How my web design agency gets high-paying clients (without cold emails)

When I started my web design career, I was always looking for the next hack. Instead of building something which is going to last, I was trying to use every single secret technique they promote to get new customers. And that means trying cold outreach, trying LinkedIn cold outreach, even paying ads, like doing things for free. Whatever you saw online, I've tried it only to realize that even when I did get customers that way, I've gotten the worst type of a customer. So at that point I decided to completely stop focusing on hacks and focus on growing a real business and a real brand over the next 5 years. And that resulted in me growing my business to more than $3. 5 million in revenue and working with customers like checkout. com, Upwork. Yes, Upwork is actually our client and we built the website for Upwork and not actually getting clients from Upwork and many other leading brands. The first way we get customers is the existing clients we already have. And that can be in different ways. The first one is doing incredible service delivery for them. I mean just overd delivering consistently. And yes, of course, everybody's telling you that, but I just want to get that out of the way to ensure that we know that doing great work is actually going to bring you more work. But then the next step is also pretty interesting. Realistically, if you're working for any types of a business, you might be working for a creative director or CEO or a marketing person like whatever. And those people are either going to change jobs or they might start a new business. And the thing you should look for is that if a marketer you work with moves to a different company, you should reach out to them and try to foster an actual relationship while you work and also afterwards so that you consistently get new customers from existing deals. For us personally, we get a lot of deals by working for bigger companies. People quit, they move jobs, and they just want to work with us again. They're like, "Hey, you know what? I've moved jobs. I want to still work with you. You're the best. You're going to make my life so much easier. Let's work together again. " Like even for existing customers, you can also ask them to recommend you new customers. There is an amazing book called Referral Code that I believe everybody should read and it explains that you can actually ask for referrals. For the really long time, we were just waiting for referrals to come into our business. But realistically, if you're doing a great job, you can go ahead and reach out to your current customer and say, "Hey, I know that you're really satisfied. I saw you left a five-star review. Can you recommend us somebody which might need services like this? " Yet, then you can also follow that as a sales call and as a sales process. So instead of just leaving it there, you can say, "Do you mind me reaching out next week? " Maybe somebody else comes to your mind or maybe like they don't have anybody next week. Then you can reach out the week after that, the week after that. And in general, just try to position getting referrals more as a sales process and more as a channel where you can get more great customers from your existing client base. And also, you should also focus on upselling your current customers. And I don't necessarily mean upselling, but just trying to suggest them a lot of new things they can do. I mean, for us, we've had customers which paid us $1,000 for the first project and then ended up spending more than $200,000 per year with us. So, it doesn't necessarily mean that if a customer doesn't spend a lot of money with you initially, they're not going to spend long term. So another way you can market is to market to existing customers of yours and to find ways that they can bring you more work. new customers by moving jobs. referrals or in general that you use that as a marketing channel of your own. The second way we get customers is that we treat our agency as a business and as any business it needs marketing. So what do we actually do? First part is SEO and LMS. So our website is number one. Whatever you search in Chad GPT, Claude, Google, whenever you search, you're going to find us in maybe top five to 10 examples. And people might say to you, hey, you know what? Like you can find a hack to do it. But realistically, over the last 6 years, we've been writing blogs about Webflow, how to do things on Webflow, and we've been writing blogs which are really specific and which are really good value in order to come to this position. So, you might be scared at this point to identify, hey, you know what? Like, I might need five to six years kind of in order for this to get off the ground. Well, you're probably going to get some customers and the growth is going to be like this. But if you're focusing on the right things for a really long time, at one point, the business is going to be taking off and you're going to be getting more referrals than you can handle for your own thing. The only important thing here is for you to niche down and to actually understand how are you positioning and how are you delivering services? Because if you're delivering everything to everyone, it's probably going to be hard for you to rank in the first 10,000 kind of like searches on Google or anywhere

