Aaron Hoos

The Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is a week-long challenge for business owners to focus on a specific aspect of their sales funnel for one week. It’s a fun way to keep you focused on one of the most important parts of your business. A new Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is published every Monday and a wrap-up post is published every Friday.

Long-tail search engine optimization is when you target a keyword that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of traffic. It attracts some traffic but not nearly the amount that the more popular keywords in your category attract.

Identifying a longtail keyword and building an entire marketing campaign around it will help you opportunistically draw in even more business through a keyword that most of your competitors are probably ignoring.

So here’s what to do: Go to Google’s keyword tool and use the big keywords in your industry. Then find a keyword/keyphrase that has considerably less traffic. Say, hundreds of people instead of thousands.

Once you’ve identified that keyword, brainstorm potential blog content and article content optimized for that keyword specifically. That’s all you need to do for this week’s challenge, but be sure to plan to release that content in the next couple of weeks.

This week, I challenged you to revisit your search engine optimization to figure out if you were truly targeting the keywords that your Audience and Leads are searching for.

That’s not to say that you can’t work on other keywords, of course, but you should be putting your focus on the keywords that your Audience and Leads are typing in.

Here’s an example from my own business a few years ago: I determined that my particular target market wanted to sell digital content on their blog. They needed blog content, ebook content, autoresponder content, and sales funnel copy. A lot of my peers were targeting their keywords for “freelance writer” and “freelance writing”. I took a different approach and targeted my keywords to some of the specific needs that my Audience was looking for, and it made a big difference. I didn’t have to compete for the really popular “freelance writing” keyword and I stayed busy with projects from people who found me through other keywords.

Schedule time to revisit your SEO at least once a month.

The Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is a week-long challenge for business owners to focus on a specific aspect of their sales funnel for one week. It’s a fun way to keep you focused on one of the most important parts of your business. A new Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is published every Monday and a wrap-up post is published every Friday.

Your Audience and your Leads use search engines to find information and solutions about the problems they face or the needs they have.

Are you showing up in the right places?

Think about what your Audience and Leads are searching for. Are the keywords you’re building your website around the same keywords your Audience and Leads are using?

I’ve seen some businesses with websites built around keywords for their Prospects. The problem is, their Prospects aren’t the ones searching on the web. It’s the Audience and Leads that are searching.

So review who your contacts are at each stage of your sales funnel and think about how they are using search engines. Then target your SEO marketing around those keywords.

A friend of mine wants to start a business. She’s successful at work but isn’t earning what she is worth. Like a lot of people I’ve met, she really wants to start a business but here’s the conundrum:

It’s hard start a business when you’re busy with a “regular” job. On the other hand, it’s hard to quit your job then start a business.

Here’s what I recommend:

START HERE

1. Choose what you want your business to be about. Even if you don’t yet know WHAT you want to sell, you probably have some idea about the topic. Are you a mechanic and want to (eventually) run a business that is mechanical in nature? Do you love jewelery and (eventually) want to do something in that field? It doesn’t matter yet what you sell, but choose your topic. It can be fairly broad.
2. Start a blog. Spend 20-30 minutes a day writing a blog post. Do it every single day. Build up a body of knowledge on the topic. (Okay, if “every day” is too much, then start off a little less — say 3 times a week — and slowly increase over time until you’ve developed a good habit of daily blogging). Aim for high quality, insightful posts that help to advance your reader’s knowledge of the topic.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do in the beginning. If you’re at this stage — a sort of “dreaming the entrepreneurial dream” stage — then this is all you need to do. Don’t worry about search engine optimization, blog design, social media, etc. (That’s good stuff, but it’s not the point right now).

Eventually, you can take it further and turn your blog into a business (as I’ll describe in a minute), but your top priority should be consistent, compelling blog posts every day.

What you want to do is build a body of knowledge, which will:

• Position you as an expert.
• Help you explore the depths of the subject
• Teach you things you didn’t know
• Build an audience (and they’ll be more likely to listen and respect you because you don’t have an agenda of selling them anything)
• Create an asset of information that you can later draw from

FAST FORWARD TO QUITTING TIME
Let’s say you stay with your company for another couple of years. You don’t love it, but the income is nice and the health care pays for your knee operation, but now you find yourself transferred to a department with a boss you don’t like. You can see yourself quitting in a month or so.

The good news is, you have been consistently positioning yourself as an expert for the past couple of years. You have 600+ blog posts and an audience of faithful readers.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Decide what you are going to sell. A product? A service? There are lots of options. Pick one or two that you can do now and shelve the rest for later.
2. Create your sales funnel. Describe the contacts at each stage of your sales funnel and how you’ll engage them at that stage and then move them forward. (Download this Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide to get you started).
3. Implement the contact-engaging marketing that you’ve just outlined in the above step to engage and market to your Audience, your Leads, and your Prospects.
4. Quit your job. Woohoo!
5. Implement the contact-engaging content that you outlined a couple of steps above.

