How do you get more clients . share methods ?

[benjaminjones]

Basically I am new to freelancing online and have set up my freelance web design business, bens web design services

I am really working hard to market the business and get new clients to work with but finding it a struggle. What's your best marketing methods to offer services ?

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

What are you doing at the moment in terms of marketing?

 

[billmccallum1957]

Have you tried googling Ben's Web Design?, not too easy to find you.

 

[fisicx]

What's your best marketing methods to offer services ?

Advertising: PPC, newspapers, parish magazines, local radio and so on.

Which Ben are you? Google offers a selection.

 

[KerryDoingFine]

Hi Ben. You have a number of options. If I was you I'd sign up for some digital marketing training. Smart insights are a company I've used myself (and still do) and found them very good. In terms of how you get customers three key things I'd suggest you work on are (a) building you social profiles up, as a starting point to developing and building a social presence. (b) explore a content marketing strategy, so you build a blog around an aspect of webdesign and bring something of value to people searching for information about web design. (c) sign up to some freelancer sites and start directly applying for jobs that are posted, freelancer and upwork are two that spring to mind.

Good luck

 

[benjaminjones]

At the minute I am using various marketing methods none paid as I don't have the budget as of yet . Blogging , social media , Seo , telling people I know

That's about it really

 

[stevebrownlie]

A lot of the stuff you're trying will work out great for you but will take some time. I get business from random contributions I made to websites/communities/speaking, linkedin, forums etc all the time but it took a long time for it to start to 'matter' in terms of volume.

To get off the ground you need one of two things:

1. Hustle - get on the phone, knock on doors (that's how Distilled actually started... door knocking for web design) and close the deals.

2. Money - knock together a leadbait [white paper, website analysis tool... free manually done analysis...] send traffic to it [perhaps via another article] from say Facebook. You can probably get 'leads' into your marketing automation list for $3-12 depending on how well you do it. (I paid about $10 for SEO company leads via FB and a funnel - since they are one of my best customers for whitelabel services etc - mainly PR & linkbuilding).

Send them e-mails, call the hot ones. Close the deal. $200 on FB might get you 20-30 interested people (or at least people you know have a problem like 'worried my site isn't mobile friendly'). If you close 3-4 of them you do really well. That's not a big conversion rate - you might do more. If you can't stick $200 on a credit card, go do some work anywhere to get some $$$. You'll grow faster, and have more clients if you invest something. Obviously if you're great at 1. just go do that.

 

[Annoying Donkey]

Fastest way to build a business is to find non competing businesses who have an established customer list and make an offer to their list. Obvious choice for web design might be your local printers, or maybe a hosting company, however any type of B2B that has a list of your customer types would do...

 

[Mitch Cox]

Personally, I leverage social media to the max and show up to every event. It totally removes the "cold" element of the pitch, because they are actively looking for new suppliers (Linkedin) and/or are placing themselves in a sales environment (Events).

I've gone from making 100+ calls per day to halving that and increasing my presence on social media like Linkedin. My largest clients have come from this source, one being Amazon.

Another tip..go to the pub! A lot of other clients seemed to have come from this avenue but maybe thats just my industry.

Good luck.

 

[beasty]

Fastest way to build a business is to find non competing businesses who have an established customer list and make an offer to their list. Obvious choice for web design might be your local printers, or maybe a hosting company, however any type of B2B that has a list of your customer types would do...

A useful reply (The rest is all pretty obvious) do people really need to be told to network? use PPC, pick up the phone?

Partnerships with guys with useful databases is a much sharper (IMO) way to get business quickly.
You might produce a whilte label web design business for the aforementioned printers and let them market it ongoing, getting a nice clip

 

[DesignSmoothie]

Hi Ben,

Start looking at popular web design blogs and offer to write a guest post. In most cases you can provide a link back to your blog/website which will encourage more people to follow you. Create a subscribe feature on your site so you can start building a mailing list. You can give away a free report or ebook in exchange for their email address. Use this email list to reach out to your new followers on a regular basis with your latest tips.

 

[telemax]

Pick up the phone. Choose a vertical e.g online wine retailers, give the owner a call, find out how you can help them compete in a competitive market. There are always hundreds of businesses with ideas about what they would like to do in an ideal world to compete with the biggest companies. You, ask questions , listen to their answers and come up with suggestions.

If you don't want to call, do some targeted emailing. Research the companies, run a mail merge, follow up 3 days later with a call or another Email.

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

If you're just doing general web design, you're basically competing against the world and his brother who can knock a site together.

Have you thought about specialising in a specific sector? It will give your marketing efforts much more focus, you're competing against a lot less other designers and it will be a lot easier to make your potential clients aware of you. Because you specialise in that sector, you'll find you're not competing on price too.

 

[benjaminjones]

Thanks a lot for the comments. I will read and read again and take in what's been said. Thanks a lot