Non-podcast blog posts.

How to Avoid Overwhelm, Hack Growth, and Get Results 3X Faster (in your pajamas)

October 10, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

It’s been about 3 weeks since the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite mastermind group was launched, and so far, the participation and ideas shared have been absolutely wonderful.

But more on that in a minute.

First, I want to address a very real problem that I, and many other entrepreneurs experience on an all-too-regular basis. The problem I’m talking about is overwhelm; caused largely by information overload and trying to do too many things simultaneously.

According to Dr. Paul Hammerness and Margaret Moore, authors of Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life, multitasking increases the chances of making mistakes and missing important information and cues. Multitaskers are also less likely to retain information in working memory, which can hinder problem solving and creativity.

And when do I find that I try to multitask the most?

When I’m feeling overwhelmed and am trying to “beat it down” by being uber-productive.

Yeah, right.

Let’s be honest here. NO ONE is productive when they are feeling overwhelmed. I’m sure as hell not. Just ask my wife.

(Feeling overwhelmed was one of the reasons why we recently spent all day working on our 90 day strategic plan.)

What Causes Overwhelm?

The root cause of overwhelm is simply having too much to do at one time. You didn’t need me to tell you that, did you?

Of course not.

Like you, I’m a hard-charging, fire-breathing, gonna-kick-some-butt entrepreneur, and because I’m wired this way (thanks mom and dad??), I find it very difficult to just ignore what I see as potential opportunities.

So, instead of ignoring them, I just add a “little task” to my to-do list, because I’m “sure” I’ll have “more time” later to investigate the idea.

Sound familiar?

Do I ever get back to investigating the idea? Yes, sometimes I do, but more often than not my to-do list just grows…and then keeps on growing to the point that I can’t bear to even look at the bloody thing any longer.

If you can relate, go ahead and leave a comment below. Or, if you don’t have time now, you can just put it on your to-do list and come back later *smirk*.

How to Growth Hack

Back when I was in my 20s, I spent waaaaay too much time playing a first-person-shooter game called Half Life. The game was insanely addictive and I poured hours into it.

Often, I would get “stuck” in a level and would then invest far too much time trying to figure out how to complete the level.

One day, someone told me about something called a “walk through”.

A what?

A walk through is a guide that was created by someone else who’s already completed the level. Not only do they describe in detail how to get through the level in the least amount of time, but they also would tell you how to find and unlock every bonus along your way.

Talk about helpful!

With walk throughs, I no longer had to spend hours trying to find the super-duper bonus or hidden room. No more frustration, no more taking 3X as long as I needed. Armed with a good walk through I could now blast my way through the level in record time.

So what the hell does a walk through for Half Life have to do with feeling overwhelmed?

Plenty.

In a game, many people actually enjoy the time-consuming hunt for the bonuses, etc…

But in business? I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely ZERO interest in learning things the hard way. When it comes to business, I’m all about speed and efficiency. I want results now, dammit.

A Mastermind is a Walk Through for Business

If you are like me and you want to avoid overwhelm and get results faster, then I suggest that you find yourself a mastermind to join because being in a mastermind is like having your very own “walk through for business”.

As the name suggests, the collective intelligence of a group of people all focused on solving the same problems is far superior to just one person trying to do it on their own.

Back when I ran my Dyrand Systems (IT Managed Service Provider), there was always so much to learn and do that I often felt extremely overwhelmed.

And then I decided to join a mastermind full of other people that ran companies like mine.

Now I was a part of a close-knit group of like-minded people, all trying to solve similar problems. Did participating completely eliminate overwhelm? No, but, thanks to my not having to re-create the wheel with every new idea, my participation drastically reduced overwhelm-related stress.

As a member of the group, each time I discovered a new idea that I wanted to test, the very first thing I would do was to communicate with the other members of the group to ask them if they’d tested it. Many times, I found that my “new idea” had already been tried by another member without success.

Phew! Now I didn’t have to blow X hours figuring that out for myself. What a relief! (Remember, the mastermind members are all experienced business people, so I could trust what they told me.)

Not only did I not have to waste time testing ideas that had already been proven not to work, but I was also regularly exposed to new ideas that I probably would not have otherwise discovered and many of these ideas are why my company was ranked as one of the PROFIT 100 fastest growing companies in Canada for two years in a row.

Thanks to my fellow mastermind members, I was able to hack the hell out of growth!

Bam. Take that Mr Overwhelm!

What to Look For in a Mastermind Group

There are literally thousands and thousands of mastermind groups on the planet, so finding one that will be a good fit can be a chore.

Here’s how I find the ones that I joined back then: I called other CEOs in my industry and asked them for recommendations. Brilliant, eh?

Of course, now, thanks to the Google, if you don’t feel like calling other CEOs, you can also search to your heart’s content.

That said, I think you are nuts if you skip making the calls, because, as was the case for me, making those “cold calls” most often led to some very productive discussions and a few of them even led to what have become long-term friendships (Hi Mike, Josh).

Aside from recommendations from others, I would also suggest that you pick a mastermind whose members are as closely focused on the business you are in as possible. Ideally, they do EXACTLY what you do, because the more similar the business, the more valuable the ideas shared in the group will be.

How Much To Invest?

In terms of cost, I would suggest you join the most expensive mastermind group that you can afford.

Why spend top dollar?

Simple. High priced groups attract more successful members. Simple as that.

Who would you rather surround yourself with? People just scraping by, or people who are running 7 or 8 figure businesses? The answer is kinda obvious, isn’t it?

Does that mean that you should join a group that costs $1,000 a month right away? If you can afford it, yes; however, if you can’t and your business is tiny compared to the size of the other member’s businesses, then no. Instead, I’d suggest you find a group more suited to your current situation for now. You can always join the more expensive group later on if you find that you are outgrowing the current one.

Does Your Location Matter?

In terms of location, the groups that I used to be a part of, and the the group that I now run, all have members from all over the place. In the old days (2005-ish), I’d hop on a plane 4 times a year to fly down to a resort for a three day meeting. For the more expensive groups, this is still pretty common; however, given how easy it is to meet online to share ideas, I don’t feel like flying to a location is as necessary as it once was.

Instead spending money on hotels and plane tickets, join an online group and then spend what you saved either on the dues for the group, or, if you can afford it, hire yourself a VA to help get some work off your plate.

If you know of a good group, please share the name down in the comments.

If you are an independent marketing consultant, freelancer, or small agency and you want to mastermind with others who are building the same type of business as you are, then check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite.

The Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite

The group that I currently run meets online once per month and we have a daily discussion via a private Facebook group.

The online meetings are just that. We use GotoMeeting and hold an online discussion during which we all take turns sharing what we’ve learned since the last meeting, what is working, what isn’t, etc… We also have a hot seat each month where one member can volunteer to have the other members do a critique on whatever they like. Could be a website, a landing page, a free report, a proposal template, etc.

Possibly even more valuable than the monthly meeting has been the Facebook group. In the group, on a daily basis I and the other members are sharing ideas and asking questions.

Here’s just a few examples of what has been shared recently:

Mike shared a landing page that he is testing for lead capture in the dental niche
I shared how I’ve increased website traffic by 59.44% over the last 30 days
Todd asked questions about how to handle recurring billing to clients and got several answers
Bobby shared a diagram of his 3-step lead generation direct mail campaign
I shared the results of a recent mailing that I did and promised to do the same with the next one
Todd shared an interview he did with a guy who’s getting a 38% conversion rate on a lead generation campaign

What Current Members Are Saying

If getting to participate in our discussion is something that appeals to you, then I encourage you to apply for membership now.

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How to Test the Viability of a Niche Marketing Without Wasting Valuable Time and Resources

October 4, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

Once you’ve chosen your niche, I suggest you test that niche in the way that I’m about to describe before fully committing to it.

The reason for this is that I often see people putting a great deal of time and effort to building a complete website for their chosen niche before ever running any tests. As you might guess, pursuing the wrong niche can turn out to be a massive waste of time and resources.

To avoid what could be weeks or months of wasted time building the site, creating blog posts, and in promoting those posts, you can greatly minimize the risk of picking the wrong niche by putting up a few landing pages and then driving traffic to them.

In my book on marketing automation, I cover in detail how to create landing pages and lead magnets. What I will be covering in today’s post is quick and easy way to drive traffic to these landing pages so that in a very short period of time you can determine, with a high degree of certainty, if a given niche is worth pursuing.

Two Ways to Generate Immediate Traffic

There are two ways that I commonly use to drive traffic to a landing page in the shortest possible amount of time. While neither method is free, the cost of testing a niche using the method that I’m about to outline pales in comparison to the cost of putting weeks and/or months into pursuing the wrong niche.

Use Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC can be a great way to test your niche.
(image source: 123rf.com)

Depending upon the niche you’re going after, you’ll want to try Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn paid advertising to drive traffic to your landing page. If your business is B2B, I would suggest that you use LinkedIn because you can target your ads very specifically.

If your business is B2C, I suggest you use Facebook for exactly the same reasons.

As a last resort you may also want to try Google Adwords; however I suspect you’ll find the costs are excessive when compared to either Facebook or LinkedIn; especially given the fact that you cannot target your audience nearly as well with Google as you can with the social platforms I just mentioned.

When using a PPC campaign to drive traffic to a landing page, you need to be aware that there are several variables that you’re going to need to test before you can determine if the experiment was a success or not.

Test Several Variables

The first variable that you want to test is the image in the headline of your ad. I would suggest that for the first part of this test you keep your headline consistent and use anywhere from 10 to 20 different images. Once you have identified the top performing image that I would suggest you test different variations of the headline.

After you are getting a satisfactory click through on your ads, you’re going to need to look at the conversion rate of your landing page. I cover how to split test the landing page in detail in my marketing automation book.

Direct Mail

Some niches will be easier to reach with direct mail than with PPC advertising. For these niches, I suggest you use three-dimensional direct-mail, otherwise known as lumpy mail.

Old fashioned mail is another great way to test a niche.. provided you use it the right way!
(image source: 123rf.com)

The reason that 3D mail works so much better than conventional mail is that the recipient of your direct mail will be pretty curious as to what is inside the envelope and, as such, the likelihood that they are going to open your envelope is substantially higher.

The costs of sending out 3D mail will, of course, be higher than the costs of sending out conventional mail or postcards; however, I believe that the increased response rate will be more than worth it. (And yes, you could actually split test this, too!)

When choosing a 3D object to including your mailing, I suggest that you find something that closely relates to the captivating headline you put at the top of the letter you are going to include in the mailing (you should also split test your headlines over time).

The more creative you are, the better your results are going to be, so be sure and put sufficient time and effort into coming up with

ideas for what you’re going to send before you reach into your wallet.

There are numerous suppliers from which to choose (Google the term “3d mail” or “lumpy mail”). The one that I am currently using is www.3Dmailresults.com.

In our case, the call to action in the letter is just the same as it would be with the PPC ad, and that is the landing page URL – which we personalize to the recipient.

How to Maximize Landing Page Conversions

To maximize conversions, we’ve built landing pages that are customized to each individual. On these landing pages we display a video was specifically created for the intended recipient. As we are attempting to test this niche’s appetite to outsource their marketing to our marketing agency, the video shows 3 to 4 minute review of their website. In the videos we identify the 5 to 7 critical factors that are wrong with their site, and share how each factor is costing them money.

As with all the marketing that I do, this strategy relies heavily on some ninja marketing automation tactics to increase its effectiveness. To be able to replicate what I’m about to explain you’re going to need to use Infusionsoft, FuzedApp.com and Wistia.com.

Wistia is the company that I use to host the video, which I embed on the landing page. Producing the video takes less than five minutes. All I do is have a look at their site, make a list of the deficiencies, and then record the screen share where I introduce myself and explain what these deficiencies are and their negative impact.

This video is then exported to a dropbox folder, and, thanks to FuzedApp.com, it is automatically uploaded to the appropriate folder in Wistia. I then use FuzedApp.com to set up video tracking so that I can apply the tag in Infusionsoft if my prospect watches more than 75% of the video. (I chose 75% but you can pick any percentage you like.)

In each case, we have done our best to obtain a working email address for the prospect. The way that we do this is to go to their contact page and then view the source code to find an email address (search for “mailto:” and if an address is available in the code, you’ll find it). This is the email address that we use in their contact record within Infusionsoft as well as in the URL of the landing page. To mask what is now an ugly landing page URL, we simply create a “pretty link” (easy to type) that includes their name. To do this, you’ll need the Pretty Link plugin for WordPress.

Using Automation to Track Video Engagement

By taking this approach, when a prospect receives our lumpy mail and then visits the landing page that we have specified, if they watch more than 75% of the video we receive a notification from Infusionsoft.

