Learning From Others

Your weekly podcast where respected entrepreneurs share their accomplishments as well as their hard times to help you start or grow your business or project more successfully.

Dennis Yu: Don’t Be an SEO Bro Marketer 08/31/2023

Dennis Yu: Don’t Be an SEO Bro Marketer Today's guest is a former engineer at Yahoo who understands search engines second to none. We talk about all the ways to run an agency wrong, hoping to teach you how to be successful and do it right. He founded BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that provides training and mentorship for aspiring entrepreneurs across the globe. On a mission to create a million jobs internationally, please welcome Dennis Yu. Dennis Yu, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the Learning from Others Show. How you doing, man? Good, Damon, and it's awesome hanging out with you again. I wish it was in person like we were driving race cars in Vegas. I. That was fun. You know, we got a couple stories we could probably hit. Um, you and I have engaged on mostly Facebook over the years and kinda got a little friendship going on and, um, yeah, I, I flew out and I, every time I fly out somewhere I try and kinda keep track of who's where and, um, I. And meet up with somebody and establish a relationship a little bit better. So I appreciate the opportunity of you being willing to go hang out. And we did, we went and did a limo in race cars and um, I mean, you live in Vegas, but we, we did the tourist a little bit of the touristy thing. Yeah. Yeah. And, and thanks for taking the time. That was such an honor. And you know, you're one of the few ss e o people out there. I know this is being recorded. You're one of the few ss, e o people out there that is legit and drives results. And I am not being compensated to say this. But I've been sharing this and I'm, I know people that are watching this and have seen my Facebook posts. They're coming to you. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. It's, um, we'll probably talk 'cause you're legit about that today, you know? Yeah. Not, not about me, but about the industry. And, um, for, for me, that's been, uh, Good and bad to throw rocks at my own industry. Right? Like, it's unfortunate that that's such a valuable sales proposition to distinguish yourself as actually doing your job. But, but it is. So why don't we, why don't we start there? So, um, actually before we get into it, um, let's, let's have you talk about yourself the most, uh, enjoyable, comfortable part of a podcast. Um, I, I actually like how you put it on the intake form when, uh, so I ask the guests, you know, what's your elevator pitch that we can use? And Dennis just puts Google me. If we're talking about s e o and, and you don't have a knowledge panel show up when I Google you, you're a fat weight loss coach. Fat weight loss goes, where's, where's the analogy of a fat weight loss coach? Oh, fat, okay. Overweight weight, weight loss coach. That's overweight. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So Dennis, um, has been in marketing for how, how long have you been in marketing? 30 years. Yeah, how'd you get into it? And I was one of the original people, one of the first people at Yahoo. So I built the internal analytics at Yahoo. So I'm a search engine engineer, so I'm not an S E o. I am the person who's trying to protect the results from the SS e o people trying to trick us. Yeah. Have you got jaded over the years knowing like how this works and being able to see the manipulation that's going on when it's not done for the right audience and the right users? Do you think that weight loss scams will ever go away? Every year there's a new scam, right? And people fall for it. 'cause they're just like, how do you not know that? It's a scam? Hey, if I take this one pill, you're gonna lose 30 pounds in 12 days. Like it's a scam, right? Mm-hmm. So the salespeople are always inventing new techniques. And I remember, this is like back in my day, we used to walk uphill both ways. I built websites by hand using Microsoft Front page. It was engineers that were building websites, people like us that actually physically knew how to do the thing. It was before the marketing people and all that came in back then. You remember it was called web mastering. Mm-hmm. Before it became digital marketing and social media and influencer and all these other words that are now really just buzz words, new words for the same thing. Mm-hmm. Right. And now I'm, I'm gonna blame the internet money Bross. Yeah. And the motivational speakers for now, all of them are ai. Experts and crypto experts and chat G P T experts and they're SS e o experts too. So all these people have come in in the last few years seeing easy money and now they're gonna start selling S E o. I was a Josh Nelson seven figure agency conference and Josh Nelson's amazing. I love the guy. They're people that come into that program 'cause they think it's easy money. And in the program Josh teaches you should sell s e o, but he also says you should also deliver s e o too. You should also understand what it is. Some agency owners, the guilty will be unnamed, are selling ss e o and they don't even know what it is, but they know that people want it and they need it. So they sell it for $2,000 a month and they're making all this money. This one company that I'm probably gonna release a full investigation later today is making three. Well, they're, they were making last month, $320,000 a month off of 150 clients that are paying for s e o and Facebook ads and websites and things like that. It is a scam. There's no way to defend it. It's a scam, but it's a sales guy running it. He has no operations, he has no marketing. He's a sales guy and some of them even white label their stuff out. So they have no idea what it is and someone else is doing it. They, the client doesn't know anymore. I mean, you know, they, but they're selling it 'cause they're salespeople. There's too many salespeople in the s e O space. Mm-hmm. We need more mechanics, not people in the car dealership wearing a tie. Slick hair saying all these things about the car. We need more mechanics that actually have grease on their fingers, like you and me. Yeah. I mean, I often get asked what, um, what should I know as I shop s e o and, and I think that why people are so attracted to, to you know, you and your transparency is because it establishes trust when you're willing to go, Hey, you know, One example, s e o takes time, but here's why. And then you explain it. Or, hey, not only here are the advantages of s e o, but here are the disadvantages because what they're getting pitched to you. You nailed it with the sales bros and not enough actual people doing the work is the majority of the time. These people that. Sounds smooth, are not the people that are actually doing any of the work. So they're gonna tell you whatever they think that you want to hear. And so when, when I get asked, you know, what should I be, be looking out for? And I'd be curious, some of the things that are top of your mind is, is my first thing is transparency. Like, they should be able to communicate. You