A lot of my business clients have actually been through referals. I have a client that I got referred to two years ago that has gotton me a ton of business since. Partly because I got him out of a tough spot, after he let a Geek Squad "tech", touch his Raid 5 File server and then tell him the drives were bad and the data was unrecoverable.
Once I got him back up and running, he was so gratefull that he got all his drawings back (he's an architect), that he signed a contract on the spot with me. Now every job that he signs he reccomends me to the owner to do all the IT work, from pulling ethernet cable to setting up networks and installing machines, and then Ive been able to get maintenace contracts from some of them. I go out of my way to keep this guy happy cause he has been an invaluable assett to my business.
I have also been thinking about targeting a marketing campaign toward the small businesses in my area with the theme "is your data secure, are you backing up?". You would be suprised how many small firms do not have any kind of consistent back-up procedure in place, and moreover have no clue what it would cost them, in man-hours, lost revenue and recovery fees if their primary source of data somehow was gone and a back-up was'nt in place.