How to Get More Clients for Your Service-Based Startup (For Free)

Getting new clients can be expensive, but here is where and how you can get them for free.

It has come to a point that free traffic online is almost a thing of the past. 

Think about it. 

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have all reduced the organic reach of all accounts. For example, today a person with an Instagram account containing 100,000 followers is only expected to get approximately 3,000 likes on a new post where they may have had 15,000 likes on the same post when Instagram first launched. 

This doesn’t sound bad at face value; it’s an engagement rate of three percent, which is considered a good engagement rate on Instagram by today’s standards. To obtain a three percent engagement rate, it’s likely that about ten percent of your followers actually see each piece of new content you post. 

In simple terms, if you have 100,000 followers, 10,000 will see a new post, and 3,000 will engage. Now, if we bring that down to the startup level and you have 500 followers, 50 of them will see a new post and 15 of them will engage. 

Not only does it make it extremely difficult to build a relationship and land a new client, but it also makes growing a new account to an influencer level almost impossible.  

This could be an entire article itself, but I’ll end the social media section by making a single point. Even people who have purposely followed your business account aren’t guaranteed to see your content in their feed. Social Media companies do this because they want you to pay for advertising. 

This is happening all over the internet. The best keywords on Google are dominated by large corporations and websites that can afford to land thousands of backlinks from authoritative websites, which allows them to grow their own authority and rank for keywords organically. 

It’s not enough to have the best content anymore. You must spend money or be very skilled to compete on Google because, without the corresponding authority, your only option is to pay for advertising on Google. 

There are exceptions, but those are mostly based in very niche fields with low competition and, in turn, require little authority to rank. There’s almost nowhere you can go online as a new startup and get the traffic necessary to land enough new clients to sustain a new startup without paying for advertising. 

The problem is that most new service-based startups are launched by regular people and aren’t funded well enough to pay for the advertising necessary to build the client base needed to turn a profit. 

Read more: www.entrepreneur.com