Client Magnets Official Blog

Archive for the ‘Niche Marketing’ Category

Have you ever wondered what your clients are saying about your business? Would you love a direct line into your clients’ minds; to know what they really want and what they’re willing to buy?

Social media is a place where you can really get into the mind of your buyer.  You can dialogue with your clients and listen to what they are saying -  not only to you, but to each other.  It’s the perfect place for you to find out what your clients REALLY want.    And when you discover that, you can go to it – providing it to them!

Here’s my four step formula for using social media to “get into the mind” of your prospect…

1.  Identify “Hot Topics”
By listening and engaging in social media conversations, you will quickly identify the “hot topics”.

The key here is to listen and learn. What are your prospects asking? What do they need help with?
What topics are the most popular?

2.  Respond to Demand
Once you have the “hot topics” in mind, it’s time to showcase how you can help your prospects.  Use these hot topics to create the content for your blog and social media updates.   Give your prospects the answers they’re looking for.   Position yourself as someone who is in-the-know, who understands popular concerns. Demonstrate your expertise in a way that inspires people to use your business or services.   Give your prospects what they want, when they want it!

3.  Create a “BUZZ”
Social media gives you a ready-made channel to generate buzz about your new content and offerings.  With platforms like Twitter, you can use “hashtags” to incite and track conversations about specific subjects and groups.  There are also search tools available that will enable you to easily track what people are saying about you, your “hot topics” and your content and offerings.

4.  Track and Evaluate Market Response
Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media networks are ready-made tools to help you in the quest to get inside the mind of your buyers. By tuning into the various social media platforms you make it easy to evaluate the response to your new product, content and business presence.  You can use the information to review the effectiveness of your offerings and continue to craft better-tailored content in the future.  It’s also a way to determine what formats and delivery methods work best to reach your prospects and clients.

I encourage you TODAY to start “tuning in” to what your customers REALLY want!  If you listen to their conversations through the various social media platforms, they’ll tell you.  You can then use that information to give them what they want – and then everyone wins!

Writing a sales letter is a practice in anticipating what your prospects will think, and overcoming their objections. When you’re writing your sales copy, it’s invaluable to be able to put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and predict what they’ll think when they read your copy. It may be difficult to predict all of the objections that your prospects will have to your sales letter, but one thing you can easily manage is this: catch the catch. Explain why you’re offering such a great deal or such a great product to your prospects, or they won’t believe your pitch.

Prospects Look Out for Deals that are Too Good
From an early age, most of us are told “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” By adulthood, most people feel that they can judge whether a deal is good or not, but that little doubt lurks in the back of most people’s minds. If you do a great job of establishing the value of your product, and justifying your price, people might have trouble trusting you or your sales copy. If you make your product sound “too good to be true,” you have to explain yourself to your prospects or risk loosing sales.

Reasons for Offering a Great Deal
A few key phrases can help diffuse worry over a deal being “too good” and convince your prospects that you’re on the up-and-up. With one technique, you explain to your prospects why a product like yours normally costs more, and how you’ve managed to change the production method to realize a cost savings. Then, you can say something like “I can pass along my cost savings to you.” This lets the prospect know that you know you’re offering a really good deal, and gives them a reason for you offering a good deal. If you don’t explain this to them, they’ll think that you’ve misrepresented the value of what you’re selling, and will turn away from your product.

Another technique involves presenting yourself as the “good guy” and responsible community member to your prospects. For example, you could tell your prospects that a colleague has recommended that you charge more for your product, but you’re “not greedy,” so you’ve chosen to offer it for less. One successful copywriter said “This is such a valuable skill set that I’m offering it at this price so as not to price it out of the hands of the people who need it most.”

In most cases, it doesn’t really matter how you overcome the “it’s too good to be true” objection – just that you address it somehow. When you re-read your sales letter, look at it from the eyes of a potential prospect. If you find yourself thinking “What’s the catch?” then you probably need to re-work your copy, or add in some language explaining why you’re offering such a great deal. With this technique, you can overcome the mental objections of the prospects, and you’re that much closer to making a sale!

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

Good marketers know they need to stay fresh in people’s minds to be ideally positioned for that sale, or to form a good business partnership with a new affiliate. People try a variety of ways to stay in people’s thoughts, both physically and on the Web. You may do article marketing, newsletters, email blasts, and media marketing to keep your Web presence fresh. Alternately, you may send postcards, letters, holiday cards, or even birthday cards to build relationships and stay connected with people physically. Most of these methods are getting old and tired, but forming good relationships enables you to connect with people in creative new ways.

