Webflow Expert Robert Smart
About this episode…
WEBFLOW EXPERT ROBERT SMART
Study, determination, and a knack for design were going to take Robert out of his poor upbringing in South Africa. But the death of his brother, drew him back again. To help young people see a brighter future for themselves, he needed time. To have time, he needed to go freelance.
Faced with the daunting reality of having to survive without savings or a backup plan just one month before COVID kicked in, Robert shares how he made the most of platforms like LinkedIn and ultimately doubled his income during the pandemic.
He eventually had so many leads, he started hiring others. Plus, through content creation and organising meetups, he’s giving back, while moving forward.
Read the highlights in the next tab.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
It’s funny how you can get over your fears when you look at the bigger picture. Robert creates videos because he knows becoming the expert and being seen is going to help his family…
“It took me quite a while to get comfortable in front of a camera. All I'm thinking about is my family needs to be fed, so Robert, just get over it. They need to eat, I need to feed them, so just get over it, get over yourself.”
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Robert gets to help clients solve bigger problems, creating strategies, beyond what they initially come to him for. He does this by digger deeper…
“There's a lot of times I don't think they know what they want until you ask the right questions. And then I just send off a proposal based on their pain points and say, listen, okay, so when we were chatting, this is what I found out, this is what I discovered, and this is how I can address it…”
TEACHING OTHERS BY TEACHING YOURSELF
Robert creates a lot of content and one way he knows what to create is to think about his younger self…
“Create content for yourself 10 years ago. What would you want to actually learn?
That’s what I'm currently doing. Like, okay, Robert, 10 years ago, you didn't know this. So I'm going to teach you that. And that's how I'm creating my content. 10 years ago, what did I not know? And then I teach myself…”
IN PERSON MEETUPS
Robert started collaborating with another freelancer on a podcast and with meetups. These started off online before moving in-person…
“It was just mind blowing how many people are hungry for that in-person connection.
You know, you always see these guys online, you hear about them, you attend these online meetups, but being there in person, there's just something special happening at that present moment where you can chat to people like, oh, that's what you look like, you know okay, that's what you sound like in real life..”
HIRING OTHERS
Robert had read and heard about ‘burnout’ a lot in the online space. When his workload got too much he knew that was where he was heading. Instead of turning work away he decided to capitalise on his leads and hire instead…
“I got so busy because I just took work, you know how we are, like you just take work on, like, God, go on, go on, go on and that's what I did, I took on a lot of work, to a stage where I realised, man, I can't carry on like that, I'm going to burn out…
So that's when I decided, okay, let me just try and hire a few people just to take on this overflow of work.. and see where I can take this.”
“My family…
They need to eat, I need to feed them, so just get over it, get over yourself”
Robert Smart, on creating content despite not wanting to be on camera
More from ROBERT SMART
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and Webflow Expert Robert Snart
Steve Folland: So we're off to Cape town in South Africa to chat to Webflow expert, Robert Smart. Hey, Robert!
Robert Smart: Hey Steve, it's good to be on your podcast, man.
Steve Folland: As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
Robert Smart: Yeah, so I grew up in a very poor area in Cape Town. Right. So life wasn't always as easy as one would think, but I eventually decided that, you know, I wanted to go study. I went to go and study full time. I'm actually a graphic designer by trade, but then as the years progressed, I started going more online and focusing on designing and developing websites. Eventually I started moving more into the no code space because of the agency I worked at.
Robert Smart: But the reason why I went freelance is prior to COVID, um… my brother was killed in the area we stayedon. And what happened was I always wanted to go back to my previous high school in order to give back. My whole mindset was to help these kids understand that, you know, where they are currently - is not where they will end up.
There are lots of opportunities to go and study, to further their education you know, to get themselves out of the situation that they are currently in. So my plan was to connect with someone who already started something in that area, but then COVID happened, and I actually started on my own as a freelancer a month before COVID happened. So that was February and then March, I think it hit the whole world.
And now… I won't advise people do this: I went out on my own without any savings, right? I had no backup plan. My only backup plan was to sell my car, which will give me about three months lee way and then covid happened and I was like man, what the heck am I going to do?
And that's where I started strategizing and I'm like, okay, first thing I need to push out a lot of content. I pushed out LinkedIn content, I pushed out content on Dribble and Behance and all of these platforms.
And that's how I eventually got working, through LinkedIn mostly and my website. So that's how I, I went from, you know, having no money to eventually getting a lot of work in that I was able to sustain myself and my family.
I actually doubled my income. That first year of freelancing, I doubled my income during the COVID period.
Steve Folland: So prior to that, you were at an agency?
Robert Smart: Yes, I was at an agency. An inbound marketing agency - so I learned quite a lot from them. And I was able to implement a lot of those strategies because we used to work with different clients all over the world and some of the same strategies I just implemented on my own.
