B2C online entrepreneurs, "How did you get your first 100 paying customers? "

I don't know about 100, but my very first three clients came through thought leadership articles. I believe that referrals and SEO kicked in after that for a good mix of sources.

Smart marketing through relationship building on social media and SEO. If you are a purely click through online marketer, your relationship building will be within your funnel and email campaigns. If you use the internet to build connections that you then take offline, obviously you will want to build into your funnel a step that includes a phone call.

Emails and Direct Mail,usually difficult for most to believe. Bought every book I could on the subject of selling and embraced the gift. Over a period of time I've become rather good at the content creation, the email funnels, the service packaging and of course the customer experience improvement. I am an Experience Designer, I focus on Design of Utility Products, Customer Engagement, Growth Hacking and Customer Experience.
The Secret behind it all is a mind shift change. Focus on making your clients' money, that will get you paid very well especially when they make money.

Picking up the phone and asking people if they had a problem that needed our solution. It was that simple. Would love to discuss more if you're interested.

To get your first 100 paying customers keep the following steps in mind:
1. Ask friends. And their friends. And their friends.
Start with your existing network. Talk to the people you know and the people they know. It may not yet be a huge amount of people, but there should be a few interesting connections among your friends and family. Ask about pains. Listen. Validate your idea. Do not go all-in on selling right away. You are still a start-up and customer feedback are your magic potion to becoming the best you can be. Do not make the mistake of not drinking it. In early customer development you are not selling, you are learning. Other business owners: they may have an existing customer base that is a fit for your product as well. Investors: if your start-up has been funded, ask your investor to spread the word. Investors usually have great networks. Ask for introductions. The great thing about networking is that you never know what you can get out of it.
2. Blog away.
There are tons of reasons why you should start a blog. In fact, you should have started way before you started looking around for ways to grow your start-up. But hey, better late than never, right? Ads follow people around. They are annoying and put off rather than attract. Blogs on the other hand still spark a feeling of trust and authenticity. When I started out working with metrics, I could not see myself using anything else than Google Analytics. It is easy, it’s good and it’s free. But while making my way through start-up marketing, I found myself regularly reading well-written posts over at Kiss metrics’ blog. Stuff like ‘Smart Marketers use Smart Metrics’ or ‘Key Customer Metrics You Need to Be Tracking’. Crafting content is the best way to boost your Google rankings on those keywords you have so carefully selected. Blogging puts you in full control of the type of content and keywords you want to be associated with. If you are doing well, people will start linking to you, growing your online visibility and network. This in turn will lead to new opportunities. Once set up properly, your blog will be an autonomous traffic machine. You can turbocharge this whole process by using guest blogging to build relationships with top influencers in your space.
3. Find your internet tribe. Blend in.
Find these communities and become part of the tribe. Look for places where people are either looking for a product like yours or asking questions you can help them out with. You will find customers, trade advice, build network and sharpen skills. All of which will help both you and your business grow. This is exactly how Zapier co-founder Wade Foster found his first customer in Andrew Warner. Warner is the founder of Mixergy, one of the best podcasts out there for entrepreneurs. Quora holds a huge database of high-quality content and a living community of experts and influencers. For entrepreneurs, it is a great way to get quality advice and get in touch with early customers looking for answers. Just make sure you are right there when someone is asking that one question you have the perfect solution to. New apps and products are launched every single day.
4. Email in the cold.
People who claim cold emails do not work, do not know how to write good cold emails. Flashback to Wade Foster and Andrew Warner. Note how Wade is just striking up a conversation here, as if he were chatting with Andrew. In his reply, Andrew said he needed a Wufoo Aweber integration and whether Foster and his team had already built it. If you are just starting out building up your network, you simply will not be able to do without cold email.
5. Give stuff for free
You want to get as many people behind you and your product as possible. If your product is SaaS, having users test it for free can be incredibly valuable. It will build up an initial user base and help you to refine your product-market fit. There is also an exclusivity to putting up your product for beta, which will help attract users once your app is live. Free trials will drive users, traffic and virality. Another way of playing around with free stuff is to put up a part of your product for free, while excluding other, powerful features. This approach allows users to get to know the benefits of using Hootsuite with just enough main features to know that they want more. This works because most social media users, even individuals, will have more than three profiles to manage.
6. Affiliate marketing: pay your influencers.
For the sake of getting a lot of users as quickly as possible, affiliate marketing can be a powerful strategy. There are several ways they can do this. The affiliate receives a commission you agreed upon for bringing the customer to you.
You can think of affiliate marketing as outsourced marketing. Others bring in visitors and you only pay if those visitors become paying customers. On top of that it is great for SEO as you will get content and backlinks from affiliates driving traffic to your website.
Affiliate partnerships are also a great way to get influential bloggers to write about you. Bloggers are all about passive income, so you can bet they would at least be interested if you offer them real money.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath