Making Time for Potential Clients
What’s the secret to making time for potential clients, especially if you’re time and energy are already maxed out?
Businesses do many things to reduce friction for customers, such as building automations, writing FAQs, offering a wide variety of payment options, and so on. The idea is that if I want to buy a widget and I can do it without having to interact with a human, that saves me time/hassle and the company money.
Limitations for Freelancers: Making Time for Potential Clients
But as freelance editors, we’re not selling widgets. Sometimes we don’t want to reduce friction. Sometimes we want to increase it.
Editors sometimes report to me that they have difficulty converting prospective clients. I listen to their process and basically it amounts to something like SEO drives the customer to the website, the website answers all the customer’s questions, the customer submits a questionnaire about their ms, and the editor replies with a quote and a booking schedule.
But no one books.
That’s because the prospective client has never actually interacted with the editor, has never gotten a sense of them as a person, and has never had a reason to feel like they’re putting their faith in the right person.
Sometimes, my best piece of advice for an editor is to be less efficient. Let the client acquisition process be a little messier.
What people need to know right up front is
- whether you work in the genre(s) they’re writing,
- whether they have the budget to hire you, and
- what, in general, your credentials are.
That’s it.
The rest – here’s how I work, here’s how to book, here’s my next opening, etc. – can be shared later, once the client has reached out to express interest.
Tips for Editors & Writers
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The Importance of Client Testimonials and References
Anyone can say, “Hire me, I’m great!” But not everyone has the kind of testimonials and references that can help prove it. As a freelance editor, you may think, “Hey, I’m not asking for a staff job, why do I need references?” The answer is that you need to provide context for people to make
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The Type of Editing That’s More Powerful than AI
AI is going to kill routine jobs. But it won’t kill jobs that require expertise and human judgment. That’s why it’s important for editors to move beyond basic skills like proofreading. It’s not enough to say, “But homophones!” Most people will accept a small error rate if it means they can save three thousand dollars.
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When You Don’t Have the “Right” Background
Many students at Club Ed have an English or journalism background, and it makes logical sense that editing is a potential career path for them. But I do have students with a variety of other backgrounds: some are (or were) lawyers, or psychology majors, or history majors. And they sometimes wonder if this is a
