One of the boys rushes around frantically with a net trying to catch the birds. Every time he gets close, the birds fly away. There’s lots of squawking, and feathers flying. The other boy stands quietly, holding out some birdseed.

One boy is trying very hard, and is probably exhausted, while the other hardly seems to be working at all.

Which one will get the results he’s looking for?

Instinctively you know it’s the boy with the birdseed who will be more effective, and a lot less sweaty.

When it comes to marketing and trying to attract clients, you want to act more like that second boy. Unfortunately, though, most people tend to act more like the first.

A lot of the things you might be doing, that are considered to be traditional marketing techniques, might actually be counterproductive. You could well be chasing people away.

Effective marketing techniques used on the wrong market will only provoke resistance, and build defensiveness. You could be running after people, figuratively speaking, with barrages of email, rounds of cold calls and direct mailings, and quite possibly be achieving the exact opposite of what you want.

For example, no matter how effective cold-calling may be for me or someone else, if you detest doing it, your negativity will prevent it from being effective for you.

Even if you are using marketing techniques that are proven to attract clients, if you do them with the negative energy of chasing – if you give off the sense that you are giving simply in order to get – you will end up like the boy who is chasing the birds. Tired and without any bird in the hand.

You want to break down the barriers between you and your prospective clients, not create more of them.

Make sure that the things you are doing marketing-wise, both online and offline, will attract clients to your business. Doing what everyone says is the right thing, but doing it with the wrong energy, won’t produce results.  Do the things that feel right to you. That will bring the positive energy into your marketing, and your clients will feel it.

You’ll know when you’re being a client magnet because it will feel easy. It should feel enjoyable, and you will have an abundance of clients.

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

•    Carefully choose the niche that you want to be known as an expert at.

•    Learn everything there is to know about your declared area of expertise. Go through the experiences and learn the lessons, connect with a mentor and then put it into practice to be successful. Only then can you teach and help other people to do the same.

•    Pick something that you’re passionate about; when you’re passionate, that really shows through.

•    You will make a greater impact in a place where you genuinely have some value to offer.

•    Realize that you don’t have to try to get every person you ever encounter to become a client.

•    Build your relationship with the people who have already “raised their hands” and expressed an interest in your product or service.

•    Focus your effort and energy on people who are pre-qualified to buy. It is more pleasurable to work with and for them than to try to convert people who will never be interested or will never be qualified to buy your services.

•    Approach your tasks with the right energy. A positive attitude will resonate with your clients; conversely, so will negativity.

•    Be a congruent model for success by focusing on and being committed to your prospects and clients.

•    Use one-to-many methods for connecting with clients and offering services, as much as possible.

•    Put systems in place to start building your list.  Then continue to grow and improve your lead generation systems.

•    Know the principles behind offering ethical bribes, such as a free report, and have processes in place to handle responses.

•    Incite a call to action by creating a sense of urgency for people to sign up with you or purchase your offer. Deadlines work well for this.

•    Don’t underestimate the value of affiliates and joint venture partnerships.

•    Be consistent. Systematize and automate your process so that you can make money even when you aren’t working.

•    Use articles, teleseminars and social media to increase your exposure and the perception of you as an expert.

•    Use quality software to build and maintain your websites and blogs.

•    Always offer an upgrade with every sale.

•    Build relationships by following up with the people you meet at networking events right after the event.

•    Offer something for free or do a product giveaway at an event, collecting contact information in exchange for entry.

Implementing just some of these strategies today will add many more prospects to your list and take you closer to a more profitable business.  When you’ve applied them all, you will be a true client magnet.

But, how do you make that happen?

Simply put, you need to be seen as an expert in your field.

People will then go out and look for you. They will actively search you out and ask to be added to your list.

But first, you need to know how to establish yourself as an expert.

•    Choose your area of expertise carefully.
Maybe your passion is working with divorced women, but you decide to become a marketing coach for businesses, because that’s where the money is. Your passion isn’t with businesses, but they aren’t as financially challenged as divorced women.

You have to decide what you really want to be known as an expert at. Is it business marketing, or helping divorced women? You should follow your passion. Choose your area because of your passion; don’t choose your passion because there’s a niche for it. Your passion will reflect in your attitude. That is what will resonate with clients and make you attractive to them.

•    Choose a topic where you can add value.
There’s no point picking a group of people, or deciding on a niche, if you have no proven track record in that area.  You need credibility; proof that you’ve done what you are professing to be an expert at. How can you teach it if you haven’t experienced it?

