The How and Why of Creating a Buyer Persona with Chris Handy

chris-handy-interview_0Chris Handy is back on Bright Ideas to dive into why having a buyer persona is such an important tool in any inbound strategy.

We rarely have repeat guests on Bright Ideas (in fact, this is only the second time; in the first interview, Chris shared how he built a $400k two-person agency in just 2 years). I didn’t necessarily plan on bringing Chris back, but on a webinar I heard someone explain some really insightful points about a buyer persona — turns out, Chris ended up being the mystery speaker and he has graciously accepted another invitation to offer some proven tactics on how creating buyer personas have helped grow his business.

This topic relates to ALL business people, and I know you’ll learn a great deal yet again from Chris.

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

  • (03:00)  Introductions
  • (04:00)  What I’ve been doing with my Podcast and Groove
  • (10:00)  What happened at your first live webinar?
  • (14:30)  Why should I bother with creating a buyer persona?
  • (19:00)  How many buyer personas should you have?
  • (21:45)  How do you create a buyer persona?
  • (27:00)  How do you use the persona in your content marketing?
  • (29:00)  How do you use the persona in your lead nurturing strategy?

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

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Chris Handy

ChrisHandyChris Handy is the Founder & CEO of ThinkHandy, a sales and marketing alignment consultancy in Fort Worth, TX. Apart from starting ThinkHandy, Chris has also done work for eRecyclingCorps, Easysale Inc, and EzBayer.

Chris’ company is Hubspot Certified and has an extensive inbound marketing background. Chris is a graduate of the Univeristy of Texas at Arlington in Management and Marketing and is a self-proclaimed Saved By The Bell “Trivia Master”.

My Two Year Plan to Build a $500,000 Marketing Agency

how to start a marketing agency image source: thinkgeek

What do ultra-successful entrepreneurs all have in common?

Focus.

When you nail that down, you get results… when you don’t, you’re just doing busy work.

As I’ve thought more and more about my business, my products, and how I’ve been spending my time, I’ve come to the realization that how I’ve been allocating my time is not exactly (and the actions that I’m taking are not exactly) what I need to be doing to achieve the results that I’m after. This podcast discusses how I’m going to change my approach and get my business to exactly where it needs to be, with clear and precise steps. If you are a business owner or are looking to start a marketing agency, I really hope you take a listen and get some insights from how to do the same with your company.

 For more episodes from myself and other successful business professionals, subscribe now and don’t miss out on future shows.

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

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How Owens Harkey Made the Inc 5000 List with Scott Harkey

scott-harkey-interview_0

Scott Harkey is a partner at Owens Harkey, a firm that made the 2013 Inc 5000 list. He and his partner Matthew Owens achieved substantial growth by specializing in media buys, an area where they have substantial expertise.

Owens Harkey has not only had big growth in the past year, they’re also planning on going from their current $6M in sales to $12M this year. This is a fast growing company using proven marketing strategies – so if you’re at all interested in media or online buying, or in digital marketing for that matter, I guarantee you’ll take away some great lessons.

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

  • (03:00)  Introductions
  • (05:00)  What is media buying?
  • (08:00)  What are the two biggest mistakes made by media buyers?
  • (12:00)  Would you encourage other agency owners to get into media buying?
  • (14:30)  What does digital marketing mean for your firm?
  • (18:00)  How does YouTube Preroll buying work?
  • (21:00)  How can you get started with retargeting?
  • (23:00)  What is the hottest trend in digital media buying?
  • (25:00)  What are some best practices for Facebook advertising?
  • (29:30) What are some of the best practices for image selection?
  • (34:00) Does buying media via content networks make sense?

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

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Scott Harkey

Scott HarkeyScott Harkey always fostered a love of marketing. A native to Arizona, he proudly attended Arizona State University. Most of his time at ASU was spent studying marketing, and he also formed Mammoth Marketing, a marketing promotions company.
He then began to work extensively in all aspects of the radio world, in radio formats extending from Hip Hop to Oldies. During his six years in Media he ended up in the senior rep position at CBS radio and generated over $3 million in annual revenue (Job share position).

