How to Get Clients Fast: 15 Actionable Strategies You Can Deploy Today

1. Use Twitter's Advanced Search [0.5hr + 1hr per week]

If you thought Twitter was just a medium for punchy jokes and cat memes, you’re wrong. 

It’s quite possibly one of the best ways to get clients on this list. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? (neither did I to be honest!)

With the press of a button, users can get what is on their mind out into the world — quickly, easily and unfiltered. 

The barrier to share is so low it provides unprecedented access to what’s in people’s heads and happening in their daily lives. 

If you can chime in on these flash thoughts with an informed, helpful perspective, you might just turn a random tweet into a new customer. 

Using Twitter’s impressively comprehensive search function, you can drill down on the exact tweets that are useful for your business. Once you’ve got your searches locked down, logging in a few times a week and dishing out your expertise is all you need to do to maintain this strategy.

How to Get Clients With Twitter

1. Optimize your Twitter profile. While yes, your main reason for being on Twitter is to attract people to your offer, you want to come across as an all round helpful person with no blaring ulterior motive. Here’s how to achieve both:

• Use a photo of yourself instead of your logo as the profile picture. While you are representing your company, it’s you the clients are going to be doing business with. Your face-in-a-mini-circle will show up on all your posts and replies, allowing potential customers to get familiar with you.
• Create a beautiful header image using Canva. Either call out to your offer or use text to elaborate on your unique selling proposition and the benefits of working with you. The trick is to do this tastefully. Draw attention to your offer without coming off as spammy or single focused.

• Your bio section should be used as if it were a headline for your website. It should clearly state what you do, who you do it for and what makes you different.

• Put your offer page link in the website URL field
• Use Twitter’s pinned tweet function to pin your offer and provide a page link to your profile. This will ensure it’s the first tweet people see when they visit your profile.

Note: Add you offer details in either your header image or your pinned tweet, not both ​— otherwise your profile may come across as spammy.

2. Use Twitter’s Advanced Search to look for questions that you can help answer and show your expertise.

Put the effort in to get as direct and detailed as possible with your searches ​— this will save you scrolling through a lot of rubbish!

3. Hit ‘Search’ then click ‘Latest’ under the search bar to show the most recent tweets. Identify your best searches and bookmark the URLs.

4. Set a day and time each week — or each morning if there are enough new tweets — to go through the latest tweets in your searches. Answer all the questions you can. Never sell, just provide value. Those who are interested will go back to your profile and see your offer from there.

2. Go on a Podcast Tour [5hrs]

Being a guest on a podcast allows you to tap into a whole audience of qualified leads — an audience that’s taken the host months (or even years) to build. 

Sounds too good to be true, right? But don’t worry, it’s a win-win for all parties. The podcast creators get valuable content, and you have a medium to get the word out about your services.​

The trick to this method is to provide tremendous value first, both in your outreach and actual podcast interview. By being genuine and letting your expertise shine through, you’re building natural trust and authority with the listeners. If you make enough of an impression, they’ll be looking you up after the show.

As for securing these seemingly too-good-to-be-true guest spots — it’s all about the outreach...

How to Get on a Podcast

1. Create a spreadsheet with the column headings below.

2. Log into iTunes and start searching keywords surrounding your niche.

Do similar searches in Google to find podcasts that aren’t on iTunes or results you may have missed: [Keyword(s)] + ‘Podcast’.

Finally, check Listennotes.com, a dedicated podcast search engine. You can search episodes, podcasts and look through curated lists. For $7 you can even export a CSV of the list, including contact details for the podcasts.

3. Write down any relevant podcasts in your spreadsheet.

4. Find the best contact person and contact method for each podcast. Go the podcast’s website if they have one, find the ‘contact us’ page and write down the details in your spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can look up the host on LinkedIn or other social media platforms and either contact them directly via those mediums or check if they’ve posted a preferred contact method.

5. For each podcast, do some quick research on what the podcast is about. This will help you craft your outreach in a way that shows you are familiar with the podcast content. Add this information to the ‘About’ column of your spreadsheet.

6. One of the biggest pet peeves of hosts is want-to-be-guests pitching the exact same story they’ve had on the show many times over. Try to think of a unique topic you could pitch for each podcast based on the audience, topic and your expertise. Add this to the ‘Unique Angle’ column of your podcast.

