Digital Agency Table Talk 001

0:00:00
What’s up everybody? Alright, so this is session one of digital agency table talk. First thing I want to do is I want to check out and see what kind of delay we have. Comments and reactions are coming in, so that’s good. I want to get my windows in place as well. What’s up everybody? Alright. Oh good. This is here myself. Okay. Alright, we’re going to shut that off. We have a 30 second delay. It’s not too bad. Here’s what I need from everybody right at the beginning. Go ahead and comment in the chat where you are watching from.

0:00:39
Got a bunch of people here. Let me see if we can… Oh, yep. Viewers is looking good. Alright. Hey, what’s up Justin? What’s up Michael? What’s up Remy? Josh? Seven second delay would be good. I think it’s more like 27 seconds. My fun’s going off too. Alberta, Hamburg, Toronto, Finland, Yorkshire, and we’re all over the place. Dublin, New York City, Washington, love this stuff. Alright.

0:01:23
So while everybody joins, we’ve got 76 people so far. I just want to talk a little bit about what digital agency table talk is. This is like I said session number one. Basically my inner circle has been asking for a while. I get requests pretty much weekly in my inbox and DMs and everything else. People saying, hey Kevin, go do an AMA or an office hours type thing. We need a live situation where we can come in and just ask you stuff, get advice, consulting, whatever. You can even talk on different topics. Just something live that we can participate in every single month. And so I thought about it and I was like, you know, we could probably do something bigger and better than just like a random AMA. We could bring on guests, expert guests. We could make it a more interactive format. And so I just started brainstorming and I was like, what can we do different?

0:02:23
Because a traditional AMA, if you watch other AMAs on different YouTube channels and stuff, it’s mainly like people ask questions ahead of time, right? So the person’s on and they’re just reading questions and they’re just answering questions. I’d rather do something more interactive. So here we are. We have the ability to bring on guests live, I think. This is session one. We’re going to test all this stuff out. I haven’t tested it. We’re just, we’re winging it in session one. We’re going to figure out how things work. We’re going to figure out how to make this stuff better going forward. This is just how I do things. I just, I don’t read the instruction manuals. I just, I just go and we see what happens.

0:03:01
But I think it’s all going to be, you know, good enough, right? I do have a bunch of questions that people ask in the inner circle in case live stuff doesn’t work or there’s hiccups or whatever. I can still answer questions, you know, regular AMA style. But I do want the ability to bring on guests. Also session number one, you’re going to see if you watched my last video on YouTube that I’m in my new office. It has zero sound treatments yet. It’s bear floors, bear walls. The echo is horrendous. This mic helps a little bit over the normal mic that I use. But still, this is the early stages of digital agency tables. I’m talking to get better. We do have sound treatments coming in. The whole show is going to get bigger and better.

0:03:43
And here’s how the format works, okay? People, oh, by the way, as it stands right now, this is really built for the inner circle. It’s live here on YouTube because I want everybody to get the value. But in order to participate, in order to ask questions, in order to be a guest on digital agency table talk, in order to come on live, you have to be a member of the inner circle. If you want information on the inner circle, you can get it at digitalambition.co slash inner circle. There’s over 800 active members. A lot of the people you’re going to see in the chat here are members of the inner circle. So if you want to know about it, ask them. And I’m sure they will give you the feel, right? So if you are a member, you can participate. You can ask the questions. I’ve got some ahead of time from the inner circle threads. You can come on as a guest.

0:04:32
I’ve got people waiting in the green room right now. And so we will be bringing on them in just a minute. And that will be the order of preference. People in the green room, and by the way, I do want to say this, there is a limited number of spots available in the green room. So if you are on the list to be a guest and you’re trying to get in the green room and it says it’s full, just hang out. Just keep trying like as a guest comes in and they ask their stuff and then they drop off. There’s going to be another spot available. You try to jump in to that spot and then just hang out in the green room until it’s your turn. The people in the green room are going to get preference to be on the show. And that’s the main part of this show. It’s the people in the green room, right?

0:05:12
If there’s a law in the green room, if there’s any dead air time, then I will go to answering people’s questions that they submitted ahead of time. And then if there’s any sort of law in that, we will let people in the main live chat in YouTube ask some stuff. But this chat, I’m watching it, is going very, very, very fast. We’re up to over 122 people, looks like now, live. So it’s not a great place to ask questions because they just, they fly right by a lot of the times. I can scroll back up a little bit and look for them, but yeah, it’s just not a great format. I also can foresee in the future, like I said, bringing other expert guests, other YouTubers that you guys know and love, other plug-in owners, whatever, we don’t know yet, but we can have them come on and be part of this experience and that expands the AMA. Or you’re not just asking me questions, you actually get to ask them questions as well, which I think is going to be a lot better than me interviewing people. I’ll do a little bit of that, because I do want to ask them my own questions, right?

0:06:19
But I think if I just sat there and interviewed and everybody watched, it wouldn’t be as great as, hey, let’s bring some people on and get other people involved in the discussion. I think that would be fantastic as well. All right, so let’s see where we want to go with this first. I’m going to bring on Josh first. He was the first one in the green room, so it makes sense that we would bring him on first. And this, I’m about to click the button on Josh, and we’re about to find out if any of this works, the way that it was planned to work. All right, so Josh, how’s it going? I’m going to thank you. I am fantastic. All right. What we need, what we need is in the chat. And you guys tell me if you can hear Josh. That would be the next question that we have.

0:07:02
I’m pretty sure you can see him. Can you hear Josh? And then we got a 20-second delay or so, so we’ll see what people say. I’m going to read some of this while we’re going here. Yeah, looks good. Looks good. Good, good, good. All right, so people put in questions in. That’s good. All right. Echo, yep, you can hear him. Okay. So, Shallow, when you say echo, is it me echoing or is it Josh echoing? Josh, can you say something? Say test, yes.

0:07:38
Yeah, test, test. There’s not an echo in my hand. I know my room has echo, so I don’t know if that’s what they’re talking about. There was an echo when we did the test with the four. Beep beep. Josh is in a cave. Turn down your volume level a little bit. Oh, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Maybe it’s me. Wait a minute. Oh, I got a giant mixer in front of me. Hold on. I’m just going to toggle some stuff around. All right, Josh, talk now. Okay, I’ll keep talking.

0:08:11
Okay, but I can’t hear Josh now. All right, one more time. Yeah, I’m going to keep his head going along. He’s got us. Okay. All right, so Josh is doubled. Everything is echoing here. All right, I’m going to turn this off and then Josh, you talk while I can’t hear you. Then we’ll just see if that go. Go ahead. Cool. So I’m here and Kevin’s not. All right, so while Josh is talking like that, is he still echoing? As Sasha says, when you turned down the toggle, the echo went away. When you didn’t hear Josh, it was good.

0:08:45
Okay. With the air. Haha, that’s a challenge, isn’t it? All right, let me see if we can. Yeah, you know what? It’s putting your audio into the feed. Okay. So let me see if there’s a way. There should be a way for me. All right, I don’t know how bad the echo is. Pass sound only. Yeah, well, I am, yeah, I am passing sound only to my headphones. Well, I’m trying to. All right. Yeah, no, I don’t know how speakers on.

0:09:30
Nope. I’m reading the chat. Everybody suggestions in the chat. Stop you are good. Okay, I’m just going to keep you low in my, I’m going to be able to barely hear you basically and I think that’s going to at least help some stuff out. All right, so Josh, what is your questions last topic for today? Okay, so I run a web and mobile app development agency and we swap to doing agile project management a couple of years ago and I’ll be interested to know what your approach to managing your dev team is and how you communicate that to your customers. Yeah, good question. So I have done a overview of base camp in the inner circle, I highly recommend base camp to people. I was with click up before and what I have found and I have used other project management systems as well.

0:10:26
And for me, and this is going to be one of those questions where it’s like just this is my preference, but you know, everybody still kind of needs to do their own thing. I am a highly technical person when it comes to software and I like the idea of something like click up, I like the idea of more technical and more, you know, software with more options. However, in practicality and in actually running an agency and in managing these different projects and in managing a team and especially here’s the kicker, especially when clients are involved because we’re not just managing an internal team, we’re also managing our clients. And so if I get a client and to click up and I’m trying to like, yeah, do this inside, no, no, it doesn’t happen, right? Not a good format for clients. And so when it comes to project management in the digital agency world, my goal is simplicity. It’s like the simpler it is, the better it is just by default. So base camp really fits the bill in that. Because base camp is designed, I would say almost equally for people who work for an agency or an agency owners and for clients to be able to participate in the software.

0:11:42
It’s one of those things where the client can actually with like no learning curve whatsoever, just come in and start participating in the project because they know how to use a forum, they know how to upload things and these are all everything in base camp is sectioned out, right? So they can just go to the docs and files, upload stuff there. They can go to the discussion area, they can start a thread just like it’s a normal forum. They can go to the task area and they can see all the tasks on their project. So what we do is we have a project manager, right? So there’s a project manager manages a group of projects and they are also the point of contact with the client. So when the client needs something, they either post in base camp usually. We try to keep, and this is another kind of little tip. When you use a system like this, I don’t let clients really communicate outside of that system. So we’re no longer dealing with emails, we’re not getting text messages from clients, we’re not getting DMs from clients.

0:12:40
It’s basically a situation where we say, hey, if you want to communicate with us, if you want to sign us a task or ask us a question or whatever, you go to go into base camp and do it there because now all of our team can be involved, nothing slips through the cracks. Now they don’t always do this, you know, but what I tell them and it’s in the contract as well, if you communicate with us outside of base camp and something slips through the cracks, that’s on you, right? Because we told you that that will happen, right? Things will slip through the cracks if we don’t do this stuff in base camp where everybody is involved and we can keep track of everything and there’s a history, right? So we make them do everything inside of base camp. The project manager is always getting those alerts and those notifications. So as soon as she gets like, hey, there’s a new task that needs to be accomplished, she creates a task, she assigns the task and it’s just a very simple process of we’re assigning tasks, we’re putting dates on them, okay? That’s the next thing, it has to have a due date.

