Tag: Josephine County

EDDM – What Is It and How Do You Do It? 🏠

Posted on by brianjpombo

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If you read this before watching, spoiler, Brian’s talking about Every Door Direct Mail!

Transcription

EDDM, what is it and how do you do it?

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

EDDM stands for Every Door Direct Mail. And this is a sample of it, I’m going to talk about it what is Every Door Direct Mail.

Well, if you’re not aware, the post office has had this program for a number of years now, where you can declare a certain area, and it’s a postal route.

Within a zip code, there are specific routes you can declare a certain area and you can say I want every door in this area to get a copy of my direct mail.

Yeah, this could be an envelope, this could be a piece of paper like this, this can be a postcard, there’s a number of different, you know, ways of doing it, but you’re paying for a bulk amount to be sent out.

The idea is that it actually reaches all of those areas.

Now, depending on the personnel in your area, this may work, it may not work, and you’ve got to really keep an eye on it to make sure that it actually reaches its destination because it’s junk mail.

Because the post office knows it’s junk mail, some postal employees have been known to skip it, and to dump it off in a dumpster or hide it somewhere, just so they have less work to do.

I’m not saying all post office, all people work for the post office do this or anything of the sort I’m saying it has been known to happen and anybody that’s done any amount of work with direct mail knows that flub ups can occur.

Now, with that in mind, though, Every Door Direct Mail may be really useful for you because you can cover a really big area. If you have a message that you want most people to see that it’s a great way of doing it.

This is a piece and you can always tell whether something’s direct Every Door Direct Mail, by this right up here, I don’t know if you can see that. That is showing it actually says EDDM retail us postage paid.

So where a stamp should be, it’s going to have this little insignia. And here it says it will not have an actual name it will say a something like local postal customer.

So that’s the name this showed up in my mail and said his person probably covered a very wide area be curious, I’d love to know because I’m going to show you all the details of this piece. I’d love to know if you know this person, have them get in contact with me I’d love to find out how well this did for them. I want to know if they got their money back and more.

I want to know if they covered the enter you know county or whether they they covered very specific areas and be very interesting to to know and be able to help other people out. This is what it looks like. Very simple page.

So what was on this side is just what I showed you this is nothing but a piece of paper neon, horrible color.

These horrible colors standout and they get attention that’s part of direct mail, you got to get attention.

So even though it technically this is this can get attention as long as I mean, I doubt you get into many of these in the mail every day and on it is a very simple message.

It says Bill’s tree service with his phone number. I hope you don’t mind me showing his phone number.

If you’re in the Southern Oregon area, Josephine County, I imagined bill might be able to help you with your tree. So there’s a little free advertising for you bill. It says licensed bonded insured, and there’s his license number.

I think they may have to have that in their advertising. I’m not sure of the rules for California, but I see it quite often free estimates. So you can estimate on what Bill can do for your trees but here’s a list.

Bullet point list on the bottom of things that can happen removal, hazardous removal, wind sailing, crown cleaning, stump, grinding, hedge trimming, logging, chipping, fuel reduction, retrieval, cat drone plane antenna install.

These are all things that they can do for you at Bill’s tree service, LLC now look at how simple that is. I would bet that bill got some attention with this one way or the other.

I would bet bill got some attention nowadays with with the yellow pages not being hardly I know in at least in our area. It depends on your area. Some areas they’re still thriving, the physical yellow pages, but in our area it’s not.

The simplicity of just finding who to use for your tree services.

It’s not there and everyone’s looking a little bit different. Some people, they go into Google, some people, they have to ask someone they know some people check with the local Chamber of Commerce, or with another website that is one of these websites that you have to pay to get on as a vendor.

They’ll look at reviews online and so forth.

Bill found a way around that with a simple piece of paper sent in the mail. Now, are there ways Bill can make this even better?

Absolutely.

One of the things I’d say is I would either say the city or the if it’s Josephine County, I’d say Josephine County resident, here’s a, here’s a special deal from Bill’s tree service. free estimate for this, this is I mean, even, it’s just taking the same information and presenting in a different way.

You can get more attention, there’s a reason why you put who it’s for. And if you don’t have a name of a person, or you can’t put a name and a person like something that’s direct mail, you want to get as specific as possible. You may say, Well, this whole area is, you know, in this certain neighborhood.

So you could say that the you know, residents of the suction suction neighborhood, or Josephine County residents, we live in Josephine County, Oregon.

He could say that, that’s a quick way to be able to gain a little bit more attention, you have a couple more extra split seconds is what you’re looking for when it comes to direct mail, before between the person throwing it away.

And actually reading the next sentence reading the next thing that stands out, this is going to hit certain people, and it’s not going to hit other people, he could take this exact same one, and put it out a couple of weeks from now, and probably get a very similar result to what he’s already gotten.

If he got a good result, I’d suggest he tried again, do nothing but sin the same one out, we’ll get something maybe even a different color, another horribly ugly neon color, they do work. This is the simplicity of getting attention, though.

Sometimes it just means doing something, doing something to get attention, it doesn’t mean you have to use direct mail, it doesn’t mean that you definitely don’t necessarily have to use Every Door Direct Mail.

You can go online and check out the post offices website, you can actually see maps and see where your mail will hit in theory.

That’s a great Every Door Direct Mail is something you, you certainly want to check out. And there’s a lot of other tutorials on YouTube and so forth, where you can find out how to do it exactly. Or you can work with a professional, somebody that knows how to do it a little bit. I am business investor.

So I love discussing these ideas. I love discussing how businesses can do simple things to get attention, because there are people who are not even in your local area that will buy Every Door Direct Mail in order to reach people and it’s well worth it if they understand who their audience is and who they’re trying to get.

Even if it’s a if it’s a very small minority of the people who they’re reaching with each piece of mail.

Hopefully that’s helpful to you. I have a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Right now it is at the timing of this filming.

It is still available on my website for free AmazonProofBook.com.

If you get this or watch this or listen to this later, it may not still be available for free, but hopefully there’ll be something there that you can discount or something that will help you out in your business.

AmazonProofBook.com That’s all I have for today. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

How Important Are Relationships? 👫 (B2B Networking)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Thoughts on the value of relationships and networking after Brian just recorded an upcoming podcast with Grants Pass local, Cat Bonney.

Transcription

How important is relationships?

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today, I wanted to discuss the concept of relationships in business specifically. So it’s all about being relationship reliant for me.

In fact, there are three pillars at BrianJPombo.com.

The first one I like talking about the most, right off the bat, at least, is being relationship reliant.

This is something that came later in life for me, even though I was surrounded by it, and the evidence was everywhere. It didn’t occur to me that the relationships you have the strength of the relationships, but even the loose ties that you have out there in life, or that one of the most important things possible.

That all business is based off of people, you know, like and trust, it’s based off of some form of relationship.

Now, sometimes you don’t necessarily have a relationship with the person, most of the products and services you use, that you spend money on, you don’t know the person behind it. But you have a relationship with that brand.

There is something there, someone has created something, put it forth, and you’ve taken it and exchanged it for money.

There’s a relationship there even at the most crass you know, just financial interaction, you know, even just that there’s still a relationship, and it goes on from there. The strongest relationship you have with someone the people that you paid the most amount of money on the most regular basis.

That’s some of the most powerful stuff and it can tell you something about even the things that you pay a small amount for. It all has to do with the same thing. It all comes back to some form of relationship.

I was reminded of this today because I had a really good podcast interview.

So I have a podcast that’s local. It’s called Grants Pass VIP. And what it does is it covers basically stories of movers and shakers in Josephine County, Oregon. And Grants Pass is the largest town here.

It’s named Grants Pass VIP, because that’s where most of the people will relate to it. Up this past year, about Yeah, about a year about this past year, I’ve been working very closely with the Chamber of Commerce.

Even though a good portion of that year, we weren’t even meeting in person. But meeting over over video chat. So I got to meet somebody that we had known each other kind of at a distance or name’s Cat Bonney.

Cat, she’s just a million different things in town. And she’s one of these people that I finally got to sit down and have an interview with for my podcast, this will be coming up. Not available yet if you’re watching this right away, but you’ll see it soon over at GrantsPassVIP.com.

Cat is a very interesting person, her entire life has been built on the idea of getting out there and making a difference and encouraging other people to do the same thing. And having her hands and a whole lot of different items.

But all around this concept of really making a difference for people and in doing things that that stirs her soul, not just a way to pay the bills, you know, obviously, there’s always that end of it, but you have to have things that really make a difference for you.

Even the short period of time we hung out today at the coffee shop, recording the podcast, even that short period of time I found it really interesting how useful her knowledge is. I mean, just she asked what she can do for me and I just tossed something out there.

And she threw some advice out that I know is gonna save me many hours, and many headaches. And so I thank her so much for that. That’s one simple, subtle relationship that I that I’ve had that I have that I share with her.

You can’t put a price tag on that. But at the same end, it’s going to profit me if you could put a price tag it’s going to profit me greatly over time. If nothing else in the saving of time just for a brief moment, a brief conversation.

These are the things that are true throughout. And if you’re looking to grow things, if you’re looking to look at the world differently, if you’re looking to think more like people who have something that you want out of life.

It comes back down to a relationship. My entire way of building my business for the past, you know, two-plus years, via podcasting, and via the book that I wrote, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

These are things that that happened because of relationships because I connected with other people, sometimes at a distance will originally at a distance online with a lot of people.

And then also in person talking with people and going through it and wanting to reach out and meet certain people that I couldn’t find a way to get a conversation with until I could find a gift that I could offer them.

The gift in this situation was the Podcast, the podcast allows me to offer a gift of publicity to somebody.

In exchange, I get to meet this person to get to know them better, and find out if there’s anything that I can do in their life and maybe even learn something from them. Simple, simple concepts, these simple ideas, but it all comes back to the relationship.

