I ask my Twitter audience questions like: “What’s your least favorite part about writing?” and I get answers like “Finding clients”.
This makes me sad.
My query was to find out what people don’t like about writing. The automatic association for some freelance writers is that writing is business.
When I ask questions like “What’s your favorite part about writing?” I get answers like expression and freedom and other wonderful words that I also love about writing.
Likewise, when I join Twitter Chats about freelancing, the same topics come up time and again:
Finding clients is hard.
And, honestly, I don’t get it.
Now, that might sound callous or arrogant. And maybe it is. Because, while I appreciate how hard it is to get new clients when you cold pitch and submit CVs, I can’t get my head around why people don’t deviate from this horrible process.
Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
So why do people persist in the process that’s “hard, tiresome, boring, painful, arduous, mind-numbing, and demoralizing”?
The answer is: because it’s habit. Remember that small word that causes so much pain or gain?
Let’s do something about that habit.
I have secured customers from two avenues during my career as a freelance marketer. Note, I use the term “avenues” rather than channels or platforms. I’m not about to tell you to go all in on Twitter or start writing life-coaching posts on LinkedIn. Neither am I about to tell you to start writing long-form blog posts to try and rank on Google.
The two avenues that have bought me all my customers are:
- Word of mouth referral.
- Content promotion.
1 - Finding freelance client via word of mouth referrals
Word of mouth referrals are when someone literally recommends you to their colleagues, peers, friends, bosses, competitors, anyone.
I’ve had 25 customers in the last 5 years. To validate that word of mouth referrals not only exist but work, I’ve counted back which of those 25 have been word of mouth referrals.
Care to hazard a guess?
6** of those (24%) have come from word of mouth referrals. Actually, 3 of them were from the same person.
And that’s only the referrals that became paying customers. Sometimes they weren’t a good fit. And we’ve already touched on when it’s okay to say no to new business.
**Editing note: I got 3 word of mouth referrals today. Two within my niche and one under the blanket of digital marketing. These came from two former customers and one person I network with online. Word of mouth is real, folks.
So, how do you get a word of mouth referral?
Other than having nice customers who do this naturally, it’s a two-pronged approach to obtaining referrals:
- Delivering great work.
- Asking for referrals.
Delivering great work speaks for itself. If you provide late or below-par work, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to get a referral.
Not only does the work you deliver have to be great, but it must also be a good working experience for your client. If they have to chase you after delivery dates or you ignore feedback, you’re no longer making your client’s life easier. And, after all, that’s why they hire you: you have a specialist skill they can’t complete (or complete as well) in-house.
But there is still no harm in asking for a referral if you’ve delivered great work. For example, when growing one client’s blog, we’d reached levels we could never have imagined. The impact on the business was so great that more than 90% of the pipeline could be attributed to work I’d completed. When the time came to reduce work with that particular client, I asked them if they knew anybody else who’d benefit from the work we’d done.
The result?
17 referrals.
And, no, that’s not a typo.
My client was so thrilled with my work that they wanted to spread the work with peers, former colleagues, and investors.
Sure, not all 17 turned out to be anything. But they all have quality recommendations for when they do.
That said, it’s hard to gain word of mouth referrals from existing customers only. And, what if you don’t have many customers yet?
That’s where my second avenue comes in. Let’s talk about content promotion.
2 - Finding freelance clients via content promotion
What’s the first thing you do after you complete your work for a client?
Okay, after you breathe a sigh of relief, what should you do?
Promote your content.
Why?
Content promotion makes up the rest of the 76% of customers that have come to me and asked if I can do work for them.
By “content”, let’s assume I’m referring to whatever the output or deliverable is for your client. It may not be content in the traditional sense of consumable content marketing (videos, blogs, graphics, etc.) but you have provided someone with something. If you have no output to share, simply sharing that you’ve done something is great too. If you have a graph, chart, table, code snippet, behind-the-scenes photo, anything, it unlocks a passageway to being found online.
As well as the objection of having nothing to share (from freelancers who aren’t writers or designers mostly), obtaining permission and dealing with NDAs are the next most common. I’ll come to those shortly.
I’m forever surprised when I ask freelancers about their processes and they don’t include promotion outside of sharing on their favorite social media.
Don’t get me wrong. Social media is great. As I was writing this book, I shared an ebook that I worked on 9 months ago on LinkedIn. Within an hour, I had a message in my DMs asking me to create the same for a new client. Since completing this book, I’ve completed that ebook. It netted me £7,500 ($9,000).
