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The Brand Design Masters Podcast with Philip VanDusen is dedicated to helping you build the skills you need to design bullet-proof brands - for yourself, your business and for the clients and customers you serve.
In every episode, Philip, his co-hosts and interview guests will share inspiration, ideas, trends and techniques that will lift you to greater heights as a creative professional or entrepreneur - so you can build a successful creative practice, business and personal brand in the Creative Economy.
How To Find Freelance Clients
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Philip VanDusen:
So let's talk about freelance clients. How do you find freelance clients?
One thing you have to know is that there's basically two ways to get clients. You go to them, which is promotion. You're going out and you're putting yourself in front of them actively is promotion.
And then you get them to come to you is attraction. And notice that I didn't use the word passive. There's a lot of, people talking about passive income and stuff and passive, business development. Passive does not enter into any kind of business development, really. Both of them take action on your part.
And the amount of action and how difficult that action is will vary. But for the most part, But promotion, is faster. So you get clients or activity in your business development pipeline faster via promotion and attraction has a longer timeline.
So we're going to talk about some business development techniques along this timeline. Some of the going to be more rapid, some are going to be a longer horizon. And then we're going to have that secret weapon at the end, but so I wanted to lay this out as a construct and I'm going to go through them from the fastest to the slowest .
So the first thing you got to do, you have to jump on the low hanging fruit. You got to start with people that you know. Some people have a tendency to jump right over this one and it's a big mistake. You got to start with your, friends and family, friends of friends, old school connections, old coworkers, people that you've worked on projects with old contractors that you have used for projects, people that you have just met at a conference.
and gathered their business card and never called them. Start with people that you've met that is word of mouth marketing. You're getting across to them through word of mouth that you're looking for work and what kind of work you want and then they're going to be using that to talk about you with their network or make referrals for you to their network.
The question is like, how do you go about that, right? There's a couple different ways, and one that I've been using recently, which I think is really effective
So how do you go about approaching people that you know? You can either, text them, if you know them well enough, give them a call. Telephones still work these days. Send them an email, but make sure that you're making the email very personal. Make sure that you mention something that you know about them.
You don't want it to be a form email. You can use a paragraph, that's a form, maybe describing what kind of work that you want, but you want to make sure , that it gets across that the email is personally addressed. Text. And that you are really talking to them. This goes doubly for LinkedIn because you get pinged, I get pinged so much by people who want to engage with me, but I can, you can tell, you can smell it from a mile away like you can smell advertising that it's a bot or it's some sort of cut and paste job and you don't want to do that because , you're chopping off that relationship from the get go.
Now another way that I've been using recently and a lot of people that I know have been using is using short video. There's a, there's an app called Bonjoro, which allows you to send video through email. Essentially, it's a link, but it's a very quick and easy way to record videos and send them through email.
You can also use Facebook messenger videos. You can record a super short video and compress it and actually, place it into an email. Videos work because the more and more. Digital we've become business development has gotten very impersonal.
So the more that you can make it one on one, actually talking to someone, them seeing you, it's much more difficult for them to ignore you. If they see a video of you talking to them, just in a relaxed way, people will respond. I would say the response rate for sending someone a video is probably like four times what it is sending them an email, if not more.
Try to leverage video, Facebook Messenger video you can post it on YouTube, make it private, send them a link. There's a number of different ways to do video, to send people video messages. So I highly recommend doing that. And so what do you say? First of all, you describe the work that you want and you ask what kind of referrals you would like from them and tell them how they can help you very specifically.
And here's the other thing. They may be reaching out to people with an email, right? Or a text or whatever. Take care. For you to recommend you. Here's one of the things that you want to make sure that you do. You want to make sure that you make it super easy for them. You want to basically give them cut and paste text, a script that they can copy and paste into an email that makes it super easy for them to recommend you.
It could literally be the recommendation email with a sentence at the beginning that they can personalize. Because if you put it on them to describe what it is that you do or what kind of work you want to get. Something's going to get lost in translation, so make it really easy for them and give them some swipe copy in order to make it super easy for them to share.
