How to get your first clients for a new business
This method seems to work consistently well across many industries.
You're starting a new thing in a new field. Maybe you're transitioning from a job to freelancing, maybe you're going from coding to design, maybe You've just moved across the world.
You've got no past clients, no testimonials, no professional network to speak of.
Where do you get your first leads?
How do you get your first clients?
There is a catch-22 here. You need clients to get your first testimonials and build a network, and yet you need testimonials and a network to find those first clients.
How do you solve it?
One of the best ways I've found to work in this case is called "permissionless apprenticeship". You basically do some work for free without asking for permission and rech out to the person you've done the work for offering the results free of charge.
This works especially well with things like desing and SEO because in both cases you can show off your skills without contact with the client, just based on their public website.
These projects then become part of your portfolio (e.g. a showcase of how you'd redesign a specific website or tweak someone's SEO), and if you do get responses from these people you can often also get testimonials from them for the free work even if they don't hire you.
This method has very broad applications, even if you're a therapist or a coach or a car mechanic.
The same method applies:
Find people who need to what you're offering and offer them full service for free (that's important, it's not a freebie, it's the actual full service).
Do good work for free and ask for a testimonial (ideally give them a template to fill in so it's easy for them to write it).
Use the testimonials in your marketing material (website, ads, flyers, social media - as appropriate) to get more clients, get more testimonials, etc, etc.
Like any brief article online, this only covers the basics and may not actually be enough to get you going.
Drop me a note or leave a comment if you have a specific question on how to make this work in your specific circumstance and I'll either reply directly or write a follow-up answering your question.