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Tag: marketing

Hustleburg Episode 10 – Answering Listener Questions 3-5-20

Before we get started on this week’s episode, I’d like to thank the folks over at Radio St. Pete for their addition of Hustleburg to the lineup on Thursdays at 8 AM and noon, as well as the podcast archive.

Thank you for the opportunity to share with your listeners how we do business in the ‘Burg.

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, Brett Bittner answers listener questions about how to market your business beyond social media, favorite marketing methods, and which social media platforms you should use to market your business.

How Do I Get the Word Out About My Business Beyond Social Media?

Social media isn’t for everyone, and some small businesses want to go beyond it to bring their business to the people they wish to serve. Brett responds to the above question with that in mind. The focus for someone not using social media or going beyond their social media networks should be to network. While most people think of networking as happy hours and business card swapping, there’s far more to it than that. Each interaction with someone in your field, you should learn how you can create value for them and act on it within your network. “Connectors” are some of the best businesspeople, because they know who can help whom, how, and they work to connect the helpers.

What Is Your Favorite Marketing Method?

Being a digital marketing firm, Beyond Your Side Hustle uses and recommends using social media and content marketing to share what it is that we do. By being a content producer, whether on social media, podcasts, you get to impact people’s lives that you may never encounter in a positive way. By adding all of that value to your community, value will be added to your life in return.

Which Platforms Should I Be Using for My Business?

This is a topic broached in Episode 4 of Hustleburg, where Brett discussed the single-most-important platform (Facebook), due to its popularity and the expectation that you have a page, even if you don’t have a website and alluded to what you should also consider. Keep in mind that current popularity and forever popularity aren’t the same, and that all social media platforms “age up.” Also, make sure that you use platforms that your likely customers do and that you can tell your story in a compelling way.

Start Marketing Your Business Online With These Three Easy Steps

If you’re just getting started marketing your business online, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a FREE Getting Started Guide.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

Website
Hustleburg Listener Community
Facebook
Instagram
Brett’s LinkedIn

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

Hustleburg Episode 9 – Interview with FUSE Therapy’s Amanda Grozdanic

In this episode, Brett talks with FUSE Therapy‘s Amanda Grozdanic, a licensed and registered occupational therapist, working in aquatic and outpatient therapy, primarily for children with disabilities. FUSE Therapy focuses on the direct needs of the child, emphasizing nature and recreational activities to address any and all limitations.

Brett and Amanda discuss who might need occupational therapy, how she can help with sensory processing for autistic children, and what about her approach sets her apart. Her focus on aquatic recreation in the community is also discussed. A hiking day to celebrate the launch of FUSE Therapy is scheduled, weather permitting, for March 14th.

Connect Your Child With FUSE Therapy

Find out more about FUSE Therapy:

Website
Facebook
Instagram

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Hear Your Question, Answered, on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

Hustleburg Episode 8 – Answering Listener Questions 2-20-20

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, our host Brett Bittner primarily answers questions about the viability of an idea, business and marketing strategy, and how much content is “too much.”

How Do You Know If/When A Business Idea is Viable?

In response to this question, Brett shares his thoughts on how you know when something moves beyond just an idea into a viable business. As with most bootstrappers, going beyond your side hustle means easing yourself and what you create into the market while still having the stability and comfort of your day job. The most important thing to know about viability is the reaction of your community about what you’re creating, and to find that out you must create. Just do it. It’s not just an athletic shoe slogan.

Where Do You Start When Creating a Strategy?

When creating a larger-scale business, a business plan can offer many insights as the entrepreneur critically evaluates the idea, product, or service. For many side hustlers, a strategy map will suffice to get past the idea stage and into the market. From a marketing perspective, strategy is determined through identifying the struggle your ideal client faces and working backward to determine the best way to tell stories to show how you and what you do will help them to tackle that struggle.  

How Much Is Too Much Content?

The short answer is that there is no such thing. With a diversity of platforms and channels, you will never overwhelm your community with content, because they don’t (and won’t) see everything that you put online. Not even your mom will get tired of seeing the content you create, because she won’t even follow you everywhere, and even if she did, the algorithms won’t show her absolutely everything. Read more about how there’s no such thing as too much content here. Finally, Brett touches on how it’s possible to create so much using a strategy like this from Gary Vaynerchuk through repurposing and sharing similar content through a variety of channels and using different contexts that are relevant to each platform.

Start Marketing Your Business Online With These Three Easy Steps

If you’re just getting started marketing your business online, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a FREE Getting Started Guide.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

Website
Hustleburg Listener Community
Facebook
Instagram
Brett’s LinkedIn

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

The Single Most Important Platform

Question from Hustleburg’s Episode 4, Answering Listener Questions:  What is the single most important social platform to get your content out as a side hustler and beyond? Or does it vary from business to business?

I’m glad you hedged your question, because I look at this two ways.

