From Struggle to Success as a Freelancer: What Oki Dzivenu Did

When Oki Dzivenu, DPhil, ELS, first tried freelancing the first time, things didn’t go so well. “I changed my LinkedIn profile and set up a website. Then I waited and waited. Nothing happened,” he says.Oki soon learned that experience and enthusiasm, and “letting the world know” that he was a freelancer, weren’t enough for success as a freelancer. So he got a job.

A Second Try at Success as a Freelancer

Many coaches, gurus, and authors say that it’s easy to become a success as a freelancer. They promise quick results, sometimes within 30 days.

The truth is, it takes a lot of work—and time—to build a successful freelance (or other) business. There is no easy, effortless way to do this.

A few years later, Oki decided to try freelancing again. This time, he knew that he had to work hard to make his business a success. But he needed some honest guidance on what to do and how to do it.

Skepticism Turns to Success as a Freelancer

When Oki heard about my online course Finding the Freelance Clients You Deserve, he was skeptical. Oki had seen too many aggressive promotions from business coaches making promises that sounded too good to be true. But this course seemed different, and Oki decided to take it.

“Unlike other businesses coaches who make outlandish promises to lure unsuspecting students, Lori never shied away from emphasizing that, if you put in the work, you’ll get the results you want and deserve,” he says. “To my utmost surprise, I got my first client even before I completed the course!”

The course is based on the proven process I used to become a 6-figure freelancer in 18 months in 1997, and everything I’ve learned since then. What I did back then laid the foundation for my success as a freelancer to this day.

But it was a lot of work. And it took about a year to create a stable, money-making business, and 18 months to reach six figures.

The Right Marketing Attracts Clients

With more than 15 years of experience in content marketing, copywriting, and scientific writing, Oki came into the course with a clear understanding of the type of work he wanted to do and the type of clients he wanted to work with.

To get the clients he deserved though, Oki needed to focus his marketing on the needs of those clients. Oki had two specialties within medical writing:

  • Biopharmaceutical and life sciences companies
  • Organizations working to combat cancer.

The needs of clients in these two specialties were very different. Biopharmaceutical and life sciences companies need to get more business while organizations working to combat cancer needed to educate and inform people, and get more funding for research and programs.

Through the course’s lessons, exercises, and coaching, Oki developed overall messaging that worked for both specialties and then individual messages targeted to the needs of clients in each specialty.

Success as a Freelancer the Second Time Around

Now, Oki’s LinkedIn profile has a compelling, client-focused headline and summary. The summary presents Oki’s experience and services clearly and concisely, and has separate sections for biopharmaceutical and life sciences companies and organizations working to combat cancer.

Within a few days of making these revisions, a client searching LinkedIn for a freelancer found Oki!

Oki revised his company name to Exquisite Medical Scribe, LLC from Exquisite Scribes, LLC, so that clients would immediately know that he was a medical writer. He also developed a benefit-oriented, client-focused tagline: “Developing compelling medical content.”

“I learned how to make my freelance business a roaring success,” says Oki. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Finding the Freelance Clients You Deserve is a step-by-step, 7-week online course shows freelancers exactly how to find and impress steady, high-paying clients. Since 2016, my course has helped hundreds of other freelancers grow their freelance businesses too. It works whether you’re just getting started or are busy most of the time but know you can do better.

Learn more about Finding the Freelance Clients You Deserve.

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