Amy Wees has been making money online since 2007 – what started as a freelancing gig has grown into four online businesses today. Amy’s long list of achievements in eCommerce includes selling, podcasting, consulting, and coaching. That’s why many would agree that if there is anyone worth asking for advice on the best ways to make money online – it’s Amy.
In today’s video, Amy is joined by Nechole Whitlock, another successful online entrepreneur. Amy and Nechole join forces to walk us through 4 legit ways to make significant money and build an online career from home. Watch below:
What Can We Learn from PRO Online Freelancers Amy and Nechole?
Together, Amy and Nechole lay down four ways to build an online career or business – with actionable steps and resources to help us get started. Below are some of their pointers:
- Start from the easiest. Don’t overwhelm yourself with difficult tasks that might burn you out right off the bat.
- Use your present resources – skills you already have, items that you own that can be sold.
- Brainstorm all the things you’ve done. Go through your resume and list down as many tasks you’ve done in your previous jobs – these are the things you can do naturally and have income-generating potential.
- Research the services that people are looking for online and find your match.
- Determine the work required for you to deliver. What process should you follow? What deliverables is your client expecting? What kind of info do you need from the customer to complete the process?
- It’s never too late to learn a new skill. Take advantage of free courses available on Udemy, Coursera, and other online learning platforms.
- Sign up on as many online working or eCommerce websites as you can – e.g. Upwork, Fiverr, Mercari, Etsy, and more.
- Remember: your first time doesn’t have to be perfect. Use your first customer as a testing ground – and don’t stop improving!
Top 4 Ways To Make Money Online
So much has evolved in the last five to ten years. Every day there are more income-generating opportunities available online than one would have imagined. Honestly – the digital world is so vast that there are actually more than 4 ways to make money online. But we are here to talk about the most effective, sustainable, and easiest ways to do it.
So, without further ado – the top 4 ways to make money online – from easiest to hardest – are:
1 – Work on Small Tasks
The online world has become a resource for an unlimited range of small but profitable work-from-home job opportunities. There’s data encoding, customer service, copywriting, graphic design, and so much more. Check out Upwork, Fiverr, and other similar platforms for small tasks. Most of them offer pay rates from $5 to $30 per hour – depending on the complexity of the job or the qualifications required.
2 – Sell Stuff You Have or You Can Make
Several marketplaces allow the selling of pre-owned items. You may have a piece of furniture, appliance, or fixture that you haven’t used in a long time – but that others may find useful in their own home. If you haven’t used something for 3, 6, or 9 months – it may be a good idea to sell it instead of leaving it to gather dust in your storage. Go do your spring cleaning and set some of your stuff aside.
You may also enjoy making stuff – food, clothing, accessories, art, etc. Use your talent to make something you can sell with minimal capital involved.
3 – Offer A Service
Once you’ve had more experience working on odd jobs online, chances are that you’d discover a niche of services you could focus on. Amy first started writing product listings for herself and other people on Fiverr – and got good at it over the years. Her freelance copywriting career has now progressed into her own eCommerce consultancy firm where copywriting is one of the services she offers.
4 – Coordinate A Service
Nechole’s experience in eCommerce has led her to master the ins and outs of managing a business. She learned the value of gathering team members with individual skills that each fulfill a role in performing a service. This has taught Nechole to coordinate services from the experts in her team and deliver those services to customers who need them. Now she makes money from services that – although she may not be able to provide as an individual – her team is more than qualified for. Coordinating services may be one of the most difficult to pull off out of the 4 money-making opportunities mentioned here – but it is the one with the most scalable potential.
So – which one of the four money-making online jobs sounds promising to you? Perhaps you’ve already started doing it? Whether or not you’ve started or you’re just getting ready – remember that every expert was once a beginner. Every professional was once an amateur. Don’t let the fear of failure stop you from doing what you want to do. And if you ever need a little push – don’t forget: we’re rooting for you. Good luck!
