Make More Money from a Broader Range of Freelance Engagements, with a Little Help from AI
By Nick Usborne

Perhaps the hardest part of being a freelancer is landing new clients. Month after month, year after year.

Finding new clients takes up a lot of our time. And for many of us, it’s our least favorite part of being a freelancer.

That’s why it’s so important to maximize your revenues from every project you land and hold on to your clients for longer than one gig.

So … how do we do that?

How do we turn a $2,000 gig into a $5,000 gig?

And how do we hold on to that client for years instead of just weeks?

The answer is to offer MORE.

First, learn the skills to write a broader range of project types.

Offering more to your clients is all about expanding the scope of the original brief.

For example, if your client asks you to write some pages of web content, you could expand the scope of the project by asking if he would like you to write some social media posts to drive people to the content.

If you’re writing a sales page, you could ask the client whether she would like you to write a series of emails to drive people to the page.

If you’re writing a white paper for a B2B client, you could offer to outline and write an accompanying pitch deck.

The idea is to find ways you can offer more to your clients. Every time a client says yes to expanding your engagement, it’s good news for the client and good news for you. They get more of the work they need done, without having to find a second freelancer. And you make more money!

Of course, if you want to pursue this strategy, you need to have multiple skill sets as a digital writer.

It doesn’t work if you only know how to write emails. Or only know how to write sales pages. And so on.

If you don’t have that broad range of skills yet, stay tuned. We can help with that.

Next, do MORE in LESS time by leveraging the power of AI.

As freelancers, it makes sense for us to expand the scope of every client engagement. It also makes sense for us to maximize our income by getting great work done a whole lot FASTER.

Here are a few of the ways I’ve been using ChatGPT to achieve that combo … MORE plus FASTER.

1. Write social media tweets and posts almost instantly.

We already talked about expanding the scope of a content-writing gig. Ask the client if he wants some social media updates written to support the content.

It turns out ChatGPT is really good at writing tweets, Facebook posts, etc.

What I do is copy the full text of the content page I have written, paste it into ChatGPT, and then add the prompt “Please write 10 high-engagement tweets to support this post.” Take note that I specify “high-engagement.” It results in much better tweets and updates.

ChatGPT is REALLY good at short-form content like this. Does that mean you send the output to your client without any edits? Nope. Never! If ChatGPT writes me 10 tweets, I’ll end up using maybe six of them. Always review and edit AI writing.

2. Use ChatGPT to write emails and subject lines.

This time we’ll look at using AI to help us expand that sales page project by offering to write some supporting emails.

I follow the same kind of process. I copy the text of the sales page, paste it into ChatGPT, and then ask it to write some emails to drive people to the page.

It usually does a reasonable first draft. Not ready for the client, but a solid starting point. I might then ask for a tweak, like, “Please rewrite this email in more conversational language.” Or, “Please lead with benefits instead of features.” And so on.

Pretty soon I’ll have drafts for a few emails I can then work on myself. I’ll be adding the human touch and making edits an AI program wouldn’t think to apply.

At the end, I’ll also ask ChatGPT to write me five or 10 subject line variations my client could test.

The outcome? I get to create a series of emails and subject lines I can pass on to my client. I’ll bill the going rate for those emails, but ChatGPT has helped me create them in a fraction of the time it used to take me.

3. Now let’s go back to the white paper and pitch deck.

ChatGPT knows what a white paper is. Give it a solid brief in the form of a detailed prompt, and it will do a solid first draft for you.

Again, you’ll have to go back and forth, asking for changes and refinements. And sometimes, even after a few tries, the output isn’t close to what you want. So you start over, with a new set of prompts, or maybe some more briefing information.

One way or another, using ChatGPT as your assistant will get you to a final draft a whole lot faster.

And then … the next step. Copy the white paper, paste it into ChatGPT, and ask it to use that information to create the outline of a pitch deck or PowerPoint presentation.

If you like the outline, you can ask ChatGPT to write the text for each slide and suggest some visual element. Again, you need to go back and forth a bit. And you’ll always have to add some final, human edits at the end.

Wrapping it up …

There are three things at work here.

First, AI helps you get great work done a whole lot faster. You bill the same as you used to for any given project type, but you’ll likely get it done in half the time.

Second, assuming you have trained to write a wide range of digital copywriting project types, you can use AI to help you expand the scope of every project … and get that work done faster as well.

Third, when your clients realize they can come to you for more than one project type, and that you deliver quality work faster than other freelancers, they’ll keep giving you new projects to work on. This means that instead of having to look for new clients and projects each month, you can hold on to your clients for years!

Finally, if you don’t yet have the professional-grade training you need to work on several digital copywriting project types, be sure to find out about our upcoming training.