Freelance Marketing Tips

Hi there my freelance friends. Welcome to Freelance Marketing Tips, a monthly newsletter packed with practical ideas and tips, and a healthy dose of inspiration, to help you build a stable, successful freelance business. Ready to get started?

What’s inside this issue:? How to Get Enough Experience to Get Started as a Freelancer| LinkedIn Tips | More Useful Content and Tools

How to Get Enough Experience to Get Started as a Freelancer

?Getting enough experience to get started in freelancing seems overwhelming when you’re new. ?Here are 5 practical ways to get more experience.

1.?? Take any Decent Freelance Opportunity

Focus on getting experience and samples you can use to show clients what you can do—even if it’s not what you really want to do. One of my first clients needed a proofreader, something that, as a writer, I didn’t want to do. But I agreed.

This led to me finding a high-paying specialty—medical writing—and getting the experience I needed to get more medical writing clients.

Each opportunity is likely to lead to other opportunities, like it did for me. A decent opportunity means the fee is fair and the deadline is reasonable.

2. Build a Strong, Trusting Network

Another early client was a prestigious health system that hired me after getting a referral from one of my colleagues in a professional association. My colleague happened to be the neighbor of the editor. Looking back, I can’t believe that they hired me when I had no experience in medical writing.

But as I learned, if people know and trust you, or trust the person who referred you, they’re willing to give you a chance doing something where you have little or no experience.

Professional associations are the best way to build a strong, trusting network and to meet people who can give you referrals. Volunteering and giving more than you take in networking are the best ways to build trust.

?3. Consider Your Experience Broadly

Most of the freelancers I meet have more relevant experience than they think they do. You probably do too. Consider any relevant experience you have from work, school, or volunteer activities, such as:

• Writing journal articles as a student.
• Editing a newsletter for a club as a volunteer.

?4. Go “Back to School” to Get Experience

Professional associations offer many reasonably priced or free opportunities for informal and formal learning. Informal learning like reading, videos, webinars, or podcasts is great for getting basic knowledge.

Formal learning such as conferences, courses, workshops, and tutorials helps you build knowledge, skills, and experience. Professional association conferences are a great way to learn while networking. Online courses help you build in-depth skills and experience.

5. Develop Spec Samples

Show that you can do work you haven't done before by developing spec samples—fictional samples that are like a project you want to work on for clients. Say, for example, that you want to write a blog post for clients that help people stay healthy:

• Visit the website of a client you’d like to write for and study their posts.
• Chose a topic like the topics they cover.
• Write a sample blog post.
• Label the sample a spec sample (e.g., “Sample blog post for a health system”).

For big projects, do a spec sample of part of the project.

If you’re an editor, create a fictional version of the project with errors (before) and then fix the errors (after). Show both versions in the sample.

LinkedIn Tip

Build a Big Relevant Network through Professional Associations

Getting 500+ LinkedIn connections is easier than you might think. That’s great—because you need those connections to rank high in search results when clients are looking for a freelancer on LinkedIn.

And using the Member Directories of professional associations is an easy way to grow your network fast!

Professional associations make it easy for you to find hundreds of people to invite to join your LinkedIn network. If you mention in your invitation that you are both part of the same professional association, people are likely to accept your invitation to connect on LinkedIn.

Learn more about building your LinkedIn network.

More Useful Content and Tools

5 Ways to Get the Experience You Need to Find Freelance Clients, ?from the Mighty Marketer

More information on how to get more experience.

How to Make a Spec Portfolio, from Chron

Create samples that you can show to prospective clients.

How to Start a Freelancing Business in 2024, from Ryan Robinson

See #6: Create Examples of What You Can Deliver (on Your Portfolio Site)

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About Lori

Hi, I’m Lori, a freelance writer who helps other freelancers get the steady, high-paying clients they deserve.

When I started out, I didn’t know anything about marketing. So I made a lot of mistakes, like marketing to the wrong clients. But because I did a lot of marketing, I was able to become a 6-figure freelancer in 18 months.

As I met other freelancers, I noticed that many freelancers didn’t know much about marketing. So I started The Mighty Marketer to help other freelancers get the clients they deserve.

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