Seven years ago, can you believe it?! I sat down with my buddy Jan Koch, of Virtual Summit Mastery, during the WordPress summit. We chatted about a lot of things, but we spent a lot of time on how to leverage Dollar A Day and the power of checklists.
The transcript is copied below, but if you want to jump into action right away, read this article on how checklists can help you scale your business, and here’s a link to our Dollar A Day program.
Jan Koch: Can you give us a little intro of who you are and what you’re doing currently?
Dennis Yu: So I’m just a data guy I like to share. And as a geek, hopefully, this is good for people who really like to geek out and roll, up their sleeves.
I believe that we can create education for students and this education can be driven by an apprenticeship-like model where we teach kids. So we have a 21-year-old CEO and you could see that he’s been all over the world. He’s an author – all these different places. And if we lift up these young adults and connect them with their passion and give them jobs and not like a low wage job, but a job that actually ties with the things that they like to do, then they’re going to do the best work for businesses that you would ever see.
We want to create processes and checklists and dashboards and all that, a whole structured framework that the education system doesn’t do, but also that the workplace needs. So I think about things that small businesses need. They need a website, they need social media, they need a social app, they need Twitter, then they need all these things.
And so when you unite the supply with this demand, you create an amazing ecosystem. So that’s what we’ve been working on. So we are not an agency, but we, do. Work, but we farm it out to other agencies that are qualified because we’re not an agency. We’re a learning software company. So we produce the dashboard We produce content. We are here to help. We put all of our knowledge out there freely. And today we want to share a lot of that knowledge so that you guys can give it a try. The main thing is something we call Facebook for $1 a Day.
Jan Koch: What are the prerequisites? What do we need to have in place being like a small business owner, for example, what do small businesses need to have in place before they can start leveraging Facebook?
Dennis Yu: So we were talking about how small business owners can generate leads.
A lead is someone filling out a form. It could potentially even be them or watching a video, clicking on something, or demonstrating. And in some cases, if you have a low-priced product, you can drive a direct sale right there. So we have something that we call this 30-item checklist – and there are actually more than 30 items – but there are 30 general items in each of these items break into other items and behind them, there’s videos and articles and other things like that.
But let me just tell you about this briefly because a lot of people, when they see the things at work with some of the brands we work with some big brands and we drive some, pretty good sales numbers. And I think that it’s not possible for small businesses because they don’t have the time, they don’t have the money, they’re not sophisticated, they don’t have teams of people.
This 30-item checklist, which you can get now, we’re not selling anything. There’s no hype about it. This is just try it out, you’ll find out if it works. The prerequisites are these three things set up goals, content, I guess you could say targeted, and set up is the things that you would want to have in place anyway. You want to have your tracking pixels, and your Google Analytics – probably run that through Google tag manager. You want it, if you have the Facebook conversion tracking, you want the Google conversion tracking, which is both Adwords and through analytics, and you just want to tie everything together.
So we call this the plummet of this setup, right?
Then, goals. What is a lead worth?
This is usually where these businesses get in trouble. The smaller they are, they are. You run the ads and then I’ll tell you, or run a campaign. And if you’re an agency or a freelancer, you need to know this upfront. If you’re a small business owner, you need to know this upfront. $20, $50 and there’s a whole math on determining what a lead is worth. And basically, it’s following the funnel, and we say, there are three stages, audience engagement, conversion. If you know what a conversion’s worth, then you can back into what getting an email is worth, right? Because if one to 10 emails buys and a buy-in’s worth $50 then an email is worth $5 – that kind of math.
And if you have your plumbing setup, then you’re able to measure the goals, right? Even if you have your analytics and tracking, and systems and business manager and all that set up, and you can have goals against these goals at different points in the funnel, you have content.
And this is the second, most common reason that businesses fail, especially small ones. They don’t have the content or their content is only conversion content, as opposed to nurturing content along the way, which is necessary to generate the lead and then a lead sequence, a sequence of messages, like an autoresponder, marketing automation that kind of thing, which then leads to an eventual sale.
Often their thought leadership content is so sales oriented that it’s not worth sharing. And when that’s the case, they wonder why their stuff doesn’t convert. So you know, that you can do – on Facebook, you can do crazy targeting, which we’ll go into in just a minute, it works so well, but if you hit the right people, but you don’t have amazing content and we’ll define what amazing is later then it’s going to fail and you can’t blame Facebook.
