Your first search
Five minutes, and the first leads are in before you finish reading this.
Say what you sell, in one line
Askhawk writes the searches from a sentence about your work, so write it the way you would say it to someone at a table: “we rebuild Shopify stores for small brands”, not “ecommerce solutions”.
The words a buyer uses are rarely the words on your website. They say “my checkout is broken”, “who can redo our site”, “looking for someone to run our ads”. That is what the search looks for, and you can edit every phrase it suggests.
Pick three places, not thirty
Start with the places you already know your buyers are. Two forums and one marketplace beat ten sources you never read. You can add more the moment you see what lands.
- Reddit and Hacker News are free on every plan
- A marketplace if you sell where briefs are posted
- Your own city on the map, if the work is local
Then fix it once
After the first hour, open the list and dismiss anything that is not a fit. Each dismissal teaches the next round: the phrases that brought it are weighed down, and the ones that brought a good lead are kept.
If a source floods you, turn it off rather than raising the bar for everything. One noisy board is a source problem, not a scoring problem.