Justin Blaney's Blog, page 50
November 11, 2015
The Beautiful Cycle of Innovative Content Marketing
Let’s say you own a daycare for man’s best friend and want to grow your list. You don’t want just anybody on your list, you want people who will eventually bring their family pet to your doggy daycare business. Growing your list is a multifaceted beast, so let’s take it one piece at a time.
Today, we’ll look at your blog.
↓ Continue reading below ↓
The blog
Email is still king of innovative marketing. As much as we assassinate spam, the good stuff eventually gets through. Combine email campaigns with a blog and your content is going to increase your clout exponentially.
In innovative marketing, a blog will build your reputation in search engines because it increases the size of your website. Each new post counts as a new page, so when Google’s search engine crawls around your site, it sees more pages and figures you must have more authority than that doggy daycare place down the street with only three webpages on their site. This increases your rank when people are searching and, as we all know, the higher you rank the more likely people are to click on your business in the search results.
Email marketing
To integrate your blog with email marketing is fairly simple. If you have a monthly newsletter, include a teaser with a link to your latest blog post. For readers who have requested an email every time you post, design your blog to trigger emails to that list every time you post.
The advantage to a teaser and a link is that it drives people to your website. You could include the content of your blog in the email in its entirety, but driving traffic to your site is better for SEO (more traffic means more authority and higher rankings), helps you know who’s reading your content because you can measure clicks and increases the likelihood of someone poking around your website because they’re already there.
This post originally appeared on Inkliss.com
Become famous for your helpfulness
Find out more about becoming famous through helpfulness with a free copy of the book.
October 29, 2015
What Is Marketing? The Big Content Marketing Blog Post
Content marketing has been all the rage for roughly a decade now and the principles that underlie this—and any other effective lead generation method for that matter—directly correlate to being helpful.
Content marketing uses blogging, ebooks, white papers and social media to provide content to a specific audience. Usually, this content is available in exchange for a small price, such as a like on Facebook or an email address. Over time, these exchanges of information build a more complete profile of your audience, which allows you to qualify them into leads and pass them through your sales funnel toward a closed deal.
One of the greatest no-nos to content marketing is self-promotion. While inbound marketing is all about promoting your services, it’s done with minimal self-promotion. Give your audience some credit. After they’ve read your content for a while and seen you answer their most pressing questions time and again, they’re going to figure out you’re good at what you do.
That said, you’re going to need to promote yourself roughly 10-20% of the time. For those readers who devour your content and are ready to hand you the reigns to implement your solutions for their business, you need to tell them you’re available for hire. Since this isn’t the vast majority of your audience, keep it simple and keep it minimal.
Converting the skeptics
One powerful tenant of content marketing is transitioning your audience from being casual consumers of your ideas to thinking of you as a thought leader in your space. This is a slow process that takes real expertise as well as time, a lot of time. It tends to start with someone begrudgingly giving you their email address in exchange for an ebook or whitepaper, something they see could be of value. They’ll read your ebook, find the value they were hoping for and come back for more. In time, they’ll rely on you for information. How much easier do you think it will be to sell your product or service to this person now that they see you as a thought leader? I bet you could get coffee with this person if you wanted to, whereas six months earlier they wouldn’t even click on your email. Behold, the power of content marketing.
From salesman to advisor
The other cool thing about being helpful, whether you're meeting with someone in person or sharing your ideas through your content, is that people see you in a different light when you're trying to help them instead of trying to get their money. We tend to avoid salesmen, but advisors are in demand. So don’t be a salesman, be an advisor. Take the time to find out what your audience is struggling with and craft a good solution for them. Make their life easier and get on equal footing with your potential client in the process.
This will also help empower your salespeople because their focus is on the value your services can bring to a client and not on how they can meet their quota this month. When your audience sees they’re not a means to an end, they’re more inclined to use your services.
This post originally appeared on Inkliss.com
Become famous for your helpfulness
Find out more about becoming famous through helpfulness with a free copy of the book.
October 19, 2015
Boost Sales and Build Demand with Quality Content. And Class.
Yes, it’s important, vital, to keep your eyes on other people and focus on being as helpful as possible through high volumes of quality, consistent content. It’s equally important to get the credit for being the helpful expert.
What getting credit doesn’t look like
Desperately grasping for credit is not the road to being famously helpful. There will be times someone attributes your awesome ideas to someone else. Rather than crafting an email or some sort of blurb to your homepage to say “By the way, so and so didn’t do that, we did,” showcase your class by moving on.
