you're going to make $100k as a social media manager in 2025

[Music] congratulations you just hit $100,000 in Revenue as a freelance social media manager you get to work from anywhere in the world you get to work to your own schedule with the ultimate flexibility and not to mention you have finally found a creatively filling job that you love do I have your attention now the social media management industry is continuing to grow year on year it's time for you to take it seriously in this video I'm going to show you the exact road map to making $100,000 as a freelance social media manager using my four-part

framework and no I'm not going to make you start an Instagram page or waste weeks building a website we're focusing on getting you clients as fast as possible and scaling from there in case you're new around here hello my name is Ellen and I left my 9 to5 corporate job back in 2019 after 10 months of side hustling as a social media manager I now run my own Boutique digital marketing agency I've worked with hundreds of clients all across the world and now I help other aspiring social media managers set up their freedom-based business because

let's make it clear this is not just me who has achieved this level of Freedom both financially and with my schedule there are dozens of other successful students of mine who have done it too so if you clicked on this video feeling skeptical I'm about to blow your mind and change your life before we jump into the four-part framework I want to touch first on the skills you need to become a social media manager we're going to talk about skills not experience because I'm a firm believer that unlike training to become a doctor or a

lawyer as a social media manager you don't need experience and you can learn on the job however some of the core skills that you will need is creativity and organization as social media managers we constantly need to be coming up with new strategies and creative ways to connect with our clients audiences you also need to be organized if you're someone in your friend group who just loves organizing all of the events and dinners that you have if you're the type of girl who goes on a holiday and creates an entire Excel spreadsheet of your schedule

you are in the right place with social media management there are kind of two paths you can go down you can become heavy in the content creation services or you can go more into the management side I often get asked if a social media manager needs to be able to shoot content and I actually have a lot of clients that I work with internationally who obviously I can't shoot content for because I live on the other side of the world hello if you didn't know I'm from New Zealand in case you hadn't picked up the

accent and I'll work with clients who are based in the United States and my role is to lead the strategy do all of the research do the trend research come up with a storyboard of content get them to film it they send it back to me I edit it and I post it and I manage the roll out of the content for other local clients I have product based clients that I've worked with in the past who Shi me products and then I create the content and this is more of a ugc style of business

where I'm doing this user generated style of content creation sometimes it's a Content package sometimes this content package paired with social media management and in case you're curious what a day looks like doing that I'll link a Above This Vlog which is a ugc come create content with me video so I have dabbled in both Avenues and both different types of services and for those listening there's probably going to be one that speaks to you more than the other like if you are already really interested in content creation maybe you have your own personal Instagram

account going down uh a Services list that has some content creation is a good option for you but if you're also sitting here being like I wish I could be better at filming reals and become a social media manager you don't actually have to create all the content you could focus on packages that are either just on strategy or on strategy and management alongside the creative and organizational skills you also just want to have an interest in social media do not get into this industry if you're just here for the money I know I kind

of clickbated you with my title talking about $100,000 and everyone's like oh I would love a six fig salary but if you don't have a passion and an excitement for social media you're going to get burnt out in this job because it is a challenging industry again I'm not a doctor I'm not saving Liv I'm never going to compare myself at that level but social media is a landscape it's always changing there's always new updates and Trends in the industry and a lot of people jump into this role and are in it for the money

or in it for the wrong reasons and then they get really burnt out trying to keep up with all those changes the other thing that's really important as not just a social media manager but a freelancer is your time management your discipline and your self motivation you my friend are not going to grow to six figures if you are not kicking yourself in the butt every morning if you're not getting up if you're not motivated if you're not putting your business out there I think some people confuse motivation with confidence when I started I had

zero confidence in myself I had no idea what I was doing but I was really motivated to make it work I knew that I loved social media I'd had a Blog for a few years at that point and I'd been working as a journalist I love storytelling but I wanted to get out of print media and get into the digital world did I believe I was the best social media manager in the world no but I did believe that I could help people and that's what's important [Music] now you are ready to enter phase one

of growing your 100K social media management business and that is all about building your portfolio the most important thing for you in this phase of business is experience you are going to learn so much more getting out there and working with a client rather than posting on your own Instagram because it's entirely different and I really believe although watching YouTube videos like this is really helpful and you should definitely subscribe for more nothing will compare to that firsthand experience that you're going to get working with a client from the dynamic of client communication managing messages

