About the Author

Lance is an aspiring social artist based in Central Florida. His goal is to be a kickass dude, meet cool people, and generally dominate at life. He enjoys sports, surfing, socializing, reading and writing. You can contact Lance via email here or online here.

Give Freebies To Build Your Creative Portfolio

By on Mar 24, 2009 in Game

networking1For you entrepreneurs and bloggers out there, here’s a cool tip that could help blow up your business. For the PUA’s and relationships people in the audience, this is good networking advice.

I work full-time and run a little side business as a web developer and technical consultant. What I’ve recently done is set up WordPress blogs for two different clients. I didn’t do this out of the goodness of my heart, I did it to help generate more business for me. Here’s what I did.

1. I work out at this gym regularly and I’ve befriended several of the personal trainers. I blogged a little bit about one of the trainers, a hot chick, in this post.

2. All personal trainers are looking for clients to train on the side, outside of their gyms, in order to make more cash.

3. Most personal trainers aren’t web savvy AT ALL, but they know that they need a website to get contact info out there.

4. What they don’t realize is that they need a good website with good SEO in order to grab some search engine traffic. That’s where I come in.

5. I walked both trainers through the process of setting up self-hosted WordPress blogs and gave them primers on publishing high value content and some basic SEO techniques. This took about 2 hours of my time each.

6. Voila! Both trainers have nice WordPress blogs. Now they can print their website URL’s on business cards and marketing literature AND they show up in search engines.

The Benefits of Freebies

The important point here is that I did all of the above completely for FREE and I still give my trainer buddies tips and advice for FREE. Why? Because the people who can afford personal trainers have money and either are business people or own businesses, which is the market I want to appeal to. So when one of those folks knows someone who needs a website or blog, they get my name.

Also, if my personal trainers decide to take their blogs to another level, they come to me and I charge them my regular fees for upgrades, consulting, and support.

The cool thing is I convinced my boss at my “regular” workplace to do essentially the same thing. We have a huge portfolio of well designed websites, but we have basically zero social media clients. I convinced my boss to take one of our current clients and gussy them up with a social media presence and strategy, completely FOR FREE. We dumped some hours into this, but now we have a nice portfolio piece to show to future clients and our current client is happy as a clam. Not bad, eh?

If you’re a blogger, consider writing quality guest posts for blogs that have high traffic (ie giving another blog a good freebie).

Takeaway

Give some of your good work away for free in order to build your portfolio and expand your network. Much credit to Evan Marc Katz for helping me with this idea.

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  • http://www.dietbrainery.com Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach

    Nice suggestions! I advocate such partnerships with recruiters and realtors (realtors get leads for folks moving into town who then need jobs – that’s where recruiters come in) – love your particular partnering idea too!

    Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach´s last blog post…FINALLY! Probe launched into Acai Berry scam diet products

  • http://casualencounters.com/blog/ Janak

    Slick, Lance. Want a guest post? I can totally do it straight! Ish!

    Stay spectacular.

    Janak´s last blog post…How to Find Sex: the Art of the One Night Stand – Part 19 “The Heavy Stuff: Pregnancy, STDs and contraception”

  • http://20-forty.com/ lisaq

    Nicely done! Great ideas to consider.

    lisaq´s last blog post…Pure Romance: More Than Just Sex Toys

  • http://dadshouseblog.com dadshouse

    Giving stuff away for free is a great way to build buzz. That’s sort of what you’re doing with these trainers. Good work.

    Converting that buzz into real paying gigs is where the rubber meets the road. I’ve never excelled at sales. My son is a master negotiator. I could use some of his skills!

    dadshouse´s last blog post…Spring Fever – Contest With Prizes!

  • http://www.thedateabledork.com The Dateable Dork

    Lance – Great advice. Hope you get a lot of good consulting gigs out of it! I see my boss do that kind of thing all the time – giving clients little freebies to keep them happy, knowing that they’ll come back to us with their next big project. If only my line of work was conducive to generating a little side business of my own!

    The Dateable Dork´s last blog post…Still sick, but back home at last

  • http://www.pualingo.com/ Pua Lingo

    Great advice. I think the main takeaway here is that giving value is (somewhat counter-intuitively) the best way to get value. This is true in relationships as it is in business.

    Pua Lingo´s last blog post…Lay of Rage / Revenge fuck