I have been freelancing as a front-end developer since 4 years but the problem is I get clients only through Upwork and Fiverr. I want clients outside these platforms and only from the USA or European countries. What is the best approach?
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1 Answer
To remain a freelancer means that you have to build a business. A business consists of numerous parts including marketing, sales, administration, legal, accounting, etc. When working with platforms such as UpWork, they are acting as your marketing team. To go outside of them, you need to build your own marketing team. If you don't know how to do that, you are better off where you are.
Some people recommend contacting old clients to see if they have work. If you have not kept contact with them, they might not take this contact properly. I do a monthly newsletter to old clients and old prospects that contacted me. I simply offer information, no selling in that newsletter.
Other people talk about using LinkedIn to find people at companies where you want to business and contacting them. Typically, that means paying LinkedIn for the contact information. I get a number of requests "to connect" each month from people who only want to sell me something. In most cases, I turn them down. I would expect a response rate from such prospecting to be similar to any sales call - less than 1 percent will result in a sale.
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1A key point is that when we are building this sales team, we often have to pay for the sales and marketing expenses BEFORE we get the clients and get paid. Upwork takes their fee after we get paid. Also, the sales team expects to make a lot of money. It is rare to find one that will take only 20% of what you make. They want 20% of what 8-10 programmers make. So, building a sales team takes a bunch of investment.– David RCommented Apr 25, 2021 at 13:37
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