The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Rule of 26 For Service-Based Businesses: Three Steps to Doubling Website Revenue by Michael Buzinski

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

The Rule of 26 For Service-Based Businesses: Three Steps to Doubling Website Revenue by Michael Buzinski Buzzworthy.biz Have you ever asked yourself, “Self, why is digital marketing so complex for service-based businesses?” Digital marketing is made complex by two main factors. The intricacies marketing agencies create to measure success for large enterprise companies. The plethora of tactics and tools available to obtain enterprise marketing goals. Neither completely pertains nor scales down to the needs of small or medium-sized businesses, and less so for service-based businesses. Michael Buzinski shows you the path to doubling your website revenue using the Rule of 26. In this easy-to-read guide to simplifying your website marketing plan, you will learn... The only three key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to track when marketing your website. The three clear objectives that will double your website revenue. How to leverage both earned and paid website marketing tactics without needing to be a marketing genius. Simple strategies that increase your revenue without proportionately increasing your workload. Stop guessing about how to make your website work for you. Leverage the Rule of 26 to grow your business by working smarter, not harder. Using Michael’s clear and precise three-step website marketing plan will drastically increase the leads garnered from your website and help you get paid what you are worth.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly did i mention we always appreciate you tuning in? To see the video version of this, go to Goodreads.com.

For just Christmas, see everything we're reading and viewing over there. You can also, to see the video version of this, second try, YouTube.com. For just Christmas. How can I forget that? I say at the beginning of every show, right? All the different groups, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, YouTube stuff, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids are at. There's 5 trillion social accounts that we have. Go see them all.

Can lawyers say 5 trillion? It's 5 trillion. Maybe I'm off by maybe 5 or 10. Anyway, guys, go check all those out. Subscribe to them and be involved in everything we're doing. Today we have another great, brilliant author and marketer on the show. He is the author of the book, The Rule of 26 for Service-Based Businesses, Three Steps to Doubling Revenue. And it came out May 18th, 2021. And I need to correct that. The Rule of 26 for service-based businesses,

three steps to doubling website revenue. That's always important to make that distinction. Michael Buzinski is on the show with us. He's going to be talking to us about his amazing book and everything that went into it. He is the president and CMO of Buzzworthy Website Marketing. He's a lifelong entrepreneur, digital marketing thought leader, and best-selling author. Dubbed a visionary marketer by the American Marketing Association, Michael's sole mission is to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns. Buzz, as most people call him, has simplified digital marketing success with the rule of 26. And it's on a mission to double the website revenue of service-centric businesses across America.

Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you very much for having me, Chris. There you go. And as we were talking before the show, you're in your Bengals colors attire there. Is that lucky? Does that help with some luck? That's right. This is a Bengals shirt underneath, but this is a navy blue. So we're almost there. There you go.

So welcome to the show. Give us your plugs so we can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, you can find everything you need to know about me at my main website at buzzworthy.biz. That's B-U-Z-W-O-R-T-H-Y.biz. We are a website marketing firm and we do focus on service centric businesses. So if service that you're selling to other people, then we want to help you increase your revenue via digital marketing. There you go. What motivated you want to write this book? Actually, this is a COVID pushed type of project. I've

always been told that I was going to write a book. People always asked me when I was going to write a book. I just never had something to write about. But then when COVID hit and the pandemic kind of shut everybody down, at the time we were very done for you, white glove service. And when the pandemic hit, everybody started tightening up their purses. We were very fortunate that our clients were able to continue with us. We only lost one client during the COVID, first year of COVID in 2020. But during that time, there was a need because in times of trouble, marketing is one of the most important things businesses are needed to do. And I needed to find a way I could service more or serve the needs of

more businesses without them having to necessarily hire me. And so one of the questions that always people always ask me is like, how can, is there a way to simplify the process or simplify the way I approach my website marketing? And so I just dug deep and looked into where we could find the highest return on investment, whether it be time or money, into the website to create those. And so I discovered a mathematical rule, and that's where the Rule of 26 comes in, where we can create growth, immediate growth in revenue from our websites, while then working towards a compounding return when you get through all three of the steps of the rule of 26. Nice. What are some samples you want to give us?

