#34 Million Dollar Media Buyer Justin Brooke?—?Marketing On The Move
Biography:
Justin Brooke is an online marketing strategist responsible for tens of millions of dollars in sales. He has pioneered inbound and outbound marketing strategies and has consulted for 9 figure companies.
He has spoken on stage from California to London about his knowledge and have since committed himself to content marketing, conversion optimization, and online media buying.
He is a multi-channel strategist when it comes to online marketing and have since climbed his career, paving the way since 2007.
Topics of Conversation:
[00:14] Introductions
[02:38] Campaigning
[03:24] Management
[05:57] On Side Bar Placements
[10:00] On Different Scenarios
[15:09] On Going forward
[19:44] Target Tackling
[24:21] Reaching Out
[26:04] Active Campaigns
[29:38] Leads
[34:25] Limitations
[36:14] Future Plans
[40:39] In Conclusion
Reach Out To Justin Brooke:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/justinbrooke
Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinbrooke
Tweetables:
“When I say duplicate or swipe, I mean use their stuff as inspiration for what you’re going to do yourself.”
“Stick to what your genius is.”
“You have to test a lot of things, you have to cast a big wide net out there and then you figure out that once you cast the big wide net then you reign it back in.”
Transcription:
[00:14] Stephen: Hey guys, Stephen Esketzis here with Marketing on the Move and I’ve got Justin Brooke with me today, how are you going Justin?
Justin: I’m good man, thank you for having me on.
Stephen: No, thank you so much for jumping on, I’m a massive fan of yours and between your website, your blogs, some of the content you’ve been putting out, absolutely epic so it’s a pleasure to have you on today. But, so yeah, give the audience a bit of an insight to who you are and what you do if they haven’t heard of you.
Justin: Yeah, the short version is I got started in late 2005. I couldn’t really figure out what I was doing until about 2007, I think I made about $300 total in that 2 years just trying to figure everything out and I think I tried. I always tell people that I failed until I finally just ran out of failures possible, and finally got the success. But, anyways I said this was the fast version, so 2005–2007 nothing going on. 2007 I landed an internship with an online millionaire, Russell Brunson and I get the education of the lifetime as an intern because my job is to study his quarter million marketing library and write review articles all over those courses by the best guys Jay Abrahams, Dan Kennedys, Joe Polish, it’s everybody. But it was an unpaid internship so I’m still broke but I have a really awesome education take that home, begged my wife to let me apply some of the stuff that I learned. She gave me $60 that we borrowed from the electric bill because we didn’t even have the $60 I started a pathetic Google Adwords campaign, $2 a day budget. You can do the Math, $2 a day times 30, that’s $60. I’ve made a $150 that month. So I doubled my money and I paid the electric bill and re-invested everything again. Double, double, $11 in a row, I doubled my money and buy the end I had a 6 figure business I was making something like 5 figures a month and it was paid traffic. You know, as I say on stage in my presentation, paid traffic literally took me from ramen noodle soups to red lobster. So, it’s the thing that I’m obsessed with.
Stephen: That’s epic. That’s such a powerful story. I love that. Just shows you how paid traffic can change someone’s life so literally.
Justin: It can, it can.
[02:38] Stephen: That’s awesome. So, I guess now that you’ve come a long way from obviously doing $2 a day campaigns, give us a bit of an insight as to what sort of campaigns you’re running at the moment at what sort of scale?
Justin: Well, one of the campaigns I’m running right now is a half million per month that we’re spending but I’m the small guy on the campaign. They want me spending $180,000.
Stephen: Oh, God. Jeez.
Justin: Yeah, so I’ve really got a lot of work cut out for me. I’ve got a massive campaign that we’re just, me, my wife, my team, we’re just plugging away at everyday. You know, new campaigns, ads, adsets, and yeah, so it’s big right now. We’re managing a lot of money.
[03:24] Stephen: And, not just the money but like in the organization as well, I can’t imagine what your adset management is and your ad management and making sure you know what’s going on in every level.
Justin: Yeah, I learned from the very beginning that you’ve got to have a very clean campaign set up. You’ve got to have clean accounts structure because, just like if you’re working on a desk or in a garage or whatever. You’re going to be much more efficient if you’re work area is clean and systemized. Wherein everything is messy and there’s no structure to it, then you’re going to lose a lot of productivity and the same thing happens with all my ads. You’ve got to have clean account structures.
