The Seven Principles for Attracting More Clients

Master these Seven Principles and you’ll grow your business

If you are going to attract more clients to your professional service business you must market those services. But you can’t market haphazardly and expect consistent results. You must market according to proven principles. This brief article outlines those principles and gives the owner of a professional service business the keys to growing their business with less struggle and effort.

1. Marketing is a Game

Not many business owners see marketing as a game. They see it as a struggle. But it’s only a struggle because they are unaware of the rules of the game and how to win the game.

Let’s look at a game most people are familiar with – baseball. In baseball there are four main activities – throwing the ball, catching the ball, hitting the ball and running. Pretty simple. If you took a person who was highly proficient at these four activities but didn’t know the rules of baseball and had him join a baseball team, he would struggle for some time. Until he figured out the rules of the game, baseball would be mysterious and perplexing.

It’s much the same with marketing. Most of us know the fundamental activities of marketing – networking, writing, speaking, sending emails, etc, but we rarely see it as a game with very specific rules that lead to attracting clients on a consistent basis.

The marketing activities we engage in seem random and subject more to luck than intention. If we could discover that hidden marketing rulebook that explained how to move a client along the bases with some degree of predictability, marketing would be less of a struggle and much more fun as we began to win the game with some regularity.

Introducing Marketing Ball

Marketing Ball is the name I gave to the process that finally makes some sense out of the game of marketing. Marketing Ball outlines the rules, the skills and the moves required to win the game.

Marketing Ball is built on the simple premise that everyone who is now a client was once a stranger and that the purpose of marketing is to build a relationship with a prospect until they feel comfortable doing business with you.

Those relationships are built one step at a time through a very logical and methodical process. Even if you don’t realize you’re playing Marketing Ball, it’s still happening in the background. But as you master the game you’ll discover that you can convert prospects into clients more quickly and reliably.

Like baseball, in Marketing Ball, you move prospects around the diamond one base at a time. You start at home base armed with your marketing message. When you deliver that message, your aim is to get your prospect onto first base. You’re on first base when you have the attention and interest of a prospect.

Once a prospect is on first, your next marketing activities are designed to get them to second. Second base is when a prospect is ready to explore working with you. Third base is where a prospect is ready to buy from you and home plate is where you’ve consummated the sale and started working with your new client.

Mastering the game of Marketing Ball is a matter of understanding and practicing the “marketing plays” between the bases and gradually moving a prospect from a complete stranger to someone who is a paying client.

Marketing Ball isn’t about getting home runs by delivering a perfect marketing message (there isn’t such a thing), but by moving prospects around the bases as they learn more about how your services work and how they will benefit from working with you.

2. Having the Right Marketing Mindset

If marketing is a struggle for professionals, not only don’t they understand the game of marketing, they have a poor attitude about it. And this attitude, or what I prefer to call Mindset, colors our approach to marketing and tends to result in us avoiding most marketing activities.

A marketing mindset, is how we think about marketing. It’s our attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, expectations, fears, fixed positions, assumptions, and limitations. You could say that our marketing mindset is the “water that we swim in.”

It affects us profoundly, but we don’t see it because it’s so close to us. What we focus on, what we believe, what we think and what we assume, shape our actions. And if these beliefs, thoughts and assumptions are negative, we see marketing as something bad, something to be avoided.

Here are a few of the beliefs, thoughts and assumptions I’ve heard from Independent Professionals over the years. Do any of them sound familiar to you? Do you operate from any of these as if they were the gospel truth?

• Marketing leads to rejection
• If I ask for referrals it will sound like I’m begging
• Marketing doesn’t work for this kind of service
• I don’t have the time to market myself
• Only people with sub-standard services need marketing
• I can’t start until I know exactly what to do
• I’m not qualified (educated, experienced, etc.) enough yet
• Marketing is a bother and an interruption to people
  

And these are only the tip of the iceberg! In working with clients I’ve discovered that most are attached to literally dozens of thoughts and beliefs that lead to marketing avoidance.

How Marketing Mindsets Work

The response most of us have to negative marketing mindsets is to resist them. For instance, you’ve heard that networking could be useful to your business. But you don’t enjoy it due to your belief that “nobody who attends networking events needs my service.” But you resist that, put on a happy face and try your best, struggling through every event that you attend. Ultimately your experiences verify your beliefs and you give up networking as a waste of time.

When you’re stuck in a negative marketing mindset, everything that happens lines up with that mindset. People want reality to be consistent with their beliefs and this makes it hard to change a mindset.

