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Advanced Approaches to Successful Affiliate Marketing

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Advanced Approaches to Successful Affiliate Marketing

Are you ready to truly develop excellent affiliate marketing skills and stratagems? After you determine which program works best for you, you should have no problem attracting your target market. Soon you will be able to connect with broader, more diverse groups. This article will teach you some methods to make connections with your targeted audience. You will be better able to meet your customer’s needs by using email to market your products.

Email can be a great way to advertise your business. When you sell a product to your customers, be sure to give them the option of being added to your email list. An email address and their name is the grand total that you need, so make it super simple for them to provide this to you. However, once you do have your client’s details make sure you treat them with respect and don’t abuse them. You can utilize different programs that will make sending out mass emails quite easy. Send out a mass mailing when you are gearing up for a sale, and don’t forget to link to your latest article or blog when you do. To sweeten the deal for potential email subscribers, put up a notice that email subscribers will receive additional promotional offers. Show your appreciation by sending a thank you note to customers who have made a purchase.

Taylor your marketing program to your target audience. Think of them as individuals. While certain customers may be more inclined toward using social media for communication, others might prefer a timely newsletter. Use customer demographics, surveys or test marketing strategies to identify the types of interaction that are preferred. Research the strategies your competition uses by visiting their sites as a customer. Try a variety of approaches to determine which ones your customers seem to prefer. When implementing different methods, strive to choose the ones that are the most appropriate for the nature of your product or service.

Be creative with your affiliate marketing efforts. Once you get established, stay in touch with current customers and find ways to obtain new customers. These are great strategies to think about as you come up with your own personal methods as well.

Services Offered

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After you have your clients and have done the competition analysis its time to decide what services you are going to offer your clients. The next couple of training will cover some of the most common offline marketing services you can offer. However there are general principles that need to be taken into consideration when deciding what services you offer clients. This training will help you determine the services that best fit your potential clients.

Business Needs

When determining what services to offer business owners they must first have a genuine need or desire for the service. Most businesses have a poor internet marketing strategy therefore they will likely need whatever services you offer. However, for example, if a business already has a nice mobile optimized website there is no need for you to offer a redesign. If a business has a genuine need and/or desire for your services then it will be an easy sale.

The question then becomes how to determine if a business has a need for a particular service. The easiest way is to find a pain point the business has in their online marketing strategy. That pain point will usually be the reason why a business is missing out on new leads. When you can clearly show that a business is losing money and how your services can help, then you have established a need. Another great way to find a pain point is to find an aspect of the businesses marketing strategy that is incomplete.  A great example of this is with video marketing. Businesses will start a YouTube account and create a couple of videos, however these videos don’t bring in legitimate leads. Knowing this you can offer the business an improved video marketing strategy.

Value

Another important aspects to consider when determining what a service to offer a business owner is the value your services bring to their business. The easiest way to establish the value your services add to a business can be determined by new leads. Showing the number of new leads from different online marketing efforts can reasonable expect to deliver will help show value. Also remember that the value your services add must outweigh the cost of your services. Therefore if you are providing PPC leads, the cost of the clicks mustn’t outweigh the value of new customers.

Your Services

Now that you know how to find what services best fit a business, you must determine what services you want to offer. Much like picking a specific niche to focus on, I recommend picking a limited number of services to offer. By focusing on a limited number of services you will be able to develop a process for implementing you services. This helps not only makes it easier to track your efforts but it also makes your business scalable.

The main service that you offer can be anything from website design to monthly SEO services. You simply have to choose the online marketing method that you are most comfortable with and have the most experience with. Your main service will be what drives your business so spend the appropriate amount of time determining what your main service will be. The training following today’s will show how to properly implement multiple services so you will have an idea of what works best for you.

Track Your Efforts

Like most aspects of running your own successful business you must be able to track your marketing efforts. You have to track everything you do on two fronts:

  • You have to track the work you are doing
  • Track the value that you are adding to a business

Tracking the work that you are doing is very important. At anytime you must be able to show the work you’ve done on a particular campaign. Without this information you are shooting yourself in the foot. Knowing the exact amount of time spent on a campaign, results of a particular strategy, what was done on a campaign will help in the long run. At some point you will get clients that are dissatisfied with your services and you will need crucial information like this to help determine what the issues of the particular campaign.

