Headlines vs Branding, Productive Procrastination, and Service Pricing

Your weekly dose of freedom

This week’s issue is late and shorter because I barely have enough energy to work at my day job and take care of little sweety, and not become sick.

But I don’t want to let you down, so here is the menu for this new issue of the Build Your Freedom newsletter.

We will explore the power of personal branding, or branding in general, over copywriting hacks, how to procrastinate productively by allowing ourselves to switch projects wisely, and how to price services to raise our income without the feast and famine effect.

(This newsletter is for YOU. I want it to be as helpful as possible and I need your feedback to do so. Please let me know what you’d want me to write about, if you find this format helpful or not… Make it yours!)

Creative freedom: brand power

All over social media or blogs we read the same advice over and over: your headline is crucial to stop people scrolling, to make them open your emails.

Sure, it is important. We all see those headlines we can’t help clicking on to see what’s inside.

But is the most important thing to develop as a creator?

I’d argue that there is something else you need to get people read or watch your stuff.

A strong brand.

We talked about how a brand help you stand out in a previous issue:

Build Your Freedom

The Invisible Creators: How to Make Your Work Stand Out

Build Your Freedom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. There are too many creators. Or rather, too many creators posting average content. And you are invisible. This is not your fault, you don\’t have the strategy and systems to go beyond that…

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2 years ago · Frank Elda

But today I want to emphasise a particular benefit of having a recognizable brand.

What happens when you get an email or see an article from someone’s brand you resonate with?

You click and read.

You barely read the headline or email subject line. You see the name and you click.

Because you know you will get something good out of it. Be it valuable insights or entertaining information (or both!).

I have a few people like that hitting my mailbox or showing up on my Medium feed.

When Michael Simmons publishes an article, you know it is good stuff (and he doesn’t publish often, so that’s an event in itself).

When Dan Koe sends an email, you know you will get something helpful out of it. A new perspective on business or self-improvement.

And they don’t need to use copywriting hacks to make clickbaity headlines.

They have established a strong personal brand and their name is enough.

Of course, when you are not yet at that level, headlines will help you get more visibility. Do the work to make them appealing.

But, please, work even harder on building a brand.

Because anyone can craft a compelling headline. Even AI. But there is only one you.

Mental Freedom:

You’ve work on this project for a while.

And you reach the (inevitable?) point when you don’t want to touch it anymore. It was exciting first, but now it looks like a smelly fish in your bin. You want to stay away from it.

But what do you do instead? You push harder.

That’s the advice you’ll read everywhere. “It’s a bump. Push through it! Don’t give up!”

Sure it works.

I experienced it many times and you too I am sure.

But is it the only way to make stuff happen?

More importantly, is it the BEST way?

Here comes the productive procrastination method.

I learned this concept from an article on Medium that got my attention: “Why you should work on a million draft at once”. (Nice example of headline, just to counter what I wrote before).

I encourage you to read it, but let me give you the idea here.

The principle is that when you get stuck on a project or don’t feel like working on it. You should not even try but switch to working on something that motivates you.

(Netflix doesn’t count as work, unless you use it for research!)

I know what you think: “But Frank, this is terrible advice, I will never finish it and endlessly jump from one project to the other”.

That’s also what I thought for a few seconds.

Until I realized something.

When you push harder to work on the now-dreaded project, you are splitting your energy. A part is used to do the work. But a good part (if not most of it) will be used to deal with your emotions.

Because your emotional you shouts: “don’t do this, it sucks, I don’t like it, etc…”

Your logical you will have to fight hard against the emotion. And emotions are strong. They can be tough to beat.

You will work in a semi-exhaustion. Drained before the end.

Is it the picture of a productive session? I don’t think so.

What if instead, you could feel light and joyful, super pumped by the perspective of doing some work on another exciting project?

You will work much more efficiently and be 10x more productive.

You’ll be in a flow state instead of on a battlefield between your logical and emotional self.

“OK, but then I won’t work on the first one anymore because I will find it boring.”

It should not happen.

Your emotional state will be high and you wil now be motivated to make progress on the first project.

And if you really can’t do it anymore, it might a sign that you should forget it.

For example, I have a list of drafts on Medium.

I scroll the list and work on the most appealing one at a given time. It won’t be the same depending on my mood.

And if one is not resonating with me anymore for long period of time, I let it go

In any case, how good would be my writing if I had to push hard each word out of my head to write a sentence?

I am still new to this concept to be fair. But I feel that it can improve my productivity a lot. It may not work for anybody, but it makes sense in term of energy management (something I want to write more about in future issue).

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Nice read to achieve financial freedom!

If you offer services, like freelancing, you certainly struggled with pricing.

It’s probably the most common topic for beginners. But also for more advanced freelancers or service providers.

I see often two scenarios.

First scenario, you price low because you are not confident that you can deliver the service at high standards and get results for your client.

It is not bad to start low. It makes sense since you don’t have much proofs that you work is worth more. And you don’t have case studies or testimonials to show that you can charge more.

But the problem is if you stay at a low price. It becomes unsustainable after a while and you will start to lose motivation.

Feeling underpriced can even lead you to produce work of lower quality. I know I did at some point.

This is bad. The end of your business is near if you don’t do something.

Second scenario, you price too high.

You have heard gurus saying that you should only focus on high paying clients (high ticket services), and you don’t lack confidence so you do for it.

But your services quality doesn’t match this price point (yet).

So what happens? You close a client, write a victorious tweets and make some good money. But the following month, nada. No one wants to pay for your services.

You may have some luck again and close a new client later, but only to fall down to the same desert island after that.

The feast and famine pattern.

Not a great situation either.

But there is a third approach that I learned from Jacob McMillen (my teacher in copywriting and freelancing).

Start reasonably low to get enough clients to fill your schedule for the month.

Then, pitch new clients at a higher price the next month and replace the previous clients until all your slots are filled with those higher-paying clients.

Of course they can be the same person if they accept to pay you more.

And you repeat the process.

This means that you adjust your price to the market, to what people are actually ready to pay you for the quality of work you provide.

With time, your expertise increases and you can more easily find higher paying clients.

“But I can’t raise my prices indefinitely. I won’t find anyone willing to pay me.” you may say.

Sure, at some point you’ll reach a saturation point and you won’t be able to charge more.

At least if you don’t bring more value.

Don’t forget that money is only an exchange of value.

Thus when this happens, you can either keep working at this saturating rate which can be enough to make you good money and live happily, or you can find ways to increase your value.

Learn new skills, take more responsibility in the projects. Anything that will save time or effort to your clients.

I hope you enjoyed this issue!

Please share it if you think it can help someone else:

In the meantime, be great!

Frank