Is Marketing a Gamble?

Last week, when I wrote about leadership marketing, I said:

Business owners aren’t marketers. A lot of business owners do the work of marketers to market and sell their own stuff, but that’s not what they got into business to do. So they don’t feel comfortable going outside the box to create their own marketing plan. (And, I assume, they think they can’t afford to hire someone to create a custom marketing plan for them, which is a lie, but I think it happens a lot!)

Kristi McDaniel, of Simply Yoga, noticed this …

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What’s Holding Your Marketing Back?

My friend Adrienne Dorison talks a lot about the bottlenecks in your business.

For example, if you or your team has limited capacity to deliver your product or service, your bottleneck is in delivery. If you have a sales problem getting leads to become paying customers, you have a conversion problem.  And if you have trouble getting new leads in the first place, you have an attraction problem.

Any given business will move through these problems in something of a cycle. For example, let’s say you have a delivery problem, so …

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The Biggest Blogging Mistake I See Business Owners Make

When Jim* came to me for a Strategy Session, he seemed to have the PERFECT business on paper: he’s in a super specific niche, with almost no competition, teaching professionals how to use a specialized piece of software. 

(*Not his real name!)

He was even getting promoted by the maker of the software (for free) and had grown his list to more than 10,000 ideal customers by offering valuable freebies on his blog and a popular newsletter. 

Yet he wasn’t …

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Does Your Business Need Another Lead Stream?

Last week I was interviewed by Tom Poland for his podcast, Marketing The Invisible, and as a thank you, he sent me his book by the same name.

One of the big points he makes in the book is that a business needs multiple streams of leads to ensure they’re never in a panic and that their leads never dry up.

Just like an investor should never put all her money in a single stock, a business owner should never put all her resources into a single stream of leads.

And …

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