How to Find Freelance Clients (Dom Kent Style)

I never had to actively seek freelance clients.

Does that mean I had an unfair advantage on my journey to earning $300,000 a year as a freelancer ?

I say no.

It means I was ready to become a freelancer because people knew about my work, my subject matter expertise, and my reputation.

I had written a little bit, but I was no means a writer. I did, however, have a solid network thanks to my online presence and attendance at industry events. It’s this that set me up for my decision, in October 2018, to turn my back on my £75,000-per-year job 9-5 job.

I was niche. I was somewhat known. I was ready.

Now, you might not be ready. And I plan to cover this in this blog post, too. However, you must always have in the back of your mind that the best way to achieve freelance success is to create a never-ending pipeline of clients thanks to being known for your consistent quality in your niche.

Once you’ve carved out a specialised niche and delivered outstanding work, clients stop being a chase and start coming straight to you.

Yet every freelancer faces the catch-22 of needing proof of expertise before those inbound leads materialize.

Before I preach inbound marketing and word of mouth referrals, let’s tap into these proven strategies to land your first clients and then turn your reputation into a self-sustaining pipeline.

Landing Your First Clients

Until your inbound engine roars to life, deploy these tactics inspired by top UK and US freelancers:

Tell Everyone You Know

Your personal and professional network is your first goldmine.

• Refine Your Niche Continuously
  Drill down further: which sub-verticals or use cases yield the best projects and rates?
• Send personalised messages to ex-colleagues, mentors, and friends.
• Send personalised messages to ex-colleagues, mentors, and friends.
• Refine your pitch with each conversation—clarity breeds confidence.

Moonlight for Your Employer

If you’re still on payroll, gauge whether your current company needs freelance support. Part-time projects for a known client let you:

• Challenge it.
• Accept it.
• Content promotion.

If you work in pre-sales but can write blog posts, your marketing team might be looking for that exact combo of subject matter experience and desire to write.

Leverage LinkedIn for B2B Tech

LinkedIn remains the premier platform for B2B lead generation in tech niches:

• Optimise Your Profile: Use a headline like “Freelance Content Strategist Specialising in UCaaS & CCaaS.” Include niche keywords in your summary and experience sections.
• Publish Regularly: Share short posts and long-form articles on topics your ideal clients care about. Be authentic and offer value. Don’t post for the sake of posting. Leave at least 24 hours between posts.
• Engage Thoughtfully: Comment on relevant posts, join industry groups, and tag connections when sharing resources. Don’t spam people and don’t aim for X number of comments per day. Just add value where you can.
• Send Connection Requests: To people in your industry and those most likely to hire you. Don’t send them a personalised pitch. The goal is purely the connection so they can see your future posts.

Deliver Exceptional Early Work

Your first few projects set the tone for referrals. Over deliver on quality, communication, and deadlines.

Happy clients become champions—sometimes referring multiple colleagues in a single ask. Track referral rates and ask for introductions when wrapping up each project.

Note: While not all customers will give you a case study, collect logos and nice things they say so you can bring them up in conversations. (Obviously not if you have an NDA in place.)

Promote Every Deliverable

When you start getting freelance clients and producing outputs, the number one thing that brings me clients is sharing my work online.

Whatever you create—blog posts, whitepapers, slide decks, code samples—push it out to the world.

Proactive content promotion consistently outperforms cold outreach. If strict NDAs apply, negotiate an anonymised case study or at least a summary you can share.

Transition to an Inbound Pipeline

Once those first clients are under your belt, systemise your growth:

1. Refine Your Niche Continuously
   Drill down further: which sub-verticals or use cases yield the best projects and rates?
2. Showcase Measurable Outcomes
   Lead with data—revenue uplift percentages, conversion improvements, efficiency gains.
3. Automate Content Distribution
   Create a simple, repeatable checklist for every new asset: publish on your blog, share on LinkedIn, syndicate to niche forums, and email to your list.

Make Work Come to You

This section is taken directly from my book, The Autonomous Freelancer .

Chapter 4 - How to make work come to you

I ask my Twitter audience questions like: “What’s your least favorite part about writing?” and I get answers like “Finding clients”. This makes me sad.

My query was to find out what people don’t like about writing. The automatic association for some freelance writers is that writing is business.

When I ask questions like “What’s your favorite part about writing?” I get answers like expression and freedom and other wonderful words that I also love about writing.

Likewise, when I join Twitter Chats about freelancing, the same topics come up time and again:

Finding clients is hard.

