ChansLogic Ep007

July 14, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we talked about the importance of branding to help your business be THE banana in a bunch of bananas!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

Facebook is about building trust....not selling

June 5, 2016 Chandler Walker

Facebook has a massive user base of many different people from many different cultures and walks of life. People go on Facebook and other social networking sites to be able to unplug, see what there friends are doing, check out the latest news from around the world and to feel a little more connected to society.

Because there's so much attention on Facebook and so many people are on it businesses and marketers see it as an opportunity to sell products and services. If there's that many people in Facebook it must be pretty easy to sell on the platform right?

Turns out people don't want to be sold on social media. They want to get away from the selling, click bait marketing and other common tactics employed by marketers. Think about it; when your scrolling through Facebook and you happen across a blatant ad you scroll right past it. You don't have the time or patience to listen to another blah blah blah sales or landing page about features and benefits of a supposed wonder product.

So what makes you stop and click, share, comment or like something on a social network? For most people it has to be something that sparks emotion; it's a funny video or picture, meme, article that you find interesting or an educational piece that gives you some valuable info that you can use. Once you see enough of this stuff from a page on Facebook you start checking it regularly, like the page and begin to trust them as a resource for content you enjoy.

This is how we build a relationship with people and show them that we care more about them than sales by providing a tremendous amount of value at no cost. Now that we understand how people want to interact on social media and how they consume content on it. Why are traditional marketers still relying on short term tactics for selling with click bait Facebook ads, sending people to a landing page with a countdown timer (that never really hits zero), promising certain features and benefits and then sending a series of spammy emails encouraging people to hurry and buy now?

It's because they don't understand the changing landscape of marketing and haven't taken the time to learn how people want to be interacted with on social media. Plus it's much more difficult to produce content that actually helps people for free and the results take longer to show up in the form of new customers. But when they do you form a powerful relationship with your customers, because you already given them so much. Your brand will become so engrained with them that they will go out of their way to purchase the products and services.

When looking at the ideal strategy to build your brand and get people to purchase your products and services it's all about building that trust and developing a relationship with your customers. You do this by focusing on what they want and how they want it and this is through producing incredibly valuable information through blogs, videos, funny pictures and videos and interacting with them and talking back and forth when they have questions. It all comes down to LISTENING to your customers and reverse engineering your strategy to address their wants and needs!

ChansLogic Ep006

May 27, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we touched on the "voodoo" marketing selling that is popping up everywhere, building your clientele from beginning to end and of course appearances from Pepe!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

Stop Selling Voodoo Marketing!

May 24, 2016 Chandler Walker

In today's world everyone wants to be successful and everyone wants the magic formula for success. Because of this, there is a whole industry out there devoted to convincing you that they have that secret formula and if you purchase it you're going to be set for life.

There are about a million people posing as “marketers” telling you to buy their special product and it'll make you millions of dollars. Have you thought about why these people are selling these products? They know that you have a dream to live long and prosper and because of this dream they can sell you hopes and dreams and prey off of your curiosity. They do this by using click bait tactics, catchy titles (like million dollar master formula), promises they can't keep and “hurry and buy now” selling tactics. All of these encourage you to take action when you're not ready and everyone eventually regrets the decision.

For every course that promises leads, leads, leads, the million dollar master formula or the “hurry and buy now” products there are 10x the amount of people buying them in hopes that it will give them that special meal ticket to overnight success. How many of these people actually achieve that success? If you answered just about zero, you'd probably be right.

Not only is this not ethical in any way, shape or form, it's downright wrong. No special product or master formula will replace the hard work and dedication it takes to build something great, the understanding of how to build relationships and ethically nurture people into purchasing when they're ready and when they've had enough time to make a smart decision.

When you see someone selling something promising to get you rich. Take a good long look at it and ask yourself, “are they selling a viable product or are they preying on my hopes and dreams?”. If you start paying attention to what's being sold you'll notice that these tactics are everywhere.

If you're looking for a system to help you in your marketing and to help make sense of it all it would have to include:

Social marketing component in relevant networks. You might not need to be on all of them. Just the ones that make sense for your business.
Email system, be human and use this to give information and build trust. Do not use it to write the longest text in the history of the world to sell things.
Website, this is your little piece of real estate where people go after you've nurtured them effectively and built trust on social media. Please don't fall into believing SEO is a selling point in website. This should be standard practice and is not voodoo magic!

Social media builds brand awareness and trust with your audience, who then go to your website for more information when they are ready and finally enter their email that you asked for in an ethical fashion where you continue to nurture them by giving good information and content. At the end of this you'll ask them to purchase your product.

No trickery, no tactics, just help them understand what you do and how you do it to ensure you're both a good fit for each other.

P.S. the picture that you see with this blog post is a perfect example of what NOT to do!

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions on social media or email chandler@stoneagefuel.com and we will answer them in our podcast/video series!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my YouTube channel

Subscribe to our #ChansLogic podcast

ChansLogic Ep005

May 13, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we recapped our time in Salt Lake City for the 2016 USA Weightlifting National Championships and USA Weightlifting Olympic Team Trials, what happens at the gym when we are gone, our coach preparation, branding and of course appearances from Pepe!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

ChansLogic Ep004

April 29, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we get into managing and promoting goods (supplements in the case of the fitness industry), expanding your business, quality content people will be interested in reading, and some failures we encountered along the way and how we have grown from them.

Be sure to subscribe to ChansLogic on iTunes!

Tag #ChansLogic to get your questions answered!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

So You Want to be an Entrepreneur?

April 29, 2016 Chandler Walker

Being an entrepreneur is a journey never traveled in a straight line. It’s not a linear path with a nice little manual that tells you what to do and what not to do, there’s no direction and definitely no one size fits all model.

It’s a journey that often takes you on a roller coaster of a ride, leading you in all sorts of different directions. The hardest part about this roller coaster is understanding that you have to be flexible and capable of adapting to changing situations and environments before they even happen. The ability to spot trends before they happen can literally make or break your ability to survive and thrive.

Always be thinking 5-10 years from now and always be understanding how the environment is shifting and where you need to position yourself to make it work! Those who are flexible will make it and thrive, while those who refuse to adapt will fail to grow and develop as the business environment changes over time.

I see a lot of people who say, “Oh, you run your own business? That's great, you get to do whatever you want, you make your own hours and all you do is party and drink mimosas.”

That is entirely untrue unless you managed to raise a bunch of money for your business and then didn’t care to put in the follow through work necessary to allow your business to thrive! These are the people that have little to no idea how to manage their business in the short and long term, blow through all their finances and end up with nothing to show for it in the end.

So when you quit the work world, you’re not sitting at a desk all day, you’re running your own business and your own projects and your own everything, you are grinding 24/7. You have to be up and running with things, working long hours to make it work and if you’re not getting enough done it’s time to make more hours in the day. Get up earlier, take less breaks, stop messing around for three hours at lunch .

You have to decide whether or not you want things automated and whether or not automation takes away from the human aspect that people crave from a brand. It’s about you getting out there talking to your current (and potential) audience and then going back to put in the work. If you are not even willing to do that, you are eventually going to fail. Most business owners don’t succeed because they just continuously fail and then they finally give up.

The key to all of this is understanding that everything falls on the you - the entrepreneur - to understand the flow, manage finances effectively and to put in the work to ensure that what you’re doing will not fail. If you don’t understand something or you’re not good at something find someone who is and do whatever it takes to convince them to work with you. This way you can focus on your strength and they can build and support your weaknesses.

We can be good at some things, but we absolutely cannot be good at everything!

Learn to Crush it with Facebook Live!

April 15, 2016 Chandler Walker

There's been a battle between live platforms lately with Periscope, YouTube live and now Facebook live. With Facebook taking a serious interest in live video and making it the centerpiece of its current strategy this is bad news for everyone else.

Facebook has been paying some media publishers to produce live content in order to increase the awareness of its live platform, get more users engaged and using the feature and it has prioritized live in its news feed. Kobe Bryant's last game was featured on Facebook live! Now there will be a live button that replaces the messenger button at the bottom of the Facebook app and Facebook will be introducing a video search feature to make it easier for people to search for videos like they do in YouTube. If that isn't enough Facebook is going to be adding filters and drawing on the screen during live videos. Hello snapchat? Er Facebook?

This is a huge indication companies should be working toward going live to build awareness and offer a unique piece of your business that is raw, real, unedited and unscripted. People love to see this! It adds the human piece to your brand in a world of boring non personalized marketing, where consumers feel as though they are just numbers and companies don't care about them.

How should we use live effectively? We should start by thinking about what people are asking and what they want to see in behind the scenes, funny or unique content. If you see everyone else doing something do something different. Create a small mini series that you put up weekly that covers something people are actually asking about or interested in. This means you actually have to LISTEN to your audience and react from what they say. When you're recording live be sure you have someone to respond to the comments and engage with your viewers. Chances are you're going to have a lot more comments from the viewers in your live video. Finally ask the viewers questions during the video. People love to be interacted with and will comment back with a response on what you're asking them.

With Facebooks improved embedding you can now put your live videos that are saved as recordings on your website or anywhere else you'd like to showcase them. Though the most important thing for Facebook is keeping people engaged on their platform. In addition to improved embedding you can use live to record from a GoPro, drones and similar items.

If you're interested in continuing to be relevant in social and digital marketing you're going to want to, at the very least, produce some live content and see how it does in terms of who watches it and how many people you get engaging with you on that video. Don't ignore this, you'll regret it later when everyone else is doing it and it's much harder to build that engagement. Those who jump in early are the ones who build the biggest following and achieve the greatest success!

Rank on Google by Being Human and Making Friends!

April 11, 2016 Chandler Walker

Google has released the three most important factors that are considered when your website is ranked. The three most important factors are:

1) Quality and relevant content (writing to pain points and what people search for to find a solution). Get writing and write in a way that shows how your audience can benefit from what you offer and that showcases what they would search for to find a solution. Keep it natural and you'll benefit the most. If you stuff keywords and make it seem like your talking to robots you will not benefit from the content.

2) Inbound links or backlinks, which are other trustworthy sites in relevant fields linking to you. Spammy crappy links will get you dinged though so don't go create a bunch of fake sites and have them link back to you.

3) RankBrain, basically a bot that looks at search engine queries and analyses similar queries to get an idea of how relevant your content is and what would make sense to include in a search. This is why you don't need to stuff keywords into your posts and if you do it'll sound unnatural and your site will get dinged for it.

Basically it all comes down to writing to what humans want to see, keeping your writing natural, writing what will benefit them the most, working with others in a similar fields and not doing unnatural stuff like keyword stuffing!