Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies, exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee. And on today’s show, we’re talking to Paul Kortman, who is going to be lifting the lid on his agency, showing us how they have productized and systemized their offering, both in SEO and in PPC. That’s PPC through Google, Facebook, etc. Absolutely fascinating episode. Totally blew my mind. And I’ve not stopped thinking about it since we recorded it. So guys, sit back, relax and enjoy. And please keep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times.
Lee:
Hello and welcome. You are joining a conversation with me, Lee, and Mr. Paul Kortman from Connex Digital Marketing. Paul, how are you doing?
Paul:
I am doing fantastic. And I’m super happy for our conversation today.
Lee:
Me too, mate. We’ve already had a really cool chat. We always have a pre-show chat with our guests. And I have to admit, this has been one of the nicest and easiest ones to date. Pretty good going, isn’t it?
Paul:
Nice. Yeah. Maybe it’s because I podcast and so I’m used to the drill.
Lee:
You’re used to the drill. That’s good. You’re a professional podcast guest.
Paul:
Yeah. I like that. That’s a good title.
Lee:
Paul, tell us a little bit about yourself and also about your businesses. We want to know more.
Paul:
Yeah. Well, I’ve got this bug in me that I like to start things and figure things out. And once I started my first business, you know, it’s a slippery slope that I ended up starting a bunch of other businesses over the last seven years. But to date, the first business that I started that was successful, I tried an IT consulting thing before that and that never took off. But I do digital marketing, Connex Digital Marketing. We started as Connect Social seven years ago and we’ve adjusted the name and adjusted what we offer and what we do. But the, you know, it has been the core business. It’s afforded my lifestyle, my wife and four kids and our dog and our RV and traveling the world and all of this. And so like, it’s been a really great run. But at the same time, I also like to start other businesses on the side. So I’ve got, yeah, a blogging business and I’ve got a community website business. And yeah, just put our fingers in different things just to see what’s going to work and what’s going to take off.
Lee:
That’s awesome. And I mean, how did you get into the entrepreneur lifestyle? I assume you started off as a job for the man, as they say here in the UK?
Paul:
Yeah, I definitely was working for the man. And it was not, it was one of those things of where I was always commended for how well I worked and what I did. I have a degree in a completely unrelated field and I got into IT. You know, I was a certified nerd and, you know, just enjoyed helping people, you know, interface with their computers to use an IT term. But, you know, one day in, I was working at a marketing firm. I was enabling their 25 staff to be productive and billable. And I was keeping their 200 websites up and running on their servers that they were doing. And, and I told the web developer, I said, Hey, you guys are doing SEO wrong. And it’s because I’m self-taught in IT. And so I stick my nose in places where it doesn’t belong. And I figure out how things work. And then, and that day I just got cocky and was like, you guys are doing this wrong. They were building $80,000 websites and saying that they were SEO optimized. And when I pushed them on what that meant, they were saying, well, we write semantic code. And I was like, you can’t claim that you’re SEO optimized by just saying that your code is okay. There’s content and there’s backlinks and there’s so much more. And this was shoot, this was 11 years ago.
Lee:
So in 06, what was the reaction? I’m assuming lead balloon.
Paul:
Well, no, it’s, it was a thanks for volunteering, Paul. Oh, so I ended up developing a digital marketing department within a traditional marketing agency. And I hired an IT guy to replace myself and hired a couple of people to help me manage what became a really successful department. And now, I mean, the people I hired are still working there and they’ve grown that team from four to 12 in the last seven years. But yeah, we definitely, we created a whole new line of revenue for that agency. And then I woke up one day and said, man, I’m commuting 10 hours to the job, an hour each way. So 10 hours a week. And I was just like, is there any way I could work from this coworking spot that just opened up near my house? And the boss man said no. Now this was the greatest job I ever had. And so I hope someday he gets to hear me say this on, you know, a podcast somewhere. It’s been seven years and still that was the greatest job I ever had. By the way, that will hopefully be the last job that I ever had. And he was just really close minded about telecommuting and about working in different physical locations. So I’ve taken that. And let’s just say I blew that apart. I started my own agency. Seven years later, I have a staff of six. I have not met a single one of them ever. And so it’s one of those things of where, and I’ve not met 75% of my clients either. I have a couple of clients that I’ve met from moons ago and they’re still with me, but the majority of them I have not met. And it’s just very, the antithesis of what he had set up for his agency and how he was working. Yeah. So I fell into this entrepreneurship out of a need for freedom and wanting to do things different. We operate completely differently than the traditional agency model. And I’ve had ups and downs with that, but I just, I don’t like the traditional agency model. And so we were able to find a different way to make that happen.
Lee:
And that’s quite similar for us. We do like the idea of being able to travel. We do have a physical office for me and Larissa because we, we do have a one UK staff who works physically here and we work together on certain projects, but also for myself, I’ll end up going traveling as well. And for the rest of our team, like you never actually physically met, met on the internet through cameras, et cetera, and chatted on the telephone, et cetera, but never actually met. And, and it’s not to diss the traditional agency model because that definitely works for a lot of people. But I think for myself, that kind of feels too restrictive. I don’t know if you would agree with that, you know, being bricks and mortar and huge salaries and everything else that comes with that physical office, et cetera. It’s, it’s quite a strategy.
Paul:
The high overhead, the lack of productivity, you know, they talk about when you’re around the water cooler and good ideas crop up and how can you make that happen? And it’s like, I have significantly more productive meetings with my staff in 15 minutes a day than I ever had with my staff in the office physically. And so, by the way, I’m not a sports fan, but the, the whole office would always talk about last night’s game and all of this and what’s happening on in sports ball. And it’s like, that is such a waste of time. And yet, you know, we consider that to be, you know, team building and all of this. And it’s like, ah, I’ve gone so far from that now that I don’t, I see right through the, the BS that we tell ourselves about why it’s good to have a physical office and be working together and all that. Like I said, it doesn’t mean it’s not for everybody. And I have gotten shot down from many a client who expected me to still be in my hometown and expected to be able to go have coffee tomorrow. And I kind of go, yeah, I’m a, you know, an eight hour flight away and it’s not going to happen. And they’re just like, well, we can’t meet in person. No, sorry. Well then I can’t work with you. And it’s like, okay, well, you know, to each his own. I’m not the right agency for every client. And I’m okay with that. I’d rather work with a client who’s more, I don’t know, just open to the productivity that we can produce.
Lee:
Totally. Now you mentioned, or I’m pretty sure I heard the word RV at some point. So are you like, are you all roaming around the U S in your RV? Do you have a home base or are you pretty much anywhere at any time? Just let us in on your world. This sounds fascinating.
Paul:
Yeah. I’m originally from Michigan in the United States. My wife and I and our four kids sold our stuff in our house three and a half years ago and then did a round the world trip. And then our next edition was going to be heading south towards South America and to Ecuador. We decided to buy an RV to make that drive. We didn’t get very far and we fell in love with Mexico. So we’re setting up a home base in Guanajuato, Mexico in a town called San Miguel de Allende. And it’s a beautiful mountain town where prices are half to a third, or I should say a third to a half of what they are in the States. And my kids are, you know, speaking Spanish and hanging out with other Mexican kids and it’s just a sheer joy. So yeah, we probably spend six months of the year here in Mexico and then another six months in Europe or Asia or somewhere on the coast, maybe in Mexico, maybe in Ecuador. Who knows?
Lee:
Sounds ideal. And I presume you homeschool the kids then?
Paul:
We do. There’s, there’s a couple of different options. And by the way, I run another business and another podcast that if you’re interested in all of that jazz, not just about us, but like how in the world can a family travel the world? Like I’ve heard this whole backpacker location, independent digital nomad thing. And it’s like, yeah, there are also hundreds of thousands of families doing this exact same thing in different modes. They’re all very different, but they have a lot in common of like, you know, wanting freedom. And you can go to nomadtogether.com. There’s a podcast, there’s all kinds of resources there. Check that out if you’re interested in how families can have freedom. Yeah. I don’t want to rob our whole conversation about that because there’s a ton to talk about and there’s all kinds of craziness there. But this, you know, Connex my, my agency has afforded me to live this lifestyle. And hopefully someday I will travel to Thailand and the Czech Republic and Indonesia and Florida and Guatemala, where my staff are located. So some of them travel, some of them don’t, but I hope to visit them all or bring them all somewhere at some point in time.
Lee:
That’s brilliant guys. That is nomadtogether.com for the podcast to learn more about that. Just wanted you to just quickly unpack that as well, because it’s something that we are trying as a family. So we’re doing our first stint in Florida.
Paul:
Nice.
Lee:
We’re looking forward to and, you know, to see if it will work for us. So it’s just dipping our toe in the water just a little bit.
Paul:
Yeah. And, you know, WP Innovator podcast, it is all about kind of trying to change your agency. A lot of us have been stuck in doing what we think an agency should be, you know, so we touched, didn’t we, on, you know, a physical location, the old way of being an agency. And a lot of us do tend to start agencies that we think we have to start because it’s the way agencies have done. And yet you’ve changed that. You are running an agency in a completely different way. You mentioned, you know, you have your 15 minute meetings, etc. What does a kind of a week or a typical week or a typical day look like for your virtual team across the world?
Lee:
Yeah. So, well, a couple of things I want to back up. One quick mention something and let you ask follow up questions eventually on that. But, you know, we do things differently by not having a physical location, not having staff show up to a physical location. We also do things differently that we don’t charge on the billable model and we don’t the billable hour and we don’t track hours and we don’t, you know, bill by the hour. So there’s a there’s a whole other concept there, the economics of running an agency that we could get into. But to answer your question about what does my staff do and what do I do, my role has dramatically shifted over the last two years now that we’ve gotten some stability inside of our agency. And by the way, stability and agency are not two words that ever go in a sentence together. You constantly have churn, you have, you know, you’re constantly having to sell and bring in new projects. And we found a way to get away from that a little bit and have recurring revenue and have recurring clients and have a system set up so that we’re not reinventing the wheel with every new client that comes in. So now what happens is I have a couple of my team members are actually really siloed. We operate under SOPs. We’ve created standard operating procedures. Here’s what you have to do for every day. Here’s how you do it. Here’s, you know, the checklist of things you have to accomplish no matter what every day you have to do this. And the nice part for my staff is when they’re done with their checklist, when they’re done with their SOPs, they’re done for the day and they don’t have to worry about it. And so we also do the unlimited vacation and I have a seriously dedicated staff. And so the only thing I say is just make sure your work is done before you go. And, you know, I’ve got next week is going to be a challenging week. I’ve got three staff on vacation next week and they’re putting together a list of here’s everything I have set up. Here’s all you need to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Paul, take care of this. And so next week, I’m not going to be doing what I normally do, which is sales and podcasts and, you know, client communications. I’m going to be backfilling for my staff. I just the irony of three of them gone in one week is crazy, but it’s pretty cool because everything is systematized and process driven. So it’s very easy for me to step in. I taught them how to do it. I helped them develop the SOPs. And so for them to then turn around and say, OK, here’s a list of things you need to do, Paul. It’s really easy. I don’t have to be trained on it. I can just jump in and take care of it.
Paul:
That’s awesome. Now, I am even more intrigued, mate. The more you talk, the more I want to know. And like you said, agency life, it’s not necessarily tends not to be super reliable. I think feast and famine is something that people will have heard of. I’m going to imagine feast and feast or famine is something you may have experienced early on. And it sounds like you’ve created a business to avoid that kind of scenario. Again, moving away from what would be perceived to be a more traditional agency model where you get very unique, very different projects in all the time. And it’s time and material and all of that sort of stuff. And bigger projects get more money in all that sort of stuff. All quite stressful. You said you don’t charge per the hour. So now my brain kind of disconnected for a second when you said that because I couldn’t quite work that one out. So unpack this. How have you moved from feast and famine to this kind of stable sounding agency?
Lee:
Yeah, stable sounding. You don’t believe it.
Paul:
Yeah, exactly. There is a part of me that’s like, what? Show me the light.
Lee:
Yeah. So the first thing is I had such feast and famine for the first five years of our business. It was unreal. Unfortunately, unlike most businesses, I started out with feast. My first month, I billed $40,000. Wow. And so like that is unheard of. And, you know, when I stepped out, I instantly had to hire because I was never the solo entrepreneur, solo agency guy because I just had so much demand pent up that, you know, they say strike when the iron’s hot as a, you know, an idiom of just like when something is right, when the price is right, whatever. And I’d like to claim that I was really smart and knew what I was doing. But it was more along the lines of I just couldn’t stand working for the man anymore. And when I stepped out on my own, I only did it when I had some level of confidence that there was going to be some income. But, you know, my wife had said, you know, we had saved up. We had six months of, you know, a runway, if you will, six months income in the savings account that was like, OK, well, if we fail, at least, you know, six months later, you can get a job. Ah, boom. First month out, I’m bringing in 40K. Had to hire people and rode that wave for a good year or two. And it was just fantastic. And then realized, oh, yeah, churn. I might need to get into more sales. And what I found out was I had spent my five years while I was at the agency building an audience, building a network. And these were all people who knew me and who would refer people to me and like, oh, you got to talk to this Paul guy. Oh, Paul can help your problems or whatever. I didn’t realize because I was getting cold called from people saying, hey, I heard about you and want to work with your agency or want your agency’s help. And so, yeah, we definitely became the yes man. And yes, we can do that. Yes, we do that. Write up these huge, long proposals that would take me two days and make me lose whatever hair I no longer had. You know, and you win some, you lose some. But it just was such a drag. And I got a business coach and she helped me see through things a little differently and see things differently. And I started working towards reconfiguring things. But at the same time, my wife and I decided to sell our house and leave the country because from what we had thought, I hadn’t met any of my clients or majority of my clients. And so this would still come and go, you know, like I’d still have clients coming in. And so for five years, three and a half years, I had a really good feast. And then we left the country and spent a year overseas. When I got back, well, while we were overseas, I didn’t realize it right away. But my new business funnel, my pipeline dried up. And I thought, oh, no big deal. I still, you know, still was bringing in 20K a month and all was good. I had my staff taking care of things. We were traveling. Life was good. And then as so happens, three of my cornerstone clients dropped within three months of each other through no fault of my own. Just, you know, client churn and I had nothing in the pipeline and I lost 90 percent of my revenue. So I went from 20K to $2,000 a month type line revenue in three months. And at the time we were in South Africa and it was crazy. I mean, to give you an idea, the amount of data that I had to use and the cost that it was, I was paying close to $1,000 a month in Internet fees. And so it was just like I can’t survive with only 2K coming in. And so we burned through our savings and I came back to Michigan to try and drum up some business and found out that my friend who was a competitor, you know, were friendly competitors. Since I left, his business, boom, he had to hire. He was the solo guy for multiple years, just solo agency guy. And when I left, he got so much business and so much referrals that he had to hire left, right and center. And it was really discouraging to me that like people are such that old mindset of like, oh, Paul left the country. He doesn’t need any more work or we can’t refer people to him. So through a lot of reconfiguring, I was able to come to a better business model where we charge a lot lower prices. I mean, I used to tell people they would ask, hey, you know, what can you do for $500? And I would say, well, we could have this phone call. And now to the point of where I raised my rates, but it was $500 a month for a long time. And now it’s $600 a month on the SEO side and $500 on the PPC side. But just like super affordable, straight up front pricing. This is what you get. This is what we’re going to do. This is how it provides value. Here’s case studies on how it works for everybody else. None of this custom jazz like people and I have learned to say no, even when I’m hungry, even when I don’t have the money I need to, you know, run our business. I’ve learned to say no. And I came out on the other side and things are so much better now because yesterday I was I take a half day off every Tuesday, take my kids and we go exploring and we go check some stuff out or whatever. And while I did that, we had two new sales, one of them, which I had spent the total of a half hour on the phone with a guy and the other one I’d never talked to him in my life. And so, you know, there’s $1,200 that came in yesterday, top line revenue, brand new clients, and they’re going to be with us for six months. So, you know, this is this is the kind of life that now I lead. And the reason for it is and I heard this preach so many times that I could not fathom that I could do it in an agency world. How can you do this in marketing? Because everything is so unique and custom. And it’s like when you come down to it at the core, there is something that everybody needs. In my case, in SEO, everybody needs incredible content that’s worth getting backlinks to. But they also