It’s like buying a brand-new Tesla. You don’t know how to drive. You crash into the wall and you blame Tesla. No, it’s because you didn’t know how to drive. And in this case, I think the big failure, on the web I’ve been doing this almost 28 years is crappy content. It’s not because Facebook’s expensive. It’s not because WordPress has bugs or not. No, it’s straight up your content sucks in the same way Tiger Woods can beat you and me in golf, even if you and I have the nicest clubs and he has crappy rusted clubs, he’ll beat us. And so people give lip service to this content.
So if you have your goals, content, and targeting together, then you can spend $1 a day and use the techniques that we talked about. And that’s a big if because if you don’t have these 15 items in place, something’s going to go wrong for you. Because if you don’t have an audience with remarketing setup, which is, remarketing as people who’ve been to your site, and now you want to show them another message on Google or Facebook.
Remember, this has nothing to do with Facebook or Google or with Twitter or LinkedIn. It’s just using these guys as a delivery system, in the same way, you could say, the people who say, I’ll just say one thing, just so that – because this happens all the time so I just want to get this out of the way. People say, oh this, doesn’t work on social media, cause I’m not very social, or I’m B2B, or I’m some other kind of thing like that because I think all social media people are doing like sharing silly pictures and things like that, checking in with their friends are doing.
Well, that’s as ridiculous as saying I don’t want to reach my customers, or, my customers, they’re not on WordPress and they’re not on MailChimp.
The point is that it’s a delivery vehicle. Who cares? It’s not that they’re on Facebook that matters. It’s not that you’re trying to socialize with their drinking pictures or their travel and food pictures. No, what you’re using it as a data platform to connect everything else.
If they’re on the internet and they’re in a city where there is Facebook or Google, then this applies to them and they can drive leads. And this especially works for small businesses. Big businesses, they actually are disadvantaged because their ability to personalize is a lot lower.
It’s easier to personalize when you have a narrow niche. So this is really a David and Goliath thing. That’s how I do Facebook.
Jan Koch: Nice. So how do we get this plumbing in place? What is it that we need to take?
Dennis Yu: There are three things you have to do, and you can go through this document and go through all the checklists here.
But let me just tell you what it is, and then everyone here, if you want it, you can go to blitzmetrics.com/all there are multiple guides there and go through this, but let me just talk you through conceptually, what’s going on.
Dennis Yu: Yeah. So the idea of plumbing is, if you have your plumbing in place, then you can run the water through it and it’s not going to leak. So here we say grant us access, but it doesn’t matter. Grant yourself, access, and grant, other people that you’re working with access. Maybe you find a really bright student, which is what we’re all about. Train up these bright students, and have them do this for you. But either way, you need to have your ads account, different kinds of analytics, and tag management. Some of these are optional, but if you get these things in place, then when something good happens, you can start to amplify it.
So let me show you an example of what that might be. Okay. So if you have something that’s high authority that really determines if you are just, it doesn’t matter.
Like I’ll just put on one of these things. Okay. So this is an article I wrote, I’m a journalist here on Ad Week – Ad Week is a big marketing site. And here I wrote a blog post and guess what? It was not on our WordPress. It was on their WordPress. The ultimate SEO is when you post on other people’s sites that have more traffic unless you have so much traffic, and I think this, the audience of small businesses, then I think you’re going to get more power posting on other people’s sites.
Jan Koch: It’s tough to compete with Ad Week, yeah…
Dennis Yu: So here’s AdWeek, and I’ve written an article. And look, if you mouse over this do you see, these are all linking to other – there are other things that we have written, right?
And then we talked about goals, and content targeting, just like we did, and we’re not doing this from an SEO standpoint. We’re doing it because we want to have content that truly is interesting. In this case here, we’re talking about how you know if someone’s going to be successful in Facebook ads.
That’s a good question. And we’re targeting this against the agency so that they can use, these techniques to determine. Are these small businesses going to just be a real headache for you? You could build them an amazing site. You could do a great campaign. You could give them lots of help and be very attentive and teach them and all this.
