How to Grow Your Freelancing Business Using Referrals

Remember that your clients could be a lot more than just a one-off business transaction. A client who liked you could provide you with steady work for months, maybe even years. See, even if they run out of work or start cutting down business, have relationships with each other. It’s not difficult to grow your freelancing business using referrals if you’re providing a good service.

Most of the time these types of referrals are pretty difficult to come by. Happy or neutral customers might come back to you, but they often don’t tell anyone about your excellent work. Sometimes you just have to ask. It can be a strange situation for both involved.

You might feel weird doing it and if you do it wrong, they will feel weird. You’re a freelancer, though, a business built on self-promotion. No freelancer ever got to the top by just passively hoping they made a good impression.

1. Strong Foundation

I get this might sound obvious. To get a good reference, you must go above and beyond for your first client. If your head is in the clouds, dreaming about success, this could get overlooked. You must first have quality, not quantity.

Quantity might seem like where the money is, but they will run out of clients if they’re doing bad work. Start with a few clients and build a good relationship with them.

In the early days of your freelancing business, your customer service has to be the number one thing on your mind. Once you’ve worked for them for a while, they’ll begin to see that they can trust you. They will be excited about your work.

Even if you do your best, you can’t make them talk to others about you. Quite frankly, most of them probably won’t.

Yet, if someone says they’re in need of a freelancer, you might be the first to come up in their minds. It isn’t as good as them, telling everyone they know that you’re the best, but it’s a start!

2. Stay In Contact and Ask

A “please refer me to your friends” email after they haven’t talked to you in two years will be ignored. If you stay in contact with your clients, you stay on their minds. Don’t be overly weird and pushy. Don’t email them every other week. In business, unsolicited, but friendly contact should stay in the camp of “just enough”

Then comes the most crucial and hardest part, asking. You may uncomfortable the first couple times. You may feel a shameless. It isn’t rude to ask them to remember you if they have a friend that needs something.

You aren’t (or at least shouldn’t be!) asking them to go promote your business single-handedly for you. They don’t have to shout your name from the rooftops. An email won’t seem out of the blue if you’ve stayed in contact with them.

If it’s reasonable enough, why wouldn’t they refer you?

3. Make It Worth Their Time

Sometimes being the best freelancer this side of the Mississippi is still not going to get people talking about you. Perhaps the client will make an offhand mention to someone who won’t hire you. What are you going to do about it?

Before you shrug your shoulders and walk away, you have another trick up your sleeve, incentives, free stuff, discounts. Give them something. People will go to great lengths for incentives that generally aren’t even worth. People love free stuff.

If your business is small, you could possibly not have the money to gamble on giving away free things for a possible referral.

Or maybe you give stuff away for referrals that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Then offer discounts. Every 5th referral, they can have a free service from you.

It may cost you some time and while time may be money, your bank account doesn’t recognize the currency of time. Therefore it won’t hurt the bottom to give it away.

4. Make It Systematic

You’re in control of this, so develop your own system. Maybe when things get low, you send out the emails again. You start the rounds making phone calls.

Even when things are busy, you make sure to talk to Example Corp. every third Wednesday of the month. Send out your “Thank you!” emails on Fridays. Do whatever makes sense to you.

If it becomes routine enough, it will be business as usual. Your time will be spent as much doing jobs as it is soliciting new work. The client list will grow exponentially and it will get harder to keep up. It is more cost effective to keep your old clients to garner new ones.

So, make sure your quality stays the same. If new work dries up or you hit your peak expanding, you can always fall back. They referred you to their friends, so they’d be more than happy to hire you back!

5. Don’t Stop

Once you get to a good place, you might not have to work as hard at advertising. Don’t get lazy with it, though. It may seem hard to keep running yourself ragged when it no longer seems necessary. You need to make sure that you’re advertising or customer service never falters no matter how situated you are.  

Business may be booming now but the economy is unpredictable. Clients can also be unpredictable. Even 20 years from now, technology may be making what you do almost extinct. Businesses stay alive through hard work. Just keep grinding!

There is nothing better for potential clients than someone they trust saying you’re awesome! You know your work is good, show everyone else. Perhaps though you’re highly skilled in your trade, the self-salesman part is kind of weird to you.

It doesn’t feel natural to everyone. If you keep up with it, it’ll become easier each time. Before you know it, you’ll have more work than you can even handle!