This should really be a no-brainer. The key to making any business successful is sustainability. Having a successful launch and making a ton of money at the onset is great. But nothing lasts forever, except perhaps diamonds if you ask Sir Ian Fleming, who incidentally was never officially Knighted, a fact I just found out now while researching this article.
Anyway, back on track. That initial run of business (and resulting income) is great. That’s how you get your business up and running. But what you need to create in order to be really successful, is repeat business. You don’t want clients to come to you once and then disappear into the ether, never to be heard from again. Like the title of this article says, you want them coming back for more. To say it in the simplest of terms, you want them to keep giving you their money. And there are many ways to do this.
Make Your Business Indispensable: This is pretty simple, actually. Provide a product or service that people simply cannot do without. Provide quality work, and clients will continue to return whenever your services are required again.
Iterations and Improvements: Two companies have got this down to an art form; Apple and Nintendo. Every year millions of people flock to Apple stores or their electronics retailer of choice to pick up the latest version of Apple and Nintendo’s product lines (such as the iPad or Nintendo DS). Apply this to your own business by continuing to upgrade and improve your products and services, and if you’ve done your job right by making them indispensable to your clients, they’ll happily return to plunk down the cash for the newest offering you have on the table. Just hopefully not quite as ravenously as Apple’s customers. I feel terrible for their store employees every time they launch a new product.
Special Offers: This is a pretty big one that I touched on in Wednesday’s article. To boil it down to a bullet point, offering special deals (that don’t involve you offering a service at a loss) is a great way to draw in new clients, which you then have an opportunity to turn into repeat clients.
There are literally hundreds of ways to go about turning your clients into repeat business, but as always, my job is to put you on the right path to Personal Independent Earnings, not hold your hand the whole way. Apply a little creativity, and you’ll find yourself with a lengthy client list in no time. After all, repeat PIE is the very best flavor there is.
