Digital marketing is red hot right now in 2019, as more than ever before, business owners are realizing they need online presence.
It can be incredibly lucrative but there's also a lot of broke digital marketers out there.
The proper question to ask:
How do you build a profitable agency?
95% of digital marketers are doing the following:
- Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA)
- Pay-per-call Marketing (PPC aka Paid Advertising)
- SEO Agency (Search Engine Optimization)
Which one's the best?
I had my fair share of clients in all 3.
I hit a ceiling in income at around $10K per month.
It wasn't until I overcame the following 3 major pitfalls, was I able to ascend to the top 1% income in the US. ($40K+ per month) Very rapidly I may add.
The 3 Major Pitfalls for Digital Marketers
1. Client Retention
2. No consistent way to prospect for new clients
3. Too Much On-going Work to Keep Clients Happy
In this article, I will show you how to never let these pitfalls stop your success.
I'll also reveal the 4th type of digital marketing that most people don't know about yet that's the very best at resolving all 3 pitfalls at once. It's called lead generation.
Getting to $10K per month is pretty easy with digital marketing imo as long as you have strong work ethic & learn some decent skills.
I'll cover exactly how you can do so in this guide. Including top hacks I've used to continually get new clients. & Techniques that increase your social media marketing reach by 50% or more.
However beyond $10K per month, you have to begin working smarter as well.
You don't need a college professor that's never ran an actual business to teach you about digital marketing, with the internet we have all the information we'll ever need at our fingertips.
So there's no lack of information, what's missing is:
But I don't have a degree in marketing... I have zero experience... How would any business owner take me seriously?
What I realized is that if you can provide results upfront for free, you don't need a resume.
I generated free leads for business owners to earn their trust, I only asked to get paid after they got some leads & closed some jobs from me (I made them $$$ first).
Let Gary Vee tell you the power of working for free to build authority in the marketplace.
The 3 Pillars to gain Market Acceptance
1. Traditional piece of paper route (a degree / certificate)
2. Work for somebody else that's an authority and then ask for endorsements / references
3. Provide free service for people, and let the testimonials of the early people, give you credibility
Gary is 3.
He often recommends 2.
99% of the world is 1.
I was def 3.
Before we even begin talking about building a multiple 6 figure digital marketing agency.
We have to address the fact that:
Most people fail to even get started.
Because they're so afraid of failing or looking stupid.
In order to get paid top dollars in this world, you have to become a valuable person worthy of higher income.
You can only become that person through tons of experience until you become the bonified expert.
In short:
You gotta go learn new shit. Go do shit. Go try shit. As Gary would say...
How do you gain experience without pushing yourself outside your comfort zone? You gotta go take massive imperfect action.
This is the digital marketing business plan that got me started with no experience.
Most important thing is to get started as soon as possible. Fail forward. Go get a client and do the service for free, if you suck and fail to produce results, who cares, you didn't charge anything anyway.
PPC and SEO requires heavy expenses so you can't really afford to do that for free.
But Lead Generation and Social Media Marketing is def feasible to do for free and earn your stripes.
It is important to know the pros & cons of each digital marketing model.
Knowing how to do each model allows you to work with virtually any client.
But if you just know social media marketing, you're gonna miss out on highly lucrative industries out there that doesn't really rely on social media.
Each model was instrumental to where I'm at today.
Below shows what my income looks like today:
Digital marketing is what has allowed me to achieve the laptop lifestyle of my dreams: you can check out some glimpses on my Instagram here.
Why such disparity between my lead gen income versus other models?
I just decided to focus on lead-gen because I love ranking sites & generating free, organic traffic. (Just like I've done with this blog).
Lead-Gen also has the strongest client retention.
You can still reach 6-figure income with all models.
I will share with you pros & cons each, and how to make each model successful.
Including some of the best tips & tricks I've learned since 2014, that you will not find anywhere else (guaranteed).
Chapter 1:
4 Types of Digital Marketing
1. Social Media Marketing
Managing people's Facebook & Instagram pages to increase followers and create posts that get high engagement which increases its reach & exposure. For example: doing giveaways and asking people to follow, tag, comment on the post is one of the main strategies.
Pros
Cons
Conclusion:
Social Media Marketing is limited to select niches, and the amount of $$$ you can demand is usually lower, since results won't be as drastic as PPC, SEO or Lead Generation. However this is the easiest and cheapest form of digital marketing that one could get started with.
