Monthly Archives: May 2020

You know that cycle where you hustle your butt off to get clients, and then you hustle your butt off to work with the clients, and then you stop working with the clients and realize that you don’t have any more clients, and then you freak out about how you’re going to make your rent payment this month? We have all been there. It’s a completely normal part of business, but what is not normal, however, is staying in this cycle for too long. The trick is to book our clients for a few months in advance. I’m going to share my four best strategies for booking out consistent clients in this post.

When I sat down to think about what I really did to take my business from struggling to have consistent revenue to 1.5x-ing my revenue every single year, I realized that there were four main steps that I took, four main things that I did to make that happen. The first step, which is the least sexy and the one you’re probably going to avoid the most and is probably the most important, is that I niched way the hell down. Picking a niche is not picking an industry. It’s not about picking something to do that has a ton of competition. The opposite, in fact. The way to get consistent clients when you’re a bootstrapping business owner getting started and trying to make a name for yourself is to conquer a niche that doesn’t have a ton of competition, yet people are craving.

Here’s the trick to niching down. Look at your industry that you’re currently in, whether it’s wedding planning, or web design, or photography, or whatever, and ask yourself, what is the sub-niche that I’m going to conquer within this industry? Then you’re going to go one step deeper. Now that you have that sub-industry, I actually want you to solve a specific problem within that sub-industry.

Okay, so when I did this, for example, I was a copywriter for entrepreneurs. That was my industry. My sub-industry is that I worked with creative service providers who had online-based businesses, sub-industry, and then very specifically I decided that I was going to focus only on sales pages for those people. A big sign that you are not niched down enough is if your potential clients and customers are price shopping. This means that they’re looking at a whole bunch of people in your industry and then going with the cheapest option.

Step number two to consistently booking out clients for months in advance is to show the F up with consistent and valuable content. I don’t care what vehicle you choose for your content, whether you want a microblog on Instagram, or write a blog on your own website, or do YouTube videos, or podcasts, or whatever. The key is that you need to show up and you need to show up consistently wherever you are creating content, and that content has got to be valuable for your target clients. I cannot tell you how powerful this is to have an array of blog posts, or podcasts, or videos that are already answering people’s burning questions. It makes you look like such a pro.

And that allows me to do step number three, which is a big one for service providers, and not enough service providers are doing this, is I would run promotions for my services. Now I am not talking about discounting your services, and giving people coupons, and dropping the price. Hell no. There are other ways of doing promotions for your services that will help you to get a slew of clients all at once and book out a couple of months of clients at a time. I like to call this doing a popup promo, and the puppet promo is something I teach in-depth in my program, Yay for Clients, but for the purposes of this video, I want to give you a rough outline of what that might look like for you.

When you do a popup promo, what you want to do is create a limited time offer. This could be offering a service like a mini service that you don’t normally offer. You could offer it for just a week and only have a limited number of spots, which is another way that you can get more people signing up to work with you. Or what I also love to do is run a promotion before I raise the price of my services. So let’s say I’m going to raise my service price from $500 to a thousand dollars. I would do a promotion around that before I raised it to a thousand dollars and get a slew of clients in at the $500 price. Whenever I did this for my signature services, I was able to book out at least two months of clients at once, which still allowed about a month of time for organic clients to come and hire me as well, and so it always had a steady stream of client bookings.

My fourth and final step for you to get your business booked out for months is to do what you say you’re going to do. It is astonishing how many service providers fall off the face of the earth while working with their clients, and oftentimes it’s not that the service provider is trying to be really shitty, it’s just that they don’t realize how important client communication is for their clients.

I have got a serious tip for you here, which is that communication is more important than quality. Meaning, you communicate with your clients regularly, and keeping them updated on the progress of your work is actually more highly correlated with client satisfaction than the quality of your work. So yes, there are always ways that you can go above and beyond for your clients and send them gifts in the mail and make them super duper happy, which is awesome. However, essentially you just need to do what you said you were going to do, and show up on time, and give them stuff, and maybe go like a little ounce above and beyond and you are going to do amazing.

