Join the 5 day challenge to Get More Referrals!
Oct. 4, 2023

22 ways to get leads WITHOUT social media

What’s social media done for you lately? If the answer is not much, you’re gonna love this episode! We’re going to cover 22 ways you can get leads for your business WITHOUT social media.

Social media can be a great tool in your business but it is far from everything. Lead generation can come from a variety of relational and broadcast strategies.

What’s social media done for you lately? If the answer is not much, you’re gonna love this episode! We’re going to cover 22 ways you can get leads for your business WITHOUT social media.

Social media can be a great tool in your business but it is far from everything. Lead generation can come from a variety of relational and broadcast strategies.

This episode will give you more ideas about where to find your clients along with some tips to get you started if these tactics are new to you. The options are endless and I’d encourage you to continue exploring and experimenting with ways to bring in new business.

You’ll love this episode if:

1) You’re not a big fan of social media
2) Your current lead gen methods aren’t working well enough
3) You need new ideas for finding clients

We’ll cover:
+ 11 Relational Strategies to Get Clients
+ 11 Broadcast Strategies to Get Clients

Tools from this episode:
Some of the links below are affiliate links and I may get a small referral fee if you make a purchase at no cost to you. These affiliate fees help support my free and community work and I only recommend tools I use and believe are valuable

Upcoming Online Events
Growthtrackers Live (Fridays): https://lu.ma/growthgym
The Impact of AI on SEO Strategy (Oct 27): https://lu.ma/aiandseo

Connect with Lex
Newsletter: https://read.lowenergyleads.com
Website: https://lexroman.com
Growthtrackers Live: https://www.youtube.com/@lowenergyleads/streams

Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Starting a Business Simplified. Host Suzy Wraines walks you step by step through everything you need to get your business off the ground. Learn more at https://suzywraines.com/ or find the show on your favorite podcasting app.

Credits
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!) | License code: CYHCUU5DLPVC8OTQ

Thank you for being part of the Low Energy Leads community! Leave me a voicemail with your thoughts on this episode.

 

Step off the marketing treadmill when you get the Low Energy Leads newsletter

Transcript

Since I'm not a big fan of social media, I get asked all the time, how do I get leads without social media? Today's episode is about just that. We're going to talk about 22 ways that you can get leads for your business without social media.

I'm splitting today's techniques into two buckets, relational and broadcast.

I like to split marketing methods into those two buckets because I think far too often we see marketing as a one-sided activity. We're throwing something over the wall and hopefully it will land on someone, but actually for service-based businesses, relational techniques are a stronger play, a more common play. When I see service providers that are in business for 5, 10, 15 years, they're almost always using relational techniques as a huge part of their marketing strategy. As we go through the techniques today, I want you to consider which ones you've already tried, which ones you'd like to try and which ones seem like they would bring you the fastest result.

I'm Lex Roman. I help creatives make smarter marketing bets, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show.

Earlier this week, I asked you about the role of social media in your business, and I got this hilarious response from Ben Mosior, Ben and his collaborator, David Holl. They make strategy more accessible. They're the authors of the new strategy tactic stack from Pip Decks, and Ben said that they use LinkedIn for two reasons to be seen to make sure that their network knows what they're up to, and for business intelligence, which I thought was an interesting reason, sales Navigator helps them figure out the size of the organization. They're looking at the political structure, maybe who the decision makers are as for the rest of social media, here's what Ben said about that scrolling and shit posting sounds about right, doesn't it? For many of us, social media is not providing the utility we think it is, and that is why we're going to talk today about ways that you can get leads without it.

Relational and broadcast strategies can also be described as going to them versus making them come to you. I've spoken about this before, but if you're waiting for your leads to come to you, that's going to take longer than for you to go to them. That's why I see more service providers relying on more relational activities, and to be honest with you, even when I worked in Silicon Valley, a lot of these big tech companies are using relational techniques.

Even companies like Facebook, they have a sales team. Companies like LinkedIn, they have a partnerships team. Companies like Slack, they have an events team. This idea that you're just broadcasting out your company and hoping that it will find people, it's actually a strategy. I've never seen a company singularly use. Companies are always pairing these two modalities, relational and broadcast for the best results in terms of finding leads and closing them into sales.

Some of the techniques we're going to cover today you will be well familiar with, but I would encourage you to see them in a new light to reevaluate them. Maybe you use them in your one or two of your business and maybe it's time to try them again.

Relational strategies

Method 1: Ask people you know

Method one for finding leads without social media is to ask people, this is an off overlooked strategy, and yes, it is not necessarily a low one, but people they might know, people who need to work with you and very often the people that are closest to us, we neglect to keep them in the loop about what we're doing, our availability and the kinds of people we want to work with as clients. So it's worth every quarter or so going through your network, go through your phone, go through your email, go through your LinkedIn and see who have I not talked to in the last couple months who might know my buyers?

Reach out, schedule a coffee chat. Reignite those relationships, particularly people you know, know your buyers. Make sure that you're staying in contact with those people and don't hesitate to reach out to them when you're looking for work. It's not enough to just post somewhere, Hey, I'm open for business. You really need to reach out to people one-on-one. That strategy is going to pay off so much faster than social media. People feel a personal responsibility to you when you reach out to them that they don't feel when you just post somewhere.

Method 2: Get warm intros for coffee chats

Building off of that method too is to ask for warm introductions for coffee chats. Now, coffee chats are not sales conversations. They're more like informational, get to know you interviews, but having those warm introductions can make those go really well. If you're speaking to someone who happens to be in buy mode for your service, one of the easiest ways to nail this is to reach out to people who are big connectors in your network and to ask for introductions to people who tend to hire for the kind of thing that you do.

So a corporation that brings in copywriters every year, that might be the kind of person that you want to meet or the flower shop who is constantly working with wedding planners. Maybe they are someone who's looking for vendors all the time and they need to know you. Getting those warm introductions will move those relationships faster than cold networking will. Even if people like you when you're networking, it takes time for them to warm up for you to be a preferred vendor for them, especially if they have more than one person in their network that does what you do. But those warm introductions go a long way. So thinking about who's close in my network, who knows those people who are my buyers or know my buyers and working those for coffee chats, that's a great way to spend your time. That time almost always pays you back in one way or another and you're going to want to get smarter and faster about how to figure out who you should be asking, what kind of ask you should be making and how those coffee chats should go, what the action is that you leave that person with, but that's a perfect place to be experimenting and it's something that I recommend you definitely hone as a core skill for being a salesperson in your business.

Method 3: Create a referral program

Method three is to create a referral program. We think of this as something that we can't control. We might say, oh, if you like what we did together, refer your friends, refer your family, refer your colleagues, but we think, oh, well, we can't do much more than that, but actually there's so much you can do to drive referrals and not just with your clients. We're going to do a whole nother episode about what it means to drive word of mouth because it drives me absolutely crazy how much people flatten what's really a pretty big complex marketing strategy, but just taking referral programs alone, I want you to think about whether or not you have one and what it would mean to start building one out. A referral program can be as simple as a mailing list that you send an email to a couple times a year letting folks know what you're currently offering, who you're working with and what your availability is, and they can go up to things like insider programs and affiliates, so whether or not you incentivize your referral partners, knowing who those people are and staying in touch with them intentionally and relatively frequently can make those referrals pay off so much more.

I want to share an example of this because I get pushback on this one in particular. People will say, well, Lex, if they liked my service, they will refer work my way. Last year I worked with a videographer and I loved the videographer. We had a successful session and the videos turned out great, but I have not heard from that videographer in the last year and a half, and in the meantime, I've met probably about 10 other videographers in the city of Atlanta, so when I recently needed a videographer, I called someone else and I would hypothetically recommend that initial videographer, but he hasn't stayed top of mind and I don't really have any loyalty to him because he really has shown that he's not that interested in keeping in touch with me. So particularly if your service is relatively easy to find, if there's a lot of what you do out there, I think it's even more important to differentiate on your relationship building and your relationship upkeep, and that's where the referral program comes in most handy.

Method 4: Become a referral partner for others

Method four is to become a referral partner for others. Now, what you're going to want to do here is think about who you are often referring work out to. What kinds of providers do you need in your circle to make your clients even that much more successful? What are your clients asking for recommendations on what are they looking for information about? Where are they going after you that you could build service provider relationships to solve for the things that your clients are already trying to solve? So you don't just want to be a referral partner for whoever you like. You really want to think about what's a strategic play where I could actually become a trusted resource for my colleagues, my peers, my clients, and I could send work to this person's way and then ideally in turn they would send work back to me, but even if that doesn't make sense, those relationships will get stronger and guess what?

That will lead to more referral relationships in your life. It will also lead to things like collaborations and amplification of your work, which we're going to talk about a little bit later.

Method 5: Become a recommended vendor

Method five is to become a recommended partner for another company. What I mean by this is really becoming a recommended vendor for a larger corporation where they have maybe a little bit more name recognition and maybe they're doing a lot of marketing and sales so that you are sort of coasting a little bit off of how popular they've become. An example of this would be Microsoft. There are recommended providers for installing Microsoft Software and if you become one of those recommended providers, then when people choose Microsoft, they might also choose you. There's also platforms like Squarespace's Expert Marketplace. Webflow has something similar. The Showit community tools like Dubsado and HoneyBook have recommended experts, Mighty Networks, Circle all kinds of platforms and companies, especially software companies.

They have these recommended expert programs and if there's something that you love using a tool you love using or a software that you're an expert in, you can become a recommended provider for them. You can show up in their internal directories. You can even partner with them in more formal ways often as part of that, they'll include all kinds of education. They'll include free promotion of your business. If this applies to your business, it's definitely worth looking into because you can benefit from the sales and marketing work that they're doing for their business as you build your own.

Method 6: Pitch yourself to open job reqs

Method six is to pitch yourself when you see open job req. Now this is a strategy that I used when I launched my first business. I saw a full-time role and I pitched myself on contract. This is an especially great strategy if you offer some kind of creative service where they are often hiring for those roles full time.

What you want to do in this case is you want to take the job rec that you're interested in, you want to go to LinkedIn, you want to type in the name of the company and you want to see if you know anyone who works at that company because if you know someone who works there, you can likely get in touch with the hiring manager and you can get a feel for whether or not they would be willing to do that job on contract. Now, as I'm releasing this episode, it's a little bit of a weird job market out there, especially in the us, but I think it's worth a try. It's at least worth exploring, especially if you want longer contracts or if you want to work with bigger corporations. They often have a longer lead time to hiring those full-time roles and they need a pocket of freelancers that they can turn to for those three to six month projects while they hire those full-time employees.

Method 7: Create an amplifier network

Method seven is to make your own amplifier network. Now, amplifier network is a term that I made up. I covered this in an earlier episode of the show, but it's the idea of the social media engagement pod lifted out of social media. So when we think about an engagement pod, we're thinking of a bunch of people that like comment, share our posts. I think that idea is getting a little tired. I don't know about you, I'm getting tired of being asked to and share posts. So the idea of an amplifier network is a smaller group of people where they're genuinely excited about each other's work and they are sharing and amplifying that work in select but meaningful ways in an ongoing fashion so you're not hitting these people up every day. The way that engagement pods were working in the past, you're really looking more like every month, maybe every couple months you're saying, I'm doing a webinar, would you promote it?

And then those people might promote it on social media, but they might promote it on their email list or they might directly send it to a friend, so you're not dictating the channel, you're not saying like share, et cetera. You're really looking for a more meaningful amplification that goes farther with trust than social media would. You're looking for them to vouch for you in a substantial way. It's going go so much farther than liking and sharing because this person is putting their reputation out there for you, and so this is a smaller network of people. Go back and watch that episode and hear how I break it down, but this is not just like a random group of people that you add to a group chat. These are people that you know like and trust as well and you're deliberately deciding that you want to help each other grow.

I think amplifier networks are really cool and they're an amazing way to grow your relationship. They're an amazing way to support each other for basically no money.

