A few months ago, we made an effort to do a better job of sharing and promoting our content. The initial results were quite impressive, so we hired a full time VA who primarily focuses on content promotion, and we’ve continued to refine and revise our strategies.
We posted on SlideShare on a Monday. We spent a full day tweeting about the SlideShare once an hour for 24 hours.
This probably had the biggest affect on initiating traffic, since Twitter is a significant source of our traffic.
We also shared the SlideShare with LinkedIn groups that we belong to, as well as on Pinterest, our Facebook page, and on google+.
We had hoped to do all the sharing on Monday, but due to miscommunication (and our VA helping us working in a different time zone), this all happened over the course of 48 hours, mostly on Tuesday and then Wednesday morning.
We didn’t reach the front page until later on Wednesday, and stayed there until Thursday afternoon.
Lessons Learned
At the start of this post, I mentioned that we didn’t land on the front page on the first try. After our first SlideShare was viewed a few hundred times (with no large boost in traffic to our site), we spent more time researching what makes SlideShares popular. Instructive (how to) shares seemed to fare pretty well.
Our goal going forward is to make future SlideShares just as informative, as well as more visually appealing.
What Do You Think?
If you have comments or questions, please take a moment to leave them down in the comments. You will get an answer.
Enter to Win a FREE Copy of My Digital Marketing Handbook
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/SlideShareHomePage.png10221178Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-19 06:00:492015-12-07 17:32:29How I Landed on the Front Page of SlideShare
Sometimes I’m not as disciplined as I’d like. When first start my day, there are tasks that are absolutely critical to growing my business that I know I must do, yet despite this, I sometimes forget…or get distracted by something else.
Sound familiar?
How to Stay on Task – Day After Day
Last night after my wife and I finished watching Homeland (we’ve just finished episode 2 of season 1), my brain decided it was going to go into “bright ideas” overdrive and one of the ideas that surfaced was the need to create a daily activity checklist.
Pilots use checklists. So do astronauts. I’m sure there are many other types of people that use them as well. Why? Simple, they don’t want to forget anything.
We actually use a lot of checklists already. We have checklists for podcast post production, writing blog posts, blog post editing, blog post promotion, onboarding a new client. You name it, we have a checklist for it.
Oddly enough, prior to last night, I’d not yet created a checklist of daily activities. Go figure.
My Daily Activity Checklist
Bad habits, distractions, and laziness be gone. I now have the first draft of a daily activity checklist to keep me on task.
In the checklist above, you will notice that I referred to something called a stalker list. This is not a list of people that you want to creep on! Instead, this is a list of the influencers who you’d like to build a relationship with. There are plenty of ways to find these people and one of the ways that I’ve found is to use Followerwonk by Moz.
With Followerwonk, you can easily find people who are influential in just about any niche you can think of. To see how to do it, simply have a look at the screenshot below.
If you aren’t a major influencer yourself, I suggest you start by targeting people who are slightly above your level of influence, as opposed to shooting for the stars.
This was a tactic that we used to recruit other bloggers to help spread the word about The Digital Marketing Handbook. We used Followerwonk to find out who we needed to connect with and then I had my VA comment on two posts and tweet those posts out (using my Twitter account). After that, my VA (using my email account) would send them an email to ask if they’d be interested in reviewing my book.
Because we’d focused on helping them first (comments and shares on their posts), when we emailed them, it wasn’t a cold email and many wrote back saying they’d love to review the book…as well as share it on their own social networks.
What Do You Think?
Even though I have interviewed over 100 entrepreneurs on my podcast, I’m well aware that I still have plenty to learn. If you have ideas for daily activities that a content marketer should be adding to this checklist, please share them in the comments below.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DailyActivityChecklist.jpg341690Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-13 08:50:362013-12-13 10:56:24How to Stay Focused with a Daily Activity Checklist
At a recent business networking event that I attended, I had the opportunity to be a firsthand witness to a “power networker” named Dave. Dave was a networking machine and he worked the room like no one I’ve ever seen, passing out business cards left and right.
Dave was amazing. In fact, he was the talk of the room.
Problem was that none of the “talk” was flattering. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. In just under an hour, Dave had managed to become the most annoying person in the room.
Do you think that anyone who received one of Dave’s cards would ever call him? Do you think that in the short conversations that Dave had with each person that he devoted any time to attempting to understand the problems or challenges faced by the person he was talking to?
Hardly. Dave was only interested in one thing: passing out as many cards as possible. After all, sales is just a numbers game, right?
WRONG.
Today, the way to successfully attract clients is not to interrupt them with your sales messages. The way to attract clients today is to create content that is actually useful.
In his book Youtility, Jay Baer completely hit the nail on the head. Smart marketing is about HELP not HYPE.
In the “old days” we would begin our buyer’s journey by reaching out and talking to a real person. We did this because we wanted to learn more about the company and create a bond of some kind.
When was the last time you reached out and talked to a live person at the very beginning of your research process? In my case, it’s been a very long time! The days of one-to-one communications early in the buyer’s journey are OVER.
Nowadays, the buyer’s journey starts off with online research and by the time you or I talk to a prospect, 60% of their homework is done. Customers are smart and they are stealthy. They are rigorously evaluating us without our even knowing they exist. IF we pass their sniff test, ONLY THEN do we stand a chance of actually speaking with them.
Content is Mission Critical
Content Marketing is the process of creating content that our prospects actually want or need. If you aren’t publishing high quality, helpful content, your competitors are probably eating your lunch.
To be successful with content, you must think carefully about the customer buying cycle and then create content to meet the needs of people in each phase.
The first phase has the largest number of potential buyers so you should begin with content that drives interest and awareness. We’ll call this top of the funnel content.
The next phase is the middle of the funnel. Here you want to focus on increasing engagement as well as answering questions about what you sell and how much it is.
The final phase is the bottom of the funnel. This is the place where you want to getting into the nitty gritty of all the frequently asked questions that are aligned with the buying process.
Attracting Buyers with Content
High quality content connects your buyers with solutions. (image source: 123rf.com)
Content marketing has one purpose: attracting buyers.
Unlike paid advertising, where you are attempting to interrupt buyers from whatever they are doing (so they will pay attention to you), the goal of content marketing is to attract buyers who are already searching for solutions to the problems they have.
Does’t that seem like a much smarter idea?
To succeed with content marketing, you have to shift your mindset from “how can we sell them” to “how can we help them”. People are tired of being sold and if that is your approach (like Dave), they will avoid you. However, if you focus on providing help, not only will people trust you more, but they will also help you to spread the word on their social networks.
Here at Bright Ideas, we walk our talk and provide a steady stream of the most helpful content that we possibly can. On this site there are hundreds of blog posts and interviews that are jam packed with content that is genuinely helpful.
How do I know it’s helpful? Because I get at least one email or tweet a day (from people I’ve never heard of) thanking me for creating content that is so helpful. My audience also regularly buys our products and services, so I can assure that being “helpful” definitely pays the bills.
Don’t just take my word for it though. According to BtoB Magazine, “Content Marketing” is one of the top priorities for marketing in 2014.
Check out the total number of searches for “content marketing”. From January of 2001 through to today, the trend has been steadily increasing.
Still not convinced? Here’s a bunch more statistics:
The Bright Ideas Traffic Report: Amazing Results From Effective Content Promotion
How Content Marketing Has Forever Changed How to Attract Clients and How You Can Take Advantage of This Shift
How to Get Started With Content Marketing
Getting started with content marketing is actually very easy to do.
Step 1: Find out what your customers are interested in learning more about.
To do this, I strongly suggest that you invest some time to actually call your customers and ask them. There is no substitute for first hand research like this.
If you are too lazy to call people, then I’d suggest sending out a survey and using plenty of open ended questions. Multiple choice is OK, but what you really want is to hear the answers in your customer’s own words so that you can use these phrases for keyword research.
Listen to your customers! (image source: 123rf.com)
Now that you have some idea of key phrases that your customers are using, make a list of them and start to use tools like Google trends and the Google keyword tool to gain insight into the trends and search volume for these key phrases. The data you uncover from doing this will help you to determine which topics you should write about.
If you are just starting out and don’t yet have any customers, use Google to find some discussion forums for the topic you are researching and take note of the questions people are asking. For questions that you see showing up over and over, go write a blog post that answers that question. Now you have a page you can tell people in the forums about and that will drive traffic to your site.
Step 2: Create content to provide helpful advice and answers to the questions your prospects are asking
Now that you have a list of questions, write a blog post that answers each question. It doesn’t have to be a long post and you don’t need to be a world-class writer. You need only be HELPFUL.
If you are brand new to writing, I’d suggest you look at other blogs in your niche and see which posts of theirs have received the most comments and social shares. Use these posts as a guide to helping you to create an effective post.
Generally speaking a good post will go something like this:
Overview of the problem (this is why you should read this)
Overview of the solution
Proof that the solution works (your proof or proof supplied by others)
Call to action (what your reader should do next)
Want to Learn More?
As you might guess, there are plenty of addition details, tips, tricks, and hacks to becoming a successful content marketer and to help you discover them, I have written a book that will take you from zero to a steady stream of new customers-all from content marketing. Plus, so that you can get an even bigger bang for your content marketing buck, I have devoted two chapters to how you can add something called marketing automation in with your content marketing.
Have questions? Please use the comment form below.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/SprinterOnBlocks.jpg552828Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-12 06:00:162015-12-07 17:38:38How to Get Started With Content Marketing
One of Joe Mechlinski’s favorite things to ask is, “How can we add value now?” Joe built his management consulting firm into a multi-million dollar business by providing tremendous value for his clients, helping them achieve significant growth in their companies.
Joe shares many of his strategies in his New York Times bestselling book, Grow Regardless: Of Your Business’s Size, Your Industry, or the Economy… and Despite the Government!
Digital marketing strategy forms a cornerstone of Joe’s success. He shares with us what he did to make the launch of his book a success, as well as how he uses content marketing in his own business.
Of course, that only scratches the surface of the good ideas that Joe shares in this interview.
Listen now and you’ll hear Joe and I talk about:
(01:55) Introduction
(03:25) His bio and background
(06:10) How they got started in business
(08:55) How they dealt with their worst month ever
(12:55) How to position yourself to charge a retainer
(15:55) How they got their early clients
(18:55) Where you can be most successful first
(23:25) Overview of how they positioned themselves to command value pricing
(27:55) Why having 3 business goals was a big challenge and what they did about it
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:
What should I talk about next? Please let me know on Facebook or in the comments below.
Joe Mechlinski is the co-founder and president of entreQuest, a business development firm that helps increase revenue for small-to-midsized businesses.
He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Grow Regardless: Of Your Business’s Size, Your Industry or the Economy… and Despite the Government!
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Joe.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-12-02 06:00:592020-09-10 06:49:59Digital Marketing Strategy: Joe Mechlinski on How He Built a Multi-Million Dollar Management Consulting Firm
If you are thinking about embracing content marketing to help grow your business, I hope that what I’m about to share with you will motivate you to begin immediately.
At 9am one morning last week, I hosted an online meeting with a prospective client in need of the type of help that we offer via our consulting company, Groove Digital Marketing. There were three people on the call from the prospect’s company: the owner, their copywriter, and their marketing/technology pro.
At 11:45, the call was finished, and without the need of a proposal, the owner said, “At this point, I cannot see why we will not be proceeding with you.” Two hours later, they’d made their first payment of $5,000 and we had a deal.
How Did This Happen?
Now that you know the outcome, I want to give you the back story. My hope is that when you see what happened, you will realize how powerful content marketing and marketing automation can be.
On November 5th, Brian (their technology/marketing guy) somehow found BrightIdeas.co as a part of his search for a solution to their marketing and operational challenges.
When he found my site, he decided that the free offer I make on the home page was valuable enough to become a subscriber.
The “lead magnet” I offer on the home page is access to my Conversion Tactics 4 part video training series. (If you would like to see the videos in this series, just go my home page and enter your details.)
This offer is the #1 way that I use to fill the top of my marketing funnel. Once in the funnel, subscribers are sent video #1 on day one, video #2 on day two, etc…
In Brian’s case, he watched video #2 on November the 8th and video #3 on November 9th. He watched 100% of video #1 and #2 and just 75% of video #3. I know this because I am able to track how much of my videos that each subscriber watches. In fact, the emails a subscriber receives from me actually differ, depending on how much of the videos they watch.
After watching 75% of video #3 Brian, who was unknown to me at the time, emailed me to ask if we could arrange a time to chat. I replied with a “yes” an asked him to book a time via my online calendar.
Houston, We Have Contact
Brian and I’s first call happened on November 18th and during that call, he gave me an overview of their business. He also took time to describe the problems and challenges that they wanted to overcome. Upon hearing these challenges, I knew that I could probably make a huge impact on their business over a period of time, and asked Brian to arrange another call for he and I, as well as the owner of the company.
Brian concluded by saying that his boss was a “very tough sell”, so I suggested that he have his boss listen to a few of the podcast interviews I’d done with other entrepreneurs whose businesses were more automated than Brian’s.
Houston, We Have Touchdown
The call with Brian’s boss (Paul) was a very long call and I spent most of the time asking questions. One of the challenges with conversations like this is that, with so much to talk about, the conversation can “wander around” for quite some time – and not necessarily lead to the desired outcome.
To avoid this, I decided to use a Lifecycle Marketing self assessment as a framework for the discussion. By using this framework, we were able to have a productive conversation about each area of their business. More importantly, I was able to learn a lot about Paul’s needs, wants, and desires in a very short period of time.
I was also able to learn a fair amount about Paul’s values and quickly realized that he was very passionate about his product and wanted to give his customers the best possible experience.
It probably took me a solid hour or so of questions before I ever got to the point of making any suggestions. In fact, after asking Paul to rate himself on each of the steps of Lifecycle Marketing, I would ask if he believed a change needed to be made or not. The goal of the self assessment and “is that really important to you?” questions was to figure out what Paul was most motivated to fix first.
Getting the Deal
Many inexperienced salespeople think that “closing” requires all sorts of fancy techniques and magical statements.
The truth is exactly the opposite.
The “close” is the logical conclusion to the consultative approach to selling – which is a fancy way of saying, to sell, you must ask questions – and lots of them.
The more questions I asked Paul, the more he began to trust what I had to say – and as time went by, enough trust was eventually built up for Paul to decide that we were the right fit for what he needed – so he made the decision to move forward.
Key Take Aways
Regardless of what you sell, there are always people looking for your product or service. The key is to let them find YOU. This is the primary goal of content marketing.
For over a year, I have been dutifully creating and publishing content that would help my target market to solve their problems. Had I not been publishing and promoting my content, Brian would have never found my website.
Once Brian did find my site, if I wasn’t capturing leads with a free offer (called a Lead Magnet), it would have been impossible for Brian to become a subscriber, and had he not become a subscriber, he would have never been exposed to the three videos he watched prior to reaching out to contact me.
Video is extremely powerful on the web. By using it, I was able to give Brian a first hand look at my personality and communication style. Had he not been exposed to these videos, I doubt that his motivation to reach out and ask for my assistance would have been nearly as high.
Marketing automation also played a huge role because Brian didn’t watch video #2 or #3 when I first sent him the links. He, like everyone else on the planet, was probably too busy on the day that these first emails arrived, so it wasn’t until he received a few reminders that he actually took the time to watch them. Had I not created the reminders in my funnel, it’s unlikely that I would have a new client today.
Want to Get Results Like This?
There is a very specific process to achieving success with content marketing and marketing automation and in today’s post, I have given you a glimpse of the results that can be achieved when you get the formula right.
If you have not yet implemented content marketing or marketing automation, I strongly encourage you to start today. To help you do that, I have written a book called the Digital Marketing Handbook: The Ultimate Small Business Guide to Putting Client Attraction on Autopilot that will be available for sale on December 10. If you get on the early bird list today, you will be notified the day the book is released and you will be given a coupon code to get 25% off the price. Go and register now!
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.png00Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-11-26 06:00:062015-12-07 17:32:20How Content Marketing and Marketing Automation Led to a $5,000 Retainer Client
As I have written about many times before, one of the really terrific things about having a podcast is that it is an extremely powerful tool for networking. Thanks to my podcast, my professional network has never been better – and the best part is that I don’t have to fly to conferences to expand it.
Just a few minutes ago I got off the phone with Michael Gass – a past guest on my show – and we talked about the promotional part of his digital marketing strategy. Since interviewing Michael some months ago, he and I have started to get to know each other a bit and I have quite enjoyed my interactions with him. Had it not been for my podcast, it’s unlikely that Michael and I would ever have crossed paths; much less become the business-friends that we now are.
Michael runs a blog called Fuel Line that is very popular with ad agencies. After reading one of my most recent blog posts, Michael emailed me to offer to help me with some ideas on how I could further increase traffic to my blog.
As I am always looking for ways to increase my traffic, I was very happy to take Michael up on his offer.
Michael Gets 35,000 Monthly Visitors
Michael has been blogging for quite a number of years now and his site receives between 30,000 and 35,000 visitors a month. Currently my site is getting around 10,000 visitors a month, so I was very sure that the advice that Michael was going to give me would be worth listening to.
Rather than keep Michael’s advice to myself, I thought it would be a good idea to go ahead and write this quick blog post to share his ideas with my audience as well. I hope you enjoy them!
If you have questions or comments about the ideas that Michael shared with me, please make sure and use the comments down below so that we can start a mini-mastermind on how to promote our blogs and generate more traffic.
Below is a list of all the tools that Michael told me about, along with his advice on how to use each one of them
SocialOomph
SocialOomph is a tool that he uses to promote his content across a variety of social networks including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Michael told me that he has around 800 posts on his blog and he uses social to regularly promote about 250 to 300 of his best posts. To do this, he creates a spreadsheet with the blog post titles and URLs and then uploads that spreadsheet to SocialOomph.
He creates a schedule that shares one of his posts every other hour from 3 AM to midnight every single day from Monday to Friday. He told me that this schedule matches the work schedule of his target audience around the world.
To create a spreadsheet he pastes the post title and the URL on one line with just a space between the two of them.
