I need a little help / advice with Freelancing

foozball3000

foozball3000

Executive Member
Joined
Oct 28, 2008
Messages
5,951
Reaction score
1,787
Location
Kyalami
I've been freelancing since March, and I've kept my head above water (after I had to downscale my life a bit). But if something bad should happen to my car, PC or anything, I'm in deep trouble.

So, I need to amp it up a bit. Luckily I'm a Jack of all Trades... Quite skilled as an artist, graphic designer, programmer (C#.Net and ASP.Net), CGI artist and quite a bit more. But I have no idea how to go about this.

Can I have some guides to marketing my services? Are there questions that I need to ask myself regarding marketing, or do I just put up a banner somewhere and hope for the best?
 
Start by charging friends and family for work you do for them and or ask them to promote your services on their facebook walls. Im sure someone loves you enough :-).

Offer your services to them when they have an event, like creating invites or email invites etc etc. Don't do stuff for free if it infringes on your working hours, you could instead spend that hour on the phone, phoning customers.

Also, have you considered what might happen when a biggish client doesnt pay?

Its tough there, I mean, who does your work while you're on the road and who's out seeing customers while your working?

Anyway, start locally and try and get out there to small business and offer them something valuable that you can charge a monthly fee, even if it's just small piece of software, smb's will pay for something that takes the workload off of them and try and sell the fact that you should automate the important stuff. Im sure you can think of a piece of software that can do this for them.

Thats my 2 cents.
 
In my experience, it's all been about contacts and word of mouth. I started out working in the industry for about 2-3 years, made my contacts, and since then I've been happily freelancing (front-end web dev) for about 7+ years now, and haven't spent ANY time or even a single cent on marketing at all. In all that time I've only ever had 2 'slumps' where I didn't have work for over 2 weeks or so, otherwise it's been full throttle.
 
Hi. There are plenty of sites that you could offer these kinds of services that are perfectly safe and I have and still do use most of them.

Odesk
Rentafreelancer
Elance

and there are a lot more.

Golden rules are when first starting out. Don't charge a fortune at first.

Come in cheap do a few jobs, get a good reputation and feedback and then start to charge more.

Secondly a good cover letter is imperative. Don't be lazy and copy and paste the same thing over and over. Check your spelling in the cover letter. Be professional, make sure the client understands that you understand what needs to be done. Be informative but don't include information that isn't relevant to the job posting. For example if someone wants a business card designed don't say I have 10 years coding experience.

On Payment options I recommend the Payoneer card. Long story short, easiest and quickest way to get paid with the least amount of charges involved.

Sites like 99designs are a waste of time. Price money is good but considering the amount of designs you will do and how many you might win just isn't worth it in my opinion. Plus there is always the problem of people stealing your ideas.

As for getting in local clients like the other people have said, word of mouth is the best advertising. Maybe make a website as well and advertise on Facebook, twitter etc. Honestly I found it to be a waste of time advertising this way but it's not to say it won't work for you

If you have any questions please ask them and I will assist as best I can.
 
Hi guys. Thanks for the great responses. :)

I'm working through all the tips (may take a while), there's no reason not to test everything :). The best place to start is to be able to show folk what I can do. Videos are probably the most powerful means of advertising these days, so I'm making my Demo Reel.

The plan of action is..
1. Get Demo Reel.
2. Get own site up (more of a glorified business card, doesn't have to do much)
3. Advertise in local papers. (There's just something about being able to go sit next to your client and do the designs.)

In the meanwhile, I'll keep competing on CrowdSPRING and keep feelers out on the freelancing sites.
CrowdSPRING is a great place to develop en push your skills.

Word of mouth in my groups won't get me far.. but then again, a newspaper add in the local paper isn't too expensive.
 
foozball3000 said:
Hi guys. Thanks for the great responses. :)

I'm working through all the tips (may take a while), there's no reason not to test everything :). The best place to start is to be able to show folk what I can do. Videos are probably the most powerful means of advertising these days, so I'm making my Demo Reel.

