What's working for me in getting new clients

Here's what's worked for me.

I've dropped off a bunch of fliers around town at dentist offices, professional buildings and their offices. Sure the sign says "no soliciting" but I'm not soliticing, I'm just offering SEO if someone wants it. If not, then I just got a nice little bit of exercise walking up and down floors of office buildings and trying to look legit to security.

Believe it or not this method has been very effective in getting clients in my opinion for the investment put in.

Also what's worked is Chamber of Commerce meetings. I just dress nice, smile, and ask questions and be positive. Then I contact people who sounded interested.

It's funny, a lot of business owners have somehow learned the buzzword "SEO" and they get excited when you say "SEO" in their presence even though they may not exactly know what that means. They just know they need it! How great is that?

Then just calmly talk about it likes it no big deal and like it's easy stuff and a lot are interested.

Then I like to get their business card. I look to see if they have google places done and optimized. Then I check their website's source code for keywords. I contact them with free keywords for their website and a small explanation, or I give them some other type of valuable freebie like, "let me put some words into your Google places listing or website that will increase your likelihood for being found in the search engines".

This helps people see that I'm giving and I'm not worried about getting anything in return, in return they feel compelled somehow to inquire more about my services, then the more they learn, they start to realize they're behind the curve and that SEO is advantageous.

I just offered a bunch of keywords to an IT consulting company out of goodwill and the guy immediately had his webmaster interview me and he's lining up existing clients for SEO with me for a referral fee. These are clients I didn't have to do any work to find and they already trust the IT consulting company so they're likely to believe in my services too and have the necessary patience for results because their expectations have been managed positively.

Good luck! It hasn't been easy but things are happening now without much effort. Seems to have all happened overnight, but before it happened overnight, there was about 40 days of WTF is going on??