Update One: Getting The Project Underway

Today feels like the real first day of this challenge. I’ve tried to start this so many times, and I always find a way to keep putting it off, but this time all the prep work is out of the way. Every video I needed to explain things is done, so now it’s literally just about actioning everything I’ve talked about, and documenting it as I go. I’ve got massive plans, not just for today but for the whole year ahead.

It’s the first full week and I’ve got so many plans, though I didn’t get much done over the weekend. I don’t really get much chance at weekends, there are personal responsibilities, and I want to spend time with my girlfriend too, so it’s a case of properly balancing things at the moment, which is fine.

What I did manage was finally reopening the business bank account for the ecommerce side. I’m just waiting on confirmation that my details and ID checks have gone through.

The Plan

Before diving into the week, I mapped out four things to focus on to get the freelancing business firing again.

• Fiverr.com, building out the store properly. It’s a brand n ew store, four or five basic gigs listed with no videos or testimonials, and no sales yet.
• Upwork.com, somewhere I’ve never really tried hard before, even though I’ve always known you can get good clients there if you push through the noise.
• My own website, low ticket offer: a one off service for £35, a low barrier way in for people who can’t commit to ongoing work.
• My own website, high ticket offer: a done for you local SEO service, roughly £650 a month depending on the size of the business.

The idea is that the low ticket offer naturally funnels into the high ticket one. Someone buys the £35 audit, I point out what’s wrong with their site, and that becomes the start of an ongoing working relationship. Fiverr and Upwork are the short term plan to get some leads coming in again, my own site is where the longer term relationship building happens. If I can land ten businesses on the done for you service at around £650 a month, that alone gets me to my vision goal.

Alongside all of that I also want to start some outreach, though not the usual kind. Cold email doesn’t get the best returns for small businesses, most of them ignore an SEO pitch straight away. So instead of pitching, I want to find businesses with actual issues on their websites, test pages that are indexed when they shouldn’t be, duplicate homepages, subdomains that shouldn’t be showing up, and just tell them. No pitch, no asking for anything. If I do that enough, I think eventually people will reply and ask if I can fix it, and that’s where the low ticket offer, and eventually the high ticket one, comes in. I’m not quite ready for cold calling yet, so for now it’s cold email, at least it’s something proactive and getting out there to a certain extent. I think it’ll build slowly at first, then hopefully pick up once there’s a bit more momentum and visibility around the business again.

Even just talking through this plan and writing it down has been useful in itself, it’s made everything feel more organised in my head, which is honestly half the point of doing this at all.

Why This Actually Matters To Me

It might sound strange, because I’m new to making content and I don’t feel entitled to any of this, but I am confident that as long as I stick to the plan and keep documenting everything and working hard every day, I’m going to hit these financial goals. I’m humble enough to know I don’t have any god given right to success, but I’ve also done enough work on myself now to believe it’ll happen.

People say money doesn’t buy happiness. Maybe that’s true for some people, but I know it’s going to make me happy, and more importantly it’s going to make my family and my girlfriend happy too. That’s really what this is about underneath all the strategy and the plans.

Maybe I’m just in too much of a rush though. I need to remember to keep chipping away and take baby steps, one step after another, rather than expecting it all to happen at once.

Getting The Fiverr Store Actually Ready

The first proper block of work went into making the Fiverr store good enough that people might actually order from it. I’ve always wanted something like this on the side, an extra bit of income, and an extra way to actually speak to business owners rather than just chasing them.

Three of the four gigs now have videos. The fourth, the more custom video based gig, I tried to record but there were so many cuts in the edit that it looked ridiculous, like I was a robot, so I’ll re-record that one later when the office is quieter. The other three I’ve gone through properly: better titles, better descriptions, all the tags reworked. I’ve also added portfolio pieces to three of the four, the fourth is custom enough that it doesn’t really need one, people would message me first anyway rather than order it outright.

Once the store is properly filled out I’m going to leave it alone for two or three days and see whether clicks and impressions pick up. Impressions have actually dropped off a bit already, and it’s not getting many clicks, so messing with it further right now is just diminishing returns. If nothing changes I’ll look at Fiverr engagement groups, or just ask around, friends, other business owners I know, anything to get that first sale and the first review in. I think once you get past that first one, sales tend to come more naturally.

Upwork And The First Bit Of Outreach

Alongside the Fiverr work, the plan for Upwork is simpler.

Update the profile properly, add a portfolio, and start looking for UK based jobs, mainly for the time zone overlap. I want to send Loom videos with inquiries where I can, since it adds a human element and might help me stand out, even though I’m sure plenty of people are already doing that. I also want to post more on LinkedIn about the low ticket offer specifically, since it’s only £35 and a low enough commitment that people might actually take a chance on it, and I’m hoping that naturally funnels into the higher ticket service over time.