don't need to know, you know, the, the full granular details of, of everything that's going on, but you should be able to clearly communicate, you know, here's. The intent behind why we're gonna focus on this thing in content, not just, we're gonna write stuff, you know? Mm-hmm. And what's, how, how are we gonna measure progress? Right. And how long is this gonna take and why? Yeah. But the majority of the people that are out there are just like, oh yeah, no, we'll get to it. You know, we'll get there, you'll see. And it's just like these vague responses, and I think that's become a thing of, of. Beyond just ss e o, but you and I are, are in that space more so just marketing in general is these constant sales bros of it's yell loud or talk louder or be flashier. Mm-hmm. And the emotions overtake the sales process. And then it doesn't matter, like right before we hit record, I was telling you about somebody that we're working with and they're killing it and the data shows they're killing it. But a, a sales bro got in their ear about, Hey, you need to be louder and flashier, and they're tearing it all down. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The sales bross are focused on collecting the money. I. They'll make huge promises. They're, they don't even know whether they can hit those promises 'cause they're not operators. The fact that you are posting screenshots, of course you're masking out like the client name and the keywords and all that, but showing the increase in traffic and sales, not just ranking on more keywords. 'cause you can rank on a bunch of garbage keywords and claim victory. Yeah. We need more people doing what you're doing and actually teaching the techniques. Not that these clients wanna learn how to, you know, who wants to learn how to change a transmission or, but at least if you know that that guy who is an actual mechanic is posting videos of him as he's, you know, working on the transmission and got grease on his hands as he's working on the car. There's a lot more trust there and especially if the mechanic shows what they're doing, right? I'd love to, you know when, when you go to a car or uh, you know the dealership and something's wrong with the car, they're gonna give you an itemized list. Of the things that are broken and what, and therefore the toll and you know, maybe the dealership will still overcharge you, but at least you know what they're doing, right? Yeah. If you're buying a new car or not a new car. So Damon, let's say you're buying a, a car off of whatever, like Facebook marketplace and the guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always been in the garage the whole time and never been driven. And you see it's got 150,000 miles on it. I don't know if that's exactly true. Oh, it's, it's never been in a crash, really. I don't know. It just looks like some of these. Here don't look like they were the original parts. Are you sure? Oh yeah. It's brand new. You know, it's, it, I don't trust, I just hate to be cynical. I don't trust what other people have to say. So if you're gonna buy a car, Damon from somebody, third party, are you just gonna take what that guy says or are you gonna have a mechanic check it out real quick? Yeah. You, you're, you're doing the equivalent of an audit. Yeah. So I, you know, audits take two minutes. In two minutes we can spot all kinds of garbage. That you and I know, like buying a bunch of fake links or most commonly having done nothing. Yeah. And letting the, especially in a service-based business, letting the G M B and the reviews that are actually done by the client carry the weight and claiming credit for that. Yeah. How dare you claim credit for something the client did? Yeah. And dressing it up as, oh well, Google's algorithm changes all the time and it takes a while and it's a mystery. And I can't tell you our methods 'cause they're proprietary, can't give you access to our systems. I hope you understand. It's such a big secret. I'd have to kill you. Proprietary is one of, if the not top red flag for me, as soon as somebody says that in, in a marketing sales discussion, because we're all using the same dozen or two tools. Mm-hmm. It's just who knows how to use them most efficiently in which combination to deliver on the results. Yeah. If any that you have mapped out into SOPs, Can you imagine if you ask a mechanic, so you're fixing my transmission. What tools are you using? Oh, it's prop tools. Using wrenches are secret. Yeah, yeah, I can understand if you're like Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookies, but even they put their recipe out there as like a, a campaign to try to, you know, what was like a gorilla campaign? 'cause they, they planted that thing to try to make it popular. But I flew back from LA yesterday to Vegas and the pilot greeted me. I always liked to just have a quick chat with the pilot if I'm the last one on the plane. And can you imagine asking the pilot, so, um, How did you learn how to fly? A 7 27? And he says, oh, it's a secret. I can't tell you. It's super proprietary. No, there's flight training manuals and all that kind of stuff out there. It's, it's public. In any field. If you're a doctor, hey, you're a heart surgeon and you're gonna do heart surgery on me, what scalpels are you using? Hell yeah. Super proprietary, the scalpel and you know, it's the scalpel that I use. It's, you know what, you could be a heart surgeon too. If you pay me $10,000 and sign up for my weekend course. I'll teach you how you can be a heart surgeon just in a weekend, because I'm also gonna give you access to my proprietary scalpels. It's the skill of who's using the scalpel. It's the, do you remember Mars Blackman and the Air Jordan campaigns? I think you're old enough to remember that. Uh, I never got in the shoes and think that, but that's No. Uh, but it, but so they had Air Jordan, you know, Michael Jordan, the most famous basketball player ever, and they were making fun. It was, the commercials back in the eighties were hilarious. Mm-hmm. That Mars Blackman, who was Spike Lee would say, it's the shoes. It's the shoes. Got the shoes, Uhhuh. You could jump as high as Michael Jordan and hit your head on the rim, right? Yep. So do you think if I switched from Adidas to Nike that I'd all of a sudden be a better basketball player, do you think If like me doing ss e o, if I just switched from my primary tool to, you know, the proprietary ones or Majestic or Hfss or SEMrush, like, do you think that would matter? No, it's all the same data. There's no proprietary, like you said. Yeah, it's, it's your skill. The other red flag for me is guarantees and, and my position on gu. Sure, they sound lovely. I get why they're attractive, uh, attractive to the consumer and attractive to sell. Um, and, and, and in some forms of marketing, maybe there's guarantees. But in s e o there, there's so many abstract variables and, and wildcard that you should be able to communicate why they're variable in a wildcard and also communicate. Why you can't offer a guarantee on it. What you can do though, is you can communicate averages and expectations. Mm-hmm. You know, you can't guarantee