Step 1 to Effective Client Attraction

Friends and colleagues, it's time to get back to basics with a pop quiz. What's THE number one most important step to attracting more clients to your healing arts practice?

Aw, c'mon, take a guess. Do a website? Network like crazy? Build a referral system with allied providers? Get on insurance panels?

Useful as all of those strategies are, they are not THE essential first step. So what is?, I hear you ask.

Time.

That's right, time. As in, carving out time -- daily -- for taking strategic action steps, and then giving those actions time to work.

Something so simple seems to be enormously difficult to accomplish. And I'll confess right now that I don't always manage it either, what with actually working with clients, creating new resources (my "artistic" passion), keeping up with bookkeeping and other non-marketing business demands, and striving for balance in the rest of my life.

But I can testify to the fact that when I work an action plan daily, I get more new clients, or returning clients, than when I goof off in my marketing discipline.

I have clients with success stories who are living proof that daily discipline in working an action plan does pay off, and faster than expected.

So why is this a habit that is so hard to adopt? Three reasons come to mind:

1. the thought of daily marketing feels overwhelming
2. we aren't really sure what to do or how to do it
3. we give ourselves legitimate excuses (but those just sabotage our business)
   

I'll let you in on the secrets to getting beyond these reasons and getting into the daily action plan habit. Ready?

• Take on one project at a time
• Make the action steps small and easy
• Track your accountability on paper (or in Excel)
• Use an accountability partner (colleague, friend, coach) to keep you focused
• Get just-in-time help for only one immediate project or one action step at a time
• Set your action plan work time into your business schedule as an appointment with Success
  
• Identify your time wasters and energy vampires, and eliminate them
• Sacrifice a little leisure, social or volunteer time for a month & devote it to your business
  

Coaching questions:

What are your personal time wasters and energy vampires? What will you do today to eliminate them from your attention for the next 30 days?

Look at a project or marketing strategy you know you should be tending to. How can you break it into small, easy action steps?

What specific time block each day will you commit to making your business a success?

3 Reasons to Be a Go-To Guy or Gal

A go-to person is someone who is knowledgeable, resource-full, generous of spirit, and enjoys being helpful without coming across as constantly pushing their own services and products with high pressure sales tactics. It may be a natural personality characteristic, but it's also a great marketing strategy.


Reason #1: It draws more ideal prospects to your door.

Prospective clients -- people who fit our ideal client profile but may not yet be ready to seek our services -- do like to window shop. It's human nature. And everyone likes to get something for nothing, or find a bargain. People naturally seek additional information from former sources, and tend to hire providers with whom they have already created a kind of psychological bond. When we establish ourselves as knowledgeable, generous sources of helpful information is creates rapport and loyalty between you and the prospect.


Reason #2: It keeps the energetic attraction magnet working for you.

There's a metaphysical principle that what you put out comes back to you three fold -- another way to state one of the laws of attraction. Being helpful and generous with your time and information, we invite to us people who will surprise us with referrals and opportunities to take our work into realms we may not have thought of. Becoming known as the go-to person in our area of expertise is like fueling up the lighthouse beacon -- energy flows brightly from us, and unexpected rewards know where to find us.


Reason#3: It deepens your credibility, and others' trust in you.

Giving away some degree of help and information puts our priority on being of service. It furthers the know you, like, you, trust you factor that makes people feel it's safe to trust us with their secrets, fears, and vulnerabilities. In sales terms, it's a try-before-you-buy offer or test drive to determine fit, function, worth of our paid professional services. In other words, it's good business because it helps establish the credibility of our services.


Coaching question:
What area of your professional interests will you become the go-to person for?

The Art of the Soft Close for Business Phobic Solopreneurs

Solopreneur coaches often say that using a trial session is a way to discover if prospective clients are a good fit for us, and that it's a way for them to understand the benefits of coaching. New counselors are often tempted to provide a "free consultation" session for the same reasons.

But by itself, a trial or free consult session that has only these purposes won't necessarily turn a freebie into a paying client. What's needed is a comfortable way to "close the sale."

Yes, that's right, at some point we do actually have to ask for the business if we want it. We have to switch to the business-owner side of the brain and help the prospective client make the decision to hire.

I'm one of those who would rather not be put in that position. I'd much prefer that people would just automatically intuit, or deeply feel, or logically grok that my counseling or coaching services are so fantastic that they'd be super foolish to pass up the chance to pay me for them.