managing expectations and boundaries creating content to a brief all of these things are really important and you won't experience that when you're just hiding in the corner editing reals for your own Instagram account and calling it practice this is why my students who sign up for the dishing up digital school we start with pitching in module 2 and three we start them putting together their packages and prices we start them off reaching out to businesses they don't have a website they don't have an Instagram account they don't have any large following most of the time

it's trying to use their existing Network to see if they could leverage an opportunity there but also just reaching out to businesses who have no idea who they are what works if you're just getting started with no experience is targeting local businesses and using that little bit of a connection maybe it's that coffee shop that you go to every week maybe it's the L on down the road from you introduce yourself and create a personal connection by being someone who's a local or even a customer of theirs you are then going to most likely want

to offer a discounted rate for your services I'm a big fan of discounted rates and not entirely free services which is the root that I went down because young Allen did not know any better but I firmly believe even if you're getting started with no experience you deserve to be paid for your time even it's just a little amount of money I also like the idea of giving someone a discount because it's much more juicy and attractive to the business owner they're going to see ooh this social media management package is usually $800 and I

can get it for $400 by taking a chance on this really keen and excited new social media manager what a great deal that is the kind of emotion you want to be sparking in this phase once you get those crucial first one two three clients you're then going to start leveraging the social proof you're creating so you're getting testimonials you're getting screenshots of positive messages from these clients you're getting screen shots of analytics or even just copies of the videos that you've edited you're going to leverage all of that stuff to start booking even more

clients and this is where we get to create the Snowball Effect testimonials and social proof create trust with potential clients it's really scary Outsourcing it's scary hiring a social media manager from the perspective of these businesses and clients and if you can show testimonial social proof that is going to be the thing that ultimately gets them across the line if they're feeling nervous and this brings me really nicely to phase two this is when you really start doubling down on setting up a freelance business this is when you want to introduce better systems backend systems

for your business you want to tighten up on your packages and also potentially your Niche I really like getting started as a newbie with a broad Niche so that I can test out a whole bunch of different potential clients spoiler alert you're probably not going to know what Niche you want to go into till you try it I've had many students go I want to go into the fitness Niche or I want to work with personal trainers or I want to work with wedding planners and then they actually start working for that client and they're

like okay I'm really passionate about Fitness but I actually don't want to manage PT Instagram accounts so in the second phase you're going to start to specialize a little bit more you're going to fine-tune your packages you're transitioning from offering whatever your client wants to offering structured juicy packages again this is the shift from like the Newbie into a slightly more experienced freelancer maybe this is where you start to outgrow some of those early clients you took on at a discounted rate and you're replacing them with slightly larger clients you want to make sure you've

shifted away entirely from working on an hourly rate and you're instead a monthly retainer and you're offering packages to clients this is also when you want to fine-tune those contracts those invoices maybe get a software that will do some funky little automated onboarding workflows again we're putting on our business hat we're putting on our CEO hat hair using the money and then maybe the couple of hundred you've got from those first clients you want to reinvest that into software or maybe hiring a coach like me who can help you scale the entire way but this

is the point in the path where I see a lot of social media managers fall off the track because they're not investing they're not doubling down on their growth and they play it safe we are not here to play it safe because that's not what's going to get you to that Milestone of six figures and this brings me very nicely to phase three finding and securing higher ticket clients once you have been through that process of you know the discounted rates doing ad hoc work maybe on a bit of an hourly rate this is when

we start to see the more premium clients or when we want to attract the more premium clients I should say and phase three is where finally I'm going to let you do it you can set up an Instagram page maybe a website if you have the funds to invest in that but it's not entirely essential yet but we definitely want an Instagram page if you were somebody who is struggling to increase your prices you feel like you're only getting low ticket clients coming in the only leads you're getting are just saying I can't afford your

services then you need to focus on your marketing although I started my business through cold pitching for the first 10 months when I shifted to marketing myself on Instagram and again leveraging all of the experience that i' then had from the clients that I've cold pitched to I started attracting dream clients to me and it was all through my marketing and my messaging and the way that I was showing up online and the most dreamy part about that is you get on a discovery call with a potential client and they're already sold on your systems

on your beliefs on the way that you run things because they've been binging all of your content on Instagram as long as it's optimized to attract clients you are going to be able to do this with under a th000 Instagram followers I have so many students Jade is a perfect example of this ma s doesn't even post on Instagram anymore because she's fully booked these are just a couple of my students who took the dishing up digital school and a proof that a successful social media manager making a full-time salary off their freelance work does

