Developing a Marketing Mindset To Become More Valuable, Persuasive And Successful - I Love Marketing Episode #251

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe.

Polish and we are ready to rock and roll. So today Dean is going to set the stage of what we're going to do. But I want to just mention in the very beginning that we have put up some awesome episodes on I Love Marketing. So if you haven't listened to the last few, the one we just did prior to, I don't know, one or two episodes ago, we've got Tom Bilyeu who is one of the founders of Quest Nutrition. They're doing over a billion.

That was such a great one.

Yeah. Kevin Kaiser, who's. I mean, his is probably right before this one. Tucker. Max.

On.

On, you know, putting together books and all.

Process. You know, I talked with Tucker. We talked about doing an episode just.

Where we have a.

A book process smackdown.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Just go have a full on debate about the 90 minute book process versus the book in a box process and who would want to go either way, you know?

Right, exactly. Exactly. And I. And we're in the process of selling a house. And so if anyone happens to know anyone that wants a really beautiful home on Camelback Mountain in Arizona that loves hiking and walking out your backyard and hiking, they can. You should email Dean and Dean will let you know all about that.

Yeah, just email me. I'll give. Just call my cell phone and I'll really. I'll give you the whole money.

So we're gonna. When the house is sold, we're gonna actually do. We'll do a Facebook episode. On a Facebook episode and I love marketing episode to show the Facebook strategies and show the recorded message strategies and the drone video strategies and all kinds of stuff.

It's been exciting, actually.

Yeah. Yeah. And so Dean's been helping me since he's the, he's the guru on selling homes and. Yeah, people have heard me talk. Yeah, that's a whole nother discussion. I'm tempted to kind of go into it, but I won't. We're going to do a yellow page roulette episode. Yes, my favorite. So set the stage for this, Dean. And also the fact that you have an advantage that I don't, which is you're the one on the other side of the United States because you're where you are right now. You're in Florida or you're somewhere else. I am, yeah. Yeah.

I'm sitting here in my evil scheme hatchery.

Okay. Yeah. All right. And I'm in Arizona. And so the way this works is tell everyone what you're going to do. And I don't have the advantage of seeing it where you physically see it.

It doesn't matter because we're not going to, you know, we're going to use this to talk about the category because the, the whole thing we've. The very first Yellow Pages roulette episode we did was somewhere in the first 10 or 12 episodes, I think. And, you know, we were doing. We're about to record a podcast. And I love it when the Yellow Pages arrives on my doorstep because I look through it. I was at Frank Kern's house. We were looking through the newspaper and the Yellow Pages. And we often say it's like if direct response marketing was on trial, there wouldn't really be much evidence to prove that it exists. If you look at the newspapers and magazines and Yellow Pages and, you know, you look at. Every once in a while, if you ever do see a Yellow Pages ad that is in any way direct response, it's usually up in the carpet cleaning section and it's one of yours, right? You know, that's kind of the funny thing, you know, and here's. Sometimes you'll see a chiropractor with a direct response ad, but very, very rarely do you ever see anything good. But what I. We had, the first episode that we did about the Yellow Pages roulette was we just picked a number and went to that page and talked about how we would apply the profit activators to that business. And so my Yellow Pages arrived just a couple of weeks ago. I posted up a video on Facebook and we asked some people to, you know, pick some page numbers. And so I'm looking at the Facebook post right now, and Pete Butler suggested that we start with page 123. So, okay, let me.

Let me say. Let me say one thing too, before we get rolling, because inevitably there's someone who is listening to this that is so young that they don't even know what Yellow Pages are. And they. They're thinking, okay, why are you guys going to talk about something that is outdated and no one uses anymore? Which, of course, would be a lot of ignorance to believe that. However, we both know that Yellow Pages, the whole industry has been absolutely killed with Internet marketing, online marketing, and all the new methods of delivering information to people. But this is, although we're calling it Yellow Page roulette because we're flipping through an actual physical Yellow Pages and looking at categories, the methodology and the strategies and the offers and the Copy and the premises and the benefits or the features and the call to actions and the irresistible offers and the guarantees and the sense of urgency and the education. If they're providing education at all. And, you know, if they're talking about price, if they're talking about years in business, it does not matter that this is in the Yellow Pages. This just happens to be the format that we're going to use to actually discuss how to make a case for what it is, how to be either compelling or convincing, how to differentiate yourself between other competitors. So as you listen to this, here's a couple of guaranteed ways to make sure you get very little value out of this. One is to just stop listening right now and go, you know, listen to another podcast or something. Yeah. So that's one way. The other is to listen to it with the mindset that, well, this doesn't apply to me because I'm in a different business. That's not, you know, or another way is this, you know, I've already done that and my industry is different or my clients are different, or that sort of stuff would never work for me. Everything that we talk about is about human psychology and marketing, which we've, you know, I've said, maybe, Dean, you said it in a different way. Is marketing is applied psychology. It's literally looking at what you're, you know, you're saying to people in wanting to influence behavior, you're trying to attract, you're trying to repel, you're trying to either capture a lead, you're trying to generate a call, a visit to a website. So there's all these different actions that people can take, and there's a million different ways that you could present a case, some more effective than others. However, we want to take a lot of this complexity and simplify it while simultaneously helping you become more effective at how you present your service and make a case and how you fish. And so, yeah, I just wanted to say that because a lot of times people hear yellow pager, web this, you know, yellow Pages. I mean, what the hell is that?

