20 Hot Client Industries That Hire Freelancers

Great article with a lot of good places for freelancers to hit. For a marketer/SEO freelancer, hitting all of those companies for work would work perfectly. Especially since they’re booming and each company wants to be #1

Plus, your little about blurb at the end is inspiring. I’m off to your blog now to read more about you.

Good tips! I hadn’t thought or heard of VC-partnerships. Great for freelancers, regardless of trade or specialty.

Holy crap, this is just about the most useful thing ever posted here.

Useful.

@ Michael: I thought so too!

A helpful listing.

See my blog The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide at http://boomersurvive-thriveguide.typepad.com for information on how the pharmaceutical industry is targeting boomers. Look on the left side of the blog and select Prescription Drugs from the listing.

I’m also writing a new blog called the Boomer Consumer for the Seattle Post Intelligencer at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/boomerconsumer/.

Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Your forgot to add 2 more categories:

1. Category that consists of people who are cloning everything they consider to be profitable.
2. The one that consits of people who will always have some money to pay for cracking software, writing spambots, OCR-recognizers e.t.c

These 2 categories are going to take their niche in the list of top client idustries that require freelancer attention nowadays. And being illegal or unethincal doesn’t stop job listrings from these industries from appearing on various freelance websites.

I echo what Michael says. Keep up the good work.

Jaime,
Great list for any freelancer who has trouble coming up with possible markets to target. I’m not sure I would agree, however, about how ripe some of them are at the moment. I spoke to a freelance medical writer last week who has been working in the pharmaceutical industry for years and who tells me that the industry is currently contracting. She has to look elsewhere right now because all her clients have brought their medcomm writing in house.

And I’d stay away from real estate. Only a few of them have money to spend at a time like this.

Still, great article and I’ll do a post to link to it at the http://www.CreativeFreelancerBlog.com

what was left out…

“With the coming recession, I get a lot of questions about whether it will be increasingly difficult for freelancers to get new clients . . .”

Do you (anyone) think that freelancers are feeling the pinch of the economy? I don’t. I’ve had several clients tell me “we used to do this in-house, but. . .” and I haven’t felt a dent at all. Crossing fingers.

And every second client always ready to say you something like “I’m also [designer|programmer|writer|analyst|e.t.c] so i will pay you no more than …. , just because i personally don’t have time for it”.

Yeah, we have 20 industries available for freelancers, but even working within these niches every freelancer will meet harassing low offers from clients at least once during freelance career. What the sense of listing these 20 niches, when not all of clients are competent about considerable pay rates?

Great post all the way around! Your headline caught my attention, and once I began reading, I didn’t stop until I reached the end. This is one post I know I’ll refer back to, and one that I chose to share on StumbleUpon and Twitter. Thanks for the information!

A truly great post, thank you!

@Michael: I agree. It’s obvious a lot of work went into this post – it’s very useful and I will be coming back to this.

And the byline was much better than the first article you did. Made me want to click to your website.

Client targeting is often overlooked by freelancers – a very useful list,well done!!

Very HOT indeed. Thanks for pointing those out.

Great post, Jaime!

So useful stuff

One small comment about #1.

Realtors make up some of the worst clients. The companies may be better, but the individual sales agents are often the worst clients you could imagine.

The coming recession? I take it you’re votin’ for Hussein.

I can personally attest to number one. Some of my most lucrative and long-term gigs have come from realtors and a subsidiary industry, mortgage writing. And with foreclosures, interest rates and adjusting ARMs in the news almost every day, in the current economy, even more copy is needed by real estate sites to stay current and relevant.

Great list — and inspirational “resource box” copy by the way. I’m off to check out your site.

Yuwanda

@Jamie – May I ask, where did this information come from?

I will not disagree that this list is useful for scrounging up some work …

… but, egad, what a disgusting bunch of industries!

With the exception of “women” and “green building” I don’t see much enjoyable work up there.

Schilling for pharmaceuticals, real estate and luxury stuff (and by “spirituality” we mean pulling the wool over the eyes of “baby boomers”) — these are all groups that are easy enough to figure out. Open up any classified section in the country and you’ll find these folks begging you to help them shovel coal into Hades. BTW, that’s not a bad idea! Maybe Satan has some leads… I’ve been hurtin ever since Blackwater refused my resume.

“Eben Pagan, a leading authority on business trends”

rubbish

Do you happen to have a link to that study mentioned?

Woo hoo.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The real estate industry is an excellent example. The are not always very computer savy. Just make things easy for them.

Nice breakdown.

I have to disagree with the idea of pitching VCs. They get everything for free, or very low cost. Every VC has a long list of wannabe VP/CTO/CEOs of the next hot startup and they can get them to do just about any kind of consulting you would normally use a freelancer for, for free.

Here’s a tip for this blog. How about using a different font or color. My eyes were straining because the contrast is not great enough.