Sometimes something will happen that challenges your belief and things can change very rapidly. For instance you may go to a networking event and connect with someone who turns into your best client. You then start to question your belief about networking because the new evidence is that it worked for you.

Start Questioning Your Mindsets

What has occurred to very few people, however, is to start questioning your mindset even before you have any observable evidence that it just may not be true. This is a simple but extraordinarily powerful approach, as it undermines your attachment to the beliefs that may be holding you back.

When we don’t question our limiting beliefs, we automatically become subject to them. When we start to sincerely question them, we may discover that what we were so certain was true may be the exact opposite.

Is it really true that all marketing leads to rejection that asking for referrals is begging that you don’t have time to market yourself, that you can’t start until you know exactly what to do? Perhaps not.

Once you start to inquire into your mindset, with the intention of discovering the truth, you may surprise yourself and actually realize that the opposite of these beliefs are just as true or truer. In my personal experience, I’ve discovered that marketing leads to acceptance, that asking for referrals is a contribution, that there is time to do marketing and that you can even start without knowing exactly what to do.

Learning and mastering this process of inquiry regarding various limiting marketing mindsets can transform your outlook about marketing forever. For many people, this has turned their experience of marketing from one of struggle, effort and poor results into an experience of ease, engagement and consistently good results.

3. Understanding the Language of Marketing

Marketing actually has a language. And the purpose of this language is to get attention, generate interest and motivate people to take action to find out more about our services.

If you understand this language and speak it fluently, you’ll be more successful at moving prospects around the bases of Marketing Ball and ultimately turning them into clients.

The language of marketing is based on what I call “Marketing Syntax.” Syntax is the order of things. Syntax creates meaning. For instance, the order of letters in a word give that word meaning and the order of words in a sentence give that sentence meaning.

I also discovered that the order in which you present marketing ideas determines the meaning the listener attaches to your message. In other words, if you deliver your marketing message in a certain order using marketing syntax, you’ll get more attention and interest than if you use a different order.

For instance when people ask us what we do, we often answer them literally, that is, we tell them our label or our process. We say, “I’m an accountant. I prepare taxes for small businesses.” That’s accurate, but it’s not a very attention-getting message. The listener is thinking, “What’s in it for me?”

The first three steps of marketing syntax are as follows:

• Target Market – That is, whom do you work with?
• Problem/Challenge – What issues do your clients have?
• Outcome – What results do your clients get?
  

This syntax can be used anytime you communicate about your business, verbally or in writing. And when you use it, your attention value will go up dramatically. Let’s look at these steps in a little more depth.

When someone asks what you do, the first words out of your mouth need to be about whom you work with. This creates focus: “I work with multi-national technology firms” or “I work with retailers on the East Coast.” When you identify who your ideal clients are, your listeners can immediately know whether or not you can help them.

Next you tell the problem or challenge you address. “…who are being beaten up by outsourcing” or “…whose profit margins are shrinking.” When you mention a problem, you hit a nerve. Problems are where people live. It’s what they are thinking about. And if you can address their problem, they will realize you know something important about them.

Finally, you communicate the outcome you actually deliver. This is what a client gets if you work with them. “We help our clients maintain their profit margins in an outsourcing economy.”

With this understanding of marketing syntax, you can start to develop your own personalized marketing message.

4. Creating a Powerful Marketing Message

Once you understand the basics of Marketing Syntax, you have the building blocks that enable you to create marketing messages that actually communicate the true value you offer.

The problems most professional service businesses encounter in developing such a message include the following:

• The message isn’t directed to a target market.
• The message fails to hit a nerve.
• The message talks about services, not solutions.
• The message tries to say too much and gets unwieldy.
• The message doesn’t say enough and becomes cryptic.
  

All of these are relatively easy to solve as these examples show:

Not directed to a target market:

Every marketing message should start with something like: “We work with this kind of client…” or “We help this kind of client… (insert the appropriate demographics or psychographics).”

Fails to hit a nerve

Talk about a problem, challenge, issue, pain, or predicament that is symptomatic and clearly observable. Say: “We work with managers who are struggling to reach their financial targets.” This they can understand, and it hits a nerve. Don’t say, “We work with managers who are marginalizing their optimal financial opportunities.” Huh? Don’t laugh, I’ve heard worse.

Talks about services, not solutions

When you talk about services, I need to translate what it means to me. If you get right into solutions, results and outcomes, I see the immediate benefit. “We offer a retention maximization program,” isn’t as good as, “We have a service that will increase retention of your best employees.” Now that has value.

