The One Thing That Can Make or Break Your Creative Business

StudioPress FM

This week we re joined by Seth Spears. Seth s company (Spears Marketing) helps small business owners and bloggers build a reliable and profitable web presence that works… even when you’re not working. His primary focus is on digital marketing strategy.

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Seth is a husband, a father, and fanatical about the Cincinnati Reds and the Cincinnati Bengals. He s a staunch free-market advocate and often called a renaissance man. Last, but certainly not least, Seth is a part of the brotherhood I founded two years ago called Brocation, where a group of entrepreneurs take a few days each winter and hang out in the mountains of Colorado.

In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Seth Spears discuss:

• The founding of Spears Marketing in 2009
• Focusing on your core competencies
• Tools to build your online presence
• Branching out into the Wellness space
• The power of an effective marketing campaign
• Common marketing mistakes made by small businesses
• Successful marketing for the biggest ROI
• Repurposing content for multiple distribution channels
• The value of networking with like-minded entrepreneurs

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

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The Show Notes

• Follow Spears Marketing on Twitter
• Visit SpearsMarketing.com
• Like Spears Marketing on Facebook
• Follow Spears Marketing on Instagram
• Wellness Media
• Brocation

The Transcript

The One Thing That Can Make or Break Your Creative Business

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Seth Spears of Spears Marketing to discuss why a marketing campaign can make or break your creative business.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I’m your host, Brian Gardner, and today I’m joined, as always, with the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Hello, hello. Thanks for joining us this week. We are continuing our series on talking to members of the WordPress community.

Brian Gardner: Today we’re joined by Seth Spears. Seth’s company (Spears Marketing) helps small business owners and bloggers build a reliable and profitable web presence that works. His primary focus is on digital marketing strategy. He is a husband, a father, fanatical about the Cincinnati Reds and the Cincinnati Bengals, though I don’t know why, and he’s a staunch free-market advocate and often called a Renaissance man.

Last but certainly not least, Seth is a part of the brotherhood I founded two years ago called Brocation, where a group of us entrepreneurs take a few days each winter and hang out in the mountains of Colorado. Anyway Seth, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.

Seth Spears: Thanks, Brian. Hi, guys, how are you?

Brian Gardner: We’re doing good. Lauren?

Lauren Mancke: Good, good, good.

Brian Gardner: Good, we’re all good, so let’s start talking.

Seth Spears: It’s good to be good.

Brian Gardner: Yes it is. All right, so you founded Spears Marketing in 2009 as a one-man band in the digital marketing area. It’s a digital marketing shop that you created. What’s the prequel to that? What were you doing before 2009?

The Founding of Spears Marketing in 2009

Seth Spears: Yeah, it’s a great question, Brian. Prior to that I was working for a college in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was the assistant director of admissions there. I was doing a lot traveling around, recruiting students, encouraging them to attend the college that I was working for. I ended up leaving there after about four years, kind of got burnt out and was sick of it, and decided I was going to go out on my own and do independent consulting for homeschooled students preparing for college.

Obviously, I had the background on what it took to get into college working for the university, and I was also homeschooled in high school. I was intimately familiar with that process as well. So doing that, I realized that if I was going to do consulting, I had to have a website, so I began researching on how to build a website.

I’ve always been a tech early adopter and played around with different software, social media. I had heard of WordPress. I think I’d played with WordPress.com a little bit and Blogger, and I actually had started a couple of blogs back in 2005, 2006, but nothing big. Definitely wasn’t an expert in HTML, CSS, or anything digital marketing at the time, although I did have a marketing degree.

I began reading as much as I could on building a website, promoting yourself, and using social media in order to do that. It just so happened that, while the consulting gig I was doing there didn’t become that successful, I learned a whole lot about online marketing, using WordPress, building websites, and social media that it turned into a lot of friends and family members asking me to help them to build a website for them. It kind of led into a natural progression of starting a web design and digital marketing agency.

Lauren Mancke: Your company started out as a freelance business and then grew into a boutique agency, but then you scaled back to a one-on-one targeted approach. I can probably guess the answer to this based on my own experience with scaling back my agency, but talk to us a little bit about how all that went down, why you started to focus exclusively on client strategy and consulting, and moved away from service implementation.

