Navigate the Rapids
Online Marketing Podcast

NtR is for Smart Business Owners.

Marketing isn’t easy. Marketing while you’re trying to run a business is crazy.

This podcast teaches you what you need to know to make better decisions about your online marketing dollars, helps you understand terms, tactics and tools that will build or bust your business.

Look at this as your competitive advantage when it comes to understanding how to navigate the rapids of today’s digital world.

Want to check out a few episodes?

Listen Now:

Episode 36 – Hiring: Finding Personalities that Work Well Together with Glenda Woolley

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • What is DISC
  • How knowing your individual behavioral style can help your business grow
  • How to use DISC to get the right candidate in the right seat on your bus
  • How to improve the communication skills of your entire team

Guest Profile

As a Certified John Maxwell DISC Consultant through the utilization of online assessments, I help leaders as well as their team members learn their individual behavior styles, their preferred communication style and their strengths in leadership. I provide one on one and/or group coaching to ensure that you put your assessment results into action. Information is interesting but what is most important to me is helping you develop an action plan to further develop your communication skills and ultimately make a positive impact on your company’s bottom line.

WHO I WORK WITH: I partner with C-Level Executives, Directors, Middle Managers, Operational Managers, Supervisors and their teams.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about Glenda Woolley visit www.5starleadership.com

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

Episode 35 – PPP Loan – Now What? with Andy Magnus

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • Economy and the Impacts
  • Major areas of change to the PPP
  • PPP1 vs PPP2
  • EIDL Loan update/changes
  • Other tax changes that impact your business

Guest Profile

Andy Magnus, CPA of ProActive Tax Pros LLC is a nationally known tax advisor, speaker, writer and humorist.

He spent 5 years as an IRS Agent and Regional Trainer and decades helping Small Businesses with their business and tax strategies and return preparation.

His firm – ProActive Tax Pros LLC, helps successful entrepreneurs keep more of what they earn so they can explore opportunities, grow their business and do the things they love.

You will enjoy Andy’s unique perspective and ability to make taxes simple, interesting and enjoyable.

Other Notes/Links

In the podcast at 14:30-38,  Andy mentions that period of time for measuring forgiveness is 24 months.  In actuality, it is 24 weeks.  Although time is an illusion, the SBA does not understand the concept.    Thanks to Gail Moran for catching this.

To learn more about Andy visit http://proactivetaxpros.com/

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

Episode 34 – Cold Calling Tips During Quarantine with John Eyres

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • What John has learned in the last 2 weeks of calling during the quarantine
  • What NOW is a good time to call those C-Level people
  • How you can be positive when doing your cold calling
  • How to take advantage of John’s book and workbook

Guest Profile

John Eyres is the owner of Business Connections Consulting. They provide outbound telephone calls to potential clients, past clients, or any list you provide to them.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about John Eyres visit https://busconcon.com

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

Episode 33 – Clearly Communicating Your Story

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • How you can craft a message that generates more leads from highly interested prospects
  • How applying the 80/20 rule can keep your message on track
  • The best way to integrate your message into an email campaign

Guest Profile

Tom Ruwitch is a business growth specialist with more than 20 years’ experience helping businesses and individuals thrive using innovative, interactive marketing. He is the founder and president of StoryUp Marketing, an agency that helps businesses tune up their stories so prospects and customers tune in and act.

Prior to establishing StoryUp, Tom founded MarketVolt, a marketing firm that is best known for its powerful, easy-to-use email marketing software. MarketVolt helps businesses implement powerful technology and bright ideas to attract leads, engage prospects, close sales, and maximize retention and referrals. MarketVolt was recently acquired by Benchmark Email which continues to operate and support the software.

At MarketVolt and now StoryUp Marketing, Tom is the lead consultant for clients who seek branding, web site, email, social media, and other marketing guidance. Tom is an experienced web developer, copy-writer, and direct response marketer. He is especially adept at helping businesses coordinate their online and offline marketing efforts. He has experience designing and executing marketing campaigns for small business startups and publicly traded companies.

Tom is a speaker and consultant who appears regularly as a featured presenter at business expos and other events. He writes a monthly marketing column for a business journal in St. Louis, and he is a guest blogger on marketing topics for many online publications.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about Tom Ruwitch visit https://storyupmarketing.com/

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

Episode 32 – Productivity & Cash Flow During Crisis

Show Notes

Show Outline

Thanks for joining us today, my name is Will Hanke, and I wanted to bring in a special guest today to help us sort through some things. Since most of us are stuck at home, we’re dealing with different situations than we’re used to.

For some, we’ve suddenly got kids or pets or spouses in our work area, demanding attention, distracting us from completing projects. How can we deal with them and still get our work done?

In addition, how do we handle the change in cash flow? For many, there are projects that are now sitting waiting to be delivered, with money due.

Today’s guest is Cathy Sexton, a productivity expert and business coach with over 17 years of experience helping business owners sort through their situations to make them more productive and profitable.

Questions

  • Cathy, tell me a little about your business.
  • For those that typically do not work at home, but suddenly are, what are some good tips around setting up a temporary office?                                                                                   (this can be two fold )1. Working from home NOW and those that have already have home offices but now the kids and spouses are in the midst of it all..
  • What ‘guidelines’ should we set for our family? 
  • Distractions and accidents are bound to happen. How can we deal with those and still stay on track?
  • From Callie “I’ve heard of grouping things you do into chunks and then work on a chunk for a period of time. What are some common chunks I should put on my list? “
  • Stepping away – one advantage of working from home, especially as a business owner, is that we can take a break if need be. Similar to the previous question, how do we keep our sanity but also get things done?
  • For those of us with a team, what are your favorite virtual tools for keeping in touch?
  • So let’s talk about cash flow, how do we handle what could be a devastating effect in our business when our business takes a huge shift?
  • I know you have a program called “The Miracle Money Method” . Can this be something that is still beneficial during these times.?

Episode 31 – Your COVID-19 Action Plan

On March 24, 2020 we held a special training session to help businesses navigate through the uncertain times and provided tips to help them stay in business.

Here are a few things we cover:

  • We are poised for an increase in demand for many products and services over the next 4-6 weeks. Companies that have their marketing in order are going to see those increases in the form of web form fillouts and phone calls.
  • Virtual selling is here, and those businesses taking advantage of tools like Facetime and Zoom are going to have an advantage over slower-moving businesses that don’t want to do business in non-traditional ways.
  • Your competitors might be taking their foot off the gas, and this is a grand opportunity to take more market share online.

NTR 30 – How We Solved the Audience Problem at E4E

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids – the show where I explain digital marketing trends, strategies, and every day topics that every business owner needs for success – both online and off. This is episode number 30 – How We Solved the Audience Problem for E4E

In today’s show we’re going to talk about…

  • The troubles our “business” was having around membership, video, and our website
  • How we solved these challenges by taking advantage of websites and systems that already exist
  • How we went from hiding our assets to giving the world access – and how that grew our brand exposure
  • Lots more!

Ntr 29 – Leveraging Social Media for Better Brand Visibility

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids – the show where I explain digital marketing trends, strategies, and every day topics that every business owner needs for success – both online and off. This is episode number 29 – Leveraging Social Media for Better Brand Visibility

In today’s show we’re going to talk about…

  • Which social media platforms do you need to be on
  • What are Stories? What are #hashtags?
  • Does anyone care if you’re the owner?
  • How to get more eyeballs on your posts (ie engagement)
  • Lots more!

Join me and special guest Karen Fox as we talk about social media!

Episode 23: Founder and CEO Robert “Cujo” Teschner

Sink or Swim is a bi-weekly podcast of marketing interviews like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • What Rob would have done differently in his previous career
  • The most satisfying part of his new career
  • How the Air Force set Rob up for success after leaving the military

Get Rob’s book Debrief to Win!

Guest Profile

Mr. Teschner is a combat veteran, former F-15 “Eagle” instructor at the prestigious Air Force Weapons school and a former F-22 “Raptor” fighter squadron commander. A 1995 distinguished military graduate of the Air Force Academy and 2013 distinguished graduate of the National War College, Mr. Teschner retired from the Air Force in December of 2015, having achieved the rank of full Colonel. He is now the Founder and CEO of VMax Group, a St. Louis-based national Leadership training company.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about Robert “Cujo” Teschner visit www.vmaxgroupllc.com

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

NtR 28 – Your Online Business Listings

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids – the show where I explain digital marketing trends, strategies, and every day topics that every business owner needs for success – both online and off. This is episode number 28 – Your Online Business Listings

In today’s show we’re going to talk about…

  • Googling your own business
  • What is a NAP?
  • How and why you should get more business citations
  • Two tools to get consistent citations
  • Why you need more reviews

Transcript

All right, my name is Will Hanke. My company is Red Canoe Media. Today we’re gonna talk about your business listings and some different apps and different things that you can do, different websites you can use, to assist you with getting your business listed online correctly.

What happens when you Google your own business? Has anybody gone out and typed in the name of their business and just see what comes up? Did what came up what you expected or what you wanted? Of course, you probably work on it daily. Good. Okay.

Typically when you look up your business now, of course you get, hopefully your website and then a couple of social properties, maybe your Facebook page or Linkedin profile, things like that. A lot of cases you might start to get something like this now, where people have filled out questions or it has your address or it has your time, things like that, that you’re open.

This is what you should get if you do the same thing and get a different list or especially if your website is not in one of the first results, then you need to do some work on it.

Another thing that might happen is, of course, the photos, your reviews, your address, all this information about you and then some other different things over here which is pretty new from Google, is your business on Google. So it recognized that I was the one looking this up, recognized that it was my business because I was logged in to Google, so it started to give me some different things. You haven’t posted recently. In the past 14 today’s, less people are looking for your business, things like that.

So if you Google your business and these things don’t happen, then you need to get into what’s called Google My Business and we’re gonna talk about that in a minute, but first let’s take a nap.

Dan’s all over this. Right? Let’s take a nap. Nap in my industry stands for three things. Name, Address and Phone Number. These three things are extremely critical to your business when you’re listing your business online. The difference between them will be obvious in a minute. So the name of my business, Red Canoe Media. The address 152 Hinrichs Lane, Arnold, MO 63010. Phone number, 314-496, okay.

However, sometimes, my business might be listed as 152 Hinrichs Ln, and maybe a different phone number because I’m using a Google voice number on my website, so I can track those calls, right?

To the search engines, they’re confused. They don’t know am I Lane or Ln and it sounds a little silly but it really should always be the same no matter where you’re listing your business. The Nap is extremely important when you’re listing your businesses on other places.

So just for the heck of it, I went out and I typed in my business name and figured I’ll look and see what other people are doing. So, MapQuest, I didn’t even know MapQuest was still a thing, but apparently it is, they’ve got me listed as 152 Hinrichs Ln, interesting. Yelp has be may down here, same thing, Ln. Then on my website, in the footer, it’s hard to see but it’s Lane.

So there are obviously things that need to be fixed. Either I need to go to MapQuest and Yelp and get these fixed or I just need to come up with a solution one way or another and stick with it and then start fixing some of these other places. The reason that this is important is because it shows up here when somebody is typing in your business name.

If Google can’t make that connection between the two, you’re missing opportunities to list your business online and to get it recognized.

All right. I know you came here for apps. Come on, Will. All right. Google My Business. This is one of your first apps that you need to download. You can also get to this online at Google.com/business. Google.com/business. You need to go to this website and claim your business. If your business is not claimed or it’s never been filled out, then you’re gonna get a couple of different options. You’re either going to get nice job you’re on the map. Your business info might be incorrect. Or your business isn’t on the map at all. So this all does tie back to Google Maps as well.

So either way, you need to click the button that says verify your business info. Once you get on this page, after you verified your business and say, yes I’m really here. This is really my business. There’s a tab on the left called info. This is where you’re gonna wanna fill out everything related to your business. So your business name, address, phone, of course those three things. Hours that you’re in business and let’s see what else. Hours, your address, hours that you’re open and labels. They give you a section for labels so you can put in things like I put in SEO digital marketing, web design. These are things that people might type into the search engines to find my business. So since they’re giving me the opportunity to do that, I really should be doing that.

Also, up in the top left under Red Canoe Media, up there it gives you an opportunity to put in some different categories for your business. So in my case, I put in marketing, business, digital marketing, things like that, advertising agency. Stuff like that.

So this all reflects back to your business when somebody types in the name of your business online. It could also tie into keywords that we talked about earlier. Once you’re done filling it out, they’re typically going to send you a postcard so it’s not just going to go live on the website immediately, on Google. They’re going to send a postcard to the address that you put in. It will come about 10 days later with a little pin number. Plug in the pin number and that verifies your business online.

Bing also has the same thing. It’s called Bing Places for business. A lot of people don’t know that. Bing is still a thing and Bing is actually what’s powering Yahoo search now, as well. Yahoo is no longer a search engine. They’re powered by Bing’s results. So by doing this on Bing, you’re actually going to help yourself on two of the other major search engines. That’s at Bingplaces.com. There is an app for that as well, so both of these you can use an app. Both of these will alert you if there are any changes to your hours or something like that.

So when somebody looks up your business online, they actually have an opportunity to edit, let’s say the hours. Maybe I’m eight to five. They could actually say, actually Red Canoe is only open eight to four. What’ll happen is you’ll get notified and you can either verify that, that is true or verify it is not true. But those kind of notifications would show up on your app so you would always have the best information out there.

Speaking about an app, there are some services that will help you get your business listed on other sites like MapQuest and Yelp and a lot of these. The first one is called Yext.com and I don’t, Kara, do you know the price of Yext? A couple of hundred bucks a year, probably. The great thing about Yext is you put in your address once and they will go put your business on a 100 or so different sites. The nice thing is it’s controlled because you put it in one place and it’s on all of those. If your phone number changes, you go to Yext, you fix your phone number and it will send that to all of those sites. So everything stays congruent.

The other one is Moz Local. Moz Local is about $89 bucks a year. Does something very similar and that’s moz.com/local. I think it’s $89 bucks a year, somewhere in the $100 range per year, but that’s the one we use.

And lastly I want to talk about reviews. Several people have commented about reviews today. Reviews are huge when it comes to your business online. If you don’t have a lot of positive reviews, it’s very possible that people will pass you over. It also shows up here, so we can see five stars, 39 reviews. Pretty good, right? And the other thing it does, it shows up in what’s called the three pack or the snack pack. So if somebody types in, my example is SEO expert. I type that in, these are the three results that come back. Red Canoe Media at the time had 25 positive reviews. Red Tail SEO, whoever those bums are. They got no reviews. And then the SEO Expert, two reviews. So just from this one example, it’s pretty obvious which one most people are going to click on or find out more information about.

So the driving those positive reviews moves you up in these map type listings as well, and there’s also some social proof there just of the fact that nobody has left a review for Red Tail. What does that say about them? Probably not anything positive. I don’t know who they are.

Reviews are huge and they don’t need to be overlooked. If you do want a free review score, let me know. I’ve got a free review tool that I can plug in your business name and it’ll give you a score and tell you where you are listed and where you’re not listed. What sort of Nap you have on the different systems and any incongruencies therein. Those are some big words. That was good. And that’s reviews.redcanoemedia.com or just see me and I’ll get yeah one.

All right. Questions and answers. Hopefully answers.

Richard Terry.

I notice a lot of times I’ll put my address in and it will correct it with, and I’m on Reflection Court, and they’ll correct it as Ct. So, how do we get that to where it’s the same?

If it’s on a website where they’re auto-correcting it, there’s probably nothing you can do other than maybe reach out to the webmaster and ask them to fix it but they’re probably not going to. So I would just move on to the next website. You’re not going to fix them all.

Dad.

You mentioned that Nap is name, address, phone number. What about home based businesses? Do I want my home address out there for the world to come visit me?

So that’s up to you. Mine’s out there. If you look up mine, I just work out of my home. Probably the only bad thing about it, if I can get back there, is it does show my home, but I’ve never had anybody show up.

So it does have a thing there. See the outside of that business. So you could creep around and see who my neighbors are and that kind of stuff. But there is a button in the back end of Google My Business that says people do not come to this location to do business with me and I think Google has some sort of an algorithm in there where they won’t show your home as much but I’ve never had any trouble with it. I do have clients that say I don’t want to list it. I have a client, right now, who refuses to put an address out there because they’re home-based, so they’re never going to show up in any of these type of rankings, especially in the map or the three pack because they don’t want to tie an address to a location.

I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

Bill.

Something that I deal with all the time, I’ve never looked at it in this context and that is that the post office and the IRS have address databases and so when you deal with them and you have to fill in an address on an application or a form or something like that, it will return to you a screen that says, our database shows the following address. Either use yours or accept ours. And the address that they send to you has no periods in it, has no special characters or anything like that. It’s very structured and I don’t know if businesses tap into that or businesses use that or use that as part, but it doesn’t admit much variation in addresses at all.

If there’s an official address for your location, I’d probably use that and that would probably fix your problem, Richard, because that’s probably where they’re pulling that from is some sort of an address database in the sky, I guess.

Rick.

Will, so real quick when I talked about my experience with the Dolphin Tank, I mentioned the talent in the room and the intelligence in the room, but also I failed to mention the giving heart. So Will is a genius and he has taken his time to spend time with me.

What Will?

That Will, right there, in the Red Canoe shirt. So, this guy is amazing but I do have two questions for you and I thank you for that, Will.

I have two questions for you.

Thank you for the beer.

Well, you buy a beer, and you get anything you want. So I learned that.

So, on these labels, on these labels, do you put SEO or do you put search engine optimization or how do you do that and then on the address question, can you just like a city and a state instead of your home address because my business is out of my home also.

I’ll answer the second one first. No, you cannot just put a city and state. You have to have a real address, so it’s all or nothing and that’s the trouble I’m having with one of our clients right now. They don’t want to put a home address on there. But then Google doesn’t have anywhere to send the postcard.

What was the first question? I forgot now, answering the first one.

I would put both. So I would put SEO and I would type it out search engine optimization. So if there are acronyms, is that what they’re called? I’m former military so I’m very used to acronyms but you really need to type those out as well for people that are looking for you that way.

Karen.

On the Google, I have a phone number here and I wanted to change it and it will not let me change it. I use my cell phone, but I just went in 10 times and it won’t let me.

Okay. You might want to try and do it on a desktop instead of the app. It may just give you more options.

Mary. Kara then Mary.

Moz is 99 to 1,000 bucks and their standard is 99. Yext is 199 to 999 with their standard being 499. Also, I had an issue with showing the outside of my house and you’re able to go into there and change the outside pictures of your house. So if you add different images, then it will populate and kind of override what Google puts for the outside of your house.

There is an option here for photos. Typically that’s for photos of your store or the inside or your products like that. If you work out of your home, you’ll have to just get a little more creative. Thank you.

Last question.

I just wanted to say I had a P.O. Box for a long time and then I just started using my home address and I also have never, that’s been about 10 years. I’ve never had anybody show up. So, you know, I was kind of concerned but it doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal.

Okay. Thank you everyone. Have a great day.

Episode 22: Rental Property Automator T.J. Tavares

Sink or Swim is a bi-weekly podcast of marketing interviews like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • What’s a scattered site rental unit?
  • How a very cool tech accelerator played a big role in Keybot’s success
  • How TJ balances the role of Chief Revenue Officer with his many other tasks

Guest Profile:

For the past 10 years, T.J.’s been creating win-win customer relationships in early stage companies that he’s founded, co-founded and advised. He’s the organizer of the Lean startup Circle in St. Charles and was previously a Startup Weekend mentor for business development and marketing. T.J. is currently snappin’ necks and cashin’ checks as the Chief Revenue Officer with Keybot Inc, a smart lock company built to open doors to the 80 million scattered site rental units that have Internet infrastructure turned off when they are not occupied.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about Rental Property Automator visit www.getkeybot.com

Watch the Leasing Robot Video

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

Episode 21: Nancy the Psychic Nancy Feranec

Sink or Swim is a bi-weekly podcast of marketing interviews like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • Does Nancy know what you’re thinking right now?
  • How she handles skeptics
  • What marketing tactic got her business off the ground that she still does today

Guest Profile

I’m an authentic psychic medium. As a Psychic I see into the future and give insight about your journey. I can tell you things about yourself you already know. The intriguing thing is how do I know these things. I tell you what is helping you and what is getting in your way. I’ll always tell you the truth. As a Medium, I connect with your loved ones on the other side. Bridging one world to the other to bring Spirit to life and healing to your soul.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about Nancy Feranec visit NancythePsychic.com

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

Episode 19: Founder of App2Speak Gina Baldwin

Sink or Swim is a bi-weekly podcast of marketing interviews like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In this episode, find out things like:

  • Why she likes to keep a job on the side – and how that helps her grow her business
  • What event really helped her app take off
  • What digital marketing tactic Gina thinks is the best for promoting an app

Guest Profile

Gina Baldwin, M.S., CCC-SLP is a Licensed Speech Pathologist, a St. Louis Native, with over 30 years’ experience practicing in a variety of health care environments. She earned her Bachelors of Science degree in Speech Pathology at Western Illinois University and her Masters of Science degree in Speech Pathology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Helping people with their speech and communication is her passion.

For years, she empathized with her patients’ frustration and emotional pain over their speech impairments due to accidents or illnesses. She had an idea of what they needed to regain relationship connections, independence, and self-respect.

After searching everywhere and not finding the tool she envisioned, Gina designed and created a software application called APP2Speak™. This affordable resource has been funded for four years by her and her husband, Scott.

The simple act of touching a photo allows the speech impaired individual to convey a short phrase, sentence, or even a complex story. APP2Speak™ is fully customizable. The user can easily integrate their own photos, take a photo within APP2Speak™, and record a voice for personalization. These features make the application ideal for all individuals who need assistance for speech and communication.

APP2Speak™ is for sale in the APPLE iTunes and Google Play stores with over 500 downloads and has sold internationally (6 countries). It is a recognized resource by Assistive Technology of Australia, MO Assistive Technology, and over 25 additional state Assistive Technology Organizations. In May, APP2Speak™ made local TV headlines providing St. Louis Police Officer Gary Glasby a means to communicate with his family and friends.

Gina enjoys jogging with her dogs, swimming, and creating heartfelt memories by sewing strip quilted bags, pillows, et al., via her hobby Purse Therapy.

Other Notes/Links

To learn more about Gina Baldwin visit https://app2speak.com

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

NtR 27 – Web Hosting

Welcome to another episode of Navigate the Rapids – the show where I explain digital marketing trends, strategies, and every day topics that every business owner needs for success – both online and off.

  • This is episode number 27 – Web Hosting
  • My name is Will Hanke, I own a digital marketing agency based in Saint Louis, Missouri, and this is my 21st year in the industry. Yes, I was building websites back in the days of web directories, before Google and search engines as we know them even existed.

In today’s show we’re going to talk about…

  • A big Facebook change
  • Ask Will – How to discover which content of yours worked well in 2017
  • Main topic – Web hosting
  • Featured resource
  • Whoops I forgot to mention – new segment
  • So let’s get started. Just over a month ago Mark Zuckerburg from FB announced some big changes to the FB feed. On podcast 67 of DigiKnow we talked about the announcement, how it affects businesses, and how it will change how advertisers will really need to step up their game with quality. It’s all about engagement now. If you’re not creating content that is worth sharing, you’re wasting your time. Not just FB, but in general its time to stop with the fluff and either create good, quality content, or stop wasting your time and budget on the efforts.
  • By the way, you can subscribe to DigiKnow by visiting redcanoemedia.com/digiknow

Up next is my Ask Will segment. This week’s question is an email from Ray.

Will, we are in the middle of revamping our blog fand have hired a writer to do some posts on our products, processes, and members of our staff. We know we do have some good blogs out there, but aren’t sure which ones . Is there a way to identify those fairly easily?

  • Since we just talked about how FB is pushing for better engagement, it only makes sense that you identify which pieces that you’ve created so you can improve on them and build more similar pieces.
  • The easiest way to do this is to use Google Analytics, assuming you have it running on your site. If you do, you’d want to log in, and then select a date range that you think is fair for your assessment. I’d recommend at least a year’s range or more.
  • Then click on Behavior, Site Content, All content. Now you’ll see all of the pieces that got traffic in your timeframe. Sort by clicking on the x button and voila! your most trafficked content.
  • Now, I’d also recommend you look at other metrics, like comments and shares. If you share this content on social media, it’s worth seeing what people responded to as well.
  • Use Pareto’s Principle – the 80/20 rule. Take your top 20% content and make it better.
  • For more info on this, see the shownotes for this episode, number 27, and I’ll have a link to a video that shows you how to do this in more detail.
  • Promo Are you struggling with a particular task, or do you have an SEO or other digital marketing question? Tape your question and I’ll feature it on an upcoming episode. To learn more about how to do that, visit redcanoemedia.com/askwill

Alright, so let’s get into the main topic for today. Today we’re talking about web hosting.

First, a definition

  • Web hosting is like the piece of land that your website lives on. Your domain is an address that points to a location on a server where your website lives. All the files, databases, etc are found there

There are two main types of hosting nowadays – NIX and Windows

  • Windows is not that popular and not used as much as in the past. In fact, many popular hosting companies are phasing out their Windows hosting
  • It sometimes costs more and doesn’t always handle all the programs needed to run a website today
  • The other is *NIX. Typically this is a LINUX system – or some flavor thereof. It could also be referred to as BSD.  This is the most common type of hosting and what most hosting companies default to
  • For purposes of today’s talk, I”m going to refer to this type of hosting for that reason

Types of server configurations

There are a few main types of configurations, each getting a little more expensive as they go because of their capabilities

  • Shared hosting – this is when hundreds of websites are packed into one server, using up most of the disk space. This is good for starting out, but understand that some servers can’t handle popular or well-trafficked sites under this system.
  • VPS – this is usually a mix of only a handful of accounts per server. Instead of competing with hundreds of other sites for processing, you’re only dealing with a few
  • Dedicated – This means just what it sounds like – your own server in a computer facility somewhere. No other website is on your server.
  • Cloud – This newer addition to the mix is my new favorite – it simply means your website is still hosted on a server, but it could actually be replicated across multiple servers across the country. Redundant backups and copies are available, making delivery to your visitors quick.

Pricing

  • Disk space is cheap nowadays. The expense related to most hosting accounts is in the management.  Sites like GoDaddy (probably the worst place to host your website) offer very cheap rates and cheap or limited support along with it.
  • Typical business hosting can be between $7 or $8 a month and up to $30 or so.  It really depends on how much space you need, the amount of traffic you get, and how large your website is.
  • If you have a popular website, you’re not going to want to be on a shared hosting package, of course. VPS and dedicated servers can be upwards of hundreds of dollars a month.
  • Again, you’re not paying for the space necessarily, but the electricity, the software required, and the manpower to run it.
  • Software is the big one here, along with manpower. Systems are always getting updates, and those have to be installed by someone that knows what they’re doing.

Bandwidth

This is the amount of data that flows in and out of your server.

  • For example, if you have a homepage that is 10kb, and someone visits your home page, they’ll download your home page and you’ll use 10kb of bandwidth.
  • If you’re hosting videos or other large files, this can cause your bandwidth to increase dramatically.  It’s better to host those on sites that specialize in that, like YouTube, Vimeo, and Amazon S3.
  • The amount of bandwidth you get allotted can also affect your pricing.  In fact, if your site is small but popular, hosting companies may ask you to move to a better package simply because of the bandwidth.
  • You could be slowing down other sites, which I guess is a good problem to have!

A few things to consider when buying hosting

  • Backup frequency
  • Price
  • Support level (and cost, if not included in monthly)
  • Ability to host more than one site on an account (addon domains)
  • SSL – is it included or does it cost extra, and is there a cost for installation

Resource / Tool

Lastly I want to talk about a tool that I use and how you can use it to grow your business.

  • The tool is a website called WHOIS
  • I mentioned this in passing on episode 26 about domain names
  • WHOIS lets you know some pretty cool information about a website, including (in some cases) who is the owner, when it was registered, when it expires, and where its hosted.
    • Some people register their sites as private. If that’s the case, you won’t be able to see their personal info
    • Registration length is an SEO factor, as I mentioned on episode 26 about domain names.
  • You can visit the website WHOIS.SC
  • Its free!

Whoops I forgot

On episode 26 about domain names, I failed to mention a really cool option that not a lot of people know about- backordering

  • You can ‘sit’ on a domain name and if it fails to get renewed, the registrar that you’ve paid to backorder it will try to grab it for you
  • In many cases these never expire, and are tranferrrable
  • Typical costs are around $20 to $30 – one time

Thank You for Listening – What to Do Next

  • Ok that’s it for today’s podcast! I encourage you to visit redcanoemedia.com/ntr to subscribe and get notified about future episodes.
  • Of course, if the information you learn here helps your business, I’d very much appreciate a review as that is what helps me get the word out to more people.
  • All the notes, links, videos, and anything else we talked about today are available on our site at redcanoemedia.com/ntr
  • Thanks for listening – I’ll see you in the next podcast!

NtR 26: It’s Your Domain Name – Or Is It?

