5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 5

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grow twitter followers

This is Part 5, the finale of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.

Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • How To Get Influencer to Promote Your Brand
  • Tactics to Get Influencers Attention
  • Importance of Using Influencers

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

This is the final post in this series that gives you easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. You can check out the other episodes in the additional resources section. You can also Subscribe now so you won’t miss out on my upcoming shows featuring more strategies and industry experts.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 5 #thebrightideaspodcast #digitalmarketing

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Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Idea hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 113 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business, and I have yet to meet an entrepreneur that doesn’t want to do that. So if you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and profits, well my friends, I’m happy to say that you are in the right place.

In today’s episode we are going to dive into part 5 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotion. So, why is that such a big deal? Why is twitter promotion such a big deal?

Well as I mentioned in previous episodes, the one thing that is so wonderful about twitter is that it is a very frictionless social media platform. It’s dead easy to use. If you are following the strategies that I have been explaining in the prior episodes, you have learned how to create pre populated tweets and you’ve learned how to create widgets that show real time social proof.

All of this stuff works because if you do this right people, we don’t have to type anything, we don’t have to think. All I have to do is click the mouse once or twice. So that’s pretty frictionless.

So, when there is a lot of people just taking an action that is almost effortless for them to take, get enough of them doing it and as you might imagine the aggregate value of that can be quite significant to increase the buzz for your product or your event or whatever it is that you are trying to draw attention to. If you’re in business, which we all are more than likely, that is going to increase your profits.

In this episode, we are going to talk about how to do a pre crafted tweet so that you can get influencers to help you to spread the word and there’s a process that you need to follow. To do this right, you don’t want to just call him up and ask him because that’s probably not going to work.

Before we get into that I got 2 announcements. If this is your very first episode of the BrightIdeas podcast, welcome!

If your listening to this on a mobile device right now, text the word podcast to the number 96000 and you’re going to see some real  cool marketing automation trickery which I talk a lot about here on my blog, plus gives you an easy way to opt-in and make sure that you never miss a future episode.

If you are listening to this on iTunes, some other place, wherever it might be. If you’ve never been to the blog before go to brightideas.co and you can become a subscriber, you can let people all about it and get a lot of free stuff there and ton of free content and ton of interviews, and I absolutely know that if you’re an entrepreneur you are going to love it.

Announcement number 2. If you are in B2B sales, something that I have spent all my prior life for a 15 years’ worth of B2B sales sold millions of millions and millions of dollars’ worth of stuff. The key, or one of the keys, is being able to get your foot on the door. That’s a huge problem for a lot of people. Once they are in the door they can ask right questions and get the business done but get in the door, man that can be such huge challenge. If that is a challenge for you, I have a course that will help you to improve significantly the results that you are getting back by 15 years of my experience. It’s called the best buyer formula, you can learn all about it at brightideas.co/bbf.

Okay with that said, let’s get in to it. I want to talk about pre crafted tweets–as I mention before the objective of this is to get important people to share your content for you.

You want to provide them with everything that they need to make it dead easy for them to do. Ideally, you want make it so they can do this and maybe 30 seconds or less. So, the way you want to do this is–I’m going tell you what you need to do but after I tell you how you are going to be able to make this work.

What you needed to do is write the tweets for them, send them off an email, and say, “hey here’s 5 tweets, if you wanted to pick one just cut and paste it” Boom! Send it out!

Great! Right? Well, it is very simple but there are some important things to understand about this simple concept and that’s in the how you do this.

DO NOT email somebody for the first time saying, “hey man I love your stuff can you send another tweet for me?” No, that’s not going to work.

What you need to do first is you need to find out who were the influencers that have the audience that I want and start following them and reading their stuff, share then sign up in their newsletter list to put in your RSS reader. Pay attention to their work; share their content with your tribe for a while first. Make lots of comments on their blog, make sure you do lots of tweets and make sure that their @username is in those tweets where you’re basically say, “man, your stuff really rocks and I’m telling my crowd about it”. They are going to like that. Not only that, they are going to start to know who you are.

I speak from experience because I have a pretty big tribe of people and got a lot of emails but there are certain people whose names… “Owen” …who I’ve come to know over a long period of time simply because they’ve reached out and they become active participant in my community.

Now, the next thing that you can do if you happen to have a podcast and if you don’t–man I encourage you to start one immediately–is reach out and ask to interview.

My first professional network is better than it has ever been in my entire life and it’s not from going to conferences or going to launches or swapping business cards.

It is because of my podcast. It is hands down the most powerful personal networking tool I have ever discovered. Here’s why: when I send a tweet or an email to a stranger that says something to the effect of, “how would like to be on my show” or “I’d like to have you as a featured guest on my show?” The ego — and I have one too, I’m not calling out other people I’m calling out all of us — it simply prevents us from ignoring an email like that in most cases.

Now if I, reaching out to Richard Branson, he’s probably going to ignore me because he is a whale and I’m a fish, but I find reaching out to someone who’s a slightly bigger fish than me more than likely I’m going get a reply.

So once you’ve interviewed them, start to build the relationship. No tricks. Just bee real. I’ve tend to friend people on Facebook and I like to see what’s going on in their life and they like to look what’s going on with my life and we have opportunities to comment. One of the things for people who know me is that I’m going to be a Dad in about another 2 months. Depending on when this episode airs, so at the end of April. So if there are new Dads in the audience, I need some advice man. So feel free to reach out and tell me what I’m in for cause I’ve never been a Dad before.

The point is, you want to be real. You want to connect to these people and then once you’ve done all of that, then you can send them an email with your 4 or 5 pre crafted tweets and because you have a relationship with them and you have goodwill with them. They are going to cooperate with you and the impact that an influencer can have on your stuff can be quite significant. So, it’s very, very, very worthwhile to put the time and effort into doing this.

Another idea by the way on how to make an influence looks good is when you’re blogging and you’re writing about a topic–and this is actually in our checklist of things to do when we write a blog post, and yes we have a checklist for almost everything that we do–is that you find a way to mention other people and make them look good and then of course once that post has gone live you can tweet out to them and say I’ve mentioned you in this post and more than likely they are going to read it and when they do, if they like what they read they’re more than likely they’re probably going tweet out that content if it was a good post. If it is a crap post and you mention them you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting their time but of course you making yourself like an idiot so don’t do that.

There are definitely specifics on how to write a post as matter of fact, I have written a post on how to write a post so if you come to brightideas.co and search around you’ll find it and if you can’t find it, send me an email trent@brightideas.co and I will send you a link or a member of my team–say if I can I’m too busy to — have a member of my team reply to you and send you a link directly to that post.

