My 5-Step Plan to Get Clients As A Solopreneur
An actionable plan that you can choose or not choose to follow
There’s a lot of freedom with solopreneurship.
There’s a lot of:
Skills you can learn
Platforms to produce on
Products to create
Business models to pursue
Ideas of yours to execute on
With that freedom can come feeling overwhelmed. As a result, you might be afraid of spreading yourself thin and only stick to one strategy. For example, I wrote for two years thinking that that would somehow move the needle forward for me in terms of providing products or services, getting clients and establishing a personal brand.
No matter how early you are in your personal branding or solopreneurship journey, you can plan how you’re going to move forward with providing value to your audience or clients and earning some revenue.
If you haven’t already, build a roadmap for how you want to move forward. In this article I’m going to share my high-impact activities to move the needle forward when it comes to building a business online.
And remember, you don’t even have to do these things in these steps. Additionally, make sure to do the following:
Regularly reflect using your data (e.g., what posts performed better?)
Ask your audience what they like (e.g., “did you guys find this article helpful, what do you wish you would’ve seen in it?”)
Ask yourself what you like (e.g., do you enjoy what you’re writing about?)
First step - Creating a portfolio
I’m learning copywriting right now, specifically email copywriting. After practicing email copy, I’m going to practice some social media and blog copy. I’ll create samples of my work and include it into a portfolio that I create on Canva.
Before I give you more details about how i’m handling the portfolio, here’s why I’ve chosen copywriting as a solopreneur.
Writing good copy is the foundation to any business, from the content to the sales funnels and even when it comes down to the outreaching you do to patients—you get better and clearer at communicating.
You can leverage the skill easily with your personality—the more personality, the more readers (audience or clients) are invested in reading your copywriting in the form of emails, social media, ads, blogs, etc.
Copywriting fuels any other skills you have—if you know how to write good copy, you’re likely to be good at scripting for videos, writing long form articles, or writing with a compelling style with websites that you build.
I wrote an article about how copywriting is helpful to any solopreneur or brand here.
Anyways, now onto portfolio stuff.
Besides email, blog and social media copy samples that i’ll include in my portfolio, I’m also going to include:
Landing pages
Sales pages
Landing pages and sales pages are things that go into a sales funnel. The reason i’m including those is because I eventually want to not only offer email copywriting but leverage my skills to create entire sales funnels for clients.
In terms of the length of the portfolio, I’m roughly aiming for :
8 pieces of email copy samples
5 pieces of landing pages
5 pieces of sales pages
Besides pitching the portfolio to clients, I plan on showcasing it as a CTA for my audience to check out on X and Substack at the end or beginning of articles.
I think doing a portfolio is a smart, actionable step. Besides showcasing your skills, it gives clients a compilation of how you can put your skills into action. Although your content can serve as a magnet for attracting clients (or an audience where clients may be hiding in), having a portfolio gives you peace of mind that you have one thing that shows your best skills.
This would be especially helpful if or when a potential client (or anyone) asks you to show them your skills or the work you do—it’d be better to send a portfolio rather than a link to your Substack account where that person would have to read through many posts just to get an idea of how you can perform with that skill. So I guess you can say that having a portfolio speeds things up.
So when the portfolio is done, I’m not just going to cold-send it to leads. I’m going to implement a specific strategy for doing the outreach to clients, and here’s what i’m thinking for outreach.
Second step - Reaching out to prospects
Reaching out to clients is as important as crafting the content, building your portfolio, and creating the products and services. If you don’t do this, your products and services are just going to be sitting there… unused and not bought.
None of the following are in a specific order.
Decide who I’m reaching out to:
Getting clear on my ideal customer profile (ICP)
Understanding their pain points
How I’m going to find prospects:
Prospects that are posting ads
Prospects doing e-commerce, coaching or providing other services
Prospects posting videos about their products or services
Optimizing my Substack in the case that a prospect visits my site (I’ll do the same for X)
My method once I find those prospects:
Network on X and Substack by commenting and sending DMs
Cold email creators/entrepreneurs/brands (emails found in bio often, just got to dig)
Network with people in real life (don’t just limit yourself to finding prospects online, you never know how things can happen for you)
The types of outreach I’ll do:
Email
Phone call
Direct message
SMS
Voicemails
Things to remember to do during outreach:
Don’t be too pushy
Give value (e.g., loom video showing them how to do something related to the service or product you’re offering)
Be personal
Personalized subject line
Highly personalized first line
Give a personalized reason as to how you can add value
Justify nay claims early on
Give a low commitment CTA
Make clients feel special
Don’t say the price in the first message
If they ask about price, suggest a call instead
Don’t be longwinded
I plan to do most of my outreaching on X and Substack.
Again, I think outreaching is a smart and actionable step to do because you want to put your skills to use. It’s as simple as that.
Third step - Gaining social proof
Once working with a client, I’ll ask for a testimonial and include that in my portfolio and share it in my writing.
I think showcasing social proof is a smart actionable step because you can include it in your portfolio that you will pitch to other clients. Those other clients will see the type of work you do and what results you can generate for them.
Also, including social proof in my content can serve as organic inbound for prospects to reach out to me if they happen to read my content.
Fourth step - Creating a freebie
After getting the social proof, I’ll have established enough credibility to create a freebie. In this freebie I’m going to include a CTA to lead to an email course (which I’ll talk more about next).
You can technically create the freebie whenever you want. It doesn’t have to be after creating the portfolio, reaching out to prospects and gaining social proof. Again, this is just my strategy.
Nonetheless, I’m going to create a freebie including copywriting tips and strategies and how the skill can increase your personal brand. I write to solopreneurs and people who need copywriting services, so this freebie can help both types of people. I mean, your clients are likely also solopreneurs (duh), they just might need help with their copy since that might not a skill they’ve mastered.
Where I’m offering the freebie as a CTA to my email course:
At the end of articles
In my posts on X
In my Beehiiv newsletter
In my video descriptions on YouTube
Creating a freebie is a smart and actionable step because it shows you’re generous, and that you mean business.
Fifth step - Creating an email course
In the email course I’m basically going to elaborate on what the freebie includes.
To be honest, I haven’t planned it out yet.
But for now, what I’m thinking of is
How to write good copywriting
How to use copywriting for your personal branding
How to use copywriting to increase your monthly revenue
Super vague, but again I haven’t put much thought into it. I’m also not going to overthink it. The point is to trust the process and just create and experiment with things like this (especially when you first start building online).
Where I’m offering the email course:
At the end of articles
In my posts on X
As a CTA at the end of my freebie
In my Beehiiv newsletter
In my video descriptions on YouTube
Creating an email course is a smart and actionable step if you want to increase your credibility online. It shows your audience and clients that you know what you’re talking about enough to make a course out of it.
If you really liked this, make sure to read about what it takes to establish something of your own. It’s my favorite article I’ve written that’s helped people.
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