There are 5 steps to booking clients online. And not just any client. The dream clients you’ve been hoping for.
So how do you get your potential clients to see you as the only person they want to work with? How do you book clients in without feeling like you’re spinning your wheels?
1. Know Who Your Ideal Client Is
The first step to booking your dream clients is knowing exactly who that person is. One of the huge benefits of being a freelancer is you get to decide what type of client to work with.
Take an hour and write down the characteristics of
- The perfect project
- The ideal type of business you want to work with
- How much money you get paid
- What type of service or services you’ll provide
- How big of a company do you want to work with? A solo entrepreneur? A huge corporation?
When you take the time to get clear on the exact type of person, type of business, and type of projects you want to work on, you’ll find your ideal clients so much faster – and they will find YOU because you are exactly what they are looking for too.
3. Define the Core Service Or Offer for Your Business
Once you’ve decided who your ideal client is and what type of work you want to do for them, it’s time to decide your core offer.
Your Core Offer is Designed to Attract Your Ideal Freelance Clients
While many freelancers (including myself) do a lot more than graphic design or sales funnels or general virtual assistant tasks, it’s important to lead with the one thing you want to be hired for. You can always “upgrade” your clients to additional services as you go.
Any experienced freelancer can tell you that scope creep is a thing. You get hired to manage someone’s social media accounts and the next thing you know, they are asking you to create images for their website or help create a passive income product for their coaching business.
Long-term projects will often lead into more and more ways you can work with your best and favorite clients. But you have to start with one thing. If you offer too many things at once, you will overwhelm the business owners you’re trying to attract!
Start with One Project or Service
It’s like when you go out to eat at a nice restaurant. The hostess doesn’t ask you what you want to drink, what your main course will be, if you would like a salad, how you want the bill divided up, if you want coffee or dessert after your meal… They simply ask you how many are in your party. Then you gradually get asked everything else.
So when your perfect client lands on your work with me page, have as few options as possible. For example, in my design & marketing business, I have 3 ways people can hire me: Website Design, Logo Design, or Ongoing Retainer. That’s it. In reality, for my freelance business I do social media content, blog writing, SEO optimization, graphic design, web design, funnels, video editing, automations…. You get the idea. If I had all of that on my work with me page, my clients wouldn’t even know where to start!
3. Target Clients with Paid Promotions
If you are serious about growing your freelance business, you can’t just rely on your search engine optimization, your online presence, or previous clients to refer you to your prospective clients. The easiest way to get your business in front of the client base you want to attract is with paid advertising.
Choose ONE paid traffic source. Facebook ads, Bing, Google ads, etc. Pick one and learn it, inside and out. Or hire an expert to do it for you.
When it comes to content for your ads, promoting a video works great on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Video content helps you get freelance clients easier because they can see your face and “get to know you” before they even meet you. You can’t really do that with a blog post or a pretty graphic.
Even if you’ve never edited a video before, there is software that makes video editing easy. Even for a beginner.
4. Networking: Word of Mouth, Social Media & More
There are so many ways to advertise and network. You can do webinars, YouTube videos, Facebook live, email marketing, word of mouth …. You can hashtag your heart out on Instagram & Twitter… You can network in every single Facebook group and pin and repin and pin again on Pinterest… Which one works? All of them!
Word of Mouth
Good old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising is one of the best ways to land high-value clients who are ready to book you and pay your top rates. When someone refers you to their friend, you are immediately more trusted than if they ran across your portfolio online.
Let your friends, fellow freelancers, professional contacts, and previous clients know that you’re accepting clients. Put it out there in the world.
Offer a referral fee or discount to your existing clients who refer you to their friends. Your biggest clients are often a great resource for booking new ones!
Networking in Freelancer Groups
For some reason, networking gets a bad rep. I’m not sure why since it’s so effective! So how do you “network” when your business is virtual?
If you’re a freelance designer, for example, make friends with some freelance writers. Join Facebook groups where they hang out and participate in the conversations. Even though your niche or service might be different, the process of growing your freelance business is much the same. Then you can refer clients to them and they will do the same.
Another way to tap into your social media network is to do guest posts on their blogs or guest trainings in their Facebook groups.
Everyone struggles to come up with content and it’s very common to have an outside expert (like you) fill in the gaps. Your ideal clients will click with what you’re saying. Then at the end, give them a way to book an appointment through SquareSpace Scheduling (formerly known as Acuity Scheduling), Calendly, or another automated scheduling system. I like to use these because they send out automatic email reminders for your meeting without you having to do it yourself. If you don’t have your online booking system set up, just guide them to your contact form or give them your email address.
Social Media
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter… There are so many social media networks! Which one works best for you? That’s always a big question and my answer is whichever one is easiest for YOU.