The second part to tracking your services is determining the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The easiest way to do this is by tracking the number of leads your services have provided to the business.  When you know the number of leads you provided you can then reasonable estimate the value of the leads to the business. This is not just for the benefit of your clients, this can also be of great benefit to your offline business as well. Tracking your marketing efforts allows you to split test different aspects of your marketing campaign. You will be able to find what works best and constantly improve your marketing efforts and delivering even more value

What’s Next

Now it is time to start thinking about what services you want to offer businesses. Narrow down your expertise to one particular service that you can offer at premium prices. Make sure that business have a genuine need and/or desire for your marketing service. Focus on providing value to the businesses you work, which usually comes in the form of new leads. Finally be sure to track all of your marketing efforts. This will help you not only you grow you business but you will also start to provide better service.

 

Competition Analysis

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Now you have successfully signed a new client for your offline marketing services. The first step to starting a new campaign is the competition analysis. The big secret about SEO, PPC, Video Marketing or any service that you offer is that you only have to be better than the competition. That’s it, you don’t have to create ads that convert at 30% or have the best SEO in the world you only have to beat local competitors.  This training will help you through your competition analysis.

This training is relies on a lot of tools. Most of the information can be found out using free alternatives however to get the most accurate and up to date information it is worth investing in the tools mentioned. Also all of the tools mentioned come with some type of free trial take advantage of them for free while you get new clients!

Competition

To begin I will assume that you have already done your keyword research. If so then you are ready to begin some general competition analysis. For starters it’s important for you to identify the top online competition for your clients. There is a distinct difference between your client’s physical competition and online competition. You have to find the competitors in your client’s area that are dominating the internet. It will typically consist of 2-5 different companies depending on the area.

To do this we will be using the online marketing tool  Semrush. This is an online tool that shows ranking and PPC analysis based off websites and/or keywords you enter. With this one tool you can find out valuable information about the top ranking websites for your client’s top keywords. Visit the tools website and simply enter some of your primary keywords, you will start to notice the same sites appearing regularly. These are your client’s online competition. You simply need to record these top online competitors so you can further analyze their online strategies.

Backlink Analysis

The next step in your competition research will consist of Backlink Analysis. Here you will find the sources that your competitors are using to achieve high rankings. For your backliink analysis you can use SEOMoz Opensite Explorer. This is an excellent tool for you to quickly and easily find what type of backlinks your client’s offline competition is using. You can get an exclusive 90 day free trail of the tool. You also get membership access where you can speak with other SEO’s and learn more about latest Google trends.

When doing your backlink analysis you will be looking for the overall link building strategy the competition has used to achieve high rankings. Some things you can look for include:

  • Link building strategy
  • Backlink sources
  • Anchor text used
  • Top backlink sources (news sites, guess post other prominent sites etc.)

Once you have a general sense of your competitors top backlink sources you can begin to get equivalent backlinks for your clients. Since your competitors websites’ are ranking well for ideal keywords then you can assume that getting similar backlinks will help your clients site rank too.

Social Media Analysis

With the last Google updates, Google has made it clear that a high value is placed on social signals. With that in mind you have to find out what your top competitors are doing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Google+ and YouTube. You need to get a general sense of what they are doing on these networks and how to generate user engagement. If you can clearly define and understand how competitors leverage social media to benefit rankings (and bottom line) then you can begin to implement similar strategies for you clients.

PPC Analysis

The last step for any strong competition analysis is discovering your competition’s PPC campaigns. This will be beneficial even if you don’t offer PPC as one of your services. For the part of the competition analysis you will need to use another online marketing tool and that is Keyword Spy. With this tool you will be able to see the exact PPC ads competitors were using and how effective they were. With this type of information you can quickly develop your own PPC campaign using the ads that are PROVEN to work.

What if you don’t offer pay per click services how can a PPC analysis help you? Well PPC rely heavily on the copy that used to attract readers and take some sort of action. With a quick analysis of your competitor’s ads you can see the wording that prompted user to take action and apply it to your clients site. This alone can greatly increase click through rates and new leads for you clients.

