It’s November. And for me and my business, I love looking forward to the new year, and I wanna challenge you to think about some ways where you can adapt, change, and grow your Freelance business. We wanna head into the new year with some fresh energy, some fresh ideas, and some fresh goals to keep us motivated. If you have a question about how to set goals for your Freelance business, we’ll stick around. I’m gonna show you why goal setting is so important, and I’m gonna give you some powerful ways to set goals to grow your business. And my three big factors that you should focus on when setting your goals that will help you grow your business.
Guys. I can tell you that as a young freelancer, I would, I, I would go through the New Year’s cycle just about like everybody else.
You know, I would think about some resolutions, and I didn’t really give a lot of consideration to how I could specifically create goals for my business. Not that I didn’t want to, I just really didn’t know where to focus my time, my energy, and my thoughts. But over time, I have learned that there are some very key ways that I can use the new year and some goal setting to really bring some focus, clarity, provide motivation for myself. Going into the new here. Setting goals helps us to imagine new possibilities and ways that we can grow our business to the next level. Goals are a healthy way of us being able to identify new ways that we can grow new skills, add new services, add new clients, improve our marketing, improve our reach. And there’s just many ways that we can go into a new year and create ways to help us grow. So one of the things that I want to kind of focus in on here is just for, for me, what are the reasons why I set goals in my business and how I do that? Number one, I try to find goals that I can set that are measurable. If I am interested in growing,let’s say myself, you know, maybe I’m going to learn one new skill or maybe two new skills, or maybe I want to learn a new application or maybe a new technique, or maybe I want to study a certain type of marketing and learn how to use that marketing tool better. But whatever it is, I, I want to clearly define it.
I think sometimes when we set goals, we can be vague, and when we’re vague, I mean, it really is. That’s really kind of the, a cheater’s way of setting a goal, because you really don’t know if you hit it or not, and you can kind of swing for the fence. And if you, you know, you, you don’t know how far you hit, then you don’t know if you really made an impact or not. But if you can set a clearly defined goal, then when you’ve achieved that goal, that is measurable. Okay? And I would also say that another thing that I do is I try to set realistic goals. It’s not a bad idea to have a big, hairy, audacious school. In fact,
I have many of them in my own business, which are those goals that are really big overstretching, probably more than what you can accomplish in a year or maybe even two years. But these are the goals that, that you’re really, really pressing for. But the goals that I wanna set for the year are, are smaller goals, more incremental goals that can be measured and calculated. Because what I wanna do, a as I go throughout my years, I want to be able to see my progress. I want to be able to see how I have done toward either reaching, achieving, or exceeding the goals that I’ve set for myself. Okay? And if I set them in a manner that they are attainable, then those little successes build confidence, they create positive energy, and they motivate me to want to set additional goals and to keep taking further steps. So when we, when we set goals for ourselves, we want them to be actionable. We want them to be attainable. We want them to be clearly defined so that we know exactly what we’re reaching for.
Now, I want to share with you what I would consider to be the three big factors that I use when setting my goals. I think that there’s a lot of ways that we can, we can goal set, and there’s tons of ways to, to go about that. However, I think it’s important to make sure that our goals land in one of three main areas in terms of business growth.
Because at the end of the day, right, I think that’s what we’re interested in. We’re interested in moving our business forward, and we want to make sure that we’re spending our time and our effort on the right things. Nothing can be more frustrating than to set a goal that you might end up achieving, but in the end of the day, doesn’t really help you move the needle in terms of progress that you’re making in your business.
So I’m gonna share with you the three big factors that I think we should focus on when we’re creating our goals for the new year. I’ve already started doing this in my business, and it’s exciting because you can make your goals and know that the end result is going to help you with your net increase in your business growth. So here are the three big factors that I want to share with you.
So, number one, I would say that the, the number one factor that I use for setting goals is growing customer leads. I want to grow my reach. I want to grow the impact that I am having in terms of getting my services out in front of more people. And by getting them out in front of more people, I want to create more awareness of myself as a business owner.
See, we can’t have customers until they know about us and they don’t know about us until we put ourselves out there. So for, for one big factor in terms of growing your business, maybe you wanna set a goal around awareness. What can you do to help increase your exposure? So that could be in the form of, you know, maintaining or building a social media page or a channel, maybe that is building a website or creating additional content for your website. With Zoom, we can jump into networking sorts of events, whether it’s through Zoom, maybe it’s a Facebook group, finding places where our customers are hanging out and start to mingle with them more. So as we do that, we’re creating more awareness for ourselves and our business and creating relationships that could then potentially turn into new business.
So factor number one is awareness, growing customer lead. Maybe you want to create a goal around that. Maybe you want to create a goal around growing the, the leads that you get by creating more awareness for your business. Okay, so factor number two is conversion. So what is conversion? Conversion is taking those people who know you, know, your business and converting them into customers.
