Transcripts
1. Introduction: In my last class, I
shared my story and advice on finding a remote work career path
that works for you. And in this class, I'm
going to dive deeper into the specific path of
freelancing and share my advice for finding
clients and building a career as a 100%
remote freelancer. Picture this. You wake up
anywhere in the globe, open your computer,
and get to work. For me, that has been my reality for almost ten years now, traveling to over 30 countries
while working remotely, and that is the power
of online freelancing. Freelancing online can be your ticket to location freedom, time freedom, or
simply a side hustle. And in this skill share class, I'll break down the various ways to find clients so
that you can take the skills you already have and monetize them
with freelancing. Within this skill share class, we'll cover why focusing
on client attraction is usually a better
long term strategy compared to prospecting, where to find clients
in person and online, how to attract them with
content creation, and more. In addition to
watching the videos, you'll also be able to
post about yourself and your goals in the
class project section of the class and
receive feedback on your plan if you so
choose to do so. So without fever ado, let's jump on to the videos.
2. Attraction vs Outreach: As a promoter of the remote
freelance lifestyle, I have a lot of people asked me how I find work as a freelancer. And I've realized
that for me and a lot of other
successful freelancers, work is not something I find myself actively searching
for most of the time. These days, I find myself naturally attracting
clients based off of my previous work and
the network I've built over the last
decade of my career. That being said, you
don't need to build a career for ten years to
attract clients to you. In fact, you can
attract clients at any stage of your
freelance career. The alternative, which you
can also do at any stage of your career is reach out to
potential clients yourself. A lot of the principles
for success, whether the client
reaches out to you or you reach out to the client,
are the same for both. But I think for all of us,
the goal should be to move from outreach to attraction
as much as possible. Attracting clients
has a few benefits over prospecting for them. Number one, it's obviously
less time consuming compared to actively looking
for clients, and number two, you tend to have more leverage and be treated more favorably, given that they are the
ones asking to work with you as opposed to the
other way around. If you're not attracting
clients just yet, then of course, don't beat yourself up about
it, but like I said, I think you should definitely be thinking about
what you can do to get clients to come to you instead of having to go to them. That being said, when it
comes to attracting clients, there is just one downside
that I can think of, and that is that you're not really in control of the timing. A client could reach out to you tomorrow or six months from now. It's hard to know when
exactly you'll get the call. Ideally, you'll
have clients lining up the door to work
with you specifically, and you can just
handle projects one after the other as you make
your way down the wait list. But in reality, it doesn't
often happen like this. Of course, it highly depends on the exact kind of
work you're doing. But for someone like me
who is a web developer, if I'm not available to take on a project when the
client is ready, then chances are the client
will simply find someone else with the capacity to do it and is ready to go right
then and there. One week you might
have two projects come across your desk at once, the next week, nothing. It's just the nature of the
beast for most freelancers. But in those periods where
work is not coming in, you can always go looking
for clients yourself. You might actually do a
mixture of both, and in fact, most of the places I
will recommend you to find clients in this
skill share class, you can both attract
and prospect clients. However, as your career
grows as a freelancer, so too should your reputation. And that means that you
should be attracting more and more clients as you progress throughout your career, rather than always having to
reach out to them yourself.
