The Small Business Marketing Secret named SAM

Here’s a cool little article I had from way back in 2002 about Joint Venturing.

Now  those of you that have heard my seminars or courses Know about how I doubled two businesses at the same time with Strategic Alliance Marketing (SAM) or Joint Ventures. I wrote this to help a friend understand the concept a little better… here you go, hope you enjoy it:

When things go together, they’re said to be complimentary. An example of two items that might go together are CD players and CD’s. If you’re in the market for one of these two items, you might be in the market for the other.

You may be able to increase your business’ marketing efforts by combining the marketing of one of your products or services with the marketing of some other company’s  products or services.

They can take any one of these forms (we’ll discuss them below).

#1 External joint venture marketing. You combine your marketing with that of another business that sells a product or service that compliments your own. You both benefit from the exposure and your customers will be looking to this other business for its complimentary offering. Likewise, the other business’ customers will look to you for their complimentary product or service. You both access each other’s customer database. An example would be a travel agency and a luggage shop that could work together.

#2 Internal joint venture marketing.

You probably offer complimentary products within your own business. If this is the case, you need to market this so potential customers will be aware that your business offers certain products or services that compliment each other. This encourages one-stop shopping and also allows your business to sell one product or service on the back of the other. An example is “You Haul It Yourself” trailer rental that also sells packing boxes.

I’ve actually seen one business that sells a course on how to write successful marketing campaigns. The majority of their customers never find out that in addition to selling that course, they do consulting and write marketing campaigns themselves. They don’t do an effective job of letting their customer base know that. Those things naturally go hand-in-hand.

Another kind of internal joint venture marketing would be a combined location or common business. You can have businesses that share a common location such as a mall or a strip mall shopping center. They can market their businesses as complimentary to each other. This can take a number of forms, but the most popular is sharing the media cost. An example would be a strip mall with a number of home improvement products or services.

You want to take advantage of this either by phone or by sending the other business a letter.

You might say, “Dear Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner. Our company specializes in (or sells) _______. We have discovered a logical tie into your business or customer base in that it _______. We have created a system for dramatically increasing your profits without risk, investment or even effort on your part. You can do a trial close where you say, ‘Mr. or Mrs., let me ask if you could generate sufficient profits to _____, would that interest you?’

The process is relatively simple. First, we create a joint marketing plan together to consist of either (choose 1 or 2 of the following) a letter of endorsement from you, a telemarketing campaign, a seminar, workshop, sales presentation, display or design a customer/client newsletter, or a display ad. We will share the profits on a 50/50 basis, 25/75 basis, etc.”

Why Write A Book to market your business? Here’s 10 Great Reasons

There are plenty of reasons to write a book, especially if you are a business owner or sales professional. Here’s a brief list of 10 reasons why you should write a book sooner rather than later.

1. People will visit your web site for additional valuable information, and in this Internet age Traffic to a website is huge, but prequalified traffic is even better. They’ve read your book, you now have credibility and the website is now surfed with a set of eyeballs that is there for more information, not to glance at it and leave in the first 2.8 seconds like most websites
2. As I just mentioned in point number 1, your credibility goes through the roof.
3. You will become known as an expert on the subject of the book, which of course the media loves and NEEDS experts to fill up the incredible amount of information they produce every day.
4. You become a celebrity when you are an author. Ever hear the following, “Next on Oprah, the author of…”, or “Next on Larry King, The author of…”, or “In our next segment we’re going to talk to the author of a book called…”. That’s right, an author is considered talk show worthy, turning you into a celebrity.
5. Offer your book as a bonus for purchasing one of your products or services. Bonuses motivate to purchase sometimes, and you have additional opportunities to sell through the book and gain repeat business.
6. Gain new leads by having people sign up on your website and give their contact information before they can download your book in a digital format
7. Make money selling additional products that branch off from the book, like CDs, seminars, Coaching, etc.
8. You’ll gain valuable referrals from people telling others about your book
9. Gain free publicity for your business sending press releases announcing your new book.
10. Dominate every Networking event and mixer just by saying you’re the author of…and watch how many people want to talk to you with a new found level of respect and admiration.