Be Creative with Your Connections
Do you send out holiday cards every year to your prospects? So do most businesses. You don’t stay fresh in people’s minds by doing the same thing that everyone else does. Find new ways to be creative with your connections, and catch your clients’ minds in a unique way. By forming good relationships with people, you’ll have a fresh pool of creative ideas to draw upon to keep your relationships dynamic and unique.

Consider this example: Carrie Wilkerson spoke with my Mastermind Group and talked about how she uses social media to build relationships. Carrie mentioned that one of her contacts talks on Twitter every day about how he walks his dog in the morning. He mentions the dog by name, and even the type of dog. When Carrie wanted to make a connection with this man, she didn’t just send him a note or a card; she sent a dog toy for his dog. She mentioned his dog by name, and found a toy that the dog would appreciate, based on the information that this man shared about his dog.

This showed the man that Carrie listened, and was interested in him as a person – not just him as a business contact. This is a fantastic strategy for solidifying relationships, and as a way to stay connected with people that will actually stay fresh in their thoughts. That man probably won’t remember everyone who sent him a card, but he’ll definitely remember the woman who sent his dog a toy.

Use Your Relationships to form Unique Connections
Your relationships with people provide valuable connection opportunities. By building good relationships, you set yourself up for opportunities you might not otherwise have. When you build a good relationship with someone, for example, you’re much more likely to be set up with the friend of a friend as a new business contact. People are more likely to refer business contacts that they like, than pushy sales-oriented people who don’t care about them as a person.

Use your relationships with people to form unique connections. Don’t just be the sales person, or the person with the coaching product, or that consultant. Be a friend; be the person who sent the dog a toy, or the person who’s always asking about the kids or the wife. By building these unique connections with people, you’re getting into their lives in a real and meaningful way, and you’ll be in their minds if a fantastic new business connection comes up, or if they remember that they know someone who might be a good match for your business.

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

Although starting a blog isn’t really a complex undertaking, it’s still a good idea to do some research so that you know you’re presenting the best site possible. You want to drive as much traffic as you can to your blog in order to keep your internet rankings climbing.

It’s also important to keep in mind that blogging involves more than just writing the posts. You have to consider such factors as user experience, site design, and the software you’ll need to get your blog running.

Here are a few resources you can check out that offer great information for starting a blog.

www.IncomeDiary.com. This is the site where Michael Dunlop, blogging entrepreneur, offers a free e-course that details his process.

www.WordPress.com. WordPress offers the software you’ll need to get started. One of its strongest selling points is the ability to customize features to suit your own needs. There are also many free features you can use to get started in a matter of minutes. It also allows you to track statistics and block spam.

www.UXBooth.com. You want visitors to your site to have a good experience; this is what will bring them back again and again. This site offers tips for creating the best experience for your readers.

www.SmashingMagazine.com. This design site presents the latest in web design and development. While you won’t need to study design in order to launch a blog, this site can be a useful resource for getting ideas about how your site should look.

www.CopyBlogger.com. This is a good resource for learning how to write blogs that will drive traffic to your site as you build your list and market products.  It offers courses on copywriting, SEO, headline writing and keywords, among other topics.

www.ProBlogger.net. Visit this site to learn about the more technical side of having a successful blog. You’ll find information about blog design, advertising, tools and services, and much more.

www.WarriorForum.com. A forum where Internet marketers talk about their trade, this site can provide useful information about sales techniques. You might even find tips for marketing methods that apply directly to your niche.

www.TaskUS.com. Although this is technically a virtual assistant site, you can use the service to create custom ranking lists and other useful information that you can post in your blog.

Once you’re comfortable with the technical and writing aspects of blogging, you can start drawing visitors to your site.

Remember that if you want to become a great copywriter, you should first be a great copyreader. You can learn so much from reading other people’s copy and applying what you learn to your own niche.

These resources are sure to give you tips and tricks that will help make your blog successful.

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

It’s a lot easier to turn a ship that’s moving in the wrong direction than it is to turn a ship that’s not moving at all.

If you’ve been getting “analysis paralysis”, scratching your head and trying to figure out what your direction is, just pick a purpose and start heading toward it. If you’re off course, the market will correct you.

