5 Easy Ways to Find the Best Freelance Copywriting Clients (2020)

Maybe you already have a handful of decent clients but you’re not sure where the next group will come from. Outside of word-of-mouth, pitching, and Upwork, how do you find more freelance clients? How do you find bigger, better clients who appreciate your talents, pay well, and, most importantly, pay on time? There are tons of unique ways to use social media to get clients to seek you out instead of you having to find them.

How to Find More Freelance Clients

Digital networking is a killer way to get a steady stream of awesome clients, but there are hidden tactics that work better than others–particularly on social media. Here are some of the secrets that the pros aren’t telling you about how to find more freelance clients using social media:

1. Create a Pinterest Portfolio

A decent online portfolio will get you really far in freelance life. Eventually, you’ll want to create your own freelance portfolio. But, creating a Pinterest portfolio is a fast and uncommon way to put a body of work or spec work together. When you’re ready to move over to hosting your portfolio on your own website, you can use a Pinterest plugin to show your Pinterest portfolio on your own website. Here are the instructions for Squarespace portfolios (highly recommended for portfolio sites… again, they’re not paying us to say that!), and here’s a WordPress plugin to display your Pinterest feed on your site.

How to Create a Pinterest Portfolio

• Make a Pinterest profile.
• Set a timer for three minutes.
• At the end of the timer, stop obsessively scrolling through Pinterest and pinning things-it’s an addiction, sure, but don’t let it get in the way of what you came here to do.
• Next, set up a board and name it something along the lines of ‘Portfolio.’ (No need to go looking for what other people have done, just get it rolling and perfect it later).
• Get the free Pinterest Save Button extension for Chrome. Note: if for any reason you don’t have Chrome, for the love of everything… get Chrome, FFS.
• Go forth and seek out all of the work you haven’t even saved on your computer.
• Look for all of your published work (even uglier stuff). If you don’t have any published work, upload spec work.
• Get Pinning.
• Pick the very best images from each link.
• Add Pinterest covers:

Cover Images for Your Pinterest Portfolio

There are two solid ways to create Pinterest covers. You can design your own graphics using Photoshop, Illustrator or you can use free programs like Canva for templated design. Honestly, using Canva is the easiest way to design Pinterest covers, because they already have a ton of awesome, modern designs ready-to-go with the correct dimensions. Unsplash for non-stock photos.

Note: If the images on offer from the links you’re Pinning are , add your own image from either a Google Image search, Pexels, Unsplash, or another not-shit stock photo site. If you can’t find a good one from the brand, don’t use one from the brand. Instead, find and use another relevant brandless image (i.e. a close-up laces on a sports shoe for a sportswear company).

Choosing Work for Your Pinterest Portfolio

What if you didn’t personally design a piece of work but you were involved in helping it come to fruition? You can list the piece of work on your portfolio, add the associated images, and add your role in the caption.

You can also pin webpages from the brands that you’ve worked with (even if they weren’t the specific pages you were involved in making-just pick the best graphics that the brand has) and add a caption to detail your involvement with the brand.

How to Make Your Pinterest Portfolio Look Good

Have you ever avoided presenting some of your work because of the use of shockingly bad images by the publishing site (your client)? Don’t worry, find some modern non-stock images to use on the Pin itself.

You can’t change the crass use of old school stock images that some clients insist on using, the cursive font, or the motivational posters your old boss still displays proudly above their desk, but you can change the first impression by manually creating cover images and picking better photos for the Pins themselves. If it’s good work, post it.

LinkedIn harbors a colossal network of people. It’s a social media platform that works best when used for networking and profile building. But, this crowd does not like to be overtly sold to.

“91 percent of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content.”via Hootsuite

LinkedIn is often severely underutilized or utilized badly, and that’s one of the reasons it can be such a killer platform for freelancers who know their shit.

To get more clients on LinkedIn, you can post your own blog posts, post other people’s blogs, and always keep those relevant your profile.

Connect with People on LinkedIn

Start connecting with more people on LinkedIn to get more exposure. Send out short personal messages with your connection request to introduce yourself and make it more likely that they’ll respond in kind. Many people try to sell their services via LinkedIn messages-but that just comes off as tacky and kinda jerky, too. It’s more like a soiree where you circulate the room, oozing intelligence and making people curious.