Business is about other human beings. It’s about you and other human beings connecting. That’s all it is. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re making dog food, it doesn’t matter what you’re making. I don’t know, why do I always go back to dog food, it’s interesting.

Maybe it’s because I have no experience in the dog food market. And but for some reason, my mind always jumps to dog food when I’m thinking about things. It doesn’t matter what your industry is all a relationship based.

This is very difficult. If you have a task oriented mind, my mind is very much at least on the forefront is initially task oriented. I have a little bit of people orientation back there. But mostly it’s task oriented. And it took me many years to realize the practical benefit of relationships.

I hate to say it that was sounds weird, doesn’t it? If you think like a robot, it’s difficult to put it into words. But that’s a sadly that’s where I come from. So that’s all I got for today.

Go check out my book if you want to hear some more about about how to take relationships and take them to the next level and also meet people that you would have never met before. That can be really helpful to you.9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

AmazonProofBook.com.

And I’m going to be back here tomorrow talking about the second or the three pillars for BrianJPombo.com. Stay tuned for that, we’ll see.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Business Hacks For Chaotic Times 💈💼 (G St. Barber Co. in Grants Pass)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian talks about the attention a local barbershop (G St. Barber Co.) received from offering free haircuts to those looking for work.

link to article – https://www.kdrv.com/community/free-haircuts-for-those-in-need/article_2a1c3528-a654-11ec-a5f9-e30b527f5a1d.html

Transcription

Business hacks for chaotic times.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Check out this article I found. I also found a video regarding something happening right here in town, you may have something like this happening where you live also, where we have a barbershop that’s offering free haircuts to anyone that is looking to get go out and get a job interview and is looking to move themselves up in the world, but they can’t afford it.

This is just a helpful leg up to be able to help out but what it also is, is an amazing marketing tool is you’re using a situation that everyone’s aware of the crunch of money and everything else and tough times and using it to your advantage by offering something.

I mean, think about a barbershop think about all the time in a barbershop, where you have an empty chair. There are tons of periods of time where there’s just nobody coming in and we’ve nobody’s coming in, no money is being made in most cases, as smarter barbers may have a subscription program or something like that setup but if you don’t, then chances are you need it.

You need all the help you can get even if it’s a free person, because it’s one of those businesses. That’s very special in the fact that people don’t like switching up.

Especially men don’t like switching up where they go to get their hair done. Once they commit there, they’re there for life.

So you get you get somebody to come once or twice to the same barber. If they’re happy with the results, they’ll keep coming.

If they’re even partially happy with the results. They will keep coming, which is a which is a really cool deal.

Congratulations to this fella for setting up this program here locally. It’s something you can do even if you don’t have a barber shop. That’s not even if you don’t even have a local retail shop.

Find ways to offer to make an offer that’s tied to the news that’s tied to the conversation already going on in people’s heads and you’ll go far. It’s a nice quick tip for tonight.

Go check out, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business my book that’s all about how to overcome competition works in into any industry whatsoever. If you purchase this read it and you say it can’t work in your industry. I would love to interview you and I will give you double your money back. So reach out today.

Go go pick up your own free copy. If you don’t want to pay for it, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

AmazonProofBook.com, all one word.

You have a great night. We’ll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Secret Zoom Hack 💻

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian talks about tips he uses when on local Chamber Greeters calls on Zoom.

Transcription

Secret zoom hack.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Let’s talk about zoom, shall we?

I have a lot of meetings that I have on zoom, sorry about the shaky camera work, I’ll get it stable here. There we go.

I’ve got a lot of meetings I do on zoom. Most of them are one on one meetings with individuals but I have a number of meetings that I do with large groups of people, a lot of them that I don’t even know. And here’s a fun thing to do.

This comes in real handy if you’re would normally go to something like a public meeting but this is now because of a certain situation, you may be stuck on zoom.

So a lot of mixers and things like that right now a lot of them are contained to zoom meetings. And so I go to a what they call a chamber of commerce meeting that’s called greeters.

Sometimes they’re called mixers, or that there are other terms for him. But it’s the basic ideas that everyone has a chance to speak real quick about their business. And it’s just a way to get to know everyone. And a lot of the stuff happens.

While before and after the meeting, it’s getting to talk to everyone before and afterward, that’s really where the magic happens, you don’t have that on zoom.

So what you’re left with is a little bit of chatter going on in the chatbox and you just kind of have to get bits and pieces here and there.

So here’s a little hack that I’ve been able to come up with and it’s extremely simple, and you may already be doing it. But if you’re in a situation like this, here’s what I recommend you do.

While it is going on, you either sit there with your phone, or another device connected to the internet and you’re looking for the things that people are bringing up, or you’re writing down their information, you’re writing down their names, and the names of their businesses, so that you can then connect with them in other sources.

So I check LinkedIn, I check Facebook, I check Instagram, any other places that you think you could connect up with these people. And if in a situation like Chamber of Commerce, you’re kind of expected to be able to meet and be able to connect and all these different places.