I don't use the Yellow Pages.

Yeah. Yeah. One last thing. Based on what you just said there, one thing I learned very, very early on in marketing is that you are not your own custom. What you respond to and how you respond to things has nothing to do with how other people respond. Meaning coupons, as an example, I don't use coupons, and a lot of people that don't use coupons cannot even imagine why someone would use a coupon. And they get these things mailed to them or they see coupons online or I would never use Groupon. I mean, that's not me. Those are only price shoppers and that sort of stuff. I actually know very wealthy people that have a ton of money that use online coupons and use Groupon and use Valpak and all kinds of stuff. And I know a lot of people that are not wealthy that don't use them or do use them, it doesn't matter. The point is, what the marketplace responds to could be completely different than you. Now that's not to say that what you respond to and how you respond to things is not very, very useful to say, okay, here's how I behave. So obviously others behave that way. That's a good thing to look at. And another way to look at it is I don't behave this way. But clearly all these coupons and all these ads and all of these things and all these direct mail pieces and all of this advertising and all of these companies that exist, if no one was buying them or using them, they would not exist. So clearly there has to be some reason why these things exist. And the more you can understand how to use them for your own benefit, the more powerful you're going to be.

So I'm looking at these. The interesting thing is what I see is, you know, it got, for a while I just flipped through and look like the biggest section in here is attorneys. You know, I mean, attorneys is one of the crazy ones. And I remember all the time that attorneys would always, you know, have full page ads in there. And now it, you could see it creeping up, right? Well, now it's become the standard is to have a two page spread. So you have the whole thing right there. Like I'm looking at, through all these attorneys that have two page spreads in the yellow pages here. And when I come to one, this is, you're going to love this. There's two pages, Winters and Yonkers. Their thing is get aggressive attorneys. And then when you turn the page, there it is again. Get aggressive attorney. So it's like they're kind of like modeling their own behavior, being aggressive in the yellow Pages. You know, they've got this two page spread and then you turn it and.

There it is again.

So they're in your face twice as much. It's so funny to see like, as they evolve because now, you know, in the next, the next issue of the yellow pages, everybody's gonna have to one up that and have, you know, everybody's gonna have four Page spreads.

It's funny, they should have pop up yellow pages. I wonder what that would call.

We're not far from you know, having, you know, video pages kind of thing on here too. But let's talk.

Yeah, well, let's. Let's talk about like, why don't we go over some of the things that you definitely want to have in your advertising and things that you may not want to have from copy and then let's go into one. Or if you just want to jump. Right.

Let's do it in the context of. Well, let's do it in the context of one of these. So Pete Butler picked page 123. So when I go to page 123, we're on the fence section. So the page 123 is the Williams Fence Company. A full page ad. I'll take pictures of these and we can put them up in the show notes. But it's not so important about the ad because we're not critiquing the ad as much as we're talking about the category. So we're using the pages to pick a business to see if we can find a business that the profit activators don't apply to, especially in the before unit stuff. So you know, when you think about a fencing company, what, you know, what comes to mind for you, Joe? What comes up, like when we talk about profit activator number one, selecting the target market and if we just focus on the before unit stuff of fencing.

Well, I guess if I looked at a fence company, I would be thinking, well, is it commercial or is it residential? Is it something where you want to keep someone out or is it something that has to do with decor and design? I guess it's really funny, until you mentioned it, I can't even remember the last time I actually thought about the category of offense. I know, you know, it's sort of interesting and I've never once ever called a fence company. Right.

Yeah.

So I guess.

But you're right that you start thinking about that, right? Like who is when you start thinking of it, you know, there's lots of different people that you could attract. And let's, you know, if you start saying residential fencing, it probably be the largest category and you know, then you're starting to get into the different types of fences that people could. That people could have.

Yeah, let me. I just want to cut you off. Then you start to think, no, go. You start thinking this, this actually brings up a really good point. So now finish your thought and then I. To Mention something that I think is really good for anyone that's like going, okay, what the hell, here we go. We're going to talk about fences. But that's not the business.

