facebook – The Business of Creativity

The Foolproof 5

A Foolproof 5-Step System to Attract Perfect Clients

“It’s Foolproof!”

“I think you’re nuts.”

– Finding Nemo

Are you attracting the type of clients you want?

I’m surprised at how many lawyers and non-lawyers answer “no” because it’s really not that hard to do. It seems that not a week goes by when I’m not asked how I’ve been successful in attracting the clients I love to work with – entrepreneurs.

You can use my system to attract your perfect clients, no matter who they are. You don’t need a massive marketing budget either, because you can do everything on this list without spending a dime.

Here are the steps.

Know the type of problem you will be helping people solve until they put you in a hole.
Create a product or service offering to solve that problem.
Share information of value to people experiencing that problem for free via your blog.
Let people know where they can find what you’ve posted on your blog.
Allow people to hire you to help them solve their problem.

Want to know more?

I thought so.

Here’s how you do it.

Step 1: Know the type of problem you will be helping people solve until they put you in a hole.

That may sound crass, but when you know what you love to do – the thing you can’t NOT do – you’ll have recognized your purpose in life and retirement will be an obsolete concept. The day you commit yourself to aligning your income streams with that thing you love to do will be the day you “retire” no matter if your 65 or 25. For instance, I’ll be helping people share their creativity with the world through entrepreneurism until the day I die. I can’t NOT help those people. What will you do until the day you die, happily, and for free?

Step 2: Create a product or service offering to solve that problem.

You have to “package” your passion into something people can repay you for. Notice I didn’t say “pay you for”, I said “repay” you for. You MUST provide value first. You have to put it out there. You put it out there for free initially (see the next step), but don’t expect people to take a risk on you – you must take the risk on them.

If you have a service offering, package it up in some way that doesn’t equal a blank checkbook – in other words, do you absolute best to avoid pricing your service by the hour. Hourly fees are lose-lose, you only end up trading your life for a few bucks. Sometimes you’re not worth your hourly rate, sometimes you’re worth a thousand times more. It’s a bad, outdated, shortsighted metric of value. If you can build in some continuity, such as a monthly flat fee for your services that lasts for a year, then do it. Trade a long-term relationship for a higher project fee every time you can.

If you have a product offering, price it to move, but at a profit. The key to success is to make a lot of people a little happier, at a profit each time. If you can build in some continuity (and you can), do it.

Step 3: Share information of value to people experiencing that problem for free via your blog.

There is no excuse for not having a blog. None. You can have one set up for free inside of 10 minutes. Just go to http://www.wordpress.com and you’re good to go. If you have 20 minutes, you can get your own domain name and have a wordpress blog set up in your own name or brand, like http://houchinlaw.com , http://www.spacebetweencenter.com or http://kevinhouchin.com . It doesn’t take a technical genius, it only takes a bit of passion for your message, which shouldn’t be a problem if you took step one seriously.

The thing I hear most often is “but I don’t know what to write…” Ugh. Yes, you do know what to write. At least if you took step one seriously you do, because if you took step one seriously you have something to say. It’s more likely that you probably have so much to say that you don’t know where to start and are simply overwhelmed. Or, you’re really just afraid that you can’t write.

So, just have a conversation.

Imagine a perfect client sitting in your plush office. What question do they ask you? That’s a blog post.

What do they fear? Each of those fears is a blog post.

What gets them jazzed? Each spark of enthusiasm is a blog post.

What’s the latest and greatest thing in their life? That’s a blog post.

What just made YOU happy about the progress toward solving the problem from step 1? Blog post.

What just made you angry about a setback? Blog post.

Are you starting to get the picture?

500-1000 words. Just a few paragraphs. FYI, we’re at just under 800 words right now.

I work with a lot of lawyers. There is absolutely no excuse for lawyers not to write because the one thing law school did to benefit each of us was to thrash the fear of writing 500 words in 15 minutes out of us. The place lawyers screw up is that they think they have to write like we did in law school or for the court. They think they have to include footnotes and case citations proving up every factual statement.

