26% Of People Would Like To Freelance & 28% Already Do At Some Capacity

Recently, I started working with a new company called 1Q. (1Q is a powerful tool to survey people and based on their instant answers, drive them to action) In my work with them, we ran a question about freelancing so I could learn how their tool worked. Below are the results.

Are You A Freelancer?

100 respondents* age 18-75 with an income between 10k-250k/year answered as follows: 

• 46% responded with "No"
• 26% responded with "No, But I'd Like To Be"
• 19% responded with "Yes, Part-Time"
• 9% responded with "Yes, Full-Time"

Survey Insights

What I found most interesting about this survey were the results of the 26% who are not a freelancer but would like to be one. It seems there are many people like Jim Karwisch ready to make the leap.

There are almost as many people who want to freelance as there are who actually freelance part or full-time. If all of these people were to join actual freelancers, 54% of the workforce would be freelancers. Let that sink in for a moment.

Now, this is only 100 people so the sample size is fairly small, but this small slice of data provides some interesting data to think about. 

Path Of The Freelancer was written for two groups of people. The first is those who are freelancing and want to take freelancing to the highest level, and the second group is those who want to freelance but are not. According to this data, my best target for the book is those who are not freelancing but want to. 

Follow-up Survey

Using 1Q, I sent a follow-up survey to the 54% who were freelancers or wanted to become one. Here is how 48 responded.

 The 48 respondents** answered as follows:

• 2.1% Yes, I'd buy it now - Click to buy http://amzn.to/2lhHIhl
• 27.1% Yes, but I'd want to download a free chapter first - Click 4 Free Chapter http://bit.ly/FreeCHP
• 12.5% Yes. Not ready to buy now. Please send email updates - Click 4 Email Updates
• 4.2% Yes. Not ready to buy now. Please send RSS Feed - Click 4 RSS http://bit.ly/RSSpotf
• 54.2% No, I'm not interested.

Follow-Up Survey Insights

The follow-up survey did include a photo of the book cover before displaying the answers.

In my review, I was definitely happy to see one person was ready to buy right now. Almost half of the 48 who answered were interested in the book, with 13 people interested in buying after reading a free chapter.

7 people ended up clicking the amazon link, 20 clicked the link for the email updates and free chapter. 4 people clicked the link to the RSS feed.

While 1Q is a great tool for surveying and driving action, I'd have to drive 13 or 14 sales from the two surveys ($1/respondent for a total of $148) to fund the cost of the tool. If I could discover the specific demographic to target and could get my acquisition cost down to $5 per sale, this could become an effective tool for driving book sales. 

Recipient Demographics

You can review the demographic data for both surveys below.

*The following is a breakdown of the demographics of the 100 respondents. 

**The following is a breakdown of the demographics from the 48 who are freelancing or want to become one and responded to the follow-up survey.

Header image courtesy of Corinne Kutz via Unsplash.