No more wasted hours rebuilding your CV for every pitch
It’s amazing where you can find work as a freelancer. I recently attended a wedding and told the person sat opposite me I was a copywriter. We chatted a bit about my experience and she soon revealed that she was looking for somebody to write blogs for the company where she works. Top marks to the bride and groom for seating us together – the resulting work will more than pay for your wedding presents!
Our conversation ended as they often do:
Prospective client: “this sounds great. I’ll just need to run it by my CEO. Could you send me some examples of your work to help me persuade them?”
Me: “sure, I’ll email you on Monday!”
Then Monday came, and I tried to compose an email.
Jack of All Trades… Master of None?
It should have been easy. I have a portfolio that I keep on top of regularly by adding extracts, links and photos of my published work to a PDF as I go along. It’s on my website and my LinkedIn, “ready to go.” But it’s all a bit… general. A bit broad. It shows off my range… but it doesn’t make me look like an expert.
This potential new client wants me to write about wellbeing. I love to write about wellbeing! I really want this gig, and I know I’m good enough, but my portfolio is screaming “I’m trying to be everything!” Right now in this moment, I need it to scream “Wellbeing is my niche! I’m really good at wellbeing!”
“Wow you’ve done loads! But I’m really looking for a specialist….”
I speak to many business owners who have this problem; from photographers to designers, artists and consultants. We tend to build websites that reflect the breadth of our work, but this may weaken our offer for a specific client who is looking for a specialist in a certain field.
Personally I am quite early in my writing career and don’t feel ready to limit myself to one area yet; I want to try different things (and quite frankly I need the money). But I don’t want to have to build a separate website for each different type of work I might do.
I need a quick, efficient and highly professional way of presenting my work. I need it to be dynamic, curated and customised for a specific audience in a specific moment. Enter Sho.
Sho is a brand new platform – from the creators of Buyerdeck – that presents your work to your clients without the hassle of building a website, and allows you to customise it for each individual viewer.
A portfolio curated by you, designed and powered by Sho – for FREE
Launching on 1 August, Sho is not just another portfolio site. For starters, your “sales deck” is super-simple to build. Just upload your content or add weblinks to populate your library, then choose one of Sho’s templates – within minutes you’ll have a professionally presented ‘shop window’ you can start sharing. All of this costs nothing, as part of Sho’s unique freemium subscription.
Customise your content
You can invite as many clients as you like to view your deck, and then customise it differently for each of them. Let’s say I build a deck of my wellbeing-themed writing to impress my target client today, but next week I want to send somebody just the blogs, or just the websites. Sho will allow me to specify the changes and create a new deck for the new prospect, while leaving the old one intact and viewable.
Finally, Sho incorporates analytics so I’ll be able to find out who’s looking at my examples and how they are engaging with them.
Try it for yourself
As a creative freelancer I’ve spent many years shying away from the very idea of a ‘sales process’, and never even considered that I might be able to harness the power of data science as part of this. Something tells me I might be about to change my mind.