Method 8: Participate in relevant communities

Method eight is to participate in relevant communities where your buyers are hanging out or where the people who know your buyers are hanging out. Now, this can range. These are going to be really targeted though. You want to make sure that you are showing up in an industry group, in an interest group, in the location-based group that really makes sense for the people that you want to be getting to know and you're going to want to try some of these on for size. There's a lot of experimentation that can happen with which kind of communities make sense. They might also be paid communities, so this doesn't necessarily mean free Facebook groups and you want to try some of them on for size.

You want to see who's in here, who's participating, what kind of conversations are happening, and is there an opportunity for me to share my expertise in an authentic way and to build relationships in a way that's not slimy, that's not about sales, but is actually about you being interested in who those people are. Communities are a long play. You're not going to pop into a community and offer your services and make a bunch of money, but they are a high value play and they are a repeatable play, and your investments there can pay you back many times over because they're a community. You're not just investing in one person, you're investing in a group and that trust gets banked over time. I've heard from several service providers including agencies and consulting firms that communities can be a high value way that they spend their time and that they've gotten direct buyer relationships out of those, but not without several months of investment.

So try some communities on for size, look for some early signals that your buyers are there or that your power connectors are there. Actually engage authentically and then try to have some conversations that move some of those relationships beyond the community.

Method 9: Guest speak in relevant groups

Method nine is to guest speak in relevant groups. You can ask people that you know clients, referral partners, peers for introductions to relevant communities, professional groups, et cetera, where you should be guest speaking to get in front of your buyers. Back when I was doing web design, I did this with HECA, the Higher Education Consultants Association. I pitched them on doing a couple webs on how to get your website to help you book more families and students as a college consultant. That was a really successful promotion for me because there were a lot of new business owners coming in and out of that group there were a lot of business owners that were breaking away from their past business affiliation and they needed a new website, so I got several clients from that promotion and what's nice about this strategy is that again, we're still in our relational strategy space, so you are still learning more about your clientele, you're learning about your different perspective.

You're building a relationship with a partner, so this strategy can actually play on multiple levels in your business and I love that when we can find a marketing strategy that doesn't just do one thing but builds layers of trust and relationships in your business and offers bonus education or lets you create content that you can reuse, we love that it's an efficient play. In order to book guest spots, you're going to want to ask around, you're going to want to ask your clients, your referral partners, your peers. You're going to want to ask in groups that you are in, where are people speaking? Where are people attending things, where's interesting talks happening? You're going to want to think about where your buyers might be hanging out, where your connectors might be hanging out and where you can show up as an expert to offer guidance and where you can connect with those people who might want to learn more about your services.

Method 10: Host your own event

Method 10 is to host your own event. Whether you want to host that event online or offline in your community. Hosting an event can give you a huge leg up because you decide who gets invited to that event and you decide what you want to talk about or what you want to format the event as Now you can always partner with another business or another entity, especially if you're doing something in person, but creating that space that you want to create and convening the people that you want to convene is a really powerful way to grow your business is a really wonderful value add. Whether you're doing that online or offline, it's an amazing way to build more trust and when you're speaking and hosting things, people gain trust so much faster because they're seeing you. They feel like they're getting free value from you or low cost value from you.

You're welcome to charge for this event. I didn't say it had to be free and events are a great way to pull people out of the woodwork, people who've sort of been lurking in your business, particularly on your email list. Encouraging those folks to come out to that event can really show you who these people are and it can get them to engage with you in a way that they might not electronically via email. If you're new to hosting events, I would start with something small and simple and you really want to anchor it around your service, so you want the topic and the design of the event to really focus on the value prop of your business. You don't want to just host events for hosting events sake. You want to host an event that gets people asking, how can I work with you?

