Weekly Update #7

Last week I continued to work on my strategy of creating content that shows my strengths and using that to find new clients, ship content, and teach.

While I have several clients, the work is not entirely consistent enough to make me feel like I've made it as a freelancer. I most likely need to double my current projected revenue for this year for the business to be sustainable.

To that end, I'm starting to broaden my search for clients and freelance work, which feeds directly into my content.

Growth

Twitter (Profile)

YouTube (Channel)

• Twitter activity has been significantly reduced.
• I really wanted to like Twitter. The "tech Twitter" community is real. But Twitter itself is not a great platform. It's full of hot takes, angry people, self-promoting, and crypto scams.
• A fundamental problem with Twitter is discoverability. To be discovered, you need to tweet, but no one sees your tweets. So the suggestion is to reply under big accounts to get more visibility. This results in you spending hours each day just firing off hundreds of stupid tweets in the hopes that 1 gains traction, resulting in profile clicks and new followers.
• It honestly doesn't feel great to do and feels like a ton of busy work without actually providing value. You're mostly grinding away to grow your account.
• This is not a problem when you have a lot of followers since your content tends to be shared out a lot. It's a massive problem to get to that point.
• Contrast that to YouTube, where I have done absolutely no self-promotion. In the last week, I've gained 28 subscribers.
• People are on YouTube for many reasons, but a key one is to learn. Therefore, they actively seek guides/tutorials/videos that show them how to do something.
• That doesn't exist on Twitter. Like, at all.
• Further, with YouTube, your backlog becomes an asset. No one reads Tweets that are a year old. I actively go back through useful channels to videos discussing subjects I need to learn about. Posted 1 year ago? Who cares! Watch it.
• YouTube is more similar to a personal blog where the content compounds. Now to grow, you still need to make content and be active.

Freelancing

• My son was sick last week, so I lost a day of work.
• I'm waiting on other people for my current projects. I need access to some resources for both.
• Since I'm treading water, I signed up for UpWork to try and get more clients. I was hoping to avoid freelance sites since the competition tends to lower the rates for everyone.
• I still have some very warm leads in my network that may pan out. Therefore even though I'll start applying for jobs, I don't feel much pressure to win them yet. It's a good place to be.
• As I apply for jobs with people I don't know, it's becoming clear I need to show value with more social proof. This is hard, but I'm in a good place to leverage it.
• The classic proof is with a resume. And mine is good, but it's not freelance project-based. It's a history of traditional jobs. And even though it says, "Yeah, I know Next.js," how do I prove that? Well, you send them to my YouTube channel, where I talk about Next.js, build projects with it, and have a massive following (one day) as social proof.
• It's caused me to focus on my niche even more. Instead of talking about a whole lot of general programming topics, I want to be able to prove I'm an expert in my niche instantly.

SaaS

• I spent most of my limited time last week on content, which will probably be the same this week. It shows my skills better than a SaaS app you can't use yet.

That's all for this week!