

Ask HN: Where do you (marketers) find freelance gigs? - nedwin

After seeing the same post for freelance programmers, I'm curious where marketers go to find freelance gigs?<p>The post this is referencing:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710470
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kaisdavis
Good question, nedwin

Background: I'm a freelance marketer (soon to be) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My experience has been that freelance gigs for marketers come from 3 different
sources:

1\. Personal / Professional Referrals 2\. Direct Outreach to Businesses 3\.
Craigslist / elance / community sites

## 1 — Referrals

Referrals are the best way to get a client / gig because someone is vouching
for your experience. I generate referrals by asking clients if they know of
other business owners for have a need for {skillset}.

## 2 — Direct Outreach

I wrote about this as a comment here
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655212>).

In short — manufacture interested customers by defining the types of companies
you want to work with, making a list of companies that fit that criteria,
identifying who is in charge of the department you want to work with, and set
up an informational interview to learn about the company.

## 3 — Craigslist / Aggregate Sites

These sites suck. When a job reaches these sites, it's generally because the
employer went through options (1) and (2) and couldn't find someone capable.
These jobs have been picked over.

That said, I have some success browsing craigslist, seeing businesses that
have listed an open position / a gig and emailing them.

I like looking at businesses that post in the 'services' section (not
advertising a need for a marketer) and then contacting them to learn about
their business and offer my skills.

~~~
nedwin
How much success are you getting from direct outreach?

Curious as to what sort of work you're doing as well...

~~~
kaisdavis
I haven't done direct outreach for a few months. I'm moving to Honolulu next
week and will be restarting direct outreach in November.

Back of the envelope / from memory? Leads (meetings) with ~1/10 contacts and
projects from ~1/3 meetings.

I do Wordpress development, online advertising, search engine optimization,
and social media work. It sounds like I might fall into both of your markets —
marketers who need a solution for wordpress development / tweaks and wordpress
developers looking for projects.

If you're interested in chatting, shoot me an email at kai@kaisdavis.com.

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slckfielder08
Freelance marketing is a much different beast than freelance programmers.
That's because, unlike programmers, most people think they can do marketing,
without any experience or training. The same cannot be said for programming.

Those that are wise enough to acknowledge that they're not an expert marketer
tend to bring the job in-house. Marketing is much more hands on with the
business end and I believe people feel more comfortable having someone there
day in and day out.

With that said, there are places like elance, RFPDB, and Craigslist where
marketers can find work. However I've found that personal recommendations are
the best way to go (I know this is obvious).

My experience has proven that these sites are extremely ineffective. People
ask for the world at very low pay. Like the many different programming
languages, there are many different disciplines of marketing. I'm not sure if
programmers are expected to know every language, but many people looking for
freelance marketing help expect someone to have expertise in all forms of
marketing (i.e. SEO, Social, PPC, Media, Content, Email, etc). Not impossible,
but not common.

I'm sure paragraph 3 was all you were looking for, but I thought I'd add in
some color to the answer :) Hope this helps.

~~~
nedwin
I was really asking more out of curiosity in contrast to the freelance
programmer question.

I think there are a lot of similarities between freelance programming and
freelance marketing though there seem to be more cowboys in marketing,
perhaps.

Thanks for food for thought!

------
jonnyrowntree
I used to be a freelance graphic & web designer and writer. I found most of my
gigs on Fiverr (<http://fiverr.com/>) and posting to my Twitter & Facebook
followers.

You could also try creating a website and optimising it so it shows well in
the search results for your specified field.

