A lot of people think consultants have no skin in the game. They wave their hands, give advice, and leave the client alone to implement. But when it comes to consulting on marketing, the most effective ones combine advice with other proprietary assets. These assets give you leverage. They’re your relationships, expertise, and materials you’ve …
How to earn more with less stress as a marketing freelancer
Doing execution work is not just an important part of a marketer’s journey—it’s essential. The problem is, it can be stressful and exhausting if you aren’t intentional about how you do it. It’s hard to relax when you’re spinning so many plates under the constant pressure of deadlines and deliverables. Your brain never really turns …
Workshop: How to design highly profitable productized advisory services
Productizing your consulting services in a way that people can buy them “off the shelf” is not quite as simple as it may seem at first glance. Do you package things according to levels of access to you? Or by customer segment? Or by specific projects? Should you offer “unlimited” access to you—and if so, …
Eliminating execution work
Apple has around 100 skews (unique products). Hewlett-Packard has about 10,000. If you go into an Apple store, they still sell third-party peripheral products. But they don’t make them themselves—they’re a distraction from their main thing. When it comes to your marketing practice, you could offer anything under the sun. You can find a decent …
Google Analytics 4 Live Workshop
TL;DR: On Monday, August 29 at 2pm EST/11am PST, Jordan Choo of Kogneta will be doing a live workshop on how to set up, configure goals, and create client reports in Google Analytics 4. As you may know, Universal Analytics (the current Google Analytics version) will be depreciated in July of 2023. Now is the …
Advice for independent marketers during a recession or downturn
Okay, so there’s some concern going around about a recession. Will it impact your business? Is it already impacting your business? Some of you have said that leads are drying up and clients are canceling services with you. So let’s get in front of it. Here are a few ideas to consider here if you …
Mindshare Radio is now public
I decided to make all 170 episodes of Mindshare Radio available for public consumption. Over the last two years, I’ve covered a wide range of topics centred around the idea of helping marketing strategists, fractional CMOs, and advisors sell their expertise, not just their hands. Each episode is around five to twenty five minutes long …
The 5 major problems with execution work
One of the biggest challenges I hear from marketing consultants is they’re getting stuck doing execution work instead of advising. Managed advisory/fractional CMO services are a great way to ease into advisory work. In the short-term, it can be an exciting and highly profitable line of work. But if you don’t manage to shift into …
Phasing into a niche
Yesterday, I alluded briefly to the idea that you can be a generalist and niched down at the same time. In fact, that’s exactly what I did and it worked great. First, I kept my B2B marketing agency running to accept any business that came along while I built out a new horizontal specialization as …
Introducing the new Mindshare Pro membership program
Today, I made some changes to Mindshare—a professional development community for marketing consultants, strategists, and fractional CMOs. The group is focused on helping you package and sell your expertise—not just execution—and to turn your ideas into leveraged products and services like advisory retainers, mentorship programs, memberships, subscriptions, group coaching, info products, workshops, training, and more. In …