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Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. And on today’s show, we’re talking with Cliff Almeida from MyWebAudit and the owner of HireAwayz Digital Agency. He’s sharing how we can use web audits to generate leads and also to add massive value to existing projects and to existing clients. His story is awesome and the value he offers is incredible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. This podcast is brought to you by the Agency Trailblazer community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then it is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the agency reset roadmap that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We also have lots of noble straight to the point, easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners. And we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency trailblazer.com. You are joining a conversation with me, your beautiful host with no hair. That’s mister Lee Jackson. And today, we have the handsome Cliff Almeida with a gorgeous goatee, at least on the last picture I looked of you, mate. You are from MyWebaudit as well as the owner of HireAWhiz, a digital agency in the US.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s my introduction for you. How are you doing, Cliff?
Clifford Almeida:
I’m doing great, Lee. Thanks so much. Looking forward to this.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mate, me too. We’ve got a lot in common. We had a great conversation before the show, and you were just talking about your history. I can’t wait to share that with the listeners today. But, also, massive shout out as well to Jamie Hill. He’s the wonderful guy who connected us. He’s connected a whole load of amazing podcast, guests over the last few weeks. So really, really grateful to Jamie, especially.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So, but also great to meet you and and to make a new friend.
Clifford Almeida:
Likewise.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So with all the gushingness out of the way and, and all that, could you just give people a very quick introduction to the world of CLIF? You can always start with nice things like your favorite color and your favorite drink or favorite food, but also maybe a little bit about your businesses and just what you’re all about in your own words.
Clifford Almeida:
Sure. Sure. So Lee, I’ve been, you know, what I pride myself most about is my family. So I’ve I’ve been happily married for a little over 8 years. I have 2 beautiful kids, and I love to travel. I’ve been to over 35 countries, and my goal each year is to try to visit at least 4 to 5 countries. I’ve been in the web agency space for about 20 years. I run a digital marketing agency in Phoenix, Arizona.
Clifford Almeida:
We focus on WordPress development, software custom software development, and, we recently launched a software of our own called MyWebAudit. There are several people in our communities where we share a mutual customer base.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mhmm. Absolutely.
Clifford Almeida:
Our agency has worked with small mom and pops, and we’ve had the blessing of working with some very large national organizations from nonprofits like the National PTA to state and federal agencies as well, as well as a few Fortune 500 companies where we got subcontracts through influencer outreach and a little bit of, trusted partner referrals.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. And you started back in 2000, which means you’re probably about 21 now, I’m imagining. Right.
Clifford Almeida:
Yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Plus a little bit of tax, so we won’t go we won’t go into that. But can you just tell us your initial journey in into the world of the web?
Clifford Almeida:
Yeah. For sure. You know, for me, it was really exciting. Technology enabled me to bridge a gap between my personal life and where I was trying to go with my professional life. I lived I was born in India. I then lived in Australia for a little bit and then moved to Papua New Guinea, an island a remote island north of Australia. I lived there for a long time, went to missionary school. Once we were about to graduate, I moved to the US.
Clifford Almeida:
Back then, there was no inner no. There was no affordable way to call. There was very little Skype, any any sort of access like that. So I decided to learn how to build a website and use, you know, some of those old IRC chat bots and a few things like that to keep in touch. So I learned development there. And, long story short, I loved what I did, got a bachelor’s in it and got a great job at the governor’s office. On the side, I started building websites for business owners because, you know, that was my side hustle. Like, I’m sure most of most of the other agency owners have started their businesses.
Clifford Almeida:
In 2008, I was able to make more money in my side hustle. At that point, we had grown our business a little bit that I decided to leave my job as the deputy chief information officer for the governor’s office and pursue the agency life, full time. The biggest pain point there was that I love technology, and state government, for the most part, is usually behind 3 to 5 years at least. And so a lot of my vision couldn’t be executed. I decided to pursue my passions through my agency.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Tell me about agency life. Doing a side hustle is very different from going into a a full time agency environment, especially without the experiences, as it were, of running a full agency. What were the first couple of years like?
Clifford Almeida:
A nightmare. Right? So so
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Tell me about the nightmare.
Clifford Almeida:
Alright. Yeah. You you start you start the the illusion is, hey. I’m making this much money, and, I can make so much more. But then you realize, you know, you have to consider things like scalability. You know, who can you who can you HireAWiz? Problems with quality assurance. Not everyone is you, and there’s so much to learn. So the first few years of my agency life involved, learning from trial and error, very expensive trials and errors from, hiring, outsourcing.