Now, Scott is partnering with a long-time friend and marketing expert, Matthew Owens, to build the kind of marketing services firm he has always envisioned. As partner, his core responsibilities lie in marketing strategy, business development, account services, media services, and broadcast production. His personal webpage: owensharkey.com

Additional Resources

How to Pivot Your Agency From SEO to Content Marketing with Robb Bailey

robb-bailey-interview_0

There are a great deal of companies that focus primarily on SEO, and that’s a problem. The problem is, it’s easy to think Traffic leads to Revenue… and that ignores a big missing piece. It’s really Conversions lead to Revenue.  That’s why Content Marketing is such an important piece of an overall marketing strategy.

Robb Bailey of PageLadder understood this and shifted his company’s emphasis on SEO to an Inbound approach and has seen massive success from it. As one of Hubspot’s prime case studies for effective Inbound Strategies, Robb and PageLadder have a great deal of insight for you and I highly recommend you take the time and listen if you are using – or thinking of using – a Content Marketing Strategy (hint: you probably should be).

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

  • (03:35)  Introductions
  • (06:00)  Why the transition from SEO to an Inbound Marketing Agency?
  • (08:35)  What did the transition from SEO to Inbound look like?
  • (10:00)  How did this change impact fees?
  • (16:35)  How are you prospecting for new business?
  • (23:35)  How are you using builtwith.com to find prospects?
  • (34:35)  What is the Content Marketing Blueprint?
  • (39:35)  How does the Content Marketing Blueprint help to identify the gaps?
  • (42:35)  When do you ask clients to start to pay for your help?
  • (49:35)  Do you require a client to move from WordPress to Hubspot?
  • (52:35)  Why do you prefer Hubspot reporting instead of Google Analytics?
  • (57:05)  How do you drive traffic to new content in the first 90 days?

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

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Robb Bailey

Robb BaileyRobb is the CEO & Co-Founder of PageLadder, an agency that helps emerging growth companies bridge the Inbound Marketing gap through Content Marketing Strategy. His work was featured in a case study at HubSpot’s Inbound Conference 2013 by Innovative Marketing Resources. PageLadder has been recognized as a Certified Partner Agency by HubSpot. Learn more at RobbBailey and PageLadder.

Additional Resources

How to Leverage Content to Build a Successful Law Practice with Cathy Moran

cathy-moran-interview_0

In this episode I interview Cathy Moran, a bankruptcy attorney. Cathy shares how Content Marketing has helped her attract clients and help them better understand the bankruptcy process before they even speak with her. Her strategy generates more leads who are ready to start working with her without first having to undergo a long consultation.

This speaks to the core of my philosophy on content: make it relevant to your client and help nurture your leads throughout the sales process.This episode definitely helps to validate how and why content marketing is such a powerful tool for your business. Listen now and you’ll hear Cathy and I talk about:

  • (02:35) Introductions
  • (04:25) Why is Content Marketing for lawyers in bankruptcy so important?
  • (07:35) Why is giving information away for free so effective?
  • (10:05) When did you get started with Content Marketing?
  • (11:15) How did Content Marketing affect the types of clients you attracted?
  • (12:35) How should an attorney decide what to write about?
  • (16:35) How has content helped you to get more referrals?
  • (20:35) How should an attorney get started with Content Marketing?
  • (25:05) How can you make a blog post interesting?
  • (30:35) How should you make an article interesting?
  • (33:55) How do you promote your content?

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

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Cathy Moran

Cathy Moran Cathy Moran opened her own law firm the day after she was admitted to the California bar. She’s practiced bankruptcy law in the Silicon Valley of California for 32 years, representing debtors, creditors, and trustees. She is certified as a specialist in Bankruptcy Law by the Board of Legal Specialization, State Bar of California and has particular interest in the intersection of bankruptcy law and the fields of family law and tax.

Cathy launched Bankruptcy in Brief, found at bankruptcyinbrief.com in 1998, when the web was new. Currently she writes for consumers on bankruptcy issues at bankruptcysoapbox.com and on issues for lawyers new to consumer bankruptcy law at bankruptcymastery.com.

Her latest web project is ConsumerLedger.com, a personal finance site where she shares what she’s learned about law, money, and business with the general public. Cathy serves as the Northern California chair of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. She is a frequent speaker at lawyer gatherings on bankruptcy, marketing and content creation. She makes her home on the San Francisco Peninsula, close by her alma mater Stanford University.