Boosting sales and becoming famous through helping is a long-term game and you will have short-term frustrations. Let them go, keep your eyes forward and stay on track with the strategy you crafted, adjusting as necessary as you go. Helping is not about you.
That said…
Get credit for your work. If you help a thousand people anonymously, you may be living out the principles of helpeting but it won't help you directly boost sales. Sign your name, affix your logo and help people connect the dots that all this expertise you have goes a long way toward helping your clients. This is good for you, but ultimately, it’s good for your taget audience.
If you’re targeting the right people, then the most helpful thing you can do is contract with them to do what you do best. So with the content you create, hold your standards high, make your mark and keep helping. Nothing big, nothing flashy. People will gradually see your consistency and start telling other people about you, which will boost sales.
Helpful people and businesses won’t be kept secret for long. They’re too in demand. So go stir up the demand for your services and enjoy the rewards. Just don't let it go to your head.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
Become famous for your helpfulness
Find out more about becoming famous through helpfulness with a free copy of the book.
October 1, 2015
Increase Your Network and Your Qualified Leads
Just the word “networking” can send some people running for the hills, conjuring up images of schmarmy, slick haired snake oil salesmen oozing superficial conversation and business cards at every cocktail party they can get into.
That’s not real networking, though. Networking, properly understood, is about relationships. The entire premise of inbound marketing is based on the idea that people buy from you because they know and trust you. It’s that warm, fuzzy feeling people get when they realize you’re not in business for business alone but actually care about the people you’re doing business with. So that guy at the cocktail party who keeps looking around for someone more important to talk to? He’s not building relationships and therefore failing miserably at networking.
Now you don’t have to have strong personal relationships with everybody in your network in order to be helpful to them. In fact, it’s a good practice to make sure you have a large number of people in your network you don’t meet with often but still share a degree of trust and respect. The variety of relationships you can have is greater.
What your network is not
The key there is sharing trust and respect. So connecting with someone on LinkedIn is not necessarily adding them to your network. If they don’t know you, if they haven’t vested trust in you, they’re not in your network.
However, you can have a huge chunk of your network be made up of people who have never actually met you, but still trust you.
How to build a network when you can’t meet with everybody one on one
One of the best parts of helpeting is that it makes it possible for you to build relationships with thousands or even millions of people. It’s the difference between the old cliché, “It's who you know" versus the reality that it’s who knows you. When the key is others knowing you, you can scale your abilities to serve millions, even billions.
For example, Seth Godin has a huge tribe of people who are more than happy to help promote his next book and spread the word about his latest project, all because he’s been helpful to his audience for years. Chances are, most of the people in Seth’s network haven’t actually sat donw and had a meeting with him, but they’re still in his network and they’re still a very potent part of that network. They respect and trust Seth because he’s consistently served then with the quality and volume of his content.
This is a principle you can start implementing immediately. Take a bit of the time you usually spend meeting with people one on one and start considering ways you can help your target market without meeting face to face. Make a plan and start doing more of these helpful activities to increase your network.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
Become famous for your helpfulness
Find out more about becoming famous through helpfulness with a free copy of the book.
September 3, 2015
How Not to Help Your Target Market
It seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but imagine you’ve just wrapped up a get-to-know-you meeting with someone by asking, “So how can I help you?” If you've been in a situation like this before, on either side of the table, you can probably guess what the other person says. “Thanks for the offer. I can't really think of anything right now." Then you say something like, "If anything comes to mind, just shoot me an email."
Asking people how you can help them is going to frustrate your attempts to be helpful. If you’ve been trying to get your audience to tell you what they need, you’re likely going to be frustrated by a lack of responses.
The thing is, asking, "How can I help you?" isn’t helpful. It puts the burden on the other person to figure out what they need and then articulate it to you. That's like telling a client to do some work so you know what kind of work they’d like you to do. A true helpeter doesn't ask how they can help. They take the burden of figuring out how to help all on their own.
Being truly helpful requires listening intently to your audience and paying attention so that you're able to make the connection between what you have to offer and what your audience needs. When you’re examining your twitter feed or reading through your Facebook comments, you must be constantly searching for opportunities to help, looking for clues the indicate people’s needs and then making the connection between their need and what you have to offer. As you make these connections, jot them down and strategize a way to respond to your audience in the best possible way.
You'll have a lot more success if you come up with your best idea on how to help your audience rather than depending on them to sort it all out.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
August 20, 2015
Generate Leads with Your Content through Introductions
Nobody will help kickstart your network more than Jeff. Not surprisingly, he’s the epitome of a helpeter.