Transcription
Amy Wees: Well, thank you everyone for coming to this presentation of freelancing 101. You know, I really wanted to give back in some way, I’ve been trying to find ways every day to give back because I see so many in my community, just losing their jobs losing their income, even business owners really not being sure what to do not, you know, sure how to do it. So it’s really important to, to help and to give back. So those of you who have skills that can give back to others, and can maybe help them, now’s the time to do that. So if you’re a note taker, like me, I’m a copious, note taker. Don’t worry, at the end of this presentation, there’s going to be a link for you, where you can download all the slides and all the notes, I actually wrote up a whole guide, like a full guide to this. So you guys can download that. This is not a sales presentation. I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m not here to get you to sign up for something. That is not why we are here, we are here to help you. We are here to help you be able to get creative and make some money online how to give you you know, there’s so many blog posts yesterday, when I was creating these slides, I went through it and I looked up blog posts about making money online. And nearly all of them give you this like quick five steps and don’t tell you anything actually real. And then you’re just kind of left on your own, or you’re left to sign up for something. So I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m here to give you real steps to get started today. Okay, so we’d love to see your comments in the you know, throughout in the chat and online in the Facebook Live. Ask your questions, and we’ll do a question a q&a at the end. So let’s get started. All right, who the heck am I? And why am I talking to you about all this stuff today about freelancing? Again, I’m not here to sell you anything. But I just wanted to tell you a little bit about me and who I am. So you’re not like who’s this crazy lady that is online right now on my Facebook screen or in this webinar talking to me. So I’m a mom, I’m a wife. I’m a cat lover. I live in San Antonio, Texas. I’m a military veteran, I retired from the Air Force in 2009. And then continued as an Air Force civilian for many years. But over 18 years in, in either working for the Air Force or being in the Air Force, and that’s where I met my husband, I invented a product. It drove me crazy that my that I had to clean the cat litter box. And it really stunk it cause migraines. So I invented a product, it’s called 50s. That’s what you see here on the screen. And it’s just a better way to clean the cat litter box and eliminates odors and lets you use the litter over and over again. But anyway, that inventing a product took me on a journey. Because, you know, I didn’t know how to. I have an MBA, I have a couple of business degrees, but I didn’t know how to bring a product to market unnecessarily. I had never done that before. So I went on this journey. And that’s what kind of led me here today to talk to you about freelancing, because freelancing is one of the many things that I do as an entrepreneur. So I’m a business coach, a mentor, and I have four online businesses. So one of them is my pet brand, that you know, I sell products online. And then I also have a digital training business and a podcast for Amazon sellers called the seller roundtable. I have a deals website for buyers and sellers called rebate chat. I have a consulting firm called amazing at home. And I’m also a public speaker so you can kind of see all the different things that I do. But I’m also a chick with cool friends. You know, it’s good to have cool friends, they get you through things. So today I’ve brought one of my cool friends. I couldn’t have done any of these things without having a good network and having good friends. So definitely, I want to encourage you on your Freelancer journey to build up your network, talk with other people who are doing it learn from each other join. There’s so many great Facebook groups. There’s so many great LinkedIn groups, join other groups and network with other people who are doing this already. And so I have brought one of my friends along today to help me out with this presentation. And her name is Nechole Whitlock and Nechole, did you want to say hello to everyone?
Nechole Whitlock: Hey, everybody, I’m so glad to be here. I’m here to support me and also to support you all because we know this is A for some a very challenging time, a very uncertain time but it’s awesome. Oh, an opportunity. So hopefully you’ll see that because me cares about your success. I care about your success, and we want to make sure people understand that there are solutions out there to help you right now.
Amy: Yes, awesome. Thank you for being here and you call, you’re a great friend. All right, so we are gonna get right into it, how can you make money with no money? You lost your job, your hours got cut? What can you do so in case you don’t have a money tree growing in your backyard, or your front yard, I have been looking for one, I haven’t been able to find one. So I had to create my own. And so I’m gonna go over some ways to make money online, that required no money at all, nothing to sign up for no scammy weird thing, you know, just from easiest to hardest, what are some ways that we can make money online. So the first way that I’m going to cover is working on small tasks. So there are all these websites out there, that you can do small things that only take a few minutes of your time every day. And you can earn money by just following some instructions and doing some small tasks. So I’m going to give you a bunch of examples of those. And then secondly, you can sell stuff you already have or that you make. So I’m not trying to get you to go out there and buy a bunch of inventory or anything like that. I’m not trying to get you to buy products from somebody, I’m going to show you how you can sell the things that you already have, or the things that you make, and without any meetups or anything like that. So that’s cool. And then the third thing that I’m going to talk about today is how you can offer a service like freelancing using the skills that you already have. So you’re doing the work from start to finish, we’re going to cover all the steps. And then finally, the hardest one to do is to actually coordinate a service. So you’re offering the service, you’re outsourcing it to a freelancer, you’re managing projects and delivering a bigger service. So let’s start with small tasks, we have this cat over here rolling in the money. We all want to be the cat. But you know, you can really earn a lot of money, you know, doing small tasks. And so really how to how do you do small tasks online, here’s some steps to get started. So first, I want you to discover, I want you to research, I want you to learn about all the possibilities, I’m going to show you where you can learn. And then the second thing is I want you to choose something that seems very straightforward to you, I don’t want you to pick the toughest thing, you know, like, Oh, I’m gonna go become a web development tester. And I’ve never done anything with a website before. No, instead, maybe pick something like, I’m gonna do a survey, because that’s something that’s very easy for me to do. And it’s something just to give me the opportunity to try it right. So and then you’re going to sign up. So you’re going to go find the website that you’re that is making the offer, you’re gonna sign up, you’re gonna follow the instructions and make your first dollar. And then finally, what are the requirements to do small tasks online, the things that you need, most of the time, you’ll need a computer, it’s really hard to do it without a computer, you can do a lot of these tasks with your phone. But a lot of them require you to be able to see a screen, so you will need