I discovered recently that a lot of people who are in businesses that are older, bigger and more established than mine - even Jordan Peterson! - all still experience Impostor Syndrome. Which made me think: what if we we've got Imposter Syndrome all wrong? What if this little pessimistic voice we all seem to carry around inside of our heads is actually the key to our success, rather than something we're succeeding in spite of?

Do you have a website that's over twelve months old and you're starting to get the niggling feeling that you have outgrown it and it needs a bit of a refresh? Website refreshes are one of my most popular services and now I'm going through my own! And I'm going to tell you…I understand now how much it feels like it sucks. I wanted to use this episode as an opportunity to share what I'm learning and what I've gained from the website refresh experience.

When it comes to marketing our regional and rural small business, quite often we focus on the visual aspects of a website and as a result, we don't pay as much attention as we should to the language and wording. This aspect carries so much weight in what it is that we communicate and the success of how it lands with our clients.

I love diving into the language of marketing and how we can use words to articulate what a business does, why they're important and why you should choose them. Another who shares my love of this is Martha of Word Candy Comms. Martha has a fantastic perspective on words and language so I had to talk to her about what she thinks about SEO, language, tone of voice and how we can bring all that together to write more successful website text and social media captions when marketing our regional and rural small businesses.

Let’s jump in!

In this episode, we're back with Tori Kopke, my very first business coach, to talk about the idea of reverse engineering goals.

Now, that might sound super woo-woo and a bit far fetched for you if you haven't come across this term before. But, I can almost guarantee that once you realise how this works and how it can play-out in your business, you're going to be kicking yourself that you weren't implementing this sooner! This is a practical way of moving the needle in your business and engineering growth to get ahead. It's also a vehicle to make those big, bold dreams achievable when we categorise them down into yearly, monthly, weekly and daily goals.

I think we can all agree that things are more than a little bit different when it comes to small business in the regional and rural space versus the big smoke. This is true of a lot of facets of our business, but none more so than how we handle our marketing.

A lot of the time we get stuck trying to apply a big city social media strategy to our regional or rural business, only to find it just does not fit. The people are different. The way we make decisions are different and motivating factors are different.

Today, I wanted to set your mind at ease and give you my take on how we should look at social media for our small business in the context of a broader marketing strategy. How you can be consistent and measure results without getting hung up and feeling like you have to live and die over likes on a Facebook post.

If you've ever thought advertising on local radio was way out of your budget for your small business, well then this episode is perfect for you.

Today we're following up with part two of my chat with Fiona ludecke, my highly talented and very experienced local regional radio rep. So, if you haven't listened to Episode 34 yet, I recommend you put that on the list next. Here, we're diving into the ways you can maximise advertising on your local radio as part of a small business marketing strategy.

Does the idea of consistently marketing your small business seem like a a pipe dream? It's feels like there's twenty different platforms and you don't know which one to be on or what to say. Well, don't sweat it, you're not alone!

I want to introduce my concept of layering in your marketing, where it's about going through, one step at a time, to establishing sustainable, consistent strategies that articulate to your potential customers what you're like to work with, why what you do is important and how they can do business with you. And as you develop these strategies and systems, layering in more platforms but in a way that you can maintain over time.

This is my go-to way for ensuring we avoid the overwhelm and getting some traction that you can maintain.

Let's jump in!

When it comes to marketing you regional and rural small businesses, there's two big things we want to be looking out for: bang for your buck and opportunities to put things on autopilot.

I'm really excited to bring you a radio rep from our regional radio station, Fiona Ludeke. Fiona talks about the benefits of radio when it comes to promoting your regional and rural small business.

In today's chat, we're going to talk about what radio can actually bring to your marketing at a surprisingly affordable investment. Many believe radio is beyond their reach however after listening to Fiona, I think you'll see how achievable it is and how much of the heavy lifting your local radio station could be doing in terms of getting ears and then subsequently eyes on your business.

Ready? Let's jump in

I think it goes without saying that as travel our business journey, there's going to be inevitable and uncomfortable stages of growth. They keep coming up and can make us feel like we're bursting at the seams. That's when we know we're about ready to hit another growth spurt.

One of the biggest periods of growth that happens for us in business is when we shift from that early phase of the hustle where we're doing everything and wearing all the hats to becoming our own CEO.

There's no one else that's probably best suited to guide us through this stage than my very first business coach, Tori Kopke. In this episode, I share with you her insights about moving into a CEO position within your own business and how that's going to unlock all this potential for growth right into the future.

Do you feel like you're trying everything with your small business's marketing and it's just not working? You're trying to be on all the platforms sharing all types of content, sending emails and even putting things to print? And it still feels like there's no translation towards sales?

It might be that you're throwing everything out there in a way that's not giving your potential audience somewhere to go. Perhaps you're not using your marketing to create a pipeline?