7. Go through your list and start contacting people. Take note of the status of each outreach in the ‘Status’ column. Here’s a podcast outreach template you can customize:

8. Once you’ve secured a podcast spot, make sure to provide tremendous value to the audience. You’re trying to achieve likability, authority, and trust. Do this by giving away a lot of expertise and information for free, being authentic, and providing something valuable on your offer page. Go in with the mindset of providing value, not performing a sales pitch. Don’t forget to mention your offer page at the end (with the host’s permission).

3. Host an ‘Ask Me Anything’ [3hrs]

Ask Me Anything sessions — commonly shortened to AMAs — are the birth child of internet forums. It’s the term given to an informal session where an expert, celebrity or a random ‘drive through liquor store’ employee makes themselves available to answer questions on a particular topic.

AMAs are a great low friction way for leads to ask whatever niggling questions they’ve had surrounding your topic or service — and it gives you a medium to deliver a ton of value and expertise to your community.

The best part is it requires very little effort or setup on your part — all you need to do is sit in the hot seat and show off what you’ve got in that shiny noggin of yours. 

These sessions are great when your topic involves something people are always ‘meaning to do’ but never get around to. By offering leads such a low pressure way to get clarity on the topic, they’re more likely to take the next step.  

Added benefits of running an AMA are:

• Audience insights — you get the most burning questions on your ideal client’s mind delivered straight to you on a silver platter.
• Content creation on the fly — you can repurpose your answers for blog content or opt in offers — ‘10 most common questions about [your topic] answered!’

How to Get Clients by Hosting an AMA

1. Choose your topic. Jump into your CRNs and search for common questions and concerns involving your area of expertise. Make sure the topic you choose is relevant to your CRN.

2. Create a title for your AMA. Use this format: “I am a [job title] specializing in [area of expertise] - Ask me anything!”. If you are trying to attract a certain type of client, frame your pitch in a way that would attract those clients — “I am an international tax lawyer specializing in offshore business setups for US citizens. Ask me anything!”

3. Ask permission. Reach out to the moderators of the CRN you’ll be posting the AMA in. Tell them that you are thinking of doing an AMA and wanted to get feedback and approval.

4. Decide whether or not to schedule your AMA — meaning you’ll be online to answer questions between a certain time — or put the post up and just leave it open ended.

The benefits of scheduling a time means it creates immediacy — the audience will only have a given amount of time to ask you the question they have on their mind. If you schedule your AMA:

• Make sure to include the time zone. 
• Post the AMA a week ahead of time with details of how members can participate.

5. Post your AMA! You can host an AMA on just about any platform — Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, through a webinar — but if you are already within your CRN’s forum, we recommend just creating a dedicated post and hosting it there. There are three main benefits of this:

• It will be searchable within your CRN, so your ideal client base are more likely to stumble upon it at a later date.
• It will be text based so you can easily repurpose your answers into other forms of content.
• That post will remain open as a low friction medium for people in your community to reach out to you in the future.

Think of it like creating an on-the-fly blog post within your CRN - valuable, searchable, and posted within the heart of your ideal client’s resource network.

In your post include:

1. The title you created in step 2.
2. Create a brief intro for AMA participants and add this to the post. Headings should include:
   • Who am I?: In which you talk about your experience, expertise and story
   • About the Topic: A quick definition and some context about the topic you intend to talk about.
   • Questions: What sort of questions can your participants ask of you? Give a few example questions.

6. Run the AMA and be as helpful and informative as possible. Don’t sell. Just make sure your offer page is in your profile.

7. Repeat this process for each of the CRN groups you are a part of.

4. LinkedIn Outreach [2hrs + 2hrs per week]

Facebook for your professional life — LinkedIn has tremendous power to connect you to the right businesses in the right way. 

Unfortunately, this power is often used for lazy outreach and unethical marketing tactics.

Set yourself apart by using the platform in the way it was designed. No bots, no automation, just highly-targeted quality outreach. 

LinkedIn has a free plan and tiered premium plans — starting at $50 USD a month. The premium plans include access to a more advanced search functions, as well as the ability to send messages to contacts that haven’t approved your initial connection request. 

Unless LinkedIn is one of your main client generation strategies, it won’t make sense to go premium just yet. We’re going to go through how you can use LinkedIn’s free plan to connect with new leads — which should still get you great results.

