Finding the Right Clients

Great news lads, your boy is getting some fun new contracts in!!

A few days off a month into my freelance extravaganza and things are picking up. For the first few months whilst I work and travel I'm keeping it casual. My legend girlfriend is coming out for three weeks in June and so is a geezer I went to school with in August - as I don't wanna have to work flat out when they're here, it makes sense to stick to a handful of decent clients.

Your first month is all about building a portfolio and getting some good feedback in. I've secured the rising talent badge pretty easily so should be on track for Top-Rated by the time I start properly hitting this up.. I get back around September.


I already posted about the fact that I've picked up a few jobs where i didn't really get paid enough which is basically inevitable when you're starting out. After a month though I'm riding a 100% job success score due to the seven five star feedback's I've picked up. The first three weeks under my belt are all top-rated eligible, so by the time I get back I should have the sixteen I need for top rated status.

Quick Tip - even if you're picking up long term work, you can explain to clients that you're after five star feedback to boost your profile. For me, they've been happy to end the contract, leave feedback and open a new one. Boom.

For the last month I've been throwing around applications to jobs I didn't 100% fancy and knew I probably wouldn't get. It's pretty much necessary slog and helps you find out which proposals work for you.

Once the next bunch of connects come in, I'm planning to focus on finding clients that will pay well and provide long-term work. Question is, how do you find them? Here's a few ideas I use.

• Straight off the bat, I discard anyone who is expecting a stupid amount of work for next to nothing. Even in the first month I wouldn't consider proposing to a job which offers $2 per hundred words. Thumbs down.

• On a similar note, often the budget and expertise level don't really mean anything. You'll find clients which expect expert level work for $5 / 1000 words, or who set their budget really high so they aren't filtered out - before stating that they expect a hundred articles for that price.
  
  The trick is to figure out how much you want to earn per word - or per hour, once you know how quickly you write - and then find proposals which you expect to pay that.
• Check out the client's employment history. You can see their rating, the amount they usually pay, how many freelancers they've hired and more, at the side of the job offer. For example, I'm looking for gigs which pay at least $20/hr, so it would be worth me applying to this one:
  
  

  
• You can also check out their previous hires below the job description. This is a good place to learn their name (so you can stand out with your application) but also to see if they've paid a decent amount for copy-writing before. Or whatever it is you do.
  
  
• Finally, don't be put off when a client has no feedback yet, or hasn't hired anyone. UpWork is the first freelancing site which will come up when someone does a Google search for freelancers - so small businesses who have decided to hire their first freelancer will inevitably end up there.
  
  In fact, these guys are probably better than a lot of clients already on UpWork who are expecting loads of work for shitty pay. If you've already got good feedback, you can hit them with a detailed application and hope to dictate the terms of the contract a little more.
  

The key message is that if you scope out clients before you apply for jobs and put out thoughtful and personal applications then you waste less connects and score jobs with decent pay. Like the one I'm about to crack on with now.