Stephen: Yeah, and how have you sort them in the past? Is that something, which you’ve learned, and just something you’ve been getting better at? Or something that you went out and said, alright, we’ve got to start it this way and try to maintain it this way?
Justin: You know, you figure them out and well, I play a game called Call of Duty. In Call of Duty, basically the way you win at that game is one, you have to be good enough at the actual controllers so you can aim but once you get that down it’s about knowing the run patterns of the different players and if you know the run patterns then you can kind of be at the spot before the guys are even there because you know the run pattern. Well the same thing happens with each traffic network. I see paid traffic all as a video game to me. You know, instead of points, I get dollars. Yeah, but it’s all a big video game to me. And, with paid traffic like Facebook once you know the right account structure, the right adset type, how to position the ad, how many to use, which bidding settings. Like, once you figure that part out, you’ve mastered that network. But then, Yahoo! Gemini comes out and now one comes out and Pinchers just launched to that platform so you’re always learning. In Call of Duty, you’re always learning new maps in online advertising, you’re always learning new networks but you really all do the same thing. You just move the buttons and have different settings.
Stephen: Yeah, so it’s just alright in adjusting as time goes on. I mean, things change dashwords change, adnetworks change and it’s just adjusting your strategy?
Justin: Yes! And, sorry about my voice, I just got over a cold. I’m all better now but.
[05:57] Stephen: That’s good. Hopefully you’re jumping over it now. So, clearing up. I have a cool question for you, because I’ve gone to your website and if anyone hasn’t been there before, imscalable.com but you talk about a whole lot of the tapes that have value in it. I highly recommend people going there, there’s a link on my website as well so you can go and have a look but you talk about one thing which I really enjoy is the actual fa?ade bar how one side converts better than the other and explain a bit on how you tested that and what you did to test that? Because I found that really interesting, I mean, it’s a small sort of thing overall but give us a bit of insight how you came to testing left or right side bar.
Justin: You know, I actually stumbled on that one. A friend of mine Michelle McFearson told me that she had some success with it and I think that I’ve heard another blogger saying he had success with it. And it got me thinking, you know, one thing I don’t do when everybody is saying, “Oh this button”, or “This squeeze page”, or “this thing” it converts better than anything else. The first thing I do is I go look to see if there’s any legitimacy to that because there’s so many people that are following one guy and that guy doesn’t even know what he’s doing. They don’t know they’re following a guy that doesn’t know what he’s doing. And so, as soon as I heard about it, you know, I trust these people. They’re friends of mine. I know they’re good. But I still looked it up and what I found was that there were all kinds of eye tracking charts that showed the way people viewed websites online. They’ve done all these eye tracking and thousands of dollars of testing and the way people view a website online is they have what’s called an F-pattern and they have a Z-pattern. A Z-pattern is less likely, most people look at websites in an F-pattern. Which means they start at the top left corner and they look over and then they look down and they look over again. And you just look up and it’s an F-pattern eye tracking chart. You could see just study after study after study that’s been done on this and so I started thinking okay well, what other websites are using this. And I noticed on Facebook, all the navigation is over on the left hand side. Amazon, all the Navigation’s over on the left hand side. If you think about most of the bigger websites the navigation is over on the left hand side and even on Google. People always challenge me, “Well then why would Google put the ads over on the right hand side?” Because the ads aren’t their business, the search is their business. The ads is how they monotize the search.
Stephen: Okay, I see. I never thought about that, until now. Like, that’s crazy, when you put it that way, it’s literally staring you in the face every single day and people don’t realize that.
Justin: Yeah, absolutely.
Stephen: That’s awesome.
Justin: And that goes to show, everybody’s just following this one guy like everybody has their side box at the right just because everybody has their side bars on the right.
Stephen: Yeah, and I think there’s a pretty cool them. I think; is it Thrive themes that does that? The way that you can split test the actual side bar and you can do some pretty cool web for that.
Justin: Yeah, there is a couple of themes that can do it. But unlike Thrive themes that is one of those like a club thing. It’s not monthly, you pay one fee but maybe they have a monthly fee now. I don’t know, whatever. They have a bunch of themes there. One of them in there is called Focus Blog and it does what I think is the perfect blog setup out of the box. I mean, you just have to go in there and tilt it. You know, side bar on the left, header up in here, feature leverage here and then it’s all done.
