PORTALS FOR PROFESSIONALS:

In this section of the article, I will explain all the useful portals to start presenting yourself as a professional in the industry, as well as a number of useful strategies to start creating traffic/work.

SOUNDBETTER

Definitely one of the best known portals on a global level, has also been in a partnership with Spotify for some years now. Soundbetter is certainly an interesting portal to analyse.

For this website you will need to prepare an excellent showcase of your life as a professional, I strongly recommend that you share all the strongest achievements and tracks you have in order to attract as much traffic as possible. 

Below are the pros and cons of this portal:

PROS✅

  • Great reference space where to contact you as a freelancer
  • Open activities or ‘Polls’ in which you can participate, so you can create an initial history of your profile and first reviews
  • Career opportunities: it is possible to apply for a paid ‘Premium’ partnership. If you get accepted, you will be part of Soundbetter’s elite and you will receive many opportunities to work with artists and professionals on a regular basis.
  • High ticket and high authority: on Soundbetter you will be recognised as a professional in the industry and can set much higher prices than the average outside. This is definitely a good thing because you will have the opportunity to work with more qualitative customers.

CONS❌

  • You will need to bring in some traffic yourself initially. It is not at all automatic to receive work requests.
  • The portal clearly gets a fee from your labour earnings
  • The ‘Premium’ process requires certain targets to be reached on the portal before you apply, so you need to work for a while and have a long-term strategy

  • You might have little work to do at the beginning: having to deal with higher prices and few reviews/experiences on the website might be challenging to start the business, but it’s not impossible

    At all. Consistency and strategy are the key words.

In my personal experience, Soundbetter can be a great starting point OR a great plan B for your business.

You could decide to use this portal as the only way where to find you to collaborate, creating “scarsity” and a more attractive offer (you will need to pair this with ADS investments targeted at the platform itself).

Alternatively, you could decide to use different portals where your prices change a bit, and only use Soundbetter for the “elite” requests.

Keep in mind what has previously been said in this article: is it better to be the best at one thing or to earn a little bit from everything? 

The choice is yours.

FIVERR (and similar)

Regarding all these secondary portals, I will not go into as much detail as for Soundbetter. 

As you will notice opening the websites, inside you will find very similar Dashboards and workflows – what really changes is the dimensions of the audience and the average prices. 

In this case I suggest you doing some good market research and find out which portal is most suitable for you.

Here below a list of the most famous portals:

 

Personal experience

Let’s get straight to the point: is it possible to make a living out of these websites? YES✅, if the right strategy is being applied. If you think that you will receive tons of paid requests everyday, let me tell you you’re fantasizing too much. 

I have personally worked for months and you will not get any jobs and therefore earnings if you don’t set the right strategy and create a good source of traffic.

I will drop the basics to bring traffic to your platform in order to get you started, but this a marketing topic so I won’t go too into detail.

CREATE YOUR
PORTFOLIO✅

Your history and portfolio are the most important things for your first impression with customers. 

In order to do a great work on this, I suggest you to include AT LEAST these points:

  • Bio
  • Music
  • Credits
  • Something unique about you
  • Why should I work with you

When you’re done, send it to some trusted industry professionals and start getting feedbacks. 

CREATE
DEALS✅

Deals are always a good thing. 

Since you’re starting, you could think about unique deals that could attract your customers to work with you. 

I suggest you long terms deals like  

“5 song mixing and mastering + 2 extra free” (in this case you need to balance the price as if the customer was paying for 7, so you won’t lose too much) 

Be creative. With unique deals you’ll be able to boost your chances to get more customers.

PUT YOUR 💵
AND RUN ADS✅

Here things start to get interesting.

I won’t go into details as this is a marketing topic but I want to let you know that running great ADS to your profile could make the different on a long term strategy. 

Put some money on the table, get the basics of marketing and running ADS on Meta / Instagram and try to bring some traffic. If you get the right tartget, It will definitely boost your requests (and your customers)

A good alternative is to create traffic one by one proposing yourself, keep in mind that this will make things a lot longer.