Idea #1: Teach What You Know
Are you very protective of your industry secrets? Try something different for once: share everything you know.
Share your secrets in forums, on Facebook and Twitter. Post it to your blog, email it to your contacts, prospects and clients. If you feel you’re giving away too much, you’re on the right track.
This is what you’re worried about: “if I give away all my secrets, then no one will want to hire me.” This is what actually happens: people will see you really know your stuff but won’t have the time or desire to do it themselves and they’ll hire you to do it for them.
Let’s say you prepare the taxes of small business owners. I hate doing my taxes. If I come across your post “7 Ways You Can Save Money in Taxes”, I’ll read it and then I’ll ask you to do my taxes because I know you can save me money; I don’t want to do this myself. Makes sense?
Idea #2: Think About Your Indirect Competition Too
Let’s go back to the tax specialist example. On your website you’ll want to tell me why you’re better than other tax specialists, and that’s really good. But you should talk to me not only about your direct competition, but also about your indirect competition, which is ways I can solve the same problem with a different approach. For example, you’ll want to tell me:
- Why working with you is better than having tax preparation software do the work for me.
- Why doing my taxes is better than not doing them (yes, for some people this is an option).
- Why working with you is better than doing it myself.
Remember, your direct competitors are not the only ones competing with you.
Idea #3: Learn From Your Own Blog
How often do you go through your all blog posts, see which ones got more re-tweets or comments and write down a few notes about what works and what doesn’t? I do this every week. If you don’t know what your audience liked in the past, you have little chances of creating something that they’ll like in the future.
Idea #4: Have a Facebook Page
I know, I know… you already have a Facebook profile. But, you should also have a Facebook page. Here’s why:
- You can only have 5,000 friends under your profile; you can have unlimited fans for your page.
- Facebook pages get indexed by the search engines and you can even get a link back to your site.
- On your page you can have an opt-in box so people can subscribe to your newsletter or get a free report.
- With a page, you can send an update to all your fans at once.
Idea #5: Partner with Group Administrators
Let’s go back to the tax specialist example again. It’s April 1st and people know they need to do their taxes by 4/15. Take a look at this Facebook group:
Do you think that from these 13,407 entrepreneurs at least a few of them will need their taxes done? And, did you know that the administrator of this group can email all his members? What if you offered him a commission for every person that hired you plus a small fee for sending the email?