  • Intro
  • This is the podcast where we explain digital marketing in a way that’s easy to understand, we talk about topics that will help your business grow and compete with the big dogs, and we get ideas and tools that will boost our online exposure to potential customers.
  • In today’s show we’re going to talk about…
    • Something new in social media – Instagram hashtags
    • Will’s Pep talk – getting away
    • Main topic – old school Domain Names
    • How to learn more about your domain name
    • Featured tool
  • So let’s get started. This past week on DigiKnow (my other podcast) we talked about how now you can follow hashtags on Instagram.
    • This is pretty cool because it fixes a problem that was inherent to Instagram – the fact that people used hashtags to sort and segment their posts. It’s also a great way to attract other people who like the same things.
    • Its important that you use the hashtags that are popular and avoid misspellings
    • So the update is important because now, much like following friends, you can now follow topics of interest to you and they’ll show up in your normal instagram feed.
    • For businesses, this is important for a few reasons – you can get in front of more people if you’re careful about the hashtags you use, and you can create your own new hashtag for people to follow
  • By the way, you can subscribe to DigiKnow by visiting redcanoemedia.com/digiknow
  • Up next is my pep talk segment. This week we’re going to talk about going to conferences
    • So last week I went to Austin to the Digital Agency Growth Summit. It was an invite-only event in which about 300 digital marketing agencies from around the country attended
    • While I think people would be surprised to know that I’m not very outgoing at these conferences, the amount of information you get at them is invaluable.
    • I think its really important to step away from the screen, the cash register, the machine, and learn from others that are doing better than you. In some of these conferences they really share a lot
    • Of course if you make friends and can pick their brain, even better.
    • So I want to encourage you to find a conference, whether local or across the country. Take time to immerse yourself in your industry, watch for new trends, listen to people, and maybe make a few new pals
  • Promo – Are you struggling with a particular task, or do you have an SEO or other digital marketing question? Tape your question and I’ll feature it on an upcoming episode. To learn more about how to do that, visit redcanoemedia.com/askwill
  • Alright, so let’s get into the main topic for today. Today we’re talking about domain names
  • There are a few areas I want to cover
    • First, what is a domain and how do you get one. A domain name is like your address. It’s the only one in existence, and it’s where you live – or in this case where your website lives. It’s unique, and no one else can own it.
    • You get domain names from domain registrars, such as GoDaddy.
    • It does have an expiration date, and its important to make sure that date is at least 5 years from now.
    • Explain (google is a registrar, 5 years out, fly by night)
    • Many business owners dont know that they dont own their domain name. Hosting, web guy
    • WHOIS is a great place to find out more about your domain
    • Next, its important that if you change domains, that you create the right redirects to not lose all your authority
    • Next, buying up competitor domains
    • Next buying similar domains
    • Buying misspelled domains
    • Keyword rich domain with dashes (phone test)
    • Last, security – SSL its kind of hosting, but its now a ranking factor
  • Lastly I want to talk about a tool that I use and how you can use it to grow your business.
    • The tool is whynopadlock
    • Here’s what it does
    • You can get it at whynopadlock.com
    • It costs $0
  • Ok that’s it for today’s podcast.
  • I encourage you to visit redcanoemedia.com/ntr to subscribe and get notified about future episodes.
  • Of course, if the information you learn here helps your business, I’d very much appreciate a review as that is what helps me get the word out to more people.
  • All the notes, links, videos, and anything else we talked about today are available on our site at redcanoemedia.com/ntr
  • Thanks for listening – I’ll see you in the next podcast!

NTR24: Jay Grosman, CEO and Founder of iAuto Agent

Navigate the Rapids is a weekly podcast of business profiles like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

Business Profile: iAutoAgent

If a person can be defined by those things he is passionate about, then Jay Grosman can be defined by his love of family, his concern for others, his integrity, his passion for vehicles and his commitment to his clients.

Jay began his career in automobile sales 19 years ago, working as an Automotive Professional at a leading car dealership in St. Louis MO.

JABP_060408_87-finalAfter 19 years as a leading salesman in the St.Louis market, he was frustrated with the status quo. The lack of transparency, the low trade-in values, the long, uncomfortable-for-the-customer dealership experience, all of it! Every time he had to give customers the low trade-in value of their car, he was delivering bad news. He knew people’s cars were worth more, and he wanted to give that value back to them. He wanted to do something better, something new. So Jay decided to jump out of the car sales business and designed a totally new way for people to sell their pre-owned cars.

“I am proud to say I am the CEO of iAuto Agent –a totally new concept for the sale and purchase of pre-owned cars in the St.Louis area and beyond. We eliminate the frustrations and hassles of trading your car to a dealer and having to accept a price that’s always less than the actual value of your car. I’m confident my company will appeal to you and the thousands of clients I’m privileged to serve. Our company’s motto is “Don’t Trade. Get Paid.”

Jay feels that his career success can best be measured in his approach to customer service, his passion for building relationships, his knowledge of vehicles, his innovative marketing programs, and his unfailing desire to serve his customers.

In this business profile interview, find out things like:

  • How this one-of-a-kind business model works
  • What almost 20 years of sales taught Jay
  • Jay’s biggest struggle with explaining how his business makes revenue
  • What Jay would do if he had an unlimited marketing budget

Find out more about Jay’s business at www.iAutoAgent.com

Prefer to watch the original broadcast/video?

NTR23: Thad James, SAMMY J Balloon Creations

Navigate the Rapids is a weekly podcast of business profiles like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

Business Profile: SAMMY J Balloon Creations

Thad James started entertaining and amazing audiences for over fifteen years using balloons of all shapes and sizes. What started as a hobby grew to a thad no beard5 10-22-12passion and developed into a full-time business. SAMMY J Balloon Creations excels in offering unique sculptures and designs for a variety of events. While Thad spends a lot of time blowing and twisting, he’s very interested in expanding the tools to grow his company. Thad is constantly learning the latest techniques on marketing, social media and networking. Standing out from the crowd is a focus of SAMMY J Balloon Creations.

In this business profile interview, find out things like:

  • How Thad’s business model is more than just birthday parties
  • Thad’s biggest challenge with building his business
  • How Sammy J Balloons became the first ever business to be invited back to a local home show
  • Lots more!

Find out more about SAMMY J Balloon Creations at www.sammyjballoons.com

Prefer to watch the original broadcast/video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QErWcni3K0

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

NTR22: Fashion Bag Designer Angela Propes

Navigate the Rapids is a weekly podcast of business profiles like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

Business Profile: Farragio

Born in England, raised in Missouri, lived in Alaska, back in Missouri; a husband, two kids, a rescue pug, a rescue cat . . . it’s been an adventuresome life and through it all I’ve had the dream of owning my own business.

In March of 2010 I finally decided to take the plunge and start my own business, but having many different interests I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go in. That’s how I came up with the name “farragio”. It’s my play on the word “farrago” which means a mix of things. (more…)

NTR21: Chief Rabbit Inspector Jeff Lefton

Navigate the Rapids is a weekly podcast of business profiles like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

Business Profile: Abra-Kid-Abra

magic-show-scouts-coin-behind-ear2Jeff Lefton has been performing and teaching magic since 1969. He has performed in Hollywood at The Magic Castle, in Las Vegas, and on a 3-month national tour for General Motors. Jeff was shy as a child, and magic helped improve his confidence and bring him out of his shell. He founded Abra-Kid-Abra in 2005 to help children develop their presentation skills and confidence through magic and variety arts. Jeff has written 20 curriculums and shows in math magic, character, reading magic, and more.

In this business profile interview, find out things like:

  • How Jeff found magic at an early age
  • How Abra-Kid-Abra helps kids with their presentation skills
  • How partnering with his competitors has turned into more business
  • How Jeff cornered the market on after school programs and uses that to fuel his other service offerings

If you’re wanting to add a little magic to your day, this podcast is a great listen!

Find out more about Abra-Kid-Abra at the website: www.abrakid.com

Prefer to watch the original broadcast/video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYohXRPOdkk

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

NtR20: Douglas (Coach) McFarlin: Bottled Water for Homeless Veterans

image

Navigate the Rapids is a weekly podcast of business profiles like this one. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

Business Profile: H2O(H)

“The words homeless and veteran should not be in the same sentence.”

This is one of the first things Douglas ‘Coach’ McFarlin said to me when I first met him.

And this mantra continues in his business – H2O(H) – a business model where bottled water is sold to help furnish homes for veterans.  It’s one of the most unique (and inspiring!) business models I’ve ever seen.

In this business profile interview, find out things like:

  • How a chance meeting with a homeless vet stirred Coach to start H2O(H)
  • How some failures can lead to a more profitable business
  • How singers like Lionel Ritchie and Carrie Underwood are involved with H2O(H)

If you want a dose of inspiration for your business, this is a great one to listen to!

Find out more about H20(H) at the website: https://h2oh.us

Prefer to watch the original broadcast/video?

pssst…. want to be a guest on the show?

NtR19: The Pivot

Seasons Change

In order for any business to really succeed, it needs to be nimble and adapt to changes.  The same is true of the Navigate the Rapids podcast.

Over the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to interview some terrific experts, no doubt about it.  But now it’s time for Navigate the Rapids to adapt and change – so this short 5 minute episode is about that ‘pivot’ in the way our future episodes will be done.

Of course, I’d love your comments about the shift in my approach – positive or negative!

NTR18: Pricing Expert Dale Furtwengler

Do you think you’re under charging? Or do you have any idea if you’re charging enough?  This week’s guest will help you understand how to price yourself according to which types of clients you want to attract.

You’ll Learn:

  • Why business owners struggle with pricing.
  • What is it that customers are really buying.
  • How business owners typically come up with their pricing.
  • What the wrong approach is.
  • What it takes to get premium prices.

BONUS Video Footage for Red Canoe Elite Members:

Links Mentioned in this Episode

About Dale Furtwengler

Dale Furtwengler helps his clients get higher prices regardless of what their competitors or the economy are doing. He’s the author of the internationally acclaimed book, Pricing for Profit. His latest book, Become a MAVERICK: Grow your business using the unconventional strategies of world-class companies was released in January 2015.

Watch This Episode

https://vimeo.com/129790106

NTR17: Cold Calling Expert John Eyres

You’ll Learn:

  • How to use different lists for successful calling programs
  • Why you should have a well crafted script to use on the phone.
  • How to use the phone to your advantage.
  • Why the person calling needs confidence for a successful calling program.

BONUS Video Footage for Red Canoe Elite Members:

  • Sharing trade leads with a person in similar industries
  • Law of 250 – What is that?
  • How to use VM Messaging – 5 different key components.
  • Find out about Red Canoe Elite

Links Mentioned in this Episode

BCC JohnEyres photosAbout John Eyres

My name is John Eyres, my company is Business Connections Consulting. I’m a business owner, speaker, trainer, and author. I am an expert at the Art & Science of Cold Calling People hire me because they want to increase their sales, attract new business, and they don’t care that much for cold calling. They want to do this because telemarketing is just one of the key tools in the marketing TOOLBOX to create new business, and my company is very cost affordable. They know that telemarketing leads to face to face meetings that initiate proposals, which conclude in sales that make you money.

NTR16: Experienced Trademark & Copyright Attorney Morris Turek

Part of running a successful business means having your legal ducks in a row – protecting yourself and your brand from thieves and competitors.  A big piece of your branding is your logo and tagline, so having those protected – and knowing why that’s needed – is what we’re talking about in this episode of Navigate the Rapids.  Attorney Morris Turek breaks it down for us in this very enlightening and educational session.

You’ll Learn:

  • The difference between trademark and copyright law
  • How to find out if someone is infringing on your protected assets
  • What “fair use” means and how to determine if you can use someone else’s trademarked work
  • What do to if you get a cease & desist in the mail (hint: it’s a serious matter)

BONUS Video Footage for Red Canoe Elite Members:

  • Registering your competitor’s trademarks: What can you get away with?
  • Buying competitor’s domain names: What can you get away with?
  • Who owns photographs or articles when you hire someone to do them?
  • What two line sentence you should add to every content-creation contract (including photographers)
  • Find out about Red Canoe Elite

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Morris PhotoAbout Morris Turek

Morris Turek is a trademark and copyright attorney located in St. Louis, Missouri. He helps entrepreneurs, businesses, organizations, and educational institutions avoid the high costs and devastating effects of being sued for intellectual property infringement. Morris focuses his practice of law almost exclusively on trademark and copyright clearance, federal trademark and copyright registration, intellectual property litigation, and intellectual property licensing. He is a 2005 graduate of St. Louis University School of Law and is the owner and founder of YourTrademarkAttorney.com.

Find Morris on Twitter: @TMAttorney

Watch This Episode

NTR 15: Communication Strategist Chris Reimer

If you’ve ever wondered how an accountant could turn into a social media influencer and marketing strategist, you’ll find out on this episode with my guest Chris Reimer. His down to earth charm makes this an easy listen – plus Chris shares some great information about his new book, which if you haven’t picked up yet, you really should.

You’ll Learn

  • How Chris went from accountant to tee shirt salesman to marketer
  • The lessons learned by running a tee shirt business
  • How social media has influenced the way people find employment
  • How the movie Office Space affected the writing of the book Happywork
  • How small, seemingly insignificant management decisions can sometimes leave a huge impact on your employees

(more…)

NTR14: Executive Recruiter Turned Entrepreneur Bryan Crawford

Have you ever been in a job where the hamster wheel of life seems to never end? That’s where Bryan Crawford was in his own family’s business – pounding the phones, doing the things every employee is supposed to do – but not really getting much farther down the road of success.  Finally Bryan thought, as Kevin O’Leary (Shark Tank) says, “There must be a better way!”

This episode we dive into some great things around setting goals, getting started, ongoing automation, and better communication.  You’re going to love it.

You’ll Learn

  • Why resume writers suck
  • What does a parking lot have to do with your success?
  • How does tracing a logo for a Valentine’s Day box make you a better business owner?
  • How hearing a cell phone ring can make your customer communication better
  • How automation can streamline your business

BONUS Video Footage for Red Canoe Elite Members:

  • How to get other people to get things done
  • What services you can use to find those people
  • What are free days, focus days and buffer days?
  • Tips on building systems & processes
  • Find out about Red Canoe Elite

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Bryan Crawford

Bryan-PortraitBryan Crawford is an award winning executive recruiter turned entrepreneur. Bryan shares his experience working with industries top producers, leaders and business minds with small business owners and entrepreneurs both on and off line. Success has a formula. From daily disciplines and mindset to marketing strategies and business practices; when you are able to learn from others who are successful you are able to shortcut your path to success.

Get on Bryan’s waiting list for more information on the 3 Pillars video series

Transcript:

Will:   Hey everyone Will Hanke here thank you very much for joining us here today on navigate the excited about today’s show we’re going to bring you something a little different than normal really excited about it so my guess today is Bryan Crawford. Bryan is an award winning executive recruiter turned entrepreneur he shares his experience in working with top producers and senior executives and small business owners and entrepreneur to help them short cut their path to success thanks for joining me today.

Bryan:    My pleasure.

Will:  Pretty excited to have you on the show here today, so tell me a little bit about your past and how you took the recruiting and moved it beyond something just like that.

Bryan:  My family has been in the career since 1968 and at one point my dad had 24 offices plus recruiter employees and as a recruiter I grew up in a mentality where you the phone it’s like a hamster wheel with light bulb, if you’re in the wheel calling the lights are on and as soon as you stop your income stops, everything stops and so from a business perspective it’s an extremely inefficient model it’s just not a very efficient model especially when you’re exposed to online marketing and the possibilities there and I have a disease that’s not going to kill me hopefully but I have the manage that I got five kids and I just wanted more freedom than being tied to a desk on the phone all the time and I look at online marketing as way to diverse my income so I could have more time off and not be so tied to a phone and so many other things wrong in place for one big jug of money to come in once a month every other month.

Will:  Yeah, so you were turned on by marketing what was the first kind of……

Bryan:  Frustration! I was turned on by my marketing because I got tired of seeing resumes come across my desk from a so called resume writer for somebody has been paid 150, 200, 300 bucks for it was terrible these people contact me for business and they looked at best buy two weeks ago and they are getting a resume for some company and they are being paid to put in information after asking you an hour and a half questions so I actually tracked—like we do in marketing now I didn’t notice back then I was tracking success and what was working and tracking phycology and studying and all those stuff and I put it into a video course like an online course itself to get some more income and my initial thought was we always have all those resources and there is not like many job search site and then I thought how boring is that I don’t even enjoy that I can imagine people coming back to me after the job is already so I kind of back off of that and changed a mile up so then as that was going on I got involved with digital marketer where you and I met and my mind was blown my world kind of exploded and I suddenly found a way to take all the marketing online and deploy them into the big recruiting space to where honestly I had clients paying me 25 to 30,000 dollars for a hire and I was spending 20 bucks on Facebook to get those candidates to writing copying in the right funnel so now I’m transitioning from a tied to my phone to calling for candidates to silver recruiting for clients but teaching them also how to  and set their own funnels to where they can reduce their overhead in the recruiting cost because they have a pipe line of warm people who are open to conversation if that makes sense.

Will:  Yeah, now that’s really cool so you have like 10 years of executive search?

Bryan:  Yeah.

Will:  Experience I guess is the word how does that help with entrepreneurs and small business owners?

Bryan:  Well when you play at the executive level I’m talking to people who some of them I do a lot of a lot of the people who I talk to work they own the companies, they are multimillionaires in some case they are actually billionaires and when you are talking to their lead executives and talking to top sales performers but when you’re making 100 calls a day and over 10 years you’re able to get some really good conversations and you’re able to track the parallels between success and failure and you’re able to understand very quickly what is separating everyone from the pack and—there’s a guy name Scott he’s a recruiter and trainer he says “that recruiting is a development course disguise as a job’ and I never asked him what that meant but I’m pretty sure I know what it means and that is your expose to top performers and getting to learn from them in their patterns every day and you can model that, 30 seconds somebody calls me I can tell you if they are worth talking to are not its sad but its true and so you can take those path to success and it is not just a big company these are individual traits of mind set and behaviour and you can scale that down to the individual themselves and put it right into your entrepreneur and your small business owner and teach other people what it working what is not and show them the big pattern that are going to lead to success of failure.

Will:  Right, right so how does this kind of translate to online business?

Bryan:  Well online business or offline business we are calling business if you’re not you’re not going to be in business very long right so take for instance the silver or cream firms who don’t do anything online who still make a lot of money because they’re calling but it’s a lot more work and so no matter what you do whether you’re cleaning carpets having an online presents and having the proper model in place whether its leap generation or whatever is going to make your life a lot easier, you can make a lot more money, you’re going to work a lot less and ultimately they will help you leverage in a lot faster.

Will:  Right, right. Who doesn’t want to work less and still make the same amount of money or more?

Bryan:  Yeah I mean seriously, who wants to work less? Call me last I’m going for it man.

Will:  Yeah if I had the choice to do this or go fishing you know call me fishing.

Bryan:  Yeah

Will:  Or better yet don’t call me right?

Bryan:  Don’t call me I’m fishing.

Will:  Yeah, yeah that’s awesome so what do you think is the biggest mistake that people at businesses make when they are trying to kind of expand and grow?

Bryan:   Well if we could go into the three points for today so I could rename this whole thing the parking lot tracing letters and the cell phone and the body bags, so these three principles are what come up over and over again and they are not just one particular thing it’s more of an understanding now this is—ties into somewhat but also with the understanding that people know you got to have a ritual in place for personal development every day you have to be reading taking care of yourself all the basic right but the 1st one is the parking lot and this one is one where it’s so many people including myself get hang up on in fact we have mention digital marketer this is Ryan Dicen  is awesome I never met the guy, Ryan  Dicen and are so awesome because one thing that is they take action, they take action fast and the parking lot analogy is this Will if I were to say “drive down here and lets go out to eat” you’re not going to say “I’m going to use this key, I’m going to put it in here, I’m going to turn my hand this much” you don’t think about everything all the time you focus on where you want to go and still when you get to the parking lot or my drive way you’re not thinking back at your house or when do I turn and how fast should I go or what about if a car comes but that’s what all of us do we all think about so much about all the little things that could or should happen verses just starting and taking action and Dane Sullivan says “the biggest part of success and taking action is that 80% is just starting” if you just start just get in the car and drive down 44 you will figure everything else out and just last week I can’t name companies that had some contract in place but companies that you would know, that we all know that they’re some big brands that suddenly like we are like “where are they?” I had meetings last week with directors of finance and head of large sales team over thousands of people and one of the things that came up is that leadership as the company grew got caught up on the phone and we’re not focusing on the things that were taking too long they weren’t moving forward and things just started to stall and big company or you don’t have a blog or what theme should I get? What best? What should I get? Should I call will? Should I call so and so? Of course you call will right? Let’s start and take action and that is the parking lot analogy is don’t focus on all the little things you got to do just start driving and focus on where you want to go.

Will:  Just get out of the parking lot huh?

Bryan:  Just get out of the parking lot or get to the parking lot in fact I heard this this morning I’m a big by the way but Dane Sullivan argues that it is easier for a person or business to grow than it is and it’s because when you focus on the you get that clarity intellectually and emotionally everything else becomes you’re able to know where you want to go and the small things don’t matter when you getting focusing on where you want to go. The parking lot just get to the parking lot and park don’t worry about when to turn when to change lane just go and I’m not perfect but when I started to apply this parking lot analogy and thinking into my own businesses everything start to take off extremely fast because I was no longer focusing on I was focusing on the

Will:  Yeah I know we weren’t planning on talking about goals and stuff today but I think that’s a big thing is one of the things when you’re setting goals let’s say for the year is to write it down and another thing is to put it out there and take action on it and make it something concrete and not just something in your head. I think the same kind of a thing applies do something to make that start to happen and you will be surprise that probably it will start to happen.

Bryan:   I have a–when I see one of the fun things about being a recruiter I’ll help companies go into new markets and build teams and what not and I have so many executives who are really, really god trainers who will hire these other guys that will who were so worry about what to do and how do I do this application of all process and go out there and make a frigging mess we will come in and clean it up just take action and the ones who do that they explode but the one who focus on who should I call for like what 2 o’clock or 4 o’clock don’t get anywhere and it’s so simple  but don’t get tuck on the diving broad just jump.

Will:  Yeah and that even applies to a business owner who has a website, one of the things when I build a website for somebody at and I hand it over to them and I say “ok here’s how you get in the back end here’s how you do this, here how you do that” well you know I don’t know if I should do anything I said “listen get in there and make a mess” like you said “and I got a backup we’ll put the backup after you’re done but you’re going to learn a lot in the process” and I think that’s a great analogy.

Bryan:  I go to quickly but there is a story he tells about who is a great leader when he selling the junior he was working under somebody superior there was a—some project about 5 years in length they were trying to make up this big studying big choice on what to do A or B and 10 minutes in the room he said “do A” and the bottom line is that he’s like “sir how can you make that call in 10 minutes and you’re going to do this for 5 years?” he goes “who cares? If it’s right we’re going know right away, if it’s not right we’re going to know right away and we’ll do the other one but just either why do something” that’s exactly what it is.

Will:  Yeah that’s fail faster.

Bryan:  Yeah fail faster.

Will:  Yeah so tell me about tracing letters.

Bryan:  Tracing letters this is actually a St. Louis carnival story yeah man.

Will:  excited about it so talk to me, you’re talking my language now.

Bryan:   My—I got 5 kids and so valentine’s boxes, you ever do the valentine box or did the valentine boxes?

Will:  Oh definitely yeah.

Bryan:  So I find out like 6 o’clock the night before my wife kind of FYI’s me.

Will:  That’s usually the way it goes yeah.

Bryan:   Yeah, so we’re like the kids need this valentines box done and I wrapped it all white paper and he wants a Carlos logo so I go to the computer and found the Carlos logo and I traced on there and it’s about this big and what you realise this is a great analogy is that my job was to trace the outside of the logo letters and he will colour it in and if you ever do something like that it’s a simple task but if you just trace the letters you get to a certain point where you realise you got to shift your perspective, it’s not that difficult but you got to move over your hand adjust your posture, change your view and trace your letters is  all about perspective and getting somebody else perspective and an example last week in this company everybody would know who they are but they had a huge sales and it came down to the head of new executive who no longer believed that it was important for the development team software development team o have interaction with the sales team. So things will take you longer, there won’t be a faster, they had to go back and treat things a lot more because they are getting input after the facts when if they had the sales team input the entire time they would know exactly what the in customer was wanting and didn’t like or needed and so perspective comes down to just shifting your perspective is don’t tunnel vision, don’t be scared of the input. Input is not nearly as scary as failing and going bankrupt so get the input said that one of the biggest he does to help companies grow is the in marketing survey where he survey’s and polls clients on the experience, what we could do better , where we suck at and you got to get that perspective to go forward right down to—back to the people don’t like to submit their page because of other criticism and it might be harsh but that’s what it takes to go forward and this is so harsh for me I’m a perfectionist, I’m a big guy but I am a—I wear my heart on my sleeve it’s hard to get that perspective but coming down to this personal development is reading, read books everyday get in the mind of somebody else and I could wrap up this point with this there’s an interview online was Steve Jobs and somewhere in their interview there is a developer big guy talking to Steve about how there’s a period of time where languages change so fast every 6 months there is some new coding language and he was kind of about this and Steve thought to himself “wait a minute we didn’t learn to code all those different ways teach you to think differently and make you a better coder now” and he said ‘that’s how I got where I am now is learning about all that and thinking differently” and that’s exactly what businesses  is don’t do and enough of and actually I lied I’m going to stop there, there’s one big thing that I would love to talk about is in banking if my clients ever heard this someone but there are a lot of family owned banks. Dad or grandpa started the banks there are some clients that I have that are a billion plus and one in particular the grandson took it over great guy but see in these banks where it’s self-made dad, grandpa all this growth, all these great things happen and then the wealthy son or grandson takes over and they just kind of level off for a while and one of these call me and say the best thing for this guy to do is go to a Walmart because he has never been to Walmart he’s entire life he didn’t have the perspective his dad or grandpa had of going through the cycle having phycology of all the different clients and prospects he’d be able to think that way so that’s just another example will of we change your perspective and give much perspective as possible. Growth is so much easier and you can make that end result so much faster.

Will:  Yeah that’s terrific so what are a couple favourite books that you like that really kind of screw with your head for like a better way to say it?

Bryan:  ‘The staples rich’ I’ve got one which is great one.

Will:  Oh yeah

Bryan:  If you’re a small business pick up Chris Tucker’s  ‘Virtual Freedom’ like do it yesterday whether you want to hire a full time BA or if you have database work and you want to hire someone to do it for 50 bucks overnight get his book on ‘Virtual freedom’ I’ve got so many books highlight it but just start reading get the perspective.

Will:   Cool I’ll put the links to all those in the show notes for sure for anybody who wants to grab those, so tell me about the cell phone in the body bag this sounds awesome.

Bryan:  So there’s always this big question with marketers especially small business that always get as much is how do you online all the competitors how do you cut through faster and how do you get the attention of somebody else much faster? I was reading last week and this came up and I—they talked about responder and I can my wife’s in medicine first responders doctors, nurses, police officers death to them is a very emotion you have to in that space it’s a said fact but when you on an accident scene you cannot do your job if you but there is one thing that consistently causes more nightmares more phycology issues and that is a cell phone and  they say “when a cell phone rings in a body bag it cuts through everything”  because that connection is made that this person is a human being not part of your job and one person said “I’ve seen thousands of dead bodies but the only one ever stands out is the one where the phone ring.” It could be in the purse, on the floor, in the body bag but that cell phone ringing is what makes that connection and cuts through all those years of conditioning that this is a part of your job, in marketing is it the very same way and I will tell you I’m not trying to brag but I got into a search where I was just like what I’m I going to do? It was and everything else and so I was thinking about the same concept and so email blasted them, I send out an email that was so uncool and so not fancy it was just you know it was right down to earth and I just talk like a person I has an astronomical response write probably the best response write in 10 years I got slammed and it was just the number of people it was the quality and I had high level executive saying “hey we don’t need anything but I really appreciate you treating me like a person”  so it comes down to if you want to get to somebody quickly and make that connection forget the business stuff I mean it’s  there for a reason but talk to them as a person  that is the reason why I get soon much repeat business and me as the individual these huge firms because they know me as Bryan I guarantee you half of my clients can’t even tell you my company name I don’t care because I’m their guy but that is what you got to leave with is treat them as a person not a client or a customer or a number and something not everyone knows but we had a lot of change in the country in the past year with the down turn and then all the banking regulations and one of the biggest trends right now all the regulations is making the small banks expenses so they are all getting bought out by big banks and clients are pushing back because the big banks treat you as a number not as a relationship as much so this comes back to show you that the connecting on a human level is one of the biggest most effective ways to move forward.

Will:  Yeah so it’s interesting a lot of the people that listen to the show and watch the podcast they are small business owner so you know a lot of those are probably paying somebody to do their newsletter and their newsletters are very and maybe there is a couple pieces of content and there is some sort of sale or something, can you imagine how much—how interruptive it would be to do something like you said and just write a newsletter that’s hey here’s who we are and here’s what we do can we help? It would be very interesting to see some of these business owners take that and run with it.

Bryan:  Yeah I will send you a copy of the email that I send out and I don’t have the matrix but the response rate just blew my mind I couldn’t keep up with the response it was crazy but I just took out all the typical stuff at the big companies and how to send out a current email and just I got specific and treated them as a person and t was the coolest thing it comes down to dynamic in like we talked about earlier where we have all these technologies for a reason is treating them as a human and get the a specific message let the talk to them and with technology now 9 dollar a month plan 9 bucks and it totally adjust your customer’s  needs and what they are looking for and it totally awesome. So there is no excuse not to be able to use online marketing to automate different conversation but to make your life so much easier you have the ability now as a small business to sever your customer and clients above and beyond these big companies there is so many conversations and so many layers of tape that had to be cut through to deploy what we are talking about right now and when you can do it as a small business owner in 24 hours awesome.

Will:  Yeah let’s say 5 years ago that was the kind of the case with SEO for a company to take advantage of SEO 5 or 6 years ago they could out rank these big budget companies with just a couple tweets and just do a couple things and they are kicking their butts at least these big companies just couldn’t keep up its interesting how that’s kind of maybe not a case so much any more specifically with SEO but there are many other ways through online marketing that you can still blow these big companies away.

Bryan:  I would tell you I have outrage many big recruiting firms like huge recruiting firms for local searches and it came down to engagement instead of a person—a company putting out something and the audience engaging into that company people were engaging with my post and so all of that came down to Bryans doing all of his activity who is the only guy under my recruiting firm and Dallas Texas shooting up like crazy all these markets over engagement  which again is automated as far as my campaigns now yeah man this is an awesome time for a small business it’s almost—you’re almost at a disadvantage in some ways to be a huge company because you don’t have the freedom to take action.

Will:  That’s right and you don’t have the freedom to like you said fail faster, come up with some idea hey lets put this campaign together and see what happens.

Bryan:  Yeah it’s—I was talking to a company last week and I asked this guy you’ve only been here for two moths why are you looking to leave? And he said that when it comes to sale campaigns all these layers of process, they hire all these people, all these things and the tech company moves very, very fast by the time you get a campaign in place and deploy it will be 6 months you can’t do that in that space, look at  man those post move fast and that’s why—yeah I’ll say it again being in a small business right now is a lot of fun you have all of the tools available to you of the big dogs and you could move a lot faster.

Will:  Yeah and it’s an advantage for those that take—that have that available what about businesses that are still kind of—small businesses but they are still stuck in the old school ways what are you predictions for them?

Bryan:   I think there is always going to be a—I see this right now there’s always going to be a desire for that relationship in fact to your point one of the things that makes a successful was actually a lot of firms are who are hopping on the online wagon are just sending like lengthen messages or email all day……..

Will:  Right.