When lawyers write a blog post, they should write for clients, not other lawyers. No footnotes. No case citations. Minimal statutory citations (only if they’re REALLY helpful.) You don’t get brownie points for acting smarter than your clients. They expect you to know the source, and they really don’t care where the answer comes from, just that you know how to help them, so don’t slow them down for the sake of your ego. Only your competition cares about the citation. Help them if you want, but I’d rather focus on attracting clients.

If you’re afraid you can’t write, then record yourself and pay someone the $12/hour it takes to have that recording transcribed. If that’s too technical for you, trade services with a copywriter who can interview you for 15 minutes and type up a blog post for you. There’s nothing wrong with “ghost bloggers” helping share your message.

If you don’t write or don’t want to work in the written word, record yourself and post audio files, or even better, do video files (known as a “vlog”). None of these will take much money or any real programming skill. If you can use a computer, you can accomplish these tasks. If you’re not willing to do any of this, get used to looking at the world from the inside of a cubical – if you’re lucky. These activities are becoming more critical to successful businesses of any size every hour.

WordPress blogs also have “Pages” where you actually share how people can REPAY you for the valuable content you’ve shared with them via your blog by hiring you for your services or purchasing your products – maybe even both – but we’ll talk about that in step 5.

Step 4: Let people know where they can find what you’ve posted on your blog.

This is where social media comes in. You know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and if you’re a video-savvy person, YouTube. These are speed-networking-on-crack and blow the roof off of conventional media outlets. Sure, you’ll want to submit your great articles to major publications, but get the quick stuff out quickly – via your social media networks. Provide value and share the value. Your blog is the hub. Media outlets are the spokes. Almost all of the good ones are free. Again, no excuses.

You can very quickly and easily set up your system to update your twitter.com status every time you post a new entry to your blog, and have that update Facebook and then LinkedIn, AUTOMATICALLY sharing your content with the world even EASIER than copy/paste. Again, no excuses.

If you are comfortable speaking in public, start giving talks to groups of people who personify the ideal of your perfect client. When you show up to speak, you’ll walk away with clients. The key is to create as many avenues for people to engage with the content on your blog as you possibly can.

Step 5: Allow people to hire you to help them solve their problem.

If you’ve thoughtfully, sincerely, and regularly completed steps 1-4, your perfect clients will find you. They’ll ask for your products and services. You just have to let them. Too many people say “I’m just doing this for fun” and fail to create an income stream from their passion or hobby that will allow them to escape the day job and “retire” doing what they love.

If you take just these few steps and practice them regularly, the income streams will appear and you’ll be able to focus as much time on them as you want. You’ll “retire” well before you’re 60s because you won’t think of quitting what you do for a living – what you do FOR a living will be aligned with ACTUALLY LIVING, now. What could be better than that?

This is the only life you have (at least right now), why waste another day of it doing something you don’t love?

Trademarks on Facebook

If you own some trademarks, be sure to fill out this form on Facebook to make sure nobody else registers your mark as their Facebook Username (Vanity URL).

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights

Thanks to Mari Smith for including this link in this post.

Play Nice: Legal Issues & Social Media

You already know, or are learning, that social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are wonderful ways to keep in touch with your friends and business associates. However, unthinking posts in such forums could land you on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

My goal here is plant a few seeds in the back of your mind about social media content you create. I won’t be able to cover every possible way you can get yourself in trouble, but I’ll hit the highlights.

Of course, each situation is unique to you, your state, the people on the other side of any discussion, and a bunch of other factors, so don’t simply take my word for it. If you find yourself in trouble, consult your own attorney — everybody should own one.

The most probable ways you can find yourself in hot water are:

Defamation: damaging someone’s reputation.

Privacy: disclosing someone else’s secrets.

Interference with Business Relations.

Negligence: being a dork and harming someone.

Contract: ending up in an enforceable agreement.

Trademark: confusing consumers about a brand.

Copyright: sharing something that’s not yours.

Defamation

In today’s world, we lump harms to someone’s reputation arising from a written statement (libel) or from a spoken statement (slander) under the common term “defamation.” Here’s what we look for:

1. Defamatory language on the part of the person being accused, which could be you or someone else online. Note that the language does not have to be direct, it can also be innuendo, satire, etc.

