I am a founder of a very successful web design company www.virginprofile.com and would like to share some of the experience I have gathered along the way.
As a freelance webdesigner, there are alot of limitations to what you can do. Firstly it is difficult to get trust of individuals and companies becuase of the fear of scam. Secondly, if you have a low budget, you will be at disadvantage because you are competing with bigger firms too.
If you register as a company, that fear of mistrust would not be there since the company has a registered address and all transactions will have to go through the company account. This implies that you can get the patronage of big companies and government agencies.
How to promote your company
there are numerous ways of promoting your business, but the online media is a good place to start since you are running a web based company. The first thing clients will look at is your own porpularity online. It is ironical if one is trying to emphasise on the importance of being popurlar online while he himself is not. So it is very important to be actively involved in online social media like facebook, twitter, youtube,linkedin e.t.c
most potential clients are also on these social media online so runing ads from time to time is highly recommended.
In subsiquent posts I will be talking about other mediums of advertising like newspaper and search engines.