Hey freelance friend!

The tides always ebb and flow in our world and after one of my favorite and largest clients sailed off into the sunset at the beginning of the year, I hit the ground running with client outreach.

I think it's easiest to organize prospecting into three categories: lapsed clients, warm leads, and cold leads. Interestingly, I've had the best luck so far with old clients and cold leads and hardly any with warm leads. 

Here's a breakdown of what I've done and the outcomes to date.

Whenever I need to drum up new business, I immediately reach out to people I’ve already worked with. It’s the fastest way to land projects because people don’t need to vet you, they’re already familiar with your work, and you’re already in the payment system.

I sent four emails reaching out to folks I hadn’t received assignments from recently.

👎 Bad news: One had a paused budget and another email bounced back.

👍 Good news: An agency editor asked for clips in another content area (which I sent) and another said he’d have assignments this week.

As I write this, four doesn’t seem like a lot, so I have some room to improve here. 🤣

Next I sent a batch of emails to prospects I spoke to last year but didn’t turn into work for one reason or another. Ironically, my “warm” leads have actually been my cold leads this month - no responses so far. C’est la vie. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I always keep a running Notes list of companies and publications I want to write for. So a couple of weeks ago I sent out a batch of LinkedIn requests and actually heard back from one! The freelance need isn’t immediate and the company is moving into AI content engineering, but I got a real person’s email address so I can start my follow up sequence.

This got me thinking that I want to lean more into cold outreach. Interestingly, I then saw Jennifer Goforth Gregory post about cold outreach today on LinkedIn, which served as validation that it’s worth putting in the elbow grease. Of course, for real results this needs to be done at scale. She plans to send out 100 LOIs this week!

I’m actually taking off a couple of days this week so I won’t be that aggressive. Instead, I’m challenging myself to send 20 this week and then boost that goal next week.

Two years ago, landing a new client on LinkedIn seemed to take no time at all. But with so many freelancers and job roundups, posts asking for freelance help get inundated within hours. But it’s not impossible to land work there - it just takes fast turnarounds and really specific clips. I actually subscribe to a paid roundup service to get LI posting alerts throughout the day. It saves me from having to do it myself and I only reach out about opportunities that are a really strong fit for me.

I landed one client at the end of 2025 doing this and a new one in 2026 (though it wound up being a small project). Still, the work has already more than paid for the service so to me, it’s a no-brainer to add to my prospecting routine. There are tons of those freelance job aggregators out there. If you want to know the one I use, just email me and I’ll let you know.

None of this is a novel approach to getting clients. And sometimes it can feel so frustrating to send dozens of emails and DMs and still get nowhere. But I do think there are still clients out there, even if we have to work harder to find it.

I’d love to know what’s working for you (and not!). Are you noticing any strategies working better than others? Hit reply and let me know!

Happy freelancing,

Lauren