 What's the number one way to get clients? Well, if you have studied any of this marketing stuff, you'll hear that the number way to get clients is through word of mouth, word of mouth marketing, right? What does that mean? It just means other people talking about your business to their friends, family, colleagues, et cetera. Now, just that statement, oh, the number one way, I mean, if I often, you know, ask people when I talk to audiences, hey, think about the last three clients you got, the last three new clients you got, where do they come from? And, you know, people say, oh, they came from referrals, you know, word of mouth. So you might say, well then, how do you get more word of mouth marketing going? So here's the thing. It's true for all of us that the number one way we get clients is word of mouth, at least in the beginning. I mean, even with more established businesses, that might be true as well. So it's not actually useful in terms of a strategy or education to educating people on how to do business to say, number one way is word of mouth. Because how do you actually get word of mouth going? Right? Two ways. You either do good marketing or you do good customer service. That's it. And you might say, okay, well then ideally, I don't have to do any marketing because I don't like marketing. Marketing is evil. Marketing is, you know, morally questionable or it's a chore or all that stuff. If you think that, then maybe you should try some of my other videos that help to change your mind on marketing. But anyway, let's just even go there. If you don't want to do marketing and you say, I would just want to get all my clients to word of mouth, which just means good customer service, right? Okay, give it a try. What happens? You say, well, okay, I have got five clients, 10 clients right now, 15 clients, whatever, however many clients you have. And I'm doing my very best to serve them well. I'm bringing my best care, my best expertise to each moment with my client and they are getting great, even if they're all getting great results, all of them getting amazing results. Do you think you're going to have enough of them talking about you to get enough more clients? Chances are no, right? I mean, how many clients do you need to have life-changing effect before enough of them talk about you so that you'll have a constant stream of new clients? How many? I don't know what the answer is that. Now, some people go, well, I need to really make my clients talk about me. And what does that mean? That means what you're going to do, you're going to email your clients, text them, call them. If you see them in person, hand them a stack of gift cards, gift certificates to hand to their friends. That's a very common strategy, by the way, to get clients. Oh, send your clients a stack of 10 gift cards, gift certificates that they are able to give to their friends to get a free session with you. Sounds clever. It's gimmicky. And sure, it works for some people, but it's not. So here's the thing, how often can you do that? Are you going to bug your clients every week? Obviously not. I mean, your clients are paying you for your service. Your clients aren't paying you for your service and to be bugged by you on an occasional basis to make sure they spread the word about you. All right? Now, if you have an affiliate program, that may be different. I have an affiliate program and I'm grateful that some of you watching this are part of that and you spread the word about me in part because you thankfully believe in the work I do and because you share in some of the profits of my business and that's great. But most of your clients aren't sharing in the profits of your business. And so they just, maybe you can ask them once or twice a year, beg them to please talk about you to their friends and family, but even if they do it once or twice a year, you're still not going to have enough ongoing client new client flow. So just trying to get your customers, your clients, your, even your friends and family to talk about you. You know, it's one, it feels like you're bugging them, which you are if you do it more than like twice a year. Okay? But number two is that even if they do it, even if all your friends and family talk about you twice a year to their, to their friend, you still don't have enough. So I said, there are two ways to get good word of mouth. Either good customer service, meaning people know you're doing good work. So they talk about you every now and then. And number two, you got to do good marketing. It comes down to this. Did you think you could avoid marketing? Really? Did you really think that? Be very curious to know what your thought is about this because essentially you have to have, you have to do good marketing. You have, you know, so that you have enough customers, clients on a regular basis, so that some of those customers and clients will talk about you often enough so that you have some new clients and customers. But really most of your clients and customers are going to come from good marketing. You can't escape it. I'm sorry to say. You cannot escape having to do good marketing to have a thriving business. You can't just rely on word of mouth. You really, until, until you are so well known, right? Which, how did it happen with good marketing? Now you might say with George, isn't it possible just to get super well known by doing really good work? Yes, but that's like playing the lottery. I know you do good work. How is it going with having lines out the door for people to work with you? Hello? Right? All of us do good work. I mean, at least we believe we do good work. No one's going out there going, yeah, I do crappy work and how come no one's talking about me enough to get enough clients? No, all of us believe we do good work, right? In our own way we do, right? And so no matter how awesome you are at your service or you know, whatever it is you provide to people, vast majority of us well-intentioned, skillful business people still need to do good marketing. All right, so when it comes to good marketing, what is the best way to get word of mouth with good marketing? Hopefully this won't surprise you, but when I say it, it's with authentic content on a consistent basis. Let's think about this. What's the easiest way for your friends to spread the word about you? Is it to have you reach out to them twice a year saying, oh, I need clients, will you please think about three people you could refer to me? Now you might do that and I encourage you to do that. You know, once or twice a year, definitely reach out to your friends and ask for referrals. Great, all right. Now how many of them do it, right? Because it's work for them. You're giving them homework without paying them usually. I mean, even if you pay them, sometimes they still are too busy because they have to think about, they have to go through the contact list and go, is that person a good fit? No, is that person a good fit? Maybe, it's like, it's so much work for people to have to look around and try to refer you people. It's just, it's something that they, it's not a high priority for them, right? All right, so the easiest way for your friends, family, colleagues to refer you is when they see a post of yours on social media, they find it helpful or inspiring or funny or profound or interesting in some way and they share it on their social media. That's it. That is the easiest way to get word of mouth going is by being consistent in showing up with authentic and helpful content. So this is one of the many reasons I'm always yelling at you to please be consistent in showing up and posting content. You know, another important reason I always mentioned is that it's good for your personal growth. It's good for your professional growth too because every time you create content, you become smarter about your field. You get better at communicating or at least you get practice communicating. And then of course you get practice putting ideas together, telling stories, finding out, you know, how you could say something in a different way. It's all comes through practice, right? So this is why I want you to dedicate yourself, you know, to, you know, if you don't have enough clients and you've already done the personal outreach, right? Now this is, you know, it is important. Like I said earlier, if you haven't, if you need clients right now and you haven't yet done the personal outreach to all of your friends, family that you think are relevant for you to contact about this twice a year, ask them, hey, I need clients right now. Can you, you know, here's how I describe my services. If anyone comes to mind, I'd be so grateful if you forward this onto them or if you can give me any feedback about how I'm describing this so that it's even more useful. I'd be great. But again, you're just hoping that one out of three or five people that you reach out to will actually have a thought about who they can refer to you. It's a, you know, it's still important to do but it's not usually enough to keep your client roster full and your inquiries coming in. So like I said, two ways to get word of mouth. Good customer service, which I know you're already trying to do, right? You're already doing your best to be of the best, you know, service provider to your clients. And number two, good marketing and in terms of good marketing, instead of trying to be persuasive or, you know, trying to get people's attention, you simply show up on a consistent basis authentically with as helpful or inspiring or as interesting of content as whatever you can muster that day and then watch what your friends, family, colleagues do. They will share your stuff occasionally. Not all of them obviously will share. Maybe not the majority of them will share but if you keep on showing up, you're going to become more interesting to people, right? Because how do you become interesting with practice? You don't, not, most of us aren't born interesting, right? Most of us aren't born with the ability to be profound, funny, enlightening, inspiring. We do it through practice. We try again and again and again. We notice what are the things we put out there that is inspiring, educational, funny, meaningful, profound. And then we go, ah, okay, let me move more and more in those directions. So if you want to get word of mouth going, again, don't just think, ah, I'm going to sit back. Now this is where a lot of people go wrong with the word of mouth is they just say, I've heard that word of mouth and referrals are the number one to