The Bridges To Your Island
Before we jump in: This article was originally shared with my email community in September 2019. I'm sharing it with you on the blog today in the hope that it may be of some encouragement and insight to you in your creative journey right now, and also give you a little sneak peak of what you can expect from Weekly Letters too. If you'd like to receive letters like this one straight to your inbox every Sunday, you can sign up below. You'll also have access to all of my Mini Books too!
A question I’m often asked by my clients who are getting their business up and running and off the ground is this:
“Jen, how do I find my first clients? How can I get consistent work?”
And the thing is, as much as that feels like the most important question to ask I’ve found that tweaking it slightly can make it even more impactful for our business.
Instead of worrying about how they’re going to find clients, I encourage my clients to focus on how they can make it easier for the people they’re here to serve to find them instead.
That’s where the bridges to your island come in.
The island is your business, this beautiful space you’re building where you’re going to have incredible impact in the world doing the awesome work that you do.
There are a whole lot of people out there who will truly resonate and connect with the work you do, they just might not know that you exist yet.
That’s why we need bridges that make it easy for the right people for our work to find us and connect with what we do.
Because they’re already paying attention to something, whether they’re listening to podcasts, searching for inspiration on Pinterest or Instagram, asking their network for recommendations, the list could go on and on.
And here’s the thing: this isn’t easy.
Building a client base from scratch is hard. You may have crickets in your inbox for weeks and months at a time for a while. That’s okay, anyone who has built a thriving client based business has been exactly where you are.
But if you turn that frustrated and anxious energy into intentional action in your business, into building bridges to your island that make it easy for your dream clients to find you and hire you, you’re giving your business the best shot it can to thrive.
And the thing I always tell my clients? It’s an experiment. You won’t know what the best kind of bridges are for you until you get stuck in and find out. You might find that word of mouth is your biggest client referral, or maybe Pinterest or Instagram is where your dream clients stumble across your work, or your podcast, or maybe with a Google search thanks to fantastic SEO.
If you’re like most businesses I know, including my own, you’ll probably find that there a few solid bridges you can build for yourself that help the very best clients for you find your work.
Building these bridges takes time, but if you build strong ones they can serve you and your business for many years to come.
So my encouragement for you today? Make it easy for the people you’re here to do awesome work with to find you, through your bridges and through what they find and connect with once they arrive at your island too.
There’s no sure science to anything in business. We have to get stuck in and figure it out as we go. So if this journey feels messy for you right now just remember that it feels messy for everyone else too, it’s in the figuring it out and showing up anyway where a business is truly made.
As always, I’m rooting for you!
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