How To Diversify Your Freelance Business with Intention

How do you protect your freelance writing business from uncertainty, burnout, and AI disruption?

In this solo episode, host Ashley Cisneros Mejia shares the exact framework she presented at the Growth Without Burnout Summit, a virtual conference for freelancers. She also shares new insights and tools designed to help freelance writers diversify their services without tossing out everything they’ve built.

Ashley introduces her signature 3L Framework – Look Back, Lean Forward, and Launch Lightly – to help freelancers rediscover past wins, uncover hidden income opportunities, and test new offers with clarity and confidence.

You’ll also get the inside scoop on her new small group mentorship experience, The Expansion Circle, where freelancers walk through her Freelance Expansion Starter Kit workbook together to map new income streams and expand with purpose.

If you're feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or simply ready for more, this episode is your creative reset.

The Expansion Circle kicks off on Tuesday, June 17, 2025 at 7 p.m. EST on Zoom.
Register here by June 13.

Watch the full Growth Without Burnout Summit replay here.

Download my free guide “If You Do This, Try That” here.

About The Expansion Circle:

The Expansion Circle is a free 5-week group mentorship experience designed for freelance writers who are ready to grow with purpose. Led by Ashley Cisneros Mejia, this intimate program walks you through the Freelance Expansion Starter Kit—a 52-page workbook packed with prompts, templates, and tools to help you uncover hidden services, test new ideas, and build a more resilient freelance business. We’ll meet weekly on Zoom to brainstorm, strategize, and support each other through what’s next. Space is limited by design, so if you’re craving clarity and community, this is your invitation to join. Click here to reserve your spot. 

Full show notes

Chapters

• 1:18 Diversifying Your Freelance Business
• 3:04 Current State of Freelancing
• 4:54 The Three L Framework: Look Back
• 8:00 The Three L Framework: Lean Forward
• 11:20 The Three L Framework: Launch Lightly
• 13:39 Putting Ideas into Practice
• 14:32 Invitation to Join the Expansion Circle

