Ask HN: How to Become a Consultant?

You need to build an audience on the internet to get a steady pipeline of leads.

It sounds counterintuitive, but, share everything you know on the internet for free (Blog for SEO), and then collect emails at the bottom of each post promising further valuable information.

You’ve now got a list of leads who think of you as an expert and specifically need help with your niche area. You need to email them regularly with further valuable information to keep them engaged. Occasionally sell your services to this list, while keeping it mostly informative so people don’t unsubscribe. This will become the “inbound” portion of your sales funnel.

Next, you need to create the “outbound” portion. Using your email list, send out a survey and find out what type of people are looking for consultants in your specific niche.

Once you have a good target profile, troll LinkedIn and create a contact list that fits the profile, and systematically reach out to each of them. You also should share some of your content posts that you think would be relevant to them (and that have proven to be popular) to both establish trust, and also potentially get them on the email list (not everybody needs help right now but will later).

Once you have an inbound and outbound process that’s working and you can calculate what percentage of leads eventually convert, scale it up. Hire virtual assistants to automate and dabble with ads.

Now you have more work than you can handle and have the beginnings of an agency where you can sell other people’s time for even more profit.

Thanks! That was an interesting read. You talk a lot about how to understand the client but not at all about how that translates into whether it's a good client/consultant fit. Did you write about that somewhere?

Highly recommend from Steve Friedl's excellent Unixwiz.net Tech Tips collection[0]:

"So you want to be a consultant...?" [1]

[0] http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/

[1] http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

Thanks.

I spotted a couple of misspelled words ('Ressources', 'has lead') so it may be worth running the article through a spell-check.

Not OP, but it's good if these two are met:

1. You and the client can converge on what should be done.

2. You have the skills/experience/whatever to help the client do that.

Lack of #1 is bad because you could end up signing up to do work that you believe is the wrong solution (or solution to the wrong problem) and end up being ineffective.

Lack of #2 is bad because doing things that are too far from your expertise will result in worse outcomes.