7 strategies to land your first freelance clients

The most uncertainty with self-employment often comes at the beginning, when you start down this career path. That’s because everything is new and yet to be defined from how you spend your time to how you’ll market yourself to how you’ll file your taxes. It’s exciting and challenging and requires grit, openness, and flexibility. One of the most important things to get right at the beginning is landing your first freelance clients.

Your career as a freelancer officially begins when companies and individuals are confident enough to seek you out or accept your pitches and are willing to pay for your services.

When I started freelancing 11 years ago, I tried a variety of approaches to attract and land my first freelance clients: most of these tactics worked and others didn’t. There wasn’t a rule book, so I made it up as I went, networked with freelancers to learn how they did it, and consistently put myself out there so customers could find me.

Sometimes it was stressful, but mainly fulfilling. What I’ve learned can help minimize the stressful parts, and instead more quickly and strategically kick off your business, no matter if you plan on becoming a self-employed designer, coach, accountant, insurance broker, marketer, writer, or speaker. Here are suggestions on how to land your first freelance clients.

Tap your existing network

Most professionals will transition to freelance from full-time work, so the best first step is to leverage your existing network of contacts from your past roles to find clients.

When I started, I wrote personalized emails and LinkedIn messages to my contacts with a note that I was now an independent contractor, what services I offered, and a link to my website.

It was less of a formal pitch, and more of an informal note to trusted colleagues alerting them to my job change, and that I’d be grateful for referrals if any relevant projects came through. This resulted in projects coming my way right away, and even a few freelance clients months later.

The people who already know you and can speak to your qualifications are one of the best ways to kick-start a flow of referrals, especially if they can directly refer to a specific contact.

Yes, this requires you already have a rapport with other professionals in your industry. And if you don’t have a network in the beginning to work with, now is the time to start building one.

When you do, let these colleagues know you’ve started freelancing and provide them with easy-to-share information about who you serve and what you offer.

Pitch yourself to potential clients

It’s important to go outside your existing circles and pitch contacts who’d be your ideal clients as that is how you develop a diversified list of customers.

You don’t want to be reliant on any one source of leads for your freelance clients, but in the beginning, you have to be more flexible as to where your customers come from.

Sending pitches over email or LinkedIn are viable options, but email is harder to ignore, so that’s always my recommendation, especially when messaging someone you don’t know. (Disclosure: I teach marketing and career development courses on LinkedIn Learning.)

A cold pitch has to be relevant, personalized, clear, and concise. A well-crafted pitch starts with researching to find a relevant contact at a company that would likely benefit from the services you’re offering.

In the early days, I probably sent 100 pitches to marketing agencies that seemed like they’d benefit from my help on their content marketing programs, luckily resulting in a few projects. If you don’t fully know who your ideal clients are at first, you’ll refine your focus over time by continually describing what you do to others.

Once you’ve identified the right contact, the pitch needs to be personalized to their circumstances like how your offerings help them solve their most important goals.

From there, clearly define your offerings and their leading benefits. “There’s a great old sales adage that says the confused mind says no. The hardest part of finding new clients was clarifying what I meant by the term ‘consulting services,’” says Selena Rezvani, a leadership speaker and consultant, and author of Quick Confidence.

“Whereas it was much easier to sell ‘leadership training‘ because people have a shared definition of what that means. Consulting can mean so many things and acts like a catchall term at times,” she added.

“So really clarifying my offer and at times avoiding the word ‘consulting’ helped me get more green lights. Remember, clear is kind. Make your offer extremely easy to understand and don’t obfuscate it.”

In tandem with clarity, these pitches need to be concise. You don’t have much time to get them to respond, so a few sentences are usually all the space you’ve got to capture their attention and get them to react to your outreach.

Pitching is an iterative process that often requires you to send outreach to numerous contacts before receiving a response, so recognize it’s an ongoing effort.

Get active on freelance marketplaces

Fortunately, there is a wide variety of marketplaces across industries that list open projects for both new and seasoned freelancers.

These marketplaces are particularly helpful when you’re first trying to land freelance clients as they are destinations where companies look for support from external talent. More general marketplaces like Upwork, Toptal, and Fiverr offer all kinds of projects from companies, so the project listings are relevant to many different types of freelancers. Niche platforms center on a specific industry or certain job functions like Behance for freelance designers or Voices for voice-over talent.

To get clients from these marketplaces, set up a profile to showcase your experience, skills, and portfolio as that’s how companies find you and determine if you’re a match for their project. You can also send over a proposal and pitch yourself on open projects listed on these platforms.