In this post, I’m going to talk to you about the three key mindset shifts you can make to double your sales and get twice as many clients. The farther I get in business, the more it becomes clear that mindset is everything. The reason you don’t have what you want right now is that you don’t believe it’s possible, and everything you have right now is a result of your past beliefs.

I don’t know if you know this, but I run a program called Yay For Clients where I coach entrepreneurs like you to create signature services and book out those services completely so that they can make a consistent full-time income from their business. Now we’ve had more than 150 students go through this course and through the last year or two I’ve been able to see a few patterns in the entrepreneurs who are successful and those who struggle a little bit more.

It’s not about your God-given talent. It’s not about being cut out for success. It’s not about how much money or resources you have. Resourcefulness is more important than resources by the way. It’s not about how old you are, or how young you are. It’s not about where you live or your first language. It has nothing to do with any of those things.

The people who are more successful are those who get in the right mindset, and specifically, there are three mindset shifts that they’re able to make in order to start getting those clients coming to them on a regular basis and truly becoming a boss of their own business. And that brings me to our first mindset shift, which is to become a boss, not a freelancer.

There is a massive difference between the mindset of someone who is freelancing, or basically just being reactive to what gigs are coming their way and competing for opportunities, versus a boss who is running their own business, deciding what services or products they’re going to offer and selling those products and growing at that business. Huge, massive difference.

We all start off, or most of us start off, as freelancers, but at a certain point, once you realize what industry you want to get into, you need to transition from being a freelancer to being a boss. This is going to require that you decide how your business is run, not your clients, that you decided in advance who you want to work with, not react to the opportunities out there, and that you create a signature offer that you’re going to sell again, and again, and again rather than creating custom proposals, or customizing your services to the client.

I know that sounds crazy, but it actually helps you to get more clients at higher price points and get more work done in less time. So, it’s a pretty great mindset shift to make. So, do you need to decide that you’re a boss? If so, I want you to put the boss in the comments below. That’s going to be your first step towards making this mindset shift. The second mindset shift you’ve got to make is to start seeing selling as a service.

Here’s what happens to a lot of my students and other entrepreneurs. They create a service, they go through the process that I talked about in step number one, they start seeing themselves as a boss instead of a freelancer, and then when it comes to actually ask for money for what they do, they freak the F out. A lot of unresolved worries about unworthiness and money and limiting beliefs come into play here.

The big thing is seeing selling as a negative versus a positive. I’ve used selling as adding a net benefit to the world as a whole, and I always use selling as a win-win situation for me and my client. Ultimately I’m helping the person to get a result they desire and there’s a price tag on that. And one thing I really want you to remember is that people who pay to play get better results than freebie chasers.

I’ve had people who have read my post and consumed my content for years and have never taken any steps forward or made progress because they’ve never invested in themselves. Now I’m not saying that they need to invest with me, but I can see that this has become a pattern of I want more, and more, and more free content. And that’s fine and I love creating free content and making my training accessible to people. However, until you really step up and make an investment, there’s only so far you’re going to go.

No business owner has made it without ever investing in themselves. By charging good prices for what you do, you are being of service to your client. You’re going to do better work. Your client’s going to respect you more and everybody’s going to get a better result in the end. Now if you’re still struggling with this, that means we need to address a mindset shift number three, which is viewing money as limitless.

We are in a universe of a limitless abundance, and if you’re feeling like you’re stealing from people by asking them to pay for what you do, you have a lack mentality. Totally fine. I also fall into this from time to time. There is truly no limit to how much money exists in the world. The only limit is the limit you’re putting on yourself. Now this one’s really hard sometimes because we’ve been so ingrained in the trading hours for dollars scheme and viewing it as having a cap on your income. And it’s just not true.

The biggest step here is to step out of that trading hours for dollars, or looking at your prices as an hourly wage situation. So, let me give you an example. Let’s say that you do coaching and in your coaching package you have a monthly call with people for three months. So, that’s three calls, three hours of calls. And you decide that you’re going to base your pricing around the fact that there are three hours of calls that person is paying for and you think, “Oh, well, I can only really charge a hundred dollars an hour.

