Latest / Content, Briefly / Peak Freelance: Elise Dopson on the State of Freelancing

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Peak Freelance: Elise Dopson on the State of Freelancing · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [instrumental music] AI is replacing a lot of listicles, how-tos, tutorials, because there's nothing new really to add to those conversations.
• 0:08
  A lot of the clients that I've worked with and the companies that I've spoke with are using AI for those use cases, and they're reserving the freelance budget for people with subject matter expertise, people with a network, people who can talk to a very specific high-level audience.
• 0:23
  [instrumental music] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. We're off to a pretty good start. We've gotten a lot of really good feedback on the podcast so far.
• 0:31
  And before we get into this episode, I have two quick favors to ask of you. First, if you're enjoying it, we would really appreciate a rating and/or review in your podcast app of choice. That would really mean a lot.
• 0:42
  The second thing is we want your feedback, suggestions, and ideas, so please feel free to send anything you've got to podcast@superpath.co.
• 0:50
  Feel free even just to say hi, let us know what you thought of an episode, or if there's a guest you'd like to suggest. Very open to all of your feedback. This episode is brought to you by Hopscotch.
• 1:00
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• 1:07
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• 1:47
  Hey, everybody. Jimmy here. Another episode of Content Briefly for you. Very excited to have Ellise Dobson on this episode. Ellise, hi, how are you? I'm good.
• 1:54
  I'm really excited to chat all of, all of the things we've just been discussing in that intro. I'm excited. We have a lot of good stuff to cover. Um, we're gonna talk about the state of freelancing.
• 2:02
  We're gonna talk about you, Ellise, your, your work and your career also. Maybe first though, could you just intro yourself for people who, who don't already know you, and talk a little bit about your work? Yeah, sure.
• 2:11
  So I'm a freelance writer. I work primarily with B2B software companies in the e-commerce and marketing space. That's always a mouthful when I have to say it out loud. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah.
• 2:21
  I work with the clients who have e-commerce software, like the software itself for the tool, but then also like marketing tools and software to add on to those e-commerce platforms. Mm. So that's kind of what I did.
• 2:32
  Quite a long story to get here. I'll try and condense it as best I can. I did have a blog when I was 12, so that was- Oh, wow... like going way back. Yeah.
• 2:41
  So I'm, I'm 25 now, so it's been quite a long journey since then. Nearly half my... over half my life by this point. [laughs] That's crazy. You're young. You're young.
• 2:50
  I mean, I feel like I read something that you had written, I guess it was a couple years ago at this point, that you were making 100K as a freelancer by age 21. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.
• 3:01
  That's pretty wild. What happened? How did you get s- [laughs] I mean, you know what I mean?
• 3:04
  Like, how did you sort of discover this was something that you cared about, that you were good at, and then how did you, like, take the leap into turning it into a really good business for yourself?
• 3:12
  Growing up, I never, ever wanted to be a writer. I couldn't think of anything worse. Like, my grandma used to say to me, "Ellise, what do you wanna be when you grow up?" And she was like, "You should be an author."
• 3:19
  I was like, "No way." I couldn't think of anything worse- [laughs]... than writing all day, and now here we are. But yeah. I started the blog because I was in school, didn't really like school. Wanted a way to work.
• 3:29
  Didn't get paid much. It was mostly, like, free products and free things, and it made all my friends at school jealous. Uh, but I really got into SEO that way, so I... my blog primarily got traffic by SEO.
• 3:42
  So I would research keywords. I would teach myself all of this SEO stuff, and then it got to the point where I left school, and I thought, "You know,
• 3:51
  I wanna do this more seriously, but I've learned as much as I can myself, so I need someone," you know, it's like some proper education here.
• 3:58
  Um, so I got an apprenticeship at a marketing agency, like in person in Manchester where I'm from.
• 4:03
  I was there for I think it was about a year or two years, and I said to my boss at the time, "This long-form content has gotta be the way to go," and none of the people in the agency were convinced because, like, short-form...
• 4:15
  This was the time of, like, keyword stuffing and, you know, all the bad things that we don't do anymore. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Said to my boss at the time, I was like, "This long-form content is the way to go.
• 4:23
  It's gonna be the big thing." And he said, "Okay, you can try it for the agency website."
