Here's my single biggest piece of advice to anyone entering the freelance business or who is already in it. Go high end, whatever you do position yourself at the very high end of the market the way the world works these days. Anyone can have a free cell phone in the poorest country in the world and compete with you on price. They can maybe do a website for $2 and 22 cents and spend two days on it and be happy with it. You don't want to compete on price. Let me say that again.

If you're going to be a successful Freelancer and be this in this field for the long run, you do not want to compete on price you want to compete on value. You want to position yourself as delivering the absolute highest quality value at a fair price. Quality price. You don't go to the Lexus dealership and ask for the thousand dollar car. If you're you know really tight and you're on a strict budget or you're buying a car for your kid and you only want to spend $1,000 will you'll go down to the used car lot. And you'll look around there.

Don't try to confuse people don't spend the time and energy and effort of making that $50,000 car and then saying Well, okay, I'll take $1,000 for it. I'm no different than the 10 year old Toyota Corolla. Don't do it. My advice is position yourself from day one, as high end, high quality now this needs to be reflected not in you spending money, but just how you describe yourself how you talk about yourself, the photos you take and put on your own website and social media. How you talk to about yourself to a prospect in person and over the phone. Now, I've made a lot of mistakes in my freelance career.

But one thing I did, that I'm very happy about is when I really started seriously around 2001. I looked around at the competitive landscape and I noticed that all of my competitors and public speaking and media training space, they all said the same thing. They also will we work in every industry and we work and public companies, private government, athletes off Will you do everyone were tons of tons of experience. And I had done many trainings over the years on just a very, very part time freelance basis while I was doing other full time jobs. So I had a number of trainings under my belt, but certainly less than 100 when I started this seriously, and I thought, How can I differentiate myself How can I distinguish myself and eliminate wasted energy and increase the odds, I can go after a marketplace where I can get the most money for the least amount of effort to make a real business.

And what I noticed from the trainings I've done in the past, with PR firms where I was doing other services as well, is that I did some work for publicly traded corporations, you know, they were on the NASDAQ or they were on the New York Stock Exchange. So bigger companies had a lot more money. And when I trained the top executives at those companies, the CEO CFO, typically the money didn't matter, they were after quality, the most. And so I said to myself, why don't I specialize in doing media training. With companies that are publicly traded companies, and doing the senior executives at those companies, figuring those are the people who have money, and they're willing to spend the money. And I don't see any of my other competitors marketing themselves that way.

So when I did my first real website for my training business, I said, the only company in the world specializing and training senior officials at publicly traded companies. And I had in fact, trained senior officials at publicly traded companies and I was marketing myself that way. So it was true. And what I found is it gave me instant credibility. It gave me instant traction. So when I was talking to a prospect at a major company, they instantly felt more comfortable with me.

Here's the thing when I talk to people in smaller companies, and companies that weren't public or they weren't the CEO It didn't hurt at all. They felt like well, he is dealing with the top. That's good for me too. So I'm not asking you to lie, I'm not asking you to paint a false picture, but I am asking you to really think about your whole marketplace. Who are the absolute best customers? What level of service are they expecting?

And then how can you target your offering to meet that demand? So that you are seen as I'll use several analogy, some of them will sound dated, some of you might like whether it's the Lexus of your niche or the Rolls Royce of your niche. Whatever you think of as the ultimate luxury. That's what you want to be. Because that allows you to charge more price more, get more respect. And here's the thing about pricing.

I have found the more I charge people, the more they like me, the more they listen to me, the more they respect me So please keep that in mind.