Title: How BizMarketing Helped More Than 10,000 Businesses In 2021
Guest: Kyle Rhodes
Peter: When I started my first internet business back in 1994, we had a client named Jack Carroll who had a car dealership locally here in Lynnwood. I was really excited to show him his new website that we created for him. So I went up to his office, I had this laptop. I show it to him and I’m like, Jack, what do you think of your new website? And it was really funny.
He said, Yeah, it’s pretty nice. Hasn’t sold any cars for me yet? And I’ll never forget that. It was kind of like a sanity check on what we do. At the end of the day, it’s not about the activity.
It’s about actually helping businesses win. Never forget that. Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life.
Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today, my guest is Kyle Rhodes from bizmarketing.com. Kyle is our designer. He is a design expert and he’s been with us for about three years now. Today, I’m going to flip the tables and let him ask me some questions about our topic, how we helped more than 10,000 businesses in 2021.
Kyle?
Kyle: Yeah, very excited about how we were able to help all these people. And my first question I want to ask you, Pete, is why do you help businesses? What motivates you to help people win online?
Peter: That’s a great question. So our slogan is we help businesses win online and We have three core values in the business. And the first one is We Help Businesses Win in any way we can. The reason that I like to help businesses, a couple of things. So first of all, when I started my first internet business back in 1994, we had a client named Jack Carroll who had a car dealership locally here in Lynnwood.
I was really excited to show him his new website that we created for him. So I went up to his office. I had this color laptop, one of the first color laptops at the time. I show it to him and I’m like, Jack, what do you think of your new website? And it was really funny.
He said, Yeah, it’s pretty nice. Hasn’t sold any cars for me yet? And I’ll never forget that. It was kind of like a sanity check on what we do. At the end of the day, it’s not about the activity.
It’s about actually helping businesses win. Never forget that. Can’t lose sight of the purpose. Exactly. And second of all, it’s sort of that Zig Ziglar quote that, you know, everybody should know, which is, you know, Zig Ziglar was a famous sales trainer, motivational speaker, author.
He said, You can get anything in life you want as long as you help enough other people get what they want. I always think about that in terms of applying that to business. It’s like, you know, we are helping others get what they want in some form or fashion. We’ll get ultimately what we want. I don’t think about it in a selfish way, but I think about it just as a motivation.
Do.
Kyle: Yeah.
Peter: You know, I think we all enjoy helping others. Right. And then lastly, I’m a member of Business Networking International. It’s an international business networking organization, and their one liner is givers gain. I really believe in that.
So, yeah, so that’s that’s sort of the so that’s, that’s sort of the why we help businesses. And that’s why I was so excited that we were able to help more than 10,000 just in this year alone.
Kyle: Yeah, that’s awesome. My question for you would be also, how did you get that goal? What motivated you and why did you set the goal of 10,000?
Peter: Right. Yeah, that’s a great question. I work with a business coach named Ann Gearing. She and I were working on some goal setting for me personally with respect to the business for the next three to five years. One of the things I was thinking about is just this idea of helping businesses and they don’t need to be a client to help.
You know, we don’t have to sign everybody up to our services and, you know, they don’t have to pay us or they don’t have to invest in our services with their money. And I came to this number because we’d been doing some podcasts and we’ve been doing some blogging and things like that. I thought, you know, I think helping a thousand businesses win would be a good goal for me for the next three to five years. And then I thought about it, I looked at our podcast, for example, and I realized we’d already had close to at the time about 2,500 downloads of our podcasts. I’m like, well, you know, hopefully there’s a good business information in there and we’re helping businesses win in that particular way.
So I said, you know what? I don’t think a thousand is enough. And they say that if your goals aren’t big enough to where you have to stretch your brain to think about hitting them, then they’re probably not necessarily big enough. So I said, well, why not add a zero? Right?
So I added a zero. And so Anne and I had this discussion back in January, February timeframe of 2021. Fast forward to now we blew the 10,000 out of the water. I’m pretty excited about that.
Kyle: Yeah. How’s, how specifically were you able to reach that 10,000 number this year?
Peter: First, let me tell you kind of what we did. First of all, we stepped up our content creation within biz marketing and we create a lot of blog posts and podcasts and we try to just kind of educate business owners and businesses about different trends and things that will help them do better online. So we’re trying to be educational and helpful.
Kyle: They’ve been kind of ramping that up as well.
Peter: Yeah. So we ramped that up and we got really serious about it. About a year ago, we started stepping up our game in that space. Emily Caddell, our marketing director really helped.
Kyle: Yeah, she’s awesome. Push that.
Peter: Yeah, she’s a, she’s a real expert in that space as well. So we were already producing content on a weekly basis and one of the things are producing articles and podcasts and things like that. And one of the things that happened back in 2021 is I started getting a bunch of people asking me about this thing that looks like a bill they got from a company called a U S domain authority. I don’t even know if that’s actually the name of the company, but it just was, it said, you know, pay us domain authority and you get this directory listing on their site, $2.89 a year. Well, within the course of a week, I had two of our clients contact me and say, am I supposed to do with this bill?
Should I pay it?
Kyle: Kinda confusing. Well, look like a bill but it’s.
Peter: Exactly. Yeah. It’s you probably receive one of these letters in the mail if you’re a business owner. It looks like, you know, it looks like a bill. It has your domain name listed there.
Honestly, I could see where a lot of people would get confused and just say, Oh, I guess we’re supposed to pay this $289 because it’s got five different ways to pay and all that sort of thing. So I got a little ticked off honestly. And I said, you know, I’m going to write a blog post about this. And first of all, I contacted my clients and I said, listen, yeah, don’t pay that. That’s ridiculous.
And then I wrote a blog post that basically said, yeah, this is not a good idea. Don’t do this. And then I also took that and made a video, put it on YouTube. It went viral. This blog post I wrote went viral.
Since we posted it, it’s been viewed 24,000 times.
Kyle: It’s crazy.
Peter: So we’ve had 20, just this year alone, we have 24,000 people come and take a look at this post in one month, in just the month of July alone, we had 10,000 people, over 10,000 people take a look at that and read it. Since then, I’ve had a bunch of phone calls and emails and LinkedIn messages come to me from people who are thanking just thanking me and hey, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for putting this out there because I would have spent $289 for year one plus, you know, who knows about year two, three, four, whatever. That’s money that I can save and put it to good use. Yeah. And just goes to show how much
Kyle: you can creating one little blog post can help thousands of people. If you’re able to position it in a way to help others.
Peter: I’ll just mention that the YouTube video has like 1,300 views already. Already blew through the 10,000. I guess, well, I think we need to add a zero onto that number and say a 100,000 businesses. We’re going to continue to create educational content, articles, especially with relate to online marketing and helping businesses just do better. If they want to use our services, great.
We’re here to help. So that’s what I think is next for us.
Kyle: We’re really excited to be able to help down a thousand businesses and go get the next 100,000 people.
Peter: Exactly. We’re going to help businesses win online one at a time. We just got fortunate and then we picked a topic about something that was, very timely and relevant and, and it went viral. So hey, Kyle, thanks a lot for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
And, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again.
We’ll see you soon.