The main thing to understand about how Michael is using social is that he does not use it to promote his latest posts; instead he uses it to continuously promote his best posts. To promote his latest posts he uses HootSuite Pro.
Hootsuite Pro
HootSuite is another tool that allows you to promote your content across a wide variety of social networks and is one that I currently use. Unlike Michael I have been using only HootSuite Pro to promote both my new posts and my past posts on an ongoing basis.
In Michael’s case, whenever he publishes a new post he uses HootSuite Pro to promote his new post three times per day for a week. After the week is complete, he then stops using HootSuite to promote that post and adds it to his spreadsheet that gets uploaded to SocialOomph.
StumbleUpon
Michael told me that he has had very good success using StumbleUpon to promote his new posts. He didn’t say that there was anything particular about how he used it, other than to say that it was a part of his promotion strategy. I am already using StumbleUpon, and in terms of social networks that are sending traffic to my site, StumbleUpon ranks fifth behind Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and mobile Facebook.
Twitter
Michael is a very big advocate of Twitter and tells me that he gets a lot of traffic from it. In checking his account I see that he has 64,633 followers. He tells me that he used to use a tool called TweetAdder her to build this following however; over time, that tool has lost a great deal of its effectiveness.
He is now using a tool called ManageFlitter. ManagerFlitter has a free version and a paid version. Michael is using the paid version. He recommends following no more than 100 people per day and then he sets the program to wait for about three days and then unfollows anyone that doesn’t follow him back.
He tells me that you can build a very targeted following (which leads to traffic!) by following people who are influential in your niche, and then by following those that follow that person.
I’m sure that some folks think that using automation to build your Twitter following is something of a gray hat tactic, however, as it is a strategy that is working very well well for Michael, I did not want to excluded from this post. Plus, it’s a strategy that I intend to test for myself.
I should also add that as of right now, I have only 2,470 followers and Twitter is my #1 source of social referral traffic, so I can only imagine how much more traffic I’d receive it I had 60,000 followers like Michael does.
Another past guest of mine, Casey Graham, founder of The Rocket Company, told me that Twitter has, by far, been the biggest source of his traffic as well.
Blog Post Syndication
As I have been having very good luck by syndicating my content other blogs, I suggested to Michael that we each pick a post from each other’s blog to publish our own blogs. Seeing the results that I had achieved with syndicating content like this, Michael was very open to the idea and so we are going to trade posts here in the very near future.
Michael has some concerns about potential duplicate content penalties so that he said he’s going to keep a close eye on this, and if there is no noticeable drop in SEO traffic (his largest source), were going to begin syndicating content to each other’s blogs on a more regular basis.
I strongly encourage that you build relationships with other bloggers and begin to do the same.
To do this, you can either get to know someone like I have done and then send each other the raw HTML for publication on each other’s blog, or you can use a service like Repost or Triberr. Both Repost and Triberr make it very easy for other people to publish your content to their blog with only the click of a mouse.
Both services are free and quite easy to use. In fact, if you like this article will notice that there is a repost button up at the top so you can easily repost it to your blog.
Let’s Review
Use SocialOomph to manage promotion for your best posts on an ongoing basis
Use HootSuite to promote your new posts for the first week after they have been published
Used StumbleUpon to attract a new audience to your blog
Use ManageFlitter to rapidly grow your Twitter following
Syndicate your content to other people’s blogs to expand your audience
Want More?
Aggressive content promotion is something that I have really only started to do myself in the last 30 days or so, and as I wrote about in a recent traffic report, the results that I have been able to achieve in a very short period of time have been nothing short of amazing.
At the time that I published my traffic report, I reported a 68.57% month-over-month increase in traffic. Since then, my traffic has continued to climb and is now about three times the amount that it was prior to my implementing the strategies that I outlined in my post.
Next Steps
If content marketing is a strategy that you want to make use of in your business and your looking to achieve significant results in the shortest period of time that I would encourage you to get on the VIP list for my new book. When you do, you’re going to receive a free chapter, which (conveniently enough) is the chapter on content promotion. Plus, as a VIP, you will be eligible for a 25% discount on the book on the day that the book is released.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.png00Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-11-06 06:00:532020-04-15 10:00:04Michael Gass Tells Me How He Gets 30,000 Visitors a Month
Are you looking for ways to create predictable revenue for your agency? Have you considered creating blog content for your clients on an ongoing basis for a monthly retainer? If not, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
We all know that the number one way to drive traffic and conversions (which leads to new clients and customers) is to create content and then to promote the heck out of that content. When you create content, you position yourself or your firm as an authority, you provide value to your audience, you benefit from the social sharing of this content, and you build trust – which ultimately leads to a more engaged audience, more traffic, and more conversions.
But, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, right?
So, if blogging is working for you, why not offer it as a service to your clients? Just imagine how good it would feel to have 10 or 20 clients all paying you a monthly retainer of $500, or $1,000, or $2,000, or more.
Never Start a Month at Zero Again
Just imagine never having to start a month at zero ever again.
When I ran my prior company, we had $80,000 a month coming in on retainer every month, and let me tell you, that made running my company a LOT more fun and a LOT less stressful!
It also made my company a LOT more valuable, which is why I was ultimately able to sell it for $1.2 Million – far more than it would have been worth if I didn’t have $80,000 a month in PREDICTABLE retainer income.
Many of the agencies that I have interviewed on my show are already producing blog content for their clients on an ongoing basis and they report that doing so has not only added to their bottom line, but also really deepened their client relationships.
Position Yourself for Higher Value
Now, instead of being seen as just the web designer, these agencies have elevated themselves to the status of “Director of Inbound Marketing” for their clients.
That is the kind of positioning that happens when your clients start to see you as a valuable strategic partner, instead of just a service provider, and it’s positioning like this that will give you pricing power and long-term client relationships.
If you are already blogging and seeing good results in terms of traffic and social sharing, then you are perfectly positioned to begin offering this service to your clients. If you aren’t yet getting traction with your own blog, read how we here at Bright Ideas have recently started to see a HUGE increase in our own traffic as a result of some new content promotion strategies that we have recently begun to use.
Why is Scalability Important?
If you are going to begin to offer this service, or you already do and want to increase revenue (more clients on retainer), then there is an issue that you are either already facing, or will face as soon as you reach 4 or 5 clients on retainer. The issue that I’m referring to is how to scale your services (add more clients) without the wheels falling off and destroying your profit margin.
Consider this challenge: what happens when you have 10 clients that each want one blog post per week. That is 40 posts a month to produce, edit, and publish. That is also 10 editorial calendars to manage. Then there are all the people (clients) involved in the review of this content prior to it being published. Then, there is the team of writers to manage, and the time it actually takes to create all this content. Oh, and don’t forget that you will also need to promote all this content, too.
Can you see how there are a lot of moving parts here?
You bet there are. But with the right tools and processes in place, you can definitely do this very profitably.
For example, when my IT services firm started to remotely manage our clients’ desktops it was pretty easy to do when we had just 50 desktops spread over 3 clients. However, when we had 800 desktops to manage, things became infinitely more complicated. To solve this problem, we had to invest in some productivity tools as well as to create very specific (and repeatable) processes for how we delivered our support services.
Starting From Scratch
For the remainder of this post, I’m going to assume that you aren’t yet offering this service. If you already do have a few clients on board, it’s my hope that you will still find value in the tools and processes that I’m explaining. If you have pearls of wisdom to share, please do so down in the comments as I definitely don’t know everything there is to know about this topic and would love to hear from you.
START WITH AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR
Even if you have just have your own blog to manage, I’m a big believer in having an editorial calendar. We use one here at Bright Ideas and the goal of the calendar is to help us to ensure that the posts that we plan to publish all fit together with our strategic plan for that quarter, as well as to tie into the products that we are promoting.
If we didn’t have this editorial calendar, the posts that we would publish, while still valuable on an individual basis, would not be nearly as effective at helping us to increase our revenue because they would not be aligned with our strategic plan and the products we have to sell.
Instead, I’d just be producing a post here and a post there on a whim, plus, I wouldn’t have a clear idea of whether or not we had enough content in our production queue to ensure that we keep on publishing our posts on schedule!
Creating an editorial calendar is pretty easy to do. In our case, we have a dedicated Google calendar which we always look at in the monthly view. Then, each post is shown as a day-long event with a color coding to indicate the status of the post. Red = planned, but not started. Yellow = in progress. Green = Proofed and ready to publish.
FINDING TOPICS TO WRITE ABOUT
Once you have got your editorial calendar ready to go, you need to figure out what to write about . To do that, we refer to our strategic plan, think about the products we have for sale, and any that we might be launching – like my book.
Once we know what we are hoping to sell, we start to study what our readers are most interested in and consider how we can deliver educational value in the post in such a way as to segue to a call to action at the end of the post that will help us to achieve our revenue goals.
[Ed note: do you think it would be a good idea to write about blogging strategy for your own blog as a tool to help you to convince clients to put you on retainer to create blog content for them?]
Now that you know what your (or your clients’) strategic plan is for the quarter, and you’ve mapped out the content that you want to create in your editorial calendar, it’s time to set to work to actually create the content.
Fear not, it’s not nearly as hard as you might think. In fact, if you are smart about it, it can actually pretty darn easy to do.
CONTENT CREATION STRATEGY #1: USING CURATION
One popular method for content creation is curation. With curation, you are essentially acting like an industry news portal. What I mean to say is that the posts you create need not be all original content. Instead, you could be aggregating industry news that is of interest (that is the curation part) and then expressing your (or your clients’) opinion on the industry news. Just be sure to use proper attribution links in your posts so that you give credit where credit is due.
Curation isn’t anything new. News sites have been curating for years, and if done correctly, your readers will appreciate the value of finding all this good stuff in one place, especially if you have strong opinions about why the news is important.
I suppose you could concentrate entirely on curation, however, when mixed in with my next idea, you might get even better results – not to mention the fact that you will help your clients to realize that YOU will able to help THEM produce epic blog content with very little effort on THEIR part – and that is the kind of thing that clients are going to pay you for!
CONTENT CREATION STRATEGY #2: INTERVIEW YOUR CLIENTS
Interviewing Mike Michalowicz, author of one of my favorite books, The Pumpkin Plan. Listen to Mike’s interview at https://brightideas.co/1 (or just click this image)
Having now completed north of 100 interviews with entrepreneurs, I can assure you that conducting an interview is really easy to do. The key is to know what you want to talk about before you actually start the interview. I’ll cover more on that in a sec.
Once the interview is done, you now have a piece of valuable content that can easily be used as a podcast, or turned into text and published as a post (with some editing), and the best part about this is that the content is not some low-quality crap from someone who doesn’t know jack about the industry. Instead, you now have high quality content that came from the mind (mouth) of an industry expert: YOUR client!
STRUCTURING YOUR QUESTIONS
The key to a good interview session is to brainstorm with your client and figure out what questions should be asked to get the answers that their readers are looking for.
To do this, I always start with the end in mind. What are the major points that I want to cover? How long does the interview need to be? Have I left room for follow up questions so that I can dig deeper? Can this interview be divided into multiple sections that could each be a post?
Whenever I do an hour long interview, I end up with about 10,000 words of text. After editing spoken text down to good written text (easily outsourced), those 10,000 words will probably be reduced to about 6,000 to 7,000 words – more than enough for 4 blog posts of 1,500 words each. So, with the idea of doing one interview to create 4 posts, be sure to structure your questions in a way to meet the needs of your editorial calendar.
Important Point: Can you see how 90 day strategic plan, editorial calendar and interview questions all kind of tie together?
Oh, one more thing. Another idea for interviews is to ask your client to express their opinion on some news items that you have “curated” as doing so will create value for the audience, as well as to further strengthen your client’s position as an authority in their industry.
RECORDING THE INTERVIEW
Recording the interview is a snap. Here’s what I do.
The interview itself is done via Skype. If your client doesn’t use Skype, you can simply call their phone from your Skype account. I then record the interview onto an external mp3 recorder that serves as my primary recording. To be safe, I also record the interview with Call Recorder for Skype (costs about $20) so that I have a backup copy.
Having done over 100 interviews, I can promise you that it’s not a matter of “if” your primary recording will fail, it’s a matter of when, so be sure and always have two recordings for every interview.
For a more detailed look at all the technical parts of producing my podcast, read this detailed post.
TRANSCRIBING THE INTERVIEW
Once the interview is complete, the next thing to do is have it transcribed. You can either use a VA for this, or you can outsource it to a transcription service. I have used both. The service that we are currently using is called Speechpad and they charge $1/minute and take one week to do the transcription. If you want it faster, you can just pay more.
MANAGING THE EDITING PROCESS
Now that the transcription is done, you are going to need to have it reviewed and edited. The reason for this is that a transcription of spoken text, while full of valuable content, makes for awful reading because the way most people speak is full of um’s and ah’s, etc… Plus, they may ramble a bit here and there. This editing should be done by someone who is a good writer and has a strong grasp of the primary language you are writing for.
To ensure that this editing is as easy as possible, I strongly suggest that you structure the interview questions in such a way as to help your client give you the most direct answers possible. If you don’t plant to publish the interview as a podcast, this is easier to do as you needn’t concern yourself with producing an interview that is pleasant to listen to.
Oh, and by the way, these interviews don’t need to be done by you. This is a task that can, and should, be outsourced to an intern or VA that speaks English very well. The portion that you should not outsource is the planning of the interview and coming up with the questions.
GETTING CLIENT APPROVAL
Once the content has been edited and saved as a draft post, you are going to need to get your client to review and approve it so that it can be scheduled for publication. They key here is to have process that ensures that nothing falls through the cracks. I do not recommend relying on email alone for this as, at some point, something is going to slip through the cracks, especially if you have 10 clients on the go all at once (which you will, at some point).
One method that I have devised to address the issue of basic project/task management is to set up a Google spreadsheet that you and your client have access to. In each column, you list the title of the post you are working on, and then in each row, you make a list of all the activities that need to be done for that post. One of those activities is going to be the editing and approval. In our spreadsheet, we use color coding to make it easy to manage. Blue = new task. Yellow = task in progress. Green = task complete.
The benefit of the Google spreadsheet approach is that it’s FREE and it’s very visual – which works well for most people.
PUBLISHING THE CONTENT
Once the content has been approved, it’s time to publish it. On the surface, this seems like a pretty simple thing, right? Well, let’s consider it when you have 20 clients and 5 writers.
Who is going to be in charge of what? How is access to client blogs going to be managed so as to not allow access to client blogs for writers that have left your team? Even password/access management can become a big issue as the number of blogs you manage increases.
My suggestion is to either have ONE dedicated person on our team in charge of publishing content, or to make use of the spreadsheet technique I spoke of earlier. Just be sure that whatever you are doing now will also work when you have 20+ clients.
A good tool for managing access to clients’ blogs, along with many other ongoing tasks that you can charge for is ManageWP.com. I have used this tool for several years and LOVE it.
PROMOTING THE CONTENT
Content that is written and not promoted might as well not be written in the first place. That’s a strong statement, but I make it only because for much of the first year I ran this blog, I completely sucked at promoting my content. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I sucked at promotion. The truth is that I didn’t really do much in the way of content promotion! Shame on me.
Once we did start to aggressively promote our content, our traffic numbers went through the roof.
It’s because we struggled for our first 11 months and then got such amazing results so fast that I formed the opinion that if you aren’t going to promote it, don’t bother writing it.
At the time of this writing, our weekly traffic numbers are about 4x what they were before we began aggressive content promotion.
INCREASING PROFITS WITH TIERED PRICING
Content promotion is one area where you could actually tier the pricing for your clients. Tiered pricing can significantly increase your profits, as my business partner Nathan Barry wrote about in this post on WPEngine founder, Jason Cohen’s blog. (disclosure: I’m a happy WP Engine customer)
When it comes to your blogging service, you should offer 3 tiers of pricing; each of which will offer a specific number of posts per month as well as a different amount of content promotion.
SCHEDULING SOCIAL SHARES
Social sharing is actually something that could be completed as a completely different service that you could charge a retainer for and I plan to cover this in a future blog post. If you aren’t yet a subscriber and don’t want to miss this future post, become a subscriber today and you’ll be notified when that post is live.
For the time being, we’ll consider social sharing as a part of the blog creation/promotion process.
Like everything that we’ve discussed so far, the key here is to have a scalable process for social sharing so that, as your client roster expands, the wheels don’t fall off and kill profits.
If you have already created an editorial calendar and you have a Google spreadsheet for task management, you are in good shape. All you need to do is to create some extra entries in the calendar so you can plan the social sharing in advance (and discuss it with your client), and then create more row(s) in the task manager so that you and your team can easily track when social sharing has been completed.
In our case, we pre-write all of our social shares in a spreadsheet and then we upload that spreadsheet to Hootsuite ($10/mo) so that we only have to deal with it once per week. If you have 10 clients, you will need to repeat this process 10 times.
REPORTING RESULTS TO YOUR CLIENTS
Whenever you have a client on retainer, it is critical that you regularly reinforce the value of what they are paying you a monthly fee to do for them.
Back when I was running my IT support company, this was especially important because the better we did our job, the fewer IT support incidents our client’s would actually see. In other words, the better we did our jobs, the less it LOOKED like they needed us!
As you might guess, this can make client retention quite a challenge, UNLESS you are regularly reinforcing the value of what you are doing. The way to do this is with concise reporting.
For a marketing agency, the key to reporting is to show your clients the positive trends that are the result of your work.
How much has traffic increased? How many leads did we get? How many calls did we receive? How many sales have been made?
These are the key metrics that all your clients are going to care about, so the reporting that you create for them must cover these items as succinctly as possible.
There are many reporting platforms from which to choose. Here’s a short overview of four tools for social media analytics from the Social Media Examiner: http://goo.gl/5hYEfY. Hootsuite also provides fully customizable reports. So does Google Analytics.
Creating SHORT reports that drive home the VALUE of what you are doing can take a LOT of time if you don’t have the right tools, so make sure that you determine what is right for your business and then find a way to create these reports in as short a time as possible. If I’d found just one tool for this, I would have shared it here. Sadly, I’m not (yet) able to point you to one such tool.
