As this year comes to an end, many of us are planning how we're going to improve our businesses next year.
You may have already asked yourself:
How can I find more clients next year?
How can I boost my income next year?
How can I find more of the right clients with the right budgets next year?
Some of you reading this may even be planning to quit your day job next year and start your own business. (Hurray!!)
I always feel excited when I go into a new year because it's filled with endless possibilities, not just for your business but also for your personal life.
The end of a year is the perfect time to plan how you're going to move your business to a new level in the next twelve months. That's why I thought I'd make my final post of 2016 a roundup of my twelve most popular posts on finding clients.
Use these posts to help you find more clients with bigger budgets next year and make it the best year your business has EVER had!
And if you want even more help than a blog post can provide, I have a FREE 5-day podcast series, Find More Clients, that will teach you the marketing strategies that worked the best this year for women entrepreneurs.
12 Awesome Blog Posts
To Help You Find More Clients
One of the best parts of being a creative entrepreneur is the work.
Unlike your friends with a j-o-b, you get to decide which projects you take on, which challenges will stretch you creatively, and which tasks are the best match for your skill set.
One of the worst parts of being a creative entrepreneur? Finding that work.
When you dreamed of becoming a freelance designer (or a freelance copywriter, in my case,) we didn’t fantasize about sweaty palms at networking events. Awkward sales conversations. Struggling over how the heck to install a Facebook tracking pixel.
And hey, networking events and social media can be great ways to find new clients. But there’s also a beauty in getting back to basics.
Finding clients doesn’t have to be complicated or anxiety-inducing. It can really be as easy as sending a few simple emails.
If you're going to read my blog posts every week, I want you to know who they're from. I want you to know about my past, my journey as a designer and how I can help you.
Basically, I want us to become friends!
So if you have a spare 10 minutes and you're curious about who these emails are from, read on. I'm getting brutally honest about my journey today.
The start of it all
In 2010 I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. One day I wanted to be a teacher, the next day I wanted to be a writer. So, I didn't do anything. I waitressed in Pizza Hut for a while so I could at least bring in a bit of cash, and I worked in telesales for day. (Six hours of cold calling and I was outta there.)
In 2011, I worked in as a shop assistant for Calvin Klein Jeans. It wasn't the most glamorous job but it paid the bills. My boss became seriously ill and had to leave for six months, so I took her place as manager and learned what it takes to manage a department, deal with angry customers, handle employees, work ridiculous hours and hustle towards sales goals (or suffer the wrath of Head Office if I didn't.)
I didn't know it at the time, I was learning what it took to be my own boss.
Twitter has recently become one of my favorite social media platforms.
It’s the perfect place to connect with likeminded creatives, build friendships and share your work.
The mistake a lot of business owners make when promoting their business on Twitter is only tweeting their content, services and products.
That’s not going to work on Twitter.
Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? You can apply this rule to ANYTHING in life, but we're going to apply it to the wonderful world of Twitter. Here’s what it comes down to:
Use 20% of your content to promote your brand, and dedicate 80% to content that really interests your audience and engages them in conversation.
Your social media profiles are more powerful than you think.
At the moment, your social profiles probably have a few words about what you do and a link to your homepage, right?
But you can do so much more with your profile than that.
Think about it: the more you grow your social following, the more people will start visiting your profile every day. These people are potential subscribers, clients and customers, so you need to strategically lead them where you want them to go.
Without a streamlined profile, you're losing countless potential clients every day.
Does this sound familiar?
You signed up to Buffer and scheduled a months worth of social media posts, but when they were sent out they barely got any attention.
You replied to tweets and Facebook posts that announced they were looking for someone with your skills, but none of them got back to you.
You came THIS close to deleting your social pages and cancelling your Buffer plan because social media felt like a waste of your time.
You've always winged it and got clients through referrals, so maybe that will be enough to keep your business going?
If that sounds like you then I want you to know I understand where you're coming from.
So you need to book more clients-- fast. You worry about money and how you're going to pay your rent next month. You see all these other freelancers getting booked out for six months but not you- your inbox is quiet and depressing.
You get most of your clients through referrals from past clients or other freelancers, so you focus your efforts on trying to bring in more referrals.
That's a good place to start, but as the saying goes- you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket.
If you're a newbie designer, you're most likely a college student itching to get their work into the world and start living the freelance life.
Or, you're someone who has an interest or a qualification in design but you're stuck in a toxic day job that eats away at your soul. You want to quit and start freelancing. You want to be your own boss. You sometimes do freelance work on evenings and weekends, but it doesn't bring in enough money to enable you to quit your day job.
You need the income your day job provides. After all, there's rent to pay, food to buy, a car to run... Quitting your job just doesn't seem feasible right now. Especially since the bulk of financial responsibility will lie on your hubby. Leaving him to handle most bills by himself while you build the dream hardly seems fair, does it?
The one thing we creative entrepreneurs dread is having zero clients.
Nada. No payments coming in, no work to keep us busy, no solution to the bills that loom over our heads.
This is an especially big fear for new freelancers or side hustlers who want to start freelancing full-time. They're used to their steady income each month, so the prospect of worrying about money when they begin freelancing scares them to death.
The fear of 0 clients also hits experienced business owners-- hard. When you've been working for yourself for years and suddenly hit a slow stage where clients are hard to come by, imposter syndrome sets in and you start to feel like you're not good enough to run a business.