0:13:36
So if it’s not assigned to somebody and it doesn’t have a due date, it’s going to fail. And so that’s kind of the rule is like when you create a task, it’s got to have a due date and it’s got to be assigned to somebody. Now, once it’s got to do date and once it’s assigned to somebody, it’s onto that person. It’s on their play, it’s their responsibility to make sure that it actually happens. And then because Base Camp is a very simple tool, we take bigger tasks and we just break them out into sub-task because you can’t really track progress on a task. So a task is either it’s undone or it’s done inside a base camp. So if it’s a longer task or a more involved task, we just break it out into sub-tests. And then the project manager’s job is just to kind of keep an eye on those sets of tasks and make sure that they’re getting accomplished. But in terms of, and actually did a Facebook post for this, I’m going to try to find, because it was a really good little write-up on like agile versus this versus that versus all these other project management systems and philosophies. And it was a little tongue-in-cheek, but it was still, I think, just a good summary of my advice on this, that I don’t buy into any specific project management philosophy other than get the shit done that you are assigned and by the time you were assigned it, right?

0:14:51
And then as long as you have the right people and the right seats on the bus, it all works out, right? If your project manager is good and your people are good, then the stuff gets done. So that’s my thoughts on that. Cool, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let’s see where we’re at in the chat. Hey, tell me about the echo now. Are we better? All right, people are saying much better, it’s okay now. Now it’s perfect. Yeah, I know, yeah, I know. There’s a big delay on the comments. Okay, Basecamp is great for those who use Basecamp and use contracts and invoicing. Okay, all right, I assume that we are good on our audio.

0:15:31
All right, let me check our green room here, see who we can bring on next. I think we’re going to bring on Sasha next. Okay, give me one second. I want to make sure our echo, yeah, yeah, everybody saying our echo is good to go. All right, Sasha, I’m going to bring you on. All right, how’s it going, Sasha? Hey, it’s going pretty good. Good, good, good. So first, tell me what we should probably do, make this a little bit more formal. Tell me about like, are you a freelancer or are you an agency owner? I didn’t ask Josh this question, I probably should of, but tell me just a little bit of bachelor background. Okay, so I guess you could say small studio because I’m a one person show. So I’m definitely looking forward to getting to a point where I could say I have, you know, a nice small team, but right now it’s just me and I do brand-in strategy and websites.

0:16:28
Awesome. Yeah. Cool, so what’s your question, what’s your topic? All right, so my question right now as I’m trying to pivot a few things into business was more so around market and research. So my question is what sort of methods or tips or insights do you have around really drill, you know, drill in deeply into the target audiences, either their struggles, pain points, that type of thing so we could make sure when we are craft in either the messaging, we really are speaking to what struggles they have, what they’re dealing with. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So when it comes to market research and it comes to, this is, a lot of this is done in the discovery process, right? And by the way, it’s a really good question and it’s a question that brings out the importance of discovery and charging for discovery because what you asked really is like, how do we do our job correctly?

0:17:26
I think a lot of agency owners out there and freelancers, you know, they get a website project. They say, hey, I need a website, it’s like, yeah, you do need a website, all right, I’m going to build you a website and then they just start designing and they just start, what do you like? Okay, let’s put that stuff together and there’s really like, where is the thought about the actual end user, the customer, the person who’s going to be coming to this website and buying products and what is the sales process look like? And so for me, you know, we’ve got to start with the discovery. I’ve talked about this numerous times and because this discovery process takes both experience and time, you should absolutely be billing for it. So there should be a discovery phase that the client is paying for, which allows you to come in and do the necessary work to learn number one about their business and number two about their market and their customers. So for me, the discovery process starts with what does the customer, the client already know or think they know about their market?

0:18:25
So I’m interviewing the owner, I’m interviewing and a lot of times if it’s a bigger company, there’s going to be a marketing team, there’s going to be a sales team, there’s going to be obviously the C suite, right? So you’re getting as many of these people into this process as you possibly can. I want to talk to the sales people because I want to know what those sales conversations look like. A lot of times they’re using, you know, especially if it’s a larger company, they’re using sales recording software, right? So they actually have sales conversations recorded with clients. I ask them, like can I listen to some of those? I want to know what these real world like customers are experiencing and asking and thinking, right? That gives me tremendous insight into how this website needs to be built and what we need to talk about and things like that. I want to talk to the executives, obviously, especially, you know, they’re going to have the like higher level of the overview of what they’re doing for marketing, what’s worked in the past, what’s not worked.

0:19:25
That is a key question, by the way, right there is what has worked for your company in the past. And I want to know if it’s worked offline, cool, because the last time we can bring those things online for them and make them work the exact same way. So I want to know everything that’s worked. I don’t care all that much about stuff that hasn’t worked because it doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad thing. It could have just been executed poorly or the wrong format or whatever, right? So I’m more interested in what have you done that’s worked. And then we can use that as a starting point. We can double down on it. We can get creative and use different angles. But I’m interviewing the company first. Then what I’m doing is I’m going out and most of the times in my discovery process, I’m doing a lot of SEO discovery as well.

0:20:09
So SEO is really, really great for market research as well because what you’re doing when you do SEO keyword research is you’re getting into the mind of the customer. You’re figuring out exactly what they asked for, exactly what they’re looking for. And then because by the nature of SEO and it’s a competitive space, you’re looking at, hey, what did these other companies that are in this niche, what did they do in terms of their website? What kind of content are they serving? What does their funnel look like? What are their calls to action? And so I’m doing that kind of competitor research, the keyword research that’s involved there as well. And then for most projects, I would say that’s like the extent of the budget. If there is larger budgets, you can even get into bringing in actual real world customers doing interviews with them. So I’ll say, hey, let me tap into your client list a little bit.

0:21:06
Do you have any really good clients that have provided testimonials with you that would be willing to speak with me, bring them in, and do a little interview with them, and just figure out what insights they have. So it’s a mix of all of those things. But like I said, an extremely good question because this is a very important part of the job that we do. And if we’re not doing discovery, we’re just guessing and we’re just winging it, right? Thank you. That was really helpful. Have you done any discovery for clients yet? Have you done any of this or are you preparing to? I have, but it hasn’t been like as exhausted as going into say, let’s go do the focus groups and that type of stuff. It’s been the typical like, okay, what has worked, what wasn’t working, and then just trying to figure out like, okay, you had this type of stuff.

0:21:57
Let’s see what we could do from there as I have done where I tried to ask like, okay, you said you wanted to do these type of sales or you have a blog and you’re really trying to, I guess, make it more on stages, try to drill into that. But what you just said gave me definitely good ideas to try to dig a little deeper into it. Perfect. Good stuff. All right. Thank you for coming on. All right. Let me cool. Perfect. All right. Let’s check our chat real quick. Nice.

0:22:30
It’s like Shazin in a mastermind or Shala, Simon, Justin, Silent Phil. What’s up, Silent Phil? You’re not so silent, Silent Phil. I see you everywhere. All right. I’m going to bring in the next guest. We’re going to check in on our green room here. Let’s see. Rune. I think we’re going to go with rune next. Well, now I’ve got to cancel out somebody that’s been joining for the last 10 minutes. It’s not letting them join. So I’m going to cancel them out real quick. And rune. I’m going to unmute you.

0:23:07
It won’t let me unmute you. So I can, I hope you unmute yourself. I’m going to add you in. Are you there? Test, test, test. I cannot hear you. Maybe now. Hello? Yes. I can hear you. How are you doing? Perfect. Perfect. Give me your little background. Any owner, freelance, or what are you?

0:23:28
I’m free, Dancer. I think being an alpha model. Excellent. I’m having an immortal for a while. But I’m moving over to the bricks. OK. Excellent. I’m going to get you that. Have you been using bricks like testing around and playing around with it? Yes. Testing around. What do you think? Experience so far. It’s much better being done in the elemental. Awesome.

0:23:54
Good stuff. All right. So how long have you been doing this work? I think 10 years. 10 years. OK. Excellent. So got a lot of experience under your belt. What’s your question for today? I’m also curious about the other things that don’t exist. Anyone? Yes. Why do you expect it to be violent? When can you be expected to buy it? That’s a really good question.

0:24:20
So it’s in a, it’s in private beta right now. There’s over 500 people in that beta. We’re getting a lot of really great feedback on the product. We’re getting a lot of really good suggestions. We’re fixing bugs. When we did the initial launch, it came with a bricks initial launch as well, which added a lot of complications to things because a lot of things changed immediately. And so we’ve been spending a lot of time basically making sure that all the existing frames are rock solid. We’ve been adding new frames as well. But we’re not to the point yet where we can do a public launch. And here’s why. We are working on the plug-in side of frames that handle the licensing and all of that. Now, everybody that did the pre-sale, they all have a license key, but the license key doesn’t do anything.

0:25:07
There’s nowhere to put the license key right now. So we need that plug-in to handle the licensing side. And it is being worked on. Mateo is working furiously on getting that plug-in ready to go. But there is some back and forth with Thomas at bricks. And Mateo, they’re kind of working on a strategy because the way frames works is it goes through bricks’ remote template system to tap into a source website where we host all of the frames, right? And so what we need is basically a way to intercept those requests and check a license to see if it’s valid before we can allow the request to continue. And from what I understand in the discussions is that like intercept is not really there yet inside the ability to intercept those requests. So Thomas, thankfully, is extremely responsive. And he’s always fantastic. Every time I’ve reached out to Thomas about anything extremely responsive and very helpful.

0:26:07
And he’s helped us along the way of adding some things in that we needed to make frames work as a product. And I think the last message from him was that in the next bricks update, he’s going to kind of fit in this little intercept capability. And so Mateo is going to be able to tap into that and actually get this plug-in finalized. And once that plug-in is finalized, I’m ready to go. You know, I’m going to talk to the team and I’m going to make sure that they’re comfortable as well. We’re working on a public library for frames so that people can actually see the frames live, you know, even if they’re not a member or have a license. So I don’t think that that’s necessary for version one and to actually do a public launch. But, you know, there are a couple of people on the team who would like that to be there for version one. So that’s part of the discussion, you know, we’re just going to see. And for me, it’s like I want to get into more people’s hands as quickly as possible. I’m more concerned about getting the feedback on actual frames. You don’t need the library to use it.