you're gonna be on page one in 10 months, but you could say on average it's 12 months or whatever, give or take. You can talk about the home runs that took four months. But to me it's a huge red flag. It it's a sales guy. Anytime I hear somebody saying there's a guarantee. As you talked earlier, it's the guy doing the sales and not the person actually doing the fulfillment and the guarantee in our space, what, what you and I are doing, it's competitive SS e o. So for us to move from position five to position one, that means we have to get ahead of those other four guys. So we, we can't, we. Guarantee what those other four people are doing. Yeah, we can, we can guarantee our effort level, we can guarantee higher r o i because we can focus where there's less competition or where there's more bang for the buck by going, by changing our strategy. Yeah. But we can't guarantee number one on Google for city name, you know, plumbing or whatever it is. Real estate city name. Yeah. Well, let's talk to, um, Let's talk to the aspiring agency owner and how they can avoid being part of our future discussions and how to approach. You do not want me writing an article about you in that I love writing articles about people, and they're either very positive, which is 99% of the time, like I love Uplifting You, Damon. And then there's the 1% of the people that are outright scamming 'cause A, they're not delivering, and B, they know it. There's a lot of people that are unintentionally ignorant. And this is the advice that we're giving agency owners right now. You wanna take care of your clients. You recognize there's a lot of stuff that you'll never know as much as Damon Burton, but there's certain things you do need to know. You've gotta learn the basic tools to see that rankings turn into traffic. That turn into sales. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if you just generate, so there's one personal injury client that they were paying this guy. His name sounds like a whiskey. His first name is Jason. You can maybe figure out who it is. And he was charging this personal injury attorney $70,000 a month. And what he did was upload a dictionary to the site on how do you get a commercial truck driving licenses. So they, you know, attorneys, they want truck driving cases. 'cause those are million dollar cases versus like fender-bender ones, right? They really want the truck driving cases. So, This guy was ranking on all these, these truck driving terms, but they're all like, how do, what are the, you know, how long does it take to get a commercial truck, uh, driving license? And what is a C D L? And none of them had the intent of someone who got hit by a truck. Yeah. And this guy that was charging $70,000 a month, what he did was he was, he was creating 200 garbagey posts in a glossary every month. I told you about this one. Mm-hmm. We talked about this before. Yeah. And. The client who's wealthy and has made, you know, over a billion dollars, didn't know any better, but he suspect it's, you know, these guys are not dumb, but they don't know about s e o. They're real smart and they, like, you don't wanna try to pull the wool over. Just because they don't know about SS e o doesn't mean they're dumb. Okay. They're, they can kind of, they're busy. Yeah. They're, they're good at the thing that they do, and you're good at the thing you do, and I get that, but, So this guy Jason was claiming, look at all the look we're driving, we're ranking on another 2000 keywords. Yeah, but they're all garbage. And I looked inside the analytics and there is no more phone calls and no more cases being driven off of this s e o. All the cases from a search engine organic search standpoint, we're coming on. People searching for the client's name. This, this client is on TV, billboards. He has more billboards in Kentucky than anyone else. He's all over the place, right? So they Google his name and, and then this s e o guy was claiming credit for this guy's TV ads and billboards. So my number one thing for people that your agency owners and your, you know, you need to offer, you can't just offer Facebook ads 'cause then you have a 90 day churn. That's just unfortunate, right? Mm-hmm. You can't offer social media by itself unless you just wanna churn it out. You have to offer s e o, you have to offer some kind of P P C or whatnot to show that you can drive results. But the key is start with the results first. Yeah. Don't talk about all the s e o, whatever. Start with you need more cases, you need more clients, you need more book jobs, you need more phone calls. And that comes from people that. Come to our website because they search on these certain keywords and here's the competition on those keywords. So most of these s e o people, they use the s e O tools that you and I know that generate that auto, generate these reports and put the agency's name on them, right? Mm-hmm. Because why wouldn't, why wouldn't I wanna use these different tools that just send out reports to make it look like there's work being done? Mm-hmm. But that's not work that's being done. It's just showing rankings that go up and down. Hopefully the numbers are going up every month and if the business is doing well and they're taking care of their customers, even if you do nothing from an ss e o standpoint, those s e o numbers will go up, won't they? Yeah. So don't rely upon rankings. Rankings are nothing compared to traffic. And traffic is nothing compared to sales. 'cause even if you drive more traffic, this one personal injury attorney was, was driving an extra, I forgot the number, but two or 3000 visits a month to their website. People that were looking to become truck drivers. Yeah. And then that pollutes our remarketing audiences. 'cause we pay to remarket against people who come to the site. Right. 'cause all of those could be cases. So we're remarketing everywhere. 'cause of the pixels. Yeah. So s e o start, it sounds fundamental and it doesn't matter if you do Facebook ads or website building or... /episode/index/show/learningfromothers/id/27899751

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Chris Michael Harris: Entrepreneurship Reality 02/14/2022

