Efficiently Marketing and Running Your Small Business With Mark Amell

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[00:00:00] Mark Amell: The latest statistic that I saw 86 percent of small businesses that are struggling use one or two marketing techniques.

[00:00:08] Mark Amell: And 90 percent of million dollar small businesses use 10 or more. And the reason for that is a small business doesn't totally understand marketing. A lot of times they go in a, somebody talks to them and that sounds great. And they put all their money into it. And 10, 000 later they're broke and they haven't gotten to where they wanted to get.

[00:00:32] Are you looking to improve your sales skills without compromising your values? Welcome to Sales Made Easy, a podcast for business and personal growth. Join Harry Spaight, author of Selling With Dignity, your Formula for Life-Changing Sales Results as he hosts sales experts and business owners who share their journeys of personal growth and business success without resorting to pushy sales tactics.

[00:00:58] Now, here's your [00:01:00] host, Harry.

[00:01:02] In this conversation. I had the privilege of speaking with mark Amelle he really brings a ton of value. This guy has been running his own business for the past 35 years or more out of his home doing marketing and providing for his family. So he knows a thing or two about the home based business and knows a heck of a lot about marketing. I know you're going to love the conversation, so let's give her the listen.

[00:01:25] And of course, I appreciate all great reviews. We'll talk to you soon.

[00:01:30] Harry: Mark, let's just go a little bit with your background. First, you said that you have been running your own business for a few decades now.

[00:01:39] Harry: So talk

[00:01:40] Mark Amell: to me about that. I've had my own home business for 35 years. which has worked out great for me. Awesome. So

[00:01:50] Harry: Do you have a couple of thoughts as to how they might be a little bit more successful starting their own business from home?

[00:01:57]

[00:01:57] Mark Amell: It's real easy to get distracted and, [00:02:00] you know, go to the refrigerator 20 times during the day. The more structured you are, the better success you're going to have. And even with your customers, if you tell it's more, it's time management. You know, if you tell your customers that I'm going to take calls at two to four in the afternoon, so that you can focus on your work, you know, set up.

[00:02:23] Mark Amell: The first thing I do is I have my coffee and I look at what I want to accomplish for the day. And then my smart time is in the morning. You know, so I work on more difficult projects in the morning. The I have four dogs. So we go out and run them in the morning. So they're tired and I can focus for a couple hours, but it all comes down to having them structured in the, your family structured, the people, you know, if your kids go to school, try to get what you couldn't done before you go to pick them up.

[00:02:56] Mark Amell: You have a lot of flexibility being [00:03:00] working from home, but there's also A lot more distractions. The other thing I would say is when you're first starting out is You know, if your morning routine was get up, take a shower, get dressed, you know, go for a ride, you don't have that drive anymore. But if you still go through that same routine, your mindset is going to be, hey, I'm going to work.

[00:03:23] Mark Amell: Well, what am I going to get done? Yeah, that's

[00:03:26] Harry: very valuable. It's like you know, if you think about the time blocking. When you go to the regular job, you pretty much have stuff to do. Maybe you're, maybe you're on a project, but you don't necessarily need to come up with stuff to do generally when you're on your own working from home.

[00:03:49] Harry: Like you mentioned, there's the distractions, there's the pets, there's the children. There's the refrigerator, you know, there's the smartphone, there's all kinds of things that people could be [00:04:00] distracted. So you mentioned about with your morning coffee, looking at the day and thinking about what you want to get accomplished.

[00:04:07] Harry: What for someone who's starting out, do they even know what they want to get accomplished?

[00:04:13] Mark Amell: What I do is I every Friday evening or after late, I plan the next week out. I list I have all my categories of projects, you know, customers training cleaning, you know, I'm a single parent. So I list those out how many hours I'm going to give them.

[00:04:35] Mark Amell: So I know that I'm going to work 60 hours, let's say in a week or 40 hours in the week, how they're distributed. So in the morning, I say, okay, I think this is what I'm going to chunk it off and make sure it heads towards that goal. You can always make up other things that are not heading you towards that goal for the week.

[00:04:56] Mark Amell: And the whole objective is by Friday, when you make up your [00:05:00] next week's schedule, you've got your calendar clean. You've cleaned everything up that you've done. Things happen. But I try to get hard to that point, but it's, it's really about planning for the week and your goals and your business. What do you want to see your business goals and how you're going to get there?

