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How I Get Over 70% Of My Clients From My Website

Posted by

Ian Brodie on December 19th, 2010.

Of all the things I teach about marketing and business development, the thing most people are interested in is “how do you get so many clients via your website?”

And it's a good question to ask. The web is a fantastic equalizer – allowing small businesses like you and me to match and beat our big competitors.

We may not be able to match their marketing dollars. We may not be able to send legions of foot soldiers out networking. We can't afford the fancy agency graphics and presentations. But if we know what we're doing – we can use the web to make just as much an impact on our potential clients as they can. Sometimes even more so.

In my case, I get somewhere over 70% of my clients from my website (ie – that's how they initially found me, and that's what triggered them to contact me). And my site is ranked higher for traffic than some of the top 50 consulting firms globally.

It's not because I'm some internet genius (far from it – I've made a ton of mistakes). But I have learnt a few simple lessons on what it takes to get clients via the web. And most importantly – I've put those lessons into practice.

Which, of course, begs the question – what are those lessons Ian?

Well, first up, I have a clear picture of who my potential clients are.

Most people have an idea of who their target clients are – but they haven't really got under their skin. They don't really understand them. They maybe did an exercise at a workshop for 20 minutes once, and that's it. Or they “just know”.

But the truth is that unless you really put work into it, you don't know. Not enough.

I spend literally hours thinking about my ideal target clients. Trying to get inside their head. To understand what their biggest needs and concerns are. What messages will resonate with them and what will turn them off. I try to infuse what I write on my site or the videos I do with that knowledge. I try to create useful resources to help them with what they're really worried about.

My hope is that they'll feel like I really understand them and am on their side (in fact my hope is not just that they'll feel like that – but that I really do understand them and I really am on their side).

I don't always get it right by any stretch of the imagination. But I do get it right often enough, and with enough people that I've been able to build a “following” of sorts.

I've also learned what people who need my services actually search for on the web.

I've learned that there are two primary sort of searches. People who have a problem or opportunity I can help with usually start out searching for useful information they can use to help them. Then eventually, they may come to search for people they can hire or services they can buy.

It would be nice if everyone came looking for help. But in reality, the vast majority of searches are for information. Where most consulting and coaching websites go wrong is that they try to sell to people. They talk about how brilliant the consultant is, what fantastic benefits the services will deliver, and how great everyone says they are.

That's great stuff – and you need those pages for the much smaller number of people who come looking for someone to help. But if you want to be really successful on the web you need to have content to attract and engage with the far greater number of people who are in the earlier stage of looking for valuable information.

Catch them early with blog posts, articles, videos and other resources which establish you as an authority in your field and you're positioning yourself to be the person they turn to when they decide they need help.

To do this you need to continually research what people are looking for on the web in your field – and to be able to distinguish between the searches that lead to winning business and those that don't.

Of course, if you want to get those searchers to your site, you need to know how to get traffic.

There are lots of different ways to get traffic to your website – from paying for it through pay-per-click and banner advertising, to getting to the top of google's search results, through to getting traffic from other related websites or social media.

All of these strategies take work. From on-site optimisation and link building to get traffic from google, to writing compelling pay-per-click ads and landing pages, to forming alliances for guest blogging and article syndication.

Your best bet is to master one or two strategies. I get most of my traffic from search engines – but also know how to boost it via social media and guest blogging. Getting traffic is the “grind” of succeeding online. It almost always requires a lot of work – though once you know what you're doing, much of it can be outsourced quite cheaply.

But I've also learned that getting people to your website is not enough.

It's great to get lots of visitors and to be at the top of the google search results for lots of keyword phrases. But since most visitors won't be ready to buy when they first visit my site, I need some way of connecting with them so that I can keep in touch and initiate more direct communication.

If you want to succeed online you can't rely on clients remembering to come back to your website.

Some people use social networks: Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter as a way of interacting more directly with potential clients.

Personally, I use good old email.

Potential clients who sign up for my free video training course get a weekly “Insider Strategies” email from me with useful articles and tips on how to get more clients. It ensures I stay top of mind without them having to remember to come back to my site.

I've found it's vital to create the right impression with your website.

Your website needs to get across to potential clients who you are and what you'd be like to work with. I still see consultants websites these days with no About page, or just a generic description of the company. These days people want to know more about who they'll be dealing with. We like to see behind the scenes and get suspicious of businesses who don't “open their kimono” and share more information about who they are.

And these days, your website must look professional too. It doesn't have to be too slick with all sorts of clever graphics and animation. My site here is fairly simple in design.