0:27:08
The library is inside of bricks. That’s what makes the experience so good is that you don’t have to go to an external site. Look around, click things, copy them, paste them into your bricks install. Everything happens right inside of bricks. You click the little template icon, you go right into the remote template library, you can see every frame right there, you can store them, you can filter them, you can find the exact frame you want, one click add to the thing and move on, you know. It’s, when you compare it to an experience like Oxygen, where there were products like this and lay out packs and things, where you had to browse an external website, click a short code to copy it, paste it in. There’s a lot of back and forth, it’s not a seamless experience. Bricks gives us the ability to really make this seamless. So if that answers your question, we are, I didn’t give you a timeline, I can’t give you a timeline, I can’t give you a timeframe, because I don’t know. I’m not the one developing the plug inside of it, that’s on Mateo’s plate.

0:28:02
And like I said, he’s back and forth with Thomas on stuff. I don’t control Thomas’s schedule, I don’t control Bricks’ schedule, I don’t control Mateo’s schedule, so it’s going to happen when it’s going to happen. But what I can tell you is that everybody is working as hard as they can to make it happen. So that’s good. If I had to guess, like me, I would say, by the end of October. Now Mateo may be sweating bullets here, I don’t know, I don’t know. But if it were me, like I’m saying, I’d love to have this thing out before the end of October. But if it’s in the November, we could do something where we did with the ACSS, initial launch was done Black Friday week, and that worked out really, really well. So if we have to wait, and that’s what I would say too, if it bleeds into November, then you should probably be thinking about it’s probably coming Black Friday. So if it doesn’t come out in October, that’s what I will say. That answer your question? Thank you.

0:29:03
Cool, cool. All right. How we doing in the chat? Looking good, looking good. A lot of good comments on frames. All right. All right, cool. Let’s check the green room again. What I’m going to do is I’m going to drop some, unfortunately, I have to drop some people out of the green room. Well, actually, I don’t, I don’t. I think we have enough, we have enough spaces available. So that’s fine. All right, we have the Hunsey. I need to know how to pronounce your name. I’m about to bring you on, and you’re going to tell me how to pronounce your name.

0:29:39
Let me unmute you, add you here, the man the mental legend. How you doing? Everybody well known around the inner circle, and the YouTube channel. How are you doing? Well, thanks. I’m doing it. I’m doing it. How do you pronounce your name? Donesy. Donesy? Donesy? Like that? I’m doing it. Donesy, but I get you. I get people calling my name also with some used to it.

0:30:10
All right. I like what you said. All right, perfect. All right, so tell me, well, I kind of know already, but tell everybody else, you are background a little bit. Are you a freelancer, agency, owner? How long have you been doing this stuff? Well, I started out doing graphics, layouts, books, reports, the stuff like that, and I was for ready to web design for the first time using front page. There, we were all of that, but I never really got into it. Till COVID struck. But ever since then, I’m getting to find you on YouTube, I’ve just died then. So right now, we say I’m a freelancer trying to translate into writing a new, in microagence element for you like that. Got it. So that’s where I am right now.

0:31:01
Cool. All right. What’s your question? Okay. My question is basically about getting jobs. I mean, Nigeria, and there are quite a number of talented people here, right? But quite a number of us are trying to get jobs, fields from the US, Europe, and stuff like that, because when you consider how much we could get paid, but then the same thing here, you can’t just build some real cheap here. I’ve got good and cheap, but how do we place ourselves in the foreign markets? That’s my question. All right. That’s the self-question. That’s the self-question. That’s a tough question because I’m not in your shoes, right?

0:31:47
And I’ve never been in your shoes. But I have been in a situation where I didn’t have any clients, and I was starting fresh, and I was trying to figure out how do I get people’s attention, right? Now, that was never, how do I get people’s attention in other countries, but it was, nonetheless, how to get attention, right? So you’re a freelancer. You’re trying to build a microagency. Like, what is your goal for the size of the agency eventually? Like, how, you want to keep it micro? Or do you have bigger aspirations? I see microagency, right? I’ve known the world and the project we have project business. Yeah. I was solo president, right? But if something comes up where I need external expertise and look for the president, we’ll work on that project and we’ll pay at the end of the project, not kind of stuff.

0:32:35
Really, the vision of the next example is to, 36 months is throughout the team of maybe four or five people at a full-time basis where you have different unique specialties, maybe SEO accessibility, design, and stuff like that. And we still work on a project, my project business. Everybody is basically still a freelancer, but we are team and the agency at the same time. Okay. All right. And where are you getting your clients right now? Right now, most of my clients are local and sometimes rebels from cousins, relatives, abroad, and stuff like that. But it’s, don’t let me get into what’s happening on my head. It’s just a shit stop right here right now. Got it. We’re hoping. Okay.

0:33:26
Have you ever had a client outside of your country? Yes, I have. Okay. And where do you come from? Someone in the US. Like, do you remember how they found out how did they become your client? In Wollerapro, the friend. Okay. From somebody in your country. You’re like, they made a contact. Okay. You don’t have to admit that the friend was a majorian, referring to me by another majorian. Got it. Okay. All right.

0:33:57
So, here’s the thing. Like, the internet is it has brought everybody together, so to speak. And there really are no borders anymore, in my opinion, right? So you have the ability to go get a client in the United States, in Canada, in the UK, in Australia, wherever. The challenge is how do you get these people to know about you? Because there is one thing that I have kind of learned along the way. If you have the skills, and people want those skills, then it doesn’t matter where you’re located, right? They’re hiring you, especially for a job like this. Like, web design doesn’t need a location. You know, doing their website, if you’re amazing at it and you provide a great service, and they can afford your price, and they want you, then they’re going to hire you. And they’re not going to be concerned about where you’re located. And that’s true for me as well.

0:34:54
My team is not all in the United States, right? Most of my team is not in the United States. So I am one of the, like, I’m hiring outside the United States. I have clients who hire outside of the United States. So this is all like, it’s the norm now. And so the question for you is, how do you get in front of more of the right people who are going to see your expertise? And this just goes into basic marketing. And it’s like, all right, well, what are the main channels that you’re going to do? That we can leverage now? Are you basically doing all referrals right now? Are you doing any marketing whatsoever online other than just, hey, I’m going to try to get as many local people as I can get? Well, I’m trying to restructure to do more marketing online. Basically, I have about four or five bills to get done. And I want to visit some things I’ve learned from one guy at the other circle.

0:35:57
I’m trying to get some property in place and rebuild our website. I don’t want to call it my website because I don’t want to be so open up too long. Get that stuff done and get a little bit of the marketing. Targeted marketing, stocked down as well. So really full-fledged marketing sales. I’m actually looking at the end of the year, but I’m trying to get ready. Trying to get myself in the proper place so that when the jobs come, we’re ready. Yeah. So if we look at different channels, you think about something like SEO or it’s like people are going to try to rank. You’re going to try to rank for a web design or web development, all this other stuff. That’s not the route that I would attempt to go. You look at social media. Are you going to create content? Are you going to be an educator?

0:36:52
And then through that education, people are like, wow, this dude really knows what he’s talking about. I really like a style and I really like how he does things. And I actually want to hire him. That takes a lot of time, a lot of efforts. And you have to have, I guess, a certain personality for it and want to be able to do it. You have to be self-motivated to do that kind of stuff because it’s not going to be an overnight thing. It’s going to take a long time to get results. So that’s definitely not a, like, let’s get clients tomorrow type of thing. You can run ads. You can do that, right? But that requires money, obviously. You’re going to pay either way. You’re going to pay in time or you’re going to pay in money.

0:37:30
You can try to do a little bit of both. I would probably recommend the same thing I would recommend if I were starting in a brand new location and nobody knew who I was. And maybe even zero experience. And I actually just had this conversation with a person who wants to break into copywriting. So actually through my jujitsu gym, somebody referred one of their instructors to me because he’s like, maybe I want to do something more than jujitsu. I want to do, maybe build my own business. And I’m really liking this digital marketing stuff. In fact, I’ve heard about copywriting. I really love to write. I kind of want to look into that as an angle. So they said, hey, give Kevin a call. See what he thinks. I had an hour-long conversation with this guy about breaking into copywriting.

0:38:17
And I told him the same thing. And if it were me, I would go demonstrate my skills and knowledge to a company for free if I had to, if it was the right company, and tell them, hey, look. And I told him, be honest with him. Like 100% honest. Like tell them right up front, say, hey, I am really skilled at this, but I don’t have a big portfolio. And I don’t have a lot of real world experience. And what I need is the real world experience. I want to prove to you that I can get your results. So I’m going to do xyz for free if you’ll let me. And we’re going to track the results together. And I’m going to show you the results that I can get. And then if you want to keep me around, we can talk about it going forwards, right? Or we can part ways or whatever doesn’t matter to me.

0:39:06
But at least I’m going to gain some real world experience out of this. And you’re going to get whatever results that I can get you. And so we’ll both be happy at the end of the day and just have those really honest conversations with people. And if you’re up front and you’re honest and you’re likable and they want to give you a shot, they’ll give you a shot, right? And that is the start of building your portfolio. But more importantly, it’s the start of building your network. OK, so one of the best places to get new work, I’m not going to say new clients, but new work is existing clients. All right, now you can also get new work as well because these clients that you’ve done work with who now trust you, let’s keep in the copywriting sphere, right? You do this copywriting for this person for free, you get them good results. Maybe they’re like, hey, cool, yeah, I’d actually like to hire you. I want to keep this going.

0:39:55
All right, so they hire you. But then they’re in a network of their own business owners, like especially if they’re successful businesses, they know other successful business owners, right? And so they get into conversations and they’re like, hey, I got this copywriter, he’s done amazing things for me. You need to try them out, right? So now I got client number two off of client number one, that all starts from that first part of that network that you’re trying to build. So if you need to work for free a little bit to get in the door with these other people and your angle could be the exact same thing, right? I don’t have a lot of experience, but I don’t have a lot of companies in my portfolio outside in Nigeria, right? And I want to expand. I want to start taking on more clients in the US. I want to be taking on clients in Canada or wherever you want to target.

