Marketing Your Freelance Business

This is a guest post by Josiah Choy from KickoffLabs. KickoffLabs provides landing page and email marketing solutions.

The hardest part for many freelancers and consultants is generating new business. Most freelancers would rather focus on perfecting their craft than to go out and get new leads. Unfortunately, how good you are doesn’t matter if no one’s heard about you. After all, you only get paid if you make the sale. Take for example, the New York Times bestsellers list – a list of books that sell the best. If it were a list for the best writers, it might be called the best-writer list.

If you’re a freelancer, here are 5 techniques to connect with your customers to generate more business.

Last week, I hosted a training seminar to teach local businesses how to improve the number of leads & sales driven by their Web sites. I charged the 5 attendees $250 each, for an effective hourly rate of $312.50, and I delivered outstanding value to them.

Best of all, this something I believe any freelancer or consultant could do.

But first, let’s back up and talk about why you might want to consider hosting a seminar.

OK, so let’s talk about cold contacting! So over the last two posts, we’ve established a framework for getting ideal prospects and went over exactly how you’ll break the ice with new contacts.

Today, I want to focus on logistically how you’ll make first contact.

In a perfect world, you’d have referrals. Someone you trust (and who trusts you) would make a mutual introduction to the new contact. But what do you do when you don’t have a reference?

Last week we covered how you could pre-qualify 10 ideal clients that you’d like to work with (missed last week? Read this first.)

Today I’m going to introduce a strategy that will help you get in front of the people on your list, and maybe even walk away with a client or two.

The biggest single mistake people make when reaching out to someone they don’t know is their failure to produce value.

Not to toot my own horn, but now that I’ve grown a sizable audience I get people I don’t know emailing me all the time.