Clifford Almeida:
You know, outsourcing was really big in the early to late 2000 and has grown since, but we had to learn the painful lessons, especially working with some larger clients. Things like for me, I wasn’t married at that time, at least when I first started. And so I had the ability to work 17, 18 hours literally and and enjoy making the money, but not have to worry about what that looked like past that. But in 2010, I got married and then shortly after we had children and that got even worse, right, because those take a lot of time. And then I had to figure out as we were growing, growing pains from systemizing, optimizing, learning from our mistakes was a painful and long journey till we came upon potentially resources where they were masterminds from YouGoos to WP Elevation and, for example, like the one you run where you’re able to teach and and help others that are on the journey, maybe not as far, to help you learn from the lessons, things about productizing, systemizing, efficiencies, mindsets, things like that. And that transformed our agency significantly in 2015. Before that, it really was a nightmare. Stress on relationships, health problems.
Clifford Almeida:
We we we unlike a lot of agencies, we didn’t have a lot of cash flow problems, but potentially, we didn’t understand the value we were bringing to the bringing to the table even though we were closing 20, $30,000 projects. Potentially, once we understood what we were delivering, we should’ve been charging double or triple that easily.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely. Everything around mindset and and learning from other people’s mistakes are absolutely essential. I think very early on when the WP Elevations, the u gurus of the world didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have had access to those. What what particular things from either WP Elevation or YouGurus were kind of life changing or moments for you guys making you realize you needed to start doing things differently in your agency?
Clifford Almeida:
I would say valuing my time. Right? Yes. I used to think, potentially, hey. Look. You know, I can make a 150, 200. I mean, the most we’ve probably made, I would say, is $2,000 in an hour, which is amazing. But, the mindset of understanding that you can buy more time, and so I needed to value that. That was that was probably one of the biggest ones.
Clifford Almeida:
The other one was being able to say no. I’m a yes man by habit and personality, so I’ve taken that into my agency. Right? So we have, we had customers irrespective of what they paid us or what their value were. To us, it was just my my mindset and my personality to say yes. But I’d realized by potentially saying no, even to great opportunities, it opened up, you know, even better opportunities down the road. So, for example, saying no to a bad prospect, has led to opportunities for us to build better client relationships with existing customers and leverage that more and to potentially be able to focus on new opportunities that have come our way. So I would say, understanding the value of time. The second one would, you know, would have been around, saying no.
Clifford Almeida:
And then the third one would be, to look at my service as a value prop and not a commodity. And being able to charge on value that we bring to potentially our customers versus the hourly work was tremendous in our business. That’s helped us almost double actually, a little over double if you consider 2018 now in in a little over 2 years from 2015 to 2018.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
The the valuing the time and the value proposition, I remember my very first website, I charged a $150 for and worked over a week. And then kinda realized that unless I could purchase a time machine, there is gonna be no way that I’d actually be able to run a successful business on those and had to slowly increment the prices, which was, I I I’m terribly embarrassed by the fact that I did that. But sometimes you do have to learn from those mistakes. But I definitely recommend if you’ve never looked at WP Elevation or the Yougurus content, then do go ahead check out their podcast because they are already putting tons of this sort of stuff out for absolutely free. You don’t even have to pay for anything if you don’t want to. So go ahead and check out the WP Elevation podcast, the You Gurus podcast. And obviously, you’re also in the right place here with the Agency Trailblazer podcast because we do try and learn from the lessons of other agency owners too like Cliff, so that we don’t have to make those mistakes either. So Cliff, am I right therefore in thinking that fast forwarding to today that you guys are now charging a lot more for the work that you do and are in theory working with a lot less clients.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So you’re not having to pile lots of clients in, but you’re able to give a smaller set of clients much more value.
Clifford Almeida:
Definitely. Definitely. So, you talked about $400. I wanna say our first website was a flash website for $400 that took me ages to build, and this is this is probably back in 2,001. You know, Macromedia launched the new version of flash, and everyone kinda wanted it. Right? And
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yep. I remember.
Clifford Almeida:
So, yeah, I think 400 is maybe that’s a magic number. I’ve heard that a couple of times. But, yes, 400 now, we don’t, we don’t touch projects under 35100. And, for the most part, yes, we’ve applied the 80 20 principle year to year in our business. Right? Identifying 20% of our clients that generally give us 80% of our business and continue to refine that model. And and most oftentimes, we usually get down to a 90, 10 when we look at all the services offered. And so we’ve stopped the numbers game. We work on leveraging the value that we have with the existing clients.
