Local businesses – be it restaurants, nail salons, or studios – are suffering, and they need help.
If you know how to do a few simple things like help these businesses collect reviews from their customers – which helps them rank in Google – you can help them. If you understand how to navigate Yelp, you can help them. Many don’t understand how these platforms work.
That is the biggest market out there. In fact, the local market is bigger than Google, Amazon, and Facebook. These giants make up less than 10% of the economy. Most of the dollars in our economy go to local businesses. They go to the dry cleaner, the grocery store, the chiropractor, the real estate agent, and the car dealership.
These small businesses seem to have problems, but if you’re a real marketer, there are never any problems. An expert marketer knows how to recast problems as opportunities.
This ability to turn what would be a problem for most into an opportunity is going to be some of the best value you can provide to the market.
Those that have problems and are struggling are actually the best people to help, because if everything’s fine and dandy, they likely don’t actually need your help. It’s easier to sell when someone’s in need than when they’re hot.
Imagine you’re a doctor and you went through some basic training on how to do some kind of medical procedure – for example, LASIK, or you know how to do a cast on someone’s broken arm.
All of a sudden, there’s all these people coming into the emergency room because they went skiing and they broke their collarbone, or they tripped on the curb while they’re skateboarding. There’s people coming into your hospital, and you’re trained to be able to do the very thing they need.
You’re helping, so now there’s way more people coming into the hospital.
Do any of the surgeons in the emergency room need to convince the people that come in when they have a gunshot wound or were in a car accident or other crisis? Do they ever need to sell them on the medical procedures? No.
That’s how you should be thinking about entrepreneurship. If you’re really good at what you’re doing, then you are like a doctor of your specialization.
If you have customers that you are uplifting and you’re sharing what you know with the world, then you don’t need to sell.
Don’t listen to those gurus out there who are trying to sell you courses. Look at what they’re actually doing, and look at if they’ve documented what they’re doing.
The reason I put content out there is to document what I’m doing. It’s not a secret.
A doctor would never say, “Sorry, that surgical procedure is really secret. I can’t tell you about that.”
When someone tells you something is a secret, run. Whether you believe in reciprocity or karma or otherwise, one thing is true: when you put your knowledge and expertise out there, it will come back to you.
People sometimes say to me, “I don’t want to put it out there, because they’re not going to hire us; they’re going to then do it themselves.” They’re wrong.
Whatever you want to get for yourself, you need to create 10 times or a hundred times that value for your community. You can’t do that if you aren’t creating anything.
If you’re doing it right, then you’ll never need to go out there and explain to people what you do. You’ll be a surgeon in the emergency room. You will be a creator, not a consumer.
That’s the abundance mindset we all need to have.
The best way to create valuable content that fosters connections and business is to listen to what others have to say.
I’ll go to Twitter or Facebook, and I’ll interact with people and content that I think are important to what I’m looking for.
I’ll scroll through several posts I don’t want to touch, then I see another post about Colin Wayne Erwin, who built his business in the last few years from nothing to $30 million. He’s an entrepreneur, and he runs Redline Steel. He wakes up in the morning at three or four o’clock, and he goes to work. He’s a busy man.
I could comment or like, but here’s what I’m going to do instead: I’m going to create a video reply.
I make a hundred of these every day. It only takes about an hour, but it will create more social engagement and content than pretty much anything else you can do in that hour.
It’s the algorithm that determines what shows up on people’s feeds. If you understand what feeds the algorithm, then you can win. It’s not black magic, and it’s not about software.
It’s about creating.
When you create 15-second videos, create shout-outs, and give gratitude, that’s when people feel like connecting with you. It’s human.
You know what an ad looks like. You can smell an ad, see an ad, and taste an ad. If you can create something that doesn’t look like an ad, then that’s what the algorithm is looking for. That’s what us as humans are looking for.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but that’s how you can succeed.
They think I must spend hours a day doing it or have a team of ghostwriters.
My “secret”? I spend 2 hours a week recording videos that then get chopped up into many snippets that go across all social media and get turned into blog posts.
