Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Get More Retainer Clients with Mark Sneider

Do you want to discover how to get more retainer clients for your marketing agency?

Did you realize that more retainer income will not only make your business run smoother, but it will also significantly increase its value?

Retainers are where it’s at, and, with the right strategy, you can increase retainer fee income.

In today’s episode, I interview Mark Sneider, President of RSWUS.

In this interview, you are going to hear Mark and I talk about:

  • the biggest opportunities that he sees for agencies in 2013
  • how agencies can increase their recurring revenue from retainers
  • how to get started with an inbound marketing campaign
  • how to automate your inbound marketing
  • and so much more…

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

An Interview with Mark Sneider

Trent Dyrsmid: Hi there Bright Idea hunters! Welcome to the Bright Idea podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid. And this is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to understand how to use online marketing and sales automation to massively boost their business.

And on the show with me today is the fellow by the name of Mark Sneider and we’re gonna have an in-depth conversation specifically geared to agencies and some strategies and tactics that Mark uses with his clients to help them grow their business. So Mark is a 25 year veteran of the consumer packaged good and advertising and marketing and services industries here. And he’s MBA from the J Kellogs school of Business at Northwestern where he majored in marketing and economics. And he now runs a firm called RSWUS. Mark, thanks very much for making the time. Welcome to the show.

Mark Sneider: Great! Thanks Trent, happy to be here.

T: So for folks who are listening to this who maybe don’t yet know who you are, please tell us just briefly who are you and what is it that you do.

M: As you mentioned I’m Mark Sneider. In 2005 I started a business exclusively focused on helping agencies when they business. And so our sole purpose is really to help marketing service firms of any type or size find a good qualified opportunities that fit within their sweet spot where their core strengths lie and set the table for them, make sure they’re adequately prepared going into these meetings. And then where we can help them move those opportunities closer to close by coaching and counseling them. Giving them perspective that they may not otherwise have. Often times agencies operate in somewhat above a vacuum and not really fully understanding kind of what makes them different in the eyes of the marketers that they’re reaching out to. And so we see a big part of our world as being kind of that objective set of eyes that deals with lots of different agencies of all types and sizes and can provide some good perspective that can help these agencies better position themselves and better move through the new business pipeline.

T: I know when I was running my technology services firm you’re so head down in writing your to do list everyday and emails everyday. It’s very very easy to lose that kind of higher level objectivity to see hey, is my act sharp? Am I chopping down the right trees? Am I even in the right forest? So it sounds like you’re uniquely positioned to help agencies get a better view and ultimately get better results. So with that in mind I wanna really talk about opportunities that you see and then I’m gonna ask you some questions about some of the things, some of the actual tactics that agencies can use, they can listen to this interview and then they can use some of these tactics to help their business move forward. So for 2013 and I read I think you did a survey, I don’t remember the name of the survey off the top of my head but it was a fairly lengthy and detailed survey and there’s lot of good info and I’ll make sure I’ll put a link to it in the post where this interview is, but you talked about opportunities for 2013. So where do you see some of the biggest opportunities for agencies to pursue in the coming year?

M: You know I mean obviously the social digital space is growing and changing day away. Marketers seem to be getting more sappy in terms of their understanding of how they should be playing in the space but there’s still a lot that’s not understood on the marketers’ side.

T: Give an example.

M: Well just think it really will stand to not understanding how to strategically make the right choices and play in the right spaces, okay. And there are lots of tactics out there and there are lots of things that come and go that are hot but agencies that can stand up and help their clients will get the opportunities more broadly. Help them understand how to effectively integrate online marketing with offline tactics. And then I think the other challenge and opportunity that the challenge as marketers are also being pressed the better to justify their expense in the social and digital space. And so it’s those agencies that come to the table and showcase their ability to provide the analytics.

We represented an agency that ultimately won the Jack in the Box business and they won that business and large part because they were able to help Jack in the Box take the step back and understand where the consumers were gathering their information how they ought to be playing in those specific spaces. They had an offline agency that was doing a fine job for them but wasn’t doing a good job of integrating with social and digital so they were looking for this new agency to help them establish that integration. And then they were also short on the analytics and understanding how to monitor the social space and make that data actionable for their business.

So I think that marketers are becoming savvier because of knowing the right kinds of questions to ask agencies and I think the agency, it’s not just the agency that isn’t playing in the social and digital space with a great deal of depth that that risk today. It’s agency that isn’t looking at it more broadly and strategically to help the client effectively operate in that space and integrate with offline. And then also understand how to measure the effectiveness and respond to these measurements on going.

T: So what I’m hearing you say is one of the biggest opportunities is if you run an agency and you’re not yet big in the digital space, you’re not actively pursuing social media services to your clients, and then giving the deliverables so the measurements, the metrics that you can get, because everything that happens online, the beauty of it is it all happens with clicks and whenever you get clicks there’s a ton of data that you can get. Coz I know I use this on my business. You can very easily see your campaigns this was working this wasn’t working.

M: Right exactly.

T: With that in mind which services, coz I know one of the things and I might be jumping ahead of my questions but that’s okay, one of the things that I read in a report from hubspot was one of the biggest challenges that agencies face is unpredictable revenue. And of course one of the easiest ways to solve that is to get retainer income. So what are some of the services that you think hold that the agencies listening to us may or may not be delivering but probably should be delivering and could be generating recurring revenue for delivering those services?

M: That’s a tough one. I think it’s specific services.

T: Like content creation or social media management or those that I’m kinda thinking.

M: Social media management is fine. It’s certainly establishes kind of reoccurring presence of that agency within that client’s space. The challenge with that is it is overhead intensive for the agency. They need staff to support their clients so it certainly is a good entree. It’s a good way of establishing some sort of reoccurring sustainable relationship. I think that, I don’t know that there is kind of one thing that agencies can necessarily offer to guarantee kind of that on-going retainer relationship other than becoming more of the service sort of the lead agency that’s kind of guiding the overall strategy and developing consistently new campaigns and so forth.

T: What if an agency went to their client and they said “I don’t know exactly what campaigns and what strategies will provide you the results that you need but I know exactly how to find out what campaigns and strategies and that’s accomplished by it seems thru split testing an a b and all that kind of thing”.

M: Sure.

T: Coz I had a conversation with Jay Baer. I think I interviewed him about a week ago from ConvinceandConvert.com and probably most of the people listening to this may know who Jay is. And that was one of the questions that I asked him and I thought that was a great answer because it shifted the burden or the risk of how long is it gonna take. If I’m the client how long is it gonna take this agency to figure out thru all these testing that they’re gonna do of various landing pages and ways of driving traffic and content generation. How long is it gonna take them to find out what really works for me. Well if I agree to have them on retainer that’s their risk and I know what my costs are gonna be and therefore they’d become more of a partner to me. Do you think that’s, to me that seems like it would be like a good conversation to have, is that something that?

M: Yeah I mean that sure, I think that’s fine. I think it’s one piece of the whole puzzle. Split testing and your a b testing and your social media management, I mean certainly it’s an important part of it but it’s one piece of it. So I think it’s the value that an agency can bring to a client is much bigger than I can figure out how to find the right message within the digital and social space that’s I think much bigger than that which is let me show you how to make all of these elements work effectively for you and consistently for you. Because it isn’t just about digital and social that ultimately is gonna drive every business. Yeah I think it’s a fine entry point and I think it’s a good conversation to have but it’s not necessarily the be all end all for every single client and I think that again I think that the challenges are much broader than just how do you message in the social space. It’s how do you become integral part of your consumers’ lifestyle in every weight of connection with that consumer. And that is the social and how you’re messaging and how you’re touching them at each decision point along that process but it’s also how do other platforms you did into what’s happening in the digital space and vice versa.

Personally I think while the content management component of this and the social component of it are important and that’s where consumers are controlling the conversation. You gotta be there and you gotta be a lead in that. You can’t be so far wrapped up in that and so concerned about that that you lose sight of other things that are going on in the conversation outside of that social space. So I think that smart agencies are gonna be those agencies that not only can bring that expertise on the table socially but can also help those clients that more broadly about their consumer and how they live and how to best connect with them at any given touch point.

T: So kind of the difference between tactics and then strategies?

M: Yes I think that it is that and I think being able to stay ahead of the curve in terms of what’s current for its value. I think the more an agency can convince a client that they understand the broad implications of not just how social and digital operate and how we need to play their massive share but again how that affects and how it interfaces what other elements of what they’re doing. And that isn’t just taking it one step further. It’s not just the marketing space but it’s the sales space and it’s the taking it to an extreme. But it’s the internal communication and how your ambassadors from within your organization embrace that. So yeah I mean it’s an important part of the whole social piece of it and it’s certainly that agencies need to be on top of it but I think that there are lots of agencies out there.

I just got off the phone with a social digital agency client of ours who was approached by a prospect and asked. I have social and digital agencies calling me all the time and they’re all claiming all the things that were just talking about here in terms of a b testing and all that kind of good stuff. But tell me in a one page powerpoint slide what makes your agency different. What other things can you bring to the table that can help me as a client know that you guys are thinking bigger than just this one piece of the puzzle. That’s not diminishing the importance of social but we can’t get so wrapped up in the social space to think that that’s all there is and that’s what’s gonna knowing that as an agency is what’s gonna help me set myself apart long term.

T: So there’s a kind of thought that comes to mind as I’m listening to you because if again I remember running my company when it came time to building a business we had to have a way to get our foot in the door but if you’re trying to sell everything in the beginning it’s like way too much of a conversation. So the concept of helping, coz there’s these tactics to get you to the door and the buzz these days is definitely social and I think to a great degree content marketing as well which I don’t so much see as social but it’s more about thought leadership. And I know that in my research on you one of the things that I think you’re trying to do and you could correct me if I’m wrong is through your ongoing blogging creates some thought leadership and wouldn’t it make sense then that if agencies want to be able to talk about the big picture with their new clients or yeah I would say their new clients coz that’s so much of a conversation to have with a brand new client, if they’re starting to put some time and effort into that thought leadership won’t that position them well.

Coz you just said with the agencies what makes you different than all these other agencies, if someone’s been reading your blog and you’re writing really great content that demonstrates that you have skills, experience and expertise in that area I gotta think that because when people buy stuff whatever it is they’re gonna buy there’s a certain number of questions they wanna get answers to before they buy it. And I know in my experience you can knock a lot of those questions through simply having a blog and sharing really great quality content coz people will consume it and they’ll go “oh that agency’s pretty smart with respect with strategy and branding and so forth because I’ve been reading about it.”

M: Sure sure. Yeah without question I mean the programs that we manage in RSW part of these programs is constructing what we call VA or value added email program. Most agencies are not really good at developing their own content and the old cupboards children syndrome where they do a great job of making the shoes for their clients but pretty crappy job of doing it for themselves. So we try and develop content for agencies to help position them as thought leaders in their space but the space that we’re typically choosing is not necessarily expert in the digital social space. That could be a component of it but it’s an expert in the sector or industry that we’re going after. So it’s an understanding of the trends and issues facing that industry and it’s an understanding of the consumer that operates in that space and how to best connect with those consumers coz marketers wanna know that you get them and that you are a thought leader in their world but obviously they also wanna know that you have the skill sets tactically and strategically to be able to kinda carry them forward.

So what we do in RSW is we talk about thought leadership or we basically give it away. We try and help agencies create better business programs for themselves. So we talk about tactics and strategies and we showcase an understanding of the issues going on in the space. And so we try and employ the same strategies for our clients in our program by writing content or finding interesting insights that we can share with their prospects that show them that they get it and they’ve got current and valued thinking that they can bring to the table. So clearly the content creation is an important part of building that thought leadership. Now that said you can’t just rely on that to win the day okay. Because just part of this part of the findings in the study we just completed was marketers still value traditional means for outreach by agencies and they learn about agencies via traditional means like phone and email and mailings. And so our programs and the program we employ for our own business is to integrate consistent messaging across multiple platforms whether it be mailings or phone calls or emails and sitting underneath it is the thought leadership component of it that starts with the blog but activates and then engages consumers or prospects. We don’t just let it sit.

So yeah I mean the social piece is critical. We rely on it very heavily for our programs and for our own business but I believe that a smart agency is gonna be a real value to a client if they can come in with great entry point, what you’re saying, but I would favor an agency that comes in and talks social and the value of content creation but talks about it in the context of how maybe ultimately we can help you think about how to integrate this program or this initiative across other platforms or across how to use it to better activate your sales force or help engage your internal employees or whatever. So can be a great tactic to open up a door but I think the agency that’s gonna really differentiate itself is one that can let that prospect know that they’re a bigger thinker and that they have the techniques available and the analytics available to them to effectively analyze and react and respond to what it is they’re doing.

T: One of the things that you mentioned and that Jay mentioned in my interview with him and he’s mentioned in the book The Good to Great refers to it as the hedgehog strategy. And it’s the intersection of 3 circles and the common thread was pick a specific niche. Like to say that I wanna be the best marketing agency in Houston is tough to do. But to say I wanna be or we are the best marketing agency for accounting firms in Houston someone could own that space or for biotech firms or autobody shops or whatever niche you wanna be. Do you see many agencies specially the smaller ones, are they spending too much time trying to be everything to everyone and in essence being nothing to no one? Or do you see them getting really nichy like there’s a sale cap I wanna go after just this one niche and I’m gonna own this space because it seems to me you’re gonna have a much more strategic conversation when you know the space that well. You get a lot more referrals. You get a lot more thought leadership. But they’re afraid but what if I’m just doing it for accountant what about all these other people that are just gonna magically just come and knock to my door and they’re not gonna be accountants. I might lose that business.

M: Yeah definitely. I mean the tendency is to try and be everything to everybody and you nailed it, it’s a fear of missing an opportunity. But when we manage programs for our agency clients we’re not suggesting that the agency completely change its face but we do have that agency zero in on specific spaces and really zero in on showcasing expertise within a specific single or limited multiple sectors. Because you can’t be everything to everybody. And if you try to just be a generalist agency across all sectors you’re gonna look like everybody else. So I think that the caution is getting too narrow in your focus.

We had an agency client where we were, basically the agency was zeroed in on service marketing expertise and there were certain group of sectors that we were targeting where we were targeting kind of the unique perspective of that. We brought to the table the agency and only playing in the service sector and we were very successful in opening up opportunities for this client. They hired an outside consultant to come in and evaluate kind of where they were going and the consultant recommended that they narrow their focus even more into a very specific, it was like an engineering sector or something along those lines. And the problem with that is that suddenly their universe shrunk, one, and the problem was the opportunities in terms of the dollar volume of business that presented themselves within that sector was very limited.

So yeah definitely a proponent of zeroing in and you don’t have to, you can zero in and also not be in a position where that random stray thing sort of pops in, you can take those things and still live a life of showcasing expertise and insights within specific sectors. What I mean by that is we have agencies where they play in multiple sectors but they have couple of core areas maybe in health care and finance and we will build programs and communicate to those prospects within those sectors as if those were the only areas that we operated effectively in. So there’s a way of kind of playing both worlds sort of thing but definitely you need to focus if you’re gonna be able to differentiate yourself.

T: So let’s say there’s somebody listening to this and they’re thinking “you know that kinda makes sense but I’m not ready to change my whole corporate website and make it all like I’m just gonna be the agency for accountants”. Is there any reason why they don’t have a separate website which is completely and totally geared and optimized for SEO as a matter of fact for accountants in Houston as an example? And then they’re kinda have their company branding down on the bottom and they can still have their main website but for that particular niche as they’re trying to gain traction for that niche maybe their using this other site which is still the about page is still all about their firm and their principle and so forth. Is there any reason why someone couldn’t go that approach?

M: No I mean there’s no reason why they couldn’t go that approach. I don’t know that they necessarily have to in order to effectively play in a specific space. And I don’t think that marketers necessarily are managing a search right now for a major healthcare institution up in Michigan and these guys are not necessarily just interested in finding agencies that operate exclusively in the hospital space. I think there’s value in perspective that agencies can bring from different sectors but that said we’re looking specifically for agencies that have a core expertise in the hospital system space that can bring the insights and the knowledge. But there’s definitely some trade offs. If all you play is in the hospital space that’s all you know and there can be some limits to the broadness or the vastness of your thinking. You played in different industries yourself and you bring experiences from those different industries that can help you think differently about a sector than somebody who only, it’s like we’re talking about agencies and how they think what’s different really isn’t all that different.

I will never forget one of the first presentations I ever made back in 2006 in Kansas City to a group of 20 agencies and gave them all the overhead projector transparency and I asked them to write down their elevator pitch. And 19 of the 20 we’re different because we’re strategic and we work hard and our clients really love working with us. And so that’s the risk in only operating in one sector. Not suggesting that there’s not value in it coz clearly becoming expert in an area thus that marketers wanna know that you understand their space and you can bring value and you can be forward thinking but I don’t think you have to change your agencies face completely to reflect that sector in order to convince the marketer that you know your stuff and you can help them better than an agency who doesn’t present themselves that way.

T: Okay. Alright I’ve got lots more questions for you. I wanna get the listeners some clues to hear what’s coming up. Next I wanna talk a little bit about inbound marketing. We’re gonna talk about some of the tools that you’d suggest that agencies use. And then coz we’re already closing on an hour, if we have time I wanna talk a little bit about developing more business from existing client. So I think we’ll probably run out of time before we get through all of that. I’ve got even more questions on that but I don’t think we’re gonna have some time for that today.

I know that in my research on you or I should say my producer’s research on you before this were some conversation points around inbound marketing. And in your survey there were some agencies that felt that inbound marketing was effective and there were some agencies that felt that inbound marketing wasn’t effective. I’m interested so the perspective for the question is this, I’m an agency, I wanna get more business for myself, should I be using inbound marketing and if so what should I be doing?

M: Yeah inbound marketing is definitely a great tool to use. I think the challenge I’ll just give you some background and perspective. I became a hubspot partner about six months ago on the agency search side of our business because I’m reaching out to marketers trying to get them interested in our agency search model. And the intent of that partnership was to see to what degree kind of the higher order inbound marketing program could significantly change the dynamics in terms of inbound leads and do business ultimately for that business. And the ultimate goal was to see if what we were doing for our agencies on RSWUS side of our business is related to content generation with the goal of trying to create some inbound activity, if there was something more that we could be doing that we weren’t already doing for those programs. And what I found is that there is value in stepping it up but for an agency to assume the responsibility of trying to develop the amount of content that they needed developed for themselves and the time that it takes to manage a program effectively, it’s challenging.

