A recent Doing It For The Kids podcast posed the question “Do you think it’s possible to market yourself as a freelancer in 2024 without using social media?”
I’ve been free from social media for over a year – in both a personal and work capacity – so I don’t use social media to get work.
It’s been a process. I got rid of:
Twitter in 2022
LinkedIn in 2023
I gave up on Mastodon quite quickly (I was already tiring of short-form social media) and never really used Instagram.
How do I get work?
Word of mouth: previous clients or freelancers in adjacent fields
Collaborations: with developers and freelancers in other disciplines
Communities (Circle, Discord, Slack)
Newsletter ads
Visibility through being an “Official Partner” with some tech I use
There’s nothing atypical about any of these methods, but writing them down made me wonder what that looks like in numbers.
In practice
I don’t have a high turnover of clients and usually juggle a combination of long/short term projects.
I had 18 clients over the last year. These range from teeny tiny one-off projects, to projects that span many months.
Eight of these were new clients:
1 came through the “Official Partner” thing
3 were from collaborations
3 came through communities
1 was word of mouth from another client
The other ten were either previous clients or projects on a longer-term basis.
There are other things I could do to promote myself further:
Go heavy into SEO
Create service/industry-specific landing pages
Build a newsletter
I don’t particularly want to invest time/energy in any of these channels, but I know they work for some people.
Update
It was pointed out to me that there may be a few other ways that I get work:
Building a reputation/niche as someone who cares about a particular combination of things (privacy, accessibility, etc)
Appearing on podcasts – not something I do much of these days and it was rarely about more (usually about freelancing, privacy or one of my now-archived side projects)
I wouldn’t necessarily count on these as things that directly bring in work, but they probably help to a small degree.