Personally, I’m on Facebook the most and that is where I find most of my clients. Is it because that is where my dream clients hang out? Maybe. More likely is that I’m already on there and I know the platform.
What social media outlet are you most comfortable with? Focus on that one first.
When creating or updating your social media profiles, be sure to make it easy to find your website or a link to a nice portfolio or other examples of your work.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone looks like an amazing fit for a project or a client and when I click on their profile, I can’t find any contact info, their website, or any other information about their company. Don’t play hard to get. This is an easy fix (and easily overlooked).
Email Marketing
To be clear, we aren’t talking about sending cold emails or buying email lists from list farms. We’re talking about collecting the emails of your potential high-value clients by offering a free gift (known as an opt-in or freebie).
Growing Your Email List
Deciding what to offer people as an incentive to sign up for your email list is a whole topic unto itself. The quick rundown is you want to create something that solves a little bit of your ideal client’s problem and gets them ready to work with you.
If you’re a graphic designer, you could create a guide or checklist and call it “What You Need to Know Before Hiring a Freelance Graphic Designer”.
If your specialty is systems or automations, you can create something like “5 Systems You Didn’t Know Existed to Make Your Life Easier”.
Maybe you have a boutique agency that only focuses on helping authors launch bestselling books. You could have a free video series about “How to Increase Book Sales with a Book Signing Event”.
The main thing to grow your email list is to offer something that genuinely helps your potential client and positions you as the expert.
As your business grows, so will your email list and the good news is, there is a lot of money to be made with emails. The general consensus is that each email subscriber is worth $1 a month of income.
Even if you hate writing emails, there is software available like Conversion.ai to help you write better emails to get your potential clients to book with you. I’m not much of a writer myself so I lean on software like this to help improve my content a LOT.
What kind of emails do you send if you’re not offering your services and cold emailing?
If you create blog content monthly, you can send out your latest blog. If you’ve just wrapped up a few short-term projects or one big project, you can highlight how your work helped your client earn extra money or made their life easier. You might create emails to address common questions your clients may have about working with you or a freelancer in general. Maybe you’ve decided to run a flash sale for your a’ la carte items for some additional income this month..
The most important thing is to decide on your strategy, develop a process or system for creating your email newsletter and be consistent. And no awkward cold emails – Yay!
5. Ask for the Money (Close the Sale)
When it’s all said and done, you started your freelance business to make money, right? If you’ve put yourself out there on social media, done the work to identify who your ideal clients are and how you can help them, promote your business with videos or other advertising, there is no reason you shouldn’t be signing clients up left and right.
Closing a sale can feel awkward at first (and that’s normal) but it gets easier over time. There is no reason whatsoever to feel awkward about sending invoices. Business owners do it all the time. Do you think your electrician feels weird when he sends the bill? No. And neither should you.
A sales conversation should address questions your potential client has about the project, your rates and how everything works on your end. Some common questions are
- What is your turnaround time?
- How do we communicate?
- Do you use a certain project management platform (Trello, Asana, Clickup, etc)?
- What happens if I don’t like the work?
- What is the timeline?
Once you answer their questions, the only question left should be “where do I send the invoice?”.
Speaking of invoices, accepting credit cards is super-easy with payment processors like Stripe and Paypal. Even if your new client doesn’t have a PayPal account, they can enter their credit card details in and you still get paid.
Your client onboarding will eventually become a streamlined process, but at the beginning may be a bit messy. That’s perfectly normal as you learn what works best for you and your clients.
Follow This Guide to Increase Your Income
There are a million different strategies and a million different methods to grow your freelance business with high-value clients. Experienced freelancers will tell you that it really boils down to the five steps laid out in this guide:
1. Know who your ideal client is. Choose ONE market or niche. You can always expand later. You’ll have faster results (and get higher quality clients) if you focus on ONE market. A web designer who specializes in Chiropractors can charge a LOT more than someone who designs for anyone.
2. Decide on your core offer. What do you want to be known for? For me, it’s sales pages and funnels. What about you? Remember, you can always offer more services once you get to the sales conversation. You can ad a’ la carte items that suit their needs. Not only are you adding to your payday, you’re making them feel like a VIP.
3. Get in front of your ideal clients with paid promotions. Video ads are an amazing way to do this. If your budget doesn’t allow for that, move on to step 4 and start flexing your hustle muscle.
4. Work your network. Get visible on social media. Interact in Facebook groups, Reddit subreddits, and other online communities. Go where your ideal client hangs out. Even if you want to only work remotely, network in local groups. You never know who knows someone who needs your help. Make sure you have a professional portfolio that’s easy to find so your potential clients know they’ve found the perfect solution to their problem.
5. Close the sale. Fill your client roster with long-term projects, short-term projects, and retainer clients to have predictable income. Make sure your invoicing and onboarding is a streamlined process so your clients feel well taken care of and excited to get started with your amazing company.