The Business Marketing Show with Ed Keay Smith and Brendan Tully

Our special guest on this episode of the Business Marketing Show is Haydn Stevenson from Staged.com

I first met Haydn in Tokyo when I was presenting at the Netpreneur Summit 2015. We hit it off and discovered we had a lot in common. He was kind enough to show me and a few others from the Summit around his home town of Kamakura well known for being the home of the Great Buddha.

Haydn is a hype-free Twitter organic lead generation specialist and Co-founder of Staged.com. He is father to 2 gorgeous girls, has escaped death 14 times, avid non-ficition reader and came to Japan when he was 19 to train in Martial Arts with the goal to train in Ninjitsu.

With a burning passion for apply technology, Social Media and leverage to business, and a clinical loathing of wasting time, Haydn has been developing lead generation software and system for small businesses for over 15 years.

The Staged.com suite of highly-automated, Twitter-based Lead Generation SmartTools is a culmination of a 5 year process of constant and never-ending, incremental improvement that the Japanese refer to as Kaizen.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

The post E51 – Twitter Marketing with Haydn Stevenson from Staged.com appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

This is Episode 50 of the Business Marketing Show – we both regularly see clients in trouble, websites hacked, domain names expired and a whole host of other problems that could have been easily avoided.

In this episode we share some simple, most DIY steps that will go a long way towards eliminating the downside and protecting your web and online assets.

This episode is one every business owner should listen to as it’s extremely rare to come across a business that has all of these steps implemented.

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

The post E50 – Easy Steps to Eliminate the Downside & Protect Your Web Assets appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

This is our first episode to kick off 2016. In this episode we provide an update to the Small Business Marketing Plan & Blueprint episode we did at the start of 2015. In this episode we detail the exact strategy we’re using right now in 2016 to get real results for our small business clients.

Fixing your mindset, particularly around time and cost investment, is a key part of making your online marketing strategy work effectively.

Unfortunately most small businesses owners choose services based on price instead of features, benefits and expected performance. Looking at the expected return on a service first, and then working backwards to determine what you can afford or an appropriate budget is a much better approach.

Other common mistakes in thinking and mindset:

There’s no excuse for email problems with today’s technology. Our email hosting providers of choice are Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is the better one if you’re used to using Microsoft Outlook. Google Apps is the business version of Gmail.

Many businesses try to get the cheapest web hosting possible which is a terrible idea. You know yourself, if a website is slow to load or unreliable you quickly lose patience and click away. Visitors to your website behave in exactly the same way. Slow and unreliable websites also hurt your Google ranking!

Brendan’s company has built a high performance, search engine friendly hosting product specifically for this reason: https://www.thesearchengineshop.com/website-hosting/

For more detailed information on hosting check out our hosting episode:

Google Analytics is FREE and the defacto tool for measure website performance. Here’s the link: google.com/analytics

You probably already have it but don’t have a logon for it. If you’re unsure, ask your web developer if you have it.

It’s free and completely DIY, here’s the link: google.com/local/add

Once you’re setup, make sure you get secondary listings setup too:

The age of stock photography is gone and there’s a lot more that goes into an effective commercial photo than simply pointing a camera and clicking a button.

We talked about commercial photography in detail with Matt Reed from PhotographyProject.com.au in episode 16: https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-16-commercial-website-photography/

Generally we’ll recommend that you do both SEO and AdWords at the same time as they balance out each others strengths and weaknesses. One big advantage of Google AdWords (when done right!) is that you have complete control over what keywords you do and don’t show up for, where and what device. You can also be up and running within 24 hours whereas SEO improvements can take weeks or even months to take full effect.

It’s important not to treat Adwords as an expense to be minimised, when done right Adwords should be making you money.

It’s also important to be aware of how the sales process for your products and services work, it’s complexity and length. Generally speaking, cheaper or lower cost products and services that have a shorter, simpler sales cycle will benefit the most from high Google rankings and AdWords. Depending on the products and services you sell, Google may not actually be the most effective marketing channel and something like Facebook ads or the Google Display Network may work better.

