The PPC Machine

🚨 I’ve started a newsletter. Don’t worry - I’m not going to call it a “dispatch” or pretend it’s a letter from the trenches of entrepreneurship. It’s just a good ol’ fashioned email. With jokes. And marketing advice that won’t make your eyes bleed.

It’s called The Smarter Soloist.

It’s for solo business owners who want to grow their business without:

Googling “what is a funnel” at 2am

Sacrificing their weekends to the Content Gods

Becoming a shouty LinkedIn thought leader with a ring light and a dream

Each issue includes:
✅ A true story
✅ A useful marketing insight
✅ At least one sentence I’ll regret writing in a few years

If that sounds like your cup of tea (or glass of wine), you can join the early subscribers here:
👉 https://newsletter.thesmartersoloist.com/subscribe

Or ignore this and go back to pretending that spending 3 hours choosing a Canva font counts as marketing. Your call.

The Smarter Soloist Seriously useful marketing advice for solo business owners – wrapped in stories that might make you snort tea out your nose

One of the effects of living in the digital age and in the era of Amazon Prime is that people now expect everything to happen instantly.

So if it's late at night and someone wants to arrange a meeting with you for later in the week, they don't necessarily want to have to send you an email or fill in a form and wait for you to get back to them the next day.

By using an online booking system such as 10to8 (which is free, by the way) or Calendly, you can give people the ability to see when you are available and book themselves in for a meeting or a phone conversation.

As a financial adviser or mortgage broker who's selling the same products from the same providers as thousands of other advisers, one of the ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to become known as an industry expert or thought-leader.

To achieve this, you need to make sure you are responding to, and commenting on, things that happen in the financial world - e.g. changes to the tax regime, announcements from investment companies, changes to interest rates, etc. You can use your blog and/or social media channels to do this.

One way to get exposure to a wider audience of potential clients as a mortgage broker or IFA is to find forums (such as Lemon Fool) or Facebook groups where people are asking questions about personal finance.

Providing information and answers in response to these questions will help establish you as an expert in your field and allow people to get to know you in a relaxed environment.

Most forums will allow you to include links in your posts or in your signature and this can be a good way to get people to click through to your website to read more about a particular topic you've given them some help with.

It's pretty easy these days to start your own podcast and release weekly, fortnightly, or monthly episodes to help you attract new clients.

The beauty of podcasts is that people can listen to them while they are driving, working out at the gym, walking the dog, etc. And this opens you up to a whole new audience who might not have time to watch your videos or read your blog posts.

If you're wary about starting your own podcast, another option is to see if you can be a guest on someone else's.

Got a favourite financial services podcast? Let me know in the comments.