[00:05:17] Harry: Right? What would you say would be some of the priorities that come to mind for a newer business?

[00:05:26] Mark Amell: Know what you're, as far as sales and the marketing, know what you're selling. What is your offer? What is your target market? How are you going to talk to them? You know, people, if you're going to talk to businesses that are only open from nine to five, then you've got to black out sometime in the afternoon.

[00:05:48] Mark Amell: Either go talk to them or call them, get your list ready of. People that you're going to call you can't when you're a home business, you could work at 1 o'clock in the morning, but you're not going to be able to talk to anybody.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Harry: So, yeah, you go. Go ahead. I was just going to say, so it's really, I mean, I'm smiling here.

[00:06:08] Harry: I was around thinking about it is that this is not necessarily what people think about, which is they need to work on their sales, what they're going to say, who their ideal client profile is and talking to people. So, yeah, you and I are completely aligned on that for sure.

[00:06:29] Mark Amell: Thoughts? Yeah. If you don't, if you don't know who you're talking to or what your offer is and test your offer, you're going to waste a lot of time because, you know, as a marketing person, I can yell and scream at all the small businesses, you know, that I do marketing, but it, it gets drowned out by all the big corporations, smoke and mirrors.

[00:06:53] Mark Amell: I've got to have a very specific niche. I got to have a very specific message. So [00:07:00] that I do stand out and it's very possible with strategic planning, you know, a small business can succeed. I've raised, you know, kids and family and on my small business. And because I had everything strategic planned, I actually went 20 years without having to market at all.

[00:07:20] Mark Amell: Wow. Residual income.

[00:07:22] Harry: Yeah, very cool. It's.

[00:07:26] Mark Amell: Yeah, it just that planning and being efficient with time and it's very lonely being a small business owner. Get the, get the right people that you can talk to around you. There was. And this is a very short story. Henry Ford's board was trying to take them kick Henry Ford out of the business because they said he didn't know anything.

[00:07:52] Mark Amell: So he had all these people coming in and asking questions. And after a while, he said, judge, I got a desk. I got a board on my desk with these [00:08:00] switches. If I want to know answers to any of those silly questions, I know which switch to flip and get that answer. And the judge dismissed the case, but it's having trusted advisors around.

[00:08:12] Mark Amell: Yeah,

[00:08:13] Harry: it's really good. And, you know, so people might not necessarily think about these things, like having a schedule, having your ideal client profile, having the conversations. And you mentioned the trusted advisors, because There's, again, there's a lot of distractions, there's a lot of shiny objects, there's a lot of potential for self doubt.

[00:08:38] Harry: Did you ever have to deal with self doubt if you're going down the right path or anything along those lines?

[00:08:46] Mark Amell: I did, but I always have checks and balances. When I was building the marketing company, I spent five years talking to some of the best self proclaimed gurus around the world. And I would always, [00:09:00] you always have to break things down.

[00:09:02] Mark Amell: You know, the whole world is complicated, but if you break each of those down into small tasks, then you can validate each tasks you're going, don't try to get. Try to get the whole picture. There's two different ways of thinking. The eastern culture likes to think of the top, the 30, 000 foot view. The western culture likes to do all the down details.

[00:09:28] Mark Amell: You've got to be aware of both and make sure they all fit when I had a large programming project to do, I would have my programmers. I talked to him about it and they go. Okay. Great. And they go sit down on the terminal and start typing. And I'm like, wait a minute. You have even thought about what you're typing or where you're going.

[00:09:48] Mark Amell: We don't want to have. You know, 10 puzzles with half the pieces missing. Let's make sure that each of those pieces go towards that final picture. Yeah,

[00:09:59] Harry: it's really good [00:10:00] advice. I know someone who would immediately start doing the typing. Yes, that would be me. But yes, there's. Tons of value to sit back and to kind of just visualize what the real goal is here.

[00:10:13] Harry: Again, you have to know yourself and if you're not great at that, that's where having a trusted advisor, someone that you can look up to and say, look, this is what I'm thinking, what are your thoughts? And they might provide some guidance for

[00:10:26] Mark Amell: you. And that's what I've always kind of relied on. I had, I guess, an advantage in that my father started his own business and I watch it grow.

