Jovan Cicmil's Blog - Marketing

Should You Use Local Outreach To Find Freelance Clients: Pros and Cons

December 4, 2024

Many freelance gurus give the following advice for finding your first clients: Find local businesses that might benefit from your services. Reach out to them offering your services. The logic is: the business owners are more likely to respond to you because you’re a local, you can visit their business, schedule a coffee chat, and so on. This approach has its pros and cons like any ...

How To Promote Your Freelance Services the Right Way

April 12, 2023

Freelancers often shy away from self-promotion. It can feel awkward, cheap, and untasteful. When I started freelancing in 2011, I felt the same way. It took close to a decade to change my mind. If you think of freelancing as a business, self-promotion is nothing but marketing for that business. The trick is to do it in a way that matches your personality. You need to promote what you offer ...

Crafting Freelance Offers: Charge So Much That It Makes You Uncomfortable

March 29, 2023

Let’s perform an experiment. For this experiment, you will need an account with a freelance platform, but the results will be universally applicable. I’ll take Upwork here as an example. Go to Upwork. Find 10 projects with a maximum budget of $5,000 (on Upwork, this is a common budget because it’s one of the default options for fixed-price projects). Make sure you ...

Should You Use Upwork or Cold Email as a Freelancer?

October 26, 2022

Freelancers face the same dilemma all the time — should you sign up for a freelance marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr, or make your own way by directly contacting business owners and offering your services? Some freelance teachers swear by one approach. Some swear by the other. I swear I will help you understand both approaches so you can make an informed decision. Is the Upwork fee ...

How I Reduced My Earnings by 14% With a Single Email

June 24, 2022

Tired of stories about how people got crazy returns from a single brilliant move? They’re everywhere these days. There were probably a couple on the page where you clicked on this article. Not to worry — I’ve got you covered. Here’s an (arguably more instructive) story about how I cheated myself out of thousands of dollars with a single wiseguy move. On being far-sighted… In ...

A Guide to Creating and Capitalizing on Viral Tweets

April 21, 2022

On March 22, I wrote this tweet and it went viral. On the morning of March 23, I had over 1000 notifications. The tweet had over 10,000 likes and over a million people had seen it. I had some good fun with the responses, but I also profited in more concrete ways. Here’s what happens when your tweet ...

How to Write Follow-up Messages That Generate Clients and Close Deals

August 18, 2021

Following up with prospective clients is tricky business. There’s a fine line between a confident, entrepreneurial message and a spammy ping notification that serves no purpose other than to irritate the person on the other end. During my decade of freelance experience, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to experiment with different approaches to communication. I’ve also had the ...

The Two-Step System for Getting a Better Deal From Marketing Agencies

August 6, 2021

A digital marketing agency reached out to me a few days ago with an offer to promote my recently released book. The exchange didn’t go well, but it was highly instructive and I believe I’ve discovered a neat two-step approach to filter marketing offers. Their proposal was simple: for a flat fee of $2,000, they will promote my book to a number of top industry blogs and get me featured on a ...

How To Upsell to Clients as a Freelancer

April 30, 2020

If I have learned something in ten years of freelancing, it is that the best kind of client is a repeat client. The overhead of searching for new projects, applying, interviewing, vetting clients and acquainting yourself with the project is immense. This is why it’s very important to regularly search for opportunities to extend your relationship with your existing clients. The trick is doing it ...

How I Built, Promoted, and Sold a Product with No Investments and No Marketing Budget

January 14, 2020

It doesn’t even involve a special kind of product, but it does entirely hinge on your relationship to the product. Eight years ago, I was a beginner programmer with little technical experience and no business acumen whatsoever. I had built no interactive websites, published no viral apps and written no recondite articles on software architecture. What I had was a desire to play fantasy football ...