Clickstarter

I sometimes think I’ve strutted through life like an overconfident idiot.

Way too many people have told me I’m crazy. Some of my business ideas gave them excellent grounds for that.

But the confidence to take risks is odd, because I’m also rather socially awkward and easily intimidated.

But when I really want to do something, I become convinced I can pull it off.

The evidence tends to arrive later, if it ever shows up at all.

When I look at people who followed every business consultant’s or accountant's spreadsheet, our destinations seem surprisingly similar.

Their businesses grew. Mine grew.

We both have staff and lawyers.

I'll admit that I do have more failures behind me and far fewer LandCruisers in the front yard, though.

That hardly proves my approach was better. Some of my lessons were expensive and entirely avoidable. But I got to try things I genuinely wanted to do.

And for me, that counts for something.

And I still don’t understand why I’d need off-road capability to get to Coles since that's about all that those LandCruisers seem to be doing.

I think I need a little break from steamed milk. It's not been sitting nicely and I'm starting to not enjoy coffee from cafes.

So I'll be changing over to long blacks with milk on the side. I tried it on Sunday in Perth and it didn't feel quite so icky inside.

So that's what I'll be ordering on Friday in Brisbane instead of my standard large flat white. I usually will go through at least two of those in a Click over Coffee event, so it's a LOT of texturised milk sitting inside my already ample belly.

There's a few others coming along already, so there's room for more at Navy & Oak in Fortitude Valley. It's about an 8 minute walk from the station or you can park for two hours free outside the cafe.

If you're in town, I'd love to see you face.
I promise to bring mine.

Book here: https://t.ly/Y9s2I

The marketing advice that advisors in this country have given to one-person businesses is a job description.

Not a list of tasks for a person. I'm talking a complete job description for a full-time marketing TEAM.

Record videos. Edit them. Write website pages. Monitor Facebook groups. Comment across platforms. Attend networking events. Speak at conferences. Design flyers.

Then send ten cold emails a day.

Where are these consultants coming from?

I'll tell you where they're NOT coming from. Small business. Or any business at all.

I can't see where this fits in the time any business owner has when they're doing the work that the business is meant to be doing.

Each recommendation arrives separately. Usually from someone whose business revolves around that particular activity. Or from a YouTube video. Or some LinkedIn bro. Or a Insta marketing "girlie." The video bro recommends video. The networking person recommends networking. The Instagram girlie recommends Instagram.

What about the combined bill here? Especially the hours. No one of these things is going ot move the needle on its own, so where do the hours come from to do all the things?

So here's what I'd suggest instead for a local service business.

𝗕𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝟯𝟵 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀. Three a week across 13 weeks. One protected session. Use info and photos the business already has. Ten customer questions answered. Ten explanations of the work. Ten pieces of evidence. Nine booking posts. Schedule them. Walk away for two years.

Yes. Two years. No one is following your Facebook business page posts that closely to know you repeated a post from three months ago. No one cares.

𝗙𝗶𝘅 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲. Can a stranger tell what you sell, where you operate and how to make contact? If not, fix that before making more pages. And get rid of the contact form. Give them an email address, for f&%k's sake.

𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁 $𝟱 𝗮 𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗮. One clear service. Your town or city. Easy path to enquiry. No funnels. No pretend scarcity. People see through that s**t these days.

Then track what actually lands in your inbox or your bank account.

Voila. Your new digital marketing strategy. Get someone on a government subsidised program to help you out.

You're a small business. Not a corporation. Get smart and stop being led into marketing madness by bros and girlies who have no idea what it is that you even do. And generally don't care either.

I’d happily trade a few lessons on LinkedIn hooks for one on leaving women alone.

I'm sure you can picture the scene.

A woman posts about her promotion. A man sends a connection request, follows it with a compliment about her appearance, then sends another message when she doesn’t reply. Something like, "Did I offend you?"

Yes, Keith, you did. And you're a creep.

It’s hypothetical. But I reckon a few women I'm connected to on here have an eerily similar situation that they can bring out from their own inboxes.

If I knew about that exchange, I’d never to refer a client to him. In fact, I'd warn people about him. Which probably makes me a "beta" to a bunch of guys like that. I'm ok with that label. Because it means nothing coming from a creep.

My referral puts my judgement on the line too. I need confidence that the person I recommend understands professional boundaries, especially when nobody else is watching.

That’s why I’d like social media training for business owners and professionals to spend more time on how we behave - not just what we post.

Anyone can learn to write a decent hook in an afternoon. Knowing when to leave someone alone? That is clearly something that some people struggle with.

I’d start with one exercise during the training.

