Freelance Programmer/Designer

Following on the thread started by Vince, I have been thinking about actually making money off of my talents for a while. I have been coding PHP for over 2 years and have been into HTML and Graphic Art for almost 6 times that. So I know how to get started and building a portfolio and have read everything in Vince's thread so there is no need to repeat any of that in here.

How do I get my first customers?, and where do I look? or, how do they find me?

Thanks for any help.

Your first customers are easy. If you can find someone that you can truly provide a valuable service to you have found your first customer/client. Don't expect to get rich, otherwise this won't work.

This first client can be anyone... Your mother, father, uncle, aunt, old school teach (very good choice), coach, friend, etc.

Like I said, don't expect to get rich, and as a matter of fact, you should come up with pricing before you approach them. You want to have your REAL pricing so you can tell them of your service, let them know how much it would cost them if you were not such good friends, then do some work for them free of charge or very cheap.

This person will be your best marketing material and spokesman(woman).

Now you have the gift of word-of-mouth advertising.


Now you can live off referrals for a while, at the same time building your skills and customer service. Use profits to purchase what you need to build your business. Form strategic partnerships where needed now you are loaded.

Get a REAL 800 or 877 number. In other words, get a toll-free or semi toll-free number and put it and your website on all marketing collateral.

Incorporate a name and get your tax id. Oh yeah... I might start a flame about this, but if anybody disagrees bring it on.

Now remember, you should incorporate a name that has nothing to do with your service business. As a matter of fact, don't put any kind of label on it at all. If you have questions about why then contact me privately.

Now, register your business locally and pay to have the name published for a couple weeks. Make sure this dba name is under your incorporated name as a division.

Next you want to get an old telephone book out. Search through it and find similar businesses. Now get a new telephone book (yellow pages), and find the same businesses.

Only note the ones that are no longer there.
Now check to find out if they went out of business.

If so, request to have those phone numbers routed to your 800 number. Take my word for it... try it and see.

Now, you should have enough clients to keep you busy for a while.

laidbak does it again!

lol - sounds like a script from a movie.

Are you speaking from experience laidbak?

Personally - I started my own business round March this year, and was running that in conjunction with working full-time as a developer. I contacted a few friends who had done the same thing to get as much advice, etc as possible before taking the plunge. Turns out a mate who has been running his own design company had a pile of programming work that needed doing, so I took it on. His work keeps pouring in, enough to quit my full time gig. Which i'm doing next week!

I've been in the industry for around 5 years, and every single job I've had has come via word of mouth. It's all who you know.

This article may assist

The Freelancers New Client Primer

There are also a whole series of articles on getting started selling your services and finding clients

http://www.sitepoint.com/subcat/107

Yes, I am speaking from true experience. I've consulted with many businessmen from small companies that never took off and are about to die to huge companies that seem like they will never go away.

BTW, never feel compelled to do work for free on in exchange for "Tons of Referrals"... this is usually a load of "you know what".

If a client is only willing to send you referrals and no CIH (Cash in hand), you have a couple options to keep you from lossing bigtime.

1. Ask that they send over at least two paying clients before you do any work for them. You may have to work with these clients concurrently so this is good practice.

2. Alternatively you could do the free work for this client, however, only after having them sign a contract stating that they will send over X amount of paying clients in X amount of time after the project is done. If the conditions are not met in time they are obligated to pay your rate.

Sounds logical.

I remember reading something somewhere a while ago that said, never do something for free. Always charge something, whether it be heavily discounted or whatever. The thinking behind it is that you should always assign a value to your work.

This is a really good advice, It recall my first also last mistake. I trusted this guy (this group) I didn't ask he to put down anything. Finally, I had to take the site down without paying anything and all my time was worthless. Since, I always charge 1/4 of the amount before I start doing anything.

devilFish,

As a starting point, you can try this site http://www.Project4Hire.com where people post projects they need help on. You can bid for these projects and get contract work that way!!!

My company is located in San Bernardino Country in California. I am looking for a Cold Fusion programmer to do projects for our web site. This forum showed up under google search for this. If anyone is interested please post a reply.
Thank you