It’s not that prospects don’t want your products or services it’s just that they’ve been used to doing without them and now you need to help them make a change. What’s the best way to thaw someone’s thinking and change their mind?

You could try the direct approach. You could tell them how effective your products and services are. You could try to persuade them to buy your products and services. If you’ve done this you know how frustrating it can be.

Its hard, sometimes impossible, to persuade or convince people to do something new. Most of us want to keep doing things the same way we’ve been doing them. You’ve come up against this when you’re talking to a prospect and trying to generate a sale.

If you want to get that prospect to become a buyer, you need to find a way to help them to let go of their past ways of working, change their mind and take the action you want. How do you do this? It turns out that the most successful strategy for marketing has other uses as well.

Discover a small business marketing strategy that works to help prospects take the action you want, buy more from you >>

I was talking with my client Andrea a couple of weeks ago and the conversation strayed from marketing. She mentioned that her computer was so slow that she spent a lot of time waiting for it to load and process information instead of getting her work done.

As one of the younger and newer new employees, she wasn’t comfortable going to her boss and telling her that she wanted a new computer. What could she do?

My advice to Andrea was not to ask for what she wanted. Instead I told her to help her boss understand why she needed it.

To help your prospects – or your boss – let go of the status quo, do what I showed Andrea how to do. Lead the conversation so that they have ownership of the ideas and conclusions. Ask a series of questions that focus their attention where you want it to be and help them make the decision you want them to make.

Obviously, you’ll tailor your questions to the person and the situation. I suggested to Andrea that she ask her boss about:

1. Revenue Objectives

2. The Impact of Sticking with the Status Quo

3. Defining What’s Needed to Reach these Goals

A week after we discussed this approach, Andrea called to tell me the result of her conversation with her boss. She’d gone in hoping to get a new computer and ended up with a better computer and a raise!

Whether you’re marketing yourself or your business, there are simple strategies for achieving your goals. You could keep marketing the way you have been and getting the same results, or you could discover what actually works.

Take a look at your marketing:

1. What are your revenue objectives?

2. Wouldn’t you like to give yourself a raise?

3. What will be the impact of sticking with your current small business marketing strategy?

4. What do you need and want to reach your business goals?

Getting your prospects or your boss to change their mind can be as easy as melting an ice cube in a glass of water. Instead of fighting prospects’ frozen thinking why not find out how to melt their resistance and increase your sales.

Ready to unfreeze your sales? Discover the simple strategies that work to grow your business >>

Dave’s question highlights the fundamental opportunity of the web and its biggest problem. Like Dave, I’m sure you know a web site presents a global, 24-hour marketing opportunity but… how do you make it bring in as many sales as your best salesperson does?

Let’s take a look at how well face-to-face selling and selling online work and why.

-In-Person Sales
What percentage of sales do you close when you’re face-to-face with a prospect? 30-40% is respectable and not uncommon.

-Online Sales
What percent of visitors to your web site make a purchase? A few sites convert up to 3-5% of visitors into customers. For most web sites, the number is much smaller, often only thousandths of one percent.

Do these numbers represent your success in person and lack of success online?

Discover exactly what to do with your internet marketing to increase sales >>

Here’s how to make your web site as effective as your best sales person:

1. Target People Who Are Looking To Solve a Problem

People come to trade shows because they are looking for a product or service. When they walk up to your booth, you know they’re at least mildly interested and want more information.

Online, the best ways to attract people who are looking for your products and services is to make sure your site can be found in the search engines, to use pay-per-click ads like Google Adwords and to get your articles published everywhere you can online.

2. Start a Conversation

What’s the first thing you do when a prospect walks up to your booth at a tradeshow? Do you immediately start spouting product features and prices, or do you introduce yourself and try to get a conversation going by asking them a question? Of course, you don’t immediately try to sell them. First you find out what you can about their business and which product would best suit their needs.

The same is true online. If you immediately try to sell people, you’ll turn them off and they’ll go away. Instead, write marketing copy on your web site that begins a virtual conversation with prospects.

Start by asking them the biggest or most common question on their minds relative to your product or service. Continue to ask questions about their problems and aspirations. Use this virtual conversation to spell out their concerns and, once you’ve defined them, explain how the solutions you provide solve their problems.

