How to Earn $10,000/Month As a Solo Freelancer (No Agency)

hey I'm Nick I made over $30,000 a month last year as a solo freelancer and in this video I want to peel back the curtain show you guys how I did so give you guys a practical road map to get there yourselves and then also make a case for why I think for the vast majority of people that are watching this video it actually makes more sense to become a solo freelancer than it necessarily does to start an agency but I'm going to cover all that in a minute so if you follow all of the

steps that I lay out in this video if you learn all the concepts it's virtually impossible not to hit $110,000 a month or more if this is something you guys want to do then stay tuned and let's get into it all right so just before I get into the nitty-gritty a quick disclaimer this is just one way that I scaled my own freelance practice to $30,000 a month with nobody else in my business it's not the only way so um if I were you you know a lot of people on the internet make claims like

this is the only way to do it you have to do it my way if you don't you're not going to succeed just be a little Discerning here in reality there are multiple ways to achieve success this probably makes more sense for me just given my my background and my experience and stuff like that but I know that there's still a lot of value sharing this with people so to any Discerning viewers just take whatever makes sense to you and then leave the rest so I have a qualifier here I say how to earn 10K

a month solo without an agency and the reason I do so is because what I'm found um are that everybody on the internet wants to run an agency but very few people know what actually goes into said agency so uh to be clear the benefits of running an agency the benefits of starting one as a business is that they have basically no Capital cost or very low Capital cost uh there's there's very little barrier to entry super easy to like whip up an agency um and then you can make a large amount of Revenue very

quick quickly notice how I said Revenue there I didn't say profit so people like to think that an agency is just like The Logical first step for them and I'm kind of guilty of perpetuating this notion um for search engine purposes like every second video of mine says agency AI agency automation agency but in reality in this video I'm going to show you why you don't actually need to do any of that you can actually just do solo leveraged freelancing and you can make a similar amount of monthly profit to a big agency with 10

or 15 people just as a solo operator and you can do so with less time less energy and much much l risk because you don't have people depending on you you only have technology and the current state of technology is such that you could you know build systems um that produce leverage like I'm going to talk about and and and show you guys some of uh and in reality you can achieve more than $10,000 a month with just a few hours of dedicated work per day so if that all sounds Fantastical to you um it's

it's not uh myself and many other people make much more the money than this online uh with just a few hours of dedicated work per day the whole myth that you have to work 16 hours a day and bleed for your businesses definitely like a deprecated one one of the past um what I'm going to do in order to help you guys get to that point yourselves is impart a few simple Concepts in this video particular we're going to be talking about three the first is called displacement the second is called Leverage and the third

is called feedback loops and let me just see if I could draw on this yeah I can Okay so let's actually jump into what I mean by this I have a little picture of money here and you're probably like why is there a picture of money well the reason why is I just don't want want us to forget what we're doing all of this for in the first place the reality is if you start an agency or if you want to start an agency you're probably not trying to ship people to Mars or something you're

just trying to build a better lifestyle for yourself and so the only real thing that matters to that end is is your ability to earn money and your ability to earn money quickly and money in business terms sort of has two components has the revenue component which is the top line then it has the profit component which is how much is sort of leftover after all expenses so in reality leverage freelancing um allows you to earn sub substantially more profit per dollar of Revenue because your margins tend to be a lot higher and you tend

to be able to keep a lot more of the money that you make so an agency hypothetically might make $100,000 a month or something but you know their their profits in the end of the month might only be $220,000 or $15,000 or something whereas you as a leverage freelancer you might make $15,000 a month and then your profits um would be like $14,000 a month from that so you can basically achieve the same sort of outcome which we all want which is money you can just do so at sub stantially lower Revenue multiples and you

can um you know uh also structure your life in such a way that you're not constantly working you have better work life balance and so on and so forth let me be very clear about why you should Jo you should join um or you should start some sort of leveraged freelance operation uh the main benefits here are you don't really have to sacrifice work life balance you get similar levels of Financial Freedom as an agency with the typical lack of work life balance that comes with it this lack of work life balance this tends to

happen because you start hiring a lot of people you start bring other people onto your team and so you stop just being responsible for yourself and for your clients you start being responsible for a bunch of internal team members as well you need to take care of work that you weren't necessarily expecting to and somebody has like a a PTO or maybe like an unexpected leave you start having to just like deal with a lot of that quite frankly does not contribute to revenue so on that note you also have no wasted time if you

do this yourself anytime spent communicating a project communicating about a project is time not spent doing the project and that's something that not a lot of people understand until they get into a corporate environment um you would be surprised at how much of the total effort in a project has just spent talking about a project not actually doing the project I think the bigger a company gets generally speaking it's like a rule where like as a solo freelancer you spend 100% of your time like doing the project right you spend very little time just talking

about the project unless you're like me and you just talk to yourself in front of a camera sometimes um if you invite somebody into your business well now because they don't know everything that you know there's a little bit of this communication cost that comes in maybe you spend 80% of your time working on the project but 20% of the time talking about it when you invite three people into your business now maybe do 60% five people it's like 50% that number just keeps on going down when you do leverage freelancing when you do it

solo um 100% of the time you spend that is the shittiest line I've ever seen 100% of the time that is too I'm going to need to figure this out 100% of the time you spend just goes towards the work I guess is what I'm trying to say so that's really important um you don't have to manage staff I freaking hate managing staff I think I'm good at it but it's a lot of work man man there's a lot that goes into managing staff and you can really screw it up um there's training there's onboarding

there's dealing with sick days poor performance there's a lot of legal requirements especially if you want to go about hiring employees um you know getting rid of all of the staff like Terminator T2 style like reduces risk you don't you don't have any of that stuff Weighing on your shoulders anymore um you can just do what you want um and that takes me to the next point which is that you're much faster instead of having an idea like most people do in companies and they have an idea at some like top level and then as

a manager their their their task is they have to like get everybody on board with their idea or their vision and then convince them of it and then and only then do you start like delegating and collaborating and making the idea happen as a leverage freelancer you don't have to do any of that you just have the idea and then you just do it and it's just so much faster the the gap between you and then the implementation of the idea is basically zero um a good example of this is I wanted to get myself