Single Most Important Social Media Platform

The single most important platform is where everyone already is. Right now, in 2020, that’s Facebook. At the end of 2019, they reported 2.5 BILLION monthly active users. As such, it’s simply too large to ignore, and people expect that no matter what business you’re in, that you at least have a Facebook page with some basic information.

Your Customers Are Already There

The reason that people expect this is because that’s someplace where they already are and they can find out something about you. Even if you don’t have a website, people expect that you have a business page on Facebook. We aren’t talking about your Facebook profile, we’re talking about a Facebook business page. You don’t want to confuse the two. A profile is where you share the photos of your children with their grandparents, but a page is about your business activity. Separating them keeps your personal life personal and your business life business.

Great Tools to Advertise

Also, Facebook is going to be a great way to jump into advertising as a part of your digital strategy on social media. Facebook offers so much data on their users to advertisers, so that you can hyper-target your demographics and psychographics. This allows you to spend your advertising dollars only going after your ideal customer. Their tool allows you to really focus on specific zip codes, specific age groups, and specific interests. When you really know your customers and your potential customers, they provide an awesome opportunity to utilize. These tools within Facebook further their position as the single most important platform in 2020. Keep in mind that some advice in the digital marketing space doesn’t age well, because of how rapidly things change so I’ll likely revise this in the future.

Also, Consider This…

Current popularity does not always forever popularity, so the above is not to say that it’s going to be the most popular social platform going forward. Remember Myspace? Or Friendster before that? Neither of those stuck around, as they were surpassed by something that was more interesting or more social. We wanted something different, found it, and platforms either evolve with us or go away.

The other way to look at this question is to consider other platforms as well, because marketing is all about telling the stories. Most importantly, it’s about telling YOUR story, and how will you best tell that story. For example, if you do something that’s very visual, has a very compelling visual element, or is very complicated to share with words, you’re definitely going to want an almost exclusively visual platform.

Finally, you also need to make sure that you choose a platform that you’re comfortable with using. That does not mean, however, that you can just not use a platform because you’re not comfortable. You should learn how to use it. You do that by watching what successful users of that platform do, by interacting with them and your potential customers, and by using the greatest information resource in the history of mankind.

This listener question was a part of Hustleburg’s fourth episode. If you have a question you’d like to have answered, please join the community here.

You can subscribe to Hustleburg on your preferred player here.

Hustleburg Episode 7 – Interview with Tread Connection Tampa Bay’s Peter Jaeger

“Weekends are for fun, not for tires.”

In this episode, Brett meets with Peter Jaeger of Tread Connection – Tampa, a mobile tire and wheel service, serving Saint Petersburg. In addition to installing tires and wheels at your home, office, or anywhere in between, they also provide mobile flat repair, wheel balancing, and nitrogen fill services for your car’s tires and wheels.

Brett and Peter discuss how operating a franchise is a bit different than building from scratch and how much things are the same. They discuss challenges in marketing a small business, even with a national brand name behind you, and their upcoming appearance at the 33rd Annual Mustang and Ford Roundup on March 14, 2020. 

Grip Tread Connection

Find out more about Tread Connection – Tampa:

Website
Facebook
Instagram

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Get Your Questions Answered on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

Hustleburg Episode 6.5 – Mini Episode 2-10-20

In this mini-episode of the Hustleburg podcast, our host Brett Bittner switched seats and served as a guest on HALO Social Meetup Podcast. The full conversation is available here, but this mini-episode is a pretty good summary of the hour-long conversation in about 10 minutes.

Mission, Passion, and “Why”

In the first segment, he talks about how knowing your mission and your passion for it will yield better results in your organization. This gives you a glimpse at why he’s obsessive about someone’s “why.”

No Such Thing as Work-Life Balance

Next, he discusses how’s there no such thing as work-life balance, because we all have different priorities around what makes us happy. He also offers a bit of advice to young adults about where to start looking when it comes to their career, but the advice is applicable to any of us.

Define Your Voice, Outline Your Story

Now, we’re going deeper into work-life balance, defining ourselves and what success means to each entrepreneur and using your “why” to define your voice and the story of your business.

Find Your Tribe with Social Media

Often, social media as a whole is demonized, but he reminds us how social media connects us more than it isolates us, and how we can use it to find our tribe.

Change the Culture

In this segment, he talks about how social media, like money, is a magnifier of who we are already, necessitating a change in culture, rather than vilifying a tool or other object without introspection.

Build the Tallest Building

In this final segment, he further discusses changing the culture, happiness, and how we can have the tallest building in town.

If you’re just getting started marketing your business online, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a FREE Getting Started Guide.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

Website
Hustleburg Listener Community
Facebook
Instagram
Brett’s LinkedIn

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

Hustleburg Episode 6 – Answering Listener Questions 2-6-20

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, our host Brett Bittner primarily answers questions about branding, both in the business and personal sense.

