NOTE: What you’re about to read are excerpts from my book, 51 Content Marketing Hacks: Extraordinary Lessons on Creating Content That Will Help You Sell More and Gain More Customers.
(To be more specific, the excerpts below come from chapter seven called “5 Types of Content Marketing to Continuously Attract Prospects“.)
Universal Business Truth: Without a Prospect, You Don’t Have a Future
My wife and I used to like watching a show on History Channel’s now defunct network H2 network.
It was called America’s Secret Slang.
Each episode features the origin of commonly used phrases in our country. It’s a really interesting and fun way to learn where some of the words we use every day came from.
In one episode, the origin of the word “prospect” was discussed.
It originally meant “future,” as in “how your future will be.”
During the gold rush days, the word came to mean that a particular piece of land had a future — it had potential.
As time went on, people who could potentially become customers became known as prospects, because they are a potential source of future income.
What all businesses need to understand is that if you don’t have new prospects, you don’t have a future.
Later in the chapter, I share the following story…
The Wisdom of Loggers
I once read something that I found very interesting: For every tree that loggers cut down these days, they plant four seedlings.
*Because of this practice, there are more trees now than there were in 1920.
If you think about it, this is a very smart practice. Because without new trees, loggers have no future.
How Success Causes Problems for Many Businesses
When many businesses start out they need clients, so they focus on doing everything they can to get prospects.
They do this regularly and religiously until customers actually start showing up.
But once they start showing up, something interesting happens: They stop focusing on getting prospects (or lessen that focus) and begin to concentrate on servicing the customers they’ve attracted.
Obviously, businesses need to focus on their clients, and no one would ever tell you that this isn’t a priority.
But what eventually happens if you forsake your prospecting efforts to focus exclusively on your current customers?
That’s right.
You’ll end up like loggers who don’t invest in seeding their future.
The Solution: Learn from Loggers
If you want to have a future in your industry, you must continuously bring in new prospects.
And that means you must begin planting seedlings today.
(In my book, I share five types of content that experts use to attract prospects.)
*IMPORTANT: When I say that there are more trees, that doesn’t mean we have the same amount of biodiversity today as we used to.
P.S. If you want to read some of my book, 51 Content Marketing Hacks, you can sign-up below to read three chapters from it right now…