Write down what someone has actually agreed to by accepting my connection request.

A professional connection. Room for relevant conversation.

I wouldn’t put comments about their body, looks or clothing on that list. I wouldn’t put an obligation to reply there either.

And how, if you receive silence, it's definitely best to just stop right there. You can survive an unanswered message. I believe in you.

I also think that running a business is one of the best paths to freedom. But that comes with a big cup of steaming responsibility for the impression I leave in someone’s inbox.

I’d take the training myself. Because I have my moments in the comments too.

So while we're congratulating ourselves on banning kids from social media, maybe it's time we started looking at fixing the problems with adults on social media next.

There's no feeling quite like "sold out."

It's better than likes, shares, follows or comments.

It's better than "social proof."

It's money in the bank. It's validation. It's dopamine firing for all the right reasons.

So when I show up in a couple of weeks time in Helensvale on the Gold Coast, I'll have a (hopefully) full room of people who booked their spots in my workshops on AI and Content Creation workshops for the Digital Solutions program.

It's also validation that ads on Meta still have their place, since that's the only place where I promoted them. Total spend? $78 to sell out two workshops over two weeks out from the date of the events.

Say what you will about Meta, but their ads platform is still the best bang for my buck.

My advice: earn the open before blaming the subject line.

I didn’t deserve a place in anyone’s Saturday morning at all. Who does, really?

Three months into my newsletter, I’d grown from 150 subscribers to about 200. Around 30 people opened it each week.

I was sharing lessons I was learning on the fly which was all very fascinating to me, but of questionable use to someone trying to run a business.

I hadn’t earned their attention at that early stage. Most people in my town didn’t even know me, and I hadn’t done enough useful work in front of those who did to be worthy of an inbox invasion each week.

By year three, after more than 150 editions, I had around 10,000 subscribers and an open rate above 70%.

I needed those reps to make something people would miss if it didn’t arrive. And that took time. Years of it.

That’s the standard I’d use before sending another newsletter - and it's the question you maybe shoudl ask first as well: would someone miss the help this email gives them?

For nearly 18,000 people now, I had to become useful enough to earn that appointment with them each week.

Apparently, being fascinated with myself wasn’t sufficient. Who'd have guessed?

So when it comes down to considering whether to put together a newsletter attached to your business, ask yourself... who acutally cares about what you're sending them? What's in it for them? And have you earned a place in their inbox?

I still remember what it was like on November 30, 2022 when I used a VPN to get into the first version of ChatGPT.

I thought it was a little like magic.

I had used tools like Jasper, Copy.AI and Writesonic and while they were fun to play with, they were pretty awful at producing anything that felt like more than a haiku or a set of dot points. So this was different.

But pretty quickly all the marketers and MLM peddlers were using it and by mid 2024 the internet was overrun with AI-generated text that we all began to recognise.

And while the tools got better, the people haven't. My little experiment with Pangram couple of weeks ago showed me that.

So my first workshop of NT October Business Month on the first of the month is all about getting your AI to sound more like you in two important ways. One in the tool. One in your ex*****on.

It sold out on the weekend, so I'm moving it to a bigger room an adding another 20 spots. Grab one of them here: https://t.ly/sAGD0

I had never heard of Jurien Bay before I spotted it on Google Maps in June as I looked for places to deliver workshops in regional WA.

But it's roughly 40% of the way back from Geraldton to Perth and seemed like the only other town kinda on the way back that might bring in a few people for the Digital Solutions program. After all, they don't get a lot of programs dropping by there.

And it's got a pink lake that influencers take photos at.

So I was sold.

So I'm heading there next week.

An early morning coffee catch up (a few people have already booked!)
A bit about AI tools for small businesses.
An update on using social media.

It's all free (apart from the $5 for the coffee to make sure they actually turn up!) but otherwise - but I suppose most of you won't be heading to Jurien Bay on the 23rd of this month, but just in case you know someone who is there, I'd appreciate you passing it on to them.

I'd love to meet them.

Oh and send them this link: https://t.ly/G0PwP

I don't want to get into all that 10x growth DM spam them till they buy strategy stuff. It doesn't work for small business.

It works for course creators and LinkedIn coaches (or so they like to tell us when they're selling a course on how to do it.)

This is just 30-minutes on the basics that someone new to LinkedIn for their business would need to know to get started at finding their people, sharing their knowledge and not annoying people into AI slop oblivion.

That's all.

It's free if you have an ABN (and even if you don't I can find a way to get you in!) and on tomorrow. Reg here so you get in and get the resources afterwards: https://t.ly/zo4m4