4 Questions To Ask Yourself That Will Immediately Expose Why Freelance Clients Aren’t Finding You [ Freelancing to Financial Freedom ]
What if the real reason clients aren’t hiring you has nothing to do with demand and everything to do with how you’re positioning your freelance business?
If you’ve been showing up, putting in effort, and still not seeing consistent client flow, this episode speaks directly to that frustration. Instead of just pushing harder, you’ll learn how to identify what’s quietly holding you back, whether it’s unclear specialization, missing pricing signals, inconsistent marketing, or a weak network, and how to shift your approach so clients start coming to you.
By the end of this episode, you will:
Gain clarity on what you need change so clients instantly recognize you as the exact freelancer they need
Discover simple fixes that can stop you from unintentionally losing leads, especially in your pricing strategy
Learn how to build a steady pipeline through consistent marketing with a powerful approach.
Hit play now to uncover the hidden gaps in your business strategy and start turning missed opportunities into paying clients today.
Connect with Kiri, the host:
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00] By the end of this episode, you're going to learn four questions to ask yourself if clients are not coming in right now. Welcome to the Freelance to Freedom Podcast. This podcast helps early freelancers learn how to get more clients with clear strategies that help your freelance business make more money in less time. I'm your host, Kerri Mohan, founder of Flourishing Freelancer. Let's dive in.
[00:22] Take a listen to this episode to find out how you should be using AI to specialize your business, what a web of context is and why you need it, and how important it is to make sure that you are being consistent. Welcome back to the show, everyone. I was thinking about my sister the other day. I love her, really. She's awesome, but she's the exact opposite of me.
[00:44] And I was helping plan her wedding, like, thirteen years ago because, you know, I'm super organized and whatnot and had been through it myself, obviously. And she was having such a hard time figuring out what she wanted, especially in a venue. And I remember we flipped it at one point. I said, okay. So what do you don't want? Like, out of the places I'm
[01:05] sending you, what do you not like? And that changed everything. All of a sudden, it was like, instead of saying what do you want, It was what do you not want? And then that became a lot clearer. I know you're probably thinking a lot, how can I bring more clients in? How can I bring more clients in? Well, that's a very positive good way to
[01:23] think about. Maybe you should also be thinking about questions to ask yourself when clients aren't coming in. What could I be doing that's better because clients are not coming in right now? And that sometimes sheds light on what you need to be doing, right, and how to change exactly what you're doing. Here are these questions that I want you to ask yourself moving forward. So I've got four that I thought were
[01:48] highly important if you don't have clients coming in that will help you shed some light in this area. Number one, how specialized are you in one area of your business or whatever you're offering? Right? How would you type out what you do in Google? Right? I guess my way of saying that is if someone's saying, I'm looking for a copywriter who specializes in newsletter funnels, that's very specific.
[02:13] Right? Like, how would you ask ChatGPT for what you do? Okay? I'm looking for an executive assistant who also has worked in an office at one point and is very successful in their freelance career and has corporate experience. Got it? Like, I'm looking for a marketing strategist who specifically helps startups who are in the 0 to 2,000,000 seed funding stage, help them get their product out there
[02:38] to millions of people. I'm looking for a Facebook ad specialist for authors who are launching their first book and want to be a New York Times bestseller. Those are the kind of questions I someone who might be typing into Google or into ChatGPT. Are you that person? So how specialized are you? A lot of times starting out, you tend to generalize.
[03:01] And I have fallen into this too, and I fell into it with coaching as well where I'm like, but I I just want everyone to join my group because I I have really good frameworks, and I really like what I do. And I think people can really learn a lot from me. But the more I spread out too much, the less likely I was to reach
[03:16] someone who could really succeed from what I offered. Right? For me, that's vitally important. I wanna see someone take my frameworks and be able to build an amazing life and change their life with their business and love their business and realize they can never go back to corporate again. Right? But the only people who do that are those who follow my stuff really
[03:35] closely, and the only people who do that are the ones that I know are specifically from a corporate background are usually women, etcetera, etcetera. So you need to think about that too with your business. How specialized are you in one thing that you offer? Do clients know exactly what you do from the way you talk about it?
