When you, as a freelancer, take and complete more and more projects, your profile begins to stand out. Not only it shows the true potential you possess but also let an employer place their trust in you. However, it’s not the time for to relax thinking that your freelancing career has already taken a giant leap. This is the most crucial time, and if handled with extreme care it would help you in shaping truly a great career. On the other hand, if you fail to understand the of the situation, you may not be able to fully exploit the chance that you’ve earned for yourself. While you could hope for a great shining profession in the former case, latter case would bring you to a plateau phase, earning a constant amount but not as much as you could have.
In this article we’re going to talk about how to exploit this situation to your advantage.
Maintain contact with your clients you’ve worked with
Now that you’ve worked on enough projects you’d have many contacts of the clients that you’ve worked with. It is a useful habit to always keep in touch with the clients you’ve worked with in past. You should send out newsletters to them at appropriate times, informing them about any newer developments, and what you can offer them. However take extreme care not to overdo this and irritate them with too much of emails. You may even make occasional calls and ask them if you can help them in any way. This would guarantee that whenever they’re in need of a freelancer they’d certainly consider your name increasing your chances to score the project. Also, they may refer your name to their acquaintances.
Request your previous clients to post testimonials and reviews for you
I do not need to remind you how crucial it is to have a number of great reviews and testimonials in boosting your profile and proving a free but great marketing tool. A new client would certainly lay his/her trust more in a professional with enough good reviews than those without them. Thus, you should remember to request your client to write a review for you as soon as you finish the job for them.
As the number of reviews and testimonials grow along with the number of finished jobs you’d find it easier to grab more jobs.
Get yourself a website or blog
As I’ve already told you the importance of having a website or blog, I’m going to repeat it again. A website would not only serve as a cheap advertising tool, but also help you showcase your previous work, testimonials and services you have to offer. Clients can directly hire you from your website, saving a little on the fees that you have to pay on the freelancing websites.
If you’ve taken care of all these simple things, apart from having those hundreds of finished projects in your profile, you will notice that you are at an advantageous position than you were at the beginning. Here are some of the rewards that you can expect.
- Repeated clients: You’ll not have to aggressively hunt for jobs now, than you did before. Majority of the business would come to you from those you’ve worked in the past. Even if you’re not putting much efforts on advertising yourself or something is not going right you’d still have those clients to depend upon.
- Recommendations: Word of mouth has always been the best tool for promotion. Your clients would do that for you, and you’d watch your business grow as every client brings even more clients to you.
- Edge over other freelancers: If you’ve a superior profile with more number of finished projects and positive feedbacks you’d be in a better position to land up more jobs than them.
- Boost in trust factor and better reputation: More feedbacks and better profile builds you a great reputation and clients would be able to trust you more in giving a job, even more difficult jobs.
- Motivation: Of course, when you’ve a good profile full of a number of finished projects and feedbacks, and more work is coming you’d feel good. Use this good-feel factor as a motivation to do even better in future.