Managing all the Moving Parts
As you can see, for just one client, there are a lot of moving parts to manage. Just imagine having 10 or 20 clients to look after. While that can be challenging to do, I can assure you that, speaking from experience, once you have clearly defined processes in place, supported by tools that are easy to use, the value that you create, both in terms of cash flow, and the value of your company, will have made this all very worthwhile.
Plus, with all that retainer income coming in, you will never have to deal with the stress that comes from the peaks and valleys that are the result of relying solely on project-based revenue.
Let’s Review
If you do a good job for one client, you will get more clients. The key is to create a scalable process that will allow you to steadily add more clients without the wheels falling off. Here’s how you make that happen:
Develop a 90 day content strategy for every client: sit with your client and figure out what their goals are
Create an editorial calendar for every client: research what your client’s audience is interested in, then combined with your clients strategic plan, and populate the editorial calendar accordingly
Use curation and interviews to easily create content for each client so that you are able to create high quality content quickly
Create a process to handle content editing so that the finished product is something you are proud of
Create a process for content approval so that nothing is ever published that your client hasn’t already approved
Create a process to support content publication so that you don’t have to deal with the wild west for password and access management
Create a process to support content promotion so that clients actually see a lift in traffic from the content they are paying you to produce
Create a process to support social sharing to maximize content promotion and traffic
Create reports and a process to continually reinforce the value your client is getting for the monthly fee
Automating the Process
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts to manage as you grow your retainer income from blogging for clients. Earlier I mentioned that I’ve interviewed many agencies that are already doing this, and, in every case, when I asked them how they were managing all the moving parts, the answer that I got was the same: “we use spreadsheets and email and it’s killing us”.
Each time an agency told me that they didn’t yet have solid processes in place, I thought…hmmm…there must be ONE tool that could be used for this. I wonder why no one has told me about it. Maybe it doesn’t yet exist for small agencies?
As it turns out, I was unable to find an affordable version of such a tool, so my business partner and I have decided to build one.
As of the writing of this post, we have showed our tool, which is still in development, to over 20 agencies and they have all said some version of “Wow! That would help us to save a LOT of time! When will it be ready?”
I’m happy to say that we are just about a month away from releasing our tool to a small group of users for beta testing. Click here to apply to become a beta tester. If you are a good fit and are willing to help use ensure the best product to market fit as possible, when we come out of beta, you are going to be able to get a lifetime license for less than it would cost you to use the tool for a year.
There is no fee to become a beta tester. To apply for our beta program, please click here.
If you have any thoughts to add or comments to make, please use the comment form below. Thanks!
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/increase-retainer-income-post.jpg284485Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-10-23 06:00:142015-12-07 17:32:29How to Profitably Scale Blogging for Clients on Retainer
Tom Martin knows a thing or two about developing a content marketing strategy. He’s a regular contributorto standout blogs like Ad Age, Copyblogger, Social Media Examiner, Social Fresh and MarketingProfs, to name a few. So when Tom shares his well-tested strategies for content creation and content promotion, youmight just want to listen. (One Quick Tip: Use social media to identify where your target audience hangs out, and then place content in those places.) His content strategies come together to form a Painless Prospecting System. In other words, if you do content right, clients will be attracted to you and you won’t have to work so hard. (As you may know, I’m a firm believer that content marketing has forever changed client attraction, and to succeed in business you need to learn to take advantage of this shift.) Listen now and you’ll also hear Tom and I talk about:
(3:25) Introductions
(6:10) Overview of the Painless Prospecting System
(8:55) Overview of his target customer
(10:45) How he finds places to put his content
(13:55) Overview of his content creation strategy
(16:55) How he’s using dictation to produce effective blog content
(21:55) How to find Propinquity Points
(28:05) How he suggests to become a contributing author
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:
What should I talk about next? Please let me know on Facebook or in the comments below.
Trent: Hey, there Bright Idea Hunters. Welcome to the “Bright Ideas” podcast. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid. And this is the podcast for marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, and marketing consultants who want to discover how to use content marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their business. And the way that we do that is we bring proven experts onto the show to share with you the specific tactics and strategies that they use to make themselves successful.And today’s episode is no different. My guest on the show today is a fellow by the name of Tom Martin. He’s the founder of an agency by the name of Converse Digital. And he is also the author of a book that is just about to be released called The Invisible Sale.And what Tom has done and what we’re going to talk about in this interview in detail, is he has created what he calls a “painless prospecting system.” So, if you’re suffering from making cold calls and doing all sorts of expensive and exhausting outbound marketing strategies and you’re not getting the results you would like to, this is definitely going to be an interview that you will find very helpful.For example, in about the seven-minute or so mark in the interview, after we get through the introductions and we give an overview of what the painless prospecting system is and how to find customers, we go into detail on how on some specifics of how to get your content placed in all of the right places where your target audience is going to find it, so that they are going to want to come back to your blog and learn more about you.He is also going to talk about how he is rapidly producing content and then reproducing that content so that he’s able to get published on so many different places. And some of the places he’s published are on Ad Age, Adweek, MarketingProfs, Copyblogger, Social Media Examiner, Social Selling, SOCIAL FRESH. So, he’s getting a whole lot of distribution for his content. So, if that’s something that you would like to learn more about, make sure that you tune in to this episode.So, we’re going to welcome him in just a minute. Before we do, the other thing I want to tell you about is the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite. And you can get more information at brightideas.co/mastermind. And here, on a one-by-one, hand- selected basis, we are assembling a group of people who all have one goal in common. And that is to build a very successful online marketing agency or marketing consultancy. And they don’t want to be just stuck out there in isolation without anyone’s help and without anyone’s ideas. And that what the mastermind is there to do is to bring us together to allow us to share, encourage, support, and motivate each other. So, if you’d like to learn more, brightideas.co/mastermind.So, with that said, please join me in welcoming Tom to the show. Hey, Tom. Welcome to the show.Tom: Hey, Trent, thanks for having me. Trent: No problem. It is a thrill to have you have here. I really want to learn more about this painless prospecting system and this propinquity theory that we talked about just before we hit the record button. But before we get to that, I want to make sure that the listeners understand what they are about to get by listening to this episode. So, let’s start off with who are you and what do you do? And after that, we’re going to talk about some of the pretty amazing results that you’ve achieved. Tom: Well, I’m Tom Martin. I founded a company here in New Orleans called Converse Digital. And it’s a digital strategy and lead- generation firm. We work with digitally-challenged clients to help them understand “How do you take a traditional lead gen process and power it with digital tools”? I’m 20 years in the ad business, most of which was spent actually as the business development person at an ad agency. And since a lot of that experience has now translated into what we call “painless prospecting.” But it’s basically the methodology I use to both launch and power the growth of my firm since 2010. Trent: Okay. And that growth has averaged how much per year? Tom: We’ve averaged about 25 percent year over year. I’m not a big fan of huge, gigantic growth. I’m much more of a fan of a nice, easy- measured growth that I can manage. So, we’ve kept it right in that 25-percent range. Trent: Okay. And you mentioned one other statistic to me, too, that I want to get out in front here real early, is your close ratio for clients. It was pretty impressive. You want to talk a bit about that? Tom: Yeah, I think it’s probably the thing that most has excited me as a guy who was the biz dev guy in an ad agency environment where, if we were closing 25 percent of the pitches we got into every year, we were super excited. We thought we were doing great. Since I’ve converted to this painless prospecting style in Converse Digital, we are looking at, right now, at about an 85 percent close rate. We very seldom don’t close a lead. And if we do, it’s always price-oriented. They thought we’d be less expensive than we are, and we just don’t fit their budget model. Trent: So, now we’re going to dive in to how you’re closing 85 percent of the people that you’re talking to. And I think that’s really the dovetail into the conversation that we’re going to be having about the painless prospecting system and the propinquity theory. So, can you just, in a short a period of time as you can, sort of explain at the high level, what your painless prospecting system is? And then, we’re going to get down into the nuts and bolts of exactly how someone can do it for themselves. Tom: Sure. The painless prospecting system is all premised on the concept that today’s buyers are self-educating. They’re hiding behind Google searches or they’re just going online and looking for information to help them make buying decisions or just do their job better. And the whole idea behind the painless prospecting is that we all have our sort of go-to set of online resources that we use to educate ourselves and figure out what things we need to purchase to do our jobs better. In a painless prospecting world, what we do is identify and categorize those locations online, we call them “propinquity points.” And then, we plan and schedule our own content to appear repeatedly at these propinquity points, thus giving a prospect the opportunity to sort of trip over us and find or discover us, as well as repeatedly be exposed to our content and our messages. Which, you know, just like advertising, frequency creates awareness, content frequency creates awareness or what we call “propinquity” that ultimately leads that person to move from a “I know who you are” to “I get to know about you, I like you and ultimately, I want to buy from you.” Trent: Okay. So, the key, it would seem to me, is two critical success factors. One is, “I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got the right content that is going to resonate and speak to the audience that I have chosen.” And then, “I also have to make sure that I get that content to the places where they’re already hanging out.” Is that correct? Tom: Absolutely. It really comes down to those two simple points. And if you can nail both of those, then you can painlessly prospect. I like to laugh about how my painless prospecting system is generating leads while I sleep. Or last year at Mardi Gras, while I was having fun here in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, there was a new business lead that was coming through my system and ended up calling me and saying “Can we have a meeting because I’m going to be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.” I had one meeting and three weeks later, I have a new client. I didn’t do a thing other than have him meeting with a guy and then write a contract. But, my system did all the work for me while I was out with my family having a good time at Mardi Gras. Trent: So much better than making cold calls and doing every other kind of thing that people spend all that kind of money doing. So, let’s get into some more nuts and bolts. Who is your target customer? Because I want to walk through the specifics of how you did this. Tom: Well, my target customer tends to be one of two people. They’re either a mid-size business owner or they’re the senior person on staff in marketing. It might be a VP, a director, their titles vary. But they’re the senior marketing decision-maker, again, at a mid-sized firm. That’s kind of where I play right now is in that mid-size arena. Trent: How much revenue is “mid-sized” just so we understand? Tom: Say around $25 million or less. Some of our clients might be $5 million or $6 million. But I would say if it’s a true B2B group, they tend to be in that sort of more $15 million to $25 million range. Trent: Okay. And what industry are they in? Tom: We really do not specialize in a particular industry. Currently, we work in a pharmaceutical, liquor, restaurant, travel, and hospitality. People come to us for the process and the approach, and then, we help them meld it to their industry. I have a pretty rich background in terms of, throughout my 20-year career, I touched a number of industries throughout my advertising career. So, once we get in with a company, we understand what are the business levers that power their particular industry. We can usually help them figure out how to turn our system to really fit and maximize the effectiveness of the system in their industry category. Trent: Okay. So, in your case, you wanted to make sure that you were creating content and that that content was placed in locations that your target audience would find it. Can you walk us through, what are some of those places and how did you find them and how did you make that happen? Tom: Sure. Early on, one of the core platforms that I was able to penetrate is Advertising Age Magazine. In the advertising world, there are two trade mags: Ad Age and Adweek. And I’ve always felt Ad Age was probably the bigger of the two; it was a little bit more national. And so, early on, I’ve secured a reoccurring writing position there in their small agency diary column. And that really did two things for me. It put me on the radar of the senior marketing people. Not so much that business owner, but that senior marketing person, not only at the mid-size, but at the national level. It also gave me an enormous amount of clout. The real kind, not the online version. And people saying “Wow, you write for Ad Age. You obviously must know a thing or two.” And it really opened the doors to a lot of the things. Because you tell people, “I write for Ad Age.” When you try to then go to some of the other, more targeted. So, like MarketingProfs, because it’s a huge B2B community. Copyblogger, because I think it’s one of the premier social media content marketing destinations. A lot of people go read Copyblogger. Social Media Examiner. Again, people that are interested in social, Social Selling. A lot of them are there. SOCIAL FRESH. A lot of these big, sort of aggregator-type online blog areas. All of those, when we said I write for Ad Age, that was an instant credibility check. You can write for them, you probably can write for us. So, laid the Ad Age, then began to lay all of the social media sites. Primarily because when I first launched Converse Digital, it was in the height of social media. It was 2010, everybody and their dog was getting interested in social. So, it created a really nice niche that I could populate very quickly and establish myself as an expert within that niche. And from there, as social media has begun to become saturated. Anybody with a laptop is now a social media consultant, then I really began to dial my choke down to where it is today, which is really focused on helping people use social media, e-mail and Web content to shorten the sales cycle and improve the conversion rate, which really dovetails nicely into my professional background. Because that selling of professional services has been what I’ve done for more than half of my career. So, I’ve just been slowly dialing down into a real niche core that, currently, not a lot of people function in. There’s a whole lot of people talking about social and digital and e-mail. You don’t have a lot of people really talking about social selling, yet. That’s sort of the next big thing I think that’s coming through. Trent: So, you’re producing content for other people’s blogs as well as your own. What percentage of your time do you spend sitting and writing this content? And when you produce a piece, does it only go to one location? Or can you cross-publish the same piece of content to more than one? Tom: Well, I’d say a couple of things. One, it varies because the way I think about content creation. I think, fundamentally, content creators are thinking about content creation at the wrong level. Everybody thinks about it at the individual blog post level. And I believe that you need to look at it from an ecosystem. So, I try never to write or produce anything once. Big believer that you have to look for ways to take anything you create and place that in multiple channels. Now, I don’t just copy and paste though. So, for instance, there’s a section in my book that talks about using voice to text software to make it easier to write more blog posts. Trent: Like Dragon? Tom: Yeah, like Dragon. Specifically, Dragon. And how you can use that software along with an iPad or your iPhone to, instead of just driving to work in the morning, you can write a blog post while you’re driving to work. And I take people through step by step how you do it. It’s super simple. It’s made it real easy for me to create a lot more content. So, I might write a blog post on my own blog about that. I might take some of that content from the book, build it into a nice 700 to 1,000-word blog post, put it on my blog. But then, and for instance, I actually did this. You can go to MarketingProfs, for instance. I took that and I angled it to where I just focused on the mobile application of it. And I wrote a post for MarketingProfs that was “How to lose weight while blogging.” And it was all about how you can take this mobile device and this mobile application and go get on your own your ellipse or your stationary bicycle or whatever. And while you’re walking and running and getting a little exercise, you’re actually writing a blog post. Trent: So, now, I’ve just purchased Dragon, myself. I was actually messing around with it for the first time yesterday on my desktop here. So, do you use the mobile version and put it on your iPhone, so that you can create your content while you’re on the move is question number one. And the second part of that question is do you lay out, in form of bullet points, for example, just on like a postcard or whatever, so that you have your, sort of, talking points so that you don’t end up rambling on? How do you do it? Tom: Yeah. I actually wrote entire sections of my book while driving to and from speaking engagements. And what I did learn, in fact, I talk about this in detail in the book, is the number one thing you have to figure out is when you move to a dictation model of writing, you do have to write down, sort of, your core, thematical outline, if you will, of whatever it is you’re going to create. Blog post or white paper or whatever. Because, yes, if you don’t, you just roll into these tangents, which is fine because once you transcribe it over, you can copy and paste. But you end up losing so much time in the editing process that it kind of outweighs the benefit of being able to work out or drive and write a blog post at the same time. But if you can do it well, it’s perfect. In fact, because I know you produced a lot of content. Another nice opportunity, and again, another way I spun that particular blog post, is I wrote one about how you can use this type of software to break through writer’s block. Where I can’t get any words on the page. Okay, fine. Put the headset on, go for a walk and just start rambling. And what happens is that, you know, just the act of talking through your idea, you end up kind of finding some points, getting into a theme. And before you know it, you’ve got a rough outline for a blog post. Versus just sitting at your desk with your hands over the keyboard going “Oh, man. I have nothing to write today. Nothing’s coming to me.” And so, again, it’s a way of looking at, “Okay, I wrote one blog post.” But I was actually able to take that base post, pull a piece of that, angle it a different way and create a new, valuable piece of content that solves somebody’s problem. One being writer’s block. The other being a little bit more fun with MarketingProfs that was a “Hey, here’s how to solve two problems content creators have, ‘How to Create Content and How to Find Time to Exercise.'” And it was fun, but people liked it. And that’s the way I look at the content. You always are looking for ways to “How can I take this? Spin it to where it makes sense as a new, valuable post and makes sense on that person’s particular platform.” So, for instance, that “Lose Weight While Blogging,” I would have never offered that story to Copyblogger. I just don’t think that’s Brian’s style. But, Ann Handley over at MarketingProfs, she loves fun stuff like that. That’s her style. And MarketingProfs has a sort of fun angle to its brand. So, you offer that story over to them because it fits their brand. And so, I think that’s a big part. When you’re planning this content distribution to your propinquity points, you really have to understand “What is the platform? What is their style? What do they value? What kind of information do they like”? And then you take your core content and you spin it to fit and then, of course, you back link across so that’s there a reason for the person for the person at Copyblogger or SME or MarketingProfs, there’s something there that you’re not going to explain in-depth because it’d be a whole other post. But they kind of need to understand it to understand the post they’re reading today. And so, for me, a lot of times, that is one of the core strategic underpinnings of a painless prospecting platform is the social theory called propinquity. Real world, most people have never heard of it, few people know how to say it. So, when I write guest posts that talk about painless prospecting or social selling, I always try to find a way to work in the concept of propinquity. It’s usually very easy because it’s a foundational element of my thoughts. But I never define what it is. It’s always a link back to a post on my website that explains, “What is propinquity and why does it matter to marketers?” I always get a lot of back traffic from that, and it’s a good use of a propinquity point to then drive inbound traffic to my blog where then I can hopefully maybe capture somebody with, register to get a newsletter or