When you price your services based on the hours of work, you are doing yourself and your clients a massive disservice. Instead, you need to look at pricing based on the value that you’re creating for someone, which also means that you can add other elements to your services other than just those hourly calls. Because let’s face it, there’s also prep time and post-call time, and organization and administrative work that has to happen to make those calls happen as well.

But in order to get somebody to pay you for that, they don’t care how many hours you’re spending prepping for the call. What they want to know is what is the net benefit to them? In other words, what is their return on investment? This doesn’t necessarily have to be financial. However, I’m going to challenge you if you think that your services don’t have a financial benefit, even if it’s not a direct benefit. But also think about the other benefits of your service.

How is your client’s life or business going to change as a result of working with you and what is that worth to them? Now, these three mindset shifts are going to get you willing to take the actions that you need to take in order to get results. So, once you’ve made the mindset shifts, then it’s time to get your butt in gear and start taking action. Now I’ve actually got a really great freebie for you, which is a checklist of 64 actions that you can take to start booking more clients and book out your business.

If you’d like to grab your copy of that, just go ahead and scroll down to the description box below this video and grab your copy. I would love to know which one of these mindset shifts is the most important for you. I already said if you need to start seeing yourself as a boss instead of a freelancer, write boss in the comments, but I’d also love to know, do you need to start seeing selling as service? Well, then I’d love you to write selling is service in the comments. Let’s create an affirmation around that.

Savvy business owners should never settle for a lackluster advertising campaign. Instead, you should work on making your marketing efforts as excellent and effective as possible. To increase the likelihood that your advertising work will yield impressive outcomes, consider using some or all of the tips and techniques outlined below:

1. Optimize Your Content. 

One of the best ways to keep your company on the road to growth is by optimizing your content. This strategy is important because it will help ensure that the content you produce is engaging, intriguing, entertaining, and information-rich. When you consistently produce this type of dynamic content, your audience is more likely to share what you have with individuals in their target audience. Once this happens, you can count on expanding your sphere of influence. Sales will typically increase as well. 

Note that there are many strategies you can implement to optimize your content. As noted by the Content Marketing Institute, using incredible visuals such as infographics is a wonderful way to take your content to a new level. Another strategy that has worked wonders for other business owners is the use of professional video production services. A third strategy to consider is making content scannable through strategies such as writing short paragraphs, including compelling calls to action, and utilizing textual elements such as subheaders and numbered lists.

2. Make Your Website More Shopper Friendly.

In addition to developing dynamic content, make sure that you tap into the power of making your website more shopper-friendly. This strategy is empowering because it will increase the likelihood that people will buy based on the functionality and aesthetic appeal of your product pages and other site components. One strategy you can use to ensure that people can easily shop on your site is the inclusion of an online shopping cart. Consider using a WebDev Guide for more information on how to develop your website in a manner that is conducive to conversion optimization.

3. Implement Social Media Optimization (SMO) Strategies.

Another strategy you should consider implementing to keep your company growing is implementing social media optimization (SMO) strategies. These strategies are empowering because they enable business owners to share their brand in a more conversational, casual way than some of the traditional marketing methods would permit. One type of SMO strategy you might find effective is Twitter marketing. Strategies like Twitter polls would help the business owner ask the audience-specific, brand-related questions and receive answers from them. The answers received can function as research through which the brand owner attains a clearer understanding of how products should be made and marketed. 

4. Encourage Satisfied Clients To Leave Online Reviews. 

Another strategy you can implement to keep your company growing is encouraging satisfied clients to leave online reviews. As noted in Search Engine Land, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they would a personal recommendation. Thus when your consumers consistently leave glowing reviews about your brand, you develop a positive business image that can prove effective in drawing more business to your company. 

5. Utilize Email Marketing Strategies.

One final technique that can really push your organization forward is the use of email marketing strategies. This online advertising technique provides you with a medium through which you can offer clients constant updates regarding sales, new product launches, and any other information that is relevant to your brand. You can also use email marketing as a springboard for dynamic dialogues by empowering your audience to fill out questionnaires or customer feedback surveys in which they express their views regarding the efficacy of your services and/or value of your products. 

Conclusion

Once you realize that online advertising is an effective means through which to build your brand, it’s time to put together a strategic plan. Use some or all of the strategies outlined above to ensure that you can keep your company growing!