 Over the last 10 years, I have probably tried just about every possible way you could think of making money online, freelancing or side hustles. And over the last five years, I've started a bunch of different businesses and spent over $100,000 on different types of freelancers. So I'm incredibly familiar with freelancing. I've come at it from both sides as somebody who hires freelancers and as somebody who did a lot of freelancing myself. And being in this position, I have noticed freelancers making the same mistakes over and over again. A lot of the times these are very simple mistakes that can be fixed so easily. And there's also things that a lot of freelancers don't do that if they did, they would make a lot more money. So in today's video, I'm going to be talking about my top five freelancing tips for beginners. And let's jump into it right now, right after you gently tap that like button. All right, so my first tip is to basically take an inventory of yourself. And what I mean by that is I want you to evaluate your skills, your strengths, and what makes you unique. And I know that this one is kind of obvious, but a lot of people actually skip this step. They just go out and they try to do something that they see other people doing. And they're actually leaving behind a lot of really amazing opportunities. So what you really want to do here is literally just brain dump everything about yourself onto a piece of paper. Talk about what you've done for a living, right? So maybe you're watching this and you're an accountant, for instance. Talk about things that you've done in your past. Maybe you spent 10 years playing baseball. Talk about things that you're really good at. Maybe you're really good at a video game, for instance. You get the idea, do not judge it, just write it down. Even if it sounds absolutely ridiculous, like playing video games, for instance, you think you could, you know, never make any money from that. Well, sometimes you actually can. It's very, very important that you do not skip this step. You need to take a complete inventory of the assets that you currently have. And by assets, I mean your skills, your strengths and things that make you unique. And you want to be really brutally honest with yourself. Okay, if you're not good at something, don't say you're good at it. And if you are good at something, don't be too humble and say that you're not good at it. But once you've made this list, then you want to move on to step two. And that is don't do something that somebody from another country that has a much lower cost of living could easily do. So for instance, there are many examples of graphic designers on Fiver that will charge you like $5 to make a really good piece of art, some sort of photo or some sort of infographic. So it really doesn't make sense if you're an American, or you're English, or you're Canadian, or you're Australian, and you're watching this for you to do something like that. That doesn't mean that you can't do art for a living, you can, but you need to get more specific. You need to niche down. You need to figure out a way that you can separate yourself from people who do, you know, $5 artwork on Fiverr. Because realistically, people from the Philippines, or India, etc. can be just as good at art as you. So that is a massive mistake that I see people making where they try to compete with people that can do things from countries that have a much lower cost of living. If people who live in this country can live like a king on $500 to $1,000 a month, whereas there's a lot of places in the United States where you're going to pay like $3,000 a month for rent alone, then you probably don't want to compete with them. You're simply going to get crushed by them as a freelancer. And again, you're going to want to niche down. And I'm going to get to that a little bit later in the video. So number three on the list is to not be a generalist. Make sure to be a specialist and also pick skills that are valuable and sought after. And it's actually pretty easy to look these things up. Typically, you can look these things up on Upwork or Fiverr to see how much people are charging. And you're going to see if somebody is charging like $100 an hour versus somebody charging like $5 an hour for a different task. You probably want to learn the skills of the person who's charging $100 an hour. It's all about supply and demand. The reason they're able to charge so much is because there's not that many people that have those skills. And this kind of goes back to the last point, which is to not do something that people from a low cost of living country can do. I have hired a ton of different people and I know that there are certain roles where I have to hire Americans. I absolutely have to. And the reason for that is because most of my audience is American and I am making videos for Americans. And so there's certain tasks that I can only have an American do because they understand kind of the cultural nuance of somebody who lives in the US. For instance, I probably would not hire a copywriter to write email marketing if they're not from the United States, Canada, UK or Australia. And I would prefer to hire somebody from the USA since most of my audience is American. So a huge mistake that I see people making all the time on a lot of these freelancing sites is they'll be like, oh, I do this and I do that. I'm a video editor and I'm a graphic designer and I can do data entry and I can write content and I can get you coffee and I can scratch your back. I think you get my idea here. Anybody who is actually skilled at something knows that there's no way unless you're like freaking Elon Musk that you're skilled at 100 different things. What you're basically saying there is that you're willing to do anything, which is good. Don't get me wrong. But it's very obvious to any business owner who's looking at this that you are not actually an expert on any one of these things. You're a jack of all trades. So instead of saying that you edit videos, maybe become an expert on YouTube editing or TikTok editing. Instead of saying that you're a photographer, maybe become an expert on food photography or maybe niche down even more and become