“Very pleased. Included a lot of small business marketing ideas I hadn’t thought of. I think it’s going to be very useful to my business.”

Amanda – Orlando, FL

“Charlie, the call was useful beyond the question that I posed. Afterwards, I had an informal coaching session with my son who is starting a mortgage company.  I used the “3 columns idea” to organize who does what tasks.  The ABC model helped write the sales letters.  And I used the “Charlie story” to coax him to accept coaching from a pro early in the game.  Thanks for the marketing help.”
Doug Jacobson – Seattle, WA

“I got at least 8-9 really good marketing ideas explained very well by Charlie, and will forward it on to key members of my organization so we can get things cranked up. I appreciate it and look forward to the next one.”

Jim – Memphis, TN

“The marketing seminar was very enlightening, using easy to understand concepts with methods on how to implement the marketing strategies.”
Dave – San Diego, CA

“I really liked it.”

Paul, San Francisco, CA

“Your marketing teleconference this morning was very worthwhile. I have pages of notes, and I’m sure if I implement just 10% of the ideas that were discussed, my new business venture will be off to a great start. I would recommend you highly to any business – large or small.”
George Delgado

“Full of good marketing ideas.”

Herb Moeller – Brush Prairie, WA

“I believe your marketing ideas will take our firm to the next level. Thanks Charlie.”
Carly Lewis V.I.P. Litigation, LLC – Atlanta, Georgia

“Thanks for a very informative tele-seminar. I got several marketing tips that I will be putting to good use right away. Great information!”
Troy Milligan

“I was able to incubate a couple of ideas during the call that look like they’ll be very profitable. I greatly appreciate the information that you have passed on, Charlie!”
Jim – Chicago, Illinois

“Charlie sure packs a punch in an hour-long tele-seminar! It’s like getting a good swift kick in the pants to help market my business better, more efficiently and without hemorrhaging money! I definitely took away several key points and cleared my calendar this afternoon to make them happen.”
Marci Whitman, Boomerang Marketing

“I just wanted to let you know how pleased I was with the small business marketing tele-seminar. The call answered a couple of questions that I have been looking to answer for some time now,and I thank you.”
Edward Henessey – Highlands, NJ

“Lots of real-world maketing ideas, pertinent and practical.”
Gina Vener

“The call was great! Charlie presented at least 30 simple marketing strategies that were fantastic!”
Sam McNamee

“Great call, Charlie! You gave some valuable nuggets that will produce fruit in my residential and commercial mortgage business. Thanks for your Q&A format.”
Joe Tufo

“I think your approach and the way you handled this whole marketing teleseminar is pretty amazing!”
George from Northridge

“I found a lot things that I haven’t been doing that I should be doing to boost my sales.”
Tom – North Arlington, NJ

“This marketing teleseminar was even better than the first. Tying everything to ABC – model – provided a great mental framework for creating one’s marketing message.”
Gina Vener

“I was able to instantly relate your markeitng ideas to my situation. During the call, I applied what you were saying to develop the start of two marketing ideas that I think will be very profitable.”
Jim from Chicago

“Charlie, you are among my top 3 marketing gurus. Good responses to questions asked by your listeners.  All doable! Looking forward to the next teleseminar.”
Sandra Schrift

“I never realized I could learn so much from a single teleseminar. Thank you for providing great content.”
Virginia

“I enjoyed the teleseminar very much. I really liked your demeanor on the call and your focused explanations.”
Carol Clea Richards

“Very informative and very practical. I have been in sales for 30+ years and still learned a lot from it.”
George

“Wonderfull teleconference. I have several of your books and will be buying more.”
Jeff Moore

“Your teleseminars are very informative and provide me with inspiration, insight and confidence in regards to various marketing tactics to utilize in regards to my Interior Design business.”
Denise Ann Hourigan

“Your information has been everything you advertise:  focused, pointed, straightforward, practical and applicable. Thank you!”
Malcolm Dayton

Want to attract more clients, sell more and be more successful? You can with one-on-one expert marketing guidance. Use this link to see if you qualify to have Charlie Cook help you grow your business >>