need somebody to reach out and acquire those backlinks. So we package that together and said, we’re going to create incredible content for you and we’re going to get 10 referring domains for every article that we publish. And if you run the math and the stats, it’s like, wait, that’s $60 incoming referring domain. The going rate right now is $120 if you’re going to buy backlinks at the quality that we’re delivering. Oh, and by the way, these don’t go away when you stop buying. That’s $120 a year at $60 forever. Wow. You know, it’s a huge deal. Plus, you get this incredible content, which a lot of companies struggle to create content. And so we give you, you know, this incredible article on top of that. It just makes it like a no brainer for people to purchase. And it’s really easy for my staff to deliver because my content guy or my content staff, I should say, they know every day I open up Trello. Here’s the five cards that I have. I write these five articles or I do the research or whatever the step is to get these articles moving forward. And then they’re produced and they’re done. They’re off my plate. And I work on the next one. Similar thing for my link builder outreach guy. He deals with emails that come in and he deals with new projects that come in. And it’s just like, OK, so here’s an article that was published. Here’s the people I need to reach out to. I write a template. I send the emails and I respond to everybody who’s responded on my other outreach. And so it’s just very much well defined as to what the process is. And so if somebody comes to us and says, I need a 301 redirect project. Well, no, we won’t do it. Yeah, I know how to. And I’m really good at it. And I love it. But I don’t have a system in place for it. And I don’t have a way to be recurring profitable on that. So no is the answer. And it’s refreshing, but still freaks me out every time that I say no, because in the agency world, you’re taught not to say no. That every new project, you’ve got to figure out a way to accomplish this. And it’s so inefficient that you actually kill your staff and you kill your potential profitability instead of niching down to either a certain vertical or a certain task that you do. And that’s where I found, you know, I’ve finally crossed over to where everybody used to preach that. And I was like, I can’t be done. It can’t be done. And now where I’ve done it and go, this is the way that it needs to be done. I’m kind of quiet in awe.
Paul:
As a visual guy, if I’m wrong in this, correct me. But I’m kind of imagining it’s almost like a factory, you know, like a factory floor where this factory is dedicating to doing this one thing efficiently. All of the technology has been put in place for the elements to start at one end of the factory and for the product to come out at the other end. And each person has their specific part to play and it works perfectly and that’s all they do. And they churn out that one thing all of the time. So if someone then rocks up and let’s say they’re making a, I don’t know, it’s a chest of drawers, the chest of drawers factory. And that’s all they do. Someone comes along and asks, could you please build us a car? Well, they’re obviously going to say no, because that factory is not set up to also build a car. It only does this one thing. It does it really, really well. So the obvious answer is no, we don’t do that. So in my brain, I can kind of understand it in that way. Is that kind of a very bad metaphor, simile? Can’t remember my English.
Lee:
I would say it’s actually very much indeed what it is that we do. Because when you approach that factory floor as an owner and you say, how can I make more money? Because as an owner, that’s the question that we should be asking is how can I be more profitable? Which whether you distribute that profit to your staff or you keep it all for yourself, you know, whatever. Your question is, how can I be more profitable while delivering more value to my clients? And so when you look at that factory floor and you say, okay, how can I make it so that, you know, this widget gets made faster? Okay, well, I can optimize this or I can work on this or I can tweak that. And so that is where my days are spent now is finding out what’s the problem area for my staff? What’s holding my staff back? What, like one of them that we have right now is a CRM tool that we use to fulfill part of our outreach. And it’s just slow. And so it’s okay. Do we need to train our staff better? Do we need to have the CRM tool develop more things faster, different functionality, whatever? And we’ve found different ways that if we optimize for five minutes on an article. So we’re currently at 20 articles a month, we’re optimized for 40 articles a month. If I save five minutes per article for one of my staff members, even if it takes me two or three hours or an entire day to put a system in place to save them that five minutes, you’d think, wow, that’s totally inefficient. But when you do the math, five times 40, that’s 200 minutes. Well, that’s why is my brain networking? That’s over three hours in a given month that I’ve just optimized and saved my staff on. That means that, yeah, I may have spent two, eight hours, whatever, and it’ll take me three or four months to recuperate that as far as efficiency goes. But I’ve created a happier staff. I’ve produced the product faster for my clients. I’m making more profit. And, you know, shoot, I enjoy putting systems into place. And so it’s very much like that factory floor of where I’m trying to make sure that my clients are happy, that the widgets are getting produced to a high quality and quickly, and that my staff is happy. And I’m able to do that because it’s so systematized that I can jump in there and find out where a problem is and actually fix that problem instead of when you’re like, hey, we got a new project. And in this case, we’re going to build a website in Magento. Oh, we got a new project and we’re going to build a website in WordPress. It’s like you can’t optimize for anything. And so, you know, now I’ve got it where it’s really down. And it even makes it a whole lot easier when I look at tools or vendors that we want to purchase from. There’s one that costs $1,000 a month that we’re eyeing because we know exactly how it will help us. We know exactly where it will slot into the whole process. And so, yeah, I run my numbers based on what I pay my staff. You get paid X amount of dollars per month. You’re expected to accomplish this in a given day every day in that month. That’s the agreement we have. If they’re more efficient, and this is the billable hour model. If you bill on the hour and you estimated that it would take you an hour to accomplish this and you ran into something and suddenly it was only 15 minutes, you still bill that full hour, which, by the way, in the U.S. is illegal, just so you know.