How to Find Clients with LinkedIn

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile.

• Fill out all the available fields in your profile including your relevant experience, education, awards and expertise.
• Use your headline to clearly state who you are, your unique selling proposition, who you can bring value to and how.

• Add your offer page link in the website URL field of your ‘Contact Info’ section.

• Connect with everyone in your existing professional network.
• Ask for recommendations from your connections and spur reciprocity by giving recommendations to others. 

There are SO many things you can do to optimize your profile. To avoid going down the rabbit hole and spending days or weeks on this step, identify the five most effective optimizations, set a timer and only do those. You can always improve on your profile later.

2. Search for relevant connections. Use LinkedIn’s advanced people search to find your ideal clients.

• Click on the search bar at the top of the LinkedIn window and select ‘People’ from the drop-down.

• Click ‘All Filters’ to bring up the advanced search. Select 2nd connections. Select all the filters that apply to your ideal client. There aren’t too many options in the free advanced search, so you may want to narrow down your search by area.

• Create a spreadsheet to keep track of your past searches and to note where you are with current searches.

3. Go down the search results and add all relevant leads to a second spreadsheet.

Don’t just connect with everyone on the page. If too many people mark your request as spam you could be penalized by LinkedIn. Aim for 25-50 requests per week.

4. Briefly research each possible new lead by visiting their LinkedIn profile. Note something unique about their business or profile that you can mention in your connection request.

5. Send a connection request to the possible lead. LinkedIn allows you to add a note with your connection request, but it can only be up to 300 characters. Use this as an opportunity to introduce yourself and your company, and add the unique personal note you gathered in the previous step.

Here’s a template you can use for your initial connection note:

Note: You can’t add phone numbers or URL’s in your connection request note, so don’t bother trying to send your offer page just yet.

6. Create templates for three follow up messages that you’ll send to new connections who approve your request. Each week, return to your spreadsheet and send the next message in the series until you get a reply.

Here are some general guidelines for each message:

• Message 1: Connect on a personal level by mentioning something interesting you found in their profile, a favorite shared sports team or an interesting story about an experience with their company. Offer something of value, like a recent blog post that’s very relevant for their business. Ask them if they have any questions about [your area of expertise].
• Message 2: Send an explanation and link to your offer page OR free work, depending on the possible value of the client. Note: Start your offer link as https:// so that the link is clickable. Links from the LinkedIn messages can go to a blank page if not formatted correctly.
• Message 3: Call out the fact that you haven’t received a reply. Mention they probably get a lot of spam and that you’re not trying to be salesy. In fact, this is going to be your last message. You’re just trying to bring value after all. Link to your offer one more time and wish them well.

These messages will change a lot depending on your target client, industry and value per sale. For more in-depth message templates based on different business types, take a look at this article by Jake Jorgovan.

7. Repeat the connection request + message follow up process with each suitable connection in your search, then start with a new search. Make sure to note down each search in your ‘past searches’ spreadsheet so you’re not covering the same ground.

5. Do a Referral Swap with a Complementary Business [4hrs]

I’m going to let you in on a little secret... I used to be a piano tuner. 

Can you guess how I got most of my clients? 

Referrals from a local piano removalist! Why? Because a piano needs to be tuned right after it’s moved.

By removalists passing on my contact information, it helped them create a better experience for their customers. It gave the ‘full service’ effect.

Turn this kind of thinking towards your own business and you could be sitting on a conveyor belt of new clients.

How to Cooperate with a Complementary Business

1. Take out a piece of paper and write down everything that precedes someone purchasing your services. Start broad at first. Write down everything that comes to mind.

2. Identify the strongest and most frequent connections. For example, a settlement agent’s strongest connection would be a real estate agent — to settle on a house you need to find one first!

3. Think of how you could create a win-win for the complementary business.

• Can you refer just as many clients back to them? Such as a marriage celebrant and a premarital counselor.
• Can you work some extra value into the deal for the referring business, such as offering their clients a free service or discount? This makes the referring company look good because they’re getting a better deal for their client.

If all else fails you can just offer a referral bonus to the complementary business.

4. Contact the most appropriate complementary business you can find and ask for a meeting. Present your offer, with concrete examples of how this would look. Including the numbers, mock-ups and anything else that makes the deal easy to picture in the company's mind.

