One of the biggest challenges for freelance writers and copywriters is generating new customers. Especially those who are just starting their careers usually have neither a large network nor an equally large customer base that can be used to generate new orders on an ongoing basis. But even old hands need to keep an eye on maintaining their established customer relationships and ensure as well that they generate new contacts, that might turn into new customers or clients.
We’ll show you some of the classic ways of acquiring customers and a totally new one based on blockchain technology.
Online portals
Since the internet came up freelance portals shot up like mushrooms. Upwork or smartjob are just two of the bigger ones out of a veritable flood of portals. Basically there are two types of portals. Some focus on presenting freelancers to potential customers and others focus on the offerings of publishers, agencies or companies. Of course, there are also some special portals such as Freelancer, where the freelancers bid directly against each other to secure orders. No doubt it is a good idea to use some selected portals. Of course, you have to check in advance whether the respective portal actually fits your own profile and your own expertise. Scoopshot, for example, aims on photographers. If you are a writer, you’ll find no clients here nor will they find you.
But you also should keep in mind that these portals have sometimes serious disadvantages. Building a meaningful profile is really time-consuming and does not necessarily pay off immediately. Also, most portals are internationally oriented. The number of freelancers represented there is correspondingly high. This makes it difficult to stand out from the crowd, even if you have the most meaningful profile around. Internationality might also lead to some confusion: The Indian freelancer, for example, who writes blog entries for 5 USD, can actually live quite well with this payment — in India. In Germany, on the other hand, such lousy pay would lead to quick starvation. Nevertheless some potential customers see the prices of (international) competitors and get some funny ideas what the level of payment should be.
The settlement of the payment itself can be problematic as well. Normally the payments are settled by the plattforms and they take a more or less decent share of your revenues. If you have bad luck and the customer is not satisfied with the performance (eventhough all the requirements were met perfectly), the payment might be reduced by the customer. For you as a freelancer the chance then will be quite low to see the full payment anyways. Nonetheless, many portals are an excellent way to attract new customers. Here is a list of some sites that might be worth to check out.
Your own website
Of course, (almost) every freelancer has his own website or at least some online space where he presents his work and skills. Especially at the start of your career you’ll hardly will generate any new customers by it. Even with a perfectly optimized page for search engines, it’s hard to land on Google & Co.’s first pages. But only in this case, you have a chance that potential customers actually will visit your page. Your own online presence is more important from a different perspective. Those who became aware of you probably want to know more about your skills, qualifications and other projects. For this your own website is ideal. If you succeed in presenting your own skills well and clearly, you have almost won — here are some hints you might consider for your own website.
Social media
LinkedIn, Facebook and Co. can also be quite useful for customer acquisition. Twitter and Instagramm are helpful too. If you post your articles and promote your skilly through the socila media, you can significantly increase your reach. Also, many agencies and companies post offers in the social networks. So, if you clarify your target customers well, you can follow them and get new orders as well. Additionally a platform such as LinkedIn is the ideal way to keep in touch with former customers and to call yourself occasionally back into their memory. By addressing potential clients directly on social media, customers can also be generated. After all, 12% of all respondents to the Hubspot study “State of Inbound” cited LinkedIn as an important means of cold calling. However, in this case, you should have dealt with the respective company beforehand and developed a clear communication strategy.
Be aware of mixing your business and private affairs too much in social media. Potential clients can be deterred if they see images of you in the midst of excessive celebrations or find that your tweeted world views are diametrically opposed to theirs.
Trade fairs and events
What sounds old-fashioned and obsolete in times of the Internet is actually a very good opportunity to win new customers. At fairs, special events and expert meetings, there are always plenty of publishers, editors and media or information portal operators. These guys are not only looking for interesting new topics, they might also be interested in freelancers for better managing their own work load. Additionally companies presenting at fairs might also be interested in presenting themselves to the public in a better or a more regular way. But they may lack the knowledge, the time and the skills to do so. Here you come into play. You shouldn’t underestimate what a huge advantage the immediately established personal contact is. Anyone who leaves a sympathetic and competent personal impression in the real world is way ahead of their competitors in virtuality.
A completely new way
crumbl offers a new and ideal solution for many customer acquisition problems. Our platform is designed as a content marketplace. So, as authors, you can offer your articles (of course other forms of content such as video or audio content as well) to all of our cooperation partners and, with the appropriate quality, experience a correspondingly high distribution and access rate. You can also offer each article exclusively to individual platforms or magazines for purchase and publication. In addition to the potential directly generated revenues, thanks to the distributed ledger technology you will participate in a fair and transparent manner in the advertising revenue. crumbl also helps you managing your social media sites. For example, posting in social networks can be easily done via crumbl. Of course, you’ll can track these post afterwards. So it’s quite easy for you to supervise the follow up on your social media posts.
Learn more about crumbl here or test us out in the closed beta phase and convince yourself.
All you have to do is send Felix a one-liner at felix@crumbl.org expressing your interest.
