Are you looking for website customers as a freelancer or small agency? Kori Ashton is the CEO of WebTegrity and has grown her team from her living room couch to over a million dollar revenue a year in just 5 short years. She’s able to help you better understand how to find customers so you can do the same.
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, my name is Kori Ashton, and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. Today we’re gonna be looking at how to find your customers. So a lot of you watching my channel are freelancers, or maybe you’re small agencies, and you’re looking to advance and grow your WordPress agency. Well, I’m here to help you better understand how I’ve done that here with WebTegrity using these avenues to find customers.
And of course, this is gonna be brought to you by pressable.com. If y’all are, in fact, freelancers and agencies, you have another opportunity to increase your monthly revenue with your ongoing customers, with your clients by giving them premium hosting. You should be looking at pressable.com as that hosting solution. They’re incredible and they have amazing support.
Networking – Meetups
All right, so what are some areas that you might be able to go to this coming year, this coming month, this coming week, even, and find some new customers? Well, I’m gonna show you the very first thing is to network inside of Meetups. Did you know that WordPress themselves offers Meetups all around the world in your local area? Go to meetup.com. I’ll put the link below.
You can check out where they’re running Meetup groups, and there might be other things inside of your area. There might be small business groups. There might be marketing groups. There might be all sorts of different resources that you can find inside of Meetup, and attend these networking sessions totally for free to go be a part and pass out your business cards, helping people understand who you are and what you can provide.
Join Associations
The next thing is I’m gonna challenge you to join associations. Now these might actually require a little bit of money, a little bit of an investment on your part to go join, but I’m telling you right now that we did that very early on, and it paid off big time.
Some of these associations, like a small business citywide association puts on these ribbon cutting ceremonies for local businesses when they open their doors. You, as a member of these associations, are invited to those opportunities, to go network with that brand new business in your area.
It’s a phenomenal opportunity to not only show support for that business in their grand opening moment, but also, for you to engage with them, tell them hey, if you need any help with your current website, I’d like to be your solution to that, or if you’re looking to do ongoing social media marketing or search engine optimization, I’d love to help you get found and engage your customers. Maybe we can set up a time after it kinda dies down with all this great excitement of your grand opening. Makes sense, huh? You’re not only there to celebrate, but you’re also there to sell.
Vertical Opportunities
Another thing is to find a vertical. So this is something we did early on, as well, that made a difference. We very quickly found that realtors needed a lot of help, so we figured out how to speak their language, understand what their points of pain were, and how to integrate with IDX, right? How to find MLS listings. So we went and did all of that, and we started being consistently able to land more and more realtors.
Then we went and looked at churches. Now, they don’t always have the largest budgets, but they’re very consistent with paying you, and they’re usually great with responding back to you in time, so you’re able to turn a project very quickly. So any sort of small nonprofits, or faith-based organizations in your area, I would look at finding those verticals.
Another vertical we went after were anything to do with animal-related things, like veterinarian hospitals, or local shelters or anything like that. We were able to go in, help them build out a few websites, and then all of a sudden, after you have one or two, you’re able to communicate with a few others in town and say, hey, we’ve already built for these folks, we’ve already built for these folks. We would like to come show you what we think we can do for you.
So super cool to have verticals, and show that you’re an expert in an industry.
Giving Back To The Community
Another opportunity is to give back. You guys, I cannot stress enough how important it is to give back to your local community. Whether you can find a young Codeup group that’s trying to learn code, and you go and you speak at these events, or you go teach at these events, you go find a high school, and you start teaching there on the side, in a summer program.
Give back your time. I guarantee you, the karma will come full circle. There will be a moment that somebody’s parent is watching you teach a class, and they go, gosh, this gal knows a lot about her stuff. I’m gonna hire her for my company to do my website. Of course, that’s not why we’re doing it, but I’m telling you, those opportunities just kind of spring up really cool in those moments, so be certain to give back.
Another thing we did was while we were finding those nonprofit niches, we were speaking to those communities, we started to dedicate our time and donate our time, so we would give back a website build a month. Now that might be too much for you. You might say, well, I wanna do one a quarter. That’s fine. Give an opportunity back to your community, and I promise you, it’ll come full circle. And then, again, we want to just educate, educate, educate.
So I’m challenging you to set up, maybe go back to those associations, those local associations, and set up an opportunity to go in and speak to small businesses on how to improve their online marketing strategy, right? You become the expert in that moment. You’re giving away education, you’re showing them your expertise, and I promise you, they’re gonna look at you as the expert in that field, they’re gonna wanna hire you in some capacity, even if it’s just consulting. There’s opportunity there if you’re offering that education.
Referrals With Incentives
And, of course, there’s always referrals. Now y’all might be saying, gosh, I’ve already, you know, fully extended the capabilities of my current customers, but maybe you can incentivize them. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to say to them, hey, I’ll give you a free month hosting if you bring me a new client this month. Right? So work with them on how to give back to them, if they’re paying it forward to you. I’m sure that a lot of you have ideas, as well.
As you are freelancers, and you are small agencies, if you do, would you add to the thread below in the comments, and just say maybe where you’ve engaged or been able to find customers in your networking opportunities? Of course, there’s always paid marketing. You can go inside of Facebook and run ads, you can go inside of Google, and run ads, LinkedIn and run ads. There’s opportunities like that, but I think there’s nothing better than boots on the ground, face to face, a good old-fashioned handshake and networking with people to really start to grow that trust, and grow your brand name inside your local community.
I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe and if you like stuff like this, conversation about agencies, conversation about growing your freelancer strategy, and how to improve your pricing, how to improve your cashflow, how to grow your team, I’ve got all sorts of resources. Again, I’ll put those in the links below. Hope you’re having a great one. See y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, y’all.