But these businesses will still fail if you don’t have certain things in place. This is what we’re sharing and then we bring in other experts. So we take this article it’s on AdWeek, and then as you’ve probably seen me do before, I will promote that on Facebook. So if I make a post about it, I could boost that post, but I could just as easily come here and say, I want to send people to this URL that we’re looking at. And then, cause we have all of our plumbing in place. We have all of our tracking, and our conversion, pixels, all we have good content, we know what we stand for.
Then under here and more demographics, if I’m going too fast for people that haven’t done this before, don’t worry about it. There’s a whole guide around it. Okay. I’m going to work and. So now I’m targeting people who work at the Wall Street Journal. This is not people who read the Wall Street Journal. This is people who work at the Wall Street Journal.
And if I’ve got an article about whatever kind of vertical about dentists, then I’m going to target the American dentist association. I’m going to talk at the conferences the dentist goes to, and I’m going to target the media. So who are the influencers? Cause I want to influence the influencers. I think about all the people, that you would want to hit – is it in the New York Times? Not people who read the New York Times, but people who work at the New York Times. Think about all the people that are the most influential, that if they were to come out and say, Jan is the best and he’s sharing his information and blah, blah, blah, where would you want your stuff to show up?
If you had a magic wand and you could have your stuff show up in any publication among any conference organizer, any TV show, as you name it. If I want to be on Fox News food company or all of these guys. So this is your magic wand to influence the media. I’ll just show you one other example. I want to get people thinking broadly about what’s actually possible. I don’t want them thinking social media, whatever, like that’s nonsense. It doesn’t even mean anything.
So this is one of my random blogs. They have many blogs. This is one I use just to test. So obviously it’s wordpress.com and not org and all this, but whatever, this is just one of them. So I have this, happened just a month ago. I was here in San Francisco and on my way to a meeting at Facebook, and I had a problem with Uber. They really screwed this thing up. And in fact, they gave it the tag of Uber PR disaster. I waited a week before I wrote this blog post and I tried to resolve it with them, but they really made a mistake because this driver was awful. I ended up having to get another Uber. I missed my train, I took it. And then it was surging three times. It costs me $170. I just made the Facebook meeting in time.
They said of this problem, of this bad driver, they’re not Uber employees, we’re just an app. They’re just contractors. They’re not employees of ours. And we can’t do anything about this because we already paid the driver. We’re just an app. And this is exactly the problem Uber does not want to have to happen, because they’re unregulated, and people like, oh yeah, it’s cheaper, but they don’t realize that there’s this there’s a good reason why there’s government regulation in certain areas, right?
So this is the worst thing that can happen to them, by saying something like this. And I said, are you sure? And I gave him multiple. Are you sure you want to, say this, right? Because this is exactly what you should escalate because I’m going to write an article and I’m going to use you, Marie, as the representative from Uber saying that this is Uber’s position, are you sure?
She confirmed multiple times that she was sure. So then I put this on some nonsense WordPress site that I have. It gets no traffic. I was like most of the years out there, no traffic and that’s cause I wanted, I didn’t want to put it on a high-profile site because I wanted to demonstrate that this would work for anybody.
I’m not saying use this just to complain. I use this one complaint when, just as a way to demonstrate how these techniques work, you can use it to influence anything on anyone. So here it is, I demonstrate what’s going on. And then here it is multiple times, she’s saying, no, sorry, Uber’s just an app. So if you have a problem, it’s your fault. If you die, it’s your fault. Explain the whole thing. Very factual. Didn’t get emotional or anything like this.
And then I took that article and this is the magic of Facebook I went in and I targeted people who work at Uber who worked at Lyft, which is their big competitor. People who work at the taxi commission and there’s like a governing body, there there’s a national taxi limousine commission. I looked at there, the companies that fund them. So all the people in the VC space, I put all of these guys in to get.
And what do you think happens when their competitor sees blood from a mistake that Uber made? It’s okay that Uber drivers mess up or this happens with any kind of driver, but it’s how you handle it that really becomes the issue. And then you have a Comcast or a United Breaks Guitars kind of issue. This is what you do not want. These companies should be smarter than this, about social media Because when these other guys in the government regulators and their funders and everyone who, they do not want to know about this find out, then it becomes a big deal. And then they’re in a very difficult situation, of their own causing because they continued to escalate it and they, allowed us to document it along the way.
