To sustain your financial needs as a freelancer you need to retain your clients or find new ones.
Whichever way.
If I had to give you just one piece of advice if you needed new clients right now, it would be to start with your personal network.
If the thought of promoting your services to family and friends makes you squirm, then I would encourage you to think of yourself as a doctor.
Change the way you think about freelancing.
Patients bring their problems to doctors. Doctors diagnose the problems and prescribe some form of treatment.
A doctor might take an x-ray of a construction worker, and say, “Yep. You have waist pains, you have been lifting heavy items. I’m going to help you.”
The doctor might do a blood pressure test, compare the most recent reading to his chart, and say, “We need to do a better job at managing your hypertension. I’m going to write you a prescription for Lisinopril in addition to the pain killers.”
You get the idea.
As a freelancer, you’re not selling knick-knacks and non-essentials, you’re fixing someone’s broken business. How can their business truly thrive if it has broken bones?
You must believe that the services you provide are essential to the success of people you care about, friends and family included, and that saying nothing is withholding treatment.
To not tell your personal network how you can help would be doing them a disservice.
As a freelancer, you’ve got medicine, and you’re looking for clients desperate for it.
See yourself as the missing piece to their puzzle.
The question then becomes “how?”
How do you promote your skillset to your friends and family without being tacky or coming off as desperate?
I’m going to tell you how in two steps:
- Build a Targeted Audience List.
- Word Of Mouth / Referrals.
1. Build A Targeted Audience List
People do not know what you do until you tell them.
When you know this you realize that you have been the one keeping yourself from getting new clients all this while.
A simple process of building a list is creating a lead magnet.
It’s very simple.
What information do you know your target market needs? Create it in a book format (pdf) and give it to them for FREE.
Think of what problem you can solve for your audience as quickly as possible and give it to them.
Now I am not telling you to put up the whole tips and tricks of your strategies to getting your work done but giving out 1% of that information won’t run you down.
Once you can create the book, go ahead to creating a system that will make them drop their email address or phone number before getting the book.
Maybe a landing page with a form will do this trick for you.
Don’t try to scrape email addresses from the internet. It makes the work tedious. Many of them might not need you at all and even if they do, not at the moment.
2. Word of Mouth / Referrals
One of your greatest means of getting more jobs as a freelancer is Word of Mouth marketing.
Who already know you? What can he/she say about you, your job and the ROI from working with you?
You have to very cautious about how you treat each of your clients.
No one is bigger than the other.
One might not pay you much today but become a ladder to your biggest contract as a freelancer.
Make sure you work with clients, as most times clients can be very frustrating
Grow a network of happy clients and jobs will never depart from your table.
Bottom Line.
As a freelancer, there are a lot of opportunities and different ways to ensure you keep your business sustainable. This is just 2 of many others but these tips here will surely get you what you want.
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