And, honestly, I don’t get it.

Now, that might sound callous or arrogant. And maybe it is. Because, while I appreciate how hard it is to get new clients when you cold pitch and submit CVs, I can’t get my head around why people don’t deviate from this horrible process.

Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” 

So why do people persist in the process that’s “hard, tiresome, boring, painful, arduous, mind-numbing, and demoralizing”?

The answer is: because it’s habit. Remember that small word that causes so much pain or gain?

Let’s do something about that habit.

I have secured customers from two avenues during my career as a freelance marketer. Note, I use the term “avenues” rather than channels or platforms. I’m not about to tell you to go all in on Twitter or start writing life-coaching posts on LinkedIn. Neither am I about to tell you to start writing long-form blog posts to try and rank on Google.

The two avenues that have bought me all my customers are:

1. Word of mouth referral.
2. Content promotion.

1 - Word of mouth referral

Word of mouth referrals are when someone literally recommends you to their colleagues, peers, friends, bosses, competitors, anyone.

I’ve had 25 customers in the last 5 years. To validate that word of mouth referrals not only exist but work, I’ve counted back which of those 25 have been word of mouth referrals.

Care to hazard a guess?

6** of those (24%) have come from word of mouth referrals. Actually, 3 of them were from the same person.

And that’s only the referrals that became paying customers. Sometimes they weren’t a good fit. And we’ve already touched on when it’s okay to say no to new business.

**Editing note: I got 3 word of mouth referrals today. Two within my niche and one under the blanket of digital marketing. These came from two former customers and one person I network with online. Word of mouth is real, folks.

So, how do you get a word of mouth referral?

Other than having nice customers who do this naturally, it’s a two-pronged approach to obtaining referrals:

1. Delivering great work.
2. Asking for referrals.

Delivering great work speaks for itself. If you provide late or below-par work, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to get a referral.

Not only does the work you deliver have to be great, but it must also be a good working experience for your client. If they have to chase you after delivery dates or you ignore feedback, you’re no longer making your client’s life easier. And, after all, that’s why they hire you: you have a specialist skill they can’t complete (or complete as well) in-house.

But there is still no harm in asking for a referral if you’ve delivered great work. For example, when growing one client’s blog, we’d reached levels we could never have imagined. The impact on the business was so great that more than 90% of the pipeline could be attributed to work I’d completed. When the time came to reduce work with that particular client, I asked them if they knew anybody else who’d benefit from the work we’d done.

The result?

17 referrals. 

And, no, that’s not a typo.

My client was so thrilled with my work that they wanted to spread the work with peers, former colleagues, and investors.

Sure, not all 17 turned out to be anything. But they all have quality recommendations for when they do.

That said, it’s hard to gain word of mouth referrals from existing customers only. And, what if you don’t have many customers yet?

That’s where my second avenue comes in. Let’s talk about content promotion.

2 - Content promotion

What’s the first thing you do after you complete your work for a client? 

Okay, after you breathe a sigh of relief, what should you do?

Ask.

Ask.

Why?

Content promotion makes up the rest of the 76% of customers that have come to me and asked if I can do work for them.

By “content”, let’s assume I’m referring to whatever the output or deliverable is for your client. It may not be content in the traditional sense of consumable content marketing (videos, blogs, graphics, etc.) but you have provided someone with something. If you have no output to share, simply sharing that you’ve done something is great too. If you have a graph, chart, table, code snippet, behind-the-scenes photo, anything, it unlocks a passageway to being found online.

As well as the objection of having nothing to share (from freelancers who aren’t writers or designers mostly), obtaining permission and dealing with NDAs are the next most common. I’ll come to those shortly.

I’m forever surprised when I ask freelancers about their processes and they don’t include promotion outside of sharing on their favorite social media.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media is great. As I was writing this book, I shared an ebook that I worked on 9 months ago on LinkedIn. Within an hour, I had a message in my DMs asking me to create the same for a new client. Since completing this book, I’ve completed that ebook. It netted me £7,500 ($9,000).

It doesn’t always work that way. That’s why you need to consistently be distributing your content.

A thorough content promotion process, which only needs to be bullets of where to share, can take eyeballs on your content and outputs from zero to hero. But eyeballs don’t pay the bills. However, when the right people read your content, you stand a higher chance of getting business to come to you.

