Michael “Buzz” Buzinski is a life-long entrepreneur, a digital marketing thought leader, an author, and the Chief Marketing Officer of Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. He has worked with over 750 service-based businesses and helped them make their digital marketing S.I.M.P.L.E. (Streamline, Identify, Market Research, Plan, Launch, and Evaluate). Using the Rule of 26, Michael can double any website’s revenue.
Buzzworthy has been nationally recognized by the American Marketing Association for its innovative approach to digital marketing for small to medium-sized businesses.
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Bottom of FormListen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Michael Buzinski about making digital marketing S.I.M.P.L.E.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How you can implement the rule of 26 to double your website’s revenue.
- Why service-oriented businesses should focus on search engine traffic rather than social media.
- How businesses must utilize SEO correctly and how to do that.
- Why a company’s website is important even if they get leads from referrals.
- How writing a book positions you as an authority in your industry.
Connect with Michael:
Links Mentioned:
buzzworthy.biz
Guest Contact Info:
Linkedin.com/company/urbuzzworthy
Rob Kosberg:
All right. Hey, welcome, everybody. It’s Rob here again with another great episode of the Publish Promote Profit Podcast. I have with me today a great guest that’s going to teach you a lot about using your book, but especially using it in conjunction with online marketing and media, Michael Buzinski. I think I’ll call you Buzz, right?
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
Yeah. That’s great.
Rob Kosberg:
Buzz is a lifelong entrepreneur, a digital marketing thought leader. He’s the author of, The Rule of 26 and the chief marketing officer of Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. He’s worked with over 750 service-based businesses, helped them make their digital marketing SIMPLE, which is a cool acronym for streamline, identify, market research, plan, launch, and evaluate using the Rule of 26, which we’ll talk about here. Michael can help any website double its revenue. What website doesn’t want that? So Buzz, great to have you with me today. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
Thanks for having me.
Rob Kosberg:
So, you know the elephant in the room we’ve got to get right out of the way is, what the hell is the Rule of 26?
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
There you go. Right after I launched the book, I had somebody ask me that, and I was like, “I guess you’ll have to read it.” They’re like, “Oh, what? Oh, you’re not going to do that to me.” So, the Rule of 26 is a simplified marketing strategy that gives you three objectives to creating predictable revenue for your business. The Rule of 26 states that if you increase the unique traffic of your website by 26% and your conversion rate of that website by 26% and the average revenue per client by 26%, you get a compound effect of 100% more business or doubling your revenue. Then once you’ve established that, you can do it again, same steps, and then you have quadrupled your revenue from your website. Right about then, you now have a blueprint of how to scale your business at will, because you are now getting a predictable revenue. When you do things to your site and you know what to do and how to generate more traffic and whatnot, you have a gas pedal for your business.
Rob Kosberg:
Great explanation and love how you used the 26% as a rule and certainly a rule of compounding as well, which is very, very cool. So, tell me, not that you have to give me all 26 steps if there are, but talk to me about the larger framework, because everybody has their framework and their secret ingredients. So what are the things that you’re looking at when you look at applying this Rule of 26 to someone’s site?
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
Sure. So, the Rule of 26 has literally three steps and I just gave them to you. I gave you the concept of the rule. The book goes through a lot of ideas and tactics for each of those objectives because most entrepreneurs struggle with where to start. With my 30 years of experience in marketing and sales, I’ve seen a lot of things. I started in marketing before the internet was a public thing. It was still just military and federal government. So, as I watched traditional marketing now get basically taken over by digital marketing, you’ve created this integrated marketing ecosystem that has a lot of folds in it. There are all these key performance indicators that everybody will throw around. The problem with that is that a small business owner or even a medium-sized business owner that has a marketing team doesn’t have the time to be tracking down 38 different KPIs. If you go to Shopify, they have 73 or 75 KPIs, and nobody has time to track that kind of stuff. They’re incremental. Those KPIs are more for the enterprise level. I specialized in the SMB market or the SME, depending on how you want to say it, because I love people, marketing people, and the SMB is the backbone of our economy. So, my mission is to help that Main Street business owner, it’s privately held, closely held and managed. They’re providing services. So now we’re selling people’s services to other people, and I’m really good at that. That’s why when all of my mentors were like, “You need a niche. You need to niche down. As a marketer, you need to get into a vertical,” I said, “All right, my vertical is small to medium-sized businesses.” Like, “No, that’s not enough.” I’m like, “Okay, service-centric businesses.” “Still not enough.” I said, “Watch me,” and I’m already out. So there it is, because once you’re selling a service, it doesn’t matter what the service is, those are the idiosyncrasies and those are the great challenges, but the fundamentals are all the same. So the book quickly goes through a lot of that. I do not bore you with a bunch of anecdotal ramblings. It’s not a Michael Gerber montage of stories or anything like that.
