By Alicia Forest

Do you often find it difficult to make time for your marketing activities? Or do you find that when you do market, it's not consistent enough to bring you the results you want? Marketing your business is as important as what it is that you do. If you embrace that, you will stop struggling so much and reach a whole other level of success!

Before my business evolved into what it is now, I was trading my time for money. As a webmistress, I charged by the hour. As a writer/editor, I charged by the hour. As a public relations and marketing consultant, I charged by the hour. Do you see the problem here? There are only so many hours in the day, right? And if I wanted to pay the rent, I needed the majority of them to be billable hours, which left little to no time for marketing. As you can imagine, I struggled to get clients.

But I don't struggle anymore, and here's why: it's called passive income - multiple streams of passive income - that enables me to work with fewer (but more of my ideal) clients one-one-one, and gives me much more time for marketing and growing my business with a lot less effort.

Here are 3 steps to implementing this model into your business:

1. Use the funnel method of marketing. I talk about this constantly, but it's such a powerful model (that actually works) that I want as many people as possible to embrace it. If you set your business up within this system, it will automatically do your marketing for you. And it's the best kind of marketing - the "set it and forget it" kind! (Visit http://www.clientabundance.com/mpfunnelarticle.htm for an article I wrote about this.)

2. Stop trading time for money... and start creating products that will bring you passive income. You can create products from knowledge you already have, in a way that is easy to package and deliver, such as an ebook. Taking your expertise and bottling it actually allows you to help more people than you ever could one-on-one, and it lets those prospects who might not be able to afford your rates an option of still working with you, just in a different form.

3. Raise your fees. Once you start offering products, and start bringing in passive income, raise your one-on-one fees. Now don't gasp! What will raising your fees do? It will allow you to gracefully let go of some of those less than ideal clients and let you work with more of those whom you are best suited to serve. The increase in fees will, at the very least, offset the loss of revenue from the clients that have dropped off, but ultimately you will bring in more revenue by taking your business to a higher level of quality and commitment. It will also give you more time to create more products!

Structure your business around this model and you will enjoy working with more of your ideal clients and customers, create more income by way of packaging your knowledge into products, and give yourself more time to spend building your business to the highest vision of it you can imagine.

Copyright 2006 Alicia M Forest and ClientAbundance.com.

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