How to Land Freelance Projects in Significantly Less Time

Nearly one-third of a professional freelancer's time is spent looking for work. Freelancing is the only field where even a short period of being passive will almost always end up to a less-than-rosy monthly bottom line.

Making your services known and negotiating with clients can be more tedious than working, so through the years the majority of freelance professionals learned to master several tricks of the trade to reduce their solicitation time in half. Here they are:

You got mail!

Make it easy for potential clients to know that you have "opened shop." Keep your contact information in check and practice entertaining telephone call queries in a professional and restrained tone.

Get a separate email address for your transactions with clients. Don't create an address that sounds childish or "jokey," otherwise, people will have a hard time taking you seriously. To weed out any junk mail, keep the Spam guard on.

Prepare several email templates.

This is crucial if you pitch articles to magazines or bid for jobs at well-known sites for freelancers. You also need to write collection letters in the form of an email, explaining the breakdown of your rates to your client.

Keep your templates short yet concise. Here are several examples:

I'm interested in (state nature of work). I have attached a copy of my resume and two sample articles.

I have read that you're in need of bloggers that specialize in SEO and affiliate marketing. I've had two years of experience in this field and am interested. You can find my blog at (provide blog URL).

Keep your resume up-to-date and always have a set of clips or portfolio handy.

Prepare a chronological and functional resume to suit your client's specific needs. If your articles were not published online, format your manuscript using Microsoft Word, double space it using Times New Roman and a font size of 12.

For artists and illustrators, it would be best to have a website where you can upload photos of your art, and provide your clients with a link directing them to your site.

Come up with creative ways to promote yourself. 

If you're a copywriter, your press kit is your best tool for landing lucrative gigs in advertising. Think about your specialties. Are you an animal lover? There are a lot of businesses that offer pet grooming services that would love to attract more dog and cat owners. 

Your press kit may be a simple, short brown envelope with a paw print on the flap. And then come up with a catchy phrase, like "A Penman for Pets," and have the words printed on top of the paw print. Insert your sales pitch, a brochure with information about your copywriting services and rates, and include your business card. 

Another excellent way to keep yourself within your target clientele's radar is to mail a newsletter to a select group of people who would most likely want to hire you for the services you offer. 

You can turn a newsletter into an additional income generator as well. If you write or proofread sales and collection letters for entrepreneurs, you can ask them if they're interested in getting publicity for a reasonable fee. Get a pool of freelance writers and editors, and sell advertising space or write product reviews.

Are You Making Enough to Sustain Your Freelance Business?

In addition to your overhead expenses, you have monthly bills to take care of. When you've gone for a year or two working without a boss, you may have noticed that your budget is reduced because you're no longer commuting to and from work five to six days a week, shopping for corporate attire, or eating meals at the office cafeteria.

And yet, even without transportation fare and money for food and clothing to worry about, the long-term success of your freelance business will depend upon your willingness and determination to work for a minimum amount to sustain your freelance business.

I'd like to illustrate how you can make this feasible. In the Philippines, the minimum wage among salaried professionals in the private sector falls just slightly above Php11,000.00. Now sit back and think, given your education, training, work background, and specialties as a freelance professional, how much money do you think should you be earning as your monthly minimum wage?

If your clientele is mostly based locally, you can't justify a minimum wage that's horrendously high. But if you'd like to attract clients outside the Philippines where they usually offer payment in U.S. dollars and require you to have a PayPal account, you can charge at higher rates. 

To illustrate, as a 10-year veteran freelance writer and proofreader, I have seen it fit to raise my "minimum wage" to Php18,000 since, along the way, I have decided on my specialties, which are article writing, proofreading, ghostwriting, and writing corporate resumes. And then I made a list of my overhead expenses:

Electricity

Mobile phone pre-paid cards

Internet connection

Stationery (coupon bond printed with my letterhead, legal-size envelopes, envelopes for my manuscripts, and stamps) 

Marketing materials (press kit, ink cartridges, and card stock for my business cards)

After making this list, I computed the equivalent of 70 percent of Php18,000, which, in addition to my target monthly minimum wage, I felt would be enough to cover my overhead expenses and other necessities like healthcare, household expenses, meals, money for recreational activities, and savings.

Take a look at the following equation:

Php18,000 x .70 = Php12,600

Php18,000 + 12,600 = Php30,600 

I have to aim for a minimum of Php30,600 monthly, so I have to manage my time, either to be more effective on a series of projects with quick turn-over rates, or justifying a larger-than-usual fee for a project that stretched for several weeks.

Stay tuned for my next several posts on setting your freelancer's quota. 

How Do You Convert Productivity Into Profit?

Would you like to know the secrets to earning your desired income from freelancing? Here it is:

• Raise your level of productivity by sticking to a weekly schedule so you can work without interruptions.
• Be aggressive in promoting yourself and your services.

The best way to stick to a schedule is to track your activities by keeping a record where you can enter or write down what you did every hour, everyday, for five to six days of the work week. By doing so, you end up with proof on which type of projects are prone to giving you a certain level of difficulty, and which are easier to handle.

This method is also effective if you want to prevent yourself from getting distracted, like resolving to go back to that graphic design job even if your favorite T.V. program is on.

To illustrate further, as a writer who offers feature articles to magazines, I email my queries to editors during Mondays or Tuesdays. By doing that, the editor has the rest of the week to read my query and the sample articles that I have submitted as clips. And while I wait for the editor's reply, I'm free to tackle other projects and assignments.

Having the ability to meet deadlines is crucial for a faster turn-over rate. Let's say you were able to dispatch a proofread manuscript to your client on a Friday. Your client emails you next Monday and praises you for "a job well done" and asks you to bill him. While preparing a Statement of Account, you can then proceed to start on another assignment.

Do keep coming back, because in my next articles, I'll talk about cost-effective strategies for advertising yourself and your freelance services.