They had to take a step forward before any light went on.

This is quite the opposite of how people really want to move forward. Most of us prefer to “see the light” before we take the next step. We want to know where we are going, and see all the steps illuminated and lined up, so that we can go from point A to point B, B to C, C to D, D to E and so on.

But the truth is, that is not really how we move forward. The truth is that often, only the first step you take will be visible. The only way to see the second step is for you to be one- hundred percent wholly committed to taking step one.

That is truly what change is like. There’s no denying that change is uncomfortable, but if you want to accomplish your goals, you’re going to have to step up, move forward and make changes as you go along. The more comfortable you get at doing that, the more stepping up will be a constant experience in your life.

So, if you are serious about doubling or tripling your income, for example, you could go to Vegas or play the lottery, but the real way to accomplish your goal involves doing some things that up until now, you’ve been resisting.

You may not even realize that you’ve been unwilling or unable to make changes. It’s amazing how creative people can be at avoiding change.

But, whether you want to make ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, or ten million, whatever the level or the goal, the process is exactly the same

In order to affect any kind of change, in your life or in your business, you have to take the first step without being one-hundred percent certain about where your foot is going to land.

That takes courage, and it takes faith. That is what change requires.

Commit one-hundred percent to taking step one. You don’t need to know what’s going to happen after step one if you never get there. You will only know what happens next when you take that step. You won’t ever get there if you keep asking questions.

You’ve got to act, and jump right in with both feet, even when you don’t know where that jump will land you.

Once you master this process of change, and just keep stepping through it, you will find yourself more and more comfortable with moving forward without knowing where the next step leads.

As you find the courage to take one step after another, I promise, things are going to change for you.

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

Avoid Sterile Updates
Some businesses create social networking accounts, but just don’t “get” the purpose of networking. These businesses share sterile updates, like “New article posted today” or “New article posted today.” These updates just aren’t very interesting, and they don’t generate buzz or interest in the way that more conversational updates can do.

Instead of saying “Teleseminar today,” a business could say “Excited about the teleseminar today, with 300 people registered and more openings available!” You’re conveying the same basic information, but in a more engaging way. This more conversational style generates buzz and makes it more likely that people will follow your links or want to find out more about what you’re promoting.

Find Ways to Interest Your Followers
Don’t just share a bunch of self-serving updates whenever you have a new product to promote, or an action you want your followers to take. Find ways to interest your followers, and make them want to know what you’ll share next. This can be interesting quotes related to your business, or just general quotes designed to make people think or give them ideas.

You could also share interesting things that other people have posted on the Web, either via sharing links or Re-Tweeting things that other Twitter users have already shared. You don’t have to spend a lot of time creating interesting content in order to interest your followers; just share interesting content, even if it already exists elsewhere.

Promote Conversation to Build Social Networking Success
One of the single most successful social networking marketing techniques hardly seems like marketing at all: promoting conversations. Promoting conversations, particularly when they tie back in to your business, is a great way to keep and build followers, and even boost sales.

One business that uses social networking to promote conversations is a motorcycle part supplier. Every Friday, they ask people if they’re working on their motorcycles or riding for the weekend. People share information about the repairs they’re making, which gives other people the confidence to make similar repairs, or undertake their own repairs. This translates directly to additional sales for the parts supplier, because people order parts to make their repairs. All of this is because the supplier asks a single question every weekend that promotes conversation.

Bottom line: if you’re using social networking to promote your business, don’t just promote your business. Don’t just share sterile, boring updates. Engage your social networking followers. Share interesting information and links, and encourage conversations. You don’t have to talk directly about your business to boost business performance; in fact, some of the best performance boosts come when you don’t talk about your business at all, but instead facilitate interaction among your followers.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

A) get $10 from 100,000 clients,

B) $100,000 from 10 clients, or

C) $1,000,000 from 1 client?

If you’ve chosen option C, one single transaction, congratulations for having great business sense. But for the sake of practicality, let’s use the first two choices for a model of quantity versus quality.

You know that no single person can provide a service that’s perfect for every potential customer. To further that sentiment, I’d like to suggest that no person can serve 100,000 customers as well as they can serve 10 customers.

It’s simple math that results in the same $1,000,000 answer for both options A and B, but you, the business owner, benefit most from choice B.