3. Finding Clients In-person: Let's start with the
most classic of the ways to meet new clients in person. In person is the best way to meet clients in terms
of gaining trust, but also the least scalable. It's a high quality, low volume sort of game. On the Internet, you can scale your message and marketing to reach millions or billions
of people worldwide. But in person, even if you
went to a big conference, you'd only be able to reach a few hundred people
at best per event. The other hand,
through the Internet, you can reach across
the far corners of the Earth to meet and connect
with potential clients, but at the same time, your competition
can do so, as well. So the advantage of in person is that you'll have
a better chance of cutting through the noise and connecting in person
with another human, which at the end of the
day, should be your goal, even if you were to meet this
prospective client online. For me, personally, in person networking was where
I started out. When I was trying to become a freelans web developer
back in 2015, I would go to this
co working space in my city called River City Labs, a tech focused co working
space in Brisbane Australia, where I took up
every opportunity to attend open meet
ups for members. During the day, I
would use this co working space as an office
for learning decode, while at the same
time networking and gaining visibility with
potential clients. For me, just by attending these meet ups and telling
people what it is I do, I was able to find my
first few clients. In fact, some of you who know me well will also know that I found my first ever full time job as a developer through an in
person meetup as well. So for me, it was a great
way to get started. Obviously, this method
of finding clients wasn't going to work after
I left my home city, but to get started
in freelancing with minimal know
how or network, I can't think of a better
way I could have done it. So to make a list of
the possible places you could meet
clients in person, we can definitely
put on the list co working spaces, ideally, ones with a focus on
the field you work in and open industry meet ups. For example, the
one where I found my first job was a meet
up for Ruby on Rails. In addition to these,
other places you can meet clients are relevant
conferences in your field, hackathons or such events
where you're able to team up and use your
skills in a team setting, and business lunches,
breakfasts, or dinners, where you can meet
business owners that fall into your target market. Basically, anywhere where your potential client
is likely to hang out and be open to meeting new people is
a good place to look. It could be a pretty broad list, and it will, of course, vary
from industry to industry, but a common piece of
advice I used to hear, which I wouldn't really
recommend is looking to friends and family
for your first projects. In my experience, unless the friend or family
member is truly serious about the
service you're offering and not just doing
it to help you out, it's not good training
for finding real clients, nor is it likely to result in solid industry
recognized experience. If your ideal client just so happens to be a friend
of yours, perfect. But otherwise, I
wouldn't recommend it. Instead, I'd recommend
figuring out where exactly your target clients
are hanging out in person. And if you can,
start hanging out in these locations and putting
yourself out there. And in these
situations where you meet potential
clients in person, you don't need to lie,
nor should you lie and say that you're a super experienced freelancer
when you're not. Especially in person, people will appreciate
your genuineness, and you might just be
surprised how many of them will actually
give you a chance. Remember that people buy from people and they buy from
people that they trust. So when you're making these
in person connections, truthful, be authentic, and start your freelance
career the correct way because you don't
want to destroy your reputation before you've even had the chance
to build it up.
4. Finding Clients Online: When it comes to in
person networking, you need to have physical
access to your target market, and that's going to be difficult for a lot
of freelancers, especially when your
target market may come from other countries
with stronger currencies. While in person networking can be a good hack when
you're starting out or later when you're
trying to attract top tier clients who aren't
actively searching online, most of the time,
you're probably going to be looking
for clients online. The two best websites, in
my opinion for finding freelance clients are
Upwork and LinkedIn. On both of these
platforms, you can both prospect for clients as well
as attract them to you. The main difference
between the two is that Upwork is specifically a
freelance marketplace, while LinkedIn is a
professional network. It's not just for freelancers. So while Upwork has been set up specifically for business owners to connect with freelancers, LinkedIn is a little
bit more broad. On both platforms,
you need to treat profile optimization
as a priority, and this is what prospective clients
will be judging you on and is important for both
outreach and attraction. While an upwork profile and a LinkedIn profile are
slightly different, a lot of the same
principles apply to BF and other similar platforms. Here on skillshare.com, I have existing classes for both
Upwork and LinkedIn, where I go into more specific
detail on each platform. While I definitely recommend you check out Upwork and LinkedIn, there are near infinite ways
to meet clients online. One of the methods we haven't discussed here that applies to a range of different websites is to join the conversation. This could be on
any platform where relevant conversations
are happening online. It could be industry
relevant Facebook groups, slack channels,
discord channels, Twitter threads, or forums. The list goes on. But how this works is that
you start to join the conversation
and add value to other members of that
group or community, value that is relevant to the
service that you provide. While you are kind of
working for free here, giving out free help and assistance to
prospective clients, it can be a great way to build up credibility and trust with professionals and
your niche and break through in a competitive
marketplace. Personally, I'm not a
huge fan of this method, as it does require
a lot of work. But for those of you who
have the time and passion to be investing in this
as a long term strategy, at least until you
have a few clients under your belt,
it is an option. Ideally, as I always say,
you want to be attracting clients to you with a
strong search engine, optimized profile or website. That being said,
your online presence needs to reach your
prospective clients somehow, and that somehow can be
through your content, which is exactly what we'll
cover in the next video.