Chris Michael Harris: Entrepreneurship Reality Today's guest had a massive success with his very first business. But opportunity can come at a cost. Listen as he shares with you the awesome journey of entrepreneurship with a realistic view of what to expect with rapid growth. Please welcome Chris Michael Harris. 02.03.54 How Startup U Podcast Started 06.45.35 Entrepreneurial Journey 19.31.68 About the Learning Curve 32.35.59 Website's Name 33.10.78 A Favor: The Two Things You Must Do Contact Info: Today's guest had a massive success with his very first business, but opportunity can come at a cost. Listen, as he shares with you, the awesome journey of entrepreneurship with a realistic view of what to expect with rapid growth, please welcome Chris Michael Harris, you are ready to grow your business, and I love helping entrepreneurs find success. So let's do this. I'm Damon Burton, Forbes contributor, author of the search engine optimization book, outrank and president of SEO National. I've been featured on Forbes, entrepreneur and hundreds of websites and podcasts for helping big businesses grow bigger and make more money by showing up higher on search engines, including shark tank, featured businesses, NBA teams, and Inc 5,000 companies. I'm bringing my successful network to you [email protected]. Whether success to you means financial freedom, freedom of time or freedom of the soul. We're in this together. Welcome to the learning from others podcast. Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my SEO book outrank. If you visit www.freeseobook.com today. Chris, Michael Harris, welcome learning from others. Good to meet you. Hey man. Great to meet you. Hey, so before we hit record, he said, uh, you know, you recognized a couple other people we've chatted with and, uh, I think that's kind of something interesting that you find when you kind of dive into the podcast world, regardless of which side of the mic you're on. I think it's called that you can run into. there's so much opportunity and there's so many people out there, but you kind of realize it's, uh, it's its own little world too. Yeah. Especially when you like really niche down to entrepreneurship, you see a lot of the same names and faces kind of popping up. It's interesting. Cause like we have our own little world, but yet we have the people that kind of continue to pop up in that world. So yeah, it was interesting to see a lot of the folks in there that I write. Yeah, I appreciate you jumping on. So, you know, the drill two questions, question number one is who are you and why are we listening to today? All right, well, I am the founder of StartUpU, you and the host of StartUpU podcast started UTV, uh, and that all kind of came to be because I had early success with my first venture when my, uh, my brother and I decided to launch a little side hustle. And that evolved into a multi-million dollar company within the next 36 months. By the time I was in my mid twenties and realized throughout that process, wow. They didn't teach me like how to do this. And despite the fact that I was at a very notable school university of Georgia go dogs by the way, national champions and right now, um, yeah, I just feel like there was so little application, both in life and formal education, not to disparage those, but that actually applied to running a business, especially when it was growing as quickly as we can. From year one to year two 48,000 to $500,000. I mean, it's ramping growth, right? Not no funding whatsoever. And so I kind of had this vision of what I would do after that, that business. And it really revolved around education. It really evolved around, I can't build every single business, but I can help people and indirectly create a lot of businesses. Uh, and so that's what we've kind of started to work on with startup you, and as we continue to serve people in the online space, both in all animals. Uh, that's the, there's a big vision as far as what we can accomplish doing that. Well, I want to dig into that entrepreneurial journey. Uh, but not until I ask you a question number two, which is why do you suck at dude? I suck so bad at feeling like I don't have to insert myself into bloody everything. Uh, I, I I'm just so some of us are just so type a, we just can't freaking take a chill pill. And sometimes I get myself in trouble and get a little distracted, uh, probably is the best way to say it by just literally feeling like I have to like, not just do something, but like I joke with a buddy of mine this morning literally is why it's so relevant. I'm like, I feel like I have to assemble the damn Avengers with everything, with everything I'm doing in my life. Like, I can't let anybody take the lead. Like I have to be, you know, the driving force of it and it drives me nuts. So I'm really bad about that. So it's in business. Business and business, personal family, everybody's health around me. I mean, it's just like, don't take me to the grocery store. I'll tell you everything you want to know about human health and wellness and optimization and what you should eat. Shouldn't eat. And it's like, bro, some people just trying to eat and enjoy their food. They don't want you analyze their label for them. And that's what I do. I'm I am a food Nazi for sure. Did you realize this? Was it? When did you become aware of this problem? My whole life. So, so you've known about it. There wasn't like a tipping point where you're like, oh, damn, I need that. I think, I think there's a more recent revelation in terms of how problematic it was. Like. Like a more of a, this is actually a detriment it's not serving you kind of thing. Right. And I think also there was a lot of underlying frustrations that have been there for a long time, but not necessarily cognizant to me to address it as a real problem that it is right. It's kinda looked at it as like me being the overachiever and everything that I do. And I kind of like staked my claim on that. Like, yeah. But then as you get older and wiser, and I think entrepreneurship really does that to you, you kind of realized that you need to pick and choose your spots a little bit more strategically and the best that's what they do, right? The best of the best. That's what they do. And so I'm, I'm I always tell us, I have acquired a lot of knowledge now. I'm like, let's acquire some wisdom. Let's get that. Like John C. Maxwell wisdom going on, like that's my that's kind of the season of life that I'm in. Yeah. Let's I mean, I think this is where it's digging into a little bit more, um, you're right. Like you learn, uh, you learn a lot, but then you also learn that not everybody cares and the part that's, the part that's frustrating for me is, um, is when people ask, you know, when, when they go, Chris, I know you've accomplished a lot of things. How did you do it? Or Chris? I know you've been through this, you know, gave me some pointers and then. You feel compelled to help them because when you find success, if you want to bring other stuff with you, but the part for me that's frustrating is when you're in that scenario, when somebody asks for it and then they don't take action on it drives me insane. Yep. Totally agree. All right. So let's talk about the first venture. Um, w what did you say? The figures where you do. Yeah. So we went from launch from college department to we at one point to within 36 months, no funding. It was a, it was a residential moving service for college students during the transitional summer months and evolved into doing furniture installation for college apartments. So we kind of did a, we were kind of on both sides. We had a commercial on a residential division. And how long ago did this? Let's see, that was, I finished. So 11 was when it was a side hustle. 