I often get asked “How do you get new business?”

I think it goes like this for me:

• Blogging: I’m not joking. Some of you people who sit back there laughing at my inability to type and spell eventually start working with me. This has become particularly apparent in the past few months when I changed around a few things and did some experiments. These projects are really good because we generally spend a lot of time talking about neat, interesting things and the businesses who start chatting normally have pretty similar values and thoughts on life to me and we get some really good conversations going (and good websites made).
• Current customers recommended us: These are cool too. When someone comes to you because someone they know really liked working with us, it sets a nice environment of trust which really does lead to a smooth project.
• Past experience: People like the interaction design I did at PlanHQ and often hunt me down because they enjoy using it and think it looks and works really nicely. Most of these people have similar styles to me in terms of design, which means we click pretty quickly
• People I Know who recommend us: People like Julia, and Silverstripe who are super awesome at what they do and want to work with us on the bits we do best. I’ve enjoyed working with these guys heaps and it’s very cool to see a project with a larger scope from start to finish

We’ve never advertised as such and I definitely never want to. I think most of our ‘lead generation tools’ (theres some biz lingo for you) are fairly mundane, but how cool is it how much our blog contributes?

The funny thing is, in the past few months I’ve been experimenting with a few more ‘out there’ posts on management and various other things, which I kind of knew wouldn’t be everyones cup of tea… But the opposite has really happened, the more focused I get on what we really think, and how our business operates (I’m really just the mouthpiece for all of us), the more I get to meet and be introduced to the kind of people I get very excited about meeting (sorry old friends for all the gushing I do).

That has reinforced my belief that you shouldn’t try to appeal to everyone, but focus in on what you really want to do and appeal heaps to the small portion who think the same way as you do. It has also reinforced my belief that everything you do is marketing (from hanging out with the cast of an Arts Festival events and talking about business to having the boyfriend of someone you work with get very excited about the tools you use and pass this onto to everyone he talks to) and as long as you know exactly hwat you are about and stick with it, it’s actually very simple to attract the kind of work you like.