The Top 5 Ways Freelancers Land Clients (And What Actually Works)

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 382
Welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. If you've ever thought to yourself, God, I need more clients, please God, rain them down out of the sky, I'm probably going to piss you off today, and hopefully in a good way, because in this episode, I'm going to break down the five most common client acquisition methods that freelancers use according to the internet. I'll talk about the sources in a second. And I'll show you exactly why most of them probably are not working well for you. And just for the record, right now I have over 250 active clients on Retainer right now, not to mention the thousands and thousands and thousands of other customers that I've acquired from my other businesses. So at least I know something about marketing and client acquisition. So I'm going to talk from my experience, what I've seen from other people's experiences, and I'll also talk about how to make at least some of these five methods work well for you. And I'll share an extra strategy that flips the script on all of this and works no matter where you live. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for creator freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls. Part of earning more money without selling your soul is getting clients. You can sell your soul to get clients. I'm not going to talk about those methods. These are just going to be the five methods that freelancers use to get clients. And when I talk about sources, I've tried my best to find the top five sources of clients, as reported by surveys from a lot of top job platforms, a bit of research I could find through Cornell, Listicles. I tried to take a conglomerate of whatever I could find online, because the problem with freelancing is that it's a massive market, but there's not a lot of studies about it. There's not a lot of research and data about it, mostly because freelancers are not that sophisticated with how they run their finances. They don't report to anybody. There's no good way to figure out how many freelancers are doing different things, and what's working for them, and what's not working for them. So what we really got is what we can find on the internet, and what I can find from my own client base, and what I can find from our email list, and what I can find from the resources online. So these are the top five ways that freelancers get clients, as far as I can find. And these are all self-reported. And I'm just going to give you the list really quick, just to kind of spoil it for you. I want to talk about each one of these in detail. Number one, the number one method that freelancers get clients from is word of mouth and referrals. No surprise there. Number two is partnerships and networking. Basically, they're collaborating with other agencies or other freelancers or going to networking events, et cetera. Number three is through direct outreach. That's emails, DMs, calls. That could be cold or warm, so you're sending out messages or DMs to ideal clients that already know you or people who have no idea who you are. Number four is social media, kind of online networking through social media. And number five is freelance marketplaces. I want to talk about each of these because I found some interesting studies. There's a study from one of the bigger freelance marketplaces that I'm not going to name, but it's a study that they did, that they surveyed through their own audience, and they have hundreds of thousands of freelancers as a part of that, maybe millions, that 68% of freelancers rely on passive methods to get clients. They rely on passive methods. And if you look at that list of five that I just gave you, three of the five are usually passive, two of the five are active but usually are passive. So let me just explain what that means. So word of mouth and referrals, that's entirely passive, meaning you're waiting around for referrals and word of mouth. You can make it more active, we'll talk about that later today, but it's usually a passive form of getting clients. So when people think of a passive form of getting clients, like passive income, I get referrals, there's mailbox money just comes to me, I get people sent my way from a friend or a friend of a friend or an old client sends a client to me, that's all passive, right? Number two, partnerships and networking. This should be active and can be active, but this is usually passive as well. You get your clients through your network. When you're a freelancer saying, hey, I get my clients to my network, you're thinking through the friends and relatives and friends and friends and old clients and new clients, you're thinking about your network and the clients you get through that network, and it's kind of really just an extension of the referrals. You're getting referrals and clients directly from your network, and it's usually not an active thing. It's more of a passive thing, although that one could be either way. The third way is direct outreach. That is entirely active. To do direct outreach or cold outreach or warm outreach, that's all. You have to be active with that. The fourth method is social media and online networking. So posting on socials, reaching out to people, connecting with them, following up with them, talking to them through socials, that's all active. And then the fifth one is marketplaces.