Alright, if you do all this stuff, you’re going to be one step closer to having influential people promote you. To get the show notes for this episode, all you are going to do is go to brightideas.co/113. If you’ve missed the previous four parts of this 5-part series, there’s going to be a link in the show notes or links I should say, to all of the previous episodes. I really encourage you to check this stuff out.

Twitter is my number one social referral source and I still have plenty to learn about twitter and that’s why I’m doing these episodes cause I’m learning new stuff and I’m implementing it on my blog and I’m sharing it with you while I’m doing it so make sure that you go and check those all out.

If you been enjoyed this episode I would love it if you go to brightideas.co/love where you’ll find a pre crafted tweet that you can automatically just click on and send out and I would thank you very much for that. There’s also a way to leave the feedback for the show in the iTunes store. If you feel like doing that I’m going to be one of your biggest fans.

So that’s it for this episode. Thank you so very much for tuning in. I love doing this podcast and I love all the questions and feedback that I get so you as an audience member are someone that I appreciate immensely.

That’s it! I’m going to keep on trucking and will see you in another episode soon.

 

Additional Resources

 

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 4

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grow twitter followers

This is Part 4 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.

Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • How to Create a Shout Out Tweet
  • Benefits of Using a Shout Out
  • What They Look Like and What They Do

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

The next and final post in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 4 #thebrightideaspodcast #digitalmarketing

Click To Tweet

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Idea hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 112 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth in their business. I know we all want some of that.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately increase your profits, I am very happy to say that you are in the right place.

In this episode, we are going to dive into part 4 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.

Now, if you’ve missed those other episodes, you can get to them starting at brightideas.co/109 and just keep on increasing that number one way up and you will get to all of the other episodes that proceed this one.

Okay, so we are going to talk about how to create a shoutout tweet and I want give a shoutout to Mike Stelzner from the Social Media Examiner—If you haven’t check it out you probably should–because I learned this little trick from him and I’m sure he learned it from somebody else.

The way that Mike uses it, is that when someone registers for social media marketing world, they can see this list of presenters and then next to the list of all the presenters names is a pre-crafted tweet like we talked about how to do in the previous episode–the episode number 111, the transactional tweet–but he does something that is pretty cool and I’m going to walk you through it.

Basically, the purpose of this tweet is it gives someone the ability to click a link and say–Hey Chris P we’re really looking forward to meeting you in person at social media marketing world.

So, what’s the big deal about that?  Well, there are two things that are kind of a big deal.

Before we get into the big deal, I’m going to explain how I’m going to use it. As you know, I interview countless entrepreneurs here on my podcast. Now that I’ve discovered this little shout out tweet idea and every one of the posts that I do to host those episodes, those interviews, I’m going to create a shout out tweet.

So, why would I do that? There are two reasons.

Number 1 is that I want a person who is my guest to feel the love for being my guest. So the people listening will click that shout out tweet with their name and I mean there’s a specific detail–I’m going to give it to you in just a second.

They are going to give a notification and gives my guest the opportunity to interact with the listener and of course, they are going to love that, so that helps them. So what helps me?

What helps me is I’m going to put a hashtag in there–you remember I talked about the importance of putting hashtags in. And that’s the very first episode, in episode number 109 or 110, or the both short episodes and you should listen to them both.

Anyway, so what’s the big deal about the hashtag? Well, if I have that hashtag I can then populate a twitter widget with all this wonderful stuff that the listeners are saying about all these episodes that I do. So the hashtag was #thebrightideaspodcast and each time they are tweeting this shout out, I’m going to have this never ending stream of peoples on twitter saying how much they love the so and so episode of the podcast.

So, there’s really good reason to do this, its super easy to do. You use Click to Tweet just as I described in the previous episode–that’s episode number 111–and if you go to that post you see the screenshot and everything of how to do that so I’m not going to cover it again.

But here’s the one detail that is super important. When you start to tweet to someone, let’s say you’re going to tweet to me. If you just write @TrentDyrsmid-“Hey men I really like your show” or whatever. I’m the only one who can see that tweet. That is not really doing a lot and that is not as effective as if you put the word hey or whatever before the @trentdyrsmid. If you say, “hey @trentdyrsmid, I’m really digging the BrightIdeas podcast”– which I hope you do by the way and if you do please go and tweet that.

That way it goes into the public twitter streams. Obviously, you want it in the public twitter streams so more people see it cause that’s the whole idea right? We are talking about ways to increase twitter promotions so we don’t want to keep this stuff all over ourselves, we want the whole world to know.

So make sure that you do that and then of course, if you’re going to put the URL in there–which you might want to do– that’s a way to get people back.

So, in my podcast I’m probably going to put a URL back to the homepage of my blog because that’s where people come when they learn about the podcast if they are not familiar with it. They can become the subscriber and so forth.

So then you just again, like I did in the previous episode, you take this little bit of code or hyperlink rather. Put it in the blog post. You guys see this actually when you’re listening to this very episode.

Actually, there won’t be this one because there’s no one to shout out to so maybe I make a shout out to me–yeah that’s we all do!

Anyway, so that how you do. We got one more episode to get on this five part series.

So please make sure that if you haven’t already become a subscriber that you do so that you don’t miss any episode, you can subscribe on itunes or if you want to get an email notification just head to brightideas.co and become a subscriber.

If you’d like the show notes, a link to the screenshot, and the links and everything to this and other episodes go to brightideas.co/112.

That’s it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in.

 

Additional Resources

 

 

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 3

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grow twitter followers

This is Part 3 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.

Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • How to Create Transactional Tweets For People Who Purchase on Your Site
  • Getting People To Populate Your Tweets

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

The next 2 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 3 #thebrightideaspodcast #digitalmarketing

Click To Tweet

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Ideas hunters!

Welcome back to yet another episode, episode 3, number 111 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. This is the podcast for we help on entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their businesses. Who doesn’t want some of that?

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, to increase conversion and ultimately increase profits, well, I’m very happy to say that you are in the right place.

In today’s episode we are going to talk about part 3 of my 5-parts series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.

Now if you want to get episode 1 and number 2 its brightideas.co/109 and /110 and will take you to two other episodes.

So in this episode we are going to talk about how to create a transactional tweet. Before we dive into that, I want to cover in case you miss the other two episodes.

Why is it so important to use twitter to get people to help you bring awareness to your brand?

