23 Ways to Get Clients for Your AI Agency

you guys really seem to like the video I put out recently on five different ways to start an AI agency in 2024 and that was more on the technical expertise side and how you can get your foot in the door to actually learn the skills required to start one of these agencies and get the AI expertise part of your business so if you remember in that there was three problems if you haven't watched the video already I highly recommend it that's the best video I have right now most up-to-date information on how you can start an AI agenc here start to get into running AI businesses and they open up doors to you down the line to all sorts of different things but you got to start somewhere and those are the best starting points at I've seen right now from the thousands of people in my free community and my accelerator as well so if you remember in that video there's three problems or three key hurdles that you need to get over when you're starting one of these businesses the first one is some kind of technical expertise and actual understanding of how AI can help businesses and that's familiarity with the tools it's experience and Building Solutions and playing around with them yourself and then the second problem is the lead flow how are you going to actually generate leads and get people to come and contact you about building things for them and finally the third problem is Authority and credibility needed to actually close this deals to prove to these business owners that you are the person for the job and they can entrust you with their money to actually give them the results they require so technical expertise we've handled in that first video of five ways to an a agency if you haven't watched it go and watch that first and now in this video I'm helping you with the second problem or the second hurdle which is lead flow so we covering 23 ways to get AI agency clients so what I'm going to do in this video is rip through these 23 methods very quickly I'm not going to be giving you super in information just a high level overview of what the lead generation method is and who's used it in my community Etc where I'm getting this information from and then from there on my free school Community same deal list last video um it's going to be all the information on each of them so say if we have one two 3 under each of those on the school Community there going to be resources and free resources that I can point you to on YouTube elsewhere that you can then go and explore that lead generation method further so keep that in mind as you're watching this each of these methods is going to have more information if you are interested in pursuing that further on the school Community now jumping into things that's started as a disclaimer before you go into this I don't want you sitting there and making a big list of 10 different ways or 10 different examples or methods that I'm going to cover here and thinking you're going to do all of them the worst thing you could do is to try to do too much at once if you're just getting started I like the hori analogy of taking some weight off the bar when we starting as entrepreneurs we like to think we're really strong and put a load of weight on the bar and think that we can do very complex things so I want to make it clear that all you need to do is pick one of these and do it well and you will get your agency off the ground personally for me to grow Morningside AI my agency into what it is now we have only had to use one of them and that was YouTube so there's your disclaimer there's the note you don't need to do too much doing too much will actually be detrimental to your success so 23 methods client acquisition number one is

fivr so with fivr you may have negative connotations towards it being a $5 cheap platform but in fact this is where a lot of people and a lot of business owners go when they don't know where to look so they'll go into Fiverr they'll go on to the next one which is upwork and they

try to find some professionals who are on there and offering services in the AI space the FIV and upwork methods do work extremely well if you're willing to put in the effort on the platform if you just treat it as another throwaway part of your business you're not giving it all of your attention you're never going to reach the higher earnings on the platform and also the reviews and ratings that you need to get that Authority and credibility to close deals right remember the three problems technical expertise lead flow and authority and credibility these will give you the lead flow because you can position yourself on them as I build XYZ or I can do this for you and then if you've got the reviews to back it up over time you're going to have the authority and cred ility that'll get those deals over the line so fivr um Mark a member of our community one of the top guys in my accelerator if you haven't watched me interview with him from last year that'll be up here but Mark is absolutely crushing it he is top rated on Fiverr so he is like the number one AI guy on Fiverr right now and he Rags at the top any time you search anything AR related Mark is right at the top there and you can actually run ads to make sure that you get done with placements and stuff like this so Fiverr and upwork um Mark uh I will have resources and links to Mark's channels Etc cuz he's got some videos on fber that'll be on the school community so these are the same deal upbook and priv allow you to list yourself on a platform and be discovered by business owners thirdly we have referrals now these are

