Have you just started your own small business? Or are you doing some freelance work? How do you get new and more customers?

We’ve found that the following works for us. Maybe you too.

1. Partners
It is very helpful to team up with people who provide other related services and arrange to refer business to each other. For example, if you are a web designer you can partner with graphic designers to refer businesses to each other.

2. Profile
Building your business profile is a constant and unending task. This means a well structured and designed website, writing for/being written about in trade publications, attending business networking events, speaking at conferences, entering/winning/judging awards, and that’s before you’ve started with all the usual social networking avenues like starting a blog, commenting on other blogs, tweeting, facebook, linkedin – I think you get the idea now. An important consideration with this is to ensure you’re getting a profile that will be seen by potential clients, and not just chasing fame within your industry.

3. Happy clients (word of mouth)
Unfortunately, the most effective new business method is also the most difficult — happy clients are repeat customers, meaning more work and thus more billings. But more importantly, clients also talk, whether they have a good or bad experience. Marketing people know other marketers, business owners know other business owners — and they ask each other for recommendations, and value those recommendations highly. The better you service your clients, and the happier they are, the more likely they are to recommend you to their colleagues, friends and family.

Finally, don’t expect things to work instantly, building up a reputation takes years so your biggest asset and selling point is the standard of your work and the way you approach clients. Showing your work in the best light and having a diverse portfolio will give you the confidence to approach people for work.

When we first got into business, we were dreamy about what exactly we wanted to do. See, we’re able to do many things that are internet-related. So when we started, we thought we could do everything and offer all of the following to customers: web design, SEO, social media marketing, strategy, reputation management, etc etc. Nice eh? Soon we would be swimming in clients!

Wrong. We quickly realized that this was a very bad approach to business. Indeed we did get a range of clients who wanted a range of things done for them. This earned us much needed revenue but it also stretched us thin. We were trying to do too much with too few resources. We were extremely lucky that nothing disastrous happened (for example, if one of us had fallen sick – weeks worth of work would go undone!)

Over time, we realized that we needed to reduce the range of what we offered or we would burn out. And so we did just that. Currently we offer only or two from the range that we had initially started with and are looking to niche this down even further.

It is not immediately apparent, but it is true that a small business almost always makes more money and has a better chance of success if it chooses to attack a very specific niche. We almost failed because we were trying to be too general. Do not let this happen to you. if you are thinking of starting your own business, make sure that you have defined what it is that you do down to extreme specifics!

Good luck.