I stumbled into freelancing pretty much by chance. While I was in college, working on a Computer Science degree, I would get local contract jobs here and there for a variety of clients with no real relation to each other except for one thing: they had all been referred to me by someone they knew. With each successful job I was generating more and more word of mouth about what I could do and it was leading directly to more leads. I never actively advertised any of my services and yet people were managing to find me.

My very first big time project after I graduated was with an area minor league baseball team. I heard they were taking bids on a re-design of their site and its content management system so I wrote a proposal, had a meeting and won the bid. After the new site was completed and launched I began receiving quote requests out of the blue from people who had either seen the site or had been referred to me by the team’s staff. One project eventually snowballed into the majority of my current client base.

I put together this dopey little graphic to help illustrate my point that you can take one successful job and spin into a lot of future work with a little bit of luck and good word of mouth. As a freelancer, you’re more than capable of making a living bidding on job after job but once people start talking about your skills your reliance on job boards will begin to dwindle away.