Transcript

Ashley Cisneros Mejia: 0:00

you're not just a worker. You're not just the talent. You are a business owner and you don't have to navigate the business world and building a freelance business by yourself, but you do have to lead the way for your own enterprise. Welcome to Talk Freelance to me, the podcast for women freelance writers, 10 99 independent contractors and solopreneurs. I'm your host, Ashley Ci SDOs Mejia. For more than 20 years, I've worked as a journalist and freelance writer. Today as a mom of three kids, I'm passionate about helping other women leverage the freedom that freelance offers on top freelance. To me, we're all about the business of freelancing. If you want to learn how to monetize your talents, make money on your own terms, and design a flexible work life that actually works for you. This show is for you. Before we get started, don't forget to follow us on your favorite social media platforms. Review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and don't forget to share this episode with a friend. Visit our website at Talk Freelance to me.com For free resources. Join our email list to be the first to know about our latest offers. Thanks for tuning in and let's get into the episode. Today I wanna talk to you about something that I've been thinking a lot about and that's how to diversify your freelance business with intention. How do we create new income streams? There's so much noise. Now about the economy, at least here in the United States, about where we are in the moment in terms of AI's impact on the freelance creative world. And I think a lot of people are questioning how do we insulate our businesses? How do we lean into what it is that makes us unique, special, uniquely qualified? How do we. Really dig into those things to protect our businesses from everything that's happening externally. How do we meet the moment and answer the question in terms of what's next for freelancers? And I have put together a presentation about this with a framework that I developed called the three L framework, which is just a way to. Look at what you've done, not just with freelance, but even nine to five roles, even volunteer work, civic leadership engagements, thinking about everything that you've done in more of a holistic way and mining that for ideas. The basis of what I'm gonna talk about today was the foundation for a presentation that I gave for the Growth Without Burnout Summit that was hosted by Austin Church and Freelance Cake. So let's talk a little bit about that. If you're feeling stuck, or tired or scared or thinking that you need to shift in your business, this episode is for you. So let's talk about the first thing. What's happening in freelance right now? Freelancing has changed a lot, and I think we all can agree about that. Platforms are so much louder that they've ever been. AI is everywhere. It's not just about chat, GPT. There's all kinds of existing infrastructure and programs that are incorporating AI into them, and you've probably noticed that clients are expecting more, sometimes for less. They are making business decisions, financial decisions related to. Fear about the economy, fear about uncertainty, and also they're trying to utilize AI as a way to cut costs. And for those of us who've been in this game for a little while, it's very easy to feel shaken by everything that's shifting underneath our feet. Sometimes the work is steady, but it no longer feels good. Sometimes our work is slow and we don't know what to try next. Should we throw in the towel on this freelance? Game all together, or should we look at maybe just making some tweaks? Sometimes we're just so busy and overwhelmed. It's hard to think clearly. It's hard to take a time out to put the emotion aside for a second and to really put our business hat on and think about what is the. Next thing that we need to be doing as the leader of our businesses, and this is where I developed this framework from this place. I created it for freelancers like myself, freelancers like you listening, people who want to grow with purpose and intention. And I call it the three L framework. And I'm gonna walk you through it now. So the first L in the three L framework is, look back. This is, I think, where we need to start from. A lot of times we're just looking at the here and now, and I think that's a good place to check in. In fact, I have a whole exercise called the alignment and awareness tool, but I think it's also important to look back at what we've done and not just in the last month, not just in the last quarter, but. Even just what we've done in our career, I feel like life sometimes is cyclical and that things that you maybe did in your twenties, things that you did early in your career, or even people that you met in different facets of your life, sometimes those things come back around. Sometimes we set experiences aside for a second and unknowingly we come back to it or unknowingly we need to come back or revisit things that maybe we haven't touched in a while. So in the look back phase, this is where I'm encouraging you to start by looking at what's working in your business, what you've done before, what projects you've done before, even what kind of work really inspired you, lit you up, things that you enjoyed, and thinking about what services. Maybe felt good before that you haven't done in a while. Are there clients that you, or even organizations that you really enjoyed working with years ago and you haven't spoken to them in a bit? So this step is about gathering clues. There's a lot of data that you probably have from your previous work, and when I say work, I'm not just talking about your freelance clients, I'm also talking about your nine to five roles that you may have had before. I'm talking about your volunteer work. If you serve as a leader in organizations, civic groups, thinking about what kind of projects you've worked on, what kind of things have you done even that were unpaid but that were valuable because those. Positions. Those roles may give you clues on hidden services that you might be able to incorporate in your business. Now, you don't have to guess about what works because you've already lived it, you've already done it. So just takes a moment to give yourself permission to pause and reflect, and you can utilize. A variety of things for me. I have so many external hard drives from work that I've done before, or old resumes, old performance reviews, evaluations, testimonials. If you have even old access to your old client rosters, those are a great place to look. Even your address book. Sometimes I look at my phone and I'll look at different contacts that I've had and uncover. I haven't talked to this person. What did I know them from? Oh yeah. We worked on this project together. Use those tools to think about people and projects and work that you've done in the past as a way to jog your memory and to maybe get ideas of what you could bring back. The second L is called Lean forward. Because once you've looked back, it's time to think about the here and now. It's time to think about what clues from my past, can I revisit? Can I call some of these people, text some of these people, email some of these people, or even some of these old services that you've done. For example, myself, I used to have a brand. It was called My power brand.com. I still have the domain. And I used to do a lot of resumes and LinkedIn profiles for clients, and I did a bunch of those. I've actually started to do some of those organically from folks that have met me and have asked me to help them with those personal branding materials. It's not something that I'm marketing like I did before, but I'm thinking maybe I should bring this back because there's a lot of people. Who are interested in those services, even if they have access to all the big language models like Chat, GBT and Claude. And, but they still want to the strategy of how do I communicate, what kind of aspects