How Do I Land My First Freelance Gig?
Let’s jump right in.
First, get engaged with your community.
Start networking, go to meetups, talk to people in your field, have people fall in love with YOU giving great service. That’s right, the face and personality behind your service actually matter. Join Facebook Groups, sign up for Slack Groups; get involved (listed below)! Listen to people, be genuinely curious about them and their goals, and then offer a helping hand where you can. This step should land you a few referrals (don’t forget to ask for them), help you build a small portfolio, understand what’s marketable and get you off of the ground financially.
Getting involved with your community is not only financially crucial but it will fill the void of decreased social interaction and contribution. This happens somewhere between when we transition from an office full of people to being alone at your AirBNB kitchen table in Spain.
Get involved.
Slack Groups: https://slacklist.info/
Discord: https://disboard.org/servers/tag/freelance
Meetups: https://www.meetup.com/topics/freelance/
Reddit: https://goo.gl/kU2qkj
Facebook Groups: https://goo.gl/DZQW34
Second, explore your inbound strategies.
Start marketing yourself across the plethora of platforms built to solve the income consistency problem. The freelance market is becoming flooded and freelance platform management systems (FMS) like Upwork have become more prevalent and more industry-specific. Now there are close to 50 FMSes and it’s getting out of control! Find the platforms that fit your skillset most (your community can point you in the right direction), reference other professional industry-specific profiles to help jumpstart your profile, and start submitting proposals!
Pay attention to what is and isn’t working! Try different messaging, different platforms, different price points, different customer segments, passive income streams, different Slack & Facebook Groups, and different marketing tactics. For those of you who could use a marketing framework, “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg should help out.
Over time, you’ll find out what works, how much you can charge, and what value have to provide in order to charge even more. If you don’t know how much money you need to make in order to live the lifestyle you want, then I suggest you do this before any of the previous steps.
If you do all the above and don’t land your first gig in a month, reach out to us and we’ll point you in the right direction. Additionally, if you have any specific questions around navigating the freelance space, please feel free to reach out to us here or on our website.
Want to see the biased bit on where zaaas fits into the picture? Check us out at https://xsu-develop.firebaseapp.com/!
Much love and happy freelancing.
-The Freelancers at zaaas
