Aaron Hoos

In this business, your success is entirely dependent on leads. The more leads you have, the better. So where do you find these leads?

HOW TO FIND LEADS

First, start with you.
List you all the different places in life where you interact with other people. These are called your “spheres of influence“. List as many spheres of influence that you have. (By the way, you probably have more than you realize).

Some common spheres of influence include:

• Immediate family
• Extended family (don’t ignore family who may not live nearby!)
• Close friends
• Friends
• Acquaintances
• Current co-workers
• Previous co-workers (list all of your previous jobs)
• Alumni (college and high school)
• Church (past and present religious affiliations)
• Charity connections
• Other organizations (Toastmasters, etc.)
• Online connections (Twitter followers, Facebook friends, people you frequently talk to in forums)
• People you do business with (accountant, dry cleaner, mechanic, dentist, etc.)
• Current clients
• Past clients (past clients at your current job and past clients at your previous job… Just make sure that you are complying with any non-compete clauses if your are still in the same industry)

Second, list names
List all of the people by name in each sphere. Yes it will take a long time but the more time you spend being thorough right now, the more successful you will be later.

Third, gather contact information
Figure out how to get in touch with the people. If you know their number or email address or postal address, great! Collect it all into one place. I suggest a database of some kind.

Fourth, identify how you can help them
This step is optional but I think it helpful. Figure out how you can help them. If you’re a real estate professional and they are renters, you’ll likely be able to help them buy their first home. If you’re a financial advisor and they are near to retirement, you’ll likely be able to help them transition their portfolio into safer, income-producing investments while minimizing tax consequences.

If you really want to improve your odds, check out this blog post: 6 sales funnel tips for real estate professionals (it applies to financial professionals, too!)

Fifth, get in touch with them
Using whatever method you have identified (face-to-face, phone, email, or postal mail), get in touch with your contact and let them know what you do and make a recommendation about how you’d like to help them.

Chances are, one of the following things will happen:

• They will become your client
• They will hedge a little; they won’t commit, and they’ll tell you that they’ll think about it
• They will tell you no
• You won’t reach them or they won’t respond

If they become your client, that’s great. Congratulations! However, most people will fall into the second category and some people will fall into the third category. In those situations, thank them and let them know that if anything changes, you’d love to help them. Ask them for permission to stay in touch and collect any contact information you don’t have (so you can email or mail them something). Don’t delete the ones who never responded; just keep them on file and from time to time reach out to them.

GET EVEN MORE LEADS

Now that you have this list started, it’s time to generate even more leads. Here are three ways:

• Add another sphere of influence. Join a group, join the gym, get involved in a new organization, volunteer for a charity, etc.
• For each of your leads (yes, that big list you just created earlier in this blog post), do the same exercise and write down THEIR spheres of influence. Sure, you might not know their names but just get down the spheres of influence first. Then create a strategy to approach those people and make a request like: “Can you put up my business card on the bulletin board at your work?” or “can I put on a presentation about insurance in the lunch room at your office?” Make sure to keep the request easy for them to do. Remember: They won’t agree to anything that makes them uncomfortable!
• You probably already have a website that is geared to people who are ready to become clients. (Most real estate and financial professionals have a site like this). Move up your sales funnel and create content that is geared toward lead generation instead of prospect conversion. For example, a real estate professional might want to create content that answers some earlier stage questions like “should I buy a home right now?”. You can do this on your own site, or start another site, or use internet marketing (like articles and press releases and social media) to help you drive traffic to your website.

It doesn’t make much sense for someone to type in the word “real estate professional” or “REALTOR” and find your website or blog in the search results. If they’re in Dustytown, Australia and you’re in Wausau, Wisconsin, there’s not much you can do to help them.

So you need a plan to focus your search engine optimization on only your most likely prospects. So where do you start?

STEP 1: FIGURE OUT WHAT YOUR TARGET MARKET IS LOOKING FOR

Well, you first need to start by figuring out who your most likely prospects are. Are they people moving into town from out of town? Are they people buying or selling within town? Do you have an even more focused niche than that? (Hopefully you do).

Each of these groups is looking for something different.

If your target market is military families who are moving to Wausau, Wisconsin from elsewhere to work on the ultra-secret military base then they are searching the web for very different terms than if your target market is soccer moms and dads who are looking to sell their first home and upgrade because they have baby #3 on the way.

