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Kent Lewis grew up in the Seattle area. In college he studied business and marketing. After college he went to work for a PR agency but left to go into the digital marketing industry in 1996. Kent has formed several marketing agencies during his career. He is quite up front about challenges he faced along the way as well as what he learned from each issue he faced.   Kent's philosophy about community is quite interesting and well worth adopting. He believes very much in giving back to his community. Today his day job is serving as “Executive Director of NextNW, a non-profit trade association that unifies the Pacific Northwest advertising & marketing professionals interested in professional development, sharing best practices, and collaborative problem-solving”.   Kent gives us many relevant and timely business insights. I hope you agree that this conversation gives us some good business lessons we all can use.     About the Guest:   Kent Lewis, Executive Director, NextNW Lewis is currently Executive Director of NextNW, a non-profit trade association that unifies the Pacific Northwest advertising & marketing professionals interested in professional development, sharing best practices, and collaborative problem-solving. He is also Founder of pdxMindShare, Portland's premier career community, with over 12,000 LinkedIn Group members. With a background in integrated marketing, he left a public relations agency in 1996 to start his career in digital marketing. Since then, he's helped grow businesses by connecting his clients with their constituents online. In 2000, Lewis founded Anvil Media, Inc., a measurable marketing agency specializing in search engine and social media marketing. Under his leadership, Anvil has received recognition from Portland Business Journal and Inc. Magazine as a Fastest Growing and Most Philanthropic Company.  After selling his agency in March 2022, he became a CMO for the acquiring firm. Beyond co-founding SEMpdx, Lewis co-founded two agencies, emailROI (now Thesis) and Formic Media. As a long-time entrepreneur, he's advised or invested in a host of companies, including PacificWRO, Maury's Hive Tea and ToneTip. Lewis speaks regularly at industry events and has been published in books and publications including Business2Community, Portland Business Journal, and SmartBrief. For twenty years, he was an adjunct professor at Portland State University, and has been a volunteer instructor for SCORE Portland since 2015. Lewis tours nationwide, averaging 30 speaking engagements annually, including a regular presenter role with the Digital Summit conference series. Active in his community, Lewis has been involved in non-profit charity and professional trade organizations including early literacy program SMART Reading and The Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO).  Industry recognition and awards include Portland Business Journal's Top 40 Under 40 Award, American Marketing Association Oregon Chapter Marketer of the Year, and Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers by BuzzSumo.   Ways to connect with Kent:   Links https://kentjlewis.com/   And LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentlewis/     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. Today. We get to chat with an award winning entrepreneur, and he just told me a really interesting factoid. We'll have to, we'll have to talk about it, just because it is about one of the most fascinating things I've heard in quite a while, and a very positive thing. But I'm not going to give it away, because I'm going away, because I'm going to let him talk about it, or at least start the discussion. I'd like you all to meet Kent Lewis. Kent has been an entrepreneur for a while. He helps other entrepreneurs. He works in the non profit arena and does a variety of different kinds of things. And rather than me telling you all about it, you could read the bio, but more important, meet Kent Lewis and Kent, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Kent Lewis ** 02:05 It's, it's a pleasure to be on the show. Thank you for having me, sir.   Michael Hingson ** 02:10 Now where are you located? I'm based in Portland, Oregon, yeah. So you're, you are up up the coast, since I'm in Southern California. So yes, you know, one of these days I'll be up that way again. Well, Alaska Airlines will fly me up there.   Kent Lewis ** 02:27 Yeah, totally right. Yeah, good   Michael Hingson ** 02:29 to have you, unless you come this way first. But anyway, well, I'm really want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. And why don't we start? I love to do this. Tell me a little bit about kind of the early Kent growing up and all that stuff.   Kent Lewis ** 02:44 Yeah, so I grew up in Seattle, Washington. I think something that's influenced me is that my dad was is, or is, a retired architect. And so there was always this design esthetic, and he was an art collector enthusiast, I should say. And so I was always surrounded with art and mid century, you know, furniture and there's just style was a it was a thing. And then my mom was always in when she was a social worker and went into running nonprofits. And so I grew up around that as well of just giving back. So if you ever heard that common term, you know, learn, earn, return. Start your life you're learning, then you're maximizing your earnings during your career, and then when you in and around later in life, you start giving back, right, returning, right. And I learned from my mom that you never stop you never stop learning. You never stop returning. And my my mantra as an entrepreneur is never stop earning right? So, so I've always been giving back and donating my time, and I've always appreciated sort of good design and well thought out things. And I think that's influenced my career in marketing and as an entrepreneur, business owner, and now more of an advisor, Coach type,   Michael Hingson ** 03:59 well, so growing up in Seattle, did you visit pikes market very often?   Kent Lewis ** 04:04 My dad used to work right, right, like, two blocks away. So I would go there all the time. In fact, I remember when there was just one Starbucks when I was a kid, yeah, at Pike Place Market, and they used to sell large chunks of delicious, bitter sweet chocolate, I know, you know, in the behind the counter, and it was a very hi and you could smell the teas and all that. It was a very different experience, very cool place. And so, yeah, love   Michael Hingson ** 04:33 the pipe waste market. I understand that they don't throw the fish anymore. No, they do. They do. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Maybe it was just during the pandemic that they decided not to do that, but   Kent Lewis ** 04:44 think you're right about that. But they definitely, they, they're still, it's still a major attraction. It's too big of a thing to stop.   Michael Hingson ** 04:51 Wow, that's what I was thinking. And that's just way too big of a thing to to stop. My probably not the greatest fish fish catcher, I've been there, but I. I never caught a fish.   Kent Lewis ** 05:02 Yeah, that's only got, like, one or two in my life. And I don't, I don't do it much, but   Michael Hingson ** 05:08 Well, well, that's the place to go anyway. So where did you go to college?   Kent Lewis ** 05:13 I went to Western Washington University in Bellingham, uh, just 1020 minutes from the Canadian border, because, in part, when I was in school, it was a 19 year old drinking age in Canada, so I was 20 minutes away from my earlier drinking age. Turns out, I grew up going to Vancouver, BC quite often for the soccer exchange program when I was a real young youngster. So I fell in love with Vancouver, and as I've had been fortunate enough to travel the world a bit, I realized that it was one of my favorite cities, and it still is. It is such a global, amazing egalitarian, like, no matter your color, race, creed, you could be a millionaire or you could be a bus driver. There was no not the same class, classism you see in other US cities or around the rest of the world. It's truly an amazing and it's also, of course, beautiful   Michael Hingson ** 06:04 there. I found that true throughout Canada, and I've enjoyed every Canadian city I've ever been to. One of my favorites is really going to Toronto. I was always impressed as to how clean it really was.   Kent Lewis ** 06:17 You know, that's true. I've been there a couple times in conferences, and I found it to be clean and impressive, you know, and then, but my, one of my favorite, other cities I only spent overnight, there was Montreal. What a beautiful, beautiful place, absolutely stunning. I   Michael Hingson ** 06:35 spent two days in Montreal once when I was selling some products and turn the TV on at 1131 morning that I was there and watched the Flintstones in French. That was unique. That was unique. Cool. How cool is that? Yeah, it's awesome. That was kind of fun. But, you know, so you, you went to college. What did you major in?   Kent Lewis ** 06:58 I majored in business with a marketing concentration, which is great because I ended up doing marketing for a career, and for 22 years ran my own agency, or my own business, basically.   Michael Hingson ** 07:10 So what did you do when you got out of college?   Kent Lewis ** 07:14 I went immediately into the world of public relations agency life. I always wanted to be a found out after college that I, what I really wanted to be was a copywriter, you know, writing ads. I just coolest thing as a kid. I just didn't know that. It's, I didn't realize what it, what it you have to go to Ad School. You can't, you can't graduate regular college and become a copier. At least you weren't able to when I was, you know, back in the mid 90s. So I started in PR because it sounded hard to pitch the media and try and get them to say what you want them to say about your brand, your client and your brand. And that did me well, because when I got in from went from PR in 94 to digital marketing, SEO, search engine optimization 96 my PR background was extremely helpful. You know, in in that, in that whole world. So because doing PR builds Domain Authority, which builds your rankings in Google, and the rest is history. So, so it was very helpful. It gave me a bit of an edge. And then my business background meant I was better equipped to to go from doing the work to managing people, they're doing the work, to doing my own thing, you know, and running a instant running team, I was running a business. So that was super cool. You   Michael Hingson ** 08:38 know, it's interesting. I've especially because of the World Trade Center, but not only, but before it as well, I learned a lot about dealing with the press. And I've, I've watched a lot of press interviews today, and it's, it's amazing how often and then people have said that this is the way you should do it. No matter what the press person asks you, you answer with the with the answer you really want to give, whether you answer their questions or not. And I think that's an interesting approach, and I suppose it can be positive, but especially for for politicians who don't want to answer the tough questions. But I I know that for me, I've always tried to structure my answers in such a way that it gets them to take the question that they originally asked that I might sort of answer and reframe it so that I will answer a lot of times that, for example, talking about blindness and blind people, there are just so many misconceptions about it and and all too often, like first time I was on Larry King lives, Larry was asking questions about guide dogs. And he said, Now, where did you get your guide dog? And I said, from San Rafael, California. He said, well, but the but the main. School is a new is in Michigan, right? And I said, No, it's a different organization. And what we learned after doing that interview was that the way to deal with Larry was to program him and send him questions in advance with answers. Then he did a lot better, because the reality is, he didn't really know necessarily the answers in the first place. It's just amazing how you know how a lot of times it's just shallower. The Press tends to over dramatize. But I appreciate what you're saying about marketing and PR, I've done so much of that over my lifetime, and for so many reasons, in so many ways, I know exactly what you're talking about.   Kent Lewis ** 10:47 Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, it's, it's a fascinating world that I've, that I've, you know, been live, living and working in. And I, yeah, I'm impressed, yeah, Larry King Live. That's pretty cool. And, you know, hopefully you've helped people just side note, you know, get a clear understanding of what it is, what it is both like to be blind and then how you navigate this world successfully, as if you're, you know, fully sighted. You know,   Michael Hingson ** 11:18 well, one of the things that I actually learned over the last couple of years is something that I've actually written an article and had it published about, and that is that we've got to change our view of disabilities in general. People always say, well, disability is a lack of ability. And I say, and I always say, No, it's not. And they say, Well, yes, it is. It begins with dis. And I said, then, how do you equate that with disciple, discern and discrete? For example, you know they begin with D is the reality is, disability is not a lack of ability. You think it is. But I've added to that now when I point out that, in reality, every person on the planet has a disability, but for most people, their disability is covered up. Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, or at least we give him credit for it back in 1878 so for the last 147 years, all we've done is spent so much time improving on the technology that provides light on demand, which just covers up your disability, but it's still there. And I realized that one day I was at a hotel in Los Angeles at three in the afternoon when we had a power failure, and everybody started to scream, even down in the lobby, when they had all these nice big windows that were letting in all sorts of light, but it wasn't giving them the light that they wanted and the amount that they wanted, and people panicked. So I realized then, oh, well, now the reality is they're light dependent, which is as much a disability as my light independence is. It's just that it manifests itself differently, and there are a whole lot more light dependent people than light independent people. But we've got to really change our definition and how we view it. So   Kent Lewis ** 12:58 that's really insightful. It's good to think about.   Michael Hingson ** 13:01 Yeah, it's kind of fun. But, you know, so, so where did you, where did you go off and go to work in the in the marketing world? So you did? You didn't go to Copyright School? Or did you? No, no,   Kent Lewis ** 13:13 I just know. I once I talked to the creative director at this agency in Seattle where I did my first internship. He's like, Yeah, you'd have to go back to art school. And I was like, what school I just finished? So, you know, it didn't really matter. And we So, with that said, we, you know, I moved into PR, and then I moved to down to Portland from Seattle, because I could actually get a paying job because the internship I did three months full time, virtually, basically no pay, I found a low paying job instead in Portland. So I moved I only knew one person here in Portland, my cousin. She's still here. We both have families now, and I know a lot more people, but I basically have, since moving here to do my second agency job. I've been, I've been a part of 10 agencies in my career. I've been, I founded two, co founded two, fired from three and exited the four that I created, or co, co founded, basically. And so right now I have a consultancy. I could say that's my 11th agency, but I don't even really count it as an agency. I'm just a fractional CMO, you know, marketing advisor at this point, just a few hours a month, because my my day job as of January, is running a nonprofit called next northwest.org which is a it's a trade organization for marketing and advertising and creative community, the creative services world. And it has 119 year history in Portland. And now it's, it's now expanded to five states and into Canada. And so I've got this I'm working. I manage a board of, you know, decent sized board, and a decent sized advisory. Committee that I created, and just the last couple months, and we do learning events for the creative community and networking events and celebrations, like, you know, awards, award shows to celebrate the work. So that's kind of my day job. And then I also speak and write a lot you and I share a passion for for education and learning and sharing knowledge. And so I've been, I've probably averaged 25 speaking engagements a year for the last 20 years, and last year was 30. For instance, I fly yours, mentioned your your travel. I'm flying to Tampa on Sunday to present on Monday, on a panel about AI in the senior care space, for instance. And then I come back and I, I, you know, got it. I got one or two more. But I, you know, I typically do a dozen fly flying gigs, and then I do a lot of webinars and local gigs as well.   Michael Hingson ** 15:55 So what are you what are you going to say? What are you going to say about AI in the senior care space?   Kent Lewis ** 16:01 That's a great question. So what my focus as a marketer is, here's how you can use AI to streamline and automate and maintain or improve quality. So it's not meant to it's not a secret hack, cheat code to lay people off. It's a It's get more out of your current resources, basically, and do more with less, and do it more effectively. That's kind of, that's, you know, that's my, what I'll be talking about is the how you know how to use it for research, ideation, content creation, content editing, reporting, synthesizing information, customer service, that kind of thing. So I only have, you know, it's a panel event, so I'm only doing like a 10 to 15 minutes part, and then there are other presenters doing their part, and then we have a little Q and A, usually, I'm a sole presenter on whatever topic, usually digital marketing or employee engagement, which is what I got passionate about. Once I sold my agency. After 22 years, I became an employee at that the agency that acquired my company, and I was immediately underwhelmed and disappointed in what it was like to be an employee, and wanted to fix it. So that's what I had been focusing on when I given a choice. I want to evangelize. You know, what I learned from my experience, and I've done a good amount of research, and, you know, two weeks ago, I presented in Portland on the topic to entrepreneurs. Then the next day, I flew to Denver and did the same presentation to a group of agency owners. And then the next day, I did a webinar for similar group of entrepreneurs, you know, so three versions, three days in a row, a 3060, and 90 minute version. So,   Michael Hingson ** 17:42 pretty fun. Yeah. So how many books have you written?   Kent Lewis ** 17:47 Ah, I knew you'd say that so or ask that. I have not written any books, but I have, darn but I've written, you know, probably 200 articles. I could easily AI them into some sort of book, if I wanted to. You know, I went from writing 80% to 90% of my art content was on digital marketing for the first 20 years. And then the last 10 years, I focused almost exclusively on writing about entrepreneurship and and business ownership, leadership and employee intention, retention, engagement. And, you know, so I mostly syndicate my articles, like business journals, occasionally in Ink Magazine, etc. So if I were to write a book, it would be about the business side of things, instead of the second, I would write something about digital marketing. Not only am I no longer an expert, and consider myself an expert relative to others, those books are outdated the second they're printed, right? So, so it doesn't make sense to really write a book on digital marketing, and everything's already been said, etc. So, so if I wrote a book, it would be probably more on the employee engagement side versus anything. But I will say that I don't know if you know who Seth Godin is. He's the number one marketing blogger in the world. He's written many best sellers, Purple Cow, permission, marketing, etc. He's remarkable guy. And I had was fortunate to talk with him and then meet with him over lunch in New York City 15 years ago. And he said, after our two hour lunch, he charges $75,000 for speaking engagement. So it gives you a sense of who he is. He has for for 20 years. And so he said, Kent, you've got a book in you. I was like, I wish you hadn't said that, because now I don't want to, I don't want to disappoint him, right? So there you go.   Michael Hingson ** 19:31 Well, if you write one at some point, you have to send us a picture of the cover and we'll stick it in the show notes whenever. Yeah, that sounds great, but yeah, I you know, I never thought of writing a book, but in 2002 we went to the AKC Eukanuba canine championship dog show in Orlando. It was in December, and among other people I met there. Here I met George Berger, who was at that time, the publisher of the American Kennel Club Gazette, and he said, You ought to write a book. And I went, why? Well, because you you have a great story to tell. You should really write a book. Well, it took eight years and a lot of time sitting in front of Microsoft Word to get notes down, but eventually I met someone named Susie Flory who called because she was writing a book called Dog tails. And it was a story of what she wanted to write stories of, actually, 17 different dogs who had done some pretty interesting and miraculous things. And she wanted to write a story about my guide dog at the World Trade Center, Roselle. And she said, Tell me your story, if you would. And I did. And when we were done, there was this pause, and then she said, You need to write a book. And since I've written books, I'll help you. And a year later, underdog was published, and it became a number one New York Times bestseller. So that was pretty cool.   Kent Lewis ** 21:01 That's fantastic. Congratulations. Very impressive.   Michael Hingson ** 21:04 And then last year, well, in 2013 we published a children's book called running with Roselle, but more adults by a thing kids, because it's not a picture book, but it tells the story of me growing up and Roselle growing up, and how we met, and all that. So it isn't really as much a World Trade Center book. But then last year, we wrote, live like a guide dog. And the intent of live like a guide dog is to say to people, look fear is all around us, and so many people just allow themselves to be paralyzed, or, as I say, blinded by fear, so they can't make decisions. They don't learn how to control it. But if you learn how to control fear, you can use fear as a very powerful tool to help you stay focused, and you'll make better decisions. So we use lessons I learned from my guide dogs on my wife's service dog to write, live like a guide dog. And so it is out there, and it's it's a lot of fun, too. So you know, it isn't the easiest thing to write a book, but I would think you have a book in you, and you should, well, I   Kent Lewis ** 22:03 appreciate that vote of confidence. And hey, I mean, you did it, and you had an amazing story, and you've done it multiple times. Actually, it's great inspiration for me.   Michael Hingson ** 22:16 Well, I'm looking forward to reading it when it comes out. You'll have to let   22:20 us know. Yeah, will do so   Michael Hingson ** 22:23 you at some point, switched from being an employee to being an entrepreneur. How did that all happen? Why? Why did you do it? Or what really brought that about?   Kent Lewis ** 22:38 Well, I kept getting fired.   Michael Hingson ** 22:40 So why'd that happen?   Kent Lewis ** 22:42 Yeah, so that's the fun part. So I I've never been fired for cause like a legit clause. I'm a high powered, high performer, and so I actually, that's why. So the first time I was fired was by the guy that invited me to co found an agency. His name was Ryan Wilson. He was my he was my boss. And then he was fired by our larger agency. He ran a team that I worked on. I worked for him. I was inspired by him. I I was mentored by him. I thought the world of him. So when he came to me three months after he got fired, it was about, it's always about a girl. So he he basically, he got divorced. And so this other woman, they met at the office, and they were soul mates, and they he had to clean up his life. And he did, and he said, I've got an agency die. I've got two clients ready to sign. I need key employees, and you're one, one of them, then I would hope you would join me. I said, No, the first time he got his act together. I said, yes, the second time, and that. So I we built an agency together with, you know, we start with six people. I brought in two other people and another gal that ran the PR side. I was running the digital side. She brought in somebody said we had six of us on day one, and a year later, we didn't have a formal share shareholder agreement for our percentage of the company that went from being worth zero to being worth a few million dollars, and we felt that we should have something in writing, and before he could, we could get something formally in writing. My, my other partner, she, I didn't really want to do the business with her, but I didn't really have a choice. I want to do the business with him. She said, I'm asking for more equity. I said, Okay, I feel like that's fair. I think we've earned it, but, and I'll, I'll be there with you, but I wouldn't have done this if she hadn't said, I'm going in. Are you with me? So when I we asked, she asked me to make the ask. I wasn't necessarily prepared or thinking about it, and it really offended him. He was really mad, and he was playing to fire her, and by me teaming up with her, he felt, you know, slight. And he fired us both, and the next week, I started anvil, my agency, Anvil Media, that I ran for 22 years, I did a couple other starts, one with a college friend and a guy I had met at that that at one of the first, one of the earlier agency agencies I'd worked at. He and we, he and I and my college buddy started an email marketing agency in 02 and then I decided, well, this isn't for me, but I now learn it's not that scary to hire employees. So then I started hiring employees at anvil and late 03 and so I ran anvil with employees for, you know, 20 years. Two of those first two years were just me and some contractors and and then, oh, wait, I started a second agency because I needed a more affordable solution for my partners in small business called Formic media. Ran that for five years before I merged it with with anvil. But in between, I was also fired. When I first started anvil, I was it was just a hang of shingle in 2000 to do some consulting, but I wanted a full time gig, and a year later, I had an opportunity to run my my team from the agency. I was fired from that company. That agency was sold to another agency for pennies on the dollar. And when my old boss died, rest in peace, we hadn't really cleared the air yet, which is it still is one of my greatest regrets. You know, for nine months we didn't talk, and then he passed away. Everybody peace, not before he passed away, I was able to get, yeah, his his soul mate. They weren't married yet, but they were going to get married. She told me that two weeks before he died, he expressed regrets and how we had ended the relationship, how he had fired me, and he was looking forward to reconnecting and re engaging our friendship. And so that made that meant the world to me. I had a lot of peace in knowing that, but I so the first the second place I got fired was this agency again about a girl. So the first time was a girl telling me, you need to ask the boss for more money or more equity. And I did, and that offended him. And the second time was my girlfriend at the time, who's who moved over from that agency to the new agency where my my old boss died before he could really start there. She was dating on the side the Creative Director at that agency, and he'd been there over 20 years. And so when I started there, I saw something was up, and I was like, Is there anything going on? She's like, No. And so eventually I just broke up with her anyway, because I just it wasn't working, even if she wouldn't admit that she was having a side relationship. But I was eventually fired because he was a board, you know, he was on the board. He was, he wasn't my boss, per se, but he was one of the senior partners, and they just wanted me out. You know, she might have money. Wanted me out. He definitely wanted me out. So that was the second time I got fired. And then the third time I got fired was it kept the stakes get given, getting bigger. When I sold my agency 14 months later, they fired me, really, not to this day, not for any cause. It's that they asked me to take an 80% pay cut a year into my buyout, and I and then I they were going to close my Portland office, which I was, I own the building, so I didn't want to lose my own myself as a tenant, so I offered to reduce my rent 30% so I basically, for two and a half months, worked for free for this agency that had bought my agency. So they were making payments to me. I was carrying the note, but they they couldn't. A year later, they're like, I'm sorry. So they a year later, I took a pay cut for two and a half months, and when I asked them, you know, when am I getting back to my pay? They said, Well, you know, we can't guarantee. We don't have a path for you back to your full pay. And I was like, Okay, well, then I told my wife, let him inform them that we're going to go back to, we are going to go back to our full rack rate on our rent. And when I, when we notified them, they they totally, they totally fired me. So they canceled the lease, and they fired me, and so they so it. And you know, I, my team was slowly being dismantled, a 10 of us, 11 of us, I guess 10 or 11 us went over, and within a year, there were only two wait. Within two years, there was only one person left on my team. So it was a really sad, sad experience for me. It wasn't as hard to sell my business as I thought. It wasn't as hard, you know, just emotionally, it wasn't as hard to sunset my brand after 22 years. Wasn't easy, but it was way easier than I thought. What was hard for me was watching them was was closing the office. It broke my heart and and then watching them dismantle my team that I spent, you know, two decades building, most of that team was within 10 years, the last 10 years, last even five years of of our business. Us. There was a relatively new team, but we were so tight, and it was just heartbreaking. So, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 30:09 yeah, wow. So what do you think was your biggest mistake in running your own agency?   Kent Lewis ** 30:19 That's a great question. I think the biggest, biggest mistake was not understanding the Hire great people and get out of the way. Lee Iacocca, you know, to paraphrase him, I hired great people and I got out of their way. But what I didn't do was make sure they had all the proper training, alignment of core values that they had, there was enough trust between us that they could come to me with they were struggling or failing. Apparently, I was a fairly intimidating figure for my former my young recruits, but most of that time, up until the last five years, I always had a senior VP my right hand. I hired her with the attention that she might take over the business someday, she was totally creating a wall between me and my employees, and I didn't know it until 2012 and so, you know, I had 10 years to try to undo what she had created the first 10 years, basically of a fear based management style, so that that didn't help me, and I didn't believe it. I didn't really see it. So then I rebuilt the company, and from the ground up, I blew it up in 2013 so 10 years after of having employees, 13 years of having the business, I completely dismantled and blew it up and rebuilt it. And what did that look like? It started with me just not wanting to go to work in the building, and I realized I can't quit because I'm the owner, so I have to fix it. Okay? I don't mind fixing things. I prefer to fix other people's problems instead of my own, but I really a lot of people do, right? Yeah. So I wrote a credo, basically, what would it take for me? What are, what are it got down to 10 truths, what? What are the truths that I need to go into work and that others around me, co workers, team members, need to also agree on so that we can work together successfully. So it went from being about clients to being about the team and being about accountability. And you know, it was so it was so decisive. It was so radical for my current team that had been with me five to 10 years of they lose clients, I get more clients. And I eventually told them, I can't replace clients as fast as you're losing them. It's not a sustainable business model, so you need to be accountable for your actions and your decisions. That's the new anvil. You and you're out. I gave them 72 hours to think about it and sign it. Signed literally to these credo. It's not a legal document, it's just a commitment to credo. And half the team didn't sign it, and they quit. And then within 12 months, the rest of the team either quit or we've I fired them because they did not fit in the new anvil. And it's funny because everybody else that I brought in didn't even it didn't even register. The credo was so unremarkable to them, because we were already aligned by the time we hired them, we'd done our research and the work to know who fit, and so they didn't register. So eventually we just dropped the credo was no longer needed as a guide or a framework. It's still on the website, but, but you don't, you know it doesn't really matter. But that's what I got wrong, is I did not build the trust. I did not have I had processes in place, but but without the trust, people wouldn't tell me how they felt or that they were struggling. So a lot of process wasn't recognized or utilized properly. So I rebuilt it to where and rebuilt the trust to where the team that was with me when I sold I was very close with them. There was 100% trust across the board, a mutual respect, arguably a mutual love for the craft, for each other, for the company, for our clients, and it was a lot of fun to work with them. I didn't sell because I was unhappy. I sold because I was happy, and I thought now's a good time to go and find a good home. Plus my wife was my operations manager for five years, and she wanted out. Frankly, I thought it was easier to sell the business than try to replace my wife, because she was very good at what she did. She just didn't like doing it, yeah? And she also didn't like, you know, me being her boss. I never saw it that way. But once she explained it, after I sold, she explained, like, you know, you boss me around at work, and then you try to boss me around at home, and I'm not having it. You pick one? Yeah, so, so I was like, I think, like, I bossed you around. And she's like, Hey, you just, it was your company. It was always going to be your company. And, you know, that's fine, but you know, I want to move on. I was like, Okay, why don't we just sell and so that, yeah, they the operational people. And so it took her, took that load off of her. She's worked for. Nonprofit now, so she's happy, and so that's good.   Michael Hingson ** 35:05 Well, it also sounds like there were a lot of people that well, first of all, you changed your your view and your modus operandi a little bit over time, and that's why you also got you fired, or you lost people. But it also sounds like what you did was you brought in more people, not only who thought like you, but who really understood the kinds of goals that you were looking at. And so it was a natural sort of thing. You brought in people who really didn't worry about the credo, because they lived by it anyway.   Kent Lewis ** 35:38 Yeah, that's exactly right. And that was, that was my lesson. Was, you know, I always knew there's a concept called Top grading. You know, you thoroughly vet client, you hire slow and you fire fast. Most entrepreneurs or business owners hire fast and fire slow, and it's very, very expensive and but, you know, I got that part and I just better. I was far better at, I was far better at, what would I say, creating processes than kind of feeling, the love? And so once I figured that stuff out, it got a lot it got a lot better.   Michael Hingson ** 36:16 It's a growth thing. Yes,   36:18 exactly, yeah. Well, you   Michael Hingson ** 36:21 have something, and you sent me something about it. You call it Jerry Maguire moment. Tell me about that.   Kent Lewis ** 36:28 Yeah. So that's, you know, I just, I just sort of backed into the story of just being unhappy. But what ended up happening more specifically that Jerry Maguire moment was putting my son to bed in March of 2013 and I mentioned that feeling of not of dread. I didn't want to go to work. I was frustrated with my team, disappointed in my clients, not appreciating the work we were doing, frustrated with some of my partners. You know, in the business, I felt disconnected from the work of digital because I'd worked on the business for longer than I'd worked in the business by that point, and so I just, it was, it was, I was a bit of a mess. And I realized, like, I need a reason to get up and go to work in the morning. And that's when I came up. I was inspired by Jerry Maguire's manifesto from from the movie, and apparently you can find it online. It's a 28 page manifesto. So I ended up distilling into those 10 truths that we called the credo, and so what happening is just again to recap, it took me a like a couple days. I had instant clarity. I like I fell asleep like a rock. Once I realized I had a plan and I had a framework, I felt better about it, even though there was much work to do. So as I mentioned, you know, half the team quit within the first week, the other half bled out over the next year. That meant 100% employee turnover for two years in a row. As like as I upgraded my team, that was painful. I had to hire three people in order to keep one good one. You know, as I as I search, because we don't have formal degrees in the world of digital marketing, right? So it's hard to find the talent, and you want to hold on to the good ones when you get them. So it took a long time to get the team dialed. Meanwhile, my clients got tired of the turnover. As I was trying to figure it out, they started leaving in droves, and so in 2014 in March, a year later, exactly, I lost my five biggest clients in a 30 to 45 day period. So I lost, you know, 40, over 40% of my revenue vaporized, and I could not replace it fast enough. So I didn't take a salary for nine months. I asked two senior execs to take small pay cuts like 10% and as we hunkered down, and so I didn't have to lay off any good talent, and so I didn't, and we sprinted, we rebuilt, you know, the pipeline, and brought some new clients in. By the end of the year, I paid back my my two senior employees, their 10% that they pay cut. I paid them back, but I didn't take a salary for nine months of that year. It was the worst year I'd ever had, and the only time I ever had to take a pay cut or miss a paycheck myself. So that was the price I paid. The plus side is once I realized that the focus should be on the employees, which was what the credo was, I didn't realize at the time that it wasn't about my clients anymore. They were the life blood. They were the blood flow, right? But we have this organism that needed love, so we I breathe life back into it, one employee at a time until we had a higher functioning group. So it took me five or six years, and in 2019 so six years after I blew the business up, I had an offer on the table, had a sale agreement finalized, and we were less than a week away from funding, and I backed out of the deal because I felt, one, it wasn't a good cultural fit, and two, there was more work to do. It wasn't about increasing my valuation more. It was about finishing my journey of an employee first agency and. Three years later, I sold for one and a half x higher multiple, so an additional seven figures to to another agency based on a stronger profitability, even though the revenue is about the same, stronger, you know, profitability right better. Happy clients, stable clients. It was a lower risk acquisition for them and the so that was the high point. The low point was becoming an employee and wanting to be the best damn employee that agency had ever seen to being a very disappointed, disengaged, disheartened, disheartened employee. And I then I decided I started writing notes of everything, not to do that they were doing wrong. And I decided, once they let me go, I need to focus on this. I think I needed to help my other fellow entrepreneurs ways to avoid going through what I went through as an employee, because I had just been one, and most of my employ, my entrepreneur friends, haven't been an employee for over 10 years. You easily, quickly forget what it's like to be an employee, and I want to remind them and as other senior leaders, how important it is to put your employees first, otherwise you can never deliver on your brand promise no matter what it is, because they won't deliver to your standards. Because it's you know, they don't feel the same attachment to a business if they as if they're not owners, right?   Michael Hingson ** 41:22 But it sounds like you also, when you did sell, by that time, you had employees, one who had bought into the credo, into the philosophy, and two were satisfied. So it was a much better situation all the way around. Anyway,   Kent Lewis ** 41:38 exactly. It's right? And that's, that's the thing is, I realized it's not about throwing money at a problem. It's about throwing time and care at a problem. And the problem is that most employers, there is no loyalty employ to employees anymore, and therefore there's no employee loyalty to brands anymore, to their employers. And so I'm trying to unwind that. And it's not about pension plans, per se. It's not about bonuses, really at all. That's one of 120 items on my punch list of auditing and employee journey is, yeah, do you have a bonus program? Mine was basically spot bonuses, little spot bonuses for timely things, because the big cash bonuses blew up in my face. You know, i i the biggest bonus check I ever wrote. The next day he quit and created a competing agency. Now, he had planned that all along it, the bonus was only helped him do it faster, but I realized there was no appreciation for the bonuses. So stop doing that. So instead, I would bonus, reward the team with experiences rather than cash. And they the cash they got from a really, I paid over market, so that money was not an issue, and so that experiences were the memorable part and the fun part, and it helped motivate when we'd have a little contest with, you know, the wind being a dinner or whatever it was, something fun, right?   Michael Hingson ** 43:00 I was, earlier today, talking with someone who's going to be a guest on the podcast. He's in Germany, and we were talking about the fact that there's a major discussion in Germany right now about the concept of a four day work week, as opposed to a five day work week, and in the four day work week. Inevitably, companies that subscribe to the four day work week have higher productivity, happier employees, and some of those companies have a four day work week with a total of 36 hours and up through a four day work week with 40 hours, which is, of course, 10 hours a day. And what he said, I asked the question, did it make a difference as to whether it was 36 or 40 hours? What he said was mainly not, because it was really about having three days with family, and that that whole mental attitude is really it that we, we have forgotten, I think, in this country, about employee loyalty so much, and we just don't see anything like what we used to see.   Kent Lewis ** 44:09 100% you are correct,   Michael Hingson ** 44:13 and so it is. It is an issue that people really ought to deal with in some way. But you know now the new chancellor in Germany wants to go back to a five day work week, just completely ignoring all the statistics and what's shown. So the discussion is ongoing over there. I'll be interested to see how it goes.   Kent Lewis ** 44:36 Yeah, yeah, totally. I would be in Troy. Yeah. We know for whatever reason, for whatever reason that they've you know that well, I guess it kind of makes sense. But you know, you wouldn't think you could be more productive fewer days a week, but the research is showing that these people, that you know, that the like the Northern Europeans, are the, you know, Finnish and Scandinavians are like the half. People on the planet, despite not being in maybe the friendliest climate, you know, 12 months of the year because of a lot of how they value, you know, work life balance and all of that. And I think that's the thing, you know, we we came from an industrial age where unions got us the weekends off. You know, it's a very different we've come a long way, but there's still a lot more to go, so I, I will be interested to see what happens with the with that concept that four day work week.   Michael Hingson ** 45:26 Well, the other part about it is we had the pandemic, and one of the things that came out of the pandemic, at least, I think, in the minds of a lot of employees, was even working at home, and having to do that, you still got to spend more time with family and people value that. Now I don't know how over time that's going to work, because I know there's been a lot of advocating to go back to just everybody always being in the office, but it seems to me that the better environment would be a hybrid environment, where, if somebody can work at home and do at least as well as they do at the office. Why wouldn't you allow that?   Kent Lewis ** 46:04 Right? Yeah, I think it's that's the other thing is, I do believe hybrid work is the best solution. We were doing three three days, two days in the office, required, one day, optional flex. I ended up going in most days of the week before I, you know, even after we sold and we sell at the office, because I like, I'm a social being, and I really enjoyed the time at the office. And it was, it was, I designed the space, and it was, you know, as my place, and it was my home away from home, you know. So I feel like I've lost a little bit of my identity, losing that office. Yeah, so, but yeah, I do think that it makes sense to be able to do remote work, whatever, wherever people are most effective. But I do know there is a reality that companies are fully remote have a struggle to create cohesiveness and connectiveness across distributed teams. It's just it's just science, right? Psychology, but you can be very intentional to mitigate as much as you can the downside of remote and then play up as much as you can the benefits of remote people having their life and they see, on average, I heard that people valued their remote work about to worth about $6,000 on average, that there's a number that they've quantified.   Michael Hingson ** 47:21 Wow. Well, I know I've worked in offices, but I've also done a lot of work at home. So for example, I had a job back in the late 1970s and worked and lived in Massachusetts until 1981 and the company I worked for was being pursued by Xerox. And the the assumption was that Xerox was going to buy the company. So I was asked to relocate back out to California, where I had grown up, and help integrate the company into Xerox. And so I did. And so that was the first time I really worked mostly out of home and remotely from an office. And did that for two and a half, almost, well, a little over two and a half years. And my thanks for it was I was terminated because we had a recession and the big issue really was, though, that Xerox had bought the company and phased out all the people in sales because they didn't want the people. They just wanted the technology. And I've always believed that's a big mistake, because the tribal knowledge that people have is not something that you're going to get any other place. Totally, totally agree. But anyway, that occurred, and then I couldn't find a job, because the unemployment rate among employable blind people was so high, since people didn't believe blind people could work. So I ended up starting my own company selling computer aided design systems, CAD systems, to architects. Some of the early PC based CAD systems. Sold them to architects and engineers and so on. So I did have an office. We started, I started it with someone else, and had an office for four years, and then decided I had enough of owning my own company for a while, and went to work for someone else, and again, worked in an office and did that for seven years. Yeah, about seven years, and then I ended up in at the end of that, or the later part of that time, I was asked to relocate now back to the East Coast, because I was selling to Wall Street and New York and Wall Street firms really want, even though they might buy from resellers and so on, they want company, companies that make products to have them an office that they can deal with. So I ended up going back and mostly worked out of the office. But then, um. I left that company in 1997 and it was, it was a little bit different, because I was, I I had my own office, and I was the only person in it for a little while. We did have some engineers, but we all kind of worked in the office and sometimes at home. But for me, the real time of working at home happened in 2008 I was working at a nonprofit and also traveling and speaking, and the people who ran the nonprofit said, nobody's interested in September 11 anymore. And you know, you're you're not really adding any value to what we do, so we're going to phase out your job. Yeah, nobody was interested in September 11. And three years later, we had a number one New York Times bestseller, but anyway, your face yeah, so I ended up opening the Michael Hinkson Group Inc, and working out of home, and I've been doing that ever since. I enjoy working in an office. But I can work at home and I can, I can adapt. So my exposure to people and working not at home is when I travel and speak and get to go visit people and interact with them and so on. So it works out   Kent Lewis ** 51:05 that's, that's fantastic, congratulations. That's awesome.   Michael Hingson ** 51:10 It is, it is, you know, sometimes a challenge, but it works. So for you, what is your philosophy? You obviously do a lot of giving back to the community nowadays, is that something that has kind of grown over time, or you always had that? Or what's your philosophy regarding that?   Kent Lewis ** 51:29 So I I believe that, as I mentioned, I believe earlier that learn and return us. I believe that you should giving, giving back your entire life, as soon as you're able to, in whatever way. And so I, you know, when I first moved to Portland, I barely knew anybody. I was volunteering at this local neighborhood house where it was, you know, as tutoring this kid, and ironically, in math. And I'm terrible at math. Then I went to Big Brothers, Big Sisters for a while, and then I for the last 19 for last 25 years, I've been a volunteer, and for eight or nine of those years, I was on the board of smart reading. It's a, it's a, it's not a literacy program in that you're not teaching kids to read. You're teaching kids a love of reading. So you just sit with, you know, title, title, one school kindergarteners in an area near you, and you sit and read with them for 10 to 15 minutes, that's it. And it's a game changer, because some of them didn't own any books. And then they get to take books home with them, you know, like scholastic style books. So anyway, I I decided, of all, like I have friends, that their their passion is pets, others, it's like forests or planet or whatever. To me, I think I can, I can solve all of those problems if I invest in children, because they're shaping our future, and we can put them on a trajectory. So for instance, statistically, prison capacity is based on third grade reading levels in blue. So if you're if you can't learn to read, you can't read to learn, so you need to have a be a proficient reader by third grade, or you're left behind, and you're more likely, 10 times more likely, to be in the system, and you know, not in a good way. So I realized, well, if I can help these kids with a love of reading, I was, I was slow to learn reading myself. I realized that maybe we, you know that one kid that you find a love of reading, that finds books they love and is inspired by the books and continues to read and have a successful educational career, then that's that person may go on to solve cancer or world hunger or whatever it is. So that's kind of how I look at so that's my theory in general about giving. And then specifically my passion is children. So that's kind of my thing, and I think there are a lot of different ways to do it. Last night, I was at my wife's auction or the fundraiser for her nonprofit, which is around the foster system. It's called Casa court, important court, court appointed special advocate. So these kids in the foster system have an advocate, that that's not a lawyer or a caseworker, you know, by their side through the legal system. And I think that's a fantastic cause. It aligns with my children cause. And I was, I had seven my parents fostered seven daughters, you know, Daughters of other people, and the last two were very that I remember were transformative for me as an only child, to have a sister, you know, foster sister that was living with us for, in one case, two years. And it was invaluable and helpful to me. She helped me find my love of reading, helped me learn my multiplication tables, all that things that your parents might be able to do, but it's so much cooler doing with somebody that's, you know, I think she was 17 when she moved into our house, and I was, like, nine, and she was so helpful to me, so inspiring. So in a nutshell, that's, that's what we're talking about   Michael Hingson ** 54:55 when you talk talk about reading. I'm of the opinion and one of the best. Things that ever happened to reading was Harry Potter. Just the number of people, number of kids who have enjoyed reading because they got to read the Harry Potter books. I think that JK Rowling has brought so many kids to reading. It's incredible.   Kent Lewis ** 55:14 Yeah, yeah. 100% 100% I Yeah. I think that even you may, you know, you may or may not like rolling, but I as a person, but she did an amazing thing and made reading fun, and that that's what matters, yeah, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 55:33 yeah, well, and that's it, and then she's just done so much for for children and adults. For that matter, I talked to many adults who've read the books, and I've read all the books. I've read them several times, actually, yeah, now I'm spoiled. I read the audio versions read by Jim Dale, and one of my favorite stories about him was that he was in New York and was going to be reading a part of the latest Harry Potter book on September 11, 2001 in front of scholastic when, of course, everything happened. So he didn't do it that day, but he was in New York. What a you know, what a time to be there. That's fantastic. But, you know, things happen. So you one of the things that I've got to believe, and I think that you've made abundantly clear, is that the kind of work you do, the PR, the marketing, and all of that kind of interaction is a very time consuming, demanding job. How do you deal with work and family and make all of that function and work? Well,   Kent Lewis ** 56:41 good question. I, I believe that that the, well, two things you have to have, you know, discipline, right? And so what I've done is really focused on managing my time very, very carefully, and so I have now keep in mind my oldest, I have three kids, one's graduating college as a senior, one's a sophomore who will be a junior next next year, and then The last is a sophomore in high school, so I'm there at ages where two are out of the house, so that's a little easier to manage, right? So there's that, but similarly, I try to maximize my time with my youngest and and with my wife, you know, I built in, you know, it was building in date nights, because it's easy to get into a rut where you don't want to leave the house or don't want to do whatever. And I found that it's really been good for our relationship at least once a month. And so far, it's been more like almost twice a month, which has been huge and awesome. But I've just intentional with my time, and I make sure 360 I take care of myself, which is typically working out between an hour and an hour and a half a day that I'm I really need to work on my diet, because I love burgers and bourbon and that's in moderation, perhaps sustainable, but I need to eat more veggies and less, you know, less garbage. But I also have been at the gym. I go in the Steam Room and the sauna, and I'm fortunate to have a hot tub, so I try to relax my body is after my workouts, I've been sleeping more since covid, so I work out more and sleep and sleep more post covid. And because I'm working from home, it's really I find it much easier to get up and take breaks or to, you know, just to manage my time. I'm not traveling like I used to, right? That's a, that's a big factor. So, so anyway, that's, that's kind of my take on that. I don't know if that really helps, but that's, that's kind of where I'm at.   Michael Hingson ** 58:59 The other part about it, though, is also to have the discipline to be able to be at home and work when you know you have to work, and yeah, you get to take more breaks and so on, but still developing the discipline to work and also to take that time is extremely important. I think a lot of people haven't figured out how to do that   Kent Lewis ** 59:19 right exactly, and that is so I do have an immense amount of, I do have an immense amount of, what would you say discipline? And so I don't know, yeah, I don't have that problem with getting the work done. In fact, my discipline is knowing when to stop, because I get into it, and I want to get things done, and I want to get it off my plate, so I tend to do sprints. But the other lesson I have from covid is listening to your biorhythms. So, you know, we're a time based society, and we look, you don't want to be late for this and that I you know, that's great, fine. But what's really more important in my mind is, um. Is to, is to be thinking about, is to let your body tell you when it's tired, if and and more importantly, is to not stress about in the mornings when I wake up early. By that, I mean between four and 6am before I really want to get up at 630 and I just if I'm awake, then I'll write stuff down to get it out of my head, or I will just start doing my start my day early and and not stress about, oh, I didn't get enough sleep. My body will catch up, yeah, it will tell me to go to bed early, or I'll sleep better the next day, or whatever it is. So that was important, and also to learn that I'm most I can get a lot of tasks done in the morning. And I think bigger picture, and that's what, that's why I wake up early, is all the things I need to do that I forgot. I didn't write down or whatever, and I think of them at between four and 6am but the other is that I do my best writing in the afternoon, like between four and six. So I told my, my wife and my, you know, my my kids, you know, my first figures out when they were both in the House. I was like, I may be working late, jamming out an article or doing whatever right before dinner, or I might be a little late. Can we can wait for dinner for a little bit? They're like, Yeah, that's fine. We don't care, right? So, but normally I'd be like, I gotta get home because it's dinner time. But now that I'm already home, I just keep working through, and then, and then, oh, I can take a quick break. But my point is, they're totally adaptable.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:27 But you communicate, yes, communication issue is key. Is key, absolutely. That's really the issues that you do communicate.   Kent Lewis ** 1:01:36 It's all about setting expectations. And they had no expectations other than eating dinner. And we've been eating dinner later. Just, just a natural evolution. So it's not, it's not even an issue now, because I don't want to, I don't want to, what, right? What? Late at night, I just found it late afternoon, I just in a zone. Anyway, yeah, you listen to your body, and I'm way less stressed because I'm not worried about, oh my god, I have to get to bed at a certain time or wake up at a certain time. It's like, just kind of run with it, you know, and and go from there. So what's next for you? What's next? So I want to shift from going from speaking for free to speaking for a fee. There you go. And the re the reason why is I never asked for, and I'd even waive, you know, honorarium or pay because I got more value out of the leads. But now that I don't have an agency to represent, two things. One is, I want to get paid to do my employee engagement retention talks, because it's I'm getting great feedback on it, which is fun. But I also am being paid now by other agencies, a day rate, plus travel to go speak at the conferences. I've always spoken on that like me and want me and I just represent. I just changed the name that I'm representing. That's it, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:56 well, and there's value in it. I realized some time ago, and I k

