Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing ideas to help you grow your business

What everybody ought to know about Strategy

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The Internet is full of lists. That’s because they are easy to read and often rich in ideas.

The thing is, a list without a strategy is like having ingredients without a recipe. It’s one thing to know what the 21 habits of successful business owners are — but how do you put those habits into action? How do you make the changes required? Where do you start?

A proven approach

Successful business owners are the same as successful sports people. They have a coach or mentor to guide them. They refuse to waste years going in the wrong direction or going nowhere.

Here are a few examples of extremely successful people and their mentors:

  • Steve Jobs was mentored by Robert Friedland.
  • Jobs then went on to mentor Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Larry Page.
  • Bill Gates was mentored by Ed Roberts.
  • Michael Dell was mentored by Lee Walker.
  • Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, was mentored by John Lilly.

Those with time to waste use a different approach

Those who wrongly believe they are time rich, that they can keep throwing months or years down the drain, go it alone.

  • They collect ideas from newsletters, blog posts and books and end up with lots of lists, but no specific strategy.
  • They have no formula to get from where they are to where they want to be, based on their unique situation, challenges or resources.
  • They end up with lots of disconnected ideas, steps, tips, techniques and tricks.

As millions of people will confirm from their personal experience of that approach, it doesn’t work.

In short: Get the help you need, from someone who has achieved what you want to achieve. Life is too short and too precious to waste.

Listen up!

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It’s both easy and dangerous, to confuse silence with satisfaction.

Customers and clients who receive an average service, don’t shout about it. An average service isn’t good enough or bad enough, to motivate them to make a noise.

Silence and indifference

Silence is a sign of indifference… and indifferent people tend not to stick around for long.

If your clients, prospective clients, newsletter subscribers or blog readers, etc., don’t say too much, take heed.

7 Habits of highly successful leaders

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success habits

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredible leaders. Here are 7 habits, which are common to all of them:

  1. They don’t compare themselves to their competitors. They compare themselves to the work they did yesterday, and then commit to do better today.
  2. They show, rather than tell.
  3. They encourage others.
  4. They show up, even when it’s easier not to.
  5. They listen.
  6. They are keen to take responsibility.
  7. They spend their prime-time with friends or learning, not watching TV.

Tip: Here are 21 Powerful habits behind highly successful business owners!

Photos: What everyone needs to know about ageing online

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Tammy was shocked when she emailed me today.

She explained that she had been following a business expert on Twitter for years. Then today, he suddenly aged by around 15 years!

15 years older in just 24 hours

Of course, the guy is just a day older today, than he was yesterday. The thing is, he’d been using the same photo on his online profiles for the past decade and, apparently, it was a few years old when he started using it. Yesterday, he decided to update his profile photo and like all of us, he looks very different than he did back in the late 1990’s.

He has told his Twitter followers he needed to change the photo, as he was tired of people not knowing who he was, when he met them face to face for the first time.

[I wrote about ageing online here: To age online or not to age, that is the question!]

The issue this guy now has, is that his brand is strongly associated with an image, which no longer exists. By failing to invest in a professional logo and failing to update his profile photo every year or two, he’s facing a totally unnecessary challenge.

We all get older

However, until recently, business owners were connected to people who either saw them pretty regularly or who were seeing them for the first time.

In the digital age, we are represented online by photographs, which are a snapshot of how we looked when the photo was taken. If these are seldom updated, we risk facing the same problem the business expert now has.

Keep people in the picture

If you do not already, consider updating your profile photos and avatars every year or so.

Even better, invest in a professional logo and use the logo alongside your picture. This allows you to change your photo, with the continuity of your branding intact.

Tip: Here’s a great video about what makes a logo memorable and valuable!

So, who are your next 10 clients?

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Your next 10 clients will usually be a lot like the previous 10. They will pay you a similar fee, have similar requirements and expect a similar level of service too.

That’s great news if you already attract high value, high profit clients. It’s not such great news, if you tend to attract fee sensitive, average clients.

How to build a highly valuable client list

If you want to build a more valuable client list, start today by getting specific about the type of clients you want to work with. When you have done that, consider the following:

  • What level of service do these higher quality clients expect? Do some research. Find out what they want from a provider in your industry.
  • Next, build a level of service, which over-delivers on what they expect. By exceeding their expectations, you will have a vastly more powerful proposition to offer them — something that will earn their attention and interest.
  • Are you prepared to execute on this strategy, in order to build a massively more valuable client base? Nothing I have mentioned so far is difficult to do. However, putting it into play requires courage. It means leaving the failing familiar.

As service providers, we have the freedom to choose who we work with. Deliberately selecting the kind of clients we want, in advance, is the key to building a highly valuable client base.

In every sense, it pays to choose wisely.

How to get more clients from your newsletter or blog

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content marketing, newsletters, blogging, list building

Leigh emailed me with a great question. She wanted to know why her newsletter, which has over 5000 subscribers, generates very few client enquiries for her consultancy.

As Leigh was making a mistake that’s common to lots of newsletter publishers and bloggers, I thought I’d share my answer with you.

Building your list

The root cause of Leigh’s problem, is that she is doing everything possible to build her list. This is the mantra of pretty-much every content marketing guru and newsletter / blogging course out there.

It’s also total, utter bullshit.

The numbers

If the purpose of your newsletter or blog is to generate business leads from prospective clients, then your focus should be on quality, not quantity. It’s about building meaningful, deep relationships with the right people, not shallow relationships, with a wide, vague readership.

For example.

  • If you have just 50 engaged subscribers, who value your newsletter or blog and are a perfect fit for your services, you have a valuable list.
  • If, like Leigh, you have 5000 poorly-targeted people on a list, who you gained using list building techniques, you’re wasting your time and money.

Get out of the list building mindset

So, make sure you’re not chasing the wrong numbers.

Instead, focus exclusively on earning the attention of your prospective clients. Learn about their most pressing challenges. Then, publish answers and ideas, which will help them. Become a valuable asset, before they need your services.

If you get too few client enquiries from your newsletter or blog, it’s probably because you’re building a list, rather than creating connections with prospective clients.

The message here is simple: Go deeper. Not wider.

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