on a bunch of podcasts and I was curious to see whether I could just reach out to people and say hey how's it going I run a YouTube channel has 35,000 subs and I just want to see if you were interested in hosting me in your podcast so uh it took me something like an hour to whip up a campaign that started getting uh you know maybe a dozen or more positive responses from various podcasters and hosts and so on and so forth if I were in a bigger agency you can imagine how that process

might have been very different like somebody would have had an idea they would have distributed that idea to their team their team would have had to get on board with the idea understand the purpose of the idea understand the vision they would have had to you know uh create a strategy around that you would have had to give it to a copywriter who would have had to check with me to make sure the copy looks good I don't have to do any of that I just got to do it on myself obviously you know that

comes with the uh qualifier that like you have to be good you have to be able to write all the stuff yourself and do all this stuff yourself but I find in practice the gap between you and the level of skill you think you need to do something well uh that that gaps a lot smaller than you think and if you just do leverage freelancing you tend to learn these things pretty quick okay another more High level thing is Personnel constraints make your business lean so have you ever heard of the phrase um we should

throw more people at this problem well most companies operate like this in a leverage freelancer's case we have very limited Personnel Resources just you and so because of that you are basically forced to structure your business super lean from the get-go you you are forced not to take on more than you can do you're forced to be smart about the way you approach systems and businesses and and and clients and I'm going to make the case later in this video why that constraint is actually a very very good thing it's great to have an artificial

constraint put in front of you especially at the beginning because it forces you to build your business lean from the GetGo build your business efficient from the GetGo if in the future you decide to hire and build an agency anyway well no freaking problem you've already built uh an agency three or four or five times efficient because it's just you when you bring people on you know now you have systems and stuff like that that multiply your leverage uh and then the last one is obviously higher margins and it's all yours the majority of S&B

agencies small to midsize businesses they make about 30 to 40% margins that's sort of like a generous estimate a lot of them make 15 to 20% on $30,000 Mr that means they might take home $10,000 as a leverage freelancer your profits are usually closer to about 90% which means you can make the same profit at literally a third of the size without all the annoyances listed above the tldr is more freedom uh more money more joy okay anyway so I think I've I've gotten my case out of the way I'm no longer going to talk

about why you should do agencies as opposed to well I am going to talk a little bit about that but uh from now on we're going to get into some Core Concepts and I'm also going to cover like the implementation of how actually take an idea to do this leverage freelancing thing and then actually how to go out and make it a reality I'll show you guys how I did it I'll show you guys how a bunch of other people do it and um yeah I'm looking forward to diving into this because I think this

is the first time somebody's really talked about these Concepts in the context of business so I have three concepts that I want to cover with you guys the first is an idea called distance versus displacement this is an a doge like a hand-me-down from physics class if you guys remember back in I don't know secondary school or maybe College um people talk a lot about distance versus displacement and and the reason why is because the two are different looking at this graph here we have a point a and then we have another point B the

the distance is the total amount of well I guess I can't recursively Define this distance as the total amount of distance traveled it's the total amount traveled before you get to the point you want to get to and in this graph as you see we have these dotted lines that go up and we're traversing quite a lot of distance to get to this point B displacement on the other hand is just the straightest line path from A to B so you can walk a really long distance but if your distance isn't in exactly the right

direction that doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you're jumping all over the place right doesn't matter how far you walk you could walk 7 million miles north okay hypothetically and that wouldn't matter at all the only thing that matters is your ability to make it this is actually kind of fancy uh make it to that to that point B so agencies will typically cross a lot of distance they'll spend a lot of energy moving but a lot of that movement at the end of the day is wasted it doesn't take them any close to their

target when you're a leverage freelancer you you have a very straight line path from a Tob you basically accomplish the same displacement you just get to do so in about half the distance so um a lot of the time you know because it's just you and the organization it's not like 10 other people pulling at you uh you you just get to go the way that you want to go so this isn't just a con cept for agencies and and freelancing it's a concept that we're going to we're going to talk about basically in this

video in every video forward and that allows you to achieve more in half the time more and half the work more and half the distance so I want you guys just to keep that in mind it's a mental model um that I use all the time it's what I use to get to $30,000 a month it's just how I I see a lot of problems the second concept I want to chat about is one called Leverage now again this is a hand-me-down from physics you'll see me do a lot of this but uh all levers

are that's where the term Leverage comes from levers they're just machines simple machines that multiply force they make it easier to do things like lift a load for example so to use leverage means you just do the same thing with less or you do more with the same if you see over here I have this little little diagram of um basically like a fulcrum and then a little lever and it was one of the simplest levers possible um you know anybody that's gone to some high school physics class will probably understand this intuitively but this

load is really close to this fulcrum you see how it's like it say 2 m here and then over here on the right hand side um this the length of this thing is 6 M well there's a physical law where when you push one end of a lever and that lever rests upon a fulcrum like this the distance between that the tip of that fulcrum and then where you put down the effort basically multiplies the amount of force that you're able to generate you see how this load is 2 meters away whereas we're putting the

effort 6 meters away we're basically generating three times the effort with the force that we're putting so in order to this load which might be 1,000 lb we only need to put 333 lbs of effort down here you don't actually have to fully understand that the physics behind it that part isn't relevant all I want to do is just give you guys a simple example because I think we we all understand intuitively how this works if you go further and then you push it'll be a lot easier than if you go really really closely and

all uh we're going to be doing is we're going to be finding very high leverage actions we're going to be finding the spot on this lever that we just push a little bit that produces a massive result Eric aredes said give me a lever long enough and a Fullmer which to place it and I shall move the world I think this is sort of a a dramatization of the reality but yeah you know logically speaking if your lever is long enough and the stick does not break you could lift a black hole for all I

care um so that's core concept number two I just want you guys to keep that in mind as we talk about what I'm going to talk about core concept number three is um the difference between tight and loose feedback loops so if you put your hand on a hot stove what are you going to do obviously you're going to pull it away really quickly right the reason why is because you have a tight feedback loop you are very closely in tune with your body and the consequences of the actions of that body what you find