Figure out what your target market is looking for and the types of words they are using to search online.

STEP 2: GET THE SEARCH TERMS

Head over to Google’s Keyword Tool and type in some of those words into Google’s keyword search. In the example below, you see I’ve done that with the fairly generic term “Homes for sale Wausau Wisconsin”…

By the way: The key here is to combine an action verb — “buy home”, “sell home”, “list home”, “find home” — with a location — in this case “Wausau Wisconsin”. Don’t forget to try mixing words like “buy house” instead of “buy home” and also try the short form of your state instead of the full name (or, drop the state altogether and see what the results are).

When you click the Search button you get the result of your search…

And just below that, you get a big list of ideas that are similar to the terms you’ve written…

This list is useful because it shows you related keywords that people are searching for that you might be able to use.

Find a few that you want to focus on — somewhere between 3 and 6 keywords. If you help people buy AND list homes then consider focusing on 3 buying-specific keywords and 3 listing-specific keywords.

STEP 3: USE THOSE SEARCH TERMS EVERYWHERE

You’ve found the terms that your clients are looking for. Now it’s time to use those search terms everywhere. Use them in the following places:

• In your website domain name
• In your website title and subtitle
• In the title of your blog posts and web pages
• In your article marketing (in the title of the article and in the text)
• In your press releases
• In the title of your ebooks
• In the title of your print book
• As the name of your ezine
• In the title of your Storify locally-focused stories
• In your Twitter description
• … and anywhere else that you put online and offline

Mix and match them. Pepper them throughout your work. “Own” the words by making your brand synonymous with those words.

If you are a financial advisor or real estate professional, a condition very similar to “the CSI effect” could be hindering your success.

WHAT IS THE CSI EFFECT?

The CSI effect is a problem faced by the justice system when juries place too much faith in fingerprints and DNA evidence. It’s called “the CSI effect” to suggest that forensic shows like CSI (and others) are tainting real-life juries by making them believe that forensic evidence is easy to obtain, can be processed by a lab in hours, and decisive beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt.

Although the CSI effect is just a hypothesis, it does raise the issue that today’s media might be making everyone an expert.

WHAT DOES THE CSI EFFECT HAVE TO DO WITH YOU?

You might not be prosecuting criminals but you might be impacted by the CSI effect anyway… or, at least something similar. Our prospective clients have access to all kinds of information — from us and from others; on TV and the web. There is no shortage to the information that they can access.

Unfortunately, it has made “amateur experts” out of many clients, turning naive homebuyers into superstar DIY real estate agents and untrained investors into the next Jim Cramer.

Let me be clear about something before you read any further: Savvy clients are good. I’m not proposing that financial and real estate professionals would be better off with clients who couldn’t tell their left hand from their right hand. The root of the problem is NOT that they have access to lots of information to make better decisions. Rather, the root of the problem is that they have no filter to help them navigate the complicated world of real estate or investing.

They’ve been empowered and informed but not equipped.

The result is: Real estate professionals are finding lots of people going the list-it-themselves route or are assuming that they are expert househunters. And financial advisors are finding lots of people who leave voicemails on the advisors’ office overnight because of some great stocks they found while browsing online.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

This is tricky. You don’t want to belittle them by telling them that what they know is wrong, nor do you really want to validate that their unsorted knowledge is a replacement for your expertise.

What clients really need is structure. They need decision-making systems. They need rules. They need ways to synthesize their information. They need frames. They need order. They need taxonomies. They need context. They need the bigger picture.

Right now, your clients are looking at splotches of paint on canvas; you need to help them step back and see the entire painting.

Here are some ways to work with your clients to counter the CSI effect:

• When writing your blog, make sure you use categories (or some other sorting system) that make sense in the bigger picture.
• In all of your marketing, make sure to highlight that the one piece of information you’re expressing is a single cog in a giant piece of machinery.
• Prepare information, verbal and written responses, and proactive marketing to address the reality that some of your clients will tell you about something they saw on TV or the web that doesn’t mesh with what you do. (For example, a normally conservative investor tells a financial advisor about a speculative stock they just heard about from a friend on Facebook).
• If you’re looking for a great idea for your next downloadable document, consider a “big picture” ebook that your users can use to sort out the huge, unsorted mass of information available to them on the web.

