11 Marketing Tips from Jim Connolly

Marketing Tip 1: Throw that old marketing guide in the bin!

My first marketing tip is this: If you want to avoid wasting stacks of money and missing countless sales opportunities, throw your old marketing guides and audio programs in the recycling bin!

You need to know what works today; where even the smallest business can advertise itself to millions online for less than the cost of a one-off trade journal advert – AND – where you can mail a million potential clients in a few hours for just pennies.

Marketing tip 2: Content marketing – Learn how to use content to market your business!

Content marketing works. In fact, it works REALLY well. In 2011, I generated almost £140,000 in fees from this blog, exclusively through Content Marketing.

You may or may not be familiar with the phrase “Content Marketing”, yet you visit content marketing sites every time you access the Internet.  When you visit news sites, entertainment sites of blogs like this, which offer business advice, you are visiting a site that uses content to market itself. Content Marketing can successfully be used to market any type of business and it is unbeatable when it comes to attracting new clients, sales leads, inquiries and subscribers.

Briefly, here’s how Content Marketing works:

• You build and market a website and fill it with FREE information that hasreal value to your prospective clients, whilst offering them the opportunity to purchase goods, services (or both), which are closely linked to the information you give away.
  

For instance, on this blog I provide thousands of marketing ideas and regular, valuable, free marketing advice. People read the information, use the ideas and share what they find here with their friends.  Then, some of those people see the quality of my information and decide to hire me, when they need expert marketing help.  Others buy my audio program and last year alone, those incomes were close to £140,000. That income was all thanks to inquiries and product sales I achieved, through Content Marketing.

Over the past 17 years, I have spoken about Content Marketing to thousands of people. The most common question they ask is a version of this:

“Hang on Jim. If I freely give all this valuable Content Marketing information away, surely people will simply do the job themselves?”

I answer by explaining that there are 3 groups of people (in general), who will read your Content Marketing; blog posts, newsletters and social networking updates etc.

These are:

1. The first group is small. They are what I call serial freebie seekers. These people never ever pay for professional help.  They were never prospective clients, so you lose nothing.
2. The second group is the largest.  These people will try and do something themselves, but will hire professional help if they are not getting the results they need.  They value genuine expertise.
3. The third group is the smallest. These are the rare people, who value their time and also ‘get’ that by hiring an expert to do something correctly for them, it works out a lot less expensive, the results are better and things happen faster.

In short: No one in the first group was going to spend a dime with you anyway. You lost nothing by giving them free information.  Some of the people in the second group will use your information and have a go at doing the job for themselves, whilst others in the group will see that they need expert help, andsome of those people will hire you.  With the third group, if you demonstrate through your Content Marketing that you truly are an expert in your field, you become massively more likely to get a call from them when they need help.  They already know all about you and your work.  They trust you.

Content Marketing is a huge subject, which I cover here on the blog regularly.  If you want to make sure you never miss a post, click here and get future posts delivered direct to your inbox, for FREE.

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