If you are already actively engaged in community support, any type of fundraising efforts or charity events, then this method is perfect for you. If not, this might be a great time to consider implementing charitable donations and activities as part of an ongoing business promotion strategy.

It creates goodwill in the community and opens doors for collaboration with other businesses whose customers may also be interested in your services. There could also be great tax advantages as well.

[To supercharge this non-profit approach and also effectively recession-proof your business, we specialize in helping community-minded professional advisers to secure $10,000 to $100,000 per month in free Google Ads - guaranteed for life. We say more about that elsewhere].

One simple method is to create a page on your website to discuss or promote a charity, then promote the launch of that event with your news release. If your practice is already actively engaged in this type of activity, you can simply discuss what the charity stands for and what they hope to achieve. You can also write about a recent charitable event that has already taken place and report on how much they were able to raise or what they accomplished.

Alternatively, you can tie your products and services into raising money for a worthwhile charity in some way eg $100 from every sale goes to this cause. The news release will then be about your business helping to raise money for the charity.

“[Mortgage Broker] to Host Charity Golf and Social To Benefit Homeless, Disadvantaged Women and Children”

“[Event Name] Charity Food Drive Hunger Relief Fundraiser [City] Announced”

“[Financial Planner Event] Raises over [$xx] for World Without Cancer”

Important: we must not mention your products or services directly in the news release. We should only discuss the non-profit activities.

Max (not his real name) was a Mortgage Broker who appeared to be doing very well...

Max operated a local branch office of a large and reputable national mortgage lender. He maintains autonomy and control of his business with the parent company providing marketing, branding and lead generation.

The mortgage company also provides back-end administrative support, so their loan officers and brokers can focus on doing what they do best, originating loans.

Max and his team were very active in the community, sponsoring and supporting numerous charities, actively volunteering at local events, providing food and supplies for the local homeless population, and more.

Max's office was consistently a top producer within the company.

But Max had one major problem.

He had hit a ceiling and was stuck at $7 million in monthly sales volume. Not bad, but Max wanted to do a lot more and knew they were fully capable.

Max understood their business and was great at it, but he did not know how to attract more clients cost-effectively.

Max tried numerous ways to find and close more deals.

He knew they were losing money in lost opportunity costs but was stuck in the dilemma of how much he could safely invest and whether that investment would provide a return.

And he was also getting burned out by the sheer amount of effort he was putting into finding new customers for their business.

Max knew he could build the company, but the pace at which he was growing was too slow, too painful. And the revenue ceiling he hit was discouraging.

At one point, Max considered just going back to work for the home office and going back to a cubicle again. Give up on the dream of running his own brokerage and being independent.

The idea of no longer having all the expenses and stress of running a business started to look very appealing.

One day, Max was attending his local BNI (Business Networking International) meeting and another member gave a presentation about how much success they had been having and how they were able to do that.

After the meeting, the Max cornered the other member and grilled them about their success.

He was told “It’s about working smarter, not harder”.

Max was not quite sure what the definition of “working smarter” was in his context, but he had heard it before without giving it much thought.

Working harder and doing more is not smarter, in fact, quite the opposite. You have to do things differently.

That was his problem. He wanted to move forward but was not making any changes, he was not doing anything differently. He had been putting more effort (working harder) into the traditional methods most brokers use to promote their agencies.

At that moment, he decided that the traditional way of building a business was inadequate and sub-optimal. If he wanted different results, he would have to make different efforts.

Having heard what we had been able to do for other businesses in the area, including that other BNI member, Max contacted us to see if we could help them.

[Please note as we continue the story: this was initially using our most basic solution, without premium elements like our proprietary Multi-Channel Booster or Big 6 Distribution.]

After performing a quick analysis of their online presence, we showed Max and his team where they were going wrong and why their potential clients were unable to find them. They were almost invisible on the internet!

We also pointed out the things their competitors were doing right and explained how the prominent visibility of those competitors was driving most of their estimated traffic and sales.

The mortgage company’s corporate brand was a very strong brand and had a great online presence, but their ability to increase sales at any particular branch was severely limited by the rules and processes regulating the mortgage loan industry.

We set Max up on a basic 12-month news release campaign and agreed to evaluate the campaign at six months.

Because of the restrictions on advertising and promoting mortgage lenders, we had to request limited distribution of our news release articles.

Limited distribution refers to publication through media outlets whose guidelines are more relaxed in these categories. This means the articles we published would not get the same coverage as a standard news release.

At the start of the campaign, Max was closing an average of $7 million per month in total loan (sales) volume and had been stuck at that level for many months.

Three months into his campaign, his loan sales volume had grown from $7M to $10M. He was ecstatic!

And so were we! We knew he would get great results, even with our basic service. Yet we were not expecting this much from a limited distribution campaign, even though we had performed a thorough analysis before launching the campaign.

Even though Max's (limited distribution) campaign was exceeding expectations, he wanted to know if we could improve upon these results or maybe get more results even faster.

At this time, we added in the Multi-Channel Booster, which we call our "Secret Rainmaker Weapon".

We knew Max was going to be more than pleased and we were excited to start moving him to an even more powerful service.

After publishing just two multi-channel boosters, his loan sales volume grew from $10M to $15M.

Max and his team were so happy that they wanted to discuss opening and promoting additional locations.
 

While discussing ideas with them, they mentioned an upcoming charity event they were hosting. And that’s when the idea of using our Big 3 Premium Distribution with Multi-Channel Boosters came together.

[Please note: we added Bloomberg and other premium news sites in July 2022 to make it Big 6. Before this, it was Big 3 or then Big 5 - without the hyper-powerful Bloomberg. In October 2023, we have just added even greater Business Insider distribution, which takes our results to new levels again.]

After combing through hundreds of search results featuring similar content, we knew it could be done. We just needed to make sure we were abiding by the strict rules and guidelines that the syndication services required for publishing restricted content and getting approval.

Max already had a separate website specifically for his charitable organization, but we needed a dedicated page for this on their corporate website since that was the website we were promoting, not their charitable activities.

Once we had all the required information, we worked with the mortgage company to create the dedicated page on their corporate website all about their charitable work and community support.

Next, we had to work with our writing team to create the article so that it would comply with the strict syndication requirements. Our simplified instructions were:

“Do not use ‘mortgage’ in the headline. Don't mention anything about loans, mortgages or lending. We are going to link to a ‘community services’ page. We need this to sound like news, the kind of news you would see in a newspaper or on a news broadcast on television. Our client hired us to help them get into the Google 3-pack, increase traffic and attract additional new home mortgage loan borrowers.”