[00:10:36] Mark Amell: Some lessons from that.

[00:10:38] Harry: Yeah. Yeah. So it ran in the family. Sounds

[00:10:42] Mark Amell: like a little bit. Yeah. I think it does. You have to watch everybody and observe what you're doing, but I was, you have to be self aware, you know, like you said, what are, what are your strong points? Go with those. What are your weak points?

[00:10:58] Mark Amell: Get help in those. [00:11:00] Right.

[00:11:00] Harry: Yeah, it's really great. You think of you mentioned a statistic about the businesses that don't do well. And over the years I've heard various statistics, but basically the percentages of businesses failing in their first five years is somewhere around 50%. If I recall, it's a pretty high number.

[00:11:25] Harry: If it's not 50%, it's still a very high number. So even if it's one out of every three. That's a high number. So when people are starting a business, they have to look at it and say, just because we know how to do the thing doesn't make the business

[00:11:41] Mark Amell: successful. No, you have to make other people aware. And yeah, the latest statistic that I saw 86 percent of small businesses that are struggling use one or two marketing techniques.

[00:11:55] Mark Amell: And 90 percent of million dollar small businesses use [00:12:00] 10 or more. And the reason for that is a small business doesn't totally understand marketing. A lot of times they go in a, somebody talks to them and that sounds great. And they put all their money into it. And 10, 000 later they're broke and they haven't gotten to where they wanted to get.

[00:12:20] Mark Amell: So a small business, if they use one or two marking techniques, they go head to head with their competition. But if you, if you're using more than 10, you're spreading it out, you're getting Google to recognize you as an authority in many different areas. And I niche it down even further every month should have a topic.

[00:12:43] Mark Amell: Say like a a pest control company in April, the termites are starting to swarm. So you have a termite month. So all of their blog posts, all their articles, all their email contacts are about termites because that's what's [00:13:00] coming. So Google says, okay, you're a termite expert. I see you everywhere. The next month you pick.

[00:13:05] Mark Amell: bed bugs or whatever, because there's a lot of traveling, right? So you have a, you have a topic of the month and you break it down and you focus. It also helps you focus on that niche. So maybe you've talked to over six months, he's emailed these people and they're saying, no, I'm not that interested. All of a sudden you trigger something that they remember.

[00:13:29] Mark Amell: Or another example of I try to follow up. I've had

[00:13:34] Mark Amell: I've gone decades without marketing because of residual income, but that's one example is I had a car guy come out and do a car detail did a great job, great price, and I get an email on whatever the month specialist, I can find him if I want to do it again. I had a guy come out and do an amazing job on my garage store.

[00:13:56] Mark Amell: I was really happy with it. The price was less than I [00:14:00] should have paid for it, but he's never contacted me. I have no idea how to find him. You know, it's year and a half later, if he had, if he had spent a couple pennies a month, sending me a flyer, I would have called them back out when it needs help. So getting tech, you know, little things like getting testimonials, getting Google reviews.

[00:14:25] Mark Amell: Google reviews are important. If you've got five reviews from your family members, you know, that stands out. If you've got 150 and you've only got a 4. 8 stars, that's okay. People can read the comments and judge for themselves because it's not all this online business selling is about getting, gaining the trust of somebody you don't know.

[00:14:50] Mark Amell: Right. And one of the The second highest, the second highest reason reasoning that Google uses is [00:15:00] reviews. They look through the reviews. Where do you stand? Do you have enough of them? If you've got, like I said, you got 10 and your competition has 150. The top level is your local search engines.

[00:15:16] Mark Amell: People don't realize there's between 50 and 70 different local search engines and directories in their area. And if you've got road spelled one way, R. D. and R. O. A. D. the next place, you got different phone numbers because you like to use your 800 number sometimes. Google's going to say I can't display your information because It's, I don't know which information to display.

[00:15:42] Mark Amell: Wow. Yeah.

[00:15:44] Harry: So it's really looking for consistency there, which again, most of us are not thinking about great stuff thoughts.

