Reaching Client

May 21, 2011

I feel glad because I have finished my final exam and now I can focus more on this website and getting my life back. Haha.

There are two persons who already asked about my opinion on getting customer for freelance. Here I share with you some of the tips based on my experience. I am not saying that by sharing this will means that I am good in reaching client. Its not that way as I am still far behind the world of video and design freelancing. I am a full time student yet wasting all my time in video freelancing and crapping in twitter.  Yes, I do crap in Twitter, like seriously.

So if you feel free to read my story of being freelancer and student at the same time, do it. If you don’t want, I don’t force you. I am just sharing what I did and my experience. I am going to do my internship in this coming June and in just 3 years before, I joined video production team from Medtech and developed from there. I started my design’s passion before my Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia, specifically at form 5 where I did design for merchandise for Hari Guru peringkat sekolah. I am really glad that most of the designs that I did last time are still on their own desk at school. The passion did not just stop there. I developed myself in another platform, blogging after my Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia. At that time, I did have a blog that I updated every 2-3 days. I did design banner for my own blog. I even started to have my own domain and self-hosted website 5 month after that. 2 month after that I started to design my own wordpress theme. Found it enjoyable, I did release my own version of WordPress theme for public, but still so many bugs to be fixed.  Then my life change as I joined Medtech. I even started my own freelance job 5 months after I join Medtech until now. Lot of experience gained there.

World of freelancing is big you don’t even can’t imagine the limit. The main point of doing freelance is actually just because you hate your boss or your course that is too structured, then you start to do it on your own way and discover something that really suites you. In my case, I choose video freelancing as my free-time activity.

Establishing Credibility

The first phase that you should focus more in freelancing is the credibility. Which I can say, second most hard of freelancing. What is the hardest part of freelancing? You better read until the end of the post. The whole big point of establish credibility is to make your skills visible to the client. In my case, which I can I was lucky because I joined Medtech. In Medtech, I can say I did produce video for Medtech almost at the average of 12 videos per semester. You multiply by 6 and you get roughly how many videos that I did so far for Medtech.

Back to the main point, honestly I am doing video for Medtech almost with free of charge. I didn’t think about to get money or else. From that, I realized that I gained credibility and make my skills visible to the client. I did video for free for my friends and even my lecturers. I don’t think about earning some money first at the beginning of the period. Have the passion first and let others see that you are enthusiast enough in that field. At the same time, what did you get is the connection that you can use after this for your own good.

A part from that, I joined events that related to the design and videography. I joined many events related such as Kul Sign Festival and much more. It is totally fun to mingle around with people that have the same interest with you. I get to know Kuku Besi and lots of photographers in person from the events. We worked together to finish the assigned task and you learn from the pro at the same time. I can say this is totally a fun activity to do. You can build connection between the community with the same interest with you and this can push you up to the higher level. I mean, you don’t need to be isolated from others just to learn something different and you can refer to someone that already pro to explain to you clearly. You may also get higher impact when your artwork for the event is selected. Which in my case, I get much impact for this video.

Collaborating with events and clubs is another way of establishing credibility. Last semester I did collaborate with International Culture Night together with Theseplay just for fun. Actually this is our first collaboration and I think it was a huge success. The response that we get was great and a good way of promoting our services.

The next step after you earned the credibility is a bit easier. Promote it.

Build Connection

Building connection is for me,  a necessity for every freelancer. It is the key of business to make connection so that you will continue to expand your business and at the same time, you don’t have to lose your loyal customer.

In Universiti Technology Petronas, I might not be friendly with so many peoples. I am kind of an introvert. Less talk, more works. So that is who I am. I put my virtual life as my main life ‘literally’ so I maintain my relationship with each person virtually. Early of my phase in freelancing and student, I am focusing on the target market to the group of businessman, staffs of the university and organization (which I can expect they can afford to invest my skills).

The outside world of my university is different as always. I need to publicize myself as my skills. I promote my service via web as you read now and also some of my channels via youtube, vimeo and much more.

Maintaining the connection is the hardest part which you may lose your customer with your credibility. I have experience a lot of this problem in dealing with my client and to be honest, I am also have to reject the job that I feel I can’t take it anymore. It is better if you reject it rather than you give a bad output to the client.

Entering competition

Yeah I not gonna ask you to join competition, I just encourage you to join. More benefit you will get if you join the competition. What can I say about competition is, it just uplift your name faster. Maybe your credibility will be increased based on your performance, but in term of money. I think you will not gain much. So don’t really hope that video will gives you much money because the probability for you to get is low based on competition. However, the best video still can be the winner.

One thing I like most about entering competition is it enhance your reputation and portfolio. I did apply that based on the winning of MUFORS Road Reel on past February and I can say that they do believe in my reputation.

Preparation

Well, if you think that you have managed to build connection quite large and earned some reputation, why not give it more impact?

There are a lot of medium that you need to be prepared. Web, promotion, publicity and much more. For me, the first thing that you should do to establish freelance job is the website. Make yourself visible to the world. It is okay if you only get 100 traffics per day or less(I don’t really care about my traffic), the main point is for the potential client that want to hire you. Do focus on their needs and make them believe that you can do the best for them. In my case, I have my own experience in dealing with website so I just can do it myself. But if you want to make a website but don’t have the skills, do hire people to develop website for you. That will cost you some money from your pocket but it is really to invest.

Business card is another way to promote yourself when you go into some place or events, I did my own business card and spread the business card to the world. Do it in a cool way and you will impress them with just the first impression of your business card.

Same goes to facebook and other social platform. Use it wisely to promote your services.

I have also tried to publish my work and promote it to certain forums like photomalaysia and lowyat, but certainly I think that it is not a good platform for me (at least for me) due to low return of client and hard to keep update with it. So I just skipped it for now. But I believe you can try also but maybe in a different way that is more attractive than me.

Establish legal company

Yeah I think this is the most important part that I assume freelancers from Malaysia lack of it. They don’t think that the need of establishing legal company for their service is really necessary.

Most Malaysians do provide freelance services. Others may find it is not necessary. But for me, this is the most important. It is actually the sign of ‘you are serious in making business’. In freelance sector, you are the boss of your company. But most people misjudge the term company. They feels like when you do freelance, its nothing to be serious as to be bonded with legal rules from the government by registering your company to the government. In fact, most of the huge company tend to choose company that is legal to do business. So do register your company under SSM (for Malaysian) and run the business legally.

In my case, I want to share something based on my experience. Petronas and UTP feels it hard to hire personal because of moral issue such as corruption and much more. There are a lots of ambiguities in dealing with personal freelancers, security issues and much more. It feels safer to deal with company rather then personal.

Of course, you can also charge more.

I think thats all that I can write for now, its already consuming one hour to write this. So I better stop now. It is always better if you can try a new and cool way to promote services to the world. Keep trying and I believe you will be succeed in the future. So don’t lose hope!