How To Get Clients Today

Quickly Get Your Professional Service Business Off The Ground With These Handy Videos That Show You How To Get Clients Now

My name is Raglan Tribe and I’ve made a few videos to help you “kick-start” your consulting or coaching career. Now one of the biggest barriers to setting up your own professional service practice is getting clients! You can’t really call yourself a consultant, coach or service provider until you’ve bagged your first client. If you’re struggling to get clients then these videos will quickly get you started.

I’ve been consulting since 2003 and have won all kinds of clients from Government to large companies such as: Toyota, Hyundai, Ford, Toshiba, Finmeccanica all the way down to the very smallest of businesses. Either way, my approach is very similar. You see, it doesn’t really matter how big the organisation is, it all comes down to building relationships with individuals and the techniques are universal.

Focus on Relationship Building

You need to build a relationship over time before they trust you enough to undertake the service.
First you become visible to a client, either because of something that you’ve written or maybe a talk that you’ve given and they approach you or you go to them.
Next you make contact and you both agree to some follow up meeting. All the time, your credibility is growing .
You listen to their requirements at the follow up meeting, maybe give a presentation and this may lead to further meetings with their colleagues.
Then eventually you bond and connect with a potential buyer who is authorised to contract your service.
You reach conceptual agreement then there comes the critical stage of clinching the deal in the form of a proposal that gets contractually accepted by the client.
Now you deliver the assignment with great results so that they keep coming back for more and more business. Not only that, they also refer other business to you and your practise grows in line with your delivery success.

But there are plenty of challenges. It takes time to get clients and land the deal and that’s time without any earnings. Your fees have to be high to recover all the lost marketing time. There’s endless frustration with follow up and chasing. You can’t control the flow of business with multiple opportunities on the go. After a while you’ll rely more and more on repeat business from existing clients. This is a good sign as it demonstrates good delivery, but it also can limit the growth of your practise.

But I told you that you can get clients today! So how do you overcome these obstacles and build high value relationships that yield business without sacrificing all your precious time. Well you either focus on prospects where you aready have a relationship such as ex colleagues or previous customers or the answer lies in Web Chemistry.

So What Is Web Chemistry?

… and How Can It Get Clients Today

Web Chemistry is a structured approach for getting clients and managing new client relationships over the internet. I’ve put together a short video on web chemistry and in it I show you:

How to position your expertise online and avoid the cycle of feast and famine
How to save time and the frustration of endless follow-up
The top 3 strategies that build residual income streams and that raise your daily fees
The most critical factor for selling high value services over the internet (hint: it’s not relationship building)
How to consistently manage and control your sales funnel to achieve the right level of client flow

Web Chemistry helps you build strong relationships and position your expertise online to secure high value clients, even while you sleep.

Watch my video to find out more and get clients now.

Britain can’t PR it’s way out of the financial blackhole

The 1 Tip You Need To Know Before You Start Consulting

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If you are thinking about becoming a consultant you are probably already expert in some sought after field and would now like to exploit the potential of your expertise for generating consulting income.

Consulting is a great way for generating substantial income, raising your profile and expanding your network and even horizons.

But how do you get started? Or more importantly where will you get clients from?

This report, based on my own consulting experience over the last 8 years, reveals hard won secrets for driving your consulting success. These tips will get you quickly started along the consulting road.

Enter Email For Instant Access To: 6 Secrets To Kick-Start Your Consulting Career Report and Video

I suppose the greatest tip I ever received when starting my consulting career was don’t sell your service, instead focus on building relationships. Now think about this for a moment, how do you start a relationship?

Well, I generally do this by giving the client something of value without the expectation of receiving anything in return. It’s called “Giver’s Gain” or “What goes around comes around” and when it comes to consulting, nothing is more true than this expression.

