This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Ok, very awesome. Now you have talked, obviously, this whole discussion is anchored by your house list, your prospect list, your client list, so mortgage brokers are in a unique position. If they are in the business for a long time to generate repeat business from their list, contrary to myself, I am in an industry where we fix tax problems, to be completely honest, we don’t want you back as a client. Once your tax problem is resolved, you don’t want to come back to me, and I don’t want you coming back. Otherwise, it was why did we go through it in the first place, right?
James: Right.
Jassen: So clients coming to us to have tax problems fixed, it is hopefully a one shot show which is not good for business continuity, obviously, so we are constantly having to acquire new customers. Well, mortgage brokers can build lifelong relationships, literally lifelong relationships with their clients and have somebody, just an individual or a family, not even talking about real estate investors here, that purchase themselves properties, buy themselves properties all the time, but just families that are just moving every five six seven years, based on the need of their family, kids or come and go, what not. So you can build a lifelong relationship with them and get repeat business over the years. So what are some ways that a mortgage broker can take advantage of that awesome phenomenon in their industry?
James: I will focus on some things that I have been talking about throughout this entire presentation and four things that I can think of, number one is you definitely want to have a monthly newsletter, and the trick question I tend to ask you is how often do you send out a monthly newsletter, Jassen?
Jassen: I am going to want to do that at least once per quarter.
James: Wrong answer. You want to do a monthly newsletter every month. The problem is there are a lot of people that have monthly newsletters that they get out a few times per year and that is kind of the problem. You want to consistently send out your newsletter once a month, and I have a really easy solution for you, if you are not able to get out a monthly newsletter regularly, and that is outsource it. Hire someone else to do it for you. Go on one of these outsourcing type websites and hire someone to do your monthly newsletter. Commit to paying them four hours a month in order to do it, and they will get it all done for you. You want to get your monthly newsletter out. What can you include in your monthly newsletter. You can include any of the articles you have been recently adding to your website. Any offers for any new special reports or downloads or audios or whatever you put in there. You can request business specifically, you should always have a call to action in your newsletter. You can put in there request for referral, testimonials, recent loans you have closed and people being happy with those loans and congratulation notices to real estate notices who have referred you business or other people that have referred you business. You can put in there updates on the gift certificates you are giving out to people who have sent you referrals to encourage more referrals. Lots of different things like that you can get into your newsletter to keep people excited and reading it. I tend to keep newsletters really light, more fun stuff, rather than really dry stuff, but your own personality will come through. The other thing you want to do beside the monthly newsletter, and I think you should mail that by the way and not e-mail it.
I am not sure if you caught that. But use the post office not your e-mail provider, and I talk a lot about that during the full week mortgage broker marketing webinar, especially how to set that up and all the services you can use. It is real easy to do, you just need to know how, someone to walk you through the process. Then the other thing you can do besides those monthly physical newsletters you mail out is you could do occasional e-mails with updates and promotion stuff and special reports and important announcements and get those out via e-mail. I think you should definitely do that as well.
That is not a replacement to a monthly newsletter. You still need to use the physical paper one. There is a lot more perceived value for someone who mailed something to you than someone who e-mailed something to you, just so you know. Actually, there is a really great stat on that. You told me that it was twenty times more effective to do something in the mail. Did you tell me a stat like that recently?
Jassen: Gary Halbert, that is where that came from.
James: Twenty times more effective for you to put something in the mail, so just consider that when you are trying to save yourself a couple of shekels and a couple minutes of time doing it through the e-mail. It is not worth it.
Jassen: Well, especially, being a mortgage broker the commissions in this industry are high enough that it is well worth it to spend the 60 cents or $1 per month to send your newsletter to your list of a few hundred to a few thousand people. The return that is going to come boomeranging back on that is more than sufficient to justify the cost.
James: If someone is not worth spending seven to ten dollars a year on to have them on your list, get them off your list.
Jassen: Right.