I believe the CSI effect is real… and it’s affecting more than just the justice system. I think many of my financial and real estate clients are facing a similar situation.

But I also think that this is an opportunity for you! Rather than joining the ranks of real estate and financial advisors who ONLY give out unsorted, unfiltered information, why not become the professional who helps prospective clients MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL.

One of my favorite methods of marketing (for my business and for many of my clients’ businesses) is article marketing. Here’s a checklist to make them more effective for your business.

Articles give you backlinks, they help you to rank for keywords, and you appear more often in search results. I also like article marketing because good articles can effectively draw people into your sales funnel. Creating good articles requires good planning. It’s not as easy as sitting down to jam out words.

Here’s an article marketing checklist to help you create great articles over and over. Just make sure you’re covering all the points listed below for each article, and they’ll keep sending you quality traffic.

• Research requirements and restrictions of the article site – Each article site has its own publishing parameters — requirements and restrictions that its article-providers must adhere to. For example, some sites will only allow a certain number of in-article links to your site. Other sites have minimum and maximum word counts. Take note of what the requirements and restrictions are. Don’t forget to also take note of the publishing timelines. Some sites will publish your articles right away, others will keep you waiting for weeks.
• Describe the purpose of the article – At the top of the document where you’ll write the article, write down the purpose of your article. For example: “Generate more Leads” or “To generate lots of backlinks” or “To publish something I can later point for my portfolio”. Even though you’re writing it here, it won’t show up in your article. But it’s nice to have it in your face the whole time you’re writing.
• Describe your audience – You may already know your audience (of course), but writing out a sentence or two about them is truly helpful here. More importantly, write something related to how they will come to this article. Where will they have found it? What will they typically be looking for when they read the article? What questions will they have? What doubts will they have? What hot buttons will they respond to?
• Describe the role of the article in your sales funnel – Every piece of marketing you do plays into your sales funnel. Briefly describe what stage this article will be for, what step it is accomplishing in the stage, and what action you want your sales funnel contact to do as a result of the article.
• Create an outline – Jot down the basic 2-5 points you want to cover. (Since most articles are about 400 to 650 words, you probably won’t be able to cover more than 5 points, and you probably shouldn’t try to cover fewer than 2 points). This is the skeleton of your article and you’ll build in it shortly. But first, you should put it aside and spend time on a few other things before you write…
• List keywords to be embedded in article – List the keywords you want to use. If I have a specific group of keywords or number of keywords I want to use in each section of my article, I’ll put them right into my outline.
• List keywords to accompany article – Some sites give you a place to list several keywords to accompany your article.
• Create article meta-data – This is a catch-all term for things like tags, categories, topics, and any other fields the site might provide.
• Write the author Bio (in text and html) – Write your bio. Keep it short (and be sure to adhere to the article publishing site parameters). Write both the text and html version of your bio.
• Add sub-points – Earlier, you wrote out the skeleton of your article and then put it aside to do some other steps. Now, pick it up again and add sub-points to each point in your outline. These subpoints should cover the basic “movement” of the point from start to finish. Think of them as just a couple of words that summarize a paragraph.
• Rearrange (if necessary) – In my experience, there is a very strong likelihood that you’ll need to rearrange some of your points or subpoints here. But skip this step if everything feels like it’s in the right place.
• Write the article!!! – It’s FINALLY time to write your article! Write a paragraph around each sub-point. (That’s just a good rule of thumb, although you might find that you need to write a couple of paragraphs for one sub-point while one paragraph will suffice for a couple of sub-points).
• Plus the article – To “plus” something means to make it better. This is the fun part! Take a break then come back to the article and look for a place to really wow your audience. Add something special. Create new insight. Draw deeper conclusions. Move your audience to a frothy state.
• Fact-check – Review your work to make sure that all of the ideas are your own or are appropriately attributed. If you state a fact, double-check it to make sure you’re correct.
• Review for flow – Look over your article for the basic flow of ideas. Is it smooth? Does each idea move clearly into the next idea?
• Review for the sales funnel, audience, and purpose – Earlier, you listed how this article functions in your sales funnel, who your audience is, and what the purpose of this article is. Now it’s time to re-read your article to make sure that you still cover these things.
• Add introduction and conclusion – Now that you’ve created a great article that does exactly what it is supposed to do, you can add an introduction and conclusion. Make sure they are similar (for a sense of completeness), make sure the introduction draws your reader in, and make sure the conclusion offers a clear next-step for them to take.
• Edit – Edit, edit, edit. Your content doesn’t have to be letter perfect every time (mine certainly isn’t) but the less control you have over editing it later, the more you should edit it now. Edit for grammar, spelling, and style.
• Write an article synopsis (if necessary) – Finally, add an article synopsis if the article publishing site calls for it. (Some do, some don’t).