Now in the spirit of this approach, I have compiled a report detailing some of my top consulting secrets. Secrets that have lead to millions of pounds of consulting business. In this cool report, I show you how to:

Get lucrative clients
Better still, how to get clients coming to you!
Managing the client pitch so that your service is seen as irresistible
Writing the proposal so as to clinch the deal
And so on …

Create a Lead Generation Marketing Machine for your Consulting Practice And …

Discover how to secure High Value Clients online for your services

Even While You Sleep. Yours FREE …

Here’s What’s Inside:

Discover how to position your expertise online and avoid the cycle of feast and famine
How to save time and the frustration of endless follow-up
Top 3 strategies that build residual income streams and that raise your daily fees
The most critical factor for selling high value services over the internet (hint: it’s not relationship building)
How to consistently manage and control your sales funnel to achieve the right level of client flow

Just watch the video and the enter your email into the box below to get access to Web Chemistry and further consulting tips:

HTML Meta Tags That Rock!

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The tool I’m introducing today is the Meta Tag. Meta Tags are embedded in web pages and describe the page for Search Engines but are invisible to human visitors. They allow you to define the:

Page Title
Description and
Keywords

When you type a search phrase, the entries that come back in the Google list show these Meta tags. Most websites don’t bother to fill them in. Therefore, Google shows some random lines from the page instead. For instance here’s one cryptic entry that I found:

Dismissing fairly

eg dismissal of an employee who was taken on as a temporary replacement for an employee on maternity leave. However, for such a dismissal to be fair, …

I don’t think that I’d click on this description; it’s just not very compelling!

Much better to write your Meta tags the same way that you’d write an advert. If the searcher typed in Employee Dismissal imagine how powerful this might be:

Just One Small HR Mistake Cost This Small Business Owner His Company

Download free tool that shows you how to safely manage disciplinary meetings without fear of comeback.

Or, for a performance management coach how about:

Are You Getting What You Deserve From Your Small Business?

Download free tool to set you on the right path for high performance business achievement.

And best of all, these Google Adverts don’t cost you anything!

Which Keyword Analysis Tool?

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I develop business websites and blogs for consultants, coaches and professional service providers. One thing I get asked all the time is how can my website Attract New Clients?

Well really it’s no different to any other marketing. The fundamental question is where does my market hang out? and how can I get my targetted message in front of them? The video below shows you how to connect your website to the market and then afterwards, I take you through the process of Keyword Analysis and which tool to use.

Website design always starts with keyword analysis so that you can tap into the most lucrative target markets. Basically, carry out the following steps:

Start with Google and ask “what keyword phrase would my perfect customer type in?”
Then dig down and check out all the related phrases and synonyms
Now find the keyword phrases that have a high number of daily searches but not too many competing pages
Now write your pages to address the best niche search phrases. Include the keyword phrase in the article heading, page title, meta tags and body

So for instance:

I have a client who does performance management coaching for small businesses. During the analysis I discover the phrase “Time Management Strategies” which has 145 daily searches, 56,100 pages mention the phrase and 3,230 pages have the phrase in the title.
On the other hand, another client provides HR outsourcing services. This time the phrase “Human Resources Job Descriptions” has 891 daily searches and 6,670 competing pages (but careful the singular has only 144 daily searches)

In both cases, a good strategy would be to write an article with these titles and then watch your web page climb the google rankings.

Finally, you want to know which tool should you use for conducting this analysis. The answer is straightforward, who has the most reliable data? and of course the answer is Google. Therefore, you can either take out a free account with Google and use their own keyword analysis tool or use other tools that rely on Google’s own database, such as Market Samurai.

Does Google Leave You In The Dark?

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I don’t know about you, but so much of Google just leaves me in the Dark. For instance, I sign up for a new Google tool and I can’t see it along with all my other tools. I come back the next day and mysteriously, it’s now there!

Then again, look at their quality score for advertisers, it doesn’t seem much, they hardly explain how it works. But it makes an enormous difference to your “pay per click” costs.

Obviously, they try and keep you in the dark so that spammers can’t exploit their methods to create high rankings for irrelevant sites and I don’t think this is ever likely to change.

