Do You Focus Your Money Making Ideas on Clients or Customers?

Many money making ideas fail to recognize the importance of clients.  In fact many work from home affiliate marketers do not even see a difference between clients and customers.   The difference does drive your strategy and can reflect directly to the bottom line.

A dictionary review of the definitions of "customer" and "client" reveals:

A Customer - a person that buys goods or services from a store.

A Client - a person using the services of a professional.

In fact the term client originally denoted a person under the protection of another.

To highlight the difference try this simple exercise.

1. Concentrate on the target niche, and the product or service you wish to sell.
2. Write down one page of content with this in mind “your clients are under your protection”.  Deliver to the clients needs.
3. Now create content with this focus, “your customers will buy these products”.  Deliver to the successful achievement of a single sale.

The content is different, but more importantly the difference in intent is huge.

Which of the two examples would you consider purchasing from?  Who would you purchase from again?  Would you rather be treated as a customer, or as a client?

Generating traffic takes deliberate effort and resolve. A customer is likely to only visit once. A client, who sees the value, will potentially be a client for more than one marketing campaign.

There is a lesson here and it is to do with the approach you use.  The foundation to your money making idea hinges on who you serve?

Do you generate traffic to your site to sell? Are you targeting customers?  Are you treating your web sites and splash pages solely as a one time sales site? 

A potential customer reaching your site has only two options, buy or do not buy.  If they do not buy the potential to have the customer return requires more effort on lead generation.

Nothing wrong with that.  Nonetheless why shouldn’t you leverage your traffic generation and time spent creating compelling copy.  Maximize your potential return from the steady build up of traffic generation. 

The alternative, to a pure sales focus, is to seek and support clients with valuable content.

The focus of your efforts is to generate a relationship with the client. Establish value by servicing to the clients needs.  Your web sites and blogs provide the worth of something compared to the price paid or asked for.   The sell can be both soft or direct, and the client stills has high regard for the content provided.

The difference here is you generate a list of clients that put value in the communications that exist between you.  Your thoughtful attention to the client's needs and the content you provide  serves to generate a long term client, that will possibly purchase more than one time.

Begin to serve your clients rather than sell to your customers.  The consequence is that your results will begin to soar turing your business opportunity online into a revenue engine.