c# 从零开发第一个小软件_如何在2020年找到作为自由软件开发人员的第一个客户

c# 从零开发第一个小软件

In my previous post I mentioned that I had started my freelance career as a senior full stack software engineer. The first problem I faced was clients – it's a pretty tough job to find them. I will show you my trial and error approach to getting a first paid contract. It’ll start from paid ads on social networks, going through content marketing and surprisingly ending on free promotional channels. At each step I will share with you my thoughts, tips and samples. The whole journey from zero to one client took me three weeks.

在我以前的文章中，我提到我已经开始了自由职业生涯，是一名高级全栈软件工程师。 我面临的第一个问题是客户–找到客户是一项艰巨的工作。 我将向您展示如何获得第一份付费合同的反复试验方法。 它将从社交网络上的付费广告开始，经历内容营销，然后意外地在免费促销渠道中结束。 在每一步中，我都会与您分享我的想法，技巧和示例。 从零到一位客户的整个旅程花了我三个星期的时间。

At the start of the journey I had a portfolio site, several photos for ads, and a lot of optimism. I need to mention that I decided to avoid freelance marketplaces such as UpWork and Freelance.com as their rates are too low. I also avoided TopTal and Turing.com as I don’t want to spend my free time on their several-stage interviews (I've played this game with Google once, and don’t want to do it again).

在旅程的开始，我有一个投资组合网站 ，几张广告照片和很多乐观的想法。 我需要指出的是，我决定避免使用UpWork和Freelance.com等自由市场，因为它们的费率太低。 我也避免使用TopTal和Turing.com，因为我不想将自己的空闲时间花在他们的多阶段采访中( 我曾经与Google玩过这款游戏 ，也不想再做一次)。

Before we start, let’s go through the conversion funnel of user acquisition and make the terms clear. Firstly, users click on a link from an acquisition channel (e.g. Facebook ads, a blog post, etc.) and land on your site. Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the amount you pay to get the user on your site via paid acquisition channels. When the user contacts you for the first time via a form on your website, via email, or in any other possible way, he or she becomes a lead. When you sign a contract with the lead, he becomes a client. All these funnel steps are illustrated below.

在开始之前，让我们看一下用户获取的转换渠道，并明确说明这些条件。 首先，用户单击来自获取渠道的链接(例如Facebook广告，博客文章等)，然后进入您的网站。 每次点击费用( CPC )是您通过付费获取渠道吸引用户进入您的网站所需支付的金额。 当用户首次通过您网站上的表格，通过电子邮件或以任何其他可能的方式与您联系时，他或她将成为潜在客户 。 当您与潜在客户签订合同时，他将成为客户 。 所有这些漏斗步骤如下所示。

付费广告 (Paid Ads)

My first idea for acquiring clients was via paid ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit. This seemed to me like a straightforward way to get my first clients. I spent $150 in total on paid ads and got zero clients. But thanks to the paid ads, I realized my problem: I didn’t know who my client was. In other words, my offering of full stack development was too broad – that’s why I couldn’t target my ads to a narrow audience, which meant I was spreading my marketing budget to a large number of random users.

获取客户的第一个想法是通过Facebook，LinkedIn和Reddit上的付费广告。 在我看来，这是获得第一批客户的直接方法。 我总共在付费广告上花费了150美元，获得了零客户。 但是由于付费广告，我意识到了我的问题：我不知道我的客户是谁。 换句话说，我提供的全栈开发产品范围太广-这就是为什么我无法将广告定位到狭窄的受众群体的原因，这意味着我将营销预算分配给了很多随机用户。

I brought all details of each paid acquisition channel together in the table below. As you can see in the table, the most pricey acquisitions channel is LinkedIn at an insane $3.50 per click. Reddit Ads was the only one that generated leads for me, but not clients.

我在下表中汇总了每个付费获取渠道的所有详细信息。 如您在表格中所见，最昂贵的收购渠道是LinkedIn，每次点击的疯狂费用为3.50美元。 Reddit Ads是唯一能为我带来潜在客户的客户，而不是客户。

Let’s do a quick calculation to understand, based on the data from the table, how much it would cost for me to get a client from the most promising paid channel: Reddit Ads.

