Full-time freelancers, how do you go about finding new clients?
This comment was posted to reddit on Mar 30, 2016 at 5:46 am and was deleted within 22 hour(s) and 11 minutes.
Full-time freelancers, how do you go about finding new clients?
After leaving a dev job of 10 years I've been freelancing for 18 months as my sole income. I've tried:
Cold email lead generation (VA collects leads from LinkedIn, I cold email them)
Reddit 'forhire' etc
Reaching out to my limited real-world personal networks (My bad here, I don't have many technical circles)
Signing up to lead generation emails (LetsWorkshop, others)
Signing up to Government RFP portals
They were all a waste of a massive amount of time and in some cases money.
What has worked for me:
Pay attention to what pays in job listings. E.g. Wordpress dev jobs don't pay well, so there's plenty of people around doing it, who probably have better portfolios and do it cheaper. You can't compete. Steer clear of it or you'll always be fishing around for shit work paying little $$$. Something that pays well in job listings, maybe RoR? There's less people fishing around for the work.
Have a rock-solid LinkedIn profile with examples of every piece of work you've done and problems you've solved, with all the possible keywords on it someone could search for to find you. Potential clients go to LinkedIn and search for "Angular Developer" when they need a developer - I want to be in that list of people. Even better if you're a 2nd or 3rd degree connection.
Meet people in real life. Meet for coffee, take notes. People on the internet don't have proper $$ to spend - people in real life do. If someone contacts you on the internet, try and meet them in real life.
Strangely, the better the budget your client has, the less they dick you around, and the more they have their shit together. My worst paying client is also my biggest time waster.
Put your phone number and email address everywhere. It makes you look 'real' to prospective clients.