What’s Next

Take the information within this training and start applying it to some of the competitor in your area. You can use a good competition analysis even if you don’t have any clients. A good competition analysis can be the valued added proposition you offer prospect when you meet with them! Be sure to include every section covered in this training and develop the best competition analysis possible. Finally remember to use the tools mentioned as well to get the most accurate and useful information possible for your analysis.

Cold Calling

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“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”

-Robert Collier

The Basics

99% of internet markers (me included) don’t like cold calling. In the world of offline marketing it is probably the hardest part of the job. Quite frankly if you don’t like it and you can afford it, I would recommend outsourcing it. Hopefully you can get to the point where you no longer need to make cold calls, instead you can rely on online lead generation methods and referrals. However if your just starting out and you can’t afford to outsource it cold calling is a great way to get real paying clients.

Cold calling is the most effective lead generation tool, that’s why there is endless training material on how and how not to do it. I don’t consider myself a cold calling expert and like I said I don’t enjoy doing it, but I have done it with some success. Therefore this training will just be my own little spin on cold calling.

First and foremost when cold calling for me I know there is one thing that kept me from doing it as often as I should have…. fear. No matter what I called it or what I pretended it was all it really was fear. Now I was just fine in one on one meetings, in fact I excelled at closing deals. But there was just something about picking up a phone and calling 50 businesses every day and I wanted no part of it.

So what changed for me, well I realized two things. First the one thing that I hated more than cold calling was NOT HAVING CLIENTS and its repercussions. Second everything that I was doing was passive and I wasn’t doing anything that produced leads on a regular basis. With that in mind I decided that I had to focus on cold calling no matter what so that I could reasonable expect, legitimate meetings with business owners interested in my services.

Fear

I don’t know what it was like for you but I’m a fairly confident person. However there was something about cold calling that made me scared out of my mind. It wasn’t just hearing people say no but something more than that. So I knew that if I were going to do cold calling I had to do something about this fear that I was having. The problem was I would let my imagination go crazy with all of the things that could go wrong during the call.

My solution was twofold. First if for some reason I was feeling nervous or scared before a call I would just give myself 3 seconds and acknowledge it. Following that I would take 5-7 seconds take some deep breathes and visualize speaking with a business owner that is 100% happy and excited that I called because I can help grow his/her business. I visualized having a fun and enjoyable call with the business owner and setting a meeting to talk more about how I can help them. I take a couple more deep breathes and start to dial.

Value

Another problem I had when cold calling was a general lack in confidence. Not because I wasn’t confident in my skills or services I was offering but a lack in confidence in my approach. When I first started I was just trying to cold call to get a sale and do everything on the phone. Going back to the fear a little bit, I didn’t feel like I was adding any value to a business by just cold calling.

To help with this I decided to only call with some type of benefit to the business owner. Instead of calling with the “hey I can get you higher rankings” I offer some type of report, mockup, analysis just something to add value from my call. This way I know the business owner will get immediate value from my call and be more likely to have a meeting.

Offer

My last issue with cold calling was trying to close over the phone. I was never good at closing over the phone during first contact with a business owner. The easiest way for me to get around this was to stop trying! I felt more comfortable in a one on one meeting with a business owner so over the phone I would only to close a meeting and NOT a sale.

Script

Finally I developed that I was 100% comfortable with and could repeat in my sleep. Having a reliable script gave me more confidence and helped me close more meetings. Another thing it did was give me a foundation to use no matter who was calling my business. For example if a business owner calls me right now interested in a website redesign then I basically just start into my “website redesign script.” Obviously this is done in a natural manner and doesn’t sound like a script, but I am always ready to field a call and close a potential meeting.

So here is my exact script:

“Hello, this is Heidi can I speak to the owner (say business owner name if you know it)?”

“What is this call in reference too?”  (Gatekeeper)

“Who am I speaking with?”

“This is Pam”

“Hi Pam I’m hoping that you can help me out. <vague info about service>.” (note you never want to pitch the gatekeeper, by keeping the information vague she will be force to connect you with the owner)  

“Oh ok. Well you can just leave the information with me” (expect objections, just continue to until you speak with the business owner)

“Actually I should leave it with the owner directly”

“One moment please”

“Thanks”

…..

