The 4 Keys to Properly Blogging to Make Your Phone Ring

Have you ever wondered how the Google search algorithm works? Yeah, me, too.

No one really knows. Not even Google knows it all; so I’m told. But, time and time again, I have seen over and over again that properly blogging is properly rewarded by Google and it will make your phone ring.

For example, one of my businesses is practicing law at LifeCycleLaw.com. I published a post on that site about apartment  roommates getting out of their joint leases on June 20th and had two calls about it by June 25th.

How did that post get that result? It followed the 4 Keys to Properly Blogging.

Those 4 Keys are:

  1. Pick a topic that people want to read
  2. Write right well
  3. Post it a few different places
  4. Repeat

How to find topics people want to read

Do not waste time trying to think up the “right” topic. Just follow a few online boards on the Internet where either your colleagues or your targeted customers ask them, pick the trending one about which  you have knowledge and experience and draft a question and answer about it.

In this example, another lawyer asked for advice on how to help a prospective client get away from a bad roommate. I’ve done that for a client or two in 28 years of practicing LifeCycle law, so I wrote an answer to the lawyer’s request and then mushroomed it into a post on my LifeCycle Law Blog. 

How to write right well

Write like you are talking intelligently to a neighbor whom you are not trying to impress. Blogging is not about perfect word choice, grammar, and syntax. Spelling is certainly important, but you can leave a preposition or two dangling at the end of a sentence right where they end up at, if it makes the point you need to make.

Open with either a question or a statement about the subject of your post, then lay out the issues that get involved in that subject, then discuss the issues and how to manage the issues, then leave a tripwire and an invitation to contact you.

Use relatively short sentences, unless you are known for a long, flowing, brook-like style. Leave lots of white space by using bullets or numbered lists and subheadings.

Post it a few different places

If you took your question from an Internet board, cross post your blog post as answer to that board as well as your own website. If there are public postings allowed on your local newspaper, post your stuff there, as well. Good content in such places sometimes leads to editors either wanting you to write something officially for them or wanting to do an article on you.

Repeat

Don’t expect your first blog post to generate your first phone call immediately. Regardless of whether or not you get calls in the beginning, keep on posting as often as you can afford the time. If you’re not busy enough doing what you do for a living, then spend more time marketing by welcoming attractions putting your blog posts on your blog and other places. Then, write another one and post that one. And then, ….

Track where your customers/clients come from

(See? Leaving that “from” at the end didn’t kill anybody.) How do I know the two calls came from blogging? Because I ask every person who calls me, “How did you find me?” In these two cases, both prospects told me the Googled “Roommate Attorney” or “Roommate Lawyer” and several of us lawyers came up in the local box and my firm’s name “LifeCycle Law” seemed catchy and inviting (Fine! They said “Interesting,” but I think it’s catchy and inviting.)

This stuff actually works

Like I said at the beginning. This one blog post on breaking up with roommates brought me two new prospects the same week I posted it. I know, because it was a fresh topic for me and I verified how they found me.

Anyone with almost any sense can set up a WordPress website blog, post on it properly, and get known by doing so.

If you want help with your own WordPress website blog, let me know, because I’m happy to help. Most of the time, almost all of the time actually, I’ll help you for free. Why? Because I have no competitors, only colleagues. And I want us all to be Great! All the time!

In the meantime, how many of you blog on your own sites already? Drop a comment below and leave us your example.

 

Marketing By Welcoming Attractions

I almost always have almost all the clients I want to serve at any given time. New and old attorneys alike often ask me how I manage to get them. I tell them, “I wear a white hat to help me market by welcoming attractions.”

If they ask what I mean, I tell them, “Get a cup a coffee and sit, because this’ll take a minute.”

I learned most of my marketing methods from my father, Leo, who could sell ice to an eskimo in a November snow storm. I was a precocious reader and, when I was 10 or so, after I’d read all the volumes of Childcraft Encyclopedia, he started me reading the salesman’s PMA trilogy, The Law of Success, Think and Grow Rich, and Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude,  plus Dale Carnegie’s book How To Win Friends and Influence People. From both Dad and Hill and Dale, I learned two things:

  1. The law of attraction essentially states, if you think positively enough about something and proactively and persistently work for it, you will eventually attract it to you;
  2. Winning friends is the best way to start using the law of attraction to attract  success; and
  3. You have to use what you’ve got to get what you want.

Why focus on making friends first before making them clients? Because as my Grandma Rose taught me before she died when I was seven, “You have to make money off of your friends, because your enemies don’t come around.”

