Digital Agency Table Talk 004

0:00:00
All right, we are live. Welcome to another episode or session of Digital Agency Table Talk. My name is Kevin Geary of Digital Ambition. First, to start things off, while everybody is joining in and when you join in, by the way, go ahead and drop a common immediately in the chat. Let me know you’re here and watching. Let me know where you’re watching from. And let’s just talk for a second about how Digital Agency Table Talk works. What we’re doing here with Digital Agency Table Talk, the goal is to just provide as much value as possible to Digital Agency Owners and Freelancers. We want to bring on live other Agency Owners and Freelancers to ask questions or bring up topics that they want to discuss. So it’s a bit of a different format than you might be used to. It’s not like a traditional podcast. It’s not a traditional AMA. It is a very interactive experience. And members of the inner circle are able to come into the green room, which we have on the back end. I’m going to put up the link right here to the inner circle. And they’re able to hang out a little bit and wait for their turn to come onto the show. And then they get to ask whatever they want to ask or talk about, whatever they want to talk about. What we can do or what we’ve been doing, some ideas for you, we talk about getting leads, we talk about closing deals, we talk about SEO, digital marketing in general, whether that’s for your own agency or even for your clients. Feedback on UX or UI or dev, project management, issues with clients, pricing and pricing models, scaling and agency growth, WordPress questions, page builders in general. If you have questions about automatic CSS or frames, we can talk about all of that stuff. We can screen share. Like I said, it’s a very interactive experience. So if you are an inner circle member, you get to come on, this is a chance for people to get free coaching, free insights, whatever. Or if you’re not an inner circle member, you can just watch for free on YouTube. So let me go ahead and I’m going to pull up. I got to find my windows here so that we can actually get started. I want to first find my chat window.

0:02:13
All right. So let’s see who we got in the chat. It’s like Rubens here, Jeffries here. I’ve got about five people in the green room right now. Three, four, yeah, four or five people in the green room waiting to get on. I’ve already discussed with them what their topics are going to be. And it’s going to be good today. I can I can promise you that. I do want to say that the green room is limited to like I think it’s four or five spots. So if you’re trying to get into the green room and you can’t get in, just wait for somebody to be done with their turn. They’re going to drop out of the green room. It’s going to open up a new space. Then go ahead and click the link. The link is in the inner circle. By the way, click the link to get into the green room and you’ll hopefully get your spot. All right. So we got Justin in here. See Mark. What’s up? Turn to that into Bego. Awesome. We’ve got John from Dublin, Pixel, Mac from Tel Aviv and oh, Surge Lab. Swany, Georgia. That’s very close to me. Excellent stuff. Okay. Drop not just comments, but likes on the stream. And then I do want to encourage you. Hey, if you have like a, you know, like a face, if there’s a Facebook group that you know that would really love to watch this stream, get the value that we’re going to be discussing today, go ahead and share this out. Let’s get more people knowing about digital agency table talk. The more we get our numbers up, and it’s not just for me, it’s for all of us, right? The more we get our numbers up, I’m going to start reaching out to other people, other industry experts, people that you want to hear from. I’m going to get them to come on as a guest and me and them are going to run digital agency table talk that week. And this is going to give people an opportunity to actually come in and ask somebody else some questions. Maybe somebody that they’ve wanted to talk to for a very long time that they already know and probably learn from in this space. So it’s going to get even more interactive. But obviously we need the numbers to do that. We’ve had good numbers, right? We’ve had over a hundred people watching live a couple different times. I think our average is approaching a hundred. And so it’s on the way up, right? But if we want to get the big wigs, we want to get those, you know, the major people in here, we’re probably going to need some more numbers. So hit like, right? That helps share the stream. That helps get more people involved.

0:04:33
Okay. Aside from who we have in the green room today, which we’re going to bring on Simon in just a second. He’s going to be first. We have two different discussion topics. So if there’s any law in the green room, I’m going to talk about website as a service a little bit. This is only if there’s a law. If there’s no law in the, like we prioritize people who are in the green room. So if there’s no law, then we’re not going to talk about these things. But if there is a law, we’ll get to website as a service. And I also want to talk about LTDs. I want to talk about lifetime deals in this industry. There’s been a lot of talk lately, a couple different plugins making some moves away from LTDs. There’s been people knocking down my door asking for everything to be LTD. They want the LTD from ACSS. It hasn’t been available for over a year. They want LTDs for frames. They want LTDs for everything. And I want to talk a little bit about the economics of LTDs. There’s a lot of people who say, hey, this is perfectly viable. It’s a great option. Everybody should do it. There’s people who say it’s not viable. It’s not a great option. You shouldn’t do it. There are pros and cons on both sides. But I want to just discuss my take on LTDs. That’s if we have time. If we have time. All right. So I’m going to go ahead and bring on Simon. And let’s see if we can. There we go. Simon, how you doing?

0:05:55
I’m doing really good. Excellent. I’m doing awesome. What I want you to do first is just tell us a little bit about your background. How long have you been doing this stuff? What kind of clients do you work with, etc? Basically, I’m running my company WebNastify and I’m working with agencies, business owners, website owners to taking care of their back-end stuff like servers, security and those kind of things, custom deployments and many circle members already know me for my services or that I can help them with those kind of things. Excellent. What’s your topic for today? Well, I wanted to ask what are the best practices when you’re creating the case studies on your website? Because I have too many services and I don’t want to put them all on the website. It will be 40-50 pages websites. So I just want a simple website with some reviews, real case studies that I have and that’s it. Got it. Okay. Do you want to organize your case studies? You said you had a lot of different services. So do you want case studies organized by the service that they were or do you do many different services for each client? Yes, I have many services for each client. So I want to organize by the agency. Okay. So when you say organized by agency, what do you mean?

0:07:18
I mean, for example, I work with one agency in London and I have a case study under that agency and I released all the services that I provide and all this stuff. Got it. Okay. So yeah, I would recommend that it be a custom post type. So you’re going to make a custom post type for this particular thing and then custom fields obviously and then this way you’re going to build out one main template. Now what I would do is go into Figma, right? It’s probably the easiest place to do this and wireframe out exactly what you want your case study format to look like. Okay. That’s going to be the easiest place to do it. You go into Figma, you get the whole thing wireframe, kind of figure out the story you want to tell. Like good case studies kind of follow a story and the real thing is, you know, do you have the data to put into these custom fields? Like, did you track here, what happened? You know, before I was there and then during the work that I was doing, and you’re going to outline obviously, you know, what you did, why you did it. And then after here are the new results. Do you have all of that data available to you? Yes, I have. Yeah. Okay. Good. Because a lot of times, you know, people come and they say, I want to create case studies and they obviously have the new data. But then I’m like, okay, do you have the old data that, you know, before you got there, what did the data look like? Oh, we don’t have that. It’s hard to create a case study because it’s like you can’t show point A to point B. You can only show B. So as long as you have the point A, then you should be good to go. So yeah, work on telling a story with it. The challenge is to make it very visual, right? It would be easy to write up a case study.

0:08:56
It’s just like a blog post. Okay. And that could, that can work too. But I think what you’re asking me more of is you want like a visual kind of storytelling type case study. Is that correct? Yes. And I was also thinking if I can create a podcast with that and put it on the website as the first, first item. What do you mean like a podcast? Like a FAQ with the agency owner. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that could be part of your template, right? If you’re going to do that with every agency owner, right? So yeah. That interview with the owner would be probably front and center. All right. So you have your hero, you’d have the video and then below would be all the, you know, real case study details. Yeah, exactly. So it would be the post, not a page. Correct. Yeah, custom post type. Okay. Custom fields, one template controls every case study. So now you have the only challenge with it is if you have lots of different services, you may be depending on the services that you did for each individual client, talking about different things. But if you’re talking about different things, you are kind of limited in the format of the case study. You know, right? So there could be data points that are unique to one person and not the other. And the format you’ve created doesn’t necessarily fit that. But there is stuff you can do with conditional logic of like, oh, I need this section of it. If I need to talk about this kind of thing, you can, you can absolutely do that and make it very dynamic. Well, you don’t want to do, are you doing this in bricks or oxygen? What are you, what are you using?

0:10:27
Brits. Okay. The thing you would never want to do is create a case study page, right? Outline. And then do that as a single page or post. And then duplicate that for the next one and do that. And then duplicate it again and then make it again and make them all super custom. Because then you come along later and you’re like, oh, I need to change the design up somehow or whatever. And you’re stuck editing every single one individually. Right. There’s no single source of truth for your case studies. And this is hopefully an area where you’re going to build up a good amount of case studies. And so it’s going to become a maintenance and management nightmare. It’s not going to scale if you do it that way. So even though there’s some potential limitations to having a custom post site and one single template to rule all of these in the end, it’s far more scalable and maintainable. And it absolutely is going to get the job done. So yeah, that’s all my questions. And in the future, if you would like to host me as a security topic or call topics, I’m here to help you and answer all the questions. Good stuff. So we love it. Yeah. All right. Thanks for coming in today. Yeah. See you. All right. So that was Mark. Let’s check on the chat here. Oh, yeah. All right. So Simon’s getting a lot of love in the chat. Good, good. Good. All right. Pixel Max has green room in dark mode. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that means. Pixel Max. We’ve got a, oh, let’s see. No, we’ve got, yeah, we’ve got people in there. I see them. They’re live. Cynthia’s here. Frederick is here from Canada. Looks like Silent Phil is back. Silent Phil, I’m wondering when you’re going to get into the green room so that you’re not silent anymore. I hate Figma. It’s so slow. Hmm. Hmm. What is slow about Figma? I don’t understand that. You’re going to have to explain why I would get hating Figma for potentially other reasons. I just don’t know that it is slow, never experienced the slowness in Figma. Or are you saying you are slow in Figma? That could be, that could be the thing. But that’s not Figma’s fault, right? That would be a user error. All right.