Find out how to make your site engaging to get visitors’ attention and prompt them to contact you and buy from you. Use this link >>

3. Build a Relationship by Being Helpful

Where does your best business come from? From clients you’ve been helping for years; clients who know and trust you. When you’re standing in front of a prospect, you can hand them a free report, answer their questions directly and demonstrate your expertise.

Converting online prospects to clients involves doing the same things with your web site marketing. Offer a free report to prospects to prompt them to give you their contact information. List commonly asked questions; then answer. Include content on the site that demonstrates your expertise and knowledge of your customers’ business needs.

Think about how many ideas and how much information you’d share with a prospect in a 15 minute face-to-face conversation at a trade show. Your web site needs to present at least this much information. In fact, it gives you the opportunity to present more.

4. Make it Personal

Make a personal connection with your prospects. If you’re an entrepreneur or a business owner, use your web site to help prospects get to know you. Help your prospects see you as more than just an anonymous site that wants their money. Do this by:

• Putting up snapshots of yourself in your office or on the golf course. (In the last couple of weeks my subscribers have seen me on my bike and on my sailboat.)
• Using audio and or video clips with ideas prospects can use throughout your site.
• Providing free telecalls. Not only does this give your prospects a chance to hear you demonstrate your expertise, it gives you an opportunity to find out what they’re really thinking about.
• Using ‘Live Help’ on your site.

Most businesses have hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors and many of them market similar products and services. Whether you’re marketing in person or online, your best competitive advantage is the strength of your relationship with your prospects.

For getting a conversation going or closing a sale, nothing beats being there in person, talking face to face with a prospect. But your internet marketing can and should do as good a job. You don’t have to live with conversion rates in the thousandths of a percent. Put the four ideas above to work and make your site sell.

Tired of waiting for your site to transform itself into the lead- and profit-generating machine you’d hoped for? Discover what works from someone who is already highly successful online and make your site more profitable.

Discover the “secret” website marketing strategies I use to sell products and services every day >>

Most people are mystified by internet marketing. It’s still a relatively new and very unique medium. You hire a web designer; you give them your marketing brochure or similar information about your company, and they create a web site for you. And then… more often than not, nothing happens. If you’re lucky, you get a handful of visitors, but very few contact you, much less buy from you.

It quickly becomes obvious that your web site isn’t working. It’s not generating leads or sales. Of course, if you knew where or what the problem was, you’d fix it. But that’s the most frustrating part of it; you’re stumped.

How can you tell what’s missing from your internet marketing? And how do you fix it?

Think of your website marketing as a large water main or pipe connecting a gigantic reservoir to your business. The reservoir is overflowing with prospects and your goal is to get as many relevant prospects as possible down through the pipeline to your business.

The web marketing pipeline has three valves; one for visitors, one for relationships and one for sales. Most websites are built with all three valves shut, blocking prospects from rushing to your site and keeping profits from flowing into your bank account. In most cases, even after months or years, these valves continue to restrict the flow of business so that only a small number of prospects ever make it to the point of sale.

To fix your website, you need to open all three valves. You need visitors, prospect relationships and sales in order to put money in the bank.

Ready to stop struggling with your website marketing? Tired of just getting a trickle of prospects and sales? You can tap the reservoir of prospects waiting to buy your products and services. Get the details >>

Opening Your Web Marketing Pipeline

Visitors
Take the following three steps to get more qualified visitors to your site:

1. Build incoming links from other sites. Writing and distributing articles is the fastest and most effective way to generate the type of links to your site that attract visitors and that help your ranking in the search engines. It’s effective and essentially free.

2. Sign up for Google Adwords. With a couple of attention-grabbing words, your pay-per-click ad is a quick way to attract site visitors while you’re working on improving your search engine positioning.

3. Help the search engines find your site and give it a top ranking. Make sure you know which words your prospects use when searching for your site and include them throughout your copy. And, of course, submit your site to the most popular search engines.

Relationships
The more people that read your web page and contact you, the more prospect relationships you’ll have and the greater chance of generating a sale. Your site should prompt 5 to 20% of visitors to contact you. If it doesn’t, take the following three steps to open the relationship valve.