Instead, run your mouse over the above picture to help you feel in control of High and Mighty Google! Become the puppet master for a change.

7 Steps to Create Your Own Web Based Lead Generation System

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Finding new customers in this climate is harder than ever and your web site could be the best marketing tool that you possess. If it’s not bringing in new leads for your business, then what purpose is it really serving?

Whether you’ve got an existing web site that isn’t working hard enough or you haven’t got one in place yet, I’ve put together a 7 step process to help you create your own web based lead generation system and bring lots of customers your way.

Step 1: Market research and segment prioritisation

You can be anything you want to be but you can’t be all things to all people, Dr Glenn Livingston

Otherwise you will lack focus and credibility.

So what does that mean? You have to get to know your market and work out who you want to appeal to the most.

Carry out keyword research – find keywords and phrases which relate to your products or services. Use tools like “Google Keyword Suggestion”
Segment your market based on the keyword research findings
Prioritise those segments
Be very focused at appealing to those priority segments. You can only have one headline on your web page. What will yours be?
(Read my blog 2 Niche Finder Golden Rules for more tips)

Step 2: Set up a domain name

If you’ve already got a website, I’m guessing your domain name reflects your company name in some way. But how are people going to stumble across your site if they have no idea who you are?

What you want is to find a domain name that is close to the term that your customers are searching for; this brings in targeted website traffic. Now the search engines know you are highly relevant and put you high on their list.

Having decided on your domain name, here’s a quick tip. Register your domain name independently from your hosting company so it’s yours to move where you want, without being tied to one hosting company.

www.ukreg.co.uk and www.godaddy.com are domain registration companies we often use.

Step 3: Hosting and web set up

You need build your website on a content management system (CMS) platform to allow you to add your own content on a regular basis. It needs to be search engine friendly with pretty urls and metatag set ups. We’re big fans of the WordPress CMS system. (Don’t worry if this all sounds alien, it will become clear as these blogs unfold).

The structure of the website needs to be search engine friendly. Optimise every aspect of your site including the invisible descriptions seen only by the robot crawlers. But most importantly: the highly visible domain name, title and headings can increase the rankings of your website tenfold. You need to make certain that key sections are addressed such as Contact Us pages. Not only will this have a big impact on Google quality scores but it provides an opportunity to build a layer of trust with your audience, as the users gets a sense of a bonafide company behind the website.

Step 4: Content creation

Content is king online. But remember you need to create content not just on your web pages, but on your posts, blogs, autoresponders, lead magnets to name but a few.

When you are thinking about the type of content you need to create for your priority market segment, an important step is to understand the difference between content that fulfils a point of entry requirement and content that fulfils a point of differentiation requirement.

Let me explain. Point of entry information is a mandatory requirement to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about. However, your customers can find out the same information in a lot of other places too. On the other hand, information that differentiates takes you a cut above the pack. Customers want to know this information and are having great difficulty finding the answers elsewhere.

For instance, I think most customers understand the importance of building a list and have a fairly good idea how to do it. A differentiator would be, how to build a list of hyper-repsonsive customers. The 20% of raving fans that are far more likely to buy, rather than the 80% of customer that don’t respond and just clog up your systems.

Points of differentiation will set yourself apart from your competitors, grab their attention and prove that you know your stuff. They would be hard pushed to find this out anywhere else unless they parted with some money or did some serious research.

Think of your website in the same way. Make sure you provide information that addresses the point of entry requirements at your first contact with them, then in order to get them to sign up or visit again, give them a flavour of the point of differentiation information they will learn. You want to put good stuff after you have got their details but you want to allude to it before. They need to have an incentive to sign up.

Step 5: Autoresponder service

It’s very unlikely that your customers will buy from you straight off. You have to develop trust from a series of exposures. Email auto responders are a great way of doing this. You can keep expanding the information and build trust over a series of emails rather than trying to get your information across in one hit. We use Aweber which you can find at:

http://www.aweber.com

It’s important to set up a proper auto-responder service rather than using an autoresponder script built into your website. No-one likes receiving spam. Subscribing to services like aweber keeps you out of spammers jail by providing double opt-in and proof of sign up features, as well as giving you sophisticated analytics and messaging management.