Bryan:   Everyone is doing that so when I actually call somebody I have to have that personal connection there is a balance but I use the online space to or to make people aware of my brand and who I am and so when I do call them, they know who I am, they know I have some authority in the marketplace because I can track them online and it makes my life a lot easier if you’re not doing that is much, much hard to compete you’ll still have business but I think a lot of industries you sure to be very hard to keep the lights on it’s just going to be  hard to move forward. You’ll still be able to exist but it’s going to be a lot of work.

Will:  Totally agree yeah and the businesses are taking advantage some even just one of these—we are not saying go out and do all this different online marketing stuff but if you just took your newsletter or just one product and started do some automation type of stuff with it and building content around it what an idea answering questions before they ask the questions they are going to take over.

Bryan:  Well because you said it I got to let the cat out of the bag here because a very small business this will change their life I set up an automated campaign I hate to keep talking about the recruiting space but it just transplant this to your own business but a lot of firms their open jobs for the month if you’re happy in your career what’s that going to do for you? That gets annoying and so I talk to a lot of people and I got their feedbacks and they say “we’re busy it will be better to have like a summary of what we—help us stay inform” and so I did a summary newsletter in our campaign based of my based on my company blog through so it’s automatic it was every Friday and it’s dynamic they are awesome it shows top 5 awesome banking stories Dallas, Huston but when is goes back to my blog I’m using the idea of the in line content or its more of a native content where the job openings are more of news features and so you’ve engaging with passive clients, passive customer, passive job seekers but because you are given you editing value to say here what I have, here’s what I can offer you. They are more engaged and the authority it being built and so we again there is what 4 or 5 touches, 10 touches there is always different arguments how many touches but you can use that to make your life so much easier as a small business and you can set up your campaign even for 9 bucks a month and never touch it. I will never touch that newsletter for 6 months it goes by itself.

Will:  Right.

Bryan:  With that the important thing is as people click on different articles they are clicking on banks news and stuff  I don’t really care if they click on certain companies hiring or hiring trends or how to perp for this upcoming way in the industry that’s a buying sign and my system tracks that so I can send now a list of a to a thousand prospects in Austin and Dallas Texas and the banking industry and the 45 people that click on hiring trends I’m alerted I can contact immediately verses having to call or email a thousand people and figure out who is interested that is the leverage that we have available to us as a small businesses and a lot of these stuff Will I was the MRI the biggest company in the world for recruiting I couldn’t do any of this there was some many contracts and things in place that we weren’t even allowed to do this stuff as independent I could deploy this stuff and life got some much easier.

Will:  And you know we have mentioned active campaign a couple times it’s—that obviously played a big part everything that you’re doing so how do you think a small business can plug that in what’s an easy starting point for them?

Bryan:  I would say if you have any list of any signs at all for instance I’ll give you an example there is a here in town the other day I got an email from them and I got a open it up his logos will cause my entire screen this huge logo and then it’s like this one sentence text about “hey is almost over have you seen a “that’s the 1st email in 3 months that I got from the guy.

Will:  Right.

Bryan:  And he’s a one man shop no he’s a great doctor he’s great at what he does so what he could do is take that existing list and put it into a—I mean don’t say “hey come see me” give them some health benefit, give them some care or some benefits to come in to seeing him or automate that and the people who click on certain articles have campaign set the fire and now they are sequent and ever email and have these campaign in place to segment who is interested and who is not I mean it’s not that heard it’s really simple but that is what he could do he could take his list of a couple hundred people probably upload it and just have it all automated.

Will:  Yeah I also brings to the point about when you do send something out don’t just send out here’s the latest sale which is kind of what he did he, he come see me when it was me, me, me instead of giving it’s pretty cool. So how could people get more content like we’re talking about today?

Bryan:  Will there is two things happening in my world but CAB is a career blog as career at blog.com that is a site we still out but its got 3 areas 1 is for job seekers which if you’re watching this you’re probably not looking for a job the 2nd the other areas the 1ist is optimizing productivity in everyday and the 3rd is following your boss how do you go off independently and so we are priming the pump right now with videos for our YouTube channel and a podcast. I’m a batcher I’ll do everything and just schedule it out for a 30 day deploy you know I’ve got 5 kids again takes up a lot of time so careerblog.com if you want more information on the marketing and the recruiting side recruiting also many of our recruiting clients is market-recruit.com that just got launched 2 days ago we’re still on building that out but you can contact me through there as well and something that they need to look up is com is the fantastic school for a small business.

Will:  Is this something that’s yours?

Bryan:  It’s not mine but I had to put it in there to change my life you can schedule a and social media updates to all of them for a month in advance every single content and they have a plan that is already 10 bucks a month I would say as a small business are one of the things that will blog you down tremendously but I wanted to add that value Will go to .com and check it out its awesome.

Will:  Oh thanks well that’s cool that made it worth the free cost of admission well listen I really appreciate you come out to the podcast and spending some time with us.

Bryan:  Will pleasure to having me on there is some much I could talk about for 10 years but now it’s an exciting time right now for small businesses for sure.

Will:  Listen thanks everyone joining us if you are member  stick around we’re going to talk to Bryan a little bit more and get some in depth if you’re not go to  and jump in there you’ll see all of our podcast plus all the bounce podcast that people don’t see otherwise we got a lot of good things there Bryan I appreciate you being on the show.

Bryan: Thank you any time man.

  Will:  Thanks man.

NTR 13: Email Marketing Expert Tom Ruwitch

Did you know that over 95% of people that access the internet have an email address (or five)?

Did you know that around 90% of those people compulsively check their email multiple times a day?

The truth is out – email marketing remains one of the best and most widely opened/accepted forms of marketing.

In this episode I talked with Tom Ruwitch from MarketVolt, a terrific email service provider located in Saint Louis, Missouri.  Tom shares some terrific tips and secrets about email marketing and segmenting your list for better overall results.

You’ll Learn

  • If email is a dead & obsolete technology
  • What is an ESP and why you should use one
  • Some keys to a successful email marketing campaign
  • Mistakes you should try to avoid when putting together an email campaign
  • How B2C and B2B businesses use email marketing differently
  • How to ‘Market to the Maybes’
  • What Tom means by ‘Separating prospects from suspects’

BONUS Video Footage for Red Canoe Elite Members:

  • The big question – when is the best time to send an email or newsletter for the best response & engagement?
  • Which days work best for various industries
  • Advanced strategies for planning an email campaign
  • How to keep customers engaged, even if they only buy from you in very long cycles (years!)
  • Find out about Red Canoe Elite

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Tom RuwitchAbout Tom Ruwitch

Tom Ruwitch  is a business growth specialist with nearly 20 years’ experience helping businesses and individuals thrive using innovative, interactive marketing. He is the founder and president of MarketVolt, a marketing firm that is best known for its powerful, easy-to-use email marketing software. MarketVolt helps businesses implement powerful technology and bright ideas to attract leads, engage prospects, close sales, and maximize retention and referrals.
Tom has helped to establish MarketVolt as one of the midwest’s leading interactive technology and marketing firms. He serves as the company’s lead consultant for clients who seek web site, email, social media, and other marketing guidance. Tom is an experienced web developer, copy-writer, and direct response marketer. He is especially adept at helping businesses coordinate their online and offline marketing efforts. He has experience designing and executing marketing campaigns for small business startups and publicly traded companies.

Tom is a speaker and consultant who appears regularly as a featured presenter at business expos and other events. He writes a monthly marketing column for a business journal in St. Louis, and he is a guest blogger on marketing topics for many online publications.

https://vimeo.com/118520309

Transcript:

Will:  Hello everyone welcome to the navigate the rapids podcast today is January 30 2015 name is Will Hanke today we’re going be talking about something I think a lot of people maybe over look and that’s email marketing my guess today is Tom Ruwitch, founder and president of marketvolt one of the mid-west leading interactive technology and marketing firms he sever as the company leads consultant for clients who seek websites, email, social media and other marketing guidance Tom is an experience web developer, copywriter and directs respond marketer. He has especially helped businesses coordinate their online and offline marketing effort, he has experience designing and executing marketing plans for a small business start-up and publicly traded companies. Tom thanks for bring on the show.

Tom:  Thank you Will it was a great pleasure.

Will:  Very excited to have you on today and like I mentioned earlier a lot of people still even today don’t realise the power behind simple email marketing.

Tom:  I agree we hear that old cliché that email marketing is dead and nothing could be further from the truth.

Will:  Yeah before we jump in and start asking a lot of questions why don’t you tell me a little bit about how did you get started at marketvolt.

Tom:   Sure, sure it was about 14 years ago it was way back in 2001 before a lot of people even heard about email marketing and I’ve come out of a media background, I’ve a newspaper reporter for a long time worked on the online side of the newspaper as well as the print side and it wasn’t as if I’ve done email marketing I’m not going to complain or claim to be better at the internet the some political did a few years ago. I got on to the idea of email and internet marketing because what I really recognised the best way to connect buyers and sellers was to do so through interactive technologies and email a certainly an established an emerging one at that point the old media advertising models were on advisement on some page of the newspaper or a billboard or some space in the television ad hope people see that and then hope people act and buy and so forth but the internet, email certainly back in that day was all about having a conversation and connecting buyers and sellers in much more interactive way and I saw that back in 2000 or so when I could and we built it and over time the power and the potential of email has emerged and has continued to really be an important force on how buyers and sellers connect .

Will:   So ah were you still working when you started the marketvolt thing, were you still working as a reporter.

Tom:  I had left the newspaper and was involved in an internet start-up called sports we had built software for the newspaper industry to collect and published  sports statistics we build that company up and raise money built it from me and my other co-founder to about  85 a people and sold it in 2000 and it was in that time from 2000 and 2001 that I was working on the next thing and develop the idea for marketvolts and built it.

Will:   Oh great that’s a very cool story.

Tom:   Yeah.

Will:   And I think I’ve heard of the sports thing it’s been quite a while very cool. So you’ve mentioned earlier about email being that’s not the case you say.

Tom:   Not the case at all, it’s been short of this myth or this slim that emerges over the years and when RSSV came out on websites that’s going to kill email and certainly when social media came alone that’s going to kill email and the reality is email is still enormously important part of all of our lives 95% of the people on the internet have email accounts and 90% of the people who have email accounts check their email compulsively, multiple times a day hourly sometimes and they are so stabbed that I saw in the study that—the same study that set 95% check impulsively 8% of people in that survey said they would check their email minutes or moments after they had sex it’s kind of a I hoped for your loved ones sake that you are not among that 8% I share not to gross people out or make this too R rated but I shared that so I could emphasize the idea that the people or checking their email and you have an opportunity to be in front of them and if you’re not emphasizing email is part of the marketing fix you’re missing the opportunity to have those conversations and be in front of audiences and then the numbers are not shrinking the return on investment, the number of people using email the amount of revenue generated by email that’s not going down if anything going up.

Will:   Yeah I would say the ways of communicating by far emails is the one that’s used the most and compulsively check the most often, I don’t log into twitter and see what somebody said in the last 10 minutes.

Tom:   Right.

Will:   I am running a business however most people– well ok all of the people that will communicate with me that’ll pick up the phone and call me or they send me an email, you’re not going to shoot me a message on twitter or Google plus or something.

Tom:   Right it’s true, it just remain in an essential  element of our daily lives both given our lives as consumers and our lives as business people so the tool works in different ways for different segments (07:00?) but it’s equally affective because we’re active in email as consumers we’re in email as business people and so the medium is important in both segment of business.

Will:   Yeah, yeah so you’re a and why should businesses use one for email marketing?

Tom:   Yeah so ESP is an acronym that stands for email service providers  and fundamentally there are many, many businesses market full my company is among them that are in that category and the service is software typically web posted software, you have an account you can log into the account you can use the account for the following things to store and segment your list, it has a built in database for you to manage your list and segment them into categories, creating content where you don’t have to be a HTML a web expert you can create content that is compelling and with basic word processing skills to do so, sending an email with confidence if you try to send bluck email to multiple people and do it from your own computer chances are you’re not going to get many of them true and chances are over time your internet service provider  will say “stop doing it or we’re going to cancel your account” and so sending with confidence that the emails will get through to the inboxes is very, very important and finally the ability to track and then automate. So emails service providers who open your emails who have click which links who forwarded them and then depending on the system there is automation that can follow automatically segmenting your list automatically sending follow ups and our system has a lot of those capabilities and so why is it so important to use an ESP? It just makes it easier to do all of those things and it removes the headache and hassle of processing and making sure your email is getting through, you’re paying a service to make sure it gets done.

Will:  Yeah and its definitely worth paying someone instead of trying to do that on your own because even if you’re smart enough to keep a database and all those kind of stuff you’re just not going to keep up with especially if you’re trying to grow your list it’s just going to become more and more of a problem.

Tom:  Yeah and I want to make that when people understand when you and I are using the term ‘pay someone’ you’re paying for the software that helps you do it yourself, the key thing is you’re still creating the email , you’re still pressing send it’s still you’re name on top of the email it’s you doing the work the software just makes the work so much easier and makes the results so much better you’re paying for that system that does the work for you now in some cases companies like ours provide the services too so if you don’t want to do the work yourself you can hire our consultants or our experts to help you some companies do that and some of the SP’s do it, some of the SP’s don’t so that’s a very different sub categories within the space in terms of service but ESP probably refers to the software.

Will:  Well thanks for clarifying that up I appreciate that, so let’s talk about someone who wants to create their own email campaign what are some of the successful keys that they need to put in place?

Tom:  Yeah the 1st is planning if you don’t go into it with a plan you are bound to fail so many businesses will get into email marketing and this principle applies also to social media or any other marketing  we have to do this for whatever reason…..

Will:  When we get to the twitter we have to be there because we heard.

Tom:  Yeah why you’re doing it? Well my competitors do it my boss told me to do it that’s a good, understand why you’re doing it what are you try to achieve, what are the business goals, what are you going to say and why. We have a planning process that we can help our clients go through don’t have a whole lot of time to focus on that today  but the key thing it typical scenario of businesses all around the first of the month every month I’m going to send them an email and newsletter or month, weekly or every second Monday but just some periodic approach and then more of these businesses will get to about the 30th or the 29th of the month two are three days in advance of the deadline and their—the person responsible is thinking what heck have I ever this month and it’s a hassle it doesn’t work you’re blowing an investment so without planning you’re going to fail so that’s thing number 1. Thing number 2 is with email marketing you really want to focus on getting permission from the people you’re going to contact you don’t want to scrap together a list from a business directory or some chamber guide or visiting people’s website and just pulling emails off you don’t want to buy list and just being to pound people over and over again with spam. What you want to do is give people reasons to raise their hand and join your mailing list by providing valuable tips on your websites and drawing people to your website and giving people a reason to sign up by asking them when you meet them at networking events or if you speak there all sorts of list building tactics but the key thing is that you’re having a conversation with who said “hey Will I want to hear from you” or “hey Tom I want to hear from you” and that’s a good and to the 3rd point is the reason they want to hear from you is you’re proving value if all you do is pitch, pitch, pitch they’ll tune out because people who are in an audience who you’re trying to connect with only the smallest percentage of those people are already buyers or really on the verge of a buying decision you’re talking to the 99% who are not on the verge of buying decision and all you’re saying is here is the latest deal buy now they’re tuned out but if you’re providing useful information tips, interesting information they’ll continue to read they’ll forward, they’ll share so far 3 points very quickly summarised. Plan, build a list with permission and provide value in your emails and you will be successful.

Will:  Yeah to the point of providing value I just helped one of my clients get set up to start sending out normal newsletters they were very  accidently sending them out every once in a while and usually when somebody meeting something along the line of newsletter “oh we got to get our newsletter” anyway we said “okay” I got it all ready for him the and of course in this business owner mind it’s let’s talk about the sale, here’s what our latest sale was this month ok we could probably do that I’m going to put a couple blogs in there and things like that to break it up a little bit so we send that one out two weeks later “hey we need to do another one because there is a new sale coming and we really need to push that” and I think a lot of business owner even when they get that part down they still think they just need to push out sales all the time.

Tom:   Yeah and it doesn’t work over time because if you are proving content that people see as irrelevant or too pitchy they will being to tune out so you’re open rates will decrease your rate people say “take me off your list” will increase and your spam complain rates will increase people will click that “hey this is a spam” button that they have in their email software even if they signed up and gave permission if your emails are annoying them they’ll click the spam button and as a result you’ll have even more trouble getting  the emails through because some of the filters may think you are a spammer because people are complaining about your emails so keep it relevant and provide value.

Will:  Yeah, that’s exactly what happened to we started getting all these unsubscribes ad of course and it was all on me this wasn’t happening before well you weren’t sending anything before so there is nothing to unsubscribe to.

Tom:  I have a blog Will blog.marketvault.com and I forget how recently it was it’s probably today the 3rd or 4th most recent blog post and I know this will be our so  might have to find it but it talks about the headline of the blog posted something like ‘is your email too pitchy’ or something like that and the point of the post is that in a survey of marketing people be people we’re not marketing people but in a survey of businesses  the respondents said that marketing fails to sway them because they feel it’s too pitchy so the communications they receive coming are too pitchy now that the key thing to remember is that is you still can pitch its ok to pitch you just have to be selective and discriminate about how you do it and when you.

Will:  Yeah I went back in and said “you know what we got to switch this up” we need to provide value as you said and then oh by the way we’re having a sale and I think that approaches working much better a lot less unsubscribe

Tom:  Yeah and one of the ways to think about it is the emails that you are sending are always opportunities for you too prospect and identify your best folks because you’re able to know who opens your emails and who clicks so a great example that we use is the example of a music store bricks and mortar music store and within that database let’s say a thousand people sign up for the email list you might only have 100 people who have any interest in classical music a lot of rock and roll fans a lot of blues fans whatever only but only 100 people are interested in classical music so if for whatever reason you have classical CD’s on sale and you begin to pitch that sale to 1000 people you’re getting 900 people don’t give a whoot about it and a lot of us 900 people are going to tune out and be annoyed. So what can you do in a newsletter you can have a little bit of everything for everybody that’s a core principle a newsletter if you’re sending it to the whole list hit everybody’s –get everybody’s interest a little bit of everything for everybody a little bit of roll and roll a little bit of jazz a little bit of classical and then the classical then could have a link read the interview with the new conductor at the orchestra and then pay attention who’s showing interest in your stuff about classical music, people who click are obviously interested in classical music and over time you can begin to build segments in your database and even immediately following that newsletter so if somebody clicks that link I’m going to send them a coupon for my classical music sale and you’re hitting maybe only 15, 20, 30 people but those 30 people are really going to be happy to get those coupon and they are going to come into the store and meanwhile you are not annoying 900 people, who clearly won’t have any interest in that.

Will:   Right yeah well that’s definitely interesting. So music stores are a great kind of b to c way of doing things. How about b to b and does it work the same?

Tom:   You know we were talking before we started and you were talking about in these meet ups you got to turn off all the noise in the background. I am a working person and the phone is ringing off the hook here at market vaults.

Will:   It’s good, it’s like the telethon with all the phones ringing in the background.

Tom:   Yeah it’s so darn busy here. So you were asking about b to b.  It works in similar ways and we were talking about the myth of email being dead. We hear all the time from b to b people, “Well I am not going to sell some $5,000 piece of equipment or some consulting engagement that’s worth thousands and thousands of dollars on an email and that’s probably true. In many b to b businesses, sales are going to be get done with face to face and direct consultation in the same way that sales were being made 10 or 20 years ago; but the path to the sale can be significantly different. Who do you call or how do you get to a meeting? You might have again a thousand people in your roller desk and the old style sales hustle would be knock on every door on every floor, call people over and over again, cold call until you break through and get yourself to ten meetings. Well with email marketing we talk about the concept of separating prospects from suspects. You can send an email that has something about a particular product. I will take an example from a printing company with which we work. They do standard printing stuff and the people in their database are all interested in the standard printing but they also have a very specialized product that’s expensive and very niche and that’s counterfeit proof printing; printing that has a seal in it, for things that you have to verify that this is in fact a thing. That company in its email newsletter, included last January in advance of the Superbowl, an article about how around the Superbowl, the idea of secure printing is really important because you have the mementos and the photos and the programs and for collectors you have to use secure printing technology to verify that this is the official program and not a counterfeit knockoff. So they shared that article or they linked to an article and what they recognized strategically, is the people that are clicking through on that article are interested in the concept of secure counterfeit proof printing and those are the people that our sales reps can calls or email directly. Say like, “Hey you know I was wondering whether you saw that article we had in our newsletter, we offer a service like that and I was wondering if you are interested?” Now they are going to get to a sales meeting or get through on the telephone much more quickly and much more effectively that way, they will get to their 10 meetings or their 20 meetings or their 30 meeting much more quickly by identify prospects based on who is clicking on an email than if they just called a thousand people in a course of a month or whatever it would take and knocking on doors randomly it’s a very efficient way to identify your prospect by sending valuable and interesting information and paying attention to whose showing interest than following up.

Will:  Yeah and we’re going to have John on here in a couple weeks about cold calling and the great thing about the email is its intrusive so it shows up when you’re ready to open it.

Tom:  That’s right, that’s right but even we have worked with John, John is a great tele prospector and what we’ve done with campaigns with John, yeah it’s a cold calling in many cases the primary call to action might be on calling on behalf of so and so and we’ve like to set up a meeting and people will say not interested but we’ll have a secondary call of action would you like some free report could we get your email to send you something that you would value and then they’ll say “yes” much higher rates of sure I’ll take a meeting so for every person who takes a meeting and you might have 30 people who give you their email address and then we track who clicks or who opens the email and we invested in other phone call to those people because they say no at first but they got my thing and they’ll pick up the phone and you get additional action on the back side or it might not even be John doing the follow up calling it might be the business person directly or the sales rep this idea of knowing who your prospects are because you can track who’s opening your email and they welcome the email , who opened the email who clicked on the link they are showing interest they are more likely to answer the phone because they know you and are paying attention to your  content and they are more likely to take that next step, sales meeting, whatever the case maybe.

Will:   Yeah it’s interesting how they say no but then you see them opening the emails and that’s actually something I heard you talk about before, it’s kind of marketing to the maybes. What do you mean by that?

Tom:  Well if you think about putting a marketing message in front of a thousand people, that small percentage of people who are ready buyers, you know in sales we talk about the person who has the need and the authority and the resources to make the purchase and all three of those things have to be  at the moment you are putting a marketing message in front of a person, in order for that person to say, “Okay I am buying it”. Then you may also have the opposite spectrum, those are the yes es; you have the opposite spectrum: I have no need , I have no interest, I have no desire, I am happy with whom I am with, or I know you and I don’t want your product, the flat out nos. You won’t move them, they are not coming around. But that whole spectrum in-between is the maybes and if in your marketing, whether it’s a print piece or a teleprospecting script or a billboard or a television ad, if you provide some way for the maybes to raise their hand; it’s not yes I will buy, it’s sure I will give you my email address for a free report or for something of value or I will text 12345 to enter a contest and then reply with my email address when the text ask me to get an additional something. The maybes, if you can get them to raise their hands so that they can give you their email address and you can then begin to engage them with ongoing valuable content, you will convert more sales over time, it’s as simple as that; the bigger your email list, the more sales you will convert over time. It may not be tomorrow but it will happen and so thinking of your marketing communications, your advertising and so forth as an opportunity not just to jump to please to meet you will you buy but please to meet you, will you buy and If you think of your marketing communications as not just please to meet you will you buy? But please to meet you, can we begin a conversation? Which is what you are really asking the maybes, you are going to have great success doing your marketing communications.

Will:  Yeah I have something huge that I started steering a lot of my clients towards, like hey let’s offer some sort of a free check list, let’s offer a top 7 tips or something like that that they can give an email address, they can pull it down and there is no sales pitched involved; it’s purely just giving them a piece of value and it’s something that they can consume very quickly, it’s not a 200 page eBook where they are just going to give up 3 pages in. But that has made the entire list building process a lot simpler.

Tom:   Yeah we have one on our blog, on the sidebar of our blog website. 10 secrets to write subject lines that sell and you enter your name, you enter your email address and you get a two pager with 10 quick tips and if you are doing email marketing, this is going to be valuable to you. And from our perspective, marketing our business, the person who is thinking about, “how can I make my emails more effective” is the person we want to be talking with and we want to provide value to. So what follows that opt-in is a follow-up email telling them a little bit more about our company, telling them a little bit more about the value we will provide if they stay on the mailing list, here are more tips, here is what you can expect and over time, many of those who sign up for that free report ask for demos, sign up for the software, become customers.

Will:  And this is automated right they click on the link on the side of your  blog fill out their email address and it automatically emails them, it does this automatically right?

Tom:  Yeah and in fact the way that we start to talk about the product, you know the balance between pitching and value, we say, “Hey by the way here is an email thanking you, thank you very much for downloading the thing, we hope you find it valuable, we will continue to send you some stuff, by the way this email was sent to you automatically, setting up automated marketing processes is a really important thing for you to do as a business” that’s a tip. Setting up automated marketing processes is a way to help grow your business and here is how I did it. And the here is how I did it is beginning to describe our system, our software. So we are establishing that relationship, we are providing value, you just got some tips, but we work our way into pitching. So it goes back to that point I made before; it’s not that you should never talk about your products and services and be afraid to pitch; you just have to do it in a context where it’s going to be welcomed and ere it makes sense and it is not over killing the irrelevant stuff.

Will:   Yeah so another thing I heard you talked about was separating the prospects from the suspects; can you explain that concept and how it applies to email marketing?

 

Tom:  Yeah we were talking about that a little bit before this idea, link tracking and in a b to b or b to c. The paying attention to the classical music fans who click the link, those are my prospects and the people who are never opening the email or never clicking, those are the suspects and part of the idea is that you want to call your list over time, you don’t want to keep pounding emails to people who are showing no interest and occasional people will just sign up and tune out over time. And so in marketing and sales in general your goal is to have as many conversations with the true prospects who welcome your communications and minimize the amount of time you are spinning your wheels with the suspects. Now you can send emails to anybody and there is not a whole lot of additional cost by sending or apparently any additional cost if you press send and send it to everybody; but if you send everything to everybody every time without paying attention to separating the prospects suspects, what we talked about before is your open rates will go down, your spam complaints will go up and you will have less returns.

 

Will:   Yeah well listen I appreciate you being on this show today, this has been terrific information.

Tom:  I am really, really happy to be here and to spend some time with you and it’s a great program you have going and I am going to continue to tune in. Next time I am on or going to hangout with you or anyone else, I am going to unplug the phone before I start.

Will: Yeah I think I told you that we did one before With Cathy and her cat jumped up on the table and ran across the screen; that was fun.

Tom:  Yeah well cats do that, you know you can’t keep the cats off the keyboard.

 

Will:   Right so tell me how people can find out more about marketvolt?

 

Tom:  So first of all I like communicating one to one with people. So if you have a direct question or want to reach out to me, you can reach me at [email protected]. Our website that talks about our products and services and has resources on it is marketvolt.com. The blog that I mentioned that’s marketing tips of all sorts, not just email marketing but all things is blog.marketvolt.com. And we have a new thing that I wanted to encourage people to check out and that’s called 5in25.com, the idea there it’s a webinar series; 5 powerful marketing tips delivered in just 25 minutes. We typically do it in the middle of the day so you can grab a bite to eat, sit at your computer and in 25 minutes we cover all sorts of cool stuff, tips for b to b marketing, b to c marketing. So check out the site, we have a different slate of webinars at different times; if you click 5in25 you will see what we have, always free, always 25 minutes.

 

Will:   Can people go back and see the previous ones that you have done?

 

Tom:  We have things archive in different places and we are working on that but for now the best way is to sign up for one. If you can’t attend at the date that you see when you hit the link, sign up and you will get a link after the date that it runs, we have the video in our archives.

Will:  Which is what a lot of people do, they will sign up for the webinar and know that the recording will come later.

Tom:  Right

Will:   That’s okay. Well listen I really appreciate you being on this show today. Marketvolt is a wonderful system, I have got several clients who use it as well and I really appreciate the tips on the segmenting and the marketing to the maybes, those were terrific.

Tom:  Thanks Will, thanks very much.

Will: Thanks everyone for watching this show today, my name is Will Hanke hopefully we have helped you today to navigate the rapids of business a little better.

NTR 11: Video Marketing Guru Mason Duchatschek

Most business owners still aren’t taking advantage of video marketing like they should (if at all!).  In this broadcast we talk about video marketing, and how consumers are using it to leave reviews on businesses – hurting their bottom line.  Mason also talks about his book (which I’m a co-author) and gives some great tips on avoiding and dealing with bad online reviews.

You’ll Learn

  • What is an Internet Boogeyman?
  • How to spot an Internet Boogeyman
  • What you should NOT do if you run across a bad review about your business
  • How to neutralize customers before bad reviews happen
  • Mason’s thoughts on the best content creation methods
  • What you can do offline to avoid an Internet Boogeyman

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Mason Duchatschek

Untitled-1Mason Duchatschek is a #1 Amazon.com best selling author, keynote speaker and entrepreneur who helps business owners attract, capture, and convert more of their ideal prospects into customers both online and offline, even if they find web and social media marketing options overwhelming.

As a true “multi-preneur,” Mason heads the companies AMO-Employer Services, IncBuildatribe, LLC,  and BusinessWebVideos.com, which have helped over 1,000 companies maximize the capabilities of social media and web marketing technologies and the people who implement them. He has provided consulting, speaking, and thought leadership to major corporations such as Miller Brewing, Land O’Lakes, and Purina Mills.

Over the last 20 years, he has coauthored the books Sales Utopia, Attract, Capture & Convert and Defeating an Internet Boogeyman. And, his ideas have been featured in Selling Power, Entrepreneur Magazine, The New York Times, and Fox News.

Transcription

Will: Hey everyone, hope you are doing well today! This is the Navigate the Rapids broadcast. Today is January 2nd, 2015 so if you are listening to this in the recent time, hope you had a good holiday season. Here we are back at it again! It is another Friday, another broadcast and today  have a great guest, Mason Duchatschek. We are going to talk about some things that business owners do not necessarily want to hear about and that is all the bad people out there trying to ruin your business and your reputation. But it something that we really need to know about more than all the good stuff. I talk a lot about all the SCO factors and all the things you have to do to make your website good but we do not often talk about the things that. can sneak up on you from behind and screw things up.

My guest today is Mason Duchatschek, as I said. He is a Number 1 Amazon Best Selling Author, key note speaker and business marketing expert that I think can help each and every one of you attract, capture and convert more of your ideal prospects online into clients. He also has amazing ideas and advice on how to repair, build and protect your reputation online. Some of his ideas have been featured on Selling Power Magazine, New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fox News and  News Week. So Mason, thanks for joining us today

Mason: Pleasure to be here, thanks for having me Will!