0:12:44
So let’s go with, we’re going to bring on Marco next. We’ve got Marco, then we’ve got Stratos, then we’ve got Ruben in the queue. And we just did open up a new spot. So if you’re trying to get in, go ahead and try to get in now. All right. Let’s bring on Marco. How’s it going, Marco? It’s going well. Thank you very much. How are you Kevin? I am doing fantastic. So before we get into our topic, just go ahead and tell everybody your background. Right. So I’ve worked in the online marketing world for about eight, nine years now. About half of that time I spend as head of marketing for ACE with software company. Also as part of the management team. And the other half, I’ve spent being self-employed. Now as a solo freelancer helping small and medium sized businesses in Switzerland and Germany. We’re basically with the general marketing work. Usually I would first rebuild the website because every time I just find a horrible website and you cannot really base any marketing on top of that. So been building websites with Oxygen and now bricks for some years now. And yeah, doing things like LinkedIn, SEO, it’s a big part of my work. Copywriting as well. The basics of having a decent online marketing presence for companies. Yeah. Excellent. So what’s your topic today? Right. So I’ve been thinking, I’m in my late 30s now. I’m thinking about where to go with my business. I’m a solo freelancer. Doing fine. It’s all good. My clients are happy. But I’m thinking where what’s the next stage for me? Where do I want to go with this business? And at the moment, I can work for a handful of companies at the same time. For six maybe and that’s fine. Financial is. It’s all right. But I’ve been thinking, how can I scale the knowledge and skills that I’ve been building up over the last few years? And what I realized as well by talking to other people around me and my network is that what I really enjoy a lot is helping other people become successful.

0:15:00
I think that’s something you can relate to probably. Yeah. Yeah. So I took some inspiration from from Deena Circle, which I enjoy greatly and some other people out there on the web and book offers as well. And I thought, okay, for the German speaking market, I’m based in Southern Germany, for the German speaking market, thinking about creating a digital product, I’d probably call it, that packages bundles up knowledge in a way that’s really actionable for people who basically struggle to get off the ground with their own small business. I met a lot of those people. It is hard, running your own business is really hard, setting up your own business is hard, overcoming all those fears that people have is really hard. So I’m thinking about putting to get to something that is a digital, yeah, and then help to that. And I’m wondering, what do you think, how would you go about doing this, how much would you focus on a certain niche of people, where do you start, you build a community first by offering free content, or do you build a product first, such as a community based product, or to do it. Where would you start? Yeah. Good questions. So who are you wanting to reach with this knowledge? Probably people who are solo freelancers, solo business owners, just like me, or people who have really small businesses. And why do I want to reach these people? Because I think they have the big challenge of all those challenges out there that you need to deal with, marketing, sales, business processes, admin stuff. It’s endless. And if you don’t have dedicated teams to do these kinds of things for you, you need to deal with it yourself. So I think these people benefit most from having really actionable advice and tools as well. Cool. So right off the bat, I will say, I do think it is an important for agency owners and even freelancers to diversify their income streams. There’s different ways to do this. You can do it obviously with affiliate related stuff, right? So you’re working with clients. You recommend tools to them. They use the tools. You get paid a little extra. So there’s another revenue stream for you. That’s smart to do.

0:17:35
Software. Okay. There’s agencies and freelancers who have created software to solve specific problems. And then they sell the software to other agencies and freelancers. There’s another revenue stream for you. Then there’s education, which is what you’re talking about, right? And so you could branch out into the education side of things. I do think it’s like I said, it’s important to establish one of these other revenue streams because being a freelancer, being an agency owner, as we know, you know, leads can dry up sometimes. There’s ups and downs. And so you have these other revenue streams coming in. They help supplement things. They help stabilize. And they scale typically a lot more than just doing work for people. So it’s always smart to do things that scale in terms of revenue. With that said, the education side of things, each one of those has unique things. The affiliate one is the easiest to do, but it also is probably going to make you the least amount of money in terms of an additional revenue stream. Software thing, you would need specific skills to do that, or you would need to hire people to have those skills and put an investment together. And yeah, yeah, yeah, education side of things. You obviously need the knowledge and the experience, but you also need to just be naturally like a teacher. Like you have to like teaching and you have to like creating content. And that’s not for everybody. So as long as you feel like you have fun, you really need to be fun for you. It needs to be fun to create content.

0:19:01
If it feels like a job, you’re not going to do it for very long. And you’re not going to do it for long enough to gain the traction that you need to gain to actually make it worth anything. So that would be the first part. You know, like I have, I just create content. That’s what I do. It’s like it’s fun to me. The results that people get, that’s fun to me to watch them. When somebody comes into the inner circle and they sell a $1,000 $2,500 website and then six months later, they’re emailing me saying, I just did a $15,000 website or a $20,000. That’s the best thing. And all of this content that we get to create is conversations that we get to have. The people that we get to meet, all of that is absolutely fantastic. It’s fun. Okay, so it makes this not a job. That’s the key. You don’t want to feel like you have two jobs running an agency and then creating all this content to just try to make this revenue stream because somebody you decided you want another revenue stream. That’s what you would not want to do. Now, the question is when you’re looking at the group of people, right? You’ve got general freelancers. I would not go after them. I would not go after general freelancers with this kind of content. Why? Because everybody already does that. Everybody already goes after. There’s a gazillion podcasts for freelancers out there. There’s a gazillion podcasts for business owners out there. And they give general business advice, general marketing advice, very difficult to compete and get anybody’s attention in that regard. Even if you’re really great, it’s just really hard. So this is an example of where I would absolutely say to niche down, find a specific kind of freelancer, find a specific kind of agency on or whatever. And you can see I’ve done that, right? So the niche here is people who, it started with oxygen. That’s where, that was, it started very small. Okay? So it started with oxygen. Now it’s oxygen and bricks. But really, what it’s becoming is anybody who develops using WordPress and probably more specifically WordPress page builders, right? And so they want to build a business that utilizes WordPress page builders.

0:21:05
So that’s kind of what the niche is now. And that makes it very easy to know who am I talking to? Where do these people hang out? What kind of things do I need to tell them? Right? I know everything about them. And so when you target freelancers or agency, you don’t know anything about anybody. They can be in all these different situations, wanting all these different things. And so there’s really no way for you to focus your content and there’s no way for you to focus your marketing efforts. So that’s going to be the hardest part for you is figuring out what is that niche? What is that focus that I can go after? And then once you do have that nailed down, yes, I absolutely think that content, free content to build an audience is always step number one. It is possible sometimes to release if you were doing the software route. There’s a lot of different ways to go about this, right? There are people who have released software first. And the software actually builds the audience while it actually brings in money. And then they start doing content after that’s always a possibility. But like I said, that takes yet another idea, kind of a separate business altogether almost. So it’s not the common route. The common route is let’s create content for the audience we want to reach, build the audience. And then you have access after that to do whatever monetization strategy you want to do. So yeah, I would say that that is your best bet.

0:22:29
Now it’s going to take a while. There’s going to be a lot of content that needs to be produced. It’s going to be a lot of doing stuff for nobody in the very beginning. So you just got to be prepared to do that. But yeah, that is that is the path. So when you started in a circle that did all of these, I don’t know, what was it, 700, 800 when I joined, did all of them basically come from the ACSS plugin? No, no, no, no, no, no. They, they, my majority came from this channel right here. This channel and the communities that I’m active in that has driven the majority of the signups. Now automatic CSS helps, right? So the software becomes part of the marketing arm while it provides value to people. And frames is going to help as well. And especially considering the fact that these things can break into other communities before I do, right? So if I make ACSS compatible with Gutenberg, which is going to be the next step, okay? So it becomes compatible with Gutenberg. People who use, I don’t even use Gutenberg right now. I don’t even like Gutenberg. I’ve talked about that before. But it’s going to be compatible with Gutenberg. And so people that do use automatic CSS with Gutenberg are going to go into groups for Gutenberg. And they’re going to be talking about ACSS. And then so people are introduced to that before I even arrived there, right? So it is part of the, it does work for marketing in some regard, right? It wasn’t created for that purpose, but it does work towards that purpose. And so yeah, but the main feeder of the inner circle was this channel doing oxygen tutorials and then obviously leveraging the communities as well.

0:24:12
And then moving into bricks and so on. Now I was wondering, you know, what we’re going to see a drop off from going to oxygen to bricks. And the answer was no. There hasn’t been a drop off. Even though the bricks community is technically smaller or appears to be smaller, I wouldn’t argue it is smaller. I would actually argue that it’s bigger, especially now. It wasn’t bigger before it’s bigger now. Even though the numbers on the group doesn’t say that, the engagement metrics do say that. And I don’t have access to them, but I can tell, because I’ve been doing this for a very long time, that I can tell where the attention is. And the attention is with bricks. So yeah, and that’s why there hasn’t been any drop off. Plus there’s the fact that the inner circle is not heavily focused. I guess it’s heavily focused, but not there’s enough balance that it’s not just a focus on builders and techniques. And this and that, it’s sales. It’s marketing. It’s growing in agency. It’s doing all this other stuff on the back end, right? The people really care about and really find valuable. In fact, that stuff is arguably more valuable. It’s more valuable to learn how to go from selling $2,500 websites to $25,000 websites than it is to learn best practices for bricks development, right? Even though bricks development best practices are extremely important and you should absolutely learn them, you could argue that it’s not as important as making a lot more money with your agency, right? So in terms of what people are paying to be in the inner circle. So yeah, that’s where it came from. And yeah, that’s that would be the path forward. Bonus question, if you don’t mind. Do we have five moments? Yeah, go for it. So the centerpiece of my communication to, you know, the first 10, 20, 30 people would be an email list. I really liked the idea of owning that channel and not having to rely on the algorithm of LinkedIn or Instagram or anything like that. Would you agree that that’s a decent way to start building an email list? Yeah, kind of. It depends on the, it depends on the niche. It depends on the industry.

0:26:19
So I had a, and I’ve talked about this before, I had an online business in 2012, like 2012 to 2018. It was very successful and it was driven by two things, content marketing and email marketing. Okay, so it was all content marketing and email marketing had a big email list, very big email list for that business, but it was marketed to consumers, right? And so we were able to use that email list very effectively. And we had many different funnels. Basically, somebody would come in, they would do a content upgrade or a freebie of some sort, they would get on the email list. The email list would segment them to their interest. Based on their interest, we would send them an email sequence. The email sequence would sell them into an initial product. And then after the initial product, they would be upsold into the additional products, right? It’s a very common funnel. And it was all, you know, based on like, we were in an industry that was kind of untrusted. But this is like every industry, right? There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of unscrupulous people, right? And so if you’re trustworthy in that industry and you educate and you do provide really good content and your products that you’re selling online courses in this case are really good. And do absolutely get people results, then it’s pretty easy to do that model. The hard part is like, you know, you’re just creating stuff on a whim and tricking people and using marketing tactics. That’s all nonsense, right? So if you do it legitimately, then it’s going to work. But that was consumers. And I feel like email marketing to consumers still works really, really, really well. I’m not as big on email marketing to B2B as much. Because I feel like, well, they’re very busy, you know? People are very busy. They’re not in their email nearly as much as just general consumers are. And it’s just a little bit tougher.

