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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.


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.


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.


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,


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


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


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.


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

guaranteed. Certified, experienced technicians. Lowest prices

guaranteed. Everyone always says they have the lowest prices, and

some companies do offer low prices, but a low price for a repair bill is only

one small part of the equation. You also have to look at the callback

ratios. Do you have to keep calling the guy back? Energy efficiency,

warranty length, frustration, time and effort. A little mistake that cost a

home owner $1,700 on his electric bill.”

I want you to imagine this being an article that you read on Yahoo. Here’s what

we are going to do, we are going to go over to www.yahoo.com. This is a good place

for you to go next. Here’s what you are going to do, you are going to read through the

headlines.

Chain of McDonalds is really worried about.

US Stealth bombers over South Korea

Debate over kind gesture on receipt

The bronze reaction to headband thief

Jan surprises with new Camaros.

Get ready for your new guilty pleasure.

Groups re-think rewarding cop killer case.

Lost camera found 6,000 miles away.

http://www.yahoo.com/


Nicki Minaj freaks out at Idaho hopeful.

FBI tries to record to set record on UFOs.

You get the idea. This is what we are trying to do, we are trying to find things

that we can write about. “Should you pay for the second repair. How to tell if the

service technician is to blame for your HVACs faulty performance.” Let’s see how long

this article is. It is 492 words. Basically, 500 words.

“The big hairy secret the big named HVAC manufactures don’t want you to know

about their product quality control. Hint, they rely on us to tell them what’s wrong.” This

article is 625 words long. That’s what I was saying earlier, right, about 250 words,

maybe up to 750 words, something like that. That’s all you need. Do you get a little bit

longer? That’s okay. A little bit shorter? That’s okay.

Let’s go back over here to—that’s not where we were. Creating content, round

one, was using the headline bank. Now let’s go to round two. Round two, ask yourself

these questions. Question one, what are things people need to know about when doing

business in your industry? What are the main key words associated with what you sell?

What questions are people asking all the time during sales meeting? Here’s a good

one. What subjects are you an expert on?

Think about these things. What we are going to do is I’m going to challenge you

to sit down and make a list. First of all, of just general topics that you can write about.

Number two, create those into headlines. Let’s take a look. I sat down a few months

ago, and I put together a list of topics that are topics for remodeling articles. Let me

make this a little bit bigger on the screen. Let me tell you how I did this. I went through

and I did a quick audit of some of the topics that I have covered on webinars. I thought,

okay, let’s now make these into interesting topics for articles. Here is what I came up

with.

Seven lies you believe about remodeling marketing.

Six and a half ways to use an iPad in your remodeling business.

A fresh take on proximity marketing.

Cashing in a new movers.


Itty bitty teeny tiny canvassing

The new and improved testimonial

How to write epic cues that actually sell

How to milk your past customers for more business

Three sure fire ways to waste money on advertising.

Co-marketing with big boss stores, worth the price?

Should you star in your own commercials?

The best advice for remodelers for under 1 million

How important is price in advertising?

So on and so forth. You can see this. I went down and I kept going and going. I

came up with 75 things. I’m going to tell you what I did with this in just a minute, but I’m

going to give you an example here that I find to be interesting, which is, I did a webinar

yesterday called “guerilla marketing.” For guerilla marketing for remodelers, I had

something like 15 or 16 or 17 different things. Here’s why I’m showing you this. I put

together this webinar and now I can go back to this webinar, and I can pull topics for

articles out of it.

Here’s what we’ve got. Guerilla canvassing number one, the timeshare method.

I could create a headline and then an article that says something like, “what I learned

from the timeshare selling maniacs in Cabo San Lucas about remodeling marketing.”

That’s going to introduce an article about what I call timeshare method of canvassing

where you compensate people for their time.

Number two, micro-canvassing. I already had an article about this which was—

let’s see. Where was that? “Itty bitty teeny tiny canvassing.” That’s about micro-

canvassing. Let’s go to the next one. Guerilla marketing home shows. How to use

sweepstakes—how to use big bad bill to increase your home show results by two to

three times. All I’m doing is going through this list of things that were in my webinar. I

can write an article on any of these.

How putting an iPad in a blender can help your marketing. The flamethrower

approach to getting attention in remodeling marketing. Let’s see. Air cannons, flame

throwers and crow bars, oh my. Whatever, we can come up with these. Pimp my ride.

MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13We talked about pimping the ride. We talked about the fajita. Maybe you were on this

webinar, maybe you weren’t. If you were on this webinar, you could understand what

this fajita is. How the wicked angel fajita influenced the choice of my companies colors.

Calloway Golf, Victoria’s Secret, and Air Jordan’s, lessoned learned from the country’s

top marketers.

I’m just putting together headlines. Why a four-foot gold wrench can save your

business. If you’ve got a mustache, I’ll give you $100. These are just articles. I come

in here and write an article about singling people out. I don’t need to go through every

single thing. What I’m trying to let you know that if you pay attention to your

surroundings. In your surroundings you might be sitting in a sales meeting with a

prospect, the prospect starts asking you questions. Make a note of the questions.

These are good topics to write about in your blog.

That being said—oops, I already went through that. Let’s talk about finding an

audience. This is where we are going to end up today. Not a super long webinar today,

but that’s okay. It’s good content. Finding an audience. First thing, build up your email

list and your social media. This is a great place to get your articles out. If you’ve got an

email list, boom, you send out a new email when articles are posted. If you’ve got a

Facebook account, you can post it. There’s a chance for people to share them. You

start to build your audience.

The willingness of people to read and participate in your articles is going to be

directly proportionate to how good the articles and the information is. Next, find

organizations that can use your information. Let’s take the case of a remodeler. You’re

a kitchen and bathroom remodeler, are you writing articles about all these different

issues like we showed you a minute ago.

Like what? Let’s see, what everybody ought to know about remodeling. Free

book, tells you 12 secrets to getting a good deal. The number one most common goof

when hiring your contractor. Remodeling methods, which ones actually work which

ones are guaranteed.


Hopefully, looking at this list just gives you the confidence to say, you know

what? I think I can do this. Find organizations that can use your information. Are there

homeowners associations that put out newsletters in your city? Where can you find

companies that can use this information? Are there other websites that are dedicated to

these kinds of topics? Then let’s go for the fences, folks.

Number next, find news outlets that can use information and partner with them.

Here’s what I strongly recommend you do. Number one, come up with a list of 100 or

so newsletter—excuse me, not newsletter, blog articles, topics, articles that you can

write. Then actually sit down and write five of them. Get whatever resources you need

to utilize, to get people to edit and give you feedback, so that you can be sure that

you’re actually writing decent articles.

Do it, but let’s assume that you can get over the hurdle of actually writing

something worthwhile. Now, package these up and start shopping them around to the

news organizations. You say, “Well, what are you talking about? Channel 5 News?”

No, I’m not talking about Channel 5 News. What I’m talking about is this, I live in a town

called Southlake, Texas. Is one out of probably 40 major towns in the Dallas/Fort Worth

area. If you don’t know much about Dallas/Fort Worth, it’s a lot like other big

metropolitan areas.

You’ve got Dallas, and you’ve got Fort Worth. Those two towns, cities represent

probably 20 percent of the population of the area. The other 80 percent is in all these

little towns, suburbs and I live in one of them. It’s called Southlake. Did you know there

are two, count them, two different newspapers that are distributed for free to all the

residents of Southlake. These are advertising oriented, advertising supported

publications. One of them gets thrown into the lawn. One of them gets sent through the

mail. One of them I think it’s called Southlake Times, the other one’s called Southlake

Journal. I don't know. These are the newspapers where people go when they want to

know what happened at the city council meeting. They want to see the crime blotter,

whose house was broken into. If you want to see how the high school swimming team

did. You’ve got to look in this paper. This is called every town on the planet has these.


If you don’t the neighboring town probably does. Here’s what you’ve got to

understand about these people. I’m going to show you a slide here.

Information age, good content is in high demand. Do not overestimate the

competition. I’m going to show you this, content is king. On the left-hand side you’ve

go Jerry Seinfeld, on the right-hand side you’ve got Disney land. What you may not

know about Disneyland is that Disneyland, before it was Disneyland, the park, was

actually Disneyland the TV show. You’re probably more familiar, depending on your

age, with something called The Wonderful World Of Disney. It was a TV show that ran

on Sundays from the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Then it was kind of off and on. It was

called the wonderful of Disney. It was originally called Disneyland. It was designed to

promote Disneyland the park as it was being introduced in 1955. I know this because I

just did a webinar last week on Walt Disney.

