Before you start your freelance business, you need to get very clear on why you want to start freelancing in the first place. Once you have your bigger picture goals in mind, how you utilize your limited amount of time will greatly determine your level of success with freelancing.
1. Define Your Goals.
Without clearly defined, easily measurable goals, you’re going to have a very difficult time getting to where you want to go.
- Is freelancing a path to just earning extra income on the side of your day job?
- Do you eventually want to become a full-time freelancer because of the lifestyle benefits of being your own boss?
- Or, are you looking to use freelancing as a stepping stone to eventually achieving a different goal entirely?
Regardless of what your ultimate goal is, you need to make it abundantly clear. Take the time to understand why you’re considering starting a freelance business, and make sure it’s the right move in your progression toward achieving your bigger picture goal.
Only after you have the clarity around where you want freelancing to take you, can you start backing into your shorter-term goals and benchmarks that’ll help your freelance business become a success.
Over on the Millo blog, April Greer shares one of my favorite takes on the importance goal-setting within your freelance business, and how to set meaningful goals that move you forward.
Let’s say your bigger picture goal is to become a fully self-employed freelancer. You’ll set your own hours, decide who you want to work with, and call all the shots in your business. Now, how do you get there?
You know that you’ll need to get your freelance income up to a sustainable, healthy level that allows you to eventually quit your day job without stress about where your next paycheck is going to come from. Must reach a side income of at least 75% of what yours salaried job pays you, before even considering quitting to pursue your side business – full-time.
Starting with your freelance income target, based on your living expenses, risk tolerance, and realistic expectations on how long your savings can sustain you, now you can back into a rough idea of how many clients you’ll need (and what you’ll have to charge them), before making it to the point where you’ll be able to leave your day job to freelance full-time.
2. Find a Profitable Niche.
Let’s assume you’re a graphic designer by trade, or you’ve at least been building your skills with Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop in your free time.
Clearly, there are a lot of competitors in your industry that’ll be willing to charge much lower rates than you, no matter what you do. There are people from all around the world with lower costs of living that’ll always be willing to accept lesser-paid gigs than you. Get over the idea of trying to compete on price as a freelancer, right now.
It’s not worth racing other people to the bottom, especially when sites like Fiverr and Upwork already have countless options for low-priced freelancers. Side note: I personally recommend not ever listing your services on either of those sites, unless you absolutely need to (after striking out from trying everything in this post first).
By taking the time to find a profitable niche for your freelance business, you’re actively seeking out an industry and type of client that values quality. When you’re in a space that competes on quality, you’ll completely change the ways in which you sell your services. You’ll be competing on value, not price.
Instead of taking any graphic design project that comes your way, choose to concentrate solely on infographic design for startup blogs, or eBook layouts for enterprise tech companies. Choose an area that genuinely interests you, and focus on becoming the best designer in that narrow space. Once you’ve built your skills to a level that you can confidently charge a premium for, then you’re ready to start your freelance business and look for your ideal clients.
Once you’ve made yourself invaluable within your niche, you’ll have a platform by which you can expand your freelance business in any direction you’d like, in the future. Rather than stressing about how you’re going to get from step 0 to 100, take freelancing one small step at a time. Progress begets more progress.
3. Identify Your Target Clients.
Just as important as finding a profitable niche, is attracting the right types of clients for your freelance business.
As you’re just starting your freelance business, it’s fine to take a bit more of a shotgun approach to landing a few clients. Make some initial assumptions about who you want to work with, target them first, and after working with a few of them, you’ll develop a very clear sense of whether or not you want to continue pursuing similar clients.
This is a difficult decision to make at first, because it means turning away a lot of business. However, the process of narrowing in on your target clients that you work best with, will help you achieve much better results in the long run. Once you have a few clients who are willing to advocate for you, the momentum will really pick up. This is something Caroline Beaton has had a lot of success with, when she got started with her freelancing business.
