5 Ways To Give Yourself A Raise Today

[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the six figure creative podcast. I am your host Brian, Hood. I'm here with my Now you've got a creepy mustache.

Brian, baby. Talk to me. I'm here. Brian, baby. Talk to me

Mark accurate is back. Hey dude, it's going to have you back on the five guys.

You're always a hoot.

sexy as ever. I grew more hair. Things are going great for me. Just so you know my life's perfect. It's awesome. So

thanks for

Right. I know just talking to you before, before we started recording to that is

Uh, it's going awesome. Did

I, have a new, sexy voice, speaking of sexy. And I know what everyone can tell. It's like,

all right. Wait, let me, let me cut you off. Okay. So when I, when Brian first called, I was like, you look great. You've lost weight. Why do you sound like rod Stewart? And here he is, he it's a little raspy. He's bad boy, Bri,

Harry host, mark and bad boy, Bri hidden it with an episode for six figure.

Creative was good. Talk to me.

Yes. So this episode is going to be a good one today. So let's actually get to the, to the meat and the meat and potatoes. This episode, [00:01:00] this episode came to me on a walk the other day. And I was like, I really want to talk about this. And I know, you know, this topic, like the back of your hand, because you are like, you're like a lifelong entrepreneur.

Like how long have you been essentially? Self-employed

I've never had an actual job, a

thug life chose

mated.

old are you? 27 times 365. You are 9,855 days. Unemployed.

Going on going on 65, dude. I feel like it. Oh my

God.

Did you hit, you'll hit or you hit 10 K days unemployed this year. I'm about to hit 5k in, in a couple of months. Yeah.

interesting. Okay. I'm

cool with

that.

You need to put it on your, I have my 5k day on my calendar. Just to celebrate. You need to have your 10 K day

on

your

well, you know, you know, it's funny the first dollar I ever made, I mean, aside, you know, mowing my lawn. Oh my God, mom and dad. I still have no idea how to. Okay. So I guess if you will know, I was self-employed I was sad, you know, I had, I had some leverage, you know, the HOA was going to get pissed off, but anyways uh, and say buy my [00:02:00] first real dollar ever made, it was playing with a band, awful metal bands, one of the worst things I've ever been a part of.

But you know, like when you're younger, it's just like, I want to

get out

Young metal bands are always garbage.

Dude, it's skinny jeans and insecurities, for sure. It's awesome. But um, wait a second. I'm still there anyways. we showed up and we thought it was going to be like, you know, cool hip venue.

And we showed up, bro, it's a smoothie shop. We played a smoothie shop. We got paid $5 and everyone left to go hang out with their girlfriends here. I am to Wiebe, you know, picking up my drums, like everything. I take the five bucks and I'm like, I'm a professional now. That's it baby?

And you went and bought a smoothie and blew it all.

oh for, yeah, for honestly terrible.

But they've gone under since that smoothie shop,

and you're still here alive and kicking, which is the whole point

of bringing

I'm alive and kicking. I am more beautiful, making more cash than ever in my whole life did.

my gosh. Oh

my

gosh. That's

guys. It's, it's always a hustle. It just, [00:03:00] you get new hustles as you grow. That's it?

so the, the subject of the day is basically giving yourself a race as someone who's self-employed, whether you're a freelancer business owner or owner of multiple businesses, like both mark and I, cause we both serial entrepreneurs with ADHD and we can't stop at one. The beautiful thing about what we have is that we can give ourselves.

Pretty much anytime we want one, if we're willing to put in the work. And this is a really interesting thought to think about, because if you have a day job, if you want to raise, you've got to kick ass and kiss ass for a long time. Before you get a raise. If you ever do, you have a gatekeeper sitting there who determines whether or not you get a raise.

And for some people, they have to go back to school and spend a bunch of money and spend years upping their education to get paid more so that they're worth more to whatever place is hiring and dishing out the salaries for those positions. If you even have a salary, if you're not hourly, the beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur self-employed create a freelancer is that you can give yourself a raise today.

And this whole episode is going to be breaking down several ways that today you can start working on to give yourself a raise, which [00:04:00] is a beautiful, beautiful thing, mark.

I know you've done this a bunch of times and just even playing this episode out with you, it's fun talking about some of the things you've done in your own business. So this will be, this

will be a

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's honestly, you know, it's kind of funny because nobody really talks about this, but this is by far the most powerful thing about being self-employed now, again, I've never had a real job. But you know, I have a lot of friends who have nine to fives or, you know, maybe they're contracting or, or whatever, but at the end of the day, you know, I always hear the argument, uh, oh, okay.

I was hanging out with one of my buddies this morning. He works at a Vox media and, you know, he used to work at new Yorker magazine. his job is to like work in sports PR specifically. And I was talking to him and I was like, bro, like how much he, you know, we were just talking about money.

And I was like, you know, if you were doing this on your own, you, oh my God, the PR that you're doing and what you have accomplished, you can make like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And he was like, ah, just like, don't feel like I'm qualified yet. And I was like, oh, that is the worst mentality.

It's because you're insecure, dumb bosses are telling you [00:05:00] that you're not good enough, bro. You're sick. Like, let me go in on it with you. And you know, of course trying to get that 10%. It's not going to happen,

Yeah, there you go. but

that's actually, that's actually interesting thought is

if you're, getting paid by a corporation to do a job, you can almost certainly, I mean, you should, without a doubt, be able to charge more than that on your own, as a freelancer doing it on your own,

because the business that hired you is making way more than they're paying you off of your work, which is the dead giveaway that you are worth. It. You are, you are credible and you should be able to make the money on your own.

Yeah. Remember that the salary they give you is with their margin built in. So you can probably get the whole, the whole pie, you know?

Yep. So the whole episode today is basically supposed to be a challenge for you to think through what you do for a living as a creative or freelancer or whatever it is you do for money. If you're self-employed to always have the mindset that you can earn more. And I know in my life, in Mark's life, I know that when we we've hit times in our lives, where we have to make the money, for [00:06:00] whatever reason, whether it's like a tax bill coming up, or we're trying to buy a house, or we're trying to get that engagement rate, or we're trying to get married.

Cause I know you got married recently and I

got

married a little bit before that you just bought a house. I just bought a house a couple years ago or a year and a half ago. So like I understand that. when we hit those challenges, we always make it happen because we have this mindset that like, we can go make more.

And, and as, as business owners, we get that privilege, which I think is a really, really good thing about being self-employed. So let's, get into this stuff, cause this is

the

fun stuff. So.

Method number one of giving yourself a raise is by far the most obvious.

So we have to talk about it. It's just raising your damn prices.

Uh, Mark. Talk about, talk about that first bullet point there.

