You want all of your customers to remain close to you. You want the relationship you have with your customers to grow, and you obviously want more repeat business. In addition, every business owner wants their current customers to refer other customers to them.

Being in regular and frequent contact with your customers is known as “Building Your Fence.” Your fence is designed to keep your clients and customers in and the poachers out. A poacher is anyone who is trying to steal your customers. It could be a direct competitor, but it could also be another company that is targeting the same dollars that your customer uses to buy your product or service.

To remain strong and effective, a fence must be properly maintained. If you are not in regular and frequent contact with your customers and clients, your fence will begin to deteriorate, losing one slat or whole sections at a time. Either way, the result is the same. As your fence becomes weaker, you will lose customers and profits.

Let’s be practical for a moment. You have probably invested a great deal of time and money growing your business and building your customer list. Don’t let your hard work, and the hard-won relationships you have with your customers—and the profits they bring you—slip away by being lazy and not communicating with them.

One of my mentors, marketing genius Dan Kennedy, actually coined the phrase “fence building.” One of the best pieces of marketing advice comes from Kennedy’s book, No B.S. Direct Marketing. “My single biggest recommendation is the use of a monthly customer newsletter. Nothing, and I mean nothing, maintains your fence better.”

Commit right now to starting (or restarting) your monthly newsletter. Dollar for dollar, newsletters are the most effective marketing tool available. Plus, customers who read your newsletter are usually in a good position to do business with you again and recommend your product or service to others.

Every time you mail your monthly newsletter you make your fence stronger. Think of this as adding another slat. 

Learn more secrets on how to use a newsletter to boost your business in my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life.

You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, usually at the worst possible moment. Well, there’s another variation of that, and it goes like this: The product will cease working exactly one day after the warranty expires. Enough of us have had that exact experience that it lends credence to the veracity of the law. We all take those 30- or 60- or 90-day warranties with a grain of salt. It makes us skeptical consumers.

Your customers are no different. They’re wondering, “What if it doesn’t work? What happens when it fails? What if I don’t get the result I was expecting?” They may be on the fence about buying from you. You’ve done a lot to move them to consider buying from you, but they’re thinking, “Yeah, I kind of like it. It sounds like it will solve my problem. I think the price is fair, but what if . . . ?”

Get rid of the “what if,” and you can close the deal. It’s easy to do. Easy? Yup. All you have to do is reverse the risk. Risk reversal means that you, the business owner, assume all the risks associated with purchasing the product (or service), so it’s going to work to your customers’ satisfaction. If they’re on the decision fence and have nothing to lose, they’re going to buy.

Let’s be clear—square one is that you must offer a high-quality product or service. That’s a given. It’s a no-brainer. Some of my coaching clients assure me that they do (and I believe them), and then they go on to tell me about their 30- or 60- or 90-day guarantee. That sort of offer simply makes people skeptical because we’ve all been burned by that warranty version of Murphy’s Law. What happens after 30 days? What happens after 60 or 90 days? When prospects wonder about that, they’re going to be hesitant to buy. You haven’t gotten them over the trust hurdle.

Learn more immediate profit producing strategies in The Fastest Way to Higher Profits, Jim’s latest hit book. It is available at www.HigherProfitsBook.com or www.Amazon.com (where it is also available on Kindle).

Six. Have gratitude. Gratitude is not something I lack. I had cancer. Quite frankly, I’m grateful to be alive. Develop the mindset of gratitude, because sometimes you have the opportunity to stare the alternative in the eye.

My outlook is very different now. Few things even get me upset. I’m grateful, as you can imagine, for every day that I have to face down whatever challenges come. Gratitude enables you to have a positive mindset where you feel like you can take on anything because you’re grateful for it. You can even be grateful for the challenges. This mind shift is huge, and when you have an attitude of gratitude, good things are going to happen.

Seven. Follow up on promises. One of the biggest wealth attractants is simply saying what you will do and doing what you say. Ask yourself if there are any areas in your life or your business where you’re not following up on promises. One of the things that I do, both in my personal life and especially in my business life, is if I say I’m going to do something I do it. If I say I’m going to deliver something, I always work to over-deliver.

Under-promise and over-deliver is a good strategy as long as your under-promise meets your customers’ basic expectations. Then, when you over-deliver, you stand out from the competition. Do what you’re supposed to do. Do it when you say you will. No surprises. That’s a very simple way to seriously stand out.

I believe it is vitally important to continuously invest in your education. One way that I do that is I read three to five books per month. Among the books in my library you’ll find classics such as Think and Grow Rich and Psycho-Cybernetics, and a great book by Lee Milteer, Success is an Inside Job.

Several of the business building philosophies and strategies that I have learned and use regularly were recently featured all together in Lee’s “Smart Thinking” newsletter, and it inspired me to share them with you.

One. Focus on things that will help you to create wealth. Ask yourself, “What am I going to do to move my business forward? How am I going to add ten new clients this month?” Then continue on with your day and let your subconscious do its thing. When ideas hit, write them down. See which ones work for you, then run with them.