And of course, they resolved it. That’s what happened. I tried many times through the regular channels saying guys, I really think you’ve made a mistake. I tried six times and they gave me a $5 credit. You guys really messed up here. Are you really sure? And they kept insisting. Yep. This is your fault. We’re just an app. If you have a problem with the driver, then it’s the driver’s fault. You’ve told me this 6, 7, 8 times. You’ve insisted. And I said, you really should escalate this. Just, my piece of advice to you.
So if you think about how this relates to lead gen if I’m trying to get leads in my – what is your niche, right? What is the area that you’re specializing in? Think about who you need to target, who are those influencers? What are their sites? If you go to Google and you type in the keyword that you want to rank on, who are those other people, right? Who are the folks that have the biggest publications that have, that are best known, that have the highest influence and those people become your friends, and those people become folks that you want to target this way?
Now, if you have an audience already, like an email list then you can go into Facebook and you can start to build audiences of these folks. So remember we said here that there’s a 30-item checklist, and this goes on and on with lots of detail on how do you, click on all these different things and how do you put the pixels in place, all this, but one of these key things here is here in targeting, which is audiences, are you want to upload your email list to match to Facebook, because Facebook will match it about 50%, maybe 60%. And then all the people who are in your email list, you’ll be able to message on Facebook.
You want to put the pixels in place, which are part of this setup, right? So if you put the custom audience pixel, which is just a Java script, then you have automatically targeted. You’re going to run the Google pixel at the same time you run the Facebook pixel so that when people visit your site, they’re then going to also be here so that you can send them a message. The effectiveness of email marketing, a lot of people say, oh marketing is great and a lot of people say marketing sucks when people say it sucks because their email list is too small.
Jan Koch: Or they don’t nurture it the right way, yeah/
Dennis Yu: All the things that apply to email marketing apply here. If you don’t build your list, nurture it and build it up big. Some people say, oh, I got 20 people on my email list and I want to generate as much sales as the Golden State Warriors in the NBA. No, that’s not possible. Their email list is hundreds of thousands. And then of course it helps if you have a winning sports team and this sort of thing.
You have to build the list up. So the prerequisite to be able to be really successful in Facebook ads is you have to already have an email list, you have to already have some traffic to your website because Facebook is an amplifier of what’s already working.
So in this case, Jan, I know beyond that for your WordPress summit, you’ve got a fair amount of traffic and then you’re continuing to nurture them. You’re not selling anything. You are acting as like a PR agent where you’re helping, you’re lifting up other people who as being experts in certain areas. And I think everyone here attending this call should know, or watching this video should know who the other people that are really knowledgeable. They’re not competitors of yours. There are people that you want to lift up and when you lift them up and you amplify them, and then you spend a dollar a day on them, you help them spend a dollar a day, then you have something amazing.
So what we’ve done, just for fun, is we’ve done a little coding and we have a WordPress blog generator for all of our students. You can see, there’s a number of them here. They come in and they get a blog. And that this is a full WordPress blog and they get to be able to write articles and they talk about stuff and we’ll amplify it. We’ll cross-link to one another. You can tell this is a student blog because it’s not written our way. But that’s okay.
So you see these and they write their blog posts and often they read our content, and they’ll talk about it and you’ll see here, they’re sharing their, stories. Sometimes they just share videos. They prefer to do that sometimes, whatever it is. But if you nurture a group of other people that are producing amazing content, then they’re almost like third-party contractors of yours, but they do an amazing, they do amazing things for you.
If you are PR.
They reciprocate. And I think that’s what a lot of people don’t understand because they think only at one level deep, they think, oh, just my website. I’m going to put all this content on my website. It’s hard enough to do things on my website. Why would I be spending time trying to help other people on their websites?
Or advertising? Stu Canada – they do software for schools where the schools want to learn how to do it. Simulated trading all this. So they have other, have a network with these schools and professors where they’re teaching certain topics that relate to digital. As these folks are using their software.
This is a great way for us because they have a large list and they have a nice network. We’re happy to come in and teach right? As you should be like everyone here in this video, whatever your expertise is, you want to reach out to these other people and share information. You want to interview them.
