Photo by JennyHuang.

This article won’t be for everyone. Not all of us care to grow a large business or automate our income. Many of us are perfectly satisfied to earn dollars per hours and that’s great!

However, I have a lot of freelancers ask me this question:

How can I scale my business? I can only take on so many clients before I lose my sanity, free time, and desire to work!

So for those who want to increase monthly income and perhaps even automate it, how is that possible for a freelancer–without simply raising prices?

Below are some ideas that I and others have used to scale and automate our freelance business.

Option 1. Productize Your Services

This isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds and the only way to truly automate and scale your income beyond six figures.

Now don’t instantly balk at this. I understand that not all of us would want to offer products alongside our services. However I encounter many service providers who want to scale their business but don’t think it’s possible to offer products as a service provider.

You can. For instance, you can create an email newsletter and podcast that clients and others subscribe to for a monthly fee. Or you can create an ebook or e-course showing them how to do basic web development, marketing, or (insert your service here), for themselves.

This does not replace you as a service provider, but rather allows them to do the low-level grunt work themselves, see the power of it, and then come back to you for the advanced stuff that you enjoy most and is worth more money.

In essence, with such DIY (Do It Yourself) products, you’re actually having them pay you to be further convinced of the importance of your services and abilities while also helping them earn initial revenues to pay for those services (through doing initial work on their own).

You can also do seminars.

I recently helped nearly 200 freelancers launch their own seminars for offline businesses interested in learning the basics about getting online. We included in the seminar materials an attendee workbook that took the client step-by-step through how to evaluate their website for conversions and effectiveness, how to do basic search engine optimization, how to create and monetize a blog, and so on.

Option 2. Partner with a Complimentary Provider

Another strategy to scale your business and automate your income is to partner with other service providers that your target client would also hire alongside you. For example, if you’re a website developer or programmer, you could partner with providers who specialize in search marketing, conversion analysis, web copywriting, branding management, and social media.

Once you have a client, it’s a fairly easy upsell to these additional services. You can then negotiate with each service provider to provide you a residual commission on any referred business.

Option 3. Outsource

To increase the amount of business you take on without increasing your hours, consider outsourcing. You can find a couple individual freelancers or partner with a firm that will take on your projects.  This allows you to outsource your chief service and also provide several other complimentary services.

The difference between this and partnering with a complimentary provider is that everything is still done under your company name and brand. You can increase your referrals, reputation, testimonials, portfolio, and brand recognition when you outsource.

If you’d like a full-service firm you can easily outsource projects to, contact me at support at settletheweb.com for more information.

The way a typical outsourcing relationship works is this:

The outsourced talent provides a price sheet with set service packages and pricing. This pricing should be at a discount as they do not need to spend time and effort (and advertising dollars) finding, courting, and landing clients. You’re doing that for them.

You can then increase the service pricing to include a nice chunk of change for yourself. Everybody wins. It costs you nothing, costs the outsourced talent nothing, and the end client only has to deal with one contact person for several services (a HUGE benefit to companies who are being forced to outsource).

Option 4. Apprentice & Then Hire Additional Freelancers

For those of us who would like a closer relationship with any provider we outsource to, consider apprenticing someone in your area of expertise and then bringing them in-house. They can remain an independent contractor (for taxing purposes and so you don’t have to deal with employees) and pick up extra work you don’t want.

You earn a percentage of all their earnings gained through you, and a smaller, limited percentage on all other work earned outside of your direct referrals for a defined period of time.

The additional percentage on other projects is the “thank you” bonus for mentoring them and passing on your knowledge for free, not to mention the experience they get in the field with your clients–without having to land those clients themselves! However, make sure it’s a very small percentage and only for a limited time-frame equal to the amount of knowledge and experience you’ve passed on to them.

Option 5. Become an Expert

Many associations, groups, companies, and conferences will pay you to come and educate their people on your area of expertise. And as long as you know 10% more than the people you’re talking to, you’re considered an expert.

I know that sharing your knowledge can be a frightening experience, particularly when doing so as an ‘expert.’ However I can assure you it is a rewarding experience and reinforces that you do in fact know quite a lot and can make a difference in someone else’s life or business.

To find gigs speaking as an expert, visit your local Chamber of Commerce, local business groups, and speaking associations. Also look into industry conferences and expos that may be looking for experts. Virtually every industry is interested in having a web presence and will be open to you discussing your expertise at their event.

You don’t even have to ask them to pay you! Do it for free in the beginning and you’ll land some of the attendees as clients after your talk. Be sure to record your initial talks and eventually you’ll have enough experience and a media kit to then charge for your speaking time.

So there’s a basic list for you. Of course it is not exhaustive and I’d love to hear any ideas you’ve used to scale and automate your business. And as I tend to write very long articles, I didn’t have the space to go into the step-by-step for each of these options.

However, if you’re interested in a particular option and would like me to write an additional article solely on implementing it, do let me know. If you’d like me to do a series of articles covering each option in more depth, I’m happy to do that as well!

Jaime Mintun

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