So it’s not that big a deal, I throw out a connection on LinkedIn pretty easily out to these people, because they’ve already heard from me, so they know me from there, I know them from there, whether we’ve had a one on one conversation or not, I do try and connect with people.

If you’re in a situation where you’re not quite sure if they know who you are, and everything else, you could just say, Hey, I saw you in the meeting this morning. just figured I’d see if you’d be willing to connect here.

Or if you want to be friends or whatever, if you’re talking to Instagram, and but places like Instagram places like Twitter, you can follow them without them having to follow you.

You’re just tossing it out there you’re putting, you’re putting everything out there. But at least from that point forward, you can start to pay attention to them.

If I don’t get somebody connecting with me on LinkedIn, I’ll follow them, it’s a very common way to be able to still connect with someone without them having to connect back with you.

Then you can learn more about them over time and start a conversation sometime later. It’s not that big of a deal. But it’s a start, it’s a start to, if you’re looking to reach out more and meet more people, it’s a great way of doing it. Now here’s the reverse side of that hack.

The reverse side is you’ve got to make sure that you yourself are able to be contacted easily. So you got to make sure that you put your name out there. In my particular greeter’s meeting that I’m thinking of we’re allowed to post our stuff in the chat.

So I’ll post my name and I’ll post my company and I’ll post out specific link one, I give one place to go to every time one specific place to go to time so I’ll post a live link in the chat. If you’re using zoom or any other type of video chat, oftentimes they’ll have that option.

So put it out there make it easy for people to find you and invite them say hey, if you’re on LinkedIn, connect up with me because I can’t find everybody out there and be able to connect with them.

If I haven’t connected with you connect with me on LinkedIn, toss it out there. Find ways to get to know more people, it’s only going to help your business.

Business is about people. It’s about relationships.

Hopefully, that makes sense. I have a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business stuff short one, easy read, go get your own free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

It’s all I got for today. You have a great one.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Advertising Advice & Expectations 📫 (Mail Review)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian breaks down some mail advertising pieces and gives some tips as well.

Transcription

Advertising advice and expectations.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to talk really about how to apply the principles that we’ve been talking about over this past week. All the last few videos and podcasts I put out had to do with a plot had to do with really the basic principles.

Now I want to take some of that and apply it and show you how so much comes down to both expectations and tracking. So first off, let’s talk about expectations you have to know what you expect to get off of your advertising.

Otherwise, you can determine whether it was successful or not.

You can just wait and see what happens but if you’re doing anything more than that at all in regards to either advertising or word of mouth or anything else, it sometimes it’s tough to be able to track it and know where one started and the last one ended and to really know if it was worth your effort and money to do it.

So I’m going to give you an example that direct mails are a fun one because it’s one of those that really can be tracked. And you can really good a good get a good idea as to whether it worked or not. Or my favorite things to send out as postcards.

Here’s a postcard, this is from a local lady who’s doing real estate and I don’t get that many real estate postcards or letters or anything.

There are hundreds of it and probably close to 1000 Real Estate people that cover this area and it’s a small area but there are tons of them there’s everyone in their brother’s a real estate person but very few of them advertise directly.

So I got to first off give her name is Suzie. Give Suzie props for putting this out now we’re going to talk about what worked in this and we’re going to talk about what didn’t work but once again this has to do with expectations.

You know and whether you’re tracking it if you’re tracking it and you’re getting back more than it was necessary to be able to constitute it working then you keep doing it you find a way to keep getting it out there or get it out to a broader audience or what have you.

I don’t know why I was placed on the list but here it says thinking of selling your home.

Okay so there’s the headline, it’s not super clear yet. I’m not sure if you can read it from where you’re at. It’s not super bold white on a dark background doesn’t do as well as a dark color or black on a white background.

The little picture of a teacup and some flowers, there’s not a chair but there is a little watermark symbol.

I just happen to know that I believe this is dream time the website that you can purchase and if you don’t purchase it there watermark stays on there so that’s that doesn’t look that hot. I’ve just noticed that now for the first time I didn’t notice it the first time.

Not that that’s going to deter whether people are interested or not but doesn’t say anything about a home I mean obviously this is on the inside of a home but besides that, and it’s a little beat up.

One of the letters fell off here but it says call for your complimentary market analysis. So that’s the basic pitch that’s what they’re going for. They want you to make a phone call.

See what your home is worth today, John L Scott real estate. So this is the main site and then you’ve got the address side and the rest of the copy here which is interesting.

That says if selling your home is on your mind, or you just want to know its current value, I would be happy to help.

I believe in old-fashioned customer service call me to receive your no-obligation market analysis and her phone number.

Suzy Matney PC broker-owner license in the state of Oregon or phone number and her website, there she is right there. And then it says something about you know, some offices are independently owned and operated.

If your home’s currently listed with another broker, please disregard this letter, all this type of thing that you probably have to do legally, if not ethically.

