since 2 years stuck in getting good clients
I've been building my own marketing studio for the past while, mostly working with small local businesses. In my experience they don't have a lot of money to pay for marketing services and/or don't trust me because I don't have a big portfolio, I look kinda young and I'm very generous (often too generous...).
Before I started this, I was side hustling for about half a year as a social media manager and didn't find any success in that either. I used to get clients through cold calling and cold emailing which got me to the wrong clientele, since they always thought they could act however they want with me and my small business.
Now I'm trying to build trust via social media (Instagram mostly) in hopes to getting better clients there. This takes a long time though and I suppose it could be way faster than this. To get to revenue quicker I built a digital product as well, which trusted viewers could invest in.
I really think I'm doing something wrong tho, because it seems like everyone else gets their first few good clients through warm contacts for example, and can then scale up more or less quickly. I don't really have warm contacts which I could ask: everyone around me knows what I'm building, and I always ask if they know someone I could help out but they don't :/
Btw I'm conscious about not being able to build this quickly but I'm starting to get really frustrated because I tried so many things and always end up at the same point. It takes up so much energy to plan, build and scale each idea, especially when trying to make it perfect (even tho I know, it'll never be perfect).
If someone knows what might help in this situation, I'd be super glad.
Thank you for reading and supporting 🙏