We've been talking recently about the importance of nurturing or romancing your potential clients. And in the last email I shared my simple system for categorising clients into As, Bs and Cs and investing time each week or month to think of how to build your relationships with those As and Bs.

But what about the Cs?

Who are those C category potential clients? Well, they're mostly people I haven't met or had detailed discussions with yet – so I don't really know whether they could be great clients for me. That means I can't afford to invest a ton of time yet into creating a tailored plan for developing my relationship with them.

Historically, C category clients have been largely ignored by most professionals. Maybe they received a Christmas card or maybe a newsletter every now and then. But most professionals invested their valuable time in their As and Bs.

And that was the right strategy. There just aren't enough hours in the day if you're having to do all your nurturing by hand.

The Power of the Internet for Building Client Relationships

I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear me say at this stage that “the internet has changed everything”. It's a bit of an overworked phrase.

But it has. It really has.

Through online marketing on the web it suddenly becomes viable to keep in touch and add value to C category prospects.

And it's well worth doing so. You may not yet know whether they could become great clients for you, but they might.

“Might” isn't good enough if you have to invest time and effort into communicating with them. But if you can do it essentially for free, then “might” is not bad at all.

And if you can build up a very large number of “might”s then it can become incredibly powerful.

With old-school nurturing you can invest your time in (say) a portfolio of 25 potential clients each with a 20% chance of becoming a client. That means you'll get 5 clients from your nurture activities.

Now let's say your C category potential clients only have a 1% chance of becoming a client. Doesn't sound so good initially. But what if you can nurture relationships with 1,000 of them? That gives you 10 clients. Or even 5,000 of them?

Suddenly the economics begin to change.

And through the web, hooking up with 1,000 or 5,000 potential clients isn't unrealistic at all. If you can get sufficient traffic to your website, and if you can offer them something of value to get them to sign up to receive communications from you – then building a list of thousands of subscribers who could become clients isn't such a tall order.

In fact, it's exactly the strategy I've followed to build my business.

By optimising my website, doing targeted pay-per-click advertising, and harnessing social media I get lots of website visitors from people who could be potential clients.

By offering relevant free reports or videos in return for them signing up I've had thousands of people opt-in to receive communications from me.

And by sending (hopefully) useful emails like this one I can demonstrate to readers my knowledge and expertise in how to win new clients.

So over time, if I keep adding value, many of the people who receive these emails will choose to contact me and we'll end up working together.

It's an approach that – once set up – runs almost on autopilot. it works when I'm out of the office or even asleep.

And, to be frank, it's rather more pleasant than knocking on doors touting for business.

And it's something almost everyone can do for their business.

More details on how next week…