2. That language must be “of or concerning” the person claiming to be harmed by the language.

3. The language must be “published,” which is just assumed in the context of our discussion of a troubling tweet or other social media content.

4. The language has to damage the reputation of the person making the complaint. Note that even a statement of opinion might be trouble, for instance: “I don’t think Sylvia can be trusted with the key to the store” would be actionable because you’re implying a personal knowledge and accusation of dishonesty that would harm Sylvia’s reputation.

If the language refers to a “public figure” or involves a “matter of public concern,” then we have to also prove:

1. Falsity of the language; and

2. Fault on the part of the accused person.

Remember that you can get in trouble with statements that target an individual, company, association, or anyone that has a reputation to be damaged. And, it could cost you big-time, especially if you are referring to a few special cases such as a statement that goes to a business or professional reputation, says someone has a “loathsome disease,” has committed a “crime involving moral turpitude,” or imputes “unchaste behavior to a woman.”

Even a truthful statement can get you into trouble if sharing that bit of truth damages someone’s reputation.

Privacy

This one is touchy. If you disclose something that a “reasonable person” would not want disclosed, then you could wind up in trouble, even if the disclosures are truthful. An example would be disclosing the real name and location of someone in witness protection. Another example would be attributing to someone views he doesn’t hold, or saying someone did something they did not do. Exposing someone’s extramarital activities inadvertently by posting a photo showing person X with date Y when the date is not X’s spouse could land you in hot water.

Note that this right is personal. Companies cannot claim a right of privacy, although they have other avenues to pursue similar situations, such as “Intentional Misrepresentation,” otherwise known as “fraud” or “deceit.”

Interference with a Business Relationship

This one is pretty well explained by the title. To get in trouble here you have to know about a valid contractual relationship, or a valid expectation that someone will be entering a valid relationship, then you have to intentionally mess it up. Enough said.

Negligence

Think about a car accident. Now think about a car accident online and you’ll be heading down the road to understanding this potential problem.

When you drive a car, you have a duty to conform to a specific standard of conduct, which was breached in the accident and caused actual damage to someone. The same can happen online. Do you have some duty of care?

A good example would be an attorney or doctor who has a duty to keep client information confidential. You also signed, but probably didn’t read, a “terms of use” agreement for each social media site when you signed up. Those agreements generally define your duty relative to the content you post on the site.

Did you breach that duty? And, did your breach cause damage? All four elements have to be in place to get you in trouble for negligence.

Contract

All it takes to fall into a contract is an offer, an acceptance, and a promise to pay, known as “consideration.” That’s it.

You might think you’re joking around during an online exchange, but just a single post and response could bind you into some contractual action. Watch out that you don’t agree to something you really don’t want just because you don’t think social media exchanges count as contractual language.

Heck, you could also get in trouble here by making an offer for business services that are seen as an open offer for everyone. The possibilities are endless.

Trademark

Trademark law is all about protecting someone’s investment in their brand — personal or business. It’s about consumer confusion.

The test for trademark infringement is if an appreciable number of consumers would be confused about the source of some goods or services, thinking those goods or services come from, are affiliated with, or endorsed or sponsored by the person making the complaint. The affiliation and endorsement factors will get you in trouble.

So, don’t use someone else’s brand name for your online name, and avoid inferring that you are associated with people or brands with which you really have no affiliation or sponsorship.

Copyright

I admit it will be hard to get yourself into a copyright infringement situation from a single 140-character tweet, but you might be tempted to post a few tweets in a row to share a short poem or song lyrics. Don’t do that.

It’s easier to get in trouble on Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace because there you might be tempted to post a photo or piece of music that will land you squarely in a copyright infringement situation. Just because it’s online and easily copied, doesn’t mean you have the right to make and post other people’s creative work. You don’t.

Trust your instincts — if you had worked hard to create something, would you want it posted by someone else? Probably not.

I’m sure there is some form of legal trouble that you could get yourself into that goes beyond this list. But I’m going to assume that you’re not a criminal mastermind and that you’re not going to use your online accounts to harass people or solicit young boys or girls to meet you at the mall for a date.

Use your account only for good, to make friends and help people. It’s a jungle out there, so be careful and play nice.