Will: You have quite a list of thing that you have been featured on that is pretty awesome!

Mason: Thank  you

Will: So we are going to talk a little bit about what we have called the ‘internet boogy man’, which is a book that you have written and we will talk a little bit more about that.  But prior to get into that tell me a little about your background, I know you have done some work with building tribes and things like that. Tell me about that.

Mason: I am an entrepreneur at heart and  I own several different businesses and really embrace the online and social media marketing stuff a few years ago. Out of frustration I was listening to Tony Robins and Frank Kern interview. Frank Kern made the comment in the interview that ‘if what you are doing is not working then that is good news because at least you know now that a lot of the old school methods of sales and marketing are not working like they used to and may not change, if anything they will get worse,’ he said now is they time t start learning the new ways to do things. So I really had been frustrated that a lot of the old school sales and marketing methods were not working and in the old school method there are only so many ways to reach a business owner if you are marketing. You can reach them by mail but Americans sort their mail by the trashcan and now they are not reaching them. You could call someone by telephone but it is not enough to get passed the receptionist, now you have to be able to get passed caller ID twice because now the receptionist and the decision maker have it and if they do not know   who you are and why you are calling they are not going to take your call. You can do advertising on radio or TV but now with TV people record digitally a lot of their shows and fast forward through the commercials and on the radio they change the channel.

It has just never been more difficult. The walls that separate prospects from people trying to sell and market to them, those walls have never been thicker or taller. I realized that several years ago and said I need to embrace this new technology, social media and online marketing and find an alternative way. In the goal of building my own businesses I really fell in love with all of these new tools, technology and strategies. I have been blessed to have had some success with it and have people who are willing to pay me to have the same.

Will: Awesome! So tell me a little bit about build a tribe, we will tackle that 1 1st.

Mason: Build a Tribe is the site where people can go to learn about how to build their business online. The sister site to that is business web videos where people can actually execute those strategies and tools with some our help and some of our tools. Anyone that takes the time to visit buildatribe.com right now I am offering my bestselling book ‘Attract Capture and Convert’, the entire audio book from the front to the end that I have read in the study for free. It is available for anyone who enters their name and email on the form of that page, it will get sent to them automatically. Build a tribe is about how to build your business online and business web videos is more about the tools to help execute it

Will: So what is a tribe?

Mason: Tribe is your friends, fans, followers, evangelist for you and what you offer. They are the 1s that will go out of their way to tell other people like them about you. Those are the people that like, trust and support you and are thankful for your knowledge and expertise and ability.

Will: That is good to have for any business, and we should say there are different levels. I have some followers that follow what I do and then I have fan or I like to call them cheerleaders, people like you said that will actually go out of their way to tell someone else ‘hey you have to meet this guy or hook up with this company.’

Mason: Those are the 1s that make the effort worthwhile. When you knowledge, skill, ability (06:14) can help improve their lives and businesses in ways that are so powerful that they appreciate it and they go out of their way to share what you have done with others, that is my main goal, why I do it.

Will: With the internet it is a lot easier. In the past you could only build a tribe with the people you met and word of mouth, your fans telling other people. now you can build content and out things out on the web and attract people that you may never meet but they are still considered your fans. Very awesome! I was blessed enough to get an email from you asking to help write the book, so tell us the title of the book we are talking about

Mason: The book I have right here is ‘Defeating an Internet Boggy Man.’ I wrote that with your help and Adam Barnes. The feedback we have gotten since we put it out is very positive, a lot of business owners  said ‘I knew I needed this stuff but I had no idea how to do it.’ Very positive feedback and it makes all this worth while

Will: I swooped in and helped with some of the CSO stuff, but this is pretty much your baby. Tell us what exactly an internet boggy man  is.

Mason: An internet boggy man is anyone who is a dissatisfied angry or hostile past customer or client. Sometimes it is just a jealous competitor posing as a upset past customer whose intention is to smear you, your company reputation and your brand online. In the old days, marketers would go to business owners and say ‘hey you need to invest in advertising so that you create top of the mind awareness in your prospects. So when they recognize and need what you have to offer, they call you.’ Advertising sales people would convince business owners that they need to come up with creative ads, catchy jungles and they needed to repeat them often to build that top of the mind awareness. Unfortunately the new step in that new step is internet research. I have seen statistics upwards of 90% of people will go online to do research before they make a major purchase. But I am even thinking minor purchases, if people think of a company they are going to look them up on their tablet, mobile phone or computer to find out this company’s address, hours of operation, do they have what I am looking for in stock before they get in a car an and make the trip. When they go online the goal of the internet boggy man is to have disparaging, hateful material there for a potential customer to see that would drive them elsewhere. An internet boggy man places themselves in front of a prospect in their online checking out that potential vendor.

I can think of 1 of my favorite stories to tell and we talked about it in the book, there was a particular hair restoration company that advertises very heavily on radio and television. If you were in this particular market and this particular city, you would know this doctor’s name, and they even say in their ads, ‘go check us out online.’ When you do there is someone who has had a very bad experience with this doctor, posted a site with this doctor’s name/nightmare and right next to that is a YouTube video which features necrosis of the scalp which is disgusting and it will turn your stomach to look at this video that is so disgusting and this person basically had their head, scalp destroyed. I have yet to see anyone look at that video and not just turn around, it is repugnant, gross, disgusting. I did the math on this, and since that video has been up, it averages about 1,000 views per year. If the doctor is charging 10,000 per procedure that is about 10 million dollars a year in potential lost revenue, even if 1/10 of those people who actually heard the ad, went online to check it out were legitimate prospect who were likely to buy, 10% is still a million dollar a year problem.

The question I like to ask business owners is if you have someone who was embezzling 1 million dollars a year from your business how long would you wait to fix it? I would not wait at all, I would take care of it right now. The problem that they all have is they do not know how, and that is why we took the time to write the book Defeating the Internet Boggy Man.

Will: I mentioned that it is the holidays and I have a son in the air force, he came home for a couple days and they are getting ready to head back. They are in New Mexico, which is quite a drive, we are in St. Louis and I think it is around a 16 hour drive. I said ‘I will get you a hotel halfway so you can make it a 2 day trip and it will be a little easier.’ The 1st thing my wife does is to pull up hotels.com and instead of going to even the reviews on hotels.com they have another section called guest rating which is very interesting. It is actual people that they followed up with later on. She goes through those reviews and a hotel is kind of an obvious business along with a restaurant that people typically look at the reviews prior to deciding if they are going to go there. But more and more small business as getting reviews online whether they like it or not, if you are not watching those it could be a problem.

Mason: That is just scratching the surface. In doing research for the book Defeating the Internet Boggy Man, I have seen 1st hand auto dealers who have spent big bucks advertising and you go on the internet and not only do you see bad reviews, but entire websites dedicated to telling the story of how this or that particular auto dealer took advantage of  them, mislead them, treated them poorly. You might think 1 person had a bad experience but when you see multiple people saying those things there is something to it. I see videos people make to tell their story or blog posts, articles or even websites. People seriously feel aggrieved and want to be heard because obviously the company that caused the problem did not do what was necessary to fix it.

Will: Couple years ago the guy was taking a flight, looked out his window and saw the baggage handlers tossing his guitar onto the thing and he ended up writing a song United Breaks Guitars and it took off and was a PR nightmare for them because they did not handle it correctly at the other side I think. So what are some of the things you should not do when you come across an internet boggy man?

Mason: There are 3 things off the top of my head that I would say. 1. Do not ignore them, respond and respond quickly. Make your paste that ‘Mr. or Miss Upset Prospect we apologize please send us a direct message and let us know what we can do to accommodate, we will do everything we can,’ show the rest of the general public because when an internet boggy man takes their displeasure to the public, you need to respond in a public fashion and demonstrate that 1. You heard them, 2. You are sorry and 3. You are doing everything you can to make it better. If you do those things, the public realizes that no one is perfect but they want to see how you handle it, and respond, do you make an effort to rectify the situation. If you do not then you probably deserve the heat the internet boggy man is sending your way. But if the internet boggy man continues to be unreasonable no matter what you do then I think the general public is pretty in tuned to the fact that this internet boggy man is unreasonable and there may be nothing that you can do to satisfy them. At the point the tide could turn and you and your company may actually get some sympathy and understand from the general public as opposed to victory all that the internet boggy man would like to stir up.

The 2nd worse thing you can do is argue with the aggrieved party. If they are on fire, the last thing you want to do is add gasoline. So arguing with the internet boggy man particularly in a public fashion is not a good idea. The 3rd thing I would encourage business owners not to do is resist the temptation to sue the internet boggy man. I know of 1 particular auto repair shop that made that choice and they did sue their internet boggy man who up hateful and disparaging reviews and websites, and they went all out to the business bureau to take the auto person tot task. The auto dealer took them to court and won. The problem as I said before, is there is no erase button on the internet. There is nothing the internet boggy man could do, he could not take all those stuff down. The business owner spent a ton of money and time, and yes they got a moral victory because the judge found it in their favor. But the net of it was that they wasted a bunch of time, money and they still could not get rid of that stuff. I think that is a mistake a lot of folks make because they think they can get rid of it when it is very unlikely to get rid of nay of that stuff but you can try to neutralize it. that is the strategy that we talk lot about in the book if you have an internet boggy man, how to really neutralize the problem as opposed to pretending that you can erase it when you really cannot.

Will: And being proactive about it before it even happens

Mason: Absolutely! I think when it comes to problems relating from the internet boggy man the best thing you can do is solve those problems before they occur and there are a couple ways to do that.  Some of those things are offline, 1. Hire really good people. Take the time to find out if people are honest, reliable , drug free, corporative teams members. Find that and make sure you have good people. 2. Make sure you train them well so they know how to satisfy customers’ needs. 3. Make sure you have friendly customer service policies.

In the book we wrote about it and this was 1 of the stories told by Adam Barnes when he was the Chief Operating Officer of regional sporting goods chain, he had several employees in multiple states and he told them of the time when he was a store manager. There was a particular street hockey goal that 1 customer had an experience with, they had these little clips on them that held the net to the frame. This 1 customer’s son played hockey regularly and kept breaking these clips, the dad kept coming in and getting these new 1s. He was angry and finally called the manufacturer and said ‘you guy have a defective product here. I keep having to buy these clips,’ they said ‘we recognize that and we have made a reengineered part and it should be at your local store.’ By now the customer was furious, he goes back into the store, talk to Adam and the 1st thing Adam does is apologizes ‘what can I do to make it right?’ He said these are the parts we have and when the customer told him that there was a new reengineered part, Adam went over to the parts bin and yes it was true, there was a replacement part out there but they never changed skew, the number the for the item. So this was lumped in with a bunch of the old 1s because the manufacturer did not communicate with the retailer that they made a new version of this.

When Adam saw what happened, he immediately had all the old 1s thrown out but he apologized to the man, said ‘we understand that it has been a waste of your time, we are sorry it has been frustrating but we had no way of knowing.’ So he explained it, it was not making excuse he was telling the truth, ‘we had no way of knowing, this was the 1st we had heard about his. If we had heard about this before these old pieces would not be in here.’ He refunded the cost of the entire hockey goal to the customer and let him keep the goal. He was like ‘I appreciate the value of your time and I am sorry you went through this. We should have known but we did not, but I want to make it right to you.’ So let us say if the price of the goal was $100 retail, his cost was probably $50. So for $50 he prevented an internet boggy man from coming to life and actually turned that customer into an evangelist because of the quality service that he provided .

That was a way that he actually turned a hater into an evangelist or an advisory, by doing the right thing. The sporting goods chain hired the right person by hiring Adam because he is a sharp guy, they had him trained to take care of the customer at store manager level, and they had policies that gave him the flexibility to do what was necessary and right to make the customer happy.

Will: That is a great story. I have heard of other similar stories especially with the skew of a specific item, the better item being the same as the old 1and the repair people not knowing that. There are all kinds of crazy things in between and maybe it is not the consumer’s fault but still the consumer is the 1 that is going to be PO about it. I want to circle back real quick to talking about responding to a negative review because I know there are some good ways and bad ways to respond. Can you talk a little bit about how you should respond to a negative review or take that on?

Mason: Quickly, respectfully and do what you say you are going to do, tell the truth if you are responsible, accept the responsibility and ask ‘what can I do to fix this,’ and do everything in your power to make them or exceed their expectations and  above and beyond if at all possible.

Will: I think it is very key that you do that, especially reply in a very truthful way. If you screwed up, say you screwed up, and just saying that kind of stuff will turn that negative review into a positive review in someone’s mind who is reading it. They go ‘this company is legit or cool, they admit their mistakes.’

Mason: I am dealing with real people here, authentic, genuine human beings who understand what I am saying. People want to do business with people not some nameless corporate coved culture. When you can demonstrate authenticity and humility and responsiveness and a sincere desire to help a customer, that is going to come through.

Will: Let us take the other end of the spectrum. What happens when there is a negative review and no reply or the business chooses to ignore it?

Mason: Basically they will suffer the consequences in lost business, revenue, that are tied to having a damaged reputation. Like I said, it is not just a matter of a prospect recognizing the need for what you have to offer  and then calling you anymore. There is that middle step whether it is going online on the phone or tablet or computer and checking out. If they see bad stuff they are gone.

Will: Like I said, I am guilty of it. My wife check on things too, everyone does, it is part of the thing. There is also something with Best Buy where people would go online and research or come into the store, pick out a TV they like, they go home and do some research on it and end up buying it somewhere else. That is another issue that hurts too. But if businesses are not aware that that middle step is being taken and they are ignoring it, then it is going to hurt. We talked in the book about some of the different ways to use Google Alerts and things. So for the small business owner that maybe does not have time to hang out on Twitter all day and see if anyone is talking about them, there are other ways to still kind of keep an ear to the internet to see if people are talking about your business.

Mason: For people who are not that technical, whenever I talk about things like this I always think about my dad. If we are talking on a level my dad would get this because by his own admission he is like ‘I am old, I do not want to mess with this stuff, I do not know what you are doing.’ So if I can explain it to him in a way that he gets it, it is usually pretty good. I would encourage people to go to Google.com/alerts and there you have the opportunity to enter words or phrases that you wanted to be notified, and basically Google will notify you when those words and phrases are used on the internet. So you have to just enter those words or phrases in the box and it will ask you how often you want to be notified, every day, as it happens, every week or whatever it is. But you can basically choose what words you want to be alerted to when they are typed in on the internet  and how often and it is free. So those are some really important things that I think for most people to realize it is not complicated or expensive, just go to Google.com/alerts, put in the words that you want to have notification sent to you when they are put up on the internet.

That is not only good for recognizing when an internet boggy man is trying to cause mischief but it is also good to know when people are saying good things about your company, liking your products and services. A lot of times if you are a retail company or a manufacturer and someone is ranting and raving and saying wonderful and nice things about your company, send them an upgraded product or a thank you note or some type of accessory for that product and say ‘hey we appreciate you  sending the good news and we just wanted to thank you and we hope you like this new accessory. Hope you enjoy your new ABC widget even more.’

Will: That is a great comment. We talk about replying to the negative reviews but replying to those positive reviews is just going to take that person that is maybe a follower of your business and maybe turn them into a fan. This is a terrific point. Let us talk a little bit about your favorite things to do to neutralize an internet boggy man before they get to you?

Mason: Very good question because again, there is no erase button on the internet so you cannot erase it. But studies that I have read recently have said that 89% of  people who go on the internet and do web search do not read pass the 1st page of results. It means that if there is negative content about you, your business, your products and you can get that pushed down to page 2, then you solved 90% of your problems. So how do you do that? A lot of f the strategies that I wrote about in the book, Attract, Capture and Convert, talked about how to build your internet presence and do it well. It takes advantage of all the CSO factors that I know you preach so much about. But really create content that educates, entertains and inspires, create it in an easy that is friendly to search engines so that it gets found by people who are looking for it. So including specific keywords or your names in the titles of your content, keywords, tags, descriptions, those types of things.

I think it is also important to distribute that content everywhere in every type of content that you possibly can. The analogy that I would use is that of (28:02). I met a young pastor who grew up in Alabama and he had ADHD as a young child. His dad took him fishing for the 1st time and he had a terrible experience. They would cast their line into the water and let the bobbers sit on the surface, wait for a fish to nibble, for the bobber to go under and he would reel it in. the reality was it sat there for so long waiting to wonder, he could not sit still and it drove his dad nuts and it was just not a good experience. So his dad came back with a better plan the 2nd time and decided to teach him how to jug fish. For those of you who do not know, it is when you take hundreds of plastic bottles like milk jugs, and you put the lid on them so they float like bobbers, you tie fishing line to those jugs and because the fish swim at different depths, you use different length lines and you put a hook and bate at the bottom of them and drop them in the water where you know there are fish and no one else fishing. Then when the jug goes under water, you swoop in with a net and catch them!

When the pastor did this, he was running up and down the river all day swooping up fish. Here is the analogy. The river is like the internet, the fish are like your ideal prospects, the bate is your ideal content and that is why it is important to put out fresh content because you want to attract your ideal prospects rather than repel them which is what would happen if you have stale bate. The fishing lines and jugs are like your media channels. If someone’s only internet presence is their website, that is like having 1 fishing line in the water, like regular fishing with 1 fishing line and a bobber waiting on fish to come to you and when they bite you reel them in. Some businesses can survive on that, fewer and fewer nowadays. But jug fishing is really about how do I have a tweet, Facebook post or video in YouTube? Those are all different lines and different bate.

The people I talk to say ‘I want to have my content in all kinds of different forms and different places. I am not just interested in catching the fish in my river. I want to be in every river, stream, lake, ocean where there are lots of ideal fish and few competitors. How do I do that?’ When someone creates content designed to educate, entertain and inspire it it means they create it in ways that are friendly to search engine and they distribute it in video format, articles, vlogs, podcast, they are getting their content out to where the fish are instead of waiting on them to come to them.  So you do those things very well it makes it difficult for an internet boggy man who is doing a random post here, random video there to really penetrate that ‘force field’ around your knowledge and content base

Will: It is funny I was thinking force field too. The more things you build around there it does make it harder to get in. In your opinion what is the best kind of content to create?

Mason: For obvious reasons people will go to websites. But I happen to believe 1 of the most effective ways is video, particularly YouTube which is owned by Google and Google likes its own products. But video marketing for multiple reasons, 1. When a video is done correctly, I talked about this in both books, Defeating the Internet Boggy Man and Attract Capture and Convert, about how to create video content so that it ranks high in search engines, even higher than other people’s websites. If you include keywords in your title, tags and descriptions and other things, most internet boggy men do not know how to do that so that will allow you to get your content to rank above theirs and push that down in search engine rankings.

So video is very important particularly when done properly and there is a formula to getting videos to rank. I think also video has amazing credibility. People nowadays spend so much time on YouTube  that they almost treat like people in my generation, your generation and people older than us treat TV. When you see something on TV it is credible, well YouTube is beginning to be that way, I saw it on YouTube it becomes much more credible.

Adam was up in Wisconsin 2 or 3 weeks ago in a company that he had done some work with in video marketing and he had never  met he operations manager. After a day on site, we were out to dinner with the other members of the management team and this person came in and said ‘hey good to see you again,’ to Adam. The interesting thing is that she had never seen him or met him before, she just felt like she did because she had seen so many videos with him. She felt like she knew him and that he was an old friend but she had never officially met him. When we made that out to her, she simply smiled and laughed and said ‘I understand why they video marketing works so well.’ I am sure you or other members of the audience, there are people you see on TV that really like, some pop music stars or actors and actresses that they would love to hang out with, athletes, maybe a few politicians that they would not like to hang out with. The reality is we do not know those people, we have never met them and we just feel like we know them because we have seen them on TV.

Will: We can even take that a step closer to home and say the weather man on TV, people are eager o go to places he is going to be doing whatever event or something simply because they saw him on TV. They do not know the guy, but they are familiar with him and feel like they know who he is. I actually had this experience several years ago. I was in Springfield Missouri, right after I think it was the TV show Survivor, season 18, Stoked Teens. 1 of the cast members was a guy names Ben Wade and everyone called him coach, even his parents because he was a soccer coach at (34:30) University which was 30m away and explained why he was there. I was with 1 of my buddies from high school, sitting out on the sidewalk café right after of Survivor had wrapped, like a week and a half later maybe. I am sitting there with my buddy Mark, and I see coach walking done the sidewalk with 1 of his buddies. I tap Mark in the side and I am like ‘hey that’s coach from Survivor,’ he is like ‘son of a gun it is.’ I immediately reached out and said ‘hey coach,’ and he kind of waved and nodded. I said ‘we are buying rounds if you would tell survivor stories!’ He said alright and sat down with us, and every time he was getting low we would order another beer.

He hung out with us for probably an hour, we asked all kinds of questions about the show, editing, the people that run the show, how tired and hungry and sleep deprived they really were. Just asked him all kinds of questions that we wanted to know the answer to. He was very gracious and coo about it. We are still Facebook friends to this day but the interesting thing about it was that as he left, he was an absolute total stranger, I did not know him but I felt like I did enough to say hello and offer to spend money and have him join us at our table. Why would I do that? Because I felt like I knew him and TV and video are what gave me that feeling. I think that video, which is why I am such a big fan of video marketing, is such a powerful medium for connecting, establishing trust and credibility and telling a story in an interesting way. The fact that it is actually preferred by search engines  makes it very hard to ignore whether you are trying to build you business online or trying to protect your reputation from an internet boggy man who is trying to destroy it.

Will: YouTube is the number 2 search engine. A lot of people do not realize that, they think it is Yahoo or Bing or something. But it is number 2 by far with the amount of traffic and searches. The demographic for people searching on YouTube used to be teenagers, the younger crowd but it is definitely gaining a lot of momentum. And obviously the fact that Google integrates that into their regular results too. It might be the 3rd result, but it is a video and has the little square and people are more likely to click on that and watch that video. Terrific point! So we talked about the early warning system with Google Alerts, what about some things off line that business owners could do to help ford the efforts of the internet boggy man?

Mason: Again, I will give them the 3 biggies: hiring good people, training them and having good customer friendly policies in place. Offline I think those are the 3 biggest things someone can do. If you do those 3 things then you should solve a lot of internet boggy man problems before they occur.

Will: If you have a sales team or something like that, make sure they know how to handle an irate customer and that it is not always just passed onto the boss or the boss never hears about it because it was handled so well. Terrific points! I really appreciate you coming on the show today. Tell us how we can get a copy of the book

Mason: Defeating the Internet Boggy Man is available in hardback at internetboggymanbook.com you can get it in hardback at amazong.com as well or kindle format. The same thing with Attract, Capture and Convert. I will make a free audio version of Attract Capture and Convert for anyone who goes to buildatribe.com and registers their name and email so we know who to send it to

Will: Is there a special way that people can contact you if they wanted to talk to you more about this or about some of your other services?

Mason: buildatribe.com or my contact information is there at Build a Tribe or busiensswebvideos.com, either is fine

Will: Okay both ways they can find you

Mason: All coming to the same video and office

Will: Awesome! I really appreciate you jumping on the broadcast today. I definitely appreciate your time and some of your wisdom with a side of things we do not always talk about.

Mason: My pleasure!

Will: My name is Will Hanke, I really appreciated everyone listening today, hope you have a great rest of your day. And thanks again for taking time to watch Navigate

NTR 10: Speaker & Author Fred Miller

If anyone ever asked me to make a top 5 reasons why I think my business is so successful, I’d put public speaking in the number one spot.  I truly believe it is the biggest reason why Red Canoe Media thrives.  And a lot of that is thanks to today’s guest Fred Miller.  Fred wrote the awesome book No Sweat Public Speaking a few years back and I read the entire thing in one night.  I still go back to it for tips.

If you are afraid of public speaking, you’re really missing out on a super way to increase your visibility and authority, there’s no doubt about it.  And if you’re just petrified of crowds, you can always do video.  People love to see who’s talking and they feel a closer connection to that person or brand because of that.

You’re going to like this episode of NTR!

You’ll Learn

  • Why speaking is important for every business owner
  • Why so many people have a fear of public speaking
  • How the fear of speaking can be lessened
  • Fred’s “Expert Stool” approach to public speaking coaching
  • Tips on using PowerPoint
  • Tips on closing your presentation

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Fred Miller

Fred E. Miller is the principal of “NO SWEAT Public Speaking!”

He is a speaker, an international coach, and an author.

His first book, “NO SWEAT Public Speaking!” was published in 2011. It is being bought internationally, and has rave reviews on Amazon.com.

He recently published a new and revised edition of one of his other books, “NO SWEAT Elevator Speech!” This is one of the topics he speaks and gives workshops on. Many people struggle with this Personal Mini-Infomercial.

Fred-and-Book--2His website, NoSweatPublicSpeaking.com, has over two hundred articles and videos on Public Speaking and Presentation Skills.

In St. Louis, he has been interviewed on KWMU, Fox 2 News, KSDK, and KMOX.

His Ladue News column, “Talking Points,” is a monthly favorite.

His Mantra is: “Speaking Opportunities are Business, Career, and Leadership Opportunities.”

No one ever challenges that statement. Why would they!

His received his bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Missouri before taking his first sales position with Proctor & Gamble.

His entrepreneurial business background includes being the owner, or partner, in five successful business-to-business companies.

Watch on Google Plus

Transcript:

WH:
Hello welcome to todays’ shows. This is navigate the rapids where we help business owners get through tough waters of online marketing. Today’s guest speaker is speaker (0:33) coach and author Fred Miller. Many people find climbing the career ladder or succeed in one own business usually means doing speaking in front of groups. It is a credibility builder. However, because of the fear of public speaking, many dread an activity. It consistently rank as the most common fear people share which holds many people back from reaching their potential, personally and professionally. If you have this fear or want to be a better presenter, our speaker has a messaged for you today. His first book “No Sweat Public Speaking” is being bought internationally and has rave reviews on amazon. Locally, he has been interviewed on radio stations KWMU and (1:15) and on television, stations fox two, and KSDK TV. His (1:20) Missouri news columns talking point are monthly favourite. Help me introduce Mr. Fred Miller
FM:
You personified my mantras. Speaking opportunities are business careers and leadership opportunities. I always run into you at speaking events and learn a ton of stuff from your presentation.
WH:
I appreciate that. It probably one of the most well-known secrets of building my business, the opportunities to speak in public
FM:
Take those videos of those opportunities and put them on your site so that people can view it again. When I was interviewed for the first time on KSDK that is one of the top videos on my site, and that is a lot of credibility.
WH:
I can imagine that people are just drawn to you because you were on a TV show. Tell me how you got into public speaking.
FM:
For years, I was a fan of Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracey and (2: 36). I was in toastmasters for many years and it was something I always wanted to do. I had several small business and I got out of them because the time was right. In 2011, I published my first book “No Sweat Public Speaking” because public speaking most people greatest fear, it holds so many people back.
WH:
Why do you think people have that fear?
FM:
Well that is a good question. First, when I am asked that question I asked why not. If you think about it, most of our conversations are one on one, usually one the phone, so you do not see the person. Young people are texting, emailing and they do not see or hear the persons, so when they get up in front of a group of people, they are out of their comfort zone and they feel uncomfortable.
The second thing is people’s fear of failure. It is shame because we learn more from failure than anything else that went right the first time. Another reason is they do not know their subject. Never go up and talk about what you do not know. Some people do not know the structure of a presentation. You need to practice presenting, practicing is not optional. Steve Jobs is my presentation hero, he used to practice for weeks, and he is the best of the best.
WH:
I practice a lot, but I still get butterflies, but they are less than when I started.
FM:
What you want to do is take that nervous energy and channel it into your presentation, because presentation without energy is boring. You do not really want to get rid of the butterflies completely, because you might get too comfortable in front of the audience and lose your edge. There are two parts to presentation, content, and delivery.
Delivery trumps the content, you can have the greatest content in the world, but if you do not delivery, it in an interesting way the audience will never value the content.

WH:
You should also videotape yourself presenting and use them in online marketing as well.
FM:
People feel a better connection, when they can see and hear you. The smart people then would videotape their presentation and put it on their website. There are three learning styles, visual which is done by most of the population, auditory, which represents 35%, and then there is kinaesthetic which is learning by doing. If you can combine at least two style, the audience will get. The goal of communication in any form, verbal, written, or oral is to get the recipients as quickly as possible to get it.
WH:
I think the video on my website is another way to reach people.
FM:
People like to work with people they know.
WH:
We have talked about why people are afraid of public speaking, but what can people do to lessen that fear?
FM:
Never wake up and say I am scared, I am not prepared or I hate this because that is negative talk, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In addition, when you are about to present you need to meet and greet people as they come in. It is easy to talk or present to people you have met before, so I have walked up and down in the aisle and introduced myself to the audience, to ease them and myself into the presentation. I have found that nametags help the meeting and greeting process so, I insist on nametags because people do not remember names. Although it is best to take off the nametag when you are speaking because it is a distraction to the audience. In addition, the presenter must make it clear the moments they plan to handle question and how. Usually questions are done before you close.

WH:
I like the nametag idea; it helps me remember their names.
FM:
Here is another tip. You want to find a friendly face in the audience, finish the thought, and look at another person. Do not keep staring at that one person, because it would become uneasy and make them uncomfortable. Do not take it personally when you see a sour puss face, there are a lot out there, and they may have a lot on their minds just find another face to look at.
WH:
You got ton loads of videos about the different level of the elevator pitch and something about the expert’s tools. I was hoping that we could talk about the expert’s tools
FM:
It goes hand in glove with internet marketing. Everyone wants to be seen as an expert because we like to work for experts. We experts command more money for the product and services. They want to build their expert tools, which comes in three legs. Speaking, writing – on and offline- and promoting that through the internet.
If you meet people and they ask how do I find out more about you, you can tell them, google me and it would be like a third part endorsement. When they google you and find all the hits, they are only going to look at a few pages and that is great credibility building.
WH:
Do you typically take the videos and put them on your website or do you link to them for that third party?
FM:
I would take the YouTube and embed it into my site.
WH:
I have some clients that use vemo and they seem to have some control over it.

