Client Magnets Official Blog

When you meet someone for the first time, you have a chance to make a real connection, or you can just pass on your name and be forgotten. Successful relationship-building requires more than just handing out business cards. To build long-lasting, solid and mutually-beneficial relationships, a little homework and a little thoughtfulness goes a long way. Here are my tips for making an impression that brings lasting results …

Research the People You’re Meeting

If you’re meeting someone in particular, research the person or people you’re meeting. Lots of resources exist that can give you both professional and personal reference material. The Web is a source of myriad information, with things like company websites, personal bios, work histories, resumes, portfolios; depending on who you’re meeting, you may be able to find a wide range of information about your contact.

If the Web doesn’t yield any useful information, you could check with the company where your contact works, to see if they have any marketing information containing professional info about your contact. You could also check periodicals, such as magazine stories, newspaper articles or professional interviews. Depending on how public the person is that you’re meeting, you may be able to find everything from the name of a spouse to the first place he or she worked out of college.

Use the information you find when you meet your contact. Talk about common interests, such as being dog owners, adoptive parents, yachters; whatever common bond you can form with your contact can help you form a good relationship. Ask about things near and dear to the person’s heart – not just business talk – and you’re well on your way to forming a real connection.

Ask Questions and Show Genuine Interest

Get to know people to form real connections. Ask questions about everything; not just their professional life, but their personal interests and family life, too. The more you can show that you understand, know and really “get” the person, the better your relationship will be, and the more business opportunities you’re likely to gain. Be a real person to your connections, too – if your new business partner volunteers information about his wife, talk about your wife. The more personal you can make your relationships with people, the better your long-term success with those relationships will be.

Have Fun Making Connections With All People

Everyone can have fun building good relationships – all you have to do is be genuinely interested in people. Enjoy getting to know your business colleagues, or even that woman you met on the street the other day. Forming connections with people can help in all aspects of your life, and even random connections can help your business in unexpected ways. You never know when someone will refer a key contact; an affiliate who may have great products for your prospects, or a business or distributor that could make your product a high-demand success!

Don’t just see people as stepping stones to a better business. Form real, legitimate connections by getting to know people, and I promise good business will naturally follow.

The thank you page is one of the most overlooked places of real estate on the web.

That quote, from one of my mentors, Yanik Silver, speaks volumes. There is so much opportunity to promote more business and further your relationship with a new client on your thank-you page.

That client has just indicated that they trust you by opting in to your offer. Signing up to your list is a sign that they want to hear more from you.   Don’t let them leave wanting; offer them even more before they click off your thank-you page.

When developing your thank you page, think about what you can do to increase your client’s involvement. Marketing research has shown that the more people are involved, the more likely they are to buy – again.

That’s one reason companies hand out scratch-off cards with prizes or discounts hidden beneath the ink. It’s called an involvement device. When someone physically has to do something, it increases their involvement, which increases response and increases conversion.

The content on your thank you page needs to be relevant to your target market. Think about what you want them to do next, where you want them redirected to, and if there’s an opportunity to make them another offer.

There are several key ways you can accomplish this.

•    Make another offer. While letting the client know you’re glad they signed up, also let them know about another offering. Make a special offer. Offer a special prize or a special bonus that new clients will receive, but only if they sign up there and then.   Remember to use language that encourages action.  For example, “This is the only time you will see this offer. It’s for new subscribers only and you won’t have access to it again.”

•    Ask for more information. Once a new prospect joins your list, ask them to describe their biggest problem. You can then direct them to other offers you may have to help with the problem, or develop that new offering if you don’t have one.

•     Create a “tell a friend” campaign. Invite people to tell three friends about your offering in exchange for a special bonus. “Congratulations. Your place on the call is reserved. But just before we continue I would like to offer you this free gift……..”

Everyone who opts in helps you spread the word to other people. This will make a massive difference to your opt-ins and really help to increase your list. You can automate this process using Viral Friend Generator software.

When saying “thank you”, the key is to include only one of these options on your page. Either attempt an additional sale by making another offer, ask new clients for more information, or create a tell-a-friend page.

Any one of these options added to your thank-you page will start increasing your sales immediately.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Many entrepreneurs, small business owners and other professionals find themselves focused on earning an income, finding new clients and the day-to-day struggle to survive.  Having enough income and cashflow to grow your business rapidly is not an uncommon problem.  I often hear people talking about their expected income for the next day, weeks or months ahead.  They focus on knowing where the next paycheck is coming from because they don’t have enough confidence in their existing client base or cashflow.   They fear their income will dry up.

