Freelance Blog

As a freelancer you need to take absolute responsibility for everything in your business. You must be able to win clients, you must price your services appropriately, you must ensure you complete your jobs and therefore get paid. The whole cycle starts with the first point though, you need to learn to consistently win clients.

When you are starting out especially, but at all times through your career as a freelancer, finding clients will be a big focus. The really good freelancers, contractors or consultants will never leave a job, until they have the next one lined up. Therefore, the really good operators will have a constant source of income.

There is not one best way to win clients. There are many many different methods you can try. We have summarised some of the main ones here but you are pretty much only restricted by your imagination and your tolerance to rejection. Here are some ideas.

1. Initiating Contact With Your Clients Cold

In the old days, there was cold calling. Now, with the plethora of communication mediums available to us, I prefer the term cold contacting.

Cold contacting is a difficult way to acquire clients. There is typically a very high rejection rate (Ie. clients saying no to you) so you need to have a thick skin. It basically becomes a numbers game. If it takes you 100 rejections to get a new client signed, your client portfolio will grow depending on the number of phone calls you make. If you make 100 phone calls, you’ll have 1 client, 300 phone calls will land you 3 clients and 500 clients will keep you busy with 5. Your success depends on your ability to weather the 99 failures in good spirits before you win the next client.

2. Advertising

Straight up, advertising can be very expensive. You have to pay someone else to put your message on their medium (Ie. radio station, TV station, magazine, billboard or newspaper) The benefits of paying money for advertising include that you can reach a much broader spectrum of prospective clients than if you do anything else, and that you prospective clients call you. This makes closing sales much easier.

Advertising is not just about throwing some money at an advertiser though. Unless you hire professionals, it will also take some time. You need to be careful you don’t throw all you money away for waste. You must research the various advertising media to ensure you pick the correct one. If your prospective clients don’t see your message, they will never contact you. You also need to ensure you structure your advert in a way that attracts the attention of your prospective clients and convinces them to contact you. This is not as easy as it sounds given the plethora of advertising messages we see each day. If you get your advertising campaign wrong, it can cost you a small fortune. If you get it right, it can be like turning on a perpetual money tap.

3. Networking and Referrals

This form of marketing is similar to cold calling as the emphasis is on you making contact with your prospective clients. It isn’t cold though as it entails you have been introduced by someone.

Using referrals means you need to contact your entire network, everyone you know, to see if there is anyone your family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, friends of family and family of friends may know, who may need your services. Once you find people who need your services, you can use the person who told you about them, to give you an introduction and recommendation. The reason this works is that you are leveraging off the trust your friend has in you, and the trust your potential client has in your friend, to generate an element of credibility in your skills. That way the potential client has a much easier time deciding to use your services, than those of someone that no-one has recommended

4. Use A Placement Service

When I first became a contractor, the only thing I did was focus on supply organisations. I pretty quickly found a job with an organisation who had their own book of established customers. They placed me with their customers and took a percentage of the money I made. They made money with no expenses so they were happy, I could concentrate on making money rather than marketing my business so I was happy.

As you grow in your freelancing career, you’ll quickly learn that there is no absolute and perfect way to find your next client. All of the above are proven methods in their own right, but the most successful freelancers, consultants and contractors will use a mixture of some or all of the above.

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• What Your Marketing Isn’t Saying About You (prweb.com)

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