Moving on. Merely thinking about attracting people is useless, unless you actually welcome them into a relationship with you. Intentionally welcoming attractions is what really makes things happen.

The goal of  intentionally welcoming attractions is building a relationship with whomever you are attracting. The most effective marketers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty of them, put themselves just enough in other people’s way to attract prospects ever-so-subtly into a conversation and build that first conversation into a relationship. 

One method I’ve seen taught over the years is the S-E-E method. Smile, Eye-contact, Enthusiasm. When you see someone coming your way, smile at them, make good eye contact, and be enthusiastic about starting a conversation with them. Nowadays, however, people are put off by, to the point of even being prejudiced against, aggressive salespeople using the SEE method too enthusiastically. Instead of being attracted to such a SEEing person, they quickly move the other direction. (Think about that guy trying to sell you Direct TV in the main entry aisle of Sam’s Club.)

The best marketers overcome this prejudice by using a “stranger magnet” that is very subtle, but also very effective. For example, 40 years ago when I was a teenaged wire rope distributor, I went to a day-long PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) seminar in Atlanta  and met a real customer magnet.  I could tell it the minute I laid eyes on him.

This guy was a tall, well-dressed fellow with a huge diamond ring on his hand that visibly showed the words, “World Champions.” It turns out he was a relatively unknown professional basketball player (his name escapes me now) who turned to selling life insurance after his pro career fizzled out. He was lucky enough, however,  to at least have been warming the bench on a winning team once and he had the ring to prove it.

That ring was his conversation-starting stranger magnet. After watching him for a few minutes, I walked up and told him I thought he used that ring like a champion salesman. He explained to me the details of what he was doing, how he was doing it, and why.

He always wore his championship ring and he always wore on his right hand. When he was standing around in a crowd, he would stand with his right foot forward, holding a drink cup in his right hand, with his elbow  close to his side and bent so the cup, his hand, and that ring were in front of his right chest. Then he would just wait for people to notice it. 

As soon as anyone passing by  saw it and smiled and said anything close to, “Man, that is a nice ring,” this guy would cast his hook by moving the drink cup to his left hand, gaze down at the ring just a second, extend his handshake palm down, saying, “Yes, it is,” and then he would ask the admirer, “What’s your name?” While he kept hold of the their hand, he’d ask “What do you?” The answer was quickly followed by “How do you do it?,” which eventually led around to “Who does your insurance?”and then he just reeled that prospect right into his boat. 

A minute into the conversation, he’d pull a card case from his pocket and ask, “Do you have a card?” and, if they didn’t hand him one, then he’d take two of his cards out of the case, turn them over onto his card case and sign the back of one. Then, he’d slide the signed card behind the other one face down, hand them and his card case over to the person, trust his new friend with his nice 14-karat-gold-plated Cross pen, and invite the prospect to write his or her name, address,  and phone number on the back of his unsigned card while they continued to chat.

I told him I thought his shtick was impressive and then he taught me the rest of the lesson. “Yeah, but you got to follow through on your shot or you’ll never score with it.” I asked him what he meant.

He explained follow through. He sent every person who gave him a card a personal note within the next few days and included a signed basketball card he had printed  up himself with a picture of him in uniform, resting his hand on a basketball, with his team ring on the same finger on which the new friend had earlier been admiring it. Then he would call that person a few days later to make sure they got it. During that call, he’d suggest they get together and talk basketball, which, more often than not, resulted in a conversation about insurance.

His ring was his magnet for welcoming attractions, starting conversations, and building those conversations into relationships. And it is the perfect way to find, attract, and develop new customers and clients, whether you are selling advertising on your AM radio program or wire rope or new home construction contracting services or Macintosh software programs or family medical services or electronic health records or divorces or estate plans or anything else. I’ve marketed all those things and more simply by welcoming attractions, getting contact info, and following through with subsequent meetings including soft-selling whatever I was doing at the time.

Now, anyone who looks at my slightly under-tall, slightly over-weight, slightly bald (okay, very bald), near-sighted self will never think I have a world championship ring to use as a magnet. But I have used many other things over the years just as well to welcome people into my circle as friends and let them buy goods and services from me later on.

At times, when I first started traveling the mid-south selling cable to dragline owners and operators, I used my youth as my magnet. People thought it was nice that a 16-year-old kid was out there servicing their needs as well as I was. Ten years later, when I was selling people on letting me build them houses in Nashville, I walked around malls and let my wife and our new first-born son do the attracting of other new mothers, some of whom it turned out wanted to move out of their currently too-small homes. And, I’ve discovered several other magnets in 28 years of practicing law as well. But none of them has been as successful as the one I discovered by accident and am working with now–my white, Panama straw, riverboat gambler’s hat.