0:40:40
And so you can use that exact same angle up front, honest, tell them exactly what your motive is, right? And then do the work and blow them out of the park and gain their trust. And then they’re going to start paying you number one. They’re going to want to keep you around. If you’re doing a good job, they’re going to want to keep you around. And that’s the up front agreement. It’s not going to work forever for free for you, right? But I’m going to do this XYZ task. We’re going to track the results together. And then if you want to keep me around, we’ll figure it out. And like I said, if you knock it out of the park, they’re going to keep you around because they want to keep those results coming in. And so then it’s, hey, now can you introduce me to, do you know anybody else who needs this kind of work that I’m providing because I would love to do this for them as well?

0:41:24
And you just have to start building that network. And if you invested that time, that I think that time investment is way better than investing the time in SEO, investing the time and trying to make content on YouTube because that is a direct path to actual work. And it’s a direct path to building your portfolio, which you’re going to need to gain a trust of other people who are looking at you from the outside. Thank you. So that’s that’s that’s that’s sorry, say it again. Thank you very much. I was right. I took some notes down and all well taken. Thank you very much. All right. You’re absolutely welcome. Anything else?

0:42:03
I’m good. I’m good. I’m going to stay on and well listen to everybody. Thanks for the additional well known. Good. Those. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks for coming on today. All right. Let’s see. Check our green room here. I want to also check the chat. All right.

0:42:24
Hey. Hey. Oh, somebody I’m muted in the green room too. Hold on. Let me mute it up here. I can hear the broadcast in the background. All right. We’ve got Jason is joining. We’ve got M.O. I think it’s M.O. If Jason doesn’t, I think his thing’s been joining for a few minutes. I’m going to lock him out. How many people do we have in the green room? I think we’ve got enough space. Okay.

0:42:55
All right. M.O. I’m going to bring you on next. So get ready. All right. Is it my pronouncing your name correctly? Yeah. It’s Emile. Emile. All right. How are you? Fine. Thank you. I’m doing very well. So give us a little bit of your background agency on our freelancer. How long have you been doing this?

0:43:18
I’m basically an e-commerce owner. So we own two e-commerce. It’s basically one e-commerce. But we have one for Europe and one for our country, which is Romania. And we decided with our developer, we work again for one year now and we are very pleased. And we’ve decided to start an agency which will serve us too because we still have to develop quite at least four or five new websites for different brands we represent. So but we want also to use our skills, which we have in the part of content marketing SEO and we’ve proved on our websites and use our developer skills. It is a freelancer but he already has a portfolio of tens of websites. So it’s not at the beginning. And yeah, basically I’ve asked my question, which would be how would you approach like what bricks would you lay first in order to start this? So like I was thinking what to do first. We set our framework of building websites.

0:44:34
We make a blueprint website. We set our project management thing. We might not make our website live because now we don’t have a website. We are still working on our e-commerce system together. So basically it’s like I started studying the basically the discovery things. You’ll explain on the digital ambition, you know, so it’s excellent. I started studying the statement of work and how to price something. So I will be in charge mainly of the sales and presenting projects because my partner developer is very good with the development but he sucks with sales. So like we are going to complete each other and we are also going to bring on other people. So yeah, basically my question is how would you start? So given this, what would be the order of the things you would set up? So the building blocks of getting your business up and running. Yeah? Yes.

0:45:35
Okay. First thing, I mean I’m going to assume like you already have the legal structure in place. You’ve actually started a legit company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We do have. Okay. You got banking in place. Everything, yeah. That’s sorted. Okay. Do you have bookkeeping in place? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we do have, we make business. Us and him, we both have companies.

0:45:59
We do bookkeeping from 10 years ago. So yeah, we are good with that. Okay. Good. Because bookkeeping and the tax situation and all of that, I always tell people I’m like, you know, it’s the boring part. It’s a hard part. It’s annoying part. But if you just like start running a business and none of that is in place, you know, you go six months, 12 months down the line and then you look back at a giant freaking mess. Which by the way is right when you’re gaining traction and momentum, you’re now having to shift gears and go clean up this giant mess that you’ve created, which is a really bad thing to have happening when you’re in that pivotal moment of like, hey, I’m actually gaining traction and momentum now. And I’ve got these clients and I’ve got deadlines.

0:46:41
And okay, so we don’t want any of that to happen. So that’s good. You’ve got all that stuff in place. Next thing would be the contract situation, right? So do you have like when you’re bringing a new client on board, do you have a contract that they’re going to sign? Are you confident in that contract? No, so that’s a really good thing to have a contract for the plan. Yes, you need a contract. I would go to monstercontracts.com. I believe that’s the domain. Let me double check here. Let’s go monstercontracts.com and that is it. Yeah, yeah, start there. Start with monstercontracts.com.

0:47:18
You need a contract. You need an SOW template. So when you’re bringing on a new client, a statement of work is very, very important. Don’t move forwards without a statement of work. It’s just a recipe for absolute disaster. So you’ve got your contract. You’ve got your SOW. You should probably also be developing. It’s going to take some time to develop this and some trial and error. I mean, I have a version in the inner circle that you can just grab. But the whole proposal, right? You want a proposal that’s laid out that kind of spells out what you’re going to do for the company. Then it has the SOW attached and then it’s got a place for them to sign. I use PandaDoc.

0:47:55
I send this out to them so that they can review it and sign it all in one go. And it also alerts me when they’ve reviewed it and all that good stuff. But you want all of that in place so that you can seamlessly bring someone from a prospect into an actual client. The next thing you’re going to want is a project management system in place, right? So there’s got to be a way to manage this client. I mentioned Basecamp, bring them into a seamless experience. The thing that you don’t want to do is you don’t want to bring on a new client and then everything is chaos. And they feel like, oh my gosh, like what have I gotten myself into? And you’re starting the whole project off on the wrong foot. You want them to feel like this has just been a very seamless experience. They have their shit together and this is all going to work out fantastic. You don’t want a client second-guessing everything right from day one, just a bad way to start on a project, right?

0:48:47
So you’ve got your project management system in place. In the beginning, I’ll say this as well, it takes a lot of extra time and a lot of extra discipline, but it’s another situation where you’re going to eventually have a mess on your hands if you don’t do it. But everything you do in these early stages, and it does feel like everything’s hectic because everything’s new, right? So it’s hard to focus on doing this as well, but you need to document everything that you do in the very beginning with a brand new client. So start building your SOPs, your standard operating procedures. So when we need to do this for a client, this needs to happen and then you document it. And then it’s easier to maintain these SOPs over time than it is again when you actually have traction and momentum and more clients coming on board and more work to do and more deadlines to be like, oh, we also need SOPs. Well, now’s not the time to create SOPs because we don’t have the time to create SOPs. So try to create those as early as possible.

0:49:47
Like I said in the beginning, I don’t like to read instruction manuals. I just like to dive in and get things done, right? So I created the bookkeeping problem. That’s why I told you not to do it. And when I’m telling everybody not to do it, I created the SOP problem. So I’m telling everybody not to do it. Don’t do the things that I did. So this is what I would do again if I had to start over. Get all these things situated from the very beginning. All right. So the next thing that you need, you’ve got your processes in place or there being worked on for actually serving this client, the question is like, what else is there? Well now we’re folks on the client side of things. But I think you’re also asking about what maybe marketing, like building your portfolio, what else?

0:50:27
Like, let’s say we have a portfolio in which we could include our websites because we built them, yeah, same team built our websites. And then we have websites also my partner, the developer builds, our tons of websites. We just still don’t have our common website. Like we didn’t make a branding for our new agency and just put them together. So there is a portfolio, but there isn’t a brand in the website. Yeah. So and this is a good, we just had this discussion in my mastermind yesterday. And this actually goes to the Hunsey too, if he’s still watching, very important. Where you get your clients from determines how important it is to have a portfolio and to do all these other traditional things, having a website that people think of. Okay, go to digitalgravy.co. That’s my website. It basically has nothing. It’s like a one page website, okay?

0:51:27
It doesn’t have a portfolio on it. It has a, it calls out one of our last clients and some of the results that we got for them. But it hasn’t even been updated in a while. I don’t use my website as a tool because I don’t need to. Because of the way that I’ve set up my sales process, my lead generation process, it’s just not a thing. If you’re going to be doing SEO, if you’re going to be doing PPC, if you’re going to be doing Facebook ads, if you’re going to be doing content online, if you’re going to be doing a lot of other like traditional marketing channels to try to get business, then you’re going to need a better website. You’re going to need a portfolio. You’re going to need all of these things to build trust with people. I haven’t done that because I don’t do those things. I don’t market my agency with any of those channels, a little bit with PPC. Just because it’s like a low hanging fruit, I just do it, right?

0:52:19
But what I’ve mainly done is I built a referral network. And the way that I’ve done that is with not just existing clients, but with, and I call this the Melcon Cookie strategy. And again, I tell you, anybody in my mastermind, they’re going to, they heard this yesterday, okay? If you sell cookies, find people who sell milk and share each other’s customers, okay? And so what I’ve done is I partnered with local designers, especially I found branding agencies to be a really good partner because what they’re doing is they’re working with the exact customers that I want to work with. But they’re not competing with me, right? They don’t do web design and digital marketing, all these other things. What they do is they do branding. And it just so happens that when somebody accompany rebrands or is starting a new business and getting their brand off the ground for the very first time, it doesn’t matter either situation, they need a website, right?

0:53:17
If they have an existing website, but they just rebranded, well, the new branding probably clashes with their existing website and that all kind of needs to be redone. And so what I’ve done is built this referral network to where the clients come into these different agencies and freelancers and they’re doing their thing for them. But then that client also needs a website and digital marketing and that’s the referral that happens right there. And then same thing, if I’m getting clients that need branding because I don’t do branding, right? So I refer them back to my network. So we’re going back and forth with this. But here’s the other thing on the branding agency side of things is when they refer the website project to me, I sell the person on design and I use that designer because most of the time they can do if they’re working from wireframes, right? They’re still good at design, obviously. So they can do the web design.

