Don't build a website for a client you don't know (Copy)
Being in places your clients already trust will bring you further than a year long of content
In my first official year of business, I printed 300 postcards and delivered them on foot during a cold Berlin winter.
They had really nice illustrations. I spent four days walking through Berlin, leaving them in every café and coworking space I could find. Sometimes I'd sneak into the bathroom and stick one in the door, because where else would people stand still for a minute and read?
I got two clients out of it, not the greatest conversion from my effort.
At the time, that felt like very little. Four days, 300 postcards, two people; I filed it under experiments that didn't work, and never did it again.
It’s easy to focus only on the two clients I converted and nothing else, but a lot of the value from this experience started to show up much later. And this is a hard part to accept in any business.
Both of them bought the full package I had at the time. And later, people started saying, "Oh, you're the guy from the postcards," and sending others my way.
I didn't understand back then that this was not only about how the postcards performed. What also worked was that they put me in the same places as the people I wanted to work with, building a presence at the café where they drank their coffee. Building a brand at the coworking spaces where they worked, without even knowing it. And (not so) suddenly people could put a face to the name before they ever needed me. I was out there, man, and very close by.
And that’s the first step: building trust in the most effective way. Being someone online is very different from being present in places where people already have a certain level of trust and familiarity.
LinkedIn and Substack and all of these, they feel very productive, but they are not very sustainable in terms of making money. It's not a game that you can play fast. The content only starts bearing fruits around about one year, two years. So you have to go to places where the trust is already high, and you feel reachable.
Someone who has never met you needs to see you again and again before they trust you. On social media, that's at least seven times before they even get curious. Then they need a reason to talk to you, then they need to trust you, and then maybe they buy. In places where trust already exists, a lot of that work is done for you.
Posting more feels tempting; it's “free”, you can do it from your desk and not freezing in the streets, and you get likes, which feel like progress. Then months go by, and the likes don't turn into money in the bank. You start wondering what's wrong with your content, when nothing is; you're just playing a slow game and expecting fast results.
And yes, I'm writing this in a newsletter, so I'd be a hypocrite to tell you to stop. Keep writing. Just know it's slow, and slow is fine if you've got a year. If you need clients in the next three months, it can't be your only plan; you need to do something else.
Go where your people already are: rooms, communities, events, the places they already trust and find connections. There, you skip most of those seven touches, because you're already standing next to them and there’s something around vouching for you.
Where do the people you want to work with already gather?
It can be a place or a community online. Write down one, and one date this month when you'll actually show up there, and LinkedIn doesn’t count for this exercise.
Hit reply and tell me where. I read every one, and I'll write back.
