Social media-free business

19th Jul, 2024

A recent Doing It For The Kids podcast posed the question “Do you think it’s possible to market yourself as a freelancer in 2024 without using social media?”

I’ve been free from social media for over a year – in both a personal and work capacity – so I don’t use social media to get work.

It’s been a process. I got rid of:

I gave up on Mastodon quite quickly (I was already tiring of short-form social media) and never really used Instagram.

How do I get work?

There’s nothing atypical about any of these methods, but writing them down made me wonder what that looks like in numbers.

In practice

I don’t have a high turnover of clients and usually juggle a combination of long/short term projects.

I had 18 clients over the last year. These range from teeny tiny one-off projects, to projects that span many months.

Eight of these were new clients:

The other ten were either previous clients or projects on a longer-term basis.

There are other things I could do to promote myself further:

I don’t particularly want to invest time/energy in any of these channels, but I know they work for some people.

Update

It was pointed out to me that there may be a few other ways that I get work:

I wouldn’t necessarily count on these as things that directly bring in work, but they probably help to a small degree.

I also remembered a tip on sharing work I heard at talk a few years ago: pass on work that isn’t a good fit for whatever reason (tech/industry/budget etc) to people who might be a better fit and there’s a chance that might come around one day.