If you skip this step of cold emailing, you will never land any clients.
Period.
Hey, I'm Megan.
For proven tips for growing your business and making more money as a freelancer, click
on Subscribe and hit the bell so that you'll be notified when I upload new content every
Thursday.
Sourcing leads is the first step to finding success with cold emailing.
When freelancers follow my method, they can sometimes see an immediate 25-50% increase
in their conversion rates.
So in today's video, I want to offer you three concrete tips, pieces of advice that you can
follow so that you can also turn more leads into clients.
Don't forget to check out my last video where I shared three cold email subject lines that
you can copy/paste and use for yourself.
I'm going to drop that link in the description below.
Alright, let's go.
Three proven tips for sourcing leads.
Tip #1 is get specific with who you contact.
You cannot skip this step because if you do, it will kill your conversion rates.
Let me explain.
If your goal is to cold email everybody, you're going to fail.
And that's because everybody is not your audience.
Everybody is not your ideal client.
Your lead sourcing needs to be targeted.
I'm going to say that one more time because it's really important.
Write it down.
Your lead sourcing needs to be targeted.
Most of this boils down to your niche, which hopefully you've picked one by now.
But if you haven't, I've got a video on that and I will drop the link to that in the description
below.
As an example, if you're a social media manager, your goal should not be to do social media
for anyone.
What do you enjoy?
What do you know a lot about?
For me, in the beginning, it was fitness and nutrition.
These were two industries that I was very interested in and passionate about, and I
had a lot of knowledge of them.
So I was sourcing leads in those industries.
And honestly, I could've gotten even more specific than that if I wanted to.
But the point is this: Don't be Debbie Desperate and source and cold email anyone you can find.
Source leads that fall within your niche.
That way, when you eventually cold email these people, you can say, "Hi, my name is so-and-so,
and I'm a fitness writer."
"A nutrition writer."
"A finance social media manager."
Whatever.
This is the simplest way to position yourself as an expert of your field, and that is ultimately
what's going to get you to stand out from your competition, because you've got a lot
of it.
Tip #2 is source human beings, not companies.
Are you looking for email addresses that are, they look something like info@ or support@
or hello@?
Stop right now.
The thing with cold emailing is that in the beginning, your leads don't yet know that
they need your services.
So you want to make it as hard as possible for them to blow you off.
When you send a cold email to a very generic address like info@, one of two things will
happen.
The first option is that they're just going to ignore you.
Or the second is that some random maybe like a customer support rep will get back to you
and say that they have forwarded your information to the appropriate department and if they're
interested, they will reach out for more information.
That's never going to happen.
You'll never hear from them again.
You want to make it as hard as possible for your leads to ignore you.
This means you need to track down a living, breathing human being.
They need their own email address that goes only to their own inbox and you're going to
reach out to them and strike up a conversation.
People form relationships with other people, not with companies.
So that's why when you are sourcing leads, at the end of the day, you want to find an
email address for a human being, not the company.
When I'm sourcing leads, I'm looking for someone that in some capacity works with that brand's
blog.
So I'm usually looking for someone with a title like Director of Content or Blog Manager
or Editor, or something along those lines.
That's my lead and that's eventually who I'm going to cold email.
I'm going to help you out with this step, so in the comments, tell me what you do for
a living, whether you're a writer, a social media manager, a graphic designer, whatever,
drop it in the comments and I'll tell you who you should be looking for when you're
sourcing leads.
Tip #3 is what I call "10 for 1."
10 for 1 is kind of my rule of thumb, and basically what it means is that if you want
to land one client, you need to source 10 leads.
This is my average conversion rate, and I tell you to aim for 10 because very often,
what I see freelancers do is source one lead, send one cold email, and then they sit back
and they're like, "Ohhh God I worked so hard.
That's great."
That's not going to cut it.
You've probably heard that cold emailing is largely a numbers game, and it is.
But you also want to strike a balance between sourcing enough leads, sending enough cold
emails, but also making sure that every single email is high-quality.
You never want to sacrifice the quality of your cold emails for the sake of sending more.
So my advice, the goal I suggest you set for yourself, is when you sit down to source leads,
aim for 10 targeted, high-quality leads.
This will get you results so much faster than if you only source a few leads or if you source
a bunch of leads that aren't targeted or are low-quality.
Lead generation, I know, is one of those things where sometimes you feel like, "Where do I
even start?"
So I want to help you out a little bit more.
I have created a guide where I will show you step by step how I use five different sources
for generating leads.
These are highly qualified leads, high-quality, and it's one of the reasons why I'm able to
land clients so quickly and so consistently, and it helped me scale my business to five
figures a month in revenue.
I break each method down step by step so that all you have to do is follow the directions
I give, and there are plenty of screenshots so you know what to look for.
I will link to that in the description below.
If you found this video helpful, please don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click
on the thumbs up, and I will catch you in the next video.