How to Get Attention

Add Audio to Your Web Site – Increase your response and sales. Adding your voice to your web site personalizes your prospect’s web experience and increases the likelihood they’ll contact you and buy from you. When you add audio to your testimonials they become ten times more credible. I instantly saw my sales shoot up when I added client audio testimonials. Click Here >

Use Video to Generate Massive Amounts of Traffic – It’s amazing! Just upload your video to the top FREE video services and you’ll be found—and ranked—by the search engines within hours, if you know where and how to do it. Revolutionary changes have transpired in the past few months that involve the convergence of new, unprecedented forces with proven technology. Be the first to see how it works. Click Here >

Learn How to Get Free Publicity with Talk Radio – Advertise for free on the radio. Did you know that American radio stations need more than 10,000 guests PER DAY to fill their shows? Learn how to get attention with radio publicity using this marketing tool. Click Here >

Get the Media to Contact You and Get Free Publicity – Get interviews with the media and get business. Click Here >

Learn How to Position Your Web Site At the Top of the Search Engines – Attract more prospects and clients to your web site. It provides an informed, up-to-date and honest appraisal of what you need to do to market your site to the search engines. Once you buy the search engine placement manual you get monthly updates for a year covering any changes to the search engines. If you want to learn how to push your site to the top of the search engines, this book gives you the details. Click Here >

Are You Struggling with Search Engine Positioning to Build Traffic to Your Site? – It is possible to generate a huge amount of traffic from a top search engine placement. The problem is that getting your site to the top of the search engines and keeping it there requires a bit of expertise and some painstaking work on your site pages. Most business owners are better off focusing on the services they are good at and outsourcing this onerous task. I know and highly recommend Brett Smith. He’s the best in the business and can help you generate more traffic to your site from the search engines. Click Here >

Get the Most Out of Your Advertising Dollars Cost-per-click campaigns to ramp up your business quickly. This guide shows you how to: cut campaign costs, achieve high click-through rates, and grab and hold onto the top position for your ad words. If you are going to spend money on online advertising, start with this marketing tool. Click Here >

Build Web Site Traffic and Business with Your Blog – Discover how to create and promote your blog in a flash. A step-by-step blog building tutorial. Click Here >

How to Convert Prospects to Clients

Email Marketing Using Autoresponders and Email Broadcast Services Save time while growing your target list and staying in touch with prospects and clients. This automated system delivers instant information to your potential customers, and then follows up with them automatically over the coming days, weeks, and months. Click Here >

Engage Your Coaching Prospects with Custom Assessments – Get your prospects to complete an online evaluation of their needs to get the conversation going and help convert them to client status. Click Here >

How Can You Take The Rejection Out Of Cold Calling?
Is selling painful for you? It’s not your fault, there is a better way. With this sales approach you’ll quickly and automatically be ahead of the game and instantly in a league above your competition… >

How to Generate Leads and Sales With Your Site

Selling Products and Services from Your Web Site – These email broadcast and shopping cart services make it easy for customers to buy your products and for you to stay in touch with them through your newsletter. Set up your shopping cart to function seamlessly for you and your clients. Includes forms to collect collect email addresses and autoresponders follow up on client purchases with a series of time delayed messages. Click Here >

Accepting Credit Card Payments Online Instantly – Use the world’s number one online payment service, its the fastest way to open your doors to over 40 million member accounts worldwide. Get paid directly into your bank account. This is the quickest way to get paid online. Click Here >

Increasing Communication and Sales with Forms - Have you ever wanted to add a form to your site without having to struggle with confusing code? Logiforms takes the pain out of setting up forms and managing date helping you generate more qualified leads, sales and retain clients. Click Here >

How Can You Master Google AdWords and Attract Online Sales?
Use Google AdWords and the power of guerrilla marketing to attract new customers 24/7/365. With Google AdWords you only pay for prospects you get. Use this definitive guid to become make your online advertising pay for itself… >

Where I Host My Web Site - Many years ago I discovered OLM and I’ve hosted all my sites with them ever since. Their rates are very reasonable, their hosting packages comprehensive and their customer service outstanding. They actually have people available to answer your questions. In addition they have a great reseller program and low cost url registration service. Click Here >

Miscellaneous Services

Bridge Lines - When you want to bring a group together on the phone for a conference call or teleclass.

