Struggling to land your first client?

In June 2024, I started writing.

I spent 8 months making zero money.

Then, in February 2024, I changed strategy.

Result:

• February 2024: 750$

• March 2024: 750$

• April 2024: 9476$

(In case you wanna learn exactly how I gained 40,000+ followers, made $65K in 14 months, working less than 25 hours a week - purely by writing online - click here for more information: https://heythemnaji.com/work-with-me)

How did I get here? How did I go from making zero money to making $10k/month??

I didn’t beg. I didn’t scam. I didn’t “get lucky”. No.

The answer:

I worked for free 🙂

Huh?

Yep you heard right - working for free made me my first $10k/month lol.

Because here’s the Paradox of Getting Paid Clients:

The more free work you do, the more paying clients you get. It's the secret to getting inbound leads flying in left and right.

Here’s how to leverage free work to get your first paying client:

When I first started my Writing Business, I started offering Ghostwriting services.

I knew I was good at writing, but I needed to prove that to people. So I literally just DM’d people and said I’d write a long-form Thread completely for free in exchange for a testimonial (only if they like it).

Here is one of the outreach messages I sent:

This was back when I was more active on the platform X. I even paid people to Retweet the posts.

Meaning: I wrote the post not only for free - I paid to work 😅

I did so much free work, I got 7 Testimonials in less than 2 weeks.

Result?

People started recommending me.

My first client reached out to me because he heard of my free service (I don’t even know who told him about me).

So I showed him the testimonials I got from other well-known creators.

And boom...

He loved it and paid me the same day.

Then more people started reaching out.

And more.

And more.

And boom - I earned my first $10k/month. 🙂

Simple.

But:

Many resist doing free work in the beginning - don’t be this person.

Because the harsh reality is:

Why should somebody pay you if you have not proven to anybody that you can do what you say you can do?

You have no credentials. No case studies. No leverage. No trust. No experience.

And that’s okay.

But if you don’t have any paying clients yet, the most effective way to get them is to work for free to prove yourself.

And make sure to overdeliver. Treat them like they were a paying client.

I wrote free Threads for people and put my heart into them - sometimes, it took me more than 2-3 hours to write those posts.

But it paid out big time.

So don’t be entitled.

Reach out to people and offer them work for free in exchange for a testimonial.

If you want to make money fast, work for free.

Any questions left?

Reply to this e-mail and I'll get back to you. And as I said in the before - if you wanna become scale your business to $5k/month + grow your brand on Threads, you can check out here how we can work together: https://heythemnaji.com/work-with-me

With love,

Heythem