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13 Comments

Building a freelance work pipeline

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience building automated-lead pipelines for freelance contracts?

I've been working as an independent consultant for a little over a year now and 95% of my leads come from manual outreach. I specialize in mobile and web applications, primarily within sports tech, although I accept plenty of work outside that domain. I have a solid portfolio and excellent reviews from past clients.

I'd like to create a lead funnel to help free up my time to focus on building personal projects. I've heard people mention that being active on social media, writing basic articles, and open source contributions are decent routes. Curious if anyone has experience with those or other pipelines?

Also, open to any advice on my personal site: https://www.conorleary.dev

  1. 10

    I'm a freelance frontend developer. I don't have an automated lead-pipeline yet, but I am also interested and on my way to build one. So I'd like to share my thoughts, with the hope to help others and maybe get feedback.

    In the past I did many different types of projects, from minor WordPress tasks like theme customization (2-3 hours), full Wordpress web sites and shops (2-3 days), cross-platform mobile apps (2-3 months), to frontend consulting (up to 2 years).
    Most projects I got through word of mouth: through friends who knew somebody that needed frontend help (~10%), networking at meetups (20%), or client referals (~70%).
    With lack of positioning I found it hard to acquire new clients directly. I guess, smaller clients get intimidated by large projects in my portfolio and the bigger clients can't relate to my WordPress projects.

    Currently I'm trying to position myself as a web performance expert.

    I built a web based CSS optimization tool that removes unused CSS from a website, which gets decent amount of organic traffic (~3k sessions/week).
    I started a blog, where I post tutorial-like guides about page speed optimization. Through Google Search Console and Analytics I have now insights what people are searching for and I'm trying to be helpful by posting articles that answer those questions or build tools that people are searching or asking for in the comments. Currently I'm working on WordPress-Plugin that optimizes CSS and a PRO (paid) version of the web tool.
    I have a newsletter subscription form on the page, where the list is growing by 5%-10% every month (that's not much, but it adds up :-) ). Currently I'm sending only announcements about new blog posts, or updates regarding new tools or functions. But I plan to use it to promote my services as well.

    I already started getting requests from my readers, to implement some optimization techniques I described in the blog on their site. This first relatively small task (1h) led to a second larger project (2d). And I hope that getting multiple projects of this type will lead some day to bigger and more lucrative deals.

    I see this whole process as a marketing funnel, where you can optimize the conversion at each level:
    Visitors -> Newsletter subscribers > Clients with small tasks > Clients with bigger projects

    I could also use social media (instagram, youtube etc.) to build audience, but I'm struggling with regularity and discipline. I know it would help a lot, but it's so far out of my comfort zone. :-)

    Here is my current strategy in summary:

    • find a niche and be helpful
    • build an audience
    • offer free advice (help them to do it themselves)
    • offer paid help (if they want you to do it) to get in touch with clients
    • let them know what else you can do for them
    1. 1

      Great advice! Mind sharing a link to your site(s)? I'm curious to see how you balance client acquisition for a freelance work vs email/blog acquisition for your newsletter.

  2. 2

    I built a robot to auto-apply to all relevant contract project ads to help with this. Although I don't use it that often it does work.

    1. 2

      Where do you source the project ads from?

        1. 1

          Looks interesting. Never heard of jobserve before, but looks like there are some decent leads on there. Mind if I ping you directly with a question or two?

  3. 2

    Just signed up to follow this. I'm thinking about making the jump into freelancing

    1. 3

      Feel free to dm on twitter @conorleary_ or on my site https://www.conorleary.dev Happy to offer any advice I can

      1. 1

        sweet - thanks - will def reach out and share some stuff i know

  4. 1

    Hi,

    We can help out. Please email me on [email protected].

  5. 1

    Not a pipeline, but we built a platform that allows freelancers handle multiple projects.

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