So, that's what I want to cover in this episode; the idea that whenever we put marketing content out there, it's vital we're thinking about what we want our potential customer to do next. Where do we want them to go after this post or video or link? And how does that next step move them closer from just browsing to actually buying?

When I figured all this out for my own business, it literally blew my mind and I've never looked back. I want you to understand the concept of marketing like a pipeline.

Do you ever feel like you are putting in so much energy into marketing your business, trying to acquire new customers, or perhaps even converting those potential customers into paying, loyal customers?

This is one of my favourite topics to cover! When we start bringing apps, software and systems into our business to do the manual handling for us, it opens up all these opportunities for growth. It allows us to market to potential customers on a 24/7 basis an helps us turn our website into an actual marketing machine that's contributing to the growth and success of our business.

If you're looking for a way to get started with automations and discover some beneficial apps that can do some clever tricks and jobs within your business so you can focus on the specialised work, then this is the episode for you.

We have finally reached episode number 30, which means we're at the end of season two!

I wanted to take this moment to share with you everything I've learned over the last 15-ish weeks, recapping my biggest take-away’s from both Season 2 and my podcasting experience in general.

I'll also let you all in on what I hope is coming up next.

Let's jump right in.

If I were to mention the idea of taking some time off, there is a very good chance you would laugh, cry or both. Taking time off seems like worlds away from the daily doing that we undertake in small business however a recent camping experience where I was forced to cut everything off made me realise just how valuable these rest periods are.

I got to disconnect from all the noise and reconnect and strengthen that connection with my immediate family and our friends. And not only that, because I had a break, I had time for the air to clear in my mind and all these new ideas and a fresh energy bubbled to the surface. When I got back, I was excited to jump back into work and put everything into action. This is why rest is important; and what made my time off so much more achievable is some of the actions I’m going to share with you today.

Today’s guest is my business coach, Luke Williams. Luke has a fantastic perspective on how everything connects together and what we can look to gain by getting the fundamentals right in our business and focus on the places where we can make a 1% improvement every day, rather than trying to go big and bold and overcomplicate things.

I've found his insight into my business and the way I run it to be refreshing, enlightening and ultimately successful. I've been incredibly fortunate to steal a bit of Luke's time for you in this episode, so you too can hopefully benefit from his fantastic insights and his outlook on life.

The whole COVID saga of 2020, 2021 was, as I'm sure you can relate, was the craziest, weirdest, hardest time to have ever been in business in our living memories. I was one of the incredibly fortunate people to actually have a business grow during COVID.

There were a few fundamental things that I did that I have been doing for over a decade that put me in the best position possible in order to tackle that challenge when it arose. It actually didn't really have anything to do with business specifically, but it was more about things I told and did in and of myself, that pay dividends, both professionally and personally.

In todays' episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing Ronald Mcdonald's house manager and community engagement coordinator, Rhiannon Curtis. We discuss the incredible success of the International Women's Day Lunch's annual event. Together, we dive into how certain struggles, efforts and strategies have worked towards making the yearly event what it is today. This episode is more than just beneficial for other Non-For-Profit organisation's and can be translated and incorporated into other small business ventures and events that you may have.

Navigating the online world as a grownup is scary on a good day. So how do we teach our kids how to use platforms such as YouTube and Google with caution? Because, let’s be real - we can't stop them from seeing, viewing and engaging with these platforms forever, as much as we might like to.

A recent experience with my seven-year-old after his YouTube habits got a little out of hand saw me draw a line in the sand and have a serious chat with him. My purpose was to make him understand how algorithms work and how more often than not, these platforms aren’t the product - we are!

Have you ever become disenchanted with where your industry is going or perhaps you've identified a gap that you feel you're ideally suited to better serve your clients and meet their needs?

In this episode, we're jumping back in with Liz Jarvis from Better Business Decisions to talk about how we work together to capture what it is she's doing to revolutionise finance and our money mindset within our businesses, to put business owners back in control of the money conversation.

Do you have some crappy sleeping habits? When you're running a small business, sometimes the small hours of the morning or late at night is the best time to tackle those administrative tasks. But when you really stop and think about it, when you pull an all-nighter, how effective are you the next day?

I've had a really hard look at my sleeping habits and I've started developing and sticking to a bedtime routine, just as I’ve done so with my own children. I'm going to share this routine with you as it involves reading some fantastic books that have made a profound impact on me personally.

Have you ever had an idea for promoting your business and realised that it's almost too late to start because the opportunity is a week away?

I want to share with you a framework that I've been using with tonnes of clients in the small business space - as much as the moving parts might look different from one business to the next, the concept is the same. It's all about covering key areas, having a good timeline, utilising all of your platforms and having a clear set of goals so you can measure the success of your promotion.