The Importance of Building Relationships with Potential Clients as a Freelance Developer

When it comes to finding clients for your freelance development business, having a solid relationship with potential clients is crucial. Unfortunately, many developers underestimate the importance of building relationships and instead rely on online platforms and outreach campaigns to find new clients. However, this approach can be hit or miss, and there's no substitute for face-to-face interaction and personal connections.

Dev Shops and Outsourcing

Many dev shops don't have enough work to justify hiring a full-time developer, so they often outsource tasks to other developers. If you're a developer who wants to outsource your services, it's essential to build relationships with these dev shops. Start by researching the company and understanding their needs before reaching out. Once you've identified the right contact person, reach out and explain that you're available for outsourced work. Ask if they'd be interested in receiving a copy of your portfolio and CV.

Don't just leave it at that, however. Follow up with these potential clients regularly to keep them top of mind. A good rule of thumb is to follow up once a month or so for the first year, even if nothing else comes of it. This shows that you're serious about working with their business and willing to put in the effort to make it happen.

Outreach and Direct Contact

Another effective way to find clients is to reach out directly to potential customers. This approach works particularly well for B2B businesses, such as local companies looking for website or app development services. Instead of going door-to-door or trying to sell your services online, create a list of target businesses and research them beforehand.

When you do meet with these businesses in person, make sure you're prepared and knowledgeable about their needs and goals. Show genuine interest in their industry and be willing to listen to their problems. This will help you tailor your pitch and demonstrate how your services can solve their specific challenges.

Networking Events

Finally, don't underestimate the power of networking events, such as Business Networking International (BNI). Attend these events and connect with potential clients face-to-face. BNI is a great resource for meeting other business professionals in your area who may be interested in your development services.

Attending networking events can help you build relationships with potential clients and establish yourself as a trusted expert in the field. Don't be shy about approaching people and introducing yourself – a warm smile and a firm handshake can go a long way in making a good impression.

Consistency is Key

Regardless of which approach you choose, consistency is key when it comes to finding new clients. Follow up with potential clients regularly, attend networking events, and build relationships with dev shops and other businesses. By putting in the effort to build these connections, you'll increase your chances of landing new clients and growing your freelance development business.

Tips for Success

* Be proactive and persistent in your outreach efforts

* Research potential clients beforehand to understand their needs and goals

* Attend networking events and connect with other business professionals

* Follow up regularly with potential clients and dev shops

* Build relationships with multiple businesses and be willing to adapt your services to meet their specific needs