Says too much

To get someone’s attention, you need to communicate in meaningful sound bites. Run-on sentences or worse, messages with multiple targets, problems, and solutions, will only confuse people: “We work with large and small companies in the broadband and microwave industries who have management, marketing and financial issues and want to dominate markets at the lowest cost while retaining high-performing and self-generating managers/leaders.” Expect confused looks.

Says too little

You might understand the message you’ve come up with, but your audience many need some translation. “What do you do?” “I’m a management consultant.” Wait, what’s wrong with that? Nothing except that it’s meaningless except to other management consultants. There’s no target, problem or solution. And so the twenty questions game begins.

Next, you expand your marketing message into written marketing materials that communicate about your services in more depth.

5. Developing Persuasive Marketing Materials

What’s persuasive? Many think of overly exaggerated hyperbole. But that’s not the case. Good marketing information educates your prospect about how your services will benefit them.

Marketing materials are what come after your main marketing message. Once you have someone’s attention and interest, you need to provide enough information so that they will know if you can help them or not.

Marketing materials, such as a web site, brochure or presentation also employ marketing syntax. They open with a discussion of the target market, continue with an overview of the prospect’s situation and challenges and then discuss desired outcomes and solutions.

Marketing syntax continues with the following elements:

• Stories or case studies of clients you’ve succeeded with.
• Benefits, advantages and features of your services.
• Background on you and your firm for credibility.
• A call to action to let the prospect know what to do next.

Let’s look at all of these in a little more detail. The purpose for this information is to answer the unasked questions lurking in the back of your prospects’ minds.

Stories or Case Studies

These answer the question, “Have you worked with clients like me and have you been successful?” This is a very valid question. And you don’t answer such a question conceptually, you simply outline a number of case studies that explain what you did for your clients and what results you produced. This is very persuasive and gets the prospect thinking how they could get similar results.

Benefits, Advantages, Features of Service

This answers the question, “How exactly do your services work?” Prospects want a snapshot of what it will be like when they are clients. What will happen, how long will it take, how will they be involved and exactly what process or methods will be employed?

Background on You and Firm

This answers the question “Who are you and are you credible.” Interestingly enough, this is not the biggest question most prospects have. So it doesn’t need to be the first page of your website. But many are interested in your background, experience, education and even some personal information so they can get a sense of what it would be like working with you.

Call to Action

This answers the question, “What do I do next to find out more?” People are hesitant to pick up the phone or even send an email until they know more about how you start working with clients. Tell them what will transpire once they contact you. Show that you are accessible and easy to work with. And give them a reason to contact you now (not someday).

The great thing is that all of this information can be communicated efficiently and effectively on a website. It’s a powerful marketing vehicle that is often under-utilized by professional service businesses.

Now you are ready to take your marketing message and materials and get them in front of prospects through a variety of marketing strategies.

6. Determining Marketing Strategies

Once you are armed with the previously mention marketing principles you are ready to choose marketing strategies or activities that get your message out into the world and in front of prospective clients.

Let’s revisit Marketing Ball. The marketing strategies you employ depend on where your prospects are located on the Marketing Ball model. Remember that the purpose is to move them around the bases. First are marketing activities to get prospects onto first base.

From Stranger to Affiliation to Attention

Your first step in moving from home base to first is developing affiliations with those who could be possible clients. An affiliation is a connection between people. If you belong to an association or organization, you have an affiliation. If you went to the same college, you have an affiliation. If you belong to a church, you have an affiliation with all the other members.

Your first marketing task is to form affiliations with groups and organizations who are made up of prospects or those who can lead to prospects. These are the people who will be most receptive to your marketing messages. Whether you network, make calls or send mailings, if you have created an affiliation first, your message will be more readily accepted and you’ll get the attention you need to get onto first base.

From Attention to Familiarity

Going from first base to second base is a longer process where you get to know your prospect and they get to know you. People like to do business with those they know, like and trust, so your next task is to stay visible and become familiar to those you are affiliated with. Doing such things as networking actively, adding members to your ezine list, and meeting with others over coffee or lunch builds your “familiarity factor.” Then once you are more familiar, prospects want more information.

From Familiarity to Information

Even when people know you by name, they don’t necessarily understand what you really do for your clients. Your next job is to provide the information that lets them know who you work with, what challenges you address and what outcomes you produce. Important information tools are web sites and articles such as the one you’re reading now.