Additional Resources

3 Reasons You Must Create a Buyer Persona

buyer persona template

Having trouble conveying your message to customers? Not closing sales as efficiently as you would like? You might have to adjust your buyer persona.

If you haven’t created a buyer persona, you are wasting your time and money. In this episode, I dive into some quick tips on how to create a relevant persona and how to use that to create relevant content – all of which leads to a successful content marketing strategy. Take a quick listen and you’ll learn:

  • Why Buyer Personas Are So Important
  • The Consequences of Not Identifying Your Ideal Customer
  • What the Right Customer Can Do For Your Business
  • Audience Jacking and How to Find Your Ideal Customer
  • Tools For Identifying Potential Leads

For more episodes from myself and other accomplished business professionals, Subscribe now and don’t miss out on future shows.

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

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Idea Hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 115 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 today’s episode I’m going to talk about 3 reasons why you must create a buyer persona template.

Why might you want to listen to this?

If you are having some difficulty being interesting enough and getting enough traction with your marketing, maybe you’ve missed out on this.

The other reason I think you should listen to this episode is you’re going to discover the number one mistake that most new marketers make in this area and I’m going to teach you how to do it properly.

So before we get in to that, I have two very quick announcements.

If this is your very first time listening to the BrightIdeas podcast and your listening to a mobile device, please right now text the word podcast to the number 96000 and you’ll see some of my cool marketing automation trickery – which is very easy to reproduce – plus you’re get an opportunity to opt-in and make sure that you receive notifications of all future episodes that come out.

Announcement number 2 is if you’re looking for proven blueprint for using digital marketing, I wrote a book and it’s called the Digital Marketing Handbook and you can download a free chapter at brightideas.co/book.

With that said lets transition over and go ahead and teach you about why you need to create a buyer persona.

Welcome back to another video on my series on content marketing. In this video – as the headline might clue you in – we’re going to talk about buyer personas.

So a buyer persona is something that you don’t want to skip. This is really important because if you don’t take the time to define exactly who you’re writing for and who you want to attract to your blog – and ultimately they will become… the goal of course, to have them become customers of your company – you’re going to fail in a couple of really important areas.

Number 1 is relevancy. You’re content obviously is not going to be as relevant as it is otherwise could, and that can have a cascade effect on two other really important things. If your content is not super relevant, your audience is not going to be very engaged. If they’re not very engaged, they’re not going to do a lot of sharing in social networks – and don’t underestimate the power of social networks.

When you produce copies of content – be the video like this one, or a podcast, or a written piece of content – if you really nailed relevancy, a lot of sharing can take place and it can actually have a very viral effect.

So how do you go ahead and get started with creating a buyer persona? Starts with research. If you have the customers right now, make sure that you pick up the phone and talk to them, because if they are your ideal customer, and you want you want more of those people, in order to track more you need to understand precisely who they are – and at the end of this video I’m going to give you a link to some additional resources that you can get some templates for this stuff.

Now, if you don’t have a lot of customers, a little term that I invented is called Audience Jacking. Basically all that is this: you’re going to go to your competitor’s blog and you’re going to look at who’s commenting on those blogs – and typically when people comment, under their names is a hyperlink to their own website.

When you get back to their website, you’re going to learn a lot more about those people. One other thing that you’re going to be able to do is find their social profiles. When you figure out who they are, go to their Facebook page and under their picture there’s going to be a more button and underneath that more button is you can see what they like, so that’s going to give an idea of some of the interest of that individual.

The other thing you should do is go to their twitter profile and look at their twitter stream, what site’s content are they retweeting, who are they following. This is going to tell you a lot about the type of things that are of interest to this person (who is of course of interest to you), same with LinkedIn. Look at their LinkedIn profiles, there is tons of data there for you to mine.

How do you find your competitors or how do you learned about your competitors?

There is a free resource called Quantcast. If you type in any sites URL into Quantcast, you’ll get a lot of demographic information about that site.

How do you find what (on at any given website) the audience is most interested in? Go type their URL into a Quicksprout – so go to quicksprout.com. Neil Patel has a tool there that does website analysis. You punch in the URL, let it crunch its numbers, click on the top tab of the middle called the social media tab, and then give it a minute to crunch the numbers and then scroll down and you’re going to see a list of all of the most shared pieces of content on that site – which also by the way, will give your ideas of the things that you should be writing about.

