Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth

So we have been propagating some pretty scandalous ideas lately and they have got some of you thinking and moving! Today we are dropping the full knowledge bomb on all of you about the myth of online businesses. A lot of you seem to still be convinced that your next client or even all of your clients will be found online and to be honest this is just not true. If you run a service based business you need to rethink your model! Just to be clear this does not mean that your clients do not use the internet or are not on Facebook and Instagram, it just means that people find services and make connections in real life and through referrals, people! We need levels of trust and real life relationships will always trump online advertising and presence. This is the know, like, and trust principle. So think about human connection, your personality and those tactics that can work in these arenas. It's like as a community we have become confused. A lot of us have started small businesses trying to mimic huge online businesses rather than think about what will get us going in our own stream. This line should have been drawn more clearly a long time ago! These are growth strategies for people with already established client bases, not tactics to find new clients when you are starting out. If you follow this popular online strategy and social media presence rulebook, you will end up with no clients! This is true all over the world, so get your head straight and let's find you some clients!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today is all about learning to focus and just doing the actual work! We often play work, procrastinating, doing the fun little things and walking circles around the actual tasks, and then we wonder why we are not succeeding or reaching our business goals. In this episode we are joined by Jonathan Cronstedt, the President of Kajabi, who tells us exactly what we need to hear about the actual requirements for positive business results. Kajabi is a majorly successful company in the digital world, serving online entrepreneurs and helping them to overcome all kinds of technology challenges. In their 7-year history, the company has had back to back showings on the Inc. 5000 and has helped its users sell over $400 million dollars of their products via the platform. This is bananas, right? We talk about marketing and the online space, using Facebook Lives to grow your brand and generate sales, and we get into identifying distractions versus opportunities and how to be more productive in general. Jonathan emphasizes the need for mastering one marketing area rather than trying to do a bit of everything, and why it is so important to see a strategy through. Jonathan has so many amazing stories that will resonate with you and that’ll help you in your business, so don’t miss out on this straight up awesome episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody! Today on the show we are giving you a very important lesson, so listen up! We learned this lesson just the same, so the sooner we can get this through to you the better: content creation will not get you more clients. Yes, we said it. We used to blog five times a week sometimes, and saw almost zero increase in clients from it. In this episode we will be breaking down why exactly it just does not work as a strategy and what you should be doing instead. In fact, we are taking it as far as to tell you why you should stop building an online business altogether and instead focus on growing your local reputation, which can take you further, grow you faster and make you more money! This episode is perfect for service-based biz owners, so copywriters, photographers and designers, we are talking to you.We have to admit that we do love content but if you think that it will land you new clients, you are sadly mistaken. New people will not just magically find you on social media or your blog and want to start paying you money out of nowhere. We hope you can see that this is a ridiculous idea. One trouble here is that we see our heroes creating great content and we want to mimic this, but we have to remind ourselves that they are rather serving an established customer base through that content rather than building one from scratch. The clients we are looking for out on the internet are usually waiting on our very own street, we just have to go out and get them!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us today on the podcast is Kali Rogers, the Founder of Blush Online Life Coaching, a life coaching business aimed at female millennials. Kali is here to teach us more about the super do-able, fun and stress-free Pinterest strategies that have boosted their site traffic and sales and grown their clients and customers. The best of all? You don’t need a Pinterest marketing degree to implement them, you can start today! If you have a Pinterest account but have stopped using it for some reason, we hope this episode will inspire you to get back into it, or if you have been utilizing this potentially awesome tool, that you will get what you need to brush up your skills even more. In the beginning, Kali used Pinterest for personal reasons such as recipes and fashion inspo, until she decided to take a break. At first she didn’t see how Pinterest, a mostly visual medium, would be applicable to Blush, a service-based business. How would she promote a life coaching business through images? When she first started she didn’t have any entrepreneurial skills but realized that she needed to communicate to people that she and her team knew what they were talking about. She resorted to writing as a cheap, safe means of publicity, creating numerous articles for The Huffington Post, including “An Open Letter From Introverts To Everyone Else”, which went completely viral. Many people have a Pinterest account when they first get started in business, but then they get distracted along the line and stop using it on a regular basis. In this episode we are going to show you that, even though it’s an oldie, it’s still a real goodie. So be sure to join us for this awesome conversation!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ready for our drop-the-mic statement? Service-based peeps listen up: You already know your next client, and guess where she is not? Online. In this episode we are sharing with you the secret double whammy referral engine that service-based owners can use right now, today, to get booked out within thirty days. This exact method can be used to get a constant stream of referrals who pay quickly and who are a dream to serve.Today we are unwrapping the secrets of a super effective referral engine for service-based businesses and we’re coming at it from two, no three, different angles, starting with that first important connection and going onto how existing clients can be leveraged to gain even more quality leads. But before you think you’ve heard it all before, we are not giving you the same old tips and tricks, we’re dishing out hot off the press information, things that very few people have heard of. If you have ever worried about where your next client is going to come from, grab a notebook and a yummy cup of something because this episode is going to knock your socks off!