1. Use your page design to lead people through the information in the sequence you want them to follow, and lead them to the steps you want them to take.

2. Grab your prospects’ attention with your web copy by focusing on their concerns. Speak to their interests.

3. Give prospects a compelling reason to give you their contact information. Offer a free report that solves their problems or run a contest offering a prize they’d love to have.

Sales
20% of your sales can come directly from a prospect’s first visit to your website. What most people forget is that 80% of your sales come from your follow-up systems. Check to see that at a minimum you are doing all of the following:

1. Set up your email system so that prospects automatically receive a sequence of messages prompting them to take the next action you want them to take.

2. Use a weekly or monthly ezine to share ideas, success stories or case studies with qualified prospects. Pose problems and include links to your solutions.

3. When people sign up online for your free offer, be sure to collect information about what they want and need so you can follow-up with a phone call.

Marketing is all about percentages. Open the visitor valve by 25%, the relationship valve by 25% and the sales valve by 25% and your sales will increase by almost 100% (1.25 X 1.25 X 1.25). Leave them alone and sales will stay the same.

Ready to Open Up Your Website’s Sales?
Take just a couple of minutes to learn how to increase your web sales with our web marketing solution.

You’ll discover exactly what’s missing in your web marketing and what to do to start attracting more prospects and sales so you can put more money in the bank.

Get the details and take advantage of our current bonus offer with the following URL >>

I’m asked the same questions by other business owners. They want to know if it’s a good idea to use their other marketing efforts to direct prospects to their web sites.

Should you be trying to get more people to your web site? My answer may come as a surprise to you.

For most companies, it’s a bad idea to try to direct people to your web site for a crucial reason. Very few web sites do a good job of converting prospects to clients. Wendy’s site was no exception. It looked good, but it wasn’t clear what site visitors were supposed to do or why. The result was that first-time visitors and qualified prospects looked around and left.

You wouldn’t take a solid lead and give it to someone on your staff who knew nothing about marketing; you’d give it to someone you could rely on to follow up and close the sale.

Typically when you have a prospect on the phone you do an excellent job of getting them to tell you what you need, clarifying the value of your services and getting them to take action. Most small business owners and marketers I talk to tell me that once they are talking with a prospect they can close the sale 20% or more of the time.

The opposite is true with most web sites. Most don’t generate leads or sales, even for a half a percent of the prospects that visit them. In effect most web sites are like a sales person who never shows up for work and never follows up on leads. If you had such an employee, you’d retrain them or fire them.

Is it time to retrain or fire your website?

Imagine where your business could be if your web site was ten times as good as your best sales person. A web site can generate far more leads than any sales person, and can convert leads to sales. Discover how to make your web site work >>

Creating a Path to More Sales

With effective internet marketing, it’s possible to lead your prospects step by step through the sales process. First you grab their attention; then you demonstrate your expertise; then you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt how much better off they’d be with your product or services and, finally, you give them an urgent need to buy. Here’s how:

Step One
Take a couple of minutes to map out the sequence of steps involved in your marketing and sales process. List the actions you want your prospects to take. What information do you want them to read and in what order? At what point in the process do you want them to contact you? How?

Not all your prospects will take the same path. With the right incentives, you can prompt some prospects to take a shortcut to the point of sale. Include the incentive information you want prospects to read in your sales sequence.

Step Two
Use the map of your sales process to plan your web site, the layout or organization of elements on the page, and the marketing copy you’ll uses.

Step Three
Test each of your web pages and each element on the page to determine its effect on lead generation and sales. With a bit of fine tuning, your web site can become your best sales tool.

When should your marketing direct prospects to your web site? When you’ve set it up to move prospects along the sales path. If it doesn’t do that, don’t send prospects to it. Once you’ve built the pages to convert prospects to clients, you’ll want to refer everyone to it.

Are you ready to finally stop wasting time and money on your web site and find out how to use it to take your business to the next level? My clients report increases in their leads and sales of 300% to 1500% with these simple internet marketing strategies. Get the details >>

Do You Want To Take Your Business To the Next Level?

Discover how to attract more clients, sell more of your products and services and be more successful with less effort. Finally you can use a simple and reliable web marketing system so you can stop struggling and start making more money. Get the details >>

I’ve built a web site and it’s been up now for three months, but I’m only getting a handful of visitors each day. What are the best ways to get more people to my web site and enjoy more lead generation?

