When To Do It Series: Work Doesn’t Just Fall Into Your Lap

Posted by Tisha Tolar on June 10, 2010

If work just fell from the sky, the world would be a lot richer. I know I sure would be! But it doesn’t happen that way. Work must be sought out. Work must be asked for. Work must be pursued all of the time. Otherwise, work just doesn’t happen.

Finding Work Is a Priority

No matter what industry, niche, or freelance situation you are looking to work, you need to find work. You need the money. If you have a retail-type job idea, you have to find places to sell your merchandise. If you provide a service, you have to let people know what you can do. This must happen all the time. As a freelance writer, I’ll admit this is not always my strongest skill. Often in the past, we have sought out work, snagged the job, and then pointed all of our focus on the task at hand. Only when we started running out of work did we think to start marketing ourselves again. This will not fly if you want to continue running a stable business. You always need work in the pipeline and you always need to be looking for work.

Where to Find the Work

Unlike when you are looking for a job and scan only the newspapers everyday, when you are marketing yourself you need to be looking everywhere. From want ads in print to want ads online, you need to schedule time into EVERY DAY to market yourself to your potential clients and customers. Here are some place you might start looking for work. Add the resources that work out well for you profit-wise to a list and return to them religiously each week when hunting new work.

Online – with sites like Craigslist, you have plenty of resources that will help you find work or marketing opportunities by conducting a simple search in your related industry. In addition to the ad sites, you may also have luck using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to attract attention to your business, merchandise, or service.

Networking - you never know who you will meet or how they will help you get ahead. By marketing yourself in person, you may be surprised at the work that comes your way based on the people you already know.

Associates – companies and fellow entrepreuneurs that have similar products or complimentary services might be a great source of finding work. Networking with people that also have their own business can bring invaluable feedback to your business model and help you find a new audience.

Make the Time or Suffer the Consequence

Stressing the importance of always having work can not be stressed enough! You’ll never be able to stay ahead if you keep getting behind. Consider that in most work scenarios, freelance or otherwise, you don’t apply/seek out a job, do the work that day, and get paid immediately. It generally can take days, weeks, months to set up work, do the job and see any money. If you are not making attempts at securing work all the time, you will find yourself in big trouble when one week all of your highest-paying clients quit on you. Oh yes, it does happen. As they say ‘when it rains it pours’ and whoever ‘they’ were certainly knew all that rain can make you feel like you are drowning.

How to Deal

Promoting yourself all the time can actually be very profitable. You might have some times when all the work is coming your way. Then what do you do? Set limits with your clients/customers. Start a schedule so when new clients take an interest you won’t have to turn them completely, you can just schedule their work into a later date. At first you might feel perplexed and overwhelmed by all of the attention and work to be done but face it, you deserve it. You’ve worked hard and you’ll make it through. Much of running your own business is trial and error. You can learn your invaluable lessons about how to manage your time when you are short on time and full of work.