THE FUEL: What’s the BIG IDEA?

What are you really passionate about? Who are you passionate about? I'll meet with you in a free hour-long consultation so we can talk about your BIG IDEA in full. We’ll dig deep into your BIG WIN and figure out just what that looks like for you and your organization. We’ll talk about what has been holding you back from achieving your goals and go over some practical first steps. There’s no obligation and no charge for anything at this point.

1. THE FORGE: Design and Development

And we're off! We receive your first year’s or first month’s payment for your service package and get right to work. We spend hours researching your big idea and checking out all of your competitors, so we can build a site or design a project that exceeds their influence. Your domain name is registered, the back end work is all done, and all of the other technical details like DNS and email are taken care of. We’ll start building your website using Squarespace. There’s no need to pay Squarespace anything for hosting until we finish up Design & Development and are all ready to launch.

In addition to setting up everything necessary for all of the functions of your website, we'll also set up custom areas for your site visible only to you and your team containing your marketing plans, content ideas, posting schedules, reports, tools, and more.

We’ll gather up the best of the best content from you and your organization, create a bunch of new content ourselves, and make it all look real pretty. You'll see several live proofs throughout the design process until the site is exactly how you want it, and then ultimately sign off on a ready-to-deploy version of the site. The design and development phase ends, you pay your first Squarespace hosting fees, and your site is launched with accompanying marketing and training sessions to help you hit the ground running.

2. AGILE RICH CONTENT DEPLOYMENT with Social Media Cross-Pollination

AGILE is a method of project management that divides necessary tasks up into small teams centered around your core network. We’ve taken this amazing idea (originally developed in the 1970’s and codified in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and accompanying Principles) and given you tools in a special secure area of your website that give you a concrete marketing plan for the year and help you to use agile concepts to grow your website.

Simply put: you are puttin’ together a posse. A KaioCreative website is less about building a nice, safe little fire than it is about letting Your People be passionate and giving them the freedom to burn where they are. From day one, you will be able to easily schedule and post your content to all of your social media channels so that you reach your audience where they are and draw them back to your website (social media cross-pollination). We’ve taken care of all the grunt work; all you have to worry about is posting to your website on a consistent basis and finding passionate people to come along for the ride.

So how do you get those passionate People in the first place? Rich content. Rich content refers to consistent, valuable, usually free content that evokes an emotional response and generates interest. Rich content is the prize inside the cereal box. Its a huge part of what makes you remarkable. Truly rich content causes your prospects, customers and clients to think to themselves, "Wow, this is amazing. I can't believe that they're providing this for free!"

CREATING THE WOW MOMENT

We spend so much time picking your brain and gathering up the best of what you have to offer during the design and development period so that from site launch, your site visitors have that 'wow moment' that causes their eyebrows to shoot up. We’ll give you some practical ideas for initial marketing that allow you to attach a very valuable burst of rich content to your brand at the onset in a way designed to be unusual and remarkable. We go big.

After site launch, your responsibility to keep the fire growing is to continue to generate great rich content that will keep people interested. This may sound like a lot of work, but it’s actually really easy. Squarespace’s systems let you safely delegate small tasks to multiple members of your team and even to your People. You can sit down when you have time and crank out a bunch of content, then schedule that content to release in a way that works best for your site. If we did our job right, you should have a good idea what minor changes you may need to make to your internal workflow to help keep that steady stream of rich content deploying.

3. FUELING THE FIRE: Consistent Change and Redeployment

This is where the rubber hits the road, and we commit to be right with you all the way through support and training. Your commitment to updating your website regularly is absolutely key to this process. If you do not continue to update your site, I guarantee that your site will suffer from static site syndrome just like any other old media website.

It will take some work on your part. However, what matters most is that you and your core team are posting regularly on what you're passionate about, and you've given your site visitors a way to contribute content as well. If you’re truly passionate about something, creating content becomes easy. Don't worry about writing an essay every time; write about what interests you, no matter how brief. A few passionate, genuine words are much more valuable than carefully crafted, glurgy sales pitches. Authenticity is much more important than length. Be yourself.

Many people get stuck in the 1-2-3's for what seems like an eternity. This is the most frustrating part of ignition, because sometimes it can feel like you're spinning your wheels, or even like you're cranking the engine but it just won't turn over. Hang in there, because when the spark catches, it's a wild ride!

