For over a decade now, Freelancer has been the most sought-after marketplace for businesses to find high quality service providers for their projects. If you are just venturing into the freelancing game yourself, you may find it intimidating to compete with other established freelancers in your job category. This is all the more challenging for designers where competition is intense even for the well-established designers.
But there are a number of tricks that can help a freelancer win more designing projects.
Personalize every bid
One of the most common mistakes among freelance designers is to include a boilerplate message with each of their bids. While this makes your bidding process more efficient (you do not have to spend too much time writing a message), it brings down your success ratio substantially. Every client is different and have unique needs. Your message to them needs to reflect their unique expectations.
To begin with, address your client by their name (if that has been provided). Follow this up with a few personal notes and observations about their project. You may for instance point out that you love their current logo and how you can make a few minor modifications to improve branding. Follow this up with more details about yourself and how you intend to work on this project. It goes without saying that you must include links to your past work. Portfolio is an inalienable component of any freelance bidding process.
Offer initial designs
Designing can be a lot of work. Not surprisingly then, most service providers tend to start work only after they win the project. You may however turn this into an opportunity by proactively offering some initial designs with your bid.
The objective of this strategy is not to demonstrate your skills (that is taken care of by your portfolio). Instead, it is to get the ball rolling on the project. You can make use of free online tools to make logos and designs to get started. It is a good idea to let the client know that although these are high quality designs, your intention is to get an idea of the client’s preferences through this initial legwork.
The reason this strategy is so effective is because clients are often at the receiving end of non-responsive service providers. By getting the ball moving beyond project discussions, you are in a better place to win the confidence of the client and thus secure the project.
Improve visibility
The Freelancer algorithm ranks the bids based on factors like the service provider’s authority, bid and past experience. If you have just started launched your freelancing career, it is very likely that your bid may go unnoticed by the client mainly due to the sheer number of competing bids. One way to increase visibility in the initial stages is by ‘sponsoring’ your bid. Sponsoring bids cost just under $5 and allows you to bypass the other quotes to be seen on the top of the bidding list.
While sponsoring your bid is not a guarantee to secure projects, it increases your visibility quite substantially. According to Freelancer, sponsored bids are 518% more likely to be awarded with projects compared to the non-sponsored bids. Also, using this strategy in conjunction with the other steps mentioned earlier in this article would allow you to establish authority and thus win the project.