Well, part of the thing. I've had a bit of an interesting breakthrough in that I have always talked about selecting a single target market. And often it's difficult for people to wrap their mind around focusing on a single target market, even though intellectually they know that they can attract any different market. But when you're trying to advertise, when you're trying to get new people, you know, they're the only people. The only thing people are thinking about is themselves. So you definitely want to, you know, narrow your focus so that they think this is exactly for me. But I had a little bit of a breakthrough in the last year or so. You know, when I do the breakthrough blueprint events and we spend three days talking about this, one of the hardest things to get people to do is narrow that focus, right, Even just to go through the exercises. But I coupled it now with. With Dan Sullivan's idea of the largest check, right, of focusing on if we can list all of the possible target audiences, all the types of people that you can help, and then let's sort it by what would be your largest check, what would be the most valuable market. And that kind of takes the. That takes away the fear or the pain that people have in kind of limiting themselves, because at least they're limiting themselves to the very tippy top of the market, you know, and you start. It's easier for them to kind of go through that process by thinking about the most valuable clients, Right, the ones that can. Yeah, the ones that you can have the most impact on. So there we go. So that's what I was going to say. What were you going to say?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, very similar, is that this actually the big lesson here of me or you not having thought about fences as an example, is when you're in the business that you're in. And so everyone that is listening to us right now, whoever you are, if you just say, okay, here is the business I'm in, here's the company that I work for, that I own, that I'm in charge of sales and marketing, or here's the industry or the business I want to be in, because it's interesting to me when you really understand something or you have a deep interest in it and you live it and breathe it, you view it from a different lens and an experience than anyone else, which is why it's so hard for, for business owners to select a single target market because if you own fences and you have the ability to do cement fences or chain link fences or short fences or tall fences or whatever, then you. I honestly think it's difficult for people, no matter how much they, the more they understand and know something, the harder it is for them in some cases to niche it and make it specific because they see all the different applications. So this exercise of me having to think through this puts me in like, all right, when I was a carpet cleaner, I understood carpet cleaning inside and out. I mean I lived, eat and breathed it. I knew about alkaline, I knew about acidity in terms of chemistry, I knew about carpet fiber identifications and the pile and Berber and all the different forms and all the different methods of cleaning from absorbent compounds to which would be like, you know, a chem dry type system which is basically using a circular mop and mopping the carpet versus a steam cleaning system using a truck mount or a portable. And you know, all the different ways that you know, pre spraying and all this sort of stuff that you know it inside and out. And you, you can sometimes make this assumption that other people get it and grasp it because you know it so well. And that's one of the most dangerous places to be in because you start thinking like the person that does the thing versus thinking like the person who actually is needing the thing or interested in the thing or wanting the thing and being able to convey information about the thing, and let's just call the thing your glop, whatever glop. Then you know your glop inside and out. So you know, you may not say very important things or say them in such a simplistic way that people understand them. And you also, if you're a high integrity person, which many people are not, you actually think that the world will just understand that you have high integrity, that you care, that you're honest. And if you don't convey that very well, they're only going to look at the world through the experiences of the skepticisms that they have, the fears that they have the financial limitations that they have to buy stuff. Because Gary Halbert would always say if someone wants what it is you're selling, the only thing that stands in the way of them getting it, buying it, assuming they have the money, like they literally can afford it, is fear. And if you remove the fear, then they will buy. And so I look at all consumers and all prospects as these individuals that want things, but they're scared of getting ripped off. They're scared of making a bad decision. They're scared of making a wrong decision. They're scared of their reputation and how they're going to look if they make a bad decision. And so there's all these things that are competing in their mind with why should they buy from you or why should they buy from someone else, or why should they even buy it at all? And should they be spending money on a fence or should they be putting their daughter through college? Should they be spending money on a fence or should they be looking for a sofa at Ikea? There's a million different things. That being said, I'm sitting there thinking, okay, so how do you select a single target market? Well, everything that comes to mind for fences is, well, why would someone use a fence? So you're talking about the largest check, right? So what would so do you, out of all the things that a fence person could do, I imagine, you know, if someone has animals like dogs would be different than if they had rabbits, that would be probably a different fence. If they have children, do they want to have a fence for young children or older children? Or do they want a fence for safety for, you know, people not jumping, you know, into their privacy, neighbors, pools? You know, like in Arizona, you have to have locks on pools because if someone walks through your, you know, I mean, there are certain laws where if someone can go into your backyard and a child drowns in the pool, the person that owns the house could actually be held liable. Do you want a see through fence? Do you want one that's glass? Do you want chain link? You know, do you want a fence to protect you from sound, you know, along, you know, cities that have freeways, they'll put up big giant fences in some people's backyards, will have very high ones because of, you know, sound. So there's, you know, out. There's a lot of different categories just in the things we've been talking about there.

Absolutely.

So you're like, okay, well I. So someone's going to go through the yellow pages and they're looking for a fence for their pool or there it's a new, you know, that sort of thing. What you say and how you say it to attract that person is critical. And if you just list everything versus one person really emphasizes that, you know, know the ultimate, you know, fence specialist for pets. That's much different than we sell fences. And here's the 400 different types we sell.

Exactly. And you look at like I'm looking at the ad on page 123, it's got, they just have a list of the final coated chain link fence, PVC and aluminum fence, gate operators, construction sites, fence rentals, custom built wood fences, hot dipped galvanized chain link fences, do it yourself materials, all these things, you know, and everybody's got the same thing, free estimates. You know, it's kind of like any of these categories. You could, you know, take people all the way. You could just switch the phone numbers and it wouldn't make any impact because there's absolutely no difference between the Walker Fence company, which is facing the Williams Fence company. They're all, you know, it's identical in the offers that they have. You know, you go to jimwilliamsfence.com or go to walkersfence.com, but they're essentially the same thing. Nobody's focused on anything. So I think if you're looking at residential yellow pages that you've pretty much got to imagine that the people most likely to open this page are going to be people who have a home, that they're residential is who's going to be looking through this is the highest probability, you know. And so now you start to think about what's the goal of this? You know, what is it that we want to do? Because Profit Activator 2 is really about turning a invisible prospect into a visible prospect, right? You can't get a list of people who are looking to buy a fence right now, just like you can't get a list of people who are looking to do anything. You know, you can get a visible list of certain people who might be prospects, you know, but you can't get, you've got to create this list. So rather than trying to convince people to use your company just on the strength of this ad, part of what we do is separating that Profit Activator two from Profit Activator three, which is about educating and motivating people. And just focus on the job of work of this yellow pages, which is to get somebody to raise their hand, get somebody to identify themselves so that now you've got all the time in the world to continue to educate them. So how do we get them to identify themselves? We either get them to call a free recorded message or we get them to text their email address to a number or to go to a website and leave their name and their email address. And so when you've got, you know, if that's our objective, then everything that we would do would be about just getting them to do that thing So I think with this kind of a category here, what do you think people are thinking about this? You know, about what type of, what are my options with the fences? How much does do fences cost? You know, I think that what I would do is put together a guide to show fence prices and different options of fences, like a fence planning guide that somebody could, that somebody could download right from the yellow Pages. When you think about it, if everybody's got their smartphone, I would probably do something like text your, just text your email address to this number and get your, and download your, your fence planning guide. Right, exactly. That way you've got, you know, that way you've got the, the right person. And I've always, it's really been fascinating that we've done a lot of things where we put pricing guides together because that's the thing that people are most interested in. And so putting a pricing guide together that lets people's guard down. They want that. So they're willing to leave their name and their email address to get that. And now you've got a way to engage with them and you know, communicate with them kind of one on one. You can do short personal, expecting reply emails or you know, engaging with them once they kind of raise their, once they kind of raise their hand. And you know that the only reason somebody's going to text their email address to this number is because they're in the yellow Pages looking at fences in the fence category. Which means they're looking for a fence.