0:28:05
So I have an email list for digital ambition. I have an email list for digital gravy. I have an email list for automatic CSS. I don’t use them all that much, even though I have a background of years and years and years of using email marketing really effectively. There are probably things that I could do with email marketing to amplify what we’re doing with digital ambition or automatic CSS or whatever. But there are other things that are higher priorities right now than doing that. I see them as, I see some of these other channels as a better use of time than email. So I’m not saying that email is bad or that it’s not effective, but there probably could be other things that you’re doing that would be a bigger bang for your buck at the time than email marketing. And so if I send out an email versus post a new video, I’m posting a new video that that’s the thing that’s going to grow everything faster than sending out another email. If that makes sense. And the videos of what I’ve noticed, I don’t need to email people to sell the products. Okay, the video sell the products. So why do I need to email them? Right. I can email them because there are people on the email list who haven’t bought yet and they could be nurtured. But it doesn’t it’s not there for me to justify not making another video. I should just make another video. That’s going to be better than influencing these people and nurturing them into into buying basically. I can confirm that by the way, every, you know, I’m on the inner circle, you know, once a day at least. And if I do see a new video that is, you know, that is a big, big signal to me, you know, and I will go look at the video. I might not watch everyone in full length, but I’ll have a look at it. I’ll have a look at the description. I think I speak for a lot of inner circle members who are quite excited to find your next video. So I can totally see the tactics around that. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a situation of there are a lot of things you can do. And this is actually a really good lesson to agency owners and freelancers when they’re dealing with their clients. Okay. So you can have a background in something like SEO or PPC or Facebook ads or maybe you’re on TikTok now, whatever, or you have a background in YouTube, whether it’s organic YouTube or ads on YouTube, email marketing can be a background.

0:30:24
And what I, one thing I see all the time and I would make this mistake early on in my career and now definitely don’t do it. And this why I’m talking about it now, you can’t like stuff the square peg into a round hole with clients where they’re like, what can we do to, you know, open up a new marketing channel online. So my background let’s say is an SEO so I go, you got to do SEO SEO may not be the thing that they need, right. And so I had a background in SEO with content marketing and email marketing, but with these new businesses, I don’t even use them. I don’t use SEO for digital ambition. I don’t use SEO for automatic CSS. I don’t use email marketing for either of those things with those were my background. I use a thing that’s not my background YouTube because it’s the best channel for the thing, right, for what we’re doing now. And so this is a mistake that comes up all the time. I think with clients is like, well, my background is in PPC and SEO. So we’re going to try to make it work for you, even though it’s really not the best channel for you. So you have to adapt these different techniques and strategies to the actual business that’s in front of you and not say, well, this one channel should work for every business that I ever encounter. Perfect. Well, thank you very much. I think my big challenge will be to narrow down the niche and let myself be guided by where that niche is and then apply whatever suitable tactics. Yeah, you know the niche, then I think every a lot of the other questions are going to be answered for you because you’re going to know what content they need. You’re going to know how to talk to them and you’re going to know the format that they prefer to get the information in and then that as long as you listen to the answers, you’re going to be good to go. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Kevin. All right. You’re welcome. All righty. Let’s go back to the chat. See what we got going on. All right. We got the Huntsian here and Web Nestify. Sam White. Looks like a little bit of discussions going on. I think you all like to hang out with each other just as much as you like to watch the stream. Sasha says, yes, I’m definitely in the inner circle more for the how-to’s and best practices. Getting the builder stuff is just cherry on top. SEO and agency stuff is what got me to subscribe to the inner circle, not a specific builder techniques. Absolutely. Daniel says, got bricks ultimate yesterday. Any recommendations for first steps tutorials coming from oxy? That’s a big question. Shaha design. Is it Shaja? Shaha design? I don’t know. I don’t know how to pronounce it. I’ve not found any place which has so much value information as the inner circle. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So glad to hear that. There is a new training coming out right after this stream, by the way. And it is the 10 milestone. I’ll say it’s not milestones. I call them checkpoints in the video.

0:33:21
10 checkpoints for every sales conversation that you have. And the goal here is to teach you how to ditch a script and to ditch a presentation. There’s a lot of agency and freelancers out there using like slide deck presentations to try to sell their services. And if they don’t use that, they are using some sort of script on the back end. And I am an advocate of ditching the script, ditching the presentations and just have a conversation with the prospect. Just talk to the prospect. Be a human, right? Don’t put them into this presentation. Don’t force them into this script. Be a human and talk to them. Now, how do you do that without getting flustered? How do you do that without forgetting what things you need to ask? You follow these checkpoints. There are, you see the best sales people, number one, the best sales people can sell off the cuff. You put a prospect in front of them that they, it’s obviously a prospect who needs the services that they offer. But they don’t know anything about the prospect. They haven’t done any research. They haven’t done any preparation. And they can still sell like butter. Why? Because they know what the objectives of this conversation need to be. They have checkpoints that they are going to make sure that they navigate to throughout the course of this conversation. And when you have a, when you have checkpoints versus a script or a presentation, it actually allows you to respond to the prospect in real time. So prospects like to ask questions. They like to go off course, right? And a lot of times when you’re following a script, you’re following a presentation, you’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, we shouldn’t go there right now. Let’s talk about that later. And you’re like, let’s stick to the script, right? You’re trying to force them back into the presentation, force them back into the script. And prospects feel like this isn’t, this isn’t the situation they want to be in. They just want to have a conversation. They want to get their questions answered. They want to get the information they need to get. And so having checkpoints instead and just being in a free flow conversation allows you to be in tune with what the prospect is wanting and needing in the conversation. Talk to them like a human being, but still navigate back to the checkpoints so that nothing is missed and all of the really important things are covered. And in this training, it’s an hour and 20 minutes long of going through these checkpoints, checkpoint by checkpoint. And why is this a checkpoint? And exactly what do you need to make sure you get out of each specific checkpoint? What are you looking for? And how are you going to respond in one checkpoint based on what you learned in another checkpoint? And these are things that, because I do sales call coaching, we do role playing and people miss checkpoints all the time. And sometimes they hit on checkpoints, but they don’t really hit on the right parts of the checkpoint or they don’t leverage the information they get in one checkpoint in another checkpoint. And so it’s 10 checkpoints that you want to hit on every single sales call. And you’re going to know exactly why you’re hitting those checkpoints and what you need to get out of each checkpoint. And if you do this on your sales calls, you’re going to have fluid conversations that the prospect actually enjoys being in. They’re not going to feel like they’re being talked to. They’re going to feel like they’re being talked with. That’s the critical difference. And you’re going to close more deals. You’re going to have higher ticket services. It doesn’t matter if you do web design or SEO or PPC or what have you. You’re going to be able to close higher ticket clients this way.

0:36:41
And you’re going to be confident doing this with no preparation. You could go. I use the example of like there could be a board room that you’re going to talk to about the services that you need to sell. That would terrify a lot of people. I need to do all my research. I need to have a script in place. I need to know exactly what I’m going to add. No, you don’t. You don’t. These 10 checkpoints are every single sales conversation. You just cover these checkpoints. If you know what the checkpoints are, you’re going to know exactly what questions to ask. How the conversation is supposed to flow. You’re going to be able to respond to the prospect and then wrap back around without getting flustered or lost or anything else. Very, very powerful and empowering. So that is the training that’s about to get released inside of the inner circle. All right. We’re bringing on Stratos. Next and we will see what he wants to talk about. Let’s go Stratos. How you doing? Hi, Kevin. How are you? I’m doing fantastic. Give us a little info on your background. Okay, I’m coming from a computer engineering, I T, I started working with computers about 98. Helping customers and other stuff. And I start building websites back in Dreamweaver. I think that was 99. Some around there. And then I stopped and start using WordPress around 2014 again. And I am a freelance agency. I work in a freelance and in an agency free as a freelancer. As you can see, English is not my first language. That’s all right. Okay, and I try to share my knowledge from the websites I’ve built with a YouTube video channel that I also have. It’s not my main job, but I try to help people with that also. So can I talk about LTDs in my opinion since you mentioned that? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so no LTD for me. It’s not a sustainable option for products. I sell websites. Do I want to share the website with an LTD for full support, lifetime support for a client? No, I don’t. I want revenue. I want them to buy support and maybe choose what kind of support they want and how many hours they want to prepare for me in order to work. So they can establish the price and they can know how long of that hours that they have already paid that can use every month. And I think for a product, it’s better to have a major discount for the first clients that will come, maybe a better price and let’s say that the product will cost 200 bucks a year. Some clients will buy it in 100 bucks per year. They will sustain that price because they are the early adopters. They use the beta and they help that plan grow and they will keep that price, but they will pay every year. No LTDs.

0:39:29
This is my opinion. Yep. So, all right. Thank you for bringing up this topic because I mentioned I would want to get heard at some point. So, yeah, so let’s get into it. I agree with you. It doesn’t make sense in really any other capacity. It’s very difficult to find any other industry. If you have a product that just sell it and to not support no updates, nothing, okay, then go LTD. You just create once you can sell it. But if you want to go for security updates, for compatibility updates and for new features, then you have to pay. Right. And so, there’s no software product that I can think of where people don’t want updates. Right? So, it’s because when you talk about like an ebook, obviously it’s a one-time price. The ebook is not getting… You own the ebook and the ebook is the ebook forever and on going forwards. And if there’s a new version of the ebook at some point, you probably got to pay for the new version of the ebook. I think only music is that kind of stuff. You only paid once. Well, but you buy a song and you have the song forever. Yes, but the song doesn’t get updated, right? You get to listen to that song over and over again. Yeah, that’s very nice. Buying a CD. You buy a CD, it’s got the same 10 songs. When the next 10 songs come out, your CD doesn’t update. If it did, they wouldn’t have just sold it to you for 12.95 and that was the end. That’s right. That’s right. And so, we’re talking about this in the context of software, but you can compare it to really any other industry. There’s no other industry where the thing continues to improve over time, but you only paid a long time ago and you never ever pay again. If anybody has an example of where this happens in another industry, I would love to hear your example. I’ve racked my brain. I’ve tried to think of one and I can’t think of any other examples. I also can compare WordPress and building websites with other industry. I work in computers, but we don’t get so many features, so many things, so many plugins, so many. We don’t have so many programs. WordPress is a fast majority and gets so many tools right away. So they have to be paid. Yes. All right. So we’ve established that. Let’s talk about why LTV. Somebody came up with the idea of, and you froze. I don’t know if you froze for everybody or just me, but you’re back now. You’re good. I don’t know if, I don’t know exactly when LTVs came onto the scene or who established them, but let’s, we can talk about pros and cons. Pros to the person that developer. There are pros to the developer. What is your price? What is your price? I think that it is easy to sell. It sells itself. It says we’re going for a lifetime deal. Maybe only for a few days. Maybe forever. I don’t know, but with a lower price. So it’s easy to sell. You’re going fast with a majority of users that will bet a test your product and they’ll say that this is the things that you would like to be fixed. And also your name as a company will be heard a lot. People will share that because it’s an LTV.

