How to Market Your Freelance Business Better

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When you embraced the freelancing lifestyle, you did that to be in full control of your work, your earnings, and even your vacations. You do everything autonomously (except if you’re part of a team of freelancers), including celebration of successes and endurance of failures.

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The services you offer as a freelancer is your very own business -- it runs and stops on every direction you lead it to. You know it will thrive if you have constant clients, otherwise you’ll end up going through a slack season doing nothing, earning nothing.

You need to proactively market your freelance business. Marketing is among the business skills that you should master as a freelancer. Like in any other business setup, you promote what you’re offering to people until they see your value and hire you.

Improve Your Marketing Strategies

You probably have bookmarked multiple articles about the best practices in marketing a freelance business. Those tips came along with a promise that you can make it big in freelancing. Surely, you can, but it will take time and tons of hard work.

Let’s say you’ve already started promoting your freelance services since day one. Are they all working out to highlight your best selling point? Are your marketing strategies still parallel with your current goals?

You can market your freelance business better if you know which problem areas you should fix and improve. It’s time to have a marketing audit with this checklist:

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Website
- site traffic (have you done enough SEO?)
- content (relevant and fresh content) 
- portfolio (are you constantly updating it?)
- user experience (can your clients see what they need to see?)
- landing page CTAs (are your calls-to-action clear?)

Email marketing
- email list (outdated)
- messaging (not fit for the clients you’re reaching out)
- email frequency (spammer alert!)
- campaign metrics (what’s not performing well?)
- email marketing tool (are you not tracking how your emails are performing?)

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Social networking
- audience (you’ve been targeting the wrong people)
- content (all your own or are you sharing other’s content?)
- messaging (have you discovered your brand voice?)
- engagement (do you always reply to comments or queries?)
- post frequency (are you posting daily or weekly?)

Advertising
- Facebook advertising (when was the last time you boosted a post?)
- Pay-Per-Click ads (do this if your site’s not getting clicks organically)

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Offline community building
- attending events (workshops, conferences, etc.)
- meetups (are you even a member of a MeetUp group?)

Where to Find Your Clients

If you worry that your target clients can’t find you, then be in their radar. Be where your potential clients can notice you. There’s a plethora of freelancers online, and if you don’t move to get head to head with them, you’ll lose opportunities.

Are you catering to a specific client base? Search for online communities where members are part of your target market. They could be on Facebook or LinkedIn groups, Reddit, or StartupNation.

Included in the checklist is the offline community. Polish your people skills whenever you go to events. Don’t forget to have your business cards with you. It’s still a reliable extension of your brand so have a unique design that will give potential clients NO reason to throw your card away.

If your workload permits, spend time to take a deeper look at your existing marketing strategies. It’ll be worth it and who knows, you’d thank us for the upcoming clients you’ll gain.

Postuar 11 maj, 2016

flDyan
flDyan Stafi

Junior Product Marketing Manager at Freelancer. Outside of work, I'm into wedding coordination, entrepreneurship, beach trips, badminton, reading novels, and binge-watching TV series on Netflix.

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