get the blog sent to you by e-mail, etc., which, again, escalates that ability to move someone through the sales process. Trent: So, the question I asked earlier that you didn’t give us, probably because I asked two questions at one time, was what percentage of your time do you spend creating content? I’m still curious about that. Tom: Right, I didn’t. I would say on a weekly basis, three to four hours. But, then, what will happen is at least once a month, I might do a six to eight-hour binge where I’ll sit down and really create more of that, sort of, ecosystem. I’ll create my core posts that I’ve written and then, I’ll begin to create the spinouts that are going to be sent off as guest posts to other platforms. I’ll set aside a day, six to eight hours, maybe sometimes more. And I try to do it all in one sitting because I just find it’s a more efficient way to do it than to try to one-off stuff, a little bit here, a little bit there. Trent: The concept of bucketing, I guess, would be a good way to describe that. Tom: Absolutely. And it works. Trent: All right. So, what advice would you give to the listeners who are thinking “Okay, this makes some sense. I want to get started.” What advice would you give them to start? Should they be, I guess, they’ve got to research the locations where they’d like to have their content seen. Would that be the first place? Tom: Yeah, the first place really is to define those propinquity points. There are lots of tools and techniques that can be used. If you’re fortunate enough to have access to social-listening software like a Zissimos [SP] or a NetBase or a Radian 6, those are very helpful. But if you don’t or you’re just not sure you want to go to that level, the easiest thing to do is to, for instance, in Twitter, create a Twitter list of all of your prospects that are on Twitter that you’d like to business with. And put them into a single Twitter list, throw them into a client like a HootSuite, make a column. And then, get an intern or a receptionist or somebody that doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do every single day that requires them not to be able to look at a computer because it’s a better use of their time than yours often, because your time is best spent selling. And have them just simply catalog every single URL in a spreadsheet that is shared by members of that list. And what you’re looking to do and this will take you six weeks, maybe a couple of months because you need time to allow the trends to appear. But, like, for instance, every single time somebody shares a link from Social Media Examiner, you document “Hey, that’s one more tally or tick mark in the Social Media Examiner column.” And what you’re going to see is over time, you’ll start to see certain websites. A lot of times, those that you’re familiar with, but sometimes ones you’re not so familiar with, will bubble to the top. So, then, you can be pretty confident that those are valid propinquity points. Because you’ve got, it’s a highly-shared website by your prospects of a sub-segment of your prospects. And that’s usually a really good place to start. Because that content is obviously drawing the right kind of people. It’s obviously considered valuable because it’s getting shared. And if you can get your content there, you increase your opportunity for virality of your content because again, you already know that content is getting shared by prospects within your target audience. Trent: That’s a cool idea. Tom: It’s super dead-simple. And like I said, it’s the perfect job for an intern or a receptionist who, in-between welcoming people to your building or accepting phone calls, they’re going through Twitter and going “Oh, there’s another one. There’s another one.” It’s just super simple and easy. Again, it takes a little time to allow to have enough. You can do the same thing with hashtags. If there’s a hashtag that’s relevant in your industry, create a list in HootSuite that searches for every instance of that hashtag. Do the exact same thing. Look for what websites are being shared under that hashtag. And you know, you will find, sometimes, a little niche-y, like a blog or a forum that doesn’t show up in Google searches because it’s just not that big. But you will see an overabundance of those content links being shared by your prospects. And so, what it helps you really do is that it helps you discover those little niche-y blogs, forums, etc. that you just otherwise don’t see. Unless you’re really paying attention and looking for the patterns that are emerging. You can do the same thing with LinkedIn. Follow all of your prospects on LinkedIn, see what they’re sharing in their news feed, Facebook, you name it. Any place where somebody is sharing content, you can do the exact same thing. In fact, we like to bring it all together, which is why if you have something bigger like a Radian or a Zissimos, you can do it inside those platforms. It just makes it a little bit less heavy-lifting. Trent: So, with Radian or Zissimos, do you still have to have a person manually collate or count how many times the links are all shared? Or is there some type of reporting mechanism that you could essentially say “Here, I want to follow these 37 people and I want to look at their tweets over the last 30 days and da, da, da” and now I know, instantly, which are the most popular sites? Tom: Zissimos makes it a lot easier. It’s not a complete turn-key system, but it’s infinitely easier. You can create the list and the system will help you find it, the URLs and tabulate some stuff. Radian can do some of it. The biggest challenge with Radian is when you look at their URL share report. If they’ve used a short link, a bit.ly, a t.co, it rolls all that up under the short link. Doesn’t look underneath the short link to see, the, what really was the media that was shared? And so, that becomes a challenge. Whereas Zissimos will look underneath and return back the underlying URL which really gives them an advantage. But they’re also three times as expensive as Radian. So, really, it’s an enterprise-class platform. If you have it, great. If you don’t, yeah, you can do some of that through Radian. Or you can just do it yourself with a simple spreadsheet and HootSuite. Trent: What’s the URL for Radian? I can’t seem to find it. Tom: Radian6.com, I believe. I think that’s what it is. And Salesforce bought them, so maybe they’ve switched. I just have it bookmarked because we’re a subscriber to it. So, I just have it bookmarked. Trent: Okay. And folks, if you’re listening to this and you’re driving, don’t worry about writing all this stuff down. Everything is going to be in the show notes. You can get to those show notes at brightideas.co/78. There it is. It’s now called salesforcemarketingcloud.com. Tom: There you go. Trent: Good enough. So, that has been absolutely a very, very interesting way to go and find out where your audience is hanging out. Now that you know where they’re hanging out, what would be some suggestions to you when you’re reaching out to some of these blogs or websites and you want to become one of their contributing authors? I’ve got to think that they’re getting a lot of people saying “Hey, let me write for you.” So, how do you separate yourself? Tom: Yeah. I think, especially, the smaller, niche-y ones, not so much, maybe. But definitely the bigger ones. Really two. Some of them will have, they’re looking for contributing authors. You go to socialfresh.com. And Jason Keith has got a form that says “Hey, you want to write for us? Fill this out.” He’s actively looking for and he’s got his process. Others won’t have that. And even if they do, I think it never hurts to really do what I would suggest, which is, get to know the people that own and operate the platform. There is just no replacing the development of relationships. Good old fashioned sales 101. People like to do business with people they like. And you know, every platform that I write for, I personally know the people who own or are the key editors at that platform. And I knew them before I wrote for the platform. So, I was able to meet Ann Handley over at MarketingProfs, get to know her. Meet Jason Keith, meet Brian Clark, meet Michael over at Social Media Examiner. All these places I write for, I was able to meet those folks through either Twitter. Fabulous, I think one of the best uses of Twitter in a social selling environment is it’s using it as a platform to meet people that you don’t currently know. And start to form the budding of a relationship that can then maybe be transferred over to, maybe, like a Facebook where it’s more of a private friend. You can kind of get to know them a little bit more. Maybe LinkedIn. Or just exchanging e-mails and so forth. So, I always tell people “Identify where you want to be. And then start to build a relationship with the people who own that outpost.” Because if you get them to like you, respect you and appreciate your content, then, when you make that ask and say, “Hey, I really think I can bring some value to your readers. Here’s an example of something that I might want to do. Would you be interested in a post like this?” And it doesn’t have to be a finished post. It can just be a really tight outline that gives them a really good sense of what you’d want to write. I think you’ll find that your listeners will find their take ratio will be much higher. Than if they’re just Joe Blow sending in an e-mail. “Hey, I really love your site. I think I have something for your readers and I’d like to write for you.” You and 10,000 other people. Because you’ve got to remember, these people are making money quite often through the sale of advertising or event monetization, things of this nature. And so, by giving you a guess-posting capability versus forcing you to pay for access to their audience, that’s a big give. So, if you’re not really bringing high-value content to them and creating value in the other direction, you’re not likely to get it. You’re not likely to get it at all. Trent: Okay. So, this whole propinquity theory and painless prospecting has worked very well for you. I want to thank you for sharing the nuts and bolts of how to make it happen. Before we wrap up, have we missed anything, Tom, that you think is really salient to this discussion? Tom: No. From the prospect of using digital tools as an inbound selling strategy as opposed to cold calls, I would encourage your listeners to pay very special, close attention to it and begin to experiment with it. But I would also encourage them to make sure that they understand that this, I think it’s a slower selling process than, like, the cold call process is. I always just say “This is sort of like fly-fishing versus tuna- fishing.” Tuna-fishing, you throw out a bait, you troll, you dang near run into the tuna. Fly-fishing, much more elegant. You’ve got to keep dropping that bait in the water, presenting it, in hopes of getting a bite. And that’s really what this is. It’s a much more elegant way of doing it. It’s a hell of a lot more fun. And if they want more information on how to do it or if they’re looking for a guidebook, next month, my book The Invisible Sale is coming out. And, literally, that book is a field guide for anybody that wants to do this. I give you the arguments to make to your boss, the statistical arguments for “This is why we need to it.” I show you exactly, step by step, how to build the painless prospecting platform. Show you how to create every type of content imaginable. And give you apps and shortcuts and tips and techniques, both my own and from pros; podcasters, videographers, etc. And then in the end, we talk about how do you actually close that self-educated buyer. Because it’s a little different. You have to come it at differently than maybe the traditional sales. And it’s really a tool for anybody that wants to learn this in- depth. And really begin to do it themselves and I would highly encourage anybody to go pick it up or pre-order it at theinvisiblesale.com. Trent: That’s The Invisible Sale singular? Tom: Singular. Trent: Okay, I’ll put that in the show notes, as well. All right, Tom. Thank you so much for being a guest on the “Bright Ideas” podcast. I, as I always hoped to, got some really good golden nuggets. I loved what you shared about going on Twitter, going on LinkedIn using hashtags, figuring out all your prospects, websites they’re mentioning and using that as a way to start your outreach program, so that was terrific. And if people want to get a hold of you, what is the easiest, single way to do that? Tom: They can follow me on Twitter. I’m @tommartin. Or visit conversedigital.com. Both will find me. Trent: Okay. Terrific, Tom. Thanks for being on the show. Tom: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Trent: All right, so that wraps up today’s episode. If you want to get to the show notes, just go to brightideas.co/78. The other thing that I would really love it if you would do is go to brightideas.co/love. There, you will find a pre-populated tweet and also, a link to the iTunes store where if you would take a moment and if you thought this episode was valuable, leave a five-star rating in the iTunes store. I would really appreciate that. It helps the show to get more exposure and build the audience. And the more people that are aware of the “Bright Ideas” podcast, the more people that we can help to massively boost their business. That’s it for this episode. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you very much for being a listener. I look forward to being with you again in an upcoming episode very soon.
About Tom Martin
Tom is a no nonsense, straight-talking 20-year veteran of the advertising and marketing business who favors stiff drinks, good debates and helping companies grow their businesses. As an internationally recognized digital marketing keynote speaker, blogger, founder of Converse Digital, and Author of The Invisible Sale, Tom marries his two passions, marketing & technology, to teach companies how to leverage digital marketing channels to achieve and sustain sales growth, enhance brand perception and painlessly prospect for new customers. His first book, The Invisible Sale, is now available for pre-sale at TheInvisibleSale.com. You can follow him on Twitter @TomMartin, connect with him on LinkedIn, circle him on Google+ or contact him at http://ConverseDigital.com. You can find Tom’s marketing missives on his blog at ConverseDigital.com, Ad Age, where he is a regular contributor, as well as many of the top social and digital marketing blogs like Copyblogger, Social Media Examiner, Social Fresh and MarketingProfs, to name a few.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tom.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-10-14 06:00:092020-09-10 05:02:34Content Marketing Strategy and Tom Martin on His Painless Prospecting System and How You Can Use It to Make Client Attraction Easier Than Ever Before
Do you ever feel like there is just not enough time in the day to get everything done?
Do you feel like you have a crystal clear picture of exactly what success looks like for your business?
Would you like to hear from another small business owner who is successfully making the transition from owner/operator to just owner?
If you are looking for actionable tactics and strategies that you can use to spend more time working “on” your business, as opposed to “in” it, you are going to love listening in on the discussion that we have in this interview.
My guest on the show today is Brad Martineau, founder of Sixth Division – a leading source of coaching, training, and done for you services for Infusionsoft users.
When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Brad and I talk about:
(9:35) Brad’s biggest challenge
(12:52) How to transition from Solopreneur to Entrepreneur
(18:05) The story of Pardot & what anyone building a business can learn from their strategies
(20:05) How to define what success means to you
(23:35) How plusthis helps capture more leads, target them more effectively, and sell more products
(27:15) How Iron Tribe (a past brightideas guest) uses plusthis with great success
(30:05) How to customize thank you pages
(30:10) How Laura Roeder (another past BrightIdeas guest) uses plusthis
(35:05) What transactional text messaging is and how you can use it to offer a speedy response to your customers
(40:05) How to use expiring promotions to offer time-limited discounts
(48:05) How to use a Cycler Tool to determine the order in which you deliver content
(55:00) Lightning Round
I learned a great deal in this interview, and strongly encourage that you go check it out now.
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:
What should I talk about next? Please let me know on Facebook or in the comments below.
Dyrsmid: Hey there, Bright Idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas
podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast for marketing
agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to use content
marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their business. My
guest on the show today is Brad Martineau, founder of Sixth Division, a
leading source of coaching, training and done-for-you services for
Infusionsoft users. They’re also the founder of a company called PlusThis
which we’re going to talk about in some detail in the interview.I met Brad while attending Infusion Con 13 and I learned of his new
venture which I just mentioned, PlusThis. They were a battle of the apps
finalist. They do some really cool stuff that integrates with Infusionsoft
and that’s why I wanted to give Brad an opportunity and talk about it.Before we get to that we’re going to talk about my technology tool
tip of the week. That is something called ‘Buffer App’. I use Buffer App to
very easily schedule up a bunch of social sharing. whether I want to put it
on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. When I’m reading my RSS feed each morning
and I see stuff that I want to share with my particular audience if you
just hit the tweet button it’s all going to go out automatically right away
and I don’t necessarily want stuff to go that quickly. I like to stagger it
out. Buffer App, which is a free tool to use, you can get it at
BufferApp.com is a super easy way to stagger your distribution and choose
which of your social networks you want to share that traffic on.Lastly I want to make mention of an upcoming webinar that I have.
It’s called the Seven Secrets of Success for Small Businesses. If you want
to attend that webinar you’re going to learn all about something called
‘life cycle marketing’ which is a seven step process that I absolutely
promise you will have a massive impact on your business once you understand
and then embrace these seven steps in the business. If you are not yet a
subscriber and you want to get notified of that webinar just go to
BrightIdeas dot C-O, enter your details and you’ll definitely get emails
from me making you aware of the next webinar date.With all of that said please join me in welcoming Brad to the show.Hey, Brad. Welcome to the show.Brad
Martineau: Thanks. Glad to be here.
Trent: You recently have come out with this new tool, I’ve just
started to use it really early on and that’s why I wanted to have you on
the episode to have you talk a little bit about the tool and how you’re
using it to build your business and how your clients are using it to build
their business. It’s called PlusThis, it was a battle of the apps finalist
at Infusion Con 2013. That’s how I learned about it and I want to talk
about that but before we dive into that for people who don’t know who Brad
Martineau is or what you’re doing maybe just take a quick moment and
introduce yourself.
Brad: Yeah sure. Obviously, my name is Brad Martineau. Funny how I feel
compelled to say that even though you’ve said that several times. But
that’s my name in case anyone missed it the first time around. I’m a co-
founder at Sixth Division which is a company that provides marketing
services and coaching primarily right now our target market is people who
use Infusionsoft but we see ourselves at some point expanding to work with
the small business population at large.
My background very quickly. I was the sixth employee at Infusionsoft.
I believe it was back in 2004 was when I started so I was the entire
support team and then we hired a support team and I moved into
implementation. I was specifically just helping people implement the
software and I ended up in product management which is a fancy way of
saying that for about five and a half to six years I got to work on the
front lines with customers to figure out how they were using Infusionsoft
and quite frankly other tools in their business to run their business,
being able to see what worked, what doesn’t work. My job was to work with
our developers and our executive team to create a product development
pipeline and build features that were powerful and also made sense to
people.
I believe I had the best job that you can possibly have. Being able
to work with end users and customers and then being able to work hand in
hand with the developers. I had my fingerprints over pretty much every
feature that was developed the time that I was there. It was really fun to
see what technology could do and understand, at a level deeper than
probably any business owner ever cares to know and I don’t know that I
really care to still know that, but it was really good to get that deep
dive of, ‘This is what’s possible with technology,’ and have that blended
with, ‘Here’s what people are doing in the real world to build their
businesses.’
I did that for five and half to six years and I got to a point where
the stars aligned, planets aligned got to a point where it made sense for
me to branch off. I was going to solve all the problems in the world and
then reality hit, there was a learning curve like I think everybody goes
through of building and running and growing a business is a little bit
different in theory than it is in practice so there’s a little bit of a
learning curve but after a while I connected with Dave Lee who’s my
business partner. He also worked at Infusionsoft. We worked together for
about six years. He had subsequently left as well. We decided there’s a
need for a practical, down-to-earth yet elite team and service provider to
really help people grasp this concept of marketing automation and really,
as opposed to the tail wagging the dog, put the business owner and make
them be the dog that actually wags the tail. A lot of people get in and
jump on this train ride that is Infusionsoft and they’re holding on for
dear life. We want to put them back in control and really help them
leverage the power that Infusionsoft can bring their business.
That’s the short summary. I was at Infusionsoft and now we’ve got a
company over here where we help people unleash the full power of
Infusionsoft on their business. We’re having a blast, having a good time.
PlusThis was spun off…I don’t know if you follow 37 Signals but they
wrote a book early on and talked about by product and how some of their
products were created because it was just something they needed when they
were initially being a consulting company or building and designing
websites. PlusThis is the exact same thing. It was a, we were working with
clients… and maybe you’re going to ask where PlusThis came from so it’s
going to dovetail into that but we worked with a lot of clients and we
realised very, very quickly that there were almost zero implementations
that we could do, and do the way that we wanted to to really unlock
Infusionsoft without requiring a little bit of custom development. That’s
not to say you can’t make it work. It’s just to say that the way we wanted
to build it we needed some additional tools that weren’t available. We
started contracting a developer to build these little scripts that we
wrote, and we would install it on our customer’s web server and they could
do really cool things. We realized we were building the same things over
and over again.