a computer. And then most will require you to sign up for a free account, fill out some information to verify that you’re not a robot, a monkey or a child or a cat or something like that. And then you’ll need a way to get paid. So a lot of them will pay through PayPal or Venmo different payment methods. So you don’t worry, they’ll provide you instructions on what to do. But these are some ways to do that. So let’s talk about some small tasks that you can get paid for. So there’s so many cool things. The pay ranges anywhere from $5 to $30. An hour or more. I mean, it’s crazy. Yesterday, my husband Rashid signed up for we were as we were discovering some of these things, he signed up to test web UIs web user interfaces. And he just had to go through, firstly sign up on the computer. And then he had to go through on his phone and check out a website. And he had to find it was a website for restaurants. And he had to find a restaurant in the Los Angeles area and just kind of talked through, okay, I could filter this on the app and I can do this and for just that it took him about seven minutes to complete that task and to record his experience as he was doing it. And that would have earned him $10 So Seven minutes of work for $10. Yes, it took him some time to sign up. But hey, that’s pretty cool, right? So what are some things you can do? You can transcribe text from watching videos. So you can watch a video and you can actually type up the text, the only thing you need is a computer the ability to type, you can do that@rev.com. And there’s a bunch of other websites where you can do that. And then next, you can make a list of things. So you know, when you when you are searching Google, you can look across and see all these top 10 ways to make money online, top 10 robotic vacuums you know, you can write a list like this in informative list and get paid to do it at list verse.com. And then finally, you can get paid to talk about what you know. So if you’re an expert in a certain area, maybe you’re a cybersecurity expert, or you’re really good at project management or anything, you can go to clarity.fm. And you can sign up to actually just talk about what you know, people will pay you to talk about what you know, amazing. You can teach or tutor online, you can teach English, you can offer tutoring and many different subjects. You can translate text in different languages. So if you speak different languages, there are many translation services, you can become a virtual assistant and help companies get stuff done. So I have a few of these virtual assistants that work in my companies. And they’re wonderful. They do everything from helping me with copywriting, to checking emails to responding to customers to posting on my social media, all kinds of things. And every single business out there could use the help of a virtual assistant. So there are many services where you can become a virtual assistant and offer your services. And if you’re thinking oh, man, they only want overseas people. Actually, many people prefer people that are in the United States, because English is their first language. And if it’s copywriting or something like that, that they need done. That often is very helpful for them. You can become a customer service agent. So there’s training involved, but it’s they’ll definitely train you and you can answer customer service calls right from your home. American Express is hiring right now. You can test mobile apps or website interfaces, like I told you about Rashid doing this with, with this company yesterday that he just signed up for, you can complete small, simple, quick tasks on sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. So they’ll they’ll provide the instructions, you just go out and complete the task. And you can earn a few dollars for every task. And it really adds up once you get really good at it. You can write reviews for products or services. And finally, you can even offer tech support, there’s a site called pulse.com that allows you to offer tech support. So the next category is selling stuff. There are lots of and this is the big concern about selling things is that you’re going to have to meet someone, right? That’s not we can’t do that right now. But you have a house full of stuff that you probably don’t need anymore. And other people actually do need. And there are all these websites now where you can sell things that you already have in your house online. And you don’t have to do any meetups, you simply when the item sells, you just ship it out. And you can buy shipping right from home on your computer, you can print the label right from home, on your computer, package everything up and drop it off at the post office or have the post office come pick it up at your door. It is that easy ups comes to our door every day and picks up packages for us. So that’s the thing. This is one of those sites that I love called mercker. i You can add this app on your phone or you can go to it from your browser. And you can see the things that have sold in the last however many minutes. It’s not toilet paper. It is things like Nintendo Mario Kart, jewelry shoes, a t shirt and Oculus quest. I mean, these are the things that are selling right now. So if you have just anything in your home, you can sell it online in many different ways. So let’s talk about some examples here. So you can as I mentioned, you can sell anything on a site like mercker i.com You can sell gently used kids clothes, if your kids closets need to get cleaned out right now and you’ve got stuff that is in good shape. So that kid is in.com you can sell your adult clothes poshmark.com You can sell parts on eBay. So so many people buy parts I know our TV the other day The power supply died. And so we could have just bought a new power supply for it on ebay for about 30 bucks. But if you have an old TV or old electronics laying around listed for parts, obviously I wouldn’t want to ship my whole TV. But you know, if you know a little something about that you could list it for parts as well. You can sell things that you make. So some people are making masks right now and selling them on Etsy. And then Amazon handmade also has, you can list anything that you make on Amazon handmade or etsy.com. You can sell old or new electronics and phones on swap up, I buy things from swap all the time, because I don’t like having contracts on my phones, through my phone providers. So I just go ahead on swappa. And I’ll buy something that is gently used like new, and then I own it, it’s for half the prices, I would have paid for it brand new, and it lasts me for years. It’s why buy even offers plans for you to be able to take care of those those electronics long term. So if you have a new phone and you have an old phone laying around, somebody might want to buy it listed on swappa.com, you can rent out your car@touro.com and you can rent out your house or an extra room@airbnb.com. Now obviously, we’re a little bit limited on renting our car and house right now. But I just want you to know about these possibilities for the future. Nicole, did you have anything to add here? Yeah, I
