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Being a Hero To One Individual At A Time

If there is one thing I believe in, with all the strategies that are out there in marketing today, it's the power of building the relationship. This book has been years in the making, but I never thought I would be here 5 years ago, let me tell you why.

Why I Did It

5 years ago I was literally thrown into this industry. This wasn't what I had planned on doing! I was a coal miner, and a pretty darn great one at that! It was my job to run different pieces of equipment and make sure the electrical side of things were good. (That's me on the right after I had repaired a scoop).

It was a great job, and one that I was proud to do. However, as you can imagine, it was hard work. I put my boots on at 4:30 every morning and headed into the dark abyss where I stayed for 10-12 hours a day. However, at $33 dollars an hour I wasn't complaining too much. I had everything.

Until I didn't.

One day fate came knocking in the form of a coal mining accident and left me lying on the mine floor wondering what I was going to do for work.

The Reaction

I had always known that you could make a living online, but I had no idea how to do any of that stuff! I hadn't even gotten on the internet before 2003.

Yep, you read that right. I was so convinced that coal mining was in my future that I didn't think about anything else. But once I was pushed into it, I started digging, searching to find my place in the internet marketing world.

Everyone said Do what you love doing, do what you're good at!

But sadly, I wasn't a great programmer, I wasn't that well versed at much of anything. It made me so disappointed that I almost gave up. Until I realized something... Hey, I'm good at making friends!

Enter Relationship Marketing

This was something I was great at! But there wasn't a lot of people talking about it. I realized later that this was a good thing for me, but it didn't dawn on me until later, which is kind of embarrassing. Either way, I started my journey, I wanted to prove that a single individual could build a successful business on the strategy of building relationships alone.

This book has been 4 years in the making, millions of sticky notes and Evernote scribbles along with it. I've had to get a bigger whiteboard to map out the progress too because I always knew that this time would come.

I would write the road map that you could use to build your own business.

Today people call me a Relationship expert. While I am humbled and flattered at this admonition, there are still faults and failures in my personal life that I have had to learn.

I think it is important that I tell you about everything. Not just the great things that I have accomplished by building relationships in business, but also in the negative failures as well. My reasoning behind this is not to get you to call me an expert, but to show you where I went wrong by standing in your way with a sign that says Don't Go Down This Road!

In the end, The Relationship Manifesto is the whole journey until now in my career. One can get sidetracked with everything that needs to be done in the marketing industry to be visible, but my theory when I first started 4 years ago was that you could bypass all of that, focus on relationships, and still end up where you need to be.

That theory that was developed so long ago has proven to be effective, and I will map this out for you in this book.

Everything else is secondary.

This will show you how you can start becoming a hero to one individual at a time. There is a psychological factor in a system call the Dunbar numbering strategy that says There is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. This is important because it focuses on the value of pinpointing people in your marketing strategy that you will cultivate over time that will help your Dunbar number become stronger.

So why worry about doing one hundred things every day when you should only be focusing on one?

The relationship.

Grab your copy of this book today and join me in my journey to relationship advocacy.

Sample of the book

Here's a sample I want you to read entitled Why Relationship Marketing? This will shed some light on why I do it.

I awoke one morning, just like any other day, to the buzzing of the alarm.

The clock on the nightstand said 4:21. I could hit the snooze and grab another nine minutes, or I could get my work clothes on and go eat a bowl of cereal before I started across the mountain for work.

I chose to snooze.

That was generally the way my mornings went at the house before I started to work; setting my alarm for the last possible minute before I had to rocket out of the house in the darkness of the morning to cross the mountain.

This morning was no different. I grabbed my lunch pail, kissed my wife, said goodbye to my baby boy Eli, and jumped into my car to make the drive. Even though I thought that this morning was no different, it really was. I just couldn't see it yet.

It had rained the night before, and, because I always set my alarm for the last minute, I was constantly in a hurry to get to work.

This day was different because I was about to have an appointment with fate on that dark foggy mountain.

As I crossed over, coming down off the mountain, I was going just a little too fast when I met the next curve. The car I was in locked the brakes and the rear end swung precariously over the edge of the cliff.

I got the car stopped in time.

My heart was beating out of my chest as I listened to the silence of the dark morning. In the distance I could hear the crickets chirping and the motor humming quietly.

Fate had failed.

But we would meet again. However, it wouldn't be that day.

Looking back, I realize that being a coal miner was never for me. I wasn't one for following the crowd. I always looked for new opportunities and tried to bring new ideas to work to help people be more efficient, only to be shrugged off with disdain.

I was never meant to do what I was doing. I had worked a job where, like Ryan Hanley so eloquently demonstrated in his Content Warfare book, I was comfortable.

There was always this nagging feeling down in the pit of my stomach that yearned for more. Even though working beside of some of the toughest and bravest men in the country was humbling, I was never meant to be a worker bee, hitting the snooze every morning.

So, why relationship marketing?

