Audio Lesson Six: WHEN

WHEN, AS IN, HOW OFTEN?

Your one-page marketing strategy and plan is almost complete!

To review one last time, you’ve discovered and documented:

Who you’re marketing to
Why they are motivated to buy
What you can offer them
Where they live, work and play
How you’re going to sell and market to them

Now, let’s create a calendar.

You started this as your homework following Audio Lesson Five, so let’s pick up where you left off.

(If you haven’t completed Audio Lesson Five, or the corresponding section in the worksheet, turn back now or go all the way back to the beginning, if you must.)

do less, sell more. really.

This is where you have to be careful not to overdo it. Resist that urge that got you into trouble in the first place. Don’t give in to the pressure of feeling like you have to be everywhere, and all things to all people. It’s bunk.

Now, you will start to notice some positive signals that this new, singular-focused marketing system is starting to work. Naturally, you’ll be intrigued by the notion that, “If a little works, more must work better!”

That’s true.

But it’s a roadmap, however paved with good intentions, that will lead you right back to where you started. Overwhelmed and underperforming.

That’s not to say you can’t start to add things as compliments to your singular strategy. But rather than reinvent the wheel, repackage the same wheel and ship it out in a different container.

so how often is often enough?

As I said in the prior lesson, how much time you devote to this is up to you. But here’s my rule of thumb: Any more than once a week is too often (for you and your audiences). Anything less than monthly seems like not often enough. Do you really want to touch your potential clients, prospects and referral sources fewer than 10 times per year? Probably not.

Most of my coaching clients report starting with a monthly cadence, as that seems eminently achievable (and it is), then ramping up to bi-weekly once they see it working. A great many graduate to weekly, but only consider doing so if it doesn’t feel like a strain on your time and resources. (Do less, not more. Sell more, not less.)

So let’s say you’re typical. (Don’t mean that as a slight, whatsoever!) And let’s use monthly as our kickoff cadence.

If you commit to that, you should be able to line up your list of questions and issues that you wrote into your beginner’s content calendar and identify the top 12 topics you need to address. You now have a whole year’s content calendar planned!

That was easy. (Wasn’t it?)

If you have fewer than 12 topics on your list, don’t sweat it. Even if you have only five, that gives you five months to come up with seven more to round out the year. And once you get going, you’ll discover more and more ground to cover. It will come naturally to you. You’ll be responding to feedback and insights you glean from your audience, as to what’s relevant and important to them. You’ll never run out of things to talk or write about!

Once a month is your time commitment. Seems reasonable. Let’s do this.

what does a typical month look like?

Everyone’s recipe will look a little different, based on each person’s addressable audience, the content pillars they’ve chosen for themselves, and the communities in which they plan to distribute their content. But in the prior lesson, we settled on a podcast + email + LinkedIn approach as an illustrative How.

So let’s run with that.

The cadence we’ve settled on for now is “monthly.” So that means we need to produce one podcast per month.

(I’ll skip the part where you get yourself up to speed on everything it takes to conceive, brand, produce, syndicate and promote a podcast, though I do offer an audio course on all of that as well, similar to the one you’re listening to now. Depending on your acumen going in, there will be some learning curve to get started, but it’s not insurmountable. Once you have that mastered, let’s move along.)

One podcast per month. How long does that take to record? Well, most podcasts I listen to run 20-40 minutes in length, recorded in real time with no breaks or edits. That’s what I try to stick to in producing The Thought Leadership Project podcast, the Yacht Rock Podcast: Out of the Main, and the Small Business Matters podcast.

So if you follow that form, it should technically take you 30-60 minutes to record an episode, including set-up and break-down time. It might take 10-30 minutes to do some light editing, say adding your intro and outro and fixing any glitches that need addressing. And another 10-20 minutes loading the episode onto your hosting platform.

All told, it’s about an hour’s worth of work to record and produce one episode. Per month. Of course, you can outsource the editing, posting and syndication to an assistant, a freelancer on Fiverr, or a friend or family member. That puts even more time back into your day!

Can you find one hour per month? What are you spending now on marketing?

now, make it a machine!

Now that you have the content, it’s time to weaponize it.

