BONUS - LIVE Q&As with Prerna Malik, Beth Gladstone and Tom Garfield

In this special bonus episode of the Being Freelance podcast we take a selection of the regular Live Q&As that we do in the Being Freelance Community and let you soak up the wisdom once more.

You can catch full video replays of all of our Live Q&As in the community. Find out more.

In this episode, we've got:

• Freelance content marketing and SEO strategist Beth Gladstone

• Tom Garfield who creates websites alongside his wife Ellie, as ‘Brand New Notebook’

• Conversion copywriter Prerna Malik of Content Bistro
  

We begin with Prerna, who shared her amazing freelancing story on the Being Freelance podcast in 2018. Prerna has written for online business icons such as Pat Flynn, Vanessa Lau, Joanna Wiebe, Amy Porterfield. And that’s where our first question starts…

1. How do you get to work with high profile clients?

First up - Laura asks:
How did you get to work with such high profile clients like Pat Flynn?

Prerna Malik:

The answer <laugh>, like it or not, is a little boring. There is no exciting story here. I literally pitched Pat Flynn in Instagram DMs. So there you go. <laugh>

Steve Folland:

But how do you end up pitching? Had you been going back and forth? Had you been interacting with each other?

Prerna Malik:

So yes, there is of course the groundwork to the relationship and there was a connection. I had been on Pat's list for a while. For a long time, in fact. His was one of the first email lists we signed up to when we started our business. We'd been on his list for a while, and then as you do, you interact and connect with them. Initially I was very active on Twitter, but then Instagram came in and yeah, I was responding to Stories, commenting, like just genuinely very, very interested in what he had to say and all of that. And then we also met in person at different events. 2017, I did quite a few events in the US. I travel to the US pretty much once or twice a year for different events. And I still remember in 2017, you know, I ended up meeting him at I think two events and then later on reached out to him because I knew that he's working on launches and funnels, evergreen funnels for his programme.

One about affiliate marketing, which by the way, again, that was a course that I'd taken when it launched initially, right? So yes, there was definitely the foundation, a solid foundation of a relationship. And when I knew that he's working and I reached out to him, and so I was like, okay, I'd love to be involved with the team and help with sales copy and with the launch strategy and all of that. And he was like, okay, that sounds interesting. Let's get on a call. We chatted, I walked him through my process and how I would work with him, his team and all that, what I would do - it turned out to be a great experience. He brought me in on another project. Yeah, there you are, <laugh>.

Steve Folland:

Oh, I love it. You see, it's not a boring story! There's so much and it's starting off with that genuine interaction, there's a long tail, but it wasn't forced. It was just genuine.

2. how much should I be spending on a website?

Okay - next question. Tom, another Tom says, how much should I be spending on a website?

Tom Garfield:

Wow. How much should you be spending on a car? That's the question, right? So it depends on what you need it to do. It depends on the size, it depends on all that. But we do have a little bit of a narrower audience here, which is freelancers. So I'm gonna say that you are probably one person and you are running a business that's just yourself and you need to find X number of clients per month, per year. So if I was to build you a website and it was to be no copywriting, no branding, I'm gonna assume that's already being taken care of by someone and you needed five, six pages, there are various options. You can have a template, which is where you pick something else off the shelf and customise it. For a good one you can go somewhere between 1500, 2000 pounds or you could go bespoke, and that's probably about four or 5,000 pounds.

So I would say if you are a new freelancer, you should consider the lower end. I would also consider your current skillset depending on what you do. So one of the mistakes I see made is, let's say you're a copywriter and you're a great copywriter, but you can't design for toffee, but you try to and you think, right, I've got great copy, so I'm gonna try and build a lovely, fancy website and see how I get on. You are far better off playing to your strengths and building a website that is super simple, super basic, keep it clean, keep it consistent. Don't try and do anything fancy with design and colours and fonts. Just write a really great set of pages with a nice heading, content, couple of buttons, and that's all you need to do. That is gonna serve you way better than trying to go too far with whatever it is you're not skilled at. So you can definitely build your websites yourself, which is nominal depending on the platform that you choose. But if you want a professional design, don't go with someone that's charging anything less than four figures. Maybe that's unfair to say, actually. It depends. But typically I would say that's about the minimum you should be expecting to pay for a professional website, but it depends what they're including.