All right. So here's the biggest lesson in raising your prices? All right. Even a 50% of the people opt out and they're like, dude, you're not worth it. Well, if you only have half the customers, you're still making the same and you're working less. So there's some math for you right there.

You know, what's funny is I D I tried that exact math on the episode and it became our most popular video on tech talk with over a half a million views now, but I up the man [00:07:00] and that's why it was so popular. So now that you did it right the right way, it'll be fun for our take dog editor to pull that clip, put it on there, see if it goes as viral.

I know it won't because you didn't put the math error in there. So you got to put the

Uh, All right, so this is, this is real math. You make $1, give me three. That's how it that's.

How the,

that's got a Ponzi scheme. You go to jail for that.

oh, God, it's great. Yeah. You just raise your prices, you know, there's going to be here's the thing is any time you raise your prices there's two ways to kind of go th th things that kind of pop up in your head, especially if you're freelancing. If you don't have any existing work, then, you know, raising your prices, it's not tangible.

It's not really affecting anybody. You just have new people saying no, or yes, but if you have, you know what I'm saying, if you have a existing base of clients, this is where it gets tricky. And I think a lot of people would disagree with me on this. Here's kind of how I try [00:08:00] to look at things. If you raise your prices, you are deciding through, you know, history of, unless you're like a crazy narcissist or something.

You have some history to back up that you were providing valuable work for someone, And you know, if you have that, proof to yourself you're stating to the world that you're worth something more. Now, when people bought in at a lower price point, you were saying to the world that maybe you were worth less, or maybe you were more of a chance, you know, it wasn't a guaranteed success.

Right. Well, what I try to do and just how I've kind of always approached business. And I think it's also why I've had, you know, clients and customers and people that I've worked. For years and years and years is because I honor people when they meet us. And even if that means I have to take a little hit, as long as it's not really affecting our margins and we can at least break even, I think it's worth it.

So like if somebody got my original [00:09:00] rate, they took a chance on me and that what an honor that is, if you, if you're a risk initially, and you're not charging, you're the new guy they're taking a risk on you. I want to reward people longterm. I personally, I think it's a tasteful way to go

about

Yeah, I'd do the same thing, but for all these new people, I don't do that. I raised

the

rates

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. No, but what I also say is the people who have those deals like, Hey, I'm going to keep you locked in. But if anybody asks you, you're paying this new rate, just so you know, and then I have the new rate for everybody else. So it's kinda like, you know, you gain some homies over time and everyone's like, wow, what a guy, you know, he really hooked me up and he stayed true to his word.

I think it's a, long-term good thing

Yeah. And I want to put a caveat on that because one thing I hate to.

see, and I, I just see this all around me from people that I know in my life is that you have a client on a recurring service, whereas like services every month. And that's the point where you don't want to be grandfathered into this old rates because you're doing the same amount of work you're providing even more value because you're getting better and more efficient at what you do.

But they're stuck in that grandfather rate [00:10:00] sucking your time and Soloway. And so there, there has to come a time where you need to either fire those old clients or raise your rates, which in turn will usually fire clients for you because they don't want to pay the new rates. Again, your 500, our client will never be your $5,000 client.

So you have to make that decision and I'd rather make the 5,000 our client happy. Then it continued to placate the $500 client.

Yeah. And there, there's also some nuance to that, right? It's like if it's specifically a client business, you know, the more people that you have, the less time you have with each of them, you know, what you can do sometimes is, you know, a good way. If you want to kind of bridge the gap and meet in the middle and still have your same margins, is you can just offer an alternate experience.

So to speak with that you know, if you've got someone who really was there for you early on, you could barely pay rent, like scraping by with rice, you know if they were paying you 600 bucks a month and now you're a thousand or something like. Well, you can say, Hey, I still want to do this for you.

Thank you so much for being here. Here's what we can do. This is what's taking up a lot of time. So maybe instead of you being able to call me anytime we have a [00:11:00] messenger bot or something like that, and you can have, you know, one of your you know, an intern or somebody who's like helping out, or just you responding to that, and it's still value, but you know, there's ways to bridge red bridge that gap.

Yeah. And that's, that's more getting into the systems building stuff, which we'll talk about later in this episode. But, but when it.

comes to giving yourself a raise today, you can go raise your rates. The next client you talk to, you can raise your rates with an existing client that you have on a recurring service.

You can raise the rates today and give yourself a raise. Moving. there's actually a one or two more things. I think we need to discuss in the raising your rates category, because this is a really, really, really good way to give yourself a raise, but it's scary. It's really, really scary.

So there's there, isn't an additional thing you can do here that if you don't want to raise your prices on your clients, there's actually a way to still give yourself a raise and that is decreasing the amount of time it takes to fulfill. And I think you kind of started to touch on that mark, which is maybe systemizing processes, maybe hiring really affordable help, which you've done a lot.

And with VAs in the Philippines, I believe mark, how many do you have working with you at this

point?

Well, we have vias like [00:12:00] all around the world at this point, but it, it depends. I mean, the team can range anywhere between three people and 20 people on a given month. So it just depends what we

need.

Yeah, it's on-demand labor. Like it's, it's when you need help, you can get them to, to fulfill on specific projects, specific deliverables. And it scales based on the amount of work that you have on hand. So it's not like you have someone on payroll constantly sucking away your monthly budget, which is a great

way of doing it.

Maybe we should have a whole episode on that. I feel like our audience could really, and I say cheap labor. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I made it in a way That there is

something called geo arbitrage. Gr

arbitrage is when you're in an area that's high income and you can hire labor in an area that's low income and the quality of life for them at that low income is as good or better than what they're

already

getting paid.

I gotta tell you my, my team halfway across the world they live better than I too. They get it, they get paid, you know, it's, it's just the dollar can go very, very far and you want to make sure that you're fair with everyone and it supports a good lifestyle. So there's a way to do a taste.

[00:13:00] yeah. And I remember when like, VA's were a big thing, this was probably five, six years ago. And I first heard him, like, you can hire labor for like three to five bucks an hour. I'm like, Ooh, that sounds sketchy and mean or whatever. So that's kind of the gut instinct, but then you realize that the cost of living in a lot of these places is so

freaking low, that, that, kind of, that

kind of income goes a long way.

Yeah. And there's also like a lot, I mean, I've made every mistake in the book with, with hiring overseas. So,

you know, you learn over time to

do it

Yeah, this is not an episode about hiring overseas, but this is a way I'm just saying that there's a way to increase the amount you're essentially earning on a project by decreasing the amount of time you spend on that project. So I know that the first time I figured this out, this is when I was Mixing heavy metal music in my studio and downtown Nashville, Tennessee earning roughly a hundred bucks an hour, which is great. Like that's, that's like that's an income that I think most people would be super, super happy with. and I was already at the upper limit of what I could charge at that based on my niche, like the type of clients I'm working with, these are bands that don't have labels they're self-funded.

