Service Websites And Real Fit

SPEAKER_02 0:25

So I saw somewhere that you said service-based businesses. Service-based websites are kind of like dating websites. And I have a service-date-based business. So I I gotta know.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

I gotta tell me more about the one of the things that we always forget, like if we're in service businesses, is that we are feeling people out just as much as they're feeling us out. So the reason it's like a dating website is people are looking, are they for me? Is it gonna work? It's not just the bare bones of they offer this service, I need this service. It's it's deeper than that because there are a lot of people who offer the same services as either of us. And so they have a lot of choices, and you can go out and learn as much as possible. So if you have a really high-level website that doesn't really tell people anything, it's not really an effective date.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

And if you want to grow your business without burning out or selling out, you are gonna love today's episode. Jen is a marketing strategist and founder of Women Conquer Business. She's featured in the international documentary Click the Link below, which exposes predatory online marketing. Jen helps women solopreneurs and small teams replace hype and overwhelm with ethical, sustainable marketing they can maintain. Jen, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to meet you, Tanya. It is such a pleasure. I'd like to start these interviews by asking my guest to tell me their story. How did you get here? Because I think our story and our evolutions along the way are so important and can really make a difference in other people's lives. So tell us your story.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Sure. I'd always wanted to have a business, but I could never figure out what that would be. And I was an executive at the city of Portland. I'm in Portland, Oregon. And I was at, I belonged to a gym and we had a retreat. And I noticed that the gym owner was so stressed out and so busy and had so much going on. And I kept helping her and asking her questions. And she had a web developer who wasn't very helpful, and she just had so much on her plate. And I was like, I can help with that. I never really thought about it. And I was really unhappy at my job, and I started helping people on the side. I was doing digital transformations and I was the web developer, and I had so many jobs at the city. And I I left one day I just said I'm done. And it was it was transformational. It's been uh about 10 years. It's been a long journey for sure, but I don't have a lot of regrets about it. It was a good move for me to do that. And the mission is still the same. We can all help each other, and we can do more for small businesses and rise our communities up together by helping one another.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

I love that. That is beautiful.

Why Hustle Marketing Creates Shame

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Now, I did some lurking before this interview, and I know you spent a long time in marketing, and you've said that most of the advice out there was never built for the women you work with. What did you see that made you start Women Conquer Business?

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Well, a lot of it started with that first client I had who was very stressed out. She had a man web developer who wouldn't listen to her, wasn't really helping her. And so I thought, oh, well, and at the time, like I said, I was working at the city, but I was also doing a lot of tech projects. And I know that pat the girl on the head and tell her just let the men take care of it. I know about that because if you're a woman in a male-dominated arena, that can happen a lot. In terms of marketing not being for all of us, it's really that most of the advice out there, if it's either for enterprise companies. So if you read the HubSpot blog or you get marketing brew, all of those things are for really large companies. And then if you're on YouTube lurking around, a lot of the influencer types, they have big teams. And they're telling you you should be able to do all of this, but most people don't have a big team or a marketing department to help them. And so it's there's really a big disconnect between what a small team that doesn't have a marketing department or a solopreneur can do relative to what other people can do. And so there turns it turns into a lot of shame. A lot of people feel a lot of shame around what they are doing for marketing instead of feeling good about what they have done. And so it turns into this kind of spiral of feeling bad about their marketing instead of feeling really empowered and like they're making changes and connecting with good people.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

So, so true. And I know so many of my audience members can relate to what you said. And if you're male out there listening to this, trust me, that does happen all the time.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

It does happen. And it I think that it happens to men, small business owners too, if they're not tech uh oriented. In my house, I'm the one who programs the remotes and knows how to do all the channels. That's not my husband. He is at a big company and he has difficulty communicating with the tech folks. So I think it does happen both ways. Um, I'm just speaking from my own experience as being in a male-dominated industry and helping the people that I help. So it's definitely it definitely goes both ways. And it definitely does happen if you're questioning whether or not it happens. It really does. Well, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

And I see what you mean by these influencer outs, these influencers out there who are like, oh, you gotta post every day and you hustle harder, buy that, buy that two or three thousand dollar course. And I we are very anti-hustle culture over here. We are about same symbol business because hustle culture is not, it's just gonna lead you to disaster.

