But we often ignore that a buying decision is the result of a well-defined process called

Customer Value Journey. It’s true for a million-dollar B2B deal. And it’s true for a few dollars worth impulsive buying by a B2C customer.

Off-line or on-line, the Customer Value Journey is more or less the same. The process was there before the internet. And it will be there tomorrow.

Most freelancers often wonder why they don’t have a stable and predictable income. Statistics show that on an average 90% freelancers struggle to pay their bills.

Freelancers don’t get paid on time; they can’t charge enough; they don’t get enough clients; they choose wrong clients, and so on.

But those are just symptoms, not reasons.

The problem has little to do with technical skills or creativity.

There’s a limiting belief that there are too many freelancers in the market, so the competition is high.

That’s a load of baloney.

A reason is, most freelancers don’t understand business. They have experience as employees.

Many of them are freshers – having no experience.

Without having an entrepreneur’s mindset, they try to learn too many things half-ass. Naturally, they get half-ass results.

But the freelancing profession is not so complicated.

Even if you have just one skill, you can become a successful freelancer – by guiding your prospects along the Customer Value Journey. How about attracting swarms of customers instead of going to them? How about getting more deals that you can handle? Are you ready for that?

Let’s dive into understanding the Customer Value Journey. It will give you a step by step process for attracting, converting, and keeping your best customers.

What is Customer Value Journey?

The Customer Value Journey (let’s call it CVJ) is about turning strangers into super fans. Digital marketing can make this journey incredibly faster.

I reviewed many templates of CVJ, but none of them are as in-depth as the one developed by Digital Marketer, the partner of our Online Business University.

The CVJ is an 8 step route that people travel as they discover your brand, build a relationship with you, and finally become your super fans.

If we draw a map, the path will look like this.

It looks like a gallery floor-plan with several arrows showing different directions, right? A customer left alone in this journey will get lost along the way.

They may get confused, and even forget why they ever started on this journey with your brand.

That’s why we need a strategy to guide people through all the eight steps, helping them when they get stalled anywhere and encourage them to move along the journey.

Here we go.

Step 1 – Know Your Ideal Customer

In the beginning, you should avoid the temptation of offering everything to everyone. Most freelancers make this mistake and end up nowhere.

You must figure out who your ideal customer is, where they hang around and what they will buy. You need to create a document around this. We call it Customer Avatar. Building your customer avatar can have a massive impact on your marketing results.

The customer avatar document is a “Swiss Army Knife of Marketing” because it impacts practically every aspect of your marketing, including:

• Website design
• Content marketing
• Paid traffic
• Product creation
• Copywriting
• Email marketing

And that’s just scratching the surface. Any part of your sales and marketing process that touches the customer will improve when you get clear on your customer avatar.

After all, it’s a human being who buys our products or services. It pays to get a clear picture of the characteristics of the person, so you can present them with a message that can move them into taking the desired action.

Here is a sample template showing how a customer avatar document looks.

For example, let us take a buyer group of small supermarket owners like Venkataesh.

He wants to let his business continue to grow after the Covid-19 lockdown. After doing a little research, our customer avatar document looked like this:

You should take your time to research your customer avatar. Because it can make or break your business going forward. It’s very, very important.

Step 2 – Make Them Aware of Your Offers

At this stage, you let your prospects discover your offers and your brand.

Prospect awareness can be triggered by advertisements, blog posts, words of mouth referrals, events, social media or any other channels that get people’s attention, then entertain or inform them.

You need to create a campaign with contents relevant at this stage. It’s called Top of the Funnel Content Strategy.

Step 3 – Engage Them with Your Brand

Engagement means an emotional involvement or commitment. It’s about being on the same wavelength with someone. It’s a prerequisite to building a deeper relationship, just like it happens before marriage.

In digital marketing, it happens just after your first interaction with the prospects, and it continues through the entire experience with your brand. It’s a continuing conversation you have with them throughout the Customer Value Journey. You use multiple channels like a blog, social community, email, customer support and the likes.

Step 4 – Ask Them to Subscribe

If the prospects like the experience of interacting with you, they start liking you. A level of trust begins to build up. At this stage, you can ask them to subscribe to get more valuable information. The purpose is to get their email addresses to establish a closer relationship with them.

Today people are careful about giving their email addresses. You have to offer something valuable that makes it worthwhile to exchange their email addresses against that offer. It may be a free ebook, demo, webinar, downloadable cheat sheets, or anything useful to them. They fill in a form, submit, and get access to your freebie – instantly.

Step 5 – Convert Them into Customers by Offering a Low-Ticket, High-Value Product or Service

It’s also called the Tripwire marketing stage. The idea is to offer subscribers a low-cost, low-risk, high-value product, and sell them more expensive products later. … Once a subscriber becomes a customer, they are more likely to become a customer again.

A tripwire offer is not supposed to make you a profit. The only intention is to create a smooth transition from subscriber to paying, happy customer. Real profit will come later in the journey.

Step 6 – Make Them Excited about Your Brand

People feel good after they buy something. It’s a scientific fact. Buying gives a feeling of acquiring something due to release of a mood-enhancing hormone called dopamine. That gets people ready to be excited.

That’s why this sixth stage of building excitement in your buyer’s mind is essential.

