How to Find Freelance Clients

Being your own boss means it’s entirely up to you to find the freelance work you want to do at the rates you want to charge. If you’ve already taken the steps to find your niche and brand your website, you might be eager to find freelance clients so you can get started growing your freelance career. There are a few different ways to find clients as a freelancer; all of them involve being resourceful, social, and proactive. 

Read on for tips on how to find freelance work by marketing your freelance business and growing your referral network—plus, what you should keep in mind once you’re ready to hire your first client. 

Marketing your freelance business

Before you even consider pitching yourself to potential clients, it’s crucial to establish your online presence and create a strategy for marketing your freelance business. Developing and maintaining a strong online presence makes it easier for prospective clients to find you and become familiar with your brand before they even contact you. Plus, maintaining an active presence makes it easier for previous clients to keep your business on their radar in case you’d be a good fit to hire for any future projects or refer to someone in their network. 

Some essential touchpoints for building your online presence include: 

Your freelance website

A simple way to represent yourself as professional and credible, building and branding a freelance website is vital to growing your business. Squarespace includes features like built-in SEO, beautiful customizable templates that require zero design experience to use, and a wealth of marketing tools, such as online scheduling, blogging, and email marketing. 

Social media

Research the most popular social media channels that professionals in your industry and your target audience frequently use, and establish social media profiles on those channels. Make sure your account handles match your website name so your audience has a consistent experience across all interactions with your brand. 

As opposed to your website, which should be focused on your business and what you offer to clients, your social media should primarily be used as a tool for building and connecting with an audience—not a surface full of marketing pitches. Proactively interact with your followers and the accounts of other professionals in your industry, and create content that adds value to the lives of your target audience. 

For example, if you’re a web designer, you could work on establishing thought leadership on tech industry trends, or—if it’s on brand for you—lean into industry-relevant memes about programming. You could even create humorous video content that’s both entertaining and informative for your audience. Creating content that’s sharable will help you increase audience reach and engagement, increasing the potential that qualified leads will find you. 

Content marketing

Cultivating personal one-on-one connections with clients is key to word-of-mouth growth, but it’s also important to balance those interactions with scalable solutions like content marketing. Some popular starting points could include launching a blog on your website or starting a newsletter. You could also get involved with podcasts, either by developing your own or strategically partnering with others in your industry for guest spots on their shows. Whichever option you choose, the goal is to create content that’s valuable to your target audience and can reach a lot of people at once. 

Tapping into your referral network

The next most powerful tool for finding freelance work is something that everyone everywhere already has built into their lives: a network—which is literally anyone with whom you have any sort of positive connection. 

Your network might include: 

• Former colleagues

• Other professionals in your field

• Followers on social networks

• Family members

• Neighbors

• Friends

• Friends of friends

Some of those categories of people in your network might have the potential for more qualified leads than others. For example, your cousin might be proud that you’re taking the leap to self-employment, while not quite understanding what you do or how to gauge whether or not the people they know might need your services. But a former colleague might have a firmer grasp on your expertise and have relevant connections in their extended network. 

That’s where it’s important to reference how you’ve marketed yourself on your freelance website and other surfaces: Make sure your services can be easily pitched to anyone. For example, you might be a “high-conversion website copywriter” or a “punk rock pet portrait photographer.” Make sure you have a tagline or brief explanation of your services on your website and social channels, so your network can easily reference that information if needed.

Beyond your existing network, be proactive about ways you can expand your referral network, including: 

• Other freelancers. Build your referral network by nurturing relationships with other freelancers in your field, especially people who have different specialties. For example, if you’re an email marketing expert and you connect with a social media expert, you can help each other by referring clients who are looking for freelancers in one another’s niche. 

• Webinars, conferences, or other events. Attend freelance-centric or industry-related events where you can network with more of the sorts of people who could lead to high-quality, high-intent referrals. Make sure to send requests on social media to the people you connect with, introduce yourself and your business, and remind them where you met each other. 

• Former or current clients. If you’re just starting out in freelance, this might not be applicable yet, but it’s essential to keep in mind from day one. Referrals from clients tend to be some of the most highly qualified leads you can get: New clients referred to you by previous clients tend to start from a baseline of mutual trust, since both you and the new client trust the word of your previous client. 

However you get referrals, an easy way to set up time to meet with them is to use an online scheduling software like Acuity Scheduling. In addition to charging for any appointment-based services (e.g., photoshoots or coaching calls), online schedulers make it easy to set up free introductory or networking calls. 

With online scheduling, all you need to do is mark what times of day you’ll be available for calls like those, and the scheduler will exclusively show those times to anyone trying to schedule with you. No need to play “What time works for you?” email tag, or worry about anyone scheduling calls with you during the time you’ve set aside for something else. You can directly send a customized scheduling link to select people, or let anyone self-schedule through your website or social media booking options. 

