MYM Tactical Marketing Webinar 3/28/13 Hey, how y’all doing today? This is Rich Harshaw. We’re here for our Tactical Marketing Webinar. We’re going to talk today about blogging. This is going to be a different webinar than you might be expecting in terms of the nuts and bolts of how you create a blog. I’m not going to cover it. I think it might have said in the description I was going to cover it. Here’s what I found out later, there’s 150 million blogs in the world or something like that. Evidently, it’s not that hard to figure out. What is hard to figure out is how to make a blog that actually is worth reading. That’s what we want to focus our efforts on today. As you continue down the title screen, raise your credibility, get more exposure, become the expert. Not just the expert, become the expert and improve your SEO. This is what we are trying to accomplish. What we’re going to be heavy on examples in light of sort of the—I don't know what you call it— the foundational, fundamental, nuts and bolts of here’s the stuff. I just want to show you, most importantly, how to create some good content. That’s what we are going to talk about today. Let’s go through a few preliminaries. We’re going to talk about what is a blog, why you should have one, how to set one up; a very brief discussion. In fact, you are going to be astounded at how brief that discussion is. Creating content and what you do with the content. That’s really the key things that we want to talk about today.
37
Embed
MYM Template - tripletech.biztripletech.biz/...Marketing_Webinar_3-28-13_Transcription.docx · Web viewHey, how y’all doing today? This is Rich Harshaw. We’re here for our Tactical
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
Hey, how y’all doing today? This is Rich Harshaw. We’re here for our Tactical Marketing Webinar. We’re going to talk today about blogging. This is going to be a different webinar than you might be expecting in terms of the nuts and bolts of how you create a blog. I’m not going to cover it. I think it might have said in the description I was going to cover it. Here’s what I found out later, there’s 150 million blogs in the world or something like that. Evidently, it’s not that hard to figure out. What is hard to figure out is how to make a blog that actually is worth reading. That’s what we want to focus our efforts on today.
As you continue down the title screen, raise your credibility, get more exposure, become the expert. Not just the expert, become the expert and improve your SEO. This is what we are trying to accomplish. What we’re going to be heavy on examples in light of sort of the—I don't know what you call it—the foundational, fundamental, nuts and bolts of here’s the stuff. I just want to show you, most importantly, how to create some good content. That’s what we are going to talk about today.
Let’s go through a few preliminaries. We’re going to talk about what is a blog, why you should have one, how to set one up; a very brief discussion. In fact, you are going to be astounded at how brief that discussion is. Creating content and what you do with the content. That’s really the key things that we want to talk about today.
On the introduction to blogging, here’s what I mean when I say “blogging.” I’m talking about writing articles and posting information online relevant to your industry. If you posted on a website or something like a blogging program, that’s not—I’m not really that concerned about it. It’s good to have a blogging program, something like Blogger or Wordpress, or something like that because they’ve got built-in features that allow people to search easier. I’m not really concerned about that. If you want to be concerned about that, then go ahead and concerned about that. What I’m
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13concerned about today, most specifically, is writing the content. You’ll hear me say that about 46 times today.
Go find some blogging software. I’ll talk about this in just a second very briefly, but here’s what your main goal is. Number one, raise your credibility as an expert in your industry. You go back to the discussion we’ve had before or if you go to the book called—what’s the book called? It all of a sudden slipped my mind. It’s the Robert Cialdini book, Influence. Thank you. Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion. One of the key motivators that he talks about for persuasion is authority. If you can present yourself as an authority, then it’s going to do wonderful things for you and for your business. You’re going to get the credibility that comes along with being the authority.
Here’s the interesting thing, I’m going to point it out now. One of the things that I want you to firmly affix in your mind right now is I want you to not overestimate your competition’s ability to do things. This is a very common human condition. It is not a marketing thing, a business thing, or a modeling thing. This is a human thing. It’s very easy to overestimate your competition. You think, “Oh, they are great.”