In the real world, it doesn't work like that. I've had to recognize that the REAL purpose of any trial or free consult session is to GET THE CLIENT. I've had to learn the art of the "soft close" -- that is, how to end the trial session with a comfortable way to talk about hiring me.

I have a brief outline for a soft close script I recently came across that I thought others who are reticent to be business-like in trial sessions might like to have. It's available on my wiki here.

3 Realistic Expectations for Solopreneur Success

Because few of us in the counseling, coaching or naturopathic medicine professions have been trained for being in business, we tend to have unrealistic expectations about how long it should take to consistently turn a profit.

Likewise, we can be overly idealistic about how soon marketing efforts will start bringing in clients. And the danger of this is that we adopt a shotgun approach to setting business goals and working an effective marketing plan.

Exact timelines will vary according to what degree of resources you start out with, how much time is available to work on your business, and how persistent you are at following through on a small number of daily tasks. But there are some generally realistic timeframes to keep in mind.

If you are like most solopreneurs I work with who have a small pool of resources to invest at the beginning, and are financing the launch of your business on personal credit cards or family loans, it will take longer to get a continually full client load.

The realistic expectation for the time it takes a one-person businesses to truly succeed is about 5 years.

If you are reluctant to set business goals with targets for where you want to be in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years, it will take longer to feel and be successful. The more organized and business-like you are in your approach to running your business, the faster it will settle into a nice rhythm of keeping clients coming in.

The realistic expectation for success without a detailed business plan is from 3-7 years.

Note that detailed doesn't have to mean extensive. You don't need a 20 page business plan with charts and graphs. Start with 3 goals -- big, medium, small -- and target dates -- long range, mid range, near term -- by which you intend to achieve them.

If you are impatient or scattered in your marketing strategies, or trying to make a method work that goes against your natural personality, it will take longer to generate powerful client attraction. The more concrete, specific and consistent your marketing activities are, the faster they will pay off -- although not always in the direct ways you can measure.

The realistic expectation for highly effective marketing to be producing a steady stream of clients when you're a one-person show is from 12 months to 3 years.

These timeframes may sound like a very long time when you need clients now. There's no time like the present to get started on focused planning and follow through.

Overwhelmed? Not sure where to start? Email for a brief strategic steps chat.

Multiple Streams -- of income or hassle?

There's a lot of excitement in some quarters about the old idea of having multiple streams of income. What that means is that you have additional ways to make money aside from your one-on-one client appointments.

There are two common ways to do this for the novice solopreneur:

• developing and selling products -- books, self-help tools, diagnostic kits, dispensary items
  
• developing and selling live group services -- group therapy / coaching, workshops, signature talks, teleclasses, etc
  

The more experienced business owner may also venture into:

• affiliate programs -- where you get a percentage for referring clients to others
• creating online membership programs
• train the provider programs

What's important to realize is that establishing multiple streams of income when you are your only employee means that you are running more than one business. It can become a multiple nightmare -- assuming you even had time to sleep -- in keeping up with your bookkeeping, different tax structures, various regulations, not to mention different marketing campaigns and business plans for each income stream.

However, some of these same activities can be more simply started as marketing strategies for your one initial service.

What's your plan for transitioning multiple marketing strategies into multiple streams of income?

4 Tips for Managing Marketing Overwhelm

One of the most frequent things I hear from counselors, coaches and naturopathic doctors is how overwhelmed they feel with the sheer volume of marketing tasks they perceive it takes to build a successful practice.

And it's true -- there's a lot to do in the beginning and most of us were never trained for exactly how to do it. We quickly end up feeling like we're operating in the dark.

Here's the advice I give my clients:

1. Start with only the strategies that fit your personality.
That is, if you're an extrovert, capitalize on your outgoing networking skills.
If you're an introvert, develop a dynamic web-presence.

2. Get your basics in place as soon as possible so they can run on autopilot.
That is, do first all the things that need to be done just once (get your website up, list on locator directories, get give-aways loaded into an autoresponder feature or email link to you, design and order business cards, develop a brochure or promotional flier, etc).

3. Set aside dedicated time every day to keep yourself moving forward until all the basics are in place.
Optimal is 3-4 hours every day. Realistic for those with families, or another job, may be 3-4 hours a week.
Schedule it as an appointment with your business, as if your business were a client.
Perhaps put this on your schedule as an appointment with someone named Business Self.
Enlist others to help you keep this time commitment, because it's vital.

