My second month of business is complete and the honeymoon is over. Last month I used my contacts at my previous employer to bring in all my new projects but because I wasn’t marketing, this month started out slow. I went though the usual questions of doubt every business goes through “Is this the right thing to do?”, “What if I’m wrong?”, and my personal favorite “Does anyone really want my services?”. One great thing that happened, while reading some blogs I caught a reference to a book titled “Get Clients Now!”. The Amazon reviews were pretty decent so I picked up a copy of it from my library.

Since I had no real billable work, and I wasn’t attracting anything new I decided to go ahead and implement the program “Get Clients Now!” was talking about. As you can see in this post, it generated some great results and brought a lot of work my way at the very end of the month.

After a few days of implementing the program I started to see some results, from the most surprising of places. One great lead came from a personal blog post I made to someone’s blog. This is turning into a great relationship and will provide a lot of value for both of us in the years to come. Another great lead came from just asking my friends and family if they knew anyone who needed my services. This lead is taking awhile to solidify but will create more than twice than what I made in all of July.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Marketing doesn’t have to be cold-calling or shaking hands at a networking event. In my case writing, helping people, and creating a nice website paid off more than me stammering though a rehearsed speech about why I am great.
• Actively work to keep your “sales pipeline” full. What happened in July was I worked so hard my pipeline ran dry, which made August a very slow month. Once it started to fill up at the end of the month, I started to get busy again.
• The main goal of any freelancer, consultant, or contractor is to provide value to their customer. The more value you provide the more business you will create.