It’s kind of like in families, right? I’ve got six kids, and I’m with them all the time. It’s really easy to see where they struggle, to look at their problems, to look at the hidden things that the outside world doesn’t see. Then you go to baseball, you go to church, you go around other families and you see their kids and all you see is the good stuff. All of their bad stuff is hidden, right? You don’t ever see it, so you assume that everything is great with all these other people and that everybody’s life is wonderful. Yours is the only one that has these warts, problems, and hiccups and things that are difficult. Occasionally other people have these situations, but they solve them. It’s not true.
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
You’ve got all the ability in the world pull off what I’m going to talk about today. Your competitors ability to pull off is no greater or no worse than yours, all things being equal, but taking the initiative to just actually doing it is going to be the determining factor, okay?
What I’m talking about here is creating a blog. You say, “What do you mean competitive. I don’t even understand what you are talking about. Who cares if my competitors have blogs?” Here’s what I’m not talking about, okay? I’m not talking about some stupid, cheese ball piece of junk blog that has a bunch of crap in it that nobody wants to read, but you have it as a blog because somebody told you that you should have a blog or because it’s a hobby. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about becoming a bona fide expert that dispenses real, interesting, good, awesome, worthwhile information that people actually want to read.
Here’s what you’ve got to understand and here’s where this whole idea comes in, you have this kind of information. You don’t get to your station in life, your station in business, your level of success by being an idiot. You don’t. There are a few idiots that sneak through, but mostly not. They get sifted out before they hit any modicum of success. You’ve got a wealth of information. You’ve got a plethora of information. Any kind of word you can think of that means a lot, you’ve got that much information. It now becomes a matter of how do you package it and dispense it and get it into the hands of people so that this can happen.
Raise your credibility as an expert in your industry. Get a following, improve your SEO, and enhance your business. This is really where we are trying to go with this. This all comes back to a hypothesis that—you’re going to have to kind of go with me on this—which is as follows, that online marketing is the most important aspect of your marketing.
Now, this is going to be different for certain kinds of businesses. It’s not always true, but for my remodeling friends out there, which is a huge
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13chunk of our business, hear me loud and clear. If you don’t win the online battles, your company is going to lose. If you’re not currently losing, you will continue to lose more and more in the future to those who are mastering this.
This is what this competition comes into play because when you’re talking about online success, there are very few winners. There are very few winners. Think about it. If you were in the middle of Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, like I am, there’s something like six or seven million people in the area. How many competitors do you have? You say, “Well, I only compete here in this narrow section of this metropolis.” That’s okay, but you’re going to be competing against, you know, a lot of people. You’ve got to outcompete. This is one of the ways you can do it. In fact, this is one of the best ways you can do it, okay?
That being said, how do you set the dumb thing up? Google “How to set up a blog.” I did this in preparation. I thought, well, I’m going to put this together and I’m going to do a little tutorial. Then I found that it’s not that hard. There are about a million tutorials, so why would I spend time putting together a tutorial of something that there are 49 million other tutorials of. Just go Google it and find it. If you don’t like the one that you find, just Google another one. You can use stuff like Wordpress or BlogSpot. Whatever you want. I don’t care. That’s not an important discussion for us today. If you use our site builder as one of our customers. Some of you are on site builders. It has built-in blogging platform. That’s fine. I don’t want to even talk about that. You’re going to come back to me and ask me about this. I’m going to say I don't know, go ask Google, they will tell you. I want to talk about content, all right? Spend an hour learning this. Can you be bothered to be spending an hour? I know you can because you are on this webinar spending an hour already, so spend another hour.
Next, let’s talk about creating content. Where I want you to start is the headline bank. This is in a bottle. It really is. Now, the origin of the headline
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13bank is that about 15, 16, or 17 years ago, I started organizing headlines into a list. Headlines that I found mostly in other sources, just reading magazines, reading books about marketing, things that I saw in my mailbox, some of the headlines as the years went on were the ones that I wrote. We put together this list of headlines. The idea was that you take these headlines and modify them for your own specific situation in marketing. Then you’ve got headlines.
