Jim Connolly Marketing

5 Things to start today, which your future self will thank you for

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business development

Here are 5 practical things you can get started on today, which your future self will thank you for. They’re in no particular order.

Let’s get started!

1: Look for the hidden gold dust that’s under your nose. What was the last marketing email you received, which you opened? What was the last marketing message you read, which motivated you to make a purchase or make an enquiry? By decoding what prompted you to take action, you can get ideas, to make your own marketing more effective. There’s gold dust all around you, if you choose to look for it.

2: Look for trust-building opportunities. Trust is the foundation of every great relationship. We earn trust from what we do, rather than what we say. So show, don’t tell. Tip: This strategy works great.

3: Look for better problems to solve. By solving better problems, you increase your commercial value. Increasing your commercial value is the starting point, to attracting the best clients and earning the best fees. The good news is that most of your competitors will deliberately avoid the tricky stuff. They’ll avoid solving the problems that require additional effort. This presents you with a wonderful opportunity. An opportunity to set yourself apart from your competitors and position yourself as a highly valued provider.

4: Look for the main barrier to your success. Then invest the time and effort required to remove it. Once you’ve removed it, what used to be your second biggest barrier to success will be the new number one. So, invest the time and effort required to remove it. Repeat.

5: Look for outreach opportunities. Right now, there are people who already have the trust and attention of your prospective clients. These trusted people are of massive value to you and your business. Identify who they are. Then, figure out why they should introduce you or recommend you. Get this right and the results can be amazing.

I hope you find at least one thing here, which you can get started on today. If you do, your future self will thank you.

These 4 business owners grabbed the attention of their marketplace. You can too

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marketing blogs, individual

It’s not hard to make your business stand out and attract lots of great clients. In fact, it’s easy.

Here are 4 examples, from business owners who are getting it right.

  • The accountant, who set up a network just for her clients. So they can connect with one another, help one another and buy from one another.
  • The dentist, who provides sessions for people who have an irrational fear of dentists.
  • The coffee shop owner, who offers customers poetry evenings and creative writing events.
  • The gardener, who not only keeps your garden looking great, but also provides all the garden consumables you need and delivers them to you.

The challenge isn’t that it’s hard to stand out. You simply need to Choose An Edge.

The challenge is that it’s easier not to.

I feel like I already know you

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I’d like to share a short, easy to understand, yet extremely valuable idea with you today. It’s all about attracting high quality leads on a very regular basis.

I was prompted to write this, after some emails I received this morning. As usual, a number of them contained a version of the following statement: I feel like I already know you. These emails were from people I’ve never met. In each case, they were referring to knowing me via the ideas I share, either on my blog or the email version of the blog.

Why am I telling you this?

What this means for you and your business

Now imagine that instead of me receiving those highly targeted, premium quality leads, it was YOU.

You received them. With more tomorrow, the next day and the next. More leads than you need. And all from people who feel like they know you. People who know your work. People whose attention you have. People who already trust you. (Think about that for a moment).

This opportunity is open to you. Wide open. It requires a couple of things.

  1. You’ll need to generously, regularly share valuable information. Information so useful, that people will eagerly want to receive it and share it.
  2. You’ll need to accept that no matter how great your information is, very few people will take notice at the beginning. Which is fine. Because all you need are your first 10 people. They’ll share your stuff with 10 like-minded friends. Now you’re at 100, which becomes 1000 or 10000 or 100000. If you stick with it.

That second part is where most people fail.

They invest time and effort for weeks, sometimes months, and see little audience growth. They get demotivated. Then quit. Largely because they have been given incorrect expectations of how growing an audience actually works. Despite what many content marketing gurus say, building a valuable audience takes time. It requires patience and commitment.

Focus on the 10

The key is to focus ONLY on earning the attention and trust of those first 10 people. Turn up regularly and give them your best ideas (not sales pitches or advertisements). As long as the information you share is useful enough and you turn up regularly enough, your audience will grow. And the growth accelerates as more people subscribe. When I started my blog, it took me an age to get my first 100 readers. Today, I can get that many in 24 hours. So, stick with it.

I hope you found this information useful. But more importantly, I hope it inspires you to build an extremely valuable community.