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1697: Neal Samudre reveals the key ingredients behind writing content that goes viral, focusing on how emotional connection, simplicity, and relatability drive people to share. Discover how to create messages that not only grab attention but inspire action through strategic storytelling. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://goinswriter.com/write-viral/ Quotes to ponder: "Virality is about resonance. It's about a message that spreads not just because it's new, but because it feels familiar." "Make your message simple, memorable, and emotional." "People don't share facts; they share feelings." Episode references: Contagious: Why Things Catch On: https://jonahberger.com/books/contagious Buzzsumo: https://buzzsumo.com Made to Stick: https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1697: Neal Samudre reveals the key ingredients behind writing content that goes viral, focusing on how emotional connection, simplicity, and relatability drive people to share. Discover how to create messages that not only grab attention but inspire action through strategic storytelling. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://goinswriter.com/write-viral/ Quotes to ponder: "Virality is about resonance. It's about a message that spreads not just because it's new, but because it feels familiar." "Make your message simple, memorable, and emotional." "People don't share facts; they share feelings." Episode references: Contagious: Why Things Catch On: https://jonahberger.com/books/contagious Buzzsumo: https://buzzsumo.com Made to Stick: https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1672: Chalene Johnson breaks down a high-impact strategy for getting more eyes on your blog by mastering the art of promotion. Her step-by-step tips help you stop relying solely on SEO and start using smarter, faster tactics to drive traffic, grow your audience, and build authority. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.chalenejohnson.com/promote-your-blog/ Quotes to ponder: "Just because you write a blog doesn't mean people are going to read it." "The trick is to work smarter, not harder, by promoting your blog in places where your ideal audience already spends time." "If you've taken the time to write a great blog post, you owe it to yourself to promote it like crazy." Episode references: Canva: https://www.canva.com Later (social media scheduler): https://later.com Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console Pinterest Business: https://business.pinterest.com BuzzSumo: https://buzzsumo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1672: Chalene Johnson breaks down a high-impact strategy for getting more eyes on your blog by mastering the art of promotion. Her step-by-step tips help you stop relying solely on SEO and start using smarter, faster tactics to drive traffic, grow your audience, and build authority. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.chalenejohnson.com/promote-your-blog/ Quotes to ponder: "Just because you write a blog doesn't mean people are going to read it." "The trick is to work smarter, not harder, by promoting your blog in places where your ideal audience already spends time." "If you've taken the time to write a great blog post, you owe it to yourself to promote it like crazy." Episode references: Canva: https://www.canva.com Later (social media scheduler): https://later.com Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console Pinterest Business: https://business.pinterest.com BuzzSumo: https://buzzsumo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura López, de "Actual Comunicación Amodiño", empresa que se adica á xestión da comunicación dixital. Hoxe falamos dos hashtags máis empregados nas redes preferidas. 🔊"En Europa, moitos usuarios non seguen a creadores específicos, o que podería implicar unha tendencia cara a un consumo menos personalizado de contidos". 🔊"Os creadores de contido, non inciden só nas áreas máis expostas mediaticamente, senón tamén na saúde e na alimentación". 🔊"Se ben coñecer ao completo as temáticas máis faladas en redes sociais pode non ser tarefa doada, os hashtags máis empregados poden darnos unha boa pista ao respecto". 📢 Os hashtags máis empregados nas redes preferidas Se ben coñecer ao completo as temáticas máis faladas en redes sociais pode non ser tarefa doada, os hashtags máis empregados poden darnos unha boa pista ao respecto. ✔️• En Instagram: a plataforma de Metricool analizou 28 millóns de cancelos e clasificounos en catorce temáticas diferentes. E así que nos atopamos con mascotas, (#mascotas, #mascotasfelices, #tiendademascotas), arte (#artedigital, #artecontemporaneo, #picsartedit), beleza (#belleza, #bellezanatural, #salondebelleza), fitness (#fitness, #fitnessmotivation, #fitnessmodel), comida (#comida, #comidasana, #comidasaludable), fotografía (#fotografia, #fotografias, #fotografiainfantil), humor (#humor, #darkhumor, #humornegro), o propio Instagram, lifestyle (#estilodevida, #estilodevidasaludable, #estilodevidafit), moda (#moda, #modamasculina, #modainfantil), música (#musica, #musical, #musicaltheatre), natureza (#naturaleza, #naturaleza_spain, #naturalezaviva), marketing (#marketing, #marketingdigital, #digitalmarketing), viaxes (#viajes, #agenciadeviajes, #viajesporelmundo). ✔️• En TikTok: a mencionada plataforma, tamén recolleu hashtags virais en TikTok desta tempada. Atopámonos deste xeito con hashtags de nenos e maternidade (#hijo, #bebé, #cutebaby, #kidstiktok), moda (#otoño. #autumn, #zara), beleza (#skincare, #belleza, #calendariodeadviento), finanzas (#finanzaspersonales #solana #autónomos), comida (#recetasfáciles #pizza #recipe), deportes (#fútbol #laliga #sánchez), vehículos e transporte (#motor #motorsport #derbi), manualidades e trucos (#diycraft #handcraft #scrapbookingideas), educación (#studytok, #estudiantes, #study), mascotas (#perro #animal #puppylove), entretemento (#noticias, #política #gobierno), tecnoloxía e electrónica (#iphone #apple #tecnologia), fogar e melloras (#decoración, #homedecor, #navidad2024), saúde (#fertility, #mentalhealthcare, #mentalhealthhelp), viaxes (#newyork, #erasmus, #donostia), videoxogos (#fortnite #game #disfraz) 📢 Onde consultar os temas máis populares da rede? Para consultar os temas máis populares existen varias ferramentas e plataformas que nos permiten coñecer que se está comentando en tempo real, aínda que en xeral case todas as redes sociais mostran os hashtags máis populares. ✔️• Trending de X. X ten unha sección de tendencias que mostra os temas máis comentados na plataforma. Pódense ver tanto as tendencias globais como por localizacións máis concretas. Esta ferramenta atoparémola dentro da pestana “Explorar”. ✔️• Explora de Instagram. Na pestana de explorar de Instagram móstrasenos contido que está a ser popular e relevante para nós. Como truco adicional, se buscamos unha temática concreta no seu buscador e seleccionamos a subcategoría “hashtags”, mostrarásenos aqueles máis populares por volume de utilización. Así, por exemplo, se buscamos “radio”, veremos que as máis populares con #radio (24,3 millóns de posts), #radiofrecuencia (1 millón), #radiofrequency (1 millón) ou #radiostation (909 mil publicacións). ✔️• TikTok Creative Center. TikTok ten un centro de creatividade que conta cunha biblioteca dos anuncios que mellor están a funcionar, os hashtags, cancións e creadores que son tendencia, así como unha “guía de inspiración”. ✔️• Google Trends. É unha ferramenta de Google que mostra os temas maís buscados no buscador en tempo real e permite filtrar por ubicación, tempo e categoría. Esta plataforma axúdanos a coñecer non só as tendencias en redes sociais, senón tamén en buscas xerais de Internet, o que dá unha perspectiva máis ampla dos intereses dos usuarios. ✔️• BuzzSumo. Se dispoñemos de ferramentas especializadas como BuzzSumo, poderemos analizar as tendencias en redes sociais de maneira máis detallada, mostrando os temas e artigos máis compartidos en varias plataformas. Iso si, require de conta e algunhas funcionalidades son de pago. ❓Pregunta para a próxima semana: cal é o idioma das redes? 👉Máis Información ACTUAL COMUNICACIÓN Amodiño: ✔️Páxina Web: https://actualizadoscomunicacion.com/ ✔️Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/actualizadoscomunicacion ✔️Twitter: https://twitter.com/actualizadoscom ✔️Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/actualizados_comunicacion/ 🎙️"SUSCRÍBETE" ao podcast.👍 👉MÁIS ENTREVISTAS: https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-salta-da-cama_sq_f1323089_1.html 👉Máis Información e outros contidos: ✔️Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PabloChichas ✔️Twitter: https://twitter.com/pablochichas ✔️Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pablochichas/ ✔️Clubhouse: @pablochichas ✔️Twich: https://www.twitch.tv/pablochichas