By following these tips, you can build strong relationships with potential clients and establish yourself as a trusted expert in the freelance development industry. Don't be afraid to reach out, follow up, and connect with others – it's often the people who are proactive and persistent who come out on top.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi my name is luke sisliano and i'm a self-employed web developer i've done a few articles and videos for free code camp that relate to working for oneself as a freelancer i've decided to expand on those a little bit in this video and the article that's going along with it by really discussing what it even means to be a freelance developer in the first place and i'm also going to talk about how you can get business the first of those topics i think is really important to address because a lot of people aren't really even clear as to what it means to quote on quote unquote be a freelance developer so we're going to really discuss what that looks like and kind of what a more of an actual definition for it is and then we're like i said we're also going to look into how you can get customers in your business and we're going to look at two routes for that the first one being how you can get customers online through your own website and we're also going to look at how you can get customers uh locally in your city uh the one thing i want to do a little differently in this video is i don't want to throw out a lot of the general advice that you'll hear from a lot of resources as to how to get business there are a lot of ways to get business where you can make a few bucks but the approach i'm going to be taking and suggesting in this video and again the article that's going along with it is really meant for those that kind of want to take their business to the next level in other words they don't want to just make a few bucks they want to be really profitable and they want to do really well for themselves so we'll be discussing those tips as we go along but as i said in order in this video we're going to talk about what is freelancing we're going to talk about a list of items that you need to complete before you even think about reaching out to customers once you've decided to go to the freelance route we're going to talk about how you can get customers online and we're going to talk about where to get customers locally and how to get customers locally in your own city so all that said let's get to it okay so before we talk about how to get customers into your development business i think it's important to first kind of talk about what it even means to be a freelancer in the first place i think this is important because the word freelance has kind of become a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in today's society right you'll hear people say i'm a freelance developer i'm a freelance writer a freelance writer i'm a freelance journalist i'm a freelance this or that or blah blah blah in other words because it's almost become kind of a buzzword it can tend to mean different things to different people you might have person one and person two and this person says i'm a freelancer and they mean it one way and this person essentially hears something else and they never really are on the same page as to what the person does so i'm gonna lay out a couple of actual definitions of what it means to be a freelance developer to answer that question of what is freelancing in the first place and the really comes down to two definitions the first one being the individual who is truly self-employed the second one being the individual who's doing it as a side hustle um let's look at the first of these two that i just mentioned if you're going to freelance route it can mean that you are truly self-employed and with that you are a one-person operation uh it's your first of all it's your sole job you don't have any other jobs that you work you know you don't have a full-time job and develop software on the side or anything like that you are a developer and you work for yourself and that's it you have no other income outside of your business and you are truly a one-person operation um you know not only do you do all the marketing and uh or i should say donald do you do all the dev work you do all your own marketing you do all your own bookkeeping you do all your own uh you know uh regulatory filings and things of that nature so you are a one-person operation you are the administrative side of things you are the uh business development side of things you are the actual uh dev work side of things you know that is you um going this route can result in much higher income than you tend to receive uh in a job for somebody if you really you know you know if you really decide to get behind your business and keep it get it going in my experience you can really make a lot more working for yourself than you can working for somebody else because you're keeping one hundred percent of what you bail out right instead of somebody else billing out your labor and then taking a percentage of it you're keeping 100 percent of your you know what's built for your own labor so you know if you really put your nose to the grindstone you can uh make a lot more money going the self-employed route self-employed slash freelance route than you can working for somebody else the one thing to understand about this though is that going that self-employment route is going to result in a less stable income when you're working a job for somebody you have the security of a paycheck whereas you know when you're working for yourself you might have a big month you might have a bad month you might have a mediocre month your income's going to be all over the place uh you know you have to worry about clients paying you on time you have to worry about getting clients you have to worry about how slow is your business how busy is your business um things of that nature so your income is really going to go up and down in you know like a really big way so you've really got to think about um the fact that if you're going to go the self-employment route that you're going to have less stable income than you would working a job even though you have the potential to in aggregate make more money you know like at the end of every year the other thing excuse me and the other thing about you know going the truly independent route is that you're going to be putting in a lot of hours um because again you've got to do all the dev work you've got to do all the marketing you've got to do all the bookkeeping and you've got to do all of the name 10 other things you know that i haven't listed yet so you know it's easy to work full time as a dev without having to do all that stuff so if you're going to be doing all that stuff as well it means you're going to be working a lot of hours now even though you're working a lot of hours one of the upsides of this is you tend to get a lot of flexibility where you work right you know you can take a vacation and get work done while you're on vacation you can travel and you know like work while you're traveling if you you know uh you know if you kind of want to just become a traveling nomad and code all over the place you can potentially even do that so it really gives a lot of flexibility into how you live your personal lifestyle um the reason uh i keep talking about this in the context of self-employment and you doing everything is that going this uh individual route does not involve you having any employees okay once you start hiring employees you're not a freelancer you're a business owner at that point so you know i really define being a freelancer as a self-employed one-person operation and again once you start hiring employees you're not a freelancer anymore you're a business owner you're responsible for people and you know things of that nature um you know yeah uh you know you have to work more uh because you have to make sure the revenue is coming in to you know pay people um you know like etc etc so that kind of spells out what it is to be kind of that one person self-employed operation and calling yourself a freelancer um you know another option though where people can probably call them fairly call themselves a freelancer is when it's more your side hustle right in other words you have a full-time job somewhere or some kind of full-time business or career somewhere and you're doing development work on the side this could be for example you know like you're working a dev job somewhere and you uh you know start building websites for people on the side just as one example but you keep your full-time job or you know maybe you've got a full-time job that's completely unrelated to software development and uh you know you're finishing up free code camp and you want to just do some work on the site as a part-time project again you keep your full-time job but you're doing you know your dev work you know like on the side uh that would be another definition that i would assign to the word you know like freelance developer so the one thing about this approach is you're you're working two jobs right because you're working your full-time job and you have your business on the side and that means you are working a lot of hours i mean a lot because you have a full-time job and now you've got a business that you know you've got to run a part-time business that you've got to run you know like on the side of that so it means a lot of times you're going to be working on client projects at night you're going to be working you know like on client projects on the weekends it really tends to mean that friday is only two more working days until monday so if you know if you're going to go that route of making it a part-time business while you have a full-time job understand you are going to be working a lot of hours uh upsides and downsides of this approach are that it can result in more stable income for you because you know like as i said a minute ago people who truly work for themselves only uh you know kind of good months and bad months and their income can be all over the place well if you have a job somewhere then that means you have a steady paycheck right so you know you've got the steadiness of the paycheck but you also have a lot less upside potential because again you can make more working for yourself and you're just choosing to devote a lot of time to working for somebody else so the amount of money your business can bring in is going to be limited again because you're just doing this as you know like a side hustle so you know which one's right you know going the whole self-employment route or go in the side hustle route that really depends on you it depends on your you know your personal choices your personal preferences your personal situation and just kind of what it is you want out of life more than anything else so there's nothing right or wrong you know with either of those approaches you just gotta pick um which one's right for you but if you are gonna think of yourself as a quote-unquote freelance developer you my suggestion would be either a say i'm self-employed and i'm going to make this a full-time thing and i am going to work really hard at it i'm really going to try and grow it and the second approach would be hey this is a side hustle and i'm gonna keep my main job and whichever one of those is right for you hey rock on man um so again with all that said that's kind of how i define freelancing in one of those two terms uh you know you know you can pick which one's right for you so with all that said uh in a minute we're going to talk about uh how to get customers online and how to get customers in your own locale but before we do that i think it's really important that we lay out some things you need to get done in your business before you even try to get a customer at all okay in other words before you start proactively marketing yourselves to anyone so let's take a look at that okay before we talk about how you're going to go out and get new customers for your business we need to talk about a few things that you need to nail down inside your business uh before you even start marketing yourself to new people