The Gardener’s Guide to Getting Clients

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We started a garden as a family this year. This is the first year we have ever done it, and we had our first salad last night with tomatoes from the garden. I have to tell you, I felt just amazingly proud. They were delicious, and it was so much fun to know that we grew these.

We got the dirt, we prepared our soil, we planted, we watered, we nurtured, and we were eventually able to create something we enjoyed as a family at dinner. It was a very cool experience.

And I was thinking about how it relates to our business, because it's really very similar.

Preparing Your Soil

In your business, you're going to have to do things like set up your foundation, which is really like preparing the ground. You're preparing your soil.

That might be:

• Building your website
• Starting your email list
• Creating the process you're going to work through with your clients, so you can deliver great results for them

That is really similar to the “preparing your soil” part of gardening.

Planting Seeds

The next thing is planting seeds. When you're thinking about having a garden, you're thinking, "Okay, I want to grow some tomatoes, and maybe some peppers, or some cucumbers." Each seed you plant is something you hope to harvest down the road.

In your business, the seeds look like your marketing. It might be a lead magnet you're putting out there with an ad running to it. It might be a blog post or a video you're going to share.

Each piece of content you create, once it's done, is something that will allow you to harvest over and over and over again. Not like planting a garden, where you only get it for one season.

Digging In Right

Think about where you are in your business right now. Are you at the planting seeds stage? Do you already have your foundation in place? Do you already have your lead magnet and those kinds of things? Then you should be thinking about your podcast, your videos, your ebooks, the things that help you plant those seeds.

If you don't have your ground prepared, you're not ready for that yet.

You need to be aware of what stage you are in. If you don't have all the foundation pieces in place, then getting on Facebook and doing your marketing is really going to be a waste of time. You're sending people to a website that wasn't set up to convert yet, or to a Facebook page where they'll get distracted and click somewhere else.

You need to create those things before you start planting the seeds.

Keep Watering and Weeding to Continue Growth

In addition to planting the seeds, you need to water. You can't just plant a seed and expect it to grow.

We live in the Midwest and we do get a little rain here and there, but it also gets really, really hot. If we hadn't been watering our garden, weeding it, making sure it was getting sunlight, and nurturing it along the way, we wouldn't have had tomatoes for dinner.

With your business it's the same. You can put those blog posts out there, you can have your podcast and your YouTube channel, you might be running a Facebook ad to a lead magnet. But you can't set it and forget it. If you are not nurturing people after they subscribe, you're not going to harvest new clients and customers down the road.

So create a way to stay in touch. That might look like:

• A follow-up email series
• Updating old blog posts and resharing them refreshed with new ideas
• Looking at your Google Analytics to figure out what your audience is interested in, then planting more seeds on the topics they already like
• Looking at the results your clients are getting, and improving your systems and products so they get better results, and so they start planting seeds for you through word of mouth

Your business is a long-term investment of time, and you need to be making those investments along the way. You also don't want to do it out of order. Watering dirt when you haven't planted seeds isn't going to get you anything, and if you plant seeds in crappy soil, you're not going to get good produce out of it.

Quick Recap

Take a look at where you are in your business, and make sure you're doing these three things:

1. Preparing the ground. Setting up your foundation.
2. Planting the seeds. Doing your blog posts and your marketing, so people can get into your funnel.
3. Nurturing the people you've attracted after they opt in.

So that's it. Let me know in the comments what you think, and what stage you are in your business. And don't forget to share and subscribe so you get notifications of next week's video.

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