Rob Kosberg:
I can’t tell you the number of authors that will say things to me like, “We’ve tried digital marketing, or we’ve tried Facebook,” I’m sure you hear it a lot, “and it just doesn’t work for us.” It’s the newer version of the stuff that Dan Kennedy used to talk about, where people send out a postcard and say, “Well, direct mail doesn’t work for us.” What are the biggest mistakes that you see when a small to medium-sized business comes to you and says, “Well, we tried Facebook marketing, or we tried fill in the blank, and it just didn’t work for us”? What are the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen that they’re making so that it’s not working for them?
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
The number one thing that I see is that they give up. They give up way too soon. Another thing is that they’re using the wrong tools for the wrong reasons, or they’re using tools for the wrong reasons. So in my concept, social media is not the best lead generation for service-based businesses. It’s a conversion tool. Until you have enough traffic to understand whether your website’s converting properly, social media is not where you’re going to get profitable traffic. They have a study that showed that organic SEO or search engine traffic closes about 14%. So, the traffic comes from somebody making a search, finding you, going to your website, 14% of those people usually become a client of yours. On average, contrasted with organic social media, which is 2%. So now you look at search marketing is technically on the organic side. It’s just organic. It’s just for service-based businesses. I don’t want any emails nailing me for something else. It’s seven times more profitable to focus on traffic coming from search engines than from social media. Does that mean you don’t do social media? No. You do social media because once they do find you, guess where they’re going to click on? Your social media to see if you’re approachable. Are you likable? Their clients will hire them when they like and trust the service provider.
That’s the biggest mistake.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. Great stuff there, Buzz. Do me a favor. Define for me what you mean by service-based businesses. I know that that’s a really, really broad stroke, and I imagine that you would want to work with any service-based business. Give me some defining characteristics of what that means.
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
The overarching definition is a human being creating services by other human beings, to other human beings; so, doctors, anything in the medical profession, construction, landscapers, home developers, chiropractors, dentists, lawyers, you name it. It’s a human service. Some of them have products that go along with it, like heating and plumbing and HVAC and stuff like that. It’s the human being that’s installing it. They’re hiring you, because they can buy the heater anywhere, but they’re going to hire you as the plumber and the heating expert to get it in there and working in your house. That’s where we’re talking about. I’m actually going to say service-centric in my new revised version of The Rule of 26 as it comes out, because I think that it just makes sense. That’s where we need to make that distinction. It’s your business is centered upon serving other human beings, not selling a product.
Rob Kosberg:
I hear service-based businesses, and oftentimes, people define it differently. So it’s good because you’re including doctors and dentists and professionals and that sort of thing. I thought so, but I wanted to be completely clear. Now, the other thing that these businesses have, many of them, not all, but many of them will have in common, is that they’re local businesses or they’re oftentimes brick-and-mortar-based businesses, at least the ones that you’ve described. When you talk about search engine optimizing, that of course is a lot easier, I would think, for someone that has a local-based business than maybe a national service provider, though I imagine the rules still apply. You just gave an incredible stat: seven times more profitable. I did not know that, and I thought I knew many things about marketing, which I do, but I did not know that. So that is really, really good, really helpful. What are the things for these local businesses that they need to look at when maybe considering somebody to help them with their search engine marketing?
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
That’s a really good question, Rob. The biggest mistake that I see local businesses do is they’ll grab a SEO agency that will talk about the most profitable keywords, and they’ll try to get keywords that have tens of thousands of searches per month. Unfortunately, those are not regional or local. So a local-based service business, say a dentist or, I mean, any of them, that are just trying to get business in their immediate area. That’s where they’re most profitable, either within driving distance of their clients or within driving distance for their service operators. So now all of your content is wrapped around the community that you serve, and so you’re making yourself community centric. So now you get to talk about the community, which means you get to mention where you’re located and the other places around you which you serve. That allows that localized search engine, which is a much smaller volume, but much higher in profitability. If you were in Springfield, Illinois, and you are a massage therapist and somebody finds you that lives in Chicago that’s a four-hour drive, do you think they’re going to become a client? Nope. They’re going to come to your website. They’re going to see where you’re located, and they’re going to bounce, which is going to hurt your SEO. So, you want to be very, very targeted and niching down too. Be very specific of what kind of vertical within your business. I’ve run into sports-centric chiropractors versus car-accidents or automobile-accident specialists. You get orthopedic surgeons who only do knees, knee replacements. It’s all they want to do. Okay, then everything we’re going to talk about on your website is knees. And you really focus in on that, because once you do that, then anything around it that you might take is great, but you’re always getting the perfect client for what you want to do. What’s the most profitable, most valuable to you, most enjoyable, all of those things? That’s what you want to focus on, your content and how you lay out your website and your social media, is what you talk about.
