Many solopreneurs have shared with me that it is hard to land the first few clients. Therefore, many of them try to land some pro bono clients – clients that don’t pay, but will help them experience working with a client, provide a testimonial, etc.

My recommendation would be to stay away from not paying clients; I would recommend charging lower rates, but still charging something for your time and effort.

Paying clients are more qualified than free clients; they will keep their appointments, do their homework and be much more serious about wanting to get results out of working with you.

If you are struggling with gaining your first five clients, you might want to get yourself a mentor in your field, as well as a business coach. Your mentor (paid or free) will navigate you through doing business in your industry, and your business coach will help you run your solopreneur practice as a business.

Remember – when new grads graduate from colleges, they have no experience, but they still get job offers that pay salaries. Their salaries are not as high as a salary of someone
with 10 years of industrial experience, but they are not asked to do pro bono work either.

Biana Babinsky
Biana Babinsky is the online business coach, author and expert, who teaches solopreneurs how to use the Internet to gain more clients and make more money. Get her Complete Step by Step Online Marketing Course to learn how to promote your solopreneur business online and get more clients.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.