It’s no secret that valuable time is squandered when you have to exhaust yourself chasing a large number of clients. Wouldn’t it be magnificent to be able to sit, give your attention to a few clients, and make the same, or more, money?

Consider the chain of benefits: More focus on individual clients leads to better results for those few clients; those clients will offer better testimonials; and those satisfaction ratings will attract more high paying, high quality clients. This a circular effect of good business.

Of course, your next question is, “How?”

Scoring those lucrative client relationships starts where all good business does – in the early planning stages, even before lead generation.

Think big before you attract clients. You can’t skip this step, because if you do, you’ll end up attracting small-fry clients, and when you present them with the top-quality, top-priced program, you’ll fall flat.

Here’s an example to explain: you’re selling a top-notch software program targeted at high-end, complicated tax processing. If you market to general accountants, you might be netting prospects that do anything from A-B-C accounting services to intricate, full time gigs with top corporations. There’s no doubt that you’ll strike out with the majority of your audience. Accountants that make their living on Joe Smith’s bread-and-butter will have no interest in a high-end product like yours. Instead, back up and find a creative way to market to only those accountants serving the best-of-the-best, super-corporations. They will be willing to pay what you’re asking. They’ve been around for long enough to see the value in it, and are successful enough to be able to pay for it.

When asking for the big bucks, keep these things in mind:

• Before you bring people to your website, before you send out your newsletter, consider the caliber of your product or service, and match it to the caliber of client that would be most likely to spend the kind of money you’re asking for. Do the research required to find these people, rather than spending time generating dead-end leads.

• Consider your prospects’ mindsets. Do they have cheeseburger budgets and milkshake level businesses? Or do they have filet mignon budgets and crème-brulee-level companies? Which would you rather have? Know that fast food customers won’t have the money, or the taste, for expensive steaks.

• Don’t make quality an afterthought, or you’ll have attracted prospects in vain. Aim high, and your prospects won’t bat an eye at your price revelations.

Don’t assume that high paying clients are high maintenance. Often, they’re more understanding and less demanding. They have the experience that it takes to understand the ins and outs of the business world. They understand your challenges, and are more likely to allow you the freedom to run with your expertise.

Low-paying clients are often new to the business world, and may either indirectly (or directly) look to you for advice beyond the scope of your work, or spend too much time highlighting insignificant details.

Don’t be intimidated by the lucrative account. Be drawn to it. Recognize it for the gold mine that it is – and for the quality that it can create 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

It’s not flat; there’s no way that it could have traveled seamlessly through a postage meter.  It contains more than paper.  It’s got depth!  She tries to determine what’s inside by squeezing the envelope in the area of the biggest bulge.  With that, she hears the unmistakable sound of a duck, “Quack!”  What in the world?…

Of course, the office employee opens the lumpy envelope first.  In it, she finds a cute-as-a-button rubber duck that quacks every time she squeezes him.  The letter that accompanies the duck is from an insurance company that is conducting a promotion for new customers.  The little quacking duck is a perfect likeness of the insurance company’s mascot.

The woman gives the duck a prominent place on her desk.  He makes her smile.  She makes him quack when coworkers walk past, making them smile.  When she knocks him over with a paperweight or telephone receiver, she sees the name and phone number of the insurance company on his bottom.  And most importantly (for the insurance company), she remembers their business name every time she glances at the duck, prompting her to not only recommend the insurance company to her boss, but to her company’s own clients.

The power of lumpy mail is two-fold:

• First, lumpy mail begs to be opened.  Can you imagine yourself throwing away a piece of lumpy mail?  Surely, you’d be wondering what was in there, and might even resort to fishing it back out of the trash to satisfy your curiosity.

• Secondly, the item in the envelope that’s responsible for its lumpiness will stay with your target for as long as they choose, effectively giving your company’s name a front seat in that target’s mind.

Many times, business owners focus on the letter that’s enclosed in their direct mail envelopes; when, in fact, their focus would be better placed on actually getting that envelope opened.  And it doesn’t matter who opens it…even if a gatekeeper at a large corporation is intrigued enough to set to it with a letter opener, your correspondence has a greater chance of completing its voyage to the decision maker’s desk.

Emails cost nothing to send.  But with direct mail, you’re paying for paper, envelopes, ink, and postage.  Unless people are opening those direct mailings, your spending is in vain.  Even with a conservative mailing list, you can spend hundreds, or thousands, of dollars in the blink of an eye.