Steve Folland: So your motivation to go freelance wasn't so much about a change in work or a change in finances, even though that happened, but something else,
Robert Smart: Yeah, the only way I was going to be able to help these young people… to play the big brother role because my brother died. I was like, man, the only way I can give back to my community and to, to tell these kids, listen, man, there are better opportunities, was to actually not work full time.
Steve Folland: So it was to free up your schedule, free up your time so that you could go into the school and give your time in a different way that you wouldn't have been able to if you were just working full time in an agency.
Robert Smart: Exactly. Cause I mean I traveled for about sometimes two hours a day just to get to the office and back home. So bulk of my time was you know, traveling back and forth and then I'm at the office whole day. So where would I find time? I can't do it during the weekends because weekends, you know, everyone's at home. So how do I get them to come back to school?
Steve Folland: Yeah. I'm so sorry to hear about your brother, but what a wonderful reason to go freelance that I don't think has come up before. So it freed up your time. But you're in that pandemic period. It sounds like your first clients came through LinkedIn and through that inbound marketing? How much time were you spending on that marketing? What were you putting out there that was being effective?
Robert Smart: The content that I pushed out was mostly UX and Webflow related. I don't think there was at that time, many freelance Webflow developers. Maybe there were, I don't know. But I just got a lot of leads in. Early on, my focus was to take on any work that I could get, but then when I decided okay, I might as well just niche down on this whole Webflow thing. And then that's what I just created content around. So my goal was to at least once per day, post something on LinkedIn.
And that's what I did. Five days a week, post every day, once a day. Even now, I'm trying to double down on content creation. And especially around Webflow, user experience, growth driven design, all of those kind of things. But that's how I initially got clients in or leads in via LinkedIn by creating consistent content.
Steve Folland: So you decide because you notice that people are coming to you for Webflow, you start talking about Webflow more and it starts bringing you more and more work. How did it sort of evolve? That first year sounded like it went really well for you.
Robert Smart: So during that first year I got leads in via LinkedIn, word of mouth. My previous agency that I worked at, then my own personal website because of the strategy that I worked at. Then one of the things I also did was, on Twitter on one of Ran Segall's posts.
I actually asked him to review my website. You know, cause I just developed this new website and I wanted to see what he thought of it. Cause I followed him on YouTube. And he did. You know, I'm grateful, and if you ever listen to this Ran, thank you for reviewing my website. With that I got a lot of traffic to my website and that's how it started climbing the rankings, Google rankings, so eventually I landed up, I think within six months, I was on the first page of Google when it's typed in Webflow designers, South Africa or Cape Town or whatever, I was on one of those first pages. And eventually things just started going my way.
I got so busy because I just took work, you know, how we are, like you just take work on, like, God, go on, go on, go on and that's what I did, I took on a lot of work, um, to a stage where I realized, man, I can't carry on like that, it's just, I'm going to burn out. And I read all these articles and YouTube videos and all of these things, “be careful of burnout” and you know, all of these things, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to burn out if I don't think of a plan.
So that's when I decided, okay, let me just try and hire a few people just to take on this overflow of work. And that's when I, I think two years into this whole freelance thing. I decided, okay, it's probably best just to start a company. And start employing people and see where I can take this.
Steve Folland: Did you hire them as in like a full time employee or on a freelance basis?
Robert Smart: At first, I just ran a test to see, okay, let's see if you work on a freelance basis for six months, uh, let's see how it goes. Because I don't know, I can't promise any work or anything like that. And, and one of my, you know, first employees he's still with me two years later. I really enjoyed that working relationship that I thought, okay, let me just, you know, employ full time and then, you know, If he wants to leave after a couple of years, it's fine, you know at least we enjoyed each other's company and we are able to part ways on a good note, I guess.
Steve Folland: So you actually enjoyed hiring? You know, because it is a thing, right? You enjoy doing the work, but then you hire people. And then suddenly that means managing other people's workloads, reviewing their work and all of that, as well as dealing with the client. Like you enjoyed that aspect of it?
Robert Smart: What I enjoy is the initial stage. I like meeting new people. Currently I am not doing a lot of Webflow work in terms of development. So I mentor these other people like, okay, this is how we do it. I like sitting with clients, working out strategies that will help them grow.
Robert Smart: The reason why I do that is because I, I realized that especially in the startup scene. There are some businesses that only last for about two years, two to three years. You know, they say that two to three years are very critical. And I realized that most of the the businesses tend to close doors after that two, three year period because there's no funds coming in, there's nothing.
So I prefer working out strategies for them in terms of you know, how can we grow you online or your business online? Generate those leads and then you can close them. So that's what I do enjoy doing. And obviously people management, that comes with its challenges. Especially if you are a perfectionist like myself. But I quite enjoy the whole QA process as well. Making sure everything goes out perfectly.