In this value-packed episode of Building Your Empire With SophieZo, digital marketing expert Sophie Zollmann reveals game-changing strategies for developing an authentic marketing style that sets your business apart. Discover why following generic marketing trends could be hindering your business growth and learn how to create a unique marketing approach that resonates with your target audience. Key Topics Covered: • Digital marketing trends vs. authentic brand messaging • Developing a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) for effective online marketing • Utilizing SEO tools like Google Trends and BuzzSumo for content strategy • Content marketing techniques that align with your brand identity • Social media marketing strategies that showcase your authentic brand voice Actionable Takeaways: 1. Identify your business's unique attributes to craft a compelling UVP 2. Leverage digital marketing tools to stay ahead of industry trends 3. Create SEO-optimized content that reflects your authentic brand voice 4. Implement social media strategies that attract your ideal customers Whether you're an entrepreneur, small business owner, or marketing professional looking to enhance your digital presence, this episode provides essential insights on building a distinctive brand in today's competitive online marketplace. Transform your digital marketing strategy and learn how to build a thriving online business that stands out from the competition. Listen now to unlock the power of authentic marketing in the digital age! Join us for Building Your Business with SophieZo anytime and connect with Sophie at SophieZo.com.  

This episode dives into the key steps to create a data-driven and audience-focused content plan to fuel your WordPress website's success.In this episode, you'll learn:The importance of keyword research tools like LowFruits and Semrush  to understand user search queries.How to leverage Google Trends Google Trends tool to identify trending and seasonal topics.Tips for analyzing your website traffic with Google Analytics Google Analytics to discover your top performing content and audience demographics.The value of tailoring content to different audience segments based on age, location, interests etc.Techniques for competitor analysis using tools like BuzzSumo competitor research tool to uncover successful content strategies.How AI writing assistants like ChatGPT ChatGPT AI assistant can spark fresh content ideas and craft optimized headlines.The benefits of using an editorial calendar to stay organized and consistent with content publishing.Why repurposing and updating older blog posts is important for SEO and content freshness.The power of collaboration with influencers and guest blogging to expand reach and build relationships.Bonus Tip:Utilize writing enhancement tools like SEOBoost to improve content quality and audience engagement.By following these strategies and consistently creating high-value content, you'll be well on your way to building a thriving WordPress site with a loyal audience.If you liked this episode, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. Or watch our Podcasts on YouTube. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

Ross Simmonds is the Founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing, a content marketing agency that strategizes, distributes, and optimizes content. Foundation has worked with some of the most successful SaaS and publicly traded cloud companies in the world. Ross has been named one of the most influential marketers in the world by multiple marketing publications and firms like BuzzSumo and Semrush. He is also a sought-after public speaker, an angel investor, and the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever. In this episode… In today's fast-paced and content-rich online landscape, simply sharing links to a piece of content on various platforms is not enough. This approach is outdated; instead, you must repurpose engaging content to build your brand. What content distribution strategies can you leverage, and how can you maximize value in your campaigns? Many entrepreneurs fear judgment and don't want to seem overly promotional, especially if they don't recognize the value in their content. As a shy kid who spoke an average of five words a day, renowned content creator Ross Simmonds understands the fear of judgment, rejection, and public presentations. To overcome this fear, he recommends shifting your mindset to recognize how your content benefits your audience, allowing you to promote it on as many channels as possible. Widespread content distribution and amplification requires creating a pillar asset like an informative and engaging YouTube video or podcast that you can repurpose into highlights, reels, or moments. Tune in to the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as William Harris welcomes Ross Simmonds, the Founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing, to discuss content amplification and distribution strategies. Ross talks about evaluating content engagement, his book Create Once, Distribute Forever, and how to use AI to accelerate content creation.

Crafting the Employee Experience    Take away: Developing an abundant mindset centered on gratitude for what you have, rather than lament what's lacking, is key to living a fulfilling life. Balancing business growth with personal fulfillment means defining your "why" and ideal lifestyle, not just chasing endless expansion. Prioritizing employee engagement through efforts like "stay interviews" and enabling people to do what they're passionate about leads to higher profitability and client satisfaction. And instilling financial literacy around passive income streams like real estate from an early age can set a strong foundation for long-term wealth creation.   Money Learnings: Kent's parents had purchased a 10-unit apartment building before he was born. While they had modest incomes from their jobs, the rental income and equity buildup from the apartment building provided an additional stream of income and financial security. This taught Kent the value of real estate investments for generating passive income. His parents taught him not to rely on Social Security for retirement income, as it may not exist by the time he retires. They emphasized that he would need to create his own wealth and fund his own retirement through savings and investments. His uncle's example of buying his first apartment building while in college, and dressing professionally because successful real estate investors dressed that way, also influenced Kent's view of real estate as a path to building wealth from an early age.   Bio: Kent Lewis founder of pdxMindShare, an online career community and networking group mentioned on Seth Godin's blog. Formerly a CMO and founder or co-founder of multiple agencies, he's known as a thought leader in digital marketing. He's been an adjunct professor for more than 20 years at Portland State University and a volunteer instructor for SCORE. Lewis co-founded SEMpdx in 2006, a trade organization for search engine marketing professionals. His recognition includes Marketer of the Year by the American Marketing Association and Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers by BuzzSumo.   Highlights from this episode: Building passive income streams through real estate investments as a way to achieve financial independence. Balancing personal fulfillment with business growth - finding the right size and structure that aligns with your values and desired lifestyle. Prioritizing employee engagement and satisfaction as a key driver of profitability and client retention. Conducting "stay interviews" to understand what motivates employees and how to improve their experience. Defining your "why" and living life on your own terms, rather than chasing other people's definitions of success. Cultivating an attitude of gratitude and focusing on what you have, rather than what you lack, to live an abundant life.   Links: https://kentjlewis.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whats-your-story-write-book-kent-lewis/ https://twitter.com/kentjlewis https://www.anvilmediainc.com/     Richer Soul Life Beyond Money. You got rich, now what? Let's talk about your journey to more a purposeful, intentional, amazing life. Where are you going to go and how are you going to get there? Let's figure that out together. At the core is the financial well being to be able to do what you want, when you want, how you want. It's about personal freedom!   Thanks for listening!   Show Sponsor: http://profitcomesfirst.com/   Schedule your free no obligation call: https://bookme.name/rockyl/lite/intro-appointment-15-minutes   If you like the show please leave a review on iTunes: http://bit.do/richersoul   https://www.facebook.com/richersoul http://richersoul.com/ rocky@richersoul.com   Some music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast   Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.

What is good content? How is A.I. impacting the creation of content? And what are the opportunities for content writers in the near future? All good questions that we didn't have answers to. Until we invited Ross Simmons to join us for the 402nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. This is a good one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Create Once, Distribute Forever by Ross Simmonds The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Before we jump into this episode, I just want to give you a quick heads up that The Copywriter Accelerator will be opening up for the one and only time this year… at the end of August. I won't share any details at the moment, you can find out more when you visit thecopywriterclub.com/waitlist. Over the past decade, written content has become a critical marketing component for tens of thousands of organizations looking to get attention online. That content takes a lot of different forms from articles and blog posts to case studies, lead magnets, white papers and other written assets used to attract and keep the attention of readers. But what makes good content? How is AI impacting content writers today? And how do you ensure that you clients see content as an investment that pays off, rather than a cost that they need to cut? Hi, I'm Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And for today's episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with content writer and founder of the content agency Foundation Marketing, Ross Simmonds. Ross got his start writing about fantasy football in high school and has been recognized as a top marketer by publications like BuzzSumo and SEMrush. His work has been featured in dozens of publications including Forbes, HuffingtonPost and CBC. Ross answered those questions I just posed and a lot more. This interview opened my eyes to several new opportunities and I think you're going to like it. But before we jump in with Ross… We have a new gift for you as a listener to The Copywriter Club Podcast. We went through the past 400 episodes of this podcast looking for the ideas that our guests have shared over the past couple of years related to finding clients. We pulled out a bunch of our favorites and compiled them into a new pocket sized guide that will inspire you as you look for ways to attract the right clients to your business. It's a bit like having a couple dozen of the best copywriters in your pocket advising you on how to find your next client. To get your copy, visit thecopywriterclub.com/pocket and download this new guide. And with that, let's go to our interview with Ross Simmonds. Rob Marsh: Ross, welcome to the podcast. You are one of the people that I have had on my list for a long time, and have been wanting to talk to you. We've had a little trouble connecting the last couple of months. You've had some travel and lots of stuff going on. But let's start out the way that we like to here on the podcast. And that is, tell us about your story. How did you become a content marketer and now ultimately founder of Foundation Content Marketing Agency? Ross Simmonds: Yeah, Rob, thanks for having me on. I'm excited for this conversation. I'll take people back into time a little bit. So I've always had a passion for writing and for creating things from the time I was a young kid. When I was a young kid, I fell into that whole meme and being obsessed with the Roman Empire. And I was writing books about what the Roman Empire must have been like. And I was doing that probably when I was like 10 years old. So early on, I was creating and writing chapter books and stuff like that. As time went on, I continued to be passionate about writing and creating.  And in university, I ran a fantasy football blog. And I was writing every single day about fantasy sports and how I thought people should adjust their strategies in the wo...

Welcome to my podcast show today. We are going to reveal the new AI tools to streamline your content marketing efforts: In this episode, we delve into the transformative world of AI-powered tools that are revolutionizing content creation, distribution, and analytics. Discover the latest innovations, including the groundbreaking GPT-40, an advanced AI writing assistant that elevates content generation to new heights. We'll also explore Jasper, Copy.ai, and Frase, revealing how these tools help you produce high-quality content effortlessly. But that's not all. Learn how AI is optimizing content distribution with tools like HubSpot and SocialBee, ensuring your message reaches the right audience at the right time. Finally, uncover the secrets of AI-driven analytics with Google Analytics and BuzzSumo, providing you with deep insights to refine your strategy and boost engagement. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting out, this episode is packed with actionable insights and expert quotes to help you stay ahead in the competitive landscape of content marketing. Tune in and transform your content strategy with the power of AI! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rajni-yadav54/support

You can have complete social content domination if you know how to leverage the power of AI. In this episode, Ross Simmonds, Founder & CEO of Foundations, joins Jake and reveals how to use AI to expand your reach and distribute your content at scale. Discover why Ross champions video content as the most versatile form of media and explore the "4 Es" for creating incredible content. Tune in to learn how to transform one piece of content into twenty and uncover the insights behind Ross' book on this very topic. You'll gain valuable tips on building a scalable distribution engine to maximize your content's impact. What You'll LearnHow to use AI to distribute your content and expand your reachWhy Ross believes video content is the most versatile form of contentThe 4 Es of creating incredible contentHow to turn 1 piece of content into 20 pieces of contentWhy Ross wrote a book on this very specific topic How to build a scalable distribution engine About RossRoss Simmonds is the founder & CEO of Foundation, a global marketing agency that provides services to organizations all over the world ranging from some of the fastest-growing startups to global SaaS brands. Ross was named one of Atlantic Canadas Top 50 CEOs and one of the top marketers in the world by BuzzSumo and SEMRush. Ross is also a well sought out public speaker, an angel investor, and the author of multiple books.Connect with RossLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rosssimmondsX: https://twitter.com/thecoolestcoolCheck Out Ross' Website: https://rosssimmonds.com/Connect with JakeGet a FREE copy of Jake's bestselling book, Big Idea To Bestseller, when you cover shipping and handling - https://go.bigideatobestseller.com/free-bookFollow Jake: @jakekelferSubscribe to Jake's YouTube Channel - @jake_kelfer 

Join Dots Oyebolu as he engages in a fascinating conversation with Ross Simmonds, Founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing. Recognized as a leading voice in content marketing, Ross shares his insights on modern content distribution strategies that drive revenue in marketing.Key Takeaways:(01:46) Ross' journey from selling do-rags in high school to becoming a revered content marketing strategist.(03:53) "Content user fit" and the need for marketers to understand their audience deeply through market research tools like SparkToro and Audience.(09:03) "Content market fit": Ross discusses identifying content themes that resonate with target audiences on specific platforms.(13:40) The strategic importance of generating backlinks through tools, proprietary research, and a stats roundup for enhancing SEO.(20:05) A discussion on the future of SEO and SEM in the face of evolving digital marketing landscapes.(22:44) Ross encourages marketers to diversify their strategies, likening AI tools to an "Ironman suit" for marketers To achieve greater efficiency and creativity.(24:06) Ross underscores the timeless essence of storytelling in human connection and marketing.(29:46) Ross suggests focusing on generating customers and revenue over complex marketing metrics.Resources Mentioned:Ross Simmonds -https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosssimmonds/?originalSubdomain=caFoundation Marketing | LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/foundationmarketing/Foundation Marketing | Website -https://foundationinc.co/Ross Simmonds' Personal Website -https://rosssimmonds.com/SparkToro -https://sparktoro.com/Buzzsumo -https://buzzsumo.com/Insightful Links:https://www.coseom.com/b2b-saas-marketing-the-future-is-now-embracing-modern-strategies-and-trends-2/ https://www.beacondigitalmarketing.com/blog/b2b-content-strategy-new-era https://foundationinc.co/lab/modern-distribution-playbook/ https://divbyzero.com/blog/saas-content-marketing-strategy/ Thanks for listening to the Marketing Leadership podcast, brought to you by Dots Loves Marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review to help get the word out about the show. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.#PodcastMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #BrandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #MarketingIntelligence #GTM #B2BMarketing #D2CMarketing

As a 6x entrepreneur, 10x agency professional and digital marketer since 1996, Kent Lewis is currently Founder of pdxMindShare, a networking group and online career community. He speaks internationally, writes for industry publications like Inc. and SmartBrief and is regularly quoted in the media. Kent was President and Founder of Anvil Media for 22 years, before selling his agency in 2022. He was also an adjunct professor at Portland State University for 20 years. Kent was named a Top 40 Under 40, Marketer of the Year by AMA Oregon and a Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencer by BuzzSumo. Key Moments [08:06] Struggling with age bias in work. [11:04] Realized business leader's intent wasn't perfect. [12:50] Realized importance of employee experience for success. [17:11] Smaller shops target tech market, face competition. [20:01] Avoided investing initially, then pushed sales and marketing. [22:09] Overcoming challenges, rebuilding, and finding success. [26:23] Survive challenges, maintain support, open up. Find Kent Online https://pdxmindshare.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentlewis/ https://twitter.com/kentjlewis If you're enjoying Entrepreneur's Enigma, please give us a review on the podcast directory of your choice. We're on all of them and these reviews really help others find the show. GoodPods: https://gmwd.us/goodpods iTunes: https://gmwd.us/itunes Podchaser: https://gmwd.us/podchaser Also, if you're getting value from the show and want to buy me a coffee, go to the show notes to get the link to get me a coffee to keep me awake, while I work on bringing you more great episodes to your ears. →  https://gmwd.us/buy-me-a-coffee Follow Seth Online: Seth | Digital Marketer (@s3th.me) • Instagram: Instagram.com/s3th.me Seth Goldstein | LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/sethmgoldstein Seth On Mastodon: https://s3th.me/@pch Seth's Marketing Junto Newsletter: https://MarketingJunto.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Featuring:-Sinead Norenius, VP of product management, CisionA world with better content. That is the tagline for BuzzSumo, a content marketing platform that is part of the Cision family and is overseen by Sinead Norenius, VP of product management at Cision. With a promise such as that, it's not hard to imagine that she would know a thing or two – or a ton more – about influential content.When you listen to this podcast, you'll quickly learn that expertise is very real and very powerful.Authenticity and transparency are two words constantly on the minds and lips of brands and their communicators. They can also be elusive. Norenius devotes attention to how you can focus on both to create genuine connections with your audience.She also sheds light on a far-too untapped goldmine to reach consumers.“Micro and nano influencers,” suggests Norenius, “are your C-to-C strategy.” Why? Because “these are consumers with a really loud megaphone.”Another type of influencer with which all brands must become familiar? Virtual and CGI influencers. If you're unclear about this, you won't be after this podcast.And though it can be very hard to control, user-generated content must be an always-on strategy for communicators, she advises. “Look at it as the ongoing social media conversation in which your brand needs to be involved.”

Are you ready to embark on an electrifying journey deep into the heart of content creation? Welcome back to It's Simply Digital! In this episode, we're not just sharing tips; we're launching a full-scale content revolution to propel your skills to new heights. We've carefully curated five game-changing hacks to supercharge your content creation game. Get ready to create some excellent content!   In this episode, I discuss: Your content is your sales page and your cold outreach. Connecting emotionally with your audience using aspirational identity. Addressing fundamental human needs like love, security, connection, and status. Sharing your brand's mission and values to foster a sense of belonging. Answering your audience's questions effectively. Conducting keyword research for targeted content. Utilizing tools like Answer the Public, BuzzSumo, and AI-powered research. Using AI platforms and editing software for efficient content editing. Keeping content to a fifth or sixth-grade reading level. Emphasizing the importance of visual content in storytelling. Leveraging tools like Canva and Adobe for graphic creation. Simplifying complex graphic design with AI-powered tools. Scheduling content with social media management software like SocialPilot. Analyzing engagement data to optimize posting times. Harnessing email marketing and automation for personalized outreach.   Key Takeaways: The Power of Quality Content: Your content is now your sales page and the key to connecting with your audience emotionally. Deliver the aspirational identity your audience seeks by focusing on emotions like love, security, connection, or status. Keep it relatable and aligned with your brand's mission. Content Planning and Research Tools: Answer your audience's questions and perform keyword research to create content that draws them in. Combine keywords with clear, valuable answers to engage your audience effectively. Visual and Video Content Creation: Visual and video content is essential for today's audience. Use tools like Canva, Adobe, or AI-driven platforms to create captivating visuals that complement your powerful content.    These hacks can transform your content creation process. Remember, your content is your bridge to your audience, your opportunity to connect, and your key to success. Don't underestimate its power. Stay tuned for next week's episode for more valuable insights; until then, keep crafting awesome content!   Go be awesome!   This podcast is brought to you by our newsletter—actionable tips delivered to your inbox every Friday.   Find It's Simply Digital on LinkedIn and Instagram.  How can I help you with your brand? Learn more by heading to our website. Want to support this Podcast? Like, share, and tell your friends!  Listen on Spotify. Listen on Apple.