a cake photography expert. Number four on the list is optional, but I've seen people have an insane amount of success with this and that is to pick skills that are rising but are not saturated yet. So I'll give you an example. Last year, I started my discord and I went through the process of like setting the discord up and everything, but then I looked at other discords and I realized they all look way cooler than mine. So what did I do? I went to Fiverr and I looked up people who were creating discords and I found this guy, Arnucos, who is an expert at creating high quality discords. Now, this is not a super difficult skill to learn, but I'm guessing that Arnucos himself spent a lot of time on discord and he may have even created his own servers. And so he probably evaluated his own strengths, what he naturally has an affinity to, and he was like, Hey, I wonder if anybody else is creating discords. And so he probably went on Fiverr, looked it up and didn't see that many competitors. And as you can see, this guy is charging $195 to set up the discord and that's just the basic package. The premium package is $295 and there's a bunch of different upsells. I think I probably paid him like $250 or something. He did a phenomenal job. I was super happy with his work and I was happy to pay him that $250. And this guy has now done thousands of different orders to create discord servers. When I first looked him up, there actually wasn't all that much competition and now he's got a lot more, but he's established himself. He's done thousands of different orders. So he is firmly established as the go to guy to create discord servers. So this is a niche that he is going to be able to do for years and years. Another example that I've seen is somebody becomes an expert on some sort of email marketing software or online course platform. For instance, I knew somebody who became an expert in creating ClickFunnels web pages. And if you're not familiar with ClickFunnels, it's basically a way of like hosting your online course as well as marketing it. And so this person became an expert in creating ClickFunnels pages and they were charging hundreds and hundreds of dollars an hour. And I'll be honest with you, if you tried to get into this right now, there would be a lot more competition. But when they first started, there was basically nobody doing it. And even now when there's a lot more competition, they've been doing it so long that they've established a brand. So they've continued to get business years and years into the future. My number five tip on this list is to find a sub niche, right? So you find a niche and then you go one step further and you find a sub niche. And I know this can be kind of difficult to understand. So I'm going to really break this down step by step. And sometimes you find like a sub sub niche, right? So you actually go several steps into that. So let's say you've been watching my videos for a while and you've seen all the people that are getting jobs left and right as digital marketers. And you also see that it has a lot of great potential for making money as a freelancer as well. So you take Seth's free masterclass, which I'll put down in the description and the pen comment below, you learn digital marketing, you get yourself a job and now you've got a certain skill set, right? Now you're good at digital marketing. Well, here's the thing about digital marketing. There's a lot of different types. So if you type it into Google, there's like 15 different types of digital marketing, but there's really some main ones. And you look all of them up and you decide, Hey, I really like SEO, which is search engine optimization. So you look into SEO and you discover there's a bunch of different types of SEO as well. For instance, you could learn to write content for blogs and writing content for blogs is different than writing content for other types of mediums because you have to be search engine optimized. So basically you have to make sure you're using certain keywords, you have to make sure you're linking things correctly within the website as well as within the blog, it really is a skill set in and of itself. So if you're able to become a really good freelance writer and combine that with some SEO skills, that can be incredibly lucrative. But there's actually a lot more to it than that. Another thing you can do, and this is actually something that I'm looking to hire within the next year or so, is you can become a link outreach specialist. And this is basically where you reach out to other blogs and you try to get backlinks from them. And if you're not familiar with SEO, you might think this sounds kind of silly, but actually it's incredibly important because when you get backlinks from other blogs, that makes it much more likely that Google is going to trust your blog and it makes it much more likely that your blog's content is going to rank. And that means you're going to have more people clicking on your content and more people viewing it. So link building is actually incredibly important in SEO. And so a lot of different blogs will actually hire people to reach out to other blogs full time to try to get backlinks from them. And this is something that typically it's very difficult to hire somebody outside of the country that you live in, because when you're reaching out with people, you're negotiating with them, all that sort of thing, it really does take a strong understanding of the culture that you're in in order to negotiate effectively. So this is something that if you get really good at it, you can get paid super, super well. So I think you guys have an idea here, right? We started with digital marketing, then we niche down to SEO, then we niche down to writing, and then we niche down to reaching out to people over email. So that is the process of finding a sub niche. And you have to start with the big niche and then just research it, research it, research it until you find something that is perfect for you. If you enjoyed this video, check out this digital marketing interview I did with a 16 year old who was able to land a $40,000 a year job, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera. And I will see you next time.