For thirty years, I wore a black beaver Stetson fedora. It was hot as can be, so  I would take it off and carry it a lot when I should have been wearing it full time. I would wear it a while and then carry it a while as I walked to the office and the court house and back again. And no one ever said a thing about that black hat.

Then, in the summer of ’13,  I developed a pretty good-sized squamous cell carcinoma on the middle of the top of my forehead. After I had it removed, my wife, the loving family physician that she is, sent me to Elvis’ milliner, Alvin Lansky, the owner of Mr. Hats, on Highland just north of Poplar in Memphis, and told me to tell him to pick me out whatever hat I would love to wear the most, because she was not going to let me out in the sunshine again without it being on, and she was dead serious about it.

Now, those of us who wear hats know one thing — a person doesn’t pick a hat to wear, a hat picks a person to wear it. And you will know when the hundredth hat you’ve tried on has picked you, because several other hat lovers in the store getting their own hats will be watching you as much as you’ve been watching them and, eventually, when your hat picks you, several of them will look at you from across the store and say, just loud enough for you and everyone else to hear it, “Umm-hmm. Now that’s your hat.”

I must have tried on several dozen hats that afternoon until, finally, this white Panama gambler’s hat jumped out of Mr. Lansky’s hands and on to my head and a smile beamed across his face as he then looked around the store at some of my fellow shoppers, some of them men and some of them women. And then the other salesman in the room nodded his head just a little at me with silent approval. And then another man, who was accompanying his wife to buy her a new spring-summer church hat, said, “Looks good.” And then his wife, a well-dressed woman, who looked 100 percent like she knew what she was talking about, winked her left eye at me as she tilted her head down a bit, leaned back, and raised her right shoulder and bobbed her head back and fort sideways, exclaimed, “Hon! You are WEARIN’ that hat!”

I was absolutely amazed over the next several weeks at how much attention this crazy hat was getting me. Guys would stop and say, “Nice hat, man.” And other women would confirm the first woman’s reaction saying such things like, “I so love a man who can wear a hat like that.” And one even said, “You look so much like Rhett Butler in that hat it makes we want to get out my Scarlett one.” After that one, I told the story to my wife Susan, hoping to make her insanely jealous. Later that evening, after she was done reacting, I told her, “I am NEVER taking this hat off again.”

The deputies in all the Shelby County courthouses would compliment me on my hat and, when people in the courthouses needing a juvenile court or general sessions attorney would ask them, they would point down the hall in my direction and say, “You need to go get that lawyer  in the white hat.”

I thought it was because it I was such a good and well-renowned lawyer until one of them finally told me the truth. He said, “Nah. It’s just that you were so easy for them to spot in the hallway crowd, so we’d just point them to you so they would quit asking us, ‘Now, which one are you talking about?’.”

Regardless of the deputies’ motives, the hat was bringing me plenty of new clients. The men said they wished they could pull off the look.  And the women who complimented my hat almost always allowed me to tell my wife they liked me as much as they liked my hat.

But then, I changed my practice:

  • from Memphis to Baltimore (by way of Easton);
  • from focusing on the divorce and family law controversy aspects of LifeCycle Law to focusing on the LifeCycle Planning aspects, which is like Business Planning, Estate Planning, and Elder Care combined, except that it spans from the cradle to the grave and before and beyond; and
  • from being office-based to being virtual and meeting clients wherever they wanted or needed to be met.

Despite the changes, however, my hat continued to be a “new friend” magnet. People would continue to comment on it. So, I decided to use it to its best advantage, like that basketball player I met forty years ago used his ring. And my hat has helped me market by welcoming attractions just like his ring helped him.

Here’s how the standard female version of an initial encounter goes. It is as cheesy and hokey as can be. But it works for me, and as long as it continues to work, I don’t intend to fiddle with much.

I’m usually sitting in the “front room” of a Starbucks, as far away from the front  door as possible, but still before service area begins. I’m sitting or standing at a table facing the crowd. Probably, I’m typing on my computer.

As soon as I hear the front door open, I’ll look at whoever is coming in, cast them a small smile, often accompanied by discreet nod of head, which movement of the hat catches their attention. And then I go back to my screen.

Quite often, a person will come over to me and say something nice about my hat and how such a thing tops off a well-dressed man. When I reply, “Well, thank you very much, ma’am. That’s very kind of you. That means my hat’s doing it’s job.”

“Oh, really?” the person will ask, “What’s your hat’s job?”

