3. It's important to emphasise that you already have skills, knowledge and expertise that is valuable to your prospective clients. The trouble is most of us take what comes naturally to us for granted, and completely underestimate value of what we know to our prospective clients.

Not only is what you know very helpful, you could be using it to attract your prospective clients, by packaging your knowledge and expertise in a form that meets one of their current needs. A classic way of doing this would be to offer a free report or information pack which answers a question or solves a problem that your prospective clients have.

For example, if you are a recruitment consultant, you have probably noticed that some of your existing clients are more successful at attracting and retaining talent than others. Now if you sit down and reflect upon this, you could probably come up with five things that companies who are successful at retaining talent do that others don't. This could be based entirely on your personal observations over years. Voila! Flesh out your opinions and you now have a report, '5 ways attract and retain talent' or ''What companies who are successful at attracting and retaining clients do that their competitors don't'

This does not need to be a ground breaking piece of academic research. I want to remind you that you already have an opinion on this, which may well differ from mainstream view, and if I asked you this question over lunch, you would have no problem in coming up with an answer.

4. Once you have your article written, you could offer this free report by placing a message or short ad in a place where your target clients congregate. I call this a magnet - something that provokes prospective clients to raise their hands and say, 'I'm interested!' By requesting your report, responders indicate that they are interested in this topic.

Now, not everyone who requests your report will be a hot prospect, but there will be some potential clients within this group. The free report would just be starting point of your relationship. From this point you could offer more 'birdseed' each time demonstrating your credibility in this subject area, up until point when prospect asks, 'can you help me', or a one-to-one conversation is necessary.

This is a low cost way to generate leads and position yourself as an expert in your particular field. Yes, it takes a little brainstorming, imagination and creativity on your part, but knowledge which shapes your 'birdseed' should come naturally anyway, and time spent thinking about needs and desires of your prospective clients will never be wasted.

(c) Bernadette Doyle, 2004. Reprint rights granted to all venues so long as article and by-line are reprinted intact. This article may not be used for any publication unless it is opt-in.

How did I know what search engines would like, and how that would increase number of people who would come to site? Well, I found out that some guarded information about latest optimization tips for Yahoo and Google was available on Web FREE. (If you want to know what that resource is, just download updated Free Google Optimization Guide.)

Once I had pages optimized to my satisfaction, all I had to do was link some of those pages to front of my site (where article was then located) and wait for increase in traffic to my site. Google spiders me every day like clockwork ever since I made this tiny change to my website that increased my site rank from zero to five in January.

Of course, I then had to figure out if my secret technique to baiting Google spider was going to work with Yahoo's new search engine spider.

Not only did it work, but it worked faster than leading Google spider to specific page of my site! Yahoo's spider is not back at my site on a daily basis yet, but it does come regularly, finding new pages, and reindexing area with most content.

So there you have it. If your site has been indexed well for a term you didn't really want, first, make page as relevant as possible to visitors who end up at your site.

Next, give search engine spider "food" to eat that is more relevant to your site. It doesn't hurt to optimize this page. You can now download new optimization guide for FREE here- IF you're one of next 100 subscribers. Only 1000 copies will be available for download so get yours now.

Third and last, get spider to come on back to your site. If you know how to bait a search engine spider, great! You'll get your results faster, and since spider finds link on its' own, you may get better placement. Or, you can submit your site to one of Inktomi's partners, and/or Google and wait 6-8 weeks it takes to be included.