1. Business Cards

A business card is a great marketing tool as well as an easy way to give someone all your contact information in one easy place, I made my own business card design that has my name, a subheading that has some relevant keywords of what I do, my email, website and phone number.

I designed my business cards myself and got them printer with VistaPrint, although you can get some pretty nice looking templates on GraphicRiver.

I made those when I was strictly focusing on front-end development, I have since changed my scope and become a full-stack kind of person who specializes in CodeIgniter, but enough about that.

I have used the business card strategy to promote myself to small business owners very recently in fact, here is a story from a few weeks back:

I was traveling and was waiting for a boat in a small town called Florø and had a few hours to kill so I looked around to see if there was any new restaurants or stores that had opened since last time I was there.

I found a local “ecological food and stuff”-store, I went inside and bought something, because if you are going to promote your business to a business owner you should at least buy something in my opinion.

Anyways, I went to the owner of the store, he was a young dude who seemed to be on the up and up on the whole web stuff.

I paid for my stuff and asked him if the store was new and if he had a website up and running, he told me he had bought a WordPress theme off of ThemeForest and needed some help customizing it, I gave him my business card and he said he’d call me.

Not bad eh?

2. Networking

Networking is a really powerful way to get clients in your local community, you should let everyone in your town/city know what you do, tell your friends, colleagues and family to spread the word about your freelance business.

Having a business card might also come in handy here as you could give people 10-20 business cards each and let them spread them around to their friends, colleagues and family.

Funny story actually, I was at the dentist, and by some random coincidence we started talking about work and stuff, I mentioned that I was a web developer and gave her my business card.

Then, I shit you not, 3 days later her husband called me and wanted me to do their website, I ended up billing them $100/hour for editing a template that they supplied, great client!

Never underestimate the power of networking, and never forget your previous clients, connect with them on social networks like LinkedIn and twitter, once in a while poke them a little and ask if they need or know anyone that needs some web development done, most of the time they might know someone who need your services.

3. Google Places

Lets do a little mental experiment, say you live in new york city and want to order a pizza, and you go to Google and type in “pizza in new york city” or a similar search term, you will get a list of pizzerias that have their stores in new york city, in Google this data is pulled from Google Places, which is Google’s business directory that interfaces with Google maps.

Now what you should do is to add your freelance business to Google places add all your details and such, you will get a letter in the mail with a verification code that you need to enter to get listed officially, Once that is taken care of, you should be listed in the directory and you should show up for relevant searches in your area.

4. Local Search Optimization

Adding yourself to Google Places is just a start, you should also focus on a bit of Local on-site SEO.

if you don’t know what SEO is then you should check out my previous post labeled “What is SEO – The Beginners guide” as it is a little more detailed than what I’m writing here.

On-site SEO, is the practice of changing the wording, headings and title tags on your website to be more relevant for a search term.

Off-site SEO focuses more on building links to your website with optimized anchor text which Google uses to determine your relevancy for a keyword.

Anyways, in our case we would opt for a title that looks something like this: “Freelance Web Developer in New York City – Your Name” or “NYC Freelance Web Developer – Your Name”, be sure to not make your title to long so it cuts off in the search results, for more information about title tag length and best practices you should check out this Moz article, If you can’t fit your name in the title, you can leave it out and just have your keyword in there.

I have opted for a more general title tag “Norwegian Freelance Web Developer // Helge Sverre”, since my local city is very small and there is not really a market for web development services, and certainly nobody who is searching for web development freelancers or companies that are located in this city.

use “//” in my title tags just because it looks unique and cool, there is no added benefit of using // as a separator between your keyword and your name, most people either use a dash “-” or a pipe “|”.

5. Engage with other Freelancers

A great way to get some additional clients is actually to interact and engage with other freelancers, some freelancers actually got way too much to do and is willing to subcontract some of their work to other freelancers or just flat-out referring their clients to you, remember to return the favor though, nobody likes an ungrateful person.

In fact while writing this post, A web developer added me on Skype and we started connecting on LinkedIn, he does web design and ASP.NET type development jobs, So being a person who does not know ASP.NET I said I’d refer or subcontract jobs like that to him instead of turning down clients.

I don’t have to turn down clients, he gets extra business and the client gets a competent web developer, It’s a win-win-win.

Thanks for reading.

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