It doesn’t always work that way. That’s why you need to consistently be distributing your content.
A thorough content promotion process, which only needs to be bullets of where to share, can take eyeballs on your content and outputs from zero to hero. But eyeballs don’t pay the bills. However, when the right people read your content, you stand a higher chance of getting business to come to you.
That’s why content distribution is so hard. And why so many marketing teams deprioritize it. Finding the right places takes effort, time, and research. Writing a new blog post feels like you’re contributing more. Creating a new infographic seems like everybody is busy. Creating new code when you haven’t tested your previous shows your client you’re efficient. But only on the front end. And, as any business-savvy person will tell you, it’s what happens behind the scenes (or after publication or handover in the case of a freelancer) that makes businesses money. We’re talking about optimization for search and promoting content in the right place.
To put that into context, I can attribute over $170,000 worth of work in the last 18 months to content promotion.
Over the last 5 years, I’ve collated where works, doesn’t work, and only works for certain content, so I have a plan of where to share my content when it’s ready to be released into the wild. Sure, I rely a lot on traffic from Google. But, in the example of one post in particular, I gained an extra 67% worth of views compared to just hitting publish and letting people find it on Google.
“Leaving dollars on the table” is an overused phrase in the marketing world. But, in the case of content distribution versus relying solely on SEO and a bit of luck, you’re not only leaving dollars on the table (i.e. missing customers who’d find your work and approach you) but you’re creating more work for yourself in terms of cold pitching and looking for gigs.
I promise you that promoting your content is a whole lot more validating too. Sharing something you made and getting feedback is invaluable. And don’t get me started on the dopamine hit when you get a bunch of likes or someone shares something you created.
Yes, finding where and how to promote your content is hard. That’s why I created my own checklist for others to use. Sure, you might not use all of them. But for less than $1 per tactic, I’d wager you spend a lot more unbilled time tiring yourself out applying for gigs.
You can download my content promotion checklist here: bit.ly/freelancepromochecklist
And, if you do, you unlock a code for 33% off my blogging course too.
See what I did there? I just promoted my checklist and my course in my book!
Obtaining permission
The number one objection to promoting content that you’ve created is the fear that your customer won’t let you.
Let me be straight with you here.
They wouldn’t pay you if they didn’t want people to see it.
As a business owner myself, when I commission someone to write a blog post or create a graphic for me, I want them to share it.
Why?
Because more people will see it!
If you can’t get over this imaginary hurdle, there are some things you can do to:
- Ask.
- Do it anyway.
When you ask your client what their content promotion process is, you might even get some extra work too. If content distribution is a weakness of theirs, you might get a gig writing social media copy or tacking on some outreach time as a deliverable in your retainer.
If it’s all taken care of in-house, a simple “I assume you’ll want me to share it too?” puts you on the front foot. Why would they say no? You just offered to amplify the asset they’re paying you to create.
Even in the case of ghostwriting, the act of sharing the post without publicly calling out you wrote it goes a long way. When someone reads it and thinks it’s great, they’ll ask you if you know the author. And that’s you!
When you do it anyway, there are two outcomes:
- Your client asks you to take it down.
- Your client thanks you for sharing their content.
Use scenario judgment to gauge whether this is going to lose you a customer or gain you a fan.
In most cases, however, if your name’s on it, not promoting it is counterproductive to your freelance business.
Oh, but then there’s the dreaded NDA…
Dealing with NDAs
NDA stands for Non-Disclosure Agreement. This means your client doesn’t want you to disclose that you’re working with them, a certain product, or part of their business. In the case of security or sensitive topics, this is fairly commonplace.
If “the brand” is the author of blog posts, you might see this too. But it’s not the end of the world for promoting your content.
You have two options when a client proposes an NDA:
- Challenge it.
- Accept it.
If you challenge the NDA, there are two scenarios:
- The client removes the NDA and you continue your work (and are able to promote it later on).
- The client insists on the NDA and you continue your work as they proposed.
The worst case scenario is they say no. So there really is no harm in asking.
When you promote enough content, success, or metrics, you draw people toward you. Customers come to me because they want me to replicate the success I’ve had with previous customers.
One major thing that helps with drawing people towards you is being known for a specific niche. This could be industry-specific, asset-specific, or skill-specific.
In chapter five of The Autonomous Freelancer, we take a deep dive into what being niche actually means.