You will have the most impact if you genuinely have some value to offer. People will see this when they read your tips or your articles. When they see that you can add some value to a topic, they will want more of what you have to offer. That’s how you attract a following.

•    Write articles.
Articles work very well, both as a way to showcase your knowledge in your area of expertise, and as a means of promoting your business. I have articles posted all over the web. When you create articles, offer them to other businesses that tie into the same clientele as yours. This will increase your exposure. The more people are familiar with your name, the more you will be viewed as the expert.

•    Teleseminars
Just by promoting a teleseminar, you indicate that you are an expert with valuable information that people need. There is also something about having a timeframe and deadline that increases the perceived value of teleseminars in people’s minds. The need to sign up for something you’re doing creates a sense of urgency in people, and they don’t want to miss it. Teleseminars are great for both establishing your expertise and building your list.

•    Social Media
MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are great ways to build a following. As your following increases, so does your image as the expert. And simultaneously, you will also put things in place that will drive more people to your website, and build your list.

By following these tips, you will establish yourself as an expert and make your business so attractive that clients will seek you out. The impact on your list and on your business will be continual growth and success.

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

1. Recognize People for their Value
People want to be recognized for their intrinsic value as human beings – not as social connections. Recognize people for their value and individuality first and foremost. By building successful individual relationships with people, you can later leverage those relationships to form valuable business connections. But don’t make the connections about business from the beginning – make those connections genuinely about the connections, and about recognizing people for their individual value.

2. Don’t Ignore The People Not On Your “Target List”
One popular strategy that networkers use is to develop a list of targets – people they want to meet or spend time with at events or online. People who aren’t on that list may get ignored. This is a big mistake, and one of the primary differences between networking and relationship-building. When you target people, you miss out on other people who may have unexpected things to offer.

3. Give People Your Full Attention And Be Sincere
One of the most mortifying experiences that a person can have is shaking someone’s hand, only to realize that the person they’re greeting is looking over their shoulder to see who in the room is more important to greet. Don’t be keeping one eye open for the ‘important’ people when you’re building relationships.

Give everyone you meet your real attention. Make genuine connections with people. They sense the sincerity when you make these connections, and you never know when one of the people you meet has another valuable connection that they can provide you with – a connection you’d miss if you were too busy to move on to a more ‘important’ person.

4. Look At What YOU Can Do FOR People
When people are networking, they tend to evaluate someone and think “What can this person do for me?” Don’t ask what people can do for you. Ask what you can do for people. Look at ways you can provide value in other people’s lives. Offer valuable information, or helpful advice. Help them make connections that will serve them in business or their personal lives. People will return the favor, and may surprise you with the ways they can help your business. You’d never discover this if you were too busy asking what they could do for you.

Relationship-building does take more time than traditional networking, but you will make more valuable connections from it. Take the time to get to know the people you meet, and don’t dismiss people as being ‘unimportant’ because you’re too busy looking for ‘more important’ people. Every connection you make is valuable on a human level. It’s those real, true connections that will reap the rewards of success in the long term!

But, you can’t stop with simply adding people onto your mailing list; you’ve got to take it a step further and get them to actually buy from you. A thousand people on your mailing list is certainly promising business potential, but you need to focus hard on how to convert some of them into paying business.

While you don’t try to sell to anyone and everyone, you do want to try your best to sell to those people on your mailing list. Naturally, they’re your best chance for a sale because they’ve expressed an interest in what you’re offering.

You’ve heard the expression, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink? In a sense, you have to look at the prospects on your list in the same way. You’ve led them toward your business, and while you can’t make them buy, you can make them very thirsty for what you’re offering.

In order to do this, one of the things that you need to think about – even before you start building your list – is what your sales process is going to be.

Once people have joined your mailing list, what will you put in front of them that invites them to get their credit card out?

That first offer should make it easy for them to say yes by having a low financial cost and a low emotional cost.

If you set the bar too high, if the only way people can spend with you is by shelling out a lot of money or committing to a long-term program, you are making it harder for them to say yes. It’s just too big a jump.

Think of your business as a ship and your prospects are on the dock. You wouldn’t expect them to jump onboard straight from the dock – you’d at least put out a gangplank to help them come aboard.

Before asking them to take a huge leap, make a big change, a big investment and a big commitment, give them the opportunity to know and trust you first. Extend the type of offer that will make your prospects feel less vulnerable. An initial low payment offering is fine – just make sure to present something they can buy.