And remember to always say thank you if they do anything for you. Even if they respond to you, give them a big thank you. You have to show your appreciation.
Alright, next. Okay, let's go old school. Let's go retro. Creative professionals very rarely use advertising, especially individual freelancers.
And , you can get real traction from advertising. You can also really help you build your email list. You've heard that said before, you have to spend money to make money. Now, probably the lowest hanging fruit on this is Facebook ads. Facebook ads are really cheap. You can start for $ 5 a day. And there's a little method that I want you to think about when you do Facebook ads.
What you do is when you go on Facebook and you start a Facebook advertising account, you get a pixel. It's a little snippet of code that you can put on your website or put on a blog post. So when people go there from Facebook, Facebook will record that person went to your site. On Facebook and so you then have them as a targeted audience and someone that you can direct advertising to directly on Facebook.
So you can put an ad up on Facebook, people, as I said, can smell advertising, right? So if you're trying to sell something with your initial ad on Facebook, You might not get as many people clicking through to it. So what you want to do is actually promote a blog post or something of value, an article, a PDF, a lead magnet, whatever that is, and get people to go read that blog post or get that lead magnet because you're not selling them hard.
But the thing is that then Facebook captures them and they tag them via that pixel as someone who's interested in your stuff. And so then, when you start running real ads for products or services on Facebook, you can target those people specifically. And then you can create lookalike audiences through the Facebook advertising interface.
It'll take that group of people and then it'll find Facebook will, through it's all, encompassing knowledge base of knowing everything about you, it will create a much larger expanded audience of people who are like those people. So Facebook ads, Google ads are also great. They're not as cheap but they can also be very effective.
And running Google AdWords is awesome and they have, obviously, with Google Analytics, incredible analytics around your advertising. While they're not cheaper, they also are very effective. I also just recently ran a LinkedIn advertising campaign for a client of mine. That is definitely not cheap, but LinkedIn's targeting mechanisms are incredible.
You can target like CFOs and CMOs specifically across companies that are small to medium size or large to enterprise size. You can get crazy about your targeting on LinkedIn advertising. And the cool thing about LinkedIn, it's not like Facebook and the fact that it's a based route, people's industries and their job titles and what their responsibilities are and their interests, business. Aspects of targeting
and so that's what makes LinkedIn paid advertising effective But as I said, it's not cheap Now you can also go super old school back in the old days, right? How do you do advertising? You get business cards printed up, start sticking them on thumbtack boards and coffee shops and grocery stores and leaving them on doctor's office, coffee tables.
You can go that way. You can print flyers. You can put things on bulletin boards. You can make fridge magnets and beer koozies and, all sorts of swag, stress balls, and You can advertise in really old school ways as well. Now, when we talk about advertising in that timeline, advertising is as promotional as it gets, right?
Will get a speedy response when you advertise. It takes money to do it, but If you need clients, and you want to drive that business development pipeline, get it rockin pretty fast, advertising and promotion is the way to go. Alright, now, let's talk about Listing sites.
I wanted to call out specifically non marketplace sites. And why I'm saying that is that I'm not talking about the 99 designs. I'm not talking about the Fivers of the world. The things that are driving down and creating incredibly negative pricing pressure on the creative industries.
I'm talking about sites where clients will list freelance jobs. And, Anyone who's a freelancer can respond and it's not like there's any, memberships or no dues that you're paying, the listing agent, the listing company may have to pay something to list their freelance job, but it's not like , the relationship is controlled from the get go by some sort of service site.
Totally old school. Craigslist, right? You know what Craigslist looks like? It is so incredibly old school internet. It's amazing. But the thing is that there's a ton of stuff on there and it still works. Here's the other thing is that you can look very hyper specific in terms of geography, if you only want to work with people who are in your state or in your county , and once you start looking all over the country, the listings like totally add up, but there's no way to search Craigslist for the whole country.
You have to basically do it regionally to an extent. So you can list your services there. So people looking for services can find you, but also people are listing freelance jobs there and you can go and find them. And don't stay just local. Branch out. Go look in other cities, right?
