How to get clients without paid ads
When work depends on who happens to remember you
New work arrives by referral and luck. Some months the phone rings and you wonder why you worried. Other months it goes quiet, and you spend a few days feeling sick about money before something turns up. You have no reliable way to change that, because you have never chosen a way of finding clients. Work has simply come to you.
Paid ads would be the obvious fix, but they need a budget and some know-how, and a lot of the time you have neither. What you do have is hours. This article is about spending those hours on the right thing, so that finding clients stops being something that happens to you.
What "choosing a channel" means
A channel is a route by which someone who needs you finds out you exist and gets in touch, such as a referral, a Google listing, a phone call you make, or a local group. Choosing channels means deciding, in writing, which one or two routes you will work at each week, and for how many hours.
The method
I will use a made-up example throughout: a mobile mechanic, who services cars at the customer's home or workplace. This is an illustration, not a real client, and the numbers are invented to show the working.
Step 1: Write down your real hours
Not the hours you wish you had. Look at last week and ask how many hours you could have spent on finding clients without the paid work suffering. Our mechanic says four hours a week. That number is your whole budget, and everything else in the plan has to fit inside it.
Step 2: List where your last customers actually came from
Go back through your last ten or so customers and write down how each one found you. Ask them if you cannot remember. Our mechanic finds that seven came from word of mouth, two found his Google Maps listing, and one saw a neighbour's post. This tells you what already works, and it usually shows a channel you have been treating as luck when it is a repeatable habit.
Step 3: Score the candidates on three questions
List every channel you could plausibly use, then answer three questions about each one.
- Are the people who pay me actually there?
- Does it fit inside my hours?
- Will it put me in a conversation with a real person quickly, or does it wait for strangers to stumble across me?
Here is the mechanic's version. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that appears on Google Maps when someone searches for a mechanic nearby.
| Channel | Are my buyers there? | Fits my hours? | Quick conversation? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asking past customers for names of people who need a mechanic | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Google Business Profile with regular reviews | Yes | Yes, once set up | Yes, they ring me |
| Phoning or visiting small businesses that run work vans | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Writing blog posts about car care | Maybe | No | No |
| Posting on Instagram every day | Maybe | No | Maybe |
Step 4: Pick one main channel and one supporting channel
Choose the strongest and write it down. The mechanic picks contacting small trades businesses, because a plumber with two vans needs servicing more often than a household does, and one yes can mean repeat work. His supporting channel is Google reviews, because it already brings customers and costs him half an hour a week.
Step 5: Turn it into a weekly schedule
This is where the plan becomes usable. The mechanic's week looks like this:
- Tuesday and Thursday mornings, one hour each: contact five small trades businesses with vans, by phone or by dropping in, and offer to service the vans at their yard.
- Friday, 30 minutes: message that week's customers asking for a Google review and for the name of anyone else who struggles to get to a workshop.
- Monday, one hour: follow up with everyone he spoke to the previous week.
- Sunday, 30 minutes: write down how many conversations he had, how many quotes he sent and how many jobs he won.
That adds up to four hours, which is the budget from step 1.
What good looks like, and what most people write
Most people produce a list of intentions: be more active on social media, do more networking, start a blog, ask for referrals. None of those can be done on a Tuesday morning, because none of them say who, how many, or when.
| What most people write | What a usable plan says |
|---|---|
| Do more networking | Contact five named local businesses each Tuesday and Thursday |
| Ask for referrals | Message every finished customer on Friday with one specific question |
| Be consistent on social media | Not on the plan, because it does not fit the hours |
| Grow my business | A weekly tally of conversations, quotes and jobs won |
A good plan names a specific kind of buyer, gives a number you could count at the end of the week, and leaves things off. If your plan has nothing you decided against, you have a wish list.
Three mistakes that make the exercise useless
Choosing by taste. Plenty of people pick the channel that feels most like running a proper business, such as a polished website or a content calendar, when picking a phone call would be more honest. Choose by where your buyers are and what fits your hours, even if the answer is unglamorous.
Choosing too many. Five channels at 45 minutes each means none of them gets enough attention to produce a single conversation. Two channels is the limit with four hours. If you only have an hour a week, pick one.
Having no count and no review date. Without a number you cannot tell whether a channel is working or whether you just stopped doing it. Write down the weekly tally, and set a date on which you will look at it and decide whether to keep, change or drop the channel.
What to do once it is written
Most articles stop at the plan, and that is where most plans die. A plan on its own does nothing until the hours are booked, so open your calendar now and put the working blocks in as appointments, with the same status as a paid job. If a block gets bumped, move it to another day that week rather than letting it vanish.
Then keep the weekly tally from step 5. Three numbers are enough: conversations started, quotes or proposals sent, jobs won. Set a review date several weeks out and put that in the calendar too. When it arrives, the tally tells you what to change.
- If you are having plenty of conversations but few quotes, the problem is probably how you describe what you do or who you are talking to.
- If you are sending quotes but winning few, look at the price, the wording of the offer, or how quickly you follow up.
- If you are having very few conversations, either the channel is wrong or you have not done enough of it. Check the diary before you blame the channel.
Change one thing at a time so you can tell what made the difference. And if a channel clearly is not working after an honest go, swap it for the next one on your scored list. You already did the scoring.
Doing this properly takes an afternoon, and if you would rather have it done for you, a Lead Generation Strategy built from your own answers is $99.