Winning Repeat Clients - Tip #3: Teach Your Clients to Fish

It's been almost two months since I posted on this topic, so I'm overdue for another tip. Today's tip for converting freelance clients into repeat customers:

Teach Your Clients to Fish

You want to create value beyond what your competitors provide so you can either win more business or get paid more. A great way to do that is to help your clients do things on their own that you're now doing for them. That may sound contrary to a successful business model, but bear with me here ...

First, if you help your clients with grammar/formatting/writing stuff like I suggested in tip #2, they are going to start providing you with better written content ... hopefully. Say you charge 2c/word for editing and then you teach your client that one space between sentences is really the current trend and get them to start only using one. Well, now you can still charge 2c/word, but the same edit will take less time because you're not looking for this pesky little change over and over.

(Side tip: You can use Find features for spaces to quickly find these changes. You can search for "  " and replace with " ".)

If you could teach yourself out of a job by offering your client some better ways here and there, you've got bigger problems. You can create more value (and make more money) with your time and energy if your client learns to avoid some of the more common writing problems.

Another example, say your client is sending you 1000-word blog posts on topics that should really be kept to 600 words or less. You could keep editing them down to about 800 words at your 2c/word rate, or even keeping the same word count, without ever telling your client what they're doing wrong. I mean, you've only signed on for editing.

OR, you can explain to your client that you think shorter posts would work better in this instance. Suggest ways to keep the posts shorter or things that can be left out. Show them an example with a recent post and suggest they aim for less content the next time. You might be lowering your pay per post if you're charging on word count, but you're adding value to your client in a way that will keep them coming to you over your competitors.

In the end, you want to feel good about the value you're providing and if you keep your clients happy, you'll keep your clients.