0:54:08
And I actually, when I put out a proposal and I am billing for design in that proposal, a lot of times, especially if they’re smaller designers, you know, there’s one case in particular where somebody partnered with they’re kind of underselling themselves all the time. They have this problem of underselling them. Well, I don’t undersell them, right? I sell it at the price it was supposed to be sold at and then I give it to them and they make more money than they would have made otherwise doing the project, doing the design for that. And so they get to keep the client relationship, the clients really happy, they’re referring them to me. So I’m happy now the clients even happier because now they’re getting their website, their digital marketing, all that stuff taken care of. So I’m constantly just getting leads from other real people. And so none of these people are like, where’s your portfolio, right?

0:54:56
They already trust me because this designer who’s done great work for them and I vet the designers, right? I’m not working with like, you know, shoddy designers. So it’s legit design person saying, if you need a website, this is the person you need to talk to. If you need digital marketing, this is the person you need to talk to. And you know what? They just talk to me. And then we have a conversation and then I send them a proposal and then they sign it and then we move on. There’s no where’s your portfolio, who else have you done work for? Yadda, yadda, all those questions are answered and the fact that the trust was built in the referral, right? Referrals are like gold, okay? So and because of this referral network, I don’t have to do any mark.

0:55:34
I can be very lazy when it comes to marketing. I can have a very lazy kind of website, right? So you can do that. But if you’re not going to go that route, if you’re going to go the traditional marketing route, then yes, you need a portfolio. You need all these other things in place. You need to be able to say, here’s what I did for this company. Here’s what I did for that company because you’re going to have to build the trust. The trust is not there yet. You’re going to have to build the trust and you need these tools to build the trust. So with that said, where are you getting your clients right now or where are you going to be attempting to get your clients from? So for now, probably mostly through networking, like I said, but we will definitely find the name and brand and just put a simple website for the start. And we can also add some portfolio for my partners for the following, for our own websites.

0:56:29
So that’s what we’re going to do. OK. Yeah, so yeah, then you would be in the portfolio building process. And if you have the time to do it, especially, it is a good thing to do. It’s always good to have crystal clear examples of the work that you’ve done, right? But you also have there is a time thing. And honestly, I would have a bigger portfolio if I wasn’t also building automatic CSS and running the inner circle and doing a YouTube channel for these other businesses and products. So there’s got to be a time balance in there somewhere. But if you’re not doing any of those other things and you have time on your hands to really build up your portfolio, then that’s definitely a good step to do and to build your own website. But then it’s always a question of, and we ask clients this question all the time too, right? I’m going to build this website for you, but where are the people going to come from? Because it’s not a, if you build a, they’ll come situation.

0:57:23
We all know that, right? You build a website and it’s just going to sit there. So you’re still going to need to get eyeballs onto that website. And that’s the next question is, you know, where are they going to come from? Where are you going to drive people from? So do you have a marketing plan laid out? Right. No, no. OK. So that would be your next step for sure. And because it sounds like you’re going to be, if you don’t want to just rely on referrals, and there’s two different referral situations. Referral situation A is, I get referrals from time to time, but I can’t really rely on them. They just kind of come in randomly sometimes, sometimes not. And sometimes there’s a big wall in our projects because they’re not coming in.

0:58:05
If you’re in that situation, then you need to be branching out and building these other marketing channels to supplement that. Then there’s the companies who are like, dude, our referral network is so strong. We’re constantly getting referrals all the time. I don’t need any of these other marketing channels. If that’s your situation, then just keep that rolling, right? But it sounds like you’re more in camp A. So you’re going to get referrals from time to time, but you should really probably be building these other marketing channels out. So you need a solid marketing plan as your next step. And then you do need these portfolio type pieces in place before you roll that stuff out, because you don’t want to roll it out, and then people come to the website. There’s nothing there for them to see, nothing to build trust. That’s not going to work, right? So what I will say with your marketing plan is keep it small and manageable and focused, right?

0:58:54
Like go all in on something. If it’s going to be PPC, just go all in on PPC. Get the analytics set up properly, get the landing pages set up properly, the way that don’t just be like, oh, we’re going to run ads to our homepage, and then that’s it, right? Like do PPC the right way. So 100% all in on that. If you say, hey, we’re going to do content education on LinkedIn or something like that, or we’re going to do some other LinkedIn strategy, go all in on the LinkedIn strategy. I put all your effort and focus into it. Now, I will say set a date, you know, so say three months, 90 solid days. We’re going to go all in on this marketing channel and see what we can produce. And at the end of 90 days, when the smoke clears, you check out and say, hey, what are our results? Is this working?

0:59:36
How much have we spent on this channel? And you know, treat it like you would for a client, basically, and say does this make sense to continue doing this? Are we getting traction? Are we getting momentum? Are we getting projects? And if you’re not, if it’s just like, man, this is working at all, then you may need to say, all right, I’m going to switch to a different marketing channel for 90 days to see if we can produce something there. Now, obviously some channels, SEO as an example, you can’t just do a 90 day effort. And then see what happens, right? You’ve got to know ahead of time that’s going to take a much longer effort. But some of these other things, you can definitely get results in 90 days. And if you’re not getting results in 90 days, you should probably try something else. Yep.

1:00:13
So if you have all those pieces in place, you have the processes, you have, you’re able to serve clients the right way and you’re able to market and get new clients. That’s it. It’s a wrap. Okay. Another question just if it’s possible. Yeah. I’m in sort of position, like I think the lady before down she was or I’m not sure. But for some parts of the marketing online thing like SEO and content marketing, I’ve got a lot of training. I’ve tried some stuff on our websites, but because of a lot of things to do, I cannot say that I’m yet really good at that. So would you apply the same strategy, let’s say for one client, okay, we’re doing you the website because that for sure we can do it well. And but we are doing for you also the content just for free for some pages.

1:01:11
Or I or you would suggest like work it on our websites until we like see that we are good on doing on our websites and then offer it to clients. What would you go for? No. Yeah. I wouldn’t do it for yourself. I think that’s kind of a waste of time. I mean, you could do it. It’ll make you a little bit more comfortable, right? But here’s what I did. And this is a very, very important point. So everybody should really listen very carefully here. So you can use the free model that I talked about with the Hunsey, right? You can use that in many, many different ways. All you need to do if you’re wanting to get new clients is get your foot in the door.

1:01:53
Any way to get your foot in the door and build trust. If I do web design, that’s my thing, right? Well, let’s just say it’s my thing. Like all I do is web design and development on bricks. And I want to get a new client. I don’t have to go offer web design for free. Okay. There’s two ways to do this. But I’m going to tell a real world story here of how I landed a real world local project by doing some free work. So I approached this person and at the time, Facebook chatbots, I don’t know if anybody remembers, like you had this software where you could run Facebook ads and if somebody commented, it would trigger the chatbot or whatever. And you would get leads through Facebook Messenger and you could start conversations with people through Facebook Messenger, all of that stuff.

1:02:41
Okay. That was big at a certain time. And it was new. And a lot of people were getting really good results with it. And there was a company local to me that I thought that model would work really well for. And I thought it was a new thing that I would really like to test that I had never done before. And I approached them and I said, hey, here’s the new thing that’s going on right now. Now it actually turns out that I didn’t end up liking this as a model, but it was just a test. Okay. And so I approached them and I said, hey, here’s this new thing. I do think it would work really well for your type of business. I don’t have any experience, real world experience running this yet. Of course, I’ve got a lot of marketing experience, but this is a new tool.

1:03:24
And what I want to do is I just want to test out a campaign using your Facebook page, your Facebook ads account. And I want to see what we can generate in terms of leads and sales for you. And I’m going to do it 100% for free because this is a learning experience for me. I actually want to use you as a case study. So I want to track the analytics and the results. And I want to be able to publish this and show it to other clients because I think that I can sell it to them if it works really well. And we just had that upfront conversation. And they were like, well, sure, I mean, we’re not doing anything on Facebook really. So go for it. And so I did. I went for it. We ran it. And we got decent results.

1:03:59
Right. They got some leads. They got some sales off of it. It wasn’t like blockbuster. It wasn’t. It wasn’t crazy. But here’s what happened next is they were like, by the way, do you do websites? Because we, our website needs to be redone. It hasn’t been done in like five years. And I was like, well, yeah, actually I do. And so I sold an $8,000 website job off of doing some Facebook Messenger test stuff for free for them. Right. So it was just a foot in the door. And a lot of times you need like a just a low hanging fruit, right, to get your foot in the door.

1:04:32
You don’t want to be like, oh, I’ll do your entire website for free. Like no, that’s not what I’m talking about, right. Find a small entry level foot in the door thing. Like a Google My Business is a very good example of this. Their company is established. They have a website. You go to their Google My Business and they’ve done nothing with it. There’s no category selected. They’re not even the owner of it. There’s like no reviews. There’s no nothing. Like it’s a ghost town, okay. So that’s a foot in the door thing. Whereas it’s like, hey, you start building a relationship with them. Hey, I noticed your GMB.

1:05:01
Like you’re not leveraging it at all. You’re not in the map pack because of this. There’s a lot of things. I think that if we just fixed it up, you know, give me 48, 72 hours. I think I can, you know, help you out here. And I’m like, oh, sure, yeah, I even know what we could do. You know, to get into that kind of conversation, they didn’t even know. So then you come in, you do that for them. And it leads to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Because now they trust you. And they’re like, wow, okay. All right, this guy can be an asset for us. And then it’s just what else can they do? And you know, like I said, if you’re a web design web development for you, it’s e-commerce. So you’d be doing little, like what are the foot in the door type stuff can you do for e-commerce brands?

1:05:38
There’s a bunch of opportunities there. You can get your foot in the door, build trust. And then that conversation is going to continue on and on and on. The other side of this, and this is for the Hunsey again, if you’re still listening. And anybody else, when you’re working on building a portfolio, you don’t have to have real clients. I told this to the copywriter that I was talking to as well. And he, I told him, hey, maybe focus on e-commerce copywriting. Because that’s a really, like if you wade service-based business copywriting and e-commerce space copywriting, I would say there’s a lot more opportunities in the e-commerce space. I talked about maybe email marketing copywriting for e-commerce. There’s even like sub-nitches in there. But here’s what I said. I said, go find e-commerce brands that their copy is just mediocre. Like it’s just not good at all.

