5 Ways to Make Freelance Friends
If you ever feel a little lonely as a freelancer, you’re, uh, not alone…While your non-freelance friends are out celebrating a colleague’s birthday or sharing their
Are you losing deals to the competition?
We all know how frustrating it can be to get excited about a prospect, put work into a proposal and then find out that they’ve decided to go with somebody else.
The proposal itself can make or break your chances of securing a new client.
Making a great first impression is essential, and your proposal needs to promote your strengths, perhaps even allowing the client see samples relevant to their project. This handy checklist will help you get the content on point.
But there’s more to a proposal than just the content. It has to look good, too. After all, we live in an aesthetic world.
If you don’t dress up for the occasion, you’re unlikely to make it past the first date.
The design is what frames the content and supports the message. The two should work seamlessly together, like two peas in a pod.
If a proposal ticks all the boxes, you’ll be well on your way to securing that gig.
It’s a no brainer that attractive content gets more attention, but how do you achieve this?
Here are some tips to help start your winning proposal.
Top tip: We’ve built proposals straight into the Fiverr Workspace app and make it super easy and intuitive to create them—for free. Save time and money and create proposals within seconds. Find out more in the video below.
Fiverr Workspace – Proposals from Fiverr Workspace from Fiverr on Vimeo.
1. Use a simple template
The design of your proposal is important, but it shouldn’t detract from the content. Clients will want to get straight to the detail of the proposal, and you can help this process by using a clean and sleek design. A simply-designed template will signal quality and help you present your brand as professional.
You can help your proposal stand out from the rest with a few added features. E-signing and file attachments can make you look infinitely more experienced, not to mention make things simple for your client to speed up the process of getting a signature.
2. Customize to your brand
A template provides a great skeleton for your project proposal but now is your chance to fill it out with your individual touch. Your brand is more than just a name – it’s your whole identity as a business and it’s represented through aesthetics, graphics and tone of voice.
Add your own branding, logo, images and custom slides that sell you and your work to create a seriously compelling proposal.
Choose a color palette that works well with your brand color scheme to make you more memorable. Adding color to background highlights, text headings, bullet points and tables is a quick and easy way to represent the consistency for your brand.
3. Use a visually appealing, structured layout
Spent all your time working on the content but didn’t worry about the layout? Think again. It’s vital to make your first impression count.
A well-organized structure could begin with the title, summary and statement of the problem/issue and continue onto approach, methodology, cost and benefits.
You can also use photography, graphics, or screenshots to help enhance your layout and bring your proposal to life.
4. Retain their attention with the right formatting
There’s nothing less appealing than a block of unformatted text. If you want to get your client’s attention, space out your information in a way that’s simple to digest and easy to scan.
No one likes to read long, drawn-out sentences in clunky paragraphs, featuring a fancy font that blends into the background. Stick to short paragraphs, and use sub-headers, bullet points and indentations where you can.
Choose a font that is easy to read and stands out from the background. Make sure the proposal is also suitable for printing.
What’s next?
Fiverr Workspace’s free proposal software will help you create a professional-looking proposal in minutes. It includes e-signing, payment platform integrations, and the ability to add custom slides or images. Plus, it integrates with the rest of the Fiverr Workspace software to provide smart alerts – like reminders to follow up, report on a milestone, or send an invoice – all built in and free to use.
