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Entrepreneurs with Denis Oakley

I HELP BOLD LEADERS TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESSES AND THE INDUSTRIES THEY COMPETE IN

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Growth Hacking for Solopreneurs

One of the things that I do is growth hacking for solopreneurs. Growth hacking is an overused phrase. To me it has a great resonance. I live on the very edge of one of the largest untouched jungles in SE Asia. Seen from a distance it can look beautiful and your path can seem clear. It’s not that easy. Pretty soon you have no contact with the outside world, visibility reduces and it is quite simply trackless.

My parang (the Malay word for a machete) is a vital tool and I use it to help make and find my way through the dense vegetation. In the same way I help my clients find their way through the dense and confusing marketing options that are available for them and craft a strategy that lifts them up into the sunlight.

I’m feeling rather poetic today!

Growth Hacking for Solopreneurs – The Process

Like most good things it’s pretty simple. The following are the key stages in growth hacking for solopreneurs

  • Understanding the business model and the value proposition
  • Considering the ideal customer
  • Thinking about the many marketing channels available and brainstorming ideas for each of them
  • The prioritising and taking the best ideas to run simple low cost experiments

The first stage is simple. I need to know and understand your business. Many of my customers have weak target customers. They may say small businesses or women. These are huge audiences with lots of distinct segments within them. Trying to market to them en masse means that your bland boring message disappears and gets lost.

creating a persona when growth hacking for solopreneurs
first thoughts as I create a persona

So often one of the first tasks is to figure out who the ideal customer really is. Sometimes this means deep dives into Facebook or Google Analytics trying to put a personas together. Other times it is reading amazon reviews or listening to you talk about your first or second customers. Whichever it is I then create beautiful detailed profiles of ideal customers which we then use as the baseline of the marketing experience. These ideal customers are detailed enough that they almost seem real. I can tell you what Emilia’s handbag looks like, or what type of glasses Virgine D wears – even though I have never thought about that before – that’s because they are real people who you want to sell your goods or services to. (They are both favourite persona’s I’ve done for customers)

Once we know who we are selling to we then start looking for them. I have a list of 19 generic marketing channels – ways of reaching customers. We quickly think about how easy it is to reach the customer using that channel and how to do it. There are lots of millennials on the internet and because every marketer and her pet cockatoo are chasing them the obvious ways are expensive. That’s cool if you have unlimited resources and nerves of steel. Really it is. The only problem is that Google and Facebook will get rich on your money.

There’s a better way though. That’s to look for trails that lead us easily through the undergrowth and avoid consumer’s resistance and price wars with other marketers. Some of the approach is based on systematic processes, parts on stealing other good ideas that have not been worked out and some is based on imagination and daydreaming. Whichever part comes to the fore it is all aimed at finding some way that will effectively allow you to acquire customers at a much lower cost than through frontal assault.

Unfortunately it’s not that easy. We don’t know whether the approach will work, nor do we really know whether consumers will love your product or service and how we deliver it.

So we never use big fancy marketing campaigns. These take lots of time and money and if it goes wrong you haven’t got very far. A far better approach is to do lots of small experiments to test and learn. How can we spend $100 on a SEO experiment that will make a big impact? We think about it and have a hypothesis. Then we spend the $100 and see what happens. It’s ll data driven and if we see no results we’re a bit disappointed but the world hasn’t ended. On the other hand….

If it’s good we don’t celebrate too much. We go back and spend $500 to see if we can reinforce the success and do it on a larger scale. When that works. We spend $2000, or $5000 confident now that the approach will bring you customers and sell your products.

Why does it Work?

Small cheap steps that you repeat until we find something that works. Its systematic, effective and far far less risky than amost any other approach

That’s the story of how I do growth hacking for solopreneurs

Why am I good at it. I’d like to say it’s because I’m good at hacking through jungles. It’s probably because I have run so many small scale frugal campaigns over the years for tiny struggling startups. That’s given me a wealth of experience. When you combine this with super curiosity and a love of awesome stories you often get results.

If this sounds like it would help you – send me a mail – denis@denis-oakley.com

 

 

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A Sales Process for Artists and Designers

Getting your work to sell itself means being with the right person at the right time
Getting your work to sell itself means being with the right person at the right time

Being an artist or a designer can be a huge challenge when working for yourself. On the one hand the work has to be done. To maintain quality work often can’t be outsourced. On the other hand you need to get out and make sales taking you away from the stuff that you love doing. So here’s a sales process for designers that I have adapted from my consultancy sales process

A Sales Process for Designers

This article lays out a sales process for designers that enables you to get a stream of high quality leads whilst taking as much of the sales as possible out of it.

Now you can pick up jobs on Elance or Freelancer if you are prepared to dive to the bottom and reduce your diet to something that is filling but not nutritional. You can also get the phone book out and blister your fingers on the speed dial and make your voice sound as if you smoke 60 a day from cold calling.