12 was full time. 13 was half mil, 14 was 1.2. So it was a good, yeah. Okay. Has that jaded you having success the first round of you run into, you know, cause I think that's where we're going to want to talk about next is like the entrepreneurial journey and um, I'm not, I'm not a big fan of saying that. So entrepreneurial success was locked, right? Because I think the majority of people work really hard at it, but having such a great success, um, round number one, you know, did you walk into venture number 2, 3, 4, or whatever point, and then look back and go, this one wasn't as successful or as quickly successful. So what's different this time question. Um, so it was definitely a fail forward situation. Let me be crystal clear about that because I think a lot of people here. Revenue numbers. And they immediately think like, oh man, like he's just a hot shot. Maverick business owner, entrepreneur, like just with kit. And it's like, no, no, no. I got my ass kicked. I did, um, I got, I just, I accelerated the process and we were very blessed to be in the right place. Right time. But don't dismiss. We worked very hard to achieve what we did, right. There was just a, but to dismiss how hard I suffered, how much and how hard I struggled and suffered throughout that process, uh, there was a starvation period, but then there was like a keeping up with growth struggle. And I was in really bad shape for a long time. Like my 2014 brutal. I spent 95% of my time managing cashflow because now we're working with big companies that installation work. I told you about those manufacturers that were giving us those. They're passing their, their revenue lag on to us, right? Like their cashflow management was we had to deal with because we're the last link in the chain, there was the actual manufacturer of the product. And there was the furniture supplier who we worked with. And then there was us and all of them were trying to manage their cashflow. Well guess why? At one point I was at $443,000 in 2014, when I made one, two. It's kind of hard to make payroll when you don't have, when you're not that liquid at that point when you're still so young and the banks at that point, I think they've gone a little bit better now. They won't give you a line of credit or even a credit card until you're, well-established in the world until you're a big boy and you've shown that you can manage things, but it's kinda like when you, when you first start driving a car, they don't trust you. Insurance companies don't trust you yet until you've got a proven track record. It's no different than that. Even if you show rampant. And I've got some pretty funny stories around that with the banks and stuff like that. But I really sabotage my personal credit to get that business off the ground. So like getting even a credit card, two, three years later, even though I had the proven revenues, my, my personal credit hadn't recovered. And so it was a really tough kind of situation to kind of get out of that or whatever. But, so I want to make sure that's known because I think a lot of people hear these stories and people don't, people don't tell you what it took to do that they just tell you the sunny day scenario in revenue is only one part of the growth equation. So make sure people know. Um, not you, I'm not, I'm not getting the instruction by the way. I'm just saying people listening, please. Sorry. I'm not like I was I apologize. Um, but what I realized thereafter, there are a couple of things. One don't take growth for granted. It's it's it lightening sometimes as cotton a bottle. However, the way that you maximize the probability to catch lightning in a bottle, there is a formulaic process you go through, not again. But there is a more formulaic process that you go through. Um, I think a lot of people lean into their business venture with a gut, feel about what they're doing. Maybe it's a cute and clever idea that they have, but they don't really analyze the market. They don't analyze the, the, the need in the market. Who's underserved. And, and so what I've done is try to take a more scientific approach. I call it the science of. Um, and I already bought the URL to write the book by the way. So I was thinking about doing that. I already beat you to the punch, uh, but I, but I really have kind of tried to craft the science of startups, taking all the intangibles or as many as we possibly can. Right. The failure rate in entrepreneurship is so high. I was just reading a statistic. They showed that 70% of businesses that are started will not be around in day. And I would presume that that number is actually quite higher because there's a lot of businesses that start, they never actually register as a business. And so they're just kind of, there's no statistic around that per se. Um, but anyways, if we can somehow kind of massage a little bit further to increase the likelihood of success in relation to what it is right now, that's kind of what my goal has been and learning through. Having other ventures that I thought were just like amazing ideas. Like I was involved with the neuro marketing company. Uh, we were actually using four different layers of biometric tools to actually sense a person's response to a marketing stimuli. So not that sounded like really complicated. It's really not basically we're, we're analyzing, we're analyzing brainwaves, we're analyzing what's called galvanic skin response. So we can, we can sense like how you're actually responding to something with the intensity that you're responding to it. So we were testing this on McDonald's with their, where their kiosks. Yeah, it's all in person, right? So you have somebody go in and have all these gadgets attached to them. And what it's doing is we have, we can measure how much they, well, first, if they like something or if they did it, or if they were confused. So if they went, try to order off a kiosk, McDonald's was concerned. People are not gonna to use this because it's going to be complicated, confusing versus ordering from an actual person when you go into a McDonald's. Right. So this would effectively allow you to come in order. They could cut down on that expense and like, they would just run more autonomously. The store would, right. I was like, this is a home run is a slam. Completely flopped on his face. And there was a large clever flopped on his face. Um, and there was a reason for that because we didn't analyze the market. We didn't analyze that first. We ran into this cute idea. We didn't know. I was like, is this something people actually really want that's better than the current solution that's out there. And the answer was no. And so we got nowhere with it, even though I thought it was like, this is a billion dollar idea. Oh my God. I'm so excited about it. Got it. So the, the research FOC or the kiosk as a whole flop, the kiosk is still a thing that's happening, which is actually kinda interesting, kind of a gross anecdote here, but they were testing it in Europe and they found that like every single one of them had fecal matter on it, which is disgusting. It's okay. So this is funny conversation because. I agree with kiosk that they're going to continue to proceed. But even me, I would consider myself a relatively smart person. And especially where I go through the methodical internal dialogue where I'm like, oh, what's the marketing scenario behind them using kiosks. And you know, what do the AB tests and things like that. And I still run into. User experience issues with those. And so it's interesting to see that