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.

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By

			

			
Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard
 for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 

			Launch your new site today!

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 ...

Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

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.

B