How to Start Freelancing

Congratulations, You’ve laid a solid basis for freelancing at this stage. Now we’ll speak about how to obtain your first clientele.

When you first start freelancing, there are three key techniques to consider:

1. Work Directly with clients

Working directly with customers is the purest kind of freelancing: someone has an issue, they pay you to fix it, and no other individuals or platforms are involved.

Working directly with clients has two key advantages.

The first benefit is that you get to retain every penny of the transaction. You and the customer reach an agreement on a price, the consumer pays you, and you retain everything.

There are no fees to a platform for matching you, and there are no fees to someone for referring the work to you.

The second advantage is owning the relationship. When you deal directly with customers, they know who is doing the work, you learn a lot about them and their requirements via communication, and you eventually build a good relationship with them.

Many freelancers have clients with whom they work repeatedly or consistently over a lengthy period of time. These connections are extremely beneficial since the customer already knows, likes, and trusts you, making the transition from conversation to paid assignment simple.

And these ties are most easily built while dealing directly with clients.

2. Working as a subcontractor

Subcontracting is when a business enters into a contract with a client and creates a second contract with someone else to fulfill that first contract.

It usually looks like an agency selling a large project, and then contracting one or more freelancers to help fulfill the actual work of that project.

Agencies that subcontract may refer to this as “subbing out” the work.

An example of this would be a large creative agency selling a new brand package for a client, and subcontracting website development or website copywriting to a freelancer.

For a lot of creatives trying to start freelancing, this is a great deal! Instead of creating a lot of individual relationships with clients, you can form a few strategic relationships with larger creative agencies and let them worry about finding clients.

While that may seem like an efficient way to create a stream of paid work, there are a few major trade offs.

The biggest trade off is that you are dependent on someone else to supply you with paying work. So what happens when they can’t, or if they won’t?

Subcontracting takes a lot of the control out of your hands.

Another tradeoff is that you are leaving money on the table. The agency won’t just pass through the whole client fee to you for doing the work – they keep a cut of the fee for signing the contract.

And lastly, you don’t own that client relationship. Some agencies even require you to sign a contract with them agreeing that you will not work directly with the clients they subcontract to you.

So even if you do communicate directly with the client, in their eyes, you work for the agency. And you may not be able to work with them on future projects without working through that agency.

3. Use Freelance Marketplace

Freelance jobs websites make finding new clients very easy when you start freelancing. In fact, they are built to connect as many freelancers to paying projects as possible – and fast.

These freelance jobs websites are two-sided marketplaces. On one side, they build a supply of freelance talent (that’s you!) and on the other side, they build jobs that demand that talent.

So at any given time, they are working to actively add new freelance jobs or projects to their website. And then they try to connect those jobs to a freelancer as quickly as possible.

Upwork, Fiverr, and freelancer have long been the most popular freelancing marketplaces. These websites can help you find your client.