not necessarily how to get your first client methods these are just general client acquisition methods so referrals after you've done a couple jobs on Fiverr and upwork you can then go ask the people that you've worked with for referrals for other people that have similar businesses and similar problems to them so referrals something that a lot of the time businesses forget to do and you need to build it in as part of the system to your business okay after XYZ number of days when they go and ask or on the on the offboarding or like end of client call we need to ask or request for this if you do it every time you finish a client project successfully you were going to get some clients from referrals which is just free acquisition basically and it's also coming through with a little bit more Authority and credibility when you go to hop on those calls with those referrals that you've been connected with because that's come from someone that they know they're saying hey these guys did a good job they can help you with this problem as well so you get the authority and credibility and the lead flow from this number four we have warm Outreach or

warm reach outs as uh hzi was so is reaching out to people that you already know who are in your network the homi strategy that he detailed in $100 million leads is the gold standard here I'm going to try to tell you a better method um I will leave a link to that particular podcast you can get it for free that'll be on the school Community as resources for this as well basically you can pull all the contacts that you have in your phone your email all your followers Etc and you can build a list of people that you have warm Reach Out capabilities to and then you write a message to reach out to them offer your services or even ask them to refer you to people who car this is actually by far the easiest way to get clients initially for anyone who's starting these businesses is to reach out to your existing Network and many people overlook this and this is actually something we're seeing a lot of success with them accelerator and as soon as people join the program we tell them I could get straight into warm Outreach and they're signing one two three clients within the first couple of weeks as well so warm Outreach if you're not doing it don't overlook it because it's a very easy way to get your foot on the door and get started next we have

LinkedIn content and then similarly we have I'm going to H the separate link and uh con next and DM so LinkedIn content and DM LinkedIn is by far one of the most effective platforms for getting least for AI AG here right now people in my accelerator are crushing it with some of the stuff we put out there not to just keep talking about that but that's where I get most of my information from LinkedIn absolutely smashing it if you able to post valuable content and then people are engaging with it they're liking it they're leaving a comment Etc then you have the justification to then go and uh shoot them a DM and say hey look saw that you engag in my post I was wondering if you have any other questions or I can help you out in any other way and you start a conversation there and that can lead to hopping on a discovery call this is a good way to attract if you I mean I talk about it every video right now but there's technology adoption curve I'll link it up here you need to watch it if you haven't if you want to make money in the AI space you have to understand this technology adoption life cycle which I've covered in a video um you are going to attract those early adopters who are easy clients to get signed initially and by posting content and letting them respond to it and say hey I'm interested then you able to find those IL adopters who are willing to get AI built into their business right now whereas the majority of the market right now is not actually interested so LinkedIn content post valuable things and DM people um and Linkedin connect in DM is a little bit different we set up an automation like on drify again I'll leave resources for all of these so that you know how to set these campaigns up and set up these automations but you can use automations on LinkedIn to automatically connect with people from a given uh industry or Niche you can filter by Niche or industry and you're able to connect with them automatically send them a little message Etc and then you're able to shoot them a DM and a sequence of DMS and you can offer your services that way so this is more of an automated way this is a Content based way you can automate this to some degree if you have some fancy AI content creation tools but I'd recommend just starting off manually writing it initially so of course you can do both and if you choose LinkedIn as is your platform you can stack these two and I would recommend that you do so you go all in on growing so you can use the connect and DM Automation and again I'll leave setup guides on the school post um you can use this to add people to your audience and then therefore more people are going to see your content you're going to get more people out here who've got a bit more trust Etc so it is a virtuous cycle where you're going to see more and more results over time because you keep adding more people to your connection request so to your connection sorry and one thing I'll mention here if you are using an automation um a friend of mine who was a LinkedIn sales expert that's the whole thing he does he says if you are sending connection requests don't include a message with the connection request if you send just a plain empty connection request people assume that you know them or it's just a friendly thing and they'll accept it at a much higher rate I believe you said it's a 20 to 30% increase an acceptance rate of the connection request if you don't include anything in the connection message because then they assume that you're trying to sell them something so if you can leave it out and you're going to see more connections and more people added to your network now similarly we

have uh seven Twitter content Twitter X whatever you want to say uh Twitter content and then Twitter cold so similar to LinkedIn you can't call DM people you need to be connected with them or some people you can message if they choose to but in the majority of cases you can't call DM people on Twitter it's much more likely that you are able to send a call DM to someone so the call DM strategy applies here and then posting content on Twitter and growing your following so more people see it giving up value Etc building trust similar to the LinkedIn content strategy again it's just different platforms right so you can take this idea of posting content and doing Outreach on basically any platform you want LinkedIn and Twitter are good ones but again you got to pick one and do it well if you try to do both you could try to crosspost it but there are nuances and intricacies and details that pick up on each of the platforms that are different and so if you're trying to split yourself between learning LinkedIn and becoming a really deep expert in LinkedIn and then also doing Twitter as well it's going to be harder to reach the high levels of success with the platform if you're spreading yourself to thin so LinkedIn or Twitter same deal then number

nine is YouTube and I think you watching this video is exhibit a of how YouTube works I have built my entire AI career off of YouTube own I haven't whether doing anything else sure do a bit posting on LinkedIn a bit on Twitter now um but my main thing has just been YouTube and I just focus on getting really good at that and I've grown a massive following now on within the AI space and built three different businesses off the back of it so YouTube extremely effective this is the gold standard of personal branding because people sit here and watch you for so long you buil up a lot of trust and again you need expertise lead flow and credibility Authority YouTube handles those here can do very well so if you're able to get on camera and talk and sound like you're intelligent like you know what you're talking about and you've got experience then people are going to trust you a lot more and you're going to get a lot of Highly engaged leads messaging you as long as you've set up a good funnel as well but YouTube a little bit more difficult as you need to learn how to talk on camera and not be uh really boring but if you can do it right it can be a game changer for your business and completely transform your life as it has for me over the past 18 months um but for YouTube it's the same sort of deal with LinkedIn content and Twitter content give out value identify who the people you're going to be selling to and the people you want to engage with put their Niche or who they are in the title in the thumbnail Etc it's not really that hard but I will leave some resources on the school as to how I got started on YouTube and that'll be pretty helpful for you to show you I mean I got off on the right foot immediately and the resources that I used I'll include on the school Community as well so getting into number 10 now we are almost halfway there number 10 is medium articles now medium

that's like low medium high if you're not sure and you can't read my wrting medium is a platform that allows you to write blogs write articles and it also has a discoverability in kind of a an algorithm that helps your content get discovered by people who have never followed you before or seen you before so in the same way that YouTube when you post a video it tries to put it out there and find people who want to watch it I think it's actually the other way around it finds videos that people want to watch not people that want to watch your videos but long story short there is discoverability on these platforms where if you post something good it can reach a broader group of people who have never heard of you and never seen you before same thing on medium but it is text based and you can write an article and give out some value talking about how you've done this for a business using AI or how you created this Coe system that does this uh using AI again but you don't have to put your face on it Lug around all this camera equipment you don't have to buy a whiteboard where if you go like I do um it's a lot more lightweight than YouTube but you can still get the same kind of result not results but you can still get results and if you choose again these businesses the reason we're creating these businesses is to build the life of our dreams use AI to create a life that we actually love living and all the perks and benefits that we want and the lifesty that we want if you are someone who doesn't want to have to get on camera like this and lug these camera equipment around and buy whiteboards and stuff this is a very good alternative to YouTube you can just be sitting on a beach in Bary or wherever you want to go and just be typing away in your laptop I'm a little bit envious of that I like writing but at the end of the day for me YouTube is a bigger lever I can put more effort into it I get to connect with you all a much deeper level but for some people medium is a good choice and I've interviewed SJ a member of my accelerator who's making um as a side hustle and I don't usually recommend using this model as a side Hustle but he's been able to learn make. com and start posting on medium and now is making as much money from his AI automation agency as from his job so he's able to supplement his income and basically double his income by just learning make. com and then posting his learnings and his journey really sharing his journey on medium which is what I keep telling you guys to do learn something document it and then you're going to have two to three months of evidence of why you are the person you say you are why you can help these businesses and that helps with that Authority component of learning these deals so medium like text based version of YouTube if you want to watch it interview with the SJ I had on the channel recently where he talked about how he's actually using medium and you can see links to all those details that'll be as one of the resources on the school Community for the medium side of things okay number 11 now is a bit of a different one um it is