that haven't found you yet and the reason i say you need to nail these things down from the get-go is because it's all about getting your business off on the right foot correct um if you start off on the wrong foot then as you start getting busy it's only going to get harder to go back and correct these things so the time to make sure you've got all your ducks in a row is from the beginning not something you do later on so two things you need to nail down before you even go out and try to market yourself to someone who hasn't heard of you yet is one setting up your company around the idea that you're going to exit or you're going to service your existing customers first and try to get new customers second i'll explain why this is in a minute the second thing you're going to do is get all your branding set up your website review profiles things of that nature and i'm going to give you an action item list for those in just a minute so let's talk about each of these in turn the most important part of how you're going to get customers in the future is to focus on your existing customers first in other words focus on your existing customers first and market second and like i said before you even try to meet anybody else you got to make sure your business is set up around this concept so why do i say it is crucial to set up your business around the idea of focusing on existing customers first and servicing existing customers first um well let me explain this a little indirectly if you talk to not just and not just developers if you talk to just business owners in general and you ask them hey what do you need to do to grow your business the first thing they need they'll almost always universally say is they need to market more they need to advertise more they need to do more things to get people who have never heard of them calling and that usually involves some kind of paid advertising going to networking events and you know and all that kind of stuff um well think of it like this every dollar or every you know every bit of time you put into dealing with advertising every bit of time you put into uh going to networking events that's money and time you're not putting into uh existing customers that you already have working for you that means those existing customers are going to wait a little longer to get the product that you're supposed to be working on for them it means those existing customers aren't having as good an experience as they would otherwise have and then they become less likely to refer somebody to you in the future they become less likely to give you a review be someone who gives you a review i should say this puts you in a position of having to reach a new customer every time you want to get new business so in other words you know if you want to have four new customers your marketing would need to reach four people four separate people who have never heard of you at all think of how resource intensive this is you know to go out and reach four people you've got to do enough advertising to reach four separate people uh if you're doing it through networking events you've got to go to enough networking events to meet you know like four separate potential clients it is incredibly resource intensive to run a business that is entirely reliant on customers who have otherwise never heard of you as opposed to customers who are referred to you by somebody who has already heard of you okay so i've this is something i've gone around around with businesses about for years and a lot of people just to be frank don't get it and they wonder why they struggle um you know if you focus on those existing customers first what you could do instead of that resource intensive approach i just described is you can get one lead and then turn that lead into several new clients and several jobs without putting any more resources into getting leads so i have several personal examples of this i'll just share one with you in 2013 i uh i built a website for a lawyer that lawyer was you know i focused on it you know got it out the door that lawyer was really happy with my services uh relatively short amount of time later doesn't matter relatively short amount of time later that lawyer called me had me build a second website for her law firm on a new kind of about a new niche area of law that she was going to be practicing so she was going to have two websites so that one phone call became two jobs because she was happy with my services and became a repeat customer she has since then referred me to more people and one of those people have hired me and and so in addition to that one phone call turning into three different products i've built i am also performing on i also have a performing uh or a contract for performing on ongoing maintenance with the lawyer and i have a contract for performing ongoing maintenance with the person that the lawyer referred to me so one phone call turned into three separate jobs and two ongoing maintenance contracts okay think of that versus you know if you wanna do three projects you gotta go out and get three separate leads it is much much better to service your existing customers first and let those existing customers turn into resources whenever you see a developer who makes twice as much as somebody else so in other words if developer one makes twice as much money as developer two it's not because developer one is getting twice as many phone calls um from people that wouldn't have otherwise heard of them uh they're getting more phone calls but they're also getting a lot of referrals they're getting a lot of repeat business and things of that nature you cannot grow your business at any kind of decent rate without referrals without repeat business you cannot do it and you get those referrals in that repeat business by focusing on your existing customers first so what focusing on your existing customers first means is if there is something that you could be doing for an existing customer do it okay and if you have time left over at the end then that time goes into marketing so let's say for example you've dedicated yourself to saying hey i'm going to work 45 hours a week in my business okay and then your dev work for the week and customer service for the week takes up 30 hours okay and so you've worked 30 hours you have 15 more to work but you don't really have anything else you can be doing for clients right now then you devote that other 15 hours into going out and trying to get new customers but focus on your existing customers first and you will actually find yourself working smarter not harder and your business will grow you know like exponentially as a result of that so thing number one to do when getting ready to start up your freelance business before even trying to get a customer understand that you need to service existing customers first the second thing you need to do before even attempting to go out and get customers is establish your branding okay and by your branding i mean things like your website your portfolio will work and things of that nature the reason why you need to have your branding set up before you even try to get customers it's pretty simple right put yourself in the shoes of someone that you're hoping will hire you like let's say you're talking to you know um a local local auto shop um asking uh you know and you're hoping that you can you know build a website or an app for them or something and you know you don't have a website of your own you don't have a portfolio work to show them you you know don't have any online reviews or anything of that nature what are the chances they're going to take you seriously slim to none right so what you'll wind up doing is spending a lot of time trying to get that first lead even though you know even though you could have gotten that first lead with a lot less effort if you had done like all those things in advance so first part of branding yourself is to get a portfolio website up uh and when i say a portfolio website i mean a website that shows what you do and uh you know some stuff you've built you can build out your own or if you're looking for inspiration a really good resource for uh to go to uh for your website would be html5 up uh we're gonna link to them in the description below uh you know if you use a free template from html5 up just make sure that uh you know you're following their licensing requirements and giving attribution you know like we're required and uh things like that they have paid templates you know like you can use um as well but so getting your website up is number one including a portfolio in that website is really crucial if you have not done a lot of things yet or haven't done a lot of projects yet you can still include a portfolio that targets your market on your website so let's just say for example and again i'm using simple examples let's say your niche is going to be hey i want to build uh you know websites and apps for small local businesses okay so what you can do is put together essentially uh mock-up websites that would fit local businesses so like let's say for example you know you want to go around and introduce yourself to local restaurants well you know put together a restaurant website for you know a mythical restaurant and put it in your portfolio you know put together something for professional services businesses like law firms psychologists things like that and again a fictional mock-up and put that in your portfolio you can put five or six projects in your portfolio that would be examples of the types of local businesses you're going to be going out you know like in targeting so you can have a portfolio saying for example if you walked into a psychologist's office and you had a psychology website on your uh you know on your portfolio you could walk into a psychologist's office and explain here's what your website could look like i have you know a mock-up of this so putting together a portfolio into your website is crucial because again no one's going to take you seriously if you have a website of your own and you don't have a body of work to show and it may sound like duh when i say you have to have a website but you would be surprised at what a lot of other people do the other thing after you've put together your website and your portfolio is you need to set up your online review profiles um so for example go to google my business and set up a profile for your new for your new company uh go to facebook and set up a facebook page for your new company those would be the two big ones that i would suggest and whenever a customer is happy with you make sure you're asking the customer to you know like leave you a review as you get more reviews online more people will be willing to hire you you want to get those review profiles set up you know like like from day one so you're in a position to ask people for reviews um it's kind of hard to call somebody and say hey would you mind leaving me a review online when you don't even have the profiles to send them to yet right so get those set up you know like from day one the last thing you need to do before even attempting to go out and get a new customer is uh get get a business card for yourself and get a business phone number so people aren't just calling your personal cell phone business cards can be gotten pretty cheaply from a service like vistaprint and i mean i would just do kind of a basic option and then in terms of a business phone number you could use a free service like google voice it'll just go straight to your cell phone but then you have a dedicated line you know like for your business phone so those are the things i would really do in terms of setting up your branding so you know just again quick to quickly recap before you even attempt to go out and get a get a customer um meaning someone who hasn't heard of you yet number one understand and structure your business in a way that is focused on i'm gonna service existing customers first number two is establish your branding and branding is things like website portfolio online review profiles business cards and business phone number okay so once you get all those things out of the way you are then in a