in practice is that not all feedback loops are this tight imagine if instead you put your hand on the stove and then it took your brain 15 seconds to register that your hand was burning your hand would probably look a lot different at the end of that 15 seconds right so when you have tight feedback loops you're able to iterate very quickly and that's what we get to do as leverage Freelancers but it's also something that I I just want us to keep in mind moving forward if you're in a big agency and there's tons

of people and there's reporting structures and you don't actually see the things that you do play out in the real world when you have that distance you tend to burn your hand a lot more and you know it's not even that you burn your hand more often is that when you do burn your hand it tends to be a lot worse so that's um those are the three concepts that I wanted to cover just to remind you guys we had distance versus displacement at the beginning which which is where you can travel a much longer

distance to get to the same point so it's always good to try and travel as little distance as possible we had leverage which is where you can multiply your Force by pushing as far up that lever as possible and then we had tight versus loose feedback loops where if you want to make good decisions and if you want to be smart about how quickly you respond to decisions typically you want to minimize the distance between you and the consequences of your decisions you want to keep those feedback loops really tight all right sweet enough with

the philosophy how do you actually earn $10,000 a month solo um now that we know these three concepts now that we can keep these in mind while we operate well it's pretty straightforward and you know I talk a lot about automation agencies in my material and in my programs and on my YouTube channel um but what I've come to realize in Consulting with people recently is that you can do the exact same approach I show people how to do for automation agencies but you can do them in whatever industry you want essentially I've helped copywriters

hit $10,000 a month I've helped um I don't know program software Freelancers I've helped uh I've helped some accountants hit $10,000 a month uh I've helped video editors hit $110,000 a month the core process is almost always the exact same the only thing that differs is Step number one which is a high income skill so four key steps to this number one is we're going to get a high income skill which I'll talk about step two is we're going to productize that high income skill step three is we're going to do daily lead generation I'll

talk about how to do that and then step four is we're going to do optimization and client retention I'll talk about that as well um this works for anyone regardless of where you're starting out it works for any skill level it works for any area of expertise uh you can treat this like a curriculum if you need to keep track uh you can you know get a whiteboard on your on your beside your bed every morning when you wake up and just do the daily leg generation task that I'm going to talk about however you

want to structure this is fine but these four steps along with these three concepts this is all that you really need to know to hit $10,000 a month um capitalism at the end of the day is just a game it's literally just a game that you were signed up to without your choice or consent and so because you are thrust in this game uh you might as well learn the rules of the game you might as well learn some strategies that you can just repeat effectively in order to get what you want to get and

that's that's the case that I've made here okay so let's talk about that high income skill first and foremost what is a high income skill well I like to simplify this I've a lot of people ask me um the simplest way to explain this is a high- income skill is an ability that either generates money or it saves money for a client by doing this you make yourself highly indispensable to that client you make yourself extraordinarily marketable to that client and it gives you a lot of staying power and sticking power now the rub is

which most people I think misunderstand when they hear the high income skill part they're like well yeah Nick no I could be a master at something and of course I'll make 10,000 bucks a month the reality is you don't actually need to be that great at anything in order to make $10,000 a month with that you'd be surprised at the graveyard of extraordinarily skilled Specialists out there that are amazing at what they do and they don't make more than three or $4,000 a month because they they have the high income skill they don't have anything

else that I'm about to show you and this is a big problem that I see when people sign up to my my programs to be honest they are very good at what they do hell I'm sure a couple of them are even better automator than I am or definitely better computer programmers that's for sure they just lack everything else and so um you know they could be the best in the world with that thing if they don't have the other bits it doesn't kind of falls apart you don't actually need to be that good in

order to combine this with the other bits and make a ton of money so uh the distance I would say nowadays between you and then somebody that makes a ton of money with a high andcome skill it's just a few weeks it's a few weeks of self-education realistically it's a few hours a day of practice few hours a day watching YouTube videos we have the best Library um out there ever and I'm going to run you through a couple right now we have automation obviously I'm a little biased here because this is you know the

the content of my programs a lot of what I talk about but there are other high- income skills as well copyrighting people talk about how AI is completely decimated copyrighting and stuff it hasn't not good copyrighting anyway and that's going to take quite a few years left um in order to like replicate really really powerful copywriters specifically like um like direct sales letters like long form copy um newsletters um anything where there's just a lot of nuance built up over over many layers the third is Performance Marketing So Paid ads um this is still a

very high income skill although people like to think that you know Facebook and Google and stuff like that are like taking taking over all this video production and editing that is getting substantially more in demand I would say as we're changing um you know like the distribution of content and then I have a big list of other skills here as well so you know SEO funnel building growth hacking email marketing affiliate marketing business development uh web development mobile apps are still really big um I say a and machine learning here really generally I don't actually

mean like you need to be able to create an AI model or anything um cyber security I'm seeing blow up a lot public relations I worked at a PR agency $115,000 retainers you can make a ton of money with any of these things all I've done here is I've just given you a little list here and it's not important what you pick okay it really is not important what you pick the only thing that is important is that you just pick something and you spend 10 to 15 hours learning the fundamentals with free lowcost resources

everything you need is 100% free on YouTube um the second that you're at about 10 to 15 hours and you feel at least reasonably confident about like the the subject matter of this you can just move on you don't have to become a pro um don't spend your entire learning before you actually go out there and start marketing yourself that's a very classic beginner's mistake okay so once you've um achieved this High income skill once you have something and it's got literally 10 to 15 hours which some of you guys could realistically do before the

end of the day today once you have achieved this level the next step is you need to take this and you need to productize it what is productizing your offering well you know if you don't productize you will never make more than a few thousand dollars a month doing freelancing this is because um a lot of Freelancers fall into this pit where you know they have some sort of custom project that they give or they they just offer a general service they say like I offer copywriting services and then every time they get a new

client every client has a different copywriting need some clients need some you know video sales letter other ones need some I don't know email marketing newsletter other people need like Google ads and whatnot they take on every project and because every project is so different from the previous projects they're never ever able to build momentum they're never able to take advant of things like templates and this is really where the leverage comes in right why would you uh kind of like in The Leverage example why would you push the lever super close to the full