I have a strong team that does this, but if you’re just getting started, you can use Fiverr ($5-20 a task) or hire a virtual assistant for $500 a month, full-time.
Sometimes, I’ve gone weeks without producing anything, since I rely upon evergreen content to drive results, instead of making fresh content every day.
The Topic Wheel is how you structure all of your content into 6 topics, which is your HOW (sharing your knowledge).
The hub of your wheel is your WHAT (the stuff you’re selling).
And the outside of your Topic Wheel is your WHY (start with WHY, sharing stories, generating identity, connecting with emotion).
A Kardashian handing a can of Pepsi to battalion of police officers, which somehow diffuses racial tensions.
NatWest Bank’s Mr. Banker mansplaining to female customers.
Budweiser today giving out rainbow beer glasses during Pride Week.
Big, monolithic brands lack such purpose that their ham-fisted attempts to stand for a mission creates more backlash.
You can see it– a bunch of marketers in a glass-walled conference room, listening to a pitch from their ad agency.
I would have loved to be in the room when North Face marketers agreed to deface Wikipedia (go Google it for a laugh), which backfired gloriously when they were caught.
If you’re not a large corporation, but want to have a brand that actually stands for something, I’ve got good news for you.
When you attempt to serve everyone, you serve no one.
If you don’t have a clear niche, you can’t have a mission– with Nike, Disney, and Red Bull being rare exceptions.
I see a lot of entrepreneurs who vaguely say they want to “change the world” or “give back”.
Two of them, former specialists in our program, I caught red-handed stealing from me, all the while espousing virtue.
Decide on a cause you authentically care about and find a way to get businesses to pay for it– then you have congruity between your mission and how you make money.
Amateurs focus on bidding and budgets, while pros focus on strategy– their #GCT alignment (goals, content, targeting).
Amateurs like to constantly “turn the knobs” and touch their campaigns every day– which keeps resetting their ad rank.
Amateurs create lots and lots of new ads and are posting content regularly in a “content calendar”, while pros have just a few ads and keep polishing up their Greatest Hits.
Amateur golfers hit drives all day, while the pros focus on their putting.
Why?
The former is showy, while the latter is mundane.
The pros rely upon Facebook to do the heavy lifting– handling the targeting, bidding, and low-level details when they set up their campaigns properly.
A simple 3×3 grid campaign structure gives you an #AEC (awareness, engagement, conversion) funnel for you to load up your Greatest Hits, that will continue to produce results for you forever.
Would you trust a surgeon who keeps opening and reopening the patient’s wound– who takes 50 times longer to do a surgery and makes 1,000 more cuts? Or who wants to apply some new technique he read about yesterday– for surgery on your loved one?
For your surgery, would you want the surgeon who has focused on the fundamentals for years or the surgeon who keeps switching out their tools every few days and only wants to talk about the latest updates?
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Why pay full price from the other guys?
I’m so desperate for new business that I’m hitting up everyone I see– even homeless people, pitching my wares.
Even if you don’t need heart surgery or didn’t ask me– I’m willing to give you an 80% discount on my services if you buy right now.
====== Okay, you think that’s ridiculous?
How many of you are discounting your services– being afraid to charge your worth, since you don’t think people will pay?
How many of you are cold-calling and cold-emailing– which is spamming people that aren’t interested, no matter what you call it?
I get hit up dozens of times per day by people I don’t know, who have no perceived authority (proof that they’re any good)– all peddling their lead gen services.
If their techniques to “10X my business overnight” are the same as what they’re blasting at me– no thank you.
Be an inbound marketer– have awesome clients come you to you (not you begging them), who pay you well, treat you well, and don’t give you headaches.
It’s not a magic secret that depends upon black box algorithms “that successful people don’t want you to know”.
Nor do you need special software, since it’s not about mass blasting or tools that “work while you sleep”.
The answer is a simple process to define your LIGHTHOUSE client– the people and projects you want to attract, based on your demonstrated, documented experience.
