3 Mistakes I Made When Running My Freelance Digital Marketing Business

Eagle-eyed readers of this blog know that I’ve been running my own freelance solo agency for the past 11 years. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at just 23, I embarked on a mission to live my dream of being a community manager and organic social media marketer.

Social media was new and exciting then. I was a true believer in its ability to connect and bring people together. I was young and idealistic and while I devoured everything I could read about social media and social media marketing, I wasn’t very good at actually running a freelance business.

I was even worse at managing my time and personal productivity.

Here are some of the errors I’ve made along the way and the lessons I learned from them.

All You Need is a Freelance Marketing Website, Right?

Wrong. In 2023 it’s even debated whether or not you actually need a site or can just get away using Notion or some other service as your portfolio page on the internet. 

If you do decide to put a site together you should know that there’s a lot more than throwing one up online. You need to think about your content strategy and SEO. 

It’s difficult to actually commit to the things that you need to commit to in order to rank for relevant keywords in 2023. You should be forewarned that it takes a lot of time and effort in order to create the sheer amount of content that you need in order to do so. Before you embark on the website creation route take careful stock of what it would take to actually make it worthwhile and determine whether or not that time should be best spent elsewhere.

I was guilty of not doing any of this. I created several sites for my agency over the years without actually thinking through what it would take to make it work for me. Despite hundreds of hours spent on design and development, I didn’t ever get one qualified lead from a website. It was ultimately a waste of time that could’ve been better spent on higher-impact activities.

Local Digital Marketing Clients Are Cheapskates

Unless you live in a major metropolitan area like New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc. chances are your clients are cheapskates. There’s less money to be made in Tier 2 and 3 cities and therefore clients have smaller budgets and are likely to be more risk-averse. 

In 2012 I ventured out to conquer the rural French countryside. It was my idea that every business would need to embrace social media marketing and that rural areas were lagging behind their urban counterparts by ~10 years or so. 

I thought I’d establish myself and have a near-monopoly in just 10 years' time! (Don’t judge me too harshly – this was the thinking of a naive 23-year-old)

Wrong again. While I did manage to revolutionize the way rural French businesses operated in my area and spread the word of social media marketing and its importance, businesses simply were not interested in actually paying for my services all that much.

Their budgets were too small and their expectations were too high. I would’ve needed to take on 30-40 clients to replicate what a well-paying urban client would pay me for a single contract. 

This is just an extreme example of what happens everywhere outside of the aforementioned urban hubs. 

Do yourself a favor and embrace the interconnected, remote-work, outsource-friendly world we now find ourselves in. There’s no reason to limit yourself to one specific geographic area any more. The world is your oyster and you are well-suited to compete for contracts no matter where you are. 

I Thought I Could Be a Multitasker

Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s it certainly felt like multitasking was how important people managed to juggle many responsibilities. As I continued growing my business, I found myself needing to work 8-12 hour days, which felt like a major drag. 

Here’s a hilarious solution my early-20s brain came up with what if I could make work feel like a game by ‘hacking’ my mind into thinking I was playing a video game? 

The experiment went as follows: I bought dual monitors and had a gaming PC hooked up to one and a Mac hooked up to another. I used my Mac for whatever tasks I needed to get done and the PC for frequent micro-breaks that I’d take in order to keep me motivated and engaged with work.

It did not work. While it did allow me to work 12-hour days fairly easily, the actual amount of work that got done was terribly low. 

You can only hack your brain so much. Human beings aren’t meant to multitask. Deep work and focus is a better solution for those looking to get things done. 

BONUS: My Organizational Skills Sucked

For years I was relying on my noggin for keeping track of what needed to be done. Sure, I’d take some notes on scrap paper but those notes weren’t particularly well written. Furthermore, my handwriting sucks and it was sometimes difficult to decipher what I meant. Another issue I had was forgetting my own thinking while I was taking the notes and then failing to review the notes promptly and ensure that there were action items for everything I had noted.

Getting organized with my notetaking and task management was the first step I took to creating the Marketing Ronin System. It was the impetus that started me on my journey to where I am now.

If you want to learn from my 10+ years of experience and discover a framework for achieving consistent success and high-performing campaigns, I highly suggest filling out your email in the newsletter box below. If you do so, I’ll send you a one-pager containing an overview of my methodology along with some concrete steps you can take to start implementing it today.