Because you’re investing so much more in direct mail, high response rates are more than desirable.  Direct mail experts site 1 or 2 percent response rates to direct mailings as satisfactory, even impressive.  But if you want extraordinary response rates to your direct mailings, a lumpy mail endeavor could result in response rates as high as 25 percent.  That means that, even if your budget is so tight that you can only afford to send out 10 pieces of lumpy mail, you can expect a response from 2 or 3 of your recipients.

So lump it up!  Mix up the mail bag.  Make mail interesting again.  Maybe you haven’t the budget for big bulk mailing…but there’s nothing stopping an honest shot at some lucrative lumpiness.

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

This is a question that I encourage you to ask yourself. Too often, we don’t allow ourselves to do something because we’re worried about the sky falling in. When you feel that way, consider the worst case scenario.

For instance, perhaps you are uncomfortable making cold calls, but that is your primary way of generating business. As terrified as you may be to pick up the phone, think about the worst possible thing that could happen.

The prospect might shout at you or hang up on you. While that’s not pleasant, it certainly isn’t the end of the world. Because after that, it’s then over. The person isn’t going to start a Twitter campaign telling the world that you called him and he didn’t want to buy from you. Nothing else will happen.

Considering the worst case scenario will help you to learn how to take risks in your business. It will toughen you against the possibility of any little thing going wrong, and will give you the confidence to move forward in spite of that possibility.

The thought of losing money holds a lot of people back from taking risks or making changes. They are afraid their investment won’t pan out and they’ll look foolish for having lost money.

One thing I have personally learnt from considering the worst that could happen is that it’s impossible to lose money. If something doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would, don’t consider it as lost money. You just didn’t get the expected return on your investment, but you didn’t lose.

When this happens, view it as an educational experience. For example, a few months ago we had a mistake happen in my business that cost $20,000. While, yes, that is a lot of money, it was also a $20,000 education for me and the team members involved. That mistake will not be made again. We didn’t lose money; we learned a valuable lesson.

In fact, we couldn’t have bought that particular education. There isn’t a $20,000 seminar that could teach us what we really learned through that one mistake. We didn’t just learn it in theory; we learned it in the muscle, where it will always stay.

When you are considering making an investment or a change of some sort in your business, don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Face the worst case scenario head on. Once you realize what might go wrong, you can handle it. And, if it does, view it as a learning experience, not as a loss.

You will find yourself moving into areas of growth that you never thought possible.

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

You may have been handling the details of your personal and professional lives on your own for so long that you don’t recognize when it’s time to start outsourcing. Let me give you an example of how outsourcing one routine task could free you to focus on building your business.

Let’s say your favorite dry cleaning firm is an hour round trip from your office. What could you be doing in that hour that creates more business, instead? When you multiply the time away from business tasks times your standard business fees, you begin to understand why delegating that kind of routine task can improve your bottom line.

Maybe your routine tasks are business related—answering phones, shuffling through email or making travel arrangements. Whatever it is that’s keeping you from actually focusing on finding new customers or creating products, it may be time to let someone else do it.

Your greatest need may be as simple as being able to rest once in awhile.  You maybe trapped in the cycle of working long hours, late into the night and every weekend. Wouldn’t it be more productive to work with a team and have them take over tasks that don’t require your personal attention, and actually balance work and rest?

Finding the right team to take over things that keep you distracted from work can make a huge difference. Decide what kind of help would do the most good right now. Do you need a personal assistant to handle dry cleaning pickup and delivery or a virtual assistant to schedule your newsletter?

For each business owner, it’s something different. But at some point, it isn’t optional if you want your business to grow. Insisting on doing everything yourself is a sure-fire way to keep your business small.

Finding skilled team members to lighten your load can surprise you in another way. You’re going to find there are things you simply aren’t suited for; for instance, you might slog through ironing your own clothes but why focus all that effort on something that can be outsourced to someone who does it well?

So consider where your team would do the most good. Decide what can be outsourced and then find people with the right skills, whether virtual or local. Remember, it doesn’t matter if the team member who posts articles to your website is in Australia or anywhere else in the world, so long as they do a great job and free you to do the things you need to do.