4. During your Business Self appointments tame overwhelm by:

• having a plan to guide your efforts each week
  
• being clear about your daily task goals
• getting instruction or examples to calm the uncertainty
  
• doing the easiest tasks first
• recognizing your signs of creeping overwhelm
• taking short breaks -- get away from your desk
• avoiding second guessing yourself
• letting go of perfectionism
  
• asking a knowledgeable friend or colleague to give you feedback
• working with a coach to avoid reinventing the wheel
  
• postponing the marketing tasks that require repetition* until the basics are done
• taking a week off once your basics are in place

*Examples of tasks that require repetition:

• blogging
• social media
• attending networking groups
• approaching referral sources and following up

Becoming systematic is the key building a successful private practice, and that includes having a method or system for your marketing as well.

You can do this.

Client Appointments Slowed to a Trickle? Try One of 4 Ideas

Are you like my friend* Julie, whose business as a life coach has taken a nose dive in recent months?

Maybe you're in the same boat with my colleague Arty, whose counseling clients are getting fewer and farther between?

Or, is your situation more like my client Dr. Genefer, who is considering closing down her naturopathic medicine practice and working as a natural supplements sales rep?

There's no question that the recession is impacting the bottom line of the solopreneur in the healing arts. But before you start cleaning houses, flip burgers, or throw in the towel altogether, ask yourself if you have tried enough creative, alternative ways to generate income in the field you love.

If not, here are 4 low cost, quick to start, in your field ideas to consider. BTW, these aren't as much for generating quick cash as for consistently keeping your pipeline full.

1. Start a Group

• Pick a dire need that your clients are desperate to end, improve, or achieve
• Make sure the target market is viable enough to be willing to pay for group membership
• Be direct and grounded in how you market the group
• Do it in person, by phone, connected to a networking organization, or sponsored by a company

2. Write a Self Help E-book

• Focus on a specific, definable problem with easy to describe steps to end, improve, or overcome
• Limit profesional jargon, maximize step by step instruction, and keep length to 15-50 pages
  
• Include pictures or clip art, and worksheets
• Include a plug for your regular services at the end
• Be assertive and persistent in how you market the e-book, whether as a free tool, or for a small fee**

3. Produce One or More Downloadable Self Help Audios

• Use a free conference call service on the internet if your computer isn't capable of recording
• Script out what you will say and rehearse it with a friend before recording
• Be clear in your diction, simple in your words, and slow-ish in your speaking
• Invite several friends or clients to participate in the recording with their questions
  
• End with a call to action for buying your e-book, or making an appointment for regular services
• Capture the wav file and save to your computer, then load onto to your website
• Market via social media

4. Develop a Creative Payment System

• Borrow and adapt from concierge or boutique practices
• Offer bonuses or discounts if clients will pay for a package in advance
• Seek out private contracts with small business owners to serve their employees
• At the least, get a shopping cart or PayPal buttons on your website and start taking credit cards
  

*Of course these aren't the real names of my friend, colleague.

**Check with your state -- in some places electronic products like ebooks and audio downloads are now taxable when sold.

What I Read So You Don't Have To

I'm a useful info junkie. I freely admit it. I spend half my marketing time learning from others, then "translating" that knowledge into direct, practical, easily implemented help for my clients.

One thing that becomes clear in doing this, is that there is a certain amount of advice that is universal when it comes to promoting a self-employed business in the healing arts, and a lot that will never pertain to us.

Here's a list of what I keep up with, so you don't have to:

Seth Godin's Blog
One of the best out of the box thinkers, author of Purple Cow, Meatball Sundae, and All Marketers Are Liars, among other brilliant works.

Milana Leshinsky's Coaching Millions
and the Milana founded Association of Coaching and Consulting Professionals on the Web (ACCPOW)
Smart, direct, common sense guidance that really works, especially for solopreneurs

David Frey's Small Business Marketing Best Practices
Lots of info for product sales / customer driven businesses, some of which is adaptable for the solopreneur in the healing arts.

Joan Stewart's Publicity Hound
Website and frequent ezine for those who want solid, creative ideas for getting attention in the media.

John Jantch's Duct Tape Marketing -- Book and Blog
Especially useful on generating word of mouth referrals from existing clients, but also great on explaining online technologies for non-techies

Rhonda Hess's Prosperous Coach blog
Very helpful resources and perspectives on building a solitary practice.

