Should You Use Local Outreach To Find Freelance Clients: Pros and Cons

Many freelance gurus give the following advice for finding your first clients:

Find local businesses that might benefit from your services.
Reach out to them offering your services.

The logic is: the business owners are more likely to respond to you because you’re a local, you can visit their business, schedule a coffee chat, and so on.

This approach has its pros and cons like any other. Let’s determine whether it’s right for you by looking at the main factors:

Your location.
The type of services you sell.
Your goals.
Your personality type.

Your location

Local outreach works well…if you live in London or Austin. If you live in Čačak, Serbia it doesn’t work so well.

Freelance gurus will tell you this story: they cold-called 100 local businesses, went for coffee with 10 owners, and closed 3 deals for $5,000 websites. Dreamy. And you can do it, too! Just leave your comfort zone, man!v

Yeah, but what they leave out is: they live in an expensive metropolis where:

small local businesses can afford this sort of pricing.
their margins are sufficiently high to justify the expenditure.
local agencies charge prices in a similar range.

None of these statements is true if you live in about 90% of the world. I live in Montenegro. Try to sell a $5,000 website to a small local business here, I dare you. They will call you an idiot, tell you their monthly net profit is 800€, and if they really need a new website they can get one done by a local agency for 600€.

The competition problem isn’t insurmountable - with the right positioning and marketing, you can justify high prices. But it doesn’t matter when the business in question can’t afford it.

The type of freelance services you sell

Let’s say you have your sales figured out. You know how to find well-paying small business owners and how to close the deal. Great!

But are your services well-suited to this approach?

Businesses have a very limited set of needs: a landing page, an online store, social media integrations, inventory, etc. If you have higher technical aspirations, forget it.

Gaming? Algorithms? Machine learning? Stock market analysis? Web3? Anything else that requires engineering knowledge? The odds are distinctly against you.

In terms of sales, local outreach is more like being a plumber than like being a software engineer. Fix the pipes, get called regularly to maintain the pipes. No need to build a new type of boiler.

Nothing wrong with that, but it would be prudent to accept this in advance and learn your skills accordingly.

Your goals as a freelancer

What are your goals? If you haven’t written them down on a piece of paper, you probably should. It will help you get a clearer perspective of what you need to do.

Here are some good questions to ask and how they relate to the topic of this article:

Do you want to start a local agency? Then local outreach is a great start.

Do you want to have global clients? Then it’s likely a waste of time.

Do you want to move abroad and freelance from there? Then you should wait until your move is complete before you start local outreach at your new location. Maybe you can start contacting people over there before you move.

Can you leverage a local network in other ways? Maybe you’re freelancing on the side while building a SaaS for coffee shop owners. In that case, making contacts with local coffee shop owners is a smart move, even if they don’t pay the fabled $5,000 per website.

Your personality type

A lot is written about leaving one’s comfort zone. I agree that you can’t reach new heights without venturing outside. But be careful to distinguish between leaving your comfort zone and simply doing something you hate.

Gathering the nerves to approach someone you’re dying to meet? That’s leaving your comfort zone.

Calling your aunt who runs a hair salon to sell her a WordPress website? If that gives you a bad feeling in your gut, just don’t do it. It’s not sustainable, it will make you miserable, and it will take you in the wrong direction.

Think: do you really want to be cold calling clients? As a freelancer, you must have some sales skills, but there are many different ways to find clients. Find the ones that suit you and never mind all the comfort zone talk.

Leave your comfort zone when needed, not when some online guru tells you. Find a path to your goals that’s aligned with your personality, and you just might see it through to the end.

It doesn’t hurt to try

I hope I have helped you make an informed decision.

If you’re still in doubt, remember: it doesn’t hurt to try. Shoot some emails, call some people, and see if it works for you. Try different ways to Pitch Ideas to Your Freelance Clients Like a Propitch prospective clients. Then you can either stay on that path or turn elsewhere, knowing you left no stone unturned.

You might find that you have a knack for cold email copywriting. Maybe you can even sell that as a service someday. Then you can try to find freelance writing clients by cold email or by going to Upwork or even by applying to LinkedIn jobs.

Maybe during that process you’ll find you’re great at conducting interviews, or at negotiating, or at outsourcing, or at How To Be an Effective Leader in Remote Teamsleading a remote team. You never know where the road will take you after you find your How I Went From ‘Hello World’ to My First Freelance Client in 1 Monthfirst freelance client.

Finally, never take guru advice at face value. Factor in your unique conditions - economic, personal, political, and cultural. Think independently. After all, that's what freelancers do best.