So there's not like I can't charge tons and tons of money for [00:14:00] what I'm doing. So the only way I could give myself a raise was by decreasing the amount of time I spent. And so what I did is I created a detailed step-by-step checklist of all the non-creative left brain tedious tasks associated with mixing heavy metal.

And then I put it into a checklist system and a whole tutorial video on how to do those things. And then I outsource it to an assistant of mine in Atlanta, and it wasn't geo arbitrage that we just talked about a second ago, where it's cheap labor overseas. I probably could have done that instead. It was somebody that I was paying a really, really good, fair, relatively higher wage of like 30, 40 bucks an hour to do these tedious left.

Awful tasks that I hate to do, but

it allowed me to where, when I worked, it's only the creative right brain side of my, the stuff I'd love to do this stuff I'm passionate about. Right? Like I have the sign behind me that says it takes more than passion. Well, if you build the system out, all you have to do with the things you're passionate about.

And then it also did this wonderful thing of leveraging my time of earning about 300 bucks an hour, give or take sometimes more, sometimes less on projects because I'm just opening up the session and all the tedious scraps done at that point. I'm just mixing, I'm just being creative and [00:15:00] making myself sound amazing.

Yep. There's also just real quickly on that too. Cause you said, you know, just as an idea here, if I was talking a little Bri, you're like, Hey, I want to go from a hundred to 300. Yeah. You could, you know, decrease time by you know, having someone else, do you kind of more of those menial tasks that you're not into, but another way to do it is, you know, you can change what the value delivery looks like and the fulfillment in which to get there, which means your pricing model.

So you can

change

from

Wow. Nerd, can you break that down for us? Non

nerds?

That's what I was about to do. And you interrupted me. You can go from $100 an hour, which truly incentivizes someone to work slower, or you can do a project rate and work really quick and then get a bunch more projects. So, you know, you can have limitations within a project rate if, if you wanted to do that.

And then you systemize getting that project done and you limit how many variables and like revisions or whatever are associated with that project. And, and you just you're on sales. You're just getting a bunch more projects in your.[00:16:00]

Yeah. So that is what we call a productized service. If you want to know more about that, we actually have a very in-depth episode about this with Brian castle and episode 169. The episode title is earning $10,000 per month with a product high service and only two hours of work. So juicy title, because it's a juicy subject.

And it's basically going deep on exactly what we said here. So if this sounds like the way you want to give yourself a raise, go listen to episode 169.

All right. So raising prices again, there's two ways to do that. Raise what you're actually charging, and then you can also lower the amount of time you're spending because that's the basic accomplishes, the same thing as increasing your dollars per hour. Great way to give yourself a raise. Let's talk about the next way to give yourself a raise.

This one's a little less scary, little less complex. To me, this is a lot more tangible and probably one you could literally do tonight as well. And that is creating a long-term followup process. This sounds boring. It's not sexy. This won't be a big topic on tech talk. This will not do great on tech talk.

It's fine. I'm sorry. SAB. My Tik TOK guy, but we got to talk about this because this is an easy way to give yourself a raise. Mark, do you want to take this one away?

I would [00:17:00] love to take this away my dog. Okay. So a long-term followup process. Honestly, I really hate that. I think I said this on the last time I was on here. I just hate the term follow because it's just annoying.

It's like a little gnat.

yeah. Yeah. It's just like get fly away. Here's the deal is building a business in my.

My view in life in business is there should never be a You pay me mentality. That's short-term thinking, you, someone can make a million dollars in a month, but he's probably never gonna make it again. Cause you know, the product probably wasn't that great if it only took a month to make that much.

Right. So what I view as, you know, follow-ups or, you know, whatever is and building a good business, a tasteful good business that you can be proud of. Long-term in, it could be art, music, photography, video, whatever is, you're just creating friends at mass scale. You're building trust at mass. And what that means is you're meeting people where they are at.

[00:18:00] Okay. And that's the hardest thing because everybody, especially if you're early on in your business, you're just in starvation mentality. You're like, I got rent due in five days, I'm trying to take my girlfriend out to dinner. She don't like me anymore. Sucks. Everything's terrible. I need to get a sale.

Right. But the thing is, is that you can't pressure someone into giving you their credit card. That's robbery. You know? So what I always try to say is I'm never trying to get a checkmate. I'm just trying to stay on the chess board. Okay. Just stay in the game. You know, when between, when I was only producing at a certain time, and now I run a music licensing and publishing company that pitched.com, plenty of, you know, it, we talk to massive companies and enterprise sales take a long time, but at its core, It's very similar to when I was just a producer talking to artists and I still keep in mind, I'm still working on, on records, you know, but the process is always the same is where are they at?

How can I stay [00:19:00] relevant in their life? Can I actually help them? Because if I can't, then there's no point in us working together. Can I offer them some value? Can I enter them? Someone else? You just want to stay in the game when they need something. And they will know when they need something, they will ask you.

You just want to be front of mind, keep the conversation going, let them know that you are truly there to actually help a sale can take a day. It can also take five years. And that is fine. If you don't land something, the first conversation you have with them, don't be upset with yourself. You know, that's part of it.

I'm not down to give someone two grand. If I just met them, unless I've known about them for a while, you know, people want to protect themselves,

everyone's in it for themselves sometimes, you know,

so there's a bunch of different ways to do this and stay top of mind with people, but that's the whole key. I'm going to talk about this in a second, but I want to touch on something because you were basically talking about lead nurturing mark, and we have a whole episode on that episode of 180 3 called lead nurturing, changing the way you think about client relationships.

about 10 episodes or so [00:20:00] ago. But there's another way of doing this, that I kind of propose is really relevant and something you should always have as a freelance. this is Kind of what's your proposing mark. it's the email follow-up and it's the very much like annoying gnat follow up that doesn't have to be that way, but it can be if you're just like, Hey bro, just following up. How are things going with with business? How are things going with the band?

Like that's the kind of way I've done it for years, but there's a, there's an art to this and part science to this. The science is make sure you were sending an email to someone at the appropriate time, over a long period of time. So just to be more tactical with you, if someone reaches out for a quote and they don't.

Keep following up, stay top of mind with them on like nice, easy to do touch points. Once every three to six months, that's an easy cadence to have a CRM helps for this, which is a customer relationship management system. You can put reminders in there so that if you check your CRM every day, it'll say, oh, today I've got to follow up with this band that hit me up for a quote a year ago, or this, this potential client.

You know, if you're a wedding, photographer was like this client, they were, their wedding got pushed back. So now I need to follow up with them to make [00:21:00] sure I'm hitting their inbox at the right time or whatever it is that you do. It's just following up. So if you're at the right place at the right time, top of mind, and you can come up with better ways to follow up than just saying who did fallen up, how are things going?