1:06:31
And if they had way better copy, they would be doing a lot better. And I just said, just rewrite it. Go find these examples, rewrite it. And then you could do two things. One, you can use that in your portfolio. You can say, here was the copy, the A version. Here’s my B version. This is the kind of work that I can do. They didn’t even have to hire you to do that, to be able to put it in your portfolio, to say, this is what I found, this is what I did. You’re just demonstrating your work, demonstrating your expertise. But you could always take that and send it to them and say, hey, I was on your website. I’m a copywriter. I just noticed that your copy is a little bland. And I think if your copy wasn’t so bland, it would be doing a lot better.

1:07:10
You’d be selling a lot more stuff. So I took the time to rewrite the copy for these three products right here. And I’m just giving this to you for free. I just wanted to put this in front of you. If you like it, use it. Go ahead. Go for it. You don’t have to pay me anything. If you don’t like it, you can put it in the trash can. Doesn’t matter to me. But I rewrote it. I just wanted to do this as a test piece. And if you do like it, then we can have a conversation. You want more of this done. I don’t know.

1:07:38
But that’s another angle. You don’t have to go actually get a client to agree to anything before you start doing work for them. If you’re a web design and developer, you can take a website that sucks and just redesign it on your own time and say, hey, this is what I would have done if I had built this website. So this is what it would have looked like. This is the UX pieces that I put in place. Here’s what the new UI looks like. And then boom, there’s a portfolio piece for you. You don’t even have to talk to this person. You just took an example that you found online. You made it the way you would have made it. It’s now in your portfolio. Why can’t it be? Why can’t it be?

1:08:13
It can. There’s no rule. And then again, you can send that off to the person and say, hey, by the way, I was browsing your website. I’m a web designer. The whole spiel that I just gave. So it’s another way to get a foot in the door with companies and to also build your portfolio even if you can’t get people to talk to you. Awesome, excellent stuff, excellent stuff. Thank you very much. You are very welcome. Thanks for coming on today. I’m looking forward to talking forward for our next things in the digital ambition in the circle. And I have a question with yes or no.

1:08:45
Is the seal dead or not? It’s not dead. It’s getting harder and harder and harder. It’s getting more competitive. It depends on the niche that you’re in, 100%. There’s a lot of niches where I feel like it’s not dead, but it’s dead because it’s so competitive. It just takes a tremendous amount of resources and time to win. And for most companies in that niche, it wouldn’t be the best place to put their money right now. But it’s not dead. How can we determine which of the niches we are? You could just do basic competitor analysis. You can see what are, you know, get your top 10 target terms and see who else is ranking for them.

1:09:29
You’re not going to win. Thank you very much. All right. Okay. Yes. Sasha says, please mark your concept work as conceptual. Don’t lie and say you did a site if you know you obviously have not done the actual live site. Yes, you cannot take those pieces and say these are my clients. You can’t misrepresent, right, but you can say this is my work, right? Had they hired me, this is what I would have done. All you need to do is give people an example of the work that you do. All right. What else we got in the chat and do we have? How’s our green room looking?

1:10:16
All right. We have no one else in the green room. I do have how long we’ve been going a little bit over an hour. I know some of this was, we worked out some technical difficulties. I’m going to spend a little bit more time here. We’ve got 158 people, 160 people watching live. So we’re good to go. First of all, how are you guys liking this so far? Drop some comments. Hit the likes. Give me some thumbs up. How are you liking the format so far? I’m going to do a little, we’ll do some stuff after the fact where I get some people’s ideas for what else we can do at the show or how we can improve some things. But I just want to get a general idea how you guys are liking things so far.

1:10:54
What I’m going to do is I’m going to pull up watching the chat go through here. I’m going to pull up some of the questions that were asked from the people who could not be here live from the inner circle. Again, I’m going to put this up on the screen. If you want to be in the green room and be able to come in and be a guest, then you’ve got to be a member of the inner circle. If you want to ask questions and get them answered and have those prioritized, then you’ve got to be a member of the inner circle. So you can go to digitalambition.co slash inner circle. But what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to pull up those questions that people had for me. I’m going to pull them onto the main screen here. All right, so Josh Carson says, do you qualify clients or will you send proposals to everyone? If you do qualify them, what is your method?

1:11:40
So yes, I do qualify clients. I do not send proposals to everyone. There are a few ways that I qualify. This qualification happens on the very initial sales call. I have a training in the inner circle on the exact, like step by step, how this initial sales call goes, what you should say, the past, you should lead people down and how to qualify them during this call. But it goes something like this. So after I have gathered kind of their needs, just high level needs, what I’ll basically say is, okay, so based on what you’re saying and what you are company needs and the sites that we have done for other companies just like yours, the typical price is anywhere from and then I throw out a bracket, okay? And depending on the range of there going to be end determines the size of this bracket. If you know they’re on the lower end, then you give a smaller bracket. You don’t want to be like, it’s anywhere from $5,000 to $80,000, you can’t, that’s not going to work, okay?

1:12:47
That doesn’t help anybody, it’s nonsense. It’s kind of like the email that I got two days ago, I ordered more flooring for my house, right? And they sent me an email and it literally said your delivery will be between 7 a.m. and 12 noon or 12 noon and 6 p.m. So I’m like the whole fucking day, all right, thank you for this email that gave two different time slots, they basically covered the entire day. Don’t do that with your price bracketing either, all right? But it’s companies like this, I want to write them back and make, who approved this, who approved this, this email? But anyway, I digress, we won’t go off on too many tangents. So price bracketing, when it’s low, first of all you have to have a minimum, all right? You need to set a minimum. So let’s say your minimum is going to be $3,500. Some of you that’s like, wow, you never even done a site for $3,500 before, that doesn’t matter.

1:13:40
So let’s say your minimum is $3,500, so your bracket is, it’s anywhere from $3,500 to $7,500. And then you basically just ask them point blank, is that what you were expecting to pay, right? You can phrase it a bunch of different ways, okay? But is that what you were expecting to pay? And then you just gauge their reaction, right? And they’re going to be like, okay, that’s someone that wasn’t willing to pay at least $3,500, right? Or they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s for sure no problem, right? So they answer with confidence, you just want to gauge that reaction. The next thing is, and let me give the next example, if it’s going to be like a $30,000 website, because you know right off the bat, you’re talking to somebody like, ah, this is not a $10,000 website, this is more like a $30,000 website. So you can say, all right, you know, typical project like this, based on the clients we’ve worked with in the past.

1:14:31
And I always say, based on the clients we’ve worked with in the past, because I need them to know that other people have paid this money, because they can’t, I’m not going to let them off the hook with that. So over price, this is too high. It’s not because other people pay it, right? Other people are willing to invest the money. It’s just you that’s not willing to invest the money. I just need them to know that it’s them and not me, right? So I say, based on the clients that we’ve had in the past, the other projects that we’ve done, I said anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000. And you know, I know that’s kind of a big range, but honestly, it’s going to come down to the scope, the deliverables, yada, yada, yada. But you’re giving them this bracket. And then the same question follows, is that about what you were asking to spend? And guys, I know some of these numbers are going to be like, wow, I can’t even imagine.

1:15:18
I’ve been on calls where the person told me point blank. And by the way, the bigger the company is, the more detached they are from the money. Okay, the person you’re talking to does not care in the slightest about how much this project costs, because they ain’t paying, right? The company’s paying and they’ve been given a budget, right? They know what the budget is. And yeah, they’re still trying to get like the best bang for their buck, but it’s not personal to them, right? So I’ve been on calls where the company, the person was like, it was a marketing director and she’s like, I’ll just be up front with you. We can’t go over $80,000, right? So okay, like fine, all right, we can’t go over $80,000, like whatever. Maybe we can, but for a lot of people, they haven’t even been on a call where $80,000 was even in the realm of like, you know, their imagination. So I’m just telling you that these numbers, if they sound crazy to you, don’t sound crazy to other people.

1:16:09
And that’s all in your head and it’s something that you’ve got to get over that’s definitely a thing that’s going to block you. So you give the range, $20,000 to $50,000, and then you ask the same question again, is that about what you were expecting to spend? You want to know what their expectation was. You’re going to get that, ah, that’s nowhere near us. We can’t, there’s no way we’re going to get there. Okay, then we’re not a good fit. You have to be able to say no. And I’ve done this in a bunch of different videos. I’ve talked about this concept where you can’t care about the outcome. If you care about the outcome, you’re going to sell yourself short. So you cannot care about the outcome. You have to be positive, right? You have to be energetic.

1:16:53
You have to be excited about the opportunity, but you can’t care about the outcome one way or the other. If this person says no, if this person walks away, if this person isn’t a good fit, then you’ve got to be okay with that. That’s part of the process of being successful at this stuff, all right? So let’s say they’re like, yeah, that’s actually what I, you know, I was expecting to spend about that much. Okay, so the next question is, okay, great. So are we on the low end of that? Or do we have the full $50,000 to spend, right? Or if you’re on the lower end, it’s like, okay, so are we on the lower end, like toward $3,500, or do we have the full $7,500 to spend? And how you phrase this is really, really important. Do I have the full $7,500 to spend? Which means, can I give you everything you want?

1:17:41
Because if I give you everything you want, it’s going to be more like $7,500. If we have to be on the $3,500 end, we can’t give you everything you want, right? But we’re going to have to take some things out. Maybe we have to do some things later. So you’re not proposing it as, do you want to spend $3,500 or do you want to spend $7,500? It’s mainly like how much, how much are the things do you want? Are we going to include, right? How much of those things are we going to include? So if I have the full $7,500, I can pretty much give you everything you want, right? If we have $3,500, I probably can’t give you everything you want. So that’s kind of how you’re phrasing it. And then what they’re, what you’re going to do with this process is you’re going to get them to a basic number that you’re already basically agreeing on it, right? So like, well, I don’t think we have the full $7,500 to spend, but I think we’re going to do around $6,000.

1:18:30
So they know a couple things might get cut out, but you now know $6 is the number. So when you go back and you create your proposal and you’re working everything out, and the first thing I do with my proposal is I build in everything, right? Build in everything, and then the number is going to be like $15,000 or something like that. Let’s just say, we’re just throwing out random stuff. But I know the number they need is 6. So now I just start taking things out. And I start putting those things in phase 2. So I’m like, all right, we’re going to take these out of phase 1, but we’re going to work them in later at a later time. And I put them in a separate list, and I say, this is going to be our phase 2 list. And I keep taking things out into where around 6. Now, if they say 6, if it’s 6, 5, if it’s 7, they’re still going to say yes. Okay? So you don’t have to be exactly at 6.

