portfolio

📈 Compound interest for freelancers

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Happy Thursday! The latest inflation numbers came out yesterday, and they weren’t pretty. The topline number was 9.1%, meaning if you haven’t got a substantial raise this year, your real wage is falling fast. This is why building a profitable client business is so critical in 2022. And we’re here to help you do exactly that.

Mentioned in today’s newsletter: News, paid subscriptions, Disney ads, and desktop vs mobile. Plus how to create relevant portfolio pieces, compound interest for freelancers, and a time-saving tool we can’t live without.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes and 34 seconds

Making the Rounds

  • Web traffic down 18% across top 5 U.S. news sites in 2022. It’s not just web traffic going down either. Engagement on social and viewership on cable news networks have seen similar drops as well. 
  • Paid subscriptions convert 2.15X better on desktop vs mobile. A new subscription report from Piano based on publishers with 140B+ pageviews per month found that desktop users convert at an average rate of 42.4%, while mobile users convert at just 19.7%. Maybe desktop traffic ain’t dead after all.
  • Disney signs deal with global ad tech company The Trade Desk to pave the way for more automated ads. The partnership will make it possible to run automated ads across Disney properties using their first-party data to target consumers.

Working With Clients

Most Clients Are Terrible at This (and That’s a Good Thing)

Want to increase your chances of getting the gig?

Make sure you’ve got relevant sample pieces in your freelance portfolio.

There are two ways to think about relevance:

1) Task-specific

2) Market-specific 

Task-specific relevance means that if you’re applying for a job to write emails, you should highlight email work you’ve done in the past (instead of sales pages or video scripts).

Market-specific relevance means that if you’re applying for a job to run ads for a health company, you should highlight previous work you’ve done in the health space (instead of another niche like finance or relationships).

The bottom line is:

The last thing you want is to make clients try to imagine what your work will look like for a specific medium or market.

Give them a relevant example.

Working For Yourself

Compound Interest For Freelancers

Finance experts say the secret to building wealth is compound interest.

That’s why Warren Buffett accumulated 97% of his wealth after his 65th birthday.

But while we may not all be able to replicate Buffett’s investing success…

There’s another way freelancers can put this mechanism to work for themselves:

By stacking high-income skills.

You see, it takes a very long time to master a deep skill like copywriting or media buying…

And while it’s definitely worth committing to…

If you can develop other skills that complement or intersect with your primary skill…

You can see some explosive gains.

For example: 

Most copywriters know nothing about paid traffic…

And most media buyers can’t write copy.

The same thing goes for copywriting and graphic design or funnel building.

It’s an unusual combo you don’t see very often.

So by developing competence where those two skills intersect, you can carve out a unique position in the market…

Opening the door to many more opportunities than most other freelancers will ever get.

And over time, mastering these skills will deliver a much higher return than any other investment you could make (unless you are Warren Buffett, of course ;).

Tools We Love

Is This Even Legal?

Ever find yourself retyping or copy-pasting the same thing day after day?

Whether it’s messages to prospects, colleagues, or clients…

Document templates…

Daily reports….

Or even usernames and passwords…

Truth is, all that time spent typing adds up.

That’s why we’re big fans of TextExpander.

TextExpander lets you set up shortcodes and abbreviations to save time on stuff you type.

Once you set it up, all you have to do is type in your shortcode, and TextExpander will automatically paste your text for you.

Learn more about how to save time with TextExpander.

Gig Alert

NOTE: You may have to sign in to Upwork to view certain job postings.

Quote of the Day

“I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”

— Charlie Munger

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