[00:15:54] Mark Amell: It's also looking at how often do you update, you know, my customers, I update them every [00:16:00] month because after six months, Google is going to say, I don't know if they're still in business.

[00:16:04] Mark Amell: I haven't seen any activity. So it's again, consistency sending that message. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:11] Harry: Yeah. Wonderful. All right. So when you're thinking about, like, for the small business person that maybe is just starting a business, how important is the website before? I mean, comparatively speaking, if they don't really know who their ideal client profile is, they're not great at having conversations.

[00:16:38] Harry: And they said, well, if I just create a website, the business is just going to come in. If someone was talking to you like that, and they gave you those thoughts, what would you suggest

[00:16:49] Mark Amell: for them? I would say that they have to have at least a basic website that people can verify them because you're doing online sales, right?

[00:16:59] Mark Amell: So [00:17:00] they're going to, they're going to want to know before they give you money. If you're legit, if you don't have a website, or if you've got a website that. Looks like it was made 10 years ago. People are going to say, I don't know if I trust them. So they're going to look at other areas. If you've got a nice, more modern ish website, they're going to feel, feel more comfortable.

[00:17:25] Mark Amell: The thing there's two differentiations. One is a landing page and one is a website. If you've got a post, you've, you've got your theme of the month. If you have a landing page, it should amplify that post. It should further explain it and tell them the next step, get out to my calendar, send me an email, you know, some kind of, you got to tell people what to do that call the action.

[00:17:51] Mark Amell: Otherwise they're going to say, Oh, that looks nice. You know, and move on, tell them what to do. Then what the website is, is further [00:18:00] verification. The examples I use for that is. If I want to go fix my roof and I, Oh, I need a roofing hammer. Somebody tells me that I go in, I click on an ad for a roofing hammer and I go in there's on the landing page.

[00:18:15] Mark Amell: There's three different roofing hammers. They explain the differences. They put the prices on and they click one. If you send them to Ace Hardware and there's a hundred different types of hammers that hasn't helped them any, they're going to move on. They're going to get confused. But it's good to validate.

[00:18:34] Mark Amell: Okay, this is a big store. They've got other things that I may need, but you're not answering their question and people have, let's say, a short 10 shorter attention span as we go along. Yeah,

[00:18:48] Harry: that's right. That's for sure. The attention spans of us is about a second and a half, I think based on you know, everything that we have at our access to

[00:18:59] Mark Amell: our [00:19:00] fingertips.

[00:19:00] Mark Amell: So, well, they Google uses last I checked Google use it. If it took longer than two seconds to load your website, they start deducting brownie points because after three seconds, the person's going to go to the next. Search on the list. Yeah. And that's another reason for landing pages is they tend to load on under a second.

[00:19:23] Mark Amell: Okay.

[00:19:24] Harry: Yeah. So the landing page. So you mentioned this is

[00:19:28] Mark Amell: interesting.

[00:19:30] Harry: Give me an example of a landing page. Where would someone use it? Would they use it on social media? You can tell I don't have any landing pages.

[00:19:38] Mark Amell: So. A landing page is just like a website, you know, it's a one page website or if they click on it, then there's the thank you for giving me your email address.

[00:19:49] Mark Amell: So the link to it can go on social media. It can go on to your, any of your link generations. tools. So it's, [00:20:00] it's really just a, a standing small website. Okay. If in my case, I have DMA consult dmaworld. com and I could have cold email. DMA world. com. So that cold email actually points to a website instead of to my web and to a landing page and not my website.

[00:20:26] Mark Amell: Oh, okay. Yeah,

[00:20:30] Harry: I get it. All right. Let's switch gears a little bit. It's a fascinating topic, but I really wanted to chat a little bit about alignable because this, a lot of us are getting messages. We sign up for alignable and I know me, I've tried it a couple of times and then I get caught up with other social media.

[00:20:52] Harry: So, but some are doing very well with alignable and I've got to ask what's your experience with [00:21:00] alignable mark.

[00:21:01] Mark Amell: Well, I started just in January and,

[00:21:05] Harry: and we're in August of 23. So you've been in it roughly seven months or so, seven and a half months, maybe.

[00:21:12] Mark Amell: Right. So I've got almost 800 connections. And I've had close to 100, 000, 140, 000 profile views.