The easiest to understand example is the classic headline, “The three biggest problems you’ll have with most plumbing companies and how Mr. Burrow’s Plumbing overcomes them all.” Then you take that and you say, “Geez, I’m a real estate agent.” “The three biggest problems you’ll have with most real estate agents, and how XYZ overcomes them all.” It’s a really easy thing to understand.
Here’s what I discovered later. This is a great way to put together headlines that can then become blog postings, articles, okay? Good headlines in marketing are 70 percent of the work. They do the heavy lifting. It’s no different here. What I’m trying to accomplish on this webinar right now is to get you to realize something, which is you—once you have a stable, a cache, a stockpile of headlines that are articles; it’s going to make it—you’re going to get over this hump of “I don't know what to write about. I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start.” You do, you just have to have a little bit of help. That’s what I’m here to do.
Grab the headline bank and re-write at least 80 of the 100 headlines. Don’t edit as you go. Don’t worry about how good the article would be or if you know how to write it, just write the dumb headline. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Once you’re finished, then go back and make those edits. You say, “Well, this isn’t going to be a very good topic.” Throw it out or I don't know enough about this, throw it out. Go research, okay.
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
Let’s take a look. Here are a couple of examples. What I’m going to do is I’m going to shift to a different program. I’ll put this on my screen and make sure that shows up. Here’s the headline bank on the screen right now. I’m going to blow this up a little bit bigger so you can see it a little bit better. That’s about as big as I want to make it.
This is the headline bank:
The secret of making people like you. Five familiar skin troubles Which do you want to overcome How I improve my memory in one evening. A challenge to women who had never dreamed of serving
margarine.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to simply re-write these. I’m not suggesting that you don’t know how to use the headline bank. If you’ve been in the MYM program, you probably know how to use the headline bank. I want to show you the magic of creating blog topics.
Watch this. Fantasy Tan, this is a client of ours right now. They create tanning formulas and solutions and they sell it to salons, okay? The secret of a beautiful, realistic, safe tan. Look at the original headline, “The secret of making people like you,” The secret of a beautiful, realistic, safe tan.” You say, is that actually an interesting topic? Well, if you were to write this “the secret of a beautiful, realistic, safe tan,”
Now we would look at this and say what kind of information would we put in that article? I know a little bit about tanning solutions because I’ve done a lot of this marketing for this company. We might talk about the difference between DHA, which is the active ingredient in tanning solutions versus things like Ultraviolet rays and tanning beds and tanning lotions.
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
We’re going to go back to this 100 headline bank. “Five familiar trouble do you want to overcome?” “Five familiar tanning blunders, which do you want to avoid?” Then you, as an expert, would sit down and say, Okay, what are some of the things that people do wrong in tanning? One of them is they use cheap products that make them look orange. Number two is they use tanning beds which makes them get cancer. Number three is they use lotions which makes the palms of their hands turn orange. Number four—let’s see, I can only think of three. Then change it. “Three familiar tanning blunders, which do you want to avoid.” See how this works.
Number three, “How I improve my memory in one evening.” “How I improve my tan in just 30 minutes.” You get the idea of how this works. A challenge to women who would never even consider spray tanning. Everywhere women are raving about this revolutionary spray tanning process. “Six attitudes about fake tans. Which group are you in?” Write these, not necessarily with the thought process of this is an advertisement because it’s not an advertisement. Think of it in terms of an article, okay? Think of it in terms of an article. If you say, I’m not that good at writing. That’s kind of a problem. You need to fix that. I mean, really, come on. How old are you? Did you go to school? If you didn’t, did you learn how to write? I mean, come on. You can learn how to write. This is a marketing course. We’ve got lots of resources for writing. This is one of them, okay?
“The three biggest problems you have with most tanning methods and how Fantasy Tan overcomes them all. For people who want to tan but don’t know who to believe.” I can see this being a great article. If you wanted to get a good tan before the season starts, but have heard conflicting reports of what the best way is to do it. Here’s an authoritative overview of the top tanning methods, the pros
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13and the cons, so that you can decide for yourself. Boom. Write the article, okay?
Now, as you can see—I’ll scroll down.