James: Just think about it that way. You should be willing to spend $10 per year on staying in touch with somebody if they are on your list. Besides the e-mails and special reports and things like that, you can also give them access to your social network. If you are on Twitter or Facebook and you keep it clean, then you can definitely have them follow you on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin if you are more of a business minded person. Then the other thing you could do is definitely summarize articles with an automatic RSS feed, and I don’t know if we really have time to go into what that is, but there are certain services out there where you can automatically have any new article you ad to certain types of blogs that you set up automatically e-mail to them once a week. Any new content you add to your website they are automatically being get hit once a week with those articles, just by opting into that site for you.
Jassen: I agree. What is really all this about? It is not really maintaining communication, maintaining top of mind awareness and building that relationship so that people what?
James: Know, like and trust you.
Jassen: The whole, actually I think some people have started referring to it as, KLT, which is kind of sad that it has been reduced to an acronym now, but it is true. It always has been true and always will be true. People do business with people they know, like and trust and so anything that you can do to build that ongoing relationship I think is valuable to your long term existence in the industry. Wouldn’t you agree?
James: I totally agree. To comment on that abbreviation thing, the “KLT” thing. Why don’t we just abbreviate the whole concept as RM. Call all of it relationship marketing and not even talk about any of the details.
Jassen: Well, then this webinar would have been over an hour and twenty-eight minutes ago.
James: Yes, you just say, use relationship marketing and lead generation. We will call it RM and LG and just say that is all it is and that is what is silly about using some of these acronyms. You really need to talk about what they are. You get to the point where everyone is talk in abbreviations and no one remembers what it was.
Jassen: Right. I will be honest, that is one of the downsides to being a big Twitter guy. There are so many acronyms on Twitter because you only have 140 characters for everything. Sometimes it feels like, “What does that mean?”
Again, the whole focus of everything we have been talking about here is, you are right, it is relationship marketing and lead generation, so everything that we have been talking about is to focus on those two big things, is getting people into your pipeline, that is the lead generation and then building the relationship by marketing to that pipeline, and it really galls me when I am on somebody else’s list, and I must be on a dozen or two dozen people’s list just because I am interested in this sort of stuff, and the vast majority of them make no effort to build a relationship. It is sales pitch, sales pitch, sales pitch. What do you think I do after a while when I am on someone’s list like that.
Jassen: I can tell you what I do.
James: I am off those lists pretty quickly. I don’t need to have sales pitch. I am looking for information or I am looking for a relationship. I don’t want to just be sold something, or I can go to their website if I am interested in being sold.
Jassen: Exactly. I hope that we have hammered that point into people’s brains that everything that we are talking about is, to be summarized, you are doing lead generation to build a list so that you can develop a relationship with that list that will then grow your business. I think that is about as simple as the flow chart can get.
James: I think so. I think that is a pretty good summation of it.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: All right let’s move on let’s talk about ways handyman can improve the effectiveness of generating prospects from the marketing that they’re doing.
James: OK, I’m going to kind of go through this pretty quickly I don’t want to dwell on it and extend this thing out but the first thing you need to do if you’re trying to improve anything, you need to be measuring so always be measuring, testing, and trying to improve on things you’re doing and there are three things that you should really focus on improving.
The first thing is your headline so a lot of times that’s going to be your unique selling proposition and you need to focus on what you are offering to them, how you are getting the attention of the people you are sending the information to. So, for someone who’s focusing on real estate agents to try to get houses ready to sell very quickly you can say “get you house in tip-top shape with one phone call, we’ll prepare your house to sell” You know whatever your unique selling proposition is for those guys and then be testing that headline versus new headlines so you send that out week one, you send out another week or two, you see which one does better you take the winner and you keep testing that against something new until you find out the one that performs the best overall you want to constantly be testing headlines.
Also your call to action, what you are using to tell people what you do… call me, email me, stop by my office… whatever you are doing to get them to contact you, whatever your call to action is you want to test that too to see which one is most effective.
And then the last one of the three that I recommend people test is test what you are offering are you offering them a free special report, are you offering them a video, are you offering them a free bid or consultation, are you offering them a free telephone interview about things they may need to know, whatever you are offering test different ones to see which one works best and so that’s what I would emphasize people test to improve effectiveness of their marketing.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
The following is a brief excerpt from How To Market Your Handyman Business (a one hour and forty minute presentation on marketing strategies for handyman business owners).
