Today I wanted to share a post that might be useful for any fellow PRs wanting to earn more money in 2024, without having to take on more done for you 121 clients.
Whether that’s because there’s a cap on how many 121 accounts you can take on, or you’re constantly getting ‘we don’t have the budget for PR right now, can you work for 50p?’ conversations.
For most of us who are freelance PRs, finding the right balance of small businesses to work with can be tricky. In my experience, bigger organizations can sometimes feel uncomfortable not working with an agency, as they’re used to that kind of structure. Many smaller businesses find working with freelancers much more attractive, but then find it harder to justify marketing budgets. I find that from November-Feb, it’s the worst time for me with 121 clients pausing, canceling, or asking for lower hours (I moved away from a day rate/hourly rate, but that’s probably a whole other blog post).
Last year, by the second week of January, I’d lost 50% of my 121 clients. The same happened again this year. Whilst I find clients often come back to me down the line, I still needed a way to replace the income, but also a way to have a ‘back-up’ for when this mass exodus seems to occur. Enter, diversifying my income.
Two years ago I took part in a free challenge with Lisa Johnson called ‘Race to Recurring Revenue.’ It’s a free challenge that helps you figure out how you can swap trading time for money (e.g. 121) and turn your knowledge into something profitable.
It talks about passive income-which I was definitely sceptical about. In fact, I imagine most people are very sceptical about it now, with a wave of ‘faceless Instagram’ accounts offering six figures from passive income (spoiler alert: most of these are not legit).
However, this method of passive income definitely is-and it’s instead focused on the process of moving from a one-to-one model to a one-to-many model (such as training groups of people in your expertise) by creating things like courses or memberships.
In fact, diversifying income is what I usually say because in most of these cases-you do need to do a bit of ‘active’ work. But it’s much more passive than pitching every day for your clients!
When I learnt about this, I’d only ever done people’s PR for them, so how could it work with PR?
How I made £20,000 as a PR without taking on any more 121 clients?
Above is a screenshot of moonclerk, which I use to take payments for my courses, membership and digital products-yes I know the amount says £26000 but someone also used it to pay for a done for you 121 option once, which I’m deducting from that total for transparency-so the total earnings from non-121 work is £20k. This was set up when I first launched in May 2022.
So how did I do it? After signing up do the challenge, I then went ahead and signed up for the follow-on course that continues the work of the challenge and taught me how to deal with this ~(which I’ll talk about in another blog post). I learnt the process of turning a service into a different type of income stream, and thought I’d list them in this post to give you some inspiration…
-Courses: My first course I launched two months later, it was a 6 week live course to train other VAs in PR. (price £250) This originally was for VAs themselves, but I am noticing more people who I work with now having their own team and I’m thinking about launching it again just for people who want to train a member of their team on PR. You can listen to a podcast I did about my first launch here at the time, This was the first time I moved away from doing 121 PR and I really enjoyed it. I then launched a 6 month course for solopreneurs (price £250 a month, for siz months). This was great as most people who joined were interested in working with me 121 but couldn’t afford to do so-I also offered a 12 month payment plan so they could join for just £125, which is obviously a lot cheaper than 121 PR. I offered lots of support-a whatsapp group, helping with drafting pitches-I just didn’t do the day to day PR which takes up so much of my time (the 37 emails it can sometimes take to get a piece of coverage!)
–Ebooks and templates: These are templates and guides I created to solve specific problems, like press release templates. I also recorded a few masterclasses. These aren’t big earners (Prices start from £7, so they’re not going to make me me millions!) but they are really passive. It doesn’t take long to create the content and sales pages-and the sales I get are often just out of the blue where people have presumably discovered them on social media or via google. It might only be £10 or £20 here and there-but it all helps.
-In-person days: I’ve also created in-person days and I’m doing these again in 2024! These cost a few hundred pound and are usually capped at ten people-they get some support before and after, and you’d be surprised at how much you can do in a day! Yes you do have to pay venue costs but they’re a great way to offer something different and are lower-intensity than most other options as it’s just one day!
One thing I made sure to do from the start is to offer payment plans on everything I did (with no interest or incentive to pay in full) as I always want to be accessible in what I offer. What’s also great about this is that you then are paid long after you’ve done something-which is the dream! In September, I had to temporarily homeschool my son (more in the latest episode of the podcast) and these payments were such a relief when I couldn’t take on 121 clients. The stars had aligned that I was still receiving monthly payments for my in-person days and my group programme and they’d both been delivered.
-Membership: This is what I’m currently running. I have a PR membership (£59.99 a month) which has lots of press ops, trainings and networks with journalists. I have around 20 members but there are some costs attached with it, like paying for experts and hosting platform, so it’s not a massive earner for me but I love it.
Does this mean you don’t do any 121 PR?
This might contradict what I’ve said, but no! The thing is I still really love doing people’s PR, getting the buzz of landing people press coverage. I know some people who don’t do any 121 any more and just focus on one to many, but I love to have a balance of the two. However, having these recurring revenue streams can also help your 121 work so much-for one, I changed my pricing structure and am really confident in it. I can be more confident as I know that if a client can’t afford it, I have so many other options. They can come to an in-person day or come into my membership. It means I’m much firmer on my prices now and I find it often balances out-someone might go into my membership for 6 months and then quit and work with me 121, or someone might pause 121 and go into my membership. It moves conversation away from ‘no’ to ‘here’s different ways to work with me, without reducing your fees and being resentful at trying to get results with a budget of 1/2 day PR.
I think having the passive income ‘back-up’ also means I’m more confident in my pricing and also in dealing with those times of year when things get quiet. Once you’ve figured out a sales page and how to put an offer together, you start to think ‘okay, I need this much money this month-what can I put out there!’
Hopefully that’s given you some inspiration to think about. You can start small-perhaps just a one-off masterclass or an ebook, or put a course out there and have it ready for anyone who can’t stretch to 121 clients.
If you’re wanting to do what I’ve done, I’d definitely recommend Joining the free challenge that is open for registration now. Full disclosure, I’m an affiliate for the attached course (so if you do decide to jump in, I’ll be able to offer you extra support with my course bonuses-which will be revealed soon!) after doing it twice (I redid it the second year to focus on launching my membership) but either way, the value in the free challenge which includes a masterclass is insane-and can definitely get you taking steps to monetise your PR skills by itself!