One of the most significant issues freelancers face is the challenge of marketing one’s services efficiently. I realized this recently when checking the results of my Freelancer Friday Poll 070, one of the many surveys that I do on LinkedIn once a week.
It was shocking to learn that most freelancers spend more than 50% of their time searching for clients!
Imagine the business impact of that kind of use of time! So, is it easy to find freelance jobs? It really looks like a big struggle to so many. To millions, on a global scale, I’d imagine!
The competition is fierce as the internet with over 5 billion users enables anyone to work for almost anyone else.
If you set up a small grocery store, the location of the store does a big part of the marketing as the customers are typically those who happen to pass by and inevitably see the store.
In a freelance business that is done remotely, this kind of free marketing impact does not exist. Let’s take a look at what the results mean and how every freelancer could improve by systematizing the search for finding the best marketing approach.
Results of the poll
An absolutely wonderful amount of 211 freelancers responded to the poll. 27% of the respondents said they spend 1-10% of their work time searching for clients which is perhaps a reasonable amount of marketing and sales in a freelance business.
15% of them spend 11-30% of their time on the client hunt. The range I set for the options is rather huge on purpose as I had a hunch on what ranges might be needed. LinkedIn only allows four response options in a poll.
Now, the interesting part! The remaining part of the freelancers, 57%, i.e. a clear majority, spends at least 31% of their work time for searching clients. That’s insane! 31% is more than 12 hours a week assuming a standard workweek of 40 hours (which is unrealistically small in the case of many freelancers, perhaps).
The only thing crazier is that the largest portion of the respondents, 78 people which makes up 37% of them, estimated that they spend more than 50% of their time on the client-hunt. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I dropped my coconut when seeing these numbers!
Results of the Freelancer Friday poll 070.
Then, (after cleaning up my coconut mess,) I started thinking about what is behind this phenomenon… It looks like one-third of freelancers have no clear idea how to find clients!
So, here is a short analysis of why marketing and sales seem to be the biggest bottleneck in so many people’s freelance businesses.
How not market your freelance services
First of all, everyone who has a LinkedIn account knows how bad many people are at connecting with others in a meaningful way. Owners of small businesses whose marketing budget is minimal, inexperienced digital marketers who think the job is easy money for them, and a big bunch of starting freelancers who really have no clue about these things.
Fortunately, there are many who excel in connecting with their clientele, but in my experience, the bad examples are more common than the good ones by far. See what I mean?
Bad examples
Many freelancers fail to make even the simplest form of professional connection. Typically, the chat starts with a one-word line followed by a pointless, and usually quite bad, the copy-pasted pitch of the freelance services.
A random pitch at a random target, that’s all. No thanks.
Many times it is not enough just to send that mindless pitch without any kind of attempt to discover the needs of the person picked as the unlucky target, but when it comes to the most commonly used cliches, the chat just ends.
Here is another example.
No requirements for you, my friend. Better luck next time.
Just guess how many people asked for “requirements” just during the day I was writing this article! Well, I can tell you: several. 😉
Most of these miserable attempts of marketing freelance services seem to lack targets to start with.
In both of the examples above, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of targeting in place as I don’t think I look like a guy who needs more logos or T-shirts in particular. And as I already have a WordPress site, namely this one, why would I need more developers since it is already there?
It seems to me that the amount of bad examples of marketing leads to more bad marketing. Horrible marketing, actually. Perhaps, because so many freelancers are spamming each other mindlessly, it looks like a normal thing to do. Even if completely pointless.
Particularly on LinkedIn, thanks to its Block button, the opportunity to do business with someone is gone forever as the ability to send messages goes with blocking.
Thank you, LinkedIn, for the existence of the Block button!
Really bad examples
This is hardly all. It’s not only that many freelancers have no idea about who they should connect with or how to connect with others in general, many are just posing as freelancers while actually doing something completely else.
Perhaps these people are trying to market their clients’ services somehow, even if very badly. Or maybe they are thinking that as freelancing is so hot right now, “freelance web developer” looks far better in the profile title than a title of a full-time employee Code Monkey in a mid-size no-name company.
Here is someone whose title includes keywords “expert” and “freelance” who pressed the Connect button on my profile, didn’t bother to add any customized invitation, and started sending mere ‘hello’ messages. Would you have replied?
Someone posing to be a freelancer and yet selling services of some larger company. Who would buy?
This is just one of the many of the thousands of messages I’ve gotten on LinkedIn. There wasn’t even a feeble attempt to connect with anyone, just spamming away with some pointless messages and finally a copy-pasted ad of one’s business. Or even someone else’s business!
This is the opposite of how you could harness the world’s largest online platform of professionals. There are good ways to do it (you can google how), there are bad ways to do it (which don’t produce sales when we look at the results), and then there are some ridiculous attempts.
Some of the worst marketing attempts get simply too funny to be taken seriously.
I remember an honestly speaking quite absurd chat (or more like an attempt). It went along these lines.
A new freelancer connection first sent a page-long pitch about not his freelance service but a list of things that the company he actually works for does.
Obviously, I didn’t pay attention.
He then sent me a YouTube link which I didn’t click, obviously. (It looked like some random music video.)
I asked him to stop spamming and thanked him in advance for doing so… very politely.