Number one reason is that, it is really really easy to do. For the people who are going to do the clicking for you, you don’t even have to really type anything, they don’t really have to do anything, if you do it the way I instruct these 5 part series. People literally only have to click a mouse button and they are going to send a pre populated tweets and all sorts of other wonderful things for you making it very easy for people to do – that collective power of all those people doing that very simple little thing can translate into very big boost in the buzz for your product or for your event, and obviously that can help you to drive profits.

A couple of quick announcements before we get in to this. If this is your first time listening to the BrightIdeas podcast, and you are on mobile device, go ahead right now and text the word podcast to the number 96000. You’ll see some of my marketing automation trickery in action and ultimately you’ll be able to get a notifications of every episode that we produce from here on in and plus some other special surprises in the store for you. You’re in front of your computer and you’re listening to this on iTunes, just go to brightideas.co and enter your details and you can have the very same thing happen.

And the next thing that I want to tell you about; in the last two things that told you about my digital marketing handbook, this one I want to talk about something a little different.

If you’re a solo entrepreneur and you’re feeling a bit stuck or alone – not an uncommon feeling – I strongly encourage you to check out the BrightIdeas mastermind for you will be able to start spending time around other very motivated entrepreneurs, all dedicated to helping each other succeed and sounds like a very wonderful thing to be a part of that, I can assure you that it is. You can learn more about it at brightideas.co/mastermind.

So with that said lets kind of dive right into this and give you yet another golden nugget.

So a transactional tweet: what’s it for, why did you do it? The purpose is you want to be able to give people a very easy way to share their excitement about a transaction that they have just completed. The reason for that when the people buy something they typically pretty excited they want to tell other people.

Let me give me example. If someone signs up for my mastermind group – which I just mentioned – or they buy my digital marketing handbook or they buy the best buyer formula or they do any other things or buy any other things or register for an event, right on the thank you page, I’m going put a transactional tweet and typically it all say that something like “please click to tweet” and it will be the words that would show up in twitter and they just click it and that’s it!  It’s done! They don’t have to type anything, they don’t have to do anything, and they don’t have to put hash tag in. Nothing and it’s all done for them!

The benefit of that is, remember back on episode number 2, I was talking about those widget boxes that you can use to accumulate real time social proof. If you write this tweet and you include hash tags every time someone buys your stuff, you’re going to be sending out these tweets, you’re going to have this constant stream of people saying all these wonderful things and that going to show up in that twitter widget, that you could put that on your page, on the side bar, wherever you want to put it.

So let’s get in how to do this and man, it is so incredibly easy, easy, easy, easy!

Alright, go to clicktotweet.com it’s free, you can pay more if you want to like extra stats and stuff like that. But I find free version is just fine. So here’s the thing, you are going to do number 1. You are going to write your tweet – you want to craft it in a way that it would be something that they would say. So, think about you’re the user that just bought the book or sign up for the course or attended the event or whatever it was.

What would they say? What would they say after that?

So, in my case of the digital marketing handbook – I just bought a digital marketing handbook and recommend you check it out – or something to that effect. So then you’re going to include in that tweet, very important, you going to include a link to the sales page for whatever it was that they just bought because if you forget that pieces really doesn’t do you any good at all. Then the next thing that you really want to put in there if you have enough room and you don’t have too much volume to drown you, you may want to put @your-username, so that you can get a notifications on your mobile device or whatever it is that you used to monitor twitter. Then you are going to reach out to this people say hey thanks. And that’s something I really recommend that you do because it does help you to build relationship with your new customers. And then, the hashtag! Don’t forget the hashtag because if you forget the hashtag then you can’t create the widget later on that’s going to show these wonderful tweets from all these people that have bought this stuff and registered for your events.  So, make sure that you get the hashtag, that you hit the create tweet button and it’s going to give you a little URL.

So, now all you do is go over to your wordpress site on your thank you page. You type out – what I typically do – is in bold italics. I go “please click to tweet” and then I put colon and then take off the bold, take off the italics and write out whatever the tweet was.

I don’t need to include the URL. I don’t need to include the @TrentDyrsmid and I don’t need to include the hashtag – hashtag in the words that are shown on the screen – and then I highlight it then I turn it into a hyperlink with the URL that I got from ClickToTweet.

So now, when you’re done, all someone has to do is click that and it will populate up a tweet with a hashtag in the URL. Everything, all in it, cause you crafted it that way and they hit the tweet button and whamo! And that’s it! The tweet is sent and you my friends now are taking advantage of all that excitement that your new customers, or your new subscribers, or whatever it is that they just did whatever transactions they just completed, you give them a way a frictionless way to easily share their excitement with their tribe.

Alright so that is for this episode. If you would like to get to these show notes and I’ll include some links to all this stuff and some screenshots and so forth, just go to brightideas.co/111.

So that’s it and I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in. If you enjoy this episode, I would love it if you would go to brightideas.co/love where you will see a transactional tweet where you can tweet out and say – “yeah brightideas podcast is pretty bad ass and you should check it out too”!  I don’t think that’s exactly what it says but it’s something similar to that.

Okay, thank you so much and I want you to comeback for another episode soon. Take care

 

Additional Resources

 

 

groove-weekly-update-post-header

Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for Week of March 17th

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groove-weekly-update-post-header

Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive.

Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback was very encouraging.

In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results that I achieved.

As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business.

Sound good? Here we go!

Key Activities in the Week of March 17, 2014

During the week of March 17th, I worked on the following things:

  1. Created a Content Marketing Blueprint to be used as our 90 day content marketing game plan
  2. Had my designer rebrand our new Top of Funnel (TOFU) lead magnet. This is a report called “25 Website ‘Must Haves’ for Driving Traffic, Leads, and Sales”
  3. Had my designer create a call to action for the bottom of each blog post that is a part of the first inbound campaign
  4. Created the back end automation in Hubspot (emails and the blog posts they link to) so that when a new lead downloads this report, they receive a series of 3 emails to help them move towards the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
  5. Published 3 blog posts that these 3 emails will link to
  6. Did 4 discovery calls with prospective clients
  7. Signed one new client

Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

Check #thebrightideasblog Update on How Trent is Growing @mygroovedigital to a 7 Figure Agency Using #ContentMarketing

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Content Marketing Blueprint

GrooveCMB3DImage-300px-wideIf you are going to succeed with content marketing, you’d better have a pretty solid game plan. Just banging out blog posts without a strategy in mind isn’t going to get you the results you’re after. Trust me on this one.

The goal of the blueprint is to force you to really think about who your ideal buyer persona is, what their problems are, and how your solutions can help them to solve their problems.

