Tips for Wooing Your Writing Gig Prospects

April 14, 2010

I’ve advocated marketing to help the writing clients find you as much as possible. By marketing and helping clients find you, you can make more money and reduce your competition instead of focusing all your energy on banging on the same doors as dozens of other freelance writers who saw a gig listed on a job board. For those that have started that marketing campaign to help clients find them, here are some tips to help you get people to query as well as to successfully court those new prospects once they make first contact.

Website Design

There are lots of ways to get traffic to your business website. But when you get traffic to your site, what’s there? Beyond a professional-looking website or blog, make sure your pages correspond to the types of keywords you’re trying to attract traffic for. Analyse your traffic reports regularly to investigate how people arrive on various pages. Does the content on their entry page deliver what they’re searching for and display your skills in the best light possible? Anticipate your visitor’s wants and needs on that page in terms of content, navigation, and links that can help them delve deeper for the best user experience possible.

Contact Page

Instead of hoping prospects will dig for your e-mail address, provide a contact page. Most website templates have this feature built in and it saves you from having to publish your address on the site, which leaves you vulnerable to spammers.

Initial Response

When someone touches base, I often use a new client questionnaire that I’ve developed to help me with their initial project. It also helps them see that I am professional in my approach of trying to find out how to best help them. The questionnaire should help you understand the scope of the project for quoting and researching purposes as well as help minimise crossed signals and rewrite requests. Questions on your questionnaire can relate to target audience, call to action, SEO keywords, and more. Another thing I like about the questionnaire is that it gives me an opportunity to indicate my terms. My questionnaire has a blurb about my payment terms, details about copyright, and info about my revision policy. It helps set expectations up front.

Next Steps

If the prospect doesn’t make the next steps clear, don’t be afraid to ask. I give people time to absorb the info included in my quote and if I am interested in hearing back from them but don’t hear back within 2–3 days I do a follow up to find out if I can provide further info to help them make a buying decision.

Additional Tips:

  1. Try to anticipate potential questions when laying out your website and answer those questions. List samples, list your specialties, and demonstrate your expertise. If you do, chances are that by the time people contact you, they’ve already decided you’re someone they’re seriously considering hiring and this can shorten the pre-sales process as well as save you time during client courtship.

  2. Don’t be afraid to decline potential business. Just because someone approaches you doesn’t mean they are the best client for you. In some cases it takes an attempt to help you both decide if the relationship is symbiotic but if something doesn’t sit well, trust your instinct and decline.

  3. If you’re not peckish due to a workload famine when you get a new query, price on the high end of your price list. I have two sets of pricing and if I don’t need the work, I price at the high end. I have nothing to lose and they’re already interested in me so it doesn’t hurt to try to boost earnings. Plus, while I don’t generally deal with hagglers, quoting high gives you wiggle room….if you want to wiggle.

  4. Make a questionnaire template and save each completed one. I have some clients who’ve given really valuable info in their questionnaire that I come back to later in the relationship and in some cases, that detail can help me adapt to their tone and style. I also save my initial quote so that I’m consistent with them if they come back later.

  5. If you are quoting during a famine, don’t pigeonhole yourself into a certain price point permanently. To help prevent this either in feast or in famine mode, I typically put a disclaimer on initial quotes or on my questionnaire that states I review pricing every six months. That way, I’m not locked into the initial quoted pricing forever and clients (hopefully) won’t be indignant pricing goes up later on (after proving my worth).

Do you have any tips for courtship with a new client? Please share!