The goal of the landing page is to get them to opt in and download our lead magnet – which is highly relevant to the niche. When they download the lead magnet, we will have captured their preferred email address and then an automated follow-up campaign begins in Infusionsoft.

The reason the video tracking is helpful is because if they do not opt in, we are still able to tell if our prospect visited the landing page and watched at least 75% (or whatever we specify) of the video.

If, over time, we see the videos are being watched and we are not capturing leads, we’ll know that our direct mail is effective at getting them to visit the landing page, however, the landing page is not effective at getting them to give us their contact details.

Conclusion

There are unlimited niches out there, but not all are good targets – pick wisely!
(image source: 123rf.com)

As I hope you can now see, testing a niche using either of the methods that I have outlined above will give you immediate feedback on whether this is a niche that you can get traction with – and, best of all you will not have had to build an entire website.

It’s not enough to believe that a niche needs your help, or that they can afford to pay you for it. If you cannot acquire a customer at a cost that is less than your average customer value, you will not be in business long!

Moreover, if you really want to grow, you are going to need a system for attracting customers on a regular basis, as opposed to just getting one every now and again via personal relationships. Niche testing will tell you if this is likely to be possible.

If you succeed in getting traction using this test, then it is a good idea to dive in, build a site and begin creating and promoting your content on an ongoing basis as I describe how to do in my new book.

Brett Labit

October 2, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

It is always impressive to line up a speaker a month or two in advance and have them come deliver dynamic and relevant content. I think it is even more impressive when they have zero notice and step up to the plate and knock it out of the park! That’s exactly what Trent did for Local Impact Zone. He is engaging, accurate, relevant and timely with his delivery. More importantly, his depth of knowledge and ability to execute and apply his knowledge will be extremely valuable to any business wanting to grab market share and be an industry leader. If you want a great speaker, I highly recommend Trent Dyrsmid.

~ Brett Labit

Ian Ippolito

October 2, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

I wasted a lot of time when I started vWorker.com because I didn’t know what I was doing. A guide like BrightIdeas.co can save you a lot of time and money.

~Ian Ippolito – Founder, vWorker.com

How to Stay Focused and Get Results (Faster) with a One Page Strategic Plan

October 2, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

Do you ever feel like you have too many projects on your plate and you’re trying to do too many things at one time? Does a sense of overwhelm or a lack of focus end up actually lowering your productivity?

If so, you are definitely going to find today’s post helpful.

One of the things that I love about running the Bright Ideas umbrella of companies is the freedom that I have to take my business in virtually any direction that I like.

One of the things that I find most challenging about running the Bright Ideas umbrella of companies is that I have the freedom to take my business in virtually any direction that I like.

Can you see the problem?

With so many different opportunities to pursue at any give point, I often find it quite a challenge to choose which one to focus on at any one time. Whenever I find myself in this situation, which has been far more often that I’d like, I find that my stress goes up and my productivity goes down.

The Negative Side Effect of Having Too Many Choices

Too many choices can be paralyzing.
(image source: 123rf.com)

According to research from several universities, humans ability to to weigh choices is remarkably advantageous; however, it can also come with some serious liabilities. When faced with too many choices, most of us find it extremely difficult to stay focused enough to complete important projects, handle routine tasks, or even take our prescriptions.

These findings appear in the April issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

Kathleen D. Vohs, PhD, the study’s lead author and a member of the University of Minnesota’s marketing department, concluded that making choices apparently depletes a precious resource within the human mind. “Maintaining one’s focus while trying to solve problems or completing an unpleasant task was much harder for those who had made choices compared to those who had not,” says Vohs. “This pattern was found in the laboratory, classroom and shopping mall. Having to make the choice was the key. It did not matter if the researchers told them to make choices, or if it was a spontaneously made choice, or if making the choice had consequences or not.” (Read more at: http://phys.org/news127404469.html#jCp)

In other words, the more choices we have to make on the fly, the worse off we are.

Reducing the Number of Choices with a Strategic Plan

Even though I built (and sold) a multi-million dollar company that was ranked as one of Canada’s PROFIT 100 fastest growing companies for two years in a row, I’ve never really considered strategy to be my forte.

I’ve known how to grow businesses, but I haven’t always been the best with strategy.

Instead, I would attribute much of my success to my ability to compartmentalize my “fear of failure” in such a way as to allow me to take a “ready, fire, aim” approach to my business endeavors.

While my “ready, fire, aim” approach has served me reasonably well over the years, more recently, I have come to realize that taking some time to create a strategy, while seemingly unproductive in the moment (“what work am I getting done here?”), is actually highly beneficial in terms of its ability to help me stay focused and reduce my stress.

For large companies with a board of directors and a complete management team, developing a strategic plan is pretty common. However, for the vast majority of small business owners like myself (and most of my readers), I am willing to bet that taking a day per quarter to create a strategic plan for the next 90 days is rarely, if ever, attempted.

With that in mind, I thought it would be very helpful to many of my readers if I was to delve into how we spent the yesterday coming up with our Q4, 2013 strategic plan, and to provide an example of our simple strategic plan.

How to Develop a One-Page Strategic Plan

As your company grows and you add staff, ensuring that everyone remains on the same page will become increasingly challenging. Over time, different members of your team will have different ideas about who your company is, what products or services it provides, and how it provides them.

If you don’t yet have a team, you are unlikely to ever grow to the point where you need a team, unless you have a clear focus on what you are trying to accomplish.

Like most things in my life, if strategic planning is going to work for me, I must make a routine of it. To do that, the very first thing that my team and I did was to schedule a full day once per quarter in our calendars.

I realize that this isn’t the most profound of ideas; however, I’m willing to bet that if you don’t take the time to schedule your meetings in advance, they aren’t likely to actually happen.

Once we had our date(s) selected, the next thing we needed to figure out was a framework for creating a strategic plan that didn’t end up being just another useless piece of paper that was stuck on the wall.

To do this, we turned to the book, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish. In this book, there is an entire chapter devoted to mastering the one-page strategic plan.

According to the book, to remain competitive, any organization needs three things:

a framework that identifies and supports your corporate strategy
a common language in which to express that strategy, and,
a well-developed habit of using this framework and language to continually evaluate your strategic progress.

Most importantly, to make this useful for us, the process had to be relatively simple. According to Verne, the strategic framework that works best for emerging companies is called the Planning Pyramid.

The beauty of this pyramid is that it graphically conveys to everyone on your team how all the various vision pieces – values, purpose, targets, goals, actions, schedules, and accountabilities – align, establishing a common strategic language that is easy to use and helping to eliminate confusion.