Chrome when you could just go way far out and push it push it really far instead multiply your Force if you could build templates that do 80% of your work for you which is what productization essentially refers to you're going to be a lot better off so you know productization just means you create clear repeatable and templated services that do I like to say 80% or more of the job um that's just my my rule of thumb I don't try and get like 100% of the way because I found that's infeasible and just like a

long lever and a fulcrum this is going to multiply your output multiply your ability to do cool things like if you think about it if um before that is not a square that's a triangle if before you know you're pushing down here this is going to help you push all the way over here this is going to multiply your ability to uh produce some output at the end okay so what are some examples of product IED Services a quick one is a 200 $25 website in 72 hours package maybe you just whip up a website

um with a set number of pages or something like that that's like your beginner offer um you you guarantee some sort of result here in 72 hours this solves a short-term need for people that need like a highquality website quickly uh one that I talk a lot about in my program is uh cold email systems let's say $1,538 cold email system setup you use templated copy you give people nine mailboxes and then you say you're going to get 10 guaranteed leads in 60 days or you don't pay uh be a $596 detailed SEO audit with

actional recommendations maybe you're some big hot shot SEO guy and people just pay you to give them a giant list of things they need to fix saves them a ton of time and energy why is this important the reason why is because clients get exactly what you tell them that they're going to get you never have any sort of misunderstanding regarding the deliverables he provided and then the deliverables that they paid for and then more importantly it means that you get to template things you do get to template assets you get to template um you

know proposals you get to template sales materials you get to template basically everything uh which at the end of the day allows you to just like not have to spend 2 to three hours every time you get a customer or a client you just spend a few minutes you're also able to deliver much faster because of said templates and the repeatability of the process this also means you'll deliver better when you start doing the exact same thing every single time and if you just do this for a month the the deliverable at the end of

the month is going to be completely unrecognizable compared to the deliverable at the beginning of the month the issue is because we provide different services and we work on slightly different skills we never allow ourselves to get really good at doing that one thing and because we never standardize it we're never able to point out the deficiencies in every service implementation well if you take this approach and if you productize as quickly as you possibly can you tend to deliver a lot better um which helps you you know make uh make money without having necessarily

to spend the concent amount of time and then speaking about time this allows you to move away from hourly billing it allows you to start focusing on the outcomes that the customer gets Instead This is NE necessary to minimize your daily time spend and take advantage of Leverage this is really where the term leveraged freelancing comes in so now you're thinking Nick this sounds great and all but how the hell do I actually do this in practice right these are three or four steps I I have no idea what this looks like um what I

want to do here is I just want to show you a good example of a friend and a former client of mine um Joe Davies aacho these guys producti the hell out of search engine optimization and PR now I'm not saying you have to excuse me I'm not saying you have to set up a website uh that does all of this just like they did with this cute little devil thing and then this wonderful little animation I'm not saying that I'm just um giving you guys a quick example of how you can how you can

talk about the deliverables how you can take services that people previously thought were like really vague and and and hard to conceptualize and hard to make these discreet line at them type things and turn them into something that is producti so check this out digital PR campaigns designed to be resold one of the big things in PR and I know this myself cuz I worked like I owned a PR Agency for a period of time um a reasonably big one as well one of the big issues with PR is like when you start working with

a company they typically do things extraordinarily custom they want to like learn about you your vision your brand you know that this whole consultation period might take weeks and then the whole idea behind PR public relations is at excuse me at the end of the result at the end of the working relationship the idea is that you just get a couple of articles in big journals like CNN or uh uh you know Wall Street Journal or or something of that nature what fcho has done here is instead of all that instead of that lengthy consultation

period instead of all this time energy and resource mobilizing all this you instead just offer people a guaranteed number of links you offer people a guaranteed Dr that just stands for domain reputation guaranteed amount of traffic guaranteed number of stories created and then you give them like a very flat and simple cost up front all they need to do in this case is they need to like click on button you also show them an example of what they get if they do buy or work with you so I love the way that these guys do

this stuff and you know if you're follower my channel you know that I mention them pretty often because I think they their their productization is one of the reasons why they're able to make you know seven or sorry eight figures a year now um with PR where a lot of people can't now after you've looked up some companies that provide your service I mean fcho is a great one if you're doing any sort of SEO then open up this Google sheet and I have a couple of very simple steps here and I just wanted to

like put this somewhere that wasn't on my whimsical in case I tried to change it or turn it into an asset later um but uh all you need to do is just follow these these three steps First Once you have this list of services broken down into deliverables like the number of links and so on and so forth um what you do is you deconstruct each service down into the work that you have to do in order to create it for instance if you think about it a $225 website in 72 hours that package that

I talked about earlier you might need a couple of things for that you might need a landing page you might need an about page maybe you need a contact us page maybe you need some images maybe you want to be an image of the founder waving or something basically you have to list all this stuff out line item Style just so you know everything that goes into the project and then after you're done all you need to do is just produce a stepbystep guide on how you would do it assuming that you have zero knowledge

once you have the step-by-step guide the reason why you do this is because we're starting to standardize the way that you you provide or produce a service and this might only take you I don't know 20 30 minutes per thing once you're done go through this process step by step the the process that you just created so that you can see if this is sufficient of an sop in order to produce the desired result and then just use it to create a general template with sections that apply to maybe 80% of projects so how do

we actually make this relevant well if you think about it in terms of Fat Joe you see how it says two to six stories created the whole idea here is you you write up a story and then you send it to a journalist and you're like hey how's it going you know I know you specialize in this here's a story that we wrote for this client which is doing all this cool you can literally just copy and paste this and post this on your magazine or or your your newspaper if you want so you're saving

the a lot of time what you would do in this specific case is you would just template out like 50 stories you would like one time write 50 stories they'd all be slightly different they'd all be General uh enough that you could just swap in various Brands and so on and so forth and maybe when you get a new client you would ask them a couple of simple questions then take that brief feed it in chat gbt and now you just have like a slight little variance to that story that you just send over to

a PR journalist or something this eliminates you needing to copyright it eliminates you have spend a bunch of time and energy doing that um and it's basically one of the straightest line paths to just do the work involved in this um once as opposed to every single time you get a client obviously you can then spend a lot more time on every story you're not like stressed out because you have a client deadline that's coming up um and you know it just gets a lot easier what's another way that you would productize this you would

