Getting Your First Freelance Client

No matter where you are in your freelancing journey, this article will help you get your first freelance client or improve your process to get many new clients. Every freelancer has to start at zero clients and no publicly available freelancing reputation such as ratings and reviews. Read ahead and learn how to change that in less than a week.

Work Experience & Skills

It’s probably pretty obvious that in order to do freelance work, you need to possess skills that are needed in the market. Unless your market is looking for highly focused skills, it’s better to have some extra skill sets to be well-rounded. Start with the skills and work experience you have, but if you determine you need more: learn while you earn. It’s better to get started with limited skills rather than wait to be perfect, because that will never happen.

To determine what skills and work experience you should highlight to gain the most visibility, you need to use the concept of convergence to find your niche. Going through the process of finding convergence, you will know where you are strong and where you need to improve. It will also illuminate what target audiences you can immediately start talking to while avoiding those that have a low probability of gaining attention.

Portfolio

A portfolio is a collection of work that shows potential clients your skills and work experience. If you are lacking work experience, you do not need to wait until you have a portfolio built. Instead, you can build one on the way as the author did when starting out in freelancing.

As a small word of caution, if you lack work experience you might consider getting some prior to starting freelancing so you have some real-world experience. Without some experience, your first freelance job might not go well and your reputation can suffer early on when it’s the most critical. If you fall into the category of needing work experience first, there are a few options and you can determine which works for you.

1. Concept Projects

Building a portfolio with concept projects can help you show your skills to freelance clients in industries or categories you are targeting to work with. Some helpful advice is to stay away from well-known or overdone examples. In web development, as an example, everyone has seen the “to-do app” and it’s lost appeal.

2. Charity Projects

A better option that will provide more realistic work experience is to complete small projects for charity organizations. Not only is the project defined with a scope, but it also requires communication which is an important freelancing skill that needs to be continually developed. It’s also an easy way to gain a written review or recommendation.

3. Small Business & Content Creator Projects

Another excellent option that is similar to charity projects is to provide a limited scoped project for a small business or content creator. It’s preferable that they exist in a market you are targeting or very familiar with. The project can be done for free or low cost. It’s important that the person you do the work for has a true sense of appreciation and not someone to take advantage of you.

Your portfolio projects can be shown to potential freelance clients in various ways. The most common is a simple portfolio webpage, static graphical documents, or hard copy documents.

Public Profile & Niche

Depending on who your target audience is and how you plan to approach them, you will most likely have some kind of public profile or several. What’s most important is that each profile is completely filled out such as on LinkedIn or Upwork (or any freelancer platform). Profile completeness is usually built into algorithms on whether or not your profile will be displayed in various search results.

It’s also very important to use the same avatar profile picture. If you are targeting clients in Western countries, ensure that your profile picture is in professional casual clothing and you are smiling. Use other guidance targeting other national cultures, but for Western countries a passport photo is looked down upon (negative).

Everything that you highlight from skills to the choice of words used should be dictated by the niche you are creating based on your convergence research. When you start writing proposals, potential clients will be reviewing your profile. Therefore, it is important that everything matches what the client is looking for.

Writing Quality Proposals

Everything up to this point has been preparation for writing high-quality proposals that are custom written for each freelance job post or other outreach method. In most cases, you’ll have a lot of different job posts that you could write a proposal for. What most freelancers do that doesn’t get results is write quick or copy & paste proposals to as many as they can. To their surprise, but it shouldn’t be any surprise at all, they don’t get any responses. After a better strategy is revealed, it’ll make sense why they didn’t get a response.

Filtering

The first step is to filter job posts. If you’re on a platform that reveals public information about the client, a lot of helpful information is there. Why would you write a proposal to a client who is:

• Payment unverified

• 0 - 50% hire rate

• Less than 4-star rating

• Reviews written by other freelancers reveal the client is unresponsive or unrealistic

The truth that you have to understand is that most job posts are not meant for you. In the - very beginning you are looking for job posts that meet the following criteria:

• Client is payment verified

• Client has over 50% hire rate if they are not new to the platform

• Client has over 4-star rating (unless they are new and don’t have a rating)

• Freelancer reviews of client don’t cause you any alarm about behavior

• Less than 20 proposals written (the less, the better)

• The job itself will take you 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete.

Anything outside of this is a waste of time (and platform credits). Why? Your goal in the beginning should not be money, but instead reputation. The money follows reputation. By limiting your proposal writing to jobs with the highest probability of response rate and fast completion, you are strategically aiming for a 5-star review with a rating of how amazing you are.

Writing The Proposal

Many, if not most, starting freelancers make huge mistakes when writing the proposal. Those mistakes are copy & pasting a proposal template and telling the client how wonderful they are. Both of these mistakes share something in common which is that they don’t address what the prospective client cares about.

If you learn nothing else, this next statement can totally change your freelancing career into one of success and achieving your goals. The key to getting to the interview is showing the client that you will solve their problem and you are uniquely qualified to do it. That really is the secret. So how is it done in a practical sense?

Your written proposal should be composed of restating the problem in your own words, how you will solve their problem at a high level, how you’ve solved the problem in the past (if applicable), and a call to action to book a video call. Nowhere in that is how great you are or all the skills you have. That is the purpose of the profile! Keep the solution to their problem simple, they don’t want to and probably won’t understand all the details. The length of the proposal should be approximately the same length as the job post, but no more than about 6 sentences.

Note that you can attach a copy or link to your portfolio even if it’s found somewhere in your profile. It makes it easier for the client to find it if they don’t have the time to look through your profile. However, you don’t need the portfolio if you don’t have one. If you follow the composition of the proposal as described, the client will most likely make up their mind based on that. Some people (about 25%), will want more detailed information.

Interview

The prospective client initially feels you may be able to solve their problem after reading your proposal, they may have briefly looked at your profile, they have an interest in you working with them, and they invite you to an interview. However, if the response you get back seems odd or out of place you may be talking to a problematic client. In most cases, the response is a sincere willingness to make sure things can proceed forward or the prospective client needs to select one of a few good freelancer candidates.

No matter what the prospective client’s goal is, your goal must be to get a video face-to-face call, ensure a personality fit, and ensure you can do the job. Again, your reputation is paramount. Nobody is perfect, but you and the client should have a personality fit to work together and communicate effectively. You also need to make sure that you can do the job by getting the details as it won’t be any good to accept the contract and get a 1-star review for failure to perform.

The face-to-face component establishes a real human connection. People treat others as human beings with thoughts and emotions when that connection is made. You will be more understanding if the client takes a while to respond due to a busy schedule, and they will be more understanding of you if the task isn’t 100% perfect due to slight miscommunications. It also makes it much harder for the client to not give you all 5-stars during the rating process. The video call cannot be underestimated.

SUMMARY

To put everything together, you must have at least some skills to start freelancing, but work experience is a big help. In order to show your skills and work experience, you should create a portfolio. Put together a totally complete profile that speaks to your niche and displaying your appropriate profile picture. After the administrative tasks are out of the way, you are ready to start writing high-quality proposals to filtered job posts. Once a potential client responds to a proposal, then your goal is to get a face-to-face conversation with them so you can make sure you understand the project, make sure there is a personality fit, and most importantly, establish a human connection.

You have the foundational knowledge to get your first freelance client. Be complete. Be consistent. Get the first ‘yes’ and many more will follow.