Keep that question in your head, I want to delve into my story a little further before I answer that. The answer to that question came in a horrible manner.

Some people will miss their chance to do a great thing, and by the time they get the chance to have another opportunity with it, they're laying in a hospital bed, or another horrible event has happened in their life.

It doesn't always happen that way, I understand that, but for me it did.

The day fate caught me was like any other day. I did the usual thing, hit the snooze, rushed out of the house, drove across the mountain, making it to work at the last possible second.

It seemed the same.

My shift was moving power in the section of coal mine where we worked. To help you better understand what was going on I need to tell you this. The equipment that runs “inby" (a coal mining term that means where you actively cut coal) all operated on electricity. All other equipment, called “outby" (meaning coal was not actively cut out of the mine) were usually diesel powered.

All of the inby equipment had power cords, just like your vacuum cleaner does. If you want it to work, you plug it in. Same deal. However, when you keep cutting coal, the “plug" gets further and further away from the face (where they cut coal) of the mine.

In order to allow the equipment to reach the face, the plug has to be moved every week.

While that sounds like a simple task, it's not. The “plug" or power center, as we called it, was a 4 ton beast 15 feet in length that operated up to 9 pieces of equipment.

One of the jobs in moving power is to “unplug" cables from this power center and transport them up to the face and then plug them back in once the power center is in place.

This was what myself and two other miners were doing. We had just finished lapping the cable and were moving it up the section. I was straddling the cable with my left leg draped over the center and my right leg on the other side when it happened.

Without any warning the miner operating the equipment that was pulling the cable must have goosed the equipment because all of a sudden it jerked forward. When that happened, my left leg was immediately trapped underneath all of those lengths of cable.

I helplessly scrambled to get it free as the cable kept twisting my leg until I heard a sickening pop and felt a pain that I'll never forget to this day.

I must have screamed like a girl because I heard a high pitched noise and turned to look but as soon as it happened, it was over. They were able to free my leg, but I was not able to walk under my own power.

Fate chuckled.

Blinking, I lay on my back, watching the coal dust dance in the light. What would I do now? This was all I really knew how to do. This was truly the only job that I had had any experience in.

The Answer

One year later, I had an epiphany...I could make money on the internet!

I was never proficient with computers, but I had been on Bebo.com (remember that?) before, and while browsing through some of my friends streams I came across what I now know as an advertisement.

Would you like to make $5,000 a month online? It said.

I sure would, thank you. Let me at it.

That lit a fire under me that I wasn't able to quench. This was the beginning. I would learn how to do this or bust…or starve. Whichever came first, but I was determined to do it.

Many months later, and a lot of money wasted, I finally figured out that earning an income online was going to be harder than I thought it would be.

Those guys were liars, none of the stuff I read was true. There was no way I could make that kind of money in one month, I was missing something.

After figuring out my mistakes, I finally came to the conclusion that I would need a platform to broadcast from. A place where I could make the money I needed to provide for my family.

Finally, after more months of wondering how this was going to happen, I came across a blog called SmartPassiveincome.com from Pat Flynn.

The guy was a genius. I later met him at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, but this was many moons later.

I wanted what he had. I began to read his blog, starting at the beginning and working my way to the front. He was consistently saying one thing:

Find your niche.

What was I good at that wasn't completely saturated, but still one where I could make an impact in the online world? I didn't know anything about building a website, I could barely write on my own blog, I couldn't build apps, nor could I say I had a million social followers and “here's how I did it".

I was stumped.

That was the point where I almost gave up. It had been a year since I first started researching this, and it had been 6 months since I had started my own blog. Nothing was working and I couldn't figure it out.

Until my wife stepped in.

Thank goodness for someone that could see something I couldn't see.

Have you ever had those people in your life? When you thought you had exhausted all avenues of possibility and they come in and save the day?

That was my experience. As I talked to her about it, I explained to her that I could literally do nothing that would be of any use for people online.

“You're good at building relationships. Look at all of those close friends you have made in a short time."

So it began.

Why Relationship Marketing?

Because I live and breath relationships. Because one day four years ago I had a theory that someone who wasn't proficient online could still become successful by building their business on the foundation of relationships. Because I love people and live to get the answers they need. Even when it means I don't know them myself, I'll find someone who does.

It's because without the people you have no business. You have no content marketing, no social media results, no action on your blog. I choose relationships because building relationships, leads to all of this other stuff you want online.

Relationship building has changed the way I do business online. And it can change the way your online business is done as well.

Even Google is leaning more towards the personal side of the search results. Making the user happy by culling out the bad so they can give them the good all the time.

So that's why.

One thing is for certain, while I was lying on my back on the mine floor, I knew I wouldn't stay there. I would get back up again. There was a feeling down in the pit of my stomach that made me realize I had bigger things to do for people…and you do as well.

Choose relationships and you will watch your brand pivot to higher results than you have ever seen before!

Hope you enjoyed this small portion of what this book has to offer! I can't wait to publish so you can read the rest of the book.