Here’s one expert session: What you need to know about the world of Facebook Advertising. Pretend I didn’t have a list. If I don’t have a list, then I want to share my information with other people who do have a list. Yeah, of course, we have the list, but if you don’t have a list then this is fantastic because you can come up with other people’s lists.
So when you create this stuff, it lives on their site, just yes. Blog on these or post here on ad week or it could be business to the community or the Wall Street Journal, or we’ve been New York Times, LA Times NPR, all of these Fox, CBS, we’ve been at all these places, and we get to post and we cross-link. And, when we do this, like here’s another one: When marketers get confused and implement retargeting.
We’re talking about the same techniques. Ha, what’s the most common problem when people set up retargeting? It’s that they don’t know the difference between the conversion pixel versus the site-wide replay custom audience pixel.
And then we, lift up other people. So this is one of our friends,s Franco, and he runs an agency and we ask him for his feedback and he comes in and gives us his feedback. So we picked him up in this article.
Jan Koch: Oh, that’s similar to what I’ve done with the guest posts for the WPC. For example, I had a guest post on SEM rush and what I did is I didn’t talk about myself, I just shared strategies that some of the speakers in this case, it was all Rand Fishkin. And what was the other one? Oh, that’s embarrassing. But it was two, two speakers who shared their experience on SEO. And I just gave my opinion on those strategies in the guest post.
Dennis Yu: Yes, what happens? And then you, say you tweeted them, what are they going to do? They’re going to retweet it. They’re going to mention you, they’re going to link to you now. Now all of a sudden their list is your list. That’s the whole thing that people don’t understand about social media it’s not a technique to try to cheat the system. Because I think SEO people have this idea that, if I do this one, one trick, then it’s this in the system I’ll magically unlock the algorithm.
How do you make them look good? Because when you make them look good, they drive traffic to you. And that’s how you build your list into X amount, and then $10,000 a month and all this kind of stuff that you’re talking about. So if you build your business off of other people who have already successfully built their business, then you’re not starting from nothing.
Most of the small businesses, and we talked to small businesses all the time, but their problem is that they’re trying to multiply off of a base of nothing.
You can have a million times zero is still zero and you’re multiplying off of a base of zero. If you look at Facebook or YouTube or any of these sites that became successful, a lot of people think that it was a lone entrepreneur that was struggling all by themselves. And somehow they worked so hard and then eventually magically they became successful.
But actually what happened with any of these major sites is that they had help from another site. All of them, even Facebook, was, their money came from gambling. People didn’t want to know that, but casino revenue, right YouTube was a porn network. Wikipedia started off as porn. I believe in it, and Jimmy Wales is open about that. If you ask or a Google or you’ll find out.
But every site that we have seen, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Every site that I’ve seen that’s been successful has been successful because they worked with other sites that gave them the traffic.
So retargeting is a way that you’re able to make that happen because you interview them, their list becomes your list, and then you have that. You amplify it again because if it’s good content, you want to amplify to a similar audience because then those lists become your list. And a lot of people at that point say, I don’t have time, or I don’t have money.
And we say, okay, you can spend $1 a day. If you target the right audience of just a few hundred people, then $1 a day is super high.
Jan Koch: Say, for example, if I took the WP summit and I have that landing page where people, when they opt-in, get three free interviews with Dan Norris and Tim Page, and Alex Harris. So how would I set up a Facebook campaign for that landing page?
Dennis Yu: Let’s look for the center of influence. You don’t have any singular person so if we bring in the audience from any one of these people, or we bring in the audience from Forbes or CNN or whatever, it’s not going to immediately stand out. so you lose relevancy.
So if you had one where you have Matt Mullenweg, who founded WordPress, and there’s an interview with him, and then you target all the people who make WordPress sites that would have very good alignment.
Jan Koch: So it would make sense to have like a landing page for each speaker?
Dennis Yu: Yeah. So you have 28 of these? Because, remember what you’re trying to do is leverage audience to audience. So if you have one of these speakers, then who’s their audience? They’re known in certain areas, they have a different footprint. If you have one with me, for example, then who’s my audience? Where, do I have the most influence? Because that is what you’re going to drive. You’re going to drive that audience to where they’re going to definitely recognize the influence.