Browser Compatibility – Make sure everyone looking at your site sees it the way the you want them to see it. Different web browsers and computer operating systems may distort the way your page looks even if it looks great on your computers. Test this service with a 24 hour free trial.

Web Site Programing – When I need a form fixed or a javascript inserted on my site or an online database setup, I call Sheila Fenlon and she does it for me. She has helped me keep my sites up and running for years and can be trusted to solve your web site programming problems. If you’d rather not learn Perl, PHP, MySQL, Apache or Unix Sheila can help you. Just tell her I sent you.

• What are your target markets?
• What do your customers care about?

2. What are the priorities for the growth of your business?

• What’s the desired outcome of your business marketing?
• What is your business strategy?
• What is your business marketing plan?

3. What are the barriers to growth?

• Perceptions (colleagues and customers)
• Practices (roles, processes, use of IT, etc.)

4. What business marketing strategy, structure and actions will accelerate the growth of your company?

• How can you build a steady stream of loyal customers and referrals?
• What proven marketing ideas can you use?
• How can you differentiate your services and products from your competitors?
• How can you appeal to customers?
• How can you leverage existing resources with your business marketing plans? (most people and companies usually are sitting on a wealth of ideas and talent that they’re not using effectively)
•What’s the optimal marketing strategy for your services and or products?

5. What steps can you take immediately to improve the effectiveness of your business marketing?

• How can your marketing plan help you increase the number of customers and their understanding of the range and value of their services?
• How should you structure your use of media?
• How can you you to help the search engines market your services?

The biggest holes in small businesses’ marketing efforts are in lead generation. For those that don’t know it already, identifying, attracting and building a steady stream of prospects is the number one strategic marketing task for growing a service business.

You need to know who is interested in your products and services in order to market to them, again and again.

Every small business has some sort of lead generation strategy, whether its just handing out business cards, sending out press releases, writing articles, asking for referrals or, in more recent years, putting up a web site. The problem is that many of these approaches are used sporadically not systematically, and techniques aren’t in place to capture the contacts made.

Interested prospects are missed, or if contact is made, are pushed away by your materials, web site or phone system. The result is that hundreds and thousands of potential prospects fall through cracks in your marketing and you can’t profit from their business.

If your lead generation strategy and systems aren’t generating dozens or hundreds of new leads each week then your small business marketing strategy has a big gap in it.

Four Common Holes in Small Business Marketing

1. The Lack of Compelling Content
Whether it’s the title of your web site and the description shown in the search engines, or the title of your article and the first paragraph, your content needs to pull in prospects. Too often marketing materials are written from the sellers’ point of view instead of the prospects’.

Compelling content captures prospects’ attention by focusing on their problems. Without good copy prospects won’t be moved to become clients.

- Is your marketing content compelling from prospects’ perspective?

- Does it lead with information about prospects’ problems and concerns?

2. Limited Reach
If you could contact all the people who need and want your services, you might want to. Using advertising, direct mail or cold calling to do this is in most cases cost prohibitive. PR, writing articles and having a web site are some low cost ways of getting attention. The objective with any of these is to reach as many people as possible in order to find qualified leads.

Despite effort put into creating small business marketing materials, building web sites and writing articles, independent professionals rarely get the visibility they want. Articles are only read by a handful of people and web sites are hard to find.

To leverage the time and money you put into your marketing materials, articles, and web sites, you need to do everything you can to help people find them. This sounds obvious, but most service professionals write an article and just post it on their web site or send it to a few clients.

With hundreds of online ezines and offline publications looking for content, you could be putting an article in front of tens of thousands of people instead of just a few.

The same is true of search engine listings. Most people can’t even find their own sites in the search engines. Help the search engines put your web site on the first page or two for your keywords and you’ll increase your exposure and reach hundreds of new prospects each week.

Depending on your business, this is easier then most people realize and will extend the reach of your small business marketing dramatically.

- How many people per week see the marketing copy or articles that are meant to get them to make contact?

