Making the decision to become a freelancer is a bit scary. Will you find enough clients, can you get enough work to support you, will you be able to meet deadlines? None of this helps your stress level, but the best thing to do is to take a positive approach. You know that you have the skills, so believe in yourself and start by drawing up a plan to manage your new business. Clients as we all know are the lifeblood of any business, so it’s important that you allocate enough time in your plan for building up your new home business client base.
Building a network
Online networking is critical for building your client base, and most of your work will probably come through the contacts you can make through networking. You have to look beyond the direct contacts you have, and think about the contacts they may have, and how extending your network will lead to extending your client base. Social media networks are some of the fasted growing networks on the Internet today; with an estimated 40 billion users logging into Facebook daily you can’t afford not to be part of that. Other networks worth getting involved with are Twitter, Ning, LinkedIn and that’s just touching the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds out there, just try doing a Google search on social media sites and see what comes up. These are all potential opportunities to accumulate clients.
Participate
Whilst you might enjoy lurking round forums to watch and learn, you need to become active and participate. There are thousands of forums and community sites covering just about every topic under the sun. Find those that interest you or relate to your home business, join up. Most are free to join so you won’t be out of pocket. But you need to participate, get yourself known. Contribute help, advice, opinions, establish yourself as an expert. When you have been a forum member for a while most will let you add a signature to your posts. Take advantage of this, create an interesting signature leading back to your website or a business link. The two fold advantage here is that you are establishing links to your site, which help your ranking, but hopefully you are leading potential clients to your home business.
Look after current clients
Whilst you are busy building your new client base, never forget to look after your existing clients. Word of mouth from satisfied clients or testimonials go a long way toward establishing your credibility and gaining referrals.
Register with freelancing job sites
There are many freelancing job sites to be found on the Internet; in fact one could almost say some spring up overnight. But until you know what you are doing you are better off to stick with the more reputable ones initially. They are well established and to some extent they will protect your interests where they can and give you guidelines on the best way to go about getting work. Get into the habit of visiting the more popular ones like eLance.com or freelancer.com and checking out the job listings.
Your showcase
Whatever your home business is about you need to tell others and to have your own website when possible. Admittedly not every home business needs a website, but it goes a long way towards being your own personal showcase of what you can do and how well you can do it. It is a place to demonstrate your abilities and talk about your business to attract new clients. Sell yourself and offer plenty of options to contact you. However, don’t make the common mistake of many new business owners, thinking “build it and the visitors will come”. It doesn’t work that way, you need to do a bit of work to get your website recognized and ranked in the search engines, and you need to find traffic. If the search engines don’t find your website how do you expect visitors to find it? But put in the hard yards to get your site ranked then reap the rewards with visitors – potential clients.
This article was written by William Eve. William writes about saving money, investment loans and real estate for Home Loan Finder. If your a first home buyer or looking to refinance, visit the Home Loan Finder website for great advice and to compare home loans today.
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