5. Once you get a few companies on-board, nurture these relationships. Take company owners out to dinner, offer them referrals when you can and provide feedback on how the partnership is going. You want to keep these partnerships healthy so they’re maintained for as long as possible.

6. Run a Local Talk or Workshop [4hrs]

It's time to shut the laptop and meet your ideal clients face-to-face. 

There are two main concerns that subconsciously pop into a potential client’s mind before any sale — ‘Is this person legitimate?’ and ‘can I trust them?’. 

Online, it’s a lot harder to answer these questions because there are fewer cues to pull from — such as body language, social standing, etc.

There’s a reason half of most landing pages are dedicated to building authority and trust.

Once a potential client meets you in person — especially as a speaker at an event — you’re eliminating those major concerns in one fell swoop, paving the way to take the relationship further.

A great way to design this kind of interaction is to host a local event or workshop.

How to Reach Clients by Running Local Events

1. Go to Meetup.com and search for any groups that may have your ideal client in them.

If there are none, create your own group. Make sure it’s on something that targets your ideal client (e.g. ‘The [Your Ideal Client’s Job Title] Group [Your City]’). Note: You’ll be charged a small fee each month to run a group on Meetup.

2. Send the group organizers a proposal for your event. If you started your own Meetup group, you can jump straight to the step where you post the event. 

On the group’s Meetup page, you'll have the option to send a message to the organizer(s).

If this option isn’t available, click on the hyperlink to see the other organizers.

Here you’ll see which group organizers have made themselves available for contact. 

Ask the group organizer(s) if you can host an event. Be clear to ONLY offer value. Remember, they are paying to run this Meetup group — so they're not going to let just anyone come along and utilize it for their own gain. 

Show them how much value you will bring to their members and in-turn, the group in general. You’re going to make their group look good by offering a quality event to their members.

Here’s a template for the outreach:

3. If the organizer says yes, provide them with a benefit-driven event description with clear descriptions of what the attendees will learn. This takes away any friction on their side, since you’ve done all the work for them. 

If the organizer doesn't reply in a week, send them the event description anyway as a follow up email:

4. Once confirmed, create an event on Facebook and link to the meetup event page. The discover function within Facebook Events has become a very powerful tool for attracting relevant visitors to your event.

5. Fill your talk with value and only at the end briefly mention your offer. Show the offer page URL or give it out on a business card, small flyer or on the event ticket. You want to give the impression the offer is a side note — not the reason you ran the talk.

If you deliver enough value during the talk, the audience will be asking you how they can connect.

7. Automate Existing Client Referrals [1hr]

How often have you been completely obsessed with a new habit, song or piece of clothing… only to completely forget about it a few months later? 

It doesn’t mean it wasn’t effective, or you didn’t swear by it at the time. 

It’s just part of being human. If something doesn’t prompt us to recall said amazing thing, it gets buried under the mountain of input our brains have to process daily. 

It’s the same with your services. A client may be really pleased with what you did for them — but that doesn’t mean they’re walking around repeating ‘Who can I refer Jim to’ in their heads.

The question “who else might find your service useful?” probably never even popped into their heads. 

Even if you recognize this and are clever enough to ask for referrals, chances are you’re going to forget to ask a good percentage of your clients — because guess what? You’re human too!

So why not take our unreliable brains out the equation and automate the whole process...? 

You can do this with either your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software or your ESP (Email Service Provider).

How to Automate Client Referrals

1. Create a ‘client’ tag or list that is applied automatically when a payment for one of your services is processed.

If your method of taking payment doesn’t allow this, you can assign this tag manually within your ESP or CRM.

2. Write the email asking for a referral. Here’s a template you can use:

3. Create an automation or rule (depending on the software you’re using) that waits three months after the ‘client’ tag has been assigned, then sends the referral email.

Note: Since this is automated, you will need to take note of unhappy clients and take them off this automation. You can even create a ‘non-referral’ tag and add that to your automation — IF ‘non-referral’ tag is applied, THEN don’t send the referral email. Use the 'non-referral' tag for refunds as well.

If you prefer to hand pick the clients you ask a referral from, assign a ‘seek referral’ tag to them. Use this tag to kick off the automation rather than the ‘client’ tag.

4. When this automated referral email results in a new client, send the original client responsible a personal thank you email.

