This question comes up from time to time on forums that I participate in. Many people want to know if you can really get clients from your web site. And the answer is “Yes!”.

Over 98% of my clients come to me from my web site and I have worked with many coaches, consultants and business people in many other industries who also get a high percentage of their clients online.

Here are some tips to help you get clients from your web site:

- Not everyone who comes to your web site is going to become a client immediately. Design a few different paths for your web site to work with for your web site visitors. Let your web site help your web site visitors subscribe to your newsletter, buy your product, attend your teleseminar, etc.

- Create very clear paths for your web site visitors to take. If you don’t understand how your web site visitors are using your web site, how are they going to use it? Design separate pages for lead generations, sales, coaching services, etc.

- Test, test, test. You will not know what works online until you test different methods of marketing, different web pages, etc.

- Drive traffic to your web site. You will not be able to get clients form your web site, unless you have traffic coming to your web site every single day.

Use online marketing techniques such as social networking, blogging, article marketing and others to drive traffic to your web site.

- Always try to turn more web site visitors into leads and clients. If your web site visitors leave your web site without taking action, you will lose them forever. Work on turning as many of them as possible into leads and clients. That way you will be able to continue working with them.

For more information on getting clients with your web site grab my FREE Report, “How To Get Clients Online” at http://www.AvocadoConsulting.com

Biana Babinsky

Here is a question I got recently:

Biana, I have been following your advice and I am seeing great results. I am now using my article marketing and blogging to bring in web site visitors, turn them into newsletter subscribers and then into clients. Last month I got 74 new subscribers!!!

I was on your social networking call a few months ago where you talked about social networking and Twitter in particular. I am wondering how I should incorporate Twitter into my existing online marketing strategy. Should I use it to bring people to my web site? Should I use it to get more newsletter subscribers? What’s the best way to do that?

Biana’s answer: I think it is great that you are thinking about adding Twitter to your marketing lineup. Social networking has been a part of my online marketing strategy for a long time and social networking has been bringing great results year after year.

I also find it’s great that you are creating strategy for using Twitter and how it is going to fit into your online marketing plan before starting to use it. I see many business owners starting to use Twitter and other social networking web sites, use them for a while and only then try to understand how to fit them into their online marketing plan to generate leads and clients. By thinking about this before you jump in you are way ahead of many business owners.

I recommend using Twitter for listening to your target market, creating awareness for your brand and expertise, and building your list. You can also use Twitter for promoting your products, teleseminars and services. But if you use it first to accomplish the first three tasks, you will see much better results when you do start promoting your products, teleseminars and services. Here is how it works:

- Listen To Your Target Market. One of the biggest benefits that Twitter provides business owners with is the ability to connect with their target market and hear what the target market is talking about.

One of the biggest challenges that business owners face is not knowing what they target market needs. At Twitter you are able to listen to your target market, see what kind of issues your target market is experiencing and what kind of help your target market needs.

Now use this information to offer a product or a service that your target market needs and you will see great results!

- Create Awareness For Your Brand And Expertise. Twittering, sharing and connecting with others will help you create more awareness for your business. Many people learn about their new Twitter friends by following their profile link. So make sure you include your link and watch your web site traffic increase!

And, twits are listed in search engines, thus helping you increase awareness of your business even more!

- Build Your List. The bigger your list, the more successful your business is. Use Twitter to build your list by sharing information about your free gift and your newsletter with your followers. Don’t promote it all the time, but it’s perfectly fine to mention your offers from time to time.

Make Twitter part of your Online Marketing Strategy - you will see that with some thinking and planning, you can start seeing results from social networking! For more information on using Twitter to promote your business, join me for How To Use Twitter To Promote Your Business Teleseminar at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/ztr

More tips for using Twitter to market your business:

- What Is Twitter? Answers To Popular Questions About Twitter

- 7 Things To Do To Promote Your Business On Twitter

Biana Babinsky

Hi,

As you probably know, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced on December 1st that we have been in recession for about a year. I am sure that you, as a business owner, have seen the signs of recession before the National Bureau of Economic Research made the announcement.

I have been seeing the signs of recession as well, because I have been getting emails from dozens of business owners every single week asking me about marketing in recession. To help these business owners, I decided to write an article on how to get clients during a recession.

However, as I started to write this article, I saw that I wanted to say much more than I could fit into a one-page article.

So instead I wrote a report: “5 Keys For Getting Clients During A Recession” and it is available for you, FREE, at
http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

Get the report and discover:

- - How to find a target market filled with people hungry for your products

- The best marketing techniques to use in recession

- Five keys to building your list easier and faster

- Two questions to ask yourself to make your social networking extremely profitable

and much, much more.

Download the report, FREE, at

http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

Biana Babinsky

I was reading an article today, Sneaky ‘daylighters’ risk firing by working extra jobs. I realized as I was reading it that two of the experts that they cite in the article are coaches. One is a business coach and the other one is a business communication coach.

I love how coaches are now quoted in many different publications, giving their opinions on anything from job search to running a business to weight loss.

And the best part about it is that introduces people, who have never heard of coaching or who have only heard about it once a twice before, to the coaching field. I am sure that after reading the article quite a few people went to a search engine to find out what coaching is all about.

And this is another reason to work hard and get better placement in search engines for your business web site. As coaching is becoming mainstream, more and more people are going to be using search engines to find out more about coaching.

There are many search terms that you can optimize your web site for. In addition to using obvious terms, such as life coaching, life coach, business coaches, career coaches, find keywords that your potential clients use to look for services like yours. Then use the keywords to optimize your web site for search engines.

Biana Babinsky

As registrations are rolling in for the How To Get Clients And Build Your List With Social Networking Teleseminar Series, I am having conversations with business owners about social networking.

One question that I have received a few times is:

How Can Coaches Use Social Networking To Promote A Coaching Business?

This is a great question, because I think social networking is one of the best media for coaches to promote their businesses. Sadly, I see many coaches under-use, mis-use or not use social networking at all.

Here are three steps to help you get coaching clients using social networking:

#1: Describe Your Coaching Business On Your Profile.

Don’t just say that you are a life coach, a business coach or a career coach. There are thousands (or even millions!) of other life coaches, career coaches and business coaches using social networking web sites. How is your potential client supposed to know which one to hire if everyone is a life coach?

Instead, use your profile to discuss the benefits that your clients will receive when they work with you or buy your products.

For example, many times I don’t even mention “coaching” or “consulting” when talking about what I do. Instead, I concentrate on clients’ benefits. I tell my potential clients that they will be able to Get More Clients Online when they work with me.

#2: Share Your Free Gift On Your Profile.

I am sure that you would like everyone you meet on social networking web sites to immediately become a life coaching client. Unfortunately, that will happen very rarely.

When your potential clients just encountered your profile on a social networking web site, they don’t have a relationship with you yet. Because of that they do not know that you are an expert at what you do, and they are not willing to invest into coaching with you (yet!).

They are, however, ready to get your free gift and subscribe to your newsletter. Make sure that information about your free gift is VERY visible on your profile. That way you will get more subscribers.

Don’t have a free gift for subscribers yet? Create a free gift now, because a free gift can triple the number of newsletter subscribers without increasing your web site traffic. Once you have your free gift in place, start offering it to people you meet on social networking web sites.

#3: Create Information Products (And Share Information About Them!).

Once your target customers opted in and downloaded your free gift, start sharing information with them and building relationships. As you are building relationships, make sure that you mention what you have to offer.

Many coaches only offer coaching services, and they mention this in every newsletter. However, very few people will be interested in your coaching services. From what I have seen with many of my clients, fewer than 1% of subscribers are interested in one-on-one coaching services. For some people it is the issue of pricing (one-on-one packages cost a lot of money), others are more interested in other ways to learn (e-books, audios, group coaching, etc).

Therefore, if you are only offering coaching services you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Many of your subscribers and people you meet through social networking will not work with you one-on-one, but are interested in buying your products.

Start creating information products to increase your revenues and get more clients through social networking.

Biana Babinsky

Some coaches I know have 2-5 clients, have a few people subscribing to their list every month and have 100-500 web site views every month. Of course they would like MORE - more clients, more subscribers and more web site visitors.

How can they go from 2-5 clients to 15-20 clients, to hundreds of people joining their list and to thousands of web site views every month?

Here are my thoughts on this:

First off, congratulations! If you have a few clients, people are joining your list every month and you have steady web site traffic, it looks like some of your marketing is working!

The next step is to track which marketing is working, because it is very important to know what is actually producing results. So my first question is: Are you tracking your efforts to find out EXACTLY which of your marketing efforts are bringing in the results?