You’re looking at this list and thinking that it is a huge checklist!

It is. However, you’ll find that going through each of these steps when you write an article might slow down your article writing slightly, but you’ll produce very high-quality content that will add people to your sales funnel for a long time to come.

In the past decade (plus a little bit), the internet has created a universe of opportunity for new and old businesses to become marketing machines. This has been good… but it has also been bad.

In pre-internet days, businesses would think up some marketing ideas, have them created by professionals, and rely on more traditional methodologies to get the word out: Flyers were mailed; coupons were handed out; advertisements were published. These efforts were expensive, time consuming, and usually required the skills of an outside expert (to design and/or to publish).

Now, anyone can start a business and any business owner can drive traffic to their site using a variety of web-based marketing activities (like blogging or article-writing) and techniques (like SEO). They can do it themselves quickly and affordably.

This is advantageous — because it blows the doors wide open for anyone to become an entrepreneur — it has also had some nasty repercussions:

PROBLEM 1: MAKING IT UP ON VOLUME
Do-it-yourself marketing has led to entrepreneurs trading quality for quantity and spamming search engines and inboxes and Twitter streams with volumes of content. Even businesses that market legitimately (that is, they don’t spam. Rather, they create quality content that adds value for the reader) need to achieve a certain quantity of marketing to get the job done.

PROBLEM 2: MARKETING THAT DOESN’T KEEP UP WITH THE EVOLUTION OF BUSINESS
On top of volume is another reality that people don’t realize: Businesses change and markets change but content posted online can outlive those changes. So if you create a series of articles and point those articles to a page on your site, then take that page down, those articles no longer provide the benefit they once offered. (I’m definitely guilty of this one!)

PROBLEM 3: NEW OPPORTUNITIES ARRIVING DAILY
There’s a third factor in this new reality of “DIY marketing”. New marketing techniques crop up almost daily. When I started writing (nearly two decades ago) the internet wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t on very many people’s radar at all! Then, over the years, the web arrived and along came new ideas about how to market your business: Websites then ebooks then blogs then articles… Heck, just a few years ago, no one had heard of Twitter. Now it is THE darling of social media. It seems like a new way of marketing your business is arriving daily.

THE RESULT?
You can probably imagine what happens when you combine these three things together: A “requirement” of quantity + an ever-changing business environment + a constant flood of new marketing opportunities = An over-abundance of marketing is published and it is helpful for a brief season, but then it ceases to be helpful.

What is needed is sales funnel strategy to solve the problem: Businesses need to take one more step before they start flooding the web with marketing. (Or, if they have already started, they need to pause and revisit their strategy). In doing so, businesses will find that they will spend less on marketing but quickly achieve a more profitable result.

Sales funnel strategy will reduce the need for a volume of work and will actually make a lesser quantity of marketing content more effective. Sales funnel strategy will remain effective for longer than marketing that wasn’t applied to any sort of strategy, helping businesses stay competitive even though they are evolving. And, Sales funnel strategy will help businesses discern which marketing opportunities are right for them and which ones are unnecessary wastes of time.

TRENDING: SALES FUNNEL STRATEGY
Because of the economy being what it is (and what it was just a year or two ago), I think businesses are looking to cut back on expenses but increase the effectiveness of, well, everything they do. On top of that, I suspect that entrepreneurs are getting tired of having to race from one marketing technique to another just because everyone else is doing it. Entrepreneurs want to get back to basics and work on the parts of their business that can generate results.

So sales funnels and sales funnel strategy will increase in importance in the year(s) to come as businesses pull back from the frenetic pace that once was a DIY requirement.