How can you do that? Give them some memorable experience of the buying process. Send them a thank you letter. Give them a quick-start tutorial. Give them some bonuses; some discount coupons; or some freebies. Anything that they will remember.

Step 7 – Make Them Repeat Buyers

This is called the ascension stage. See the ladder image on the top left corner of the CVJ diagram.

The goal here is to generate repeat buys from the same customers. Real profit starts here.

Your entry point offer was planned for conversions. Your ascension offers should be aimed at making profits because a happy customer becomes a repeat customer.

It’s a known fact that cost per sale to an existing, loyal customer is 90% cheaper than acquiring a new customer and selling to them.

A good ascension offer may include upsells – bigger, better versions of earlier purchase. It may be cross-sales – parallel products that can complement the products already sold. Or it may be a DFY (Done For You) offer that relieves some burden of work at the customer’s end.

Offering premium membership to enhanced, personalized services, monthly templates, priority help-desk access etc. are some other examples of ascension offers.

Step 8 – Ask Them for Referrals and Reviews

Usually, a happy customer would be willing to advocate for you. Yet sometimes they may need a little extra push to reach out and give you a positive review or refer your service to their friends and contacts.

The smart idea is to ask them to write their positive experiences on social media or for your website.

Step 9 – Make Them Your Brand Ambassadors to Promote Your Brand

At this Promotion Stage, your customers become your captive brand ambassadors. They talk about your products or services; they write about your brand and share your offers.

This is like getting into a kind of joint venture with them by sharing affiliate or other types of commissions and giving away free products every time, they send a customer to you.

The arrangement becomes a sure-fire way to make formidable brand equity in the market for you.

Conclusion

Understanding the Customer Value Journey has catapulted many struggling freelancers into high-income entrepreneurs.

Understanding the CVJ process itself will boost your freelancing results. But there is more than you can learn to reach an even higher level. We’re a dedicated Digital Marketing Institute that makes people learn while they earn and make their presence felt in the market.

We’ve helped thousands of freelancers to reach top levels that they never imagined would’ve been possible. We offer rigorous training leading to internationally recognized certifications in Digital Marketing and personal coaching.

To know more about our Institute, visit Online Business University.

If you have found this article useful to you, please leave your comment in the comment box below.

But we often ignore that a buying decision is the result of a well-defined process called

Customer Value Journey. It’s true for a million-dollar B2B deal. And it’s true for a few dollars worth impulsive buying by a B2C customer.

Off-line or on-line, the Customer Value Journey is more or less the same. The process was there before the internet. And it will be there tomorrow.

Most freelancers often wonder why they don’t have a stable and predictable income. Statistics show that on an average 90% freelancers struggle to pay their bills.

Freelancers don’t get paid on time; they can’t charge enough; they don’t get enough clients; they choose wrong clients, and so on.

But those are just symptoms, not reasons.

The problem has little to do with technical skills or creativity.

There’s a limiting belief that there are too many freelancers in the market, so the competition is high.

That’s a load of baloney.

A reason is, most freelancers don’t understand business. They have experience as employees.

Many of them are freshers – having no experience.

Without having an entrepreneur’s mindset, they try to learn too many things half-ass. Naturally, they get half-ass results.

But the freelancing profession is not so complicated.

Even if you have just one skill, you can become a successful freelancer – by guiding your prospects along the Customer Value Journey. How about attracting swarms of customers instead of going to them? How about getting more deals that you can handle? Are you ready for that?

Let’s dive into understanding the Customer Value Journey. It will give you a step by step process for attracting, converting, and keeping your best customers.

What is Customer Value Journey?

The Customer Value Journey (let’s call it CVJ) is about turning strangers into super fans. Digital marketing can make this journey incredibly faster.

I reviewed many templates of CVJ, but none of them are as in-depth as the one developed by Digital Marketer, the partner of our Online Business University.

The CVJ is an 8 step route that people travel as they discover your brand, build a relationship with you, and finally become your super fans.

If we draw a map, the path will look like this.

It looks like a gallery floor-plan with several arrows showing different directions, right? A customer left alone in this journey will get lost along the way.

They may get confused, and even forget why they ever started on this journey with your brand.

That’s why we need a strategy to guide people through all the eight steps, helping them when they get stalled anywhere and encourage them to move along the journey.

Here we go.

Step 1 – Know Your Ideal Customer

In the beginning, you should avoid the temptation of offering everything to everyone. Most freelancers make this mistake and end up nowhere.

You must figure out who your ideal customer is, where they hang around and what they will buy. You need to create a document around this. We call it Customer Avatar. Building your customer avatar can have a massive impact on your marketing results.

The customer avatar document is a “Swiss Army Knife of Marketing” because it impacts practically every aspect of your marketing, including:

• Website design
• Content marketing
• Paid traffic
• Product creation
• Copywriting
• Email marketing

And that’s just scratching the surface. Any part of your sales and marketing process that touches the customer will improve when you get clear on your customer avatar.

After all, it’s a human being who buys our products or services. It pays to get a clear picture of the characteristics of the person, so you can present them with a message that can move them into taking the desired action.

Here is a sample template showing how a customer avatar document looks.

For example, let us take a buyer group of small supermarket owners like Venkataesh.

He wants to let his business continue to grow after the Covid-19 lockdown. After doing a little research, our customer avatar document looked like this:

You should take your time to research your customer avatar. Because it can make or break your business going forward. It’s very, very important.