Step 6: Set up your promotional campaign

Before running any campaign to increase your traffic you need to have analytics in place, otherwise any optimisation efforts will be pure guess work. It’s likely that you will have multiple campaigns running. Whether it’s pay per click, with multiple keyword groups and split testing or an organic campaign, you need to be able to monitor it. I recommend Google Analytics, a comprehensive and free service.

The types of promotional campaign you will carry out will grow with your experience. Whether its onsite optimisation such as keyword stuffing, or offsite optimisation through backlinks, JVs, article marketing and so on, it’s important to develop a checklist to make sure you cover off all the possibilities and monitor your analytics closely.

Step 7: Optimisation

You can’t start optimisation until you have a feedback loop in place. Every change you make you can assess in the context of traffic, conversion sales, leads and so on.

Now begin the optimisation:

Create your system
Run the system
Check your analytics
Identify the weakest point
Fix
Monitor improvements
Look for next weakest point and run the system again

Addressing anything other than the weakest point is wasteful because it will not compensate for that weakest point.

If this all seems too much, it is worth it, this will generate business and generally it will be new business that you couldn’t have reached through other means. So persevere.

For more information on web based lead generation systems download my free report now.

P.S. If you’re in a hurry to set up your own web based lead generation system or you unsure of where to start yourself, get in touch and we can do the whole lot or a mix according to your budget. Some clients handle all the research and content generation and leave us to do the technical part, for others we do the whole shebang.

The 2 Niche Finder Golden Rules You Must Follow!

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The internet is flooded with competition from all walks of life. If you are thinking about setting up an internet business in a general market area you might as well take the money you are about to invest and throw it out of the window. To be honest there’s no way someone new to the internet world can hope to compete, unless they know a few insider tricks.

The only way for a new entrant to make some money quickly is to get your foot in the door with a market niche. Before you take the plunge into any new market, you need to drill down to discover where the niches are.

The definition of a niche is a special area of demand for a product or service; a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

Where do you start? You’ve probably got a few ideas on the type of product or service you want to offer based on your experience or interests or from seeing where others have had success online already. Take this market and think about what broad search terms or keywords people would type in to research it. Now take your search term and run it through one of the internet niche marketing software applications to generate niche keywords.

An easy, free keyword tool is the Google Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Your broad term should generate a list of keyword results. You can take any of those results and search further on them to drill right down to the niche terms.

There are 2 golden rules to follow to select a niche business that will work quickly for you.

Rule 1: People should already be searching for that niche.

Google Keyword Tool estimates how many searches there are on your chosen term. You need to select a niche that already generates some level of interest.

Choose a niche term that generates more than 1,000+ searches per month or 33+ searches per day.

Rule 2: Choose a niche with limited competition.

The quickest way to see how competitive your niche is, is to type that exact niche keyword or phrase into the search engine using speech marks around your phrase. (Whilst people rarely use speech marks when searching, it establishes how competitive the search term is if your site was optimised to match exactly what people are looking for).

The number of search engine results (pages) for your keyword niche should be 10,000 or less.

1,000+ searches a month, combined with 10,000 pages or less will give you the best chance of success with your niche. But if you are struggling to find anything you want to exploit, try relaxing the boundaries a little as you may still reap rewards.

It’s still worth considering any niche with less than 10,000 competing pages, regardless of how many searches there are.
On the flip side as long as a 1,000 searches or more are carried out per month, you can increase your limit of competing pages to allow up to 20,000 search engine results.

For example, let’s say you have an interest in fitness and you know triathlons are pretty popular, then try to see if there’s a niche you can exploit. Typing in the phrase triathlon into the Google Keyword Tool gives you many different keywords such as triathlon bikes, triathlon training, triathlon fitness, triathlon wetsuit.

