Digital Agency Table Talk 002

0:00:00
What’s up everybody? Welcome back. It is session two of digital agency table talk. What we’re going to do here is first I want to pull up and make sure our chat is working. We’re getting comments coming in. Give everybody just a little bit to start to join a little bit of a delay. Hello Josh. How is it going my friend? If you are a member of the inner circle and we’ll talk just in just a second about how digital agency table talk works. But if you are in the inner circle, the green room link is listed and it is live. So you are able to join right now. We’ve got one person in the green room as we speak. We need more people in the green room to have a great show today. So even if you were in the green room last week, you can feel free to hop back in.

0:00:56
I know a couple people were like, I want to have a longer conversation. We can go ahead and do that as well. We’re also going to keep an eye. Here’s something we’re going to keep an eye on this time. The mixed-minus issue, I believe it’s worked out, but we are going to see if it’s worked out. What I want you to do first is drop a comment. Just say hi. Let me know you’re here watching. And I’m going to talk a little bit about what digital agency table talk is. This is an opportunity for, well, one, if you’re in the inner circle at digitalambition.co-inner-circle. Let me see. I think I have a, there we go. Put a link up on the screen. You have the exclusive opportunity to join the green room to be a participant live on this session.

0:01:44
That is an exclusive opportunity for inner circle members. When you are live and you are able to come onto the show, you get to ask any questions you would like about web design. You get a few ex, SEO, business, getting leads, sales. You can get feedback on websites you’ve done or designs or whatever you want to do. We can screen share here. It’s very dynamic. We can do a lot of different stuff. So it’s kind of like a way to get free coaching, free insight, free advice. We’re planning on having guests in the future. I’m starting to get some people lined up. It’s going to be very exciting. But if you’re not in the inner circle, you still get all of this value because you get to watch for free here on YouTube. There’s kind of a backup plan in place with digital agency table talk.

0:02:26
In the sense that we don’t have enough people in the green room from the inner circle. By the way, we’re testing out a new day and time today. It was on Friday last time. Now we’re testing out Wednesday morning to see how the engagement is here. Friday was great. Friday was fantastic. But I want to see if Wednesday is better. Now we’re a little bit, I don’t know, this session, active campaign, my email system is down right now. I could not send out my email reminders this morning like I normally do. So we’re going to rely on YouTube’s algorithm to help us out today. But I also want you to help us out. If you have a community and you know that they would find value in what we’re doing here with digital agency table talk, I want you to grab the share link on YouTube and just go share that and say, hey, hey, they’re live right now.

0:03:09
There’s going to be a lot of value here. Come watch, come participate. In the backup plan that I was talking about just a second ago is this. There’s not enough people in the green room from the inner circle, then I’m going to open this up to everybody watching here on YouTube. I’ll share the green room link. Anybody can come in and get value and be a participant. All right. We’re going to prioritize people who are in the inner circle. But if we still have time and there’s no more people left from the inner circle, we’ll open this up to YouTube. Okay. So you definitely want to be watching. Now the green room does have a max number of participants. So if you’re trying to join the green room now and you’re like, oh, I won’t let me in, it’s because it’s full.

0:03:49
And what we’re going to do is we’re basically going to drop people off after they get their turn. They’re going to drop out of the green room and that’s going to make space for another person to come in. And you just hang out in the green room until I bring you into the live stream and it’s your turn to go. All right. But kind of told you how the digital agency table talk format works. There’s, I got like insane feedback on the first one last Friday or it was the Friday before last. It was, I’ll be honest with you. It was tough to take a week off. I was like, man, I should be doing it this week. I really wanted to get back in and do another one. So this may very well go weekly, may very well go weekly.

0:04:26
I was very motivated last week. I had to, you know, I’d hold myself back. I was like, ah, we’ll just, we’ll keep it at every other week for right now. But I was definitely wanting to get back into it. So let’s take a look at the chat here. We’ve got M.O. We’ve got Neal. We’ve got Orlando. G.D. and Marcus and Silent Phil. Farhan. Hopefully I’m saying these names properly. Jarmo. John. Man, this is good. Good turnout.

0:04:51
I like what I see. All right. Let me check everything out. So we’re about to check out our sound and see if our mix minus Ola D’Hunzi. I, I don’t know. I need to practice the name more. I got to practice the name more. I heard about this one from a YouTube alert. It says Austin. Well, that’s fantastic. That is good. I’m glad YouTube is helping out. And what? What’s up, Plaster? All right.

0:05:14
Let’s check out. I’m going to see. We’re going to bring. So I believe it’s Jeffrey. It was the first one in the green room. So we’re going to go ahead and bring him in first. He’s going to be the very first call. One thing before we do that, I do want you to, in the comments, OK? Everybody’s putting where they’re from right now, which is fantastic. One thing I would like to see is drop a comment with how long you have been a freelancer or an agency owner. So I would like to see experience level now of people who are watching. I think that would be a good thing to check out. So while everybody’s dropping those comments, I’m going to go ahead and bring Jeffrey in. And let’s see if we can do this properly.

0:05:56
All right. How’s it going, Jeffrey? Yeah, good. Good in here. Do I want to put you on the left? Or do I want to put you on the right? Let’s do that. Let’s do that. All right. How are you doing today? Good. I’m good. It was like a surprise for me when I saw the invitation on the circle. So I just came and you didn’t know what to expect. Partly.

0:06:18
Where they are during the first talk. So yeah, that’s what we need. As we need participants. We got a lot of people that are shy, they’re worried. Don’t be shy. But give us your background. Let us know where you are. Number one and number two, how long have you been doing this stuff? All right. So I’m freelancer as a web developer and web designer in Paris, France. I’ve been working with Oxygen Builder before and with automatic CSS. And I’m switching to breaks. And I am pretty happy because yesterday and the day before I got some great contracts for like a financial company and another one for startup to design the website. So the effort was, is paying now.

0:07:14
I can get some more clients for the end of the year. It’s good. Excellent. Excellent. All right. Before we continue with this conversation, I need to know is the mix minus working. Do you, what you would hear if it’s not working is an echo, a bad echo. So hopefully we’re not hearing the echo this time. It’s going to be a little delay before I can get people’s answers on that. But I want to make sure that our audio is good before we get too far into the, all right. Mixed minus is good. Jasp says audio is good. All right. So Jeffrey, how can I help you today? What can we do for you?

0:07:47
I don’t know. I think it’s not related to the agency, I guess, because as I told you, I’m a freelancer and I want to stay freelance. I don’t want to build a company and grow. I’m also like a photographer in my part job. But it was already related to building stuff in bricks. And I was in the NSI call to, you know, past something. So I just saw the link and I came. But I don’t know if it’s, if we all had to talk about designing, if it’s not, it’s all right. But I’m just going to give my turn to another one. Yeah, no, go ahead. What do you have about designing? OK. Maybe it’s like it’s better if I show screen.

0:08:36
I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know if you can. But go as our button to do it. Is it like you? I’m going to go with this Dworkrite 2.4 screen. OK. I need to switch to Google Chrome. I’m on Firefox. So what I’ll do is I’ll let you. You can go back in the green room. You’re fine. Switch to Chrome while you’re back there, get all your permissions set up and everything. And then if it will let you, screen share, we’ll bring you back on. OK. All right.

0:09:02
Sounds good. All right. Hang tight. All right. So let’s see. We have, I think you guys are still seeing a split screen. Let me see if we can get back from that. Main camera. Let’s see. Mm-hmm-hmm. Got to learn these controls. Session number two. All right. There we go. I think, I think Jeffrey will have to rejoin.

0:09:26
All right. So we’ve got and hopefully hope we have it again. Because bam, like more people just came in right away. OK. All right. We’re going to move to Andrew. I’m going to bring Andrew on here. And then we’re going to get to Josh. All right. So we’ve got Andrew and then Josh in the lineup. Andrew, bringing you in. Oh, hey. Can you hear me? I can hear you loud and clear. How you doing today?

0:09:52
Hey, kind of nervous. I’ll apply for jobs in Switzerland. No problem. It’s not foreign to me. There’s only hundreds of people watching this. So you’re all good. So tell us what is your background? How long have you been in this? Yeah, I’ve fought four years. So I don’t have a lot of portfolio projects. But I’ve done a lot of trainings. So I’m trying to get more real world projects. Got it. And how many real world projects have you done up to this point?

0:10:28
Three. OK. So we’re going to get lost there. So I got one from my dad. And then another one was actually the other two were friends. OK. Good. So the classic starting point. Family and friends. So what would these sites tell us about them? You said an author and what else? Yeah. So the author one was, it’s my dad. He’s an author. And then there was a construction site. So that was for a buddy of mine.

0:10:57
And then there was the lawyer site that I’m still working on, actually. It’s finished, but I’m just doing SEO for it. Got it. And is this all free work? No. So the SEO, it’s cheap. But it’s like a little bit of money for the articles. Because I actually have to be kind of like a paralegal. I’m writing it myself. So I just have them check the copy after and then get a little money. Which got it. Excellent. How can I help you today?

0:11:25
Yeah. So I’m going to be applying for jobs at web agencies. And I’m just curious, what kinds of things would you want to hear if I was coming up to your agency? Like, hey, I want to work for you. Yeah. That’s a really good question. I mean, I get a lot of inquiries about people joining the team. Now, thankfully, I have over the past couple of years. I started out trying to find people in the traditional places. You go to Upwork. You go to Facebook groups. You try to recruit people. Once I started the inner circle, and I put a job board in the inner circle.

0:12:06
We started to get lots of members, obviously. And there’s just the kind of built in benefit. For me, and I’ll tell you what I do look for in just a second. But as far as recruiting goes, because I do want to answer a recruiting side of this, because I do get asked that a lot as well. People are like, where do you find freelancers? Where do you find people to join the team and all of that? And for me, it’s cheating. I have a cheat code in the inner circle, because I just recruit straight out of the inner circle. That’s what I do. I post the opportunities in there. And by the way, if you’re in the inner circle, and you’re in that position, that’s another good benefit of that.

0:12:43
But I also have the benefit of everybody in the inner circles already watching all my trainings. This is one of the biggest things when you’re hiring somebody is like, what do they already do? What’s their natural processes? Where did they learn? Where did they get their skills? Are they self-taught? How do they do things? Do they know about BIM? Do they even use BRICS? How long have they been using BRICS? Or do they use oxygen? How long is it going to take them to integrate into our team to where they’re getting right off and doing valuable work?

0:13:17
I did make the mistake very early on many times of hiring. When I initially was hiring, I was like, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find people who are green. And I’m going to train them from the ground up. And that way, they’ll know exactly what we’re doing. They won’t have any bad habits to break. And we’ll be able to just get them right on our processes. And what I found is that that takes a tremendous amount of work. And by the time you train someone, and you still have to also look for personality stuff, you have to, there’s a lot involved. And it’s just, it’s not worth the time, honestly. So one thing is I would, if you are looking to become a part of an agency, skills, practice, and the stuff I teach all the time, like we talk about, everybody’s going to focus on like beautiful design.

0:14:07
And if you really focus on the technical aspects, if you focus on the principles, you focus on consistency, you focus on things like accessibility, those are the things that are going to make you very, very valuable to an agency, right? People who can whip up beautiful designs are like, hey, to say it, but there are dime a dozen, right? Because we live in a worldwide economy. So you’re competing with the entire world on who can make a beautiful design. There’s not enough people paying attention to the quality of development, the consistency, the best practices, the accessibility side of things. If you come in with those skills, you’re automatically going to be a lot more valuable.

0:14:47
So that would be one thing I would say is be practicing those things religiously. And then when you are applying for positions, these are the things you should be highlighting, right? It’s not just, hey, I can build sites in bricks. Hey, I can build sites in oxygen. It’s when I build sites, here’s what I do, A, B, C, D. And these are the things I pay attention to. And these are the trainings that I’ve done in the past to make sure that I’m doing this stuff the right way and so on and so forth. And I think that’s going to help you a lot versus all the other people who are like, oh, yeah, I’m competent. I can put sites together in these page builders.

