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There are other ways to get clients besides building an audience
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Feed the rebellion.
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Missed me?
(Nooooooo! from the guy in the back chair)
Well, a lot has happened in the meantime.
- My German neighbour Hans (the one I wrote about because of his loud morning sexual activities) has moved out of the building.
- I finally registered my business in Spain and dealing with Spanish administration felt like performing stunts for Mission Impossible.
- My partner and I are moving house this month.
- We almost got scammed out of €2,500 while house-hunting.
- We are building another business focused on Spain, outside social media.
- My LinkedIn group of clients is doing really well. Clients are getting clients and actually finishing marketing and sales tasks.
- I accidentally threw out of my newsletter around 50 subscribers, because of the automation I set (operational oopsie).
- I am neck-deep in building AI workflows (getting AI to do a series of tasks instead of asking it one question at a time). And I’m meeting other nerds, because not having anyone to talk to about what I’m building was getting lonely and frustrating.
And that last point is what I want to talk about today.
The other day, I saw a creator on Instagram promoting this method for client acquisition:
- Download your LinkedIn connections as a CSV file—a spreadsheet.
- Upload it to Claude.
- Ask it to find people in the industries you want to work with,
- then Claude gives each person a score from 1-10, based on how well they match the kind of client you want.
The example involved 20,000 connections.
And voilà: a list of people who are supposedly a good fit for what you sell.
.
.
.
.
I felt my eyes widening when I saw thousands of people commenting the keyword to get the method.
And I thought:
… you punk! …
You see, I tested this approach as I was creating another client acquisition stream for myself through agentic workflows, and the tiny problem with this method is two things:
DATA SEGMENTATION AND DATA ENRICHMENT.
You can’t spit an Excel sheet in AI, and it will spit back out clients.
Forget about that.
In plain, stupid language, you would need several specialized AI’s to give you what you need, which looks more like this (and this is a simplified view):
1. SEGMENTATION: sorting the prospect list.
2. ENRICHMENT: finding out more about the prospects
But even if you do all that properly, you still have to contact those people, find out whether they need your help, and give them a reason to buy.
Which brings me to the bigger question: why start there?
And posting on social media isn’t automatically the answer either.
Here are four broad ways to find clients.
1. People find you
- Through Google or AI search
- Through your website
- Through social media posts and profiles (where we often over-invest)
- Through articles, videos, podcasts or books
- Through newsletters
- Through conversations in online communities
- Through business directories and freelance platforms
- Through public events, talks or workshops
2. Someone else brings people to you
- Client referrals
- Word of mouth
- Personal introductions
- Recommendations in online communities
- People sharing your content
- Guest appearances on podcasts or newsletters
- Collaborations with other creators or businesses
- Media coverage and interviews
- Mentions in articles or publications
- Recommendations from business partners
3. You contact potential clients
- Cold emails
- Cold calls
- Direct messages on social media
- Reaching out to your existing network
- Meeting people at networking events
- Starting conversations in online communities
- Applying for projects on freelance platforms
- Contacting potential referral partners
- Following up with people who previously showed interest
- Sending physical letters or packages
4. You pay to reach potential clients
- Google and other search ads
- Social media ads
- Promoted business and freelance listings
- Newsletter sponsorships
- Podcast sponsorships
- Event and conference sponsorships
- Advertising in industry publications
- Sponsored articles
- Paid creator and influencer partnerships
- Ads in email services
- Advertising in AI search services where available
The approaches I marked in green are the ones where I’ve observed the strongest results in getting paying clients.
In my estimation, you have around 60-70% chances to land a client this way, everything else has a lower chance.
That’s my observation, not a promise that they’ll work best for every solo business case.
The problem is:
- we usually don't ask for refferals or connections or business
- we burn old relationship bridges
But if your goal is to get clients, I would check those options before automatically making “post more” your plan or scraping with Claude every LinkedIn connection you find.
Try it.
___________________
Sandra @ Thought Readership™
PS. Start small:
- Write down 10 people (past clients, former colleagues, people who know your work, and people who previously asked about your help)
- Make it easy to understand what you sell. My client Yenti is having FREE workshop on positioning:
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How to land paying clients from LinkedIn in 2026
This workshop was created to fight the overflow of broken and toxic advice on how LinkedIn works. Come get a no-BS guide to attracting high-quality clients on LinkedIn without selling your soul or spending all day online. For introverted coaches & consultants doing great work offline but still overlooked online.
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- Ask people you know for a specific introduction. Keep a simple note of who you contacted and what the next step is. And if someone says no, respect it. This is part of what we do in my group in Scaling Authority.
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