8. Create a Killer Offer for Your Network [6hrs-12hrs]

Brace yourself… I’m about to get you excited about an offer you’re not even going to break even on — at first. 

This method involves creating an AMAZING deal that you're going to limit to only [x] people - and it’s only available to members of the CRN. It’s going to involve massive amounts of value for very little money. Don’t even try to make this one economically viable — your aim should be to deliver about 10x the value comparative to the price. 

Why do all this when it doesn’t make economic sense?

By delivering a ton of value to a small number of people within your CRN you are:

• Building references for yourself within that community. 
• Generating word of mouth within the networks that matter most to you. 
• Indirectly drawing attention to your services — even those that don’t take you up on the offer will see your post and know what you do.
• ​Creating case studies involving active members of the community. It’s one thing to see a case study of a random business, it’s a whole other thing to see how much Joe from your community 10x-ed his conversions because of you. Members are more likely to trust the result is it’s from someone they know.

How to Use the Network to Reach Potential Clients

1. Contact the moderator of your community and say you’d like to offer a crazy valuable at cost service to [x] members of the community. If they want to promote it that would be great, otherwise you just want their blessing. Be clear about your intentions for this — you want to give back value to a community that’s given so much to you, and get the word out about your services. Remember, promoting your amazing offer makes their community look great, so don’t be afraid to ask.

2. Clone your offer page and change it to suit your community-only offer. If you don’t have a way to cap orders, ask for applications and say the offer is only available to the first [x] community members who apply. Describe your offer in detail, make sure it’s benefit driven and clearly outlined. Make clear your offer will be in exchange for a testimonial or case study.

3. Post your offer on the forum, and any other medium your community allows. Let moderators know the applications are open if they agreed to promote it for you. Sit back and wait for applications to flow in.

4. Go the extra mile to deliver incredible work to those who took you up on the offer. Keep track of before and after stats to tangibly show the impact your services/product had.

5. Once the offer is over, create case studies about each client and release one every few weeks in the community. Include tangible value and key takeaways in the posts so they don’t just look like sales pitches.

9. Cold Email Outreach [6hrs per week]

Another ethically questionable method that falls under the ‘depends on how you use it’ caveat is email outreach.

Yes, if you spam 1000 inboxes with a copy/pasted generic sales pitch, it’s not going to do you (or the internet in general) any good.

For your emails to be successful, you’ll need to use them as a delivery system for highly personalized nuggets of value. Don’t treat this like a numbers game — it’s about establishing high quality relationships.

There’ll be no links to your offer page in this one — instead you’ll be delivering free work. Because each piece of outreach takes a long time to set up and deliver, this method is only suitable for high ticket sales.

How to Win a Client with Cold Outreach

1. Create a dream client spreadsheet. Note down any companies, people or brands you would love to work with, and that you could provide tremendous value to — businesses where your service or offer could make a big impact.

2. Choose one business to begin with. Research who is the decision maker is — who is the principal person appropriate to contact in regards to your offer?

3. Get personal. Once you’ve found the most appropriate contact, take a journey on the internet to get as much background on this person as possible. If you’re feeling a bit ethically questionable at this point, don’t worry. You’re only going to use information these decision makers have voluntarily made available on the internet.

Read blog posts by this person, listen to podcast interviews, Google their name and look at their LinkedIn profile. 

Note down any hobbies, shared values or experiences you have.

4. Get their email. You may find it posted along the way. If not, do some thorough investigation until you find it. Search in Hunter.io for your target, and if that fails this post by HubSpot has some great suggestions for ethically obtaining someone’s email address.

If you really can’t find the person’s direct email, reach out via LinkedIn instead (see the LinkedIn Outreach section of this post). Don’t settle for sending your email to a company's generic email address (eg. [email protected]).

5. Do some ‘free work’ for the company (ideas on what you could do are in the free work section above).

6. Deliver the free work in a value bomb of an email. Some tips for structuring your email include: 

• Keep the email about the recipient and the value you are delivering — don’t talk about yourself or your company. If you impress them, they’ll look you up.
• Describe and link to the free work you’ve done and outline the result it will get them. For example, if you offer an SEO audit, describe how many visitors making the changes you suggest will earn them.

• Keep it short and to the point. A few sentences maximum.
• Personalize the email where you can (based on the information you gathered during your research earlier). Keep the tone casual. Show that you’re a real human on the other end of that keyboard — interested in building a real authentic relationship.