Marketing isn't just about selling; it's about connecting. In the digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve is not just a choice; it's a necessity. Whether you're a digital creator, entrepreneur, or a realtor, these tools will transform the way you connect with your audience and position your brand.Here's what we discussed:Uncover essential tools for bloggers, email campaigns, and podcasting.Explore Feedspot's podcast insights and BuzzSumo's most-shared articles.Discover the grassroots power of Reddit and Quora for unfiltered audience insights.Leverage influencer insights and monitor industry trends with Google Trends.Answer burning questions with AnswerThePublic.com.Master the art of aligning trends with authenticity.But remember, it's not just about following trends blindly. It's about authentically aligning your brand with what matters most to you and your audience. In today's episode, we're not just marching in the trend parade; we're leading it.So, grab your marketing toolkit and join us for a journey into the world of entrepreneurship, where success means staying ahead of the game.Learn more about Katie and Next Step Social Communications:Speaking: https://katiebrinkley.com/Website: https://www.nextstepsocialcommunications.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiebrinkleyYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/@rockymountainmarketingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamkatiebrinkley/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/socialprofitlab Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2001, Chris Carr launched a start-up in his spare time – a marketing company called Farotech. What started primarily as a web design firm quickly grew into a comprehensive digital marketing agency specializing in helping clients in the healthcare, orthopedics, manufacturing, SaaS, and cybersecurity fields see explosive growth through a proven marketing system. Since early 2020, Chris has become a thought leader in artificial intelligence (AI). Through years of analysis, workshops, and hands-on experience, he's observed the rise of modern AI and its potential to reshape the business landscape. Recognizing that most businesses are not ready for this massive disruption from AI, Chris offers workshops and lunch-and-learns to equip businesses for the future that's already here. Find out more at farotech.com. Today, we're going to talk about AI and branding. My guest, Chris Carr, is at the forefront of these topics. He will share actionable tips that you can start doing now to incorporate AI into your business so you aren't left behind when everyone else moves forward with that technology. “If you're an individual who's not willing to adopt that technology [AI], there's a chance you will get replaced by somebody who does. ” – Chris CarrThis week on SmallBizChat Podcast:Building hyper-personalization into your marketing. Why your marketing should start with your branding. The stages of solving a problem. How AI is changing every industry. Targeting your brand to your audience. Standing out in an AI-filled marketplace.Chat priming. Authenticity in branding. Resources Mentioned:Become Your Own Boss: https://smallbizladyuniversity.com/ Boss Quiz: https://smallbizladyuniversity.com/boss-quiz/ There's an AI for That: https://theresanaiforthat.com/ SparkToro: https://sparktoro.com/ BuzzSumo: https://buzzsumo.com/ Connect with Chris Carr:Website: https://farotech.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-carr-84b1a02/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/chris_carr YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Farotech Podcast: https://farotech.com/podcasts/ LinkedIn:Can your brand survive and thrive in an AI-centric world? Chris Carr of Farotech believes it can, but only with the right strategies in place. Join us on the SmallBizChat Podcast as we explore the role of AI in branding and the key shifts businesses must make to remain relevant. Listen in today!#SmallBizChat #business #AI #branding

Struggling for inspiration when it comes to content creation? Tune into our latest episode where we delve into the exciting world of content creation, discussing everything from the importance of brainstorming sessions to the power of personal experiences. We'll explore how to survey your audience effectively, draw inspiration from competitors, and use content idea tools like AnswerThePublic and BuzzSumo to boost your creativity. Discover how to capitalize on news and trending topics, benefit from industry events, and bring in guest contributors for fresh perspectives. We'll also cover the art of repurposing old content, and the impact of sharing case studies and success stories. Finally, we'll wrap up by encouraging all creators to delve into their own personal experiences for authentic, relatable content. Join us as we navigate through these diverse content creation methods, and say goodbye to those inspiration struggles!Help support The LOTS Project by checking out OpusPro using my affiliate link https://www.opus.pro/?via=849311Find out more about me at https://thelotsproject.com

Marketing your business can be challenging. There are so many tools out there not to mention the various strategies you'll need to develop in order to ensure your efforts bring results. In this episode, Terri and I are chatting about the top ways to measure your marketing and discuss some of the different tools you can use to boost revenue and expand your business reach.  Links:  Track website data with Google Analytics Track email and other marketing channels with Constant Contact View, schedule and track multiple social channels with Hootsuite Tools to do competitive analysis and other types of marketing research: SEMRush, BuzzSumo, Brand24, Social Status Learn more about Triangle business services for other business and commercial needs Follow our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages! Learn more about Triangle Credit Union  

J'en parle ici ;)  Voici les étapes pour créer votre entreprise avec des outils IA : Trouver le nom parfait avec Namelix : pour générer des noms de société créatifs et percutants qui correspondent à votre vision et à votre marque. Créer une identité graphique avec Canva ou Tailor Brands concevoir facilement des logos, des visuels et des supports marketing attrayants pour donner une identité visuelle professionnelle à votre entreprise. Trouver des idées de service avec Marketnews ou AnswerThePublic pour découvrir les dernières tendances du marché et à trouver des idées de services en analysant les recherches des utilisateurs. Créer une présentation impressionnante avec Tome ou Beautiful AI pour créer des présentations percutantes et professionnelles en utilisant des modèles alimentés par l'IA et des fonctionnalités de conception intelligente. Prospecter avec des messages vidéo grâce à Vidscale pour créer et envoyer des messages vidéo personnalisés à vos prospects, ce qui vous permet de vous démarquer et d'établir des connexions plus authentiques. Trouver de nouvelles idées de croissance grâce à Chat GPT pour générer des idées de croissance, répondre à des questions commerciales et obtenir des conseils personnalisés. Analyser les nouvelles tendances avec Talkwalker pour surveiller et analyser les tendances, les mentions de marque et les sentiments des utilisateurs sur les réseaux sociaux et le web. Trouver des idées de contenu avec Buzzsumo pour trouver les sujets les plus populaires et les plus partagés dans votre secteur, vous permettant de créer du contenu pertinent et attrayant pour votre audience. Générer des posts sur les réseaux sociaux avec Agorapulse ou Podsqueeze pour planifier, automatiser et générer des posts pertinents et engageants sur vos plateformes de médias sociaux. Automatiser votre messagerie avec Manychat pour interagir avec vos clients, gérer les requêtes fréquentes et automatiser votre support client. 

El análisis de la competencia online es parte indispensable de la estrategia de marketing digital. Nunca deberíamos invertir nuestro tiempo y dinero en un nuevo negocio, emprendimiento o proyecto sin antes haber estudiado a nuestros competidores potenciales. Para saber cómo hacerlo, en este episodio contamos con Sebastián Pendino, consultor de marketing digital y negocios online. “Esto lo puede hacer cualquier empresa sin tanta cantidad de recursos. Estudiar la competencia no es demasiado complicado”, afirma nuestro especialista. En ese sentido, recomienda “armar un listado de nuestros competidores que conocemos, e investigar los que no conocemos, y simplemente con un programa podemos armar una columna con el listado de competidores y varias columnas con los puntos que nos interesa analizar, desde ventajas competitivas o debilidades, si son fuertes en redes sociales, si responden rápido a los comentarios, etc.”. “No hace falta tener herramientas tan sofisticadas. Podemos analizar la competencia simplemente simulando ser un comprador”, agrega. El consejo que nos da Sebastián es “entrar en las redes sociales de la competencia, y eso es ver los comentarios de los usuarios que hacen ante cualquier tipo de post”. Luego podemos entrar debajo de cada producto donde están las reviews y “ver si hay críticas y qué hay a favor, porque también podemos imitar cosas que nos gustan de nuestra competencia”, aclara nuestro especialista. “Y finalmente comprar uno de sus productos y ahí podemos ver la demora en la respuesta de soporte, si es una única persona que está respondiendo y gerenciando el negocio, etc.”, detalla. Luego de eso podemos ver la web y usabilidad, ver cómo son los carritos de compra, si hay descuentos, si hacen remarketing, y finalmente apuntar al newsletter, para saber sus novedades. Las debilidades de nuestros competidores podrían ser nuestras fortalezas competitivas, y pueden ser nuestra propuesta de valor. Con el análisis de cinco competidores es suficiente para obtener la información que necesitamos. Hay 3 cosas fundamentales para mirar la competencia. El primero es la experiencia de usuario: “Es fundamental, porque si hacemos publicidad, pero el proceso de compra no funciona, se desperdició todo ese esfuerzo”, destaca nuestro especialista. “Luego es lo que es soporte, si responden en el chat o por redes, si responden rápido y nosotros poder mejorar eso”, comenta Sebastián, y añade: “Y tercero es ver los precios y ver qué hacen en cuanto a ofertas, promociones, etc.”. Aunque no es posible saber completamente cuánto gasta nuestra competencia para atraer clientes, Sebastián nos hace algunas sugerencias. Podemos usar la herramienta Semrush, “que te permite saber qué anuncios está haciendo la competencia y podemos saber el PPC”, explica nuestro invitado. “Y también el analizador de palabras claves de Google suele darnos el PPC para tener una idea de cuánto cuesta. Pero no sabemos cuántos clics está recibiendo la competencia y ahí siempre queda la duda del valor total que está invirtiendo. Hay números que nunca vamos a saber, pero podemos tener una noción de cuánto están pagando por clic y el costo de adquisición del cliente”, asevera. Existen algunas estrategias para ser más competitivos, y una es a través de la fidelización de clientes. “Ahí podemos ir con tarjetas por puntos para otro tipo de compra posterior, podemos hacer ofertas y promociones y trabajar bien lo que son redes sociales, email marketing, y algo fundamental es crear una comunidad de gente que esté muy amarrada a nuestro producto y en eso podemos combinar nuestra marca personal con la marca comercial”, desarrolla Sebastián. “Otra cosa que puedo recomendar para ser más competitivo es educar, donde vamos explicando ventajas usos, formas de utilizar nuestros productos y servicios”, señala. Para lo que son las herramientas pagas, Sebastián hace referencia a las de “Social Listening, que analizan la reputación online”. “Podemos auditar la marca de los competidores con ciertas keywords. Y además hay herramientas que funcionan con inteligencia artificial para saber si el comentario que están leyendo es positivo, neutro o negativo, entonces tenemos resúmenes que podemos analizar y saber qué es lo que hablan tanto de nuestra marca como de los competidores. El software que más uso es Awario y hay otra conocida que se llama Mention. Para ‘espiar' a la competencia está Brand 24 y SpyFu y para ver contenido es BuzzSumo”, cierra nuestro invitado. Página web: sebastianpendino.com

How do you come up with content ideas?In this episode, I'm sharing the four places you should go first when creating your editorial calendar. I am all about quarterly content planning. It is planned enough that you aren't flying by the seat of your pants but agile enough that you can pivot if you need to.Key Learnings:1. Look for trending content.2. Built a guest posting shortlist from BuzzSumo.3. Look at forums to find out what people ask about your expertise.4. Feed the Google monster with low-hanging fruit.Website: https://www.sarahnoelblock.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahnoelblock/Newsletter: https://tinymarketing.me/newsletter-Support our Sponsors:Bonjoro - Get 15% Off - https://tinymarketing.me/bonjoroFlodesk - Get 50% Off - https://tinymarketing.me/flodeskDemio - https://tinymarketing.me/demio

https://DarkHorseSchooling.com SUMMARY: The Dark Horse Entrepreneur podcast helps entrepreneurs who are struggling with technology, procrastination, and imposter syndrome. In this episode, Tracy Brinkman discusses how to generate endless content ideas. He recommends ten websites that entrepreneurs can use to get ideas for their next piece of content. These websites include sites like BuzzSumo, Quora, and Reddit.   Tracy discusses how important it is for experts in their field to come up with content ideas, and provides a list of ten websites that can help generate an endless stream of content ideas. The websites listed include: Quora, Reddit, Google Trends, and BuzzSumo. Tracy  emphasizes that the purpose of the list is not to provide ideas that can be copied and pasted, but rather to give experts an idea of what their audience might be interested in.   The conversation discusses the website Socrates which is a search engine designed to help you learn more about your target audience. You can use Socrates to find out what topics and keywords that are already popular inside your target audience as well as common problems they're facing and questions they're asking. The information from Socrates can be used to create content that is relevant and useful to your audience.   Quora is a website where people can ask and answer questions on any topic. It is a great resource for finding content ideas, as you can easily find questions relevant to your niche or industry.   TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00   10 Websites for Endless Content Ideas 0:02:14   10 Websites to Help You Generate an Endless Stream of Content Ideas 0:03:51   How to Use Socrates to Learn About Your Target Audience 0:05:34   How to Use Quora and Answer the Public to Create an Endless Stream of Blog Post Ideas 0:07:07   Quora: A Great Way to Generate Content Ideas 0:08:28   How to Use Various Websites to Generate Content Ideas 0:13:17   How to Use Various Online Platforms to Find Content Ideas for Your Life Coaching Business 0:19:04   How to Use Google Trends to Find Out What's Being Talked About in the Coaching World 0:20:36   10 Ways to Find Ideas for Your Life Coaching Business 0:22:21   Ten Websites for an Endless Source of Content Ideas   HIGHLIGHTS This is a great way to find some visual content that is relevant to your audience to help you come up with ideas that are both interesting as well as being visually appealing.   Now in this particular example, it's actually the introduction to one of the people Twitter is trying to get me to follow. But if I click on their profile, they have a whole host of great pieces of content in here.   And as you might expect, these conversations can be a great source of content ideas to get started. Once again, type in the keyword or phrase and see what people are tweeting about.   How you can as a life coach to keep up with this example and I beat this one down the ground, could give your prospects, your clients, your customers some great ideas for motivational gifts for their loved ones on the holiday season.   Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world and it's also a great source of content ideas. Simply browse through all the various Reddits. Some of you may think of them as forums and see what people are talking about.

Join me for a great conversation with Maddy Osman, bestselling author and owner of The Blogsmith, an SEO content agency for B2B tech companies that works with clients like HubSpot, Automattic, Kinsta, and Sprout Social. Maddy Osman is the bestselling author of "Writing for Humans and Robots: The NewRules of Content Style." She's a digital native with a decade-long devotion to creating engaging, accessible, and relevant content. After teaching herself web design at age 11, she found her true passion in content creation—learning the intricacies while transitioning from technical to creative SEO marketer. Maddy's journey from freelance writer to founder and CEO of The Blogsmith yielded numerous insights to share about content creation for enterprise B2B technology brands. Her efforts earned her a spot in Semrush's and BuzzSumo's Top 100 Content Marketers and The Write Life's 100 Best Websites for Writers. She has spoken for audiences at WordCamp US, SearchCon, and Denver Startup Week. During the interview we have discussed, how to explain SEO, SERPS, SEA and all things related to creating content that engages people and robots. Enjoy the show! You can connect with Maddy via her site or LinkedIn.

Want to build faster, deeper trust with your social media followers?   Today's guest, Deb Coman, is sharing exactly how to do that! You'll want to grab a pen and take lots of notes, like I did. Deb is a content conversion strategist who empowers service-based business owners to create trust-building content that generates sales, referrals, and collaborations. Deb hosts a weekly Twitter Chat called #SocialTrust Mondays at 3pm ET and was featured by BuzzSumo in their Top 100 Content Marketers to Follow Right Now. Deb's Content Conversion Lab and private services help clients simplify their marketing with actionable steps that create alignment, consistency, and connection. Deb and I dish on:    - Strategies to find content and engage on social media  - How meaningful conversation differentiate from social engagement, and why that matters to your bottom line  - Why consistency is more important than frequency   - What erodes trust in online engagement   - How many social media platforms are enough, and how many are too much   Purchase your copy of Love Based Feminine Marketing: The Art of Growing a 6-Figure Business Without Hustle, Grind, or Force, (https://tinyurl.com/ydmzb6qz) TODAY!!! Subscribe now so you'll never miss an episode and leave us a review. It really helps us know which content is most important to you. Join our Feminine Business Magic Facebook Group (https://tinyurl.com/ygdkw7ce)  with your host, Julie Foucht. This is a community of women dedicated to connecting, supporting, and celebrating each other in growing businesses that honor their Divine Feminine while filling their bank accounts abundantly.   Resources mentioned: Purchase Love-Based Feminine Marketing (https://tinyurl.com/ydmzb6qz)    Deb Coman's Free Gift: Download and Get started with building social trust with these 21 Trust-Building Topics http://DebComan.com/TrustTopics   **Contact Deb Coman via Facebook or http://DebComan.com **   **Connect with Julie Foucht via Facebook (https://tinyurl.com/yeb82uuj) or email at https://juliefoucht.com/**

Come and listen while Host Candace Gish interviews a variety of extraordinary women, whom are working to make the world a better place! #DivasThatCare Deb Coman is a content conversion strategist who empowers service-based business owners to create trust-building content that generates sales, referrals, and collaborations. Deb hosts a weekly Twitter Chat called #SocialTrust Mondays at 3pm ET and was featured by BuzzSumo in their Top 100 Content Marketers to Follow Right Now. Deb's Content Conversion Lab and private services help clients simplify their marketing with actionable steps that create alignment, consistency, and connection. You'll find Deb on almost all social media platforms and at DebComan.com

You've got to do less, to do more. Then you've got to learn how to do nothing and like it. -- Buzzsumo --> https://buzzsumo.com Feedly --> https://feedly.com Inoreader --> http://inoreader.com Jenn Odell's talk --> https://youtu.be/dveUrpp6vs8 -- Have a question you want me to answer? --> Ask it here Join the Discord for just $3 --> Join it here Looking for my Substack? --> Read it here

In this episode of the Influence By Design podcast, Samantha engages in an interesting conversation with Deb Coman, a content conversion strategist. Deb defines social trust as the “relationship currency we earn with meaningful conversations.” For full show notes, links and transcription visit: https://samanthariley.global/podcast/378/ ABOUT DEB COMAN Deb Coman is a content conversion strategist who empowers service-based business owners to create trust-building content that generates sales, referrals, and collaborations. Deb hosts a weekly Twitter Chat called #SocialTrust Mondays at 3pm ET on Twitter and was featured by BuzzSumo in their Top 100 Content Marketers to Follow Right Now. Deb helps clients simplify their marketing with actionable steps that create alignment, consistency, and connection. WHERE TO FIND DEB COMAN Website: https://debcoman.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DebComanWriting Instagram: @DebComanWriting Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DebComanWriting LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debcoman/ CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/samriley/ Instagram: @thesamriley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samriley/

In this episode, I share 5 SEO mistakes that are preventing your site from ranking higher on Google. -=-=-=-=- Tools & resources discussed in this episode: [Blog post] 15 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid - https://www.99signals.com/common-seo-mistakes/ Semrush: Get 1-month free trial to Semrush PRO (worth $119.95) - https://www.99signals.com/go/semrush-pro-offer/ Free and Paid WordPress Caching Plugins - WP Fastest Cache, WP-Optimize, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket ($49/year) BuzzSumo - https://buzzsumo.com/ FindThatLead - https://findthatlead.com/ Mailshake - https://mailshake.com/ -=-=-=-=- BONUS RESOURCES + FREE DOWNLOADS If you're a fan of the podcast, here are some FREE online marketing resources from my blog, 99signals, to help you level up your marketing skills: The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit (https://resources.99signals.com/blogging-tools-ebook) - This eBook features 75+ marketing tools to help you blog better and boost your traffic! The Ultimate Guide to Link Building (https://resources.99signals.com/link-building-ebook) - Learn 25 powerful strategies to build high-quality backlinks, improve search engine rankings, and drive targeted traffic to your site. The Essential Guide to Link Building with Infographics (https://resources.99signals.com/infographic-backlinks-pdf) - Did you know you could build high-quality, authoritative backlinks with well-designed infographics? This PDF guide will show you how you can easily design an infographic and quickly build high-quality backlinks to supercharge your SEO. Top-rated articles at 99signals (https://www.99signals.com/best/) - This page contains a list of all the top-rated articles on my blog. It's a great place to get started if you're visiting 99signals for the first time. -=-=-=-=- Visit https://www.99signals.com for more insights on SEO, blogging, and marketing. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandeep-mallya/message

Henry Sims is a digital marketing nerd. Having started his career path in Mechanical Engineering and Kinesiology, he got frustrated with the boundaries of the traditional system. He left wanting more and not knowing what to do, which landed him in the world of entrepreneurship. He dove into the family businesses, where he found a deep interest in digital marketing. His passion and implementation of digital systems and strategies lead to further success of the family businesses. Since, he has worked with high level business coaches and consultants, politicians, local businesses, and more under his growing digital marketing agency, Zesty Owl. Use it because there are so many eyeballs there…and it's free Content changes a lot, but currently we see that a lot of educational content is very good as well as user content. We know subconsciously what an ad looks like….we skip by them. People want to know what's in it for them. If you can find the right content and the right…there often isn't a limit to how much you can post. But sometimes it can overwhelm people. They don't want to see the same kind of content over and over again. It's a balancing act and it depends on the platform Twitter…you need to put out a lot of content. YouTube you could be ok with putting out one video a week A lot of…businesses put out too many asks. one of the general basic rules is the 3:1 ratio…put out 2-3 pieces of content and then an ask. You don't want to keep asking all the time because there's no value in that When people don't really want to define their message and they'd rather just try and reach a lot of people, then you're diluting your message which means for those people that do matter to your business, you're giving them diluted content. So instead of trying to reach the masses…it's better to really define your message and create that content that is geared towards those people that are right for your business because they will see that and it will impact them far more than your diluted content meant for everyone. Likes is that little button we push…the engagement can be anything…see more, sharing it, commenting on it, it could be clicking the user name to see your profile. Those are all engagements. Don't care too much if they like it….if they are engaging with it, that's a good sign that it's grabbing someone's attention. It's more of a back end advertising metric that we can see Not everyone likes posts. The percentage of people that actually do like posts is low….knowing that people are clicking around on it on the back end is really valuable to know. And you can see that with your ads. If you're playing a strictly organic game, then you definitely want to drive up the comments and the shares…those are strong. A like is a very easy thing to do, putting a comment takes more time….the platforms want to make sure that gets seen by more people. Find what kind of content your audience resonates with and that's just a constant testing process. Buzzsumo  Social media is a long term game.  They build this trust over time and that gets them to reach out and get involved more. You want to be able to show who you are as well as what you do and that gives the viewers this kind of connection, some way that they can relate and connect with you and build trust with you. I like posts with photos. Photos are engaging and they help tell more than just text and they help portray an emotion differently than text does. It also, from just a pure advertising standpoint, it takes up more space i the feed so as you're scrolling through you have more chance of grabbing someone's attention by having a photo there instead of just text. I like to see new content (images) frequently but it depends on budgets and audience sizes. If your audience is very small…its going to be a lot easier and quicker to...