So pretty typical yet typical picture name of the real estate company. And that’s it. It’s a very straightforward pitch. And let me talk about what works or what does work.

She’s got a call to action, she’s got more than one way to contact her. If you don’t want to use a phone, you go to her website and go specifically to her. Not just someone else at the real estate office, which is good.

And I didn’t go to the website to see what the presentation is there that can matter to you got to make sure you are asking for something very specific. But this is specifically asking for people who want to sell their homes.

Now, what are the chances that she’s going to get my business versus all the other people that never asked me?

If I was interested in selling my home, if she caught me on the day or week, this might pique my interest?

If I paid attention to it long enough. There’s not a whole lot drawing you in here. It’s pretty boring, pretty straightforward.

There’s no glitz or glamour, but maybe that’s all that’s needed.

Once again, expectations come to, does this produce the results?

Is she getting people contacting her because of this piece or does she have to send out multiple amounts to be able to build up familiarity?

This is the first time I remember seeing her now maybe we’ve been I apologize if that were the case. But this is the first time I recall seeing her in regards to real estate and selling homes.

There’s a lot of things you could do you could do, you can have a little bit more standout pictures. It could be it could stand to be a little uglier.

Honestly, I mean, if it were more ugly, bolder, you will get more attention that way. If you offered something for free to be able to, I mean, seeing what your home was worth, for the most part, I would think that most people would know that you’d be able to look online to get a lot of estimates like that.

Maybe they don’t and maybe this works great. Once again, it comes down to expectations or tracking. And what are the results are what you want them to what I would test against this is maybe a little bit more to the offer, maybe offer, you know, see all that off the top of my head, I can’t come up with an offer right off the top.

But there are so many more different ways of doing this. This is very bland, but don’t throw off bland. bland may get the job done.

That’s the real question, in the end, is whether it gets the job done and what you expect back from it. And whether you’re planning to do more than just one so I’ll let you know if we see more from Suzie.

Suzie, I recommend continuing your direct mail out there to the community because you’re one of the only ones that I’ve seen this certainly in the last few years.

So hopefully that’s helpful to you in kind of taking some of those principles that we talked about and kind of reverse engineering them based on a piece of advertising that we saw, hey, I want to also recommend my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business if you have a business if your business owner or an executive in charge, and you want to make things completely competition proof is my book.

You go get yourself a copy off amazon.com or anywhere books are sold or you get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com. AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Phonebooks, Yellow Pages & Your Business 📒

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Thoughts on the phonebook and the impact of google search on local businesses.

Transcription

Phonebooks, yellow pages and your business.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I have a really interesting story that goes along with my business story and the phone book. When I was younger, telephone books for how you found people, okay, they were how you found people that you knew through the white pages of the phonebook.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with telephone directories, the pages that are white, we would normally refer to those as the white pages, because those were the ones where you had most residential, people being able to be found.

So if you knew somebody’s last name, you could find them in the white pages in most cases, okay.

Then the yellow pages were the pages where all the businesses were, and specifically businesses that paved this phone book a little more to be highlighted on the yellow pages.

And so you have larger ads there and everything else and those are separated by subject. Now, this is for people that aren’t familiar with phone books.

In the old days, you get a handful. Actually, when I was just starting out in business, there were three or four phonebook companies, and they were very thick, large manuals, and you would get from and even in a small area, you would get really large books delivered for free.

Because so much advertising went into it and so much money, it was a very lucrative thing. And it was something that entire businesses thrived off of paying for one advertising source, and that was the phonebook.

So this is a phone book. This is the latest one from the yellow book company, one of the only phonebook companies that I see out there anymore. And these guys, this one’s for Medford and Grants Pass here in Southern Oregon, also includes Ashland, Central Point, Rogue River and White City.

And I remember when I first started out that they’re not as thick as they used to be, they’re a lot thinner, there are not as many advertisements very few people are willing to pay for the advertising in back in the day. It actually cost quite a bit to get into the phonebook because you’re paying once and this is going to sit on somebody’s counter or somewhere where they can reach it, it’s going to sit there for a very long time.

Oftentimes way past the date in which, as widgets labeled that this is labeled for 2021, and 2022.

So we’ll see how long these exist, I would predict that you’re still going to see phonebooks into the future, they’re just going to have a different flavor and they’re going to go in a slightly different direction.

Because nowadays, as we all know, if you search into Google, it’s easier, quicker, faster than going into a phonebook. Google has been able to kind of develop its own phonebook algorithm as long as you’re typing in something that can be seen in a phonebook.

Oftentimes, a local section in Google is going to pop up with all the people that fit that category, based on where you’re searching for. But also, if you put the name of the town, you’re going to see that real quick.

Now, when I first started getting involved in business, this started becoming a thing and phonebook started losing power. And one of my first clients was telling me that they got all their business via the phonebook for years and years and years, 20 plus years, they had been getting all their business via a phonebook ad. And now they’re at a point where they’re getting less and less.

They know they weren’t paying enough attention to online work. So a lot of my early work was helping typical business brick and mortar businesses get over on to the online space.

