Once you have settled on one of the many small business ideas being shared on various lists on the internet and are ready to put in the work to grow your idea into a big and profitable business (but realize you don’t have that much money lying around for hiring full-time employees to help you run your business), you can turn to hiring freelance contractors to implement some of the goals / tasks you have in mind.
And then maybe when you have more money coming in, you can hire full-time employees to execute those tasks while firing or retaining the freelancers you have been working with. Below are some of the tasks you can hire freelancers to help you with.
Note though that you can hire freelancers for a whole range of things. So, don’t be limited only to what is listed below. Hire freelancers depending on your current and future needs as a business owner.
1 – Content writing
Contents
If you own a business, you will be in need of copy – for your website, blog, sales pages, flyers, brochures, ads, email campaigns, advertisements and more. Instead of hiring a full-time employee (or team) to handle all your content needs, you can hire a freelance writer to create the content for you.
You can even get the help of a blogger for hire – someone more experienced in running a blog that gets targeted traffic to help you with building up your own blog (and helping you rank it for your target keywords so as to get more leads and customers online for your business).
You can hire the writer to also create free 4 to 7 day online courses that you can use in client onboarding. Apart from that you can hire the writer to create detailed answers (in the form of articles to be published on your blog) around the questions you get asked frequently by prospects and your existing customers.
2 – Bookkeeping
Instead of having a full-time accountant (especially at the beginning – when you think some of the money that you could use on paying a full-time employee can be used on other more pressing issues like increasing sales) you can hire a freelance bookkeeper to help you reconcile your books of accounts.
Give them receipts of your utility bills, expense / revenue / profit reports and let them help you with statutory deductions / taxes charged for your type of legal entity and other deductions targeting the kind of business you have set up.
3 – Web design
When you start a blog or website, you can use, say WordPress and a myriad of free templates or premium themes without worrying about doing any kind of customizations to your site’s design. However, if you want to change the look (layout of your site and certain elements on your site) you can hire a freelance web designer to help you with this.
4 – Online ad management
Instead of trying to do online advertising yourself when your time could be better spent on something else, you can hire freelancers who are good at different ad platforms to help you create and launch your ads on said platforms.
You can hire freelancers who are good at Facebook advertising, Google AdWords, Pinterest ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, blog ad networks, affiliate networks etc.
You can even do this by hiring some bloggers / internet marketers who have proven to be good at some of these platforms – that is as long as you find someone who is good at creating / launching ads on said platforms who is also willing to help you with your own targeting and online advertising in general.
5 – Email marketing automation
It is said that email subscribers are some of the best people to sell products and services to. You can get freelancers to help you on this front as well – to get yourself more of the right people opting into your email list knowing that this will help with your revenue and profit goals.
Hire people to write the content for your email campaigns and auto-responder series. Hire freelancers to help you create opt-in boxes on your site. Hire people to create landing pages on your site that convert well. Hire people to help you with A/B testing – and of course find ways to implement email automation and sales in a way that works for your business.
6 – Blogger outreach / cold emailing / cold calling
When you are just starting out and don’t have a big list or group you can’t tap into for the initial sales, it can sometimes be a good idea to get someone to help you prospect for customers / clients on a part-time basis, just to test things…and maybe decide to hire them full-time as time goes by.
Most people starting new businesses are usually told to look for new customers within their immediate circle (friends, family and neighbours for example). And it works wonders for many. But not people find their initial success selling to this group.
So, if you are one of the people that think that they can maximize their odds of getting robust number of sales by targeting people outside their immediate circle from the very beginning, I suggest that you strongly consider how getting someone to do some cold calls or to send some cold emails can help you quickly ramp up sales – and make what just an idea become a serious business.
And before you go out there looking for the freelancer fit to do this task for you, it might be a good idea to:
-To decide whether you want to exclusively rely on cold calls or cold emails and to decide how you’re going to make whichever you choose work for you to bring in new business. If you choose to do both, that is also fine – as long as you are clear on how you are going to make them work.
Go on the web to find some tools and scripts you can use for emails and calls. Read case studies online to see how others have succeeded turning complete strangers they emailed / called into loyal customers.
- To research the kinds of people you want to reach with your marketing campaigns. What kinds of prospects would you want to target with your emails? What kind of people would you want to reach out to via the phone to tell about how your offerings marry well with challenges they experience at their place of work or home.
- To determine the daily workload you will give the contractor and to also come up with a way to measure the results of your outreach campaigns.
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