If some efforts are already working, why not increase these efforts and see if they bring you more results? Marketing is not about creating breakthrough, award-winning campaigns. Marketing is about finding out what works for you and your practice and using what works to get MORE clients, subscribers and web site traffic.

My next recommendation is to streamline your marketing and create a marketing system that you use to move people around your marketing funnel. Create a system for getting people to your web site ==> getting them to subscribe to your newsletter ==> using your newsletter to offer them coaching and your other products.

You can do this by:

- Driving qualified traffic to your web site. Article marketing is great, but you need to use it consistently in order to get more web site traffic. I recommend my clients to submit at least 5 articles a month to article directories.

Other ways to drive traffic include search engine optimization, having your own blog and blogging on a consistent basis, participating in online networking where your target market networks and more.

- Once your get the traffic to your web site, make sure you can convert it into newsletter subscribers. Create a nice free gift that you can give away, such as a free report, audio recording, etc and promote it on EVERY page on your web site. Doing this will ensure that no matter where people have entered your web site, they can subscribe to your newsletter.

- Use your newsletter to promote your services and products. Now that you are adding subscribers think big about what they need, create products that they need and offer them to your subscribers.

As you are working through your online marketing strategy, see if you want to publish your newsletter more often. When you publish your newsletter every two weeks, or even weekly, you will be able to share more with your subscribers, get them to know you better and get them to buy your products and services.

Need more help? Check out more blog posts on list building:

- How To Use Your List To Get Clients

- Coaches, How Often Do You Send Out Your Newsletter?

- What To Do With Your Social Networking Traffic

More information on list building is available in the Grow Your List Home Study Course available at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

Biana Babinsky

Are you having a hard time explaining what coaching is to potential clients? Many of my clients ask me how I describe what coaching to my own potential clients and connections. Every few weeks I have a client, who is a coach, ask me how I deal with explaining what coaching is to someone who I want to become a client.

Well, first of all, I do not explain what coaching is to my potential clients. And I don’t recommend that you do that either. It will take a lot of time, your potential clients will get confused, and most importantly of all, they are not interested in coaching.

Your potential clients are interested in what’s in it for them, in what you can do for them. They are interested in results they will achieve when working with you.

For example, at networking events, I tell people I network with that I help business owners get more clients for their business. This is short, very much to the point and makes the person interested right away. This is because I just told them how they can benefit from working with me.

Notice, I didn’t start explaining what coaching is, how it works, etc. What I want the person to remember is how they will benefit from working with me. That’s it.

Take the focus away from yourself and tell your potential customers who you work with and how you can help them. For example, if you are a parenting coach, people you are networking with would much rather hear that you “help parents get along with their teenagers” than hear a long explanation of what parent coaching involves.

Having a clear message about what you do that you can deliver to potential customers is going to make a huge difference to your business. When your potential clients hear about benefits they can get from working with you, they stop and listen. And if they like what they hear, they hire you.

My How To Create A Marketing Message That Will Get You Clients Audio Recording gives you the step-by-step process for creating a marketing message for your business. You can get it at http://www.marketingsalad.com/marketing-message.html

Biana Babinsky

I received this question from a coach recently:

“I am a career coach and have been coaching one-on-one for the past few years. I decided to start creating group programs and a few months ago I offered a Coaching Group option to my newsletter subscribers. Basically, I envisioned it as a group of 5-10 people who would get together on the call twice a month and ask me questions about their careers. I promoted this a lot - through a networking group, my newsletter, web site, seminar sites - but could not get a single participant. What am I doing wrong? How can I get people to sign up for my coaching group?”

Biana’s Answer: What strikes me from your description is that you are just offering a Career Coaching Group. That is not enough for me to make a decision if I need your group and if it would work for me.

Is the group for people in their 20’s, just starting their first jobs? Is it for people in middle management trying to move up? Or is it for people trying to switch jobs? Or maybe it’s for people who are unemployed and need help landing a job asap?

As you can see, there isn’t much information about who exactly you are doing this group coaching for, so your potential customers are not sure if it’s for them. And if they are not sure, they will not sign up.

So how can you create a better group coaching offer? Don’t just call it a coaching group, name it something meaningful, name it something that will communicate value and give people an idea about who it’s for, so that they can self-select either in or out.

For example, my How To Make Thousands Of Dollars With Teleseminars program tells you right there, in the name the value and who it is for. It teaches people how to create extremely profitable teleseminars. So, if you are in the market to learn how to create effective teleseminars, you will know from the name that this program is for you.