Affiliate marketing has been a huge source of passive income for me ever since I started blogging in 2015. It's because of affiliate marketing that I generate a steady side income of over $10,000 a month. So I wanted to do an episode on affiliate marketing, where I wanted to share some of the things I've learned so far. Then I realized a few months back I did an interview with Jules Dan for his podcast, Storytelling Secrets. In that episode, I shared my experience with affiliate marketing, the mistakes I committed while starting out, and shared a few actionable tips and tricks for affiliate marketing beginners. So I thought it'd be a great idea to publish my full interview with Jules Dan for this episode. (with his permission of course) This interview you're about to hear is from episode 46 of Storytelling Secrets. In this interview, I share everything I know about affiliate marketing. So if you'd like to dabble in affiliate marketing and would like to learn the secrets that will allow you to earn a steady stream of passive income each month, this episode is for you. Here are a few things this episode covers: Mistakes you should avoid in affiliate marketing How to incorporate storytelling in affiliate marketing 3 best affiliate marketing tools Tips to stand out in affiliate marketing 3 books I'd recommend to affiliate marketing beginners I hope you find the episode useful. -=-=-=-=- Resources discussed in the episode: Jules Dan's podcast (Storytelling Secrets) - https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/storytelling-secrets-jules-dan-uzqlxKrb2Ng/ 3 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools Thirsty Affiliates - https://thirstyaffiliates.com/ OptinMonster - https://optinmonster.com/ BuzzSumo - https://buzzsumo.com/ -=-=-=-=- BONUS RESOURCES + FREE DOWNLOADS If you're a fan of the podcast, here are some FREE online marketing resources from my blog, 99signals, to help you level up your marketing skills: The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit (https://resources.99signals.com/blogging-tools-ebook) - This eBook features 75+ marketing tools to help you blog better and boost your traffic! Top-rated articles at 99signals (https://www.99signals.com/best/) - This page contains a list of all the top-rated articles on my blog. It's a great place to get started if you're visiting 99signals for the first time. More Resources for Entrepreneurs: 75+ Best Books for Entrepreneurs - https://www.99signals.com/best-books-for-entrepreneurs/ 10 Best YouTube Channels for Entrepreneurs - https://www.99signals.com/best-youtube-channels-entrepreneurs/ 10 Best TV Shows for Entrepreneurs - https://www.99signals.com/best-tv-shows-entrepreneurs/ -=-=-=-=- Visit https://www.99signals.com for more insights on SEO, blogging, and marketing. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandeep-mallya/message

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast AudienceQuestions are great. More and more, users are typing full questions into Google, rather than single words or phrases. Google can see this, and loves it when you answer them directly. If it's obvious what you're answering, they'll direct ever more users to your answers. On top of that, when you think in questions, you tend to solve a real problem. Solve someone's problem and they'll be a loyal listener for life! That's what powers real audience growth. So, where do we find these questions?“Answer the Public” is a great resource for this. It's a website which is similar, in a way, to the keyword tool discussed earlier, but it's designed to surface every possible question around a keyword or keyphrase. Type in your keyword - eg. podcasting - and you'll see a huge list of questions. You'll see them grouped by type - why? what? Who? - and you can refine it along the way. Wait till you see the questions that you never even considered!Next, let's use social media, and Twitter in particular, to see what people are asking, right now! The technique is simple: type in your keyword AND a ? or a question word. This prompts twitter to surface all tweets that ask a question related to your topic. Eg. Podcast AND ?meditation AND howNutrition AND whatAnother great resource is Quora, an entire website of questions! Type in your topic, or related keywords, and see what questions pop up.Finally, try Buzzsumo to see what type of content is really resonating with your niche right now. Type in your keywords and it'll surface the most shared content in your niche. This should give you ideas on what people are really connecting with right now. Task List: Pick at least one of the above tools and go in deep on it.Try all your topic or keyword variations and see if you can write down at least 10 of the most common questions people are asking.Use these as your next set of podcast topics and you'll increase your search visibility by a huge amount.Bonus points: use the Google keyword tool from above to check search volume and prioritise your questionsCheck out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast AudienceSupport the show (https://pod.academy)

Steve Rayson is a serial entrepreneur that loves building and selling companies before they get too big. His last business he sold for $20 million when it had only 6 staff and was making a turnover of $6 million and had a net profit of $3 million a year. He originally worked in management consulting for KPMG and Ernst & Young before becoming a serial entrepreneur.  He went on a course to learn about the Internet in the 1980's and saw the opportunity to start an online education company. That was Kineo (an e-learning company). Then he started Buzzsumo with 2 developers in an industry he knew nothing about and bootstrapped the startup with just a few thousand dollars. Steve has set up, grown and sold three companies including: Kineo and BuzzSumo, a social media data company.  He is an entrepreneur passionate about startup businesses and growing them without VC or institutional investment.    What you will learn: Why giving away your knowledge for free works  How webinars scale your time and reach How to work with influencers to get global attention Why building a business today is much faster and cheaper in a digital world  How to grow a business with the freemium model Why you need to build a quality product fast and keep innovating to stay ahead of the competition Discover the advantages of selling a software product vs selling a services business   Notes: These are for my information and not to be used in the post or iTunes     Tools Satismeter.com that measured NPS (Net promoter scores)  Slack    “Speed to value” - How long do I have to use this product before I get value out of it?  Books    Love is the Killer App Crossing the Chasm Lean Startup Managing the professional Services Firm      Takeaways The importance of understanding that business is a team sport. The importance of persistence (posting to 300 forums) Why paying double the money for one good developer is better than getting 10 average developers and worth more than 10 marketers. The importance of a high energy team The importance of investing in yourself 

John talks to Cheryl Clemons (LearnerLab, StoryTagger) and Steve Rayson (Kineo, Buzzsumo, Anders Pink) to get insights about how learning people can use marketing techniques to help engage learners. They also address the thorny question of whether and to what extent it makes sense for learning people to think like marketers.   TOPICS 01:25 Should you think like a marketer? 10:04 User-generated content (UGC) 13:40 Influencer marketing 16:46 Brand 24:50 Product design 28:24 AI 36:58 Evaluation   Steve mentions a tool called Satismeter used for collecting Net Promoter feedback - https://www.satismeter.com

On one hand, our Marketing RV hosts think the internet should be completely free from government regulation. Actually, that's the only hand that matters to both Ranalli and Volpe. They do recognize, however, that none are immune from making stupid decisions based on influencers. So maybe the solution is for individuals to be aware of the potential fraud in cyberspace and any space, and to do some homework before acting or reacting. Whether it's a purchase, a diet trend, trying a new exercise, or even commenting on a post, pause and think about the consequences. Sure, that's easier said than done but the alternative is a nanny state, and who wants that? Social media influencers is the topic of this podcast. One story our food-enthusiast hosts did not cover was the Fyre that burned a lot of young people expecting a luxury vacation and music festival.   Fyre may have singed the entire influencer industry, or at the very least created permanent smoke damage. Click here to read about the scandal involving a remote tropical island, models, and much anticipated music festival. If you're not familiar with the story, check out Vanity.     HIGHLIGHTS 01:00   Gene auditions for WKRP 01:15   Gene reveals a secret: ha has no hair! 04:30   16 UK social media influencers agree to disclose they are paid sponsors see who they are here. Do you know any of these 16? Lorraine knew none; Gene knew one. Here's an update to that story: 07:17   Should celebs disclose they are being paid to endorse products? Gene's use of UFC's Joe Rogan is just an example. He's still a fan! 13:20   “This is where Twitter stepped out of their space.”   14:25   Is Twitter dead? 17:55   Lorraine contends Mac and Microsoft choose to not get along. 19:00   Gene and Lorraine contend that government regulation will ruin the internet.      20:15   Gene admits to being lost without GPS. Find out where he goes to recalculate his route. 21:30   Gene and Lorraine are afraid of autonomous vehicles. 22:15   Two teens stumped by rotary phone challenge. Watch it here. 25:15   According to Buzzsumo, LinkedIn is the Heavyweight in B2B Content Marketing. 28:00   Gag me! Are we listening to Ranalli & Volpe or those polite little cartoon chipmunks Chip & Dale? 28:40   When did Lorraine become the grammar police?

Multiple streams of income bring more value to your business. One stream of income people often forget about is email marketing. Today's guest Ken Mahar, founder of Email Broadcast, has been in the sales and email marketing arena for many years. Business owners nowadays are quick to find an expert in other media marketing channels, but when it comes to email marketing, they often implement it unprofessionally, ignoring the potential for campaigns to generate income. Ken's company sets about optimizing your email marketing strategies by carefully preparing them months ahead and sticking with them, therefore nurturing that ongoing relationship with the buyer. Email marketing is the dinosaur of digital marketing tactics, yet remains one of the best. Ken has over 18 years of email marketing experience, going back almost to the dawn of the online space. Ken's experience, along with the expertise of his team, helps clients launch and maintain successful email marketing campaigns. Today he's sharing some of the mistakes people make and valuable ways to avoid those mistakes. Episode Highlights: Common mistakes people often commit with their email marketing strategies. What content planning takes place between the firm and a client before starting a campaign. How Ken helps clients bring a lead through the funnel. How often he refines the client's automation processes and tracks the campaign's performance. The importance of segmenting your audience. How personalization is important – to a degree. Tips for learning how to implement the technical side of an email campaign. Why outsourcing the email marketing side of your business can pay off. The importance of grabbing that email address! Why business should always offer something that people want (and not something they don't). Transcription: Joe: Multiple streams of income bring more value, right Mark? Mark: Absolutely. Joe: All right. One stream of income so many people forget about because it's hard, you have to learn things and it seems so old school is email marketing. But I understand you just had Ken from Email Broadcast on the podcast and he talked a lot about the benefits of email marketing. Mark: Yeah. One of the things he started out with in the call which I find to be just really poignant to so many entrepreneurs is we are really quick to hire people that are specialists in Facebook marketing or AdWords or different paid media but when it comes to email marketing a lot of us just say I'll take care of it. And then we make it like this after thought, right? It's kind of out there or is like okay we're going to send out a couple of broadcasts e-mails. In fact, the number of people I talked to that own businesses and we talk about their different marketing mix they tell me oh yeah you know if we would be using our email list that would be a huge opportunity for growth but we just haven't really done that yet. It's staggering the number of people that are doing this. And I think the reason why we are not necessarily using our email lists the way we should is because it's actually kind of tough to do. It's easy to send out a broadcast to our list of potential clients or customers that are signed up for email notifications. But it's really hard to actually sit down and say okay I'm going to segment that list. I'm going to set up automation sequences. I'm going to set up follow up sequences to these people. And I'm actually going to be intelligent about how I'm emailing my list. And so much of us just kind of give it this kind of head nod of like okay we're doing something with our email but it's not really optimized. And Ken from EmailBroadcast.com, that's what his group does entirely. They help people set up an email automation sequence, email broadcast like editorial calendar months in advance so that you're intelligently talking to your customers and your newsletter subscribers in a way that could actually nurture those relationships. One of the tidbits that he gave me which I absolutely loved was this idea of going to a conference. How many of us collect just dozens of contact cards at conferences and then what would we do with those? Maybe we send out an email after … maybe; most of us don't, saying it was nice to meet you but what Ken does is he takes all of those and he drops them into a sequence with his email system. And so we talked a lot about these ways that we can look at email marketing in probably a more sophisticated way than most of us are doing. And if nothing else this is a pitch to saying you have an email list but you probably aren't using it the right way. And so I thought it'd be good to have him on since this is all his firm does to talk about some of the mistakes that they see in how entrepreneurs are running their email lists and what we can do to start to actually implement a few changes today and actually start utilizing that email list more appropriately. Joe: Yeah, I think people that are running their own internet businesses or buying one and wanting to grow it should seriously look at this. You know I've probably done a thousand valuations over the last six years and there are only a few … a tiny little handful, a fraction of a percent of people that focus on that and it makes a difference. Michael Jackness is one of them and he now travels around the country, actually sometimes the world giving presentations on his email marketing campaign that he does for one of his coloring books. It really is something that you can and should do and the customers actually when it's done right they appreciate it. When it's done wrong it's a problem. We are imperfect ourselves in this regard Mark. I think you've sent out some emails in the last few weeks where I get it and it says that it's … it's to me, to joe@quietlightbrokerage and still says it's dangerous, right? So doing it on your own even though it's coming from Quiet Light to a Quiet Light email address stuff like that can still happen so I think doing it on your own is … it's a gamble. So hiring somebody like Ken unless you've got the resources to really study it up and do it is a pretty smart idea. Mark: Yeah I mean just to bring it up into different sections; you have the technical side which is what we were running into. I had to setup the SPF and the DKIM records- Joe: What? Mark: Yeah right. Joe: I'm so glad you do that and not me. Mark: Exactly. So we had to go there but then you look at okay you have an email list but you don't just treat it as one big blob of people that you're talking to. You need to actually set up and start to segment that list. And then how are you actually interacting with these people. These things multiply. So if you segment your list into four segments which isn't that much. And then you would consider okay these four segments are going to get distinct emails and there's going to be an eight email sequence between this four segments. Now you have to write 32 emails in order to get all of these sequences in place. And then you have to measure and go back and do these and continually improve. It's a lot of work and honestly the fact that we're doing a lot of this on our own as entrepreneurs, is it a good idea? Maybe … maybe not; maybe it's the time to hire somebody out but I think if nothing else think about it. Think about what you're doing and how you're using your email list. Are you treating this audience as one big blob of people and sending them all the same message? If so you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Joe: I agree. If you can get a 2 or 3% lift in your discretionary earnings because of email marketing as long as it's a profitable lift; it's important. That adds a lot of value to your company. Jackness I believe you a little 50% of his revenue for his website comes from his email marketing campaign so that's something serious to consider for people that have the right type of product. So let's go to it, let's see what Ken has to say. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: All right Ken thanks so much for having me. This is Ken Mahar. Did I pronounce that right Ken? Ken: Yup. Mark: Awesome. Thanks for joining me. You come from EmailBroadcast.com so this is going to be an episode really focusing on email habits, some of the mistakes people make with email marketing, and we'll also wrap into this episode hopefully things that maybe what you should do from sell side to be able to prepare for selling your business and making sure that that part of the business has good opportunity and is well set up. But let's start out real quick, Ken, if you can provide everyone just a background or a bio on you. Ken: How much time do we have? I'll try to keep it short I guess. I'm Ken Mahar. I'm the founder and CEO of Email Broadcast. I've been running this company for 18 years so back before email marketing was really even a thing was when I got started. I actually have a sales background and I used email marketing for my own sales efforts. I found it to be tremendously helpful and successful. Itched it to some other businesses that I had worked for before, I'm saying you should guys really do this and then they're like we don't know how to do it so I started serving them. So yeah my background in sales is everything from retail to business to business. And then I got into inside sales for a high tech firm, I took over a territory. It was 11 states. We sold direct and through the channel. So I've kind of done everything there is in the sales arena. And the reason that I am still running Email Broadcast is because I found that email marketing is one of the best channels to impact sales. And so I kind of combined my expertise in the sales arena along with delivering email marketing from my entire team. We have the technical aspect; the writer's, the operations and all that stuff and then I do my part on the sales and the strategy part. So I guess that's a quick background on me. Mark: You've had the company for 18 years? Ken: Yeah. Mark: Holy cow man that's ancient in the world of internet businesses. You've seen a lot. Ken: Yeah. In fact I thought about naming my business Constant Contact or they ever existed and I just thought that sounds a little too aggressive so I didn't do that. But Email Broadcast is a pretty good name. Mark: Constant Contact aka we're always going to be in your inbox is really really what we're saying. Ken: Exactly. Mark: All right; pretty cool. You've seen a lot, 18 years is a long time. I've been online for about 20 years myself … actually, 2018; 20 years. I've been online for 20 years. I started my first site back in 1998 so that's a really long time; cool. All right, email marketing; there is a lot that goes on with email marketing and I want to get from you some of the common mistakes that you see people do with email marketing. Everybody knows that you should be doing it. I know here at Quiet Light we recommend pretty heavily that people establish a good list and use this as a channel to acquire more customers. Primarily because out of all the things, all the customer acquisition channels that are available out there email is one of the only ones that you actually own and have the ability to control. Google you can't control. AdWords you can't control. Facebook you can't control. Amazon you definitely can't control. Email you can, so let's sort out some of the common mistakes that you see people make with their email marketing strategies. Ken: Sure. Yeah, I think strategy is a good place to start. I think the big picture that I see people make mistakes around is thinking that email is about them. And what I mean by that is they look at email as just another channel for them to promote and to use their sales messages. When in my mind email is more of a relationship builder and a two way communication channel. And so I see a lot of people these people do a lot of mistakes made … in a strategy where people say okay let's talk about what we want to do in our next sale and our next promotion and us, us, us, us, us, and it just becomes a channel for commercials. And if you think about it email is a media channel. And in media channels you should have content that people are interested and excited to hear; whether it's educational or inspirational or whatever. And then you might have a commercial message every now and then. But if you are only commercials how long would you listen to that radio station? And people treat their email like that. They just promote, promote, promote, and they don't add any value to their audience's lives. So one of the big paradigm shifts that our clients go through is to realize this isn't about you, this is about your audience. What do they want to learn? What are they into? What inspires them and to get them to think in that perspective. So I think that's a pretty big mistake. What else? I think the second biggest strategy mistake I see is that people think that copy writing is email marketing. And they say oh yeah we need to get an email out, we haven't had one for a while. Let's get one out today and let's make it really good. And that's just a terrible, terrible strategy because the chances you'd be coming up with a great idea, creating great, well written, well researched content; actually having something so valuable to your audience that they're willing to forward it to someone … you know one of their friends, getting your … making sure that every single link works, making sure that it's grammatically perfect all like in 24 hours is just a recipe for disaster. So we look at it and go you should be planning this stuff out weeks or months ahead. My team is already done with November and we're scheduling December messages right now. And we've been working on the November stuff for a while already. So planning ahead and having like an overarching strategy is a big mistake that people make. Mark: Let me go back actually to your first point. Mark: Yeah. Mark: We had Mike Jackness on the podcast several episodes ago and he talked a little bit about their email marketing that they do. They see crazy open rates of 30% plus on their stuff and they're emailing their members almost every single day. So it's a pretty heavy and intense email marketing strategy but really the key behind what he's doing really isn't a surprise. And he's trying to offer ridiculous value with every single email so that people look forward to it. And your point about making it all about you, there's a great BuzzSumo article where they analyzed 100 million headlines to see what got shared the most. I love this blog post. I actually go to it once every few months just to revisit some of the concepts in this. But one of the big things that they do there and I found that these headlines is that headlines that get shared, the headlines they get opened, the emails that get opened are the ones that promise something to the user. Who is the person that's actually opening this? Is there a promise in that headline? And when you decide with this headline I'm going to promise something to the user that's a much better reason to open it up. Nobody really cares about your big news for the day all that much but they do care about what they're going to get if they're going to open that email. Ken: Yeah, it's funny when people put on their email marketing hat they're like … they disconnect from their own mind about what do I want in my own inbox, right? Mark: Right. Ken: It's something that I would really appreciate in value and go wow that was really good. And in fact, that's kind of our litmus test where we ask ourselves is this so good that you would forward it to a friend? And if that's a yes then you're probably on the right track. Mark: Right, so you got to start with that value prop, make it into something about the other person and let your subscriber know what are you going to get from this is email. If you take the time to open it if you're going to take the time to click it if there's a link in there you've got to get something in return and you got to make that promise up front. I'm sorry to step all over what you're saying. Ken: No, it's okay, and I think … and this is a really important point. So it's you take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuk's book right? Jab, jab, jab, right hook. Of course you're doing email because you have a strategy in mind and the strategy is you want a return on your investment right? But you need to think about the ratio, and 3:1 is a good ratio. Do you give, give, give between each ask or are you ask, ask, ask, ask, ask and maybe give once in a while, right? Mark: Right. Let's talk about that strategy of you guys just finished November and for a reference, for people that … because this probably won't actually air until maybe first day of November, it's October 25th today. So we're not even done with October. You guys have finished out your planning for your clients all the way through November. When you're planning that out are you looking at sort of like this rhythm to the emails as far as … like you said give, give, give, sell, give, give, give, ask, or is it also kind of moving along with holidays? What sort of planning are you doing on behalf of your customers to plan that far out in advance? Ken: Right. Yeah, so that actually opens up another great strategy idea that I think people blow it on. One of the first things we do when we onboard a client is we come up with … in fact I got a meeting in about an hour on this where we come up with 50 to 100 different content ideas before we even get this campaign started. So we have this giant treasure trove of content ideas. Once we learned about the audience we think we know who they are. We think about what would be important to them. And we come up with a lot of ideas. Some of them are just plain nuts but we document everything; we put it in a document. And so as we work with our clients, the November emails aren't just planned, they're actually planned, executed and already scheduled. So they're in the can just waiting for the days to tick by until they get released. So we actually started working in November last month. So yeah probably another big mistake that people make beyond if like not thinking of content ideas ahead is not planning for email work. And it is weird people will just kind of go oh dude I tried to sneak it in between something else because that is blocking out real time and saying this is an important part of my business, it's a huge channel for me. I've got to schedule time for this and they continuously under estimate how long it takes to write brilliant copy, have a copy edited, come up with great images, get it scheduled, think about how they can enhance it. And it's one of those things that if you put it aside for a second and then you come back to it you have fresh new ideas, a fresh perspective and you can always make it a little bit better. So scheduling that time, getting on a rhythm, and doing it ahead of time is big paradigm shift for a lot of people. Mark: Yeah let me ask you, I don't want to divert too much from kind of the thread we have going here but in the world of email marketing, we have a couple of different concepts as far as when people receive emails. Well if you start off at the very first contact with somebody who just joins your email list they might automatically be put into a campaign where they're going to get different emails at certain times versus your … maybe your entire block of subscribers where you might just be sending out broadcast to those subscribers on a regular basis. I want to ask you a little bit about that. How much emphasis do you like to put on one versus the other? In other words if I come to EmailBroadcast.com and you have a lead magnet there and downloadable resource or something else, how long are you going to put me in a pre-defined process where you're going to lead me through an arc and trying I guess funnel marketing right here but bringing you down that funnel to a certain point versus taking me out of that campaign where I've got this ready written emails that everybody else has received earlier and now I'm in your general kind of flow into your general broadcasts. Ken: Yeah well, I'll speak to exactly what's happening right now on our campaign. So we have a year-long champion going on right now that is a story format. We have some brilliant writers … in fact actual published and award winning authors and so we've tapped that and we've written out a fictional story about a guy who owns an RV lot and has a huge competitor move into town and is trying to figure out how to handle it with his marketing. And so right now when you sign up on our email list we kind of thought of it as kind of a Netflix situation where you binge on episodes until you get caught up. So right now when you sign up you get an email from us once a week until you're caught up and then we do a monthly broadcast. So I'm not sure that completely answers your question but it still kind of depends on when you join but I think we're in episode eight or nine right now. So for seven weeks in a row, you would get the next chapter of the story and then once you're caught up it comes out monthly. Mark: Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like again when you're planning out your broadcast schedule here for November and December as you go get into those months you really need to think about the fact the person that's been with you now through that time they've already been through that. In this case a year-long journey, that's pretty significant and they've already had that exposure to your company. And so you're going to write and create that general broadcast strategy with that in mind that these are not people completely new to who you are. Ken: Right and then what we've done is we did have an interruption in the story, like a commercial interruption like the old school radio shows or something. But we had a message on like July that was like hey here are a couple of things you might think about and there were something promotional. There was a blog post. There was a different value ad but it was just kind of a little interruption in the normal sequence. So if you think about it we actually planned … the emails that are going out on November and December we planned last year; last fall when we outlined our storyline and figured out what chapters were going to go when. And so right now we're working on our 2019 campaign which is going to be all different. We've been working on it for a month and a half or so and we're kind of finalizing our strategy around that and so we hit the ground running in January. Mark: Yeah so much of marketing and I don't think really matters what the format is whether it's AdWords or Amazon Ads or email marketing, so much marketing seems to be this idea of measuring, refining, repeating. So you're going back and you're taking a look at what worked, what didn't work, you're testing things against each other. How often is your team if you have a client on board and you've drafted this this kind of initial sequence that people are going to get when they enter into one of the many different funnels that you have set up. How often are you going back and refining that for them? Ken: Well, we look at it monthly. It's part of our process where … it's on our checklist to go and review the automation for instance. So if we've built an onboarding series or a welcome series for a client we look at it monthly and we kind of track the numbers and we start and we look at it. If it's not performing to our expectations then we'll think about tweaking it. And so we'll dig in in the messages and think okay what are people on the activity that we are getting what are people most interested in? Which of these has the best open rate? What clicks are … what things are people clicking on and maybe we should refine the message a little bit. So we look at it once a month. There's a danger at looking at it too much. It's like looking at your stocks every single two hour period, things go up and down and so you want to avoid the small sample bias and look at it over time but we look at it monthly. Mark: Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the mistakes people make. I'm going to throw one in and then you tell me if I'm spot on or if I'm off base here. I would say one mistake that I see is people taking a one size fits all approach to their email list. So everybody gets the exact same emails regardless where they came from. Ken: Yeah and a good example of that is we are on boarding a new client in the cosmetic medicine practice which serves 90% females but we are … and so part of our strategy is that we're going to ask people to identify their gender when they sign up for our email list. And if they do say that they're male we're going to have a completely different first message for them making them feel very welcomed as a man in what is otherwise a woman dominated consumer market. And we think that's going to be a big deal. It's going to grow their practice through male audience without much effort at all. So yeah not segmenting your audiences is … you're right it's another big mistake. People think oh I'm just going to broadcast to everybody. Okay well, there are certain messages that are good for that and that maybe most of the time but really you should be thinking about your email lists thinking about what segments can I target. For instance, another example we have a large furniture retailer in Louisiana, Arkansas in Texas and we came up with this idea that we should target the people who have their private label credit card. And we also identified another sub market of people who are on their … so private label credit card is for people with pretty good credit and then they also have a kind of a buy here pay here market. So we get a different message to each of those segments. It turned out combined they were only 7.8% of the list but in one message to each of them we ended up driving $430,000 in new sales for the weekend for just that one segment. So by targeting a message just specifically to them with a specific offer that was really relevant; that we had huge response. Mark: That personalization is a huge issue right now. I saw one thing that was really cool. It was somebody who is qualifying their email subscribers before they signed up through a quiz. And the quiz was kind of fun and it was actually in the cosmetics field. So it was what's the shape of your face? And it just had cartoon characters. It wasn't offensive or anything like that. What's the shape of your face? What's the tone of your skin? And they went through probably about six, seven questions but then you were able to break out into this really cool like super segmented this is a female with this skin tone with this shape of face with this size of eyes this sort of thing and you can really cater the messaging. And this was more than … they were doing email marketing but also some other recommendations that is super super cool. Ken: Yeah, the danger around that … well, not the danger but the recommendation is don't ask for anything you're not actually going to use. So a couple of things around like I see a blast for last name in their email sign up forms and I think that's like one step too far of getting a little too personal a little too quickly off the bat. And unless you'd actually have a use for somebody's last name why are you asking for it? Even … but also people take that in the wrong direction as they say here sign up for our email list and all they ask for is the email address. Okay well, that's not enough, right? It's like at least get their first name because if you don't you're giving up on a huge personalization opportunity with putting peoples name in the subject line and addressing them by name and actually creating a relationship. When you're saying give me your email address what you're really saying is I'm going to blast you like I do everybody else on my list and I don't really care who you are or anything about you. So there's a check for your listeners if you're only collecting email address you're doing it wrong. Mark: Yeah and I'm going to make a plea here as well, this is turning into my great show here but one of the things I can't stand with email marketers when they're … when I get on a list is the hey buddy buddy sort of approach that comes without me even knowing who you are. Like there's a point where you got one of the so corporate and stiff to the point where it just feels stale and separate. But if you come in and pretend like we went to college together that's equally off putting to me. I want to have somewhere in the middle where I can get to know you a little bit and again kind of test out to see do you have value to offer. But I guess that's where that copywriter comes in, having a copywriter who's done thousands of these emails before. Ken: Yeah, and I would actually say that I would rather somebody do that if that's really their authentic voice and that's really who they are where they want to be buddies with you and if you're not ready for that then fine get the hell off my list. I think that's a better approach than trying to please everybody. You know I'd dig into authenticity around email marketing, it's one of the things that we really drive home with our clients is to say I want people to know who you really are not who you're pretending to be. So if you've only got six people on your team let's celebrate that. You're feisty and small and responsive and adaptive versus trying to pretend like you're some mega-corporation. But yeah everybody's different and you have to realize that. So really you should concentrate on attracting the people that you want to attract. Mark: Yeah. Ken: So if that's important to somebody that they'd be buddies with you and you didn't like that then maybe they did themselves a favor by not winning your business; who knows. Mark: Yeah, absolutely the authenticity is definite. I see sometimes with these people also lack of authenticity trying to win me over by being a little hokey. But if it is authentic to me then well so be it. The rest of the people buy me dinner first. So I want to shift gears really heavily here because I want to get to this before our time is up and I want to talk about the technical side of this. Ken: Yeah. Mark: This is just the hairy issue. There's a lot of systems out there. We use drip marketing at Quiet Light Brokerage. I like the system but we also have an external CRM which means we need to get these two things to talk to each other. What tips would you have for people on that technical side? I know that's really an open ended question but I'm going to have to throw it in your part as far as just the tips of working with the technical side. How much effort should people be putting into that sort of that technical side setup? Ken: Yeah, this will tie back into the strategy question too. One of the most under-utilized aspects of email marketing is the use of automation. When you can define what your sales process is and know where people are falling out of your funnel or use an automation series to take people from not step A to step B but from step D to step E. You know there are all kinds of opportunities to use email to kind of leverage your time. Basically having the platform do what you would do if you had a million hours in the day and all you did was write emails all day. Setting up the platform to do that is important. But you're right that does take some technical integration stuff. So my tips, I would say work with the bigger players in the market is probably a good tip because they've been around for a while. They likely have the integrations for some of the bigger … so if you're trying to choose an email marking platform and a CRM go … I wouldn't go with a guy that's brand new yesterday because he probably doesn't have a very well developed API and it's not a plug and play situation. So if you're trying to save yourself some headaches go with bigger players in the market that have been established that have an API that already potentially connect. Look at the integration possibilities. But I'd also say that it's generally worth it, right? There may be some pain involved in trying to figure it out but don't give up. Get help, hire somebody and figure out how to get those things integrated because it can really make a big difference for you. You mentioned the CRM right? So we've got ours dialed in so I can fill out a single form and it populates both my email marketing to start a drip series but it also sends that exact same data to my CRM to save me from double entry. So yeah integration is the key. There is a lot to integrate; getting your sign up forms cracked on your website, getting the email thing dialed in, connecting your CRM. We're going to be connecting in a medical records system for this latest client that we did and getting an API expert on that and we have that in house so we do not have that problem but it's important. Mark: Yeah, so when we get into the actual set up of these things … I have another company that I own, I know those folks that listen regularly probably know about it but we use a lot of automation on our email side there. And even with that I mean you talked about the multiplying effect here, right? Let's say that what you are going to segment your audience into just three different segments and then you're going to set up automation sequences with a series of 10 emails in each. Well now you're writing out 30 different emails with different email copy and on top of that you have your broadcast emails that are going to go out. And on top that may be some other campaigns and you have to try to make sure that these things don't duplicate where people are receiving multiple emails because they're accidentally subscribed to two different campaigns within our system and then figuring out how to make all the technology work together. So this is the part where I'm going to just make this quick pitch for the stuff that you guys do over at EmailBroadcast.com which is you guys do all of this. You are the full service sort of provider for this email automation of marketing right? Ken: Yeah, I have a team of people and I think that's the key thing because each of my team members is a specialist. So I have an engineer that thinks in bits and bytes. I have copywriters. I have a sales strategist which is me. I have an operations manager to help keep things on track and then an account coordinator. We designated an account coordinator for each account so they truly understand who our client is, what their business is, what their goals are, what they're trying to accomplish, and can really feel like a member of their team. So in effect, we are an email marketing department. Imagine a Fortune500 firm that had an entire department to handle email marketing. Well, we are that but for much smaller businesses who can get us for the cost of a part time employee. So yeah we handle everything from strategy to the copy writing, to the design, to the engineering, the mobile optimization, integrating it with the CRM, integrating it with medical record systems, setting up all the automation. Making sure things aren't overlapping and you have people getting multiple stuff and somebody looking at it; somebody thinking about your campaign a month in advance. Thinking about the seasonal stuff like Q4 for us is heavy so we've been thinking about Q4 since July about how we're going to get ready, which of our clients are going to want to do extra messages. That's the value we add. We're the people that you wish you had an entire department … and I think this is a different … I think this is an important point because some people go okay great this email something I'm going to outsource and I'm going to look for that one guy. Well, I've been doing this for 18 years and I'm not even that one guy. I'm not … I can't be the best copywriter, the greatest sales strategist, the engineer to integrate everything, the operations manager to get it all done. I mean maybe that person is out there but you're certainly not going to get them for a song. And so I think dividing the labor … you know divide and conquer and having each person in a team that's used to working together is a great solution. And a lot of people don't realize that this kind of solution is out there. They think that email marketing is something they have to do on their own even though they struggle. They've written the messages a bit inconsistent, the branding is not where they like it, they're doing stuff last minute, they know they're abusing their audience's trust, they have low engagement, they're like hell and they know there weren't any other options. So we are out there. Mark: Yeah, fantastic. Regardless of whether or not somebody is going to use an outsource solution like what you guys offer which would be like an outsourced email department as you said it is something that I think people need to really pay attention to that aspect of the business. And you're right, I look at a lot of businesses … I look at the health of a lot of businesses and see where they're putting their time and efforts. And sometimes I see this really just beautifully built out Facebook campaigns, this really beautifully optimized Ad-words accounts, but it's only been on a rare occasion where I see that applied in the email world. And when I do see it applied though it tends to be sort of a cash machine, right? All these other customer acquisition strategies are able to just funnel in there. And once they funnel in there those people are in because the systems are set up and ready to go. It does take time to plan. It does take time to refine. It does take time to go back there but this can be one of the biggest customer acquisition channels for pretty much any business that's out there. So I think the work that you guys are doing is awesome. I love some of the tips that you had in there. I know that there are a lot more tips that we didn't cover. I mean on one of our conversations you talked about hey what are you doing with the conference cards that you get? Do you actually follow up with them and is it just kind of one quick follow up or do you drop them into a sequence of some sort where they end up getting a series of emails; that's brilliant. There you go, look at that you- Ken: I just attended a conference so I'm holding up a fan of contacts that I have and I … you know we walk or talk. I put these people into a segment in our email list and we've already emailed them twice which is more than anybody else who went to that conference has done. We have a third message already scheduled so yeah that and we advise people about their offline activities. Like we have customers … I had this customer one time, he literally interrupted my … our phone call to take a call. I only heard his part of the conversation. He sat there for five minutes helping this person out, they sell this rooftop tent deals and I'm like how many conversations like that do you have a day and he's like I don't know 15, 20. I go how many people are you getting emails from? Zero. I'm like wow okay huge opportunity for you. Ask for their email address after you just spent five minutes helping somebody. They're going to give it to you. Put them on your list and now you've got a chance to market to them and then they'll buy a tent. So yeah there's a lot to email marketing and I hope your audience takes it to heart and really goes after it and figures out how can I add value? How can I make this amazing? And don't worry about the immediate payoff. Trust me it'll it will pay off in the end. What can I offer people that come to my website to actually get on my email list? If you're saying sign up for my email okay you need to rethink that. What value is there? People don't know what your email is. They probably haven't defined how often it goes out. They don't know what they're going to get in return and so sign up for our newsletter you know who wants to do that? But if you can give me the top five tips in selling my business in the next year oh okay yeah that's why I came to your website, that's what I want to know about. So that's the kind of thing you need to offer. Mark: Awesome so if people have questions about this or just want to bounce ideas off with you how can they reach you? Ken: Yeah, ken@emailbroadcast.com the phone number is 805-316-3201. And if you want a little branding tip or just have some fun call that number just to listen to our auto-responder. It's pretty funny that we put together. You could go to our website at EmailBroadcast.com and on there there's a pretty easy to find that you can schedule a 20 minute call with me free of charge just to be asked about your email. I can give you a couple of ideas, find out if … work out something that might be right for you but kind of get your head in the right direction. So hopefully that helps. Mark: Yeah absolutely. I'm actually going to call that number because that's a pretty good tease to get them to call the number. Well put links to that on the show notes page so feel free to go to the show notes page and you'll be able to see those links as well as contact information for you Ken. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Ken: Thank you, Mark, it's been a pleasure and I hope everybody here is reinvigorated to do great email marketing. That's why I exist in the world, to get people to up their game around email marketing. Good luck. Links and Resources: Email Ken Mahar Email Broadcast Website Call Email broadcast @ 805.316.3201

