How To Grow Your Business Online By Planting 100,000 Seeds
People often ask me how we get new business. Where did the impressive client list come from in such a short period of time? The only thing I ever say is that we don’t do any of the old stuff that agencies used to do. We don’t pay for advertising of any sort. We don’t sponsor awards. We don’t go to networking events. Conferences mostly bore us to death and taking people out to lunch around here means buying them a burrito rather than an expensive restaurant. So how do you go about creating amazing word of mouth marketing for your business when you have no budget and nothing but a blank canvas to work with?
Well the first answer lies in the tools that we have at our disposal. 10 years ago a new business would have been forced to advertise or use expensive marketing. You couldn’t just talk to your potential customers online. That’s very easy to forget. Cold calling and mail shots were the norm. Creating a brand from scratch was tough and the big boys held all the cards. The small start up didn’t have a voice. Reputation, trust and word of mouth marketing were done the hard way by shaking hands, swapping business cards and getting people talking about you one on one. That’s why conferences, newspapers and mailing lists were like gold. A large captive audience that could hear your message and buy in to you. The second key thing that you have to do is to plant 100,000 seeds…
Planting 100,000 Seeds
First of all what are seeds? Seeds are conversations, blog posts, tweets, Youtube videos, links, Facebook updates or any other little seeds that you spread. They take time to create and 99% of them won’t reference your own business in any way whatsoever. The best seeds are when you help people, share their links, promote their businesses, make them laugh or give them great content. People are amazing and if you help them with one tiny little seed the chances are they’ll send back 10 times more in return. Send out 100,000 useful helpful seeds and you create amazing word of mouth marketing. You can’t plant 100,000 seeds overnight. You can’t even do it 9-5. Your whole life has to become about creating seeds. About writing helpful blog posts. About shining the light on others. You don’t pay €5000 to sponsor something and get €20,000 of business back. The world doesn’t really work like that any more.
Once your 100,000 seeds are planted you’ll see business and brand awareness come to you in ways you could never imagine. Single tweets will send you huge accounts. Leads will come from friends of friends who were passed on a useful blog post. People you’ve never met or spoken to will be recommending you to other people you’ve never met. After a while you get to a tipping point where people start to plant additional seeds for you. Even better seeds than those you could plant yourself.
They key is to never stop planting the seeds though. Stop planting them and eventually the whole thing will dry up and you’ll be back to square one. See marketing yourself isn’t hard and it’s not about broadcasting any more it’s simply about planting 100,000 seeds 
