In recent years, freelance jobs have become prominent in almost all fields and industries. More and more people are interested in freelance careers. The first time you started as a freelancer, it seemed to be difficult to get freelance clients. When your reputation in the freelance market is not strong enough, you have to spend a lot of time and effort to build your career.

So in this blog, we would like to share with you the ways to get freelance clients. It may help you find and have the opportunity to work with more potential clients.

How to Get Freelance Clients

1. Identify your skill as a service

No matter what field you are working in, the important factor that directly affects your success is to understand both your strengths and weaknesses. Having a great understanding of your skills will help you become successful in your career, and a freelance career is no exception. From that, you can easily find and realize the right service you can serve your clients well.

Everyone has two main group skills, including hard skills and soft skills. You can brainstorm the hard and soft skills you’re strongest at, and then write them down. You can pick one of them to provide service to your client.

Your hard skills could be:

• Computer languages.
• SEO.
• Writing skills.

Your soft skills could be:

• Communication skills.
• Time management.
• Negotiation skills.

Your services could be:

• Building and developing websites, web, and mobile applications.
• Creating ideas, and content in different channels, and platforms.
• Promoting clients’ products and services online and offline.

After defining your skill set and service, you can research and update frequently to improve your knowledge and expertise. This is a good way to make sure that your service stands out in the market with quality as high as possible.

2. Define your ideal client and market

You can not develop your freelance career without clients. But this does not mean you reach out or cooperate with anyone. Your clients always affect the success of your freelance career or even your business career directly. So you need to take time to define your right clients.

You have identified your skill set and your service, you can research the market about who is interested in your service and write down the list of potential clients in the future. Focusing on the target audience and market will help you save your time, money, and resources as well as get more achievements.

Your clients could be:

• Web development :  Local stores, fitness centers, institutes, hotels, or creators.
• Marketing: restaurant, hotel, business, beauty center.
• Accounting: startups, SME.

3. Have a clear and up-to-date portfolio

After determining your service, and your ideal clients, it’s time to start building your portfolio. The portfolio is one of the first things that include your information to help you promote your business and expertise. A good portfolio needs to be shown clearly, organized, updated, and scientifically.

To optimize your portfolio sample, you can create a case study alongside it to explain what, why, and how you approach it. If you’re putting together a case study on a sample from previous work experience, let's include what end results you achieved.

Remember that once you start doing freelance jobs, you have to build your portfolio gradually and continuously. Don’t spend too much time putting together a large portfolio of samples that might not appeal to anyone. Instead, you should create short, targeted samples and it will actually get you started freelancing right away.

One way that help you do this is by utilizing searchable portfolio sites, such as:

• Sortfolio.com
• Coroflot.com
• Graphicartistsguild.org
• Hireanillustrator.com

Completing your portfolio, then you can send it over to your targeted client.

4. Using social media

No one can deny the influence of social media in the media world now. The presence of social media platforms at all times allows you to promote yourself and your service quickly. If you can take advantage of the power of social media, you can easily get more potential clients.

There are many ways to use social media to get clients. You can optimize your website portfolio, create your blog, and keep your industry-relevant social media accounts up to date such as LinkedIn, Upwork, Freelance.com, GitHub, and Behance.

5. Create content

Content is a good way to promote your freelance brand far away to more people, meaning more potential clients. You can write about topics relevant to the field you want to work in and give you a chance to demonstrate your expertise. You can consider starting with a blog and then adding it to your portfolio or online resume.

You need to determine who your target clients are first, find out, and understand their demands and expectations. You will create relevant content to ensure that your target clients are approached. That'll catch the right people’s attention and will be more likely to get you a new cooperation.

There are many types of content. It could be:

• Illustrations.
• Infographics.
• Videos (with your name in the credits).
• Images (taking photographs for a particular post/guide, with a link to your site beneath).

Conclusion

Getting freelance clients is always a challenge with anyone who is new in the freelance market. Doing this requires every freelancer to invest in not only their service but also their strategy. If you are a freelancer and want to cooperate with many more potential clients in your field and industry, we hope this blog will help you overcome the difficulties of getting a wide range of freelance clients. However, getting clients is not all. Remember that improving and ensuring your quality service at the best is one of the keys to help you succeed in any career.