I reply, “To make nice people like you come over and say, ‘That’s a nice hat,’ so I can make a new friend.”

After hearing my cultured drawl, they almost always smile and say something like, “Well, you both look and sound like a nice Southern gentleman.”

Whether they ask my whereabouts or not, I’ll usually reply, “Well, I am from Natchez, Mississippi, ma’am. We’re friendly people. Where are you from?” (Yes, I know that leaves the preposition dangling, but it’s a casual conversation.”

From there we might play the geography game, but then the conversation almost always rolls back around to my hat when the other person makes a departing comment, such as “Well, I just wanted to tell you that I loved (sometimes only liked) your hat.”

“Well, thank you for saying so, because whenever I tell my wife someone else likes my hat as much as she does, it makes her insanely jealous. She always wears colorful hats and scarves covering her hair and everyone loves just them the heck out of them. So, whenever someone tells her they love my hat, it makes her insanely jealous.”

This usually makes the other person laugh and sets up the final step in firming up the new friendship, which is getting a name and phone number.

I’ll suggest they shoot a picture of me on their cell phone and text it to Susan’s cell phone and tell her they love my hat. Almost everyone is willing to go along with the gag, which results in them knowingly giving Susan their cell phone number.

And then comes the follow through. Susan shoots a screen shot of the picture, which captures the sender’s cellphone number and what the sender said about me or my hat, and then she sends it to me. Once I have the person’s cellphone number, I’ll send them the following text message:

Hi. I’m the nice lawyer in the white hat. My wife smiled at your shot of me. Thank you for playing. As a token of appreciation, please enjoy a free eBook copy of my life-changing motivational book, “Great! All The Time!,” which you can safely download as a PDF using this link: https://lifecyclelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Great-All-the-Time-E-Book.pdf

My book teaches people how to find peace and satisfaction through a purpose-driven use of life’s precious resources. It’s a workbook that involves writing letters to yourself to discover what’s your “Cha-ching!” (whatever makes your register ring) and to help you figure out how to get it.

Screenshot of KRB at Starbucks

Here’s how this approach works for me in real life.  On a recent Wednesday morning I was sitting on the long bench on the right side of the Starbucks in Woodholme Centre next to the serving area counter. In walks a nice woman, who exchanges a glance with me and proceeds to order her latte. While she’s waiting to pick it up, she strolled over,  said she loved my outfit, agreed to help me make my wife jealous, snapped a shot, and sent it to my wife, who sent me this screenshot, from which I extracted the number, and then at 10:18 I sent the above thank you note and book link..

At 10:21 am, the middle-aged woman responded:

Wow! Thank you so much. I am grateful!

Then, at 10:33 am, she texted back again.

Your book is amazing. I am on page 17. Will resume focusing on it after completing some thing on my ‘to do’ list for today. You and your wife have a great day!

Today, two days later, after giving her some time to work through the book a bit, I texted her back to follow through some more:

Hope you’re enjoying the book. I’d love to read a copy of your first letter if you want. Here’s a shot of my wife Susan in a Wrapunzel scarf so you can see who my competition is and what I’m up against. She’s a great family physician who works a Mercy Personal Physicians at Overly. If ever you need a new doctor, she’d be a great match for you and she’ll never tell me you joined her practice.

She hasn’t responded back yet, but 9 times out of 10 people continue the textversation. Usually, after I tell them about Susan, they ask me what I do and that’s when I tell them I help people plan for all the bad things that can happen to them over the rest of their lives and hope that none of them actually do happen except dying of old age at their own leisure and on their own terms.

Eight times out of those nine who read what I do continue to talk to me and most of the time I end up becoming their LifeCycle lawyer.

So, that’s the story of both how I get almost all the clients I want and why I wear that darned white hat everywhere except inside a courtroom.

What’s you marketing secret?

 

 

 

 

5 “Gets” Any Business Must Get To Get Ahead

Have you ever known what business you wanted to run but couldn’t figure out how to get it running already? Yeah, me, too. But let me tell you what I found out.   To succeed at any business, you only need to get 5 things.

  1. You must get known
  2. You must get called
  3. You must get hired
  4. You must get done
  5. You must get paid

If you do these five things effectively and efficiently, then almost always, you will succeed in your business.

My good friend Linley Richter tells me does almost all of these things almost all the time and he is damn near perfect. I hate to tell him, however, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades and if you don’t do all five of these things persistently and consistently, then whatever you are doing will most likely be wasted.

Get Known

Getting known is all about branding your company, your products, and your services. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on branding. Read it. Apply it. No need for me to repeat the whole darned thing here.

