I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about how to get new business. Potential clients come from a range of areas for me – some through Google to my website, some through referrals, some through Twitter and some through my networking. The latter is something I certainly need to do more of, as I’ve been relying on referrals and my website in the past couple of months. Actively going out there and meeting people is certainly a proactive method, while I consider queries through my website or Twitter more reactive methods – even if I’ve specifically posted about work on Twitter or updated my Hire Me section.
I am by nature a very proactive person. If there’s a problem, I’d rather work on a practical solution rather than dwell too long on the problem itself. Realising that my current methods are mainly reactive made me realise I need to amend how I’m doing things. For my work, I need a mixture of proactive and reactive methods
So, my question this week is, do you have a proactive or reactive approach to freelancing? Or a mixture of the approaches? Which method do you reply on most? Let me know in the comments!
[poll id=”11″]
I would say that 90% of the time, I’m reactive…. and the majority of the work that I get is through relationships that I’ve already established either from working with people on previous projects who are looking for someone to subcontract to. There’s a lot of demand in the market I cater to, so even when things get slow they don’t tend to stay slow long enough for me to need to start actively pursuing new clients… at least that’s how it’s worked out so far.