You can be better than that. But I swear to God that is better than nothing because most people listening right now have no longterm followup process. And it's better to be the annoying Nat than to be completely forgotten. I'd rather be the annoying that

they completely forgotten.

Yeah. That's the thing is like, and also. You know, you're not 99% of the time. You're not actually knowing people like there's, there's this company that I've been talking to for, I don't know, the past six months or so December and January, they just work gone. I was like, I don't know, what did I do? I smell, they can't smell me through email.

So it can't be that. And I was like, what's going on here? They're not responding. Turns out they, they had a build out like this whole crazy thing that had nothing to do with me. And they were like, Hey guys, we're doing like a crazy amount of royalties this month. We had to build out this new system, blah, blah, blah.

Sorry. We didn't get back to you. Yeah, [00:22:00] deal's still on. This is great. Here's here's the stuff. And I was like, cool. You can't take things. Personally, people get busy, but if you just stay top of mind, people are happy to just, nobody's going to like scroll back in their texts or emails,

I remember following up with a client for, as a potential client, they'd hit me up for a quote. They want to know pricing. I gave them pricing, they were interested, but kind of like dragging their heels. I followed up with. don't remember the exact numbers, like 20 something times over a year and a half period.

And by the end of it, I landed the client. I got paid and they thanked me for following up with them. I, I have never, even, and that was back when I was just being in that. I was like, just following up, how are things going? Just following up? How has this just felt like I was just doing that, just following up email that John McLucas kind of poo-pooed on the episode we did with him on episode 180 4 uh, where we talked about how to keep plants from ghosting you, it still worked and I never got, I never got pushback from clients.

I never got told I was

annoying.

I only got thanked.

You're not annoying. Unless people tell you, you are, you know, like [00:23:00] that's the best thing I've ever I've ever heard. And you know, there's one deal that I'm working on right now. No lie. We're on email 64. Like I could show you a screenshot. We're on email 64 back and forth. And we're just about there, baby.

And I am stout. Like it's it, it takes a while, but you know, those can build really fruitful relationships. You're not trying to convince anybody. You're just saying, Hey, I'm here for you. If you need it.

let me just give you a couple more things here on this note. This is the reason why this is giving yourself a raise is because if you're not top of mind, when it comes time for the project to go forward, then you're not going to get hired.

So the, the more you're top of mind with the more people, the more you're going to get hired, which is the more you're getting paid, which is giving yourself a raise. Huh? Think about that. But there's another thing here. Even clients that have paid you before you should have a long-term followup process, because if it's, unless it's a type of client that has only one time, which there's probably some examples where like you would literally only be hired for this one time ever, and they're never going to need it again.

think Chris gave the example of like the wedding, the wedding [00:24:00] band artists in his city that makes like these really cool custom wedding. You're gonna get hired one time and they're hopefully never going to come back again. So that's an example of it, but if you're doing anything like me and Mark's background, which is a music production, the client's not going to come back all the time, but they will eventually come back assuming they're still around.

So staying top of mind, long-term even with past clients, to me is even more important because they've already paid you. They've already given you money. Now it's about increasing the lifetime value of that client. And staying top of mind is a big part of that. You can do that through lead nurturing, which is like all sorts of forms of things, of content, to networking to whatever.

Or you can do it.

through email or text or phone calls or whatever. Mark, how many times you just randomly call me out of the blue, just to stay top of mind with me.

Well, how many times do you pick up? Let's talk about that Bryant. No. Oh

My phone's on do not disturb twenty

four

seven, and you've figured out the trick of calling twice in a

row.

yeah. I literally just call you until you pick up or pick up.

You're good at it though. You're good at staying top of mind and you always do it in a non-abrasive aggressive.

Well, that actually means a lot, Brian and I can [00:25:00] say that you do the same, just kidding. You never hit me up. No kidding. Uh, but no,

bad at this,

but

I don't know. I just give a about you I mean, that's the thing is like, I'm not, I mean, we've been friends for how long we met through business, I guess, but like

I don't even remember how we met her when it was to be honest with you.

I mean, I don't think either of us have ever had an angle with any conversation we've ever had, you

know, I mean, it's just like, I'm doing cool.

I'm stoked to know you, dude. Yeah. Like inspire me. I'm bummed out today. So what, what are you doing? Help me out. But yeah, I think, I think the main thing here. Okay. I think this is the main thing behind everything and I keep talking about taste, but I think ultimately that is the most important thing over everything to, in my opinion, to creatives is how do I approach business tastefully?

You know, that's the thing is, you know, about, I'm not the you pay me kind of guy. I'm not, you know, if it's not right for someone, that's it, that's it. I think the main thing [00:26:00] that people appreciate, whether it's production, photography, mixing to video, whatever people appreciate your intention. And as long as you make your intention now, And, you know, Brian, if I call you up, you know, that I just I'm saying hi, I think you're awesome.

And you inspire me a lot. It's fun to talk and that's it, that's it. If we haven't to talk about business cool, but that's not why I called you. And that's with all of my friends, all these companies that I'm working with, you know, I'll WhatsApp them and I'll be like, dude, listen to this record Sounds wild. You know? Cause we, we talked about glam rock, you know, that's how I landed this other business, you know, but it's just about letting people know that you genuinely give a about them. And I know that it sounds so obvious, but you would be surprised just how much that would separate you from literally every other person.

There was a company that had talked to them today and they were thinking about licensing something with me. And you know, I, I basically said only if it [00:27:00] works for you, let's just figure out if it works first because like, I don't want to up our friendship.

Yeah. And what we'll talk about sales process in a minute, because the whole point of sells isn't to sell somebody is to get to what I call get to their truth. And if you get to their truth, you'll determine whether or not you're a good fit. And if you are a good fit, it is your obligation to sell them.

And if it's not a good

fit, it's your obligation. Push them to someone who is a good fit, but we'll get, we'll get to that in a minute, because that is another way of giving yourself a raise. But I love what you said there. I'll say this I'll, I'll end with this section here with, with this thought and as someone who is not naturally gifted at, reaching out, letting people know that I care, letting people know that. I value them.

I'm not naturally good.

at that. I will say the crutch that I use at least for client work is a CRM, a CRM. I've talked about it before. If you don't have one, you need one. If you don't know what one is, we have an episode called CRM.

billion dollar companies use this software. And so should you, that was episode seven of our podcasts. If you want to hear a baby, Brian and baby Chris uh, before we knew what the hell we were doing, go back and listen to that.

But the whole point [00:28:00] remains that it will tell you what a CRM is, how to use it, what you should use and all that fun stuff. All right. So, but that's th that's the crutch I use to stay top of mind with people and keep notes on people and remember what to talk about, what we did talk about what to say, what to follow up with all those things.