Clifford Almeida:
And then when we bring in new clients, we definitely wanna make sure that, know, we’re considering lifetime value, not just the initial, 5, 10, or $15,000 for the website.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely. One of the things as well that I encourage people to think about is on the part where you said saying no. By saying no, that actually can free up an incredible amount of time for you to go and look at the existing clients you have to see how you can help them further. But it also opens up time and opportunity to look at other problems that you may have so you can solve them. And I know, Cliff, because I’ve had a spoiler alert. You may have had a conversation about this, but you guys did have a problem that you created a solution for. So if we can jump into that time machine, first of all, and could you just unpack what that problem was?
Clifford Almeida:
For sure. So ultimately, when we were looking to speak to a prospect or when we worked with customers where we’re taking to them when we’re taking them through some sort of a discovery, which is a detailed planning intensive, what we did is we tried to take a holistic look at their website. So what we ended up doing at that point was analyzing their website, then we would go into a separate tool like Moz, which we still love and use to do their SEO. And then we would run into different page speed APIs or page speed tools to run the page speed, etcetera. And so we would run through dozens of different tests across several different tools and generate these reports for our customers. The the big problem with that was that we had to first take the information from multiple reports and tools, and then we had to potentially identify what we wanted, and we had to reward them because everything was positioned for web agency owners and tech and using technical jargon. And we had to format everything to look good. And we love doing this because it paid it paid us big time.
Clifford Almeida:
Right? So we were generally charging anywhere from 1500 to $25100 for these reports. Mhmm. But it was painful because of the time.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Were you using these as well to generate new leads, or were these just essentially for existing clients for your paid discovery processes?
Clifford Almeida:
When when this initially started, it was only for our paid discovery processes.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So what what did you what did you decide to do about this problem? Because it’s a big problem, and I’m assuming there was nothing out there that would help you. You got all of these different tools, but they’re all disconnected, and it’s creating hours of work for you to make something look pretty and worth it in such a way as that it’s consumable. What was your solution?
Clifford Almeida:
Alright. So firstly, I wanted to let you know that it wasn’t so much just the audit. Right? Like, there were some business challenges that we needed to address early on in the game. And those challenges were we didn’t understand specifically all the different ways to help them. Right? I’m sure everyone’s been there. For example, maybe your specialty would have been in web design or web development, but then you didn’t understand page performance. Or maybe you did that, but you didn’t understand on page SEO. Right? So we didn’t understand all the different ways we could help them, and then we didn’t understand what specifically to give them and where to use it in our sales process to be able to prove our value and how best to present it.
Clifford Almeida:
So what we did is we slowly started patch patching together a process where we could automate and systemize certain areas. A 100 hours in, 200 hours in, 300 hours in, we were like, man, this looks, like it could be built into a tool. So we started sharing that with a few of our agency friends, Jamie Hill being one of them in the early days. And they were like, dude, we love this. Like, how do we start getting access to using this? And so, 4000 hours later, we’ve, we’ve built out an application called MyWebAudit. And MyWebAudit, in simple terms, allows us to measure what matters to business owners, things that we can potentially measure in 5 to 10 minutes. We do a series of manual and automated tests. And ultimately, we then position the messaging specifically to the business owners so it could be understood and valued.
Clifford Almeida:
This helps potentially generate a tremendous value upfront, building trust, and establishing us as subject area experts. And it’s transformed our agency as well as hundreds of others.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So before we talk about the others that it’s transformed and the actual product itself, did you have a period of time where you were using this and then decided to productize it as a service for other agencies? Or did you very much set out to solve a problem that you you had and you would be productizing it straight away?
Clifford Almeida:
That’s that’s a great question, Lee. So we used it in our agency for about a year. Yeah. Okay? So we were using this model. Once we realized how effective it was, we started not only using it for discovery, but we started using it for lead gen, primarily from the educational point of view. So, I’m not great at sales. I’m actually not great at speaking either. And so what I try to do is overcompensate by delivering value.