position to go out and uh start trying to get customers and start establishing a customer base in terms of getting customers online and getting customers locally in your city so with all that said let's you know let's talk about how to get customers online especially since you will have now created your own website as part of your branding okay so let's talk about how you can get customers online as an as a freelance developer now if you go back to the start of this video you remember i said that i was going to be focusing on concepts that are really meant to take your business to like kind of like that next level so in this video i'm not going to talk about places where you can get customers online uh you know essentially through like third-party hiring sites instead what i'm going to talk about is how to build up your web presence in a way that is going it's going to bring you customers on a regular basis building up your web presence in a way that is profitable for your business revolves around a couple of concepts number one is going to be invest in your web presence don't spend on it this is really crucial i'll explain what this is in a minute number two is optimizing your website for a few niche areas in your local market okay and i'll explain why this is in a minute uh but before we get to optimizing your website let's go back to the first one which is investing in your web presence instead of spending on it here is the difference when you invest in something you own it when you spend money on something you're renting it so an example of spending would be you build a website for your business you put your portfolio in it looks really nice and to get customers in your market to see your website you like do paid ads for google paid ads through facebook things like that you're renting ad space from a third party you're spending money on ads because you don't own anything at the end of the day right well you can make money doing that so let's say you spend a thousand bucks on ads this month let's say it brings ten thousand bucks in business into your bank account it's easy to look at that and go score the problem with that is that thousand dollars is gone it's never going to bring you another dime okay it's um you spent a thousand got 10 but that's it and next month if you don't spend money again your revenue goes from 10 000 to zero so you get locked into spending you know essentially spending money on ads on just you know a perpetual basis and it can get really hard to get out of that trap now if you invest in your business you can put some time and resources into something once but then it keeps paying you a dividend forever because you own it so investing is when you own something an example of owning something would be creating a blog post for your website that is meant to reach your target audience in organic search it could mean doing youtube videos that your target audience may see organically like things of that nature and that can have a much better result for your business when you go that ownership route and investment route versus spending and renting okay um so just to give you a personal example uh my previous brand uh was was acquired earlier this year in 2020 something i'm quite happy about obviously so over the years i'd written roughly 400 articles on that for that brand um you know again reaching out to like my target market uh and a lot of those articles got a lot of traffic people called me because of them when i wrote an article it was on my blog forever i never had to do anything else with that article right so as opposed to an ad where the ad goes i pay for an ad it goes up but once it gets clicked on it's gone unless i pay again if i put time into writing an article it's there forever and it can keep on giving a return it doesn't have an expiration date on it okay so there was one article the top perform there a lot of my articles performed well but the top performing article on that blog got roughly call it ten thousand clicks um over a seven several year period so you know clicks and organic search without paid ads um if i had been doing paid advertising i probably would have spent somewhere in the area of let's say 10 bucks a click okay so to get ten thousand clicks from potential customers would cost me a hundred thousand dollars it's a lot of money right that article that got the ten thousand clicks uh between researching it and writing it took me less than i want to say less than 10 hours to do it so i got the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars worth of advertising for less than 10 hours of work now obviously that post was a home run they're not all going to be like that but you can see as you keep building up posts on your blog as you keep building up videos think of how that compounds over time so if you invest in things like blog post videos and other content that you're going to own as opposed to renting ad space you can really increase your profitability real fast and more people will find you without you having to spend a lot of time and money to do it my pr my prior brand that was just acquired the i started it in 2013 i sold it in 2020 i spent zero dollars in advertising the entire time you know like i had that brand okay it was all just investment in video it was uh you know mostly in blog writing but also uh you know like some videos i did on youtube interviews i gave you know like and some other things but i did not spend any money marketing that business at all so build up your business and your web presence in a way where you're investing in it and again investment means you own it if you put a blog post on your website you own it no one can take it from you if you put a video up on youtube you own it okay no one can take it from you do that as opposed to spending which means essentially running ad space from third party so rule number one invest in your web presence don't spend on it once you're doing that it comes to well what's my web presence going to look like and you really want to optimize your web presence for a few services in your local market okay so in other words your website may not even really hold out everything you do and it may not just talk about all the geographies you service and that's fine okay the reason i say that's fine is best explained by looking at what other developers do or i should say a lot of developers do which i consider to be quite wrong okay um you'll find a lot of freelance developers that have you know like a general website for themselves it says hey you know i build stuff for the web or i'm a web developer and kind of like a broad term um they'll list a bunch of languages and frameworks that you know they're familiar with um they might say where they're located but they don't really say i service these areas in other words you know they're not targeting a particular geography so you know if you're a consumer of services and you look at their website it's not really clear what niche they serve if any what services they offer it's kind of broad you're not sure if they work with people in your area or not um and so you may be might be less likely to call that person as a consumer the other thing is think of that competition think of the competition if you're a freelance developer and you've got a website that just says you know i can build pretty much anything for anyone anywhere then you are potentially or essentially i should say competing against every other developer out there uh good luck doing well in search results with that uh number one and number two even if you can get your site doing well in search on that on that broad of a level you are really like i said competing with the whole world you know like essentially so it is much better to reach a large number of people advertising some of what you do than it is to reach no people advertising all of what you do right so in other words uh in other words what i would suggest doing is focus your website on your local market and you know really just narrow down and you know make your website really emphasize a few of your services so like for example i live in ohio my website really focuses on you know ohio and all the cities you know like they're in it and it really only discusses a few of the services i can provide to people i can provide things other than those services but i just don't really get into them that much you know like on my website and as a result of that if you for example go to google and google you know do a search for ohio website design my site actually like comes up first in uh the organic results and that is really important because you would be surprised at just how many people uh are looking for a developer that's close to them a lot of my clients and i do mean a lot of my clients you know again that you could call a developer in another state but i'd get a lot of customers that want someone in ohio so you know like they're calling me i mean don't get me wrong i do stuff for people all over the country um you know and i i mean i built stuff for people in literally all over the country on a regular basis but again in terms of what comes in through my website i really focus on like my local market because a lot of people are looking for someone in their local market and it's not as much competition i'm not trying to compete against every single web developer in the country i am competing against the web developers who are specifically holding themselves out to my state um so clearly spell out you know like what geographies you service and the reason i say to clearly limit it to a few services is you want customers who land on your website to clearly understand what it is you do and you don't want them to go sifting through you know let's say you've got like 20 i'm making up a ridiculous number to prove the point let's say you've got a list of like 20 things listed on your website that you know you can handle um again they don't want to sift through all that all right so i really just narrow it down to just a few things and focus on your local market that's really what optimizing your website for your local market looks like in terms of geography and content and it's also important to optimize your site in general uh for those kinds of things um uh spoil alert i'll be doing an seo guide for a free code camp in relatively near future but for now we're going to put a link to an seo starter guide from google down in the description to this video so when you're building out your website to get clients online really think of it from the standpoint of a few services you really want to target a specific geography you know like you really want to target make sure the geography is big enough to actually support your business like you know a large city or or even an entire state but again you know narrow down your services narrow down your geography let that be the focus of your website and again it's not everything you do it's not everyone you service but that's fine it's much better to get a lot of traffic for a few things than no traffic for a lot of things okay the former equals you making money the latter like does not so once you've got your website up after that it's all about adding blog posts adding uh you know adding video to youtube things like that do things that you're going to own and that are going to be relevant to your potential customers and that's how you're going to get clients online for your website and the beauty of it is again you do a blog post today you do a video today something like that it keeps paying dividends for years and years and years and years like with the example i gave about my previous brand that was acquired if you just rely on spending money to bring in business like through ads and things of that it gets pretty hard to make some money so invest in your web presence don't spend money on it and optimize for your local market and that is how you get customers online and that's how you get people calling you um on a recurring basis in terms of new business coming in so while what we just talked about is going to bring in a lot of local business optimizing your website for your local market let's talk about some