get clients. So I'm just going to do good work. You're already doing good work. I mean, what are you going to do? You're already trying your best to do good work. And of course, all of us can improve, but I'm going to do good work and I'm just going to sit back and just hope and wait for the word of mouth to come in. Doesn't work like that. Yes, it does work like that, but it'll be like trickle. Every now and then you'll get an inquiry and then you'll have to go and get a full-time job because that can't support you financially doing that. But if you show up consistently with content, you make it easier for all of us who are in your circle to go, whoa, that was interesting, share. And then imagine, instead of, okay, you have a friend named Jane. Okay, instead of reaching out to her, I mean, yes, in addition to reaching out to Jane once or twice a year, but Jane now has to think, oh, can I refer three people? Who are three people that I know? I got to look into my address book. I got to look at my, it's work for Jane, but, you know, and she may or may not even refer three people or send it to three people. However, throughout the whole year, because you and Jane are Facebook friends or you and Jane are connected on Instagram or on LinkedIn or wherever you guys are connected on social media or Jane is a subscriber email list throughout the year, Jane sees something interesting that you have. And if you show up enough, right? How many social media posts are you gonna do each year? I'm hoping that you do at least once every two weeks if you're super busy, you have a full-time job, you have young kids, you have your caretaking for your elderly parents, all three are happening. You can at least post on social media once every two weeks. Take 30 minutes once every two weeks to post on social media, right? Most of us don't have all three situations and we can post on social media at least once a week. So if you post on social media on average once per week, then Jane might catch you on social media. Let's say, okay, let's be conservative. A third of the time she catches you on social media. So that's what bad math here. What's a one-third times, okay? So she sees you 17 times during the year and out of the 17 times she finds five of those things interesting, okay? She shares five of your posts each year and to her 300 Facebook friends, to her 150 Instagram followers, to her 100 LinkedIn contacts, that's times five would be 500 LinkedIn impressions each year or 1500, 300 Facebook friends times five shares. That's 1500. So that's like way more than if Jane sent forward of your email to three people once a year. Do you see what I mean? So this is why, well, I really believe it. I mean, this is not just believe it, I've seen it. This is why my business has continually grown year by year by year by really not doing anything different. I mean, I've been doing the exact same thing since 2015 when I committed myself to consistent content. I just, I'm gonna show up consistently at least two, three times a week consistently. Now I show up, as you see, if you follow me, I mean, you see something on my page, what four times a week, right? Is usually how I show up with content. So four times a week, you might even catch one of those four times or one of those eight times over two weeks, but you catch me a lot. And so you have that opportunity, right? I'll talk to all of you here. Not all of you share my stuff, but occasionally you do. And so it's like, that's why my business keep growing. That's why people who have thriving businesses often are consistent with showing up, so that it makes it easy for people to talk about them. So I hope this is helpful and I look forward to any questions and comments you have and what the action is from this video is please show up so that your word of mouth, you know, engine, marketing, people talking about you gets easier and easier over the months and over the years. And because if you commit to showing consistently, that also gets, I know, let me say this one thing before we end. Showing up consistently doesn't get easier over the years, but you get more persistent. You get more confident, courageous, and willing to make mistakes. So right now you might not be confident, courageous, not willing to make mistakes, you're perfectionistic. Well, the only way I know how to really break that in a very practical way is to just say, I know I've got to expose myself to showing up consistently and the more I expose myself to that feeling of being consistent. For example, I've always said, when I start these videos, I don't feel like making them. I didn't start feel like making this video, but I had to schedule to do so. So I said, I'm just going to start recording. Let's see what happens. Let's see how this one goes. You know, I had some ideas already written out and I go, okay, that's pretty much what I'm going to say. More or less, I didn't have any notes with me as I, but I just show up. And the more I show up, the more I understand the feeling of what it's like to just show up imperfectly. So you've got to just experience it. The more you experience it, the stronger you get. So I hope this is helpful. Thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to any comments or questions below. Thanks.