All the previous messages were days apart from one another, but now after the mention of the word ‘spam’ he replied immediately by first highlighting how much value his messages were adding (which was absolutely zero) and by calling me rude.
After being asked to stop spamming (with the most polite tone), he called me rude!
That connection was quickly removed and blocked: No business here for you!
Hilarious examples
So, attempts that completely fail to make a business become positive experiences for all the wrong reasons. The attempt is so bad because of a lethal typo or something that you cannot do anything else than ROFLing away while you try to get your act together.
Here’s one of those.
Keep waiting, buddy, but don’t hold your breath.
It gets even funnier when the typos multiply. I think they breed inside these marketing messages somehow. 🙂
The “massage” theme seems so popular in my inbox. 🙂
My InMail inbox on LinkedIn is full of similar cases because I don’t even have time to remove and block all of these people, but every now and then there are great connections with whom I can do business. Really!
So, not all hope is lost, fortunately.
At this point, we can easily conclude that the ability to connect with potential clients and get them interested in your services is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the freelance industry. Would you agree?
Good.
So, is it easy to find freelance jobs?
Yes, but you got to get the approach right. That’s fairly obvious, but somehow, based on the evidence above and the results of the poll, it looks like it is so complicated for many.
But then, what works?
It’s hard to say because there are so many options! There are so many ways to get your name (and possibly your face too) in a place where someone might notice you and perhaps approach you. Inbound sales are way more efficient than outbound. Inbound means that someone connects with you seeking your services rather than you approaching potential clients.
A quick check with my freelancer friends produced this non-exhaustive list of approaches you could try that has brought good clients to them:
- Make a portfolio website and do some SEO, then track the traffic with Google Analytics
- Comment on relevant content on any online platform, e.g. Twitter and Facebook
- Participate in events online and/or IRL
- Write guest blogs in the popular media of your industry (these will be seen by many)
- Do traditional networking (just meet people)
- Create a profile and start posting about your work on LinkedIn
- Do projects on freelance sites until your profile looks better than most (those profiles rank high even on Google because of the site itself)
- Participate in discussion forums like Reddit (your name will appear to many)
- Write in-depth articles to the main media of your industry
- Set up a YouTube channel and produce content that appeals to your clientele
- Work with influencers who reach a lot of people in your field to get your story out
- Do direct email marketing (yes, many of my friends report that this still works!)
- Post pictures on Instagram (which is particularly good and easy if you work in a visual domain)
- Join a professional paid community where everyone is hoping to do business with others
- Write a blog about what you do or your insight on industry trends
- Do social media giveaways to attract the eyes of the many
The last three are something that I’ve used recently with great success myself. Yet, these are just ideas for you even if many other freelancers have managed to excel in harnessing several of them for their marketing purposes.
Whatever you choose to do, it is important to be systematic. Without measuring the progress your marketing effort would be random and you wouldn’t be able to optimize it to the point that you get inbound business.
To systematize the act of finding a good way to market your specific freelance services:
- Set goals, e.g. making your first sale via your new sales channel, then set monthly or quarterly goals, etc.
- Create a process that tests your own performance against those goals and measure it regularly (e.g. if sending 100 mere “hi Sir” messages to random people is not getting any reply, why would the next 100 work out better?)
- Drop the marketing channel if it doesn’t work for you well enough and try another one (and don’t worry about the effort wasted so far as continuing would produce only more waste!)
- Assess whether or not the marketing activity is something you like (this is important in the long run… it would be horrible to have a business process that you hate!)
Don’t underestimate the last point. You should like the act of marketing your services! That makes it not only more fun but a nearly invisible process that comes to you very naturally.
Also, you have to play to your strengths. Let’s take networking as an example.
In my case, I never truly liked being in big real-world events, so when I started as a freelancer, I didn’t feel like doing my marketing that way. It felt too much like going into scientific conferences to present my latest work without having the visibility of being the presenter.
But ever since I re-activated my LinkedIn account and started consciously increasing my online network, I came to like the little chats that started from some comment I made on someone’s post which led to connecting on the platform, which in turn led to an introduction Zoom call and soon after a consulting gig for me!
Now, engaging with other people in my field has produced me a recognized (coconut-powered) brand and more than enough visibility to get a number of opportunities for inbound sales. Just because my profile is visible to so many.
“Yes, but in my case, is it easy to find freelance jobs?”
Yes and no. The point is that you are conscious about the basics:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- Who others are trying to reach those people and how are you different?
- What channels are those people watching regularly?
This is where you can get it right or you get it all wrong. Knowing your industry and the value chain can play a crucial role. Is it YouTube where you would need to be seen by many, or is LinkedIn’s professional network where your clients do their businesses?
Everything depends on who your clients are and how you with all your unique skills manage to attract them. It may take some experimentation to get it right, but be sure to avoid the stupidest and the most unproductive ways of connecting with potential clients.
The important part is that you get started with a systematic process to figure it out. And keep experimenting with new approaches once the first one succeeds.
To learn how to use freelance platforms by building a highly specialized profile and strong track record fast to gain a significant amount of inbound business, check out this article: How to Start Freelancing and Make It to the Global Top – My First Year on Upwork.
You can read more about sales channels that I and some of my friends have built with great success here: Freelancer’s Sales Channels – 5 Proven Examples Other Than Freelance Sites.