When Jeff meets with a new contact he doesn’t talk business as a rule. He gets to know you by talking about life—family, travel, sports, etc. The whole time you’re talking with Jeff, his mind is looking for ways he can help, usually in the form of introductions. Jeff filters through his network for people he thinks would be a good fit, people who can help you on your journey, and then makes the introduction.
Introductions are the central facet of the sales system Jeff advocates, a powerful system with the potential to form bridges between full networks that are otherwise unaffiliated.
That’s great, but how does this help my inbound marketing?
Guiding people to helpful content is the focal point of inbound marketing. You should be creating the bulk of the content you’re recommending to people, but be sure to point them to other helpful sources as well for two main reasons.
Being helpful means providing the best content, not just promoting yourself. This often means pointing the way to somebody else. Rather than diminishing your expertise, this builds you up as a trustworthy source of information. People love having one go-to source to point them in the right direction. Become this source.
This increases your credibility. Pointing to other people’s content can help build a relationship between yourself and other reliable sources. When you’re driving traffic to somebody’s blog, it’s easier to ask for the same in return. As credible sources come to see you as a credible source, they’ll promote you on their own platform and drive up your results further. It’s a beautiful cycle.
You have the ability, with your content marketing, to bridge entire networks. That’s huge potential just waiting to be accessed.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
August 6, 2015
How You Help Matters
Laundry, finding a date, doing their homework, whatever it is, helping is just a good thing to do. There are ways to make it better, though.
Consider your content for a moment.You could probably produce content on any number of subjects, answer any question you hear people asking, but to be as helpful as you can to your target audience you need to focus on where your talents lie. Using your strongest talents will go farther and help more people. For example, if you’re a dentist, you could still write a blog about learning to garden. People might be interested in reading about your experiences, but if you want to help people as well as you can, a blog about dental care would be far more effective.
There is a flip side to this, however. Helpeters are willing to help with things outside their sweet spot. If you refuse to take out the garbage because you’re a dentist, you’ve crossed into dangerous territory. Doing something we’re not great at can help keep us humble and remind us that helping is not about us.
What Are You Good At?
So as long as we're making room to help out wherever help is needed, it’s a good idea to be as efficient as possible with our helping. This means that, most of the time, the way you help can and should align with your strongest talents. Chances are, you’re good at more than one thing.
If you’re trying to decide which talents to focus on, I think we should help people with activities that pay us the greatest hourly wage or bring us the most joy. Let’s say you’re still a dentist and an incredible gardener, but dentistry brings a far greater income. On one hand, it would be more efficient to help people as a dentist because it pays more, allowing you to either provide more for your family or spend less time working. On the other hand, you might enjoy gardening and really hate dentistry. Only you know what you need to earn for a living and what you enjoy most. It could be that you do one thing for income and another in your free time.
Either way, you should be able to find ways to use both skill sets to help in the most effective way you can while still setting yourself up to earn more and enjoy life.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
July 23, 2015
Helpeters Help People Who Can’t Repay the Favor
While helpeting is good for your long-term numbers, it’s vital to remember that the principals behind helpeting dictate focusing on others, not your numbers. We must walk a fine line between being efficient with our investments and making helping all about ourselves. Crossing that line will diminish your results and earn you the distinction of being that guy who only helps when he wants something.
Prevent this by always making time to help those who can't help you back, who have little to no chance of giving you anything in return. If you only help those who can help you, you're just helping yourself. If this is your approach, you're not helping so much as making cold, calculated investments in order to get something. Your focus is on you. Taken further, this leads to manipulation, demanding repayment, anger when you don't get something in return for your investment, etc. People will see through you eventually and your results will drop in the end.
It’s true that what goes around comes around and, while there may be disagreement on why, most people can agree that it's important to help those who can’t help you in return.
One of the complicating issues is the fact that some of the most self-centered, unhelpful, arrogant people in the world are also some of the most successful. How can helpeting be a true principle worth applying if that's true? For one thing, you’re not one of those people. If you were, I don't think you'd be reading this blog. It’s true that some people get ahead in life by sheer force of charisma, connections or intelligence. While I believe these people would do better if they applied the principles of helpeting, too, they don't have to in order to be successful because the balance of luck is tipped in their favor. Now you may not be able to get the job as CEO of the 49ers because your parents own the team, but you can rise far above your peers and even achieve greater success than those at the top of the top if you apply helpeting.