0:42:36
They buy this. So you will have something to work with and begin with more users than just from zero. Yes. Okay. So good points. I agree with all of those. The pros also is you, you do get that money upfront. So if we’re talking about LTV, you’ve collected three years of dues upfront. And that is really beneficial to a lot of people. And they like that. And that can be very helpful in the early stages. If we look at LTVs, it’s like a crowdfunding kind of strategy. It’s like, hey, let’s get a lot of, let’s get a big influx of money. And we can use that money to aid in our initial development and marketing and things like that. And then we’re going to switch away from the LTV to a subscription model so that it’s sustainable for the rest of time. That I can see as a very viable strategy. The idea that you’re going to be able to create a software product and sell it on LTV forever and ever and ever. There aren’t always new people coming into the market. Okay. So there’s always going to be the next person to sell to. This is correct. Right. But there is a support component to this. Obviously, there’s still a work component to it. And at some point, it’s going to be disadvantageous to have the LTV to have all these users on LTVs. Right. And then you’re only relying on new money constantly. So that’s a disadvantage to the developer. I also argue that it’s a disadvantage to the consumer. And we’ve seen this in many, many different products where when the money starts to slow down, when the money starts to dry up a little bit, the developer scales back their work and their effort. Right. And so the new people and, by the way, because the developer has to go after new people, they guess what? They only compare. They only care about the opinions of the new people. The old people in the community who are like, well, we want this and this and this. They’re like, but you ain’t paying. Right. I got to go after the features. I got to put the features into this thing that all the new people are going to want. Regardless of whether you guys want them or not. So the product that you bought in LTV for may evolve in a different direction because your input is no longer valuable. It’s only the input of the new people that are being sold to because that’s where the only place to get new money. Right. So if you have subscriptions for this community, you care about what everybody thinks because everybody’s still paying. There is also a big difference between a lifetime deal for one user and life, then deal with unlimited projects. So I have built one. I think I have built 100s websites with oxygen, something like that. I have a NLTD and I have paid only once 99 bucks since I was a nearly a doctor and I have built 100 websites. If they have even lifetime deal for one website and the client didn’t have to pay anything else just one time, they will get a little bit of money.

0:45:35
But for every website and not just get 99 for all of those websites that I have paid. Correct. And this is a tool that I am using to make money. It’s not a tool that I use just for fun or a hobby. It’s a tool that I use to collect money for my client. So I would happy to get to pay oxygen just to get a better product. Right. And so there’s, I’m talking about oxygen. Not only low. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fine. It’s good. You can call people out. I don’t care. So there. Yes. So there’s a scenario. There’s a little bit of hypocrisy built into the scenario. Where people who are billing clients on an ongoing basis are demanding software that they don’t want to pay for an ongoing basis. So there’s that’s a bit of a hypocrisy. Right. If you want to buy ever and I’m talking to the people who are like I won’t buy it unless it’s LTD. All right. So there’s let me be very clear. There is nothing wrong with offering an LTD for a limited amount of time. I think it’s wrong to offer it forever. I think it’s wrong to have that as the only option because eventually it’s going to harm the people you are selling to just as much as it’s going to harm you. So it hurts both sides of the aisle in my opinion. So therefore it’s it you just shouldn’t be done. On the on the flip side of things it’s it’s very crucial for buyers to and I’m talking to the people who are I only buy this is that I see this all the time in comments and groups they’re like I won’t buy it because it’s not LTD. I won’t buy it because it’s not. I have a stand. Yeah. I want people to know it’s okay to buy an LTD if the developer is open source programs because they are free. I only use open source. Yeah. So I don’t want people to feel like it’s wrong to buy an LTD right even though I said it’s wrong to offer it long term if you’re a developer. It’s not wrong to buy it if the developer is currently offering it because you are engaging in a mutual relationship where it’s like okay they’re offering it and I like that value and I’m going to take that value. I have your life time deal. Yes. I have your product like that deal. Absolutely. So we’ve made an agreement. We’re both on the same page that the value is fine. This transaction value is fine. The problem I have is with people who say I will only buy LTDs and when a company doesn’t offer the LTD they say I won’t buy the product because it’s not LTD and here’s why those people are asking for a fundamental mismatch in value. They are demanding almost a mismatch in value and personally I don’t ever do that. I don’t want to demand a mismatch in value from somebody. I want to I want to have an equal value transition or transaction that we both agree on and that we both understand.

0:48:24
What somebody who is a company doesn’t offer an LTD and somebody is demanding the LTD they’re basically knowing that hey I want to pay you once and I want you to work for me for the rest of time for that one amount. That’s what I’m asking you to do. This is a company that’s not offering an LTD and they’re saying if you won’t do that, if you won’t work forever for the one payment that I’m going to make then I don’t want to do business with you. Well guess what? I don’t want to do business with you either because I don’t want to be in a relationship like that. I want you to recognize that if I’m going to do ongoing work you do ongoing payments. There is no other fair scenario. That is the fairest scenario. The only time the LTD is acceptable is when the developer says I’m willing to do this for you because I recognize that at this current time there are some benefits to me to doing this LTD and there are obviously benefits to you to doing the LTD. But if the developer is not comfortable doing an LTD anymore and they need subscription money money because they’re going to be doing continued work then you it’s not right to demand an LTD or to say I won’t buy these products unless it’s on LTD because you’re asking for a fundamental mismatch and value. You’re asking it would be the same as you asking or somebody asking you to do work for free on their website or anything else because they paid you once two years ago. Nobody would do that. Nobody would do that transaction. So I don’t take these people seriously and I do think they need to really sit and think about what they’re asking for and they also need to think about how this eventually does harm them. All these LTDs they have and we can talk about the oxygen LTD. Everybody who wanted to back Lewis and say, well he’s doing the right thing because he’s honoring the LTD. No, he didn’t honor the LTD. That LTD is gone. You have to understand this. You have to look through the lines that he’s setting up and you’ve got to realize that oxygen is no longer going in the direction you hoped it would go. It no longer has the community that it had because of break dance and because of the split and because of the PR and all of this he had a choice. He could make oxygen a subscription which absolutely would have worked and I don’t care how how many times he says it would not work on a subscription. It would work on a subscription. Okay, he could have done that. There are people that will complain. There are people absolutely. There are people who will understand because this is a tool. Also, I would like to be rewritten 100%. Yeah, I don’t care about backward compatibility. The sites that I have already built with version four are good to stay with the version four new websites. I would like to JS. Yes. I don’t care about backward compatibility. Re-write it so we have a good tool to work with. Correct. Okay. So everybody’s like, why get to keep my LTD? And I’m like, yeah, you get to keep your LTD. What good is it? What good is it? Because the product you have an LTD for is now dying. Right?

0:51:17
And so at the end of the day, two years from now, what value is that LTD going to have that you get to say, oh, he did the right thing. He didn’t do the right thing because you have an LTD that’s dead. That wasn’t the right thing. Obviously. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen. That’s what’s going to happen here. I don’t know if it’s going to be in a year or two years or three years, but that’s absolutely what’s going to happen. When they say we’re not rewriting it, we’re basically just maintaining it. Okay, there’s no forward thinking anymore. There’s no, it’s done. This is an industry that moves too fast, too fast. There’s too many new players. There’s too many new features. There’s too many new everything. You can’t just maintain something and then expect everybody to continue flocking to it. And this is evidence, guys. This is evidence by how they’re selling oxygen. Go to the pricing page. They’ve reduced the price of oxygen. They include breakdance when you buy oxygen. They want to push people to break dance. Oxygen’s LTD is dead. So if you thought, oh, he honored the LTD by releasing breakdance and continuing to maintain oxygen, he didn’t honor anything. He didn’t honor anything. The new builder, you could have got oxygen on a subscription. You would still have oxygen. You would have the oxygen that you want instead. What you are forced into doing is either getting bricks or getting breakdance or getting what any other builder, right? But oxygen, not the situation anymore. How can I as a developer who cares about my clients into the future? I’m not just building a site and like, good luck. Good. See, I want a relationship with my clients for years and years and years. How can I ask them to use oxygen when I don’t I no longer know the future of oxygen. In fact, I know most of the future. I know that it’s going to be maintained, but nothing’s really going to be great, you know, added to it. There’s a ton of technical debt. So this is a big point of contention that people think that they got to keep the LTD. They think that it was honored when really it wasn’t honored. They took all the resources and all the ingenuity and all the thinking and all the forward thinking and they put it into another product that is not the product you have an LTD for. And in doing so, they split the community and in doing that, they killed third party development for oxygen, which is a big part of it. I don’t care what anybody says. That was a big part of oxygen too. And without that, it’s going to be really tough. And really just the entire vibe, right? And so the community is fairly dead. And what is that’s the question I ask. What is your LTD worth now? What we could have had versus what we have now. So that’s an obvious example, right, of the LTD. And they say, hey, the LTD is profitable. The LTD is sustained.

0:53:52
Obviously not. Obviously not. Read between the lines. Once again, obviously not. So that’s my take. So it’s not fair to the developer and it’s not fair to the consumer. And the people who demand it are demanding a mismatch in value, which is not a relationship that I want to have with people. And it’s not a relationship that any of us would we just go golden rule, right? Treat people how you want to be treated. Do you want to sell your services for one price and have your clients never pay again? Then don’t demand that of other people. Now you can take the LTD if they offer it, but don’t demand it and don’t have this line that I’m not going to buy products unless they’re on LTD. That’s somebody that wants a fundamental mismatch in value. Yeah, something something the last to go. I would like to promote my channel from Indershackle because I don’t promote it in anywhere else. So I would like your permission to do that if I can. Yes. Yeah. So inside the inner circle, we have a special space where you can any creator can come in and share tips, tricks, whatever videos post. So yes, post in there. And let’s do this. What is your what is your channel name or do you have a link? I have a link. I can drop it in the drop your link in the chat to your channel. It’s a tutorial. See if you search for strategic story. And I will drop my link. We’ll get you guys some get you some exposure here. So everybody is watching head over to strad us this channel. Subscribe. Yeah, not right now after the live.

