Facebook, with more that 500 million users, encourages people to spread the word about rock bands, television shows, and businesses they love. (Users do this by becoming a “fan” of your fan page on Facebook.)

Although at the moment Facebook has 500 million members, this is fairly irrelevant to a local business owner. What you need to do is build up a targeted local following, can you imagine having 5 to 10 thousand people following your fan page and responding every time you put an offer out?

The key is to target people who are local to you and your business.

If you have a business that is national or even global then you don’t need to be so specific in your targeting.

I must admit I was a late adopter because I didn’t see what all the fuss was about, but now I find it an incredible source of highly targeted customers.

We have clients that turn a slow day into one of the busiest days of the year by posting an offer of some kind to their Facebook page – it’s like cash on demand.

Imagine you own a restaurant that has a slow Tuesday evening and you have a couple thousand local fans, you just post a special for that night, and watch the tables fill up.

Or an electrician who decides to work on a Saturday because they need some extra income that week, just create an offer (like a ‘no call out charge that day’) and post,you will soon have the phone ringing off the hook.

The only downside to Facebook that I have found is that you get caught unawares with the amount of response you will get.

Contact us for a FREE consultation on how Facebook can help your business.

The first thing every business needs is a website, and we mean every business. We have yet to come across one that doesn’t need a site.

No need to worry when I mention a website, it doesn’t have to be a 1,000 page all singing all dancing monster, just a simple site, around 5 pages (they often work way better anyway) that achieves the outcome you need it to achieve, getting more clients.

The biggest mistake we see business owners make is to build a “work of art” as a website, it needs to be simple, with a very clear call to action. That means you must have some reason on the site to convert someone who is merely browsing into a client.

The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing will send you a lot of customers which makes it a very cost cost effective way to generate leads.

A onetime cost for a lifetime of leads!

There are a couple ways to do this:

Add a coupon/voucher for a special deal, people love coupons and hunt for them all the time. If you took time to fully understand the customer lifetime value from our last post, you could even offer a free money off voucher knowing that you could have them visit again at full price or spend more with you when they visit.

Add an email capture system by offering a helpful free report or ebook and the potential customer would have to register their name and email to get the report then you can email then at regular intervals with special offers or more news and information, this builds trust before they even visit.

                Getting Found

It is not enough these days to just build a website and hope people find you, your website has to be optimized to get to the top of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Without doing this you are wasting your time.

There are two main parts to preparing your site to be seen. On-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization includes your title, keywords, description, and tags. Off-page optimization includes sites that link back to you, and votes from other ranking sites.

How much money…how much profit will you realize from each of your customers, over their “buying lifetime” with you?

This is such an important concept, and we can’t say it strongly enough, that just knowing and understanding this one thing, can have a bigger impact on your business than just about anything else you can do.

Once you understand it, a whole new set of factors will come into play, and can absolutely revolutionize the way you look at your business, the way you do business, and the profits you will generate as a result.

Let me give an example to explain what I mean.

Let’s say that your average sale is $50. And let’s say that your average customer buys from you 8 times per year.

So, from these eight transactions you realize $400 in income. And let’s say this customer does business with you on average, for 10 years. Over that 10 year period (or their “lifetime” of doing business with you), that average customer has been worth $4,000 in income to you.

Now let’s expand this example to a theoretical base of 500 customers and see what it means. Those 500 customers at $400 a year nets you an annual income of $200,000.

Let’s assume that with the proper programs in place, You are able to increase the amount of customers you have, the amount they will spend with you each visit by only 10 percent.. Here’s what happens:

First, the number of customers you have increases from 500 to 550.

Next, the average transaction amount per sale increases from $50 to $55.

Third, the average number of purchases per customer increases from 8 times to 8.8 times.

So, the annual income from your customer base will increase from $200,000 ($50 x 8 transactions x 500 customers) to $266,000 ($55 x 8.8 x 550 customers). That’s an increase of $66,200 per year!

That is a huge increase!

So, if you know what the lifetime profit value of your customers is, you will probably discover that you can spend far more to acquire a new customer the you originally thought!

Next post will be about some tried and tested ways to generate clients online.