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01) Networking
Your local Chamber of Commerce, trade shows, seminars, and anywhere your prospects hang out are all good opportunities for networking.
In many cases, the hotel bar the night before the seminar is the best opportunity for making contacts.
It’s usually more effective to try to capture contacts and leads than to try to close a sale on the spot, so get your elevator speech ready and have plenty of business cards on hand.
02) Volunteer
Besides making you feel good about helping a worthy cause, it’s a great way to network if you can volunteer where you come into contact with prospects (or people who have frequent contact with your prospects).
03) Write a Book
With Print on Demand (POD) publishers, nowadays it’s easy and cheap to type up and edit a book in your favorite word processor, upload it to a POD’s server, and have the book available for shipping within weeks or less. Books are also a great way to position yourself as the expert.
There’s something almost magical that takes place when you send your clients an autographed copy of your latest book. In their eyes, you instantly gain credibility. Your status becomes elevated. They are more likely to want to do business with you.
There’s little doubt that successful people want to surround themselves with other successful people. And a book shows them that you are successful. It gives you prestige. You are now an author. It’s far easier to dismiss your self-claims in a salesletter than it is from a book. The fact that anyone can have a book printed is irrelevant (at least for now).
If you don’t have the time or patience to write a book, you have several options:
- You can dictate the book and have it transcribed (elance.com and guru.com are good places to get a transcript done for you, but there are many other places online and offline to have them done as well).
- You can have someone ghostwrite the book for you. Be sure to check out their previous work, though!
- You can hold a teleseminar by yourself or with other experts and have it transcribed and edited into a book.
- You can get together with other experts in your field and each contribute a chapter or two for a book.
- You can interview other experts and compile it into a book.
- You can take books that are in the public domain, update it for today, and release it as a book (You may want to consider legal resources to make sure your choice is actually in the public domain…it’s not always straightforward).
As you can see, it’s fairly easy to have a book done in very little time and at very little cost. Just be sure the subject and material is relevant and fills a need. Ideally a book can also be used as a selling device for a back-end item or as a lead generation device.
04) Attend Special Events
Watch your local news and constantly be on the lookout for events in your area where you can increase your visibility. As always, the best lead generation methods are those that introduce your products and services by way of something free (in exchange for their contact information, of course).
05) Be an In-house Speaker
Besides getting great fees to appear and speak, you establish yourself as the expert. And like your free local mini-seminar, it’s a great place to pitch your products and services.
06) Mini-seminars / workshops
A great way to bundle up all of your products and services and sell them from the platform. It’s very inexpensive to rent a hall and put on a 2 hour presentation for your target market on something that interests them.
You position yourself as the expert, and you get to pitch your products and services. Be sure to record the event and offer it to other prospects who may not be able to attend the presentation in person.
07) Start a Talk Show
If you have regular content to deliver that your target market wants, your own local talk show may be another avenue to cut through the clutter.
There are plenty of local access stations that have these types of programs, and in most cases the community stations are free to air your programs.
Think nobody watches them? Well, you’re not going to beat out American Idol, and even infomercials will likely edge you out, but informal surveys show that people are aware of these shows, and sometimes watch all or a part of one during late night channel surfing.
There are even some regular “shows” that some of the locals rely on for information they can’t easily get anywhere else.
The key is to not do the same boring thing everyone else is doing. If you can’t start your own talk show, why not appear as a guest on one? You can get a DVD recording of it to use as a lead generation device. You can get great leads that way if your target market is watching.
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