If you’re not heading in the right direction, the market will quickly give you feedback that will help you adjust. Just don’t get overly concerned that what you decide today is going to be cast in stone.

Don’t worry about picking the wrong area or niche at first. Don’t worry if you find that you’re being called an expert on something that you don’t want to be known as the expert on.

Areas of expertise can change. But you can only change your direction if you have already set out in one to begin with.

Bob Burg is the author of a book called “Endless Referrals.” He is now positioned as a referral expert and an expert on helping people to generate referrals for business.

When he first started out, his niche was memory experts. He noticed that people who took his memory courses wanted to improve their memory to remember the names of people they’d met at networking meetings and events. They wanted to improve their memory to achieve better business results.

As he spotted that connection, he started to focus more on being the referral expert. No one accused him of being a fraud because he was now a referral expert instead of a memory expert. The market let him know in which direction to steer his business.

When you set course in your chosen direction, look for niches and markets where it’s going to be easier for you to establish personal relationships and position yourself as an expert.

If the niche you do choose turns out to be an enormous amount of effort, you have to weigh whether or not it’s worth your while to continue down that road or take a different road to get business.

When Dan Kennedy, the marketing expert, was invited to submit a proposal to give a speech in Switzerland, he opted out. While plenty of other people would jump at the opportunity, and spend a day putting together a proposal to bid, that is not the way he wants to go after business. Perhaps it didn’t seem worthwhile to spend the time writing the proposal. The point is that you have to make the determination of how you want to do business.

Your niche will evolve with your business. It’s an actual evolution that happens in most any business. Look at my own situation. I started out as specializing, by trial and error, as a cold calling expert. But I didn’t stop at that. Today, I’m teaching people how to find new business and triple their income! The way in which I’m helping people and the types of people I’m helping is completely different from what I started out with.

But it’s turned out for the best for everyone!

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 people don’t use their business potential to the full. It is relatively easy to focus on your every-day business; the sales and marketing, the product or service; and forget that you can leverage your business to perform far more than simple day-to-day operations.

If you’re ready to turn your business into a serious money-making venture, it’s time to think about hosting a Big Pay Day live event. Hosting a live event and turning it into a Big Pay Day is a perfect way to boost your revenue, increase your income and turn your business acumen into big dollars!

How do you monetize your event, and how do you create the opportunity to service your clients better and increase your earning capacity? Let me share a few of my secrets with you …

1. Launch a new product or service. You can also use your event to launch a new product or service for your existing business. If you’re creating a new product line or have new services to offer your clients, launching them at your event is the perfect time to introduce the products and generate buzz.

2. Launch a high-end coaching program. Your Big Pay Day Event is the perfect time to launch a high-end coaching program. You’re hosting an event because you are an expert in your niche. You could be sharing your expertise about your business field, or sharing the keys to your personal success. Use your event to share your expertise, and then launch a high-end coaching program to help attendees achieve their own success. It’s a great way to monetize your knowledge.

3. Turn your event into a product. Don’t forget that you can turn your event itself into a product. Take video of your event and launch a series of DVDs, or take the written materials from event and turn it into a book. Be creative, and think of ways in which you can share your event in the form of a new product.

4. Build your reputation in the industry. Building your reputation in the industry gives you two benefits: you can boost your existing business, and you gain the leverage you need to launch new products and services. While building your reputation in the industry might not yield direct revenue, it can lead to the acquisition of new clients, as well as creating additional business with existing clients.

Decide How to Monetize YOUR Event
When you’re considering hosting an event, think about how you will monetize it. You can use any one of these strategies, or a combination of strategies, to yield revenue far beyond the registration fees you’re charging people to attend your event. Start with one of these strategies and build on it, depending on what you have to offer and the resources you can leverage while you’re planning the event. Think about your business plan and your business goals. Ensure your strategies are consistent with helping you achieve your goals and your BIG PAY DAY!

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

There are many ways to become a client magnet. Here are 20 proven methods that will help you to achieve astonishing business results.

•    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.

Consider your role as a consumer. When you’re shopping, do you look at the products first, or the price tag first?

If you looked at the price tag first,
retailers would pick up on that and simply offer a collection of price stickers inside the front door. You would choose what you could afford, and then the actual product would be a surprise – possibly an unpleasant one.

You don’t shop that way, and neither do the people that you have identified as your perfect clients.