Steve Folland:

Mm. What if you you've done it yourself using a template on Squarespace, for example, but you thought, okay, I've got a bit of money, I don't have four figures, I don't really wanna start from scratch. It's not that bad. What would be a good thing to look at? Would it be, for example, photography or hiring a copywriter or hiring an SEO or getting a logo or...?

Tom Garfield:

All right, so let's say you had 500 pounds to spend and you need a website, you've got no other way of getting any more money than that and you've got maybe a little bit of money to spend. So what I would do is I would get a Squarespace website and if I'm not a copywriter myself, I would get a copy writer to review and edit my writing. You're unlikely to get a significant amount of copy written for that money, but you can certainly get someone to review and give you feedback and pointers. So you can get a really nice simple template. Again, keep it simple. If you're not a designer, keep things consistent. That's the main thing. Don't deviate from your standard. Like pick two colours, pick one font and just keep everything nice and simple. That's gonna do far better than you trying to get fancy with it.

So I'd choose a nice simple Squarespace template, get that set up, pick like four key pages- Home About me, my Services, and Contact and get a copywriter basically to give you some advice and guidance on the copy that you've written yourself, edit, feedback and then go from there. Cuz you can use that as a online business card type thing. Get that four pager with some copywriter support and build it from there.

3. Are regular blogs still worth doing?

This came in from Claire who said, are regular blogs still worth doing?

Beth Gladstone:

That is the million dollar question at the moment. There's a shift that's been happening for a while, but obviously the big news lately, Chat GTP, AI has sort of supercharged where this was already heading. So I think when we think about blogs from an SEO perspective, regularly creating content isn't such a big deal because you could obviously put out 20 blog posts targeting all of your keywords and then let that build over time into your SEO strategy. Publishing blogs on the other hand, regularly, not for SEO, so for example, just to share thoughts, interviews, things like that where it's not so keyword driven. That's the type of blogging that I would say yes, it's definitely still worthwhile.

You're putting out regular content, you're building your brand, building your thought leadership, all of that good stuff with SEO because of what's happening in kind of the AI world - in a nutshell it's now very easy for anybody to put out blogs about anything written by these kind of AI tools and chat bots. And we'll see a lot of companies doing that. Probably the bigger ones followed by the smaller companies for that reason, I think blogs are going to be much, much more difficult to achieve some of these goals. So it's gonna be really difficult to build ranking because there's gonna be so much more content, it's gonna be really difficult to get noticed around key terms because again, the volume of content is going to be so high.

So my advice at the moment to businesses is it's great to do blogs if you're doing it for brand, but if you're doing it to try and rank and to try and get people to your website, you'd probably be better focusing your time on your actual website. And by that I mean your homepage, your product pages, your services pages, your metadata, making sure that that core content on your website is really good, really optimised for search, really attractive to people landing on your website because it'll be far easier to attract people to rank using those core pages than using blogs because the blog landscape is just going to become so competitive. I realise that's quite a long answer, so I hope that makes sense. <laugh>,

Steve Folland:

Oh my god, no, but it's a really interesting answer. Is the answer then to like, create content that gets across our own personal experiences or knowledge, like we have to think beyond just keywords when we are thinking about blogging?

Beth Gladstone:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think there's a few different strategies you could take. So either, yeah, any content that's bylined, so content that's written by you or by somebody in your company, or by an influencer or an interview, something that's bringing something unique that can't be just created by an AI tool, that's gonna be a really good type of content for blogs that will still be interesting. Um, I think niche content. So, if you are just writing blogs with generic keywords in your industry, I don't think you're going to see ranking now or at least not ranking enough that it's actually gonna move the needle and get some people to your website. So anything vague, you know, 'how to start a blog', 'how to use this marketing tool' and anything that's very vague and there's a lot of content already for that on the internet, I'd say it's a waste of time if you can write something very niche.

So if there's a very specific topic or product or service that you offer that no one else is really offering and you can write a blog around that, um, you, you can achieve ranking because there won't be as much content about that on the internet already. And then again, thirdly, as I said, kind of brand content where you're not really trying to rank but you just want to have all this really rich content on your website that will help to convert people, help them to find out who you are, what you do. Those are kind of the three blog strategies that I would still consider. But anything generic going after generic keywords that have got really high competition, I really think your time would be best spent elsewhere.

