How do you build a good freelancing profile in the field of web development considering the competition? - a podcast by Jason Resnick

I hate to break the news, but there isn’t a hack here.

This takes time, effort, consistency, and most of all, doing good work.

If you were to take several names of those “freelancer profiles” that you respect, what do they look like?

Have they been in the game for a long time?

Do they market themselves effectively?

Do they work with some of the best names?

How do their clients talk about them?

and maybe the most important aspect of their profile is…

What sort of focused solution are they providing? 

The reason this is important to pay attention to is that I guarantee you that every single person you respect, has invested a great deal of time to hone their craft. 

They aren’t jumping over to the newest shiny object in web development every 3-6 months.

They get great at one thing and evolve with that. They become the goto person for that particular technology.

That’s not to say that they didn’t start by being a general web developer. Most have in fact. But they quickly realized that they were great at one thing, or enjoyed working on a specific platform, or even found themselves working with some of the best companies in a particular industry.

By focusing on that, it allowed them to focus the time and energy on that thing and not all the things.

They then rise quicker through the ranks, or as you said, build a good freelancing profile, because they are providing value in ways that generalist developers don’t. 

The companies and people they work with spread the word among their colleagues.

Their street cred rises and things like testimonials, projects, and even rates begin to stack up.

There are other ways in which to market yourself to help boost your profile too.

One of which is through podcasting.

Let me explain what I mean by this. 

When I first starting down the road of becoming a WooCommerce developer, I was coming from a Ruby on Rails and custom PHP development world. Very much a generalist.

I wasn’t known in the WordPress space at all. But I did enjoy listening to podcasts and talking geek with other developers.

Through the socials I had a conversation with another dev who was building a business as well and as we were sharing experiences, we both had toyed around with the idea of starting a podcast.

A month later, we did just that. It was a round table like discussion talking about any and all things WordPress with myself, him and we’d bring on another dev or 2 to join in.

The podcast itself only lasted 19 episodes, but his company wound up being bought out by a very premium WordPress agency and I become known in the WordPress space as the WooCommerce guy.

Maybe a year or 2 later, I would be talking with Troy Dean, founder of WP Elevation, an accelerator course for WordPress consultants and very well know in the WordPress space. 

He had mentioned that his business mentor said to become one of the top 20 people in your space, you need the top 20 people in your space talking about you.

So Troy said, well if I have a podcast and invite the top 20 WordPress people to come on my show, then they’ll be sharing out the podcast and talking about my show.

And that’s what podcasting can do. Very quickly you can build up marketing around what you do. You can definitely get a lot of people aware of who you are and your profile.

But you still need to deliver value and show up each and every single day. There’s no fast path to having a great reputation, but there is a fast path for destroying that reputation.

If you show up each and every day, do good work, and genuinely care about who it is that you serve, the rest will fall right into place.

Further episodes of Ask Rezzz

Further podcasts by Jason Resnick

Website of Jason Resnick