Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 3, January
Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.
Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in Web Developer, Web and Graphic Design, Corona App Development and more!
To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!
How to Respond to Job Postings Faster than the Competition (Without Canned Responses)
Ever wanted to know how some freelancers jump on those job postings before everyone else, and still manage to get the gig?
It’s not with canned responses, I can assure you. These don’t go over well when it comes to pitching for a job. But there are techniques one can use to get their name in the hat early in the piece.
Some have questioned the point of jumping on a job quickly. Let me tell you, as someone who has advertised for and applied for many, it counts. I know a whole slew of people who employ freelancers who stop reading applications after the first 50 or 100 come in, and that can be anywhere from twenty minutes after posting the job, to twenty hours later.
That’s not the only reason to get in early, of course. If a client only has to see two or three applications before finding the perfect match, they’re usually ecstatic. Nobody enjoys wading through applications.
To get inside that first batch of responses, we’ll be using a little bit of automatic “here’s one we prepared earlier” magic, but piecing these together in a way tailored to each job —as such they’re not canned responses, but we’ve made sure those things that will stay more or less the same across the board are quickly dealt with. Continue Reading
Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 1, January
Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.
Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in WordPress Development, Graphic and Web Design, Web Application Development and more!
To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!
Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 3, December
Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.
Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in Programming, Web Design, Web Development and more!
To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!
When New Freelancers Pitch Prospects: 7 Things to Never Say
Whether you’re pitching a guest post on a blog to promote your freelancer website or looking to land another freelance gig, as a new freelancer, pitching prospects is a little tricky.
You don’t want to make yourself out to have experience you lack. But at the same time, you don’t want to give away that you’re a greenhorn.
The best course of action is to focus on your strengths and present yourself concisely and professionally. Remember, pros write one sentence or two about themselves as a bio — and in my experience, new freelancers write two paragraphs or more.
If you pitch right, your lack of experience may never come to light and you’ll have the best chance of getting the gig.
Whatever you do, don’t run afoul of these common problems I’ve seen in new freelancer’s prospecting pitch letters:
1. Highlight what you lack
Common examples of this approach include:
“I don’t have any samples yet.”
If you don’t, you don’t — definitely don’t pretend you have a bunch of clips if you have yet to do even a free sample for a pro bono client.
But why go out of your way to specifically mention it? You’ll be surprised how many prospects might not even ask to look at your portfolio before they hire you.
For freelance writers especially, a well-written letter of introduction or query letter may just get you the gig on its own merits. So if your portfolio isn’t in great shape, simply don’t bring it up.
2. Broadcast that you’re a newbie
I know writers and designers who have years of work under their belt at staff jobs. Then, when they start freelancing, they feel all insecure about their credibility. Not sure why, but if you’ve done this work in any context, you have experience.
Which is why you never want to volunteer a statement like:
“I’ve only been freelancing for a few months.”
That’s not really relevant, and certainly not putting your best foot forward. What’s important is whether you can show you could do the assignment.
So stress any related experience you have, not how long you’ve been a freelancer. Continue Reading
Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 1, December
Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.
Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in Graphic Design, Java Programming, Web Development and more!
To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!
Track the Potential Clients You Want to Work With
After you’ve been freelancing for a few years, you generally get a clear idea of who makes a good client.
You may have things very narrowed down, to the point that you can cite industry and demographic information, or you may have a broader idea, but you’ve probably got enough of a feel for prospective clients that you can identify who’s a good fit by looking at their website or talking to them at a networking event.
But what do you do once you notice a good prospect? There are plenty of things you can do to get on someone’s radar, but if they don’t already have a project in mind, they aren’t likely to become clients.
If you can keep track of potential clients who you may want to work with in the future, though, you can come back and check in with them on a regular basis, both as their businesses evolve and as you have opportunities to take on more work. Continue Reading
Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 3, November
Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.
Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in WordPress Design, API Development, Software Programming and more!
To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!
50 Simple Marketing Ideas All Freelancers Can Use
As a freelancer, you have a wide variety of marketing options available to you. Just which ones will bring you the clients you prefer to work with depends — it’s important to make sure that the methods you use allow you to reach the places prospective clients will be.
It’s worth considering a wide variety of options. For that, it’s useful to have a list of options to consult:
15 Ways New Freelancers Can Use Social Media to Boost Business
Social media is a great way to connect with new people, including potential freelance clients. Having a presence on one of the hugely trafficked social-media platforms can also help your own freelancer website rank better in search and help you get found by prospects.
But here’s the problem: You’re not supposed to be salesy on social media. It’s supposed to be mostly a place to hang out and socialize.
As a result, it takes a little finesse to use social media for prospecting, since messages like “Got any design work for me?” tend to get you unfollowed, disconnected and/or blocked, depending on the platform.
Also, each social-media platform has its own flavor and etiquette. It’s hard to make time to figure them all out and use your time on them productively…without becoming distracted and ending up playing Mafia Wars or forwarding funny YouTube video links. But if you focus on specific marketing and network-building activities, social media can be well worth your time investment.
If you think it’s all a waste of time, let me report that I’ve gotten several high-caliber clients off LinkedIn and Twitter that booked tens of thousands of dollars of work with me in the past couple of years. Full disclosure: The collection of tips below represent my personal take on what I’m seeing out there that’s really working for freelancers in social media.
Besides having social buttons on your own blog and hoping to heck someone retweets your stuff and a prospect sees it, how can social media help you find clients?
If you’ve only got a sec, the short version is: Connect with and then help others, and they will help you.
Want more? Here are 15 specific social-media marketing techniques new freelancers can use: Continue Reading
Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 1, November
Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers from the freelance community.
Each week, we’ll feature a selection of the best job opportunities posted for the week. This week, we’re featuring jobs in .NET Development, Web Developer, WordPress Development and more!
To apply for any of these jobs, simply pick up a FreelanceSwitch membership for an affordable $7 a month. See something you like? Join now!
5 Awesome Portfolio Tips to Maximize Sales for Freelancers
One of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to maximize sales as a freelancer is your own personal career portfolio for your freelance business.
The location of your portfolio is important. It resides at the center of your freelance business marketing.
You should host it on your own website using any number of (free or premium) awesome portfolio themes. Start with a strong template, then customize the WordPress theme for your portfolio to make it unique to your branding and freelance business goals.
This is a fairly standard workflow to follow. But how you set up your portfolio, the language you use, and the weight you give to design elements, is where the most important portfolio marketing decisions you will make reside.
The sales process is one of guiding a potential customer to understand how your work benefits them.
The sales process is one of guiding a potential customer to understand how your work benefits them. The key here is to understand that this is a process. In most cases, you cannot simply put your portfolio online and expect potential customers to automatically “get it” and jump to buy from you. First, you need to put some thought and craft into your portfolio design.
The good news is that the mere fact potential customers are looking through your work is a great sign! You’ve attracted attention and they’ve found their way to your portfolio. But is your portfolio set up to maximize sales? Or do you risk losing the customers that are finding you to the competition?
This guide is filled with professional portfolio tips and walks you through the important considerations for staging your portfolio in such a way that you drive sales and engage potential customers.
A few simple portfolio design tips can dramatically change the way that your customers take in your freelance portfolio, and in turn can make all the difference between them clicking the link to your contact page or clicking away from your portfolio altogether. Continue Reading