Thanks to your consistent effort, you have positioned yourself as an expert long before you made the leap out of your job into the world of business ownership.

ADDITIONAL TIPS TO MAKE THIS WORK

• Pick a topic you love and know something about and can spend years doing. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.
• This only works if you are consistent. I’ve seen people do this and succeed. I’ve seen people not do this and struggle. It really does work. Set an alarm, brainstorm some topics, and be relentless. Consider it an investment into your escape hatch. (Check out this blog post about blogging frequency and check out this blog post to discover what you should never, ever do).
• I mentioned earlier that you shouldn’t worry about search engine optimization (SEO) at this point. There are probably some SEO aficionados that are rolling in their graves right now but my reason is this: I want it to be a fun and simple effort. And search engine benefits will still be present in your blog, it just won’t be an intentional thing that you’ll do right away. You can always integrate that in later.
• Don’t fret about what you’ll sell while you’re working. That will work itself out, trust me. Here is a blog post about 5 different types of content monetization to get you started. There are other things to sell, too, but content monetization is an easy first step. If you can’t figure out what to sell, send me an email and we’ll talk about it.

Like anything that is effective, this method takes some effort. There will be days when you want to quit. But this is, in my opinion, the most effective way to start a business when you want to start a business someday but aren’t ready to quit your job just yet.

In the past decade (plus a little bit), the internet has created a universe of opportunity for new and old businesses to become marketing machines. This has been good… but it has also been bad.

In pre-internet days, businesses would think up some marketing ideas, have them created by professionals, and rely on more traditional methodologies to get the word out: Flyers were mailed; coupons were handed out; advertisements were published. These efforts were expensive, time consuming, and usually required the skills of an outside expert (to design and/or to publish).

Now, anyone can start a business and any business owner can drive traffic to their site using a variety of web-based marketing activities (like blogging or article-writing) and techniques (like SEO). They can do it themselves quickly and affordably.

This is advantageous — because it blows the doors wide open for anyone to become an entrepreneur — it has also had some nasty repercussions:

PROBLEM 1: MAKING IT UP ON VOLUME
Do-it-yourself marketing has led to entrepreneurs trading quality for quantity and spamming search engines and inboxes and Twitter streams with volumes of content. Even businesses that market legitimately (that is, they don’t spam. Rather, they create quality content that adds value for the reader) need to achieve a certain quantity of marketing to get the job done.

PROBLEM 2: MARKETING THAT DOESN’T KEEP UP WITH THE EVOLUTION OF BUSINESS
On top of volume is another reality that people don’t realize: Businesses change and markets change but content posted online can outlive those changes. So if you create a series of articles and point those articles to a page on your site, then take that page down, those articles no longer provide the benefit they once offered. (I’m definitely guilty of this one!)

PROBLEM 3: NEW OPPORTUNITIES ARRIVING DAILY
There’s a third factor in this new reality of “DIY marketing”. New marketing techniques crop up almost daily. When I started writing (nearly two decades ago) the internet wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t on very many people’s radar at all! Then, over the years, the web arrived and along came new ideas about how to market your business: Websites then ebooks then blogs then articles… Heck, just a few years ago, no one had heard of Twitter. Now it is THE darling of social media. It seems like a new way of marketing your business is arriving daily.

THE RESULT?
You can probably imagine what happens when you combine these three things together: A “requirement” of quantity + an ever-changing business environment + a constant flood of new marketing opportunities = An over-abundance of marketing is published and it is helpful for a brief season, but then it ceases to be helpful.

What is needed is sales funnel strategy to solve the problem: Businesses need to take one more step before they start flooding the web with marketing. (Or, if they have already started, they need to pause and revisit their strategy). In doing so, businesses will find that they will spend less on marketing but quickly achieve a more profitable result.

Sales funnel strategy will reduce the need for a volume of work and will actually make a lesser quantity of marketing content more effective. Sales funnel strategy will remain effective for longer than marketing that wasn’t applied to any sort of strategy, helping businesses stay competitive even though they are evolving. And, Sales funnel strategy will help businesses discern which marketing opportunities are right for them and which ones are unnecessary wastes of time.

TRENDING: SALES FUNNEL STRATEGY
Because of the economy being what it is (and what it was just a year or two ago), I think businesses are looking to cut back on expenses but increase the effectiveness of, well, everything they do. On top of that, I suspect that entrepreneurs are getting tired of having to race from one marketing technique to another just because everyone else is doing it. Entrepreneurs want to get back to basics and work on the parts of their business that can generate results.

So sales funnels and sales funnel strategy will increase in importance in the year(s) to come as businesses pull back from the frenetic pace that once was a DIY requirement.