such a, you know, cause I knew that, uh, somebody did some research and some process went behind it, but it's amazing something so simplistic in nature, which is just take your order. Um, yeah, no. So decide now, but you know, this whole comment is definitely not to go down. Discussion of COVID, but what's interesting is with all these plexiglass things and all that everywhere, that's the first thing that I think of is now it just as this wall that captures everything and it just sits there. Everything's now touch and do it yourself and walls. And I just, every time I see it, I just think of how much stuff is just there. It's great. Um, all right. Um, I want to talk about, go back to credit. So you talked about, um, you know, growth and managing payroll and things like that. And liquidity did you have to, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize how, just like you said, everybody looks at the sunny, the sunny side of growth and they don't realize the pain and managing cashflow. And then specifically you mentioned in credit. You can grow too fast to where it shoots you in the foot. And then I'm curious if you had it, you had briefly commented in passing on personal credit. So did you have to personally guarantee a lot of the credit lines to support the business? Well, so that, that's what I'm, that's what I could not get even get approved for because I, so I went to bank of America when I was starting this business. And we had like, uh, you know, we had done it as a summer kind of side gig in college and had proven think we made like $12,000 and, you know, whatever, like it was north of 10 grand, right. So we'd already proven we can make money. So I go to bank of America where I banked and the, the regional vice president of small business division at bank of America was like, Hey, Nobody's given out credit cards or loans to small businesses to startups, there's just not. So go use your, your personal credit. And then when you're making some money, then come back and talk to us. So that's what I did. So I put all this stuff on credit cards. Growth took longer than I expected, which I know that sounds really counterintuitive. Cause they just say we grew so fast, but there was a period where like growth this when people realize growth requires. Like just because you say you made $500,000 in revenue doesn't mean you took $500,000 home. I think some people have that. So bastardized this such a distorted view, it's like Elon Musk is worth blah, blah, blah. It's like Elon Musk company is valued at that, but he's not personally walking around with that kind of liquidity, nor is Jeff Bezos. Right? Like, so there's a huge distortion between business revenue, generation, the amount of capital that that's required to continue growing that firm because every step, especially when you're growing. Now you're having to acquire all of the things quickly to facilitate and keep up with that growth. Meaning you're bringing on things you're not taking affordable steps necessarily. So you have to keep up with this massive rampant growth revenue wise. Your profitability is going to suffer because of it more than likely because you're not going to be efficient because you don't have the resources you need yet. Plus now you're bringing in resources like expanding your insurance. Well, guess what? I'm in the involuntary insurance market at that point. Cause I'm a brand new company. My rate for insurance just work comp alone was 33. Meaning every single a hundred dollars I spent in payroll, I'm spending $33 on top of that in work comp, I paid, I paid bloody Liberty mutual way more money than I ever paid myself in that business way more money. So people don't know those things, they don't analyze it, which is why we have such a vanity metric around revenue. And by the time I got to the point where I wanted that credit card, a low margin business, they see that despite the rev. Now I assaulted my personal credit to try to get that business off the ground. And you know, it, even, it took six, eight months to really get good traction, six, eight months of not paying your credit cards, maxed out, hurts your credit pretty bad. And that's exactly what happened so that there was a blemish and it was like, well, yeah, you got the revenues, man, but there's still not a lot to show that you're gonna be able to pay us back because you're not even paying, even pay yourself at this point. So, you know, we really have to Daymond John Thomas when he came on into... /episode/index/show/learningfromothers/id/22098452

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Bob Regnerus: The Love-Hate Relationship of Facebook Advertising 07/26/2021

Bob Regnerus: The Love-Hate Relationship of Facebook Advertising Today's guest is a digital marketing expert, and author of five books, including the 4th Edition of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Since 1998, he has been helping his clients achieve their goals through digital media and storytelling, and he is eager to share his experience with you of not only the ups of Facebook advertising, but also what to watch out for. Please welcome Bob Regnerus. 00.00.53 Facebook Ads 00.14.32 Ads Click-through Rate 00.25.57 Published a Book Contact Info Bob Regnerus Facebook wizard. Thanks for jumping on learning from others. How are you? Hey, Damon. Good to be on man. Good. Look at you and your fancy background while the listeners can't see the fancy background, but you got a fancy background. I do I do it's yeah. It's a green screen with a nice blue background. So it leaves at least some of the cluttered office, uh, out of people's of you. So these backgrounds are getting fancy. I was actually on a call just a little bit before you and I jumping on and the person says, how do I get rid of the background? And I said, are you talking about you can't get rid of your background? He goes, no, no, no. That's not where I'm at. That was like, oh, that looks super real. Well, I love the ones where they're like on a beach or something. Yeah. Sit back in their chair and disappear into the ocean. That's always fun. Yeah. The stuff we never knew, we would learn in 2020, right? Yeah. All right, Bob. Well, why we listening to you today? What are we going? Hey, I want to talk about Facebook ads, but doing it for seven plus years, been in direct marketing for 22 years. So, um, let's, let's learn a little bit about how to make Facebook, Facebook ads work. Right. But not until I ask you a question number two, which is what do you suck at Bob? Um, well, I, I I'll give you two answers. Um, number one, I suck at it. So maybe that's just laziness, but like, thanks to this. My wife knows how to do it. Um, the other character I would say is, uh, I hate to lose, like, I'm a basketball coach, so like I'm just wired to win. So I'm a really poor loser, whether it's cards or I don't care if I like, if I lose a game or Rumi cube on my phone or something like I'm a sore loser. So I'll give you two floods. Do you legitimately suck at ironing? Like you burned stuff or you just don't like it. I can't do the process. Like I can't iron a collared shirt and make it look good. Like I can get a little