I'll start by saying I'm not an expert In SEO, digital marketing, web design or anything like that.
A lot of the stuff I read on this sub would discourage me from even trying if I was a novice because I would be convinced I was incapable of doing it because other people were so expert at it.
I'm here to tell you that if you are an expert in a specific field you don't need to be an expert in all this other stuff. If you can find a way to sell your advice to someone else the rest of the stuff you can hire out or piece together.
The first thing I want to share is that it probably took me 10 years to finally come up with an idea that I could actually earn a living from. I had a lot of terrible ideas that never went anywhere.
But each time I failed, I learned something new. Failure has value and it's absolutely true that you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes.
Because I was entrepreneurial minded I was always on the lookout for an opportunity. It was always looking for some angle that could be used to make some money.
List of things that didn't work is unbelievably long. At my wedding my brother made a list of all the ideas I had had over the years. There are more than 20 ideas that I had but some sort of time and effort into.
So for 10 years after college I toiled away in commercial lending. I hate it every single minute of it. I hated it that so much that I actually quit and open an ice cream store, not because I was into ice cream, but cuz I wanted to do anything but write book reports for a living.
After the first summer it was very clear I was never going to make a living selling ice cream. The money just wasn't there.
Out of the blue about a week or two after I close my ice cream shop, I got an email from a recruiter who was looking to fill a roll with lender who did some very specialized niche lending.
I took the job and went back to the corporate world. Because it was a niche, I didn't know anything about it but I learned quickly.
after about a year, a consultant came out of the woodwork to represent one of the borrowers. The guy was a real scumbag. And then I had my aha moment.
If this scumbag could make money giving advice to people in this arena, I could probably do that too except do it ethically.
So I threw up a website offering my services.
Of course having website doesn't necessarily mean people that are going to be the path to your door.
I started googling all the keywords that I would search for, and found articles written by the scumbag. I also used tools to analyze my competitor's websites to see what keywords they were ranking for. And then I focused on those keywords.
I started to write similar articles and post them in similar places. This was back when it was popular to publish on lots of different sites instead of just focusing on your own SEO.
I also started contributing in forums where potential customers might hang out. The trick is to add value to those conversations without overtly soliciting clients. Show them you can add value and they will seek you out.
Finally I discovered the value of Google advertising. This is actually what built my business. I was spending $2000 to $3,000 a month on ads and it was driving tons of potential customers to my site.
The trick with Google ads is to make sure that the cost of acquisition is worth it. If you're paying $1 per click and selling $1 items, it's probably not going to work. If you're paying $1 per click and you're selling $100 items, you only need one conversion for every hundred clicks.
I did consulting on the side for almost a year before I had enough clients where I was comfortable leaving my full-time job to make the consulting my full-time gig.
I've had some really good years, and some real shit years. I've had some very high highs and some very low lows. At this point I don't sweat it if I have a slow week, but that level of comfort comes with time.
Back when I started, social media wasn't much of a thing, but these days I'm starting to lean into it. About half of my clients come from my YouTube channel. I joined Twitter only a few weeks ago and got one client out of it. At this point I've only got a hundred or so followers so has that grows I would expect it to become a bigger part of my customer acquisition makeup.
As far as being a consultant, my biggest piece of advice is to under promise and over deliver. I hate dealing with building contractors because they all tell me things that turn out not to be true and then I get pissed off.
So when a client asks me what to expect, I give them the gloom and Doom scenario. That way if things don't go as planned, they're getting exactly what I described. Alternatively if things turn out better, then they're extremely happy with me.
The other thing that I've leaned into is making myself the face of the business. I know this won't scale. I know it won't allow me to sell the business for a ton of money. But what I do know is that people trust me. I handle everything myself and when I say I'm going to do something I do it.
I'm highly responsive to my clients and they never wonder if or when they're going to hear back from me. Most of them hear back almost immediately, if not within a few hours.
If you're able to provide excellent customer service, you're going to be light years ahead of most of your competitors. People are just so used to be treated like trash, all you have to do is treat them like you would want to be treated and that will endear you to customers.
If you're an expert within a particular field and you want to work for yourself, your first task is to figure out what exactly you can sell in terms of information, and who are you going to sell it to. Once you have that you can start thinking about getting out there and selling your services.
Don't push too much pressure on yourself to succeed. Treat it like a game. Treat it like an experiment. If you have an idea follow Mark zuckerberg's advice to move fast and break things. Throw up a landing page, run a few Google ads and see if you can land some clients.
Don't invest tons of money to build the perfect website or say you'll start once you have a large social media following. Just get your website up, and start to run some ads and solicit clients. If it doesn't work out, don't despair. There's always another idea.
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I think it's important to point out that just because someone wants to do something within a particular field, it doesn't mean there will be opportunities to make a living at it.
Artists and musicians tend to be creative people who thrive on doing what they love. And while there are a select few can make it to the top of their field, the vast majority toil in anonymity and will never parlay their passion into financial success.
Just because I enjoy playing baseball doesn't mean people are going to pay to watch me unless I'm the absolute best. Along the same lines, Just cuz someone makes music and wants it to be there career doesn't mean will happen.
At some point people have to be realistic about their prospects of making a living at doing the thing they love. The vast majority of people have jobs that they don't love, but it pays the bills so they can enjoy their hobbies in their free time.