I promised some additional resources. If you watching this on YouTube or some other place, just go to brightideas.co/persona. That will take you directly to the blog post that contains this video plus a bunch of other resources that we created for you.

One of those resources that we didn’t create but will be downloadable is a guide. It’s actually a template for creating buyer personas and it was produced by Hubspot. It’s a wonderful guide. I didn’t need see the need to recreate it plus there will be some additional resources for you.

Now if you are watching this video and this is the first time that you’ve ever been exposed to BrightIdeas, I have something else for you that I want to give to you. That’s my conversion tactics four-part video trainings series, it’s absolutely free! All you have to do is go to brightideas.co, enter your name and email address and you will be given instant access.

Thanks very much for tuning in. I hope to see you in another episode so take care.

 

Additional Resources

 

Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

content marketing strategy

This episode touches on some key elements of starting a content marketing strategy and why it’s important to take the time to set up your strategy before starting your content marketing. I’ve built Bright Ideas on content marketing, and I believe you can have success with content marketing as well – assuming you have the right strategy. Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • Why Content Marketing is Becoming so Important
  • Your Sales Funnel and How Content Helps
  • Finding Influencers
  • Defining Your Target Market
  • Supporting a Niche or Specialized Service

For more episodes from myself and other accomplished business professionals, subscribe now and don’t miss out on future shows.

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

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there, Bright Idea hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 114 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this the podcast where we feature interviews with the entrepreneurs behind some of today’s fastest growing companies, if you’re looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you start a new business or to grow an existing one, you are in the right place.

Now, I just said that this is the podcast where we do interviews and guess what; I’m not going to do an interview in this particular episode. That’s right! I’m branching out and I’m going to start doing some monologue podcasts. The reason for that is that I want to increase a frequency of the episodes that I do in the ITunes store and I want to be able to make myself available to help you guys in small bite size chunks so these episodes that I do as monologues are going to be lot shorter and they’re going to be direct and straight to the point, so with that said lets jump into what we are going to talk about in this one. On this episode we’re going to talk about beginner’s guide to creating an effective content marketing strategy. Now I’m actually kind of cheating in this first episode in that, I already recorded the bulk of this episode as a video and I have decided to repurpose that particular video because there’s nothing on the video that you actually need to see to get the point of what I am explaining. So why do you want to listen to this episode?

If you don’t have a content marketing strategy in place, I can promise — boy oh boy I’m speaking from personal experience — success will take forever if you get it at all! In this episode you were going to learn from some of the many, and I want to emphasize, many mistakes that I made very early in my content marketing career.  when I really didn’t have a clue of what I was doing, and as a result of all those make mistakes, I’ve developed a proven plan that I use and that many of the people I’ve interviewed in the past have used — that’s what I learn it from, so really if content marketing is your thing, and boy oh boy it really should be cause it is the way to get business in this day and age, you really going to dig this episode. So that’s it lets jump right into it.

Everybody this is Trent here from BrightIdeas and in this video, I want to share with you something that I go through with client after client after client at the beginning of our engagements, and that is how to get started with a successful inbound marketing campaign. So before we dive into the tactics, I want to talk a little bit about the concept. So the concept is you need to create a “funnel”, for a lack of a better term, of content that’s going to help people to discover you and then go all the way through to becoming a customer. The top of the funnel is where you are probably going to be, or you should be, creating the most content and this is in the area where a lot of people who are new to content marketing make big mistakes.

They start talking about their stuff, their products, and their services. The problem with that is that early on in the buying process people don’t care about you, they care about themselves, and the problems that they are trying to solve. In the order to be successful to attracting interest into the top of your funnel you need to not interrupt people from what their interested in, you need to become what they are interested in and you need to then create content which helps them to solve the problems that they have. We are going to talk about the specific of how to do that in a minute. In the middle of your funnel, this is where you want to start dealing with what I call “providing answers to pre sales questions”.

