If you want the answer in a sentence here it is.  Deal with larger companies that can afford to pay more money, be very good at what you do, offer these companies a sample of your work, and be sure this sample brings them results.  It's worked for me every time.

 

This article is really my own personal business philosophy.  I haven't heard or read anyone specifically saying to do this, but it ALWAYS works for me.  It's the way I do business and suggest others to do the same.  This pertains more to service businesses and information websites. 

 

First Be Good At Something

You have to have good skills that people want.  Who wants a marketing consultant that knows nothing about marketing?  Who wants a web designer who's only made two websites and neither designed very well.  Do what it takes to be GREAT at something so that people need your services and in turn your services make them money.  If your services don't make them money, you'll get one job from them and that's it.

 

How To Break Into Big Money

I overheard a guy saying how he was going to web design school and his wife is going to graphic design school and when they graduate they're going to sell one website a week for $25,000 each.  I guess anything is possible, but it's not going to happen the week after you get out of school!  I don't know if you can get even close to that much money anymore for a website.  $2,000 is a lot for a website now a days.  At any rate, that's what I overheard.

 

My philosophy starting from back in 1996 was to always show people how great I was at whatever I was doing.  I found, and you will too, that it's hard to convince anyone of what you're "capable" of doing.  They want to see the proof.  And proof is a track record.  Why do you think the top CEO from a successful company moves on to be the top CEO of another company?  They don't just grab someone working at McDonald's to be the new CEO.  They want someone with a successful track record who did well as a CEO somewhere else.

 

Well, when you first start out in business, you have no track record.  And it takes quite a few years to develop a track record.  But businesses want to see who you've worked with and proof of how well you've done for them.  How I got around this when I first started out, was by giving away samples of my services.  In 1999 I was the foremost expert on search engines, but no one knew this and no one cared.  I had a few websites getting 100,000 hits a month, 100% free from search engines and I knew I could sell this highly targeted traffic to a business and make them a ton of money.  This was a true fact.  But getting advertisers was like pulling teeth.  I was confident in what the ad results would be.  I knew the sites were great with a lot of traffic and I had nothing to hide, so I approached companies and put them on my sites for free for a month.  Obviously, they loved the results and each started paying me $5,000 a month.  At this point I developed a successful track record with these companies that lead into dozens of jobs with other companies which included marketing, web design and general business consulting.  When it was all said and done it added up to over $1 million profit.