Focusing on Your Core Competencies

Seth Spears: I got burnt out. I grew things from just me doing everything and being a one-man shop to growing it into a mini-agency where I had a couple employees, outsourced some other services, and was taking on anything and everything. If there was money to be made there in the online world, I was doing it — everything from the web design, from social media, creation, strategy, implementation, SEO work, some banner creation logo stuff. Just a little bit of everything, really.

Wherever I saw an opportunity, I was taking it, and I got burnt out. I realized, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. It’s more important to focus on what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and really narrow down the focus on your core competencies. I realized what I really enjoy and what I’m good at is the consulting and strategy — working with other online business owners and bloggers, helping them to figure out what works best and to grow, and market their site and their business for more traffic and increased revenue.

Brian Gardner: Now, did you come into our space through Copyblogger or through StudioPress? I’m trying to remember how I first met you, and I was thinking about that.

How Seth Found His Way to StudioPress

Seth Spears: I guess it would be Copyblogger, sort of. I’ve always been very entrepreneurially minded, and even before I started doing the independent consulting in 2009, I was familiar with Copyblogger. I’m thinking that was around 2007, 2008. I was, I wouldn’t say a regular reader of Copyblogger, but I was familiar with it, and I did read many articles just trying to improve myself, learn more marketing strategies, and things like that.

I became familiar with StudioPress when I was trying to teach myself web design and learning about WordPress, and I was looking for themes that I liked. This would’ve been late 2009. I think around October or November, and I ran across StudioPress and the Pro Plus Package. I was broke and looking for the best deal I could possibly find on as many really good-looking themes. I found some coupon code for the StudioPress Pro Plus Package, and I think I spent $99 to get all of them.

I was like, “Oh, this is the best deal, and I really like some of the themes.” This was pre-Genesis even, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I think I made the best decision possible there, and I’ve said before, that was the best $99 I’ve ever spent in business.

Brian Gardner: All right. Everyone listening? It’s not $99 anymore, or never was supposed to be, but apparently back then it got through.

Seth Spears: Yeah, somehow. Some little coupon code that … I don’t even know.

Brian Gardner: Yeah.

Lauren Mancke: How do the tools we that we offer help make running your business smoother and easier?

Tools to Build Your Online Presence

Seth Spears: Most of the clients that I work with now, they’re bloggers. Even the ones that are not bloggers, they just have a business and a web presence. Probably 95 percent of them are on WordPress, and since we all know that Genesis is the de facto standard when it comes to WordPress frameworks and themes, it just works. It’s so extensible. You can do so much with it. It’s safe. It’s secure. It’s fast, and it’s SEO friendly.

Just the themes themselves are fantastic. I host many sites on Synthesis, which is great. The fact that it has the Scribe SEO plugin built in is a major benefit to that. That definitely helps with client sites in order to improve their search engine optimization and help them to rank a little bit better.

All the information that Copyblogger puts out, either through the membership and now all the podcasts and everything let’s not forget the conferences — I’ve been to every single one. I’m coming to the next one, too. The information is just great. You’d be hard pressed to find somewhere other than Copyblogger and Rainmaker Digital that puts out as much quality information as you guys do.

Brian Gardner: And we don’t even need to continue the show anymore. This was just a commercial for our company.

Seth Spears: I’m not even being paid for that.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, we did not pay him for that plug.

Seth Spears: No, I looked back one time and realized I have purchased every single thing that Rainmaker Digital now has put out with the exception of Third Tribe, I think, and that’s because it came before I was even in the industry. If that’s still around, you can get me a copy of that. That’d be great, Brian.

Brian Gardner: I think it’s evolved since then.

Seth Spears: Yeah, sure.

Brian Gardner: Aside from what you do at Spears Marketing, you run another business — which probably, I’m guessing, takes as much if not more time out of your day — called Wellness Media, which is a network of blogs in the health, wellness, and natural living space. How did that whole thing come about?

Branching Out into the Wellness Space

Seth Spears: I began working a whole lot with health and wellness mama bloggers. One of my first and biggest clients is WellnessMama.com. So working with Katie over the years and helping her to grow her site, I became acclimated to the industry — health, wellness, natural living, fitness — and began working with a lot of those bloggers as well. Kind of began to specialize in that.

Then I saw a need. A lot of bloggers starting out, a lot of online business owners, they had great information — and they had a desire to share that — but they didn’t really know the best way, the best strategies. So Wellness Media started meeting a need to help train them and give them more information so that they could grow and prosper.

