How to find clients online in 2025: Cut through the noise, land new business, and scale your side hustle

The digital marketplace has never been so busy. In 2024, more business occurred online than ever before — and much of that is driven by solopreneurs. Research shows that 45% of working Americans have a side hustle, and of those, 71% go it alone.

It’s a golden age for freelancing or starting your own business, but it also means it can be difficult to stand out in such a crowded landscape. 

To know how to find customers online and set yourself apart, consider these five strategies.

1. Build your strong online foundation

Your first order of business is the initial impression you’ll make on prospective clients: your website, professional email, and domain. Attracting customers online means prioritizing these essentials: 

Secure a unique domain

Name your personal brand something simple and immediately recognizable, then take it to the next level with a memorable domain. Then use the top-level domain (TLD) extension — you know, like the “.com”, that comes after the domain — to differentiate yourself further. Descriptive domains include extensions like .app, .healthcare, .law, .fitness, or .realtor, and help customers understand right away what you offer.

Create a clear, attractive website

A simple, user-friendly website builder is likely your best option to showcase your services, portfolio, and contact information. Remember to design your site to be responsive, with intuitive navigation and display for both web and mobile devices.

Avoid business jargon or buzzwords — be yourself, and articulate your specific point of view and unique selling proposition in plain language that audiences can relate to. Incorporate visuals such as icons, images, videos, or infographics so it’s not just text.

Finally, search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to find customers online, so make sure your website contains keywords your target clients are looking for — tools such as SEMrush and Google Trends are your friend here. But search trends don’t stay the same, and you shouldn’t have to edit your site every time you want to capitalize on changing demand. That’s why having a blog is handy. By sharing valuable posts that demonstrate your knowledge and insight while answering your audience’s frequently asked questions, you can consistently compete for viewers. You also give people a great reason to visit your site again and again.

Set up a branded email address

You’ve named your brand and you’ve scored a domain that matches it. Now, don’t neglect to complement these with a professional email address. A custom, on-brand email will be easy to remember for potential clients, while also signaling that you’re a trusted expert.

2. Master the art of social media marketing

Leveraging social media is a powerful way to attract customers online. Representing your business on LinkedIn is a smart place to start, as you can detail your service offerings in your profile, list your relevant credentials, add customer testimonials, and even use a customized, on-brand URL. And LinkedIn Premium members have three months of free access to a suite of digital branding tools through Name.com — including their domain, website builders, and security solutions.

But there are numerous other platforms, so focus your time and energy wherever your target audience is most active. Participate actively, commenting respectfully on posts that are relevant to your work, while regularly sharing content of your own.

Think of questions you hear from peers and customers, look up the common queries that surface in your Google search results, or consult forums like Quora to see what people are asking in your industry. Then use your social channels to provide value with helpful tips, links, and resources. Your posts can position you as an expert, while also showing your day-to-day life in a relatable way that humanizes your brand. At the end of the week, combine or expand these entries to create content for your site.

You can also diversify posts with platform-specific features such as Instagram Reels, LinkedIn Articles, or Facebook Live, for more dynamic and interactive content.

3. Collect and leverage first-party data

Your website and social channels provide metrics and analytics to help you boost digital audience engagement. This is called first-party data — unlike third-party data, it belongs to you and helps reduce your reliance on costly advertising platforms.

• Follower counts, clicks, likes, and shares can provide helpful intel, but you can collect more detailed data directly using website forms, email sign-ups, and purchase histories.
• Incentivize audience members to share high-value information with you through creative promotions; in exchange for an email address, advertise a free ebook, exclusive content, or a limited-time discount.
• When you know more about your audiences, segment them and provide targeted, personalized experiences such as email campaigns and product recommendations customized to their preferences.

AI tools can help with this — in fact, 75% of small businesses have already deployed AI tools. Since AI excels at analyzing huge troves of data and surfacing patterns, they can be used to help segment your audiences and uncover their commonalities and attributes.

4. Tap into online communities

Dedicated online forums and communities enable you to connect even more directly and build trust with the people most likely to pay for your services. From Facebook groups to Reddit threads, these arenas let you prove your expertise to the audiences who will appreciate it.

Like regular social media, sharing actionable advice and resources can serve you well, so ensure your website, portfolio, and social media handles are easily accessible in your community profiles. One of the best ways to attract customers online is to have someone tell their friends and colleagues about you — because they’ve already vetted you, and you delivered real value to them.

5. Automate and scale for growth

It’s good to be busy, but not if it leads to burnout. For solopreneurs who want to grow their business online, automated tools are a great way to optimize output without compromising on quality.

Once more, AI-driven solutions make a huge difference, which is why 93% of small business owners say they’re cost-effective ways to boost profitability. Among entrepreneurs surveyed, 67% say they’re better than existing tools for customer acquisition, 61% say they’re better for customer service, and 55% say they’re better for personalizing the customer experience. Here are some ways they’re being deployed:

• According to the survey above, email marketing automation is a use case cited by almost a third of small business owners. A tool like Titan’s Smart Write AI helps you automate your email marketing so you can nurture leads, send follow-ups and thank you notes, and share updates with minimal effort. They can also help you write email templates.
  
• For example, having an offboarding email ready to go at the end of a client engagement is a great way to ensure you collect the feedback and testimonials you need to win new business. Just be sure to personalize it before you hit “send”, such as adding a summary of what you accomplished for your customer so that your successes are top of mind.
  
• Scheduling and CRM solutions are also valuable and help you automate appointment bookings and task management so you can stay organized and save time as your client base grows.
  
• Finally, your website can do a lot of heavy lifting, streamlining client acquisition with forms and landing pages. Set up automated lead capture on your site so you can collect customer information, guide them toward your services, and gain promising new business leads.

Starting a solopreneur side hustle is an ambitious undertaking. But once you implement the five strategies detailed here, you’ll be amazed at how much progress you’ve made toward building a thriving online business and finally being your own boss. 

It all starts with laying the right foundations, and the right domain, business email, and website are great starting points. From here, you’ll need to find creative ways to capture data and audience insights, as well as understand which workflows you can effectively automate in order to grow. 

To learn more about how you can build your audience and scale your side hustle into a full-time career, check out this blog.