Mason Hipp, aside from having an awesome beatnik poet name, has written a concise and excellent list of tips for freelancers: 5 Tricks That Make You More Attractive to Clients. Every so often i’ll read an article, and by the end of it i’ll be standing on my chair shouting “AMEN, BROTHER!” at the top of my lungs. This was such an article.

These are Mason’s tips, with my own input straddled betwixt:

1. Respond Quickly to Calls and Email

It seems like such a small thing — answering client emails within an hour, instead of within a day or within the week — but it actually makes quite a difference in how potential clients perceive you and your company.

This one’s huge – so huge that we made it one of our five corporate operating policies. When i was working at a broadcaster, towards my departure they began to outsource more and more work to external game studios. The project manager would wail and moan and pull her hair out, because the studios wouldn’t respond to her calls and emails. Living my sheltered payroll existence, i had never heard of such a beast. What was this mythical “not-answering-emails” creature all about, anyway? How is that even possible??

The more experience i gained, the more i learned that one of the biggest problems with freelancers and vendors, not least of all Flash game vendors here in Ontario, is that they don’t communicate well. So when i started my own company, i made sure that “constant communication” was high on our list of principles.

2. Negotiate on Scope, Not on Price

Lowering a price for your client, in most cases, will make you seem more desperate and less confident.

Agreed. Indeed, when i outsource work to freelancers, i know the quality of service i’ll receive by the way the freelancer prices his work. If the price is too low, i know i can’t expect to see the work arrive on time and on spec.

3. Show Off Past Success

One of the best ways to give your clients this confidence in your work is by showing off previous work and successes. A portfolio, testimonials, and case studies are all good ways to show off your previous work.

There’s obviously a huge “duh” factor to this one. Suffice it to say, when i receive a resume from an artist or programmer (especially an artist), i need to see that portoflio link at the very top, and it needs to be an actual clickable hyperlink. Then i need to see evidence. If i like what i see, i go back to the resume and read the part with words on it. If the link is at the bottom of the resume, you’re flirting with disaster. If there’s NO link, i delete the resume.

But in addition to just showing off your work, consider case studie and testimonials, as Mason suggests. Wherever contractually possible, we try to give an insider’s look at what it was like to create our projects. i find it frustrating to look at someone’s work, and to not know who the client was, and why the project existed to begin with.

4. Use Pretty Things

Even Mason admits that this one is obvious – put your best foot forward. But to put a finer point on it, he talks about paying attention to detail and the trim that you put around your work:

Using a collection of professional and visually appealing materials will make your business seem more established, credible, and attractive to potential clients.

If you professionally frame and matte a photo of a turd, it’ll be a very nice-looking turd. Every supporting material you use, from your site to your business card to your letterhead to your invoices, should be polished, tight, and consistently branded. We could stand to clean up some stuff on our site because we’re not exactly putting our best foot forward. The problem is that when you have a very small body of work, you don’t always have the luxury of displaying the best stuff and enough stuff.

5. Be Personal

Take an interest in your clients, their situation, and the overall well-being of their business. If you care about them, chances are they will start to care about you — and before long you’ll have a lasting freelance relationship.

This is one area where we excel. i find that if you humanize your business relationship, you’re much more likely to extend grace to your client in difficult situations, and to have that grace extended to you when you make mistakes. But if you give no quarter, no quarter will be given.

i was at a conference earlier this year, and met with a woman from a casual games portal. We shot the breeze for much of the meeting – i joked around, and was very relaxed, and tried to be that bright spot in her day when she could let her guard down and enjoy an easy hour. When we shook hands, i saw that the next guys in line for a meeting were a very bidness-oriented game studio: two fellas who wear daddy’s suits and run a meeting like they’re representing Iran and Pakistan at the Model UN.

The studio rep sighed and asked me what i thought of the next two guys. i said “they could stand to loosen up a little.” She gave me a forlorn, rueful look, and then shook my hand and thanked me for a wonderful meeting.

Lesson affirmed: people are people. We all need a break. We need to be loved, looked after and paid attention to. We need people to take an interest in us – in our well-being and our state of mind. And those rules don’t fly out the window just because you’re doing bidness.

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

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