The fact that you show something like this 28 world-leading word, WordPress experts. That’s great as a generic kind of catch-all. But remember we said that Facebook ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all the social media platform stuff are based on micro-targeted PR. So I can target exactly down to the people in your town that are 35 years old that work at a certain place. I can go very, small to tiny audiences and I want to send those people to personalize tuned content for them.
So eventually you’ll have lots and lots of landing pages and eventually, you’ll see that landing pages, every article is actually a landing page. So a landing page is just where people come in.
So we have an article, right? How the golden state warriors got too many clicks on a video drove all these sales. This is before Steph Curry won the MVP. So you can see we’ve got an article and it’s on Ad Week, but we don’t have a form at the end to say, okay, fill in the information, and then we’ll send you more. Because this is actually on another site. But what we did. Were we linked to all these other ones that are on our site?
Oh, we linked to one in the Wall Street Journal. We need to win on whatever. So if they come here, they, so they read through this. If they click, if they like that content and they click through, then they can give us their information.
So look at this quote in Forbes today who doesn’t want to be quoted in Forbes here is why the best SEO firms don’t offer, blah, blah, blah. And it’s our friend, Josh Steimle. So can you see the orange and the light orange? So yeah, so originally this thing only had, this is a public figure page.
This is not a profile. Okay. A lot of people get confused. Oh, Elizabeth told me I’m not, this is like the last video you ever received me. Cause I don’t like to do videos. So here we had an organic reach of 2000 and then we boosted it to 6,000 more. A lot of people like it, but it wasn’t that we got a lot of people to like it, it was that we got a lot of high-influence people to like this because we do a lot of work with Infusionsoft and with Marquetto and with Facebook and so forth.
So we, we take our customer audiences and we tie them to these posts and then we send them now what happens if people click through and they go and they click on this, they go to Forbes. They don’t go to our site, they go to Forbes. But then within that Forbes article, we have multiple links that then bring them to our sites.
Because when you see this in your newsfeed, quoted in Forbes, or here’s some interesting article, whatever, and you go to the Wall Street Journal and you read this, you don’t maybe people who are watching this video know that we paid to have that show up, but you’re going to read this and think, wow, this is the Wall Street Journal, and, oh, this is a guy who. Who runs digital for the Golden State Warriors? Here’s what he said. This is an article blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you come in and you click on other stuff that we have.
So, my advice to you on this video whoever’s watching this video is who are the other people that you want to work with that so that you can dominate that space, so you can openly share content openly amplify their expertise, and then you spend a dollar day. You tell each of them to spend a dollar a day. The sum of many people spending a dollar a day drives a lot of traffic and not just a lot of traffic, but a lot of qualified traffic, to the right people that you want, because we’re talking about the best audience that they have. And then your content machine drives your leads.
Jan Koch: So that’s actually interesting for the 10 K a month case study that I’m doing currently, I use WooCommerce to sell productized WordPress services. That will be pretty similar.
Dennis Yu: For all the people who were 20 minutes in and are actually watching this, I’ll tell you my one big secret: checklists.
So the content that we have on. We were talking about certain things, talking to you, like you have your five SEO tips or there are other ones. Oh, here are 10 tips on how to do stuff. Guess what? Those are all checklists. All of our articles with the exception of a few are really just promoting our checklists.
Was it a good article? A good how-to article is, oh, here are the seven things you need to do. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, just like this 30-item checklist. This is a checklist, right? It’s a sequence of actions and when you prove that the sequence of actions works through an article like this one, How the Golden State Warriors did this and this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is how they did it.
And everyone has their 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So when you have articles that say. I’m Jan, or I interviewed somebody, and here’s what they have. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, here, there, here’s the order of the things you need to do and their checklist. Then they’re going to naturally want to get the checklist.
Where do they get the checklist? You have to fill out the form to get the checklist.
Jan Koch: Actually that really ties in well with what Tim Page shared on the WP summit, which is a lead pages test tested, countless different opt-ins. And they even gave away a one-hour chat with Clay Collins with SEO, but the checklist outperformed even that one hour, by far.
Dennis Yu: Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. So today we’re talking about a checklist for Facebook for a dollar a day, right? I’m sure people, they want this checklist. So where do you go? Let’s blitzmetrics.com/fdd, which is Facebook for a dollar a day. So come in and get this checklist on how to do this kind of stuff.