Clifford Almeida:
Right? I believe that, there’s a blessing in giving, and I believe in the reciprocity principle. So if you give something, people are generally more, responsive to, you know, listening to what you have to say. And so we started reaching out via cold email as well as cold calls. Just reaching out to local businesses saying, hey. You know, we’re fellow, business owners, and we’d like to offer you something of value. Just, 5 to 10 actionable ways to help you get more out of your website. Build trust, generate more leads, and and more customers. And that’s how it evolved, from us using it for about a little a little over a year and, then sharing it with a few other people.
Clifford Almeida:
And then since then, it’s evolved significantly.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So how old is the tool with regards to being public facing for people to start using it?
Clifford Almeida:
It it went live out of beta at the end of October.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Quite young. And you guys have done phenomenally well with it. I mean, how many roughly, I mean, how many businesses are using it now or what I don’t know what numbers you’ll have. Is it either how many audits have you run or or those sorts of figures?
Clifford Almeida:
Yeah. For sure. We’ve run, I would say tens of 1,000. Let’s see. I’ll be accurate. I’ll be accurate. So we’ve in our agency, we’ve run thousands of audits. We’ve we now have over a 100 customers, and we have 100, almost a 1000 users in our system.
Clifford Almeida:
We usually get about 5 to 10 sign ups a day right now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome. That’s fantastic. Well, I can actually see as well that, you know, the, little pop up that says someone signed up. It says that someone signed up just a few hours ago That’s right. Which which I noticed. I quite like that as well. I like the design of your site as well. Folks, if you wanna know what we’re talking about, we’re talking about my web audit.com.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s my web audit.com. And I’ll make sure there is a link in the show notes for you guys to go ahead and check that out. So you’ve had phenomenal growth then over the last few months since October. What’s been the secret to your success? How have you got this product out there to the masses to encourage people to go ahead and sign up? Because, I mean, if I if I rewind a few years ago, I had a product that I put online and I got one sale. Yeah. And then I gave up.
Clifford Almeida:
Right. So, ultimately, for me, this was a vision. So I had to commit to the vision. Part of that vision, Lee, was to be able to, support the customer service line that enabled you know, so I allocate a couple hours. I’m already really busy, but I allocate I I committed to allocating couple hours. So I’d venture that almost every one of our customers at some point has probably interacted with me personally. The reason I wanted to do that is I know this has worked for our agency, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for everyone else. And so I wanted to know why.
Clifford Almeida:
So anytime I hear, you know, someone say, well, I’d love this, you’ll hear that generally within 30 to 60 days, if it connects with our core principle of helping web agency owners generate more leads and close more deals, it’s in our application. Irrespective of if it takes 20 hours, it takes 200. Right? And so, I made that commitment from day 1. I’ve been blessed to have champions who’ve come in, like Jamie and and John and Christina Romero and you name it. Right? In in several different web agency mastermind groups who’ve been able to come in and say, hey. You know, let’s give this a try. We offer a free trial. So they come in and ultimately delivers on a big pain point, which is being able to potentially audit a website in minutes.
Clifford Almeida:
Right? And be able to position that value in a way a business owner can understand. So ultimately, we wanted to make sure that our application delivers results. And because of that, we’ve potentially grown 15% on average month to month. And, thank god, in July, we’re we’re looking to close June with over 40% growth from May to June, and that’s heavily because of word-of-mouth as well as a new Facebook campaign we’ve launched.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I also love our community and people like Jamie and Christina who evangelize and share tools with other people. So I think we’re very blessed as, design and web developer community to just have such an amazing bunch of people who are super supportive. Now I’d love to do a a little get a bit of education from you, mate. Obviously, I understand this tool could be awesome for me looking at an existing website, working out the problems with it so that I can solve problems with that site. I can also see this is great for me to do a post audit as well. So once I’ve done everything, I can run a scan on this site and go, okay. We’ve we’ve covered everything that we said we were gonna. There’s a problem there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I can resolve that. But how might I use a product like this to run a website audit to generate leads? Could you walk us through the process from connecting into the product and how you would then approach a cold lead with some form of audit to try and to try and win business.
Clifford Almeida:
For sure. So I’ll cover practical ways that this could be done within the next 24 hours for anyone who potentially comes in and uses our trial. Alright. So the first one would be once you run an audit, we highly recommend leveraging your existing and past relationships first. So we’ve built in proven cold email outreach templates as well as email templates that you can use to reach out to existing and past clients offering this website audit from a value perspective. Alright? So all you do, in this case, let’s say let’s just say you do as a virtual walk through. You would run it through our application sign up, which takes about 3 to 5 minutes max. You would run your first audit, which may take, you know, 5 to 10 minutes max, and then you go in to one of our pre written templates and send that out.