did. So um, regarding Makari, if you go and just do a random Google search for sites like Makari, there’s so many additional sites on which you can sell anything and everything. In addition to Macari and Poshmark, I wanted you to know that those are additional options. Um, you mentioned earlier about UPS picking up. So I know right now for several for UPS and and a lot of the major cities, they’ve paused some of the requests for pickups and same thing for USPS. So you will probably have to drop it off at this point. But again, that’s a temporary thing for many different reasons. There’s a lot going on. And so there’s an increase in the number of deliveries and you know, and so they are running into those types of challenges, but the service does exist. It’s just on pause right now, if you contact them, and they say no, we can’t come pick it up. Just wanted you to be aware of that. But there are, don’t overlook the opportunity to sell on Facebook marketplace. as well. A lot of people are not thinking about that because you can ship. Depending on how you put the listing of you can ship and not have people come to your house. So just do a Google search for sites that are you can just do a Google search sites like Macari and Poshmark. And it’ll give you a list of sites. And that’s a great opportunity. And don’t forget the old one which is out there forever, which is Craigslist. Craigslist is typically the hole you drive by. But again, you can work it out with the person that says hey, I will only ship this item. And you work that out. So wanted to make you aware of that. And then there’s also some Facebook groups in which you can barter and or sell your items. If you have a lot. So it’s stuff you haven’t touched in what this is the perfect time to do spring cleaning. And so if you sit down and kind of go, Oh, have I touched this thing in the last three months, six months, nine months, or did I buy something and still has the tags on it, that’s an opportunity to sell it, it doesn’t always have to be closed, it can be any number of things. If you have extra charger cords, if you have an extra box fan and you have like anything bigger things are going to cost you more for shipping. But go through your house and kind of see do a real good clean sorting of have I used or touched or even look for this thing. And the last 369 months if you haven’t touched in nine months or a year, and it’s probably something you want to consider selling and you can make money doing that. That’s how I got started in E commerce. I actually started selling stuff. I had my first big garage, I had multiple garage sales. But after that, I started selling on eBay. And that’s how I got started.
Amy
Yeah, that’s actually how I got started too. In 2007. I just started flipping my textbooks on Amazon because a lot of people don’t realize you can actually list used items on Amazon as well, what’s known as merchant fulfilled and then when the item sells, you can just ship it off. You can buy shipping right on Amazon, and you can ship it off. So that’s how I got started on Amazon in 2007. It was a great way to get rid of stuff in my house and a great way you know, get rid of clutter and make a little extra money at the same time. And it was kind of fun to to discover different things and how they would sell and just learn the industry. Yeah. So let’s get talking about what do you do when you’re on one of these many sites that we mentioned. We gave you a couple of examples, but how do you do this? Like what is the deal? So we want to give you As we mentioned practical advice on how you can actually get going. So over here on the right, I have some examples of some supplies that you might need to get started doing this. And their supplies, if you most likely already have in your house, you might have a printer, you might have cardboard boxes, or, you know, envelopes. to ship things out, you might need a measuring tape so that you can measure the dimensions of your boxes, possibly I use a food scale, actually to weigh boxes, that works just fine. That’s the same as the postal scale, it will work just fine. So a scale could be also helpful. And then your phone, your phone is the best for taking pictures and making listings. So all you have to do is sign up on the website. Usually you can use your Facebook account that makes it really easy or your email address, then you just install the app on your phone so that you can make very quick listings. And you can get notifications of what sells that’s really helpful. You can list the thing and make sure to include a description using keywords that people search for. So online, the only way to be found is actually to put words in that people can search for human readable words. So if you’re selling a measuring tape, don’t call it nothing, you know, don’t say, Hey, I’m selling this thing, say, a measuring tape that is, you know, four feet long, and you know, whatever. But make sure you’re actually describing it, that there’s something that goes into that so that people can search for it and find it. And then finally follow up when people show interest. I know on Mercury, for example, when someone hearts my item, and I follow up with them, I’m much more likely to get a sale. And then when it sells, you’re going to receive a notification and an email letting you know, hey, congratulations, you sold something. And every single one of these sites has instructions on what to do. So for example, if you sell something on Amazon’s merchant fulfilled, or Etsy or any of these your merch arrived, you get the email you go in, there’s the option to purchase discounted shipping, you measure the box that you’re going to be sending it and the weight and you can print your shipping label right at home, tape it on the box and drop it off at your nearest US Postal Service. So let’s say you sell three things this week. Well, you know, usually you have about one to two days of handling time. So you can go ahead and wait until you have two or three or four things in the queue. And go ahead and pack them all up on one day, and then drop them all off at one time. And that way, you’re not going out constantly doing these things. And then finally, really just you know, if you don’t have a printer or anything like that at home, this might not be the right thing to do right now. Because you can always go out to a UPS store or something like that, and use their printers or a FedEx store, use their printers and stuff like that. But right now, since many are in quarantine, maybe this is just something that you want to explore and list later. All right, so I’m
just gonna just add a little bit more I’m sure. Oh, regarding like selling things around the house, the one thing that you will find is that if you sell smaller items, or items that are can be put into like clothing and always be put it in a padded envelope, you sell smaller items, your shipping cost is going to be more manageable. Whenever you have something delivered, always save your boxes. And so what we do is we splice our boxes open to flatten them and then store them in a specific place you can store them in your closet, or you can store them in your garage, then that way your boxes available to you. Which is always important, because sometimes, you know you don’t have enough and shipping supplies. packing tape is always good, you can order the packing tape. So there’s a couple of sites you can go to like bubble fast is one where you can order some supplies. If you walk through your house and you do an inventory, you have a pile this high. That means you got stuff that you can sell. So you may want to go ahead and place an order, I will tell you getting shipping supplies from USPS is absolutely free meaning you can get the boxes go to usps.com and then they’ll deliver them to you right now the delivery may be a little bit delayed, but you can pre order boxes, so you don’t have to buy them. If you need any other shipping supplies and you don’t want to go out you can order both the fastest one and then shipping costs. If you want to do a cost analysis on your shipping costs. You might look out for the pirate ship. That’s another option, pirate ship.com And then that way you can manage or mitigate some of your shipping costs. If you don’t have a printer, there’s ways to get around that. So what she had mentioned was, you know, go to your local UPS Store, what you can do is that you can save the file off to a PDF, and go to your FedEx with the zip drive or with the flash, and they can actually print it off for you. So that’s another thing that you can do. There’s so many different ways you can get creative about getting the shipping out, even if you don’t have a printer.