How I got an undetectable fake tan for less than $30. How often do you hear yourself say, no I haven’t tried
spray tanning. I’ve been meaning to. Whose fault is it when your spray tan looks like it was
applied by a third grade art student? Do you have the telltale signs of a spray tan? Three advantages to getting an undetectable spray tan?
We can just keep on scrolling. I said in my previous slide, try to write 80 out of a
100. I don't know maybe I’m better at this than you. It doesn’t matter. Write 80, write
70, and write 50, it doesn’t matter. Just write something, okay?
Let’s go over here and see this for remodeling. Let me make this a little bit
bigger.
The secret of a stress-free remodeling project.
Five telltale signs that your kitchen is overdue for a remodel.
How to remodel your bathroom in under a week and for under $10,000.
A challenge to women who would never dream of remodeling their
bathroom with an acrylic liner.
Everywhere women are raving that this simple and inexpensive kitchen
makeover.
The three most common reasons people put off remodeling. Which group
are you in?
Does your kitchen ever embarrass you?
These are articles that you could write. How long do the articles need to be?
Well, the articles need to be anywhere from 300 to 700 words long. You say, well,
that’s not very long or that’s really long. Make it however long you want. How much do
you have to say? Make it that long. Here’s what you need to do, you need to
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13understand that I’ve got fifth graders and sixth graders in my house. Actually not fifth,
I’ve got sixth graders. They learn how to write articles by learning how to write a main
topic, and three supporting points, and then a conclusion. That’s all you’ve got to do.
If you don’t know how to write, go to Google and type “fifth grade thesis writing”
and figure it out. Fifth graders are learning it and you can use it and learn it too, okay?
The number one most common goof when hiring a contractor. Well, what you
need to do now is sit down and figure out what is the number one most common goof.
Remodeling methods, which ones actually work, which ones are guaranteed to torture
you, a fortune and leave you madder than heck. Three fairy tales you would hear from
bathroom remodelers, even honest ones.
You get the idea of how this works. What I’m going to do is I’m going to show
you another example. I’m going to pause my screen. I’ve got to find the other example.
That is not it. I’ve got it up here somewhere. Here it is.
Here is one that I did for an air conditioning company. What you’ll see this is the
headline bank. It’s the same thing again, okay.
The secret of a pleasant HVAC service experience.
Five familiar service technician problems, which do you want to eliminate?
How do I improve the efficiency of my HVAC in less than 24 hours.
It’s the same thing again. I want to show you what these look like when they are
actually written into articles. What we did is we sat down and we wrote—I think we
wrote ten of these into articles.
“How to save a fortune by spending $22,000 on your next air
conditioner. I know it sounds absurd, but it’s absolutely true. Let’s change
that. A $22,000 air conditioner can save you so much on your energy bill.
The additional cost is actually relevant.
The reason why some people who already understand that it’s
actually worth it to spend $25,000 on a new Prius. That it’s even though
the Prius have the look, feel , and power of a far less expensive car. It’s
all about the gas mileage. The Prius might come at a $5,000 premium,
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
but over the course of five years, you more than make it up in gas savings.
In the world of air conditioning, the super-efficient king of the jungle is
called GEO thermal systems.
The short version is that it uses tubes that are buried deep below
your house where the temperature is a constant 54 degrees year round to
heat or cool, depending on the season that requires far less energy. This
of it this way, is it easier to heat 20 degree air up to 70 degrees or to heat
54 degree air up to 70 degrees?
That’s why GEO thermal systems do. Yes, GEO thermal does cost
more up front, but if you are planning on being in your home for at least
five years, you’ll make back the extra up front expenditure in spades. If
you are planning on being in your home ten or twenty years or longer, you
should check into GEO thermal. It’s definitely worth your money in the
long haul.”
That is an article. Let’s see how many words that article is. Its 248 words—248
words people. This is not taking you 13 hours to write. Take a little bit of time. Here’s
another one that came off of the list.
“88,448 customers can’t be wrong. Horizon Services it the highest
quality HVAC company, period. In business circles, there’s an ongoing
debate about whether people would rather do business with a huge
company that at least appears to know what they are doing or people
would they rather do business with a little mom and pop, so they can have
direct access to the owner of the company. The reason the debate never
ends is because there are obviously pros and cons to both approaches.