Step 2 – Make Them Aware of Your Offers

At this stage, you let your prospects discover your offers and your brand.

Prospect awareness can be triggered by advertisements, blog posts, words of mouth referrals, events, social media or any other channels that get people’s attention, then entertain or inform them.

You need to create a campaign with contents relevant at this stage. It’s called Top of the Funnel Content Strategy.

Step 3 – Engage Them with Your Brand

Engagement means an emotional involvement or commitment. It’s about being on the same wavelength with someone. It’s a prerequisite to building a deeper relationship, just like it happens before marriage.

In digital marketing, it happens just after your first interaction with the prospects, and it continues through the entire experience with your brand. It’s a continuing conversation you have with them throughout the Customer Value Journey. You use multiple channels like a blog, social community, email, customer support and the likes.

Step 4 – Ask Them to Subscribe

If the prospects like the experience of interacting with you, they start liking you. A level of trust begins to build up. At this stage, you can ask them to subscribe to get more valuable information. The purpose is to get their email addresses to establish a closer relationship with them.

Today people are careful about giving their email addresses. You have to offer something valuable that makes it worthwhile to exchange their email addresses against that offer. It may be a free ebook, demo, webinar, downloadable cheat sheets, or anything useful to them. They fill in a form, submit, and get access to your freebie – instantly.

Step 5 – Convert Them into Customers by Offering a Low-Ticket, High-Value Product or Service

It’s also called the Tripwire marketing stage. The idea is to offer subscribers a low-cost, low-risk, high-value product, and sell them more expensive products later. … Once a subscriber becomes a customer, they are more likely to become a customer again.

A tripwire offer is not supposed to make you a profit. The only intention is to create a smooth transition from subscriber to paying, happy customer. Real profit will come later in the journey.

Step 6 – Make Them Excited about Your Brand

People feel good after they buy something. It’s a scientific fact. Buying gives a feeling of acquiring something due to release of a mood-enhancing hormone called dopamine. That gets people ready to be excited.

That’s why this sixth stage of building excitement in your buyer’s mind is essential.

How can you do that? Give them some memorable experience of the buying process. Send them a thank you letter. Give them a quick-start tutorial. Give them some bonuses; some discount coupons; or some freebies. Anything that they will remember.

Step 7 – Make Them Repeat Buyers

This is called the ascension stage. See the ladder image on the top left corner of the CVJ diagram.

The goal here is to generate repeat buys from the same customers. Real profit starts here.

Your entry point offer was planned for conversions. Your ascension offers should be aimed at making profits because a happy customer becomes a repeat customer.

It’s a known fact that cost per sale to an existing, loyal customer is 90% cheaper than acquiring a new customer and selling to them.

A good ascension offer may include upsells – bigger, better versions of earlier purchase. It may be cross-sales – parallel products that can complement the products already sold. Or it may be a DFY (Done For You) offer that relieves some burden of work at the customer’s end.

Offering premium membership to enhanced, personalized services, monthly templates, priority help-desk access etc. are some other examples of ascension offers.

Step 8 – Ask Them for Referrals and Reviews

Usually, a happy customer would be willing to advocate for you. Yet sometimes they may need a little extra push to reach out and give you a positive review or refer your service to their friends and contacts.

The smart idea is to ask them to write their positive experiences on social media or for your website.

Step 9 – Make Them Your Brand Ambassadors to Promote Your Brand

At this Promotion Stage, your customers become your captive brand ambassadors. They talk about your products or services; they write about your brand and share your offers.

This is like getting into a kind of joint venture with them by sharing affiliate or other types of commissions and giving away free products every time, they send a customer to you.

The arrangement becomes a sure-fire way to make formidable brand equity in the market for you.

Conclusion

Understanding the Customer Value Journey has catapulted many struggling freelancers into high-income entrepreneurs.

Understanding the CVJ process itself will boost your freelancing results. But there is more than you can learn to reach an even higher level. We’re a dedicated Digital Marketing Institute that makes people learn while they earn and make their presence felt in the market.

We’ve helped thousands of freelancers to reach top levels that they never imagined would’ve been possible. We offer rigorous training leading to internationally recognized certifications in Digital Marketing and personal coaching.

To know more about our Institute, visit Online Business University.

If you have found this article useful to you, please leave your comment in the comment box below.

“Riches are in niches”

• Susan Friedman, best-selling author, and niche expert

Why should I care about finding the best digital marketing niche?

That is a common question asked by freelancers when they start. They believe that targeting the broad market will give them a better chance to acquire more customers.

Before telling if that belief is right or wrong, let us have a closer look at this “niche” stuff.

What is a Marketing Niche?

The Oxford dictionary says it’s “The business of promoting and selling a product or service to a specialized segment of the market.”

Examples speak more clearly than definitions. So, let’s take the Digital Marketing Market as an example. That means you want to help business owners by providing digital marketing solutions.

So, are the solutions? There are many.

If you visit fiverr.com, you’ll see the list of services that look like a restaurant menu! Some of those are.