If you’d like to follow Verne’s exact process, you can download everything you need from gazelles.com.

How We Made It Even Easier

As my team and I started to go through the plan, step by step, we realized there was a lot of repetition in the gazelle’s planning document. Perhaps it wasn’t really designed for a team of less than 5 people, or perhaps my brain just works differently than Verne’s?

Either way, after an hour or so, we realized that we wanted to simply the template to eliminate any duplication and possible areas of confusion.

The Bright Ideas One Page Strategic Plan

The one page template that we created was broken down into 3 main sections.

Stuff That Shouldn’t Change (much)
Annual Targets
Quarterly Targets

Stuff That Shouldn’t Change (much)

We called the first section, “Stuff That Shouldn’t Change (much)”. Pretty spiffy, eh?

In this first section, we wrote down the following:

our core values and beliefs
our core competencies
our purpose
our sandbox
our brand promise

The reason that we called this section “Stuff That Shouldn’t Change (much)” is because from quarter to quarter, as the name suggests, the items in this section aren’t likey to change.

Is this section important? You bet it is!

Core Values and Beliefs

First, whenever you are building a team, if you don’t have a very clear idea of who you are, then how on earth are you going to attract other like-minded people to your team? Do a little bit of reading up on the importance of corporate culture (think Zappos) and you’ll quickly realize that culture can and does play a massive role in the long-term success of your business.

The next four sections are as much for the internal team as they are for the world to see because attracting customers is just like attracting employees. If you don’t know exactly who you want to have around you, it’s pretty unlikely that you are ever going to get them, right?

Core Competencies

In our case, we wrote down content marketing and marketing automation so that everyone on our team clearly understands what we are all about. If you want to learn about outbound sales tactics, we aren’t your guys. However, if you want to discover how to attract interest to your company so that you can use marketing automation to nurture and convert those people into customers (with automated systems), then we are your guys, and if you ever want to work here, then you need to know what we are about.

Sandbox

What arena are you playing in?
(image source: 123rf.com)

As the name suggests, the Sandbox is where you play. For us, we wrote, “to be the leading source of information and tools for marketing agencies with up to 25 employees”.

Notice that we limited our Sandbox to agencies with just 25 employees. Why? Because the tools that we have expertise in were designed for this size of company. With bigger companies, the best tools are different and we aren’t experts with them.

Brand Promise

In my opinion, the promise of your brand is really about setting expectations. If you can set and meet expectations, people will trust you and spread the word. In our case, we wrote, “we will help you to become lean and extremely profitable within 12 months”. While I’m sure we could tweak the statement to more clearly define “lean” or “extremely profitable”, the main point that we wanted to convey is the part about the “12 months”.

Transforming a business from average and barely profitable to lean and extremely profitable doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. However, if you have less than 25 employees, 12 months should be enough time to accomplish some pretty meaningful results.

Annual Targets

In this section, we listed only two things:

Top priorities
Financial goals

Top Priorities

The top priorities that we identified are as follows:

produce epic content
produce epic products
maximize conversions
maximize automation
maximize content promotion

While none of these items are a specific goal, we feel that if we make these our priorities that everything else will fall into place. As you’ll see when we get to the section on Quarterly Targets, we got a lot more specific with which activities we needed to focus on.

Financial Goals

Your financial goals are an important piece of your plan.
(image source: 123rf.com)

Here’s how we defined our goals:

deadline: 12 months out
revenue
net profit margin
profit
number of subscribers
cash in the bank

That was it for the annual targets. Keep it simple.

Quarterly Targets

Now that we have defined who we want to be when we grow up, it’s time to define the blocking and tackling that we are going to need to keep focused on over the next 90 days to make our game plan work.

For us, here’s what that looks like.

SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats/Challenges

We chose to put this in the quarterly section because these things can change rather quickly from time to time and we wanted to ensure that we were continually reminded of what they were (or what we believed them to be).

Strengths: Track record and awards for past entrepreneurial achievements
Weaknesses: Constrained cash flow, focus (I have entrepreneurial ADD)
Opportunities: Sell more info products, software, memberships, SaaS subscriptions
Threats: Competition from other gurus/blogs

Top Priorities (same as annual)

The top priorities that we identified are as follows:

produce epic content
produce epic products
maximize conversions
maximize automation
maximize content promotion

Rocks

To understand Rocks, think of filling up a mason jar with rocks, pebbles, sand, and water. If you want to really fill up the jar, you start with the biggest items first (rocks) and then add pebbles, sand, and finally water.

Obviously, if you didn’t put the rocks in first, you’d never get them all in, and, because they are the most important, you need to start with them.

For us, our rocks are:

publish my book
launch our SaaS app for marketing agencies (beta)
publish and promote 22 blog posts and 10 podcast episodes
deliver an epic talk to the San Diego chapter of the American Marketing Association on Nov 7th (hope to see you there)
launch the new/improved Bright Ideas website (coming soon!)

For each of the rocks above, we also defined who was responsible for each one so that we could all be held accountable. We also made a spreadsheet listing out all the topics we wanted to blog about and then scheduled each one of them in the editorial calendar. The goal is to have all content created and ready to go at least 30 days before it’s published.

Financial Goals

Here’s how we defined our goals for the quarter (same metrics, different dollar amounts from annual):

deadline: 12 months out
revenue
net profit margin
profit
number of subscribers
cash in the bank

Key Performance Indicators

While these could have been also included in the annual section, we decided that if we achieved them each quarter, then we’d be on track for them annually as well.

Given that Bright Ideas (not including our agency, which is a separate entity with its own plan) is an information products and software company, it seemed logical that our #1 Key Performance Indicator (KPI) would be revenue per subscriber. The fact that this is extremely easy to calculate and track made the selecting this metric as our #1 KPI even easier.

For tracking purposes, we identified four levels:

current level (shown in red)
minimum acceptable improvement (shown in yell0w)
target performance level (shown in green)
exceptional performance level (shown in bright green)

As I’ve described above, each of these numbers are displayed on our scoreboard in the denoted color.

Rev It Up!
(image source: 123rf.com)

Theme

I like to play games, and I like to win. With this in mind, we decided to come up with a theme for the quarter, name it, decide what the measure number is, and then define a reward for winning.