Amy
All right, thank you, me. Cool. All right, so now we’re gonna get into freelancing. This is how you can offer a service of some type. Even if you are doing something like sewing, if you know how to sew, you could offer sewing, you could offer laundry, you could, there’s so many things that you can do here. So we’re going to talk about how do you get started freelancing online? How do you actually create a job for yourself online? Now I started this, when I started my business, when I invented the litter box cleaner and started that business and started selling some other products online, I had to create product listings. And at first I was hiring it out, I was going to sites like this and hiring it out. And I found that I could really it really had a huge impact in my sales. And I wanted to really learn how to do it. So I taught myself how to do it, I first hired it out and I started doing it myself, I started learning more and more and more about it. And then finally, I started offering it as a service because I got really, really good at it. And in the beginning, it really helped me in my business because it was a way for me to help other people. And for me to earn a little extra money to be able to put into my business. And wow, it took off, I started consulting people. And that is how I now have a full time full up consulting firm. It all started with doing freelance work online on fiverr.com. So very, really an interesting way for things to turn out. So I’d love to kind of tell you guys how I got started with this and how you can get started with it as well. So here’s the steps to getting started, you’re first going to brainstorm all the things that you’ve done, think of the things that you have done for your organization. If you have volunteered and put an event together you have created flyers, anything that a business could possibly need. If you have done things in your work. If you have you know at work done marketing plans, or anything like that, just make a list of things that you do or you like to do, if you volunteer for the PTA, and you create T shirts, like all of those things are skills that people need, and people hire out. So write down a list of the skills that you have and things that you really enjoy doing. And just have them there. And then the second thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to do your research. So don’t worry, we’re going to talk about each of these steps in depth. So you’re going to research services people are looking for and find a match to something in your list. Next, you’re going to decide on what your final product is going to be and determine the work required to deliver it. Then you’re going to design your offer. So people know what they get and how to order your service. You’re going to advertise your offer and get your first customer and deliver your first order. So let’s go through each of these steps. First step is to brainstorm. Make a list of the things you’ve done. I’ve put some examples here. These are just you know some examples of work that you could do teaching coaching, taking pictures, organizing, painting, sewing, laundry, cooking, fixing a lot more drafting emails, reviewing products, making a short video, designing a social media, do you post on social media? Do you like to do that? Well, guess what? That’s a skill that not everybody likes to do that sometimes they like to hire it out. Maybe you make flyers, maybe you make posters, whatever it is, whatever you like to do, you can actually get paid to do it. So make a list of all the things that you love to do. A quick tip is to go through your resume, go through your job description and see what some of these skills are. To get your your brain moving on. Oh, yeah, I have done that. Oh, yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve done that too. Okay, cool. So make your list.
I was going to add to that. Also, don’t overlook things that you know how to do potentially naturally, or because a lot of people don’t think they think about sometimes you think about your job and what you did in your job and now your job is misplaced. But maybe there’s things that you knew how to do naturally. Like I’ll give you an example. So we do piano lessons online. That’s a service, someone who knows how to play the piano and knows how to play the guitar. Again, that’s something that’s potentially somebody else is looking for. Or you know how to fix Michaels or you know how to detect something that’s wrong with the car. So always look at things you know how to do naturally, maybe that’s not your job. Maybe your job is, I don’t know, your hair salon specialists, but to really know how to sell really well. So you can do different things to show people how to do things. So what do you know how to do naturally as well, no, overlook those gifts?
Amy
Definitely not. I mean, I’ve never been a writer. But now I am a copywriter. So definitely look at the things that you love to do, and things you do as hobbies, things you do around the house, that other people might want to hire you to do. So when you do your research, think about the various you know, the you want to look at what are what kind of things are people looking to get done? What kind of things are people looking to hire for? So get out there and start looking? So you want to look in your industry? For example, if you’re in cybersecurity, what are the things that businesses are looking for? Are there specific services that big companies are offering, or even firms are offering that you could offer a subset of yourself? If you’re in retail, like like I was, you know, or still am, you know, I knew product listings were a big thing, like people really needed help with that. So that was an opportunity that I saw in my industry. So you know, look in your industry, look around for the things that people are asking for, and then look in your neighborhood groups and discussions. I’m sure in your neighborhood Facebook group, people are looking for things. Hay is, you know, does anyone know a good lawnmower? Does anybody know a good you know, somebody who does this or that? Look on nextdoor.com thumbtack.com is a website for Labor’s website for people who have skills, things like teaching someone how to sew things like teaching, you know, piano, any any of those things. And then Facebook groups Facebook marketplace, you wouldn’t believe how many people even here in San Antonio, they list they’ll create, they’ll cook a bunch of food, and they’ll take pre orders and they’ll deliver food for people. And then Craigslist, obviously is another place to look for what are what kinds of things are people posting, and what kind of things are people looking for. And then Freelancer websites. So you can go to fiverr Upwork, you know, that comprehensive list that we saw on modern day jobs.com. Go on those websites and see what people are posting an offering. Maybe you can offer a subset of it, or even a more creative version of that that would be more appealing based on your research. So you can see over here in this picture I have on Fiverr somebody offering social media content, and then somebody saying I will provide professional video editing. And then finally, just narrow down your list to the ones you’re most interested in. Next freelancing, your product and process. So once you’ve chosen, hey, I’m going to do a sewing class or I’m going to do a piano class or I’m going to do a flyer or a social media post. You really need to write down your product and your process. What is this offer in its final step. So you need to document what the customer gets, what is the customer gets. So you can see over here I have this example from that social media offer on Fiverr. She says what I’ll provide in this gig a social content calendar, including copy track links and posting times, Twitter, Facebook and or Instagram. And then she says for $550, she’ll do 10 posts per month design, copy, hashtag research, she can delivered in three days. And she these are what is included a page and channel evaluation for keywords and hashtags research 10 social posts and custom graphics. So how do you do this? First of all, you’re going to choose the easiest thing, the most straightforward thing that you think you can provide today right now, right start to finish. And then you’re going to just write down the steps that it takes to get you to your final product. So you know, what do I have to do to give this person 10 posts per month with design plus Copy Plus hashtag research? What steps will I have to take, you’re going to want to write that down. You’re going to write down the information that you need from the customer in order to do the work. So if you’re offering As social media posting, what information do you need from the customer? If you’re offering a piano class? What information do you need from the customer? And what information do you need to give them back in order to connect with them virtually for this service that you’re offering? If you’re doing someone’s laundry, okay, you need their pickup address you need, you know, pricing you need, you know, what kind of things are the things that you need from them? And what are the things that you need to provide? The next step is write down what your process is going to be after receiving these customer requirements. So okay, your piano lesson? What do you need to prepare that for that piano lesson before it happens, or if you’re doing social media posting, what are the things after you receive the customer’s information that you’re going to have to do between then and delivering the order, write that down, figure out what that process look like, and then figure out how long it’s going to take you to actually do that work. So for example, for us, when we do product listings, we have the customer fill out a form on our website that tells us about their product tells us about you know what their unique selling points are all of those things. And then we take that input form, and we write the listing, we use all of our own tools and everything we tell the customer, okay, it will be delivered via email within seven to 10 business days, that gives us enough time to do all the research, do everything that we need to do. So in the beginning, you definitely want to kind of have a basic idea of how long something’s going to take you what are the steps of getting it done, what do you need from the customer, and what does the final product look like. And then finally, anything you need to learn before starting. So take the time, if you pick up, pick something that maybe you aren’t sure, like you want to get into social media posting, but you don’t know what they mean by copy? Well, maybe you should watch some YouTube videos about offering a social media service, you can nearly find anything on YouTube, or in blogs, you can really research and try it for yourself, try doing it for yourself for a little bit and practice it before you actually make the offer. But the reason why I asked you to choose the easiest thing, first is so that you can really take it from start to finish. And then you can build on from there, maybe you’re just going to design one social media post to begin with. And then you’re going to build that up to a service. All right, then next we have, you’re going to write up the details explaining who it’s for, what the offer is, what you will deliver, how long it will take and the pricing, so you need to actually design the offer. So you really want the customer to be able to click on your offer. If you’re going to post it on a Facebook page or something like that. You want it to look really, really appealing. And then you want to create an image or video to convey your offer. canva.com is a great online service to create very easily create images. And you can put them in different sizes for Fiverr for Facebook, for Instagram, and it’s free. They also have a paid version, but you can really get a lot done with the free version. Next. loom loom.com allows you to create a video and record it and actually deliver it in the link in a link to the customer. So you can create a video right with your browser. And maybe if you’ll notice on Fiverr a lot of people have videos explaining their service, you can create one of those videos right on loom and download it right there, it’s free to do so check it out. If you want to send videos to your customers, maybe you want to send a video explaining what it is that you’re delivering. That’s a really great way to deliver a service do that on lynda.com. It’s really easy to do. And then finally, after you’ve written up your offer, you want to copy and paste it into the web forms on the freelancing website, Facebook pages, your email lists, all of those types of things you want to you want to get the information into the offer. The final step is advertising. You have to tell somebody about your offer. So you you don’t have to pay for advertising. You can post it on Facebook. I have this example over here Reddit has a reddit.com really great website has a subreddit called slave labor. And you can see this person is offering that they will edit your photos to look like vintage film I in fact no one app that will do this on my Phone, like in two seconds. So this person is saying They’ll edit your photos to look like vintage film 10 photos for $5. Well, there you go. So they’re giving, you know, their Instagram page, all that that’s free, it’s, it’s free to have a Facebook page, it’s free to have Instagram page. So you don’t even necessarily have to use freelancing websites, you can use this process to research what people are looking for. And you can offer it right online. So you’re gonna post it everywhere, posted in your LinkedIn industry groups posted in your, in Facebook groups, hey, I’m doing this thing, you know, and also create content. So if you have a YouTube video, or YouTube channel or a Facebook page, create a little video explaining how to do that, you know, and then you wouldn’t believe how many people they don’t actually want to do it themselves. But now that you’ve showed them how they trust you, and they’re going to hire you to do it. So it’s a great way to get the word out about your service to establish your authority, put some stuff out there about how to do it. And this is perhaps the most important part here. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s not going to be perfect. It’s you know, if you let fear kind of take over your ability to give it a try, then you’re never gonna get started. So don’t don’t think it has to be perfect. Just pick the simplest thing, pick something very simple and give it a try. Give it a try. Use your first order to really just streamline your processes and grow from there, don’t try to make it too complicated. Keep it very simple. And just get started.