• Social Media Marketing
• SEO
• Social Media Advertising
• Public Relations
• Content Marketing
• Podcast Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Crowdfunding
• SEM
• Marketing Strategy
• Surveys
• Web Analytics
• Book & eBook Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Local SEO
• Domain Research
• E-Commerce Marketing
• Mobile Marketing & Advertising
• Music Promotion
• Web Traffic

Now you have a list of 21 services that customers are looking for in the market. Each one is a well-defined niche.

As a digital marketing freelancer, you should have some knowledge about each of them because all of them are inter-connected.

Imagine You are Meeting a Potential Client

The prospect says he is looking for someone who can help him with his E-Commerce Marketing. You say that you can do that.

Then he asks if you can do Email marketing. You say, “yes.”

Then he asks if you have expertise in Video Marketing and site-wide SEO optimization.

And you say that you’re an expert in those also.

If you’re in his place, what will be your impression of such a freelancer? An experienced business person will ask you to show proof of your work on all of those areas.

Are you having so many portfolios ready? Unless you’re the owner of a mega-agency, chances are remorse that you would have that much experience, proof, and testimonials to convince him that you’re the trustworthy guy – right?

Now imagine Scene 2

You say to your prospect that you’ve had an experience of running E-commerce Marketing. You’ve served 20 clients in the last two months. You show him the sites, client testimonials, and samples of some E-commerce themes relevant to his business.

You also show him how you can put him on Google Maps within a matter of days. You tell him how he can manage E-commerce marketing on several channels easily. You make him aware of the opportunities he has never known before.

Will he be able to have some confidence and trust in you? Sure, he’ll have.

Suppose now he asks you if you can do Email Marketing for him. You tell him that you don’t do that right now, but you know an expert who runs successful Email Marketing campaigns for many clients. You say to him that if he wants, you can refer him to the expert.

You got the idea. Clients are professionals, and professionals love honesty and openness from fellow professionals.

It’s a limiting belief that by trying to cater to a broad market as a freelancer, you’ll be able to grow your business. It’s a blunder.

90% or more budding freelancers don’t earn enough to pay their bills, mostly due to this misconception.

Does that mean you’ll never be able to expand your market across other niches?

The answer is a resounding, “Yes.”

There’s a well-defined journey. And there’s a fool-proof road map.

First, we provide full-stack training and internationally acclaimed certifications to become a millionaire businessman within the shortest possible time.

To know more,  Click Here.

In the next step, we train and guide freelancers to become entrepreneurs.

The difference is simple. Freelancers work for themselves while entrepreneurs hire and outsource others to work for them.

The strategy is to become a master of one or two Digital Marketing Niches at first, learn with us, and earn while you learn.

We provide you all the resources to make you Freelance Ready (We nicknamed it as Fredy) and create products. We also provide you with our exclusive Digital Marketing Market and hand-hold you to find plenty of ready buyers all over the world. We’ve selected the 8 most profitable niches.

Read on to know about those best digital marketing niches for freelancers.

The 8 Core Niche Areas

1. Customer Value Optimization (CVO)

Businesses can’t run without customers. A prospect looking for your service invariably has the intention of acquiring more customers. He may approach you for your expertise. Knowing CVO will give you an edge. You can explain to him how your service can help him increase his customer base.

Any business has some kind of sales funnel. Most of them don’t know how to lead their prospects through a smooth customer value journey through different funnel stages.

A well-optimized funnel can convert prospects into buyers, then buyers into repeat buyers, higher value orders, and finally nurture the buyers to become raving fans.

Explaining the process of CVO will let your prospect know that you know your “stuff” better than most other freelancers in the market.

It’s a must-have skill for any freelancer. No matter what your niche is, CVO is the foundation of the Digital Marketing business.

2. Social Media Marketing

Society is going online, like never before. People are consuming more and more information on social media. They can voice their opinion to their contacts and share their feelings there. They praise, they criticize, and they recommend stuff on social media.

A business can be in the B2C or B2B market. All of them must learn to use social media to inform, engage, excite, and influence buyers to do business with them.

Obviously, there’s a super hungry market looking for Social Media experts to help businesses achieve their goals.

3. Content Marketing

In January 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled Content is king. Since then, it has become a phrase.

Without content, there is nothing online.

Articles, graphics, videos, pictures, emoticons, gifs, animation … all are contents in some form or the other.

There’s a massive demand for high-quality content creators. But a content creator who knows how to distribute and market content as well is in higher demand.

The “value-first” content plan can lead stone-cold prospects at the top-of-the-funnel through becoming loyal customers and finally into becoming high-paying, long-term associates.

A freelancer having content marketing skills can have enough buyers than he can handle alone.

4. Email Marketing

Among all marketing activities, email marketing generates the highest Return on Investment (ROI).

Most businesses are doing email marketing wrong. Worse, many of them don’t do it at all. So this is an area where a skilled freelancer can help his clients plan three different types of email campaigns, and apply them. He can also help the clients integrate and automate the process. Email marketing can literally “make sales when you sleep.”

It pays more than handsomely to know Email marketing well.

5. Search Engine Marketing

In a way, the internet is the largest database of information on earth. Billions of people are looking for information all the time on the internet all the time.

Right now, there are over 1.80 billion websites. Over 550,000 websites are being added each day, according to Google.

In this mega crowded place, how can a prospect find your product or service? And how can she decide that your offer will be the best solution for her? This situation is real for you and true for your clients as well.