Little companies are good. Pros and cons.
What about the middle ground? That’s where Horizon Services
come in. We are not a national company, but we’re also anything but a
mom and pop. We’ve got two offices. We also have a fleet of 195 trucks,
and warehouses with over 240,000 parts. We service about 180
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
customers a month, so we are plenty big. We also have management that
live and work in this local area. They strive every single day to make the
business as personal as possible. For instance, we always answer the
phone with a live human between 6:00 and 11:00.”
Here’s another article:
“Shopping around for the cheapest price for air conditioning
systems? Not after you read this you won’t.”
I’m going to pause right here. I want you to stop and think about something for a
minute as we go through this. Do you think it’s possible that there would be companies,
people, organizations, entities, whatever you want to say, that would be interested in
making this information available to their audience? Just think about that for a minute.
The last one you say, I might be a little bit self-serving. Let’s go back and look at
it. What if we changed this headline? What if we said something like, “The debate
rages. Do you prefer huge, national companies or doing business with mom and
pops?” Boom. See how this works?
“Shop around for the cheapest prices on new air conditioning
systems? Not after this you won’t. Everybody knows there can be a big
price difference between two TVs who appear to be the same at a glance.
One 42 inch model might cost $450 at Costco, and another might be as
much as $1,500 at another store.
We all understand that difference and features brightness,
crispness, richness of colors, as well as energy efficiency, durable, remote
control, et cetera; can make a huge difference. A similar discussion could
be had about anything else, cars, computers, hotels, smartphones,
jewelry, restaurants, et cetera. You name it, price is not the most
important consideration.
Then when it comes to air conditioning systems, it seems that
everyone is just simply wants the lowest price. That’s understandable
when you buy something that you almost never buy and that something is
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
something that you have very little understanding of how it works, what
constitutes value or what you should be looking for it’s easy to default to a
simple comparison of prices.
Yes, we all know that you need to compare apples to apples, but
because people’s unfamiliarity with air conditioners, all the apples look
basically the same. Just give me the lowest price.”
You see how this works? You write the article about this topic, okay? Then we
talk about whether—the important elements. The twists, it’s important to compare
features, but here’s the most important question: Who is installing this system. Now,
you can make these geared towards your company or you can make them generic.
For instance, granted that AC install won’t affect your wallet, not your life, but the
fact is less than optimal install happens all the time. You start and make sure you have
the right system. If the unit is too big, you’d be wasting money. If it’s too small, it has to
work over time. The right system—blah, blah, blah.
This paragraph down here says, “At Horizon, we insist that our technicians
participate in 150 hours a year.” This can easily be changed to be generic instead of
company-centric. You can come in and say, “Make sure that any company that you
work with has at least 150 hours a year of mandatory classroom training. Make sure
that they are tested, quizzed. Make sure they are observed in critical situations. Make
sure that their work is spot checked. You could put this into a more generic tone and
format and it still has the same meaning.
Now, here’s what I want you to stop down and think about again. Is it possible
that there are third parties that would be interested in making this information available
to their audience? The answer is almost definitely going to be yes, if the information is
good, if it’s real, if it’s unbiased, okay?
“The three most dangerous words you can say to your HVAC
technician ‘you’re the expert. You know the old saying, half the doctors
finished in the bottom half of their graduating class, right? Unfortunately,
the same thing can be said about air conditioning technicians.
MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13
In the case of your AC tech, their level of expertise has a lot more
to do with the ongoing, on the job training and field experience than it does
when they did back in school. That’s because your heating and air
conditioning system is, by far and away, the most technologically
advanced appliance in your home and becoming more so every year.
Truth be told, your worst case scenario when hiring a technician is
somebody who’s been working in the field for 15 to 20 years but who is
not up to speed on the latest technology changes.”
Then we go through and we talk about what we can do. We can make this
generic. We can make this company specific, either way.
“Three fairy tales you hear from HVAC companies. All work is