I mean I’ve got an agency client on the RSWUS side who has been operating with hubspot for a while and whether they took it to its holistic stand or not I don’t know. I know they were blogging 4 times a week and all the things that were supposed to be doing but at the end of the idea they just ran out of energy and they had existing client relationships they had to manage and things just got in the way. So I do believe that content development and creating some sort of whether it’s an automated process to communicate with prospects with the goal of trying to establish more inbound leads, whether it’s that or like we do right now in the RSWUS side for our own business. I have a guy who heads up our sales and social for the business and he is kind of like my human hubspot I call him because he’s writing posts, I’m writing posts, we get people downloading surveys or calling those people. It’s agencies that we’re reaching out to so they’re a little more receptive to the content that we’re pushing out. The need is very well defined and clear in terms of business offering and what we can do for an agency.

So I think it’s important for agencies to have content and to activate that content. I’ve wrote a post couple of years ago that got under the skin of some social folks because I talked about social marketing inherently being a passive medium. And my point was it is if all you do is write it and you let it sit or you write and you don’t think about kind of what you’re writing and how you can use social for SEO or about activating it, pushing it out to prospects. How it’s gonna only have limited value. So I think content creation is critical for agencies because they can use that content then in a lot of different ways. In pushing it out to prospects and using it to bolster SEO so it is important but I think that certain agencies that are wholly committed to kind of the higher order inbound marketing program can do it. I think if they’re offering it specific enough it can definitely be a value but I think it has some challenges. I think it’s right for agencies to look at inbound for clients and using inbound as a tool to help clients. But I think the agency offering it’s a time so amorphous and has so many different ways in which it can help a client that it’s tough to really use it and have it in another shelf being the effective tool to drive business.

Coz the difference that I’m seeing between agency search in RSWUS is that I’m managing the agency search hubspot program and I’m writing 4 posts a week and I’ve got the work flows going and all that kind of good stuff. And I’m getting people downloading stuff and I’m getting reports on who’s clicking up things. I’m not doing a great job of it coz I’m the guy managing a following up of those people coz I have a company I have to run where as we who manages who’s my human hubspot, his job is when people download stuff, call them, follow up with them, stay in touch with them and so he’s much more active on that front than I am. And I think that’s where agencies must be prepared to carry it to that level on their own. That’s where the challenge. That’s where it breaks down for me. I think that so.

T: Something I wanna offer to yourself and to anyone that’s listening. I interviewed a fellow by the name of Peep Laja who runs agency, you can get to that interview at Brightideas.co/9. All of their new business comes solely from the blog. He got 50,000 visitors to his blog on the first month. He doesn’t write a lot of posts. In the interview and obviously his particular strategy may or may not work for everyone. I can’t tell you exactly what his agency’s focus is but in the interview you’ll get it all. It worked very very well within the sphere of what he was trying to accomplish. And so I wanted to make sure that people are aware that that’s another resource that they might wanna check out.

M: Yeah absolutely.

T: Alright so I’m gonna finish with this one last question and then get you to tell where people can get a hold of you and so forth. Coz you’re kind of a long answer guy so I don’t think we have time for a few more. But maybe this one is a short one then I’ll ask one more. But in terms of, and I know you’re gonna mention probably hubspot coz you’re partner, tools that agencies could or should be using to help manage the whole I call it life cycle of the lead. You get a lead by one way, shape or form. Maybe it’s from your website or a reporter or whatever. That lead needs to be nurtured to the point when they’re ready to either call you or be called and say yes and become a customer.

And then there’s a whole other phase of client side marketing that happens after that, but what are some of the tools that you would suggest that people use to try? Coz we’re all, especially small business owners, we’re all over worked we don’t have enough time, work work work, and so I’m a big fan of automating that. I call it the sales funnel. I’m a big fan of automating the sales funnel and letting people raise their hand and tell me what they’re interested in. But what are some of the tools that you use for that?

M: Well yeah I mean for our programs it’s not rocket science. It’s a matter of consistency and consistency in messaging and consistency in the outrage and we use all platforms. We use content and blogs that our clients are writing and we’re pushing those out.

T: Is there any specific software tools that you’re using? That’s more what I’m going after.

M: No.

T: No particular. Okay. So you’re a hubspot partner. How does hubspot fit in to, coz I haven’t used hubspot. I use infusionsoft and I know that for me infusionsoft does a very good job coz I can create all these campaigns and have emails go out and they all have links and they go to various landing pages. And depending upon what people click and what people watch, what forms they fill out I can segment my list. I can have automatic additional campaigns get fired off because they clicked on this link which inherently told me they were interested in whatever topic that link was about. Does hubspot do something similar to that?

M: Hubspot has the technology and platforms to enable its customers to do that, yes.

T: It does.

M: So obviously you create the content so that’s again just I think that’s the biggest challenge for agencies. Frankly they need somebody to create the content for them. That’s again part of what we’re looking at. Hubspot of course can reuse that platform to help dial up the outbound activity to increase inbound activity for the program. And I think the answer is yes but it’s yes with a caveat which is if you have the resources and the time to put the program together correctly and effectively. Because if you do it half ass it’s not gonna work for you.

And it sounds like what you’re doing is the right way to be managing it and probably this agency that you referenced is doing it correctly. I don’t know what they’re offering is but I think that if an agency wants to jump into something like that they need to know that they need committed resources to develop the content and manage the intricacies of the program in order to effectively do it. I mean I could use a marketing assistant full time dedicated to hubspot and writing content and developing things that we can be pushing out. So I think that’s my only caution. I think it’s a great, conceptually it’s a great way to go and it is the right thing to do. And it needs to be part of every program. You just got to go in with eyes wide open knowing how much time you’re gonna need to commit to it if that is the sole means by which you are going to generate leads, okay.

Our programs don’t just rely on inbound. We are reaching out to prospects via phone, email and twitter and activating blogs that our clients are writing and hosting surveys on their behalf and then pushing that content out. And getting inbound leads but not just relying on those inbound leads to find opportunities for clients.

T: And that’s something I should comment coz maybe I didn’t make that clear both for my own purposes and Peep’s purposes. One of the things that I spent a lot of time, coz a lot of people, I know I did this when I first started blogging with my previous venture. You know you create all this content but it’s like a tree, if you chop down a tree in the forest will everybody hear it?

M: Absolutely.

T: No. You have to put a lot of time into promoting your content.

M: Absolutely.

T: So if anyone’s listening to this thinking I should just create 4-5 blog posts a week. I would say no you don’t wanna do that. You might wanna create one really good one per week because 99.9% of the world hasn’t read it yet.

M: Yeah right.

T: And so there’s a lot of value in figuring out well who owns the community where my audience hangs out. First of all know who your audience is and then figure out who owns the community and then just go to the community owner and say I have some content that I think that your audience would really find a lot of value in. And have your marketing assistant or whomever is on your team spend probably 4x time promoting the content as it did to create the content the first place. So when I say inbound I don’t mean that people just magically show up and find all of your stuff. What I’m talking about is putting your thoughts and your strategies and your ideas on your blog and then doing everything you can to get people to that blog so that they can see that you’re an expert and they will want more from you.

M: Right. And that 4x the effort is what folks, agencies need to recognize if they want to what we’re calling is inbound as a means by which they’re gonna build a business. Because it takes a lot of outbound whether it’s promoting or whatever it is you’re doing, in our case it’s calling, tweeting and emailing in compliment to any content we’re pushing out. So whatever the means is again it’s not just if I post then they will come. So that’s how I grew up in there.

T: Okay. So I wanna give you the opportunity and I don’t know if you can. Hopefully you can think one off the top of your head coz I did not put this in my questions before. I don’t think I did. Is there a particular success story that you’ve had with a client recently that you wanna maybe talk a little bit about in case there’s people listening to this who are thinking maybe I might like to work with Mark but they might need a little bit more information. Either if there’s a case study on your blog that you wanna point them to or there’s something you wanted to talk about. I just wanna give you the floor to do that for a few minutes.

M: Yeah if you were to ask me 3 years ago what we do I would tell you that we were on the business of finding qualified leads and helping agencies better position themselves. And today when I’m asked that question I answer it by telling prospects that we’re in the business of helping agencies close business. So we have to bring the opportunities to the table. We have to help the agencies better position themselves. We have to be developing the content.

But we have a client that’s been on board for 9-12 months. This gentleman took over the agency from his father a couple of years ago. Brought us on board to help him build his business. One of the first opportunities we opened up for him, he asked us if we would review his presentation that he planned on giving to his prospect. And we agreed because that’s a big part of what we do. We review parts and pieces of proposals and presentations and it was awful. I mean there was nothing in there about the prospect. There was very little in there. We’ve been talking a lot about thought leadership. Nothing in there about thought leadership. No good reasons why this prospect should consider this agency. So we gave him some very hard to swallow but honest feedback on how to improve his presentation. And not only getting end up winning this piece of business but our new business director who represents him sits in on his presentations as webex presentations and he’s like a changed man in terms of the confidence that he has going into this presentations.

And really zeroing in on the needs states of the clients and talking about things that matter to them and not just being another agency that’s pounding your chest and talking about how great you are. And I think the biggest compliment that he received that he passed on to us was that his whatever 70 year old father who run the business for 30-40 years said that hiring RSW was the best decision that he had made since taking over the business. And I think that really is a testament to not only our ability to create opportunities for this agency but also to bring value beyond what he brought us in to do. And that’s helped him become a better sales person and better understand kind of how to approach the prospects that he’s going after.

T: That’s a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing that. So if someone is listening to this and they would like to get a hold of you, what’s the easiest for them to do that?

M: Dropping me a line at mark@RSWUS.com or you could just simply visit our website at RSWUS.com and there’s contact information or resource to contact us there.

T: Okay terrific. We’re I think in the order of an hour and I try to keep these interviews to about the length that someone could consume in the commute to and from work depending on how long their commute is. I think there’s a lot more things that we could talk about so you’re welcome to come back on to the show anytime you like. Thanks very much for making the time to be on the show with us today.

M: Thanks for inviting me. Appreciate it. Take care.

T: Alright take care.

Get to the show notes for Mark and I’s interview where you can get the transcript and other things that we talked about. Just go to BrightIdeas.co/20. And the other thing I wanna briefly tell you about is the massive traffic toolkit. If you go to BrightIdeas.co/massivetraffic and enter your email address you’re going to get instant and free access to the massive traffic toolkit. So what is that? It is a compilation of all of the smartest traffic generation strategies that have been shared with me by my previous guests here on Bright Ideas. And the best part about this toolkit, you do not need to be an SEO expert to be able to execute the strategies that are shared in the toolkit. So go to BrightIdeas.co/massivetraffic.

So that’s it for this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid. Thanks very much for listening. Please do me a little favor. Head over to iTunes and leave a 5 star feedback for us and leave a rating rather and leave some feedback. Coz whenever you do that it helps the Bright Ideas podcast get more exposure and the more people that are able to watch or listen to the podcast, the more small business owners that we can help to discover how they can use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively boost their business. Thank you very much. I’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.

About Mark Sneider

marksneiderMark Sneider is a 25 year veteran of the consumer packaged goods, advertising, and marketing service industry. Mark earned his MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Business School at Northwestern where he majored in Marketing and Economics. Mark obtained his undergraduate degree in Marketing from Miami of Ohio.

Sneider started his career serving clients at DDB Needham in Chicago prior to attending Kellogg. Prior to starting RSW/US, Mark was General Manager for AcuPOLL, a global research consultancy. Sneider worked in Marketing for S.C. Johnson, Andrew Jergens, and O-Cedar Brands.

Sneider has been invited to speak at numerous Agency events and network conferences including the 4A’s, TAAN, and MCAN.  Sneider has been featured in prominent industry publications including Adweek, Media Post, e-Marketer, and Forbes.

When not working, Mark coaches select soccer, teaches Sunday school, and runs. Mark is married and has three teenage children.

10benefits

10 Benefits of Google Plus Communities for Marketers

Google Plus Communities is a recent addition to the social network, it is in some ways similar to Facebook and LinkedIn groups. However, it is different in the way it has been laid out and is definitely easier to navigate.

Brands on Google+ can create communities, this is unlike Facebook where groups can only be created using the personal profile of  the admin, which can severely limit the branded presence in groups. “Administrators have to use personal Facebook profiles when posting to the Group; they cannot comment or post as the brand itself.” 

But more importantly, communities has value for marketers. Below is a list of benefits of Google+ Communities.

Ten Benefits of Google+ Communities for Marketers

1. Creating a community allows brands to identify consumers who have a specific shared interest.

Google Plus Branded Community

2. Identifying popular topics and using it for SEO.  Brands can create content around  topics important to community, which could improve SEO.

Community members can post to a specific topic. If a topic has more posts it could be inferred that topic is more popular.

Topics posted in Google Plus Communities

Note: Google+ does not show the number of entries for each topic, so at this moment it seems this may require more manual sifting. However, I cannot imagine there won’t be some analytics tool that would be able to help with that going forward, or Google may itself roll out this feature.

3.  Gaining more followers.  Communities don’t require a user to also follow the brand’s Google+ page,  however by joining a community a user maybe more likely to also follow the brand’s Google+ page.

The more the Google+ followers a page has the more likely the brand will be able to capitalize on SEO. This is because when a brand publishes the content on its page the more followers it reaches the greater the chances of the content being shared and  discovered by other consumers. Read more

4.  Making the brand more social.  Communities allow an easy and accessible platform for like-minded consumers to connect with each other.

For the Gen Y consumers, community and relationships are of great importance. A brand that facilitates that kinship is more likely to develop loyal customers in the long term.

5.  Allowing consumers a chance to be highlighted.  Communities offer the ability for consumers to share content with other members.

Posts by community members can be selectively shared on the brand’s page, making the connection between the brand and the consumer more intimate.

Cadbury UK Google Plus

6.  Gathering resource.  Content shared by both the brand and the community members make the community a go to place for expert information.

It helps cement the brand’s position as an expert in the category. It makes the brand more reliable and trustworthy.

7.  Discovering new content.  Brands can find unique content that community members publish.

Communities offer crowd-sourced ideas that brands can leverage.

8.  Using communities to get feedback on new product ideas.

Unlike a page where fresh content replaces older content fairly quickly, communities allow for topics that consumers can visit anytime and interact with the respective posts. (Hat tip to +Jerry Daykin)

9.  Identifying the most active community members.  These consumers who post regularly and respond to other community members are brand advocates and potential influencers.

10.  Seeing new or changing trends within the community.  As members gravitate to a specific topic or a new one, brands can have a better understanding and insight.

Share your experiences

These are some of my first impressions on the benefits of Google Plus Communities for marketers.  What do you think?  Where are the opportunities for brands with Google Plus Communities?

 

The original article “TEN BENEFITS OF GOOGLE PLUS COMMUNITIES FOR MARKETERS”  by Krithika Rosenthal was published on Krithika Rosenthal’s Blog

Original Article

 

Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Disrupt an Industry and Make a Million Dollars Doing It: An Interview with Jeremy Yamaguchi

Imagine running a company that generates over a million dollars per year in an industry where your competition barely has a clue how to keep up with you.

What would that look like?

In today’s episode, I interview Jeremy Yamaguchi, founder of GoldenShine.com and in this interview, you are going to hear Jeremy tell the story of how he started his company as a side project 3 years ago, and, thanks to some very smart online marketing, combined with some clever automation, the business is on track for 7 figures this year.

And to think, it all started because his wife was laid off.
This is a fascinating interview, and the lessons that Jeremy is going to share are applicable to virtually any local service business.

In this interview, you are going to hear Jeremy explain:

  • how he came up with the idea
  • what the first version looked like
  • how he knew that the opportunity was bigger than he originally thought
  • what he did next to capitalize on that opportunity
  • how he drives organic traffic to his site
  • how he’s expanding into new markets (and driving traffic)
  • and so much more…

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Watch Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent: Hi there, Bright Idea hunters. Thank you so much for joining me for

this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and

this is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to learn how

to use online marketing and sales automation tactics and strategies to

massively boost their business. And on the show with me to tell you exactly

how he has done that is my friend Jeremy Yamaguchi. Jeremy, welcome to the

show.Jeremy: Hey, Trent, happy to be here.Trent: All right, after much trouble I think we have the sound figured out.

So, for the folks in the audience, Jeremy, who don’t know who you are,

please tell us who you are and what do you do?Jeremy: So, my name is Jeremy Yamaguchi. I have a background in user

interface design, web programming, new media marketing, branding, and logo

design, somewhere along those lines. I actually ran a website design and

development firm for a number of years and I’m currently running a company

called Golden Shine Cleaning Agency. And what we’re doing is we’re taking a

high-tech, high-touched approach to a traditionally low-tech sector of

being household cleaning services.Trent: All right. So, gut reaction. Now, I know the story, so I know

there’s a big story here, but somebody listening might be going, “Household

cleaning, yeah, what’s the fun of that?” But you’ve achieved some pretty

phenomenal results, so talk to us just real quick about the business model,

how it works, and how much revenue you’re generating, and how many

customers you’ve got.Jeremy: So, it’s essentially housecleaning. That’s what it comes down to.

It’s as interesting as it sounds, let’s say. And the beauty of the business

model in and of itself is that it’s recurring in nature, so you don’t have

to continually replace your client base. Once you sign up a customer, you

can retain them for years, assuming you’re doing your job well. And in

terms of our performance as a company, we have been revolutionizing the

local industry, to put it simply. We have been around it for about three

years and we have over a million dollars in projected revenue for 2012. We

have over 4,800 customers and really we’re disrupting the space.Trent: Four thousand, eight hundred customers, that’s plenty of customers.

And you really the core of your business how these customers are finding

you, and the whole marketing, and that’s why you’re on the show, is

everything is happening online, is that correct?Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. That’s where the high-tech part of high-tech, high-

touched comes in. Yeah, that’s a story in and of its self, and I’m sure

we’ll talk about that.Trent: Indeed, we will. All right, so for the people – there’s going to be

people in this audience who maybe haven’t started a business yet, and there

are some people in my audience who are already running a business. They

always want to know more about the guest and your background. I know you

just alluded to it very briefly, but what were you doing before you started

this company?Jeremy: Well, I do have a background in web development and interface

design, so that spans prints, old media, new media, all of that. I ran, and

actually still continue to run a new media marketing firm. We build

websites. We do branding. We do SEO. We do all sorts of stuff. I handle

social media campaigns, and that’s my background. I would traditionally

work with I guess you would call it, “clients in more sexy industries,” as

it were.And that is really where the opportunity came in is applying that sexy to

what is probably somewhat less than sexy of an industry – housecleaning.

