How To Find Clients For Your Location Independent Business

The idea of location independence is appealing to many entrepreneurs. Imagine being able to run your business from anywhere in the world.

 In practice, though, we begin to worry about our ability to support our business when we are miles away.

 Namely, how do we find clients when we cannot approach them face to face?

 Luckily, with the help of the right tools, a clever strategy, and a little thing called the internet this problem has almost been made obsolete.

 

Cold Emailing and Cold Calling:

 If your target market is another business, it is likely that they have a website and a contact form/email available, which makes cold emailing an option. Combine that with a telephone number, and you can implement calling too.

 Wondering how to find them? There are a ton of options for identifying your target market and collecting their contact information.

 The process is more or less like this:

 

1. Identify relevant influencers and businesses in your target market. Some ideas:
   1. Run a Google search
   2. Search in a relevant directory
   3. Find people who wrote content related to your niche.
   4. Find people who commented on that content.
   5. Find people who linked to that content.
   6. Find people who shared that content.
   7. Find people and businesses featured on competitor websites (logos, testimonials).
   8. Find people who linked to your competitors.
2. Collect their websites and contact information (email/contact URL). This can be done manually or through software.
3. Reach out to them with a personalized email.

 Before you disregard this as a waste of time (how many emails can you send before you get utterly bored?) consider that there are several viable solutions that won't make your head spin.

 

• Use Software: There are plenty of software options to auto-submit to contact forms or automate your pitching. Or, if you don’t want to completely automate it, but want a more personalized solution, you can use NinjaOutreach, which allows for sending custom templates. It will also mine the contact information for you.
• Hire A Virtual Assistant: This is the perfect task to outsource to a ready and willing virtual assistant. All you need to do is give them the email addresses, a template, and you’re ready to go!

 Just remember to adhere to best practices to increase your email open rate and stay out of the spam box.

 Lastly, consider adding in some GMail plugins like Rapportive, Full Contact, or Hubspot’s Sidekick. These will add additional information to your email address and can also track opens and replies, so you know about following up:

 

Be Active On Social Media:

 Social media is no longer just a place for funny cat photos…that is just half of it. The other half is a place where like-minded individuals congregate and seek out ways to satisfy their personal and business needs.

 Having an active presence on social media takes time but it pays dividends.

 One way to connect with your target audience is to search for key phrases that are relevant to your business using a freemium software like Buzz Bundle.

 For example, if you run a Virtual Assistant business and you are looking for clients, you can search for “looking for a virtual assistant”. It will run through social media platforms as well as forums to find relevant conversations you can engage it.

Looks like Josh already responded with some help!

Additionally, there are a ton of free websites that allow you to search through historic social media messages. I just typed “Virtual Assistant” into Twitter Search, and within one minute found this:

Looks like a potential client for my business – I should tweet back. Or better yet, since the name and blog are there, why not go and send Niall a cold email (referencing this tweet to make it personal).

 If I want to take this a step further and automate it, I can get these alerts sent directly to my inbox using a monitoring tool like Twilert.

 Lastly, we have been using the following strategy to successfully reach out to people on Twitter and ask them if they want to try our software.

 Starting with FollowerWonk, capture thousands of Twitter handles for your target keywords, such as digital marketing agency.

On the paid plan, these results can be exported.

 Combine this with HootSuite to bulk upload messages manage any replies and mentions that came out of it.

 Here’s what it looks like:

This puts Twitter outreach on autopilot.

 Direct Advertising:

 Forget inefficient and expensive forms of advertising like commercials, billboards, and magazines.

 Nowadays, there are much better platforms offering more targeted services.

Facebook Ads have been shown to produce insane ROI with the right targeting and lead pages.

 In conjunction with Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, online advertising is much cheaper on a cost per thousand basis as compared to more traditional forms of advertising like radio, television, and newspaper.

 We have been using Google Adwords on a very small budget and have managed to get people to come to our pricing page for under a dollar! This is a great way to jump to the front of the organic search line as you build up your SEO.

 

Turn It On Its Head: Have Them Find You

 Although I don't recommend remaining purely passive with your business, there are plenty of ways to attract clients “without even trying”.

 Having an online website and blog allows you to write about content relevant to your business.

 By being an authority and producing quality content, you will see results overtime.

Content marketing has been the main source of clients for NinjaOutreach.

 We combine writing our own blog with guest post and product review outreach to build our traffic and convert new visitors.

 Here’s what our analytics looks like over the last few months:

As you can see, it does take time to get rolling, but it builds and overtime it will be a passive way of attracting a steady stream of clients.

 What’s excellent about this strategy is because people are coming to you from another source, there is already a degree of trust built into it, which makes people more likely to convert.

 

Final Thoughts – The Old School Way Is Not Dead!

 Location independence does not mean Mars. There are plenty of online communities and in person networking events even in “remote” areas such as Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines.

 Do a search for Entrepreneur Meet Ups in a location near you, or join a website such as entrepreneur.meetup.com to find a global list of meet ups. There are also many membership site communities like The Dynamite Circle, The Micropreneur Academy, and The Fastlane Forum where you can network and pick up clients.

 By connecting with other location independent business owners you can get valuable advice and clients to grow your business.