Charities and nonprofit organizations using Charities and nonprofits to get your first couple of clients is actually a strategy that Mark put me on to and I'm going to do a whole video on this a little bit later but basically if you're looking to get your foot in the door and build a bit of a couple testimonials get some real hands-on experience in building AI solutions for businesses so I started trying to reach out to a profit driven small business owner who's a complete hard ass and is very like bottom line focused you can reach out to these Charities and nonprofits and offer them free services say hey look I would like to build you this website chat would you be interested we're doing a thing at our agency where we want to give back to the community for businesses that necessarily wouldn't get access to AI solutions would you be interested from the screenshots that marks in through of the email responses you getting which I'm going to Again cover in a different video um there respon rate was great and he was straight in the door being able to build these solutions for Charities and nonprofits so if you're looking for your first client that can be a very effective foot in the door uh to get started next we have a whole bunch of AD platforms that I'm going to separate out

cuz there I don't want you guys to think you can do them well at once we have Google ads as in search then we have YouTube ads we have LinkedIn ads then we have meta ads so Facebook uh WhatsApp uh Instagram Etc and so all of these you know that Google is search by the way so I'm going to rub that off all of these can be learned individually and sent to some kind of offer whether that's a free AI audit whether that's some kind of lead magnet where you give them ebook Etc but each of these platforms offers a very lucrative way to get clients in this whole ad space if you are someone who has experience in digital marketing uh like myself this is a very exciting place for the AI agency space right now because very few people are experimenting with actually getting clients through paid traffic so if you want to explore something if you have these the skill set these are not something you can just casually pick up it does take quite a while and you are going to need to focus on okay I'm just going to use search ads I'm going to run into this there's a lot of you're going to be spending money on ads of course so this is for people who are perhaps willing to invest a little bit more to get results faster but if you put a bunch of spend behind Google ads or YouTube ads and Linkedin Med ads Etc and you spend time to focus on just one platform and test this offer to see what's converting the most you will find eventually you may need to bring in an agency or bring in an expert get a consultant Etc but you will find some combination of AD creative and copy and messaging and also the offer that you're making on your landing page that is able to generate you leads and books call on a consistent basis and you can turn up the ad Spin and you're going to get more leads so this is extremely lucrative and this is something that is again still wide open because myself my business partner Josh run a marketing agency extensive marketing experience but because we on morning side through YouTube we've never had to run ads for our agency so we haven't actually explored paid acquisition for AI agency clients so it's still wide open I'd love to see more we see it in the accelerated starting to come up as you'll see a little bit later uh but experimenting with these is extremely exciting space for me and I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses but like I said if you're going to do it just pick one and do it well and experiment back and forth until you're getting a good uh cost per lead or whatever conversion me you're looking for cost per appointment book to C it's a number 16 we have school communities

this is one that we're starting to see quite a lot in my accelerator where people are using these School communities to find hyper targeted pockets of their ideal uh ideal customer the business owners they're trying to attracted and then they can go in there and they can build a bit of Rapport they can make posts they can Network they can DM directly and use the school communities as a way of just finding a big pull of the people they want to get in touch with and then working some leads in there as well the guy in my accelerator who's really crushing it and getting a lot of bookings with us at the moment he's selling an AI Co calling system to real estate agencies and agents and what he's doing is finding School communities that have the people that he's trying to sell to he's going in he's making posts he's sharing value he's directly dming people and building up a bit of Rapport in the community and then getting a ton of bookings from there by just sending them the link by DM Etc School communities are great for that and finding a big pocket of people that you want to get in touch with you do have to be wary when you're doing the school Community strategies not to comeing too hot and just immediately start saying I sell this who wants to buy it because you get banned immediately if you do that stuff in my community you'll get banned instantly um but if you can go in and build a bit of report you make post you become known as a person the AI guy or girl in the community that they can go to talk to you get in touch with the moderators owners Etc you make yourself a a part of that community and give out a lot of free value and actually add to the net sum of the value in that Community then you'll be able to generate leads in that Community basically whenever you want if you have a good offer and if you have new stuff to sell them so extremely effective strategy because it's hyper targeted and you know if you go into a large school community and you spend 2 3 months even building up Rapport and becoming the person within that Community they can go to if it's enough you have basically infinite pool of people and there's always people coming into these communities as well so you've got a an excellent Cent acquisition method if you choose to do this but again you just pick one and do it well you'll have enough clients um to get you off the groundout and similarly to this we have Facebook groups we have LinkedIn

