Now you should have everything in your marketing foundation.

• Your goals and objectives for your freelance business
• A clear picture of who your ideal client is
• Services and solutions to solve the problems your client has
• Trust markers to accelerate the relationship building with your clients

The time has come to start looking for clients.

There are dozens of different ways to find clients. Marketing tactics abound and there seems to be a new one coming out every week now.

But there is one core truth to your entire marketing system:

Find people who you can help and build a relationship with them

At the end of the day, that’s what really matter.

Trust.

Relationships.

Always remember that. It’s your main strategy.

Next you can pick which tactics to use to reach that goal. The thing is about tactics, they don’t work for everyone.

Someone might try blogging and have huge success with it. But someone else won’t see a dime or even a single lead.

Is that blogging’s fault? Is it the freelancer’s fault?

No. It’s just an example of the tactic not working in that specific environment. You can analyze it to the tenth degree to try to find out why, but it’s probably a better use of your time to move on and try the next tactic.

In my experience, one or two well-executed tactics are enough to keep you busy. Full-time, turning-work-away busy.

During the time I did Redmine consulting those tactics were creating open source plugins and writing developer-level documentation. The plugins were far more useful to landing clients than anything I wrote.

So don’t get dismayed if a tactic doesn’t work for you. Just move on and try something else.

Eric Davis

P.S. Those Redmine plugins were exactly how I became the go-to guy for Redmine development work. Without them, I’d just been another freelance Rails developer.