How to Create a Persuasive Pitch and Land Your First Client as a Digital Nomad
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’ve figured out the skills you have and can offer clients, how much you want to charge and what type of clients you’d like to work for. The only thing missing? Paying clients.
So, how do you pitch to clients as a digital nomad so they say “yes” and you can start getting paid to travel?
I’ve outlined these four tips to help you stand out from the crowd.
Table of Contents
1. Pitch to Clients Who Need Your Services
Whether you’re working with local clients or pitching virtually, you want to make sure they can and will actually benefit from the services you offer.
As a digital nomad, you have the advantage of choosing which services you’ll offer and then creating a unique pitch for each client.
Study their business and ask yourself some of these questions:
- What’s missing?
- How can they improve?
- Do they need a website to grow their business?
- Are they looking to start building their social media presence?
Make sure what you offer aligns with what they need.
But just because you know this potential client needs your help, doesn’t mean they know they need YOU.
Often times, clients you’ll pitch to as a digital nomad, don’t realise hiring you is an option, or understand how much time they could free up by outsourcing some of their workload.
You’ll be working virtually and may not always have set hours, so you need to show the client why hiring you as opposed to a traditional employee, or even doing the work themselves, is ideal.
Remind them that when hiring a contractor as opposed to an employee, they don’t have to pay your employment tax or offer health insurance benefits. This is a huge savings for them that they couldn’t enjoy if they hired a traditional employee.
Tell them how you can make their lives easier and help their business run smoother.
Do you specialise in SEO services or helping blogs get ranked in search engines? Tell them.
Make them an offer they won’t want to turn down.
2. Include Relevant Samples in Your Pitch
After you’ve studied their business and figured out how you can help, you need to show them why you’re qualified for the job.
Create samples and show them to the business owner. Show them your online portfolio, blog, or whatever you’ve created that demonstrates your skills. Give them tangible examples of how they can grow their business by hiring you.
If you think they can enhance their Instagram feed, plan out a sample grid for them with captions, hashtags and call to actions, and show how it can help them reach their goals.
If you think a local business could benefit from starting an online blog, write a short post for them.
Do their competitors already have an online presence? Use this information to show them the business their competitors get by being engaged in their social platforms.
The more evidence showing how you can help them, the more persuasive your pitch becomes. You want that money in the bank so you can start paying for your travels (and probably your bills, too.)
3. Create a Comprehensive Pitch
Now that you’ve found a client you want to work for, and you’ve created samples specifically for them, you’re ready to pitch!
Know though, that the business owner may not be looking to hire anyone, even if someone recommended you to them. That means this business owner, influencer, or whoever, may not be looking to pay you hundreds of dollars every month.
Your pitch has to be convincing enough for them to hand over money to a digital nomad they weren’t expecting to hire.
Pitching to Local Clients
So, how do you get started?
If you’re pitching to them in person, try emailing or calling ahead of time to set a time to meet. Business owners and potential clients need your help because they’re busy people. Work with their schedule.
Make sure they’ll have enough time to listen to your pitch and consider everything you have to offer. A lot of influencers can even be found on Facebook or Instagram; this is another way to reach out.
Do you have a mutual connection? Maybe the client you want to work for is your best friend’s uncle’s dog walker. Have them introduce you. This can make the initial pitch more lukewarm than cold.
Pitching to Virtual Clients
If you’re pitching to a virtual client, especially someone who might get a lot of offers, you want to find ways to make your pitch stand out from the sea of offers.
Not only should you send them a complete package with services, pricing and samples of your work, but you should also send a catchy email to grab their attention.
Let them know how you found them. Briefly explain why you think you’d be a good fit for helping their business or platform grow.
If you really want to stand out, send a video with your pitch introducing yourself and telling them why they need your help. In the age of Internet scams, adding a personal touch will give them peace of mind knowing they’re talking to a real person and not an overcrowded agency.
Once you’ve sent the pitch, don’t forget to follow up if you haven’t heard back in a few days (but don’t be creepy about it.) If they haven’t answered in 12 hours…they’re probably busy!
It’s also important to mind the time differences. If you’re pitching to other digital nomads or business owners who operate in other countries, you might send a pitch at 3pm that arrives in their mailbox at 4am.
Chances are—they’re not checking their inbox before the crack of dawn. Keep this in mind when deciding when to send your pitch and while waiting for a response. Give international clients more time to respond than you would a local business owner.
Even better, see if you can find their normal working hours online (if they own a brick and mortar business) or check which time zone they’re in so you know when they’re most likely to open your email.
4. Keep the Pitch Professional
Set up Your Email Signature
When you’re ready to hit “send,” make sure it looks professional! Does your email signature reflect the services you offer? Do you have an email signature?
Try services like WiseStamp, where you can create professional email signatures, for free, that you can connect directly to your email account.
Make sure too that your email has a greeting and closes with something like “I look forward to hearing from you” or “I’m eager to see how we can work together.” Don’t just attach the package you’ve created for the client and hit send. They should know what they’re looking at.
Your email should give this potential client a reason to view any attachments and consider your offer.
Make Their Life Easy
And if you want to make it easier on the client to view any documents or slides you attach, consider attaching them in a viewable google drive link.
Instead of clogging up their hard drives by making them download a file, they can just click a link and view the documents online.
They might be more willing to view something with an online link than if they have to download a potentially dangerous file onto their computer.
You should also consider converting the long and junky google doc link into a more trustworthy-looking source.
Create Something Unique for Them
If you want to pitch to clients successfully as a digital nomad, try a site like Bitly, where you can take long and suspicious looking links, and turn them into shorter, more appealing links.
You can even customise the link so it says something like, bit.ly/”yourclientsname.” Then they’ll know they are clicking on something created just for them.
Because they may not have met you in person, you want to make yourself and your content look as trustworthy as possible.
Double-check Before You Send
And always, always, make sure you double, even triple check your email before you hit send.
Grammatical errors and typos can make you seem less knowledgeable, especially if you’re trying to convince someone to hire you for writing or editing services.
Tools like Grammarly will help you catch the little mistakes you miss, even after you’ve read the pitch out loud.
Check Your Socials
Lastly, do your social platforms, like your Facebook, reflect what you want to do? Or do you still have pictures of you from an underground rave in Germany?
Especially in the digital age, employers and potential clients want to get a sense of who you are. And this means doing “the creep” on social media. Your platforms should reflect who you are professionally, and what services you offer.
Get Started
Now that you know how to pitch to your dream clients as a digital nomad, what are you waiting for?
Pitching directly to clients, rather than applying to remote jobs on job boards, gives you the freedom to work whenever and from wherever.
And, if you sign multiple clients, you’ll become more financially secure. If you lost one client, you still have income from other sources. If you apply to one full-time remote job and lose it, you’ve lost your entire income.
Approaching clients directly can seem intimidating, but if you offer valuable skills and add a personal touch to your pitches, you’ll sign your first client sooner than you think!
Thanks for reading, if you have any additional questions, join my Facebook Group and start getting paid to travel.
