Website Design Business Startup--Please Teach Me How to Get Clients for Website Design.

First BEFORE approaching people build a small set of examples of your work it will save you a ton of headache down the road. Your logo, website, etc... will be the first thing your potential clients will see so make sure its promoting yourself like you want it to.

I think the best place to start is word of mouth. Spread the word to friends and family first, business and social acquaintances, constantly promote yourself to those you come in contact with. Once this is exhausted I'd move to more traditional marketing approaches.

Initially something that still works for me if I need design work is to go through your local yellow pages and start looking up their sites online. Find ones that are horrid which are pretty easy to come by and call them up. Yes, everyone hates cold calling but it works and does so pretty fast. If you can't cold call you are going to probably have a hard time closing deals anyhow so you might as well get over that hump right away.

In real estate there is a saying "Location, Location, Location" your saying should be "Promote, Promote, Promote" give yourself time. Your promoting here in WF, your family and friends, your colleagues and peers, and your local community. Things will start to fall together and you'll begin to find niches available to you. One other place that is always good to let know is printing companies and programmers these people are always looking for good designers.

Hope this helps,
Fred

Go out and find a couple of the ugliest looking sites you can find. Contact these businesses and offer to do them a website design makeover for free so long as they allow you to use them as a case study for your business.

You now have some really good examples you can use to approach new businesses. Let your work do the talking. If you can show them what you have done for other businesses then it should make it a much easier sell for you.

I think that it was on this forum I read it but it was something like Get a domain uglywebsite.com or something along those lines.

As a web designer yourself you create a website where people can post an ugly looking website. Now you go out and find ugly websites and put them on the site. Then contact the customer and say that their website has been put on the site by someone and that you are a web designer that will be able to help them out.

Now doing this gives you a double sided sword. You can use facebook and get people to vote on ugly websites (Survey's etc the are a few really good WSO's on how to monitize this and using viral scripts to gets hundreds of likes) and it will give you leads in the future.

For a totally different approach which has made me alot of money I would also recommend that you get your hands on a WSO called "the Bower Formula" by John Durham.

Make sure you're putting your designs out there, in a before and after format.

You might want to get involved in some local networking groups also, as many
of them allow their members to present their business on occasion during
monthly meetings.

All this should help you grow your centers of influence. It takes time, but keep at it.

Will offered one of the best techniques to kick start your services. Follow his advice, you won't regret it

Thanks Will. I will follow your advice, set up some sample site and then go out to get clients. Thank you everybody for your sincere contribution.

You will need a portfolio of what you've done in the past - this is the best way to get your sales - another thing is that you want to offer good competitive prices.

The best way is to form strategic partnerships and endorsed relationships with people in related but slightly different businesses. For example if you do web design you can find someone who does SEO but doesn't like doing web design. The advantage is that they already have paying clients. This will save you headache of talking with people who have no money. I wish I knew that when I first got started