To be able to do that, you have to build trust. You have to create an offer that clearly communicates your value and the services that you offer, and then an invitation for people to do work with you. So maybe you wanna create a goal that’s centered around this whole idea of conversion. What would that look like? Well, maybe you want to maybe create a specific offer for your customer that gives them a chance to kind of test drive your services, that pays you a little bit of money, that allows you to create a relationship with a new customer and allow them to kind of get to know you a little bit. And if you’ve done my 1003 day challenge, you know that that’s the premise behind that challenge is to create an offer that would allow you to create a new relationship with a new customer.
And that conversion factor is little things that you can do in your business that will allow you to increase the amount of conversion. Another example would be maybe being diligent about going out and collecting customer testimonials, those success stories that you’ve had from past clients. And those stories communicate. Not only do you know your craft, but the type of person you are and what it’s like to work with you and the results that a client can get from working with you.
These, these success stories are very powerful, but you have to go out and get them. You have to go out and ask for them. You have to cultivate them from your existing customers. And believe me, there’s nothing more powerful than a success story or a testimonial that tells your potential customer that you’re good, you are trustworthy, and you are a good person to work with.
So maybe you would create a goal that’s around, you know, conversion. Maybe you are going to go out and talk to past customers and you want to get some, some feedback from them, and you want to get those testimonials, add them to your website, add them to your social media posts, and share those in places where people will see them and start to develop a greater comfortable trust with you as a business owner.
So the number two factor that you might want to focus on for goal setting is conversion, getting those potential customers and converting them into customers. Now, the last one for the day is factor number three, which is retention. Okay, I’ve said this in a previous lesson, but the fact is, guys, that the effort that it takes for us to find a new customer is so much more than keeping an existing customer happy.
When we’ve already had an opportunity to serve one client, it’s easy for us to do work for them. Again, if we are careful in managing that relationship, if we are creating relationship with our customers and providing them with good value, then for them to be able to come and trust us for another, another job should be easy. It should be easier than having to go out and create a brand new relationship and find someone that you don’t already work with and convert them to a customer and prove yourself to them that you can be trusted.
So what can we do with retention is we can continue to build a relationship, continue to build a relationship with our existing customers, that we can start to leverage those existing relationships and allow that to become recurring revenue in our businesses. So maybe one goal that you might set would be starting a monthly newsletter that goes out to your existing customers, that explains a little bit what’s going on in your business.
Maybe it talks about the new skills that you’re learning, maybe a new service that you’re offering, and allows you to also share those wins from projects that you’re wrapping up, grabbing those testimonials and bragging on that new client inside the newsletter, celebrating the wins. Guys, when your existing clients see that they are energized, they’re looking at what you’re doing for other people and a little bit of the FOMO takes over, they see that there could be something that they could do in their business and maybe that would inspire them to reach out and connect with you and have you do, do something similar for them. So creating a a mechanism like a newsletter would be a great goal because that would be something that you could do on a regular basis.
Doesn’t have to be big or elaborate, but creates touchpoints that develop a relationship between you and your existing clients. So as we kinda wrap up here, I want you to think about the goals that you can set for next year. Make sure that they’re actionable, they’re clearly defined and it’s, it’s not a bad idea if they can be somewhat of a habit.
If you can maybe create a goal that would allow you to form a new habit, whether it’s posting on a social media, whether it’s, maybe it’s creating a newsletter that’s put out on a regular basis, something that you can add to your business that’s repeatable, that allows you to grow over time. And then don’t forget those three big factors that you can use that will help move the needle when you’re growing your business.
Factor number one is growing those customer leads your exposure, showing new people who you are and the services that you offer and the products that you sell. Factor number two, conversion. Building trust with your audience, allowing them to see that you do good work and convert them into a paying customer. And then factor number three, when setting your goals is set goals that will help you retain your customers.
Customer retention is huge. Create a relationship and continue to share throughout the year the good work that you’re doing in your business. And allow those customers to see how you are serving other customers. Guys, that’s, there’s, there’s magic in that that can happen when you share things that are going on in your business and the wins that you share with others and those success stories that those customers are sharing with you.
So I hope that you’ll take an opportunity in the next couple of months. Let yourself think a little bit about how you can grow your business. What are some things that you can do to grow yourself and look forward to growing, not just your customers, but your, your conversion and your customer retention. Do you want get started as a freelancer but not quite sure where to begin?
Then be sure to check out the Freelance Blueprint, a free resource that I created just for you. Inside the Freelance Blueprint, I share a detailed roadmap that you can follow to help you build a stable and profitable Freelance business. Grab your copy of the Freelance Blueprint right now. Just go to Freelance ceo.com/blueprint. Hey, just a second. Before you go,
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