Steve Folland: How do you bring up the chance to go deeper with a client? As in, they might come wanting a website, but you see a chance to look at strategy and so on.
Robert Smart: So when I do the initial call with the client… I've learned this through this book - The Introvert's Edge by Matthew Pollard. This was a few years, about a year or two back. And I'm like, man, this sounds very interesting. I’m an introvert. I don't know how to deal with people. Let me just learn. And what he suggests is you create a script.
And I've created the script and I memorized it and obviously I've tried to figure out various questions that will help them or allow them to answer in such a way that I can use it for my proposals, right?
So I also listened to a lot of Jonathan Stark’s, you know, ‘why’ questions - I tend to ask all those why questions as well. And when I talk to them, I discuss this process that I follow, and usually during that stage when they see, okay, you focus on, you know, whether it be creating wireframes or doing a discovery session where you learn more about not just the business's goals and pain points, but the end user's pain points. So all of those discussions. The prospect, once they learn what I can do, they're like, okay, man maybe you should just let us know what that will cost us. There's a lot of times I don't think they know what they want until you ask the right questions. And then you can, and then I just send off a proposal based on their pain points and say, listen, okay, so when we were chatting, this is what I found out, this is what I discovered, and this is how I can address it.
Steve Folland: Nice. Just to go back to when you asked Ran Segall to review your website. So Ran was on the podcast years ago, and even then actually, he was creating content around Webflow. So he has a big YouTube channel. You're obviously watching that - was he asking for people to say get in touch? Or was it a cold message?
Robert Smart: Yeah, so I created my Webflow website and I was thinking like, how can I get more eyeballs on my website? And I just dropped him a cold email. I said, Ran, listen, man, my website was developed in Webflow. I always see you creating these YouTube videos where you review a Webflow website, do you mind doing mine as well? And I think I sent him that on the Friday, and on the Sunday, I just saw this massive spike in views on my site. I'm like, what the heck is going on? Cause I've got Google analytics on my phone… I'm like, why is this a spike? And then I went on to YouTube. And I saw he actually reviewed my website and I was so happy he did that. Because it was a long shot. It was a long shot.
Steve Folland: Wow. So then that makes your website go higher in Google. Because one of the things I noticed on your website is the level of detail that you go into your case studies, you know, it isn't just a small portfolio clip, you go deep into that strategy that we were talking about. Those things take quite a long time, but they're worth it?
Robert Smart: They are. A lot of people do reach out to me and they say, man, I really loved your case studies. I find the detail very nice. That's exactly what we want you to do for us. So that was just me putting my thoughts to paper, if I can put it that way. And it's a strategy that I used. And it seemed to be working and even on my company's website, we're using something similar as well.
Steve Folland: Nice. Okay, so here's a thing. So you decide you're going to bring people on and you give that a company name rather than just have people underneath you and you're the figurehead… So your company is…
Robert Smart: 59er Digital.
Steve Folland: How does your personal brand sit alongside that?
Robert Smart: What I'm currently doing is I'm currently putting a lot of focus on becoming an expert, right? I've studied a lot of these other experts like Chris Do and Gary Vaynerchuk and all of these guys.
So if you look at the followers they have, as experts, they've got more followers than their businesses. Right? And that means that they are bringing work in. Because they are becoming the expert in the industry, or there are of influence. And that's exactly what I'm planning on doing as well.
So I'm creating all this content to set myself up, because man, I've got all this knowledge and years worth of experience, and I thought, okay, how do I actually share it with people? And one of the things that I've learned is just, you know, create content for yourself 10 years ago. So what would you want to actually learn?
That’s what I'm currently doing. Like, okay, Robert, 10 years ago, you didn't know this. So I'm going to teach you that. And that's how I'm creating my content. 10 years ago, what did I not know? And then I teach myself.
Steve Folland: And people see you doing that - you're being seen as the expert. But actually if they want you to build their website it feeds into your company.
Robert Smart: Exactly, exactly.
Steve Folland: So you're creating a lot of content. What have you experimented with in terms of content creation?
Robert Smart: I'm mainly focusing on LinkedIn at the moment. I tend to create mostly carousel PDFs. That I put on LinkedIn, sometimes a lot of personal stuff as well, that seems to do well, but I've noticed that if you create videos under 10 minutes on LinkedIn, those also do extremely well extremely well. So I'm like, okay, let me just go and experiment with that. And now I'm trying to create more videos sharing my knowledge on LinkedIn.
It took me quite a while to get comfortable in front of a camera, you know. So, I'm just like, okay, all I'm thinking about is my family needs to feed, so Robert, just get over it. They need to eat, I need to feed them, so just get over it, get over yourself.
Steve Folland: Are you also doing videos for YouTube ?