From Information to Experience

The final stage before getting to second base is providing more of an experience to your prospects. Going beyond information, where you tell people what you do, is to actually demonstrate the value of your work. This can be accomplished through case studies, presentations and, in some cases, offering a sample of your work through presentations, executive briefings or teleclasses.

From Experience to the Selling Process

With a sufficient amount of affiliation, attention, familiarity, information and experience, prospects are much more likely to want to explore working with you. You might say this is where marketing ends and selling begins. When you get to second base you are engaging in the selling process and learning how you can help this prospect specifically. Selling is much easier if you have played the marketing game well up to this point.

Because this article is more focused on the marketing process, I won’t go into the details of the selling process here. But now you know the most important strategies of the marketing game and how to play to win.

7. Creating Marketing Action Plans

Even after you’ve developed the foundation of your marketing, which includes understanding the game, maintaining the ideal marketing mindset, creating a powerful marketing message, materials, and strategies, you have one more important step towards marketing success.

And this step is creating a marketing action plan. You might think of this as a marketing blueprint, much like an architectural blueprint. This action plan is your step-by-step guide in implementing your marketing strategies.

An ideal marketing action plan includes the following elements:

Your Target Market

Who exactly will you approach? Who are your potential clients and where can they be reached?

Price

What will you charge for the service you are offering?

Strategy

How will you get the word out? What is the specific strategy you’ll use to market your service? For instance, this might be networking, speaking, publishing, or mailings.

Purpose

This is the ultimate result you hope to achieve by implementing your plan. For instance, the purpose of a speaking plan may be to “Get 10 new clients valued at $5,000 each.”

Intended Results

This is everything else you intend to accomplish through this marketing strategy. So in addition to attracting more clients, you may want to a) get more exposure to you target market, b) increase your credibility, c) add names to your email list, d) sell products at the presentation, e) improve your speaking ability.

Strategy Game Plan

This is your actual approach to implementing your strategy. If you’ve chosen a speaking plan you need to determine where you will speak, how you will get engagements, what topic to speak on, what handouts and materials are required, and what offer to make after the talk. This will often take some research and assistance to avoid major mistakes in your implementation.

Marketing Materials and Resources

What written or other marketing materials will be needed? And what other resources will be required for success? This may include money, information and assistance.

Offers and Call to Action

For many steps of the plan you may need to ask someone to take action. You will need to approach organizations and ask them to book you. At the presentation you will be selling your ideas and ask them to buy your concepts. At the end you will deliver a close that asks your participants to request a follow-up.

Follow-Up

Once you have implemented your activity, you need to follow up in some way, shape or form. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope the phone starts ringing.

Action Steps and Timeline

The final step in your marketing action plan is to outline all the steps you will take in chronological order.

I hope you found this article useful. Feel free to leave me a comment.

To Your Success,

Chad Timothy
http://www.chadtimothy.com/
http://www.softwarebillionsclub.com/
Chad Timothy's 500K Instant Cash Flow System

How to Maximize Your Opt-In List: A Quick Guide

Make everything user friendly

Your website is the front-end of your operations, the shining gemstone of all your marketing efforts. This is why you should make everything as painless as possible when people are trying to sign up for something.

Streamline it

The most important component of your offer should be clearly visible. Use simple, bright colors and clean text links. If you want your visitors to view two or three more pages, make sure that they can navigate the deeper pages with little effort. If they don’t want to navigate other pages anymore, the registration form should easily be seen on the landing page they are on.

There is not fixed formula for the placement of your main call to action. It all depends on your website’s over-all design, the length of your copy, the number of illustrations and graphics, etc. You don’t have to guess. What you can do is create different versions of your landing pages with the call to action box in different places. Ask people to take a look, and see which placements convert well. Testing is key.

Additionally, you can also experiment with your font styles and font sizes.

Straightforward registration forms

What do you need their home addresses and phone numbers for? People are no longer comfortable with sharing this information with total strangers, much less to someone who is amassing hundreds or thousands of people’s names and email addresses. If you do not have a direct use for such information, then don’t ask the information from people trying to opt-in. If you need a person’s physical address, you can ask them confidentially in specialized (customized emails) and you have to reassure them that all the data would be held in strict confidence. Ask for a name and their email address- that’s all you need for an opt-in. You can get to the nitty-gritty of their private lives after you get their email (and trust).

What’s in it for them?

Really, with the amount of junk on the Internet today you have to be really convincing with your offer. And you have to be reassuring as well. You can go the extra mile for more opt-ins by providing sample screen shots of what they will be receiving in the mail. Live samples such as online PDF copies of a few newsletters can also be helpful (make sure that your ‘snippets’ are good quality).