Have you ever felt like that?  If that sounds like you, then it’s time to STOP focusing on your income.  It’s time to start focusing on a long-term plan for success and diversification.  But how?  How do you free yourself from the day-to-day financial worry and really start to thrive?

The answer simply lies in starting your own high-end coaching program.   A high-end coaching programme (when designed and delivered the right way) will provide enough guaranteed revenue to enable you to stop worrying about money and be free to focus on your long-term success!

This is how the strategy works …

Sell Once a Year to Generate Guaranteed Revenue

• With your high-end coaching programme, if you market and sell the right way, you will only need to focus on the selling once and then you’re done for the year.

• Create a program with a limited number of spots, and you’ll only have to sell long enough to fill those spots and then you can focus on serving your clients and creating alternate revenue streams.

• Create a program with a fixed time limit, such as my annual programme, and you only have to sell those spots once per year. Then you’ve got the commitment for the income, and you’re free to focus on other areas of your business. No more worrying month-to-month whether you’ll have enough cash for next month; with a high-end coaching program, you can earn enough money to free yourself up for other pursuits.

Free Yourself Up to Look at the Big Picture

One of the biggest benefits for you and your business of creating a high-end coaching program is freeing yourself up to look at the big picture. If you’re like most people, you spend countless hours per week working on finding enough business, and the rest of your time goes to satisfying your existing clients. You never have time to think about the long-term plans for your business, or how to diversify your revenue streams.

Once you have the committed income of a high-end coaching program, you can stop spending so much of your time selling yourself and your services because you have a guaranteed revenue stream. Instead, you can focus on creating the other steps to achieve success in your business, and put together a long-term plan for your business!

In order to truly become successful in your own business, you’ve got to stop focusing on immediate income so you can begin to build a road map for long-term success.   Worrying about your day-to-day income is short-term thinking and can seriously hamper your long-term business success. When you start a high-end coaching program, you get financial commitments for a large portion of your revenue and begin looking at other ways to improve your business success.

So if you want to see an end to your day-to-day financial struggles and the beginning of long-term success, it’s time to start your high-end coaching programme!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Do you know what the most valuable page on your website is?

It’s not your “About Me” page. It’s not your “Testimonials” page.

It is the page where people give you their contact information and purchase your products or programs. That is the goal of your business.

To achieve that goal, you need to get people to opt-in. Nothing else can happen until they do this.  That is why the design of the page where they opt-in – your squeeze page – is so important.

Getting your prospects to hand over their contact info isn’t always easy, but if you focus on your squeeze page set-up, you will successfully obtain client information, build your list and make sales.  Use my tips below to maximize the effectiveness of your squeeze page.  These strategies work!

•    Make your homepage a squeeze page

To get maximum results, make your squeeze page your homepage. This will lead to a significant increase in your opt-ins and in your list.

•    Model successful squeeze pages

To get ideas for your new home page, model other successful squeeze pages. Look at other people’s pages with new eyes. Emulate the elements that make them successful while using your own unique copy that speaks to your own target audience.

•    The important information should appear within the browser window

The pages that are most attractive give the most important information at the top, without having to scroll down. Everything your visitors need to see should appear within the browser window in front of them. Don’t make them have to “lift a finger” to find the best of what you have to offer.

•    Use headlines and bullets to present your message

Announce your best information in the area that most people notice first – the headline. Develop a headline that will grab your visitors’ interest and get them to stay online to hear the rest of your message. Use a prehead and a subhead to deliver your best copy.

Successful pages don’t include one long paragraph of copy after another. A successful squeeze page presents its best content as great mini headlines in a bulleted format.

•    Make big, bold promises

Use numbers within your bullet headlines. State that you’re going to solve problems. Make big promises in your bullets. You’ve done the research, campaigns and surveys to determine what your target audience wants, now highlight that information in your bullets.

•    Make a personal connection

Your target audience want to know who you are.   Don’t keep your personality a secret. Make your squeeze page personal. People buy people. Although we’re all speaking virtually, on Twitter and on teleseminars, people want the personal human connection.

They want to know you. They want to see the person behind the site. At the very least, include a photograph of yourself. Add audio and video to increase the personalization.

•    Use a thank you page

Don’t lose that personal touch once your visitor has opted in on your squeeze page. Your thank-you page is a great place to further your relationship and offer your new client even more. You could make another sale just by asking for it on your thank-you page.

•    Remove Navigation Bar and Banner

There are a couple of web page staples that should not appear on a successful squeeze page. These items do nothing to help you get people to opt-in. So, strip out the navigation bar and ditch your banner. They should not be on your squeeze page.

