MBA1034 How to Market When You’re Starting From Scratch

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that helps you grow so your business can do the same with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over@100mba.net and in today's lesson, you will learn how to market your business when you're starting from scratch. This is something that gets asked a lot in the business world. What if I'm just starting with nothing? No email list, no contacts, no social media following? How do I market my product, my business and start making sales? Well, in today's lesson, I'm going to show you how to build the foundation of your marketing plan as a new business. Too many people waste time and money spending on ads to try to market their new business and they fail miserably because they don't have the right foundation. I'm going to show you how to set up your foundation so you can start making some sales without any marketing, paid marketing, that is. And then show you how to start with paid marketing so it's more effective. It's okay if you're starting at zero. We all start with nothing at the start. We all start from scratch. But let's get you some traction. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro, a step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba AND use code MBA. Many people, when they start their business, they have a product, they have a service, and they're all set up and they're ready to go. Now they just need some customers. So typically, people spend money to get customers. They run Facebook ads, they run local ads in the newspaper, they run local ads in billboards even, or run video ads on TV or on YouTube. Not a terrible idea, but unfortunately, many of us do this before we have the right foundation. You want to maximize your conversions, you want to maximize the efficiency of that paid marketing. In fact, I don't even recommend doing paid marketing at the start. You need to have a conversion, meaning you need to make some sales without any paid marketing to see your baseline conversion rate. When I say conversion rate, I'm Saying how many people go to your website or go to your business and actually become a customer? So say, for example, you have an online course and you're running a Facebook ad to your online course. How many people that visit your website actually turn into customers? One in a hundred? One in a thousand. You need to know the baseline without running any ads so you can know how efficient are these ads? How are you going to know if these ads are bringing in you more customers with or without them? Beyond that, you need to make sure that you maximize the conversion when you actually have the paid ad. There's no sense of spending money to drive traffic to your site or to your business and they don't have a plan for them when they arrive. So in today's episode, I'm going to focus on that plan as well as the first steps when you're starting from scratch so you can market. And we're going to focus in on businesses that do transactions online. Doesn't matter if you have a software, you're selling T shirts. But it's an online business. So let's start with the foundation. And I call this getting your house in order. And by house, I mean your website. You need to make sure your website is ready for visitors. Too many people, they just put up their product on their website and they send people over there and say, hey, buy my product. That's not enough to convert people. You need more information. People need more to chew on to be convinced that your product, your solution, is for them. So say, for example, we go with this online course example. You want to detail what they're going to get with this course, what the outcome will be, how many modules, how many lessons are they getting, any downloadables. You're going to detail exactly what they're going to get. You want to give some time to give a backstory, have an about page. Why did you start this company? Why did you start this online course? You may want to shoot a video showing people what they're going to learn inside the course. You have to sell them. People don't realize that your website is a sales tool. So you got to make sure you have enough information there to convince them you have the solution to their problem. The second thing I want to mention when it comes to getting your house in order is that you have to realize it's very hard to convert somebody into a sale in that moment right there on the site. How many times have you visited a website for the first time, saw the product or service and said, yep, I'm going to buy Right now, unless it was a purchase that's less than $10, maybe something even cheaper on Amazon, it's just not going to happen. So what happens is that you spend so much time and effort to get the person to your website and then they leave and you lost them forever. So what you want to do is you want to be able to grab their email. Why? So you can contact and build a relationship with them later on. So you can get them back to the website to reconsider and be convinced that your product or service is for them. So you need some sort of opt in some sort of way to capture their email. Now, if you're a software company, this could be a free trial. If you're selling an online course like we're talking about, you can give them the first module for free and just tell them, hey, all I need is your name and email address and you'll get that access. You'll get access to that first module of the course. One, it gives them a taste of what you got to offer. It gives them again more to chew on. Two, it gives you context so you can email them back. So you can email them and say, hey, what did you think of module one? This is what we cover in module two, three, four, five and so on. You can make them a special offer, all that kind of stuff. So you want to capitalize on the fact that they're on their website. You want to grab as many emails as possible. That's why you see a lot of websites. The first thing you see is that they want your email. They want you to just put your email address and get something in exchange. Some people, their whole homepage is just that because, hey, I got you to my website. I need to continue this