The key to freelance survival is proactivity. No one is going to prioritise your career or creativity in the way that you can. That’s why you have to look at what you need to do to develop proactive habits around getting work.
That includes taking control by:
- Ensuring a single client never makes up more than 30% of your income
- Spending time on customer relationship management before, during, and after the work is done
- Selling things you produce that are unique you through knowledge, skill, and offering like products, speaking, events, ideas, merch, coaching, toolkits and more
- Having an active profile on LinkedIn, at industry events, and in places where your clients roam online and in person
- Packaging your knowledge in your content marketing, products, website and the way you pitch yourself as a unique mix
- Applying for things to challenge yourself – like opportunities, awards, grants, volunteer roles, etc
- Taking part in industry discussions in a meaningful way
- Remembering you are a brand and that it is your job to market it as such
- Encouraging your clients to refer you by making it easy for them to describe you and what you do
- Following up three to five times on the jobs you apply for
- Defining rituals of freelance proactivity that you can engage in to keep you visible, moving, and creating regularly
Passive activities are:
- Relying on word of mouth
- Waiting for clients to be so happy they do the referrals solo
- Leaving the fate of your freelancing up to someone else’s job board
- Never circling back
- Peer only networking
- Making it the client’s job to follow up
- Waiting for work to arrive
- Expecting opportunities to happen
- Identifying challenges but not doing anything about them
- Having an industry bitch but deciding you’re powerless to change things
Photo by Anthony Young on Unsplash
How much of your freelance destiny are you proactively chasing? How much are you leaving to the hands of others?
- Are you regularly reaching out to your clients to make sure they are happy and things are moving in the right direction?
- Are you chasing opportunities and creating opportunities without prompting or a dry spell making it necessary?
- When work is slow, are you creating ways to bring money through the door, or attending events and networking opportunities?
- Are you building and tinkering with ideas so your services and products are always evolving and updating?
- Do you check in with previous clients to see if there are opportunities to work together again?
- Do you have systems in place for attracting attention, work, and collaborators?
- Are you targeting relationships via social media to grow your outreach?
- Are you showing up in new places and spaces on a semi-regular basis?
- Are you testing ideas, running experiments, and creating things to keep your skills sharp and your opportunities plentiful?
- Are you learning, adapting, trying, and building regularly?
Not finding any of this freelance proactivity guff appealing? Maybe its time to do a little check in to see how far that goes.