15 Easy Ways To Let Clients Find You

Are you struggling to grow your business? Do you hate to sell yourself to prospective clients?

The secret is to parlay your expertise into great business leads through getting published, speeches and seminars. Use writing and public speaking to position yourself as an expert, obtain valuable publicity, build your reputation and even promote a favorite cause or issue.

You probably already know that writing and public speaking, albeit a struggle for many, is the best way to build credibility. But did you know that speeches and seminars are also the best way to keep your pipeline filled with qualified prospects? There is a proven process for marketing with integrity and getting an up to 400% to 2000% return on your marketing investment. At the New Client Marketing Institute we call it the Educating Expert Model, and the most successful professional service and consulting firms use it to get more clients than they can handle. The findings of our 8-year, $2 million research study about how the most successful professional and consulting firms use this model were published in our book, Client Seduction.

For starters, don’t waste your marketing dollars on advertising and brochures that merely assert your competence. The best proactive lead generation strategy is to regularly demonstrate your expertise by giving informative and entertaining talks in front of targeted groups of potential new clients. The trick is knowing who to contact to get booked as a speaker developing a topic that will draw the right audience.

Want proof? In 1991 a random survey of the top 1,000 U.S. law firms found that 89 percent held at least one client seminar per year. In 1999, 94 percent of law firms were regularly holding seminars. Lawyers at the top 1,000 firms ranked seminars as the most effective tool for cross-selling and gaining new clients (Source: FGI Research, 1999).

Here are the top 15 places for the professional or consultant who speaks to find or create a perfect audience:

1. Small-scale seminars and group consultations that you host with 4 to 8 in attendance
2. Public seminars that you or others promote and charge admission to attend
3. In-house workshops that pay you to present to one company only
4. Local and national association meetings where you are a break out session speaker, panelist or a roundtable moderator
5. Radio and television shows that interview you for how-to advice
6. CEO peer group meetings like Vistage (formerly TEC), Inner Circle and Renaissance
7. College courses and extended education programs, like the ones offered through university extension programs
8. Public workshop companies like The Learning Annex that pay you a percentage of the gate
9. Chamber of commerce events, from monthly breakfasts to special workshops and seminars
10. Teleseminars and Webinars that you put on or that others invite you to speak at
11. Promoter 50/50 seminars and expos where you are invited to speak and sell an information product and split the proceeds with the person staging the event
12. Pre-recorded audio and video products that you sell on your Web site
13. Service club speeches to groups like the Rotary Club and Lion’s Club
14. Multi-level marketing organizations that pull together people who sell for them
15. Churches that offer public programs

Here are some of the key benefits of promoting through public speaking:

 Allows your message to be heard above the noise of all the other professionals and consultants

 Systematizes your marketing with a proactive approach that is simple and affordable to implement

 Makes it easier for your clients and business advocates to refer potential clients to you

 Creates multiple streams of income because prospects actually pay for you to market to them

 Produces all-help, no-hype marketing you actually feel proud to communicate

 Leverages your time so you get more results in less time

Getting Paid to Market Your Practice

Is there another way to woo and win clients, position yourself as an expert and get paid for it in the process? Consider the humble self-published tips booklet.

What is a tips booklet?
• Tips booklets educate a target audience with tips, techniques, or strategies.
• Tips booklets have simple design, with minimal graphics, photos, and colors.
• Tips booklets measure 3 ½" x 8 ½" and fit in a standard business envelope.
• Tips booklets are 16 to 24 pages.
• Tips booklets typically sell for $1 to $5.

“Tips booklets are an imaginative way to promote your business at low cost and high impact,” says Paulette Ensign, who has been dubbed the “Booklet Queen.”

As founder of San Diego-based Tips Products International (www.tipsbooklets.com), Ensign works with individuals and organizations to help transform their knowledge into tips booklets to use for marketing, motivating, and making money. Personally Ensign has sold almost 1 million copies of her booklet, “110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life,” without spending a penny on advertising. She has students who have now surpassed her own sales results.

“How many times have you heard the same sound bites come out of your mouth to your clients, prospects, and audiences, almost boring yourself to tears in the process?” says Ensign. “Imagine generating money directly from those pearls of wisdom that effortlessly trip off your tongue.”

Ensign offers the following 10 steps for getting paid for your tips:

1. Capture those tidbits of information as soon as they come to mind. Jot them down in a notebook or get them into a Word document. They can be in a raw format, with just enough information to jog your thinking about what you mean. There will be time to refine them later.
2. Let a couple weeks go by, allowing most of the information to surface in your thoughts. It rarely happens by declaring two hours on a Thursday afternoon to sit at your computer to think of it all.
3. Refine and organize the tips. Divide them into categories and edit the text. Use a writing style similar to what you are reading here.
4. Be sure to include your contact details so readers can easily reach you. Add a brief section about your background so people will know your qualifications for presenting the information.
5. Hire a graphic designer to make the words look good on the page. Your completed product will be a tips booklet measuring about 3 ½ inches by 8 ½ inches when printed. The designer will create their part of the finished product as a PDF file.
6. Send the PDF file from your graphic designer to a printing company. Do an initial print run of 1,000 copies.
7. Think about who can benefit from using your booklet to promote their own product, service, or cause. Send them a sample of your booklet and a cover letter describing some of the ways they can increase their sales or further their cause by using your booklet as a promotional tool.
8. Consider corporations, associations, publications, and any other group that seems appropriate for the topic of your booklet. Reach out to as many of them as you can, on whatever budget of time and money you have available to you.
9. Realize that every time one of the large-quantity buyers sends out your booklet to promote their own product, service, or cause, they are also marketing your business. Your contact information in the booklet allows the reader to reach you directly.
10. Enjoy the expansion of your customer base and your checking account. You are now reaching a larger audience than you are likely to do single-handedly, thanks to the large-quantity buyers of your booklet. And you have been paid by your buyers to reach those new people.

“Those sound bites you have been saying for years will now be reaching far beyond your current clients, helping your buyers, their clients, and your own business,” says Ensign. “It doesn’t get any better than getting paid for your marketing materials.”