Once you have gone through this process, the next step is to come up with 3 campaigns that can be executed over 90 days. Each campaign covers one topic, has 8 blogs posts, and is published over 30 days.

All 8 blog posts have a call to action that sends visitors to a landing page where the campaigns lead magnet (ebook) can be downloaded.

When the download happens, a lead is captured and then the automated follow up emails start to go out. The goal is to have your new lead move down through your funnel and transition from being an ‘information qualified lead’ to a ‘marketing qualified lead’, and then, ultimately to a ‘sales qualified lead’.

The Lead Magnet for Inbound Campaign #1

25_Must_Haves_3d_ebook-450px-wideThe first lead magnet is a free report will serve our first inbound marketing campaign, which will consists of 8 blog posts published at a rate of two per week over a 30 day period.

I will not be writing these posts. Instead, I have created a detailed set of instructions and will be outsourcing this task to contract writers.

Why use contract writers? Simple. As the CEO, my job is to work ‘on’ the business, not ‘in’ it. If I’m to build a company that can one day be sold for over $1,000,000 (like my last one), I cannot be the one to handle ANY of the day to day operations.

The Call to Action for Lead Magnet #1

Within Hubspot, there is something called a Call-To-Action.

Essentially, it’s a way to create a button that will be clicked to take someone to a webpage where a lead can be captured.

Rather than use just a button at the bottom of the post, I’m going to be using Hubspot’s Call-to-Action feature so that I can get analytics on how many times the button is shown and how many times its clicked. As you might guess, I want detailed analytics on what is (and isn’t) working so that I can continually improve conversion rates.

To ensure that the Call-to-Action stands out, I had my designer create a professional looking image for me that I just uploaded into the Hubspot software.

25-Must-Haves-CTA

Create The Back End Automation in Hubspot

On of the things I really like about Hubspot is their Inbound Campaign planning tool.

By using this tool, it’s pretty hard to forget anything. Plus, as my campaign is running, I can collect all sorts of data on how my content and offers are converting. Plus, at the end of the campaign, I will be able to see how my campaign did against the goals I set for it, as well as if the campaign achieved a positive ROI or not.

Below is a screenshot of our first campaign. The campaign is not yet live, but notice how detailed this screen is. It’s literally a checklist for everything you need to do to run a successful campaign.

In future posts, I will be sharing the results of this campaign, so be sure and become a subscriber if you want updates sent to you.

Hubpost-campaign-planner

Published 3 Blog Posts to Nurture My Leads

The goal of capturing a lead is to convert them to a customer. To help my leads to move along through my funnel, I need to answer questions and concerns long before a sales conversation every takes place.

When we did our blueprint and defined our persona, we also determined what some of these concerns might be. In our case, they were:

  • How do I know that content marketing will work?
  • How do I get started?
  • What results can I expect?

The three follow up emails that a new lead receives address these issues and then point readers to the appropriate ‘middle of funnel’ blog post.

The posts we published to address these concerns are:

Discovery Calls With Prospective Clients

At the end of the day, everything that I’m doing from a marketing perspective has a single goal: give me the opportunity to do discovery calls with qualified leads.

When you end up talking to someone who already knows they need what you do, and they have already been exposed to your (high quality) content, the chances of your converting these prospects into clients is actually quite high – assuming they can afford what you do, and have the authority to say yes.

My Results for the Week

Of the 4 discovery calls that I did last week, thus far, one has become a client and gone ahead and purchased a Content Marketing Blueprint for $2,000. The remaining 3 have the payment link in their inbox and I am waiting for them to proceed.

Two of these calls were done on Friday, so it’s quite possible that payments will be received at some point today or tomorrow (if they do, I will update this post).

The Content Marketing Blueprint is the first step of a new client engagement. Once this step has been done, my client has a solid game plan for their first 90 days of content marketing.

If we both liked working together on the Blueprint, the next step is for my team to set up their Hubspot account (we call this ‘building the engine’) so that all the inbound campaign items I showed you in the screenshot above (except the blog posts) is done. If they want us to, we will also create the three premium reports for them for an additional charge.

At the conclusion of step two, the next (final) step is for my clients to put Groove on retainer to create the blog posts for them. We’ll also advise them on how to promote their content on their social media accounts.

Check #thebrightideasblog Update on How Trent is Growing @mygroovedigital to a 7 Figure Agency Using #ContentMarketing

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Now What?

If you liked this post, and want future updates on our progress with how to launch a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 2

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grow twitter followers

This is Part 2 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.

Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • How to use Hashtags in Pre-Populated Tweets
  • Including a Customized Tweet Button on Every Page
  • Twitter Widget For Your WordPress Blog

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

The next 3 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 2 #thebrightideaspodcast #digitalmarketing

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Transcript

Hey there Bright Ideas hunters!

Welcome back to another episode of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their businesses, and we all want that don’t we?

If you are an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase traffic for your profits, well my friends you are in the right place.

In today’s episode we are going to dive into part two of my five part series. The first episode can be found at brightideas.co/109 and its series titled five ways to increase your twitter promotions, in other words, to get other people to help you spread the word on twitter.  So, why is it such a big deal?  Why should you care about this one of the great things about twitter?

It’s really easy. It’s frictionless. People can pre-populate a tweet or do the things that are talk about in these five part series. So, when you make it really easy for a bunch of people to do stuff, that’s a great way of creating more buzz which is obviously another tool in your toolbox for increasing your opt-in, increasing sales of your products, and so forth.

So, before we get into the how to do this, I have just two quick announcements.

Number one, if this is your very first episode and you would like to make sure that you never miss another one, and you’re listening on your mobile device, please text the word podcast to the number 96000 and just pay attention and see what magic marketing automation happens. If you sit there in the front of your computer and you have already found us, if you found us on ITunes, just go to brightideas.co and you could become a subscriber there.

The second announcement is, if you are looking for a digital marketing/content marketing blueprint to follow to build your business. Well, I’ve written a book and it is called The Digital Marketing handbook that is how I build my business into the success that it is in. You can get the free chapter, if you head over to brightideas.co/book.

Alright that’s it!  Let’s dive into the gold nugget for you and this episode so we’re going to talk about how to embed a twitter widget on every page that you used to promote your product or your event or whatever it is that you wanting to draw attention to.

So, to see is in action, if you visit the brightideas.co/blog and looking the right side bar, you’re going to see a widget there that I used to create social proof and awareness for my digital marketing handbook.  So, I want to explain to you how you do that, but first lets dive into just a couple more quick little details that are important.

