Do you feel that your freelancing career has taken a dump off late? Have your earnings have been dwindling for the past few earning sessions? Are your clients vanishing faster than you are able to bring new ones in? Are you in the middle of a major career change and wish to take up freelancing as a full time opportunity? Here are some often over-looked but golden nuggets to get your freelancing career back on track:
It is not your competence; it is your nonchalance
Freelancers are a hard-working lot. The reason why we do ‘freelancing’ and choose not to work for someone else is because we do have expertise and talent. We choose freedom over working for someone else, among various other reasons.If you ever wondered why your business is down and under, it’s clear that lack of business in your case isn’t your competence; it’s because you don’t do marketing. You don’t sell and pitch hard enough to clients, while managing customer relationships.
If you’ve lost a customer, it’s because of you. If you haven’t been able to ask for more prices, it’s your problem. Your freelancing career isn’t as good as it should be because you didn’t bother enough, not because there’s a dearth of clients in the world.
Ask me, I know this better than most people 
Re-vitalize your relationships
It so happens that each time I needed work, I would shoot out about 20 emails with a proposal to all possible clients and I usually see about 20 % conversions. There are a lot of those emails answered back by clients and I have not chosen to work with them for some reason or vice-versa.I am sure you’d have some emails hidden away. Now is the time to mail all those clients to let them know that you are open to negotiate and see if business can be reconstituted again?
We fall off the wagon sometimes. We might not be able to work with clients for a few reasons. Project considerations, scope of work, type of work, and budgets — all of these change with time. Go back to clients if you can (I am hoping you didn’t burn your bridges) and ask for more business.
Finding Work is a part of the job
Let’s be humble enough to accept that we don’t have steady paychecks; it doesn’t mean that we let it be that way. Operating from abundance has always been a great thing to do. Bid on projects, solicit projects from businesses or clients in such numbers that you can literally live with late payments.
For this to happen, you simply have to keep finding work even while you are presently working on a few other projects – you’d do well to mark out an hour everyday just shooting your proposals or querying your way to acquire clients. Freelancing then, will no more remain the unsteady nightmare as most people dread it to be.
Be prepared to slog it off
As freelancers, our lives can be as tough or as easy as we want it to be. You will see that you put in a lot of hours in a day. I do.
While the rest of the people have holidays and weekends, most freelancers — like you and I — don’t have a single holiday, so to speak. Thanks to the time constraints and tight schedules most freelancers work on, it calls for tremendous amount of concentration, focus, determination and hard-work to ensure that the work gets done in time, and well.
If you weren’t doing it until now, it is time to wake up and let the keyboard ring. Put in the time. Work on the numbers. Consider managing your time well, get more productive, and do what 3 people do in a single day.
Marketing your freelance business is a game of numbers
Assuming each client is worth $500 for you.You email, call, bid, yell, and beat your chest to 10 clients per day. Assuming your conversion ratio is 10%, ONE client will buy.
10 clients or projects pitched per day = 1 client on an average with a monetary value of $500.
In a month:
10 X 20 working days = 200 clients pitched to, in total.
200 X 10% (conversion rate) = 20 clients who buy @ 500 USD worth of services from you
= $10000
I don’t know about you, but with this kind of money (and absolutely no overheads), I can travel the world and be richer then most people in just a few years. Who says writers don’t make money, eh?
Be the best at what you do; write awesome, linkable content
Be on top of whatever you are doing. You have to make sure that your clients know your worth. Without you, there ought to be a flutter at your client’s office. Be indispensable and irreplaceable. That’s your value added. You will have to work hard to maintain it that way. Look to enhance this worth. Invest enough time and effort on yourself. Improve your skills by learning, practicing and applying often enough.I really like what some of these guys do when writing content. I learnt it from them. I think you should too.
See some of my favorites here (this list is not even the beginning; I have over 2000 RSS feeds on Google Reader):
Freelance Writing, Writing for the web, Copywriting
Sean Platt at Ghostwriterdad.com
Kristi Haines at Kikolani.com
Dana Prince at The Freelance Writer’s Blog. She also contributes at Future Simple.
Online Marketing, Traffic, Social Media, etc
Marcus Sheridan at Saleslion.com
Danny Iny at Firepolemarekting.com
Corbett Barr at ThinkTraffic.com along with his team of writers such as Caleb Wojcik, Rick Mulready, and Gregory Ciotti.
Jason Acidre at Kaiserthesage.com
Affiliate Marketing
The Mthink Magazine (this is a multi-authored business information site)
You get the idea, don’t you?
Use a Free trial (Free Trail for freelance writing services, are you kidding me?)