Clifford Almeida:
And so within 15 minutes, you could potentially be sending out your first audit to an existing or past client with the done for you system from the email copy to the completed template. Alright? That’s one easy way to do it. Okay. Another way would be to potentially connect with your communities, whether that’s an in person networking group like a BNI or your local chamber of commerce. I don’t know if they have those out in UK, but I’m guessing they do. And, or get into your LinkedIn or Facebook groups where your potential prospects are. So, for example, in in our case, we have niched down our agency on the side to remodel contractors. So I’m in LinkedIn groups for remodel contract business owners.
Clifford Almeida:
So in there, we would just again, we have copy for this, and potentially, you just drop a line saying, hey. You wanna build a relationship. Right? This is not about selling. So I just wanna let you know everything that we do is based off of, the give methodology, which which ultimately stands for generosity, which you’re giving them something of value. You’re giving them information, and then the value is positioning it so that it is, relevant to them, and then you’re educating them on the value of of how they deal with an expensive problem they’re dealing with. Right? So please keep that into context. We’re not talking about mass mailing people and spamming them and and offering this. It’s all about delivering value.
Clifford Almeida:
So build a relationship in a group and then position, in essence, the audit as a value add. Like, hey, you know, as as a way of giving back to this community, we would love to do 5 web website audits where we will give you, you know, a dozen actionable tips that you can implement in the next week or 2 to help increase your conversion rate. Right? Or in this case, you would just say, you know, increase your lead generation from your website. So that’s another way.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay.
Clifford Almeida:
Okay? And, the other one that we utilize and other people oftentimes use is reach out to your personal network. This is not reaching out to your friend. It’s reaching out to a champion client and saying, hey. Here’s the website audit we did for you. We’re gonna be using this as potentially action list of things we can use for our website care plan. But I wanted to let you know, we usually charge $349 for this, but we’d love to do this for 1 or 2 business partners that you work with that think that you think that could use our our service. Now they’re not just referring you as a potential person who could help them out with your website. They’re offering something of value.
Clifford Almeida:
And so we have a prewritten script that could be sent out to potentially get referred to their professional network with that website audit offer.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome.
Clifford Almeida:
Alright. And, and and so those would be probably a few easy ways. We have obviously other ways, which are Facebook advertising. Those are not free or PPC. Sure. John Falk, he he’s got the numbers down. So he knows what his cost per click is. He brings them in.
Clifford Almeida:
He charges them for a website audit, and then he puts them into his website care plan. I swear, literally, 30:30 minutes ago, I got an email from him, and he his testimonial is I got 30 x ROI, but he just sent me an email saying, hey. This week, I or last week, I literally did, 2 website audits. Both of them joined our, agency, and we put them into our care plan. Right? And that’s the process because we’ve visually taken dozens of points and positioned them effectively. And so lead generation becomes a much easier it’s not easy, like, we’ve had people come in and say, hey. We sent out 5 cold emails or 10 cold emails, and we didn’t get, you know, we didn’t get a response, and they didn’t do any follow-up. Right? So our application provides you all the templates you need for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th follow-up.
Clifford Almeida:
And, potentially, for those that need the service and value what you’re offering, they reach back out because you’re not selling them. You’re delivering something of value.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So with the audits that you send out, do you ever get people well, so not that you send out, but if I was an agency and I’m picking a local business to email and say, here’s an audit that you didn’t necessarily ask for, do you ever get people that might be a little bit upset by that or offended?
Clifford Almeida:
No. Never. And by the way, I’ve done it. Right? So everything that we utilize, we actually leverage in our web agency as well. So the way we, the way we position it specifically, Lee, is we just tell them, hey. My name’s Cliff. I’m running I run a website agency here in Phoenix. And, again, we’re working with other local companies.
Clifford Almeida:
We’re just offering something of value. There’s nothing. We’re not selling you anything. Sometimes we’ll get someone responding back like, hey. We already have a web guy, and I’ll say, sure. No problem. Just let us know, and we’d be happy to send this to you, and you should send it to your web guy. And the scenario when we’ve had this happen a couple of times was like, hey.