Agile Thinking: A new mindset for a new landscape

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agile, mindset, thinking, business

Business is changing. Moreover, business is changing fast. This is great news for agile thinking business owners, who embrace the opportunities. However, it’s not such great news for business owners who are working in today’s rapidly changing environment, with an outdated approach to business.

Today, I’m going to share some ideas on how you can benefit from the exciting opportunities that are all around you.

First, I’d like to demonstrate how things have improved and why we need to apply a new mindset, to the new landscape.

A new mindset for a new landscape

Many of the world’s most influential businesses were unknown 20 years ago. Some, such as Facebook and Twitter, weren’t even founded until the early 2000’s.

That kind of global growth was previously unthinkable.

What’s more, billion dollar companies that lead their industries have been started by relative unknowns, in very untraditional ways.

Here’s a great example. Writing in Techcrunch, Tom Goodwin summed up the new age of agile business:

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

Tom is right. Something interesting is happening. None of those achievements or business models were possible until very recently. The game has changed. And it has changed for ever.

The age of agile business

When I look at small businesses, they tend to fall into one of the following 2 broad categories: They are either dinosaurs or agile operators. That’s to say their approach to the agile business landscape means they are facing extinction or facing unparalleled success.

Armed with a laptop and an idea, there’s very little an agile business cannot achieve.

  • The new business landscape allows an agile small business owner to have an idea in the morning, and put that idea into play before the end of business that same day.
  • Using social networks, we can listen to what our marketplace wants and provide that want. No more guess work. No more focus-groups. You can get it right every time. And in a fraction of the time.
  • Instant access to data, means research that took weeks or months can now be done in days. And at a fraction of the price.
  • With a great marketing email and some email software, a struggling business can generate a fortune in sales…  and fast!
  • With the correct strategy, anyone can develop their own community. I reach thousands of people every day, many of whom are prospective clients, without spending a penny on advertising. You can too.
  • If you have a great business idea, you no longer need a bank loan. Today, you can use crowdfunding to get the investment you need. People are doing this all day, every day.

Make no mistake, this is the golden age of business, which people have dreamed about for decades.

Yet, in spite of all this potential, almost all small business owners operate their businesses with a 2000’s mindset. They lack agility. This places them at a huge disadvantage.

For example:

  • They still take just as long to make a decision, even though they can get the feedback they need in a fraction of the time. As a result, their agile competitors have already eaten their lunch.
  • They use social networks to follow the crowd, rather than lead their marketplace.
  • They have a website that’s almost an online brochure, when it should be and could be, a lead-generating machine for their business. If you didn’t start work today with leads from your website waiting for you, you should have. Fix it. You’re leaving money on the table.
  • They waste money advertising, when they should be building their own platform.
  • They waste time, money and energy attending networking groups, like people did in the 1970’s, rather than build their own community.

No matter what industry you are in. No matter where you are. Your potential right now is limited only by your willingness, or otherwise, to embrace agile thinking.

What an opportunity. Grasp it with both hands.

Stop competing for business. Seriously. Stop it

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marketing blogs, competition

In most industries, there’s no shortage of providers. Quite the opposite. There’s a surplus.

There’s way too much choice. And that’s why it’s so competitive.

Imagine this

Tomorrow morning at 9am, all your competitors decide to quit. They literally cease trading. Leaving their clients with no option, but to hire you.

As a business owner, this would present you with a huge opportunity. With no more competition, you would be able to cherry-pick the very best clients. You could choose to only work with clients who are happy to pay a premium fee for a high quality service. You could decide to only work with clients, who gave you the freedom to do your best work.

You’d be free to do things your way.

Now imagine this

Tomorrow morning at 9am, all of your competitors carry on as usual.

If you still decide to cherry-pick the very best clients. To offer a premium service for a premium fee. To only work with clients who give you the freedom to do your best work. To do things your way… you will still have no competition (or very, very little).

Competition is a mindset.

Don’t give these people your time or money

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time, money, business success

Today, I’d like to save you time, money, energy and stress. I want to help you avoid making the extremely costly mistake of using someone’s title as a decision-making shortcut.