“This is {Owner Name}”

“Hello John, this is Heidi….. is this a good time to talk? I have some information about your business that will take 2 minutes”

 “Alright”

“I work with a company’s in <insert industry> that want to get more customers and more profits”

“What we do is help these companies increase the effectiveness of their current marketing by 300% or more”

“<Additional benefit of your service 2>”

“<Additional benefit of your service 3>”

“Are you the type of business that wants: more new customers, <benefit 2> and <benefit 3>?”

(do not say anything let them respond)

“Uhhh yes”

“What exactly do you do?”

“Well I would love to explain more of it to you so… lets schedule a meeting and I will go over <value proposition>. I have Tuesday’s and Thursday available which works best for you?”

“Tuesday I will have some free time”

“Great. My morning schedule is tight when will you be available in the afternoon, I only need about 15 mins”

“Let’s do 4 PM”

“Great see you then John”

I will modify this script accordingly to match whatever service I’m offering. Now as I mentioned before I don’t have to do any cold calling for my business. The only time I do any cold calling is when I want to get more leads into my funnel with one off services. So I may cold call a businesses that I think can use YouTube Optimization package or a new services I come up with. Having a reliable script that is natural is very important for your cold calling success.

What’s Next

You now have access to the exact script I use to promote my business and services. Please adjust it accordingly to match you and your services. It doesn’t not have to be exactly what I have here, you have to do what you feel most comfortable with. The most important thing with cold calling is that you do it until you achieve your goals. Also start early with your cold calling most business owners have the morning open doing office work and finishing work from the previous day.

If you want more information about cold calling be sure to check out the WarriorForum. There are lots of great threads and WSO’s about how to effectively cold call and build a successful business.

Cold Emailing

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The Basics

Contacting prospects via cold emailing can be an easy way to generate leads for your offline business. If you want this can be the first form of contact between you and all of the prospects that you’ve collected. I use cold emailing as a way to contact business owners daily because it is efficient and with the right swipe file very effective. If you have done your prospecting correctly you should have a large number of business owners contact information including their email.

This is the exact template I use, and it is quite effective. You simply have to adapt it to fit the services you are currently offering.

The Template

Subject Line: Looking for new <business type> in <city name>

Body:

“I live in<city name> and I recently decided I needed a new <business type.> I have done some research and it is clear that you are best choice available I was wondering if I could schedule an appointment….”

Would you like to get more email and submission forms like this form local customers.

As the owner of a local business in <city name> I too know how difficult it can be to generate new business. However we have been able to increase small business leads in your industry by 64% while reducing cost of marketing by 200%. You can find out more by clicking here.

<Your Name>

Business Name

Phone Number

P.S. This link  will only be available for one <business type> in your local area; we are making this information available to all of the <business type> in the area so act fast.

How it Works

Now lets look a little closer into why this email is so effective. With this email we are trying to get the business owner to say a series of micro “yeses” in order to get the Big Yes at the end which is visiting our website.

The subject line to any email is the most important part! Most businesses owners will open this email, because they think its coming from a potential customer. Also there is the settle hint of “new” in the subject line which implies that the person writing the email is looking for this service now.

The opening paragraph is also important because most email service providers will show the beginning of the email next to the subject line when the reader is still previewing the email. Plus when the business owner opens the email the opening paragraph will keep them reading our email.

We then transition and tell the business owner who we are and what we have been able to do for other businesses. Now I know some of you may not have results to put in this section but don’t worry. You can always research and find convincing stats about the effectiveness of mobile marketing, SEO, PPC, or whatever service you provide.

We then have a clickable link which will then take the business owner to your website promoting your offline marketing services. It should be a landing page where the business owner can get free information about the service you provide or watch a compelling video. In an earlier training I recommended you purchase some PLR about offline marketing services.

We then end by providing our contact information. It is imperative that you leave your phone number. You want it to be as easy as possible for a small business owner to contact you. Finally in the P.S., you will use scarcity by informing the business owner that the information is only available for one business.

Now once your email are sent you are done! Give some time for the business owners to respond. I typically wait 24 – 48 hours before following up. I start by contacting all of the leads who tried to contact me either via email, phone call, email submit etc. I will then contact any of the businesses that received the email and didn’t try to contact me via warm calling. If the business owner is not interested just move on, there will be plenty of interest in your services.