Prospects want to know your prices, but unless your prices are preceded by the benefits that you’re offering, consumers will have nothing to gauge those prices against.

Follow these four steps to eliminate your fears in revealing your price. Gain the confidence you need to make the most out of your requests for cash:

1. Present what you’re offering. Answer the timeless questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Keep it simple. If you make it too complicated, those raised hands might start to return to laps.

2. Summarize the benefits. Because you’re offering specific solutions to specific problems, this step should turn on light bulbs in your prospects’ minds. This is the step in which you convince them that you are their answer.

3. Introduce the price. By now, your listeners or readers are absorbed in what you’re offering. The benefits are foremost in their minds, as is the question of price. Reveal your pricing while the question is still in their minds; and before it reaches their lips. Perfect placement of price revelation makes it comfortable for you and acceptable to your audience.

4. Map out a direct route for the money. Make it crystal clear how easy it will be to sign up, jump on, or join in on your program. Prospects should leave your teleseminar, your sales page, or your conference without any questions about how to participate. Or, better yet, they should leave already having signed on. Make it possible for them to sign up immediately. Make it easy for them to do so.

When your appeal is placed correctly, while all of the most fantastic points of your product or service are fresh in the minds of your audience, you will not only feel more confident in asking for money, but your prospects will have more confidence in their spending.

After you identify your sea of raised hands (those people whose problems you can solve, and whose interests you have piqued), you’ll need to devise an effective method for telling them how much cash they will need to jump onboard.

The steps I’ve outlined here make up an excellent plan for starting to ask for money. As you proceed, you will learn to tweak your own presentation to meet the needs of the people in your particular niche. You will learn to identify the exact moment in time when they are most receptive to pricing, and when your presentation best complements that revelation.

When considering how to properly sandwich your asking for money in your presentation, consider your own shopping habits. You see the product. You consider how it could benefit your life. You look at the price tag. You proceed to the check-out. You leave the store with the satisfaction of knowing that you fashioned your own shopping experience.

Give your prospects that luxury. Take the time to learn about what price placement gets the most lucrative results for your business. You’ll soon discover that timing is everything – especially when it equates to money on your pocket.

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

The principle behind being a client magnet is that people want what you’ve got to offer, they realize that you’re an expert, and they want to get onto your mailing list.

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

If you’re eager to share your brilliant expertise with potential clients, starting a blog is a great option for you. It’s also a fantastic way to generate more income for your business.

How will an online blog help you to increase your revenue?

While blogs were once used primarily as outlets for expression and basic journaling, they now also serve as a very useful tool for making money online.

Once you’ve established yourself in your field, your blog postings will enable you to connect with your audience, gain their trust and develop a loyal following of readers. Some of those readers will then translate into paying customers.

You may be very familiar with blogs, and may even be a loyal reader of some – perhaps this one – but if you’ve never created a blog, the concept may intimidate you. However, let me assure you – once you understand the basics of blogging, you’ll see how valuable it can be to your business.

Michael Dunlop, who ventured into online blogging at age fourteen, says that starting one is nearly idiot-proof. He puts it very simply – a blog is easy to create; then you just start adding content, building traffic and making money.

He grew his refurbished website, www.RetireAt21.com, to 160,000 visitors each month over the course of only five months. It is currently the largest site for young entrepreneurs.

To be as successful as Michael in blogging requires two initial things: quality software and quality content.

Knowing the best software to use when creating your blog will give you an edge over the competition. Poorly programmed blog sites don’t rank as well in search engines. Michael highly recommends using WordPress for your blog software because it will help your site outrank others that aren’t using this software. Being ranked higher than other sites will give you a lot of advantage. People always tend to click on those links first.

WordPress is also easy to use. With many features that can be customized, it will help your blog to stand out among the thousands of other more generically programmed sites out there in the virtual world.
That is the name of the game. The higher your blog ranks and the more it stands out, the more visitors you will get.

The other aspect that will set your blog apart from the rest is its content. Plenty of people write and post blogs daily, but how many are really profiting from them?

The difference between the blogs that make money and the blogs that don’t is the value they provide. When you write your blog, write about something new, give something valuable to your audience or package your information in an interesting way. As an expert in your own right, the information you have is valuable to your readers.

Using the right software and taking the time to share and present your expertise are the keys to a valuable and successful blog.

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