So, that’s really my background and where my skill set comes in.Trent: Do you think, though, how much of having that background enabled you

to be successful in this business, because building your websites are not

particularly tricky these days?

Jeremy: Sure. Well, let’s just say that we build a lot more than websites.

Part of our advantage in this business – it’s multifaceted. There are two

sides to it. There’s the client side, which is our advertising advantage

and the fact that we can present ourselves in a fashion that a lot of our

competitors can only dream of. And then, there’s the operation side the

back end. And that’s where being a web programmer has been very

advantageous.

I built an operations management system. It’s proprietary web-based

software that automates a ton of our processes, and it not only makes us

more efficient and builds our profit, but it also allows us to provide

profoundly better service than our competitors can through the use of

technology. You know that’s our distinct technological advantage.

Trent: Okay. So, let’s walk through – well, I want to start at the

beginning. So, I know you got this idea I think when you said your wife was

laid off. She – correct me if I’m wrong – she said she liked cleaning

houses, and so originally, you just kind of threw up a quick site, put some

ads on Craigslist and you got some leads and some business from that, is

that correct?

Jeremy: Exactly. It’s a classic recession story, almost. My wife was laid

off for a day at work. We needed to fill that gap and said, “Hey, what do I

like doing? I like cleaning, maybe that’ll work.” And I said, “Why don’t I

build a website and see what kind of traction it gets.” And we posted it to

Craigslist, got a substantially larger number of leads than I expected, and

that’s where I guess the – that’s where it clicked, as it were. And I

realized that this industry is in fact pretty ripe for disruption, and

we’ve been going strong ever since.

Trent: All right. So, the key take away from that, that I really wanted

people to understand is your first version was really cheap and really

fast. Throw up just a bare bones – you didn’t build any of this back end

automation or any of this fancy stuff, correct? You just put up a basic

website, put an ad on Craigslist.

Jeremy: Sure, absolutely. Yeah, it was I mean I’m not going to say it was

hideous, because as a designer and something of a perfectionist it was

okay, but it was okay in that it was built in a day, so you could take that

as far as you can, but it wasn’t amazing, no.

Trent: The point is, is you were able to get a lot of real validation that

you – that this business had plenty of opportunity before you invested a

bunch of money. And that’s something that I think is very – it stands in a

lot of people’s way, in that they think that they have to do too much and

put too much capital at risk. Where they spend doing market research, and I

think that the best market research in the world is to throw up a shingle

and say, “Do you want to buy?”

And in your experience that’s exactly what happened, all right. So, you did

that for a while, and then you figured out, “Okay, we need to grow this

business, and bring in some automation, and some more advanced technology.”

So, kind of walk us through that process. What happened next?

Jeremy: You know it’s not so much as a single next step as much as it is a

continual iterative process of improvement. It goes from improving our

marketing on the SEO front. That’s a story in and of its self. You know how

to rank great, and as someone familiar with SEO you know that all too well,

improving on our rankings, getting a lot of great leads through web search,

through other advertising channels. And then it’s also iterating on the

back end.

Really, it’s in a sense kind of akin to the whole lean startup approach of

building as you learn. You do something. You assess its impact on your

business, and you either replace it with another test or attempts or you

keep it if it’s performing wonderfully. And you have this feedback loop

where you continually try to improve all aspects of your business from your

presentation from the client side, to the operation side, and it’s a daily

process. I don’t think I’ll ever stop working to improve this business on

every end of it.

Trent: Yeah, that’s the joy of being online is that we never lack for data

on what’s working and what isn’t working.

Jeremy: Sure.

Trent: So, what was the next step? And so we’ve got business coming in from

Craigslist, and then you realized that you – did you realize you needed

more business or did you realize you needed more automation, because you

were already finding inefficiency with the first business that was coming

in?

Jeremy: Well, it was probably more business, because while I originally

built this site as an experiment to see, “Hey, can I get my wife a cleaning

job or two?” You know I quickly realized that that wasn’t the end goal,

here, and that there was much greater market and opportunity that I could

pursue. And at that point it was – it started drawing a lot more of my

focus from my other business to this, pursuing all the marketing efforts,

all of which have – well, most of which have been totally web-centric, up

to this point.

And from Craigslist we basically started an SEO campaign. Built out a

sizable website with a lot of great content, and started doing various

things to rank. That was essentially the next step, as far as I remember.

Trent: Okay, okay. That’s what I was looking for was that next step. So,

your SEO strategy was it – well, you go ahead and explain it, I’m assuming

it’s probably a long-tail strategy of some kind, but I’ll let you explain.

Jeremy: You know it’s actually all of the – it’s all of the tail. You know

if you search for the generic term “housecleaning” at the moment, and

you’re in San Diego, Google considers that to be a geo-specific search

term. So, it’ll give you a local result, and we have the number one result

for the head term “housecleaning” if you’re searching from our service

region. Also, we have targeted a ton of long-tail. I mean long-tail being

what it is that it’s hundreds and hundreds of keywords that we ranked for

that are more obscure, but that do add up to quite a significant amount of

traffic. So, we’ve targeted that, as well.

Now as far as how we target that it’s the whole smorgasbord of SEO

optimization from getting authoritative articles and back links, to we’ve

created some amazing info graphics that have actually received some great

traffic for us across Twitter, the social media sphere. And that’s resulted

in some great traction for us, and a definite jump in rankings. We really

tried a lot of things and a number of them have worked sufficiently well

that we are now ranking amazingly for the terms that we care about.

Trent: And how much content is on the site, currently? How many posts?

Jeremy: I couldn’t answer that off the top of my head, but I would say

we’ve probably got 60 blog posts, and we’ve got maybe 40 inner pages across

the site. It’s not a shallow website. It’s got some depth to it. Of course,

it could be. It’s not 10,000 pages or anything like that, but we also have

somewhat of a stringent quality standard that doesn’t allow us to just

explode out with tons of copy. We don’t release anything that doesn’t sound

– that doesn’t have the tone that we’re aiming for as business. We try to

control that – our message very, very tightly.

Trent: And in terms of ongoing content, so do you have an editorial

calendar? Are you continually adding new content, and if so what frequency,

and how long are these articles that are – that make up a post.

Jeremy: Yeah, we add content on a regular basis. We’ve actually expanded.

We’re not just in San Diego. We’ve expanded the operation now Orange County

and Los Angeles, and each of those expansions come with their own website,

complete with unique copy, which is a lot of copyrighting, and their own

blog. So, we try to post at least every other week to our blogs, and those

are three blogs, at the moment.

As we continue to expand we’re going to have maybe five or six blogs

running concurrently, and that’s a lot of high quality that you are going

to have to create. We don’t post anything that doesn’t – that isn’t

awesome. And maybe, it’s not all awesome. You can’t expect everything to be

amazing, but we have very high standards for the stuff that we release, and

that has proven to be one of the greatest challenges that we’ve faced, is

coming up with really great high quality and contextually relevant content

to post across our various websites.

Trent: So, you mentioned more than one blog. You mean GoldenShine.com not

the only blog, now. There are others?

Jeremy: No, as we’ve expanded to other regions we actually have – there’s a

few different you can take on SEO when you want to target various

geographic regions you can go with the subdomain, or the subfolder. So, you

could do GoldenShine.com/orange-county as our Orange County recommended

profile. I opted to go with whole domains, so we have

cleaningorangecounty.com is our Orange County website. We’ve got

hellocleaning.com as our L.A. website, and as we expand we’ve gone the

route of standalone domains, with very geo-specific content. As I tend to

think that that is a better approach to ranking across geographic regions,

rather than just creating more targeted content under the goldenshine.com

domain name.

Trent: Okay, and for the listeners who are listening to this and don’t have

access to the web right now, I’m just pulling up some of those other sites,

and the name on them is still Golden Shine, and the branding is still

consistent. So, you’ve kept that consistent across these various blogs.

Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. It’s an optimization effort. In a perfect world

we’d be under one domain, with one brand, but this was something that I

decided to pursue as I think it’s more advantageous on the rankings front

than going with Orange County subsections under the goldenmshine.com

domain.

Trent: Okay. Now, you talked a lot about just a minute or two ago, about

producing this high quality content. So, talk to us a little bit about how

it’s produced. Are you using 1099 riders? Are you going to Elance? How are

you getting it done?

Jeremy: Actually, I’ve tried just about everything. I’ve used professional

copywriters. I’ve used Elance. I haven’t tried Fiber yet, as I’m not

certain that the quality that you would get for five bucks would be – would

meet our standards, but I have a – actually we have some employees who

we’ve hired for a variety of functions, one of which is good copywriting

skills. And they actually write a lot of the copy for our blogs. And we’ve

been very lucky in that they’re pretty good. And they’ve been able to

consistently deliver high quality content, that has been to our standards,

and that’s how we actually get a lot of the content that we post, now.

I do also work with various 1099 copywriters, and freelance copywriters, as

well, because we are kind of an insatiable beast when it comes to web copy.

We can use as much as can get. So, I really – I’ve used most of the options

available at the source for great copy, and while it’s hard to find, you

can find the people who do, in fact, write very well at reasonable rates.

Trent: And are you when you decide to add a new piece of content, are you

choosing the keyword first, and then creating content around that keyword,

or how do you decide what you’re going to write about?

Jeremy: You know honestly I think our foremost concern is to create

something that is interesting to our customer base, and also that’s

contextually relevant. You know that has to do with cleaning of some

variety. Maybe it’s cleaning tips like how to clean your wooden floors, and

that’s somewhat of a niche article in that not everyone has wood floors,

but we found that that’s interesting enough to our client base that we’ll

get some decent interaction from our audience both in the form of shares in

other social media distribution.

And that’s really how we enter into all of this. We want to create

something that’s interesting to the read first and foremost. With SEO being

the secondary benefit. We’re not just creating posts for the sole fact that

we might be able to get some long-tailed keywords stacked up a random

searcher once a year. It’s more that we want content that puts us in a

position where we are authoritative. Where the reader and visitor does

understand that we know what we’re talking about. That we have experience

in this industry, and that boosts our credibility and it also provides a

value to the reader. It’s genuinely valuable content that they will take

away good information from and hopefully share with their friends.

Trent: Plus it’s going that when you have good quality content you’re going

a long way to nurture your needs. I was interviewing a fellow by the name

of Jay [Baer] yesterday, and in the interview we were talking about this

topic of lead nurturing and he said, “You know everyone has questions that

they want answers to before they’re going to buy anything from you. And

there are some people have three questions, some people have 10 questions,

some people have more than that, and your content, if it’s well-written,

I’m assuming for you guys, is doing a good job of helping to answer these

questions, and therefore establish trust credibility and rapport with your

perspective customers.

Jeremy: Sure. Yeah, that’s one of the goals, and certainly, I would say the

primary goal of any content that we write.

Trent: So, in looking at, and I’m on Hello Cleaning, right now. How much of

the traffic is coming to these sites from SEO versus say paid media buys?

Jeremy: Well, it varies per property. So, for goldenshine.com, which is our

San Diego website and really the mother ship, if you will. So, it’s

majority organic. So, we get a lot of traffic from organic search, because

we’re ranking so well, organically. The other sites because they’re recent

expansions, organics can take a while to do and materialize, regardless of

how well you optimize. So, that’s a mix of PBC and other media buys across

the web, as well as some offline marketing, actually, some old media stuff

that we’ve been piloting and seeing how it works out.

So, it varies from property to property, but I would definitely say we’re

paying more for our visitors on the newer websites than we are on Golden

Shine, which happens to rank much better.

Trent: Okay. So, when I arrive at Golden Shine, however I get there, I’m

going to land most likely on a blog post as opposed to the home page, if

I’ve come organically pending upon the search term that I punched in. Would

you say that that’s accurate, or where are people landing most commonly?

Jeremy: I think the whole site is pretty well optimized, but the home page

is the authoritative page on the website, as you would expect. So, it

definitely sees the most traffic of any given page across the site, but I

guess that’s the whole long-tail versus head term question. Does a long-

tail add up to substantially more traffic than the head term, even though

the head term in and of its self, it worth more than any individual long-

tail term. I would say that it’s probably almost 50/50. We get as much

traffic from the head terms, the housecleaning, or the San Diego

housecleaning, or housecleaning San Diego, San Diego maid service stuff

like that, then as we do from longer tail terms, like how to clean hard

water deposits, or stuff like that.

Trent: Yeah, so let’s talk about the conversion process. The traffic’s

coming to me the call to action looks like the “get a quote” button or the

phone number. Both are in the top right hand portion of the screen. Is

there another call to action that I don’t see, or is that it?

Jeremy: That’s our ultimate goal for any given visitor. We want them to get

a quote. And they, yeah, they can call us. They can do it through the

website its self, that’s their choice.

Trent: Do you have metrics on the percentage of leads that you’re getting

from the “get a quote” button versus the phone number?

Jeremy: Yeah, I think we get about 50% of what we get by phone that we get

from web based conversions. So, you know if 100 people convert online,

we’ll get another 50% back on.

Trent: Okay. So, when you talked earlier in the interview about automation,

and that’s the area that I want to dig a little deeper into now. Because in

a service business like this where you are using a large number of

subcontractors, are they subcontractors or employees? Because I know we

talked about this a while ago. You had an incident, you had – so, which one

is it?

Jeremy: Yeah, they are independent contractors. We are what’s called the

domestic referral agency, which is a specific big business-type that we can

form in the State of California. And it allows us to refer independent

contractors to homes across Southern California.

Trent: Okay. So, you have a – there’s a reasonable number of people in that

pool of subcontractor so you have a lot of moving parts to manage,

scheduling, quality assurance, payment all that stuff. So, can you talk a

little bit about some of the back end automation, how you’ve made this

business more efficient so that you can actually turn a decent profit at

it.

Jeremy: Well, the system that I’ve built it’s called our operations

management system, for lack of a better name. But it automates things from

scheduling to it’s a CRM, so it handles customer records, feedback. It

handles alerts. It’ll e-mail our customers before their jobs, and they’ll

know to expect our housekeeper, which reduces the lock-out incidence rate.

You know so housekeepers don’t show up and have no one there.

It handles all sorts of stuff from reporting both on our conversion

tracking, and performance on that front, as well as it has some pretty

awesome feedback loops for housekeeper performance, as well, which allows

us to provide better, higher quality housekeepers to our customers.

So, because it allows us to analyze their performance and continue on with

those who are doing amazingly and give them preference when it comes to new

clients. If someone who has a great record and gets like some of the great

feedback, requests a job, they’re going to get it over someone who has a

lower quality performance record. So, that ensures that we’re sending the

best possible housekeeper to our clients, and it’s a great quality boost on

that front.

Trent: So, if I’m understanding this correctly you’ve got for lack of a

more detailed explanation, kind of an Amazon type rating system where your

customer is coming back after the fact and saying, “Hey, that was a four

star cleaning, or a five star cleaning, or no that wasn’t a very good

cleaning.” That information’s then going into the database and in some way

interacting with the record for each of your subcontractors, and assigning

them a score. Would that be fair to say?

Jeremy: Yes.

Trent: And then, when new jobs go into the schedule, and these

subcontractors are receiving I’m guessing some kind of notification that

there are new jobs for them to go and grab, somewhere in the math you have

made it so that those subcontractors who have a higher score can take

precedence in some way shape or form to get the job or do they get the

notification? How does that work?

Jeremy: Well, as part of the system it’s not just on our end. This

operation software actually is extended out to the housekeepers that we

work with, and plus jobs. So, as the job comes in it’ll be visible to all

of our housekeepers and they can say, “Yeah, I want that Thursday at 9:00

a.m.” And we will see that six or seven housekeepers requested a specific

job, and we can dispatch to the highest performing housekeeper as opposed

to just sending to the first person who contacts us and say they want it,

so then – go ahead.

Trent: Okay, so then. That’s what I was trying to understand the dispatch

process is that still a human interaction process where someone on your

team is saying, “Hey, we’ve got this job. It came from 123 Some Street in

L.A. and here are the six subcontractors that are bidding on it. This one

has the highest score therefore I’m going to assign the job to that

person.”

Jeremy: Exactly. Yeah, there has to be the human review, because you’ve got

to make a judgment call and say, “Is this the best person for the job?”

There’s also an additional factor in here, which is that across the level

of good housekeepers, there are fast housekeepers who are just very

efficient and get through homes real quickly, and that there are really

slow but incredibly detailed housekeepers that will clean things with a

toothbrush.

And what constitutes good, is somewhat relative to the [home]. So that’s

where our office staff has to come in and do a great job. And they do a

great job of this, of pairing housekeepers to customers for their tastes.

So, it can’t simply be boiled down to ratings, the five star housekeeper

always gets the job, because you might have a few five star

housekeepers requesting a job and it’s a matter of interpreting the needs

of the customer, and pairing them with the best possible housekeeper for

their needs. And that’s how you get great result, all around.

Trent: And repeat customers.

Jeremy: Precisely, which is the bread and butter of the business.

Trent: All right. So, we could probably continue on down that rabbit hole

of automation for ever and ever, and ever, but without people being – for

those who are listening to this – without seeing interfaces and so forth,

it would probably be not as beneficial. So, I’m going to shift gears here

and I wanted to ask you about the product launch. Did you have any kind of

formal launch for this? Or was this very much just an organic, it just kind

of built slowly over time?

Jeremy: It’s entirely organic and that’s probably due to the fact that it

was a secondary pursuit for me for a long time, because of the demands of

my website design and development firm. That sucks most of my attention,

and this was something that I saw as an opportunity and pursued kind of

with gradually greater interest. You know as time progressed and then as I

saw more and more traction, and began to realize the opportunity, I was

able to devote more and more time to it. But it wasn’t something that I

spent six months building, and then tech-crunched out of the gate to get

things off. It was very organic in that sense.

Trent: And how about the new site in Orange County, and L.A? Was there a

launch strategy for those? Was there anything you did in particular or did

you just simply put the sites up and then start to purchase traffic, start

to optimize by creating content, and over time traffic just sort of built?