4. How would you launch and sell an online course without an email list?

Terry asks: What would your approach be to launch and sell an online course without having existing audience? Then in brackets he says - I don't have an email list right now.

Prerna Malik:

Okay, so I'm guessing then would you have social media or?..

Steve Folland:

Terry, do you have a following?... Yes, I do, he says. So he doesn't have an email list, but he has a social following.

Prerna Malik:

Perfect. So yeah, my approach would be to take some of those followers from social and bring them to your email list. You wanna start bringing them to your email list. Alternatively, what you could do is if you want a quick cash infusion, you could pre-sell that course to people on social media and simultaneously get people to sign up to your email list as well. And that could, you know, you really honestly sometimes don't even need like a fancy webinar or a five day challenge or even an ebook or something like that. You could just tell people that when you sign up to my list, you'll get the first lesson of the first module for free and boom, that is your course specific opt-in, right? But why am I keen that you take people from social to email? Because again, social is, you know, the cliched advice, but it is true, it is borrowed land and you want people to be connected to you in a way that tomorrow, if Twitter decides to, well implode <laugh>, you don't lose all of those really lovely humans who've chosen to follow you.

But yeah, the most efficient way would be on Twitter to help people, Hey, I'm coming up with a course that's gonna help you do A, B and C. Be really specific in terms of the outcome and the pain that your programme is solving. Like your programme has to solve a pain area, right? So be it in terms of that, if you're interested, let me know. You can, you know, pre-enroll at the founders' price of... give them a special deal and look at getting your minimum viable number of students in. But at the same time, also tell people if you'd like to get a sneak peek at what I'll be teaching, you can get lesson one, of module one for free and here's where you're going. You can just create a simple landing page with any email software provider. Like literally all of them have landing page functionality. ConvertKit is my favourite, but I believe Flow Desk and Mailer Lite and all of the others have similar functionalities.

Steve Folland:

Yeah, Terry, good answer. Right, especially cuz Terry did actually write a cheeky second question, which, which was around pre-selling courses. So you touched on that without even knowing it was already on his mind. He said, uh, what are your thoughts on it? Presumably you think it's a good idea. He says, I see it recommended a lot and I'm wondering what your thoughts were so it sounds positive.

Prerna Malik:

Oh yeah, absolutely. A lack of email list should never hold you back from launching a course or selling a programme as long as you know you have an audience somewhere. And as long as you know that this is an idea that people really need, I honestly can't convey more because I don't know your audience, I don't know your offer, I don't know your expertise, your background. It's a very nuanced discussion. But on the surface, I think if you have an audience somewhere, you can sell a programme. You just need to be realistic about the results. Not all your social audience is going to be an audience of buyers. That's also true for email lists, but I have seen historically like email lists have more buyers than social audiences. So yeah, that's another reason to get people to sign up for your list.

5. Should I put my freelance prices on my website?

Louise says, can you ask Tom if I should put my prices on my website?

Tom Garfield:

So I have a general rule of thumb, which is, if you can, you should. So if you have fixed prices, then go for it. It's a great way to either sort of eliminate bad fit clients. So anyone that can't afford you, basically, you should probably think about whether or not that should be a 'from' price or a range. So if you have fixed prices, then go for it. Put the price on. If you have a range of prices or packages, that are maybe from a certain amount, then you could do that. But maybe be a little bit careful with that. Cause sometimes when someone sees the from price and let's say it's a thousand pounds, they're sort of gonna psychologically hold you to that thousand pounds because that's the first price they've seen. So they go, oh, it's a thousand pounds.

So, in theory the from price might make people think that that's like the price they're gonna anchor to that price. Whereas if you say it's somewhere between 1 and 3 thousand pounds and then you quote them and it's two and half thousand pounds, they might even be pleasantly surprised and go, oh, it's not right at the top end of that range that I saw. So be careful with that. Um, if what you do ranges from a sort of a very significant amount, so if it's like a thousand, all the way to 10,000 for example, it might just be like totally pointless to put the price on your website. Cause that doesn't mean anything to anyone. 1 thousand pounds, 10,000 pounds, totally different. And so what you should really do is go down the route of saying like, it's a customised service. This is something that is completely bespoke to everybody that I work with. It really entirely depends on you and your circumstances. The best thing for us to do would be to have a discovery call to understand more details about the project. And so yeah, I would say if you can, you should, if you can't, don't try and force it.