Stephen: That’s awesome. Yeah, and I recently have designed my website and I made sure that the sidebar is now on the left so looking forward to those extra email opt-in’s and sales. I’m loving that. But, yeah, so let’s chat a little bit about some of the ways that you can drive traffic as well. We actually had Mike Colella from AdBeat who had come on recently.
Justin: Absolutely.
[10:00] Stephen: And he was sharing some of his insights as well on the different Landing Pages out there and obviously there’s a lot of Lead Generations for different supplements and this and that. So, what I want to do is give you a bit of a scenario and how you have sort of gone back in tackling the traffic side of the said scenario.
Justin: Sure.
Stephen: So, what I want to do is I’ve got two scenarios here, we’re going to through the first one and I can get some feedback from you as well. So, the scenario is you’ve got a $100,000 as your target within the first year, you’ve got $5000 to spend in advertising or $5000 full start so depending on how you want to spend that whether it’s in ads or maybe adviser why not. And it’s a lead generation website for solar panels. So it’s obviously Lead Generation and they sold those leads to solar panel supplies. So how would you go around something like that in the advertising medium traffic side of things? Is there some sort of path that you would take?
Justin: Yes, so I’m just trying to gather my thoughts a little bit.
Stephen: That’s alright, if you need a second I mean. It’s a bit of an on the spot question. But —
Justin: Right, so if I understand the question right. The goal is to make a $100,000 the budget is —
Stephen: Right, the $100,000 will be from selling those leads to the solar panel supplies and what we want to do is to get as many leads as possible so we can sell those to the suppliers around the country.
Justin: Okay, so I have a $5000 to start.
Stephen: Correct, so in the bank $5000 and yes, so how will you start? Is it something where you look into Spy Tools to see what people are currently doing or do you model of that? Where do you go from here?
Justin: Yeah, first thing I’d do is I create a customer avatar and everybody, well; we can skip this step because it’s boring and they don’t know how to do it. But, it sets you up for success the whole way through. I never ever start a campaign or new business without first creating a customer avatar or sometimes they call it a customer’s persona and that’s why it refers to I figuring out what’s there average gender. Male or female are they? What’s their age? What’s their income level? What are their fears? What are their likes? Their desires? Where do they hang out all the time. What music do they listen to? Do they have kids? I get, and I just do recount first. Figure out who they are and what everybody does wrong is you want to sell to everybody and they rationalize that everybody is their customer some weigh but start with the lowest hanging fruit. You can always scale up to selling to everybody in the world. But start with the low hanging fruit. The guy that is, or the girl, that lady who is the perfect match.
Stephen: Right.
Justin: Then once you have the customer avatar then what I do is something what I call mapping the neighborhood or mapping the competition which is: I create a spreadsheet that has all of my competitors, their landing pages, their ads. How much traffic they get? Where they are getting their traffic from? I look this information up in AdBeat; I look it up in What Runs Where, SEM Rush. Once I have that information now I know who the customer is, where they hang out and I know what all my competitors are doing. From there it’s pretty easy to create what you can get paid.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: If I have $5000, I’m going to start with $1000 and I’m going to start testing as many landing pages as I can I’m going to test 5 different segments of the market and I’m going to test 3 different ads so I’m testing a lot of different combinations with the first $1000. That $1000 isn’t designed to make me money. It’s designed to buy me the data of what’s working and what’s not.
Stephen: Right.
Justin: Once I have that data I poured of the ads and the landing pages. All the ad segments that were losers. That were not profitable and I re-invest another $1000 into the ones that were profitable as a test to make sure that that actually works and it wasn’t a fluke. If the test passes, we’re good to go. Now if it doesn’t work, and if you don’t find any winners at all in that first $1000 chances are you didn’t do the avatar and you didn’t do the mapping the competition because you probably just tried to guess or you didn’t test enough things but if you did all those things and you didn’t do it you just got to go back to the drawing board. That’s why I split the $5000 into five segments that give me 5 rounds in the chamber basically.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: And, so that’s what I do. I break it into five and I spend the $1000 at a time until I figure out what works and then I just go, go, go.