This "Content Curation for L&D Professionals" episode of the HR L&D Podcast, is sponsored by Think Learning. Today, we are joined by CEO and Founder of Anders Pink, Stephen WalshStephen is an incredibly successful entrepreneur from within the content curation and learning and development space and has successfully co-founded with Steve Rayson, three content curation, e-learning and blended solutions companies including Kineo, BuzzSumo and more recently, Anders PinkAnders Pink aims to help teams stay smart through continuous learning and by curating relevant content. They help find, filter and share the latest content on any topic, client, sector or industry which saves businesses time by locating better content faster and therefore improving engagement. Anders Pink are also able to embed curated content into your Learning Platforms and this is something we find out much more about in this episode of the HR L&D Podcast!In this episode, we take a deep-dive into Stephen's 20-plus years in learning technology and communications to help us understand how learning and development practitioners can achieve a culture of continuous learning and content curation for their businesses.We also discover more about Stephen's book 'Content Curation for Learning' and we explore how L&D professionals can intelligently filter the way people see information and better support organizations by creating habit-forming practices that will help you to improve your processes for continuous learning and content curation.So, fasten your seat-belts for a journey deep into the world of content curation!In this episode of the HR L&D Podcast, we discover: * The biggest challenges to developing content curation processes * Why content curation is important in relation to Learning and Development professionals * The key strategies behind Stephen's "Seek, Sense and Share model". * The key skills you need to become a successful L&D content curator * The key takeaway practical steps you can immediately implement to successfully curate content * The key strategies you would recommend to help them make their content curation processes more efficient? * How easy is it to automate the content curation process * How you can own the content curation process? * The trends in content curation by sector * The key ‘tangible business benefits' of a business having a content curation strategy? * How Anders Pink can help you with your content curation objectivesTo find out more about the companies featured in this episode of the HR L&D podcast: * Find out more at www.anderspink.com * Click the link to access Stephen's book: 'Content Curation for Learning'...

In episode #5 of the Marketing Mantra podcast, I'll be talking about a simple SEO hack you can use to build high-quality backlinks. -=-=-=-=- Time-stamped Show Notes [00:29] Episode Topic: A Simple SEO Hack to Get High Quality Backlinks [01:18] This SEO hack is building backlinks through infographics. [01:59] The first aspect of designing an infographic involves keyword research. [02:10] Use tools like Google Image Search, Buzzsumo, and Pinterest to discover popular infographic topics. [03:37] Use design tools like Canva, Venngage, and Piktochart to design your own infographic. [06:13] Next, you need to promote your infographic and generate high-quality backlinks. [07:50] Generate an embed code for your infographic using Siege Media's Embed Code Generator. [08:39] Submit your infographic to infographic submission sites. [10:45] Promote your infographic on Reddit. Submit your infographics to this infographics subreddit. You can also share your content on these marketing subreddits. But be sure to read the guidelines. [11:38] Try Brian Dean's Guestographic Link Building Method to get tons of contextual backlinks. [14:22] That's it for this episode of Marketing Mantra! -=-=-=-=- Tools and resources discussed in the episode: 3 online tools to design infographics: 1. Canva - https://www.canva.com/ 2. Venngage - https://buff.ly/2OteACe 3. Piktochart - https://piktochart.com/ Want to hire a freelance designer to design your infographic? Check out these sites: 1. Fiverr - https://www.fiverr.com/ 2. Upwork - https://www.upwork.com 3. Freelancer - https://www.freelancer.com Siege Media Embed Code Generator - https://www.siegemedia.com/embed-code-generator 40 Infographic Submission Sites to Generate Backlinks - https://www.99signals.com/infographic-submission-sites/ How to Get Backlinks With Guestographics (by Backlinko) - https://backlinko.com/how-to-get-backlinks For a detailed explanation of the infographic link building technique, visit: https://www.99signals.com/high-quality-backlinks-infographics/ -=-=-=-=- BONUS RESOURCES + FREE DOWNLOADS If you're a fan of the podcast, here are some FREE online marketing resources from my blog, 99signals, to help you level up your marketing skills: The Essential Guide to Link Building with Infographics (https://resources.99signals.com/infographic-backlinks-pdf) - Did you know you could build high-quality, authoritative backlinks with well-designed infographics? This PDF guide will show you how you can easily design an infographic and quickly build high-quality backlinks to supercharge your SEO. Top-rated articles at 99signals (https://www.99signals.com/best/) - This page contains a list of all the top-rated articles on my blog. It's a great place to get started if you're visiting 99signals for the first time. -=-=-=-=- Visit https://www.99signals.com for more insights on SEO, blogging, and marketing. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandeep-mallya/message

When you're just starting as an ecommerce seller, do you improve your Amazon listing first or get started on Facebook ads? There's no right or wrong order here. The main thing to remember is that you need to plan out how you can get both done at some point. In this episode, we're gonna tackle the Facebook side of things. As you may recall, I had my good friend Dave Huss join me in a previous podcast to talk about building a Facebook audience. I've had the chance to sit and have a chat with him again. And this time around, we'll be focusing on creating a Facebook page and being able to optimize it for engagement. If you're new to Facebook, find the quickest way you can earn from it. Remember, it's always good to have another revenue stream outside of Amazon. Here are some detailed steps you can follow. ENGAGEMENT 1. Ask yourself why people should care about your page. Based on your answer, pick the best niche that represents your product. Don't be afraid to go really specific, like creating a page dedicated to French cooking. 2. Select about 30 key/quality pieces of relevant content. You can use a tool like Buzzsumo to do this. If it's too costly a tool, you can do the research yourself. BUILDING THE MESSENGER LIST 3. Post or schedule posts 2-3 times initially. If you don't see traction on your posts within a couple of days, change something up. 4. Boost some of the posts to your core audience. 5. Try to get people to like the page. 6. Do a giveaway to get people on your Messenger list. Other Useful Resources: MyEcomcrew Online Merchants Guild Growth Scout Thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

In this episode, I sat down with “Paid Traffic Guy” himself - Dave Huss. Dave helps online entrepreneurs bring in new customers by leveraging paid traffic and using retargeting to recover lost sales through Growth Scout. He's also an ecommerce entrepreneur with brands in the arts and crafts niche that have a massive following on their respective Facebook business pages. And this was the focal point of our conversation. Dave gamely shared how he was able to leverage Facebook as a marketing platform for his products. His brands' business pages have 150,000 and 90,000 fans respectively. Here are Dave's best tips for building a following on Facebook and creating consistent engagement with the target audience. Figure out who your actual customers are. Create an avatar that embodies the key characteristics of your target demographic. Identify the “places”(e.g. social media platforms) they're hanging out in. Find a model for your own social media campaign. Take a look at your competitors, focus on brands that aren't that well known but have a strong social media following. See which aspects of their strategy can be applied to your own campaign.                                                     Test your products on your best-engaged fans, the people that care about what you're doing. Aim to reach the same people on multiple channels - social media, email etc. Run like campaigns. Spend time creating and curating engaging content. Build a content library using a scheduling tool like MeetEdgar to ensure that you have posts that are constantly in rotation. Incorporate videos in your social media posts. If you don't have the capability to create your own videos, look for cool and relevant ones on tools like Buzzsumo. At the end of the day, Dave reminds us that “...The Facebook page is not really for selling stuff. I really want to put that point across especially for Amazon sellers...The Facebook page is for building trust and engagement with your ideal customer…” Other Useful Resources: MyEcomcrew 7 Figure Seller Summit Thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

Stephen is still in missing in Chicagoland, so we once again retained the services of guest co-host Holly Harrison for an episode featuring two topics that could not be more completely unrelated to each other.First, Holly teaches us some media relations skills that gamedevs need to know (even if they don't want to), and then, because Stephen isn't around to stop us, Mark and Martha (but mostly Mark) talk about the history of Star Trek games! Media Relations 0:01:25 Holly HarrisonMarketingProductionHey you, indiedev, use presskit()!Write a better press release using the Inverted Pyramid - Todd Versteeg, Signature StyleHolly recommended “trying out” Buzzsumo and Buzzstream.Artist Statement Guidelines - Getting Your Sh*t TogetherSimilarweb - WikipediaAsk Holly your PR questions on twitter: @hollharris. Star Trek Games 0:31:20 Mark LaCroixGaming“How a Star Trek card game quietly continues, 10 years after its official end” - Cyrus Farivar, Ars TechnicaThe unreleased sequel to the Star Trek VCR board game was called “Borg Q-Uest.”… The "Q the Referee" CCG card that features a still taken from that game's unused footage. The fictional VCR board game from Community we mentioned was called “Pile of Bu…Mark talked about the end of the 90s-era Star Trek action figure line. That sto…“Looking At The Star Trek: TNG Interactive Technical Manual From 1994” - Will Stape, Treknews“The inside story of Apple's forgotten project: Quicktime VR” - Kif Leswing, Business InsiderYou can actually play “Star Trek: Klingon” on YouTube!“Language App Duolingo Finally Added Klingon” - David Murphy, Lifehacker“The best Star Trek games” - Richard Cobbett, PC Gamer“Jeff Bezos announces Amazon is picking up 'The Expanse'” - Richard Lawler, Engadget“Retrohistories: Secret of Vulcan Fury: Trek's Lost Adventure” - Chris Chapman, YouTube“The Game Archaeologist: Perpetual's Star Trek Online” - Justin Olivetti, EngadgetUbisoft teased on Twitter that DS9's USS Defiant will appear in Bridge Crew. Mark praised Star Trek: Ascendancy on a previous episode of the program. Nicest of 2016“Hogwarts Mystery Players Upset With Use of Microtransactions” - Shabana Arif, IGN

