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This made me proud

Posted byIan Brodie on January 10th, 2016.

As I write this (in October), my eldest son Chris has just started his second year at University.

Like all students, he's a bit short of cash, so he decided to go for a bar job at a local pub that had just got new owners.

Now over the summer, he'd learnt to set up simple websites in WordPress, so I suggested to him that since the pub was new they might be on the lookout for a new website too. And that he might be able to help them with that and get paid rather more than he would for bar work.

So he duly got talking to the owners, showed them the websites he'd done before, and ended up getting both the bar job and the job to do them a website.

But what really made me proud was he then decided to take a walk up the local high street looking for small businesses that didn't have a website or just used a basic template or directory listing.

He then went inside and asked them if they'd like a website doing.

Not the most advanced of sales techniques.

But it worked. He came out with a list of half a dozen interested businesses that he then followed up with and actually won some clients.

Now at 19, he's got way more bravery than I ever had. It would have scared me witless to try something like that. And I'd have lost sleep worrying about what people would think of me if I just strolled up to them and tried to sell them something.

It's amazing what you can achieve if you don't care (so much) about what people think of you. And if you don't know how things “should be done”.

If you're anything like me you probably overthink things. You probably worry too much about what others will think of you. You probably don't want to be seen as a “salesperson”. You probably don't want to put yourself in an uncomfortable position by asking for business.

But maybe if you did then like Chris, you could win more clients.

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A simple tip for getting better ideas

Posted byIan Brodie on January 3rd, 2016.

I'm guessing your business is a bit like mine in that good ideas are worth their weight in gold.

Clients pay us for results. But it's our ideas (rather than our hard labour) that usually delivers those results.

And its our ideas that help us stand out from the crowd. To differentiate ourselves and become seen as an authority.

Better ideas = better results.

Great ideas are hard to come buy. But here's something I've noticed…

The quality and quantity of my ideas increases whenever I've just read something new in a different field.

So while I get lots of OK ideas from reading books on marketing or browsing marketing websites; the best and most original ideas I have usually come from joining two different fields.

I might see something in a book on stand-up comedy on how to rehearse and realise it can be applied to marketing presentations.

Or an article on overcoming addiction might trigger an idea on building useful marketing habits.

Some of the very best marketing concepts and ideas I've used in my business have their roots well outside marketing.

So if you want to increase the quality and quantity of ideas you get, read outside your field. Try something different. A history book. Something on psychology or biology. A biography. A book on marketing if you're in manufacturing, or on manufacturing if you're in marketing.

You'll get more, different ideas from them than from reading “more of the same” in your primary field.

It certainly worked for me.

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Habit = done

Posted byIan Brodie on December 27th, 2015.

I've been reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg recently.

There are some powerful, and frankly, troubling stories and examples in there.

And a lot directly relevant to marketing too.

A great many people struggle to get results from their marketing, not because what they're doing doesn't work. But simply because they don't actually do it.

Some how, some way, client work, admin, or pretty much anything else always seems to be in emergency mode and push marketing to another day.

But with marketing, just like with diet or exercise, it's consistency that gets results.

“Binge marketing” doesn't work.

What does work is regularly generating new leads and contacts. Regularly keeping in touch to build your relationship. And regularly talking to them about opportunities they have to get great results.

One of the keys to habits is a “cue”. Something which triggers the routine of the habit to start.

Many people who take up regular exercise find that the simplest and best cue is simply to make sure they exercise at a regular time. The clock hitting 6pm is all the cue they need for the habit of exercising to kick in.

You can do the same thing with your marketing. I advise picking a time when your brain is at its freshest – usually the morning.

Put it on your schedule and keep the time consistent.

Take yourself somewhere away from the hustle, bustle and interruptions of your normal work environment. Go to a coffee shop, or just change rooms.

Then get down and do what you need to do. And make sure you give yourself a little reward afterwards to embed the habit.

As ever, no rocket science. It just works. Turning marketing into a habit means it gets done.

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Conversation beats performance

Posted byIan Brodie on December 27th, 2015.

I watch a lot of talks. Both live and on video.

Partly because I speak on stage reasonably often myself, and partly because it's a good source of new information.

Recently I took stock of some of the talks I've rated the highest. And an interesting common factor was that none of them were super polished and perfect.

I see talks every now and then that are technically brilliant, but that I just don't connect with.

It's like the speaker has rehearsed their piece to death. They're up on stage perfoming their piece and it wouldn't really make any difference if the audience was there or not.

By contrast, the talks I connect the most to are the ones where it feels like the speaker is having a conversation with the audience.

I don't mean they interact with the audience a lot and discuss things with them, though they might.

It's just that it feels like they're chatting to us 1-1. That they're aware of our presence and are reacting to it. That there's no pretense or performance. That it's just them, honestly talking to us just like they would if we were down the pub together.

For me, that's the hallmark of an effective presentation these days: that it feels like a conversation.

If you do talks in your business, or sales presentations, you should think about how to do something similar yourself.

Rather than getting your presentation word-perfect and polished. Rehearse how to be more relaxed and get into conversation mode with your audience.

It'll go down much better.

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Start your virtuous circle with this

Posted byIan Brodie on December 13th, 2015.

Last week I wrote about some of the key factors that make a huge difference to your ability to find freedom in your life.

But straight after the email went out I realised I'd missed something crucial. 

One of my key points was that your marketing needs to generate a surplus of leads, so you can choose to work only with the people and on the projects you get the most from. And you don't have to be some kind of sales superstar able to convert all your leads into clients.

But there's something else about the type of leads you generate too.

Ideally, you want to focus on “continuity income”.

Continuity income is where you sign a new customer or client on an ongoing basis rather than for just one project or piece of work.

So that could be getting customers for a membership site like I do. Or signing clients on a retainer or at a regular service level.

Now that might not seem like much of a difference from selling one-off pieces of work (after all, clients don't stay members of membership sites or on retainer forever). But in practice it makes a huge difference.

The difference is that when your month starts, instead of having a blank slate you need to fill with new business, you're always pre-booked. You have a guaranteed baseline income.

Sure, some clients may leave. But not all at once. And usually very few if you're doing a good job.

So every month you already know pretty accurately the minimum you're going to earn.  

I can tell you that makes a big difference psychologically. 

Suddenly you get the confidence to try new initiatives. To invest in new projects for your business. All because you don't have that inner panic about how you're going to hit your revenue targets. You know in advance that you're going to be fine.

It gives you that freedom I talked about last week.

If you don't have a form of continuity income in your business you really should consider it.