6. How do you spend regular time on your own marketing whilst also doing everything else?

Sam aks - Beth, do you have any advice on spending regular time on your own marketing whilst also doing everything else?

Beth Gladstone:

Sam, that's something that I struggled with for a long time. As a marketer, everyone else's marketing gets prioritised. So my own website for a long time was very embarrassing, even though I created these amazing websites for other people. And I think the conclusion I've come to is that because marketing is so broad and there's so many channels, there's so many strategies, I think the idea of marketing becomes overwhelming because we think, okay, we must do a podcast. We must do an email newsletter. We must do five different social media channels. So my advice to you would be to pick one channel, just one channel out of all of those, something that you can do consistently. Because I think consistency and marketing is, is really what makes the biggest difference. So rather than spreading yourself thinly across all of your client work and then try and see your your own marketing, pick one channel. And usually the channel that you can do consistently is obviously the channel where your customers are. They need to be able to see you, but also it should be a channel that you enjoy because otherwise you just won't stick to it. If you're trying to force yourself to do something like LinkedIn or Instagram that you don't enjoy, it's gonna be really difficult. And actually even doing one channel consistently, I would say it is enough to build a profile to make sure that people are seeing what you're doing. So that's personally where I would start. And then you can build on from there.

7. SEO wise, how do we know what people are searching for when it comes to our freelance services?

Melissa asked this question. Tom, something that can be challenging from an SEO point of view is knowing what people are searching for when looking for our services. For example, I'm a sustainability and conservation copywriter, but that's not necessarily what people might be putting into Ecosia slash Google slash Bing when they think they need my services. Do you have any tips we can bear in mind when doing a keyword research for our websites slash blogs?

Tom Garfield:

Definitely. So this is a question basically about low volume search keywords, which means that there might not be many people searching for that thing. It might be very specific, it might be super niche. And so when you do keyword research using tools like Ahrefs or SEM Rush or things like that, sometimes there'll be no data or you won't really know exactly what it is that people are searching for. Cause it doesn't tell you roughly how many people are typing those sorts of things in. The first thing I would say is trust your gut. Because if you are thinking of that, you might be right. I mean be careful of the kind of whole jargon thing - is this something only people in my industry really know is a thing. But if we take that sustainability example, I would say, what are all of the different terms that people might use to describe sustainability?

So is it eco-friendly, is it environmentally friendly, is it green? Those sorts of keywords. And ask people outside of your field for help as well, what would you type in if you were looking for what I do, if you were looking for someone who did sustainability copy. So sometimes the data just isn't there because the data isn't perfect. These tools that you can get to do keyword research can't tell you everything. They don't have all of the data, but it doesn't mean no one's looking for them and it doesn't mean those kind of keywords aren't being searched for. So I would say trust your gut, get lots and lots of advice from other people. Ask them what they would type in, try and collect a little table of the kind of responses and see if there are any common themes. But mostly just go to Google search for what you think it might be. Have a look at the search results and often you'll probably see some competitors or similar websites that maybe used that phrase, but also some other phrases too. So it might be sustainability copywriting, eco-friendly copywriting or something like that. So look on Google itself as well. There'll be featured snippets and there'll be the sort of 'people also searched for' type boxes and stuff. And you can often use that to search for info as well.

8. What makes a great sales page?

Noah asks, what do you think makes the difference on a sales page? What makes a great sales page?

Prerna Malik:

It's a great question. What makes a real difference on a sales page? And this is one reason why, even though I may have the same process for all of our clients, the end result is always very different. And I've worked with clients in the same niches, you know, like, so online marketing itself, I must have done like, I don't know how many sales pages, but not a single one of those pages would be the same is because what makes the most difference is what someone brings to the table in terms of story, in terms of experience, in terms of expertise, in terms of their unique approach. You may be teaching the same thing as a million other people, but there has to be something that sets you apart. Also - the best copy cannot save a weak offer.

Steve Folland:

Nice. Yeah. So often then, if we're solo businesses, we're freelancers selling ourselves, what it might well be is, thinking what makes us different? Why us?