1. More options means more opt-ins

Letting people ‘shop’ for the stuff that they would receive in their personal mail boxes is one of the most efficient ways of multiplying the number of your opt-ins. For example, you can offer them a newsletter, but directly beneath the check box for the newsletter is another check box for a good primer or a cool free eBook. You see the difference already? They’re not stuck with something that looks machine-wrought. They see a list of free goodies that they would get immediately by just giving away their email address. Additionally, you can also offer your new opt-ins technical options. For example, they can choose between plain text emails and vanilla-flavored HTML emails. They can also opt for monthly newsletters, daily alerts, bi-daily alerts, weekly primers, and more. Expanding to the social networks such as Facebook can also help increase the exposure of your current deals. It’s fast, and it works.

2. More value for their opting-in

There’s a difference between adding one-time bonuses for opt-ins and genuine quality content delivered over time. In the age of Web 2.0, the agile email marketer gets the most number of conversions. Don’t rely on ‘carrots’ too much because they won’t get people talking about your website much. ‘Carrots’, as we’ve mentioned earlier, are one-time bonus you offer people to just sign up (but it is by no means an effective method of convincing people to buy anything from you). If you can produce engaging case studies with real statistics and usable data for your mailing lists, then you have something.

3. Invite people to opt-in whenever you are communicating directly

Your website can be considered direct communication; the same applies to Twitter and Facebook. So what’s stopping you from offering your email course or newsletter when you’re actively communicating with your clients?

Here are just a few of the places where you can include an efficient “call to action”.

Your website

Of course. It should be at the center of all your activities.

Social networking

I will say this again and again: use social networking to your advantage.

Call centers rock!

Inbound call center communications are actually a vibrant source of conversions, if you know how to format the script right. With B2C communications, it’s always wise to include an invitation to sign up or opt-in for something when the customer is about to close the chat window. If your customer service representative provided good service, then there’s no reason why a cheerful and polite request to sign up would be denied. Think about it; what do you have to lose if you ask your agents to include an extra link at the end of each B2C conversation?

Conferences and other engagements

Nothing like good old offline marketing to get your website started. While you will get only a fraction of the total number of people attending a trade show or conference, you’re still getting more people to sign up. Remember, business cards are not a sign of agreeing to anything. Ask for permission first and tell your potential consumers what you have to offer when they agree to register.

Make your content shareable

Social networking works best if people can share what they saw on your email or website to other people. Actually, this is already the beginning stage of viral marketing. By encouraging involvement, you’re making people feel that they are part of something dynamic. However, don’t expect thousands of new subscriptions with mere Tweets and Diggs. The main impetus for creating content that is shareable is exposure. More exposure means better business, remember that.

I hope you found this article useful. Feel free to leave me a comment.

To Your Success,

Chad Timothy
http://www.chadtimothy.com/
http://www.softwarebillionsclub.com/
Chad Timothy's 500K Instant Cash Flow System

Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Everyone’s talking about using social media networking to increase their profits. Traditional strategies like email marketing are being slammed for ‘hipper’ strategies like using Twitter and Facebook. However, lots of companies still use email marketing no matter how cumbersome or ‘un-hip’ it may seem. From getting people to buy eBooks to getting people to sign up for auto-shipping programs for slimming pills, the humble email is still the number 1 choice of those who are just entering the wild world of niche marketing, etc. and for those who have been in this business for a long time.

Spam laws matter

There are two sets of international laws on spam emails. One is for the United States and the other is for Europe. In the United States, there is the federal legislation for spam and there are also state regulations for spam. It would be best if you can take into consideration these existing laws just to be safe. You can’t be too careful, because CAN-SPAM laws are in force and are funded.

What makes an offer, an email course or a ‘hard-sell’ email spam? First, if the sender of these materials does not provide a basic ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘opt-out’ option in the email, which can immediately qualify the email as spam. Why would you send someone unsolicited mail if they can’t unsubscribe? That’s already forcing someone something they won’t even read. The content of newsletters also matter. If a newsletter looks like it’s been written by a troubled fifth grader, then would people want to read it? No, people would rather have something else on their personal mailboxes, like emails from friends and their bosses. Certainly not a newsletter with grammatical errors and senseless content.

It’s quite easy to follow the basic rules of CAN-SPAM. First, identify yourself adequately in the Sender box. Next, include the physical address of your company or organization. Third, make sure people can stop your emails from coming. Write the unsubscribing information on the bottom of the email, but make sure you include it. If you don’t, you might be fined $11,000. And that’s for every time you commit such a mistake!