Searching for freelance work

Aside from your referral and social networks, many freelancers start out by sending cold pitches to potential leads via email, or looking for work on popular freelance gig marketplaces.

Cold outreach

Reaching out to local businesses or entrepreneurs online who you think would benefit from your services is known as cold outreach or cold calling. For example, if there’s a local massage therapist you love who doesn’t have a website yet, you could email them to offer your web development skills to help them optimize their business. Just make sure you always personalize your correspondence, instead of sending form letters that could come across as spam. Make it clear why you admire their business specifically and what needs your services would fulfill for them. Point to your expertise by sharing your website portfolio, but never make it all about you—the focus should be on the potential lead’s business needs and how your services would benefit them. 

Freelance gig marketplaces

On popular freelance gig marketplaces, you can build your own freelancer profile and browse or get alerts for a wide range of project postings by clients in all sorts of industries. It can be a straightforward way to start out as a freelancer, but keep in mind that gig marketplaces typically charge fees for getting work through them. If you can find freelance clients directly through your other channels instead, you won’t need to worry about paying money to make money. That said, some industry-specific marketplaces, such as Squarespace Circle for web designers, are beneficial for connecting with high-quality clients and building community with peers in your industry for knowledge sharing and referrals. 

Hiring your first client

Once you and a prospective client hit it off and agree that you’d like to work together, there are four key steps you should follow to set expectations in your working relationship and cover both of you legally. 

1. Clarify project scope. Will you be signing onto one project or a series of ongoing work? Make sure the scope of the project is crystal clear to you and the client—in writing. For example, if you’re a content writer, the scope of a project could include three 1,000-word blog posts with a maximum of two rounds of revisions each within two weeks of your delivery of the first drafts. Being specific like that helps you manage your time, set expectations, and identify when a client is asking for anything out of scope—in which case a new contract and compensation agreement should be introduced. 

2. Align on project timeline. Much like the project scope, be as specific as possible when aligning on a timeline. There might be a single deadline or a series of deadlines. Either way, make sure you and the client are on the same page about those expectations. 

3. Agree on rate. Consider what type of rate and invoicing terms make the most sense for the type of project or ongoing work that this client requires. It might make sense to charge a fixed-fee rate with half paid up front and half paid within 30 days of delivery. Instead, it could make more sense for you to charge an hourly rate, and keep the client updated with estimates of how long the project will take you to complete. Be specific and always align before starting any of the work. 

4. Sign contract. Depending on the company or individual, you might be in charge of writing up the contract, or they might want to own that process. Either way, it’s important to advocate for yourself and make sure the contract includes a few key details: your rate, your rush rate, your payment deadline terms, any late-payment fees you charge, the scope of the services you’ll be completing, and any deadlines for those services. It’s also common to include the right to share samples of your client work on your portfolio website. 

Nurturing ongoing client relationships 

The simplest way to ensure you’re building a strong foundation for your freelance business is by cultivating strong, ongoing relationships with clients. Once you’ve landed your first clients, keep in mind the following tips to establish trust and strengthen your reputation with them: 

• Stay professional, pleasant, and consistent with your approach to communication. That includes being responsive (within reason during working hours), considerate, and reliable. When you say you’re going to do something at a specified time, they can count on you to do it.

• Deliver excellent work, and go above and beyond wherever possible. Just make sure you’re not selling yourself short by doing work that’s outside of the agreed project scope. Instead, you could be proactive with problem solving, offer relevant suggestions for their business, or even deliver projects early wherever feasible. 

• Gracefully take constructive feedback on your work. Nobody enjoys working with people who get defensive or take constructive criticism personally. Be proud that you did your best, but then accept their feedback as an opportunity to keep growing your skills and delivering the best work possible for them. In fact, developing great work for one client helps you hone skills and confidence that you’ll be able to transfer into your work with the next client. 

Adopting these habits can help make you more memorable and build your reputation as an effective, reliable partner who’s enjoyable to work with. When you can do that, you’re already on your way to building a client referral network without even needing to directly ask for referrals. That said, it is common to gently remind clients that your business is driven by referrals, so it’d be helpful if they could keep you in mind when a relevant business need arises in their network. 

Even after your work with a client ends, it’s important to stay on clients’ radars. Simply treating clients as relationships—not transactions—can boost your reputation and lead to referrals from those clients or even additional future work from them. You could stay in touch by recommending they follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter, and/or you could just set personal reminders to reach out to those clients periodically to see how they and their businesses are doing. Be human and professional, and you’re more likely to attract the same. 

Regardless of how you find new clients, remember to keep an eye out for red flags, such as businesses you can’t verify as legitimate, or clients who demand a high volume of work within a short turnaround time for low pay. Remember: You have the power to end a relationship with any client for any reason. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to spend it on clients who respect you and your work.