In the good old days, when internet marketing first became a useful tool to get clients, we used services like Google AdWords to help us get the exposure we needed. The great thing about this strategy was that you could get endless streams of exposure to your website or your brick-and-mortar business.

The sad fact is though that most businesses, including ourselves, became too dependent on Google back in those days. This may sound over-the-top but it was almost like printing money with the way that Google would allow people to get traffic, and how entertained people were by the fact that they were able to talk to someone or buy something online.

When the dreaded Google slap occurred though, we were all in for a rude awakening!

Here’s how one of our MULTIPLE Google Adwords accounts look after being suspended. We spent close to $100,000 in the one account below, and have learned a lot since that on how to “play nice” with Google so they don’t break up with you like a deranged ex girl/boyfriend

Many businesses had to completely close their doors overnight.

We heard so many horror stories that we knew that we had to do something different so we wouldn’t suffer the same fate. When my wife and I decided to move to Pasadena in California, I went ahead and made the tough choice of selling our main online web properties so that we could reinvest that money into using new strategies to grow. We didn't get what we wanted for the site but we were able to take that time to figure out what was next.

We made 3 quarter mill using this site for exposure, starting 10 yrs go:

We tested about 40 to 50 different systems before settling on may be 10 different systems that help us grow our business every year. For now, I’m only going to focus on three of them so you can have an idea on how you can implement them in your business right now to start getting more clients.

Over the years we realized it wasn’t really about making money, it was more about developing systems that could grow our business without us or without just being fully dependent on one person.

That’s why we now depend on these 3 systems below to help us get more clients. There are plenty of other systems that we use, but let’s focus on 3.

This may not sound sexy but social media, video marketing, automation marketing, and any other form of marketing online owes a huge portion of its success to email marketing. Before Google decided to stop allowing people that used direct marketing strategies to advertise on their search engine, we decided that it would be a good idea to start building a list of email prospects.

This decision was huge! Without building a list of about 30,000 prospects our business would’ve been doomed just like countless other people we heard from.

The truth is we take email marketing and being able to email people whenever we want for granted. We used to use many different platforms for email, including, Aweber, iContact, Getresponse, Constant Contact, Ontraport, and Infusionsoft.

The best strategy that we can give you, in regard to email marketing, is that you should definitely be building a list of interested prospects the “right way”. But there is actually another level that most entrepreneurs NEVER practice to increase their profits.

NEXT LEVEL email marketing basics

If you tie together your email marketing with social media and building real relationships via one on one interaction, you create almost “bullet proof” communication channels with your prospects and customers. Once your communication channels are solid, you’ll always be able to get the right messages to the right prospects at the right time. A great example of how we do this is by talking to all of our customers, and many of our prospects over the phone.

You can learn SO much by speaking to prospects one on one. I’ll share more strategies about how to do this later using a system called ARP for both your sales calls and customer support calls.

Here’s a flowchart that shows you our “marketing flow” so you can see how we tie all of these channels together.

If you want to know more about how to tie all of these pieces together, check out the article we wrote on email marketing automation and strategies, use this to build up a client list that will buy from you for years.

The RIGHT CRM

If you are not using a customer relationship manager you are really missing out. The main purpose of a CRM is to allow you to save all the data that you have on customers and prospects in one organized place. And remember, it’s customer relationship manager. That means you’re trying to build a relationship with people on your email list. One of the best ways to build good professional relationship is by giving. You reap what you sow right? With that in mind make sure you sell good seeds of professionalism, authority, and entertainment.

Whoa wait a minute entertainment? Yes! Most people that are interested in your product and service want to experience new and exciting things. The product or service they may be buying from you may not be that exciting but the way that it’s presented via your marketing can be.

A great example of entertaining people and inspiring visitors when they purchase a product from you, is the shaving razor called One Blade. They take something boring like razors, and created the best razor in the world. You can go take a look at their site here at https://www.onebladeshave.com.

So in the end you want to use your CRM to give your prospective clients and customers a good experience by using the data that you’ve collected to energize and entertain them.

Below you can see CRM Data in Our Infusionsoft account to get a good idea what it looks like. Other good CRMs include, Ontraport, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, etc..

Screenshot of marketing campaigns triggered by the data in our CRM - We use Infusionsoft

A sales team is very important but most people neglect this area of their business. The for this is that many entrepreneurs and service providers just don’t know how to sell, so they definitely wouldn’t know how to hire a salesperson or manage a virtual sales team.

What I recommend before hiring a sales rep or consultant is that you become the first sales person for your company yourself. If you HATE sale, rename this role to "account manager". By doing this, you’ll be able to understand what your customers really want and be able to share this with anyone you decide to hire.

The shortcut to this process, that I feel is very important, is outsourcing all of your sales as soon as possible. This is actually one of the services we provide for people that are selling business services or high end products to consumers. You can find out more about that here.

We actually quadrupled our sales over a six-month period after I went from the old model of doing all of the selling myself, to the new model of having others do the selling while we did the marketing. If you need any help with this step, make sure you reach out to us by clicking here.

This is a screen shot from 7 yrs ago when we just made the transition. The column on the left has sales that were made over a 6-month period, while the column on the right is sales from a calendar year. So we basically quadrupled sales! Note: Our profit ONLY doubled, but that is still huge growth from one year to the next.

We started our companies with VERY little money, $500, now we regularly have six figure months. Is it all easy now, NO WAY! But it’s better now that we know it’s the systems, strategies, and sweat that get your results.

Some of this may seem a little bit overwhelming, but it’s definitely important for you to start implementing these steps and systems into your business yesterday!

If you’re not using these systems to grow your business or get more clients, you should be ashamed of yourself :-). If you have any questions, please reach out to us and asked or leave a comment and will be sure to answer for you.