If you are in a service business, there are only three ways you can get new clients:
- You to client: “Will you do business with me?”
- You to client: “I do great work, will you do business with me?”
- Client to you: “We’ve heard you do great work, will you do business with us?”
(excerpt from “Consultant-Market Yourself,” by Robert Gentle)
Pop quiz, which of these three options would you prefer? Really? You all chose option #3? Imagine that!
So how to you get potential clients to hear about you, form a favorable opinion of the quality of your work, and initiate contact with you?
While there are many ways you can do this, I believe that the following is probably the easiest path:
- Start with your website. Make your site a Mecca for people seeking information on your field of expertise. If you post a lot of informational articles on your site, people will form the (accurate) opinion that you are an expert on that topic.
- Attract traffic to your site by writing short articles with links back to your website. Publish these articles on article submission sites like ezinearticles.com, articlecity.com, goarticles.com and articlebliss.com.
Each of these sites allow other webmasters to post your articles on their sites as long as they make no changes and keep the link pointing back to your site. This creates a viral effect that can multiply your single article dozens of times, with each new site that publishes your article containing a link pointing back to your site.
- Attract more traffic by posting appropriate comments on related blogs. Each comment should include your signature file with a link back to your site. Do not spam! If your comments are not appropriate to the conversation and are not informative, you will not convince anyone that you are an expert.
- Find related online forums with http://www.boardtracker.com/. This is a search engine especially designed to search out what is being discussed in millions of online forums. Once you have located a discussion related to your topic, repeat the previous step for commenting on related blogs. But be sure your comment is not just a self-serving plug, but is relevant to the discussion and provides helpful information.
- Produce new content regularly and often. Make sure your site always contains new, fresh information so people will keep coming back.
Eventually, you will have written enough content that you can repackage the information in another form, like an ebook, a printed booklet or even a full-length book. Then you will have an information product you can truly leverage to get your client acquisition process in high gear.
COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown
Labels: info products, rainmaking, writing website content
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