This isn’t what life is about. When you do get work from these sources the jobs are rarely the nice creative jobs that keep you busy for months at a time.

So a better approach is to follow your passion.

Find Your Targets

So there are basically two questions that you need to answer for your particular business or skill set.

  • Who has the money?
  • Where can you find them?

If you’ve been doing your business a while you know who are the good customers, so the first thing to do is to look them up on LinkedIn. Get connected to the people that you know.

Then you start looking to see where they hangout. Are there conferences, tradeshows, meetings, lectures, events. There will be because in most industries there is a real need for people in it to meet. They need to get to know each other, look for business, find new jobs,  keep up to date on the latest ideas. All this.

Stalk Them

Then you go along to the meeting with your big pack of business cards. Then during the coffee break  there is a very simple process that you follow.

  • Look around the room and find a person by himself (not on phone) or a group of 3 or more
  • Walk up and say “Hi, I’m Denis, What do you do?” (That is a little bit compressed)
  • Let them talk and murmur encouraging noises.
  • The tell them what you do. Use your elevator pitch. Extended it out to 2 minutes. Max
  • You may get super lucky and have it move straight into a sale,
  • Move on and repeat

This way you should come back from most events with between 10 and twenty business cards.

Use Your CRM

When you get home get onto your CRM. If you don’t use one this is basically a cross between a diary, a contact list and a way of making sure that the people you meet turn into business. I use Salesforce (Big scary and super powerful) for one of my businesses, for consulting I use Nimble.

Then send them an email saying it was great to meet, maybe follow them on twitter or comment on their blog. A little bit of grace and favour goes a long way.

Look for Mr Big

Getting to Mr Big and talking naturally is your aim
Getting to Mr Big and talking naturally is your aim

It may be that they are a direct target customer or they may not be the MAN who you need to know. Either way you need to follow up because at the moment you are just the nice guy (among hundreds) who they met and who sent a follow up email

So you send them an email saying

Hey John, great to meet last week. As you know I do 3 D Design and you can see some of my work here. Who’d be the best person to speak to at Company X about being involved in some of your forthcoming projects?

I’ll follow up this email with a call so there’s no need to reply directly unless you are super busy and don’t have time to talk right now.

This basically tells him that you are going to call and hassle him unless he helps you out. Because you have already been nice to him the psychology of gift giving means he needs to give you something back. And you ask for something easy. A name and an introduction.

Bang you are to the next level. If you don’t get an email response then you follow up with a call – either about 20 minutes after you’ve sent it or a few minutes after you’ve seen them open the email using something like Sidekick.

We then repeat this step a bunch more times until you get through to the right person. You can do this search by either asking  people who the best person to talk to would be, or you can ask them to introduce you. Either way is good. Which is best depends on your situation.

Reach Out And Meet….

When you get to the right person

Hi Mr BIG, I was speaking to a couple of your colleagues, Jon Doe and Jane Bah and they said that you are the man when it comes to X.  I’m going to be at Y next week and if you are there too can I have 5 minutes?

Alternatively I can come to your office on Tuesday at 10:00 and show you my portfolio….

Here again you give him a choice. Meet in his office – when he is busy and stressed. Or at a social gathering – which because you are already going to gives you massive credibility in his eyes. That lets you create the personal relationship and if he can’t help you can ask the classic question “Who else do you think I should talk to?”

That gives him an opportunity to get away from you and gives you a new lead to start the process all over again.

Always be yourself when talking to leads and Mr Big
Always be yourself when talking to leads and Mr Big

Be Yourself – Don’t Sell

There you go a simple and effective sales process for designers to rapidly increase your sales whilst spending time on the stuff you love.

The really big point, the elephant in the room, is that at these network events – be yourself. Don’t try and sell. Talk passionately about your work, about technical issues, about the industry. Critique designs. You being you sells. Not you being a salesman (which you don’t want to be and are bad at!)

Then as always iterate and improve the process so that it becomes a routine, a habit and something that’s just part of your everyday life…

I help businesses of all sizes improve and streamline their sales processes. How do you get the most out for the time and money your spend getting new business? If you get frustrated about not getting enough business or it taking too long use the contact form below to request a free consultation

 

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How to Do Keyword Research for Global SEO

How do you do keyword research in a language you don't know?
How do you do keyword research in a language you don’t know?

Global SEO, by one definition, is doing SEO in markets other than English. There are several advantages and also some serious disadvantages. First of all most of the world doesn’t have English as a first language. Whilst their economies are smaller than the US/British/Canada/Australia block they are growing and will in time be larger. So there is a lot of money on the table.

On the other hand these people don’t primarily search in English and you don’t read or write their language, so whilst you may be able to get compelling copy written or translated it may well be useless for SEO.