0:55:28
Yes, yes, after the live. After the live. So I’m sure you’re doing that. I am going to check on our numbers here. All right. We got good viewership today. All right. Hit me up in the chat. I want to know what yours. Yeah, go ahead. Tell me tell me. Did you post the did you post the link? No, I’m I’m going to copy that right now. I have to join YouTube to do that. Oh, yeah, you’re still on the green room. I would be. Yeah, I can do that from green room. Okay, I’ll let you go. You can pop that in and we’ll get some people over there. Yes, only watch after the live stream. Thanks for having me. Yes. Thank you so much for coming in. Bye, bye. All right. Hit me up in the chat. L.T.D. talk. I went off script with the L.T.D. talk. I had a little bullet points, but strad us got me fired up. So you got to off the cuff L.T.D. answer. Mm-hmm. To be fair, there was also a normal price for the ACSS L.T.D. of $2.49. Obviously, this price was also just imaginary. Okay. I’m not following that part of the conversation. Mm. Yeah, hit me up with I love this rant right now. Kevin is spitting the truth.

0:56:48
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the side of it that people don’t think about. They don’t realize that it harms them as a consumer to have all of these L.T.D. licenses. I can’t tell you how many L.T.D. licenses I see people talk about that the product doesn’t even exist anymore. And in that case, by the way, the developer got you, my friend. They got you. They got three years of your money up front. And then you don’t have you didn’t even get three years out of the product. So they got you in that scenario. So that’s the thing, right? It’s the L.T.D. model works as a initial crowdfunding where I as a developer say, I’m going to give you a tremendous lopsided value because I’m playing on being here for the next 20 years, potentially. And so you’re going to pay, let’s say, $2.99, which is maybe three years worth of what the subscription is. So you’re going to give me three years up front. But if my plan actually works and I’m here for 10 years, you’re going to get seven years of value. Maybe we’ll say 10 years is the cutoff. We go do something else after 10 years. So you get seven years of value. Now I’m okay with that because I need a good influx now to do what I need to do with this product, to add to it, to market it properly. And so I’m going to offer you seven years of value because I also know you’re taking a risk on me. You’re taking a risk because I could get this three years of revenue from you right now up front. And then this thing fails in a year and you lose two years of what you paid for. That is a risk to the consumer. So there’s a relationship where we’re saying, all right, there’s risk to me for creating the software. And I want to be here for a long time, but I need more money now to get this thing off the ground.

0:58:45
So you’re going to take a risk. I’m taking a risk. We’re just going to do this together. And we’re going to trust each other. And you get the hopefully you’ll end up getting the value. But I know I’m going to be able to switch to the subscription model at some point. And all the new people coming in are going to pay a fair relationship. And that’s the key, right? When a tool is now established. And there is no risk anymore. It’s like, well, we know this tool exists and that it works and that people like it and people use it. And it’s going to be here for a year after year after year, right? Then why are we still doing an LCD thing? There’s no, there’s no more wondering like is this thing going to be around? We know it’s going to be around. And we know it’s going to be around and we know it’s constantly under development, which means the developer is constantly doing work. And so there should be constantly people paying the same subscription rate. So that’s that’s that’s the thing. And if you’re in that situation and you’re like, well, what I’d really like though, even though you’re you’ve established this thing, I recognize all the hard work you’ve done up to this point. I recognize that the people who bought early on were taking a risk. I’m not having to take that risk anymore because this thing is obviously well established. But I’d still like you to just continue working for free. I’d still like to just pay you once and you just keep doing the ongoing work. And I’ll just extract an insane amount of value. And yeah, that’s the relationship we should have. That’s what people are saying when they’re like, I won’t only buy it if it’s LCD. That’s the relationship that they want to have with the developer. So I’m just not about that kind of relationship. And I can’t be a hypocrite because I wouldn’t I wouldn’t agree to that for any client that I have for web designer SEO or PPC or anything else. So why would I agree to it in a software scenario?

1:00:26
All right, let’s go ahead and bring on. We’ve got Rubin. We’ve got Ronnie. We’ve got Josh in the green room. Rubin is next. Let me bring him in. So Rubin, tell us your background. Yeah, I started off in IT doing mostly residential computer repairs, but also for some businesses. And one day a customer asked me to build a website. So that’s like I got into the web development. And that was about 10 years ago. And definitely started off off as a pixel pusher, but then probably about five years ago read Donald Miller’s book about building a story brand. And really got into that and developed some tools for being more than just a developer with being someone that can lay out and write copy for a web page. And obviously I’ve learned a ton from the inner circle. I love following best practices. I love things that are sustainable and scalable. So really appreciate what you’ve done there. Yeah, we need more of that. We need more of that. Yes, what we’re trying to elevate the industry. And that is that’s a good thing. Yeah, so my question is about PPC campaigns. I know it’s I think it’s standard to charge a percentage of ad spend. I don’t like that idea because it feels like it’s kind of a, I don’t know, taking money under the table from the client. I just like to tell them, hey, this is what you’re paying Google. And this is what you’re paying me to manage your ads. Yeah, what do you do and what are your thoughts on that? I had the exact same thought in the beginning. And it was it was it was mainly when I was serving smaller PPC clients. And I yeah, I felt exactly the same way. I was like, hmm, percentage of revenue thing. I just I just don’t know, especially because it’s like, you know, a smaller PPC client is having to like, you know, this is a significant investment to them in a lot of cases, you know, to put out a thousand, two thousand dollars a month in digital advertising for maybe a solo per newer local business. And then it’s like, and then you got to add 20% on top of that for me versus just a flat rate. And so there’s they’re kind of really trying to control costs. And if it’s a percentage, you know, we need to increase ad spend for whatever reason. Well, that increases my fee. Obviously, then there’s the idea of like, are you just having me increase the ad spend because you want more fees, you know, there’s that situation, even though, you know, Google in the dashboard is basically telling us, hey, your campaign is hindered by the budget, right? You need more budget to make this campaign more successful. We relay that message to the client, but the clients like, well, you just telling me that because you want more, you know, fees.

1:03:04
So it does kind of create that situation. But then when I started managing bigger PPC accounts and we’re talking about, you know, one of my clients was a hundred thousand a month. Okay. So this is a client that, you know, obviously, the money, they have the money. It’s not one person’s money. It’s a lot of people’s money, right? It’s the company’s money. So there’s less, you know, that personal nature attached to like, oh, you’re spending my money, you know, now the people who are helping manages and dictating kind of what we’re doing with the campaign, they’re not writing the checks, they’re, you know, the money isn’t theirs. So, you know, they’re just interested in what are the results? And what I found though is even though it’s not their money, it’s a lot of money. And companies don’t like to just, you know, willy nilly throw out a lot of money. And so as the spend increases, the care does increase a lot. And your attention on the campaign has to increase a lot because if you go, let’s say there’s this one person who’s like a thousand dollars a month, okay? Which I get it for that person feels very, very, very significant. But if I go four days without optimizing the campaign, they haven’t lost a lot of money. There’s not a lot going on there. There’s not a lot of, you know, oh, you didn’t optimize it. And so I’m out a gazillion dollars, right? But if it’s a hundred thousand dollars a month, you got to pay attention, like really close attention. You got to give that campaign a lot of love, all right? And so in that situation, it makes sense that, hey, as this cost increases, the spend increases, the amount of love I got to give this campaign is increasing too. And that’s where the percentage really comes in and makes a lot of sense because my fee has to go up as your ad spend goes up because I got to care a whole lot more about what’s going on inside this account. Yeah, that does make sense. Do you break that out for the client where they can see how much how much of the cost or charges going towards Google or Facebook or whoever versus what what you’re charging for the management. Yeah, well, it’s obvious to them because I don’t take their I don’t the money doesn’t run through me. The ad spend goes directly to Google, right? And then we run the report at the end and it says, all right, here’s how much you spent this month. Based on that, this is the fee. They already know the percentage up front, right? But it’s all completely separate. Because I know with some reporting, like agency analytics, you can do a markup in Google ads to kind of help cover that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:05:34
So you use the client pays, pays Google directly. You don’t run that. That was one of the things that drove me nuts too because I watched your video about profit first and that is kind of messed up those metrics to have a ton of ad spend that was just being. It wasn’t actually, you know, it was just, yeah, invested my profit first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would not, yeah, I do not recommend running their ad spend through your company. Definitely don’t recommend that. You just don’t want to be involved in it. There’s no reason to be involved in it in my experience for the companies that do it. Like you said, they do a markup, right? It’s like you run the ads and through me. I mark it up. And then it’s just another fee for like what appears to me to be for no reason or benefit. But it’s also a risk, you know, to the agency. You know, there’s a lot of cash flow running through for various things. So I just don’t see why that risk would be necessary, even if you can mark it up, I wouldn’t even know why you would want to market it. The situation doesn’t need to be happening. And so like why do it? But yeah, it’s what I do do, which I do think is important is it’s unfair for the agency to take the ad spend and the conversions and do the calculations on that and kind of leave their fee out of those numbers. You know, the client really needs to know what did it cost me for a lead not just on my ad spend, but for your fee too. And so we do help them calculate that and put that in our reports. Okay. And then what I mean, do you mind sharing what your your fee your percentage fee is? So I have a breakdown based on tiers. So it’s depends on their ad spend and the percent as their ad spend goes up, the percentage goes down. Right, but the total that they’re paying is going up. So what I’ll do, see I can do this, right, because this is a good technique.

1:07:26
I’ll put the breakdown in the inner circle. So anybody that’s in the inner circle can go and get the tiers. Awesome. And then what I did is I made a bottom tier, which is just a flat fee. So and what this does is it kind of excludes smaller clients to a degree. Because if my minimum fee, because there’s there’s a minimum amount of work that has to go into setting up the account and managing the campaigns. But if they’re only spending $500 a month, see I need at least $500 a month to do management for a client. But if they’re only spending $500 a month, that’s their whole budget for ads. It’s like what’s going to be very hard to make this make sense, right? So there is a like a minimum. The $500 is the minimum. That’s up to like $2,500 in ad spend. Now after that, it kicks into an actual percentage. Okay. And I do have one other question, then. What do you, it is about PPC. Do you, what do you set as a minimum you would spend, you would pay to Google for a campaign? Or is it based more on how many clicks you can get or how many impressions you can get?

1:08:29
I run the forecast just to see what’s what’s going to happen. And I tell the client like this is what we can expect at this level, right? And depending on if it’s their only campaign, like there’s absolutely going to be a minimum, right? If it’s a new campaign that we’re tacking on, it just needs to be enough for me to get good data on. And for us to like test out the campaign and see how well it’s going to work and things like that. But you know, if it’s a new client starting out and we’re just starting with one campaign, then there’s an absolute minimum. And it’s going to be based on the forecast that we run. Because in some niches like roofing for example, you know, if you’re like, oh, I have $15 a month, oh, I have $15 a day. Well, okay, like I’ll talk to you in six months when we have a little bit of data. You know, you need a substantial budget in some industries to even get started. So it’s just based on the forecast really. And then if they’re like, well, we can’t do that. Well, the PPC is not a good fit for you. Okay. So you look at the forecast and you have kind of a benchmark of 100 clicks before you would say that’s reliable data. Or at what point would you say that’s reliable? It’s actually going to be on the number of conversions, right?