uh get a big list of journalists you you'd spend one period of time assembling a big list of all the magazines for all these different niches that maybe you want to work with and now when you get a new client you don't actually have to like do that when you get the client you just know okay well I have this big network of Journal um all I need to do is just take that story customize it to every client using the brief and then just send it out so you could make $576 and you could

do so in realistically like 20 minutes of work that's the whole idea behind productization I know I talk about SEO here and there's a lot more than SEO that you could do but you can take the same approach and you can apply it to copywriting you can take the same approach and you can apply it to automation I talk a lot about templates I always provide blueprints at the bottom of my videos you can take the same approach talk about C cyber security get template out audits you literally take this approach to more or less

any service that you provide cool so now that we understand what produ ising our offering looks like the third and probably the most important part of all this is the daily lead gen so you know in in in an agency you typically have salespeople you have people that fulfill the work right if you're doing leverage or solo freelancing yourself logically you have to do all that yourself so you have to sell the product and then you also have to fulfill the product unfortunately what always happens when I see freelance to start this stuff is they

end up getting caught around like the 3 to 5K a month Mark and the reason why is because they will generate a bunch of leads first and then they'll get so overwhelmed with all the leads and now they have to fulfill and deliver on all those leads so they stop doing the lead generation once they're done the projects because they haven't done any lead generation now the pendulum swung the other way and now they have no leads again so they have to go full into lead gen well there's a much better way of doing this

and the best way to do so is just to always have some sort of trickle of lead generation going on my recommendation and one that's worked really well for me and approximately over 1,00 people now 1,200 agencies and Freelancers that have tried this is doing daily lead generation instead and just making it a non-negotiable if you can get in the habit of doing some sort of daily lead generation um you'll find that like 95% of your competitors you'll just leave them in the dust because so few people have the wherewithal to to even do like

half an hour to an hour of consistent daily sales activity per day uh and if you are smart about how you do it if you take this idea of distance versus display placement in mind and if you find the shortest line path to achieve the same result you can typically achieve basically what an entire sales team will do just yourself as long as you're smart about it so how do you actually get smart about it well I'm I'm going to talk about it here but there are three strategies I like to use for Leen the

first is um upwork which I think a lot of people um they on constantly and I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't on it especially for freelancing it's a little bit harder for agencies but I also talk about it there as well the second is cold Emil and then the third is communities um and yeah Legion is just a numbers game at the end of the day it's just all about momentum as long as you can keep this up if you do this I don't know every morning when you wake up for 30 to

45 minutes using the platforms I'm going to tell you um you you are almost guaranteed to win and I'll talk about why in a sec okay so the first thing is or the first platform or or tool is upwork now I've made about half a million dollars on upwork if you're not already making $10,000 a month and you don't have a profile on upwork you are losing a ton of money um if you are not signed up to upwork because you have some pre-existing limiting beliefs about it like the clients are really shitty on this

platform or doesn't matter how much time I spend on upw work I'll I I don't want to do my stuff through a platformer or whatnot I just want this to be my permission to you to at least give it a try right like you probably have all these opinions but all sorts of things that you've never actually done because people have told you or you've read a couple of Articles and all that subconscious is just swirling around in your head um I'd recommend not fully disqualifying anything until you actually try and dip your toes into

that water until you actually get your feet wet cuz it worked extraordinar really well for me it's working very very well for hundreds um over a thousand people um in in my groups now so most people do up workor wrong here's how you do it right the first thing you do is you set up your profile and then you optimize it um and I have some optimization checklists that I'll run you guys through in a second but essentially this is my profile over here you guys see how it says Nick s Vancouver Canada 99% job

success top rated plus the job success the top rated plus and the earnings amounts and the jobs you're not going to have this stuff if you just make a profile it takes you some time to acrew this sort of experience um and to be frank the amount of experience I have is one of the reasons why getting future jobs has been so easy for me but all you need to do is just follow this little checklist the first thing is just check your profile pick and just make sure that like it it stands out um

I like to uh Center myself so that it's like somewhere around chest level just a quick and easy hack that you know eliminates 95% of the issues where people just don't trust you because they don't see your face or something like that um I like to use a really bright colored background just another little conversion hack if I use a bright colored background I find I got 2 or 3% higher proposal to reply right that's important um online for messages you know if you want upw workk to work for you you have to play the

game and just like uh you know you do cro for a website you also do c on your upwork profile when people see that you're online for messages they're just more likely to get back to you these are all very low hanging fruit but if you want to win on upw work try this you'll be surprised at how easily it wins the next is uh your little description and your title and stuff like that when you do this put yourself in the shoes of the clients that you're attempting to win if you think about it

make sure you know the problem that you are solving or or make sure you know the the the issue that you are attempting to to to solve on upwork people already know what they want so you don't have to tell them what it is that you do because if you're applying to one of their jobs it's evident that you do the thing that you said that you did right they also don't care about all your fancy copy writing and stuff because everybody tries to do this fancy copyrighting and stuff that's not really a thing to

compete on the one thing that actually matters is your past experience the big issue with people on upwork is they tend not to have any past experience and so if you can provide the implication that you have some past experience if you can have them infer that oh yeah this guy's worked with some some big people before uh you're basically always the person at the top of the list you're basically always going to win so I always talk about a simple format where you introduce yourself you talk about what it is that you do and

then you just do two or three little bullet points with the big dick you know social proof case studies in my case my work over 50 million reads I write a newsletter read by the founder of HubSpot and I've been featured in major Publications like Popular Mechanics and Apple news you know if you're hiring me for article writing and you see these you're going to be like wow that guy knows his if you look at all of the other profiles and platforms it's just going to be filled with people trying to show off how amazing

they are at copyrighting very few people actually give a the biggest trust signal you can do on upwork is just um use my social proof format okay so that's juice Point number one juice Point number two is to apply with a customized video so upwork application just cost money to send um you know it's like 10 12 connects or something like that comes out to about a dollar and a half since every application costs a certain amount logically you should attempt to recoup as much of that value as you can the way that you do

