Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link to Collect.chat as a way to land new clients. If you decide to try this product, I’ll receive a small commish at no cost to you.
In a perfect world, your inbox would be flooded with emails from potential new clients who want to hire you with hardly any effort on your part. What an awesome feeling it would be to be in demand like that, right?
But the truth is, it takes time with a lot of effort on your part to find clients. Yep, you’ve got to work for it baby!
If you want to keep revenue coming in to pay business expenses, employees or if you want to be more financially secure, you’ve got to have clients. Without them, there is no business and no dinero!
11 Ways To Find New Clients
So how do you go about growing your clientele? Here are some easy ways to find clients offline and online.
Let’s start with offline opportunities.
Speak At Local Events
Offer to speak at local events where your ideal client would attend. When you share your experience and expertise, it brings opportunities to get new clients.
Join Local Organizations
When you join organizations like your local Chamber of Commerce, you get the benefit of networking with other members, have your business displayed in their directory and attend networking events to meet potential clients.
Use Snail Mail
I believe mailing out postcards to reach potential clients. The U.S. Post Office website has many resources to help you promote your business.
One service they offer is the Every Door Direct Mail. This is an affordable form of targeted advertising that lets your target your mail audience by zip code and other demographics. The mapping tool is easy to use and they even offer discounts for small businesses.
Moving on to online opportunities…
Referrals
Direct referrals are a great way to land new clients. It’s worked great for me and I think it’s safe to say it’s worked for other entrepreneurs as well.
So reach out to clients you’re currently working with and ask them for a referral.
Follow Up With Former Clients
Another opportunity to land new clients is to follow up with former clients. Let’s say you’re a web designer and created a website for a client. If some time has passed, email or call up an old client and ask if they’re ready to update their website.
Or say you’re a Virtual Assistant and lost a client a while back over budget reasons. Reach out to them and ask if now is a good time to start working with them again. You can even offer a discount to help seal the deal.
Participate On Information Sharing Sites
Share your expertise and advice in your field on Q&A sites like Quora. Millions of people turn to Quora in search for answers to questions like ‘how did you start earning money from your blog’ or ‘how do I set prices for things on eBay’. This is a great opportunity to build relationships and yes – even find new clients!
When you join Quora be sure to complete your profile so that people can get to know you and what you’re all about.
Facebook Groups
Look for Facebook groups in your industry and participate by sharing your tips and expertise.
I landed my very first website client from a Facebook group. She asked how to change the color scheme of her theme. I showed her how to do it but when she got stuck, she reached out to me for helped and asked what other services I offer. The next thing you know, I’m customizing a whole new theme for her.
Social Media Ads
Another surefire way to reach new clients is by placing ads on social media – and it’s affordable.
Besides being cost effective, other benefits of social media ads is increased traffic to your website, it can expand your audience reach and get higher conversion rates.
Capture Leads
More often than not, a customer will visit your website and leave without ever reaching out to you. Rather than lose those opportunities create a campaign to capture email addresses and draw them in with a freebie like a free consultation, eBook or course.
Another way to improve lead generation is to create a chatbot for your website. A chatbot lets you provide valuable customer service by providing the answers they’re looking for and recommending your products or services they will find helpful.
Bot builders like Collect.chat* doesn’t requite any coding making it really easy to use and embed onto your website. You can create a free account but if you want extra features like logical jump and Zapier and API integration you can upgrade for as little as $19 a month.
Set Up A Website
Set up a website to promote your business. Make sure to include important pages like testimonials for social proof, a portfolio to show samples of your work, the services you offer and a contact page so potential clients can reach out to you.
Blog About It
Another feature to add to your website is a blog. And if you haven’t started a blog yet, you’re missing out.
Blogging about your industry, sharing tips and giving free advice is a great way to build relationships, build yourself up as an authority in your field and turn those readers into customers!
Wrapping It Up
I hope these 11 examples to find new clients will be helpful. If you have anything to add to this list, please share it in the comments below!
Hi Cori,
Although I haven’t used all of the tips mention here, I believe they work pretty well. I have and still using referral strategy to acquire new clients. The deal is, once your existing or former clients are satisfied with your work, they will always refer their friends and colleagues to you. In fact, not only clients you have worked for, this includes reaching out to web owners where you have contributed a guest post.
Don’t be surprised about that because it works as well. That is why it is vital that when you are writing guest posts, make it unique. I get emails from people telling me that they were referred by “so and so,” the owner of a site where I submitted a guest post, and they want to know if I can create similar articles for their blogs.
The rest is history, Cori. Thank you for sharing!