ClickFunnels Critique And SEO Longevity

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Now, let's talk about the scathing review that you wrote of ClickFunnels that that brought the attention of the documentary. Tell tell us about that.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Yeah, so that whole thing is so crazy to me. Hey, who makes a documentary about marketing? So everything that happened after writing the blog post has been insane to me because that wasn't where my head was when I wrote it. What happened was I kept having clients and I had at one point several people come and say, Can you just get me off of ClickFunnels? It's so expensive and it's not really doing anything for me. Or I'd had, if you know, the blog post, and I don't know if you want to put that in the notes later or whatever, but in the blog post, there's this big story about somebody who buys it, doesn't know what it's about. And then her main driver was to get me to also join ClickFunnels so that she could boost her affiliate revenues. And that whole thing is just this broken system. And ClickFunnels has to an extent stepped back from it. But I shared this post about all my frustrations, how the platform doesn't work super great. They prey upon women and small businesses and tell them they need to do everything there, and it's far more expensive than anything most people need. And a lot of the things that it's supposed to do are broken or very hard for people to manage. And then because it's part of that whole influencer marketing thing, it puts you in that shame spiral of, well, if you're not successful, it's your fault and you're broken, and you need to have buy this course and it'll fix you, or that course, and it'll fix you. So I'd had it and I wrote this review or rant about it. And then I was like, people were really liking it. And I was, I was like, I'm gonna use my SEO powers for good, or at least in my idea, good. And it ended up, it still is a top 10 blog post. I need to go back and update it again. And it ended up like being like the top ClickFunnels review for five or six years. I'm sure ClickFunnels absolutely loved that. And so it got the attention of a director in um he's in Denmark and he um or Norway overseas. And I got this random um LinkedIn request, as we do, about a meeting. And I was like, I don't know, who are you? So then I researched them and I was like, well, they seem like a for real thing, and it was real. And so in 2021, I had a local cameraman come and a Zoom review, and then now four years, five years later, it's being shopped around at film festivals, and eventually, hopefully it'll be someplace where uh more people can see it than like I've seen it with I watched it with my mom and with my husband and stuff, and um, it's pretty good. And it's so funny. In the in the interim, one of the people in the film is alleged to have run a Ponzi scheme. Whether he did it or not, we don't, I don't know, but it's not surprising based on some of the things that were done and said. And the thing that I'm the most proud of in there is that the whole time I was like, you don't need all this stuff. And I just kept the message, but I ended up being like this outlier among the marketers. Me and I think one other person were the only ones who were like, you don't really need to do all of that. But it was different coming from me than the other person who was a professor. I'm an actual business owner in the field. Um, so it was a it was a really wonderful experience. I still email with the director. It was, it's wild. Like I never thought I'd have an IMDB profile. All that stuff is so strange to me. But it was a great experience. And it shows how slow marketing works, about how you don't need to do this big hustle thing. This is one blog post that I wrote almost seven years ago, I think, eight years ago, that I continue to update every year. It continues to rank and do well. And then what happens is I do get a few clients a year that read the blog post and they're like, yeah, that's not what I need. I need the person who's writing the thing that says, don't do that. And so it's it also helps with getting the right people. Um, and so that's really philosophically what needs to be happening is making sure that we're not over-creating and overcommitting ourselves in marketing and we're creating things that last a long time because that's still possible even in 2026.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

That's that's so much fun. I love that. And I I'm an I'm an SEO girl. I love that that that has helped helped keep your blog post up there and keep you getting clients.

Slow Marketing And Buyer Timelines

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Now let's talk about your approach of slow marketing you just mentioned. What exactly is slow marketing and and why do you think it applies better in general to business?