so is you customize the hell out of every application right we talk about leverage we also talk about um things that don't scale this is an example of a thing that doesn't scale but it's very effective so because you've already paid this money you're going to try and recoup as much value by maximizing your conversion rate and the way you do so is not just by copying and tasting some shitty CV like 99% of people you do this by recording a customized loom video or equivalent if you don't want to use Loom you can use

something else uh where basically you introduce yourself oh that's much better and then you produce something of value for the customer without the customer asking what do I mean by this well um you know if I were to go on upwork right now let me see if I could dig up a tab and drag that puppy over and then if I were to uh let me see see here I don't know I'm just going to type in automation because I think that's a little bit easier and then if I were to I don't know python

developer needed to split large CSV files let's say I was a python developer I was trying to do some software freelancing or something I would record a video that looks something like this hey how's it going my name is Nick I just came across your job post looking for a python developer splitting large CSV files for context I run a YouTube channel with 35,000 subscribers and I make thank you rise about $130,000 a month currently I'm talking about stuff like this development and and Automation and so on and so forth what I want to do

in this video is actually just want to create the thing that you're asking for or at least show you how to create it um you know get you about half the way there so that if you do choose to work with me it's going to be easier for me to do it's going to be easier for you to do okay great so here's what I would do I would and then I would open up my vs code I would create a sample CSV file and then I would literally try doing the thing that the guy

is hiring me for basically um this does take a fair amount of time if it's the first time that you've done something like this and you're unsure exactly of how to you know do the thing you obviously have to learn how to do the thing um but this is where you produce an insane amount of value and basically if somebody actually clicks through your video you are almost guaranteed to get that job every time the average proposal to reply rate through my communities is now somewhere around 25ish perc meaning that if you send a proposal

about 25% of the time you are going to get some sort of reply back this is skewed because a lot of people have no job success no top rated no nothing imagine if you're me uh my my proposal to reply is substantially higher because I'm always at the top and people see wow this guy big dick huge amount of money that he's earned so on and so forth he knows his stuff uh imagine if 30% is the lowest you ever go you spend $3 basically to get a positive response um three to four five $6

per meeting something along those lines maybe you do three meetings to get a win and it's like 20 bucks a 20 bucks a client this is extraordinarily low cost and it's super scalable so if you're not doing it I'd uh i' recommend that you look into it the last thing is just outbid everyone on every job upwork has like this bidding feature if I um can I go back to the screen that I had before let me see I think it's because I'm full screen here so give me a second if I were to go

over to a random upwork job and then just apply let's do this you see how at the bottom left hand corner uh it says boost your proposal uh what you can do basically are these are the top four spots on upwork when you submit a bid on a job uh what you do is you just outbid everybody and you just make sure that you're always at the top so I I just spent you know uh an extra $25 doar or something like that on this right if if I'm trying to outbid if I'm 20 right

it's first place second place we sort of tie the first person to do that the bid always gets it we go 21 I'm first I've now spent an additional amount of money to earn this job and you're probably thinking like well Nick doesn't that add up it does but if you think about it again you've already paid right if you've already paid but you're basically guaranteed to get a meeting if you do something that is this high value for the customer then you might as well spend whatever money you need additionally um they have this

little Gambit if your proposal isn't viewed you get all your money back so the game theoretic move is just always out bit everybody okay so yeah I I wanted to be very specific here I didn't just want to give you guys broad overviews because lead gen is the most important thing if you don't have leads you don't have a business so um optimize your profile use the walkthrough and the checklist that I just showed you guys apply with a customized video because up work apps cost money you might as well get as much of that

back as you can and then just outbid everybody on every job obviously don't be ridiculous about it if somebody's bid 200 connects or something they spend I don't know how much money that is but it's a lot uh you know you don't need to be first place right you could be second place If you bid 15 instead um but yeah be be a little bit smart about it and I think uh if you just try and put yourself in the customer shoes uport can go a long way for you okay so the second approach um

is cold emo I've generated hundreds of thousands of dollars from cold emo campaigns and I firmly believe if you are currently not using this channel to reach high value clients you are leaving a massive amount of money on the table you're being silly I have cold email campaigns that are constantly running despite the fact that I'm on YouTube and I'm you know making a lot of money on YouTube too cold email is so high leverage there's basically nothing that's higher leverage right now than cold email um so here's how you do it right the first

is basically you need to set up multiple mailboxes for volume so unfortunately the way that the vast majority of people do it is this is our little email um you know and they send I don't know like 500 a day uh across to many different email inboxes so they'll send to you know this is one mailbox and this is like a bunch of mailboxes uh this 500 a day this is going to be marked to spam basically immediately so what you do instead is you use a platform like instantly or smart lead and what this

does is instead of just one mailbox basically this is just our array of mailboxes we get like 50 different mailboxes and then it automatically distributes volume from every one of these mailboxes to you know the the client or the prospect mailboxes for you it takes care of all this automatic distribution so now basically the uh daily average amount of mail that's being sent from a single mailbox is not 500 now it's maybe I don't know like 30 per day future videos will involve me with an actual pen instead of me painstakingly drawing this with my

mouse the idea being uh when you do stuff like this um you know the likelihood of every any one individual mailbox being banned is super low uh and then you can yeah you can typically just get a lot more Alpha that way uh which is a little re recommendation oh cool an eraser so yeah 30 emails per day per mailbox um keeps you below spam th thresholds that's my personal recommendation um you don't have to do it this way but this is just what I like to do this is what I recommend in my program

some people can get away with more some people have to get away with less after that you need to Source your leads the two best ways to Source leads as of the time of this video is use a platform called Apollo um or use a platform called LinkedIn sales Navigator Apollo is basically just a big directory of different leads you can buy leads using Apollo itself but uh basically what's occurred now is there's this whole ecosystem setup around Apollo where instead of just buying the Apollo leads what you do is you buy a scraper that

some other dude developed that actually sort of it it it like scrapes Apollo instead so instead of paying Apollo now you're paying some other guy and then this other guy you know uh delivers the leads for instead of $79 per month for 24,000 export credits per year you pay like $3 for uh I don't know the the equivalent is probably like 12th of what Apollo is charging something along those lines it's just an estimation don't hold me accountable so you can do that with Apollo um there are two good ones right now there's one called

