One of the things a freelancer goes through constantly is the draught in projects. Like a harvest season, during the dry periods of the year there will be less than few projects. One of the worst pitfalls of being self-employed is the non-existence of financial security. So if you’re not prepared to be without cash or save for many rainy days, don’t be a freelancer.
One of the ways I’ve thought about helping myself gain projects is by emailing website owners I’ve visited. If I’m visiting a website and think of on-the-spot solutions for them to make it better, I’d email and ask if they’be interested.
When my webhosting provider, Easynet-Interactive first started out, there’s a list of clients on their website. I think they still do have it there.
So anyway, when I saw the list and began randomly clicking the links, I came across websites that have been averagely done and badly done. There isn’t any well done not because I wasn’t the one designing them but it’s because some prefered not hiring anyone else to do it for them.
Out of the lengthy list, there was one company website that I seriously couldn’t stay on that long. It had a very annoying repeated background image. Its default blue hyperlinks were clashing against its repeated background and it had default red text against its annoying bright blue-ish background image. They already removed their website but if you could imagine it, it just horribly done.
During that time, I was so tempted to just fire an email to the webmaster or email the owner of the website directly. Giving a direct phone call to the company would be great as well but there’s higher tendency of not being able to discuss to the person in charge.
There was an article that I read, it’s actually a bad practice emailing potential clients out of the blue and asking if they’d like their website revamped. I don’t remember why it was bad but I feel that if the email doesn’t sound like a spam mail then it won’t become an annoyance.
Some clients or humans for that matter are lazy in many ways. It’s not surprising that there are clients who sit on their butt until the last moment before thinking of improving their website. That’s why I feel actually dropping a line to the potential client is one of the better ways in securing a job. You’re actually doing them a favor by looking for them and not having them look for you.
But that’s the start of the relationship, after the project is over, there’s still a step further to truly succeeding from a client. That is by gaining referrals from your client.
I’ve personally not tried this out yet but it sure might be time to try and see what feedback I might get later. Hmm, maybe I’ll conduct a little experiment on this next week.
So please suggest local website owners that you think I should approach. Excluding government owned websites please. :P
Erm, I don’t have much suggestions for the website, but they method you are mentioning above are actually widely practiced by alot of people involved in selling (stock, stuffs, services)… They call it “cold call” … Meaning by you call up every stranger who might be a potential client :)