Marla. J., Minneapolis, MN

You built a web site to create a surge of inquiries and new business, but hardly anyone even drifts by, much less stays to learn about your company. Given the time and m0ney you’ve spent, you’re frustrated that your web site hasn’t turned into a pr0fit center overnight, and you’re inclined to dismiss its revenue-generating potential.

Don’t! There are three excellent ways to bring people and lead generation to your web site.

1. The Best Way to Attract Visitors

Unquestionably the best way to channel a flood of visitors to your web site is to get it listed at the top of every search engine. If prospects can find your web site in the first ten on Google, Yahoo and MSN, you’ll get plenty of visitors. Even a listing within the top twenty will bring in a steady stream.

You know that search engine position depends on keywords and the way they are used on your site. Search engines look at the frequency of use on your page and number of links to relevant pages.

If you’ve ever worked with the site code yourself to try to get to a top position in the search engines, you know that it is not obvious how to succeed at this. The experts (and many who claim to be search engine specialists are not expert) charge $12,000 to $30,000 and up annually, per site, to achieve and maintain top search engine positions.

Thanks to top placements for a several keywords, my site attracts over 35,000 unique visitors each month. You or someone in your firm can achieve this, too.

Discover the techniques that will improve your site’s search engine placement and save yourself over $12,000 a year >>

Don’t have the time to do your own search engine positioning or a budget of $12 to 30 thousand dollars for the task? Write me and I’ll refer you to a reputable firm that can help you.

2. The 2nd Best Way to Attract Web Site Visitors

Top search engine positions make a big difference, but if you don’t want to invest the time or m0ney to put your site at the top of the search engines, there is a virtually no-cost technique you can use to bring in qualified prospects.

Thousands of online ezines and newsletters are hungry for content, and your prospects are always looking for ideas that will improve their businesses or their lives. Write short articles with ideas and information that your target market can use, send it to the ezines, and links from those back to your site will bring hundreds or thousands of prospects right to your ‘door’.

One article I sent out last December, ‘What Santa Knows About Marketing’ was picked up by over a thousand ezines, newsletters and web sites, and is still listed ten months later.

You can attract tens of thousands of visitors to your web site each week just by writing and distributing articles.

Discover how this formula works to bring in sales and find out exactly how to get slightly famous and a lot richer with your articles.

3. The 3rd Best Way to Attract Web Site Visitors

I love Google Ads and you should, too. They are simple to set up, you pay only when people c.lick on your ads, and you can set daily budget limits. They look like the easiest way to attract qualified leads to your web site. Why aren’t they the number one way to attract web site visitors? Because making Google Ads profitable is more complex than it first appears.

Have you tried Google Ads? What were your results?

Lots of companies use Google Ads, but few can justify the cost based on the sales generated. It turns out that to make your Google Ads pay for themselves, you need to pay careful attention to keyword selection, the wording of your ad, and the layout, wording, and links on the page that people are sent to from the ad.

I’ve written 8 tips to make sure your Google Ads help you make m0ney. Get all 8 tips along with the formula for making m0ney with your web site.

Given the challenge and the cost associated with search engine positioning, and depending on your particular product or service, Google Ads may be the best way to attract visitors. Use the approach outlined above to put them to work for your business.

Tired of spending m0ney on your web site and not generating a flood of new clients and sales? Waiting won’t improve your results. To make m0ney with your web site, you need a proven formula for bringing in prospects and business. Discover exactly how to get all the business you can handle online.

I need help in generating sales from my web site. My site has been up for two months and I’ve gotten thousands of visitors but only a couple of people have contacted me from the site. Obviously I must be doing something wrong with my internet marketing . What’s the secret to getting people to buy from my web site?

Fran T., Boston, MA

If you have a web site that’s not pulling in prospects and sales, like Fran’s, I have secret to share with you. Your sales and profits will increase as soon as you apply it. Whether you’re marketing on the web, in print or in person, you are guaranteed to make more sales.

Here it is; people buy from you when you give them what they want. Sounds obvious, but most people don’t apply this secret to their internet marketing and to their offline marketing.