Opting-in matters, too (a lot)

Well you know, you can just send your emails to tens of thousands of people right? Some companies are still doing this up to now. Well you can do that too, if you want to fill up the Spam folders of Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Fact is, these three are wising up with better spam filtering. Now, what would make your email, well, recipient friendly? The answer is “opt-ins”. We know you probably are laughing right now, because opt-ins is part of the ABCs of email marketing. But hey, we give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If you want to annoy people, send unsolicited email. If you want to make fat profits from selling something online, then make them opt-in for something.

Offering something to potential clients must be done with all honesty. If you want to offer infrequent sales letters so they get discounts galore on some months, then just tell them. It would be better if they choose this option for themselves. Instead of being annoyed, people would feel empowered, because hey, you gave them the choice to receive something of value when they subscribed to your mailing list.

Is there a way to make your offer even more powerful? YES.

Double opt-ins can make two things possible: first, reduce the chances of your mails being automatically junked by Spam filters and second, a double opt-in can filter out not-so-serious takers from the serious takers. By asking them to confirm their subscription, you can also take the opportunity to pitch another product or upgrade. Make your mails creative! Creativity rules in the realm of email marketing.

Why are you sending them to your homepage?

We know your homepage is one of the well-designed parts of your website, but does it really drive home your message? Does your homepage really contain the information that would get you a sale, based on the unique content of your email? Remember the basic rule of sending out emails over a period of time? Each email has to be unique but should employ different strategies in selling whatever it is you need to sell. It might be useful if you had unique landing pages based on what your emails are promising to your recipients. For example, if you offered them a money-back guarantee, the link on your email should lead to a landing page that talks about the money-back guarantee more. It’s all about efficient dissemination of information, right?

Quality is also an issue here. We know that it can be tiresome to write new information for your mailing lists. It’s not unusual for webmasters to have people rewrite things that have been sitting on their website for years already. Hey, people notice these things. If every email is mirror of the last one, what’s the point of reading these mails anyway?

Re-thinking graphic-laden emails

Most email services these days offer recipients the ability to download or ignore images – many choose to ignore them. Should you quit using graphics altogether? Not really. Visuals work very well, but you have to balance it out. 75 kilobytes is the ideal size of HTML emails with graphics.

Back to the basics of copywriting

Should copies for your emails be shorter or longer? Some people say that shorter copy works better in conveying what needs to be said. For example, “Know How To Take Care of Baby Tigers Without Being Eaten!” is definitely an eye-catching headline (and it’s only 11 words long!). How long should the email copy be? It all depends on what you are trying to sell. Some products require short copy; some need longer copy in order to sell well.

Subject lines are for nerds? Not anymore!

Every part of the email matters, not just the body of the email. If you have an insufficient sender’s address you get fined. If your subject line is lousy, you’re missing out on getting fast clicks and genuine interest in what you have to say! Now, how can you make those profit-laden subject lines? It’s easy! What’s the gist of your email offer? Are you offering discounts or bonuses? Write those down! Try to create a subject line that’s 6-8 words long. If you need to be wordier, just make sure that people can read your subject line in one breath, okay?

Learn how to link your emails with Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Online marketing is all about creating synergy. Isolating one part of your advertising campaign from the larger body can be detrimental to your efforts in building a name for yourself or your company. Twitter and other social media networking services can be avenues of fast information relays. But you have to make sure that what you’re saying on your emails are also connected with what you are saying on Twitter. For example, an ideal link to your Twitter page would be “Liked the 10% discount here? Get more discounts and freebies. Follow us on Twitter at (insert your Twitter link here)” It’s easy, it doesn’t take up much of your time and your clients would think that they’ve hit a gold mine with a single email that you sent. Email marketers need to provide a lot of useful content to people in order to gain their trust.

Now, don’t forget mobile phones. Mobile marketing is very promising if you do it right. Immediacy can also make a world of difference. For example, if you own an online bookshop, you can send a message to your mailing list that would get a fast response: “New York Time Bestsellers at 50% off, only 2 days to go!” Because of the time constraint, people who are already thinking of buying a book would probably check out your website since you are offering a big discount on selected books.

Are you bored with testing?

Testing emails? People might scoff at the idea at first, especially if they’ve read too many books and they feel generally lazy. But it works, that’s the point. Get a small segment from your current mailing lists and send them different emails. Measure the response rate. Its easy mathematics: the email that gets the most number of good responses is the mail that is most effective in laying down the cards!