about myself should I be talking about to really push myself forward. That's a service that I haven't, like I said, I haven't been marketing, but just organically because of everything that's happening in the market. That's something that I've been working on with clients, and perhaps you can do the same. So once you've gotten those ideas and you can look at them and say, what are some services that I can offer based on what I already know? Are there things that I know how to do when I'm thinking about those previous offerings or. Work experiences that I should be offering. Maybe I'm not talking about them. Maybe I'm putting all of my emphasis on a specific service. A, I don't know, writing white papers, but maybe there is more of, maybe you're great at LinkedIn and maybe you could offer services to help job seekers talk about their stories, their professional stories online in a compelling way you might. Have ideas and they're just under their surface and you haven't. Been able to bring them forward into the here and now and take them as new ideas going forward. You can also use this time to bring forward kind of inspiration or ideas that you've had on the shelf you've set to the side. Are there certain formats of services or types of clients that you've really wanted to serve? Maybe it's time to bring those ideas forward and to experiment a little bit. This is your brainstorming phase. I call it your. Thinking about what's, what else? You can offer a phase. You can ask yourself if I'm doing this. What else could I try? And I actually created a list for you for this process, and I'll include a link in the show notes. It's called, if You Do This, try that. And it's basically a guide of a brain dump of ideas that I had about. If you do this type of writing, what else could you do that's adjacent or complimentary? And I'll include this in the show notes. You can download it if you want, and just see if it sparks any of your own ideas. Maybe it's a jumping off point to something new. The third L is launch lightly. That's where you start to test. That's where you start to experiment. And so perhaps you've generated a couple ideas of services that you could offer, products that maybe you could package and bring forward in some way. This is where you pick one. You pick, and I have a whole framework for kind of deciding. What, how, among the ideas, like how do you grade them to determine the one that you should test, but this is where you experiment. You just take one of one idea at a time. You're not, like I said, overhauling your whole business at once, but you're giving yourself that permission to test. To do a soft launch, a pilot, a beta test, to check and see if anybody's interested in this idea. You don't have to have a U huge rollout. You don't have to have a perfect business plan for this new offering. You launch lightly. I. So this might mean offering a new package to an existing client that you have. Maybe if you're doing one, maybe you're doing website content for your client and you notice you guys haven't talked about bios for each of the team members. Maybe this is something that you could offer to them and even create a package to offer to other people who also. Need bios done for their team members. Maybe you can post about your idea on your social media channels if you're active on social media, and see what kind of response that you get. You can build a wait list before you can do online polls. You can send a survey out to your clients. You can just. Ask them, call them, text them. If that's, if you guys have that communication comfort, really. But you can create, you can gauge and test the waters and see what the reaction is. You don't need a whole full rebrand. You just need permission to do some testing and to launch lightly. Then based on the feedback, you can incorporate that and decide if this is something that you actually want to. Launch and diversify. This is a step that really helps you build momentum and gives you that confidence to move forward because you're moving with data, not just from a gut feeling. Part three is putting everything into practice. And so that's where you actually take your new idea and you begin to offer it into the world and diversify, create that new offering, that new income stream, that new product, because that will really diversify the way that you generate income, so you're not reliant. On one specific type of writing. So if any of this sounds interesting to you or something that you're curious about, I've created a couple things. In addition to that Idealist that I mentioned, I have a whole workbook that I call the Freelance Expansion Starter Kit. It's a 52 page. Guide and journal, if you will. You can actually type in it. You can print it out and journal, but it walks you through in more detail that three L framework that I mentioned. And beyond that I'm actually experimenting with something and you're invited to participate. I am taking that workbook and I'm developing a. Group, small group coaching experience that I'm calling the expansion circle. I'm inviting freelancer freelancers who are interested to join and we will actually walk through that workbook together to develop new ideas for your business. Things to try. New offerings, just things that you can do to insulate your business from some of the effects that we're seeing from the economy and for AI being on the scene. So this program is only five weeks. We will meet weekly on Zoom. I'm trying to keep it small on purpose so that I can really. Serve each of the freelancers in a meaningful way, and we'll talk about what's next. We will workshop your ideas. We will build strategies. This is a pilot round so it's completely free it, we kick off on Tuesday, June 17th. Again, it's. Five Tuesdays in a row, so if you'll be done by mid July, I'm asking everyone if you're interested to go ahead and sign up by June 13th so I can button up the plans and ha be ready to go on June 17th. If this feels aligned to you, if you're curious about this, if you want an opportunity to bounce ideas off of a fellow freelancer and business person. This is your invitation. I think we all have a tendency to work in our businesses so much instead of on our businesses. That's a concept from the E-Myth business book. This is your chance. This is your chance to take some time. We're not. Really working on writing. We're working on the business on your freelance business. This is a great opportunity. I hope that you will take advantage of it. You can register at Talk Freelance to me.com/freelance-men mentorship. Again, that's Talk Freelance to me.com/freelance. Hyphen membership. I will put the link in the show notes, and if you just go to my website and you click group mentorship, that button on the, in the menu, you'll get right to the page. So here's what I want you to remember is that you're not just a worker. You're not just the talent. You are a business owner and you don't have to navigate the business world and building a freelance business by yourself, but you do have to lead the way for your own enterprise. I'm here to help you to work with you, and I'd love for you to join this expansion circle. Thank you for listening to Talk Freelance to me. If this helped you, please share it with a fellow freelancer who needs a little nudge forward and I'll see you inside the expansion circle. With that, we've come to the end of another episode. Please make sure you hit subscribe and give me a five star review on Apple. Check out the show notes and grab my free niches. Get Riches freelance writing worksheet to brainstorm the best niches for your writing business. Until next time, this is Ashley Cisneros Mejia. Don't forget we all get this one. Precious life. Don't constrain yourself to a box that you are never meant to fit in. It is your right to profit from your own creative gifts. Our music was composed by Donna Raphael of World Instrumentals Talk. Freelance to me is a product of Fenix Creative Studio.