Looking For A Simple Marketing Plan For Your Small Business? Project One Thousand Two Hundreds Could Be Your Solution.
It can be so hard when marketing your small business, can’t it?
With so many choices, and so many messages aimed at you every day, how do you know where to start?
Is it facebook or twitter?
What about LinkedIn and LinkedIn only?
Or why not give PR a go?
The truth is, if you are running a service based business of any kind, it does not need to be (and if you are starting out very much should not be) any of these marketing tactics.
But what should it be?
Well, I have something that I honestly believe, if you totally embrace it, will set you on the path to having as many clients as you want and need to grow your business to whatever size you choose.
Yes, genuinely.
Based on marketing small businesses since 2003, based on spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of my own money growing my business, and based on managing my clients’ online marketing spend to the tune of multiple millions, this works.
What Is Project One Thousand Two Hundreds?
Here it is in short:
- One hundred website pages
- One hundred reviews
- One thousand email subscribers
If you do not have all of the above in place already, this is what you should do.
If ever a marketing opportunity passes in front of your eyes, if it doesn’t involve adding a page to your website, collecting a review from a client or adding email subscribers to your email marketing software (or writing something to send to them), put it on your brand new COULD DO LIST (more below), then instantly forget about it.
Your COULD DO LIST can be a Word document, a Google Sheet or wherever you store information, but please create it, then dump all ideas that do not fall within Project One Thousand Two Hundreds onto it and get back to finishing The Project.
1. 100 Pages
At first, when people hear about Project One Thousand Two Hundreds, they may struggle to even believe that 100 pages are possible.
Let me assure you, it is more than possible.
Whatever service business you are in, whether you are an accountant, a book keeper, coach, consultant, copywriter, graphic designer, financial adviser, mortgage broker, surveryor or treatment provider, I can assure you that it is EASY to write 100 pages about the service you provide.
I know this because I have helped hundreds of service business owners to achieve this in time.
When you think about all of the questions your clients ask you as you go about your business and then realise that each of these is a page on your website, you soon get to 100 pages, and past 1,000 in time (as many of my clients have done).
That may sound daunting, but it isn’t really, as that has taken a number of years to achieve, and remember that they only carried on adding more content because they kept on getting more and more clients from their website.
So if you get to 100 pages and you are busier than you have been before, you can stop, but you probably won’t. However, you don’t need to make that decision now, do you?
You just need to do the first 100 pages.
So, how do you start this process?
First, you have to choose to write the right content, or you might as well not bother at all!
Let me explain further.
1.1. What Is The Right Content?
I had been adding content to my website since I started my business in 2003, but to my big regret, I did it all the wrong way for years.
I would just write what I knew would help my clients to get more clients…. sounds good, right?
The trouble is, whilst I knew they needed the help I was offering in my content, I didn’t take the time to check that my page or blog title matched what they were searching for.
Big Mistake!
Huge! (name the film)?
Adding any content without checking that the page answers a question your ideal clients are already typing into Google is a complete waste of time.
So, how do you know what they are looking for, then how do you write that content to please all search engines and show them you know what you are talking about, so that they put you higher up the search results.
I will make it easy for you here – grab my website cheat sheet here:>>
1.2. Where To Put The Right Content
The next question I am usually asked when preparing all of this new content is usually, where do I put it?
This is quite easy to work out.
To be an authority in your area of expertise (and that is precisely what you need to do), you must have on your website:
- A page in your services section for every service that you provide; AND
- Another four or five pages at least beneath each service page which dives into different aspects of that service.
One service page covering all of your services screams “New business” and even only one page for each of your services isn’t much better.
However, one page for each service with several pages below each one shows someone who knows that they were doing; it shows an authority figure.
So, when it comes to adding new content, here is my general rule of thumb, based on what you now know about an authority website:
- If it covers something not yet covered in your Services section, put it there; or
- If it is a different perspective on a service that you have already covered, being prepared to target a new keyword that you would like to receive traffic from, add it as a blog post.
2. 100 Reviews
Now we move on to your reviews.
As I mentioned above, when people land on your website we want them to see “Expert” screaming at them from every page.
One sure fire way of doing this is to have lots of reviews, and not just on your reviews page, but sewn onto every page of your website.
You want your propsects to be thinking “Wow, they must be good to have this many reviews, I am going to give them a call/enquiry/live chat to find out more”.
How do you collect these reviews?
I have a detailed training for review collection on The More Clients Academy which covers review collection AND Google My Business, which is vital if you have a local service based business.
However, here is the simple three question review collection process I recommend you use (not just at the end of your service, but whenever you have a break through moment with your client.
You send an email with these three questions:
- What did you like about my/our service?
- What, if anything, could I/we do better?
- Is there anything else.
They will reply, and if the reply is gushing and flowing, turn it into something you can copy and paste onto your website, then ask them if they are happy for you to use that wording.
This is WIN 1 and is the most important one. You want 100 reviews on your website first!
If they say yes, the final step is to resend them their now approved review, and ask them to copy and paste it onto your Google Business listing (include the link for them).
Hey presto, you are on your way!
3. 1,000 Email Subscribers
Finally, you need to make sure that all of these lovely people who provide you with reviews, along with all of the new prospects who keep finding your website now, find their way onto your email marketing list so that you can keep communicating with them to:
- Remind them to come back to you and use you again when they need your expertise; and
- So that they are able to recommend you to friends and colleagues.
Click here to download my email marketing guide:>>
Finally, I mentioned above that you must create a Could Do List, now let me explain why this is so important.
Why The Could Do List Is So Important?
From my experience (far too many years to even dwell on now (but 2003 full time in this business), this is what will move the needle the most for any service business.
In fact, for many of my clients, this alone is enough to create the business, coaching business or consultancy business of their dreams.
If you complete The Project and you still need more, then you can:
- Start Google Ads (as your website will now have enough good content to convert visitors into clients); then
- Look at your Could Do list (in that order).
But as I say, it is unlikely you will need to.
Will you commit to Project One Thousand Two Hundreds?
Fill in the contact form below and let me know!