So when you do this, you want to make sure that all the tweets that are shown up in this widget are about the topic that you’re trying to draw attention to.  In the episode number 109, I talked about the importance of the use of a hash tag and that hash tag is now going to can become critical in making sure that every tweet that shows up in this widget.  I’m about to explain to had a do, is on the topic that you want it to be on so people who come there, they’re going to be able to see everything that people are saying and it’s going to help you to increase social proof for your product to your event of whatever it is you are trying to draw attention to and it’s going to do it in real time, so this is really cool.

So for to create a widget, all you need to do is go to twitter.com/settings/widgets/new/search and you are going to need to be logged in to your twitter account to do that. So once you do that, you are going to see a pretty intuitive interface. The very first thing is, you’re going to see is the box called search query and that’s where you’re going to put in your hash tags. So from my digital marketing handbook with hash tag #DMhandbook – so that means the only tweets that are going to show up in this widgets is tweets that going to contain that hash tag. So, how does that hash tag get applied? Well, on the free chapter download page there is a pre populated tweet that includes that hash tag. So hopefully many or most of the people who download the free chapter – because I ask them to write at the top of the page – will be kind enough to collect that tweet out for me and that’s going to populate this widget. So make sure you’ve got the search type then there’s a check box called “only show top tweets”. Make sure that you click that one. Specify a height that you want. I find that 300 pixels  is a very nice height but if you have got a really long sidebar and you feel like filling it up with a bunch of tweets, make it as tall as you want to. Choose a theme, light or dark, and then click the create widget button – and there is also an opt-out tool – I wouldn’t  check that but you can read a little there’s a question mark you can click and make your own decision. So click the create widget, it’s going to give a little snippet of code and all you need to do is go into your word press blog (which I’m assuming that most of you are using) and you’re going to look in your sidebar, drag over a text widget and then just paste the code into it, and that’s it! Voila!

The widgets that we have created will show up in your side bar on in every single page of your blog and you will be going a long way to increase, to bring awareness, and increasing the social proof in real time for whatever it is that you are trying to draw attention to. Pretty cool ha!

Alright, so that’s it for this episode. If you want to get to this show notes, I include the screen shot of how to do all of this go to brightideas.co/110. If you enjoy this episode I’d love if you’d take a moment to go to brightideas.co/love where there is a pre populated tweet all you got to do is click on it and I would love it if you do that, so thank you so much in advance.

So that’s it for this episode, I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid, can’t wait to have a tune back in for part three which will be coming out tomorrow.

 

Additional Resources

 

 

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 1

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grow twitter followers

This is Part 1 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Honestly, I used to hate Twitter, partly because I never understood how to use the thing. Now, my website’s number 1 source of social traffic is Twitter. It is an integral part of my digital marketing strategy.

I want to touch on a few key points on how to leverage Twitter for your business. Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • Benefits of Using Twitter
  • Including a Customized Tweet Button on Every Page
  • How to Add the Share Button to Your Page
  • What to Tweet

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

The next 4 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 1 #thebrightideaspodcast #digitalmarketing

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Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Idea Hunters!

Welcome back to another episode of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase your profits. Well, my friends, you are in the right place. In this episode we are going to tie–this is actually part one of a five parts series of new episode that I’m doing. These are episodes in bite sized chunks, so we have only 5 minutes but you wanted a pick up a golden nugget these new short episodes are going to help you to do just that. This is part one of five part series on five ways to increase your twitter promotion.

So, why am I talking about this?  Well, twitter for me is actually my number one source of social traffic. I use to hate twitter cause I don’t understand how the heck to use the darn thing. That was the long time ago and since then I’ve learned a great deal and I continue to learn a great deal. So, in this episode I’m going to give you a tip, the first of five, on how you can do that.

Now before we get to that, just really one very quick announcement– two announcements I should say, excuse me.

This is your first time listening to the show and your listening on a mobile device and you like to get notifications of future episodes, please make sure and text the word podcast to the number 96000 and something very cool happen on your phone and if you want to know how to do that, I have got just send me an email on what you know and probably will have a post at some point it’ll explain how I do it. Second of all, if you are looking for a blueprint to use digital marketing, it’s a combination of content marketing and marketing automation to improve your business.

I have written a book, and it’s called a digital marketing handbook and you can get a free chapter by going to brightideas.co/book.

Alright so let’s jump in to today’s episode with tip number one: which is to include a customized tweet button on every single page of your products. So, why do you want to do that? First of all, one of the great thing about twitter is, it is super frictionless. I mean by frictionless, is it makes a very, very easy for people to do. So the propensity to do it, of course, goes up and when that happens when you get a whole bunch of people doing something that is really, really easy to do, the aggregate effect of that you can significantly increase the buzz for your product, or your event, or particular posters, whatever it is whatever page you would like to draw more attention to. So, it’s actually very, very easy to do. The very first thing you need to do is create a custom twitter share button and the way that you do that is you go to about.twitter.com/resources/buttons and when you do, you will see that there are 4 types of buttons there. One shares a link, one is follow, one is hash tag and one is mentioned. So in this case you would want to use the share a link button.

So, pick that one and then there’s some button options that you need to configure and I’ll include the screen shot in this episode so when you get there you are going to see there is a share URL. So if you going to spread this button all over your site it will give the page title and the page URL of whatever page that twitter button is on. But in this case we don’t want to do that, we want to promote one particular page. So you need to specify the URL of the particular page that you want to use. Then, the next thing is the tweet text and you can either write something in there or you can choose to use the title of the page – that is entirely up to you.

If you want to have a “@” notification come to you put your username in, and then most importantly you also want to include a hash tag.

Now, in case you don’t know a hash tag is (because I didn’t when I first got on twitter), it’s a way that people search for information. So, one of the topics that I talked about is Infusionsoft.

For example, if I was talking; doing a tweet, composing a tweet about Infusionsoft, I would instead of just writing the word infusionsoft; I would write #Infusionsoft and what that allows people to do is often times more advanced twitter users will be searching for a hash tag. So somebody wants to know about infusionsoft for example, they would see that hash tag. They could search for any tweets that have that hashtags and they would see list of them. Now in this case you want to create your own custom hash tag and there’s a very, very specific reason for that which I’m going to get into in part two of the series.

So that’s it for now like I said it’s just about to tell you how to get to the show notes in the screen shots so will finish up here.

Alright, to get to the show notes for this episode go to brightideas.co/109.  If you really enjoy this episode please do me a small favor head over to brightideas.co/love where there is a pre-populated tweet that you can automatically send-out.

That’s it for this episode I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid.

