As you may know, there are just three ways to increase the profits of your business: Get more clients, Increase the amount of money your customers spend on their purchase or Increase the times they buy from you.

Of these, the third way – Having your clients increase how often they buy from you is the easiest.

Getting past clients purchase again is 10 times easier (and cheaper) than going out and getting a new client.

Think about the services you provide, are their any things that should be done on a regular basis? For example, lawn care companies can send early reminders about mowing schedules, leaf cleanup, etc., Bookkeepers can send out quarterly reminders to clients to send out their quarterly income tax payments, etc.

Real life example:

One of my carpet cleaning clients sends out postcards annually to remind his clients that it’s time for them to have their carpets cleaned again. He gets a great deal of repeat business from this. And to make it easier, he’s set up a foolproof system to make it easy for him to remind them.

As he’s filing out the paperwork for the receipt for the client, he has a pre-stamped postcard that he fills out with the date of this service. He then files the postcard in a folder for next year, one month prior to the annual service date. At the beginning of the month, he pulls all the postcards in the folder (from last year’s service calls) and drops them in the mail.

Your “To Do” item for the week: List out 1 or 2 services you provide for your clients on a routine basis. Set up a system that will allow you to easily remind them to contact you to set up an appointment to follow up.

Use the example system that my client has set up. You can set up a file box with a folder for each month for the next year, then drop the pre-stamped postcards in. At the beginning of each month, just mail out the pre-made postcards. (You can get simple, inexpensive postcards made up at Vistaprint.com for under $30 where you can customize with areas to fill in the service date and the clients’ address.)

Another option is to create an email template with a reminder notice. Then create reminders in your calendar to follow up with your past clients on the designated day. All you have to do is pull up your email template, fill out the name/email address and hit send!

Share your comments below: Do you have a good follow up system in place to attract repeat business? What has worked for you? Do you struggle getting people back in the door so-to-speak? Let me know below.

As a business owner, I assume you do some form of advertising to let people know who you are and what you can do for them.

Do you know how well each type of advert is working for you?

Everything you do to drive traffic to your business, both offline & on, should be tracked.

So how do you do that?

Have a specific “call to action” for each advertisement you run. If you are having them call, set up a seperate phone number or extention for them to use, or have them mention a specific code for a special offer.

If you are directing them to your website, set up a specific page that they will go to so you’ll be able to see how many people visited that page for your special offer.

Your “To Do” item for the week: Review your ads that are running this upcoming week and be sure there is some way of tracking them.

You don’t want to be dumping money into ads that aren’t generating you any leads/money.

By tracking you’ll know what types convert the best, and which ones are not worth re-running.

Share on your comments below: Do you track your ads already? How has it saved you money/time? What methods have you found that worked the best for your business?

How available are you to your clients and prospects?

One of the biggest issues that many people have with businesses is the lack of support.

Example: We’d bought my son an mp3 player for Christmas last year and within a couple of days, he had an accident and the screen cracked rendering it useless. I knew that because of the way it was damaged, it might not be covered under warranty, however, I went to their support area on their web site to contact them about it. The only way they had listed on there to contact them was via an email address.

I sent them an email with an explanation of what had happened along with a picture. From the information on their site, they did handle repairs at the users cost, so I inquired as to how much it would cost to fix it along with a couple of other questions about the process.

I waited over a week and when I didn’t hear back, I sent another email. It has been over 6 weeks and I still haven’t heard back from them.

Needless to say, I will not be doing business with that company again!

So what can you learn from this?

If possible, try to have at least 2-3 different methods for prospects and/or clients to contact you.

This can be via phone, email, support forums, social media, texting, etc.

Even if they don’t have direct, immediate access to you, they should be able to reach someone on your team or get a response back to their call or email within a timely basis. (24 – 48 hours at most.)

By making sure you or someone in your company can be reached for questions or concerns, you’ll greatly increase your trustworthiness.

Share on the blog: What types of contact methods do you have set up in your business? As a consumer, what methods of contact do you prefer when trying to get in touch with a business? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Image Credit: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Client:Frietha Lawrence – Artist at Count It All Joy Studio
Launch Date: Jan 2012

Content Management System: WordPress

Features:

• Modified Starter Design
• Dynamic menu
• Auto Generated Image Galleries
• Contact Form

Visit site:AllJoyStudio.com/

In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you a simple way to keep tabs on your reputation on the internet using Google Alerts.

Go to Google.com/alerts to set up alerts for your business today!

If you run into any trouble, please comment below.

When you are in the need for assistance with something, whether it’s fixing a leaky pipe or getting a tooth ache taken care of, who would you prefer to handle those problems?

A home improvement guy or a general practitioner might be able to help you well enough, but wouldn’t you be more secure in hiring a licensed plumber or a dentist to deal with your problems?

Becoming an expert in your field can be invaluable in your business. You’ll be more likely to receive referrals, charge higher fees and get to that most revered state of being able to pick and choose your clients!

