Yesterday, or last year as I like to say, I explained our summary of 2015. We are quite happy, by the way, in our intentional build of the business.
2015 was supposed to be a foundation year and we weren’t aiming for income. This may sound strange, but there’s reasons for that.
We model some very successful businesses and you don’t necessarily need to be chasing the money straightaway.
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However, there’s a very fine line in the focus between aiming to create content that’s fantastic, and then making an effort not to sell anything to anybody.
People want information that is tucked in your head. The reason quite often they are following you is because you know stuff and you’ve got a way of putting it, and it’s what they like to hear.
So don’t leave it too long to offer premium content or a premium service, something that they want. Now if you do it in the right way, they can just simply say, “No thanks, not now, not interested, maybe later, maybe never.” Or they can just ignore you.
But on the other hand, they can make the decision on their own; trust them to make a decision. Your customers, your potential customers are going to be somebody else’s who has that product.
Those products don’t need to be polished, they don’t need to be perfect. And this is one of the things that maybe I have done wrong in the last year.
We are going to be launching The Owners Gold membership side, which has a low monthly fee, or an extremely good offer if you want to pay a year at a time.
Now what we will show you in that side is we will provide way more than enough value for the fee and the reason is because we want people to be members for life.
The things we cover change; social media for instance, we will cover it, we’ll explain how to use Facebook or Twitter properly for business, these things change.
There will be things along Instagram is growing and there will be things that come along that we’re not even talking about today.
If you are a member, we will provide training on how to use them, how to set them up. And that will all be free, whatever you pay us day one will be free forever.
If ever you leave, you can leave anytime you like. You can join anytime you like, but we will make sure that you’re getting value and the amazing thing is we will talk to you and we will also enable you to talk to your fellow members.
And I have always had that intention and I delayed the launch. Now perhaps that’s wrong. A lot of coaches would say, that’s wrong, let the user make the decision for themselves.
Me, in my opinion, it doesn’t count for diddly squat, it’s your decision whether you are interested. So, by the way, this isn’t a hard sell on this by the way, it will be there, you will see it.
So with that in mind, when I say change your focus, it changes ours as well.
So I’ve got a special New Year challenge because every Friday we have a challenge. We had a Christmas kindness challenge last week on Christmas day, and today New Year’s Day we are going to have a New Year’s challenge.
So pen out, get your pad, get your piece of paper, and let’s get started.
Weekend Challenge
#1 Your Focus Must be to Build the Business With Every Action: So when I say must, this is not “Whoa! Jon, don’t you go telling me what to do!”
But, it must be that, otherwise why are you in business? Unless of course you’re a charity, but, even if you are a charity you’re going to be raising funds.
Your business will survive if it has continuous growing funds; a business that stands still dies, it withers on a vine. A business must grow to survive.
Now it doesn’t have to grow at the rate of Google and Facebook and so on, it can grow slowly but steadily. So everything you do must have an endgame for it, so you need some goals.
#2 Your Website Needs to Make Lead Capture the Number One Aim and Nothing Else: Now just one proviso, if you sell products, you of course can make it sell, but even in that case, number one is to capture leads, not many people will dive in and buy instantly.
It’s like the cocktail party where you go along and you jump in and you go to a little group of people and you go, “Hello, I am Jon, I’m from Marketing for Owners, I’ve got to this website product, it’s, would you like…?”
Yeah, you’re not going to do that, you’re going to walk along and you’re going to go, “Hello, hi.” Someone might say, “Oh, I’m Henry…” Whatever, you say, “Yeah, I’m Jon” and you start chattering away and then every now and again you hear something where you can interject a bit and then people talk to you and then you say a bit more and so on.
And gradually they start to get to know you and then they smile and they laugh at your jokes, they start to like you.
And when they trust you, they invite you to their parties. And then later on, every now and again someone will ask you what you do and you say “Well, I help people make a better life for themselves” and so on. That’s how it works.
So, lead capture, you don’t get an opportunity to get them to know you or to like you, or to trust you unless you are communicating with them.
So if you look at the Marketing for Owners website, go to the homepage, what’s the first thing you see? It’s going to have a lead capture, probably two.
If you scroll down any page, there are other methods. If you listened to yesterday’s, you will find out what we are going to do, that’s why you’ve got to do it.
#3 List Building Should Start Today: If you’re in business and you are not list building, which means capturing e-mails and contact details, possibly names of people, potential customers, then you’re losing out.
You have to start today if you’re going to think “I don’t know what to talk to them about.” Anything you’ve ever talked to any customer about, you can write in an e-mail and send to the whole list via an auto responder so that people gradually get to know you.