Now the difficult thing for entrepreneurs around the world is that we are often impatient and distracted with the day to day operations involved with running our company. So finding the time to do this isn’t as easy as you’d like it to be.

That’s exactly why freelance writers, ghostwriters, and similar services have popped up in recent years, to help us get that book out of our heads and finally into print. When that happens and the book is done business owners often proclaim, “Why didn’t I do this earlier? This is huge for my business.”

Mentors and Coaches and Gurus, Oh My!

Chapter 4: Mentors and Coaches and Gurus, Oh My!

Get One!

End of Chapter.

Okay, on to Chapter 5…What?  That’s all you really need to know isn’t it? You Impatient Entrepreneurs don’t want to read another 3 – 4 pages talking about Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan having coaches do you? You don’t really want to hear some sappy story of how a mentor in my life stopped me from running down a path of self-destruction?

Ssshhheeeessshhh! Are you serious? Listen up Impatient Entrepreneurs, I apologize but the publisher is going to force me to write more than “Get One!” in this chapter, sooooo….uhmm…where do I start?

Oh I got it…A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…WHAT NOW!?!?

Great, somebody named Spielberg just called and said I can’t tell you all about a favorite movie of my kids, Star Wars. Man, you got Darth Sidious and Obi-Wan mentoring the same person. Good and Dark side mentors all in one series of movies!

Well if I can’t do that let me briefly tell you about one mentor of mine and how he is responsible in part for this book and me still being alive to write it. His name was Pastor Jeff Brahim, a business man, a tough ghetto-raised street-fighter, and a man of God.

By the time I got to be 26 years old, I had way too many street fights with money being bet on me to afford to pay for my living expenses in college (for the women in the audience that is a testosterone-filled confidence booster, in other words I was pretty confident in myself). I had a successful personal training business, ran a martial arts school, worked with 10 different chiropractors establishing their exercise therapy programs and was doing massage therapy on the side. I’d been on ESPN with one of my businesses, was a regular guest on a large radio talk show, and was recruited by a financial consulting company to teach seminars to the public. I worked five straight 16 hour days every week and then went out to party until 2 in the morning 6 nights a week.

I was around people all but 3-4 hours a day…but I was one of the loneliest people in the world! I was so depressed that I daily wondered if life was worth living. I found myself crying one lonely Saturday night saying to myself, “This can’t be all there is to life!” There had to be more to life. I had money, a great car, friends, health, and…. an issue with my family that was driving me deeper into depression.

You see I went out every night to drink, and I mean drink a lot! Young, single, in shape, decent looking, and with an out-going personality you’d think a guy in his 20’s would be scoping out the smorgasbord of women at the nightclubs, right? Well, if that’s what you said you’re right, but only partially right. You see, I also lived with an incredible amount of physical pain and was the only listening ear my emotionally distraught parents would talk to (translated vent to). They started unloading 30 years of anger about each other and life on me. I worked so hard to avoid free time. Then I felt guilty so I killed myself to go spend as much time as I could with them.

My body reeled from being in so much pain from years of fighting with no equipment, stress, and some genetic deficiency that I often could barely breathe. That discipline thing kept me going. I drank up to a fifth of whiskey every couple of nights to deaden the emotional and physical pain I felt. Yet, every morning I’d crawl out of bed to my business because that’s what I was supposed to do.

All the time thinking, “Is this all there is to life?”

I mentioned that financial consulting company a couple of paragraphs ago. Seemed like a weird thing to through into my life didn’t it? Well, that’s where I met Pastor Jeff. He was part motivational speaker, part business genius, and part Bible study leader. As for me I was a dyslexic agnostic…I always wondered if there was a DOG?…some of you got that joke, congratulations. Now explain it to the people around you thinking the editor let a typo get through!

Seriously, I hated that Bible crap and those whiney Christians. But this dude was different! He had a street hardened toughness that I had only seen in my dad. Yet he had this peaceful calm about him with a business sense that almost hypnotically pulled me to his classroom in our office complex. He taught business with a little Bible mixed in so I could at least listen to that. Heck, I thought it was cool that I discovered that there was a Book in the Bible that had my name on it, James!