Yes, exactly. And what a lot of people don't really think about, and it took me a while to actually grasp this, is that when you, a lot of people don't want to narrow their niche because they think oh, I want someone to call me so that we can talk them about everything through and that sort of stuff. Not realizing that for one, you can spend a lot of time filtering through and having conversations with very unqualified people. And whenever you offer non threatening free information, useful education, teach them how to make a buying decision, make them aware of different things that they weren't even aware exist in your industry or category. You're not only having a person show up that is self selecting and self identifying themselves as interested, but putting them through a process like opt in to get this guide or call and this free recorded message and request this or text your, you know, your number in, you're actually saving yourself a lot of time because that is a, There's a lot of systems that I'm terrible at. You know, I'm not, I'M not good at operations. I'm not good with administrative stuff. I mean, as we're doing this episode right now, I've got two organization people in my office downstairs going through all kinds of stuff that they're helping me organize. You know, that. That sort of thing. And I'm no good at those sort of systems, but I'm really good at marketing systems. I'm really good at thinking through. How do you set something up so it makes the selling easy and ideally unnecessary because the marketing robotically does the selling for you. Using my whole concept of elf marketing, how do you set up the communications and the interaction with the prospect and with the client so that it's easy, lucrative, and fun? How do you do that? If you think of it as if you take the time to learn this, of what we're saying, and you have the copy written and you have the offer created and you really think through the amount of hours that it will save you, the amount of labor, including your own and labor that you would need to hire in order to do sales, you can literally make a company work in some cases without even having any humans that are doing sales for you.

Oh, right. Exactly.

And that is a notion and a mindset that, you know, some people never get it. They never understand that. And I was talking to Jay Abraham today this morning. Me and Jay talk all the time. And we were talking about an individual that I know that has a very big company and is very successful in one company he has, but not very successful in another company that he started because one company had establishment through distribution. And the current company that he has literally requires someone to sell it. People aren't out there buying it. This is something that needs to be sold. Certain people go buy things and other things need to be sold. One of the points that I said is that this guy just doesn't have a marketing mindset in order to do well with his marketing. Like the thing that you said, Dean, Offering a free guide, a free report for people that know and get this and understand it. They get it. However, when we did an episode, I can't remember which episode number it was, where we talked about what were the original things that made all the biggest difference in our businesses. And the thing that was the biggest difference for me was my consumer awareness guide. On all of these episodes of I love marketing, we've talked about free reports and sales letters and consumer guides dozens, if not hundreds of times. I would highly encourage people to listen to. If you have not, or re listen to the very first episodes that we did when we started doing this podcast back in 2010. I think when we first started doing.

This.

We talk about how to. It's all the things that people don't know that they don't know. And if you're the one that provides that information to them. When someone all of a sudden needs a pool fence, there's all kinds of things about pool fences that they don't know that they don't know. And if you offer how to, you know, six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning could be six costly misconceptions about, you know, paying for a fence or the seven questions ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home. Could be the seven questions to ask a fence, you know, manufacturer or someone you know to install a fence. The how to avoid for carpet cleaning rip offs could be, you know, how to avoid, you know, rip offs or how to avoid wasting money or fence.

Construction rip offs for fence contractor rip off.

Yeah, exactly. And so all those things become things that people don't know that they don't know. And if you're what I realized just by saying those things. Oh, the seven questions, the eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a blank. When you just start saying those things, the human mind is, oh, I didn't know there were eight mistakes. And if you're running a yellow page ad, or you're running a social media campaign, or you have something on your business card, or you have it on the side of your service vehicle or wherever, wherever you're running a message, wherever at you're offline online, by saying those things, you're making the brain realize that there's things that I don't know that I don't know. And once someone has basically shown you this or demonstrated it, you all of a sudden are curious. And that's the beauty of direct response. When you said you made a really interesting line in the very beginning of this episode, you're like, if direct mail or direct mail, if direct response was on trial, you could not find proof that it even exists. And the people that do use direct response or first get introduced to it, they have this very ignorant notion that, well, I would hear this all the time in the cleaning industry. Well, if everyone buys Joe Polish's stuff, all the carpet cleaners are going to use this. It's not going to work. How effective is it going to be? What's really funny, Dean, is In the late 90s, every major city in the United States had one or multiple versions of my 24 hour free recorded message ads. Running from either myself or one of my licensees at the time that were selling programs. Literally, there were so many thousands of ads and promotions in all forms from our clients, me and you. You look at yellow pages today and most of them are gone. I mean, even people that use direct response for a of time, if you just, if you cookie cutter it, I mean, since, you know, since so much of my focus is no longer on the cleaning niche like it used to be, I don't do anywhere near the level of things in that industry that I used to do. But the people that absolutely know it works, they still run yellow page ads.

