Continuing my series of articles on the Three Main Issues Clients Face En Route To Success, after getting Your Vision really clear, then working out your Strategic Plan, you need to decide on your tactics.
When I first trained as a coach, the issue of how to attract clients was a knotty one, as it was such a new industry. Coaches ran around like headless chickens, putting up notices in health clubs, printing brochures to put in doctors surgeries, and all sorts of nonsense like that.
I was very lucky, as my own coach was Chris Barrow and he knew which tactics worked on how to attract clients.
1. Choose your niche. Chris’ was dentists and mine was initially executives within the music industry then wealth coaching as I became more fascinated in that.
2. Have a simple website with an email capture box and a clear “elevator speech” on the front page, talking directly to your ideal client, not about you.
3. Send out a weekly ezine to allow people to get to know, like and trust you.
4. Create three simple product choices (maximum) ranging from free to fee allowing for all budgets.
The other thing that helped massively at the time was a book by CJ Hayden called Get Clients Now!
In this book, she outlined about 30 different ideas, or tactics, for marketing yourself, whether you are a coach, consultant or any service provider. But then she said something very interesting…..
Pick three tactics, to start with, but pick three that you like the sound of, because if you choose a tactic that you hate, you will simply never do it.
Then give those tactics a thorough using, to see if they work. If they do, keep doing them, and perhaps try one more at a time. If they don’t work, pick another three you like the sound of and give those a thorough trying out.
And so it is with business and internet marketing, there are so many tactics that you could use, that you simply have to pick a few that you like the sound of, and try them out. But make sure you actually do them, as too many times my mentoring clients tell me they are doing something and it’s not working, but it turns out that they are NOT doing the tactics they have chosen, they just think about it a lot!
The other thing to remember is to actually monitor your results! Every week, I sit down and look at my “key performance indicators” which are
1. Unique visitors
2. New unique visitors
3. New subscribers
4. Front end sales / Back end sales
5. Results of any split testing I’m doing
Those KPI’s tell me what I need to focus on that week, is it traffic, conversions to subscribers or conversions to sales.
I was reading a PDF today which contained an interview with business guru Michael Masterson, who wrote my favourite business book “Ready Fire Aim”.
He said that it’s a race, when you start any new business, to find out which is the Optimum Selling System (OSS) for that product or service.
This is why so many businesses fail, they simply don’t manage to do that, they don’t find their OSS before the money runs out.
Online, you have many tactics for getting traffic, which is the first part of your OSS. Without traffic, you can’t tell whether the other components of your OSS are working.
As soon as you are getting 100 visitors a day, a week or a month (bit slow that last one) then you can see how many convert to subscribers and sales.
You can choose traffic generation tactics from blogging, article marketing, podcasting, online video or tv, you can buy it with Adwords, Yahoo or Bing. You can comment on other people’s sites or in forums, you can give stuff away to joint venture partners mailing lists, you can buy advertisements in ezines.
What do you do when your OSS stops working for any reason? My Optimum Selling System for The Money Gym website was Google Adwords for a long time but then Google decided in their wisdom that my personal website NicolaCairncross.com and the website I had set up for the next book, were both “get rich quick scams”. No amount of protestation on my part – including proving that my book is for sale on Amazon – could convince them otherwise.
So I have had to find another OSS for my book and it’s blogging, article marketing and creating Marketing MOT’s to upload to Youtube. Those are being syndicated all over the web according to my Google Alert on my name. I’m also being interviewed regularly by Neil Long for his Internet Profits Radio Show, some of the interviews are also appearing on Womens Radio.
All of which I enjoy enormously so I’m very likely to do them. Jury’s out on the results yet, I’ve only been blogging this intensely for a few weeks and my traffic is definitely improviing.
The other thing I’m exploring more is Joint Ventures. You can read an article I wrote recently about Joint Ventures and why they are so powerful here
You can also watch some free videos about the power of joint ventures here, by Andy Hussong, Andy was the right hand man to John Reese, the Traffic Secrets guru so I figure he might know a thing or two about joint venture tactics!
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