That’s why content distribution is so hard. And why so many marketing teams deprioritize it. Finding the right places takes effort, time, and research. Writing a new blog post feels like you’re contributing more. Creating a new infographic seems like everybody is busy. Creating new code when you haven’t tested your previous shows your client you’re efficient. But only on the front end. And, as any business-savvy person will tell you, it’s what happens behind the scenes (or after publication or handover in the case of a freelancer) that makes businesses money. We’re talking about optimization for search and promoting content in the right place.

To put that into context, I can attribute over $170,000 worth of work in the last 18 months to content promotion.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve collated where works, doesn’t work, and only works for certain content, so I have a plan of where to share my content when it’s ready to be released into the wild. Sure, I rely a lot on traffic from Google. But, in the example of one post in particular, I gained an extra 67% worth of views compared to just hitting publish and letting people find it on Google.

“Leaving dollars on the table” is an overused phrase in the marketing world. But, in the case of content distribution versus relying solely on SEO and a bit of luck, you’re not only leaving dollars on the table (i.e. missing customers who’d find your work and approach you) but you’re creating more work for yourself in terms of cold pitching and looking for gigs.

I promise you that promoting your content is a whole lot more validating too. Sharing something you made and getting feedback is invaluable. And don’t get me started on the dopamine hit when you get a bunch of likes or someone shares something you created.

Obtaining permission

The number one objection to promoting content that you’ve created is the fear that your customer won’t let you.

Let me be straight with you here.

They wouldn’t pay you if they didn’t want people to see it.

As a business owner myself, when I commission someone to write a blog post or create a graphic for me, I want them to share it.

Why?

Because more people will see it!

If you can’t get over this imaginary hurdle, there are some things you can do to:

1. Ask.
2. The client insists on the NDA and you continue your work as they proposed.

When you ask your client what their content promotion process is, you might even get some extra work too. If content distribution is a weakness of theirs, you might get a gig writing social media copy or tacking on some outreach time as a deliverable in your retainer.

If it’s all taken care of in-house, a simple “I assume you’ll want me to share it too?” puts you on the front foot. Why would they say no? You just offered to amplify the asset they’re paying you to create.

Even in the case of ghostwriting, the act of sharing the post without publicly calling out you wrote it goes a long way. When someone reads it and thinks it’s great, they’ll ask you if you know the author. And that’s you!

When you do it anyway, there are two outcomes:

1. Your client asks you to take it down.
2. Your client thanks you for sharing their content.

Use scenario judgment to gauge whether this is going to lose you a customer or gain you a fan.

In most cases, however, if your name’s on it, not promoting it is counterproductive to your freelance business.

Oh, but then there’s the dreaded NDA…

Dealing with NDAs

NDA stands for Non-Disclosure Agreement. This means your client doesn’t want you to disclose that you’re working with them, a certain product, or part of their business. In the case of security or sensitive topics, this is fairly commonplace.

If “the brand” is the author of blog posts, you might see this too. But it’s not the end of the world for promoting your content.

You have two options when a client proposes an NDA:

1. Challenge it.
2. Accept it.

If you challenge the NDA, there are two scenarios:

1. The client removes the NDA and you continue your work (and are able to promote it later on).
2. The client insists on the NDA and you continue your work as they proposed.

The worst case scenario is they say no. So there really is no harm in asking.

When you promote enough content, success, or metrics, you draw people toward you. Customers come to me because they want me to replicate the success I’ve had with previous customers.

One major thing that helps with drawing people towards you is being known for a specific niche. This could be industry-specific, asset-specific, or skill-specific.

Are You Ready to be a Freelancer in the First Place?

If any of this has sounded overwhelming or you think you don’t have enough connections to start marketing yourself, it might simply be that you’re not ready to become a freelancer.

Listen. I get it. You see people (like me) posting about how great their freelance life is and how much money they earn.

Honestly, it’s amazing. I love my work and the life it enables me.

But I worked full-time for 10 years before I went freelance full-time. For the best part of that final year, I worked freelance for nearly as many hours as my full-time role.

It was this secondary income, combined with customers approaching me as I posted my content online, that made me realise I could do this type of work for myself.

Becoming freelance hadn’t been on my radar. But it made total sense at that time in my life.

Main Takeaway

Establish authority in a narrowly defined niche and build a rhythm of creating and promoting valuable content.

Inbound leads will become your primary growth engine. But to kick start that engine, combine network outreach, strategic moonlighting, laser-focused LinkedIn activity, high-impact early deliveries, and relentless content promotion.

Execute this playbook, and you’ll soon be fielding enquiries instead of hunting for work.

Need help with finding freelance clients?

Book a 30-mins freelance coaching call with me .