Freelancers work alone… not! Quite the opposite! Actually, I think, only the starting ones and the unsuccessful ones do. There are loads of upsides to networking as a freelancer, connecting with your peers, and working with them in a mutually beneficial way.
Obviously, networking with groups where you might find clients is a good idea too. Grow your network and rock the world!
Here are tips for networking as a freelancer for those who:
- Are not getting enough clients
- Are not visible enough online
- Lack referrals
- Have trouble in some of the areas of running a business
- Lack perceived credibility or social validation
- Are building their personal brands without much success
- Lack social validation
- Experience moments of poor motivation from time to time
Let’s proceed using my favorite formula: how not to do it, and then, how to do it.
How not to network
You know these guys the moment you open your message inbox on any social media platform. It’s just hopeless self-centered bad advertising that leads to making no connection and doing no business. Don’t do it like this!
Spam, plain and simple
A person thinks sending a cold brainless pitch leads to sales. On social media, it doesn’t. Even if you got the keywords right, what reason is there for a person to react or even not use the Block function. A bad poorly-targeted pitch is like a horrible stench all around you: people want to make sure they never cross paths with you again.
The usual case is that the message is all about your service, then you list your services, then there’s a bit more about how your service is so great (without any evidence), and finally, you say you need a job. This is followed by contact info. People won’t care. You’re not making it relevant to them.
A brainless pitch like this will get you blocked, nothing else.
Getting these kinds of messages is simply annoying. They don’t connect.
One of the most annoying things is that the targeting is all wrong. I’m not saying you should never do cold messaging/email, but if you do, you must get it right. It needs to go to the right people, so, especially on social media where all the information is right in front of you, if you don’t dig deep enough and use it, your poor targeting pisses off people rather than makes them talk to you.
Skip tracing, that’s my thing! No, wait, now I suddenly feel like a “tired landlord”.
It gets particularly pitiful and desperate-looking when the ad comes with “low price” or some other form of expression for a discount.
A similar issue arises when there is an obvious match with a keyword (in the below, ‘Upwork’), but the rest is nowhere near the need of the person. And unfortunately, anyone can tell if the person sending this message bothered to check the profile of the recipient.
Someone wanted to sell me Upwork reviews. Yeah, I’m so new to Upwork!
Poor targeting is presented in another way too. Many seem to send links and demand that you go and like their post. That won’t work either. First, demanding people to like you and your stuff makes them not like you. Second, when there isn’t anything obvious you have in common, any attempts to connect with a bad excuse will not resonate.
I did not like that post. I blocked the guy.
Not being completely annoying is already half a victory.
Messages that go horribly wrong
Sometimes, the messages come out so badly that all you can do is either laugh or cry. Or both.
English skills are an essential part of connecting with people in the times of the global economy, and you should give a chance to get the message across, but when it comes out as a request for ”massage,” and everything is also pure self-centered advertisement, the response in kind is all you’re gonna get (unless you get blocked straight away).
Somehow we ended this little attempt of making contact with a short discussion about massage.
(The “massage” theme seems to be so popular that I swore that every guy sending me a request for a “massage” will get my personal recommendation to visit a massage parlor close to their location.)
But no, that’s not the worst of it. Nowhere close. This is the record!
(No caption needed.)
Anything along these lines, particularly when you call yourself “best” something, won’t go anywhere. Except for getting blocked for good.
Pointless messages
Some people seem to think that a minimalistic approach is the best. Unfortunately, not being able to convey even the simplest form of a message with actual content probably is probably the bottleneck. It doesn’t lead to anything because people value their time and simply skip things that don’t resonate with them.
Yes?
Just saying “hi” doesn’t really open the conversation correctly either.
It takes two to tango, but rarely a mere “hi” only works on a dance floor when the other person cannot ignore you in the physical space. It doesn’t work online.
If you want to connect with someone, give them a reason. One of the best reasons is to go comment on other people’s posts, provide insight, and share your experience relating to the theme of the original post. Make yourself become a valuable member of the person’s network by participating in whatever is done in that network.
It’s not difficult, anyone can do it.
But you have to stop thinking about your needs and focus on what those other people do. Then your messages are read, comments are replied to, and little by little you make a genuine connection. Eventually, at some point, you both might realize that doing a little business thing makes perfect sense. So, in a sense, you managed to sell something without selling anything at all!
Exposure and visibility
One of the high-level benefits of networking is that you reach more people easily. When done right, it is both effective and efficient on top of being fun!
Getting the first opportunities
Someone, a young freelancer with a fresh degree in accounting hoping to become a full-time virtual assistant with a niche being bookkeeping connected with me on LinkedIn in the nicest possible way, commenting on some of my freelancing-themed posts.
Without selling anything we chatted about this and that regarding freelancing and other things. She read a few CoachLancer articles I pointed her to which resulted in more things to talk about.
We had several little interactions over a couple of weeks until I was convinced that she is a very nice person and a great connection to have in my professional network. She was pondering whether or not she should do a couple of jobs for free and I objected to the idea and advised her to think about the value of work in general. Every action that saves time or makes money for someone else should be compensated for. She was mainly considering remote unpaid intern positions…
At that moment I had a few bookkeeping-related things to be done so that I could save a little bit of time, so I thought instead of asking my usual connections, why don’t I give this person a chance? Nothing to lose, I thought, but everything to gain!
I shared my files with her and gave an example of the format I needed for the results. She did a great job in a very short time! And I was happy to pay a 100% bonus just to encourage her to deliver such great service to others and to kickstart her career!
That was a win-win in every possible way! Just because we connected in such a nice and positive way randomly on LinkedIn.
