Get Started on Your Freelancing Career
Here are my top tips on getting started with your freelancing career, I thought it would be a great to share with my fellow and aspiring freelancers. This is by no means a definitive guide, these are just the steps I have taken in the past that have worked for me. I would love to know what tips you’d like to share!
Past Clients
You might be fortunate enough where you’ve had a couple of clients on the side of your full-time work so make sure to get in contact with them as they know you and your (great) work already and what to expect. I always like to start off by emailing all my past clients asking about their upcoming projects and if I’d be a good fit again.
I like to use Mailshake (not affiliated, just a great product 😜)to send out the emails, as I can send them out in one click and it also sends follow up emails if they haven’t replied.
New Clients
Finding new clients is always a good idea to increase workload of course, as well as being a great way to push yourself and grow as a freelancer. The way I like to find new potential clients is to first scout out the local area for agencies in my field (for me, that is web development and design agencies). Look around their site and see if you like the work produced and if it’s something you’d like to see yourself doing, because the last thing you want to do is working on a project you have no passion for, so if it checks all the boxes find their contact email and note it down with the name of the agency.
Once you have collected information on all the agencies you’re interested in working with, put the emails into Mailshake or similar to contact them all simultaneously. In the email, give the potential new client a brief overview of yourself and your skills, ask if they work with freelancers and if you’d be a good fit for any projects. Finish with a link to your portfolio — keeping it simple is key, no one wants to read a wall of text, let your portfolio do the talking.
This should get the ball rolling with emails back and forth on how you’d fit in and what project you could be working on next! Sometimes, of course, you may not get a reply at all, but don’t panic, because as you can imagine they’ll just be busy. If no reply, sometimes a week or so later I’ll just send a gentle reminder, asking if they would like to meet for a cup of tea or a chat over the phone. This can also be done automatically on Mailshake (again, not sponsored I promise).
Testimonials
Your clients have always been head over heels for your work and always can’t thank you enough, so why not get them to write up a little testimonial? You can put this onto your portfolio letting other potential clients know you’re to be trusted and that you’re excellent at what you do.
Update Your Portfolio
You’ve done some pretty awesome work, right? Go on, show it off! Get a case study together of what you did on that particular project, what you were asked to do, what you had to overcome, the final results and what you learned from the whole thing. Shopify have written a great article on how to structure a case study, definitely worth a read.
Maybe you use Dribbble as your portfolio, if so, create a project on Dribbble for that particular work. Simply split the different parts of the project up into shots, going into detail in your description about why and what you’ve done.
Personal Projects
We’ve all got those personal projects we haven’t finished or only bought the domain for. No better time than now to get started on those again or even a brand new project! It doesn’t have to be anything huge, maybe it could be something like a little tool that people could find useful or some code that could save someone hours of work. That’s what I did with Simple Typography a year or so back. I aways found myself writing code for type so I give myself a base to work from and open sourced it to the community.
All of these kind of personal side projects give you that little bump in notoriety and also can help and inspire people. It could also help you land your next project and push future clients your way.
Housekeeping
These are just two simple things I like to do to keep me less cluttered.
- Unsubscribe from those emails that you delete without opening or those that are not much use to you, this clears up the amount of unless emails coming in. Try to get as close as you can to your inbox being 0. How fresh will that feel?
- Turn off the notifications on your phone that distract you from what you’re doing during your working hours. Try and keep it to the things important to you in that time, for me it’s my emails and client chats.
I hope that these few tips help you out . Again, I would love to know what tips you’d like to share!
