Getting clients/leads with free methods

There are very few "free" methods of lead gen that actually work consistently.

Most of my personal leads come through organic SEO which I suppose you would count as a free method but I have spent countless hours on my sites over the past few years to get it into a position to generate leads for me.

As for my clients, I mainly use paid options, although we do some SEO, shout in the streets (or the online equivalent, cough cough reddit), post classified ads, there used to be ways of doing it on facebook without paying, but the recent organic reach update has put the shitters on that.

If you know how to do outreach (link building) and you do it properly, then you'll generate targeted click throughs which should then become leads if your website does it's job.

You basically have to do whatever you have to.

I read about a guy on here who does great things on craigslist, other options might be email marketing, forum/blog commenting although I think the number of leads generated form these would be miniscule.

Thing is, not every method works for every industry, so only being able able to choose from the free methods available you are seriously damaging the number of leads you can generate and the industries you can generate leads for.

Freelance Sites? Craigslist Gigs? There you'll find people who're ready to spend money.
No Seo, no nothing.

Just my 2 cents.

Go old school, and speak to everyone you know. Let them know what you are doing, and ask if they know anyone who might be interested in such paying you for it. If every 2nd person puts you in touch with one person, you've got yourself some leads. If they don't turn out, maybe they know someone. This should be enough to get you at least your first one or two clients. I am 3 years into my agency, and only now, for the first time am I using paid means (PPC, etc) to promote your business. Not to say that is the right thing to do, but with a little hustle you can do just fine.

All I can say, is don't work for free when you're starting out. Whether its your first client, you should be projecting confidence (maybe results) so that the clients trust you and spend straight away.

I suggest Craigslist, but don't dismiss Facebook if you can afford a small budget. FB will allow you to target specific towns / cities. Direct them to a fanpage and then, after getting a handful of people, make a post and simply ask them to spread the work about your client.

I barely ever paid to get my sites for offline markrtig ranked. I always approached them personally. It always worked for me better than how others did. It is always good to try doing all that you can with the free tactics. I always used to teacj free methods since I kkow so many of you guys have little additional cash to use for advertising.


I would highly recommend just knowing the keys to cold calling, or at least knowing how to properly email them. Certain services are actually better to sell over the phone, and others better just through email.

CL, Backpages .....Yes indeed.

WILL -

Trust me they definitely do help, but as long as it is done in the right way.
Do not target irrelevant posts or provide your link where not necessary.
There may always be a chance that you may be banned or penalized.
And believe me, you may not want to get in that.

Craigslist sometimes do provide leads,apart from that Social Media sites like FB ,Google Plus will also help in generating leads for free.Dont leave doing what you were doing earlier,its a nice strategy