not need to be posting on Instagram every single day however if you are in the process of wanting to scale up and attract more of those higher ticket clients I cannot encourage you enough to work on your own marketing this is also something that a lot of social media managers when they get to this phase they need that reminder because they often will end up spending all of their time all of their day all of their energy on their clients and forget about building their own business so it's really important to have a bit of

accountability for yourself and show up and be like nope I'm going to have a CEO day once a week or once uh one afternoon a week and I'm going to focus on creating my own content and marketing my business the key thing you want to be leveraging in your social content is talking about the ROI that people get working with you the return on investment what could their potential results be and again this is where you get heavy on the social proof you want to be utilizing all of those screenshots utilizing insights and stats from

reals that you've created for previous clients and and putting that everywhere on your social Pages now some of my students continue to cold pitch throughout this phase of their business as well like they're starting to mark it on their Instagram but just to speed things up they really want to push to those 10K months faster they do still continue to cold pitch and network so going along to events is a really great way to do this but also the key thing is to be careful about who you are pitching to I've broken this down in

the free webinar that I just launched recently but one of the big mistakes people make is pitching to small small businesses businesses that are too small like people who are hand making candles part time in their garage and they're only selling one candle a week and you're pitching to them to be their social media manager they cannot afford you you're setting yourself up for failure and one of the things I unpack in this webinar is how to identify potentially higher ticket clients or just medium-sized businesses that can afford you and kind of unraveling a little

bit of those mindset traps that we fall into when we think we're not good enough to pitch to those businesses when in reality they need your help and that cold pitch could be the difference between you hitting your goals or not now congratulations you've made it to phase 4 this is where we enter the phase of scaling scaling all the way up to that juicy six figure Milestone there are a couple of different routs you can take here and I actually have a podcast episode where I break down the Journey of scaling as a social

media manager into more depth so I'll link that down below if you'd like to go have a listen but you can look to potentially scale an agency so bring on more team members and more contractors so that then you can bring on more clients you can also look to diversify your services so perhaps you're a social media manager who then starts offering SEO or copywriting or maybe even web design so you're really kind of expanding further I did this in 2020 I started doing like blog post writing and other graphic design projects for my clients

and it really helped me scale to those 10K months because suddenly I'd have a client who was just doing social media management paying me $1,500 a month then all of a sudden they're paying me $3,000 a month because I'm doing all of these extra add-on and additional services and that was also made possible from hiring contractors and support so similar to the previous pathway that I mentioned you can't do all of that alone and then the third way to scale which has become my personal favorite and what I've kind of spped towards in the last

2 years and that is through digital products so often you'll have people who can't afford to hire you on a monthly retainer especially in this phase of scaling like you're really stipping into into the role of a premium service provider you're offering higher ticket packages and there will be a certain amount of the market who are cut off from those Services because of the price point and that is where you can come in with lower ticket digital products let's say you had a template bundle and you're selling this for $50 a month if you have

10 people buy that that's an additional $500 you could also look to sell things like ebooks or perhaps you're doing online live trainings or even inperson trainings which I know is technically not a digital product because then it's in person not digital but you get my point there are ways to scale and introduce not just new services but also new revenue streams one of the most beautiful things about being a social media manager and being your own boss is you are the boss at the end of the day and there are so many different Pathways

to success you get to decide what works best for you if you really want to scale digital products and come join me yes girl if you want to scale up and have five different social media managers or community managers working with you and tenic your clients go for it if you are somebody who wants to start working with really high ticket clients and maybe you're on retainers that are $5 to $110,000 a month which is 100% possible all of these different Avenues are just so exciting and I hope this video shows you the possibilities the

opportunities in this world of social media management because I've been doing this for 5 years now and I freaking love it and it lights up my heart so much being able to see and watch other social media media managers reach these cool Milestones as well now if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of some of these strategies and how to for example write a c pitch what to charge as a social media manager I'd highly encourage you to check out my new free webinar this is a 60-minute class that you get instant access

to entirely for free and you are going to learn so much so come with a blank notebook and a pen that is full of ink cuz you're going to be writing a lot of notes and I hope to see you around o and make sure you're subscribed because I'm uploading more videos on YouTube and I also have a podcast for all things social media management thank you guys so much for watching I'll catch you in the next one bye