 I want to ask you to think back to one of your best projects ever. This is a project that was just like a perfect project. Everything with the client just went great. Everything was smooth. You guys were in perfect sync. It felt like you were working more with the client instead of for the client. They valued you, they listened to your feedback, they weren't just giving orders. They also didn't give you a difficult time about your prices or payments. This is what my version of an ideal client is. Now what if all your projects could be with ideal clients and these type of projects? Odds are if you're watching this video, those might be far in between. And it was for me. That was my story. It was hard to find one of these ideal clients, a client that was a good fit for me that I truly enjoyed until I did some work. And that's what I want to show in this video. The work that I did to get to a point where I'm getting a consistent funnel of high quality leads and clients that I'm now working and being able to pick and choose the clients that I work for. But it wasn't always like that. I had to put in some work first. In this video, there's a few exercises I want to show you the same exact exercises that I did. There will also be download links so you can download the worksheets at the end of the call. Let's go back to finding ideal clients real quick before we jump into the work. The problem is the problem for most of us web designers and developers and creatives is when we first start off our first year, we're just learning and we're usually taking jobs for a very low pay and we're just getting all the work we can to get experience and build a portfolio. And if we get really good, then we start to get a lot of referrals and recommendations coming in. And we could actually build a business off of referrals and recommendations and have a sustainable income. I was able to do that. I was able to build a really nice freelancing business and even start a company, an actual agency just off of referrals and recommendations, but there's a huge problem with that. And the problem is when we're only getting referrals and recommendations in, we're just taking the work that comes our way. It's a comfortable place to be in as far as finding work and finding clients, but it also puts us in a position where we have to take jobs that are not a good fit. And think back, think back to those difficult projects, the projects that were not fun and you're just happy to be finished with those projects. When you're finished, you're like, I'm never going to do one of those again. That comes because we have to at times. This is very common for us that are still new, still in the one, two, three year mark. Another problem with this model right here of just working with referrals and recommendations is they dry up. We can go through a long dry spell and I'm speaking from experience. And the scary thing is what happens on a long dry spell, as soon as a lead comes in, we're just jumping on it, we'll undercut, we'll do it for far less than we would do it for. We would see red flags that says run from this project is going to be a nightmare and we still take it. It could be a scary place to be in, a feast and famine type of place where we have to take that work in order to pay bills. This happened to me. I actually had a dry spell for four months at a point where I'm running agency, a company, I have overhead, I have staff that I have to make payroll for and it got very scary. And at this point, this is when I decided I need to do something different. I need to put in some different kind of work to find good clients and scale my business. And that's when I started building marketing plans for myself. Now I know marketing plans, they're, they're not fun. I mean, for me, for some people that they're, they're, they're exciting. I just like to design and create websites. When it came to marketing, it was something that I wasn't comfortable with. And I didn't really know too much about, but take a look at it from this point of view real quick. All right, let's say you get a client and this client, you're talking to them and they say, Hey, we got an excellent product. We got this excellent service. We think we're going to be very successful. We want to build a website and we think that we're going to really grow and do great. And you start to ask some questions like, okay, that's great. How are you going to reach your audience? How are you going to get more customers? What kind of marketing strategy do you have? And if that client were to say, we don't know yet, we haven't done any of this yet. We're still thinking about it. I mean, what would that, what would that say? What would you think? Me personally, I would think, oh, they're not ready. This business that they're trying to build is not going to succeed that this might not be good. I don't want to work on a project with someone that's not ready to do it. And at the same time, I'm myself doing the same thing. I'm relying off of referrals, recommendations and not doing marketing. So if you are feeling like this is a little bit scary, this is going to be very easy for you because this is going to help you find the right avenues to go ahead and market. There's all kinds of different ways to market and to find new clients. The trick is, or the key is to find the right way that works for you because the way that works for me is not going to be the same that works for you and vice versa. We all have our own strengths. We all have our own assets. We also have our own weaknesses and different personalities. The key here is to find what is going to work best for you. We're going to have a few worksheets and a few exercises