- What are you doing to increase this number?

3. Missing Motivators
Grabbing prospects’ attention is the first step in lead generation; moving them to make contact, visit your web site or call your company and add themselves to your target list is the next step. When you write an article or send out a mailing, provide an incentive for prospects to take action. Offer a workshop or free report.

- Does your marketing motivate prospects to come to you and give you their contact information?

4. Malfunctioning or Non-Existent Systems
If your marketing is working, prospects will call your office or stop by your web site. You want to make it is as easy as possible for prospects to get in touch with you, and you want to collect their contact information.

Again, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you been frustrated by menu-driven answering systems that didn’t list the item you called about? (Or made you go through too many steps to find it?) Or a web site with no name, email address or phone number of a person who could answer your questions. And many phone systems and web sites aren’t set up to capture visitors’ contact information.

- Do you have automated systems that make it easy for prospects to contact your company?

- Do you have automated systems that make it easy for prospects to give you their contact information?

Marketing involves generating leads, converting them to clients and reselling to clients. If you’re not attracting the number of customers and clients you want, make sure your marketing strategy isn’t full of holes.

How to Get More Clients Using Push Then Pull Marketing

Marketing is like rowing. You pull hard on the oars to go forward, then lift them out of the water and push them back to finish the stroke and get ready for the next pull. Once you’ve got the sequence of the stroke right, you and your boat slip forward through the water and build speed and momentum.

If you push when you should be pulling, the boat goes backwards, or, even worse, you lose your balance and fall into the bottom of the boat. The same is true with your marketing.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in marketing their services is to simply PUSH information about their services and themselves out to prospects and hope that this will result in attracting prospects. Unless you are already a household name and in such demand that your phone is ringing off the hook, this approach rarely attracts the numbers of new clients you want.

The result is that most small business marketing falls into the bottom of the boat instead of propelling your business forward. You know how it works. You send out a mailing to tens of thousands, make hundreds of calls and get only a very limited response. It’s not for lack of effort. It’s that this approach doesn’t work.

An alternative to the typical push and hope approach to marketing is to PULL prospects in and then in the context of a growing relationship, PUSH useful information out to them. If you want prospects to remember your firm when they have a need for your services, start by attracting their interest.

Generate interest by focusing on what your potential clients want and the problems they need solved. Use this client centered marketing strategy to pull prospects in so you can push your expertise out to them. Give them ideas they can apply instead of information about credentials, or past clients. Like rowing your boat, you won’t move very far unless you repeat the sequence again and again.

Are you pulling prospects in or just pushing your information out? Review your business marketing materials to see if you have the sequence right. Take a look at your web site, brochures, newsletters, correspondence and proposals.

PULL TACTICS – ‘Client’ Centered
Do your marketing materials:

1. Begin with a clear identification of the niche market(s) you work with?

2. Lead with client problems and concerns?

3. Use the two elements above to create a picture that your target market can identify with?

4. Provide useful ideas that your target market can use and that demonstrates your expertise?

PUSH TACTICS - ‘You’ centered
Do your marketing materials:

1. Focus on you, your services and staff?

2. Focus on glowing testimonials and your client list?

Which works best? Both. The challenge is getting the emphasis and order right. The pull then push marketing sequence that works to move your business forward involves the following:

1. Create resources that pull prospects to you and your firm.

2. Get prospects to give you their contact information (Most firms let over 99% of the people who see their information go away and n.ever follow up. 80% of business is lost due to lack of follow-up.)

3. Push useful information out to self-selected prospects on a regular basis. (Remember the majority of buyers won’t make a purchase until they’ve had a minimum of 5-6 contacts with your firm.)

When your prospects have a compelling need, they will turn to the firm that they’ve had regular communication with, know and trust. At some point prospects will want more details about your services, credentials and testimonials But this is often the last information you need to provide.

Use the pull then push strategy to get your marketing moving. You’ll be amazed as you watch both your prospect and client lists grow and your business gains momentum.

Before making a purchase from you, buyers need to trust that your products and services will do what they are supposed to. Does your marketing strategy help establish the trust necessary to convince prospects to buy from you? If you’re struggling to attract clients and customers, use the following tactics to convert prospects to clients.