What’s Next

You should create a base email marketing template and funnel. Decide what page you want to send your leads too and what your follow up sequence will include. Remember when creating the email you are trying to get a series of small yeses to get the business owner to visit your site. Be sure to remember the purpose of each section of the email. Finally be sure to track your email marketing efforts. You want know when to follow up with the prospect and maybe even split test different aspects of your emails. I typically do this in an excel spreadsheet. You are now ready to begin sending bulk emails to business owners to attract new business.

Auto Calling The Basics

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One of the most effective tools used for businesses is an Auto Dialing Software. Now this isn’t cold calling, this is getting your marketing message to an unlimited number of businesses with very little work. In this training I will show you exactly how to set this up for your business.

Auto Calling gives you the ability to call literary hundreds of business owners at once with auto dialing software. From here you have different options including having someone be redirected back to you live or (and my personal favorite) going through a pre-sales funnel of prerecorded messages. The best part about this is you don’t have to do anything until a prospect wants additional information from you.

Method 1: Instant Sales Call

Let’s walk through the first option of having a prospect call be redirected to you. First you begin by getting the phone numbers of your prospects and inserting them into your auto dialing software. You will then use a prerecorded message prompts the prospect to “press  1” for more information. After which prospects will press 1 and be redirected to your main phone line or simply hang up.

This method is great because prospect that “press 1” immediately become hot leads that is calling you! They want to know more information about the service you provide. Now you can decide if you want to set a meeting with your new lead or sale them your services right on the phone.

The most important part with this method is getting the right prerecorded message, which prompts the business owner to “press 1.” Lets look at a sample script of an effective prerecorded message when using this method:

“Hi, this is <Your Name> with <Business Name> we specialize in getting more leads for <Your Nice>. I have helped increase local leads by 64% while reducing marketing cost by more than 200%. Give me 5 minutes and I can show you how to increase your customers and ROI  I guarantee it. This opportunity is limited to one <Business Type> in the area so press 1 now to speak with me immediately.”

OR….

“Hi, this is <Your Name> I will be delivering 5 free leads to the next <Your Niche> that calls me! Press 1 now to be transferred to me immediately and claim your free leads”

Now both of these are just examples of some script that I have had success with in the past. Feel free to use them yourself or adapt them how you see fit. The most important thing is creating an attract offer which entices the business owner to press 1. You must always be prepared to answer your phone and go immediately into sales mode to either close a meeting or close a new deal!

Method 2: Virtual Sales Funnel

This method I like a little better than the first because you can send each lead through a virtual sales funnel all on autopilot. First you take you list of prospect’s contact information and put it into your auto dialing software. You software calls all of the numbers at one time however you don’t want the prospects to pick up. Instead you want to leave an enticing voicemail. Your voicemail will prompt the business owner to call you back during normal business hours. When the business owner calls you back they will then be sent to a second recording which further explains your services. At the end of the message you will prompt the business owner to leave their contact information. You now have a list of business owners just waiting for you to call and sale your services.

Again the message that you leave the business owners are very important, however at the end of the funnel you again have red how leads ready for your marketing services. Here is an example of the prompts I use when selling mobile sites:

MSG 1: Hi this is <Your Name> I am having some trouble viewing your website, please give me a callback at 123-456-7890

Hint – a good way to ensure you get the business voicemail is to schedule your calls to go out early in the morning (2am – 4am) this way no one will be in the office. However this will not work if you are working in a niche that offers 24 hour services.

(Business owners call back and directed to second prerecorded message)

MSG2: Hi <Your Name> thanks for giving me a call back, sorry I am unavailable at the moment. The reason I called was because I was on my mobile phone and couldn’t view vital information about your business because you website wasn’t compatible. This could be making you miss out on up to 36 new clients per month. So I created a free mockup of how what a new mobile website for you website should look like! If you would like your free mobile website please leave your Name Phone Number and best time to reach you and I will contact as soon as possible. We are only offering a limited number of free websites so please make sure to leave your information.

Thanks!

