Monthly Archives: March 2020

Let’s talk about the number one best way to build your network. Now, building a network isn’t about numbers, it’s about quality, it’s about relationships, and as much as you may think that you’re in the product or the service business, you’re actually in the relationship business. So building relationships and establishing trust over time is probably the most important thing that you can do for your business, and it’s also the most important thing and the best way to build your network. What you want to do is you want to stay top of mind in people’s minds. You want to be liked, you want to be inspiring. You want to be considered to be helpful. You want to be considered to be motivational. You want people to want to hear from you. When your email shows up in their inbox, you want to make sure that they want to open it.

Now, how do you do that? Here it is the number one best way to build your network.

Send people stuff. It’s really easy. All you have to do is send people stuff. You have to curate content and send people valuable, inspirational, educational stuff, and not just promotional stuff. So I don’t mean stuff like your social media posts or a link to your latest video or your podcast. What I mean is the stuff that is inspiring to you, has been valuable to you, and with your knowledge of that person’s business you think might be inspiring or motivational to them. If you know that they’re working on in a particular project, you might want to send them an article that kind of relates to that subject or that category of business. You can send people things like articles, or you can send them links to podcasts or videos that you’ve liked, or particular resources. That could be things like software as a service, certain things that you use in your business that you find to be very helpful to you.

It could be other resources. It could be things like fonts or links or image banks. It could be things like websites. It can also be things like trend or inspiration or something that you’ve found that’s been helpful to you or kept you motivated in your business. So why send people stuff? The answer is really simple. It’s because it helps them. It helps them develop their own content. It helps them stay inspired. It may give them content that they could share with their clients or their customers that would be germane to the business of the product or service that they’re working on for them. It gives them stuff that they can share on social media. It gives them stuff that they can share with others and it also makes them smarter and it makes them more relevant. Basically, when it comes down to it, it makes them glad to hear from you and that is the goal. You want to make sure that your network connections are really glad to hear from you.

And why is that important? That’s important because eventually, you may need something from them. Networking is all about giving and take. It’s all about giving value to others and hopefully in time getting value from them. So getting people to the point where they really look forward to hearing from you and look forward to opening your emails is valuable because eventually when you ask for that favor, you ask for that referral, you ask for that introduction, they’re going to be more apt to give it to you. You may be looking for a job referral or you may be looking for a client introduction or some sort of LinkedIn introduction or something like that. So when you ask for that favor they are more likely to say yes. Essentially what you’ve done is you’ve built up equity with them, you’ve built up relationship equity, you’ve built up to help equity or value equity.

So when it comes time for that ask, for that ask of some sort of favor from you to them, they are going to be more likely to say yes. Now, how often should you do it? I think once a week would be good. Anything more than that, and it might be a little obvious, it might be a little badgering. People get a lot of emails as it is and people’s inboxes get inundated, and you want to be chockfull about what you send, so you’re making sure that it is really valuable and you’re not just avalanching them with a whole bunch of stuff that may not be particularly pertinent. Why do I know that this is the number one best way? Well, the answer is my favorite network connections do it for me.

They do it, they send me stuff, they helped me do my job. They give me ideas for content, they give me ideas for my newsletter, they give me ideas for video subjects. They help me inspire my clients and they helped me stay up on-trend. They helped me stay motivated. They helped me stay inspired and subsequently because they send me this stuff, I love opening their emails. I prioritize my communications with them. I prioritize looking at their stuff because I know that it’s going to be helpful to me and I don’t just pass over it or throw it in the trash. And a lot of my business partners who I work on projects with do it. They are always top of mind for me. So remember, you always want to make sure that you’re showing value first without expectation of return because you want to build up that value equity that helps equity with people.

So when the day comes, when you’re going to look for some sort of little favor, they are going to be more likely to say less. So remember, you want to show value first. You want to show value and give value without expectation of return because over time you really want to build up that help equity with your network. So when the time comes and you’re going to have that small ask, that little favor that you need from them, they’re going to be looking forward to opening your emails and they’re going to be more likely to say yes to your request. So that’s it.

What is the best way you can add value to your job, to your business, to your products, or to your services so you can be more successful? So we all have one thing in common. We all want more time. We all have demands on our time. Demands of family, and demands and friends, demands of our job. If we run a business, entrepreneurial demands. So driving revenue, driving growth, servicing clients. We have demands on producing things, so producing content, or producing inspiration, or producing learning for others. We also need time to consume, so consuming inspiration, consuming content, consuming learning. There are so many demands on our time. We all need more time. So how do you add value to your business? There are essentially six main ways to add value to a business.

1: Give something better, something more unique, something of higher value by adding innovation, by adding quality to your products and services.

2: Making it more convenient. Making your customer’s lives easier by delivering what you deliver, in a more convenient way for them.

3. Making it cheaper. Operating and competing on price is the oldest game in business, but you have to be careful with that, because essentially when it comes down to it, it really is a race to the bottom, and it’s a very dangerous race to be in.

4. Offering a better customer experience. So if you have direct contact with your customers, and can offer them a real experience, offering a better, more valuable or more unique experience, is a great way to add value to your business.

