There are plenty of resources to tell you all about various parts of getting new clients, but none of them are complete. I have gathered together the ultimate guide. If you are new to freelancing and need your first clients, or you have been doing this for a while and need fresh clients, this guide will lead you to success.
Step 1 – The Preparation
Before you can go out trying to get new clients, you must be ready for them. You must be able to say this is who I am and this is what I’ve done on the drop of a dime. By preparing, your business can take on a specific direction with attainable goals, and you will be able to give leads the proof they want quickly and effectively.
Business Plan.
The amount of time you want to spend on this is up to you, but it depends on how serious you are. Is this a part-time hobby or a full-time income? A business plan on some level will always be helpful, and you should constantly tweak it to match your needs.
What needs to be in your business plan? This is out of the scope of this article, but in summary you should have the following:
Description of your business – What is your business about? What problems does it solve?
Goals, long term and short term – What do you want to accomplish in the next few months? What do you want in the next few years? Make these attainable and measurable, for example a bad goal would be to make lots of money soon. A good goal would be to make $20,000 within a year. Make sure your goal is realistic, and feel free to alter it some when things get going.
Intended Market – More on this below, but describe who you are gearing your business towards. You need a crystal clear description.
Marketing – How do you plan to market yourself? What promotions will you run? More on this below.
Competition – You must pick your competition. Select 4 or 5 companies. Describe what they do, and why you’re better. If you cannot describe why you are better, or why customers would obviously rather come to you for business than to them, then you need to figure something out.
More on number three – You may decide to limit your target market. This is very smart. By limiting yourself to a specific market of people or firms that mostly need websites, you can get a lot more clients from this market. For example, if you create websites for car dealerships, a dealership will pick you over someone that creates sites for everybody. You will know and understand your clients much better, and be able to reuse work much more often. For example, if you create a page that allows you to change the colors of cars online, you can reuse all of this except the actual pictures for each site you make. By having a specific market, you can gear all of your advertising money to much more targeted locations, and get more bang for your buck (or punch for your pence, depending on where you are).
Everything you do from here on out should be with the business plan in mind. Don’t waste time and money doing things that won’t reach your goals. For example, if your target market is businessmen and women, then don’t go buy an ad in Nickelodeon Magazine. This is extreme, but be sure to always follow your plan.
Does this mean you are stuck with your plan? No, you must tweak it as things go on. Things will change. Your business plan should reflect that. If you do not, your business plan will become outdated and unusable.
Portfolio.
You must gather together a portfolio of your work. This is the easiest way for potential clients to see what you create. It can include all of your work, your best work, or the work suited to your target market. In any case, you want plenty of work in it that shows a diverse range of your abilities. You want the potential client to see at least one or two things that they really like. This is very important, because your portfolio often carries much more weight in a client’s eyes than some degree or certificate. It’s what you do with the knowledge you have that matters. Show off that you can use it well. Your resumé shows what and where you have learned and where you got experience. Your portfolio shows your potential, your dedication, and results close to what you will give.
One of the hardest things when you are just starting out is filling your portfolio. How do you get projects in it even before we have gotten beyond the prepare step? Four ways:
Do projects for yourself, create your own problems and solve them. For designers, build web pages for yourself that you may or may not use. Make samples that show off your talent. For developers, write a small app.
Launch a site, make a site or blog. Base it on your app or your design.
Do projects for free, offer to do a charity or other group’s project free of charge.
Do projects in exchange. This is the best one on the list. I have found this to be a great thing to do at the beginning of your business. By exchanging work for work with another freelancer, you both get a quick project in the portfolio, and now you also have a contact with someone that does what you don’t, better yet, he or she has yours!
Now that you have your portfolio built up, design a site, or have a site designed for you, to showcase all of it. When building a portfolio page remember the following tips:
- Keep it usable, don’t invent new user interface concepts.
- Be sure to provide as much as you can for potential clients to see.
- List what you did on each project.
- Provide demos if you can.
- If you have a high profile client, put them at the top.
- Try to keep it on one page that can be easily navigated.
- Don’t use a splash screen, get to the point.
- Keep your site targeted – if your market is businesses then keep it professional
Step 2 – Contact
Getting Clients to Come to You – Promotion
This can come in many forms. Basically, you want to come up with ideas that really put you out there for your clients to find. Here is a secret of gold. Follow these steps for success.
- Figure out who your target market is.
- Figure out where they will look to find you.
- Get there.
If they are going to google you, get your site on the first page of all the google searches relating to you that you can. If they read trade magazines, go buy an ad. If they frequent a couple of websites, go buy up some ad space. If they are active in the chamber of commerce, join it. This thinking requires some work and creativity, but it really pays off. The more thought you put into this, the better results you get.
I have heard of freelancers getting success with adwords, although I don’t think I would ever do that. Usually there are cheap or free ways to get targeted results.
Analyze your results so that you can spend less for better results later. Find out how your clients heard of you. If your spot in the phone book has done nothing, ditch it!