FM:
I use slide share. It allows you to have links going back to my site.
WH:
Slide share has this setting where a pop up comes in the middle of the screen at the end of a presentation and says if you want to find out more click this link.
FM:
Really, that great I have to check that out thank you.
WH:
Since we were talking about slides, let us talk about PowerPoint.
FM:
Everyone loves PowerPoint but most of the time it is done incorrectly. There is just text and more text. We cannot multi task. You can be reading here but people are looking there and there is a disconnect. The best option is use a high quality, universally accepted image and you provide the information with your mouth.
Use the beam button on the keyboard to make the screen go blank, so that the audience looks at you. Let us go back to presentation where delivery trumps content. On the delivery side, there is verbal and non-verbal. Non-verbal trumps verbal. If they are drawn to the light on the screen they are not looking at you, and it is important that they look at you.
There is voluntary and involuntary communication non-verbal. If your one of those people that roll their eyes when you do not believe what you hear you need to keep that in check because people believe what they see.
WH:
Do you use anything besides PowerPoint?

FM:
I stick with PowerPoint but I may have some physical things. Here is the thing about props, if you take them out and you are finished you need to put them away. It is distracting; the audience are going to focus on the prop, not you or your message. PowerPoint is a tool but it has to use it correctly. Here is another tip, as the audience is looking at you; you need to stand to the left because we read left to right. It is a little thing but it makes a big difference. Blanking the screen is such a big thing, I remember the first time I did it, and everyone shifted and paid attention to me
WH:
How can business owners get started in finding gigs to speak at?
FM:
There are certain places that always have speakers, chambers of commerce, associations, clubs or even where you work, persons could also join toastmasters. Toast masters is an international organization have all kinds of chapter everywhere. They use two tracks of learning, public speaking, and leadership skills each with its own flavour.
I made a huge mistake when I started. The first club I joined all belonged to Mensa. It took me six month to figure out I was not fit. I eventually dropped out and I realized later on that I really want to do this so I joined a different club.
It is a nurturing environment. One of the things that people really like about it is that you will give a presentation and people will give you an evaluation, they will tell you what they like where you can improve and something else you like. Moreover, companies have lunch and learn, they have continuing education programmes but you have to go on and seek those, we are looking for those gigs and we want to go out and speak.
WH:
I recently have a chamber president tell me she was worried about her 2015 schedule because she did not have enough speakers lined up. I stuck my hand up and said I could do one of the twelve.

FM:
Well that is an opportunity for somebody.
WH:
Another way to get speaking gigs is to create them yourself. Three years ago, I started a meet up group hear in St. Louis, specifically around search-engine marketing. I tossed myself out there saying I am going to be teaching this class, if you are going to show up please do.
FM:
Yes, I think you should make your own speaking opportunities. I hope that I am going to start one next year called “No Sweat Public Speaking”. People can also teach a class. I teach at St. Louis community college continuing (23: 58) for three nights. There I am getting credibility and great stories and improve my speaking because I have a regular chance to speak. Here is another tip, make an audio recording of presentation or article and use it for podcasting.
WH:
Do you ever think that there is an audience too small for you?
FM:
The worst audience I have ever had was a video camera. Just make my own video, looking at the lens without any feedback was toughest thing in the world. I finally learnt that I could flip around the viewfinder. Yes, smaller audiences are a lot tougher. If you go to a movie theatre, and find a small number of people in there you kind of hold, back your enjoyment. The bigger the audience, the better because you get more feedback.
WH:
I really enjoy the bigger audience for the same reason. It takes longer to warm up a small crowd, they do not want to laugh in a small crowd or they have their arms crossed and you just know it is going to be a tough crowd. I spoke at a group session last month that had only four people which was a bummer. One of them eventually turned into a client for me so lesson learnt.
FM:
Another important point is although you have done this presentation countless of times, it is the first time that particular audience is hearing it so you need to do your best and present regardless of the size of the audience.
WH:
What about humour in a broadcast?
FM:
Humour is like icing on the cake. Do not expect everyone to laugh at it but make it appropriate to your material. Never say before I get started I want to tell a joke. Self-effacing humour is good in certain doses therefore never overdo it; it can have a negative effect. Never make fun of the audience.
WH:
Let us talk about questions. I like to take questions as they come because it makes the presentation more interactive but sometimes, I let the questions wait until the end. How do you handle typically questions?
FM:
I think somewhere in between is better. I always took them at the end, until I realized that if I had three different modules, for example, I probably should take a limited number of questions after each and more after the presentation. One of the problems I have found in taking questions during the presentation is that I am not good at time management. Another problem that I have found is that someone asks a question unrelated to do the topic that is currently being addressed and it throws off the rest of the audience.
Sometimes if someone raises their hands during the presentation, tell them to write that question down and ask you again after the presentation. In addition, there is no problem telling persons that you do not know how to answer the question, simply ask them to meet you after the presentation so that you can have a discussion with them. Never throw that question out to the audience because the discussion can go off into a tangent.
By the way, when someone asks you a question, you look at him, or her, finishes the thought, look at someone else with another question, and do the same thing, because what is going to happen is that you will end up in a conversation with one person and that not is good. The point is to be able to control the progress of the presentations.
WH:
During a presentation do you like to use the tips ideas, or is each one of your presentations different.
FM:
Tips are good idea; I did that with the nuggets lesson. People rather have a number to how many steps to do something for example 5 ways to overcome public speaking. What is also good is having a strong beginning and end because those are the moments people remember.
WH:
I have heard of the hammock moment, where people fall asleep during the presentation and wake up at the ends, so that tip you gave is good. It is also recommend having these moments of heartbeats in the presentations. Those moments you can change the way you are presenting to grab the audience’s attention again. It would be similar to do blanking the screen so they are focusing on you. So do you recycle any of your presentation for similar events?
FM:
I use modules in the presentation, and I tweak the presentation based on the modules. It is easier to present if you already know what you are presenting.
WH:
I remember this one time I was so nervous that I left my laptop; I had to use someone’s laptop that had the file.
FM:
Having dropbox or keynotes, pdf, or a printout of the file reliefs a lot of stress when you are anxious about presentations. Some people do not realize that PowerPoint and key notes have presenter view.
This allows you to see the slide the audience is looking at, the upcoming slides, and some notes. It allows you not to read directly from the slides, the audience hates that.
WH:
How do you finish of a presentation?
FM:
My slide has an exit door on a black background. Then I say time for the closing, blank the screen and then I say before I close. The closing have two parts: summarize what we talked about and challenge them to take of find a speaking opportunity and grab it. I have a signature presentation sign off that the audience does with me sometimes. I say “No Sweat”
WH:
Tell me about the book that you wrote.
FM:
“No Sweat Public Speaking”, it has the components, parts, and elements of a speech. It is great book, it on amazon. I wrote another one about “No Sweat Elevator Speech”. Everyone struggles with his or her elevator speech. An elevator speech is a mini presentation.
WH:
What is the best way to contact you?
FM:
Go to my website, http://www.nosweatpublicspeaking.com/ get the book, I do a lot of videos and blogging. I would love to hear from people.
WH:
This has been one of my favourites you always have a ton of advice.

NTR 9: Web Marketing Expert Caren Libby

 

 

Listen, if you need a website, you need Caren Libby.  Her expertise and years of work in various fields have given her a special appreciation for small businesses and their struggles with marketing.  Caren has a terrific background and unique way of helping business owners find out just what pieces of the marketing puzzle they’re missing.  I talked to her about that and a lot more in this information-packed broadcast.

You’ll Learn

  • The most important step to take when you want to improve your online presence
  • How Caren helps business owners see the big picture for their online marketing strategy
  • Why Caren’s services are so unique
  • Caren’s favorite WordPress plugins
  • Her definition of a ‘successful online presence’

Links Mentioned in This Episode

WordPress Plugins Mentioned

CarenLibby_5x7 (1)About Caren Libby

A professional, dynamic online presence has the potential to be a marketing powerhouse for building your business. Caren Libby will share her tips for creating a content marketing strategy that can take your business to the next level.

Find out more about Caren at CarenLibby.com

Watch on Google Plus

Transcript:

WH:
Today my guest is Karen Libby. Her eclectic background and project management sales and marketing, gave her a broad level of experience in a variety of businesses. In 2008, she started image media LLC. It is a company that provide web design, marketing, and photography services. Karen works with clients to help them to build a comprehensive online marketing plan. It supports her company goals in the image that they want to project. Thanks for coming on today.
KL:
It is a pleasure to be here.
WH:
I’m excited to have you on today, to talk about business and how you can help businesses see the overall picture. Before we get started on that, tell me about what was going on prior to the instigation the business.
KL:
Well prior 2008 I had had several years of experience in cooperate America. I had worked for two large cooperations in St. Louis. ( 1:33) in a completely different industry. My role model then was a Project Manager and the other one was in Sales and Marketing which gave me a broad level of experience in that area and that gave me a lot of insight about overall cooperate strategies for project we were working on as well as what it is like to work for very strong leadership. I try to incorporate a lot of that into the services that I provide on a regular bases with small-large businesses. In addition to that I lived in California for 8 years and 7 of those years I spent as a manufacturer’s rep. I was the liaisons between large manufacturers and small business owners mostly retailers. I was able to discover what it was like to be in their world as independent business owners. Some of the challenges they face were much more different that cooperate America much more personalized, and close to their clients and I learnt a lot about marketing from that experience in addition to sales. That was probably more important than my cooperate experience. All of it together has helped me a lot to do what I do now.
WH:
What was the catalyst that had you start your business in 2008?
KL:
It was combination of passion and desire to do it. When I finished my college degree, one of my greatest goals was to start my own business. I thought that was really important and would be an incredible experience. When I became a manufacture rep in California I basically was an independent contractor and had my one business although I was associated with some big agencies out there which gave me a taste of what it would be like to be my own boss. I took my passion for photography and decided to start my business in 2008 for various reasons. One was to fulfil that goal the other was when the recession was full fledge and I was no longer working for (3:27) my future and if I ( 3:43) it was a good time as any to get started with it. So I started with photography business and built the marketing services into it and ultimately began building websites for clients.
WH:
As a marketer the down turn in the income was the best business I have had. That was a good timing for you as well?
KL:
We really found out what we were made of during this period. It took a lot of courage to start and create your own world. It is that experience that leads you to where you are.
WH:
I have read that some of the greatest business in America started off in periods of downfall in the economy. Let us talk about small business and how you help them.
KL:
I had a great deal of exposure to how important it is to have the right kind of strategies. In order for us to accomplish all of the goals in our department we had to understand what to do in our world to make that happen. I started to look at the projects that I had to do in web design and marketing consulting from that strategic stand point. A lot of clients are focusing on their own business and not looking at the strategy behind it.
WH:
Ok so you take a step back and assess the situation as a whole and decide to help them on which step are needed to help to take going forward to start their marketing plans.
KL:
When someone comes to me and says I need a new web design or I don’t have a web presence, I need to get started, what I do is take what I understand from what they told me and break it down into 8 different categories. So we go through a work book that has very specific areas that need to be addressed before I start building their website. The website leads to a lot of other online tracks from the website which includes the social and email marketing and so forth so until I understand where they want to go with everything based on their business goals it’s difficult to help them create this website project to reach those goals.
WH:
So when they decide they want to do that what is the most important step to take when a client needs to improve the role of online presence
KL:
It’s about stepping back and taking a look at the whole picture in a 360 degree view of the business in itself and quite frankly this is the most difficult part because it requires a thought process, a decision to be made, it requires a focus to move forward in their business in general. There is a lot of detail involved. I help them through the process by making it as simple as possible by taking it in chunks. I address these different areas, some areas may have more presence than others and we improve the weaker areas and run with it.
WH:
How do you help your clients see the bigger pictures?

KL:
One of things that I bring to the party as a photographer is an artistic visual view of everything. I lay it out in kind of a visual aspect so they can see the circles and colours and fill it in later with the detail and the content. Once I get through the work book that I provide and address these 8 points I have a real clear understanding of where they want to go in terms of getting started. It isn’t until I start building the infrastructure of the website that they can see the pretty picture that I am talking about. I had a lot of experience with a lot of different clients so I can do that rather quickly once I understand what they are looking for.
WH:
I am assuming you are building on various CMS systems. On what platform do you build websites?
KL:
I utilize the word press platform. The reason I do that is I began blogging as a photographer in my own business in 2008 and I fell in love with the system I thought it was easy to manage user friends a lot of different possibilities. As I got deeper in it I was wondering what it would be like to be an actual website on it. It took a lot of tutorials and practices with different things and host. Then I started to work with real small businesses and evolved into working with large businesses for example the one I use to work for. Word press for many businesses large or small have evolved so much that you can build almost any type of website on it including shopping carts and so on. I can again take that strategy and all those components and mould word press into the tool that I need.
WH:
I am a huge word press fan. What are some of your favourite plugins for word press?
KL:
I have a list that I really use on a regular bias, anti spamB, advance tiny mce. Word press has a great rich editor built in but it is missing some components that I would want to customize. That one was one of my favourites because I am so visual. I use wpoptimize for optimizations and also wptotalcash. Some people may not understand what those are for but they improve functionality the system of word press because you can customise to your costumers needs. I also use one called (12: 24) backup. Some of them make it prettier, some of them make it run better. Sometimes clients want specific things and I use the plugins based on what they want. Using www.wordpress.org based themes and the plugins have such infinite possibilities and that the magic, putting those pieces together to make it work. A lot my clients are tech savvy and word press makes it very easy for them once we go through the beginning phases.
WH:
What other unique services do you provide?
KL:
What makes my combination of services unique is because I have such a broad background and experience in the clients of that I work with both as an employee and as an independent consultant, help me from a strategic stand point. I can see it from a big and small stand point I can identify what they are going through and understand how easy it is to see what they need to make it work best for them. The other thing is me as professional photographer of 7 years see the visual ways of the website in ways that other website designers or developers may not see it. It also gave me a lot of potential to advise them the best way to bring that visual desire to life so that people who see their website can see what they are trying to provide with that.
WH:
What percentage of people can you have a predetermined concept of their concept?
KL:
I would say about 75% of the people I work with have an idea, actually most have a website. They usually want to update their website to match their current business message and goals. They have been many changes in web design particularly in the mobile area. They want more white space, user friendly format. I think I can take what they already created and go through the work book with them, create ideas with them and build something really quickly that they can relate to which makes them feel like they have a strong online presence.
WH:
So you do a lot of the redesign part of it as well versus building a website from scratch. A lot of it is people calling and asking for it to be updated.
KL:
In many cases I take an old PHSP site and transfer it to the wordpress system to give it a fresher look. The 75% of people that have an idea of what they want. They don’t understand the functionality or how the user would be looking at it. Throughout the process of working throughout the work book I keep asking, what does your audience want to accomplish? In terms of getting you where you want to go in the website, it’s not just spreading the message about your business. It is getting action taken so you can do business with people. That is something I always have to remind them of. Some people have this vision of what it looks like but did not consider the functionality.
WH:
Tell me some examples on things you have worked on.
KL:
The honour privilege of working on a number of different styles of website site. The websites that I build are highly customizable and highly recommended to work on mobile device. I have built websites so credit union (20:52), liaison for a bank website, business, life and career coaching as well as insurance companies. I have mentioned that I had built a website for a corporation locally that was actually for their intranet so the employees who needed it could utilize it as a tool. That was one of the first websites I have built and it was fairly complex. I also built websites for day spas, restaurants and many different types of business even shopping carts but not extensively. If you look at my www.karenlibby.com you would see my portfolio.
WH:
Besides websites what other kind of things can you help people with?
KL:
In addition to providing the photography for the website and also for their social media I get a lot of request for (23:11) head shots. It is so important to the business now and I do it on a regular basis. It has been the second biggest part that of the services that I provided for my business. The other one is email marketing. I help them layout their campaign with the email marketing. Which is closely tied into their website because that is when the sign up takes place. Actually the email marketing is designed to drive potential clients to the website. It is like a big cycle. I also have a little social media marketing.
WH:
On the email marketing, do you build the template for the email newsletter so that it matches the website?
KL:
Oh yes I like working with email service providers. (24:12) capability for me to do that, to make it match. Also to change it up for the holidays, I have a lot of flexibility as well as a lot of services that is incorporated into the email marketing program of that I can survey different aspects to drive the marketing further.
WH:
Which email marketing programmes do you like?
KL:
I have used several but the most favourite is marketbolt. It is a local service provider that has an incredible amount of tools and customization and possibilities that have served my clients.
WH:
The owner of marketbolt engage with people, which email is really good for doing.
KL:
I just read an arcticle recently about the value of email because it does touch people personally, it is right there in your inbox, it is consistent and accessible. It is difficult to capture social media all the time so you know you have that ( 26:00) relationship with the recipient.
WH:
What would you define as a success online presence?
KL:
They need the basic overall strategy. It is necessary to feel like the vision is correct and proud of what they are sharing. They need to have feedback or people supporting them, services that I can’t necessarily provide. The success is based on so many observation from so many different areas and that comes back to the strategy and consistency.
WH:
You play well with others.
KL:
I can’t do it alone. The success of my business is to be able to work with people like you and tom and Kathy.
WH:
Is building the website saving the business owner time?
KL:
Yes absolutely, the wordpress system alone makes it easier, not only for me to help them but also to maintain it.
WH:
How can people get in touch with you?
KL:
You can look at my website which has my portfolio. I also have several galleries with my photography. Welcome visits and feel free to sign up in the work book.

NTR7: Founder of LinkedSelling and Webinarli Josh Turner

If you’re looking for a different way to promote your business, especially if you’re in a B2B type of company, a webinar series may be just what you need. Webinars allow you to share your expertise, sell your products and gain new leads.  Today’s guest Josh Turner, owner of Webinarli, shares some great insight into how to set up a webinar, what tools to use, and how to get more people to attend.

You’ll Learn

  • What types of businesses should be using webinars
  • How to target the right prospects
  • Tips for optimizing your webinar funnel from start to finish
  • How to generate real sales & new clients from webinars

josh-e4e-bio-pic-Josh-TurnerLinks Mentioned in This Episode

About Josh Turner

Josh Turner is the founder of Linked Selling, a B2B marketing firm specializing in fully outsourced lead generation campaigns, as well as Webinarli.com, which specializes in webinar lead generation. His company represents clients in the US, Canada, UK, Asia, and Australia, in a wide variety of industries. Josh’s company also operates LinkedUniversity.com, an online training program for LinkedIn marketing, as well as Webinar University, where you can learn how to grow your business using webinars. He has been featured in the Huffington Post, Miami Herald, and many more national publications

Watch on Google Plus

Transcript

Will Hanke: Hey everyone and welcome to the podcast today! My name is Will Hanke with Red Canoe Media. On this show we to tell everyone how to navigate the rapids of business. With me today on the call is Josh Turner, who is the founder of LinkedIn Selling, a (00:39) specializing in fully outsourced lead campaigns as well as webinarly.com that specializes in webinar lead generation. His company represents clients in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Asia and Australia in a wide variety of industries. Josh’s company also operates Linked University, an online training program for LinkedIn marketing as well as Webinar University where you can learn how to grow your business using webinars. They have been featured in the Huffington Post, Miami Herald and a lot more national publications. Josh, great to have you today!

 

Josh Turner: Thanks for having me man! Great to be here!

Will Hanke: I really appreciate you coming on today’s show. Today we are going to talk a lot webinars, webinarli and how that works. But before we get into all that how about you tell us a little bit about how you got started, I know Linked Selling was first. So how you got started in your business…

Josh Turner: 2 primary sides of our business: helping businesses generate more leads using LinkedIn and helping businesses generate more leads using webinars. We got started with the LinkedIn stuff first, and how we got into that was that I had started using LinkedIn for the company I worked for back in 2006. I was very early on in LinkedIn’s history at that time. Remember it was 6 million and change or something like that and they have over 300 million now, so it has been growing really rapidly. I was the CFO of a construction and manufacturing company  and I was using LinkedIn to develop business for that company. Fast forward to 2009 and that company closed, so I was faced with the decision of deciding whether to find another job doing finance stuff or going out on my own, which I had been itching to do for quite a while and decided to give it a shot. 1 of the reasons I was successful in getting a couple clients really quickly, enough to at least pay the bills and keep my lights on, was that I had built up this really solid network on LinkedIn that I used to start getting the word out about what I was doing.

I really started doing a lot with LinkedIn to grow my business, was very successful with it and had a nice little client base working as an outsourced CFO, essentially a business consultant. I did that for the first couple years, I was in business for myself. In 2011 I had a couple of clients who noticed the things I was doing on LinkedIn and said ‘we see the thing you are doing on LinkedIn, do you think that could work for our business? If so, would you be willing to do it for us’? The light bulb kind of went off in my head and I thought maybe there would be some people out there willing to pay me to do this for them. As if turned out, it was really an untapped niche, you could find Facebook consultants and done for you social media people all over the place. But to find a company specifically focused on lead generation using LinkedIn and had a professional appearance in doing things the way I had envisioned it, you could not find it. To this day we still have very little competition on that side of our business and it really took off. We started Linked Selling in 2007, we have clients all over the world now, we have a team of 12 here in St. Louis, 1 in Nevada.

As we were looking at our business a year ago, we realized that LinkedIn is something we are excellent at, but for our business we have also really excelled at using webinars to generate leads. Webinars and LinkedIn for our business have really been neck and neck and because of that we said maybe there were some other businesses out there that would have helped us help them generate leads like this using webinars. We put a lot of thought into it before we just threw up an new website and started doing it. We interviewed a lot of potential customers, and really worked through the work flow of how our business is doing webinars right now. We really researched that there is a lot of business owners out there who realize the value in using webinars to position themselves as experts in their space, grow their audience, keep their name in front of people and generate leads and increase sales.

Many of those same businesses do not have the tools, know-how or time to get in the know-how to effectively set up the kinds of marketing campaigns it takes to consistently drive traffic these webinars. If you do not have many people signing up for a webinar, it is almost  a waste of time and then people will just stop doing them. So that is what webinarli is, we help consistently drive new traffic and attendees to our client’s webinars.

Will Hanke: Yeah there is nothing worse than doing a webinar and seeing that there are 2 people watching, and you know it is your mother and your sister

Josh Turner: Exactly, that is no good. We launched webinarli in the spring of 2014, and it has been going well. Turn out, there are a lot of people that need help with these things and that is what we do.

Will Hanke: Are there certain kinds of businesses that should use webinars that works better then others?

Josh Turner: I am hard pressed to find a business that could not benefit from using webinars, but if your b to c, there is probably a good chance that webinars might not be the fit. At the same time, if you have some sort of educational component to what you do, it might still be a fit. Like a financial advisor could definitely use webinars to educate their communities, clients, potential clients, anyone they have on their email list. But I look at something like if you are a residential contractor, you are probably not going to generate leads and have a very tight co-relation to sales by running webinars about home improvement, that would be a little bit of a stretch. I think that a company like that would find some higher priority marketeering activities to work on. If you are b to b, it is absolutely something you should be doing. We keep an eye on a lot of those surveys that companies like marketing props and all those people put out about what are the tactics that marketers are saying are generating the most results. Webinars is consistently at the top of the list or near the top. So if you are b to b it is definitely something you should be looking at.

Will Hanke: With your expertise on the LinkedIn site and your companies expertise there, it really helps the business owners be able to get the right people onto their webinars as well

Josh Turner: We certainly leverage LinkedIn extensively when we are helping a client promote a webinar whether it is through organic outreach and campaigns or through LinkedIn’s advertisement platform and sponsored updates and such, there are a number of ways to use LinkedIn there.

Will Hanke: How do you guys which prospects to target?

Josh Turner: It really depends on who the client is that we are working with and we are very clear with them about who it is we want to do business with and what that profile looks like. Depending on where we are going to target those people, there are different ways to slice and dice the search criteria to set up different advertisement campaigns. On Facebook, if we think we think we can reach their audience there, the kinds of things you have at your disposal and the target are a little different than what you have on LinkedIn. How you decide which prospects to target really comes down to the types of businesses our clients want to work with and having a real clear understanding of what options are at our disposal in the different places that we run campaigns.

Will Hanke: I think both of those are very important. Talking about number 1, do you guys find that most business owners know who their target audience is, and specifically know or in general?

Josh Turner: There is always a variety on that spectrum, but I would say that most of the people we work with have a very good idea of what the prospects is for their business. If they come to us and say it could be anyone, anyone could be interested in what we do. If we cannot get them to work with us, drill down and come up with a much clearer definition of the best prospect that they want to work with, it is difficult to create messaging that will resonate with people. It is also very difficult to target because the audience size is 7 billion at that point, so the campaigns you run will not resonate with people. those people typically do not become our clients, our clients are typically people who know they want to go after.

Will Hanke: Do you ever come across clients with more than 1 target audience?

Josh Turner: Absolutely! And we handle it a number of different ways. 1 example is a client of ours who we had a campaign running that targeted directors in larger hospital networks, health care companies specifically in roles related to information management, and it went very well. Then we set up a second campaign to go after another target market of theirs which was a general counsel and legal professionals in big companies. So similar product, they just have different segments that they approach differently in the market. We have a client who we are approaching in the market to target credit unions initially and then the campaign is going to roll into commercial real estate brokers. So there are definitely ways with these things to target a lot of different types of people. we do the same for our business, at any given time, we have probably 5 – 10 active different campaigns running targeting different types of people. For example, we have a webinar running specifically for people in Australia, 1 for financial advisors, one for professional services firms, one for companies in the United Kingdom, then we might have a more generic 1 for anyone. That is just an example, we could keep in going down the list.

Will Hanke: I think it is very important that you define who that target and if possible the particular person or spot on the company for that particular title and show those advertisements specifically to those people.

Josh Turner: Yeah, definitely. especially with LinkedIn you have the ability to not just target some generic profile, but you can really drill to say, you want someone in this company, this exact position or you can even know the exact person you are going after, and there are different ways to get that person to attend your webinars. Whatever message you want to put in front of them, and just because you put a message in front of them does not mean they are going to attend. But it becomes a numbers game, so if you are the type of company that has say 100 named accounts you are trying to target, LinkedIn is a place you need to be spending time, no doubt about it.

Will Hanke: There are also the custom lists in Facebook, where you can advertise specifically to these people and show these advertisements to these people, that is a very cool thing too.

Josh Turner: Yeah, then to be able to have all of them working together with re-targeting. So for anyone doing this, a lot of people wonder what is the thing they should do first. Then they decide they are going to do LinkedIn, but if you are not setting up some of the basics, like re-targeting which can be very easy to set up, then you are going to be missing out on some leads. So even if you think that LinkedIn is where your prospects are at, but you cannot even find out a way to try and use Facebook’s advertisement platform to try and target them, still do the re-targeting because they are on Facebook, and if they hit your landing pages and do not opt in why not show them an advertisement on Facebook too?

Will Hanke: Yea, like they say in the military, you are just flanking around and trying to a way to get to the same result. So let us talk a little bit about the webinar funnel from before the webinar starts through to after it is over. What kind of tips do you have? Let us talk about starting before you even push the live button.

Josh Turner: First, when you say webinar funnel what that means to me is the entire process that you have planned out for how you are going to work someone through all the way at the top end with your advertisement campaigns, to the next step of your landing pages, the email sequence once they are on your list, signing up for the webinar, then the webinar itself, and what happens after the webinar, all the way to how they become a client. On the frontend, in the initial stages, one of the best tips I can offer is to segment your landing pages. So if you are doing a webinar, create a number of different landing pages based on the different types of people you want to target for your webinar. If you are going to send out  a blast to your enter emailing list about the webinar,  you probably want to use a more generic version of the landing page. Let us use the example I had of a professional services webinar, learn x, y and z, this is a webinar specifically for professionals services firms. You can segment that down so that you have a landing page for bankers, 1 for CPAs, 1 for any of the other types of professional service firms you are going to be targeting. The campaigns you run to target those kinds of people should also be specific to them and drive the CPAs to the CPA landing page.

What you will see is a very significant lift in conversion in those very targeted, specific landing pages versus the generic 1s, thus your advertisements spent on campaigns you are running is greater, you get more out of it, your cost per lead will go down, and you are simply generating more leads out of the same budget. So it takes a little  work on the frontend, but it does not mean you have to have 10 or 5 separate webinars. You have these landing pages really funneling all these people into the same landing pages for professional services firms.

Will Hanke: And once you do the webinar it kind of resonates with all those people. I think that is very smart, I think anyone who has tried to do a webinar has tried to reach everyone or even if you only reach everyone in professional services, the generic landing page is not going to resonate as well as something specifically for bankers to example.

Josh Turner: Absolutely! It does take a little more time to set up on the front end but it is definitely worth it.

Will Hanke: So once they get to the landing page and they opt in, there is an email sequence that happens after that, still prior to the webinar starting.

Josh Turner: Yeah, a couple things on that. If you are asking for tips

Will Hanke: What is the time sequence between putting an advertisement out and actually doing the webinar?

Josh Turner: It really depends. If we are talking about doing a live webinar then you are probably going to want at least 3 weeks ahead of lead time to start promoting it, unless you are simply promoting it to your emails or an affiliate who has a big list, that is a different story or you do not need that kind of lead time it can be next week. But if you are driving traffic to webinars on a consistent basis from advertisement campaigns and the different sorts of tactics we help our clients with, sometimes when you get it rolling it is not working right away. If you do not give yourself any breathing room, you could run into that situation where you have a webinar coming up in a couple days with no one signed up for it yet. It just does not give you any breathing room to changing your messaging, tweak your messaging and advertisements to try and get thing where they need to be. Then in terms of the email sequence, you have to set that up accordingly and it depends on how much time. But you certainly want people to get a welcome email like ‘you are confirmed, here is the information on how to get into the webinar’, which they should get relatively shortly after signing up, if not immediately.

Then you really want to think about the things you need to say to the people to continue to keep reminding them about why they should be excited about this webinar and why they should show up. If you do not do that they will forget why they signed up for this webinar a week or a few days ago, like ‘why did I think this was going to be good, I do not think I am going to do it’. If you have a couple emails going out the 2 or 3 days leading up to the webinar, just reiterating what they will learn in the webinar and the benefits they will get out of it, you are going to get your attendance where they need to be, and 30 – 40% is what you need to expect. You might be thinking, ‘I am using go to webinar or their other webinar platform and they are going to send out a reminder email for me’, that reminder email will remind them of the topic and how to login. But normally it will not remind them of what they will get out of it and why they need to attend and be excited about showing up which is really the key part about getting them to show up.

Will Hanke: Yeah. I think that is another thing that a lot of business owners miss when they go to do a webinar that is hugely important, to have those couple emails worth of content that show what we will be looking at, and the benefits as well.

Josh Turner: Absolutely!

Will Hanke: We are getting ready to start the webinar, what kind of tips do you right before you go live and the webinar starts?

