i've been ghosted

Hey you

Hope you’ve had a good week. I’ve managed to lose with cold and earned myself another. Being ill is really not good for being productive. What do you do when you’re ill but you’ve got client work to do? Reply back and tell me know, would love to hear!

This week we’re talking about ways you can convert leads into customer and what to do if you’be been ghosted.

If you’ve been working on your personal brand and marketing, you should be at the point where leads are coming to you.

But remember. Having leads doesn’t mean paying customers. Work is still involved in converting them. Molly has put together five ways to turn leads into customers.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is something you use to get a potential customer to give you their email addresses. A lead magnet could be a pdf, an ebook, or a cheat sheet.

Ideally, you want your lead magnet to be full of value and something that customers can achieve value quickly.

Lead magnets help you to demonstrate authority as you should share something that you do or use yourself that gets a result.

Some customers like to learn how to do something but not implement it. This is how you can turn leads into customers. They reach out to implement what you taught them in your lead magnet.

Scarcity

“There are only 20 left. Get them before they are all sold out.”

You might have had this effort used on you before successfully. Scarcity is a great marketing tactic to give leads the final push to help them decide before they miss out.

If you have a list of leads, sending out an email with your limited availability can give them the nudge to become your customer.

Leverage reciprocity

Receiving something for free doesn’t mean that it’s free. There was a study in influence by Robert Cialdini where monks gave people flowers for free. Compared to where they didn’t get our flowers, they received more donations.

You can use this to help convert customers. If you can offer free audits, free research, or free content, potential customers will feel more obliged for your paid services.

Social proof

If you didn’t know, I’m quite a bit of a food snob. I have high standards when it comes to eating out. I think it developed due to being able to cook nice food at home. It’s a bit of a joke when you eat out, and you can cook better food yourself at home.

My friends and family know about my food snobbery. Running a website reviewing restaurants helped make this more concrete.

So if I tell someone that a restaurant is good, people will believe me because of my self-built authority.

This is a perfect example of social proof in the wild. And should be something you leverage yourself.

You should be displaying any testimonials publicly, especially on your website. And you should always be asking current clients for testimonials so you can keep adding to them.

Create a sense of community

People like to feel like they belong. So creating a community can help form bonds with your customers, make you more of an authority, and allow you a place to upsell other products and services.

You see a lot of communities being part of courses. Where people can get together with similar people. There are also free communities that you can leverage without creating your own community.

If you can be present in them and add value by answering people's questions, you’ll become known for being “that person.” The person who can do SEO. Or the person who can create content.

Quick Tip

What do you do if one of your regular clients goes radio silent on you?

Sadly enough, this is a common occurrence that can be disheartening as a freelancer. The sad reality is that it can happen to us all.

People don’t like confrontation. Or having to let people down. These are the conflicting emotions someone has to deal with if they tell you they no longer want your services.

Telling someone you’ve had a long relationship with that budgets have been cut, so they no longer need you is tough.

So rather than putting on their big boots, they do nothing, which is fact, worse. Or it could be that they are too busy and too much time has passed to address it.

So what can you do if you’ve been professionally ghosted?

Don’t be aggressive. Don’t go in sending loads of emails and looking like an entitled little baby. This is business. It can be tough. Don’t make a horrible situation for the client worse by reacting badly.

If you haven’t heard from a client when you usually should have, email them. Make it short and sweet, asking for more work or why you haven’t heard from them.

If you haven’t heard from them in a week, send another short email.

If you don’t hear back from them after that, “It's not you, it’s me” has happened.

You could also call them if you have their contact details, but this likely will make things awkward, so it depends if you’re happy to embrace the awkwardness.

One thing that I always say is ABL. Always be looking for new work. Just because you have a full roster of clients doesn't mean that you should stop looking. You never know when a situation like this can occur. When you get ghosted. So keeping a pulse on the work available can help avoid getting caught off balance. And it’s good practice to not get rusty.

If you made it this far, you are a legend. Feel free to reply to this email to say hello or tell me your biggest problem as a freelance writer so I can answer it in future newsletters. I read and personally answer all replies. So don’t be shy.

Have a brilliant week, and I hope you crush it.

Craig