2. Pay-per-Click Marketing (PPC)
Running Paid Advertising for companies using Facebook/Instagram Ads and/or Google Adwords. What's considered interruption marketing. Takes some skill to generate leads while keeping cost per click as low as possible, daily maintenance of ad performance is required.
Pros
Cons
Conclusion:
PPC is a great way to produce customers right away for a business but to do it longterm you really have to tweak the ad campaigns to make sure your not overspending to get each customer. Ad spend can quickly begin to eat up profit margins if you're not careful. PPC clients are great way to make fast cash.
3. SEO
Ranking other people's sites to the top of Google. It can take some time but you can also make some lucrative longterm contracts. Once the site ranks its very little maintenance.
Pros
Cons
Conclusion:
Companies are willing to pay good money for SEO however you need to be properly trained because there's many different ways to screw up SEO. A lot of false information out there. Also after you get the rankings, be weary of clients that can 1 day decide to leave you when they feel like they don't need you anymore.
4. Lead Generation
Instead of ranking other people's sites. You're ranking your own sites at the top of Google and then using a tracking phone number, forwarding calls or leads to local businesses and they pay you for those leads. These are digital assets that you own almost like setting up virtual billboards and you get paid monthly for them. (My favorite digital marketing model)
Pros
Cons
Conclusion:
What makes lead generation model so great is that because you own the digital assets, you have so much more leverage. Your clients have to pay you because they don't wanna lose the leads to their competitor. This means you can keep building more and more assets & increase your clients without having to worry about losing your old clients. Client retention is the key to continue to grow and not slide backwards with your digital marketing agency.
Top 7 Hacks to Get Clients
Getting a client is your first step in building your digital marketing agency.
I recommend prospecting for new clients everyday if you wanna really grow your business to 6 figures as quickly as possible.
Not every single client will stick with you forever till the end of time.
Clients can come and go at times especially with social media, PPC or SEO. You have to be ready for that and continue to fill your pipeline with people that you can offer your services to everyday.
My mentor taught me this over and over again: Making more money is simple, all you have to do is "make more offers".
Below are some of the best strategies I know of today to effectively make offers without coming across like 99% of spammy salesy marketers out there.
Hack 1: Give Value First, Provide Good Will
My favorite sushi restaurant in town…
People feel inclined to give back when they receive value first.
If you want to ask a restaurant owner, or whatever biz owner if they need a social media person, instead of asking out of the blue.
Leave them a 5 star yelp review first. Then ask.
You’ll be amazed just that one gesture of doing something good for them first goes a LONG way in them at the very least being very appreciative and willing to listen to your pitch.
“Hey Mr. Owner, I just wanna say I’m a big fan of your restaurant. I just left you a 5 star Yelp review! by the way, I was looking at your social media and was wondering do you have anyone managing that for you?”
Become their customer first as well. Biz owners are hard-wired to be nice to their customers. Not to marketers.
Hack 2: Scrape Emails and Send Biz Owners A Video Presentation
Go to Fiverr.com
and search: “scrape business email”
Make sure to bananatag your emails so you get notified which biz owners open your email and clicked on your video.
Watch your calendar begin to fill up as business owners are now reaching out trying to meet you at Starbucks.
Here’s an example of a video I made to sell a SEO service
Ok to breakdown above video here’s what I’m showing to the biz owner.
- First grabbing their attention by making a custom video that is specific to their niche & city (I’m seperating myself from 99% of marketers that are lazy and don’t put in this extra effort)
- Showing them that they’re missing out on so much business because they’re no where to be found in the top 3 rankings.
- Showing my expertise by using tools like Majestics to understand exactly why the current top guy is #1 (number of quality backlinks)
- What needs to be done & how to fix this issue so that their company can take the top spot
- Finally asking them to reach back out to you if this is something that feel they need help with
if you just do 5 of these videos everyday without fail, you will have built a 6 figure digital marketing agency in 6 months or less.
6 figure income, lets say is $10K per month. To me that’s not that impressive anymore. Its not hard once you start getting digital marketing clients that pay monthly.
Only thing that’s standing in between you & $10K per month is discipline.
Hack 3: Look for Businesses Sending Out Coupons
Ya kno those flyers you keep getting?
Those are all potential clients,
Any business that’s willing to spend money on sending out flyers and offering coupons is a business that’s trying to grow.
Scrape their contact info… and reach out to them and offer a solution of doing coupon marketing using social media.
