How to Finish Off Projects With a Bang
If you’ve devoted weeks or even months to a major project, you want to end it right. For some freelancers, a good end to a big project is an equally large check — but there are few extra steps you can take to use the last days of a project to your benefit.
You can take steps to find future work through this project, use it to promote yourself and to simply tie up some loose ends.
1. Your Loose Ends
The last days of a project can be pretty busy as you push to meet a deadline. Before you say good bye to a project forever, it’s worth taking care of a few details.
- Make a note of any pieces of the project that were a work-for-hire — and any that you can use in future projects
- Make a copy of any files your client needs
- Invoice your client, including any expenses that you need to pass along
- Return any proprietary material to your client
- Back up the project files
Depending on your client, as well as your own workflow, there may be other steps you need to check off your list.
2. The Possibility of Future Work
You may be able to turn a current project into months of future work. The obvious way to do so is to approach our current client and check if they have any other projects in the pipeline — you can even suggest a few, such as offering maintenance on a new website, or future editions of a newsletter. But finished projects also make for great marketing tools.
With a completed project, you have a new item to add to your portfolio. You also should ask your client for a testimonial when you’ve completed the project: assuming your client has great things to say about you, adding a testimonial to your marketing materials can make a big difference in convincing potential clients to give you a project.
If you’re looking at a truly huge project — one that can help you get your foot in the door — it may be worth talking to your client about how they plan to launch the project in question. A brand new website launch, for instance, can be an opportunity to get your name into a trade publication or even throw a launch party. While your client probably wants to take full credit — they did pay for the project, after all — you can still get your name mentioned in the promotions.
3. Promote the Project
Whether or not your client wants to do a big launch of your project, it’s worth doing a little promotion of your own. At a bare minimum, it’s worth writing a blog post or sending out a newsletter to your past clients pointing out just how great your latest project turned out.
You can also go a step further: say that your big project was putting together a newsletter for fish enthusiasts for a pet store. You can make sure that other pet stores also know about your talent for newsletters by spreading the word about why newsletters are so useful to pet stores. Offer to write an article for a pet store trade magazine, or offer some information to one of the publication’s writers. You can even send out a press release announcing the finished projects.
Promoting the projects you’ve completed, even if you aren’t going to make any more money from their success, can be an effective marketing technique. An architect often goes to great lengths to promote a completed building, even after his part of the work is done. That’s because a finished project can be a better recommendation than a portfolio piece: if it’s available in the real world, prospective clients are more likely to be interested than if they can only look at a screenshot in your portfolio.
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Great tips about promoting the project after completion. I often neglect to do this and yet it’s a very minor task in comparison to the completed project. Thanks for giving me a kick in the butt.
Good tips. Especially like the promotion ones as they help both you and the client. Getting red to wrap up an e-commerce site based off wordpress for a client that I know she’s very please with and will be promoting the heck out of it for both of our benefits.
How long should we keep backups of the project though? Until we have confirmation from the client that everything is all set or for as long as possible? Or with storage space being as cheap as it is now (relatively) should we just keep the backup forever?
100% agree with the ideas for promoting a project once you’re done!
Great thoughts! It’s always a great idea to take the knowledge (and momentum) of a particular subject matter and showcase it to tell other clients how it can help them too.
Excellent post.
I focus on invoicing the client and asking for more work.
I also make sure I back up all the materials. I frequently do updates of the same project in a couple of years (like student study guides and instructor’s manuals) and that way I have my original files to work from.
Great post! It is always good to be reminded of the things that are so easily forgotten once you get done with a project. We tend to focus too much on getting the project out the door, then forget to promote it when it launches. Thanks to Twitter and our new blog, this becomes a little easier with every project.
Having testimonials is key; client referrals are even better. Make sure to take care of all loose ends of a project and you will be amazed at the response from your client….they may even send you more work just for paying close attention to details.
Excellent post, really insightful advice on how to maximize the benefits of a completed project. I love the idea of a launch party, it’s something I might suggest to a current client as we approach a major update/release for their website.
I think more widely you really help in encouraging people to view the finishing off of a project with the same enthusiasm as the start. Just in general that attitude will ensure that you tie up the loose ends of the actual project work with the same intention to detail as a the start. That’s often my problem – I love the “grand vision” of new design projects, I’m less good at all the detail work towards the end, but by thinking about how I can market the project when it’s complete, and how many advantages it’ll bring, then that’s great motivation to get through that work!
Making sure everyone is happy is a good idea, and your ideas on how to expand the relationship even further are really solid. I tend to be more of a word-of-mouth, low-pressure kind of salesman, but I’m pretty sure I could weave a few of them into my process.
I definitely agree with doing some promotion on the project you worked on.
Excellent post, with good ideas. I’m RT’ing.
Great article. I do like the idea of really finishing out a project strong, I notice a lot of people just kinda rush to finish up and mark the project ‘complete’ rather than really wrapping it up with the same attention to detail they started the project with.
I very much liked the third point. It seems most of the freelancers (including me) refused to care about a site after getting paid. Promoting on our own is an excellent way to get new clients as well as our old(!) client love to know it that we not only making money but care their sites.
I’m using my blog to promote my clients websites by talking about their business and linking to their website. This way It’s forwarding traffic to their new website and boost their visibility on the web. The client is happy and I’m happy! Because don’t get fooled, I’m using this new project to promote my services and to showcase my new projects, to generate new leads.