other ways you can get business locally that don't involve your website okay now let's talk about how to get business in your local market as you gathered in our last segment when i talked about optimizing your website i said optimize your website for your local market so that web presence i suggest is actually going to do a lot tapping into your local market for you but with that being said there are ways to go about getting business locally that don't involve your website so let's look at each of those so in terms of getting customers locally offline there are three things i would really suggest number one is to do contract work for other developers this is a situation where other developers maybe have a little too much to do and you know they're looking to outsource some work and you would be surprised because there will be developers who want to outsource to potentially i should say outsourced to you on a regular basis another one would be contacting potential customers directly and this would mean going out and introducing yourself to you know like b2b type things so for example um you know going to like the local restaurant the local bakery the local whatever and offering to build them a website let's say and then a third option would be to go to networking events so let's go ahead and talk about each of these in turn excuse me in terms of doing contract work for other developers you would be surprised at how many dev shops are interested in outsourcing work because they find themselves in a place where they have too much to do for the amount of staff they have but they don't have enough to do to justify hiring somebody else full time and there are it is not uncommon for dev shops to outsource stuff on a regular basis and if you have somebody if you're a developer and you want to outsource and you have somebody that's worked out well for you in the past it's you know likely there's going to keep sending something to that same person so other developers who want to outsource can be a good uh good uh source of local work when you're trying to get these kinds of opportunities it's important that you don't just you know call them up and say hey are you interested in outsourcing and then leave it at that or something like that instead what i would do is actually pick up the phone uh reach out to the dev shop um ask to speak to whoever would it is that would be you know in charge who or whoever's making this kind of a decision before you make that call actually research the company know a little bit about the company then um after the call or when you get them on the phone i should say you know explain who you are explain that you're available for outsourced work tell the decision maker that you would love to send them a copy of your portfolio along with your cv get their email address email them over copy of your portfolio and your cv now and the important thing i should say is going to be don't just leave it at that so in other words what a lot of devs do in this situation is they email them to somebody saying hey i'm available to outsource and then you know they never follow up um you know again this the shop you're contacting really doesn't have they don't know you they don't really have any reason to call you so you know over somebody else so what you want to do is consistently follow up i would suggest following up you know once a month or so for nothing else a good solid year until they tell you no until they you know or until they hire you tell you no or it's been about a year i mean you got to follow up regularly you know like for things like this so don't be shy on following up and again like i said when you reach out um do it in a way where you're intelligent about you're intelligent and informed about what it is they do explain how you can provide value and then just follow up regularly after that and you would be surprised at how much work you could get um from other dev shops a second option is to go out and contact potential customers directly again this is like a b2b thing like this is going to local businesses um offering to build them a website offering to build them an app you know just offering to provide services of some sort it's the same thing when you go into a local business don't just you know go door-to-door and go walking on in and say this is who you are and this is what you do actually make a list of businesses that you want to go out and talk to and then take some time do some research when you go in and talk to a business make sure you actually know something about them make sure you know about what they do maybe know a little bit about their history you know and whatnot and just like with local developers do not be shy about following up until somebody specifically tells you no again you'd be you know surprised at just persistence and face-to-face contact can go a long way so do not be shy about following up the third thing is something i have talked about a lot in my prior free co-cam videos and that is going to networking events um uh bni uh which stands for business networking international is a good source of uh local networking uh uh and you know just other networking events in general so uh that's something i've talked about before um i do think it's always best to go out and try to meet your potential customers face to face which is why i recommend me just going straight into businesses or going to straight to developers but you know if nothing else um networking has been around for hundreds of years for a reason so attending networking groups such as bni can be another great source of uh getting business locally so you know uh that is really it in terms of this guide for what is freelancing and how to get clients online and in your city um i know there are a lot of things i've discussed in other videos i didn't really raise here and again these tips are meant really to uh not just make some money through your freelance business but to take things to the next level uh if you have any questions you know feel free to connect with me through linkedin don't you know don't be shy about contacting me directly i respond to people all the time who you know inquired to me through free code camp so best of luck with everything and i hope this has been helpful youhi my name is luke sisliano and i'm a self-employed web developer i've done a few articles and videos for free code camp that relate to working for oneself as a freelancer i've decided to expand on those a little bit in this video and the article that's going along with it by really discussing what it even means to be a freelance developer in the first place and i'm also going to talk about how you can get business the first of those topics i think is really important to address because a lot of people aren't really even clear as to what it means to quote on quote unquote be a freelance developer so we're going to really discuss what that looks like and kind of what a more of an actual definition for it is and then we're like i said we're also going to look into how you can get customers in your business and we're going to look at two routes for that the first one being how you can get customers online through your own website and we're also going to look at how you can get customers uh locally in your city uh the one thing i want to do a little differently in this video is i don't want to throw out a lot of the general advice that you'll hear from a lot of resources as to how to get business there are a lot of ways to get business where you can make a few bucks but the approach i'm going to be taking and suggesting in this video and again the article that's going along with it is really meant for those that kind of want to take their business to the next level in other words they don't want to just make a few bucks they want to be really profitable and they want to do really well for themselves so we'll be discussing those tips as we go along but as i said in order in this video we're going to talk about what is freelancing we're going to talk about a list of items that you need to complete before you even think about reaching out to customers once you've decided to go to the freelance route we're going to talk about how you can get customers online and we're going to talk about where to get customers locally and how to get customers locally in your own city so all that said let's get to it okay so before we talk about how to get customers into your development business i think it's important to first kind of talk about what it even means to be a freelancer in the first place i think this is important because the word freelance has kind of become a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in today's society right you'll hear people say i'm a freelance developer i'm a freelance writer a freelance writer i'm a freelance journalist i'm a freelance this or that or blah blah blah in other words because it's almost become kind of a buzzword it can tend to mean different things to different people you might have person one and person two and this person says i'm a freelancer and they mean it one way and this person essentially hears something else and they never really are on the same page as to what the person does so i'm gonna lay out a couple of actual definitions of what it means to be a freelance developer to answer that question of what is freelancing in the first place and the really comes down to two definitions the first one being the individual who is truly self-employed the second one being the individual who's doing it as a side hustle um let's look at the first of these two that i just mentioned if you're going to freelance route it can mean that you are truly self-employed and with that you are a one-person operation uh it's your first of all it's your sole job you don't have any other jobs that you work you know you don't have a full-time job and develop software on the side or anything like that you are a developer and you work for yourself and that's it you have no other income outside of your business and you are truly a one-person operation um you know not only do you do all the marketing and uh or i should say donald do you do all the dev work you do all your own marketing you do all your own bookkeeping you do all your own uh you know uh regulatory filings and things of that nature so you are a one-person operation you are the administrative side of things you are the uh business development side of things you are the actual uh dev work side of things you know that is you um going this route can result in much higher income than you tend to receive uh in a job for somebody if you really you know you know if you really decide to get behind your business and keep it get it going in my experience you can really make a lot more working for yourself than you can working for somebody else because you're keeping one hundred percent of what you bail out right instead of somebody else billing out your labor and then taking a percentage of it you're keeping 100 percent of your you know what's built for your own labor so you know if you really put your nose to the grindstone you can uh make a lot more money going the self-employed route self-employed slash freelance route than you can working for somebody else the one thing to understand about this though is that going that self-employment route is going to result in a less stable income when you're working a job for somebody you have the security of a paycheck whereas you know when you're working for yourself you might have a big month you might have a bad month you might have a mediocre month your income's going to be all over the place uh you know you have to worry about clients paying you on time you have to worry about getting clients you have to worry about how slow is your business how busy is your business um things of that nature so your income is really going to go up and down in you know like a really big way so you've really got to think about um the fact that if you're going to go the self-employment route that you're going to have less stable income than you would working a job even though you have the potential to in aggregate make more money you know like at