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Author

Jim Hamilton
March 28, 2025

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Happy Friday! This is the Freelance Gig, where we share news, tools, tips, and tricks to help grow your freelance business. 

Mentioned in today’s email: LinkedIn, Calendly, ChatGPT, Meta and Youtube. Plus how to get your first freelance client even with no experience and how to fix your LinkedIn profile and get noticed in 2025

Read time: 2 minutes and 54 seconds.

Together with Authory

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Working With Clients

How to Get Your First Freelance Client Even With No Experience

Your first freelance client is the hardest one to land.

Especially if you’re looking to build your business around a new skill.

So — what’s the best way to do it?

Our recommendation is…

Offering to work for free in exchange for a case study or testimonial.

Removing your fee from the equation limits their downside…

And getting them to agree to give you a case study creates buy-in + ensures you’ll have a proof piece you can use to make landing the next client easier.

But a word of warning before you go on the hunt…

Don’t expect clients to trip over themselves trying to hire you just because you’re offering to work for free.

Here’s why:

By making this offer, you’ve eliminated the monetary risk…

But not the time and energy risk.

They’ll still have to invest some time and energy into the project and communicating with you about it.

There’s a chance it could all be wasted if the project goes bad.

And they likely value their time much more than whatever fee you might charge them.

So whether you’re prospecting via cold outreach or on freelancing platforms…

Keep this factor in mind.

Express your gratitude to them for taking a chance on you…

Explain how hungry and motivated you are to knock the project out of the park.

And emphasize that you respect their time.

Making the Rounds

POLL: Do you use Calendly in your freelance business?

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Working For Yourself

How to Fix Your LinkedIn Profile and Get Noticed in 2025

LinkedIn is the #1 platform for freelancers in 2025.

But it’s getting more crowded than ever.

Which means it’s getting harder to stand out.

That’s why optimizing your profile is so important.

Done right, it can generate inbound leads as clients and recruiters discover you organically.

Luckily, our friend Professor Heather Austin recently put out an amazing, in-depth tutorial on how to use LinkedIn to create opportunities in 2025.

Tap here to check it out on YouTube:

AI Prompts For Freelancers

Prompt of the Week: The 90-Day Follow-Up

This AI prompt is designed to help you create a template for a 90-day follow-up email you can send to clients asking if they need help with anything else.

Here is the prompt:

I'm a freelance [TYPE OF FREELANCER]. Create a fill-in-the-blanks email template I can use to send to clients 90 days after completing a project to see how they're doing and if they have any other projects they need my help with. Keep the language casual, friendly, and conversational.

Tool of the Week

Stop Copy-Pasting & Use Simple Shortcodes Instead

TextExpander eliminates wasted time on repetitive tasks.

This trusty time-saver lets you set up shortcodes for just about anything you can think of…

So you can auto-populate a chunk of text, big or small, in just a few keystrokes.

  • Emails

  • Templates

  • Connection requests

  • Outreach messages

  • Etc etc

It may not sound like a game-changer…

But once you start using it, you’ll realize how much time you just got back.

Give it a go at the link below:

Bonus Points

💼 Careers: These people found fame and money—on LinkedIn (link)

🗣️ Marketing: 10 great portfolio websites for freelance writers (link)

🎧 Work Beats: Deep Focus - Chillstep Beats for Ultimate Concentration and Creativity - Soothing Rhythms (link)