While most big businesses have some type of statement about their mission, value, and purpose that they use as a guide in their marketing efforts, not many small businesses do.  As Scott Beebe from Business on Purpose explains in my interview with him, this is a shame,  and also a lost opportunity.

Scott shares several concrete examples in our interview about how having a strong sense of purpose and values helped a business increase their bottom line revenue.  Far from being abstract ideas, a mission and vision statement should be something a business uses as the foundation for their entire marketing system.  Listen to the interview to get an understanding of why this is important and how you can create it for your business.

Learn more about Scott at MyBusinessOnPurpose.com and FourStepstoBusinessFreedom.com.

It's the time of year that many businesses send out holiday cards to their current customer base.  I think this is a great idea, but unfortunately many business owners think that the main purpose of doing this is simply to say "happy holidays". 

It's not--and if that's what you think, you're missing a big marketing opportunity.  In today's episode, I explain the true purpose of holiday cards, and give you a few ideas about how to use your holiday card mailing to get big results for your business this year.

My favorite TV show has new episodes again!  If you are a small business owner, you need to check out The Profit on CNBC.  It's much more than good entertainment--it's a fantastic education in how to run a small business.  Listen to today's episode to find out why I like the show so much, and why you need to watch it.

It doesn't matter how effective your advertising and marketing campaigns are, or how much money you spend on them, if you and your staff lack basic sales skills.  If your staff is not able to convert a phone call from a potential customer into an actual customer, all of the money it took to generate that phone call will be wasted.  In today's episode, I illustrate this point with a story about one of my home services clients.  He was spending hundreds of dollars a month on pay-per-click advertising, only to have efforts undermined by his office staff's inability to close the sale on the telephone.  Listen to the story to see if you might be making some of the same mistakes that his staff was making.

Once again, there have been a few big stories in the news lately about businesses getting in trouble about things related to customer reviews.  This time around, the stories involved businesses using fake reviews, and one business who decided to try and charge a customer for leaving a negative review.  I guess it must be time for another podcast about how NOT to respond to negative reviews, and about customer reviews in general...so here it is.

Sometimes, we as small business owners are so close to our own businesses that we forget a very important fact--our prospective customers actually don't always know what we want them to do.  If they see our ads or stumble across our website and want to see if we can help them, are they supposed to give us a call?  Fill out a form?  Download some content?  If we don't tell them how to enter our sales funnel, they might simply leave without doing anything. 

We call that process of telling customers what do to a "call to action", and in today's episode I interview Tom Schwab from the online business accelerator about how to create calls to action that actually work.  Hint--"Sign up for our email newsletter" is not one of them!  Tom has lots of great information to share, and he even offered listeners a free call-to-action cheat sheet, which you can download at http://tmschwab.com/minute/. 

So, press the play button to start listening to Tom's great advice, and then visit his website for lots more information and free resources (that's your call to action, by the way). 

In my experience, most local small business owners are not thrilled about the fact that social media is part of the modern marketing landscape.  Very few are using it effectively, and many of them are wasting more than a little time and money trying to figure it out.  In today's episode, I interview Kristen Robinson from KR Design about how local business owners should be using social media.  She shares some very practical tips and real-life examples that will give you some ideas you can implement in your own business.

In case you were wondering why I hadn't published a new podcast episode in a few weeks, it's because I was attending the annual summit of Duct Tape Marketing consultants, which this year was held at a ranch in Colorado.  In this episode, I give a report from the summit along with fellow consultant and previous podcast guest Mark Fortune. 

Referred customers are better customers.  They require less education, they don't complain as much about price, and they tend to be a better fit for your business.  But how do you go about getting more of them?  That's the topic of a recent workshop I did for my local chamber of commerce, and in today's episode I show you the part of the workshop where I talk about four ways to get more referrals from customers.

Last week a reporter and cameraman were murdered on live TV in Roanoke, VA.  Another woman was shot and seriously injured in the attack.  Because I was personally connected to both the Roanoke community and one of the victims, this act of pure evil really affected me deeply.  In today's episode, I talk about how we, as small business owners, can do something that might help prevent violence like this in our communities while also benefitting our businesses.