That makes it a lot harder when you try to reach customers in Bangladesh and Bulgaria. However you have one large advantage compared to doing SEO in the English world.

Google has 20,000 engineers and they speak English. Hummingbird, the google update, that brought in sentiment analysis and hurt a lot of old fashioned SEO doesn’t appear to work in other languages. The resources required to replicate Hummingbird into 200+ other languages aren’t being devoted to it probably because of the lower ROI than alternative algorithm improvements for the English market.

What does this mean? This means that you can be working the traditional approach of identifying high volume keywords with low competition and using them to drive your business.

In the rest of this post I’ll describe how to find those keywords.

Don’t Use Machine Translation for Global SEO

First off; machine translation sucks. There are lots of reasons why this is so but for SEO purposes one of the key ones is that you’ll probably use Google Translate. And so does everyone else. If you use it much of your time doing Global SEO keyword research will end up improving Google translate and make Global Hummingbird a bit closer. The other reason of course is that many of the suggestions that Google offers are plain wrong. Google Translate, as much as anything, captures how a language is written, not how it is spoken. Search terms are a verbal expression of intent!

Word Context is Critical

As important as the translation of the words is the context in which they are used. When on business trips in Indonesia and Thailand I have often been forced to rely on Google Translate . The results of sentence translation have been comical when there has not been a total failure. Far better to rely on the frequently used words and phrases where there is a large corpus of evidence to support machine translation.

So you lose the slang, the nuance, how people thing and speak everything that helps you find great keywords. Ands that means at early stages that when looking at a foreign market that the Google keyword tool is crap and the Global Market Finder tool is even worse.

So what do you do?

Look for the overarching keyword in that language that describes your product or service
Look for the overarching keyword in that language that describes your product or service

Start with One Word

You start with one word. Look it up in an online English-“Foreign Language” dictionary  and then go to the google search engine in your target country. This might be Google.pl for poland or Google.com.my in Malaysia.

Then you look at the results. The obvious problem is that they are all in a foreign language…. Oh dear! Don’t reach for Google Translate. Have a look at the images, either on page, or the image version of the search. Does this capture what you are looking for?

Often I will do a search for the term on my own google search page and also in the locale based search page.  That way I can see how the search term is interpreted differently.

Find Synonyms and Validate

That may give you a result or it may not. Then you look for synonyms in the local language. A local language thesaurus is great for this task. Then you repeat the process for the synonyms.

What you do is to work through the synonyms slowly building up a corpus of words that you have validated as being appropriate to the target market.

Then you start adding modifiers onto your validated keywords. And you validate these exactly the same. Here though you have a slightly different problem. When you test the keyword + modifier you can end up with a page of results. Are they any good?

Does Search Volume Support it?

The best quick indicator here is the number of search results. So for example when I search “cheap car hire” I get 40 million results. That looks good. When I search for “miserly car hire” I get 90,000. So if you get no results or a low number the keyword is probably no good. A rule of thumb is that if  there are less than a million results your keyword phrase is not regularly used.

Start Keyword Mining

Now you have a firm foundation of good keywords for Global SEO it’s time to be more traditional and start mining wikipedia and competitors websites for additional keywords. Whilst you may not be able to read or understand anything on the page a useful heuristic is to look for

  • Bold
  • Highlights
  • Links
  • Metadata

Suck them all up and add them to your list of language specific keywords. Make sure that as you do this you are also picking up slang usage.  So for users may refer to a can of ‘pop’ ‘soda’ or ‘soda-pop’ include all this into your list of keywords

Then it’s getting back to the tried and tested tools of keyword research

  • Keywordtool.io
  • Semrush.com
  • Advanced Google Queries

Once you’ve done all this dump the data into your excel file (machine translate into English so that you are able to keep track of them all) and put it into the Google keyword tool looking for local search volume in your target country.

Bang!

You should have a number of good keywords that you can use.

Translate using a Native

That’s the research done. Now you need to get your content translated by a NATIVE. not a fluent speaker, by a NATIVE making sure that they are focusing on the keywords that you give them for each piece.

And soon traffic will be flowing through to you from Google search.

The first time you do this it is time consuming, but that is as much due to learning and refining a new process. Once you have got it working smoothly it will be another effective tool in your arsenal.

Thoughts on process

First of all thanks to Eli Schwartz at Survey Monkey who inspired this post at a lecture at MAGiC

Whilst I’ve done a fair amount of SEO over the years in APAC as much as anything the key thing is to build yourself a nice, easily repeatable process. This can significantly increase the time cost the first time you do it but in future you get a lot of speed and quality improvements. Most critically you can scale. You can pass it to someone else and say you do it like this. Then you can check to see if the process is followed. That is where you get the big wins.

We help companies improve their sales and marketing processes by squeezing out speed and cost to make more sales with less time and money. If you are interested to find out more please use the contact firm below

How to Do Keyword Research for Global SEO