Improve your business results with smarter marketing
Do you want to get rich fast? Well there are lots of folks willing to take your money with a promise of making it happen. Want instant internet success? There are just as many systems designed to separate you from your cash with promises of Google domination.
Like the promise of getting rich quick, most of it is bullshit.
I’ve wasted countless hours running down dead-end strategies with no real results. Paid traffic? Yep. I’ve sent guys on fiverr $20 for thousands of visitors that turned out to be bots.
The honest truth is there are no real shortcuts. Like everything else in life if you want success the best way to achieve it is to put in the work. But that doesn’t mean that the work has to be a slog. In fact you can actually achieve quite a bit without spending your entire day working on your marketing. And I’m going to tell you how to do it.
Have a marketing strategy
It’s really easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of advice on the internet. It’s equally tempting to read something and convince yourself that you should try it. The allure of the shiny new toy is hard to resist. I could walk into Home Depot tomorrow and buy every tool they have in stock. It won’t make me any more successful at building that shed in the backyard if I don’t have a plan or the skills to use them.
The only way that shed is going to get built and not fall down is if I’m using the right tools and I’m working from a set of plans. So what is your strategy? It should always start with knowing who your audience is. Once you know that, figure out what it is that you can give them to make their lives easier. From there start creating content that is going to get them to buy what you’re selling.
Once you have an ideal client avatar use a content strategy that involves ideas and concrete tactics that are going to solve problems those clients have. Then sell yourself as the solution.
That should be the strategy behind all your content.
Create more content
One of the biggest mistakes I see from new clients is they stopped thinking about their website as soon as they paid off their developer. The website just sits there like a brochure on the internet. But it’s just one brochure out of billions. What makes your site different from all your competitors is the content that backs up your expertise; the proof that you know what you’re doing. The types of content you create should definitely include blog articles and videos. And because you know who you are creating it for this process is going to be so much simpler.
But writing blogs and creating video content isn’t a new suggestion. You want a simple hack that incorporates the shiny new thing — that’s why you’re reading this.
So start a simple podcast where you bring on guests who would actually be your ideal clients. If you’re a coach and you work with executives — interview executives you’d like to work with. It’s a 20 minute chat that you might not otherwise get. And when the podcast goes live the interviewee is very likely to share it with their network — which probably includes people in similar positions — who may also fall into the category of your ideal client.
If this is the strategy behind your podcast you don’t even have to worry about how many folks are listening because your goal isn’t to be a number one podcast — it’s to use your podcast as a lead generator.
Recycle your content
At this point you may be thinking — where am I going to find the time to create all this content? That’s a totally legitimate question. You could spend hours each day working on content — when you should be talking to prospects. But the solution is simple. Reuse and repurpose your content across different mediums.
Not everyone listens to podcasts. But if you use a simple transcription service, you can turn your podcast interviews into profile pieces in the style of magazine articles. If you think people like sharing podcasts where they are the star — just imagine how chuffed they’re going to be when you send them an article!
A lot of people will immediately share profiles on social media and feature them on LinkedIn. This in turn gets you in front of more people who could possibly hire you.
But what if it’s not a profile or podcast? There are a few services out there that will actually use AI to create short videos from your informational blogs. Lumen5.com is a great example. You drop in a link to your post and within a few minutes you have a shareable video of that post automatically generated. It’s awesome and you should try it.
Make sure people see your content
Sometimes creating content is heartbreaking. You spend hours crafting a blog, video or podcast and nothing. Not even the person you interviewed shares it out. It can feel like a complete waste of your time. But it doesn’t have to be.
There are tools like the Revive Old Posts plugin for Wordpress that will take your evergreen content and constantly reshare it onto platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This can inject new life into what would otherwise be dead content. I’m often surprised when a piece of content I wrote one or 2 years ago suddenly starts getting attention from LinkedIn users.
In these instances it’s often because the resharing tool happened to get the right piece of content in front of the right person at the right time. They liked it and shared it to their network, introducing an entirely new audience to my services through my content.
Evergreen webinars
Before I hung out my own shingle, I was the Marketing Director for a professional speaker/consultant. I remember setting up and promoting webinars on a regular basis. The technology was simple enough. But the timing was tricky.
We would schedule the webinar for a specific time and date and then pray to God that nobody hired him for a paid gig. Then there was the stress of actually getting enough people to register in order make it worth his time.
Fast forward 15 years and that’s not an issue anymore if you create some evergreen webinars. These webinars work in the same way as other webinars — but run on demand.
And because they are pre-recorded you have the benefit of only presenting the best version of you. The service I use is EasyWebinar.com. But there are others out there.
These programs are amazing lead gens because they are always on. I get people from all over the world watching mine. And that not only builds my list — it gives me an opportunity to promote specific services on specific webinars.
Market smarter not harder
Marketing your business can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be. With a little bit of knowledge you can simplify the process and get your products and services in front of the right people so that you are constantly keeping your sales funnel active. If you want to talk about how to implement any of this just book some time on my calendar for a no-bs Zoom call.
