How To Get Clients As a Freelancer: 5 Simple Steps

These approaches to getting clients as a freelancer have a low success rate:

• Sending cold emails to dozens or hundreds of potential clients per week
• Applying for freelance jobs
• Creating a website and hoping potential clients find it

While you might get the occasional job using these strategies, the constant rejection is discouraging. Even if you do win a client using these strategies, these clients tend to be low quality and expect a lot of work for little pay.

The best clients typically hire from referrals.

If you have no network, how do you get that first client? And once you have a few clients, how do you maintain steady work? 

In this post, I’ll explain a solution that allows you to emerge as a well-known freelancer in your niche, resulting in steady work from high-paying, low-maintenance clients. 

Step 1: Define One Service For One Niche 

It’s tempting to offer a variety of services across different industries to get your first client. It makes logical sense that you have a better chance of getting a client if you offer more services to a larger pool of clients.

However, most clients look for specialists to complete a specific task.  

Therefore, positioning yourself as a generalist is actually counterproductive and can turn potential clients away.  

For example, if you’re a cybersecurity company hiring a writer, which one are you more likely to hire?

A cybersecurity client is more likely to hire Pablo because he’s a cybersecurity specialist.

Therefore, select one niche and offer one service. 

Niching down also reduces competition as there are far more generalists than specialists in any specific niche. For example, there are far more “writers” than “cybersecurity writers.”

Establishing yourself as the definitive specialist for one service in one niche also immediately makes you seem like an expert, even if you have minimal experience.

To select a niche, use this formula:

Some examples of a single service for a single niche include:

• Web design for SaaS companies
• SEO for real estate agents
• Email marketing for ecommerce 

A commonly asked question is: can my niche be too narrow?

In general, it’s better to start in a niche that is too small and then expand rather than the other way around.

However, one way to determine if it’s too niche is by identifying a list of your dream clients and then do some research to see if they’re already using the service you plan to offer.

For example, if you want to offer email marketing for ecommerce, you can see how many ecommerce companies are already doing email marketing. 

Some quick research shows that plenty of ecommerce companies are doing email marketing.

Niching down also allows you to become a true master at a single service, allowing you to deliver better client results in less time. As a result, you can earn more per hour worked. 

Step 2: Work For Free

The mistake most aspiring freelancers make at this point is cold emailing anyone in their niche and pitching their service. 

The problem is that prospects receive dozens of cold email pitches like yours every week, so most won’t respond – even if you personalize it.

Instead, identify your dream client. 

This should be a real company. 

For example, it could be Airbnb or Nike. 

Then, identify exactly who in that company would be responsible for managing the service you offer. 

For example, if your service is YouTube strategy, it might be the brand manager. If it’s email marketing, it might be their marketing director. 

You can use LinkedIn to find these people. I often find that the best way to find these people is searching on Google rather than LinkedIn. 

Here’s an example:

Ideally, target an executive or senior team member with decision-making authority. 

Once you know the company and the person, create not just a personalized pitch, but an entire strategy of exactly how you’ll execute for them. When possible, execute the entire strategy and then hand them the final product. 

For example, if you’re offering email marketing, send them an entire completed email sequence for their company. Or, if it’s web design, send over a completed mock-up. If it’s SEO, send them a completed keyword roadmap and a blog post targeting one of those keywords.

Then, offer to continue executing for free for three months.

Here’s an exact email template you can use:

Here’s a real example of how I might pitch an ecommerce company email marketing services. 

The email should be only a few lines (ideally 3 or less). Most importantly, ensure the recipient doesn’t have to do any work to receive the value. 

If you send a generic email offering to work for free, it still burdens the recipient to figure out what they want you to do. As a result, most will still turn you away, even if you’re offering to work for free.

Instead, telling the recipient exactly what you’ll deliver so that all they have to say is “sure” removes any burden and is purely helpful to them.

It’s also important to note that you should only send this pitch to your dream client. This pitch requires a lot of work up front, as you have to create real samples, but it tends to have a very high acceptance rate. 

Additionally, if you land a gig (even if it’s working for free for a period of time), that brand name will give you more credibility that instantly makes you stand out to potential clients looking for high quality freelancers. The brand association will also make it easier for you to justify a premium price for your services. 

Even though it might take longer to make money in the short term, your efforts will pay off in the long run as you’ll be able to charge more and work with better clients.

Step 3: Build A Personal Brand

One of the biggest challenges as a freelancer is earning consistent work. 

Even if you’ve worked with some of the most impressive companies in the world, it won’t help you attract clients if nobody knows about your experience.

The solution to ensure you always have a long list of clients waiting to work with you is to build a personal brand. 

Personal branding is the process of establishing yourself as an authority on a particular topic by posting content about that topic. The content then attracts followers who want to learn more about that topic. 

Once you have a group of people who recognize you as an authority on that particular topic, you’ll have consistent demand for your services as those people will reach out to you organically. 

For example, Alex Lieberman has established a personal brand as a B2B content creator with hundreds of thousands of followers.

As a result, he always has plenty of demand for his ghostwriting agency.

For example, he posted this Tweet:

And there was plenty of demand in the comments:

The key to building a personal brand is consistently posting content about the topic you plan to establish yourself as an expert in (e.g., web design for real estate agents, email marketing for ecommerce, etc.).

So, how do you create content on a topic if you don’t have any experience? 

First, remember that you’ve already created a handful of real samples for the dream companies that you pitched. 