•    Test, measure and improve your conversation rates

Make sure you test and measure your conversion rate on your squeeze page. Find out how many visitors are actually buying into your offer. Regularly measuring your conversion rates will tell you what’s working and what isn’t on your page.

When you apply at least one of these tips, and you will see an improvement in your conversion.

Make a checklist and work through it. Improve your squeeze page one component at a time and you’ll be in a much stronger position – I promise!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Every consumer wants to know what’s in it for them.  If he gives a bit of his hard-earned money, what will he get in return?  If she donates an hour of her valuable time, what can she expect to receive?

Whether the consumer donation is money, time, or loyalty, those consumers want to know that what they’ll receive will greatly outweigh what they invest.  Dan Kennedy put it well when he referred to this concept as, “Selling money at a discount.”

This is the duty of your teleseminar’s registration page.  Not only should your registration page name a common problem, agitate it, offer a solution, give benefit bullet points, and offer simple registration and payment, but it should quell fears, silence objections, and calm arguments…with a call to action that springs to action, even before those objections are formulated.  Before your prospect has a chance to ask him or herself, “What’s in it for me?” or, “How is this going to better my position?” or, “How is this going to save me money?”, you need to thoroughly answer those questions for them.

You can quantify the cost of any topic. No matter the subject matter, you will always be able to find proof that you will save your customers money, time or grief.  Consider these examples:

• If your topic is business related, and the foreseeable objection is price, include a statement like this:  “For an investment of X, you’ll get the information to avoid the problem of Y, which if left unchecked, will cost you 100 times X.”  For example, you can show your readers how spending $50 will save them $5000.

• If your topic is weight loss related, you can quantify the cost in this manner:  “You’re already spending money on this problem, in the form of high insurance premiums, gym memberships, weight loss programs, and clothing.  You’ll spend far less than all of this to participate in this teleseminar, which will eliminate the need for most of your current money spending.”

• If your topic revolves around parenting, consider presenting your quantification this way:  “How much money are you spending on guilt gifts for your children?  What if a great parent/child relationship was to replace those gifts?  You would save money and gain what you really want.”

• Or, if your topic has little to do with money, and a lot to do with emotional cost, you can quantify your clients’ investments like this:  “Isn’t it worth X to never feel Y again?”

You must calculate the actual monetary amounts for your registration page readers.  Don’t expect them to do the math – they may click away without ever seeing the true monetary benefit that you’re offering.

Even if you’re not able to attain a sign-up from every reader, a good call to action will break through denial, and push those people closer to a sign-up next time you host a teleseminar with a similar topic.

Even if you’re hosting a free teleseminar, you must use your call to action to convince prospects that their investments of time will save them money, time or angst.  In other words, you must convince them that participating in your teleseminar will literally make them money, or trap the money that they already have in their pockets.  You must convince them that investing one hour can save them five hours of work.  Or, convince them that investing one hour will save them hours of sleepless grief.

Your call to action should do just that:  call for action to be taken.  In fact, it should be so powerful, so undeniable, and make such good monetary sense, that your readers won’t be able to help but spring to immediate action.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Social networking platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, give you a powerful new tool for connecting with potential prospects, clients, sales leads and new business partners. Because of the nature of social networking, successful social networking is about more than just creating a marketing campaign and sending it out into the ether. Social networking is a social process, and it works best when your personality shines through to your social networking contacts. With the right techniques, you can build your personality on social networking platforms and improve your social networking success.

Offer Advice: One way you can get real personal, real fast with your contacts is to offer advice or even just sympathetic comments. Listen to what people say, and respond to them even when it’s not related to your business. This is a fast and easy way to form personal connections with people, which can lead to unexpected business opportunities. Additionally, by offering advice or sharing information about related things in your life, you’re letting people find out more about you as a person and letting your personality shine through your social networking.

Share Personal Information: Share personal information via Twitter and Facebook. For years, people have had distinctive mindsets of “this is business” and “personal is for friends.” Let your business contacts be your friends, too. When you share information about your diet, or struggling with the conflicts of being a parent and business person, you’re sharing personal information that lets other people see that you’re not just a faceless business – you’re an individual.

The things that you share might resonate with your followers, and give them a reason to keep following you beyond your business information. People are also more likely to refer friends to other friends for business opportunities than to faceless strangers, so if you and your business can become a friend, you’ll get more business opportunities.

Find Ways to Blend Business and Personal: Find ways to blend business and personal updates. If all of your updates are personal, your followers who aren’t particularly interested in your business might just go away. If you share personal information, too, your followers may be interested in you as a person and continue to follow, even if they don’t find your business particularly interesting.