I have a restaurant client that exploded their business because we began offering incredible coupons on social media.
The restaurant would only break even because of the coupon was so generous but they were gaining long-term returning customers.
This is essentially what groupon did in the beginning, now they're a billion dollar company.
Hack 4: Send Lumpy Mail
You can do the above strategy (hack 3) but instead of regular way of soliciting, get creative with it, send them a lumpy mail.
Most people throw away regular mails that’s clearly marketing.
But lumpy mails get opened because people are now curious to see what’s inside.
You can send these mails to not just biz owners with coupons out but any biz that’s spending money on advertising are good companies to target.
A company that’s spending money already on marketing knows the value of marketing already, you don’t have to spend the time educating on that. They already get it. That it takes money (in marketing) to make more money.
Amazon has these 80 pack of social media emoji toys for $32.99. Check it out here.
That’s $.42 per toy, per mail.
With postage, you’re looking around $1 per lumpy mail sent.
If you landed 1 client out of 100 lumpy mails sent, even up to 300 lumpy mails. You’re still coming out ahead.
Once you figure out the cost of acquiring a client.
You can really begin to scale.
Hack 5: Become The Local News Press
This is a strategy that my mentor taught me. He has used it to get countless appointments with business owners and that’s when his digital marketing agency really started to take off like Tesla’s rocket to outerspace.
Basically you create your own local news site, here’s what one of our students made:
www.placercountyreviewagency.com/
And all you’re going to do is reach out to business owners and ask if they would like to be featured on your news site and book 1-on-1 interviews with them.
Here’s why this works.
Business owners are already hard-wired to ignore marketers.
But business owners LOVE press.
Their business is like their child. Their business getting featured on the news is equivalent to your child (if u got any) getting first place trophy at a wrestling tournament.
Your job is to:
- Book Appointments
- Interview them, ask a lot of questions about them & their business (biz owners love talking about themselves or their business)
- Look for anything that they’re struggling with in their business (this is where they might tell you about issues in their marketing or lack of customers)
- Keep the conversation casual & light
- At the end of the conversation, after you spent a whole 30 min to an hour with them, & you’re getting them exposure on your news site, you have a license to pitch, don’t forget to make an offer
“Hey Jim, remember when you were telling me about an issue with your website & lack of customers? Well what’s funny is I’m also trained in digital marketing skills, its the same exact skill I apply to my own news site to get exposure online. And I believe I can help you with that exact problem that you were describing to me, do you have a minute? I’d like to share with you what I know and what I believe I can do for you.”
By this time, you should have so much rapport built with the biz owner because you just let them talk about their entire life & business to you for the last 30 minutes.
Just know
Now you’re thinking. “But I’m not actually the media” and my response is this, yes you’re. With the internet everyone has a voice, there’s youtubers and bloggers out there that are getting celebrities on their shows today.
They don’t work for any media company or go through any formal training.
Asking for an interview to do a cover story on your local media site is probably one of the most powerful ways to get in front of business owners consistently, we cover this strategy extensively in the training.
Becoming more creative in the way you get in front of business owners is the Trojan horse that makes all the difference from the average marketers out there that’s cold calling all day.
Hack 6: Adwords Coupon Strategy (Advanced)
This is one of the most powerful strategies out there and I can’t believe I’m sharing it for free but here it goes.
Adwords has coupon that they offer where if you spend $25 you get $100 extra to spend on Adwords.
You can buy these coupons from eBay.com
Now open up a Adwords MCC account here
The MCC account allows you to create multiple adwords account all under 1, this is needed because you can only run the adwords coupon once per account, but with the MCC you can create 100 accounts and keep running coupons.
You will need to put a brand new credit card for each new account. (Do not use the same credit card more than once)
How do we accomplish this?
Well you can use all the different credit or debit card you might already have, or open new credit cards with your bank or you can even ask friends / family debit card or credit card.
Once the card & coupon has been used, you could report the card missing and have them replace the card and that also counts as a brand new card.
But if you wanna get serious with this strategy as I have done, the best way is to go get a business account at Bank of America or Chase, they will allow you to create as many employee credit cards as you want.
I have like 50 employee credit cards. Each single one of them act as a totally different card.
(Note: Do not use VCC’s stands for virtual credit cards, Google knows the difference and using VCC will significantly increase the chances of your whole account getting shut down)
Check out the above screenshot, I spent $13,890.65 in adwords coupons
Run the ads to a simple landing page with a tracking phone number.
