How To Get Consulting Clients Easily At Your Ideal Rate

When you’re wondering how to get consulting clients, blogging is the one activity that never fails.

Hubspot agrees with me. Their research found that 71.4% of people say blogs affect their purchasing decisions “somewhat” or “very much.”

And my experience backs this up. Blogging has helped me get millions of page views, sell three Amazon bestsellers, and grow a startup.

With this young company, I was able to attract new consulting clients and build social proof via blogging.

How did this work so well?

It’s the classic belief that, “When I publish quality content into the world that actually helps people with their problems, by reciprocity they will help me accomplish my goals of growing my business.”

To be clear, by blogging, I mean written, audio, or videos. Any and all can get the job done.

Start blogging professionally and I guarantee you’ll generate more sales leads and new clients.

Here’s why I’m so confident blogging will help you get clients easily who value your consulting services.

Why Blog? 3 Biggest Benefits

So what does blogging accomplish for your business? Blogging gets more people to

Know about you
Trust and like you
Buy from you

Those are some of the three most powerful reasons to do anything in business, and it’s what makes putting out content special. Call it a triple threat.

Technology and processes are amazing—I’m a big believer—but these will never replace the strength of a quality human relationship built on shared value and trust.

And all relationships start from some form of communication.

So getting content in front of your people makes them like you and appreciate your knowledge. This likability builds trust, and if someone trusts you then you’re already halfway there when it comes to closing the sale.

Plus, blogging is free. It takes nothing more besides your time and some creativity to get organic traffic coming to your site from Google. When you run an ads campaign or hire a PPC agency, the results can be incredible, but they’re never free.

Though like most things in life, there’s the wrong and right way to blog.

Business Blogging Checklist

Writing in-depth guides about new ideas, techniques, and strategies your prospects can use to better their lives will turn them into raving fans of your brand.

They’ll follow you on all social channels. Recommend you to other people. And over time, if you continue to feed them value, buy everything you sell.

I can’t tell you how many people, who found me from my blog content, bought my first book, then my second and third, then worked with my advertising company.

Anyway, to get to that point, you first need to communicate effectively.

As I share in an article I wrote recently on how to write a blog post: in any piece of content, you want to ensure you have a healthy dose of the following elements.

Personal stories
Social proof
Content people care about
A clickbait headline

How To Get Consulting Clients

1. Share Personal Stories

People find other people interesting. It’s as simple as that. Tell your war stories, triumphs, failures, and learning moments in your blog posts.

You’ll find your prospects identify with you better and when you get on a sales call, they may bring up one of your stories as the reason why they scheduled a call with you.

When trying to build trust, nothing is as powerful as a personal story that gives the audience insight into who you are, why you think the way you think, and gives them opportunities to identify common interests with you.

I look for opportunities to share relatable stories as often as possible. Then, I’m not surprised when I’m in a meeting or phone call and they break the ice mentioning a funny story that they thought of from my content.

Plus, my entire LinkedIn is filled with stories and looks different than most people’s for a reason. I want viewers of my profile to know me, not just my job titles.

Tie in stories and emotions to create a stronger bond with your prospects before you transition to credibility and logic.

2. Build Social Proof

It makes sense why social proof is important. No one wants to be scammed or waste money on a fraud consultant.

Knowing that, you can’t be so humble that you never mention your accomplishments or you’ll only be shooting yourself in the foot.

In a noisy online business world, you actually need to self-promote every success story of your clients, ask them to promote you, and do what it takes to look like an expert in your field.

So where’s the place to build social proof? You guessed it, your blog.

Ironically, we’ll blog about a client who hired our SEO agency to attract new SEO agency clients.

Start writing individual blog posts on a difficult challenge that you accomplished and the average person hasn’t. Feel free to name drop important people or share impressive details in your personal stories. And the more client testimonials and quotes you have, the better you can drop these in your content.

For example, we helped a client go from zero to thousands of monthly page views. So I wrote a blog post listing how we did it.

Now are you more likely to listen to what I have to say if you’re trying to get traffic to your site? I believe so.

3. Create Content People Care About

It’s an awful feeling to spend hours on a piece of content, then check analytics and see that 13 people read it.

I’ve found that most people who struggle to build an audience are focused on the wrong audience.

They write what they think is interesting, without ever considering their audience might not have the same opinion as them.

So by getting outside what you think people care about, you’ll open yourself up to using data to see what topics really interest them.

The way you’re going to do use, and a tool I swear by when doing any SEO efforts, is Ubersuggest.

On Ubersuggest, you enter a main keyword for your niche. And then you’ll see a list of the top 100 Google SERPS (article URLS) on the right.

This screenshot shows what’s trending online for the keyword “online business coach”.

Viewing these blog posts on the right, you can see what content really strikes a chord with your audience and how those blog posts were written.

Don’t copy these blogs, but see what posts are hot and one up them with an even more valuable post than the one people are enjoying.

Only then will you know for a fact that your niche cares about the content you’re publishing.

4. Write Clickbait Headlines

Everyone hates clickbait. I love it.

Because you can’t help people and accomplish all your goals with boring headlines that no one clicks on.

