With your business growing, its always one of your top responsibilities to find clients and try to convert them to long-term work. Here are six sources that you can try.
One of the most common questions asked by new freelance writers is “How can I get clients?” What follows is an indication of the diverse ways you can connect with potential clients both online and off.
Mailing them directly
Targeting direct mails is always dominant way to boost your business. Doing your research about how direct mail works is important if you intend to make an impact as it can also be expensive.
A decent direct mail campaign introduces what you do and offers the reader some advantage to getting in touch with you immediately. In order to win your clients, always consider what kind of discount or bonus might prompt a total stranger to hire you. It’s crucial that your direct mail list is just as significant as the advertisement itself, so judiciously curate who you’re sending your mail to since you’re paying for each piece.
Network System
Although networking might seem like an old-school way of making business, but it can be effective, even in this digital world which we live in. That’s because it can often be a lot simpler to forge a personal connection with someone when you meet in person.
Some places like chamber of commerce meetings, educational seminars, networking lunches and conferences are places in which you might connect with your ideal clients. This method of marketing requires a lot of honest investigation and groundwork. It also depends on the factors like whether your ideal clients are present at these events and, more important, open to hearing pitches.
Emailing directly
Another effective can be reaching out to prospective clients over email. A good step can be making a list of brands you’d love to do business with or people you know you’d like to forge a personal connection with. Then you’ll need to hunt down the email addresses for these companies. There are companies who wanted to work with and wrote personalized letters to those companies. With the required upfront work of doing your research and custom writing each letter, their response rate was better.
You’ll have a much better chance of a person reading and responding to your email with a carefully written, personalized pitch. By using your email-tracking tool can significantly boost in seeing which versions of your emails are getting the most interest in terms of being opened by potential clients.
One should always try out things though and set a number-based goal for cold email pitching. A lot of professionals recommend sending numerous pitches before being effective with a tool like cold email marketing. As your pitching skills will get better, you’ll also learn what type of subject lines and pitches work overall from how many potential clients are responding to you.
Linking with potential freelance writing clients on LinkedIn
With LinkedIn, you can control the power of instant connections and getting your pitch and work samples directly in front of people who are making crucial choices about content marketing. The platform also helps break down the barriers between you and potential clients, making them just a connection or conversation away. Furthermore, business professionals might be more open to replying to a message on LinkedIn or interacting with you there than through an email or a telephonic call.
However the platform’s opportunities aren’t limited to only this form of passive marketing. It can help you to grow connections and have a warm pipeline of leads at the ready at any time by you being active on LinkedIn as a marketer, and forming connections, participating in groups, monitoring your own group, and more.
Some of the key things to keep in mind with your LinkedIn profile:
- Writing a tagline of what you do and who you do it for
- Including all the facilities and services you offer clients in the overview section of your profile always helps
- Pulling your LinkedIn connections list to ensure that you’re only connected with your vital clients such as marketing professionals, C-suite executives, digital agency owners, and CEOs
Using people you already know to multiply your freelance writing business
You may already have people in your instant circle who’d like to work with you or could refer you to others, which could make breaking into the world of freelance writing simpler. Begin with telling your existing field of connections about your choice to launch a freelance writing business. This includes a post on LinkedIn and your own Facebook page if you have a lot of potential connections who might hire you for the type of writing you like to do.
Via freelance job board sites
Job board sites allow you to interact with clients who are already interested in purchasing your services and who have already taken the effort to write up specifics about their job offers. At the minimum, it’s totally worth your time to look up for job boards each morning when you launch your business to see what’s in demand and whether there’s anything worth bidding on.
There are many different freelance job board sites out there, and you’ll find success stories and complaints about each one. Before even signing up, you should assess the site and determine whether it’s appropriate for you by seeing if there are enough jobs posted in your perfect category and type of project. Many people who post a job have a rough idea that they aim to outsource the project and hire a freelancer, but that the budget notations on such projects can be imprecise at times.