#BUILDING A CLIENT BASE FULL#
#BUILDING A CLIENT BASE PLUS#

However, I’ve also built-up strong relationships with creative agencies who need my skills. Partner relationships are where it’s at Through my contacts, I have got some fabulous direct customers over the years. What I had to do was learn fast - YOU CAN DO THAT TOO - and soak up the fact that the business owners I met were genuinely supportive and ready to give me a try. Remember, when I started out business networking with my web development hat on, I had zilch experience. It’s very different to the dog-eat-dog world of big business. They want their contacts to succeed because it means more work for everyone. Small business owners are really keen to ensure other small business owners survive. SMBs want other SMBs to thrive Believe me, business networking is more vibrant now than it’s ever been. How business networking can kick-start YOUR writing career Potential business clients need your ability to empathise and use words. NOTE TO YOU: If you’ve a knack for words and have ever read a website you WILL be able to use that knowledge to empathise with a reader. So me beginning to write content for the web was a natural immediate step to take. I knew how the search engines worked, and I also knew how websites needed to work to get the best results for a business. I had skills they needed I’d worked in the world of the web for years. My writing background was fiction and poetry! YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES. Don’t dismiss it just because it’s not business oriented. Let’s face it, you write blogs - it’s what you’re doing now on Medium. NOTE TO YOU: If you’re a writer at heart, you’ll have a portfolio of stuff you can use as evidence of your passion for words. So, I could evidence my writing background. I had a writing track record I could point to I’d been writing fiction for years up to that point and in a bid to build my author’s profile, I’d also started publishing bits of illustrated poetry on Facebook etc. I couldn’t face continuing in the business with him, so I needed to find an alternative income fast. When my husband and I split up, the whole sorting-out-the-finances thing happened very quickly. Over fifteen years, I got to know a lot of people some became web customers, some became design suppliers, and many just became great business contacts.

To build the business, I had to be out on the circuit every week, schmoozing, presenting, and building up relationships. And to get both, I had to go out and start business networking. This meant that my role in the business was both customer facing and supplier facing. In-house, we had no design skills, so I needed to find graphic designers who could create the nice look and feel that clients wanted.

#BUILDING A CLIENT BASE PLUS#

I had no experience of the web world at all when we started but I learnt fast and took on the role of business development - aka sales - plus some HTML in Dreamweaver. This was pre-WordPress, so we wrote our own - excellent - content management system and did all our own coding, CSS, and HTML.Īt one point there were three of us in the business - two technically minded people with experience of coding, building systems, and running IT… and me.

#BUILDING A CLIENT BASE FULL#

And the secret isn’t rocket science… people like to work with people they know and trust.īefore I started writing full time, I was running a small web development business with my then husband. Someone gives someone my name, we have a chat, 99 times out of a hundred we gel, and I do some well-paid work for them. How I get my clients… A little background firstĪLL my clients come to me via word of mouth now. I believe it’s because I used a particular method to get going. This has put me in a fortunate position, I know, but it’s not just through good luck. Now, I have a number of clients who come to me again and again some just once a year, some ad hoc, some every month, and currently one that keeps me busy pretty much 5 days a week, every week. I have earned my income solely from writing for several years, but I kicked off my writing revenue using a very different method to most I’ve read on here. Now, I’m not dissing this work, and I’m not saying writers shouldn’t get work this way, I’m simply saying it’s not for me. None have been waxing lyrical about the experience, and the discontent that emanates from them resonates strongly with why I refused to go down that path. I’ve seen a few articles on here recently about content farms, Fiverr, and other platforms that enable writers to grab pieces of work.

Building a client base