relationship and continue to speak to you. Now you might be thinking, what does this have to do with marketing my website? Well, we can't put the cart in front of the horse. We have to make sure they have something to see and consume before I start sending traffic there, before I start spending money or spending effort. So this is a process. You got to build your site and make sure there's enough information and a way to collect the email addresses so you can continue that relationship. And you can have autoresponder emails via email marketing software, whether it's Mailchimp, AWeber, Infusionsoft, all these marketing services will automatically send a sequence of emails to anybody who joins a list. Okay, now that you have your site in order, you have your sales page, you have your about page, you have all the different Pages about the features or the, you know, benefits of your product. You have an opt in a way for them to get something for free in exchange for their email. And it's on every page and it's easy for them to opt in. The next step is we need a content marketing strategy. One of the easiest ways to get free leads, free customers is through content marketing. Content marketing is basically I'm creating valuable information for people to find me. So for example, a lot of people search the term when's the best time for a webinar? Well, we wrote a blog post with that information on webinar ninjas blog. So when people search those keywords, we rank pretty highly. In fact, as of the day I'm recording this, we are ranked number one on Google because we wrote that information in a helpful manner and it was shared by other people. So Google ranked us high. So I didn't pay anything for that other than the time I took to write the blog post that included this information. So people are coming to my website via blog posts. That's the beauty of content marketing. People don't really understand how powerful content marketing is. Over a thousand people search that term every month, just that term. So we're getting a thousand visitors just because we included that piece of information in our blog post. If I ran a Facebook ad to get a thousand visitors every month, I would easily pay five to six thousand dollars for that. So you can see how valuable that is. But it doesn't have to be a blog post. It could be a podcast and you have a show notes page. It could be a video blog post where you post videos on your blog posts and you have a little write up with the video or a transcript. People can find you via your YouTube channel. The point here is, is that you gotta be able to produce some sort of content to help your customers in your marketplace. So whatever you do, let's say for example, you sell handcrafted furniture, you can create great blog posts or videos on interior design, how to make the most out of a small space, what's the best furniture for a studio apartment? You get the point. Help your customers out with how to use your product, how to be better with your product, how to be better with your concept, or what market you're in, or I should say the subject you're in. You should have a content marketing strategy before you spend a dime on ads. In fact, I know companies that have run totally on content marketing didn't spend a dime on paid ads. They may have spent some money on getting some Great writers to write blog posts and turn up great posts on a regular basis. And many people believe that that's a better investment. Why? Because a blog post is evergreen. Because a podcast episode is evergreen. It's gonna live there forever. And it's gonna bring in visitors month in, month out, while an ad is run once. And you gotta keep on paying for that ad month in and month out. All right, step three, you've got your house in order. You have a website with information and an opt in. You have your content marketing strategy. Step three is all about search engine optimization, SEO, and it ties in with content marketing. You need to make sure your site is optimized, that you are showing up in the rankings. The first test should be if I Google the name of your company and you're not the first result, like number one on Google, there's a problem there. Your name should be pretty unique or not that competitive. You need to get somebody to help you out with that. Now, if you're inclined and you want to learn about SEO and you're into all that kind of stuff, it's actually not too hard to understand. In fact, inside the $100 MBA, we have a Google Analytics course that teaches a little bit more about SEO. It's kind of a SEO 101. But if you want to learn and take a deep dive as well in the Greater understanding of SEO, highly recommend Brian Dean's website, backlinko.com Great articles there. I would start from one of his earlier articles because, you know, they kind of build upon each other. But the point of SEO is to make sure that people can easily find you with a search on Google or Bing or whatever. And you have to do something to your website. You have to optimize it. You have to make sure that your metadata is right. You have to make sure that your keywords are actually being easily found. There's just certain things you have to do, the titles of your blog posts, the slugs or the URLs. If you run on WordPress, there's a great free plugin called Yoast Yoast SEO that's Y O a S T and it's really easy to use and it helps you optimize your site quite easily. If you don't have the capacity that yourself, definitely hire somebody to do it. If you're not easily found on Google or any search engines for any of your major keywords, not just the name of your business, then that's a major problem. You're missing out on a lot of traffic. So those are the three things we're really going to focus on before we start doing any paid ads. Starting from scratch, you got to do these first three things first. And this may take some time to do, especially the content marketing strategy. May take a few months, but it's well worth it. It's the foundation of your business. Now, what if I'm done with those three steps, I want to start looking into paid advertising. What's the best way to do this? Well, we'll get into that in a moment, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You