Learn How To Promote Your Business Online For Free In Zambia.

What I learned about getting clients without looking desperate in Zambia

You always have to make marketing strategies a priority if you run a company as a freelancer, as a consultant, a start-up, an agency, or as someone selling products.

That’s the hard way I learned.

It was in 2014 and my monthly mortgage debt and credit card bills were being paid by my cash scrap. My child was only 1 month old and I had a debt of half a million dollars. How can’t I be despairing?

We must all start somewhere in order to even a little advance ourselves. But, how do you win over the people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on ads every day, pay countless spell writers to blog posts for them and take lovely images each day on Instagram?

How are you like those cool guys and hot kids who get millions on each video they post, but when you say the same thing during that same time, you get nullifying views?

This year I’ve finally rolled out my sleeves and started playing after a decade of not doing much marketing. It is something we will have to continue to do and test, as entrepreneurs, until we finish our business for good the day we go.

Here’s what I did to promote my company free of charge. This can also be done by anyone.

Decide Your Customer Channels in Zambia

You can post almost anything on tons of platforms at any time. But if you do it yourself, you only have so much time. Don’t try to post first everywhere, therefore.

You may or may not want to be restricted to one channel. I’ve learned from Nat Eliason’s blog (the only SEO expert I follow) about how you can purchase, engage and retain channels.

Here are the channels that I used:

• Customer Acquisition — Content and SEO
• Customer Engagement — Linkedin
• Customer Retention — Email

Your choices will depend on where your target market is best reached. In my case, I run an unlimited graphic design service that allows businesses to fund their own in-house designers.

Customer acquisition in Zambia

When they need graphic design assistance, I’ve asked my network what they do. They said that they were going to look at their closest friends and relations first. If no one is present or able to function, check on Google is the next thing most of them do.

I therefore make most of my marketing efforts to provide content for those looking for design knowledge. I consider that it’s dead when nobody finds it, even though the content is a king. It is also prudent to design content for at least one search engine if you build content.

It’s a lot of work to get started and I did it by researching Daniel Daines-Hutt’s content marketing thoroughly: # Nerd retargeting, and Nat Eliason SEO. Then all the other things I have learned are execution.

Customer engagement in Zambia

Odds are that the company that you run in this world is not special. It is a strong indication that your company is highly sought after if you find your industry competitive.

Looking at where this market lurks and is exposed is important for remembering your prospects. This is where dedication is at stake. Instagram and Pinterest might be the most visual content production, which is perfect for graphic designers, but I don’t want to get in the crowd.

Since several of my clients frequently visit LinkedIn to read industry news and get in contact with experts they’re following, I have been using LinkedIn a lot of time to develop my profile, contacts and relationships with anyone who needs support in the field of graphic design.

Customer retention in Zambia

So far, email has worked well for my client. I have never had a newsletter or e-mail series every week, but this can happen once we build a Content Team. In the meantime, we have frequently reached customers and prospects with our support.

Second, you need to consider your customers ‘needs. In my situation, I know a person who wants to post quotes, but doesn’t have time to post them. Therefore, by sending insighting quote images relevant to his niche, I would like to check with him per e-mail.

He will reply most of the time to ask his citations for my support. It’s not easy to do this in person with hundreds of my clients, but we do so as much as possible because it is our responsibility to support as many of them as possible.

Add Your Site to Free Business Listing Sites in Zambia

But that’s something I should do, I didn’t put my site anywhere. I have put it in both free and paid listings in my event. The paid people didn’t bring a single tourist, while two free visitors helped to raise my site traffic by approx. five times as I did zero marketing days.
For my case, the bulk of the above increase came from the Service List and Google My Business between May and July. I had a dozen inquiries per month with these two places alone, and I had at least two inquiries with customers.

It takes a lot of time to send your business to lists. I therefore optimized my efforts by sending my company to those from which the majority of visitors can come. I first saw the lists of some of my top competitors. I noticed that. I’m then using an Ahrefs tool to search these competitors ‘backlinks.