Jeremy: That’s mostly what we do. I mean we’ll throw out a press release

and let people know, but given the noise it’s not exactly brand new news

that’s going to be repeated everywhere that you get your news that a

housecleaning company expanded to another geographic region. So, we haven’t

beaten too many drums over the patch, but it is definitely something that

we throw some stuff out there and we get some interest. And it’s mostly

just launching all of the region is the primary effort there when we do

build a new site and expand into a new region. It’s a lot of work and it’s

getting all of that set up and humming along smoothly that’s really the

launch, effectively.

Trent: Are you building a list of perspective customers with this? Like, I

don’t see what you see is so common. As you know, “Hey, download free

report, give me your e-mail address, that kind of thing.” Are you doing

anything like that? I just haven’t seen it, yet?

Jeremy: No, we don’t have any white papers or anything like that. In a

sense our credibility builder as it were is our blog or our various blogs,

and that’s where we build an audience. That’s where we establish ourselves

as experts in the field, which we quite frankly are. And that’s what we do

in lieu of a download or something like that.

Trent: But, without a list if you wanted to offer a special or a coupon or

this or that or the other thing, you can’t reach out and say, “Hey, come

get this discount coupon for this weekend.” And I know in my business the

list is everything. It’s the most valuable asset, so why wondering why you

chose not to go down that road.

Jeremy: Well, the thing is, is that we do in fact have a mailing list, and

it’s first and foremost we have our mailing list which is our existing

customers, and up until very recently we had an opt-in box on the website,

“sign up for our mailing list for news, tips, tricks and deals from Golden

Shine Cleaning Agency.”

And we did see some interest there, but that was a call that I made to

remove that sign-up list, quite frankly because we didn’t have the time to

reach on the regular basis to our existing list. We weren’t essentially as

much advantage of it as we could. And being that that was the case and had

been for some time, I made a call to remove the mailing list call to action

from the site, because it did detract from our primary call to action,

which is to get a quote for your home.

And as the saying goes, “When you emphasize everything, you emphasize

nothing” and I wanted to reduce the things that we were emphasizing and

kind of pitching to a website visitor in order to focus on the things that

were really the most important to us.

Trent: Okay. Every business owner has a period I call it the, “Oh, beep

moment.” Where stuff hits the fan, things go drastically wrong, and I’m

wondering if you had an incident like that at all in the last three years,

or maybe you had more than one?

Jeremy: The Valley of Sorrow. Yeah, you know we – yeah, I’ve definitely

been through that. In our particular case it came in the form of a letter

from the employment development department letting us know that we were

being audited for employment classification purposes. So, they just wanted

to make sure that the housekeepers that we work with are correctly

classified as independents, so we’re operating under all the regulations

and that we’re in compliance with the civil code that we operate under as a

domestic’s referral agency.

And thankfully, we were. We passed that audit just fine, because we were in

fact compliant, but it’s never a pleasant thing to receive a letter from a

state or government agency, particularly if it has “audit” in the title.

And that I would say is definitely the “Oh, bleep moment,” as it were, so

far. I’m sure there’s going to be a few more occasions where I have my day

promptly ruined by something I received in the mail, but as of yet, that’s

been the primary source of stress. But that’s behind us; thankfully I’m

proud to report.

Trent: So, we’re going to wrap up here quickly – fairly shortly rather. I’m

having trouble speaking today – fairly soon, and before we do that a couple

things. I want to know in case there are people who are listening to this

who are thinking that, “Hey, maybe they want to be able to do some kind of

business with you, or they want to partner with you.” What are some of your

plans for this future, and how can people get a hold of you?

Jeremy: Well, right now it’s now of what we’ve done to date. We are working

on expanding out to other geographic regions. We’re currently focused on

California for the moment, but we certainly are interested in scaling on a

more national level given the opportunity and the time, really it’s what it

comes down to.

And then, we’re also still at the continual process of improvement,

iterating on what we’re currently doing, and figuring out a way to do it

better, whether that’s our customer service, and the way that we deal with

problems when they do arise, or the way that we attract new clients in our

marketing, the client facing end of things. That’s something that I think

there’s always room for improvement on that front. And that’s something

that we are definitely pursuing on a continual basis.

If people feel like they can help contribute in that sense, I am all ears.

I’m always open for new ideas to see what kind of products people have that

can help move us forward in any of those various directions.

Trent: Okay. One last question just popped into my mind. The software, are

you using open source, and putting existing objects together or did you

just start with Note Pad and write from scratch?

Jeremy: Blank slate.

Trent: Really?

Jeremy: Yeah, white screen writing it up from scratch. That’s not to say

that we don’t use tools. We use stuff like JQuery and existing libraries

that developers provide to help make programming easier, but we haven’t

built off of preexisting CRM systems or anything like that. This is all

built from the ground, and it kind of had to be that way I think because of

how specific our needs are. It’s allowed us to tailor things very well to

fit our needs and that isn’t something we could of necessarily could have

done if we went with and out of the box solution.

Trent: Did you look at Infusionsoft in any detail before you built your

own?

Jeremy: The CRM?

Trent: Yeah.

Jeremy: I didn’t. Although, I did look at Salesforce, Zoho, and a few of

these other various CRM systems, and they’re great as far as CRM’s go, but

we needed something that is like a CRM on steroids. The CRM is probably

only about 25% of what our system does. The automation that comes in on the

provider side, on the scheduling, and on the reporting side is something

that it’s too specific to our needs to have been solved with an out of the

box solution, I think.

So, we programmed it. Yeah, it was absolutely a great investment of time.

It’s been years in the making, but it’s our distinct technological

advantage. Having built it, this is what separates us from the competition.

Trent: The only reason I bring that up is there’s going to be some people

who are listening to this who would be daunted – overwhelmed by the idea of

maybe building their own custom solution. If that’s you I don’t obviously

know Jeremy’s back end business processes, but I’ve interviewed quite a few

people that use Infusionsoft. I use Infusionsoft, and it is a CRM system on

steroids, and it is amazing what you can do in terms of customization, work

flows automation.

So, don’t let the fact that Jeremy built software from scratch discourage

you from getting into this or any business where you think that you want

that back end automation, because it can be had without being a programmer.

And there are obviously more than one platform. I just happen to be

familiar with Infusionsoft, because I use and again, because I’ve

interviewed a lot of people that have used it.

Jeremy: Well, I definitely agree. I think you can certainly choose an out

of the box software that will solve your problem for 90% of the use cases.

And it’s just we chose to go this direction to get to the 99%, but if you

can get 90% of your problem solved without investing years into developing

custom software, that might be a better decision, arguably.

Trent: Yeah, okay.

Jeremy: Yeah, do not feel daunted.

Trent: Last thing is how do people – what’s the best way to get a hold of

you, Jeremy?

Jeremy: You can actually contact me at Jeremy@goldenshine.com. That’s

probably the best way to get a hold me. You can also just LinkedIn me,

Jeremy Yamaguchi, and I’m pretty accessible through that format, as well.

So, pick your choice.

Trent: Okay, terrific. Jeremy, thanks very much for being a guest here on

the podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

Jeremy: Thanks for having Trent, appreciate it.

Trent: All right. Take care.

Jeremy: Bye-bye.

Trent: All right, if you want to get the show notes for my interview with

Jeremy, just go to brightideas.co/19, and the other thing that you’ll want

to do is head over to brightideas.co/massive-traffic. If you enter your e-

mail address there you’re going to get free instant access to my massive

traffic tool kit.

So, here’s what the tool kit is. It’s a compilation of all of the best

traffic generation strategies that have been shared with me by my guests

here on Bright Ideas. And the best part about it is you don’t need to be an

SEO guru to be able to implement any of the strategies. So, you can get it

at brightideas.co/massive-traffic.

So, that’s it for this episode for the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host

Trent Dyrsmid. If you enjoyed this episode, please do me a small favor,

head over to iTunes and leave us a five star rating along with some

feedback. Every time that you do that it helps the show to get a little bit

more exposure in iTunes and with more exposure we can help more

entrepreneurs to discover Bright Ideas to help them massively boost their

business. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure. We’ll see you in the next

episode.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at brightideas.co.

 

About Jeremy Yamaguchi

JeremyYJeremy started as a web designer and developer, as the founder of Aeron Creative. Jeremy has a strong design aesthetic and the ability to create highly functional web apps. These skills have provided him with a distinct technological advantage when applied to the household services sector.

As founder and president of Golden Shine, an employment agency for household-related services, over the course of a few short years Jeremy has grown the business to seven figures.

 

Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Increase Lead Conversion, Work Less, and Automate More: An Interview with Jay Baer

What if I told you that you would have a better chance of growing your revenue if you focused on getting fewer leads?

You’d think I was nuts, right?

Well, not so fast there grasshopper!

In today’s episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Jay Baer of ConvinceandConvert.com to talk about his exact strategy for maximizing lead conversion (notice I didn’t say that we were going to talk about his exact strategy for getting the maximum number of leads).

In addition to the above, Jay and I also talk about:

  • how to spend less time working IN your business and more time working ON it
  • which automation tool Jay is using to do this (I use the same one)
  • a great example of content marketing with bricks and feathers
  • how to persuade more clients that going on retainer is a good idea for them (as well as you)
  • Jay’s favorite tools and resources for small agency owners
  • how to ensure your business is worth more when it comes time to sell it
  • what books he’s reading right now
  • and so much more

Don’t forget to leave a comment so Jay and myself get to hear what you think of the interview :)

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

In this episode, I interview Jay Baer, president of convinceandconvert.com.

Watch Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

An Interview with Jay BaerT: Hey there Bright Idea hunters, thank you so much for joining me for the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast for business owners and marketers who wanna learn how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively boost their business.On the show with me today is Jay Baer from ConvinceandConvert.com. Jay, welcome to the show.Jay Baer: Thanks Trent, I appreciate that you have me on the show.T: No problem. It’s an honor to have you here. So for the folks in the audience who maybe don’t know about you yet, can you tell us who are you and what do you do?J: Sure. My name is Jay Baer. I am the president of the social media and content marketing accelerator firm Convince and Convert. We work with major corporations all across the world helping them understand the social media and content strategy. Then we also work with a number of different ad agencies, PR firms, marketing firms all across North America helping them kinda get in price and stuff and sell social and digital services. We have award winning blog at ConvinceandConvert.com, weekly podcast on social pros and a daily email newsletter called one social thing.

T: Alright so you’re audience and my audience is the same group of people and we wanna help them do the same thing. If you’re running an agency we wanna help you run a more successful agency. More clients, more profits, more revenue and a better lifestyle. So wtih that in mind in the study of agencies that I have done and they’re very similar to the business I was just talking to you about off camera that I used to run, big challenge how to get leads, leads, leads. Everybody wants more leads. So can you share with me what you’ve seen agencies have particular success with when it comes to lead generation?

J: Well I think actually I would debate the premise a little bit.

T: Sure.

J: I feel like agencies are, in many cases too focused on leads and not focused enough on conversion rate. I was in an agency at one point where we just went through the string finishing second over and over and over again, right? And you’re just sort of burning stuff time and burning resources at that kind of point. So I would challenge people and we do this with agencies and corporate clients all the time. We just say you know what, don’t worry as much about leads until you know that you’ve got the conversion process dialed and that you know that you are closing the maximum percentage of business that’s seriously you’ll never gonna get them all, obviously no one converts a 100% of their leads, but figure out whether it’s market automation or the nurturing or being smarter about content or how you interact with leads in the funnel. Spend time making sure that once you’ve spent the time and resources to create a lead that you’re actually closing them.

Setting that aside in terms of the lead generating vehicle I always feel like the best way to do that is demonstrate your expertise in some way but to do it in a, and I just have this conversation with my agency clients this morning, to do it in a focused specifc manner. So agency blogging for example, very popular now, it didn’t use to be but of course now almost every agency has some sort of blog or some sort of thought leadership program which ostensibly creates leads and many cases it doesn’t because the blog doesn’t really have sufficient call to action they didn’t do it.

But I find the biggest problem with most agency thought leadership program is that it’s about everything the agency knows. And if your thought leadership is about everything it is by definition about nothing. So even though your agency might actually offer 25 different services you really ought to pay attention to 3 or 4 that really makes sense that you really wanna go long on and create content, create thought leadership, create ebooks and blog posts and podcasts and videos about those topics because then you can actually get enough density of content and enough lead generating inbound action to adopt and make it work.

T: In other words find a niche and make sure that you go really really deep on that niche or topic whatever word you’d like to use.

J: Yeah and there’s really sort of X Y and Z axis on that potential niche so you can either have a geographical niche were all about Alabama or were all about Houston or whatever your story is. Or you can have a vertical niche or you can have a services niche and I think the best agencies that generate the most consistent stream of leads are those that apply all three of those contents. We’re the best agency at search engine optimization for health care in Texas. Now are you gonna have the most leads? No you’re not. But your lead conversion rate is going to be massively higher because you’re saying this is what we stand for, we are the best in the world at this one thing. And I think that’s a better approach.

T: I’m gonna guess that you have read Good to Great.

J: Yes absolutely.

T: Because this is the hedgehog strategy in the book.

J: Yap exactly.

T: Okay so for anyone who’s listening if you haven’t read that book yet it’s a really fantastic book. Now you mentioned something that is near and dear to my heart early in your answer. You talked about lead nurturing and automation. A whole another interview we could go down with that good one and maybe if the calendar permits we’ll come back to that. But can you give us a short answer for people who might not know what lead nurturing is and how would you automate lead nurturing?

J: I think the easiest way to conceptualize it is to say nobody becomes a customer of anything, of twizlers or an agency or a car or anything in between. Nobody buys anything until or unless the questions they have about that product or service have been satisfactorily answered. Period always. So what you need to do as a business owner of any kind of business and I think that’s even more acute in professional services is to say let’s walk it back and for somebody to higher agency what do they have to be satisfied with? Well they have to be satisfied with their expertise. They have to be satisfied with our deliverables. They have to be satisfied with our price. They have to be satisfied with the talent of our staff. They have to be satisfied with the way we do business. They have to be satisfied with the fact that we know things that apply to their industry and there’s probably 2 or 3 other things in that chain.

So at some point from the lead generation to signed deal process those questions have to answered. The way agencies have historically tried to do that Trent to say let’s get together in the conference room and we’ll have the whole conversation and we’ll kind of throw a bunch of things against the wall and we’ll tell you how great we are and hopefully we’ll convince you. You know, we’ll convince them in the conference room.

T: In other words, we’ll close you.

J: Yeah right we’ll close you over donut or whatever. Lead nurturing marketing automation says sure you’re gonna have that human element at some point but the human element is much farther down the consideration found in this classically kind of the case. What you do is when someone becomes a lead we know that you are interested in this particular agency service because of either information you provided in your lead form or what web pages you were looking at before you filled out that form and then we put you into a business rules governed sequence which then delivers to you information that answers some of those questions that need to be answered without me having to do it face to face.

So in my case we use infusion soft because of marketing automation software company that handles our email marketing and our follow up sequences. If somebody, I just put out a new ebook today and if somebody signs up for that ebook they’ll go into a special follow up sequence, they’ll get another email from us a week later with some different information. Then a week after that we’ll give another email with some other information then a week after that we’ll give another email. So we are leaving them down the consideration path of very strategically and very specifically because not everybody is ready to have a meeting in the conference room 2 seconds after they fill up the lead form which is usually what happens in an agency environment. Somebody says those are our contacts I’ll say call these guys right now get them in, let’s get a meeting set up. And in some cases people want dinner and movie first.

T: I’m an Infusion Soft user myself.

J: Oh great.

T: And I absolutely love it.

J: They have a conference next year. I’m looking forward to it.

T: Terrific. I’ll see you there. And I’ll tell you if I would have understood back when I was running my agency equivalent if I would have a tool like Infusion Soft and understood how much power it had I could have done a lot more. So for the folks again that are listening to this, if you haven’t checked out Infusion Soft yet go get yourself a demo, go sign up on a webinar. It is amazing. When people open those emails and they can click on links you can apply this thing called tags and all you’re really doing is segmenting and segmenting and segmenting and you can cause automated sequences to occur based upon links they click and things they do and all can run on auto pilot for you on the background.

Which segues into my very next question, is that many small and not just agency owners, Jay, but many small business owners they get so consumed with doing everything themselves that they spend all this time working in their business and no time spent working on their business. So with your clients, how do you get them, coz you can either have lots of control and not much growth or give up some control and get a lot more growth. How do you coach them through that process?

J: Yeah I’ve been through that process myself trying, I mean this is my 5th professional company that I had started. I’ve got $5 million agencies in a row from scratch and I read the e-myth years ago, right, which is where that premise comes from and I didn’t believe it at first. I mean it makes intuitive sense that you gotta kind of step away and let people blossom and I literally said you know what, I’m just ripping off the band aid. And I said I’m just gonna try it. I don’t believe it but I’m just gonna try it. And I just went into this massive empowerment phase like I don’t have to do everything and maybe it won’t be exactly how I would do it but it will be just as good as is so why and it was. And we experienced explosive growth as a result of giving up that kind of control and I have subsequently had it purposely done that I’d moved out of state and then a bunch other things that actually prohibit me now from having that kind of control and it’s been really really effective.

And I have agency clients that are really good in that principle and that sort of empowerment principle and working on their business instead of in it. And I have agencies that are not very good at it. It’s both sides. And what I find is it’s not so much about a particular thing you can do in the agency, it really is cultural. It really is about what kind of life do you wanna have as an agency principle and you find it in here to let it go. Coz you can read all the books you want but you gotta believe it. You have to believe inherently that the people you have hired are good enough to put your name out there even if you don’t actually work on that particular project. And some people can get that and other people just can’t. I mean there are people I know who have been trying to get there for 10 years and can’t. It’s not because they’re not smart, they just can’t get past it. They just can’t get past that sense of work. I wish I had a more specific example for you other than just ripping off the band aid as I didn’t say look I’m going to take 2 or 3 projects that I work on now and just stop working on.

And I think the easiest way to get there in theory is to do an audit of your activities as a principle to say okay. And a lot of agency owners don’t do this. They don’t really know how they spend their time. They think they do but they don’t really so a lot of times all I do is say okay let’s actually keep a time sheet for yourself and real strong audit of your involvement and then go back and say are the things that you’re doing things that you are uniquely qualified to do. And for me that’s always the filter. That’s how I try and run my businesses. I try and minimize doing things that I am not uniquely qualified to do. And if you sort of use that as a filter do I get involved, do I not get involved, that helps I think having that sort of light switch approach.

