4 Money-Making Strategies for Freelancers If Your Clients are “On Hold” from COVID-19

For those of us who make a living providing a service to clients, this whole COVID-19 is really starting to take a toll.

I can see it as I interact almost daily with thousands of freelancers who are all handling the crisis differently—some panicking about money and others worrying about the future.

And while this pandemic may open a few unique opportunities to freelancers, all in all, service-based independent contractors are feeling the pain of a down economy.

That’s primarily because so many of our clients seem to be “on hold”—waiting to see what the economy does, how long this thing lasts, and what the world looks like when it’s all “over.”

If you find many of your clients are “on hold,” waiting to spend money on your services until they know how this all shakes out, I’ve got a few money-making suggestions you can try while you wait.

Honestly, these are things you probably should have been doing all along.

So take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build some diversity into your freelance business and, in the long-term, you’ll be glad you did.

Then maybe the next time there’s a big swing in the economy, you won’t be stuck looking for financial aid for freelancers and, instead, you’ll have a well-oiled business that can survive just about anything.

Without further ado, here are my best money-making ideas while your clients are “on hold”:

Create once, get paid forever

Most freelancers get paid on a 1:1 basis.

Complete 1 project; get paid 1 time.

Send 1 invoice; get paid 1 time.

But some of the brightest and most successful freelancers I’ve ever bumped into know how to create something once and get paid for it over and over and over again. This is commonly referred to as passive income (even though it’s often not all that passive at all).

While your clients continue in a holding pattern, now is the perfect time to start building a few “create once, get paid forever” revenue streams into your business.

Here are a few examples to share what I mean:

• A designer might create a high-value set of textures, fonts, backgrounds, or icons and upload them to a marketplace like Creative Market where customers can buy that same product over and over again in perpetuity.

• A writer without many paid articles in her queue, may choose to finally write that book she’s had in mind for the last 5 years but never made time to write. From there, she can sell it as an ebook over and over again.

The goal is to create something that takes a bit of time upfront, but less time over the long-haul to promote and sell.

Where your business model may have looked like this before:

Now, a portion of your revenue can look like this:

For some freelancers, cutting out the actual work cuts out the fun of freelancing. But for those who want to build a long-term business that can survive for years to come, adding in some “create once; get paid forever” opportunities is a must.

Sell once, get paid forever

For freelancers who thrive on the day-to-day creative work they do for their clients, there’s another option.

That’s to sell your services once and continue to get paid for it over and over.

Unlike the example I shared above, you’re still doing work on a daily or weekly basis for your clients.

However, instead of starting the cycle over by finding a new client to sell to (as you might in a traditional freelance business model) you cut out the need to repeatedly sell yourself by building recurring revenue into your model.

Here are a few ways you might accomplish this:

• A marketer sells a monthly social media package to her client. For a flat fee each month, they manage social media accounts, create new content, moderate comments, and grow following.

• A developer gets hired on retainer with one of his clients. Each month, the client pays a predetermined amount in exchange for a certain number of hours worked or projects completed.

In these scenarios, you don’t have to “convince” your clients to renew their contract every month—instead, that selling happens just once at the beginning of your relationship.

Your business model (or a portion of it) may now look more like this:

Aside from making the initial sale, there’s not much selling/pitching involved in this adjusted business model, leaving you with time to focus on the actual work you enjoy most.

Make small adjustments with big impacts on revenue

If reevaluating your entire business model and experimenting with new models is a bit more than you’re prepared to do right now, perhaps another way to make more money from your freelance business right now is through small adjustments.

I was first introduced to the idea that small adjustments could make a big difference when I was working with a freelancer to help them get more clients through their online portfolio.

For ease of math, let’s say 1,000 people visit your portfolio website every month.

Out of those 1,000 visitors, maybe 25% of them are actual good-fit clients interested in working with you. That’s 250.

From those 250, maybe 5% fill out your contact form. Now we’re at about 13.

Of the 13 people who contact you, one third (about 4 people ) will jump on a discovery call.

You’re a good salesperson over the phone, so 50% of people who take a discovery call end up becoming a client.

That means, in this hypothetical situation, for every 1,000 people that visit your website, you can plan on about 2 new clients.

Here’s the full break-down I explained above:

Once you see the numbers lined up so cleanly in what an online marketer might call a “funnel,” it’s easy to see how small changes can add up to huge impacts for your business.

For example, if you could double the traffic to your online portfolio, everything else would double too. You’d have 4 new clients each month.

Or if, by adding some more obvious contact buttons or making your form more user-friendly you could increase your contact form rate to 15% instead of 5%, everything from that point on would triple. You’d have 6 new clients each month.

But the real magic comes in a compounding effect. This is where small changes can really begin to add up to huge impact.

Let’s say you were able to double your site traffic to 2,000 visitors every month and you were able to increase your contact form rate to 15% instead of 5%.

You’d have 12 new clients every month. I don’t know a single freelancer that couldn’t do very well with 12 new potential clients every month.

Here’s what the numbers would look like.

Sure, doubling your traffic or tripling your lead-generation rate can be really hard. So let’s see what would happen with very small changes.

Let’s see what happens with just a 2% increase across the board:

Just a 2% change on each metric can literally double your new client intake from 2 to 4.

That’s the power of small changes.

If you find your clients are on hold right now, taking time to focus on small changes (maybe with your online portfolio or maybe somewhere else), you’re going to quickly see what successful freelancers have known for years:

Small changes can make a big impact.

Offer new services to your clients to stay relevant

The world is changing fast with the COVID-19 pandemic growing farther and wider than anything we’ve experienced before.

While a new world brings a lot of fear and trepidation, it also opens the world to a lot of opportunities.

The last global economic downturn (in 2008) spurred the creation of new businesses that have completely revolutionized how we live and interact today. I’m talking about What’sApp, Instagram, Groupon, Uber and lots more.

As the world changes, a smart business-owner will refuse to cower in the corner waiting for things to return to “normal” and will, instead, focus energy on the opportunities that will undoubtedly arise.

One way you can take advantage of this changing world as a freelancer is to offer new or different services than you may have in the past.

This could be as simple as taking some freelancing courses to better understand what to offer clients and how.

On a more complex level, you could have in-depth calls with clients to identify ways you can better serve them.

You may want to try learning new skills on sites like Lynda or Udemy.

I can almost guarantee, there are new opportunities that will stare you in the face in the coming months and years following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The question is: what are you going to do about it?

Money is still there… you just have to get a bit more creative

I have an abundance mentality. Not in some woo-woo, The Secret sort of way. I don’t mean “if you just visualize money, it’ll come to you.”

That’s ridiculous.

No, I believe that there is plenty of money to go around—even during an economic downturn. Companies still have objectives to hit. They still have money that needs to be made. In turn, they still have work that needs done.

Not to mention: as companies cut back in a downturn, they may downsize from employees to contractors—which means there may be more opportunities for freelancers and remote contractors in some industries.

When you operate from a place of scarcity, you hope things will never change for fear it could all blow up in your face.

The truth is, the world is changing all the time. Not always as dramatically as with Covid-19, but changing nonetheless.

To survive as a freelancer, you have to adapt.

You can do it.