If you work as a freelancer, you must be aware that generating new leads is one of the most crucial—and occasionally most challenging—things to complete. Without a steady stream of new leads, your freelance business will soon cease to exist and dry up.  Therefore, how do you create fresh leads?

The good news is that you can produce new leads in a variety of easy and simple ways. Three of them will be discussed in this post. So continue reading if you’re ready to start producing some new leads!

3 Ways of Generating Freelance Leads

The key to business success is maintaining momentum. Establishing a reliable strategy for attracting clients is crucial, especially if you’ve never freelanced before. 3 simple ways on how you can start in generating freelance leads are :

1. Referral & Word of Mouth

The best clients are always found through referral and word of mouth. Since you have received endorsements or recommendations from others, the new clients are already inclined to trust you. This also raises people’s perceptions of your value.

The easiest way is to ask the current clients to refer your service to their friends, family and their networks and possibly reward them for their action with a fee or bonus. 

2. Cold Outreach

For the newbies of freelancing, cold outreach might sound alien. However, this step is among the best steps to start on generating your new leads of freelance. Sending messages to strangers or so-called potential clients to see whether they’d be interested in hiring you is known as cold outreach.

The challenge in cold outreach is that sometimes, what you’re offering is not always what they actually want. And even, nobody you’ve reached out to has shown an interest in what you’re selling. It’s either you blindly throw rocks up to the sky and see which head will fall onto. 

Some freelancers disagree with this technique as it is not the best option for the new freelancers. They said, you might need more resources to convert the cold prospects into clients  which ask for credibility, testimonials and a more reliable results-based promise. However, it doesn’t hurt to give it a try too. 

3. Freelance Platforms

Instead of pursuing cold leads who may or may not even be interested in the service you offer, you should be focusing on the people that have expressed a need and are actively looking for your solution to solve their problems. Those are the ones you’re after. They are the paying clients who need to hire you right now.

Their intention to hire you is your goal as a freelancer. Freelance platforms are the best place to start as a new freelancer like you. The best among all platforms is Upwork. But you might also want to try Fiverr and Freelancer.com.

Other platforms that you can find your paying clients are :

• Toptal
• Contra
• Peopleperhour
• 99Designs

Conclusion

As a new freelancer, the best decision that you ever made is to become one. But you need to understand the challenges and the learning curve that you need to go through. It can become harder and steeper along the way, but definitely it will be much more fun if you love it. 

You need to be clear with your goal and always have an open mindset to learn many new things along the way. As finding new freelance leads should be the ongoing process, many tips and tricks that you can find to acquire your clients. The moment where you start to get busy with your deadlines and clients requirements is the time all the lead generations are worth it. So you better be prepared and be organized in your jobs and deliverables.