They still, oh, I'm telling you, like print ads. I mean, it's exactly the same thing. Real estate agents don't really use yellow pages as much as carpet cleaners would, for instance, but they definitely use homes magazines, right? Like homes and land magazines. Any. I always, whenever I go somewhere around the country, you know, I'm always looking to see if there's anybody using direct response. And literally the only people I see doing it are people who are running my ads, you know, or running. I mean, it's like I've got a client that we do mortgages for the home equity conversion mortgages and we're running ads in almost every homes and land in Florida right now. And those ads we run print ads that are running at 12 to $112 for every dollar invested in these ads. I think print ads are a bargain right now. I mean, still, it's so funny how people just kind of like immediately discount something, you know, And I guarantee you people are still looking in the yellow pages too. And it just, if you do it right, there's gonna be, you know, you just look at the roi. That's really all it is, you know, but everybody wants to kind of rush to do Facebook ads or run Google Ads or whatever, which are great, but it's certainly a much more competitive.

Yeah, totally. And one thing I will say, if you're in the marketing business or you're teaching people marketing or you happen to be someone that just really loves marketing and you haven't figured out how to take your knowledge of marketing and turn it into cash because you're not yet creating value for other people or creating results for other people, which is the same as value. When you hear value creation, one technique and one method. As an example why yellow pages are so damn useful. For one, if you're someone that is doing an I love marketing meetup group, I would recommend doing a yellow page roulette where you have people bring examples.

A business card roulette.

Yeah, you could do a Valpak roulette, you could do a magazine roulette, you can do a Facebook roulette where people go to their Facebook page and they literally physically print out the ad or put together a Little Keynote or PowerPoint presentation and show different examples. Or just bring your iPhone or your Android or what the hell. Ever come to the meetup group and show different ads and then have a conversation about it. Just talk about all of the things that people are doing right, all the things that people are doing wrong. And you will learn a lot. Another thing. Say for instance, you sell something to dentist and you teach them how to be more effective with their advertising. If you pulled out any yellow page and you were in a particular city and you wanted to pick up clients, you would take all of those ads for dentists. You would figure out what the yellow pages charge to run an ad. And if you have a way that that dentist as an example, could generate more clients or generate more business, you could take a copy of their ad. You can attach it to the top of a direct mail letter, you can send them the letter with a dollar bill attached saying Dr. So and so I know that you pay $400 a month for this ad, which is $4,800 a year, and I don't know what your current return is on this, but I have some ideas that could triple it and I'm happy to produce a result for you to prove that. And you'll probably get that phone call and you've all of a sudden picked up a client or you can go through newspapers, anyone that money in marketing that actually had marketing advice. Or if you sold something to dentists and you're like, okay, you're spending $400 a month for this thing. I actually have a piece of equipment that will be as good of or better investment for the results your clients are getting or for whatever. You use their advertising as an excuse to call you as a way or to visit your website or to watch a video that you put out or to request a your report. So you can use other people's advertising to actually get them to buy things from you. Not just how to be more effective with their advertising, but that of course is for people that are in the consulting business or the advertising and marketing business, or that are just very clever and see those categories as how to do that. So I used to go to, I don't do it anymore. I haven't done it in a while. When I would go to different cities. I would literally take the yellow pages out of hotels and I would, you know, I would take them with me, and I would know how to target people in different cities. And anytime you're at a hotel, ask the hotel if they'll give you one of the yellow pages. And most of them will be happy to do that because they usually have way more of them than they ever need. And most people, most hotels really don't even put yellow pages in the rooms in some cities anymore. But it's gold there for people that are marketers and need clients. You know, so many people are like, oh, you know, I want to go into the marketing business and do what you guys do, but I need to get clients. How do I get clients? Well, I just gave you a really clever idea. There you go.

