Inbound Marketing: How Amerifirst Mortgage Generates 1000+ Leads a Month

Our guest today is Dan Moyle. Dan is in charge of marketing over at AmeriFirst Mortgage. Dan knows how to succeed with inbound marketing in a ‘boring’ industry.

If you are in an industry that many would consider ‘boring’, and you’re not sure how you could possibly come up with enough to write about, this interview is for you. Dan shares the strategy he’s used at AmeriFirst to produce a lot of content that has produced fantastic results.

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Inbound Marketing: How Block Imaging Increased Sales by $9 Million

In this interview we’ll explore the success that Block Imaging has experienced with inbound marketing. We interview Krista Kotrla, Senior VP of Marketing for Block Imaging. Block Imaging buys and sells imaging equipment ranging from $50K to $500K.

We talk at length about the incredible results Block Imaging achieved through inbound marketing. When you hear the results, you will be stunned at how much of an impact inbound marketing has had on their business.

Krista will also explain to us how they got started, some of their mistakes,  how to create an effective inbound marketing campaign, and the major pivot that had a dramatic impact on their results. If you are looking for a proven success story from a company that sells relatively technical products in a “boring” industry then get ready to take notes. Don’t miss the golden nuggets on:

  • How to be helpful instead of ‘us’ focused.
  • How to create content from customer questions.
  • Why getting buy in is critical.
  • How content breaks down barriers between departments.

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How the Cleveland Clinic Has Increased Blog Traffic 800% in 12 Months

how to increase blog traffic with Facebook by Amanda Todorovich

Amanda Todorovich is the Marketing Manager of Digital Engagement at the Cleveland Clinic. She oversees all content marketing strategies including the blog, social media, and email marketing. The Cleveland Clinic has been blogging for about a year and traffic has grown from 250,000 visitors per month to over 3 million visitors per month.

In this interview you will hear Amanda explain a couple of really important things that you need to understand if you haven’t started inbound marketing or haven’t yet found success with it. We discuss the importance of buyer personas, how to figure out what to write about, and how to get eyeballs on the content.

The Cleveland Clinic has put a huge amount of focus on Facebook and made a significant investment in building their following there. If you want to learn how to maximize reach and increase blog traffic with Facebook, listen closely!

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The Two Biggest Challenges Faced by Small Business Owners – And How to Overcome Them

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No matter what industry you’re in, if you own or manage a small business, you’re likely to suffer from the same two major challenges as other small businesses:

  • Lack of cash
  • Lack of time

There is no denying that running a small business can be difficult. In all my years in business, and all the interviews I’ve done with other business owners, I’ve realized there are a number of common problems, the top two being time and money (and not necessarily in that order).

Here is some practical advice on how to address the challenges that otherwise will sink your company.

Problem #1: Cash Flow

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The number one challenge of small businesses is cash. Even if a business is profitable on paper, it’s astoundingly easy to hit the bottom of your bank balance.

Solution #1: Find a Way to Generate Recurring Revenue

My last company, an outsourced IT services firm, almost didn’t make it. The standard sorts of projects we were working on just didn’t create the kind of consistent cash flow we needed and – even after a few cash infusions, including mortgaging my house – our bank balance was hovering near zero.

BUT, we were about to land a new client. It was a big contract, and would certainly put us in the black for quite some time. I had a great relationship with the client. All seemed to be headed in the right direction.

Sadly, after a lot of hard work trying to win the contract, they told me they’d decided to go with another firm!

We had a great relationship, and they told me they wanted to work with me, but we didn’t offer what the other firm did – a monthly service contract with remote management (which at the time was new technology). The monthly contract also meant a fixed (predictable) expense each month for the client.

From my perspective, it was predictable revenue for the IT service provider. I asked for a couple of days to be able to redo my proposal, got my partner to figure out the technology end of it… and we won the contract – which meant that we now had money coming in each and every month. (yay!!)

More importantly, we had a new business model. One that was much more stable, and much more valuable.

Starting out each month at zero is very likely to kill your business. That’s why I strongly recommend building in a recurring revenue model, so that you automatically have income coming in each and every month.

This is one key to how I’m growing my marketing agency. The other piece of the puzzle is getting the leads so that my recurring revenue clients can find me. That’s where inbound marketing comes in.

Problem #2: Limited Time

We all have a limited amount of time in which to do our work.

As a small business owner, this becomes painfully obvious. You may end up finding yourself work hours so long that you wonder why you started that stinking business in the first place.

Solution #2: Create Systems to Automate As Much As Possible

robotLuckily, there are ways to maximize the time you do have available.

Focus on Bringing in Money

First, stop trying to do everything yourself. Prioritize your top activities – these should be revenue generating.

Set up a routine so that you’re focused on what brings you results (in the form of revenue) before all else.

Systematize What You Can

Second, get yourself set up with smoothly running systems for the things that need to be done repeatedly in your business.

If you’re not familiar with the now classic E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, it’s well worth a read. The big takeaway of the book is to get out of the minutiae of your business, by developing systems. There are a number of benefits to this:

  • Because you have figured out exactly how you’re going to do a particular task, that task requires less mental time and energy
  • It allows you to easily train new employees (or outsourcers) to do the repetitive tasks
  • It allows you to grow your company more efficiently
  • It allows you to automate tasks, saving even more money because you don’t have to worry about labor

My Favorite Way to Automate

I’m a huge fan of Infusionsoft. It’s a seriously powerful automation software that allows me to:

  • Lead generation on my website
  • Customized, personalized follow up lo leads to help convert them to customers
  • Email marketing
  • eCommerce
  • Offline payment processing
  • Digital product delivery
  • Automate internal processes

Here’s the caveat to all of this: Although I’m a big fan of Infusionsoft, its strength is in helping you convert your website visitors to customers, and managing everything behind the scenes during and after that process. If you aren’t getting enough traffic to your website, Infusionsoft won’t be enough in and of itself. That’s why I also use HubSpot – and a solid inbound marketing strategy.

Conclusion

I hope this post has been helpful to you. If you’d like more of an Infusionsoft review, you can find that here, or check out this excellent demo of the software here.

If you have any questions about the software, I’d be happy to answer them. Just post a comment below, or contact me directly.

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Agile Marketing 101: What You Need to Know to Succeed

agile marketing process overview with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is CMO for BitTorrent, a well know internet brand. Jascha has been in internet technology for 17 years and has worked on projects including Microsoft product stores, social marketing, and workflow management & innovation.

In this episode, we won’t be talking about BitTorrent though, we’ll be talking about agile marketing processes. If you are not yet familiar with agile marketing, grab some paper and a pen so you can take notes as you learn how to avoid wasting money by evolving away from the legacy mindset of marketing.

We discuss specific tools and tactics and additional resources you can use to increase your education on this topic.

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How to Leverage Reddit to Build Your Audience

brent csutoras tells how he is using reddit for business growth.

You’ve probably heard of Reddit, but do you know how to leverage it to grow your business? Have you tried using Reddit for your business but found it difficult to figure out how to get results?

Brent Csutoras is a social media strategist and entrepreneur who specializes in social media marketing, content marketing and viral content creation. He’s been involved with the Reddit platform for a long time.

Reddit is a group of thousands of communities. No matter what you are interested in there is a sub Reddit for you to join in on the discussion. The whole purpose of Reddit is to share content that a particular sub Reddit would find interesting and would like to discuss.

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How Salesforce.com Increased Blog Traffic 310%

blog traffic increase tips from Amanda Nelson

Are you looking for powerful tips to increase blog traffic?

In this interview Amanda Nelson shares 10 tips for managing a successful blog. Amanda Nelson is the Director of Marketing for Ringlead.com, a data quality platform for major CRM and marketing automation platforms. In her previous position as content manager for Salesforce.com, Amanda took the Salesforce.com corporate blog from 80,000 visitors per month to 340,000 visitors per month in just one year.

These tips worked at Salesforce and are working at RingLead, so whether you are a smaller company or a large one, these strategies will work very well for you if you implement them the same way Amanda did.

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

  • (01:00)  Introductions
  • (06:45)  What did you mean by “know the data”?
  • (13:30)  How did you find your best guest bloggers?
  • (15:00)  How did you nurture your guest bloggers?
  • (17:00)  How do you come up with great headlines?
  • (18:30)  How should you optimize a blog post?
  • (19:30)  What metrics do you watch for in each post?
  • (20:20)  Why is editing so important?
  • (22:17)  How can a B2B blogger be fun?
  • (25:00)  What tips do you have for getting creative?
  • (27:00)  How should you involve your team?
  • (28:00)  How do you go about planning your content?
  • (29:15)  What is a content engine?

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.

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Transcript

If you would like a transcript of the show please visit the original interview published at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/21

About Amanda Nelson

AmandaNelsonAmanda Nelson is Director of Marketing at RingLead where she leads the content marketing strategy and execution. She has spent the last three years in content marketing and community management at salesforce.com and Radian6, and has a background in account management for interactive and full service advertising agencies. Follow her on Twitter at @amandalnelson.

 

How to Use Programmatic Advertising Technologies to Laser Target Your Best Prospects

an overview of programmatic advertising

If you are looking for a way to laser target your absolute best prospective customers, listen to this interview to learn about programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is impressive stuff! It is a fairly new vehicle that will allow you to target your customers more cost effectively than ever before.

In this interview Trent interviews Trip Foster, CMO for Brandscreen and Zenovia Exchange. These companies are really focused on programmatic digital media. They offer a demand side platform and exchange for buying and selling of digital display ads.

Are you ready to dive into the details of what programmatic advertising is, why it is important, how you can get started, what it costs, and how your company can benefit?

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