Deciding to become a freelancer is an exciting career choice that provides a lot of opportunities—both for making money and for enjoying personal freedom, like being able to work a full day without leaving your living room. With these advantages, it’s no surprise that freelancers now account for a significant 35% of the U.S. workforce.
If you decide to quit your day job and begin working as a freelancer, though, there are a few things you’ll need to be prepared for – one of the most important being the necessity of marketing yourself.
As with any business, gaining clients as a freelancer is not quite as simple as writing a quick profile and watching your inbox light up with job offers. If you want to succeed in finding clients that will enable you to make a great living, you’ve got to learn how to effectively market yourself.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a marketing guru to have success marketing your freelancing services. If you are looking for a way to find more, better-paying clients, here’s how to effectively market yourself as a freelancer.
Build an Online Presence
The internet allows freelancers to find and work with clients all over the world, and it has been the biggest factor behind the rapid growth of the freelance economy. However, in order for clients to find you online, you’ve got to develop a great online presence.
This starts with creating profiles on websites that are designed to connect clients and freelancers, as these websites are more often than not the first place a client will look when they are wanting to hire a new freelancer.
Take your time to create professional, well-written profiles on these sites that include a professional-looking profile picture, a detailed description of your background and qualifications, and examples of your past work. Also keep in mind that it’s a good idea to create profiles on as many of these freelancing platforms as possible – the more nets you cast into the sea that is the world wide web, the more likely you are to catch a client.
Having created profiles on all the top freelancing websites, the next step to consider in building your online presence is creating a website dedicated to your freelancing services. This is something that many freelancers overlook, and although it isn’t exactly a necessity for freelancers, it can be very valuable. Even if few clients ever find your website on their own (after all, driving organic traffic to a website is its own unique struggle) referring potential clients to your website still helps you come across as professional and established, which can go a long way toward winning a job.
Lastly, consider creating social media profiles for your freelancing business as well. Unlike websites, these profiles are free to create and very simple to maintain. While you may not have too many clients discovering you through your social media, social media profiles, like your own website, help you build a professional online presence that clients will appreciate when they are deciding whether or not to hire you.
Find Your Niche
You may have heard before that it’s better to be a medium-sized fish in a small pond than it is to be a big fish in a big pond. Well, the same logic holds true for freelancing.
If you are able to specialize in a specific niche, it’s much easier to build a reputation as an expert in that area than it is to become recognized as an expert when you are a generalist. For example, if you are a freelance writer with a background in legal work, you may wish to create profiles that highlight your legal writing abilities. There’s certainly no shortage of law firms looking to improve the content on their websites and blogs, and by marketing yourself as a legal writing specialist you automatically become a more attractive hire to them than a writer who markets themselves as a generalist.
No matter what type of work that you are involved in, do your best to define your niche and go about marketing yourself as a leader in that niche. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to avoid taking on work outside the niche that you choose; someone who is intentionally mining for diamonds wouldn’t throw away a gold nugget if they found one. Defining a niche for yourself, however, will allow you to target specific clients more effectively while still keeping yourself open to a wide range of work.
Improve Communication Skills and Learn Time Management
Marketing a product and marketing yourself as a freelancer have some similarities, but they’re also quite different. Rather than creating advertising campaigns for your services, the majority of marketing yourself as a freelancer boils down to your communication with potential clients. The time management is critical for freelancers when they work on the projects and at the same time communicate with clients.
This communication includes the initial pitch that you make on a project that they post (or your response in the instances where a client finds your profile and pitches their project to you) as well as all subsequent communication between you and the client. While clients certainly have a lot to consider when deciding who to hire such as your profile, your work samples, and your reviews (more on these later), how you communicate with them also plays a major role in their final decision.
When communicating with clients, you want to come across as intelligent in your field, polite, and well-spoken. You’ll also want to take the time to understand what problem the client is trying to solve by hiring a freelancer and explain why your services are the perfect solution to that problem. Sometimes that problem may be as simple as a company that is lacking a logo, and other times it may be more nuanced such as a company that is wanting a website that better encourages customers to progress through their sales funnel. Either way, it’s up to you to identify the problem they are facing and effectively communicate how your services are an ideal solution.
All told, being a great communicator – particularly in the form of written communication since that is the medium through which you will communicate with most clients – is an essential skill for marketing yourself as a freelancer, so try to focus on how you can improve your communication skills wherever possible.
Don’t be Afraid to Ask for Reviews
Positive reviews are the lifeblood of freelancers working online. Just like an online shopper who checks the Amazon reviews of a product before they ever consider making a purchase, prospective clients understandably put much more trust in the unbiased opinions of other clients who have worked with you before than they do in your own declarations of how great you are.
Therefore, building a great reputation is an absolutely essential part of marketing yourself as a freelancer, and getting reviews from satisfied clients is how you build that reputation.
Many clients who are pleased with your work will leave you a review after the project is complete all on their own. Others, however, may not take the time. In most cases, it’s not because they are unwilling to write you a review but simply because the thought never crossed their mind.
If you are confident that a client is happy with your work and you politely ask them if they would mind leaving you a review, though, most will be happy to oblige. This small dose of proactiveness in gathering positive reviews can help you build a positive online reputation much more quickly.
Of course, in the same way, those positive reviews are worth their metaphorical weight in gold to freelancers, negative reviews can be a shackle on your freelancing career that never goes away, and they should be avoided at all costs. The moment you begin freelancing, make it your unwavering priority to satisfy every single client who works with you – even the ones who are difficult and demanding. You don’t have to work with them ever again if they turn out to not be worth the effort, but for any project that you have already agreed to complete, do everything that you can to avoid getting a negative review.
Final Thoughts
Knowing how to market yourself as a freelancer will set you apart from the many other freelancers who simply create an online profile or two and hope clients come their way, helping you to ensure that you reach your full potential as a freelancer.
If you take the time to build a professional online presence, develop your niche, communicate with clients in an effective manner, and seek out positive reviews, you will be well on your way to effectively marketing your freelancing services.