that we're going to go through and after this video, you'll be able to take these exercises, work on them yourself and you got to put in work. If you want this, if you want to build a business and even if you're just going to freelance, you have to put in some work into building your business and attracting clients and finding new clients and that takes some marketing. There are two different types of marketing that we're going to look at. Really quick, we're just going to briefly touch on them. That's going to be outbound and inbound marketing. Outbound marketing, a couple of examples would be cold calling, email marketing, network events and LinkedIn doing like LinkedIn outreach type marketing. The inbound marketing, you are basically building something of value that attracts clients to you. Instead of going out and actively syncing clients in outbound marketing, inbound marketing, you're building something so clients come to you. A couple of examples would be SEO, content like blogs and YouTube videos. Just what I'm doing right now, building your portfolio on social media like Instagram, Dribble, Behance. There's freelancing platforms like Upwork and Elementor Experts and then Google and Facebook ads. Working on both of them is actually a good idea, but you need to find out what works best for you and let's go ahead and take a look at that right now. First up, we need to identify who your ideal client is. In the very beginning of this video, I told you who my ideal client is. And I could go more deeper into that, but we need to find out who your ideal client is. Where are they? What problems do they have? How can you help solve their problems? This is the first exercise right here. And this is the exercise I run with my clients when we're in discovery and strategy sessions. This exercise helps us identify who their customers are. So running an exercise like this on yourself is going to help you identify who your ideal client is. There's a lot of questions in here. A lot of silly questions like, let's give them a name. Where do they shop? All kinds of questions that they might sound silly, but they have a purpose because once you've gone through this and you've made it really you put more thought into your ideal client, you're going to understand who they are and where they are. After you finish doing one of these, repeat, do this at least three times. Create three client personas for yourself. Before we get into any of the other types of marketing, we need to understand who your client is. You should be able to answer these questions. Who are you serving? What are their problems and challenges that need to be solved? And where are they spending their time and giving their attention to? Building the client personas will help you answer those questions. Here we go to exercise number two right here. We need to list 10 ways to find your clients. This one was a game changer for me. This was very huge for me because I was stuck on a couple ways of trying to find clients when there are so many different ways. So on this list right here, I want you to take time. Take time and list down 10 different marketing ways that you can find clients. Earlier I listed some in both inbound and outbound. There's anything from SEO, from Google ads, Facebook, social media, LinkedIn, email marketing, there's all types of ways. List down the ways that are possible for you. If something is impossible for you to do, then don't put it on this list. Only put something that you can't actually do. You might not like it, but if you can do it, put it on the list. Now we need to find out where your target client's attention is at. Inside this exercise right here, for both inbound and outbound, write down an item inside your list. We're going to keep going back to that list. Write down the item in there and put in there where your client's attention is at. For example, let's say we're going to do inbound. You have Facebook ads as one of your ways of marketing. You will put this inside your inbound list and then write in there where is your target client's attention at. I can tell you right now their attention is not in web design, graphic design. Their attention is in their own hobbies, their own interest. Their interest isn't the same as yours. I've seen many people, many designers create web design ads, targeting people who are interested in web design and not getting any results. When you understand who your target client is, who your ideal client is, and you understand, and this goes back to those silly questions. This is why we look at those silly questions and we put them in the client persona. We're getting a better understanding where your client is at, what are their interests, and that's where you're going to go ahead and place your ads. You would do that for each one of the items. So in both inbound and outbound, write down each item and where their attention is at. This will take a little bit of time. Like I said, this is going to be some work. And step number four, this is the big one right here. This is something so simple. Yeah, it is such a game changer right here. You may have seen a chart like this used for something else. In this exercise, what we want to use it for, we want to take every single one of those items in your list. So you have a list of 10 items up to market. Let's place them where they need to go. If an item is not going to bring you much results, very little results, it's going to go in the low impact down on the bottom. If you see an item in there that you see this can potentially have a much better rate of success, I could get a whole lot more clients in through this way. Then you have the right and the left, the very difficult