Numbers motivate me and I use them to get things done. You know those 30 day plans? How to learn to blog in 30 days? Become fit in 30 days. I am the target market for such calls to action. I use it to motivate me to exercise. I use numbers to motivate me to form a new habit and I use them to stay motivated to pitch.
Once you’ve mastered the art of writing good pitches and writing good articles, you need to find a way to be consistent in pitching because it’s a numbers game.
Using the Law of Averages to Pitch
I follow Improvement Pill on YouTube and the founder posted this video about The Law of Averages- How to be successful in anything you do. In a nutshell, there are three types of customers. The hard-nosed customers who are already satisfied with their current service provider and they make up about 80% of the market. They are very hard to sell to.
Indifferent customers make up about 10% of the market. They are easier to sell to than the hard-nosed customers but they are indifferent about their service provider. They aren’t looking for a new provider but they’re willing to listen to other service providers.
The easy consumer is a straight out buyer because they already have issues with their current service provider and they’re open to a solution but they’re hard to find. This is exactly who Rod was when he got scammed by a writer. At the moment when he realized that he had been scammed, if a good writer with great samples or good testimonials had offered to write the same article, he probably would have hired them on the spot.
The chances of finding an easy consumer are roughly one in a hundred. According to the law of averages, you increase the chances of something happening by increasing the frequency. I took this information and ran with it.
I wasn’t consistent with pitching, so I decided to use the law of averages to motivate me. I set out to send 100 pitches which included posting my services on different sites. I wasn’t only pitching to get paid to write articles, I was also pitching to have my articles published as a guest writer so that I could increase my marketability.
I figured that by the time I got to 100 pitches, I would have increased my chances of finding easy consumers and I would have had a few positive responses.
Every time I sent a pitch or applied for a freelance job, I would note it down in my diary. I began towards the end of November. Towards the end of December, I had been able to get a two-part blog post published on a Founder360. I applied on ProBlogger, blogginpro, contenta, and many other sites.
I pitched to magazines, I pitched via Linkedin. I applied to ads on Craiglist. I even posted an ad on Craiglist. I managed to get an ongoing gig on Craiglist that paid very little, but I soon realized I wasn’t comfortable writing on the topic. I could not continue with the gig and explained it to the person that had hired me. Long story short, despite the fact that he was going to pay me peanuts, he decided not to pay me my dues. He even blocked me. You’ll get a few of these clients in your journey. That’s why it’s advised that you either get a deposit up front or use an escrow service.
My 85th Pitch is when Things Turned Around
As I was pitching, I kept trying to look for new places to pitch and I discovered Reddit via this blog post. My 85th pitch which was me posting my services via Reddit is what got me clients that paid way more than peanuts. Most of the freelancer sites on Reddit require freelancers to pitch at or above a certain number of cents per word which was much more than I had ever had the guts to pitch for.
This was a good thing. It forced me to stop limiting myself financially as a freelancer. I got a couple of inquiries and was ecstatic when the first client that I got through Reddit paid for the job that I had done – on the same day! No arguments, no fuss. It was a seamless transaction.
Wash, rinse, repeat
If you repeat the whole 100 pitches process several times over, as you get better at pitching and knowing the best places to pitch, you will probably increase the number of successful pitches per every 100 pitches. Try to aim to pitch a minimum of 5 times a day. I know of people that send hundreds of pitches within a month. The more pitches you send, the more successful pitches you’ll have. It’s that simple.