Robert Middleton's More Clients Blog/Action Plan Marketing
He gets the challenges, obstacles, mindset of the independent professional. Plus he's a Harry Potter fan, so that makes him a perfect match for me.

Fabienne Frederickson's Client Attraction blog and ezine
Starter ideas for conquering the mental obstacles to self-promotion.

WomenEntrepreneur.com
More of a clearinghouse of women-written blogs on having your own business, but I especially like Bonnie Price's blog.

Entrepreneur.com
A solid, conventional source for understanding the basics of the marketing world, mostly geared for small businesses with more than one employee, but still useful information.

Wasting Your Time or Making an Investment?

Many years ago a successful colleague said to me that he had learned to stop doing things that didn't make him money. From my perspective trying to operate on a shoestring budget, that sounded good to me.

Turned out it's harder than I thought to know when what you are doing is making money for you, or is just a waste of time.

Oh sure, you can get into tracking conversions, quantifying return on investment, monetizing web traffic and audience attention, and split testing, and other bean counting. But that's not my style. And I bet it's not yours either -- few of us learned how to do all that between classes in psychopathology, naturopathic therapeutics, and advanced coaching methods. (But that's definitely something to outsource to a virtual assistant or bookkeeper)

Any solopreneur business is a game of trial and error. Making errors is important because they provide juicy information.

For example, years ago I spent a trial period of about 15 months doing the conventional networking thing, joining business groups, making the rounds of meetings, collecting business cards, doing the follow up. I got one client from that effort.

One.

On the surface it would seem that that was a colossal waste of time. An error in judgment to think that my introverted personality would be magnetic enough to cause business connections to flock to me for therapeutic coaching, like I was a Northwest version of Dr Phil.

But over the years, that one client became a good referral source. She sent me a dozen or more clients who I never would have met without her intervention.

Moral of this story is: even when you can't see the return on investment of schlepping to another breakfast meeting, don't underestimate the potential money-making value of making a good impression.

(And I'll say more about ways to maximize that initial good impression in a future post)

Are You Doing What it Takes to Succeed?

If I asked you to name the 3 top things you are doing to make your private practice succeed, what would you say?

What personal characteristic do you rely on most in making yourself a successful business owner?

Is there something that you know you need to have or do more of, before you will fully achieve your goals? What is that?

Most importantly, what will you do with your own answers to these questions?

For a little inspiration, I thought you might find this video of interest. For practical ideas and coaching, I'm here to help.

How 6 Psycho-Graphic Factors Will Fill Your Practice

A few days ago I used the word psycho-graphics and was surprised to learn that it was an unfamiliar term among some of my self-employed healing arts colleagues. Whereas demographics outline the objective facts of what age, gender, ethnicity, location, income range, education level, etc, pertain to specific individuals or groups, psycho-graphics are the more subjective factors that pertain to their buying decisions.

In developing an ideal client profile, it's best to know both the demographics and psycho-graphics of your niche market. This knowledge tells you whether a specific group is viable for you as a population to pursue. The psycho-graphics will also suggest how many and what kind of obstacles you may encounter in reaching that niche market.

In crafting your ideal client's identity, it's not enough to know what you can do for them. What you must focus on is what they want and don't want, when are they actively seeking change, and what are they willing and able to pay for. So you aren't done with defining your ideal client until you can provide specific answers to these six questions:

• What are they experiencing that they don't want to experience?
• How does it impact normal daily functioning in job, relationships, and personal satisfaction?
• What motivates them to get help?
• What compels them to be willing to pay for help, and when will that occur?
• Who do they turn to for referrals or recommendations?
• Where do they look for resources and information?

When we know these psycho-graphics, we know where and how to deliver marketing strategies that will connect with our ideal clients at the moment of their readiness to pay for our help.

If we concentrate our marketing efforts on connecting with this moment, the urge to hire us is almost irresistible. Filling a practice then is so much easier, because clients practically beg us for appointments.

Are You Planning to Become a Successful Solopreneur?

Everyone in business intends to be successful. But are you planning how to actually get there?

Plan?? Who me? I hear you groaning.

When I ask clients, what's your current marketing plan, most often the answer I hear is: My plan is to get more clients and make more money.

Uh huh, I say. And exactly what are the structures and action steps that accomplish that?

Well, uh, I hear, I put a profile up on the internet, and I have business cards, and I sent a letter announcing my services to chiropractor's offices but I haven't really gotten much business yet. I guess I just need to do more of that.

