I was talking to someone recently and I mentioned how I’d gotten off Upwork a few months ago.
“So how do you get clients now?” she asked.
I paused and thought. “I don’t really know.”
Well, I’ve thought about it a bit more. Here are the facts:
Since getting off Upwork, I’ve had some old clients get back in touch with new projects…
I’ve also had some referrals that turned into actual work…
And finally, I applied for and got one email writing job that was advertised within Ben Settle’s paid newsletter.
And while it’s been enough work (along with my ongoing clients) to keep me busy, I’d like to have a more steady drip-drip of new leads.
So I’ve taken the advice of several successful copywriters (Chris Orzechowski and Roy Furr), and I’ve started putting together a list of businesses I would like to write for.
The goal was to put together 50 such companies. I’ve been at it for about a month. And so far I have… 8.
In spite of the fact that good direct marketing companies should be easy to track down (they run ads, right?), I’m not finding it so easy to actually find them.
It’s kind of like that old game Minesweeper that used to come with Windows.
You click on one square, hoping it will open up a whole patch of the board that’s free of mines…
But it turns out to be just one stupid revealed square, with no extra information, and you’re back to where you started.
At least that’s how it feels for a while.
But if you keep it up (so I tell myself), the Minesweeper field starts to open up and you get a better idea of where those mines (ahem, clients) might be hiding.
(By the way, did you know that Minesweeper happens to be an NP-complete game? That’s a fancy computer science term that means Minesweeper is pretty damn complex. And that progress in the game probably won’t be linear, and might require going down some dead ends.)
Anyways, the point of all this is to inspire myself, and maybe you as well. Because if you keep putting in the work, eventually results will start to follow. Either that, or you land on a mine and blow off your foot. (Haha, nervously.)
Of course, maybe you’re not off Upwork. Maybe you’re just trying to get started there. (And why not? It’s a good place to get clients, and it worked well for me for years.) In that case, you might like this collection of the tricks and strategies I used while I was still on Upwork: