How do you get new clients for freelance / contracting / consulting work?

Question

I'm curious as to how many of you Flowers work for yourself or for a tiny independent web development shop. Other than the obvious network, network, network and cold calls/emails what other inventive ways are there to get new clients? Anybody ever get clients from attending conferences and handing your card out to everybody?

Answer 1

You forgot networking.

Answer 2

Aren't there web sites for connecting clients with contractors?

Head hunters in your area might be able to find you contract work as well. But, they'll take a large cut.

Answer 3

My experience has been by word of mouth (ie, networking as you so aptly pointed out). At one point I printed up business cards, handed out about 500, and didn't get 1 call from them. But man, once I get in with a client, they usually are my own personal pimping service and I get several calls from that.

It's odd -- there is an ebb and flow to it. One guy used me about 5 times, and I got about 3 other clients from him. They were all screaming for attention for a while, and then they all dropped off. Fast forward 9 months or so later, and all 4 of them called me within 2 weeks. Now they are all dark again.

I'd like to think that is because I'm just so cool that I solved all their business problems for them. :)

I don't know if this is your bag, but I don't turn anyone down no matter how small the job. I go to home users' houses and help them tune their PC. Those gigs have led me to their friends who own small businesses, etc.

Finally, if I don't have anything lined up, I just drop some old clients an email or a phone call. Sometimes the sound of my voice wakes them up and they say, "Boy am I glad you called! We really need..."

Answer 4

Some ways I have gotten "new work":

1. Selling shareware. New customers call me and want something similar.

2. Making Widgets and plugins for other products. New customers want their own widgets.

3. Contributing to open source projects. Same idea.

4. Sites like LinkedIn. Staying in touch with old co-workers is easy this way. If you are good, they will find you.

Answer 5

Craigslist. Don't ignore the small jobs, they sometimes can lead up to bigger jobs or bigger clients.

Answer 6

@go

Anybody ever get clients from attending conferences and handing your card out to everybody?

Probably not. Matt's experience is probably a lot more typical.

At one point I printed up business cards, handed out about 500, and didn't get 1 call from them.

Exactly. I wouldn't recommend handing a business card to anyone until they express interest in your services. If they aren't interested when you hand them the card, they definitely won't be interested a week later when they find it in a stack of other cards. People who immediately push business cards at everyone they meet come off desperate, which is not a trait you want to show potential clients.

Definitely you want to have business cards to hand people, but wait until they express interest. Maybe even wait until they ask. Besides, your business card in their hand isn't very valuable. What you really want is their card in your hand, so that you can follow up on the interest they expressed.

Answer 7

What I've done is work small to medium-sized jobs on the "freelance auction" type of sites, weeding through the bid requests until I find interesting things. Generally, I end up with a repeat client, and the size of projects done for a client grows over time. I've had a few jobs through word-of-mouth from previous clients.

The largest downside that I've noticed to doing this, other than not getting filthy rich, is that a lot of the work that I do ends up being under an NDA, meaning I can't show off some of the really interesting and challenging work that I've done to future clients.

Answer 8

I tend to get new clients on word-of-mouth, although some have also come from rentacoder and similar sites, where I had to choke down an underpaid contract to make the contact on the chance that they'd be willing to pay my normal rates on future work once they know me. (Although the rate isn't everything - right now, I'm working with one of them who can't afford to pay my normal rates, but instead offered to prepare a case study for me, which I expect to be able to use to help get new clients in the future, as his original project is already the one that I most often describe as an informal example when asked about the sort of work I've done.)

I avoid headhunters whenever at all possible, but that has less to do with the chunk they take out of the bill rate than with my preference for working from home and having multiple active clients at any given time. The headhunters I've encountered focus pretty much exclusively on full-time, on-site contracts, which aren't really my thing.

Answer 9

DO NOT use rentacoder.com. I had bad experiences with them. Not the site's fault but the coders who hang out there are of poor quality.

A coder bailed out on me in the middle of a project and wasted a month of my time. Another coder canceled within 24 hours after getting the full source code of my application which needed conversion.

Plus coders which deliver code which didn't meet the clear requirements I gave them. I am a developer myself and I gave them clear instructions.

What frustrated me is that I picked coders with high ratings. I only had one good experience so your mileage may vary, but all in all the quality of work done by coders is pretty bad. I think these coders are beginners, inexperienced and cheap ones who bid on anything and try to do do anything.

I would try more professional sites like eLance.