Six Unconventional Ways To Find Design Clients - RD292

<p class="p1">Ask any designer, and they’ll tell you that their number one way of landing new design clients is through word-of-mouth referrals.</p> <p class="p1">If you do an excellent job on a client’s project, there’s a good chance they’ll pass your name along should they hear of someone requiring services you offer. I’ve built my entire business on this model. And chances are, so have you.</p> <p class="p1">But does that mean you should only rely on word-of-mouth referrals? No, it doesn’t.</p> <p class="p1">Are you familiar with the term diversify? In short, it means “using different options.” Such as “you should diversify your investments,” meaning you should have multiple investments. If one of them isn’t doing well, your other assets can help make up for it.</p> <p class="p1">Diversification can also apply to your income stream. If all your work comes from one client, and that client suddenly has financial difficulty and stops sending work your way, you’ll be in trouble. That’s why it’s best to have multiple clients. If one stops sending you projects, you can still make a living from the rest.</p> <p class="p1">But I want to talk about diversity concerning how you obtain new clients. As I said, word-of-mouth is the most popular method in our field. But word-of-mouth has limits. That’s why you shouldn’t rely solely on it for your clients.</p> <h2 class="p1">This is how word-of-mouth works.</h2> <p class="p1">Imagine a tree. The tree trunk s one client. You design a project for this one client. They may refer someone else to you via word-of-mouth if they like what you did. That someone else is now a limb on that tree.</p> <p class="p1">Again, you do a good job, and that someone else, the limb, tells another person about you. That new person becomes a branch on your tree, and so on. Every limb and every branch can trace itself back to the trunk, the first client.</p> <p class="p1">Now you have a big tree of clients, all somehow connected back to that initial client. And that’s great. But there’s more than one