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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent Peterson (00:01.454)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Brittany Brewer. Brittany, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Brittany Brewer (00:11.955)
Yeah, for sure. My name is Brittany. I'm the Senior Account Executive here at FreeUp Marketplace. Essentially, my role entails getting our clients onboarded into the platform, helping them with their day-to-day job requests, and just making sure that they have a great experience with us. As far as my passion goes, I have been in this industry for some time. I myself am a digital nomad. I work and I travel, and that's a huge passion for me.
So that's pretty much it.
Brent Peterson (00:45.014)
awesome and being a freelancer allows you to do that and I think there's so many stories about people that have traveled all over the world and worked where they're at and now even the Nomad visas are such a thing that it makes it super interesting. Alright but before we before we talk about that I'm gonna I'm you volunteered to be part of the free joke project or can I say you've
Brittany Brewer (00:59.645)
Yeah.
Brittany Brewer (01:02.907)
Yeah, definitely.
Brittany Brewer (01:10.941)
I'm sorry.
Brent Peterson (01:13.834)
You've all, you, we're gonna do the free joke project. All you have to do is say, should this joke be free or do you think at some point somebody could charge for it? And I'm gonna guarantee it's not gonna be a very good joke, but that's the point, isn't it? All right, here we go. My wife asked me today if I had seen the dog bowl. I said, I didn't know the dog could bowl.
Brittany Brewer (01:21.919)
I'm going to go to bed.
Brittany Brewer (01:40.246)
Because I am a huge animal lover, I'm gonna go ahead and say that should be a paid joke. Oh really?
Brent Peterson (01:45.762)
Right. Well, I think you're number you're probably number four out of 220 for paid, but I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah all right, so let's talk a little bit about the about gig work and hiring freelancers and how that looks tell us a little bit about What you do and why that's why I said why that's important in the economy and how people can get involved
Brittany Brewer (02:10.215)
Yeah, for sure. I think, I mean, when COVID happened, so many people were up in arms with what they were gonna do with work. People who had barely ever used a computer were all of a sudden working in front of a computer, working from home. And a lot of people kind of got into that rhythm of, okay, like maybe I can hire people remotely. Maybe I can.
you know, start to do things on my own and scale up and maybe start my own business. And we saw like a huge shift in that definitely around, you know, 2020, 2019. And basically what we see now is day-to-day operations, people coming in, they have maybe certain projects that they're feeling overwhelmed with that.
they just need a little extra help. So whether it's somebody who has started an e-comm business and they need help with product sourcing or they've got everything down but they don't really understand marketing and they need somebody to come in and maybe take that over for them, what we do is we can help put them in touch with freelance talent who can take over those tasks for them. So that's sort of what we see on like a day-to-day basis is people coming in, they need help with.
outsourcing with scaling up their business and we'll put them in touch with freelance talent who can do that for them.
Brent Peterson (03:34.338)
And I think the freelance talent market allows you to grow as a business with a little less risk. And I can point to just a conversation I had about hiring somebody in California, how much overhead there is. And in sub states, it's very difficult to let go of them.
Brittany Brewer (03:42.302)
Oh yeah.
Brittany Brewer (03:49.948)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that, like I said, people are definitely more comfortable with the idea of hiring freelancers now. You know, 15 years ago, the idea of being based in Columbus, Ohio, but employing someone who was based in the Manila Philippines might have seemed like a crazy idea. But people understand now or are starting to understand that you bring on a W-2 employee for your growing business. That is a huge financial responsibility.
You're paying somebody to work nine to five, 40 hours a week, and there's probably a lot of downtime where things really aren't getting done. You're paying for more than what you need. And that kind of gets scaled back when you are working with a freelancer. There's no minimum or maximum. So if you need somebody to just come in and kind of guide you with some marketing, you can do that for 10 hours a week, five hours a week. And...
grow your business without having to bring somebody on full time and spending all of that overhead in the beginning.
Brent Peterson (04:55.902)
Yeah, so tell us a little bit about higher up and how it different or free up. I'm sorry. Higher up sounds good too though, doesn't it? Free up and how it's different than some of the competitors.