Today we are talking to Chuck Mullins all about due diligence. An internet business veteran who is now a part of the Quiet Light team, Chuck purchased his first internet business while still in college and was more successful at 18 than some of the most seasoned entrepreneurs. For both the buyer and the seller, the due diligence process is one of the most difficult parts of buying and selling an online business. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools that can be used to simplify the process. In this episode, Mark and Chuck look at over 20 different due diligence tools and explain how you can use them in our due diligence processes. Episode Highlights: Chuck guides us through a group of tools that can be fundamental to any well thought out due diligence plan. Any buyer knows that this is the most important thing you can do to make sure that no stone is left unturned when preparing to make that purchase and hit the ground running. Try using a due diligence consultant service. We don't advise leaving it all up to them but they can take some of the work out of your hands. Never just research the business but remember to also research who is selling the business. Google trends is very powerful. Google Trends lets you read the trends that any given business may have experienced. Be sure to be aware if your acquisition is "trendy" or "evergreen." SEM tools can provide insight into the business potential and the size of any risks. Website crawling tools are used to determine customer and market trends. Social media tools are an additional way to gain insight into connections for that business and also the business owner's niche interactions in their niche. Lessons from Due Diligence: For first time buyers the best advice Chuck offers is that you don't know what you don't know. Due diligence gives you the answers. Know what a tool is good at, put it in your due diligence toolbox, and use it correctly. Surround yourself with the types of people who can help you. Be careful to use your lawyer for law and your accountant for money. Always remember that you as the buyer ultimately make the business decision. Don't be afraid to ask questions! Keep good records of what you have looked at. Work off a checklist and be meticulous about it. A seller is as interested in you in the success of their business. Transcription Mark: Hey Joe, how are you? Joe: Doing good Mark, how about yourself? Mark: I'm doing well, I'd talk to somebody that we both know well and that's one of our own Chuck Mullins. Joe: Mr. Chuck Mullins, good man he is. Mark: He is, yeah. He joins us on the interview on the video part push on the interview wearing his Quit Light shirt which he had embroidered. The only person at Quiet Light that has one. Although, He didn't tell me that he made one for you. And I haven't seen you in it yet. Joe: He did I almost put it on today. It's just, it's a little big so I [inaudible 0:01:16] it. I need to put on some layer, run it through a two cycles of the dryer. Mark: It would have been so appropriate because, you know, he's wearing his shirt in this interview and you've been wearing your shirt in, and he's getting, make one for me though of course. Joe: He should. You're the founder of Quiet Light Brokerage. Mark: Absolutely. Joe: You should have like a logo on the back of your office chair that says Quiet Light Brokerage, what's wrong with you? Mark: I thought about it but. Most of my office is really a mess. If you seeing this on video and we'll talk about this one a bit. My office is usually a mess. It's all about angles, right? My angles a little bit of center today because I don't want to show you the rest of my office. So, yeah. But this actual episode is going to be great for a video. If you're listening in your car, if you're listening on the podcast, you'll still get a lot of value out of it. But I'd recommend at some point checking out the Youtube channel. We are separating our channels, so we will have a new channel, just for the podcast episodes. And this episode will, going to kick that off. So make sure you'll go there and you subscribe. And the reason that is a good one to watch on the Youtube channel is because we're reviewing due diligence tools in this episode. We actually go over 27 different due diligence tools. We bring them up on the screen and you can see, we kind of browse around and fumbling around on somebody's sites. As we talk about how you can use this in your due diligence process. Any buyer out there who is looking to acquire a business in the next few years or so, you know due diligence is probably the most important part of that process for you making sure that you're checking under every rock and every hidden area to see is there anything wrong with this business that I need to be aware of. Well Chuck and I go over 27 tools that he has used personally in his past of buying businesses. So we bring real interest in episode from that stand point. He brings a lot of experience in buying and selling businesses for.. Do you know how long he has been doing it? I can't remember off hand. Joe: In 1997 I think. He was self-employed in college, making more in one month the most people make in a year when he was in college. Mark: Right right and then, He and I have been presenting at Pubcon for 7 years. We go over this video a little bit but we've been presenting for 7 years at Pubcon together and people always come to see Chuck and then hopefully I can pick up a couple of the scraps to come off the table when presents. So it's a great presentation on a how to go about buying online businesses. Joe: And just a point out of the obvious remaining, not so obvious. Technically we represent the sellers in what we do. Well we can't help them and help them while unless we also help as many buyers as possible. So it's, many people would think that what you're about to present with Chuck is in contrast to what we do. But we're always about full disclosure, always making sure that buyers are making good investments and so that both they and the sellers are happy to closing table and it's successful transaction down the road as well. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Again, we going to do represent the sellers, but if our seller's getting sued, 3 or 4 months later that is a pretty bad job on our part. So it's important that both buyer and seller walk away from a deal, happy and when you know that deal. So that's the goal. We get a transaction wins. And part of that process is due diligence. I say, I hate like throw a due diligence. When I first started Quiet Light and I got like, you know, a monster due diligence, I would kind of [inaudible 0:04:31] and be like, Oh man, this is going to be a pain. Now when I see a well thought out due diligence, it's makes me happy because I know that, that buyer is going to be really happy and that deal is gone go through. Because where they're going to really inspect that business thoroughly. Joe: Yeah, well thought, that was important. Not just a massive list but a well thought, that was specific to the business that's being purchased. I've seen blank at due diligence less come through where somebody clearly copied and paste it. But I'm excited about this episode Chucks a really, really smart guy and successful entrepreneur and I think a lot of people would learn some good stuff here. Mark: That's good, very good. Let's get to it. Mark: Hey Chuck, how are you? Chuck: Doing great. How are you Mark? Mark: I'm good. Thanks for joining me on the call. I see you have your nice Quiet Light shirt on. You're the only one at Quiet Light that has that shirt. Chuck: That's because I took the initiative to have it made. Mark: Right. We'll get them for everybody else eventually. Chuck: Actually, I think I bought Joe one. But he didn't want it. Mark: Oh really, I got to start getting on him so he wears it from the Podcast. Chuck: Yeah Mark: Yeah, anyway for this Podcast, if you guys are listening to this in your car, this would be one of the once that I would recommend over going to Youtube and we've set up a new channel on Youtube just for the interviews. We're going to put all our interviews on that channel. I'd recommend looking at that because we're going to review a bunch of due diligence tools. A little bit of background between Chuck and myself. Chuck and I have been presenting at Pubcon. What? 7 years I think? Chuck: Yeah, I think so. Mark: Yeah, a very long time. Chuck invited me to speak within that Pubcon a while ago. We've been doing it ever since we've had all the people join us occasionally, to talk about buying and selling websites. But he and I have been talking about that night. Typically we talk on the sell side and Chuck was talking on the buy side. And the result was that more people are interested in what Chuck had to say than I was ever had to say. So I figured, it would be good to have you on here. Both, so I think we can get to know you a bit better. I'd also review some of the due diligence that you've use in the past in buying online businesses. So let's just do a quick introduction for you as far as your background. What's your background in buying and selling online businesses? Chuck: So, I started my first website back in 1996. Through the few years, made a bunch of money in college just a kind of doing really well. And made more money than you know, than I was living on. So I start looking at doing various investments. So, start looking at real estate, franchises, I was looking at car washes, and a storage facilities, and a Laundromats. And nothing ever, just kind of, really worked for me or really peaked my interest enough. You know like, I dabbled in real estate. But everything just kept kind drawing me back to the internet business. So then, you know, I made a few websites that were successful. But I started thinking about you know, what if I could acquire somebody's company and then just build upon that and stand on somebody else's shoulders, instead of trying to prove out a model myself. You know, use a model that has been proven by somebody else. And then just take all the knowledge I had, and expertise, and grow that. So I start doing really well, and at a certain point I just fell alive, you know presenting at a conference, and kind of just, giving back, and then that's when I reached out to you and I think my initial presentation I gave was with Jason, Quiet Light, we did it at affiliate summit. I don't even know, 8 or 9 years ago. Mark: Yeah, I remember that. I was in the audience for that presentation and then, that was January. I remember specifically because it was really cold at that conference in Las Vegas. The fountains were frozen when we got out of the hotel. I was kind of surprised about that. So it's cool! So yeah, you've been doing this presentation for a long time and I know whenever we do the presentation, when we get to the slide on due diligence, whereas all the phones in the rooms go up to take pictures, because people are really interested to know what's our tools they can use to do due diligence. So we're going to review some of these tools here, as well as talk about some of the principles, buyers might want to apply when you're doing your due diligence. As always, we'll just throw out the blanket; cover your tails sort of a disclaimer here. Due diligence is ultimately a buyer's responsibility. Make sure that you're doing it, make sure that you are bringing in professionals. What we're going to do is were going to give some advices to things that we've seen work, but by all means, this is not complete when you're talking about due diligence. Wherein you need to apply a complete process to the business that you are looking at. So I'm going to share my screen here and open this up, and I'm just going to share the full screen, and hopefully on my [inaudible 0:08:56] of so that people don't get those. But can you see that chart does that come up for you? Chuck: Yeah. Mark: Alright. Good, good. So here we go, where going to just get started right away with this list of tools and I'll be browsing to the website as you talk about the individual ones. The first one that we're going to talk about is Centurica and they're full service due diligence firm. They are the only one of that sort that we have on this list. So why don't you talk a little bit about Centurica, what they do and why they made this list. Chuck: Sure, So Chris Yates is the owner of Centurica, they've been around for quite a while and Chris runs a buying and selling website conference called and Rhodium. Rhodium Weekend I think is kind of, the official name. I ran into Chris way back when I started to look at buying and selling businesses. he was the first person.. I'm always looking for knowledge where I look into learn more. So doing some searches and came across his conference and went to it. Kind of on a whim, because there was no information about the conference because that was the first one that they've had. So it was like, trying to figure out and I thought well, for the money, maybe I'll pick up something and if not, it's not a total lost because you know, I'm just come and go to Vegas to hang out. You know Chris is really a smart guy and I ended up I think I was probably the first one we, to get into his master mind group. So I'm going to master mind group with Chris and a bunch of other entrepreneurs and he does this great due diligence product were he just kind of takes it over from you. Will do like a full blown due diligence review on a business that you're going to acquire and I would never say that you should handle fully the [inaudible 0:10:33] somebody else do the due diligence. But you should allow, if you're going to hire somebody, do it in parallel with them. So that way you're just getting, you know, a second, third set of eyes on a due diligence and on the business that you're looking to acquire. So they offer various levels and, so it looks like they've got something from 59 dollars right there and all the way up to, I think a 5,000 dollar package. That's kind of like a suit to nuts version. Mark: Yeah and just look at the website; they have a whole team of people here that are associated with them. A lot of these people, you and I know, we know them through Rhodium Weekend and through that master mind group as well. These are some really smart guys, good guys, to be able to just get on the phone with and get their feedback. In fact, I'm seeing n a few guys here, Mike Nunez, he has been on a Podcast with us before and a super smart guy. Well, these guys are [inaudible 0:11:24] really good contact as well. These are people that you can arrange calls with and bounce my ideas of. The amount of money, 5,000 dollars, some people might [inaudible 0:11:35] sort of price tag, but what do you think? Do you think that's worth spending that much money on due diligence support? Chuck: Yeah I mean, with Quiet Light, we're generally not dealing with the lower end deals, right? We're generally dealing with mid to high six figures, mid to low seven figure deals, so you know, five grand and that's their highest package, right? They got stuff that's cheaper, but how could you go wrong, you know, spending.. If you're on a million dollar deal, what's five grand, is what? Half a percent? I think it's probably money well spent. Mark: Yeah, absolutely I agree. The only assets that you put an end, this is, that whenever you are hiring somebody on the outside to potentially look for problems, understand that, what they're going to do is they're going to find problems because that's what you're hiring them to do, and they should do that. So this is not a criticism or some trick or by any means or attorney that's looking up for liability issues. But as the buyer, understand that you need to take that information, process it, through a business decision that you're making. Any sort of due diligence tool? I knew the ones that we offer here, that's the way that you should be going about using that information, that fits into the larger scheme. Alright, let's move on, Centurica is a good service. If anyone wants an introduction pres, it's either Chuck or I can provide an introduction pres as well. The next two are related obviously, Google.com and Google Trends, everybody knows what Google is, I'm sure most know what Google Trends are. How would you use each of these sites in a due diligence process? Chuck: Sure! So with Google, right? I mean, it's just a matter of Googling things either about the business, about the person, if you're buying the business, Google the terms around the business, and look for red flags, right? Look for if they've got one star review, average one star review, maybe that tells you something about the business. You know, look for complaints, things that are negative about the business, right? It's kind of one of those, you'll catch all due diligence place where you just, kind of sorting through all of the information that you can find on a given business and/or a person. Never just research the business, always research the person who is selling the business as well because, you could find out a lot of stuff and make sure that you're avoiding, potentially avoid some of the pitfalls, if somebody has done some sketchy stuff in the past, and find that out. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. You can learn a lot about their background as well, and all you have to do is search for all of the places that I have written for, come up, but years ago, I was involved in a lawsuit in those couple of pages. And so, anyone that was doing research on me, I would often get those sort of questions, "What happened then?" everything was fine. I didn't mind the questions, but people that were being smart and doing due diligence would ask about that. Chuck: And don't just look at the first page of Google. Look at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, right? Because anybody can hire a reputation management company that will push some of those negative reviews, you know, to the 2nd or 3rd page. But they'll be there generally, still, just maybe a little lower. Mark: Right, Now if anyone wonders and are looking at the screen, I did not play hockey. Even though I'm from Minnesota I'm not a hockey player. There's a couple of them, that's out there that have gotten their name out there. Google trends, what search term I put in there? Chuck: Yeah so type in Paleo Recipe, or Paleo Diet I mean, because Paleo is a little different. So, if you look at the screen. Mark: You changed the date range? Chuck: Yes I changed the date range. That's, in January, you see that giant spike. Because that's when everybody is getting into a diet mode. Check that out even further. Mark: So we're looking right now. Let's set 2004 to present. So we'll do the entire history in Google Trends. There we go. Chuck: Sure, so you know, if you're looking to buying a business, and you're seeing.. Well use Google Trends to figure out what the trends are. Here you'll see is like a giant up peak that just kind of went up, and then all of a sudden it just kind of, trail off, and you're going to find things like this. Then you'll also notice that there is like ups and downs, like inter year, so that would be like the seasonally of the business, right? So just because you see, like this one giant peak, which correlates with January, and then you know, throughout the rest of the year it drops until December where December is at it's low, around Christmas time then it spikes immediately back up. So you're going to look for not only seasonality but you can look for long term trends. And when you're looking at businesses, think about whether the business is a trendy business first, it's an evergreen business. So, diet in general is a trendy business. If you look almost any diet, you'll see that there's a, it goes up, up , up, up and all of a sudden it tails off, right? There's something made it go up, usually it got unpopular, and then it'll trend off. I personally, one of the businesses that I bought was a Paleo website, and I managed to buy it exactly at the peak market, and then.. Mark: Right about there right? Right around January of 2013, early 2013. Chuck: Yup, definitely it's like, it was going up, up, and up, I'm like, great! Then it went down, down, down, and it was less great. So, luckily, we were able to so a little bit of magic and kind of keep the revenue going by trying to grow the business but it's another story. Mark: Something else that you can do with this, so as many people know, I own CatholicSingles, and the turn chart out for CatholicSingles doesn't look that great, when you look at it. Something I've learned from this chart from a few other places is, if you think that you're buying a website that gets lots of natural search traffic, be careful to make sure that it's not branded search traffic. So what's happening here is, the previous owner was losing out to a competitor who was beating him in a brand search, and so, the site still gets lots of natural search traffic to a keyword that still has a lot of relevance. But he lost a lot of brand relevance as well. So you can, if it's a large enough property you can often pick up on brands trends and what are not, you're going to have to compete on that [inaudible 0:17:34] as well. You can type in competing services and see what their trend is overtime as well. And you can actually compare the two together. So you can see how competition is playing along with. Maybe what you're looking at acquiring. Chuck: And then if you scroll down, you can do it by region as well. So what are the countries that has something popular. So maybe it was a US based company, and you see "Hey look! It's doing well in Canada and South America" or I guess none of that case was in South America, but Australia, and I think it was Mexico maybe. So maybe you expand into some of those other countries. Mark: Right, right. Exactly. Yeah Google Trends has some good date out there, I recommend again putting in your, whatever, competitors you know of, and comparing the traffic and the trends for the competitors and get the sense for, how those are working together. Chuck: And one additional point would be, Google trends is the search volume of a specific keyword, so it's not some magic formula, it's how many people are searching for something. So sometimes, people search, the way they search for things changes overtime, so you just want to, kind of remember that. That just because, you know. People might have been searching for, I don't know, Blue Widgets but now they're calling it, instead of Blue Widgets, they're calling it Blue Fuzzies, right? So it doesn't always mean that the actual market is declining at it. Sometimes it can just be a change in the way people are searching. Mark: Yeah, I think an example, that would be internet marketing has pushed toward in digital marketing. And so you see, the phrase you use to refer to something, is slightly different overtime. So, that's a good point. Now let's move off this chart because it's sort of depressing. State business websites, this is one that I haven't really seeing people a whole lot of, but it's a really good idea to use state business websites. Chuck: Yeah, I mean it's just the basic of going to whatever state the company is in, doing a search for the business, finding out who the owners are, and if there's any kind of red flags that maybe appear on that, just some basic due diligence there. Mark: Yeah, that one's not coming up here, but when you do the search, what will happen is, you'll see the records with the state, whether or not if filed in good standing, any other possible red flags that would come up. It's really just checking their box, making sure that everything is on the up and up with that business search. Maybe we can get back to this, if that comes up again. BuiltWith is a really cool tool and it shows all the technologies that a website was built with, right? Chuck: Yeap! Absolutey! So if you want to look at, like the technologies that go.. Is your internet out? Mark: No, I just typed it in wrong. Chuck: I guess your internet wouldn't be out, considering we're.. Mark: Right, right. So we could take a look to see what Quiet Light Brokerage is built on. And you can see that we have Googled conversion tracking, you can you see the whole technology stack and all the services that are used. When this might be useful as if you're looking at the P&L and you don't see a subscriptions but you would see here Drip. And you know that Drip is a subscription based service maybe that's not their P&L. That would be something to catch and maybe ask them about to find out what's going on there. Maybe they just start using [inaudible 0:20:47]the website. Chuck: Absolutely! And you know, one of the things you want to do as part of getting ready to acquire a site is make sure that you have the people and place to take over any kind of service that you need in advance. Right, so, if you have no idea how to use Drip and you're taking it in purchase in your company, maybe you need to has somebody in place who does know how to use it or request a standard operating procedure so that you can learn how to use it. So I would definitely have a list of like all of the kind of aspects of the business that you're not proficient at. And make sure that you have people in place that can help you with that [inaudible 0:21:26] running when you do take over the business. Mark: You know something that, speaking of Drips, I talked to Rob who sold Drip to Leadpages a few years ago, and he talked to me about how Leadpages was completely ready and able to switch over to a new website surely after they closed. They were making plans and building out technology as they were going through due diligence so that they can hit the ground, running right away. Something that might you want to do as you're going through a website's technology stack is take a look at what services are you using. If you are going to the Quiet Light website you'll notice that we have Hotjar, for example. Now I haven't tracked anything with Hotjar on the website in a while. We use it for surveys once in a while, but this would be a service for, maybe those report that you want to ask for during due diligence. Maybe some heat mapping that would just be useful information for you to be able to see and as you're making plans. Or OptinMonster, asked, have you run these campaigns before? What was the conversion rate like on these campaigns? And you can start getting really prepared as you're doing your due diligence to make that transition. Of course some sellers may not be eager to share some of that information with you, so go about that with some level of sensitivity understanding that they might be ready to open up all the books to you, but knowing what's there can help you request different reports. And Chuck you said something before in one of your presentations, probably multiple presentations and that was ask questions. Ask lots and lots of questions. Chuck: Yup, absolutely. I always say ask, ask, ask, and even ask questions you know the answers to. I feel like that's like some kind of weird tactic that people do. But they ask questions regardless of whether you know the answer because you almost want to get a seller to lie to you, because then you know how trust worthy they are right? If somebody's going to lie to you about something, it's a red flag. So, I've seen a lot of people that will ask the same questions in multiple ways. You don't want to be annoying right? Like, don't ask stupid questions but definitely ask. I shouldn't say, you don't want to ask stupid question because almost no question's stupid right? But we all understand there are all stupid questions that you shouldn't ask, that's just, are irrelevant. But don't feel like, if it's relevant to you then it's not a stupid question. So, ask everything. Because the time to ask is before you buy it. Right? You don't want to have a bunch of questions after you've inked the check. So, ask early and then ask often. Mark: Then the other thing too is you can get more callers on a particular answer. I know when I talk to some sellers and ask them why are you selling? They'll give me an answer one day and had talked to them another day and they give me s slightly different answer. And it's not that they're lying. The reasons are complex. There's more than one reason going on there and you gain caller, you gain more information about what's really going on behind the sale. By asking the same question, and looking at, in different formats, I know when you started to do video interviews or recording interviews of some of our clients and part of the reason for that is because people talk about questions differently then they might write them out. So this could ask a lot of those questions. Chuck: Yeah, absolutely! Archive.org. Mark: This is a great one. So if you're doing some due dilligence there's a whole industry people who just buy expired domains, stir a new content on it and then run with the site. Some of the amazing firm like [inaudible 0:24:38]some of them are buying like big sites, or what used to be a big site and for whatever reason, site's no longer so, this will give you an idea like in 2008. What was the site look like? Was it a brokerage site or not back then, you know. It's not always a bad thing but if it was something spamy back then, It might still have some problems moving forward. So it's also good just to see if you had some ideas of you wanted to try this or try that. And getting an idea for some of the things they've tried in their past or looking at previous screenshots of what the site was like one, two, three, four years ago? Mark: Yeah, I think one of the big challenges that you always have as a buyer and.. Sellers as well have this issue, right. Sellers know their business intimately because they've lived with it for so many years. As a buyer, you're coming in and trying to compress knowledge that they've gain over the course of sometimes 20 years now. And to a decision that you have to make within or week or two. Going back in the scene, what the history of the site was, just kind of, again it adds color, it adds more information into what does this person done in the past for the business. Like you said maybe we can see some things that they tried and you can ask them about that, if you're looking at the Quiet Light site, yeah, you might see that we sold some domains in the past. And if there's someone looking to buy us they could ask a question on that, you know, why don't you sell domains anymore? And we could go into that whole discussion. Chuck: Something else to look for is to look for gaps in the years so you know, you can put something on your website, right? And your like, your a [inaudible 0:26:14]telling a way back machine not to cross your site anymore. So if there's like a three year gap, why is that gap? Most legitimate sites aren't blocking the way back machine. From calling their site, so you know, that might raise a red flag and might be something you want to dive in on a little deeper. Mark: Awesome, alright let's move on at Trademarkia.com. Chuck: Yeah, you know it's a, if you're, if they told you to have a trade mark, search for it, figure it out. If they have told you they don't have a trade mark, search for it. See if somebody else has a trade mark right? Make sure that they're not infringing on somebody else's.. What's the word I'm looking for.. Somebody else's IP. You don't want to buy a business if they're infringing on other people's stuff. Mark: Yeah, and this can also be a very useful in search results if you're advertising on Google and you have competitors that are stepping all over that brand search. If you get that trade mark and you have the ability to get a trade mark you can keep all of those guys off, and brand is usually a very cheap way. But if you have competitors branding against it, that's [inaudible 0:27:16] your IP, so, searching for that trade mark is a useful thing to do. Alright, moving to the next set of tools and these tools here seem to be more of, search competitive intelligence and taking look at a site's search profile and I should just say probably maybe SEM. All [inaudible 0:27:33] right? Because this still include adwords as well? Chuck: Yeap, yeap! So organic and paid, my likes spy for a lot. It's a.. You can look at people's history of what kind of ad campaigns they did. As so, if somebody says "Oh we've only ever run one ads set and haven't done much testing" and then you look back at, and shows you. Well actually they ran a hundred different variations of this ad. Cross, you know 5 years and blah blah. So you will able to see a.. Verify some of the information they said. You can also check and it will show you, like literally shows you, what paid ads they ran. And like detects in them. So if you think, "Oh I wonder if they try this", so you're going to look back and see what sorts of ads they've run. It's kind of interesting, you can also use this right here, like you see their competitor. So that'll show you overlap, so if you know some of, some competitors, you'll be able to see like what keywords they have overlapping using this venn diagrams. It's some really cool stuff and then you can look for opportunity, for words that they're going after, that your knots. They also have they a tool in here somewhere that will allow you to look at specific keywords over time and then it puts it over a timeline and has the Google updates. So you can see like, ok they had this key word was, you know, rank number 1111, and then drops off to like number 7, and [inaudible 0:28:57] Google get an update right when this happen so you can potentially know why they dropped off, it's because, well, Google did this update. So seeing what people are using like a private blog now, where to get a bunch of links and it's like doing really, really well then everything drops off a cliff. Because of Google did an update and it affect it, or, the reverse is true where they went from having nothing to all off a sudden number 1 rankings, just like overnight. And you can see, okay, well nobody just all send this from zero to number 1 ranking for 20 different keyword terms so then you know, Well, they must have done something to have that spike and then you can dive into what they're using like, blog that works for paid links or whatever. Mark: Yeah, any sort of quick changes in these results are going to be something to watch out for. So that's over all a good tool. And a lot of these tools out here, Moz, Open Site Explorer, Semrush, Magestic, AAtraps, I personaly like AAtraps. These are all really good tools, using in combination. It's going to give you a sense for how the data all adds up. Understand that when you're looking at data, in any of these tools, they have to use third parties to estimate what this is, for example, they're estimating for Quiet Light Brokerage, where estimated adwords budget is 3,000 bucks. Actually not too far off from that, but it's not accurate. Just understand that these are useful for trends, these are useful for getting another point of data, nothing's going to replace first hand tracking, it should be Google and Linux, or whatever tool people are using to analyze something. But you can use all these external tools in combination as well to try complete picture of what a website's doing and how it's ranking. Chuck: It's a bit [inaudible 0:30:45] That was I think only Google adwords, so if not taking your account, pay traffic, whether it's Facebook or other things. Right? Mark: Yep, yep! Absolutely that's right! Let's move on to a.. You like Spy for the best from all of these? Chuck: They are all kind of different. So there's like different reasons to use different ones, right? Some are for keyword research, some have like keyword difficulty tools, so part of due diligence isn't just looking at what the site has done, but where you can go with it. So I like to use a couple of them to do keyword research. See where their gaps are, you know, opportunity for me to grow the business. They're all kind of hit, different things to different things well. So I don't have one favorite. I do like SpyFu, I like Moz in the past, [inaudible 0:31:31], Majestic. And then on that list, we kind of didn't point it which I'm guessing maybe you thought I put in a wrong spot, but the alexa.com won. I haven't actually used this yet, but it's apparently a new tool that they rolled out. It's a competitor to all these other ones, Moz and Majestic. So they're doing a paid tool just like all these other guys. So, I haven't really dove into it yet, but it'll be interesting to maybe see how their data looks. Mark: Yeah, I actually just saw this the other day. And was intrigued by it. I haven't dug into this at all. But you would imagine that Alexa's by Amazon. You would imagine that they have some pretty good access to tools to be able estimate this information, with some level of accuracy. Chuck: And you know they've been around, since when, like early 2000 or earlier. So they've been crawling off these sites. So who knows what kind of information they've stored. I see [inaudible 0:32:34] has really good info going pretty far back. Mark: yeah, I know you're right on that. I think actually Alexa may have been the first competitive intelligence tool. That try to rank websites. Maybe there was somebody else before that. But they were the first one's who really gain attraction. Or that for a long time, everybody I knew had their Alexa bar. Up in their browser and you can see what, aside Alexa ranking was along with its paid rank. Right every marketer back in early 2010 and those two things, up in their tool bars. Chuck: It's fine, so I went to the site yet the other day, just checking it out and looking for their little site ranking. I could find it anywhere, so I'm not sure if they still have it or not. Mark: Yeah, I don't know. I try to look that up recently as well and I wasn't able to find it. I was behind actually this pay wall which is how I came across [inaudible 0:33:24] they are now offering this. Chuck: Yeah, yeah. It didn't, for a long time, like, right Google paid rank and the Alexa ranking have been dead like nobody uses those as a real stat anymore . But I just wanted to check it out. Mark: Yeah, yeah I know it's always interesting stuff. Alright let's move on to page 2 here. We're going to get into 3 tools here. [inaudible 0:33:46], deepcrawl.com and Copyscape. What do these tools do? Chuck: Yeah, The first two are pretty similar to each other. And what they do is you can plug in a domain name that it will crawl the entire site and it will look for all kinds of things. Like errors or not errors. Right, so it can show you just by crawling to the site. It will crawl every single link on the site from every single page. So it shows you like if there's dead links so if there are stuff that's going for like 404 pages, no errors, 500 errors, it will show you the redirects. So what I've used it for in the past is the one finding those dead pages or the 404 errors and then also finding the redirects and sometimes you'll see like stuff gets layered, where it will be redirected to this page, which layer's was then redirected to this page, which layer's then redirected to this page. And ultimately, what should you be doing is just going back and linking from the first page to the last page. And not using all of these bounces because with each bounce you have the a, potentially you're losing some of that authority has being passed through. Mark: Yeah, and there are the futuristic will do an on-site SEO analysis for even, one that I've used in the past that all definitely throw a, [inaudible 0:35:01] to be Orange Fox, Jacob Hagberg, has done some reports from Quiet Light Brokerage. and a lot of these tools do is, what these services work, will do, they just to analyze in a condensed manner. Because they look for opportunities and they also look for potential issue. Like you're saying, if there's tons of redirects in there, that's a problem, you are losing out an authority on those pages. 10 pages , 404, broken images. Images without all tags, accessibility issues. These are all things that you want to be looking for. Not necessarily as like major red flags but you know, a buyer beware, but also as opportunities that if you start to fix and clean these things up, there's going to be a natural lift in rankings on its long tale keywords that maybe you're on page 10 to 20 right now for, maybe that will bump you up to the first 10 results . So wait for you to just grow some opportunity. When you're looking at these 3 tools Chuck.. Chuck: The first two are very similar, right? Screaming Frog, is one that you have on your own computer, and then it use your internet connection to then crawl the site. DeepCrawl, they are running it from their servers, the Screaming Frog is relatively cheap. I forget the amount but it's hundred to 200 bucks a year. The DeepCrawl one is fairly pricey so, I would always recommend this Screaming Frog but the other one is a good service as well. Just cost a bit more. It's a 150 pounds a year. Mark: Right. They do have a free version? I've used the free version to be honest it's worth just upgrading to a paid version. Free version will give you just a flavor of what they can do. But if you really want to dig deep and really figure things out. Yeah, again, here's a 500 URL limit, most websites are going to blow through that 500 URLs because you have all their images, you have everything else connected with an individual page, so you'll go through that 500 pretty quickly. Copyscape is a bit different from these two though. Chuck: Yeah, it's different. I threw it, kind of witness just because it's one of those things, where again, you're looking for problems, so you type in your domain and It'll give you list of you know, places that content made and stolen from. So kind of, similar, but different. Mark: Right. This can be useful to see if you have people that are maybe trying' just scrape your pages entirely or if the page you're looking at for some reason is built on a shakey ground. This was something that was used a lot more probably, I don't know, 5, just 7 years ago. I know Copyscape has a really big issue on a really big useful tool for duplicate content issues. A lot of that is going away now. But I would imagine you would find copies of content that somebody's publishing their blog contents, say, on Medium or LinkedIn. I imagine this would probably pick up on that. Chuck: Yeah. I believe so. And you know when we talk about the duplicate content issue, where talking about like, right for organic search but there's also the duplicate content issue where, "Hey everything on this website was stolen from somewhere else and you're going to get sued because you stole our base content.", Right so, I would be checking to make sure that people aren't stealing other people's content. You know, so I think that's a good part of due diligence. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Alright Public WWW. This is a tool I have not heard of. Chuck: Yeah, that's a great tool. It kind of isn't a vain, of like, a Google right? But what's cool about it is instead of like.. If I want to search for something on Google. Google looks at what is this plate on the page meaning. If I search for Chuck it's looking for.. If somebody would look at a web page and see the word Chuck on it, then it might come up, right? But with this website, it's actually looking at the source code. So if somebody had a comment that was Chuck, it would potentially come up there. So, anywhere from the word Chuck, right? It's more for if you want to look a analytics code, or if you want to find somebody's affiliate ID. So if somebody's says, "Hey, I'm just running AdSense on this site, and I don't have it anywhere else.", So we could took.. Put in the AdSense number, and it will show you all the sites that are using that same AdSense ID on their website, right? So you can look for, maybe they're doing some competing stuff, maybe they just, you know, they're driving more income through the AdSense, but having a multiple sites vs the one. And it's not complete, right? There's, it's only as much as they crawl so they're only going to have as much data of the websites they crawl. But you can definitely find some stuff. You can also use a little tip here, would be.. Let's say you have an affiliate product your promoting, right? And you're making some money off of that, and say, you found a new product you want to promote and it makes 10 times the amount of money for each one you sell and you know that like, "Oh! This product, if I switch it to this one, I'm going to make 10X." Or you could look for everybody who is promoting this old product, and then you're going to try to acquire those sites, and switch them to the new affiliate product and 10X the revenue. A lot of different things you can do with that. Mark: I've heard some of people ask about that, specifically with affiliate sites. You know, "How do I know that this is all coming from the site that I'm buying.", and so that would be one tool that you could use. The other thing I could see this being useful for is if you have a tool for it. This would be a pretty rare case, but if you're buying a business as a tool, that's using on outside websites. WordPress plugins site, WordPress themes site, or any other tool like that, you could start to get some ideas as for the installation volume. Using the tool like this. Alright, SpyOnWeb.com. Chuck: So similar right it's a looking for people's AdSense IDs and things like that. It's not as complete, with the other one you could search for a lot more different types of things. But still a useful tool. Mark: Right, it gives you some machine information as for our tools also sharing this IP address, DNS server. So again, not [inaudible 0:40:53] information here, but just acquiring [inaudible 0:40:56] this. We have our [inaudible 0:40:58]. So If you want to find out what the [inaudible 0:41:02] rank is, just go to SpyOnWeb and you could also see the page rank which is saying Quiet Light Brokerage just a like a question mark for page ranks. So that would be an information. That would have scared me about a 6 or 7 years ago. Alright, DomainIQ. Chuck: Yup, so DomainIQ and the other two that were listed. This are for finding out information about a domain name. So when was it registered, how many times has the DNS changed, has the ownership changed recently, what other domains are on the same server, or same IP block or same IP address, so if you know, if you're buying something from somebody, and they say it's the only site they have and then you look start looking up and down the IP range or looking on the server or the same IP and you see there's other domain names that are the same thing and are not disclosing it you, you know, that's potentially going to be an issue. You can look up who is the owner, so if it's like similar registration name or similar email address used to register the domain, it will show you all of the domains they own. That are using that registration information. These are all for the most part paid services. So if you want to get, like the good data, you got to pay for it. But they do give you a basic level of information for free. Mark: Right. I don't think anybody has to use all these tools. You pick 1 or 2 out of each of these categories that you want to use. The only one that I would recommend maybe use in multiples one would be in this search intelligence the SpyFu, Moz, and SEMrush. I think it might be worthwhile having upwards of three maybe four depending on how lights would turns out those services. Because like you said they all do slightly different things. Chuck: It's a matter of like what they've indexed right? So they each have their own crawlers, and none of them are going to crawl exactly the same subset of the internet. So, it's just, you're going to find different things while using different ones. Mark: Right, and they all have different levels of accuracy you could see here DomainIQ is [inaudible 0:43:04] to be higher than the last one. And also, few other bits of information that I would say are incorrect but again you use these points of data… Chuck: That was 5,000 dollars? The appraisal value? Mark: That was [inaudible 0:43:17] it's less than 500 dollars. And we have more than 24 backlinks, but again, all these tools are to be used in combination with each other to put together a large picture. Obviously a tool like Google Analytics or [inaudible 0:43:31] you'll going to want to use that first. And then, these tools are been used to fill in the gaps. Chuck: And also like know what a tool is good at, so like last one, you're not going to use that tool for the appraised value right? Like, that's nonsense. But if you scroll up, scroll up a little bit. If you click on, click on the ownership record in the blue, the blue button is there. Let's see if we'll.. Mark: We got gears turning here.. There we go Chuck: Okay so just search who the owner is, when is the last time you updated, when it expires, the age of it, right. So you've owned it for just about almost 11 years, you're using Cloudflare, here's the "who is" info…. Mark: It's kind of a bad corporation name, I got to update that. Chuck: Well there you go. And go back one more time on it, I'll click on one more thing… Mark: All these tools take too long to load up. Let's move on, because this one's getting a little bit longer. Let's get it on to a Bannedcheck.com. Chuck: Yeah, so this one is a, and it's not 100% right. But you can type in AdSense account and I'll tell you if the AdSense account has been banned. Again, not 100%, but if it's says it's banned, that's probably a good indication. I'm sorry not the AdSense account number but the actual domain name. Right so, if somebody says, "Oh! I switched monetization methods, because I didn't like AdSense and I was making a bunch more money with this." Well, maybe that's not the case, maybe it's that they got banned. So, this is a good one. They can tell you whether they've been, not a 100% right. But if it's says that they've been band, then they've probably have been, right? Mark: Good news with this, I'm making money with Quiet Light Brokerage because it came back and it says that it's not banned for Google AdSense. Chuck: I wonder how that helps with our value of the 500 dollars. Mark: Hopefully, this is a little bit, so all you buyers that are looking to buy a business, we're going to require that you click on an Adsense ad. Because I think that's completely [inaudible 0:45:16] with our terms of service. Mark: socialmention.com. Chuck: Yeah, so just you know, you type in various things here and it will just tell you where it's being mention as far as social goes. So just a good tool for doing some basic due diligence. Mark: Yeah, let's repeat, useful to do, using combination with a Google trends to be able to see. Google Trends is measuring the data on Google itself. Looking at how the different social media networks are also processing the data. It's going to have a different look than just what Google has. On that note, I would say BuzzSumo, which is not on your list. It's another tool that I would recommend adding and it's a page where they do the free option but you can take a look to see what content has done really well on a particular domain name. As well as what content in that specific niche also does well. So you can really got a sense for how popular [inaudible 0:46:15] and what's getting shared and what's not. Well for then Google but also within the social media. It seems fantastic. Chuck: This one definitely should've been on my list then I'm not sure why it wasn't but I actually like this one a lot better. Mark: Will add this to the list. For people who want to download it. Last one it would be just going direct to the source of Facebook LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., etc. Almost every websites these days has presence on all the social media networks, visit their pages I assume that's kind of a lesson there. Chuck: Yeah and again, with like a LinkedIn, right? Looking at the person's profile looking how many connections they have. Are they in a niche where they should have 500 LinkedIn connections and they've only got 3, Maybe that tells you something, right? Why are they connected with all of these hackers or whatever, right? It's just a matter of again, researching the people and not just the business. So I think it's a good tool for researching people. Mark: Awesome, right. So that's a lot of tools that we just went over. Let's talk just a some couple of lessons, and we're running pretty long on this Podcast. So, we'll talk just a couple lessons about due diligence. I'm going to turn off the screen sharing here and talk about couple lessons about due diligence. What would you say for somebody who's going about due diligence the first time? What couple of lessons would you, or principles, should they really use in their due diligence efforts. Chuck: So I think one of the biggest things, is first in for most you don't know what you don't know. right, so having people to help advice you on what to search for and what to look for can be critical. So don't just think you know everything! Because none of us know everything especially when it comes to different tricks and tactics people can employ to inflate the numbers in what they're doing. What else, do you have any idea you would suggest? Mark: I would, and so on that note, obviously bringing people like an attorney, bringing an accountant, as I said before that be careful when you do so because they are being brought in with their specific purpose in mind, that are being brought in to look for liabilities, for being brought in to look for problems, and you are the business owner trying to make a business decision. Your accountant that's trying to make an account decision. Your lawyers try to make in legal decision. And so, you have to take their advice and put it into a broader framework business . It's a good business choice for you. You use their bits of data as [inaudible 0:48:41]data. And create a whole picture with that. The other thing that you said, where you cover this one's ask, ask, ask. Don't be afraid to ask for questions and then the third thing that I would recommend is keep good records of what you have looked at. And I'm working through the due diligence for the client, if a buyer comes back and ask for the same documents that they may have already received earlier on. Extremely annoying for a seller who doesn't understand why they even needed it in the first place. And a lot of sellers get skeptical buyers. They think this person isn't really serious about it. they're just looking fishing for information and if you end up passing the same documents 3 or 4 times, even twice. It start to grow those seeds of doubt and to bigger than just seeds and it cause a lot of problems really later on. So be organized in your due diligence just as you want your seller to be organized. Even your documentation. So that you'd know what you have and work off a check list, where be the last thing that I would ask. But don't be afraid to add to that check list as you go through. Chuck: Sure and something else I would add, kind of similar, not a little different, is with the seller. They're interested in knowing that you're going to do well with their business and whether they realize it or not, the questions you ask them are important to them. Almost always. So if you're not asking good questions, they're going to think that you're not serious or that you're not going to do well with the business and we often see that buyers, or sellers won't always sell to the person who offers the most money often times they're selling to the person they think who's going to do best with their business or somebody that they like. I see it time and time again. Recently I had a nice 7 figure deal, I was working with and every time I get off a call, you know, I do a wrap up call with the seller, "Okay, what do you think? and he went like, "Well that person didn't ask any good questions like, I don't want to sell my business to them.", So make sure that you're doing some due diligence upfront, you're looking into these things and you have good questions that you're asking that are relevant to the business. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Do not research ahead of time, not wasting your seller's time on the conference call is important. A lot of good sellers, when they go to sell a business, within that first week, they're going to do half of dozen to a dozen conference calls and it's exhausting to do. So if they get into a call and somebody asks, ask them question that was covered right up front. There's a good place to ask questions that have never been answered, and there's obviously you haven't done your homework, sort of questions. So do have basic homework ahead of time so that people know about, that you've put in that upfront research. One thing I'll add at that fellows, is if there's something that you're not familiar with, ask them about it and don't be afraid about that. And at the end of the day, as a buyer you want to protect your money, but make sure you're not making a bad investment so, don't be afraid to ask those questions. If you ever have questions about, "Can I discuss this or what do you think?" Use the broker. We're here to advice with the buyer and the seller through that process, we want to see a good deal done for our client. Chuck: Absolutely! Mark: Alright, this has been really long, but I think, good information so, Chuck thanks so much for coming on and maybe down the road, we'll do another one of these. Chuck: Sounds good. I appreciate it! Mark: Cool, thanks! Chuck: Alright, thanks everybody! Links and Resources: Centurica offers a full blown due diligence services. Google Google Trends Builtwith Archive Trademarkia.com SEM tools: Spyfu moz majestic alexa semrush Website crawling tools: screamingfrog deepcrawl orangefox copyscape Publicwww is a source code search engine Spyonweb for looking for peoples adsense tools. DomainIQ provide information for domain pages Bannedcheck.com Social media: Linkedin Buzzsumo fantastic sm network tool.