0:15:22
Gotcha, I actually started with saying, oh, here’s how I build websites. But then I kind of backtracked and thought, oh, maybe they don’t like, or maybe they have their own way of doing things. So they can go hard. I know how to do this, but I’m not going to see, in what order or anything. Yeah, they are going to have their own processes. They’re going to have their own way of doing things. So let’s say you build sites and you use the BIM methodology for naming your classes, for example. But you go to get hired at an agency. They don’t use BIM. So you want to point out all of these things that you have learned and know how to do in terms of best practices, but you also want to say, but I’m flexible and I can work within your system.

0:16:06
As long as the system that they use is focused on best practices as well. So if you care about accessibility as a developer, you don’t want to go get hired at an agency that doesn’t care about accessibility. Because that’s like a fundamental conflict of interest. You’re not going to be happy doing your work when it’s like, ah, they don’t care. We need to be doing things this way, and they don’t even care about it. So you should be looking not just for any person or agency that’ll take you. You need to be looking for the best fit as well. It’s got to work both ways. And I would kind of step up, you know, show your leadership capabilities in these conversations with these agencies in the sense that it’s not just them interviewing you, right?

0:16:46
Like you can interview them a little bit, right? Ask them about their philosophy with development and accessibility and best practices and standards and processes and all this other stuff. And they’re going to kind of be impressed. Oh, wow. He knows more. Like he’s paying attention to more things than just this little one compartment. Yeah, yeah, great advice. Thank you. Yeah. I forgot my question, but I’ll probably post it up later. Yeah, no worries. We can go on to the next one.

0:17:12
No worries. All right, I’m going to see if I can get the note. All right. Nope. All right, one second. Here we go. All right, I just got to ask them out. That’s all that gets. That’s all it allows me to do apparently. All right, we got to test all the buttons out. All right, so Josh is going to be coming in next. It says, hold on. Let me say, it says, Emile is trying to join for a while now. And I’ve got to click a little green button to let him in. OK, so Emile, you should be good to go now.

0:17:44
Make sure your audio is all good. You’ll be up next. It actually be Josh, then Jeffrey again, and then Emile. All right, we are going to check the chat before we bring Josh in just for a second. How’s everybody doing? Good, good, good, good. Excellent. OK, all right, Josh. Get Josh in here. There we go. Hello. Hello, hello. Josh is, so we’re on session number two. And this is appearance number two.

0:18:17
For Josh. So batten of thousand. All right, Josh, what are we talking about today? Well, first of all, I just want to just agree with you what you were just saying about employment and how to look for employees and what to look for. For us hiring people, we look predominantly at personality because we feel that anyone who actually is committed to what they’re doing is that interest is going to learn. So we want to see consistency and personality really. But yeah, today, I wanted to talk about SEO. So we are a technical design, technical design and build company. We do web and mobile apps predominantly, I do a bit of web design, and that’s why I’m in a circle.

0:18:58
I’ve been interested in further in my WordPress capabilities, but that’s not a major part of what we do. And we don’t do any sort of marketing, copywriting, anything other than technical design and build. So I have very little knowledge about SEO, and I’m looking about how I can improve my foundational knowledge on that. Got it. Well, there’s a lot of ways to improve foundational knowledge on SEO. The real question is, because SEO is not a, what is your goal with the SEO? I guess it would be my question. What are you hoping it’s going to do for the company? So for me, I want to improve our own website.

0:19:37
So basically, I want to basically better target the customers we want to be reaching. And basically, yeah, focusing more on them and targeting the right people so we get fewer inquiries that aren’t relevant to us. I mean, I have a lot of knowledge about SEO. And we’ve got to be very careful. I think that’s one of the main things that we’ve got to do is to try and get clients from anywhere in the world. So we do a bit of local SEO. I understand the foundations around about local SEO. To be honest, we’ve got clients in the States, clients in the Saudi-day, we’ve got clients all over the world. But predominantly, it’s Scotland, and even more locally than that is Edinburgh Central Belt, part of Scotland. But really for us it’s more like the size of business that’s most relevant to us. The sort of project that we want to do in the sort of value of the project that we want to do rather than location. Got it. Okay. So in terms of SEO, you said you’ve done a little bit of local. Have you done anything in terms of content marketing SEO wise? You guys have a blog on the site if you have done any kind of. Yeah. So this is one of the things that we do blogs and we do educational pieces. We do quite a lot of specific content around about the things that we’re interested in. So for us it’s like agile methodology. We do a lot of tech for good and accessible web and so on. But we’re not consistent with it. So yeah, we have grand ideas. I started a video series that lasted a couple of videos and it’s like you lose steam. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, you know, that’s why I ask these questions and I tell clients this all the time too. You know, SEO is it’s a lot of work and it’s a and it’s a long runway to get results typically.

0:21:27
And now it’s not a lot of work if you have a lot of money because obviously you trade that time with the money and so you can get a lot of things done with a lot of money or you can get a lot of things done with a lot of time. So do you mind sharing your website? Sure. Would you rather not? It’s up to you. I mean, I’m currently in the process of rebuilding it in bricks because it is built in Elementor. Okay. Because I’m the designer. I’m not a developer. And I’m gonna leave Josh out. Yeah, do you want to share my speed? No, how do you want to? I can go ahead and share it. I’ll share the screen. If you want to put the URL in the chat. Yeah. It’s just in the green room guest chat. Got it. All right. What I want to look here is. Let’s make sure it gets pulled up and everything. All right. Let me see if I can screen share here. I got can. Is that working? Yeah. Yep. Excellent. All right. So it’s called Geared app. Yes, that’s right. Okay. All right. Let’s go straight to the blog. All right. We’re going to take a look at that in just a second. We’re also going to look at this right here. All right. So you’ve been around for a while? Yeah. Nine years. Yeah. Lot of good domain history here. Not a lot of organic traffic though.

0:23:08
So that’s what you’re really wanting to improve. The good thing is you’ve got the you’ve got really good domain authority to build off of which is fantastic. So you have how many blog articles would you say you have? 150 to 100. So that’s the first disconnect I would see here. Right. It’s if we have 150 articles, but you know, not much in this column, then what we have to do is we have to go look at the articles and just start asking some questions about the articles. Now, were these written with like, hey, maybe we can get some SEO juice out of this or were they just written like because we want to write. So yes and no. I mean, definitely we know the things that we’re interested in. I don’t think we apply best SEO practices to them. So for example, I learned recently about local SEO. So say we’re talking about something that’s happening in our city that I’ve attended to an event, then referencing other buildings or landmarks within the city so that it’s in, hey, this person knows about this location and they’re talking about this thing. So joining up the knowledge, I don’t think we do a lot of like sensible SEO, I would call it within the blogs. We just output the copy or the content that we think is valuable, but it’s not tailored or refined for SEO. Got it. Were any of these created off of any keyword research at all or was it brainstorming? So for a while, so we used to have a marketing agency work for us to produce blog content and that was it performed way better and was based off keyword research, but at the minute, I don’t think it is really. Okay, but those articles are published on the site or not published on this yet are published. They are. Okay. So the first thing that we, so this content section, if you’re really looking at, hey, how do we drive the most traffic possible? Because you said we’ll take clients from anywhere and that’s good because when you’re doing content marketing, you don’t really get to choose where those leads are coming from, where that traffic is coming from, right? Could be coming from anywhere in the world. So as long as you’re okay with getting clients anywhere in the world, it’s a great strategy. Sometimes clients are like, no, we’re just hyper local. We don’t really care about any of that. Okay, well, maybe blog is not the best fit for that person.

0:25:31
Much more beneficial for somebody like you. So the next question is, what are we going to write about? And I think a lot of the big mistake in this area is companies saying, well, let’s brainstorm some topics and they start brainstorming topics. They start writing on those topics, but there is no keyword research that goes into that. There’s definitely no, you know, not much optimization going on. We can take a look at one of these individual articles in just a second. But the first thing is going to start with keyword research and just knowing, hey, how can I find and also you have to understand you, I assume, know your target market, right? And in your target market, I’m just going to try to make this as simple as possible. Within your target market, there’s going to be people who are like, they need what you do like tomorrow, right? So those are bottom of the funnel people. There’s people who need what you do at some point in the near future, but not tomorrow, right? It could be six months down the line. It could be a year down the line. You know, these are kind of middle of the funnel people. There’s, and they might be, you know, starting to do research, you know, what do we need to look into in order to do something like this? And yada yada, then there’s people at the top of the funnel, you know, they have interest in whatever, but, you know, they’re not really close to making a decision. They would need to be nurtured along, you know, this probably the most basic way to say it.

0:26:49
When you’re planning out your content and you’re doing your keyword research, you want to find target keywords that fit into all of those buckets, right? That’s what I, that’s what I aim to do because, because one of the big mistakes in my opinion is people just focusing on bottom of the funnel. They’re like, let me find the keywords of all the people that it seems like they just want to buy right now, right? And so we write articles, we try to get them ranked, and then those people come in and hopefully because they’re so hot, right? They’re so near the buying process already, they become leads. But the middle of the funnel and the top of the funnel are where the volume is. And if you have a good nurture process in place, you can make bank off of the top and middle of the funnel, right? So you can bring leads in at the top and the middle of the funnel as long as you have a nurture strategy on the back end for what you’re going to do with those leads over the next six months to get them to actually buy from you. And that’s where you build up this long runway of, you know, interested buyers, right? Yeah. So you’re going to get less buyers now, but you’re going to get more buyers later by implementing a strategy like that. The thing is is a lot of companies don’t want to do that because it’s hard and it takes a lot of extra work, right? So now we need email sequences in place, we need other engagement sequences in place, we need retargeting in place, we need a lot of things in place to make sure that we don’t just lose the interest of these top and middle of the funnel people.

0:28:17
Because if there’s six months out or 12 months out from making a purchase with you or like becoming a client, that’s a long runway where they could just disappear, where they forget about you all together because your engagement’s not correct, you’re not keeping yourself top of mind with these people. So the easier out like the shortcut is, hey, let’s just focus on bottom of the funnel people because bottom of the funnel people become a lead and then we can have a sales conversation with them and then we can make them a client and being bang done. The problem is it’s harder to find and harder to attract those bottom of the funnel people, right? So step one keyword research, let’s figure out what your target market in all areas of that funnel are interested in hearing from about you, okay? Now it’s important when you’re doing the keyword research and planning the topics, I would actually silo them out. I would put them into buckets. I would say, okay, this set of keywords, we believe these are bottom of the funnel people and this set of keywords, we believe these are middle of the funnel people and then the top of the funnel people are over here and then I would start to put together a strategy because your calls to action within these articles I feel need to match, they need to be in alignment. So if you write a bottom of the funnel article and it actually gets ranked, you want a more aggressive call to action, thinking that these are bottom of the funnel people that are reading this topic. And if it’s a middle of the funnel people or top of the funnel people, you want the call to action to be a lot more, you know, leisurely, right? You want it to be a lot, you know, no barriers to entry. Let’s do free bees, let’s do assets that they can download. Let’s do a bunch of other strategies to get them on the email list, not into the sales lead pipeline, okay? So you’re designing out you both your content and your conversion strategy at the exact same time. Then obviously, you know, we’ve talked in the inside the inner circle, there’s a bunch of different videos on KGR, there’s a bunch of, you know, stuff on how to get like the maximum results in the shortest amount of time, how to, you know, evaluate keywords to know which articles you’re going to write first versus which articles you’re going to write later. That’s a very important part of the process. And then it’s going to be about producing great content from there.

0:30:22
So let’s take a look at one of these, well, first let’s take a look at some headlines, right? Because what we can do is, and I do this with clients sometimes too, who are like, you know, I’m not sure why my, like we’ve written the articles, I’m not sure why it’s like we’re not getting anywhere. So how does nature inspire creativity in a digital first world? If we had to look at this headline and say, what’s my target keyword here? I don’t see one. Okay. So there really isn’t one here. Sponsoring the Edenburg Capital. Okay, that’s like a more local thing. You’ve got a great app idea. What’s next? So app idea is a keyword, but a very, very, very, very, very broad keyword, right? So there’s really no focus within this headline. So the likelihood that this is going to go anywhere is slim to none. Now, I want to, I do want to click on this because it does seem like it has a potential angle, all right? So you’re talking about how to turn your app idea into reality, getting clarity on your app idea. Okay. Determine market fit. How much will I need to build my app? So how much does a mobile, these are mobile apps, yeah? Yeah. Okay. How much do mobile apps cost? I have a clear concept and plan for my app idea. Now what? How to plan your mobile app? I’m trying to reframe these as like, you know, actual keywords that people would potentially search for that we could then plug into the software and just start to look and see what aligns with these things. How do I choose the best team to build my app idea? How to, how to hire an app developer? How to hire a mobile app developer? Okay. What should I look for when I hire a mobile app about these types of things? These, and by the way, I’m saying these because these could all be individual articles in themselves. Okay. I’ve got a lot of ideas. I want to add to my app. What happens next? Okay. One thing I do like about the article is its length and its depth, right?

0:32:16
It’s so you are writing a lot of, now I haven’t read the article. So I can’t say, hey, this is a super high quality amazing art. I mean, you could have written it with an AI writer. I don’t even know. But in terms of length, unless just assume this is really good content, I like what I see in terms of, now there’s a couple things. Number one is just formatting of text, basic formatting of text. So it feels fairly scannable. However, there are some, you know, kind of large paragraphs. Yeah. And bullet points and things like that. And so I would love to see spacing between all of these. I would love to see these be like three sentences max before you break to a new paragraph. You know, make it even more scannable than it is. The other thing that I would love to see, and this is harder. Okay. And this is why, you know, content marketing is difficult. This is a stock image. This is a stock image. That’s a stock image. Okay. You have the opportunity, perhaps, to start integrating real work from your own agency, right? And real photos from your own team. If you have them, flonum, right? So put those things into your articles. So it’s personal and people are getting an inside glimpse at your actual company as they’re reading the article from your actual company. Now again, that is a harder part to do. And as, you know, SEO people, SEO agencies, if we’re doing work for clients, it’s difficult to get clients to do that for us. You know, oftentimes we’re begging for like, can you guys please take some pictures of your own work? Can you please take some pictures of your own team and get those over to? And they, you know, they just struggle with that. So, but if you can do it, then it’s really, really good. Now let’s see what the call to action is in here.

0:34:04
So we have subscribed to our informative newsletter. This I would want to see much more specific here. Like let’s give them and here’s the next strategy. And so there’s a strategy called content upgrades. Okay. So we want to upgrade the content and you’ve got to sign up for the upgrade. All right. But when you’re upgrading content, you’re upgrading a single piece of content. You’re not like upgrading the whole blog. All right. So let’s say, let’s take out one of these clear concept for my app idea. Yeah. Okay. I have a clear concept and plan for my app idea. Now let me choose the best one. How do I choose the best team to build my app idea? Any of these could kind of work. All right. I will publish a list of the most common types of content upgrades. They can be checklists. They can be cheat sheets. They can be any sort of downloadable, right? And what you want to do when you’re designing your content is, oh, here you go right here. Look, it’s a black. Okay. One thing I would do is make that button not black. Okay. I, for some, I was like, I was just looking at black text and black, you know, I didn’t even, it didn’t register to me. Oh my gosh. Download free project budget cheat sheet or spreadsheet. So this is good, right? And that goes to your budgeting section. So that’s fantastic. Project planning toolkit. The one thing here is there is a little bit of overwhelm baked into this because it’s like, okay, here’s this section, which is on a completely different topic than this section.

0:35:31
And I’ve got this call to action and this call to action to consider. And then there’s like, all right, let’s send them to another article. So I want you to maybe treat this like a squeeze page or a landing page where it’s like, we’re going to bring here, bring people here to talk about one thing. And then there’s one action we want them to take. That’s it, right? That’s the one action we’re going to force them into taking because we’re really not going to offer any other action. So this CTA down here, let’s say that it was the budget cheat sheet, right? So this would be aimed at the budget cheat sheet. Every button in here would be aimed at the budget cheat sheet. And you know, I’m not a huge fan of listing it more than once. I typically use the, or not throughout the article. I typically use the sandwich technique. So I’m going to mention it right here at the top. And I’m going to mention it again at the very bottom. And then I may put, you know, another link context to a lease somewhere in here. But again, they’re all going to be exactly the same. I’m going to sandwich them in. I’m going to make sure that this sidebar over here is now tailored to this over here, which adds some technical complexity in terms of how you’re, you know, structuring the website when you’re building the blog, but it does pay off. It’s going to, it’s going to make your conversion rates jump a lot. So what happens after somebody downloads this free budget cheat sheet? So at a minute, if you click on one of them, it goes to a landing page for it. And a, you basically just fill it in and you get added to a mail chimp funnel, which then will email them the file that they’ve requested and enters them into a kind of sort of a remarketing thing. This is actually one of the blogs that we had a marketing person working with us for a while. It didn’t work out. But this is one of the things that they implemented. And that’s why the formatting is a little bit all over the shop because it was a bit of a battle when this is formed with Elementor as you’re given people too much control over the wrong things and not kind of holding that back. So yeah, totally. I mean, I think that the formatting of this is, it’s quite different to the rest of this website as well. So it’s a bit jarring and it is quite dense.

0:37:38
So, but I totally take on board what you’re saying about having it like more focus and keeping all the call to actions to be consistent with the message that you’re driving. So yeah. So a couple other things. One is you’re going to need more internal linking 100%. Okay. And I’m just kind of rattling off some random things now. I want to talk about that mail chimp funnel in just a second. And I want people to get ready to pay attention because this is going to be extremely important. Okay. But just some random things. So more internal linking. So every time an article gets published, and I teach this technique in the inner circle where you actually go and there’s a technique for looking up all related articles to that, you just using Google, right? Use Google search engine to find all articles related to that. You open all of them up and you find a way to link internally from those old old articles to the new article. Now when you’re writing the new articles, it’s easy to link to old articles. But what a lot of people don’t do is they don’t go get all the old articles that ref that should be referencing the new article and make sure they reference the new article. So you’re adding internal links to old articles, you’re adding internal links to new articles as well as all part of the publishing process. Next is you want more external links as well. So I see there’s a link to clutch right here. Okay. This is good.

0:38:58
When you’re linking to other high authority websites, Google likes this. And a lot of people are like, Oh, I don’t want to I don’t want to create external links in my articles because it’ll send traffic away. It actually doesn’t send traffic away. You you’re doing it properly here. It opens up in a new tab. They’re still on your website. They can flip back to the tab. They can come back down. But Google wants to see more than one external link. Like if you if you have no external links, Google not going to like it very much. If you have one, it’s still not going to like it very much. You’re going to need a few. It wants to see that you’re referencing. It wants to see that you’re helping network the web, right? So that’s very important. So you need more internal links, more external links. If you break up the content a little bit better, you add more, you know, proprietary type photos, assuming that this article is based around the correct target keyword, you’re going to start looking at getting results now. All right. So they download the budget cheat sheet. They go into a mail chimp email funnel. What does that email funnel tell them? I couldn’t tell you. Let me just open mail chimp. But yeah, I didn’t set this up. And we do it too. We don’t send a lot of emails and I’m mailing list very infrequently. So if if content marketing and top and middle funnel marketing strategy are going to be important to you going forward, you’ll definitely want to change that. And it’s something you’ll you’ll definitely have to focus on, right? So the first thing I would ask you is, and I know you’re looking it up right now, but I’ll just keep talking while you’re looking it up is what is the general gist of what does that email sequence say and how long is the email sequence?

0:40:37
So I think it’s like three stages, automations, here we go. Just load them there. So contact tagged with the thing that they’re interested in. So because we’ve got different resources that downloading it will add different tags, which will tell us effectively where they’re at. Yeah. It will send them an email. What are those tags by the way? Let’s pause there. What are those tags that they can be tagged with? So in this instance, it’s just specifically for the resources that we have. So in this instance, it’s the comparison scorecard. So that is for people comparing like different agencies and what to look for and what to be aware of. Got it. Do you segment your leads at all? Like do you have buckets that they belong into based on certain criteria? Let me have a look, but no, I don’t think so. Okay. No, we have people who signed up for COVID 19 and toolkit sign up. And that is the only segmentation that we have. Got it. Okay. Huge, huge right here. If people are going to be doing email marketing and guys, by the reason I’m talking a lot of email marketing here and the reason why I want to focus on this so much and I want you guys in the chat to put it like, are you guys interested in this email marketing SEO? All of that stuff? Are you are you liking this conversation right now? Drop your comments down below. Way back when I started my very first online business, that online business grew to six figures within a year and then it kept going, you know, year after year until I ended up getting rid of it. Now that was built purely, purely on content marketing and email marketing and part of that content marketing was obviously articles, heavy SEO driven, informational, in-depth articles and podcasting. So I chose two channels for my traffic. I didn’t do any paid ads.

0:42:28
I didn’t do anything else. My solely it was we’re going to do content marketing and we’re going to do podcasting. And then when people come in, what we’re going to do is we’re going to convert them to an email list and we’re going to figure out what part of the funnel that they’re in. We’re going to convert them to an email list and then we’re going to nurture them into buying the we were doing online courses at the time. Okay. And this was the entire strategy. It didn’t really involve anything else. All right. So the thing the key is here is how do you actually execute on that? Like what are the things that really matter? What are the things that a lot of people don’t do? So the big mistake a lot of people make is all these leads come into their email marketing system because you’re really your your leads can be over here the way I compartmentalize it. They can be over here in your email marketing system because they need to be nurtured or they can be over here in your CRM and your actual sales pipeline because they’re bottom of the funnel highly interested leads who want to take action very very very soon. Okay. It’s really one of the other. Now I’m not I’m mentally compartmentalizing them. They can be an exact same system. It doesn’t matter. But they need to be tagged somehow so that you know the difference between the two. Right. But segmentation on the back end is absolutely critical because the number one rule of marketing is you have to tell people the right people the right thing at the right time. Right.

