When building a service business online, there’s a whole lot to learn from young Oliver Twist. Here are lessons he can teach you about lead generation.
“I want some more.”
Like Oliver Twist, we all want more money, more business, more leads, more clients…the list is endless.
However, when Master Twist asked for more, there was a pot of food he could get it from.
For a lot of entrepreneurs, we don’t even have a pot to hope for, not to talk of asking for more.
This post is actually about Oliver, only this time, Oliver is a Human Resource professional who helps small businesses build badass teams. Oliver understands that many small businesses over utilize their team members and oftentimes, make them do tasks outside of their strong skillsets.
His goal is to restructure such systems and ensure that each team member is trained well enough to function in a particular role, provided that role is his strength. This takes him roughly 3 months to accomplish.
After practicing in this field for 5 years and working with clients he got offline, his clientele started to dwindle. So, he decided to “extend his tentacles” online and make digital media his primary marketing model.
He built a professional website, set up a services page, searched out the places where his potential clients were online, developed a content marketing plan and got started.
After 5 months, Oliver had more clients than he could handle and he loved it (who wouldn’t). He could command his rates and choose the clients he worked with.
But 3 months after that, something happened.
Oliver started getting tired. He realized that to get results, he still needed to put in the same effort as he did when he first started. Logically, this didn’t make any sense to him (it actually doesn’t).
If he didn’t write a new guest post every week, he wouldn’t get as much clients as he wanted. Oliver needed a way out.
After studying his marketing, he realized he had been doing something really wrong. As a service professional, it is required to have a Services page that sells your services and Oliver had that.
But in all of Oliver’s guest posts, he never asked people to subscribe to his email list. And that’s because he didn’t have one setup in the first place. He felt that since what he wanted was clients, all he needed was to just link to his services page and he’ll live happily ever after.
Boy was he wrong!
Now you’re probably in the same shoes as Oliver – you have a website, a services page and a good guest blogging strategy. But for some reason, your only source for new clients is your guest posts, not your email list. Here are 5 reasons building an email list should be the most important aspect of your marketing.
1. It Retains Your Website Visitors
Ever heard of the term conversion optimization? I’m sure you have. Just in case you’re new to it, it’s what entrepreneurs use to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
For your professional website, your most important conversion rate should be the rate of email subscriptions. When loads of people visit your site, do you make any effort to keep them, or do you say, “Be gone…oh ye information eaters”?
To avoid ending up like Oliver, you need to retain your website visitors by having an email list and making them subscribe to that email list.
This way, you don’t just have visitors, but readers. You can read this post to know how to go about building your email list if you don’t have one yet.
2. It Serves As A Pool For Second Rounds
As I said earlier, when Oliver Twist (the original guy, not the made up one in my story) asked for more, he knew there was more because of the food in the pot. The only thing is he just didn’t know he had no right to ask for a second serving.
But it’s your business and you have every right to ask for even a tenth round. It all just depends on how full your pot of food is. By concentrating on building your email list, you have the liberty to sell your services to them. Sure, not everyone will buy the first time, but when you sell your services to your email list again and again, you’ll always continue to get more sales.
Oliver only relied on his guest posts leading people to fill the form on his services page. Even without writing any new guest posts, you can still convert new clients because you have a list of people to sell to.
3. It Builds Your Credibility
Who would you rather learn from: the guy who has 10 people listening to him and following his advice every day or the guy who has 2,000 people doing the same thing every day?
My guess is you chose the second guy. Why? Because it means he must be saying something valuable for him to have 2,000 students/followers/fans. You’ll want to follow too.
The psychology here is ‘crowd begets crowd’. When people see that you have thousands of people on your email list, they’ll want to know exactly why. Their curiosity would make them signup and read your emails because they want to know why you rock. And if it happens that you actually give value, they’ll tell other people and the process would keep repeating itself.
4. It Gives Your Service Business Social Proof
This is what separates the influencers from the average Joes. Having more students gravitate towards you because of the size of your audience is only the beginning. Influencers would also start to notice you. You’ll start to belong to the class of entrepreneurs who seem to have it all.
You’ll become the maven that everyone wants to connect with. Why? Because sending out one email to your list could lead to hundreds of social shares on a blog post, one pitch could lead to hundreds of signups on a Joint Venture product, one retweet could lead to hundreds of new followers.
One recommendation could lead to lots of new business.
Don’t you want to be that person? I do!
5. It Gives You An Opportunity For Accelerated Growth
A few years ago, Brain Clark’s Copyblogger was just a blog that taught people how to use copywriting techniques in blogging. Today, it’s a full digital media company selling several solutions to its audience. How did it get to this point?
According to his interview on Mixergy, Brian started getting purchase requests for his blog when his audience had grown. Also, people who had complementary products wanted to take advantage of Copyblogger’s large audience. While some were turned down, Brain partnered with others including Studiopress, and Web Synthesis.
It’s this accelerated growth that has allowed the company make 8 figures in annual revenue. That figure isn’t something to sniff at.
What was the starting point of this multimillion dollar company? A large audience!
Perhaps if Oliver, the character in this post, had done more research and listened to the right people, he would have made lead generation his number one priority in his service business.
If you don’t have email marketing set up from the onset, now is the right time to do it. So much has already been said online about the importance of email marketing and lead generation, so I really don’t want to rant about it again.
The benefits are endless. And if you’re looking to build authority in your field, don’t neglect it.
So here’s my own advice: Build an email list of leads or go hungry! Your choice.
How important is lead generation in your business? Do you even have a list now? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Image credit: telegraph.co.uk