Today's Growth Classics, Growing Business Today, Marketing your business for growth and success

This whole week is dedicated to one of my favorite subjects, the subject of competition. We have podcasts roll out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I am splitting up my take on competition into three pieces because there are three different types of competition. I am going to shed some light on two areas of competition that a lot of people who I have bumped into don’t give any thought to, don’t spend any time on, and yet one of the two, the one I am going to cover today, I think is possibly the biggest growth killer in business today.

Here’s the thing, both prepaid advertising and post pay are excellent methods of advertising. There is a difference, and it sounds somewhat sarcastic is one of them you prepay into a platform, a system, if you will, and then you hope and pray it works. If you hit the right vein in certain prepaid advertising, whether it be radio, billboards, magazine ad, paper, click, some of them are just truly explosive. Again, we used to do a ton of prepaid advertising. For the most part, to a degree, they’re cost effective. They’re not very scalable in most cases, unless it’s a national situation, but they work. However, post pay advertising, as you’ll see here at least in our space, in our case, as this is a case study of our company … Post pay advertising was explosive. Incredibly scalable where the others, as you’ll see in a second, we’re not. Some forms of post pay advertising would be using affiliates, commission only sales reps, JV partnerships, paying out referral bonuses if people sent us business. There’s a very big difference between prepaid and postpaid.

Hey everyone, Ken Courtright here from Today’s Growth Growing Business Today, this is Episode 18. We are calling this one Model Success Leverage Google. Once again, Episode 18, Model Success Leverage Google. This is our first request podcast. The point of this episode is to model success, and the reason I came up with this episode is on some of the podcasts, I’ll leave my email, which is [email protected] if anyone has any questions or comments, and I had a number of people asking if I would go deeper on what is by far our most popular download which is called, How Google Ranks. That one is so popular actually that I think it went a little viral and caused us to move up the charts in new and newsworthy, for general business, and then business we hit row 1. I don’t know exactly how that works. We have yet to mail our list or do anything with these podcasts, it’s just pure viral, and it’s definitely being heard worldwide, which is kind of cool.

I have been looking forward to this podcast for some time. I was going to do it early on in the podcast, one of my first few episodes, but I’ve been adding to it and I wanted to save it until I thought it was just right on the money. I’m going to jump right in. This is titled Copy Creates Cash and I’m speaking of copywriting. Another reason that I wanted to save this podcast until about episode 15 to 20, somewhere in there, was this one’s emotional, this is by far the top 5 favorite things I like talking about.

This week is case study week, we have covered, on Monday, we covered a product based case study. This past Wednesday we covered a service based case study, and then today I’m going to kind of do a hybrid, if you will, and that is I’m going to do more of a generalization of two case studies that can overlap so many different areas. I’m going to kind of keep this one loose and free flowing. We’re going to do two smaller case studies in one podcast, and hoping you heard the prior two podcasts, so this will make some sense, because I’m not going to put the framework around it.

This week we’re dedicated to case studies. I explained on Monday’s podcast. I broke apart Growing Business Today, talked a little bit about growing, how when you’re talking strictly business you’ve got to grow some revenues. Our last dozen or so podcasts were strictly dedicated to growth.
 Then I talked a little bit about the word business, about it centers around the 4 M’s and how that’s switching to, at least in my opinion, the anchors are more content and relationships as we’re seeing evidence of in the marketplace. Then I talked about the word today, and how things are changing so quickly on how we market our businesses. What I wanted to do is this whole week is dedicated to case studies. These case studies are very apropos because I’ve got product based case studies, I’ve got service based case studies.
 I’m going to hit case studies from different angles this week so that hopefully, in each of these podcasts there’s just one or two little nuggets that you’re hearing, that myself or our company is putting into play growing other businesses. Hopefully you can use a nugget or two, and use these in your own, household or your business. We’re going to jump right into the second case study. Again, same place. I was out in Vermont, I was on a panel, and people were walking up to a microphone and we had set this up where people would walk up to the microphone, state their name, their current business, and then they would say, “And my current business challenge is.” Then based on what they say, we would choose who on the panel is best suited to answer that. With the numbers of people on the panel, and how many people were coming to the microphone, I had plenty of runs at helping folks out.

Welcome back to “Today’s Growth Growing Business Today.” This is Ken Courtright, hosting a podcast that covers a few different dynamics of growing business today. I actually want to dig into the tagline of the podcast, growing business today, and talk for a minute about those three words. Growing, if you’ve heard any of our podcasts so far, you’ll know that we are all about growth. Company name is “Today’s Growth Consultant,” we’ve been growth consulting firm for, we’re now in our 24th year.

I wanted to pick up right where we left off, episode 12. This is episode 13. This episode, we’re going to title with something about just consistent growth, but I’m going to pick up literally right where we left off. Episode 12 was centered around consistent great content. I went so far as to say that content is literal currency. There’s no question that it is. I know there’s people out there that have found themselves asking, “How can I raise my credibility? How can I raise my prices for what I charge? How can I establish myself as an authority?” The reason they’re asking themselves these questions is they know if they can raise their authority they can command more for whatever they’re doing, whether it’s how much they charge for their service to more respect from a stage publisher, different things like that. What I wanted to do on this episode is something different. Instead of me just talking, if you will, or teaching, I wanted to just simply deliver case studies showing the results of what good content does.

Pretty excited about today’s topic actually. This is a topic I can pretty comfortably say I know fairly well as this is the centerpiece of why our 700 different revenue generating sites consistently grow. This episode, episode 12 is going to be centered around content, and how exactly can we make content make us money? How can we write it? How can we display it? How can we use it and why is content so important?
 Honestly I’m just going to jump right in. This episode is sponsored by Secret Knock, our great friends Greg, Allan and Reed over at Secret Knock throwing us a bone here, helping us get these podcasts up and running and launched so thanks to them. Let’s get started. A couple of questions here.

This podcast is going to cover some of the nuggets that we used to both acquire clients. Regular, traditional growth consulting clients as well as some website partners that wanted to partner up with us on some web projects. Most importantly, how do we grow their business? How do we grow the websites? What exactly are we doing? I started strategizing what would I say if I were put on a stage, are the key components or nuggets in that vein if you will. I came up with about 20, I’m going to cover a handful of them right now. These are in no particular order as a matter of fact I like this one. It’s a Friday morning, I’m going to ramble a little bit but, yeah let’s basically get started.