bit of the creases out, but I actually create more creases when I do it. So like, thank goodness I got a spouse that like enjoys it. And, and also, you know what, I don't wear that many shirts that need to be ironed. So that's also, yeah. What, what, what type of age? Uh, basketball coach are we talking? High school, high school boys. So 15, 16 year old boy. Okay. All right. I'll let that one slide. I was going to say, are you like the aggressive seven-year-old coach? Oh no, I did. I've been coaching for 33 years. I started when I was 16 years old and I've done it every year since, um, I've coached anywhere up from five-year-olds up to 18 year olds. So boys, girls. Yeah, I am not a screaming idiot. Right? Well, let's talk, let's talk Facebook ads. So, um, why don't we, why don't we start with Facebook ads? 1 0 1. What is it? What's so amazing about it. Let's start with super basics. Yeah. I mean, Facebook obviously is, is where everybody is. Um, it, it's a media that people spend hours per day on. And so. One of our responsibilities as a, as a, as a business is to be in front of the people where they're at. And Facebook makes it really easy to do that. Obviously it's got its issues and we could dive into some of those, but Facebook remains one of the best places to reach your target audience in advertising today. Why is it such a good place to reach? Uh, what I like about it is you target people based on who they are. So you target at the kind of the user level versus keywords. Like if you doing Google ad words, right? Um, Google ad words, you're figuring out what people might type in to solve a problem into the search engine. With Facebook. What you're doing is you're interrupted. You're, you're basically interrupting them, looking at pictures of family, friends, and food, and you interrupt them with an ad. Um, but it's based on who they are and you figure out who your best prospect is, develop that list and target them. It's a really good way to advertise, I think, and you bring up a good point because I'm on the other side of the spectrum in the space of SEO. And, and I often talk about that same topic where it's not, you know, there's no one magic solution there's different, there's different, uh, advertising methods that are better or worse for different platforms, different platforms for different types of products and services. And you brought up one of the main things I talk about is. Um, you know, on search engines, it's based on buyer intent, like you said, what's the question, that's the problem they want to solve, and that can be good or bad for certain products or services. And then likewise on Facebook, it's, you're targeting a demographic you're targeting habits, your targeting patterns. And so that's better or worse for other types of products. Yeah. And similar to, you know, Google with Facebook, with, with their technology, with the other Facebook pixel, is they track behavior. Um, not only do they know what you put on your profile, the things you like, the things you read, they also know how you behave. So they know your buying behaviors. So they know the types of stuff you buy, the type of stuff you're in market for. Um, so, you know, Facebook's use of, what's called a lookalike audience where you, you give them a list of customers and create a model. Um, Really it's powerful from the standpoint of finding more people that are likely to buy from you. So like if you sell golf, like golf clubs and golf shoes, whatever, um, Facebook knows who's in market for that stuff. Uh, just the other day, I, um, I, I bought a driver, a new driver and. Was researching drivers. And guess what I saw in my Facebook feed for like the next two weeks, all kinds of golf stuff and not just golf clubs. Yeah. I got re-targeted for the golf club, but I got targeted by, uh, golf courses, offering packages for the holidays. Um, I got targeted for training videos. So like Facebook knows you're in market for stuff and, and yeah, but like, if I'm going to buy a driver, maybe I do want to buy new shoes and maybe I do want to get a lesson or something like that. So it's a really powerful mechanism if you want to, if you want to get in front of people and how does Facebook know all that stuff? Well, again, there's, there's a piece of code that's on basically every website it's called the pixel. And so what that's doing is it's not just tracking what's happening with your Facebook ads, it's tracking behavior of, of the user. So Facebook knows that let's say they, and you do a good job for your client. And, you know, they're getting a lot of organic traffic based on these keywords to a blog or an article or whatever. If there's a Facebook pixel on there. And, and I happened to land on one of those, those pages, it knows that I'm interested in that topic, right. So it's not just that. Oh, I clicked on a Facebook ad it's that Facebook knows that I visited that page. And maybe if I go visit another page that has a similar topic or similar, similar angle. Now I've created a pattern of behavior that the algorithm can pick up on. So it knows, oh, um, I might be interested in this particular health condition or something like that. So that's what makes it powerful is the technology behind the tracking that's on there. You know, Facebook is probably in Google for that matter too, is going to be up against privacy laws and things like that. And that technology will probably change, but essentially, I don't think it goes away in terms of being able to track behavior and for, for advertisers to be able to target those people directly based on the things that they're interested in right now in the moment. So I want to, you brought up privacy laws and technology. There's a couple things I want to ask you about your opinion on that here in a minute, but I kinda want. Go a little bit deeper on some of the basics for some listeners that might not understand. So it sounds like Facebook is a good tool for not only, um, you know, with, with SEO, the main driver, right. Is to, to bring awareness to theoretically a new audience. And so, but, but with Facebook you can do new audience and retargeting, so you can play on both sides of the coin, right? Yeah. So, um, I recently wrote a book, the ultimate guide to Facebook advertising, and I purposely put retargeting in, in chapter three because it's a quick win for anybody. So retargeting uses that pixel that I've been talking about basically to say, Hey, you know, I visited this particular site to research drivers and then other advertisers, you know, hooked onto that and showed me ads related to that. But also. Um, individual, like, uh, you know, I went to Dick's sporting goods website, you know, just for example, not PR, not endorsing them, of course, but I went to their site specifically to look at a, at a couple of different drivers. Well, what happened is within, you know, within a couple hours of going into Facebook, I saw ads from Dick's sporting goods. Showing me the same driver that I was looking at, right. Reminding me that I did that. So retargeting is just simply the technology of, of calling people back. You know, one of the, one of the things that's kind of