The How and Should You to Turning Friends into Clients as a Freelancer

The How and Should You to Turning Friends into Clients as a Freelancer

Some people say never to mix friendship with business. Or the same can be said sometimes about family and business too. But that's not to say you shouldn't. Ever. Because some family business can last a very long time and some so can some professional working friendships too. If you both work at them.

You may not realize it, but as a freelancer and or digital marketing expert. You could be sitting under a wealth of income just from your friends and family and those around you.

Turning Your Skills into Success Through Others

If you're already a freelancer or Internet marketer with any IT skills in web development and design to SEO and SMO, then you can use that earn money with from your friends and family. Especially more so if you're already a somewhat successful freelancer or affiliate marketer. Because you can use that as leverage to get them on board.

All you really have to do is talk to them! Find out what sort of things they are passionate about, have an interest in, hobbies they have etc. And tell them about the demand there is for these sorts of things online by people looking for how to's and information about those same passions, hobbies or interests.

Just today I was talking to a friend of mine who is a traveler / song writer and has been traveling a lot. He has a lot of travel stories and they're amazing and often funny to listen to. He's also a bit of a modern gnostic as well and knows quite a lot about world events and the ways things are they way they are. He's the kind of person who digs a little deeper into topics and researches them, writes about them.

For a while now he's been asking me about how to start a website which he can use as a platform to share all his knowledge, experiences, travel stories and songs he's written and stuff like that. Basically he has the content in droves already and I have the skills and know how to make it all come about. So after some questions we came up with a good domain name idea for him and I'm going to create it and host it on my own plan for a while.

Basically I told him what I could do and how much it would cost. I'm not really charging him anything as he's a friend but said that I will help on the site as well and want part of it when it gets successful and we'll do revenue sharing down the line on it.

We're going with a basic simple travel blog type site first. But then later on we'll be adding new features to the site and possibly something very similar to what Trivago do but more for actual travelers that want to know about places to travel to and what there is to do at those places, what to try and what to avoid stuff like that. Rather than just hotel reviews and comparisons.

An Example Template To Go By

But this is just one example of many. You could do the same thing for your friends or family too. Simply find out what their interests and passions are, tell them about how they could have a website they could put that on and in time they could earn from it. Tell them how you'll do all the footwork for it first of all and that it will only cost them something small at first like $50 or something. Get them on board with the idea first and tell them about the benefits, (but also make them aware of the work needed). And you could probably bag a sell from it.

You'll not only score yourself a quick $50 bux maybe to do it for them. But you could also later on share in that sites earnings as well. You'd have to do most of the work first of all, registering the domain, installing WordPress, setting it up and that, creating social profiles for it and all of that. All they would have to do is just login and create new posts and share them on social media and you could help promote it too.

Yes it will be their site. But you could also benefit from it too in the future. You could charge them hosting fees for the rest of their life.

Other Ways You Can Earn from Your Clients Sites

• Through charging and collecting monthly monthly hosting fees.
  
• Through charging and collecting yearly domain renewal fees.
  
• Through setting up some kind of revenue sharing with them.
  
• Through introducing new ideas and implementing them on the site.
  
• Through charging for SEO/SMO and even content for the site.
  

The trick is to find out what they are already quite knowledgeable and resourceful in. Find out what skills and talents, hobbies, passions or interests they have. Find out what life experiences they have. Identify some area they are strong on and pitch them the idea of a website where they could share that knowledge with others and then use it to earn a residual income stream with later on for life as well.

You'd have to do it in such a way so that if it all goes to pot they are the ones to blame for not "sticking to the plan" the plan of adding at least one good article a month or something. You'd have to emphasize that they are the ones that will need to add the content to it. But you could offer to proof read it and check for grammar errors etc as well and give feedback on it before the hit the Publish button.

Actually doing that will play on their ego and they'll be more inclined to write great posts and try to impress you. But you need them to think like this. You need them to know about on-page SEO and things like that so you'd have to give them a quick refresher course on it maybe but that could come in time.

The point of this is, it's all about being resourceful and finding ways in which you can earn money from those things or people that are already around you. You could upscale this even more and each new client you got, each new site you done, would be another that you could add to your impressive growing portfolio of sites other future clients can be shown as samples of your past work.

You couldn't just do this on your own immediate friends and family though. You could do it on friends of friends, or work colleagues even too during your break. The trick here would to find a way to bring it into conversation. To do that you could just have a simple notepad and pen or some jot book or something with your past clients website ideas and your own ideas in it that you're writing in and when they ask what you're doing you could then hypnotize them with your pitch and get THEIR name in your book.

Do you / have you ever pitch/ed your friends and family and those around you?

Do you identify areas within people that you can monopolize on?

Or do you prefer to keep clients at arms length?

Cheers!

Mike.