Note: Don’t include attachments directly to the email. This heavily increases the chances the email will be marked as spam. Instead, include links to the attachments within the email text.

7. Schedule your follow up emails in your calendar so they don’t slip your mind. Keep track of when you sent your first email in your dream client spreadsheet. You’ll be sending one email each week for a total of five weeks.

8. Send each follow up email with a hit of extra value — an additional resource, a broken link you noticed on the website, a second SEO audit on a different blog post. Don’t sell, just provide value.

9. If you still haven’t received a reply, follow up with one message on another medium (such as LinkedIn, Twitter etc). Send them a short message leading with whatever value you delivered in the first email. Explain you sent "a few more emails with valuable tips and tricks and was just wondering if you received them.”

10. Once your target replies, focus on building the relationship. If you’ve done it right, they’ll be begging you to work for them.

10. Be a Guru in Industry Facebook Groups [0.25hr + 1hr per week]

Community forums are a great way to ‘sell without selling’.  

If you are constantly showing up with helpful, reliable information (not just your opinion), people in your community are going to start taking notice. Since these discussions are taking place on a public forum, the value won’t just be delivered to the person you’re replying to — you’ll be impressing plenty of onlookers too.

By providing consistent value and ‘being seen’ frequently (the mere-exposure effect), you’re building trust within the community. As that trust builds, you’ll become the community's source for information on that area of expertise. If anyone needs help or has a question about [x] topic, they’re likely to seek you out to answer it.

You can apply this method to any forum and discussion group in your CRN, as well as public forums such as Quora. In this example we’re going to focus on Facebook Groups.

How to Get Clients in Facebook Groups

1. Optimize your Facebook profile for your business. Include your offer page URL in your profile. You can also use your cover photo or featured photos to advertise your offer.

2. Join the three biggest Facebook groups you can find that serve your market.

3. Once your join requests have been accepted, open Facebook on a desktop computer and navigate to the group page.

Set your view settings for posts to ‘Recent Posts’. This will show the newest posts first so you don't miss any and can easily gauge where you were up to yesterday.

Bookmark the resulting URL. This will ensure you don't have to change view settings to ‘Recent Posts’ every time. Do this for each group.

4. Each day, open the bookmarks and scroll down to the last post you saw yesterday. Scroll up, answering any questions you can to be useful along the way.

5. Don’t sell, just be helpful. If there’s a direct service you can help someone with, comment with a ton of value (usually outlining the entire process you would take delivering the service), then add “if you want me to do this for you, just get in touch.''

6. That’s it. Just be helpful and eventually potential clients will start looking you up. If you’ve optimized your profile and included a link to your offer page, leads will begin to seek you out.

11. Simply Ask [2hrs]

“Hey, I’m looking for clients. Do you know of anyone looking for [x service]”

Surely it can’t be that simple... right?

Sometimes it is!

If people in your network know you are actively looking for new clients, they are more likely to keep an eye out for you.

While this step may not seem worth mentioning — it's so obvious it’s often overlooked.

How to Ask For Referrals

1. Post on your networks and social profiles that you’re currently looking for clients. You can use a sentence as simple as “I’m looking for clients, know of anyone that needs [x]?”

For a more scarcity based approach, try “A new coaching spot just opened up! These go fast so pass on the details to anyone you think might benefit.”

2. You can also post this in your CRNs — depending on the rules of the group — and places like co-working spaces, notice boards, etc.

3. For more impact, keep it personal. Sending personal messages to people you respect asking if they have any ideas on how to get more clients, or if they know of anyone looking for [your service]. If you ask a favor of someone, they will feel important and respected, and often go out of their way to help you.

12. Attend a PAID Event for People You Can Serve [6hrs - 3 Days]

Why is paid in all caps? 

No, I didn’t just do it for the click bait ;).

I did it because 'paid' is the key to this method’s success.

Paid events pre-qualify participants. And while paid can mean as little as $20, the effect is the same.

If you’ve paid to attend an event involving your industry, you’re obviously 1) Doing well enough to actively invest in your business, and 2) Interested in improving your business.

Being at these kinds of events elicits a certain kind of social proof.

This effect works both ways — others will have a better impression of you for attending the event — and the potential clients you have access to are at a higher level than your average Joe Blow off the street.