Prerna Malik:

Right, exactly.

9. Is email marketing worth doing if you’re not a good writer?

John says, is email marketing worth doing if you don't think you are a good writer or don't or don't like writing?

Beth Gladstone:

I mean I think email marketing is great, personally. I think it's one of the most robust forms of marketing - it transcends industries, audience types. Cuz if you think about it, somebody reading your email, you are in their inbox where they are all the time they're reading your email. It's very intimate, it's very immediate. And they're gonna spend longer with your content than, you know, quickly scrolling past you on Instagram or quickly seeing something on LinkedIn. So I do think email marketing is great and building an email list, obviously you own that, you have access to that. You can email your email list at any time you like. So as a marketing tactic, yes, I would say it's a strong strategy, but if you hate writing <laugh>, it's obviously going to maybe be quite difficult for you to consistently keep up with that as a channel.

Could you try, even if you hate writing, if there's something that you want to talk about in email that you think would make for an interesting email newsletter, could you try doing like a voice note? There's some really great tools out there like Otter AI - I used to use that when I used to work with CEOs who didn't like writing but had lots to say. I would get them to just kind of talk into this app and then it would transcribe it. So maybe if you've got a good idea and you're quite happy talking, you could do that and then transcribe it and turn it into an email newsletter. Because I know sometimes you're sitting down trying to force yourself to write if you don't feel like a writer can be really difficult, but maybe there's a way around it that you could still send out some good content without that kind of painful process.

10. Any tips for hiring others?

Jo asks - do you have any tips for hiring other people to help on your business?

Prerna Malik:

Yes, <laugh>, lots of tips. So over the years, my husband and I have hired a lot of contractors and fellow freelancers for different projects. You wanna look at three things when you're hiring people for your business. One, what is it that you are absolutely not good at and that you need for your business. For instance, in our case it was design. I am horrible at design. You do not want me to do that. I know Canva's supposed to make it easy. I can mess up Canva too. So yeah, look at the tasks that you are absolutely not good at, but your business really needs them.

The second thing you wanna look at is - what is it that you are good at, but it's something that someone else can easily do for you. And at the same time, it makes a difference to client experience. Especially if you're a service provider - so an example for us was editing. I'm good at editing. Do I wanna do it? No. Can someone else do it? Yes. And they'll probably do it better. So that was like our first hire when everyone was telling us 'you need a VA', you know, we were like, no, we only have the budget for one person and that is going to go to an editor because it made an impact on client experience.

And the third thing is - look at the customer experience, you wanna look at cashflow increase, so will hiring improve customer experience or will increased cashflow and that is where you wanna kind of bring in someone.

So that is how we kind of approach hiring in terms of who to hire. And then once you've hired them, or maybe during the, in actually during the interview process, first thing, you wanna make sure you have a very clear job description. This in fact should be in your job ad you know, like exactly what would you want this person to know, do and be an expert in for you in your business. And that means like not just tasks, but also is there software that they need to know? Do you need them to be available at certain hours? If you've got a business that requires that or it's a customer support role? So you have a very clear list of the role responsibilities and what are the expectations. And then you also wanna start with a paid test task.

Once you narrow them down, a great way to do this is a paid test project. And once that is done, our process is we generally start with a three month contract depending on, so for instance, if it's for say a social media manager, even an editor or you know, you wanna start with a three month project with someone who will be doing a single project for you, like a designer, you wanna start with maybe a smaller thing like, hey, could you do this landing page for us and get an idea of their process, how responsive they are, all of those things. You wanna look at all of those things before saying, yeah, this is someone we want on our team for a very long time.

11. Any tips on coming up with content ideas?

Paul asks, do you have any tips on coming up with content ideas?

Beth Gladstone:

Kind of a broad tip: one of the things that I tend to do is when I get email inquiries from potential new clients or even questions from existing clients, I always put all of those questions into an excel, into like a Google sheet. And then when I'm trying to think of ideas of new blogs to write or LinkedIn posts or things like that, I go back to that spreadsheet because the way I think of it is if my ideal customers that I'm working with, my ideal clients are asking me those questions, there's probably others like them who are asking the same questions. And if I can answer those questions in my content, it could kind of help to attract the similar types of clients.