the end of every year the other thing excuse me and the other thing about you know going the truly independent route is that you're going to be putting in a lot of hours um because again you've got to do all the dev work you've got to do all the marketing you've got to do all the bookkeeping and you've got to do all of the name 10 other things you know that i haven't listed yet so you know it's easy to work full time as a dev without having to do all that stuff so if you're going to be doing all that stuff as well it means you're going to be working a lot of hours now even though you're working a lot of hours one of the upsides of this is you tend to get a lot of flexibility where you work right you know you can take a vacation and get work done while you're on vacation you can travel and you know like work while you're traveling if you you know uh you know if you kind of want to just become a traveling nomad and code all over the place you can potentially even do that so it really gives a lot of flexibility into how you live your personal lifestyle um the reason uh i keep talking about this in the context of self-employment and you doing everything is that going this uh individual route does not involve you having any employees okay once you start hiring employees you're not a freelancer you're a business owner at that point so you know i really define being a freelancer as a self-employed one-person operation and again once you start hiring employees you're not a freelancer anymore you're a business owner you're responsible for people and you know things of that nature um you know yeah uh you know you have to work more uh because you have to make sure the revenue is coming in to you know pay people um you know like etc etc so that kind of spells out what it is to be kind of that one person self-employed operation and calling yourself a freelancer um you know another option though where people can probably call them fairly call themselves a freelancer is when it's more your side hustle right in other words you have a full-time job somewhere or some kind of full-time business or career somewhere and you're doing development work on the side this could be for example you know like you're working a dev job somewhere and you uh you know start building websites for people on the side just as one example but you keep your full-time job or you know maybe you've got a full-time job that's completely unrelated to software development and uh you know you're finishing up free code camp and you want to just do some work on the site as a part-time project again you keep your full-time job but you're doing you know your dev work you know like on the side uh that would be another definition that i would assign to the word you know like freelance developer so the one thing about this approach is you're you're working two jobs right because you're working your full-time job and you have your business on the side and that means you are working a lot of hours i mean a lot because you have a full-time job and now you've got a business that you know you've got to run a part-time business that you've got to run you know like on the side of that so it means a lot of times you're going to be working on client projects at night you're going to be working you know like on client projects on the weekends it really tends to mean that friday is only two more working days until monday so if you know if you're going to go that route of making it a part-time business while you have a full-time job understand you are going to be working a lot of hours uh upsides and downsides of this approach are that it can result in more stable income for you because you know like as i said a minute ago people who truly work for themselves only uh you know kind of good months and bad months and their income can be all over the place well if you have a job somewhere then that means you have a steady paycheck right so you know you've got the steadiness of the paycheck but you also have a lot less upside potential because again you can make more working for yourself and you're just choosing to devote a lot of time to working for somebody else so the amount of money your business can bring in is going to be limited again because you're just doing this as you know like a side hustle so you know which one's right you know going the whole self-employment route or go in the side hustle route that really depends on you it depends on your you know your personal choices your personal preferences your personal situation and just kind of what it is you want out of life more than anything else so there's nothing right or wrong you know with either of those approaches you just gotta pick um which one's right for you but if you are gonna think of yourself as a quote-unquote freelance developer you my suggestion would be either a say i'm self-employed and i'm going to make this a full-time thing and i am going to work really hard at it i'm really going to try and grow it and the second approach would be hey this is a side hustle and i'm gonna keep my main job and whichever one of those is right for you hey rock on man um so again with all that said that's kind of how i define freelancing in one of those two terms uh you know you know you can pick which one's right for you so with all that said uh in a minute we're going to talk about uh how to get customers online and how to get customers in your own locale but before we do that i think it's really important that we lay out some things you need to get done in your business before you even try to get a customer at all okay in other words before you start proactively marketing yourselves to anyone so let's take a look at that okay before we talk about how you're going to go out and get new customers for your business we need to talk about a few things that you need to nail down inside your business uh before you even start marketing yourself to new people that haven't found you yet and the reason i say you need to nail these things down from the get-go is because it's all about getting your business off on the right foot correct um if you start off on the wrong foot then as you start getting busy it's only going to get harder to go back and correct these things so the time to make sure you've got all your ducks in a row is from the beginning not something you do later on so two things you need to nail down before you even go out and try to market yourself to someone who hasn't heard of you yet is one setting up your company around the idea that you're going to exit or you're going to service your existing customers first and try to get new customers second i'll explain why this is in a minute the second thing you're going to do is get all your branding set up your website review profiles things of that nature and i'm going to give you an action item list for those in just a minute so let's talk about each of these in turn the most important part of how you're going to get customers in the future is to focus on your existing customers first in other words focus on your existing customers first and market second and like i said before you even try to meet anybody else you got to make sure your business is set up around this concept so why do i say it is crucial to set up your business around the idea of focusing on existing customers first and servicing existing customers first um well let me explain this a little indirectly if you talk to not just and not just developers if you talk to just business owners in general and you ask them hey what do you need to do to grow your business the first thing they need they'll almost always universally say is they need to market more they need to advertise more they need to do more things to get people who have never heard of them calling and that usually involves some kind of paid advertising going to networking events and you know and all that kind of stuff um well think of it like this every dollar or every you know every bit of time you put into dealing with advertising every bit of time you put into uh going to networking events that's money and time you're not putting into uh existing customers that you already have working for you that means those existing customers are going to wait a little longer to get the product that you're supposed to be working on for them it means those existing customers aren't having as good an experience as they would otherwise have and then they become less likely to refer somebody to you in the future they become less likely to give you a review be someone who gives you a review i should say this puts you in a position of having to reach a new customer every time you want to get new business so in other words you know if you want to have four new customers your marketing would need to reach four people four separate people who have never heard of you at all think of how resource intensive this is you know to go out and reach four people you've got to do enough advertising to reach four separate people uh if you're doing it through networking events you've got to go to enough networking events to meet you know like four separate potential clients it is incredibly resource intensive to run a business that is entirely reliant on customers who have otherwise never heard of you as opposed to customers who are referred to you by somebody who has already heard of you okay so i've this is something i've gone around around with businesses about for years and a lot of people just to be frank don't get it and they wonder why they struggle um you know if you focus on those existing customers first what you could do instead of that resource intensive approach i just described is you can get one lead and then turn that lead into several new clients and several jobs without putting any more resources into getting leads so i have several personal examples of this i'll just share one with you in 2013 i uh i built a website for a lawyer that lawyer was you know i focused on it you know got it out the door that lawyer was really happy with my services uh relatively short amount of time later doesn't matter relatively short amount of time later that lawyer called me had me build a second website for her law firm on a new kind of about a new niche area of law that she was going to be practicing so she was going to have two websites so that one phone call became two jobs because she was happy with my services and became a repeat customer she has since then referred me to more people and one of those people have hired me and and so in addition to that one phone call turning into three different products i've built i am also performing on i also have a performing uh or a contract for performing on ongoing maintenance with the lawyer and i have a contract for performing ongoing maintenance with the person that the lawyer referred to me so one phone call turned into three separate jobs and two ongoing maintenance contracts okay think of that versus you know if you wanna do three projects you gotta go out and get three separate leads it is much much better to service your existing customers first and let those existing customers turn into resources whenever you see a developer who makes twice as much as somebody else so in other words if developer one makes twice as much money as developer two it's not because developer one is getting twice as many phone calls um from people that wouldn't have otherwise heard of them uh they're getting more phone calls but they're also getting a lot of referrals they're getting a lot of repeat business and things of that nature you cannot grow your business at any kind of decent rate without referrals without repeat business you cannot do it and you get those referrals in that repeat business by focusing on your existing customers first so what focusing on your existing customers first means is if there is something that you could be doing for an existing customer do it okay and if you have time left over at the end then that time goes into marketing so let's say for example you've dedicated yourself to saying hey i'm going to work 45 hours a week in my business okay and then your dev work for the week and customer service for the week takes up 30 hours okay and