As you can imagined if you a sales force a lot of times before people buy something, they are asking “what about this? What about that? What about the other thing? How to do this? How to do that?” In the middle of your funnel you want to create content that addresses those issues, because if you do, you will actually move people a lot further along in the buying process and therefore make closing a sale a whole lot easier, without having any of the one-on-one interaction that you would have to have if you didn’t have this content in the middle of your funnel. And then at the bottom of your funnel that is where you tell him to buy, or is they said in Jerry Maguire that’s where you say, “Show Me The Money!!”

Those are pieces of content which specifically instruct people to go here, do this, buy this, buy that, click here to buy, put it in your cart… content which helps people to do that, it’s going to be the smallest the money your content, but it is going to be the content that brings the money in. Now, if you sell information products and software, this type of content can actually close the sale for you. If you sell something that requires someone to interact with you because it’s a consulting sale for example, this type of content is not necessarily going to close the sale, but it might close the appointment where you then get to have the sales conversation as we often do in our own business in our consulting division. With that concept said, let’s dive into –before I do that by the way, all of these stuff is explained in a lot more detail on a book that I wrote of the digital marketing handbook and you can get that brightideas.co/book.

Alright, one of the things, the most important thing for you to do to make all of the funnel stuff happen is that you need to start up with researching and the defining a target market. Very, very often when I am in discussions with consulting clients and I say to them, “who is your target market?” and they say “well small business”, “I sell marketing services for example, and I want to sell to small business.” The problem with that is that it’s far too broad and it’s not specialized enough. So you really do need to pick a niche and specialize and the way you do that if you have customers you need to get on the phone with your customers and you need to ask them questions to gain a really deep understanding of why exactly did they choose you? How they find you? What they like most about working with you? What are areas that you could improve?

You really want to get inside the head of your customer and figure out, especially when they were in this top of the funnel phase, kind of what were they interested in? What problem were they trying to solve? Now if you don’t have any customers yet, you can still do this and it is a crafty way to do it, use something like LinkedIn for example, great for connecting with other business people, and say “listen I am doing a survey because I want to understand how the fastest growing companies are using digital marketing to achieve their results. If you help me by answering questions, we will be only in the phone for about 10 minutes, I will make sure that you will get a free advance copy of the survey so that you can gain and understanding of what the fast growing companies are doing different than the companies that are not growing so fast.” Trust me when I say, people will be fairly willing to help you because they are very interested in seeing the results of the survey.

We are going to use those conversations to gain a much deeper understanding, you want to understand their problems, their needs, their wants and their desires, and you also want to understand the language that they used to describe these things. Imagine that you were sitting at the conference room with the management team, they were doing their strategy session they are talking about their problems, what words are they using? What terminology? What phrases? You really need to understand this stuff, because you’re going to use it later on your blog post titles and also in your free report titles, the headlines on your sales pages and opt-in pages, you really have to make sure that you use their language. The other thing that you going to gain deep understanding of, is their media consumption profile. What is that? It is all the sites that they go to a regular basis, the magazines that they read on a regular basis.

The discussion groups, the LinkedIn groups, the Facebook groups, and where did they hang out online? Who did they follow? Who did they think is in an influencer within their niche? The reason that this is so important for you to know is later on when you start to promote your content, you need to know who these people are so that you could go build relationships with them and a very easy way to build those relationships is when you’re creating your content basically you just suck up to them. For example, let say that there’s a guy named Bob and Bob is really influential in the same niche that you want to get traction in. You are going to write an education blog post covering whatever.

In that post you are going to make sure that you make Bob look really good, then once the post is live on your site, you are going to tweet or email to say, “Hey Bob, I made you to look really good on my blog post.” You’re not going to use exactly those words, but that’s mostly what you need to say. Bob is going to come along and read your post, he is going to think “wow, and he made me look really smart I better tell my followers about this.” The more that you make other people, who are already influencers in your niche, look smart, the faster you will get traffic to your blog and followers. I cover a whole lot more about on how to promote your content in the book that was mentioned earlier. Once you’ve gone through step number 1, step number 2 is you want to find your buyer personas, what is it persona? Well in every sale there are people who are influencers, generally they are tasked with doing the research because their boss asked them, and they have some kind of specialized skill or knowledge that the decision maker doesn’t necessarily have. You get influencers and then you get decision makers. Now when you are creating your content, because you know that the influencers are probably the ones doing the research early on, you need to make sure that you create a lot of content for those influencers, but if you don’t know who they are, if you don’t know the problems that they have the things they are interested in, it’s going to be harder to create relevant content.

