Eight Ways to Land More Freelance Projects with Technology

Working from anywhere in the world and the flexibility that your freelancing lifestyle brings makes a freelancing career attractive for many digital professionals. However, while convenient, working as a freelancer has many challenges. 

Finding more work and keeping income stable are those challenges that turn away many professionals who want more stability and predictability from their work. While challenging, financial turbulence that freelancers face shouldn’t be a reason for giving up on your dream.

In this article, we give some ideas on attracting more clients and finding more freelance work using smart technology tools that almost everyone can afford.

Work on improving your proposals

To get more project work, you should make a good impression at the proposal stage. To create a good proposal, you need a good process, idea, and software.

Creating a proposal should not take you a lot of time. However, spending too little time and sending a badly researched proposal can result in a lost project. That’s why you have to use professional proposal templates that can help you personalize proposals better.

At the stage of creating a proposal, include project timelines to help clients visualize how long the project will take. Add a detailed breakdown of how much each project costs and include optional services (they are your upselling opportunities). Don’t forget to place testimonials and referrals from your clients to boost credibility. 

During the research phase, use this sales discovery checklist to ask the right questions. By asking the right questions, you can understand your client needs better. As a result, you will end up writing better proposals.

Do smart cold outreach

Spend more time on identifying prospects who can be looking for your services. Instead of bombarding random companies, focus on your ideal customer profile. Every time, research your prospects better before sending emails.

Define what a sales qualified lead is for your freelance business and look for those that fit such a profile better. Personalize email to resonate with the pains and challenges of your potential clients better.

Remember to use more than one channel for outreach. Most freelancers would use email for cold outreach. You can complement this channel with some message sequences on LinkedIn. This way, if your email goes unnoticed, you can still catch your lead’s attention on a different channel.

To spend less time on tedious tasks of researching leads, consider automating outreach with the best email finder tools. They will help locate emails of decision-makers faster and make your outreach activities much more effective.

Optimize your website

Create a simple website that would resonate with your clients' challenges. There are various tools to help you capture leads and convert them into prospects. For example, you can Introduce gamified popups to engage people who enter your website. For example, you can get people to claim a free consultation or a website audit.

With gamified popups, you can convert traffic into leads more effectively. Once you capture their email, you can check if they can be turned into sales qualified leads and outreach those that fit your ideal customer profile the best.

Online chat is another way to engage your website visitors. If you are using WordPress, consider integrating the Wordpress chat plugin. By responding to your leads via chat on a website, you can convert their interest into sales early enough in the process.

Also, consider introducing some lead magnet on your webpage. It can be a free consultation or a website audit. 

Pro-tip: Use these best landing page builders to make website optimization effortless.

Improve your portfolio

If you haven’t created case studies explaining your previous projects, create a page or an online presentation that you could show to your potential clients. Your case studies are your resume that showcases your experience and skills.

Keep a consistent structure of each case study. Your case studies can include the following elements:

• Overview – general description of your project
• Challenges – the problem that your client has faced and you have helped resolve
• Process – how you have approached the problem and how you resolved it
• Outcome – what results you have managed to achieve
• Testimonials – to boost credibility, include testimonials, both text and video

Diversify your income

While you can use various tools and strategies to keep your income stable as a freelancer, there will still be the months when you earn less than usual. Creating more revenue streams can help you achieve more predictability. 

Consider diversifying your income sources by developing a new business. Apart from doing some graphic design work as a freelancer, you can also spend a few hours every week to develop an eCommerce business from zero. Over time, you can grow your passive income that will complement the revenue from your freelance work.

Starting an eCommerce subscription business is a good alternative to a traditional online store or dropshipping business. For example, you can create and sell online courses in the subscription form. 

Improve on SEO

Optimize your website to rank higher in Google search results using these SEO tips. Do more keyword research – define the keywords you want rank on. Once you have defined your target keywords, produce the right content. 

Search intent is one of the concepts that you have to nail from getting down to writing a page or an article. Search intent is a purpose with which a user types a query in Google. Before creating content, do some research to identify the search intent of your chosen keyword. 

For example, if you choose a keyword to find a freelance graphic designer, you will find out that most searches are focused on product pages and transactional search intent. People typing this keyword are already looking to hire a freelancer rather than educate themselves on the ways to find one.

Once you are ready with your article, introduce content elements to help convert traffic into leads. Those can be banners that lead to your contact form or some in-text contact forms. 

Finally, to get more chances to rank higher, invest in link building and build relevant links on high quality domains leading to your articles and product pages.

Improve your lead response time

Your lead response time has a clear effect on the win rate of projects. If it takes you long to respond to a lead inquiry, it’s more likely that your lead will move forward with his search for a freelancer somewhere else. 

Don’t make your leads wait for your response – respond as fast as possible for their first message to establish contact. Aim at responding within a few hours rather than days. If you can’t keep track of your inbox, use Zapier to set notifications to show up on your phone once a lead fills out the form on your website.

Dedicate some time to responding to inquiries every day – don’t make big breaks even if you have a lot of client work. 

Improve on project management

A good project management software can not only help with your existing projects, but also improve on client prospecting. Apart from visualizing deadlines for project stages, you can use timelines to understand the stages in lead outreach and prospecting better. 

In most project management tools, you can set milestones in your business development project. This way, you will know when you are achieving your goals and understand what key steps and tasks you have to accomplish to close a deal. You can access various templates built for specific use cases such as go-to market strategy or content management plan.

Wrapping up

To be a successful freelancer, apart from doing client work, you have to cover sales and business development. To make sure your calendar is fully booked with projects for months ahead, you have to work out a strategy and use smart tools that help automate work behind prospecting. As a freelancer, you should spend at least a fraction of your time on finding new clients apart from working on your existing projects.