Steve Folland:

Nice. That's good. Do you know, nobody's asked this, but I will - there's a thought isn't there around like repurposing your content - as in we always feel like we should be creating those new ideas, creating new content and so on. What are your thoughts around how best we can make the most of the stuff we already have?

Beth Gladstone:

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question and something that I personally do for my own marketing. Because we think that when we put something out, everybody's reading it, everybody's absorbing it, and actually the percentage of people reading it is really tiny and even the ones reading it, they would probably need to see it two or three times before it sinks in. Um, so I really personally want to move away from constantly coming up with new ideas and thinking about, you know, if I've written a really great email newsletter, can I take some snippets of that and turn it into Instagram content? Can I turn it into something for LinkedIn? How can I repurpose it a blog post? You could turn that into again, Instagram or LinkedIn content because um, you could make a really nice carousel post, which is text based.

That format does really well on both of those channels. I think repurposing is gonna be a really smart way of doing marketing going forwards and about how you can take one idea or one concept and make it work across three or four different channels just by formatting it slightly differently. What I wouldn't do is blindly just use the same content. Each channel has a slightly different audience, a slightly different way that people like to engage with the content. So you do need to make a tweak. So kind of repurposing rather than just blanket putting the same copy out content out everywhere. But yeah, I think repurposing is a great marketing strategy.

12. WhaT is a backlink? Should we be trying to get them?

Angela gets the final question for Tom - what is a backlink? Backlinks is something that maybe some of us hear about and as if they're important and maybe we don't really know what the heck we're talking about and whether we should be bothered trying to get them.

Tom Garfield:

Yeah, this is a really common one and actually very commonly misunderstood by people who aren't technical. So a backlink is simply a link that points from a website somewhere else to your website. So let's say I had a feature in an article on the Daily Telegraph or somewhere or The Guardian or whatever, and they said, this is Tom Garfield, he does websites and they linked to my website. That is a backlink for me. So that link gets pointed to mine and the value of a backlink is Google cares about backlinks. They treat backlinks as kind of like votes for your website and signals of I guess trust and authority. So if you've got lots of backlinks and then from really, really good sources. So BBC News or even just like BeingFreelance.com for example, I have a backlink com the beingfreelance.com Directory and it's got some value for me, which is nice.

There's value in those links because Google scans all of the internet all the time, and they crawl everything and they connect everything up and they say, oh, this website is linking to this website, therefore it must think that this website is a good link to visit. And it gives you some credit. Basically Google says, okay, great, they think they're good. So we will trust that they are good. So the more links you have and the better quality they are, the more likely you are to rank highly in search engines. And getting more links is basically for freelancers, is probably a case of doing a bit of PR. So appearing on podcasts, trying to get featured on guest blogs, articles, anywhere that you think a link might be a natural place for someone to put on their website is a good idea.

Steve Folland:

Yeah. And if you have been featured somewhere and they haven't linked to you drop them an email. So Being Freelance was listed on Enterprise Nation's website recently and they didn't actually link to the podcast and I was like, no, that would've been great, and then I thought, hang on, I'll ask and they did it. So yeah, that's interesting what you said about the Being Freelance Directory though, because I was gonna say, does Google like see... cuz we could presumably go and put ourselves on loads of directories, right?

Tom Garfield:

Yeah. Yeah. Google counts different types of links in different ways. So a directory link is, no offence Steve, but a directory link is slightly less valuable than being a featured article on the Guardian's website for example. Cause it's a national very highly regarded sitel

Steve Folland:

Butwhat if you'd been a guest on the podcast, right? So same website beingfreelance.com? Does it go - that's a directory? Oh, but that's a whole page about Tom?

Tom Garfield:

Yeah, it's pretty clever. So it takes all of the context around the page as well as just the link that it appears on, right? So if it's a page that's all about that person and the anchor text is, 'Tom is a website designer' and, and the anchor text that you use, the link text that you use is the website design of it. Those things matter. So yeah, in theory, a page all about you with a link to your website is more valuable than being listed on a directory with lots of other people that use very similar layouts and stuff like that. So yeah, different links have different value, give you different amounts of credit. Basically that's how to explain it

Steve Folland:

Yet another reason to appear in guest posts and podcasts and all things like that. Tom, thank you so much!

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