First step – Plan Ahead.

The biggest investment you make into networking is your time. And most people don’t budget it adequately to maximize their results. They show up late and leave early. Reverse this – show up early and leave late – and give yourself enough time to connect with people before and after meetings officially start.

Here is a little secret I’m going to share with you that very few people do. Plan and block time to evaluate your results after the meeting.

Was that group a good match for you?
Look through the business cards you collected – did you have an opportunity to really connect with those people?

How will you follow up?
These are just a few questions you should be asking yourself after each meeting. This is just as important as showing up in the first place. Most people skip this step and end up frustrated and overwhelmed because they don’t take the time to “get organized.”

Step number two. Choose wisely where and who you network with.

Again and again people ask me, “There are so many different groups, what are the basic groups and where can I get the biggest bang for a buck?”

First, you have to know that there are no right and wrong groups in general -they are just right or wrong for you.

There are basically four main categories of groups out there:

• Professional associations. Most every larger city will have local chapters of organizations that bring together professionals involved in the same trade. Attorneys, Consultants, Contractors, Manufacturers, and so on – all like to hang out together. With a bit of research you can easily find such groups near you.
• Non-profit organizations. Personally, I think everyone should be involved in some organization that allows them to give back to community. And there are a lot of good causes to get involved in. This gives you good visibility, and access to other local leaders you might find hard to meet otherwise. Plus – it’s just a good habit to contribute time and money to help others.

While you shouldn’t count on getting business from these groups right away, when you do – it will be worth your while many times over – trust me.

Professional networking meetings. Like those organized by your local Chamber of Commerce or other, privately owned groups. While probably the most popular, these can often be a “total mixed bag”, and unless you have a solid plan to “penetrate” the group fast and position yourself as a highly visible COI (more on that later) you’ll be terribly disappointed with results you get from such groups.

Lead Exchange Groups. These typically allow only one person in each profession and meet regularly only for the sole purpose of exchanging leads with each other. While groups composed of well established professionals can be really effective in cross promoting each other’s businesses, in most lead-exchange groups there just two or three people that end up giving and getting most referrals – and everyone else just isn’t getting it.

Frankly, I think that unless you find a group with really savvy, well-established professionals in it – these groups are totally ineffective for the amount of time and money that you are asked to invest in them. (OK, I can just see the flood of emails on this one from people determined to prove otherwise!)

Finally, remember that depending on your business and who your clients are, your best place to network could be a golf-club membership and weekly round of golf. Or a monthly first class flight from one major city to another. And don’t overlook people who already have you as a client. Hey, I stumbled upon an entirely new niche, simply because my daughters needed braces!

Step number three is to prepare your ABC – and that stands for Audio Business Card™.

People judge you by their first impressions of you. And if what you say to them in the first few seconds isn’t clear, compelling and memorable – well, you’ll just slip into oblivion like dozens of others we run into every day and then quickly forget them.

I bet you took at least a few hours, if not a few days, to design your printed business card. But did you take at least 15 minutes to develop and practice your ABC?! I bet not!

Teaching you how to develop a good ABC is a subject for whole new lesson, but here is just the gist of what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t say:

• Your title, like “I’m the president of Blah, Blah, and Blah, Inc” – boring!
• Your label, like “I’m a consultant” – OK, good for you, now tell me “what do you do”?
• Where you live and work – I’ve never met anyone who’s hired me because of my street address!
• How long you’ve been in business – people really don’t care if I stepped off the boat yesterday, or if I’ve lived here my entire life. All they want to know is – if and how I can help them.

Do say:

• Who your ideal clients are.
• What are their biggest problems you solve for your clients.
• How your clients are better off as a result of working with you.
• How to best start benefiting from your services right away (more on that in a moment)

This is really a critical skill. If you don’t know how to create magnetic first impressions and don’t have an effective Audio Business Card – don’t bother leaving your office. Your getting any business from networking will be purely accidental, and your chances for landing a new client or referral are as good as those of being struck by a lightning – if you catch my drift.

Step number four is positioning.

Simply put, most people in the networking environment are prospecting – looking for potential clients. Positioning is about reversing this process – allowing potential clients to FIND YOU. It’s a big difference when you have people coming to you versus you chasing them.

There is an entire process I teach my clients around this concept. And it starts long before you even show up for any meeting. It’s not hard to do. With a bit of cleverness, and some advanced planning, anyone can do it.