5: Address changing lifestyles. If your business, product or service can be offered in a way that suits and changes with societal trends

6: Doing what you do faster. It’s as simple as that. The number one answer is don’t waste people’s time. Everyone says it. Thousands of consultants and business managers, and advisors and CEOs say it, Fortune Magazine and Entrepreneur, and Inc. Magazine and Forbes Magazine, they all say it. Speed is the number one driver and a way to succeed in business. So the number one answer is, don’t waste people’s time. People are impatient. I know, I’m impatient. Most people who want to be successful are impatient. Most successful people are impatient. Most customers or consumers are also super impatient, especially when they finally decide that they want your product or your service. They want it right now, and there are a lot of businesses that have made their business, and become incredibly successful, by offering what they do in a fast way. McDonald’s fast-food revolutionized the foodservice industry by offering food in a very systematic and speedy way. There are other businesses like FedEx or Amazon Prime, or Uber Eats, or Jimmy John’s, Domino’s with their 30-minute delivery or it’s free. That promise has driven their business to incredible Heights. People are spoiled, people want things now.

People perceive companies that do things in a quick way, as being better. They equate companies speed with value and competence, and higher quality products and better value. People will pay for speed. I know one agency owner who’s built his entire agency model on speed. He’s got a number one message of his core competency, and that is that they do it faster. He even has a swag tee shirt that just says speed on it, with his agency name. He leverages speed as a competitive differentiator, and it has built his agency business. There’s a great quote by Inc. Magazine that says, speed is everything in business.

Now, not only is speed everything in business, but speed can also help you as a content creator, or creative professional, or an entrepreneur, build an audience. For example, my YouTube videos, most of my YouTube videos are under eight minutes in length. I try to deliver incredible value in a very short period of time, and I get thanked all the time in comments by people saying, “Oh my God, in eight minutes, I learned more than I did in four years in university,” or “You delivered an incredible amount of value in a very short period of a time, and thanks for valuing my time.”I personally hate it when I watch YouTube videos, and the person I’m watching is blathering on and on, for 20 or 25 minutes, about a bunch of extraneous topics, before finally getting to the value or the meat of the video. I feel like they’re not valuing my time. So when people value my time, I put a high level of value on their service. So that’s what I try to deliver when I deliver my videos, and it’s been really successful for me. I get a lot of positive comments about it, and my channel has really grown very quickly because I’m delivering great value, in a very short period of time

So my question to you is, how can you leverage speed in your business? How can you leverage speed in your products, or your services, or your interaction with your clients? Or how you do your day to day work? How can you speed as a competitive advantage in what you do, to add value to your business?

Now, I work with a lot of clients who are desperate to get into content marketing. They may leverage traditional advertising for their businesses, but they know that content marketing is an important part of that mix and they want to do it. They see the value in it. It’s been proven. They want it, they need it, but they don’t have the time and they don’t have the people, and a lot of times they don’t have the expertise or the knowledge or the resources in order to do what it takes to produce content and to publish it on a calendar very regularly, which is what it takes to actually be successful with content marketing. Now, a lot of you who are watching today, entrepreneurs, creative professionals, probably use content marketing for your own businesses, right?

You probably do Instagram and Facebook and you do Twitter and you produce videos or you do writing and you do blog posts. You use the content for your business and you have skills in order to do that. You may have audio editing skills or you may have video editing skills. You have writing skills. You have design and thumbnail and graphic and infographic producing skills. You use those skills for your business and they benefit your business, or if you don’t, you’re probably working on doing it. There’s a number of different ways you can go about this. If you have a larger agency or a group of people that you work within your business, you can become or offer a full suite, a full-service content marketing services to clients, small and medium-sized businesses. For example, this e-Signature company providers high-quality create video content to its users through their blog.

You can develop a content strategy, content plans, content calendars. You can actually develop the content itself and publish it for the company. Very full-service offering. But here’s the thing, if you have content marketing skills around a particular niche, you can also use that as a key to unlock, to begin a relationship with a client business to help them in the places where they need help, where they don’t have that particular skill or that particular expertise, that internal knowledge in order to produce the content they so desperately want to do.

This is a way in the door, it’s a foot in the door that you can use by taking your content marketing skills, whatever those skills may be, and marketing them and proposing them and pitching them to small to medium-sized businesses to help them produce their content. Now, here’s the thing, you don’t have to be a full-service content marketing agency and check out this link in order to engage with companies and make money at doing content marketing and leveraging those skills that you have around content marketing to help these companies and to make money. You can approach or pitch companies to say, “I’d gladly do your podcast editing. I’d gladly do your video editing. I’d gladly post all of your content on a regular calendar onto Twitter or Facebook or whatever that is.”

You can kind of carve off an aspect of what they need around content marketing that they don’t know how to do or don’t have the time or resources to do and make that a part of your business. It’s a great business opportunity. I’m seeing it out there everywhere with clients that I’m coming into contact with. They don’t have the time, the resources, the people, the knowledge to do content marketing, and they are hungry and desperate to do it. If you can use that desperation that they have in order to get your foot in the door, even if it’s to offer a particular skill that you have to help them out, they will be very receptive to that message.