[15:09] Stephen: Yeah, and before you go on. Just to hold you quickly there, when you’re testing, what are you testing for? So are you going straight first for something like a lead generation website or are you going straight for a lead straight up? Or are you looking to go down? Which different network would you look out for something like that as well? How do you tackle those decisions?
Justin: Which network?
Stephen: Like do you start with maybe Google Display or? Well obviously you know the networks but just for the people out there who aren’t that familiar.
Justin: Google’s got a lot to offer so I probably start in Google because it’s a place where I can start really small. You know that the traffic is good nobody can say that Google has bad traffic. Otherwise, the whole advertising world is going to be… And, that’s not the case.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: So, you know the traffic is good. You don’t have to worry about, is it good traffic? You can start with a $100 or you can be spending $100,000 per day. So, it’s got something for every level. So I tell people to just start there because that’s a place where you can start, where you can grow and you can scale and you can never leave, if you want.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: And so, on Google, I will probably going to start with a search campaign because people who are searching to buy solar panels online, are probably going to convert.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: And, it’s as simple as that. Starting with that one keyword.
Stephen: Yeah, exactly right, and the thing with Google is that it’s searching for a solution. It’s not something like Facebook. It’s a bit different especially in the search side of things anyways.
Justin: Right, yeah so you think about it and then also because it’s Google, there are so many spy tools that will show you everybody’s campaigns the keywords they’re using. All the information is available. So you can easily duplicate. Now, don’t copy. Don’t be a rip-off guy, don’t be that guy. When I say duplicate or swipe, I mean use their stuff as inspiration for what you’re going to do yourself. But, because it’s Google all that data is available.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: So yeah, lead generation, when I’m testing, I’m looking for, let’s say, I’m selling the leads for $20 each. I’m just making that price up, but it seems like a —
Stephen: Yeah, it sounds pretty cool. Plus, I’m not exactly sure what it is in the industry, but yeah, that sounds close, let’s stick with that.
Justin: So, $20 per lead well then that means all that I have to do is that I can generate a lead for less than $20. But I probably have some other costs associated with my business so really I want to get my leads probably anywhere between, $5 and $10 each. That way I’ve got like, margin and profit and all that stuff.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: I’ve got people in my business who handles that accounting and does all that but I know it’s not simple. And, so —
Stephen: Stick to the traffic. Stick to what your genius is.
Justin: Yeah, so that’s what I’m testing. I’m looking for the combination. It’s like a combination lock. You’re trying to figure out which landing page, with which ads, with which keywords, all come together to create that $5 lead.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: And all the ones that don’t do it you get rid off, kind of like horse betting. You’re going to put a lot of horses out there. You’re going to be on all of them but then you’re going to figure out which ones won and you’re not going to bet on any of the other ones. All you’re going to bet on are the winners.
Stephen: Yeah, I love that sort of ‘just like’. I don’t know if it’s called dividing the herd or whatever it’s called but you really start on doubling down on the ones that are doing well and just start getting rid of the flock from the end.
Justin: Absolutely, everybody always starts with, you know, they dip their toe in and they get ‘dip their toe in’ results. Everybody’s like, “Oh, let me start with, a $100” they put up one ad and one landing page usually their whole page is not even dedicated. And no wonder they think paid traffic doesn’t work. That’s just not how it works. You have to test a lot of things, you have to cast a big wide net out there and then you figure out that once you cast the big wide net then you reign it back in. You have to buy the data.
[19:44] Stephen: So, say something like this; where like you said, you’re going to cast that wide net you want to be testing a lot of different ads. How do you go about, like you said, you spend that $1000 on the first round of the campaign. How much did you spend on each AdSet individually? Is there a set number do you think or it depends on the budget you’re in and how do you wait on what you do for the creative, what you do for the headline, what you do for the targeting? Does it all depend on leash? How do you go on to tackle on those sorts of sides?