Hello and welcome to How to Market your Handyman Business my name is Jassen Bowman and I am joined this evening by marketing expert James Orr. How are you James?
I’m doing outstanding Jassen; I’m really excited about tonight’s call we’ve been doing a lot of stuff with handyman over the years and so tonight’s going to be a really great call because I’ve got a lot of great information to share.
Yes, this is one that both you and I, I believe have a pretty big passion for. We’ve both done quite a bit of work in the handyman marketing arena and just you know helping people to build their business really from scratch and turn it into kind of a turn-key business that they can build and hire employees and have other people work for them to kind of give them a better lifestyle and also to build whatever they want really right?
Yeah, and I’m coming at this from two very different angles my father you know basically was a handyman he owned a lot of the rental properties but he did a lot of the fix up on them, that was the part he really enjoyed and so I’ve done marketing to help him you know with handyman type stuff before and the other side of it is we were building our national referral network for real estate investors it occurred to me that real estate investors were asking me do you know a good handyman in you know Boise Idaho or Miami Florida or wherever it was and I would not a lot of times know someone down there and so what I started doing was doing some marketing for handyman in those local areas and letting the handyman actually post their information up on our website and this was a while ago and so it’s not active anymore but they used to be able to go post their information up on our website and there was no charge for doing that and then when the investors would ask me if I knew somebody I’d say go check out the handyman page on the website and then they’d be able to go and work directly with people so I mean we were doing a hundred handyman you know dealing with a hundred new handyman people business owners everyday on that-
Right
-network so
So this is definitely something that you obviously know something about?
I know a little bit about marketing that’s for sure. I think I’m becoming known as the six figure lead generation guy.
Yeah, I’ve seen that around you know it’s kind of interesting if you’re, if you’re online and just kind of go around and look at what other people are saying about you, it’s really interesting what you know what people are putting out there and you’re right there are – I’m not sure exactly where the six figure part started was that with the AdSense stuff?
Yeah,
Is that where the six figure part came from?
That’s exactly where it came from in fact I got my what is this form here in the mail right from AdSense today, I’ve got it right here sitting in front of me it’s the tax bill let’s see, important tax information my 2009 1099 MISC the miscellaneous thing with my compensation for AdSense through August so I got that sitting right in front of me and yup six figure AdSense or six figure lead generation guy is pretty appropriate.
You got it.
So yeah, yeah this is what we’re going to talk about today we’re going to talk about doing lead generation and things of that nature let’s get right into because I know we’ve got a lot to cover and last time we did a call with a similar topic I think we went 90 minutes so-
Yeah, we were right at an hour and half can you – before we get into the meat of the material that we got here can I ask you to just give a really quick overview of why lead generation is so important for handyman?
Well, without lead generation you don’t have clients to work for I mean one of the misconceptions about being a business owner is that because you can do the core skill set because you can actually do the handyman work that you are then qualified to run a handyman business-
Right.
-and unfortunately it’s not true there are very different skills that are required for running a business, doing the marketing, doing the business administration and by the way when I sit here and I’m pointing at people I’m not, there are certain parts of the business I’m not that good at and I like to just outsource that so, accounting type stuff, things of that nature, those are not my strong suits marketing my strong suit. If I were actually have to go out and do – fix up a house by myself, could I do it? Yes, but nowhere near as good as the majority of people listening to this call.
Exactly
So really what it comes down to is you need to know what your skill set is and focus on that in the business and if you need help with marketing outsource it I mean we’re going to talk here about delegating and outsourcing some of your marketing go ahead and do it and you know for a very few number of people I do have some openings for consulting but a lot of this stuff we’re going to teach you how to do right here on this call along with other materials we have and you’re going to be able to go and implement it yourself or have someone else do it for you and I even do that so that’s why marketing is so important and lead generation specific because without people to actually purchase your service there’s nothing to do so-
Exactly alright for those of our listeners that are on the call now is when you’ll want to bust out a piece of paper, a pen, start taking some notes if you haven’t already done that let’s dive right into the meat of the material here, you already talked a little bit about lead generation but in general what are the two biggest marketing focuses for any handyman when they’re looking at marketing their business?
