⚔️ Zoom killer?

Happy Tuesday! An unmanned NASA ship crashed into the asteroid Didymos last night. But don’t worry, this one was on purpose: the crash was actually a planetary defense test to see if NASA can prevent future asteroids from crashing into Earth and, you know, wiping out every living thing on the face of the planet.

Mentioned in today’s newsletter: WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Plus what clients are thinking when they review your freelance portfolio, how to avoid overloading your knowledge banks, and the curse of the “quick Zoom.”

Read time: 2 minutes and 49 seconds

Making the Rounds

WhatsApp launches shareable call links for up to 32 people. The update will work much like personal Zoom links. And with no call length limits announced so far, it might actually be able to compete with more popular meeting apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Stealth LinkedIn experiment reveals “weak ties” are 2X more effective for finding work. The study ran from 2015 to 2019 and tested the effects of suggesting “weak ties” (acquaintances or people you’re less close to) versus “strong ties” in its People You May Know section. Turns out that weak ties aren’t so weak when it comes to helping you land a new gig.

Sub 60-second Instagram Stories will no longer be broken up. The company has been steadily increasing the limits on its video content as it aims to compete with TikTok.

Working With Clients

What Clients Are Thinking When They Review Your Portfolio

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.

So give them relevant samples.

And don’t be afraid to curate individual portfolios for individual clients.

Taking just a few minutes to select the most relevant sample pieces will be time well spent.

Working For Yourself

WARNING: Knowledge Banks Are Nearing Maximum Capacity

Living in the Information Age has its pros and cons.

On the one hand, you can teach yourself the basics of just about any skill for free online.

But on the other hand…

This embarrassment of riches creates a paradox of choice.

Who do you learn from? Who do you ignore?

It’s no easy task.

That’s why the secret to avoiding information overwhelm is…

Choose 1-2 experts to learn from and ignore everyone else.

– Consume everything they put out

– Implement their strategies as best you can

– Find out what works and what doesn’t before moving on

Learning a high-income skill like copywriting, sales, or paid ads can feel like drinking from a firehose.

You need to control the flow of information you’re taking in.

Otherwise your head will explode.

And the only way to do that effectively is to narrow your focus.

Bottom line: don’t get high on more than one guru’s supply.

The lessons you’ll learn from executing on ONE person’s strategies will trump it every time.

Tools We Love

The Curse of the “Quick Zoom”

Efficiency is key when communicating with clients.

If you went back and forth via email or jumped on a quick Zoom every time a client had a question…

You’d never get any work done.

Good thing you don’t have to.

That’s because SnagIt lets you quickly record and share videos of your screen so you can add context and communicate efficiently with both clients and colleagues.

It also helps you screenshot ads, emails, and sales pages for your swipe file…

So you don’t have to start from scratch on your next project.

If you’re looking to streamline your freelance workflow…

Sign up for a free trial of SnagIt today.