What I ended up learning is, the phone book was still useful, and it might be in your market. Also, there are a few things you want to look for.

Are you playing toward an audience that would pick up a phone book and look for the subject line that you’d be under?

Are you in a subject line that’s typical or could you be in a subject line?

That is something that somebody would be looking for in a phone book, you may not fit everybody that’s in that subject. But if you can find a way to squeeze into there, is that worthwhile to you?

And then are you in an area that still has phone books?

We’re in an area that has a whole lot of retirees and an elderly population, people that still use phonebooks. Intensely, and a lot of people that just aren’t online or aren’t actively online.

But believe it or not, that that’s still very, very common. And so you can still see, I can flip through this phone book. I haven’t looked through this one much.

I can still see subjects and you can always tell it’s the ones with the biggest ads. Okay, so on the back you’ve got Direct TV. Oh, There’s a large company that can afford large advertisements like this. In the front, you’ve got the locksmith, the local locksmith.

The other ad is for the phone book itself. Not as many ads as you used to, you used to see a lot of ads for lawyers. That used to be a very common thing that you would see very large ads for all let’s say, we still have a lot of restaurants, plumbing ads, still a lot of very large plumbing ads, full-page color, plumbing ads.

But there’s a way you can find out a lot about an area by flipping through a phonebook. And whenever I’d be traveling, I’d go and I’d be in the hotel room, one of the first things I grab is the Yellow Pages and flip through and see what you know, what industries are paying for advertising in the phonebook here and it’s an interesting thing.

But the one thing you can learn from phonebooks is that technology changes. And so often people get caught up with one type of technology, one type of advertising, one way of delivering an item, and they get really scared about losing that format, instead of realizing that formats come and go.

That styles of advertising come and go that that that’s just technology that’s always going to change you know, books are never going to go away. They just changed their function because of other things, pick up the slack.

With the onset of digital with the onset of mobile phones, you’re getting a different flavor, you’re getting competition that didn’t exist before. And you have to realize this when you’re working on any type of advertising. I heard somebody talking about it the other day, and let me see what was it?

It will and I probably won’t even be able to come to my head. But I remember the conversation very clearly.

It had to do with the fact that people were it was a format that people just they refuse to give up on Oh, I know what it was. It was people saying that they it was auto dealers that years ago, these auto dealers refuse to work with internet ads because they were scared of losing their position as specifically the sales staff have lost their ability to do anything because the internet was taken over instead of taking advantage of the internet and making their jobs easier.

And finding the people that are looking for them and delivering them there. They let themselves be gobbled up and there are still ones out there, there are still salespeople out there that are allowing the internet to take over and apps to take the place of salespeople.

There’s no reason why that needs to happen. Because a human can always bring another level to things. But you can have somebody that is fully educated on what it is that you’re selling, and know exactly what they need and are, and have money in hand ready to buy. If you take advantage of the pieces of the internet that are useful to you.

And then add the thing that the internet can provide, which is human contact, back and forth question and answer that will always be needed. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, realize what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and let the rest go. This is a technology and it will never stop. It’s our entire lives.

The internet is not the last thing. Mobile phones are not the last thing. Just like these yellow pages when they first came out. They were not the last thing.

They’re just the next format of technology and it’s going to constantly change from here on out. So get ready for it. Don’t be scared of it. Learn it, figure out what you can do best and what the new technology can do best, and move forward. You’ll be out of the competition for sure.

Other ways to be out of the competition I talked about in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy by going to AmazonProofBook.com. We’ll be back here tomorrow night. You have a great night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Is Offline Content Marketing Possible? 📰 (GKIC NO B.S. Marketing Letter / JoCo Eagle)

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Brian shares some of his paid and free newsletters he’s gotten over the years to show examples of offline content marketing.

Transcription

Is offline content marketing possible?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I want to talk about content, I mean, we talk a lot about content marketing here.

It’s kind of the growing term, to refer to a lot of the things that I teach companies how to do. And so I wanted to kind of bend your mind a little bit and think more about the broad sense of what content marketing is all about.

Can you do something that’s mainly referred to just on the digital end of things, right?

Can you do that offline?

Well, of course you can, it all started offline.

Content Marketing has always been around, what is content marketing?

Content marketing, is having some type of content that provides value unto itself. And then on top of that is a marketing message.

So a whole lot of what you’re watching on YouTube is content marketing, guaranteed one way or the other, they’re trying to sell something, they may not be selling to you directly. They may be getting paid by YouTube.

But in general, it’s content marketing for somebody, since everything’s content marketing, even if you think it’s just entertainment.

But here’s a great example.

What I’m holding here is one of the first newsletters, paper newsletters that I received, from what is called the NOBS Marketing Letter. This is what I received, what at the time was called GKIC, now is the NOBS Inner Circle, and this is from April of 2012.

When I first came in contact, this was really the first time I had really thought about direct response marketing being a separate thing.