Method 11: Spotlight clients and partners

Method 11 is to spotlight your partners and clients through your channels. Now, when I say your channels, I obviously do not mean social media channels alone, whether those channels can include press that you're doing, your email newsletter, your own podcast, your website, anywhere you want to feature people. When you reach out to your partners and your clients and say, I'd like to feature you, you add even more goodwill, you build even more trust and guess what? They go out and they usually share that with their networks in whatever ways that they do that, and so you build that amplification into your business by amplifying others. It's a wonderful way to cement relationships you already have while meeting a potentially new crowd of people. You can even make suggestions to your clients about how to share that information like share it in your newsletter using this sample copy or give them a video clip or an image that they can share with their network.

This is an example of a referral mechanism and it's one that is really widely spread so it's not just, oh, I know that so-and-so needs to hire a logo designer, so I'm going to recommend a logo designer. I'm amplifying the logo designer's work so that more people can see it and I may not know that Sal needs a logo designer, but here he is coming and asking about you because you shared my work. This brings us to the sponsor of today's episode. Are you early stage in your business and you're getting overwhelmed with all the steps that it takes to get it off the ground? Introducing, starting a business, simplified the podcast that's here to help Susie Rains. Your host will guide you through the transition step-by-step from success stories to valuable business tips. She's got it all covered. Tune in now on your favorite podcast platform and simplify starting a business.

Broadcast strategies

Now we're going to shift to more broadcast strategies. When I think of broadcast strategies, these tend to be longer plays, not always, but they tend to take longer because people are coming to you, you're waiting for them to find you rather than you going to them directly.

Method 12: Cross-promote with others

Method 12 is to cross-promote with others. Now I'm leaving cross-promote kind of vague. By that I just mean you're co-promoting something or you're cross-promoting on each other's channels, so either you're collaborating on a single source of content, maybe you're doing a webinar together or a podcast together or you've co-written the blog together or you're amplifying each other's work and that can go across channel. Again, you're going to allow your collaborator in this case to choose the channel of amplification. The idea of cross-promotion is really powerful. I wanted to introduce it by itself before I go into a couple specific ways that you can do that.

We leave this opportunity on the table for someone who deeply trusts us to promote our work on our behalf and that can go so much farther whether they put that in a newsletter, in a podcast, et cetera, they might include you in some kind of directory they have. Maybe they have a standard place that they like to promote their partners. The idea of cross-promotion is super, super powerful and I would really encourage you to have a look at the ways that your partners are showing up on the internet, showing up in their business and see if there's opportunities for you to cross promote together. To go more specific with that.

Method 13: Do newsletter swaps

Method thirteen is to do newsletter swaps. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but a newsletter swap is where you cross promote with another newsletter operator, so they talk about you and you talk about them in whatever way you want to do that.

It can be as simple as a one-liner with a link. It could be a whole feature, it could be a guest written newsletter. There's so many ways to do this, but the idea is that you get right in front of their newsletter audience. In general, you're going to want to look for two things. When you do this, you're going to want to make sure that they have a similar audience target that you have and you're going to want to make sure you have a similar list size so that you're getting a similar result that you're giving them. Now, you don't want to be too picky about this. I think you just want to be in a ballpark range. If you have a list of 20,000 and they have a list of 200, that's a little bit unfair. It really comes down to the quality of the audience here, and so it's worth having a conversation about.

You can also use platforms like letter growth to identify newsletters, especially newsletters that you don't know. Newsletter swaps are particularly potent because people are more focused on their inbox than they are on the algorithms in the feeds.

Method 14 is Podcast swaps

Method 14 is to do podcast swaps. Podcast swaps are typically between two podcast hosts where you co-promote each other's shows. Each of you has an ad for the other ones show or you can have each other on as guests. That's a cross promotion to your podcast audiences, whether it's you or the host. Reading the podcast ad, it really humanizes your brand voice in a way that can't really be done in writing.

Method 15 is sponsor a newsletter

Method 15 is to sponsor a newsletter. Sponsoring a newsletter is great because rather than messing around with all of the complexities of audiences on Facebook and Google and other ad platforms, you can go to a newsletter that targets your buyers that has maybe a bigger audience than you and a great click-through rate.