T: And that’s an approach that I’m trying to do here with Bright Ideas. I’m uniquely qualified to host the interview but somebody else can edit it, somebody else can create the post, somebody else can publish, review, share it on social networks. And if you’re listening to this and I talked to a guy yesterday, he was a one man agency, he was doing almost a $150,000 a year, and he said Trent, I’m klilling myself. I work, work, work all the time. So if you relate to that story but you can’t get wrap your mind around hiring a full time employee I really encourage you don’t hire a full time employee, go to Odesk, elance, freelance.

J: I run my services that way. We’re doing a million dollars this year and I’m the only employee. But everyone is 1099. This idea that you have to own a resource, lots stock and buy that resource has to sit in your office is an *inaudible. With the advances that we’ve made and in video conferencing like this and a sacred as communication is much more accepted than it used to be. You don’t have to have mediums of the same kind the way they used to. Things like base camp and other tools allow you to manage projects synchronously. All of those kind of advances that are partially technology and partially cultural in the way that this gets done really allow for partial ownership or resources in ways that was really crazy even 5 years ago.

T: And the really great thing about this and I’m sure that you already understand this and I do now but I didn’t before is when you can give up the shackles of a physical location and the shackles of employees that show up to that location and you embrace online marketing and lead nurturing and so that you don’t have to have that face to face meeting and you get leads coming to you, now you can live anywhere you wanna live. You can get clientsfrom anywhere you want them. And more likely they never want you to come and sit in the boardroom. They’re quite happy because they’ve consumed all of your thought leadership on their own schedule and then they contact you when they’re ready to go. You’re gonna charge a higher fee, you’re gonna work on your schedule and life just gets a whole lot better.

J: We actually won’t go to see clients generally speaking. That’s part of our deal. We’ve got people all over the country, if you need us to come sit in your conference room we’re probably not the right consultancy for you and we say that from the very first call. And now every once in a while we have to fly out and do some monster presentation but I don’t think we’ve ever seen any client more than once ever.

T: Yeah.

J: In 5 years.

T: But you and I, we’re not in the same room, we’re not in the same state. I don’t know how this conversation would be more enriched if we were sitting across the table from each other.

J: Yeah and I think a lot of it is expectation management. For people who are familiar with this kind of technology they’re like great. I don’t know very many people who have gotten involved into this kind of technology and then sit outside for me. I’m sure they exist I just don’t know many of those people. But for potential clients who haven’t done a lot of work like this that sort of expectation management it’s like it’s gonna be fine, trust me, you’re gonna love it. Because ultimately it’s more efficient for them too.

T: Absolutely it is. No commuting and so forth. Alright for this interview and just research in general I came across a hubspot report and it talked about some really pain points for agencies and one of them were unpredictable revenue and we’re gonna get to that in just a second. But before we get to that, for the folks that are listening to this who are also looking for really great campaign ideas that they can take to a client, can you talk about a recent client, could be one of your clients or a client of one of your agency clients, I don’t care who, but if you could think of something where the campaign was particularly successful and we’ll frame this with the content marketing mindset. Coz so many people are talking about content marketing these days and I know I’ve kinda put you on the spot because I didn’t give you more than one minute before our interview to think of this.

J: Oh that’s okay that’s easy. That I can just finish a whole new book about this topic not before last so not a problem. One of the things that we talk about in my company that I think will be useful to yours Trent is premise of bricks and feathers. So there’s 2 kinds of content. There are feathers which are like a feather. They are lightweight, they are a femural, they are disposable. Feathers are things like a blog posts or a facebook status update or a series of photos, things like that. They’re just kind of poof and they’re not gonna get printed out. They’re most likely not going to get printed out and taken to decision maker. They are top of the funnel kind of bait.

And then you have bricks. And bricks are like bricks. They’re heavier, they’re more tangible, they have to be crafted. There’s no brick tree. You have to make a brick. They have a shelf life and they can be picked up and carried and taken places up the decision making chain. They can be passed along to other people in the organization. So where we’re at in this point in the kind of content marketing renaissance I will say because it’s not new, we’ve been doing content marketing for a hundreds of years it’s just we decided to talk about it lately. Where we’re at in this renaissance is that almost everybody is doing feathers. So everybody’s got blog posts and sort of lightweight kind of content but not enough people are doing bricks like the kind of work that you do here with video show, ebooks and slide share and infographics, things that actually has some production value and some shelf life.

So I remember a post not too long ago about how an agency should balance bricks and feathers and I really believe that you’ve gotta invest in 4 or 6 kind of solid bricks a year as an agency thinks that that generate meaningful lead generation and pass along and then have a shelf life and then actually stand for something. Not just a blog post that tomorrow’s another blog and the day after that’s another blog post. But things that are really of high quality.

Soon the question becomes what’s that brick about. Well I’ll give you an example that we did in our own company. So I did a presentation, I do tons and tons of public speaking probably 75 a year and I did a presentation of the content marketing world conference last fall. And it was about how to measure content marketing. What are the metrics for content marketing. So I took that presentation which was in powerpoint and then I partnered with a content marketing institute who puts on that conferences on their popular blog about content marketing. Then we turned it into an ebook. And that ebook we put on slideshare and we’ve now generated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of leads from people who clearly are interested in content marketing strategy which is what I do and content marketing metrics which is partially what we do because they have downloaded this particular ebook.

So then we took the brick which is the ebook and then created feathers around it. So we’ve got blog posts around it, we’ve got tweets around it, we have facebook updateds around it, we have other excerpts around it so it’s the center point of what we’re doing this quarter. And next quarter we’ll have something else and next quarter we’ll have something else.

T: Very interesting. Mike Stelzner talks about the same thing. If you may have read his book launched he calls it primary fuel and nuclear fuel.

J: Yes exactly.

T: And he uses something called the social media marketing industry report as one of his bricks. I’m working on one as well, the marketing agency industry report which I’ll talk to you about after the show.

J: Yeah research is a really good way to create bricks like that because it’s not terribly difficult to put that together. The other one I like I lot that I’ve just talked about this morning with somebody is rankings to say okay here’s the deal. Well normally a blog post can turn it into a brick by saying once a month we’re gonna publish whenever the top 40, like the one I used as an example this morning was a lady, a small agency owner, who publishes every month on her blog the top 40 I think it is convention and visitors bureaus participating on pinterest by number of followers. So ordinarily a blog post about cvb’s on pinterest is a feather but because she turned it into the top 40 rankings once a month it becomes a brick because people now want to pay attention to that and they’ve sent to their boss and now she can turn it into a pdf which then goes into some slideshare which spreads around. So that kind of ranking idea I think is really really easy to execute and almost any agency can find again with that xyz axis can find a place that they can sort of own the rankings if you will. You can give ap polls for whatever.

And the other one I would encourage people to think about from my brick’s perspective is just what you’re doing Trent, these interviews. Every agency in the world could have a great podcast if they just spend 1 hour thinking about it, right? Say everybody, interview your clients, interview people in your industry and it’s difficult to master but easy to do. And not nearly enough people are plugging along those lines of thinking yet.

T: And I gotta say I’m ambitious and lazy all at the same time and that’s why I do this interview format. I get a phenomenal feedback on these interviews and including post production I’m done in like less than 2 hours. I cannot write a really awesome 2500 word blog post in 2 hours. And edit it, put fun images, and do the research. I just can’t do it. Nor do I want to go and do a podcast where I simply talk for 45 minutes like an extended monologue. But the conversation, we’re all human beings we all know how to have conversations.

J: We use a software program I see you’re gonna ask about tools later but it’s alright I think I’ve blown your format.

T: No problem.

J: You can tell I do a podcast coz I’m used in trying to do a format. So on our podcast, social pros, where we interview somebody once a week who is the social media manager or content marketing manager for a big brand. So today we’re gonna interview Katrina Walter, she’s head of social media strategy worldwide for Intel. So every week we interview somebody. So we use speechpad.com.

T: Yap I use them too.

J: And it’s transcripts but not only do you have audio but now you’ve got the full written press and naturally I use speechpad for my book, for my new book. So we did 50 interviews for the book, did them all over the phone and then speechpad records those calls and give me the written transcript so I had a 100,000 words of book interviews fit in html where I just copy and paste in the manuscript. Made it a lot faster to write this book versus my first book.

T: Yeah. Now I actually have a mentor who’s guiding me through that process coz I’m doing the same thing for a book. He’s been doing this. His book is called marketing wizards, sorry market wizards. It’s about this hedgefund manager. And he talks a lot about the importance of editing those interviews prior to putting, coz a conversation like this isn’t necessary as interesting to read as it is to listen to. So did you have an editor go through and get rid of all the ums, yeah, buts and all that kind of stuff out of those transcripts?

J: I just took them out of the transcripts and clean out myself. So I read every interview and then bolded the actual passages that I thought made sense in the book narrative and then cleaned them up a little bit when I paste them in the manuscript. I use scrivener for book writing software which I love. It’s really amazing. And that was enormously helpful. It does automatically compiles it in the manuscript format and you can have multiiple windows open and has kind of like virtual sticky notes and things like that. It’s really excellent for organization. That’s scrivener.

T: Okay I’ll be checking that out.

J: That’s great. I really really wish I would have it with my first book. I don’t even know if it existed then but I wish I’d had it. It’s a lot easier this time.

T: How long did it take you to write this 2nd book?

J: Not very long because I had it all in my head and I mentioned that I do a lot of speaking. And so this book is basically the book version of the keynote presentation I’ve been doing for 2 or 3 months so I actually again using speechpad recorded myself giving that keynote presentation and transcribed it. So I used that as actually the back bone of the book and I put the book around the keynote speech. So between the interviews and again my researches which has helped me a lot with the interviews, between interviews and putting it all together probably took me 6 weeks.

T: That’s pretty good.

J: But I just turned in the first half to the publisher and then hopefully they won’t say we hate it and start over. We’ll go on them next week. The portfolio was published in it so we’ll see how it goes.

T: Oh I wish you the best of luck on it.

J: Thanks.

T: You mentioned the woman who does the top 40 list, do you know her blog url?

J: I’ll probably find it in one second. Do you edit this out when we’re doing searches?

T: No just send it to me. I don’t edit the show in the middle.

J: Hold on a second, I can do it right now. I just talked about it this morning.

T: Okay.

J: Yap it’s cvb’s on pinterest. Her blog is annehornyak.com.

T: Great.

J: And she’s at DG Morgan, still in that agency, social media and tourism consultant.

T: Okay. Alright so I promised a few minutes ago we’re gonna talk about this challenge of unpredictable and this was in a technology services space. This was a huge problem. And so I’m just gonna preface of my own story line.

J: That’s why I got out of the web design business right there. That exact reason.

T: Yap. If you don’t have recurring revenue in your business, you don’t have a business that somebody else is gonna want to buy.

J: Oh yeah and you have no ways and strategy.

T: Exactly. So in other words you’re leaving a ton of equity, in my case it was over a million dollars worth of equity that I created when I sold my business because I had $78,000 every single month that came in on the first day of every single month. And that was we didn’t have any products that we coded or anything like that. It was delivering services but it turned all the way to automate some of them by using tools but we just convinced our customers that it was a better deal for them to be on a retainer.

So in the agency space I know that this is a huge issue. I know lots of guys, gals out there, they’re web designers, they’re this, they’re that and they’re on the time and materials model, what advice Jay can you give them to help them, first of all they gotta make the transition in their own mind and then they can make the transition in their profit loss statement?

J: Yap. It’s difficult. You have to understand or believe that ultimately it’s about arbitrary. That ultimately the retainer model is going to benefit you just as much as about more than it will benefit the client. What I mean by that Trent is that the reason why some people don’t wanna do a retainer is they’re like what if it takes us 80 hours then we’re only getting paid for 40. Well you have to believe that you’re good enough business. That more often than not it’s gonna go the other way. And if your business isn’t good enough operationally then it won’t go your way more often than not. Then you probably shouldn’t go on retainer. You should really spend some time figuring out how come you can’t predict how long it’s gonna take you to deliver services. You know what I mean?

The agency model really only works if you can deliver services consistently, right? You can’t have purpose in what it requires you to deliver coz then you can’t get absolutely upside down on the retainer model. But assuming that you have a good sense of what it takes you to deliver and you can do that fairly consistently you have to realize that ultimately it’s gonna benefit you as much or more than the client from an economic stand point. Not just from a flatting of the revenue curve but also just from your yield. Coz ultimately when I say it’s about arbitrary it’s about you, it’s about what is the agency actually paid for an hour of time. That’s the whole model. And yes the retainer takes that out of the day that their conversation but ultimately you backed that out. So okay these retainers lump together compared to the number of people that retained and what are we paying those people and that is sort of how you sort of figure out your overall P&L.

The key is to make clients realize that it’s in their best interest. And the way you do that is to not say look if we spend, and this is how agencies typically say about retainers, we’re gonna put you on retainer because that way you know what your cost certainty is and I don’t know they just come up with other weird excuses. I think the best way to do it is to say look, especially if your agency is a little bit or a lot on the digital side of the aisle where higher level of experimentation less degree of certainty in terms of what you’re gonna do day to day, month to month coz new things come along all the time.

So the way we always insist to argue with is, and this is the line I give with every client in my previous digital agencies, I don’t know what’s gonna work for you but I know how to find out. I know exactly how to use testing and optimization to figure out what is the perfect digital marketing strategy for you and your business. But that takes time. And you don’t want to pay me by the hour to figure out what works coz if it takes us longer to figure out the magic formula for you it’s gonna be more expensive. So if we do this on retainer so that you’ll know what you’re gonna pay and we’ll know what we’re gonna get, the time that we spend to figure this out is at my expense not yours. So me being a great marketer is at my expense not yours. That’s how we used to give it and used to explain it.

And the other thing is really important on retainers coz all of our agency clients are on retainers as well is a lot time clients are reluctant to sign retainers coz they feel like it’s a prison cell. So our deal is look you’re on retainer but everybody’s a 30 day out so nobody has a contract. It’s like look here’s the deal, you’re gonna pay us every month come hell or high water but the second you’re not finding value, stop paying us. And it’s amazing when you put that out there how much that takes away people’s inate and natural fear of retainer business. If they’re not getting value stop paying us.

T: So one of the thought I wanna add to that for the folks in the audience, think of your portfolio clients like a portfolio of investments. The big huge stumbling block that you touched on was what if I do to many more hours if I don’t get enough retainer. Well that won’t happen if you get good at your systems and processes which Jay pointed out. You may have lots of work it bleeds over but there’ll be other months when you hardly have to do a thing for some other client in your portfolio so it’s about the yield on the overall portfolio not the yield on every single client you have in your portfolio.

J: That’s right. That’s why when people measure job cost profitability or even individual client profitability you’re kinda doing yourself a disservice mathematically. Yes you wanna pay a 10th to that but I would put much more stock in what’s the revenue per employee or what’s the yield for the entire organization as opposed to what’s the yield for this one client. Coz you’re exactly right that will lead you to say that we need to make sure that we did $42,000 over a month of work for these guys this month but we only got paid 18, that’s gotta stop. Well that only has to stop if that continues for a long time or if that’s happened more than once. So you gotta take a little bit of a mongrel term approach to these kinds of questions.

And in too many agencies, it can be agency owners think about client profitability in 30 day incurrence which is absolutely the wrong way to think about it. We look at it in 6 or 12 months and say okay a year end of this do we feel like we’re making money on these guys. If not we’ll go somewhere else but when we start thinking did we make money this month on this client no you can’t do it, you can’t run this like that. This is too variable of an industry.

T: And it’s not the way you’re selling to your clients coz you’re saying to your clients

J: We’re partners.

T: Correct.

J: We’re partners to the next 30 days and then we’ll see.

T: Yeah. Alright so that last answer pretty much boils down to this. Have a conversation with your customers that says I don’t know exactly what to do to make your perfect campaign but I know how to figure it out. Let me put that time risk on my shoulders and let me give you credit predictability and now we’re partners.

J: That’s right. And that approach very much works better if you agree with the client from the outset on what this success factor is gonna be. If you say look we’re gonna figure out the magic formula you have to agree on what the ingredients of measuring that formula are. Are we looking at leads, are we looking at sales, are we looking at, there’s obviously a number of different ways to measure marketing and that’s a different podcast for a different time but you need to agree with the client on what those measurements are out front.

T: And all of this is stuff you could be producing blog posts on, well in advance with your conversation with your client so that you’re actually nurturing, nurturing. Even your existing clients need to be nurtured to your current way of thinking in the way that you wanna run your business.

J: I would say that perhaps more so. In fact I’ve written about this with a link on my blog that agencies really should turn this upside down and try and create content and blog post more for their current clients and think about blogging and thought leadership as a client retention and client cross sell vehicle as opposed to a new lead generation.

T: Coz I think something that people forget and I probably was guilty of this, I have my customer but my competitors are prospecting my customer. So just coz they’re my customer right now doesn’t mean that I can stop pursuading them to continue to be my customer.

J: Or persuade them to buy something different from you. I can’t tell you how many times this happened and it continues to happen to me and I’m not very good at marketing automation to current clients and very few people are. We tend to do that through blogging in my company which is probably in the state but it happens all the time that current clients read something that I wrote in the blog and I say that I didn’t realize that you guys did that. Let’s talk about you doing that for us. So now you have a blog post that theoretically was written as a lead acquisition tool is actually a retention and cross sell tool.

T: And for anyone listening to this who thinks oh I’m not a good writer, could you have a conversation about your client with something that you did for them that worked well for them? Guess what? Now you have a podcast. You can do it on skype. You can do it on go to meeting as I do it right here. Like you could just do it on the phone and record it. Every conversation can become reusable content, feathers if you will, that really can benefit your business a long term. So if you’re not doing that now I think Jay and I are both gonna say you really need to be doing it.

J: Oh absolutely. And it’s funny you say about the telephy. I’ve worked with a lot of chief officer marketing types and things like that of big corporations and they go we don’t have time to blog. And I go okay if you have time to talk it on the phone for 3 minutes a week you do. You absolutely do have 3 minutes talking to the phone. So press this button talk into the phone, press another button and here’s a blog post while somebody claim to that. So that idea that you don’t have time to create content is 100% untrue. You just choose not to make time.