4. SPREADING THE FLAMES: Organic Interest

Your first major turning point! Your prospects are starting to post your first organic feedback, you’re getting likes for your Facebook page, new Twitter and Instagram followers, and you’ve expanded your LinkedIn network to other businesses and organizations you can work with. They've responded to your rich content and your commitment to regular site updates by trusting you with their time. Keep on keeping on with your site updates.

At this stage, you should also start seeing your website regularly appearing in Google searches from all over the world. If you're faithful in posting rich content to your site that contains the keywords that people are looking for, you will start seeing significant improvement.

5. FRESH OXYGEN: Organic Involvement

Now that you are starting to build a group of interested people, you are going to start the greatly rewarding work of helping these somewhat interested site members to turn into Your People. You're building a Tribe. If you've never read "Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us" by Seth Godin, I highly recommend you do so. Seth does a great job explaining the core concepts involved.

Keep it up with those consistent site updates, send a monthly or bi-monthly newsletter stuffed with valuable rich content to your tribe, and engage your People personally by responding to their comments and problems in a timely and friendly manner.

If they have good things to say about you and your products or services, always ask them for their referral and feedback on your site. If you have a storefront, don't let them out the door without asking for their feedback. We can help you with printed collateral that you can hand them which gives them some rich content on the website—we can help with that, too! Whenever you see enthusiasm, don’t let it get away—capture it! Be real and authentic, and stay away from glurgy sales pitches. Again, be conversational and just be yourself.

6. WOW IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE: Organic Action

Organic Action is what happens when your BIG WIN meets YOUR TRIBE and has a love child. Bow chicka-bow-wow. All of your hard work is starting to really pay off. Through your commitment to excellence both on and off your website, you've built trust, and your People have responded.

Your People are so enthusiastic to have found somebody who shares their passions and connects with them personally, they act on their own and market to each other. And this is what separates Organic Action from engagement. Organic Action is actually mostly unsolicited by you. Your People are making the effort to engage with you and with other People without you first engaging with them. Their enthusiasm spills over onto your website in the form of orders, great comments, testimonials, unsolicited recommendations to their friends, and user-generated rich content posted to your site in the comments and/or blogs (easily moderated by you, of course)!

But that's only the start. Because the website makes it so easy for them to share your rich content and you’re giving them an organic incentive to do so, they post links to content on your site to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, or any of a number of other social media sites. What was a nice little fireside gathering among friends has now turned into a wildfire. Your People start finding more People for you, and your circle of influence continues to grow exponentially.

With all of these enthusiastic People posting about you on their websites and other social media centers, your position in Google searches for your target keywords will be improving all the time. As a result, you'll start seeing people who are passionate about the same things you are finding you in the most unusual of places. Don't be surprised if you get interest from places you never thought your influence would spread! This is where inbound marketing really takes off and turns a locality into a globality.

All of this starts with a BIG IDEA. If your idea isn’t big enough, we can help with that as well.

7. FUEL INJECTION: Organic Feedback

Now that you have cultivated real relationships with Your People, it's time to listen for the Leaders. As you continue to build relationships with Your People, you’ll find natural leaders that you can trust with your passion. You can safely delegate specific responsibilities on your site to these leaders (like posting content or moderating comments for example) while retaining complete control. You may even find potential employees or partners this way since these leaders are already enthusiastic about your business or organization!

Return their favor of trust in you by trusting them and showing others in your Tribe publicly that you trust them. Take a step past engagement and dare to ask them open-ended questions—and listen. Give them a voice and a platform. Engage them with real opportunities to have a voice in your business or organization. I call this idea Open Business, and I use that term very deliberately. It’s like open source software development but you’re developing and growing People. When this is done right, it is a very powerful yet rare phenomenon that will really get people talking about your passion.

Organic Feedback further fuels the fire and cycles the engine around into redeployment again and again as you make adjustments to your site to meet changing climates of influence. The incredible momentum from Organic Action makes you even more enthusiastic about your Big Idea, which further spurs you on. When it gets going, it really gets going.

The powerful site analytics tools that are already built into your website allow you to further center your site around keywords that have been proven to really matter to the People who matter most. When you work to build that sense of community through generosity, honesty, and sincerity, you will just keep finding more People to share your passion and more Leaders to lead them. Their passion will continue to make you a dominating force in search engine listings for your target keywords.

As you continue to be faithful in posting content to your site, you'll learn what works and what doesn't. Redesign and redeployment can help you to pivot with agility to meet a changing business climate. And we'll be there with you cheering you on every step of the way as your influence continues to grow.

If you’re ready to take your online and offline presence to the next level, let’s get started!