Get Called

Getting called is all about marketing your branded company, products, and services efficiently. It’s a digital world, folks; but, don’t forget about traditional media as well. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on marketing in this modern world. Read it. Apply it. No need for me to repeat this whole darned thing here either.

Get Hired

Getting hired is all about taking leads who respond to your branding and marketing and converting them to customers who order what products and services you are selling. Holy cow! Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on converting prospects. All you have to do is read it and apply. No need for me to even say there is no need to repeat the whole thing here.

Get Done

Getting done is something a lot of service-oriented business people like lawyers have a problem getting done. (Yes, I intended that circular statement.) They are great at starting cases; but once they get started, they get distracted getting hired on their next case and put the last case on a back burner. I bet you already know what I’m going to write next. But I’m going to fool you just a little bit. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on this. Read it. Learn from it the importance of spending most of your time actually doing the work that directly produces income. Then, take the oldest project you have taken on and get it the heck finished already. That way you and I can both get on the last “Get” you need to get to ahead in your business.

Get Paid

Getting paid is another thing a lot of service-orienting business people like lawyers have a problem getting to. Some folks are so busy getting known, called, hired, and done they forget the last, but certainly not least, thing any business needs to do, which is getting paid. No doubt, Entrepreneur has a great article on this. Read it. Do it.

Figuring out that these five things exist is not what’s important, however. Reading the articles is not what’s important either.

We know all these things. We’ve heard them all before. There are no secrets to any of them. Entreprenuer magazine didn’t make them up. Neither did the authors of their Entrepreneur’s great articles on them.

After you get done reading about doing all these things and perceiving them, planning them, and preparing to do them, check in tomorrow and read about “The Most Important Get To Get To Get Ahead In Your Business.”[reminder]What do you think the most important Get is?[/reminder]

 

What Others Say About PROMO Sites

Do you ever wonder what others supposedly in the know think and say about professional referral online marketing organization (PROMO) services? Yeah, me, too. And neither of us has to look too hard to find opinions all over the place about the topic.

Here’s a link to let you read Digital Law Marketing’s article on the big ones.

Here’s a link to allow you to enjoy a comment thread on The Lawyerist. Opinions are a dime a dozen on this one and there’s at least a dollar’s worth in the thread.

Here’s a link where you can study JurisDigital’s study of AVVO.

There are dozens of places to read about PROMO advertising sites.

I’m curious what you have found about PROMO sites in your industry.

Post a comment below to tell me your experience in your workspace.[reminder]What’s your best PROMO site? What’s your worst PROMO site?[/reminder]

PROMO No-Mo’; So-Med Instead

Have you ever tried to figure out how much it really costs to buy leads for new business clients sent to you by lead generation sites? Have you been really confused about all the tied package deals requiring you to buy websites (for an initial and then monthly fee) and professional pages (for another initial and then monthly fee) and then you can get leads (for each a per-lead price with scalable flow or a fixed monthly price with an undefined flow or for throwing all the money you have in your checking account into the cloud and whatever comes back to you in leads you can keep)? Yeah, me, too.

Regardless of what type of business you have, almost any business type has two, three, or ten or more industry-specific (legal, medical, automotive repair, plumber, HVAC or whatever) websites that will:

  • sell you a professional profile on their industry-specific site, where people looking for professionals like you can find you and get details about you and ask you to bid on their jobs
  • sell you a website that you can link to from that professional profile,
  • sell you warm leads from their industry-specific website and
  • sell you some paid search services to put your ads at or near the top of search engine results pages for the right amount of money used to buy the right collection of keywords.

I have a real smart son-in-law who has worked for several such websites after graduating with a Bachelors degree in marketing with a specialty of Internet marketing. I’m embarrassed to tell him how much I don’t know about this stuff. So, I asked a bunch of his colleagues who work in my primary workspace, practicing law, to try to explain what they would love to sell me.

For example, I called my rep Scott English at Martindale-Nolo. He explained they have a 3-pronged approach to Internet advertising. First, they have their Lawyers.com and Martindale.com and Nolo.com websites where you can (and, if you want to get a deal on their websites and search services, you must) purchase their full and complete professional profiles. Martindale-Nolo will sell you a profile on those pages so people can find you when they search those sites for help by topic and location.

Second, Martindale-Nolo will also provide you with a professional website, if you don’t have a top notch website already. These websites are mobile responsive and search engine optimized.

Third, M-N will sell you warm leads when people search for lawyers on M-N’s topic-specific (DivorceNet.com, etc.) legal information and professional pages.

