Getting Business Using Craigslist and Others

I want to share some tips on how to get more business for yourself as a freelancer. I’m getting a lot of feedback from people that this is an important topic, so I will try and post on this topic regularly. First off, I’ll say that you need to have a strategy.

There are many sources of business on the internet that you have at your disposal. I will review as many of them as possible, but it’s important that you pick one or two of them and really focus in on them. Finding business takes time and dedication, although it is far from impossible. I know that using my techniques, and having persistence, I have always had more than enough business than I could handle.

Craigslist has a section in it for Computer Gigs. Many people post gigs for web design, html coding, PHP and ASP coding, and many other types. There are a lot of people emailing the posters about these, so you’ll need to find a way to differentiate yourself, in order to get noticed. If you want to find out how many responses they get, and I recommend you do this, just post a gig yourself and see how many responses you get. Now I don’t want you to go posting a fake gig, so why don’t you actually hire someone for $50 or something for a simple gig - it will help you get experience outsourcing, which is something you should start getting used to anyways!

Again, if you are going to look for business on craigslist, you’ve got to be consistent about it. The temptation is to try something quickly and not see any response and then move on to something else, or worse to assume that it’s just too hard to get business. I know that even after I had had consistently good results from some techniques I developed, I would still get nervous at the beginning of a sales cycle, because it’s always scary when you don’t know when that next payment is coming in! So stick with it!

The other thing I recommend is that you build some profiles on social networking sites and start to network that way. This is an entire topic in and ot itself, so I won’t get into it too much right now. But stay tuned for more on that.

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