Freelance Customer Selection 101: Profiling and Picking Your Ideal Customers

So you might have been freelancing for a little while now, and customers are coming and going with some sort of regularity. Given you’ve had a few happy customers, you’re ready to start on the next stage of freelancing: Profiling and picking exactly who you want to work with.

Hang on, Are you doing it in reverse?

Some people start with this exact step before even doing any jobs for people – I think this is a mistake, here’s why:

Before you’ve started doing work on the side you won’t even be 100% sure what it is you want to be doing (I’m talking more about getting really specific, it’s likely you will already have an area you want to freelance in, ie. web design, scripting, etc.)

At the start you need to be open to doing anything in your chosen area. It’s only by doing this that you get to find out what you enjoy doing as a freelancer. But by the time you’ve served a couple of clients you’re going to have a much clearer understanding of what exactly you want to narrow down and focus on.

Profiling and Picking Your Ideal Customers

The first clients of any new enterprise give you an overall idea about where you’re headed. After serving a few it’s apt to stop and assess. Ask yourself the question: “Is this really the type of person I want to do business with in the long run?”

By stopping after a few clients you’re at a literal junction in the road, you’ve still got the opportunity to adjust your marketing direction and pitch before committing to more direct methods of getting the clients you’re really after.

7 questions you should ask yourself after dealing with any project

1. Did I enjoy working with this client?
2. Was their job worth the time it took?
3. Can I charge 100% of my time used?
4. Was there anything I didn’t like about that type of work?
5. Was the client happy to lock in the scope of the project or did they want to keep changing and adding things?
6. Could I deal with 3 very similar clients at the same time?
7. Would I work with them again?

This is just a small sample of the types of questions you could ask yourself after each project. I’m sure you can get creative and make your own list of customer defining questions using this one as a template.

The second half of this equation – actually using this information to profile and adjust your marketing strategy is a topic for another article. Marketing your services is a complex topic and is something that programmers really struggle with when they’re freelance programming for the first time. Hopefully you’re enjoying this series of posts on freelance programming that I’ve been putting together.

If  you’ve missed out on anything you can find it on the Code My Own Freelancing Business project page.

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