Going back to our focus of competing on value, not price, everything you do in regard to starting your freelance business – especially when you have a very limited amount of free time – needs to point back to your ability to deliver the highest quality results for your clients. As one of my freelance idols, Paul Jarvis so eloquently put it over on the CreativeLive Blog, “make your clients so happy & successful that they become your sales force.”
Your goal is to build your authority and eventually be seen as the go-to resource for a specific type of client(s).
By appealing so well to a narrow (well-selected) niche, your target clients will have a very quick path to deciding that you’re the best person to help them with their projects. This above all else, is the path to charging premium rates without anyone batting an eye at the first prices you throw out.
To determine the best type of target clients as you start a freelance business, ask yourself these three questions:
- Which businesses will find my services useful?
- Which businesses can afford to pay the prices I’ll need to charge, in order to get to my income goal?
- Who are the decision makers within these businesses, and what can I learn about their demographics & interests? Can I find a way to connect with them on a personal level?
4. Set Strategic Prices for Your Services.
I’ve spoken a lot about setting the right prices for your freelance business before you get started. I even architected an infographic that walks you through the process of setting your freelance hourly rate.
From a pure numbers perspective, this calculator from MotiveApp is as good as it gets for determining what your hourly rate needs to be, in order to meet your income goals and expense levels. It’s a great tool for double-checking that you’re charging enough to afford the lifestyle you want to live, but I recommend starting to determine your pricing strategy with a very different progression in mind.
Remember, you need to price yourself based on the value you deliver – not based on what your competitors are charging.
Don’t allow anyone else to dictate the terms by which you define your value. That’s not what starting a freelancing business is about.
In this post on his blog, Neil Patel chronicles many of the lessons he learned while running an SEO freelance business. One of the most prominent lessons that stuck out to me, is that the more you charge, the less clients complain. Because he very astutely selected target clients that have big budgets, he knows that they’re much more willing to spend money – in order to make that money back through investing in your services. Smaller clients, on the other hand, often don’t have as much money to play with, and thus can’t sustain much in terms of losses when projects don’t deliver big returns.
There’s no such thing as prices that are too high. Your prices may be too high (or too low) for the types of clients you’re targeting, but if you do your homework in deciding who to pitch your services to, you’ll be selling exactly what your clients need – for a price they can justify.
Don’t charge too far above your value, but don’t ever undervalue what you’re doing for your clients.
They’re going to hire someone to help with their projects, so it’s just a matter of showing them you’re the right person to help. Price becomes a secondary concern, if they’re already convinced that you’re the best person for the job. It’s business and they’ll make it work, or it wasn’t meant to be. Keep in mind that you won’t be the perfect person for every client.
5. Build a High-Quality Portfolio Website.
Because I’m such a huge advocate of creating a powerful online presence to support starting a freelance business, I brought in an expert, Laurence Bradford, to share all of the essential elements to building a freelance portfolio that wins you high-value clients.
As a starting point, let’s understand what the purpose of having a portfolio website is, in the first place. It’s often the first impression a potential client will have of you, your style, your work, and the past clients (or companies) you’ve worked with in your freelance business. You need to effectively communicate the services you offer, and who they’re for. Beyond that, you need to sell yourself on why you’re the best person for this type of work – for the clients you want to work with.
Your freelance portfolio needs to do the following, in order to be truly effective at selling your services:
- Communicate your specialty & display examples of your work.
- List your contact information & show off your personality.
- Highlight your relevant skills, education, and accomplishments.
- Display testimonials (even if they’re from coworkers or former bosses when you’re just getting started).
- Have regular updates that show your evolution, new clients, and updated sample work.
As you’re developing your portfolio site, find other freelancers within your space and get some inspiration from them, to help uncover how they’re positioning themselves, formulating their value propositions, and going about building their businesses.
6. Create Examples of What You Can Deliver (on Your Portfolio Site).
You want your website to serve as a destination to demonstrate your expertise.