By blending business with personal updates, you can share information about your business without being blatant. For example, you could say something like “Going to Ireland to speak for business, and taking my husband along as an anniversary gift.” This lets people know that you’re a successful business person who travels and speaks, but also shares information about your personal life – that you and your husband have an anniversary.

Be Genuine: The most important thing about sharing your personality through social networking is to be genuine. Don’t give fake updates tailored just to get a reaction from your followers; be forthright and honest, and people will respect your integrity. If you let your personality shine through to your social networking followers, you’ll find yourself with a bigger pool of followers, which potentially gives you more business opportunities.

Bernadette Doyle created Client Magnets Ltd to help self-employed people solve one of their biggest business problems: attract a steady stream of clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Are you thinking about starting a high-end coaching, consulting or mentoring program? If you’ve got years of accumulated knowledge, a top-level program can be a great way to share that information and help your clients achieve success. It may be time for you to stop running one-day programs and selling books and launch a top-level coaching program, instead. You can provide great results for your clients, and truly share your information in a significant way through these programs.

One-day workshops may be good for clients who have limited time or budget but want to make a difference in their business. In a one-day workshop, you can begin to create the foundation for a successful business owner to make a transition in the way he or she does business. However, a one-day workshop isn’t a magic medium for you to create an army of happy, successful businesspeople. You can only share so much information through a one-day workshop, and you’re essentially always starting clients out on the same basic level; they never progress past the techniques you can cover in a single day.

If you’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge about success in your medium, business or industry, you might consider selling e-books. E-books are typically a compilation of knowledge and techniques that people can use to work on their own and boost their business. E-books can provide a revenue stream, but they’re typically limited in scope.

An e-book cannot begin to convey all the accumulated knowledge and business acumen of years in an industry or field.  Like one-day workshops, an e-book can help build a basic foundation for client success, but many clients never progress past that basic level of knowledge and technique contained in the e-book. This makes e-books great for introductory materials, but ultimately too limited to help clients achieve overall success.

Top-Level Coaching Programs are Great for Client Success
Top-level coaching programs let you really share your accumulated wisdom and business expertise with your clients on a basis that can help them achieve success. Unlike e-books and one-day workshops, a top-level coaching program typically enables you to work with your clients one-on-one to help them develop the skills and techniques specific to their field. You can help your clients set goals and achieve them with your expertise; you’re not just leaving clients alone to blunder around and try to build on a basic foundation.

Top-level coaching programs provide clients with an ideal medium to move beyond the basics and truly grasp success. This is good both for you and your clients. If you’d like to help your clients achieve real results, it’s time to move beyond e-books and one-day workshops and consider launching a top-level coaching program.

Bernadette Doyle created Client Magnets Ltd to help self-employed people solve one of their biggest business problems: attract a steady stream of clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

When you think about writing a blog, which do you think is more important?

• Focusing on the content that you’re sharing with readers, expecting that people will read your blogs because of the quality and value your blogs provide.

• Concentrating on how your blog will rank in the search engines and cramming every relatable keyword possible into your post.

Writing for the person is much more important than writing for the search engines. Your blog should demonstrate your expertise to your target niche and convey your passion for what you’re doing. It should come from your heart. That is how you will connect with your readers and why they will share your blog with their network.

That doesn’t mean that SEO isn’t important, however. Offering quality and value in your content won’t do any good if people can’t readily find it.

Optimize your blog for SEO purposes with links. Be sure to include proper links to legitimate, respected sites; don’t just buy links or list them in directories.

Another way to help your blog rank higher on search engines is to add tags. This is something overlooked by many people, but there is real value in tags.

Adding tags is a relatively simple process. If you are using WordPress, look for the tags link, then click “create” under tags. Type your tag, which is basically your description of your post, into that little area.

If, for example, I were to write a post about the top 30 Internet coaches, I would list each person’s name in that area. That will show Google – or other search engines – that information about that particular person is going to appear in my blog post. The search engine will actually create a category of sorts about the person. People looking up that person will see all the posts online about them,  including mine.

Yanik Silver, one of my mentors who has hundreds of thousands of followers, was tagged by blogging entrepreneur Michael Dunlop in a post about the top 30 things to do before you die. Yanik runs Maverick Business Adventures, a wonderful company that offers unique trips around the world to people with plenty of money to take them.

In his adventure program, Yanik offers one of the top 30 things Michael writes about in his blog. That is why Michael tagged him. Michael’s blog ranked seventh in search engines when people looked up Yanik, which drew an incredible amount of traffic to his site.

All he did was add the tag. This is something you can do with every post. If you tag the name of a prominent person because they are relevant to the blog you’ve written and the niche you’re writing for, more people searching for that person will have the opportunity to come across your post.

