Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers.

We share quick tips, things you can do right now,

and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode.

We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out.

We are back for Do This Not That podcast,

and I've got to guess I've been trying to get on this thing for a long time because the dude is a legend. He is. Marcus Sheridan. I don't even need to tell you who he is because you already know who he is. But for those of you being under a rock, let me tell you about him. The New York Times calls him a web marketing guru. He's got a wild backstory, which he's going to tell us a little bit about, but the thing that I really fell in love with is his book. They asked you answer.

It became this bestselling book, and it was literally named by Book Authority, one of the five best marketing books of all time. Then he had another book called Endless Customer, which became a national bestseller USA Today. The dude speaks everywhere. He's a legend. He's a big deal. So Marcus,

welcome to the podcast. Man, Jay, that was really nice, bro. Let's do this, man. Let's do this. We're have a good combo today. Absolutely. All right. For everybody who doesn't know your story, which I think is awesome, because everybody's like, maybe they're in a job they don't like or things are falling apart. Can I go in another direction?

Do you have a cool backstory?

So how did Marcus become Marcus?

Yeah, I started with a couple

buddies, just unexpectedly, a swimming pool company in 2001. I was right out of college and things

were going okay up until the crash of 2008. And it looked like we were going to lose the business and file bankruptcy.

But the cool thing, Jay, as you probably know, about pain and suffering, is it forces us

outside of our comfort zones.

And so this is when I really started to learn about things today that are just normal

marketing speak, like inbound marketing content marketing

and as I was studying that stuff what I heard in my simple pool in mind was you know Marcus if

you just obsess over your customer's questions worries issues concerns and you're willing to

address them online you might save your business so I said ding ding ding that's what we're

going to do we're going to do.

We're going to become the Wikipedia of pools. And we became that. We became the most traffic swimming pool website in the world by obsessively answering every question that you could think of

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