In our case, here’s what that looks like:

Name: Rev it up!
Measure Number: Revenue per Subscriber
Rewards: I get to hire another full-time programmer

Establishing a Meeting Rhythm

Now that we have our Q4 strategic plan complete, we needed a way to ensure that we stay on plan. To do that, we meet first thing every Monday morning and review our progress. During this meeting, each member of the team talks about what they have accomplished as well as what they are struggling with. For the struggles, we attempt to come up with a solution. For the tasks completed, we express sincere appreciation.

How to Create Accountability

When you are a company of one (solo-preneur), keeping yourself accountable can be quite a challenge. To help with that, I would suggest you find someone to partner up with, and then each of you becomes the accountability partner for the other.

You don’t need to work together, however, it would be a good idea that you are faced with similar challenges. Ideally, if you run a small agency, you want to select an accountability partner who runs a similarly sized agency. That way, you will both understand each others’ challenges, as well as be in a position to help each other with shortcuts to solutions.

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How I Produce My Podcast

September 19, 2013/5 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

Since starting my podcast some 190-plus episodes ago, my business has benefited immensely from the exposure that having a podcast in the iTunes store has offered. Each month the volume of downloads increases significantly, and as a result, both traffic to my blog and new subscribers to my list continue to grow.

More importantly, having a podcast gives my readers a way to consume my content while they are on the fly…which I suspect is most often during their commute.

Over the time that I’ve been producing the show, I have received some helpful tips, and a lot of very positive feedback. Needless to say, I’m extremely grateful for both.

I’m also extremely grateful for what I’ve learned from the guests on my show; many of whom had never heard of me prior to receiving an email from me asking if they’d like to be on the show.

Much to my surprise, one of the greatest benefits of being a podcaster is the networking I get to do with other smart folks who, otherwise, probably wouldn’t have sat on the phone for an hour giving me free advice!

Have you ever wondered how to make a podcast? Well, wonder no more, because in today’s post, I’m going to address a question that I seem to be getting asked a lot lately: how do I produce my podcast?

Check Out the SlideShare Version of This Post

How To Produce a Podcast (And Use it to Get More Clients) from BrightIdeas.co

Podcast Equipment

Setting up a podcast is pretty easy to do when you first start.

When I started out, I was using only a $25 Logitech microphone and Skype. My show didn’t sound great, but it was better than not having a show at all.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the podcast was going to become an increasingly important part of my business, so I invested in it accordingly.

Here is a list of the equipment that I use now (links below are affiliate links):

Heil PR40 Mic (costs about $300)
Heil PL-2T Mic boom (costs about $100)
Behringer 1202 Mixing Board (costs about $100)
Roland MP3 Recorder (costs about $200)
Audio Technica Headphones (costs about $50)
Plenty of wires to connect it all together (costs about $50)

Total cost of Podcast equipment: about $800

How to Record a Podcast

In addition to the hardware, there are also a few software apps & services that are a part of my production:

Levelator – used to make my and my caller’s voice the same volume in case I screw it up while recording
ID3 Editor to tag the .mp3 file with the right image and name, etc…before uploading to my S3 account
GarageBand (Mac) to handle post production editing (which is minimal)
Bluebrry Powerpress WordPress plugin to ensure it’s uploaded to iTunes as well as displayed on my blog
Amazon S3 to host the .mp3 files (do NOT try to use your web server)
Skype for the calls themselves
Call Recorder for Skype as a second method of recording in case my primary method fails (Speaking from experience, nothing is worse than asking a guest to repeat 10 minutes of conversation because your recording failed)

Most of the software is either free or costs less then $20. The cost to host your files on S3 is negligible and Bluebrry charges $5 a month if you want access to your stats, which isn’t a must, but I sure like seeing all that growth in downloads!

Actually recording the show is the easy part. I record to both Skype Call Recorder and the Roland MP3 Recorder just in case one of the recording systems fails. Believe it or not, this has happened to me, and nothing sucks more than having to ask your guest to repeat what they said for the last xx minutes. Lame.

Editing in Post Production

To save time, I like to keep my editing to a bare minimum, and generally do the show “in one take”.

Next, I import main file into GarageBand. I also import the intro that I paid a guy to make for me (it cost $100), along with my own intro to the episode itself, which I actually record right after the interview is over, while the main points of the interview are still fresh in my mind. And finally, I make sure that I have also imported the outtro into GarageBand.

Check out the video below to see what it all looks like prior to exporting it from GarageBand.

Once you have completed your editing, you are going to be left with a single .mp3 file.

To get this file ready for publication, you still need to:

Balance the levels
Tag it with the appropriate meta data
Upload it to your media host (I use Amazon S3)

Thankfully, there is an online service that makes this really easy to do! It’s called Auphonic and in the video below, I’ll show you how to use it.

How to Connect Your Mixing Board

Trying to figure out how to connect the Behringer 1202 Mixing Board was a little bit tricky, so I thought I would share this photo with you.

The basic idea here is that you need to get all the sound into the board, and then output it to the Roland MP3 Recorder.

So, for your mic, it goes directly into the board. For your guest’s voice, which is coming from Skype, it needs to come out of the computer and into the board.

Now you have both voices coming into the board, with each one going to a separate channel. The board will then mix the voices and output it to the Roland MP3 recorder.

Voila, mixed sound that sounds far better than it otherwise would.

How to Upload a Podcast to iTunes

Once my podcast has been uploaded to Auphonic, I simply use the Bluebrry podcasting plugin to publish the episode to my blog.

Once you have installed the plugin, you will need to go to the settings page to configure a few items; the first of which is getting your podcast setup in iTunes. To do that, you must first get your feed approved.

Once you click the hyperlink in the image above, the iTunes app will start and you will be taken to the screen below:

Once you submit your feed, approval will take a few days. Once approved, you will get the URL that I have highlight in red in the next image. You need to paste this URL, along with the other items I’ve highlighted into the iTunes tab of the Bluebrry Powerpress settings. Most of the settings on the other tabs can be left at their default values.

And finally, once all this is done, if you go to the actual post that you are editing and scroll down, you will see a box like the one below where you will paste the URL of your actual episode:

That’s it, you’re done :)

If you’d like more information on producing a podcast, check out my interview with Podcast Answer Man Cliff Ravenscraft.

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A First Look At My New Book (and why I’m writing it)

September 18, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

In today’s post, I want to share with you some details about a book (my first) that I’m working on. The book is going to contain step-by-step guidance on how to use content marketing and marketing automation to attract new clients.

If you are a small business owner, marketing consultant, or run a small agency and you are struggling to attract new clients, I’m writing this book for you.