Keep this in mind, as well: The best time to have someone buy is immediately after they’ve signed up for your free offering, whatever that may be. When they sign up for it, they automatically join your list.
The instant that happens, put an offer in front of them. That will separate the people who are serious – the ones who are willing to invest – from the browsers.

The prospects who are willing to invest are proving themselves to you, and should get better and more offers from you.  Don’t spend too much time on the browsers until they indicate that they’re serious.

So think about a low-cost, low commitment initial offering, and then present it to people right after they join your list. That’s the time when most of them are ready to buy.

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

Of course you wouldn’t. That would be a foolish waste of time.

But that, in essence, is exactly what you are doing if you try to recruit anyone and everyone as your clients.

There’s a huge learning curve you’ve got to adapt to when you go into business for yourself and try to do your own marketing and selling.     It’s a real shock to the system to discover that you don’t need – or want – to sell what you’re offering to the whole world.

The most important thing to remember about selling your product or services is that you don’t have to try to get every person you encounter to become your client.

You need to focus on finding the right type of client for your business. You need to find a way for the people who would be most interested in what you have to offer to come to you. To get more clients, focus your time and attention on those people who have, in effect, already raised their hands.

Focusing on clients who express their interest in your type of business will drastically cut down your selling time. You will be focused on people who are already interested and prequalified to buy, rather than wasting your efforts and energy on people who are never going to be interested or qualified in the first place.

Make sure this concept of reaching a group of people who’ve raise their hands really strikes a chord with you. Don’t let the numbers of potential clients influence you. Would you rather market your offering to 1,000 random potential clients or to 100 viable clients you know are interested in your type of service?

It’s very important that you make the distinction between the number of names that you have and the quality of the relationships that you have with those people. You can easily open up the phone book or the yellow pages, or buy a mailing list with thousands of names on it, but that doesn’t mean that those people are predisposed to buy. They haven’t done anything to indicate that they are interested.

As you build your list, look to create a responsive prospect list so you get those people who have done something that tells you they’re interested.

You will get much better results and spend less time marketing.

Just a few years ago, it was so easy to build a list of potential clients using online resources.  A little signup box in the corner of a webpage that offered a few free tips worked well for list building.  Soon the tips grew to a free report.  Is your list continuing to grow?  If your list isn’t growing as it once did, it’s time to take a fresh look at your offer.

We call that offer your ethical bribe.  You’re giving people something of value to them in return for their name and email address, which is of value to you.  And you’re not just getting any old name and email.  It’s someone who’s showing, just by the nature of your offer, that they have an interest in your product.  They are the perfect person to sell to – someone who’s receptive to your product.  But is it time to sweeten the pot?  Are you offering enough that someone would take an extra step to get the free offering?

Since building a list of potential clients is key to building your sales, you need to make sure that you continue to cultivate your list.  What were once tried and true methods for list building may now be growing more lackluster.  If you’re not generating results as you once were, take a fresh look at what you’re offering.  Is it compelling with enough value that people would take an extra step to get it?

One tried and true sales method is to create a sense of urgency, and this is the same for creating a valuable ethical bribe.  That may the reason that free reports don’t work as quickly and effectively as they used to – there’s no sense of urgency.  It’s still going to be there next week or next month.  On the other hand, a teleseminar has a deadline, it’s taking place on a certain date, so by its very nature it has the deadline to create urgency.  It also has scarcity in that there are only so many lines available for the call.  Together, the deadline and the scarcity create the urgency you need to compel people to act.

Think about your ethical bribe – does it have a high enough perceived value?  Is it enough that people will take an extra step for it?  Keep it fresh and compelling to keep your list, and therefore your business, growing.

There are three foundational things that you need in place before you try to get your business name in front of potential clients.

•    A List Manager.

Because I didn’t have a list manager when I first started, I had to manually send out the free report I had offered to a hundred people. You don’t want to do that. A list manager is your database – the place where you store all the names you’re going to collect – and it enables you to handle the “subscribes” and “unsubscribes” automatically. You don’t have to spend any time on it, or hire an assistant to do it.

Some examples of list managers are 1ShoppingCart.com, Total Business Cart, Constant Contact and  AWeber.

•    An Ethical Bribe

What are you offering that is interesting and enticing to the clients you want? You need to present something so tempting that people will be eager to hand over their name, their email address, possibly even their mailing address.

Consider using a free report, a teleseminar, or an audio. These can all work very well in helping to build your list. If you don’t think you have enough expertise, consider interviewing an expert, and use that as your giveaway.

Spend some time thinking about what that enticement is going to be. Make sure your offer is congruent with the people you want to attract. What will have those clients flocking to you?

