Getting Clients - Focus On The Basics

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Greetings Everyone,

It’s no secret that getting your first freelance client is one of the biggest challenges you will have to face at the start of your journey. But also a challenge that you will learn a lot from.

In this article I’m going to give you tips, tricks and advice to get your first freelance client, or at least that first good testimonial to get you started.

These may sound like all the advice you hear from youtube and all over linkedin, but it's true, this advice works, what you have to do is *** apply it ***.

And by the end I’m going to reveal how I got my first job as a freelancer on Upwork.

The Three Building Blocks

The basics are important, you can't be a good programmer without knowing algorithms and data structures and you can't become a software engineer if you only know frameworks and not the core concepts behind them. Or a writer if you only read books (trying to find examples in other fields is hard `:D ).

That's why you should focus on the basics of being a freelancer.

There are three building blocks you have to utilize to the maximum:

• Your skills which dictate what kind of jobs you can do
• Your Proposals And Messages Which Dictate which clients you get
• Your profile which will dictate if those clients will work with you

So Let's take a look at each of them.

1 - Skills And Competences

What are you providing to the market, what’s your added value and what can you offer that other freelancers don’t?

Some of those questions may seem vague at the start of your journey as you aren’t sure of your skill level, but once you look at what’s the market need you will find out what niche to pursue.

Examples:

• Logo Designer (General Skill) → SAAS Logo Designer (Niche)
• Web App Developer (General Skill) → 3D Web App Developer (Niche)

2 - Proposals, Messages And Meetings

Writing good project proposals will get the client to talk to you which then will lead to a virtual meeting where you have to convince him you have the solution for his problem

Proposals:

Here are the most important points when writing a project proposal

• DON’T write about yourself or even talk about what you do, discuss what you can do for the client and how you can solve his problem
• DON’T write long proposals, make it short concise and call for a video meet on zoom or GMeet.
• If the client asks for a detailed project proposal, send it in a file and prepare it in advance, prepare a template that you can use on demand.

Messages:

Your messages to the client have to be formal and professional, no jokes or puns, no ego, and always be kind to clients even the ones who didn’t work with you.

Online Video Meetings:

Once you reach this step, and unless you mess things up, the client is in your hands and he is at least 50% sure that you can solve his problem

• Have good audio quality
• Always do the meet with video so that the client feels that you always do these kinds of meets, even if the client doesn’t use it. it will also make the client trust you more and vice-versa (Imagine Talking to a voice over the internet and seeing just a black screen, how can a client trust you like that, vice-versa).
• Have a general outline of how you want the meet to go and what you want to discuss and prepare in advance.

3 - Profile And Portfolio

Once the client sees your proposal, one of the first things he will check is your profile so make sure you have a great profile

• Use a professional profile picture
• Short And Concise Description / Bio Describing what you generally do and what you can provide to clients willing to work with you.
• Have a list of your skills separated by category
• Show your previous work experiences and projects

I’ve Done The Basics Now What?

If you have done the basics correctly, you are on the right path, now let’s talk about three ways you can use to get your first project.

1 - Free Projects

Free work may sound like a bad idea, but I assure you it’s not as bad as working for a super cheap price then not being able to raise your prices or lowering the overall market value for all the other freelancers.

Here are some examples:

• Work on a small project for a family member and make sure he gives you a testimonial
• Work for a charity, this can be a great opportunity to do some charitable work and to get some experience and a very good testimonial as well.
• Work on open source projects

2 - Personal Projects

This is where you take an idea and do it for yourself as if you are simulating the work between you and a client.

This is especially useful for skills such as development and design where you have to show something in your portfolio to have a chance of being seen by clients.

These personal projects can also be a great way of advancing more in your skills.

3 - Discounted Work

This is one of the safest plays that you can do so that you avoid doing projects for super cheap and that’s the “I’ll give you a discount” card, take your wanted rate for your first year let’s say 5$ per hour and discount it by 20-30% and use that rate for your first 2-3 projects so that you can get some testimonials in your profile.

And don’t forget to mention that it’s a discount from your usual rate so that they understand that the quality they get is just because they are your first clients and not because the work is cheap

In Conclusion, never do cheap work and always think about future opportunities, it’s true that it will make it difficult to get your first job, but down the road you won’t face problems with clients seeing your old work and saying that you did it for cheap and now you have very high prices.

Summary

• Work on your profile, proposals and meetings
• To get your first project do it for free with a family member or a charity
• Or use the “I will discount 20% as my first client” card.

Don’t forget to share the newsletter with anyone that you think can benefit from it, we have much more topics upcoming to discuss.

How I Got my first client, let me show how bad my first proposal was:

Here are three things wrong with my proposal:

• Begging (i'd really like to work ...) To Work In This Project
• Not Addressing The Needs Of The Client In My Cover Letter
• Revealing That I Was new

This lead to the following:

• Me getting the work done early before receiving the payment for the last three milestones, which lead to confrontation through upwork support
• Client utilizing me to get a lot of extra free work done
• Receiving 100$ over 3 Months 💀 because of the back-and-forth with upwork support

And I've learnt the following:

• Never do extra work for free especially if it's a new feature with massive changes to the exisiting contract, except for bug fixes and some minor adjustements those are fine
• Never do the work before getting paid, except for clients you truly trust or want to gain their trust (only for clients who seem trustworthy, but if anything seems off then run 💀)
• As long as you have evidence upwork support will always be on your side
• Focus again on the three basics (Skils,Proposals and Profile)