Clifford Almeida:
Well, can we have a call with you? Because our web guy didn’t cover, like, literally 90% of this with us. And then that’s when they wanna work with us because they see the value position from, you know, we make h t you know, we make word or add image updates to website to, hey. They understand what it what strategy looks like to help me grow.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. I like this approach as well because although you are you can be at times contacting people cold as it were, you’re coming with them with significant value. Would you recommend as well putting in some actionable steps within that that they could do so you’re adding more value? So it’s something that they could action without you even having to do anything. Therefore, they’re not necessarily gonna be doing business with you. It could just be simply pointing out that they don’t have a share image and they could use Yoast for, you know, the Yoast OG image section. Or, you know, would would you recommend anything like that in there?
Clifford Almeida:
We definitely do. So our email templates, we have several different ones so you can try out which one which ones work. We try to be brief if it’s called Outreach. Right? But, if if we have if if someone reaches back out and says, well, I’d like to hear more, then we say something to the effect of, hey, you know, here’s 4 action items we highly recommend you take, you know, within literally within the next 24 to 48 hours that you can put in place. And then that’s when we tell them something like, you know, put your phone number in the top right of your site or make sure that, you know, you have a mobile call to action. Something really simple that they can take action on. Definitely, we give them action points before we try to set up a consultation to cover. And oftentimes, we don’t even call it a consultation.
Clifford Almeida:
We call it a strategy call because literally, that’s what we’re doing, Lee. We don’t when someone gets on a call with us and they wanna cover the audit, we’re completely transparent and we’re honest. So what we do is we we spend about 30 seconds to 60 seconds telling them about our agency and what we do, and then we spend about 20, 25 minutes just dropping a ton of value. By that time, they’ve they’ve they’re either in love with what we have to offer or they’re like, yeah. You know, I’m I’m I’m really not interested in it. And in a way, it actually self qualifies, you know, it self qualifies them by us understanding, do they value what we’re offering? And then we spend 5 minutes just saying, hey. Look. You know, feel free to pass this on to your existing web agency that you work with.
Clifford Almeida:
Or if you’d like us to work with you, then the next steps are a mini discovery. Right? And that’s when we potentially break down what we’ve covered into some sort of a number where we say, hey. You know, you can go into a monthly retainer. Or in if the website is in terrible shape, then we just recommend a redesign completely.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So this is taking people down 2 channels. What so first of all, let me just cover something. If you’ve provided all of this value to them for free and they say thank you very much, fine. You’ve done something good in the world and I’ve got an abundance mindset. I also believe that no good deed goes unpunished. So it it’s great to be able to help local businesses and if they take it to their web guy and action some of that stuff, freaking awesome. Now what I’m what I’m trying to understand then are the best channels to take a web audit down. And I think I’m hearing from you that there are therefore 2 main channels that will happen as a result of one of these messages.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It could either be come on to our care plan. We’re gonna look after your website. We’re gonna keep it updated. We’re going to, I don’t know, put regular content in there. We’re going to optimize images. We’re gonna do whatever it takes every single month, so that your website checks all of these boxes. So that’s one option. And then the second option is your website is in really bad shape.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’re really sorry you’ve been let down by your previous agency or web developer. We really believe you need to, from scratch, rebuild the site, and we we can help you with that.
Clifford Almeida:
That’s exactly correct. And the way our audits are positioned, we we categorize our information based off of priority of what matters. Right? So, for example, if they have no USB, they have no trust factors, those are critical points. So we specifically position the messaging around how to prioritize what matters to them. So sometimes they’ll come to us and say, well, look, you know, we have $3,000, and then we don’t mind getting on to a retainer. So then we we specifically tackle the areas that are high priority around web design or around conversion optimization, performance and security, or on page SEO. Those are the 4 key areas we measure, and we tackle the high priority items first. And the then the reason for doing that is oftentimes by making those changes, they can already start seeing the needle move in their business.