The plan of action is..
1. Get Demo Reel.
2. Get own site up (more of a glorified business card, doesn't have to do much)
3. Advertise in local papers. (There's just something about being able to go sit next to your client and do the designs.)

In the meanwhile, I'll keep competing on CrowdSPRING and keep feelers out on the freelancing sites.
CrowdSPRING is a great place to develop en push your skills.

Word of mouth in my groups won't get me far.. but then again, a newspaper add in the local paper isn't too expensive.[/QUOTE]

I lol'd very hard. Not expensive when i worked for a company that specialized in validated advert delivery. You can pay up to 10k for a simple run. You are better off getting your website up and getting your rankings up with adwords and organic traffic. Than advertise in some news paper.
Click to expand...
 
semaphore said:
I lol'd.
Click to expand...

semaphore said:
foozball3000 said:
...
Click to expand...

I lol'd very hard. Not expensive when i worked for a company that specialized in validated advert delivery. You can pay up to 10k for a simple run. You are better off getting your website up and getting your rankings up with adwords and organic traffic. Than advertise in some news paper.
Click to expand...

:wtf:

It seems that the world is just waiting for your wealth of knowledge and wisdom. When does your book come out?
In the meanwhile us mere mortals will still get advert quotes and explore all options. I know that it seems foolish for a billionaire like yourself how we, mere start-ups, approach this.. never the less, getting quotes and testing assumptions is mostly free.

I'm grateful that I can contribute in brightening your day with the comedy show called my life and business problems.
 
foozball3000 said:
:wtf:

It seems that the world is just waiting for your wealth of knowledge and wisdom. When does your book come out?
In the meanwhile us mere mortals will still get advert quotes and explore all options. I know that it seems foolish for a billionaire like yourself how we, mere start-ups, approach this.. never the less, getting quotes and testing assumptions is mostly free.

I'm grateful that I can contribute in brightening your day with the comedy show called my life and business problems.
Click to expand...

I wasted wait R40k on advertising when I started dude. Think I was led down the wrong path by people I assumed knew better though.
Most of my work came in via my website and Google adwords. Helped a lot.
 
Mike Smit said:
I wasted wait R40k on advertising when I started dude. Think I was led down the wrong path by people I assumed knew better though.
Most of my work came in via my website and Google adwords. Helped a lot.
Click to expand...

I'll definitely go the adwords route. But if there's a way to reach some local clients, even if I have to spend a little, I'd like to do that as well.

But my goal for this week is simply to be able to show people what I can do. Next week I'll worry about getting folk to look at it.
 
If you want to reach local clients attend conferences, give talks, punt yourself like no tomorrow, go to film schools etc.
 
foozball3000 said:
I've been freelancing since March, and I've kept my head above water (after I had to downscale my life a bit). But if something bad should happen to my car, PC or anything, I'm in deep trouble.

So, I need to amp it up a bit. Luckily I'm a Jack of all Trades... Quite skilled as an artist, graphic designer, programmer (C#.Net and ASP.Net), CGI artist and quite a bit more. But I have no idea how to go about this.

Can I have some guides to marketing my services? Are there questions that I need to ask myself regarding marketing, or do I just put up a banner somewhere and hope for the best?
Click to expand...

I recommend odesk.. I've used it to hire a few Developers for my websites/applications.. You'll first need to setup a profile and create a portfolio of your previous jobs as this will help in terms of getting hired. Also the first few jobs you'll have to do for low prices just to get your ratings up..

PM me, I need some front-end dev work done on an ASP.NET site.
 
PM me your sort of standard pricing you would want to charge for ad-hoc work and contact details ... if I get my business off the ground in Jan, I'm going to need things like newsletter, etc, etc set up, as well as some weekly or monthly stuff, creatives for print, etc. But I'm bootstrapping, so obviously I'm looking for lowish pricing / perhaps using a student ... that doesn't mean that you must charge me lower, just that I may not be able to afford you :P
 
If you'd like I can PM you an e-mail address of a web development company I own 50% of. You can send through your portfolio, I know they're looking for freelancers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X