Paul:
Really?
Lee:
But everybody does it. Yeah, I had an attorney talk to me about it once. He said, if you say you’re going to work on this for an hour and you don’t work on it for an hour and you bill for that hour, that’s against the law.
Paul:
Wow. And attorneys would know this because they’re hourly. That’s all they do. But anyways, everybody does it in the agency world. Everybody bills more than how much time they spend. And they’ll bill their estimate even if they were more efficient because, well, there’s those times when we’re not efficient. And so, you know, the ebb and flow and it overlaps and it’s just fine. However, it actually teaches your entire staff a system of inefficiency of like, hey, I spent 15 minutes on this. I’m going to bill an hour. That means I’ve got 45 minutes to kick back and read Reddit. And it’s like, wait a minute. No, you don’t. But, you know, even if they only spend 15 minutes reading Reddit and then they, you know, spend another half hour working on another project and they, quote unquote, double bill for their time. The whole mindset around it is inefficiency. Instead, if you were to give somebody, here’s a checklist that you have to accomplish today or this month. And if you don’t accomplish it, you don’t get paid. And that’s it. Like, here’s how much you’re going to get paid every month or every week or every day. And here’s how much you have to do every day, every week or every month. And if you don’t do it, you don’t get paid. And suddenly it’s like, whoa, wait a minute. Now we’re being paid on productivity instead of paid on sitting in a chair for an hour. And the mindset shifts huge. And I have found that my staff actually care about their own productivity more. And they care. Hey, listen, I want to get this done so I can go to the beach. I want to get this done so I can go relax. And so they work harder and faster at getting stuff done because I don’t care how long it took them. If it took them longer than an hour, it was their own dumb fault not for asking for help. And I say that and knowing that my staff will listen to this. They’re very good about that of like, you made a mistake there and you’re going to have to pay for it because you still have work to do to get done. And they know that. And it’s weird because we cover the globe as far as like we basically have somebody working 24 hours a day. One person is on the clock. You know, they’re all doing different projects. So it’s not like clients are getting communicated with 24 hours a day. However, it is fun to find out when some of them start overlapping because they didn’t get their work done efficiently or they took the morning off or whatever the case might be. And so they’re working at midnight their local time and they’re greeting, you know, our other colleagues who are waking up and starting working. And they’re just like, you know, I shake my head a little bit and go, well, you made your bed. You get to lie in it. But it creates a great environment for our staff and our team and much more predictable budgets for our clients. I have one client where I still do custom work for them because we have an arrangement and they’re the last client that I’ll ever do custom work for. But they bailed me out of a huge problem that I was in. So they come to me and they’re like, hey, we need this functionality on our email delivery system or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, we can take care of that. Oh, how much is it going to cost? And I’m like, well, it’s a range between $500 and $1,000. And so they budget for $1,000. And I never go over that because that’s what I said it would be. And that’s what the value of it. And, you know, if my staff screws up, that’s fine. You know, like I suffer for it and I don’t have a good financial month. But it also means like when I go to hire somebody on Upwork or on Fiverr or wherever else that I need somebody to fill in a hole, I know I have a fixed dollar amount that I can spend. And they have to accomplish it for this dollar amount. If you look at that, it just makes everything so much better. And you don’t have to come back and say, oh, can I have more money? It took longer than we thought. Sorry, that’s on you.
Paul:
Dude, this is all kind of blowing my mind a little bit. Now you do a lot of it, I should say. Now you’ve got two kind of strands. You’ve got SEO and you’ve got PPC. So I think in my head, I can imagine how you could kind of systemize and productize SEO, especially around kind of creating content and doing the same thing for each client. You kind of you’ve developed a strategy for them or whatever it is. And this is something that can be used essentially for most, if not all, businesses. I can’t quite picture what you’re doing with PPC. Do you mind kind of unpacking that a little bit for us?