so you've worked 30 hours you have 15 more to work but you don't really have anything else you can be doing for clients right now then you devote that other 15 hours into going out and trying to get new customers but focus on your existing customers first and you will actually find yourself working smarter not harder and your business will grow you know like exponentially as a result of that so thing number one to do when getting ready to start up your freelance business before even trying to get a customer understand that you need to service existing customers first the second thing you need to do before even attempting to go out and get customers is establish your branding okay and by your branding i mean things like your website your portfolio will work and things of that nature the reason why you need to have your branding set up before you even try to get customers it's pretty simple right put yourself in the shoes of someone that you're hoping will hire you like let's say you're talking to you know um a local local auto shop um asking uh you know and you're hoping that you can you know build a website or an app for them or something and you know you don't have a website of your own you don't have a portfolio work to show them you you know don't have any online reviews or anything of that nature what are the chances they're going to take you seriously slim to none right so what you'll wind up doing is spending a lot of time trying to get that first lead even though you know even though you could have gotten that first lead with a lot less effort if you had done like all those things in advance so first part of branding yourself is to get a portfolio website up uh and when i say a portfolio website i mean a website that shows what you do and uh you know some stuff you've built you can build out your own or if you're looking for inspiration a really good resource for uh to go to uh for your website would be html5 up uh we're gonna link to them in the description below uh you know if you use a free template from html5 up just make sure that uh you know you're following their licensing requirements and giving attribution you know like we're required and uh things like that they have paid templates you know like you can use um as well but so getting your website up is number one including a portfolio in that website is really crucial if you have not done a lot of things yet or haven't done a lot of projects yet you can still include a portfolio that targets your market on your website so let's just say for example and again i'm using simple examples let's say your niche is going to be hey i want to build uh you know websites and apps for small local businesses okay so what you can do is put together essentially uh mock-up websites that would fit local businesses so like let's say for example you know you want to go around and introduce yourself to local restaurants well you know put together a restaurant website for you know a mythical restaurant and put it in your portfolio you know put together something for professional services businesses like law firms psychologists things like that and again a fictional mock-up and put that in your portfolio you can put five or six projects in your portfolio that would be examples of the types of local businesses you're going to be going out you know like in targeting so you can have a portfolio saying for example if you walked into a psychologist's office and you had a psychology website on your uh you know on your portfolio you could walk into a psychologist's office and explain here's what your website could look like i have you know a mock-up of this so putting together a portfolio into your website is crucial because again no one's going to take you seriously if you have a website of your own and you don't have a body of work to show and it may sound like duh when i say you have to have a website but you would be surprised at what a lot of other people do the other thing after you've put together your website and your portfolio is you need to set up your online review profiles um so for example go to google my business and set up a profile for your new for your new company uh go to facebook and set up a facebook page for your new company those would be the two big ones that i would suggest and whenever a customer is happy with you make sure you're asking the customer to you know like leave you a review as you get more reviews online more people will be willing to hire you you want to get those review profiles set up you know like like from day one so you're in a position to ask people for reviews um it's kind of hard to call somebody and say hey would you mind leaving me a review online when you don't even have the profiles to send them to yet right so get those set up you know like from day one the last thing you need to do before even attempting to go out and get a new customer is uh get get a business card for yourself and get a business phone number so people aren't just calling your personal cell phone business cards can be gotten pretty cheaply from a service like vistaprint and i mean i would just do kind of a basic option and then in terms of a business phone number you could use a free service like google voice it'll just go straight to your cell phone but then you have a dedicated line you know like for your business phone so those are the things i would really do in terms of setting up your branding so you know just again quick to quickly recap before you even attempt to go out and get a get a customer um meaning someone who hasn't heard of you yet number one understand and structure your business in a way that is focused on i'm gonna service existing customers first number two is establish your branding and branding is things like website portfolio online review profiles business cards and business phone number okay so once you get all those things out of the way you are then in a position to go out and uh start trying to get customers and start establishing a customer base in terms of getting customers online and getting customers locally in your city so with all that said let's you know let's talk about how to get customers online especially since you will have now created your own website as part of your branding okay so let's talk about how you can get customers online as an as a freelance developer now if you go back to the start of this video you remember i said that i was going to be focusing on concepts that are really meant to take your business to like kind of like that next level so in this video i'm not going to talk about places where you can get customers online uh you know essentially through like third-party hiring sites instead what i'm going to talk about is how to build up your web presence in a way that is going it's going to bring you customers on a regular basis building up your web presence in a way that is profitable for your business revolves around a couple of concepts number one is going to be invest in your web presence don't spend on it this is really crucial i'll explain what this is in a minute number two is optimizing your website for a few niche areas in your local market okay and i'll explain why this is in a minute uh but before we get to optimizing your website let's go back to the first one which is investing in your web presence instead of spending on it here is the difference when you invest in something you own it when you spend money on something you're renting it so an example of spending would be you build a website for your business you put your portfolio in it looks really nice and to get customers in your market to see your website you like do paid ads for google paid ads through facebook things like that you're renting ad space from a third party you're spending money on ads because you don't own anything at the end of the day right well you can make money doing that so let's say you spend a thousand bucks on ads this month let's say it brings ten thousand bucks in business into your bank account it's easy to look at that and go score the problem with that is that thousand dollars is gone it's never going to bring you another dime okay it's um you spent a thousand got 10 but that's it and next month if you don't spend money again your revenue goes from 10 000 to zero so you get locked into spending you know essentially spending money on ads on just you know a perpetual basis and it can get really hard to get out of that trap now if you invest in your business you can put some time and resources into something once but then it keeps paying you a dividend forever because you own it so investing is when you own something an example of owning something would be creating a blog post for your website that is meant to reach your target audience in organic search it could mean doing youtube videos that your target audience may see organically like things of that nature and that can have a much better result for your business when you go that ownership route and investment route versus spending and renting okay um so just to give you a personal example uh my previous brand uh was was acquired earlier this year in 2020 something i'm quite happy about obviously so over the years i'd written roughly 400 articles on that for that brand um you know again reaching out to like my target market uh and a lot of those articles got a lot of traffic people called me because of them when i wrote an article it was on my blog forever i never had to do anything else with that article right so as opposed to an ad where the ad goes i pay for an ad it goes up but once it gets clicked on it's gone unless i pay again if i put time into writing an article it's there forever and it can keep on giving a return it doesn't have an expiration date on it okay so there was one article the top perform there a lot of my articles performed well but the top performing article on that blog got roughly call it ten thousand clicks um over a seven several year period so you know clicks and organic search without paid ads um if i had been doing paid advertising i probably would have spent somewhere in the area of let's say 10 bucks a click okay so to get ten thousand clicks from potential customers would cost me a hundred thousand dollars it's a lot of money right that article that got the ten thousand clicks uh between researching it and writing it took me less than i want to say less than 10 hours to do it so i got the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars worth of advertising for less than 10 hours of work now obviously that post was a home run they're not all going to be like that but you can see as you keep building up posts on your blog as you keep building up videos think of how that compounds over time so if you invest in things like blog post videos and other content that you're going to own as opposed to renting ad space you can really increase your profitability real fast and more people will find you without you having to spend a lot of time and money to do it my pr my prior brand that was just acquired the i started it in 2013 i sold it in 2020 i spent zero dollars in advertising the entire time you know like i had that brand okay it was all just investment in video it was uh you know mostly in blog writing but also uh you know like some videos i did on youtube interviews i gave you know like and some other things but i did not spend any money marketing that business at all so build up your business and your web presence in a way where you're investing in it and again investment means you own it if you put a blog post on your website you own it no one can take it from you if you put a video up on youtube you own it okay no one can take it from you do that as opposed to spending which means essentially running ad space from third party so rule number one invest in your web presence don't spend on it once you're doing that it comes to well what's my web presence going to look like and you really want to optimize your web presence for a few services in your local market okay so in other words your website may not even really hold out everything you do and it may not just talk about all the geographies you service and that's fine okay the