Be sure and tune in to the very next episode and if you want to receive to get part two of this series its five part series and mention at the beginning and if you want to make sure you get email modification at that just go to brightideas.co and go ahead and become a subscriber and you will definitely get notifications of this and future episodes so thank you so much for tuning in its been my pleasure. I’ll see you again soon. Take care.

 

Additional Resources

 

 

How Peppershock Media is Using Online Video Marketing to Land Government Contracts and Oracle as a Client

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rhea-allen-interview_0

Government Contracts? Easy. International Corporations as clients? No sweat.

You’d think from the from the client list that Peppershock Media is a specialty firm based in NYC or something – and then you learn that they are headquartered in a small Idaho suburb. So how did Peppershock get their clients? I talk with the Rhea Allen, President and CEO, about the strategies her company uses to secure big name brands, and how online video marketing has had a role.

If you’re looking for ways to land that next big client, listen in to this episode.

Listen now and you’ll hear Rhea and I talk about:

  • (3:30) Introduction
  • (4:00) What type of agency is Peppershock?
  • (05:35) What type of clients do you work with?
  • (07:10) How did you attract clients without being niche specific?
  • (09:20) Do you get a lot of referrals?
  • (11:15) How did you get started in business?
  • (13:15) How did you get your first government project?
  • (16:00) What do you see as the future of marketing?
  • (22:35) How does social media play a role in business development?
  • (25:15) Tell me how Facebook ads drove traffic for Bluecross of Idaho
  • (26:35) Let’s talk about how to excel with video marketing
  • (30:20) What makes a video effective?
  • (34:30) Let’s talk about the Century Link video
  • (36:30) Can you describe the creative process used to create this video?
  • (41:00) How much gross margin can one expect from making a video?

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

How a Small Town Agency Used Online Video Marketing to Land Oracle as a Client @peppershock #thebrightideaspodcast

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About Rhea Allen

RheaAllenSince Peppershock’s inception, in 2003, Rhea Allen has managed and expanded Peppershock and has gained local notoriety in her persistent passion for causes. She is involved with the communities of Idaho and surrounding areas and has a vast working knowledge of how to generate awareness for a number of brands and causes. She is extremely diligent in obtaining effective media campaign results by planning and crafting relevant and compelling messaging for target audiences. Rhea oversees development of all Peppershock projects, from conception through distribution and follow-up.

As an in-demand Integrative Marketing Consultant, Rhea was a primary proponent of social marketing and traditional media integration within the industry. She has a passion for discovering and telling stories through visual and audible mediums. Her television news and promotions background in the Treasure Valley and at the top 12 market in Seattle provides investigative, documentary, testimonial and “edutainment” style to her celebrated work.

Additional Resources

How Elle Phillips Became a Successful Designer With Her Freelance Work

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Elle-Phillips-Interview_0

From freelance work to owning her own business, Elle Phillips made a living out of self-management.

In her 18 years in graphic design, Elle has worked her way to entrepreneurial success. Though this story itself is worth the podcast, her points on the importance of having a mentor, and becoming one herself, are really great topics as well.

If you’re a freelancer or if you struggle with pricing your services, this is a must-listen.

Listen now and you’ll hear Elle and I talk about:

  • (2:25) Introductions
  • (4:15) How did you get started freelancing?
  • (5:25) Has overseas competition affected your business?
  • (7:25) How has mentoring played a role for you?
  • (9:55) Tell me how you and Jason began your mentoring relationship
  • (14:45) What did you advise Jason to do next?
  • (18:55) What type of clients are you attracting?
  • (23:25) What advice would you give for designers on how to price their services?
  • (26:05) How do you work with clients that don’t know what they want?
  • (30:05) What are some of the most common mistakes you see freelancers making?

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

How Elle Phillips Became a Successful #Freelance Designer #thebrightideaspodcast

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About Elle Phillips

Elle Phillips2Elle Phillips is the Owner / Creative Director of Red Couch Creative, inc., a creative design group located in Eagle, Idaho. With her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Visual Communications, she started her professional career at 19 years old and has successfully grown and expanded her graphic design and marketing skills over the last 17 years, most recently as the owner and freelancer of Elle Phillips Design.

She’s worked with a wide variety of clients such as Pepsico, T-Mobile, Verizon, Spraying Systems Co. and VIP Products, among many others. Known for her ability to take on any project with extreme dedication and bring it to completion on deadline with consistency and grace, she has been working as a freelancer and entrepreneur-ette since 2004 with huge success.

Elle is proud of her ability to work with all personality and project types, happily extends her dry sense of humor onto those who don’t necessarily seek it, and enjoys assessing a clients’ needs with an almost psychic-like ability.

Additional Resources

How to Land Clients the Fast Way With Serial Entrepreneur Tom Gay

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Thomas-Gay-Interview_0I should mention that I don’t use the term “serial entrepreneur” lightly.

Tom has been starting companies since the 80’s and he isn’t slowing down now. He grew some of them into Inc 500 winners and one of them to $80M in sales. We’ve had quite a few entrepreneurs on this show, but few have been entrepreneurs for as long, and done as consistently well as Tom.

If you are an entrepreneur or are in business development, this is a can’t miss episode.

Listen now and you’ll hear Tom and I talk about:

  • (3:45) Introductions
  • (7:35) What is Refer.com and why does the world need it?
  • (10:15) When did you start and how much traction have you got so far?
  • (15:15) Why did you change the name to Refer.com?
  • (20:05) Please tell us about one of the pivots you’ve made and what you learned
  • (29:45) How should I get started at better leveraging my own network?
  • (38:45) Explain how your software helps with this
  • (42:45) What advice would you give to people who want to start their own business?
  • (45:45) How should an entrepreneur find a viable business idea?
  • (46:45) How should people “just start” in business?

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

How to Land Clients Fast With Serial #Entrepreneur @thomasgay22 #thebrightideaspodcast

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About Thomas Gay

ThomasGayThomas Gay is a life-long business owner and entrepreneur. In the 80s he founded National Decision Systems, the pioneer in advanced site selection and target marketing tools for major consumer goods companies. Tom’s firm was twice honored with the coveted INC 500 Award and he sold it in 1988 to Equifax.

In 1990, Tom started VistaInfo. After going public in 1997, Tom was honored in an Individual Investor Magazine cover story (May 1999) where he was called one of the “5 Best Undiscovered CEO’s” in the USA. VistaInfo was named a “Magic 25” company in 1999 and was acquired in 2000 with sales of $80M to create what is now known as Fidelity National Information Solutions.