0:43:50
So get the right people tell them the right thing and tell them that at the right time. If you don’t have any segmentation in the back you cannot speak to people where they’re at. You have no idea who who is this person versus who is this person. Why am I sending this message to this person? Why am I sending this message to this person? Most people are sending one message to every person in the email list. Right. So segmentation and there’s a bunch of different segmentation strategies. I do have a training planned on this absolutely critical. And this is where people have to step out of the role of web designer UX designer SEO person and actually look at if a business needs to use a model like this what they’re doing with this on the back end because if you do SEO and you get a lot of top and middle funnel leads and they don’t know what to do with those leads you’re going to get blamed for nothing happening in the business right. This is not growing our business we need to stop it. But it’s like no you don’t have the right things and there’s no infrastructure on the back end to properly nurture these leads into sales in the future. All right. So let’s give a perfect example of segmentation. I’m going to use a dog training business. Let’s just use something non technical like something very very very simple. So let’s say I have a client and they do dog training. All right. And you see they’re writing articles all about dog training and obedience training and what about if my dog is aggressive and like there’s all these different articles that they’re writing they’re bringing in all this traffic they’ve got freebies in place they’ve got top middle funnel lead capture in place okay they obviously bottom of the funnel that’s just standard everybody has that but they also have top middle funnel in place putting people on the email list so tell me they go to write an article you’re trying to remember right person right message right time if we think about a dog owner they could be a puppy owner or they can have an old dog right an old dog that pisses the floor what do I do about that is not the same person who has a puppy that needs obedience training right the person who just wants their dog to stop barking at the door when somebody rings the doorbell is not the same person as somebody who has an aggressive dog and they’re worried about abiding somebody these are all people in different situations right so what we need to do is on the back end we need to figure out now those are types of situations they can be in I also talked about like the age of the dog because the age of the dog the stage the dog is in is going to depend you know it’s going to control like what the person actually needs in terms of training and you’ve got to find ways to fit this into every business has to find ways to fit this into their own business right so for me I could segment agency owners by are they zero to $5,000 a month are they 5,000 to 15,000 dollars a month are they 15 that’s one way I could segment people right I could also segment people as are they interested in web dev and design are they interested in UX are they interested in SEL so you can do it by interest you can do it by stage there’s a lot of different ways that you can segment people but you want to find a bucketing system basically that makes perfect sense for your business and is going to allow you to talk to the right people at the right time with the right message and you create these buckets on the back end and then what you do because this is it does get a little bit difficult there’s you have to have some strategic ways of doing this as leads come in but I like to I talked about content upgrades in the sense of getting people in I also like to talk a lot about data upgrades right we need to find ways to upgrade the data that we have on people and there’s a bunch of creative ways to do this but when they come into the email list one of the most basic ways is just to ask them you know like what stage are you in or like you you get them to bucket themselves okay and this can be a step after they right after they fill out the lead form the very next screen like the thank you paid just like hey thanks we’ve got yada yada yada on the way to you that we promised if you don’t mind tell us which of these options that fits you right and there’s your four buckets or your five buckets or your three buckets and they’re like oh that one bam they hit enter and that data gets sent right back into the email marketing system as a tag on that profile right so now the goal is that if you look at an email list on the back end let’s say you have 10,000 people every single person is in a bucket and then when you go sit down and you’re like hmm I got to push out some content today right I want to talk to this specific person number one we put them in a in a funnel that’s tied to that bucket so if somebody going back to the dog training thing if it’s I have a puppy and I need obedience training guess what when they get on the back end and I and I see that tag that tag puts them in a funnel that sends them five emails about obedience training puppies it doesn’t send them anything else they don’t hear about dog aggression they don’t hear they don’t hear about anything else they only hear about obedience training puppies and at the very end there’s a call to action that tries to get them to either do and again this is the way you design your products and services fits into this bucketing system and the and the whole funnel right because you want to build you want to start to build a ladder of services so if you think this the top middle funnel person who’s not going to go for your $3,000 obedience training package there’s got to be an entry level step that they can do right so what is the entry level step okay well we have this mini bootcamp right for puppy obedience training and the goal is that by the end of this little bootcamp I’m just making this shit up I’ll stop my head okay but by the end of this little bootcamp your dog’s going to be able to sit and your dog’s going to be able to lay down on command right and so they’re like cool that’s that sounds like a good start that’s something I can do and you know what I’m going to teach you how to do clicker training to be able to do that and you’re actually going to be able to do that in a week okay so this bootcamp seven days long you’re going to use clicker training by the end of the seven days your dog is your puppy is going to sit and it’s going to lay down and that costs $49 and so $49 gets paid guess what you’ve gotten this person to take the very first step with you and then you take this product this entry level product and you use it to gain trust and show them hey I know what I’m talking about right I told you I was going to use this clicker training I showed you the clicker training can your dog sit can your dog lay down did you do it in a week good everything else I say is going to be as true as that okay and then we move them into the next stage of the funnel the next stage of the funnel so this is like what nurturing looks like but you can’t do that if you don’t have people bucketed because you don’t know what to offer them and you don’t know how to talk to them right so now we have to fit that to your business so you have a very technical business and you have very different people right now people with dogs you’ve got to figure out what are my buckets you’ve got to figure out what are my messages in those buckets what are my offers in those buckets but the whole framework is exactly the same so and if you’re going to do top middle funnel that makes sense see when it comes to um so for example um you’ve got a lead capture and we’ve segmented and we’re sending in these five emails what sort of frequency are you looking at are you saying within decreasing frequency so it’s like okay two days later send one a week later send another three weeks later send another two months later send a four if you know so that it’s that you know drip feed yeah so you want to be heavy in the beginning like daily so I would go if you’re going to do five a five email funnel it’s one email a day for five days and guys it’s like how you write these emails is important too these are not newsletters they’re not they don’t look like marketing emails these look like emails to a friend and they’re very casual they’re written very casual somewhere along some are short okay there’s a good mix in there they typically follow a story there’s a framework for doing this right so I can put the framework inside the inner circle it’s there’s a five email funnel formula I used to call it in the old business right so we can put this inside the inner circle so you can lead people through these five emails the emails chain together so it’s like if you’ve read the first one when the second one comes in it’s like kind of a continuation of the first one so you’re you’re more engaged and and likely to you know read it and then wait for the next one okay the reason you want to be heavy in the beginning is because that’s when a new lead is most excited they most want to hear from you in the very beginning they just found you they love the stuff that they’ve seen so far they just signed up for something why would they get one message and then not hear from you again for two weeks right that’s why I’ve always said because people go you can only email people once a month these days you know that kind of thing no this person is going to hear from me every day for five days and it’s going to be but it’s not going to be buy my shit buy my shit buy my shit it’s going to be let’s educate let’s nurture let’s connect let’s build a relationship let’s write and you just want to get them to engage with those first five emails like your vibe okay because every you know they don’t know who you are at this point and and they they you know they know you’re selling something but at the same time and they know they want probably what you’re selling but at the same time they want to buy from a human that they like and that they trust and so that is the main part of the focus of those first five emails so after the first five they’re either going to buy or they’re not going to buy all right and you again you want that entry level project you can’t take somebody who’d never heard of you before and in five days they’re buying your $3,000 course like sometimes every once in a while that might happen but that can’t be your strategy right so the strategy is let me give them a taste right for just a little bit of money let me give them a taste so that we can demonstrate our expertise so that we can confirm to them that we’re a real person right with a real family and like just like them right we’re not scam artists uh and so we know what we’re talking about we’re going to be able to help them we’re going to be able to get them results get them to take that first step they’re either going to take that first step but they’re not going to take that first step if they take the first step they go to another funnel right first we give them the the product of the first step and we knock it out of the park that should always be the goal get them the results you promised okay and then they go into the next funnel the next funnel is for the next product right and there might be before they get to a $3,000 obedience course there might be three products in line before that now at some point you can start offering both it’s like are you ready to make the jump or if you’re not ready to make the jump you can do this one right so you can you can still let them know that that thing is ahead but at the very beginning you don’t want to say here are your options you can do this you can do no just here’s the very first step I want you to take okay I had a puppy just like you when I got it to sit and I got to lay down man I like that that made so much of a difference just in those two things and that’s all I want you to focus on right now you’re overwhelmed as a new puppy owner right since your first puppy you never had another dog okay you’re definitely overwhelmed right let’s get this sit let’s get it to lay down just make that connection get them to buy $49 seven-day bootcamp okay that’s like the goal now let’s say they don’t do it let’s say no no I’m not ready yet I’m not ready yet now the emails start to space out more we we’re not giving up on them like they were valuable like they’re a valuable person they they and I’ll tell you this I looked at my stats at one point because I wanted to track when people sign up for my email list when do they actually end up buying the very final thing it was like a year later now that it wasn’t they hadn’t bought anything right they had bought some smaller things but by the time they bought the big thing it was six to twelve months later and if I had just given up on them after the first five emails they never would I promise they never would have got to the end okay so we do want to space them out we don’t want to give up on them now it’s like they hear from me a couple times a week then they hear from me weekly and but then what I’m also trying to do with them is I know I need to get them somewhere else okay so I need to get them to subscribe to the youtube channel I need to get them to follow me on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever I’m doing as part of the strategy right but I need to start branching out my connection points with this person so that they see me in more places because at some point they are probably going to get bored of reading emails okay so I’ve got to be able to engage them on other platforms and that’s something you should be doing as well like if people who join your email list you’ve got to be getting them to connect with you on LinkedIn you’ve got to be like going back to kind of your business model right so find these other areas push these connections that’s like selling a product right sell other connections when you’re not selling products so hopefully that answers your question but yes you start to space out the emails and you continue to nurture them and if you’re creating content because you’re doing content marketing which means you’re doing videos you’re doing blog articles you’re doing and you know what their interest is and you know what bug what bug it there in every time a new piece of content gets published it fits that bucket it gets shared with them so you don’t have to think about like oh what what do I’m going to email them today just send them the new content that you know that they were interested in so that’s a that’s kind of I would say the system on the back end and that we came to that from talking about SEO right because again the traffic it’s all relative because the traffic you get from SEO is worth zero if you don’t know what to do with it you cannot pay bills with traffic so and I tell clients at all the time like I can get you whatever traffic you want it’s not going to do anything for your business unless this piece and this piece and this piece and this piece are in place and if you’re an agency that does a lot of different things guess what you can sell an email funnel you can sell copywriting for emails you can sell a lot of these other parts of the funnel even though they’ve hired you to build them a website or to do SEO or to do ppc nice thank you so the only other thing I would say is let’s go back to and then we’ll hop into the next person it’s what to do with this blog because you do have a lot of content here and I you know I can’t possibly look at each one but I would gather that if somebody came in did some keyword research came up with a content strategy you could salvage a lot of this content and just twist it into what it needs to be in order to actually get the SEO results from it so this is not a situation where it’s like oh man we’ve spent all this time on all this content and it’s worthless because it’s not doing anything it just needs to be nurtured in itself right and so I I tell people to think about articles as a living breathing thing just like you think of a website is a living breathing thing an article that gets published if it doesn’t rank it doesn’t mean it’ll never rank you can rewrite half of it right and then change the publish date and then Google can pick it up and it starts ranking so you can take an article that kind of has the bones that it needs but it needs more focus and more love you go in and you optimize it you republish it and that’s way easier than just writing new content from scratch so the first thing I would recommend for you is get your keyword research down and then do a blog analysis of all of your existing content and say what pieces here kind of fit into