Growing as a freelancer isn’t easy anymore. The freelance platforms are saturated with freelancers offering their services at competitive rates. However, I still believe you can grow as a freelancer and acquire clients if you work smartly. Still, it may take some time, but in the long run, you can easily establish yourself as a successful freelancer with a lot of happy clients.
In this article, I am going to share a few tips that can help you start your freelance journey and eventually ace it. Let’s start:
Network As Much As You Can:
Networking opens a world full of opportunities for new freelancers. Since they’re new, not many people in the freelancing community would know about them. Besides that, clients may not be aware of what kind of services you’re offering or what expertise you have.
But with networking, you can quickly make your space among fellow freelancers and become known to clients. Here’s how you can network:
Word of Mouth:
Make sure people, your family, friends, ex-colleagues, employers, or anyone else know that you’re open to working as a freelancer. Word of mouth is a powerful tool, and it increases your chances of getting referred.
Attend Seminars/Webinars/Freelancing Events:
These are great platforms to build your reputation in the freelancing community and attract clients. Generally, people who’re providing or seeking freelance services participate in these events and you can also find potential clients there. Plus, even if you don’t find clients, you may learn a lot about the freelancing industry and emerging trends specifically to your services’ niche.
Use Freelancing Platforms:
Signing up on freelancing platforms is a great way to reach more clients. Although freelancing platforms are saturated now, you will learn a lot about how freelancers in your niche portray their services or what specific services clients usually look for. In addition, you can network with seasoned freelancers in your domain and learn more tricks to attract clients.
Create a Strong Online Presence:
You can reach more clients using social media platforms. Not just this, social media is a great tool to showcase your services. Now, let’s see how you can use social media platforms to create a strong online presence:
Join LinkedIn:
On LinkedIn, you can make yourself heard among the noise in a few different ways. Firstly, answer questions on LinkedIn professionally. Be it clients or freelance recruiters, your services and expertise may stand out among the audience. Secondly, you can connect with other freelancers, clients, and freelance agencies. Lastly, you can upload your projects and gigs and let people know that you’re the best in what you do.
Join Freelance Communities:
Facebook offers a lot of pages and groups for freelancers. There, you may find a lot of freelancers and clients seeking out each other. You can actively participate in those communities so that clients know more about your services.
Work on Your Portfolio:
Your portfolio is what the clients see before they hand over their projects to you. To make sure your portfolio impresses them, you can do the following:
Keep Adding New Skills:
Whenever you network with fellow freelancers, look out for skills that they have but you don’t. Learn as many new skills as possible to ensure that you offer every kind of service in your niche a client wants.
Work on Different Projects:
Working on different projects portrays you as an all-round freelancer. Clients may also prefer those freelancers who possess a diverse skill set.
Ensure Your Portfolio is Always Updated:
Whenever you complete a freelancing project, make sure to add it to your portfolio as soon as possible. It’s because if you delay this, clients won’t know about the recent project you worked on.
Make Clients Your Priority:
As a freelancer, you must ensure that your clients feel important so they keep coming back to you. Also, when you build a great rapport with your clients, it increases your chances of getting referred by them. Here, the following steps can help:
Attend to Them at the Earliest:
Ensure when clients reach out to you, you attend them on priority. Even if you’re taking a day off, don’t leave them on seen. Answer their questions and let them feel that they’re important to you.
On a side note, make sure you install freelance apps on your smartphone to stay online and reply to them at the earliest. One more thing, get an ever-available and reliable internet connection, for instance, AT&T Internet, which enables you to stay connected with its unlimited data.
Offer Something Extra:
You can make your clients feel important by giving something extra with your services. Most clients do not expect to get anything valuable from freelancers without a price tag on it. Be it a free consultation, make sure to accommodate something free of cost in your services for your clients.
Take a Follow-Up:
Even if clients forget you after their work ends with you, you mustn’t forget them. One way to show how important clients are to you, take a follow-up after a few days. You can ask them if they liked your work and if there are any problems you can help them out with.
Dedicate Time to Client Hunting:
To continuously grow as a freelancer, you cannot depend on recurring clients. You need to actively look for new clients who may offer a variety of projects. To find new clients, you can get help from freelance platforms, use social media, and attend local events which I have already mentioned above. With these things, you can also hunt for new clients by:
Email Marketing:
Email marketing is an effective tool to professionally reach out to potential clients. You can make an attractive email template, attach your portfolio, and send emails to your clients. Also, there are tons of email automation tools, for instance, MailChimp that you can use to automate the process.
Bonus Suggestions:
In this section, I have added two important factors that most freelancers don’t pay attention to.
Freelancers need to get feedback and reviews from their past clients. People who need the services you offer may want to know about other people’s experiences working with you. And reviews by your past clients may help them know how good you’re at what you do.
Another factor is that most freelancers try to upsell their clients when in reality, they don’t need those additional services. Most clients know what their needs are and quickly figure it out if a freelancer tries to upsell them. Here, I would advise you to upsell your services only to those clients who genuinely need them. Also, make sure when you upsell your services, you back your stance with a rational explanation.
