One of the easiest ways to get additional assignments is to work often for your favorite clients.

Three important strategies for getting existing clients to hand you new assignments are

• always having a next project to offer existing clients
• asking your best clients for more work, again and again
• adding new skills and abilities so you can pitch to existing clients additional types of assignments.

These are all good ways to extend the time frame in which you’re doing work for particular clients — in effect converting new and presumably short-term clients to long-term clients.

Other specific techniques you can use to encourage new clients to steadily offer you additional, sometimes even on-going or regularly-repeating, assignments are

• offer to update or expand on previous work
• investigate client activities to find additional areas in which you can contribute
• develop key relationships so you become the go-to professional
• bring new ideas and information, some with an eye on generating assignments for yourself, some just to prove yourself valuable to the client.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

Offer to Update or Expand on Previous Work

It’s quite common for professional writers to be given assignments that are more important and more long-term than a simple one-off piece of work.

For example, if you’re asked to write the president’s statement in a company’s annual report, chances are the company is going to need another one written next year. Or if you write an article for an insurance company on ways to avoid winter weather damage, chances are the company will want a similar article written when next winter rolls around. And you’ve already got the experience and contacts to do these assignments effectively.

Similarly, if you’re asked to write up a client’s capabilities and current contract for a website or a marketing brochure, it’s fair to assume that sometime down the road the client will have expanded capabilities and new contracts. Who better than you to do this new write-up, particularly since you are already up to speed?

In addition, more sophisticated professional writers, and their clients that either are or can be educated to appreciate more sophisticated work, recognize that many writing projects — blogs, content marketing efforts, strategic branding programs, newsletters, seasonal information efforts, insider reports, and so forth — are natural candidates for ongoing updates and continuations.

To help keep more of your clients on your active roster, get in the habit of thinking about each assignment you accept as not only the specific work the assignment involves today, but also as whatever additional work the assignment can reasonably lead to in the future.

Investigate Client Activities to Find Areas in Which You Can Contribute

Whenever you’re working for a client, you’re in a great position to find out more about what the client is doing now, as well as what the client hopes to be doing in the future. Be curious about all this. Look for clues. Sniff out this kind of information. As you find out more, think about possible ways you can add your skill set, experience, creativity, and know-how to the client’s current, definitely upcoming, and hoped-for activities.

For example, when I was writing professional education audio programs for a major association, it came to my attention that key marketing people had the idea to expand into producing films, as well. Guess who got the contract to write and produce the first one?

Develop Key Relationships So You Become the Go-To Professional

Many professionals obtain a great deal of their work through the people who know them and think highly of their work. This provides an excellent avenue to convert new clients to long-term ones.

The strategy here is not only to deliver good work to the client, but to cultivate honest, close relationships with key decision-makers. I’m not advocating that you suck up to jerks or endure insults from abusive people who happen to wield power. I’m simply saying that a savvy professional should be open to finding friends among his or her clients and allowing these friendships to endure even when the client relationship itself appears to be tailing off.

You’ll find that when you have friends who like you and appreciate your professional abilities, they will enjoy offering you additional assignments that cross their desks, perhaps over a period of many years.

Bring New Ideas and Information

One of the reasons large organizations often have both in-house departments and outside consultants working on the same problems and opportunities is that no one has a monopoly on good ideas or information. In fact, the supply of good ideas and information is often quite limited.

That’s why you can help convert new clients to long-term clients if you not only deliver your high-quality work on time, but you also serve as an outside consultant who brings your client useful ideas and information.

Becoming a source of useful ideas and information for your client will help to keep you top of mind. It will also help strengthen your client’s perception of you as a knowledgeable professional who can help with a wide range of valuable tasks.

Obviously, you’ll want to call your client’s attention to an idea or a piece of information that can lead directly to a new assignment for you. But it’s almost — some would say equally — important that you also provide your client useful ideas and information that may not immediately tie in with your capabilities. The more valuable you can be to your clients, in any and every way, the more likely they will keep you busy with assignments over the long-term.

Over the years, I’ve worked with lots of different clients — some one-offs, some over the long-term. Although I can’t claim a 100% success rate in converting new and short-term clients to long-term sources of work, I’ve had a lot of success in my efforts to do this, and in helping other professionals do the same. I’ve found that success in prompting these kinds of client conversions is often a matter of knowing and using the right strategies, coupled with maintaining the right mindset.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.