In it, you will find proven strategies and tactics for client attraction.

Some of the ideas will come from my own experience, some will come from the experiences of the many successful entrepreneurs that have been on my show. Regardless of the source of the idea, I promise you this: these ideas will all have been field tested! No theories here.

Before I share more information about the book, I’d like to share with you an experience I had the other day while speaking to a room of about 70 or 80 small business owners.

As I gave my talk and asked the audience question after question, I realized that there are still a massive number of entrepreneurs who don’t yet know what content marketing is, and, even worse, they have absolutely no idea of what is possible with marketing automation software like Infusionsoft (this is what I use and that is my affiliate link).

So, with my pre-amble in place, here we go…

Outbound is Dead

Back in 2001 when I started my last company, I used a lot of cold calls to grow the business. I grew my business almost exclusively from cold calling. It was what I knew, and initially it worked. However, over time, the effectiveness of these cold calls slowed and then stopped. In fact, in 2007, in an effort to expand the business, I spent 67 hours cold calling.

I didn’t get a single client from it.

I stopped cold calling at that point, and focused on other forms of marketing. Now, I spend the vast majority of my time focused on learning, testing, and improving upon the latest marketing strategies. As the host of the Bright Ideas podcast, I have been fortunate to have interviewed over 80 incredibly successful entrepreneurs, all of whom are making extensive use of online marketing, content marketing and marketing automation. Because of the time I spend in my own work and in talking with other marketing experts, I sometimes assume that most other business owners have the same mindset.

Then there are times when it becomes clear that I could not be more wrong.

Most Small Business Owners Are Still in the Dark When It Comes to Marketing

Recently I was asked to speak to a group of about 70 or 80 small business owners near my home in Bosie, Idaho.

When I first sat at a table for lunch I didn’t introduce myself as the speaker. Instead I simply asked people questions about their businesses, about marketing and about the things that they were doing to attract clients. Most of the people that I spoke to were solo-preneurs or owned very small businesses with just a handful of employees.

Much to my surprise, the way that most of these people were using to land new clients was similar to what I did when I built my last business well over a decade ago. They were making cold calls, sending boring direct mail, and calling their existing clients to hit them up for referrals.

Suffice to say, I was kinda stunned as I thought people had abandoned ineffective tactics like this quite some time ago.

After about 20 minutes of these one on one conversations, the host of the event formally introduced the session, and called me up on stage to give my talk. I briefly introduced myself and then asked the audience a series of questions.

Here’s What They are Doing Wrong

First, I asked those who were making cold calls to find new clients to raise their hands. Approximately half the room did so.

Next, I asked those who were using direct mail to identify themselves by raising their hands. This time about one third of the people raised their hands.

Next, I asked people to raise their hand if they received cold calls on regular basis. Three quarters of the room raised their hands.

I followed up by asking how many were receiving direct mail, and about one quarter of the room raised their hands.

Then, I asked how many people actually enjoyed receiving cold calls or receiving direct mail.

No one raised their hand.

I concluded my round of questions by asking the people who were making the cold calls and sending the direct mail to raise their hand if they were getting measurable results.

No one raised their hand.

In other words, we had a room full of people who were making cold calls, almost none of whom were getting any results whatsoever, and the same room was full of the same people who are receiving cold calls and they all found it very annoying and intrusive.

Holy cow!

This is How People Shop Today

Over the next hour, I spent a great deal of time helping the audience to think about how people shop in today’s economy. Since everyone is a consumer, I simply explored what they did prior to making a purchase.

Most were very quick to realize that the vast majority of people use the internet extensively to perform research and to gather information prior to making a purchase. In other words, they used online content to help make their purchase decisions.

It didn’t take my audience very long to realize that content marketing was something that could work very well for each of their businesses. What they didn’t understand was how to actually implement content marketing in their own businesses and so I spent a great deal of time walking them through the step-by-step actions that they would need to take to become content marketers.

By the time I got to the end of the portion of my presentation devoted to content marketing I stopped and I asked that if the presentation had ended there, if they would have found it worthwhile.

Every hand in the room went up.

A Live Marketing Automation Tutorial

I then shared that I had spent approximately three hours that morning setting up a very short marketing campaign using some of the latest marketing automation tools. I explained that these tools do not require an understanding of how to write code, or any other special technical skills.

Instead, all that was needed is a desire to learn, and to not be afraid to experiment.

At this point I asked my audience to pull their cell phones out of their pockets and to text the word ‘Trent’ to 585858. (go ahead and do it now so you can experience what they did)

Within about a minute of sending the text each person then received a text message back from me containing a link. When they clicked the link, they went to a landing page where they could opt in to be an insider and get early access to the book that I’m about half way through writing (yes, I actually plan to finish and publish it this time!)

Once they entered their name and email address into that opt in form, they were redirected to a page with the video of me thanking them for signing up and explaining to them what I wanted to them do next.

While they were watching it, I explained that I had created automation that would take further action if they watched at least 75% of the video. This extra automation caused them to receive another email, but I told them that I could have programmed it to send me a text message, or put a task in my task list, or send an email to me or pretty much anything else that I liked.

(at this point, most of the people in the audience looked pretty amazed that this was even possible to do)

Tracking Video Engagement

Around this time, anyone who had watched 75% of the video received the next email. I asked them what they thought would happen if they were able to be notified when a prospect of theirs watched most of one of their videos.

Did they think they would do better than a cold call if they were to call the prospect right at that instant?

Virtually every hand in the room went up.

Following my talk, there was time left for Q&A. To say that I was bombarded with questions would be an understatement. I did my best to share what I know about content marketing and marketing automation in the limited time that I had. Of course, there was a lot more that I could have shared if I had had more time, including the nitty gritty details of what it takes to implement these strategies effectively into your business.

After the talk was over, a member of the audience asked me if I had a book that covered all this stuff. She said that if I did, at least half the people in the room would have bought it.

Say no more.

The Book That I’m Writing Will Help You

I have been thinking about writing a book for a while now. In fact, about half of it is already written.

Seeing that there is still a huge opportunity to provide substantial value to small business owners who aren’t yet aware of the benefits of content marketing and marketing automation, I have decided to charge full steam ahead and finish my book as fast as I can.

If you’d like to learn more about the book, have an opportunity to get sneak peaks and have your opinions heard (as well as get a discount on it when it’s released), then just head over and get on the early bird list right now.