1:19:18
I try to get as close as I possibly can, but it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. It actually matters most is that you get them to say yes for 6. And this is only by the way of 6 makes sense. Don’t sell a $20,000 website for 6. Okay? That’s not what I’m saying to do. You’re taking things out because they can’t have all the things they ask for because it’s not in the budget. But if you get them to sign and you get this project and you build trust and you knock it out of the park, then the conversation is easy. Hey, remember all those things you wanted, right? Phase 2, we’re ready to start phase 2 now. So here’s the cost for phase 2. You’re ready to rock and roll?

1:19:53
Yes, we’re ready to rock and roll. Cool. Now, you get that money anyway because you’re going to do it later. So you just need to get them to sign on to this initial version of the project, this phase 1 version of the project. So I don’t even remember the question I was asking, but that’s the overview of how you want to kind of approach this. Oh, it was about qualification, qualifying clients. So that’s how I qualify them. And going back to the thing about you can’t be concerned too much about the outcome. If you’re qualifying them by giving them this bracket and having this conversation and they’re like, there’s just, there’s no way they’re going to get to where you need them to be. It’s like, you’re like, well, it’s going to be at least 3500 up to 7500 and they’re like, oh, I was saying more like 750.

1:20:38
Like, come on. Like, this is not, we’re not even in the realm of like, this is not, we’re not a good fit. Okay. And there’s a bunch of different polite ways to say that, you know, we’re not a good fit. But, you know, that’s up to you. So yes, the answer is qualify everybody. Do not send proposals to people you haven’t qualified. I can’t say that because I can express that enough. Do not send proposals to people that you have not qualified. Why? It is a complete waste of your time. And by the way, don’t I, I said this in a couple videos, don’t send a proposal to somebody you haven’t talked numbers with because you have no idea what the reaction is going to be to getting this proposal. And so once again, you’re probably wasting your time.

1:21:20
You’re going to stick or shock them. There’s no context as to why the number is the way that it is. There’s no context around, hey, all of my other clients have paid about this much. It all needs to happen in that conversation before a proposal is ever sent. All right. And remember, you guys know, like, go watch this. In the videos, none of this, there are zero sales tactics. There is zero, like, here’s how I’m going to manipulate the person. Here’s how I’m going to do this. I’m literally telling them up front, right? Like, if an electrician came to your house and you’re like, I need 70 outlets done. And they’re like, this is the price. And you’re like, ah, can’t afford that, right? They’re just telling you like it is. Like, okay, well, what can you afford?

1:22:00
Can you afford 40 outlets? So you’re being, all of the pricing is 100% legit. The sales conversation has not let me convince them to do this with me. Let me convince them to spend more money than they actually have. Let me convince them to go into debt. Let me use all these different tactics to, you know, like, I’m not even going to get into all the stuff that people use, okay? I’m not saying to do any of that. Be 100% honest, 100% up front. These are the facts. People like to work with me. I can get the job done. We’re experiencing this. This is what the price is going to be. If you can’t pay this price, we can take some of the deliverables out.

1:22:36
It’ll now be this price. If that price still doesn’t work for you, then we’re probably just not a good fit. You’re just having an honest conversation with people and you’re passionate about helping them and getting them results. You like want the project, but if they can’t make it happen, if they can’t get to where you need them to be, then it’s no skin off your back. There’s more fish in the sea. I’m onto the next person, right? So there’s, if you’re one of those people who are like, I hate sales. I don’t want to be sleazy. I don’t want to feel icky. None of that is required. None of that is required to do any of this. All you have to do is talk to people about their business, figure out what their needs are, tell them what the price is going to be, give them an honest range, see how they feel about that range, try to kind of figure out exactly what the number needs to be to get them to sign on the line, and then build out a proposal with deliverables that meet that number as a phase one.

1:23:27
You can do phase two, phase three, phase four, phase five. None of that stuff matters. Get them to agree to a phase one project, right? And then you work from there. All right. So let’s see, what else we got? Chat, chat, chat. Chat’s going crazy. It’s on fire. It’s a lot of stuff going down. I feel bad because I can’t read it and talk at the same time. All right. So we’re going to go to Zach Wallace. We’re at 90 minutes. How many people is, if we still got people, I’m going to hang out.

1:24:00
I’m going to keep hanging out. 145 people still. OK. All right. So let me, that’s a noxious. Let me turn that. I turn it on and then I forget to turn it off later. All right. So Zach Wallace says, I’m overrun with tasks. That is endless email, retainer work, half a dozen open projects, grunt work, no time to work on high level business stuff. And yet, not enough money to go hire someone either or train them. I can’t afford to hire a tax man and a lawyer and a VA and extra developer and buy more subscriptions and invest in whatever higher in tools that I need. But I also have no more time in my week to do it all by myself.

1:24:39
I have a family of five basically saying, help. So Zach, you’re right. You’re overrun. But here’s the flat out reality. If you have half a dozen open projects, that’s what you said. You have half a dozen open projects. And you can’t hire somebody and you can’t get a bookkeeper. You can’t have a VA. You can’t have an extra developer. You don’t have money for subscriptions. This all boils down to one thing and one thing only. Your pricing is way off. You are dramatically underselling yourself. So a half a dozen open projects, you should have other people, right? I can have two open projects and hire other people.

1:25:28
So if you have half a dozen open projects and you can’t do any of this other stuff, then 100% you have to fix your pricing. Now, not everybody can just fix their pricing overnight. I get that, right? If you’re selling $1,000 websites or $2,000 websites, you can’t just sell a $10,000 website tomorrow. I mean, you can, you can. But there’s a gap in there of normally confidence, what do I say? How do I position the conversation? Like there’s some education that has to happen there, but you get the education. And then like that overnight, you can go from 2000 to 10,000. You can go from 10,000 to 25,000. You can go from 25,000 to 50,000. So the brackets are just, they’re almost always just confidence brackets. That’s all they are.

1:26:18
Now, there is some experience in there as well. You don’t have the experience and the knowledge, like you’re legitimately just getting started. You don’t have the experience and the knowledge to build a large website like that or a complex website like that or a website that’s actually going to get real-world results. It’s worth that amount of money. It’s not always about the project size. Then you can’t. You can’t sell those types of projects, right? You have to gain the experience. There’s so many people who are on year five, year 10, they’ve got plenty of experience under their belt and they’re still selling websites for $1,000, $2,000, $3,000. They’re making basically no money. They can only afford to pay themselves and they’re burned out and they can’t work on their business high level. There’s so many of that.

1:27:05
That’s a huge problem, right? Those people, ASAP, need to get the education to close the gap in the confidence and those skills and like this sales process kind of thing and then make the jump. Make the jump now. You will be a lot better off. You’ll be a lot happier. You’ll have a lot more free time and you won’t be burned out and you’ll be able to serve your clients better. I did a whole video on clients should want to pay higher prices because when they’re paying higher prices with a legitimate freelancer or a legitimate agency, they get better results. They get someone who’s more focused. They get somebody who’s not living project to project because what I tell clients all the time is, hey, if everybody paid me $2,500, I’d be serving 20 of you bouncing back and forth and when you need something, I’m like, oh, sorry, I’m busy chasing the next paycheck because I can’t pay my bills.

1:28:03
When clients actually pay what the project is worth and there’s enough money to go around and there’s enough money to hire people, clients get the attention that they need and the attention that they deserve and they get the quality and they don’t get somebody who’s going to disappear on them chasing the next dollar. There’s a benefit to the clients paying as well. That’s it, Zach Wallace. You need to raise your prices immediately and figure out what needs to happen to make those prices increase happen. So, Josh M says, other than HTML, CSS, JavaScript, what other things do we need to learn to be a great web dev? Really good question. Got a lot of joshes today. All right. So, here’s where I actually did an outline for a video on how to go from a pixel pusher to a consultants model, right?

1:29:00
Because there’s a lot of people in the pixel pusher position where they’re just like, clients hire them, clients tell them everything to do. They just push pixels around the screen. Okay. What next? What do I do next? You don’t want to be that person. You want to be hired as a consultant where the client is relying on you to tell them what’s next and what needs to happen. That’s a big jump that you need to take as quickly as possible. Now, clients aren’t going to ask you what needs to happen next if you have no idea what needs to happen next. So, what other things do we need to learn? It’s literally, I say, every part of the funnel needs to be understood. You don’t have to be an expert at making every part of the funnel work, but you need to understand if you look at a funnel, you come into a client and I do all service-based businesses, right?

1:29:48
So, I’m not talking about products, funnels and things like that. I just say, a funnel is marketing into sales, into serving the client into what happens after the client has served. That whole funnel process, right? You have to, if you’re going to build a website for somebody, which is a critical piece of that funnel. You have to understand how the entire funnel works and you have to be able to come in and look at a funnel and identify problems with the funnel, right? So, you come in and you’re able to look at, let’s start, I guess, local with our website, okay? So, you’ve got to be able to look at user experience. You might be great at design, but if you don’t know a lick of user experience, then you don’t have the tools that you need to really do your job the way that you want it to be done. So, you need to be doing UX.

1:30:36
You need to understand the UX. It doesn’t mean you need to be a UX expert who can jump into Figma and wireframe out like a master, but you’ve got to be able to look at a website’s current UX and be like, that’s not great, right? And you’ve got to know why it’s not great and where the missing pieces are, okay? You have to know copy. You don’t have to be an expert copywriter, but you have to be able to read copy and be like, that’s not going to work, right? You’ve got to know what bad copy is versus good copy. Because keep in mind, you know, as the consultant on this, you are going to be bringing people in to fill these gaps where they need to be filled. You’re not going to try to fill them all yourself. That doesn’t have to happen. So if I know the copy sucks, but I don’t know how to write good copy, I just can identify that copy sucks.

