School is back, and I’m back at my desk, ready for The Freelance Lunch Club starting this week! The very first workshop will be on how to write a Pitching Email, so I thought it might be useful to share three pitching emails that have worked well for me! Want to join me for the workshop? All the details are here! https://freelancelifestyle.podia.com/freelance-lunch-club
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Podcast Transcript
Hello, everybody. I am back at my desk and I am so pleased. I actually had a really lovely summer holidays with my son, but, oh my gosh, my brain needs to be able to work on things and produce things and be creative, and I’m really excited. This week is going to be the very first Freelance Lunch Club session that I’m running. So, I think I’ve touched on in previous episodes but essentially the Freelance Lunch Club is a series of weekly workshops where I teach you how to do certain things as a freelancer and these could be things like doing your pension, writing a business plan, working out when to do all your invoices and expenses and things like that. But it’s also things like writing a pitching email, which is the very first workshop that we’ve got this Friday. My goal with all of these is to take these things off your to-do list, get them done. So, these workshops are an hour long, but actually it’s only the first 30 minutes that I’m teaching you how to do things. The second 30 minutes, you stick around on the Zoom call and you get that accountability and that body doubling to actually get the job done. So, you come off the call and you’ve got something ticked off your to-do list, not something added.
So, this week I wanted to talk a little bit more about pitching. So, on Friday I’ll be teaching people how to write a pitching email, but I thought it might be useful to share some of the times that I’ve found pitching emails really useful. I know pitching emails can feel really overwhelming and scary, and I know I have seen a lot of bad pitching emails. Usually over confident ones or pushy ones, but there are actually loads of really good pitching emails I’ve seen as well. So, I’ll just sort of share three that have worked really well for me.
The first one is one you may have heard me talk about before, if you have been a regular listener. And that’s something I call the scary email. And I’ve really badly branded that because it’s not scary at all. This is an email that you can send to your friends and family and contacts, maybe previous colleagues, letting them know what you’re doing now. So, you basically give them a quick overview of what you’re doing now, some of your packages, how people can work with you, and then you kind of give them a call to action. I’d really appreciate it if you could let anyone know that you think would be suitable for this, or if you could forward this on, or basically you’re encouraging them to tell other people. It’s not pushy, it’s a really friendly email template. There is a free template you can find on the website, but I’ll also be including one in the workshop on Friday. This email is fantastic because we all assume that people know what we do, and they know what we’re going into. And often as freelancers as well, we feel like that’s all we talk about. And I remember years ago as task that a coach had sent me to go on and ask what do you think it is that I do? And I had so many random answers from people on Facebook. This was on Facebook, so this is like friends, family, all sorts. One person thought I was a nurse, which is a terrifying concept, I’m terrible with anything like that. And yeah, loads of people had no idea. So, this is a really good way of letting people know what you’re doing, how they can work with you and usually you’ll get several leads come back from that, or even people come back and say that’s fantastic, or they might have someone else that they can connect you with. So that’s the first one. The scary email that is not really that scary.
The second one is one that I tried this summer. So just to give you a background, I’m trying to work with a lot of universities at the moment, and colleges to talk more about freelancing as a career option for graduates and students. They are doing a lot better at that and a lot of universities now have entrepreneurial departments. But I feel like freelancing is still not something that is being taught or explained properly. So, I’m doing quite a few talks now with different universities. Now what I did with this is I created a cover letter, sort of a letter that would go in the email just letting people know a bit about what I’m doing, why I’m really passionate about it and asking if they have any opportunities. I then also created a PDF which is basically information about the different kind of talks I’ve done for universities and also details about my fees and things like that. So very simple PDF that I did in Canva, I think I found a template. It was all very easy. Now I will say, now I have a wonderful admin team. I did have someone on the admin team go and find all the university email addresses and then send it for me. But I wrote the email, I wrote the PDF that went with it and if you have the time and you’re just starting out, it is definitely something that you can do and you don’t have to do it on such a huge scale like that either. You could just start by maybe targeting a few local businesses or if you have a particular niche, sending them details. Now, with these kind of things, it all depends on how you feel about your industry and things like that. You may want to start with a warm kind of relationship in terms of following some of these people on social media and then connecting with them or dropping them an email. So, there are lots of different ways around this. This particular occasion, I went in cold and I booked, I think, six or seven meetings just off the back of that, and that was in the summer holidays, so I’m expecting to hear a bit more now people are all coming back for September. And also, I will be checking in with a lot of them around early next year when people will be planning things for their end of year graduation and career things. So, it’s worth thinking about when you’re going to be sending these as well. But that’s a cold way of pitching that seemed to work really well as well. It’s not something I do a lot of. I get a lot of cold pitches actually, to come on the podcast and the blog post and generally I prefer to work with people who I’ve developed more of a warm relationship with. So, it doesn’t work for everything. But if you are trying to reach out to a lot of different people, this could be an option.
And the final one is a media pitch. And the media pitch is essentially pitching to radio stations, local media or even big media, big newspapers, and things like that, to let them know this is a topic you talk about. Do you have any opportunities to come on? Now I found actually this works particularly well with radio stations. So, BBC Radio Berkshire is like sort of our local BBC run and once you kind of get on their list as an expert in something, whenever that topic comes up, they’ll come back to you. And they often, if you connect quite well with a particular show or radio presenter, there is an opportunity to come back time and time again. So that’s a really good opportunity but also have a look at local newspapers and things like that. And one thing I would recommend to doing is having a look at all the awareness days coming up and seeing if there’s an awareness day coming up that relates to what you do in your business and use that as an opportunity to message these people. You can do it in email, but actually there’s no reason why you can’t be using social media to contact some of these people and say, hi, just letting you know this awareness day is coming up, if you’re doing anything on that, I’d love to have a discussion because this is my area of expertise. It doesn’t need to be pushy. None of this is about being pushy or aggressive. It’s more of a I’d love to help you kind of approach.
So those are going to be three of the ways. I’m going to be sharing some templates and sharing some to-do lists and do’s and don’ts in the workshop this Friday. If you’d like to join us. It is only £9. There will be a replay, there will be an audio replay, like a podcast replay, but I would recommend coming live so that you actually get it done and off your to-do list. Alternatively, if you want to join us for the month of them, there is a £30 monthly one instead, like a membership. I will be doing these weekly until probably the end of the year and reviewing then. And the brilliant thing about the £30 one is I will also be throwing in my ‘How to find clients’ bundle as well into that. So that alone is actually worth £30 so, it is well worth the investment with that. All the details are going to be in the blurb below, but I would love to know your experiences of pitching and if you are having any struggles or any questions, come join us in some Facebook group. The details will be in the outro and we could chat a little bit more about pitching.