Connect with company profiles to see if they’re looking for someone with your talents. You can, and should, also connect with and message recruiters who recruit for the kind of work you’re looking for. There are internal company recruiters and freelance recruiters who specifically hire for contract roles. To find them, type terms like “freelance recruiter” or “contract recruiter” into the search bar on the upper lefthand corner of LinkedIn. Make sure that you filter to only show people. You can also use this tool to find companies in your field that you might want to work with.

Interact with Other People’s Posts

If you want to build a following on any social media platform, you need to make sure that you’re interacting with other people’s posts. Like, share, and comment on other people’s posts. Support people and show them that you care by actually caring. When you do this, you build allies.

With the exception of sociopaths, everyone gets nervous when posting to social media-and that makes it easy to comment on someone’s post and boost their self-esteem. Not only does that make people feel grateful, but it’s the right and vulnerable thing to do.

If you want to build an audience who cares about what you’re saying, also respond to and like other people’s comments on your own posts. It doesn’t matter if you have 5 followers or 5 million, responding to a person’s comments is acknowledging their presence. And, even those aforementioned sociopaths like the attention when you respond.

Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash

3. Use Facebook to Get More Freelance Clients

With 2.38 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one monster of a platform. And, just about half of those people log in every single day.

Facebook marketing can be a great foundation for self-promotional material. But it’s a crowded space. There are a few tricks that six-figure freelancers use and don’t want others to know about.

Use Facebook groups for:

• Finding more freelance clients within your niché
• Collaborating with other freelancers and entrepreneurs
• Using community knowledge to build your freelance skills in areas like financial planning, taxes, time management, networking, and more

Join or Create Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are different from pages as they tend to be more collaborative in nature. They range from ‘ Ad Agency Hustle’ to ‘ Tools & Jobs for Freelance Bloggers & Writers ‘. Outside of Facebook marketing groups, it’s up to your imagination. There are groups for gardening and groups for tracksuit lovers. Yeah, Facebook groups like to get real weird with it.

Playing by the Rules

In groups that are specifically set-up for business transactions, you can initiate conversations by introducing yourself, your profession, and the services you offer. At the end of the day, the key is to remember that the people you’re talking to are also of the human variety.

For most Facebook groups, it’s usually against the rules to self-promote in non-marketing groups, you can join the conversations, post helpful resources for people, and become a “conversation starter” within a group. Being a part of the better groups will help you stay at the forefront of your game. And, if the group does allow self-promotion, you’ll be able to post links to your own work as well.

To make the dream work, you need to become a part of the community, genuinely help people with relevant comments and content, and interact with their posts as well.

The more you interact in a group, by sharing, liking, and commenting on different posts, the more you’ll get noticed. The key is to provide genuinely useful resources for other people. Eventually, with a consistent presence, people will start recognizing you more, and when it makes sense to, you can start to lightly mention your services.

Gaining Popularity on Facebook

People will see your posts and, eventually, make note of you for one of their upcoming projects. If you begin with this approach, you’ll also have more common ground when it comes to reaching out to those in the group that you’d like to work with. When you consistently show that you actually care, it’ll hit a tipping point and you’ll start getting lots of attention all at once.

Stay as Consistent as You Can

It takes time to build trust and admiration. You might start strong out of the gate, then wonder what the hell you’re doing, because the attention almost always won’t be instant. Some days it’ll feel like you’re sending energy into a void, never to be seen again. That’s not what’s actually happening, though. People need to see that you’re still going, no matter what freelance life sends your way. They need to have that stability before you can gain their trust, and rightfully so.

Important note: social media can get overwhelming, and time is a commodity, so just sticking to 3 or 4 solid Facebook groups will keep your interactions genuine and your personal relationships intact.

Build Your Own Facebook Business Page

Depending on your niché, you may want a Facebook Business page. Similar to Twitter, it’s an all or nothing kind of social media platform. In order to build a loyal audience for your Facebook Business page, you need to be present and sharing quality, useful content as much as possible or not have a page at all. Having a half-assed Facebook Business page is like telling your potential clients that you’ll leave them at the altar.