让我们根据表格中的数据进行快速计算，以了解从最有前途的付费渠道：Reddit Ads吸引客户对我来说需要花费多少。

If two leads cost $42, then one lead cost $21. In the most optimistic scenario, I would need 100 leads to get one client. Based on this, the assumption cost of one client would be $21 multiplied by 100, or $2,100. I decided that was too much.

如果两个潜在客户的费用为$ 42，则一个潜在客户的费用为$ 21。 在最乐观的情况下，我需要100个潜在客户才能获得一位客户。 基于此，一个客户的假设成本为21美元乘以100，即2100美元。 我认为那太过分了。

On the other hand, if you know exactly who your client is, then you can probably target your ad campaign more precisely and get cheaper and more relevant users to your site.

另一方面，如果您确切知道您的客户是谁，那么您可以更精确地定位广告系列，并吸引更便宜和更相关的用户访问您的网站。

Tip #1. If you don’t have a lot of money, don’t start doing paid ads before you know who your client is. 提示1。 如果您没有很多钱，请不要在知道客户是谁之前就开始制作付费广告。

These quick calculations helped me to make a decision – I switched to content marketing.

这些快速的计算帮助我做出了决定–我转向内容营销。

内容行销 (Content marketing)

At first glance, content marketing looks like a great solution to get a lot of traffic. My idea was: ‘If I have a good post on a trending topic, it will be easy to get a lot of traffic to my portfolio site and maybe this traffic will convert to leads and clients.’

乍一看，内容营销似乎是获得大量流量的绝佳解决方案。 我的想法是：“如果我在热门话题上写得不错，很容易吸引到我的投资组合网站很多流量，也许这种流量会转化为潜在客户和客户。”

The subject of the post was obvious for me: I would tell readers about my experience with the Google interviewing process. It should also be easy for me to promote this post on programmers’ sites like the r/programming subreddit and Hacker News.

该帖子的主题对我来说很明显：我将向读者介绍我在Google面试过程中的经历。 对我来说，在r / programming subreddit和Hacker News之类的程序员网站上宣传此帖子也应该很容易。

With this in mind, I wrote a post called ‘Google Interviewing Process for Software Developer Role in 2020’ and submitted it to r/programming. It was warmly welcomed and I got 1,496 unique visitors in a day and … zero leads. That was unexpected and frustrating.

考虑到这一点，我写了一篇名为“ 2020年Google面向软件开发人员角色的面试过程”，并将其提交给r / programming。 受到了热烈的欢迎，一天之内，我吸引了1,496位唯一身份访问者，并且…潜在顾客为零。 那是出乎意料和令人沮丧的。

Another promotional channel for the post was Hacker News. I submitted the post and it instantly sank and never reached the first page.

该帖子的另一个促销渠道是《黑客新闻》。 我提交了帖子，但帖子立即沉没，从未到达第一页。

I decided to keep the flag flying and find other channels to promote my blog post. I answered all posts related to the topic question on Quora and did cross-posts on habr.com and dev.to. Several hours later, surprisingly for me, the administrator of habr.com submitted my cross-post to Hacker News and it got to the top. It led another 1,500 viewers to my portfolio site, but only two leads and zero clients. Quora and dev.to traffic was in the region of zero.

我决定继续挥舞旗帜，并寻找其他渠道宣传我的博客文章。 我回答了有关Quora主题问题的所有帖子，并在habr.com和dev.to上进行了交叉帖子。 几个小时后，令我感到惊讶的是，habr.com的管理员将我的交叉帖子提交给了Hacker News，结果达到了顶峰。 它带领另外1,500位观众访问了我的投资组合网站，但只有两位潜在客户和零客户。 Quora和dev.to流量在零附近。

I spent almost two weeks and a lot of effort on my content marketing attempt. As you can see from the chart above, I got a lot of traffic but it wasn’t the ‘right’ traffic – it brought me only two leads and zero clients. I wrote a post that attracted software developers, and they aren’t my target audience.

