Facebook serves me some, posting in directories, people filling out my forms, and posting on forums offering work. I was wondering what everyone else did?

Maybe also, what is a online method that has not worked for you?

The following is my facebook bill for July and it's fairly low this month, but I do get conversions from it at times:

http://www.abcomputered.com/ccinfo/fb-bill.jpg

Wow, I suppose nobody was willing to share their respective "watering hole" when it came to an advertising method, or they are struggling with their own methods, and that's ok. You basically have 2 ways of advertising for your business. Online advertising and offline advertising. Both are important. I found one article that had some good ideas for online and offline advertising for the web design business.

http://webdesignbizacademy.com/?p=1

One way that was not mentioned in the above article is building referrals. You can offer incentives to give additional motivation to refer your freelance business to someone else.

One of the most basic and solid ways that I advertise is through my business cards. I have had a lot of success in the past just encountering people, and exchanging cards with them. I have found the best place to get business cards is Vista Print (http://www.vistaprint.com). A very low cost investment that can pay off.

I have been advertising in a lot of places this year including TV and print, and have learned better ways to target my ads. The positive lesson I have learned is that it's not about showing just showing your ad, but displaying an ad that is most likely to covert(someone calling or clicking your link).

I hope this helps someone, and maybe generate some sales for you in the future.

Apparently my Daughter in law is using a Facebook page, not hers, to advertise stuff for sale, A bit like Gumtree it seems. Quite successful apparently, she makes boots Ugg boot Aussie style.

Thank you for the post James T. Kirk, This is the type of post which is most useful to me, as an independent small business person.
At present I fully depend upon my sites SEO to generate leads. It is yielding a modest amount of inquiries. Probably averages about a couple a month of calls for free estimates. I usually get calls and rarely get emails. I do not use forms on my site I hate to fill out forms to get or initiate a communication with someone so I do not expect my customers to want to fill out a form. That is why I avoid forms like the plague. And often when I do fill out the form to communicate with the business proprietor he does not answer my email, causing me to regret having filled out the form that I did not want to do in the first place.
My original web site that was up for 6 or 7 years was hosted by Netfirms and I created it using Frontpage express. A friend coached me on how to do these things and upload with ftp. I used pretty much exclusively shockwave flash slide shows which are pretty much invisible to the crawlers. The site looked good but had virtually no traffic. I started learning about SEO here on this forum, had not really heard about or thought about it before. My friend who coached me on the site originally did not speak of SEO. His site was a personal family site and he was not concerned about using it to market a business.
When I moved back to Jax Fl. 3 years ago I ran an ad in the Beaches leader news paper for a year. 10 word add twice a week with the website url in the add. I did not get a one job from the add. That is when I decided to really start concentrating on getting the web site to work for me.
I have signs on my van with phone # and web site listed. I make promotional packets (I call them), use card stock in portrait orientation and print upper portion of my sites home pg screen shot on the top and upside down and backwards print a paragraph description and invite them to take a card and give me a call. Fold over the bottom and that puts the paragraph on the front of the pouch for holding cards. Can put the promotional packets up on bulletin boards.
I believe that I got the best advise for improving my sites SEO from Prism. He said to do a search and study the best or top listing sites of the search and emulate their SEO structure. When I did that I started to come up better in the searches than the sites that I was paraphrasing their SEO structure. Believe that the high ranking is partly because of the CC S-drive. For awhile i had the site up as workhorsepainting on netfirms and the same site up on S-drive as homepaintersofjaxfl and s-drive was kicking netfirms butt so I let the netfirms provider time out and did not renew and transferred to the S-drive exclusively.
I have set up a blog on my site but I have not used it, other than to get it up and working. I need to make up a bunch of blog entries that would be interesting for potential customers to read. Interesting and informative I guess. I need to get up on Facebook and twitter my blogs that is. I need to redo my sites SEO and add many new entries to the site. I have not done anything to the site in close to a year.
I have been trying to avoid paying for internet advertising. Have chosen to not use the Google adwords and they have been soliciting like mad. All of the people who solicit me to improve my SEO I believe that I have already done that myself and I would be paying someone for what I have already done and it would probably be worse not better.
I need to redo the site and make it friendly to mobile devices. Guess that it is time to get with it working a lot on the site again.

Congrats to your daughter. I've found in some niches that facebook can be very effective in marketing. It's great when you can share those kind of stories.



I've found that when someone calls, that's your strongest "call to action", and will get the most conversions (sales). Thanks for sharing your SEO tips and experience.

I just did a blog post on internet marketing that I thought would also be helpful:

http://www.abcomputered.com/blog/why-my-cat-is-better-at-marketing-his-butt-than-most-internet-marketers/