Only one out of the various links stood out and was named the “Support List.” That’s when I decided to put my business on the list. Not everybody who came from there purchased us, but it gave us the opportunity to learn more and develop a long-term relationship with them for future work.

You could also send your company to as many online platforms as possible through Submission.co, created by Marc Köhlbrugge who is founder of BetaList if you can not find any popular backlinks from your competitors.

Make an Irresistible Offer for your clients in Zambia

You should always market your business. Yet you need not require money to make your first touch with your prospects. Everyone needs a lot of faith to trade money for your service. You could be like a spammer if your company was honest and legitimate if you would ask them directly if they need your service at first touch.

I just performed an experiment on my LinkedIn account with a mad bid. It is a free, no strings attached service for designing anybody’s LinkedIn Profile Banner. Here’s the post I’ve done that has got 3669 views and counting, so that it is not so safe. This deal is not expensive realizing what we can do on our own with Canva. Many people without my support will create their own LinkedIn banner.

Some of them replied that they probably never saw such an offer before on LinkedIn. Others could respond because I was obviously doing something “dangerous.” Many people think working on 20 banner designs from LinkedIn profiles is no joke.

20 banners can take 20 hours if it takes 1 hour to build a banner. The varied responses to my post gave me more insights. In addition, these views and actions lead to more faith in me and my company.

You might wonder why I did so and if I knew I could get customers from this message. Really, I did not expect that to sell. My goal was to help change the profiles of my network and connect to people who were not connected initially and to support as many people as possible. Once you commented that you were interested, I personally told you about what you want on your banner.

Although I limited it to twenty accounts, a total of 47 people ‘raised their hands,’ only 7 replied. Two of the seven respondents signed up for my service. It is a conversion rate of 4.2%, which I find to be a bonus.

Publish Tons of Quality Content on your blog in Zambia

Do not have a website in Zambia?, hire me now.

Don’t be too sure, whether your content is important or not, if you are new to it. How does this happen? You don’t have to produce great quality content? But if you can only publish something when quality is, may I ask what does it mean to be of good or poor quality? The answer is “yes” and the answer is also “yes.” This reaction depends on the answers you obtain from the above questions.

Price is the beholder’s eye One time I had to design a customer’s book cover. It took about half a day for me to do more work than I used to do. Yet it’s been hurtful with reviews. She told me that it looked like a concept that she could have completed in less than an hour. “There’s more time, please don’t be lazy. She said, “Redesign it.”

I have completed redesign. I learned my lesson this time and spent less time and asked her questions more often. Then, in about an hour, I revamped it. Oddly enough, she liked it!

You can not understand, nor do you comprehend how this works. While this is not about materials, the point is that if you continue to study what is out there and compare your work, you will still be your own worst critic. Make sure you don’t buy the job — there’s someone else. The only way to sell is to do what they want and not what they think they are fine.

This is not to be lazy and to have a semi-baked bread. What I mean is that some people like half-baked bread while some enjoy darker ones.

You’ll return to content – it functions the same way. Since 2014 I wanted loads of content to be released, and in January of 2019 finally I began. Nobody came to me organically between 2014 and 2018 to talk to me on my business. People want to learn more in 2019, unexpectedly.

Why have I wasted so much time? Only because I am afraid people are going to judge and condemn how I compose, so I have not published anything. The Internet was so full of what I wanted to say, so why should people read it?

It’s not just my mind, I realized, just people want to learn. Most people want to learn to create more ideas, find answers or to be amused just as much as possible. You will know what the “price” of the community of people who are going to consume your content is considered by consistously producing content.

You will learn how to write social media posts to show what the content is and how to explore online spaces to find out who is most in need of your content. This method encourages foreigners to allow you to collaborate with you at some point.

Go do that. Go do that.

Get in touch… need help?

simply visit the contact me page.