Looking for Freelance Jobs
Written by Cedric Solidon on June 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 PMSo how do you look for work if you don’t have clients yet? There are several ways to do it. For one, spread the word about what you do to your friends, former employers and colleagues. Tell them that you are already in the freelancing business and that you’re ready to help them if they need your expertise. Email that to them or whatever available avenue you have. Just don’t spam them, meaning, don’t bombard them with the same message in the same avenue like email, mobile phones, etc.
Another thing you should try is cold contacting. This is where you contact businesses and offer them your services. But more than just sending emails to businesses at random, you must take a careful look at each business that you want to contact. Find if there’s something in their business where they can use your area of expertise.
For example, look at their website and see if there’s something there that you can improve upon. If you’re a designer, see if you can improve the navigation of the site, for example. If you’re a writer, see if you can still improve the site’s copy or ask if you can write their newsletters if they don’t have one yet.
Also try the classifieds section of your local newspaper. I haven’t personally tried this, but it may work for you. The only downside of this among the options I’ve mentioned so far is that you need to shell out money to do this.
Join online forums or job-bidding sites. If you’re looking for work on the web, you could try job-bidding sites or online forums where jobs are normally posted. Examples of job-bidding sites include www.eLance.com and www.oDesk.com.
But there are a number of difficulties you might have to face with these kinds of sites: the risk of getting scammed (in the case of online forums), the tough competition, and low rates.
Finally, you can also have your own website. The advantage of having a website is that you can direct people to your site if they need to know something about your services. Want to show them your portfolio? You can just upload your files to your site and give your clients a link to those files.
There are free options where you can set up your website such as www.WordPress.com and www.Multiply.com. However, I would recommend that you invest on your own web hosting and domain name to give your site a more professional feel (yoursite.com looks more professional than yoursite.multiply.com), and to provide you with more control over your website (some sites do no allow you to upload certain file types, for example).
The only downside to setting up your own website is that it costs money. Even if there are already cheap domain names and web hosts out there (take www.GoDaddy.com and www.HostGator.com for example), some people may not be to carry the additional expenses at the beginning. But I strongly recommend you invest on your own site and host if you’re really serious about it.
Once you’ve found a freelance job of your choice, you’d naturally want to know how to price your projects. And that’s what we’ll be talking about next time.
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