How to find your first freelance clients
Writing is an acquired skill, not something that requires a unique talent. To many, it seems difficult from the school bench. But today it is not difficult to get books that teach writing. Reading, regular practice and feedback from readers will help develop the ability to express your thoughts competently and clearly. And this skill, in turn, will make freelancing even easier and more enjoyable.
Participate in professional communities. So you can catch up with two birds with one stone. Firstly, it is communication with colleagues in the profession, learning something new and increasing the reputation among “their own”. This is especially useful if colleagues are busy with work and start looking for someone who can help them. Secondly, potential clients periodically appear in professional communities. And if they see someone’s helpful thoughts and polite interactions with others, they may want to start working with such a person.
Once I published a post in one of the professional design communities with the conditional title “Hourly or project-by-project assessment when working as a freelancer?”. This publication alone provoked eight calls from potential customers during the day. Two of them began to cooperate with me.
Speak at public events. Such activities will increase recognition among colleagues and clients. After all, it is one thing to read someone’s materials, and quite another to see this person live. Evaluate how he behaves, how he looks, how he talks. If all of the above is a problem, then it’s not worth speaking publicly right away. First you have to practice.
I myself tried to avoid one-time events, preferring to speak by appointment so that later my reports could be reviewed repeatedly. As a result, I settled on the format of webinars, if I need to convey a large set of knowledge, and video podcasts, if I want to share some interesting thought while driving a car or while walking through the forest.
Such videos periodically brought clients both directly to my services and paid educational materials of the Projectorate. The main thing is that each such performance in itself is free for the viewer and at the same time useful. And the greater the benefit, the stronger the desire of the viewer to share the video with others.
Teach. Any specialist has a set of unique knowledge related to the work process and the use of professional tools. And anyone can share this knowledge with others. But only a few do it.
Training materials attract the attention of both potential students and those who at first wanted to do the work themselves and were looking for information on how to do it, and then despaired and decided to entrust it to specialists. And the only specialist that a potential client will know after viewing the training materials is their author.
A large proportion of my clients are people who come to me saying, “I thought I could design my own site in Axure, and I found your tutorial videos. But in the process I realized that it is better to let the professionals do it. And I don’t know anyone but you.”
Use word of mouth. It seems to many that word of mouth is when clients have worked with a freelancer, were satisfied with the quality and recommend it to others. And that over time, you can not promote your services at all, and all customers will come on the recommendation. But this is only half the truth. Clients remember the performers for quite a short time. Therefore, for the effective operation of word of mouth, it is necessary to maintain a database of customers and periodically remind them of yourself. Occasionally, once every few months, ask how you are doing, congratulate you on the holidays, talk about the news. You can read more about this in one of the following chapters of the book.
In conclusion, I want to say that I have never bought advertising to promote my services, so I can’t really say anything about it.
It was a chapter from The Normal Freelancer’s Book. You can read it in its entirety for free. site. Join and TelegramI also write a lot of useful things there.
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