• 4:28
  So I did, and then I was like, I can't go back to writing about washing machine repairs anymore [laughs] 'cause the agency did anything and everything.
• 4:35
  So I said, "I'm gonna go to university again," because I think I'd got as much out of that job as I could. I wanted to learn a little bit more.
• 4:43
  So my boss actually at the time said, "Ellise, why don't you freelance on the side so that when you go to university, you know, you're not like a typical student with no money coming in?"
• 4:52
  Got accepted into uni, and three months after I started freelancing, which would be like the March of the year when I was meant to start in September, I thought, "I'm not going to uni anymore.
• 5:00
  I'm just gonna quit my job, and I'm gonna freelance." So that's how I got into it. It's quite a long story. That's so crazy. That's so interesting. But along the way, you've done other things too.
• 5:09
  I mean, you created Help a B2B Writer, uh, which is where our paths I think kind of really formally crossed for the first time. Mm-hmm. And then you created Peak Freelance too. Could you talk about Peak Freelance?
• 5:18
  And also just out of curiosity, like, how do you juggle all of this? Like, 'cause you still do freelance writing. You run Peak Freelance. I, I, I think you actually have some other things going on as well.
• 5:27
  Like, how do you manage all those different things? Ugh, I wish there was a simple answer to that. [laughs] But the reality is there's not. I like starting things. That's what I've realized I'm good at.
• 5:35
  I'm good at starting new things, but seeing them through to the end and finding the time to do it once the startup phase is done is, I find, difficult.
• 5:44
  Like, with Help a B2B Writer, I was so happy that [laughs] you reached out and wanted to take over because I knew I had all of these plans for it, but I, I just couldn't do it myself.
• 5:52
  But yeah, Peak Freelance came along because it was 2020, so the year of the COVID- Mm-hmm... the pandemic, and I was so tired of sat at home talking to everyone online who...
• 6:02
  and my friends who don't really get this world. Like, a lot of my friends in my circle outside of the internet is-Real jo-, like real jobs.
• 6:11
  So they go to work, and then they come home, maybe like the nurses or the support workers or anything, and didn't really get this whole remote work like they do now. [chuckles] Like everyone knows about remote work now.
• 6:22
  Um, so I met one of my freelance friends, Michael Keenan. We had like a, a Zoom call on the very first iteration of Peak Freelance.
• 6:30
  We were just gonna upload that and see how it went, and as soon as I pressed stop recording on that call, I was like, "Mike, do you wanna come and help me with this? It's too big of a job for me to do on my own."
• 6:40
  Um, so yeah, it came from there. It came from wanting to talk with other freelancers who got it because in my own life I didn't have that. Yeah. That's fantastic.
• 6:49
  I would imagine there are some people who have been kind of forced into freelancing, at least more recently, 'cause we've had these rounds of layoffs over the last, like, six to nine months.
• 6:57
  Uh, but prior to that, there was, like, k- sort of the opposite thing going on, where, you know, the Great Resignation kind of sent a lot of people out to seek out independent work because they were looking for something different in their work and in their lifestyle.
• 7:09
  Mm-hmm. Through a sort of confluence of different factors, you have a lot of people freelancing.
• 7:13
  The supply is very strong, and I'm curious, one of the reasons I reached out is 'cause we just, we're thinking a lot these days about just kind of the state of content marketing and where freelancing fits within that.
• 7:23
  It's sort of a confusing time. A lot of folks are being squeezed in the current moment, economic uncertainty, and then AI is not, not really helping.
• 7:33
  You know, I mean, it is helping it, but it's-- but the thing is that makes it complicated is a lot of folks, bosses or managers or whatever are saying like, "Hey, can't we cut cost?" or, "Can't we do this faster?"
• 7:42
  or, "Can't we produce more content?" or whatever. And so I'm curious, what are the vibes like in the freelance world right now?
• 7:48
  Like, as you talk to Peak Freelance members, like, what kind of things are you hearing out there? Now it seems to be leveling off. I would say up until 2021, everything was great.
• 7:58
  Like you were saying, there was so much supply there. Clients, I found, were not as uptight about the budget, so they would spend $1,000 to see if a freelancer was a good fit for them. Whereas now they won't do- Yeah.
