Attract Your Ideal Clients While Working With Others

Guest Blog Post by Richard Goutal

Of course you want to attract your ideal clients. But it is also true that other coaches and businesses are seeking those same ideal clients. If there was no competition for the attention of these clients, you would be correct to think you may have too severely limited your target audience. So it is a good thing to have competitors.

But would it surprise you to learn that sometimes you can attract your ideal clients more effectively by cooperating instead of competing with other coaches or marketers? That you can position yourself more completely as the expert or “the best” when you find opportunities to work with other coaches or marketers?

I raise this point because there is this tendency to want to do everything ourselves. We take “solopreneur” to the extreme. We talk about creating our own products, creating our own list, and promoting our own brand. And we should!

But we should also create joint products and engage in collaborative list building activities. These activities can actually accelerate your own profits and your own positioning in the marketplace.

Attract your ideal clients with product creation

One simple example of a jointly created project could be a book (an e-book or otherwise). There are many ways this can be done.
Cooperatively: Each of 3-20 partners writes their own chapter that contributes to the overall book theme or topic.
Collaboratively: Each of 2-4 partners work together to write and edit each other’s work that will result in a single book with multiple chapters.

Does that dilute or magnify your brand and authority? It depends on too many factors to fully describe here. However, consider:

If you contribute a chapter to a book with 10 other authors, four of whom are near-celebrity status, and your contribution to the topic is unique and of value, you will be thought to be equally an authority. By working with powerful “competitors” you will have elevated the perception that others have of your work. I can list many who have done this with that result.

If you contribute a chapter to a book with six other authors, all of whom have the same marketing visibility as you do, you raise the perceived value and desirability of the book (compared to a single author with the same content). Whereas it is good to have your own free giveaway, there are so many me-too giveaway e-books that, even if your book has truly unique content, it can be hard to get people to believe that you would or could have anything original. A multi-authored book could change that. I have seen it happen.

Use collaborative list building

A simple example of a collaborative list building activity is an ad-swap. This is where I promote Marketer B’s giveaway and opt-in in an email to my list and Marketer B does the same for me.

Naturally, you must carefully select the partner with whom you will do this. And you can only do this well if you have identified and know how to attract your ideal niche as Cindy teaches so well. Without knowing your own niche well, you can’t follow these important partner guidelines

The partner should not be the same exact niche as mine (we are indeed competitors).
The partner should not be completely unrelated to my niche (otherwise, the people on her list will have little reason to be interested in my giveaway).
The partner’s niche should ideally overlap or be related to my niche.

Collaborative marketing is applicable to all levels of marketers

It’s a fact: all of the really profitable marketers collaborate with other marketers. To me, this means that learning collaborative marketing strategies (of which there are at least a hundred variations) is essential.

Yet many make a mistake in thinking that this is something they will begin to learn later on, after they are already having success. No it is something you can learn and put into practice early in your marketing development.

That said, collaborative marketing strategies should not be the first thing to learn. The very first things are foundational – and it starts with a clear niche. But once you know who you are, who your ideal client is, what your unique solution is… then you are ready to apply collaborative marketing.

Richard Goutal is the organizer of Collaboration Live, a workshop event where you can learn collaborative marketing skills and get started on at least one collaborative marketing project. The workshop is scheduled for October 29-30, 2011 in Connecticut.