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are joined by the wonderful and inspiring Kathleen Cutler! Kathleen has worked behind the scenes on multiple million dollar online stores with her main area of focus being jewelers. She has coached over a hundred different jewelers to help them achieve their business goals and get their products selling online, but Kathleen’s expertise extends so much further than just jewelry! She wants to help everyone selling products or even services online to extend the experience of the customer and drive sales through the type connections that you would usually associate with a physical retail space. Along with all her incredible business skills, Kathleen is also an awesome speaker who will be joining us at our upcoming Product Powerhouse Summit! Make sure to go get your free ticket immediately! She will be one of many great speakers talking about the world of online product sales and marketing and getting your store busy and making that money! So without further ado, let’s get into today’s strategy!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Word on the street is that you want to do an epic launch! On today’s podcast we’re talking about three things that led to an incredible launch: using affiliates, getting together a street team and of course having a valuable product that everyone wants. But what is a street team? We’re discussing the need for one of those, no matter how big or small your business is, dishing out advice on who you might want to include, the process of asking someone to be on your team and how to communicate effectively with them.We then give you a breakdown of how we succeeded in pulling off our recent rebranding launch, sharing how we kept our followers and fans engaged with our communications, what we did to promote this change and our business at large. From our first-hand experience with launches, we advise you on using affiliates as an incredibly powerful tool to market your brand, giving you practical tips for recruiting key people who can really boost your business, even if you are only starting off. If you have a launch in the pipeline, thinking about it, or just want to learn a ton about making valuable connections in business, do not miss out on today’s Strategy Hour Podcast!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we are joined by our wonderful friend and all-round badass, Sarah Peck. Sarah is the founder of Startup Pregnant, a New York City based company dedicated to documenting women’s leadership. She is a writer, yoga teacher and hosts Startup Pregnant’s weekly podcast too! Her goal is to amplify women’s voices and promote their business through her work and she definitely has one of our favorite brains in the game! We share a lot of her business philosophy and will be using this episode to geek out on some strategies for listening to your audience as a way to help grow your product or service.This super under-utilized and somewhat simple strategy can help you and your biz so much! By paying closer attention to your audience, you can really improve what you offer and make the direct connection between those paying you and what you provide for them. Quite a straightforward equation, right? This is the second time Sarah is joining us on the Strategy Hour and if you haven’t heard her previous appearance go back and check it out immediately, it’s Episode 185! This episode’s topic was sparked by a conversation a few days prior where we were chatting to Sarah about business philosophies and implementation of these. We really believe in these ideas and they are so in line with our core values that we could not resist having her on to talk all about it!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are taking you through everything that we have messed up on! Products, launches, events, campaigns, everything! We have made a checklist of all the things we kind of wished we had done differently over the last few years, but at the same time we do need to say that for the most part, we think the mistakes were necessary and don’t believe in wanting to travel back in time to fix past problems. We all make choices as best we can at the time, so hypotheticals do not really exist in real, present tense life.All that to say, we do not really regret any of these decisions but want to play this game where we can look back at things and see where we might have gone wrong. Also, it is important to remember that our experiences are not yours. Things that did not work for us, might be amazing for you and your business. We are not making blanket statements about all businesses, because most things work for somebody at some point in time. Most mistakes are more about wrong time and wrong personnel than anything else. So without further ado, let’s get into our flops!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by our great friend, Jordan Ellis, from Jordanené Clothing and she is here to talk about the importance of building a community in the success and longevity of your business. Jordan is also speaking at our upcoming event, The Product Powerhouse Summit, which we know you are not going to want to miss! It is going to be incredible with over 25 speakers in 3 days. So go sign up right now, it is free! Today’s chat is kind of like a trailer to that and she will be giving some insight into the idea of creating community in your business’ particular niche and the benefits that can come from this.Jordan has been around our community since day zero and is part of our ride or die community, the exact thing that she wants to help you build. We will be talking about her journey with this and she even credits the TCC community with helping her learn the importance of connecting with people, her customers and peers! For Jordan, this means her mailing list, repeat customers, getting feedback, and much more. All these great tactics and strategies have helped her grow to where she is now with her product based business and you can even start to apply some of these ideas to your business, no matter if you are service based or are selling products. So come on, let’s get into it!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices