Get More Clients Online

How Do I Get More Clients?

Q:  I retired from the Fed Gov't last year and started a consulting business, both are in-person & online. I am trying to generate income & see the potential. I really enjoy reading your articles. Any ideas on how to get more clients?

Jim Hennessey
www.JLH86.com

A:  Hi Jim--

I checked out your site and you're offering a great service for those folks who need a security clearance.  Your biggest obstacle at this point seems to be getting in front of the people who need your services.

So, here's what I recommend that you do -- start by defining your target market and then figure out where to find them online.  Here are some articles I've written that will help you:

How to Find Your Niche, Determine Your Ideal Client, and Target Your Market

How to Find Your Target Market Online

10 Essential Questions to Ask Your Target Market

How to Create Your Target Market Profile

Once you've figured out who comprises your target market and how to contact them, then follow this formula: How to Get 95% of Your Clients from Internet Marketing

Bonus tip:  For more help in creating and implementing these strategies, names of the resources and tools I use to implement these strategies, and answers to your questions, become a member at OnlineBizU.com.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Finding free articles for my newsletter

Q:  How do I find other articles to add to a newsletter? I would write one article, but would like to include other content. Is there a site for free articles?

Randy
Jack Quinn Solutions

Hi Randy--

Great question!  The largest, longest-running article bank online is EzineArticles.com.  You should also check out the article directory at GetMoreClientsArticles.com, which is the submission service I use to get my articles all over the Internet.

All that either of these services requests of you as a publisher is that you give proper attribution to any article that you publish from their site.  In most cases, that means noting the name of the author and publishing the author's resource box (bio) at the end of the article.  You can go to either site and search for a topic, or check out their category index and find articles in that fashion.  Or, if you know the name of an author whose work you want to use, you can search by author name, as well.

Good luck with your newsletter!

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Getting subscribers to my ezine

Q:  I recently advertised my ezine as a part of a radio show I was on and didn't get a single opt-in. Should I have done something differently? And now that I have a sales page for my newsletter, which can I do with it?

Susanna Opper
Shawenon.com

Hi Susanna--

A:  Here are a couple of recommendations I have for you:

1.  Subscribing to an ezine doesn't get the response it once did.  Now, you have to give something away (report, audio, ebook) to entice someone to sign up for your ezine.

Here are a couple of articles on how to cretae that giveaway:

Grow Your List with an Effective Client-Capturing Device

5 Secrets to Moving the Free Line with Your Client Capturing Device

10 Most Effective Client Attraction Device Giveaways

2.  Your sales page (squeeze page) needs to have its own URL that's easy to say and to remember, especially if it's being promoted on a radio show.  You can see my ezine squeeze page here:  http;//www.TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com.

Here's an article I've written about creating an ezine squeeze page:

How to Triple Your Ezine Opt-ins with a Squeeze Page

3.  And, once you have your ezine sales page and your client attraction device created, use the squeeze page URL whenever you speak or when you have an opportunity to drive traffic to your site, rather than using your website URL.  I regularly submit all articles I write to various article directories, and the URL I give in my bio (resource box) is the one for my ezine squeeze page, as seen here:

Internet Marketing Automation Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals create prosperous online businesses that make more profit in less time by teaching them how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise, and get found online.  Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> http://www.TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

Bonus tip:  For more help in creating and implementing these strategies, names of the resources and tools I use to implement these strategies, and answers to your questions, become a member at OnlineBizU.com.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Keyword Density in Metatags

Q:  Could you tell me how the right percentage of keywords in my meta tags?
Reece

A:  Hi Reece!  Great question!  Actually, there are three primary of metatags to consider. A metatag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a web page but have no affect on how the page is displayed. Instead, they are present in the source (web design code) and help search engines decide how to index a site.

1.  Title Tags: Your title tag is a simple piece of HTML code that's located in the "head" of your web page and is only seen by search engine spiders -- not in the body of your page. Your title tag is important because:

• Most search engines look at your title tag FIRST when they're spidering your website.
• Your title tag usually determines what will appear as the title of your website in the search engine results.

This means that your title tag is a great way to appeal to both search engines AND your potential visitors!

The most effective title tags contain description simple -- just a sentence or two, limited to 250 characters including spaces and punctuation. Anything longer and the search engines will likely cut the end off. While it's important to use your main keywords in your title tag, you definitely DON'T want to "stuff" your title tags full of a meaningless jumble of keywords.  Do include a descriptive, accurate title that describes your business clearly, letting potential visitors know EXACTLY what they can expect to find on your site
 
It's important to focus on one main keyword phrase like this in your title tag -- or two keyword phrases at a maximum.  And, your most important keyword phrase should come first, which can make a difference.

Google allows only 70 characters in title tags and will cut off the text after the last whole word, so your best bet is to optimize for 70 characters because of Google's importance in the world of search.

2.  Description tags: A description meta tag describes the purpose of your web page and ideally sits just below the opening title (<title>) tag in the source code of your website.

The text you include in your description tag usually appears as the blurb that's included in your listing in the search results. This blurb gives searchers an idea of what your site is about before clicking through to it.

Just be sure to keep your description simple -- just a sentence or two, limited to 250 characters including spaces and punctuation. Anything longer and the search engines will likely cut the end off.  Your keyword should appear no more than 3 times in your description meta tags.

3.  Keyword meta tags:  At one time, the keyword meta tag was essential for letting the search engine spiders know the keywords a web page was optimized for.  However, these days, the keyword meta tag tends to be ignored by search engine spiders, mostly because they became overused by people trying to "keyword-stuff" their way to the top of the search results.  Here are some simple steps to follow in creating your keyword metatags:

• List the 2 – 3 keywords you're optimizing the page for in order of importance, with your main keywords appearing first.
• Separate keywords with a comma or space or the | (pipe, on the same key as \)
• Don't overdo it. If search engines think you are keyword stuffing, you run the risk of being penalized.

Bonus tip:  For more help in creating and implementing these strategies, names of the resources and tools I use to implement these strategies, and answers to your questions, become a member at OnlineBizU.com.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Video Hosting and Editing

Q:  What is a recommended software program to use to create and edit videos to place on a website or blog?

Kelly Johnson
CornerstoneVA.com

Hi Kelly-- Great question!  I'm just now exploring video options and here's what I have discovered.

1. YouTube.com and Viddler.com let you upload your videos at no charge and provide a code to embed them on your site, but you're stuck with the YouTube and Viddler logos on your video. 

2.  GetMoreClientsAudio.com is a great beginning place to start for uploading and hosting audios (can't do any editing with this service).  The directions are simple, and you can create the player in multiple sizes to correspond with the amount of space you have to insert the video on a web page.  However, once you start getting traffic to these videos, your bandwidth usage will increase and you may end up paying more than you intended for bandwidth overages.

3.  Amazon S3 offers really cheap video hosting, but it's pretty difficult to set up on its own.  There's a membership site, www.EZs3.com, that you can join that walks you through the process and incorporates a variety of video players and social networking viral video options.  There is something of a learning curve involved here.

4.  For screen capture video (ideal for online training), I recommend Camstasia Studio,  There's a similar open source version called CamStudio, but I don't know that much about it.

5.  Animoto for Business is a fairly inexpensive option to create PPT-type videos with audio as well.

6.  For regular video editing, I usually hear iMovie recommended for Macs (is part of the installed Mac software) and Windows Movie Maker for PCs (is part of the Windows software).  However, for PCs, I've heard more people mention Sony Vegas Movie Studio. You can compare versions here.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

How to Promote Yourself Without the Slime

Q:  How do I market my web site with a non-intrusive manner? So that people feel welcome but not obliged to visit my site?

Marek

A:  Hi Marek -- I think the real question you may be asking is how to promote yourself without feeling like a slimy salesperson.  You do need to send people to your site, for if you don't, how will they ever buy from you?  Unless you have a trust fund that's helping you pay the bills, you need to make sales in order to be profitable.

The best way to sell without selling is to do what I call "educational marketing," or where you share your expertise freely with your prospective customers.  The best way to educate your prospects is by writing a content-rich article each week for your email newsletter, or by posting 2-3 content-rich blog posts each week.  When you do this, you demonstrate to your prospects that you are the expert in a particular arena, and then you can send them to your site for more info on how they can "buy" more of this expertise themselves.  This additional expertise may come in the form of a membership site, an information product, or hiring you for some 1:1 coaching or consulting.

You can get more detailed tutorials on creating ezines and blogs, downloadable audio, and how-to articles to implement any of these strategies with a membership to OnlineBizU.com.

If you think 1:1 marketing coaching might better help you, check out my individual coaching options here.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Advertising unique product

Q:  I'm new...I have a unique product. How do I advertize? Thank You!
Leslie
ILoveMyFountainofYouth.com

A:  Hi Leslie -- You could advertise in holistic publications, but I think you'd get better results from the following:

1.  If you do any in-person work (am unable to ascertain this from your site), you need to list where you are, along with a Google map to your location.  If you're not doing in-person work, you still need to list your mailing address and phone number so that your customers are confident that they can reach you if needed.

2.  Start building a list. The best way to do this is by giving away something of value that will solve one of the problems of your target market.  This could be an ebook, audio, video, special report, etc.

3.  Capture visitor informaiton.  Use a email marketing program like www.GetMoreClientsAutoresponder.com so that you can capture the name and email address of your visitors when they request your free giveaway.

4.  Stay in contact with your visitor.  The easiest way to do this is by publishing an email newsletter in which you provide helpful info to your target market.

5.  Write and submit articles.  One new article each week published through the article marketing service I use, www.GetMoreClientsArticles.com, will help drive traffic to your site.

6.  You can also drive traffic from doing some simple search engine optimization on your site.

You can get more detailed tutorials, downloadable audio, and how-to articles to implement any of these strategies with a membership to OnlineBizU.com.

If you think 1:1 marketing coaching might better help you, check out my individual coaching options here.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Upsells for a membership site

Q: Can you help me think of ways to upsell, cross sell and reduce refunds for our software membership website?  We do upselling, cross selling and saving refund/cancellation via inbound calls of our existing members who has questions regarding billing, technical concerns and other inquiries. 

Frances Meris
Izonetech-ph.com

A:  Hi Frances -- Great question!  You've already got a good start in that you handle much of this though your inbound call center.  Here are a few more ideas:

1.  Use your shopping cart to create a special one-time offer for another product/service when:

• someone signs up for your software
• someone signs up on your prospect list
• someone purchases another product

2.  When someone calls to cancel their service (if they have been a short-term subscriber), give them a "rural refund".  This is a trick that I've seen other Internet marketers use for physical products.  When a customer calls to return a physical product, they will ask the customer is they live outside a city where it might be troublesome to get to a post office or mailing center to return the product, or just ask if the return process would be troublesome regardless of location.  Assuming the customer will say yes, they offer to refund the customer half of the purchase price if they'll try the product another two months before returning it. If they want to return it at that time, they can do so and get the remainder of their money back.  I'm told this decreases cancellations.

This could also work for a membership subscription by asking the customer to continue to try the membership for an additional 2-3 months at no cost (you extend their membership at no charge).  This also decreases cancellations.

The key in any of these upsells/conversion tactics is to not to try and fool the customer.  Make sure that they fully understand what/if they're being refunded and how much they're being refunded, or if it's an upsell, what additional charges will appear on their card.  By being transparent, you'll avoid having nasty chargebacks levied against your merchant account.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Best Wordpress Themes

Q:  What are the best  FREE (or low- cost) wordpress themes.  What do you use?
Shawna

A:  Hi Shawna--

Actually, I don't use Wordpress at all -- I use Typepad for my blogs.  I think Wordpress is a a viable option for a blog or a blogsite.  However, because it's open source software and is free of charge, that means you have to provide your own tech support, or hire someone to do that for you. For example, I read last week about a worm that was impacting WP blogs that had not been upgraded to the latest version. If you did not know how to do this, you could lose use of your blog until you figured out how to resolve this issue.  

I use Typepad because the tech support is built into the fee that I pay.  Generally, I've seen that WP is easier to customize and more people seem to know how to do this than they do with the customization of a Typepad blog.  However, I love being able to email tech support with any problem I have, rather than having to dig out the answer in the support forums. And, with the purchase of a custom header for my Typepad blog for around $50 and then going in to change the colors to correspond, I can have a fairly customized blog (with tech support) pretty quickly.

The Wordpress themes I see regularly and think highly of are the ones purchased from ithemes.com, , WooThemes,  Thesis Theme,  and StudioPress.com.  While these aren't free, they encompass the type of layout that I recommend to clients who are using WP as a blogsite.

Here's a great article by Jill Chongva on the topic of free vs premium Wordpress themes.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Low-tech, low-budget way to start an online business

Q:   How do I get started with my online business when I am not at all technical and have a very limited budget?
Beth

A:  Hi Beth!  You didn't say what you're selling, so I'm answering this question under the assumption that you have a product/service and a target market in mind.  If you don't know the answer to either of these, figure this out before proceeding.

You've got one of two paths you can follow:
1.  Sell someone else's product as an affiliate
2.  Sell your own product or service

Regardless of your option, the quickest and cheapest way to set up a site online is with a Wordpress blog.  Wordpress is an open-source (free) software program readily available online that can be customized to your look and feel.  Most people do this by installing a Wordpress template.  You can simply Google "wordpress template" and you'll be shown thousands of sites featuring free Wordpress templates. Don't use the Wordpress.com option but instead install Wordpress on a hosting account from Wordpress.org.

However, many inexpensive hosting accounts, like GoDaddy.com, Hostgator.com. and Hostmonster.com (all run from $5-$15/month) already have Wordpress installed on their control panels as a part of your hosting account.  In most cases, once you have purchased the hosting, all you have to do is go to your control panel and turn on the Wordpress option.  Most of these hosting companies have tutorials to walk you through this process.

Once you have your site set up you need to do the following:

1.  sign up for an email marketing program to begin to capture your visitor's contact info so that you can begin to market to them (I use www.GetMoreClientsAutoresponder.com )

2.  Create a client attraction device (free report or giveaway) to entice you visitor to give you their contact info

3.  Stay in touch with your list members by publishing a newsletter or blogging

4.  Drive traffic to the site by writing articles, social networking, social bookmarking, podcasts, videos, etc.

If you have a service business, you can get more detailed tutorials, downloadable audio, and how-to articles to implement any of these strategies with a membership to OnlineBizU.com.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.