Clifford Almeida:
The whole goal here is not to sell them on services that won’t help them. Right? We want them to Absolutely. Ascertain value as fast as possible. Spending time with us on that call is step 1, but step 2 to building a long term relationship is delivering value that can be measured. And, potentially, when we when we’re prospecting, especially when we talk about cold email outreach, we specifically prospect wisely. What does that mean? You know, make sure we position ourselves in front of people who can pay us. Right? I give this analogy all the time. Potentially, if you have the option to outreach to a barbershop or a home remodel contractor, connect with the home home remodel contractor first because his average project is gonna be 10, 15, $20,000 versus a barber who is gonna be doing a haircut, let’s just say even on an expensive end of, you know, £50 or $50.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. And thank you for using £50 just for our UK audience. I can’t go for a haircut anymore, so I actually have no idea how much a haircut would cost. But now you’re absolutely correct, you know, with regards to where you’re targeting as well, who you’re having conversations with. It’s something that we’ve talked about in our mastermind a lot recently with regards to who who are we targeting with our services and the prices that we have. You know, there’s a certain amount that we’re gonna need to charge just to operate as a business, let alone the value that’s that’s on top of that, etcetera. So reaching out to certain types of businesses is not gonna be very helpful to them or to or to you at all. Now, you mentioned that we can try your service for free, which obviously shows you have exceptional confidence in your product.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Does that mean we also get access to those templates that you mentioned as well as part of the free trial so we can go ahead and try some of the 6 points you laid down?
Clifford Almeida:
That’s correct. So, just to give clarity, yes, there’s a 14 day free trial. And, potentially, we have 3 different, plans. But for the 14 days, you get access to every feature. Now in regards to the email templates, the ones that I’ve talked about on this call, yes, those are all included. We have several other templates and resources that come on when you sign up for a paid, you know, for a paid plan, but everything we’ve talked about so far is accessible. And if any of your users need any help, please have them reference that they’ve heard this podcast and that they know you, and I’d be happy to take care of them in any way we can. Ultimately, our goal, just like, you know, most successful businesses, is to make sure that our customers are successful.
Clifford Almeida:
Once we can get you to a success point, which most people can see easily in 14 days, then we we have no problems retaining you as a customer for MyWebAudit.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I love your confidence. That is so cool. Folks, you can check my web audit over on my web audit dot com. Go ahead and check out that free trial. I always like it when you’ve got a free trial that doesn’t require a credit card. So it means I don’t have to actually put a reminder in to cancel it if I wanted to. But, I’m really, really impressed with what you’ve said. I’m gonna look forward.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m trialing this myself over the next few days because what we wanna do is use it to reach out to existing clients who have not taken us up on our care plan. So we wanna see if we can use this to show why they should have one of our care plans. So I’m intrigued to to see how that goes, and I’m gonna be sharing the results of our explorations in the WP Innovator Facebook group. Folks, if you are not a part of that group, you can find us over on agencytrailblazer.comforward/group, and that will redirect you to our Facebook group that’s been around now for, like, 3 years. And there’s over 1,600 of us crazy web developers, designers, WordPress enthusiasts, and even cool people like mister Cliff is in there as well. So highly recommend you go and join us in the group. Cliff, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been a complete legend.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Thank you for those ways to target new business and existing clients with, audits. So all that’s left for me to ask is how can we connect with you beyond just my web audit.com? And then we shall kick you off the show.
Clifford Almeida:
Thanks, Lee. It’s been a pleasure, and I appreciate the value you bring to our community and our space as well as the community you have. It’s been a pleasure. The best way to reach out to me is by email. I’ll give you my agency email. That’s cliff at HireAWizawiz.com. If I can provide any insights on my journey, in my agency, happy to share that with you. If you have any questions specific to MyWebAudit, [email protected] is the best email there.
Clifford Almeida:
And I’d love to maybe work with you, Lee, offline and see how we can build a workshop specifically for people who’ve listened to this and would love to know more. I’d love to throw out a workshop with a bunch of actionable value and strategies, not just on lead gen, but potentially using website audits to close more deals for existing customers or existing prospects in your pipeline by delivering value upfront.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No worries. Well, I thought for literally a fraction of a second very, very carefully, and my answer to that would be yes.
Clifford Almeida:
Thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I look forward to arranging that and getting that one sorted. Mate, thank you so much for your time, and I’ll speak real soon. Cheers. And that wraps up today’s show. If you got value from this episode, then be sure to share your love for the Agency Trailblazer podcast via social media. Come on to Itunes and give us a rating. A nice thumbs up and a 5 stars would literally make my day. If you’re not in the Agency Trailblazer Facebook group, then you can find us over on agency trailblazer.com/group.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It will be great to meet you in there. Be great to have some conversations. And on topic for this episode, if you have had experiences with auditing tools and you’ve had either successes or failures with said tools, we wanna know. Let’s have a conversation. Cliff will also be in the group, and he can be part of those conversations too. So if you have questions for Cliff, be sure to tag him in to those questions. That’s agency trailblazer.com/group. Go join the party.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Be sure to share some cool GIFs. We will either see you there or we’ll see you in the next episode.
