Ready to take the plunge but not sure how to get started? Here are some quick tips.
If you don’t have any clients lined up, it’s probably a bad idea to start cold turkey unless you have wads of cash lying around to pay the bills. Sounds simple, right? Just work your normal job and then do freelancing on evenings and weekends? One difficulty here is that clients will expect you to be available during the workday to take phone calls and respond to emails. The solution I’ve used is to check my freelance email once a day at a specific time, setting up an auto-responder email that lets people know when I’ll next check email and that they can expect a response from me at that time. This provides a sense of security because they know that you will respond even if they don’t hear back from you right away. If you can answer your cell phone at work, include your cell phone number in the auto-responder and let clients know that they can call your cell phone for emergencies.
If you can’t answer the phone or respond to emails during the day, the key to success is consistency and up-front communication. Let clients know if you are going to be communicating with them during the evenings and they’ll probably be fine with it. Just be consistent and respond when you say you will.
While you’re continuing your regular full-time job, find some friends or relatives with small businesses and offer to do some free graphic design work. This will give you experience interacting with real clients and begin building your reputation through word-of-mouth advertising.
So you’ve begun working for real clients by offering to do a few jobs for free. In exchange for your work, ask for their honest opinion of your services and for permission to use their comments as testimonials. Getting their feedback is a two-fold benefit: first, you get testimonials from real clients. Testimonials add to your credibility and make it easier to establish trust with potential clients. Second, you get feedback and critiques of your services, helping you hone your customer service skills.
How do you use testimonials? There are many ways to incorporate testimonials and share them with current and potential clients. Here are a few:
Referrals are probably the most powerful tool in getting new customers, and there’s one simple reason: because they establish immediate trust. Referrals are much more effective than any other form of advertising, because we tend to be skeptical of advertising and trusting of our friends. But how do you go about getting referrals?
There are actually 2 kinds of referrals. The first is the easiest: this is when a potential client comes to you and says, “Bob told me that you do great work for him. I’d like you to give me a quote on doing some work for me.” This is what I’ll call a passive referral. You just sit back and take the phone calls and emails asking for your business. Eventually you might get enough business this way, but to start out, you’re going to have to use the second type of referrals, and this is the active type.
Here’s how an active referral works. After doing work for a client, hopefully you’ve established a good relationship and demonstrated your quality of work and customer service. At this point, call or email the client and ask, “Who else do you know that has a small business?” (or whoever your target market is). The goal of this conversation is to get a list of names with contact information of people who personally know the client you just worked for. Once you have this list, contact each person on the list and make the connection that you have a mutual friend. If I’m the person you are calling up, I’m much more likely to trust you with my business if I have a friend or business associate who has worked with you and can vouch for you. This is a great place to use testimonials, especially those from people that your potential client knows. After signing new clients, repeat the process! Remember to ask for feedback from each client, which will help you improve your service and provide you with more testimonials to share with potential clients.
Update: For more tips on how to get referrals, read “How to get referrals by increasing trust.”
There are many great tools online for finding freelance work, although often the jobs posted online are low-budget and/or startup companies. If you do find work online, it will be with a client who knows nothing about you, and you’ll be competing with many other freelancers who are all vying for the client’s business. Also you’ll find that most sites require either a paid subscription or a percentage of your profits in exchange for access to their job listings. There are pros and cons to finding work online, but it’s a good option for someone just starting out as a freelancer. Here are a few resources for finding jobs online.
A few basic promotional tools are vital for a beginning freelancer. First, and in my opinion, most importantly, you need an online portfolio. People want to see your previous work before they commit to hiring you. Take some quality time to make your website creative, clean, easy to navigate, and informative, while showing off your best work.
Another important tool is a business card. It should probably follow the same design theme as your website, as potential clients will probably hold your card in their hand while visiting your website. The goal here is to brand yourself. Make sure your contact information is readable, including phone, email, and website.
Other handy promotional tools include Twitter and Facebook. Here are some handy tips for using social media to promote your graphic design business.
When you begin working for pay, always get payment up front. Any experienced freelancer will tell you to get at least partial payment before beginning work. You don’t have to get all of it, but I recommend getting 30-50% of the final price before beginning work. If you don’t you’ll end up doing hours of work only to find out that the client has changed his mind or can’t afford it right now. When giving someone a quote, let them know in the proposal that you’ll need a 50% down payment before beginning work. This is common practice for freelancers, so don’t be afraid to ask for it.
Good luck in your freelancing! I’d love to hear any freelancing tips or success stories you have, so please comment below.
I'm Leighton Taylor. Look around for articles on freelancing, web design, usability, and more. Feel free to check out my previous work! For a free consultation and quote, send me a message and I'll be glad to speak with you.
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Leighton Taylor Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:54 am
Awesome! Glad it was helpful! Good luck with those testimonials. Do you have a website now or is it in the works?
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