Justin: Alright, so with Google they display their text ads, and I would say that people start with text ads before you go in and start investing money on buying new banners and stuff. Start with text ads, they work very well. So there’s no Ad Images to test it’s just a headline and a description.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: We have found, because we do a lot of campaigns and because I’ve had to train employees I’ve had to figure out a system to starting campaigns so we get the same results over and over again or at least similar and that we know which parts are failing. So, whenever we start a campaign, we kind of have the same process we go through. 2 or 3 landing pages, 3 if we just happen to have a good idea for a third one.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: Or we’ll start with 2, but, multiple landing pages, 3 different ads and then 5 different ad groups. So, ad groups are, you know like in Facebook, it would be books that they like, software that they like, celebrities that they like. Same thing with Twitter ads, you know, authors, celebrities, and software. With Google it’s going to be a small themed ad groups of keywords. So you’re going to have some keywords that are like, buy solar panels online! Then you’re going to have some keywords that are all model numbers of specific solar panels and you’re going to have keywords of people trying to learn about solar panels and then you’re going to have another ad group that’s all of your competitors branded, so five ad groups, 3 ads in each ad group. So that’s not 15 different ads, that’s 3 ads multiplied into 5 ad groups with 2 to 3 landing pages. That’s how we always start. We start with that combination, and like I said, either we have extra ideas on hand we’ll come up with six or seven or eight ad groups or 5 different ads. But, normally we just start with that then we’ll see where the numbers come in.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: And then once the numbers come in they tell us exactly what to do.
Stephen: Yeah, that’s it. That’s the beauty of buying that data initially as well.
Justin: Yeah, if you’re trying to generate $5 to $10 leads and then data comes in, you turn off all the ones that are $15, $20, $50, $80 to keep the ones that are $5 and $10 and you keep going.
Stephen: Yeah, and especially in lead gen sites, one thing that would probably slip in as well is that you can sell to multiple companies or something like this. So, at the end of the day, that $20 lead might turn into a $60 lead if you sign to three companies, and that just increases your margin. So, it depends on the industry, it depends on the type of website. I think a couple of big ones out there where I think loanmybills? I think that was one of the big ones out there that was on AdBeat when I spoke to Mike not too long ago. There are heaps out there and they are really good ones to model off I think.
Justin: Yeah, I’ve got a business where I do it, it’s called VerifyTheAgencies, and basically we drive leads for other marketing service providers. You know, for me and my business, it was hard to hire and train somebody like me that could get the same results that I could for the clients so instead of trying to scale by hiring more people like me. I’m scaling by just basically hiring all the best people in the industry and just being their lead gen. I’m their sales leads, marketing and they just close the sale and fulfill on the work.
Stephen: Yeah, exactly right and that’s awesome. I mean, when you can do that, that gives you a whole list of people when you go out that you trust as well. I mean I’ve had a look at verified agencies, do you want maybe give the people a few details on where they could reach that if they’re looking for someone like that? So do they just go straight to the website?
[24:21] Justin: So on verified agencies, verifiedagencies.com, it’s pretty simple. What we do, we help businesses who are looking for marketing service providers. You know, the problem is when you’re searching for service providers, you have to first, go to Google and find a couple and then you have to call them and go through their demos and their sales pitches and then you still finally find the guy you’re going to hire and a lot of times the first guy you hire doesn’t get you the results. So you have to hire another guy, and another guy, and so on. We hear that people usually go through 3 to 4 people before they find the one they like. So what we do, we’ve already gone out and done the research, found marketing service providers, interviewed them, screened them, made them show us examples, made them give us references and so you just come to us and tell us what you’re looking for and we make a personal introduction to the right person for you.
Stephen: Yeah, and essentially I mean like, the way that is, you’ve pretty much bet them on like massive scales so people just come in knowing what they want and then that’s how it works. So, that’s awesome, I love that and, yeah, I guess now I’m moving into another thing. I mean, I’ve been following you for a while and you said you moved to active campaign recently. I want to ask you a little bit about that and how you have been finding active campaigns as the CRM and using all the animations and things as well because I know a part of our audience obviously they use some sort of email marketing CRM or something. So what goes through your head when you’re choosing active campaign or moving from another provider as well? What are some of the things you look for?