I'll tell you, I'll give you the whole, it's all there. I think it's in chapter two. The book is small, so it's not a novel or anything like that. It's really about saving time, energy, and money. So I didn't want to ramble on too much. But the rule of 26 says that if you increase your unique traffic to your website by 26%, and then your conversion rate by 26%, and your average revenue per client by 26%, you will have a compounding effect of 100% more revenue coming from your website. Wow, that sounds awesome. And if that's not enough revenue for you, just do it again. Just keep doing it.

I can't make it simpler than that. So do you guys, I get all these emails from SEO people. Is this SEO work that you guys consult on or is this other types of marketing? SEO is one component of website marketing. SEO is your organic inbound marketing. It is one of the most profitable types of traffic you will get as a service-based business because people are specifically looking for solutions that you provide. So we take a look at that. We also take a look at social media marketing. A lot of people forget that guerrilla marketing is part of website marketing. So how you're talking about your website or displaying your website offline has a lot to do with the amount of traffic and the

quality traffic you get to your website. Most definitely. A lot of people forget the social aspect or what's even funnier is they set up social sites like Facebook pages and then they never answer any inquiries or do anything with them. They just become zombies. And even worse than that is the people who pour time, seven times more profitable than those coming from organic social media interactions. And so I always tell people that it's really important to think of social media at the organic level more as your conversion tool than it is a traffic tool. So once people have found you on the search engines and they seen something on their website, they're like, okay, yeah, this person has what I'm looking for, but can I trust them? They go to the social media and then they see cobwebs hanging from the rafters and go, oh,

okay, no. Or they see somebody who's highly engaged, properly engaged. You don't have to post every day. Most social media sites for service-based businesses only need two to maybe three posts a week to be effective in what we call social proofing. So it's basically people coming there just to see that you are people, that you do engage with your community. You are human. You're likable because we do business with people we like and trust. Exactly. And so that's how we utilize that. And then for search engines, actually use your social trip to that, that will affect your SEO scores. So the more you're on, like you said, you're on the 5 trillion, which is only 2 trillion shy of all the ones that are out there. If Google sees that there is traffic going on in the background with all of those, that's great. One of the things is your

engagement. And so if you're going to have multiple platforms that you can't manually properly find a good platform that can automate posting and centralize your replies and your engagement on that. We offer a product called Buzz Social, which syncs all of your social media together and allows you to curate, allows you to schedule and reply to all of your channels all in one place. Oh, wow. Now that's proprietary to you guys that you guys offer? Yeah that's ours on our website. If you go to buzzworthy.biz, you'll see BuzzSocial all the way down on the bottom where our SaaS products are. And SaaS stands for software as a service. Nice. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more? Sure. We have actually five different services, softwares and services. It came actually right

around when I was working with the book as to find ways to put the professional tools for businesses that can't afford folks like me maybe to do it for them. And so it gives them a DIY option that is much more affordable. So we have one for SEO called, we have the social media management, which is Buzz Social. And the other one is a reputation management tool that helps you automate some of your reputation management, getting those five-star reviews on both Google and other industry-specific websites, as you will. Customized, all that good stuff. And that's called BuzzRep. All three of those right there on the site. We've got a couple

other ones that I won't bore you with, but those are the three main pieces that can help people get better engagement and better conversions and better traffic to their website. Nice. That's always important in getting that traffic. I know I was really surprised to learn that Pinterest is like a really big search engine sort of thing. That's pretty crazy. Technically, it's search engine. It's just in a social setting.

Another one that people forget is their Google My Business page. And it has become more social in its rollout with the Google Posts, where you can actually put out a post on your Google My Business page on anything you want. You can have it as news, events, offers, anything you want. They disappear after seven days. So one or two of those a week on your Google My Business will show recent activities that are going on with you, recent news. And it shows that the visitors that you are actively present in your Google space. Wow. That's pretty cool. There's so many tools that people can use and a lot of people just don't even bother with them. They're just not even into them.

There's so many out there that waste people's time. And so when we curated our collection of SaaS products, we were really specific on what really moves the revenue needle. And so if we're going to back that up with tools that are going to help us there, we need to make sure that they're one, easy to use. So all of our tools, you can learn within 30 minutes. You can be a master of them right then and there. You get them instead of just another software company out there that says, Hey, here's the tool. You figure it out or email us if you have any questions, or here's a knowledge base to read through that you don't have time for. There's actually a marketing team behind each one of our platforms that help the user get the best out of it. So we're vested in the success of small to medium-sized businesses.

