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A powerful way to reinvigorate yourself

Posted byIan Brodie on January 31st, 2016.

I know what it's like.

It's easy to become jaded with the day to day.

I'm super privileged to do something I truly enjoy and I know just how lucky I am to be in that position.

But every now and then, pouring your heart and soul into everything you do can be just a little bit wearing. And sometimes you feel like you just don't have anything left to give.

I hear something similar from a lot of people. Sometimes the joy just goes out of what they're doing. 

Here's what I've found helps a lot: talk to your clients.

Ask them what results they're getting with the things you've helped them with. Ask them if they've found working with you valuable.

There's nothing reinvigorates me more than hearing about how the hard work I've done has made a real difference for my clients. I bet you'll feel the same way too when you hear from yours.

Most of us aren't just in it for the money. Hearing directly how our efforts have done some good in the world makes a huge difference. So ask :) 

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This could be what it takes to succeed

Posted byIan Brodie on January 24th, 2016.

As I write this email late on a Saturday evening I'm sitting next to our youngest, Robert, who's decided at the age of 16 that he's going to be a global tycoon selling on Amazon.

Right now he's looking at a bunch of websites to find products he can ship in from China in bulk to sell on. He's been at it solid for about 5 hours now. 

In total he's probably spent about 30 hours researching in the last week. A couple of hours ago he had no idea how to make a spreadsheet. Now he's doing a basic P&L for the products he's identifying.

It's hard work. There's a ton of to-ing and fro-ing and dead ends as he finds something that looks viable, but then it turns out it's got the wrong plug or the shipping is too much or whatever.

But he's got the bit between his teeth, so I reckon he'll find something.

As I look over at him tapping away at the keyboard on his hand-me-down macbook I'm struck by just how much work he's putting into this.

He's basically starting from scratch with no assets,  no contacts, no knowledge. But he's making up for it with hard work and learning fast.

I wonder how much better those of us who already have assets, contacts and knowledge would do if we applied the same level of hard work and learning to our businesses.

My guess is a lot.

Frankly, I see a lot of people give up at the first hurdle when they try something with their marketing and it doesn't work first time out. Or if they don't know how to do something they won't invest the time in learning how.

No matter what advantages you start out with, if you aren't prepared to work and learn then someone who is will catch you up and overtake you. Even if they start out way behind.

Building a successful business doesn't take genius or luck or a rolodex to kill for (though all of those will help). What ot really takes is hard work and continuous learning.

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The most powerful emotion in marketing?

Posted byIan Brodie on January 17th, 2016.

People talk a lot about getting emotion into your marketing. People buy based on emotion we're told, so you've got to use that somehow.

So marketers try to harness fear, envy, joy, desire. All to get you to part with your hard earned cash.

But I think there's a more useful and perhaps more powerful emotion than any of these. Particularly when it comes to the type of marketing you and I do.

It's surprise.

Surprise is the power behind much great art and entertainment. The punchline in comedy gets its bite by subverting the setup. And nobody pays much attention to dramas they can guess the ending of. It's the expectation of surprise: the revelation, the twist and the end, the whodunnit that keeps us watching.

Surprise grabs your attention. Surprise releases dopamine and enhances your senses. Surprise is memorable.

It's the expectation of new and surprising information that causes us to read something. And it's the payoff from that surprise that makes us feel good and remember it.

Most of us do some form of content marketing. Our goal is to share our expertise to build credibility and trust with potential clients.

But no matter how great your content or expertise, if you only say things that people already know, you won't stand out and you won't be remembered.

You've got to focus on the areas of your expertise that are different and unusual. That your audience won't expect.

You've got to surprise them, or frankly, you'll lose them. 

Now you don't necessarily have to shock them every time. The kind of surprise I'm talking about often shows up as a raised eyebrow or a knowing nod. 

It happens when a little lightbulb goes off in the head of your reader. Or their perception shifts just that little bit. Or they see things that bit more clearly than before.

Whenever you're thinking of writing an article or blog post or making a video, podcast or other piece of content, ask yourself what new and surprising information you have to share and focus on that.