I hope you found this article useful. Feel free to leave me a comment.

To Your Success,

Chad Timothy
http://www.chadtimothy.com/
http://www.softwarebillionsclub.com/
Chad Timothy's 500K Instant Cash Flow System

Effective Tips for Postcard Marketing

Alright my friends. As some of you know I'm a fan of postcard marketing. Let me explain some helpful tips...

Postcard printing may not be the most popular marketing strategy in this day and age of high technology but...

Nevertheless, the power of postcards cannot be overrated, even if it is just cheap.

Postcard marketing can be the most cost-effective alternative to generating traffic and movement in any sales leads. It does help a lot in generating traffic to your website.So how do you create these small yet powerful marketing tools to help you boost your sales?

Here are proven tips that guarantee you a huge impact albeit it is just cheap or affordable.

1- Create first impressions that last. Create postcards that look like your target audience gets them from a friend.

You will not only be kept and remembered but your target audience would certainly appreciate a marketing tool that is exactly what they do not expect - advertising collateral.

2- Don't beat around the bush.

Get right to the point and deliver a format that is easy to comprehend by your recipients. By making the biggest benefit they would get as the very first thing your target audience sees in your advertising material, the rest would be a breeze.

3- Be clear and direct.

Again, the bottom line is to get your target readers to know your offer right away. So make your message brief and direct-to-the point. You only have a few seconds before your target readers get distracted with other stuff.

So make your few seconds count.

4- Sell the right offer.

Postcards are too small for you to be able to convince your target readers to take you up on your offer. Indeed, your postcard printing would be less effective if you want to close a sale.

Instead, have your print postcards sell the idea of getting your reader to seek for more information. Rather than try to make a sale every time, be sure to encourage your target readers and ask for more details of your product or service.

5- Encourage action right away.

Have them respond NOW. If you need for them to get more information, then be sure to give them a reason to do so the moment they read your message. Do not let them put your postcards down without getting any action from them.

They will be distracted with other things and your offer will surely be forgotten when they become very busy later on.

Postcards may not be new and high-tech for many, but it does not mean they do not get the job done. They can help any business, small or otherwise, to generate leads, which can turn into actual sales to increase your profits.

Top 4 Tips for getting the best results from your AdSense Ads

Top 4 Tips for getting the best results from your AdSense Ads

The revenue that you earn from Google AdSense program is totally dependent on you and your abilities.

Here are some tips that you can use to get the best results from your AdSense Ads:

1. Use channels: Channels help you in conducting a better analysis of the performance of your AdSense Ads. You can use custom channels to check what web pages are making more revenue and which ones are not doing so well.

In fact, custom channels can be used for conducting analysis on multiple aspects at the same time. You can use this analysis for making amendments to your AdSense Ads or website content in order to get better results.

2. Ad customization and positioning: Shape, Size and color are the three properties of your AdSense Ads that you can easily control and customize in a way that the Ads don’t look out of place when served on your website.

You can either make your Ads stand-out from the rest of the content on your webpage or you can make them blend with the overall webpage.

Moreover, you can identify the hot spots on your website and position your Ads accordingly. Ad customization and Ad positioning are, in fact, the best ways to attract more clicks to your AdSense Ads.

3. Content quality: ‘The best generally overcomes the rest’ – is a very true saying. If you host quality content on your website and provide regular updates to your visitors, you can expect more traffic to your website. This will in turn lead to more ad impressions and possibly more clicks.

4. Use AdSense Ads on all pages: If you have multiple web pages on your website, you should include AdSense Ads on all of them. Since the visitors can enter your website through a number of different pages, having AdSense Ads on all the pages will surely increase your earnings.

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Parts 1-4

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Part 1 (Enrollment form)

For those of you new to the Adsense scene I wrote this quick start report to help get you off and running with Google Adsense.

So, you have decided to go ahead and use Google AdSense for generating revenue from your website. Google AdSense doesn’t need you to sell any products or services.

With Google AdSense, you are just selling advertising space on your website. And the best part is that Google doesn’t discriminate between websites; so, any website owner can enroll with Google AdSense program (as long as it adheres to the Google AdSense program policies).

Moreover, setting up a Google AdSense account is so easy that you can literally start generating revenue within 15 minutes.

For enrolling to the Google AdSense program, go to https://www.google.com/AdSense and click on the ‘Click here to Apply’ button. You will be presented with an enrolment form where you need to fill-in some details like your website information (URL and website language), the Google AdSense products that you wish to use (i.e. AdSense for Content or AdSense for Search), your contact information, your email address and your preferences.