Two. This is on the flip side of the coin. You need to avoid negativity. There’s so much negativity out there that you need to focus on what you want to create. Don’t focus on what you don’t want to create, such as, “What happens if I lose this client?” Shift your mindset. Be proactive in exposing yourself to good information and to things that inspire and uplift.

As I said, I read a lot. I read countless books about the success of people such as Donald Trump, and I love Dan Kennedy books. As of this publication, I’m reading a book by Howard Schultz on how he built Starbucks. It’s inspiring. When I read things like that I feel inspired, and ideas start floating into my head about what I can do with my business.

Reading positive books and articles instead of reading all the lousy, negative stuff that you find in the newspapers and on various Web sites helps to create a place in your mind where beneficial ideas begin to spark.

The other part of that, which is sometimes not easy, is you need to eliminate negative people from your life. If you hang out with people who are doom and gloom, woe is me, this is horrible, what are we going to do? that is a drain on your positive mental attitude. You need to spend less time with folks like that.

My latest episode of Newsletter Guru TV is called “Keep Pushing for One More Degree” and in this episode I share how you can move your business (and your personal life) forward by seeking to improve just one degree!

At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils!

And with boiling water you can power a train! Here’s another one …

At 33 degrees, water falling from the sky on a Saturday is rainy day. At 32 degrees children are building snowmen, riding sleighs and promising their parents that they’re warm enough to stay outside five minutes longer!

By making one extra mortgage payment a year, a 30-year mortgage can be cut to 22!

Learn some questions to ask and some strategies to consider on how to give your business an extra edge, by providing just one more degree!

View this episode of Newsletter Guru TV and 57 other episodes at www.NewsletterGuru.TV!

When many business owners celebrate when they make a sale to a new customer and I believe this celebration is premature in most cases. In some old movies (whose names escape my mind at the moment!) will often show the salesman in the ‘bull pit’ ringing a bell and cheering, arms up on the air, when a sale is made.

But in my opinion, celebrating a first sale is premature as this is only one transaction. The purpose of getting a customer is not to make a sale, the purpose of making a sale is to get a customer and having a real and automatic plan to maximize the profit potential of each and every customer is the best way to significantly grow your profits. In this episode of Newsletter Guru TV I share a secret strategy that I teach to my No Hassle Newsletter clients. Check out “Tell Them What Else” at Newsletter Guru TV by clicking here!

I get a ton of email and questions through social media and I’m proud to say we get to 99% of them pretty quickly! Some of the best questions are even featured in my weekly newsletter, More Profits and Customers for Life! Well just this week I started a new series of episodes on Newsletter Guru TV called Jim’s Mailbag and in this episode I answer questions regarding the name of a newsletter and also the benefit of spending time on social media when you’re already so busy! Check out this fun episode by clicking here!

One of the many great benefits of social media marketing, particularly for entrepreneurs and small business owners, is that it allows them to play and compete on the same playing field as huge companies. You see, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a home based business or a multi-national corporation, everyone has access to the same 140 character Tweets on Twitter and everyone has the same ability to attract new clients with engaging blog posts! Read more of this informative article by clicking here!

Don’t Be Afraid To Be You (and Chill out on Biz Stuff!)

Whether writing on your blog, Facebook, or even Twitter, give your readers more of you! Be authentic and be real, let your personality shone through. Nobody will come back to your blog or read your posts if all you do is write about ‘company stuff’ and they especially won’t comeback if you’re perceived as always trying to sell something. Chill out, give your reader some information that is fun, useful and entertaining and they’ll likely come back for more! Read more of this informative article by clicking here!

Newsletters Help Keep Customers Longer and Spending More!

No matter what business you are in, your current customers hold the best prospect for future growth. According to research from Bain and Company, getting business from your current customers costs about a fifth of what it costs to acquire a new customer. Read more of this informative article by clicking here!

As you may have surmised, this is one content rich newsletter. If you’re not getting it in your email every Tuesday morning, you can subscribe for free at www.JimsNewsletter.com.

You may think that the reason some customers do not make the decision to buy is based on price – many business owners do – but that’s not always the case. In fact, far more often customers do not pull the trigger because they have doubts! If you want to sell more, your #1 job as a business owner is to reverse the risk that your customers feel. In episode #55 of Newsletter Guru TV I’ll show you a sure fire way to close more sales, and I’ll show you five actual examples!

Check out Reverse the Risk and Explode Your Profits by clicking here!

If you have a newsletter and are regularly mailing it to your customers, clients, patients, and prospects, congratulations! You’re among the small percentage of entrepreneurs and small business owners that ‘get it’ when it comes to the amazing power of building healthy, strong, committed, dependable, and profitable relationships with their customers.

However, there is one aspect of newsletter marketing that often gets overlooked as most people are just thrilled that their newsletter actually gets done at all! But this one shift can make a huge difference in how many people actually open and read your newsletter in the first place, which as you can imagine is paramount to having it generate more revenue!

Check out my latest episode of Newsletter Guru TV, it’s called “Dependability equals Profitability” and I shot this episode while walking my pal Toby at the lake. During the first few minutes Toby let me know that he had other plans for our walk!

Click here to watch this great episode.