It really is. The local businesses really just need so much help with that. There's so many of them. You know, you think about the number of small businesses just right in your town that really need help. It's such a great opportunity. But, you know, I was thinking about when you were talking about the things in your consumer awareness guide, one of the things that I really like to think about these, these print ads, the yellow page ads here is imagine if the ad was like the. The COVID of Cosmo magazine or the. The table of contents of Cosmo magazine, where you' using the ad as the gateway to all this other information that's available just by calling and listening to this free recorded message or texting your email to this number to get whatever it is that, you know, all those things that you were mentioning, Joe, would be great headlines. That's the way you design the whole. The contents of that. Of that guide.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, so you make that kind of look like that was the way that, you know, we talk about the, the first squeeze page. That was the approach that I took with. With living in Winter Haven, you know, taking it as the table of contents of Cosmo magazine. So most people would have their website set up and, you know, I could mirror this in a yellow pages ad. Most of the time when you go to a website, it's got, you know, the description of what it is, and then it says click here and then something else and click here. So there's all these opportunities to click on other things. And many people were had. They'd have a section where it would say, sign up for our newsletter and you leave your name and your email address. But nobody was doing. Where it was the only thing that you could do. So I took that approach of the table of contents of Cosmo magazine and I said, get a free guide to Winter Haven real estate prices. And instead of saying click here, I say free inside. And then I'd say get a free subscription to Market Watch with email updates of all the properties that come on the market every week. More inside. And then would say, get a free home loan report. You know, we monitor all the hundreds of different loan programs that are available and put all our findings together in a weekly report, Free inside. So it was all these things that you could get, and it was free inside. More inside. Free inside. And then when it got down to the, to get to it, you couldn't click on any of those, but it would say, get free instant access. Just leave your name and your email address. And you could do that same thing in a, in a Yellow pages ad where you could have all of the headlines, all of the questions, and instead of just listing it all right there, it could all be part of this guide that you can get at using a URL. Or you could text your email address to this number. Or you could have a, you could almost make it look like a consumer awareness page in the yellow Pages that, you know, answers to your questions or what every Winter Haven homeowner needs to know about buying, getting a fence. And it could list the things and you call this toll free number and the answer to this is extension 101, and this is extension 102. You can have the, you know, the most common questions that people have, all with the only intention of the page, just to get somebody to leave their name and their contact information so that we know who they are. Now they're immediately into profit. Activator 3. Something else that jumped out at me about the fence business in particular, because years ago in college, I ran a painting company with a friend and we created another company called Name Droppers. And what we did was one of the things that we needed was we needed to find people who were going to get paintings done. So we started a company called Name Droppers. And we hired college girls to go in the evenings and the weekends and survey neighborhoods to see who was planning on doing any home improvements over the summer. We would do this, you know, all summer long or all spring anyway. We'd get started in the spring and instead of just going out looking for people who are going to get painting while they were out there, we were having them look for people who were going to do any home improvements over the summer. So they would ask about roofing, windows, siding, painting Driveway, landscaping, lawn service, decking, fencing, a pool, patio, deck. You know, there were like 20 different things that we had, and we had relationships where we would sell those leads to those other businesses. So we would get our leads for free at a profit actually, because we would make, we would make a product instead of turning our, Instead of us paying to get leads, we were actually making money generating leads and finding the people who wanted to paint. And so when you think about that taking one step above what your actual business is, most people are just what our friend Jay Abraham would call myopic. They're very myopic, focused only on, on their own business and looking for people who want to get a fence. But when you think about that category, if we back out and take a wider view, no other business is doing this. No other business is thinking outside of their own limited view of what it is that they do. Right. But when you think about what all is involved in getting a fence, they probably are doing some other work. They're going to need some landscaping, they're going to maybe be getting a deck or a pool or all of those other things that we talked about, you know.

Yeah. Well, I want to mention this too, because I just looked at a newsletter because I've been organizing a bunch of stuff here at my office and it's one of those. I actually hired a person who specializes in the Condori method of organizing.

Marie Konmari.

Konmari Khan. Dori, what am I talking about? Maria Kondo, who wrote the book the Life Changing Magic of Tidying up, which is awesome. And me and you even did an episode on that book. And one thing too. There's only one organizer in Arizona that I could easily find. Well, I shouldn't even say me, one of my assistants could find online that actually is utilizing the most famous organization book in the world right now to actually market themselves. And I said buy Facebook ads using that, you know, life changing magic of tidying up and just target that.

Give away free copies of the book. I mean, talk about. See, there's the thing, right? It's thinking outside of the box of that rather than trying to run ads convincing people to hire you to come and organize their house is give away copies of the book. And now you've got a list of people who are interested in organizing. I mean, I guarantee you somebody who reads that book is going to all of a sudden become very interested in organizing. You can't read that book and not become interested in organizing your house, you know. Well, yeah.