1:09:37
So like, you know, I don’t really care about the number of clicks. If you get a gazillion clicks and there’s still zero conversions, you know, what have we done here, right? So, you know, when I get to like 25, 50 conversions somewhere in there, I can pretty, I can get a good sense of how the landing page is performing, how the ads are performing, kind of the whole, how the whole funnel is performing. Because then I also look on the back end of like, all right, what happened to those conversions? So do those leads, you know, usually it’s for a lead, right? Well, you can’t, I tell clients this all the time, like you can’t pay your rent and leads. So what happened to those leads? Did they convert to a sale? And what we’ve been doing lately, the process that I’m really liking right now, and this has taken a little bit of the technical aspect out of it. So for example, some clients, the large client was on Salesforce, right? So when we built the analytics dashboard, we had the leads going into Salesforce and they were tagged with UTMs from Google Ads, and then inside of Salesforce, those UTMs would go into Custom Fields, and then we pulled the data from Custom Fields out of Salesforce into agency analytics.

1:10:39
So you could track in agency analytics the same person from a lead to a actual contract, right? So that would report on the dashboard. But some people use different systems that don’t have that capability, right? So what we’ve done lately is it’s UTMs into, and we use WS Form, and so WS Form, and we have a little script on the website that takes the UTM parameters and puts them in the user’s session data. And so when somebody fills out a form on the site, WS Form accesses that session data, pulls that UTM values into the form submission, sends it off in the email, right? But it also takes that and sends it into a Google sheet. So what we end up with is a Google sheet of only, and you can use conditional logic in WS Form. And guys, I talk about WS Form all the time, and people are like, oh, I use this, I use that. They don’t understand why WS Form is the best form system. I’m like, because when you do really technical stuff like this, you start to run into problems with other form systems, right? But WS Form will use conditional logic to say, do they have UTM parameters in their session data?

1:11:41
If they don’t, the lead doesn’t go off to Google Sheets. The lead only goes into Google Sheets if they have UTM data in their session data, right? So what we have is a spreadsheet of only Google leads ads. And the spreadsheet tells us what campaign they came from, what source, what medium. And then what I have the client do is the client just does a review every week or so. It depends on how many leads they’re getting, like what the volume of the account is. If it’s a very small client, they’ll just do it every month. If it’s a large client, they’ll do it every couple days, you know? But they go in and they just cross reference with their CRM. They look up each person, and they’re like, do that person become a client? And they take a little box that says yes. And then that Google Sheet data actually gets reported back into agency analytics. And it’ll count to the number of actual contracts or clients that they got. So that we’re reporting clients and not just reporting leads. Wow, yeah, I love that.

1:12:36
I actually tried to set up something similar, and they got stuck with getting the UTM from the cookie. Yeah, but am I asked about that in the inner circle? Yes, I believe if we haven’t posted it yet, we are planning on posting it. So because my team helps with the technical aspect of setting all of that up. And so what I was getting from them is we need to write up on exactly how to make this work, right? Especially with WS form because so many people in the inner circle use WS form. And so we’re going to publish that that right up. Yeah, that would be awesome. Cool, cool. All right, anything else? I think that’s it. Yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming in. All right, let’s see. Anytime you want to talk live about agencies and WordPress, send me a message. Perfect. That was Stratos again.

1:13:30
Any insight into how Webflow, Squarespace, etc. jumps major backward breaking updates with live customers? I’m not quite sure what you mean. Kevin says in Denmark, almost everyone do fixed fees. Companies won’t pay percentage. Yeah, it could very well be a location thing too. You know, if you find yourself in a specific location and that’s the norm in that location, it may be hard to deviate from that norm. I was just explaining why the percentage makes sense for larger accounts. Haven’t seen any UK places doing percentages either unless it’s those people that don’t put a price on their website. Some some people do a base fee and then a smaller percentage too. So you don’t have to do like either a base fee or a percentage. You can do a combination, right? You have a small base fee and a small percentage. But it does. If you think about the logic, it makes sense to be percentage based for larger accounts and as accounts grow. What’s up cracker? Design where crack is here?

1:14:34
Love it man. He says finally caught the live session. Good vibes. All right. So we are going to, and if you guys are not subscribed to cracker’s channel, go ahead and design with cracker C-R-A-C-K-A. Go ahead and hop over there and hit the subscribe button for him. All right, let’s bring on. It looks like Ronnie is going to be next. Let me see if I can get Ronnie in here. What’s up Ronnie? Yeah, that’s me. Awesome, awesome. Give us your backgrounds. Yeah, I’m running a small agency since 12 years. It was just started as a site business. Okay, so I’m just doing websites for nonprofits and so on. So I’m not in that area where normal agencies are running and running. Yeah, let’s say actually I like to make the next step to become serious, serious agency. So I have my own web designer, I have a motion designer, and so on. So we are working together.

1:15:40
And so I was in love with oxygen and I need, I had a lot of work the last month. So yeah, and then I need a quick overview from you about, is it better to switch to bricks now for the future or stick with the stick with oxygen? How many sites do you have on oxygen? Actually, I have, so with, with, with, with SPPs. So like, so that makes service contracts 20. Okay. And how many sites do you build? Let’s say a month or every couple months. Like new contracts. So when I, when I, when I switch to full time agency, I think five to six. Okay. And do you have a team or is it just you? No, we are, we are a team of three. I have, so you mean, you mean what development? Yeah, really on the development side of things. No, no, it’s just me.

1:17:03
Okay. So if it’s just you, it’s a little bit easier, right? Because you’re able to switch back and forth. I mean, have you used bricks at all yet? No. Okay. The good thing about bricks, I’ll tell, I’ll tell you guys the good thing about bricks. And you guys actually saw me make the transition to bricks live. I mean, I, I did a literal live stream of my first interaction with bricks. And then I built one site with it. And after I built one site with it, it was done. I mean, it was, it was easy, right? It’s a very easy transition to switch from oxygen to bricks. Because the philosophy of building the website is exactly the same. Now it was a little bit more difficult in the beginning, because it was like we didn’t have a clean div. We didn’t have some things that we needed, right? Some building blocks. But we requested those things, those things were added. And now you can just switch from one to the other with basically no learning curve, I think. Yes, things are going to be in a different spot inside the builder panel. Okay, that’s, that’s, I don’t consider that to be a learning curve, right?

1:18:02
It’s just, you’re not learning how to build a website in this tool. You’re just learning where the buttons are that you need to click. So it’s very, very, very easy. It’s, it’s only difficult. It’s more difficult if you really relied on oxygen to do a lot of certain things for you, right? If you use classes and you use divs to build things, like if you were using, for example, the pre-made elements in oxygen for a lot of stuff, okay? You may not find those pre-made elements in bricks or they may behave very differently. And now suddenly you have a bit more of a learning curve. But if you’re, if you’ve been like watching my trainings and it’s like, okay, I need to build a price card, I use divs and classes and I build my price card. You can do that in oxygen, the exact same way you can do in bricks. There is no learning curve between the two because you’re not relying on like pre-made things that are different inside the builders. The repeater in bricks is called a query loop.

1:18:52
It behaves a little bit differently, but there’s really not a learning curve there. It’s the same types of queries, the same type of data, the same concept of using custom post-types and custom fields. It happens to be easier in bricks. It happens to be more powerful in bricks, but there’s really not a learning curve there. So I would say you’re going to be able to get comfortable with bricks in a week. You build one site, you build half a site, you build a few pages in bricks, and you’re going to be comfortable inside of bricks. If that’s how you build things, right? If you use divs and classes, you’re going to be very comfortable. And so you’re going to be able to hop back and forth between bricks and oxygen. So your service-based clients that are on contracts for just service, you’ll be able to go into oxygen and do this stuff there like you’ve always done it. And then on the new clients, you’ll be able to service them in bricks just fine. And there’s not going to be a huge issue. The issue I see comes in when you have a team of people who are doing a lot of the development for you, right?

1:19:48
So in our agency, I do a lot of the strategy, the UX design, and then I hand off a lot of the development side of things. You need your team to know bricks and in no oxygen, right? And so there’s going to be, the more people are involved, the longer that runway is going to be to getting them to transition over to bricks. And it’s a riskier transition to take because if something happens to bricks now, I mean, we don’t know, we can’t predict the future. I like the development team, I like the products, but none of us have a crystal ball. So there is always a risk in any tool that you choose. And by the way, that’s an argument that people will make about, well, you should do Gutenberg because, or full-side editing, because that’s native to WordPress. But what they don’t realize in their argument is they’re using third-party tools, typically, to still do that, you know, like generate press or whatever.

1:20:39
Generate press could go away, just like bricks could go away. So again, it’s not inherently safer to do that. But yeah, I would say it’s going to be an easy transition for you as a one-man person doing development. It’s not going to be a big deal at all. Okay, I would make the transition, and I would say I would make the transition, because I made the transition. So I’m just giving you the same answer I gave myself. But what about the little helpers like Oxie Hextpress to do nice looking accordions and so on? So is it already inside bricks or? Yes. To a degree. I mean, so there’s bricks extras. So the company that makes Oxie extras makes bricks extras. Bricks extras doesn’t have quite as many things. So it doesn’t have the mega-menu builder yet. I haven’t really studied it.

1:21:33
So to be honest, I haven’t had to use bricks extras yet. I haven’t installed. I haven’t had to use it yet. So the accordions are taking care of inside of bricks. That’s native to bricks. And the accordion supports dynamic content natively inside of bricks. There’s a carousel. I was using Oxie Hextress primarily for their carousel and dynamic content in the carousel. That’s native inside of bricks. Now, it’s not as good, right? But it’s there. And I don’t think bricks extras has a carousel yet. But I was able to create the carousel I needed. I needed a little bit more customization in terms of custom CSS to get it done. But I was able to create a dynamic carousel in bricks natively. So a lot of that stuff is going to be there. One thing you will notice is you need less plugins.