Lee:
Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s surprising because we definitely have more well-defined processes around SEO. We do one technique, one strategy called skyscraper, and that’s what we do. Now there are a gazillion things that can be done within SEO, but we’ve chosen to niche down to this is the tactic that we employ and we do it at scale. And so we’re efficient with it. When it comes to PPC, you’re right that it’s a whole lot different because, yeah, so there’s three main networks that we work with, Google, Bing, and Facebook. And there’s different strategies for each one of them. There’s, you know, and every audience is different and all this. However, when you boil it down, so on the surface level, I will agree with you. But what we’ve done is boiled it down deeper and said, well, hang on. To be really successful at Google AdWords, you need to do X, Y, and Z. One of them is you need to improve your quality score. Well, here’s the steps and here’s the tactics to improve your quality score. Okay, so we just have to make sure we do that every week for every single one of our AdWords clients. Okay, that sounds like a checklist. And that’s exactly what it is, is that we have it boiled down to every day we do this for every single one of our clients on AdWords. And we do this for every single one of our clients on Facebook ads. And we do this for every single one of our clients on Bing. And every week we do this. And every month we do this, etc. And so it just becomes a very repetitive, cyclical, processed system to the point of where I can have multiple people working on one client in the PPC world because they’re specializing in certain tasks. So, for example, and this is specifically on AdWords and Bing, but if you’re familiar with the concept of negative keywords, my favorite story in this was when I first started in PPC and I had an ophthalmologist as a client and they wanted, you know, cataracts was a big thing. They had a lot of older folks and so they really wanted people coming in for cataracts. So we were advertising under all kinds of things around cataracts and only to find out that dogs have a lot of cataracts and people in this community were spending a lot of money on getting their dog’s eyes fixed. And I had no idea until we looked at the report and went, whoa, what’s all this canine and the letters K, the number nine, and then spelled out C-A-N-I-N-E, and then people who can’t spell and all those variations. And so we were able to pull all of those out as negative keywords and it improved the campaign significantly. Simple illustration. But can I teach somebody who’s, do I say this best, who’s lower paid to go in and look at that report every day and find out what keywords should not be for this campaign, what keywords should not rank for this campaign, what keywords we don’t want to pay for? Yes, I can. And yes, I do. And so Anna is our negative keyword girl and she goes into every single one of our campaigns every day and looks at yesterday’s report to find out what we ranked for, what we got traffic for, what additional negative keywords need to be put into place. Now, since it’s so well-defined and so simple, she can do that every day without shooting. It seems like, well, wait, like who would want to do that? Well, you know, it’s really well-defined. She does it and then she gets to go to the beach. But the person who’s actually, you know, creating all of these and putting their creative effort into the ad text and the visuals and the videos and all this. And it’s like that person isn’t necessarily the perfect person to be equipped to go in and look at negative keywords every day. And so I’m able to split that out and find skill sets and find desires and propensities and say, I’ve got the perfect job for you or the perfect task. And that overlaps really well so that Anna can now communicate to the person who’s brainstorming on new keywords, which is another task altogether, siloed, bucketed and say, hey, by the way, when you’re doing anything around this, consider these as negatives. And so he will preemptively give her some negative keywords. So they go back and forth and there’s a there’s a defined process for that. Other processes that we have, you know, I mentioned new keywords, similar things on Facebook, new interest groups. We also have a review process for landing pages. And so there’s a checklist on what makes a good landing page. And you can go and search that and find hundreds of listicles about how to create the best landing page. Well, read six or seven of them and you’ve got a list of like, here’s what it is. You need a really good hero image. You need a really good call to action. You need a really good form or button that stands out, etc. You need some supporting material underneath it. You need to remove the navigation, blah, blah, blah. Well, we have that list. And so once a month we go through and say, hey, how well and we make recommendations to our clients. So if you need to optimize this landing page around this or that or whatever, we look at analytics to say, you know, like for Facebook, their relevancy score. How much time is a person that we drive to that landing page? How much time are they spending on that page? How engaged and interactive are they with that? Similarly, on the Google AdWords side, how SEO optimized is that landing page for the keywords that we’re sending there? And what’s the user’s interaction? Do they bounce right away or do they actually, you know, take action? Are they playing the videos? How much time on site are they spending? And so we’re looking at each one of those metrics, which is a completely different function than creating ads. And so, like, if you were just to say, hey, I’m going to hire a PPC person, go manage these campaigns. It’s like you’re asking one person to do 40 different things. And what we’ve done is broken it out into those 40 different things. We’ve put processes around each one of these. And so, like I said, at the surface, how in the world do you systematize PPC? But when you just start talking it through, you can start to see, wow, there are different buckets and different tasks, different categories. And you can say, this is how to brainstorm for more keywords. This is how to, you know, brainstorm for more interests on Facebook. Here’s how to create better ads. Here’s how to A-B test ads and all of this. And so we have this all documented and our staff just goes through each one of those checklists. And that way, I can promise our clients that their campaigns are being touched every day, even at the lowest price level. How we structure it is, you know, a percentage of ad spend. But under $2,500 per month on ad spend, we just charge a flat rate of $500 for our services. But even at that $500 level, we are touching your campaign every day. We’re making sure the numbers are right. We’re making sure the ads are right. The A-B tests are going well. And so I don’t know any other agency of our size who can promise that and charge as low as we do. And it’s all because we have things systematized, broken up into pieces, and where it just makes it really easy. Because I even have this for one of my staff where we actually have somebody filter his email for him. He gets so much email and he needs to respond to each one of these. She filters them into different buckets. And so he is focused on this bucket, which is, you know, they’re asking for money or something like that. And so he’s in that groove. And that has built in efficiencies in his brain of where for the next half hour, I’m just responding to people who have the same question, the same issue. And so I’m running out of that same mentality every time I answer an email. And so the more I can bucket things and put people into that groove, even though, like, for example, you know, I do have a PPC guy. He’s in charge of everything. And so he has, you know, like, say, 75 percent of the tasks within PPC fall under his job description. But he’s able to say right now I’m doing all the creatives. And so for the next hour, he’s focused on creatively coming up with new ad text. And so, you know, depending on which client he’s working on or if he’s going to do all five of them or whatever, he’s going to adjust and work through that. And it just builds in so much efficiency for him and for everybody else.
