If your current clients are visiting your business blog regularly, listen up! Today as we look at the ninth of the 12 Laws of Marketing with Business Blogs, we’ll help you shine the light on an awesome sales and marketing opportunity that’s right under your nose.

How great would it be to have a sales team that’s always growing, always at work and never wants to get paid out of pocket? Better yet, how would you like it if attimes they paid you to sell your products or services?

Well if this sounds like an outstanding idea to you, I’ve got good news for you. If you have clients, customers, buyers – whatever name you’d like to use — you’ve already got the best sales force right under your nose.

Law #9. Existing clients and vendors are the quickest, surest way of getting more new clients

When it comes to generating leads and attracting new clients to your business, most conventional advertising is useless. Like to prove it to yourself? It’s easy. Just go and grab five or six consecutive months of your favorite magazine. Browse through them and track how many ads are repeated.

So… how many ads did you find that ran more than once? I’d bet precious few, right! And here’s the simple explanation why — the ads didn’t generate enough new business to justify ever being run again.

The problem with conventional marketing and advertising

So why do so many businesses continue to focus on conventional advertising to generate fresh leads and build a prospect list?

· It could be pride. It could be falling prey to the lemming mentality. Thinking that says, “Everybody else does it this way, so I will too.”

· It could be that the marketing and advertising industry have tried to fool us into thinking that this is standard business practice. That we should just accept these poor results as part of the game of advertising.

Most businesses continue to pour huge chunks of their budget into these wasteful types of ads, always telling themselves, “This time, this one will really work!”

The problem with online and off-line direct mail campaigns

Direct mail lists (online or off-line,) do not bring in leads. They lead to dismal results. You know the drill, a 1% average response… or as we like to look at it — a 99% failure rate! We don’t let our business coaching clients stand for these types of results, and now you don’t need to either.

Two reasons why direct mail doesn’t work

1. To start with, almost any ad or direct mail piece can be optimized to pull a better response. For example, we coach members of the Business owner’s Coaching Club proven methods to do this including improving the headline, body copy, offer, and call to action.

2. Blind ads and sales letters mailed to blind lists are always a high risk. Let me define what I mean by “blind.” List brokers and media reps often tell their prospects that their marketing vehicle is highly targeted. This is simply not true in most cases. What most sales reps call “highly targeted” are in reality, minimally targeted.

Need proof? It’s easy to come by. Just ask the sales rep trying to sell you the lists to guarantee your response rate. Or better yet, to refund your money if their medium isn’t successful for your promotion. I don’t have to tell you what their answer will be. The bottom line is, these so-called “highly targeted” mediums are a hit-and-miss proposition at best. And most of the time you’ll miss. Sorry if this sounds disparaging, but unfortunately it’s true.

None of these “traditional” marketing methods work as well today as they did 25-years ago, yet most business owners keep pluggin away at them. No, that’s not for you! The most potent solution is to shift to another form of lead generation altogether.

Increasing sales with your own client and vendor list

There’s a tremendous source for attracting as many qualified and targeted prospects as you can handle. The source is the existing relationships you already have with clients, vendors, strategic partners, and other businesses – and your business blogging can help multiply the results you get.

The key to unlocking the power within this revved up sales force is to give each source a strong enough incentive to endorse your products and services and refer you to their clients. Let’s look at some examples.

Referral action example #1

Say you own a financial planning firm and you provide wealth generation and protection services. Go through your list of clients. Every person that you provide services for can probably refer you to 5 or 10 other people.

If you do financial planning for attorneys, it only takes one referral to get your promotional materials in front of an entire association of attorneys. And nothing pulls a quick response like an endorsement from a satisfied client, or “raving fan.”

Referral action example #2

Every vendor, supplier, and strategic partner has loads of other businesses they work with. How many of them will endorse your services to their clients? You could trade them a percentage of the first year’s fees for every referral who becomes a client. Or swap a free preparation of a financial plan in exchange for an endorsement letter to their customer list. The possibilities are endless.

And these principles apply to whatever business or profession you may be in. There’s no reason to ever again waste your precious time, money, and effort in generating a constant flow of qualified leads! Think about it.

Referral action example #3

Most people sincerely welcome a strong word-of-mouth referral from someone who they’ve come to trust. Think about it. If you walk into your favorite hair salon and the owner shares with you some exciting news about a new day spa that just opened on the other side of town. She then gives you a “gift certificate” worth $25 toward any purchase at this day spa. If you’ve been happy with the service you’ve received the last year or two from the salon and respect the owner’s opinion, would you be more likely to try out the day spa than some spa found in the yellow pages? I know I’d be.

An endorsed referral like this is a win-win-win. You increase your client base. Your endorsers increase their goodwill with their clients by making them aware of valuable products or services. The clients end up getting more of what they want or need. Everybody wins!

How business blogging ties in with this high impact marketing approach

In every example above, and in every application of this Law, there’s something you have to ask yourself. How do people get to know they trust, respect, and want to do business with you?

Without business blogging: if a current client, vendor, or strategic partner raves about your products or services — they send referrals to your store, a sales letter on your site, or force them to pick up the phone and call your office. Without a business blog people are made to make an immediate decision – take action by buying now, or take no action at all.

With business blogging: knowing how jaded today’s consumer is, with a solid business blog strategy integrated with your overall marketing you now have a powerful ally. In addition to referring people to take one of those three important actions – any new referral has the option of learning about you and your company through your business blog content.

Since there’s no heavy sales or marketing copy in your business blog posts or business podcasts, these new referrals have the opportunity to connect with you and your company. And with the aid of affiliate or other tracking methods, your clients, vendors, strategic partners, and other referral sources can use deep-linking strategies to send people to content that connects (rather than a hard sales message) – while still being confident they’ll get credit for their referral taking online action.

I could just go on and on with these strategies. This stuff works and it’s exciting! But the point of this series is so you grasp the power of the laws. Have you started to think how law #9 can apply to your business? I promise you if you dedicate serious thought to this principle and apply these ideas, it will transform how efficiently you attract and retain new clients to your business.

In the next installment of the Marketing With Business Blogs series, you’ll learn how to you’re your online and off-line marketing virtually risk free. And how to make sure your business blogging helps, not hurts.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


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