How do I get business for my web design firm?

I just started my web design firm, www.tripleidesigns.com, and want to find out the best way to get business. Should I give away services or hand out coupons? Perhaps those are bad ideas, but I don't know where to start. Any ideas? (Please only respond if you are being serious.)

How do I get business for my web design firm?
Handing out coupons is not an effective way to market your site -- it's more of a shotgun approach to marketing where you simply hand out coupons for the heck of it even if the person that gets your coupon is not interested in getting a website done.





You need to adopt a rifle approach so you can target precisely those who are most likely to be interested in getting your services. To do this, you first need to identify who your target audiences are, and then and only then should you start figuring out how to market to them.





For example





TARGET AUDIENCE: Small and home-based business owners





Marketing approaches:





1. Get a list of small businesses in your locality and then contact them through direct mail or call them





2. Put up a website and get your site visible to sites that attract small and home-based business owners. You can write articles on how important it is to have a good website, how you can create a great website, how sales is dependent on having a website that works.





3. Network, network and network. Attend chamber of commerce meetings, or even Meetup.com's small business owners and home business owners groups -- these places are filled with your target market. Get to know them, introduce yourself to them and let them know that you are available to create their websites.





Do the same exercise for other target audiences you have in mind.





Giving away free services is also a good approach, if managed carefully. For example, my site attracts a huge small/home business audience and we previously worked with a web design firm. It's a tit-for-tat arrangement whereby they do some design stuff for us and we give them free promotion on our site -- and we've actually given them quite a number of customers.





If you are going to give away free services, be sure to balance out what you can get out of the deal vis-a-vis the other party. But definitely, collaborating with key strategic partners can help you find clients for your business.
Reply:Small Business Marketing Strategy: Target the up-and-coming search engines





While Google still rules the roost when it comes to Internet search engines, and Yahoo is firmly entrenched in second spot, a number of new start-ups are hoping to give them a run for their money. And a good small business marketing strategy would be to check them out and see how you can make them work for your site!





Some of the new up-and-comers include:





Powerset (www.powerset.com): A "natural language" search engine





Hakia (www.hakia.com): A "meaning-based" search engine





Wikia(www.wikia.com): A "community-based" search engine





ChaCha(www.chacha.com): A "social networking-based" search engine





Snap (www.snap.com): A search engine that offers visual previews





It's a smart small business marketing strategy to continue optimizing for the Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines as they are by far and away the most popular -- but niche search engines could provide new opportunities to reach your market. Be sure to check them out!
Reply:There's local business and world-wide business.





I like the Web for world-wide business.





I made a video about how my own service business attracts free world-wide traffic. I'll put the YouTube url below.





I'm including another link to another video that explains the best way to attract this traffic. The video you will see is only 3 minutes, but at the bottom of that screen are links to other resources. The second one is to a 30 minute video. It's very good.





Best wishes.