5 Easy Ways Freelancers Can Get New Clients

One of the challenges freelancers face is not just working for themselves but having to invest time and effort finding new clients. In this article, we’re going to give you five easy ways freelancers can get new clients. And none of our advice will cost you much if any, money out of pocket.

Utilize Your Network

Instead of simply asking friends and family if they need work done, specifically ask them to refer people to you. It is amazing how often your network knows someone that needs your services but aren’t willing to make the connection between you and a client without that extra push. Don’t forget to ask for referrals from your current and former clients; you can incentivize this by giving them a discount on future work if they bring in new clients for you.

Promote Your Work

Use your social media accounts to promote your work, assuming intellectual property agreements aren’t affected by doing so. Pin your professional portfolio on Pinterest. Share the new website you created to your social media followers if you’re a web designer. If you’re achieving results for a client and can talk about it, do! If you completed work for a client for free, whether in the hope of publicity or for charity, promote it on social media and let everybody know about it.

Look for People with Problems

Look for people in your social network complaining about a problem you can solve, and then offer to solve it. Sign up for your local neighbourhood social media networks and when someone asks for a referral for your type of work, pipe up. There are several benefits of this approach. First, you’re identifying very likely clients who need work done, so the conversion rate will be much higher than cold calling or cold emailing. Second, because of the seemingly personal connection, whether on a local neighbourhood site or social media connections, they are more likely to go with you, though they may ask other social connections before using you. Third, responding to requests for recommendations on who can solve a problem on social media puts your name and skillset out in front of others who are curious about the answer but didn’t bother to post themselves.

Try Email Marketing

Email marketing remains popular because of it’s incredibly low. And you don’t have to pay a fortune and send out millions of emails in the hope of getting a few paying customers. Run email searches to verify email addresses and send marketing emails to your ideal targets.

Utilise Job Boards

Freelancing websites match up clients with service providers. Consider using freelancing websites to try to land a few clients. You may need to take lower paying assignments and do a good job to get the good reputation on the site to land higher paying gigs. However, this can be a good way of generating some cash flow quickly and building up a stable list of clients, especially if you complete many small, fast turnaround projects.

By using one or all of these tips, you should be able to build your list of prospects easily.