groups all right so same sort of thing applies here LinkedIn and Facebook groups first thing is finding the group you need to find someone that has the people that you want to sell to in it um and that means picking a specific Niche or a type of customer that you want to be selling to Facebook groups go on Facebook have a little search around try to get into a couple of them LinkedIn groups same sort of deal but as I said with the school communities don't come in hop don't just come in and start selling immediately that's not going to last you might get a couple call bookings from people who are probably quite stupid if they're just going to click some random gu selling stff in their Community but if you can build up a bit of Rapport get com become familiar with the people in the community be known as someone who provides value and someone's trustworthy again the authority and credibility that you need to be able to close deals if you give away some free value on these you can be sure that you're going to be getting a bunch of interest and hopefully you convert that into booking and clients as well right number 19 is

cold calling yeah this is everyone's favorite uh but it is quite terrifying for most people and it is something that if you did choose to do it well and just said okay I'm just going to learn how to c go businesses and get them interested in AI solutions that would be all you need to do and then you can teach other people how to do it on your behalf as well so while it is terrifying it is extremely effective you can in the space of a couple of hours call hundreds of businesses and offer them your services so it's in terms of input output and the amount of time and effort you put in to the potential output if you were doing that every single day there is no way that you would not get clients so I will leave some resources on how to get into cold calling on the school Community as well number 20 again talking about input output is Expos and

events so if there is a type of business owner or an industry that you want to Target and there is an expo or an event in a big city near you if you go in there it might even just be a local B but if you go there you're going to be surrounded by your ideal customer you have any infinite chances basically to go and have conversations with them and learn more about them and get in their head if you are trying to be a niche agency and focusing on selling to a specific type of people this is a in terms of the density of how many people you can talk to in a short space of time and the effectiveness of that it's going to be basically unmatched anywhere else any other method that you're trying to reach other people right so if you're there in the space of 4 hours 5 hours 6 hours at one of these events and Expos you can have conversations with dozens of people get dozens of numbers and contacts offer them your services let them know who you are these can feel little a little bit awkward you're a stranger walking around a Expo trying to sell your AI services but in the space of just one day of relative discomfort yes I know you can put yourself in your business further ahead than if you spent a month or two doing any of this stuff right so you can get a massive Leap Frog forward for your business in terms of the connections you have and the potential clients in the pipeline so while uncomfortable extremely effective and similarly 21 is Walkins so in this digital age we kind

of forget that you can just walk into a business and say hi and introduce yourself and offer your services all you need to do is search up the types of businesses that you want to find on Google you can get a big list of their addresses and then in one day you can go out and walk into a whole bunch of these businesses now the tricky part here of course is when you're walking into these businesses what do you actually do when you're in there what's the process if there's a receptionist what you ask for ETC this is going to vary from industry to Industry so you're going to need to come up with your own strategy I can't spoon feed you something here but essentially if they're a businesses in your town or city that are the kind of people that you want to be selling to you can walk in there and introduce yourself and off your Services high level overview of that next our second the last one as you probably expected is