Our tracking phone system puts a whisper message at the beginning of every call so every time the biz owner picks up the phone they’ll hear…
“This lead was sent to you by Ippei”
Right before the customer begins talking.
Nothing is more powerful than sending someone some free leads. Real customers that they can close and turn into revenue.
Now when you reach out to the biz owner they already want to work with you because your leads did all the convincing for you.
Once you use up the coupon, if you want to use another, all you have to do is create another adwords account inside MCC and put a fresh new credit card in and get a fresh new domain.
You can use weebly’s free domain like: troytowingservice.weebly.com
Just make sure you don’t use the same domain you already used.
The $13,890 in adwords coupons that I spent should tell you that I used this method over and over again to close so many deals.
You can use this to land SEO or Lead Generation Deals, more on that later.
Hack 7: Linked-In Prospecting
Linked-In allows you to form connections with decision makers.
These are lawyers, dentists, plastic surgeons... high-ticket niches that has a lot of gate keepers usually.
With Linked-In we can reach out to them directly.
This is incredible power.
Now are we logging onto Linked-In everyday spending hours on manually reaching out to prospect after prospect?
Nope.
We're all about innovation & leveraging the power of technology.
This is a Linked-In prospecting strategy that I learned from a 7 figure earner in Digital Marketing.
You don't get to 7-Figure without automation.
Here's how we're taking the linked-in strategy to the next frickin' level, effectively allowing us to reach out to hundreds of targetted prospects on Linked-In everyday with a click of button.
>> Use Automation Plugin called Linkedofy that automates building new connections & bulk sending messages without triggering spam
I used to have 2 full-time VA's on my Linked-In sending messages to people everyday. This software has replaced them.
What I love most about this strategy is that the linked-in platform itself has created an environment where it is okay to approach other business owners with ideas to collaborate because that's the whole purpose of the site, its a networking site.
And if you make your profile dialed, you can really begin to establish a lot more trust and credibility than a cold email.
All the steps involved in this strategy would take too much space on this article so click the button below to see the extended version of this Linked-In Prospecting strategy.
Hack 7: Sending Free Leads with Assets You Own (Most Powerful)
This method is the #1 reason I became successful as a digital marketer.
Instead of going out there and begging people to work with you.
I simply build my own assets, rank them to the top of Google, start generating tons of phone calls with free traffic and then send local businesses free leads to grab their attention.
Like you saw in the previous hack, every time they pick up the phone call, they hear my name right before the customer begins talking.
When I reach out to them, they’re already excited to talk to me because I already made them some money first with my leads.
Results in advance has never failed.
Then I can ask for pay per lead or 10% of every job they close.
What business owner wouldn’t wanna do that?
They don’t have to risk anything.
They only have to pay me after I get them the lead.
All the work is done already. (I already built the site and ranked it)
What’s cool about these sites is once they’re ranked, you can leave it alone and they’ll keep producing leads each and everyday.
Now the biz owner will start paying you for the leads on autopilot each and every month.
Welcome to longterm passive income.
This one strategy is responsible for creating a group of 4400 marketers that are quitting their day jobs and becoming a full-fledged entrepreneur in our lead generation coaching program.
Chapter 3:
Offering Social Media Marketing Service
- Issue with social media marketing is that its challenging to show the biz owner what you're doing is actually bringing new customers every month
- Use coupon code in your promotions will allow you to keep track of customers you generate
Many brick & mortar type of businesses such as restaurants, spas, chiropractors, & more could use someone that knows what they're doing with social media to manage their pages.
Biz owners are too busy running the business.
Every biz owner has like $500 per month to try out for 3-4 months to see once & for all if they were missing out on not having their social media marketing dialed.
If you begin delivering new customers, it should be a no brainer for them to continue.
What I like to do is do a trial for 3 months.
"If you’re not pleased with the results in 3 months, we can part ways."
This gives the biz owner relief because they don’t have to commit to something long-term without seeing any results.
Here are proven tactics I’ve used and my other internet marketing friends have used to really grow a brand / business on social media.
But first you have to understand what Edge Rank is.
Understanding Edge Rank
Key to becoming an effective social media marketer is to understand Edge Rank.
When your scrolling through FB or IG feed, ever notice certain people or brands pop up more often than others?
This is FB's algorithm that determines which posts you should see more of over others. So when you understand how this works, you can get your client's posts to show up in more people's newsfeeds.