Paul:
Dude, this is so cool. Now, do you guys have I mean, you’ve got these really low entry points price wise, which is blowing my mind. But I do understand what you’re saying here with regards to splitting everything out. I could actually charge less and yet be more profitable should I break down the standard builds that we do. And as you’re talking, I can literally think of how to break start to break things down into very easy chunks that you could actually train other people to do. So it’s kind of blowing my mind right now. And I can’t wait to go and take this offline and carry on thinking it through because this is I mean, I’ve kind of heard it before. But actually hearing someone who’s done it explain what they are actually doing is actually way more clearer than listening to it on another podcast where I’ve heard someone talking about systemizing or I’ve read books on adopting a franchise style model. You are kind of knocking it out of the park for me and really making it clear. So anyway, you’ve got this low price point, which is phenomenal. You’ve got this amazing way of working. Who are your ideal clients? I presume. Are you niching to a particular client as well?
Lee:
You know, I struggle with that so much. This whole seven years, you know, everybody has been giving me advice of niche down, niche down, you know, have a client focus on dentists focus on doctors, you know, whatever.
Paul:
I thought you said Dennis. I was like, who’s Dennis?
Lee:
No, dentist.
Paul:
Yeah.
Lee:
Yeah. And I’ve struggled with that. I’ve also and just so you know, like I’ve struggled with I know what it takes to make a client successful and I know what it takes to move the needle. And I don’t want to do something that doesn’t move the needle. And by move the needle mean help them make more profit, help them have more customers or clients or whatever. And so like I don’t want to for me, I know how to build a website. I’m decently OK at it, but it’s not going to make them more money. And so I don’t find that it contributes enough value to my prospective clients or clients. And so I’ve looked at a lot of these niches that you can niche down to or whatever, and it’s never appealed to me. And what I’ve found is by instead in niching down with a service offering, what I offer, it suddenly applies to a lot more people. So ironically, my target audience is actually agencies because we offer a white label service that’s really well defined. You have no questions. It’s not being farmed out to India and all of these things. And so it’s just like, you know exactly what you’re going to get. And it’s at such a low price point that you can upsell it, still make money and provide a ton of value to your clients. And so that’s kind of like where I’ve come from. Like I have a couple of agencies we’re working with right now. And it doesn’t really matter to us that every month for agency XYZ, we’re dealing with a new client in the SEO world. We’re writing a new article about a new topic. Like, you know, one of them was skincare, acne. And the next one was healthcare or I’m sorry, hair care for African-American community. And so it’s like something mean you could really get into.
Paul:
Yeah.
Lee:
You know, it’s just like way off. And then the next month we were writing a tennis article.
Paul:
Yeah.
Lee:
And so, you know, just really strange. But it keeps my staff excited because, you know, we’re constantly challenged on new topics and new outreaches and new audiences. Same thing on the PPC side of, you know, we’ve gotten to know non-ferrous forging. Which, by the way, ferrous metals are steel and anything with iron in it. And basically stick a magnet to it. And if it doesn’t attach to a magnet, it’s non-ferrous. So aluminum and copper are non-ferrous metals. Our client does aluminum and copper forging, non-ferrous forging. Blow my mind. I have no care about this in the world, right? But we, they’re using us on both the PPC and the SEO side. And we’ve gotten to know them so well that we can do this and we can knock it out of the park every time. And it’s because we have systems in place to say, listen, somebody’s going to come in. We’re going to have to do research on them to figure out who their target audience is, what their target audience cares about. And that research bleeds into both SEO and PPC. And so as long as you know your client’s target audience, et cetera, you’re going to be successful at targeting that audience and at creating content and creating ads for that audience. And so, yeah, I could optimize that and say we’re only going to deal with business-to-business, non-ferrous copper forging industry. Which, by the way, I think there’s all of like 10 companies around the world who do this. But I find why say no to people just because you don’t want to do the research. I would rather optimize the service and the product that I’m producing and still focus high quality time and effort on the research to figure out who their target audience is and to develop around that. So by niching down, all you’re doing, I mean, the short end of that is you’re optimizing the research. You won’t have to do research because you already know who their target audience is. In our case, we decided to go the other route and niche down what we’re offering so that we can still do the high quality research and be profitable.