With that in mind, one of the best ways to show you’re in the know within your space, is by regularly publishing new content, images, or videos (depending upon the content medium you work in) that your target clients will be impressed with. Once you have an understanding of what your clients need, go out and create examples of that exact type of content – as if you had been hired to produce it – for your own website.
There’s no better way to sell your services, than to already show your clients that you can create what they need. What’s more, is that it’ll make their projects that much easier when you have a library of related work to pull from for inspiration.
If you’re a web designer, your portfolio site should be very meticulously curated since everything about it, is a representation of what you’ll be able to build for your clients. If you’re a writer like me, then your blog posts need to speak to the quality of work you’ll create for everyone you work with. For designers, the same thing goes – make sure the images you feature on your site are representative of the style you want to create for your future clients.
7. Thoughtfully Choose Your First Clients.
Because you have a very limited amount of time to source new clients (and actually do the work for them) as you start your freelance business, you need to get the most out of the clients you do bring on. Both from a financial and portfolio-building standpoint.
Your limited number of clients and correlating portfolio pieces, will represent how you’re perceived by other potential clients moving forward.
That makes everyone you choose to work with or highlight on your website, a crucial decision – especially in the beginning. Obviously you don’t want to overthink it and go into decision paralysis, but spend a minute or two thinking through whether or not each potential client you’re considering, will help you get to where you want to go.
I typically only retain 2 clients for my freelance business at a time. It’s not for lack of work requests that come in, but rather because I’ve chosen to allocate my limited amount of freelance time to these two clients that are most aligned with the future clients I want to work with, as well.
8. Mention Potential Clients in Your Content.
You’re going to have a hard time making a name for yourself within your niche, if nobody knows you exist.
Look ahead at the content you plan on creating for your website over the coming weeks, and keep a running list of the companies you want to feature whenever possible. Then, once you publish something that mentions them, take a few minutes to reach out and let them know about it.
Most of the time, you’ll be leading with a cold email to someone you’ve never spoken to, but this push outside of your comfort zone is healthy.
Here are the essential elements of a meaningful cold email.
- Research the best point of contact to reach out to.
- Perfect your subject line for the recipient.
- Keep your ask short.
- Sell your strengths.
- Always include a call-to-action.
9. Learn How to Pitch Yourself.
No matter how skilled you are at your craft, if you want to turn your skills into starting a freelance business, you need to be able to communicate those strengths and convert your conversations into paying clients.
Here are the basics of crafting an effective freelance proposal that lands you clients:
- Make a strong entrance with an elevator pitch email that already provides immense value & shows you’ve done your homework.
- Sell your strengths.
- Anticipate and answer any questions that may come up.
- Lean on relevant work samples and past projects to demonstrate your expertise.
- Use a visually appealing layout for your proposal.
Head over here where you can pick up a free downloadable copy of my freelance proposal template.
10. Don’t Mix Your Day Job Priorities with Freelance Business.
Above all else, it’s important to remember that your day job (and sole source of reliable income) is your number one priority.
Don’t do anything to jeopardize your full-time employment, as you still need it to sustain you while you grow your freelance business on the side. My in-depth post on how to avoid getting fired (and sued) when starting a side business is definitely worth a read as you get started with your freelance career.
There are a lot of no-no’s you’ll need to avoid, including:
- Breaching any contracts or agreements you’ve signed with your employer.
- Working on your freelance business during company time (seriously do NOT do this).
- Using company resources, computers, or online tools within your freelance work.
- And much more.
Now that you’ve got an understanding of how to start a freelance business, here’s why I believe everyone (especially millennials) should be freelancing on the side. It’s been one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made, and it’s been by far my most consistent side business to-date.
I strongly recommend that anyone considering starting a freelance business or transitioning into being a consultant, begin first with freelancing on the side while still working full-time.
*This post originally appeared on ryrob.com
Superb post. Thank you for sharing!