SPEAKER_00 11:13

Yeah, so it's like the anti-hustle culture approach to marketing. And before you think of it as like, well, that's just silly, or that just applies to small businesses, large companies do this as well. So like Mackenzie and company, Bain and company, these large consulting firms practice this very same thing. They maybe just call it something different, but they create reports or large content pieces that they then that they go very deep on and then they share it with everybody. So this could be case study for people like us, you know, case studies, stories about transformations that have taken place, anything like that. That's a blog post, something that's really deep, that really goes into your philosophy, and then you can share different aspects around that one piece for a longer period of time. So it's really about depth and going deep, and then instead of breadth of feeling like you have to cover everything, and then instead of saying, I'm gonna post this everywhere and blast it out to everybody, you do the customer research to find out where your people are, and then you make sure that you're in those places. That's the opposite of people who say post every day, put it everywhere, and it's highly stressful. For a lot of folks, they are creating fast marketing. So it's marketing based on this idea that people are going to buy now. Many people have a longer buyer's journey. It takes longer for them to make a decision about whether or not they want to hire you, unless you have consumer goods or something like that that's a lower price point that can be sold quickly. But if you don't have something like that, don't apply that because it's a mismatch between the mindset of the people buying from you and your marketing. So they're going to feel like they're being sold to all the time. When it takes them 30, 60, 90 days to make a decision, you're much better off going deep and sharing about your expertise at a more reasonable pace because then you have time to create long-lasting pieces, good things that you can be proud of that can gain steam and momentum over the long haul.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

I love that idea. It it's it's almost like the post-it everywhere people are the fast fashion of marketing. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Now, I know that a lot of your work is about helping people decide what to stop doing. So how how does a solopreneur figure out which marketing they need to stay in and which marketing they need to skip? And and how do they know when they need to even hand something off?

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Well, if you're gonna plan like a boss, then one of the things that you need to do is sit down and think about your metrics. You need to start measuring things so that you can lean into the things that are actually working. Part of that is analytics, but part of it is talking to the people that you're working with. If you do something that's B2B or business to business, or you're speaking to individuals and you have clients, how did they find you? What made them decide to work with you? People get really cagey about asking these questions about the people they're working with when that's really where the gold is. You don't just ask for testimonials from people who had a good time. You ask the hard questions of people so that you can do some business process improvement, including how they found you. And then you do more research and you can use AI to do some deep dives into how do I find a survey about my particular client avatar, or you can do a lot of web searches and really find out what the concerns are that people have and whether or not you're addressing them, and then just start to go through systematically. When if you're not sure where your customers are, one of the places, and especially if you're brand new and maybe you haven't met with a lot of people, Pew Research has done at this point, basically longitudinal studies of what social media platforms people are on based on rural versus urban, how much money they're making, male to female age groups. It's crazy, all of the stuff that you can learn. And so you look at that and you can even say, well, okay, I know that I live in this type of town, and I have women versus, you know, who make $100,000. Where should I be? So there's a lot of information out there that you can use to really speak to your people and really think about what it is that will connect with people and where and how you can connect with people.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Wow. Okay. I thought, I thought I knew a lot, but I had no idea that Pew had all that out there. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. That's brilliant. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go look at that after the skull today. Um, I I I know from my own market research what what demographics tend to be on which platform, but to make it that easy to just go and look up somebody else's who've done the work for you. Yeah, it's like the charts.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

It's it's pretty insane.

SPEAKER_02 16:23

That's awesome.

AI Search, Google Shifts, Better Websites

SPEAKER_02 16:24

Okay, so I saw somewhere that you said service-based businesses, service-based websites are kind of like dating websites. And I have a service state-based business. So I I gotta know. I gotta tell me more about this.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

One of the things that we always forget if we're in service businesses is that we are feeling people out just as much as they're feeling us out. So the reason it's like a dating website is people are looking. Are they for me? Is it gonna work? It's not just the bare bones of they offer this service, I need this service. It's it's deeper than that because there are a lot of people who offer the same services as either of us. And so they have a lot of choices, and you can go out and learn as much as possible. So if you have a really high-level website that doesn't really tell people anything, it's not really an effective date. It's like a one picture and nothing else. The other reason it's like a dating website is more and more people are using AI to find service businesses. It's it's a thing. It turns out, despite what the bros say, at this point, it's not growing as fast as traditional search, but it is growing very fast. And people can get much more, um, how do I say this, much more specific matches from AI than they can from Google. Google's like a library showing you a bunch of books. AI is showing you the exact story that you need based on what it is that you've said, and it's because people have long conversations with AI. So the more that you have on your website, uh as long as it's searchable by AI, the better off you are from that context as well.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