Activities within these events often offer a more intimate and authentic atmosphere to connect with new leads.

Acquiring Clients Through Participation

1. Search for relevant events. Log into your CRNs and look for an events page. If you can find a specific page, type words like ‘event’, ‘workshop’ and ‘conference’ into the search bar.

Google [your ideal client] + ‘conference’, ‘event’, ‘workshop’ + [your location]. For example [small business owner] conference [California].

2. List all the paid events and conferences in your area in a spreadsheet. If you can travel, expand the scope of your search to accessible cities and/or countries.

Use the ‘Aimed at’ column to note the type of attendee the conference is directed at.

3. Look at your marketing budget to determine which conferences and events you can attend. Focus on events over conferences, as they are easier to get tickets last minute, cheaper and more intimate. Buy tickets for the events and conferences you decide on.

4. Interact!

• At the conference or event arrive early, and be one of the last to leave. Relationships are often formed in these ‘bonus’ moments at the event.
• Attend all the social events surrounding the main event.
• Don’t sell! Just be genuinely interested in getting to know the attendees (if nothing else, it’s great customer research!). Be helpful when your area of expertise comes up.
• Sign up to any masterminds or smaller group gatherings within the event. These offer a great chance to form connections with other attendees.

5. After the event, follow up with everyone you engaged with. Deliver any extra hits of value you can think of relevant to each contact’s situation. Mention your offer page in the P.S. or as a side note.

Here is a template for your event follow up emails:

Even if you don’t get results straight away from this method, you’ve started a relationship. If that person ever needs [x] services in the future, they’ll think of you.

13. Offer a Referral Incentive to Your Existing Network [3hrs]

Trusted contacts, associates and past clients can be a great source of new clients, especially if you make the situation a win-win.

It’s often a little uncomfortable and/or inconvenient to send a referral for someone else’s services. Offering a referral incentive can be the push your contacts need to send a referral recommendation on your behalf.

This strategy is great to use if you already have a large network or client base.

There are many different types of referral incentives you can use, and many different ways you can offer them. Let’s take a look at which incentives are suitable for which situations, and how you can implement them.

How to Find the Perfect Referral Incentive

1. Choose which sort of incentive suits your business best:

• Discounted services - Give existing clients a discount off their existing plans. This incentive is great if there is a lot of profit built into your pricing and if most of the people that will be referring you are existing clients.
• Free products or services - Give one of your offerings in exchange for a referral. This works well if you have a number of different products or services, especially low ticket items that won’t impact your business much if you give them away.
• Commission from the sale given to the referrer - If you have a high ticket or variable price, it can be a great incentive for referrers if you offer this model. An example would be offering a flat 10% of the deal value. Referrers are more inclined to bring you higher quality, higher value leads if they know they’ll get a bigger cut for it.
• Something non-business related that your clients would appreciate - This can be anything from a bottle of wine to an Amazon gift card. You’d be surprised how far people will go for such small tokens of appreciation.

2. Create a way to track referrals, while making it as easy as possible for clients to refer you:

• Ask your referrers to say “tell him [referrer’s name] sent you!”

• Ask new clients who told them about you.
• Create a business or referral card that includes a “Referred by…………….” section on it.
• Add a “Forward my contact info” section to your email signature and add a ‘referred by…..’ field for your referrer to fill in before sending.
• If you process sales online, create affiliate links for top referrers. You can use dedicated affiliate tracking programs such as ReferralCandy, or if your payment processor has the functionality, use the built in affiliate options. SendOwl and ThriveCart are examples of payment processors with built in affiliate tracking systems.

14. Work with Influencers [3hrs per week]

Influencer marketing ​— it’s not just reserved for Instagrammers. 

If you can do great work for the top influencer in your CRNs and the industry in general, not only will that provide you with social proof, but they’ll be likely to pass your name on every time someone asks for a recommendation. 

Treat the relationship as an opportunity to get feedback from an industry expert, relating to them as a mentor instead of an influencer. If they feel like they’ve played a part in helping you build your business to what it is, they’re likely to feel more nurturing towards you. They suddenly have a personal stake in your success (ego) and are more likely to refer and help you in the future.

