So how do you keep a full pipeline with eager clients and customers? Let me share 3 steps to get you started:

Step 1 — Know who your ideal client is. If you don’t know who you’re trying to put into your pipeline it’s going to be pretty hard to get them in there.

But this is deeper than just taking on anyone who waves a check in front of your face. If you want to fill your pipeline with clients who are EAGER to do business with you, you want to attract your IDEAL clients.

So what is your ideal client? Your ideal clients are the ones who you love to work with. They’re the ones who are a perfect fit for what you offer. They are NOT “women between the ages of 20 and 50 who are married with 2 children and trying to start a home-based business.” That’s a target market and that’s different from ideal client. Ideal clients are about an attitude, a shared vision or goal. An ideal client description would look more like this: “mothers who have been stay-at-home mothers but their children are now starting school and they’re ready to start working. But they don’t want a job, they want something they can do at home and have flexible hours so they can still put their kids first.”

See the difference in the description?

Now, you might be someone whose pipeline is empty and you REALLY need the cash flow, so while an ideal client is nice, you’d be happy with anyone who waves a check in front of your face.

First off, I get it. I’ve been there myself. However, as I know you know, taking on those less-than-ideal-clients while might be necessary for financial reasons, usually turn into a bigger headache than what you signed up for. I know you sometimes have to do this, but wouldn’t it be better to NOT have to? Start now focusing on attracting your ideal clients into your pipeline. Will a non-ideal client slip in from time to time? Of course. And if you so choose, you can take the on as a client. But start it off right by building that solid foundation first.

Step 2 — go where your ideal clients are. Now that you know who they are, it’s time to hang out where they’re hanging out. Don’t know where they are? Then go back to step 1 and do more digging. If you really know your ideal clients, you’ll know where to find them. Then you can focus your lead generating activities in the places where they are.

Step 3 — nurture your leads. Once you have your leads in the door, now it’s time to build a relationship with them. The best way to do this is through a consistent follow-up system, such as an ezine and/or direct mail piece. If you have a weekly ezine or something that goes out regularly to your leads, you don’t have to worry about remembering to contact them.

It takes AT LEAST 7-13 touches to turn a prospect into a client. In this “new economy” this number is even higher (I’ve found you need to be a little more aggressive to get the same level of sales as you would have a few years ago.) So if you have an easy and automatic way to stay in touch with your prospects, you’ll find building that relationship with your prospects that much simpler.

Michele PW (Michele Pariza Wacek) owns Creative Concepts and Copywriting LLC, a copywriting, marketing communications and creativity agency. She helps people become more successful at attracting new clients, selling products and services and boosting business. To find out how she can help you take your business to the next level, visit her site at http://www.writingusa.com. Copyright 2006 Michele Pariza Wacek.

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, most if not all of your marketing energy is focused on bringing in new business.

Maybe you’re doing a lot of networking…Or placing ads…Or cold calling…Or finding referral partners…Or all of these and more.

I call these “attraction” tactics because they attract new clients and customers. And they can be quite effective.

Most entrepreneurs gravitate towards using attraction tactics right off the bat. Mainly because attraction tactics are what everyone is most familiar with.

Think of all the companies that advertise on TV or radio, or in magazines and newspapers, all the time. Not to mention on billboards, the sides of buses, and these days even on eggs (yes eggs–apparently this is the next advertising frontier).

If all those big, successful companies are spending oodles of cash on attraction tactics, you probable should too. Right?

Well, yes and no.

There are actually two more, powerful types of tactics. And you need to use all three if you really want your business to grow.

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The problems with attraction
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Now, I’ll be the first to say that attraction tactics can be a valuable and effective part of any marketing plan. They get your name out there, create a sense of familiarity, and hopefully make your business memorable.

The problem is that straight attraction tactics are usually the most expensive, and take the longest to generate results (IE sales).

Here’s why…

On average, it takes 7 times more money to get a new customer than keep an existing customer.

Because you’ve got to get in front of people 7-10 times before they notice you. Then another 7 times or more before they even think about taking action (calling, buying, etc.) And that’s assuming you’re getting in front of the right audience.

On top of that, it is often difficult to track results from attraction tactics. Coke has no idea how many people, if any, buy more soda after watching their Super Bowl commercials.

But they can afford to spend a ton of money just building and maintaining brand familiarity.

Most of us small business owners can’t.

Thankfully, attraction tactics are not the only game in town.