these ideas and let’s retailer them to fit these ideas perfectly and then republish them that would I would say that would be your first step because you have such a library of existing content cool and I just have a very quick question hopefully quick and so the other thing that we find is that people come to us they’ll be doing a web app project maybe we’re building we’ll be doing a lot of dashboards and B2B tools and back-ahouse stuff and then they’ll go to someone else to do their brochure website because they don’t realize that we do websites so that like that’s another issue that we’ve had because we talk about web apps and mobile apps we don’t talk about web design or websites yeah so I mean I don’t really know what my question is but like do you know Giovanni thoughts about how we can approach that yes it’s a hundred percent part of the nurture process and part of the bucketing process as well when when somebody needs a mobile app from you is this like give me a ratio of it’s an existing company with an existing website that’s just now getting into the mobile app space or it’s like a brand new idea from scratch building a mobile app so it’s a way of one again it comes in ways like all things business and the majority I would say are existing businesses that have a process that they’re looking to improve efficiency on okay so they have an existing website yeah so what are these people that need a website that don’t know what that you do websites what situation are they in and so they would be in the situation well either they have one and they’re looking to rebuild it or they’re launching a new product for service and it’s got it compliments that product for service okay so you would be adding on to their existing website then yeah yeah or we do know we would pretty much nine times at 10 we do it okay just because it’s like outdated already and stuff like that yeah outdated and we do a lot of jam stack stuff so it’d be like improving efficiencies or we found that marketing teams actually want less control and more structure so it’s like how can we you know guide them through the through managing their site bit more so yeah it’s often different tools basically excellent so yeah somewhere in the nurture process and nurturing happens by the way when somebody becomes a lead before they become a client but nurturing also happens after they become a client right especially of the client of the very first thing when you offer other things so you need to start putting content into that nurture funnel with your clients especially that because you don’t want to overwhelm like we do this we do that we do everything you know so they come from mobile app development you get them into the mobile app development client space so they’re actually signing on to do mobile app with you now the nurturing of okay and by the way when this mobile app is done what’s the marketing strategy for it how are we going to get this mobile app into people saying because obviously we don’t want to build a mobile app and then nobody uses it right so what is that can you share the strategy with me oh well we’re going to do this and this and this that sounds excellent do you have somebody in place already doing the that website thing you just talked about and yada yada yada right oh no we actually haven’t found anybody yet actually you have you’re talking to them right so you know you trust us already to do your mobile app development let us hand to the website as well you get the same team working on both things so you just have to build that intentionally in a client management rather than you know just sales you know yes but you’re still I still think of it as lead nurturing right there yes they’re a client but they’re still a lead of all my other things they they’re not clients of those things right so they’re still a lead and so they still get nurtured just like they would if they weren’t a client of anything go yeah so nice thank you all right you are very welcome all right we are going to move on and Josh I’m going to drop you out so you can watch on the live stream but I want to make a little bit more room in the green room so see you bye all right guys um let’s see I want to go to the chat real quick what’s everybody’s thoughts here are you getting value really good details what marketing framework do you use anybody else ready to sign up for Kevin’s no more chumps doggy obedience training course I love the branding Austin nailed it all right good good good good I’m trying to find my screen to see how many on the me open up this and I want to click on this okay 92 people watch I think this is better than last time I think it is all right so let’s get uh I said I was going to emmel next so emmel I hope you are ready I am about to bring you in then Jeffrey and then we have uh Andrew back on the line as well so let’s go to the table and let’s go how’s it going emmel hello let me get out and punch your finger here okay um which so can you guys see I gotta add you to the left there we go yeah um good yeah I have just a short question I had more question more question last time you answered them now it’s a short question like for the UX design like that part of the website you know which should be concerned with everything functional like you said what resources do you recommend on that like what would be where would you start I have a lot of trainings but regarding internal marketing and everything but if you can just point me to what you like most about on this area so for you and UX design specifically UX design and also like this kind of uh maybe a equivalent of let’s say that uh uh what’s that with customer customer hero whatever do you know well it’s uh there are there is a framework for like how do you structure a page like the homepage yeah yeah there’s like story brand frameworks yeah that’s a very popular one um yeah 100 percent I I don’t use a specific framework I use a collection of principles right and it’s baking the principles that I know and subscribe to into into what I do but if so where would you get what you would do get the principle well it’s you know it’s it’s hard to say because it’s like you know you pick them up over 20 years right of doing it so it’s like you go back to 20 years ago I mean it was one thing and then 15 years ago it’s another thing and 10 years ago it’s another time right and and in this day and age we have you can do YouTube there’s online courses there’s online training program I will say this don’t go to college don’t go to school okay and a bunch of people ask me about that they’re like hey I’m thinking about going back to university and doing web design or doing UX design or something and you know I’m like no no no no no no no no no no stop that was the only thing I would say don’t do that okay um what you want to do is you want to find resources that you trust you like their personality and you feel like you can learn really well from them and pick up everything that they have to offer and be willing to pay for their premium stuff and learn learn their premium stuff and then if that’s not enough for you move on to the next person do that with the next person but also be getting real world experience as you do this right so be implementing this for clients and you’re because you’re going to learn a ton in the real world so I could study study study study study and practice practice practice practice practice but what I actually did is back in 2012 built an online business and at the time and I told the story in my mastermind at the time I needed that business to work because the business I was in I was a partner in a brick and mortar business and the partner that I was partnered with not a great person right and I was like I’ve got to get out of here and but I can’t just be unemployed right so I started the online business and I was like I’ve got to go all in on this and I’ve got to make it work like in the next year and thankfully it worked in like eight nine months right and I was able to to quit now it was a situation where I was like hmm this is still very risky to quit and try to continue to go all in on this but I did and it worked out but I needed it to work and so the amount that I learned in that nine months going from nothing to being able to leave blew away anything that was like oh did a course write a book whatever right it was literally day and night of like does this work oh shit that didn’t work this is work I shit that didn’t work this old that worked a little bit okay let’s build on that right and then you just continue on that path it’s very messy right so yes you can find people to train with right you can watch YouTube videos you can practice but I want people to get as much real world experience as they possibly can learn a ton from it but if you do want to have any work to start with if you’re like I just give me like a like box it up for me right so I can implement it story brand is a great brain yes okay well you will we’ll put something in the inner circle regarding the UX you think you’ll be something like that in the future yeah well actually what I would do in the inner circle is I would pull the community I would want the community because I’m sure that there are like I don’t myself do a lot of like trainings and courses and things like that anymore right so but there are a lot of people in the inner circle who do and so I don’t know who all the new people are that are that really that people should be listening to for for UX but I bet there’s a gazillion people in the inner circle who do and so this is a perfect time to reach out to them and say hey have you been doing UX trainings lately like do you know somebody who’s amazing at UX that I should be listening to tell me who it is and then they’re going to give you a ton of different suggestions okay thanks that’s a good idea and just the short one the last time you suggested like one of the steps for launching an agency to use the to have the contract ready the contract for the client master agreement here and you suggested also master monster contracts I took a look there so just usually do you need to make a lot of changes on that template they have or it’s kind of almost almost ready for it no it’s almost ready I mean I made changes I made some changes to mine I added a few things I mean obviously you want to go in and edit your you know the name of your company and things like that but I did I did reword a couple things that are just more towards the way that I do business versus the way that it was templated but it’s very minor stuff and it’s good because it’s like it’s kind of a plain language contract right it’s not written in legalese so it is kind of easy to add and change those small details okay thanks I’m good for all right thank you for coming in all right let’s go to Jeffrey you are back how you doing I’m good I’m good it was interesting thank you yeah my question is I have a design and I’m not sure what’s the good strategy to start building it in bricks so maybe I can share my screen and I can uh can show you yeah if it’ll let you share let’s let’s go for it uh she has screen okay Sasha says going forward I think we’ll have time when guests aren’t speaking have them stay mute to avoid the background yes I agree background background noise is too much too much okay I can hardly hear got it got it got it okay so let me see where uh I’ll maybe solo you okay that’s your screen I’m gonna solo that so that everybody is seeing it properly all right so go ahead so it’s um it’s the first website I designed where there is like some kind of gutter here and which is not the gutter from you know the content here so and there is like if this is a section uh we need to put some border radius here and the gutter so does that got to go all the way down the page yeah all the one yeah yeah for example in the footer it’s like this you know yep so my strategy is to keep everything like it used to be but put like some padding in the body directly what do you think what I would do yeah yeah all right I don’t I rarely do sites like with gutters like that but yeah I didn’t decide for the uh for the design yeah that would probably be the easiest thing to do yeah all right I mean depending on they show you what they want it to look like on different screen sizes do they want that gutter all the way on mobile do they like I’m not sure about the design of the mobile I will I will ask it’s good idea okay because like it’s right now that screen size is almost like a tablet size so yeah if there’s a desktop view what we need to see is does that extend still all the way to the edges of the screen on like a 1920 like what do they want to have happened on a on a very large monitor because right now we’re just looking at like almost like a vertical tablet size it’s seen yeah yeah all right and in in bricks I know that we can toggle for the you know the little icon in the right yep but is there a way to make it like by default because in the in the template settings I cannot find like the icon for or find the toggle for the icon so I need to toggle every button no no no no you don’t want to do that yeah that would be a disaster yeah so yes um so if you’re do you use a framework like automatic CSS or do you just do everything yeah you’re using automatic CSS yeah okay so that is button white right BTN double dash white and so you would want to target every if you want that arrow on every button yeah yeah things there is or in every every button okay and so you’re going to be using button classes and automatic CSS be it’s they also are a BTN double dash yeah yeah yeah very simple in CSS right you go into the back and CSS and you put in brackets class star equals BTN double dash and so now you’re targeting every button that starts with that has a class that starts with BTN double dash and then what you do is you add a pseudo after element to it that is a first you add that padding on the right hand side and then you add a pseudo element arrow in the pseudo element and then you hit safe and now all of your buttons have an arrow on the right hand side going forwards forever in time oh so I need to use the the pseudo element yeah and if it’s a loty icon you know the animated icon it’s the same yeah you would just it would require more CSS to animate it but it’s the exact same principle yes all right like it what do you mean like it moves when you hover it yeah yeah I don’t remember exactly because the site site is done the the the Figma is not working with the animation but if I I was wondering if it’s a lot here icon it’s the same yes let me um I’m gonna pull up a training site here see if I can open it up and then I’ll all stranger I just want to I’m not going to do the whole thing but I’m just going to show you because a lot of people like brackets BTN star what are you what are you talking about um so I just want to show that technique real quick just so everybody is on the same page okay all right let’s screen share that all right leave everybody can see that so I’m just going to go way down here if you want to target and you can do you don’t have to be using automatic CSS do something like this you can always if you just want to target like all classes that include right so it’s like this BTN star equals and then quotes all right and then you would say I’m sorry it’s not BTN star my brain is hooked on BTN class star equals button double dash open brackets I am now styling whatever I put here is going to apply to every element that has a class that includes BTN double dash which in automatic CSS the buttons are the only ones that have that so automatically targeting all buttons and now I can do whatever I want here and then if I’m using SAS right I can do my pseudo elements here’s my before or my after bam and I just put it in here and so you kind of keep everything together if you want to do your animations those get put in here if you want things to happen at certain breakpoints you can put your media queries in here right so all of it stays nice and together is one component and now every single button on your website always behaves exactly how you want it to behave as soon as you add that one of those button classes and the beauty here is you’re just adding now there is going to be one one additional slight complication all right I can’t pull your design back up because it was on your screen but that was a white button with a black arrow okay so they’re you are going to have to strategize this a little bit because if it’s a red button that black arrow planning to be a white arrow or something like that so there are going to be different cases where you’re going to have to change a couple things but that is still very easy to do in your CSS with SAS.