And then if you want the personal brand and guide PBG, the same thing. So all the techniques on how do you develop your content and how do you interview other people? How do you write your stuff? Even if you don’t know how to interview people, here’s how you write how you do a, video interview and come and turn it into a podcast and turn the podcast into an article and distributed.
And our backend content marketing team. How do we do this? We promote right? Cause once this video is live we’re going to then promote it.
So it’s checklists. So for us, it’s the checklist, we’re even showing you, we write articles. I just showed you. We have articles all over the place. Those articles are there to actually educate.
The thing I hate the most about the internet marketing people is that they say, oh, he did if you just sign up for our thing, we’ll tell you like the 10 secrets, but they never actually tell you anything. They just go on and on for an hour about how all this amazing But they never tell you a single, actual technique.
Share your techniques, openly, share your techniques like in these articles and we have all these kids coming in, they’re sharing the techniques. We’re sharing real statistics right here. It is videos. We’re sharing it. We’re not because we’re not trying to promote then $39 and we’re not doing it right We’re just giving it out. Go try it.
And then the checklists, when people download a checklist, that is actually your lead. And that’s the thing that people don’t understand about lead gen. Because if you, I don’t even the word landing page assumes that, the fish are coming into a net. And if you’re a fish, you recognize what a net looks like and you don’t want to be in there.
That’s like a telemarketer or religious people that come knocking on your door. So rather than say lead gen or conversion or stuff like. Talk about personal branding and thought leadership. Because if you put your expertise out there and say, okay, I worked very hard. I put this whole thing together for you. Look, I put this whole thing together for you, all this. All of this stuff. I put it out right here for you. Come get it. I give this to you. Put your name and email. I will give this to you. And so, now my focus – this is still a landing page, but psychologically, it’s I’m giving you a gift. I am sharing. So the fish comes in and says, oh this, is not a hook. This is food, right? This is good food. This is safe. I’m not going to get killed if I do this thing here, because the focus is on delivering the content, right?
So when we do this, then the lead gen is amazing, right? Because people come in, they fill this out, and they read through our guides. Some people are successful. Most people are confused. Most people go through all this and say, oh, this is really good, but man, there are so many things here and now I want I just want to hire someone.
Can you do this for me? Because I know you guys do this all, here’s a checklist and you have enough items in the checklist. It’s Aw crap. Yeah, I know these are all good, but I just, don’t have time for the checklist and then they can hire you.
Jan Koch: And then that’s how you nurture the lead basically and turn it into a customer.
Dennis Yu: And that’s the secret there to lead gen. It’s you create content that looks so good, that is authoritative, that is the first-party experience that drives people into a checklist, the checklist they download, and then your sequence begins with email. You have five messages in a role like three days apart whatever it is and you actually use, done properly, your nurture sequence is there to actually disqualify people. It’s not to try to get as many people to convert as possible, because there are some clients that are just terrible. You don’t want to touch them no matter what.
If you’re an agency or you’re a freelancer and you’re listing, then you should know that you should fire most of your clients, just a couple of ones that are really good and the other ones should get rid of. Cause they’re just taking up all your time and double up and triple up in the really good clients. I promise you, that’s the case. There’s always one or two clients that treat you well And the other one wastes your time.
Jan Koch: Actually, Mike Report has a really good book about this. It is a book yourself solid, and he explains the red velvet rope policy, which just talks about how to find the right clients to work with and which clients just to lay off.
Dennis Yu: And we call those people free tarts.
You spent a lot of time talking to people that oh, I spend an hour on the phone, just you’re giving like free consulting over and over again. But if you have good content out here, then you never have to have any free consulting calls because anyone who comes to you then becomes inbound.
And if they’re not sure that they’re not sure, like what’s what service you offer. Guess what you take your checklist and you turn it into a. And so in this case here, our Facebook implementation we’ve turned into a package. That’s $3,000. We don’t discount it. We’re raising the price by $10,000.
And even if people have the money, we don’t take their money because they have to qualify. They have to have a list. They have to have goals. They have to have content goals and content targets. And there’s a whole video.
And so we put our content. We put the checklists out there. If they want to buy, they can buy. But even if they want to buy, we don’t want to take their money because some clients are just not worth the headache. So on and on. And then you can see that w the way people come here is that, they see our content, they see the checklist.