Fortunately, there are advanced techniques and tools to sort this out. A master in this niche knows how to leverage search channels like Google, Amazon, Bing, Yelp so that the selected brand is discovered fast. And when it’s found, the visitors should get a positive impression about the brand.

Search Engine Marketing is a high-paying skill having incredible demand in the market.

6. Analytics & Data Management

Are you good at number crunching? Do you have a knack for analyzing complex data that helps to make decisions? Then Analytics and Data Management is an excellent niche for you.

You have to learn to set up an analytics plan and figure out the key metrics that matter. A data tracking plan to look at those metrics daily, weekly and monthly can alert you of your business. Timely course correction can save a company from potential problems.

Expert Data Analytics specialists are in high demand and rare to find.

7. Optimization & Testing

Traffic to your website has no use if the visitors don’t convert. Conversion Rate Optimization, therefore, is a science. Tracking and analyzing conversion against each campaign and split testing are two important jobs for a business.

Many digital marketers claim to do Conversion Optimization, but they rely on short-term hacks to show results. A sustainable CRO campaign is a repeatable process to keep the momentum always on.

Acquiring the real Optimization and Testing skills will give you an edge over all the run-of-the-mill freelancers.

And CRO is a very high-in-demand skill.

8. E-Commerce Marketing

It’s called E-Commerce, but I call it a science. Just ten years ago, people would hesitate to buy stuff online. The habit is changing. Particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic, online shopping has become unavoidable.

Today, almost all business houses need to be in E-Commerce. Otherwise, they would leave a lot of money on the table. No matter if you are into B2B or B2C business, you must have an E-Commerce store, and also you should have a presence in third-party marketplaces like Amazon.

E-Commerce is evolving fast. Today, displaying your merchandising on your store with descriptions is not enough.

You must be able to give a great experience to your visitors. In 2021, the visitor experience is going to be a big thing as Google is going to roll out their next algorithm on it.

E-Commerce marketing covers the entire gamut of creating an E-Commerce store, uploading products, optimizing descriptions, other content, and, more importantly, optimizing those for maximum results.

Needless to say, E-Commerce mastery has potential without limits.

Website Development

Did I forget to cover Website Design and Development? No. This is an omnipotent and compulsory skill to have. I didn’t mention it in the niche skills. Because to become a successful freelancer within a short time, you need not master this skill right now (though it is a high-paying skill but takes a longer time to develop). Still, as a freelancer, you must have the basic knowledge of how websites work.

There are plenty of free or low-cost courses available online that you can pick up and learn the basics. We recommend learning WordPress first. For example, you can check Udemy or DreamHost as two examples.

Summary

The world is changing from Job-Economy to Skill-Economy. In the coming days, companies are going to depend more on outsourcing jobs to skilled freelancers and agencies than employees.

That trend will cause millions of people to take up freelancing as a career. The market will be competitive. But you don’t have to worry.

Mastery is high-demand niches like above will make you stand head and shoulder above the crowd in 2020 and beyond. To know more, visit our online institute, OnlineBusiness.Org, now.

Your comments about the article are welcome. If you have any questions or queries, contact us today.

“Freelancers get paid for their work. If you’re a freelance copywriter, you get paid when you work. Entrepreneurs use other people’s money to build a business bigger than themselves so that they can get paid when they sleep.” … Seth Godin

Freelancing is an excellent way to fire your boss. The job economy is shifting towards skill-economy. No job can give employees financial security and financial freedom.

A freelancer’s most valuable asset is their skills. And Skills Pay the Bills.

But freelancing has limitations.

On a job, you’re exchanging your time against dollars. An employee has access to your employer’s resources. You get computers, and you get other staff to help you.

But as a freelancer, you have to invest in buying gadgets, tools, and software. You’ve to do everything yourself. You can automate some processes, but most of the time, you’ve to multitask. You also have a time limitation. Each day has only 24 hours.

You can’t grow your customer base after a certain limit. Freelancing is not scalable.

An entrepreneur can grow his business as much as he wishes.

Before laying out a roadmap to entrepreneurship, take a look at the money-mechanism of society.

What’s the difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur?

Robert Kyosaki’s 4 Quadrant Model of Income

In any economy, there are four ways to earn money.

Robert Kyosaki, author of his bestseller book Rich Dad Poor Dad, described the ways in a 4-quadrant model.

In this quadrant, he defined the categories as:

E: Employees: Those who work for others. They sell their time for money. Blue-collar and white-collar workers fall into this category.

S: Self-employed: They work for themselves. They sell their products or services. Lawyers, doctors, digital marketing freelancers, small shop owners, and interior designers are examples of self-employed people.

B: Businesses: Others work for them. They buy other people’s time and work, and sell those at a premium. Industrialists, large scale contractors (including digital marketing agencies), and promoters of corporates are business people.

I: Investors: They don’t work for money. Money works for them. They invest money in other people’s businesses against some assured return.

Some investors provide capital to businesses under profit-sharing terms as well. Bankers, Sleeping Partners, and Venture Capitalists come under this category.

Shocking Truth – Economy Supports The Rich

That may be good or bad, but it’s beyond our control. Society encourages the rich to make more money, and rich people are either entrepreneurs or investors.

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer is an aphorism due to the famous English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly.

Look at the diagram below. It shows the wealth distribution of the world.

What do we see here?