1:22:17
You need less add-ons to use bricks than you did with Oxygen. Okay. And you talked about the LCD problem for Oxygen. So that you just pay once $99 and can do unlimited sides. But bricks have the LCD do. Don’t you think they will run into the same problem like Oxida? I think they will eventually run into the same problem. But I’ve also heard Thomas comment on the fact that there is a plan as far as I read correctly to move to a subscription at some point. Now, the LCD may still be available, but there’s going to be a subscription model. And you can see this with something like Divi where Divis have an LTD like forever. But they also have a subscription model and they have tons of people on subscription. So they’re kind of using both methods to survive and to grow. And we could get into another conversation about that as a strategy. I’ll tell you it’s a lot safer of a strategy than only offering an LTD. And so I do hope that bricks introduces a subscription very soon. It’s getting to the point where let’s be honest.

1:23:31
Bricks 1.5.6 or whatever we’re on is better than Oxygen 4.0. So you have a 1.5.6 product that’s better than a 4.0 product. And I think that’s fairly objective at this point. It’s not just how I feel. It’s not just because I don’t like Lewis. It’s not it’s legitimate. Okay. And so it’s time. It’s time that they start to think about introducing a subscription. And if they want to keep the LTD at this much higher price, fine. Whatever. But I think it’s time to introduce a subscription. Okay. Perfect. And just the last question. There is a user in our forum, digital ambition, so a Tahunzi, who posted today that the bricks forged will end today so that you can buy it.

1:24:16
And do you know this tool? And do you recommend it or? I’ve heard of the tool. I’ve never used the tool. I don’t have any comments on the tool because I’ve never used it. I try not to comment on things that I’ve never used or at least, you know, have seen in use. I do have a tendency to try to limit add-ons as much as I possibly can, just for scalability and maintainability purposes. And again, because what is the track record of these tools? Right? So there’s a lot of tools coming out of the woodwork and it’s like, we know that a lot of them are not going to be here in a few months. And so if all my sites running on these tools that aren’t going to be here in a few months, that can become a problem, right? And people, when I release automatic CSS, a lot of people initially argued that, well, we don’t know if this guy is going to be around for a while.

1:25:08
And they were 100% right. They were 100% right to make that as their argument. And that’s why the LTD made sense in the early stages. I’ll gamble on you. If you gamble on me, that’s our deal. And we’re going to move forward from there. And so enough people took the gamble and then here I am. Still here, right? And we know we’re going to be here for a long, long, long time to come, because it’s consistently funded. So we don’t know this about these other tools. And, you know, we have to think about, we don’t know anything about the developer necessarily. They’re business acumen, they’re marketing acumen. I mean, these are, you can’t just look at the quality of the tool itself. You have to look at who’s leading the tool, where’s the tool going to go, how long is the tool going to be around, all of these things become factors in the decision to adopt a brand new tool.

1:25:52
So I, right now, especially if it’s a tool that’s like a quality of life improvement for the builder, which I think that’s what Bricksforge is. You know, it adds features to the actual builder. For one, I mean, I don’t know if Bricks could easily adopt a lot of those things. I don’t know. There’s a lot of things that could happen. And so, to me, it’s just, I don’t have a problem with the way Bricks works out of the box. So I don’t necessarily feel like I need more enhancements. Now, again, I haven’t used it, so maybe I would use it and then be like, okay, I can’t live without this thing. But, at the current time, I’m just not in a position. So here’s what they’re going to have to do, if you’re Bricksforge. You’ve got to create videos, you’ve got to create content, you’ve got to do something to influence me out of the position I’m currently in. I’ve got to see it and be like, ooh, okay, all right, I get it now.

1:26:43
And then I’ll go test it out and buy it and maybe adopt it, right? But at the current time, I don’t… Marketing is you put… Somebody who has a problem, you put a solution in front of them at the right time for the right price. That’s basic marketing. Okay, I don’t feel I have a problem right now with Bricks. So, hard for me to buy something, right? But if I don’t feel like… Why would I buy a solution that I don’t feel like I have a problem that it’s going to solve? So, that’s where we’re at with that. Okay, thanks a lot for having me and thanks a lot for your great tools like ACSS and so on. It tells me a lot of time and a lot of pain, okay, because I hate it, tailwind, you know? Yeah. And, yes, stick on what you’re doing and stay safe. Thank you so much.

1:27:26
I appreciate it. Thanks for being on too. All right, guys, I want to say something else about LCDs real quick. I mean, you guys got me a fire with this thing. So, there is another way that the LCD developer takes advantage of you. Pay attention to this, because I talked a lot about people taking advantage of developers. But there is a way that LCD developers take advantage of you. And it’s because they know that they’re going to make a lot of money from people who never use their product. That’s how they’re taking advantage of you. Because you buy an LCD because you’re like, I’m buying this for the potential future functionality that I have been doing. And I may decide at one point in time in the future I may decide I want to use. That’s like the thought process of many people that buy LCDs. And you see this in LCDs ending. Oh, well, I may use that in the future. So, I better grab this LCD now and they know you’re going to buy it.

1:28:18
And you’re going to pay them three years of a subscription effectively. Let’s be honest, this is what it is. You’re just up front paying for like three years of a subscription. And they know it’s going to sit in your Google Drive somewhere never to be used ever. You don’t ever have to respond to a support request. They don’t ever have to hear your feedback. They don’t ever have to do anything. And I personally hated that fact about when I did the LCD for automatic CSS. I did it on Black Friday. And I’m going to do another Black Friday promotion for frames. I don’t know what the promotion is going to be yet, but there’s going to be. It’s frames is coming out officially on Black Friday. You heard it here first because everybody’s been asking. Here’s what I hated about doing the LCD for automatic CSS. Lots of people bought the LCD.

1:29:04
And then I was like, I need your feedback. And the same thing happened a little bit with frames as well. I was like, hey, hey, I need you to actually use the thing that you bought. Please, please use it so you can give me feedback so I can make it better. I wanted that to happen. And of course, there was lots and lots of people who did. And I’m thankful for them. And they used it and we got the feedback and we made the thing better. But there were a lot of people. I didn’t want to sell it to anybody who wasn’t actually going to use it. I’m like, you’ve got to use it. Use the thing that you paid for, please. But developers, a lot of LCD developers, they don’t care whether you use it or not. They just want your money. And so they’re perfectly fine selling LCDs to people who they know will never use this product, especially when they use stupid like counters, like this is why I had to stop with the thrife card thing.

1:29:48
I love to thrife card in the beginning. I’m just going to throw everybody under the bus today. I love thrife card in the beginning. I recommended it to everybody. I thought it was an amazing tool. The developer of thrife card has very similar personality issues to the developer of oxygen, so fly. And you can see the marketing tactics, my friends. I’m going to do it for you. I’m going to do it for you. We’re going to screen share. Okay. Here we go. I’m going to show you this right here. Guys, this fucking special offer right here. Current special offer guarantee for a minimum of five days, 15 hours, 28 minutes, and 55 seconds. That shit has been ticking down for seven years. Okay.

1:30:35
Get my lifetime account, right? Yeah. Get your lifetime account before it goes away. It’s never gone away. And actually, what pissed me off even more. Oh, you guys are getting me really fired up. What pissed me off even more is I was an affiliate for thrife card. And I, like, my audience needs to trust me. Okay. And a long time ago, it was a different audience. I was like, they told us. They told affiliates. Hey, that lifetime deal is ending. Let your audience know that the LTD is going away. I let people know that the LTD was going away. A lot of people put money. That was fucking three years ago.

1:31:12
And that timer is still ticking down. They lied to us. They lied to their affiliates. So that kind of stuff absolutely pisses me off. And LTD developers do this kind of shit all the time. All these shenanigans is marketing nonsense. You can’t do this stuff to people. You cannot do this stuff and have legitimate products and have any longevity in the industry. So that’s another way that LTD developers are. And I bet you, I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s thousands of people have paid for that thrife card LTD and probably do not use thrife card anymore. And by the way, the development has slowed down to an absolute crawl.

1:31:52
All you get from thrife card is empty promises. They even purchased another thing that I used. I came and figured the name because I’m so fired up. They purchased it and basically killed it. It was an amazing thing. They bought it out and have done absolutely nothing with it. That was on LTD as well. This kind of shit happens all the time to these LTD products. And people only want to look at the LTD products that are still around. As soon as an LTD product dies and goes away, oh, suddenly we don’t learn from that situation anymore. Let’s just on to the next one. Look at the graveyard of LTD products that have failed and that are gone, that your license, yeah, you still have a license to what?

1:32:30
You have license to thin air. It’s not there anymore. Or it’s just a dead abandoned wear product. So what is your LTD worth? All right, I’m moving on. We got to get to our last guess. We’ve got Alicia in the green room. I’m going to bring her on. Let’s go. Alicia. Hey, how’s it going? Good. I’ve got to get my blood pressure down. Go ahead and talk. Cool.

1:32:52
Yeah, I think it was a, was it convert box? Was it a company buyout? Yep. Yeah, my blood pressure went back up. You’re welcome. Cool. So my little background kind of did websites on the side just for fun. When I was a teenager, using themes and stuff. And then found Divi. That was kind of the first, my first page builder experience. Yep. And it just got worse and worse and moved to oxygen and now using bricks. So it started my agency about two years ago. Beginning of 2020, we’re a good time to start up a business. Yeah, perfect time.

1:33:30
But yeah, so I’ve just kind of been doing it slowly. Had a baby at the beginning of this year. So I really haven’t been doing any projects just kind of working on rebuilding my website, working with current clients. And then that’s kind of mostly all I’ve been doing. I haven’t been doing any marketing or taking on any of the projects yet. So. Yep. So what’s your topic today? So I wanted to ask you about kind of your proposal process. I know you’ve kind of shared some of that in the inner circle. The, the, your template you shared that. Yeah. But I was going to see. So what I typically do is I do like the strategy calls 30 minutes, kind of run through all stuff, ask more of the questions, let them know, hey, I’m going to put a proposal together for you.

1:34:16
And what I’ve been doing in the past most of the time is I’ll get them to try and, I’ll try and get them to schedule another meeting to go through that proposal with them. Yeah. To cover a lot of like the technical jargon and be just face to face with them. If they have questions, I was curious like once you send off the proposal or like what’s your process when you send that do you send it immediately? Do you wait till they schedule something? Do you not do any meetings? You know, it’s kind of curious. Yeah. So. If it’s a big project, the likelihood that there has to be another call is greater. And especially more people have to be involved in the process. If it’s a kind of a person that I’ve been talking to is the decision maker, then I don’t think you have to get on another call most of the time. Because you’ve already gone through pretty much every if you’ve done the actual discovery call correctly, right? We’ve hit all of our 10 checkpoints and then I based a proposal on what we extracted from those checkpoints.