I had had this idea when I left Infusionsoft to build a library of
scripts so we could put everything in one spot and once we realized we were
actually building the same scripts over and over again and the fact that
business owners don’t want to think about FTP or API or web servers or any
of that, most of them, so we wanted to build something so easy… we like
to joke around the office it had to be so easy that even Clate Mask could
use it, who’s the CEO of Infusionsoft. We set out to build this library of
features, that’s what PlusThis is and we ended up becoming a finalist in
Battle of the Apps. It’s debatable as to who should have won that contest
but we’ll let it go. That’s where we are now. We provide services and then
we have this software tool that we’re continuing to develop and add on to
and again, everything we focus on right now is helping the small business
get more out of Infusionsoft and really leverage the power that’s there
whether it be through services or through software.
Drysmid: For some of the folks who haven’t heard of Sixth Division where
are you located and how many people are coming to work there every day?
Brad: We’re in Chandler, Arizona so we’re ten minutes door to door from
Infusionsoft. Straight down the freeway from Infusionsoft. We have some
employees who are remote and who travel in to do services. We’ve got one in
Ohio, one in San Diego and then there are seven of us that work in the
office. So nine total plus a couple of contractors that do some pretty
regular work for us.
Drysmid: You’ve built a very nice small business. The reason I ask that
question is there are a lot of people listening to this who are a
solopreneur or maybe even a two person or a three person shop. I remember
when I was a solopreneur and I got to two and then I got to three. When I
was at three I was thinking, ‘Man, how do I get to six?’ When I was at six
I was thinking, ‘How do I get to ten? How do I get to twelve?’ I want to
make sure people understand that you’re a small business owner just like
they are and you have the same challenges in attracting new clients and
making sure profits arrive and systematizing and so forth to grow your
business just like they do.
Brad: Just one point on that. Our biggest challenge…and I don’t say
challenge like ‘we don’t know what to do’. It’s the next obstacle. But our
obstacle right now is creating systems and getting everything in place to
where my business partner and I can spend our time building the business
and not doing the work. There’s an interesting gap that you have to get
across, if you had asked me even nine months ago I don’t know that I would
have told you that within the next six to nine months that I would
literally be in a position where I would be building the business and not
doing the work. And quite frankly I don’t know that I would have told you
that I wanted to. I think that probably six months or so ago I wanted to
build a team because we needed more people to provide services but I was
excited about being involved in the work because it was my baby.
The thought process of how we go about doing what we do, a lot of
that was coming from me. My business partner’s more the marketing and the
sales side. The only reason I bring this up is because for the person who’s
sitting at three or even at six, depending on the type of business and
there’s variations, and all different types of business, but there’s a very
strong pull to want to hold tightly to the thing that you do, whether it be
providing a service or you’re building something. Whatever the case may be
there’s a very tight pull, almost magnetic, that you want to keep a grasp
on what it is that your company does. Really for the company to grow I’ve
had to come to realize and to learn that I have to get people that can do
that and empower them to do that because there is so much work that needs
to be done to establish a systematized business and then to create a
marketing plan to continue to bring in the leads. There’s a full time job,
if not multiple full time jobs, just to build a business and it’s what the
business owner should be doing. If there’s anybody listening that’s
struggling with that that’s something I definitely struggled with. There’s
definitely a mental shift that has to take place to go from ‘I’m going to
be doing this work, I’m going to be doing it,’ to get to the point where,
‘I could actually go hire people. If I could find the right people, I could
put the right people in place to be able to get myself to where I’m
building the business and not doing the work.’ But it takes a bit of a
shift of a mind set.
Drysmid: I’m glad you brought that up and I’m going to go down that
rabbit hole for a little bit before we shift and talk about PlusThis
because I think it’s a really importantly rabbit hole. The first thing is,
you talked about something and as you were saying I thought about this. You
can have growth or you can have control. I think that’s part of that big
mind shift. I’m interested in your opinion. Did you feel you had to give up
control to get to growth?
Brad: Absolutely. Infusionsoft offers this thing called ‘Elite Forum’. It’s
Clate and Scott teaching their methodology. Dave, my business partner, and
I were involved in that when we were at Infusionsoft. He made a really
interesting comment the last time I was there which was just a different
way – I’d never thought about it this way. He said, ‘Entrepreneurship is an
exercise in learning to let go.’ If that’s not the truest statement in the
world I’m not sure what is.
I believe 100% that in order for you to be able to grow, and not just
grow revenues, but to grow the business however it needs to grow you’ve got
to have the mentality of finding good people that you can empower to go do
the job. I’ll frame that and this is a critical point. You have to know
what you want out of your business first. There are a lot of people that
want a solopreneur shop and that’s what they want. They want the lifestyle,
they want to run everything and that’s great. What I would say is, know
what you want and then create a plan to get there. If you want the
solopreneur bit then don’t let other people convince you that you should be
hiring to grow. Because if you just want the solopreneur gig then make that
work and completely control your schedule.
What you do is, this is my formula. You start by saying, ‘What do I
want out of my business?’ Whether it’s solopreneur or build the business,
whatever it is create a plan that says, ‘This is what my life will look
like as a result of me building this business.’ For some people it’s going
to be solopreneur. For us, we know how big we want to get. We don’t want
100 coaches in our services business. That’s not what we’re trying to do.
That’s not what we want to build. Infusionsoft on the other hand, they want
the whole built-to-last approach.
I’m not going to sit here and even pretend to try and judge and say
which one is right because it depends on the business owner but the key is
to know what you’re trying to build and then once you know that, then the
next step is to create a business plan that allows you to get there. Once
you define your ideal lifestyle you should end up with a dollar amount and
‘This is what the profit needs to be so I can live this way and this is
what my schedule’s going to be.’ Once you have that defined now you can
create a business plan that says, ‘These are the products and or services
I’m going to offer and this is their price point and I need to be able to
sell X number of each one.’
I don’t want to take this too far down the rabbit hole but for anyone
that is chewing on that create-the-menu business plan I would read a book
by Michael Masterson called ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ where he talks about your
first job is to sell your first product profitably. If you’re not at the
point where you’re into profitability and cranking with the product and
you’ve got five I’d cut four of them out and I’d focus on one. And I would
focus on your most expensive one because it gives you the most profit.
There’s a whole conversation there but first, identify your ideal lifestyle
and how many hours you want to be working and how much money do you want to
be making. Then you want to create a business plan. A business plan is
literally as simple as ‘These are my products and services. This is what I
charge for them. This is my margin. Here are my fixed expenses.’ You just
come up with an equation that will tell you exactly how many units you need
to sell. Once you decide on that you move to the next step which is go
create your marketing plan of how you’re going to get those clients.
I see a lot of people that every time they run into a roadblock they
go back and assume they have to change their business plan, their products,
their services or their pricing. I say, ‘No. Decide on that and move onto
your marketing and get better at marketing. Don’t blow up your business
every month because you don’t hit the numbers you want. Figure out how to
market the right product.’ That’s the formula that works for me. And that’s
what I’ve learned. Identify what you want your ideal lifestyle to look
like, come up with a business plan. What are you going to sell, how many
and at what price point and then go create a marketing plan to make that
happen. Then your energies and effort should be in the marketing plan and
making sure you’re driving that forward.
That forces you to have to let go of everything else because your job
is to then get those units to build the business to match whatever it is
you want your lifestyle to look like but you’ve got to let go of everything
else. You can’t be answering the phone when somebody calls in. You’re never
going to build the business to where you want it to be. Somebody else needs
to do that and you need to find someone you trust to do that. You may not
be able to take all the sales calls. I don’t do any sales calls and I
hardly do any implementation anymore on the services side and it’s a little
bit difficult for me at times. It’s hard to let go of that. But yes, I
agree 100% with your statement. we can either grow or I can have complete
control over everything. I’d rather grow and get to the point where we want
to build our business to because it makes everybody’s life better.
Drysmid: It does. Plus if you’re the solopreneur there’s never anything
that you can sell, you’re never building any equity. Nobody wants to buy a
business that is 100% dependent upon you. If you’re trying to build some
lasting value for yourself and your family and have the opportunity to
transition to retirement or real estate investments or whatever it is you
want to do when you don’t want to do this anymore you cannot be a
soloprenuer and make that happen.
Brad: Yeah, I’ll take thirty seconds. A really quick story to illustrate
that. I met a guy about six or seven years ago at a [inaudible 00:18:01]
Association conference named David Cummings. He’s the guy that founded
ParDot, the email marketing solution for bigger businesses. I don’t know
how many businesses he has but, very interesting, his model as the business
owner is he starts a business and the first thing he does is go out and
finds a president or a CEO to run the business. He builds everything around
systems so literally, he just sold ParDot to, I don’t remember who it was.
Exact Target or Vertical Response or somebody. He sold it. Because none of
the businesses depended on him…normally when you sell it’s going to be
cash less stock and then you’ve got to stay around for a year. He signed,
it was a 95% cash deal, he signed and and then he walked out, literally,
walked out the door the next day, in fact it was that day, and never went
back. Never had to do anything with it. There’s a lot of power and leverage
in having a business that can just run and crank and just go, all by itself
and you’re driving the business so that if somebody else wanted to buy it
they could just drive the business but the systems are already in place.
Trent: Just for my show notes, what was his name again?
Brad: David Cummings. For anyone who wants to follow he’s got an excellent
blog. He blogs everyday and it literally takes you two minutes to read it
and they’re amazing insights, short, bullet pointed stuff, but really,
really good insights. He’s a really good entrepreneur, great mind to
follow.
Trent: What’s his blog?
Brad: That’s a great question. I think it’s 10,000 Hours of
Entrepreneurship. If you just search for David Cummings it’ll come up.
Trent: I’ll make sure I include it the show notes. At the end of the
episode I’ll announce the link for how to get to show notes. Before we move
off this topic I wanted to offer up a book as well that I just finished
reading. In Canada there’s a company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. They’re not in
Canada, they’re worldwide now. They’re one of the more phenomenal growth
stories of at least my hometown. Their COO for years, who has left them
now, I don’t remember his name, but his book is called Double Double.
Especially being a COO, he’s a real numbers guy and he talked a lot in
Double Double about pretty much, Brad, what you said.
Figure out what the outcome is that you want and then reverse engineer. His
name is Cameron Herold. Reverse everything you need to do to get there and
then figure out what your key performance indicators are and your job is to
watch those very closely on a weekly, daily, monthly basis to make sure
you’re hitting them. In his book he chapter by chapter breaks down how to
do all this. If it’s growth you want this is probably a book you’re going
to enjoy.
Brad: I don’t think it can be overstated, the importance of ‘decide what
you want and reverse engineer how to get there’. I think there are way too
many people who wake up every day and they go into an office and they feel
comfortable they spent eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours in an office
and they go home but they have absolutely zero bearing on whether or not
they are closer or further away from their goal. Usually I see the problem
is people haven’t started by defining what their goal is. They have no idea
what success looks like. And if I can throw out one last little bit on this
and then we can be done with it. It’s not easy to figure that out. I think
some people get into it and they try and write it down and they feel dumb
because they feel it should be easy to figure out. It’s not. It is a pain
in the freaking butt to figure out and really identify what you want.
It takes a lot of thought because you have to balance everything in
your life. If you’ve got kids you’ve got to balance out how it’s going to
work with your family, how much time do you want to spend versus how much
time do you want to spend in the business? I Ultimately it just comes down
to making a decision. It’s not easy. It’s a simple process but it does take
time and it is hard because you’ve got a lot of stuff to balance and
because you’ve never thought about it before.
If you’re an entrepreneur or a business owner and you don’t have a
clear number, meaning dollar amount/time amount, that you’re working
towards, then there’s a certain part of you that is just wasting time every
day when you wake up and go to work. You’ve got to know. If you’re trying
to lose weight it’s easy. You know exactly how much weight you’re trying to
lose and then you work towards that every single day. Same thing in
business. what are you trying to make happen in the business and what are
you working towards? You’ve got to decide that. It pains my soul every time
I talk to someone that doesn’t know. ‘What are you doing then? How do you
know if you’re being successful or not if you have no idea what your goal
is?’
Trent: It’s like going for a drive and not knowing where you
destination is. Or just driving around. At the beginning of Cameron’s book,
that’s what he devotes his first three chapters to. In fact, chapter one is
called Vision/Painted Picture and it’s preparing for fast growth. Very
good. I’m sure you would love it.
That was a cool rabbit hole, I’m glad we went down it and I’m quite
sure we served the audience by doing so.
Now I want to talk about PlusThis. Infusionsoft as you know and I
know and anyone who’s listening to this already knows is an amazingly
powerful tool so much so that people who don’t use it really don’t even
get. They don’t comprehend. I get emails from people every week saying,
‘Could you spend a little bit of time with me showing me why you’re so
excited about Infusionsoft?’ I do a little Skype and screen share and show
them how much of my stuff I’ve automated and usually their jaw is just
hanging open. ‘I had no idea. I thought it was an email program.’ Which
couldn’t be further from the truth.
You build this thing called ‘PlusThis’ which integrates very smoothly
with Infusionsoft because there are all these little problems that you want
to solve that are not necessarily super easy to solve with Infusionsoft.
We’re going to give some specific examples of that in about ten seconds and
how solutions to those problems can benefit the business. Let’s talk about
a couple of the features that you guys have developed early on in PlusThis.
Let’s start off with Stealth Video Tracking. What is it and why should
someone use it?
Brad: Perfect, let me just start. All of these we go through, our approach
to PlusThis. Let me just give the backdrop for that, all those will make
more sense. The end result of using Infusionsoft in our business is we want
to make more money. We can make more money by converting more people. We
can convert more people by getting the right message to the right person.
That requires us to know a couple of things. One, we need to know a heck of
a lot of information about the prospects and customers in our database so
we know if they’re the right person to send a particular message to.
We want to provide tools in PlusThis that allow us to capture and
store more information about our prospects and customers. What are they
doing, who are they? Then we want to build tools that allow us to send more
relevant and more targeted messaging that will lead to increased
conversion. The big picture backdrop is, capture more information so we
can be more targeting and convert more sales and make more money. That’s
the idea.
Stealth Video Tracking. The generic use of this is if you’re using
YouTube, Wistia is a video provider, or Vimeo, anyone of those three, we
can help you track how long people watch any of the videos you use in your
marketing. Probably the two most famous examples of this are Jermaine
Griggs. I’ve got a whole interview with him but but Jermaine Griggs. His
entire model is set up, he’s got four videos that he gives to his new leads
to start his opt in piece. And what he does is, he uses his videos to build
relationships with his customers. Also, on each video, next to each video
he’s got a little mini survey that allows him to capture additional
information. So what he does is, he sends people to go watch his videos. If
they don’t watch them I believe he sends them up to three or four
reminders to try and get them to go back and watch the video. If they watch
the video a couple of things happen. One, he knows they’re engaged in the
content so he knows they’re better likely to get an offer and actually buy
something. Two, he’s able to make jokes in his videos and start to build a
relationship with these people and three, he’s got a higher likelihood that
people will fill out the survey and give him even more information about
who they are and what they’re interested in.
So with the video tracking feature what you are able to do is track
of whether people have watched your videos or not and then you can adjust
your marketing based on that. So, for him, if somebody watches his first
video right away then the next video gets ‘unlocked’ the next day. If they
don’t watch it, then what happens is they get a reminder the next day to
watch video one and they’ll continue to get reminders up to three
reminders. At the end of three he’s like, ‘Fine, if you don’t watch video
one I’m going to try to get you to watch video two’. But because he knows
whether they’ve watched the video or not he’s able to then adjust his
marketing to make sure he’s preparing all his prospects the right way. On
the front end marketing side that’s one way you can use it. If he had a
sales team that was picking up the phone and calling, he doesn’t, but if he
did then they would be able to, when they opened up a contact record, would
be able to look at the contact record and as they’re talking to someone
they would know what that person has watched and what they haven’t watched.
Another example is Iron Track Fitness, they were the Ultimate
Marketer winners in 2012. Jermaine won in 2011. They’re selling franchises
now. They’re a gym out in Alabama but they’ve started franchising and
they’re at like 40 locations or something. Now what they do is, on the
franchise side of it, when they’re selling new franchises, they have their
entire education and basically franchise, onboarding process built into a
membership center and that’s all video based. They have a ton of training
that’s all video based and they take people through classes. What they do
is they use the video tracking feature to track whether or not somebody has
completed a course or not, whether they’re watching the videos. The people
that manage how their new franchisees are moving through the process can go
in and they have a simple little dashboard that tells them whether the
person is watching the videos or not. If they’re not they can pick up the
phone and be like, ‘Hey, look. You really need to watch this video because
it’s going to affect your franchise in this way, this way, and this way.’
It allows them to have better customer service for their franchises.
Whether it’s on the marketing side or whether you have an info
product and you want to be aware of whether people are watching or not. If
you’ve got an info product or a course and somebody’s not watching, that
person is going to be at risk to cancel or request a refund so it’ll let
you highlight who those people are. You can pick up the phone and call
them. On the flip side if it’s any of your marketing content, people that
are watching all your videos are at a higher likelihood that they are going
to be willing to buy. They are more interested. Those are the people you
want to call first or engage with first.
Again, it’s about giving you more information so you can either
change your conversation you’re having in person or automatically adjust
the conversation you’re having through emails or whatever other follow up
you’re doing.
Trent: For the folks who are maybe are not yet using Infusionsoft I
want to make sure there’s no details that are missed here. All of this
stuff happens on auto-pilot. When someone watches a video to a certain
point, which you define, you can then apply a tag within Infusionsoft and
when a tag gets applied you can trigger in the campaign builder all sorts
of actions whether they be phone calls or additional emails or what have
you. When Brad says ‘Germaine adjusts what he does’ it’s not as though he’s
sitting at his desk doing different stuff.
Brad: Quite the opposite actually. I think he literally works an hour a
week on that business that’s cranking out. Because he has it dialled in.
It’s totally 100% automated. All you do is build it once and then it runs
every time like clockwork.
Trent: If you’re interested in hearing more about Forrest Walden I did
interview him. You can get to that interview by going to BrightIdeas dot C-
O slash 3. It was a fascinating interview. Jermaine is actually going to be
on the show soon so if you want to catch that interview make sure you
become a subscriber and you’ll get a notification.