• Total global wealth at the end of 2019 was US$360 trillion (tn)
• The distribution pattern looks like a pyramid.
• The top 10% of people on earth own about 80% of the total global wealth. They are mostly large business owners and investors like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mukesh Ambani, and Larry Ellison as examples.
• At the bottom, the 2.9 billion population has average wealth below $10,000 per person. They contribute to 57% of the world adult population. They are mostly blue and white-collar workers.
• The in-between segment of 1.7 billion people owns between $10,000 and $100,000 worth of wealth. They are 33% of the world’s total adult population. The self-employed professionals and small business people fall into this category.

Society supports business people because they contribute the maximum to boost the economy. Employees pay tax first before spending. Entrepreneurs spend first and pay tax on the money left. There are many more privileges that entrepreneurs enjoy as they grow. That’s a separate topic and beyond the scope of this article.

Freelancer to Entrepreneur – The 7 Point Roadmap

Entrepreneurs think and act in a different way than non-entrepreneurs. With a little bit of effort and determination, anyone can develop that mindset. Once you understand the pattern, you’ll be on the way to become a successful entrepreneur.

You can’t become an entrepreneur overnight from a freelancer. It’s a gradual process. But by focusing on the following 7 points, you can complete the journey faster.

1. Have a Dream and Vision

Without a dream, you can’t have a vision; without a vision, you can’t make a plan; and without a plan, you can’t progress.

So, you must have a vision around your dream. “Dream is not what you see in sleep. Dream is something which doesn’t let you sleep” is a beautiful quote by Dr. Abdul Kalam, erstwhile President of India.

Writing your goals on paper is an excellent idea. Only 5% of us have a clearly written goal. But we can’t imagine things in the text. Images control the mind.

If I say a cheetah is running on an open field, what do you visualize? The words, or a picture? Not just an image. It’s a motion picture where a running cheetah comes alive, right?

So, I suggest my students create vision boards on the side of a written goal. Always handwrite your goals instead of typing. You’ll have a lot of mental energy when you handwrite your goals before creating a vision board.

A vision board forces you to think in specific terms. If you say “I want to own a home,” that’s not a vision. You should be able to “see” your future home with specifics. How will it look? Where will it be situated? What color? A house or an apartment? How many rooms?

A vision board would have all specifics in vivid detail, in images or video format.

A compelling vision board reminds you of your dreams about your goals.

• What do you want to have?
• Where do you want to live?
• What do you want to be?
• What do you want to do?

There’s something magical about creating a vision board and keeping that always in front of you. The images embed themselves in your subconscious and drive you to take action. That’s called “Law of Attraction.” Science is not able to explain that yet, but it’s true.

If you want to be successful in life, creating a vision board can accelerate the process.

2. Have an Unshakable Positive Mental Attitude Always

An entrepreneur is like the captain of a ship. The mindset of the head of the business sets the mood of the employees and channel partners. Adversities, challenges, and failures are a part of the life of an entrepreneur. You’ve to learn to overcome those setbacks with a die-hard, “no matter what” attitude.

“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company.

When a challenge comes up, the best way is to face it. Ask yourself, “how can I overcome it to move forward.”

Being positive is a skill like any other skill and can be learned. An entrepreneur’s journey is full of long hours and erratic demands and turn-offs. Learning to manage those well, however, leads to building an insane amount of wealth.

3. Become an Idea Machine – Entrepreneurs Must Have a Creative Mind

Can you think of 10 problems that your customers are having right now? Can you list them with possible solutions?

Your customer has an excellent looking website, and he is spending a lot of money on ads. But his sales are not picking up. What might be the reasons? Can you probe by asking him relevant questions? List those out.

Then find out all possible solutions. You might not have the skills to solve all the issues. But Can you outsource whatever is out of your expertise? The moment you start outsourcing solutions for your clients, you’re on your way to become an entrepreneur.

4. Join or Build a Community of Freelancers Around You

Nothing empowers more than a supportive community of like-minded people.

You want to become an entrepreneur. Or you may wish to remain a freelancer. No matter what your goal is, you have to keep yourself updated and upskilled all the time.

A community of like-minded co-professionals will always help you learn new things, practice, and teach others. All successful entrepreneurs are excellent teachers.

5. Develop Persuasive Communication Skills

You’ll need a lot of external support when you go from freelancer to entrepreneur. You’ve to get things done by others. So, developing a super friendly yet persuasive communication skill can make life easier. When others take care of some of your tasks, you get time freedom to scale up your business.

Reciprocation is the fastest way to gain confidence in effective persuasion. The rule is “give and take,” not the other way round. You must extend your help to others first without expecting anything in return. Give some value to your community. People help those who help others.

6. Have a Financial Discipline Aligned with Your Goal

A business needs capital. During your transformation from a freelancer to an entrepreneur, you must set aside a part of your freelancing income for a planned reinvestment.

You’ll need advanced automation tools, fees for one or two virtual assistants; arbitrage (explained later) investment; subscriptions; upskill course fees, and a line of other investments and expenses.

The fastest way would be to reinvest 50 to 80% of your first year freelancing income into building an agency business. Even a commitment to a lower target is also good. But you need the discipline to stick to that consistently.

Keeping a watch on cash-flow is essential. A simple workbook on business expenses, investments, and ROI month on month can keep you on track. We shall discuss how to maintain financial accounts in a future article.

