Do This Not That Marketing

Marketing Advice, Grow Your Business

Archives for April 2018

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What to Say When You’re Turning Your Hobby Into a Business

What to say when you turn your hobby into a businessAre you thinking about turning your hobby into a business?

If you’re good at what you do so people really benefit/find value in your products or services, you might have a viable business.

One challenge?

Getting comfortable as conversations transition to business. It’s uncomfortable. Not just for some people, for most of us. Especially if you’re mission-driven and want to help everybody (or almost everybody).

So how do you get comfortable?

Sadly, there’s no magic bullet.

For most people, the answer is powering through, experimenting with what works, what feels right. Seeing how people respond. Learning, growing, habituating until it no longer feels awkward.

Here’s one way you can jump start the process of getting comfortable:

0. Think of 5-10 different ways you could have the sales conversation, introducing them to the idea that this is the kind of work that you do as a business now. Write them down. These don’t have to be long—a few sentences will usually suffice.
1. Get together with a small group of people you know and trust who will give you honest feedback. Ideally this group would have 2-5 people.
2. Tell them that you’re struggling with having a sales conversation and you have some ideas you’d like to run past them for their feedback.
3. Share 5-10 different ways of approaching the subject.
4. Get feedback/suggestions about what worked well, what fell flat.
5. Practice the ones that work so they roll easily out of your mouth. Believe it or not, practicing those phrases out loud will make it easier to say it when you’re talking to people who might be your prospects/ideal clients. You might even practice in front of a mirror. Sounds silly, I know, but it helps.

Here’s the bottom line: if you’re going to turn your hobby into a business, you’ve got to be brave. And the more you prepare and practice, the braver you’ll be.

If you need help turning your hobby into a business, let’s talk. You can email me ron@rontester.com and let me know what you need help with. I may not be the right person to help you, but we’ll never know unless you’re brave enough to raise your hand and ask for what you want.

If you’re looking for a great place to learn more about marketing for small business, check out the course I teach with Connie Ragen Green called How to Market for Small Business. You can find out more by clicking here.

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How Scaling Affects Content Creation

More and Better Content Creation by Scaling

Scaling content adds a new way to use content in all the information you gather in your business. You may already be doing a lot of this without realizing it is content scaling. Ideas such as repurposing, sharing, and curating have been around for a while. But, often it’s not done with much intent. Content scaling allows you to start thinking of your content strategy in a new light and affects content creation positively.

Improved Idea Generation

Scaling content forces you to give each piece of content a lot more thought and consideration and planning ahead. With the additional planning and reimaging of the content, you will come up with more ideas because you aren’t thinking of each piece of content as one thing in isolation anymore.

Instead, each piece of content becomes not just a blog post, but research for future pieces of content such as an eCourse, or a video education series, or a podcast. Now that you can look at content differently you’ll be able to bring more creativity to all the content ideas that you generate.

Get More Bang for Your Buck

By strategic rewriting, reformatting, and reusing the content that you have spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, you’ll actually get a lot more bang for your buck.

If you can create a certain number of pieces of content each month, based off your product funnel and the information you want to impart on your audience, and then each of these pieces of content are recreated into other formats, and each new creation is shared multiple times on social media, via email marketing and via your affiliates, how much more will you be able to grow your business from each piece of content?

Get Your Ideas to More People

When you spend time reproducing your content into many different forms, and even languages, and sharing it often through social media, email marketing, and other means, you’re going to get your ideas to more people than you did before.

The more people who see your information, the more leads you’re going to get, and the more credibility you will get for the work that you do. Strategic content creation, curation, and sharing across multiple networks will work in concert with your overall marketing plan.

Develop Thought Leadership

One of the ways in which you become a sought-after person in business is to become a thought leader. Scaled content allows you to become a thought leader by helping you make the most of the content you are creating, plus the content other people have created through curation.

By showing others your expertise through sharing your thoughts on other people’s content, and choosing the right content to share with your audience from other authors, you will become known as a thought leader within your community. This can boost your credibility exponentially among your audience members.

Make Competitors Allies

A great way to turn competitors into friends is to start curating their content. Share their content with your audience with your commentary and thoughts. You can use as much as 50 percent of your content as curated content as long as you add in your own thoughts, link to and provide attribution to the original creators of the content.

Now competitors will see what you’ve done and they may be encouraged to comment on what you said, or bring you into a cross-blog conversation that can bring you brand new traffic from their audience. Plus it turns your website or blog into a hub for information revolving around your niche, a one-stop shop for your audience to find the information of the day about your topic.

Multiply Your Message

Once you’ve developed a piece of content in any format, you can immediately multiply the message by reproducing it into new formats. You don’t want to copy and paste the information into a new format; you want instead to use the work as research, and reimagine it into a new format.

The blog post becomes a slideshare, and the slideshare becomes a YouTube video, and so forth. Use some creativity when moving content to a new format. You want to consider the personality of the network that your content will be pushed out to when crafting the new format. Also, give the new format some of its own personality and creative changes to ensure that it’s not cookie cutter.

Become a Global Brand

Most people read content or use content only in their own language. If you want to reach other audiences in other languages, you can duplicate your content into new languages by having it translated into entirely new websites. This will attract the audience you want to promote your products and services to.

Don’t just use the same content in a different language, but also be sure to consider the values and personalities of the audience that speaks that language. You may need to change more than just the words to make it work. However, adding more languages can boost your selling potential and your reach. Consider English, Spanish, French, German, and any language that has freedom of use and purchasing power on the internet.

Empower Brand Ambassadors

Affiliates, employees, contractors, friends, colleagues…they all need to feel as if they can share the work that you do without concern. Make it easy for them to share your content in their own words on their social media accounts, blogs, and among their contacts.

Push out content that can be edited by your colleagues, affiliates, employees and contractors to make it original yet still carry the message you want to get out. Teach them how to use the information to make the most of it.

Ask for Help

At first, content creation was a mystery to me. And it was hard enough to come up with any content, let alone scale it. But when you get used to scaling your content, using one thing to create another, then another, then another, you’ll find that the work gets even more interesting and enjoyable.

Do you need some help strategizing about what sort of content you should be creating and how you can scale it? If so, please ask someone. You can always email me Ron [at] rontester.com. And if we’re not a good fit, I know other people that might be able to help. What you absolutely don’t want to do is go it alone and suffer. Life is too short to suffer.