Could one of the people who said this list was useful explain how they’ve actually used it? Frankly, I can’t see how being told I should be marketing to 20 industries from Big Pharma to massage therapists helps me. The industries have nothing in common and the article hasn’t offered any practical suggestions. Now that I know drug companies are rich, am I supposed to call Johnson & Johnson and ask the receptionist if they need any freelance writing?

And the bio is terrible. Why would I take business advice from someone whose attempts to set up a business made her homeless and broke?

I hate to be so negative and cynical but really, this is terrible.

Duh?
Listing out the industries that a freelancer could go hunt in is the easy part. The posting reads like the “Secret to making money in the stock market: Buy Low, Sell High” strategy, and it’s amazing to me the number of stroking, useless comments that follow it. Like “so useful stuff” or “keep up the good work”.

What the article is missing is the HOW.
1. HOW you close a deal with a company struggling for cash?
2. HOW do you get in front of the decision maker in a company that has just gotten $9m in funding? Because EVERYONE is hounding them now that news of the funding is public knowledge, and they are SICK of strangers soliciting to relieve them of it.

Give us the hard stuff. Not the easy stuff.

The recession is real, at least here in Europe. But someone said that times like these are the best to make investments. I think this is a really cool article, refreshing and optimistic =)

Sorry to only come to all these comments now. I was out of the country for two weeks.

@ comments on targeting real estate: I haven’t approached real estate in the past couple months, but as some people have pointed out in these comments, the larger firms that are facing serious losses or closure have to give a last ditch effort and have been looking to copywriters, social media promotion, etc. to bank on all the news around their industry. Also, don’t just go after traditional agents. Go after the people who are popular right now – mortgage lending, foreclosures, etc.

@ The Nadir: I’m not saying you have to choose these industries. I personally refuse to work with pharma companies. I prefer natural medicine and nutrition. But the title of this article was not “inspiring industries to work for,” it was “profitable industries.” Whether you choose to work with them is up to you and outside the scope of this article.

@ Nigel Hall: interesting mention about VCs. I will say you may be right about that. I haven’t approached VCs cold, but networked into them through colleagues. Thank you for pointing that out.

@ Dean: this is an article, not an ebook or a complete process. I can’t give you the industries, how to approach them, what to say, etc. all in two pages. If you look at the other articles I’ve written here so far, they give many of those other pieces you’re asking for.

As far as my having failed at a business, I’d like you to find a millionaire who hasn’t failed at a business venture at some point. There are a couple out there, but three years ago when they surveyed millionaires, the average statistic was that it took them SEVEN FAILED BUSINESSES before they succeeded.

I also personally believe and have found that our greatest successes come from our greatest failures. One of my favorite quotes is, “Success is simply getting up one more time than we fall down.” Show me someone who has succeeded without having ever failed and I’ll show you someone who is kidding themselves.

@ Liam: I say the same – this is an article. I can’t cover EVERYTHING. Check out my other articles on this site. To answer your questions, read the one about landing clients nearly 100% of the time. I’ve found it to work even in extreme cases. I haven’t yet used it to close a company with funding whom I didn’t have a referral into, however I will test that out now and report back.

@ everyone else: thank you so much for all the great feedback. It’s much appreciated.

All my best,
Jaime

So…basically target every industry? I have to agree with nigel, jenngood, dean and liam. I have been an independent, interactive marketing consultant for the past 7 years, and my client roster includes everyone from Fortune 5 companies to non-profit organizations.

While you may be trying to be helpful with your list, the title of your article entry is a bit misleading. For example, I was a lead consultant for a real estate marketing firm, and I saw their business dwindle over the course of a year when the real estate marketing began to decline several years ago.

I understand you are trying to help and have good intentions, so keep up the good work!

nice…

Wonderful article. Especially when I’m considering taking a bigger risk on dedicating more time to doing consultancy work and focusing less on my regular 9–5 gig.

I am just getting back into writing and it is good to hear a list of ideas. Thanks for posting.

One other area that is always popular is erotica. Writing these stories is actually not as easy as it seems but it can be fun! Just a thought.

Jamie, great tips and I enjoyed all the comments here as well. I’ve been writing and publishing for twenty years, but just now starting up my own freelance business. These are great ideas to get me moving productively in the right direction. Thanks!
http://www.martinpenny.com

Jaime thanks for great article. and your comments about comments are very useful. I enjoyed the post and comments.

The Venture Sphere is interesting.

It’s kind of sneaky but if done properly I can imagine it would work quite well.

I wonder how many companies/freelancers already use this method to secure clients as soon as they are set up. Linking into a network. Thanks for the article.

I like that you gave specific niches to aim for. I will give it a shot, and hopefully the results show.

This was actually a decent article with real meat in it. I’ll have to browse this site more and spread it around.

Very good post! Thanks for it! Is really great to have an overview about potential freelancer clients!

Hooo! It’s good to read that freelancer has a chance to survive into this recession .. now, we can focusing on some domain.

Thx a lot!