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The 3 types of marketing tactics every business should use
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To really make your marketing work magic, you can’t just focus on attracting new customers. You need to use a mix of:

1) Attraction tactics to get you noticed, develop brand recognition, and increase familiarity and memorability

2) Conversion tactics to get people to take action, call, sign up or buy

3) Retention tactics to keep you in touch with past customers, and ideally turn them into repeat customers and referral sources

Actually, I rarely recommend my clients even invest in straight attraction tactics. Because the other two kinds of tactics–”Conversion” and “Retention”–provide far more bang for the buck. Plus, conversion tactics can usually do double duty as attraction tactics anyway.

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Converting the masses
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Basically, conversion tactics are designed to get you to take some kind of action. They convert cold prospects into warm prospects, or prospects into customers.

The best example is direct response marketing–whether it’s direct mail, a coupon, sweepstakes or a special giveaway.

A letter in the mail that says “Put a sticker here. Send this back in. Order this. Do that.” is conversion marketing.

An advertisement that says, “Call now for your free report on…”
is looking for you to take action. Conversion again.

Effective conversion is a very, very good thing because it often results in sales.

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Don’t forget about retention
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The final category of tactics is retention. This is where most entrepreneurs fail miserably.

It’s easy to spend so much time focused on getting new customers–or taking care of ones you have–you forget about the ones you already have. And before you know it, they’ve forgotten about you too.

Yet retention tactics are usually the easiest, most effective and least expensive to implement.

After all, you don’t have to tell past clients who you are, or explain the value of what you offer. If they were happy the first time they did business with you, chances are they’d feel good about coming to you again–or referring someone else.

But that’s only going to happen if they fondly remember who you are and what you do. So you need a system for staying in touch and top of mind.

Maybe you send out a newsletter. Write thank you cards. Hold special events.
Call people personally. Whatever.

The bottom line is, you can’t just advertise and sit back hoping people will decide to call or come in. If you want to turbo-charge your business growth, you need to use a mix of attraction, conversion and retention marketing tactics. Once you do, your sales will soar.

©2002-2007 Success Stream. All Rights Reserved. www.success-stream.com

Adding Renegade Marketing Strategies

Here at Simply Home Business, we have added more Internet marketing to our marketing and business promotion strategies. We are seeing the incredible potential of Web 2.0 tools and social marketing to build our list of prospective customers for products and services faster and deeper than ever before. And, because these strategies are dependent on newer technology, we are getting our help with this process by enrolling at Renegade University. We started with the free stuff, lots of detailed step-by-step guidance in return for our contact information. (See also Who Is Your Prospect? : Build Your List, posted in the Network Marketing section here at Simply Home Business.)

Web 2.0 Tools: Super Effective Marketing Through Connection and Collaboration

Web 2.0 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2)

“Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.” (3/17/08)

We are building a “webby” Internet marketing system using blogs (e.g. this blog hosted by Squarespace.com), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), content-sharing (Digg, Squidoo, HubPages) and social bookmarking (Digg, deli.cio.us, stumbleupon).  The primary purpose of our new marketing strategies is to attract prospective customers and clients by providing the kind of content and information they are actively seeking on the Web.

We want them to find us, rather than spending our time going out to find them and engaging with a lot of people who don’t really want what we have to offer and weren’t looking for it. (Some of them were even upset with us because we tried to engage with them to sell our products or services or business opportunity–when they weren’t looking for it and didn’t want it and didn’t want to spend time listening or talking about it. Imagine that?)

Why Renegade Strategies?

It totally turned our business development process on its head when we stumbled across the work of Ann Sieg (Renegade Network Marketing) and Mike Klingler (Renegade University). Because:

• Ann Sieg offers us a viewpoint that includes a solution to our need for cashflow at the beginning of our business ventures through sale of an information product that is low cost and high value.
• Mike Klingler offers us a step-by-step guide to generating and moving traffic to and through our marketing web based on valuable content and social marketing principles.

What Will You Learn?

Ann Sieg and Mike Klingler offer you the opportunity to get a free beginner’s education about using the principles of Attraction Marketing and Web 2.0 tools to ramp up your marketing efforts. At Renegade University (and Renegade Pro) you get step by step help with the mechanics of setting yourself up to utilize the technologies and strategies needed to build an Attraction Marketing engine for your business.

No matter what your business is or what products or services you market, you can use the guidance at Renegade University to set up your system for attracting prospective customers, clients and/or team members.

And last but not least, you’ll learn how to make the most of your efforts to increase cash flow into your business from the beginning, rather than spending and spending more and more money to make money.

Make the most of your energy, time, enthusiasm and imagination. You will work hard and steady but you won’t add insult to injury by driving yourself to the poorhouse while working harder and harder for less and less. Your consistent work will pay off with an endless stream of prospects for your business.

Join us there–and let Dennis and Kate be your guides to a successful home business start up.

Best wishes for your success,

Kate Williams and Dennis George
Simply Home Business