[00:21:24] Mark Amell: So a lot of exposure. Yeah,

[00:21:29] Harry: that's a lot for someone who is, it seems like a lot for someone who's just starting. Right. If you look at LinkedIn, so eight months. All right. So for roughly eight months, we use very round numbers. That's about 15, somewhere around between 15 I don't have the exact math, but somewhere between 15 and 20, 000 profile views a month, which is.

[00:21:52] Harry: Roughly 500 a day by my math, right? 30 times 500 is 15,

[00:21:59] Mark Amell: 000. [00:22:00] You're not getting that on LinkedIn folks.

[00:22:02] Harry: You're not getting 500 profile views a day. You might get four or five. Maybe some of the massive influencers are, but that is crazy. All right. So now, now you've piqued my interest. What do we, how do we get to where you are?

[00:22:17] Mark Amell: Well, what I did is. There's tools on there. There's and I updated my profile to be as best as I can. I've got experience with LinkedIn profiles and not setting other profiles. There's a there's a directory of. YouTube videos, learn, learn from Sue. She's one of the people on Alignable staff, and it tells you how to step by step set up your profile.

[00:22:48] Mark Amell: Do that. Have people look at it. Take, you know, take your profile serious. The other thing is that I do is A couple months ago they had a smart [00:23:00] Connect week and a smart connect is you get like speed dating, you get seven minutes to meet another fellow business person on Alignable. And I met a, I went to 30, I met 150 people in a week, but I also refined my, what do I say when we get that seven minutes?

[00:23:20] Mark Amell: And I learned from that. I studied what I was saying, what the reaction was. Now I go to one smart connect a day on the average, like four or five a week. And at the end of it, it says, these are the people that you met with. You talk to, I send them a mess, a connection request or a message and says, it was nice.

[00:23:42] Mark Amell: Talk to you. If you'd like to continue the conversation, here's my calendar. So my calendar has been full by just doing that. But when you're actually talking to them in that seven minutes, it's not a sales pitch and you will get shunned on Alignable [00:24:00] if you bring out your sales deck, your pitch deck, if people don't like it.

[00:24:05] Mark Amell: And they're trying to really avoid having there. You know, the audience of that. So you talk to people. I talked to people about, you know, where they're from. I talked to a lady from New Hampshire. Well, I was born in Buffalo and I went to high school in Connecticut, so I'm used to that. You know, what's it like in Florida just to see if they're the type of person that you really want to work with.

[00:24:29] Mark Amell: You know, because it's not really the person you might sell to that person, but it's the network that you want to get to. It's who do they know? So when, when you're talking to somebody, you know, how do they feel? How do they do business? Do they value the service or do they're looking for money?

[00:24:48] Harry: That's really, I mean, that's, that's what you just hit is really networking in general.

[00:24:55] Harry: If you go to a network event in person and you're just trying to sell your [00:25:00] services and talk to people, you're going to quickly be labeled as a taker. And no one wants to be around takers people that are just selling and pitching themselves all day without even asking a single question about the person

[00:25:14] Mark Amell: they're talking to.

[00:25:16] Mark Amell: Right. We've had we've had stories that this lady I got into and she started talking about her business and I watched 5 minutes straight. I don't think she took a breath. And then she asked me what I did and I had like 10 seconds come out of the shock and she took off again.

[00:25:34] Harry: Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's the yeah so we know that that's not how we want to be so good networking conversational question asking and listening.

[00:25:47] Harry: So now in a seven minute conversation, not. That's not a lot of talking because seven minutes goes by pretty quickly. So do you have a layout of kind of a [00:26:00] formula or framework for how you're going to have a conversation in seven minutes?

[00:26:05] Mark Amell: I usually like to get to know what type of person that is, you know, and I, I asked them about what they do and I, you know, they'll have a label underneath their names.

[00:26:17] Mark Amell: And I like, oh, that's interesting. What does that mean? And if the conversation stalls, I talk about my dogs, animals. Yeah. I talked to him about. How I raised a lion people, you know, that that takes a couple minutes. If you get someone, it's awkward, right? You know, get ask them questions. And it's really about getting the feel for the person because unalignable.

[00:26:44] Mark Amell: There's people that go to regularly to the smart connects and you will be in that room again with that person. And if it's, if it's real awkward, it's going to be even worse. The next time you're in the room.