Many people think that the quickest way to increase sales is to convince or “sell” more prospects. Trying to convince people to buy your products and services is hard, not much fun and rarely works. In fact, this approach repels the majority of people who may actually want the products and services you provide.

Your prospects are like you; they want and need to buy services and products, but hardly anyone wants to “be sold”. When a prospect reads your brochure or visits your web site, they are thinking about their needs and desires. Once you focus your marketing on giving your prospects what they want, you’ll see a leap in responses and in sales.

Discover which web site marketing tactics to avoid and which to use to attract clients >>

Think about your products and services. Why do people want them? What’s the first and most important concern your prospects have? What are their secondary concerns? Can you help them solve each of these problems and get what they want?

Look at your ads, brochures, or website. Ask yourself the same questions prospects ask themselves when they view your marketing materials;

- What is in it for me?
- Does the first sentence give me a reason to keep reading?
- Does the photo make me believe this firm has what I want?

What is the most prominent element on the home page of your web site or the cover of your brochure? In most cases, it will be your company’s name. Does your company name describe your prospects’ biggest concern? Does it give them a reason to believe you have what they want?

Imagine you wanted to open a new bank account in your hometown. On Main Street you see two banks with large signs in the windows.

Bank A’s sign says – AMERICA’S FINEST SINCE 1950

Bank B’s sign says – HIGH YIELD SAVINGS, IMMEDIATE ONLINE ACCESS

Which one would you choose? Bank B grabs your attention by talking about the services and results that meet your needs. They’ve made the sale.

Focus your website marketing on your prospects’ biggest concerns and you’ll generate more interest and sales. Discover how to prompt more prospects to contact you and buy from you >>

There are dozens of reasons people buy. You may hire a business coach to help you make more money, a personal trainer to become a better golfer or tennis player. You may buy a new computer to increase your company’s productivity or a high definition TV to give yourself greater viewing enjoyment. Identify the reasons people buy your products and services and it’s like finding the key to sales.

What’s the biggest secret to attracting all the clients you want?

Stop trying to convince your prospects to buy and instead focus on giving them what they want. Once they see you as helping them, they’ll help you by buying your products and services.

I was talking with David, a client from Arizona who owns four physical therapy clinics in the Tucson area. I asked him how business has been since we talked two weeks ago. He said three of his clinics were booked solid but the fourth was suffering from a lack of clients.

When I asked him what he thought was the problem, he acknowledged that his sales representatives for that clinic hadn’t been in touch recently with the doctors who refer patients to them. In contrast, the pharmaceutical companies have three reps assigned to visit each of the same doctors’ offices every week.

Even though doctors in the area had used David’s firm’s services in the past, and their patients have a continuing need for these services, without recent contact the doctors had started referring their patients elsewhere.

As David had quickly learned, just because someone knows about your services doesn’t mean they will remember you when they are ready to make a referral or a purchase, even if they were a satisfied customer.

According to a study by e-consultancy.com prospects cool quickly, at an estimated rate of 10% per day. In other words the shelf life of your small business marketing on average is about the same as a loaf of bread, 7-10 days.

Discover how to extend the shelf life of your web marketing so more prospects buy >>

Grocery store managers know that people won’t buy stale produce or moldy bread, so they continually replace their st0ck. The same thing happens in web site marketing. Your prospects will lose track or discard your previous marketing information, even if they need your products and services. To keep your web site marketing information fresh in their minds, you need to expose them to it on a regular basis.

Obviously, your marketing shelf life will vary depending on the type of information you want prospects to retain and the type of communication. When people visit my web site they can fill in a contact form requesting a call. On occasion I get these and respond within 10-15 minutes. The majority of people I talk to remember filling in the form, the content of my site, but can’t remember the URL for the site.

If people can’t remember the URL of your web site, even if it provides an essential service they want to pay for, they won’t be able to find your site and buy from you.

Find out how to use your web site to build prospect and customer loyalty and increase sales >>

Estimated Average Shelf Life of Your Marketing:
• Visiting your web site to forgetting your web site: 2 minutes

• Reading a page or more of your marketing materials to forgetting your products or services: 5 to 7 days

• Talking with you to forgetting you; 2 to 3 weeks

• Buying from you to forgetting your company; 1 to 3 months

It’s not that you don’t provide essential products and services and people don’t want them; the problem is that your marketing information regularly gets buried in your prospect’s minds.