This is the edge rank algorithm formula:
Affinity = relationship, the people or page that you interact with will show up on your feed more often. So when you're making posts to promote a page, you have to post something that people will interact with, otherwise it becomes harder & harder for your posts to be seen.
Weight = measures the level of interaction. if someone *Likes* your post that counts as an interaction, but if that person *comments* well then it holds more weight. Why? Because *commenting* is bit more engaging than a simple *Like*. a *Share* also holds more weight than a *Like*.
Decay = time, so older posts show up less and less in people's feeds. Timing is key when making posts. Studies have shown that the best times to post are: 7 AM Est, 5 PM Est, 11 PM Est.
Tactic 1: Give-aways
Image is key.
You can design great photos like above at crello.com
Do these giveaways and then asking for people to tag 3 people in the comments will ensure heavy Affinity & Weight for Edge Rank. Watch your posts soar with likes & comments, which causes the post to bleed into more people’s feeds.
Tactic 2: Use VA's to Send DM's
Hire a virtual assistant for $3-$5 per hour, I use onlinejobs.ph and have that VA begin sending DM's on Instagram to people that share similar interest to the company / business you're promoting... let me explain.
If you're promoting a sushi restaurant for example.
Have that VA go check all the people that tagged themselves at that restaurant and DM them with a coupon code for them to come back.
You can then go to other sushi restaurants around town and DM customers that visited there and ask them to come check your place out.
"Hey we noticed that you tagged yourself at Aloha Sushi, if you're a lover of sushi you should come check us out at sky sushi, we just opened up and got some specialty rolls for you, here's your 10% coupon code, hope to see you soon"
Now imagine that VA hitting up all those people and when people use that coupon code at the restaurant, the restaurant will be able to track which customer was sent to them due to your efforts.
Chapter 4:
Offering PPC Marketing
If you've never ran Facebook ads or Adwords before I recommend you get a good courses on it so you understand the basics, here I ranked the top 5 best Facebook Ads course.
If you're broke, you can look up guides on youtube at a bare minimum.
Last thing you wanna do is to be a complete noob and learn as you go while you're spending client's money.
Here's the basics you need to master in PPC
- How to target your audience using multiple Interests
- Pixels
- CTR, CPC, Conversion %
- Using a landing page like Clickfunnels
- How to create captivating ad copy
- How to scale FB ads properly
- How to create Business Facebook account to manage multiple accounts
- What to do if a FB ad account gets suspended
- Manage multiple accounts using MCC account
- Using the Keyword Tool to find keywords that convert vs. keywords to block
- Create multiple adsets to target longtail keywords
- Bidding Strategy to outrank the competition
Image is the most important part of a Facebook Ad
I know someone that's done multiple 9 figures of ad spend with Facebook ads. And what he taught me is that the Image is the most important part of a FB ad.
Here's some of the top tips to create the best CTR images.
Tip 1: Increase Saturation of the Image to Make it more Vibrant
The right image has saturation increased. Which image "pops" more and commands your attention? You can use Photoshop or pixlr.com
The right image has saturation increased. Which image "pops" more and commands your attention? You can use Photoshop or pixlr.com
Tip 2: Make Your Image Into Vector Art
When a picture is vector art its a pattern interrupt. People are not used to seeing it so it causes someone to stop and look at the ad. You can search "Vector artist" at Fiverr.com to find artists to vectorize an image for like $5-$10.
Tip 3: Tell a Story & Power of Ambiguity
People are compelled by stories because they want to figure out the conclusion. Notice how in the above ads, the use of multiple images to begin to tell some type of story.
Also notice that the images contain some ambiguity or something you just can't figure out.
This creates an open loop (a question) in the audience mind that they want to close (figure out what the heck it is) by clicking through on the ad.
This is an ad that I made:
Combining all 3 elements of:
- Vector Art
- Story
- Ambiguity
This ad went on to make me really good money with an weight loss affiliate marketing offer.
Chapter 5:
Offering SEO Service
- Expensive
- Takes Time
- A lot more difficult skill to master than Social Media or PPC
Its expensive to do SEO so you must also charge companies a good chunk of change. It also takes time and its more difficult to do than PPC or social media.
So why do people do it? (myself included)
Because once you get the page 1 rankings in Google, it turns into passive income.
