How Freelancers Can Use the Pareto Principle
Learning how freelancers can use the Pareto Principle to level up their marketing game offers great business-building wisdom.
How Freelancers Can Use the Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is a ratio used to describe certain economic and business situations, such as 20 percent of the people have 80 percent of the wealth, or 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customers. If you knew which 20 percent of your customers to focus on, you could forget the rest, do well, and have fewer demands on your resources.
What the 80/20 Rule Means for Marketing
If you’re trying to make a living as a freelance editor—or even just make some side income—then you know that you’re supposed to do a ton of things to market yourself. You’re supposed to have a website and a blog, but not just any old website and blog, a GREAT website and a blog with 5.3 million unique views each month (and each day would be better!). And you also need to be on Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and five other social media sites of your choice. You need to be able to write sales copy and sales pitches and know exactly who to send them to and when. And that’s before you even start your first edit.
Trying to do it all can quickly lead to burnout, the feeling that you’re doing nothing well, or the abandonment of the attempt. You end up wondering why freelancing is not working out like you hoped it would.
Instead, focus your efforts on those areas that bring the greatest rewards. If you enjoy Pinterest, follow lots of boards, and have lots of followers, and these followers turn into clients from time to time, your effort will be rewarded. So, there is no need to overextend yourself by also trying to be on Twitter and Facebook.
If you have a website that clearly says what you do and how people can get in touch with you, then do you really need to spend five thousand bucks and a hundred hours making it a little splashier? If you’re not interested in blogging on a daily or at least a regular basis, then try putting that idea aside and focusing your attention on other matters.
Do a few things well, see what happens, adjust your strategy as needed, and don’t beat yourself up for not having a clone. Look for what brings results and do more of that and less of everything else.
Tips for Editors & Writers
Focus on a limited number of problems in story development
Typically in a manuscript evaluation or developmental edit, I focus on what I perceive to be the three-to-five most important concerns I’ve noticed in the ms. This is the approach I teach my editing students. Editing too many problems at once overburdens the author In any given ms, there may be ten or fifteen developmental problems…
Clients who want services you don’t offer
Newer freelancers sometimes come to me in a panic because a client has approached them to do work that’s outside their typical scope. Commonly this is something like the freelancer offers copyediting and developmental editing but the client wants coaching. What should they do? They don’t know how to coach, they don’t offer coaching services,…
Expand into Book Doctoring and Ghostwriting
If you’ve been a developmental editor for any length of time, you’ve likely encountered an author who just wants you to write the book for them. Or, you’ve encountered a manuscript that was in such disrepair that it required a herculean effort to fix it, dropping your hourly rate down to pocket change. As a…