I've been serving the needs of both since 2005 after I got out of the Air Force. The David and Goliath story is one of my favorites. And so I like to serve as many Davids as I possibly can. There you go. So what are some other things that your agency offers the people that do they work with a specific agent in your business? Or what are some other different things that you guys do with your service? That's a good question. So we are a website marketing firm.

So that has to be, that's something that delineates us from, say, a creative agency who will try to be everything to all people. Where a website marketing firm is less worried about building followers and a lot of the other KPIs out there that other agencies will sell you. And we're more on the revenue based. And so we have both. We talked about the software as a service where there are tools to get through those tactics. Our whole ethos is wrapped around the rule of 26, which is basically always looking to double the revenue from the website. So as long as you're needing more, we're always going to be using those three KPIs to push you towards your goals. So we keep that part simple so that you don't have to wonder what am I? So we have done for you services as well as like you're alluding to. We also have done with you services. So you can't quite afford the white glove, but you don't have time to do it

yourself. And so we, you need a little bit of help. So we have this way of bridging the gap between DIY and done for you. Our Apex offering is our fractional CMO, where you can get basically the expertise of a 20 plus year marketing guru. Not guru, I hate guru. Professional. Marketing professional. And these are great for companies who are already into the seven figures of revenue a year, usually about 1.5, depending on your industry, on up. And these are people who want to grow. They want to get significant growth, but they don't want to get stuck in the agency world because agencies will assign you an account manager versus having a

fractional CMO allows somebody to actually dig deep into your marketing and work with your sales so that they're working symbiotically. And that is a wonderful thing. So instead of, it's a fraction of the cost of what it costs to have a full-time CMO in-house, plus you get the power of a marketing firm right behind that CMO for you as well. There you go. That's important to take and have. What do a lot of people overlook or fail at when they're trying to... I meet people that are like, we can figure it out ourselves. Or one of my favorite things always was we put like my 17-year-old nephew on the social media and the marketing stuff. So they know what to do with those kids. I don't know. What are some failures

that you see people doing? Describe the two biggest ones right there. One, you get what you pay for. Who knew? And then two, would you, if, if, if the CMO position was open tomorrow, would you pay your nephew the $250,000 a seasoned professional would cost you to do the same thing? No, the whole point is to get it done for free. The sniveling kid is just sitting around in the basement playing video games all day. You cannot save yourself to

prosperity is what I say. And if you don't understand the investment marketing is, then you have one, not ever had marketing done for you or been successful with marketing yourself. So you're, you're a naysayer and that's okay. There's a lot of them out there, or you've been burned one too many times by people who say they can do what they promise, but never actually do it. And it's unfortunate in my mark in my industry that marketing has a lot of that. There's a low barrier of entry when it comes to being a marketer. There's a lot of facets to marketing. And so you have people who have gone to school for marketing and then they get into the work

environment and they're doing one little tiny facet of marketing and they do it for five years. And then they say, Hey, yeah, I've been in marketing for five years. And you find out that they're in maybe branding and now they want to get into digital. Well, digital and branding are two different things. So if a company comes to me and says, Hey, we want to do a branding campaign. I'm like, okay, let me get you connected with a branding company because that branding agency is going to do you a lot better than my team is. I understand it. I can manage it. We used to have. We used to have a team that did

that in my creative agency, but that's not what we're focused on. And so it's really important that you hire what you need rather than what's been sold to you and asking that question. I think that's one of the biggest things that people will buy into an idea of something they don't understand. So don't buy it until you understand it. You don't need to understand how it happens, but you need to understand what is happening and what you should expect from it. And so that would be the second thing I would bring in. It would be that a lot of people get into marketing without proper goal setting and really being clear on how they're going to track their traction. How do I know I'm winning? If you don't know how you're

winning, get out of the race because you're going to lose. You're not even going to know it. You're just going to spend yourself into a position to where now you can't afford to market anymore because you spent all your money and not knowing where it went. That's a tough one. How effective is branding compared to marketing? I got in Clubhouse and there's a lot of young ladies on Clubhouse that claim to be branding people. And it seems like mostly their posts on Instagram are them half naked, which I'm like, what brand message are you sending? Is this an OnlyFans thing? But they claim they can build multi-million dollar businesses that way. And I'm like, I know, no, that's what Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs did. I remember the Steve Jobs Playboy spread or Play

