Freelancers! Leverage is the unfair advantage to increasing your profits!

In this article, I’ll teach you what leverage is, and how you as a Freelancer can use leverage to grow your profits without increasing your work load.

I first learned about leverage from a book written by Robert Kiyosaki called The Cashflow Quadrant.

In the book Kiyosaki talks about using “Other Peoples Money” (OPM) to invest in real estate. I quickly realized that there were other ways to leverage other people to make money.

What is leverage?

There are two definitions we can use that apply to what I’m going to share with you in this article.

1. use borrowed capital for (an investment), expecting the profits made to be greater than the interest payable.
2. use (something) to maximum advantage.

We won’t be borrowing capital in the form of money, but we will be borrowing other peoples products, services, and expertise to profit.

In doing that, we will be maximizing our advantage to increase the amount of revenue we can generate from one client, therefore having a grater return on our investment (ROI).

The most basic way to think about leverage is, using other peoples efforts to grow your profits.

A couple examples of how I use leverage

I use three approaches to leveraging other people’s efforts to increase my revenues.

I’m not going to go into a bunch of detail here, but you can get a free copy of my book below, which goes into greater detail on each of these things!

Reseller/Partner

The most simple example of this is hosting. Everyone needs hosting if they’re going to have a website.

In order to really benefit you have to have a really good company that has a great product and handles support for you.

You can not be involved in supporting this product or spend a lot of time managing it, otherwise you’ll eat into your profits.

Here’s what I do.

I have a growth plan from WP Engine, which offers 5 WordPress installs. However, to make this more profitable, I setup those installs as multisite WP installs and as a result, I can host 25 to 50 basic WordPress websites on each install without over doing the resources.

The plan cost me $115 per month, and I charge a minimum of $40 per month per site.

Let’s do the math on the lower end.

5 installs with 25 sites in each install equals 150 websites.

150 sites multiplied by $40 per month equals $6,000 per month in hosting.

My $40 per month plan is fully managed hosting. Which means I’m doing backups, updates, security monitoring, the works.

It’s basically my maintenance plan with hosting included.

The reason I do this is because it reduces the amount of support I have to provide, making this service pretty profitable.

My hosting cost $165 per month, and my time cost, ~10 hours per month at $120/hr my profit $4,635 per month.

Affiliate Products

There are a lot of plugins and theme providers and educational products I recommend and as a result I’ve joined their affiliate programs to subsidize the time I put into creating demos and writing how-to or recommendation articles for those products.

As an affiliate, I get paid a commission when someone buys a product through my referral link.

This is a short list of some of the affiliate products I recommend.

• StudioPress
• Appfinite
• SEOThemes
• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms
• Sucuri
• Malcare
• WP Simple Pay
• WP101
• Elementor
• Click Funnels
• Mailerlite

I leverage this revenue stream by writing articles but also making recommendations to clients.

If I’m doing a project that requires a Appfinite theme and the Genesis Framework, I require the client to purchase their own copy.

If I’m using Gravity Forms to build out a different lead capture forms, I require they purchase their own license.

I just send them an email with a list of things they need to accomplish, linking to each plugin or theme they need to have with my affiliate link.

White-Label

This option is similar to the reseller, only, it’s branded as your company but you don’t have to actually provide the service or support.

This is what we offer hear at myWPGeek. White-Labeled WordPress support.

You sell the service as part of your package or catalog of services, but we do all the work. Only your customers never know since we operate as one of your team members!

We white-label a few of the services we offer within our support.

The security we provide, is done through Sucuri, and there is WordPress training we provide which is actually provided by the WP101 plugin.

This only works if you follow these three rules!

1. You must use quality products and partner with quality companies.

2. The products or services must fill a need your clients have and fit into your business model.

3. You must have a system or process for implementing your chosen solutions into your business/offerings.

The Wrap Up

There are several ways you can add more to your catalog of service offerings without having to increase your work load.

Whether it’s reseller, White-Label or affiliate revenues, you’re generating residual revenues that will help sustain your business and lifestyle.

As always, use the comments below for questions and feedback.