your marketing as a freelancer, I want to talk about the three core areas of marketing so that we can talk about each of these in turn. The first part is lead generation. How do you actually generate leads as a freelancer? The second part is lead nurture. How do you stay top of mind, build trust, build credibility, get people to know, like, and trust you? And then the third part is sales. How do we turn someone from that lead into an actual paying client? And there's a lot of opportunities within those three steps or three core areas that you can do automation. So we're going to start first in the lead generation area. If you've already listened to last week, you might remember that there's three parts of automation. There's a trigger, there's an action, and there's a result. And the first area I want to talk about is your website. When we start talking about marketing, your website's generally what I consider the marketing mothership. It's the central hub in which all other places point to. This isn't the case for every business, but this is the case for most modern businesses today. The website is the marketing mothership in all other areas point back, whether it's your social media, whether it's paid ads, whether it's referral partners, whether it's word of mouth from friends and past clients. They're going to send people to your website, or they'll share your name with their friend or client or whoever. And then those people will Google you and then find your website, or they'll find your social media profiles and then click through your link in your profile to your website. All roads lead back to your website in most cases, or it should. And your website serves two purposes. Do you know what those purposes are? If you do, bonus points to you. If you don't, I'll share those with you. I guess it's three purposes actually, but for the terms of automation, it's two purposes. The two purposes for automation's sake is create a marketing lead, and the second is create a sales lead. The third purpose and the purpose that is beyond the automation side of things is actually pre-selling your services so that the person actually wants to buy before they ever talk to you. But that's a different discussion for a different day. That involves copywriting and messaging and et cetera, et cetera. We're not going to talk about that right now because that's not part of the automation discussion. So two automated pieces that we need to discuss here, sales lead and marketing lead. What are those, first and foremost? This is just terminology you should know.