• 8:11
  2021 was like the turning point. After the pandemic, clients got more strict over the budgets, and there was so much uncertainty as well around that time. Like, like you mentioned, people were being laid off.
• 8:21
  Cost of living, I don't know if that's a thing over in the US, but over here especially is, like, everything's expensive. So expensive. Like, yeah. Yeah.
• 8:28
  So I think all of that uncertainty was causing a lot of my clients to not just recalculate the budgets, but also the product.
• 8:38
  So a lot of clients that I work with removed features or added features, and that, of course, changed the content because, you know- Oh...
• 8:45
  you don't wanna be ranking and talking about something that you don't offer anymore. I personally had, like, a six-month gap where a lot of clients were saying, "We just need to press pause on this.
• 8:54
  We need to figure out what we're doing with the product, then we need to figure out the strategy, and then we can come back and help."
• 9:00
  So it seems like we're coming back to that last bit now, and have heard from a lot of Peak Freelance members that that's pretty similar. That's good to hear, actually.
• 9:07
  There's-- it's a funny thing about content i- in the sense that, like, it has a long half-life, so if a company dials it back a little bit, they don't feel the impacts of it right away. Mm-hmm.
• 9:16
  Which is sort of nice for the company. It's not so great for anyone supplying that content for them.
• 9:21
  At least in my experience, it sometimes feels fickle, like you're turning off this thing that's actually quite important to, to me or to the freelancers we work with or whatever. What-- how about rates?
• 9:30
  Are they trending up or down? And what does that look like over the past couple of years? And, uh, also just, like, a little more context for this question, so we have a channel on our Slack group for freelance writers.
• 9:40
  Rates come up quite a bit, and I am always surprised at the range. People will say, "I'm writing a 1,200-word blog post. What should I charge?"
• 9:48
  And some people say, "You should charge five cents a word," and some people say, "You should charge $3,000 flat rate." And it's like- Yeah... it's so all over the place.
• 9:57
  So I guess to kind of generalize, like, kind of where are we now? It doesn't have to be a specific dollar amount, but just kinda like how is, how is it, I guess, compared to what it's been like since 2020-ish?
• 10:07
  I think it's flatlined. I think they were, they were continually rising from, since I started freelancing anyway.
• 10:13
  I'd upped my rate pretty much with every new client that I had, and up until the middle to the end of last year, I had no pushback, and that's when the pushback came. Mm-hmm.
• 10:22
  So it was like, okay, maybe this is my limit, is what I was thinking at the time. This is what people are willing to pay me for the services that I can offer now at my skill level.
• 10:31
  But again, after having conversations with other freelancers, they felt the same thing. I think now to demand those high rates, you need to be more than just a freelance writer.
• 10:43
  So you need to have either experience writing bottom-of-funnel content, because I think we're gonna talk a little bit about artificial intelligence and AI and how that's taking over- Yeah, yeah....
• 10:54
  the freelance world and the content world. AI is replacing a lot of listicles, how-tos, tutorials, because there's nothing new really to add to those conversations. Yeah.
• 11:05
  A lot of the clients that I've worked with and the companies that I've spoke with are using AI for those use cases, and they're reserving the freelance budget for people with subject matter expertise, people with a network, people who can talk to a very specific high-level audience.
• 11:21
  If you have those things, then you can still get the high rate, but it's not increasing as much as it had been doing. Interesting. I have so many follow-up questions about that. Yeah.
• 11:30
  [chuckles] Is there a kind of a boilerplate way that you recommend freelancers engage with SaaS companies?
• 11:37
  You know, like sh- for example, should it be a flat rate retainer, or should it include content plus copy for social distribution? Like, is there kind of like a package that you recommend?
• 11:47
  And I ask this actually partially as someone who talks to a lot of in-house companies who I think they wanna be able to turn freelancing on and off really easily, which is- Mm-hmm... part of the appeal.
• 11:58
  I think it's kind of not quite that simple, right?
• 12:00
  If you wanna get really good freelancers, you probably should expect that they wanna go in a little bit deeper, and that you'll benefit from that.Yeah, I mean, speaking from experience, I only offer the article itself, and I use a dollar a word pricing for most of my clients.
