Understand your industry, your niche, and your potential clients
It’s always important to understand the freelance sector you’re working in, and how it might be evolving over time. When you’re working within an industry on a daily basis, it can be difficult to step back and see how technology, trends and client priorities may be changing.
Especially if you’re only talking with your existing clients. It’s obviously a good idea to keep current customers happy, and to understand their needs and concerns for the future as well as the present. But it’s potentially more important to get insights from those who didn’t hire you, to avoid the problem of survivorship bias.
Competitor research is a common recommendation when you’re new to self-employment, but when was the last time you researched businesses offering similar services, or generating interest in your local area? Have they changed what they offer, or how it’s presented to potential clients?
Invest in business assets to attract new clients
For a sustainable, long-term source of work, it’s often best to invest in business assets to attract new clients rather than short-term tactics. While you may be able to build a thriving career purely through personal recommendations, it’s always helpful to have places to direct potential new clients, or to maintain contact with them.
A business website has a range of benefits, including allowing you to use a recognisable domain name and email address for your freelancing or consulting. You can choose whether to create a simple portfolio site which allows potential clients to easily contact you, or develop a more comprehensive resource designed to sell your products or services more effectively without requiring you to be personally involved.
You can also use search engine optimisation (SEO) to appear in the results search engines show for relevant queries, which can bring new visitors to your website.
Building an email list is also a worthwhile method for staying in contact with current, former, or prospective clients. Emailing a newsletter or updates or a regular basis reminds people that you exist, and the services you offer, direct in their inbox. And lets you send out special discounts or promotions to individuals, or segments of your email list.
Make the most of your efforts
Make a shortlist of the 2-3 tactics which are most applicable to your business, considering the time, money, skills, and resources they’ll require, and the potential time before results start to appear.
Plan how you’ll use each one over the coming months, including setting some basic targets to aim for in terms of both output and what success may look like. And make sure you set up a way to track whether they produce any clients or work, whether that’s by asking how people have found your business or using tracking codes and your website analytics.
You’ll need to give each tactic some time to grow and start producing anything like consistent results before judging whether to continue with it, change your approach, or try something different. As a rough guide, sticking with something for 6 months should give you enough data and insights to show whether it needs a little more time, or should be swapped out.
If a new opportunity appears, then don’t be afraid to make changes. It could be the launch of a new social network, or the opportunity to appear in the media on a regular basis. Just make sure that if you’re committing to something new, you account for it by either dropping an existing plan, or by outsourcing something to free up more time.
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