need it to register your business. You need it to open up a business bank account. You even need it to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home, like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth classmail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime, from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth ClassMail for over a year now. And Earth classmail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH coupon code MBAMONTH. So you've done the first three steps. You have your site in order. You're ready to take visitors. You have a lot of information. You have an opt in. You have a content marketing strategy and you're implementing that strategy. You're turning out great content on a regular basis, and you've optimized your site for search engine optimization. Now you want to start maybe paying for ads, paying for traffic. Rule number one, do not invest too much money when you're first getting started, especially if you're doing this yourself. If you're going to be running Facebook ads, for example, you're gonna have to learn the interface of the Facebook ads manager. You're gonna need to understand how to optimize your audience and all this stuff. It's a lot of work, a lot of learning. It's definitely doable. And you can pick it up maybe in a week if you dedicate it to yourself. And of course, you can hire out for this, Pay somebody to take care of for you. But even if somebody's gonna take care for you, you should have an understanding of how this all works. Number two, you need to make sure that you're not spending too much money at the start. Experiment with some small amounts of money. Two to three hundred dollars. Don't drop a few grand on your first ad or your first campaign. Number three, don't drive traffic to a sale. Remember, it's very hard to take cold traffic. Somebody's gone to your website for the first time and to get them to buy right away, what you want to do is you want to grab their email address. Your goal with paid advertising should be grabbing their email address. You can continue the conversation via email. You can build that relationship and trust, give them some freebies, give them some trials, give them some free modules of your course, whatever it is, and then make them an offer. So when you're creating an ad, make sure you're creating an ad to a page. It's just all about grabbing their email. A simple landing page that has nothing other than, hey, I want to give you this in exchange for your email. Just give me your email, I will give you this, I'll deliver to your inbox, or I'll give you instant access right now. Whether it's that first module of your course, a free trial to your software, or even a PDF guide on something really useful, Your conversion rates for the money you spend for ads are going to be a lot higher for something free. Think about it. How much money are you going to have to spend to make it worth your while? Let's say, for example, I spend $100 to drive traffic to my site and it's costing me $5 per click. That means I'm getting 20 visitors. If I get 20 visitors on my site, there's a good chance I'm going to get zero buyers. That means I just lost a hundred bucks versus if I drive that same traffic, 20 visitors, that cost me a hundred bucks to just get them to sign up for free. For something for free that's of value. There's a good chance I can get a great conversion rate. I can get eight or even 10 people to sign up. Now I have 10 email addresses. I can nurture those 10 people. I can give them more information. I can Build that trust. And from those 10, I can maybe convert 2 to 3. So I made 3 sales versus 0, possibly on the same hundred bucks. So convert them to something free, not something for sale. When you're running ads other than that, that's all you really need to know when you start experimenting with paid ads to drive traffic to your new business. Now remember, the whole reason why we had that foundation to have your house in order and opt ins and all that stuff is that when we do drive traffic, people are enjoying the experience on your site and you optimize your chances of getting that sale eventually. Remember, this takes experiment, this takes time and a great ad or a campaign, it's not going to last forever. You know, it might do well for a few days, a week, maybe even a couple weeks. Then after that you're going to, you know, maybe drown out that audience and you're going to need to start a new campaign and start from scratch again with your campaign to, you know, make those conversions. But my final advice to you is that even if you don't go with paid ads to drive traffic to market for your new business, do the first three steps. You're going to get traction just off those. And it's the foundation that's going to help your business in the long run. Regardless if you go with paid ads or what kind of paid ads or how much money you spend on paid advertising. Thank you so much for listening to the hundred dollar NBA show. If you love what you hear, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We love reading every single review and everybody who leaves us a review enters our weekly random draw to win free access to one of our courses, our paid courses. We're giving away Easy course this month which is a $500 course over at easycourse Co. But somebody's gonna get a free ride. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and a review and listen on Friday to see if you won. Once you leave us a review, you enter the draw every week until you win. Alright, that's it for me today guys. But before, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Starting a business from scratch and marketing, it can be daunting. I totally get it. I've been there before. I'm actually looking into launching a new product and I'm facing that again. But don't let that stop you. If you have a great solution to a problem, eventually people will hear about it. If you do the right things, if you take the steps I prescribe to you, a great product is hard to ignore. So refine your product. Make sure it's a good fit for your audience. Get it out there and build your foundation. All right? I'll see you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.