T: Correct. I couldn’t agree more. Alright so you stole my thunder a little bit on my tools and resources.

J: Oh sorry. I kind of wove it in more like organic. I got more. What do you want?

T: Alright favorite tools and resources, we’ve talked about infusion soft. You talked about scrivener, what else?

J: Scrivener for books. I’ve talked about speechpad for recording stuff. And I love buffer app. Buffer which is a great tool for sticking social media posts. So the content curation, a great way to create feathers. So every morning I read dozens and dozens of emails including Mike Stelzner’s and other people. I can find things I wanna tweet or facebook or linked in status update that day I use my buffer app where I just click click click and it time release capsule them all from today from about 2:00 3:00 5:00 etc. That’s a great tool. Love it.

T: Why use that instead of Hootsuite? I mean they both basically do the same thing. Is there a reason from one over the other.

J: I think buffer is easier to use and sort of purpose built for that. That’s all it does. It’s very specific to that circumstance.

T: Okay.

J: And has really nice kind of web post and the other software things like that. One of the things that agencies are interested in nowadays is finding other bloggers. So maybe you’re gonna do a blogger outreach campaign for your clients, things like that. Actually I’ll write a blog post tonight about these guys called group high. It’s grouphigh.com. Outstanding I think the best database blogs and bloggers available. It’s 5 grand a year which is a pretty affordable for agencies are gonna use it for a number of clients. And you can find bloggers by type, by city, by number of twitter followers, by number of instagram followers, by number of pinterest followers and then actually create a list of those bloggers that manage those relationships within the tools and send them emails and did we hear back from them and we’re gonna follow up. Very very nice business software.

T: Yeah and very cool. I haven’t heard that one before. So there’s my little nugget for this interview.

J: See there you go.

T: Thank you. Alright so we’re just about finished up here. Two more questions and then we’ll wrap. What are you most excited about these days in your business? Where’s the opportunities?

J: Really excited about the new book and which is all about truly helpful marketing. So what if your marketing was so useful that people would theoretically pay you for it. And there’s a lot of companies that are doing that and talks all about how to do that and how to really make your marketing a utility. Excited about that and there’s gonna be lots of conferences and things about that next year so that’s exciting.

And then we’re also doing a lot of work with corporate clients and I think agencies can really start to offer the systems service over time around employee activation in social media. So social is becoming de-centralized. It started off as a job, somebody is the social media person in the company and now it’s becoming a skill. It started as a job becoming a skill and that’s fairly typical in business. And so one of the things that we get involved with a lot for corporations is finding employees throughout the enterprise who are pre-disposed to using social media and training them, activating them to speak on the company’s behalf across the social network. So how do you train somebody your company to give a respond on twitter or facebook or write blog posts or just sort of broaden the basic social participation. I think that’s an area that agencies can really help their clients with as well. So we’re excited about that Trent as well.

T: Okay. What book or books are you reading right now?

J: What books am I reading? I have the Good Fortune I guess to get sent lots and lots of books from publishers who want me to review them which is fantastic. Hold on, I’ll be back, I’ll show you.

T: Amazing things will happen, okay.

J: I just got this book from my friend, C.C. Chapman. His new book Amazing Things Will Happen. All about how to live a happy life. I very much recommend this for all agency owners. C.C. has tremendous agency experience and you will become a better after reading this book.

T: I think I’m gonna put that one on my own reading list.

J: And I’m also reading a couple of other books around trust. Don Peppers and Rogers have a new book out about trust and how trust is sort of the key currency in business now. And Jonathan Salem Baskin also has another book also around trust. So there’s two great books out on the same time. Don Pepper’s and Rogers Baskin both around trust as a business currency which I think is an interesting trend to look forward.

T: Don Peppers and Rogers, Jonathan Salem Baskin?

J: Baskin like Robin. No relation I don’t think, that would be crazy. Pretty sure he’s not an ice cream scion but you never know.

T: Alright. Well Jay I wanna thank you for making some time for your first appearance here on the Bright Ideas podcast. I sure hope this will not be your last appearance on the show.

J: Hopefully there were bright ideas. Hopefully there were actually bright ideas. I’ll just see through with the comments.

T: I guess we’ll have to wait for the comments to find out.

J: That’s right.

T: Alright. Terrific thanks very much for being on the show Jay.

J: Thank you and I appreciate it. Take care.

T: If you wanna check out the show notes for my interview with Jay just go to BrightIdeas.co/16. Now I think I wanna very quickly tell you about is the massive traffic tool kit. If you’re looking to get more traffic to your website go to BrightIdeas.co/massivetraffic, enter your email and you will get instant access to the tool kit. So what is it? It is a compilation of all the very best ideas that have been shared with me by other expert guests here on Bright Ideas. And the really great part about the tool kit is you do not need to be an SEO guru to be able to make all this stuff happen for yourself. So just go to BrightIdeas.co/massive traffic, enter your details and you’ll get instant access.

So that wraps up this episode. I’m Trent Dyrsmid, your host. If you loved this episode please do me a favor. Head over to itunes, give it a 5 star rating and leave a comment. If you do Bright Ideas goes up in the itunes store and more people will discover the show and more people that discover the Bright Ideas podcasts the more entrepreneurs that we can help to massively boost their business. Thank you very much I will see you in the next episode.

About Jay Baer

Jay BaerJay Baer is a hype-free social media and content strategist, speaker, author and the President of Convince & Convert. Since 1994, he has worked with more than 700 companies on digital and social strategy, including 29 of the FORTUNE 500. As social and content accelerators, Convince and Convert helps tie social business to real business.

He is the co-author of the NOW Revolution, 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social (Wiley, 2011) a leading book on social business. Jay speaks to more than 75 groups each year about how social strategy is changing business forever. He is also an active angel investor investing in approximately four start ups a year.

Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Get the Attention of the Media: A Case Study with Jaime Tardy

Are you looking for a simple, yet effective method to getting more press coverage?

Would you like to hear from an entrepreneur who’s been on the home page of Yahoo as well as CNN?

To discover how to one entrepreneur has done exactly that, I interview Jaime Tardy in this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast.

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

In this episode, I interview Jaime Tardy of Eventual Millionaire.

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Transcript

An Interview with Jamie TardyTrent Dyrsmid: Coming up in today’s episode, how do you make a 6 figure income by the age of 22 and then be $70,000 in debt by the age of 24 and then go on to have your story featured on CNN and on the homepage of Yahoo!? I guess she’s gonna share with us exactly how she did that. Imagine not being well-known, not having many contacts yet wanting to start a mastermind group with millionaires that wanted to participate in. Well, my guest did that as well. Or how about this? Have you wondered how to start building those really pivotal or powerful relationships that are gonna help you to succeed faster? Well, my guest did that as well. All of these and more so stay tuned.Hey everyone! My name is Trent Dyrsmid and I’m the founder of BrightIdeas.co and on the show with me today is a blogger, interviewer, business coach, succeeding in all three, and a mom and a wife and her name is Jamie Tardy. And I got to tell you this has been one of the more fun interviews I’ve done in a long time so you’re really in for a treat. Please join me in welcoming Jamie to the show.Hi Jamie! Thank you so much for making some time to come on and do this interview with me. I’m really excited about our interview today because you’re an interviewer and I’m an interviewer and I’m sure that we’re gonna get to compare some interesting notes and hopefully the audience is gonna enjoy that process. So welcome to the show.Jamie Tardy: Thanks so much for having me Trent.T: So in my research on you, I made a couple of bullet points. I’m gonna throw this up so the audience has some idea of who you are and how you came to be an interviewer. So you did the college path, made 6 figures by 22, racked up a whole lot of debt I think about $70,000 in debt by 24, quit your job in 2007 and nearly failed as a blogger in the first 6 months I think. How am I doing?J: Well you tell me all that crappy stuff. Yes! Oh yeah, exactly right, perfect. Good research.T: So I wanna dive a little bit deeper into the psyche of Jamie because for me this interview like all the interviews that I do is the study of success. You have become a very successful online marketer. You got a lot of press for yourself. You’ve had speaking engagements. You’re building a solid reputation and we’re gonna dive in to how you did all of that. But before we get into that let’s just talk a little bit about so you went to college, you got the career thing and then you went “this isn’t working for me”. Kind of what happened back then?J: Yeah. Hopefully people will take this too because I know I felt really alone when I was in that point. And I know now of course I hear from tons of other people saying “oh I’m going to be that few things” but now it’s not a big deal. Now we’re lucky enough to have the people online telling their stories and stuff but then I did everything I was supposed to. I had a goal to be a millionaire, that was my whole thing since I was 8. I went to school. I know that’s kind of weird for me, a little girl, but I went to school and made lots of money, thought I was a success, I travelled around the US, had a really nice title, expense account, got really fat coz I ate out all the time.And so thereafter a few years of doing like “yeah I don’t like being called at 2:00 in the morning saying ‘oh this is broken, can you fix this right now?'” And I was like “oh this is all there is?” Actually one of the key turning points was a lot of my co-workers, I worked in a video on demand, so like when you go on TV you can order movies, right? And so we’re working I think like 40 hours in a row or something ridiculous where we were up for days. And one of my co-workers just like “you know, Jamie, you shouldn’t be so stressed. It’s not like we’re curing people.” I was like “yeah I’m helping people who don’t have to go to the video store to get real CDs.” Like yeah this was so sort of that whole like “what is my purpose here?” Was it really to help people get more movies online which don’t get me wrong, it was great but that wasn’t really what it was about.So that’s where the turning point of going “okay what am I actually doing with my life?” It’s not about the money so why am I here? And that was sort of the thing that I tipped.T: Okay so at that point in time you had this decision that is I would say the pivotal decision for so many people who make the transition to becoming an entrepreneur and most that don’t make it as the quitting. I mean some of them get a boot, they get laid off, they get fired and so the decision gets made for them which seems really crappy at the time but those that make the transition in hindsight always go “hey that was awesome and best thing that ever happened” like our good buddy, Pat Flynn.J: Exactly. I was thinking exactly as Pat too. I was like sometimes it’s easier, just kicked out and you have to do it.T: Yeah. So in your situation much like mine you made the decision, if I did my research correctly, to quit. So there’s a whole lot of psychological stuff, and for those folks who are listening to this interview, yes we are gonna get to the online marketing techniques and strategies don’t worry but so much as I’ve become older I’ve realized that so much of successes is really what’s happening, it’s your belief systems. So can you talk a little bit about what was happening in your head around this thought of quitting your job and I guess was your original vision you’re just gonna become a blogger and magically somehow you’ll turn that into money? What was the plan back then?J: Okay so I mean the hard thing is that when I had that realization I thought I was successful and really noticing the $70,000 in debt was like oh maybe I’m not actually, maybe I made really bad choices so I couldn’t even just quit. So it took me a good, and my husband is a performer, he does like juggling and contortion and crazy stuff and always worked for himself and so quitting my stable job, my husband hates it and I’m always like, and my husband was juggler like I’m gonna quit a 6 figure job, my husband is a juggler. No offense to my husband. He’s wonderful. Really great at what he does. Makes really good money now but still back then it was sort of like “hhmmm yeah” like good idea Jamie.

So it was more of about like what are we gonna do? Like how can we do this? So it was a good that year of paying up over $70,000 in debt even before I could figure this out. And then I had that realization of going even if I have to sell my house, even if I have to go to extremes I’m gonna figure out a way to do this no matter what. And this worked on my mind, right? No matter what. So it wasn’t this whole thing of “yehey, let’s quit and I’m gonna know exactly what I’m gonna do.”Actually what I did I don’t recommend for other people which was I quit, actually one of the catalyst also was I wanted to have a baby and I couldn’t when I was travelling, you know, no time. So I was pregnant through most of the paying off all that debt and so my goal at first was just to have 3-6 months at home with my son. And then I was gonna figure out business stuff. I’ll figure out what I wanted to do which isn’t really a good idea. We had a good year and a half of expenses so that was great. We took that ton of money so that way it would be possible but yeah it was like “hhmmm now what do I wanna do after I quit my job? I don’t know.” And then it took over a year to even have general idea of what I wanted to do which was really bad.That’s why I don’t really suggest it. I suggest sort of struggling in your job and figuring out what you want to do. That way if it doesn’t work you don’t have to worry about it. Coz I tried, I have an iphone app, I have a provisional patent, I tried like all these different things just because I was curious and I wanted to learn it, figure out business stuff. And so that sort of why I started. I didn’t even start blogging. I mean I started it but it wasn’t even the thing. I’d started the blog almost 2 years before when I started paying off my debt and stuff like that and that was just a whim coz I wanted to start a blog. It didn’t have anything to do with it.T: Okay.

J: That was all over the place.

T: Okay so it wasn’t so much the decision of “hey I’m gonna be quitting and become an entrepreneur.” It’s “hey I’m gonna quit, I’m gonna spend some time, I’m gonna get my life back in order to balance, or whatever word you would like to use. I will spend some time with my new baby and then we’ll figure out the business thing afterwards.”

J: Yeah. Not a good idea but yes. Coz I knew I was gonna be an entrepreneur. I just didn’t know exactly what I was gonna do.

T: Yeah not entirely dissimilar to mine. Quit at $20,000 a year job, sold my house, put all the money in the bank, went back to school and had a plan to get a job. But I came up with a business idea while I was in school, draw out a business plan, got some funding, graduated from school, but the business didn’t succeed because it was a .flop a .com and then in the ashes of that, coz now I’m at zero, everything’s up from zero. I decided to start what ultimately the company that I had last and I built into a couple of million dollar a year company and sold it but again I don’t recommend for that transition or that path to anyone either.

J: You know what’s funny. It makes perfect sense to us now but of course you don’t know that at that time anyway, You’re just looking to do what you need to do and so while I know that now I don’t know if I’ll necessary would have changed it. And you probably wouldn’t do it. Like probably that failure was probably huge for you.

T: Yeah after selling that business it had a really profound impact on what type of business that I wanted to do next. And that’s why I’m online because and I think it’s such a great way for so many people to start because it doesn’t cost a lot of money, because you don’t have to quit your job to do it although it’s definitely helpful. There’s a whole bunch of really good reasons. So and this isn’t my interview, this is yours.

J: Right, sorry.

T: I read somewhere that at about month six of blogging you were ready to give up, I think. Have I got that right?

J: Yap. They say like do your blog for 6 months until you can find your voice and figure out your audience. And so I was like working my butt off trying to do the best blogging job I could ever do and I was a business coach at that time. So I have been a business coach for a couple of years before I started my blog back up. And I was going “this is wasting so much time and now I’m not making any money. Why am I doing this?” Right? Travelling is kind of important and blogging seems kind of them. And then the next week I couldn’t pull the trigger. I had a business coach and he was like “then just send an email to all your subscribers and say that we’re gonna stop this and that sort of thing.” I couldn’t pull the trigger. And shocking short days later I got an email from CNN saying that they wanna feature my site. And then from there it just started going kinda crazy.

T: Out of the blue. You didn’t pitch CNN beforehand, nothing?

J: Nope. The reason I found, I think I found out the way that they found me. I had a guest post on get rich slowly on my story and apparently, quite a few actually, writers for big publications got to read that blog and that’s where they got my story. But yeah I hadn’t pitched them at all.

T: Okay so that’s an important, very important point that you just mentioned and it piggy backs on an interview that I did with Ryan Holiday just not so long ago. So for those who’re listening who don’t know who Ryan Holiday is, he just published a book called Trust Me, I’m Lying… Confessions of a Media Manipulator. And in my interview and in his book, one of the things and we’re gonna talking much more about getting press in your and my interview, but one of the things he really stressed was important is don’t pitch the reporters of CNN, pitch the blogs that those reporters read. And so in your case did you know that get rich slowly was read by so many reporters or was that just a fortune smiling down on you?

J: I was like “hey that’s really big blog.” It took me a while to even go like I was big enough to guest post. Now I know JV well and we met and he’s super cool but at that time I was like scared. And so the funny thing is now I know a lot of reporters that actually read get rich slowly. I have a friend, Lorie Amandacamp that actually featured me in fortune.com coz she writes there too. And she reads get rich slowly too. So it’s kinda simple, yeah it’s just kinda driven. I just did a conference where I talked about how I think people should guest post on bigger blogs, you know, not necessarily star blogs but bigger blogs coz you really don’t know who’s been reading it.

T: Well let’s divert, I mean coz that’s a very interesting topic, I’m gonna see which questions here in my questions that I wanna skip. Coz I was gonna talk about interviewing but before we get to that let’s sidebar on to guest posting because it is something that I have had some success with and something that I think I need to do more of. I’m sure many people who are listening to this would also greatly benefit from it. So Jamie’s crash course on guest blogging in 10 minutes or less. Go.

J: Okay ready? Well it’s funny. So I guest post in get rich slowly. I guest posted a few times since. The first time I did it it was awesome like 400 subscribers especially when I was a brand new blog I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I haven’t gotten that much fun then except way later someone who kept lingers for slow finance found the article. Even though it wasn’t new, even though it’s not big of a deal I think when people are searching which is one thing that we don’t really think about, when you write a guest post for someone else’s site that is a high ranking site especially with the SEO, when somebody searches for that free or something like that, that has a lot more chance of ranking especially if you’re a newer site. So that’s where I think it’s also very valuable that we don’t really think about stuff so when you’re writing guest post start thinking what the press might be putting in for search terms or when they’re trying to look at blogs, what would they really be looking for. I think that’s really important point for you.

But I might be distinct for guest posting in general in bigger blogs is to build relationships and you probably know that too. It takes a while. Sometimes people will, like JV, except when they’re trying to accept guest post which is great but some of the other people that are harder like Pat Flynn, I’ve known Pat for almost 3 years and I go “Pat, please give me guest post.” Well, I’m finally gonna have one coming up really soon. But in general I now have really good relationship for all the people so it’s really easy to get guest posts in other places because of that. So that I think is one of the big keys.

T: So how does someone begin to build a relationship with whomever at whatever blog? How should they start?

J: Interview them, not.

T: That’s one of my secrets. That’s why I’m an interviewer. It’s the best networking tool in the world coz nobody hardly ever says no.

J: Exactly. Okay I’ve interviewed over 70 millionaires so yeah. I have millionaire friends. I’ve been invited to Greece, to Fiji, and then for Maine. Like come on, so random come over to Maine and there’s like 2,000 people in it. Anyway, so I think you’re right. I think that’s huge. That’s not actually how I’ve gotten most of my relationships because my online marketing buddies and friends like most of them are millionaires and it’s kinda funny. So that’s not actually how I got that. I mean I never tell Michael Hyatt that I’m actually gonna be guest posting in Michael Hyatt’s too but that wasn’t really how I did it.