[03:52] Right? Are you able to tie back what you do into each post that you write? Because that's important too. Like, sometimes we write posts and we forget to tie it all the way back to the beginning, which is what do we do and how we can help them and why should they care about this post? A person who does this really well is actually Emily Courtin.
[04:12] I have interviewed her on this podcast, and we'll make sure to put the link in the show notes for you. But if you go follow her on LinkedIn, which is the only platform she's on, she is so good at writing personal stories and talking about her life, but always tying it back to what she does 95% of the time. And that is so key. She has a she has a way of
[04:33] doing she was a copywriter originally before a website designer, so she has that advantage. However, she's really nailed down like, hey. I know exactly what I do. I know who I help, and everything I talk about is going to relate back to this. And I'm going to share my social proof through my stories and talk about what I do through my stories. It's excellent. She does such a good job.
[04:54] So please listen to our podcast episode where I interviewed her. She's amazing. Make sure you're focusing your efforts and get very clear on what your positioning is and what you do. And the best way to do that is think about someone typing that into chat GBT or Claude or saying or even Google saying like, I need a person who does x, who specializes in x, y, z, because
[05:17] I need to do x. Right? That's gonna really help you be like, am I that person or I can be that person? Number two, is your pricing listed somewhere? Come on, guys. One of the fastest ways you can lose a client is by not having your pricing listed. That's not to say you need to list it clearly. I very much advocate for personalized pricing packages. I think you can get more money
[05:40] that way, and I think you there's a lot more flexibility for negotiation where everyone can get what they want. I do not believe in having hard and steadfast packages. However, what I teach my students is you should have some kind of minimum or range on your web page. Pricing starts at x or pricing is usually between x and y dollars. Right? It can be like 400 to $4,000.
[06:01] I don't care. As long as a client can see, oh, I can fit that into my budget somewhere. Or they say, no. I'm not gonna be able to fit that into my budget. But I will tell you that a lot of times if people do not see pricing on the web page, they immediately think this person's too expensive for me. I'm not going to reach out to them.
[06:20] This is a silent way that you are sabotaging getting clients by not having it. Right? You need to have somewhere in your FAQs or on the actual web page anywhere. Make sure they can find it somewhere what the pricing actually is. Number three, are you consistent in your marketing? Alright? If clients aren't coming in, guess what? Unless you have a really, really strong network where people just constantly refer you
[06:44] and we wanna build you up to that point. Right? But unless you have that strong network starting out, no marketing is no sales, and no clients equals no income. Okay? So you have to be consistent in your marketing right away. And a lot of new freelancers fall off this boat. They can't help it. Right? They they just cannot help it.
[07:05] It is like, hey. I wanna start my business. I'm really excited about it. This is gonna be great. I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna create this amazing lifestyle where I can have the afternoons off or the mornings off or stay up till 2AM or whatever it is. That end goal is amazing. But then when it comes down to the nitty gritty of it, clients aren't coming
[07:25] in because you're not consistent somewhere. Now if you wanna devote all your time into one specific marketing channel, by all means, go for it. But understand you might have to spend three to five hours on that marketing channel daily before you really start to see it generate leads for you. And on top of that, you need to be also really clear on what you're
[07:43] offering. Right? So it kinda ties back to number one as well. I suggest just making sure you're marketing a little bit in a few different areas, watching the data, and then from there, deciding where you wanna focus your efforts. But this involves not only just passive marketing, but also more proactive marketing, which is outreach and making sure you're reaching out to people and through either through email or
[08:04] through research or DMs. However you're doing it, make sure that you're also reaching out to people and pitching people because that is the basis of a very strong foundation that will get you clients if you're just starting out. And finally, the last point I wanna talk about is, are you actively creating a web of contacts or the ripple marketing effect? Whatever you wanna call it.