But it must look professional. Clients make judgements about your professionalism based on what they see of your site. If it's ugly, difficult to use, and has errors on it (or even spelling mistakes) – they'll assume you won't be professional in your work with them.

Finally – and most importantly of all – I've learned you must take control of your website in your own hands.

That doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself (although these days it's pretty simple to do so).

But it does mean you have to understand it.

If you're hiring people to develop your website for you and to optimize it to get traffic, you must be able to know if they're doing a good job.

I've heard horror stories of consultants recently shelling out 5 figure sums for basic websites that have done nothing to help their bottom line.

You can't let that happen to you. You must understand the basic principles of succeeding online to make sure that whoever you hire is doing the right things to help you get clients.

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How to Get More Clients Online: Part 3 – Make it Easy to Become a Client

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 26th, 2010.

So far we've talked about how to get visitors to your website and how to nurture relationships with them online so that they build trust and confidence in your capabilities.

But how do we get them to actually buy? To become paying clients?

Well, to a certain degree, our nurturing activities will have built our relationship to the point where we're the first person they think of when they have a need and they're ready to buy.

But we can do more than that.

One of the barriers to clients hiring consultants, coaches and other professionals is that we often don't have an easy, low cost, low risk, entry level service for them.

This applies both offline and on. but it's particularly important online.

The truth is that despite all our efforts to build trust and demonstrate our capabilities, clients will always perceive an initial piece of work with us to be risky.

Yes, we've showcased our expertise in our articles, blog posts and newsletters. And they've perhaps got a sense of who we are from our emails and maybe even some videos.

But it's still a big risk.

And the more costly and complex an initial engagement with us is, the more risky it seems.

And unfortunately, we often exacerbate this perceived risk by not having an easy, low cost way of doing business with us.

Often the only way to engage with us is to take our $1,000 per month coaching services. Or to hire us for a £20,000 consulting project.

Having such a high initial entry point turns a perceived risk into a huge one. Online especially so as the potential client will have had less direct contact with you.

But what if your potential client had a low cost way of hiring you or using your services? I'm not talking about heavy discounting to get an entry point. I'm talking about crafting a small, but highly valuable service that can be delivered at little cost to yourself but which will give the client more first hand experience of working with you.

This could range from short benchmarking exercises and assessment projects to creating online training courses, private membership sites or even the traditional online ebooks.

Look at it this way: who's most likely to buy your high end coaching or consulting services: someone who you've never worked with before but you've put a lot of effort into selling to, or someone who joined your online training site, then upgraded to a group coaching programme and who then came to one of your weekend retreats?

Creating a “product ladder” – a series of ascending value products and services – like this does three wonderful things for you:

Firstly, it allows a broader range of people to experience working with you and hence qualify themselves for buying your more expensive services.

Secondly, it essentially turns your marketing into a paid activity. You're marketing your higher level services primarily through your lower level services. All you have to focus on is getting people to make the easier step of getting on the first rung of the ladder and from then on they're paying you as you entice them up to the next step. Contrast this with the difficulty of trying to persuade them to jump to the top step right from the bottom.

Finally, because you now have a steady flow of qualified prospects for your higher level services flowing through your “system”, you can create more costly (and more value-added) higher end programmes. You might struggle to sell (say) a $20,000 programme cold, but to clients who've already got tremendous value from your $10,000 coaching group it's not such a big leap.

Now creating this ladder of products and services is not necessarily easy. There are some professions where the range of services you can offer is restricted (law springs to mind). But with a little creative thought you can construct a series of escalating value products in most professions.

It's also worth thinking about how you can introduce services which overcome the traditional geographic and time restrictions which most professionals face.

Offering telephone coaching, for example, frees you up from having to be physically near to your clients. And electronic products – books, videos, private membership sites – free you up from a direct exchange of your time for money. With these services, you can begin to deliver 1 to many and get a much higher return on your time.

Once you've defined the steps in your product ladder, you then focus your online efforts on selling the service at the bottom rung. Since it's low cost it rarely needs a huge sell. Then focus on delighting the customers of that service and market your higher level services to them.

It's a whole lot easier and more effective than trying to sell that huge consulting project cold.

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How To Get More Clients Online: Part 2 – Build Relationships

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 5th, 2010.

This is the second in a series of posts on how to get more clients via online approaches for your professional business. It's written specifically with small and independent consultants and coaches in mind – but the lessons are applicable to other professional businesses.

Relationship Building: The Missing Link

If you've been looking into internet marketing for any time you'll no doubt have heard the “secret formula” for success on the web – traffic x conversions.