Okay, let's stop right here. This is not a plan.

A plan at minimum identifies what you want (goals), what you need to have and do to get it (actions), how you will know it's working (measures), and when you are holding yourself accountable for getting things done (timelines).

A marketing plan is your road map to success. It keeps you focused on the effective and efficient actions that will have the desired payoffs. It helps prevent detours into the land of self-sabotage.

And even prior to thinking through your marketing plan, there are 3 very necessary steps you can take, starting right now.

That's why I introduce my clients -- most of whom are introverts just like you who go into heart pounding, sweaty panic at the idea of promoting themselves at networking events -- to the step by step foundation building and advanced actions that get them on that road to private practice success.

What are the first necessary steps -- before a marketing plan, business cards, profiles, and referral solicitation contacts?

• carve out a minimum of 3+ hours every day for developing your marketing plan, building the structures, taking the actions, and evaluating the results
• start with narrowing your marketing to one ideal client type
• know their psycho-graphics inside and out

If you haven't done these three necessary steps, no amount of planning, or profiles or business cards or letters to others will help you fill your practice on a consistent basis.

Change and Consistency

The topics of change and the value of consistency have been "up" for me lately. Events in multiple areas of my life and work are prompting me to think about when change is good, when it might not be, and how can I be consistent during a transition process, and consistent with what. After going through many changes in my professional life through the decades, here's how I'd currently coach my clients on these issues.

Major change is your business is good when it:

• starts from the identification and assessment of a specific problem that can't be easily fixed without major change
• involves all stakeholders in the assessment and solution-generating process, including clients
• develops a solution path that leads to a better way to consistently serve your vision and values
• crafts a strategic implementation plan with well described action steps
• puts in charge the players (or parts of your solopreneur psyche) who thrive on taking risks
• gains emotional investment and accountability commitment from key players and supporters (parts of the solo-psyche)
• assesses impacts and progress during transition openly by collecting and evaluating feedback
• adjusts action plans based on feedback, or weighs the costs of not adjusting and provides rationale for those choices

If you are thinking of taking the next leap with your business, major change is likely to be required. Coaching questions you may want to think through would include:

1. Have you completely assessed the problem you want to solve, involved stakeholders, and developed a strategic plan?
   
2. Do you know where objections and obstacles to change will come from?
   
3. How can you be ready for that?
   
4. Where's your personal emotional investment and level of consistent accountability?
5. How will you measure progress and impact?
   

Think: Dating and First Impressions

Relationship marketing, like dating, is a process of getting good prospects to know you, like you and trust you, so that they will want to see more of you. First impressions count.

If we come across as interesting and nice, or funny or helpful, we likely get a second date. If we come across as an unapproachably emotionally cold, intellectually distant, and like a professional know-it-all, those good prospects go elsewhere.

I'm reading a great book right now called The Relationship Cure by the famous relationship therapist, John Gottman. It's not about marketing at all, but does have some interesting parallels to consider regarding how we make bids for connection that cause listeners to turn towards us, away from us, or against us. Obviously in marketing our private practices, we want ideal clients to turn towards us, and to want connection with us.

Basically what works in marriage, parenting, friendship and co-worker relationships, works in client attraction as well because marketing for the healing arts is all about using relationship skills to be of service when others are suffering. I'd boil it down this way:

1. Prioritize your prospective ideal clients' needs over your own
2. Engage with sincere interest in their experience of their pain or problem
3. Downplay your wonderfulness (credentials, training, associations, achievements -- nobody likes a show off)
4. Do tell compelling stories about your own life / imaginary clients that relate to theirs, but don't over do it
5. Take time to be genuinely helpful (with no expectation of a goodnight kiss--er, uh, signing up a client)
6. Have a way to ask them out for more dates (follow up marketing)
7. Listen with enthusiasm and compassion, validate emotions and worries, be supportive

This is a qualitative checklist that can be applied to a wide range of marketing tasks no matter who you're trying to date. Um, I mean, attract as clients. Like mom always said, just be yourself, and you'll be fine.

What's Your Morning Marketing Routine?