leads rapidly which is pretty big there's also another one called um it's like apify Apollo scraper and uh these just both like take your uh sorry they take your Apollo cookie and then with your cookie they scrape vast amounts of leads for you that otherwise would be behind some sort of pay wall type deal uh once you're done with that write good copy I have a bunch of videos on this so just feel free to check out the rest of my channel if you're unclear but um you can just use this as my template moving

forward hi I found you on platform I help Niche do really cool thing last year I made amount of money for other clients and I'm confident I can do the same for you I guarantee and if you don't love it you wouldn't pay a cent would this be worth a call in practice hi I found you on LinkedIn I help B2B agencies make $50,000 a month or more in an added Revenue last year I made $2.3 million for insert big client name here and I'm confident I can do the same thing for you I guarantee

you at least 20 booked meetings and a three times Roi and if you don't absolutely fall in love with it you won't pay a scent would this be worth a quick call feel free to just do whatever variation of this that you want you don't have to use the same language but in general this seems to pattern match like an effective um piece of Outreach copy it's very short it's very Punchy and it just respects the viewers time which I think is really important and then the fourth is just always test never just send one

sequence you should always be split testing your variants against each other the most valuable resource cold email is not actually the positive responses that you're getting it's the data that you get back because of those positive responses it's seeing what happens when you use different subject lines it's seeing how best to pitch your service you're going to get this data or the time will pass anyway you might as well get a bunch of data while you're doing it this is another form of Leverage it's another form of having a tight feedback loop uh which is

what allows us to use cold email and grow really quickly so get those tight feedback loops um when you're using cold email never just send a single sequence always be split testing okay and then lead generation approach number three is called communities uh a lot of people are skeptical that communities work and for good reason but essentially communities are a big business model right now um owing both to Alex hormos investment in school and a couple of other reasons communities are just a simple and and straightforward way to solve a lot of problems that entrepreneurs

have they typically don't have a support network because it's a very lonely road they typically don't have templated assets or resources as well um because yeah you know they're just getting started with business for the first time and they also kind of solve like QA and common one-off consultations so they're they're extraordinarily powerful a lot of people just haven't really experimented enough with them to make them work um here's a way to make them work what you do is you consistently provide value in a community you then establish yourself as a go-to expert within the

group for a for a thing and then once you're the go-to expert in the group um you drop value give people some sop that helps them do XYZ then people will like comment and DM you when your contributions resonate all you have have to do at that point is just engage back and then explore opportunities to help them further somebody says wow this is so cool I never thought about this you reply to them and then you just send them a DM and you say hey Peter you know what were you planning on using my

sop for it's super cool that you know you do X Y and Z just wanted to just wanted to see if I could still help something along those lines how to actually do it three or two steps here the first is just find the right groups so use platforms like school so if you go school.com slcover that page does not exist do not go to school.com discover go over here oh Discovery my bad uh jump over here and then just scroll through and look for communities that fit uh demographic that you think that you can

help you know you can sort by free or U paid or or whatever ideally you're not going to want to be looking for things like um I don't know musculature unless you're some physical uh sorry personal trainer or something you're going to want want to be looking for something to do with business so I don't know it always cracks me up how this guy is a thous members 49 bucks a month I have no idea what it what his stuff is but like when I see his profile picks it's just so funny uh what's a

good example this is a good example um this is a good example I granted this one takes a fair amount of money but this is like one for editors this is one for per menopausal or postmenopausal women this is print on demand stuff so you can absolutely help print on demand people the point that I'm making is you basically pick a niche or a few niches you join these communities um through school Google Facebook uh Discord slack whatever and then you instead of self-promoting and being like hey guys how's it going uh please visit my

website and I'll make you guys a a great funnel for your campaigns instead of that you have to be a little bit clever and you have to kind of go more ctitious what you do is you spend time observing the group before posting so you actually scroll through the whole community in my case the school Community from top to bottom and then you just kind of like ask yourself hm like what are these guys talking about what sorts of questions do they have if I uh give you guys like a practice example um there are

a few communities here uh one of my friends just launched one called organic search Academy so uh this is uh my buddy Charlie Clark founder of minty digital it's a great like SEO agency and he just started organic search Academy which is meant to help people boost their organic search marketing campaigns in the age of AI if you think about it what sorts of people are probably going to be here people that are seos or people that need help with SEO so maybe what you do is you scroll through this top to bottom so you

can see it's mostly Charlie at this point because I think this launched like a week ago or something but you scroll through this top to bottom you see the various conversations that people are having the things that they're talking about the the The Branding that they're using the terminology they're using so on and so forth and then you you you make like a little short list of these terms and the ideas and the pain points and problems that they're facing and then after that just start replying to people with a few interesting tidbits or positive

energy or ideally value so I would just go back here and I would say welcome Erica good to have you view here I would scroll through uh Charlie's post and I would say this is going to be huge I actually know Bennett I think he's in one of my other communities funny um you know you you'd respond not just these positive little like thumbs up type deals you'd actually go through and you'd provide some sort of thoughtful analysis or a thoughtful reply and you do this for maybe like a week or so um you'd build

up a bunch of familiarity in the group and now people know who you are they know that every time that they get a response from you it's always positive it's always good and then the second that you are at this point where you have like some reputation in the group all you do is you just write a value post and this value post just needs to mimic this hey I've been struggling with problem that everybody else is struggling with and I know many others here have too last week I found a way to do this

for very little money or very little time step one do this step two do this step three do this hope this helps let me know if anything's un here you don't pitch you don't ask for anything back from them you just wait to have your thing filled with DMs and and messages and comments and stuff like that and then you connect with people book calls with them and so on and so forth um very very straightforward method that you can do right now as any sort of freelancer uh and the value there is you get

a ton of Leverage The reason why is because these are posts that you make once and then they stand the test of time they're going to continue producing leads and stuff like that for you for basically the lifetime of the group if the group is small and if your post is really good odds are the person that owns the group or whatever is going to continuously site this Resource as a piece of value within the group so you're just going to get constant like positive notifications of people weeks and months later like sending you replies