Step number five is about preparing bait.

You must have Attraction Tools™ in place. Finding clients is a bit like going fishing. You may love strawberries, but you would never put a strawberry on a fishing hook and throw it in the water because fish don’t like strawberries. So you have to think about what kind of bait your audience likes and prepare that bait.

When I first got started I quickly build a database of over two thousand subscribers to my newsletter, simply by offering an attractive bait, and promoting it effectively by turning my printed business card into an advertising billboard.

Step number six is about meeting COI and becoming a COI – or a Center of Influence!

Every group has a number of core members – a higher echelon reserved for top movers and shakers. These few savvy entrepreneurs likely exchange more business amongst each other than the rest of the group combined.

Your job is to become part of this group as quickly as possible. Effective networking is not only about who you know, but even more importantly about who knows you. So becoming one of the big fish in a small pond is like hitting a lottery jackpot – new business will just keep coming in!

Step number seven is about delivering immediate value.

One of the easiest ways to build relationships and deliver value is by being interested in other people. We all love to talk about ourselves. But when you network, if you are able to temporarily suspend your own need to blabber on about yourself – you’ll instantly be better off than 99% of other people in the room.

Next, keep in mind that people are naturally lazy communicators and lazy thinkers. They tend to say the same thing to everyone they meet. So even a slight variation from their typical pattern makes the moment of meeting you more memorable.

Actually it’s not that hard to say memorable things in an environment where most everyone else is trying to sell something. Dimply DON’T ASK FOR THE BUSINESS! Be curious, ask engaging, challenging questions. Or you can develop a Polish accent (OK, so this one may not work for you as well as it works for me – but it’s worth a try, right?)

Step number eight is about getting maximum visibility.

Once you’ve invested your money and time into actually getting together with other people, you might as well get the biggest bang for your buck out of it, right?

Most people are simply invisible! Even if you meet them, they seem to work so hard on making any impression on you, that you likely forget them right as you turn around to “Hi” to the next person.

Getting visibility is easy – if you know how. Here are just a few simple tips:

• Volunteer to run the registration table.
• Appoint yourself an official greeter and meet everyone as they walk into the room.
• Stand up and share a great resource with everyone in the room
• Ask the speaker a question that will allow everyone else to see your expertise in certain subjects.

Step number nine is simple – Follow up. Follow up. Follow up…

In the last five years I can probably think of less than a dozen people who have actually followed up with me as they promised! Even fewer followed up with me more than once or twice. This is terrible. Some of those people I really wanted to do business with – but they frankly let me down by disappearing.

Aren’t you concerned about how much business you lose by “disappearing” on people after you’ve invested so much of your efforts into connecting with them in the first place?

I learned my ultimate lesson about following up when I was courting my wife. I might have thought I was prince charming, but it took me two years, and multiple “irresistible offers” before she thought that too and bought into the deal. I’ve been now married for fourteen years and have two gorgeous daughters. It would’ve never happened if I didn’t follow-up, and follow-up, and follow-up – for two long years!

Bottom line, you must have a system in place that will allow you to effortlessly and automatically keep in touch with potential clients – “till they buy or die!”

“My expertise is worth literally billions of dollars. Why would I put a $5 (or less) price tag on it?”

Yes, I completely agree that your expertise is absolutely worth plenty, and certainly a whole lot more than $5 for a single copy of your booklet, and charging even less when filling a large-quantity order. There is no denying it, even for a split second, by anyone’s definition.

And this is something I hear at least several times a week from you as a booklet author or someone consider creating one or more booklets.

Follow me for a moment into a slightly different perspective and then tell me what you think.

When was the last time someone paid you $5 for your business card? Yes, your actual business card, the one you pull out of your wallet or snazzy business card holder. Or even $1 or less for your business card or glossy company brochure? I’m guessing that has yet to happen.

And then, at their own expense and effort they sent that ‘business card’ to thousands (maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of people you have yet to meet.
And these people who got your ‘business card’ turns out are wanting to do business with you in a big way, people who can well spend thousands and thousands with you, who came to you through that ‘business card’ that you were paid $5 or less for.

And you turned several hundred percent in creating and distributing that ‘business card’ in the process.
How do you feel when you look at it from that perspective? Quite a bit different, isn’t it? Instead of paying out of your own pocket to reach beyond your current client base to generate additional business, someone else not only did it for you, they paid you to allow them the chance to do so. How does sit with you?

