Freelance
Table of contents
Resources
- link Finding Clients as a Freelancer by Paul Boag (4 hours 11 minutes) (May 28, 2022)
Don’t market. Don’t sell. Be helpful.
Goals
- Why you are struggling to find clients.
- Define the market you wish to target.
- Get the attention of your audience.
- Get permission for ongoing contact.
- Maintain and growing your audience.
- Turn leads into projects.
What we want from marketing
- More - More work to generate money during the quiet time.
- Better - If you are stuck working for the same type of client, like making small websites which are is a heavy price sensitive area, then you might want better clients.
- Easier - Rather than pitching your work, which requires time and energy, it is easier if clients want to work specifically with you.
1. Why you are struggling to find clients
- Relying too heavily on word of mouth.
- Passive - Your revenue is dependent as asking clients for recommendations.
- Limiting - Word of mouth happens within sectors and companies of similar size. So it limits you to break into new sectors or gain bigger clients.
- Risky - Since word of mouth happens within different groups of a large organization, you can become dependent on one or two large clients whose departure would be devastating.
- Wasting money on online ads or using marketplaces.
- Places like Upwork tend to attract smaller businesses who primarily choose based on price.
- Most of the large projects on these sites already have a supplier, but due to compliance they have to post the project.
- There is no relationship. You are just another supplier.
- Content marketing (blog, podcast) challenges.
- Too much noise - Hard to get people’s attention with so much noise online.
- Gone and forgotten - Even if somebody sees your content, they will quickly move on and be unlikely to remember you when they are looking for services you apply.
- Locaking time - Producing content is time consuming, which you could have used for doing client work.
Using email as a solution
- B2B lives in email - Primary means of communication for almost all businesses.
- You will be seen - Poeple may not read every email they receive, but they will see it. Same is not true for social mead.
- You will be read - The percentage of people that read your email are pretty high.
How to make people aware of your email
- Subsribe them with a sales funnel.
Sales funnel
- Journey you take a prospective client on from first hearing about you to the moment they sign up for your service.
- Steps in a sales funnel
- Attract attention.
- Build a connection.
- Keep engaging.
- Encourage contact.
- Close a sale.
Why build sales funnel
- Targeted - Target a particular group of clients we would like to work with.
- Consistent - Provide’s relative consistent and reliable source of new clients.
- Controllable - By tweaking your sales funnel and the messaging, you can control the type of client and work you win. If you want to work on prototyping, you can send the next 3 emails discussing that, and that should attract prototyping related work.
1. Attract attention
- Identify and macke contact with audience.
- For intiial contact, do not sell as they are not ready to buy.
- Instead approach them for research purposes and to gather feedback. This includes personalized email asking them for help.
- Later, introduce them to a product that we are creating and ultimately want to sell to them. Involve them in the creation process of the product. This builds credibility.
- Build further awareness of our lead magnet (free item or service taht is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details) through guest blogging, speaking , social media.
2. Build a connection
- Make your product available for free to the people you contacted. Inside the product, ask them to sign up for the email.
- For example, you create a resource that shows how to make websites performant. In the resource, you have a sign up for newsletter link (the newsletter contains more performance related info).
- So first, you gave users value by giving them info for free. Second, you gave users value in your free email newsletter. And at no point, you sold anything to the user.
3. Keep engaging
- Once people are on the mailing list, we will keep them engaged by providing regular and valuable content, so that they are still subscribed when you want to sell.
- This also ensures that they remember you when they need your services.
- For example, if you have a newsletter on website performance, then you will be the first person that comes to the reader’s mind when they want to hire someone for making their website more performant.
4. Encourage contact
- Use maillings to encourage your subscribers to make personal contact with you and reach out it they need advice and support. This helps build a relationship.
- Relationship is important because people often don’t hire based on skillset. But rather if they like you, like the way you think, the way you behave, your professionalism, your attitude, your personality.
- You can say in the newsletter, “What I’ve shared today maybe is a little bit complicated, maybe you don’t get it, maybe you have got questions, maybe your circumstance is unique. Drop me an email, I’m here to help.
- Always reply back to people. If a student reaches out, then one day the student will become the employer.
Referrals
- For a high end service, like software engineering, referrals (where client gets 10%) seem out of place.
- Paul tried and it did not work. Paul tried it with email (people refer to subscribe to email), it didn’t work much as well. He tried gamification as well, where people get points for doing certain actions, but that is again out of place for software engineering.