It’s evolved a lot since then. Now it’s a network of sites where we put out great information in the health, wellness, natural living space, then monetize that through affiliates, advertising, and things like that. It’s the combined effort of all of them helps everything grow. You’re right, though, it does take a lot of time. Still trying to figure out the ins and outs of it.

Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s talk a little bit more about Wellness Mama specifically. What role do you play there at Wellness Mama, and how has that impacted what you do online?

Seth’s Role at Wellness Mama and How It’s Impacted What He Does Online

Seth Spears: I’ve handled the majority of the marketing strategy for Wellness Mama over the years. Everything from social media implementation and SEO, looking for new opportunities, and just everything in regards to the online presence. I focused a lot on the site over the past six to 12 months on site speed and optimization, just slimming things up and making it faster, and just a better user experience.

Katie does all of the writing, all of the content. Then I handle a lot of the other aspects of it that don’t relate to that, more like the technical side.

Lauren Mancke: I noticed Wellness Mama used to run a custom Genesis Theme, but you recently moved it over to Rainmaker. Can you tell us a little bit about that process, and why you made the change?

Why Seth Made the Change to the Rainmaker Platform

Seth Spears: Actually, the main site, WellnessMama.com, is still on WordPress, and it is still a custom Genesis Child Theme, but there is a membership site that is on Rainmaker. It’s on a subdomain, My.WellnessMama.com, and that is over on Rainmaker. That powers Katie’s member content library. It’s got a couple courses that she sells. It handles all of the e-commerce for her ebooks, free downloads, and resources. The podcast is run through there.

We basically offloaded all the heavy lifting that was slowing down the site and taking up resources. We were going to get rid of a whole bunch of plugins and things, and offload them onto Rainmaker. The main content hub is now a lot slimmer, leaner, and performs better. Katie can focus on just creating content over there, and then I handle the technical stuff over on Rainmaker, which has made it a lot better for everyone. It’s been a great experience doing that.

Brian Gardner: And then we can stop the episode again because that is another commercial. It’s funny. Seth has been a raving Copyblogger/Rainmaker Digital fan over the years. As he said, he’s bought all our products, and that’s not why he’s on this show. Seth has a tremendous amount of knowledge when it comes to marketing and stuff online. That’s, more importantly, what we’re here to discuss.

Seth, the tagline on your site says, quote, “Helping small business owners and bloggers build a reliable and profitable web presence that works even when you’re not working.” Obviously, you’re a marketer, and you believe in the power of that type of thing, effective marketing campaign, and so on. What’s the sales pitch you have? When you’re talking to clients or perspective clients, what is it? How do you convince them to choose your company over someone else?

The Power of an Effective Marketing Campaign

Seth Spears: That’s a great question, and I don’t think I’ve perfected that yet. I think that’s always a work in progress. I guess the first thing is, I don’t think of marketing as a campaign. A campaign is something that has a beginning and an end date. Marketing, if it’s working — and working, to me, is that it’s continuing to bring in more traffic, more subscribers, more fans, more revenue — then that’s something that doesn’t have an end date. You continue to do that until it stops working. Then you pivot and do something else that is.

I guess what I bring to the table, and what I’ve been able to do for a lot of clients over the years, is to help them find the low-hanging fruit. So many business owners, they can’t see the forest through the trees. They’re so wrapped up in their own business that it’s hard for them to figure out what works — or what they’re missing.

Are there new ways to monetize their site? Are there opportunities that they’re missing? How can they better optimize things from the technical side, both for search engine optimization, for increased social media engagement? New content opportunities, maybe additional products that they could create and sell. All of those different ways that is going to improve their web presence, improve their customer service, their relationship with their readers, with their customers, and just to provide a better experience all around.

Lauren Mancke: Not being able to see the forest through the trees reminds me of a phrase my father always used about, “Too busy cutting down trees to sharpen the ax.” I’ve always kept that in mind. What are some of the common marketing mistakes you see around the Internet? What impact do you think those mistakes have on a business?

Common Marketing Mistakes Made by Small Businesses

Seth Spears: The biggest thing that I’m seeing right now is there’s a lot of copycats online. Someone will see what’s working for someone else — this business will say, “Oh, this strategy or this type of content is working for that company or that business. We should do the same thing because it’s working.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. You can copy the exact words that someone writes, but unfortunately, you can’t copy their customer service or the relationship that they have built with their audience. That’s what makes it intrinsic to them.