and thanking you and sending you positive DMS you don't have to believe me um you know my community does this this is one of the way one of the main ways that my community members in make money with make and maker school um actually make money they do exactly what I'm I'm telling you guys for the community aspect um and it it works super well okay and now that we are done with steps one to three which I think you probably understand more intuitively we're going to get into more abstract one which is optimization and

retention you know how I talked about testing in cold email being really important well uh testing and optimizing and and improving by 1% every day or week or whatnot this is a really important concept more generally uh if you don't do this then if we go back to our distance and displacement graph you're just going to be sort of all over the place right you're trying to get from A to B but you just keep on looping and doing random circles all over the you know all over the screen um optimizing and and retaining basically

means every time you move you just ask yourself hey am I moving in the right direction no okay well let me just move a little bit to the right then okay am I moving in the right direction no I got to move a little bit back up and then eventually what you do is you approximate a straight line path um and logically um optimizing and retaining is something that just basically everybody should be doing whether it's split testing cold email split testing your products split testing your um I don't know upw workk split testing your

community approach um or whatever okay so what does that actually mean in practice I like to set the rule to to get 1% better at the thing that I'm doing every week so 1% better at my craft means 1% better at providing the service it means 1% better at doing my daily lead generation it means 1% better at uh I don't know creating content in communities means 1% better at productizing my offer literally just get 1% better at your craft every week mathematically if you're a nerd like I am the formula for this is 1.01

raised to 52 that's 1.67 meaning every year you grow by 67% if you get 1% better every week that means that if you make $110,000 a month in year one which anybody here can do very easily by the time year three rolls around it'll be making $28,000 a month year four it'll be making like $40,000 a month basically this this uh increases your Revenue exponentially and try and contrast this to working like a 9-5 drop like in a 95 job you get like a 3% raise every year that tends just to match inflation you don't

actually make any more money most of the time um if you can grow by 67% and the only thing you need to do to to get there is to get 1% better every week like one % better every week is like .1% better every day like that's that's nothing you could read three words on a page in a book um that provides help on how to do some freelancing thing some some YouTube video on how to become a better video editor or something you literally watch one minute of that per day and you will be

0.14% better um the the leverage here in just being consistent and applying yourself daily is insane and then the second thing you need to do in order to optimize is retain retention just means having a client come back to you for more so if you do these lead generation activities that I talk about and if you do them daily and I'd personally recommend spending at least an hour and a half every single morning on the three tasks that I laid out above you could easily quantify it by saying I'm going to send five upwork applications

a day I'm going to spend 15 minutes reviewing and responding to cold emails a day I'm going to spend half an hour um you know uh creating Community posts per day if you do this consistently you will be swimming in leads it is just a matter of time um and once you're at that point you'll start realizing that actually just acquiring more leads isn't always the best answer uh once you're at the point where you know you you have a bunch of leads typically the shortest line path to maintaining and then growing your revenue is

not actually just getting more new ones it's actually just retaining it's retaining the ones have already paid you money and this is for a couple reasons the reason why is because happy long-term clients are a lot easier to manage than consistently finding new ones which means that eventually you can you know reclaim that one per day that you're spending on Outreach which increases your leverage further and then clients are also just they tend to pay a lot more because they like and they trust you've already gotten that out of the way so my average amount

of money that I make on like a a follow-up deal and like a second deal is supposed to a first deal something like 1.5 times the amount meaning if on an initial project I make $2,000 on the follow-up project I might make $3,000 on the follow-up project after I might make $4,000 how do you actually do this you just overd deliver you exceed expectations wherever possible um you stay in touch um what I mean by stay in touch is you basically you don't discount the human connection there um you set some sort of like weekly

follow-up reminder with all of your clients just say hey I found this and I thought of you or hey you know um I saw that you guys just won this big award I just wanted to check in that's really cool hey I noticed you guys were experimenting with this how can I add value for you this is super simple to do but a lot of people never do and they never really think about it this way you can absolutely systematize your client relationships and then obviously you incentivize loyalty in some respects if you think about

it offer a discount to somebody that's paying you more money anyway just sort of like negates the thing so uh you know if you're working with somebody uh long term odds are it's going to take you less time to fulfill the same project at the two-month Mark than it will the the first day that you guys work together because you guys have a better working relationship things are faster some expectations are already set and dealt with ahead of time to reward them for making your life easier you can absolutely give them some sort of discount

or or incentive bonus or something along those lines um because then it it aligns both of your needs you want to get even more work from this person they want to get work from you because you've already verified that you're good at video editing or automation or cyber security or whatever the hell I'm just make it like a no-brainer for them to do so okay great I hope you guys appreciated this video This Is In Sum how to earn $10,000 a month solo without an agency obviously there's only so much that I can get into

in a video like this which is um you know we started with high level Concepts and then we sort of worked our way down to like daily lead generation actions I'm fully cognizant that you need to deal with stuff like setting up payment processors and I don't know actually writing the cold email copy and and and juggling uh client relationships and kickoff meetings and stuff like that it's tough to make a one-size fits-all video for all of this just because there are so many niches out there and there are so many different like onboarding protocols

for clients um I will do my best over the course of the next couple of weeks to um put out resources that apply to various niches that are sort of like intran Niche if that makes sense but it's going to take me a little bit of time to do so still I do firmly believe that leverage freelance ing is a lot higher Roi per unit of your time than running an agency um I've made $30,000 a month as I mentioned to you guys before consistantly last year just doing this which is more money than you

know 99.5% of all human beings on Earth or something like that uh will will ever basically hope to make and it doesn't need to be super crazy complicated if you just spend a little bit of time understanding the concepts that I talk about here understanding the idea of Leverage and of distance versus displacement and of tight feedback loops um and just the relative ease of which you can get into something like this with low barar entry you you can absolutely do this for yourself if you have any questions or anything like that just drop them

down below as a YouTube comment more than happy to get back to you otherwise if you can do me a big solid like comment subscribe let me know what you guys want to see in the next video I'm going to be making a whole series on how to do the sort of Leverage freelancing moving forward so it'd be great to hear from you thanks so much have a great rest of the day