(Interested business owners will leave their contact information)

What’s Next

Now that you understand the two methods you can start to implement this system into your lead generating methods. Decide which approach works best for you (or split test the two) and create a prerecorded message. A good thing about using this approach is that you can use a larger list of prospects because those not interested will naturally fall out of the funnel. This method is used by some of the biggest companies in the world because it is so effective. You will be getting hot leads that are asking you to sell to them.

Direct Mail The Basics

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Direct mail is a great way to not only get new clients but also scale your business for 20, 30, 50 or even 100 clients! A direct mail campaign that is properly implemented can have the highest success rate when compared to your other lead generation campaigns. The hardest part about direct mail is getting the business owner to open your package. But the contents of your direct mail piece should be engaging enough that business owner will call back. Finally when following up with business owners you can refer to the “correspondences” you sent so you are now warm calling. Direct mail is a great lead generation system and a must for your start up business.

Packaging

The first and most important thing when it comes to your Direct Mail campaign is the packaging. Now there are many different options but the two that work best are Priority Mail Envelopes from USPS.com or Envelopes from Fedex.com. Both are equally effective and will greatly increase the chance of your direct mail piece being opened by a business owner. Typically information that is mailed via Priority Mail or FedEx tends to be important therefor a business owner will surely open it.

Another option that has been getting a lot of attention lately in the world of direct mail is the use of Bank Bags. These are simple bags that you can use to package you direct mail piece. Again the purpose of the packaging is to ensure your marketing piece is read by the business owner. Although this method may be a bit more expensive will it will greatly increase the chances of getting new leads and new clients.

DM Contents

Now that the business owner has opened your direct mail piece you MUST immediately grab their attention. The best way to do this is with $1.oo bill attached to the top of your marketing piece. This is an old direct mail gimmick that makes your report stand out and more memorable when you follow up. The $1.00 bill trick is the only method that I use when sending direct mail pieces.

By now you’ve successfully got the business owner to open your DM piece, you have their attention now its time to get a new lead! This is done with the contents you send to the business owner. Now it depends on the type of services you are selling the particular business, but you can create some type of personalized attractive report showing them their pain. This goes back to knowing your prospect. Simply create a report which shows their pain and how you can help.

For example if you are selling SEO services you can send a report showing the top keywords for an industry and how many leads the top ranking site can expect to get. Another option is for those selling mobile websites. Create a short a short report showing a non-optimized mobile site compared to a mock up site. For both examples you can create a general template and plugin different business information then send the report.

Finally, at end of your report you need to include a definite Call To Action (CTA). This is what makes the difference between sending out free and information and getting new leads. End your report by telling the business owner to call you back so you can talk more about the information you provided. You can also inform the business owner that you will be following up with them within a couple days if you don’t hear a response.

Follow UP

Although DM is very effective in lead generation it still requires some follow up. The two methods I use for follow up is warm calling and/ or sending a “lumpy” mailing. First I say warm call because since we know the business owner will open and read the DM piece we can assume they know we will be following up with them. Therefore the business owner should be expecting our call. My follow up warm call script would go something like this:

You: Hello this is <your name> I’m calling about the correspondence sent to <business owner name> on <insert date>

Sectary: Ok I will get him for you

….

Owner: Hello this is John, who am I speaking with?

You: Hey John this is <your name> I’m just calling about the report we sent you on <insert date>

The one with the $1 attached…

Owner: Oh yes I remember that, I looked it over and…

 

Now proceed to cover the report answer any question the business owner may have and set a meeting!

Numerous deals have been closed because of a warm call follow up. Most business owners want to call you back especially if you do a good job of showing how you can help them. However they are busy, so you must follow up.

Finally if you are still having trouble getting in contact with a business owner, I will follow up by sending some “lumpy” mail. These are just little items used to get the business owners attention and let them know that you are serious about helping their business grow. A good example of a lumpy mail follow up I often use is Shredded Money. I will add the line “your website costing you money” or “stop wasting money on ineffective adverting!” Of course after the lumpy mail is sent I will follow up with another warm call.

What’s Next

Before going out and investing in postage or direct mail pieces I would suggest visiting the warrior forum and finding a more detailed course about direct mail. You will be able to find a more complete step by step guide and templates to use for your direct mail efforts.

