Where do your clients hang out?

When you’re a new Virtual Assistant, it can sometimes be difficult to determine where to find your potential clients.

All the obvious things come to mind: newspapers, flyers, Yellow Pages, noticeboards.  Some of these things cost money and some don’t – just a bit of time and effort.

But there are other things you can do or use to help you find your potential client base. The important thing first may be simply working out what your client might look like. Not physically but more with respect to what they do, and perhaps what type of person they are.

Think about the type of service you want to offer. What service offerings do you have? Wordprocessing? Data entry? Database management? Social Media support?  Transcriptions (medical, legal, conference) Knowing what you’re going to offer could go a long way to determining what type of client you are looking for.  What might they do in order to need what you do?

Those can be the hard questions and once you’ve answered them, doesn’t mean it’s set hard and fast in concrete.  You are allowed to change your mind later on. I have and my service offerings have changed considerably over the years.

Going along to business networking groups is a good idea. Find out if your local council hosts any groups of this kind and go along to the meetings.  Spend time talking with other business owners and learn a bit about what they do.  Don’t think that everyone you meet is going to become a client. They won’t. But in getting to know them you’ll be able to start working out who you would like to work with and why, or who might know who and whether they can introduce you to those people? They may tell you of other networking groups and events that you were not aware of.

You’ll also start to get an idea of what industries you can begin researching online as well, thereby opening more doors to possbilities and making you aware of a bigger and wider world out there.

Have fun exploring!