Girl spread, I guess it would be. Everyone remembers that. Lee Iacocca was in it with him, I think, too. Jack Welch from GE did the Play Girl thing. I just don't understand it. But in serious note, though, what is the difference between branding and marketing for people that don't know? Okay. So branding feeds marketing. Branding is the feel that people get from your company's image. And branding is the message, the core message that should always be congruent with how you're talking to the general public. And so a lot of people forget to start with branding and then market that brand. Okay. So brand, a brand is a, so when we say branding, it's more of a noun than it is a verb or marketing is a verb that makes that help you out. And so when I look at a brand, I look at what are you saying to me?

What is the message? Once I have that message, that's the noun, I can take that and go, okay, how can I deliver this message to the right people at the right time? That's marketing. It's the delivery of messages. And branding is the creation of that. So which is going to give me the highest return if I'm a business out there looking at this? Branding or marketing?

It's like having an engine with no gas. So you need the gas, right? So gas is, the engine is going to be your brand, right? If you have a strong brand, that means you have good processes involved in your business and you can deliver on what you promise. You can under promise and over deliver. That's a good engine, right?

You have good customer service. That's part of a great engine. You have a process that gives predictable outcomes to your clients. It's a great engine. The gas is the marketing that gets that promise out to your target market when they're ready to buy. People don't realize that 95% of your target market is not in the market to buy your service. So one out of 20 people you're marketing to are actually ready to buy today or within the week or whatever you're, or are in the buying cycle if you have a long sales cycle. So if you don't have all of your ducks

in a row to begin with, you're wasting your time in marketing. Just go out and sell it. Go out and network. Do your guerrilla marketing. Do all the things that are manual out there, but don't spend money on advertising and don't spend money on marketing. Yeah. If you're just throwing money at just plain marketing and not targeting, you're just wasting so much money. And a lot of people don't realize how to even track whether what they're spending money on, let alone what they're getting back from it. Really paying attention to how you are able to track your metrics, get those reports that are reliable and real data. That's a big problem that I see. A lot of times people look at their website data and they don't have it filtered

down to actual human beings. So they're looking at visits by bots that will never buy. They're just there to see that you're, they're just there to get the information that the search engine sent them there to get. So you got to filter those folks out when you're deciding whether or not you're getting better traffic from any marketing efforts or any campaigns that you might be having. Most definitely. And you guys have got, you guys have worked with a lot of big names. I'm looking at here on the website. Do you want to name a few of them off? Drop some names. Why don't you? Denny's, the ACLU, American Diabetes Association, a few other ones i don't really recognize but we've worked sports big ones warehouse fridays pro bash or bass pro shops i'm dyslexic clearly kickstarter uh renault by

anderson and a few great people you've started a lot of different people you'll even build their websites for them etc etc uh so pretty good there anything we you want to touch on that we haven't talked about or so when we talk about branding your website is part of that brand and so i just got off the phone with somebody today's cpa and we love serving the needs of cpas because they don't like marketing at all because it's just not part of who they are as a being usually. Where does this go on the balance sheet? Yes, but they do understand ROI. And so that's why I like working with them because they're open to new ideas

because they're not usually that type of creative person, but they love the analytics that digital marketing can give them. And so we were looking at this company has been around for 20 some odd years. They work exclusively nonprofit organizations, which is a noble cause there, but their website would never tell you that you go to it.

And I would have never guessed that's all they do. And that's who they, and that's who they're about. And so their brand was missing that website. And so that is the one piece in branding that we bring to the table that most branding companies can't, which is a marketable brand of a website. Because remember, branding and marketing are different. So we take what their brand is, and then we make it a brandable website, a branded marketable website. I said that wrong. And so a marketable website tells a story

of how you are here to serve the needs and desires of your visitor. So if you can't identify within the first eight seconds, a person's pain or dream, you will lose them. Have eight seconds, convince them that you even understand their problem before you ever talk about yourself. That's pretty crazy, man. And most people talk about themselves way too much on their website. That's probably me, actually. You're a personality. That's a different story. Yeah, I guess that's true. I'll use that excuse. I'll use that excuse.

