<aside> 💡
Your potential clients have yet to meet you, and all they can depend on is what they can look up online. It's in your best interest to make sure they're impressed by what they find and assured that you're the best choice. Putting time and effort into your online presence will serve you your whole career.
</aside>
👔 Looking good
🖥️ Getting a website
✒️ Writing a copy
🔗 Social media profiles
💬 Communication
A huge help in getting the first - or any - client is to look the part. Not just in person but virtually, too. Everything related to your professional image online should give potential clients confidence that you're the right person for the job. There's nothing worse than if a client is put off by a freelancer's online presentation. It's not about competing for beauty, graphic design, or copywriting awards - it's just that you don't want to look like a slob.
Countless studies confirm how big of a role first impressions play and how difficult it is to change any conclusions it helped form. Ensure all touchpoints clients can visit or see - your website, social media profiles, or your Flowlance profile (coming soon), are properly filled. When companies are looking for a freelancer to work with, they often shortlist a few they find most compelling, contact all of them, and see which one makes the best impression. Know that you'll be compared with others, and put yourself in the best position to succeed.
The most essential thing every solopreneur has to get right is a website. If you can't set it up yourself, get someone to do it. It doesn't have to be expensive. Instead of hiring a digital marketing agency that will be happy to charge you anywhere upwards of $1000, find a student who can make it just as well for half the price, and maybe even less.
Remember to come prepared: "Hi, I need a website for my [your industry] freelancing business. Here are three websites I like, here is a Word doc with all the text I want there, and here are five images of me you can use." Whoever does your website can only work with what you give him. Many freelancers prepare only a few text paragraphs and then are disappointed that the website looks empty.
If you don't know what to put on your website, check out your competitors' websites and feel free to copy their website structure (not content!) - or even better, take what you like from each of them. The content has to be original. If you're not a strong writer, write everything you want without worrying about how it sounds or looks, and then send it all to a copywriter who will rewrite it into a copy you will be proud of. The text should be professional but also look like you wrote it - overly professional texts sound unnatural and unrelatable. Be authentic.
If the nature of your work allows you to, show something of what you've done. Instead of lumping it all into a single gallery, make a separate page for each client or project, describe your assignment, and give it some context so anyone who looks at it will know what you were tasked to do and see how you did it. You can do this either in a very basic form or as a case study. If you can make compelling and rich case studies, new clients will be coming one after the other. To help you make them like this, one of the lessons in this Module will be exclusively about case studies.
💡 Keep in mind
AI can help you with the copy, but be careful - it's notorious for generating text that sounds very pompous. Use it to rewrite your sentences rather than have it write them for you from scratch.
If you don't know what to write on your website, prohibit yourself from thinking: "This is self-evident; I don't have to mention it." Most professionals fail to acknowledge how little people outside their industry know about it. Once you allow yourself to go into the details, even the trivial ones, there will suddenly be much more to write about.