Trust me when I say, you will be glad you did :)

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How to Uncover Your Optimum Selling Strategy – Part 2

August 29, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

In How to Uncover Your Optimum Selling Strategy Part 1, I explained how I was looking for a way to get the Bright Ideas Agency generating positive cash flow in the shortest period of time possible by using what Michael Masterson calls an Optimum Selling Strategy (OSS) in his book, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat.

Today, I’m going to continue where I left off by taking a deeper dive into the second of four questions that you (and I) must answer in order to discover our own OSS.

What Product Do You Sell Them?

Most people who start a business do so because they have an idea for a product or service. Sadly, this is not always the best way to get going – unless you’re just lucky enough to nail it right out of the gate.

Personally, I’m never that lucky! Which is why I recorded the video below a few years ago.

The reason that having only one product in mind when you launch isn’t a very good idea is because you are basically putting all your eggs in one basket, and unless you already know your market/industry extremely well, that is quite a large risk to take.

To avoid this, savvy entrepreneurs remain flexible about the details of their product. If version one doesn’t work, another version can be waiting in the wings.

How to Determine the Ideal Startup Product

Here are five simple steps to creating a product that is virtually guaranteed to succeed:

Find out what products are currently hot in your market
Determine if your product idea fits that trend
If it does, you’re set, if not, go to next step
Come up with me-too versions of several hot products
Improve them in some way by adding features or benefits lacking in the originals

Let’s go into more detail on these steps.

How to Discover the Hot Products in Any Market

Figure out what’s hot!
Image credit: 123rf.com

In Part 1 of this post, I suggested you go study the competition to see where they were advertising? Well, now you want to pay attention to what they are trying to sell with all those ads.

When you do this, you are going to see trends, and the trend you are looking for is the product type that is most commonly advertised. That is the hot product.

When studying the hot products in your market, it’s also very important to pay attention to the trend for these products because there is the chance that they are near the end of their trend. To do this, first, start off with Google Trends and take note of whether the search volume for related keywords is still on the rise. If it is, you’re probably in good shape.

Another method you can use is to talk to some people in the industry, as they are going to be far more in tune with what is going on within their industry that you are ever will…unless of course, you are already an industry insider.

Once you have identified the top three to five products in your space, you should spend some time studying them. Identify their features and benefits. Compare them. Attempt to figure out which features are most desirable. Make a list of any deficiencies that you see. Write all this down and then review it.

Once you’ve done all this, and you have an idea of what your product might look like, it is a good idea to start sharing it with friends and/or colleagues so that you can ask them for input on how you could improve it. If you don’t have a draft description of your product yet, just share the products you are researching and ask the same questions. If you and the people you are showing it to are excited, that is a good indication that you have something to take it to market.

How Much to Charge?

By now, you should know where your customers are and have a pretty good idea for a product that will sell. (Remember, you are NOT reinventing the wheel here…you are just improving on a kind of wheel that is already selling!)

All you need to do now is to figure out how much to sell it for.

Much like my previous advice on generating a product, with pricing, I’d suggest you stick pretty closely to what others are doing. If you can afford to be less expensive, that could be a good thing; however, keep in mind that building a business whose only differentiator is price can be a double edged sword. Good, because it generates business. Bad, because your price-conscious buyers may leave you in a heartbeat if they find a better deal somewhere else.

Optimal Selling Price

In Ready, Fire, Aim; Michael gives a pricing example from his newsletter business. He said that, through testing, he determined that $39/year is the optimal price for his newsletter. Selling for less eroded profits and selling for more killed conversions. Based on this, if I was launching a newsletter, I’d charge $39/year.

The optimum price isn’t always the lowest one.
Image credit: 123rf.com

Earlier, I warned of trying too low a price. However, there is one exception to that, and that’s when you have a back end funnel filled with higher value, higher priced products.

For example, the last information product I launched was a course for marketing consultants on how to generate more leads. Because I wanted to sell a high volume of products, I priced it on a dime sale starting at $7 with the price rising to as high as about $10. Then, in my back end funnel, I offered two upsells. The first was at $49 and the second was at $97. Of those who purchased the initial product, 26% of buyers took the first upsell and 10% of buyers took second upsell.

As a result of taking this approach, we sold 1,450 front end units, 377 of upsell #1 and 148 of upsell #2. Overall, even though I never made a dime on the front end sale, the product’s overall profits were very good and since then, I’ve been able to generate even more revenue from the customers that bought the original product. Obviously, I’m not the first one to try a strategy like this – and, as I said before, sticking to what is already working for your product/market will likely lead to desirable results.

How Will You Convince Them to Buy?

If you’ve done a good job with defining your OSS up to this point, generating sales will not be overly challenging. With that said, they key is to generate as many sales as possible, and to do that, you are going to need to ensure that you do an extremely effective job of getting your sales message across to your buyer. This is done with sales copy.

Sales copy can have a huge impact on sales. Done correctly, sales copy can easily double your overall sales.

If you have never written sales copy before, study the sales pages and emails of other successful sellers in your space. Pay particular attention to the structure of their sales copy, as opposed to just their words.

As you might guess, an overview of how to write sales copy is well outside the scope of this post, so rather than attempt to do that, I’d suggest you grab a copy of Michael’s book and study the chapter devoted to sales copy. In addition, you may also want to spend some time on CopyBlogger.com as there are a plethora of tips and advice to be found.

For the basic nuts and bolts of writing effective sales copy, I’ll offer up four concepts (from Michael’s book) that you must know:

1. You must understand the difference between wants and needs
2. You must understand the difference between features and benefits
3. You must understand how to establish a unique selling proposition (USP) for you product
4. You must understand how to sell the USP

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How to Uncover Your Optimum Selling Strategy – Part 1

August 22, 2013/0 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

When launching a company or a product, my goal is always to get the maximum traction possible in the shortest amount of time. Sometimes, I get better results than others, and because of that, I’m always on the lookout for methods that appear to be more effective than what I’m currently using.

It was with this desire in mind, that I started to read a book called Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat by Michael Masterson, and while I’ve not yet finished this wonderful book, I have already picked up some really fantastic ideas, the first of which is what Michael calls The Optimum Selling Strategy.

Introduction to The Optimum Selling Strategy

Michael believes that for every business at any given time, there is one best way to acquire new customers, and that this best way is the way the meets the company’s greatest current need. For a startup, the greatest need is almost always – or should be – generating positive cash flow.

Put simply, startups need to find the most effective way to generate positive cash flow NOW.