Well, really there’s two different types of marketing I look at there’s marketing to your internal list you want to build up a list of all the people that know you whether it’s friends, family, business associates, anyone you meet and you hand them your business card and they hand you a business card back, you want to add them, anyone who inquires about getting a quote from you or finding out about your service or that you meet that you think would be a good prospect down the road those are the people you want to have on your internal list and what you want to do is you want to maintain that list, you want to nurture that list, you want to grow that list and then you want to consistently market to that list week in, month in but you want to do it over and over again because those are the people you are going to get business from it’s very hard to do a conversion from a cold market straight to a client but that’s the next part the first part is market to your internal list the second part of it though is to market and then directly grow that client and prospect list and there are gonna be times when you’re going to do direct marketing out there and someone is going to go from inquiry to paying clients and they’re gonna want to hire you to do some handyman work but that is the hardest sale you’re ever going to make-
Right
-the easiest one you’re going to make is your warm list people that know, like and trust you and that’s wanting to do business with you when they have a need and those are also the people that are going to refer people to you as well.
So what you’re saying is one of the focuses is doing marketing to grow your – I call it a house list – to grow your internal list and then the other side of that coin is nurturing that relationship with the people on that list is that a good summation?
I think that’s a perfect summation and I think what people don’t realize is a lot of handyman business owners come in and they think that there’s only one type of marketing and that is marketing to get new clients right up front and it’s really not a good model to have if you’re trying to think in your head what this looks like the model of I put out advertising, I get clients, and I go to work and do that not a good model. It’s not appropriate, it’s not reality, really what tend to happen is the people that know, like and trust you tend to call you when they have work for you to do and then you go do the work. It’s rarer for you to go do direct marketing and get new clients.
Exactly well especially for handymen because a handyman is someone that you’re going to need on specific occasions you know when something breaks or if you’re doing some renovations or you know something comes along it’s usually when you call a handyman to do something it is preceded by some instigating factor and so if you have a relationship with a handyman there’s probably going to be you know – I don’t know a ceiling fan goes out on a rental property or something like that you go “oh OK I need to call George.” And so if you’ve if the handyman has nurtured that relationship then that prospect on the handyman’s list is automatically going to think oh I need to call George, right?
Yeah, as long as you’ve got top of mind awareness and where that comes in is that constant marketing that you’re doing to your internal list to remind them who you are, you know what you’re about, that they know you, they like you , they trust you, you put testimonials in there, you kind of keep them abreast of what’s going on in your life and your business and then the people that didn’t really know you that well and that’s like one or two contacts to meet you, those guys get repeated exposure so that when they do need a handyman and they can refer you, or they can even use you themselves, or they can refer you to someone else that does need it and that’s when they happen to say “oh yeah, I do know a guy, I get a newsletter from him once a month, really nice guy, a lot of great testimonials, does some really great work I’ve seen some pictures you should give him a call” and then he’ll have your number because you’ll be sending them stuff and it won’t be too long even if they don’t have your number that they’ll get something else in the mail and be able to give it to them.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to take your handyman business to the next level? Read our special report on The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course.
Jassen: So, the next step is this whole mental thing. Staying focused, motivated, you know, working on; you know really keeping with it…
James: Oh, come on this is all touchy, feely kind of stuff; this doesn’t really matter, does it?
Jassen: Oh, yes it does. Hey, what was it you said on the inner game call, something about if you’re not touching, feeling now, you’ll come around eventually?
James: That’s right.
Jassen: Isn’t that what you said, James.
James: I did, I think I did say something like that. A lot of people, they hear this stuff and they immediately just turn us off so, if you’ve zoned out because we’ve started to get all philosophically on you and stuff sorry to hear that, but you know, listen to the CD again, and maybe in a few months maybe you’ll come around by then. But, it’s a hugely important part of being in business.
Jassen: It is and you know, in the interest of time, I only want to touch on one thing in relation to this.
James: Okay.