It turns out that booklets are more of an emotional experience than you may realize when first getting started. You feel that your image is on the line. Understandably so. It is not uncommon to hear you say the content needs to represent everything you know or ever expect to know on your topic. You are not realizing a booklet is the entry point for the reader into your expertise, that you will develop other products to take the reader further.

You think the design of your booklet has to be a 4-color cover with photography, a glitzy interior design, include reference to every product and service you offer, and have not a single typo anywhere in it or it is nothing at all. Yes, image is important and excellence is the goal. There is no disputing any of that.

It is, however, more important to realize that overproduction of your booklet can make it too expensive for large-quantity buyers to bring into their budget, even with the current technology lowering the costs. Remember that those large-quantity buyers are your representatives. They want to pay you for them to reach a much larger fish bowl than the one in which you currently swim. If the large-quantity buyer wants a more involved or elaborate design, on a big enough quantity they can probably do a good job of that within their own company’s production activities by licensing specific print rights from you. When print is a large part of your buyer’s everyday business function, they can do production less expensively than you can.

Find those large-quantity buyers. They are at the head of the sales or marketing departments of corporations. They might even be at the head of investor relations for the company. Several years ago a booklet author licensed a booklet to that department for $30,000. It was a wonderful transaction and that ‘business card’ reached some very important prospects for the booklet author’s business.

Look also at associations. Have the association make the purchase from you so they can engage one of their sponsors in subsidizing it. The members of the association get your ‘business card’ and, once again, are potential clients for your business.

Do you still feel you are undervaluing your expertise by charging $5 or less on a booklet? I didn’t think so.

The fifth deadly mistake of home page design is poor use of copy and copy optimization techniques.

You see, one of the ways you can attract ideal clients to your website is through search engine optimization. But if you aren’t maximizing the use of SEO opportunities on your website, your pages won’t rank high enough in the search engines to get noticed.

Here are some tips to help you leverage the power of “on-page” SEO to attract your ideal clients.

Step 1: What key words are your idea clients using to find products and services like yours?
You’ll need to do some keyword research … don’t just guess. Find out the actual words and phrases that are being use by your target market to find businesses like yours.

Step 2: Use those key words and phrases strategically throughout your website.
Your keywords should be used appropriately, strategically and with restraint (you don’t want to be dinged for key word stuffing), in several places:

• Meta tags: These are tags used by search engines to understand what your page is about and how (or whether) to index it. One of the meta tags should include an appropriate list of key words.
• H tags: These are the tags that specify your headers and sub-heads. H tagged phrase are given more weight that bolded text, which is given more weight than standard text, in search engine algorithms.
• Image tags: One of the attributes of an image tag is “alt.” This is used by readers for the blind to describe the image. It is also used by search engines in image searches. Having your key word descriptions in the alt tags can increase the number of places your website shows up.
• Your copy: Of course your website copy should also have an effective key word density of about 2% to 3%.

Want to know what all five deadly mistakes are? Grab a copy of my new book, Home Sweet Home Page: The 5 Deadly Mistakes Authors, Speakers and Coaches Make with Their Website’s Home Page and How To Fix Them! at www.homesweethomepagebook.com. Stop by the website between March 15 and 19, 2010, to join the launch and housewarming party, and download a plethora of free gifts!

Did you know that Max Factor was a marketing genius? Yep, the Polish-born emigrant-turned-cosmetic-industry-giant virtually pioneered the make-up business as we know it today. And you won’t believe the strategies he used to get the rich and famous of his era to clamor for his services and products.

But what’s even more important is that his strategies can be simply replicated in your business to attract all the new and repeat clients you want. Here is how…

Five marketing lessons from Max Factor.

LESSON 1 – Transform ordinary people into dazzling super-stars.
That’s what Max did – he turned ordinary people into movie stars. Whether he knew it or if by pure accident, Max tapped into one of the most powerful marketing weapons – the human desire for fame and fortune.

He wasn’t selling make-up. He sold a chance to be a bit more like Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland or other famous movie stars of his time.

Simple, right? But take a look at all your marketing materials…

• Are they promoting what you do or what people get out of working with you?
• Are you boring people with lengthy descriptions of your company’s consulting approach or painting an exciting vision of the dazzling success you could help them achieve?

LESSON 2 – Help clients SEE the need for your service or product.
One of Factor’s most bizarre inventions was the “Beauty Calibrator” – a weird gizmo for measuring the face, which looked more like a medieval torture device than anything you’d find in a local beauty parlor.