So how do you become an expert in your field?

• Become “masterful” at one particular skill. Learn everything you can about that skillset.
• Have a way of doing your work that no one else does, that brings results faster than others. Put your own twist on how you do something.
• Be super customer service-oriented. Go above and beyond what your clients expect someone in your field to do.

Take a look at your business and let me know what you are an expert in or can work on becoming an expert at. Please share below in the comments!

Image credit: by Chris Pirillo

In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you just how simple it is to resize images using the free software program, GIMP.

Click on the link to download your copy of GIMP http://www.gimp.org

If you run into any trouble, please comment below.

P.S. Very Important - I forgot to mention in the video! When you are renaming your files for use on your website, please don’t use spaces. Always use either a dash (-) or an underscore (_) between multi-word file names.

Example:
Don’t use “this is a cool pic.jpg“, use “this_is_a_cool_pic.jpg” instead. Otherwise, it might not display your images correctly on your website.

I always hated writing out business plans. So a couple of years ago, I stopped doing that and just focused on a short 1-2 page list of business goals.

It covered, what services/products I offered, who I offered them to (my ideal client/target market), how I was going to market to them, as well as my financial goals/budgets.

Making a plan is crucial to your success, that way you know what you need to do each day to meet your goals.

Start by figuring out how much money you’d like to make for the year, then break that down into months.

How much do you need to make each month to meet your goal? Then decide what types of products/services you’ll offer and how many you’d need to sell each month to meet your goal.

By breaking it down into smaller steps, you’ll find it less overwhelming and more easily doable!

A few weeks ago, I’d posted a comment on my Facebook page about clearing clutter from your space in order to make room for new things to come into it.

This can be physical space, digital space, mental space or emotional space.

Physical space

Not only does cleaning out physical space give you more room for physical items or just more room period, it also is a major stress reliever and gives a sense of calm to you emotionally.

Start by just cleaning your desk, a junk drawer, or a closet. Once you get started, you’ll notice that you want to keep going. It’s very therapeutic!

Digital space

This is the perfect time of the year to start clearing out your digital life. You’re computer is probably stuffed full of unused documents and programs and it is bogging down your system.

Having too much ‘stuff’ on your computer also makes it harder to find important files you may be looking for.

If you don’t have one already, get an external hard drive and back stuff up that you absolutely must have or start deleting all those extra files. (I know that I have several duplicate files that I’m working through organizing.)

Now would also be a great time to go through and clean out your email inbox. Do you really have time to read all those newsletters? Make a list of the top ones that you most enjoy reading or that benefit your business and unsubscribe to the rest. (I hope mine makes your “keep” list!)

Mental space

One of my favorite things to do, to create mental space, is to do a “brain dump”. Grab a pen & a pad of paper (Yes, I said a pen & paper, stay away from the digital devices. Trust me on this!) and take about an hour or two and just start writing down everything that you are thinking about.

All your lists of things you’ve been meaning to do, from taking out the garbage to planning your next project, all those business ideas you’ve got swimming around in there.

Keep going until you can’t think of another thing to write. (I’ll warn you, for some, this may take several hours.) But in the end, you’ll be shocked and amazed of how good it feels to finally free up that space in your mind. Now you don’t have to worry about all this stuff because you now have it down on paper!

If you’d like, you can now categorize the items into personal or business.

I typically do this at least once every 3 months.

Emotional space

This one is a bit tougher, however you need to protect your emotional well being. Break free of any energy leeches, naysayers or people who aren’t supporting you.

Schedule time to re energize yourself from work and even family. To be your best for your family and for your clients, you need to be at your best for yourself.

Go ahead and take an hour each day and do something that you enjoy doing. Go for a walk, read a book or work on your hobby.

As soon as you start opening up these spaces you’ll find that you’ll have more space to receive the things that you’ve been asking for. Be it friendship, clients or even money.

So I challenge you to take some time during the next couple of weeks and “open up” some space in your life so you’ll have room for the good things to move into it! That’s what I plan on doing.

Be sure to come back and leave a comment below letting me know how it went and what your results were!

Take care and God Bless you and your family!

Image Credit:  John Kasawa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There’s only a few more weeks in 2011. Are you ready for 2012? Check out my video below:

If you don’t know where you’re going,
how will you know when you get there?

Making a marketing plan for your business is essential. Not only will it help keep you on track to meeting your goals, it will make it easier to know what you need to do each day.

I know that without a clearly written plan, I will spend most of the morning, just wondering where I should start!

For the up coming year, I have things mapped out such as what free offers I’m going to create and promote to help grow my list, where and how I’m going to advertise to reach more people, as well as what subjects/topics I’m going to write about on my blog.

I also have financial goals mapped out and what products/services I’m offering in order to meet those goals.

So how about you? What does your marketing map look like? Do you have one started?

Please share you comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

If you have a question on getting some help, please contact me and we can set up a discovery session to see where your struggling.