called email C email to uh pre AIT slle magnet slf free service so Cod email of course pretty well established method for getting in touch with people and letting them know about your services again advertising is just to make known so we're making our business and our services known people VI these different methods and so cold email is a way of getting in touch with them using a platform like instantly is the best one to go with by far so instantly is a cold email platform and they make everything extremely easy for you if you're looking to use this method but JY thing with cold email is one how to get high quality leads so that's a entire problem itself making sure that you're sending out to people who really could use your services but then you need to think what the actual offer is and what you're saying Within These emails right so got a couple options here firstly a free AI audit similar to this so it's again similar to these ads here right where you you're making some kind of offer he click here to do this or in cold email you don't want to send any links or anything in the message itself you just want to create some interest and say hey would you be interested in me sending this over or would you like to know a little bit more about this just reply yes and I'll shoot it over so in this way you can say hey look we do free AI audits for this assist if you're interested we have a couple slots coming up next week for AI audits please just reply to this with a yes and I'll send you some more information on the AI audit and how you can book so they reply with yes and then you send them the information same goes with the lead magnet I've personally tested this lead method out and works if you have some kind of ebook or resource that you create you can send out cold email and people going to reply and say hey yes I'd like that free AI value ebook for XYZ Niche or finally you can offer a free service or product this is actually a method used by a lot of people with a my accelerator just to get their agencies off the ground particularly when you don't have the testimonials and the case studies to have that Authority and credibility to get those deals signed right so that's the technical expertise lead flow and authority and credibility that when you start out you don't really have that third one because you haven't done anything and that's why if you create cont content documenting your learnings you have some you at least you have something going into it whereas if you're starting out where a lot of these guys did they had nothing so they had to offer these free chat Bots and say hey look we'll build this thing for you um free of charge and that got their foot in the door to open up to upses and further AI solutions for them so from there they're able to sell them two three $4,000 products or services on top of that but the free service is another great one and I highly recommend you testing those out if you choose to do cold Emil again if you just do cold Emil and do it well test all these different offers and test a bunch of different lead sources I promise you will get results if you're sending out enough emails and finally lucky last saving potentially The Best For Last 23 is a webinar finnal plus ads now this

is an exciting one um that's come out of my accelerator we've got some people in there who have experimented with this and a seeing success running ads to some kind of webinar sign up where it's like an AI learn more about how AI can help your business sign up I believe the person who first did it was using a uh a $3 kind of wallet check them to see if they're actually willing to pay at all so you put a micro commitment down where they have to pay $3 to sign up and get access to the webinar and then when they or host a webinar they're sitting there they do a live event where they're going through and explaining them they get a chance to build trust and authority and credibility with the people who signed up and then this person from exelor was able to convert that into a $10,000 sale so they've signed a clim for $10,000 based off running ads to this $3 micro commitment um and getting a chance to show their expertise and what they know about Ai and how it can benefit businesses through a webinar now if you're not entirely sure what the webinar is I'll put some resources on the school to let you know how webinar finer Works a pretty popular method of selling things online Russell Brunson was really the guy who just made these things massive and got the super DED in but this is could potentially be put into something here but I want to keep it separate because it is a really new and exciting one that deserves its own category here that I want to dive into a little deeper and so that's about all for the video as I mentioned all the resources for these on each of these different methods I'm going to provide some YouTube links some free resources for each of these if you want to learn how to go deeper on them and actually learn how to do it and implement it within your agency so um I hope this been valuable there's a lot there again you only need to do one and do well whether that's a FIV whether that's medium whether that's YouTube like I've done if you just pick one and spend a solid 3 to 6 months really working on just getting the results out of that platform then you will see results but if you keep chopping and changing and you're doing a new one every two weeks you're not going to see results if you jump in and do cold email for a few weeks you L it's not working well it's CU you didn't actually push through and continue to absorb more information and seek expert advice find Niche YouTube videos and how to get the most out of it you need to keep assisting on one of these Platforms in order to get the most out of it and for you to create a system that's going to bring your leads consistently so all of it's on school Community that's down below I know a lot of you guys are already in there um we've got an excellent community over there the link to join the school Community is going to be the first one in the description down below so you can join there I'll see you in there for my Friday q& as if you guys want to ask me questions directly um mly down there if you want to leave a like or a thumbs up on the video that lets me know that you like this kind of content and I should make more of it I can clearly see the like the dislike ratio on my videos so if it's overwhelmingly positive then I make more like that it's kind of how I base my future content off also if you have questions about this or other stuff that you want me to cover in future videos comment down below and I will look through your comments and see what you guys want to see next so that's all for the video best luck with your agencies and I will see you in the next one