Acquiring clients is no easy task!

I've searched for years and years for the perfect job for me and after a lot of hardships and wrong turns, I've finally found my passion and the one thing that I am really good at...Event Planning.

My title at my last job was event manager and I thought this would be my chance to really shine and grow my passion for event planning and coordination. Although I had some good opportunities there, this just wasn't enough because this place was a retail store and they only threw 1 big event per year. Thankfully I was lucky enough to see this event through from beginning to end and loved every minute of it. This was a huge 3 day trade show type of event and It was right up my alley to prove my exceptional organizational skills and really show my true passion for organizing and planning events. The event was an enormous success and everyone involved praised my skills and said how this was the best year for this event, that it was so much better organized than previous years. I was thrilled with the outcome and couldn't wait to do more of these events. However, unfortunately this company took a different turn and many things happened within our department that were just not right for me and so, once again, I chose to leave this job and try my hand at freelancing one more time.

My biggest challenge at this point and time is still trying to acquire clients. I've done a bit of advertising in a newspaper, online and created a professional page on Facebook and got my personal website back up and running but so far I haven't gotten any results. I got an e-mail from someone looking for a quote, but this person also CC'd about 20 other event planners for a quote, and I haven't heard anything back. I got a call while I was on vacation from someone who I thought might be a potential client, but when I called the person back and left a message, they were no longer there and they still haven't returned my call. I have one more resource that I may be able to use who is an expert PR person. If I can manage to work out a deal with this person where I could pay her by commission with the first job that she would bring in, then this could potentially work out really well. Other than that, I am not a PR professional and therefore am still not quite sure how to go about getting new clients.

If anyone out there has any good tips for building a client list, than please don't be shy and communicate these tips to me, I need all the help I can get.