Now, try to follow the pricing. My main rep, Scott, could only price the first two items. We had to get a ringer, Dennis Melendez, from Martindale-Nolo.com to price the leads for us.

Having a Lawyers.com professional page by itself costs $250 a month. Having a M-N website costs $100. But, if you buy them together, you can get them for $200 a month. Of course, that combo deal expired this coming Friday (no matter which day of the year you are talking to them).

Then, if you want to add getting the warm leads, it depends on your geographic area and practice area, because the pricing for leads varies by demand. For example, divorce leads in Baltimore, Maryland currently go for $26 per lead. You have to agree to spend at least $500 per month for a campaign. They will bill your leads against your deposit. You get and have to pay for all three kinds of warm leads — the good ones, the bad ones, and the ugly ones. But, if not a lead you receive is not in practice area or geographical area you can request a credit for it.

Now, returning to our previous posts, we are trying to develop $25,000 work of business using a $2,500 per month budget. We are paying $200 for a professional page and a website and paying 500 for 19 warm leads. Assuming a 50% closure rate. We are getting 9-10 cases of people who want our $500 “no kids, no property, nothing to fight about, uncontested, easy, inexpensive divorce” uncontested divorce. $700 results in $5,000 worth of business.

Granted, if we took all types of divorce cases, including our “less easy, more expensive”  divorces and the occassional “knock-down/drag-out” divorce then we would be able to get on average $2,500 per divorce or about $25,000 worth of business. This would be a better return on investment, but we don’t want to work that hard. We just want easy, inexpensive divorces. Maybe we can get cheaper leads for the no-contest cases.

Come back for the next post and see.

[reminder]For those of you who have different types of business, what are your similar figures for professional listings, websites, and lead generation farms?[/reminder]

Finding Customers for Pennies on the Dollar Instead of a Dime

Picture of cornucopiaHave you ever thought it would be so great simply to pay one media outlet all your monthly branding, marketing, and advertising budget and be able to get all the leads you could service each month? Yeah, me, too. I’ve both had dreams and lived through nightmares like that. In a prior post, we saw how you could end up spending $2,500 a month for warm PPL (pay per lead) Internet leads and come up short hitting your $25,000 per month revenue goal. So, how can you get more business walking in your door for less, or, better still, almost nothing at all?

First, let’s review all the various ideas that may populate your BMA plan. We saw them a few posts ago. They are:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Blog
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

Note that “Internet directory referral fees,” which are the”professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) services we’ve discussed paying $25 per lead, are almost in the middle of this alphabetical list. This is probably where such things belong in a living, successful BMA plan. There are a lot of things you must invest in before paying PROMO services and there are also still a lot of things you should invest in after resorting to PROMO services.

Here are some of the must do’s you must do before investing in PROMO referral services:

  • You must choose a “result-oriented” customer value proposition to serve as the anchor of your branding, marketing, and advertising plan.
  • You must create a good tagline.
  • You must create, print, and carry plenty of copies of a nice traditional size business card, a more memorable quarter-sheet “ten-second” service card, and a trifold “elevator speech” brochure.You must create and claim your Internet address.
  • You must invest resources in a good, in contradistinction to a “bad” or a “killer,” reader-device-responsive, website. We have talked and will continue to talk about what makes a website “good.”
  • You must claim and optimize your social media accounts, your industry web aggregators’ accounts, and local marketing aggregators’ directory identities.
  • You must relate (i.e. be social) with other people in as many social media spaces your time budget will allow and convince them to follow your blog.
  • You must blog with relevant content that is supplemented, persistently and consistently, at least weekly, but preferably more often.
  • You must create a valuable lead magnet to give prospects in return for them giving you their email address.
  • You must convince people viewing your site (for the first time, hopefully) to let you continue to send them your new blog posts every time you send one.
  • You must create and implement an e-mail drip marketing program including both content and a platform through which to send it.
  • You must invest in and use an effective and efficient customer relationship management program that ties your prospect management into your client management aspects.
  • You must network in person and by email with current clients.
  • You must network around “pools” of prospects and people who can refer you prospects.
  • You must create and implement a referral recognition and thank-you program including a shout out in your blog and at mailing them a handwritten note containing at least a $5 Starbucks card. The size of the gift is not nearly as important as the handwritten note and the fact you personally took the time to say thank you in a demonstrative way.

Contrary to conventional thinking that everyone searches for whatever they want on the Internet, word of mouth still generates a lot of business for small business owners. It also costs you pennies on the dollar vs. pay-per-click or pay-per-lead.