and not difficult. If a task is going to be extremely difficult, let's say, let's say for example, one of your ideas of marketing would be Instagram, building your portfolio on Instagram. And right now you have 60 followers and you don't really have a portfolio and a large library of designs where you can just start posting and building. That's going to be very difficult for you to build that. You have put that on the very difficult side. And then if something is not that difficult, let's say Facebook ads, we're going to go back to Facebook ads. I'm not saying Facebook ads is the number one place to go. We're just using it as an example. Let's say Facebook ads for you is not that difficult. You have some experience running ads. You know how it kind of works. That would go in the no difficult, not difficult side. You would place all 10 items on this chart. Anything that is on the top, right. Those are the ones you want to keep. Anything down on the very difficult and low impact area, even if you're working on it right now, stop, stop. That's wasting your time and you're not going to get anywhere with that. You're not going to get the results and it's going to take too much of your time. You have 10 items and a few of those items are going to be placed on the top right. Those are the ones you want to stick with. Once you've identified which items are going to be high impact and not that difficult for you, choose three of those and stick with three, maybe even two, but no more than three. If you try to do more than three, you're stretching yourself too thin, it's too much. When you start with three items on here, you're going to see one or two of them are going to work and one of them probably will not work. If one of them after a month or two months is not working out, cut it out and focus just on the two, maybe even one. The goal of this is to find that one or two avenues of marketing that works best for you. You're going to need to put in work on this. It takes work, this is part of it. If you're spending all your time on client projects, you're not working on your own business. You have to delegate time for your business and separate for a client work. This is how we bring in new clients and find our ideal clients. It takes about a good three to four months. You got to give yourself time and be consistent and stay with the strategies that you've identified that are going to be the high impact and going to be the easiest for you. Those are going to be the ones that are going to work best for you. Put in time, identify which ones work. If one of them is not working after two months, cut it out. Don't waste time on it, stick with the ones that are working. One more exercise, this is a bonus one. This one could also help you out. This is to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Call this one the SWOT analysis. What SWOT stands for is going to be your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In here, you want to list what are you good at? What are you strong at? Communication might be your strength or it might be your weakness. You need to identify that. Opportunities, these are the opportunities where you could actually help your clients. Let's say you identify one of your clients to be a startup. That might be your ideal niche. You might choose to work with startup businesses. An opportunity could be a startup, they need more than just a website. They need marketing plans like this. They need social media, strong social media presence. So you have your opportunities in there. These are more services and more value that you could give to your ideal client. And then your threats. Threats are gonna be the things that are gonna get in the way. What are the threats? What are the things that are gonna get in the way of your ideal client finding you and choosing you and wanting to work with you? Identify those. So that way you got a counter measure against that. That way you could identify the threat and have a solution for the threat. These exercises you could work on your own, you could work by yourself and you could also collaborate with others. In our Building Businesses with Elementor Facebook group we have a mentorship program. You could work these exercises with a mentor or mentee or just another member in the group that wants to learn. I hope this video helps out. This has been a game changer for me. This transformed my business. It took me from a feast and famine position where I was taking any project I could and basically getting lucky if I landed a good client and good project. And I had to go through a lot that were not fun and not ideal or a good fit for me. After working this, these same exact exercises it changed everything for me. It takes work, it takes consistency. If you want this, you could do this. This is it right here. It's a formula that actually works. There's a download link inside the description. All the exercises in here are free for download. And if you like this and you find it helps, subscribe, it helps the channel. You know all that good YouTube stuff. You know, subscribe, like. Also drop a comment. If you have a question, leave it inside the comments. I will get back to everybody. Everyone that asks a question, I feel this is a very important topic. This is something that comes up most for web designers and developers and other creatives, how to find clients. If you need help with this, because I was there before and I know what it's like not being able to find them. And I found a solution. If there's any way I can help others to also grow your business, especially during these difficult times, reach out, drop it inside the comments. I will get back to you. That's it. Thank you.