I carried out a further search on triathlon wetsuit and came up with women’s triathlon wetsuit as a possible niche. A search on Google gave me these quick results:

	Monthly searches	Competing pages

women’s triathlon wetsuit	1000	175,000
women’s triathlon wetsuits	480	33
womens triathlon wetsuit	320	296,000
womens triathlon wetsuits	210	48

Whilst none of the keyword phrases fulfil the criteria of >1000 searches and <10,000 competing pages, “women’s triathlon wetsuits” is definitely worth considering as there are only 33 competing pages for this keyword phrase – perhaps you can get to the top in no time!

So get started with your niche market research now and remember the 2 niche finder golden rules to help you make your decisions.

To find out more about creating web sites that drive boat loads of customers your way, download my free report now.

I want my web site to be seen! Do I need to submit to search engine and directories?

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You’ve just created your web site, spent time and money getting it to look good. Now you need your target customers to see it. But how are they going to know it exists? Is it enough to rely on organic techniques to be listed in the major search engines or should you submit your sites to the key directories and search engines?

A search engine submit process means simply bringing your web site domain (url) to the search engines’ attention. If you follow SEO procedures (see my free report), then over time your site will be indexed and ranked organically. It takes time and effort. But if you want to try to speed things up then it is worth submitting your site to the directories and search engines.

Before I give you a quick guide how to submit urls to the key search engines and directories, a word of warning…..

…avoid the free add url services or “submit search engine free” services that you see plastered across the web.

Any free submission website or search engine submitter service is most likely to use automated software and most search engines ignore or reject these submissions. In fact many engines are now banning sites that continuously submit. They consider it “spamming”. So if you’re using a service that promises a monthly or quarterly submission, then they could be putting your site in danger of getting permanently banned or blocked.

The truth is the vast majority of search engine traffic comes from the big 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, either directly or indirectly via portals using results from these sites. So it’s a simple task to submit your own sites manually to get indexed in these 3 without the need for any automated service.

Here’s the directories and search engines you need to submit to:

Directory Submission

There are two key directories to get your website listed in: The Open Directory (DMOZ) and Yahoo.

If you get links from these quality directories, the major search engines are more likely to view your site as the “authority” on the subject and give it a higher ranking.

The Open Directory Project powers directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the web, including Google. So if you can get listed in the ODP, you’ll eventually wind up in the key search engines.

It’s maintained by volunteers who are experts in their areas of interest. It’s free to get a listing however it can be slow and difficult to get in and they don’t accept all sites.

To list your site, go to the most appropriate category for your web site, then drill down to the relevant subcategory and select the “Add URL” link at the top of that category’s page.

And then be patient! It can take anywhere from a couple of days to a year for an editor to review and list your site. And make sure your site has useful and unique content. They want medium to large sized web sites so if your site is only one or two pages long, then it’s unlikely to get listed.

Yahoo Directory is distinct from the regular Yahoo search engine (see below). For any commercial business there is a cost of $299 per year and no guarantee that your site will be listed, only that it will be reviewed in a timely fashion. Yahoo does not give priority listings or special treatment to people who pay the fee. The main benefit of a Yahoo directory listing is to have a link from a high-quality directory that may give your site credibility in the eyes of the search engines.

Search Engine Submission

The big 3 (Google, Yahoo, Bing) all have search engine add URL forms.

Google

Yahoo

Bing (formerly Live and MSN)

Whilst they provide a quick, easy and free url submission process, using the search engine submitter forms does not guarantee you a listing. The search engine algorithms are far more sophisticated and you need a quality content site with relevant sites linking back to you. If these things are not in place, submitting to a search engine will do no good because whether search engines know of your site or not, they will not rank it.

And whilst we’ve focused on getting new sites listed, make sure you announce any new content that you’ve created on your existing sites via an article announcer service. For weblogs we recommend Pingoat. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

To learn more about search engine optimisation techniques and how to get your web site seen by your customers download my free report now.

Or find out about Search Engine Optimization