SEO is what allows you to generate organic traffic meaning once you're ranked, you don't have to pay per click or continue to mess with it. Once you rank, you can just leave it alone and it'll keep getting traffic for you.
The biggest issue with people pursuing SEO is that there's so much misinformation out there about what creates page 1 rankings or there's a lot of poor services out there that people try to outsource to.
Well I'm somebody that knows how to rank for some of the toughest keywords on the internet, let me give you a rundown on exactly what's working in 2019.
1. On-Page SEO
The first step in doing SEO is to fix what is on the actual site, making sure the keyword that the site is trying to rank for is in the site title & H1,H2,H3 tags.
This is pretty basic stuff once you understand it, its pretty easy to implement on to a site immediately.
Brian Dean from Backlinko has an awesome picture that illustrates what needs to be fixed with On-page SEO.
You can read his entire on-page SEO guide here.
2. Off-Page SEO
Off-page is what makes SEO expensive and challenging. This is what takes the higher level skillset to pull-off properly.
Essentially you will need to master several core principles of SEO to be effective today.
This is the list of 8 of the most important factors you need to master to get to the top of SERP today.
Main Off-Page SEO Skills You Must Master
1 - PBN's
Purchasing powerful domains from the auctions and turning them into a site that you own so that you can point your own backlinks from the site back to your client's site.
2 - Anchor Texts
Its the highlighted text (from a link) in the content that you click & it takes you to another page. The anchor text that's going to your client's site should have the main keywords you're trying to rank for but make sure you're not using the same anchor text over and over again. Mix it up and change it up.
- "dentist in Folsom"
- "Folsom Dentist"
- "Best Dental Care Folsom"
- "Root Canal Dentist"
Just like above I would keep mixing up the anchor text while weaving in different money keywords.
3 - Guest Posts
There's many big sites out there that offer you guest post opportunities where you can write an article for them and in return they'll give you a backlink, Google "Niche" + "Write for us" and you'll begin seeing sites out there that offer this.
4 - Relevance
Create relevance from where the link is coming from is also key. If you're trying to rank a dentist site.
- Non-relevant Link: abcsite.com/fitness-training-tips/
- Relevant Link: abcsite.com/best-dentists-folsom
Getting a link from a page that has keywords in the URL is far more effective.
5 - Power Behind Your Links
Power behind a link represents the PA (Page Authority) or UR (URL Rating) of where you're getting the link from. For example a Guest Post link doesn't have much power at the page level because its a brand new article and has no links pointed to it. Where-as a link from the homepage of a PBN will have power because the homepage has bunch of links going to it.
Above is ahrefs showing the power that this page holds as UR 27 because this page has 37 referring domains pointing a link to it. So getting a link higher UR pages plus with relevance is the best links you can get.
6 - Disavow Bad Links
Use Google Webmaster tools to disavow links that are poor quality as too much poor quality links can hurt the rankings of your site. Full guide on how to do this here.
7 - Rankbrain
This was implemented in 2016, Google now uses machine learning that keeps track of bounce rate and people's dwell time on each page in search to determine which page deserves to be in the top rankings. Apparently this is the 3rd ranking factor next to On-page SEO and Backlinks. So the quality of the webpage has to be high today, if people click out of your page too quickly (high bounce rate) Rankbrain will cause your site to rank lower. To learn more about this click here.
SEO takes time, at least 3-6 months. So you will need to create a 3-6 month contract with your client to make sure they understand that they need to be patient before the results come in.
The challenge is to make sure your clients don't get impatient mid-way into the project and decide to cancel/stop paying you.
Monthy reports and keeping in good contact with your clients at least once a month is highly recommended.
Chapter 6:
Offer Lead Generation
I love lead generation because you have the most control since you own your assets.
With Social Media Marketing, PPC, SEO the client still has control over you because they can decide to hire someone else and stop paying you and there's nothing you can do about it.
With lead gen, if clients don't pay you, you can send the leads to someone else.
5 Steps of Building Lead Generation
Survey the Land
Riches are in the niches. What's cool about lead gen is that we can pick & choose what niche & city we go into. So we can pick our market with purpose. Meaning we'll only target markets that we know we can dominate the competition instead of getting forced into going into markets where its saturation and highly competitive. My thing is this: I'd rather get into a ring with bunch a second graders instead of getting into a ring with a Mike Tyson.