Cause I'm not, I'm not mark Eckert. I don't have that all just in my brain hanging out, floating around.

It's not floating around. I'm just like I miss Brian.

I know, I know. I know. I know. I know, but I'd also, don't think I'm a potential client for you. We're just

such a little different, unless there's something I don't know

about you,

Mari, is this a long game?

on man. I was like, I don't want to do business with you. Let's just keep it friends, bro. This is more fun.

Your.

on occasionally and I'll just babble some bullshit and I'll be a good time, dude. I love that.

All right. So that was a, that was a second method for giving herself a raise, which is create a long-term followup process. So you stay top of mind so that when it comes time to hire someone for the project, you are at least considered and you'll win more projects that way. So that's the second way. I have actually a guide follow up.guide is the guide that I have.

It's like a 90 day follow-up sequence. And it's literally my, like, I call it the [00:29:00] Nat followup. We'll call it the Nat G N a T to the little tiny flies fly around your face. And you hate them. that's the kind of follow-up process that, that guide shows, but it still is relevant to at least staying top of mind and you can, you can flush it out and make it sound better than what I did in that guide.

Okay. So next method for giving yourself a raise is kind of a two-parter here. And this one is very like marketing jargony. So I'll, I'll say it. And then I'll explain it, create an upsell or a cross sell. All right. This is a, this is one that you, what's actually really interesting.

You see this all the time in e-commerce you never see it in freelance services, but it's, it's a best practice. You literally cannot run ads as an e-commerce company profitably, unless you have some sort of upsells and cross-sells involved. Like there's very few e-commerce companies that make money that don't do those two things and more, but as freelancers, we don't ever think about this stuff.

And so let's talk about what a cross sells. Let's talk about what an upsell is. A cross sell is basically just another product or service that you, that.

the person needs, right. This second or in the same timeframe that you're fulfilling on a service. So, mark, do you have some quick off the top off the [00:30:00] top of your head examples of what a cross sell might be in a freelance.

I mean, yeah, I mean, the thing is if you are doing I guess a cross sells that you have multiple products that can serve somebody. Right.

Yeah, products or services.

So for me, like I see all the time freelancers making the massive mistake of on their website. They have like three to five, sometimes more services listed on their website. The reality is the person hiring. You doesn't give a about any of those services.

They care about the outcome that you're giving them. So instead, talk about the outcome. You're going to provide them. And then if there are additional services that you can provide them on the sales call, you can cross sell those services to them saying, okay, you need these things great. It'll be this much money.

Great. I'm going to collect your payment. I'm going to close you. You're my client. Now, by the way, did you know that I also offer this service? It makes complete sense to add this on as well. Now that I have your money and I'm not going to push you away by confusing you, because again, the confused mind never buys.

So we're going to focus first on closing the sale. Then we're going to focus on how can we also sell other services that make sense

for that [00:31:00] client?

I think like a good example, you know, like for instance, if you're, if you're a photographer or something, and out actually, no, no, no, this is really cool. So one of my buddies XE he's a cinematographer. He does a bunch of music videos And he's worked with, you know, big artists you know, major label stuff.

He does a bunch of stuff with Columbia, but he also has a bunch of independent artists reaching out. And a lot of times people hit him up and they want a music video, you know, your standard standard music video. And then during the call, he's like, okay, so, you know, what are the ultimate goals with this music video?

And it's always to get more traction, et cetera. And he's like, oh, well, that's, that's really interesting. So a really great way to achieve that is if you have a music video is creating micro pieces of content around that. And then we can create a social media strategy with that to, you know, essentially feed, feed your audience.

And then they will, you know, click to go to YouTube on top of that. We can also run ads with that to get you even more. So what, what is your timeline with this sort of stuff? I just want to make sure you get close to your goals and [00:32:00] he's killing it. He's doing a great job. And it's the fact is, is like you're figuring out And a lot of times, you know, if they already let's say they already had a marketing agency working for them, he'll just do, he'll just do the music video, you know? But there's a lot of different ways to help people in different ways solve the issue they have. The big thing is just learning.

What the hell the issue is. That is the hardest thing ever.

Which is really hard for creatives because when we come into this, we come in passion first and we think I love to do this thing who will hire me to do this thing who will pay me money to do the thing that I love to do. And then they just look around and realize, Oh, my gosh, I have to market myself. And I have to like get clients.

This is a lot of work. I'm just gonna go to fiverr.com and then compete with the other bottom of the barrel freelancers on that site. And I hate my life now because I'm getting paid pennies and nickels, instead of doing what your friend did and saying, okay, I'm looking. My business as an actual business, and I'm going to look at the problems I'm solving and I'm going to figure out what are the things, the other things I can offer people to solve that problem in a bigger and better way.

[00:33:00] And in the music production world, no one ever does this bands don't come to me to produce their music because they want music. They come to me because to be fair, to be completely honest with you, they want their ego to be stroked.

Oh, stroke your ego.

Yeah. Yeah.

They just want to look and they want to play in front of people so they can continue to get their ego stroked.

And so like, I'm just being real with you. Like

that's

Creative tourism. Did I get it?

And so if, if I were going back in my shoes, when I was still producing bands, I would've said, Brian, listen, do this. Instead of just bruising bands, think about the next step, which is actually the upsell. This is where the difference between a cross sell and upsell a cross, sell something you sell at the same time.

An upsell is the logical next step in the process. So if I'm producing a band, yeah. If I'm producing a band, the logical next step is they want to grow their following in some way, shape or form. They want that music to be heard. And if I'm going to get their music to be heard, I have to understand the process of marketing for the band.

How do I actually get people [00:34:00] to listen to music? How do I get Merck purchased so I can tour, how do I get on tours? How do I book tours? What van do I get for tourists? How do I order merchandise? There's all sorts of problems that they have that I can either become an expert in and be a trusted source for and create this wonderful.

I call it an offer, but this wonderful package that actually solves the thing. Come to me to solve, or, and this is something that you said, mark, when we were planning this out, if you can't do it yourself, get a referral partner or get a profit share with

someone else.

You know, kind of going back to what you just said and to this is one of the biggest things about cross-sells upsells being in business as a creative is getting out of your own way. Like, I am still struggling with

this. Okay. It's oh my God. I'll talk to you about another time, fucking going through things anyways, but I'm like, you know, you got to get out of your own way.

I think this is the hardest thing that people deal with is actually acknowledging that their passion can make money. Believe me, there are passions [00:35:00] that will never make money.

Okay. There are people that will never find a passion, but the hardest thing to do is truly knowing that you have a passion for something. You like doing that thing, you will do it forever and you can make money from it because if you don't make money from it and you haven't gone full time or whatever, it's your own fault.