Following up on yesterday's blog, I am wondering today what others do in their morning marketing routines. (No, I don't mean like jogging to the Starbucks -- although if you do that wearing a tee shirt with your business logo on it, that might count. LOL)

Like Dolly Parton, I tumbled outa bed and stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition....and then I turn on the computer and get to work. In an hour or less I have done all the following:

1. glance at the news headlines on my start page -- reassure myself that the world is still out there
2. check email for urgent notes from clients and friends / family, and skim through AlterNet.org e-news
   
3. scan through / respond to new posts on forums for counselors and coaches, get ideas for blogging
   
4. scan through Twitter, get more ideas for blogging, and respond to any Tweets from followers
5. scan through Facebook and do some keeping in touch with colleagues
6. blog or deal with the urgent emails
7. check appointments for the day and my other projects task list

Since starting that routine I've generated 6 new clients. Of course, I have all the foundations in place -- like my websites -- and often on my project list is the designing, marketing or giving of a signature talk or the writing and sending of a email campaign. Those activities I do in the second hour of the workday, or later in the afternoon, depending on my client appointment schedule.

The systematic approach really works. What's yours?

Guaranteed Success Method -- for Private Practice Failure !

Here's the No Hype Truth this morning ~~ most private practices in the healing arts flounder NOT because the counselor, ND, or coach doesn't take insurance, is fresh out of school, poorly trained, or delivers bad service.

Most solopreneurs fail to put the same level of daily commitment into building their business that they put into getting their education. The harsh fact is that you cannot develop a thriving, self-sustaining, self-employed business if you don't ruthlessly focus 50 - 70% of your time in the beginning on marketing.

Any successful business coach will tell you that spending 4 hours A DAY on marketing is absolutely necessary in the first year if you want to be breaking even or doing better than that. Sounds like a lot? Don't worry, there's plenty to do to keep busy -- it may not even be enough!

And, you want those 4 hours to be spent on the most client-attracting tasks possible. Those include:

• creating a sticky, value-providing website, and continually updating it
• blogging, Tweeting, and other traffic-driving activities
• listing yourself in online locator services and/or doing Google Adwords
  
• monitoring your web-presence and search engine rankings
• writing articles for local, hard copy publications
  
• outreach to referral sources with personal visits, and follow up materials that give valued info
• networking interactions where your ideal clients are
• scheduling, preparing, giving signature talks and / or workshops
• developing and tracking email marketing campaigns
• writing auto-responder series and special reports
  
• evaluating your efforts, eliminating what doesn't work, maximizing what does

There's more that can be done, but these are the can't-do-without basics.

The trick to making all this easy is to be methodical in getting your foundational pieces in place first, because they will then work for you on auto-pilot while your attention is on more advanced marketing tasks. In the beginning, or when struggling, if you want your business to survive and thrive, it's crucial to spend the needed 4 hours a day and be laser focused with self-discipline, commitment to success, and accountability to the health of your business.

I can't emphasize this enough -- being methodical means to have a marketing map and work on one or two things at a time until they are running smoothly, then move on to the next.

The scattered, unfocused, headless chicken approach is a successful, guaranteed method for business failure.

Are You a Business Dabbler?

A coaching colleague has been telling folks that it takes 4 or 5 years to get a solo practice really profitable. That's true for a lot of self-employed people, it seems. But the questions to me are, why and is that timeline the only reality?

You may have already been asked -- are you running a business, or a hobby -- and not realize what that means. Here are my rules of thumb for making that distinction:

You're dabbling at a hobby if you:

• tell a few friends and ask them to spread the word
  
• send a few fliers or postcards to names out of the phone book
• design a website that talks all about you
• put a few "articles" on a blog, call it a website, and never update it
  
• try to appeal to everyone with every problem because you "can't afford to turn away clients"
• spend more time getting organized than doing marketing tasks
• change your pricing too often, or give away your services, or use sliding scale too much
• use less than 4 hours a day for marketing in the first year (or more)
  

You're seriously running a business with a commitment to succeed if you:

• create do-able business and marketing plans before ordering business cards
• schedule 4 hours a day, 6 days a week to accomplish tasks on your marketing plan
• hold yourself accountable for keeping those appointments with your business
• isolate an ideal client niche and use the language they do in describing their problem
  
• work methodically in developing the foundational pieces of your marketing message
• be systematic in pursuing your marketing strategies for connecting with those ideal clients
• create many ways to give valued help as a relationship-building strategy that gets clients
• develop an emotionally compelling, helpful to clients web-presence
• lead with your personality strengths in determining the right marketing activities for you
• pull together a support team that includes professionals with expertise you don't have

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? It is.

