Every business needs to work out how best to get clients and you probably want 3 or 4 different media.

As Online Jeanie I work with service businesses wanting to put all or part of their business online.

These people want to automate what they do and “clone” themselves so that they don’t need to keep working so hard at the routine tasks.  It simply does not make sense to work hours for dollars if you can find an easy way to automate at least some of what you do.

So if you are working with people online, how do you find them?

This is one interesting question!  Just because you work online, you don’t need to do all your marketing there as well.

Interestingly I have not met any of my Online Jeanie clients online yet.  They have all come from offline networking.

My original and still my main business is my environmental management system consultancy which I run mainly online.  I meet more of these clients online than I do offline and I keep in touch with them all online.  Often I never meet a client personally even when I work with them for months or even years.  When we do meet – hey that’s fun!

You can choose whether you advertise in magazines, which is expensive and of limited value in my experience, yellow pages – good if you are a plumber or offline home service person, wildly expensive and near useless if you are supplying to other businesses or in the online world; exhibiting at conferences is expensive, collects a lot of contacts for your database if you do it right but barely pays for itself; networking events can be good so long as you have a “keep in touch strategy” but in my opinion nothing beats an online newsletter which is effectively almost free.

I do a weekly environmental newsletter and you can get back copies of this from http://www.enviroaction.com.au/news/index.html and opt in to get your own regular updates.

My experience is that the most effective marketing can be free but it takes time and understanding your clients.   Some of the tools I teach you in OnlineJeanie are how to use social media to build a “tribe” of followers who get to know like and trust you.

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

Tweet This Post