Just don’t become too dependent on these marketplaces as they often take a percentage of the project fee, they own the customer relationship, and there’s stiff competition for freelance clients.

Publish your ideas consistently

Prior to going freelance, I wrote over 100 articles about how to drive business results with marketing, which were published on a variety of industry blogs and well-known publications.

Since then, I’ve written over 1,000 pieces to share my ideas on marketing and career development; sometimes I wrote these for free or they were paid assignments from clients.

The old saying “show vs. tell” applies here as potential clients would read these articles, learn something new, and sometimes reach out to partner together if they liked my marketing advice. The value of publishing your ideas in public forums showcases your expertise on topics related to what you offer at scale.

There’s no one way to do this as you should share your ideas where you’ll reach your intended audience and in the formats you excel at whether that’s podcasting, or videos, among others.

“I decided to give value to my [LinkedIn] audience for eight months. And so I grew pretty much from like 4,000 to 100,000 [followers],” says April Little, an executive coach who helps high-potential women become executives. Little has over 200,000 followers on LinkedIn due to regularly publishing educational posts on how to succeed as an executive, get a promotion, and career advice.

Sharing her knowledge as a career coach and stories from her firsthand experiences in full-time roles attracted her first clients and helped her maintain a consistent flow of outreach.

Make your employer your first client

If you’re on good terms with your current employer, propose that you support the company in a project-based capacity as a contractor when it’s time to discuss that you’re resigning. You’ve already laid the groundwork of your familiarity with the business and built relationships with your colleagues, making this an easier first freelance client to land.

This worked for me as I stayed in touch with my colleagues at the marketing agency I was previously employed by and once I went freelance, they hired me to support a few projects.

When approaching your current or former employers, show up prepared with straightforward suggestions as to what projects you’d like to support them with, the scope and timeline for your collaboration, and your pricing based on the time commitment or deliverables you’ll provide.

Trade your services for testimonials and referrals

A helpful tactic to build your reputation and client base as a new freelancer is taking on opportunities to showcase your skills and expertise for free or at a low cost.

Exposure won’t pay your bills in the short term, so trading your services for testimonials and referrals should ideally only be part of the work when first starting.

“One of the lessons a mentor shared that I’ve really taken to heart is that your best future clients are your past clients. So even if I did a talk for free at the beginning of my career—let’s say for a corporate women’s affinity network—I’d stay in touch with that group and listen for new problems they were having,” says Rezvani.

“Along with delivering excellent work early on, I was able to parlay that free talk into doing consulting work that helped the women’s affinity network to develop a three-year strategy and global charter for their group,” she says.

“By showing I knew my customer and could expand their impact, they said ‘yes’ to what became a really fruitful partnership. So part of my advice here is to seek out freebie experiences initially and say yes often, knowing you are planting seeds that will bear fruit later,” added Rezvani.

When choosing what free opportunities to take on, consider which will get you in front of the customers you’re trying to reach, help you earn valuable experience, and provide you referrals and testimonials that’ll eventually lead to paid work.

You can’t guarantee the outcomes from these investments, so be a bit more adventurous at first with what you’re taking on, especially if it sparks your interest.

You must avoid saying yes too often though. A long list of unpaid assignments could overwhelm you if you’re not strategically integrating them as part of your overall mix.

Lead with a minimal viable product

“My first clients were free,” says Little. She built her executive career coaching business by initially offering free, hour-long laser coaching calls typically focused on helping clients frame an important ask at work. In exchange, she’d earn a testimonial about her coaching abilities, which helped her eventually transition this clear-cut offering into a paid service.

One reason this process worked for Little was because she offered a minimal viable product or an MVP. This was a straightforward, easy-to-understand service that provided one defined benefit to early clients. “I always say, start with the end in mind. Can you break up the really big goal into just one offer, one small offer to get started,” she added.

The goal of structuring one of your first services as an MVP is to make it simple for early adopters to buy in. As a result, you gather useful feedback to inform future iterations.

My MVP was freelance writing since it’s commonly outsourced, wasn’t too costly for businesses, easy to explain its benefits, and I already had writing skills and a portfolio from my side hustle.

Freelance writing built the initial foundations of my career as an independent contractor as the financial support from these assignments allowed me to eventually scale into other services.

Of course, there are many more techniques for acquiring your first freelance clients. And you don’t need to use all of these recommendations listed here either. Instead, experiment with a mix of approaches to figure out what works best for you to sign your initial freelance clients.