The other way to network your way to getting into business is by asking for advice in a way that doesn’t take much time for the one. Getting some success to others is one of the best ways to connect from the adviser’s point of view! People love to give advice.
Free advice resulted in someone landing his first job on Upwork. Great!
And once you get your things going, helping people who are in a position where you once were is one of the most natural things and one of the most efficient ways to create a network that benefits everyone. So, when you’re starting up, seek other people further down the path you plan to take and seek advice. You might actually get some.
Social validation
Social validation means that someone else vouches for your skills and competence. This is one of the easiest things to do and it’s the opposite of posting your own advertisements that most people don’t want to see anyway.
On social media, it is this simple:
- Browse for content where people are posting for jobs your friends might be interested in.
- Go and recommend some of your friends by mentioning some good aspects of their work.
Seriously, that is it! Below is a perfect example. I posted about needing a good freelancer to do a 3D animation job, and someone went and did exactly the above in an exactly perfect way. It doesn’t take more than this!
Someone in my network recommends someone he knows. This is a minimalistic but effective social validation.
Why this works is equally simple. That person did a good job for someone I know, so he could do good work for me too. Brilliant! This way, when someone else recommends you, the perceived quality of your work is higher than if you expressed your interest in the job directly yourself.
Everyone wins in this. You as the person recommending your friend get a better connection with the person you recommend your friend to. Your friend obviously likes you better. Your friend and the person you recommend your friend to might build a genuine connection. This is a win-win-win situation!
And reciprocity makes this work in a systematic way. You can take initiative and go recommend some of your connections by tagging them (depending on the platform in question works). They will see you recommending them. That makes them recommend you in return in most cases.
Social validation done right. It’s very easy to connect with people this way.
The more you give, the more you get. The only danger is that you might overdo it. That’s not great because it may make that connection of yours overwhelmed in a way that reciprocity cannot be done without spending an unacceptable amount of time on it. A few recommendations per person is probably enough for you to try this. Then reinforce it every now and then. You’ll make so many friends!
The same works outside social media also. Take a look at for instance the Freelancing Newsletter on this site and the Featured Freelancer of the Week section in it. Here are some of them.
CoachLancer’s Featured Freelancers know how to network to expand their businesses.
When providing that social validation to others, you can make valuable connections, genuine reciprocity, and life-long friends!
Branding
What is branding, exactly? In the case of freelancers, it’s all about standing out from a crowd of millions of other freelancers who are trying to appear unique and get more business. Why many seem to find it hard is because they cannot come up with anything original and unique, simply copy something they think “someone big” is doing right.
Actually, the copy-cat approach rarely works… if ever. Because uniqueness is the thing! What you can copy are some principles and tendencies, not the message or outlook. Playing your niche right is a big part of it too. By specializing correctly you avoid most of the competition in terms of branding too, not only in terms of your sales process via your freelancer profile.
You should probably try something that doesn’t require you to pretend or fake anything. Then, maintaining and growing your brand is easy and doesn’t feel like working on your brand, it’s a natural thing to do.
But when do you know your branding is on the right track? When other freelancers start to imitate your style! 😉 When my tagline contained “Lover of Coconuts” I soon saw someone having a tagline “Lover of Pizza”. 🙂 Why it probably didn’t work for that guy was that he wasn’t doing anything that would explain his love for pizza, so the pizza thing only stayed as a peculiar unrelated thing in his tagline. No benefits.
Referrals
Once your branding does the work for you, i.e., people connect with you because they see you as someone worth connecting with (for whatever their reason is). The next step is getting referrals. Referral means someone you (get to) know knows someone who you could do business with.
Here’s a great example of exactly that!
A completely silly but super-fun chat about coconuts soon led to a business opportunity by referral!
Just a funny coincidence and a great sense of humor connected me with someone in California. This person’s wishes were that I’d connect with some of her friends… one of them was planning to start a company that requires my CTO-as-a-Service.
Was it luck, was it fate or was it just a funny kind of branding done right? I don’t know…
But I do know coconuts connect in the funniest way!
Motivation and positive vibes
One upside to having a great network and visibility within it is that you can go and give positive vibes to others and get some in return!
Positive vibes spread like a plague… but in a much nicer way!
Positive vibes are needed when things don’t go well. Did you just lose a proposal battle on Upwork when you were counting on winning it? Go chat with some fellow freelancers, they know how it is. You’ll get peer support for sure.
Is there some other thing bothering you and there isn’t anyone to cheer you up? Go chat about some funny freelancing experiences with someone and you’ll feel better. And by doing that, you’re spreading those good vibes yourself also!
Spreading hope and positive vibes is good for everyone. It is not difficult to become a person with whom many wish to connect, but it might take time to reach the numbers that make it easy and efficient. It seems that on LinkedIn, reaching 10K followers makes most people see you as “someone big” which may first raise the curiosity of others so that getting more followers is easy.
Now, if the follower count is rather pointless a number as such, it does feed into getting more and more connections easily, inbound… even if you don’t do anything for a while. It’s the true connections that count most. People you spend time chatting with privately and commenting on posts both ways publicly.
This is, by the way, an issue with many people who have a lot of followers. They seem to get it wrong: they stop commenting and engaging with their connections and followers. Just preaching about their own message.
This makes it look like many influencers on platforms like LinkedIn don’t give a sh** who follows them as long as the number is big. Does that really lead to making meaningful connections or is that only you promoting yourself? Does that really make your freelance business better?
I think not. Being that guy who has a true connection with many other freelancers is the one in a position to help many by creating mutually beneficial opportunities. Focus on others and you’ll do fine.