You want to make sure they have that and you can place a targeted ad in there. All you have to do then is nail your message and your call to action. For people that are interested in ads, this really reduces the amount of factors to get right. If you're diving in with something like Facebook ads, you've got audiences, you've got images, you've got video, you've got segmentation, you've got budget. There's so many different factors there at play to experiment with. It can take some time, and so instead you're going to want to go simpler where the ad can be placed somewhere that's more targeted so that it is exactly focused on your audience and you don't have to worry about all the different settings. You can just know This newsletter targets my audience, so all I have to focus on getting right is my message and my action.

I've had great results with this with Josh Spector's newsletter For the Interested, maybe you found me there. Every time I place an ad in Josh's newsletter, it pays me back in multiples because his audience is my audience and they just haven't met me yet. It's also really great because you're supporting another independent creator and not supporting a giant conglomerate.

Method 16: List yourself in directories

Method 16 is to list yourself in directories. This is really going to depend on your business. Some businesses is going to be easier than others when it comes to directories, it could be something really widely scoped like Angi's List or Yelp or you could look at something that's more targeted by industry. If you're a film professional, there's film video directories. If you're a designer, there's design directories. What's cool about getting listed in directories is that most often those directories are working on their Google searchability, so they're making it more easy to find professionals just like you and you can benefit from that searchability without mastering Google yourself.

One way to find directories is to Google your specific profession, your specific industry, the kinds of things that you would expect your buyer to Google and see if any directories come up. Those give you a clue that you might want to be listed there.

Method 17: Mail something to target clients (direct mail)

Method 17 is to mail something to your target clients. Direct mail is still a powerful marketing channel, albeit a sort of expensive one. It kind of depends on which way you go with this. I've seen some pretty established consultancies leverage direct mail to target prospects and also to stay in touch and build relationships with existing clients, maybe to get through another department inside a bigger corporation or to get to another office. Male is actually a great second touch mechanism that can cause someone to go from being aware of your business to being activated as a lead. An example of this is Jordan Gill's done in a day system saved me.

Jordan recently did a conference in Dallas and she mailed all of us who had gone to something that she had done before postcards. I'll be honest, I don't even remember giving her my address, but it was probably just in the billing info on a checkout page of something I went to digitally and getting that postcard caused me to go to that conference and I'm sure worked on many of the other attendees. Direct mail has so many applications in your business. It's worth trying at least once to see how easy it is to engage your buyers. It also adds some freshness for your existing clients. You can also use it in other ways in your business that have nothing to do with lead generation.

Method 18: Give a conference talk

Method 18 is to give a conference talk. Conferences can be a fantastic way to speak in front of a room of your buyers or to speak in front of a room of influential people.

The kinds of people that go to conferences tend to be people who have influence in their organizations or they're people that are interested in building connections. It can be a great environment for you to share your expertise and get in the room with people who are your buyers or know your buyers. When it comes to pitching conference talks, you're going to want to look for those rooms that are highly qualified for your expertise that makes sense for the kinds of buyers that you are looking to target, but there's all kinds of calls for submission online. You can ask around and get some suggestions of some of the conferences that your clients are attending.

Method 19: Guest on podcasts

Method 19 is guesting on podcasts. You can either pitch yourself as a podcast guest or you can focus on building relationships with relevant podcast hosts. There are platforms for this like Pod Match or you can set up a profile show off your expertise and directly pitch podcasts hosts or have them find you.

There's also Facebook groups for this and communities for podcast hosts and guests to get matched. Podcast guesting can be a lot of fun, but you want to make sure you do this in a really targeted way and that you're really thinking about the audience that that podcast host has cultivated and whether or not it is the audience that you want to reach. Again, it's going to require some experimentation to make sure you're hitting the right shows, the right topics and the right actions, but it's kind of a fun testing ground if you like public speaking, and the bonus is you usually build a relationship with the host or there's an opportunity for that and they can become a strategic partner in your business.

Method 20: Guest write on newsletters or blogs

If you're more of a writer, then you can guest on newsletters or blog and you can show up there with an article that maps your expertise to your services.

This is a great way to leverage SEO in someone else's blog or newsletter. If you can find someone who has a higher domain authority than you, which is something you can check in Ahrefs free SEO tools, then you can pitch yourself as a guest blogger, as a guest writer, possibly take some work off their play and show up in a way that's easier than you playing Google's game on your own website. Some publications have a whole process for being a guest writer for doing submissions. You're going to want to Google their domain plus call for submissions, guest writers, guest posts, that kind of thing to find out if they already have a process for that or sometimes if you go to the contact page of a website, you can see do they accept guest contributors. This is a little bit different than the newsletter swap because you're writing the whole content.

You're usually taking over the whole issue rather than just being mentioned or featured by the newsletter operator, but it's a great SEO play if you like writing. If you are a writer, you can coast off the s e o Juice of other websites by contributing your expertise.

Method 21: Pitch yourself or your clients to press

Method 21 is to pitch yourself to press this strategy works the best if one of two things is happening, one, you have a really unique expertise or you're sort of a trailblazer in some fashion in your industry, you're doing something that's really off the wall kind of unusual and press worthy or two, you've gotten a really impressive result for a client or maybe they're press worthy. Don't set the bar too high though. Press is possible almost no matter what kind of business you're in, what kind of work you're doing. The cool thing about press is that even something that's featured in a publication that's not that well known can contribute to the backlinks that boost your Google searchability, so it sort of just increases your surface area on the internet where people can find you.

You can pitch press using something like HARO, which stands for Help a Reporter Out. There's other platforms like that. Quoted is another one. A better strategy for this and one that I've actually used is to build relationships with reporters that cover your space, so you're going to want to go to the publications that your buyers are reading or that are influential in your industry. You're going to want to look at who's writing about those subjects and follow them, get to know them, comment on their work, comment on the stories, subscribe to their independent newsletters, build those relationships so that you start to get on their radar. I used to write a political newsletter called LA Pays Attention, and I built several relationships with reporters, so when I launched that publication, even though I had very few subscribers, it got featured in the LA Times and in K C R W because I had those relationships with those reporters, so even though the publication wasn't that well known, I had already been on the radar of these people.

Building relationships with Press can take time, and you can always start with something as simple as pitching on hero, especially if you have an expertise that is hyper-relevant for a story that's coming out this week or next week.

Method 22: Make a flash briefing on Alexa

Method 22, and this is an odd man out. I really wanted to throw a curve ball at you because I want you to think about lead generation as a wide net of exploratory opportunities that you can pursue. Method 22 is flash briefings on Alexa. Now, I don't have an Alexa, so I'm going to explain what I understand this to be. Flash briefings are mini podcasts that people enable on their Alexa where you can share messages about your business, you can share tips of the day and things like that. I'm going to include a link in the show notes of how to set up a flash briefing.

I think it's a super creative way to get your business out there, particularly if you're targeting corporate settings where they might have an Alexa in the office, and I really want you to keep your eyes open for opportunities like that, that they can come into your consciousness and you can say, is this something I want to pursue? Should I try this on for size? Can I run an experiment around this and see if it's worth my time? Lead generation is so much more fun when you don't put all your eggs in one basket and instead you try different things on for size to see if they fit, to see if they drive results, to see if they feel sustainable for you, and you build your muscle for weathering all kinds of changes and technology changes and industry changes in the way the world works.

If the idea of experimenting with your marketing is interesting to you, you're going to want to check out my program Growthtrackers.

I go live every Friday on YouTube with something called Growthtrackers Live, to give you a taste of what we do in there and how we make smarter marketing Betts build your proven playbook of what's going to get you booked year after year in your business.

I also want to let you know about a webinar with Pathfinder SEO about The Impact of AI on SEO Strategy. I've personally used Pathfinder SEO to help improve my Google visibility and my conversion rates off of Google. I know that you will love their reasonable approach to SEO, their thoughtful ways that they're including AI and responding to AI. That's coming up on October 27th, and it's particularly great if you're running a creative agency of some kind, a web design shop, a copywriting shop, a marketing studio. Find the link to join us in the show notes, and I hope to see you there.

Until next time, keep that energy low until the value will be high.