One thing that you’ll learn quickly in freelancing is that, at least in the beginning, jobs don’t come to you — you have to go out and find them. That may change once you become established, but when you’re first starting out, you have to make an effort to let people know you’re available. In this section, we’ll cover several topics about how to go about doing that.

How to Find Freelance Clients

Your Old Boss

The first place you should start to look for freelancing assignments is with your former employer. Depending upon the circumstances under which you left, this may be difficult or infeasible, but generally speaking, who knows your skills, reliability, and work ethic better than your old company? Indeed, they may not have found anybody to replace you, and your old job still needs to get done. Putting pride aside, a smart company recognizes that since they are no longer paying your benefits and payroll taxes, getting you at even a higher rate may be a bargain — and they’ll save money in the long run.

Use Your Sphere of Influence

What is a sphere of influence? Everyone has their own sphere of influence that includes friends, family, business associates, and acquaintances that know you by name. Your sphere is a gold mine of leads and prospects who may not only become your first freelancing clients, but will also be an important source of referrals for you.

Who is in your sphere of influence? Believe it or not, most people can come up with 200 – 250 names of people they know or have had some contact with, either now or in the recent past. Think about your everyday life — who are your friends, your neighbors, your family? What groups do you belong to? Who cuts you hair and fixes your teeth? Do you have children who belong to sports, schools, or other organizations? The idea is to begin thinking of everyone. This list of people will be the very foundation of leads you will use to secure more freelancing opportunities, and build your client base.

Now that you’re off on your own, you need to get the word out about what you do and how you can solve people’s problems. Dig out all the business cards you may have collected over the years, and categorize them by potential. If you’re computer savvy (and even if you’re not), set up a contact database in your email or spreadsheet program and start entering the contact information of everyone you know. Yes, we said EVERYONE (well, all the adults anyway) you know. Your objective here is to build your sphere of influence list and utilize it to market yourself.

Next, start contacting the people on your list, telling them about your new life and asking for their assistance in identifying opportunities or people who may possibly be interested in hiring a freelancer who does what you do. This can take the form of either an announcement letter, or a phone call to convey your excitement. Do not be shy about asking others for assistance. Most people enjoy helping others, especially those they know. It’s ingrained in our human nature. Besides, somewhere in the past, you probably did THEM a favor, so now it’s payback time.

Network, Network, Network

This will be important, especially in the beginning. Not only will it put you in contact with others who may freelance, but give you insight as to who’s hiring. Chambers of Commerce often have networking events, “business after hours” or breakfast meetings that afford opportunities to meet local business owners. Business associations in your line of work may also have meetings, dinners, trade shows, and conferences you could attend. Sharing tips and trading stories with those in your industry helps establish close bonds with people who can help you down the road. Ask members of your sphere of influence to join you for lunch, coffee, drinks…whatever, just to give you an opportunity to describe what you do and how they can help you.

Oh, and by the way. Networking is a two way street. You should also go out of your way to help the person you’re with. If you can be the first to provide a referral, all the better. Business Network International, the world’s largest business networking organization, has a slogan: “Giver’s Gain”. You have to give to get.

Besides face-to-face networking, there are also online forums and Internet social networking sites that often have job postings. Here is a sampling:

• Freelance Lounge
• Writer’s Weekly
• TalkFreelance
• FreelanceSwitch
• Freelance Mailing List
• Internet Based Moms
• Freelance Writing Forum
• MediaBistro

On a good number of these sites, blogging has replaced the forum as the communications vehicle of choice, but there is still a lot of interaction, and no question is too stupid to ask.

Use Direct Mail

To market yourself, consider preparing a short brochure or postcard describing what you do. Keep it short, but make it creative and memorable. Use your picture and make it graphic. After all, you’re trying to create a new brand — YOU!

The US Postal Service has an online site where you can create postcards from your computer. You can select from a variety of styles, upload graphics and your mailing list, compose text, and then have the cards mailed to your list on the date you select.

50 4″x6″ Postcards for under $20

Use Email Marketing

Create a short email newsletter that’s informative and provides tips or helpful information in your area of expertise. The trick is to not make it too sales-sounding and to not send it out too often. Your objective is to keep your name in front of potential customers so that top of mind occurs when your prospect has a need for your services. It is extremely important to create something that contains valuable information so that the email is not regarded as spam. You also need a mechanism to be able to honor change email address and remove requests when they occur.

You can set up a free 1,000 name account on a service called My Mailing List Provider, or try the Email List Management Tool from Constant Contact for free for 60 days. Both services have helpful instructions on how to set up your mailing and offer very reasonable rates that will allow you to scale to your budget and capabilities.

FreelanceSwitch has also posted a very comprehensive blog on email marketing for freelancers that is worth reading for additional ideas.

Never Stop Marketing Yourself

A good place to eventually be is where you have more than enough work to handle. Even so, you should always set aside some time for marketing or have a mechanism in place where the marketing takes place automatically on a schedule. The reason for this is that you never know when the pipeline will suddenly dry up from some unforeseen circumstance — such as your client’s contract not materializing — and you suddenly find yourself without a gig. If you get too busy to handle additional work, you can always subcontract some of the work to a fellow freelancer or hire an assistant to do your background research, your bookkeeping, run errands, etc. so you can accommodate the workload.

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