• 12:13
  The reason for that is because I found to write that much, it's not just the word amount, it's like the research, it's the interviewing, it's the collecting sources, it's the examples.
• 12:23
  So I think that gives me, when I finish the piece and say I have three thousand words, I think that's a reasonable, you know, quote for the amount of time I've spent on that.
• 12:33
  But yeah, it's, it's a tough question because rates are so, like, particular, and I have never added on, like, extra services.
• 12:42
  But I know a lot of freelancers, a lot of them in the group have expanded their skill set because they want-- they've got rid of all those, um, employees, so they, they need- Mm-hmm...
• 12:53
  like, extra services to pick up in here and there.
• 12:55
  But for me, I've always stayed on the side of content is what I'm best at, long-form content is what I'm best at, and if I try to make social posts or try to repurpose that into a LinkedIn post, it's not a good use of my time because there's someone else that's better at that.
• 13:12
  So I've always, I've always stayed on that side.
• 13:14
  But I, like I said, I have seen a lot of freelancers who have gone into strategy, who have helped with distribution, who have edited or cleaned up another writer's work, and they're doing well.
• 13:26
  Um, so I think it's a personal freelance thing, what you wanna do and what you feel like you're good at.
• 13:32
  From the outside, it seems like there's a lot of freelancers these da- Like, there's more freelancers today than there were a few years ago. Yeah.
• 13:38
  I don't have any data to prove that, but that's kind of the, the feeling I get. Do you feel that? And has that been good or bad? You know what I mean?
• 13:45
  Like, are, are you finding that it affects how easy or difficult it is for a good freelancer to pick up work, or does the increased supply make that more difficult?
• 13:54
  I think in the first few years of that happening, it was difficult because clients were like, "Well, I can get the same piece for half the price from a junior or a new freelancer, so why?
• 14:07
  You know, what's-- why do you justify that rate?"
• 14:09
  Whereas now I think a lot of clients have gone through that process and realized that a lot of people charge half the rate or a quarter of the rate because the attention to detail is not there, or the examples aren't there, or the way they communicate and their processes aren't there.
• 14:25
  Even though you might have, like, two pieces of content that look exactly the same, the process of getting that- Mm-hmm... is what I think justifies the rate difference.
• 14:33
  So I think a lot of clients have gone from one extreme, and now they want someone established, someone with processes, someone with an idea of how all of this works. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. That makes sense.
• 14:46
  How about for new freelancers? Is it a good environment right now for people who are new to freelancing? All of these questions are essentially, like, me re-asking things that folks have been asking in our Slack group.
• 14:54
  And we've had a few conversations I've noticed recently where folks will say, like, "You know, I'm, I have an in-house content job. I'm frustrated with it." Actually, we had one the other day.
• 15:02
  A person was saying that their manager was sort of forcing AI on them, which is like, I hope that doesn't become a trend. But, so they're like, "Okay, I'm, I'm thinking about freelancing." What's your take?
• 15:11
  Is it a, is it a good time to get into freelancing? Have there been better times?
• 15:15
  I think there, there has been easier times to get into it, but I think if you have some level ex- of experience already, it's not that difficult.
• 15:24
  So if I were to go back six years and start freelancing now, I would really struggle because I had no, like, first-hand experience doing anything.
• 15:32
  So a lot of freelancers that I see now who are doing really well, who have first-hand experience doing things.
• 15:39
  So if you are in-house doing content, if you can write about your experience doing content for, say, a software company as a freelancer, that's really beneficial because- Mm-hmm...
• 15:49
  you will have insights that I can't find just on Google, or I can't find just from a 30-minute conversation with someone who's doing it.
• 15:57
  Um, and I also don't feel that pain, [chuckles] so I don't know what is more painful to a content marketer than something else.
• 16:04
  But I think a way to get that experience, say if you d- if you have been working in content and you don't wanna write about content, is to have, like, a side project.
• 16:12
  So my SEO experience came from that affiliate site and from my first blog. So I had first-hand experience. I knew what I was struggling with, the tools that I was using, why I was using them.
• 16:24
  So if you can have that first-hand experience and you can jump into that, that is such a big, like, differentiator for you when everyone seems to wanna be a freelance writer now. [chuckles] Yeah.
