How do you get the word out about your business?

Connect with influencers. If you want to market your business, if you want people to talk about you, one of the fastest ways to get more word of mouth is to connect with people who have audiences and have them help spread the word. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve help. And today I'm answering a question from a YouTube viewer.

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We are Toy Box Hero.

Wrote in to say, "I'm a toy collector. I have what I think is a great idea for a home-based business that would provide a service to other collectors. It's a web-based company that I would run from home, providing a service that would be very helpful to toy collectors. How do I get the word out about my site? Setting up the site is easy. I've never done it before, but getting traffic is where I seem to have an issue.

Thanks in advance." So, if you're a big toy collector, and you're part of that community, and you know other toy collectors, What I would do is go and start talking to the people who can influence other toy collectors. Go talk to bloggers, go talk to the place that you buy all your toys from, the different stores that you go to, and get those guys on board. And even build your system around them. I would go to my favorite toy store, wherever you're buying most of your stuff from. If you're a collector, they probably have a good relationship with you. Let them know what you're doing. Ask them to be a tester. Get their feedback. Build it around the challenges that they're seeing in the market. And then when you launch it, they're gonna be your advocate. They're gonna say, "Hey, I helped build this thing." And they can tell everybody in their store. Make a list of 10, 20, 30 key influencers in your business, in your industry. It could be offline like retail stores, or it could be online with bloggers and people who are in forums and people who are talking about these things. And use them to help build your product, get their feedback, and build a product around them. Most people, if you call them up and you're genuine and you say you'd like 15 minutes of their time because you'd like their advice and it's related to toys, what they're passionate about, they're gonna give you the time and they're gonna get excited about this project if you are. And when it launches, they're gonna spread the word. If you're trying to get word-of-mouth marketing, it's great to build it around your current customers, but if you've got nothing then start working with connectors, people who have a community. Instead of you going out and trying to get people one by one by one to sign up, use these guys who already have a big audience and have them help build your product from their feedback and then help spread the word and promote it. Here's a quick example. I not too long ago made a line of famous entrepreneur trading cards. Okay, we had people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Donald Trump and those guys on the covers of our cards. And what I did was I connected with famous bloggers. So I connected with Seth Godin and I connected with Guy Kawasaki, people who were influential in the entrepreneur space that I deal in and had their own audiences. And I asked them, "Who's your favorite famous entrepreneur?" And we made a card about it, and all the profits went to support Kiva, which is a charity that I support and believe in. And when the cards launched, I sent it to them. And we had Tim Ferriss from The 4-Hour Workweek and guys like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and sent them off the cards. And a lot of them ended up talking about it and promoting it. So it wasn't just me promoting it to my audience, it was them all saying, "Look at this great project that I was a part of. It's a great cause, it's really cool, go check it out." And all of their audiences then came to me to go check out the cards. And buy them. So it's great to have your own audience, and once you start building your own community, you support them like crazy. You want them to love what you do so they go off and talk about you. Overdeliver like crazy to get word of mouth going. But at the very start, talk to key influencers, get them involved, get their support, so that when you launch, they'll help promote you, spread the word, and hopefully it'll catch like wildfire. Good luck, great question. For those of you watching, like the video, you know the drill, thumbs up below. Thank you guys so much. And hey, I want to hear from you. You like this video, you have a comment, comment, please leave it below. It makes my day when I see those come in. And if you have a question for your business, please leave it in the comment section below and I will make a video response for you. Thank you guys, I'll see you soon.