That's not a promise, because I can't guarantee your success. Why? Because everyone has limitations and there are a lot of things that factor into your success besides your marketing. I do guarantee that you can have more fun and that you can sleep better at night by focusing on helping others rather than tooting your own horn. I’ve experienced it firsthand and seen it at work in successful, happy, fulfilled people around me.
These are people who become great by focusing on serving other people. This is greatness that doesn’t come through birth or positional authority, but is achieved by followers giving honor and influence and position to those who are helpful to them. This is democratic greatness. It's like how we buy the books of the people who help us with their content. We're giving those people our attention and, in a sense, placing them into a teacher/mentor role over us by listening to what they say. If they cease to be helpful and start trying to sell us their next workshop, we can remove them from their position over us.
You can see this play out with public speaking. If the speaker believes his speech is all about him and forgets that it’s about the people listening, he’ll lose his audience. People go to hear speakers who are helpful. Speakers at a business convention help people improve their business. Comedians help by making people laugh. Authors help by sharing ideas. Motivational speakers inspire. The speaker who focuses entirely on his audience eventually gains from his efforts. The audience he’s helping will want more. They’ll seek out his books because he was helpful. They’ll want to buy his web series or attend his next event without needing a sales pitch.
Just like the speaker, helpeters are starkly aware that helping isn’t about them; it’s about others. They don't ever lose sight of the need to help people downstream, because it’s impossible to focus only on helping people upstream without make it all about you.
So if you want a maximum return on investment, stop worrying about your investment and keep making space for people who can’t help you. It’s one way to make sure your helping motives are pure.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
July 9, 2015
Helping Your Target Market: Stage 3
Stage three is really an extension of stage two. This stage requires that you know exactly who has the highest probability of helping you reach your goals and that you focus with laser intensity on this target market. These do not have to be the exact people who would buy your services. They could be a referral partner with the ability to send you dozens of new clients every year.
If it is a customer you target, it shouldn't be just any customer. It should be your perfect customer. Someone you'd enjoy working with, someone with the money and desire to buy your product or service and someone who is likely to connect you to other customers like them.
For example, if you own a sign company, you would do well to find ways to serve commercial property managers. These property managers constantly have new small businesses come into their buildings, small businesses that need a lot of new signs to get up and running. By focusing on helping these property managers, or other potential high volume referral sources, you’re greatly increasing the reach of your helpeting. For each person you help in this category, you’re getting exponentially more in return.
This may not initially sound others-focused. Were that true, it wouldn’t fit the principles of helpeting, but focusing your helpfulness isn't just good for you. Targeting certain people to help is better for them, too. When you're focused in who you help, you can become better at how you help. As we'll discuss later, how you help your target audience should be more in line with your specific talents so you're offering more value. This focus allows you to cut out all the extraneous noise that might detract from your ability to help others to the best of your ability.
Tying it all together
To review, stage one is to cut the fat, stage two involves becoming strategic and stage three is about honing in on your target market. Identify the stage you are at currently in your journey toward becoming famously helpful. How can you move to the next stage or, if you are in stage three, how can you better target your helpeting on those high quality referral sources? Write a list of people you can help in the stage you are currently in and in the stages ahead of or behind you. Write down at least one way you can help each of these people. Then do it.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
June 25, 2015
Strategy for the Long Run: Stage 2
The second stage to increasing the impact of your helping involves being selective about helping people who are primarily upstream from you. By upstream, I mean people who are ahead of you in some way. They’re further along in their career, they have more influence, experience or wisdom. Even people who are able to buy your service or product would be considered upstream.
A word of caution is due here. Everyone needs someone upstream helping them along, and being strategic about who you help is going to go a long way toward making you more helpful and, in a round about way, more successful. However, the moment you focus exclusively on helping those who are ahead of you is the moment you prove you're really only concerned with helping yourself. Keep helping people downstream from you and make it a priority. It’s tough to keep the focus off ourselves, but it’s possible.
Helping upstream is about being prudent. You can only help a finite number of people in the world so you might as well help those you can help most effectively.
Let's look at a practical example:
Let’s say you’re a manager at an F500 company. You would do well to find ways to help those one to three levels above you in the chain of command at your company and at similar companies that you might want to work for someday. Not only can these people help mentor you up your career path, they can offer valuable insights into how to perform in your current position, making you more valuable to your employer in the long run. You’ll learn more skills, gain insight and, since you’re focused on others, have more tools to help others with, both up and down stream, than you did before.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
