How To Use ChatGPT To Get Your First 5 Clients This Week

When you decide to start your career as a freelancer, one of the toughest roadblocks you’ll come up against is finding and securing your first few clients. It can often be the most stressful part of getting started, especially if you don’t have thousands of followers or prior testimonials.

After all, no clients means your entire pivot to being a freelancer was a waste of time.

So what can you do?

Why You’re Not Landing Clients

Most people struggle to get clients because:

• They’re freelancing in an over-saturated marketplace
• They haven’t learned how to differentiate themselves from the competition
• They don’t know how to sell themselves effectively, even with little experience
• They don’t have a solid strategy but are winging it and hoping for the best
• They are inconsistent and drop out when they see no results
• They spend hours planning, thinking, and researching, but take no action so have nothing to show for it
• They send generic pitches and do not have a clear value statement
• Their online visibility and branding is poor

Thankfully, ChatGPT can solve many of these issues pretty quickly. But you’ll need to be consistent and persevere past the silence. You may hear crickets initially, but if you try the approaches this week, you’ll start to see the ground moving and you’ll lay a strong foundation for clients to work with you over the next few weeks and months.

How To Use ChatGPT To Get Five Clients This Week

If I was to list all the ways you can use ChatGPT to help you land clients, this article would turn into a book, which is not what you signed up for when you clicked to read this article. So today, we’ll keep it simple, short, and sweet, with some quick ChatGPT prompts and actionable tips you can take this very week, to secure your first five clients and get the ball rolling.

1. Ask ChatGPT For The Hidden Factor

Use critical thinking questions and ask ChatGPT to analyze your gaps. Prompts like:

• “What am I missing on this landing page?”
• “How can I improve my Upwork bio?”
• “List the strengths and weaknesses of my LinkedIn profile’s headline objectively.”
• “What do people in [name your target client] need right now as a quick solution? [turn on the deep research function for best results]”

2. Use ChatGPT To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

To effectively grow your career and reach as a freelancer you’ll need to connect with the right people. Influential people and decision-makers are most likely going to be hanging around LinkedIn or will look you up on LinkedIn to get to know more about your offer, so it’s important to use ChatGPT to assist you in optimizing your profile so you are not only visible, but your profile looks credible.

Give it prompts like:

• “This is a screenshot of my LinkedIn profile. What are my gaps and how can I improve this so it reaches my target clients and arrests their attention? Analyze everything and give me your feedback.”

3. Use ChatGPT For Pitching

Go to the places where potential clients are already looking, i.e. freelance marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork, etc., and use ChatGPT to help you at every stage of the set-up, from writing your bio, to your services description, to organizing your packages, to proposals for clients.

You can also use it to formulate pitch templates to tap into your local network of warm leads (ex-colleagues, people you’ve worked with/partnered with recently or a few years ago and have had a positive working relationship with, acquaintances and friends in business, alumni, local networking groups, etc.)

Finally, tell ChatGPT the types of contacts you’ve made and ask it to explore any gaps in your strategy so you can consider who else you could make contact with, to either convert them into clients, or gain word-of-mouth referrals.

Using a combination of all these approaches makes it way easier to secure your first five clients this week.

What To Stop Doing Right Now

• Cold-pitching on LinkedIn DMs, it makes you sound desperate
• Putting your green open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, it positions you as a job-seeker, not an entrepreneur, service provider, or expert
• Waiting for clients to come to your website or LinkedIn and magically find you
• Overcomplicating your offer–when there’s no clarity you confuse everybody

FAQs

How can I land clients fast?

At the beginning, focus on where they’re already looking for help, like freelance marketplaces. Make your offer simple and easy to understand, at the same time ensuring it solves a direct need and there are hardly any hoops to jump through. Leverage ChatGPT to help you at every stage, from researching to pitching and proposals.

What if I don’t have any testimonials or reviews yet?

That’s OK, you can start with previous projects you’ve worked on (even pro bono counts), or small wins at work which are related to your freelance service offer. You can also reduce the price so you can use your first five clients as “projects” to secure testimonials, and then you can gain more clients after.