tell your friends to tell their friends ect. Word of mouth does wonders for increasing client base size.
This. I've been doing this freelance IT service thing while still at school, and once you convince some people that you do a great job for fair prices, they will recommend you all over the place (especially if you tell them that if they were satisfied with your work, you'd be glad for a recommendation).
I did support like this:
- Behave like you would want the guy that fixes your computer to behave, that includes:
- Explain what you are doing -- try it in terms the customer understands. You basically are a stranger fiddling with their personal stuff (data, in this case), it's way more comfortable for them if they know what you're doing.
- Give them tips for free: If you see something blatantly wrong or very inefficient, go along the lines: "Hey, have you ever tried doing that like this?"
- Try nondestructive repairs as hard as possible. I'd rather invest 5 hours of challenging restores than do a reinstall, because you usually leave the complete configuration the users did intact. (You wouldn't believe the amount of corrupt Windows registry faults I have fixed by restoring a recent backup from System Volume Information.)
- Never back down in front of a challenge. If you cannot fix it in the time you estimated because you can't find the fault, be honest about it. ("Honestly, I'm stumped. I have some more vague ideas, but that will take a while to try and I also don't have the tools here. By now my curiosity is peaked on that particular problem, and I'd really like to fix it. Let's agree on X amount of money for the complete fix." where X is a bit more than what the cost would've already been by then.) Only this way you can get more knowlegeable in the strange corner cases.
- This way, you will also find valuable tools, which will make your abilities all the more mesmerizing. Nothing impresses people more than getting from black text screen back to working Desktop in a matter of two reboots (one with the bootbale dvd/cd with your tool collection). If you need more advice on useful software I can tell you some more.
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