5. Attracting Clients with Content: Looking back on my career, besides the network and
reputation I've built over the years of being
a web development freelancer in the
Shop of Eye Niche, I've also gained probably
an equal number of work opportunities
by putting out relevant online
content on my subject. For me, this is mainly through my YouTube channel code
with Chris the Freelancer, which is actually set up to
teach web development skills, but has also earned me attention and interest from
potential clients. Collectively, the work I've
gained off the back of my YouTube channel has earned me tens of thousands of dollars. For me, personally,
it's something I want to invest more into and something I highly
recommend you guys to do, as well as it can be
a phenomenal asset for your freelance business. I mean, imagine your face floating around the
Internet reaching tens or hundreds of new potential clients
while you sleep. It's happened for me and it
can happen for you, too. But YouTube is not
the only place you can post online content, of course, depending
on your industry. There could be numerous
locations online that your prospective clients
might be looking for someone with your skill set. I'll leave that up to
you to determine where exactly your target market is
discovering online content. It could even be on a
mobile first platform like TikTok or Instagram. Or a lot of conversations around your niche could
be happening on Twitter. You could be growing an
audience on there, too. Of course, I've also got to give a special mention
here to LinkedIn, as it is the social media
network for professionals. If you're targeting
business to business, LinkedIn is an obvious location to try and build an audience. Remember, no matter
what your skill set, you ideally want to move
into client attraction as opposed to having
to consistently outreach to potential clients. If you're able to build
up your influence and reach as a content
creator in your niche, honestly, there's probably
no better way to do it.
6. Partnerships: While waiting for
a flight recently, I received a call from
an SEO specialist to whom I referred
a potential client. The specialist got back
in touch with me as he determined that the client
probably needed a new website, and in conjunction with a dedicated web designer
and the specialist in SEO, there was potential there
for me to build it. You see, a lot of digital
services are specialized but have overlap with
other skill sets. For me, as a front
end web developer, I could be collaborating
with designers, SEO specialists,
online ad experts, and back end IT technicians. Without knowing
what it is you do, it's hard for me to tell what other disciplines run in
parallel with what you do, but chances are they do exist. Partnering with auxiliary
service providers can be a huge source of
leads as a freelancer. In fact, I'll give
you an example. Back in the day, I used to
work as a developer for a digital agency in
Melbourne, Australia. But later after I
left the agency, they decided they
weren't going to do web development
in house anymore. So what did they do? They
started sending me through any web development work that came up in their own business. See in the industry
that I work in, a designer and a developer
are common collaborators. But as a general principle, if you're any kind
of specialist, you could always partner with more of a generalist for when their clients eventually need specialist advice in
your specific area. So, for example,
you're a marketer who specializes in
performance marketing, which for those of
you who don't know, is basically the
industry term for someone who creates online ads. In this case, you
could partner with a generalist marketing
agency or a freelancer and take on any
specialist work that the generalist is not the
best equipped to handle. These are just a few examples. The principle is that you
should always be looking to build these relationships
where possible. In my experience, it's
not always the case that a service provider is the
ideal fit for a client, nor that the service
provider has the capacity to work
on the project. In these cases, service
providers can still add value to their clients through
a targeted recommendation, and you can be the
beneficiary of this. It's basically a win win
situation for everyone involved.
7. Conclusion: So, guys, armed with
the information provided to you in
this short class, I want you to put
together a plan of how you're going to look for
and or attract clients, and I want you to post that in the class project section
of this skill share class. Be sure to include details
on what your skill set is, what platforms or physical locations you're
going to target, and your overall strategy
to win these clients over. Also, make sure to follow
my skill share profile here to be notified when
my next class comes out, as it's highly likely to be
the sequel to this one today. For any questions on the
course material, as always, feel free to drop a comment
on any one of the videos, and if you've enjoyed the class, I encourage you to leave
a positive review. Thanks for watching, and I'll
see you on the next one.
Christopher Dodd, Shopify Web Developer & Educator