Is your marketing strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your marketing plan help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your small business marketing?

Ten Ideas to Build Your Small Business and Get Your Clients Trust

1. Get Testimonials
No matter how great your credentials are or how much experience you’ve had, people pay more attention to what others have to say about you.

Pick up the phone and call your customers to ask what they thought of your product or service, what they liked about it and how it was helpful. Edit their comments, get their permission to use the comments and then feature these testimonials in your business marketing materials.

2. Use Articles Instead of Ads
We have come to distrust ads and to believe what we read in published articles. Invest your time in writing articles to establish yourself as an expert. If you run ads, include testimonials in them.

3. Give Something Away
When you give something to people, regardless of the cost, they are more likely to trust you and return the favor by buying something from you. Use an ebook, article, workshop or free demonstration to build trust.

4. Get Referrals
When you need a new doctor, lawyer, plumber, carpenter or a place to eat you ask a friend for a referral. You trust the recommendations of people you know, and in fact, that’s how the majority of people find jobs. Don’t wait for the occasional referral to come in spontaneously; implement a proactive system to generate referrals.

5. Exchange Endorsements
Team up with a business you trust that also targets your market. Get them to include an endorsement of your products and services in their marketing and do the same for them. While a personal referral is ideal, an endorsement is a close second. This tactic can double your marketing reach at zero cost.

6. Give Examples
Tell a story instead of making impersonal and dramatic claims of what you or your product does. Use case studies to tell what you did for whom and the difference it made in their life or their business.

7. Personalize Your Marketing
It’s a common misconception that to sound credible your marketing should be dry and impersonal. People do business with people. You need to help prospects get to know you and trust you. Let your passion and personality come across in your marketing as well as your professionalism. Include a picture of yourself, with a smile, in a prominent place on the first page of your marketing materials.

8. Reduce Perceived Risk
Buyers’ biggest concern is how well your product or service will perform. Providing a guarantee may help, but in most cases its not going to make the sale. Clarify the value you provide and state your commitment to seeing that your clients are not only happy, but ecstatic about your product and services.

9. Make Contact Easy
If you want clients to get in touch with you, show them how. Put your phone number at the top of your marketing materials and tell them to call. When you call them, give them your phone number again at the end of the conversation and tell them to call. If you have a web site, put a contact form at the bottom of your home page.

10. Stay in Touch
The people you see and talk to on a regular basis are usually the ones you trust the most. Communication isn’t the only ingredient for developing trust, but it is a critical one. If you sell services or high end products, a personal phone call is one of the best ways to answer prospects questions, and to establish trust. Contact your prospects and clients regularly and get feedback on what they are concerned about.

You want to convert prospects to clients and clients to repeat clients. Use these ten small business marketing strategies to build trust and you’ll find more prospects buying your products and services.

Several times a day I get emails like this from hardworking entrepreneurs and business owners;

“I’m a photographer in a highly competitive market, Dallas/Fort Worth. What can I do to be different, unique and highly sought after?”
John W., TX

Are you in the same situation? Are you facing stiff competition for your prospects’ attention and business? Do you want to uniquely position your products and services so you can grow your business?

If so, you’ve got the right objectives. Now you need to learn the most powerful secret in marketing, one that can help you double or triple your business in months.

The secret to successful small business marketing is simple; give your prospects the information they want.

I know what you’re saying.

You already do this and you’ve got a list of satisfied clients to prove it. But despite a successful track record you’re still not attracting as many new clients as you want.

I’m sure your products and services are what people want and you’ve got many satisfied clients to prove it. But if you’re not getting all the business you can handle, then your marketing isn’t working hard enough.

Most small business marketing fails because it mistakenly gives prospects information they aren’t interested in and won’t respond to.

When you sign up a new client, your goal is to make them happy by providing the superior service or products.  What you are doing when you provide quality services is putting your clients’ interest first, and it pays off in repeat sales and referrals.

The same principle works in marketing. Put your prospects’ interest first in your marketing and you’ll stand out from the competition, become highly sought after and have more clients than you ever imagined.

