When aspiring freelancers approach me for advice, one of the first things I tell them is something they don’t want to hear. I’m tempted to hold back and to let them find out for themselves but history has proven me right time and time again.

Freelancing is selling. Successful freelancers know this, even if they don’t actually want to call it that. And aspiring freelancers hate to hear it. I suspect it’s because they see freelancers as sitting around creatively designing a logo for a client or writing a perfect article, spend weeks crafting and revising, discarding and trying again. They don’t want to hear about the grind – that part of the business where you sit down and drum up new customers every day or every week so that you always have a mix of new and old clients.

Freelancing is creative but it’s a business and to be successful in business you need to sell. And since selling tends to have a distasteful air to it, I’m going to give you a really easy “selling as a freelancer 101″ lesson:

First, when you’re talking to a potential client, ask them lots of questions. Figure out what they are looking for. Don’t just assume that they are looking for a logo or an article (or whatever you’re freelancing with). Think beyond that to how they’ll use it.

• The logo client wants a logo but ultimately he or she wants a brand that will attract customers to his or her business.
• The article client wants an article but ultimately he or she wants something that positions them as an expert in their field and drives traffic to their website. (This is tricky because clients often don’t even realize what their ultimate goal is; you need to ask questions to make the educated guess yourself).

Knowing your client’s ultimate goal will change how you approach presenting your work to them. Remember, they don’t care which color you’re using in their logo or whether the article is 400 or 500 words. Sure, they might have an opinion but they don’t really care… as long as whatever you do addresses their ultimate goal.

Believe me, your freelancing work will stand out! When they have 50 freelancers all saying “I’ll write an article for you between 400 and 500 words” and you write “I’ll write an article of about 500 words that will magnetically attract new customers to your website and start them down the path of buying from you”, they will hire you more often.

Freelancing is sales but don’t think of it as the schticky used-car salesperson type of selling. Instead, remember that you are (or should be or will be) the professional in your field and you can make professional recommendations that will address their ultimate goal. When you approach freelance selling like that, you’ll enjoy it and you’ll accelerate past all the other freelancers who are still convinced that they’ll succeed by pouring over a single project for weeks.