With your completed podcast episode, you have content to post to your website (in the form of an audio blog).

The show notes that I recommend accompany each episode become your written blog, for those who prefer to read rather than cast pods. And it’s a snap to write. They can be short bullet points, or transcripts of the audio content. You choose…both are super simple to manufacture.

That written content in the form of show notes—because you’re addressing your audience’s genuine issues and challenges when writing summaries of your audio content—will have you naturally writing in search-engine-friendly context and style. Over time, your library of podcast episodes and written show notes will do wonders for your website’s page rank and authority. There’s your SEO strategy.

You also now have something to share on LinkedIn. Not just the episodes themselves, but lessons learned from them. Takeaways and tidbits that draw your audience in and compel them to listen to your podcast, ultimately sign up for your emails, and become willing and active members of your sales funnel pipeline.

I also coach my clients to take audio snippets from the show episodes and turn them into short videos that can be posted online, either on your site, with the show notes, or on social media. There’s your video strategy. And more fodder for your LinkedIn program.

And remember that email I’m urging you to add to the marketing mix? Guess what your monthly newsletter will be, each time an episode drops? Work the middle of that sales funnel! And turn your close contacts into client-referring (or client-becoming) machines!

Need a way to warm up a cold prospect? Invite them to be a guest on your podcast! They will almost certainly avoid a thinly veiled sales overture disguised as a lunch or coffee invitation, but they will just as certainly be flattered by—and agree to—an invitation to appear as a guest on a podcast!

So now you even have a prospecting tool in the toolkit!

If you take an hour to record and produce a single podcast episode, and even as much as THREE hours to produce all of this complementary content (which, it will never take you that long, but let’s say it does), that totals four whole hours per month that you’ll be spending executing a data-driven marketing strategy and a fully weaponized, multi-disciplinary thought leadership machine that checks all of the boxes:

Website marketing
Email marketing
Digital marketing
Social media marketing
SEO (search engine optimization)
Content marketing
Inbound marketing
Lead generation and nurturing
...and even a little bit of sales, to boot!

That’s one hour per week. I know you can find one hour per week.

And if you can’t find one hour in your week., make it. Read my friend Jay Harrington’s excellent book, The Productivity Pivot, if you need a tried-and-true process for making this happen for you.

One hour per week. Didn’t I say you could do less, but sell more?

HERE’S THE HOMEWORK

So this is it. Your final assignment. Then it’s up to you to make this all a reality.

But don’t worry, I’m not abandoning you and sending you out into the wild all on your own. In a few days, once you’ve had the opportunity to get organized, I’ll send you an additional Bonus Lesson: THEN WHAT.

In the meantime, let’s get you going.

Your next steps:

Finalize and prioritize your content calendar for the next six to 12 months. (You can always edit this later.)
Whatever you’ve chosen as your single content spoke in the wheel, figure out what you need to learn, if anything, to start producing that type of content. It may be nothing; it may be something you know how to do already; it may be something you need to get smart on.
Get your email marketing machine going. There are plenty of free options out there, as well as some that are free to a point. MailChimp and Emma are good places to start. Some like Constant Contact. Others use Squarespace. I’ve always started with MailChimp.
Start to get more active and visible in the one content community you’ve chosen as your focus network. If it’s LinkedIn, learn LinkedIn. Get active, get visible, and grow your network. The more people you’re connected to in your audience, the more opportunities you’ll have to get people into your email campaign—the middle of the sales funnel.
In a month’s time, commit to producing your first piece of content, whatever that is. Write the blog. Record the podcast. Shoot the video. Schedule and conduct the webinar. One month: I’m giving you that defined timeline to prove to yourself that you can do it. And once you do it the first time, all you have to do from then on is “step and repeat!”

I’ll check in on you in a few days, when I send you the Bonus Lesson: THEN WHAT, to see how you’re coming along.

Until then, waste no time. That is, waste no more time, doing things that aren’t working all in the name of “covering all your bases.” Waste no more time doing nothing, out of paralysis-by-analysis. Cure your own FOMO. Focus on this singular objective. Get it moving.

Do less. But do this. And finally start selling more.

See you next time.