#66 Michael “Buzz” Buzinski Interview

Dr. Ty  00:00

Welcome to this episode of Easy SEO and More. I have another very special guest for you, Michael Buzinski, president and CMO of Buzzworthy Website Marketing. That’s right, he’s a competitor  and I’ve got him on my podcast.

He convinced me of this by sending me a copy of his awesome book, which I’m sure he’ll talk to you more about as well. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur, a digital marketer, thought leader, and best selling author. Dubbed a visionary marketer by the American Marketing Association.

Michael’s sole mission is to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns (I hate that too!). He has simplified digital marketing success with The Rule of 26, which happens to be the title of his book too. He is on a mission to double the website revenue of service-centric businesses across America.

Michael, thanks for being on SEO more. I appreciate it.

Buzz  01:00

Hey, thank you for having me. You know, it’s funny, because people are always asking, “why would you go on an other marketers show?” But there’s so much business out there, that even if you took all the people who actually do the services that we have, there would still be more than we can do. So yeah, I think the competition is always great.

Dr. Ty  01:19

I’ve tried to get a consortium of web and marketing people in the county where I live, and no one will do it, because they are afraid of the competition. Well, there’s only 60,000 businesses just in my county, right? So, I’ll just take 10%. Give me six 6000 of them, you can have the rest.

Buzz  01:43

If I have to take on 6000 clients I’d be like, Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Ty  01:47

exactly. I don’t know if I could do 600.

Buzz  01:51

Yeah, no, I had I had a creative agency that I broke up a few years ago. And we had 300 clients. And that was a lot.

Dr. Ty  02:00

Oh, yeah. For every for every four businesses that I take on, I have to hire someone anyway. So if I had 600 businesses, I don’t know if I could even manage the people.

Dr. Ty  02:19

Michael, the big thing about Easy SEO and More, as my listeners know, is I like to find the one thing that you think is most important for businesses to grow their marketing in today’s market. What would that one thing be for you?

Buzz  02:39

Right now, I think we are swinging into the age of the consumer. And no longer can businesses sit around and tout their benefits and features at people and talk at people. There’s so much choice now with the internet, that we really, as business owners have to take a look at our websites and start talking to our perfect clients, rather than trying to talk at anybody and everybody who will listen.

Dr. Ty  03:12

That sounds really interesting. How do you do that?

Buzz  03:15

Well, first, you got to identify who you want to do business with

(go to Port Bell Digital Academy, click on “Local SEO 101,” and do the first week’s training for free to learn more about identifying your perfect target market).

 Okay. So I, I focus on service based businesses. If you’re me, and you were a service based business like doctors, lawyers, dentists, medical… that kind of stuff,

You have a type of client that you enjoy working with the most, you really look forward to when they call you, you look forward to when you have meetings with them. And therefore, the process of you giving your service is actually more profitable.

And that’s what we call your profitable avatar, if you want to call it that. I just call it your most profitable clients. And if you could just work with those people, how happy of a business owner would you be?

But the problem is that a lot of us are so worried about losing business, that we’re willing to take on the nickel and dimers and shut down our bandwidth dealing with people who are going to suck the living energy out of us, and close the door, which basically closes the door on all the other people that we want to do business with. So if we get our marketing and our website, only talking to and attracting our perfect clients, our most profitable opportunities, we will get a lot more of those than the pitas that a lot of is just take at the beginning because what’s what pays the bills.

Dr. Ty  04:53

I like that a lot. In fact, it was probably about 10 years ago now, we had one client that dominated our income. They, they alone were almost 70%. And they were one of the biggest pitas I’ve known.

And we decided to fire them, but we did it what I call the polite way. We didn’t say we’re firing you, we just doubled our fee. And it wasn’t too long before they said, “we’re not paying this anymore,” which did not bother me at all. It was a very stressful environment, they would contact us like every week and just yell at us about things that even had nothing to do with us.

I needed to free up my stress level. And our business has actually grown a huge amount since we did that. And we more than filled that gap was when it initially happened.

Buzz  05:59

Well, I think you learned a lesson. Don’t have any one client be more than 1/12 of your income, that way you get you have some runway to make those decisions a lot faster.

I do a fractional CMO service, which gets pretty personal. I had a urologist sign up, and he wasn’t willing to give up his marketing. I had no idea why he hired me. I ended up firing him in eight weeks in. I had not known this before. We had talked like for a year, just getting to know him, but I couldn’t tell.

I have clients that I’ve had for 15 years that have been through three iterations of what my business is with me, because they know that I’m always improving my business, and I’m always improving my services.

So they get better every time. I get personal with some of my concierge clients, my “done for you” clients, but that one client, I would get this gut feeling right here in my sternum every time, every Friday at noon, when I had to talk to this guy. And he didn’t respect me as a marketer, or an expert.

He didn’t want to let go of anything. And then he would complain that everything was wrong. And I’m like, we haven’t even had this. He was complaining two weeks in, and I’m like, wait a second, we’re just onboarding.

It wasn’t long. And it was easy, you know, because he was so used to getting to pushing people around, that it was it was kind of weird, because it silenced him when I said, “Well, I’m done. I’m sorry, this is not working out. I won’t be servicing this this contract anymore.” And I never heard back from him, which was great; I’m good with that.

And onto your point, you have more energy, you can actually take on more clients, when you have the right clients. I again, if we can just bring it back full circle. If you have your website only talking in the language of the right client, the qualified prospect, if you will, then you will only attract those, so you will spend less time on the phone talking to tire kickers and plate lickers. And you will spend more time and have more time to talk to the people who will appreciate your service and appreciate your expertise and pay you what you’re worth.

Dr. Ty  08:40

I like that. It Real quick before we go. What do you think, if there were one, the one quick way of deciding how to make that change. This is just a normal website, normal company, been there for let’s say five years, or four years or so there. The website itself is newer. It’s got the newer stuff, but maybe still just talk about the benefits and the features a little bit more. What do you think could be one way for them to see to change; that one quick change that they could make?

Buzz  09:15

Okay, the quickest change is to take all of the “we’s,” “me’s” and “I’s” and turn them into “you.”

If you just started doing that, it will rewrite itself.

Dr. Ty  09:30

I like that a lot. Yeah. So turn it from what I’m about to what I could do for you.

Buzz  09:38

Or what is your situation? As a service-based business, you are doing one or two things; you are solving problems or achieving dreams for your clients. Period. End of story.

Okay, so only two things you’re going to do. So you start with their pain or their dream. “How wonderful would it be if you could have…” “Are you struggling with…” Okay, here at…, we help you so you can do this.

Or you don’t have to worry about this, right? A lot of you do that. Well, we work with you to do this for your… Right? Like, that’s fantastic.

You’re going to use we every once a while but use “yours” has to outnumber them like three to one. And if you if you write it, and it’s like you get the “we’s,” just rewrite it until you don’t have to have the “we’s.”

Buzz’s book, The Rule of 26, is available at Amazon. Click the link for more information.

You can contact Buzz by going to his web site, http://www.buzzworthy.biz.