Pastor Jeff looked at my hands, still scarred from an incident at a bar several nights before and just started telling me about his childhood. It was like talking to a millionaire, highly educated version of my dad (an awesome man that had to drop out of school in the 8^th grade to support his family and worked in steel mills most of his life). Jeff won me over with stories of business savvy and street smarts combined. He told me how to improve my business and helped me start to pursue my passion to teach marketing and sales beyond the walls of the financial consulting company.

Most of all, Jeff saw in me what nobody else had a clue even existed. He saw that I was hiding a death wish behind my hard-ass exterior. He knew how not to challenge me or confront me. He knew how to get me to focus on my passions and gifts of teaching complex concepts and making them simple to understand and use.

After 9 months of him mentoring me in a very casual manor and teaching in our marketing meetings I discovered just how powerful that “Bible Stuff “was in the world of business, dealing with family, and coping with life in general.  He never pushed anything on me. I just kept asking about it. Something inside of me was telling me that maybe there is a purpose for my life. Maybe, just maybe, I could be happy without drinking every night or trying to work myself to death.

I started going to lunch with Jeff to talk about business and The Bible, then I visited his church. As you may have guessed, I accepted Jesus as my Lord, but that’s not why I’m writing this right now. It’s all about that mentoring relationship that Pastor Jeff gave me that stopped a life from being terminated from a stupid chain of decisions on my part. Jeff mentored me way back in 1992 and 1993. He passed away soon after our time together.

As I write this chapter my eyes have filled with tears numerous times. I think of this book being written as a way for me to honor my mentor. Jeff was a mentor that gave me hours of his time to help me grow as a man, and without saying a word got me to stop drinking. He got me focused on developing my other areas of interest and to start studying sales, marketing and business leadership. He taught me how to communicate with love and wisdom.

I’m writing this today in large part due to Pastor Jeff Brahim seeing in me what nobody else saw and then taking the time to nurture my strengths and strangle my bad decision-making. So if this book has any impact on your life you can thank the late, great Jeff Brahim.

This chapter is about coaches and mentors. We should all look to be mentored, but just as important you should look to be a mentor too. As a father of 3 of the world’s most incredible kids, I now know just how important my time with them is. I know how much I can shape their future and give them the love they need to have a solid emotional grounding in their lives that I never had.

A Mastermind buddy of mine recently asked me to join him as a founding partner and a faculty member of a big-hearted, charity minded business called Mentor’s Club. Dr. Reggie Cochran is the Dean of Faculty for Mentor’s Club and has been both a friend and a coach for me. Like Jeff, Reggie has the patience of a Saint and the wisdom of the much sought after guru at the top of the mountain. He helps my overly Impatient Entrepreneurial Brain to settle down and to focus by asking all the right questions.

He also keeps, politely, kicking me in the behind to get me moving on any one of my 147 different ideas of the day. So the action step for this chapter can be 2 steps. One is find a mentor by looking above you in the company or in your profession. Look for the opportunity to take a potential mentor out to lunch. Big Tip: Don’t jump down their throat with questions. Develop a relationship first. Start by asking around within your own personal network. Take it slow but never give up.

The second way to gain a mentoring or coaching relationship is to hire one. Honestly this is the only way I’ve had a mentor in my life since Pastor Jeff. I pay for it and it’s worth a thousand time what I’ve invested.

This is going to be the fast track approach to your success. Hire the “Guru” in your industry that seems to fit your personality or style. If you can afford personalized coaching do that. If group coaching makes more sense financially go that way. Just don’t put off what could be the “one little step” that could be the difference between staying where you are in life and living your dream life.

Big Tip #2: Go to www.TheHowToClub.com and get yourself involved there. This is a great organization that I volunteer literally thousands of dollars of my best material and time to help Chuck Norris and Shakira with their charity work. For about $1/day you get access to dozens of professional coaches and mentors and tens of thousands of dollars in courses ranging from martial arts to marketing and from lawn care to language skills.

As I write this part of the book, I’m also writing a few new courses to be added to TheHowToClub.com. I was just on the phone with Edie Rather, the internationally known speaker and sales trainer. She has asked me to collaborate with her on 2 of the most in demand subjects of the century; copywriting and the Internet.

Free Reports for Lead Generation: How to write one In 60 Minutes Or Less.

