No question, the hardest part of freelancing for me is finding prospects.
All freelancers face this challenge at some point.
Sure, online casting sites are easy…agents (if you can get ’em) are helpful, as are client referrals, word-of-mouth, networking, previous clients, LinkedIn, peer-referrals, and other relationship marketing techniques.
But can we agree that the best leads are the ones we can find ourselves?…qualified prospects you’ve worked hard to find through diligence, research and effort?
A couple of years back, Andrew Peters of RealTimeCasting offered voice actors a pretty good plan at a decent price for accessing the database of U.S. businesses through “RedBooks”. I found it kinda clunky, but came away after some work with a fairly decent .xls file of leads.
Right now, I’m checking out another, better online database service that so far seems very intuitive, affordable, and easy-to-use.
I’m not willing to all-out endorse Uplead yet, but I will tell you that if I like it, and end up recommending it, the founder has promised to pass along a special offer to my readers.
Their website “about” page promises 46-million contacts in 200+ countries. You can do profoundly deep customizable searches, download them to .xls, or save them online. Uplead offers a 95% accuracy rate for the efficacy of their data. It’s fresh.
So far in my visits, I’ve found the interface to be very intuitive. The CEO/founder has been helpful and cordial in my communications to him, customer service seems attentive, and in my mind, the pricing is well within reason…
In the meantime, they offer a 7-day free trial for you to kick the tires. I think you will find it as intriguing as I do so far.
Courvo
[disclaimer: I’m an affiliate for Uplead]
and…
Hi Dave and thanks for sending this info along! I will be checking into it and also will look forward to hearing your comments and perhaps comparing notes – before jumping into anything that requires my credit card! 🙂 Kind regards, Patricia