Freelancers...

d12dozr

Sending e-mails with your latest cool perspective/animation to former clients. They will NOT contact you immediately to hire you, and might not even reply to the email, but a month, two months later you receive a call from them to offer work, and they say "Hey, I saw that image/video you did. I need something similar for a new project." This has happened to me three times in the last seven days. Let's see how many result in actual work.

I've been meaning to do this, thanks for the reminder.

d12dozr

Here are a couple more links I thought may be relevant to this discussion:

How to get Free Press – The Art of the Press Release

Artists Who Sell: How to Write a Killer Sales Page (and why)

Hieru

Very useful. Thanks

Roger

I do both photography and illustration and here are some ideas that have worked for me. They have not made me rich, but they work on occasion:

Write and article about what you do. The trick is to find the right venue for your article. I once wrote an article for the University and College Designers Association on how to pick a photographer to shoot for schools alumni associations. After the article was published, I did tracking on my website and in one week there were schools in every state in the USA viewing my webpages. There is a little tracking trick you can use. Lets say your URL is PeteStoppel_dot_com and your article is on a page called http://www.PeteStoppel.com/rendergenious.html. Lets say you wrote an article on what to look for in a good renderer. You give the URL to a local AIA publication as "www_dot_PeteStoppel_dot_com/rendergenious_dot_html?AIA_west_of_nowhere_kansas". Now lets say you give a talk on render techniques to a group of Canadian developers looking to invest in the US. The URL you give the developers would be "www_dot_PeteStoppel_dot_com/rendergenious.html?Canucks". The part of the URL you give out has nothing to do with the page people get, but it will appear in your web logs each day. So at the end of the month you have some ideal about how many Canadian developers looked vs how many Kansas architects looked. Be careful how you interpret the data. You might get a hundred Kansas architects and only ten Canadian developers. But you also might find Canadian developers 10 times more likely to pay your price as the Kansas architects. I would rather do one job for $1000 than ten jobs for $100. Best job I ever had was a two-day gig that paid about $6000 from a private prep school. My next favorite are prestige business schools (They know publicity has good business value. Next are Ivy League schools. Further down the ladder are small liberal arts colleges who never have money. Rather than turn them away, I just tell them they can not get my full service treatment for what they offer. I take their money on the condition that I take one shot and they have no choice (all decisions are at my digression.
Sometimes it works in their favor if I happen to walk into the perfect "one shot, one kill" situation. However at the top of the spectrum, I did a cover shot for Vanderbilt Business School of Dave Parker, CEO of US Air. I toured their HQ a week before the scheduled shoot. I made sketches of areas that interested me, I made a SketchUp model of a lobby with him (a 3DWH stand in) among models of his air fleet. I determined where he would stand, which planes would be placed where, where my lights would be, where power was located, how much help I needed from facilities people, even what lens I would use. When I went back for the shoot. It was wham, bam, thank you mam and I was out of there with the shoot in the can. Can't afford to screw up the good jobs.

In another case I used remote networking. My son-in-law is a former president of the Phoenix Harvard club. One of the older members was telling my son-in-law about his line of super precise engineering devices, but he couldn't find anyone to make good presentation drawings. Son-in-law said I have the right person for you, "My father-in-law is a Carnegie Mellon industrial design graduate and does computer aided renderings. Don't assume you know where you work comes from, just tell everyone who will listen what you do and why your skills are somewhat unique. I hate to say it, but we are like sharks. You swim with you moth open and eat anything in your way or at least bite it for taste.

Do you use Coroflot.com? The portfolio is free use it. Some kid at a for-pay technical college called me looking for work. I said you and me both kid. Turns out he was challenged by health problems that consigned him to a wheel chair. I gave him some pointers like, "Get a real degree" and maybe you might want to specialize in design for the disabled as a way of turning the tables on disability. Then I sent him some job leads I found on Craig's list (jobs designing for the disabled). He got a job interview at different kind of company but they really need more experience and some job site mobility. So, I hadn't heard from the guy in a month and he sends me an email and it turns out I have just the kind of freelancer skills they are looking for. And, in addition to rendering, I am redesigning some of their internal work flow.

I have also had some good luck with foreign developers just because I have a genuine interest in design and culture around the world. A lot of foreign developers are pretty tightly networked to survive in the US and you do a job for an Indian from Mumbai, he will tell the Persian office complex developer, who know a Chinese toy manufacturer, who knows an exporter in Thailand etc. Start a conversation about something ner and dear in a persons home country, their culture, their business, their family and say nothing for the next three hours. At the end of the meeting they will tell all their friends about the genius they met.