You'll get a lot more interest as a result. 

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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.

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How to be free

Posted byIan Brodie on December 6th, 2015.

A bit of a stream-of-consciousness-dip-into-philosophy email today – so apologies if you came expecting a hardcore marketing tip.

But honestly, I think it's vital for all of us to step back every now and then and make sure we're clear why we're doing this.

I didn't used to think this way. I was Mr Pragmatism. All hints and tips to get the job done.

But at the end of the day, the reason we're getting the job done, for most of us, is to have a good life. And so it's important to make sure that all the pragmatic tactics actually take us closer to that good life rather than further away.

Now exactly what your “good life” looks like I'm not sure of, I only know what it is for me.

But I can guess that if you run your own business or are an independent or do any form of professional service then “freedom” looms large in what you're looking for.

For me, freedom is the ability to do what I want, when I want, as much as possible.

Now some people try to achieve their freedom of sorts by working hard doing something they hate but which pays them a lot of money so they can then disappear to a far flung shore for a few weeks a year to finally enjoy themselves.

That route's not for me. I think it's a sure fire recipe for a painful life.

For me, freedom is doing work I enjoy, not working too many hours, and doing what I want a lot. Like reading, walking, spending time with my family.

So when it comes to marketing (hey, I have to link back to marketing somehow) that means a number of things:

1. The marketing I do has to be fun and fulfilling for me.

That means I don't do cold calling, I don't do networking. I don't even answer my phone these days. I do the sort of marketing that I enjoy (usually content marketing through video, blogs and emails).

I like to think the way I do marketing is some of the most effective there is. But in truth it just has to be good enough. If I discovered that cold calling was way better than what I do now I still wouldn't do it, because I don't enjoy it and I want to spend as much time as I can doing things I enjoy, even if there are better ways.

My goal is not necessarily to do things the best they can be done, but to do them well enough in ways I enjoy doing.

2. My marketing has to generate a surplus of leads and clients.

I've found that having “just enough” leads to hit my revenue targets tends to result in me pitching for and accepting work that I don't really want to do but I need to do to hit my goals.

Much better to have a surplus of leads way above what I need, so I can pick and choose and only work on the things that get me really energised.

3. I need to work the 80:20 rule.

If I'm going to have the free time I want to do things I enjoy other than work then I'm going to need to be super-efficient with my marketing. I need to focus on the 20% of activities that deliver 80% of my results.

Now as it turns out, I'm pretty good at figuring that out. What I'm hopeless at is then stopping doing the other things or outsourcing the ones I can't stop. That's probably going to need to be my main development goal of the next 18 months.

So what does freedom mean for you? And what are your steps to achieving it? Maybe your steps are similar to mine. Maybe not. Either way, thinking them through can be immensely helpful for you.

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John Stuart Mill’s networking wisdom

Posted byIan Brodie on November 29th, 2015.

If you've studied history, politics or economics you'll have no doubt heard of the 19th-century Utilitarian philosopher and economist, John Stuart Mill.

He was an early proponent of liberty, equality and women's rights. Way ahead of his time in many respects. And recently I stumbled across a quote of his of huge relevance if networking is part of your marketing approach.

“It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”

Mill was highlighting back in 1848 what social scientists have only recently been able to prove: that the most valuable human networks are diverse ones.

We may feel more comfortable networking with people who are like us. We may enjoy hanging around with “like-minded people” and having our opinions validated. But we get the most new ideas and new opportunities from people we know who are different to us and we don't hang around with all the time.

These “weak ties” to people who move in different circles to us and who have different opinions and experiences are easy to overlook or even avoid.

But since they move in those different circles, know different people and have different experiences, they're the ones most likely to bring different and new information and opportunities to us. Far more so than the people who think like us, act like us and know the same people as us.

So whenever you're networking: make sure to connect with people who are a bit different to your normal crowd. And keep those connections live. You don't need to be in regular contact, but you do need to stay familiar.

And ignore the advice of people who tell you to only connect to people on Linkedin who you already know. If you want new opportunities and ideas you need to expand the diversity of your network, not keep it narrow.