It’s hard to imagine that people would voluntarily put this contraption on their heads – but they did. You see, Max’s invention was designed to discover what was “wrong” with client’s face and how they NEEDED to use his make-up to correct the flaws.

Why is this important? Just like we don’t argue with a doctor sharing with us the results of a medical test he or she might have put us through, we tend to take for a fact something that was measured and is presented in a structured and organized way.

If you find your prospects a bit resisting to taking the “final step” with you, it’s likely because they are not sure they really need it and how they will benefit from your help.

But find a structured way to illustrate the need for your services and watch the resistance melt away.

• Create an assessment to quickly gather critical data and present your findings in a visual way. Create a table or a chart that allows people to see at a glance what’s “wrong” with them.
• Develop an online quiz your web visitors can take to discover their competency/need in the area of expertise you provide.
• Have a list of standard value-building questions you always ask during your sales presentation.

LESSON 3 – Make everyone feel good (and unique and special.)
At his famous Studio Max Factor built four special “celebrity make-up rooms” each designed to bring out the best in women of a particular hair color: one room labeled “For Blondes Only” (decorated in flattering shades of blue); other rooms were solely for Redheads (done in mint green), Brunettes (dusty rose pink), or Brownettes (pale peach) – all designed to make them FEEL GOOD!

So you may not have an office where people visit you, but it’s still important you find ways to make clients feel good about doing business with you. Here are few tips how.

• Hand written notes and greeting cards take little effort to send out but make a long-lasting impression. Are you regularly taking advantage of this powerful marketing strategy?
• Send out small gifts shortly after clients buy something from you. Gift certificates to a local coffee shop or a massage place won’t cost you a lot, but will make people remember you forever!
• We love talking about ourselves – give people an opportunity to do so more often. In all conversations with prospects and clients make it all about them. They will think you are the best person to talk to in the whole world.

LESSON 4 – Let your clients be your most effective marketing weapon.
Many of Max’s clients appeared in his advertising campaigns promoting his products. The magnetic power of celebrity endorsements is nothing new, but are you using it in your business?

You don’t need world famous movie stars to be your clients. Turn your regular customers into mini-celebrities by asking them for testimonials and featuring their success stories on your website and in other marketing materials.

LESSON 5 – Create an enduring brand.
I doubt that Max Factor was overwhelmingly concerned with branding, yet over 70 years later the company he started still thrives as one of the global power-players in the cosmetic industry.

The company still uses his photo on the front page of their website and his story is listed on the “about us” page. I believe it’s because Max Factor was his own brand.

Everyday I run into people who try to make their marketing materials look like they are a world-wide, multi-billion dollar heartless corporation. What they forget to show through is their PERSONALITY.

Here is a newsflash – we don’t do business with corporations – we do business with other people!

With the explosion of professional service providers starting their own businesses, chances are you’ve got more competitors than you care to count – all appearing to offer the services and products identical to yours.

The solution? Take it from Max Factor and make YOUR PERSONALITY count and let people get to know YOU. The more competitive your field is the more this matters. Because no one can duplicate you!

The fourth deadly mistake of home page design is not having a compelling opt-in incentive. People just aren’t going to opt-in to your list unless you give them a very good reason to do so.

So make them an offer they can’t refuse. Give them a compelling reason to give you their name and email address. To come up with your ideal opt-in bonus, ask yourself these questions:

Who is your ideal client?
You need to have a clear, focused idea of who you want to attract to your list before you can know what to use to attract them.

What is your ideal client’s one big question in relation to your topic of expertise?
The bigger the question, the more compelling your answer to it will be for your target market.

What is the best way to answer this question?
Your opt-in bonus can be written, spoken or even a combination in the form of a video. Which would be the most attractive? Which makes the most sense it providing the answer?

Once you have these three questions answered, your opt-in bonus practically creates itself!

Do you serve more that one niche or market? Then you’ll need to create opt-in bonuses uniquely compelling to each one … and offer then on different landing pages.

Want to know what all five deadly mistakes are? Grab a copy of my new book, Home Sweet Home Page: The 5 Deadly Mistakes Authors, Speakers and Coaches Make with Their Website’s Home Page and How To Fix Them! at www.homesweethomepagebook.com. Stop by the website between March 15 and 19, 2010, to join the launch and housewarming party, and download a plethora of free gifts!