Everything's digital. So you can do business with someone in LA if you live in New York, just as easy as vice versa. Another great site for this is Krop. . K R O P dot com. Krop dot com is another freelance job listing site.
There's another site called smashingjobs. com. And then a really great one that's put up by the Communication Arts Magazine is a site called Creative Hotlist. Creative Hotlist is a great freelance job posting site as well.
They have job jobs, but they also have freelance and part time jobs. So that's another way that you can make connections and get freelance work.
Now, the other thing is you can work hyper specifically. Every town has a Chamber of Commerce and local business owners are the members of that Chamber of Commerce.
I have joined my local Chamber of Commerce for the first couple of years of my agency business so I could meet local business owners. They generally have websites. You can advertise usually for super cheap on those websites. Local neighborhoods also generally have Facebook groups. I live outside of New York City.
And there is an incredibly large and active Facebook group for creative professionals in my area and people who are looking for freelancers go there and ask, does anyone know anybody who does websites or illustration or whatever that is. And so Facebook for local community groups can also be a great way to promote your services.
Generally promotion isn't really smiled upon in groups like that, but you can have your antenna up for people who are looking for freelancers.
now, this is an interesting one, and I and one I think that a lot of people don't pay a lot of attention to.
And while you can give a webinar or a training online, and that is a great way of going about it, I'm not sure that most people don't really understand why you do that, or what happens when you do that. Locally, a lot of educational institutions, high schools, community colleges have learning programs, continuing education learning programs for people who are professionals or have a business and they want to learn about something.
They want to learn about photography or dance or yoga, but a lot of times they also have programs in marketing. How to improve your Facebook page, How to use Twitter, how to, improve your website. You can develop a very simple training, or even advanced training for people in these sort of community continuing education settings.
The thing about that is, and this is what I mean around it's counterintuitive, you want to teach everything that you know. You want to teach them to do what you do. Offer a course like Branding for Small Business or Video Marketing for Entrepreneurs or whatever that is. Video Editing for Entrepreneurs.
You are establishing yourself as an expert. These business owners who are, are looking to learn this sort of thing will come to know and be aware of who you are, see you as an expert. And then also here's the thing, they may learn about the thing that you're teaching them, but they don't have the time to do it.
So they're going to end up coming back to you and hiring you to do it anyway. It's a great method for business development is giving trainings. And as I said, you can give a webinar on, on Zoom or on Demio or live on Facebook or wherever that is. You can take out Facebook ads to drive people there and give a course on that thing that you are an expert at or that you want to do for people.
They will learn it, but in the process of learning it, they will also see you as an expert and many of them will come back to hire you to do it.
Another thing is co working spaces. A lot of co working spaces have like continuation education programs or seminars.
And they offer those classes in the co working spaces. So that's another thing you can do. You can go to co working spaces or call them up and say, Do you do any programs for education? I'd love to give a little seminar or a training class on X, whatever that is that you do. And and try that out.
The co working space that I was a member of for a couple years before I rented my own office. They did that. And I actually went to a couple of really cool trainings and saw one on Twitter advertising, which was really informative to me right when I was starting my agency. So you never know.
And that person who gave that training was an amazing copywriter. And I actually hired her to do some copywriting on a project once. Personal experience, even as an agency person, there was a freelancer who gave a training and they got work out of it. So there you go. All right. Now let's go back and look at our time horizon thing. What we've been talking about so far is in the short promotional side. So masterminds, word of mouth, giving trainings, taking out ads, those things will drive new business pretty quickly.
Ads probably being the absolute quickest. Now, as we start to move to the middle and to the farther end of that attraction, part of the timeline of business development, let's talk about that a little bit.
Let's talk about lead magnets and freebies.
Everyone knows that building an email list is really important. You have to own your own list. You can have Facebook groups out the wazoo. You can have Twitter followers out the wazoo. You can have YouTube followers out the wazoo, but you don't have their email address. The whole idea is to use social media to drive people to a lead magnet, free downloadable PDF, checklist, resource, e book, how to guide, whatever that is on the landing page, and they have to give you their email address in order to download it.