It's a statement of the blindingly obvious really: to get business on the web you need to get visitors to your site and convert them into customers. In some ways it's about as insightful as telling an offline retailer that the secret of success is to get customers into their shops and persuade them to buy.

At least it's succinct and it helps to focus your activities.

But for getting consulting, coaching or other professional services clients online – it's not sufficient.

The trouble is that unlike buying a book on amazon or even a TV from an online electronics store, clients aren't going to buy complex, costly, intangible services after just one visit to your site.

Before clients have the confidence to hire you to perform a high value, high impact service for them they need to be convinced you understand their issues, you have the capabilities to help them, and that you'll be a good fit to work with them and their team.

That confidence isn't going to be built in one visit to your site.

You need multiple interactions. And the deeper those interactions are, the more the client's confidence will be built.

This is a big gap for most professionals. Visitors to their site passively consume the content, but there’s nothing to engage them and start up a relationship with them. Nothing for them to interact with – except perhaps a lonely contact form asking visitors to make contact if they need their services.

In fact, there are many ways to build relationships with website visitors. You can encourage comments and feedback on your blog. You can run surveys. You can create a forum for discussion around specific topics. You can encourage them to link up with you via social media. Anything that takes them beyond being passive consumers of the information on your site to being active participants.

Active participation and interaction is the key to taking your relationship to the next level. The more they feel they’re communicating directly with you – not just reading your material like they’d read a book from a distant author – the stronger your relationship will get.

For most professionals, the simplest way to get more interaction and more direct communication is via an email “newsletter”.

I put newsletter in quotes, because although that’s what they’re most often called – in fact their focus shouldn't be on news. Updates from professionals with news on what’s happening in their company, who’s moving departments, which clients they’re working with, and the latest services they’re offering are typically filed straight in the trash by clients.

But newsletters which share useful information about the area in which the consultant is an expert – and which the client needs ideas and support in – are read with enthusiasm and filed where they can be found.

Not by everyone, of course. Not everything you send out will be valued by all your subscribers. But keep producing valuable, insightful material and you’ll find you engage much more with your potential clients.

They’ll start emailing you. Thanking you for your material. Asking you questions. And eventually, contacting you about your services.

And, most importantly, since by signing up they've given you permission to pro-actively contact them – you're not reliant on them remembering to come back to your website and remembering how to find it. You can actively keep in touch and nurture your relationship with them – you're in control.

This was really brought home to me a few months after I started producing my own newsletter.

I noticed the number of emails and contact form submissions I was getting from potential clients had gone up. So I tracked back the communications from a few of the recent enquires which had eventually turned into clients.
Over half of the emails had come within a few hours of the person contacting me reading the latest edition of my newsletter.

It wasn’t the first newsletter they’d had from me. In most cases they’d signed up a few months previously. They’d read a few issues of the newsletter and clicked through to a number of other articles.

But reading the latest issue of the newsletter in each case had “tipped them over the edge”. They’d been convinced I knew what I was talking about and had contacted me with details of a particular issue they wanted me to help with.

And notice – in each case they contacted me. I wasn’t pushing anything at them. Over time the articles on the website and the newsletter had convinced them I was the right person to help them.

As you can imagine – that makes the sales conversations with these potential clients an awful lot easier than if I’m pushing and promoting, or up against other equally well positioned competitors.

There’s a saying in the world of online marketing that “the money is in the list”.

I hate the saying. I hate calling valued potential clients who’ve chosen to receive communications from you a “list”.

But the meaning behind the saying is absolutely true. Your valued subscribers are your greatest asset online.

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How To Get More Clients Online: Part 1 – The Power of a Content Rich Website

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 29th, 2010.

This is the first in a series of posts on how to get more clients via online approaches for your professional business. It's written specifically with small and independent consultants and coaches in mind – but the lessons are applicable to other professional businesses.

The Power of Content: My Story

About three years ago I first started out trying to do more online with my consulting and coaching business. Back then, few consultants or coaches were getting any sort of business online – but I was convinced from my experience wih other service sectors that it could work.

And I knew that if I could make it work for me it would pay huge dividends. It would free me up from having to invest a ton of my time into going out, networking, having meetings, making presentations, schmoozing and other time consuming business development activities.

And I also believed strongly that if I could attract leads for my business via the web, they could be more qualified. Rather than me having to knock on doors to persuade people I was the right person to work with, I wanted people coming to me already predisposed to hire me.

But my early attempts weren't a huge success.

