Ask HN: Where do you (marketers) find freelance gigs?

Good question, nedwin

Background: I'm a freelance marketer (soon to be) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My experience has been that freelance gigs for marketers come from 3 different sources:

1. Personal / Professional Referrals 2. Direct Outreach to Businesses 3. Craigslist / elance / community sites

## 1 — Referrals

Referrals are the best way to get a client / gig because someone is vouching for your experience. I generate referrals by asking clients if they know of other business owners for have a need for {skillset}.

## 2 — Direct Outreach

I wrote about this as a comment here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655212).

In short — manufacture interested customers by defining the types of companies you want to work with, making a list of companies that fit that criteria, identifying who is in charge of the department you want to work with, and set up an informational interview to learn about the company.

## 3 — Craigslist / Aggregate Sites

These sites suck. When a job reaches these sites, it's generally because the employer went through options (1) and (2) and couldn't find someone capable. These jobs have been picked over.

That said, I have some success browsing craigslist, seeing businesses that have listed an open position / a gig and emailing them.

I like looking at businesses that post in the 'services' section (not advertising a need for a marketer) and then contacting them to learn about their business and offer my skills.

Freelance marketing is a much different beast than freelance programmers. That's because, unlike programmers, most people think they can do marketing, without any experience or training. The same cannot be said for programming.

Those that are wise enough to acknowledge that they're not an expert marketer tend to bring the job in-house. Marketing is much more hands on with the business end and I believe people feel more comfortable having someone there day in and day out.

With that said, there are places like elance, RFPDB, and Craigslist where marketers can find work. However I've found that personal recommendations are the best way to go (I know this is obvious).

My experience has proven that these sites are extremely ineffective. People ask for the world at very low pay. Like the many different programming languages, there are many different disciplines of marketing. I'm not sure if programmers are expected to know every language, but many people looking for freelance marketing help expect someone to have expertise in all forms of marketing (i.e. SEO, Social, PPC, Media, Content, Email, etc). Not impossible, but not common.

I'm sure paragraph 3 was all you were looking for, but I thought I'd add in some color to the answer :) Hope this helps.

I used to be a freelance graphic & web designer and writer. I found most of my gigs on Fiverr (http://fiverr.com/) and posting to my Twitter & Facebook followers.

You could also try creating a website and optimising it so it shows well in the search results for your specified field.