Tell them what jobs you did this week and how you did them and they will suddenly think, gosh, he or she is good at this, maybe they’re the person for me. Don’t make excuses.
All I hear from top experts and I have interviewed them and they all say to put more effort into building their lists sooner.
Now they know. It is the secret sauce of online marketing, it is capturing people’s details and e-mailing them, seriously.
You think “Oh, I don’t like spam.” It’s not spam, you’re telling interested people what they want to hear.
If you don’t believe me, then why are you listening to me? Honestly, I’m not making this stuff up, it’s what built my businesses.
I have a site with 33,000 on one list, I have a site with 10,000 or 11,000 on another one, this site has 3,300. Why do you think I know those numbers?
Because they are important. How much business do I do? A couple of million quid a year, every year, okay. Trust me, gets building a list; if you want to know how, ask me.
#4 Email Marketing Sequences Should Be Longer: Now that is going to assume you are list building. But then, an e-mail marketing sequence means when you set up an auto responder.
For that you would use AWeber or Mail Chimp or Infusion Soft, Constant Contact, IContact convert kit, we use AWeber. We do the 10,000 list as I just mentioned is on Mail Chimp in another business, but we use AWeber on the 33,000 and on this business. I like AWeber.
If you go to marketingforowners.com/tools, or look on the website on the top menu under “Resources”, it’s got great tools, it’s got a couple of links to Mail Chimp and AWeber, but in our membership side, we will be teaching you how to use these things, they do it anyway.
But your e-mail sequence is where you have an auto responder, you write an e-mail and leave it in there and it says when to send it.
You can send it three days after the last one, five days after the last one, seven days after the last one, one day after the last one, once you set those up, everyone whoever signs up for your list will get every e-mail. It’s brilliant, it’s genius.
But they need to be longer, a lot of people will write two or three, maybe seven, but they need to be longer.
You’ll find our main one I think is maybe over 30 and it will get longer and longer until it is about 50. And it’s not spam, people, not many people unsubscribe, we don’t get any complaints.
Well, I might have had one at some point, but nothing of significance for the Marketing for Owners list.
#5 Create Quality Content that Teaches and That Answers Consumers Questions: People are searching online for answers.
They are not searching for products, they want answers. We sell fire extinguishers at Fire Protection Online and fire safety gear, people want to know what type of fire extinguisher do I need for my hairdressing salon?
How much do fire extinguishers cost? Do fire extinguishers need servicing? That’s what they want to know.
We have articles answering all of those questions and we are adding more and more. People search, they say “Why is my smoke detector beeping?”
Quite obviously rust, that kind of thing because the batteries needed changing. Not always, but people look that up, and we give the information and then we don’t hard sell them.
We give the information, then they get to the point of trusting us, and they think, “Oooh” and then at the bottom of the post or email we may say “If you ever want more information like this, just enter your name and join their to 33,000 others who trust us for their…” Etc. etc. Easy eh?
And we send them those articles, we send them by e-mail and we have them on the site. That’s what people want, or to teach, to be taught.
So if you join up in the owner’s club, that’s the free one, go to marketingforowners.com/join, and sign up.
Honestly, there’s nothing — no money, no credit card, no address, no phone number, or anything like that. We are not going to hard sell you anything, go there and it will tell you what it gets.
But that gets more than just the blog, there’s lots of reports, lots of downloads that are hidden on the site and you get access to everything there.
But if you join that you will get an e-mail on Monday that teaches you something, no one else gets that e-mail, the other subscribers do not get it, just the members, that’s why it’s better.
We get e-mails from people who say “Thank you, that’s given me information for my meeting today” it’s absolutely brilliant.
And I don’t write them all so it’s not all from me, but when we get the e-mails, I let whoever writes it, get the feedback. We love it, but we give information and answer people’s questions and we teach.
#6 Look to Create Opportunities to Sell at Regular Intervals: Remember what I said at the beginning, the focus is on raising money on getting income, selling stuff or services, so look for those opportunities, make it a rare but make it a regular.
Don’t be scared to try and offer your services, it never has to be a hard sell, you can say for instance if you are a web designer, “Having finished just three projects recently, we now have room to take on some more clients.
So on a first come first served, if you’d like a free audit and a free quotation, with no obligation, please follow this link, contact me, ask for me, I will be in touch and we’ll explain how it works. No obligations.” Easy. And that’s it, that’s all.
So you’re going to have a fabulous year you’re going to look at some of those things and think “Hmm, it inspires, I’ll keep going.”
Don’t forget the exciting new podcast next Wednesday on January 6. It’s my first interview with John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing. E
Thank you for being a listener, I look forward to another 366 days, it’s a leap year, of you again. Speak to you soon.
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