flickr typewriter typo?! by bitzi on Flickr

1) Streamline your marketing efforts as best you can. If you have a website, for example, set it up so that your posts go straight through to your Facebook business page, your Twitter account and your LinkedIn account.

2) Dress well and dress appropriately. You never know when you will meet someone who might give you work. It might not be at your next networking function – it might be in the supermarket. Australia seems to be relaxed in terms of corporate wear and sometimes it’s easy to get caught out as a freelancer with the whole issue of what to wear and when. In fact, I’ll devote a whole post to that soon. When in doubt, dress as formally as possible and pretend you have somewhere else to get to afterwards. This is better than showing up in jeans when everyone else is in pencil skirts or cocktail dresses.

3) Do your best possible work on every job you get. It doesn’t matter if this is a voluntary gig or a paid one. Do your best because getting the work is only half of the marketing side of things. Doing it well, on time, with all due respect to both yourself and the customer/client is the second half that people often get about. You can’t just win one gig, how you perform on that first gig dictates if you are going to have an advantage or disadvantage in winning the next one.

4) Seriously use what you have, especially if it is free. This advice applies to all sorts of things from getting an ABN which makes you look more professional immediately, to taking the time to set up an elegant template for your documents, to searching online for relevant information and tutorials to brush up or learn new skills. I meet a lot of people and I find that while they can be very nice people, I often lose a lot of respect for them as professionals if I find that they aren’t at all interested in learning and improving what skills they have. Why? Because that tells me that a) since some skills are easy to learn online, that they have no idea of what possibilities the Internet has and so they are out of touch and b) quite possibly they think they know everything already. That’s fine if they make enough money as it is for them, but it’s not fine for me if I want to recommend them to someone or if I want to hire them myself.

5) Be nice and kind to people. I mean, genuinely kind. You are building relationships with everyone you meet. People are more likely to send business your way if they care about you because you are nice, capable and kind to them and are genuine about it. If you aren’t genuine and you can’t be bothered, you might get by on charm for a bit but not for long.

6) Act with some dignity and be yourself. That means striking a balance between being the person tossing disdaining scowls at the drunk people on the dance floor at a ball and being the drunk person dancing and falling out of their clothes. Find the middle ground. Behave with some dignity but crack a risqué joke. People usually see the people who flail around drunkenly as fun but not necessarily reliable. If you’re too aloof and critical, you’re reliable but unapproachable. If you let off steam by getting drunk, separate the occasions when you do so from your professional life. Don’t post such pictures on your Facebook profile and save the crazy nights for when you go out with your friends on the weekends to places where you are unlikely to bump into any potential clients or colleagues. The exception to this is if you are a journalist and you drink with possible sources and contacts and even then you should aim to be the least drunk person there so that you have a better chance of filing your story asap and impressing your editor.

7) Leverage social media. Send your posts to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Digg the posts you write or add them to reddit. Don’t spend a ton of time on social media because you need the time to do the accounts, the actual work and the other types of marketing. Unless you are sure that social media brings in most of your work (and you’re not sure until you have a pie chart demonstrating it), don’t spend a lot of time on it and streamline whatever you can of it.

8 ) If you don’t have a website, you’d better have a good reason not to. If you need one and don’t know where to start, contact me. I can help you out or at least point you in the right direction.