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1. Considering Where to Market

Offline Marketing – Networking etc.
What kind of marketing do you do to help in building your business? When you attend networking events, are you attending the RIGHT kind of events?

When deciding where to market yourself – be strategic about it. It can be both tiring and expensive to try to market yourself to all areas and professions. Before you even consider joining a group/association etc., ask yourself

• “what is the benefit to me in joining this group?”
• “are these people within my own target market?”

If the people are not within your target market, I say make a note of them for future but try to focus on where your target market is hanging out. For example, if your target market is small business owners in the financial industry – would you join or attend a networking group that is catered to event planners?

Online Networking
There are tons of different ways to market yourself online. However they can be VERY time consuming and unless you stand out from the rest of your competition, they can be very limiting in results.

Before you start marketing yourself online, ask yourself:

• Who am I trying to target? Does this area help me reach my target group?
• Will spending time to market myself this way benefit me? Is so, how?

2. Introducing Yourself – Be Comfortable with Your Introduction

So, let’s say you found the perfect place to market yourself – both online and offline.

No matter what kind of marketing you do, you need to be comfortable with introducing yourself. Quite often your opening statement is referred to as your “elevator speech”. Whatever you decide to say as your opening intro, be sure that it sound like you and it feels natural to you. There’s nothing worse than trying to memorize lines that you are not comfortable with…. It will be obvious.

Remember, this is your opportunity to start building the relationship with this new contact. If they ask you questions, it’s a good thing! It shows that they are listening and are interested in learning more about you.

3. What to do with the Contact Info

So often we get a bunch of business cards or new contacts and the information sits on our desk, within a nice folder, or even in our email. It sits there long enough that sooner or later we forget we ever met all those people.

In many cases, you’ve met these people ONCE. That’s it – once.

The secret ingredient is one we all know … FOLLOW UP. What’s interesting with this point is that we ALL know that we SHOULD follow up with contacts. But yet, how many of us actually do it?

You’ve just barely started a relationship … now it’s time to build the relationship – also known as the KNOW, LIKE and TRUST factors.

Here are a few suggestions on how to make the most of meeting new contacts.

• If you attended an offline networking event, jot down some notes on the person’s business card of items you discussed, questions they asked
• Invite people to join your newsletter list – tell them you will add them if they approve
• The day after the event, think back to your conversation and the notes you jotted on the business card – if they asked a question of some kind, do you have any details you can send them? I have a client who has a stash of articles on different topics and when she meets someone that is interested in a particular topic, she’ll send them an email the next saying “it was so great to meet you. During our conversation, you expressed an interest in abc and I thought you may be interested in this article”.
• If they asked you for specific information about your business, send it to them – whether it be your rates, what you can do etc.

Thinking back to their conversation – is there anything about them you would like to learn more about? Offer to take them out for coffee or schedule a quick 10 minute phone call and continue the conversation. Show that you are genuinely interested in hearing more about them and their business.

When you connect with new contacts, listen to what they are telling you. Are they expressing frustration with items you can help them with? Do you have resources or information you can refer them to?

By having ongoing communication with prospects and following up with them, you will soon see the results turn positive as far as building your business.

Over the last few months, Tina and Cindy have offered a “Boost Business with a VA” teleclass. The call is geared towards educating business owners on how a VA can benefit them in building their business. It also includes useful information on how a VA can assist their client(s) in generating traffic to their website.

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If you read the Multiple Streams of Coaching Income book by Andrea J. Lee, this information will be familiar to you. The 8 steps are the foundation behind the multiple streams product funnel.

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