• 16:34
  That-- Okay, that's a great point. So we run a marketplace. We match up companies with freelancers, so we're posting ads for freelance writers all the time. Mm-hmm.
• 16:44
  And the number one thing that I hear on a sales call is, like, our business operates in whatever industry, and it's difficult to find writers in this industry. And I'm like, that's true, like, mostly across the board.
• 16:54
  So in posting jobs to try to find freelancers who can do that work, it's pretty clear who stands out. You know? Like if you say, "Send me writing samples," and someone sends you a couple writing samples that are like...
• 17:03
  Like, we're working right now with a commercial lender. We had a couple people reach out, and they said, "I have written about commercial lending. Here's three examples."
• 17:10
  It is so different than the folks who said, "Oh, I wrote about personal finance." Um, even if the writing is quite good, it's just such a different world.
• 17:17
  And I think that your point about side projects as a way to gain experience is totally spot on. I don't know.
• 17:23
  [chuckles] This sound like I don't know how you, like, have a side project with, like, a commercial lending thing.
• 17:27
  But there's obviously, like, a lot of things that you can do to pick up really good skills and really good experience that make you a very attractive freelancer for companies who are looking for a writer. Yeah.
• 17:37
  And even the side projects as well, you don't have to have direct experience with that.
• 17:41
  So say the commercial lending, you could go and interview a bunch of people, make a website, give people advice on commercial lending. Mm-hmm. You could turn all of that into a book and sell the book.
• 17:51
  And I just think having that level up of content where it's not just like, "I've been paid to write this, I've been paid to research that."
• 17:59
  If you can prove that you're really knowledgeable and enthusiastic, I think is the, is the point about that topic. It makes such a big difference. Yeah.
• 18:08
  That's great.I'm a little hesitant to open this can of worms, but I do feel like I have to ask you about AI. And [laughs] Yeah.
• 18:15
  You know, it's just you can't talk about content marketing right now without talking about AI, for better or worse.
• 18:21
  We're seeing some really cool stuff, like people are talking about some of their use cases in the Slack group recently. Like, people are doing some really cool, interesting things.
• 18:27
  Some of the initial fear and skepticism has died down a little bit, but I do still feel like there's this, you know, kind of like in the back of people's mind, there's like a worry about it.
• 18:37
  So I guess my question to you is, are you seeing freelancers come up with interesting ways to use it to speed up or create efficiency in their own work?
• 18:45
  And then are you also seeing like any, for lack of a better term, like warning signs, like things that you don't feel so excited about? Yeah. So some of the use cases, I personally don't use AI.
• 18:54
  Um, I'm not very good with-- It scares me is what I'm gonna say, is it scares me- Sure... the future of the way that th-this is going.
• 19:01
  And so I don't wanna play a role in that, even though my role is so minute that it really doesn't matter.
• 19:06
  Through the grapevine, I've heard introductions, headlines, summarizing content, so if you've written a blog post and you hate writing the conclusion, put that into AI and, you know, spit out an answer.
• 19:18
  The thing that concerns me with AI mostly is the legality of it, because I, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we own the content that comes out of these AI generators. That's a great point.
• 19:29
  I've never considered that. Yeah. That scares me. Like if I'm being paid to turn in something and it's not-- I don't own the copyright, so I can't pass it to the client, that scares me. Mm.
• 19:38
  So I'd rather not get involved, especially with client work. I have used it on affiliate sites. It's okay. It can do like a very, very basic first draft. It's not nowhere near what it needs to be.
• 19:49
  But I think for freelancers who do use it, there needs to be some kind of disclosure there, because I know if I was paying three thousand dollars for a piece and it was AI, I would want to [laughs] know what, what the deal was there.
• 20:03
  Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. We're finding, like in our marketplace, like on sales calls, a lot of folks ask, "What are you doing with AI?"
• 20:09
  It's not that they don't want you to use it or want you to use it, they're just-- they want some clarity around like- Yeah...
• 20:14
  are you gonna send me something that I have to run through a, you know, an AI checker to see if it's legit or not? I don't know. And like who knows what's gonna happen with all this. It's crazy. It's, it's exciting.