Being in a self-employed business is like having several businesses going at once. You have to do the all the work that corporations have multiple departments and many people to accomplish. Yes, some of the work can and should be outsourced to those who can do it better, faster, and cheaper than you can (after factoring in trial and error).

If you aren't ready to eat, breathe, and sleep your practice, you've got yourself a hobby.

SP* Seeks Confidence for Self Promotion

SP = solopreneur. That's you if you're self-employed in a one-person business, as many of my counselor, coach, and naturopathic doctor colleagues are. And having the confidence to promote yourself is about the biggest problem I'm hearing about these days.

Isn't it curious, this lack of confidence? What happened between the moment we make the decision to pursue all that training, believing that we could do it, and the moment that we graduate and start in with the anxiety of, am I good enough? How does that initial confidence evaporate?

One very likely cause is that we stopped believing our own "can-do" inner voice. We gave away little pieces of our confidence power when someone else had a different idea, or challenged our view, or required evidence we didn't yet know of.

In becoming educated, we learned how much we didn't know. And perhaps that scared us. Then we got out in the world, opened a practice, and realized, holy cow, no one ever taught us how to get clients.

Fear, doubt, need, recognition of our lack of knowledge -- all these erode belief in the self, and a confident can-do attitude.

Here's a hint: if you think you lack confidence for promoting yourself (meaning your skills, your knowledge and training), then don't promote yourself.

What do you / can you have confidence in? That you have a desire to help? That you know more than your clients? That you can interpret or reframe their suffering or problem in a way that will help them?

Promote that.

To paraphrase the famous movie line, If you build on that, they will come.

Projecting Expertise

Last week I spoke to two groups of naturopathic medical students about marketing their practices after graduation. As expected, there was some resistance to the concept of marketing themselves as an expert when just out of school. This is a normal and appropriate concern.

And it's not just my ND clients who have trouble with this claim. My counselor clients also feel inhibited about calling themselves a specialist. Naturopathic doctors and psychotherapists alike are trained to be generalists, and marketing as a specialist rubs uncomfortably against that.

Plus, let's face it, a lot of us in the healing arts are recovering from poor self-esteem and low confidence. It stretches our own belief in ourselves to say out loud that we have expertise in anything. If I could give us all a pill for that, the magic med would erase all the early life programming we've experienced that damaged our self-concept as relates to the joyful quality we naturally have in childhood when we KNOW we can do anything.

But I digress. One way around this marketing need to project expertise, while still staying in integrity with the truth, is a very simple language shift. In the examples here, do you spot the difference?

• I'm an expert anxiety counselor. Or, My expertise is in eliminating anxiety and depression.
  
• I specialize in helping women with anxiety gain confidence and freedom from debilitating worry.

In the first example, the claim implies a high level of experience, extra rigorous training, or something beyond the average accumulation of education and years in business. (It also is rather egocentric, and just begs to be proven with statistics or some other quantifiable method).

The second example defines a narrow scope of interest and merely says this is where I put most of my attention -- it's what I like doing best. The focus remains on the client type, their problem, and the result they want, rather than staking a claim about myself. It directly states that my role is facilitation of the client's work.

The second example is much different in that it doesn't claim to know everything about anything. It simply states what is true from day one after graduation -- I'm a helper.

If you are graduating this spring as an ND or a therapist and you can't say you're a helper -- well, why did you choose this profession?

Two Key Strategies to Attract & Keep Affluent Clients

Just listened to a tele-class hosted by Fabienne Frederickson and Kelly O'Neil -- two coaches doing fabulously well in this downturned economy by targeting affluent clients. Affluence is defined by them as people with household incomes of $85,000 and up.

One key they emphasized is really no different from marketing to anyone -- and that is, know who your client is, understand what they want, save them time and/or money in getting it, and position yourself as the credible expert for providing it.

In addition, though, the affluent in particular want to be treated as special and important to your business. So little gestures of client appreciation go a long way. Ideas for coaches, counselors and NDs about what those gestures can be include:

1. send birthday cards with hand written note -- to household members that are important to them, such as their kids, and even their pets!

2. send thank you gifts when they refer someone who ends up to be a client -- bottle of wine, gourmet goodie basket, anything extra nice, and make sure your logo is on it!

3. give exclusive access to you -- via a special cell phone number or email address reserved just for them.

4. follow up, check in, give extra attention -- make them feel special, cared about, and like you really want their ongoing business.