Transcript via Rev.com

Welcome back to the Squarespace entrepreneur podcast. My name is Omari Harebin, and today we're talking about how to leverage freelance marketplaces and job boards like Craigslist, Upwork, and even Facebook groups to build a client-generating system for your freelance business. Now, last week I shared how I got started or how I stumbled into selling Squarespace plugins, but none of that would have been possible without what I'm going to share today. Now, if you want to jump ahead, I did a workshop on this topic a couple of months ago, and you can find the replay in the show notes. But I'm going to go through the whole process for you right here and then if you want to go deeper, you can just check that out. 

Now there's a lot of freelance marketplaces out there, and most of them get a bad rap among the professional freelance community for a few reasons. One, freelancing is tough as it is so no one's really enthused to be giving a big chunk of their earnings away to a platform like Upwork. You also don't have any control over the kinds of clients these platforms attract. And so you tend to hear a lot of nightmare stories, which can be really off-putting. And when you look at the numbers, a lot of freelancers probably don't make too much money on these platforms anyway and have a lot of trouble getting clients. But in spite of that, there are still freelancers who use these marketplaces and use them successfully. So I think it's always important that when you hear negative stories, to dig a little bit deeper because typically I find there's an opportunity or at least something to learn. And if you do find any benefit or anything good tucked in there, you'll be the one to get it.

Now I say that because when I made the decision to explore Upwork and Craigslist, I too had been under this illusion and cloud that says, you know, just stay away from these places. A part of me felt like, you know, I must've been too good, right. I was getting clients off of referrals.  and so, you know, it always fed my ego a little bit when someone would show up out of nowhere and say that someone, you know, recommended them, but eventually,  my local clientele dried up and all those referrals dried up. And so I said, all right, let me go online. And I started on Craigslist and what I did was I set up alerts all around the country for Squarespace-related jobs or gigs. And then from that point on every day or every other day, or whenever a Squarespace-related, Craigslist post came up, I would get a notification in my inbox.

And so I still get those notifications to this day,  which is,  you know, is a nice reminder. And then I went to Upwork. And again, what's important about this story is that I didn't become dependent on these sources, but I use these specifically for a reason, which I'm about to share now with Upwork.  I took a similar path and I used RSS feeds to create email alerts to myself. So that every day I would have a list of the most recent,  Squarespace, irrelevant, posts on Upwork for me to apply. Now this solved a few problems that freelancers typically face, which is you go out there and you look for jobs and then you get one and then you start working on the project and the project is over, and then you go back to looking for jobs again. And so in between that time, you miss out on a lot of potential opportunities.

That could be a good fit because there's no system in place to capture them. So,  this allowed me to wake up every day and check my inbox and be able to respond regularly to prospective clients quickly as well. Now, the real hidden benefit here was that it gave me insight into what kinds of problems people were trying to solve,  relative to Squarespace,  specific problems. So prior to this, I was marketing myself as a one-man creative shop doing a whole bunch of different services. But once I saw that these problems were very specific and a lot of them were reoccurring, I realized that I could create a specific service to address these problems. And,  it would allow me to build trust and credibility a lot quicker with prospective clients because now I wasn't just a freelancer saying, Hey, I could do that.

I was a freelancer saying, Hey, I have a service already created specifically for that. And so it became a much stronger and compelling reason to hire me.  and it also meant that I didn't have to stay on these platforms for too long. When I checked my Upwork account the other day, I think I only made a thousand dollars on the platform before I just moved off of it completely.  but the insights that I gained were really important because it allowed me to then build something off of, you know, proven data and allow me to get some early testimonials and all of that. So again, if you want to go deeper on this and actually see,  over my shoulder, how I did this, I have a workshop. It's not too long. It's about an hour long.  and you can check that out in the show notes. And if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them.  I love talking about this stuff, which is why I'm not talking about it.