Starting an online business is becoming more and more frequent for entrepreneurs around the world. With so many different things to worry about, however, what can you do when you’re first starting out? Putting in the hard work is only half the solution; the other half is making sure you’ve got your marketing ducks lined up in a metaphorical row. But, how do we solve the initial question of how to get booked? How do we find that target audience and get them interested in what we’ve got to offer?
Luckily, we’ve got the solution. Halley Gray is an expert in the field of marketing online services to people in order to make a sizeable profit and get booked in the process. Halley owns and works with Evolve and Succeed, a company that works in specializing services for other people and marketing them online. Together, Halley and I work through the steps it takes in order to make sure you know what you’re doing, and you should be avoiding when starting the journey of creating your own online services and how to get booked to clients all over the place. Let’s get started!
The CLICK Technique and How To Get Booked: “K” for “Keep Going”
Before we get into the details of how to get booked, of course, we need to talk about The CLICK Technique! A method I’ve invented, The CLICK Technique is a five-day crash course on what you need to be doing when starting your own business. Each letter in the word “CLICK” stands for a different step you should be taking, and when put together, the results speak for themselves! The CLICK Technique is proven to work (and free to use!), and in the end, you’ll be getting the traffic and leads you’ve been looking for.
In the case of how to get booked, we’ll be focusing on the letter “K”, which stands for “Keep Going!”. After you’ve done your work with blog posts, sending emails, and reaching out to your initial client base, you need to make sure to push forward in order to make sure the progress continues. You need to keep going to make sure the success is as long-lasting as you want it to be! With booking your online services, you need to find the strategies that’ll help you keep going, and help you turn the content you’re producing into legitimate and dedicated clients.
How To Get Booked: Step By Step
Now, how do we implement the idea of “keep going” into the notion of how to get booked? Easy—I’ve got you covered with these easy-to-follow instructions on what you should do, what you should’ve already done, and what you should be avoiding at all costs when it comes to starting your own online business.
In the beginning, we just have to remember the difference between marketing services and marketing a product. While products are great, marketing services is all about educating and exciting people, and though your content will vary from person to person, services are still easier to market. It has to do with being unique and being yourself—getting someone’s brain in on your problem to fix in in a way that only they can see is infinitely more powerful and valuable than offering them a product.
After all, your brain has connections that no one else can duplicate, and when you hire someone who has the right brain for the right job, it’s the most powerful thing for multiplying your revenue. Combining the unique skill set with the endurance to work hard, we’ll go over the base steps on how to get booked, and how to do it right.
Step 1: Specialize In Something
So now we begin answer the question “how to get booked”. To start it off, you need to make sure you’ve got something worth selling to the masses. Regardless of the industry you’re working in, specializing in what you do and who you’re doing it for is very important. You can’t expect people to flock to you for bookings if they don’t know what you do, after all, and especially not if they don’t know how well you do it!
For starters, focus on what you’re doing versus how you feel about doing it. The best way to get success and to avoid getting sidetracked is to keep your emotions in check and worry about what you need to succeed.
Step one for how to get booked: make sure you’ve found your niche. Specialize in something that’s easy for you to do and easy for you to sell. In the most basic terms possible, starting with something you know you’re good at just makes sense. From there, you’ll already be starting with the right crowd that’ll turn into your best future clients!
The second part is all about specifics. Never, ever shy away from being specific about what you do, where you do it, and what you’ll do it for. In the words of Halley—pick a person, pick a problem, specialize in fixing that problem. What results do you get from your work? Does your website clearly state what you specialize in? You need to make sure you’re nailing down people who visit your website for that reason because they won’t waste their time trying to find the information on their own. Make it clear, and package it up so that it makes sense for your ideal client.
Step 2: Know How To Market It
Once you know what you’re doing and how you want to do it, the next part of how to get booked relies entirely on making sure your message is reaching and resonating with the right people. For example, Halley talks about the beauty line Fenty in her interview. Their advertisement campaign was wonderfully executed, and the company did an amazing job of educating the people what their product did (give an opportunity for women of color to use beauty products that matches their skin tones), while getting people excited about a company that cares for diversity and equal chances.
You’ve got to do the very same with your services. You need to educate people on what it is you do, why they need it, how it’s going to help it, and what goal it’s going to give them in the end. Get them excited about it! It’s important to take the education and excitement part of the process and take it into your own hands, because—though this may not be what you want to hear—people aren’t going to become experts on your own services for you. You need to make people notice and care with the advertisements you put out into the world.
Also, know the range of the audience you’re trying to reach out to. When it comes to how to get booked and booking out, most people don’t need the same size audience as they would if they were running online courses, for example. Truthfully, you only need 100 people on your newsletter to be booked out in advance. Even further, narrow it down to five to ten people a year, and at the end of the day, the conversion rate works in your favor. Besides—in the beginning, you only need a handful of people to know about you in order to sell them your services. This works twice as well since you’ve already tailored your content to the people you’ve been around.
In the end, the marketing is about creating amazing packages and conveying their value to the people you talk to and already have connections with. Halley states that her sustainable online business model works better than most, that being—if you can’t sell services, you cannot then offer online courses. You need to start small and work your way up, and once you’ve figured out your method and your specialty, you can try to move onto online courses.
Step 3: Utilize A Wait List
Lastly, when it comes to how to get booked, use wait lists! It’s a great way to turn “meh” clients into amazing clients, all through educating them about what they need. If your service and your reviews are strong enough, you can and will have people booking four to six months in advance to get a chance to work with you—it all comes from building that foundation in order to get to where you are.
And yes, sometimes the wait can be that long. The numbers can be a little intimidating, especially if you’re just starting, but how to get booked relies so much on your own hard work, and making sure your services are top notch. That way, they’ll want to get on that wait list no problem. If the wait is long—let’s say, six months to twelve months—then give the client something to do in the meantime! Give them a template to fill out or a copy sequence—make them excited to work with you. This makes the business relationships you foster, and your working time together, considerably more successful.
Also—make sure you’ve got your availability clearly stated on your website. Everyone should be talking about when they can and cannot offer you their help. After all, we know people who say they can work 24/7, but truthfully? They can’t. And it’s not their fault—they’ve just got other things to attend to, like real life issues and their own familial lives. The wait list is a great way to make sure that people who are still interested don’t sway because of your unavailability—this sort of system is crucial for having people commit to the next step.
In the end, when it comes to online business services and how to get booked, you want to build a foundation in order to be booked out over and over again. If you can’t get your base foundation of services set up and booked out, then you don’t have the skills you need to move onto the next step of the process. It’s how the evolution of business works, after all, and hopefully, these tips and tricks will get you squared up and ready to go in order to get the success you’re looking for.