1:31:22
I bring in a copywriter. So we’re going to pay this copywriter. First the client is going to pay me, and then I’m going to pay the copywriter, and we’re going to get the job done. We’re going to fix this problem. But I was able to identify that it’s an actual problem. So I know what good copy it now. I have a lot of experience in copywriting, so I can actually write copy, but not everybody can. If you can’t, you can still identify that it sucks and then bring in the people to fix it that need to be brought in, and the client is going to pay for that, okay? Your copy, we can talk about follow up, right? So what happens when a lead actually gets into the system? So what happens next? This isn’t my job as a web designer and developer, but you know what?

1:32:03
Your job hinges on this working, because here’s what’s going to happen. You build a website for a client, and it’s amazing. And you’ve done a really good job on the UX. You’ve done a really good job on the UI, and they’re actually getting traffic, right? They’re driving the necessary traffic to this website, and people are actually opting in. They’re getting leads. They’re getting those contact form fills are happening, right? But there’s no sales on the back end. And the client comes to you, and they’re like, there’s something wrong with the website, right? What’s wrong with the website? Mr. Client, what’s wrong with it, right? If you’re getting the leads, and this is notorious, they’ll be like, we’re not getting the right type of leads.

1:32:40
Okay. Well, I guess we can look into that. So hopefully you have analytics. There’s another thing, right? To understand analytics, be able to set up these analytics. You have to understand customer profiles. That’s really important as well. Because you have to be able to fight back. You have to be able to step in and say, well, actually, and then educate the client in a lot of cases. Because the client will blame you, and they’ll say, oh, you’re converting, our website’s converting the wrong type of people. These leads are junk, these leads are trash. When actually their sales team is trash, right? The people getting the leads are dropping the ball.

1:33:15
And people getting the leads are not responding in time. The people getting the leads are having terrible sales conversations with these people, right? That could be a real thing. And if you don’t know that’s happening, and you haven’t even looked at that side of the funnel, you’re screwed, right? Because you don’t have any, there’s nothing to fight back with, right? So what I always say in that situation is, that’s actually a possibility. There’s a possibility that we’re converting, you know, the wrong types of people. And we’re going to look at that, and we’ve got analytics in place. We need to collect a little bit more analytics. But what I would like to do while we’re collecting analytics on the website side of things, I would love to take a look at your sales process and see what’s happening there. And I want to make sure that there’s no disconnects, right? You don’t say like, oh, your sales seems probably trash. Just be like, I want to, you know, it’s important that there’s no disconnect between what they’re seeing on the website and then what they’re being told on the back end.

1:34:01
And so they let you in, you look at that sales process, and you don’t have to be sales expert, but you know enough to diagnose problems. And you can identify, ooh, red flag. I see some red flags here happening in the sales process. This is actually unrelated to the website. And now you’re stepping into that consultant role saying, I think if we make some adjustments in the sales process, you’re going to see the numbers that you want to see. You’re going to see the conversions that you want to see. Same thing happens on the front end of the website, right? If you’re not in charge of sending traffic to this website, you’re still going to get blames, right? They could be sending the wrong types of people to this website. And then the website says, hey, the website you built us is not converting, right? What’s wrong with it? What did you do wrong, right?

1:34:47
That’s like always their thing. Like, what did you do wrong on our website that it’s not converting? But really, if you haven’t analyzed the traffic coming to the website, who are they sending, then you don’t know if that’s the problem or not, right? We don’t know if it’s the website that’s the problem. We don’t know if it’s the marketing that’s the problem, just like we don’t know if it’s the sales problem on the back end. This is an entire funnel that has to work together, you have to be able to diagnose all of these things. You don’t have to be an expert and be able to implement all of these things, but you have to be able to diagnose all of these things. These are the areas that I would be looking at, right? So same thing. You could say, I want to take a look at the marketing. I want to see how people are arriving on this site.

1:35:27
And I always use the word disconnect because I’m like, if there’s a disconnect between what they’re being told in the marketing and what they’re being told on the website, that’s where the problem is right there. And then we can fix that. And so we take a look at the marketing and then we find the red flags and we fix them and then everybody is happy, right? But you have to be able to understand this entire funnel and be able to find those red flags and diagnose these issues. And analytics is a big part of that, right? One of the biggest things I see is there’s no analytics or it’s just, you can’t just like throw Google Analytics on there, right? You have to actually understand what are we wanting to track? How are we tracking that? Is the tracking accurate? Because without data, nobody is armed. Everybody is just jabbing each other like, well, you’re not doing your job.

1:36:11
You’re not doing your job. What does the analytics say, right? And you know, there’s analytics on different platforms. You can look at, like for example, if you’re running Facebook ads, what kinds of people are seeing these ads? Who are we targeting with these ads, right? That’s data as well. That’s analytics as well. So analytics is a big important part of this. But I think I just covered the gamut, right? If you’re wanting to learn other things, I would learn that before I learned how to do SEO, before I learned how to do PPC, before I learned like other skills, I would learn how to diagnose a funnel and understand all the things a business needs to do with this funnel in order for this funnel to actually work. And then you can step in as a consultant.

1:36:55
And here’s the thing is you’re going to be getting money to do this and projects. You can always pay the people who have the skills to do the things you don’t yet know how to do. And there does have to be a discussion around, do you need to learn all of these extra things? See, there’s some things that we pick up along the way in the very beginning, because we have the interests I picked up SEO, I picked up my SEO skills because I had to, because I started an online business in 2012 for myself. I didn’t learn SEO to do SEO for other people. I learned SEO to build my own online business way back in 2012, right? And so I learned SEO to do content marketing for that business. That’s where I learned my content marketing and copywriting skills as well. That’s where I learned my sales funnel skills, because I built all of it for my own business way back when. If I just started out doing web design and development and then building an agency, I wouldn’t have any of those skills.

1:37:50
If I didn’t build my own online business way back then, I never would have had a lot of the skills that I have. So a lot of you are in the situation where you only have web design and development skills, you don’t have these other skills. But here’s the thing that I’ll tell you is having those other skills is a gift and it is a curse. It’s a curse because you can constantly talk yourself into doing the work yourself and not putting the other legitimate business pieces in place where you can say, oh, should I bring in somebody for SEO for these clients? No, no, no, I can do the SEO myself. So now you’re building websites, you’re trying to do SEO. Oh, this client wants PPC. Should I bring in somebody to do it? No, I can do it myself. And now you’re doing PPC over here.

1:38:35
And suddenly, you’re doing all these things and all the work and weight is on your shoulders and you don’t actually have a legitimate business. You just have a burned out freelancer who’s trying to do everything because they can. So it is a curse sometimes to have a bunch of extra skills. So I would not be in a rush to gain all of these extra skills. I would be in a rush to gain knowledge about the entire funnel and then put the right people in place that have the skills to fill the gaps. All right. How we doing? How we doing? All right. I’m going to answer one more. That’s it. One more. Jakub, Jezy Orschy.

1:39:17
Jezy Orschy. I think that’s how you would pronounce it. I don’t know. And he’s not here to correct me. So we’re going to roll with it. Jakub asks how to reach out to leads that were interested but stopped contacting you. Okay. So leads were interested but they stopped contacting you. I assume you’ve had an initial conversation with this person. Maybe even said, hey, I’ll send you a proposal. You send the proposal. Now suddenly, crickets. And you’re not really hearing from them and you send a follow up email. Maybe you don’t get a response to that. This is a very simple one.

1:39:53
This is a very simple one. Again, I’m not in the business of convincing people to work with me. I’m not in the business of manipulating people into working with me. I’m not in the business of annoying people like a little net that’s just flying around them like constantly buzzing in their ear. Like, hey, you want to work with me? Hey, you want to work with me? Hey, I thought you were going to work with me, right? None of that. I said in the beginning. You have to be positive, but you have to be separated from the conclusion and the outcome. You have to be okay with these people disappearing. You want people to disappear if they were a disappearing type of person. You want them to disappear. Trust me, right?

1:40:31
That is a disappearing as they red flag. But I will give them one final opportunity. People do legitimately get busy. They do legitimately get other priorities coming into their vision, especially if they’re a busy business owner. They’re not always trying to ignore you. I would send the magic email. I would send the magic email. I think it’s magicemail.com. It’s free. Just go look, go research the magic email. I send that magic email out and then I move on with my life and I don’t ever expect to hear from them again, but almost always I do. That’s why it’s called the magic email, right? So after they get back to you, after the magic email, things are back on and popping.

1:41:12
But if they don’t respond to that, again, it’s not. We’re not trying to convince people. You’re better off if the person doesn’t want to work with you to not be working with this person. So don’t convince people. Don’t manipulate people. Don’t let them go. Let them go. That is the smartest and best thing that you can do. Just give them one last chance with that magic email in case they were legitimately busy. The way the magic email is worded, it gets those people off the fence. And that’s it. So that’s how I would answer that question. All right guys, let me put this up on the screen one more time. This is the end of the first session.

1:41:50
We are almost two hours into this thing. It’s been fantastic. I would like you to comment down on the stream and let me know. Did you find any or see any opportunities to make this better? We’re already thinking about bringing in live guests. I’m not the only one answering questions. We can have a live guest on here that’s an expert answering questions in their field as well. I think that’s going to be fantastic. If you want to be a participant, if you want to come on and ask questions like we did in the very beginning, and I see there’s one other person in the green room that didn’t get on. They joined a little bit late. So they’ll be in the next session. Let me know.

1:42:28
Let me know what we can do to make this thing better. I hope you got tremendous value out of this. I’m going to go back and read all of the comments from people. As you know, I love to respond. I respond almost every single comment that is left on this channel. So you can feel confident. There’s a lot of channels you go to. You’re like, I’m not going to bother leaving a comment because I’m never going to hear from the channel author or whatever. I’m pretty much interacting in some form or fashion with every single comment that’s left on the channel. I like the fact that you guys are willing to engage, that you’re willing to take the time to watch, that you’re willing to take the effort to drop a comment. So I am going to respond to that effort with my own effort. That’s what I do.

1:43:04
All right. So that’s that. I’m out. I’m going to be back very soon. I’m thinking about doing this every, maybe every other week to start. That might be the schedule. If it really takes off, we might make this a weekly thing, but I’m not going to commit to that. I’d like to do this every other week as of right now to get started with this. Okay. So we’ll be back very soon. Cheers. Good to see you.