If you’re not satisfied with the amount of work you have, think about how you look for work. Do you send out queries here and there? Are you only answering a handful of job ads each week? If so, at least one of your problems is the numbers, my friend.

Searching for work and offering your service should be a routine. Don’t try a few times, kick back, and wait for the results. Don’t make a few attempts and get discouraged because you don’t get a positive answer.

Compare freelancing to being a door-to-door salesman. There are dozens of reasons a door-to-door salesman doesn’t get into every house and dozens of reasons every presentation doesn’t end as a sale.

Regardless, it’s his job to keep knocking and pushing whatever he’s pushing. Otherwise, he’ll starve.

Being a freelancer is a sales job. In terms of contact, volume matters.

The more you reach out, the more you wave your service in clients’ faces, the more opportunities you have to win.

Be prepared though if you’re one of those people who see lots of shadows in the sunlight. For you, more attempts may seem to mean more losses.

Here’s how:

If you send out five queries, you may get one positive reply and you’ve only faced rejection four times.

But if you send out 100 queries or reply to 100 job ads, you may get 10 replies. How you view the other 90 unfruitful attempts depends on your mindset.

The pessimist looks at this situation and sees only 10 successes but 90 failures. He’ll get frustrated by what he views as a lot of wasted his time and effort and decide not to go to that extreme anymore.

An optimist sees 10 successes and thinks those could lead to bigger opportunities than they begin with. An optimist also thinks, next time if I send 200, I could get 20 that can grow.

Furthermore, trying to shield yourself from rejection by keeping the number of attempts low isn’t likely to turn out well. In reality, if you’re only going to make five attempts, you probably shouldn’t try. The odds just aren’t in your favor.

Yes, there are some slam dunk stories. There are times when you send a query or answer an ad, and just like that, it’s a connection.

That’s happened to me a number of times. But those occasions are rare.

Too rare for me to have survived as a freelancer for this long.

If you try to thrive and survive on rare case scenarios, that’s your choice. But it’s not a smart one.

To succeed, you need to do numbers, big numbers.

Set a weekly or daily quota. In cases, where you don’t have any work or don’t have enough work, send queries, pitches, and respond to ads daily. Invest hours in it.

Once you have a steady, comfortable stream of work, I’m a firm believer, you still should look for more work and continue offering your service. Not necessarily in the same gear. You can downshift.

But I can’t think of any businesses that lose interest in attracting new customers because they have customers. And I don’t suggest you do that either.

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