The Client Letter
May 14, 2013
The Northland
Sunny, 39 Degrees
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In the internet business world, the holy grail is the ability to get your offer converting at a level where you can go out to “cold traffic” (people who don’t know you) and have the numbers still work out.
If you can get something working like that, then your growth will only be limited by the amount of eyeballs you can buy.
It’s a smart and effective way to scale a business. It’s also extremely rare to see it work.
You can work for a very long time to get an offer like that. And even with access to real experts, you have no guarantee you’ll ever get it working.
Let’s face it, selling to strangers is hard work.
There’s an easier way to go about things.
And that is to stop selling to strangers.
How do you get clients?
You stop selling to strangers and start being valuable in advance. (To be clear, folks like Seth Godin have been talking about this for years. It just took me a while to GET how to connect it with money so I could actually eat.)
Those strangers turn into something very much unlike a stranger over time. They get to know you. They get to trust you. They start thinking about you when they encounter the type of problems you solve.
I wish someone had told me all of this back in 2007 when I started freelancing. I would have stopped wasting my time trying to be cute with my marketing and just gotten down to the real work of becoming valuable.
I would have wasted less time on “positioning” myself and spent more time on doing the real work on my craft that would do my positioning for me over time.
Best of all, I would have set out on this journey with a better expectation of how long everything was going to take. And why sticking with it is so important. There’s something to be said for realistic expectations.
I wouldn’t have been so frustrated when the breakthroughs didn’t come overnight.
And I would have replaced “trying to get clients” (which is a totally self-centered and needy view of things) with developing my own group of qualified people who I could demonstrate my stuff to over time.
I would have focused on transforming a huge number of strangers into (for lack of a better word) “friends” I help in advance.
Your website is an excellent way to do this if you set it up right.
If you think about it, it’s really the same thing the Godfather did in the movies… he gave first. Of course here we’re doing it without the murder and the never ending manipulation based on fear 🙂