This episode is why content strategy will make you cry tears of joy! Prepare for launch as we blast off with the oracle Andy Crestodina, Chief Marketing Officer & Co-founder of Orbit Media Studios!  We undertake this mission to learn what you should be doing with your content, how to rocket boost an article, the benefit of trigrams, and which myths to obliterate! Takeaways Original research CRUSHES all other forms of content Work harder at headlines Indicate a benefit, be descriptive, & give people value Great content does NOT win Strongest factor for results = Promotion > Quality Social media is for networking, not leads! 3 hours 20 minutes is the average time it takes to write an article #1 tactic that correlates with strong results is influencer marketing Links Orbit Media Studios: https://www.orbitmedia.com/ Blog: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/ Twitter: @crestodina LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina Podcast: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/category/podcast-content-matters/ Content Jam: https://www.contentjam.com/ BuzzSumo research: http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/

One way to enhance your social media efforts and get your product seen by more people is to connect with social media influencers. Are you asking what exactly a social media influencer is, and how you find one? This step-by-step guide will show you how to find social media influencers and why you might want to consider using them in your marketing strategy. Social Media Links mentioned: FameBit by YouTube: https://famebit.com/ Unboxed: https://www.unboxed.social/ Phlanx: https://phlanx.com/ Tool to find social media influencers- Buzzsumo: https://app.buzzsumo.com/ Blog post: How to Find Social Media Influencers: http://www.socialmediamarketingtipscanada.com/?p=2255&preview= A social media influencer is someone obviously with influence, but who has a large community surrounding them. So often an influencer will have one main social media platform that is their 'base' and then several other platforms that still have a large following. Thanks for listening! Let's connect! Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TheSocialLaunch/?fref=ts | Twitter https://twitter.com/lesliemcdermid | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thesociallaunch/ Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/socialmediatips/

In this episode we're joined by Steve Rayson, Director at BuzzSumo. When it comes to SaaS growth, a lot of content and discourse focuses on hyper-growth tactics with a (false) promise that they'll magically turn you into a unicorn. But unicorns a rare. They are outliers, so I caught up with Steve Rayson, Director at BuzzSumo, to hear about another path you can take, and it's that of a SaaS Donkey. By putting sustainability and profitability above hyper-growth, BuzzSumo have built a steady SaaS business that is loved by growth and content marketers alike, going from beta launch to $5M ARR over the last three years or so. In this episode, Steve tells us about: - How BuzzSumo challenged the Unicorn Orthodoxy and became a so called SaaS Donkey - Some of the key factors that enabled BuzzSumo to go from $0 to $2.5M ARR - The role of influencer marketing in SaaS growth including how influencers such as Rand Fishkin & Matthew Barby helped spread the word about BuzzSumo - How BuzzSumo set growth targets and went from $2.5M to $5M in ARR - The things BuzzSumo might have done differently with the gift of hindsight alongside what they have planned for the future BuzzSumo >> buzzsumo.com Proud To Be A SaaS Donkey >> buzzsumo.com/blog/proud-donkey-buzzsumo-reflections-growing-5m-saas-business Anders Pink >> www.anderspink.com Follow Steve on Twitter >> twitter.com/steverayson The Growth Hub >> www.advanceb2b.com/thegrowthhub Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

[smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/7figureceo/7CEO_057__Taking_Control_Of_Your_Business_With_Kim_Walsh-Phillips.mp3″ title=”7CEO 057: Take Control Of Your Business With Kim Walsh-Phillips” artist=”Casey Graham” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ] Kim has two companies that are all about creating ROI for her clients through lead generation. She hates awareness campaigns because for too long she thought you marketed just for awareness, but learned it is all about ROI. You can market through results and not just pay to get your name out there. She founded and runs two companies: Lead Digital Group – generates revenue for companies using social media Elite Capital Advisors – generates seminar attendees for financial advisors She spent 10 years struggling going day to day hoping she could pay the bills and made a change when a friend gave her No B.S. Direct Marketing by Dan Kennedy. She started applying direct response marketing ideas with social media and started seeing great results. Over time she was able to present what she had done to Dan, which led to them writing a book together, No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing (his #1 selling book of all time). After 10 years in business and many iterations, they reached the 7-figure mark.   LINKS Elite Digital Group: Connect with Kim & her team No B.S. Direct Marketing by Dan Kennedy & Kim Walsh-Phillips No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing by Dan Kennedy & Kim Walsh-Phillips BuzzSumo: Find the most shared content & key influencers Email your top take-aways and learnings to Casey@CaseyGraham.com   TOP TAKE-AWAYS BREAKING THROUGH 7 FIGURES Kim realized she had to take charge of her life and business. After 10 years in business, she did a few things that helped her & recommends them to other business leaders: Shut Up Your Head Trash – stop telling yourself the story that you can't do it or what people will think when you do do it. We all have things we tell ourselves and mindsets that we must overcome to breakthrough Invest In Education – you have to spend money and time to help you find a different path, new skills and challenge the way you've always done things Position Yourself As The Expert – you have to provide valuable content from your voice and experience every week to your audience Take Control Of Your Prospect Meetings – instead of chasing your leads around, you have to take charge and “prospective client interview” Say “No” To The Wrong Clients – if there are clients you don't want to work with, you have to get rid of them – they're not worth the income & you need more leads so you can replace them Raise Your Prices – price is not an arbitrary number, it should be equal to the value you're providing HOW TO PRICE YOUR PRODUCTS/SERVICES The prices of your products and/or services should be based on the value that you're bringing. You need to be able to prove the value you're providing for the end user to validate their cost. If your prices are too low, the perceived value is low as well and they're more likely to get rid of you or not buy from you again. But, if your prices are higher, they perceived value is higher as well. BE THE EXPERT You have to step and platform yourself as the expert in your niche. You can do this by sharing valuable content to your audience. To learn what people are interested in, use BuzzSumo. That shows you what people are sharing on social media and you can give them exactly what they're looking for. You can create a monthly content calendar using that information. Do not spend time highlighting other people – you become the expert in your field. HIRING THE RIGHT PEOPLE Always make your candidates jump through hoops. That will prove that they are willing to go above and beyond. You need to have a quick Round One in your interview process so you're not wasting a bunch of time. Two tools to use are: Indeed – you can post your job listings and get more applicant leads Acuity Scheduling – that's an online scheduler that helps setup interview calls Kim also gives each new hire 90 days for intense on-boarding. She understands they need time to understand your company and services before they're able to represent them well. And they need time to understand the expectations you have of them. DAILY MEETING & TEAM SYSTEM Kim's team has a very specific system on how they interact on a daily basis. They have a daily meeting that includes the following: Word Of The Day – Each person shares one word that describes how they're feeling Daily Theme – Each day they focus on a different area (Motivation Monday, etc.) Basecamp Review – Each person shares their Basecamp projects for accountability Numbers Review – Each person shares where they stand with their Key Performance Indicators Agenda Items – Someone can add an item to the agenda ahead of time they need to talk about with the team LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE YOU WOULD TRADE PLACES WITH A lot of people will give you advice, but you need to filter through what they're telling you. Listen to the people who you would be willing to trade places with. If you don't like or agree with what their advice has done for them, you probably shouldn't listen to them. Email your top take-aways and learnings to Casey@CaseyGraham.com

“How To Get More Done With Your Virtual Assistant” In this episode, Kim talks about how to use your virtual assistant, through Fancy Hands, to your benefit.  Key Takeaways! How to use Fancy Hands Assistant... $30.00 a month – a low cost way to get some help in your business. Kim uses Fancy Hands to get more done. How to get more content created... You can send your Fancy Hands assistant to research what your target niches are responding to on social media. Then use this to get ideas on what to write next. Have your Fancy Hands tasker provide you with a report on their findings when they visit http://www.buzzsumo.com. Ask your tasker to put your niche in the search box, and pull-up the most recent shared articles on your topic. Have them look-up their findings on the free version on SEMrush – on what keywords are being used by your topic.  Also, have them look-up the top 20 books on Amazon in your niche. This list can help spur your next idea on content series for your content – this will save you time. Use this as a library of ideas, so you can pull from it anytime you want/need!  Make sure you get that Virtual Assistant (VA) working for you! Please Checkout  Facebook Sales Strategy - http://www.fbsaleslaunch.com Resources Mentioned in this Episode: Fancy Hands: https://www.fancyhands.com Buzzsumo: http://buzzsumo.com SEMrush: https://www.semrush.com/features/ Facebook Sales Strategy: http://www.fbsaleslaunch.com Please leave us a review on our show notes page or on iTunes at:  http://elitedigitalgroup.com/podcast/ Click here to Subscribe to Facebook Sales Strategies!

In today's episode, Andy is joined by Steve Rayson, Director at BuzzSumo, to talk about how to create content that is more likely to be shared online. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.