A lot was when I very first started online at all I knew nothing. Absolutely nothing but I have a lot of video background but I didn’t really know that much about blogging and internet marketing so what I ended up doing was going I need a mastermind group of people that know what they’re doing and I’m just kinda ask them. Coz there is so much stuff online, it’s so overwhelming. I have been online for 3 months going “I don’t know what the right stuff is.” And so I asked Pat Flynn and Mary Kate who actually used to work, well it’s a nice company now but she used to be just a blogger. Now I have millioinaires in the mastermind group too. But I decided that I thought it would be a great idea to start this mastermind group with a ton of really good people.

T: Wait a minute. Let me interject here for a minute and pardon my crass description, you were a blogging nobody who knew nothing and you went to Pat Flynn and said you wanna be in my mastermind group and he said yes?

J: I did. Now I remember this was 3 years ago so he wasn’t as huge as he is now, right? So I looked for people that were pretty big but not too big and I’ll give you one tip on how I got him to say yes. He’s gonna love that I’m talking about him now. Oh I talk to him all the time so it’s no big deal. So the way that I got him was I said what I was good at so I had been part of the viral video sensation called eepy bird who did diet coke and mentos online and so I knew a lot about viral video and I did a whole bunch of stuff to do that. So I’m short of said “you know I’m just getting online but I have a lot of experience and all that stuff.” And then I was like I wanna get really good people so I went on and found, tried to find as many other really amazing bloggers as I could.

So once you get lots of amazing bloggers then the other amazing bloggers want to come in on it, right? And Pat Flynn and I had a bunch of other people say yes that are pretty big. And so that was really cool. And then I set it up so it was very structured. A lot of people are like “hey, let’s start a mastermind group.” Yeah I don’t know, when do you wanna meet? My whole thing was very structured. I had pdf documents. So I had to actually ask Pat twice before he said yes but he said yes.

And so that was huge for me online in general so when I went out to blog world my first time I knew a whole bunch of successful bloggers who introduced me to a whole much other successful bloggers which made me cool, right? I’m now that cool blogger. I didn’t have to speak my first time even though speaking was great. I was sort of to be on the same level as them even though I had an itty bitty blog.

T: Yeah very nice. So you talked about structure and you talked about a pdf can you just give us a little bit more details on what you meant by that?

J: So I have run mastermind groups before and so I had sort of an outline of structure of like okay the first 10-15 minutes were going over the accountability from the week before we’re doing our wins, this is the same thing that we do every single week right now. And then we do a hot seat so every week there’s one person in the hot seat where we really talk about their issues and what they’re going through. And then we’ll do a resource or two so if there’s anything online that you’ve been really using that you really love we share resources. And then we talk about goals for the upcoming week and then we call each other accountable the next week. So that’s sort of the structure and that was laid out in the pdf and also people can’t skip more than 2 meetings. They have to really be dedicated and that sort of stuff.

T: Okay terrific. I like that. It’s nice to talk about wins, put someone in the hot seat, talk about tools and resources, talk about goals and then hold each other accountable.

J: Exactly.

T: Interesting.

J: Pretty simple.

T: So going back to my second tangent, I don’t know if people noticed, my first tangent was guest posting. So you talked about building relationships. You’ve mentioned that several things here that I hope people have noticed. Attend conferences, preceeding those conferences by doing the mastermind and reaching out to people, obviously interviewing is a fantastic way to do that but not everybody maybe wants to be an interviewer. What about in the social networks, did you retweet people’s stuff? Did you tweet at them? Did you comment on their walls? Were you doing anything like that to get on the radar screen of people that did not know you existed?

J :I didn’t do too much of that. It’s hard because if you’re not very big, like I did a lot, you probably too, I did a lot of messages like “oh my gosh, I love you. You’re awesome.” That were just some sort of laughed in the same thing. Like “oh thank you. Thank you so much, it’s awesome.” But it’s not, what you really wanna do is be on the same level with them to make sure that you’re not going “oh my gosh, you’re awesome. Thank you so much for what you do.” That’s it. They’re like “oh thank you.” But make it so that they know that you might be wanna set someone that they wanna know too. So what I actually did when I was first starting is that I emailed a lot of people and sort of what I always look for whenever I build any relationship whatsoever is connection. So what can we connect on? I remember there was a blogger and he used to write about lots of different stuff but one of the things that he liked was buddhism and a couple of other things that I really connected with him on so I sent him an email and I was like “wow, you like this which is the same thing. I did karate.” He was into karate. So I was like “we like all these things. That’s awesome.” Thanks for going over here. And so that makes someone go “oh they like the same stuff as me. That’s pretty cool.” That’s putting me on the same level. That’s not necessarily going “oh my gosh, that’s great. Thank you so much.” So that’s sort of what I try and do too. Even when I meet people now, even when I go to conferences, it’s really interesting to go “oh you like pasta?” Ah I love people. You know what I mean? Coz I all like all that stuff too so it’s pretty easy for me. But I love being able to connect with people and stuff like that so that’s usually the way I try that to start building a relationship with people.

T: Okay so you just email them, here’s what we have in common, do you wanna talk, some of them say yes some of them say no, great, and the ball begins to roll from that point.

J: As a name dropped in times too by the way. So like if I know they’re good friends with someone that I know I’m like “oh I’m friends with so and so. I just looked at your stuff.” And then start building connections and stuff like that.

T: Okay so now when you’ve done this, when you’ve planted these seeds, when you go to a conference it’s gonna be quite a bit easier coz now you’re not walking up to strangers and saying “hey what do you do? What do I do?” Which most people really don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of or on the initiating end of. But this way you’re up to say “hey man, nice to meet you in person first time blah blah blah.”

J: Yeah finally. Exactly, that’s exactly it. From the very first time, the very first blog world or any conference that I’ve ever been to I try and do my research on who’s gonna be there ahead of time and then connect with them beforehand and say “oh we should meet up. Oh I should see you.” So when I message them on twitter or when I see them it’s like “oh I’m supposed to be talking to you.” Not who is this random person coming up to me say trying to touch me when I’m trying to do something else. So definitely, from that very first one. And I’m trying to convince you to go to new me expo, I’m speaking there. Actually I’ll do the interviewing in January. But everytime I’ve gone, I went and spoke at the world domination summit you know I just love doing conferences. There’s actually a conference in Maine, so excited. Gerry Hepburn was there and Amy Porterfield and Chris Brown and then we all got to hang out this past weekend and just conferences are just super fun. I know nobody knows about that conference.

T: No and I tried, it’s late. Derrick, keynoting that, didn’t he? Coz he and I just traded an email coz I’m gonna interview him shortly and he’s like “hey dude, sorry coz I was just on the plane from keynoting something.”

J: He was hanging out with me. I have a picture of him with a big old lobster with his girlfriend eating lobster.

T: Nice. So which conference was that?

J: It’s called agents of change and my friend Rich Brooks put it on. I think Rich usually speaks at new media expo and blog world auction too.

T: Okay.

J: That’s actually how I met him. We’re both from Maine. I met him on the plane kind of I knew him a little bit but we sat together and the thing right down to blog world and he was speaking and I was speaking. I was like “hey wow, that’s really weird.” And we started a relationship that way so.

T: So new media expo, agents of change, blog world and there was another one that you mentioned.

J: World domination summit which is Chris Guillebeau’s. That was the best conference I think I’ve ever been to.

T: Really?

J: That was a very very good.

T: Have you ever been to Ryan Dice’s traffic and conversion summit?

J: I haven’t. Was it good?

T: I haven’t been but a good buddy of mine who had the same kind of company that I had and hands down he said best conference he’s ever been to.

J: Really?

T: Yeah.

J: Oh I love finding out what the best conference people have ever been to. Like that to me that’s what I wanna go to. I think I’m going to south by southwest this year too coz I’ve heard so many things about that so we’ll see.

T: Yeah that’s one on my list. And I attended Yanik’s underground in DC.

J: Oh yeah?

T: Last fall I guess it was now, earlier this year. Man I don’t even remember. It was pretty cool. There was a lot of people there.

J: Was it the best conference you’ve ever been to?

T: I think I might have said that. Hopefully Yanik is listening to this. I did get to meet him. He’s a super cool guy. Kinda short though.

J: I need to interview him. Really? That’s why we were just laughing about that in this last conference how short people are. I’m really tall. Nobody realizes how tall.

T: You’re tall?

J: Like I’m not that tall. But I’m 5’9″ but when I wear heels.

T: Yeah you’re 6 foot.

J: I’m really tall. And so like Derrick, not very tall.

T: Not so tall.

J: That’s very funny. Pat Flynn also. Sorry I’m giving away all these secrets of all these people but when you meet them in person.

T: The blogosphere is filled with short people.

J: Yes. It is.

T: I’m tall. I’m 6’1″. And not even, when I put my heels on I’m even taller than that.

J: I need to see that. Come with me to the expo out.

T: I will. Wow! Okay our tangents are really good and off track.

J: I know. So bad.

T: So this interview was supposed to be about, alright, let’s try and see if we can get this back on track. Hopefully our audience is having a laugh but they’re still listening.

J: I was gonna say one another thing. I interviewed Dane Maxwell just like you did and I’m friends with Dane. It was really bad. So this is not so bad. That was like an hour and a half of I don’t know what to say.

T: All over the place.

J: Everyone loved it. There were people even out, got lots of emails, people obviously were loving it. I was like yeah. He was like hiding the food that he was eating and goes I’m not gonna tell you what I’m eating.

T: Okay wait now I wanna really run and get my cat and just hold him up in front of the camera. I said to Jamie off here that I think my cat was gonna try and sit on my lap for the interview but I had to shoosh him away coz he purrs really loudly and the mic would actually probably pick it up.

J: I love the background stuff, you know what I mean? I love that stuff. I think it’s great.

T: Alright so you’ve had a lot of success getting press. Now so where you talked about how you got to CNN. But you were on the, and I learned all this in our pre-interview call, you’re on the homepage of Yahoo for 48 hours, sadly 46 of those hours ended up being a waste but I’ll let you tell that story. First of all, how did you get on to the homepage of yahoo?

J: Well I was already featured there twice in 3 months. So the first time was because of that CNN article. They had me listed in CNN then they asked me to be on the TV show within the next day or two. So Adam Baker from Man vs. Debt was actually in that same article. I didn’t realized I was the only one that there was about 6 other people talking about getting on the deck. I was the only one that they asked to go on CNN. So I went on CNN with Tony Harris on TV. And then from that a couple of days later they featured the story on yahoo and my face was on Yahoo’s homepage. So part of me was like maybe it’s coz I’m a girl, that kind of thing, that’s why they featured me up or something. I don’t know but that was the first one.

T: That was my next question, why do you think they picked you out of the whole crowd?

J: I don’t know. Yeah I mean there were 6 of them and I looked at the photos of the 6 of them and maybe I had a professional headshot so maybe that was why. I mean I don’t know.

T: Was there any other girls?

J: There were girls and guys but there was not one just girl so. I mean I know it happened again so that was a different picture of me so I mean that might be it too when the second one came about shortly after and watched it. I was in October, it wasn’t 3 months and then in March I was featured again because I was in Kiplinger’s personal finance magazine. And yahoo, the reason why I was in yahoo is coz they were syndicated so they syndicate CNN and they syndicate Kiplinger’s personal finance. And so it was the same of very similar story, dude pays of $70,000 of debt and a whole much other stuff.

T: So it was a good human interest story that obviously many people in the audience especially, and what year was this?

J: Well 2, well yeah.

T: Okay.

J: A while ago. When I first started. So a year after blogging. I’ve been blogging for just about 3 years now so about 2 years ago.

T: So during this current recession so lots of people could relate to being $70,000 in debt and in particular for you to be a young woman who was successful at getting herself out of debt and you’re not exactly hurt on the eyes, all of those things together I’m sure contributed to.

J: Can I quote you on this? A quote from Trent.

T: I told you yesterday I look like John Hem and I go to her and I go “who’s John Hem?”

J: I think I know who that is.

T: It’s the guy from Mad Men, Don Draper. I knew his character name but I didn’t know his real name. So she was laughing at me coz I had no idea coz I’ve been told quite a few times actually that I look like him.

J: I bet you should have a code.

T: A code, yeah maybe. Maybe I can call myself the Don Draper of blogging. Oh I’m gonna get some hate mail. Do not send me a nasty email. Jamie started this.

J: I know. Send him a nasty email, that’s fine.

T: Okay so you should probably tell what happened for 46 of those 48 hours or whatever the number is. Why it didn’t do you any good because while it’s not marketing related at all it’s a pretty important thing for people to understand if they’re going out to get press.

J: Yap. And this is what I tell, and I hate telling it everytime coz I feel stupid but let me tell it again. So both times my server crashed. So the first time it wasn’t that big of a deal, I had about a 1,000 people come because there was no link. Second time I was on the homepage of yahoo for 48 hours and there was a link.

T: Did you have control over whether there was a link or no link or is that up to them?

J: So the second time, everytime now I ask and so with Kiplinger’s personal finance I asked her to put a link online. I didn’t know it was gonna go to yahoo but I asked her to make sure there was a link and she said okay. So yeah, always ask, always always ask for a link. It’s really good for SEO anyway but also nobody, another issue. So the very first time I didn’t have, so I was on yahoo’s home page. When you googled my name my site came up. When you yahoo’d my name, which nobody says yahoo’d I think, someone else’s site came up and then my facebook page came up and I wasn’t even to like the bugs. So even when my site was up when there was no link it was just bad. There was really facebook fan request but that was about it.

T: I think you got a marriage proposal too, didn’t you?

J :I did. I’ve gotten a few more since then. I’m very proud of those.

T: And when you were on the homepage did you by chance dance around your office and say “yahoo!”.

J: No I didn’t. I should have. Maybe I can do it again. So that was the thing. Really, really ask for links and also if there is no link make sure when you google your name just in case they don’t have your website and google or yahoo or bing your name make sure it comes up in search results. So for 2 hours the second time works from going back and forth, the second time I was up in 2 hours, I got 8,000 visitors to my site in 2 hours.

T: That’s a lot.

J: Yeah. And then it crashed. So 4,000 times 46 hours, yeah I know it hurts a lot. So make sure that your site can handle it. I had a hosting site, a hosting company and it’s just a shared server and I’m a geek. I have a degree in IT, I know this, I saw work in the server room at a place and I was just dumb.

T: And you were on a $10 a month cheap skate hosting plan back then?

J: Yes I was. Till I see someone dumb. Yeah really dumb. Don’t do that.

T: Two thumbs up.

J: For me, yeah. Learn from me, don’t do that.

T: Okay so let me go back to my notes here coz we are eventually gonna get, I want people to learn more about this interview business coz it really is such a terrific business but I also wanted to make sure that we keep talking about press. Alright can you summarize for us then just like you did with guest posting the Jamie’s 10 minute crash course on how to get some press?

J: Alright I just did a snitch on this, it was a lot longer than 10 minutes so we’ll see if I can do this.

T: Maybe you’ll do a master class for me hopefully, hopefully.

J: Nice shot.

T: Maybe.

J: I don’t know. I’m kidding. So the first thing that I say is to start with like helpareporter.com. I don’t know if you guys know too much about it already but it connects journalists with people that are potential sources. I’ve gotten quite a bit of press from them. I’ve gotten fox business, success magazine, like a bunch of kinda cool places from there.

T: Say that url, Jamie please say that url again because I think they missed it.

J: Helpareporter.com.

T: Isn’t it helpareporterout.com?

J: No.

T: No, oh my bad.

J: The name of the service is help a reporter out. The website url is helpareporter.com. Not very smart but that’s what’s written.

T: No yeah.

J: So I would do that and try and practice right pitching coz you need to get better at pitching before you get bigger stuff. So you can do some of the lower stuff that’s good for backlinking anyway. And then try and get the bigger stuff. And then the reason why that’s good is because when you’ve already had some press it’s much easier to get more of it. So on my site when it says I have all these press, people that come to my site go “oh I already know. She’s okay with the media.” Especially like TV stations and stuff like that don’t want you if you’re not very good on camera. So they wanna know that you’ve done stuff ahead of time or a good resource. So that just makes you a little more credible so that’s also why I say to start up with that and then move forward.

T: Okay so help a reporter out resource no. 1. Try and get some of the low hanging fruit, get some social proof, hone your pitch skills, build relationships with those reporters and over time you’re snowball will get bigger as it rolls down the hill.

J: Yeah. Just like I said with Laura Bandecamp who actually reads get rich slowly but that’s not how I met her. I met her because I was using help a reporter out. She needed a source for her book. I didn’t even know who she was. I became a source for her book. Later she emailed and was like “Oh my fifth for this fortune.com article I’m doing.” And we’ve since build a relationship again going like “Oh I should take you out for coffee. You’re great.” You know that sort of stuff. So definitely start building relationships even when you don’t necessarily know where they’re gonna go.

T: Okay. Thank you for that. Now you have, I know you’ve talked about other ways we’re only gonna have so much time in this interview. So when we get to the end of this interview or the heck you can even say it now. You know people how can they reach to get more of you to get more of these stuff.

J: My blog is eventualmillionaire.com.

T: There you go.

J: Yeah. I have a whole thing on press and stuff like that too.

T: Okay. So let’s talk about the interview business for a bit. It’s one that obviously we’re both actively involved in. And it’s your interview so you get to give answer to all the questions. Why is this such a good business to be in? And does it work in any niche?

J: It’s so funny because usually I am on the other side. I love talking. It’s so hard being an interviewer and going and I don’t say anything.

T: I’ve had people write me to tell me to shut up. They say let your guest talk so and here I am talking. So shut me up. Start talking.

J: I had that too. I just sent out a survey and someone said you talk too much and you just need more pictures of yourself on the site. So I’m like “oh you want me to shut up and then you want more pictures of me.” Yeah okay that’s funny. And it’s hard. There’s a fine balance coz you really want your audience to know who you are and there’s people that listen to my interviews love me which is great. I mean not all of them of course, right? But most of the interviews are from millionaires but a lot of them really like me too. So I love interjecting but you really have to make sure they haven’t heard this before because hearing the same story more than once is so annoying but you also wanna be able to build the relationship with like the millionaire. So when I’m talking a millionaire I want the millionaire to know all about me too.

