The Mouse That Roared – How a Tiny, 10-Person Company Became a Major Industry Force With Magazine Articles

At  my Dilbert Cube Job, while I was sales manager, I started writing  magazine articles on the side. I was placing them with industry trade  journals. It all started when Mike, my boss, did it and it was such a  pain in the butt he said “Never again!”

After that, I wrote all the articles.

This did two things:

1. It put our company on the map.
2. It put me on the map, and eventually made it much easier for me to get into the consulting business I’m in right now.

Major Publicity for $500 Per Article

Back  then I wasn’t in the groove of writing, and it would usually take an  hour or two just to bang out the first couple of paragraphs. Hard work.  But all told, the $500 per article was pretty respectable money and I  started to supplement my sales commission with that. It became a slack  adjuster in my personal finances. $500 per article became $500 every  month or two. For a guy making 75 grand a year, that’s an extra 5K or  so. Not bad.

The company grew, and  we hired three new sales guys. I went from being National Sales Manager  and chief cook and bottle washer to being Inside Sales Manager (taking  all the incoming phone calls and supporting the regional sales guys)  and being Marketing Manager.

The  Marketing Manger part of my job was to ramp up the stuff I’d already  been doing – direct mail, DeviceNet Boot Camp, generating leads on our website, and – especially – writing tons of magazine  articles and sending out press releases. Getting as much free publicity  for our tiny company as humanly possible.

” So How Do You Write Dozens Of Magazine Articles if They’re All About The Same Thing?”

It doesn’t take genius to recognize that industrial networking is a pretty narrow, and possibly dull, topic. How do you write dozens and dozens of magazine articles about that?

Like this:

Peas porridge hot,

Peas porridge cold,

Peas porridge in the pot

Nine days old.

Some like it hot,

Some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot

Nine days old.

If  all you’ve got is Peas Porridge, then you serve it up in every  imaginable way possible. You serve it with bread. You serve it with  pudding. You serve it with spinach salad and raspberry vinaigrette  salad dressing. You serve it in great big giant bowls. You serve it in  little teacups. You serve it with pasta. You serve an Atkins Diet  version with buttered steak and bacon with cashews on top.

So  I go to this trade show, National Manufacturing Week. My mission is to  book articles with every editor of every trade magazine that I possibly can. A trade show is a great place to do that. You show them some  you’ve written for other editors, you ask them about your editorial  calendar, and you come up with a hook that resonates with their  particular audience.

Between walking  the show and holding a small press conference, I booked something like  20 or 30 magazine articles with over a dozen different editors. It  averaged out to two or three a month. For the remainder of the year,  you could not pick up an industrial trade magazine and not find us  somewhere.

Our tiny company was  starting to be the mouse that roared. We were all over the place. In a  few instances, we got on the front cover.

Oh, and here’s the kicker: My name was on most of those articles. I was the author. Which made me the expert, as far as all these magazines and editors were concerned.

I’d  get phone calls from my friends: “Is this the world-famous  Perry?” That was always good for a chuckle, but the fact was, in  my teeny tiny corner of the world, I was becoming well known. ISA, the  largest publisher in that industry, approached me about writing a book  on Industrial Ethernet, which was one of the hottest topics in the  business. I knew I’d never make much money from the book (I think I’ve  made maybe five grand from the whole thing and it was a TON of work)  but it was the very first book out on the subject. It pays to be first.

The Power of Celebrity – Even a Little Tiny Bit of It

The  fact that I had a tiny but legitimate amount of celebrity attached to  my name (credibility would be a better word, actually) made me a safe bet by default instead of an unknown quantity, which is what most consultants and job applicants are. The “˜obvious expert’ as they say.

But  here’s the more important thing: I had relationships with all these  trade magazine editors. I could write and place articles of completely  different topics too, and I figured out a formula for doing that. When I left  the company, those relationships came with me. They didn’t care about  my company, what mattered to them is I knew what they want from a  contributor. Two of those magazines, IPPT and Sensors Magazine, put me  on their editorial advisory board.

I’ve  gotta tell you, press exposure – even in tiny niches that are  unknown to 99.9% of the world – is very powerful. It opens all
kinds of doors that are otherwise locked tight.

Every industry and every profession has such venues. One of the things you  should have on your sights is a list of who and where those magazines,  e-zines, websites, trade shows and organizations are. When you are  regular seen heard, and heard about in those places, an aura surrounds  you that gives you the unfair advantage you’ve always wanted.

Getting Consulting Gigs with a Rock-Solid ROI Argument

To  any prospective client, articles have real, tangible financial value.  The argument is simple: “Advertising in Sensors Magazine costs  $5995 a page, but I can get you a two page article – 12 grand  worth of space – and the article will have more credibility than  an ad. Plus it stays on their website for the next few years. I’ll  write and place that article for you for three grand instead of twelve,  all you need to do is cooperate and give me some material to write  about. And it has to be the article Sensors Magazine wants, not a  thinly disguised promo for your products. And I’ll put a response  mechanism in there so you collect some good sales leads. Is that a  deal?”

Darn right it is!  Commit to placing one article every other month for a client, along  with some other things – press releases, managing Google campaigns, helping with Search Engine Optimization, writing a white  paper, putting together postcard mailers, writing their e-zine – and you’ve got a recipe for replacing most of your income with a  monthly retainer. You’re a real, bona fide marketing consultant. You don’t have to show up at an office every day, and they don’t have to  pay full salary with medical insurance for a guy who’s walking in their office chewing up their time every day.

With  two clients like this, I was making more money than I made at my job,  and it didn’t take 40 hours a week either. I could spend the rest of my time developing products, promoting myself, working my contacts.

A New, Liberated Life

Doesn’t  really sound like such a big deal, does it? It wasn’t. Yet… it  was. It was a HUGE deal, because for the first time in my life, I was  working on my own terms, not somebody else’s. It was a sweet new season  of life for Laura and me, finally having control of our destiny.

Not  being in a squirrel cage, having flexibility to do family stuff as  opportunities arose; all of us being home every day; de-compressing  from the corporate mold and becoming more and more our natural selves.  Having long periods of productive work time instead of constant  interruptions. Liberated to be creative. I’d love for everyone to be  able to experience that freedom. It could only make the world a better place.

Perry Marshall