Josh Turner: First, I highly recommend go to webinar by (21:46) and every single time I work with someone who tries to use a different platform, it does not go well. Go to webinar is the goal standard and what you are trying to avoid is the technology not working for either you or the people in attendance. There are a lot of options for you out there to try, but even to this day, I just do a webinar with someone earlier this week on a GooglePlus Hangout. There are different tools you can use to run webinars off GooglePlus Hangouts. People are not comfortable with the technology so there are all types of people in the chat complaining about audio not working, the video not playing and this and that. If you are serious about using webinars and getting maximum results out of them is important to you, then I would recommend spending the money to have go to webinar because it is the goal standard. I should ask (22:52) to start paying me for all these recommendations I have given for them but it is a good product so that what happens.

Will Hanke: This is episode number 7 and we originally did this on Google Hangouts, and we turned it into a podcast. But to be honest, this is the first time, we are on episode 7, we have not had terrible technical difficulties.

Josh Turner: I believe it. It could still happen. 10 minutes before the webinar starts you want to logon. I will normally logon and I normally have a co-host with me on a webinar because it adds credibility. So Ben who is our director of campaign management and 1 of the top guys in our company, co-hosts webinars with me. we will normally logon on 10 – 20 minutes before the webinar is supposed to start so we know on our ends that the technology is working and we are clear on if we have an offer for something on sale or  the call to action at the end of the webinar and some important pieces of housekeeping that we both need to be clear on with each other, that takes 1 minute or 2 and it is almost always goo. So we just hangout and talk for the next 8 or 10 minutes, then for the 8 minutes until the webinar is about to start, I normally go live. I start letting everyone in and once there is at least 30 or 49 people in the room, I start welcoming them and saying things like ‘hey, great to have you with us today. I appreciate you logging on early. We have a few minutes until we get started but I want to do a little sound tech really quick and make sure that we are good on all the technical stuff. So let me know in the chat if you do not mind, let me know that you can hear my audio clearly and that you can see the screen. Just put something in there  ‘good to go’ or ‘got it, it is all good’, or something like that. So you have some interaction with the audience and them telling you they can hear you and everything is good, normally it is all good.

Then from there, we normally say ‘okay great. We will be back on in a few minutes to welcome some of the newcomers so go ahead and grab a drink or take care of any last second items’. We mute for a few minutes, I go grab a water or whatever, look at an email or something whatever it might be. Then I will get back on and essentially just welcome all the new people and there are still a few minutes to go before we get started. But then at that point with about 3 minutes to go before we get started, I will start getting into some of the benefits of why they are with us today, trying to get people excited and making them feel comfortable for them being on there with us early and I will start asking them in the chat where they are calling in from and people will say ‘Dan from Idaho, Jodi from California, Steve from the United Kingdom’, and that kind of stuff. That is good to do, you want people interacting and engaging so doing it before the webinar is a really easy way t get them to pug in things into the chat and have a good time with you and feeling represented. You can say their name back to them and thank them for being on, all that kind of stuff. So those are a couple tips just to name a few.

Will Hanke: Those are great! I was actually on a webinar 1 time, quite a while ago, but the guy did that, ‘where are you from and what is going on? What did you do this morning’? They start interacting with you and it really does kind of make you feel a little better about what is going to happen, and probably get the people to pay more attention to webinar instead of going back and checking their email or other things.

Josh Turner: That is 1 thing I stress to on almost all of our webinars. I will say something leading up to it like ‘you are really not going to want to have any distraction open for this because we have some stuff to show you today and walk you through that is very specific actionable advice and tactics that you are going to want to be able to start using as soon as we end this call. You are going to want to be paying attention to this, I highly recommend you shut down any distractions, close your email, any of that stuff because you are not going to want to miss this’. Probably some people ignore it, but if it gets some people to pay attention more that is good.

Will Hanke: I do not want to talk too much about the webinar per say, because it will be very different for every single industry. But I am sure there are some obvious things, turn off your cell phone. I am talking about the person doing the webinar, limit your distractions as well. That is very important, you do not want your dog barking in the middle of it or something like that.

Josh Turner: That is true.

Will Hanke: So webinar is over and I know that you guys have a follow up sequence, you do not simply do the webinar and it is done, there are things to do after as well

Josh Turner: Yeah, and what those things do will depend on your business. But generally speaking, there are 2 kinds of webinars: 1 deigned to get people interested in your services, for potentially selling them down the road, and then there is the webinar where you are selling a product and pulling out your credit card and ordering it. that usually happens with info products or training programs and things like that. The way those 2 types of webinars are approached is definitely different. For my business we do both of those types of webinars so I can speak a little on each of them and what works best. If we are talking about how service providers or companies that are not selling a product on the webinar, let us talk about that first.

The key is look at all the people that signed up and/or attended the webinar, you try and take the next step with them whether it is picking up the phone and calling them once they get to a certain point in that sequence or emailing them and saying ‘hey, I have sent you some information over the last couple weeks and I would to set up a time to talk and see how this might work for you. How does next Tuesday look? Here is the link to my calendar’, something like that. You will have some people that will, on the webinar if it is structured properly, who might reach out to you to talk about your services right away. But most people, on that kind of webinar are not going to fall into that category so you have to proactively go after them, put on your sales hat. It is not simply doing a webinar, it is also having a plan and a sales process.

Will Hanke: That makes sense. The 2 different kinds are very interesting, and that is actually a question I was going to ask about. Is there a percentage of webinars that you do that are purely informational versus 1 specifically because we are trying to sell something?

Josh Turner: In the entire world?

Will Hanke: Yeah, in a webinar. In other words, if I plan on doing 5 webinars, should 3 or 4 of them be informational and 1 on a product or should it be the other way around? Is there a formula?

Josh Turner: I do not know about that, maybe that is highly depending on your business’s situation and what makes sense for you, whether you have a product you can directly sell on the webinar. I would highly recommend try that out, it can be as simple as an e-book that you sell. It does not mean that you have to create some monstrosity training program, info product membership site community, whatever you want to call it. It can be something a little more simple, or if you have a real book you could make an offer to buy the book at the end of the webinar at a special price. Throw in some bonus or something for anyone that gets in on it. Honestly, the answer to that is that it really depends on the business and what your goals are because there are some people out there that do nothing but webinars to sell their info products, that is their business so for them 100% of that makes sense. For other businesses they do not sell stuff on webinars because it does not make sense because they are high priced offering that people do not pull out their credit card and purchase on a webinar, it simply does not work that way for that kind of business. So they would stay away from that kind of maybe more internet marketer, info marketer kind of model and they would be looking at a more buttoned up presentation that does a really good job of conveying what they do, their benefits, some case studies in whatever the topic is that attracted people to the webinar in the first place. Then they want to nurture these prospects, registrants and attendees towards becoming hopefully a client someday.

Will Hanke: I know that the other part of your business with Linked Selling is focused more on helping people grow their business using LinkedIn. Can you talk about how you have integrated webinars into that process to grow that?

Josh Turner: Sure! For our business specifically they really feed each other in a lot of ways because we utilize webinars to train people on all sorts of LinkedIn lead gen strategies, and some percentage of those people that are on those lead webinars and up joining our premium program. 1 of the ways we drive attendants to those webinars is through some of the LinkedIn strategies I mentioned earlier such as more organic outreach messaging and things of that nature, but also LinkedIn advertising and sponsored updates. For our business, it is very intertwined and the clients that we help with both LinkedIn campaigns and webinars it kind of works the same way, we are utilizing LinkedIn to drive traffic to webinars. Having a webinar series is really helpful for the work that we do in LinkedIn because it gives us something to invite people to, and something to say aside from are you interested in talking to me about my products and services which does not really work. You know how it is, Will, with all the meet ups that you do, when you have something that you can invite people to it is a great way to really pour in relationships with people.

Will Hanke: It is/ I have talked  about (34:41) in a past episode, it is a great way to sell without really trying to sell. You invite them to something where people are already there and excited because they know what you do and things like that. The webinars is another terrific way to do that.

Josh Turner: No doubt!

Will Hanke: What are some benefits of someone hiring you versus trying to do it themselves?

Josh Turner: That is a good and fair question. I would say the main benefit is that we take it off their plate. So all the pain of trying to figure out how to drive traffic to their landing pages, how to even set up the landing pages and make sure they convert, how to integrate the entire system so that it comes off flawlessly. For a lot of people, they do not want to put in the time, energy, trial and error that it takes to get it to the point where you are successfully running webinars and have a lot of people showing up to them. If that resonates with you, what we do might be a good fit. On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there who are do it yourselfers or marketing people in  bigger companies who have a team to do all this stuff for them. That is why we created Webinar University, our training program which is a library of training videos and step by step manual that are for those people to show them the things we do for our clients and a lot of it in there is literally the exact training that we use for our staff. There are verbatim recordings of training sessions that we do internally to teach out team things like how to use lead pages, to set up Facebook campaigns, on and on down the list.

Will Hanke: That is pretty cool. So is the Webinar University, is that a monthly fee? How do people get into that?

Josh Turner: It is a monthly fee and you have access to all the core training lessons that covers all of the things we have talked about today in a lot of detail, the entire webinar funnel. Every month we put out a new webinar breakdown. I do not know anyone else out there doing anything like this., but we go out and find really smart marketers, record and document the entire process of their webinar funnel from the advertisements we saw them running on Facebook to their landing pages, the emails they sent out, to recording the actual webinar itself and any follow up messaging. Then we critique, provide feedback and our members have access to that, once a month we publish a new1. That is really good stuff just for seeing what other marketers are doing. If you can even pick up 1 or 2 little tips from each of those it can really pay dividends.

Will Hanke: That is very incredible and it definitely worth the cost of getting in there. I have seen some of that stuff done on lead pages, for instance like you said, people critiquing your landing page. There is nothing better than having someone looking over your shoulder, not in a negative way but instead saying ‘you should try this or that and see how it helps’.

Josh Turner: It takes a lot of work for us to produce those. We put a lot of time into those because it is not simply recording all the stuff and documenting their emails, and throwing it up there. It is myself and our marketing manager sitting down and critiquing the entire funnel and recording that entire process. So every month it is several different hours of new content being put up for those webinar breakdowns.

Will Hanke: That is definitely awesome and worth it. So Josh, what are the best ways for people to get a hold of you both on the LinkedIn Selling site and the webinar site?

Josh Turner: You can go to linkedselling.com or webinari.com, or you can look me up on LinkedIn, I would love to connect with anyone there, it is linkedin.com/joshbturner.

Will Hanke: Those are very good. I really appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing some terrific thing with us

Josh Turner: Thanks for having me! It has been fun, appreciate it!

Will Hanke: My name is Will Hanke with Red Canoe Media, and today’s guest was Josh Turner with LinkedIn Selling and Webinarli. I hope everyone has a great rest of your day and thanks for being with us to help you navigate the rapids.

NTR6: Marketing Expert Steve Smart

When it comes to marketing, a lot of business owners shoot from the hip – they don’t really have a solid plan in place. This week’s guest Steve Smart is an expert at taking businesses (and business owners) and building a plan that methodically attacks marketing from many angles. He asks great questions and has some awesome systems that you’ll really enjoy learning about.
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NTR5: Family Business Growth & Leadership Consultant Bill Prenatt

Have you ever wondered why you aren’t selling more, or why you go to some sales calls and the potential client just doesn’t seem to “get it”? Maybe the problem isn’t their mood or the coffee – maybe it’s you!  This week’s broadcast we talk about selling, systems and how to get to “Yes”.  When it comes to understanding how to sell, Bill knows his stuff.

You’ll Learn

  • Common mistakes we make in the sales process
  • How to create a ‘selling system’ that always works
  • Why you shouldn’t try to sell (especially on your first meeting)
  • What your potential customers really want to hear (it’s not about you or your business!)
  • How to get to ‘Yes!’

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Bill Prenatt

Bill-PrenattBill Prenatt is not your typical consultant. His dynamic, holistic approach combines insights from 40 years of corporate experience with straight shooter, entrepreneurial thinking. In his practice, Bill teaches business owners how to balance family values with big company performance-related systems. Million-dollar sales are second nature to Bill, owner of SIMPLY SUCCESSFUL LLC, consulting company for family businesses, and entrepreneurs, who are seeking explosive profitable growth. His passion for coaching, combined with a strong leadership style, inspires countless others to improve their productivity while creating a balanced life.

Uniquely geared for family business problem solving, he guides the leadership and supports the organization as a true participant in the process. In an immediate time frame, Bill cultivates the setting for real change, the inspiration for continued growth, and the direction for effective results. Family Businesses, that are determined to grow, hire Bill to:

  • Create a new level of professionalism in the management team
  • Establish valuable growth and productivity measurement tools
  • Achieve greater level of individual and collective success
  • Facilitate implementation and accountability of projects and programs
  • Understand how the sales function integrates into each role in the organization
  • Reduce operating costs and increase sales
  • Effectively manage day-to-day activities
  • Implement new systems for increasing productivity and revenue

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Details About the Broadcast

How Bill developed a results oriented reputation in St. Louis small business community

  • Grew up in family business
  • Corporate with Sara Lee and Marriott
  • Locally with large family held regional distributor Allen Foods
  • Purchasing, sales, and operations experience

Coming from larger companies, marketing was done by a marketing department (it’s too complicated and time consuming in small business so they outsource it)

Bill believes this so strongly that he even started a second company called Experts 4 Entrepreneurs so that his marketing would be the best there is.

What Bill learned about the importance of sales processes/systems (vs. random)

  • Explosive growth occurs in a 3 step system with a beginning, middle, and ending: Filling the pipeline, Qualifications discussion/priority setting, and Getting to Yes
  • In the Discovery phase, the first priority should always be the people that know, like, and trust you. These can be existing customers, customers to clients, or raving fans.
  • Second you have the universe of suspects. These are prospects that are unknown to you. You have to decide If you are going to find them or they are going to find you
  • It is important to have a credibility statement so that you can qualify and disqualify prospects without a great deal of effort
  • Once you qualify a prospect, you have to decide if they are an A-B-C priority in terms of your level of interest and prioritization
  • Let’s come back to the third step Getting to Yes in a minute

Common mistakes made in the sales process

  • Lack of preparation – do the math and do your homework
  • Be selective about who you spend time with
  • Talk too much (use a questions library)

Exploring the ‘why’ behind asking questions rather than talking

  • Sales has changed more in the last ten years than in the previous 100
  • Talking and telling doesn’t appeal to today’s relationship-oriented buyers
  • By asking a series of well thought out questions, buyer’s will reveal their motivations

How can we convert our random questioning into a selling system

1. Rather than asking random questions develop a questioning strategy.

  • Strategic Questions — What keeps you up at night? What’s important to you?
  • Tactical Questions – What are you doing to achieve sales increases? How do you know if customers are buying everything from you that they can?
  • Communications Questions – How would you describe your future customers? How much personal interaction is required to get a final buying decision?
  • Competency Questions – Do you have the right people? How do you develop your people

2. Arrange your questions in the most productive order

  • Engage — gain information about what causes your buyer to be passionate or excited
  • Genuine Interest – Ask about challenges/issues related to the prospects business or customers. For example. “I’d like to find out more about how you reach your potential customers”
  • Opportunities – explore the prospects readiness to explore solutions. “How much time could you save if”… “What if there were a way to”…

Getting to Yes. Here are some ideas about best practices to engage prospects and create a decision making environment (not sell or close on them)

  • Establish credibility using a value ladder concept
  • Identify the right buyers/different roles
  • Anticipate and handle resistance
  • Present with benefits (not features)
  • Create small wins and build on the momentum

NTR4: Productivity Expert Cathy Sexton

Our fourth episode is all about being more productive – you know you need this! Guest Cathy Sexton is a top selling author and speaker that helps businesses not only be more productive, but also look at systems and processes that they have (or don’t have!) in place to keep the place running smoothly. She also coaches business owners and is getting ready to launch a really cool online coaching program!

You’ll Learn

  • Why dual monitors are so awesome
  • How to avoid retraining new employees (and have consistency from one employee to another!)
  • How to keep from checking your email first thing in the morning
  • How to plan your day and actually get things done!
  • How to handle client emergencies
  • What’s the biggest key when delegating a task?
  • Some of Cathy’s favorite productivity tools

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Cathy Sexton

smallProductivity strategist, coach and author Cathy Sexton helps individuals and organizations I.G.N.I.T.E. their performance. Delivering high impact principles through speaking, training and special resources, Cathy empowers people to achieve their life and business goals.

Cathy founded The Productivity Experts in 2003 after winning her own battle with workaholism and a stress-induced life threatening illness. Cathy is committed to helping people accomplish more, with less stress. Professionals can now advance their careers, avoid burnout and spend more quality time with their family and personal lives.

Cathy’s Easy Processes are taught through her seminars and her unique I.G.N.I.T.E. programs. Attendees and participants learn how to take control of their thoughts, processes and tools to achieve better results, faster.

Host of “Ignite Your Productivity Radio”, Co-author of “Focus, Organization and Productivity,” “Exploring Productivity” and “7 Point Impact,” Cathy is now working on two more books and delivering remarkable value through her productivity membership website.

Watch This Episode on YouTube

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Transcript

Will: Hey everyone, Will Hanke here from Red Canoe Media, really excited about today’s guest today her name is Cathy Sexton. I’ve known Cathy for quite a while now and she does some great things along the line of helping people with their productivity and getting more done in a certain amount of time, which is always a good thing. Cathy is a productivity expert, author, speaker, radio host and power habits coach; she ignites your productivity and accelerates results by leveraging your natural productivity style. Despite her constant experimentation with new technologies, Cathy’s current favorite productivity tool is using multiple monitors and remains grateful to whoever invented luggage on wheels. Cathy thanks for coming along with us.

Cathy: I’m glad to be here Will, thank you for inviting me.

Will: No problem. I really like your intro about the dual monitors. As you know, I got dual monitors last year for Christmas and what a great tool that is.

Cathy: Well, when I’d first seen people use them I thought, why would I do that? That’s just more craziness but once I started, it’s hard when I use my laptop alone because I’m so used to having the double monitors that it makes it hard to just go back to one.

Will: It’s a great thing, I can’t imagine not having two anymore. I can get a lot done so.

Cathy: It’s kind of like the microwave; when we didn’t have it we didn’t know what we were missing but once we have it, now what would we do without it?

Will: Exactly. So tell me first about your radio show; I know that you do a radio show, tell me a little bit more about that.

Cathy: Okay, it’s an internet radio show called Amazing Women of Power. The radio network is on 24 hours but my show is on Thursday mornings at 9:30 central time and most of the time I’m interviewing guest like you are doing today and it’s based around being more productive in some way/manner. It might be writing a book or it might be if you’re trying to take on speaking engagements so it’s not necessarily a time management type of productivity but different ways that it affects us in our personal and professional lives. The audience is generally, usually, small business owners to working professionals.

Will: Okay, and I’ll put a link in the show notes on how you can get to that but I’m assuming that if they can’t listen to it live there’s a podcast version out or something that people can download as well.

Cathy: There are some podcast versions that are on my membership site so there are a couple of free ones there and they can listen to them there.

Will: Okay and that’s through theproductivityexperts.com?

Cathy: Our igniteyourproductivityradio.com

Will: Oh, awesome, okay. Also along the lines of the radio show, you’ve also done some pretty cool speaking engagements, tell us about those.

Cathy: So I have and one of those, I guess the most exciting that I got was when I got a call from the Case Foundation, which is Steve Case who’s from AOL. Not that I got to meet him but I got to go up and work with a team of his members for his foundation and do some time management Washington D.C, so that was pretty exciting. Last May I got to go down and speak at a conference for the IDA which is the International Dealers Association so Door Dealers Association and just on Sunday I got to speak to the State of Missouri clerk. So all the clerks in the State of Missouri, all the city clerks came to town and they were here in St. Charles and I got to speak a whole day to them, working on their productivity and things like that. It’s been very exciting to meet so many different people and in so many different areas because productivity affects us all.

Will: Yeah that sounds awesome. What do you typically share with them? You don’t have to give me specifics but do you target a specific area like email or, like you said, time management or do you go depending on what they prefer to listen about?

Cathy: Usually I try to find out what their pains are and generally people say I want time management but when I start talking to them it’s either more emails or interruptions, things like that. So more and more often, people are having me speak on my ignite performance which basically stands for inner insight; really understand who we are and what’s going on in our subconscious mind and how that affects our productivity, about getting organized, it’s about interruptions, it’s about our natural productivity style—taking action, time management type thing and then email. So that gives them a little bit of all of them or I can just talk to them about one specific thing and I usually really customize based on what their needs are.

Will: Okay, so let’s switch gears a little bit towards a small business owner. If they were to engage you, how could you help a small business owner?

Cathy: Generally on my small business owners I do one of two things. One, I would be on Primus and help them look at their systems and processes and put some systems and processes to make things easier, as simple as creating checklists, as creating a process that everybody does and follows the same way; it makes everybody’s life easier. Two, just doing coaching which can be in person or on the phone, but small business owners all wear so many hats; they have so many things going on that they sometimes just need that accountability and that need to help them stay in a direction instead of going off in a lot of different directions.

Will: That’s awesome. I know that we’ve talked before about the Work the System book and about having processes in place and I can’t tell you how great it is for myself that I have an intern that works with me and if we’re going to do something new I’ll tell her, okay, open up a word doc, we’re going to go through all these steps and you’re going to type them in so that the next time we come back we’ve got eighty percent of it in place.

Cathy: That’s exactly right, that’s what I’ll tell people, if you don’t have them built that’s the best way to do it you’re training somebody new or you’re creating a new one. But even when we have processes in place and they aren’t documented, by having somebody that you’re training write it, you review it and then they follow it step by step that’s the best way to get all the details in.

Will: Yeah and then next time, this intern may be around for a year or two and then she may go on and I have somebody else come in, now I don’t have to retrain the entire process.

Cathy: Correct and you not only get that so you save time there, you save time training, you get consistency. So we all tend to want to do things differently but there are some things that need to be done consistently, the same way by everybody and it makes it consistent for your customers and just being able to get things accomplished.

Will: Definitely. For a long time I ran my business in my head and I’d get a new client and I had a list of things in my head but that list would usually change sometimes because I forgot steps or forgot things and documenting all those is a terrific way to, even just a checklist of things that need to be done, is a great way to start something off.

Cathy: Correct and you’re right about having it in your head so I tell people, you can’t prioritize and you can’t organize when it’s in your head; it’s got to be out of your head and in some kind of system if it’s electronic or paper or whatever but you have to be able to prioritize it or else we do all the stuff we like to do and not the stuff we need to do.

Will: That’s definitely true. So what kind of things get you going in the morning? What’s the first thing you do when you get into your office? How does your day typically start?

Cathy: Well I really recommend that people know at the end of their day that they are planning what they need to work on tomorrow and to pick those top three things that you want to accomplish today. Start on the very top one and do not open your email, do not listen to your voice messages and wait until you’ve got a good hour or so into that big project that you need and then maybe look at your email maybe mid-morning, maybe before or after lunch and then late in the afternoon. Most of us, our businesses are not driven by email and if we let people know I check my email three to four times a day then they know not to expect a quick response or they know they need to call you if it’s really something important.

Will: Right, I think even Tim Ferris mentioned that in the four hour work week about, he did a little drastic check of my email once a week or something like that, but that’s a tough one; it’s probably one of the first things I do is check my email in the morning.

Cathy: Right, so if you’re going to do that, what I recommend my clients do is to schedule it on their calendar just like they do a meeting. So then they’ll get a pop up to remind them you’ve got to check your email now it’s ten o’clock, ten thirty or whatever and the deal with that is it’s not about just looking at the email, it’s about processing the email. We sometimes look at an email three, four, five times before we ever do anything with it.

Will: Yes.

Cathy: So the best thing to do is to schedule that time, half hour, forty five minutes whatever that looks likes for you and actually work on the email when you’re there and process them.

Will: That makes sense, that’s really good. I use Google Calendar and I’m sure you have other favorites to use for the scheduling part of it, but I typically set out hour blocks or two hour blocks for each client that I’m working on and so the email thing would actually fit right into that it’s just building that habit might be a bit difficult.

Cathy: Correct it’s about building habits. Another thing that really works a lot of times for people is to color code those calendars so that when you’re looking at your calendar like when I’m working with a client, it’s green. So I know that’s money that’s going to be coming in the door.

Will: Oh, nice.

Cathy: And then meetings are one color, other things, personal is another color so I can easily look at my calendar for the week and say, hey where is my time going? Is it going in the right direction or am I getting caught up doing a lot of things I should probably not be doing.

Will: Oh that’s great; what about things that business owners might be doing wrong right now? What’s probably one of the biggest things you’ve seen them doing wrong?

Cathy: Not delegating.

Will: Okay.

Cathy: For a lot of reasons; one, because they feel like they’re the only ones that can do it right and a lot of times, just like on Sunday when I spoke, one of the ladies came up to me and she goes, ‘I want to thank you for telling me how to delegate, everybody has told me all these years to delegate but they never told me how to do it.’ So the biggest key when you’re delegating is that should be the first question you’re asking yourself when you’re looking at paper coming across your desk or when you’re looking at an email, can I discard it, first and the second is, can I delegate it? And so when you’re looking at delegating always put a timeline on your delegation even the minor tasks because otherwise they just get lost in the shuffle. You can say hey, this has got a variable time element on it, but always give them a time element and always have them recite back to you what they think you said.

Will: Oh, interesting, okay.

Cathy: Because we know in our head what we want, we can see that visual end point but we have to be saying it to them in a language that they understand.

Will: Right.

Cathy: So my analogy of that is that if I give you a jigsaw puzzle and I don’t give you the top of the box, it’s going to be much harder. Some people it’d be a challenge; they’d love it. But most of us would say oh wow, I don’t want to do that. So it’s kind of giving them the top of the box so that they know what that end product looks like, have them relay it back to you so that they understood you the same way and then schedule something, especially if it’s a big project, some times that you’re going to check in with them on how it’s going and if they need help.

Will: Okay and does that change whether it’s a retail establishment versus a business that works purely virtual?

Cathy: No, I don’t think it really does.

Will: Okay and are there any tools that you used to maybe help delegate or set up reminders and things like that; what kind of tools do you use for that?

Cathy: For the reminders, let’s go back to when you were talking about virtual or in-house. One thing that I use for virtual is I use Basecamp which I know you use but that’s just a great way for me, when I work with interns, they put their to do’s out there and then if they need me to do something the create a to do for me. If they’re ready for me to review something, something like that and then also using Skype; I use Skype a lot for virtual. And then for tools for following up I use a, what I call a tickler file system, so it’s a one through thirty one and a January through December so if I’ve given somebody a project that’s due on the thirtieth, I might put a not in there to check with them on the twenty eighth; where is it?

Will: Okay.

Cathy: So I don’t have to keep in my mind, okay I’ve got to check with Jane because she’s working on XYZ project, I’ve got something that’s going to trigger that for me.

Will: Interesting, that’s pretty cool.

Cathy: Yeah.

Will: Let me ask you this; give me three tips that business owners can use today to start helping their productivity to move in the right direction.

Cathy: Okay so the first thing is, and I kind of mentioned it, at the end of the day we’re already in work mode so if you’re going to stay working another hour you know what you’re going to work on so that’s the time to plan tomorrow. So we’re looking at tomorrow and we know what those top three things that we need to accomplish tomorrow so that when we come in the next day we already know what to start working on. We don’t have to rethink through our day; what was I doing yesterday? What’s going on today? You’ve already determined that, so that’s number one.

Will: Yeah I think that’s a great tactic.

Cathy: And then, having only one project on your desk at a time and I know that we tend to have piles and things like that but there’s a saying, out of sight out of mind, so we keep it in our space but in sight in mind. So when you lay something on your desk and say, hey I’m going to do this later, our subconscious mind doesn’t know later today, later next week, later next month and you have a pile of ‘laters’ so your mind is constantly trying to remind you. So put those piles to the side or behind you and only work on one project so that when you get interrupted you go right back to that project versus picking up something else and working on that.

And then, we kind of talked about it earlier but, having systems; if you can build systems with everything you can do. When we think about anything we can do well, well there’s a system behind it and I know you canoe and things like that but you go fishing, you go canoeing there’s certain things you need to do to get the right outcome! You’re going to cook a gourmet meal; you have to do things in certain processes; so when we look at that, and really in the long term, that saves us so much time.

Will: Yeah.

Cathy: Even the people that are very creative and not really process oriented, if they create processes around the things that have to happen then that would create more time for them to be creative.

Will: Yeah and you know I mentioned earlier about processes, do you think just pulling up a word doc and starting to document them, is that a great way to do it or do you have a tool that you use; what do you think is the best way?

Cathy: I think to get it done, that’s the best way to do it. I do have a form, if there are more than just one or two of you in the office, I would create a form that says who is responsible for this and it’s not the person, it’s the position and how often you do it and it’ll just give you a little bit of added information and then everything is consistent so all your procedures are done on the same type of template and the same process.

Will: That’s awesome. Okay so let’s talk about after hours; after hours for me is ten o’clock at night and by that I mean I’m always checking my email, always checking to see what’s going on with anything and if somebody contacts me at eight or nine at night, it’s likely that I’ll reply to them at eight or nine at night. What are your thoughts about that?

Cathy: Well for some of us, we’re maybe evening people or late night people or not morning people so those people tend to work; I really don’t have objections to people working at night, my whole thing is, making sure that you’re giving your family quality time and you’re giving yourself a break and not working 24/7 and staying up. Now the biggest problem with what you do is we teach what we allow, so if we allow and we answer phone calls at eight o’clock or on the weekends, people are going to call us at eight o’clock or on the weekends because they know you’re always available. Another thing that you can do in most email programs is you can reply but you can change and have it sent the next morning; they don’t need to know you’re up at three o’clock in the morning answering emails but I think it’s more about understanding who you are, when you can get your best time done and sometimes we as small business owners need to work late at night just to get things caught up. So I don’t think that’s a problem but the biggest key, and coming from a reforming workaholic, it’s so important to keep family time and that you get that relaxation time and that you aren’t working constantly all the time because you need to be able to revise yourself.

Will: Right and I’ve heard somebody say, and I think it’s Dale Furtwengler, that when two people are interacting one of them is always teaching the other one how to act.

Cathy: Right, correct.

Will: So, me answering the phone at eight o’clock at night or something, you’re right. I’m teaching them that it’s okay to call then.

Cathy: Right, right.

Will: So along those lines, how should we handle emergencies on say in my case a server goes down or maybe it’s an emergency in the client’s mind but in reality it’s not, how should we handle those?

