The holy grail mentioned in every inbound marketing book is to have highly qualified prospects reaching out to you, inquiring about working with you.
This post explores a simple method for achieving that without any significant cost or complication and it achieves that in bulk, not one-off leads.
In fact, this method is so relentless that I recently shut my doors to new clients for three consecutive months. I simply wasn’t geared up to service the flood of new clients that it generated.
Let’s start with the word “bulk”.
Inbound Marketing is a bit like fishing. You can do that one on one, as in dangling a line in the water. Or you can befriend the captain of a trawler and share his or her catch.
This is just an analogy and I’ll bring it into the real world in a moment. But for now, it will be obvious to anyone other than the brain dead that you’ve going to get a much bigger harvest, much faster, with the fishing trawler option.
You may be asking why someone would share their catch with you when it cost them money and time to catch all of those fish. Great question and I’ll come to that.
And while every analogy has it limits, this one fits my inbound marketing model so well, it’s hard to stretch it too far.
If you want bulk, inbound leads then you need to first quit thinking about finding leads and start thinking about finding the people who have your leads.
That’s the difference between the fishing line and the captain of the fishing ship.
My method firstly identifies people who
- Are targeting my ideal client
- Are likely to have a large email list
- Are already running webinars.
Great marketing is not about convincing people that they should accept your offer. Instead, great marketing puts an attractive offer in front of people who are already looking for it.
If I approach someone who ticks all three of the above characteristics with the opportunity to present a webinar to my network of email subscribers, they’ll jump at that offer. It would be like me putting steak in my dog’s dinner bowl. There is zero “selling” (a.k.a. convincing) required. Selling is what you do when your marketing sucks.
But now you’re probably wondering how I find the captains of the proverbial fishing trawlers.
Simple: I google search “business owner webinar” or “entrepreneur webinar” or similar phrases and up will pop a million or more links to the websites of people who run webinars for my target market.
The very fact that they run webinars also tells me that they are highly likely to have an email list because webinars are one of the fastest ways to grow a quality (important word!) email list.
And a quick click of a link and I’ll be on their website and I can confirm that they have an added value opt-in offer for new subscribers. Another clue that tells me likely to have a significant sized email list.
Bingo! In a minute or two I’ve just identified someone who will want to present a webinar to my email list.
Having established that, the next thing to understand is that my offer to them will be for them to present their webinar to my email list and for me to present to their email list.
All of that is subject to confirming that we each have a quality webinar that adds value and they are not simply a frenzied sales pitch.
Now, it’s like I’ve found the captain of the fishing trawler and they’ve agreed to share their catch. Of course, I’ve agreed to share mine in return.
Some people simply can’t see how that would work. They wonder why someone who targets the same market as me, would promote my stuff without feeling threatened by me.
And truth be told, one in ten will feel threatened.
But the other 90% understand a fundamental truth about email lists which is that some people will never buy from them, but they may buy from me. And visa-versa applies to my email list.
Provided I have quality content in my webinar then it’s highly likely my prospective joint venture partner will promote it because their subscribers will be grateful that they shared the opportunity.
All of this happens without any affiliate commissions being paid.
And when I present my webinar to their list, I make an offer at the end of the webinar for attendees to book a time to talk with me if they want to embed my inbound marketing model into their business.
Some attendees book a time to talk with me but not before I’ve asked them to confirm that they have the budget for my fees and that they are ready to start, if we agree that’s a good idea.
I end up with new client inquiries that come in bulk, that are free and that are high quality.
And that’s as close to marketing magic as you’ll ever get.
The leads are high quality because they’ve been through a lot of filters.
Imagine that you’re thirsty and that all you have is undrinkable storm water.
To be able to safely drink that water you will need two things: volume and filters.
Without a reasonable volume of water going into the top of your water purification system you’ll never get enough drinking water out the bottom.
And if all you have is volume, without the filters, then you’ll get lots of water out the bottom, but it will still be undrinkable.
With my inbound marketing model, you get the volume from the other person’s email list.
The first filter is the fact that my prospect initially opted in to my joint venture partners email list, indicating they were interested in some form of business growth (I don’t approach a potential JV partner unless they offer something to do with growing or developing their own business).
The second filter is that they stayed subscribed.
The third filter is that they registered for my webinar.
The fourth is that they turned up.
The fifth is that they stayed to the end.
The sixth is that they went to my consult booking page and agreed to the terms.
The seventh is that they showed up to our meeting to discuss becoming a client.
As you can imagine, my conversion from inquiry to client is through the roof compared to virtually every other lead generation method.
And that’s what I outlined in my inbound marketing book which is also the promise of this post: generating bulk, inbound, new client inquiries of exceptionally high quality.
To get started you can read my book but other than that, start an online email database for free at www.mailchimp.com and get an opt in offer onto your website home page linked to that database so you start growing a list of email subscribers.
Also read : Optimizing and Monetizing Social Media – Marketing and Sales Part I