[00:26:58] Harry: Yes. If you're running out of [00:27:00] things to talk about inside of seven minutes, you don't want another seven.

[00:27:03] Mark Amell: So in most people. You know, they want to be, they want to show, they want to have value. So if you try to find what their value is, what they think they have to offer, then you can use that to have them message out to their network, like basic networking. So you have to find that whether you want to continue the conversation or not.

[00:27:28] Mark Amell: And I've gotten more specific about who I want to continue the conversation with. Because it's, it's got to be good for both people. We don't want to, we don't want to spend an hour talking about nothing. Right? Yeah.

[00:27:43] Harry: You got to, you got to recognize the value of your time. You can't get that

[00:27:47] Mark Amell: back. Yeah. Your time, your time.

[00:27:50] Mark Amell: So

[00:27:51] Harry: good. Do you suggest that people are going to tinker around with alignable that you mentioned some YouTube videos, probably we could [00:28:00] search alignable on, on YouTube. Yeah. Learn how to set up the profile. Should they get the paid version of alignable or is there a value in that

[00:28:09] Mark Amell: or no? Yeah. The P well, the paid version for is 23 for 40 connections.

[00:28:17] Mark Amell: It allows you to connect to 40 people. The free version is just 10. So, but it also allows you to see who visits your profile. The free version doesn't the I'm looking at the premium plus it's 9, 76 now, and I'll probably move up to that because it's supposed to have national, more national exposure, but if minimum, I would try it for the 26 a month, get those extra connections, but more importantly, see who visits your profile and respond back to them.

[00:28:56] Mark Amell: Just like we were talking about. Yeah.

[00:28:59] Harry: Do [00:29:00] you, is there any posting really of, I mean, is there sharing of content like there is on LinkedIn or no?

[00:29:07] Mark Amell: It's more post the ones, the posts that get the most responses and I had, I don't know, I'm getting like I've had 500 post responses or something. If you ask questions, like, do you know of any local businesses you would like to promote that encourages engagement?

[00:29:29] Mark Amell: Because people will say, yeah, I just had this great pizza. And then somebody will say, they'll like that. If you, if you just say you do a post and say. I'm great at local search engines. Call me, you know, those posts, those self promotion posts, they get, they get kind of banned.

[00:29:53] Harry: Yeah, spam, right? No one wants to

[00:29:56] Mark Amell: see that.

[00:29:57] Mark Amell: But if you're asking. You [00:30:00] know, because like, it comes back to a small business owner can't know any everything. So if you ask, if you reach out, there's some great people, you know, I've met great business people, I've met brain surgeons, I met all kinds of people on alignable. So It's get their opinion on something, just post it and see what happens.

[00:30:22] Harry: Oh, I love it. Yeah. It sounds like fun and I'm going to, I've signed up for the paid, the lower paid version. I just really haven't used it that much, but I'm going to tap into a little bit. This has been really informative, Mark. I could definitely talk for a lot longer, but for people who want more of you and your insights, whether it be about Having your home based business or using you to help with landing pages, websites, SEO, and social media.

[00:30:55] Harry: You really run the gamut or even have a conversation about lineable. Where can [00:31:00] people find more of you, Mark? I

[00:31:02] Mark Amell: know lineable. It's, I think it's under my name, Mark Amell, like on the screen here. A M E L L. Okay. And okay. I'm sorry. Email address at mark@dmaworld.com.

[00:31:19] Harry: Beautiful. We'll put that in the show notes.

[00:31:22] Harry: You provide a ton of value re really in a few minutes. When you and I first met on Alignable, I said, after we had a Zoom, I said, I've gotta have this guy in the podcast. And sure enough, here we are and value packed. So thanks Mark. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's been a blast. We'll talk to you again.

[00:31:41] Thank you for listening to Sales Made Easy. If you found value in our conversations, please subscribe and leave a review. Our goal is to provide practical strategies for growing your business while staying true to your values. [00:32:00] Remember, six. Success in sales is about serving your clients. Serve first and the selling will follow.

[00:32:07] We'll be back soon with more insights and inspiration. Until then, keep serving and providing value to others. Good things will happen.

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