Find a good template that works for you. Direct mail does take an initial investment compared to other lead generation strategies, but as I stated before it is also one of the best. I would recommend starting off by mailing 20 of your top prospects. Most importantly be sure to follow up with each of these clients. Even If you close one new client from direct mail you will easily cover all of your initial expenses. Simply continue to repeat, improve and scale your DM process until you have reached the desired number of clients!

Contacting Prospects over the Phone

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“The golden rule for every business man is this: Put yourself in your customer’s place.”

Orison Swett Marden

The Basics

At this point you should have a good list of prospects that you are ready to contact. Over the next few days we will cover multiple approaches to contacting said prospects. Before doing so there are a few principles that apply no matter what contact method you choose. This training will cover the basic principles to consider when contacting small business owners.

Know Thy Customer

The most important point is that you should know your prospects. Obviously the level of information that you need to know about a prospects varies depending on what form of contact you are using. However the fact remains that the more you know the better. Business owners are constantly inundated by marketing company’s all fighting for their business. Therefore the more information you can learn about a business the more personalized your approach. Personalizing your marketing efforts will make everything you do a lot more effective.

Secondly you should get to know your prospects pain points. What is it about their business that you can help improve upon? It is not as simple as “make more money” but what specific problems do they have that your offline services can solve. When you know this information you will be able to present your prospects with a solution!

Finally you must learn to speak their language. The only business owner that cares about Click Through Rates, Title Tags, Optimized Mobile Landing pages is YOU! These things are important but to the average business owners it doesn’t mean much. You have to be able to explain your services in a way that a business owner can understand.

For example if you are offering SEO services the absolute worst approach you can take is the following…. “Hi, I’m Heidi with XYZ Company. I have been involved in internet marketing for 4 years and I have made over 200 successful websites. I can help you rank your site #1 on Google with Search Engine Optimization.” Before you even finish the business owner has probably stopped paying attention and decided to not work with you.

What Works For You

You are about to get a crash course in lead generation methods. I did this specifically, to show you every possible way of sparking interest from your prospects. Once you know and test the different options you can rank the different options that work best for you. You can have the best services possible but if your lead generation is ineffective then it won’t matter much. I don’t want to force one lead generation on you that you don’t feel comfortable with because you are the one that will have to contact the prospects. After this training you will be able to use create a lead generation strategy to help deliver the best possible results.

Tracking & Following

You should already have a large number of prospects ready to contact. Now imagine contacting half via email, sending 20 direct mail pieces, 100 cold calls and 10 PPC leads over the next several days. That is a lot to keep up with for anyone. Therefore it is vital that you develop a system for tracking your lead generation efforts. Personally I have an excel file with multiple tabs that separate my lead generation efforts. On this sheet I include the following:

  • business contact information
  • services offered
  • contact date
  • results
  • follow up info
  • specific lead generation info (script used, subject line, variations, etc.)

Now I can easily see what the status is of different lead generation efforts I recently used.

Tracking your lead generation efforts also makes it easier to split test different lead generation methods. You can compare the time and effort needed for each method and which is most effective. Obviously if you know which is most effective you can invest more time using that particular method. You can also split test different aspects of your lead generation methods. For example if your primary lead generation method is cold emailing then you can test different subject lines or different landing pages. All of the information you can gather is helpful because it enables you to work smarter…. not harder!

Lastly the most important aspect of any type of lead generation is the FOLLOW UP. I would estimate that approximately 95% of the time after your initial lead generation contact you will have to perform some type of follow up. The follow up can be anything a friendly meeting reminder via email, a report that is sent, a postcard or even a follow up meeting to sign contracts. Also there is a chance that you didn’t get in contact with your prospect the first time you tried to contact them, does that mean you should give up? Absolutely not, it just means you need to follow up, maybe using a different contact medium or contacting at a different time.

What’s Next

It is time to get ready to contact your prospect and start generating some real leads for your offline business. Make sure you know some general information about your prospects and depending on the lead generation method you choose. I will show the top lead generation methods I use for my offline business but you have to choose the method(s) that you are most comfortable with. Finally be prepared to track and follow up on all of your lead generation efforts.

 

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