Build Out Assets
Register the domain, I like having the city and service in it such as www.grlimos.com (GR stands for Grand Rapids). This is my limousine lead gen site that makes me $1000 per month. Build out the lead generation site with the tracking phone number posted at the top of the site and quote forms. Put some basic content on the site.
Optimize Asset
We covered this in the SEO section but optimizing asset is doing SEO on the site. Mainly about building backlinks, which are like votes in the eyes of Google. Imagine a brand new site is like being a new kid at high school, people have no idea who you are. Zero popularity. But if the most popular kid at school, like the star quarterback vouches for you, suddenly you rise in popularity. However if another brand new kid or unpopular kid vouches for you, no one would pay attention. That's the difference of having high quality backlinks versus low quality links. In our lead generation program, we have 4400 students so we can do what's called link circles where 5 students in the same niche can form a link between one another which is equivalent of getting those star quarter back links. Gives us a huge boost in the rankings.
Prospecting & Closing the Deal
When the lead generation site ranks, it'll start generating phone calls. Simply forward the calls to a local business that doesn't have good rankings (because most likely they're hungry for leads). Now our tracking phone number attaches a whisper message to every call. So when the business picks up the phone, right before the customer begin speaking, it'll whisper in their ear "This lead was sent to you by Ippei" now after 2-3 days of sending them FREE leads. When you call them up they're already wanting to speak with you and wanna do business with you. Few different types of deal you can make:
1. Pay Per Lead
2. 10% of closed jobs
3. Flat fee
4. Hybrid (Combination of Flat Fee & 1 or 2)
Scaling the Business to the Moon
What's great about the lead gen model is that once you master these skills, you can pretty much outsource 90% of it to virtual assistants (VA's). I have 3 VA's that work for me full time, they're based out of the Philippines and I pay them $5 per hour. I use onlinejobs.ph to hire my VA's. They build my sites, optimize & rank them, and all I have to do is close the deal with business owners that's already been getting free leads from me. #EasyMoney
Another key to scaling your lead gen biz as fast as possible is to also implement regular form of prospecting everyday, sending screencast videos is a great one to use. (Although active prospecting & sales is not necessary because you can wait till you got free leads in hand first, but if you do active sales, it only accelerates the growth)
Conclusion
Digital marketing has huge potential in 2019 and for the next decade imo.
Very high-demand for it because there's so many business owners out there that have no idea how to get attention online.
Even tho they all realize its paramount because just in the last 5 years, customer behavior has changed drastically as everyone has a smart phone now and is always connected to the internet.
SEO & Lead Generation requires higher-level skill but its the most lucrative.
IDK about you, but I rather be in a business that makes me as much money as possible for my time.
Sure I might have to get some additional top-level training but I know it will be worth it in the end because I plan on being an entrepreneur for the rest of my life.
If you have that same level of commitment to starting your own digital marketing agency, then I implore you to look into the SEO & Lead Generation skillsets.
Nothing has provided me with higher return on investment than being able to rank websites in Google & reaping the benefits of that everyday on autopilot.
Why Lead Generation is My #1 Recommendation
I like lead generation the most because it offers the most control & longterm passive because I own the websites.
So my clients cannot leave me. If they want to continue getting the leads, they have to keep paying me every month.
If they don't pay, then I can send the leads to their competitor.
Therefore in all the years I've been doing digital marketing, only my lead generation clients have stuck with me since the beginning (2014).
Social Media, PPC, SEO clients have all come and gone. I made some quick cash along the way with them but none have turned into long-term residual income like my lead gens.
You realize that client retention is the most important aspect of digital marketing.
(Owning your own asset is the key for client retention.)
This is a tree service site that's been making me $2000 per month since 2015, I haven't touched this site in years.
You can chose to try to build an agency on your own but I believe getting coaching from someone that's been there and done it makes all the difference in the world.
Not to mention the impact of surrounding yourself with 4400 other students that's building the lead gen biz alongside you.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't be where I'm at today which is $52K per month as of July 2019, if it wasn't for the mentor, group, weekly coaching calls, live events that's inside this lead generation program. Click here to check it out.
Vishakha says
Pitching lead generation to clients instead of other low tier services is a really good idea. After all, that is what the clients want. Excellent article.
Andrew says
Brilliant article with extremely useful information. Thank you for sharing these tips.
Jason J says
This was a very indepth article, I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels in the SEO and PPC game. I really appreciate fully understanding the differences between the different types of digital marketing agencies. Definitely need to start looking more into this lead gen business you talk about…