You will also need to select an account type (business/individual) for your AdSense Account and agree to the various policies, terms and conditions of Google AdSense program.

The account type will not affect your revenues in any way; it is there just to determine if the payment is to be made in the name of a company or an individual. The email address and the password that you provide during the enrolment process will be required by you for logging into your account later on. Note that you will be referred to as publisher by the Google AdSense program; so when you return back to the Google AdSense website, you will be asked to enter your login details as an ‘Existing Publisher’.

That’s it. You can now submit your application form for Google to evaluate and get back to you.

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Part 2 (Essential customizations)

Once you are done with setting up your Google AdSense account and once Google has approved your application, you are ready to use Google AdSense for earning revenue from your website.

Just login into your account using your email address and password, click ‘AdSense Setup’ in the top menu and select the product type (i.e. ‘AdSense for Content’ or ‘AdSense for Search’). You will be presented with various options for customization of your AdSense Ads.

Here we will take a look at setting up ‘AdSense for Content’ only (however, the setup for ‘AdSense for Search’ is quite similar and equally easy).

The first thing that you need to choose is the Ad type (Ad unit or link unit). Based on the Ad type you choose, you will need to specify the type of ad (text, image, etc for Ad unit) or number of links per link unit too.

Google AdSense program allows you to use a maximum of three ad units and 1 link unit per web page (and you must use both, in order to maximize your AdSense revenue).

The next thing is to choose the Ad layout. There are various layouts available but large rectangle (336x280) and wide skyscraper (160x600) are preferred over others (since they help get more impressions for you and hence help you make more money).

Customizing the colors of various parts of your AdSense ad is the next thing you need to do. Even though customizing colors is optional (as far as the Google AdSense program is concerned), it’s strongly recommended for making your Ads attractive and more effective.

Your choice of colors must be governed by the look and feel of your website so that the Ad doesn’t look out of place.

These are the essential customizations that you surely need to do before you can start using Google AdSense Ads on your website.

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Part 3 (Additional customizations)

Besides the essential customizations like selecting the Ad type, Ad layout and colors, there are some other customizations that you can apply to your AdSense account.

In fact, some of these can quite easily be treated as essential customizations (based on the context of your website) e.g. ‘filters’ is one such customization that is quite important. Let’s take a look at what these additional customizations are:

Filters: Google allows you to set-up custom ad filters for your website (note that this is in addition to the screening of ad content that Google does by default).

By setting up filters you can block competitive Ads and other Ads that you don’t want to display on your website. In fact, filters are a must if your website sells a product or a service (unless you want to promote your competitors through your website).

Alternate Ads: This is something that can help you in preventing underutilization of the ad space on your website. Alternate Ads are the Ads that you would want to show up on your website in case sufficient content-relevant Ads are not available.

If you don’t specify alternate Ads and if there are insufficient content-related Ads available, Google AdSense program will serve charitable Ads to your website (Ads which don’t earn revenue for you).

Reporting and performance tracking: You can even customize the reporting and performance tracking options for your AdSense account.

One important tool in this regard is the use of channels to study the performance of AdSense Ads from various perspectives.

However, you might decide to take this up later down the line (maybe 1 month after setting up your AdSense account.

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Part 4 (AdSense code)

Once you are done with all the customizations, your AdSense code is generated in the AdSense Code box. You just need to copy this code (which is in the form of a programming script) from the AdSense Code box and paste it in your website as per the guidelines from Google.

Since Google allows only three ad units per page, you can add the code at more than one place in your html code.

The next step is to save your web page to the designated web server (as per the instructions from your web hosting service provider). Please note that Google AdSense program does not require you to send over your website’s html code to them; neither does it ask to load it onto their servers or do anything else with it.

The addition of AdSense code to your website’s code is the only thing that you need to do. Separate procedures are available with Google for people who want to use AdSense Ads with their blogs (you can check these on Google’s website for AdSense program).

Now that everything is done and dusted, you need to wait for a few hours (might be lesser than that) before Google’s web crawlers find your web page or blog that has AdSense code on it and you start seeing AdSense Ads on your web page or blog.

You might see some PSA (charitable Ads) initially (almost immediately) but these will soon get replaced with the AdSense Ads that will earn revenue for you.

If the content on your website violates the AdSense program’s policies, you might keep seeing PSAs even after few hours.

In all such cases (or if you find objectionable Ads that don’t go even after you have applied appropriate filters), you will need to contact Google who will sort out the problems for you.