1:16:05
Thank you so much it’s really helpful. You are welcome anything else? Yeah maybe I as I told you at the beginning I’m also like a photographer and I do a workshop photo abroad like a funnizing workshop photo in Kurdistan in Nepal so I have like you know all the emails from the people that are interested to it but today I don’t know if I should start with another field like you know like you do you know with the teachings and everything if I should do that or if there is no some sometimes we can see in Instagram some photographers that sells I don’t know preset of the editing and everything yeah should I I’m I forced to do that or is there what kind of these what are the options for the value I can get to get more I know more what would you you’re trying to get people who want their pictures taken primarily right yeah yeah yeah what kind of photographer did you say you are I’m travel photographer I can show you okay so you do not people you do places I do I do mostly people but my my my project is to to bring people to a country that say will not go without me and I make them discover the country you know I sleep with the nomads that I know oh that’s not an interesting yeah so it’s like that’s not so you like a lot of marketing is just a product in the offer right that’s exciting as hell if you’re just want to take people’s portraits like every other fucking photographer on the planet that that’s like oh well that’s a little hard to market now isn’t it but you just told me something amazing and I’m like surely we can make this happen right so yeah so you’re just wondering how you’re gonna get people to come in and participate in that yeah I already have a like oh it’s always full and a lot of people love this but in the same time I need to pay Instagram every time to get more views you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so that how you’re doing it you’re paying for ads and getting yeah I pay for ads and it’s quite quite good because for example if I pay it 50 or 100 euros I get some one client that gave me 1000 so it’s good rush you but in the same time I don’t want to be related to Instagram every time I need to you know it diversify and do people do they have money are they not at money yeah I guess because they pay for workshops at cost at least 3000 euros okay good good keep doing what you’re doing this working is number one but yeah number two like what else do you do on Instagram is a platform I’m not I’m not big on it right now but what what else you’re doing on on Instagram and are you on any other platforms I don’t have any other platform I just I’m not like a big user on Instagram I just post my my walk yeah and maybe I can just show you my screen to it will be yeah yeah yeah let’s see some of this you know so this is my my website I gotta I gotta bring you in all right there we go okay go ahead so you know in the in the home it’s like my gallery you know all my stuff everything but I have like the workshop photo here and an inside you can see you can see on my walk and with the camera let’s watch okay let’s watch it so this is one of your trips yeah yeah this is in Kyrgyzstan so it’s in it’s in French how long have you been doing this for years so I pay I paid someone to to film during one workshop yeah we’re traveling in disco and it’s it’s like a road trip and we sleep with the nomads in New York take some photos I do teachings and everything so it’s really I focus the people between between 20 and 35 40 years old yeah so it’s you know a good energy good spirit and everything so first of all this is this is amazing very high quality work go back to your photos yeah so then after the video I got like some some some explanations about what we do and everything but for now I’m like in a process of a legal situation so I skipped some exciting rows because I’m not allowed to show them at this point yeah yeah I have like it sorry yeah you real quick the person that did that video for you they how much did you pay them I pay pay him all the trips so it’s like something like 1,500 and I pay more like 500 for the editing and how much you make from like you say people are paying 3,000 for this or what are they paying to do this just just you not like all their experience but to you just me is what 1000 per person and how many people you take at a time six six six okay so you can’t bring you yeah you can’t bring like a $1,500 video person with you on every trip yeah yeah sure I mean you could you could but that I don’t like those numbers but one I think how long is your waiting list my waiting list what do you mean by waiting list so you have you have people like waiting for the next trip right yeah yeah okay how many people you have on your waiting list maybe 500 something okay but of course they will not all try to yeah of course how often did you do the trips I just in Kyrgyzstan I have two workshops in the row for a 12 day so it’s one month and I have also Nepal with the hiking in them in the mountains so I have like just two months in the in the year I’m doing that and I don’t want to grow because I don’t want to to make it like you know big big farm company I just want to make a little bit exclusive you know yeah right yeah yes I’m with you you’re you’re going one month at a time with each group 12 days with each group and I do two groups in the row okay in the in the same month in the same country so for example I go from France to Kyrgyzstan with the first group I stay two weeks with the first group they go back home I stay in the country and the second one come and after the second one after the trip I go back to France with them yes what do people say about this experience they loved it it’s it’s crazy they all sometimes pay for the the two destinations because it’s not about the team things it’s about the experiences right I bet they also think that they got the deal of a fucking lifetime right like a thousand dollars to do all this with you yeah yeah this is exclusive okay I know I love I love the like keep it exclusive keep it small it only happens a couple times a year this is all like you you have set up for a tremendous like product experience right and to top it all off you actually like are good at photography so like that’s you know that we don’t see that very often um so to me this needs to be you and you want to keep it intimate and you want to keep it exclusive the price has to go way higher oh yeah because you know there’s no there’s no volume in this you already said I don’t want to go volume right yeah people are getting a killer deal right now they these people are robbing you blind in my estimation for what you’re doing while you’re giving them a what you’re what you’re offering the fact that it’s also photo dot shoot like it costs it’ll cost me to grand to bring a photographer to destined for a week to take pictures of my family you know yeah so absolutely this you’ve got every piece in place that’s needed you also have a waiting list just make this exclusive with the pricing just like it’s exclusive with everything else and then what I would say is just document the hell out of it because now when people are actually paying what this is worth you can actually pay it would make sense to pay to bring a videographer on every single one and then all of those document I want I want you to go to this site right now uh the guy’s name okay that you are going to learn from this guy right here you were going to you are going to take this model now he doesn’t really use it he actually he does I’ll back up I was going to say he doesn’t really use it for marketing um but he does it’s 100% all right his name is joeiel you ever heard of joeiel oh yeah I know this one okay good perfect all right go to joeiel site right now uh just good that google joeiel photo or something I don’t even know I don’t even know what the site is been following this kid from I’ve been a photographer for a very long time right been following this kid since he was on a forum called I don’t know what was it called the DP challenge I think there’s a forum called DP challenge okay this guy he was a teenager he used to take pictures of homeless people okay before anybody knew who he was and then I watched him go up and then he shoots for Sony he shoots for every major brand that you can think of um yeah he’s the big expert uh tremendous yes but go to his what he does is personal projects he does what you do but he only does it for himself so he goes personally on projects he takes his team with them he goes and travels around and they document the shit out of these trips and they’re amazing trips they’re almost like mini documentaries right um and so he immerses in the culture he shares that in all the videos he went to a war zone he went like it’s it’s really amazing amazing amazing content and the the documenting of what you’re doing is all the marketing that you need because of what you’re doing is so interesting right and so you make the trip more valuable in the price and then you document it like to death the bet which is photos which are already doing and then the videography to tell the story and you are going to put that on TikTok you are going to put that on you’re going to first cut it up so cut it up in every one documentary you could probably get 40 TikToks out of right and then you’re going to put this the full length documentary thing that you’re doing on YouTube and then you’re going to start pushing those with ads and it’s a wrap it’s a wrap because once people see what they can experience uh you’re going to get a million people on your email list and then you’re going to easily sell out because you only have a couple trips to sell even at 10 grand a pop 15 grand a pop I don’t know what you can get for them but a lot more than a thousand that’s for sure all right so your advice in in truck because he speaks fast for me but yes it’s to hire a videographer and document everything so you can set all right so step one yeah five x your price minimum the step one yeah okay yeah but my yeah I know that if if I if I double or triple the prices uh what I will got is only old people with the in the retreat and I don’t think you’re only old people I think you’ll you’ll you’ll you’ll still trust me you’ll still get a wide range of people there’s a lot of young people with money and there’s a lot of young people with money they want to travel I’ll tell you that right now okay there’s plenty of people in every demographic with ungodly amounts of money that they this is all they want to do with it okay so the only thing the only thing we get into a conversation of is now I feel bad because the people that can only afford a thousand can’t go on the trips that I used to be able to take them on and I mean okay if that’s how you feel or if that’s how anybody feels in their business with anything that they do because that that’s I can empathize with that right yeah then be a charity for one trip a year right and and decided to take people shoot take people for free on that one trip I don’t know like that’s that’s a marketing lever in itself okay but you can still do that if you want to but for sure the exclusive trips that people pay for have to go five x 10 x from where they are right now okay so I think that that is step one for you 100% now with the money that you get from that because you’re getting extra money now you hire the person to help you document it the documentation is going to be added value for the people who are on the trip but it’s also going to be the inherent marketing mechanism because now you’re going to chop that up and you’re going to have content for months to share online you’re going to get probably lots of publications writing about you at some point in fact I would be proactively reaching out to various publications so that they know you exist and they know what you’re doing and they have a chance to write about you okay there’s it’s endless endless opportunities for it for getting this out there all because the product concept is so good and so well done it’s it is the marketing this thing makes the marketing easy you can you can sleepwalk through this and and make it wildly successful all right if you’re just a little bit proactive but you can’t do it if you don’t fix the pricing the price the pricing is the one thing holding all of this back right now okay okay okay it’s a good idea thank you all right you’re welcome all right you got to take action now okay all right cheers thank you all right we’re having fun how many people do we have where’s my numbers there we go okay we still got good attendance I am an hour and a half into this thing I will go a max of two hours because I do have a life I do have other things that need to get done so we’re gonna hop over to I believe Andrew was on earlier okay remind me did we did we have some things to finish up um actually just because you were talking about the podcast and the businesses that you or the business you had it’s kind of curious about that yeah photography one no it wasn’t photography um I did do photography as a business for about two months before I decided that doing this particular thing as a business will 1000% ruin my love for it right and I was like I’m not gonna I’m not gonna do that anymore um funny story is I was hired by it was like not long after doing it too because I was I was gonna focus on commercial photography not like I knew a thousand percent I am doing like family portraits okay we’re not we’re not doing though I do that for my own family and I do that for my extended family but um for business I was like no we’re going commercial I want to do commercial portraits so think like CEO headshots that kind of thing right and so I actually I don’t even know how it happened honestly um but I got an email from a the Hewlett Packard office in Atlanta and they were like we need headshots of our new one of their it wasn’t the CEO but it was one of their C-suite like people and um that was like that was I was very young right and that was like my first taste of uh man imposter syndrome don’t know how to price this I was literally googling how do you price corporate corporate photography right because like again I was young like very little experience I had a portfolio just of stuff I had done on my own um and what I had done is done like model callouts so hey do you look like you could work in a corporate office come over here let me take some pictures of you and then we build a portfolio out that way so I can show like what I can do and then I guess it worked right and so they hired me so I was like man I don’t know what to charge because in you’re not charging for time in corporate photography commercial photography here 100% charging for value right so like what is the value of what you’re producing to this big company um and you know it’s hard to put numbers on those things but I was like you know 3000 I don’t know and um they were like yep okay let’s go and like I was like wow okay that was these well obviously that was too low because you know it probably wasn’t the lowest that they got but um it was obviously too low because they decided right away um yeah I did it and but then again it’s like man by by the time I’m done like through a whole shoot like that and like I do photography because I like photography like I just I like it as an art form I like to play around I don’t like that pressure on it like I just want to do my own thing and like this the minute I started doing it for like as a business thing I was like this is not gonna work so I wrapped it up pretty quick okay and so with the podcast thing you’re mentioning before then what was that all about so all my business was in uh it was in the fitness industry and the I’m not gonna give all the names and all that’s it’s pretty much it’s all gone oh yeah you don’t have to you don’t have to it’s all it’s all gone at this point anyway um but yeah it was in the fitness industry and it like I said it was my first so I was a martial arts instructor right that was my brick and mortar thing so I was teaching martial arts I was the co-owner of a local studio so I’ve been doing I’ll give my whole like back story of like my my entrepreneurial journey all right because that that’s probably you know somewhat interesting so I started doing like Taekwondo when I was it was a Olympic Taekwondo so there’s a few versions of Taekwondo the Taekwondo that’s in the Olympics okay that’s the version that I was doing and I started that at like 10 and with uh when an instructor here in Atlanta and as I got to like 15 16 I was starting to look at like hey what are my opportunities is like I was entrepreneurial like from the beginning did not want to go get a corporate job didn’t want to do anything so I was like I want to own a business right so I go to my instructors I was like well this is what I’m doing you know I was working at a pharmacy at the time which by the way you know solidified the fact that I don’t want to be in an environment like this want to do my own thing so I went to my instructor and I was like can I start doing private lessons for people because I was like a brown belt or black belt a teenager and then I mean most in Taekwondo and I’ll be the first to tell you like Taekwondo it’s one of those industries that’s just completely sold out and and that’s one of the reason another sub reason why I had to leave what what I was doing there because my instructor was like dollar signs like just let them buy the belts let them buy the that’s their