You can also run a promotional “event.” While freelancers should never have a half-off sale, there are some things you can do. Release something free. Designers – wallpaper. Developers – apps or code. This way, people hear about you quickly, and sample what you have to offer. Also you can hold some sort of timed event, for example a developer could run an “an app a day” for a month as a publicity thing. Not sure what designers would do here, but feel free to comment.
Going to Clients Yourself
Cold calls
This is when you email or call an individual or business out of the blue. You must pitch your services to them, and see if they bite. Nine times out of ten, they won’t, but that’s normal. Cold calling is one of the easiest ways to get big clients without a whole lot of effort. My friend Barney Carroll (http://barneycarroll.com/) recently got a huge gig that he signed on to for a couple of months after going from business to business explaining what he does.
What’s hard about this tactic? The business is not looking for you, let alone any services at all. To break through this, you must give a great pitch that bites at their fears and promises a rich future. As an incredible Freelance Switch post recently said, you can tell your prospect all about what their competition does, and what you can do for them to boost their business beyond their competition, using the services that you offer. You can explain to a brick and mortar shop that you can boost their business by putting it in front of billions of eyes on the internet with a complete store.
While this is a great way to get clients easily, this does not often get you exactly the projects that you want to be working on. Which is why the next method has morphed off of this one.
Targeted Cold Contact
Here’s how this works.
Make a list of all the individuals and businesses you would love to work for. Make it as long as possible.
Then cold call, just as said above.
This is different from the first tactic because the first is a “shotgun” effect, where you contact lots of people randomly hoping for a lead to spring. Using this targeted method, you are limiting the number of contacts, but you are focusing heavily on each and every one to try and get as many as you can, because you have specifically selected ones that you would love to have. It’s really just a Less People – Heightened Interested – More time per contact – More research per contact – Happier results?
Word of mouth
This has always been the best way to get new leads for me and everybody I know. Send out a mass email to everyone in your contacts list. Explain that you started a new business, and these are the services you offer. While few of your friends will need your services (or you probably would have heard from them), they will remember you the next couple of weeks or months. Every time they hear someone that needs your services, they will likely recommend them to you. This is great, because you probably have dozens of contacts, and because this referral is friendly, on an already established relationship, so the person who has been told about you is more than likely to take you up.
Job boards
Checking the job boards around the ‘net can be helpful. Just email your pitch and your portfolio, and hope for the best. Keep your contact personal, and always refer back to the prospect’s description. They are getting a lot of copy and paste emails right now, and you want to out shine them.
What’s hard with this method is that these people are getting dozens of emails right now, because of their post. In order to get on top, do the following.
Sound excited (but not creepy) about the project.
Keep your contact strictly formal, but personal and easy to talk to.
Always refer back to the description.
Explain how your experience will help you do a great job.
I always conclude with “If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.”
Offer a link to your portfolio.
Work sites
You should be wary of a few sites, but others can be alright. Work sites are those that have interactive system to hook up you to prospects that want work. These are different from job and gig boards. These are the networking and bidding sites. First off, avoid the bidding site such as getafreelancer.com. These will always screw you over. There are kids and people that will always underbid yours. The bid will almost always be about 25% the amount of money you should be getting. I will admit, I did get one really good client for a two-day job once, but take this with a grain of salt. One bidding site that I have heard pleasant results out of is Elance.com.
Other networking sites include oDesk.com, which I cannot attest to, but looks promising.
Talk
Get out and talk your business up. Whenever you are out, be ready to drop your pitch. You may run in to a dream client at the grocery store. Be ready at all times, and talk. This may be difficult to approach people in a friendly way. Don’t run up to people and ask if they want a website. Engage in conversation unrelated. If someone mentions they own a business, ask if they have a website. If they don’t, say “Hey, I make sites for businesses, here’s my card, look me up.” Adapt this to whatever work you do as a freelancer.
Local Bulletins
While this may not be targeted, it is usually free, so there’s nothing lost. Post ads in your grocery store bulletin, church bulletin, etc. Promote yourself in the communities that you’re a part of. People know you through that community, and are therefor more likely to pick you for a project since they know you to some degree.
There are plenty of other ways, can you come up with any? Let us know in the comments. Did I miss anything in any of the lists that I gave? Post it!
Keep in mind that client building is usually a pretty slow process. Overtime, you will build up a nice shiny list of people that you’ve worked for, and people who want you to work. Follow this guide, and get out there. If you need any help, feel free to email me. Another great resource is the FreelanceSwitch Forum, where I got a lot of help for this article. I want to thank all those that responded in the forum to help out.
I hope you enjoyed this, and please subscribe for more articles!
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Over the last few days I have managed to engineer and develop a solution to a long freelancer issue. We have long needed a single application that combined Clients, Projects, Billing, and More. All of these apps have overlapping data, and if we combined them into a single app, this data can automatically be filled into where it needs to be.