And then you start to build an email list. Everyone wants something for free. And no one is going to give you their email address unless you give them something for free. Once you have their email address, it doesn't end the freebie lead magnet train, right? You want to use super openable subject lines in your emails that you start to send out to people on your list.
And keep giving them value. Give. And subliminal reciprocity, as I call it, will come back to you. An openable subject line might be something like, can I send you this cool PDF? Or, I'd like to give you a free website audit or assessment. You want to make sure that the things that you're giving away are shareable.
People might want to share that PDF with someone else, or might want to send that checklist to someone else. And they will do that, right? And you're not going to get that person on your email list because their friends sent it to them.
But here's the thing, you always want to make sure that you brand everything that you put out there on social media, whether that's a lead magnet, whether it's an infographic, whether it's a quote that you put on Instagram.
You'll notice that when I post quotes, and I post them a lot because I really love quote inspirational quotes, I always brand them. I put my website really tiny at the bottom. And the graphic is about the quote. It's about the person. It's about the inspiration. But it came because I brought it to the internet and I want to get, a little tag for that.
And so someone might share it and they might see that email address and they might go there just out of curiosity. Wow, that's really interesting. Wonder who this guy is who shared this quote that like really struck me. Like I like the way he thinks. That's how this stuff happens. So you want to make sure that no matter what social media or lead magnets or anything that you put out there, you brand it because that will start this trail, this magnetism of people moving towards you over time.
Now let's talk about Engagement.
Just like I was saying at the very beginning about video. And, you can do text, you can do phone calls, you can send emails. Video is very personal. The more personalized, the more one on one, the more truly authentic you make communication, the better it works. Let me say that again. The more authentic, personal, and direct you make communication, the better it works.
And, the harder it is for people to ignore. And when you're doing any kind of self promotion, business promotion you don't want to be ignored. Or, put in the trash bin. Engagement is important because it is where you start to truly engage in a conversation with people. This is through online forums.
It's through Facebook groups. It's from LinkedIn groups. It's going to industry websites, industries that are target client industries that you might be interested in. And engaging in those chats, in the blogs, in the communities. Ask questions. Ask questions about the industry that people can answer. Start a conversation.
Give before the ask, because you will start to develop relationships. People will start to understand, recognize your avatar, recognize your name, and you will become recognizable as an expert in what you do or someone who they are just really aware of. And then when it comes time for you to reach out to them on LinkedIn or ask them to go, download a lead magnet, they're going to be a lot warmer to that.
So engagement it's probably one of the longest tail aspects of business development, but it's a really important one because it also trains you to be really authentic and it trains you to get engaged in a conversation, in a community. That's where you get known. So now let's talk about your brand ecosystem and to a certain extent that it goes without saying, but here's the thing.
People think, if I put my portfolio up on Behance and I, do a website, and post a couple of blog posts, build it and they will come. They're not going to. You have to draw them there somehow. But that doesn't mean that you can't not build it. You have to build a "brand ecosystem" of your own.
You need a website. You need to have your portfolio on your website. You also probably need to post on an external website, a searchable website. You want to, get into developing some social media. Start small, start with a channel or two, try, don't try to be every where, everything to everybody doing everything you'll, this is a recipe for disaster.
Get really good at a channel and then span out from there, they are the touch points of where you show up in the world, social media, your website, portfolio sites, mastermind groups, forums, Facebook, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Pay attention to what your spider chart is. You in the center. all the places you are on the outside. Start to map that out.
You have to build a "brand ecosystem". You have to pay attention to it. But it's a it's a foundational element and a branching element for everything that you do. But when it comes to business development and getting freelance clients, you have to be out there enough that you can build awareness about your existence.
Now, let's talk a little bit about content.
Content in your brand ecosystem is important. And I'm not going to spend a tremendous amount of time on this because everyone who really follows me know that I talk about content a lot because content marketing still really works. And I get contacted by people all the time through the new client application on my website because they came from YouTube.