2. Define the market you wish to target
Segment market by specialization.
Why specialize
- Less competition - Less competition and less pitching for work, and fewer other people can offer what you offer. Because we are focusing on a specific audience, we can tailor the message to better resonate with them.
- Seen as en expert - You are seen as an expert in the particular field, and become the “go to” person for that kind of work. Since you are targeting the same group of people, they will hear from you more often and come to know your name.
- Higher fees - Because fewer people can do what you do to the same standard, you can demand higher fees.
Specialization does not mean
- Turning away clients - Specialization allows us to focus our marketing effort. So we may primiarily talk about our specialism, but that do sen’t mean we would turn away other types of work.
- You will lack enough work - This mostly comes from geographic contraints, and not thinking globally.
- The work will get boring - Specialization can be short term, and you can update your marketing campaign for different areas in future.
How to start with specialization
- Take it slow, until you know it will work.
- Do not redesign your website to focus exclusively on your specialization, as you will lose work outside of that area.
- Instead, create a separate landing campaign with a landing page aimed at the audience you are trying to reach.
Find minimum viable audience
- Can they afford your service or are the size of client you wish to target.
- How often do they switch companies? If they regularly move, your reputation will move on with them.
- Do they talk with one another? Some sectors are very protective of their intellectual property, so there is little communication between companies.
- Is there community? Does the sector have dedicated blogs, conferences, and online communities?
- Are there figures within the community who are already well known and respected? Do they seem approachable and friendly?
Research and find clients
Research your sector and pick people from that. Create two lists
- Influencers - Individuals, meetups, mailing lists, forums, events, blogs, communities and membership organizations.
- You can contact your existing contacts in the sector. Ask what publications they read, events they attend.
- Use google search with words like conference, meetup. Also, pay attention to who is advertising on your sector keywords.
- Use LinkedIn, Twitter and look for influencers, companies, and other groups in the sector.
- Clients - List of prospective clients you would like to work with within this sector.
- Make a list of 30-50 organizations you want to work with, starting with companies you know and like.
- Add recommendations from personal contacts, add direct and second order connections on LinkedIn.
- Use Google Search for the rest.
Next step is to identify the specific people we want to contact at these organizations.
- Identify the role of the person we want to contact.
- For small companies, it is usually the founder.
- For single product companies, aim for the digital lead or head of marketing/IT depending on what sector you targeting.
- Multi-product companies is complicated, and better to avoid initially.
- Use LinkedIn to find the exact people.
- Company website often lists the senior people.
- If LinkedIn does not work, reach out to somebody eles and ask who the head of marketing is (make an excuse like I am doing a research study).
- If that doese not work, try emailing the catch all email address.
- If that does not work, give up and try another role or company.
Next step if to find their email address
- Use email addresses of other people at the company and make a guess.
- Use emailhippo to validate the email address.
- Use FindMyLead to lookup emails.
- Try LinkedIn and send message directly.
3. Get the attention of your audience
After you have a list of people to contact, how do you reach out to them. Make sure the message does not involve selling. Instead do this.
- Ask for their help. Ask people to share their experiences and wisdom.
- Introduction. Do not send them a message with the expectation of a reply. Introduce yourself, and explain we are researching the sector. Then ask them if they would like to know more about this.
- Survey. Follow up with an email with a link to survey that we will explain will inform our report. Offer the report for free in exchange of participation, as well as site review.
- Report. Finally, let them know the report is ready. Direct them to a landing page, where they can download the report and also sign up for an email series covering the report in more details.
- Provide value in return, in exchange of them sharing their experience.
- A report. Provide an industry report that gives them insights into their sector and the kind of challenges and best practices about how to deal with that.
- Talk about issues in your sector. Also, filter the issues in a way that it focuses on the area of the sector you want to work in.
- What problems you want to draw attention to.
- Note: Alternatively, you can use app, tool, code library instead of report as long as it is free.
- A short site review. Say “Thanks for giving us a little bit of your time to share your experience with us. In return of that if you want us to do a quick first impressions review of your website, then we would happily do that”.
- Regular emails. Keep people engaged by sending them regular vise via email that helps them overcome the challenges they face in their role.
- A report. Provide an industry report that gives them insights into their sector and the kind of challenges and best practices about how to deal with that.
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