I’ve always known about it to some extent, because I’ve experienced it in different advertising and everything else out there. But when I read one of Dan Kennedy’s books in January of 2012, January and February of 2012, it changed my life.

And in a very short period of time, I became an acolyte, I guess you would say, and subscribed to his newsletter, became part of the club.

Now in this newsletter, you can see it’s good size, I mean, you pay for this, you get you got 24 pages back in that day. It’s very simple. It wasn’t very flashy back then, and it’s got an article by him.

It’s got advertising.

Well, here’s that table of contents.

It’s got some more little smaller articles directly from Dan Kennedy. Examples of advertising where he discusses kind of the principles marketing principles that are shown throughout.

He has ads for here’s that here’s an ad for one of his books, but it’s built into the content. So it’s content, it’s useful stuff, and you can see the highlighting and everything is all done by me.

It’s all useful, fabulous information.

But at the same time, it’s selling you other things.

Here’s another article by another guy as Dave Dee, who was working with them at the time, and a whole article by him. So he’s got other people writing articles.

There’s one by Doc Nielsen, here’s one by Rich Schefren one of these people still out there quite a lot, Alex Mandossian.

So you had a whole lot of other people writing articles Lee Milteer, fabulous stuff.

Whoa, here’s one by Ryan Deiss. Those of you who are familiar with him from Digital Marketer, boy, Yannick Silver, all these so many of these names still very present out there, Dr. Charlie Martin.

And so one thing after another, all fabulous content at the same time, I mean, at the very end page, here’s all the different things that you can purchase the value ladder that you can build your way up within the gcic system. Ways that you can go further and further by paying more money on a monthly basis, right?

I mean, that’s what it’s all about.

If you’ve got any type of club like that, you have to allow people to pay more if they want more.

And of course, another article on the back I mean, value on top of value on top of value for people.

For someone that isn’t interested in this. This is as good as toilet paper, right?

For someone who is interested. It’s like gold, I still have it. I don’t throw it away.

It’s valuable to me. It’s useful to me, not to everybody, but for me, it was worth what I paid for it and more.

It’s not just about newsletters, newsletters are fabulous, you could do newsletters on a monthly basis on a quarterly basis.

That’s a way of physically getting out information still to this day print still works.

You have to know your market, you have to know if they be up for it. And you have to have information that makes that makes a solid point by being in print, right?

Here’s another one newspaper.

This is not an average newspaper.

This is a, this is one that goes every door, direct mail. So it hits every door within a particular area. I’ve talked about this guy before. Richard Emmons created the Josephine County Eagle, fabulous little piece that goes out monthly.

What’s it have, it’s got advertising in it. And it has just local political information and stuff, both from politicians and editorials.

It’s still content marketing of some form, in a different way than we’re used to. Yeah, it’s got a newspaper, it looks like the old style newspaper, what we’re all familiar with, or most people are.

And for at the same end, it’s coming in through the mailbox, it’s coming in a different way.

You can do this in the same way that you would do on a newsletter, a book, I’ve got a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

What do I do with this most often I mail it to people, quite often, sometimes I’ll give it to them physically. But more often than not, I mail it to people, and it’s content marketing, to offline market, the whole thing is full of a great a huge amount of value to you.

In terms of if it’s the type of thing you’re looking for, if you’re a business owner, or executive, and you’re looking for ways to make your business, basically competition proof by standing out, by showing yourself as being completely different from the competition.

This is the book for you, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com, so you get a digital version.

You can also buy a physical version there after you after you’ve gone past the free digital version. Or you can go to amazon.com and get one still content marketing I have offers in there for people to go the next step and find out more about the other tools that I offer businesses.

Content Marketing is virtually could be virtually anything at the same end. Digital allows us to do it for free.

Social media allows us to do it for free, not completely free, still takes time, if you’re really going to are going to want a lot of eyeballs and you really want to hit a specific crowd that you don’t already have access to. It’s going to take money.

It’s going to take a little bit of advertising here and there.

But there’s ways to get to people, there are hungry crowds out there that want what you have one way or the other.

If you’re already selling a product or service, you need to be using content marketing, to get your message out there more and more often, it’s going to be worth your time and effort.

If you’re doing it right.

And we talk about that here and I’m going to be offering more opportunities on how to learn how to do this.

How to train somebody to do it on your staff. So stay tuned or to check out more start with my book. Start from there, it will take you the next step, step by step.

It’s a short book, like I said, free copy AmazonProofBook.com.

You have a great night, we’ll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Snatching Customers, With Trust 👨‍👧‍👦 (Boatnik – Grants Pass Oregon)

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Brian shares a story of transfer of trust from a ride his two youngest kids went on at the Boatnik Carnival in Grants Pass.

Transcription

Snatching customers with trust.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I would talk about how you can go about snatching customers using a little thing we call the trust transfer. Okay, this is a fun story because I’ve got three kids.

I’ve got Tyler who seven, Alexandra, who we call Allie is four, and Lucas is two.