7. Incorporation

As a freelancer, you can run your operation under your own name as a proprietor. But as you grow, your liabilities and risks will increase.

A farm or a company owner/partner has limited liability, and the law protects individuals against many legal penalties.

The tax structure is more friendly to entrepreneurs and individual freelancers. Opening an LLC or Private Limited company can save you a lot of taxes in the long and short run.

Conclusion

The journey from being a freelancer to become a full-time entrepreneur is full of challenges. You’ll learn how to come on top in the face of setbacks and mistakes. You’ll be a different person – a leader from being a follower.

A leader creates leaders. The more leaders you’ll create, the more you’ll become free to scale up your business. Finally, you’ll learn how to run a full-grown business on autopilot.

In the process, you’ll make positive changes in many people’s lives.

I am finishing this article with one of my favorite quotes by marketing genius, Zig Ziglar.

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

That should be the ultimate goal of building a business around that mindset – of making positive changes in society.

Please leave a review in the comment box below. If you have any questions, send an email to: www.gaurav.guru@gmail.com

Ladies and Gentleman,

Boys & Girls I am happy that you are not connected with the #1 digital marketing expert in Singapore.

My name is Gaurav and I am not originally from around here, However, the Internet is a wonderful space to connect with clients from all across the world.

Just recently I incorporated my firm in Singapore as this is the tech capital of the world. More so, I really want to move to Singapore with my family. 2 Dogs, 2 Kids and 1 Wife 🙂

I’ve heard from every person I have consulted with that Singapore is such an expensive place to live, but I am determined.

I don’t have a bag of cash sitting in savings either, but I do have one thing.

I do have knowledge of digital marketing. In fact my idea and something that I am banking on is google. You know, SEO.

If I am able to rank myself and others in the top of Google, help them gain visibility online,I think have a shot at making it in Singapore..

If you are looking for a digital marketing expert, consultant, speaker and really want an awesome deal, hook me up on IG

Company Details

“Freelancers get paid for their work. If you’re a freelance copywriter, you get paid when you work. Entrepreneurs use other people’s money to build a business bigger than themselves so that they can get paid when they sleep.” … Seth Godin

Freelancing is an excellent way to fire your boss. The job economy is shifting towards skill-economy. No job can give employees financial security and financial freedom.

A freelancer’s most valuable asset is their skills. And Skills Pay the Bills.

But freelancing has limitations.

On a job, you’re exchanging your time against dollars. An employee has access to your employer’s resources. You get computers, and you get other staff to help you.

But as a freelancer, you have to invest in buying gadgets, tools, and software. You’ve to do everything yourself. You can automate some processes, but most of the time, you’ve to multitask. You also have a time limitation. Each day has only 24 hours.

You can’t grow your customer base after a certain limit. Freelancing is not scalable.

An entrepreneur can grow his business as much as he wishes.

Before laying out a roadmap to entrepreneurship, take a look at the money-mechanism of society.

What’s the difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur?

Robert Kyosaki’s 4 Quadrant Model of Income

In any economy, there are four ways to earn money.

Robert Kyosaki, author of his bestseller book Rich Dad Poor Dad, described the ways in a 4-quadrant model.

In this quadrant, he defined the categories as:

E: Employees: Those who work for others. They sell their time for money. Blue-collar and white-collar workers fall into this category.

S: Self-employed: They work for themselves. They sell their products or services. Lawyers, doctors, digital marketing freelancers, small shop owners, and interior designers are examples of self-employed people.

B: Businesses: Others work for them. They buy other people’s time and work, and sell those at a premium. Industrialists, large scale contractors (including digital marketing agencies), and promoters of corporates are business people.

I: Investors: They don’t work for money. Money works for them. They invest money in other people’s businesses against some assured return.

Some investors provide capital to businesses under profit-sharing terms as well. Bankers, Sleeping Partners, and Venture Capitalists come under this category.

Shocking Truth – Economy Supports The Rich

That may be good or bad, but it’s beyond our control. Society encourages the rich to make more money, and rich people are either entrepreneurs or investors.

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer is an aphorism due to the famous English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly.

Look at the diagram below. It shows the wealth distribution of the world.

What do we see here?

• Total global wealth at the end of 2019 was US$360 trillion (tn)
• The distribution pattern looks like a pyramid.
• The top 10% of people on earth own about 80% of the total global wealth. They are mostly large business owners and investors like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mukesh Ambani, and Larry Ellison as examples.
• At the bottom, the 2.9 billion population has average wealth below $10,000 per person. They contribute to 57% of the world adult population. They are mostly blue and white-collar workers.
• The in-between segment of 1.7 billion people owns between $10,000 and $100,000 worth of wealth. They are 33% of the world’s total adult population. The self-employed professionals and small business people fall into this category.

Society supports business people because they contribute the maximum to boost the economy. Employees pay tax first before spending. Entrepreneurs spend first and pay tax on the money left. There are many more privileges that entrepreneurs enjoy as they grow. That’s a separate topic and beyond the scope of this article.

Freelancer to Entrepreneur – The 7 Point Roadmap

Entrepreneurs think and act in a different way than non-entrepreneurs. With a little bit of effort and determination, anyone can develop that mindset. Once you understand the pattern, you’ll be on the way to become a successful entrepreneur.