Once upon a time, when I used to be a trainer one of the modules I used to train on was career skills that included “How to Succeed in Interviews and group discussions“.
I used to challenge my delegates saying:
“If you are so damned good, go up to those companies and tell them that you’d work for free for a week/month/3 months”.
Further, tell them:
“If you like my work and if you think I have it in me, which I do, would you pay me what I ask for? Of course, I’ll be reasonable but not inexpensive”
Why not use a free trial for your freelance business? Speaking for freelance writers, what on earth is stopping you from letting clients have you work for them for a week, on trial? Alternatively, have them commit a token amount (refundable) and then start working. If they like your work, they continue. If they don’t take back the rights to your work and return the token amount.
Note: Before you start your free trial, pick up all the information about clients. Their websites, contact details, etc. In case they do the vanishing act at any point without being fair, you’ll have an opportunity to defame them, draw a media blitzkrieg, and literally give them sleepless nights ( this doesn’t happen much, as I see it)
Don’t just write about social media, use it for your own business
It’s funny that we freelance writers spend time on social media but barely have anything to write home about it. Apart from all the sweet, nice things I mention in a guest post at Andy Nathan’s blog “5 Simple Secrets to Social Media Success” that you should do on social media, there’s a little more that I didn’t mention: ask for business. On Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In, just go out there ( in the middle of a mountain of valuable content, generous sharing of others’ Tweets, intelligent conversations, and blooming relationships) and ASK for business.
Here’s what I did:
Or maybe, like this:
It’s alright to ask for business in the middle of the usual humdrum of social media activity. Hell, if you don’t ask, just how would clients know?
As to my questions on Twitter, there was no response. I am not giving up.
Develop channels for marketing your business
You don’t need to buy e-books or take special courses to find clients online ( I would love to take up the courses, if only I had enough money). One way to get what you want is to “buy” your way in; the other way is to earn it and fight from the trenches. I choose the latter because that’s the only way I could survive. Say, how many channels do you have for marketing your business?
Choose one channel and dare come to depend on it and you’ll get the shock of your life if it tanks. Some of the most common channels that I use are:
- Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In)
- Freelance Job Boards such as Elance and Guru. I don’t like Odesk, just FYI.
- Other Job Boards (Freelance Switch Job Board, Flexjobs, Indeed, Problogger.net, Blogging Pro, etc)
- The directories – Dmoz, Yahoo, and the best of the web.
- Digging up old clients from your inbox.
- Email marketing (just started this one, will update on how it goes).
- The Blog
- Cold emailing Random new clients (each time I come across a new web-based business, I pitch)
- Dailyarticle.com
- Constant-content.com
Special mention for constant-content.com : I used to be on constant-content.com for a while. They blocked my account for no darned reason. They still owe me $13. I choose to ignore it and avoided the temptation to write a scathing review titled
“Constant-content: Not a Scam; they are just Monopolistic, too tight-a*****, and might just steal your money“.
Because something could go wrong with your primary channels of marketing, develop alternatives. You’ll never regret you did it.
Write a book (even an e-book will do)
Writing a book — be it trade publishing or self-publishing — is one of the best ways to establish expertise on a subject of your choice. You don’t have to be a paperback or a hardcover, bestselling author to showcase your work to potential clients. Thanks to technology that got us KDP ( Kindle Digital Publishing), Smashwords, Apple iBooks, E-PUB, and even audibles.com, there are plenty of ways to self-publish today. All you need is a manuscript, an editor, a professional cover design, and you are in the game.
I know. I heard you asking. I will plan to write a book too. I will self-publish one day for sure.
Need help? Look no further than:
Mark Coker’s Smashwords Style Guide: How to Format Your E-book
and
How to Self-Publish, and Why You Should: Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran.
Try to Pitch for the big boys while working on what you should
There are three things we should strive to do each day:
- Sacred work — the freelancing work that pays the bills and keeps you sane. This is should be as much as it should be to keep you happy. For some, $500 would be enough. For others, $8000 is still making ends meet. You are the better judge.
- Happy work — all the extra channels of marketing begin to work for you. Clients come in through social media, your blog, emails, and your cold calling or cold emailing strategy works. This is good for you. I call it “happy work”
- Ego-massaging work — Pitching to trade publishers to get your book done, writing a book and publishing it, updating your blog regularly, pitching to big magazines such as Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Inc, Business Week, National Geographic, Wall Street, Smart Money, etc., is ego-massaging work. It not only takes your level as a freelancer by several nothces, but also marks a new beginning for your career.
Each day’s work distribution : 60% sacred work + 30% happy work + 10% ego-massaging work
Works for you, will it?