parents just wanted to have the belt let them buy the belt I’m like but they they suck they can’t do the thing right so we can’t just give them the belt and then he’s like now just sell them the belt he was like one of those guys right so I was like no no no no no no we have to have like principles we have to have like a process we have to have like quality we have to have something correct going on here and that was a constant like battle so I wanted to get out of that but he did say you can’t do private lessons unless you’re an instructor here and I said oh okay well how do I become an instructor here and so we kind of went through that whole talk and then so like the next week I was hired and I started doing like just assisting classes right and then you know I I’m an introvert you know you people probably don’t see that on like this type of format or in a situation like that I don’t I’m like an amber vert like I can I have introvert tendencies but I can turn on like extraversion when needed so you know I would be like you know trying to get more responsibilities in the classroom as quickly as possible and like I wanted to be like if I’m going to be in the classroom entrepreneurial like I want to I want to run the classroom right so I want to teach the classes so it wasn’t too long after that like he started just handing off half a class to me and saying all right like you run this half of the class whatever and then it became the full class and then it became he wasn’t even here anymore and I was just running the whole studio and then it was like hey can I just get my own studio and he’s like yep we got a location over here that we’ve looked at I’ll go half on you will be 50 50 partners yeah dee dee dee dee so he put up the money I put up all the work and I went and ran that studio and then you know after a while I was like you know this isn’t working anymore I got to move on to something else so that’s when I started to get into the online business game and it was just trial by fire you know it was let’s learn one I was I was always a writer okay so if you’re if you’re a natural writer then you should obviously go the content marketing angle because you know you already have the skills there for writing all you have to do is learn the SEO components on how to write this article you know so I started writing articles publishing articles started to rank started to get traffic then I I liked the idea see it in that time podcasting was actually exploding but wasn’t overrun with people right now it’s like everybody and their mom and their grandma has and their dead grandfather has a podcast right so it’s not as lucrative as it once was but you know I got into that at the right time that started to take off really well and so I was getting traffic from these sources and then like I said it was at the time email marketing was even bigger than it is now obviously and so that seemed like the natural progression for let’s get these people in the door and then it’s like okay what are we gonna offer them what are they asking for and it just kind of like the ball rolled from there and like I said in my mastermind when I told this story very first online course I created kind of like in the commercial photography days it was like all right how do we price this thing what what are people actually gonna pay and I dramatically undersold it like I feel I think I did an entire course it’s like nine dollars for like a it was like a six month like laid out thing I feel like that’s every course on you to me yeah probably yeah exactly exactly you know but at the same time I wanted to do it right like I wanted it to be the as a legit as it could possibly be and as I could possibly make it and because that like everything I do that’s what I do and but I do I have not now but in the past have had tendencies to just dramatically undersell right and so like nine bucks here you go let’s get it and it’s you know my phone dinged and it’s like oh my gosh there’s a nine there’s nine dollars to show up and then I was like out to dinner and it’s like ding like there’s another one oh wow okay and then it just started to pick up there and then I quickly realized like well one I can’t on online course a little bit different in this work if there wasn’t any coaching involved in it there wasn’t any like once it’s built it’s built it kind of runs right so you could make the argument that well you know it could stay at nine dollars it doesn’t really cost me anything it doesn’t cost me any more of my time it’s already built but the other aspect of it that you really quickly learn especially in fitness is that everybody wants the results but nobody wants to do the work all right and in order to find the people that will actually do the work you they have to pay the money right nobody’s going to be like oh it’s nine dollars and then I’m diligently going to do this thing and change my entire life and change all my habits that I’ve ever had in the past and you know I have nine dollars on the line to make that happen you quickly realize that all these people just sign up and then they almost immediately quit and so you’ve got to find a way to make them have a an actual legitimate experience and part of that is they’ve got to have skin in the game they’ve got to have money on the line and then there has to be that personal component as well so that’s where the latter came from where it’s like okay you can do the course on its own but here’s the percentage of failure right or you can do the course with coaching and here’s the success rate of that and then now they’re making their real choice and but you have come somewhat of a ladder starting to happen there like with your offers right but yeah that’s it yeah were you were you listening to like Alex or Mozie at that time I this one guy have been listening to someone I’ve heard his name before he’s like really into the no I’ve heard his name he’s like a total Jim I wouldn’t call him a Jim Rat like a Jim monster I think it’s got it got it yeah yeah no I know I know I know who he is but I don’t know a lot about him I mean honestly I wasn’t paying attention to a lot of fitness people at the time like I was paying attention to people who are just doing online marketing in general like what are the principles like that we need to learn to make this thing work versus like what are other fitness people doing to because you know it’s also hard to I don’t know I won’t go into too much detail on it but that’s the path they worked for me cool thanks very interesting yep thank you all right let’s hop over to we’ve got Christoff Christoff I hope you’re ready let’s check this out in the chat Amber Verts unite then go away and recharge for a while and come back absolute that’s it all right to put this into perspective this is back for Jeffrey I booked a 15 day trip to Rome Paris in Greece including airfare for around 3500 so using that even as a base because you’re making an amazing video in photos yeah and I don’t even know like you booked a 15 day trip to Rome Paris in Greece including airfare I don’t we need to know what the trip involved but even that even that sounds a little bit low all right Christoff I’m bringing you in how you doing sir hi doing great are you good good but you are somewhat frozen wait a second or you’re not real one of the other wait a second to change my camera real quick yeah it doesn’t seem to be working should I rejoin yeah let’s rejoin and see if it snaps into action okay wait a second all right let’s bring in Andrew Andrew oh you were you’re just still here okay now it’s all right I’m gonna I’m gonna bump you so that just in case some people are still trying to get into the green room at the very end uh we’ll give them some space okay all right we’ll wait for him to rejoin all right guys I’m gonna give you an opportunity if you are still here in the chat if you have any questions that you want me to quickly answer uh go ahead and drop them in the comments I’m man a lot of you guys are talking about Jeffrey and his photography and it’s I’m man I tell you I’m excited about that I’m excited for him let me put this over here so I can look this way maybe we’re running right now 76 excellent excellent excellent excellent all right there are some burning questions in the inner circle okay let me hop over there one second let’s go take a look my internet for some reason is or maybe the inner circle sight I don’t know why don’t you type them here in case I can’t get over there in time to find them just copy paste Andrew’s back okay yeah hit me in the comments and I know I put on maybe I should take off slow chat I put on the slow chat which like makes it you you can only comment every so often I need to take that off for next time all right hold on I did get it pulled up let me see if I can find the actual thread you guys are talking about all right here it is I believe no that’s the video from yesterday all right here’s the event thread all right my computer doesn’t have a camera attached so it’s not letting me in yes it will I believe you do have to have both a camera and a mic what is your outsourcing process how do you vet freelancers what is your SOP for outsourcing work so I don’t really outsource a lot I partner with other people like I partner with brand designers primarily we do you know PPC we do SEO we do we do all I don’t outsource any of that stuff I don’t do branding work and then I don’t do UI design but I do have a network of UI designers who I tap into and honestly I treat them as if they were on my team so they’re in base camp like as part of our team and I leverage them you know we get projects in I sell the projects I sell the every process of the of the project so it’s not a situation where I’m saying well you know I tell them we don’t do branding you know per se but we do have really great brand designers that we partner with and instead of sending them to the brand designer to have another separate conversation and a separate contract and separate all of that over there I simply sell them the branding that I know that you know my people my network are going to be able to deliver on and then so they pay me and then I pay the those people and so that’s how I treat it I don’t like just pure outsource it and I don’t white label it really either you know like because branding there’s got to be a conversation happening there’s got to be feedback there’s got to be this and that and so like I said these people are in base camp and so they’re able to have these conversations with the clients it’s not like you know the client doesn’t know who’s doing the actual branding on the project they know who the the person is they’re having conversations with that person so I just treat it like that I treat it as if they’re my team even though they’re not like a full-time person on the team as far as vetting freelancers higher fast fire fast I think is a really good strategy you know Dave Ramsey says higher slow fire fast I tend to higher fast fire fast so if you get hired and then you stay a while you must be you know pretty good right so because if not you’re gone fairly quickly and then it’s typically let’s get that person involved in and let me back up one step I mentioned this in the very beginning that I made the mistake early on of hiring people that don’t have skills thinking that I can give them the skills and train them and then we go from there it’s much much much much much better to higher people that already know what the hell they’re doing now if they don’t do things exactly like you do it’s okay as long as they have the right personality and they’re flexible they can start to do things the way that you do it and you have SOPs and you have processes and plays all this stuff okay it’s all gonna work out but the principle is higher people that already know what the hell they’re doing because you can plug them in immediately and they don’t drain resources waiting to get trained and worked on and nurtured and handheld and all of that stuff and then you can trust them to actually you know step in and take things on so with that said when we bring somebody in one technique and this was brought up in our mastermind as well it was actually somebody else recommended but it’s something I’ve done as well in the past is I mean most of these websites we’re working on it’s very easy to fire up a staging site right fire up a staging site of that real project take this real request the the client asks for and have the new person deliver on the staging site and if they fuck it up if it doesn’t matter because it’s on a staging site right and they can fire them you can move on but if they if they deliver right it’s like oh all right we got some here right this is uh and then you start to build the relationship and really bring them into the team and uh you know give them a great role and things like that so um that’s really the process it’s like can you do the work or not do the work and do you have the right personality to fit into our team or do you not have the right personality to fit into the team and I think you find that out very very quickly when you literally bring them into the team have everybody communicating with them and give them something real to work on and because if you’re doing an on staging site or it’s something that’s being done in Figma for example uh then there’s no risk to the client these new people don’t communicate with the client right project managers always communicating with the client when I have people on the team who I trust and have been on the team for a long time they can communicate with the client do people can’t communicate with the client um but they can do real work on real projects and then we can see you know if they’re able to deliver or not I just think like real world is the best way to make it happen and the faster you find out if they can deliver or not the better off you are and the faster you can find out if they have the right personality or not the better off you are so just get them in get them dirty all right we got Kristoff back in the green room so we’re running as time we got about 10 minutes I’m gonna let him in and let’s see what Kristoff has to ask and he’s moving this time which is much better than last time a great improvement better all right give me a little background before we jump into a question okay so um my dad has a local IT business for like 30 years back so he has a lot of customers and I joined him um like four or five years back and did yes sell computers sell printers whatever and um then I started to get into uh web development and web design and started to ask the customers of my dad uh if I can make websites for them so I like yeah made like 10 websites the last four years and I started out with the mentor and like yeah it was it was bad I didn’t really like it and so I quickly switched to to oxygen and found your channel and found automatic CSS and now I’m like I have like free websites uh waiting to be done and customers are happy and so with the with these initial 10 um let’s talk price points were they free were they low price where were we at here yeah the first first like five websites were like 500 bucks okay they were pretty small websites but yeah I didn’t really know what I was doing and I think they were not very uh not more worth than five front bucks yes to be honest you gotta start somewhere right yeah yeah but right now I’m charging like uh 3 to 5k perfect uh for website and yeah no one ever said anything at the price so it works good so if no one’s saying anything about the price you know what that means right that means I’m too cheap yes that means the price goes up yeah I I think I’m doing a much better job than our local agencies because I um some of our customers had websites from those local agencies yep and they were not happy so they came to me and now they’re happy and they were like charging 8 to 10k dollars or yours and yeah so I know I have to go up with the price but yeah pricing is also the thing I want to to talk about and billing and uh because I’m I have a hard time like telling the customer to pay everything up front so I tend to be like yeah it’s like 3 to 5k bucks and uh you can pay me afterwards or monthly and I just build them the hourly rate that I have and the work that I really spend on the website and of course if I have my designer uh work on this I also build them the work that he does and yeah I just want to know how could I approach the customer and how to get them to pay everything up front or what’s the best best way to get paid really yeah there’s a good question really good question very important topic a lot of things that that people classically make mistakes on here uh and it’s an easy fix honestly so do you do a proposal of some sort or like is this all just done casually by email how’s this working out um it’s pretty casual because I mostly know the customers so it’s like really close relationship with our customers and we and my dad and I we do their computers and all of the other stuff uh that we offer them yep and so it’s it’s more like they are sold to as a so you know they it’s like uh I get it I get it so I don’t have to do much they say yes immediately yeah yep so I don’t have to really keep it you can keep it you can keep it casual no problem like you know I’ll sell through email all day it’s if I don’t have to write up if I don’t have to make an intricate proposal then I can just shoot some emails and get the get the job I will do that all day long