You can’t become an entrepreneur overnight from a freelancer. It’s a gradual process. But by focusing on the following 7 points, you can complete the journey faster.

1. Have a Dream and Vision

Without a dream, you can’t have a vision; without a vision, you can’t make a plan; and without a plan, you can’t progress.

So, you must have a vision around your dream. “Dream is not what you see in sleep. Dream is something which doesn’t let you sleep” is a beautiful quote by Dr. Abdul Kalam, erstwhile President of India.

Writing your goals on paper is an excellent idea. Only 5% of us have a clearly written goal. But we can’t imagine things in the text. Images control the mind.

If I say a cheetah is running on an open field, what do you visualize? The words, or a picture? Not just an image. It’s a motion picture where a running cheetah comes alive, right?

So, I suggest my students create vision boards on the side of a written goal. Always handwrite your goals instead of typing. You’ll have a lot of mental energy when you handwrite your goals before creating a vision board.

A vision board forces you to think in specific terms. If you say “I want to own a home,” that’s not a vision. You should be able to “see” your future home with specifics. How will it look? Where will it be situated? What color? A house or an apartment? How many rooms?

A vision board would have all specifics in vivid detail, in images or video format.

A compelling vision board reminds you of your dreams about your goals.

• What do you want to have?
• Where do you want to live?
• What do you want to be?
• What do you want to do?

There’s something magical about creating a vision board and keeping that always in front of you. The images embed themselves in your subconscious and drive you to take action. That’s called “Law of Attraction.” Science is not able to explain that yet, but it’s true.

If you want to be successful in life, creating a vision board can accelerate the process.

2. Have an Unshakable Positive Mental Attitude Always

An entrepreneur is like the captain of a ship. The mindset of the head of the business sets the mood of the employees and channel partners. Adversities, challenges, and failures are a part of the life of an entrepreneur. You’ve to learn to overcome those setbacks with a die-hard, “no matter what” attitude.

“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company.

When a challenge comes up, the best way is to face it. Ask yourself, “how can I overcome it to move forward.”

Being positive is a skill like any other skill and can be learned. An entrepreneur’s journey is full of long hours and erratic demands and turn-offs. Learning to manage those well, however, leads to building an insane amount of wealth.

3. Become an Idea Machine – Entrepreneurs Must Have a Creative Mind

Can you think of 10 problems that your customers are having right now? Can you list them with possible solutions?

Your customer has an excellent looking website, and he is spending a lot of money on ads. But his sales are not picking up. What might be the reasons? Can you probe by asking him relevant questions? List those out.

Then find out all possible solutions. You might not have the skills to solve all the issues. But Can you outsource whatever is out of your expertise? The moment you start outsourcing solutions for your clients, you’re on your way to become an entrepreneur.

4. Join or Build a Community of Freelancers Around You

Nothing empowers more than a supportive community of like-minded people.

You want to become an entrepreneur. Or you may wish to remain a freelancer. No matter what your goal is, you have to keep yourself updated and upskilled all the time.

A community of like-minded co-professionals will always help you learn new things, practice, and teach others. All successful entrepreneurs are excellent teachers.

5. Develop Persuasive Communication Skills

You’ll need a lot of external support when you go from freelancer to entrepreneur. You’ve to get things done by others. So, developing a super friendly yet persuasive communication skill can make life easier. When others take care of some of your tasks, you get time freedom to scale up your business.

Reciprocation is the fastest way to gain confidence in effective persuasion. The rule is “give and take,” not the other way round. You must extend your help to others first without expecting anything in return. Give some value to your community. People help those who help others.

6. Have a Financial Discipline Aligned with Your Goal

A business needs capital. During your transformation from a freelancer to an entrepreneur, you must set aside a part of your freelancing income for a planned reinvestment.

You’ll need advanced automation tools, fees for one or two virtual assistants; arbitrage (explained later) investment; subscriptions; upskill course fees, and a line of other investments and expenses.

The fastest way would be to reinvest 50 to 80% of your first year freelancing income into building an agency business. Even a commitment to a lower target is also good. But you need the discipline to stick to that consistently.

Keeping a watch on cash-flow is essential. A simple workbook on business expenses, investments, and ROI month on month can keep you on track. We shall discuss how to maintain financial accounts in a future article.

7. Incorporation

As a freelancer, you can run your operation under your own name as a proprietor. But as you grow, your liabilities and risks will increase.

A farm or a company owner/partner has limited liability, and the law protects individuals against many legal penalties.

The tax structure is more friendly to entrepreneurs and individual freelancers. Opening an LLC or Private Limited company can save you a lot of taxes in the long and short run.

Conclusion

The journey from being a freelancer to become a full-time entrepreneur is full of challenges. You’ll learn how to come on top in the face of setbacks and mistakes. You’ll be a different person – a leader from being a follower.

A leader creates leaders. The more leaders you’ll create, the more you’ll become free to scale up your business. Finally, you’ll learn how to run a full-grown business on autopilot.

In the process, you’ll make positive changes in many people’s lives.

I am finishing this article with one of my favorite quotes by marketing genius, Zig Ziglar.

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

That should be the ultimate goal of building a business around that mindset – of making positive changes in society.

Please leave a review in the comment box below. If you have any questions, send an email to: www.gaurav.guru@gmail.com