For example, if you wanted to do email marketing for Nike, you already created four sample emails for Nike. 

Those samples can be your first few pieces of content. 

Post them on your social media accounts and discuss what makes those emails effective and key takeaways people can implement in their email marketing strategy.

That way, even if the company doesn’t accept your proposal, those samples will still be useful in building your personal brand.

Even with thousands of paying customers, Patrick Campbell still does pricing page teardowns to show people how they can improve their pricing pages:

Another option is to interview other service providers in your niche and write case studies about their work. 

For example, Ryan Hashemi wrote a thread on influencer Codie Sanchez’s process for acquiring $200 million worth of businesses, and it performed very well. Even though it wasn’t his story, it helped him earn followers from his target audience:

While it may seem strange to showcase someone else’s work, writing case studies about how they achieved specific goals your ideal clients want to achieve will help you earn those individual’s attention and build the right audience. Then, you’ll have an audience when you begin posting content about your own work and experience. 

Additionally, you don’t have to wait until you have paying clients to create content about your work. You can always write about your experiences working with your free clients. 

Once you have some experience, here are a few frameworks you can use to craft your experiences into interesting content:

• A/B tests and lessons learned
• Personal failures and lessons learned
• Step by step instructions to specific achievements you’ve accomplished

A/B Tests and Lessons Learned

Here’s an example this marketing influencer ran a small A/B test and then wrote a post discussing actionable takeaways:

Personal Failures and Lessons Learned

Here’s a great example from Tom Bilyeu. He recently launched on Twitch without success despite a massive YouTube audience and wrote about the failure:

Step By Step Instructions

Another formula you can use is explaining step by step instructions you used to achieve a specific goal. 

Here’s a great example:

Keep in mind that the accomplishment doesn’t need to be astonishing. It can be a simple step by step process for increasing landing page conversions. 

Also, people often default to discussing their accomplishments, but your audience will resonate more with your content if you frame your successes as failures you overcame and lessons learned. 

This makes you more relatable and your content more engaging as it adds emotion and story to your advice.

If you want more help with personal branding, we have a separate community and course dedicated to the subject. However, the main thing is to get started and publish content consistently.

Step 4: Ask For Referrals

Building a personal brand and gaining the trust of your target audience takes time, so the best way to close your first paying clients is to convert your free clients into paying clients. 

Assuming the service you’re offering is valuable, it’s a no-brainer for the company you’re working with to pay you for your work, as hiring is a headache for most managers.

To get more clients, the next step is to ask them for referrals. Here’s an exact email template you can send:

The best clients often ask their friends for recommendations, so asking your current clients for referrals is one of the best ways to get more high-quality clients. 

This is also why it’s important to only work for free for dream clients as they’ll likely have a large network and be able to refer you to other excellent brands.

Even if your clients don’t have any contacts currently looking for freelancers, asking for referrals communicates that you’re looking for more work. This can result in them sending you more referrals down the road, or they may increase their contract with you.

Step 5: Build Systems and Processes

A process is a formula to repeatedly deliver the same results. 

If clients see that you have a process, they’ll feel confident that you’ll deliver consistent quality, helping you stand out from other freelancers. 

Quality clients also don’t want to micro-manage freelancers, and presenting a process eliminates the burden of the client providing project outlines, deadlines, and execution instructions. 

Therefore, developing a proven process is key to charging premium prices. 

To start developing a process, document how you complete each piece of work.

Start by writing out the project outline. For example, here’s what my own process looks like for writing:

• Keyword research
• Post outline
• First draft
• Add examples, graphics, and data
• Edit final draft

Then, write out how you execute each step. For example, here’s what my process for keyword research looks like:

1. Identify topics related to pain points that building a personal brand (our community and digital product) might solve.
2. Then, find keywords that match that topic by looking at competing websites and using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs.
3. Finally, select the keyword that best fits that topic and has the best combination of low difficulty and high search volume. 

Do the same thing for all of the following steps (e.g, post outline, first draft, etc.).

Then, construct each of those processes into a project timeline, like this:

Presenting this process to a client helps them understand why your process works and immediately makes you stand out from other freelancers. 

Your processes may change over time, and that’s fine. 

Even if you’re just starting out and have never delivered a piece of client work, you can still create these processes as you’re making free samples to pitch clients. 

As you build a personal brand, client demand will increase, and you may decide to build out a team. 

Processes are particularly important as you build a team because they allow you to produce similar results at scale. As you can see, I could give my keyword research process to anyone with a basic understanding of SEO, and they would be able to find similarly appropriate keywords.

Question: What project management software should I use?

When people think of building out processes, they often think of project management software and filling out calendars and to-do lists.

While project management software may be helpful as you scale a team, it isn’t necessary when you’re getting started. You can use a simple Google Doc to write out your step by step process to execute each step within the larger project timeline.

Here’s a sample template you can use:

How To Get More Support As A Freelancer

The process of getting your first freelance clients is relatively simple, though miscellaneous questions usually arise during the process. 

From client communication to deciding when to scale, you might want the opportunity to talk to other freelancers to get their input on your decision. 

That’s why we built the Copyblogger Academy. It’s a community of side hustlers, entrepreneurs, and freelancers where you can attend accountability sessions, ask questions and receive feedback from not only the community, as well as the seven figure entrepreneurs who run it, Charles Miller and Tim Stoddart. 

And the community is just the beginning. You’ll also have access to nine courses on topics ranging from SEO and content marketing to personal branding and email marketing. 

Join 1,500+ members for just $99.