Building your client base - keep your clients happy

Posted on October 9, 2007
Filed Under Clients, Freelancing |

In my last post I discussed how to find clients using various avenues such as the internet, newspapers, online forums, and other venues that may be available to you depending on your particular niche. It’s great when you get your first client, your first gig, and your first pay. Ideally, you want to have a repeat of this experience. You want more clients, more work, more pay! That’s the idea of freelancing, right? It’s to make money! And to make money, you need more than one client, you need many clients, more work, continuing work. You need to build your client base. Some will be one-time clients that you never see again, and others will be return clients that come back to you with more work. You want to attract both these types of clients when you’re starting out. As you continue and become more established, you will want to focus your time and effort on retaining your return clients, but when you’re starting out, it’s important to cultivate both.

When you get your first client, and indeed any client, your goal should always be to impress! Blow them out of the water with your speed, efficiency, quality of work, and professionalism. Make your clients happy, because happy clients come back, and happy clients talk.

Let’s look at these two facts:

1. Happy clients return: My experience has been that if I deliver good quality work within the agreed on time, and at a reasonable price, my clients almost always come back the next time they need work done. I have had clients contact me a year after I did work for them, asking about my availability. I always consider this a huge compliment, because it means I was memorable! I did something right, and I did it such that they cared enough to hold on to my contact information. This is important because as you progress as a freelancer, your rate of client return will become an important measure of how successful you are.

2. Happy clients talk: Guess what - if they need something done, especially something professional, the odds are that they know other people who need the same thing done. One of the biggest sources of work for me is referrals from my past clients. A few months into freelancing I started getting emails from people I didn’t know, and they would all start out with “Mr.X referred me to you, he said that you could help me with….” This was exciting for me, because it was an endorsement of the work I had done, and an unexpected source of advertisement. The flip side of this coin is also true and equally important - unhappy clients talk! If you consistently don’t deliver quality work, you will find yourself losing ground in the market, because people share information. And with the internet being such an open space, it’s easy to lose your ground before you start if you make the wrong moves.

So the first and most important part of building your client base is to make and keep your clients happy!