We have the same struggle with my teenage son. Much as we’d like him to sort his laundry and put clothes neatly away in his bureau, gravity takes over and the clothes end up on the floor. He sees and wears the clothes at the top of the pile. In short order, he’s run out of shorts. Where are they? Buried at the bottom of the pile.

If a prospect has just been to your website, read your marketing materials, talked with you or made a purchase from you, your information is at the top of the pile in their mind. Each day that goes by they take in more information that gets added to the top of the pile, and your marketing information gets pushed further and further down until they no longer remember it.

How can you avoid having your marketing go stale in prospects’ minds or get buried by all the other information they process?

1. If you have a web site, focus on getting prospects to give you their contact information so you have a means of getting in touch with them.

3. Whether it is by email, snail mail, over the phone or in print, stay in touch with your prospects so they don’t forget you.

3. Track your contacts with your prospects so you know how frequently you’ve approached them and by what means, and keep your objectives clearly in mind.

4. When a prospect becomes a client or a customer, don’t assume that they’ll remember to come back for the next purchase. Follow up immediately and tempt them with a special offer. This tactic alone can boost your sales by 30 to 40%.

It’s hard to believe, but most of the people who need and want your products and services will forget you after they’ve read your marketing materials. Don’t let your marketing shelf life expire and get discarded by your prospects. Develop and implement a system for contacting your prospects so they remember you. You’ll get permanent shelf space in their minds and you’ll get their business.

Tired of having prospects forget you. Discover how to extend the shelf life of your marketing >>

Yesterday I began to feel like a broken record. John called from a company in Boston that owns 25 storage facilities in 3 states, then Martha called from a web design firm in Austin, and Steve called from a computer networking software firm. All three had almost exactly the same exact question; How could they turn their web sites into profit centers?

There are two key elements to creating a web site that sells. You need visitors, you need to convert visitors to leads and then you need to convert leads to sales. You probably knew this already, but do you know how to put these two elements together to generate a flood of new business?

1. Create A Web Site that Sells

Before you can expect any lead generation or sale, your web site may need a tune-up. Your site needs to get your prospect’s attention, keep their attention long enough for you to get your message across, and motivate them to contact you or buy from you.

When a site visitor sees your homepage, or any page on your site for that matter, you’ve got at most 3 seconds to get their attention and interest them in reading more.

Your site needs to instantly give visitors a reason to not click to another web site, say, one of your competitor’s. Does your website have that kind of stopping power?

Discover how to give your web site the stopping power you need to increase leads and sales >>

Once your web pages have gotten your prospect’s attention, you need to engage them and get them thinking about how you can help them and why they need your products and services. Think of this as the beginning of a conversation that they’ll want to continue by contacting you or purchasing from you. Look at and read your site from your prospect’s perspective; is it engaging?

The next step is to prompt prospects to contact you. The visual elements and marketing copy on your site should prompt prospects to take the next step. Does your site do this?

Once your site is generating hundreds of leads a week, you’re headed in the right direction. Now, how will you convert your qualified leads into sales?

The average business loses 80% of sales due to lack of follow-up. To avoid losing sales, give prospects the information they need to trust you, to value your products and services and to remember you. Do these three things and your conversion rates will soar.

Stop losing money with your web site marketing and discover how to increase your online lead generation and sales >>

2. Pull in Thousands of Prospects

If you’ve got a site that grabs your prospects’ attention, engages them and then prompts them to contact you, you’re ready to build traffic to your site. There are two primary ways to get prospects to your web site.

Improve Your Search Engine Positioning
Most people who arrive at your site will start their trip at one of search engines. If your site is listed at the top when your prospects use relevant keywords in a search, they’ll be more likely to find it and visit it.

It’s not easy to push your site to the top of the search engine listings. A whole host of variables affect what is referred to as your site’s “organic position” in the search engines. The most important are your use of keywords and meta tags, and the number of links to your site.

You can improve your sites’ ranking in the search engines using a few key strategies that include where and how often you use your keywords and links including our keywords. This involves carefully coding each of your web pages, a painstaking process. The alternative is to pay someone else to do this for you.

