Obtaining clients can appear to be a difficult challenge for many businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers. But the key factor in obtaining these clients is to think outside of the box.

Below are three simple ways to get more clients in order to maximize your business’s potential.

Encourage Referrals

Encourage your friends, family members and current clients to give referrals. In return you could give a bonus for every lead that converts.

Host a contest to reward the top referring person or persons. Word-of-mouth referring is one of the best marketing strategies as it is one of the least expensive, yet most effective lead generators.

Attach Marketing Items to All Correspondence

When you send an email, make sure your signature lines include all relevant contact/connect information, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media profile links.

Include a link to your blog or website with a short description of a current or upcoming promotion of new products and services. Additionally, attach your marketing materials to invoices, payment reminders and other outgoing correspondence.

Take Advantage of Free Advertising

Sites such as Craigslist and eBay are excellent channels of scoring clients. It costs nothing to post an ad in the general or small business sections of your local Craigslist page. Many people forget to utilize eBay’s free classifieds to advertise.

To maximize your success of attracting potential customers, make your ad more visually appealing with images. You don’t have to know Photoshop and other high-caliber software to do so. If you’re not looking to hire a freelancer to design your ad but you are familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint or Publisher, you can design your own ad and generate an HTML code for your image by simply uploading it to sites such as Photobucket.

Obtaining clients requires effort, consistency and often creativity. When one strategy seems useless, re-strategize by researching ways that have proven effective. Make sure you have a marketing plan that includes some current marketing trends and modify it accordingly.