Freelancing and consulting while you look for a job?

The most important reason to market by phone

If you are looking for a regular job while you also try freelancing and consulting, start out with marketing tools that require minimal investments of planning time and financial investment at the beginning and prevent significant loss of these resources if you abandon your solopro practice to take that job.

If you have been reading my posts for awhile, you know that many of the people I advise on how to find clients quickly are unemployed or underemployed. Often they are looking for a “regular” job at the same time they pursue solopro assignments.

To land their initial clients, I recommend they start with telephoning, combined with email where practical. These techniques trim time off the preparatory stage and enable you to start making contact immediately with the most likely prospects to buy your services.

In a day’s time you can get all the pieces in place to start phoning so the money starts flowing in. This benefit is obvious.

Plus there are more. You enjoy a welcome diversion from the frustration and tedium of the job hunt, you get reacquainted with your professional, technical or administrative skills and you re-experience the self-confidence and fulfillment you felt before your old job turned south.

Telephoning and email are the speediest ways to get business because you are not locking anything down for the long term. Therefore you don’t need to aim for perfection. Nothing is going to the printer. Nothing is intended for repeated use.

So while proofreading your email is important, you are confident that you can revisit all your marketing for fine-tuning along the way. You can tweak your email each time you send it, and of course, a phone script is the most flexible tool of all.

On the fly, you can adapt the voice mail message for each person you call. You can start out with a broad niche or a less-than-perfect description of what you do and revise it slightly to fit each individual you call.

This is a relief when you are starting out and know you will make many changes to all your marketing during your business’s earliest days.

And there’s another benefit to this approach when you are also looking for a job: you avoid investing time and money on your business infrastructure which you may abandon in a few months (or even weeks) if you get the job you want.

So not only are you saving time and other resources on the front end to get a fast start, but you are also preventing waste of these same resources if circumstances soon change.

Originally posted 3-13-11