Freelancing has become more and more common as people see the benefits it offers. Freelancers have a greater control over their work life, as well as seeing a few other advantages:

  • A potentially uncapped income potential
  • The ability to work in an area they’re passionate about
  • Setting their own hours and schedule
  • Being their own boss

To achieve these, however, you’ll need to properly advertise your business. Without doing it, you mightn’t bring in many clients, and your income could be relatively tight.

No freelancer wants to be in that position. Unless you’re a freelance marketer, you mightn’t know what to do. Thankfully, it doesn’t need to be too difficult.

Using the right strategies makes sure you get your freelance services in front of potential customers while increasing your chances of converting them. Nine steps are sure to help with that, and there’s no reason not to dive into them.

Advertise Your Freelance Business: 9 Practical Steps

1. Display Your Portfolio Effectively

Potential clients will want a general idea of how high-quality your services are. That’s where a portfolio comes in. It’s a showcase of some of your best projects. Having high-quality portfolio pieces is a great way to help convert potential clients.

Spend some time figuring out which projects you should use as portfolio pieces, and you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. You could need a client’s permission to use their projects for your portfolio.

Alternatively, you could create something specifically for your portfolio. When these are properly displayed, they’ll help with bringing in new clients.

As you get more work, you’ll have more options to create portfolio pieces, giving you more of a chance to showcase your work. This could end up being a great way to bring in even more clients in the future.

2. Network Often

Networking is a valuable strategy in almost every industry, and it’s always worth putting some time and effort into. It lets you find potential clients and actually engage with them at industry events.

Networking could end up proving to be much more helpful to your freelancing business than you’d think. While you’ll have to get comfortable with networking at first, it’ll be relatively quick.

With a bit of time and effort, you’ll see more and more results in time. You could end up developing a relatively long list of potential clients.

3. Rank Your Website

You’ll naturally need to rank your website on search engines if you want potential clients to find it. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. It’s the process of creating websites and content designed to rank well online.

It’s worth spending a decent amount of time on this, but you’ll need to know a few things first:

Much more can go into this, and it can be a time-consuming process, but it’ll be worth the time and effort.

4. Highlight Client Reviews

For potential clients to want to work with you, they’ll want to have a certain amount of trust in you. They’re not going to take everything on faith, so go out of your way to develop trust as early as you can.

That’s where client reviews come in. Try to get these off of any clients you’ve worked with previously, and then highlight them on your website.

It’ll make it much more likely to convince potential clients to work with you in the future. You’ll start creating trust while showing them evidence of your skills. There’s no reason not to do it.

5. Partner With Other Freelancers

There are countless other freelancers out there, and few of these are actually your competitors. Many of them focus on vastly different areas and offer completely different services.

Despite that, their services could be complementary to yours, and vice-versa. It could be worth partnering with these freelancers and helping each other with clients.

If you’re a website developer, for example, you could partner with a copywriter to create the content for the website you create. Clients will pay more, but they’ll receive more, and you can split the profits with your partner. It’s a win all-around.

6. Ask For Referrals

You’ll work with countless clients during your career, and the vast majority of them will be thrilled with your service. This offers a great opportunity to advertise your freelance business. You could use them to get referrals, for example.

They could do this naturally and recommend you to colleagues and other business owners. You could also try asking them to refer clients to you.

Even offering a referral program – where the client who recommends new clients gets a discount – can be great for this. You could end up developing more long-term business because of this.

7. Join Niche-Focused Forums

There are plenty of online forums focused on freelancing and similar niches. Some of these even get deeper into specific subcategories, and you could find forums related specifically to your type of freelancing services.

These can be invaluable to join. Not only could you get potential clients through this, but also much-needed support and advice.

You could even offer your own advice and opinion on various topics, which could then help you develop more industry authority. Though this takes a decent bit of time, it can be a great part of your digital marketing strategy.

8. Perfect Your Pitch

While pitching your services is traditionally a sales technique, you can also see it as part of your marketing strategy. Even if you don’t get the sale right now, they could still be a potential client in the future. By perfecting your pitch, you’ll see better results.

Though this could take a while to do, it’s always worth putting the time and effort into. Make it brief while also outlining exactly what you can offer them.

Personalise each of your pitches. Spend some time researching a potential client before reaching out to them. Once you do, you should be much more likely to receive a response and set up a sales call.

9. Showcase Expertise With A Blog

Your website boasts multiple ways to help you advertise your freelance business. It’s a great way to showcase your portfolio and services while using it as a sales tool. Go further than just creating it and making it rank, though. Make it actually work for you.

Use it to showcase your expertise by blogging. Focus on topics related to your services and industry, and you’ll show a lot more expertise than you’d think.

It also helps with your SEO and other areas, giving you more than enough of a reason to consider it. While that means spending a little time away from offering your core services, it’s a great way to get the ball rolling on your future career.

Make sure this content is well-crafted, and there’ll be nothing to worry about.

Advertise Your Freelance Business: Wrapping Up

When you properly advertise your freelance business, you’ll bring in more clients and generate more business. You can scale up as much as you want. Unless you’re a freelance marketing specialist, however, a lot of this seems complicated.

Fortunately, it isn’t. It can be a lot more straightforward than most new freelancers think.

It just involves putting some time and effort into the right areas. While it could take a little time, you’ll see the results in time. You’ll increase your brand visibility, generate more leads, and convert more clients, leading to more sales. There’s no reason not to put the effort in.