Rob Kosberg:
I want to put you on the spot a little bit. You can work with anybody in any city. You’re a service provider, so in some ways you are your own client. What’s different about you, of course, is that you’re not a local-based business. So how do you personally, for your business, get clients? What are you doing to attract clients that may be the same or different than what a local-based business would be doing to attract clients?
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
Longevity has its benefits, right? I have a lot of things that are working for me because I’ve spent the last 16 years building up that authority on the internet. I’m unlike a lot of people in that respect. At the same time, I always have new competitors, so I’m always having to outmaneuver the new competition. As my own client, I need to make sure that my SEO is up to date. I need to make sure that my social media is engaging. I need to understand that, for me, I’m a business-to-business service, so my LinkedIn is the most important place I need to be. I need to be networking. I need to do all those things. As an expert, I’ve used the book, because at the time of COVID, we were just cruising along as a boutique done-for-you service, the whole nine yards, and people weren’t buying or weren’t hiring folks like me when the pandemic hit because they didn’t know what to expect. As the 90 days that the prior administration said it would take to get through this, I realized that it wasn’t going to be that. It wasn’t going to be a short stint. I started looking at other ways to serve companies that wouldn’t normally be able to work with me. Over the last year, we’ve developed do-it-yourself software-as-a-service offerings on our website. To help them with that, I created The Rule of 26, because it’s no good for me to give you an SEO platform that shows you how to do SEO without having to learn how to do SEO if you don’t know why you’re doing SEO. I give you a hammer, and you’re like, “This is a specialized hammer. What is it for?” Well, now we’re going to teach you that. Well, that’s not do it yourself. Nobody wants to read a book about just SEO. That’s not a very exciting topic for most people. I mean, I geek out on it. So, The Rule of 26 is really there to allow somebody to be able to write a digital marketing plan without having to understand digital marketing; really simplify this. Get it to where, if that’s where you’re at, let’s get you started, because that’s the second biggest mistake that I see service-centric businesses do. They go, “Well, I’ve got word of mouth, and I get referrals, so I really don’t need my website.” BS. I don’t care where your referral or your word of mouth comes from, 68% of them or two-thirds of them are going to go to your website to see if they like and trust you.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, that actually is a great segue. Thanks for sharing that. Publish Promote Profit, both my company, Best Seller Publishing, and the whole idea with the podcast is the idea of using books to grow your authority, grow your platform, grow your business. I know your book is more recently written, as you just shared. Talk to me about how you have used your book and any cool stories you have to attract clients to maybe grow your platform, get speaking, whatever it is that you’ve used your book for or plan to.
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
All of the above. There you go. You gave me my bullet points right there. So I wrote the book because it was something different. I had been trying to write a marketing book for years, for a decade. Now people are like, “When are you going to write your book? When’s the first book coming out?” I’m a teacher. I love to teach. I’ve been teaching digital marketing classes for Chamber of Commerce’s, Small Business Development Services, the SBA, Warrior Rising, which is a veteranpreneur program, and stuff like that. I love to teach, and I like to break it down, get it down to the simplest, most digestible place that business owners can relate to and use, because it doesn’t do me any good to share a bunch of information that you can’t use. So, when I finally had something that was different and it wasn’t something just regurgitated marketing mumbo-jumbo, that gave me my unique selling proposition. I now, am positioned. Anybody who lands on my website, I’m going to look different than most all of my competition, period. Now, all I’ve got to do is get it out there. So what has happened since then? Well, I promoted the book. So instead of promoting myself, I promote the book, which gets me on podcasts like yours to talk to audiences that have struggled with their digital marketing. It’s like, “Oh, and now there’s this little book that’s 117 pages that’ll get me started. Perfect.” If you find value in that, let’s have another discussion of how we can get you moving on that direction in doubling your revenue. Get predictable revenue, right? In that process, I also network with the folks who have me on their shows, and I’ve literally done business with already three of my hosts in helping them with their marketing. That was an unforeseen benefit of that. With that, then I’m able to take all of that, and it now feeds my content marketing because all of these conversations become fodder for my social media. So if we get into a conversation, I’m like, “Man, that was a good soundbite. Let’s go and share that with the audience.” Boom. Now, I’ve got this more relatable and in bite-size pieces for my LinkedIn networks, now are seeing my authority a little bit more without having ever read the book, but they’re seeing, “Oh, he’s on The Sharpreneur. He’s on the Publish Promote Profit. You get all of that authority building, and that helps. I was on a sales call. The client actually came from LinkedIn outreach, organic reaching out. Do not do the automated. That’s a takeaway right there. So it was organic outreach. I was just networking with an accountant out of Chicago. We were on a phone call, and a big agency had built his website, and they spent three months doing it. And you quite literally didn’t know what the guy did, even if you went through the whole entire website. I was like, “This is very confusing.” And when you confuse your consumer, your potential client, they’re out. They’re going to find somewhere that they can understand. They don’t want to feel like a dummy, so they’ll run from that. Then I used my website as an example of how you can create a story brand and really focus on the needs of the user. With that, my book is right there at the top because it is now the ethos in how we help businesses get started. So instead of spending three months talking about marketing strategy and customizing a market strategy, no, we have a way that we can create predictable results every time, period. So let’s just start there and get into work. Now, we can start in month one making improvements rather than talking about improvements, right? So we’re on the call. He clicks on my Amazon link, downloads the hardcover, or not the hardcover, the paperback, so the physical thing while we’re talking. We have two other conversations. He’s finished the book. Now he’s into this. He’s like, “Okay. Yeah, let’s do the Rule of 26.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, great. You get it. Right. We’re good to go.” He’s now already referred his clients to me because I am the guy. He was trying to go with this other marketing firm that really just raked him over the coals, for six months just took his money, did nothing. Before he even hired me, I gave him so much value that he listens. I was able to dive into what his offerings were. And I go, “Hey, let’s create a singular offer for what you do that covers all of that,” because he was all over the place. So now I actually have this client who trusts me with my expertise. That, as you know as an expert marketer, that’s the hardest thing to do, is convince people. It makes both of our jobs easier. I don’t have to spend so much time trying to convince him of what I think needs to happen for his brand.
Rob Kosberg:
Years ago, as a student of Dan Kennedy for a long time, Dan would always say and continues to say that his best customers always come from his books. Before I had written my first book, that was always stuck in the back of my mind. I wrote my first book about 12 years ago now. It is still true. I think people love to learn more than they love to be taught, meaning that they would rather go read your book or know that you have a book and for themselves learn the things that you could teach them or that you’re going to do for them and then sell themselves. They want to make an educated decision. Your book, as in that case, helped that person make an educated decision and probably will help the other referrals that that person is sending to make an educated decision as well. So, super congrats. Obviously, your book’s only been out for a few months, so you’re going to have many, many, many stories like that down the road.
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
Well, another story is I’m in a mastermind of digital marketers from all around the country. One of the folks that created the mastermind downloaded my book and read it. She took it to her business partner and says, “This is what we’re going to do.” They’re not a digital marketing firm. They’re a branding firm. That’s all they do is build brands. They’re like, “We’re going to use this for our branding company. Chapter by chapter, month by month, we’re going to get through your book.” So, six months from now, they will have implemented everything that they can, because I lay out a bunch of stuff that you can implement right away and/or find help to do it. However you are, because there’s people with more time than money and more money than time. So either you’re doing it yourself, or you’re having somebody to do it for you. Regardless, the tactics are the same. So with that said, I was just, I don’t know, taken aback, honored, humbled by the fact that these are branding experts who have all the resources of all these folks in the mastermind, and they decided to use my book to dive in on how they’re going to use their website to create predictable revenue for their company.
Rob Kosberg:
Great story. Buzz, I love it. It would only be appropriate now if we told them how to get the book.
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
It’s easy. Everything you need to know about me is on my website. That’s B-U-Z-Z-W-O-R-T-H-Y.biz. The book is right there at the top. It’s got the link directly to the book, to Amazon. If you’re a listener and you download the eBook, I have it for a mere $9.99, I will send you an autographed copy if you email me a snapshot of your receipt. Just make sure you give me where you want it sent to and who you’d like the book dedicated to. You can send that to buzz@buzzworthy.biz, B-U-Z-Z@buzzworthy.biz.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Love it. So buy the digital version, and you get a signed copy of the paperback as well. Sounds like a good deal to me. Dude, great to have you on. Thanks for the wisdom. Love the idea of The Rule of 26, and it sounds like an incredible book that people need to really dive into. So thanks for being on the podcast today.
Michael Buzz Buzinski:
Thank you, Rob. Thank you.