So by acknowledging that you actually put a lot of pressure on yourself, but it also can like give you a lot of hope. You know, it's, it's really exciting. You beat people. Like for instance, I met Brian, you know, early on, earlier on in my career, I was like, oh, okay, cool. I mean, you know, I copy cat and some And here I am in my own little vortex of, of music business, you know? But the thing is is that if you want to. Cross sell or upseller anything you have to realize, like it's okay for you to make these other offers because it's truly going to help someone at the end of the day, and you can provide these services.

You have to look at it objectively. The thing is, if you're in music, you look at everything [00:36:00] subjectively, this track rips, this is cool. Oh, I'm terrible. I'm a loser. Objective is like, this song is going to serve its purpose. And that is a very difficult mindset to get to. But once you can cross over to look at some songs or look at some gigs or look at, you know, some projects objectively and understand that it's going to serve a purpose.

It becomes very easy for you to naturally come up with a cross sell or an upsell. I would best suggest what's been best for me. You keep some projects subjective, you have your passion projects, whatever. And then you have your services that you look at objectively. If you can look at things subjectively, it's very easy to come up with more and more offers that ultimately make you a lot more money.

one more thing to add to that is if you are truly thinking about the. And what sort of services you can give them to get to that goal. You're ultimately helping yourself whether or not you can fulfill on those.

We talk about getting referral partners, someone that can do it for you and you get a [00:37:00] profit share or referral partner, someone you can refer the work to, and you'll have a wonderful mutually, mutually beneficial relationship with each other. Either way, you're helping your client get the outcome that they came to you for.

And if they get the outcome that they came to you for, they win, which means you win. Because now they're happy. If you want a guarantee, you're going to struggle and ultimately fail as a freelancer, don't get your clients to the outcome that they wanted. Give them the service. They want to be the designer who gives this struggling, flailing new business, a logo and nothing else.

And then that business ultimately flops and fails because it was flawed from the start and your logo never sees the light of. You did that to yourself, logo designer, instead focus on offering services or partner with people that can help that person to the logical next step, which is what's your business plan?

What are you going to sell? Who are you going to sell to? How are you going to find clients? If you don't know all that stuff, which is fine. If you listen to this podcast, you should know that stuff. But if you don't know that stuff, find partners that do and point them to the right direction so that they get the [00:38:00] benefit of that other person's insights, skills, services, whatever it takes to get the outcome that you're going

for.

Yeah, just get out of your own way, find somebody else and just

partner with them and take, do a 50, 50, whatever.

Yeah. And that's actually. Our next point on ways to give yourself a raise. So really quick to recap this last one, create a upsell or cross sell by selling other services. After the fact you're increasing how much a client is worth to you, that's an instant raise because now instead of a client being worth a thousand dollars to you, that same client can be worth 1500 or 2000 or even $5,000, just because you offered extras, upsells or cross-sells to them.

Going back to your videographer friend who offers like social media package strategy and extra content for, for that music video he created for them. That's helping them get closer to their goal. And he probably charges a pretty decent amount of money for those extra services that he's offering, which increases the project size, how much he's getting paid, which then increases his income.

So he gets raised by offering those additional services. [00:39:00] So moving on to the next one is to go out there and create a referral program. you'll see this all over the place with software companies. You'll see it in e-commerce you'll see it sometimes in online courses, but you never ever see referral like actual set up referral programs in freelance businesses.

And I think this is a missed opportunity. Mark, you do a lot of referral programs stuff in a lot of your businesses. Talk about that a bit.

So I built the vast majority of, you know, my production business of that pitch of that playlist of like all my businesses through referral,

Which just a just a pause really quick. Cause I remember you telling me your business names before And I realized, I didn't understand that was the name of your business. So one of your businesses called that pitch,

one of your businesses is called that playlist.

And then we have another one called that management

and then our publishing companies called that nineties kid,

Yeah. Really hard to follow if you're not familiar with the brand,

but now

that, you know, you know,

well, just, you know, that pitch.com best. That's my best. My girl, that's my girlfriend.

So Anyways here's the, here's the interesting thing about [00:40:00] referrals by all means, you will get the easiest conversion into a sale through a referral.

If your friend is like, oh my God, I love this pasta sauce. You got to check it out. You'll probably buy that pasta sauce. Now, the hard thing with referrals is being able to incentivize someone to share that not just out of their own Goodwill. So the way that you do that what I found is just literally like the cheat sheet is when someone has a success working with you right then and there that's when you make the plug.

Okay. So for instance as an example, what I'm doing right now, but then I'll go back to freelance for that pitch. we licensed music to a bunch of companies. So as soon as one of our members gets a place. We will say, Hey you know, just got a placement, congratulations.

This is what you're getting paid. Awesome. Share this with a friend that helps us with marketing, and if we don't have to pay as much money on marketing, we can focus on [00:41:00] getting you more deals. And which is true because you know, the more time we can all invest in landing these deals, we don't have to focus on all of this.

Like I don't, I hate doing all of the marketing work, to be honest with you. It's annoying. So it really helps us, but it helps them. So you incentivize someone after that got a success. Now, the way that I did that with my production business is, you know, a lot of artists know each other. So the way that I did it is I said, Hey we'd worked on a song together at this went great.

You're stoked about it. Listen if you talk to somebody else, who's an artist. When they fill out my form on my site, if they mention you and they start working with. I'll give you a certain number of production days, or I'll give you a free song or, you know, I'll give you a PR package, whatever, so you incentivize them to do that.

Okay. Now the way I learned all of this was actually through my mom, she taught piano growing up and she had an incredible business out of our house, 80 students a week, you know, out of the, I mean, it was [00:42:00] insane. She was making bank under the table. Uh, But what she would do is the first lesson was free.

So there's no obligation, 30 minute lesson, first lesson free. And then after the first lesson was done, she would talk to, you know, the mom or dad that brought the kid over. She was like, Hey if you, you know, you know, a bunch of other you know, people in the neighborhood who may want to have their kid, you know, do something after school, whatever if they work with us, just let them know.

they were sent my way from you. I'll give you know, your kid one or two free lessons or whatever it was. So the whole thing is everyone was incentivized to share. Okay. So the way that the best way to build a network, you know, is to build through people's existing networks. It's not to try to build your own that's.

You can do that. It's just costs a lot more. You can do both. That's what we're doing, but like you want to incentivize people to share for their own benefit.

Yeah. I'll say this I've seen the most successful ones. I've seen have a benefit on both [00:43:00] sides, because a lot of times people feel guilty referring someone and, and claiming that sweet, sweet thing for themselves. If they know that the other person's not getting something. So a lot of times, if you want something more effective and something that a little less guilt inducing, say, if you refer someone to me, let me know, I'll give you a free day or a free hour or a free something, or X percent off your next project.