You want to outsource tasks to free up time, to grow your business or simply to get enough rest.  Start thinking about hiring a team to support you in your business. What kinds of things would make your life simpler, allow you to focus on your business or find some balance?

Once that’s clear in your mind, you’ll know who to look for and what kind of skills they need.  Then you’ll be on your way to building a great team. And that team will make all the difference in your life, your business and your peace of mind.

STOP. Every method listed above is a piece of the money-making puzzle, but there’s at least one element listed there that can be expanded to include an explosion of profits – profits of a caliber that you may have not considered possible.

That element is the “call.”  If you’re talking to one person on the phone, answering his questions and moving closer to a single booking, imagine the potential it could have if you were speaking to 50, 100, or even 150 people at once.  And furthermore, imagine if you were charging money for each of those people to participate in that call.

Hadn’t considered the teleseminar until now?   Here are a few points that demonstrate the profit-making ability of these super-calls.  You can:

• Charge a participation fee: When every person that’s participating in a teleseminar (or simply listening to you speak), has paid a fee (e.g. $50), you make a significant profit.  Just think, a mere 10 participants equals a cash realization of $500.  If you can book 150 participants, that a whopping $7,500 for 1 or 2 hours of your time!  $50 is a small investment for each individual caller, but equates to an astounding profit realization for you.

• Charge for transcripts. You can make participation in your teleseminar free, but then sell written documentations of the content after it’s over.  For this method, you must ensure that your content is so fascinating (and packed with indispensable information), that a generous portion of the audience can’t resist owning their own copies for future reference.

• Charge for recordings. Much like the selling of transcripts, you can sell recordings of your teleseminar.  Remember to make your seminar worthy of a second listen.

• Charge for transcripts or recordings in packages. Maybe a caller has dialed into her first teleseminar, and is so fascinated that she wants more information from past teleseminars.  Or, maybe your call times aren’t ideal for a few of your patrons.  In cases such as these, you can wrap up packages of transcripts and/or recordings and sell them to bring in profits.

• Recycle teleseminar information. Use your teleseminars to compile the information necessary for writing a book, an e-book, newsletters, or articles.  Again, you can realize profits above and beyond that initial call.

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about the teleseminar – including:

• the contagious energy that comes with speaking to a large audience
• the ability to take questions that simultaneously satisfy hoards of people
• the platform to spread the word about upcoming events
• and the chance to get the feedback that’s indispensable to your marketing plan

But possibly the biggest motivator?  The enormous cash-making potential of the teleseminar.

Utilize these tips and come up with your own ways of making teleseminars profitable for your business.  The goal is to do the work once, and to then develop ways to use that information again and again – and to generate profit with each turn.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

•    Master your inner game. There are always going to be challenges. That’s part of growth. Know that you have the strength to handle whatever comes your way.

•    Dare to dream the things that you right now think you don’t deserve. You can’t move forward or step up if you don’t think you have the right to.

•    Make the decision to raise your game. Feel the burning desire that caused you to begin your business in the first place.

•    Focus on your vision of what your business is supposed to look like. If you didn’t start out truly visualizing, do it now. Commit it to paper so you can remind yourself: How much money do you want to make? How many hours do you want to be working? What kind of lifestyle do you want to lead? What difference do you want your business to make?

•    Develop your plan. Seeing your vision of your business is one thing, making it a reality requires purpose and preparation.

•    Evaluate your assets. Your resources are likely right in front of you.  Look to your existing clients for feedback, referrals, sales and product upgrades. Build your prospect lists to increase exposure. A good team that gets your business going, products developed, and website running goes a long way in stepping up your business, as do joint venture partnerships which help to increase exposure.  Products are probably your best asset as an independent source of additional revenue that can really step up your business.

•    Design your products, programs and solutions for the top 20% of clients because that’s where 4/5 of your income will come from.

•    Think in terms of project income, not monthly income. Plan for the year, instead of planning month by month. Plan around big projects.

•    Remember:  just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you try to do everything you think of, everything that you know you can do, you will do them all half-way. Choose only the best of what you can do and you will step up your business.

•    Take the first step without knowing what the next one will be. Take the leap of faith without a safety net. You can only see the next step after you take the first one.

•    Grow bigger than your obstacles or problems. Move forward in spite of the challenges. They are inevitable. Everyone who has experienced success has experienced obstacles. They just chose to move past and overcome them.

