Thanks for sharing the good ideas, everyone.

Mary

Originally Posted by jeanafidyk

I was wondering where you have had luck finding clients. I mean location-wise. I would love to meet clients face-to-face, I just don't where to physically go! I don't think going door to door would be too effective, but if there are places where I could go to find small business owners, that would be great. Thanks!

More often than not, people may not realize that VAs are available OR what they do. Visit the section in the forums about article writing and submit articles about what you offer to your local papers.

Pam

Originally Posted by emoreno

When I get sick of working at home, I take my laptop down to my local coffee shop and work there. And I see tons of other people doing the same thing. There's always one or two people talking loudly on their phone about some crucial business problem or mix-up. It makes me think coffee shops would be a great place to meet clients and put up fliers. Eris

That's such a great idea Eris.
I think tomorrow while my son is at daycare, I'm going to go to a coffee shop and work.

Thanks!

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I am starting with people I have worked with previously and registering with the chambers. I am also associated with several network groups I will be making people aware of my business

thank you so much. This really helped me right now. It was just a easy thing to google and there it came up, some nettworking-sites in Norway! I have not thouth of that before.

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Best wishes, Ellen from Norway
Pardon my english!

Thank you for sharing everyone - definitely some good ideas to look in to

Have a great day

Cathy

Kathy,

I never thought to approach this work from the vantage point of outsourcing. Great tip! Thanks.

DDR

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Donna, DR Business Connection
www.drbizc.com

These are great ideas. I have been thinking about sending flyers or postcards locally.

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Kari Talamantez
Task Pass http://www.taskpass.com

I'm afraid I've given up on networking locally for the time being. For 18 months (since I moved here) I attended every networking event I could find, including a couple of expensive all day biggies, and gained not one piece of business. Many of the participants were selling such things as prepaid legal, jewellery and makeup. My ideal client is someone who is overworked and overloaded and those people don't have time to attend networking events. Shower, makeup, travel and attendance (and buying a usually nauseating lunch) carves 4 hours out of the day which I feel can be better used in online marketing and producing a mailing from time to time. This feeling was enforced when I recently gained a new client, my one and only local client, and she found me online.

The local Chamber of Commerce has a few events that allow non-members and I will attend those to get a feel for it as I gained nothing from a membership in another city some years ago, but in fairness I was only able to attend evening events at the time. Many cities publish names and addresses of chamber members on their website which might be useful for a mailing. I gained a really good client a few years back that way.

I've found a couple of new meetup groups I plan to join, one on a subject that interests me and the other a geeky sort of group (love to learn new things). I must have some interests outside the business or my vocabulary will decline to a series of woofs and meows

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The Wordpro Wizard
www.wordprowizard.com

Finding clients can be challenging. What I find works best is to always have business cards on hand and give them out to everyone I see.

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Myrlene Hoyte
www.vpadmins.com