else versus on the other side, if you're really specific about your niche and about what you're doing, it's going to be easier for people to recognize you on Google, JGBT, LLMs, and everything like that. The second way is YouTube. And we did publish 250 videos over the last 5 to 6 years. And you may think, hey, I'm not an influencer. I'm not going to do this. get thousands of views. And the reality is that you don't need to. Even if you go to our YouTube channel today, like Flow Ninja's YouTube channel, you're going to see that we're not getting a lot of views, but we're getting the right types of views. So, because of that, we can get videos which have 5, 600 views, 1,000 views, and we can get a customer from every single video in that case because they're really specific to our audience. They're delivering a unique set of values to our customers. And how are we looking at which blogs and YouTube videos we're going to be producing? We're looking at things which are never going to get old. So we're trying to create things which are timeless. So instead of going from a trends to get views and to get kind of viral kind of right now, we're going to try to record videos on topics which are going to be relevant for years to come. So you can focus on your niche on your specific audience and then based off of that go ahead and create content which is going to be compounding for years and where when you publish one piece of content it's going to be giving you returns for years to come. The third way we can of course get customers is with social media and we try to do that a lot. So I mean like I look at social media maybe even guest posting we try to be kind of like on different podcasts on different blogs so that again we create content that compounds and the reality is that just one good podcast or like one good guest appearance on your industry specific uh kind of audience can bring you a lot of customers. I know that for me like I was once on a podcast which got a 100,000 views and after that I've gotten so many good business partnerships and also clients just by being on a single podcast and by investing a little bit of my time in the right spot. Apart from that of course we're going to have LinkedIn posting on LinkedIn, Instagram and just in general being omniresent. I personally believe that everybody today is sort of a media business. So that's why I think that having a lot of different touch points with your customers and investing into your marketing over the long run, not something you're going to do once, but creating systems where you can consistently produce content uh is going to be the thing which is going to be driving your business back. And of course, there are ways you can get customers from cold outbound, doing paid ads and stuff like that, but that has never worked for us. We're trying to crack the code, and hopefully if we do, we're going to be releasing the video here. But what we focused on is producing as much organic content as we can to get maybe 10, 15, 20,000 views on our website every single month and in the process that we get 40 to 50 deals every month to our pipeline. Yes, it takes a lot of time. effort. But focusing on those right things and maybe even focusing just on adding one more channel to your business, not all of them today is going to be the thing which is going to be bringing you clients next year, maybe not this year, but you're going to be creating a channel which is going to be compounding and giving you more deals later on. And also in this case, you can also have guest appearances on conferences. I like to give talks at conferences again to spread the word. And usually after I give a talk to a good conference or a good presentation, some clients are going to reach out and are going to want our services. And the final thing how we get customers is our ambassador and partner network. So we do have actually people on the ground in the US, in the UK, over the whole EMIA region which are doing technically sales for us. They're not actually selling, but they're getting a commission when they introduce a customer to us because maybe they have better networks. Again, as I'm from Serbia, from Niche, I'm in a small city. I'm not going to have the huge network of uh companies which are going to be needing our services locally. And in that process, I decided that instead of moving, I'm going to have a list of ambassadors which are going to be recommending our business whenever they see an opportunity. And the same is for partners. We have branding agencies, we have consulting agencies which we're partnering up with. If they finish, I mean like a branding gig, they recommend us a customer so that in general we can get deals from multiple places. And all of these things combined are going to slowly start building your brand. And I mean like brand is something which when you have it, it makes your business worth money at one point. Maybe you can even sell it. But more importantly, it makes it easier for customers to buy and for customers to also pay a little bit of a premium maybe to the price because they want to work just with you and with nobody else. Yes, this video is not a hack on how to do something. It's more of a reminder that if you're running a business that you should think long term, in the next five to 10 years and how to position yourself properly on every single one of these channels so that you understand that real growth takes time and that if you're investing time into the right things, they're going to compound and they're going to give you returns year in and year out. So, if you want to learn a little bit more about how to grow your freelancing business or agency, we're preparing some really good resources that you can find

in the description below.