Cathy: Well I think that you do set up a process for that type of thing and maybe it is that you have them email you and put the priority flag on it or that they text you and that you monitor things because in your position you’re right, if somebody’s server goes down that’s critical and it really depends on what kind of service; are you a twenty four hour service or are you an eight to five, I’ll deal with it—send it to me but I’ll deal with it at eight o’clock in the morning. So it really depends on the business.

Will: That makes sense so, what’s one thing that people don’t know about you?

Cathy: What’s one thing that people don’t know about me? Most people don’t know that I’m one sibling of seven.

Will:Oh, wow.

Cathy: So I grew up here in St. Louis and I have five sisters and one brother so a lot of people don’t know that and a lot of people don’t know that I’m a quilter and I think my cat just decided to come and join us. For some reason when I’m on Skype or this type of thing she usually pops in.

Will: Cats are big on the internet so that should increase the overall viewership I would think.

Cathy: Yes, right.

Will: So tell me, how can small business owners get in contact with you?

Cathy: Well they can visit my website at theproductivityexperts.com, they can email me at Cathy with a ‘C’ so C-a-t-h-y at theproductivityexperts.com ([email protected]), my membership site or check out the radio station, it’s ignite your productivity radio and call me at 314-267-3969.

Will: Okay awesome; tell me a little bit more about the membership site, what’s behind the scenes on that?

Cathy: Okay, behind the scenes is basically over one hundred, I don’t want to call it coaching programs but kind of like coaching programs or articles and things just to help us not only in productivity which, there is a lot more in productivity than anything else, but leadership, health, self-improvement, self-development; so people who are really into self-development, it really gives them a lot of things. All of my radio show archives are there so they have access to them and we’re in the process of transcribing them, so they can have it either audio or transcribed.

Will: Nice.

Cathy: And I’m getting ready to launch a really big program that’s going to be a part of the membership site and so with that program, we’ll have access to the whole membership site.

Will: Okay, you’ll have to let me know about that when it goes live.

Cathy: Yeah.

Will: Okay tell me about a couple of the current projects you’re working on.

Cathy: The one big project that I’m working on right now is I’m taking my coaching and I’m creating an actual online coaching program so people who don’t feel like they can afford to work with me on a one to one basis or want to try out a little bit of coaching, it’s going to be an eight week program, they’ll have homework and exercises to do but they’ll also get a couple of one on ones with me during the process. They’ll also get group calls so you’ll be able to hear what other people’s issues are and where they’re struggling that might affect you or might help down the road. So I’m really excited in taking what I helped so many individuals with and that I’m going to be able to help so many more people.

Will: That’s awesome, when do you think that part is going to launch?

Cathy: I hope to have it up and running by November; end of the year the latest but November is my goal at this point.

Will: Okay and is that going to be a short window of time where people can take advantage of that or you said it was an eight week course, is there a hard start and stop date on that?

Cathy: No there’s not; that’s the cool thing about it, anybody can start at any point in time, so when they’re involved in the calls they’ll be able to hear people that have been maybe down the road and they’ll get the advantage of that. Another thing is that when I launch it, I’ll be launching it as a pilot program first so those people who might be interested if they let me know they’ll get a deep, deep discount because I’m going to launch it as a pilot first and then really roll it out after that.

Will: That’s awesome; that’s a great way to work the kinks out and everything and the early adopters get a significant discount

Cathy: Yes, yes.

Will: That’s terrific. Well Cathy I really appreciate you spending some time with me today, I always learn some great tips from you and I really appreciate your time.

Cathy: Well thank you very much and I’ll come back anytime.

Will: Alright. Thank you my name is Will Hanke with Red Canoe Media and I really appreciate you joining us today on Navigate the Rapids and we’ll see you next week.

NTR3: Public Relations Expert Ed Mayuga

In the third episode of NTR I talked with Ed Mayuga from AMM Communications. Ed has several things going on – he just returned from Content Marketing World 2014 and he’s helping launch a new website. He’s been doing public relations with his wife Ann Marie since 2008 in the Saint Louis area. In addition to that, they teach at a local bank and help businesses get more exposure.

You’ll Learn

  • How you can ‘batch’ URLs, videos, pictures and more into just one link (and for FREE!)
  • What happens in Cleveland when you’re not there
  • Why some top social media consultants have migrated away from social media
  • Why Kevin Spacey isn’t really an actor
  • Three tips that Ed learned at CMW that small business owners can use today
  • What is the fundamental divide between sales and marketing?

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Ed Mayuga

Ed Mayuga, a partner at AMM Communications, Public Relations Marketing & Training of St. Louis, Missouri, is a keynote speaker on social media marketing and business development strategies for various organizations in the St. Louis area, and a social media instructor at Enterprise University.  Prior to co-founding AMM Communications in 2008 with his wife, Ann Marie, he spent 10 years in the pharmaceutical industry, and now brings his marketing and sales experience to small and mid-sized companies nationwide.  Ed held several senior management positions in the pharmaceutical industry, managing sales representatives in multiple states, and earned top sales awards.  In addition to his experience as a marketing consultant, he has prior experience as an executive recruiter, where he assisted his clients with sourcing and hiring “A-Players”, guiding his clients through the process of developing the position, interviewing, and making the final offer.

Ed graduated from St. Louis University with a bachelor of science in finance and a master of business administration concentrating on international business. He is a member of the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of St. Louis Board of Directors, a member of the STL250 board, chair of the Fair St. Louis Transportation committee, a member of the Social Media Club of St. Louis, and a member of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis.

Watch This Episode Now

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Transcription

Announcer: Podcasting from baseball heaven, St. Louis, Missouri, home to float trips, gooey butter cake, and the gateway arch. This is the Navigate the Rapids podcast where you find out how to effectively run and market your business. And now here is your host, Will Hanke.

Will Hanke (Host): Hey everyone, Will Hanke here from Red Canoe Media, thanks for joining me again today. I am pretty excited about my guest today. He does some terrific things around the St. Louis area and beyond that as well. So I am just going to jump right in and start talking about my guest. So joining me today is Ed Mayuga, a partner at AMM Communications, Chief Marketing Officer at slidebatch.com which we will talk about a little bit today. Ed is a consultant in the areas of: business development, content marketing, internal communications, marketing, reputation management, and social media. He returned this week from Content Marketing World 2014, which we will also talk about. That was held in Cleveland, Ohio, which is the industry’s largest gathering of Content Marketing Professionals in the world, attended by over two thousand (2000) marketers from over fifty (50) different countries. Today Ed is going to talk to us about key learning’s from that conference and, as I mentioned earlier, the launch of slidebatch.com, a new way to communicate digital information. Ed, it is good to have you today.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Thank you very much, Will. It is a pleasure to be here.

Will Hanke (Host): I appreciate you joining us. So let us just jump right in. First I would like to talk a little about AMM Communications, how that got started, how long it has been around, and what exactly you do for them.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well for AMM Communications it was started in 2008 and we originally founded this company. It consists of just my wife and me. We are based here in St. Louis, and our brand is Public Relations Marketing of St. Louis, Missouri. We also do some executive training but we have very large clients all across the United States. I have done work with Enterprise Bank & Trust, Laser Engage, and Visor Pharmaceuticals (which is where I used to work). We are continually expanding our agency, not just in the traditional public relations but now in the content marketing and executive training. In addition, we both teach at Enterprise University. Ann Marie just taught a class today on Public Relations 101 and for those of you in St. Louis I would like to invite you in November to my class on content marketing.

Will Hanke (Host): Awesome, so do you teach that in the St. Louis area? Do you do that every month?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well there are two semesters; the spring semester, and the fall semester. The fall semester is coming up; it is actually held at the Enterprise Bank location off Cragen, Olive road. And it is free to all sophomores, to all business leaders and it is a three (3) hour class. Ann Marie taught hers this morning and universally the comments that we get is that it is a phenomenal resource offered by Enterprise Bank & Trust. We have repeated people attend these and it is like our ‘best little known secret’ in St. Louis, especially for entrepreneurs. I certainly invite you to go there. You could go enterprisebank.com. In addition, Enterprise Bank runs these universities in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as Kansas City. So for our nationwide listeners, they are certainly welcome to come and attend.

Will Hanke (Host): Oh wow that is pretty awesome. So what kind of classes do you teach there? You do not have to give the whole run down, but are they all (well I would assume) public relations related?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well the classes that Ann Marie and I specifically teach, are actually very synergistic in the way they were created. Ann Marie taught Public Relations 101 which is talking about creating a buzz around your product or service and that [connects] directly to the story teller. Story telling is the core, as you know, for content marketing. And when I originally started teaching my classes I had a basic Social Media course and then an Intermediate Social Media course. But as I found (especially going to the Content Marketing World this week) that the period of social media being the bright, shiny thing is quickly being surpassed by the whole idea of content marketing. So if you are to take Ann Marie’s class (for instance) and then my class they are designed to fit within each other. Ann Marie would be more of the: pitching the stories, getting headlines, creating your own press releases, and then mine would be the actual mechanics of taking content and sharing it with the world.

Will Hanke (Host): Awesome, okay. Are you speaking at the Small Business Expo in October?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yes I will be speaking at the Small Business Expo with Ron Amulin. The publisher of the Small Business Expo has been very gracious to allow me to speak there over the past few years and I find it very engaging and a wonderful opportunity. The only downside, Will, is that I do not get to attend your sessions because typically they schedule us together.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah, yeah well that is ok, nothing new there right?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well you know what? I have learnt so much from attending your media groups over the years. I know I have even been up to your office for your food camp. You are just a tremendous resource. I know that you have expanded beyond the areas of (5:47-5:49??) organization in the content marketing as well and you know that is just a phenomenal resource to small business owners.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah, so tell me a little bit about Slidebatch and how all of that works in AMM and especially what it does for small business owners.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well I say it is interesting that you ask that, as you can see I have AMM Communications and I have Slidebatch banners above me. One of the recent ventures that I have joined is Slidebatch as the chief marketing officer and the purpose for us to go to the Content Marketing World this week is not as exhibiters but to launch our platform and at slidebatch.com. But the way we are doing it is a new way to author content and it is a very simple, easy, laser-focused way of doing it. It is currently free to the public but it is a tremendous tool for branding and sharing batches of information. So our goal is that in the next two-three (2-3) years everybody is talking about batching information. And when you create a batch it is online, you will be able to curate information from all across the web. Any link, image, YouTube videos, demo videos, you can upload files, you can upload power points, Word files, Google drive files from anywhere, collect them in batches, just share them with one URL to the general public and what is nice is they can view it on any device. We built it from the mobile platform moving up to the desktop. And the difference that we have is that you can actually download any of these files and we do not get any of the copyright issues because we are merely curating information from across the web. So [we promote] ‘batch should share it and show it’ as our message. We want everybody to become an author. Authoring is very intimidating for [some] people but with Slidebatch [we] will allow you to author content very quickly and easily.

Will Hanke (Host): Okay pretty cool. So you could build different batches of whatever and target those to different professionals or industries or whatever. So, for instance, if you wanted to target a reporter (because I know you are doing P.R.).

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yes.

Will Hanke (Host): You could put some things together that you would hope a reporter would want to see.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Absolutely, and you know in the public relations field we pitch stories. And in order to pitch stories a reporter (at the very basic) would want to see a headshot, they would want to see any local news, maybe some of the brochures or marketing materials and maybe the website. So with Slidebatch that allows us to put together a batch of information in our own private batch. We do not have to share this with the world; we can make it private so that reporter could look at it. No one else could see it unless we want them to. So we could control it and then later on we could take that batch, we could take the story that the reporter wrote, we could put it in that batch and then make it public and then start sharing it and we have the social sharing buttons it could be shared it on Facebook, YouTube, Pintrest, a variety of items. And if you go to slidebatch.com you will see I created batches for a whole bunch of different things. Tony Russo, for instance, would be in the Hall of Fame. I created that under my own private account. For AMM Communications, Ann Marie and I are really big into the Urban Gardening Movement and the Tiny Home Movement. I created batches just collecting all the nice tiny homes and urban gardening tips that I see. So it is certainly open for, not only personal use, but for other businesses as well.

Will Hanke (Host): Oh wow that is pretty cool. Well that sounds like a great project and you guys are currently offering that for free which is really cool.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Absolutely, there are no limits. For more of the enterprise users, we do have a white label version which is just very small software as a service. We just want to get people use it, because once they get used to seeing how many batches they can create, we truly think that we can change the way people communicate.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah I think it is terrific that you can just share one link and it goes to a bunch of different things about whatever topic you choose. That is pretty cool.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Absolutely and we also have inevitable players. So if you blog at slidebatch.com or on my blog at AMM Communications.com, both of those are self-posted WordPress websites. I will embed batches that I create specifically for that blog post within the batch within my blog post.

Will Hanke (Host): Oh wow.

Ed Mayuga (guest): You could actually view it within that blog entry which makes it very nice.

Will Hanke (Host): That sounds like it is very easy to integrate. That is awesome.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yes, absolutely.

Will Hanke (Host): Okay. Well so you just got back yesterday, I guess, from Content Marketing World.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yes.

Will Hanke (Host): So what did you think about it?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well you know the first thing we have to say is that ‘what did not happen in Cleveland stays in Cleveland’.

Will Hanke (Host): Fair enough.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well you know Cleveland. Cleveland gets a bad rap; it is actually a phenomenal place. We were right there by the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame but Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing World has put this together and in just four (4) years he has grown it from a hundred and fifty (150) people attending Content Marketing World of 2010 to over twenty five hundred (2,500) marketers, from corporate, to individuals, to P.R. firms from all over the world attending Content Marketing World. And we sent three (3) representatives of Slidebatch there. You got to see all the social media thought leaders like Scott Stratten from ‘On Marketing’. So we talked to Lee Auden, we talked to Tom Martin from New Orleans and you know these people have been speaking. They started off as social media consultants but they seem polite (so to speak) and they see the content marketing as truly the future of marketing. And I met the corporate marketers from Kraft and 3M. They all sent representatives from all across the United States and from all over the world. We had Australians, we had people from Estonia, there were people from Asia, and it was remarkable because there is just so much content. And if you look, I am going to create a batch (I have not done it yet) but I had an artist that would actually draw out what the speaker was saying. So we have these big graphic posters with the content and it is actually very visually engaging and they put those out. I posted it to Instagram and to Facebook but I am actually going to collect that in a batch and share that with the audience as well.

Will Hanke (Host): We will put it in and show notes and it will give me an opportunity to stick a batch in there.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Stick a batch in it! Stick a batch in it!

Will Hanke (Host): So what was your favorite session at the Content Marketing World?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well I have to say the closing keynote was Kevin Spacey and for anyone who is a Kevin Spacey fan, that I have been, to award winning actor. If you have Netflix, House of Cards is a phenomenal show and he is very engaging. At first I was like, “why would they invite him after to talk about content marketing?” but if you look at it he really went into talking about story telling. Actors really tell the story that they are given and a lot of times when they do improve they see the past or the story just unfolds. And the similarities that he created between acting and producing and working in the theater on Broadway and in England directly tie into how we are creating content. The reason that people will keep coming back to read your content, specifically, is because you have engaged them, you have stirred some emotion. And you know I have seen it in my own case with public relations. So it is not sufficient to just send out a press release like someone got hired or we have got this new offer. We need to actually engage people and tell them the story. Well this fits into the whole story of this company and this is why you should be interested. So I would say that Kevin Spacey was the most engaging there, followed by Scott Stratten on marketing. That guy cracks up everybody, I was familiar with him.

Will Hanke (Host): You know I saw him last year at Punk Con in Vegas and he definitely kept everybody’s attention and kept everybody laughing.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well yeah, you know his website ‘thenooooooooooooooobuttton.com’ (that’s ‘N’ followed by fifteen (15) ‘O’s’ dot com) actually gets twenty-five million (25,000,000) views. He has a ninety percent (90%) bounce rate but most people who are staying on the site. And if you go to the site he showed it, you just push the ‘blue arcade’ button and it has Dark Vader saying ‘no’, a screaming NO and actually it is not even Dark Vader, it is Emperor Zurg from Toy Story. And he puts a disclaimer “at times of dire need you are supposed to press this button.” But the story was that this is something that people go to, they spend time on and yet multiple pages but he only has one page; I mean that is just hilarious. He said “content marketing is getting people engaged” and the reason that he has the ‘no’ with fifteen (15) ‘O’s’ is because the ‘n’ with fourteen ‘O’s’ was already taken. So I thought that was very funny but I mean in the whole scheme of things he was a big Twitter guy, obviously. And he had six hundred thousand Twitter followers, but then he has actually seen the light with the Twitter for the sake of doing Twitter just like social media is not the end of the all, not like it was five (5) years ago where there was a rush to get on there. Now you need to have content unless you are going to lose people. People are not going to want to engage with you unless you have some compelling content that people want to look at.

Will Hanke (Host): Totally agree, I heard something (probably a good two years now) that Twitter is ‘marketers marketing to other marketers’.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yes, absolutely.

Will Hanke (Host): And it really made me wonder, of all the people that were jumping on Twitter that they get antedated with so much marketing stuff that they get off of Twitter and never realize the potential that is really there.

Ed Mayuga (guest): I do not know how many robot followers you have. I know Twitter has the ‘clique mad up’, but I probably have a thousand (1000) robot followers. And I got a few new girlfriends.

Will Hanke (Host): Oh that is right.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yeah I got my invisible girlfriends even though I have been married for fourteen (14) years.

Will Hanke (Host): Right, right, yeah. So let us talk a little bit more about Content Marketing World.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Okay.

Will Hanke (Host): Why not give me a couple tips, or three tips, that you learnt there or that applies especially to small business owners?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Okay well the first tip was really having the cohesive story and if you look at that classic story telling pyramid, it is called ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’. So you have the ‘Introduction’, then moving up the side of the pyramid you have ‘Rising Action’, you have the ‘Climax’, you have the ‘Dénouement’ which is a French term for ‘Falling Action’, then you have the ‘Conclusion’. So if you break it down into just that basic pyramid whenever you are telling a story that will actually be a good framework for you pushing out your content. So just to bring it home, do what I do, it would be doing a press release to announcer a product and then putting out some content blog post. You would get the rising action and then the climax would be someone actually benefitting from that product or service and then the following action would be more people getting onboard. And then there has to be some conclusion before you move onto the next story. It is not a never-ending story because never-ending stories will not accomplish what you want, which is the second thing I learned from Content Marketing World. And that people were coming at content marketing from so many different ways. You had the bloggers who were writers, you had the social media people saying “well I do not have time to write, I am just going to put out all these little bits of content,” and you had the people with the R.O.I. you know the bosses asking “how much time are we spending on this?”, “Why do we need to hire these people?” And all of them were trying to understand content marketing and put it in to a box. Well it is more holistic than that, you actually have to incorporate everything. You cannot just write content without trying to get any R.O.I. And there are many tools. There is a balance at Content Marketing World between what the speakers are talking about. We had national speakers there, you know Jay Baron did a phenomenal job, Jenny Dietrich, from Armonk Dietrich and they all talked about how they had started with just a website, and now they are actually moving on to other things. And then the third and final thing is the content curation piece. And we had Slidebatch up there just to launch our product but we also wanted to see how many competitors we potentially had and what type of famous tools were out there. So from a tactical perspective there are so many tools. There are a lot of tools that overlap each other; there are tools that will gage how much blog influence you will get, how much S.E.O you could potentially get. But it just seems like there are a lot of tools out there trying to be [like] the Swiss Army knife, they are trying to be everything. And it can be overwhelming. So when you are actually looking at the tactical side, for my third and final point, you need to find something you are comfortable with and you need to stick with it. You cannot just stay with something for a few weeks and then try the next bright, shiny object. That is not going to work. So it needs to be more cohesive and it ties exactly into what you do well because well you are the best person that I know and have ever seen in pulling together all these different tools and truly helping people not only with the website but in maintaining a consistent message.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah well thank you for that. So let us talk real quick about content in a really generic way. We are throwing the term ‘content marketing’ around and we have got some small business owners that watch this that maybe do not even understand what that is. So for most people I think they would immediately assume that means blogging or writing some sort of an article on a regular basis. But it really means a ton more than just that does it not?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yeah absolutely. Well I write two blogs currently. I write one for AMM Communications and I write one for Slidebatch. Blogging is certainly a great tool because if you write in natural language it will be called by the search engines and you will get your search engine optimization from that. But I am a small business owner as well; I know that there is not a lot of time. It is a cost benefit analysis. The cost of time that I would commit or the ninety minutes (90) or two (2) hours writing a blog post, would that not be better spent doing something else? So the basis of content marketing is taking content in the form of a story and using it to propel your brand forward and ultimately the R.O.I. for me and what I work with from my clients is that they want to sell more. They want more people to get engaged, they want people to buy their products or buy their services. So you know the challenge though is if you are bootstrapping your own company and you cannot afford to hire people, how do you do that? You have to do it yourself, and that is where Slidebatch comes in. I am currently writing a blog-post about ‘Blogging verses Batching.’ I can write a blog in ninety (90) minutes to two (2) hours or I could create ten to fifteen (10-15) batches in the same amount of time because it is much easier to send that out and I immediately multiply it (the number of hits that I could potentially get) because it not only goes to my website but it also propels my brand forward. So when you are sending out content, it is merely the vehicle. But you could use WordPress or you could also use Slidebatch and do it much easier.

Will Hanke (Host): Right and content could also be video, it could also be Podcast; it could be a lot of different things. And I think for small business owners, they need to look at their audience and how their audience wants to digest their content and then focus on that. Because if it is something that is product-based then you may be better off doing some short videos that are how-to’s and that sort of stuff around your product verses blogging. So there are a lot of things there. So let us talk a little bit more about curation. I have heard some rumors or rumblings about curation several years ago and there have been sites around LinkedIn and Reddit and these sites that really curate content.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yeah, absolutely.

Will Hanke (Host): We just did not realize it at the time but they have become quite powerful in their own ways. So talk a little bit about Content Marketing World and how they brought in the curation part of things.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well curation is the most difficult thing. How do you share a bunch of links? How do you share a podcast? How do you share a video? To your point, the key to marketing is meeting your audience where they are. Some people like to podcast and I would love to touch on that because you mentioned podcast, and you are doing a lot of podcasts. There are more people that will spend more time listening to podcasts than who will actually watch your video. Because one of the statistics they said with video is that without a five minute video the brain does something. It actually goes to sleep in the middle of the video because it is just so over stimulated. People are more likely to listen to a podcast and will save a bunch of podcasts by curating them. They could curate them themselves or you could curate them for them and then they can listen to it on their mobile device, they can listen to it on their ride home. I think the statistic that they threw out is that fifty one percent (51%) of the people will listen to a podcast on their twenty to thirty minute [journey] home, so that is the key. The issue that we have again is ‘where do you put all this stuff?’ You could upload it to various sites, use Sound Cloud for podcast, and use WordPress for a blog if you have your own YouTube channel, but they are nothing really cohesive. So what you need to find is a good solution. You could, theoretically, pull all those together on a WordPress website but that takes a little technical knowledge and it takes time. Or you could use one of the curation tools. I like Reddit, I like Reddit a lot, but Reddit is just a free flow of ideas.

Will Hanke (Host): Right.

Ed Mayuga (guest): LinkedIn is kind of the same way, just with links. And that is the reason we actually came up with slidebatch.com because there was no good, cohesive way of doing everything and we can do that.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah ok. I think curation is a great way to go especially for marketing-type companies that need to get their message out and other peoples messages out as well, it is not just all ‘sell, sell, sell.’

Ed Mayuga (guest): No I mean it is the fundamental divide between sales and marketing. I have been on both sides. I have been in sales for over twenty (20) years and I was always frustrated when I was just on the sales side that marketing would never produce anything that would really help me to sell ahead. And then the marketers would always be frustrated with the sales people because they would not use any of the stuff they created. So with content marketing we can tailor exactly the way we need to sell something and get people interested and then sales people can take this curated content and just show their prospect or their current client exactly what they want to see.

Will Hanke (Host): That is awesome.

Ed Mayuga (guest): (inaudible)

Will Hanke (Host): Very nice. And you may have already touched on some of this, but, what is one of the biggest things you see small business owners doing wrong?

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well the one thing I see small business owners doing is that they think they can be successful in just instants first. They may have started a blog, or they may have attended one of your courses where you talk about blogging or creating a video or doing something like that. They maybe do one (1) or two (2) and then they do not get the desired result so then they try something else.

Will Hanke (Host): Alright.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Then they try frequent inconsistencies, and that is the name of the game. You have got to be consistent with it, because it is not a sprint it is more of a marathon. And then the other thing is that you have these never-ending stories that are disjointed. You might talk about ‘product, product, product’ without any of the benefits and then you never finish that story, and you will not engage people that way. So if I had some advice I would say be frequent and be consistent with whatever you do and do not give up.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah I think that is terrific advice. I have a client who started blogging in 2008 and I said “we just need to do this once, maybe twice a week.” And I say this to all my clients and of course most of them kind of laugh and say “yeah, I am kind of busy running a business here.”

Ed Mayuga (guest): Right.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah, but let me tell you, if you saw the numbers that this client is doing it is incredible. And I went back and looked at the very first blog they did and after they published that blog they got about ten (10) visitors a week added because of that blog being there.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Right.

Will Hanke (Host): So over fifty-two (52) weeks if you multiply that out that is thousands more visitors that you did not have before.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Exactly.

Will Hanke (Host): Because you put that content out there and because you did it on a regular basis.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yeah so it does not have to be the complete works of Shakespeare, it does not have to be perfect, you just have to put something out. And you know, obviously, pay attention to grammar, do not swear, and do not be too controversial (I mean you can be slightly controversial). But I think that small business owners get stuck and say “you know, unless it is perfect I am not going to put it out.” Well, it does not have to be perfect, it just has to be decent enough, and it has to really evoke an emotion in some and really help them out.

Will Hanke (Host): And the last thing I will say about that client, to your point, is that there are some bigger clients in town.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Exactly.

Will Hanke (Host): Or some bigger businesses in town that are doing that and he now has six (6), seven (7) years worth of content.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Wow.

Will Hanke (Host): That they are never going to be able to catch up to. So I do not want to alienate anybody who has not started blogging. I think it is, as you said earlier, “one of the best kept secret” of getting works, getting traffic to your site, more content, getting more authority. What a great way to really build your business.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Exactly, well you know Ann Marie uses this in her Enterprise classes, I do as well, because we often hear people say “I am not creative, I am not an author” so we ask them to write a haiku. And if you remember from grade school, a haiku is a Japanese poem of writing five (5) syllables, seven (7) syllables, and five (5) syllables and it is typically about nature but it can be about anything.

Will Hanke (Host): Sure.

Ed Mayuga (guest): So we have people write haikus about their product or service and it is amazing what people come up with. People that are very introverted typically come up with some. So if you can come up with a haiku you can come up with a blog post because just expand the words a little bit more.

Will Hanke (Host): Yeah and just listen to your customers and what they are asking you and put that down into blog posters for everyone that is asking you something to your face or on the phone.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Right.

Will Hanke (Host): There are hundreds (100) of them that are typing that into Google and you will be the expert that is answering that question.

Ed Mayuga (guest): You are exactly right Will. And people as you teach in your classes, people are doing natural language word searches on Google, “who is the best?”, “who is the top in whatever I am looking for?” that is the search query that I would use for something. And if you could be creative in how you answer that and you put out content that will build your authority and as an author of being someone who is credible, then you will perforate to the top of the search engine.

Will Hanke (Host): That is awesome. So Ed give me a couple tips that people who are listening or watching today can actually take back and take action on and see results in a short amount of time.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Well the first thing I would say is go on to Wikipedia and look at Freytag’s Pyramid. And I talked about it earlier; it is about (33:18-33:19??). So use that as a framework of whatever story. If you are doing, a product bit, if you are talking about how great your product or service really is, it needs to fit in that constraint. There needs to be rising action, there needs to be some climax of some challenge that was overcome, some reason why your product or service will help that person live a better life and then there needs to be a conclusion. And that would be the benefit so that would be the first thing to do.

Will Hanke (Host): So I will put that in the show notes underneath the broadcast where everybody can find it.

Ed Mayuga (guest): Yes absolutely. So I will actually give you a batch link because I created Slidebatch on storytelling and it will have all that content as well, so that would be beneficial. And then you know the frequency and consistency is just like exercise. A lot of people have New Year’s Resolutions and they really start working out in January and by February and March, the exercise equipment is on sale on Craigslist, typically because people are so great to start. You have to be frequent and consistent. Even if it is so much as sitting there and writing that you are committing to it on your calendar or whatever calendar system you use to remind yourself that you have to do this. And half the time it is just getting started, for me, anytime I have some brilliant innovation if I do not have a piece of paper by me I can go to my phone and I can go to my WordPress website and I will write the headline and that headline will start my blog post and then I will have a lot of these blog posts that are still stored up as drafts. That is what you call the Evergreen Content. Evergreen Content is stuff that never go stale, that you could use anytime if you have enough of that Evergreen Content you will not always be under pressure to get that blog post out.

Will Hanke (Host): Very good, yeah. Ed I really appreciate you joining us today and always some great tips from you, always some great ideas so I really appreciate that. My guest today is Ed Mayuga from AMM Communications and slidebabtch.com and my name is Will Hanke with Red Canoe Media. Thanks so much for joining in today and hopefully you will be back to Navigate the Rapids business. Thanks again for joining us on the broadcast. Join us again next week when we interview Productivity Expert, Cathy Sexton.

NTR2: Digital Marketing Expert Russ Henneberry

Episode 2 is our first guest episode and we started off with a bang. Russ Henneberry has done content marketing for some pretty big names like Neil Patel and Ryan Deiss. He is a huge wealth of knowledge about creating content that drives sales – both directly and indirectly. The entire broadcast went just short of an hour, but there’s no shortage of great tips – oh and ignore his heavy breathing!

You’ll Learn

  • The three different types of content (TOFU, MOFU and BOFU!)
  • How to make your blog more than just a ‘top of funnel’ tool
  • How customer success stories can make you more money
  • Why you don’t have a traffic problem
  • How to figure your cost per acquisition on any online offer you make
  • Why you shouldn’t worry about lifetime value of a customer

Links Mentioned in This Episode

About Russ Henneberry

Russ Henneberry is the Editorial Director at Digital Marketer. He’s worked on digital marketing projects for companies like CrazyEgg, Salesforce.com and Network Solutions.