So I think this is something everybody can do. Everybody can produce content and checklist and turn the checklist and the packages they sell
Jan Koch: We are already very close to the 30-minute mark for this interview, if not we’re exceeded at already. I would love to sum it up and I don’t want to take up too much of your time because I know how busy you are.
Basically, the process looks are you, have all the analytics in place, all the tracking metrics in place on your website, you create amazing content that uplifts someone else so that you can leverage their audience on Facebook, basically you can promote that content. And then throughout the content, you have places where people can opt-in to your list or have a call with you or whatever they need to do to get in touch with you, basically end to qualify as a lead for you.
Dennis Yu: Exactly. And you use Facebook ads for a dollar a day to really influence that funnel.
Jan Koch: Great stuff. Is it for Facebook ads? Just to clarify the smaller the audience or the more targeted the audience, the better, right?
Dennis Yu: Yeah, because if you’re only spending a dollar, you’re talking about audiences that are a few hundred. Any bigger than that, and it’s not going to be effective as you’re trying to target an audience that’s 50,000 or 100,000, I would question whether you’re really targeting as far as need. If you’re targeting mass consumers, you’re not targeting the influencers.
Jan Koch: Great stuff. One last question. How do I set up an ad campaign that basically leads to a sales page for a $20 eBook or something?
Dennis Yu: So you have three parts of the funnel: audience, engagement, and conversion, and you need to put money against each section. And I would say put a few dollars against each of these. So, of course, you’re trying to drive some kind of sale, but you can’t put out all the money only against the conversion part of the bucket.
If you put some money to amplify posts that are just general awareness, like here’s one where we’re talking about goals, content, targeting, and you should actually use this, this is the same thing that we do here. This is to establish authority. We’re not collecting leads. This is actually informational. This is audience building. So you spend a dollar a day on each post that you think is worthy of this. Then you spend a dollar a day on each post that drives people to your site, to get them to fill out a form. And then you spend a dollar a day on retargeting.
Retargeting is when they’ve come to your site, and now you’re trying to get them to come back where they didn’t buy. And that’s what closes the deal.
So it should take three to five. Because you have audience, engagement, conversion, and we call this the AEC funnel. You have to put a little effort at each stage in this funnel. Make one post in each of these buckets and put a dollar a day against each other, but now you’re spending $3 a day. And then you can track how many people go from your general awareness kind of articles to your site because you can look inside your Google analytics. And then you can see in your Google analytics, how many people fill out the form and then have the people fill out the form, how many people bought your package?
So you can actually see the effectiveness of every piece of content that you have because you have your plumbing in place with your custom audiences and your Google analytics and your conversion tracking and your Google tag manager and your Google website optimizer and all of those types of data.
Jan Koch: Great stuff. Really. I’m just thinking about all the links that I have to put in place below the video.
Great stuff. I really appreciate that. You’re so open about your strategies.
Dennis Yu: Thanks, Jan. And I’ll leave everybody with one last thing. As you practice these things, you may find that you’re confused, or you may find that you want to do some kind of perfect thing. Don’t let perfection stop you. Take small steps.
Here’s one way to make sure you’re successful document what you do. Take a screenshot as you do it, write an article, and literally, your articles should take five minutes. Cause the biggest problem in small businesses, they don’t create content. They get stuck. They’re too busy. They’re whatever, but literally spent five minutes to produce that piece of content.
And if you’ve documented it and done a good job, you could even give it to me. And I will share it across my network. I might even feature you on one of the sites where we do this. So if you want to email me, it’s just Dennis@blitzmetrics.com. And if you’ve got a screenshot step-by-step example where you demonstrate how you’re following any of the techniques that we talk about, we will elevate you.
I got 40,000 followers to prove it.
Jan Koch: great stuff. Actually, I was just going to ask you how people can get in touch with you. So that’s dennis@blitzmetrics.com anywhere else do you want people, or do you want to point people to, after watching this?
Dennis Yu: Sure that he’d go to meet me on LinkedIn or on Twitter. I can’t take any more friend requests on Facebook because the limit is 5,000, but I’m old-fashioned.
And if you’re a business person, then email is how you generate business and how you communicate. So Dennis blitz metrics.com is the best way, or you can just Google me. You can see I’m very, I’m pretty easy.
