Visualize your business as a building. Whether you are an 
architect, lawyer, coach, graphic designer or accountant, 
to bring in more clients, you need to make it easy for 
them to enter. The more doors you create and open the 
more prospects will come in and become clients. Too many 
small businesses inadvertently put up walls instead of 
opening doors to new business.

People buy products and services from firms they know and 
trust. If you are trying to attract new business by 
advertising, cold calling and direct mail you may be 
creating barriers to communication instead of opening doors. 

Networking and referrals are a couple of doors that let new 
business in based on familiarity and trust. The problem with 
these two approaches is that they are limited to the people 
you've met or worked with. 

If you want to increase the number of people interested 
in your business you need to find a way to open many 
more doors. One of the most effective and low cost ways 
to do this is to position yourself as an expert and 
demonstrate your expertise through an article or series 
of articles. Chances are you've got dozens of ideas that 
would be helpful to prospects. Each time you put one of 
these ideas in writing and share it, you open a door to 
more business. 

Articles help you attract people who are interested in your 
services, establish your firm as experts, and, if you give 
them at least one idea they can use in each article, builds 
trust. A handful of articles can attract hundreds of people 
interested in your services each week. If you have a web 
site, incoming links from your article placement are the 
best way to boost your ranking when people search for you 
site using Google, Yahoo, or AOL, bringing you even more 
prospects.

Of course your article needs to be well written and 
effectively targeted and distributed to motivate prospects 
to action. Use the following steps to build more doors to 
let business in: 

1. Target Your Market and Their Needs
Focus your article on the primary concerns and specific 
needs of your market. To generate ideas for articles, jot 
down your observations and reactions after every client 
meeting or conversation. Cull your list of ideas and start 
with the ones that will be of the most help to prospects. 
If you can't come up with any ideas at all, use a survey 
to ask questions that will generate more information for 
articles. 

2. Write Compelling Copy
No matter how helpful your ideas are, if you don't have a 
headline that grabs your readers' attention, they won't read 
it. Next, your lead sentence needs to capture their interest 
so they'll read the rest of your article and let you 
demonstrate the value you provide. Generally, you'll spend 
50% of your time crafting your article title, then another 
25% on your lead sentence, and the rest of the time writing 
the body of the article. 

Find someone to read your writing. Even great writing can 
profit from editing. And don't count on the 'spell check' on 
your computer to find all the errors. 

3. Distribute Your Article Everywhere Your Prospects Read
Sending out a copy to your existing clients is a good idea 
but to attract prospects you need to get as many of them 
as possible to read your article. If your market is business 
executives, placement in Forbes, Fortune or Harvard 
Business Review would be ideal, but isn't realistic for 
most authors. 

Send your article to the hundreds of ezines, newsletters, 
and newspapers that are looking for fresh content they can 
use to meet publishing deadlines and attract more readers. 
Online placement has the advantage that with a link 
included at the end of your article readers can easily be 
connected to your web site.  

4. Motivate Readers to Take the Next Step
Motivate your prospects to take the next step to learn more 
about your business. At the end of your article, offer 
something they will want for free, and tell them how to get 
it. For example, a short report or tutorial that provides 
inside advice or research will entice them to contact you.

Most small businesses mistakenly lock out many prospects 
with their marketing. Instead you can turn your ideas 
into articles and open doors to new business. Once you've 
written and published a handful of articles you can use 
the same content to become a featured speaker, 
demonstrate your expertise in person, and open even more 
doors to attract prospects and convert them to clients.