For a large proportion of businesses email marketing is usually one of the top 3 best performing marketing channels but unfortunately most businesses do it badly. When done right, it’s very cheap and highly effective.

In episode 8 we talked about email marketing in detail, here’s the link: https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-8-email-marketing/

Finally we then have social media. Generally we say you should focus on email marketing before social media as generally speaking email still outperforms social platforms and many of the social platforms now require you to pay to get any real exposure. It’s also important to be aware of where your customers are hanging out online, in many cases a platform like LinkedIn may be more effective than something like Facebook.

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

The post E49 – Small Business Online Marketing Plan & Blueprint for 2016 appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

In this episode we recap our 2015 year and share the tactics and strategies that really delivered results this year for us and our clients and look forward to 2016 and share our predictions on the strategies that you should be focussing on in the coming year.

What worked well in 2015:

Where to focus in 2016:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

The post E48 – What worked in 2015 & predictions for 2016 appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

Our guest on this episode of the Business Marketing Show is John Cadogan from AutoExpert.com.au

I first started watching John’s Auto Expert TV You Tube Channel  about 12 months ago and was very impressed by how he put the show together.

His presentation style was professional with a well scripted and thought out story for each of his episodes. Also the quality of the audio & video production was very well done.

So I invited John onto the show to share some of his insights into how to produce a quality video podcast.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

The post E47 – John Cadogan – AutoExpert.com.au appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

In today’s cloud enabled world working remotely, removing yourself from the office, being location independent or whatever you call it has never been cheaper or easier.

In this episode we talk about working remotely. Many small business owners struggle with technology and unchaining themselves from the office but that shouldn’t be the case. In the episode we share some of the cloud tools we use to eliminate the need for a centralised office and run a business grade IT infrastructure without large IT expenses.

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

The post E46 – How to Work Remotely appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

Over the last few years small business has dramatically increased its reliance on technology. Unfortunately, as the reliance on technology has grown exponentially, there has been little or no improvement in the security precautions business owners take to protect their IT infrastructure and the commercially sensitive and valuable information stored on that infrastructure.

In this episode we detail some simple steps you can take to dramatically increase the security of your IT infrastructure, cloud services and online assets. By taking these simple steps you’ll significantly reduce security risks in your IT equipment.

Making $5 million a year unboxing kids toys on Youtube

Excellent Ted talk on computer security and some of the risks you’re exposed to on a daily basis and probably don’t even know it!

Your action list from this episode:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

The post E45 – Security appeared first on The Business Marketing Show.

On this episode we have Fleur Allen from Out of the Box Biz.

Out of the Box Biz is a business community that provides business networking, development and education events for entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners.

Fleur also won the Ontraport Success Award for Most Creativity with Technology. (Ontraport is a marketing automation platform).

Networking, when done in the right way (i.e. you don’t become a business card ninja throwing business cards at people like they’re ninja stars), is a fantastic way to build and grow your business.

In this episode we talk about Out of the Box Biz, business networking and Ontraport.

Links from this episode:

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On this episode we have John Bellamy from Heart Centered Money Makers

Through Heart Centered Money Makers John helps conscious entrepreneurs build, grow and systemise their businesses so they can focus on what they do best.

John is also a LinkedIn magician and regularly hosts workshops and events based around leveraging LinkedIn in a sales and marketing perspective. He gives us the low down on how to leverage LinkedIn to connect with prospects on customers on the platform and the difference between the free version of LinkedIn, the premium version and the sales navigator version.

Once you’ve listened to this episode make sure you check out John’s LinkedIn cheat sheet at linkthority.com

Links from this episode:

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On this episode of The Business Marketing Show we talk Turkeys, Jobs and Apprenticeships with Taylor Pearson who is the author of the new book The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom without the 9-5

This book is a must read for any business owner and really frames up how the world has changed and how business has changed over the last 5-10 years, what is means and what to do about it.

There’s a whole bunch of applicable stuff in the book e for any business owner (don’t discount the book because of the title like I did!) and the book comes with a whole bunch of additional online resources for both business owners and employees looking to break free of the 9-5.

We cover a range of topics including:

Links from this episode:

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