If you do all of these things effectively, efficiently, consistently, and persistently, then you may well escape the need for long-term dependence on PROMO leads.

Nonetheless, come back next post and we will take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of PROMO leads. Spoiler alert! One of my main complaints about PROMO leads and other PPL and PPC digital advertising is PROMO leads only work what little they do only as long as you continue paying the PROMO website owners to send them to you.

[reminder]What’s your experience with PROMO lead generators?[/reminder]

 

Remember to Plan with the End in Mind

Have you ever believed you had to have a marketing plan that would find every prospect and convert every one of them into a junkie for whatever it was you are selling? And then you over did both the planning and investment and ended up with more business you could handle and had to either expand your capacity of refer your prospects to colleagues. Yeah, me, too. Hurts, doesn’t it.

Business planning — and the branding, marketing, and advertising (BMA) planning that goes in it — is not about getting all the business. It’s about get just the right flow of business to effectively and efficiently hit your volume target so you can deliver products or services ahead of schedule, under budget, and right the first time around and make the amount of income you want, need, and desire to live the life you want, need, and desire.

Prime examples of this are the Groupon and Living Social failures. Worse than killing themselves, however, these marketing portals killed a lot of their customers using their discount coupon generators as well. All people had to do is pay Groupon and Living Social gobs of money and a great flow of new customers would jump across their thresholds. Oftentimes, however, more people picked up the deal o’ the day and creamed the business owners.

So what’s a small business owner to do? Build and use a multi-focal plan with scalable components you can throttle up and down as needed. Let’s peek at how to do this.

Picking up where we left off a few posts ago … we are a professional-service-oriented business that needs to generate $300,000 a year in revenue with $30,000 of BMA expenses. Assuming even average sales each month, but knowing things are going to ebb and flow with feasts and famine, we need to design a BMA plan that will generate $25,000 in monthly revenue for $2,500 on average per month. How do we do that?

The first thing you need to determine is, “How many new clients do I have to attract each month?” This can be revealed as a simple math problem with monthly revenue being divided by monthly spend per client. If each client spends $500 for a service, then one needs 50 new clients a month. Assuming all things being equal, you can spend $50 per client to successfully sign each client. But, wait, there’s more. What happens if you are only signing half the prospects your BMA plan brings in the top of your sales funnel. Then you can only afford to pay $25 per warm lead from the “professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) service for which you’ve signed up.

But, wait, there’s still more. Lead generation promoters are not going to be the one and only, be all, do all, end all of your BMA plan. So you can’t spend your entire monthly marketing budget on referral promo services.

Starting to see how difficult this is going to be to do? There are no easy solutions. The good thing about lead generation services is most of them are easily scalable. You can set a budget and the services will only send you whatever flow of leads you can afford for that budget. In our example, if they were charging you $25 per lead and you were putting 20% of your $2,500 monthly budget, i.e. $500 per month, then you are going to get 20 warm leads from your promoter, which, with a 50% closure rate, will only yield you 10 clients and $5,000 in monthly sales volume.

Nonetheless, if you put all $2,500 of your budget in your promoter program, then you are going to generate $25,000. Great, you’re on target. But, what about when your promoter goes the way of Groupon and Living Social? And, what about creating, hosting, and managing your website? What about doing any other type of BMA work?

In order to work out a full BMA plan, you are going to have to find some components that deliver you prospects for less than $25 per head.

More about that next time.

[reminder]What’s your most effective and efficient business lead generator?[/reminder]

 

 

30 Ingredients for Your Ragu Marketing Plan

Have you ever wished you could just pay someone 10% of your sales per year to feed you all the clients and/or customers you need to thrive? Yeah, me, too. But wishes like that only come true in our dreams. Real people, running real businesses, for real profits, have to have a real branding, marketing, and advertising plan to get there. And such a real, living BMA plan needs to be robusto, like Ragu Tomato Sauce, meaning, it all has to be in there, Ma.

What all makes a sellable marketing sauce?

Generally, a firm’s marketing budget should always include the following categories:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

While many people say, “The whole world uses the Internet now like the old world used the Yellow Pages then,” and while having a platform-responsive website that looks great on a laptop, a tablet, and a smart cellphone is maximally important, social-digital marketing is still not the only thing to think about in your marketing plan.

Take a moment and think about what all these things are, which of them you are doing, how much of each you are doing, what objective results are you expecting from each of them, and how you are tracking where each of your marketing components are taking you, and how effectively each is getting you where you want to be.

Come back to the next post and we will pick at these things a little more.

[reminder]How much marketing can you do yourself and still run your business and sell and deliver all at the same time?[/reminder]

See Your Branding, Marketing, and Advertising As Part of Your Living Business Plan

Have you ever found your self up to your belt buckle in alligators and remembered that all you really wanted to do at the time was just drain the swamp? Are you so busy trying to brand, market, and advertise to perfection that you have no time to actually provide goods and services profitably enough to maintain the rest of your life? Yeah, me, too.

Usually, such situations almost always result from failing to keep the end in mind almost all the time. So, let’s at least begin with the end in mind. And that end is money. There are more great quotes about money, than at which one can shake a stick. A good one is best understood by reading the entire lyrics to the song, Money (Makes the World Go Around).

Money is the scorecard of business. Money measures gross earnings, costs of goods sold, net income, general administrative and overhead, gross profits, EBITDA, and owners’ discretionary earnings (or what most people refer to as “income”). Money is the common exchange medium for the property component of life’s precious resources.

So, as you begin fashioning your branding, marketing, and advertising plan you have to first understand your score card target of your living business plan, which is money and more specifically the end product of almost all entrepreneurs, the entrepreneur’s discretionary income. How much “money” will it take to make your cash register of life go “Cha-ching!”?

A little data may help you decide. From 1967 to 2014, U.S. median household income has trended up from $45,000 to $54,000 or so. And most people are satisfied with that status, being fat and happy enough living in the middle.

Lawyers earned an average annual salary of $136,260 in 2015, which is substantially more than any other occupation on U.S. News’ list of Best Social Service Jobs. Paralegals make much less than half that. In 2015, paralegals earned an average salary of $52,390. So let’s assume for the sake of choosing an example, we are fashioning a BMA Business Action Plan for a lawyer wanting to make $136,260 and pay one paralegal $52,390 as part of his 53% expense ratio.

This means our targeted gross income from attorney’s fees collected will be $289,914.89, or so. Let’s assume the lawyer graduated law school in 1990, which means (s)he will have to bill (really, collect; but that’s another thing to worry about) the $300 average hourly rate for lawyers with 25 years of experience. This means the lawyer has to collect for about 966.382966666666667 hours, or so. Let’s round that up by the 5% effective collections rate of law firms to come to the understanding that a lawyer with 25 years of experience wanting to net $136,260 annual income must gross $289,914 a year needs to bill about 1,000 hours per year.

Established, medium and large firms spend about 3-4% of their billings on marketing. Smaller, growing law firms spend about the average of 10% for all small businesses on their marketing. Therefore,, we need to perceive a BMA plan that will generate $300,000 in billings for about $30,000 a year.

$30,000!

Besser! Have you lost your mind?!? No one spends 10% of their gross revenue on branding, marketing, and advertising. Well, many solo practitioners and small (2-5 lawyers) firms do. They may not realize it but they do.

To get a grip on how much it really costs to branding, market, and advertise a small business, in this case a law firm, start off by reading this old article from the ABA Law Practice folks. The data is just a little dated, but the theory is still fairly current and it applies to almost all small businesses providing goods and services.

So, go read the reference article and come back to the next post to begin working with the end in mind, developing a BMA plan that will result in $300,000 a year in annual collections.

[reminder]What’s your BMA plan? And, more importantly, if your BMA plan doesn’t work, then what is your plan B?[/reminder]

Who Should Brand, Market, and Advertise Your Business?

Have you ever felt completely disintegrated in your branding, marketing, and advertising efforts; wondering what the heck you are doing vs. what you should be doing vs. who else you should get to do it for you vs. how you and them should be doing it; such that you then make the worst choice of all, which is to do nothing but depend on letting God work it out for you? Yeah, me, too. I know how you feel. I’ve often felt that same way. But, let me tell you what I found out.

Having a better business action plan for branding, marketing, and advertising leads to much better preparation and practice of that plan for persistently promoting your practically perfect performance of not only that plan, but also the rest of your business.

Confused? I was, too. But, thank me, I’m doing much better now.

First, you have to understand the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising and how each fit into your branding-marketing-advertising (BMA) plan.

Second, you have to understand the difference between being the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician in your enterprise and let each of those three people living schizophrenically inside you have their say and do their work respectively on and in your business.

Third, you have to perceive your BMA plan as your entrepreneurial self, manage your BMA plan (naturally) as your manager self, and do the actually work of your BMA plan as your technician self.

Go get a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber, zip through them over the weekend, and come back this coming Monday ready to get to work on a Better Business BMA Action Plan.

[reminder]How should you brand, market, and advertise your business?[/reminder]