Where Do You Find Work As a Freelancer?

The key to getting started as a freelancer is to have work. But where do you find your first jobs and indeed your later jobs too? And what do you put in your portfolio if everything you’ve ever done belongs to your old employers?

When it comes to getting your first job, its really a matter of using your contacts, and that means telling everyone you know that you are available for hire. If you do not have many leads then you will also want to make sure they know that you’ll come cheap. It might be a good idea to send a mailer around to family and friends, or you might prefer to talk to people in person, whatever the case remember, no-one will hire you if no-one knows about you.

You can often also find jobs on the web on forums and job boards. Look for local sites as well as internatitonal ones. Here are some examples of places you could look:

1. 37Signals’ Gig board
2. Krop
3. Sitepoint (if you want to be underpaid!)
4. Coroflot

Another good starting point for work are places that you have worked at before or where you know someone who works. Two of my own first clients were former employers who had overflow work. It padded out the portfolio and helped me ride out the lean early months.

If you have nothing to show for yourself for whatever reason then you had either better be a great talker or find something to put as a sample. This might mean:

1. Creating an imaginary job for yourself and executing
2. Offering your services for free to someone
3. Talking your last employer into allowing you to show some of your old work for a specific period of time

In any case it’s difficult for a client to hire you on the strength of your word alone. From time to time you will be asked to do what is known as free pitching, where the potential client will ask you to do some of the work prior to payment. My view is that this devalues your industry and indicates the potential client does not place much worth on your work. Consider if you went to see a doctor, would you ask for a sample health check free of charge, or would you get your mechanic to start fixing your car to see if you liked the way he worked? These things tend to happen in creative fields such as design and writing, but they should not. Keep these thoughts in mind, particularly in your early days when you are struggling.

Once you have worked a fair amount of jobs, you should find that you steadily get an increase in repeat work and referral work and that you depend less and less on new jobs. If this is not the case you are either too expensive, getting the wrong types of clients or not good enough at your work (which in turn means you’re too expensive). You can and should generally anyway look for outside ways to get more work – advertising, yellow pages listings, getting your website found and so on, but if you have trouble retaining your clients or having them refer you on, then these are cosmetic fixes and you should be looking at addressing the main problem.

Related posts:

1. Rules for Successful Client-Freelancer Working Relationships So you’ve
2. How To Winning Any Client Project The abilit

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