I paid big bucks for a fancy website. It wasn't bad either – it followed what was considered best practice at the time. It talked about who my clients were, the problems I helped them solve and the results they got from working with me. It described my services in benefit oriented terms and showcased testimonials and case studies.

It had pretty much everything.

Well, everything except clients.

Almost no one came to my site (despite paying for some search engine optimisation work). And those that did come didn't hang around for long.

Now being a bit of a geek at heart, this annoyed me.

I wanted to know why not. I wanted to know why some websites could get thousands of visitors and could convert many of those visitors into paying clients when mine couldn't.

My first clue came when I created this blog.

I started it for fun really, and as a creative outlet for my ideas on business development. But within a few months it was getting more traffic than my official “corporate” website.

And people were emailing me. Leaving comments on the blog telling me how helpful the articles were. I emailed them back and we began to build relationships. That had never happened with my “corporate” site.

Soon, other bloggers were linking to my blog and recommending it.

As more and more sites linked to my articles and blog posts, my blog rose up the search engine rankings. It got more and more traffic – both directly, and via searches. Visitors kept engaging. When I started a newsletter they engaged even more.

And then I started getting emails from people asking me about how I could help them in their business. In other words, clients were coming to me. Not because of my fancy corporate website. But because of my simple, content-rich blog.

And that's the lesson here: the most important factor in the success of a website for a consultant, coach or other professional is the quality and depth of the content on that website.

Now most professionals' websites are simply “brochure sites”. They describe what the professional does, who they work for, the benefits they bring to clients, etc. And that's fine – if the potential client is coming to your website explicitly to check you out and see whether you're a good fit for them.

But the truth is that the vast majority of people aren't out on the web looking for us specifically. They're out looking for ideas, solutions and resources. In other words: content.

High quality content helps us get clients in three key ways.

Content drives traffic. Other sites are more than happy to link to high quality content on your site as it adds value to their readers. Whereas they have no motivation to link to your site if all it has is descriptions of you and your services – no matter how well written.

Content drives engagement. Visitors to your site stick around and explore if they find useful content. If all there is is a sales pitch for your services they click away pretty quickly.

And content drives credibility. As a professional, clients need to know you have the expertise and experience to help them before they'll consider hiring you. Sharing valuable content which gives them insight and helps them improve their business proves your capabilities infinitely more than any claims you make or even any testimonials you might have.

In short, having the passion and energy to consistently create valuable content for your website is THE biggest driver of online success for professionals.

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The paradox of pressure

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 19th, 0202.

Have you ever been hesitating to do something and then just a little nudge, a little bit of pressure from someone, has got you over the line?

Like you've been considering buying something for ages but never pulled the trigger…until they announce the price is going up in a few days time?

That's pressure working positively. A little nudge to get you to take the decision you were eventually going to take anyway.

On the other hand, have you been uncertain about something and had someone push you for a decision when you weren't ready – and so you backed out completely?

That's pressure working negatively. It feels like you're being pushed too hard – so you push back.

Sometimes pressure works. It gets people to take action when they might otherwise have waited (and waited and waited).

But sometimes it backfires. Push someone too hard and they push back and you've lost all chance of getting them to do what you want.

Typically a little bit of pressure works if someone is just about ready to make a decision and they're just procrastinating a bit. Or other priorities have got in the way.

But if it's a big important decision and you're some way off being ready then that same pressure feels manipulative. It feels like they're trying to get you to do something you don't want and they lose trust.

So what does all this have to do with email marketing, the topic I promised we were going to focus on next?

Here's the thing: an awful lot of training on email marketing focuses on applying pressure to get a sale.

5-Day cash machine emails. Gain-Logic-Fear sequences. Flash sales. Product Launches.

That's because, whether they realise it or not, most people who train others in email marketing tend to sell lower-cost products to audiences who are pretty close to being ready to buy.

Marketing training courses, financial newsletters, self-help books and seminars are all situations where a little nudge gets buyers over the line.

6 or 7-figure consulting projects or life-changing coaching engagements aren't.

They're situations where the buyer is making a big decision. Where you need to build significant credibility and trust.

Where if you push too hard too soon, you lose them.

That's why in this series of emails about email marketing for high-value products and services you won't find any tricks involving scarcity or sequences of hot-button pushing emails designed to extract the most cash from your email list in a short space of time.

What you will find are strategies for using email to build the credibility and trust you need for people to be ready and willing to buy something high value and high impact.

And we'll start in the next email by looking at what it is your emails need to “prove” to get people ready.

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