Brittany Brewer (05:05.631)
That's okay. Yeah. So, FreeUp, you know, we're a freelancer hiring platform. And of course, there's other platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. We're different in the sense that we, I definitely think we bring more of a human element to it. Our clients, we talk to them. We'll do phone conversations, we'll do Zoom calls. We will hand match them with freelancers versus just
them going into the freelancer universe on their own and putting in job requests and getting matched with hundreds of people, we do that process for them. We'll help them from start to finish. And a big part of that process is pre-vetting. And for a small business owner or somebody trying to scale, that's the biggest challenge. You know, you're trying to run day-to-day operations. You don't really have time to like vet the person that you wanna bring into the business, you know, figuring out if they're gonna be a good fit. So...
What we do at FreeUp is we'll do one-on-one interviews with the freelancers before we match them with the clients. We'll do some preliminary identity verification. We'll test them on just basic skills. They have to understand our FreeUp terms of use and best practices. So all of that's done before the person who's looking to hire has ever matched with them. So again, like as a small business owner, that saves an invaluable amount of time, just getting through that initial pre-vetting process.
Brent Peterson (06:32.558)
How do you ensure, I guess the vetting process would do this, but some of my experiences with the other platforms is I ask for a freelancer in the United States or at least in the central time zone and you get about 45 applications from Southeast Asia or from India.
Brittany Brewer (06:46.162)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Brewer (06:51.463)
Hehehehe
Brittany Brewer (06:55.259)
Yeah, well, I won't lie. You know, we have about 50% of our marketplace is made up of freelancers based in the Philippines, but what's, and they're incredible. We're so proud of our, our team, all of our freelancers, but especially in the Philippines. But with that being said, you know, a lot of people are more comfortable working with someone in their time zone. So, again, we have a hand matching process. So if you're looking for someone in central time zone,
our ticket matching team will find you someone in central time zone. We have somebody who signed up recently. He's hilarious. He's based in Dallas, Texas, very new to freelancing or to working with freelancers, but very interested in scaling up quickly. He figured out that if he's working with somebody who is in Southeast Asia, who's in the Philippines.
the project will start at $5 an hour versus somebody who's based in the US for the same role that the project's going to start in at around 24 per hour. So the challenge though is that he wanted somebody in his time zone, but he'd never worked with anyone internationally. So we just worked with him. We found one of our freelancers based in Manila who keeps US-based hours because majority of her clients are there. And we set them up and they're doing great together. It's just sort of getting over that learning curve of
or that initial kind of fear of working with someone who is so far away. Once we kind of get over that and teach the clients who have never done it before, like, hey, it's actually really easy. A lot of the people over there do keep US hours because majority of their clients are over here in the US. Once we get over that hurdle, they end up having a great working relationship. And most of our clients end up working with their freelancers.
in perpetuity. They're not really coming to us for like one off projects. They want people that are in it for the long haul versus just, hey, do this and then we're done. We're going to part ways.
Brent Peterson (08:54.318)
Do you help coach clients on how to keep or how to manage the freelancer and maybe hold them accountable? I think one of the things is that a lot of smaller businesses are growing and maybe they don't have a good management team in place. How do you handle that?
Brittany Brewer (09:02.821)
Oh yeah.
Brittany Brewer (09:11.027)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that again, I think there's such a distrust for a lot of these kinds of platforms. People will come in and put a job request in and they'll get 45 applicants. They'll just hire somebody and they don't have any guidance or understanding of what to do next. They got a job request in with a platform who matched them with a bunch of candidates and then they just clicked the hire button. And...
Unfortunately, that happens for some people, and then they don't want to work with freelancer hiring platforms anymore. But what we do is we'll offer them coaching and guidance from the start, whether that's them hopping on a call with an account manager and doing a Zoom call and helping put a scope of work together, something that can help them monitor metrics or KPIs for the freelancer they hire. We'll do that for them. And then we have a great team of freelancers
for us at FreeUp, who continually will reach out to clients, making sure that they've got the support they need, making sure that the freelancers that we've paired them with, that they've hired, are doing what they're supposed to be doing, and just making sure the project's moving forward. So yeah, absolutely we do coaching.
Brent Peterson (10:26.79)
I just attended a webinar that was about trying to recession proof your business. Do you see that at the moment people are reluctant to hire full time and looking more at freelancing?
