1) Some good business transactions are flowing through upwork.com , freelancing.com, but its getting tight there, since platforms are trying to penalise clients who do not transact on platforms, or disable freelancers who are trying to get clients of the platform for direct relationship. But eventually platforms (a middleman) will turn all transactions into GIG economy type of value exchange (depersonalised, almost like working at the bottom for some corporation with occasion abuse and other riff raff)
2) Anywhere on internet your leads can be generated (blogs, social, forums, fiends and family, institutional contacts, etc.) However, I do not think anyone will share openly these, since in marketing P - for Place is very important. At the end of the day, there are a lot of right people for a job, so the rest is pure marketing. Selling yourself to a client, who happen to be similar to you and like you, since its not just about actual work, also about trust and long-term relationship. If all your leads come from platforms, you are in the high competition landscape (zero-sum game), and you do not even control how you sell yourself (e.g. upwork controls how it positions yourself based on their algoritm)
3) Its about giving 1000 percent, before you can extract 1 percent from it. Marketing strategy should really focus on who is that ideal client, where their are, how you going to target them, what is your value proposition, how you going to gain trust without even having an ability to meet with everyone who's attention span is about 5 seconds.
4) If you can generate demand, you are on the treadmill to actual business. Since by having a client that is closed on you or your business, you can now hire anyone. But if you actually accomplish that, this is self evident - you are good marketer.
I heard that many users switch from Hubstaff because of price. They actually choose WebWork Time Tracker because it looks like Hubstaff with features and it's only $2.99 per/user.
Read the book "The Minimalist Entrepreneur". Its a great book on how to get your service out there. The book targets it in the form of a product, but you can take a lot of the same principles. Another book you can read is "The Business of Expertise", which will teach you how to position yourself as an expert in a horizontally+vertically positioned area.
I'm gonna be using guided for a while until my discord is set up, but you can connect your discord account to thishttps://www.guilded.gg/profile/EdVYggz4
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