Branding

He shares the best way to brand yourself as a student, before you even reach the workforce, especially among professions that require advanced degrees, like attorneys and doctors. These tips carry over to your personal brand beyond your education as well.

Are you concerned about changing your logo?

As your business grows, the need to grow with it and change with the times may require revisiting branding items, such as your logo. Brett shares why your logo, unless you’re a billion-dollar business that relies on being seen in a crowded field, isn’t as important as the feelings that people have about your organization. 

Staying the Course

The most important aspect of how long you stick with a course of marketing efforts is whether it’s your strategy or a particular initiative. Brett breaks down how long you should stick with what you’re doing in both cases.

Extroverts vs. Introverts

While a BIG extrovert, Brett discusses how introverts can start and grow their business and get to the point where they are able to hire an extrovert to do all the “extroverted activities” of a business. 

If you’re just getting started marketing your business online, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a FREE Getting Started Guide.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

Website
Hustleburg Listener Community
Facebook
Instagram
Brett’s LinkedIn

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

Top Books for the Budding Entrepreneur

We’re frequently asked, “What are some of the top books for the budding entrepreneur?” As such, here are our recommendations for someone ready to go beyond their hustle:

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

We highly recommend beginning with Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and we say that you should read that before anything else in the business management or leadership space. Being able to answer the “Why?” question makes so many of your decisions and helps you to define the actions that you will take. This book really lays out the case for how important that question really is.

As you’ve heard in every Hustleburg interview, I ask why someone does what they do. It’s an imperative question that will define your purpose, mission, and ultimately your business.

Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller

The next thing that we recommend you read would be Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand. It’s very much a must-read early on in your entrepreneurial journey, because it details how you tell the story of who you are what you do and how you’ll help your customer. When coupled with Start With Why, you see how to align your words with your mission and vision when you talk about your business and why you do it. Also, as you hang around us more this will make a lot more sense, but it also details why you should be the Genie, rather than Aladdin.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

This book is one that everyone should read, but ESPECIALLY budding entrepreneurs, because a lot of people actually do need to heed the advice within. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People should definitely be read early on in the entrepreneurial journey. The book provides a literal guide for interacting with others and you would be surprised how many people fail at that despite having been in business for years. Even those seen as successful really do not do a good job of interacting with others.

The Power of Moments by Chip & Dan Heath

While these are in no particular order of importance, Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments should probably be read earlier than others. This is especially the case for entrepreneurs in the service industry or with heavy and direct customer contact.

This book offers insight into some of the most powerful inspiration for creating an amazing experience for those you serve. We frequently say that marketing may get people in the door, but delighting them will keep them coming back. What you do and how you do it is essentially re-marketing your brand to your existing customers. Delighting them when they interact with you is essentially an extension of your marketing program, and it keeps them coming back and evangelizing about what you do and how you delighted them.

Good to Great by Jim Collins

This classic business study book definitely has to be on every entrepreneur’s reading list. In Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team share the stories and data about some of the best companies in history and how they became great. It even compares how they became great over peers of the time, how they became great over their competitors, and it ties together a lot of the takeaways from the other books on this list.

Listen to this list (and to hear the top podcasts for a budding entrepreneur) as part of the Hustleburg podcast by clicking here.

If you clicked any of the Amazon links for the books listed above, you likely saw they were AmazonSmile links for charity. We love Survivor’s Rupert Boneham and all he does for his community with Rupert’s Kids.


Hustleburg Episode 5 – Interview with Red Hot Tiki’s Robynne Swanson

Listen to Hustleburg

In this episode, Brett sits down with Robynne Swanson of Red Hot Tiki, a spicy gourmet market in Gulfport, just south of Saint Petersburg. With over 1500 spicy products, such as hot sauces, pepper extracts, pickled products, jams, jellies, jerky, and spicy snacks, there is surely something to attract your spicy side. 

Brett and Robynne discuss her journey from the corporate world to becoming a solopreneur, running the tiki filled to the brim with hot sauce, selling in the retail space in 2020, and how she’s moving to add a direct to consumer web component to her business. They also talk about the shop’s Scorpion Shot Challenge, an activity for those ready to tackle some of the hottest peppers on earth.

Red Hot Tiki’s 🔥 Links

Find out more about Red Hot Tiki:

Website
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Want to be on Hustleburg?

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here. 

Hustleburg Episode 4 – Answering Listener Questions 1-23-20

Listen to Hustleburg

Answering Your Marketing Questions

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, our host Brett Bittner discusses where to start creating content for your business online. He talks about how to determine the most important platforms for you, the starting point when creating the content for those platforms, and where you should be posting in 2020. He also details how to listen to your audience, add value in that community, and how to present your solution to it. Finally, in response to a question from an upcoming guest, he shares how you can build your organic follows on any social media platform around your business. 

If you’re just getting started marketing your business online, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a FREE Getting Started Guide.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

Website
Hustleburg Listener Community
Facebook
Instagram
Brett’s LinkedIn

If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode. 

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here.