Brittany Brewer (10:41.448)
Absolutely. I think that, like I said, people understand that it's going to save you money, especially if you're a small business, especially if even if you're not a small business and you're just trying to scale up. When you're working with a freelancer, you're getting exactly what you pay for. You set the role. This is what I need. This is how much I can offer and this is what I need it executed by. And people are starting to see that, you
they can utilize freelance talent and get the work done that they need to get done without breaking the bank. And that's what's bringing more and more people over to the freelancer hiring platforms.
Brent Peterson (11:19.702)
Are you seeing a shift in talent types with the AI revolution coming in? Is there freelancers now that are specializing in prompts and how to use tools like that?
Brittany Brewer (11:31.875)
Absolutely. Yeah, that's so funny that you mentioned that. So we have a few additional brands besides FreeUp, some of our supporting brands. And one of those is called iWriter. And we, FreeUp, we manage that. It's iWriter powered by FreeUp. And we have so many freelancers who are coming in who have experience with AI and AI templates and writing prompts. We also.
another one of our businesses is Copymatic, which is sort of in vain of chat GPT, similar AI writing platform. And we see many of our freelancers are getting trained up on that. And we are pairing our clients who are coming in looking for content writers, for example, we're finding them freelancers through iWriter because so many of our freelancers are just they're learning, the industry is changing so rapidly, they know that AI is the future and that's the direction that they're going in.
But what's cool about it is that because we're all under the same umbrella of, it's actually NextNet Media is our parent company. So because we're all under that same umbrella, our companies like Copymatic and like iWriter, we can offer these solutions and we have a plethora of freelancers who have been in this industry for a long time and know what our standards are, what our goals are, what our best practices are. They know all that.
now what they're doing is getting more experience with AI. So they're bringing that like free up, that free up essence to the other brands and kind of growing in that direction.
Brent Peterson (13:08.75)
Talk a little bit about AI and free up and how, I think a lot of maybe merchants or end users are seeing AI as this magic bullet or magic wand that will power your marketing, but it is not always, and it should never be a just touch, like let it go, right? There's always gotta be that human that's involved in whether there's a prompt writer or whether there's somebody that's making sure the scheduling is happening in a right way or.
Brittany Brewer (13:12.895)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Brewer (13:19.827)
Yeah.
Brent Peterson (13:37.638)
even if you do a self-serve AI platform, that content has to get somewhere somehow and talk about how important it is to have somebody to take over that.
Brittany Brewer (13:41.093)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Brewer (13:47.647)
It's hugely important. I mean we are SEO is a very big part of our parent brand and So we come at it with a unique perspective when AI content started coming out We of course, you know have clients that are seeing chat GPT for free and saying oh I can
I can do this and have a blog written in 30 seconds. Well, yeah, you can, but it's honestly terrible. You have to have the human element to it. Even if you're using a prompt that SEO optimizes a blog, you still are going to need a human element there to edit it, to make sure that headers are correct, to make sure that proper links are established. So that's sort of the direction that we see a lot of.
our freelancers trying to take. And that's what we're trying to help our clients understand is that you can of course just push a button and have a blog written, but it's not going to help in the way that you think it is. You're basically putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. You really need somebody to come in there and edit everything and get it to where it's actually going to produce the results that you want it to.
Brent Peterson (15:05.566)
Yeah, it is funny how nowadays you can really tell the content that's been written by an AI, especially if it's from somebody that you know is big and I'm one of those people. If you don't specifically make your prompts the way you're going to do it, you're going to get a whole bunch of words that you typically don't use. And I suppose it's important to teach or to educate.
Brittany Brewer (15:13.906)
Yep.
Brent Peterson (15:34.194)
editors and if you're going to hire a freelancer to understand the language model and your voice, right?
Brittany Brewer (15:42.519)
Exactly. And it can, it's really, it's really about streamlining. And you mentioned earlier about coaching. That's something that we can offer for the clients when they're coming in, you know, just getting, like I said, a scope of work down. So if you're hiring somebody to do content for you or to AI written content, even a scope of work would be, you know, getting down, okay, this is my voice, this is my audience, these are the goals. These are
popular links, these are backlinks that we want, just kind of getting all of that down on paper for the freelancer that's gonna come in and manage the job for you, that is huge. And just taking time and getting that down in the beginning, taking a couple hours, it's gonna save so much time for them down the line. So that's something that we really focus on when we're getting a new client.
that's coming in and gonna be hiring, no matter what it's for, but especially if they're gonna be bringing somebody on to do content for them.