I’m seeing a lot of that. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls that I’ve seen, especially in the health and wellness space, but I’m sure it happens in a lot of others as well. The antidote to that is to be unique, to really find your voice, to find what works. If you’re not a naturally humorous, funny person, don’t try to be funny. You can’t mimic humor. It’s something people either have it or they don’t.

The same with if you’re a really studious person and you like to read science journals, medical journals, then you should focus on that in your writing. If that’s not what you’re into, then trying to duplicate that, it’s just going to seem contrived. Just avoiding some of those things, definitely. Being authentic.

Brian Gardner: Authenticity, one of my favorite words. Yeah, I love it.

Seth Spears: Yeah, that’s what it really comes down to — being as authentic as possible and staying true to your mission, your vision, and your audience, giving them what they want.

I guess another pitfall that I’ve seen a lot is, people still trying to push market — and this would be other industries primarily, not online as much — but using social media as just another outlet to try to push their message and not try to engage and interact with their readers and potential customers. Those would be the two biggest things: lack of authenticity and not using social media tools the best way that they can.

Brian Gardner: Good stuff, good stuff. Let’s talk about successful marketing tips. You obviously run a company. You run multimillion visitor sites and so on, so you know what you’re doing. What have you seen lately as one of the more effective bang for the company marketing’s buck? In other words, where’s the biggest ROI happening these days?

I know that’s a loaded question. It’s probably different for niches and things like things that. But as a whole, where do you think right now you see a successful person spending some marketing money?

Successful Marketing for the Biggest ROI

Seth Spears: It definitely depends on the industry, but just as a general rule, I would say to niche down. You see a lot of companies where they have line extension, where they’re constantly trying to see, “How can I expand here or there. Let’s add this product or that service.” They forget about the 80/20 principle — what is the 20 percent that we’re doing that’s bringing in 80 percent of our success?

What I’m seeing that’s really working is, if companies, businesses, online business owners, bloggers, et cetera, if they can narrow their focus to really their core competency — what they are really good at, what they really enjoy — they tend to get more traffic, build up more fans and followers, sell more products. services. They have more fun with it, too. They’re focusing on what they’re good at and what they enjoy and not just those things that will necessarily bring in a few additional dollars here or there, where it takes more time than it’s really worth.

Doing that is something that doesn’t really cost you any money. At first when you do it, you may lose a little bit of income from the services or products that you’re no longer offering. But in the long run, you end up making a lot more just from everything that I’ve seen.

Lauren Mancke: What is your definition of a marketing client? What are the types of people that you like to work with?

How Seth Defines ‘Marketing Client’

Seth Spears: Primarily, online business owners who like creating content — whether that’s a blogger or someone who just has an online business, someone who’s good at creating the content, but they haven’t been strategic with it — maybe they’re not that tech-oriented as well.

My core competency is helping to break down and simplify things for them to help them understand where the low-hanging fruit is and what they can do to really grow their business using all those tools, like we’ve talked about, and basic strategies. Whether it’s search engine optimization, social media, or just improving their website and web presence so that they can make more money and gain a better following.

Brian Gardner: Are there any industries that you’ve seen that are either super ripe or less ripe for marketing campaigns? I know all of the online businesses out there, and entrepreneurs, need to have it in some fashion, but are there certain industries or niches that it’s a lot more critical to have a marketing campaign, maybe because of competition or just because of the ROI or the ability to get to a quick ROI? What have you seen?

When (and Why) a Marketing Campaign Is Critical

Seth Spears: One of the biggest things that I’ve seen is your offline service businesses, like your old-school ones that are primarily doing direct sales and things like that. They have the most to gain right now because the competition is so much less. There’s still so few businesses that have a really solid web presence.

Those that do have a website, or a decent one, they’re still not putting that much information about. The more information that a business can put out, no matter what it is, the more likely they’re going to be seen as an expert and, again, more likely that potential customers are going to want to do business with them.

Builders are a great example. Had a client a few years ago who I worked with — built them a new website, helped them a little bit with their social media, their SEO stuff. I was encouraging them to begin blogging, start writing tutorials. They were a very specialized builder of log and timber frame, so I encouraged them to really begin talking about how they do certain aspects of their business.