我花了将近两个星期的时间和大量的精力进行内容营销。 从上表可以看到，我得到了很多访问量，但并不是“正确的”访问量-它只给我带来了两个潜在客户和零个客户。 我写了一篇吸引软件开发人员的文章，但他们不是我的目标受众。

Tip #2. If you want to acquire clients with content marketing, your blog post topics should precisely target your client's pain points – otherwise your conversion rate will be zero. 提示2。 如果您想通过内容营销来吸引客户，那么您的博客帖子主题应准确地针对客户的痛点-否则您的转化率将为零。

I decided to put my content marketing strategy on hold and find another acquisition channel.

我决定暂停我的内容营销策略，并找到另一个获取渠道。

免费促销 (Free promotion)

The best things in life are free, according to a proverb. I decided to test it.

谚语说，人生中最美好的事物是免费的。 我决定测试一下。

The first resource that I found was the ‘Seeking freelancer’ thread that appears at the start of every month on Hacker News. I've been posting there for two months. No results, yet, but it’s free and requires only five minutes of my time once a month, so I’ll keep on trying. For an example of my submission, see the image below.

我发现的第一个资源是“寻找自由职业者”主题，该主题出现在每月的Hacker News上。 我已经在那里张贴了两个月。 尚无结果，但它是免费的，每月仅需花费我五分钟的时间，因此我将继续尝试。 有关我提交的示例，请参见下图。

Secondly, I’ve got invites to private Facebook groups and Discord chats. These haven’t led to any results yet. Frankly, their audience is too small and I doubt there will be any leads.

其次，我受到了Facebook私人论坛和Discord聊天的邀请。 这些还没有导致任何结果。 坦白说，他们的听众太少了，我怀疑会不会有线索。

Finally, I’ve discovered several subreddits on reddit:

最后，我在reddit上发现了几个subreddit：

• r/hireaprogrammer
  r / hireaprogrammer
• r/RemoteJobs
  r /远程作业
• r/jobbit
  r /作业位
• r/remotejs
  r / remotejs
• r/forhire
  r / forhire

Surprisingly, r/forhire turned out to be very effective. After the first post I’ve had five warm leads and one client. It was my first paid client found on the wild web. Three weeks of effort paid off.

令人惊讶的是，r / forhire被证明是非常有效的。 在第一篇文章发表后，我有五个热心线索和一个客户。 这是我在网上发现的第一个付费客户。 三个星期的努力得到了回报。

Tip 3. Don’t underestimate the power of free promotional channels 秘诀3.不要低估免费促销渠道的力量

In my opinion, this result was obtained due to two factors: luck and high quality traffic on the r/forhire subreddit.

我认为，获得此结果的原因有两个：运气和r / forhire subreddit上的高质量流量。

下一步是什么？ (What’s next?)

It’s an amazing feeling when you’ve got your first client – it rewards all the time you have spent struggling to find one. I’ll continue using free promotional channels and in the meantime will try to find my narrow niche with content marketing. A shiny showcase project with public code is another possible option for finding new clients and contracts. If you think I’ve missed some good acquisition channels, let's discuss it in comment below

当您有了第一个客户时，这真是一种令人惊奇的感觉–它使您在努力寻找客户的所有时间中得到回报。 我将继续使用免费的促销渠道，与此同时，我将尝试在内容营销领域找到自己的定位。 带有公共代码的闪亮展示项目是寻找新客户和合同的另一种可能的选择。 如果您认为我错过了一些好的获取渠道，请在下面的评论中进行讨论

As always, If you have something for me or you know someone who needs a remote full stack developer, drop me a line on ilia@ipirozhenko.com

与往常一样，如果您有适合我的东西，或者您认识某个需要远程全栈开发人员的人，请给我发邮件至ilia@ipirozhenko.com

Originally posted at https://ipirozhenko.com/blog/how-to-find-first-client-2020/

最初发布在https://ipirozhenko.com/blog/how-to-find-first-client-2020/

翻译自: https://habr.com/en/post/492796/

c# 从零开发第一个小软件