Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

  Have you noticed a slowdown in your business in the last year?  You're not alone. A client I was talking with yesterday asked an increasingly common question, "Is it always this hard to find new business?" She opened her consulting business early in 2023 after being laid off from her job in the post-COVID months. She landed a major contract within a month of opening that kept her in the black for most of the year, but that contract isn't being renewed, and now she needs to find new clients ASAP.  She's not the first one to come to me with questions like this in recent months. Costs are increasing, interest rates are rising, wages are not keeping pace, and belts are tightening. When spending slows down, most businesses are impacted at some level.  These downturns can be scary times, especially for new business owners who haven't experienced them before. Consistent, steady growth isn't a pattern we see in the normal nature of things. Sustainable businesses...

   Duct Tape Marketing is the first resource I recommend to new business owners who are just getting started. I've read it a dozen times and I learn new things every time through. Strategy Before Tactics!

It's been a few years since I've been able to participate in Made In Loveland. I'll be joining the fun this year as a speaker on February 3rd. My topic for the morning will be Marketing Lessons We Learned In Kindergarten: Don't Forget the Basics. Marketing, especially for new businesses can be one of the biggest sources of frustration, confusion, and difficulty. There are so many options - the channels we use, the messages we send, the tools and tactics that fill up our email inboxes - and many times, marketing is the aspect of business that new owners are the least prepared for. They underestimate the time, energy, and money it takes to get their businesses and their customers together. In a mad scramble to cover as many bases as they can, they enlist the help of their high school-aged kids to help with Instagram and TikTok while trying to find time to create and manage an email newsletter that most of their customers never read. And the fees that marketing agencies an...

I'm surprised by how many of my clients don't track the performance of their social media posts. It doesn't take analytical wizardry to learn what kinds of posts are performing better than others. In this coffee break, I walk you through a simple process to identify some important statistics and patterns that will help you understand which of your posts the algorithm is favoring. This helps you make better decisions about what kind of media nad content you post in order to find more favor with the algorithms and reach more people.  The Care and Feeding of Your Social Media Algorithm Workshop is happening this Saturday, January 8th from 9AM-noon Mountain Time. Enrollment information is available on the workshop page of my website: https://www.franklintaggart.com/p/workshops.html   I'll look forward to seeing you there!  #beginningsocialmedia #trackingsocialposts #algorithm