Watch This Episode on YouTube

Watch on Google Plus

Transcript

Will: I’m Will Hanke here from Red Canoe Media, thanks for joining us today. I want to jump right in and talk to my guest today, his name is Russ Henneberry. Russ and I have been friends for quite some time now and pretty excited to have him on here today. Russ is the editorial director, digital marketer and he’s worked on digital marketing projects for companies like Crazy Egg, Sales Force and Network Solutions; Russ, good to have you.

Russ: Good to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

Will: Yeah I appreciate you coming. We’ve been friends for many years now for those that don’t know. Russ just call me one day and said, ‘Hey, let’s go do lunch.’ We went and had lunch, and been friends for quite a while. So, Russ does a lot with content marketing—he knows a ton bout content marketing—and so Russ, tell me about your time at Crazy Egg first.

Russ: Well Crazy Egg, is a company that you can’t really call a start up at this point; it’s a pretty mature company now. They are a heat mapping Software Company so they create software, essentially, it’s all that script on your page and it shows you where people are clicking and scrolling around. So, they came to me with a project to start a blog. Neil Patel is the owner of this company. It’s actually him and his brother-in-law; his name is Hiten Shah, so it’s kind of a family run operation and they brought me into the family, so to speak, to take this blog and take it from zero and see what I could do with it. It was a fantastic experience. If you don’t know who Neil Patel is, he’s a very smart marketer in general but particularly smart content marketer. He’s always pushing the envelope with new content ideas and new things to do to drive traffic with content and especially SEO and so it was a fantastic experience working for those guys.

Will: I think there are a lot of people that don’t realize—talking about business owners—that don’t realize how awesome a heat map can be for your business and it’s a really cool tool that not a lot of people know about. So, after Crazy Egg you went over to Sales Force, I know that you took their blog and really built it up in a short amount of time. What were some of the major things that you had to overcome there? I know that’s a pretty big company.

Russ: Well, the major thing we had to overcome over at Sales Force as a content team, it wasn’t just me there was a whole team of people working on this project but, the biggest thing was that Sales Force was a big company that’s about selling. They are about real in the trenches, in the conference rooms, out at the bar, smoozing customers, selling. Content marketing was something that didn’t do very well at the top of the funnel so when we talk about content, we talk about three different types of content. We talk about top of funnel content, we call it TOFU. There’s middle of content, we call it MOFU.

Will: Nice.

Russ: And then there’s bottom of funnel content, which is BOFU. Now, Sales Force does MOFU and BOFU better than anybody on the earth that I have ever seen. In other words, think about the funnel in terms of how people progress through the decision to buy something or sign up for something and that is: awareness, interest, evaluation, purchase. So they start out at awareness, so they become aware of something, they get interested, they evaluate and then they buy. Then there are things that go on after that of course but the content that we had at our disposal at Sales Force in the middle of the funnel, in other words, in the evaluation stage in the close stage was unbelievable. That’s because they’re so focused on selling which is important. In fact my time at Sales Force convinced me of the power of MOFU and BOFU content.

Let me give you some examples of what we had at our disposal at Sales Force. In the middle of the funnel we had things like customer success stories, vast amounts of testimonials, case studies things like that; things that help somebody decide during the evaluation stage whether or not they’re going to move on and buy. So that middle of funnel content—in fact if you are new to content marketing, you might think of content marketing as running a blog for example, but most of the time that blog is a TOFU type content. You’re looking to drive awareness and interest in what you do and your products and services. At the top of the funnel it was a blog but actually, if you don’t have any middle of funnel or bottom of funnel content, I would start there because it’s actually easier to put together. You can take a customer that you have and write up a quick case study.

Now, just to give you an idea, at Sales Force we had a success story for every vertical, we had slide decks that were built for every vertical and every situation, so what is the problem? For example Sales Force does a lot of things not just sales CRM, they also do things like customer service so they have desk.com, they so email marketing now that they own exact targets. This is a mammoth company so, no matter what the customers’ problem was and who the competitors were that we were up against we had case studies and slide decks. When I say slide decks, these are the presentation decks that our sales guys would walk into a room and say, ‘Okay, I’m up against Oracle and the problem here is that they are having trouble with productivity from their sales team.’ So there would be a deck that would be built to defeat Oracle on that issue, because Oracle is better than Sales Force for something and it’s not as good as Sales Force for other things.

Will: Sure.

Russ: This is true in no matter what you’re doing; you have competitors that you’re up against. Look for your strengths, create case studies, create customer success stories and put those into PDF form and makes those available for customers that are in that evaluation stage. There’s a blog that we were running over blogs.salesforce.com, it was getting at least 100,000 uniques a month, which sounds like a lot and it is a lot. But one of the craziest days of my life was opening up the analytics, because they hired me also doing analytics on the site, was getting access to salesforce.com analytics.

Will: Right.

Russ: Oh my God, it was just incredible how much traffic the site is getting; millions of visits a day.

Will: That’s probably pretty overwhelming, I would assume.

Russ:> Yeah it took me a while to sort through all those analytics but blog was just getting collateral visits just because it was in the navigation, so many people visiting that site of 100,000. All we did was we started creating better content and I can tell you what we did there but I think one of the biggest lessons I learned from salesforce.com was MOFU/BOFU. Start there actually or at least make sure you’ve filled that gap, make sure you have things and that’s kind of a lot of what you do with your meet up Will, where you meet up with people in person and do presentations.

Michael Port wrote a book called Book Yourself Solid and one of the things I remember so much from that book was that he said, “… you should always have someplace to invite people to…” You should always have somewhere to invite people to see you speak and to see you demonstrate your expertise. That’s one of the things that your meet up does for you and it helps at that BOFU/MOFU stage. I’m sure you do it a lot of times because you like to speak and you like to see everybody and teach and help people and that’s certainly comes through when you talk but Will, have you ever had a possible client and then invited them to the meet up and then closed that client because they saw your expertise? I know that happened to me a lot when I used to run a meet up.

Will: Oh, yeah. It’s a great selling tool, without selling I guess.

Russ: Exactly, you stand up there and you display your expertise. They see you in action; they see you talking to other people, you demonstrating social proof. You walk in the door and everybody’s like, ‘Hey, Will, can’t wait to hear you talk!’ You’re possible client is sitting there looking around them going, ‘Well look at all these smart business people who know who Will is, come listen to Will speak.’ Tremendous social proof there and that’s a type of middle and bottom of funnel content even though you’re talking about things that are more in the awareness-interest stage. You know that there are a couple people, out there in the crowd, who are in the evaluation stage. They’re evaluating Red Canoe Media; evaluating your services and things like that. So, anyways a long answer to your question.

Will: It’s alright. So now you’re over at Digital Marketer and you told me a while back, something that’s always stuck with me ever since you told me and that was that you don’t have a traffic problem. This is something we started saying after you started working at Digital Marketer. So tell us a little bit about that. I’m assuming that means TOFU, top of the funnel not to pay so much attention as you’ve been saying, but that middle content area that most business owners don’t pay attention to. Just explain to me what that means.

Russ: Actually, the concept of it started at Sales Force where I realize how Sales Force does things, they don’t worry about generating website traffic; they just go out and buy it. They don’t worry about getting eyeballs on an offer; they just go out and force eyeballs on an offer by cutting a check.

Will: Which is something a big company can get away with.

Russ: Of course but then, when I got to Digital Marketer it drove the nail in even further to me that there is no such thing as a website traffic problem. There is plenty of traffic out there, there’s ridiculous amounts of traffic. Just to name the obvious there’s Google, who would love to send you traffic through Ad words, there is Facebook that would love to send you traffic through Facebook ads, there’s Linked in ads, Twitter ads, there’s very, very good SEO people like yourself that want to send people more traffic. But it costs money, like [12:45], you’re either going to spend your time doing it or you’re going to pay a guy like Will to do it for you.

Will: Right.

Russ: The thing is that free traffic sucks. If you sit around and think about, how am I going to get some more free traffic today? That’s the wrong answer or the wrong question. The right question is, how am I going to create an offer that makes it so it makes sense for me to just buy the traffic and get it in front of people so that I can make some money? So what we do all day long over at Digital Marketer, what they did at Sales Force, what Neil is doing over at [13:24] is we create great stuff whether it’s an offer or whether it’s a piece of TOFU content or MOFU content or whatever and we put it in front of the right people and we force it there, by paying for it and that drives quick results. You could take $50 right now and put up a page that has an offer on it. Let’s just say it’s a $100 consultation, you take $50, go into Facebook and then 30 minutes from now, you could have traffic on that page. You could go on to your real time analytics in Google, and watch traffic start coming in to that page and we can talk more about this if you want but, Facebook traffic right now, since they’ve gone public, has really handed the reigns over to marketers.

If you use Facebook we know everything that you’re doing unless you’ve opted out, of course and this is not a discussion about whether or not that’s right or wrong or the security. Forget about that. What I’m telling you is that as a marketer you can go in and target people at a ridiculously laser focused level these days.

Will: So they once partnered up with a couple of dinosauruses that let you target some pretty specific things beyond the demographics of male or female and income [15:00].

Russ: Oh my God! It is ridiculously crazy and then there are other things like creating custom audiences out of email lists and creating custom audiences out of people that have visited your website. And we can talk more tactically about things, if you want or we can stay a little bit more philosophical or a little bit more eye level, it doesn’t matter to me but my point when I say we don’t have a traffic problem is that you can put traffic on that offer, you can put traffic on a page; hire an SEO guy, pay for ads, get out there and get the traffic by paying for it because what you need to be doing is creating offers and selling things. What Digital Marketer is, is it’s a testing company; I don’t think Ryan Deiss would like that characterization maybe, but that’s the way I think about it, is that we do a lot of lab testing and we roll it out to the various divisions of our company which is every and all kinds of different spaces selling all kinds of different things. It all hinges on creating offers that allow you to make enough money that you can buy the traffic that you need.

Will: So since we’re focusing on small business owners and you mentioned talking $50 and doing some ads but obviously there’s a little work in getting those ads set up correctly so that you’re showing it to the right demographics. But they can watch that traffic come in live and once somebody is on the landing page. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the testing that Digital Marketer does. I know you don’t just put up a page, throw a bunch of money at driving traffic to it and just say, ‘well, that didn’t work.’ What do you do beyond that?

Russ: Let’s think of an example company so, if there’s anything that you want me to talk specifically about because it’s always better to talk specifics.

Will: So let’s talk about a business that sells a product, we’ll just call them Blue Widgets but everybody that’s watching can kind of plug their product in.

Russ: Well I’ve been learning some pretty crazy stuff about Amazon lately, from a guy named Ezra Firestone who did a course with us, that I can get into too but, let’s talk about what you would do with that $50. Depending on what you’re doing; you’re selling Blue Widgets, you’re selling services, you’re selling information, no matter what you’re doing. What I don’t recommend you do—like earlier I talked about let’s say you have a $99 consultation—I would not drive cold traffic to a $99 offer. What I mean by that is, if you’ve got a $99 offer or $100 offer or $300 offer or $500 offer, it’s fine take that out to your list if you’ve got people that already know who you are, no matter what the size it is if it’s 100 people, it’s 50 people, it’s 300, it’s 3000, take that kind of an offer to your list. But when you’re trying to generate—when you’re using cold traffic, in other words, these people don’t know who you are, they don’t know you from Adam, the best thing to do is to drive them into something called a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is simply a specific, and I’m going to stress the word specific, chunk of value that you trade with someone in exchange for their contact information. You’ve seen them all over the place; they’re the free reports and the free mind maps and the free videos and audios, free courses, sometimes people create interactive quizzes to drive leads. But one place to start is, you start with $50 and a lead magnet, you’ll be in pretty good shape; you spend your $50 and you can say, ‘Okay, I spent $50 on Facebook ads and I was driving clicks for $.50 a piece and I got 20 new leads.’ Well you can pretty easily throw that on a spreadsheet and figure out what your cost per acquisition is, which is how much is a lead costing me and your cost per acquisition is going to go down based on two things. One would be, how good is your offer and two is, how targeted was your traffic. If you can learn to master those two things, how do I create something that somebody wants and give it away to them for free in exchange for their contact information?

Now let’s go back to this idea of specificity because specificity is so important. What we see in our testing, across all verticals and everywhere is a couple things. One is you want the lead magnet to basically solve one big problem and be consumable within 5-10 minutes. What we’ve tried is here, let me drive cold traffic onto a page and say, ‘get your free 14 day course on SEO.’ Or let’s just say that you’re selling widgets and that widget is playground equipment, you use a piece of information—you use something very specific not like, read this eBook and create a safe environment for your kids to play that’s 80 pages long. That’s not going to convert very well because although you might get a lot of takers the first thing they’re going to do is, ‘okay, now I’ve got to read this big, old book.’ Most people are not going to consume that. My hard drive is littered with eBooks I’ve never read, especially when they’re free. So instead, you want to look at the one big problem that you can solve and pull just that piece out and that is enough to get a lead. So in this situation it might be, what’s the one—sorry my screen went a little bit wonky on me there, did you lose me?

Will: Oh I can see you.

Russ: What’s the one big thing that I could tell somebody about playground equipment or about SEO or about productivity if I’m a productivity coach, or whatever it is, what’s the on big thing I can pull out of there? Where we saw this first was, there was a guy named Eben Pagan, he put out a course called, “Double Your Dating.”

Will: Okay.

Russ: And Double Your Dating hit millions of dollars of sales. It’s a course on how to meet women, basically and Eben put out this lead magnet called, The Kiss Test. The Kiss Test, all it is is, it’s two paragraphs and it’s two paragraphs that tell you how to know when a girl is ready to be kissed, when a woman wants to be kissed and when she doesn’t, which may be more important to some people.

Will: Right.

Russ: And this thing converted like Gang Busters and the thing is, it was the one thing. He could have put out and in fact tested putting out an entire module of the course as a free give away. We see this all the time, people give away free chapters to their book or they give away a 30 day course that’s going to be delivered over 30 days or whatever it is and the thing is they don’t want all of that. It’s can you tell them, specifically, one thing that’s going to get them closer to what they want—to whatever problem it is that they’re trying to solve.

Will: Yeah.

Russ: If you could do that, it’ll convert much better than trying to convince them that you’re going to get all of this stuff for free, let me give you all of this stuff for free, no, just tell me the one thing. So the playground equipment, here is the one most dangerous thing hiding in your playground that can harm your children. Maybe it’s something with the swing or I don’t know because I’m not in that space but you get what I’m saying. What is the one thing? So specifics are really important and when we test big deliverables versus various small, specific, consumable deliverables, they do much better.

Will: So the reason that you’re doing something around this one small thing is to get an email address or some sort of contact information but typically an email address.

Russ: A Webinar sign up maybe.

Will: Yeah, so now you have somebody who has raised their hand and said, ‘I’m somewhat interested in what you’re talking about, or whatever it is that you’re selling or promoting.’ So once you have them in that, I guess you would call it a funnel, once you have them in there then you can start delivering content and start selling in maybe a nonthreatening kind of way. Is that how Digital Marketer handles things?

Russ: Well I mean certainly. Once someone even visits your page today you can begin marketing to them, even if they do not give you their contact information. Another thing a lot of people are not taking advantage of is things like re – targeting and re – marketing. Right now what we are doing in every market is why drive traffic out of Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or through email by buying into people’s email lists and things like that. You get the traffic onto the page and we drop a cookie on there on their machine on the browser. Once that cookie is there they are going to start seeing advertisements and they are going to start getting re – marketed. If they take the lead magnet and opt in then we have their email address as well and yes we start the content marketing process, a lot of ‘tofu’ content, sprinkled in with some middle of funnel and bottom of funnel (27:03) stuff as well.

If we start to see people that we can segment up and are moving deeper into the sell cycle. A lot of times this ‘mofu’ ‘bofu’ content is just something that you would literally email to someone you met at a conference. And they are like “You know what? I am pretty interested in that”. It is like, “Well let me get your card. I will send you a case study or a customer success story or something like that”. I mean, once you harvest your email address they are going to start receiving follow up from whatever the offers about; content that is around that and in the awareness and interest stage there is going to be stuff that we will also have for the evaluation purchase stages.

Will: Most of that content that you create, or that you deliver in those stages is one hundred percent helpful and not ‘salesy’ I guess is the easy way to say it. It is more just kind of establishing you guys as the expert and whatever that industry is.

Russ: A lot of it is but we also mix in a lot of direct offers. It is like “Boom! Here is something we want you to buy. Go buy this”. Or it is “Click on this, the link, and go over to the sales page and read the argument that we make that you should buy this”. If you are not mixing in content, that I would call top of funnel, you are going to burn those people out immediately. That is why it pays to have whoever is in charge of creating content, handling organic social media, things like that, being someone who generally cares about the community and takes care of that community so that it does not just turn into a big ‘pitch fest’. “Oh I got (29:06), now I am just going to keep pounding you with offers until you unsubscribe or die”. What it needs to be is this person came in and that is why content is so important at the top of the funnel to create interesting, entertaining, valuables information that someone is going to receive because you do need to be mixing in offers. You are in business to make offers, we cannot pretend we are not.

Will Hanke: So you guys deliver content, like you said. You guys do multiple versions of content, so not everything is “Here is a blog that we need you to go read”. I know that Ryan sometimes does videos. For a small business owner it is important to understand that you have to deliver content in the way that people want to consume it. That is something that I think a lot of business owners miss. Let me ask you this though, what is one thing, and you may have just answered this question, that you guys see that business owners are doing wrong?

Russ: I mean, a lot of them are not making offers. The thing is that, five years ago I was in the same boat. I have worked as a marketer that is afraid to ask for an order for a long time and you cannot be that way, you have to make offers. What you need to start with is your product. Do you have a good solid product? I was talking to a guy the other day and he was just miserable, a friend of mine from high school. I asked “So how is your job going”? He responded “I hate it”. So I asked why. He responds “Cause I am selling something that sucks”.

Will Hanke: Oh no!

Russ: You know, we have all probably been at various forms of that where it is like what I am trying to get you to buy is not that good. So start there. If you are able to “I have got a good product at a good price, this is a good value”. The why are you hesitating to offer that thing and hesitating to build a machine that would be as powerful and potent as it could be to get that product or service and those many people that need it in their hands?

Will Hanke: Right! >

Russ: So you there is still and probably always will be this icky feeling that people get when they hear the word selling. As long as it is done honestly, and it is done in a way to sell products that you are proud of. It took me a long time to realize Zig Ziglar’s famous saying ‘You can get wherever you want to be in your life if you help enough people get where they want to be’. For a long time I thought that was just about being, I did not think about it I guess. But I read it one other time and I started thinking, you know what he really means by that is that selling really is about getting people where they want to be. When you sell someone SCL services or you them a widget or you sell them whatever, it is because as the salesperson you need to be working them towards getting where they want to be. What problem do they want to solve? How do they want their life to improve or change? What Zig meant by that, I think, is selling is about getting people where they want to be.

To get into the more tactical side of selling, especially through words and online, as far back as like 1880 or whenever the Robert Cayer Letterbook was written. One of the main points in his Letterbook is that you cannot convince people to buy stuff, you need to figure out what they want and then enter that conversation in their mind while they are having it. It is much easier to sell somebody something when they already know that they want it. They might not know what the solution is, but they are already having the conversation in their mind about whatever it is and what you want to do, as a marketer, is find those people and then enter that conversation that is going on already. Then as Zig says ‘Get them where they want to be’. For example, I have got this thing that is going to make you feel healthier, you need to find people that do not feel healthy. Let us say they are having a skin rash issue and it is all over their face, the conversations in their mind could include them being embarrassed, they feel like it hurts their chances of maybe getting work, they do not feel attractive anymore. You need to enter that conversation with your seller and you need to have a product that can help them. Then as Zig said, ‘Get them where they want to be’.

Will Hanke: Yea. With the advent of the internet, injecting yourself into that conversation is pretty easy nowadays. I mean, people are going to Google or Yahoo and typing in ‘here is a symptom’ or ‘here is a situation’ or ‘here is a problem’, and they are looking for those results. And even on Facebook, you mentioned Facebook, people are putting their problems out there and you can market to those people and even in that kind of way.

Russ Henneberry: I want to put an advertisement on anybody that has ever clicked the ‘like button’ on a Neutrogena page or a Proactive page. And I want to market it to women and I want them to be between the ages of 25 and 34 because I want to talk to them about this particular XYZ issue, maybe it is finding a husband. So one of the conversations that might be going on in a young lady’s mind that has got skin issues on her face or whatever is she is having trouble meeting men and she is feeling like she needs to get married, of course, she is getting to that age. Have that conversation about that and you use your advertisements and your landing pages to make that argument and then run it to that specific person and watch what happens, it will work. The reason it works is because you are talking about something they are already talking about and now you are giving the solution. This is an easy example and it is true everywhere, if I am going to target a specific type of company for SCO, the weirdest things I remember from doing this in the past is that people would get so mad when their competitors would out rank them for stuff. That is a conversation going on in people’s minds. Are you furious because the jackass down the street has got a better ranking than you on your keyword? The biggest mistake I see businesses making is that they do not make offers because they feel like it is easier to do it. One of the funniest things I hear people say all the time is “We get all of our business from word of mouth market”. That is a really organic way to grow your business, and certainly a great way (nothing better than referrals), but I think a lot of people say that because they are like “We do not sell anything”. Do not be afraid to sell stuff.

Will Hanke: I get a lot of business cards from people who hand me the card and their eyes are down and they hope you do not ask them any questions. It is rather interesting.

Russ Henneberry: I mean do you want to talk about some things that are a little more tactical?

Will Hanke: Yea let us jump into a couple tactical things and not spend a terrible amount of time on it. Business owners are already blogging, so let us assume that XYZ business is already putting some blogs out there, what are some other things that they can do that are not going to blow the budget but some more specific things that they can do to drive a lot of people towards the bottom of the funnel or an actual sale

Russ Henneberry: If we want to talk completely organically, first of all create a lead magnet. Create something specific that you are like “Here take this and give me your email address”. Put it everywhere, in your side bar, put it at the end of the post, put it in the middle of the post if you want, put it on your ‘about us page’, which a surprising amount of people will opt in from.

Will Hanke: Totally agree with that one.

Russ Henneberry: Think about things like ‘hello bar’, putting it up there. I call this part of the process preparing your house for guests. So if you have got a site that is not optimized to drive leads, and you want leads, get your house in order. Call up someone who knows how to manipulate Word Press. Step 1, if you are not on Word Press, get on Word Press, or HubSpot or CMS that can handle this kind of marketing that you will be doing. Then call someone up and say “I need to get opted in here and here and here and here and here. And here is my login information for a webber or mail chimp or whatever your CRM or mail system is”, and prepare your home for traffic. Then go out there and master one form of traffic generation, one form no matter what it is. It could be SCO, it could be pay per click adverting on addwords, it could be Facebook advertisements, it could be LinkedIn advertisements.

If you are selling really high end products and services be to be you can afford to advertise on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very expensive to advertise on, cheap to advertise on Facebook or YouTube. You could start throwing $5 a day at your content. You write a blog post, you post it on Facebook and then you hit this button that says ‘boost post’, and the button forces the content in front of more people and you are going to get more traffic to the site and then you want to start selling (42:43), like how many more opt ins I am getting? The last step is to create email follow up, build a simple little auto responder sequence like if you are using AWEBBER you can say ‘Day 0 I got someone to sign up for my email list, Day 1 I want to send them this welcome mail that tells them who I am and what I am all about. Then Day 2 I want to send them this next step thing. So here is the next step. It is like ‘Here is my best content, here is a link to a free resource on this. Then Day 3, send them an offer! What we do, and what we see working, and teach at Digital Marketer is send them a low dollar offer that is incredibly difficult to resist.

Normally when you make it incredibly difficult to resist you sell it at costs. If it is a product and it cost you $10 to acquire that product, sell it for $10. If it is a service, like let us say it is an audit of your carpet, your carpet cleaner, your grass, you gutters (landscaping company), your roof (roofing company, your website (website designer), your email program (productivity person). Before you audit, go out there and find out what audits like that cost and market it down so low that when your competitor looks at it he is like “There is no way he could be making money from that. He cannot be making money selling that for $10 or $5 or $20”. What you have to realize is, companies that succeed do this all the time. They sell things on the front end at costs or even at a loss in order to acquire customers because there is nothing more powerful than a buyer’s list. If you have two email lists, one is a buyer’s list and the other is a list of opt ins, people that took your free stuff, there is not even a close how much more that buyer’s list is worth than the lead list.

Your goal with that front end offer is to convert as many leads into customers as possible. We call it a trip wire offer, and we generally make that offer right after they opt in for a lead magnet. Let us give an example, in the survival and preparedness space we have a site called ‘survival life’ and here we drive traffic either into a lead magnet or straight into a trip wire. The trip wire is a physical product, in this case a little survival flashlight, and this LED flashlight costs us $3.95 to acquire and we sell it for $3.95 an people are like “You cannot sell it for $3.95. You have to sell it for $12.95”. I am like “No we are going to sell it for $3.95 and we are going to get tonnes of conversions because anyone that knows this is the same flashlight you go to Amazon and buy for $12.95, we are going to sell it to you for $3.95, we are actually going to take a loss, we are going a ‘buck’ on this or two. If they order two, we actually do not lose as much money. If they order one, we actually lose like a buck or two on it.

The reason that we do it is because we want to acquire as many buyers as possible because those buyers are worth something. Once they have bought, we know the lifetime value, or even the immediate value of that new customer is worth losing the buck because we are going to make them more offers later on down the line. We are going to send them content and they are going to become part of our community. That is another reason why your lead magnet needs to be consumable. I download a lead magnet that is a forty – five page book and then you ask me to buy a $3.95 flashlight, and it is like “Wait a minute here man, I am reading a book. Let me read this book first”. You want the lead magnet to be the least amount of a speed bump. You give them something very specific that they want for their email address or their phone number and whatever else you want ask for as little as possible. If you do not need the phone number do not ask for it because you are going to kill your conversion rate when you ask for it. But if you need it, ask for it and give them something very specific and very valuable in exchange for their contact information. Then make them a low dollar offer and try to convert as many of those new leads into sales as possible.

Will Hanke: Very good. Well I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Tell me real quick about Digital Marketer and I know you guys do a lot of tutorials, and behind the scenes explaining all that stuff in a lot of detail, so tell me about that.

Russ Henneberry: Digital Marketer is actually a part of a larger company called Idea Incubator that has holdings in a lot of different verticals and spaces and we over at Digital Marketer are doing a lot of testing on different strategies and then we sell that information. We also sell courses. There is also a tonne of stuff on the Digital Marketer blog. Go to digitalmarketer.com and there are three big buttons at the top, one says ‘drive more traffic’, the other says ‘boost conversions’ and the last one says ‘increase engagement’. If you click on those you will see our best content under those circles in those spaces. For example, you click ‘boost conversion’ you are going to see our best information on conversions. All of the content under those circles is evergreen meaning it does not get old very fast. There is a lot of timely information that is not under those tabs that is just on the regular old blog.

Will Hanke: I am looking at the boost conversions and one of the things I see is nine lead magnet examples and one that generated 28,000 subscribers in forty – five days. There really good stuff there and I am always hanging out there.

Russ Henneberry: We have this lead magnet that did 28,000 leads in a month and a half. That lead magnet is in that article.

Will Hanke: That is awesome!

Russ Henneberry: Yea. We wrote it up on (51:17). That is because we spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on traffic cause we know that on the back end of that we make it all back and then some profit. The big thing is really understanding that once you have something in place then would you not be crazy to run as much qualified and targeted traffic to that offer as possible because you know it works.

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Will Hanke: If you have a machine that every time you put $1 in, $1.50 comes out, ramp it up right?

Russ Henneberry: It starts with the lead magnet and the trip wire where you are saying “Let me just give you this, give me your contact information and then let me basically just give you this. But I do want you to put some money”. Take a look at what Amazon is doing with the Kindle. You think ‘why is that thing so cheap’? It is cheap because it is a trip wire. They are going to sell you a lot of stuff on the back end once you have their equipment (acquiring a customer). Why would AT&T give me a phone for $1? That is crazy, this phone sells for $200. They do it because now they have you in a continuity program for the rest of your life. I was watching television the other day and TMobile was like “We will you out of your contract”. And you think ‘why would they buy me out of my contract”? Because they know that it works on the back end, to lose that money works. As they work it through the system, a lifetime value works. One more thing, lifetime value is also a mistake. Unless you get a big pot of cash that you can just light on fire and hope that the money comes back in the next twelve years. That is what investor back businesses do, they will go and get ten million in funding and burn burn burn burn and go negative and go negative and go negative and then hopefully the idea is that they are going to come out of it on the front end. The investors are going to make their money back, the owners make their money back, and everyone that has equities is going to make their money back.

If you are not an investor for that business or you are not bank rolling some out of your own, you need to be looking at the immediate value of your customer. So lifetime value has got its place but you need to be looking ‘Okay so if I get this customer they will probably they will probably buy from me. Let us say Real Estate agent, and you are selling mattresses. How often is someone going to buy a mattress? Every six to eight years maybe. You need to know that your funnel works right now, the immediate value of the customer. Even on things that are relatively fast to repurchase you want to know that your funnel works and that you are not waiting years and years to get your money back. The good news is that the immediate customer value is easier to calculate than lifetime customer value. Especially for small business owner is it as if you do not even know what lifetime customer value means but you know what immediate customer value is. If you out it on a spreadsheet and start running things this way you know what it means when someone opts in and you get a lead magnet. You know what it means to your business when someone buys a trip wire because you know what they do on the back end.

Will Hanke: Well man I appreciate you coming to hanging out today and I am going to put a bunch of all this stuff in the show notes after we are done here and I really appreciate your time here today, Russ.

Russ Henneberry: Yea man, it was fun!

Will Hanke: We will talk to you later!

 

 

NTR1: Introduction

In the premier episode of Navigate the Rapids (audio only), Red Canoe Media’s owner Will Hanke explains tells us a little about himself and the explains just what the Hangout and podcast series will be about – what’s the motivation behind it and what the plans are for the new show.

It’s short, sweet and to the point!

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2015-05-01 14.33.12NtR is for Smart Business Owners.

Marketing isn't easy. Marketing while you're trying to run a business is crazy. This podcast teaches you what you need to know to make better decisions about your online marketing dollars, helps you understand terms, tactics and tools that will build or bust your business. Look at this as your competitive advantage when it comes to understanding how to navigate the rapids of today's digital world.

Want to check out a few episodes?

Listen Now: (or subscribe via iTunes here)

NOTE: This podcast is no longer being produced.  Check out the new podcast Sink or Swim

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