And also give them a bonus as well as some extra song or an extra, you know, whatever. It's like some small side service or something. That's an additional bonus for them. Doesn't have to be equal value, but it's still something that they get by being referred by your friend.

Dropbox built a billion dollar evaluation off of that. One thing you share with a friend, you get 500 extra megabytes of storage and your friend gets 500

megabytes of

storage.

much free storage back in the day with Dropbox.

Morning.

brew. Same thing. Hey, you're going to get news every morning.

It's not going to annoy you.

I love it.

sweet, crew neck shirt that I'd never wear, but it.

was a hundred referrals that took to get

that.

They built a company with [00:44:00] millions of subscribers through referrals and they give out little bonus.

Like I got a mug from them. I got stickers from them. I got a sweatshirt from them and they sold, they just sold recently, like last year for $75 million. And that was all built off of

referrals. I don't think they

spend any money on ads. So we need to look at that as freelancers. yeah.

We're not a newsletter company. Yeah. We're not like going to sell for $75 million as a freelance company, but you can still make maybe 75,000 an extra 75,000 with a referral program. And that's still, that's still pretty sexy to me.

all right, So that is the, I think fifth at this 0.1, two, three, it's actually the fourth way to give yourself a raise today, which is create a referral program. That ideally incentivize both sides, but really if you just incentivize the person who's referring the work that still works so good.

One mark. I like that one a lot. And that's something we don't see in the freelance world at all. Next one on our list is one that I want to talk about. I'm excited about this one, but it's something we don't ever see in the freelance world. And that is something called billing, a funnel, a funnel. [00:45:00] I'm going to give you the technical explanation and the mark will give you the more fun explanation.

A funnel is kind of like a website. This is the, as someone who owns a funnel building company called easy funnels.io. This is the question I get all the time. What exactly is a funnel? It's more like instead of a website with five different directions, they could go, it could be your homepage. It could be your about page. It could be your FAQ. It could be your services page or whatever.

That's a website. A file is you have one thing to do. You either go to the next step, which is like, put your name and email address in, or you leave the page. That's a funnel. It is one option one, or option two. There is no option three. And that's the beautiful thing about a funnel is it's just higher conversion rates.

And as freelancers, like we don't, we don't take advantage of general best practices for digital marketing on earth. And this has been a thing for like the past decade is marketing funnels. And uh, I use it all the time to build my email list. I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing traffic into my phone.

For multiple businesses and for freelancers, I see freelancers crushing it using funnels and no one is building funnels right now. So I [00:46:00] think building a funnel is something you can do in about a day. You can use it to build your business and ultimately give yourself a raise. But mark, you have a different definition for a funnel.

And I think there's this more fun.

Well, okay. So here's the thing. When you explain a funnel, I enjoy it. I'm like lovely, lovely. I get it very cool. Now, a lot of times I go on a, you know, early on I would go online and I would look up, you know, all this marketing stuff and I'd be like, this looks gross. You know? I'm like, ah, why, why is like, why am I not resonating with this?

It just feels, I don't know. Again, it is about, you know, it is about how you can optimize getting a sale, but at the same time, I just felt oftentimes that like, while there, while you can have an approach to get someone into a sale, I wanted to kind of keep things a little bit more, you know, you can buy when you want to, I'm going to lead you to the purchase, you know, but how can I kind of make this more exciting for everybody?

So I kind of always in the back of my mind, I'm like, you know, a [00:47:00] funnel is really just, how do you get people into the party? You know, that's that a funnel, invite them to a party. You know, if, if there's a house party and he got, you know, one bouncer out front, one of your friends out back, and everyone's just like, oh my God, so much fun in here.

People are going to want to come in. There's punch there's alcohol. There's you know, a bunch of different foods. You just want people to come in, enjoy themselves talk, you know, and I don't really know exactly the, the end game with a, with a party other than having a good time. But, you know, ultimately you just want people in the ecosystem.

This is a year describing a Tupperware party. Cause you want them to buy Tupperware at the

end of it.

That's all. Yeah.

but, but that's the thing it's like, there's a lot of different ways to have a funnel, you know somebody saying, Hey, you know, come on in. It's a good time is similar to, you could make an ebook. That's like, you know how to kick ass on this thing. It works for us. Enjoy yourself, you know?

Or, or it could just be, you know, videos, you know, explaining how to do [00:48:00] stuff. So it helps people or whatever. But I think the less pushy you are on like trying to get a sale. It's again, it's like that trust thing we were talking about, that's kind of how I've, you know, that pitch to, to its degree, we do music licensing and it's like, that is a very touchy subject.

People are nervous about that. They think they're going to get screwed.

You know, and the biggest reason why we've had the success we had is because it's, we're not trying to come at you as like a lawyer and all this scary shit. We're just like, yo, it's fun. This is the next wave. Hell yeah. Check it out.

I want to help you make money. And we actually do it. Here's all the money we paid out to people, you know, it's a

good time. Let's try it out. It's going to be cool. You don't like it. That's fine too. But coming to the party, we're all having a good time.

I like this approach a lot more and I got something to say about it. So I'm actually reading, rereading a book right now called.com secrets. You ever read that one? Mark?

yeah. Yeah.

Russell

Yeah, Russell Brunson. Like he's like the king of funnels. He's built multiple, multiple companies off of the whole idea of a funnel.

He [00:49:00] is the funnel guy, and he didn't know, he knows a lot about it. And he's a brilliant guy. The problem is this is the kind of content people sees and reads about when they hear of what a funnel is. And they're trying to figure out how to make a funnel. And this is why you see so much garbage on the internet, not because of Russell Brunson, like he's doing his thing and he's got his tribe.

And he's one of the most brilliant people. I've, I've found the internet, but it's because people are just imitating without understanding what he's doing.

Yes. And I think so too part on that is, I think a sale happens as a by-product of having a good time. They're like, you know what? I want to spend more time here. That's how I look at it. You know, if they're, if everyone's enjoying that pitch and it truly is good, it's like, why wouldn't I make a purchase?

Like I'm done. I'm dumb for not being a part of this. This is great. I love being a part of this, you know? But the thing is, is kind of what you said is there's a lot of people who don't understand the intricacies. So you see like just these terrible click funnel sites and it just like, it, it just looks tacky.

And that brings me to a very important piece, [00:50:00] which I read this book years ago. It's called breakthrough advertising by Eugene Schwartz.

I've got a copy of my computer.

It's. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a great book. It's basically understanding advertising before social media was, you know, dude in the forties or fifties, it's the psychology of advertising and there's one, a chapter or a paragraph in a chapter that I just cannot ever ignore in anything I do.