Whilst some titles are defined by meaningful, proven attainment (like the title Doctor or Professor), others are way too vague. They tell us almost nothing. They can be misleading, too. Here are some examples of titles, which sound like one thing, but often mean something completely different.

The CEO

Anyone can be the CEO of nothing. Think of it like this: Bob and Mark are both CEO’s. That title tells us they are both the head of a company. However, it tells us nothing about their company or their achievements. Bob could be CEO of a 3 month old business that’s in the process of going bankrupt. Mark could be the CEO of Facebook.

If you are thinking of giving your money, time or attention to someone, just because they have the CEO title, dig a little deeper first.

The Internet Start-up founders

I get emails most days, from people calling themselves the founder of an Internet Start-up. Some Internet start-ups are funded by millions of dollars worth of investment. Some are run by people with a proven track record of success. Some are built around a great idea and amazing people.

Others are 2 weeks old, unfunded, with no business model, trying to be the next Amazon.com… only better.

Their title, by itself, means nothing.

Best-selling: From Gladwell to Godin to minimum wage

Then there are best-selling authors. Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin can rightly claim to be best-selling, non-fiction authors.

Because they are.

However, they are also a world apart in the wide, 3 tiers of best-selling authors.

Top tier: Gladwell sells millions of copies of each book. His advance for one book alone was over one and a half million dollars. He’s big news and is interviewed on major TV networks, worldwide, when each new book is launched. His name is widely known within the general population. He can (and does) commanded $40,000 for a single speaking engagement! One of his book titles “tipping point” has become and everyday part of the English language.

Middle tier: Godin is successful, but sells a fraction as many books as Gladwell. Godin appears on affiliate marketing blogs, podcasts and in marketing publications to promote his books. Whilst a pole away from Gladwell, Godin’s influence is considerable within his niche.

Bottom tier: These are the best-selling authors, who sell surprisingly few books (as few as three or four thousand) and make very little money. Just search Google for “how much does a best-selling author earn”. You will see it can be as little as $15,000, over a period of 2 years. Often less. That’s for a year spent writing the book and maybe another year promoting it. So, these best-selling authors earn less than minimum wage.

There is a huge difference between Gladwell at the top and the people at the bottom. So, if you’re approached by someone who calls themselves a best-selling author in their marketing, do some research.

The top 10 rated experts in the world

Then there are those, who title themselves as a world top 10 (or top 50) expert because they appear on a top 10 list from a well-known magazine or website.

Some of these lists are endorsed. They’re 100% legit. They’re compiled by staff writers — people who work for (and are paid by) the online publication or magazine. The publication puts these lists prominently in the main body of the main website.

However, a version of this is also a very commonly used tactic to create fake credibility. Today, lots of very well-known publications use unpaid and unknown bloggers to provide free “content” for them.

And here’s why!

The publication gets content. These publications need lots of content to maintain their search engine rankings. (Google rewards frequently updated websites). Most big publishers are cutting back on staff, so getting all that content is increasingly difficult.

This is where unknown, and unpaid bloggers come in. They provide a cheap way, in every sense, for the publication to keep Google happy.

A popular form of this free content are so-called “top X lists”. The blogger lists people, who they happen to know, as one of the top 10 (whatever) in the world. These lists are not voted for. They are just the opinion of a blogger who’s trying to gain exposure with free content. Anyhow, these lists get linked to and shared a lot… by the people who are included on them. Those links and shares are SEO ranking factors for Google. This is why the well-known publications allow them.

The unknown blogger gets exposure. The blogger gets to claim they write for the well-known publication, even though these posts are not endorsed, not paid for and not part of the main body of the website.

If you look deeper, you’ll see there’s usually a small disclaimer on the page where these lists appear. It is also VERY common to find the blogger’s friends added to these lists. The friend will then add the blogger to THEIR top 10 list. As such, the people on these lists are not part of the top 10 in the world. And they’re not endorsed by the magazine / website, which they claim in their marketing. Literally anyone can be number 1 on these not-what-they-seem-lists. It looks impressive. It means nothing.

In short, titles can be extremely misleading. Sometimes by accident. Sometimes by design.

Because of this, using titles as a decision-making shortcut can lead us to make bad decisions. So, always credential people, before you give them your attention, time or money.