You need to prioritize your cash flow.
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The mistake that most entrepreneurs make when they are first starting out is that they are so totally jazzed with their product or service (their baby), that they don’t give adequate considering to feeding their baby – with cash flow. Oddly, this same thing can even happen to more experienced entrepreneurs like me! We often assume that one method of selling can be just as good as another.

According to Michael, we’re dead wrong.

How we sell our lead product – the specific decisions we make about presenting and pricing it – has a huge impact on whether or not we’ll be successful. If you find yourself thinking that your product is so totally awesome that it will sell itself, you’re in for a rude awakening, I can assure you.

Figuring out my OSS for the Bright Ideas Agency is something that I’m working on right now; and was my motivation for writing this post. I always think through things better when I write, so why not share my thoughts, ideas, and insights with you? Hopefully, some of you will add your own ideas down in the comments, and we’ll all benefit as a result.

How to Discover Your Optimum Selling Strategy

When you get this right, you are taking a huge step in the right direction. It will make everything else that much easier. Problems will be less of a hassle, obstacles will be easier to overcome, and objectives will be less difficult to attain. Why? Simple…customer acquisition will no longer be your biggest and most expensive problem. Woot!

There’s another benefit to knowing your OSS that you should be aware of, and that is this: when you truly understand the basics of how to sell to your marketplace, you will never fall victim to anyone else’s half-baked marketing strategies and idiotic sales programs. And, even when you hand over the reigns to your marketing and sales functions to someone else, you will be able to confidently lead them in the right direction as your company grows.

The Four Secrets of the OSS

When you are first starting out, there are plenty of tactics that you could employ to attract customers. Direct mail, PPC advertising, Email marketing, SEO, Blogging, Youtube, and Podcast, Radio, etc…

As you are not likely an expert in all of these areas, you are going to very likely end up talking to people who are, and as a result, each of the experts you talk to is going to make a compelling case for why their particular method or medium is the best one for you to use.

To determine the optimum selling strategy for your business, you need to answer four questions that will have a significant impact and how quickly you generate positive cash flow – if at all!

Here are the four questions:

Where are you going to find your customers?
What product will you sell to them?
How much will you charge for it?
How will you convince them to buy it?

Answering these four questions is critical to discovering your OSS. To help you (and me) do that, let’s dive a little deeper into each one.

Where Are Your Customers?

Where do your customers spend time?
Image credit: 123rf.com

As I’m an online marketer, I tend to think about this in terms of where do they hang out online? Which blogs, forums, and communities do they enjoy? I also am starting to ask myself which magazines and trade journals they read because, most often, these companies will also maintain an email list. This is important because using “sponsored emails” is a going to be a part of my outreach strategy (which I will explain in future posts).

The trick here is that the answers may not be as easy as you’d think.

To give you an example of what I mean, I’m going to summarize the example that was used in Ready, Fire, Aim: let’s say you want to sell a new kind of golf ball. Where could you find your customers? The follow places might all work to reach them:

In the golf pro shop waiting in line to pay for stuff, so an ad near the cash register might work.
Advertising on the back page of a golf magazine might also work
A TV commercial that is run during tournaments might also work
Renting lists with names and addresses of amateur golfers might also work

As you can see, there are plenty of places where your customers could be reached, so what should you (and I) do?

The Best Strategy for Startups

Here’s my best advice for the lowest risk strategy: do what everyone else is doing. Why? Because if everyone else is doing it, it must work, right? Now, I’m not saying that you should do what everyone else is doing forever. There will be plenty of time to innovate and experiment later on, but for now, you need cash flow and want to avoid risk.

Finding the Best Locations

So, how do you locate the best places to find customers? Simple. Just pay attention to where your competition is advertising. Then, talk to people who are already selling to the same set of customers. Ask for the names of the people who are in charge of marketing and tell them you are a marketing student eager to learn what they do (this is true!) and ask for a 15 minute “informational interview”. Or, even better, ask them to be a guest on your podcast! (Why do you think I interview so many successful people on mine?)

Every industry also has its own trade association and these associations can be data gold mines. Contact them and tell them your plans for marketing your product. They will want to help you – just keep in mind that their advice will be a bit biased.

The goal with all this is to assemble a master list of media placements – a map of where all the marketing activity for your industry is happening. This map will reveal where your competitors advertise, how often they do it, and how much they are spending.

Short on cash? Not to worry! Doing research like this doesn’t cost anything more than your time.

When it comes to marketing, nothing is more important that where you buy your media. This is because it really doesn’t matter how well your sales copy is written if you are pitching the wrong audience. For example, if my ad offered 75% off Luis Vuitton bags, but I sent the offer to lumberjacks, I’m not likely to sell much, am I? Whereas, if my sales copy is just average, but I target my exact customers (and do it well), I’m going to see a LOT more sales come in the door.

What Product Do You Sell Them First?

We’ll discuss this in detail in the next post in this series, so stay tuned…or better yet, become a subscriber and you’ll never miss a thing!

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Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Get Traction With Your Audience with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com

August 19, 2013/2 Comments/in Blog Posts /by Trent Dyrsmid

Are you having trouble keeping your customers and website visitors interested in your site?

Do you want to learn a content creation model that answers the questions of your site visitors and target customers?

To learn how to quickly turn your one time website visitors into your followers, I interview Andrew Warner.

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.

In this episode, I interview Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com.

Watch Now

Turning One-time Visitors into Loyal Followers and Customers with Interviews

An Easy Content Creation System to Land Followers and Leads

People always want some form of content to satisfy their needs and curiosity about a particular topic. It is through the content that you provide that your audience engages your site, your products and your services. It is content that turns your one-time visitors into loyal followers.

Content is key to loyal customers.
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Listen to the show to discover how Andrew approaches content creation for small business owners.

Andrew’s Top Email Registration Strategy

In order to have people see your content again and again, it’s super helpful if they give you their contact information so you can reach out to them. Andrew gets more than 100 new subscribers to his mailing list every day. He does this with one simple strategy.

Listen to the show to learn what this powerful strategy is and incorporate it in your site today.

Head Game: It Changes Everything

Sometimes, setbacks are going to challenge your business. There are times when they are minor and are easily manageable, then there are times when they are “end of the world” big.

Listen as Andrew describes how he manages the setbacks that he has experienced in the course of his business.

About Andrew

Andrew Warner is only in his 20s, but he already has a big success under his belt – a $30 million internet business with his younger brother. He started out with online greeting cards and is now focusing on interviewing successful entrepreneurs on his Mixergy.com website.

He created Mixergy to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does.

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