Thank you just going to add to that, you know that the advertiser offer, one of the biggest things that stops people because we’re everyone, the change makes everyone nervous, is I just want to remind everybody, all of the stuff that’s free. Like, you know, we know that Facebook is free, Instagram is free, Pinterest is free, Twitter is free, YouTube is free. So you have the opportunity to create accounts everywhere. Once you’ve kind of determined you know, what your offer is, and make sure your offer is where people can find it. Whether you think they’re on that platform or not. There’s more and more people on social media now, more than ever. So if you don’t have it out there on all of the possible platforms that you could just like spend a day and create accounts on as many social media platforms as possible once you’ve figured out what your offer is, and put it everywhere, but it everywhere. I will say I know, read it did a post about using some social media tools and how they’re offering either some specials or discounts or free. And so HootSuite once you’ve created all of your social media accounts, Hootsuite is a tool for listing your items and listing on multiple social media platforms simultaneously. So you know, just get the accounts created. Use that to advertise your offer. And then you can go and I think you have to type in HootSuite and COVID-19 and see what their offer is, and use that to do the advertising on a daily basis or maybe a couple times a week, absolutely free on all the social media platforms, so you don’t have to type it every day. So just putting it out there as something else to think about.
Amy
And I mean, I love that tip, Nicole, but I do want to encourage people if you’ve never done this before, that HootSuite is an advanced thing. Like if you just start on just one platform, like I’m going to create a Facebook page or I’m just like I just started on fiverr.com People are already there looking for services, I found a service that I could list there. And that way I didn’t have to worry about driving traffic to a Facebook page or, you know, getting kicked out of a Facebook group because I was offering something
Oh yeah, no, I wouldn’t recommend doing any.
Amy
Yeah, I mean, I agree like that the Hootsuite is a great is HootSuite or any of I’m on a platform called Social blue social view. That is a great thing for anyone when you’re ready to grow, right? When you’re ready to really start making your own offers and doing your own thing, then that is a really great, great opportunity to be able to streamline your social media posting.
But don’t overlook the opportunity to make sure the easy platforms where you can create an account. Go do that because people can’t find you if it’s like going to Walmart if you’re looking for green towels, you’re either gonna go to the green towel section if they moved on the green towels. The lawn and garden, you’re going, okay, they’re not where I can see them. So make sure that you, you take the opportunity where you have free platforms, you can manually create an account. And when you’ve designed your offer, and you fine tune that, then put yourself out there. So you can get paid to do the thing that you know how to
Amy Yes, exactly. If anything else, start on a site like fiverr.com, offering your your service. And then at the same time, build your brand across Facebook, Instagram, across some of these pages, you don’t necessarily have to start with your own website, start with some of these free social media just build a page. And that way, you know, when you deliver the product, maybe you know, you put your branding at the bottom of the page and you’re delivering a PDF, that’s the delivery or you’re delivering a Word document, you put your branding, and the next time somebody goes and looks for you. They go, Oh, who’s that? Who is that Freelancer that I used? Oh, wait, I remember they had a brand here. Okay, let me go to their Facebook, let me see if I can find them on social media, because they might be able to, you might not be on Fiverr anymore at that point. Right. So um, so make sure that you’re actually building your own assets. So step one here is when you get your first order, think of this first order, think of this first customer that you get as your mentor, right, make this first offer super affordable, basically put it out there and say, Look, I’m doing this to build my portfolio, I’m a I’m a skilled graphic designer, or whatever, you know, I’m doing this to build my portfolio. You know, I’m offering a really great, really affordable offer right now. Here it is, right? Oh, under promise over deliver, really, you know, expect to kind of break even this first time and, and just use this first time this first offer that you do like the very first listing I wrote for someone else, of course, I had written a bunch of my own listings by then. But it was really just about focusing on okay, how can I deliver the best possible product and am I missing anything in my process along the way. So after I delivered my first order, I then went back and refined my offer. So now Oh, wow, I didn’t even realize like I could have offered these back end keywords. And I didn’t even include that in my offer. Let me go back now and make my offer look even better, even more appealing, and then grow and expand your offers. So now I’m not only offering a product listing, but I also offer, you know, product photography, or I offer this or that you can grow on your existing offers or expanded to new ones. Maybe you started with posters, but now you’re also doing flyers and business cards, you know, start with something very simple, but then add in some different things, see different things that you can grow and learn from there. And then this is what we were just talking about at the beginning of this slide is building your own assets. So you know, as you grow, you’re gonna gain more followers on your Facebook page, your email list, MailChimp