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Guest post by: Mark Satterfield Become an Author

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If you are similar to most consultants and owners of small businesses, one of the key issues that's top of mind today is, "How can I get more new clients?" Although this is an ongoing challenge for all business owners regardless of the economy, in today's recessionary times, getting more new business takes on critical status.

The good news is that developing brand new business does not need to be terribly difficult nor complicated as long as you keep just a few things in mind. That's all. If you focus on a couple of things you will find that you can drive lots of very targeted traffic to your website and then convert large percentages of them into paying clients.

Not surprisingly, the first thing you need, if you are really serious about having a marketing system that works on autopilot, is a website. This could be either an additional page to your existing website, or a free standing one page website. Given how inexpensive it is to set up a new website, if you are primarily focusing on getting more new clients as your "mission critical" business objective, then I would recommend just setting up a one-page website using the tools that I have discussed in previous articles.

The key with your website is to make it what we call "sticky". That simply means that you want people to slow down and spend some time on your webpage once they are there. The internet is a very fast medium which is both a blessing and a curse. The good news is that people can access your information at any time from any place. The bad news is that people can jump on and off your website in the proverbial blink of an eye. Thus our objective is to slow people down and make them want to learn more about you.

The key to accomplishing this is to offer visitors some sort of interesting free information that pertains to the reason that they came to your site in the first place. So, in order to get people to slow down, in order to make your site "sticky" you want to think about what are the problems that your visitors are trying to solve. Not surprisingly this could be more than one specific thing, thus you may want to create a number of free reports, each of which focuses on a specific issue.

Your free report should be a blend of both practical and helpful information coupled with promotional material about your services. Remember that the ultimate goal is to get more new clients, so you don't want to just be giving information away. I've found that if in the first two thirds of the report you provide good solid tips and ideas, readers will actually be quite interested in learning more about how they might work with you and the additional services you offer. It is also important to include at the end of your report a very specific call to action. In other words, what do you want your reader to do once they have finished reading the report? From a practical perspective, there are a lot of things he or she can do, but only one or two of them actually benefit you.

For many small businesses the next step in the process is to have a real live conversation with the prospect. If that's your objective, then you want to make sure that your report concludes with a Next-Steps section. The most common call to action is "Please call us for a free consultation". Unfortunately it's likely that will only encourage a very small percentage of readers to actually take you up on your offer. Here's a tip. Include in this Next-Steps section a list of questions that you typically answer during the free consultation. When you give people specific ideas for the types of information they will get, that encourages people to respond.

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