Free reports are big on the Internet. It’s a bandwagon that many Internet marketers are jumping on simply because it works.

People jump on the “Information Super Highway” that is the Internet because they want and/or need information about all kinds of things. People seek out free reports about subjects that will make them feel better, look better, become more proficient, or solve a problem for them. Reports can take many forms but no matter the form, a report is simply a writing that provides information about a specific subject.

Writing a report doesn’t have to be a time consuming task. A short report can be written in as little as one hour or less provided the writer has access to sufficient information on the subject and since the Internet really is the “Information Super Highway” information on almost any subject is readily available. First, let’s discuss writing a free report from ‘scratch’.

The first thing that is required for a report is, of course, a topic.

The topic that you choose to write a report on should be one that is directly related to the topic of your website or of your free membership site. The people that you will give your free report to must be interested in getting the information that will be in the report.

Choose a general subject first and then narrow the general subject down to a specific point or two. In order to choose a great topic, you can listen to the members of your own free website or visit blogs and forums that relate to the products and services that you sell.

Once you have settled on a topic for your free report, the next step is to gather information that is related to that topic.

This is a very easily accomplished task. Use your favorite search engine and plug in key words to find information about your topic. Usually the problem is too much information rather than not enough. You are going to have to sift through and consolidate information but if you have narrowed your topic down far enough, it won’t be all that difficult.

The next step is to write an outline for your report.

You need organization and form. An outline supplies both. If you are trying to write a report within one hour, the best thing is to keep your main points to only three. Three well-discussed points are better than a half dozen that are only briefly touched upon. Once you have organized your research and written an outline, it will take you less than half an hour to type up a five or six page report.

The second way to produce a free report in under an hour is to download one that is already written from a PLR (Private Label Rights) site. There are many such sites that are available on the Internet. You will have to be a member of a PLR site to download reports from the site. Memberships in these sites are usually rather inexpensive and they provide you access to a lot of material that is almost ready for you to use.

You will still need to do a lot of rewriting on the reports that you download and if you download articles that you plan to consolidate into a report, you will need to make a good outline of your report so that the information will be presented in a logical sequence.

You can either download a report from a PLR site or several articles that contain the information that you want to include in your free report and combine the articles to make one longer report. All material that is downloaded from PLR sites should have at least some rewrite done before you use it on your own site, anyway.

Rewriting is easily and quickly done. There is even software that will accomplish part of the rewriting task for you but if you use this software, be sure that you carefully read it to check for grammatical errors and to make certain that the finished product actually makes sense.

Yet another way to create a report in an hour or less is to download articles from free content sites and then combine and rewrite the information that is in them. The articles that are on free sites must be rewritten extensively.

The purpose that the authors of those articles had for placing them on sites for free use is to get credit for having written them. These articles can be used as reference but they may not be reproduced word for word.

A word to the wise: Always check the accuracy of statistics or facts that are included in articles downloaded from free sites. You can use the basic ideas of these articles as well as the facts that are contained in them but you must NOT reproduce them without giving credit to the author… that is plagiarism and it is a crime.

Again… consolidating articles into a report requires that you make a good outline before you begin.

There is one more way that you can achieve getting a free report produced in an hour or less but in this case you won’t be the one doing the writing. You can hire yourself a good ghostwriter to write your free report for you. All you will need to do is to provide this ghostwriter with the subject and the material that you wish to have included in the report… not the actual material but the subject matter.

There are many other ghostwriters that are available on the internet who are more than capable of producing any kind of report that you want.

The only thing you have to do after you order a report is, when you receive it, you read it and then you pay the ghostwriter. The report then belongs to you. You can list yourself as the author and do whatever you choose to do with it.

Becoming a Celebrity Author in 97 Days?!?

O.K., I had several other posts up and a series of training videos I was making available for free, but the Internet and Computer demons have somehow destroyed 20+ hours of work. So I’m now going to be redoing some serious marketing training.

You are a member of the update emails right? If you are you know I haven’t sent too much out recently or updated this training area too often.

Here’s why…I just wrote and I’m now editing 3 books and I’ve created a service that every attendee at every one of my seminars has requested. You all know I Love Growing Your Sales and Your Business through the idea of You writing a book and articles…But Time and Fear keep us Impatient Entrepreneurs from getting to the task.

