Best Of - The Benevolent Benefactor

Smart Cleaning School

My Total Life Freedom local friends and local networking friend Eric Laylon intersect for a second episode. In "Don't Fight Google or Facebook, Fight for Lunch", my friend Eric Laylon from ReachLocal shared great marketing tips and stats on the digital giants. I followed this with a story of who paid for lunch. In this episode, I am copying the format!

Last week in my local MCBA meeting, Eric ran the business education segment and taught on the benefits of using Alignable for marketing. I've personally avoided it, but Eric gives some great points and tips that may have persuaded me to look into it more. Thus, I wanted to share it with you. LinkedIn is a business platform for business owners and professionals (employees). Alignable is for small business owners locally (not nationally like LinkedIn). The platform is already niched to local and small business owners, which makes it a natural marketing companion to in-person local networking. Alignable has niche groups that you can join of "like interest". Eric says he has gotten so much more business through Alignable vs LinkedIn because of the platform's ability to hyper-niche. Eric explained that you can set up your profile with "who you'd like to connect with". Then, Alignable takes your preferences and puts you in front of those people. Eric uses the premium $30/mo version because the free version limits you to the # of people you can connect with. I thought Eric did a great job presenting Alignable and it really intrigued me. What do you think? Do you use this platform? I'd love to hear about it if you do.
​A few leads came in this week. The first one was military-like. My friend James Hardy of the Carpet Guys was in an online group and saw a request for a house cleaner. He was in the process of typing in my name and website when something else caught his attention. The owner of a local cafe gave my name first. He recommended me and then texted me. "Ken, do you clean for the cafe?" I said no, but I do clean the owner's home. Then he told me about the recommendation to Steven Hunsberger. I thanked him and shared that Steven is the president of my chamber and we're friends. Then I contacted Steven and he felt so embarrassed that his friend Ken and the only cleaner of 400 members in his chamber didn't come to mind when he was looking for a house cleaner. There are multiple takeaways here. First, I am so thankful that I was triangulated by multiple friends to recommend me and they all knew each other! Another is that I have done a poor job in communicating that I clean houses to Steven in all of our interactions including our recent breakfast! Steven knew that I cleaned offices, but had no idea that I did houses too. We talked on the phone and I answered all of his questions in hopes of educating him on the various options he had for hiring a house cleaning service.
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