In 2001, Tom and his wife, Patti, went to South Africa where they started a non-profit ministry organization, Monte Christo Ministries. Today, MCM feeds thousands of people daily and brings together organizations, churches and universities, world-wide, to relieve the burdens of poverty, apartheid and HIV/AIDS in the Cape Town Area. In 2014, his company IdeaLab was renamed Refer.com. 

Tom serves on numerous corporate and community boards and is a frequently sought speaker on the topics of socially responsible business, relationship marketing and leadership development.

Additional Resources

focus-header-image-web

My 2 Year Plan to Build a 7 Figure Lifestyle Business

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focus-header-image-webNote: This post has been updated since it was originally published on March 17, 2014. You can also listen to me explain my 2 year plan here.

If there is one word that is most often used to describe ultra-successful entrepreneurs, it’s focus.

When you have it, you get results.

When you don’t, you’re just busy.

Ever since last month’s dismal earnings report, I have been deep in thought about the business that I’m trying to build and the results needed to get me there.

As I’ve thought more and more about my businesses, my products, and how I’ve been spending my time, I’ve come to the realization that how I’ve been allocating my time (and the actions that I’m taking) are not exactly what I need to be doing to achieve the results that I’m after.

In other words, I’ve not been focused on the right things.

Begin With The End in Mind

To help me work my way through my challenge, my wife and I decided to begin by creating a vision board for what we want our life to look like. At the time of this writing, the board is not yet complete; however, I can tell you about a few of our ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’.

Before I do, I want to emphasize that the reason that I’m going to share this is not to boast about what we want to accomplish. Instead, my motivation for sharing some of our goals is purely to (hopefully) inspire you to take this same step in your own business/life planning process. So, with that said…

Must Haves

how to start a marketing agency

Come Up With Plan and Work Towards It

With respect to the business, which will obviously have a large impact on our lifestyle, our list of must have’s includes the following:

  • We must add massive value to our clients and customers, so that they remain highly engaged and reliant on us for a long period of time
  • A recurring billing revenue model, so that we can build a business that can one day be sold for a large sum, and gives us highly predictable revenue for as long as we own it
  • The business is location independent so that we can live anywhere we like without restricting our level of income
  • Products and services that we are passionate about with a very long shelf life so that we can build a business that will last for the long term
  • The potential to achieve a 7 figure revenue stream with gross margins of at least 60% so that our net profit margin will exceed 20% of total revenue
  • A suite of products and services that are very scalable so that we can build systems and train employees to use those systems to run day to day operations
  • Products and services that are paid for in advance so that we never have to deal with unpaid receivables and a negative cash flow cycle
  • The opportunity to work with interesting people so that the business always remains fun to be a part of

Nice To Haves

While not critical to my happiness, below are a few of the things that would be very nice to have in my business:

  • Invitations to speak and consult that are close enough for me to fly my own plane to (I have a pilot’s license) rather than hop on an airline
  • A mastermind group comprised of people running $10M (or larger) companies so that I can organize retreats to some really amazing places, and be paid to travel there
  • A few clients that are paying me enough each year that I can afford to take them to Miller Motorsports Park for a fun-filled day of racing around the track in some really fast cars

One of the biggest reasons that I chose to become an entrepreneur is so that I can design a lifestyle of my choosing. What motivates you? Please tell me in the comments below.

Make a List of Short Term Challenges

In 2013, Bright Ideas earned a six figure income from information products and consulting work. The revenue from information products came primarily from two major product launches and the consulting revenue came from consulting engagements with Bright Ideas readers who wanted to use Infusionsoft in their business.

Given that we hit $127,000 in our first year of monetization, our results were OK (but not incredible). To repeat this level of income in 2014, we either need more consulting clients, or I need to write more books and launch more products.

The problem with product launches is that, in my opinion, they are not a sustainable business model. Worse that than, however, is that a product launch is a massive amount of work and pretty stressful (what if it flops?).

Because of this, I’m not terribly interested in building a business dependent on product launches, and as such, I’m going to need to do more consulting work with clients.

The problem that I’m faced with is that, up to now, attracting consulting clients hasn’t really been my focus. Sure, I’ve mentioned Infusionsoft (see…I did it again!) on my blog many times; however, thus far, consulting engagements for this type of client have been limited to $5,000 or less, and worse, the revenue has all been one-time revenue, as opposed to recurring revenue.

Boo.

If I’m to hit my goal of at least $250,000 in revenue in 2014, I’m going to need to offer something much different that I’m offering today, as well as to offer it to a type of business that doesn’t (yet) even know that I exists.

As you might guess, I have some work to do!

My 2 Year Plan to Build a 7 Figure Lifestyle #Business #thebrightideasblog

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Make a List of Goals

The Bright Ideas business (everything I sell, except consulting) will probably generate between $30,000 to $40,000 worth of sales in 2014 without my doing much other than blogging and running my mastermind group. The rest of the income is going to have to be generated by my agency, Groove Digital Marketing. I suspect the numbers will be about the same split in 2015.

As I plan to look back on this post in two years to see how I’ve done, here’s a quick summary of the goals for each of my businesses:

Groove Digital Marketing

Within two years from today, Groove will have become a $500K company with a 20% net margin. This business will have embraced the “built to sell” methodology and every part of this business will have been systematized and delegated to a member of the team.

Virtually all revenue will be from retainer income. The value of this asset will be equal to 5X earnings IF I am not needed to run the day to day operations of the company.

This is pretty much what I did while running my last company, Dyrand Systems. In year two, I think we did just shy of $500K; about half of which was recurring revenue. By 2008, we were doing just under $2M and I sold it for $1.2M :)

how to start a marketing agency

I Plan to See This Company Become the Beacon for Groove

Bright Ideas

Bright Ideas will be the platform where I talk about what we are doing to build Groove. The content produced will be of interest to other agencies and entrepreneurs in general. Revenue will be $500K.

I came up with these numbers after a talk with a guy I really respect. His business has the exact same model as Bright Ideas (we create high value free content to generate traffic, and then monetize that traffic with info products, affiliate income, and our mastermind groups.

Like me, he also has a services division that does work for his clients – though his service business caters more to other information marketers, as opposed to the type of clients that I will pursue with Groove.

When I found out that his business did $2.5 million (with a net profit margin of 50%!)  in the last year, I was pretty stoked, to say the least. As I couldn’t wrap my mind around hitting that figure within 2 years, I thought $500K would be something that was more believable; especially if my success with Groove gives me the street cred to attract more mastermind members at a higher price point than I charge now (his pay $18,000/year and he’s got 40 of them).