Then you need to speak to these people, in maybe a different way than you need to speak to the decision makers and you are going to get it figured out when you’re having those one on one conversations. That is why, I don’t recommend that you use surveys to do these research because the meat, the stuff  that you really after is in those live conversations that you want to have on the phone. Step number 3, is to develop a unique selling proposition, which is what USP stands for, and the important word in that sentence is unique. Earlier in this video I talk about the importance of specialization. The reason that specialization is so incredibly important is that you need to be unique. Let us go back and say that I’m trying sell services to the legal profession and I put up my website, “I serve lawyers.” Well it is really hard to be unique if I say “I serve lawyers.”

But within the legal profession there are sub-niches, there are lawyers that focus on DUI, other lawyers focus on estate planning, there are lawyers that focus on injury and there are lawyers who focused on back injury and then there lawyer who focus on other… you’re getting the idea right? There are niches within niches. The more specialized that you become two wonderful things happen: the more unique you become, you have less competition. And because you’re so relevant to the niche you’re going after, you’re so specialized you can charge much higher prices than if you’re a generalist because your buyers perception of value goes up a whole bunch. Make sure that you specialize and make sure that your website conveys that point. Now, you don’t have to specialize in just one niche, but you should start off with just one niche until you get meaningful traction in that niche and chances are, given this you can run a business globally as I do from our home here in Boise, one nice can still have a lot of different customers within it. Second part of step 3 is you’re going to develop content. Two types of content, you need to have, there are lot types of content but in this video there are two types of content, Lead Magnets and Blog Posts.

The lead magnet is the thing that you’re going to offer to people when they come to your site to give you their email address. That is incredibly important because if you don’t ever capture the lead, it is impossible to further nurture those leads. Make sure that you send them the most relevant content. How do you determine what the most relevant content is? You’re going to collect data and I have talked a lot about is in my book, there’s two type of data, internal data and external data. It’s outside the scope of this video but it’s very, very important if you want more info get the book. But, the reason it is so important is that you need to make sure that you send the right stuff to the right people. Because if you send the wrong stuff to the wrong people, relevance goes down, also the thing that goes down is the number of people that open your email cause it won’t be is interesting. Even worse is the number of people that unsubscribe from your list is going to go up. You don’t want to be sending the wrong information to the wrong people. You need to have relevance as high as you can, and so making sure that you understand who your buyers are, understand who your personas are, is going to help you a whole bunch with relevance, but also, you need to collect the data about those people to make it as relevant as possible.

If you don’t have a lead magnet, no one going to give you their email addresses, they don’t ever end up in a file, you can’t collect any data. They are just a random visitor to your website, they may never return again and you don’t want that to happen. Once you have done this, now you can get ready to get going with content marketing, you are ready to start creating content that aligns with the various places in this funnel, you’re ready to create an editorial calendar; you’re ready to create a list of things to blog about. There is a lot of different ways you can create content, there’s a lot of different types of content that you can create, posts, videos like this one, podcast, different types of post, and all of that stuff I cover in detail in my book the digital marketing handbook. It’s what I used to build my own business and I have a tribe now over 10,000 people, 10,000 plus visitors a month at the time I’m recording this video in December of 2013. Maybe you are watching this a year later in the numbers, more likely is gone up a whole bunch.

If you want that info in detail, go ahead and grab a copy of my book. Now if you are not watching this on my website, if you’re watching it on YouTube or some other place and you want more free information, come over to brightideas.co, become a subscriber. When you do, you going to get access to my four part video series on how to maximize conversions, and it is totally free.

All you have to do is give me your name and your email. I  practice what I preach, I have got a lead magnet and I want to capture leads, I want the segment and want to nurture, but most of all I want to help you become more successful. So, thank you for tuning in this video. I’ve got a lots of other videos here on my YouTube channel, make sure you become a subscriber and if you really like this video, do me a quick favor, share it on twitter, LinkedIn, your Facebook or Google+, okay? Share it on all of them.

Thank you so much will see you on another video. Take care.

 

Additional Resources

 

 

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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