Freelancing is a great way to work, but constantly having to be on the lookout for new work can be both annoying and demoralizing.
Sure, there are loads of sites out there now to help find you work, and a good freelancer will always find new leads through networking. But sometimes you have no choice but to just put yourself out there.
There's been some great advice on this blog before about cold emailing, but this post focuses more on the free resources out there at your disposal
Master these tools to become the ultimate guerilla pitching machine.
1. Buzzstream free tools
The first step in cold pitching is to find your contacts. It's possible to spend hours trawling through websites and "Contact us" forms to find email addresses - time that you could be spending actually on jobs.
Buzzstream is actually a suite used for SEO outreach, but their free tools can be just as useful for the freelance job hunter.
The suite provides you several sneaky ways of extracting email addresses and links from websites.
Perhaps the most useful is the 'email research tool' which creates custom Google searches to find email addresses based on name and company details.
But you can also use it to find companies to pitch to. There are loads of list articles out there along the line of "Top X companies". Using Buzzstream you can quickly scour these articles for links and add them to a spreadsheet of potential clients.
2. Tweetdeck
One of the greatest hurdles to cold pitching clients is what I call the "trust barrier". The internet is a wide, weird and wonderful place and most net natives are wary of random people spamming them out of the blue.
It's fairly obvious that you should be using social media to enhance your freelance career, but there's one thing to know, and another to do it well.
Twitter is a great place to source and engage with prospective clients in your business, but the basic Twitter site doesn't offer the best platform for doing this.
Tweetdeck allows you to set custom columns based on search terms, which is a great way to see what's going on in your industry. For example, if you're a developer, you might want to set a column that displays all tweets including the term "Java jobs".
You can also set up multiple accounts and schedule tweets, to further enhance your precision pitching.
3. Boomerang
Everyone is inundated with emails these days, so it's essential that your pitch gets to your prospective client at a time when they're most likely to read it.
The best time to send a pitch is 10am on a Tuesday morning. 10 is best because it allows the recipient to get through their early morning email backlog, which will often be hastily skimmed over and deleted. Tuesday is best because it's not as busy as Monday but, with the whole week ahead, people feel they have time to take on extra tasks.
Boomerang is an add-on for Gmail that allows you to schedule emails. This is especially handy if you're pitching to someone in a different timezone.
It's called Boomerang because it can also be used to send you notifications when the recipient opens your mail. You can even program it to resend your email if the recipient never replies.
This is very useful, because cold emails should never just be sent off and left. If you don't get a reply, you should always follow up. Boomerang makes this easier and more efficient.
4. Canned responses
This is another Gmail add-on, this time courtesy of the Google Labs project.
Sending emails can be a long and laborious task, especially if using Buzzstream has found you a huuuuge list of potential clients.
Once you've crafted the perfect cold email, this tool allows you to save it to your Gmail, making it available as a template at a click of a button.
You can make as many templates as you like for different kinds of companies, different kinds of work, allowing you to quickly build emails using pre-designed responses, without having to dig through my sent folder to copy and paste a message I've previously sent to others.
This not only saves a lot of time, but also avoids embarrassing mistakes like accidentally calling a man Sophie (which I've genuinely done) and forgetting to change company names in copied emails.
About the author Nick Chowdrey is a freelance and staff writer specializing in business, marketing and tech. He currently works in marketing at Crunch, an accounting software company and UK top-100 accountancy. You can follow Nick on Twitter @nickchef88.