How to Secure Clients Quickly & Affordably for ANY Business (Pt. 1 of 2)

Get Clients to Come to You - Cheaply & Easily!

You've set up your office. Got business cards. Product is beautifully prepared. Placed an ad in the Yellow Pages. All your friends, family and professional contacts know about your new business, what it is, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Opening Day: Silence. The phone is not ringing, the fax machine is silent and you gave up checking email hours ago. Now what?

It's time to do the real work of freelancing / small business ownership - marketing. You can have the best product/service in the world; be the most skilled to offer it; and be the only vendor selling it. However, if no one knows about it, you will never make money off of it.

To get clients to come to you, you have to introduce yourself. Our calling card will be via a direct mail campaign.

It's a Numbers Game

Statistically, most direct mail campaigns produce a 1-3% response rate. Splitting the difference and using 2% as a measure, a mailing of 1,000 would produce 24 possibilities; 3,000 would generate 72 possibilities, and so on.

It's all about the numbers. The key is to understand them and plan for the results you want. Too many small business owners give up on a marketing idea too soon, without taking into account statistical realities.

Realities of Direct Mail

1. One man's gold is another man's junk: It's most likely (97% to 99% of the time) that your mailer will wind up in the trash. That's just the way it is. Unfortunately, we have to kiss a lot of frogs to get to the prince (the buyer).

2. Don't sacrifice quality for cost: To ease the pain of your time, money and energy going in the trash, use postcards. These work on two levels: time and cost.

a) Time: You have nanoseconds to grab a reader's attention (three to five seconds experts estimate). With a postcard, your message is right there, instantly. No envelope to open, clasp to fiddle with, letter opener to find.

b) Cost: With the advent of the Internet, it has never been cheaper, easier or faster to create a full four-color, professional postcard. Web sites such as vistaprint.com, postcardpower.com, and printingforless.com make it easy to point, click, drag and create.