Make a Plan to Get From Here to There

how to start a marketing agency

If I Don’t Set My Goals How Will I Know Where to Go?

Below is a short summary of my plans for Groove and Bright Ideas.

Groove Digital Marketing

Effective immediately, my primary focus will shift to growing Groove into a 7-figure business, and to do that, my plan is to offer content marketing services to businesses that can get an ROI on a monthly retainer of $3,000/month or more.

In hindsight, this is a decision that I should have made a year ago; however, there are two reasons why this didn’t happen.

Reason #1: My last business was really hard to grow. We were an outsourced IT department for small businesses and our clients paid us a monthly retainer for this.

The reasons it was so hard to grow were twofold: first, no one really wants to pay for IT support, and second, due to the nature of our business, attracting larger clients was incredibly difficult because selling to companies with one full-time IT manager involved a massive amount of politics (they feared for their jobs).

As a results of this experience, up to just recently, I swore I would never get into another services business as my primary means of income.

Reason #2: Thanks to my podcast, I have had the opportunity to interview quite a number of inbound marketing agency owners, and they have all been having quite a bit of success.

Unlike IT services, marketing services is something that CEOs want to buy because they know that effective marketing will help them to increase profits. And, thanks to my understanding of how to create documented processes and outsourcing, I am extremely confident that providing content marketing services can be treated as a scalable ‘product’ business in ways that offering IT support could never do.

With a scalable product offering, we should be able to grow faster! (assuming my sales engines is optimized, of course)

Sidebar: If you haven’t yet checked out my podcast, you should. The amount of free training in provided by my podcast exponentially exceeds what I have created in my paid products.

how to start a marketing agency

Know Who to Target and How

The Niches We’ll Target

Initially, we are going to focus on two niches: financial services and industrial manufacturers. By specializing, the goal is to:

  • Decrease direct competition from generalists
  • Increase our ability to charge premium pricing
  • Increase the likelihood of referrals
  • Have fewer places we need to advertise
  • Create more compelling offers and lead magnets
  • Develop high levels of industry specific expertise

The reason for the financial services niche is that I spent my first career in that niche so I have a better than average understanding of it. In addition, profits margins in financial services tend to be quite good and there are plenty of companies in the $10-50M range to target.

The reason for the industrial manufacturing niche is that they sell very high ticket items and aren’t generally known to be very good marketers. For this reason, I believe that we will be able to charge premium prices for premium quality content marketing. I have also interviewed several CEOs in this space and they have confirmed my assumptions.

My Lead Generation Plan

To acquire leads, we will:

  • Use the Content Marketer’s Blueprint (CMB) combined with Hubspot for Groove to build traffic to our site*
  • Contact existing Hubspot users who might not be getting the ROI there were hoping for
  • Perform Seek and Assist on LinkedIn
  • Buy Facebook Ads to promote webinars and other lead magnets
  • Speak at Vistage (I’ve just become an “approved” speaker, thanks to an introduction made by a past guest on my show)
  • Use dimensional direct mail + content to pursue my “Target 100” list of ideal prospects.

*as a result of a recent interview, I discovered the content marketers blueprint and how it ties into Hubspot. Suffice to say, I was blown away by what I saw. Infusionsoft is awesome for information marketers, people who want/need ecommerce, and people who want just one system to use ; however, as I’ve just recently discovered, Hubspot is ‘the shiz’ for content marketers looking for detailed analytics on what is working. Look for future posts on this.

Required Resources

In order to achieve the maximum benefit from the CMB, we have purchased Hubspot at a cost of $800/month. This is a significant investment; however, I cannot credibly sell content marketing in the way that I plan to without using the same tools myself.

The Groove Website needs a facelift which will cost $500 and a day or two of my time (this is actually done already).

Initially, my role will see me working “in” the business, and as cash flow allows, I will hire more employees to take over my day to day roles, thereby allowing me to transition to working “on” the business almost exclusively. With the time I free up by working “on” and not “in” the business, I will be able to invest time into building Bright Ideas into a much more successful business than it is today. 

Bright Ideas

James Schramko has proven that a personal blog can be built into a 7 figure business and the key driver to achieving this result is the production of very high quality, helpful content.

Many others (including me) have proven that providing incredibly helpful content for free creates a highly engaged audience and a very large mailing list.

Given that our near term monetization plan is focused on Groove, aside from creating content, Bright Ideas needn’t consume as much time as it has in the past.

More advanced funnels, product launches, etc, are all items that, given the current size of my list and volume of traffic, don’t offer a high enough ROI to warrant the time investment required.

My 2 Year Plan to Build a 7 Figure Lifestyle #Business #thebrightideasblog

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Required Resources

Given that Bright Ideas content will be centered around sharing the story of how I’m building Groove (the stories of other enterpreneurs’ successes will continue to be shared via the podcast) into a 7 figure business, I suspect that the audience demographic will shift more towards agency owners and consultants as time goes by. 

To ensure that new visitors are clear about who Bright Ideas is for and what they will learn, I am going to make some changes to the lead magnet on my home page.

Currently, the home page looks like this:

bi-home-page-mar-14

Yesterday, I sent my designer the following mockup and asked her to create something attractive.

bi-home-page-mockup

With this type of lead magnet, I don’t need to create a new course (this would take time). Instead, all I need to produce is one blog post per week to detail my progress. The post could be as simple as what I did that week and the results I achieved.

More importantly, by offering this type of “look over my shoulder” content, I expect that I will also attract the type of reader I most want to have and this will likely generate more leads for the mastermind group.

In the near term, the only monetization system that needs to be built is a new version of my resources page that I’ve started referring to in recent podcast recordings (these recordings will start to air in a few weeks).

Assess the Time Required to Execute The Plan

No plan is worth the paper it’s written on if it isn’t feasible from a resource standpoint. Given that time is my most precious resource, I thought I would produce an estimate of how I plan to allocate my time to execute my plan.

time-allocation

As you can see, I only account for 34 hours per week of productivity, where as I will work a total of about 45 hours. This is because it would be impossible for me to produce 40 hours of productive work in a 40 hour week. Email, which is a necessary evil, is a somewhat unproductive time pig. Oink!

Adjust and Fine Tune

In 3 to 6 months, when I read this post again, I’m sure that, with hindsight to my benefit, I will see all sorts of flaws in my plan that are invisible to me today. Such is the nature of the beast.

If you’d like to join me for this journey, please be sure and become a subscriber today by clicking the button down below. It’s going to be another incredible ride and I’d be stoked to have you join me!

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