Yes writing a book gives you:

• Instant credibility,
• Turns you into the media darling by showing
• You are the EXPERT in your industry,
• Opens up countless additional income streams and opportunities,
• Allows you to increase speaking and consulting fees, and
• Elevates you to celebrity status which could get you on Oprah, Glenn Beck, or Donnie Deutsch, but…

We never get to it do we?

Problem solved, actually 2 problems. Visit www.IWriteYouProfit.com and download your free course on how to get your book done AND all of the marketing done to launch your book past 98% of all authors in the world. This is me, Jim Chianese, managing this whole process. It combine, at the highest level of participation:

• My Mastermind Groups,
• Done for You Marketing,
• Article marketing,
• Book writing help,
• Ghost writing,
• Access to publishers,
• Auto-responder messages for you to automate your marketing
• Customized Testimonials and reviews for your book
• Press release writing
• Distribution of press releases
• Media Kit development
• National Media contacts (actually contacted for you)
• Local bookstore Secrets
• Personal Coaching on turning the book into at least 5 other income streams
• One-on-One training as to how to market your book (427 strategies)  beyond what the service does for you
• Insider secrets about how to get to bestseller status
• Interview questions written for you to help the media interview you
• and much more…

This is a huge undertaking by my team and we can only take on 10 clients in any 30 day period, so register now, review the education first, then decide if you are ready for a serious leap in Income and Exposure for your business. If you are, contact me through the contact channels in the free course to be put into Our “Becoming a Celebrity Author in 97 Days Program”.

register for your free course and for details about the program at:

www.IWriteYouProfit.com

How NOT To Write Great (Even Decent) SEO Headlines…a Follow-up

Yesterday’s post rambled on a little, so let me summarize today about How Not to write a great SEO headline.

As an Impatient Entrepreneur you just need to focus on a few points of what NOT to do:

• Ignore the surfer’s mind, what you should do write the headline just like you’d type into the search engine’s search bar.

• Write like a sales letter copywriter, write like a person searching the Internet. Sometimes the descriptive, eye-catching headline that work for direct mail won’t work on your favorite search engine.
• Give up, that’s right you should give up. Keep experimenting with SEO articles and headlines. Honestly when i played around with articles for my real estate clients I got huge results in 30 days or less,but not withour failing 8 or 9 out of 10 tries!

There you go my beloved Impatient Entrepreneurs, the version I should have wrote yesterday, but I had 2 other hidden experiments buried in that long blog post…I’ll tell you later if they work.

How NOT To Write Great SEO Headlines by Ignoring the Search Engine Surfer

Today I am responding in a completely experimental fashion to a post put up by Dean Hunt. I’m going to attempt to write stupid things (shouldn’t be too hard for a guy with the I.Q. of an ice cube) that people don’t think of when trying to create a Great SEO Headline. DeanHunt.com went on to show his readers a simple trick that can help you create perfect SEO based headlines for your articles, blogs and publications.

Anyway, I read his headline before I read the post, and wrote my version of the headline, the negative version. I read the post next and decided what the heck, I’m going to try it and see if any Google spiders like me as much as Dean. So if you found this post on the first page of Google contact me by posting to the blog, and Maybe Dean can be persuaded to be Interviewed by me for a Social SEO course I’m putting together.

Dean wrote about fishing, I’m going to write about martial arts to start off: When I was younger, I used to fight a lot with my martial arts classes being very street-defense oriented. One of the skills that great martial artists seemed to possess was the ability to know what their opponent was going to do almost before their opponent even threw a kick or a punch. I was about 19 years old before I started “feeling” almost like I was inside the minds of my opponent…so I started thinking how can I do that with sales and marketing, and then Mr. Dean Hunt pops off a little blog post about Great SEO headlines and uses fishing as his analogy and how he was able to transfer this technique to the Internet.

Okay he’s the guy I’m looking to for Social Media Marketing and he wrote a great analogy that sparked the martial arts idea for me…Hey Dean is that enough Butt Kissing for now?

Okay on with the experiment

Here is what Not to do when trying to write great SEO headlines:

1) Forget the central part of your message, who needs a core message? You just go ahead and write about nothing, it worked for Jerry Seinfeld didn’t it? Write away with no focused message.