Brent Peterson (16:41.494)
You mentioned other brands that are in your umbrella. Tell us about how those all work together for benefit of the client.
Brittany Brewer (16:49.879)
Yeah, for sure. OK, so Nextnet Media, that's our parent company. We've got the other brands I mentioned, iWriter and Copymatic. Also, The Hoth is someone that is a company that many people are familiar with. But we really try to provide a holistic approach for any client, whether they're signing up directly for free up or they're signing up for iWriter or they're signing up for The Hoth. For example,
we might have somebody signing up for one of our supporting businesses, iWriter. And what happens with that is they can get content written for as little as $0.01 per word. And that is actually AI edited content. So they might come in with iWriter just to get some content up. But then in talking with us, they realize that they might also want somebody to help them with social media management. And when a client mentions something like that,
Of course, they could go somewhere else. They could go to Upwork, they could go to Fiverr. But again, to provide a holistic approach, we hear them, we hear their needs, just from the content writer that they've hired, and we let them know, hey, we also have free up. We can provide you with a solution for the social media management, or maybe they need a website build. We can do that as well. Basically, we can help them build out an entire team within the supporting businesses that we have.
Brent Peterson (18:13.906)
And I'm imagining the Hoff is a reference to David Hasselhoff from Baywatch fame.
Brittany Brewer (18:20.611)
No, I should have clarified. So not Hoff, it's actually Hoth, H-O-T-H, and it stands for hit them over the head. It's really funny if you ever, if you wanna take a look at it, we've got a cute logo monster, the Hoff Monster is what we call it. But yeah, that's what it stands for. Not David Hasselhoff, that would be great though. Yeah.
Brent Peterson (18:44.578)
Yeah, of course that was a joke. I apologize in advance. Well, I apologize in post-advance of that. So if you have some advice to give, maybe merchants or somebody going into Black Friday, going into the holiday season and post-holidays, what would that be in terms of hiring and how you could utilize people?
Brittany Brewer (18:51.688)
Mm. Heheheheh.
Brittany Brewer (19:07.055)
Yep, number one, leverage freelance talent. I mean, the biggest thing that you can do now is just prepare housekeeping, getting things in line. Gosh, I just read a statistic actually about last year's Ecom season, the busy season. It was the biggest season on record. And I wanna say it was reported that like 28% of...
client concerns went unanswered through live chat during Black Friday, all the way to Cyber Monday. And if that doesn't speak volumes about people not having the support that they need, especially during busy season, I don't know what will, but the biggest thing I can say is to just prepare now. It's right around the corner and just getting the talent that you need in. And we have different levels at FreeUp too. We have entry level people who are really just
following processes, but if you're coming down to the line, it's getting to be almost Black Friday, almost holiday season. You can hire somebody on the mid-level or expert level who can come in and execute processes and even create processes for you if you don't have a ton of time to train somebody up. So just leverage freelance talent and start now. Now we're getting down to the wire, so don't wait any longer.
Brent Peterson (20:31.83)
And just this episode will come out during that pre Black Friday Cyber Monday week. And we do a we always do a blitz during that week. So there's a web episode that comes out every day. So I don't know which day it is, but it'll be one of those days.
Brittany Brewer (20:40.316)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Brewer (20:44.655)
Yeah, so I mean, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, that's huge. But again, like the holiday season, like during Christmas season too, that's obviously very busy for Ecom. So there's still time.
Brent Peterson (20:56.726)
That's great. Brittany, as we round out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you want. What would you like to plug today?
Brittany Brewer (20:58.235)
Mm.
Brittany Brewer (21:02.741)
Thank you.
Yeah, so I definitely want to mention to everybody listening that if they head over to free up pod, free up pod.com, we've got some really great giveaways. We have, as I mentioned earlier, the scope of work we created a template for our clients and anybody just to wants to create a scope of work for their freelancers. We've got some other resources there, but most importantly, for anybody who signs up to become a client with us, we've got $50 in credits to get you started.
So again, it's freeuppod.com.
Brent Peterson (21:36.15)
That's awesome. Thank you so much for being here and I hope you have a prosperous holiday season. Thanks.
Brittany Brewer (21:41.16)
Yeah, thank you, Brent.