Curious to hear what you guys out there do.
I've been a freelancer off and on for the past few years. I'm 22, in university, and have a start-up habit, so I need a way to fund myself. I found a great niche for myself in the past month that allows me to focus on delivering great work at breakneck speeds.
My main focuses are to be fast ("wicked fast", "what do you mean you're done already?", etc. from some clients since), to deliver great quality, and to deliver more than I promise, and act beyond professional--yet not quite too friendly--to clients.
The result is amazing. I'm already at a stage where I need to decline work and were I to be doing this full time I easily bring in enough requests to amount to what I've totaled as $525~ worth of work a day, which I could complete were it a full-time gig.
It's very easy: Make a dead simple portfolio that lets your work speak volumes where most people use gimmicky words (mine's at http://sicret.net ). Make your clients proud of your work (a lot of my clients love showing off their new designs, even though it's an industry that typically keeps things very private for competition's sake). I'm brutally honest with a client as well. If I am running behind because of some other mix up or I am not satisfied with a design, I will tell them, and offer them a discount or to redo.
Customer satisfaction is more important than customer acquisition. So is being truthful.
Don't be afraid to drop ineffective clients. You're in it for business, not to make everyone happy. your happiness comes first.
The most important thing I've learned: constantly charge more. Eventually you'll plateau, but until then or until your own project takes off, keep learning and keep getting better; then keep charging more. You'll be worth every penny if you give half a damn.
That's great and all, but there's a lot of IRC servers with a lot of different channels. Got any specifics? Its almost like saying "I find using email gets me a lot of clients". Its specific enough to have an idea, but not enough to be of any use at all if you don't know where to start.
You are definitely right though.
So, OK, pay attention. I'm going to tell you how to get jobs.
1) IT'S NOT ABOUT PRICE. Seriously. If it was about price, I'd go to eLance.
2) Tell me your rates up front. Period. If http://www.flingmedia.com can, you can too. If you don't, I won't trust you. You have no idea how many prospects you lose by not doing this. If you don't do this, you depend on referrals. REFERRALS WHO WILL TELL THE CLIENT WHAT YOU COST.
3) Please, for the love of God, have your portfolio up on your site, and make the links be target=_blank.
4) Blog. Twitter. I will judge you by the quality of your posts and the number of followers. Deal with it. It's like SAT scores; you can be smart and get a shitty score, but you can't be dumb and get a high one.
5) Contribute to FOSS projects. It shows an ability to work with others under others' terms. Guess what? You work for my company and you're supplementing my employees' work. If you can't get along with others, you're useless to me.
Please do not do this. Let the user decide how to handle links.
Me for example don't like those target=_blank. For useless sites I often just use the back and forward buttons of my browser. Infact for going back I use backspace(FF). So it's pretty faster than closing tabs one by one and returning to your original tab.
Most of my best new clients have been referrals who were behind schedule at the time and had a freelancer that who had been unable to get the job done so far. I all cases, I either met their current deadline or missed it by a week, and earned a longterm client who always gives me his projects. In fact I will have to hire someone this year and probably use the services of a freelancer.
Last year I officially decided to cease actively seeking clients.
I think this has probably been helped to some extent by networking with a lot of these people in person at meetups. There's no substitute for coming across as a nice guy who is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about what he does.
Letting people know is as simple as putting it in your introduction when you first meet. "So what do you do again?" "I'm a freelance web developer actually, at the moment I'm working on X but I do a lot of different stuff including Y and Z." There's no need to go overboard on 'selling yourself', if people like you and know what you do that's enough.
* word of mouth/referrals from happy clients
* people finding my site online, which is so horribly outdated that I've had people ask if I'm still in business, yet people still hire me through it (I am updating it in the next 2-3 months, but I'm kind of scared I won't be able to handle the increase in workload)
* networking
* running an open source project
I've been incredibly lucky though, I never thought to ask for referrals since I was young and thought that was a no-no or something, but they came in anyway (which is a good sign :).
I also haven't really had time to do much online promotion, but having an open source project to show quality of work and to drive people to use my project and (just often enough) my services probably helps make up for my lack of online promo efforts.
As for networking, I never really tried to sell, I just go out and meet people. I often forget to bring cards or to even mention what I do (even though I do talk too much ;). I heard someone recently explain that networking isn't about marketing directly, but rather about getting your name out there and just being a real human being. The network of your network are who you'll sell to because the people who think you're alright will refer you naturally, or something like that.
The above has kept me more than busy for years now, and since I'm also working on a startup I've had to limit what projects I can take on since otherwise I'd have no time for my own...
I did well by making and contributing to some pretty common Rails plugins in the Rails 0.10-1.x days, and blogging a bit. Some small tech-centric businesses wanted some Rails expertise, were using the plugins, and contacted me.
My main gig these days was a client at an agency I used to work for. I was the obvious choice for them because I built their software in the first place.
Otherwise, I've gotten contracts through friends, craigslist, and various mailing lists.
Don't underestimate the value of tech-related mailing lists. In the past, when I've been looking really hard, I've been able to get several leads/interviews for contract jobs per week, just from mailing lists.
Also, help other hackers find jobs/contracts. It will come back to you.
The alternative is setting up locally. All decent-sized cities have networking opportunities, things like "Business Networking International" where it's highly structured towards referrals (and while useful, sort of MLM-ish), or things like Open Coffee or Geek Breakfast. Also there are usually user groups in your preferred industry or programming language (PHP, Python, etc). Get out there. One of the biggest mistakes I see newbie freelancers/contractors make is that they expect jobs to come to them. If you troll the internet for leads you're also competing against a bunch of other yahoos who are sitting in their pajamas. Your leads will be fewer, and of a lower quality. Get out there, shake some hands, show your face, and hopefully when people think, "Hey, I need a [X]" they will think of you. If you get out there, you never know what will generate business. I had one fifteen minute conversation with a guy and he has been directly responsible at least a quarter of my business for 2008 via referrals.
Obviously referrals from existing happy clients are paramount. Whenever I complete a project, I always mention that the best sort of compliment is a referral. If they're happy with you, they won't mind giving your name if they know that you can do the job.
I don't blog much. I do use twitter, but found it to only be marginally useful in generating business. It is somewhat good at staying in touch with past clients. LinkedIn is mostly a rolodex, good for little else than getting spam from recruiters.
-M