Let’s talk about customized thank-you pages. What’s the big deal
about those?
Brad: Stealth Video Tracking is more about capturing more data so that we
can start to tailor our message. customized thank-you Pages is a tool that
allows you to actually display customized messaging. When you get into
Infusionsoft it’s relatively easy, like you just described, to have
Infusionsoft automatically branch your messaging where if they watch the
video send them this series of emails and if they haven’t continue to send
them this series of emails. You can do all that inside Infusionsoft with
your emails or your voice broadcast or letters. You can have it branch in
terms of what you send out of Infusionsoft to your prospects or customers.
What Infusionsoft doesn’t have the capability to do is let you control the
message that you display immediately after somebody buys a product or fills
out a web form and opts into your website. Or fills out a survey that you
sent them if they opted in previously.
A really good example of this is: Laura Roder is a client of ours.
She teaches people about social media, she talks about Facebook and she
talks about Twitter and she talks about LinkedIn and Google Plus and
there’s a whole bunch of different social media tools. When somebody comes
to her website and they opt in, she’s going to want to ask them ‘What are
you most interested in?’ or ‘What are you having the most problems with?’
It only makes sense that if somebody checks off the box and says, ‘Hey,
Facebook is my biggest challenge right now,’ then it only makes sense that
the next page that shows up would be a page that talks about Facebook as
opposed to having one page. Imagine 100 people filling out this form and
let’s just say they were spread evenly across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
and Google Plus. You have two options. option number one is on the thank
you page you give a generic message that talks about all four of those. Or
you get tailored and based on their biggest problem you take Facebook
people to Facebook, you take Twitter people to Twitter, you take LinkedIn
people to LinkedIn and then you take Google Plus people to Google Plus. The
more you can keep your message 100% on target the higher your conversions
will be.
She’s excited because she’s able to use it increase her profit per
lead because as people are coming in, based on what she knows about them,
she’s able to deliver a very targeted thank you page after somebody fills
out the form. Now, the email messages will most definitely be targeted
because that’s handled inside Infusionsoft but the follow up marketing
starts on the thank you page of a web form. Most people don’t think of
that. I’ll see a lot of people that put up a web form to capture a lead and
all they’ll put on the thank you page is ‘thank you’. Really? They’re at
the peak of their interest. They’re most interested right when they opt in
or right when they fill out the form and the very first message they see is
the thank you page and a lot of people just throw up a generic ‘thank you’.
It’s like ‘No.’ That’s where you either continue to conversation or that’s
where you start selling something.
Another thing Laura will do and several of our other clients is let’s
just say somebody fills out a form to request a new report Seven, whatever.
Seven Secrets of whatever it is. On the thank you page they want to up sell
a particular product, say Product A. If somebody’s already bought Product A
you don’t want to offer them an up sell at a discounted price especially if
they bought at full price. customized thank-you pages also let you
comfortably and confidently put pages out there and allows you to take
anyone that’s already bought that particular product you basically branch
them to a page that is about something else. Maybe it’s an additional piece
of content or Product B. Try to sell them that product. So, customized
thank-you pages let you start creating a completely tailored message not in
your first email but actually on the thank you page when they’re looking
at it right there. You have 100% open rate on that page. Everybody sees it.
Trent: For anyone who would like to hear the interview with Laura
Roder I’ve done that, it’s at BrightIdeas.co/44. She has done a phenomenal
job of transitioning from what used to be just a web design, solopreneur
business, so this kind of dovetails into what Brad and I were talking about
earlier, into a team and a seven figure business with a very healthy profit
margin that she runs from her laptop on the road. Again, BrightIdeas.co/44
if you’d like to hear more about Laura’s story.
Brad: So much so that when we worked with her, which was last year she was
about ten minutes late. She was like, ‘Sorry I’m late. On Monday we decided
to move.’ She was engaged and they are moving to London in the span of a
week and a half. This was inspiring to me that she had her business set up
this way. In the span of a week and a half she decided to move to London,
sold everything in her house, moved to London and it didn’t disrupt
anything in her business. It was really impressive. Anyway, really
interesting story.
Trent: That’s one of the reasons why so many of us are enamoured with
online businesses because it does give you that flexibility. Where are we
time wise? Okay, we’re still good.
Let’s talk about transactional text messaging. Again, what’s the big
deal? Why should I care about this stuff?
Brad: Text messaging. We have a ton of clients that use it for reminders
for webinars, to get people onto webinars. We have a lot of clients that
set up appointments. The way that they sell and the way that we sell set up
appointments to meet with someone and it’s a consultation and then we sell
out of the consultation.
We’ve got a guy, I forget where he is, anyway, Clint Barr. He runs a
fitness business and his whole model is people opt in for free information
and then he drives them to come into the office, sit down and have a
consultation. When you get into the gym world and into the MMA world and
all those they have insanely high close rates, 85% to 90% of the people who
get to an appointment will close. And it’s because, before you walk into a
gym you usually have a pretty good idea whether you’re going to buy or not
so their thing is getting people to come in for the appointments. We set up
a follow up sequence where we would do some email remainders and also a
text message reminder to get the person to come in because text message has
a much higher read rate than email. He was saying that before we
implemented that he would usually have six or seven no shows a month and he
got it down to one no show a month.
If you look at that and it’s like, ‘Well, those numbers aren’t
massive,’ but when you consider he’s setting maybe 20 to 25 appointments a
month. That’s 20% to 25% of the people that are coming in, that are
scheduling appointments don’t show up, and then he gets five more people
to show up, well five more people to show up at an 80% close rate means
he’s adding four new clients. You factor that over the life of the client
because they’re signing up for a three, six or twelve month contract then
all of a sudden it’s a little bit bigger deal. When you multiply those
numbers across any other business with larger margins or higher ticket
items it’s definitely worth it. Small hinges swing big doors. This is a
small hinge that could potentially swing a very large door.
The other potentially slightly different and, I think, maybe more
interesting use of text messaging that he has just recently implemented, in
his business, and I think this is true in a lot of businesses, he’s found
that speed of response is huge. When somebody opts in or somebody requests
an appointment the amount of time that passes between the time they’ve
filled out a form and he gets them on the phone to have a conversation has
a lot to do with whether or not that person’s going to convert. What he did
was he set up his system to where the transactional text message, he gets
one sent to him every time somebody opts in or requests an appointment.
There are some points where the clock starts ticking and whenever that
happens he has a text message go to him. I think he actually has changed it
to go to the assistant that actually makes the calls so the text message
comes in, ‘Heads up. Brad Martineau just filled out the form requesting an
appointment. Here’s the phone number.’ He clicks on the phone number and
can call it right then and literally be connected to the person within a
minute if they pick up. It allows him to cut down on his time of response.
Another interesting idea or use case for text messaging is not to
send it to prospects or customers but to send it to myself as the business
owner or a key employee or potentially even partners. There are a lot of
different ways you can use that once you start to realize, ‘Wait a minute.
I don’t have to send this to the prospect. I can send it to anybody I want
if I have their information.’
Trent: Excuse me, I have a frog in my throat today. I actually built
that feature into my…I have a plug in that generates leads for marketing
consultants and marketing agencies. If you want to check it out go to Mobi,
M-O-B-I, LeadMagnet dot com. I have that feature that built into the plug
in where when someone fills out the form on the landing page if I’m the
vendor, the guy who wants to get the customer, it lights up my phone and
says, ‘Bob just filled out the form two seconds ago.’ On my Smartphone I
just tap the phone number that came in and you can instantly be on the
phone with Bob and say, ‘Bob, I notice you just filled out my form.’ That’s
the moment you want to talk to somebody because they emotionally have made
a purchase decision and you don’t want to lose out on that opportunity.
Brad: Exactly, exactly.
Trent: All right. I’ll try my best to keep the frog out of my throat.
I guess I talked too much over the Memorial Day weekend so apologies to
everybody for me coughing. In Robert Cialdini’s book, I think I pronounced
that properly, on… gosh now I’ve forgotten the title. But it was,
scarcely, where I’m going with this, feebly I might add…
Brad: ‘Influence’ right?
Trent: Yes, ‘Influence’ is the importance of scarcity in marketing.
It’s hardwired into us to be more inclined to act when there’s the
possibility of losing out on something. That transitions us into this thing
called ‘expiring promotions’. What are they, why should I care about them
and how does PlusThis help me make them go?
Brad: Yeah, absolutely. Anytime you’re creating an offer of any kind, one,
your offer needs to be irresistible and amazing in and of itself. In
addition to that, any time I’m creating an offer, and this is whether it’s
an offer on a landing page, an offer for somebody to buy something or
whether I’m presenting something from stage, it doesn’t even matter in
which medium I’m delivering the offer, I’m always considering how do I…
the way s that I make the offer really great are, one, you’ve got to have a
good offer to start. Two, some type of a discount that’s available for a
limited amount of time. I’ll usually throw in bonuses for the first certain
number of people, because the idea of scarcity is so real you’ve got to
make sure you include some element of ‘I need to act now so I can get
this, this, this and this.’ The idea of creating an environment where when
somebody comes into buy…when I was at Infusionsoft the VP of Sales used a
term I’d never heard before and I really liked it. He called it a ‘forcing
function’. He said, ‘You’ve got to have a forcing function. You have to
have something that pushes the person to buy. They can’t just sit around
and say ‘Oh, that’s a cool offer but I know it’ll be there forever. I’ll
buy later.’ It needs to be something that causes the person to sit up in
their chair and say, ‘Wait a minute. I need to consider this right now
because if I don’t right now I’m going to miss out on something.’ That’s
the idea behind expiring promotions. With PlusThis it’s not a single
feature, you use a couple of features together to pull off expiring
promotions but the idea is that when somebody comes and they opt in, they
get you some free piece of information and at some point in the cycle
what’s going to happen is, you need to say, ‘By the way, I have this
product you can buy, product A and I’m going to give you a discount if you
buy it within the next seven days or within the next fourteen days.’ You
get to choose what your cycle is.
One of our clients, Sean Greely runs Net Profit Explosion, he helps
fitness businesses build their businesses up. He uses this concept where
when people opt in he’s trying to get them onto a consultation. Normally
they charge for their consultations. So his offer is that within the first
30 days you can get a free consultation instead of having to pay for it if
you jump. The key elements of creating an expiring promotion are you have
to know when the promotion ends and with it expiring you want it to be
evergreen which means it can work for anybody. We’ll take Sean’s example.
You’re doing a 30 day promotional window. If Jim comes and opts in today
then in 30 days from now his offer needs to expire and I need to be able to
talk to him about his offer expiring in 30 days from today. What’s today?
May, whatever. Anyway, today.
If John comes and opts in next week I need his promotion to expire in
a week and 30 days. It’s got to be built where no matter when somebody
comes into my system I can create this promotion that expires based on when
they’re coming in and on their timetable. What you do is, we have a feature
that allows you to calculate a date, it’s called What’s the Date, but
calculate a date in the future.
So what you would do is you would say, ‘The first thing I want to do
when somebody comes into my system is I need to calculate when does their
promotion expire.’ If it’s a 30 days window we have a feature where you
say, take today’s date, add 30 days and it will create that date and store
it for you inside Infusionsoft. Then we use another feature that’s called
Humanize the Dates, because they’re storing it as a funky computer date. We
want to convert it so it’s readable like a human would read it so that we
can merge it into emails. As soon as somebody opts in PlusThis says, ‘I
know today is May 1 and this guy’s offer needs to expire on June 1.’ So
what it will do is, it will calculate June 1 and then convert it into a
human date so I can put it in an email and say, ‘Thanks for coming and
opting in. I’ve got an offer for you. You can buy this product at half off
plus I’ll throw in this bonus, this bonus and this bonus and you’ve got to
buy before June 1.’
Then I can schedule all of my follow up emails leading up to that
expiration date but it’s specific to each contact so, again, if somebody
comes in on May 1 their expiration date is June 1. If somebody comes in on
May 15 their expiration date is June 15. For every single person that comes
in there is an automatic built in sense of urgency and scarcity because
they’ve only got a certain amount of time to take advantage of that
particular offer. So what it does is, it allows you to create that scarcity
and increase sales and you don’t have to do anything with it. Just like we
talked about with Jermaine’s system before, it’s autopilot. The thing just
runs. Every time they come in you’re cranking out your expiring promotion.
That’s the idea. We have a lot of clients that have used that all over the
board with a lot of great success.
Trent: I want to jump into that one a little deeper because I’m
thinking how I could implement that with my own. I have my info products
which are products within Infusionsoft and then I use an order form. I’m
very familiar with promotional codes and so forth that you could give a
discount. How does your expiring promotions tie into that? How does it
actually work? Would I have to create more than one order form? Do I have
more than one promotional code? Within that 30 day window let’s say, I
wanted, just hypothetically speaking, If you buy in the first week I’m
going to give you 50% off, if you buy before week two the discount goes
down to 25% off and if you wait till the very end it’s only 10% off.
Brad: The most sure-fire way to do this is with either the new order form
or the shopping cart where you can pass promo codes through the link into
the order form or into the shopping cart. And then what you do, here’s the
deal. This is where it gets tricky, right? You’re going to send an email
in week one that says, ‘If you buy within the first week you’re going to
get 50% off,’ they still have that email even when they get into week two.
They can click on the link from that email so it can’t be embedded in that
link that they get a 50% discount because they can go back to it and click
later. The third feature that you use is actually the customized thank-you
page feature. So what you do is you go in and you create a customized thank-
you page that will route to, let’s say you have three different offers.
50%, 25% and full price. You’ll create a customized thank-you page that
says if they have a tag that says I should give them 50% off I’m going to
send them to the 50% off link which adds the same product into the cart but
it includes a 50% off promo code.
If they have a tag that says they should get 25% off we’ll forward
them on to a link that says add the same product but give them a 25% off.
If they have a tag that says no discount then just add to product to the
cart like normal. And then what happens out of PlusThis, is PlusThis gives
you a URL and you plug that into all of your links across any one of the
emails. It doesn’t matter which email it goes in and then throughout your
sequence you’re going to apply and remove tags that control which promotion
they get.
As soon as they opt in this person gets a 50% off promo. That runs
for a week and at the end of that week we take that tag off and we put on
the ‘this person gets a 25% promo’. End of the next week we take off 25%
and put they don’t get any discount. What happens is no matter what email
they get throughout that calendar time frame, those emails will all point
to the PlusThis customized thank-you page URL so when they click on it,
whether they click on it during the first, second or third week, they’ll go
to PlusThis. PlusThis is going to check which promotion or discount they
should get and it will then pass them along to the appropriate URL and
because you’re passing the promo code through the URL when they get to the
shopping cart all they’ll see is your generic shopping cart URL at the top
and they’ll have no idea that a promo code was entered so they have no way
to spoof it unless somehow they figure out what that promo code is.
Trent: Slick. Excuse me, the frogs are back. That is a fantastic tool.
The last one is the ‘Cycler Tool’. I don’t even know what that is
because I haven’t used it yet. Why do I care about that?
Brad: You can do this without PlusThis if you’re really bored and like to
build a bunch of stuff out of Infusionsoft, which I’ve found most people
would rather make money. I think the first time I built this was for Laura
Roder, again she talks about social media concepts. When I opt in I might
say, ‘Facebook is my biggest problem but I’m also interested in learning
about Twitter and LinkedIn. I don’t care about Google Plus.’ Any time you
are marketing to prospects that have a wide variety of interests across
different topics you immediately come across this dilemma of ‘Okay, how am
I going to keep track of what people want and then how am I going to choose
what to send them and in what order?’ So you can get into Infusionsoft.
With her we built something called a ‘Cycler’. Think of it as a wheel
basically. When somebody opts in the first thing we want to try and pitch
them on is Facebook. If I know they’re interested in Facebook and Twitter I
want to try to pitch them on Facebook first.
If I know they’re interested in Twitter and LinkedIn I’m going to try
Twitter first. She’s got four kinds of messages in her library of content.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. When she goes to decide what
she needs to send to somebody first she needs to know what the person is
interested and then second, know if she’s already sent something. Once she
knows those two things, then she needs to have a priority of how she would
normally send things, if somebody was interested in everything what order
would she send all of her content in. So what this tool does, is it allows
you to go into PlusThis and say, ‘My library of content is broken up across
these four topics.’ And I’ll stick with Laura as a specific example.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. ‘If somebody’s interested in
all four I want to market to them, first I want to talk to them about
Facebook. If that doesn’t work I’ll talk about Twitter, if that doesn’t
work or even if it does, then I’ll talk about LinkedIn and then I’ll talk
about Google Plus.’ You go into PlusThis and you set those four up as
pieces of content that you have that you want to send out. You create a tag
for whether the person is interested in each one of those and then you have
a tag that says ‘start this content’, meaning either send this email or
start this entire sequence.
We also set this up for Casey Graham and the Rocket Company. They
were the 2013 Ultimate Marketers. They just came out and we built a similar
thing for them. Where, when somebody opts in, lets say somebody comes in
and says, ‘I’m interested in Facebook and I’m interested in LinkedIn,’
instead of choosing a sequence to start we just run an ACTP post to
PlusThis. PlusThis, say Okay, let me go check and see what this person,
it’ll basically say ‘Number one is Facebook. Let me go see if this person
has a Facebook tag that says they’re interested. If they do then I’m going
to go check and see if I’ve already sent them the Facebook content. If I
haven’t I’m going to start the Facebook content and I’m going to stop.
PlusThis doesn’t do anything else, it starts the Facebook sequence. Once
the Facebook sequence is done, then what I can do is I can run that same
ACTP post again and it will come back to PlusThis. Are they interested in
Facebook? Yes. Have I already sent the content to them? Yes. Okay, let me
move to the next one. Are they interested in Twitter? No, I don’t have a
tag for that. Okay I’m going to move to the next one. Are they interested
in LinkedIn? Yes. Have I sent it before? No. Okay, let me send the LinkedIn
content. It allows you to take this library of content and it allows you to
organize it any way that you want and you plug it into PlusThis and you can
prioritize.