While there are thousands of firms that can supposedly put your site at the top of the search engines overnight for a few dollars, don’t be duped. This process is long and tedious and the reputable firms take 2-6 months to provide results and charge between 10-15 thousand dollars a year to maintain your sites positioning.

Advertise with the Search Engines
For many small businesses, pushing your site’s organic position to the top of the search engines can take too long or be too costly. You may want to get more visitors to your site to supplement the traffic you’re getting or hope to get. One way to do this is to pay to have your ads appear in the search engines.

Overture and Google’s pay-per-click AdWords program are the most effective types of online advertising. I find Google’s much easier to use and provides better results, but you should test both.

You can also pull visitors to your site by distributing your articles online, using a blog, and advertising in email newsletters.

You try to fit in some strategic marketing when you can, but you’re not sure which activities are essential to do each week or each month to build a steady stream of clients.

You make some calls, send out a mailing or put up a web site, but you still have that nagging feeling that if you knew which small business strategic marketing activities translated into the most new business, you could be more successful.

You want more clients or, if not more clients, higher paying clients. So, what are the most important business marketing tasks to do in order to attract more of the right type of prospects?

Discover where to focus your marketing efforts and how to use a small business marketing to generate a steady stream of new clients >>

Build and Maintain Relationships with Prospects
Your number one marketing priority should be to build relationships with lots of qualified prospects. It sounds obvious, but remember that the reason to advertise, network or to have a web site is to generate leads, leads you can then convert to sales. Take a look at the number of years you’ve been in business and the size of your prospect list.

If your advertising, networking and web site are working, you should be able to generate new leads and a growing list of qualified prospects each month. A successful website, for example, can generate hundreds, if not thousands, of new leads monthly.

George recently signed up for my coaching services. He has been in business for over ten years, but his prospect list consists of less than 150 names. George should have contact information for thousands of prospects by now. Even without an active web based lead generation strategy, if George had added every prospect and client to his list over ten years his list should contain over a thousand interested people.

How many more sales could you close if twice as many — or ten times as many— people know how you could help them?

The first step is to get prospects’ attention with your marketing message and materials. Then you want prospects to take the next step; to contact you, buy from you right away, or add their name to your mailing list. Offering free, relevant information such as a report or f.ree workshop will prompt your prospects to give you their contact information and increase the results generated by your advertisements and mailings.

How big is your target market? What percentage of this group is on your mailing list?

Your goal is to help as many people in your target market learn what you do and to get them to give you their contact information. Once you have their permission to stay in touch, you can go to work building a relationship with them. Demonstrate what you do so they understand its value and you establish your credibility. When they know and trust you, they’ll be happy to tell you what they need and to buy your products and services.

So how can you incorporate lead generation and building relationships with prospects into your weekly schedule?

Discover how to build relationships with prospects and convert them to clients now >>

1. Each week reach out to get the attention of people who haven’t heard from you. Do this through your advertising, web site marketing, articles, mailings or cold calls (if you know how to use them). But don’t spend a dime on any of these unless you have a strategy in place for converting this attention into sales and qualified leads.

2. Set aside time each week or at least each month to stay in touch with your list of qualified prospects and past clients. As your list grows, use your time to focus on past clients first and use a mass mailing or email to stay in touch with other prospects. Share an idea your prospects can use and they’ll be reminded again and again how much you know and why they should buy your products and services.

3. Use your communication with prospects and clients to help them identify what they need and understand how your products and services can help them. You may think that doing this once should be enough, but most people are too busy to read every mailing they get or to remember the details until its pressing or important for them to act on. With regular correspondence you’ll increase the chances of putting your information in front of your prospects when they are ready to buy.

4. Set aside time each day to contact qualified prospects. If someone has sent you an email, left a phone message or otherwise expressed interest in your products, pick up the phone and call them. Quickly identify whether they have the authority and interest to contract with you and either continue the conversation or move on to your next lead.

Get attention; build your list of qualified leads; regularly help prospects with your ideas; and respond to your most qualified prospects promptly when they request services. Do these four things every week and every month and you’ll soon have many more prospects eager to learn how you can help them, eager to buy from you and more new clients than you ever thought possible.