Here’s why I’m’ tell you this. Jerry Seinfeld is a comedian. In the late 1980s he

was a comedian like a million other comedians. He was running the circuits. He was

making a little money. He had made a name for himself. He was doing okay but he

was not a multi-quadzillionare. He went to the TV networks that have a constant

insatiable need for content. He said, “Look, I will sell you content. You give me an

audience, I will give you content.” This is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Here’s what you’ve got to understand. There are content providers in this world

and there are audience providers in this world. You are a content provider because you

are not an audience provider. Do you have an audience? You’ve got your customer

base and that’s good. You can send them stuff, but you are not an audience builder. If

there is a newspaper that goes out to 8 or 9,000 homes in the town of Southlake Texas,

that’s called an audience. They need content. You can provide it, okay?

Disneyland, it’s the same thing. Walt Disney was a guy that had been sitting

there in 1955, drawing cartoons since the 20s, had a library of hundreds of short

cartoons and other features. Went to ABC, originally, and then NBC a little bit later and

said, “Look, you’ve got TV, I’ve got content. Let’s do business.” It was a win/win for

both. I’m telling you that this exists and is available to you. You don’t think of yourself

as Jerry Seinfeld. You don’t think of yourself as Walt Disney. It doesn’t matter. Here is

MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13what you need to realize. At the core, both of these people were the same thing. They

were content providers. You can be a content provider too if you have content. That’s

what I’m asking you to think about and consider here.

We’ve talked about how to get content. Once you get the content, package it up

—here’s the worst thing you can do. The worst thing you can do is go to the local

newspaper and say, “Hey, my name is John with XYZ Remodeling, and I’d like to write

an article for your newspaper.” They are going to look at you and go, “Yeah, okay,

John, whatever.” It’s going to sound like a sales pitch.

What I’m going to recommend that you do is that you write your five articles, you

have your list of 100 topics, and you send them to the editor and say, “My name is John.

I have a home improvement company. Through my experiences, I’ve become

somewhat of an expert. I’ve started creating articles as a way to help my perspective

and current customers understand issues surround the topic of remodeling. I’ve had

people tell me that these might be interesting for other people to look at. I’d like to

submit them to you to see if this is something that you would be interested in putting in

your publication both online and/or in print.” I think you will find the reception will be

much warmer than you think.

This is predicated on a couple of things. The first on is that you actually have

good content. Number two is that you present it in the fashion that I’ve just described,

i.e. having content already created and a list of additional content going to these

publications and saying, “Here, what do you think?” Beyond just the publications—

excuse me, the newspapers, you also can think in terms of radio programs, becoming a

host or an expert on certain topics. Number two, there are always going to be a lot of

free circulation magazines. For instance, in Southlake, there’s about six or seven of

them. Southlake Style, Southlake Times, these are ones that are mailed out probably

once every month to two months.

They are advertising driven publications. Some of them have very flimsy editorial

content. Some of them have more robust editorial content. Guess what they would all

like? Additional content. Guess how much they want to pay for it? They don’t have

MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13any budget for it. You come in as a guy on a white horse with a white hat and say,

“Look I’ve got this content.” Key thing, it’s got to be good.

Now, I’m’ going to tell you my experience with this with my own business. I wrote

this list—let’s see where did this list go? I wrote this list. I put it together and I went to

Qualified Remodeler Magazine and I went to Replacement Contractor Magazine. I said,

“Hey, how would you like to have all these articles?” I worked with these guys a little bit

enough in the past, some of them more and some of them less. I had multiple articles

that I’d already written. I said, “How would you like to have these articles?” They about

freaked out. I ended up having conversations with Qualified Remodelers Magazine, he

is one of our sponsors for our seminars and our webinars.

I said look here’s the deal. I’m’ willing to give you an article let me ask you this, if

you could wave a magic wand and you could have as much content as you wanted,

what would that look like? Don’t take into account any kind of fees or money or

anything, just if you could wave a magic wand and you could have this content as

frequently as you wanted, how often would you get this content? The guy says, “Geez,

if you could do one article every other month that would be great.” I said, “What if I

could produce an article for you every single week?”