For example, this may be a more specific example. you have a whole
bunch of interviews to talk about whole bunch of different stuff. Let’s say
you went through all your interviews, you’ve got at least 44. Because I’m
counting your numbers as you go up. As you look at all the interviews you
could categorize them and say, ‘This is a marketing interview. This is a
business building interview. This is a leadership interview. This is a
technology interview.’ You could label them all that way. Then what you do
is you say, I’m going to have people opt in and I want to know what they’re
interested in. I’m going to give them options. ‘I’m interested in marketing
and I’m interested in technology. I don’t really care about leadership and
business building.’
Instead of you building out this really intricate fancy campaign
inside Infusionsoft you go into PlusThis and you say, ‘Hey look. I’ve got
interviews for every interview you create a new entry in this cycler tool.
For all the interviews that are marked ‘marketing’ you’ll set it and say,
‘Hey if they’ve got the marketing tag I want to send this interview. Then
you have a tag that will kick off that interview and actually send it. Then
when you’re building out your ongoing [inaudible 00:52:44] you’re deciding
what email or what interview you want to release this week, instead of
putting an email in you put in an ACTP post that goes to PlusThis and says,
‘Hey, go grab the next interview that this person’s interested in that I
haven’t yet sent.’ It will automatically kick if off. It allows you to, you
basically put this library of content up and let PlusThis decide, based on
how you build it, PlusThis decides what to send and who it should be sent
to based on what they’e told you they’re interested in.
So as you add new interviews you might have a really hot interview on
marketing and you want to be sure that’s the next interview anybody gets
who’s interested in marketing. You go into PlusThis and add it to the top
of the Cycler and next time that ACTP post runs to PlusThis, no matter how
far down the list of interviews somebody is the next time it comes back
it’ll take that one first and say ‘Hey, are they interested? Yes, because
they said they were interested in marketing’. Second, ‘have I sent it? No.
It’s a brand new interview.’ And that will go out next to everybody who’s
interested in marketing.
Trent: That is very cool.
Brad: So anyway, what you get to do is, you build the logic of what kind of
content you’re going to produce and then all you have to do is just fill
the library. PlusThis will keep track of who should get what based on what
they’re already received and based on what they’re interested in. It
greatly reduces the complexity of, have I already sent this to somebody? It
allows you to leverage your content better too because you can just create
a library and you don’t have to think through who I should send what to.
PlusThis does it automatically.
Trent: Yeah that’s very cool.
Brad: That one’s a little harder to visualize so I apologize to everybody
on the call, once you see it it’s a little bit easier. It’s extremely
powerful in being able to cycle through different offers and promotions and
stuff like that.
Trent: Okay. Regarding the number of interviews it’s actually much
more than 44. If you want to listen to Casey Graham you can go to
BrightIdeas.co/63. I think we’re up around 70 or so, they’re not all up.
Two a week. I’m cranking them out. All right, so that pretty much sums up
all I wanted to cover.
We just dumped a ton of marketing automation madness on the audience
and I took feverish notes and I will mention like I say at the very end of
this episode what the URL will be to get to these show notes. Actually I
can tell you now. It’s going to be BrightIdeas.co/65. So there you go Brad
you’re number 65.
Brad: Sweet.
Trent: We’ll wrap up with the lightning round. Brad, what are you most
excited about for 2013.
Brad: I am most excited because 2013 is the year I’m going to go from being
an owner-operator to an owner and it will be two businesses. We’re starting
to treat PlusThis as a totally separate business from our services. We’ve
got some other software ideas that are bubbling but I’m excited because
this will be the year where we get our systems in place, we’ve got a killer
team in place that’s cranking and it will allow me to leverage my strengths
in way better ways than I ever could realize before. I’m stoked because I’m
starting to feel the freedom. It’s not the I went through the ‘Oh I’m
excited because I’ve freedom I can go do whatever I want. And then I
realized you know what, it’s not like-, I’m 33, I’m not at the point where
I’m trying to not work for a year. What I want to do is I want to have is a
manageable schedule and make cool stuff happen and starting to get to the
point of tasting the way that we’re going to be able to make really cool
stuff happen is by me not being involved in delivering all of the work, but
actually having the freedom to be able to apply a strategic vision to our
business. And we’ve got two really good product offerings that I think
we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do on both sides. I’m
excited because I’m right at that threshold of being able to get over the
humps, so to speak. And I feel like over the next couple of years we’re
going to be able to explode both PlusThis and the services side and I’ve
got a couple of other software things that that will hopefully be coming
out relatively soon.
Trent: Very cool. Make sure you let me know and if they fit with the
audience that I’ve got, which I’m sure they will, I’ll be happy to have you
back.
Brad: Perfect.
Trent: What is your favorite business book?
Brad: That is a tough question. I saw this when you sent the question over
before when you at least you were nice enough to warn me that you were
going to ask that. It depends, is my answer. It depends on what area of
business, like, business is not like simple things. So there’s a bunch of
different aspects to it.
Trent: Absolutely.
Brad: So I’ll just rattle off a couple that I really, really, really like.
One of them is ‘Ready, Fire Aim’ by Michael Masterson. I jokingly refer to
that as one of my bibles for building my business. It is such a practical
down to earth and logical approach to growing a business and so, there’s a
quick summary and he gives four phases that every business goes through. I
have read the overview of all four and I actually have only read the first
section and a half because that’s all that applies to my business and I had
enough stuff to go run and work with. So, love that one.
I love Verne Harnish, ‘Mastering The Rockefeller Habits’ it’s a great
read. Pretty simple read too but a great read to start to wrap your brain
around metrics and how to track them. The only caution that I would throw
out is depending on where your business is that book may… read it as a
student, not as a follower. Meaning read it to take ideas and then realize
that all the stuff he talks about may not be critical depending on where
your business is, but it’s a great frame of reference. Like, ‘Yes, I need
to be doing metrics. I need to be having reporting in place.’ So that’s a
great book.
Let me think what other like.
Trent: Well lets stop with two.
Brad: Okay, we’ll stop with two.
Trent: Two is good.
Brad: Oh, I got one more. Sorry, one more. This one I think is
awesome. For pricing and sales. It’s ‘No BS Pricing Strategy’ by Dan
Kennedy. Amazing, amazing book to help you understand how to price and how
to sell. Great book. So those three, money.
Trent: Okay. And for people that want to get hold of you, what is the
one easiest way for them to do that?
Brad: Go to sixthdivision.com We do a similar interview approach. We’ve
done a bunch of video interviews with marketers, Jermaine Griggs is one of
them. You can go there, and opt in for the interviews and get access to a
bunch of content there and then.
If you are an Infusionsoft user and are interested in anything else
we have to offer you’ll be prompted to schedule a consultation but as you
go through that process… so sixthdivision.com on the services side,
that’s the best place to find out anything about what we’re doing and then
PlusThis.com on the software side. But that’s pretty much where we are.
That’s where all of our stuff is at.
Trent: All right my friend. Thank you so much for making some time to
come on the show. I really enjoyed this interview and I’m sure the audience
did as well.
Brad: Thanks for having me.
Trent: You’re welcome to come back any time you like.
Brad: All right. Awesome.
Trent: All right. To get to the show notes from today’s episode go to
BrightIdeas.co/65. When you’re there you’ll see all the links that we’ve
talked about today plus some other valuable information you can use to
ignite more growth in your business.
If you’re listening to this on you mobile phone while you’re driving
or doing whatever, just send a text – rather, just text TRENT to 585858 and
I’m going to give you access to the massive traffic toolbox, which is a
compilation of all the very best traffic generation strategies that have
been shared with me by my many proven experts that have been guests here on
the show.
As well, you’ll also be able to get a list of all my favorite
episodes that I’ve published thus far on the blog.
And finally, if you really enjoyed this episode, please head over to
BrightIdeas.co/love where you’ll be able to give or rather find the link to
leave us a rating in the iTunes store and I would really appreciate it if
you would take a moment to do that, because it helps the show to build its
audience and the more audience members we have, of course the more people
we can help to massively boost their business.
So that’s it for this episode. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid and I
look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
Take care and have a wonderful day.
Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.
Check us out on the web at BrightIdeas.co.
About Brad Martineau
Brad Martineau, Co-Founder of Sixth Division, serves the small business community as the leading provider of coaching and software tools that help entrepreneurs tap into the power of marketing automation. He’s consulted thousands of successful entrepreneurs, business owners, and top marketers around the world. He loves teaching and helping people understand difficult concepts. Nothing drives him nuts more than seeing someone NOT do something because they don’t know how.
Back in the day, he was the sixth employee at Infusionsoft, and spent over six years leading the product development efforts as a key member of the Infusionsoft leadership team. He had a blast and learned a ton doing this, all while getting to rub shoulders with many very highly successful entrepreneurs.
Brad is married with five kids, loves playing basketball, is addicted to fitted hats, and is pretty into the whole entrepreneur thing.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Brad.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-06-17 05:00:092020-09-08 00:59:12How to Capture More Leads, Target Them More Effectively, and Sell More Products
If you heard about a marketing agency that had increased revenue by 3,596.8% over a 3 year period, do you think that would be a firm you’d want to learn from?
Are you looking for ways to get more attention for your firm (or your clients) from the media?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, you are in luck!
In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, my guest is Aaron Aders, co-founder and Market Research Director of Digital Relevance (formerly Slingshot SEO) which was named the fastest growing private company in Central Indiana with a 3 year growth rate of 3596.8%!
When you listen to this fascinating and informative interview, you are going to hear Aaron and I talk about:
(00:00) the service that his firm offers that is in such huge demand
(3:00) how they launched their company without any outside funding
(4:00) a very ingenious referral strategy that played a pivotal role in their very early days
(5:50) how they produced an industry report that literally catapulted them into the spotlight and brought them to the attention of their target market
(11:00) how they got their next report, a blog optimization guide, covered by Inc magazine
(16:00) an overview of their Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 content production plans that is used to underpin all the media attention they receive
(20:00) how they produce their own blog content, how Google authorship plays a role, and how to get credit (from Google) to their writing team
(24:00) how they nurture their leads to become qualified prospects that the sales team should talk to
(28:00) an explanation of the specific process that a lead goes through in their funnels to become qualified
I learned a great deal in this interview, and strongly encourage that you go check it out now.
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:
What should I talk about next? Please let me know on Facebook or in the comments below.
Trent: Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas
Broadcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the
broadcast for marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to
discover how to use content marketing and marketing automation
to massively boost their business.On the show with me today is Aaron Aders, co-founder and Market
Research Director of Digital Relevance formerly known as
Slingshot SEO, which was named one of the fastest growing
private companies in central Indiana with a three year growth
rate of, check this, 3596.8%. You are absolutely going to love
this interview with Aaron. Before we get to that I want to go
over my tool tip and I’ve got a special announcement webinar
coming up.So the tool tip for this episode is something called the Fancier
Author Box by ThematoSoup and it’s a free WordPress plug in that
you can download and in this interview you are going to learn
why this is so important. But to basically to boil it down to a
nutshell this allows you to make sure that the author of each
blog post is properly credited in the eyes of Google for the
purposes of Google Authorship, which is an increasingly
important component to SEO, so it allows you to insure that each
writer is properly credited and that will help your SEO efforts.
So you can just Google it Fancier Author Box of course it there
will be a link in and show notes as well.And so the webinar coming up is the webinar on lifecycle marketing
and if this topic you’re not going familiar with I strongly
encourage you to become a subscriber to Bright Ideas just go to
brightideas.co and you will receive notifications of the next
webinar coming up as this has been proven to be a very popular
webinar for folks who to want better learn how to use this
concept called lifecycle marketing to make customer traction oh,
so much easier.So with all of that said, please join me in welcoming Aaron to the
show. Aaron, welcome to the show.Aaron: Hey, thanks for having me here, I really appreciate the
opportunity.Trent: No problem at all. I appreciate you making the time to come and
share with the Bright Ideas audience what’s working for your
firm. So for the folks who don’t yet know who you are or much
really about your business can you just briefly introduce
yourself and your company in your own words?
Aaron: Yeah, no problem, Trent. My name is Aaron Aders and I’m co-
founder of Digital Relevance Inc. and what we do is mostly earn
media online so usually what that means is we work with
companies to create valuable content that target marketing will
find value in and do a visual PR effort to get that out to the
industry influential websites and things of that nature. So the
result from that is a mix of leads and search engines traffic
and the results of those links and the content and a email list
growth, a lot of digital marketing return that really have the
biggest ROI and SEO and such a media and such, so that is
Digital Relevance and I’m one of the co-founders.
Trent: Cool. So we might dive into that a little bit more in a few
minutes, but before we do I just want to kind of give our
readers our listeners as of why I invited you on the show. I was
traveling around the Internet as I always do and I don’t even
remember where off the top of my head now that we discovered you
but what stood out was your growth rate over the past three
years. You grew at 3596.8% over three years. That is a
whopping amount of growth.
You want to know kind of…where were you three years ago in terms of
how big the company was and where are you now and what in the
heck did you do to cause so much growth to happen?
Aaron: Well it was an interesting ride for sure along our growth
there. We took an interesting position beginning that we wanted
to bootstrap this thing and grow organically because I think
that is just a real natural way to grow through. I guess client
referrals and on the back of your work rather some fundraising
effort that just goes out and hires a lot of sales people; not
that that’s bad. It can get a lot of traction from new ideas but
it just wasn’t the idea that we wanted to go by because I
believe being in services is a little bit different then if you
had a product or something like that, it makes sense to a
fundraising for.
So as a service writer . . . well first of all, when we started this
company, I was 26 years old and we didn’t really have a whole
lot of funding between us or anything else, but we did have a
list of people that were interested in our services. So kind of
as when we were starting off a bit of our strategy was, “Okay,
let’s get these clients on board, let’s do great by them,” and
we took some of the first contracts to kind of, not quite a loss
but just about. I mean we were eating beans at the time to give
you an idea there.
When we took this contract we said we’re going to do this for you at
somewhat of a discounted rate and basically all we ask is that
when we make you successful, not if, but when, you tell three
other people about us and we’ll make that pitch at the contract
of signing and hold it back. We never really had anyone turn
that down but it was very effective in growing us. Because we
did hold people to telling other business owners about our
company so that kind of word of mouth marketing was really how
we grew our business in the beginning. The 3,000% growth rate,
that was past. I think you were referring to the Inc. 500
number.
Trent: Probably.
Aaron: I think you have to . . . you can’t say anything to them until
they make over a $100,000 but still, at that point we really had
a pretty small market, inbound marketing team but it was mostly
by word of mouth. We didn’t stop taking projects at losses was
obviously, and grew that way but it was really through clients’
success and really being adamant that when we make you
successful we expect that. When you do right by people and do a
good job for them and especially in marketing, I think that’s
something people like to brag about.
We got our start in SEO and having rankings being number one or
number two or whatever for a certain keywords that people like
to brag about that as well, so I think that also helped us.
Trent: Yeah. No question. So let’s go back then to, because it seems
to me that the growth has really been the byproduct of this,
what you said at the very beginning of the interview, you create
valuable content, combine it with PR campaigns and that ends up
helping the SEO or helping the ranking of your clients for a
given keyword set of keywords.
So if I’m to understand what you’ve explained so far it’s the result
of your work, combined with that referral strategy that caused
all the growth as opposed to doing a lot of webinars or doing a
lot of lead magnets or doing other things, am I correct or is
growth coming from two places?
Aaron: Well, as we scaled when we got larger we had beef up our
marketing department and our marketing efforts just to keep up
that growth rate because doubling every year gets twice as hard
every year as we scale. So we did have to pick up, but again
all of the marketing that we do–I should say the marketing that
we do for our clients–which is webinars, white papers and
research guides.
In fact, probably the most successful marketing campaign that we ever
did was a click through rate study that we released in 2011 and
so that was really significant because unless you are a search
engine or a digital marketing company doing the SEO campaign for
a ton of clients, you really don’t have the data to show real in-
depth and informative click through rates on certain keywords.
So that’s essentially was what it was. The PR study was looking
at top ten results, how much percentage of clicks the number one
position get versus the number two through ten.
So since we had such a large client base of SEO customers, we had the
data to have a very significant sample set and now there was
something in that we put together pretty quickly. We were
already tracking the data, we already had it in there, but we
created this what we call a contribution. A contribution is
something that . . . our target market finds valuable and our
target market is essentially marketing directors, VPs of
marketing. This was something that was very important to them–
understanding click through rates so they can plan their
campaigns.
So when we developed that and we went to market with it, that was
talking to, in our case, Search Engine Land and Search Engine
Journal. Websites like that, these industry, influential, what
Google refers to at hilltops, so these authority basis
essentially. So we went there, they loved it, and they were
in fact fighting over the first rights to release it and we
ended up releasing it on Search Engine Land and then released on
guest articles on a lot of other places that were still willing
to take that even though they didn’t get the first release.
But if you have a contribution that valuable, then you’re going to
see those links and the placements come very naturally but you
have to combine the contribution which is obviously putting
upfront effort to create something quality, very targeted, and
then combine that with an earned media strategy and that is the
effective, again, also targeted outreach. So all of that has to
be in sync and speaking to the same audience.
And if you can put all those pieces together then that’s essentially
what we do at Digital Relevance and that’s what I do. I’m kind
of the digital relevance at Digital Relevance here on a day to
day basis so it’s a really fun job and a great way to grow your
business.
Trent: So this report that you’re speaking of is this called the Tale
of Two Studies: Establishing Google and Bing Click Through
rates?
Aaron: Yeah, you were able to find that pretty quickly. I mean that
study was so effective and driving leads to us, driving links.
We instantly started ranking for everything around click through
rates, but it kind of raised the ship on all fronts because we
suddenly became the center of authority and kind of helped out
on our own right because of so many links from other hilltops in
our industry. That was so powerful and it really kicked off the
discovery of . . . well, earned media and contribution that is
just a way that you have to of SEO and optimizing for search
going forward.
Trent: It’s interesting that you mentioned so much success with this
and I want to make a shout out to a past guest of mine in a past
episode because what you’re describing is what Mike Stelzner of
Social Media Examiner calls Nuclear Fuel in his book, “Launch”.
