Freelance web designer for the past 8 weeks

Hi Everyone,

I'm a newbie to the forum! At the beginning of the year I decided to quite my job as a senior branding and website designer so I can concentrate on my own design business.

I've managed to generate a couple of leads via my Twitter following. Does anyone have any advice on how to generate more leads? I'd be interested to hear how you went about it.

Thanks guys

Darren

 

Hey,
Congratulations on breaking free from the 9-to-5 world! Twitter leads are great. I would definitely recommend bidding platforms like UpWork or Elance. Beyond that, continue to build your web presence: Twitter posts, LinkedIn page, Facebook updates, etc. Upload a video resume to YouTube. Tag all of this content with your name or pseudonym.

There are a lot of good marketing tips in the Rapid Business Lessons freelance course, too. Different assets get assessed. If you're not going to bother (it's free - you should), then I'd say the main takeaway is to not be sucked into AdWords paid promotion, and o never mess with Spam mail.

 

Freelancing is not for everyone but for those who want to start their own business and quit their day job like you. Freelancing is the excellent option. Social media is the best platform to get leads and engage with people in a same field. Your online presence is very important. Millions of people using social media and promoting their business. So you should have to plan and then start working. Twiiter, facebook, LinkedIn and many more other sites are great to get leads.

 

Agreed with LiberatedLancer in that you should be taking advantage of other social media platforms and not just Twitter, and invest in social media marketing. And taking only courses is always a good way to go.

I would also suggest that you focus on your own branding and business development (how you want to present yourself and sell your services). Have a well thought out marketing strategy and implement it.

You should also optimize your business website so that it shows up higher in the search results, which in turn helps you to gain more traffic to your site. How have you presented your content on your site? Have you optimized it with keywords? A good keyword research is not easy. Do NOT keyword stuff; that will get you penalized fast. I would first suggest that you use something like Semrush to check out the stats of your own site and how you are ranking and for which keywords you are currently ranking for. Then see what your competition is ranking for. Once you have an overview of this, you can have a better idea of which keywords you want to avoid and which might be useful for you. Then you re-write your content to naturally include these keywords. The key here is naturally. Your content should still first and foremost present your business in an informative and engaging way and present the professional brand that you are going for. Keywords are just a small helper, but shouldn't become the dominant focus of your content. You will need a tool to find these keywords. Like most of the world I use Google Adwords, but there are some others as well that are just as useful. That article not only lists tools, but also gives helpful advice and tips on keyword research in general. I found it pretty helpful. I would suggest that you read up on content optimization in general and educate yourself about it before trying to dive in and tackle it. There are a lot of great articles and tutorials out there with the information that you need.

I would also suggest that you build up backlinks. Always include a link to your website in your social media posts. Also, if you make industry connections, you can help each other out to mention each other and post a link to their website - whether this is in a LinkedIn post or as guest posts on their company blog. You do it for them and have them do it for you. It not only helps you to become established within the industry that you are trying to succeed in, and help you gain very useful professional connections, but backlinks ensure that their following (on social media or their blog) also hear from you. You now then have a larger reach of potential followers at your finger tips. Plus any legitimate links back to your site also help your SERP ranking. DO NOT BUY THESE! Buying backlinks may seem like the easy and quick way, but it will end up penalizing you. Easy and quick has almost never amounted to successful. Don't don't do it quickly, do it right!

All of this takes quite a lot of time and effort, but it's your business that we're talking about. A successful business takes time and effort.

Good luck! Let us know how it goes.

 

How do I follow that post nice work @FrenchPress again. I would follow that process.

 

What works for us is the old skool face to face conversation. We would attend local chamber of commerce meetings, meeting new people and just having a chat. Relationships develop from there. At least that's what we are after. Relationships rather than stone cold business. Hope it works well for you and I'd be interested in how you're getting on!