DT Business Strategies

Maximize your ROI with a Small Business Marketing Strategy that Works.

Small Business Sales and Marketing

Are You Spending More Time Figuring Out The Internet Than You Are Following Up On Leads You Get From The Internet?

By Christian

There are virtually infinite ways to run a business. And there are virtually infinite ways you can market yourself on the interwebz. Which one is best?

Answer: the one you’ll commit to mastering.

Any toolset and approach you use has pros and cons. I humbly submit my own strategy for your consideration:

  1. Set up a WordPress blog.
  2. Share ideas on blog regularly. Except for when I sketch out and take a break for a few months here and there. I share ideas when I have ideas to share. I don’t force it.
  3. Regularly ask people to get on my email list. Give them cool free stuff to trick them into signing up. Very sneaky.
  4. Regularly stay in contact with subscribers. Tell them about new content on blog. Regularly ask them to buy stuff also. I tend to stick to a 7:1 ratio or thereabouts. That is to say, 7 free articles:1 offer.
  5. Share blog content across social media channels.
  6. Advertise my business using print and PPC. Drive traffic to landing pages.

This is literally all I’ve done for years. Will you get great results immediately? Of course you already know the answer to that question.

You’ll need to work at it, just like you needed to learn how a computer works, how to use your smartphone or any other tool. And the more you work at it, the better results you’ll get. There’s a learning curve, but it’s a very worthwhile one.

This is what we do as business owners. We invest in worthwhile things. It’s how we grow.

Your blog is your new smart phone. Trust me, it’s the direction marketing is going.

Do you have questions? Of course you do! You’re likely new to a couple of the techniques on this list. Always feel free to shoot me any questions you have. You’ll hear back from me. Your feedback inspires every post I write here. Thank you for that 🙂

Small Business Search Engine Optimization (Free Strategy)

By Christian

Hey all. I’ve gone on record many times, talking about how I don’t do keyword research. I don’t do hardly any traditional SEO work at all. Yet getting traffic from Google and other search engines has never been an issue.

We’ve generated over 40k leads, millions of visitors and first page visibility on major search engines all without spending a dime or hardly any time on SEO. So what gives? I outlined this very briefly at a recent talk in front of a group of top Realtors in Indianapolis recently, and it was really well-received. So I decided to put it out publicly.

If you want to download the exact small business SEO strategy I use, you can grab it for free. Here it is:

Small business SEO strategy

Don’t worry…if you’re already on the email list, you’re gonna get it. C’mon you should know by now I’m not gonna leave you hanging 🙂

Of course, if you aren’t on the email list yet, then just put your email in the form on that page so I know where to send your report. As always, if you have any questions I’m at your service.

How to Make Money with a Crappy Product or Service

By Christian

how-to-make-money-with-a-crappy-productAre you under the impression that you need a great product in order to get a lot of sales? Hogwash I say!

You don’t need a good product to get sales. You need good marketing. The world is full of crappy products that people buy in high volume.

Just visit your local Walmart. You’ll find shelf after shelf of thin, scraggly, scrawny, skeletal products, devoid of nearly any value whatsoever. Yet people buy this shit all day long. Why? Because we love it. Why do we love it? Because we’re slaves to our passions. And what directs our passions more than any other force in the universe? Marketing! None of us, including myself, like to admit this. But it’s just the way it is. Marketing works.

Some Finer Points on Making Money with Crappy Product…(or a great one…your choice)

  1. Marketing and product development are completely separate things. Treat them as such.
  2. Marketing is what sells stuff. Don’t pretend the quality of your product or service somehow overcomes the need to sell it.
  3. The quality of your product is your responsibility to your customers. It’s your ethical duty as a human being to over-deliver awesomeness to your customers. But it’s not a marketing tactic.
  4. Customers don’t buy your shit because it’s high quality. They don’t know any better until they’ve already bought it. They may believe it’s high quality, but that’s only because you or someone they trust has told them so. In other words, they’ve been sold.
  5. When you learn to sell stuff, that’s when your whole business changes. Selling is what makes you recession proof, and it’s what makes your business viable. You can sell a totally crappy product or a totally awesome one…that’s your choice. But if you know how to sell stuff, you’ll always be able to earn a great living. The reason most business owners struggle is because they flat out refuse to learn how to sell.
  6. When you deliver flat out epic value to your customers, that’s when they say positive things to their colleagues. That’s when they spread the word and send you referrals. That’s when they come back to buy from you again and again. When you take the approach of delivering high quality, it doesn’t help you to make that first sale. Instead, it leverages every sale you make into 20 more. But you still need to make that first sale. Learning to sell is what makes your business viable. Repeat and referral business…that’s what makes you wealthy.

So IN CONCLUSION…

Do you need an awesome product to have a viable, profitable business? No. You really don’t. All you need is to know how to sell stuff. When you know how to sell, you can sell anything to nearly anybody at any time. That’s the power of marketing.

Thing is, if you fail to deliver high value in return for the sales you earn, you’ll always have to hustle to earn more and more sales. You’ll never earn any advocates that way. You’ll never get repeat and referral sales. And it’s a really big missed opportunity. Some may argue it’s our ethical responsibility to deliver high value in exchange for the money our customers send us. I agree 100%. But regardless of any ethical issues, let’s get one thing straight:

It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do. It doesn’t matter how valuable your product or service is. If you don’t know how to sell, you’re dead in the water. But as soon as you learn how marketing works, everything changes. As soon as you learn how marketing works, getting those first sales and building your client base stops being this nebulous, intimidating monster problem. It becomes easy.

And if you follow up on those sales with ridiculously high value, then you’ve changed the entire outlook of your business forever. Learning that marketing is actually a good thing is the rarest and most important lesson any small business owner can learn. If you already know this, please share this idea with your colleagues. You and I both know at least 20 people you know could use a reminder 🙂