Jassen: And we do have bonus downloads and you know, entire CD’s to talk about…
James: Yeah, what section is the bonus download for this? Is this under…
Jassen: That is a good question; I need to look that up.
James: Oh, Goals and Personal Development.
Jassen: There we go.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Goals and Personal Development actually covers this step and the next step.
James: Okay.
Jassen: So, you know, that’s where the inner game stuff is, we have another CD called Inner Game where we talk about this in depth, but the big thing here is this whole thing called the law of attraction.
James: Yeah, this is really hot right now.
Jassen: It is because of a DVD and a book called, The Secret, a lot of people are… There’s this huge buzz about the law of attraction and I’m curious to see how long that’s going to last…
James: Yeah, you know, it’s so funny because this stuff has been going on for hundreds of years, there’s been authors writing about it there’s you know, all of the self help and personal development type people have been talking about it, but they haven’t’ been pulling it out and saying, okay, law of attractions the big one…
Jassen: Right.
James: …it’s all been part of this process and, you know, people want to talk about it, but now that this one book has come out there’s been a lot of buzz about it and yeah, I’m curious to see how long it’ll stay in the limelight as well.
Jassen: Yeah, so just to define the law of attraction, it says that you attract into your life that what you think about most.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: So, if all you ever do is worry about your bills, then you’re just going to get more bills.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Whereas, if you kind of change your mindset and this has been an ongoing process for me…
James: It’s ongoing for everyone.
Jassen: Even for you?
James: Yeah, everyone. Yeah.
Jassen: Well, you’re saying you’re not perfect and you’re not there yet?
James: I’m constantly improving. So, even where I was five years ago I feel like I’m a lot better off now, but I’m still trying to make better improvements.
Jassen: Okay, the core of that is, and I like using the debt versus the wealth mentality to give you an example, but if you think about debt you’re just going to get father in debt, whereas if you focus and concentrate and dwell on building income, you know, generating an income, building wealth, then that’s what you’re going to attract into your life.
James: Okay, now that’s like the philosophical way of approaching it…
Jassen: Exactly.
James: …I’m very, you know, if you don’t want to get into the philosophical feely stuff then look at it purely from a practical sensible point of view.
Jassen: There you go.
James: If you start looking at what can I do in order to get myself away from this situation, focus on where you want to go, well guess what, you’re going to take action and to do things that are positive.
Jassen: That’s right.
James: If you focusing on woe is me I’ve got bills, then guess what, you’re not taking action toward a solution. So, I am personally the touchy, feely, you know I believe all that stuff, but at the same time I used to be like, you know that’s such a… just give me some practical stuff to implement.
Jassen: Right.
James: Okay? Well, it’s both and I’m showing you how to look at it, that if you can’t get into it on a touchy, feely level then go for it on a practical… Listen, if you look at where you want to go and you say, okay, now what can I do to get there and you start taking action toward that don’t think about the negative side of it, don’t worry about the debt, just move forward and practice that then I think that’s a very practical way of thinking of the law of attraction.
Jassen: Yeah, I mean, in a practical sense it’s like you’re saying, basically to what I’m hearing is what you focus on is what you’re going to take action on.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: So, you’re better off taking action on building a business and generating income and wealth than you are to focus on debt and generating more debt…
James: That’s right.
Jassen: …through either activity or inactivity.
James: Alright, you got bills? Stop spending, and start focusing on earning more money.
Jassen: That’s right, a pretty simple equation.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Okay. Step six is all about personal development. You know, the first the majority of this CD was steps one and two talking…
James: Hold on one second.
Jassen: Okay.
James: Do we have two steps sixes?
Jassen: What’s that? Yeah that’s right, I forgot I mis-numbered them.
James: Oh, okay so we really had seven steps. Lets do this we’ll have six steps and we’re going to give you a bonus step.
Jassen: There you go the bonus step.
James: Yeah, so this is the bonus step we’re talking about, which if you’re keeping track is step seven.
Jassen: I’m sure we’ve complete confused listeners by now.
James: I’m sure. So, this is the bonus step.
Jassen: The bonus step; personal development.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: You know, the first two steps talked about setting up your business and that’s when we talked about the majority on this call because it’s kind of the real meat here, but once you’ve got something set up don’t just stop, keep learning. Learn how to improve things. You know, we talk a lot about continuous and never ending improvement.