uh so if that’s what you’re doing that’s perfectly fine the key is just how you’re positioning the the pricing and the uh payment the billing right so you’re going to give three different options that’s what I always recommend give the person three different options for making the payments so you can pay in full upfront and if you do that you get a bit of a discount you get like 10% discount and that’s you know on a sizable project on a $20,000 project I mean that’s fairly significant you know on a $10,000 project a lot of people would think that’s fairly significant it’s amazing it’s worth it to me to give that discount because you don’t have people who you have to chase around for payments you don’t have projects that get delayed because you’re chasing around people for payments you don’t have you can focus more on being the actual designer and developer that they hired rather than being a billing department right if I have to be a billing department with all my clients that’s less time that I can spend being what they hired me to do and then you also have the money up front to bring in the team that you need actually have this conversation with somebody just yesterday on a coaching call so they were asking about website as a service you know like just sell them a subscription and you don’t even pay for they don’t even pay for the website they just pay for the subscription forever and on and whatever but it’s like $200 a month $300 a month $400 a month something like that and I will do a video a whole breakdown on website as a service versus the classic model of pricing but one of the fundamental problems of website as a service is you don’t have money to pay anybody to help you build the sites you’re selling right because you’re only getting $300 bucks at the time so it’s really nice like to have a $10,000 project or a $15,000 project it’s like here $15,000 right in your bank account okay amazing this guy over here can help me this guy over here can help me this girl over here she can help me too and now I just I have the money I need to make the project happen on the timeline that we promised and to the quality that we promised and on and on and on so if you can get paid up front even if you have to get a discount it’s well worth it to me the second option is a very important and it changes from project to project but it’s a very important concept it’s based on the timeline of the project so if this isn’t is a let’s say a two month website project you you promise the person hey we’re going to deliver this website in two months guess what the second payment option is two payments okay so you can make one payment up front or you can make two monthly payments why is it two monthly payments because we’re going to deliver it in two months and by the time we deliver it you’re going to be paid up right so that’s the second option you get no discount that’s the standard pricing option if it’s a three month delivery then the second option is a is three monthly payments it just matches whatever the delivery timeline is okay and that’s all fair everybody everybody can see this I pay as I go it’s going to be done in three months I’m going to make three payments but here’s the other caveat of of option number two it is three monthly payments of this amount it is not three milestone payments we’re not doing milestones this is not a thing okay and I I’ve said this in multiple inner circle trainings do not and if you’re listening on YouTube do not do milestones stop doing milestones you lose all of your leverage and it puts the onus on you that it’s like I’m not what you’re you’re hiring me but you don’t think I’m going to deliver why would you hire me if you don’t think I’m going to deliver that doesn’t make any sense because milestones are all tracked to oh well if you hit this milestone then I’ll give you some more money right I’m going to hit all the milestones why you’re hiring me that’s why I do what I do I do this every day so why is why is me getting money based on hitting milestones we’re going to get this done in three months you’re going to make three monthly payments it’s much more likely that you ain’t going to pay me than me not hitting milestones okay so that’s kind of the the added to not you obviously don’t communicate it like that but internally that’s the attitude that we have to have is we’re professionals right so we’re going to get this done in three months you’re going to make three monthly payments that’s it and by the time you’re done with the third payment we’re going to be done and because here’s the thing with milestones 90% of the time it’s not the developer missing the milestones it’s the client the client is not available to give feedback the client won’t give you something that you need the clients so why they’re incentivized by the way if they don’t have a lot of money if they’re cash flow is poor right they’re incentivized for the project to not hit milestones because they know they don’t have to pay so they can string out a project for a year so how is that fair to the professionals doing this work it’s not so no milestone payments it’s if it’s three months we make three monthly payments all right so you have option one paying full 10% discount option two three monthly payments two monthly payments for whatever the timeline is option three is like the financing option okay you can pay me well after I’ve delivered something but it costs extra right I’m not this is not a charity right if you went to a bank to get a loan right there’s going to be an interest rate right there’s risk to me that I give you a website we put it live and then you’re promising to make six more payments okay that’s a risk to me and I have to become a billing department I’ve got to have somebody keeping track of are they paid up are they late are they how do we go after them you know all that kind of stuff so it has to cost more so if you get a 10% discount for paying in full you pay 10% extra if you want it to string out for on and on and on into eternity however many payments they want and I would make it based on their budget you have in the conversation you know what they’re going to be able to afford so if you can make it six payments make it six payments if it’s 12 payments make it 12 payments I really want to go much beyond that but that’s their third option their third option is you deliver all the things that I ask for but I don’t pay you I’ll pay you like later I’ll pay you in little pieces on and on and on so they can do that it’s fine but it is a risk to me and our agency so it has to be a little bit extra on the pricing side of things you give them all three options you give them two different payment numbers right so like on the on the let’s say it’s going to be a three month project so three monthly payments you give them what the monthly amount is going to be but also show them the total and then you’re obviously showing them the total of option one which has the 10% discount so they see that’s the least amount of money and then on the 12 month again you’re giving them here’s how much you’re going to pay per month but here’s the total that you’re going to pay so they see at the end how much extra that option is going to cost and then you just have them choose which one you want I mean if you pre-sold them on the project and they’re already kind of ready to go what you’ll find is that 60% will pay up front and some people listening are be like that’s that sounds absurd that sounds impossible that people would just pay 15,000 dollars of 60% will pay up front if you’re doing that if you’re positioning this right you’ve had the right sales conversations with them they trust you they’re actually hiring you as like a consultant expert not like a pixel pusher okay it will it will happen another 20% 30% will choose the second option where it’s just like all right I’m going to pay on the timeline and and that’s it and then the rest will choose the long drawn out option most people would think that most people would choose the drawn out options they can keep the monthly payments low and in my estimation if you’re in my experience you’re working with legit companies who they have the money they don’t want to be in in that kind of they just want to get it paid and get it over with and get the work done and get the deliverables right so they really want to just pay you and get it out of their way especially same is true for like business owners as well small business solo pernours but the bigger the company is the less attached they are to the money but the person who’s actually cutting the check it’s not their money right it’s the company’s money so they’re just cutting checks and so and you know they’re they’re you know C suite that’s controlling finance and all of that it’s easier for them to be like yep we paid for this thing versus like oh gosh we got to keep track of all these payments and how we’re going to issue all these checks and on and on and on they’re just like let’s just get it over with right give me that 10% discount here’s your money let’s go let’s rock and roll 60% of the time okay that’s awesome I will definitely definitely try that with my next customer and yeah because you said service contracts that’s also a question that I have how much do you do you build monthly and what services do you offer your your customers so like what are all the services that we offer I’d like to you if you want something changed on the website monthly extra yeah monthly monthly management plans so we have pretty much three plans versus just we do retainers like customized retainers for people if like the first three don’t work out so well for them or just not a good fit but like the base level is just hosting it’s you know monthly plug-in updates monthly WordPress updates all of that stuff it does not include any like hours for work or anything like that it’s just pure hosting slash management now one thing I do add in pretty much every level so the even the base level they get one quarterly strategy call with me right just included in the plan but I do that because even though it’s tremendous value to them and even though they’re not really paying for it right if you looked at what I would charge for a natural strategy call and we’re not making that in the in the that low plan that they’re paying for but I do it because one I like having conversations with clients because it’s another touchpoint it’s part of building the relationship it’s part of being the consultants I said I was going to be right and we have done other stuff for them and I just want to take care of them as a client but two it always produces more opportunities it’s they get excited about ideas right they get excited about where their business can go next and it’s always leads to a conversation of okay well now can you do this this and this for us yeah absolutely I can do this this and this so like I’m losing money doing the calls technically but I’m really not because they produce more opportunity and that’s something I don’t see a lot of people doing in their monthly management plans is like giving that kind of more higher touch personal consultancy they’re just leaving that out I think a lot of people leave it out because they’re like well I’m not getting paid to do that so I shouldn’t do that but I think also a lot of people are in a position where they’re like I don’t really want to talk to people I just kind of want to be behind a computer doing my thing and that is harming if that’s kind of your your you know the way you’re thinking about it dramatically harming the the business so I would say include that on every package then the middle package has a few more options on it and it has like an hour or two of actually just doing edits like and it’s it’s listed out what it includes you know if you want to add a new page that’s not included right if you want to just change some contents swap a photo fix a link whatever all that’s included but like adding new stuff to the website not included add a new form not all that stuff gets scoped separately and then the top level package just adds a few more hours but it adds other things like advanced analytics tracking you know we build an agency analytics panel for them we do a bunch of other stuff involved there but really it’s um if they’re doing a lot of ongoing structural work like which is involved with SEO a lot of times maybe involved with ppc because there could be a lot of focus landing pages need to be created a lot of copywriting needing to be written content marketing all of those things fall into we’re building custom retainers for these people because they’re not going to fit into a standard like monthly management package if that makes sense that makes sense yeah okay so thank you for those informations you are very welcome and one last thing yeah I’m also the developer of plaster if you’re okay that’s me and I wanted to ask you if you want to try it or if you have tried it yet I do want to try it so I have not tried it yet I have watched videos on it okay so we’re at that step but I need to I need to play around with it if you want to get on a call separately we’ll go through it together I’m good I think that would be exciting and then we’ll we’ll go from there awesome thank you cool cool all right have a great day you too why all right everybody two hours we’re done we’re done we got to we got to package this thing up and move on with our life if you found value here if you liked this experience the only way to get me to do more of these experiences even though I do really really enjoy them and I would just do them for fun we need to we need to do them for likes we need to do them for subscribers we need to we do need to grow the channel right we need to reach more people so go ahead and hit like share this stuff around anything that you can do to help right if you want to see more of this stuff and I will say this participation so if you are in the inner circle like you saw there’s people that are going to get on these calls okay you can tell they’re nervous you can tell but you know what they’re actually doing it they’re actually clicking the link they’re actually participating they’re asking questions they’re getting value and that’s what’s going to make this show right so we need people who are just like you know what I am nervous I’m gonna do it anyway you know what I am intimidated I’m gonna do it anyway you know what I am whatever the excuses all right just do it anyway and this does one final nugget again from a coaching call that I had somebody said that they were dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome and they you know the kind of the question is always like how do I overcome the imposter syndrome or how do I get rid of the imposter syndrome and my answer was you don’t need to number one you’re gonna be and you’re gonna feel like an imposter at every single level so even though you don’t feel like an imposter here necessarily anytime you try to level up you’re gonna feel like an imposter let’s take a I’m a football fan college football athlete I guarantee like they’re amazing at college they could be a Heisman trophy winner they get to the NFL they feel like an imposter for a little while until they start to prove oh shit I can do it at this level too right and then they don’t feel like an imposter anymore so there’s always going to be imposter syndrome to deal with if you’re in the very early stage it ain’t going to go away the minute you sign a ten thousand dollar project because when you go to the twenty thousand dollar project it’s gonna come right back so what I say about imposter syndrome is this feel like an imposter who cares but you still got to do the work right because the only way to get past it is doing the work you can’t train your way out of imposter syndrome you can’t practice your way out of imposter syndrome you can only do the work right and just prove that you’re not an imposter and if it turns out that if you do a project and you just you blow it right up I guess you’re an imposter okay so what does that mean well it doesn’t mean you’re like cheating people it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person it means you need to go back to the drawing board you need to practice more you need to go down a level okay they come up to the major leagues in baseball they don’t cut it they go back to the minor leagues they keep practicing they keep working they oh they get another opportunity okay let’s see what we can do now right so that’s all that happens so you you you blow it on a twenty thousand dollar project okay don’t price the next one to twenty thousand take a smaller project go back to fifteen go back to ten work on it more get better at it and then come back and do a twenty again later right now see if you can knock the twenty out of the park and that so it really doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with imposter syndrome I just say good feel like an imposter just don’t let it stop you from actually doing the work you’ve got to take the next step doesn’t matter how you feel okay so that’s my final nuggets thank you everybody for joining and again intercircle digital ambition dot c o slash intercircle if you want to join that’s the only way to get in right now to be in the green room and to be able to participate in the actual show I’ll be back in two weeks and I’m just I’m feeling the vibe I’m feeling like this maybe weekly very very soon so I’m gonna say all right guys peace I’m out