If you’ve been a freelancer for any length of time, you may have noticed there are a lot of job boards out there. From Craigslist to boards hosted by trade journals to bidding-style sites, there are clearly a lot of places for companies to post their need for freelancers.
Of course, if you’ve ever actually tried to find work on a job board, you’ve likely discovered:
1. Posters seem to only care about finding the lowest price.
2. Posts are disorganized, poorly written, and not thought through.
3. Posters demand experience that’s unnecessary for the job (like an MBA to write an article on the textile industry).
What if there was a way to skirt past all of these hassles and make the time you spend applying to jobs from job boards genuinely lucrative?
After all, when you need work quickly (say a job falls through at the last minute), there’s no better way to generate income than to “fish where the fish are.” Here are 5 tips to make job listings pay off:
1. Accept that it’s a numbers game. Landing work from job boards is (partly) a numbers game. That means applying to some jobs that might not be an absolutely perfect fit but that do sound interesting.
In other words, apply to those you’d rank as low as a “7 out of 10″ instead of focusing only on the cream of the crop. Expect to reply to at least 30 job postings to make the time worthwhile.
2. Don’t write like a robot. Use stories and the intrigue to *show* the client why they ought to hire you. Write each email individually for that spur-of-the-moment energy to come through. I know, it’s easier to copy and paste, but not only is that completely lame, it’s also a waste of your time.
Writing individual emails will only take about 15 minutes a piece, and will absolutely pay off in bigger and better jobs.
3. Pitch a bigger job right there in the email! This is part of the reason for writing each email personally. Most job posters are thinking too small. So, ratchet up what they’re looking for and show them a bigger vision of what they can have.
They want someone to write 3 blog postings a week? Offer to also map out a content strategy. They want a monthly newsletter? Offer to also hook them up with a designer.
4. Hint at your prices and process but don’t spell either out. Mention up front that you’re not the lowest-priced service provider. Something like, “I’m not the cheapest copywriter, but that’s not what you’re looking for anyway–you want someone who knows your industry and I’ve spent the last five years immersing myself in the latest news on telecom systems.”
When it comes to process, don’t go on at length about Step A and Step X. Just mention, “Clients often talk about how intuitive I am when we work together–they don’t have to give me gobs of information or stacks of corporate documents. Usually, a 15-minute phone call is all it takes for me to come up with 20 solid blog topics.”
5. Don’t obsess over any one “oar.” Building a bigger, more profitable business requires putting a bunch of oars in the water. Along the way, some of those oars will wind up at the bottom of the lake. Just keep your focus on adding oars, not on what any one oar is doing, because you just never know how any one contact opportunity will turn out. (I’ve had clients suddenly re-appear after a two-year hiatus and I’ve had clients hire me an hour after getting my email.)
Job boards can be a fantastic source of quality gigs (honest!). They’re a sign that a company is in the market for what you do and are often both a great way to get your foot in the door and also a way to score lucrative, engaging projects. It simply takes a systematic approach and a willingness to do more than read a few posts and bemoan that “no one’s paying anything on these job boards.” Get in there, get engaging, and start lining up work!
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Jessica Albon is a freelance copywriter and WordPress designer in North Carolina. She shares six other ways (complete with easy-to-follow scripts) to land more lucrative projects in her recent teleclass: Emergency Client Attraction.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
On the whole this correlates with my experience. As a freelance translator I haunt a few of the job fora often considered to be contributors to the alleged decline in rates. I often hear colleagues complain that in 5 or 10 years, they’ve never been successful with a single project bid. Yet for some reason our success rate with quotations has been quite good as I see it. I tend to go into more detail on my process than is recommended here, but each quotation is in fact an individual approach that emphasizes our unique selling points for that particular project. Anything else would seem to be a waste of time for all concerned.
I agree with Kevin. An individualized response to each post yields the best results. I haven’t had to use the job boards in quite some time, but when I did use them frequently, I created several templated responses (i.e. one for press release writing, one for ebook writing, one for product description writing) and custommized each response to my skills set. Then, when a job post looked interesting,I would go to the appropriate template, jazz it up even further based on the client’s job description, and send it off. This made the response process a bit faster, and still provided a customized response that never failed to get attention.
I hear that a lot too, Kevin–that people “never” successfully win a bid, and I think it boils down to their approach. So many people just send a blanket one-size-fits-all reply and then complain that they didn’t get any response.
That’s fantastic that you find that going into greater detail about your process works–I’d imagine that depends a great deal on your niche and how familiar potential clients are with the typical working process. Thanks for sharing about your success!
I have a specific reason for going into some detail on work processes and qualifications in my case. For the past few years, many European translation clients have been concerned with the “new” standard DIN EN 15038, and although I have not self-declared compliance with that standard (for lack of complete, detailed process documentation at the present time), the methods described are very much compatible with the spirit of the standard. This tends to give prospects here more confidence.
Victoria, that’s a great idea to use templates that you customize, but I think you’ll find that you’ll get even more lucrative results by writing each response individually. Sure, there are some parts that you probably say every time, but each client is different, and there are always words, approaches, and tones that better fit one situation than others. When you’re really well-niched in terms of both service (say you only write press releases) and industry, a template works more often, but even then, you’ll find yourself making a lot more money by taking a from-scratch approach.
I just got an emailed question from Ann-Marie who wanted to know my job board favorites and how to find more and wanted to share my answer here.
Two of my favorites are problogger.com and smashingmagazine.com.
When I’m looking for new job boards, I look for those that are niched and that charge for postings–they tend to attract the better gigs. Industry specific boards can be very useful, especially when you use #3 in the article above.
Googling “Job board” + “Work Wanted” (or other keyword, like industry) will almost always turn up a wide variety, and the people who joined my audio call sent their favorites to the group so there’s a long list in the workbook.
This is an excellent post, Jessica! Thanks for your contribution to TWF. We’re lucky to have you!
I’ve long said that there’s a way to make money on job boards. I’ve met many freelancers who have! But here’s the thing…you have to:
a) Realize that it’s but one of many different ways to land clients. If you do it, you should do it only as a part of a broader, integrated marketing strategy, not as your sole source of business building.
b) Do away with the “victim” mentality. The mindset that “ALL prospects who post work on the job boards want are cheap service providers” and “it’s a war out there!” That kind of thinking (and I know this sounds very new age, but I’m telling you it’s true) will yiesld exactly that — a cutthroat environment and projects and clients that drain you financially and emotionally.
One thing I realise about finding a freelance job on job boards is that, if you are lucky, once you have landed a suitable job, you have a higher chance to build a long term relationship with your client, i.e. you get work from the same clients over and over again for long term. Otherwise, you will have to keep looking for jobs from all over the places once you have completed your projects.