And what's what's really funny is one of the main reasons I hired this woman is because first off, Lydia, who works for me, was calling different organization people and she contacted this one person named Anna. And Anna's like, oh my God, I can't believe this. I just watched his, yeah, I watched his interview with Gary Vaynerchuk two days ago. She didn't even know who I was until a couple days prior, then getting a call from my office. And then when I called her, she had listened to like six to eight hours of podcast and various stuff. And now of course, you know, she's still, it's still, she's downstairs right now with, with another organizer. But it, they still don't realize, she doesn't realize that me calling her is probably going to be one of the most useful things that has ever happened in business if she applies some of what she's learning. But you know, I was just looking at all of the. I talked to a couple of other organizers. I had Lydia who did most of the sifting and then finding me the best ones to call and seeing who I resonated with. But I ended up hiring her because one about the life changing magic, tidying up. I want someone that will come in and help me think through does this spark joy? But I talked to one lady who literally was saying, well I don't really agree with that book and here's why and blah blah, blah. And I'm like going, you know, here I am as a person who's looking for someone because of this book and you're actually using it as a way to unsell yourself by talking about it. So to me it was kind of an interesting thing for professional. Like if I had nothing else going on, I could literally, I could change the entire professional organizing business. You know, there's Barbara Hemphill who's a dear friend of mine. You know, there's an organization called napo. Yeah, she wrote the Paper Tiger. And Barbara Hemphill is fantastic. We got a great episode on I love marketing with Barbara Hemphill if you ever want to watch it about mental clutter. I mean it's f. If you've not seen or watched that episode, heard it or seen it, then type in Barbara Hemphill A T M P H I L L into the search@ilovemarketing.com but it's great. There's a professional organization called Naples national association of Professional Organizers. And the vast majority of them, they have no idea how to use something like this to propel their business. Many of Them actually view it as like, oh, we've been doing that stuff for years. Instead of embracing this as like, thank you for making all of these people aware of organizing stuff, we're actually fighting against it like it's the enemy. In the same way that when I came into the cleaning industry, I cannot tell you how many idiotic distributors of chemicals and equipment and stuff found me to be like an adversary, because I'm out there teaching people how to generate business using a different method than the archaic crap that they were doing. But the ones that align themselves with me literally did really well. And now I've got companies like Legends brand that supplies 90% of all cleaning and restoration companies in the country with their stuff, actually endorse and recommend me, but it's that sort of thing. But in the process of looking through stuff, I'm coming across all kinds of old ads and promotions and campaigns. And there was this one newsletter in a pile of mail that came in where some of my cleaners actually put me on their list so that I will get their carpet cleaning newsletter, which they literally utilize. We create a newsletter for carpet cleaners. We have a whole template for over 20 years. And they don't have to write their own newsletter. They just have to put in custom things. And one of the things that we taught many, many years ago, which was what you were doing and you and Joe Stump were doing in the real estate industry, was a homeowner's Rolodex. So all of the different services that a person selling their home, they would need a painter, they would need a carpet cleaner, they would need a landscape. Well, same with carpet cleaners. If you're going to go into someone's home and you're going to clean their carpets, what are all of the other services that they could be using? One of the things we taught carpet cleaners is here's how to get your newsletter, the direct mail and the printing done for free and actually make money by sending out a monthly newsletter which will generate more repair business, more referrals, more frequency of cleaning is you actually feature other companies that you have sifted and you have literally found to be high integrity. You trust them, you know they do a good job. Because every service business that goes into a home, that home uses other service businesses. So if you know a great plumber, who do you recommend? And you go to your plumbing buddy and say, hey, I mail out 500 or 300 or 2000 newsletters every month to educate people and keep my name in front of them and make them Offers, how would you like to pay a portion of it? And I'll put an ad or an insert or a flyer for you. This newsletter, this is something I was teaching 15 years ago. It had a whole list. Yeah, it had over. Yeah, yeah. It's probably like 20 years ago. It had eight different service companies. A pet grooming. I'm trying to think of which ones there are. There's a pet grooming company, there was a dry cleaner of clothing, there was a painting company. And I can't remember what the other ones were, but they're like service companies and there are other companies that they recommend. They could be chiropractors, they could be gyms, they could be anything. But if you're a carpet cleaner or you're a service person, other service things are really great. If you are a, you know, someone in fitness that, that is a nutritionist.

Or that's what it is.

Like. Yeah, yeah, you put a massage therapist, you know, put a Pilates instructor, put, you know, whatever. I mean, in, in it's. And it's funny because most companies, like you said, all they're, they're thinking about the fence. And so the point is this whole episode is not about the fence. It's not about the fence ad. You know, I mean we could, we could exactly it.

That's the whole thing. That's all this, you know, the whole purpose of the yellow pages roulette is just to pick a business category. That's all that is. And you know what you were talking about these directories and I mentioned it about what we did with name droppers and what I, you know, continued to do with my real estate business, you know, is contextual categories. And so when you think about carpet cleaning, that's a home service category. So you start to think about who are all the other types of categories like that. And I think one of the things that if you're in a business that there are non competitive other things in that category that you could partner up with and have a context for. We would put together things like household emergency handbook so that in the newsletter when you're sending out the clients, we put together this, just a household emergencies handbook so that you keep it by the phone or in the drawer by the phone. And if you have an emergency like you start thinking through those categories, you've got a plumbing emergency or you've got a, you've broken some glass or you've locked yourself out or you've got an electrical problem or you the carpet, you've got a stain or Spill on your carpet, your appliance breaks, any of those things where they're kind of acute onset and you need a solution to the problem right away. And we did the same thing with the auto emergency handbook that people can keep in their glove box. So right in the glove box they've got, you know, you need tires, you need brakes, you need a muffler, you need a windshield, you need painting or an auto body shop or insurance, you know, all the things that are just related to that category. If you can organize, you know, be the leader to kind of organize your little syndicate, non competitive people that you're now reaching all of those other businesses clients as well. Right. So if every, if I've got my top 150 as a real estate agent and the, you know, the, the guy who has the, the plumber or the electrical business or any of those other things they are sending out and adding value to their clients as well. You know, it's like it's a built in sort of synergistic distribution.

Yep, exactly, exactly. And if you start thinking like that, you will expand not only the way that you communicate to your clients, but your whole, you know, if you can change your perspectives of how you see something and you can rise above the perspective from a long term view than all of your competitors, the value of that knowledge, I don't know any other study of business that could reap more financial rewards, more longevity, more savings of wasted time, energy and effort and attention because it's just, it's so powerful. And the beauty of this, when you know this sort of like it's almost like learning a secret. It's like almost learning that you know, you're a person that chops down trees with an axe and no one knows but you that chainsaws exist and you can kind of go out and get yourself a chainsaw and you can, you know, speed up like by, you know, times in the land of the blind.