1:35:17
And we already talked about price, which is one of the checkpoints. Then I send a proposal, it matches the price we discussed in the call. There’s really not a lot of additional questions they already know what the process is, the proposal is very detailed. It’s got a statement of work. So. And the way that I send it, I recommend sending, I use Panda Doc. You can use any eSign software, right? But send your proposal, it’s a little golden nugget for everybody. Send your proposal with eSign software. And there’s a little spot on the bottom that they have to eSign if they want to accept their proposal. And this is not a contract. And it says this is not a contract. It just says, hey, if you want to green light this, go ahead and eSign it. And when you send it within an eSign kind of context, people just feel like I got to do something with the eSign. It’s not like just an email that was sent to me with a PDF.

1:36:01
It’s asking me to do something. So it’s asking them to make a decision. Basically, hey, green light this, you got to eSign it. And so they’ll eSign it. And as soon as that eSign comes through, I’m like, alright, we’re good to go. And so we got the green light. And then we send the contract and then we send the first invoice, whatever that happens to be. And so that’s how it would work for the vast majority of clients. The larger clients that you get, you’re going to send off the proposal. And then it’s going to be like, well, Sue in marketing has a question and da da da da da. And so now we’ve got to all come back together and have a powwow. And now we go over the proposal together. And then usually decision is made after that. That would be for a larger company. Now there’s been a couple of times with larger companies where I did send off the proposal.

1:36:41
And they have little internal discussions, you know, with whoever I talk to. That person answers the questions that other people have. And then the decision is made. So that can absolutely be the case too. But I wouldn’t try, I wouldn’t attempt to get on other calls unless it’s necessary, just because it’s going to take up a lot more of your time. And usually it’s just not necessary to do it. Yeah. What’s your typical turnaround time from the time you send it till they sign it or respond? Or how long do you wait until you respond again in the morning? Yeah, good question. Most close within a week. And a week is the amount of time that I give them before I reach back out. But it also depends on how I reach back out depends on if I know if they are looking at other offers or not. So there’s some people that will tell me that this will happen with larger clients.

1:37:32
Some larger clients are mandated to get multiple offers. Like, you know, somebody in marketing is going to try to commission a project. They’re not allowed to just move forward with the first person they come across. They have to get like three bids and then there’s a discussion about that. So yeah, that’s, it’s a week I reach out. And then if it’s somebody that’s getting multiple bids, I just ask them how that process is going. And I just kind of want to touch base. I’m not like, did you make a decision on mine? Right? I just ask them how the process is going. And then I also offer to give them any feedback or consulting on, because what will often happen is they’ll get bids from other companies. And those bids say different things like we would want to use WordPress. This person might be like, well, you should be on web flow or whatever. Or there may be like confusion on what pages are actually needed or what the strategy is. So I’ll just reach back out and say, hey, how’s it going?

1:38:23
If you have any questions about other bids that you’re getting, maybe technical stuff that you aren’t sure about. Happy to jump on another call and walk through all that stuff for you. And then what happens a lot of times because I’m willing to do that. And I make the offer to do that is they get bid from somebody else. They have questions about it. They get on a call with me. And I get to decipher, like translate, is why you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that. And why you should probably do this instead. Yeah. That’s smart. Yeah. So, you know, what you want the principle is just to touch base. Keep in contact. Build a relationship with the person. Be a human being.

1:38:59
Don’t be like, oh, we got a bid from a company. And it’s like, well, who do we talk to? Like they know me, right? And they know who to reach out to. And I’m not, you know, like in their face, like make a decision, make a decision. You know, I’m just like, hey, you know, I’m around if you guys have any questions. Let me know if not. And then the biggest principle of all, because you got to follow this in every message you send, is positive indifference. Right? Hey, I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to help you out. But if we don’t end up working together, that’s cool too. And so, you know, they know they can trust me and I’m not badgering them to get their business. Yeah. Sounds good, thanks.

1:39:33
All right. You’re welcome. Thanks for coming in. All right. Cool, cool, cool. So, we’ve gone an hour and 40 minutes. What we’re going to do here is we have no more people in the green room. In fact, I’m going to turn the green room off at this point. And I will open the floor in the comment section if you have a quick question or topic that you want me to hit on for the last five minutes or so here. I will do that. And I’m going to stroll through. Ooh, Jan says it’s hot in here. Yes, it is. A little bit.

1:40:11
We’ve woken the hive. Convert, yes. Convert box. Was it, Waji? Mm-hmm-hmm. Cynthia says, love seeing people from the IC live. I think I got ripped off with a lifetime deal on micro-thema. Stupidly paid attention to the sale and I’ve hardly used it. Absolutely. They, and a lot of them, bank on that. They bank on you not using it because they have your money and they never have to respond to a single support request ever. New show proposal. Truth bombs with Kevin could even be a good idea for YouTube shorts for this channel. Yes. And it’s a good idea, Justin.

1:40:49
I need someone to make the shorts for me to edit these splices videos up. Put some effects on it, you know, like zoom in on me when I’m freaking out. That would be good. After you mentioned Thrive Card, this website was exactly wide and buy it. It looks like a JVZoo product. Yes. Absolutely right. I hate slimy marketing and so many coaches, et cetera, use this kind of practices. Yep. They do. Same white says, I like fired up Kevin. Daniel says, this is bullshit. This is not even legal in Germany. What are you talking about the timer on the LCD? I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about.

1:41:26
All right. Let’s see. Talk about website as a service, please. Okay. All right. That would be more than five minutes. I may do it though. Let’s see. Are you excited about the new Elementor repeater? I’m not excited about anything Elementor is doing at the moment. Is the green room inside the inner circle? Yes. Yeah. You go into the inside the inner circle. Every event that’s posted here for the digital agency table talk has a link inside it to get into the green room.

1:41:53
And I’ll put the link up on the screen. There’s the inner circle link to join the inner circle. If you’re not a member. All right. Let’s go ahead and you don’t want to build an Land You Do Not Own. My question is, what’s the difference between having a WordPress site relying on a page builder? May it be oxygen or bricks? So it’s not the same as building on Land You Don’t Own. Because you control the server, you control the fundamental CMS is open source. And so your data is in a CMS that is not really dependent on anybody or any one thing. The front end, the page builder is the interface for actually building the pages. But it’s not the interface for your content necessarily. Especially if you use things like custom post types. If you use custom fields, the fact that you have pages in posts. That’s really where the content lives.

1:42:45
And so the page builder just really controls the layout of the content. So in a way, if bricks just blows up, okay, that’s one thing. But there’s another aspect to owning the land that you’re building on. And it’s this. Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix. These companies could decide one day. It’s not that the company goes away or fails. That’s not really what we’re talking about here. I mean, they could, they could, the CEO could do something ridiculously stupid tomorrow and kill Wix. That could potentially happen. But that’s not really what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is these companies waking up one day and deciding that they don’t like businesses like yours. They don’t like content like yours. They don’t like products like yours, okay. Now you might say, well, I’m not in a niche that might be targeted for this.

1:43:38
But you also don’t have a crystal ball and don’t know, right? And so, I mean, it could be something that seems fairly innocuous today is, you know, something that despise tomorrow. And suddenly you wake up one morning and your entire business is shut off. That is a possibility for Webflow. It happens all the time on Shopify for sure. It happens all the time. I’ve heard of it happening a little bit here and there on Squarespace and things like that. So that is the main thing we’re trying to avoid. Where that can never happen. Bricks can’t reach out to my site and shut off my site in my content tomorrow. That’s not a possibility. So it’s not the exact same situation. The only risk is that Bricks just fails as a company and I have to rebuild my sites and something else. But I still own all my content.

1:44:23
I still control my hosting. I still control my domain. So all that stuff is safe. And Lyle Duf says that is the landscape we live in today. Look at social media, cancel culture. Absolutely. You know, it doesn’t even have to be political. It can be for other reasons. You know, we just don’t know. We can’t predict the future. It’s just not safe to have your entire business, your entire website, the entire online marketing hub of what your business does, controlled by somebody else with an on-off switch. That is very, very, very dangerous. Aside from the fact that, you know, if you’re on Wix or whatever and you need a certain feature, there’s really no way to bolt that feature on.

1:45:02
It either has it or it doesn’t. And so you’re locked in in that regard. That’s another risk that you have where, oh, you didn’t need that feature when you built the website initially, but you guys have grown to a point where now you need this feature and Wix is never going to get it. And you’re just a number in Wix. And so guess what? They don’t care about your singular opinion. You’re going to have to go convince 1,000 other people or 10,000 other people who use Wix that this feature is needed. Otherwise, you’re never getting it. If you really, really, really, really need it, you got to leave Wix. And so now you’ve got to pack up all your things and you’ve got to go to a completely different CMS. And that’s a much bigger deal than just switching page builders. So, and that’s not even the full list of, you know, reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this. All right. I’m going to talk about website as a service later. I’m going to, I’m going to, I’ve already done one rant as enough for today.

1:45:56
Twitter won’t cancel anything from now on. I mean, you, you, you still never know. No crystal balls. Vanilla CSS style sheet for ACSS anytime soon. It’s already there. The Vanilla CSS style sheet is already an ACSS. It’s just you would have to know SAS to be able to use ACSS outside of a page builder. But it’s already there because the adaptability to bricks and to oxygen is all built in with conditional logic inside of ACSS. So, if there’s no builder detected, ACSS is a vanilla style sheet. So, you’re not going to be loading anything for bricks or oxygen if, unless those builders are actually active and detected. Can you share the price of frames? Can’t share that yet. Can’t share that yet. But the date will be black Friday. What is your perspective on freelancers or entrepreneurs building their own website? So, DIY perspective. Oh, like people that don’t have any experience building that they want to do. They don’t have any experience building websites, but they want to build their own website to save money on like Wix or Squarespace. I despise that.

1:47:02
Because they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing. And, and I, the way I explain this to people is like, look, the content matters. The design matters. The development quality matters. The conversion points matter. All these things matter. So, if you save money, if you build your own thing to save money, my wife’s calling me. So, I got to go in a minute. If you build your own thing to save money, you’re not looking at what you’re costing your company in the fact that you built this shitty brochure website that doesn’t do anything for the people who arrive here. And it doesn’t do anything to attract anybody. And you also don’t really have to push people to it other than handing out business cards and all this other nonsense. So, you’re harming the business by saving money doing it yourself. That’s the argument that I make to them. Alright, everybody’s dropping out now because, well, I mean, we’ve still got like 90 people here. But, in the chat, people are like, I gotta go. Alright, and I do too, because my wife is calling. But thank you guys for joining in. Make sure you like. Make sure you comment. Share this out. If you think other people are gonna find value in it. And that is it for me. I will see you next week. We do this every single week so you can join in very soon. Peace, guys.