James: Yeah, that’s from Tony Robbins, he calls it CANI, it’s based on the concept of Kaizen.
Jassen: Okay. The, you know, continuous systems improvement, learning more about business and you know, I talk a lot about this…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: …the most important thing you can learn about business is probably marketing.
James: Oh, yeah, marketing, focus on marketing first, yeah.
Jassen: I mean, once you understand marketing, a whole new world opens up to you.
James: It does.
Jassen: Now, there are many schools of thought about marketing, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but I personally believe that for an online business what people should focus on from, you know, if they have limited time, a full time job, you know, family responsibilities, etc…
James: Go where the fish are.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: I mean, doesn’t that make sense?
Jassen: Yeah.
James: You don’t really have time to really learn marketing and get traffic to your website…
Jassen: That’s right.
James: …go to websites where there already is traffic. Go to Ebay, go to Amazon, go to Google Base, go to a Yahoo Store…
Jassen: Right.
James: …go to these different places that already have people that, you know, you already have eyeballs on the website now you just want to put your pay job where eyeballs are going to be looking at your thing.
Jassen: Right, and once they do have the time to work on their marketing, education, and self knowledge; this is kind of my list, direct marketing…
James: On the internet?
Jassen: Yeah.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Well, okay, let me ask you, James, is internet marketing any different than regular direct marketing?
James: You know, I think I mis-heard you. When I heard direct marketing I immediately thought of direct mail.
Jassen: Oh, okay.
James: Are you talking about direct response, like you know…
Jassen: I’m talking direct response to marketing.
James: Okay. Okay.
Jassen: Which is what internet marketing is.
James: I would agree, it’s measurable, you know, if you want to put out something and find out what your results are and hold it accountable.
Jassen: Right, and you know we have an entire marketing CD. Another individual that puts out a lot of incredibly great information and about direct response marketing is Dan Kennedy.
James: Oh, don’t tell everyone his name, he’s too good. 
Jassen: Oh, come on.
James: Yeah, Dan Kennedys’ got great stuff he’s got some really inexpensive books and some very expensive boot camps…
Jassen: Right.
James: …and full courses and stuff, so start with the books and I think you’ll like what he has to say.
Jassen: Yeah, and another area where I think people can really help them boost the response rate in ratios on their listings is copywriting.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Learning copywriting is a really great skill to learn.
James: Now, let me just give a quick example because I know we’re running low on time, but here’s the idea of copywriting. If you have, you know, you put up an auction on Ebay and it gets, you know, twenty-five viewers, if you’re converting one out of twenty-five well then you’ve got that sales ratio.
Jassen: Right.
James: If you can change what’s written on that page and not convert one out of twenty, well, now you’ve improved what you’re getting from the same auction.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, that’s a good way to improve it. You don’t have to bring anymore traffic, you’re now trying to convert more people for that particular page.
Jassen: Right, and by copywriting we’re not talking about, you know, the “c” with the little circle around it…
James: No.
Jassen: …and the next to it.
James: Yeah, we should just call it something else. We should just, you know, writing advertisements.
Jassen: Yeah, that’s what copywriting really is, it’s kind of the psychology and the science of how to write advertising.
James: Yeah, write sales letters, writing sales copy, yeah, we should try to differentiate that in the future.
Jassen: Sure, we should. Now, I do want to put in a plug for one of our other projects.
James: Which is?
Jassen: We have a blog where we do all kinds of marketing tests and we test all different kinds of headlines and you know, a lot of what we do is really testing different marketing messages…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: …and different marketing media.
James: And that’s the video, audio stuff that we have on the…
Jassen: Yeah, we have all kinds of audio visual stuff, text on the blogs and you can access that, it’s completely free and you can access that at ruthlessaccountability.com
James: Okay.
Jassen: Last thing I want to talk about before I sign off.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Once you have started building a business, you know, you’ve got some things out there and you’re starting to set some goals, work on your inner game, the whole, you know, mental stuff, you’ve got your record keeping, you’ve got an entity formed, and you’re kind of chugging along. Start looking at ways to grow your online business. We talked a lot about this with the niche selection thing, but look at related niches, different products within your existing niche. Look at additional market platforms…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: If you’re making $500.00 a month on Ebay, well, why not carry that same thing over to Amazon?
James: Yeah, I would agree. You may not do $500.00 a month on Amazon, you may only do $300.00 a month, but it’s $300.00 more.
Jassen: Exactly, and all of a sudden you’re at $800.00 a month…
James: Exactly.
Jassen: …with really not a lot more in fixed expenses.
James: Yeah, now, you know, for people that are having a hard time with some of the numbers we’re using, lets say its $100.00 on Ebay and now you can go to Amazon and make $50.00.
Jassen: Right.
James: Okay. So, use those numbers.
Jassen: Yeah, so, you know, expand into different niches, products within a niche, add, you know, an additional market place by which I mean sell stuff on another website, you know, learn more about marketing, lets see learn more about marketing, learn more about marketing…
James: Let me sense a pattern here. Do you maybe want people to learn a little bit more about marketing?
Jassen: Yes. Marketing is where it’s at, there’s a reason, James, where I always say marketing is our favorite topic to talk about.
James: We always end up talking about it.
Jassen: You know, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about, we can be talking about starting an online business, we could be recording a real estate CD, we always come back to marketing and there’s a reason for it.
James: So, you mean the accounting and finance calls about marketing and the business selection calls about marketing…
Jassen: Actually, I think we did spend quite a bit of time on the accounting call talking about marketing.
James: Well, that’s the thing, we have to try to like get ourselves back on track and so I say ‘ok lets talk about accounting again’ because marketing is so important and it’s related to all these things .
Jassen: It is and, you know, a lot of people that start say a local business, you know, take an electrician; an electrician can be incredibly great at being an electrician.
James: He could be the best.
Jassen: He could be the best electrician in town and by background I’m an electrician…
James: Really? Oh yeah, okay.
Jassen: Yeah, I was an electrician in the Navy for five years.
James: That’s right.
Jassen: And that’s why I use that example all the time, but by trade, I’m trained as an electrician. Well, you can be the best electrician in the world and you can have the best service, you can have the best rates, you can have the quickest response time, but if you can’t put out marketing to get clients to call you…
James: You’re going to starve.
Jassen: You’re going to starve.
James: Yeah, that’s true.
Jassen: So, no matter what business you’re in everything comes back to marketing eventually.
James: I agree.
Jassen: So, have we hammered that home hard enough, you think?
James: I think so and I think we’re way over time.
Jassen: We are we are. James, I appreciate your time, thanks for joining me on this call.
James: You’re welcome, I had a great time.
Jassen: Yeah, this was a great call and I look forward to talking with you in the future, probably about marketing.
James: That sounds good, alright thanks, Jassen.
Jassen: Thank you, James, bye, bye.
Until my next post,
James
Jassen: This evening on our How to Market Your CPA Business webinar by one the nation’s leading authorities on lead generation and really helping business owners grow their businesses in specific niches. James Orr has lent his expertise to a number of industries and he is here with us tonight to talk about accountants and CPA firms.
How are you doing James?
James: I’m doing great. I have really appreciate you have me on and thank for that very nice introduction. It’s lots nicer than the last one I got from you which was a little bit over the top but I appreciate that.
Jassen: [laughter] Well, you know it’s true. Ever since I first met you, I’ve always looked at – we actually talked about this last week about individual strengths and weaknesses. We had an interesting conversation about that but I have always felt that one of your biggest strengths that you bring to the table in the business world is your ability to step into a niche industry, learn how it operates and learn some of the specifics about it and then apply your lead generation strategies to that industry.
James: Absolutely and one of the things that I have in my background is we did run a very large network of websites servicing about 1,200 different industries. So one of the benefits I get to bring to the table here is I get to see lots of data points. I’m not just talking about taking one particular business owner and doing lead generation with them. I’m able to say, “Look we were running websites, literally millions of websites for each city the nation for variety of industries and I can see what worked, what did worked.” Our strategies that worked really well and I’ve also done my own business locally as well. So I bring that to the table as well.
Jassen: That is awesome. Tonight what have on tap is we’re going to talk about a bunch of really different marketing strategies for CPA’s in particular, correct?
James: That’s correct and how I look at it is almost like little mini articles or little mini nuggets of information about to take a very particular type of marketing strategy and apply it or how to look at marketing in a certain way. So we’ll try to break them up into tracks. If you’re listening to this afterwards, if you’re listening to it on the audio, you don’t need to see the screen although we did this initially as a webinar. On the screen really are just some notes on how we did this. Basically you’re going to get everything you need from the audio and we’re going to break it down into five minute sections or however long the individual nuggets sections are so that you keep track of.
Jassen: Okay and we’ve got a bunch of those to get through so let’s dive right in.
James: Okay, great.
Jassen: Alright. So the first major area – we’re going to start with the big picture kind of area and then go in from there. So to start with, let’s look at two major marketing focuses for marketing your CPA practice.
James: Okay, when I look at this I really see there being two major categories to focus on when you’re doing marketing of any business and specifically when you’re marketing your CPA or accounting business. That is marketing, nurturing, growing and maintaining you individual clients and prospect list. So all that marketing you’re doing to internal database or internal list and then the other side of that number two would be marketing to directly grow your client and prospect list. So all the other marketing you do in order to generate immediate business and also add prospects to your cultivation, your database file for marketing to them is the second one we want to approach. So you it’s like internal marketing and then marketing to the world in order to grow your internal marketing. Those are the two categories I think of when I talk about focusing those.
Jassen: For our listeners that don’t understand the difference, can you explain the difference between your house list and your prospect list? Can you explain to our listeners what the difference there is that you’re talking about?
James: Sure. I don’t actually call them house list and prospect list. House list I would call everything inside your house. So basically anything – any name, address, telephone number, e-mail address that you have for your particular business is what I consider an in-house list. Now that could be made up of existing clients or it could be made up of people that inquired about something, requested information, requested a special report or anything like that and they’ve been added as a potential prospect.
For me I would treat those guys very much the same except for some very small relatively unique circumstances where I’m only marketing to pre-existing clients. But everyone is going to get the newsletter, everyone’s going to get the special offers, everyone’s going to get special reports. So prospects and past clients are all treated the same because you want your past clients to know, like, trust you and be really engaged on what you’ve got going on. Then you want your new prospects to know, like and trust you and really engage in the whole process and then when they’re ready, when they need an accounting service, when they need a CPA they know to go to you or when someone else they know needs an accounting service they can refer to you as well.
Jassen: Okay and then the second side of that in the marketing to grow that list, what do really see is the differences in communication that you’re sending out those two different groups?
James: For me, I’d like to look at it as trying to get people interested to request information from me. So whenever I’m marketing out to the public, I’m trying to say what can I dangle in front of somebody that’s going to make them raise their hand and say, “You know I’m interested in getting information about that,” or “I’m interested in that type of service or that type of product and I really want to get more information.” Once they get more information that’s really when you’re trying to do the conversion from prospect to client.
So for me all that external marketing, whether it’s newspapers or postcards or your websites or all these other marketing type things we’re going to be talking about. Basically if you use those to get people onto your internal list then you can use your normal newsletter and regular contact in order to help market over and over again to that list then convert them to paying clients.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book available from James Orr.
Late last week, I got a probate mailing list. For my county, there were just over 100 people on it in the last quarter. So, it is a relatively small list compared to the thousands of postcards I might send out to Absentee Owners or other home owners in my market to purchase properties.
Earlier this week, I put together a personalized letter and get a mailing out to this list to offer to purchase any houses they may be interested in selling. With most mailing lists I would send a postcard (or hand written yellow letter in some cases), but with this particular list I am trying something a bit different based on the recommendation of the company that I got the list from.
They recommend a personalized, typed letter with a hand address envelope so that is what I will use as the baseline to compare future tests.
The feedback I have gotten in the past is that the probate mailing list is typically an extremely responsive list. We will see how this particular mailing goes.
Until my next post,
James
