To attract more prospects and clients, you need what Taj Mahal calls "good bait" in his song Fishin Blues. One of biggest mistakes you can make, as a small business owner, is forgetting to use good bait in form of your offers. Whether you use direct mail, a web site or media advertising to market your business, success of your marketing depends on whether you provide prospects with compelling offers.

Your offers motivate prospects and clients to visit your web site, read your marketing materials, contact you and buy your services and products. Without right offer you won't attract big fish or as many fish as you'd like.

What bait are you using to motivate your target market to: - Visit your web site? - Sign up for your free newsletter? - Buy your products and services?

How many new prospects per week are your offers attracting?

Which Offers Work Best? Your offer needs to be something that your target market wants. You wouldn't use a worm to catch a whale or a safety pin to catch a tuna. Offer your target market something they can't refuse. Everybody likes to get something for free, whether it's an article, guide, ebook, report, consultation, a demonstration, offer of membership or added services. If your offer helps your target market solve a common problem, it will attract more prospects and clients.

Whether or not it is free your offer needs to provide value. Prospects will judge quality of your products and services based on your offer. If you give away a subscription to a newsletter, follow up with useful content and substantive ideas your prospects can use. Give them something that is so good they will want more.

Attracting Prospects My target market is service professionals and business owners. I offer a 15 page free marketing guide to prompt people to give me their contact information so I can market to them in future. My target market, want to attract more clients, want ideas to help them. A 15 page marketing guide is something that tens of thousands of people have found to be irresistible. Each week this simple offer pulls in hundreds of new prospects.

The first is obvious: Google is used 200 million+ times a day.

The second reason is that AdWords rewards advertisers who are ‘smart’, and punishes advertisers who are ‘stupid’. In AdWords, ad placement is only partially determined by how much you’re willing to pay for each click. The more important determining factor is how high your ad’s click-through rate is.

What this means is that a well written and targeted ad can rise in placement, even if actual cost-per-click for that ad is set low. In simplest terms this means little guy (me) can compete with big boys (giant corporations with mega advertising budgets) and win.

One of best ways to do this is by employing ‘sideways thinking’, or thinking outside box.