They were very hesitant to do so because, “This is our trade secret. Our competitors will steal it, or those who need it, they’ll just take and do it themselves.” I don’t believe that’s true. Yes, some competitors may take it and do it. But if they’re looking for this information and they find it, maybe they’ll try to implement it themselves, but when they fail, they’re going to call back because this company is now the expert. Or if they decide they don’t want to do it, they’re going to call them because they’re the expert.

Most people, if they’re trying to do it themselves, they’re going to be really budget-conscious anyway. They’re not a good customer, so they’re never going to get that business. I would say the low-hanging fruit there is those businesses who are really not focused online, but begin to transition that way. There’s so many other ways that you can monetize things there also. Whether that’s through affiliate income or maybe some advertising. If you have eyeballs, you’re always going to be able to monetize it.

Lauren Mancke: So you’ve touched on this a little bit, but can you give us a few examples of what marketing campaigns have worked for you? I’m sure our listeners could benefit from a few simple tips or nuggets of information that you have to share.

Seth Spears: Yeah. Obviously, email opt-ins are still huge, having some type of free offer. There’s all kinds of different philosophies and so many different tools as far as collecting email addresses — whether that’s a popup, a slideup, an above the post opt-in, or below the post. The thing that I’ve found to be the most valuable is, as far as email collection — and you’re going to get less from doing this, but the quality is greater — putting your email opt-in at the bottom of your post.

The reason for this, at least from what I’ve seen, is that if someone has gone through and read through all of your content, then they’re much more likely to be engaged with you and actually want whatever it is that you’re giving them away for free, or the reason you’re asking for their email address.

Yeah, you’re probably going to get more if it’s just a popup, but everybody hates them. Nobody likes them, but they do work. From what I’ve seen, you tend to get more unsubscribes from those types of opt-ins than if someone is fully engaged and has read through the full piece of content and then signs up for your list. That would be a big one.

The other one regarding email opt-ins is content upgrades. If you’ve got a piece of content that does really well maybe a blog post. Maybe it’s a recipe — if someone’s a food blogger, and they’ve got a really popular recipe that gets a lot of traffic. If you have a content upgrade, maybe just like a little box — LeadBoxes is really good for this — where you have a little box halfway through the post or at the bottom, and it says, “If you like this recipe, click here to get three more that are variations of this,” or something like that. Then they enter their name, email address, and boom, they get it sent back to them. That’s a really good way to collect more.

Repurposing Content for Multiple Distribution Channels

Seth Spears: Then I guess a third thing I’ve seen is content repurposing. I had a client several years ago who had been recording webinars for his customers and clients for years. He was in the automotive repair consulting business, so he helped automotive repair shop owners to market, market their business better, work on their budgeting, staffing, and everything that goes along with that.

He had been doing weekly webinars for them for something like five or six years. I began working with him on increasing his online strategy so that he could bring in new clients and better serve his current customers. We developed the strategy where he would take those webinars, he would strip out the audio, and he would create a podcast. He had slides already set up for the webinars, so he would strip those out, add those slides to SlideShare. Then he’s got a slide deck that he can use for them.

The webinars, he would export them as a video and put it up on video. The transcript he would export and put it as a blog post. He had one piece of content that he had originally created, and now he has multiple different channels that he can use that for, to hit people on different levels. Everyone has different modalities of learning, of how they prefer to consume content. Some people, they prefer to read. Some prefer to listen. Some prefer to watch. Some prefer all of the above.

The more ways that you can give a potential customer, reader, subscriber, access to that information so that it’s easier for them to consume your content, the better it is. That was a really good strategy that’s worked really well. I’ve seen several other industries that have used something similar, that do this very well also.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I love that you bring up the repurposing thing, something we do a lot at Copyblogger, or Rainmaker.

Seth Spears: Yeah, you guys are the champs at that.

Brian Gardner: Yes. In fact, we actually write posts on how to do that. One thing I’ve done people have probably seen it from the outside, but they don’t know necessarily the strategy behind it. But one thing I’ve actually started doing on my own site, BrianGardner.com, is taking a couple of the podcasts that Lauren and I have done, StudioPress FM, and once the transcripts have been made available, I’ll actually write a post on my own site that summarizes that. Very intentionally going after a couple of different keywords, just to see as an experiment if I take some quotes from stuff that our guests have said, and then write around that, editorialize it a bit, and come up with a full post. That doesn’t take me all that long.

For instance, if you Google “make money food blogging,” I show up on the second page of Google, and that was an example of something that I repurposed, the interview we did with Shay Bocks about food blogging. I thought, “Hey, let’s see if this works.” The site has authority, so ranking pretty good in that. I’m doing that a number of different times and may even do that with this show that we’re recording right now. For sure, good stuff.