For example, high-end marketing clients probably won’t be interested in a program titled “Marketing on a Shoestring.” Psychologically, you’re going to attract the cheapskates with that title, when what you really want are the money people. So make sure your pitch fits the people you’re pitching to.

•    A Squeeze Page

It used to be enough to have a box on your website that says, “Sign up here for our free newsletter.” These days, you will find that less than 10% of people who visit the page actually sign up.

A squeeze page is a standalone page that has one goal – to get people to join your list.

For example, use a squeeze page to promote a teleseminar. That page will contain the teleseminar topic, the details about the teleseminar, and a box where people can sign up. There is no navigation bar leading to another section of the website. There is no other information.

Here’s an example of one of my squeeze pages:
www.clientmagnets.com/steppingup

I’ve found that about 70% of visitors say yes, compared to the 10% who click on that box somewhere in the corner of your website. This is where you will capture the person’s details.

Once you have these fundamentals in place, you can begin to focus on the promotional things you need to drive traffic to your site.

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

Even if you have only a very small database, you can extract very large incomes from it.

Plenty of successful people started with no database and were able to meet their goals, including me and many of my mentors. I did not have a database when I began. I created one as I went along.

Don’t use what you perceive to be a lack of potential clients on your list as an excuse for not making the money you want. You don’t need a large database to make a lot of money. You can still reach your sales goals. You just have to want it badly enough.

What you need, more than a larger list, is to believe in yourself. If you present your product or service with a positive belief system, the customer list you have will pay the type of prices you’re asking.

One of my mentors, has a mastermind group with only 12 people. A very small list, but they pay $100,000 a piece. If only 3 of them sign on for a product, that’s significant earnings.

Of course, you can change the amount to a figure that more closely represents your product or service, but the message is clear. My mentor, believes his program is worth the price, and he believes his database will pay it. You should believe the same about yours.

As you go along, you will obviously learn how to grow your database, but your ability to make money is more about your self-worth.

Not only do you need to believe that you would spend the money on the product you’re offering, you have to believe that the clients on your list would spend that much money, as well.

Believe that, and it won’t matter what size database you have. Self-worth controls your income. Not the size of the database. Not where you live. Not the clothing that you wear or the people that you know.

If you increase your self-worth, everything can be taken away from you and you will instantly have it back overnight. You will always make money because your income is definitely directly tied to your own self-worth.

It doesn’t matter what your product is or how many potential clients are on your list. If you believe you’re worth a million, you will go out and generate a million.

If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

This one simple shift in mindset can be the key to your company’s success.

Building Your List Requires Variety. Think of your list as a fire you’re building. It takes lots of sticks to keep a fire burning. When it comes to building your list, those “sticks” are the strategies you put in place to attract and sustain business.

Just as one stick won’t keep a fire burning, there isn’t one single activity that will build a great list.  A common mistake is to attract the first few hundred names, and then expect your list to grow organically from there. The fire usually goes out from lack of new fuel.  A strong list requires many different kinds of activities and approaches – all directed at adding names to your prospect list.

Some of your “sticks” will be things you do that don’t take a big investment of time. You put the plan in place and your list starts building automatically.  Other strategies you use will require more time on your part.  Remember, there’s a rule in business …   Activities that don’t take much time will cost more money.  On the other hand, things that don’t cost much, take more time. You can decide where you are ready to invest when growing your list.

Fortunately, as you implement a variety of list building activities, they become cumulative. You won’t have to go back and start from scratch each time.  Once you’ve got your strategies in place – you’ll find your list will grow rapidly.

“How Can I Use This to Grow My List?”

Ask yourself this every time you engage in a business activity. Whether you’ve agreed to give a talk or you’re creating a free report – it should always be done with the goal of adding to your list.

Asking that question guides how those activities are done. For example, if you’re giving a talk to a group, be thinking of your free offer to make at the end. A free offer is one way to secure more names for your list. But don’t stop there.

Adopt the mindset of seeing everything you do as a list building opportunity:

• giving interviews
• meeting with groups
• holding free “taster events”
• network meetings
• special offers and promotions

When you see each activity as a list building opportunity, you’ll begin to see the power of cumulative list building efforts. Start by putting the automated strategies in place.  Then keep in mind how each new strategy can build your list, as well.

A solid prospect list is something every business owner should be working to build. As you make decisions about how to spend money and time, look at each new activity as a way to add to your list. By doing so, you’ll soon experience the power having a great customer list can bring to your business.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com