reason i say that's fine is best explained by looking at what other developers do or i should say a lot of developers do which i consider to be quite wrong okay um you'll find a lot of freelance developers that have you know like a general website for themselves it says hey you know i build stuff for the web or i'm a web developer and kind of like a broad term um they'll list a bunch of languages and frameworks that you know they're familiar with um they might say where they're located but they don't really say i service these areas in other words you know they're not targeting a particular geography so you know if you're a consumer of services and you look at their website it's not really clear what niche they serve if any what services they offer it's kind of broad you're not sure if they work with people in your area or not um and so you may be might be less likely to call that person as a consumer the other thing is think of that competition think of the competition if you're a freelance developer and you've got a website that just says you know i can build pretty much anything for anyone anywhere then you are potentially or essentially i should say competing against every other developer out there uh good luck doing well in search results with that uh number one and number two even if you can get your site doing well in search on that on that broad of a level you are really like i said competing with the whole world you know like essentially so it is much better to reach a large number of people advertising some of what you do than it is to reach no people advertising all of what you do right so in other words uh in other words what i would suggest doing is focus your website on your local market and you know really just narrow down and you know make your website really emphasize a few of your services so like for example i live in ohio my website really focuses on you know ohio and all the cities you know like they're in it and it really only discusses a few of the services i can provide to people i can provide things other than those services but i just don't really get into them that much you know like on my website and as a result of that if you for example go to google and google you know do a search for ohio website design my site actually like comes up first in uh the organic results and that is really important because you would be surprised at just how many people uh are looking for a developer that's close to them a lot of my clients and i do mean a lot of my clients you know again that you could call a developer in another state but i'd get a lot of customers that want someone in ohio so you know like they're calling me i mean don't get me wrong i do stuff for people all over the country um you know and i i mean i built stuff for people in literally all over the country on a regular basis but again in terms of what comes in through my website i really focus on like my local market because a lot of people are looking for someone in their local market and it's not as much competition i'm not trying to compete against every single web developer in the country i am competing against the web developers who are specifically holding themselves out to my state um so clearly spell out you know like what geographies you service and the reason i say to clearly limit it to a few services is you want customers who land on your website to clearly understand what it is you do and you don't want them to go sifting through you know let's say you've got like 20 i'm making up a ridiculous number to prove the point let's say you've got a list of like 20 things listed on your website that you know you can handle um again they don't want to sift through all that all right so i really just narrow it down to just a few things and focus on your local market that's really what optimizing your website for your local market looks like in terms of geography and content and it's also important to optimize your site in general uh for those kinds of things um uh spoil alert i'll be doing an seo guide for a free code camp in relatively near future but for now we're going to put a link to an seo starter guide from google down in the description to this video so when you're building out your website to get clients online really think of it from the standpoint of a few services you really want to target a specific geography you know like you really want to target make sure the geography is big enough to actually support your business like you know a large city or or even an entire state but again you know narrow down your services narrow down your geography let that be the focus of your website and again it's not everything you do it's not everyone you service but that's fine it's much better to get a lot of traffic for a few things than no traffic for a lot of things okay the former equals you making money the latter like does not so once you've got your website up after that it's all about adding blog posts adding uh you know adding video to youtube things like that do things that you're going to own and that are going to be relevant to your potential customers and that's how you're going to get clients online for your website and the beauty of it is again you do a blog post today you do a video today something like that it keeps paying dividends for years and years and years and years like with the example i gave about my previous brand that was acquired if you just rely on spending money to bring in business like through ads and things of that it gets pretty hard to make some money so invest in your web presence don't spend money on it and optimize for your local market and that is how you get customers online and that's how you get people calling you um on a recurring basis in terms of new business coming in so while what we just talked about is going to bring in a lot of local business optimizing your website for your local market let's talk about some other ways you can get business locally that don't involve your website okay now let's talk about how to get business in your local market as you gathered in our last segment when i talked about optimizing your website i said optimize your website for your local market so that web presence i suggest is actually going to do a lot tapping into your local market for you but with that being said there are ways to go about getting business locally that don't involve your website so let's look at each of those so in terms of getting customers locally offline there are three things i would really suggest number one is to do contract work for other developers this is a situation where other developers maybe have a little too much to do and you know they're looking to outsource some work and you would be surprised because there will be developers who want to outsource to potentially i should say outsourced to you on a regular basis another one would be contacting potential customers directly and this would mean going out and introducing yourself to you know like b2b type things so for example um you know going to like the local restaurant the local bakery the local whatever and offering to build them a website let's say and then a third option would be to go to networking events so let's go ahead and talk about each of these in turn excuse me in terms of doing contract work for other developers you would be surprised at how many dev shops are interested in outsourcing work because they find themselves in a place where they have too much to do for the amount of staff they have but they don't have enough to do to justify hiring somebody else full time and there are it is not uncommon for dev shops to outsource stuff on a regular basis and if you have somebody if you're a developer and you want to outsource and you have somebody that's worked out well for you in the past it's you know likely there's going to keep sending something to that same person so other developers who want to outsource can be a good uh good uh source of local work when you're trying to get these kinds of opportunities it's important that you don't just you know call them up and say hey are you interested in outsourcing and then leave it at that or something like that instead what i would do is actually pick up the phone uh reach out to the dev shop um ask to speak to whoever would it is that would be you know in charge who or whoever's making this kind of a decision before you make that call actually research the company know a little bit about the company then um after the call or when you get them on the phone i should say you know explain who you are explain that you're available for outsourced work tell the decision maker that you would love to send them a copy of your portfolio along with your cv get their email address email them over copy of your portfolio and your cv now and the important thing i should say is going to be don't just leave it at that so in other words what a lot of devs do in this situation is they email them to somebody saying hey i'm available to outsource and then you know they never follow up um you know again this the shop you're contacting really doesn't have they don't know you they don't really have any reason to call you so you know over somebody else so what you want to do is consistently follow up i would suggest following up you know once a month or so for nothing else a good solid year until they tell you no until they you know or until they hire you tell you no or it's been about a year i mean you got to follow up regularly you know like for things like this so don't be shy on following up and again like i said when you reach out um do it in a way where you're intelligent about you're intelligent and informed about what it is they do explain how you can provide value and then just follow up regularly after that and you would be surprised at how much work you could get um from other dev shops a second option is to go out and contact potential customers directly again this is like a b2b thing like this is going to local businesses um offering to build them a website offering to build them an app you know just offering to provide services of some sort it's the same thing when you go into a local business don't just you know go door-to-door and go walking on in and say this is who you are and this is what you do actually make a list of businesses that you want to go out and talk to and then take some time do some research when you go in and talk to a business make sure you actually know something about them make sure you know about what they do maybe know a little bit about their history you know and whatnot and just like with local developers do not be shy about following up until somebody specifically tells you no again you'd be you know surprised at just persistence and face-to-face contact can go a long way so do not be shy about following up the third thing is something i have talked about a lot in my prior free co-cam videos and that is going to networking events um uh bni uh which stands for business networking international is a good source of uh local networking uh uh and you know just other networking events in general so uh that's something i've talked about before um i do think it's always best to go out and try to meet your potential customers face to face which is why i recommend me just going straight into businesses or going to straight to developers but you know if nothing else um networking has been around for hundreds of years for a reason so attending networking groups such as bni can be another great source of uh getting business locally so you know uh that is really it in terms of this guide for what is freelancing and how to get clients online and in your city um i know there are a lot of things i've discussed in other videos i didn't really raise here and again these tips are meant really to uh not just make some money through your freelance business but to take things to the next level uh if you have any questions you know feel free to connect with me through linkedin don't you know don't be shy about contacting me directly i respond to people all the time who you know inquired to me through free code camp so best of luck with everything and i hope this has been helpful you\n"