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.