So do not call it a coaching group. Instead, create a very specific program for your target market that helps your target market solve one of the problems that they are experiencing. To get the most people register for your group you will need to offer them something they really want. For example, if your target market are college students looking for their first job, how about a program on landing a great job right out of college.

The next things you want to do is to create a compelling sales letter for your program. And then you need to create a good marketing plan to market the program.

You need to give your target market enough information about your program, so that they can say: “This sounds like a program that will help me solve the problem that I am experiencing. I really need the solution and this program offers it to me!”

Once you get your target market to think this way, you will get many members for your group!

For step-by-step directions for creating effective and extremely profitable group programs that your target market needs, grab my How To Make Thousands Of Dollars With Teleseminars at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zteleseminars

Biana Babinsky

I was asked on one of the calls I did recently about what steps I would recommend to take for a coach who wants to take their coaching from a part-time hobby to a full time profitable coaching business.

It takes time to re-adjust and what you need to re-adjust the most is your way of thinking about what you do. When you have a hobby, your priority may not be making money. When you run a business, your priority is to have a profitable business that brings in income.

You also need to re-adjust the way you think about marketing. Marketing is the cornerstone of your business and helps you bring in clients. If you are not marketing your business you will not be able to have a successful business, it’s that simple.

Here are some marketing tips to help you take your coaching from a hobby to a successful coaching business:

- The very first thing to do is to decide on a good target market for your business. Before you can bring in clients consistently, you need to decide on WHO these clients are. After all, if you do not know who your clients are, how are you going to bring them to your business?

Make a decision about who your target market is. Knowing your target market will help you make other decisions and will help you simplify your marketing. And we all want to simplify our marketing :)

- Decide on marketing techniques you’d like to use to market your coaching business. It is great if you want to use blogging, and social networking, and article marketing, and public speaking, and e-mail marketing to promote your business. However, don’t start using them all at once!

The best way to market your business is to pick one technique, master it, start using it on a regular basis and then move on to the next one.

And remember, you don’t have to use every marketing technique you have heard about. For example, I have clients who enjoy public speaking, who speak often and for whom public speaking is one of the most effective techniques for getting clients.

On the other hand, I have a client who says that she would never ever do public speaking, it’s just not for her. Her favorite marketing technique is blogging, she is good at it and she uses her blog to generate interest in her business.

Pick the techniques that you enjoy applying and you will be more successful with them.

- Have a marketing plan! Create a plan for bringing in more clients, marketing your business, etc. You are much more likely to take action if you create a plan and put it on paper.

Members of my online business mentoring program have access to thousands of dollars worth of resources on creating a marketing plan, picking a profitable target market and using online marketing techniques to promote their business. Get immediate access to all these resources by joining us at http://www.MarketingSalad.com

Biana Babinsky

After reading my my blog posts on list building, many coaches have asked me what comes next. Once you get some people on your list, how do you leverage your list to get clients, make money and improve your business?

Just like with using any other marketing technique, in order to get the best results from your newsletter, you need to create a plan to get clients, make money and get results with your newsletter list.

Here are some things to think about and include into your plan:

- You Need To Bring In More Subscribers Every Single Day. Your target customers subscribe to your list and they also unsubscribe. Your goal for your newsletter list is to have as many people as possible see your message and learn about your business. Therefore the more people you can attract to your list, the better.

- Publish Your Newsletter On A Regular Basis. Your subscribers will not do business with you and will not buy from you unless they hear from you. The only way they will know about your expertise and about what you have to offer is by reading your newsletter issues.

Research shows that people need to hear from you on average 7 times (sometimes many more!) to buy something from you.

If you want results from your newsletter, such as more clients and more money, you need to publish! Publish your newsletter on a regular basis with useful information that your subscribers want to know about AND promo’s of your own products and services. A win-win for everyone.

- Create Products In Different Price Ranges. While lots of people are interested in coaching, the vast majority of them will never become your one-on-one coaching clients.

Some can’t afford one-on-one services, others may be able to afford them, but are not at the stage where they can justify the money they are going to spend.

But many more people would be willing to pay for group coaching, ebook, audio and other products because they cost much less than one-on-one service packages.

Create your own products and offer them to your list - that way you are using your list to build passive income streams for your business.

In my Grow Your List Home Study Course I discuss how to use your list to get clients, make money and create passive income streams. Check it out at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

How do you use your list to get clients?

Biana Babinsky