[08:26] Right? One of my students and I were just talking about this the other day that he has started to create this web of contacts. And he decided in December that he was done with his job, and he was gonna be freelancing. He has a few freelance clients, but not enough to be his sole income. So he said, you know what? I'm going out there, and I'm gonna
[08:46] spend a lot of my time heavily pitching and doing outreach. We figured out that on average, he was doing about five to six cold outreaches or pitches a day. Out of all that, he must have sent over 300 emails and DMs. He probably got six opportunities out of it, if I remember correctly, and that's about 2%. This is not said to dissuade you making nervous, but it's completely
[09:14] accurate. If you're gonna be spending all that time pitching and cold outreach, eventually people are gonna bite and you're going to have calls. However, it's probably one to 2%. You know the saying for 99 no's, you're gonna get one yes. Right? Or it only takes one yes out of 99 no's or a 100 no's or something like that. But that is also what he's doing is he's creating this
[09:36] web of contacts. And that's what he was saying. He's like, you know, it's it's brutal. But now every person I've touched now knows about me. And sometimes people are coming back to me and saying, actually, you know how we didn't have need for you before, now we do. And to me, that's so vitally important because you have to be going out there and letting people know who you
[09:55] are. You have to be having conversations. The more you have these conversations, the more you have a web of contacts. And then people remember you and then they say, oh, actually, you're looking to do that. I actually have this, you know, Facebook ad specialist who was amazing that I heard about, but I didn't get I couldn't afford her. So let me just get you in touch with her, and she's really great.
[10:15] Right? Like, I one of the people I just hired was due to this, like, web of context. I was looking for someone, someone knew someone, and then they referred me. That person had a good web of context. Right? You need to make sure, like, it's not just being consistent in marketing. It's having conversations, creating these situations where people know you.
[10:31] The more people know you through outreach usually is how it is or conversations, the more likely they are to maybe refer you to someone in the future. Every conversation you have has the potential to have a ripple effect and affect more people than you realize. So don't get disheartened. If you're sitting there being like, I'm having all these conversations and they're not going anywhere or coffee chats or whatever you
[10:52] wanna do, Just open yourself up to them, and you'll find that slowly, people are gonna start coming to you, and they're gonna start remembering you, and they're gonna start wanting to work with you. Alright? So to recap, we're just talking about how can we flip like, hey. I wanna get more clients to instead saying clients are not coming in. What could I be doing better? Okay? How specialized are you in one
[11:13] area? Really make sure that you're focused on that. How would you ask ChatGPT to find someone like you? Is your pricing listed somewhere on the website? A lot of people will not wanna move forward if they don't see pricing. Are you consistent in your online marketing? Because that is very essential right now. No marketing, no sales, equals no clients, equals no income.
[11:32] Right? And then finally, are you actively building that web of contacts? Are you having conversations with multiple people? Even if they are not clients or potential clients, are you still having conversations creating that ripple marketing effect? And that, my friend, is what you need to be asking yourself. So if you've said yes to all these, good for you.
[11:51] I'm so proud of you. Your clients is gonna come real soon, but most likely, one or more of these are a no. And that's what you need to be focusing on. I would love to chat with you. If you need more guidance and you want an audit or anything like that, let's set up a time to chat. Alright? My information and my link is in the show notes.
[12:11] Now I want you to stay tuned and come up Thursday because the tip of the week is going to be talking about your discovery calls and how to use that in your marketing, a very underused resource. And then next week, we are gonna be talking about the number one reason why your freelance business could be failing right now and not getting you any clients. Again, we're kinda shifting to the negative here
[12:32] and thinking about it in a different way. Stay tuned for next week where we'll be talking about why your freelance business could be failing. Hope to hear from you. Again, I'm Kiri Mohan, founder of Flourishing Freelancer. Link in the show notes to chat with me, and I hope to hear from you soon. Keep freelancing. Are you struggling to get the income you desire as a
[12:52] freelancer? Download my Money Mapper for a clear view of the earnings you need to achieve your dream salary. It calculates monthly income while factoring in taxes, expenses, and the best part is that it grows with your business to include contractors and a SEP IRA. Head to the link in my show notes to calculate what you should be earning to start increasing your income.