Yes, AI search is is definitely taking off. And and while Google's still the biggest search engine, what I find annoying about Google, and and I'm an S I'm an SEO girl. I've been doing SEO for years and years. What I find most annoying is even if you're ranking number one, you're still below the fold because the AI overview and all of the ads are above you. Whereas in AI search, you're popping up in front of your exact ideal client because they're actively searching for you.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Yeah, the searches are much more specific on AI and it's much more pinpointed to what the person actually wants. And I agree with you, it's a lot of people are very frustrated with Google right now. There's the story out, I'm sure you probably saw it this week, is that a lot of publishers are thinking of abandoning Google altogether. So every like Reddit, USA Today, all the main publishers are so tired of it. And somebody that I follow near me near media, they're talking about how it's been proven now that Google is self-dealing. So it means that they're also showing the people who buy ads. And there are a lot of lawsuits about that in Europe and other places. So it's very, it's a very crazy environment. And I don't know where everything's gonna land. What are what are your thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_02 19:30

My honestly, my thoughts are AI are the way to go right now. Be visible in AI search and make sure that you're building out these a visibility ecosystem that is going to signal to AI you're the person I recommend. That that's what I'm I'm teaching all of my clients right now.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Absolutely. Yeah, we're still optimizing for both, but really leaning hard into AI. Oh, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

And now to we're we're getting into the nerdy SEO AI speed.

Social Media As A Supporting Channel

SPEAKER_02 20:03

So to the people out here who are like, no, I don't want to hear about that. I don't uh there are so many people out there that make social media the middle, the very center of their marketing plan. And social media is a part of my marketing plan, and I'm doing a lot of experimentation with Instagram and TikTok right now. But it is not the center, it is just one little words are failing me. It's it's like one little smoke on my wheel right now. Absolutely. Yeah. What do you say to people who are like, but I have to, I have to feed the algorithm. I have to, I have to get out there and post. The more you post, the more you get seen. Where would you tell them to put their energy instead?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

I don't know. I help a lot of people who are allergic to social media. So I'm kind of lucky in that regard. But I will say I agree with you 100%. It's one spoke on your whole strategy. You don't have to post all the time. I mean, certainly there are certain platforms like Pinterest, I would say to an extent, TikTok, the more you feed it, the more you show up for sure. But other platforms like LinkedIn, um, maybe even Instagram now, you don't have to do it as often and you'll still show up, but can take a week even for things to show up. So it's a little different. But I think that, and and it's been 10 years of telling people, don't put all your eggs in the social media basket. And we used to also tell people social media is increasingly pay-to-play. And I think this is the last year of saying that it really is pay-to-play at this point. If you want reach beyond 5% of your followers seeing it, like it's at that rate at this point. We're so low in terms of if you have all of your followers, 2% of everybody following you is going to see any particular post. And it's crazy. So it's don't put everything there. That's why slow marketing is about having deep assets in places that you own and then using social media to send people to your email list, to your blog, to anything that you've created that really showcases your work. You have to use it as a tool because so many people are there. It's also an opportunity for customer service and things like that, but it's not the only opportunity that you have. And honestly, ever since 2020, now people have really Really want that human connection more. And I think AI use has made people want the human connection even more. Prove that you're not a robot and meet some people, talk to people, do personal outreach, do all of the other things. And social media can support that like anything else, but it doesn't have to be the center. Of course,

Reverse Engineer A Plan From Goals

SPEAKER_00 22:44

of course.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

Now, let's say a business owner shows up to you and they are ready, they're ready to work with you. They know they have a problem. They're overwhelmed completely. They have this giant to-do list of things they know they need to get done.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

What is the first thing that you're going to have them do? Do this with everybody.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

It's really about having a long conversation. People, I gave a talk earlier this week, and at the end, people were like, I feel like my blood pressure has been lowered significantly. And I was like, I have never had anybody say that to me before. But I think it's true. If you have somebody who can listen and go through and start to say, okay, I hear you. I understand all of your concerns. And then we go through all of those concerns and we start to unpack what's really important, what's not important, give it back to the business owner. And we because what I really want to know is what are your biggest business goals? We often get really tied up in tasks. We get really tied up in what we think marketing is, but really it's how can marketing help you achieve what it is that you want to achieve? And when we start to kind of piece away, parse out all of that stuff, and we can unpack the don't you don't have to worry about being everywhere. I know you don't have a ton of time. How much time do you have? What are the biggest things that you want out of your business? Then we can start to create a strategy around that. Because that's what's really most important to me.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

