I am in the process of building out this website to be the ultimate freelance portfolio and sales engine for myself. This journal entry is for organizing my thoughts and figuring out a game plan to make this site into the organic lead magnet that it needs to be.

So, a few weeks ago I started from scratch with a new Chubes Theme. Before the rebuild, this site was disorganized, more of a personal blog than a place to drive sales and income. It did have a portfolio on it, but I hadn’t considered how to use it for sales.

Now, with the realization that I am really good at this stuff, I’ve turned it into a more focused setup. The beauty of WordPress is that it allows for flexibility and iteration over time, and my mastery of it means that I can truly create anything I want.

Figuring Out What to Build

Since I am just learning about sales, there is naturally going to be a learning curve in the growth process. Just because I know how to build things, doesn’t mean I know what to build right away. But as time goes on, and I continue to create more pages on this site, I am starting to understand what needs to be done.

The first thing I did was make the services page, which lists nine services that have a decent amount of overlap. I created some cool animations on that page to show off my skills, but I soon realized that listing all the services on one page isn’t actually enough to attract people organically.

To realize that, though, I had to start doing cold outreach. I built a plugin, which I intend to package for sale to other freelancers and small businesses, that allows me to send emails to targeted leads right from this site.

One common misstep on a lot of service business sites is that they list all their services on one page, which leaves a lot of organic traffic potential on the table.

However, through noticing this, and pointing it out, I’ve come to understand that I can’t tell businesses they need to split up their service pages when my own website has all of the services listed on one comprehensive page. Now I know that I need to split things up so that the services are each organized into their own page.

In understanding this, I’ve also realized that cold outreach might become less essential, because once I finish creating targeted landing pages for all of my individual services, the people looking for those services might start to find me, instead of me having to find them.

Cold Outreach vs. Organic Leads

So, it becomes a chicken-and-egg scenario, where I could continue to do cold outreach, but I could also spend my time building out my services pages to attract more organic traffic.

Now I am seeing the value of having a full team, where these tasks can be delegated to various people. But since I am a solo entrepreneur and not a digital agency, I can only work on one thing at a time. Thankfully, my plugin automates outreach and follow ups, so after I set a lead in motion, it will continue to follow up with them.

In the meantime, this website will improve on a daily basis, becoming more impressive for every person who lands on it, whether they found me from one of my emails or if they stumbled across it via Google or social media.

You have to walk before you can run, so it makes sense that this will be an ongoing process, and not something I can achieve in one day. I know that I have the skills to build anything, the challenge is portraying that to potential customers.

I think a lot of highly-creative people like myself face this same challenge. We can build things and create things, but salesmanship is a weak spot. On the other hand, many people who are excellent at sales fall short in the technical side of things.

The Challenge of Talented Creatives

This creates an interesting proposition, leading me to believe that some of the most talented creative people never get discovered. Of course, that realization aligns with my experience in the music industry, seeing a lot of amazing musicians who never get big, while less talented people with better marketing skills end up famous.

These are skills that can be learned, and considering that I’m already technically-skilled and confident in my ability to build anything, or learn how to build anything, I can probably learn to be good at sales. But this challenge is why agencies have teams. Some people do sales, while others build things.

I don’t have that luxury at the moment, so my only option is to use my creative skills to learn sales and turn this website into a complete and total sales machine that rivals what agencies can do. The cold outreach plugin is one step in that direction, but the other step is to practice what I preach, and instead of listing all my services on one page, with a link to get a quote, I should build out individual pages for each service.

After building the service pages, I can then link to the individual pages from the conglomerate page, thus allowing me to both showcase what I’m talking about to potential clients, but also attract highly-targeted organic traffic. People who are actively looking for the services I provide.

Accepting the Workload

This is going to be a lot of work, but I believe that it will be worth it in the long run. Because again, I know that my skills are on point. I feel confident that any client who hires me will be happy with my work. It’s just that I am currently invisible to clients, and haven’t presented myself in a way that screams “hire me.” Yet.

I’m certainly not afraid of work. I’ve proven that to myself over the years. So, tomorrow I will begin the process of building out individual service pages, and linking to each of them from the main service page. This should have a two-fold benefit: helping cold outreach clients who click through to my website see that I’m the real deal, and bring in customers from Google.

Once I get this down, I believe that this website can become a solid source of income for me, if not my main source of income. It seems like the cold outreach plugin has a chance to become an SaaS after becoming a freemium WordPress plugin.

If that happens then I won’t actually need to spend time building websites for other people, I could just spend time working on the SaaS, which would of course have a team behind it once it becomes financially viable.

Step One: Book Clients

But first, I need to book some clients using the methods outlined on this page, to give myself some financial breathing room. Because that is the number one priority right now. The site is probably good enough as it stands to convert some clients, because it does showcase my skills. It can and will become a lot more powerful. My efforts will compound into a sustainable business.

The main takeaway is that every enhancement you make to both your business and your personal skillset has a compounding effect on your success. However, if you can build things but not sell things, you could build the most amazing product in the world, and nobody will ever buy it. You have to do both to be successful, unless you can afford to pay for help.

So, it’s time to keep working.