This sounds incredibly obvious and simple, but the fact is that hardly any businesses actually do it. When you do, you’ll put yourself light years ahead of your competitors.

How to Make Your Marketing Work To Grow Your Business

1. Put your prospects’ interests first in every aspect of your marketing.

2. Get your prospects’ attention by leading with a focus on their primary concern or challenge. This applies to everything from your ads, your sales letters, your website, your client contacts, conversations and even your business card.

3. Give away something your prospects want. A well-written report can attract tens of thousands to your web site or a free course can get qualified prospects into your office.

4. Demonstrate your expertise. Whether you’re an accountant or sell tires, give them ideas they can immediately use. Do this again and again and they’ll soon look to you for advice.

5. Provide proof that you can help your prospects reach their goals. Feature past client case studies and testimonials that give specifics about the results your products and services provide.

6. Build a relationship with your prospects so they know you and trust you. Ultimately, people decide whom to buy from based on gut instincts. A strong relationship with a prospect is an unshakable competitive advantage.

7. Clarify the value of your each of your products and services by detailing the benefits in terms of your prospects’ interests.

8. Give prospects a reason to buy from you today. What’s an added benefit or time-limited incentive you can use to prompt a purchase? Depending on what you’re selling, you could use something as simple as an added special report or as lavish as a paid three-day vacation to Hawaii.

9. Provide pricing information in the context of your prospects’ interests. First get your prospects to detail what they want and then tell them the cost.

10. Once a prospect becomes a client, keep giving them the marketing information they want. Continue to educate them about ways you can help them reach their goals and you’ll create even more opportunities to give them the products and services they want.

So that’s the secret of marketing that works. Put your prospects’ and your clients’ interests first and they’ll reward you with their business.

Depending on your business, you may not have the luxury of time to sell a prospect or you may want to increase immediate cash flow to complement long-term sales.

Barry recently self-published a sales training manual and needs to ramp up sales. George is opening an exercise facility and wants customers right away so he can pay the rent. Martha helps corporations cut costs improving manufacturing processes and needs more clients this month, and can’t wait until next year.

Do you need to increase your income this week, and this month?

What can you do today to attract more clients and increase sales?

Six ways you can help prospects become clients and customers today.

1. Improve Your Small Business Marketing Message
Most people talk about their work and advertise their products and services with marketing messages that don’t pull in new prospects. Whether you are selling services or products, the most effective way to attract prospects is by telling them how you can help them.

When you tell people you are a sales. agent for a real estate firm, you’re only talking about yourself, not what you do for your clients. Ditto when you tell people you’ve got a sales. training manual for sale. To get your prospects attention you need to talk about what you do and your products in terms of solutions and benefits.

If you’re selling oranges, which is most likely to get a sale.

a. “The best oranges anywhere.”

b. “Quench your thirst right now with this organic and satisfying source of vitamin C.”

A good business marketing message helps prospects understand what you do and why they should contact you. Whether you are selling oranges, real estate, sales. training or fitness, write your marketing message from your prospects’ perspective.

2. Give People a Reason to Contact You
Whether you want prospects to email you, call you or come to your exercise facility, your objective is to get them to contact you. When they do, you can go to work and start converting them to client status. How can you prompt a prospect to contact you?

Everyone loves the chance to get something for free. Offer a free. report, workshop or consultation. Make sure its something related to what you’re selling and that your target market loves. In the last year my free small business marketing guide has prompted over eleven thousand people to contact me.

3. Establish Your Pricing in Terms of Value
Several years ago I paid a lawyer over 35 thousand dollars to write a sales contract. Why? Because it helped me make almost a million dollars. When the company I was dealing with had financial problems, thanks to my lawyer’s work, I still received every penny I was owed.

Whether your product or service sells for 19 dollars or 19 thousand dollars, your clients buy because they have a clear understanding of how your product can help them and the value it provides. Use your copy, questions and video clips to help people understand how much better off they will be when they use your products and services. When prospects are confident they will get what they want and expect, price becomes far less important.