Videos that I published three years ago are still driving new clients to me. Content works. You have to be visible. Like I said, you have to build this brand ecosystem and then you have to get out there and make yourself visible. I'm going to talk a little bit about the sales funnel, the awareness to action funnel in a few minutes, but this is where that fits in
Your blog.
Even if you're not writing original stuff and creating a blog regularly yourself, guest posting on other people's blogs count. Leveraging other people's audiences count. If you start a YouTube channel, start a podcast. But if you don't have those things, see if you can get appearances or get interviewed for other people's YouTube channels or other people's podcasts and leverage the audience of others to get your content to tiptoe into showing up in the digital sphere, building an email list, putting out emails, putting out a newsletter, also crucial.
Social media content in general tweets, LinkedIn posts, carousels portfolio pieces, all those sorts of things, you want to make sure that you're pushing content out. And I have this saying that I say all the time. It's: "out of feed, out of mind". A website is not enough. You have to constantly stay in the feed.
And there are, and feeds have different lifespans, right? I have heard something like the lifespan of a Twitter tweet is about 10 minutes before it is so far out in the feed that no one will ever read it. So if you don't catch people's eye in that 10 minutes since you tweeted it, It's gone, right? So if you're going to really use Twitter as a as a strong platform for yourself, you got to tweet a lot because you got to stay in that feed.
Now, LinkedIn, the life of a LinkedIn post is probably more like three to five days. It's a lot longer because the feeds aren't so crammed with content. And so think about the platform that you're using for your content and what that's The lifespan of that content is on that platform. YouTube, for instance, like I said, I've been doing YouTube now for years, and I constantly am getting people either, commenting on or coming to me for business from pieces of content that are years old.
So think about the lifespan of it. Podcasts will work that way for you too.
Now let's talk about the secret weapon.
It's a particular platform and it's a particular thing that you offer. Content marketing is great. The problem with it is that it takes incredible consistency, a lot of thought and energy and it takes a long period of time.
It's valuable to do. I'm not saying it's not, it's hugely valuable to do, but if you need clients now, it's not going to get you clients right now. This particular secret weapon I'm going to talk about is, sales funnel starts with awareness.
So awareness, which is the content in the feed interest, which is consistency through content over time. Your brand ecosystem and driving interest in you. That's where you show up in the feed. That's where people realize that you exist. Interest is when they start following you or start paying attention to what it is that you're doing or putting out there.
And then at one moment in time, the decision, the need on their part comes for something that you do. and they make the decision to contact you or go with you. And then after they make that decision to reach out to you, eventually there's a proposal, there's a conversation and action takes place where they hire you, they buy.
And these are the four stages of the sales funnel, right? And so your brand ecosystem and your content lives on those kind of upper two wider levels of the pyramid. And then word of mouth advertising. All those sorts of things get right to decision and action. So this secret weapon I'm going to tell you about, the secret process, really is the goal of this is to jump from right over "awareness" and "interest" and directly into "decision" and "action".
And so the method that I'm going to tell you about uses one particular platform, LinkedIn. It uses the LinkedIn platform because you can do everything on LinkedIn. You can message someone on LinkedIn, they can contact you back on LinkedIn. You can ask for referrals on LinkedIn.
That referral can happen on LinkedIn. It's a completely self contained platform where there are no distractions. Everyone is there for business. Businesses are expecting to be pitched and everyone wants to network more than ever.
So how do you do this? What you need in order to jump over those two levels of the sales cycle is you need advocates.
You need advocates to refer you to other people. And as I started off this presentation around word of mouth, you want to reach out to those network connections, those LinkedIn connections, the old co workers, the connections of connections, second and third level connections. And try to look for those people who might be able to help you.
They can also be prospects that, maybe didn't buy from you a while back, but now maybe they're ready to. So you reach out to those people, via email, in a LinkedIn message, you ask them for help in referring you. But here's the thing, you need, and as I said, secret weapon on purpose, you need to give them the ammo, For this to be a weapon.