And I did an interview with Mike. It’s brightideas.co/7. If any
of the audience would like to go and check it out and we go into
a lot of detail on producing what is called or what Mike calls
Nuclear Fuel and your report absolutely falls into that
category.
It’s something that attracts a ton of attention to your firm or your
brand and gets a lot of coverage and ends up on a whole bunch of
links that’s coming into you and that’s exactly what you’ve been
describing.
So now, I see on your site you’ve done a couple of other reports.
There’s an enterprise blog post optimization guide and a
Facebook graph search cheat sheet. Did either of those reports
have the impact for you that the click through rate report did?
Aaron: Yeah. Like I said, the click through rate report was definitely
the biggest but those were also very impactful. For example the
blog optimization guide; that was huge. I released in on
Inc.com’s website and that just trickled down to so many
different . . . but that’s what you get out of a big media
placement.
So if you create something of value for a target audience and you
market it effectively to these outlets and you get these
placements, then you just get this trickle down effect of all
these links coming across from people that just syndicate that
content just straight up. That happens from public libraries,
public institutions, private companies all in your industry and
you get requests get a placement in even magazines and print
publication. This guy has been in both and we’ve gotten
requests for both.
And you can just look . . . one of the easiest way to check that is
select maybe a paragraph of text there and throw in a Google
search and you can see how many people straight syndicate that
and you’re looking at hundreds if not thousands of links
everything time you do that. So yeah, the impact of these things
is really big and that’s what we’re seeing in most of the
releases that we’ve done.
Trent: So a couple questions come to mind, first you said you released
it to Inc. Magazine. Can you describe specifically what you mean
by that?
Aaron: Yes, a digital PR effort, the earned media part is probably the
biggest piece in terms of guarantying that you that you get a
lot of links out of that. It’s pitching to an outlet that is an
authoritative industry hilltop that has a lot of your target
audience members reading that publication so whenever this is
placed there, not only get the search engine rankings, you also
get a ton of leads coming in that download that piece; that
value added piece.
That PR digital effort is pitching to them and trying to first get
that first release to somebody and also marketing articles to
the other ones that might not have gotten first release. But if
the piece is valuable enough, then you’re not going to get . . .
it makes the outreach effort a lot easier, let’s say that. Again
those two strategies, the contribution and the earned media, you
really got to be firing on both sides and they’re going to make
each other most successful.
Trent: Okay, so when you reached out to Inc., it’s not like you paid
them. This wasn’t a media buy. You just said, hey, we’ve
produced what we think is a phenomenally valuable piece of
content and we’re going to give you first dips on putting it in
your magazine, mentioning it, linking it, whatever if you deem
it as valuable as we believe it to be. Do I understand this
correctly?
Aaron: Exactly and in doing so we call that climbing the hilltop. And
when climbing hilltops, it’s kind of a future proof way to build
links because it’s done natural. Now we also tell people that
you can’t buy a ticket to the hilltop. If purchasing the links,
first of all, Inc. and any serious publishing wouldn’t even
consider it but some websites do and that’s a practice some,
well, quite a few, people take in trying to get a guest article
posted. They’ll say, hey, I’ll give you $50 to post this on your
blog. It might be middle of the pack domain, authority website
and Google’s attacking that.
[Mad cats] came out last week and said they’re looking specifically
at in shutting down these networks and so as a result whenever
these companies get penalized using that are using tactic they
have to go in an disavow that link. Being from Indiana, I always
have basketball references so pardon me here. It’s kind of like
using a strategy as like taking the ball down the court and
every shot clock ends in a violation. It’s not worth doing at
all. You’ve got to take the other route. Just create something
of value and then you don’t have to pay for it.
I mean consider the effort of those hundreds and sometimes thousands
of links an Inc. article will place out. How long would it take
you to make that manually, to pitch that many companies and what
would you have to pay them? I mean you can’t pitch. It’s really
the best way to scale, link building. It’s a good contribution
and their immediate combination.
Trent: No kidding. So how often are you producing, and Mike Stelzner
is calling this primary fuel, blog posts versus these bigger
reports because obviously it’s a lot more work to produce the
report, the click through rate report, or the blog post
optimization report. So in addition to those reports, actually,
before I move off, how many per year of six months, or how often
are you trying to produce a new report?
Aaron: So we have tier one, two, and three levels of content, so tier
one would be like an e-book, something of that nature, that blog
put out an optimization guide, would probably be considered tier
one. Maybe tier two [good] as a guide. Tier two would be like
cheat sheets, guides, things of that nature, and then tier three
would be just really great guest articles that say you have an
awesome idea to pitch to an industry public publication in just
a really nice well thought, well researched article.
And so we try and do one tier per quarter and then multiple tier two
and tier threes depending on our cycle of editing schedule and
things like that so that’s kind of a good thing to shoot for.
But it’s really not, especially for enterprise clients, it’s not
like it takes a ton of work to create these in some cases
because even in tier one content pieces.
Because there are so many enterprises in the back of their desk
somewhere or maybe sometimes behind a payroll or maybe somewhere
buried on my website they’ve got these false leading pieces and
guides already and sometimes you can just take that and put it
through a more consumable downloadable format, in an e-book or
something like that and then we dress it a little bit.
But a lot of times these companies have tier one content but they
just don’t know it or don’t know how to promote it so that’s a
really great situation coming into. We get a client takes
thought leadership seriously and is creating this somewhere and
we get our PM on it and fast track it. Like I did with the
[CPR] study, I think we spent maybe two guys and less than two
weeks. I know that because we already had the data and we just
crunched the data and wrote maybe a couple thousand words around
it and that was it.
Trent: For the folks that are listening to his if you’re wondering,
I’m browsing Aaron’s site as I’m going the interview and you can
get free reports from him on all this stuff. How to be the
Topic of Your Industry with Earned Media and there’s a download
for that. How to Write Insanely Popular Blog Posts, there’s a
download for that. So I would really encourage you to go to . .
. it looks like it’s Relevance.com. Is that correct, Aaron?
Aaron: Yeah, our website is Relevance.com. You can check the Resources
section and we’ve got . . . it’s all over the map. How to Pass
the Google Analytics IQ Test. That’ll teach you there,
Beginner’s Guide of Google Analytics. Yes, so many ways that we
try to help our target market. Again it’s VP marketing,
directors of marketing do their jobs better and then whenever it
comes around to making decision around digital PR and SEO and
things like that we’re top of mind.
Trent: You know what’s really doing horrible interviews like this for
me is I realize how much more homework I have to do as a result
of talking to you.
Aaron: Well, it’s all there for free.
Trent: All right, so my question that I never got to was, how often do
you blog? And I didn’t mean like you described tier one, two,
three which looks like it’s all content that’s going on other
people’s properties, and then you have your own blog and it
looks like it’s pretty darn active. Two posts in the 20th, one
in the 17th, one in the 16th, two in the 16th. How many people .
. . I mean are you taking guest posts from other people or do
you just have enough people on your team that you guys are able
to crank out this much content?
Aaron: Yes, we have staff of about 80 people here in Indianapolis and
so a lot of these blog contributors, they are all staff. I know
that we have maybe one or two guest posts here and there from
people outside of our company and we do accept guest posts of
their own topic and valuable, just like any other publisher.
But we try to foster blogging for our company within our organization
and I think that’s an important point I’d like to make,
especially with Google Authorship coming. Or it is here and
it’s coming, it’s probably going to be a big part of ranking out
algorithm here soon, but it’s kind of going to . . . [employees
able to] promote themselves, right. So these employees that are
blogging on our website that’s more coverage for their name and
gives them more credit under their Google Authorship profiles.
We want to promote that because it will help us in the end, and even
if they do move on in some point to another organization and
keep doing the same thing, then their [confidence] our website
just only becomes more valuable, so really it’s in the best
interest of the employee and the employer to encourage this
thought leadership and again it helps them and probably even
more than it helps us.
Trent: And how are you ensuring that for example in the case of Rachel
Brown, I see she has two posts. How are you ensuring that the
content that she has authored that is published on your blog is
in Google’s eyes through the authorship of whatever word you’d
like to use is “credited” to Rachel? Is there a plug in or how
does that happen?
Aaron: Yeah, great question, so if you click on that post and you
scroll down to the bottom there is a plug in and it links to
their biography on the site that links to their Twitter account,
Google+. You can see their latest posts so that plug in, I
don’t remember the name of it. I know we run WordPress. I think
it was called Fanciest Author Box. So it will connect your
Google+. Anything that connects your Google+ [inaudible 24:47]
there’s ways of doing it by hand but pay the $5 or $10, maybe
it’s even free. It’s just one click if you’re using WordPress
and you’ve got a connection.
Trent: Okay, Fanciest, and if you’re listening to this I will be at
the end of this interview I’ll describe a link on how you can
get to the show notes for this episode and anything we’ve talked
about like this will be in the show notes. And you’ll be able
to follow those links to get to it.
Fancy, yeah, something called Fancier Author Box by ThematoSoup. So
we’ll check that out and make sure that’s the right one and if
not, I’ll trade some emails with you here and we’ll make sure we
get the right one.
All right, so I now you have to keep this just a half hour so I think
we have about seven minutes left. So obviously you guys are
doing a killer job in terms of getting attention which is a
first phase of lifecycle marketing of course attracting
interest. Phrase two is capturing leads so lots of people are
coming to your site because of all the exposure and these links
and this is helping your ranking and they’re entering their
contact info to get whatever free report which you have many
that they are interested in.
But the next phase is nurturing because just because they download
from a report doesn’t mean that they are ready to become a
customer. So what are some of the things that you do with
you’re a HubSpot partner, yes?
Aaron: Yeah, we use HubSpot. We are a HubSpot [founder].
Trent: So it doesn’t matter for what we’re going to talk about next,
whether you use HubSpot or Infusionsoft or whatever marketing
optimization tool. It wouldn’t matter because you can accomplish
this in all of them. But what are some of the things that you
do to segment and nurture your list of prospects so that your
sales team focuses on the people they should be focusing on?
Aaron: Well, I think, like you said, a lot of marketing automation
software out there could handle quite a bit. I do think HubSpot
does offer definitely some functionalities that others don’t.
But essentially what you want to do is from the very first
gathering their information on a questionnaire form, you want to
understand what questions, and you can get this data from your
service sales people is get prospect questions basically that
can give them an idea if this is someone we want to target and
as a prospect. So it might be a company size, it might be
revenue levels, or numbers of employees, or things of that
nature. Maybe it’s a more in-depth question, but working these
questions into your form that people have to download, fill out
the download your content can help.
Now lengthening that form too long is going to have diminishing
returns with people getting annoyed filling out giant survey but
if you can keep it to a few questions that’s pretty good
practice, and then probably even better information comes
through the software as you start to funnel users through your
marketing automation workflows. So that’ll gives you an idea,
when you send them more resources and more messaging: are they
opening, are they downloading, are they coming back to your
site, what are they looking at when they come back to your site?
Are they filling out the content form?
A good marketing automation software will have all this information
within the portal and ad leads scores as different interactions
happens so you don’t really have to . . . you can set up these
workflows and say they come in through, in our case a blog
optimization guide. We have a specific workflow just for that
because these people are interested in the writing and
authorship and things like that. So people who work through that
funnel and say you have a prospect and say we’re interested in
and they’ve opened up every analysis and downloaded everything
we sent them and they’ve kind of upped their lead score so now
they know more about our company.
At that point, depending on the content that they read, it might be a
time for outreach someone from business development. Now it’s
not that you can send them ten things about your company and
okay once they’ve read ten, then their qualified. You have to be
very tactical with the content that you send them. You’re
starting off at the very top of the funnel when they first find
you and then you work your way down the funnel. So top of the
funnel stuff might be educating them, then about some market or
industry techniques things like that. And the middle of the
funnel might be educating them about those specifics techniques
that your company provides, and maybe it talks about some
comparisons and things like that.
At the bottom of the funnel directly here’s what we do, here’s some
more data, and if you have somebody, a prospect that works
through all that content and downloads it all, then they’re
clearly interested in you, they have been educated on your
company and then outreaching them at that point is not only a
waste of your sale’s guys time but it’s going to be high
prospect, high percentage they are going to close in the end.
Trent: Absolutely, which makes the sales person job easier, lowers
your cost to your customer acquisition, eliminates the need to
waste tons of cold calling and there’s all sorts of benefits. I
think that it’s reasonably likely that lots of people listening
to this don’t necessarily know what auto marketing automation
So I want to feedback on what you just described so I can
make sure folks who aren’t terribly familiar with it really get
a handle on what it is because it’s extremely powerful concept
to embrace and then implement in your business.
So what’s of folks have websites and you can go put in your email
address and you get whatever it is they are offering. But it
sounds to me, Aaron, like what you’re doing of course is you
have not just one lead magnet, but you have many lead magnets
and the follow-up campaigns, which are these sequence of emails
that path down the funnel as it were is going to tailored
obviously to each one of those lead magnets. Am I understanding
this correctly?
Aaron: Exactly.
Trent: Okay. And then at some point down each . . . let’s say if you
have ten lead magnets. Ten different reports, for example, you
would have ten different early stage educational and nurturing
funnels, and then at some point you’re probably have what I call
a catch all product and company specific thick funnel that these
people would eventually make their way into that says “this is
what we do and you can kind of buy our stuff.” Is that correct?
Because I’m thinking of a scale of about how many, of how
manageable that you can make this.
Aaron: Yeah, we have a workflows for every piece that we send out and
all of them in and learning a lot more about our company and
that specific offering that they might have been interested in
more than maybe a different offering we have or different
offering, or different perspective on our offering. Our goal is
to get them to, as what we call, go through the bottom of the
funnel so really what that means is someone again has gone from
leaning about your expertise in the market, to learning about
your company and your offering.
So it doesn’t matter. Like when you sent it to a salesperson and if
you’re like a giant company and you have all these products that
you sell, you obviously want to send people from certain
workflows to the sales guys that handle those. We essentially
sell one thing and that’s the contributions in earned media, so
it’s pretty easy for us because we can export our [inaudible
32:54] through leads and see which workload they are in and get
an idea of what interest drove them to our company and in just
use those as conversation starters and to see if there’s any
interest there. So they all lead to the same thing which is a
high lead score on the bottom of the funnel [website].
Trent: Okay. There’s so much more I could ask you and that I want to
ask you. Excuse me, let make that stop ringing, but you told me
a half hour is all you have, so sadly I’m going to have to cut
this episode off here. I do really want to thank you, Aaron,
for coming and being on the show. Like I say, I’m kind of mad at
your now because I need to read a lot of lead magnets and see
how much better I can do at some of this stuff. For the folks
that are listening who want to get a hold of you, what would be
the easiest way for them to do that?
Aaron: Well, pretty easy: Aaron@revelance.com. That’s my email address
and you can go to relevance.com and see a lot of the guides and
research reports and things of that nature. I think it’s very
helpful for anyone that’s interested in learning more and even
implementing some of these strategies on their team, or their
marketing tam in their company, trying to earn more natural
search engine traffic and leads and social media mentions and
all the great things that earn media contribution provided.
Trent: Absolutely and that’s by the way that’s Aaron with two A’s,
aaron@relevance.com.
Aaron: Yeah. A-A-R-O-N at relevance.com.
Trent: Okay, Aaron, again, thanks you so very much for making the time
to be on the show. It’s been a pleasure to have you on and look
forward to having you back.
Aaron: Yeah, thanks a lot, Trent. It was great fun and I’ll be back
any time.
Trent: Okay, take care.
Aaron: Take care, bye-bye.
Trent: All right, to get to the show notes for today’s episode go to
brightideas.co/64. When you’re there you’ll see all the links
that we’ve talked about today, plus some other valuable
information that you can use to ignite more growth in your
business. If you’re listening to this on your mobile while
you’re driving or doing whatever, just sent a text to, rather
just text Trent to 585858 and I’m going to give you access to
Massive Traffic Toolbox, which is compilation of all the very
best traffic generation strategies that have been shared with me
by my many proven experts and guests here on the show. As well
you’ll be able to get a list of all my favorite episodes that
I’ve published thus far on the blog.
And finally, if you really enjoyed this episode please head over to
brightideas.co/love where we’ll you’ll be able to find a link to
leave us a rating in the iTunes store and I would really
appreciate it if you’d take a moment to do that because it helps
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we have, of course, the more people that we can help to
massively boost their business.
So that’s it for this episode. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and I look
forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and have a
wonderful day.
Announcer: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas Broadcast.
Check us out on the Web at brightideas.co.
About Aaron Aders
Aaron is co-founder of digitalrelevance™, a national leader in inbound marketing, planning and execution. Building on more than a decade of Internet marketing experience, Aaron steers the strategic vision behind digitalrelevance™ marketing strategy, research and collateral. Aaron also maintains a weekly tech column at Inc.com and has contributed content to various national publications including Time.com, Businessweek, Money Magazine, and SmartData Collective – where he also serves on the board of advisors.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Aaron.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2013-06-14 05:00:392020-09-08 00:41:59Digital Marketing Strategy: The Story of How Digital Relevance Grew by 3,596% in 3 Years
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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.
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Michael told me that he has had very good success using 
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Content that is written and not promoted might as well not be written in the first place. That’s a strong statement, but I make it only because for much of the first year I ran this blog, I completely sucked at promoting my content. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I sucked at promotion. The truth is that I didn’t really do much in the way of content promotion! Shame on me.
Social sharing is actually something that could be completed as a completely different service that you could charge a retainer for and I plan to cover this in a future blog post. If you aren’t yet a subscriber and don’t want to miss this future post, become a subscriber today and you’ll be notified when that post is live.
As you can see, for just one client, there are a lot of moving parts to manage. Just imagine having 10 or 20 clients to look after. While that can be challenging to do, I can assure you that, speaking from experience, once you have clearly defined processes in place, supported by tools that are easy to use, the value that you create, both in terms of cash flow, and the value of your company, will have made this all very worthwhile.
to standout blogs like Ad Age, Copyblogger, Social Media Examiner, Social Fresh and MarketingProfs, to name a few. So when Tom shares his well-tested strategies for 
