How to double your Squarespace leads with Omari Harebin
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Welcome back to the Squarespace Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Omari Harebin. Today we're talking about how you can double your Squarespace leads in the next 30 days. I'm going to share with you exactly what I did when I was getting started about seven years ago. It's precisely what I would do today, except I've got a couple of tweaks to it, so you're going to get the upgraded version to what I did because things have changed in the past seven years, and I've also learned some things as well. I've invested in courses that have allowed me to add different things to my system, even though I'm not using it currently. If I were, this is what I'd be doing. So let's get into it.
Now, when I was starting, I didn't have a referral network. My contact form was collecting dust. Nothing was happening to me. I didn't have a local network. I was just a guy on the internet looking for clients who needed help with their Squarespace website. Maybe they needed a redesign or a tweak or whatever it was. I had determined that this was going to be my niche, where I was going to focus, and I knew that if I had some focus, I could start to develop systems around that. And that's what I will share with you today, the first system I set up for myself. But what I would do differently if I were starting right now is I would find established people who already had an audience within this niche, So people who have leads that they probably don't want, I would partner with those people to either give them a referral fee or commission fixed or percentage or whatever for them to send me those leads. That would be my very first point of contact. Why? Because one of these individuals already has some authority. They already have an audience. They're already in demand, and because they're in so much market, they've overflowed. And if they can confidently refer their overflow to me, the surge will be thankful. I'll be thankful that you know the person would be grateful who sent me the referral. And you gotta win, win-win situation. So my very first approach would be partnerships of some sort.
If you want to partner with me like that, let me know because I'd be happy to send you any potential leads I get. Even though it's been a long time since I've offered these services, I still occasionally get folks who might be looking for help migrating into a platform or just a couple of tweaks or something that I don't offer anymore. And so, you know, I'm, I'd be willing to send that to you.
Now, this is where I started my journey, and this is with marketplaces. I had got, I had this idea that marketplaces were terrible. Freelance marketplaces were something you should stay away from. But as soon as I let go of that idea, I realized there were plenty of opportunities I could use. And so, I created profiles on as many freelance marketplaces as possible. I set up notifications, alerts, or RSS feeds to get the Squarespace-specific jobs delivered to my inbox daily. And what that did gave me the beginning of a daily routine where I knew I would be responding to new opportunities that weren't there the day before.
And I wasn't super attached to them because I knew there'd be more opportunities tomorrow. So having that kind of a flow puts you in a better place because even if, you know, even if you don't get land, any clients, immediately at least you start to feel like, okay, this is something that I'm in control of. And now it just becomes a matter of time. You know, maybe you don't land the first three proposals or four or five, but the sixth proposal becomes the one that, you know, kickstarts a long-term relationship. And that's another thing that I would mention to my past self is that you are, you know, initiating relationships here. Don't just think about the project when you take on a client. Think about the, just like the long-term potential,
Don't get too invested in the long-term potential, but know that it exists, Because I have clients from who I got using all of the methods that I'm sharing with you today who would still reach out to me today for help for Squarespace-related help. And had you told me that, hey Omar, you're going to, you're going to still be in touch with this person ten years from now, I would've probably treated things differently and approached my business differently. So marketplaces, and while I'm on the topic of marketplaces, if you're not already a part of the Squarespace marketplace, then that is, you have to be in there as well, the whole idea.
Do you want to be where people are looking? And you know, this is just how I was able to position myself, where people are looking. The next stop is directories. And I leveraged the Craigslist directory and created alerts in all of the metropolitan areas of the country so that anytime someone posted something related to Squarespace on Craigslist, I would get an email, and I was able to respond to those and pick up a bunch of clients doing that as well. So now we've started to like stack things; we've got partners sending us leads. We've got marketplaces where we can respond to, you know, requests for proposals. We've got directories where we're able to react quickly as well. And then the next the following source that I tapped into was Facebook groups.
I even created a Facebook group as well. And I didn't just tap into Squarespace-related Facebook groups because you should do that. But also Facebook groups with business owners or entrepreneurs who could need Squarespace help; maybe they were evaluating between platforms. And so, the search feature within these Facebook groups is convenient. And so building that into my routine as well, where daily, I could quickly comb through these Facebook groups to see if anyone needed some help or if anyone was looking to hire, I would be able to respond to those things quickly. The other source was the forum, specifically the Squarespace forum, and there's now the Circle forum. And what I found there was that a lot; often, people would ask for help and not get any response.
Slack communities have the same principle as Facebook groups. I applied to Slack communities as well as Reddit and Twitter. I created these Twitter alerts. And the one social platform I didn't tap into then that I would now is LinkedIn. I searched for a Squarespace developer just a few minutes ago to see if anyone was trying to hire those services. And I found a bunch of stuff popped up. So a lot of times, like most people, don't cover all these areas. Why? Because it takes time. Unless you have a daily system or routine set up, these are activities that you might only do once
In a while, but if you do them consistently every day for 30 days, I can guarantee you that you will start seeing an influx of leads and opportunities based on those leads that you've already gotten. So hopefully, something that I mentioned here sparked something. Hopefully, you got an idea. If there's something that you're not doing that you think, okay, maybe I can try that. I signed up for this course, or I took it a couple of years ago because the guy who created it had a system that sounded similar to what I had created for myself, but it said he had spent way more time with it. And so, I wanted to learn and see if there was anything I could implement for myself if needed. Anyway, long story short, I recommend checking out endless clients. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. If you want to build up a pipeline for your business, this will give you a framework and a bunch of different strategies and tactics that you can use to take exactly what I was sharing and implement it. All right. Hopefully, you found this helpful. Let me know, and I will see you in the next episode. Please.