And it's a thing called market bias. It's like the, I think it's the first chap or one of the first chapters. And it basically means like, what do people think about your offer before you get there? Like what has the environment of the industry already shown that person? And in licensing music licensing for us, people have gotten over They've gotten scammed. So, if I say, Hey, join this thing, you're gonna make a bunch of money. It's going to be a great sale. It like, people are like, oh, that's gross, that's tacky. You know, but if I'm just like, Hey, we're all doing this thing together, which we are. And that's what I truly believe. It's like, we're changing stuff.

[00:51:00] People are excited to be a part of that because I genuinely mean that,

you

know?

and that's the big thing is if you are going to create a funnel, which can be whatever you want it to be, but it's usually saying go to this page to get this thing, put your name and email address, and, and I'll give you this thing, but it doesn't stop there because there's next steps. Usually there's some next step.

It could be to book a call with you and have a discovery call as a freelancer, you're trying to sell a service, get a call booked Right.

there. It could be to join a Facebook community. That's what I do on my thank you pages on, on six-figure creatives, get people in our Facebook community. And then from there, there's usually emails that go out.

It's called a drip sequence, drip emails. There's things you can do. But I want to say, I want to say a really important thing, and that is if you're studying marketing, don't just do what other people are doing, please. God don't do what Russell Brunson is doing, especially in the creative world. Do what you want to do.

I understand the strategies, understand the psychology, but put it in your own voice in your own words, do it your own way. And it won't come across as, as this weird, like scammy internet marketing

speak that you see all over the place. [00:52:00]

I think to add to that, something that we didn't touch on, which is so rudimentary, it's like crazy that we didn't even think about it. I think the biggest problem with like these really, really quick, you know, funnel to knowing you to getting a huge $10,000 check people, don't use time as a tool. I think that's when it's disgusting is when they don't think that time is actually an, a value add here.

If you meet someone off the street and you're like, marry me, there'll be like, holy You're crazy. But if you're like, let's go out to coffee, give it a month. Let's go out to dinner, give it a couple of months. You'll want to be boyfriend girlfriends, give it a couple months. You want to meet mom and dad give it a year, two years, three years, four years, five years.

You want to get married that works, you know, and dependent on the price point of what you do can completely denote the timeline associated with building that

trust.

Yep. The more you charge, the more time they're going to need.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'll say this though. There's, there's something called a turtle [00:53:00] buyer and there's something called the hair buyer. Like there's the turtle and there's the hair. The turtles are what you just described. They're the ones they want to know.

Every single detail. They want it all in writing. They want to look up reviews. They want to talk to your past clients. They want to like dig in all the details. They want to think about it. They need to pray about it. And then they need to write a book about it and sell that book and see what the response is to that book and see if that book, you know, whatever, like whatever they need, they need the five years, right?

That's the turtle. They're going to be that way. They're going to analyze everything. And then you have the hair. The hair is like, oh, you solve this problem. Or you give this thing or your stuff looks that good or sounds that good. And you can do it. I want to. Now they just know like they were referred from a friend they're a hot prospect.

Like they're, they're like ready to go. You need to have paths for both of those people.

Earlier in this episode, when we talked about creating a long-term followup process, that's for the turtle buyers, that's for the ones who are slow, methodical, they need all the information. They need to be nurtured and loved and cared for.

Taken out to dinner. The hairs are the ones that need that book, a call on the thank you page of your funnel from, you know, I've got [00:54:00] this thing, put your name out, let me draw it and put your name and email address and to get on my email list. And then on the thank you page, it's like, great. It'll be in your email in five minutes.

In the meantime, if you're ready to move forward, book a call with me right now, we'll talk about X, Y, and Z. Boom. If you're using easy funnels, just use our booking widget. If you're not in your plug, just use Calendly. You can embed it on your website and they can book a call right there. That's for the hairs.

That's the ones that are ready to buy right now. And you need to account for both of those people, because both of those people exist. If you exclude one or the other you're missing out on money. so building. There's a lot more, I'm going to be talking about in the future and con on content around this that I think I'm trying to bring more of this like funnel mentality to the freelance community.

Cause there's a lot about just digital marketing that we're not using right now, but this is something you can do in about a day. You can put something together. This is valuable for your ideal client. You can build a landing page. That's collecting email address is sending into a thank you page. That's maybe taking it to the next step for those, those hairs, those, those rabbits, and then you can do a long-term followup process for the, for the turtles in the group.

And then you can essentially get leads and actually start marketing [00:55:00] yourself. What does that a lot of people are not doing right now. They're in the word of mouth. Hell. All right. So that's the ones that we're going to cover today. We've got a raise your prices just to recap, raise your prices because anytime you charge more, you are going to get paid more.

You're going to, you're going to have a raise, which is great which can also be including decreasing the amount of time spent on the project. So maybe systemize some tasks and hire people. That's the first way of getting a raise today. Second way of getting a raise is creating a long-term followup process so that you stay top of mind over a long period of time so that when they're ready to buy the hiring.

The third way is create a upsell upseller cross sells something, the LC, some other service that you can sell that client. That's either going to, going to supplement the process they're in with you for the project, or it's the logical next step, The fourth way is to create a referral program, which mark talked about learning from his mommy.

That's so cute where you can build an incentivized referral program where you can say, Hey client, you just experienced an amazing service from me. Now, if you get clients to come my [00:56:00] way, then I will give you a wonderful sweatshirt, no something better than that. Some sort of like referral bonus. And sometimes if you do a two-sided referral bonus, it's even more effective.

I'll give you guys $200 off your next, next time you come in and hire me for this and I'll give them a hundred dollars off or something. I don't know. there's different ways to, to, to flesh that out, but that incentivizes people to refer people to. And then the last that we talked about today, which was build a funnel, go out there and build a funnel for yourself.

And if you want to build a funnel, I highly recommend going to easy funnels.io,

because it is a drag and drop landing page builder.

It has pre-built pre-built funnel templates in There It has a mailing list. So you can actually build your mailing list, follow up emails. So you can drip out emails automatically over a long period of time. And it has a booking widget. So you can have all the wonderful things where they book with you right there on your website.

Just go.

to easy funnels.io, to learn more about that. Mark again, thank you for coming on as a substitute pinch hitter cohost Do you have anywhere you want to send our audience?

that pitch.com uh it's the easiest way to license your music [00:57:00] upload your catalog and we get it into a bunch of companies We pay out a hundred percent

Who is it for again? Because not all of our audience does

music,

producers, artists, musicians. Yep. I think we've already paid out close to half a million dollars,

so it's

pretty cool.

anyone who wants their music on like commercials or movies or something

movies, YouTube, podcasts, whatever we

license

it.

sick. All right. Well, thanks again, man, for coming on and uh, that's a wrap.