4. Build Credibility
People buy from those they know and trust. How can you get prospects to know and trust you?

Whether you have been in business for one month or one hundred years, endorsements from others are the most effective way to establish your credibility. Place testimonials prominently in your business marketing materials, demonstrate to prospects that you know what you’re doing and that your products and services work.

5. Start a Conversation to Create Opportunities
One of the key steps to helping prospects buy is to find out what they need and want. Once you know what their interests are, you can show them the service or product that’s the best solution and you’re on your way to completing a sale.

How can you get the conversation going even if you’re not face-to-face with a prospect?

Ask questions Ask prospects what they need and want and give them a chance to tell you. Even if you’re not face-to-face with a client you can use your web site to generate a steady stream of qualified leads by using response forms. Often all that’s needed to close the sale is a follow up phone call.

6. Instill a Sense of Urgency
Have you ever put off buying something that you needed or wanted? How can you get your prospects to avoid this black hole of procrastination?

Give prospects clear directions. Tell them what to do when and why. If you want them to fill in a f0rm, tell them how and why to do so. If you want them to buy your book, tell them how and why. If you want them to give you information about themselves, give them a reason. If you want people to make a purchase right away, motivate them with an impeding deadline.

Not every prospect will purchase your products or services today, but you can help them along. Use these six marketing strategies to attract more prospects and be more successful.

The tab is being picked up by a company looking to buy your firm, and your biggest concern is how much cash and stock to ask for when you meet with the president of the company and the senior officers. Sound like a fantasy?

Actually, I was the person being whisked across country, a few years back, to negotiate the sale of a web site I had created. With a lot of hard work and carefully executed positioning I’d developed the chance to make more than I thought possible from what had started as a just for fun project.
Whether you are a builder, accountant, realtor, market researcher, or manufacture loudspeakers or baseball bats, the way you position your firm can determine your success.
- Do you want prospects to seek you out?

- Do you want people to pay you more?

- Do you want to stand head and shoulders above your competition?

With a simple positioning strategy you can get more attention than you imagined.

I positioned one of my ideas for success using the 3 simple strategies below.

1. Identify a Need
In 1999, a new search engine was appearing on the Internet almost every week. Some were much better than others. Knowing which search tool to use was confusing. Through my own interest in finding better tools to navigate the web, I’d discovered a common need.

2. Educate Prospects to Demonstrate Your Expertise
Based on four years of study of search engines and a book I’d written previously on marketing to the search engines, I’d become an expert on how they did and didn’t work.

To help my own online research and to help others, I built a web site that provided a directory of search engines and reviewed their usefulness and functionality.

The objective of my site was simple. At a time when most people were just discovering the web, I wanted to help them find the best possible search tools for their particular task.

My mission was to educate people about how to find what they were looking for online. The site primarily focused on the growing number of reviews I authored. Instead of leading with information about my credentials, I used the content on the site to demonstrate my knowledge.

- What are your areas of expertise?

- What can you do to educate your prospects?

- How can you demonstrate your expertise?

3. Identify and Reach Your Target Market
Once I had the site built I needed a way to get people to it. While my target market was almost infinite – anyone searching the Internet – my advertising budget was zero.

(Remember I was doing this as a back pocket project while maintaining my marketing consulting practice.) How could I attract attention and get people to come back to the web site again and again?

I identified online editors and reference librarians as identifiable, approachable groups with a high level of interest and influence. I started an ezine directing readers to current search engine reviews and updates on the site and published approximately once a month.

- What is your stay-in-touch strategy?

Results
After just three issues of my ezine reporters started calling me for radio interviews and magazine articles. I received an offer to buy the web site with the price tied to the number of monthly visitors and page views.

Three months later I had grown traffic to the site from thirty thousand to three hundred thousand page views per month and closed the deal.

Positioning Your Company

To position your product or service for success:

A. Identify a Common Need

B. Identify a Market

C. Demonstrate Your Expertise to that Market

D. Continue to Stay in Touch

If you’ve been in business for three years or more you’ve accumulated a wealth of experience and knowledge. The more you share your ideas, the more people will view you as an expert and seek you out. Give your prospects examples of your expertise and they will think of you when they need your products or services.