•    Recognize that the changes you experience when you are stepping up, in your life and in your business, won’t always feel good. They can be uncomfortable at first because they will be unfamiliar. But, they will be worth 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

Of course, there are pros and cons to both, and quite often it will depend on your personal preference, and on how you want your business to work.

When you’re starting to outsource don’t think that you should be able to hire one person who can do it all. Not only is this an unrealistic expectation, but you’ll be making yourself dependent on one person.  That is not a position from which your business can thrive.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t delegate some of your business to individuals. In fact there are some great opportunities in the virtual assistant market to hire self-employed people who have specialist skills in certain areas. You want to start thinking about activities and then match those up to the right individual or organisation to take over for you.

So when should you look for a team to assist you, and when should you look for an individual? Here are some advantages and disadvantages for you to consider:

Working With Teams: As working with virtual assistants becomes more and more popular, companies offering teams of people who could work on your behalf are starting to spring up. The immediate benefit of this is that you aren’t reliant on one person to get the work done. If the person who usually does your account is on holidays, someone else will get the work done for you.

Teams are great at handling routine tasks, such as data entry, transcription, or proof reading. It’s very clear what the outcome is, and it’s very obvious when it’s being done successfully. Your assistants don’t need specialised knowledge to get the job done, and you don’t need to spend as much time training them about your business systems. It’s often a case of handing over the task and waiting for it to be completed for you.

One of the downsides to working with teams is that sometimes you can end up paying slightly more. If a team has a manager and an office, they’ve got more overheads that need to be recouped and therefore they tend to charge more. In cases such as this, some of the benefits of outsourcing can be lost when you go down the team route. But this is certainly not the case with all teams.  You should definitely shop around before you make a decision about who to use.

Working With Individuals: While my business has lots of routine tasks, there are other activities that are more specialised or require more judgment or company knowledge. And for those, I prefer to work with an individual.

For example, one of my assistants has handled my customer service for sometime now. One of the things that I really like about working with her is that in the time that we’ve worked together she has built up an intuitive understanding of how we do things here at Client Magnets. I prefer to work with an individual who, over time, becomes more and more valuable to the business because they get to know your business better.

Just remember, it’s not a mutually exclusive situation. Many people outsource to both individuals and teams, and get enormous benefit from both.

As with everything else, the key is to know what suits your business best. After all, no one knows your business the way that you do.

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, then sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

As you go about setting your goals for the next 12 months, or even for the next quarter, take some time to also figure out what you need and what needs to change to achieve that goal.

Here’s 3 steps to get you started:

1. What do you need OR what do you need to change? What do you need to reach your goal? It’s not always clear cut, but it could be a simple and clear answer such as administrative help. If it is that simple, then so is the answer – hire someone to help you do the books, help with marketing, whatever you need to help you achieve your goal.

What about your time routine or changing your work methods? Do those need restructuring to help you meet a goal? It’s not always so cut and dried though. You may need a mentor, different resources, or a much more dramatic change.

2. Visualize Your Goals. Take a moment to just think quietly. Visualize yourself when you’ve met the goal. Now work backwards, what supporting structures are in place that helped you get there? Were you in a larger office using an assistant? Were you using different resources?

Take it a step further and visualize your ideal scenario – what you’d like it to be, not what you think you will achieve. What structures are in place in the ideal world? See what you come up with.

3. Be Willing To Let Go. To get your new structures in place, chances are, there are things you’re going to need to let go of. You need to make a necessary compromise – be willing to give up something to achieve your goal – whether it’s an old work habit or even some of your revenue to hire an assistant or use a coach. Don’t compromise on the outcome. Be willing to take a trade off to reach it.

For example, I used to watch a soap opera in my early years. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I did take time out some years ago to watch this ½ hour soap opera – five days a week. I realized that this habit wasn’t going to help me reach my goals. It also wasn’t who I wanted to be, so I cut it out. It gave me 2-1/2 hours more time to focus on my goal each week.

Your compromise may need to be more dramatic. It may be relocating, a change in a relationship. But know that it’s going to get you closer to your goal. It’s all part of the process.

Have the courage to re-align your habits, find out what you need and what you need to let go of. By doing this you’re guaranteed to reach your goals.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com