11–20 of 43 posts
Get a permatemp position at a megacorp and leave before your skills go to mush. 6-12 months is all it takes
Once you have proven yourself, you won't have to compete on price. Good clients will come to you.
I started asking friends and family if they needed a website, help with web work, or an office IT guy.
I found a few people who needed a website that way, did a great job, and they told more people about my services, getting me a bit more work.
How I REALLY started getting business is when I agreed to do some IT work for a couple real estate offices about once a week. The offices agreed to let me offer my web development services to the agents when I was there.
I got a lot of new clients, and those agents knew people in all types of businesses and started referring me to others, and from there, it's been non-stop word of mouth.
I also hooked up with a couple print-advertising businesses locally that needed to refer off their web work.
I stopped doing IT work after the first year.
I advertised once in the Yellow pages in 2004. Got 1 client out of it, and it was NOT a good situation. I will only work by word of mouth anymore because it's too stressful otherwise.
Not to mention, selling myself is MUCH easier when the client is referred by a good friend of their's who has already told them that I am THE person to work with. That way, when they call or email me, they are ready to get to work, and I don't have to wine and dine - which I suck at so much it's embarrassing.
I'm not offering advice here, just sharing my story because we all get the ball rolling differently, and hopefully reading about all our experiences helps you think outside the box to find your way into a long-lasting freelancing business.
To echo what others have said, and what worked for me: work at a small agency for a few years. Learn how to write good contracts, handle invoicing, and communicate with clients. Then take a few contracts on the side so you can figure out a rate that works for you, and so you can work on those skills in an environment where you aren't relying on the income. You'll know when the time is right to switch to full time fre…
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work.
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.
Neil Gaiman, Commencement Address
Go to meetups and meet other freelancers.
The larger your network, the better you will do.
Also, sink some time into SaaS business software, or developer tools. Both lead to meeting aforementioned peers and employers.
I suggest the following (roughly in order of precedence): * Local networking groups for new businesses (new businesses need new websites. Easy sell.) * Give talks at local tech meetups (and in the about me section of the talk, mention that you're a freelance web developer. Make sure to follow with a really amazing presentation, and you'll probably get a couple leads after your talk) * Have an online portfolio where you list your past work with as many details about the work as possible (don't break your NDAs or anything, of course). * Join gun.io and look for work there. It looks very similar to freelancer.com and similar, but the clients on Gun know that they have to pay for quality work, and in my experience, they're willing to do so. * Contribute to an open source project related to the kind of freelancing that you want to do. For instance, I'm a PHP developer and I do a ton of work with Drupal. I've gotten almost every job through the Drupal community.
The contribution to open source bullet point is last, despite it being the most successful for me, because it's not always possible to give an open source project the level of involvement that is needed. It's also not as much of a sure-fire thing, whereas the other ones are.