Paul:
That’s epic. And lo and behold, and I didn’t actually realize your main target audience was agencies. Lo and behold, I’m an agency and I’m like, hmm, I think I need to have a conversation with you offline. Because there’s like three or four different clients who’ve all approached me recently. And these are agency clients because my clients are agencies as well. They’ve approached me and I kind of just push SEO or PPC straight away. I’m like, no, not my thing. And I’m thinking, I think I need a conversation with you.
Lee:
You’re not the only agency who does that. And like link building, let’s just talk on the SEO side. Like optimizing and doing an SEO audit and coming up with the right code and structure and all that. Like, yeah, it’s not hard to do. And a lot of agencies offer that. They offer it as a freebie or they offer it as a $1,000 thing or whatever. But they don’t offer link building because it’s so gray and troublesome and black hat area. Do you farm it out into India? And there’s no efficiency in it. What we’ve done is to try and build our agency around the efficiency and say, if we can do this at scale, because we’ve niched down to one strategy, one technique that works every time, then we can keep our prices low and yet offer that service to agencies to be able to say, listen, you bring in the clients. You’ve got the great relationship with them. We’ll make sure you shine because you’re bringing in 10 referring domains with every article and you don’t have to deal with an annoying Indian vendor or questionable vendors that don’t show up. You’re dealing with a real agency who’s out to make you successful and your clients successful. And so I just find that it’s an easy sales pitch for me. It’s also, I come from the agency world. I know the struggles that we deal with. I know, talk about billable model, talk about all this. Listen, it’s $600 an article. You charge $1,000. You just made a 40 point markup and you stick a project manager on it that has to check in once a month and you’re done. How awesome is that?
Paul:
You had me at hello, Paul. Guys, it’s Connexdigitalmarketing.com. Link will be in the show notes. How can people connect with you on the socials, brother?
Lee:
Yeah, we’re Connex DM on a bunch of places. We used to actually sell social media as a service. So we completely failed at doing it for ourselves. And so now that I’ve got free time, that we’ve systematized everything, we’re actually systematizing our social media. And so it’s kind of fun to see the evolution of that, of how you can actually be really efficient in social media. So anyways, Connex DM, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Paul:
Now we’re throwing it in there. And we look forward to getting you back on the show when you finish systemizing social media to unpack that for us because that sounds freaking amazing.
Lee:
It’s working really well right now. So, you know, give it some time and we’ll see. My big thing is can I drive traffic from… I want to be the traffic driver. I can drive traffic from SEO and I can drive traffic from PPC. Can I now drive appropriate, targeted people who are willing to purchase from social media? So that’s the challenge.
Paul:
And I like where you’re headed. Mate, thank you so much for your time. Remember, guys, it’s Connex DM everywhere on social media. That’s C-O-N-N-E-X-D-M. Delta, Mike, if I remember my phonetics correctly. All over social media and it’s Connexdigitalmarketing.com. Reach out to Paul. If you do have a couple of downloads, if you click on either Skyscraper SEO or dialed in PPC at the top of their website, you can grab their downloads, their information, etc. And as you can tell, Paul is a super nice guy to chat to. I’m pretty sure he’ll be happy if you want to reach out on paul at Connexdigitalmarketing.com. Mate, you’ve been a legend. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for blowing my mind. I just need to go curl up into a ball for a little bit now because my brain is a little bit in overload. And I’m kind of desperate to start writing down a few systems of myself. So do keep in touch. I think I’m going to have to talk to you again real soon. And have a fantastic day.
Lee:
Will do. And thanks for having me on. And I look forward to hearing your questions of systematization and helping you through the process because it’s a sheer joy for me.
Paul:
Brilliant. I’ve got that recorded. Thanks, mate. All right. Cheers. Bye.
Lee: What did I tell you? I bet your brain is going crazy right now thinking about your business, thinking about how can you break down the individual tasks and be more productive? How can you productize? How can you systemize? Or at least that’s what’s been going on in my brain ever since we recorded that episode. So let’s talk about this. I think this is a fascinating subject. Head on over to the Facebook group. It’s wpinnovator.com/group. It would be so cool to have a conversation around this. Do you think he’s right? I don’t know. Do you? Let’s talk about that. And if you are doing this, how are you systemizing? How are you creating these processes that allow you to be way more productive and way more profitable? So let’s talk about that. In next week’s show, we’re going to be talking to the creator of the Page Builder framework and also founder of Map Steps. That’s David Von Grease. Von Grease. I can never say his last name, but I’m sure he’ll forgive me because we’re really good buddies. We’re Snapchat buddies. We like to talk all the time. You know what? He doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind that I just totally murdered his name. And he’s probably not even going to listen to this end bit anyway. So let’s just not tell him. Let’s just keep that a secret between you and me and the internet. And we’re going to be talking to him next week. So we’re going to unpack his journey, his agency. What does he get up to? He’s a fantastic designer as well. His team is amazing quality of output as well. But also he’s got experience in niching down using Page Builder like a Beaver Builder to create a page building platform in specific niches. So we’re going to be talking to him about that as well. Such a fascinating episode. We’ll see you next week. Have an awesome day or evening. Cheerio.