Its all about networking, about numbers, about seemingly random (or at least unpredictable connections) and about the the amount of energy expended in keeping the ball rolling. Communicate frequently, but work smart rather than working hard when generating leads. When somebody responds then go into over drive to make sure all your communications bases are covered respond fast, have some prepackaged follow ups. Get a face to face or some form of commitment before someone else runs away with the opportunity.

toxicvoxel

There are a number of anoying trends that go along with this kind of economic climate.(I have been arround long enough to see a few cycles.)

1.] The first people that get hit are the contractors as companies will try and hang on to their staff base in the downturn. Additionaly there may be legal issues that may arise if contractors are used while a company is anticipating or implementing redundancies.

The good news is that when work starts to pick up again many companies will tend to use contractors in the first instance instead of taking on staff until such time as a consistent pattern of work becomes apparent. Unfortunately this trend may still be some time off in the UK and the US.

2.] When people go out of work the natural reflex is to spend a lot of time in building out additional skills in order to be more attractive in the market place. One of the typical target skills at the moment would be to develop CG rendering skills, so expect there to be a lot more competition in this market after the upturn. (The problem is that only a small percentage of clients can really differentiate this service based on quality.) Also expect a lot of purist cad monkeys to re-surface with Sketchup skills in the next 18 months so beware if you percieve yourself to be safe as being the 'Sketchup guy' in the office.

This is an inherent disadvantage of any IT based skills because what starts out as a specialist service will in time become a general skill or become redundant as new technology is adopted into the mainstream. (Eg. CAD > BIM, AutoCAD/MAX 3D > Sketchup) Now more than ever, one really needs to plan your investment in IT (self-)training / expertise carefuly in order to ensure your relevance and logevity in the market.

Skills that require the 'signature' or the hand of the author eg. traditional rendering (even if this is a small market) will be harder to replace with a cheap young graduate just out of school and will be less affected by changes in technology. Whatever you do needs to focus on the possibility of providing, where possible, a unique and customised service instead of competing with a growing supply of the standard service in the same field. If you don't all you will be able to do is try and compete on price, which is the last resort before going out of bussiness.
Part of the longer term solution is also to try and anticipate the IT workflow requirements in 5 years time and try and position yourself accordingly in terms of adopting emerging technology and developing skills that may be in shorter supply in future.

bob-designer

If possible clients do not know that you exist, they can not supply you with work or refer
you to others. So, you have to let people outside this forum know that you exist. Contact
your local office of SCORE. This is a group of retired business people that can help you
create a business plan. They well meet with you as many times as needed to help you with
your plan. The business plan will help you focus on ways to expand your client base and other
ways of operating your business. After all, most of us are good artist, but do not know how
to run a business. Check with you local Small Business Bureau or on the internet. Also, check
out SCORE on the internet. Business plans are required if you should think of obtaining an
business loan to help expand your operation. Remember, Working with Sketchup is the "fun part
of business", "running a business is not fun". You have to find that happy balance.

I once sent out a letter of interduction to 300 possible clinets. I received 2 replies. One
of those replies started an twenty year working relationship and at the same time, became
great friends. If you reach out, sometimes, it only takes one.

Ecuadorian

"How to get the final decision maker on the phone". Excellent read. I'm trying to apply it right now.
http://biznik.com/articles/how-to-get-the-final-decision-maker-on-the-phone

jeff hammond

@d12dozr said:

Here are a couple more links I thought may be relevant to this discussion:

How to get Free Press – The Art of the Press Release

Artists Who Sell: How to Write a Killer Sales Page (and why)

bm

[Edit]

@ecuadorian said:

"How to get the final decision maker on the phone". Excellent read. I'm trying to apply it right now.
http://biznik.com/articles/how-to-get-the-final-decision-maker-on-the-phone

bookmark

Dave R

Pete, it sounds like you have got a lot of good info here in this thread. I hope your business will pick up.

I've been fortunate in that I haven't had any need to go hunting for work drawing work. I have plenty of it to keep me busy for a long time and it seems to keep coming. Still, if that ever changes, I'll be back to this thread to follow up on those links and advice.

solo

This was a year ago,things picked up well since then, thanks all the same guys.

Dave R

I didn't catch that.

Or, wait a minute. My best wishes for you worked!

Ecuadorian

@solo said:

This was a year ago,things picked up well since then, thanks all the same guys.

Still, remember it can take months or even years of developing a relationship until they hire you. Better start finding new clients now.

solo

You are so right, I'm always on the look out for loyal clients.