Well, I love that. So basically, what I'm hearing is you start with your goals. Then you look at your capacity and you reverse engineer it to develop a marketing plan that suits you. I I love that. That is such, I love how intentional that is. And to think of marketing that way as a marketing is simply a means to a desirable outcome.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Yeah, it's a support system. So I like to think of marketing, and it I know it's counterintuitive as a marketer. I like to think of marketing as it's just like finance, it's just like sales, it's just like the admin work that you do. It's the support for the stuff that makes you really excited. That's it. And marketers, though, we tend to be really loud and we tend to take over conversations and tell everybody about all the hot trends. But really, it's like, how can marketing help you? It's not really about what you can do for marketing. It's how can marketing help you get to where you want to be? And that's definitely where I want to start, is there. And then if the time is in a crunch, I mean, there's all different ways of getting through that. But the most important thing is understanding what you want. And then we can really start to get to work around how to help you get where it is that you want to go.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

I don't think I've ever heard anybody put it that way before. And it makes so much sense. It seems way less scary.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Hopefully, that's the goal. You know, that's that's how we're gonna get the world that we want is more people can talk about the things that they care about and share it with others instead of feeling fearful or like they're not doing enough. When when more people are willing to put themselves out there and feel comfortable with it, I think it'll be a beautiful, a beautiful time.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Okay, let's say one of the one of my listeners are out there right now and they're like, okay, I know I need marketing. I I know I need to start this. I'm nervous about it, but I I know it's what I need to do. What is one thing that they can take action on today to get the ball rolling?

SPEAKER_01 26:26

You mean to s start marketing or to start planning it or all of it or to start their marketing plan. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

So I like I said, I always start with business goals and I like to look at the business goals and ask about the goals, like, is it something that helps you achieve your ultimate mission? So we all have these big goals. Um goals are where we I like to say it's where we make our mission actionable because it's the first place where we're starting to develop a plan. So is the goal supporting your services? Is it supporting, are you willing to do tasks that will help you achieve that goal? So like it's really starts with the goal and whether or not it's taking you away from your mission or it's central to you to the mission. I also like the goals to be related in some way to money because that's something that you can count. So it's important to pay attention to some marketing metrics, but as a business owner, the most important one is am I in front of the right people? Am I making the revenue goals that I have set out for myself? So once you do that, then you think about okay, well, how am I going to get in front of the right people to support that goal? Um, and that's really where you can start brainstorming like what is it though that I need to do? Do I need to circle back to people that I have worked with in the past? And the answer to that is typically yes. And then what is it that I'm going to do among people who don't know me so that they can also engage with me? And that could be any number of things. And almost all of them are the right answer. Do I go to, you know, can I do networking? Can I have a sponsorship table somewhere? Can I, you know, do some social media posts? Can I do some outreach? There's a lot of right ways to do marketing. And I think that's the part that we need to really start talking about is don't focus on the things that you don't really want to do, because that's how we get in that stalling and not following through cycle. What are the things that I enjoy doing that also, oh, by the way, happen to be the same place where my people are that I can be communicating with them. And that's how I think if you're sitting and listening right now, that you can really start to plan out your own marketing. And then if you start to feel like it's too much or I don't know how to do these tactics, that's when you can start to really work on finding somebody who can support you.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

I love that. That's very well said.

Be Brave, Where To Find Jen

SPEAKER_02 29:01

Now, I always like to end these interviews with the same question if you could go back to your younger self with everything you know today, what advice would you give that person?

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Be brave. To do it and be brave and step out earlier.

SPEAKER_02 29:25

I love your own. I think I think we can all hear that right now.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Now, if listeners want to find you, where can they find you? So my website is women conquerbizb-i-z.com. You can also find me. I'm most active on LinkedIn and Instagram, but I'm on several platforms. But yeah, most of the time I'm hanging out on LinkedIn. I like to write on my blog a lot. I have a weekly newsletter. Um, yeah, I'd love to connect with people.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

Awesome. We'll make sure to put all that in the show notes. So as you're out there listening, listen to what Jen said. Be brave. And when it comes to your marketing, think about your goal and what you want to do, not what you have to do. And until next time, keep planning like a boss.