We were at the carnival today. So every year during Memorial Day weekend. I’m in Grants Pass Oregon, Grants Pass Oregon puts on this, this big ol festival called boatnik.

Like beatnik, except it’s boatnik, I don’t know where they came up with a name. But the whole idea is they have these boat races on the river.

And they’ve got a big old Carnival and whole thing set up in the park alongside the river, the river that runs through Grants Pass.

So it’s one of these situations where it can be kind of a big thing. Sometimes it’s so big that nobody can even do anything there. But this year with COVID have slowly been been receding back. They were able to put on this event and everybody can come out, and so it was it was well worth it. It was fun.

We went out, I had the podcast producer Sean E. Douglas with me along with his family. I’ve had my kids who are just at that age where they the carnivals a magical thing for them. And so that was fun.

We got to have them go on a few rides. And you know, it’s fun, goofy carnival rides.

One of them was very small, very mild ride. And all my kids were a little bit tired.

They were a little bit beat up by the sun, which hasn’t been out for a while. And is this coming back with with a vengeance here in here in springtime.

And so they’re all kind of dazed.

There was this little ride in one of these little worms that goes in a circle. And Allie wanted to go on and and my youngest Lucas wanted to go on it with her.

So I go in, I sent him in there.

You could tell he’s uneasy, just uneasy.

He doesn’t know what this is, this is the first ride he’s been on at this place. Doesn’t remember going on the rides. We’ve had him on rides at places before but he everything’s new when you’re that age, you know, you don’t remember anything.

So he’s there, he’s like, I don’t know what’s going on. But you could tell he went with it because Allie was having a good time, his big sister was there and so he trusted her.

And by trusting her, he trusted the experience.

He can go along with it now, in complete opposite to that we were later on we were he wanted to go on the carousel, the merry go round.

And so we went on their, Allie got up, Tyler got up, and I brought Lucas on. And I said oh well, maybe we could fit Lucas and Allie, they both wanted somebody to be there with them when they were on the horses, and they’re both kind of small. so I’ll just combine them. I’ll put them both on the same horse.

So we did that, and the guy said, “I’m sorry, only one kid per horse.”

Okay, so I had Kate, come on my wife, she was with Allie.

And I took Lucas and put him on his own horse. Well, he wasn’t he wasn’t cool with that.

When he’s with his big sister, he’s fine.

He’s fine, because he trusts her and he’s right next door. So she wasn’t there. He’s half asleep. Anyway, he’s past his naptime and everything. And he’s just like, I don’t know, I don’t know about this, I don’t know and just crying and he’s a two year old, you know?

And so I’m holding them going, it’s okay, just hanging there, this is gonna go up and down trying to explain to them what’s happening. And see, there’s Tyler, there’s Allie, there’s mom, everything’s okay. We’re gonna be fine.

He made it through and he had an okay time. But the transfer of trust was not quite there. I wasn’t on it with them. I think if I was up there with him, it would have he would have went with it. But I don’t think adults were allowed.

Either way, the both of us couldn’t ride at the same time. And so it was one of those things where it wasn’t quite there. He didn’t quite trust it.

And Sean pointed out to me, he says, isn’t that just how things are, it’s the transfer of trust.

And I knew exactly what he was talking about, because we’ve talked about it so many times in business.

You have this situation, to where oftentimes over and over again. And when you start seeing it, you start seeing it everywhere, you start seeing it with everything that you do, you don’t realize that so many of the things that you do. From the type of business you went into the industry you’re involved in, the type of partners you brought on.

Especially a lot of your original customers, they come by referral, they come by, this person knows that person. Everything is trust based.

People will never do anything with you unless, you know people do business with people they know like and trust. And the more you can get to that third one, trust, the better.

That’s because that’s the clincher.

That’s what makes it if they trust you, it’s great, because then you can transfer that trust anywhere you want it depending on how deep that trust is. And at the same end, if you know somebody who who is trusted by others, they can transfer that trust to you.

So you want to snatch up more clients find somebody who has a trusted crowd, who has people that already trust them, and have them endorse you, and endorse what you’re bringing to the table.

So you probably wouldn’t look for a competitor, you look for somebody with something similar to what you’re doing that plays to a similar crowd to what you’re doing.

And then come in and offer something different and have them introduce you to them.

That’s how all business works like this. Normally, all you have to do is orchestrated, you have to get in there and find places to where you can build trust and get trust instantly from others. You can make it happen.

There’s a lot of ways that this has happened, but it’s ingrained in humanity.

You’re never going to get rid of this principle. It’s an automatic principle.

Find a way to make it work for you. There’s a lots of ways to do this.

I talk a lot about this on almost a monthly basis here. So follow subscribe wherever you’re at, and listen up because we go through this I love to hear your stories about this and your questions about trust.

Because it’s such an interesting topic, and it’s one of those things that is not discussed enough. If you’d like more ideas on how to grow your business and how to make it completely competition proof.

Check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com that is all the time I’ve got for tonight.

You have a great one. Get out there and let the magic happen.