Share Other People’s Content

You don’t have to just share your own content, either. If you find curated (other people’s) content that will help your followers/potential followers in some way, there’s no harm in sharing it. You can also take inspiration from another person’s content to make your own branded content. You can also search for press releases in your field and make your own blog post, infographic, or video using the articles you find.

Sell Your Freelance Services on Facebook

Facebook is a great place to build awareness around your brand. With any social media marketing, the 80/20 Pareto rule is a good rule of thumb. Spend 20% of your time selling and 80% being useful to your audience, and you’ll see a remarkable difference. For example, for every 10 posts, 8 should be useful without trying to push sales, and 2 should sell your services.

Photo by Adam Solomon on Unsplash

One of the most efficient, yet underestimated, features of content marketing is the use of hashtags; not enough people realize how useful they are.

Hashtags are to social media what keywords are to Google search. The algorithms that orchestrate these inquiries are looking for the search term itself, the location of the searcher, and any content that matches their digital profile or other recent searches. Well, the rabbit hole goes far deeper than that, but that’s a blog post all of its own.

Use Hashtags to Search for Gigs

You can easily search for anything using a hashtag, and everyone who has posted anything with a relatable hashtag will appear in the search results.

Freelancers can use this social media tool to put their services out there. For instance, if you a freelance writer, you can post about your services using hashtags such as #freelancewriting, #needawriter, #freelancewriter, #freelancer, #publishing, #writingjobs, etc., and whenever someone would search about any of those things, your post would appear in their search results. This would enable you to market yourself easily and free of cost.

These are a few things that you can start doing on social media if you are a freelancer and want to use social media to increase your clientele. It takes some work, so it’s best to start on the platform that you can see yourself using every day, but it’s easier than some would have you believe.

5. Blog to Attract New Freelance Clients

You have something to offer the world, and it’d be a travesty not to share with others what you know. One of the best ways to do this is to blog. It doesn’t need to be hosted on your own website, you just need a stage to sing on.

Just one look at massive publications like The New York Times will show you that you don’t need perfect grammar or spelling every single time. They’re pumping out content so fast, that sometimes things slip-and that’s ok. Your pictures don’t have to be perfect before you hit the publish button. You just need to be true to who you are, honest about what you do and do not know, and most importantly, help people find a solution to their problem. That goes for social media marketing as well.

Blogging on LinkedIn Pulse

Why limit the use of LinkedIn to connecting with other professionals and updating your job title? LinkedIn Pulse is a blogging platform on LinkedIn where users can create their own content and share it with their followers as well as others who are interested in that topic.

The best part is you’re free to tag each piece with keywords, so brands and potential clients who are interested in the topic you’re writing about will be able to see your piece.

Personal growth strategist Stephanie Sammons, for example, reported seeing over 200 new followers and a 38% increase in the number of people viewing her profile over the previous week, after publishing only her first LinkedIn Pulse post.

Blogging on Medium

Medium is a great platform to use because it comes with a premade audience of over 60 million people. It also comes with its own SEO to help you fight through the noise. Starting a blog on your own site is a great idea, supplementing and/or starting with blogging on Medium will get you more freelance clients faster.

Tips for Optimising Your Medium Posts

Optimizing for Medium in a Nutshell

1. Use a crisp, well-composed image. Unsplash & Pexels are just two of the better free image sites.
2. Revamp underperforming posts.
3. Use a relaxed tone of voice.
4. Work with Medium publications.
5. Follow people who like your posts.
6. Post regularly.
7. Make lists for easier navigation:

Lists can make your content easier to scan and more interesting to look at, which in turn keeps people on your posts longer. People who keep their readers engaged impresses the hell out of Medium’s algorithm. If you can do that, it’ll automatically push your posts further up the Medium blog feed and will also push your Google ranking up as well.

• Add a dash (-) or an asterisk (*).
• Then, start typing the first item on your list.
• Hit Enter and the list will automatically form, giving you bullet points.
• For numbered lists, just type “1.” and then add your first item.

So, what’re you waiting for? Implement even one of these strategies, and you’ll be on your way to bigger, better freelance clients in no time at all.

Originally published at https://freelancelifehacks.com on January 17, 2020.