So, post a list on your next blog, and tag the names on it. It will give your post a higher ranking, maybe on the first page on Google. It’s an easy way to draw traffic. And, in many instances, because that traffic will be people in your target niche, they will probably be interested in what you have to offer.

Bernadette Doyle created Client Magnets Ltd to help self-employed people solve one of their biggest business problems: attract a steady stream of clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

How much money do you want to make this year?

If you’ve answered this question with a round number, like, $100,000, or $1,000,000, or an, “I don’t know,” you don’t have a goal, you have a wish.  It’s imperative that you know your goal income numbers, specifically.  You must know how much you have to net today, this week, and this month in order to land the yearly salary that will support the lifestyle that you desire.

Here are some get-specific Millionaire Mindset methods:

• What would you like to do in the next year? Move?  Take your dream vacation?  Send a child to college?  Hire someone to manage all of that stuff for you?  Or make it possible for your spouse to leave his or her job to come to work for you?

Don’t forget the smaller costs that go along with each large goal, like the cost of providing your newest employee with a company car and fringe benefits, travel costs, tuition, and your existing lifestyle costs.  Don’t estimate.  Make phone calls.  Get current pricing on airfare, college tuition, health care, or whatever bills you’ll have to foot.  Write it down…you’re going to need it.

• Now that you’ve done the addition, do the division. Break out the calculator and find out how much you’ll need to net in a month, a week, and a day.  This will give you a manageable and reachable goal path.

Lots of people say they want to be millionaires.  But if you ask them how much they need to make this afternoon to stay on track for that wish, you’ll likely be met with a dumbfounded look.  Once this step is completed, you will be distinctly separate from those with a wishing frame of mind.

• Challenge yourself in the pursuit of your income goal. If that means working an extra 30 minutes to meet your daily income goal, do it.  If that means negotiating on a deal, even if you’re not comfortable with negotiation, then do it.

When you know how much money you need to earn this week, in pursuit of the big goal, you’ll be encouraged to do the things that aren’t so desirable.  Every time you challenge the boundaries of your comfort zone, those boundaries will soften, and your comfort zone will grow.

A goal like, “I want to make a million bucks this year,” will never incite you to rewrite an email or to hold firm on your retail price for an item.  But if your goal is, “I need to clear another $50 today to stay on track,” you’ll push right through, because you will connect those little tasks with your big goals for yourself, your family, and your lifestyle.

• Successful business people always know their numbers. They rifle off their conversion rates, costs, costs of sale, and precise percentage profits.  Businesspeople who don’t know are probably losing money.

• If the thought of calculating, relating to, or speaking about numbers frightens you, then hire a business manager to do it for you.  Investing all of your energy in working in your business, without working on your business, will be detrimental to your income goal.

• The numbers might be simple now, but if your goal is to make a million dollars, or any other impressive number, you’ll have to expect the money flow, in both directions, to become more complicated.  Adopt a know-your-numbers attitude now, rather than jumping into a sea of number soup when your chances of drowning are high.

In short, know how much money you need to make.  Then know how much money you need to make this week in order to reach that goal.  Name it, and then claim it!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Marketing Mastermind Call:

Boost Your Speaking Sales with “The Invisible Close”

Tuesday, 27th July, 2010

8:00pm UK Time (3pm EASTERN, 12 noon PACIFIC)

It’s a disservice to let interested consumers walk away without securing the benefit of your fabulous products or services. They came to buy from you. Give them what they need to say “YES!”

Join me and my guest Lisa Sasevich, the “The Queen of Sales Conversion, for this action-packed call where we will be covering…

• Exponentially grow your platform sales using Irresistible Offers

• Get massive results without being “salesy”

• Maximize your profits with no marketing budget!

• Simple, no-cost things you can do to instantly double or triple your sales conversion.

• The secrets to inspiring someone to act now…without being pushy or “salesy”!

• How to craft your “Irresistible Offer” to support Big Sales and your Big Life!

• And most important, how to share the wealth of your wonderful and unique talents and receive wealth in return!

This call is FREE for my hundreds of Marketing Mastermind and Stepping UP! members. They also get the CD and transcript of this call at no extra charge, plus a tonne of other member benefits – such as access to our online members forum.

Not a member?  Then click here to join the Marketing Mastermind Group today so you can take advantage of this call and all the other member goodies each and every month.

I look forward to “meeting” you on our call.

Best Wishes
Bernadette Doyle
www.clientmagnets.com

PS – Even if you can’t make the call, all Mastermind members receive a FREE CD of the call as well as a digital version of the audio and transcript! Take advantage now.