How to Win New Clients with the Help of Influencers

1. Identify the top influencers in your CRNs and the industry at large.

2. Decide on an offer you can comfortably deliver and maintain. You should give your offering either for free or at a very good price so the influencer is more inclined to work with you. The trick here is not to go too big. You won’t be making a profit from this partnership, so it has to be something you can do well and in only a few hours.

3. Go to where the Influencer is online — whether it be their YouTube channel, blog, Instagram account, in the community forum, etc. — and connect. Use the steps outlined in the cold outreach strategy to provide massive value upfront.

Explain you really respect them and their opinion, and that you would love to provide them with [x] service for [x] discount to get your name out there as a talented [x]. You’d really appreciate their feedback along the way and know the relationship will be mutually beneficial.

4. Once an influencer accepts, provide A-Grade service. Take note and act on any feedback given by the influencer. Make the whole experience of working with you painless, seamless and enjoyable.

5. Stay in touch with the influencer so you remain top of mind. If appropriate and if you mentioned it as part of the arrangement at the start, ask for a testimonial.

15. Create a Profile on UpWork [4hrs + 3hrs per week]

All this talk about finding clients… If only someone would make a platform where people looking for a service could search for people providing that service… 

Oh wait…

It already exists!

If you’re at all familiar with UpWork, you probably just had flashes of university qualified developers from India promising to make your entire website for $10.

Because of this ‘cheap labor’ reputation, Upwork is often overlooked as a source of clients. 

It’s a shame, because it remains one of the most promising platforms for connecting you to your potential clients. 

Let me start off by busting one of the most damaging and commonly held myths about being a freelancer on Upwork... You don’t have to do work for pennies. Upwork is becoming more and more of a platform for people seeking quality work/labor, not just jobs done cheap. 

The strategy for finding high-quality clients on Upwork works best for those with a unique skill set, such as a developer proficient in multiple languages of code. Clients are more likely to find you amongst the sea of freelancers, and it’s easier to search for appropriate jobs.

How to Find the Best Clients on Upwork

1. Optimize your profile.

• Choose a specific service you want to target on Upwork and optimize your profile for that one service. When someone looking for [x] lands on your profile, they should get the feeling of having found the exact person for the job.
• Fill out all the fields you can with as much information as possible. Languages, skills, availability, etc. Every added detail is a search filter you could be included in when someone is looking for a freelancer.
• Think of your ‘Overview’ section as a copywriting exercise. It’s your chance to convince a potential client you are the right person to carry out [x] task. Keep it benefit driven and emphasize how working with you will be better than anyone else. This is especially important since you’re not competing on price, you’re competing on quality. You need to communicate the added value you offer in your profile.
• Add examples of your work in the Portfolio section.

2. The search begins! It’s a hard slog at the very start of your Upwork journey as you try to get those first few clients and reviews. Upwork has a ‘Rising Talent’ program that helps new freelancer get seen. Obtaining this status will be a huge help for you in the beginning weeks — so make sure you fit the criteria and make the most of the badge while you’ve got it.

Use Upwork’s search feature to find relevant jobs that match your skill set.

You can even save searches so you don’t have to re-enter the same filters every time you search. 

Submit a proposal for the jobs you are interested in. When applying for jobs, make up for your lack of reviews by showing examples of your work and reviews from clients you’ve worked with outside of Upwork. Explain you just joined the platform. 

Upwork recently made a change to the platform where you have to pay 15 cents (correct at the time of this article's publishing) to apply for a job. This is good for you because it cuts down some of the chaff and means less applicants (a.k.a. less competition) for each job.

Note: Don’t go cheap to get reviews — you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. Visitors to your profile can see how much you were paid for certain jobs. If you’re not careful, you’ll be set a low-priced standard for your profile.

3. Over deliver. Once you score a few gigs, go the extra mile for the client. Ask for a review after each project, explaining you are new to Upwork and it really helps you out to have a review from them.

4. Obtain a Top Rated badge. Once you’ve maintained a job success score of over 90% on the platform for at least 13 weeks in a row - and you meet a list of other criteria — you’ll be awarded ‘Top Rated’ status. This gives you better opportunities when applying for jobs and makes you look more legit. You will be highlighted among applicants — helping you stand out. You'll also be more likely to be invited to jobs.

5. Sit back and relax. After getting a few good reviews under your belt, your Top-Rated badge and an optimized profile, you can take the foot off the gas a little. Clients will start to seek you out, sending you job positions and asking you to apply.