The one eyed man is king.

Exactly, exactly. And so what I'd like to do, Dean, is take this time to kind of wrap this up. I mean there's a lot more that we can go with this. But I want to make a couple recommendations for longtime list listeners to. I love marketing. Hopefully this gives you just more deepening perspective and reminds you of some things. If you're in the advertising and marketing business. That idea of sending people their ads, I mean I've done this before, that is a million dollar idea if you execute it upon for certain people. Those of you that do. I love marketing Meetup Groups if you haven't or done an I Love Marketing Meetup Group, obviously they're only in certain cities around the US but if you check up meetup.com you can find people that run I Love Marketing Meetup Groups. If you'd like, start in I Love Marketing Meetup Group. We haven't updated the PDF in a while, but you can go to meetups on I Love Marketing. And there's a guide on how to actually set up and run your own Meetup group, which is really, really valuable. Then the Breakthrough DNA Report which we offer for free on ilovemarketing.com if you've not read that or haven't read it in a while, that will give you a template of not only how to offer something useful for people to get them to give you their name and email, but it also walks you through all of the different eight profit activators because certainly we didn't cover all of those on this episode. But having heard what we just discussed, to go and read the Breakthrough DNA report right now, it's really fresh in your mind. It will help deepen the psychological understanding of how to write an ad and how to think through social selecting a single target market and going all the way through the before, during and after units of a business. And there's a lot of any category that you want to listen to, from how to do emails to how to do conversion to different experts and all kinds of different categories. You can look through all of the episodes at I Love Marketing that you may have never heard and subscribe. So you get this sent to you automatically all the time. And I'll tell you, I mean there's just so much good stuff that we have put on this podcast that ties into this. So go and listen to those if you've not before. And what else? Dean that's what I wanted to say. So I'd like to hear how we would wrap up this episode and send people off with the most getting the most usefulness out of it.

Yeah, I think that's it. It's like the whole you get in our world think that's really the thing. So many episodes, so many great things. I go back and listen to the other yellow page roulette episodes. Those are all great. And certainly download that Breakthrough DNA report. Get in our world there. We have a lot of people who just subscribe and listen on itunes, but if you get in our world, there's lots of other things that we can help you with.

Yeah, and I'm actually tempted to do A contest for anyone out there, because we have a lot of fans that have done great things. Chip franks has started joevolunteer.com and we've had a lot of people that have just made a killing with the magic nine word email and using education based marketing. The free recorded message company that we recommend is COA Networks, coanetwork.com, aaron Gerber. There's all kinds of things that we do recommend, and I'd almost like to come up with a contest, Dean, where this knowledge is so useful to so many business owners. This not only can make people more money, but it could save people from going bankrupt when they learn this. It certainly operated that for me. And we really are not. I mean, we probably should, but we haven't. We don't really promote like an online course and maybe we'll make a different one or a new one or something and start pitching that. I have no idea. I mean, it's not currently something we've discussed, but what I get a real joy out of is just knowing that people listen to this and they use it. Yeah, I know. Me too.

That's the thing. It's almost like we need somebody to turn this into a business, you know?

Well, yeah. Yeah. And I. Exactly. The contest that I'm thinking of, like, I just want to kind of put. I mean, this is totally off the top of my head. This is not me being like sort of secretive or whatever because I'm setting up some sneaky thing. I have no fucking idea what I'm even thinking of right now, other than I would like to see someone come up with a way to get more listeners to. I love marketing with us not having to do it. And so we've given people so many of marketing ideas, and I'd like to have someone other than us use our own marketing ideas because this podcast is not our core business. You know, some people, they make a living off their podcast. That's what I mean.

But it could be a core business. That's what I was saying.

Yeah. Well, look, if someone wants to come along and offer us millions of dollars to take the content and run the damn thing, I'd be open to that. But I'm not sure. But you know, they would have to absolutely enhance our brands, not. Not damage it. So I just used the word brand. Jesus, I can't believe that. Scratch that. Scratch that. No, obviously, building brand meaning make the logo bigger. Yeah, building brand meaning enhance the reputation of it. Not like a scummy freaking overhyped marketer. No, what I'm thinking is we should come up with a contest where after we do an episode that's really useful, whoever gets the most downloads and the most listens or the most whatever, we should give those people, like, an hour of consulting or something. Something really cool. And I want to think through something like that because more people need to be listening to I love marketing and not the new episodes. Not about. Oh, let's get. I mean, like, literally old ones. I mean, there's episodes we did now.

Where this may be. Joe, this episode, if we play it out right, this may be episode 250. Yeah. Yeah. What are we at right now? 248 or 249 as of today? Kind of.

You know, if this was our core business, I would know those things. But I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, that's in. I'll tell you, like, I've heard it a bazillion times that I've learned more listening to your marketing podcast than I learned from college. I mean, I've heard that dozens and dozens of times. And so, you know, there you go. There you go. So that's it, Dean. Until the next episode, everyone, please share this with your friends and family or people on the other side of the planet just so you can win a contest that I haven't even figured out what the prize would be yet. And go out. It's going to be great. Yeah. In audit. Audit your ads, audit your website. Look at what you say, think about the target markets, and execute upon what we're talking about here. And then if you make a lot of money, then, you know, then go do something good in the world. And that is it. So have a great day. And until next time, please let us know your comments and thank you for listening.

Sam.