is a great mailchimp.com, it’s free, it’s a great place to grow an email list. So you know, that’s a great way to just get people to sign up and subscribe to your email list, Instagram, Pinterest, all different sites and stuff like that, to grow your assets, those are called your assets. That’s how people can actually contact you afterwards, you can start building up these assets. So you can then grow off of these third party platforms, platforms like Fiverr and Upwork and freelancer.com. They come with expensive fees, they’re taking a cut of whatever your offer is. So if I’m offering something for $5, if I’m writing a blog post for $5 on Fiverr to get started, they’re going to take some of that, and then they’re going to put the rest in in your account, right. So as you grow, you’re going to want to eventually move off those platforms, or a lot of people don’t they upgrade to a pro account and they just become like a pro provider. I know people that teach on Udemy full time. That’s what they do. So there’s so many different platforms and things that you can do. Don’t limit yourself, just get out there. And don’t forget about having cool friends, you know, get out there and join the Facebook groups for freelancers. join the Facebook groups for sellers if you’re selling your stuff I know there’s a read. There’s a subreddit on Reddit called mercury and I joined that just to learn from different people selling things on work right? And then finally become the expert. So start creating content like hey, this is how I create really cool posters. This is how I create really cool flyers, create a ticket have video YouTube video posts, create an article on LinkedIn, you know, do a Facebook Live like we’re doing right now. And, you know, grow your audience that way and really start establishing your authority in the space. And before you know it, people will be asking you to speak, there’ll be asking you to speak here I am on the stage in Hong Kong at the Global sources, major trade show Summit, teaching people how to differentiate their products. So you wouldn’t believe how much starting off as a freelancer and putting out content, you don’t, you wouldn’t believe what it can lead to. It’s just really, really cool. So it’s a great way to get started. And finally, we have one other thing. This is like the hardest one, right? This is for people that are project managers, people who are experienced at providing services, I’m going to give you an example. This is where you’re coordinating a service. So maybe you aren’t a web designer. For example, I’m not a web designer, but my company offers fully built e commerce websites for people, right, this is not my offer. This is just an example offer here. But I’m not a web designer, I work on my own websites, I know my websites, but I don’t do all that I hire that out, I hire freelancers to work on my projects. And then I deliver a final product, a final website to my customers. So the difference in actually offering a single service and coordinating a service is really just on one you’re not having, you’re doing all the work yourself, and then the other, you’re actually outsourcing the work. So you could even do this, you know, as you grow your following. You know, I can outsource product photography, because I know what’s required. I know how to manage that product. But I or that project, but I’m going to outsource it to people who actually take photos. I’m not going to be the one taking those photos. I know, Nicole, for example, you do funnels for people, right? Do you do all the work for building the funnels? Tell us a little bit about how you do that?
Yeah, so I’m a former project manager. So being a former project manager, you’re you’re you do different things. But what I have a team that I work with, and people found me because of my funnels because of the funnel set that I created in some of my summits. But yeah, if you pull together a team and determine what their skill set is, what they know how to do and where you know how to do what I’m good at, is getting the requirements from people of what they want to see on the back end. And then assessing that against what my team is capable of doing and what work we have. And so again, when people reach out to us, we do a boatload of different things we will do some of their social media marketing for we’ll create marketing videos, we will do their page content for their funnels, we’ll build their funnels, if they have a Shopify store, we’ll do the front end. But again, it’s pulling together those resources. So how I found I’m still trying to remember how I found my resources, but on some of the sites, you could go to Fiverr. And if you know how to advertise what service you want to offer, and you know what the expectation is, and how much time it really should take to do it. You could put together a form that people could complete of what they want, and you could be the middle person. And then once you get the requirements from them, send it over to the resources as you’re going to do the work. And then be the middle person to review the work before you deliver it to the customer. And you get paid for that service.
Amy
Exactly. So if you happen to know somebody who needs posters and flyers in your local community, for example, you don’t have to know how to design posters and flyers, you can go out and hire somebody on Fiverr and, you know, look at their requirements that they’re posting on the job and hire them to do it for $5 Get a really great poster put together communicate your customers requirements and charge your customer $30 For that same poster, you know, and you’re outsourcing the work to a freelancer website. So that’s another way it’s called. I think it’s called Drop servicing. So you know, kind of look that up. But definitely you can do this from either major projects all the way from simple all the way to major product projects.
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