T: Exactly.

J: So that way we can start building a relationship. So I try and look for like those connection points with the millionaire that I haven’t you know same old same old for my audience and not talk too much at the same time. So there’s a lot of different things going on. But yeah I absolutely love interviewing because almost no one, even millionaires, say no.

T: Yap.

J: Coz they’re flattered. You can start building relationship big time because there’s a lot of prep work before he enters the whole interview. You have to tell them later you know when it comes live you’re a lot of different touch points as you go. And you can continue the conversation and go “oh I love to have you on the show again in a little while”. That sort of stuff. So I think it’s huge for building relationships even if you didn’t get any traffic from this. You should interview. My mentor who taught me business coaching, I’m like you need to interview people because it’s the best way for him to get infront of even prospects or people that might be good relationships for him locally, he should do it too. So I think it’s huge.

And I think you can pretty much do it in just about any niche. I have a friend who’s a performer and I was like go interview all of the venues that you wanna be booked at because it’d be great. You’d have a podcast talking about like what they look for, you know maybe how they market so that way other venues can listen to them. And then you’re getting an email. It just makes sense.

T: Yeah it does. I just can’t say enough about all of the perks. I’ll be honest with you I started interviewing on my internet marketing blog called onlineincomelab.com because I was looking for an easy way to produce more content. I knew that people were getting sick of hearing my stuff all the time and so I thought well coz I haven’t been successful at everything obviously. I’ve only had at that point in time I had a limited amount of success and so I thought well I wanna get free lessons, no. 1, I’d like to expand my network and I don’t wanna have to type all the damn content all the time.

J: Thank you for saying that.

T: Voila! The interview business was born and in my case it ended up spawning an entirely new business brightideas.co where this interview will be posted and I think that the potential for that business is just so much more than the internet marketing audience.

J: Yeah.

T: And I gonna give props to you because I took your advice for the people listening to this, in the pre-call Jamie told me about how she’d attracted all these millionaires to be as interview guests for her and some of them opted in to her mastermind and again you know what? I’m not gonna tell the story. It’s your interview. You’re gonna tell us, right?

J: Well what I was gonna say before, the reason why I started interviewing was I never saw myself as a writer. I can write and that’s great but to me, it took me a while and my mastermind group thanking this for them was like you’re really good at communicating and that sort of stuff. And so I was like I should do a podcast coz both Pat and Murin had a podcast already. That’s a great idea why wouldn’t I do that. And Murin was like you shouldn’t interview only millionaires. And I was like that’s a good idea I should totally do that. And it sort of came about from that. So because it’s so much easier to produce content this way too. You get new and interesting. You can have people that specifically know hard core all about that specific thing is huge. It’s awesome for content definitely.

T: And you know we all get transcripts done so this is just a little take away for anyone listening to this. If you still want to have written articles when you do an interview like this you end up with 10-12,000 words of content that you didn’t have to pay for. If you’ve asked your questions in such a way you can just get your VA to go and take the transcript and strip out one question and answer and wala! blog post.

J: Yeah it can be a huge thing. So yeah it’s huge. The transcripts, now I’m writing a book proposal right now who actually found me from my blog because I had all that press on there. Was like oh she must know what she’s talking then. And I looked at how many transcripts I have and each of them are 15 pages and I have 70 of them. Like that’s a lot of content. That’s so much content and it’s crazy. So definitely.

T: You and I are on similar paths.

J: Well you meet me in person.

T: I think I told you I’m doing a book as well.

J: Oh are you really?

T: Yap. And this is again I was attempting to give you props I meant in the go so I wanted to get some, people who’d made the million dollars online. And so I took your advice and I went and put a thing up on haro which was free by the way. And I said looking for people who have an expertise in online marketing and sales automation who are millionaires and would like to be featured in a book. And my book is tentatively titled, I don’t know if I wanna give the title away, somebody might turn off the registry so I’m not gonna give the title yet.

And I got a lot of responses and I did a pre-interview this morning before this interview of this guy, he’s got a $7,000,000 a year business that makes this hot sauce and he was jazzed to talk to me. And he was a really cool guy and he’s gonna do 2 interviews and he’s gonna be in the book and he’s gonna blah blah blah. You wanna make it bad, he’s probably got a mailing list for his $7,000,000 a year company and when my interview goes live it’s just promotion for him. If I have rapport with him, I’m thinking it’s fairly good chance he’s gonna tell his list about my site, his interview on my site which creates all sorts of opportunity for additional opt ins and traction and traffic and all these wonderful things.

And again I’m totally hijacking the interview but I wanted people to understand that this is it. It’s really such an awesome business to be in.

J: It is. It totally is. Congratulations on taking my advice now.

T: Yeah thank you.

J: That’s one of the biggest question I always get from everyone is how do you find millionaires. And as I responded to it, Trent, the very first time I put it out at haro. I thought I was gonna get 2 and I got 30. And I was like oh I should make this once a week instead of I was gonna do once every while, maybe once a month. I didn’t think it’d be that easy to find them.

T: Yeah and now a question that I haven’t asked yet and I’ve been thinking about, do you validate that they’re millionaire in any way, shape or form or do you just take their word for it?

J: I did that a lot. So I specifically asked them if they have a net worth of at least a million dollars or more and I need them to say yes. So I don’t go in a look at stuff. If I do the interview and I feel like they’re not telling me the truth or that they’re sort of shady then I’m just don’t post the interview.

T: Yeah.

J: But in general like if they usually seem really genuine and stuff like that I think it’s good. And I’ll look for stuff. Maybe when the book comes out that’s actually what I’m talking to my agent about. When the book comes out I think there’s gonna have to be more validation, more verification.

T: Yeah.

J: It’s like go through a publisher.

T: Absolutely.

J: Definitely.

T: And we could do, and we should do a whole other interview about publishing a book but we don’t have time for that one today. Maybe if you’ll be kind enough to come back on we’d do that.

J: Yeah.

T: We can maybe share our learning experiences. And a friend of mine who is been a marketer for quite a while, she’s written a number of books and just swears by the kindle platform. She said you know you don’t need traditional publishing around.

J: I know.

T: So there’s just a huge debate of which way to go and honestly I don’t know which way to go yet. I need to talk to more people who are smarter than me.

J: I was gonna say have you ever interviewed Johnny Andrews?

T: No.

J: Okay, Pat interviewed him, he’s a friend of mine and he’s been yelling at me too like don’t do it, don’t go to traditional publishing. You should totally have him on because he’ll give you his opinion. Now it’s just an opinion but he’s hard core.

T: I’d love to.

J: He’s got a lot of really good stories.

T: Can you make an email introduction?

J: I can.

T: Thank you.

J: Send me a note later.

T: I will. So it’s Johnny?

J: Andrews.

T: So if that’s not evidence of the awesome networking of interviewing people I don’t know what is. Alright.

J: And he did interview me way back so I didn’t even interview him.

T: Let’s talk about the interviewing business model for a minute coz I know that when I meet people and they ask me what I do for a living I tell them I have an online talk show coz it’s easy to understand.

J: It’s better. I should do that. I say I interview millionaires.

T: Well that’s cool too. But then they go the very first question is they go you can make money at that? And so there is a business model and not everyone’s is the same. Would you like to talk about yours?

J: Yeah mine’s? It’s fine coz we’re talking about this before. Mine’s a little different than yours. Well I mean not different. What I primarily was before and became online as a business sketch. So I have businesses locally, I have businesses all over the world now that I help. Usually they’re doing less than a million it depends on where they are now. So that’s what I love to do. That’s my passion. But I only work 20 hours a week so there’s always too much coaching that I can’t do. So I’m starting moving on to more sort of internet marketing types of things. So I have a membership site and I’m doing the book. And so doing a little bit more stuff that’s gonna be a lot more passive. And 20 hours a week it’s kind of difficult to do that much.

T: Yeah tough.

J: So it’s a slow process and I’m trying to make it be okay. But in general I’ve got my business coaching practice and then I also have the membership site and the marketing.

T: Okay so let’s just walk through this really simple. The interviews provide the content. You make the interviews available for free, correct?

J: Correct.

T: Are they always available for free or do you do like Andrew at Mixergy and put them behind the wall after 30 days?

J: I don’t but iTunes only shows the last I think 15 or so. You can get the rest if you come to my site.

T: Yeah. Andrew only shows the last 5 as and I decided to take a page out of his book on that one.

J: I just interviewed him and we talked all about interviewing so he care about interviewing. I just interviewed Andrew Warner from Mixergy and he gave really good tips that I have to implement also.

T: Yeah.

J: And so is this stuff.

J: The same thing that people talk about when you start a business like having your ideal customer. Well when you’re first starting you’re like I can’t, I’m gonna take anybody. Anyone that’s willing to pay me I’ll take them. And as a business coach, exactly. You wanna be working with the ideal customers. You wanna be working with the people that aren’t complainers. You know and that sort of thing. You’re gonna be so much happier. It just creates so much less stress with them also. So for your regular business make sure you’re listening to them.

T: And I wanted to take an opportunity to plug Mike’s book, The Pumpkin Plan. If you’re listening to this show and you’re running a business or your business is running you, and you just can’t figure out how to make the thing grow anymore but you’ve got a good product or a good service and you have some customers that really love you, you need to go buy Mike’s book, The Pumpkin Plan. You absolutely must buy this book and then you need to follow what the advice that he gives you because it’s really really awesome advice. And he gives evidence of how it impacted his own business and people he’s coached. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the book and that’s why I wanted to get him on the show.

J: I need to write it down too. Make sure you remind me. I don’t have a pen near me. Make sure to remind me to write that down later.

T: Alright I will. So I think we’re like way off topic now.

J: Yeah.

T: If somebody is still listening to this at the end and hopefully they’re fist pumping in their car and going yeah yeah yeah, you guys thanks for rumbling on for a while because I think it’s important stuff. So is there any other questions that I wanted to ask you? There was one tip you gave and we’ll close on this one on using haro to get press. And it was about response time.

J: Oh yeah. I actually ended up talking to somebody at haro because I wanted to find out what the real people did. I actually interviewed a bunch of PR people to try and find out what they do to get it. And it’s the same with enough 15 minute window. So when you sign for haro you’ll get an email 3 times a day which is a lot. And some people just delete them coz it’s really annoying. But if you can actually take a couple seconds to scan through and try to find exactly one that works for you and then within 15 minutes do your reply and send it back. There’s 2 reasons for this. The first is because you get a buzzillion replies and at first you’re like oh look can you read them? Especially somebody who’s a reporter, a bigger reporter. They’ll get a couple and then there’s just so many you have to start moving them into a folder and you don’t have the time. And the other reason is that a lot of times there’s bigger people like the bigger national media are on deadlines and they need to know something fast. So not only respond as quick as you can. You also include a phone number so that way they can call you and follow up too. So those are definitely good tips. I’ve gotten a lot more because of that.

T: And I took your advice on that and the first email for me comes in coz I’m on the pacific coast or pacific coast time it comes like at 3 in the morning so I just ignore that one.

J: What? Come on. Aren’t you dedicated?

T: That’s a lot for right now. The other 2 they come in at the same time everyday within a couple of minutes so I just set an alarm in my google calendar peep peep peep and I flip over to the gmail account that I use for that. Soon as they come in I scan it. It takes me 30 seconds and I’m only on 2 so I get 2 emails twice a day. Well 3 times a day but I don’t even look at the first one. And it doesn’t take very long. Like today for example somebody, they wanted someone with significant start up experience. Well you know hello, I’ve started a couple of companies, sold one. So I thought yeah okay so again I took your advice, I wrote them back , hi my name is, here’s the press I’ve been featured in, here’s my about page, here’s my relevant thing, here’s my phone number, here’s my email, I’m ready to go, if there’s anyway I can help you please let me know.

J: Perfect. Now in my speech if I do that again I’m gonna tell people to set an alarm. Do what Trent did.

T: Yeah.

J: That’s a really good idea. Awesome.

T: And I’m looking actually at my email inbox right now to see if I got a reply and I don’t think I did on this one but it’s a numbers game.

J: Well that’s the thing. It depends, right? So it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gonna use it right away either. And that’s the thing that’s hard. The success magazine one I didn’t hear back for weeks. I thought I would just assume they didn’t get it. And then she’s like oh you’re in. And I’m like okay good, thanks.

T: Yeah actually now that’s a really good point and I’m gonna hijack you one more time because it’s relevant. So I got myself on Fox 5 news here a couple of times. And the first time that I did it so I met someone who knew the producer. In the subject line I said so and so referred me. She told me exactly how to write the pitch. It was 3 bullet points, you know, my name is blah, I think your audience will be interested in this because point no. 1, point no. 2, point no. 3. It’s the hook. I didn’t hear back from them for like 6 weeks. And then they had a slow news day presumably, a slow news day. And I get an email like 3:00 in the afternoon can you be at the studio tomorrow morning at 5:45 am? Absolutely I can. And once they have you on once then what do they think they did? They invited to come on again.

J: That’s a possibility.

T: And you know what? The funny thing was, this is before my online business and I get to talk about some failure here, this is awesome. In the time between selling my technology services company and going online I spent about a year learning everything I could about real estate coz I wanted to become a real estate investor and I was gonna buy all these foreclosures and flip them. And so here’s a guy who’s I’d never done a real estate deal. I think coz I just was a horrible failure. I just didn’t understand the price these people wanted to pay for these deals. I couldn’t see any profit so my offers never got accepted. But I got myself on TV as a real estate expert because I asked and I knew what I was talking about. I’ve been reading, I’ve been studying these stuff big time. So I bring that up only to say that don’t let your limiting beliefs like my buddy who’s been a realtor for 10 years, he’s a top producer, he looked at me and he goes are you out of your mind? He says you’re going on TV as some supposed real estate expert? And I said I know how to answer the questions. I know the answers.

J: Exactly.

T: And so my point is don’t let any kind of limiting belief get in your way. If you know your material, you know your stuff don’t be afraid to tell people that you are an expert coz the interview was easy and good and it’s not like they’re doing investigative reporting and trying to trip you off.

J: Yeah definitely.

T: It’s not what it’s like. Alright we need to wind this up coz I think I’ve got other interviews to do today but yeah it’s been a really good time. Jamie thank you so much for making the time. Obviously I’d love to have you come back on. You know I’m gonna ask you to come back on. I’m also asking you to do a master class for me on maybe starting a mastermind actually. Wouldn’t mind doing coz you seem to be like that’s something some people might like to do. I’m not gonna put you on the spot on air and ask you to come.

J: You have to ask me when you’re in Vegas when you go to the new media expo.

T: Absolutely I think that’s what I’ll do. Alright so that wraps up this episode. Thanks very much Jamie for being on. Last thing, if people want to get a hold of you, the best way to do it is…

J: Just go to eventualmillionaire.com. You can shoot me an email there if you ever need anything or you can find the podcasts on itunes which is eventual millionaire podcast. That’s it.

T: And if you’re in a hurry to become a millionaire I think I’m gonna start a new plight inside that says become a millionaire faster than jamie can teaching you .com.

J: Oh I am a brown belt on karate. We will get started on that one.

T: No we’re just gonna stick with Bright Ideas I think.

J: Awesome Trent.

T: Alright folks that’s it. Thanks very much. That is a wrap for this episode. Thank you for listening. We’ll talk to you in another one.

J: Thanks so much.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this episode:

Media Attention Made Easy

Jaime’s Crash Course on How to Get Free Press

Jaime is a rock star at getting press coverage.  She’s been on tons of media outlets, including heavy hitters like CNN.  She was also on the front page of

Press coverage has been key to Jaime's success.Image Source: 123rf.com

Press coverage has been key to Jaime’s success.
Image Source: 123rf.com

Yahoo, free coverage which at first she was unable to take full advantage of.

In fact, when Jaime got on Yahoo, she realized she wasn’t prepared to be on Yahoo.  Hear her openly share the mistakes she made.  She also shares

one thing to ask for every time you get press coverage, whether it’s Yahoo or something smaller.

Listen to the interview to hear Jaime share her mistakes so you don’t have to make them.

Jaime’s Crash Course on How to Get Attention from Other Bloggers

Jaime is a master at building relationships with others.  She has leveraged these relationships to get tons of additional free press coverage.  She is a big proponent of guest posts, and sees this as a major component of what helped her grow her site quickly.

Hear Jaime share her tips on getting guest posts.

Jaime’s Crash Course on Interview Sites

I’m obviously a big fan of interviewing and interview sites.

Interviewing is an excellent tool to leverage for business growth.Image Source: 123rf.com

Interviewing is an excellent tool to leverage for business growth.
Image Source: 123rf.com

If you like Bright Ideas, you’ll definitely want to head over to Eventual Millionaire and check out Jaime’s site too.  She’s an engaging interviewer and her site is an inspiring example of how to leverage interview sites for your business.

Hear Jaime talk about why interview sites work so well.

All the Extras

Now, I have to admit that Jaime and I had mad tangents all over the place during our conversation.  I guess that’s what you get when you interview an interviewer!

But that also leads to some great content for you.  Jaime shares all sorts of hidden gems.  She even provides a crash course on mastermind groups.  And this interviewer of millionaires has formed some stellar groups full of millionaire, so you know this is good stuff!

Listen to the interview to hear Jaime share all her best secrets.

About Jaime Tardy

Ever since Jamie was little she’s had this weird feeling that she would someday have a million dollars. While she’s not quite to a million yet, she’s always been intrigued by how to do it.

She started out thinking the only way she could do it was to get a good job with a great salary.  So she went to a great (expensive!) school, and began working full time while still in school. By the age of 22 she was making six figures, and had an expense account. By the age of 24 she was in over $70,000 in debt.

Unfortunately, she hated her work. She had worked so hard, and had some cool stuff. But she was stuck in airports all the time. She dreaded Sunday nights because they marked the beginning of yet another long work week.

Jamie determined that living an enjoyable life was worth far more than a million dollars. So she updated my goal. Instead of just a million dollars, she wanted to find work she loved and the life she loved, and THEN make her million. She took time off to find out what work excited her.

And, she found it. Now she helps entrepreneurs focus their money and their strengths to create an amazing life while they build their net worth.

Jamie’s still learning too, so she interviews millionaires to get their best tips, tactics and advice from their successes and failures.