The guy—I was on the phone with him, but his face started twitching. I could tell.

(Gargling noise) He couldn’t understand. He said, “Every week?” Then he explained,

“It’s like pulling teeth for us to get people to produce these articles for us. We have to

badger, we have to babysit. We have to follow-up. We have to prod and poke and

cajole.” He said, “If you could produce this stuff every week, you are in. Here’s what

we’ll do, if you will produce this stuff every week, we’ll set up a blog for you on our

website that you can keep updated and we’ll just put in on our website.” “Oh, wow.”

The demand for content—here’s what you’ve got to understand. Back in Walt

Disney’s day, there were three TV stations. They had a limited amount of inventory of

space, so it took somebody like Walt Disney with a very significant content that took him

decades and fortunes to produce. Now, everything is so fragmented—did you know

that I’ve got a 14 year old son, just by way of example. If I would let him, and I won’t, if I

MYMTactical Marketing Webinar3/28/13would, he would spend his entire media budget, In other words, time that he’s allowed

consuming media, movies, video games, television, computer—he would spend all of it

watching YouTube videos of other people playing video games.

Do you realize that there are channels on YouTube where you can sit down, and

for as long as you have time, you can watch other people playing video games. You

realize this is where we are at? You may not be aware of this. The fragmentation of

American attention is extraordinary. In 1955, a show on ABC called Disneyland could

average 50 million viewers. Do you realize that when the Mickey Mouse club came out,

it was running for an hour a day after school on TV in an average 10 million children per

day and 5 million adults per day. 50 million viewers a day—a day. American Idol

doesn’t get 15 million viewers at this point, and it’s one of the top rated shows.

50 million viewers for Disneyland, The Wonderful World Of Disney, because

there was this concentration that there was not very many media outlets. Totally

different now. Here is why I’m telling you this. It was driven the demand for content

through the roof. There’s a bazillion and one media outlets, including the watch people

play video games channel on YouTube, all the way up to ABC, NBC, CBS, and fox.

They still are there and they need content. You can produce it.

Here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to become an expert. You’re

going to become recognized. You are going to have your SEO rankings. What

happens if the local newspaper starts posting your articles on their website and then

linking from their website to your website? Do you realize that you have just killed every

one of your competitors in search engine optimization. I’m telling you, this one thing

alone, will put you over the top. It will make you the pre-eminent dealer company,

vendor in that space. This one strategy.

That’s it. That’s what I have for you today. I’d be happy to take any questions if

you have them. If you’d like to ask a question, please type it into the console, and we’ll

go from there. Looks like we've got a question.


“Do you have a canned mail message to send to the newspaper websites?” No.

Hey Frank, how are you doing? Good to see you out here. No, I don’t. I don’t, but if

this was anybody but Frank, I would say just sit down and write it. Since it’s Frank, I’ll

say let’s talk about it later and I’ll help you put it together later. Frank being one of our

esteemed customers from Horizon. We looked at some of their HVAC stuff earlier.

Any other questions? Good. I have a couple more. “Is it shady to send the

same article to multiple newspapers?” It’s not shady to send them to them in an effort

to solicit their business, but what you’re ultimately trying to do is trying to get an

agreement with one. It would be shady to have multiple agreements, but in the context

of trying to get somebody to bite off and do business with you, absolutely not. Shop it

around.

I told you earlier in my story, I shopped them to both Qualified Remodeler and

Replacement Contractor. In fact, I came to a deal with Replacement Contractor. Then

some things came up that made it untenable on their end, there was some competitive

issues and things that wouldn’t work out. We ended up pursuing the other one more

heavily. Hopefully, that helps.

“How do you best insure that the articles and blogs place elsewhere lead back to

your site?” You just have an agreement with the publishers in exchange for giving you

this information, we are trying to gain exposure. That should be self-evident, but you

should have the specific instruction as well. Then you can put a link to your website on

all of those articles as a condition of making them available. That’s just a common

practice. Again, it’s so self-evident that it almost does not require explanation, but make

sure you cover those details. Then boom, now you’ve got a link back to your website.

“Are there any other SEO strategies to partner with sites similar to what you did

with the remodeling company?” Frank, I’m not quite sure what you are asking me there.