[26:04] Justin: So, when people hear the tone of my voice or the hesitation I want them to realize that I’ve already driven the Rolls-Royce and then I got into the Lexus. You know, I’m not saying that active campaign is bad, it’s the better option. That’s why I’m paying for it, that’s why I’m using it right now. But, I used to be a member or customer of Hubspot and I was for 2 years it just became not the right fit for my company anymore but going from Hubspot to active campaign is like going from a Rolls-Royce to a Lexus. A Lexus is still good, but it’s not Rolls-Royce.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: I love active campaign, you can do everything that everybody really loves about in, InfusionSoft, and you can do almost everything that Hubspot can do. You can do all the tagging, you can do advance auto-responder sequences all kinds of good stuff. It has real flow in there if you run an agency like me and you need to assign deals to certain people and put people in the pipeline, it’s just CRM. It’s great, it’s just not Hubspot.
Stephen: No, exactly, but I think one of the things that made it, now none have really simplified the beaches but they have simplified the look and feel of it for the average person to really be able to adapt and use.
Justin: Yeah, that was huge. That was really my only gripe about active campaign, is it could do a lot of things but the interface used to just be horrible it was hard to figure out what to do and the buttons were mainly weird things. But they just recently put a whole new interface on it and it’s smooth, it’s a lot like, it looks and feels like MailChimp but it has the power of something like a Hubspot or InfusionSoft.
Stephen: Yes, and that’s awesome. I love that and recently, I literally this morning just got an email that you can now share automations as well.
Justin: Yeah.
Stephen: There are so many cool things you can do. So, it’s definitely a CRM I would recommend and you would recommend as well. So, that’s really cool.
Justin: Yeah, it’s not for the person who is just beginning to build their list but if you’re starting to get over 5000–8000 leads, you’re starting to get into where your email marketing program is really serious to you, you need to give it a serious tool and active campaign is that.
Stephen: And it really starts off affordable as well for the average person. I mean, I remember when I moved across from AWeber, it was only like literally $9 a month, I think it starts from less than $500 subscribers. So when you’re just signing in for low and I think it works pretty well too. It’s got that massive scale for whether you’re on the high-end as thousands and thousands of leads a day even or you’re looking at a couple maybe here and there. Like, I think it gives you that flexibility.
Justin: And, by the way this episode is sponsored by AWeber.
Stephen: I wish, maybe after reaching out to them I can claim my sponsorship. But, it’s alright, what we’ll do is we’ll move off the active campaign slightly and we’ll begin to wrap it up pretty soon but, I wanted to quickly just jump in as well and say you’ve worked with a lot of landing pages and lead magnets and different offers and this and that. What have you seen as the most powerful tripwire or offer you have ever worked with. Has it been like, a one deal and all lead magnet that you’ve worked with and being like, that’s awesome and that’s just dominating?
[29:38] Justin: You know, the thing people are doing wrong with lead magnets is that they only have one and again it’s a case of everyone is following like these couple of guys. But, you know, I don’t want to accuse anybody of not knowing anything and you know, but the problem is people are copying everybody but they don’t realize that things change based on the market and the situation and the AdNetwork and just because one guy is doing amazing with a certain type of lead magnet or a certain type of squeeze page, doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. You need to do what’s right for your business, your offer, and your market. So, when it comes to lead magnets, I find that the free eBook, the free video, obviously that works. A lot of people are doing it, it’s proven but it’s not what works the best.
Stephen: Right.
Justin: What works the best in my opinion, from my own testing, and I’ve tested this in a lot of markets so I’m really, really confident in it, is a free tool. On my website, I give out a free spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has 202 traffic sources on it. If you want a website, that’s a no-brainer, it’s like, all right fine I’ll give you my email address because obviously I want the spreadsheet. When it’s a tool like that, a calculator or simple software, or a spreadsheet. You know, the difference is, that saves the person time. It’s useful, it’s immediately useful and it has a much higher perceived value. Where if it’s a free eBook, or a free cores, or free video, that costs the person time. They have to consume that material first in order to get any value out of it.
Stephen: Yeah.
Justin: But at the same time, you’ve got to have more than one lead magnet. I have 5, and I rotate them out. I use them in different scenarios, on my blog, not everybody wants the spreadsheet. Some people are looking for course. That mini secretive information and so I have different lead magnets to appeal to the different kinds of needs that people have.
Stephen: Yeah, and I think you’ve also got an ROI Calculator on there somewhere?
Justin: Yes, it’s got an ROI Calculator; we’ve got an EPC predictor. Yeah, swipe file, spreadsheet, we try to get all the different angles.
Stephen: And, I know someone who does that really well, on Marketing and just kills it, is Neil Patel. We had him on the podcast a little while ago. I don’t know if you’ve been to his website lately but —
Justin: Of course I’ve been following Neil Patel since he was just a web designer.
Stephen: There you go. He’s a killer content marketer no doubt, one of the best, and I think QuickSprout where you can go and you can actually literally plug-in your website and it’s literally a software as a service, you put it in and it gives you all the different information on the social shares and the best ranking pages and it literally pulls apart I think one and then three competitors or one in three other ones, and then you can save that and you’d build these leads through that as well so everytime you want to export it, bang, another lead, another lead.
Justin: Hubspot does 60,000 leads per month using their marketing creater tool.
Stephen: That’s crazy.
Justin: Something that Neil Patel is doing, it’s a tool. If you look around at what guys are doing, it’s these tools, these quizzes; it’s not free eBooks or free videos.
Stephen: No, that’s right. I mean, people want to use these lead magnets on their time. They don’t want to do it on your time. I’m sorry I think I’ve got that back to front, I think they want to do it when it suits them, that’s what I meant. When it suits them and not the other way around. So, tools like these, they come in out of need rather than out of want. So, people want to know, bang, all they need to know on what the competitors are doing on an ongoing basis and they think, wow.
Justin: Yeah, at the end of the day nobody really wants to learn and think. If you can just choose to have it done for you, you’re always going to choose that and that’s why I sell traffic instead of teach traffic. They used to say that information marketing was selling the shovels, but no, actually doing the traffic is selling the shovel.
[34:25] Stephen: Do you find that that sort of limits your potential as well? I mean obviously you’re working on super high scale and margins, and obviously the clients are very big. But, on a scalability sense, does that limit your potential on how much you can do at once?
Justin: No, you know, that’s a common myth that service businesses can’t scale. It’s a little harder, it’s obviously easier when you’re selling an eBook and it’s just digital and you can just duplicate it to death. We’re a service so obviously we’re repeating a certain thing, but I mean there are gigantic services out there. Huge scalable, essentially, McDonald’s is a service. So; service businesses is absolutely scalable, they scale it in different ways.
Stephen: It really depends on how you want to take it.
Justin: I use courses, like 1 or 2 courses; I use them as lead gen.
Stephen: Yeah, and that just reminded me another company that does that as lead pages really well and that’s a different model completely. That’s a software business, but they use there, I think like some of their courses and they’re quite deep courses as well. I mean, they use those as massive lead gens too.
Justin: Right.
Stephen: So yeah, that’s awesome. I love how you really dialed in the way you can take your service business and scaling them out to doing the traffic done for you solution so that’s awesome.
Justin: Yeah, and once you figure it out for yourselves then you just create a lead gen model like I did and now you can really scale it out.
Stephen: Yeah, and I think that you can scale them out in the direction that you want to as well to attract that ideal customer and avatar that we were talking about earlier.
Justin: Right.
[36:14] Stephen: So, we’ll start wrapping it up but I’ve got one last question and that is, with your blog, you’ve worked out, and if people go there then they would be able to see it, your 2015 rollout strategy. So you’ve talked about some of the different networks and kind of a very solid strategy that it’s been a bit of a corner stone piece of content I think that people can go to and see it implementing their business. How do you think that’s changed over the last couple of years and where do you think this strategy and this network and everything is sort of going in this year and next year?
Justin: Well it’s a 2015 rollout strategy and it’s a rollout strategy for aggressive marketers and I say that on the page. It’s not something that, if you’re selling on “How to teach your dog to pee outside”, probably not going to be right for you or you’re brand new, it’s something that you can grow into. You can start with one piece of it and you can keep adding on but really this is for somebody who knows their market, has a good product and really just wants to go, full blown. They want to be doing 2000 sales a day type of level. It’s really designed for, and it has changed a little bit, I do need to update the article because it’s June now and things do change. Like for instance, Yahoo! Gemini is out now and I have in there, AdBleed as one of the networks. AdBleed was really good whether it used to have Yahoo! As one of it’s main sources of inventory. But when Yahoo! Created Yahoo! Gemini and pulled out of AdBleed, all of a sudden advertisers were like where did all my conversion go? It’s not that AdBleed is horrible now, it’s still a good network but when a piece of inventory likes all of Yahoo! Pulls out, that’s huge.
Stephen: Massive.
Justin: So, I would try now AdBleed for Yahoo! And I would keep everything else the same. That’s really about the only thing that I would change.
Stephen: Yeah and do you say this is going to change in the next 6 to 12 months? Anything major or do you think it will be chugging along?
Justin: I think that’s going to be good through to 2016 at least. I’m really interested in what’s going on AOL. Verizon just bought AOL. AOL just redid their whole entire website to have a lot of content they just came out with AOL 1.0, their website is mobile first. They’re making big moves, they’re making the right moves and with Verizon buying them out, they have a lot of money behind them. And look, they’re AOL and don’t count them out.
Stephen: Yeah, and I think that there’s massively underestimated I think. So, there’s just so much going on the market as well in general it’s crazy. Keeping up to date on all of this to make sure that you are as well. I mean, the thing is with traffic, things are always changing and you need to stay up to date on these networks, on these strategies otherwise you can get left behind pretty quickly.
Justin: Right, and most people know that Google is like the king of paid trafficking and Facebook has recently become a big challenger to Google. They don’t have nearly the amount of inventory but they have better targeting, arguably better targeting, and then most people know that there’s a bang. But the pros they know that AOL is one of those other kings. AOL advertising dot com for a long time was one of the main places that the pro media pods would go to. So, I’m really watching what AOL is doing right now.
Stephen: Yeah, we’ll have to keep an eye out on that and then maybe report back on that in 6 months time to see what’s been happening. I think that a part of the fun is seeing what’s happening. It’s kind of like stock trade. You get to see what goes up, what goes down, where people move, where they spend their money. Because you never know these days, I mean something could change, there could be a shift in even within the company itself and they can shift how traffic gets run from other companies and it’s just really interesting, I think, more than anything.
Justin: Yeah.
[40:39] Stephen: That’s awesome. Look Justin we’ve got to wrap it up there but I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of those nuggets with us. I think we definitely can go back and apply a lot of what we talked about there.
Justin: It’s a pleasure and I’m really so sorry about my voice guys.
Stephen: That’s alright. Make sure you keep up the fluids and keep up the healthiness. I think you were talking just before we jumped on that you’ve got a holiday coming up is that right?
Justin: I do. I’ve got an RV parked in my driveway right now. I’m just renting it; it’s my first time using an RV. But, we’re going on a 10 day road trip starting tomorrow and if we like it we’ll probably going to buy one because I mean, I work on the internet I can go anywhere I want to. You know, we’re home schooling our children starting next year anyways, because I just don’t like the US School System, whole other franchise.
Stephen: Yeah, I was about to say I think we could dedicate a whole show to that, to just the school systems around the world.
Justin: Yeah, so we’re really excited. The whole family is packed, all the bags in the living room and we’re just waiting for 6am to roll around so we can get in the RV and start the journey.
Stephen: That’s an early morning. 6am, geez. Where are you heading?
Justin: Well you got to head out there early, right?
Stephen: Yeah, that’s true. But what type of, what are you doing along the way during those 10 days?
Justin: So we’re in Florida and we’re in South Florida, a little bit North and so we’re going to go up to the Panhandle. It’s about, 10 hours away, so we’ll 5 hours and then another 5 hours.
Stephen: Wow, that’s awesome.
Justin: And then we’re going to come back down the west coast of Florida, because we’re on the east coast to Naples, really to Sanibel Island. Sanibel Island is kind of like our manly beach.
Stephen: Ah, okay.
Justin: It’s just beautiful beach, really beach-y town, lots of shells and shops along the beach and then we’re going to come along the Everglades and we’re going to go to one of the airboat Alligator tours and then we’ll come back home.
Stephen: Geez, that sounds exciting, you’re getting me a little bit jealous now. I’ll have to —
Justin: It’s really going to be fun.
Stephen: I really want to come to the US very soon so I’ll have to come by and stop and say hello. There are so many marketers and just the business and it’s such a happening place. So, I have to come soon. But yeah, awesome Justin, pleasure on having you on as always and I’m sure I’ll speak to you soon.
Justin: Okay, talk soon, thanks!
Stephen: Thanks!
For full audio and transcript you can view the interview here.