Robert Smart: So I'm creating YouTube videos, but I'm using it on LinkedIn as well. There are obviously certain portions that I cut out for LinkedIn purposes and also to make the videos a little bit shorter. But I think this is the strategy that I've seen a lot of influencers do - they create one long form content and then they just cut it up into snippets and start posting it everywhere. Instead of just trying to create something new every time, every week, every day, you just create one long form and that's your week's worth of content.
What I'm doing is maybe I'll create a blog post, right? So I create this long form blog post, then I would take that same blog post and I will create a YouTube video, I'll create LinkedIn post, normal post,Twitter post as well…
Then you might be able to get away with seven to eight posts or five to six around about there of this long form blog post that you can cut up into pieces or snippets that you can put onto LinkedIn or Twitter and obviously you've got the YouTube version and when you create this YouTube video, you can cut that up as well into snippets that you can start posting onto these various social media platforms.
Steve Folland: Nice. You've also, for the last year or two, been podcasting, right?
Robert Smart: Yes, with a co-host - a guy called Brandon Tancott, also based here in South Africa, but he's in another city, Pretoria. He reached out to me two years ago, and he said, ‘Robert, listen, man, I want to create something, but I don't know what platform - I'm kind of keen to collaborate with you on it.’
Robert Smart: So I just said, listen, let's just try this whole podcast thing. A lot of people keep on saying, just do a podcast, man. You'll get more warmer leads from podcasts. I'm yet to test that theory out, but we've been at it for about a year, a year and a bit. And there are times when you feel like not doing it, but I think we just got into a habit of trying to do it at least once a week and just share it with everyone.
You know, you have all these negative thoughts coming into your mind. It's like nah, no one's listening to you, why are you continually doing it? But then someone in the meetup group was actually listening to us, said I’ve been listening to you guys and I find your podcast episodes very valuable. And from that day on, I was like man, we're just gonna carry on just for that one person You know that one guy who's listening to us almost every week.
And I think sometimes that boost just gives you that boost like okay, there are people listening to you. So just carry on.
Steve Folland: You mentioned a meetup though. What sort of meetup are we talking about?
Robert Smart: So we've been growing a community in South Africa, a Webflow meetup, right? Looking at no code and low code, mostly all these platforms, plus, you know, other experts we get into to do like a short talk on you know, maybe user experience design. We had a guy speaking about landing pages, how to optimize landing pages.
So we've been growing it online mostly and a couple of months back, we took over the whole Cape Town chapter of the Webflow meetup, and we've just been pushing at it. I think in the last two to three months, we've actually grew it quite exponentially you know, this is the first time we're actually having an in person meetup.
And I think about 60 people wanted to rock up and unfortunately, we could only cater for about 30. The venue that we hired or not hired, the pizza place that we got you know, cause we just had to buy pizzas. Big up to them as well. So we couldn't accommodate all of them. It was just mind blowing how many people are hungry for that in person connection.
You know, you always see these guys online, you hear about them, you attend these online meetups, but being there in person, there's just something special happening at that present moment where you can chat to people like, oh, that's what you look like, you know okay, that's what you sound like in real life.
So yeah, that was very, very exciting. We’re slowly getting to a stage where we're planning on doing more in person events.
Steve Folland: Amazing. So is that a Webflow event you’ve taken over?
Robert Smart: Yeah, so I was actually helping Brandno to grow the Pretoria Webflow Meetup chapter, you know or community. So he ran the one in Pretoria. The Cape Town one was just dormant. There was no events happening. And then I just decided, I said, listen, dude, I'm going to reach out to the previous leader and ask him if I can take it over because nothing's happening here.
And I just looked at the data. Most of the people attending the online meetup in Pretoria were from Cape Town. So I'm like, we might as well just start one or restart that community here. And that's where we started growing the community in Cape Town as well.
Steve Folland: Brilliant. And it feels good to be part of that.
Robert Smart: It does, eh? It does. The joy I get from people learning, not just from us, but from other experts in the field and just giving back. I mean, I find we both find a lot of value in giving back to others.
Steve Folland: Now Robert, if you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Robert Smart: I would tell myself: don't be afraid to take risks. A lot of time, I think, especially in my community, fear tends to keep us back from achieving the things that we want to achieve. And when I went freelancing, I took a massive risk. I didn't know if things were going to work out.
Taking a risk, learning from your mistakes, learning from your failure is super important. If you don't learn from them, you won't know what your next step will be.
So keep that in mind and also remember that, you know, the more you test and experiment, the better you'll get at what you are trying to achieve.
Steve Folland: Robert, thank you so much and all the best being freelance!
Robert Smart: Thank you, Steve. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. Much love to everyone.
This episode is sponsored by Freelancer Magazine
Dedicated to helping you grow a freelance business you love. Subscribe to Freelancer Magazine!