Learning To Get Out Of My Own Way On Camera

Making these videos has already taught me something about myself I wasn’t expecting.

I labour points. I repeat myself again and again, and I find it genuinely hard to articulate myself clearly. Watching it back, I keep comparing myself to other people making this kind of content who seem more energetic, more “extra,” and thinking I need to be more like that. But I know I’m genuinely enthusiastic about this, I’m loving the process already, I just don’t need to perform it. Getting better at getting to the point is something I want to keep working on, and I think it’ll help outside the videos too, with client calls and video audits, which is basically the same skill.

Making this content has also just been mentally tiring, putting myself out there like this. But it’s genuinely helping me get over my perfectionism, because I’m publishing stuff I know isn’t polished, work that clearly isn’t finished, and getting comfortable with that anyway.

The Wall I Hit

Not every day this week went the way I wanted it to.

Tuesday was a complete write off. I was so overtired and burnt out that even simple things felt genuinely hard, and I couldn’t record anything because my mind was all over the place. I still got some things done, but my brain just wasn’t working.

I got an early night after that, seven and a half hours of sleep instead of going to bed gone midnight, and I felt like a completely different person cognitively the next day. I know I should be getting regular sleep. I’ve known that for years, I remember a podcast with the sleep doctor Matthew Walker that really stuck with me, but it’s still a massive challenge for me, one I very rarely actually overcome.

I always just feel behind. I never feel like I’ve got enough done. Whether that’s reality or not, I don’t know.

That feeling is a big part of why I’ve always thought of myself as a night owl, last minute panic, mind racing about everything I haven’t done.

The Content Question I Haven’t Answered Yet

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I hit a different kind of stuck.

I haven’t worked out how I actually want to approach content for the freelancing brand itself, separate from this channel. I know I want to make shorter videos, simple how to style stuff that would help business owners, and repurpose them across YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, LinkedIn, and turn the scripts into text posts or carousels that feed the Facebook page too. What I don’t have is a structure for actually doing it. Should it just happen whenever there’s spare time between outreach and client work, or should it be a dedicated block, maybe every Monday morning, where I make a batch of videos and schedule the posts and then leave it alone for the week?

The point of it, if I get it right, is that anyone who looks me up finds enough of a library that it builds trust before a sales call even happens. They already know how I work and what I think, so the call itself becomes easier. It’s something that’s been on my mind for a long time and I keep putting off because it feels so overwhelming, so many platforms, so many things I could post about. But I think the answer is just posting things in my own words, since that’s the one thing that hasn’t already been said a thousand times by everyone else.

The Ecommerce Side Ticking Along Underneath

While all of this was happening with freelancing, the ecommerce side has been moving in the background too.

The bank account is still waiting on ID verification, I had a call about it partway through the week to confirm some details. Once that clears I want to sign up for Shopify again and get a demo store built, hopefully over a weekend, and then start thinking about suppliers. I also want to speak to my brother about it properly. It’s not the main focus this week, but it’s nice having something to switch to for half an hour or an hour when I need a break from thinking about freelancing. It genuinely feels refreshing to come back to the other work afterwards.

Too Much Planning, Not Enough Doing

By Friday I’d finally got the day one video published, a lot later than I was hoping, and I’d also noticed a pattern I needed to deal with.

I realised I was spending too much time trying to plan things and make them perfect, which is what I usually do, instead of just doing the actual work, contacting businesses, getting outreach done. Looking back at the week, it wasn’t wasted exactly, but it made it obvious that I need a better structure for how I actually spend my time, not just a list of things I want to get done.

The New Structure

So here’s what I’m taking into next week.

• 9am to midday: the main work block, the most important work of the day. Outreach only, email, LinkedIn, Upwork applications, Fiverr engagement.
• Midday to 1pm: a proper hour off, the gym, or some reading.
• 1pm to 5.30pm: everything else, client work, admin, whatever else needs doing that day.

The worst days for me are the ones where I get to the office without knowing what I’m doing first, I end up thinking okay I’ll do a bit of this and a bit of that, then realising I’m behind on something else, and before I know it I’ve been what I’d call time drunk all day. Busy, but reactive rather than structured, and the whole day just gets away from me. With the outreach block locked in first, no matter what else happens, I can at least say to myself that was a good day, and actually switch off in the evening instead of lying there wondering if I did enough.

Where This Leaves Me

It’s been a proper mixed week, a strong start, a burnt out Tuesday, a lot of unglamorous Fiverr admin, and by Friday, finally, a plan that feels like it might actually hold. The whole point of this project is to bring some structure into my life as well as financial freedom, and it’s a short week ahead with the bank holiday, but I’m oddly looking forward to Tuesday morning already, just to test whether this new structure actually works the way I think it will.

That’s Update One. More next time, whenever there’s something worth saying.