How to Get 6 Months of Marketing Ideas for Your Business on One Page

Want to see a cool way to get six months of ideas on one page in a journal? That's what we're going to talk about today. I I'm looking through and what I'm noticing is there's a few keyways that I'm using my journal. We're in journal number two right now, by the way.

And what I'm noticing is that a lot of this journal is those conversations with myself that sometimes take multiple pages. I may sit down for 50 minutes and just have a whole dialogue with myself to work things out. Um, and it's always amazing how much insight I actually have. com and it's exactly that the art of bringing and getting insight about your ideas.

He takes people through a whole process there. But that's an early version of kind of what I was doing in this um in these pages is having the conversations with myself. And one of the things that I would do is I would put a question at the top or a topic at the top of a page and I would just concentrate on coming up with as many ideas as I could for that topic. So let me give you a glimpse at page 179 today of journal number two and this is in the fall of of 1996.

Now at that time u the main things that I was focused on of course were all real estate related. I was coming from my own real estate business. I was working with uh the Toronto and Beyond business where we're duplicating my uh system that I'd created for my own business in Halton Hills, licensing that and working with other realtors. And then Joe Stump and Eban and I were traveling all over the country doing big real estate seminars.

But the core of my what I call my idea factory cuz that's really what everything was. My innovation lab was quickly transitioning to right here in Winterh Haven. And I was working on creating things within a prototype just the way that Michael Gerber talks about it, right? Create something once with an eye to duplicating it 5,000.

Oh, they're on to me. I guess not. And so, uh, Julie Matthews here in Winter Haven was my becoming my, uh, my prototype here, everything. And the funny thing is a lot of these things, we're doing these things now with Julie's daughter, Kennedy, who is 30 years later, you know, uh, coming into real estate.

But here was this page was all about a buyer brainstorm of how could we find buyers for people looking to buy homes in Winter Haven, which of course would be transferable anywhere. And I had 26 ideas on on one page and I'm looking through and I'm amazed at how many of them we actually use. And you'll be surprised at how creative your brain can get when you put a constraint on it. When you just set up a system, we love to solve problems.

We love to play within boundaries and instantly come up with ideas, at least my brain does. Um, so one of the ideas that I had, I'm going to give you some of the highlights, is a what I had listed here was a tape tour of Winter Haven and in cassette. Like back then, you know, there was no MP3s or no easy way to do things, but I thought, would it be a really cool thing is if we could send people a cassette with a map of Winter Haven along with their guide to Winter Haven where they could follow the line on the map and then have numbers of the tracks on the cassette so that you could drive to you could drive to a neighborhood, Cypresswood, and as you're driving through, you could listen to a taped tour as if somebody who knows the area is sitting beside you looking at the uh thing. Then the next thing that that led to was a video tour of Winter Haven.

And now these ideas, this would have taken a little more work to distribute because there's no internet. But it's so easy now to do these things. So imagine if you could just, you know, think through the eyes of somebody who's ultimately going to become your customer, somebody who whatever your business is. This just happens to be for real estate, but the same idea is to just think about the uh the ideas.

I'll get a letter from the mayor. I when I did my guide to Halton Hills, I just happened to have been the realtor for the mayor and I sold the mayor's house and sold them a new house and their son and their daughter and many transactions over a lot of time. So, I had him write a nice welcome to Halton Hills uh letter to go inside my guide to um Halton Hills. Another idea is the Chamber of Commerce brochures.

So, when you uh were thinking about moving to a new area, circa 1996, one of the things that people might do is call the Chamber of Commerce and they had a whole package, a new mover kit that they would mail. And by the way, you could buy or subscribe to that list of people who inquire. and it was like $120 a year and they would give you each month the list of everybody that inquired about um about moving to Halton Hills and we found in Winter Haven the same thing so we could mail uh postcards to those builder model lists mailing program. So in Halton Hills there were there was a lot of new construction going on and just like everywhere in the country right now there's a lot of new construction and what all the realtors were doing was they were going to the new home constructions hoping to convince the builder to let them be the realtor that lists the backup properties when people are buying properties.

So everybody's just like, "Hey, give me listings. Give me listings." And I thought it through from what the people sitting in the open houses, the builders reps, what they were going through is that many times the people who come into the model homes, they're not going to buy a new home, but maybe they're going to buy a resale home. And my uh offer to the builder uh reps was to help I write a letter for them to send to the people after 30 days that they hadn't bought a uh a new home to offer them that hey I was just thinking if you're not uh going to consider a new home that you might be looking for a resale home and here's a guide to Halton Hills that shows all the prices of what's available resellers and able to um give the those agents uh referrals on people who bought.

And by the way, I ended up getting a lot of the backup listings because I was doing something rather than trying to take something from people. I was trying to give them something. Um, another one is guided tours of Winter Haven with a tour guide. And I thought that's that evolved into uh one of the things that we offer all the buyers that come uh that ask for the guide to Halton Hills or the lakefront guide or what I expanded into all kinds of guides is making it easy for people to take that first step by just offering them a tour of homes.

It sounds like it's already happening and I'm I was surprised to see that this is the beginning of it in this early in the process because you'll see in future journals that becomes a big uh that becomes a big pillar um for me uh direct response signs with an info box. So, one of the things uh you know where when you look at going into any stores in Winter Haven or going into hotels or anywhere that people are there, we would create these info box or take one boxes with a third of an 8 and 1 half by 11 uh almost like a little standing postcard to keep on the register or in uh waiting rooms or in all the places that people's eyes would rest. There was an opportunity there. And by the way, these the idea of coming up with 26 of these is to have six months worth of pick one of these during a week and implement that one thing.

and you've had you've got a systematic way for driving innovation in your uh in your business. Another example we had was the HR department managers. You know, when you've got an asset that's going to be valuable to people moving, the people who are going to maybe know that people are moving are the HR directors of the biggest companies in your town. State Farm was one of the big uh ones there of looking at, you know, mailing just an introduction letter with some of these uh little lead business cards and a sample of the guide to Halton Hills to be a resource to these uh to these people.

um brides to be list started thinking outside the box of where are people what are people doing before they get to you know often many people who are getting married are going to buy a condo or buy a home um that that's a great way so if you can get in front of um those people um I had down here we were doing the guide to one area like just to overall to Winter Haven house prices and this was the first idea of creating niche guides for that. So create I had on here create a lakefront guide, a golf course guide, condo guide, townhouse guide, all of those things which has become just this line 23 of this one page has been in its expansion. this huge revenue generator, this huge idea that has expanded to become um you know a a repeatable, duplicatable innovation. And it all starts with just tasking your mind to come up with a full page of ideas.

Try it. I think you're going to be amazed at what you'll be able to do. to think about your business and just write down what are 26 things I could do to get more buyers for my business.