2) Ignore the Google search surfer who is looking for what you sell or offer. Why would you want a target market to see your website? You don’t really want to sell anything do you? If you’re like me I do too much offline work, writing books and articles for others to succeed, why would I want to succeed too?

Alright, I’m going to quote DeanHunt.com right now to get done writing faster…Dean Says, “Let’s presume we are writing about SEO headlines. As an author, I may be tempted to create a headline like “Killer SEO Headlines”. (I, Jim Chianese, being a copywriter swear that I think like that, because I think in great sales letter headlines not great SEO headlines. I promise to start paying attention to SEO style headlines instead. Amen)

Dean goes on to write, “But who is going to type that into Google?”

So I could be more specific and write: “How You Can Write Great SEO Headlines”

Sounds like a decent headline… right?… wrong!

You see, nobody is going to go to Google and write in second person. Remember, you need to get inside their mind, what would they write?

They would put the focus on themselves, e.g “How Can I Write Great SEO Headlines“.

Notice how I used “I” instead of “you”. Hey, Jim Chianese writing now, again sales letter mentality tells you to write the word “you” not “I”, until I read that I never really thought about it from the SEO point of view.

Okay back to Dean, “A safer bet is to simply be non-specific: “How To Write Great SEO Headlines”. In this example I used “to” instead of “I” or “You”.

Now I said this article was on what NOT to do to write SEO headlines, but I can’t help but teach so I let Dean teach the good stuff, and I’ll continue to play the mad scientist and experiment with this.

Conclusions? Want good Google.com rankings; don’t ignore the brains of the surfers. Type what you’d type in if you were searching and what you’d put into the search bar. Forget the core message if you don’t want Google to put you on their first page.

Okay it is now 5:01 P.M on April 22, 2008 here in Las Vegas, I’m going to post this and see what, if anything happens by going negative. And yes I’ll email Dean to make sure he sees this…

Oh yea, and to show proper respect visit www.DeanHunt.com

You’ll read about this guy in my books and courses, but if you know me I’m taking on Mastermind Applications with People that want to Author a book to Skyrocket their Incomes and Lifestyles. My site that I just started putting up yesterday is located at www.IWriteYouProfit.com

Which of course means my Impatient Entrepreneur’s mind will get distracted by the fact that I just wrote/sent to print 4 books in one month!

Why? To make the point that it can be done…and I want to help others do the same. So I’ve got to get the Free course together, the sales letter, the videos, and I’m in discussions with Publishers about special guarantees for the clients that come on board with my team.

Plus, I’m taking a week off to go to Michael Gerber’s In The Dreaming Room this weekend and doing the family thing next week.

So let’s see how this little experiment goes and I promise to start posting more soon, get on my email list and you’ll get even more education and research results.

What the heck was my point? My A.D…. something kicked in……………..

The Website is All About You, The Small Business Owner

This is a site built around helping some of the small business owners that are dedicated to expanding their business, but not in a position to join one of the Monster MasterMind Groups or Mentoring Programs.

The Cutting Edge Strategic Alliance is a Master-Mind Group that started with Jim Chianese back in the 1990’s. We will moderate this site and negotiate with Joint Venture partners and future clients for Jim’s company, Cutting Edge Consulting, Inc.

Please register on this blog and post often, ask questions, and give other small business owners your support.

We reserve the right to edit all posts. We will not allow profanity or negative comments that don’t positively support what we are trying to do…which again is to bring education to small business owners to help them grow.

May God Bless You and Your Success.

Jim Chianese and The Cutting Edge Consulting Team

Does Your Business Have an Unique Selling Advantage?

Unique Selling Advantage, or USA for short, is the most commonly missed opportunity for any business (Big or Small).

It is also the most deceptive set of simple words, often over-simplified by some, that will have the greatest impact on your attraction of new paying clients or customers. The Unique Selling Advantage can also keep you on top of the minds of clients or keep clients coming back for more business with you,

This page will dive in deep to crafting a great USA and then just as important, Implementing it! Easily a full 1/2 day workshop for us master minders, this is not something to be taken lightly or rushed through.

Stay tuned and submit YOUR USA.