I'll use my website as an example. We say what we do right at the top, or website marketing for service-based businesses. Right below that, I identify that most companies do not get revenue from their website. We use this thing called the rule of 26 that shortcuts the strategy process of doubling your website revenue. From there, we say, hey, these are three ways that we solve those problems. Right above that follows you down is a need-based menu. I literally lay out what it is. I need SEO. I need a new website.

I need social media help. I need this. I need that. That's in the first person to the person who's reading it, not about us. That's the whole point of it. Yeah, that makes sense. So you want people to know what you do in eight seconds, man. Eight seconds. If you can't do it in eight seconds, you're,

they're going to leave. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, if they're still confused on second eight, they're already looking for the back button, the closed tab button. So anything more you want to touch on or tease out on the book or your guys' service that we haven't? So I do have for your listeners, I do have an offer. If you go to Amazon,

the link is on our homepage on buzzworthy.biz and download the e-book of a version of this right here. Send me a screenshot of your purchase at buzz with two Z's at buzzworthy.biz. I will send you a free signed copy. I will even pay shipping. Wow. That's pretty freaking awesome.

And then you'll have both copies. I like eBooks. I want people to have more eBooks, but I love my book. I have a library at home too. And, and so I keep, I have hard copies of eBooks that I've really enjoyed having. Um, and so I have them on my shelf, but all my notes in my books are in my eBooks so that they're searchable. You can code them and you can do it how I'm a very nonfiction oriented reader. So I was surprised at how many people like buying eBooks. I didn't realize it was such a thing. I've, I come from an old world of reading newspapers,

the old way, the tactile way, getting the ink all over your fingers. And I don't know. And it's just, it's just, but this is a great offering because I love autograph books too. I don't know.

I like autographing them and I like getting autographed books from, to me, it just adds more value to it. I don't know. I like autographing them and I like getting autographed books from, to me, it just adds more value to it. I don't know. Right. I'm a tactile person too. Like I still, I have a notepad that's electronic notepad.

So it allows me to write versus having to try to type on a, on the iPad or anything like that. And I do 10 times better writing notes that way, but I need the electric, I need an electronic version of that so that I can then, it recognizes my handwriting. It'll actually turn it into text and then send it to me in a PDF that I can then copy and paste and do what I need to do with it. I'm in the Xer back and forth. I get upset when I can't find the ebook version of something. Right now I'm reading a 700 paid

nonfiction book about the generations between 1548 and 2069. Oh, wow. Long story short, it's a big, thick book. And I was really mad when I couldn't find the e-book version of it. It's really crazy. I'm on the plane back and forth from Vegas this last weekend going, this sucks. You carry this giant, worn piece-sized book. Yeah, basically. Yeah. So, Michael, worn piece-sized book. Yeah, basically.

Yeah. So, Michael, this has been really insightful. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. If you're a service-based business and you're looking to increase your predictable revenue, I'd like to show you how you can do that through your website. Just go to buzzworthy.biz. That's B-U-Z-W-O-R-T-H-Y.biz. Everything is there. Our social media, all of our SaaS products and our done-for-Z-W-O-R-T-H-Y.biz. Everything is there.

Our social media, all of our SaaS products and our done-for-you products are there. You can get a lot of information about us without having to talk to us. Consultants are free, and there's plenty of places to sign up for that on the website as well. There you go. That is all I've got. And thanks for coming on, Michael. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris, for having me.

It was a pleasure. There you go. Guys, order the book and take up Michael and his offer. If you buy the Kindle version of the e-book, you can send him the stuff. We'll put the links on the Chris Foss show, and then you can get a signed copy. That's a deal. Two for the price of one, basically, I think. Yes.

The Rule of 26 for service-based businesses, three steps to doubling website revenue. Pick that baby up and find bookstores are sold. But stay away from those dirty alley bookstores. Those are always bad. There's needles and razor blades in there. Don't go in there. There's people that are in there. They'll sell you watches or something out of their trench coat. I't know why i'm doing 1970s comics anyway guys thanks for tuning

in we certainly appreciate you go to goodreads.com for this chris fossey everything i'm reading reviewing over there go to all of our groups on facebook linkedin twitter instagram all that good stuff go to uh facebook linkedin all that things youtube.com you know the drill i'm just repeating myself at this point. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.