A List Apart is ramping up their second annual survey of web professionals.  You may be wondering what is the point of this survey.  A bunch of people answer questions.  Then we learn that 0.3% of the world’s web developers live in Argentina.  Okay.  And?

One of the questions on the survey (at least if you’re a freelance developer) is where your business comes from.  One of the options is referrals from your past clients.  For the sake of argument, let’s say you don’t get any business this way.  Should you be concerned?  If the results from the survey come back and most web professionals don’t get business this way, then I wouldn’t worry too much about it.  That could indicate that website customers just don’t talk much about who did their site for them.

What if the survey comes back and 90% of the respondents do get referrals from past clients.  Now you have some information to work with.  Since you know this usually happens in the industry, you can go to some of your previous clients.  Find a few that will be honest with you and ask them why they’ve never referred someone to you.  Is there a problem with their site?  Are you hard to work with? 

The survey results give you some benchmarks.

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