Would you like to rephrase or clarify a bit? Yeah, I’m not quite sure what you are asking

me. What we are saying is put together content for their sites that would then credit and

link to you. Any other questions? I’ll wait to see if Frank has a rephrasing of that

question.


“What else can be done to establish the links back to Horizon?” I think it’s just a

matter of the negotiation. The key thing is that making sure that you have a willing

partner that will publish your content to their audience. If so, then you can make any

kind of deal you want with them. A lot of what I’m talking about here is saying, we will

provide you this content for free. In my case, I provide the content for free because I’m

interested in the audience.

Look at Jerry Seinfeld if he would have said to NBC, “I’ll put together a TV show

because I want the exposure and people might buy more of my t-shirts and DVDS or

back in the 80s VHS tapes, as the case may be.” No, he set it up as a paid kind of a

thing. Here’s what you can do, maybe you can start for free and then you can work it

into a paid gig.

Frank, specifically for your issue, you can also negotiate exposure through

banner advertising or something else that is easy, inexpensive and perhaps even free

for that content—excuse me that audience provider to make available to you. After a

while, depending on how things go, you can potentially negotiate getting paid for doing

stuff like this.

“Should you link people back to your blog or company website?” Yes, absolutely,

that goes without saying. Number one, it’s going to give you the SEO. Let me make

this point very, very clear. Let’s say that your article is running in the local newspaper,

online version or print version, whatever. Let’s just say for sure the online version. If

people read that and they go, wow that was a great article, but they don’t even really

notice, “Hey that was Bill Kemp that wrote that.” Or maybe they notice it was Bill Kemp,

it’s just an article.

There are hundreds of articles out there to be read. This one was good and

interesting. Even if they don’t look at that go, “that was Bill Kemp, I like that guy. I’m

going to make sure I call him when I need my windows replaced.” Even if they don’t do

that, that link back to your website is automatically helping your SEO. That’s the critical

part of this is to have good content. Even in that hypothetical where they didn’t notice

who wrote that article, a lot of people will because guess what?


Here’s what’s going to happen. People are going to go into Google and they will

search—let’s go do a Google search. I would do a yahoo search, but honestly I don’t

like yahoo.

Let’s take “replacement windows,” Bill Kemp. I’m trying to remember where you

are at. Are you in Virginia? “Virginia beach” or “Richmond” all right. “Richmond,

Virginia.” Now I come in here and looking at all this crap, right? You’ve got

replacement windows, if there was somebody putting some good blog entries into the

local paper and there was one called “how to choose the best replacement windows” or

the six things to look for.

It’s going to start to appear on Google if it’s got traffic, if it’s got credibility. This is

what we are trying to say. Boom, they are going to click on that article, they are going

to see it, they are going to link back to you or you can put the same article on your

website. Maybe you provide links to other people. Okay? If you have both a blog and

a website which one do you link them to? Link them—it’s going to depend? Are they

running your article? Then link it to your website. Do you have the same article on your

blog? That’s something you’ll have to negotiate out to your audience provider. Ideally,

you want them going to your website.

“What about content aggregation, white papers, sites that are searchable that get

lots of traffic and destinations for expert articles. Any suggestions about specific sites?”

Yes, that’s a good idea, and no, I don’t have any specific information.

The key here is you just want the biggest audience as possible. If there is an

aggregating website that aggregates content, and it has a built-in audience because

people are coming to it, that’s obviously a good thing. What you are looking for is

audience. The more people that see your article, the more people have a chance to like

it, the more chance people to link through to you, et cetera. Make sure when you write

your articles, that you have social media sharing capability on each page so that people

can click, share this on Facebook, share this on twitter. Make that easy and automatic.

There’s a free website called, I believe it’s called www.addthis.com.


Please addthis.com. It’s called www.addthis.com. This is a free tool that if you

just look on here, you see it allows people to like. It tells how many people have seen it.

You can customize this so it can be shared very, very easily. Put that on all your

articles.

Okay. I think that’s it. I think we’ve covered all the questions. Thanks everybody

for participating today. It was sort of an interesting topic, I think. I hope you found some

value in this discussion. I have a feeling some of you are going to take and run with

this, so please do and let me know how it goes. I’d love to add a success story to this

topic for next time. We’ll talk to you, I believe, next Tuesday on a Tuesday morning ad

clinic and we’ll go from there.

Thanks so much. Bye now.

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