• 20:24
  I agree, it's a little scary, but I feel like the one thing that I feel strongly about is that you gotta be like super upfront and super clear with people if they've hired you to deliver work, how you use it, if you use it, and then probably even show some examples of what was, you know, what, what were the AI generated pieces of this versus not, so that everyone can just sort of feel comfortable and kinda be on the same page.
• 20:43
  Yeah, definitely. And I think there needs to be a conversation around how, how much you rely on AI.
• 20:51
  Say I was on the client side, an introduction may be fine, a conclusion may be fine, but I try to deliver the kind of work where it's not even like a thought. Like you would know- Right...
• 21:01
  AI didn't do this level of content.
• 21:03
  So like things incorporated in that is statistics, is real life examples, news tie-ins, any relevant stories on big news sites or industry newsletters, things like that AI can't do, and I, I don't think it's gonna be able to do that anytime soon.
• 21:19
  So I'm not worried for the freelancers who go above and beyond with research, who interview people, who don't just turn in a static thousand word article with no links, no relevance, no nothing. Yeah. Yeah.
• 21:31
  That's g-- I love that. A little bit of change of gears is finding work.
• 21:35
  I had never really thought about this very much, and then the Slack group has evolved, and the freelance channel has largely turned into kind of like a classifieds.
• 21:42
  People say like, "Hey, I need a freelancer to help me with this or that," or, you know, "I saw this on LinkedIn," you know, "So and so is hiring a freelancer, you should go apply."
• 21:50
  You know, and then people apply and it's great. You know, people find work and people generally seem to be really happy about that. It has had me thinking about where else do people find work?
• 21:58
  Because anytime I've ever needed freelancers, I just tweet about it and then, you know, you find people. That's-- maybe it works.
• 22:04
  It only exposes you, obviously, to a very small group of people, I guess, unless you just have like a massive social following.
• 22:09
  And I feel like there's not a ton of structure in the way that companies and freelancers find each other. It's like social networks, it's communities like Peak Freelance and Superpath.
• 22:19
  I'm sure there are many others like that. And I'm sort of curious on your take on that, like, 'cause it, it does put a certain amount of pressure on the freelancer to be in all these places.
• 22:28
  And it's not that that feels, I guess, unfair, but I just wonder like, am I missing something? Is there something else out there that folks are doing to find good work?
• 22:36
  It's a good conversation, and my freelance career has been very on market, so I've been the social person, I've been the one on Twitter, I've been the one on LinkedIn talking to people, whereas Mike was always the opposite of that.
• 22:48
  So he was like very much behind the scenes. And he built a business in the same time as me, the same income level at the same time. Oh, interesting. Yeah.
• 22:57
  Doing, like his business was mainly built on referrals, so he would get really great friends with his clients. He would ask them to refer him to other clients who were looking for a similar thing.
• 23:08
  And also when you have those long-term relationships outside of work, say his point of contact moved from one company to another, they would take him as well.
• 23:17
  There is the pressure to be online and public all of the time, but I've took a step away from that and tried to take more of Mike's approach, and it seems to be working just as good. That's so interesting.
• 23:28
  [laughs] That's not what I expected you to say. [laughs] Yeah. Referrals, I think because clients are so uptight about the budgets now, they need to know that their money is being spent well. Mm-hmm.
• 23:38
  And the, the only way you can really do that without a trial is to ask someone you know who's worked with that person. So I think that will always be like the number one top place for clients and freelancers to meet.
• 23:48
  But it's interesting also because I was thinking about this question when you sent them over, and I had a chat with a few companies who post on job boards, and they said to me that there is an attraction of posting on job boards because attached with a community as well, because those freelancers have like a, a greater perspective on freelancing.
• 24:06
  Maybe they have some education through that community, so they can tap into-Not vetted, because I suppose you can't really vet community members, but people who are committed to education, who have good education level, good templates, good courses, that's a pull also, is job boards attached to communities.
• 24:24
  That's, that's interesting. You know, some of these questions, they come up a lot, and I feel, like, completely unqualified to answer them. Like, my freelance career lasted about three months, and it was- [laughs]...
• 24:32
  a complete failure. I just sort of, after that, like, really dug my heels into the in-house world. I have hired plenty of freelancers over the years.
• 24:38
  It's difficult for me to put myself in the shoes of someone who lives and breathes that world all the time. And so, like a, a simple question, like a portfolio comes up a lot. Like, what tool should I use?
• 24:48
  What should be on it? Can I use my ghostwritten samples? Should I use my portfolio to apply for jobs, or should I customize something for each... You know, stuff like that, I'm like, "I don't know." [laughs] You know.
• 24:58
  And not that I'm asking you to answer all of that in depth, but do you have any thoughts on, like, kind of where we are on portfolios? I think curated portfolio is the way to go, and Authorist is a really great tool.
• 25:07
  They basically pull all of the content with your byline into one platform, and you can filter the content in there. So say you wanted to pitch a e-commerce client.
• 25:17
  You could go to Authorist, filter all of your content by e-commerce tag or search function, send that curated portfolio.
• 25:26
  Alongside that, the most, the biggest change that I've seen with portfolios is to not just have, like, a page of links, because I have been on the hiring side. At Peak Freelance, we work with freelance writers.
• 25:39
  I was always confused, because I would read someone's samples. Say I'd asked them to send me three samples, I'd read the samples.
• 25:45
  The samples are fantastic, let's work together, and the first draft they'd turn in would be nowhere near the s- the, the quality of those samples.
• 25:53
  I put that down to maybe, one, getting to know the brand and how we work and our tone of voice, but also the editor that they've had on that other piece.
• 26:01
  Because freelancers, our content just doesn't go from us through the client onto the website. Yeah. There's always, like, the middleman, and how much that middleman plays.
• 26:10
  So you need to overcome that with clients who are looking at your portfolio, maybe with some results, maybe with some testimonials that say how great your first draft was.
• 26:20
  Um, anything that proves the end published piece was as much yours [laughs] as possible and not too much- Totally... influence from the editor. That's a great point.
• 26:29
  It kind of brings up something which I wanted to ask you about, which is, um, Superpath is mostly in-house folks, and we've attracted freelancers, I think...
• 26:36
  Well, one, it's a place to kind of connect and network with people and ask questions and learn. There's a sort of community element to it. But there is also the opportunity to get connected with projects or gigs.
• 26:44
  I think we're probably close to, of, like, the total Slack group, probably somewhere around 40% freelancers, 60% in-house folks. One thing that I think we haven't done a great job of is sort of catering to those folks.
• 26:57
  Honestly, I usually tell them, like, "Go to Peak Freelance," 'cause, like, I- Sure...
• 26:59
  I personally don't have the expertise, you know, to help with that, and we have so much going on for our in-house folks that it's, like, hard to make kind of more time, more resources for it. Yeah.
• 27:09
  But one thing that I do hope that Superpath can be kind of a champion of is how in-house teams can be great to work with for freelancers, you know.
• 27:18
  Are there a couple things that you can think of that you love to see in your own clients or that, like, you would hope that your, your Peak Freelance members are getting from the folks that they work with?
• 27:27
  There's the obvious stuff like pay them on time, you know, which is really important, and people don't do. So there's definitely that.
• 27:33
  But are there other things that, you know, sort of the in-house crowd can be kind of mindful of as they're hiring freelancers? Yes. I actually made some notes on this so I didn't forget them. [laughs] I have four points.
• 27:41
  The first one is to give clear direction, so a brief, a style guide, an example of what good looks like. Because I've had clients before who've said, "Elise, we wanna rank, we wanna rank for this term.
• 27:53
  Can you produce some content for it?"
• 27:55
  I've gone above and beyond thinking they wanna be the best content on this, and, and in reality, they just want something that they can show their boss and be like, "Okay, that's done."
• 28:04
  Um, so clear direction, what does good look like, a style guide, maybe some resources on, like, how to find examples, maybe a library of case studies that they've done that you can pull from in their content.
• 28:17
  Second one is a product demo, especially if it's software. Because as freelancers, we don't know who we're writing for a lot of the time. We have to guess, um, unless you give it to us. [laughs] Yeah.
• 28:27
  So I always ask for a sales rep to take me through that product demo, not the content manager, because I think content managers can sometimes have blinkers on and not know- Yeah, yeah...
• 28:37
  what customers really struggle with. So if you have a sales rep, ask them, "What do customers come to you for? What are the biggest pain points that they have? What questions do they have during these calls?"
• 28:48
  And I write all of that down and keep them in, like, a, a Wiki document. The third one is comprehensive feedback.
• 28:53
  So I've worked with a lot of clients over the years who've said, "Yes, Elise, this is great," and then they've published it on the website and it looks different. I would like to know why.
• 29:02
  Like, what could I have done to make it more like 100% than- Yeah... 80% I submitted? Because that's, I think, how you get really good relationships with freelancers, is to make the Google Doc collaborative.
• 29:14
  Don't just take it from there. Do your edits and publish. Like- Yeah... I'm not a fan of this section because X, Y, Z, could we try something like this? Or I've changed this because X, Y, Z.
• 29:24
  If you can get that feedback... And freelancers also, you should be taking note of that feedback. I, in that same Wiki document that has the FAQs and customer questions, I have, like, client-specific rules.
• 29:38
  So one client doesn't like capitalized headings, so I put that in there. So they don't have to tell me all of the time, but I also know not to do those certain things to make it easier for my clients. Yeah, yeah.
• 29:50
  Just a quick one, understanding that freelancers aren't employees. So a lot of free- a lot of clients, I think, try to get away with, "You know, you're a freelancer, can't you turn this in tomorrow?"
• 30:00
  Like, no, we have [laughs]... Like, we are still businesses. We work together as partners, not as employees and employers. So we have our own schedules, we have our own ways of working.
• 30:10
  If you are very strict and rigid on your processes, give the freelancer time and documentation to explain why that is the case. Just be a nice person.
• 30:20
  Understand, like, we all know things come up-Sometimes maybe payments are late, but if you can give a heads up, 99% of the time it will be fine, and the long term relationship will be much better after that.
• 30:31
  That's great. I love it. I love it. [chuckles] That's super helpful.
• 30:34
  Note on the payments thing, we figured out this-- I don't think we've talked about this publicly, but we figured out this really cool way to pay freelancers, at least I think it's cool, through our marketplace. Mm-hmm.
• 30:42
  So we're using a tool called Wingspan to run our contractor payroll, and we hooked it up via Zapier to our Airtable base where we keep track of all the work, so that when a status is changed to Delivered, it automatically creates a payable, automatically approves it, and then puts it in a queue to be paid on the last business day of the month.
• 31:02
  Oh, nice. You don't have to send us an invoice. We'll automatically generate it for you.
• 31:06
  We've already got your direct deposit hooked up, so you just always know you're gonna get paid on the last business day of the month. And we've gotten such good feedback on that because...
• 31:13
  And frankly, it makes my life so much easier, 'cause we used to collect invoices and it was really difficult to keep track of everything.
• 31:17
  So I throw that out there just as like a way, like there are ways now, especially with like no-code tools, like you can figure out like simple ways to make people's lives easier.
• 31:26
  A lot of times at the end of the day, like they are the ones that, you know, they're the ones that help you increase your output.
• 31:31
  Like, they're the ones who help you, like get the meaty, difficult work done and across the finish line. Super important to think mindfully about like how you might work and do a better job working with those people.
• 31:41
  Yeah. And also freelancers want that support. We want to give that support. We want to be the go-to person that you use for something.
• 31:49
  So the more, the more direction we get from you, the more support we get from you, whether that's in terms of, you know, resources, feedback, anything like that helps us be a better freelancer to you also. Yeah.
• 32:04
  I love it. Elise, thank you so much for doing this. You know, this is kind of a... It's a little bit of a break from our normal format.
• 32:09
  I would really encourage folks to go check out Peak Freelance, and if there's any like specific places that we should point people to, a blog post.
• 32:15
  Uh, you do have a, a kind of like a rate sheet, um, that people can look at, which I think would be super helpful. If there's anything else we should send people to, please do let us know.
• 32:23
  Um, I would just add the research guide that I wrote is very popular. A lot of people find us through that.
• 32:27
  It walks through how I find examples, statistics, we- case studies, reports, everything like that I cover in that, and it's free. It's on the, on the Peak Freelance blog. I love it.
• 32:37
  I'll find the link and I'll make sure it goes in the show notes. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much, Elise. Great to chat. Hope we can do it again soon. Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Take care.