Honestly I have no problem with clickbait headlines, as long as the content delivers. Sure, get my attention, and keep it. I’m only upset if the headline gets me to click but the content is average to terrible.

Think about it. You’re actually hurting your audience and yourself if you write subtle headlines that don’t pack a punch.

Try this headline analyzer tool to improve your headlines as soon as possible.

Don’t hate the game, play the game to improve the reach of your content and customer acquisition.

Reach New Audiences With Guest Blogging

Another profitable activity is guest blogging.

Here are the main benefits of blogging on another’s website:

Increases brand awareness
Builds social proof and credibility
Drives traffic
Generates new customers
Offers a networking opportunity for future collaborations
Establishes trust to a new set of people

Guest blogging is an extremely underrated yet effective tactic to break into new audiences who would love your company, if they only knew about it. (Not to mention, guest posting is incredible for building backlinks.)

By far my favorite motive for guest blogging is it helps me establish trust.

Trust can make selling extremely easy or difficult, depending if you have it or not.

That’s why a smart way to attract new clients is to get what I call “shared trust” from another individual your audience respects.

When you publish a guest post, 20 readers who are wanting to go more in-depth about the strategies you recommended will think, “Wow that’s really helpful. Who is this person? Let me click to their site and see what they’re about.”

And with an amazing landing page that converts, they will often get on a sales call or purchase directly from the guest post link.

You no longer have to fight being credible and trustworthy because you received the shared trust of having an article published on a blog they religiously read.

Then you get a big sales month thanks to the small effort of a well-written guest post.

For example, The Wall Street Journal has millions of readers and huge brand awareness. Most of their readership hasn’t heard of me—Brian Robben.

Though I received “shared trust” when they wrote an article that featured pictures, quotes, and demographics about me.

This feature puts my name in the same sentence as The Wall Street Journal, a business known for business, credibility, and tradition.

Now when new audiences search “Brian Robben” on Google and finds the article, or my social media followers see the content, they’re pre-framed to see me in a more credible light.

You may not be able to get a feature in the WSJ yet, but you can publish guest posts on sites in your niche to build trust.

How to land guest posts

The way you secure these guest posts is by searching for something like “Guest bloggers [insert your niche]”.

Blogging Resources To Be A Professional

Why waste mind space when you can use digital tools to stay organized? I live by my online tools.

Here are the blogging resources I use:

Content calendar – Use a content calendar to get organized on your monthly content, how often you’ll post, to make sure you’re not forgetting any key topics, and plan promotional content around educational content. Marking down national holidays is another trick to mix cultural relevance into your content. Best to balance ambition and a manageable schedule when deciding how often you’re going to publish new material.
Google Drive – I use Google Drive to have a main umbrella folder called “Blog” and then inside that, I have folders like “Published” and “Unpublished” for blog content. And inside the “Unpublished” folder, I have a bunch of different blog post titles that I move to the “Published” folder when I’m done.
Unsplash – Blogs without images are tough to get through. Adding images from Unsplash, free images by the way, will improve the readability of your content.
Canva – If you want to be extra with your images and put text over them, then Canva is the easy to use tool for you. It’s also helpful for creating social media graphics and cover photos to share your published post.
Mailchimp – Following up with readers about new blog posts and sales offers is key. But the degree of difficulty in following up goes through the roof if you don’t have their email. Use Mailchimp to build an email list by adding an opt-in box on your blog and then send emails to your list with this same tool.
Yoast – The Yoast SEO plugin is the best out there for spreading your blog posts across search engines like Google. What I appreciate most about Yoast is it will tell you how to improve the SEO of your blog post before you publish it. Read this article if you’re wondering what is SEO?
Sumo – You’ll be surprised how many times a reader enjoys your content and wants to share it on their Facebook, LinkedIn, or in an email. Give them the chance with Sumo and its other tools to better market your business. (Shown below.)

If you don’t have a website, of course you’ll need that first before you do anything else. I wrote a step-by-step guide on how to start a WordPress blog that’s easy to follow.

The end goal is you’re extremely organized and focused on delivering value to your audience and spreading that value to as many people as you can possibly reach through SEO, social sharing, and an email list.

Pair Blogging With Paid Ads

Blogging is like an investment account. The more you invest, the greater the compound interest, and the better the results over a 10 year period.

That being said, blogging results can seem like a snail compared to the instant gratification of paid ads.

You can spend $10 to advertise your blog post and reach thousands of people the next day. That’s the scalability that comes with a Facebook ad campaign.

So if you have money in your business account saved for marketing, I’d encourage you to write an A+ blog post that blows your audience away in value, make an offer at the end for them to buy your services, and then promote it with a Facebook ad budget.

Reaching masses of prospects in this capacity can take your 6-figure business to 7-figures, or 7-figure business to 8-figures.

Conclusion

The challenges will come. When resistance hits you, remember why you started blogging at these times—you want people to know your business, to like and trust you, and to buy from you.

Remembering my why is how I put out content for over 5 years, and continue to do so. My wish is this why provides the same motivation to you.

What’s your answer when someone asks you how to get consulting clients?