So a lot of people say, so what do I say, what do I say when I reach out to a contact? You may want to start off by just giving them a little bit of value. So send them an article. Tell them why you think it's interesting for them. Send them the link to a resource.
Tell them why you think it would really help them, start off light. But then eventually, when you have the ask, you can ask people say, what do I say? You want to develop your elevator pitch to them. And essentially, it's a positioning statement pitch. You want to say who you help, what you help them to do, and what it is that you provide.
I help X do X by providing Z. I do. I help coffee shops sell memberships. By doing X and then you want to provide them with some swipe copy, something that's cut and paste, that all they have to do is address it to their connection and hit send.
It says, I have this great, friend who is a illustrator and I've noticed that, you might want to be re looking at the illustration on your website. This is a guy who might be able to give you a great idea, or I've noticed that your, your website, your competitors, websites are looking really amazing.
And yours hasn't been updated in a while. I know this web developer, her name is. Sally G and here's her website. She does amazing, website work. She helps coffee shops build memberships by doing blah, blah, blah. And this is an email that you write and that you are providing them so they can just copy and paste it and send it to their connection.
You want to use word of mouth and by giving that value, giving that curated content, that PDF, that is what's cementing the deal. And so you finally contact them, you get a referral or you directly connect with a prospect.
The other kind of secret weapon part of it is where you directly contact someone on LinkedIn.
And this takes some action on your part. You have to do a little research on them and say you look at their coffee shop and you look at Their website is looking tired and you think I can really help these people with a website What you want to do is you want to reach out to them and say: "I'd love to give you a free Audit of your competition."
You don't want to disparage their website ,You don't want a bad mouth their website, but you might want to say, "I have some ideas about your website and you might want to look at what your competition is doing. Would you be open to my doing a bit of an audit on your brand or on your competition for you?"
Do it for free, just to show you what I know, what I've learned, they're not going to say no. And so you want to go out and look at their website, develop a point of view around it, made me do a little audit of their competition, and then come back to them with a little bit of a review and an audit of their brand and give them your opinion for free.
Here's how this works...
When you do that, And they suddenly see , from an expert that aspects of what they're doing could be better or their competition is doing it better than they are.
What that does is it's the princess and the pea. You guys know the old fable of the princess and the pea, right?
The pea goes under the princess's mattress and there's many layers of mattress, but she can feel it. It drives her crazy. That's exactly what this is. You are setting the pea under the mattress of your prospect. Because once they know that their competition is doing something better than they are, Or that there's something on their website that could be better than it is to have a more effective result.
It will eat at them, and the fact that you brought that to them will show that you're observant, you're smart, and you may be the expert who can fix it for them. There are a lot of people, who have used this method, and it has gotten them work. By offering a free brand audit, in a point of view on a prospect's business website, social media channels, whatever that is, for free, starts a conversation, gets you in the door, and proves a lot of stuff that can eventually bring you work and sometimes immediately bring you work.
So I wanted to share that with you and this is not a long tail thing This is this can happen pretty quick So it really lives on the kind of the short and the promotional side of the timeline and it's some action that you can take immediately And the response to it sometimes is very quick too.
So it's not like way out here on the content end of the timeline spectrum. It's more in on the training word of mouth referral end of the spectrum, but specific kind of process of contacting someone on a specific platform and offering them a specific thing that is proven to get action.
Now it is doing to a certain extent work on spec, but if you can garner clients. 50 percent of the time after doing out of doing this or 25 percent of the time, that's a pretty good business development success rate. So I would recommend that you give it a try and see what happens. And then when you do come back and report to me about it. Cause I'd love to hear these kinds of case studies about how it's working for people.
And that's why I'm actually presenting it because I have already gotten like some serious reports from people that this works. .
And I just wanted to share some methods or techniques or thoughts around getting clients that you might not have thought of, or if you are leveraging them, then you might figure out how to leverage in a different way. Everyone needs more clients these days. And I wanted to give you some more tools to put in your toolkit and maybe a slightly different perspective on how you can utilize some of them.
Thanks again for joining me and really appreciate it. I hope you have a great day and, we'll see you again soon.