So what should you have on your website, blog, lens, hubpage?

At an absolute minimum you should have several samples of your work…testimonials from satisfied customers are gold-dust of you can get them…a brief bio about you and your qualifications…and your contact information.

It’s a good idea to put your rates on there; it can save time for both you and your potential clients. We’ll talk more about setting rates in a little while, but in the meantime, consider what products or services your clients are going to be buying from you most often, and come up with your rate for that.

If you are an article writer, come up with a price for a 300 word, 500 word, and 1000 word article, or come up with a price for word.

The same goes for ebooks or short reports or whatever form of writ-ing you are promoting. Have a rate ready to quote for your clients.

If you are a website or graphics designer, you want to have links to a couple of websites that you have designed or samples of your graph-ics work.

And you should include several testimonials from satisfied customers. This is referred to as “social proof” and it is very powerful. It’s even more powerful if the customer allows you to put a live link to their website along with their testimonial.

Ask every satisfied customer for a testimonial but don’t be offended if some of them say no. Many internet marketers or website owners use ghostwriters to provide them with ebooks, articles, webpage content and even blog posts, and often they don’t want people to know they’re using a ghostwriter.

So they won’t want to provide a testimonial. In the past when I’ve used ghosties myself I haven’t given testimonials because when I find a good writer I want to keep hold of them for myself and the best way to give away who your top ghostwriters are is to give a testimonial which will go on the writers site.

But when you do find someone who’s happy to give a testimonial, it can really help business, especially if the person giving the testimo-nial is well known by his peers in the industry.

A live link as mentioned earlier is a great thing if you can get it.

And this is something that serves both of you; the customer gets people coming to their site through that link, and they get a back link from you, and you get

But what should you do if you are brand new and have no customer testimonials yet?

This is actually a very easy problem to solve.

First of all, you can get friends or family members to provide a testi-monial for you in exchange for you doing some work for them.

You should not ever create fake testimonials. Your credibility is infi-nitely higher if you provide a real customer name with a link to a real website - and if you get caught doing this your reputation is shot.
If you don’t have any friends or acquaintances who need content writ-ing or graphics or web design work, there is another alternative.

There are a number of internet marketing forums where people are perpetually looking for cheap writers and graphics designers (details below)

Go on those forums and offer to do a project very cheaply for a few people, in exchange for a testimonial.

Now, you can’t come out and order people to say nice things about your product in exchange for cheap work, but it’s just about guaran-teed that if you provide them with excellent work they will provide you with a good testimonial IF they give testimonials.

If you are brand new and have not yet made a name for yourself, and you want testimonials quickly - and they really will help you get more clients - it will help to offer a discount price. So figure out what you would normally charge, and charge maybe 25 percent of that.

But make it clear these are not your usual rates.

Say something like “I am a new (article writer, ghostwriter, graphic designer, web designer, etc.) and I am looking for customer testimo-nials that I can use on my website. I will provide a VERY steep dis-count off of my usual prices to the first five people that respond. If you like my services, I hope you will provide me with a testimonial.” And say what your price will be - if you plan to charge $15 for a 300 word article, then say that you will be charging $5 for a 300 word arti-cle.

This should get you a bunch of glowing testimonials very quickly. And if these people who take you up on your offer are satisfied with your work, and you provide a high quality product quickly, some of these people may become future customers. In fact there’s a high probabil-ity they will. Most people who use ghostwriters tend to stick with the ones they know - because they know a level of qaulity is assured and it’s just a lot easier than trying to find new ones.

Getting around five testimonials to use on your website - get at least three - is very, very powerful advertising for you and your services.

Make sure that you read the rules of the forum that you are posting on, and post in the correct section of the forum.

You may need to post in the classified advertising section of the fo-rum if you are offering a service for money, even if it’s very little money. However if you want to get started for free try The Warrior Fo-rum first - they currently allow advertising links in post signatures (the bit that appears under each of you posts that tells readers about you)