Seth Spears: Oh yeah, that’s great. That was a great interview you did with Shay. I really connected with that one.

Brian Gardner: Cool. All right, so last year, you and I, along with eight other guys, attended this thing that I talked about earlier called Brocation. We’re sort of departing a little bit here from the show, but I’m getting to a point. For those who don’t know, Brocation is an unofficial event I organize each year, where a group of us head to the mountains for some skiing, snowboarding, food, fine wine, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, the reason I started that was I wanted to bring together a number of guys who are in the online space and just have great conversation about running online businesses. Yes, it’s time to get away and do the man thing, but the people who go there are very specifically chosen. We share our stories and encourage each other about the stuff that we’re doing.

I like to think of this Brocation event as almost like a networking focus group type of thing. It does bring a number of us together to talk about that kind of stuff. Would you say that, in some form, Brocation or any other of these networking events or focus groups can be an effective marketing tool or, at the very least, help be the sparks of what could potentially be marketing tools for other people?

The Value of Networking with Like-Minded Entrepreneurs

Seth Spears: Oh yeah, by all means. I’ve gone to numerous conferences, mastermind events, and networking things over the years, and you always leave with something, some little nugget that you’re going to pick up from someone else. There’s a certain dynamic when you’re hanging out with other entrepreneurs, other business owners — whether they are in the same niche or a completely different one.

Actually, a lot of times it’s better if they’re in a completely separate niche. They’re probably doing things that you haven’t even thought of, and you can take that back and implement it in your own business. Like I said, I’ve been to numerous ones over the past several years, and I always leave with some little chunk of gold that I’m able to go back home and begin implementing right away.

Yeah, by all means, for people listening, if you’re able to network or mastermind with other people that are like-minded and similar in your outlook on business and life, that’s very beneficial.

Lauren Mancke: I can’t hear the word ‘Brocation’ without picturing you guys doing a lot of high-fiving.

Seth Spears: There might have been some of that.

Brian Gardner: It’s funny, I think I remember when we were all hanging out in the hot tub, I was sitting there — me, little Brian Gardner — in the context of Joshua Becker, Marc Chernoff from MarcandAngel.com, and Seth. I was starting to add up because I’ve done work with all you guys behind the scenes, and I know the amount of traffic and Facebook reach you guys have —
I was thinking to myself, “Man, I’m here with half the Internet now,” because of the reach you guys have.

Obviously, it’s all in different areas. But again, we got together. We talked, and in the context of 10, it’s hard to have a big round table. The little conversations that just happened through the few days that we were up there, for sure inspired me to go out and do things — things that you would share, other folks would share.

Of course, we’re not telling everyone to go out and necessarily plan a trip together, but whether they’re Skype calls or whatever, you may pull something from someone that they’re doing and apply it to your niche, which is completely different from their niche. And it might be something that completely opens the door to new traffic, new users, new email subscribers, and so on.

More than anything, that was just a long way of saying to try to get yourself involved and network with other people who are online.

Seth Spears: Yeah, by all means. I’ve put together several different events through Wellness Media over the years, where other online business owners and bloggers, we get together in specific locations and just hang out for a few days — for anywhere from two to three days, to as long as a week or so. It’s amazing the connections that you make and the friendships, and the business knowledge that’s gained.

There’s just massive value in that, especially when you do go somewhere else. You’re a little bit out of your comfort zone. I really think the only time you’re really learning and growing is when you’re on the edge of your comfort zone — or out of it. That’s when you’re pushed, and you got to make a change.

Brian Gardner: Well, words of wisdom from Seth Spears on all things Internet, all things marketing. If you or your company are looking for digital marketing strategy, WordPress website consulting, or search and social optimization strategy, we just want to put in a good word for our friend Seth and his company, Spears Marketing.

You can check them out on the Internet at SpearsMarketing.com, and from there, you can see all that Seth does and can do for you.

Lauren Mancke: If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never, ever miss an episode.

Brian Gardner: Seth, yes, it was definitely a pleasure to have you on the show. We’re very thankful that you’re able to share your years of knowledge with our listeners. Thank you for being an ongoing advocate and supporter of all that we do within our company. It definitely helps push things.

Seth Spears: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

Lauren Mancke: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.