alarming for people is that, um, you know, 99% of the traffic that visits your site, Doesn't buy or doesn't leave their email address or doesn't do anything. Uh, retargeting is the technology allows you to call them back. Um, you know, it hasn't really been around that long, but it really has transformed campaigns. So. W what are the things that we used to see before we really had retargeting in place was negative return on ad spend. So, you know, spend a dollar to make 25 cents for instance. But if you run a retargeting campaign, you know, we routinely see, spend a dollar, make nine, make 15, make 30, um, retargeting allows, uh, especially if you're a new, especially in the e-commerce space to basically pull people back in based on the products they looked at. You know, give them an offer, invite them to come back and they buy, um, one of the most powerful things we teach is like, if you have a simple add to cart retargeting mechanism, uh, as a Facebook ad. So somebody goes to your store, puts a product in their shopping cart and goes away. Um, according to, um, Banyard 69% of the people last year, um, put something into their cart and abandoned. So like that's huge, right? But just a simple retargeting ad to remind them that they had something in their cart and to call them back, um, is really powerful. And that's where you can get those 30, 40, 50 to one return on ad spend, uh, types of types of numbers. So it's a powerful, powerful technology. So it sounds like. The goal is to be profitable on the initial ad, but it sounds like that sometimes it makes sense to be willing to take a loss on the initial ad and then convert it on the follow-up very, very big. And, um, so it, it kinda depends on market Damon, but, um, let's just take like the supplement market, for instance. It's it's pretty routine that you're going to go negative a acquiring customer. So let's say, you know, you do a lot of these companies do free trials, well, or, you know, buy your first bottle of these supplement for a buck. What they're willing to do is go negative, uh, on the front end because they know that they're going to get, make, you know, make that money up on continuity. But it, it is a challenge, uh, to. I'll I'll say this, Damon, the most expensive traffic you're ever going to generate is cold traffic. Uh, they don't know who you are. They don't know about your brand. They don't know what services you provide or the products you have. So you really, you really have to have. What I call a good retargeting platform in place before you run any cold traffic, because retargeting traffic typically converts at a profit and it's usually a very healthy profit. And so you need that in place. So when you do your cold traffic and you, you maybe are negative on the front end of that cold traffic, the retargeting. Uh, campaigns actually make you profitable, like early on. So you might be losing money, let's say in the first seven days. And if they buy within that seven day period, then you go back into the black. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So how does, how does the bidding system work? Because I imagine it's not identical, but comparable in the concept. Facebook doesn't want to just give the ad space away to whoever throws the largest budget at it, because there could be some irrelevant ads. Is that true? Yeah, it's actually a big deal. So, you know, one of the things that happened a few years ago is Facebook quote unquote, ran out of space, meaning they couldn't have any more. Onto their platform. So they started doing some other things like the, the, they created Facebook stories. Um, they created, what's called the audience network where you can see ads shown on apps and games you play and things like that. But if we talk just about the newsfeed for a minute, that's where we traditionally see the ads roll by. So Facebook is not going to fill their newsfeed with all ads because that's a very poor user experience. Um, they, they have a very. Simple formula for each person and how many ads that they, that they want to see. So Damon, you may say, I never click on ads. Your Facebook newsfeed may have one ad for every 20 posts that you see. And maybe I'm a little bit more like, like maybe I click on ads to more. So they may be show me two ads, every 10 posts or something like that. Okay. Facebook knows. Your behavior, but what's happening is at any millisecond. There are there's, there's billions of auctions that happen every day. And there's, there's, there's hundreds of thousands that happen every millisecond. And so. There are a number of, of advertisers competing for my attention, competing for your attention. Um, all based on the targeting of the, those ads. So there's essentially a competition, every millisecond for my attention. And so there's really three components that go into whether or not you're going to win the auction. The first is very obvious, which is your budget. So if you have a larger budget, you have a greater chance of winning the auction and getting your ad shown. Um, so if you have a limited budget, you're not going to win as many auctions. Okay. But there's two components that really allow any advertiser to compete with somebody who's a big. First is the click-through rate of the ad. So Facebook does one thing. Um, when they, when, when they look to put your ad in front of somebody, they actually have, what's called an expected click through rate and they know your behavior. They know my behavior, they know the listers behaviors. They, they generally know before they even show the ad the first time about what that ads click-through rate is going to be. And so obviously the ad with the higher click through rate gets priority. And then there's a third component, which is the expected value of the ad, meaning it's what happens after the person clicks and goes to your website. So this is where the Facebook pixel comes into play. Damon it's it knows like what's the conversion rate of your page. It might know that your e-commerce store converse at 3%. And so it's going to actually calculate the value of, of that click. And so those three factors will contribute to whether or not your ads get shown and it contributes to whether or not you're going to get a discount for having a really good performing ad and a really good performing. Website also going to factor in a quote unquote penalty, if you have a poor performing ad in a poor performing website. So I'd like to say that the level that, that the playing field is leveled for an advertiser that can write really good ads and has a really highly converting landing page. And you can compete with Coca Cola and low. And target and Amazon and people that are spending, you know, millions of dollars a day, uh, on ads, we can compete with them and have a good cost for action, because we're really good at writing ads. And we're really good at converting people on our way. On the value that gets calculated based on a conversion happening does, is it based more on the conversion rate or the value of the conversion? The reason why I ask is does that, does it give priority to a higher ticket item? Um, it's overall value. And when, when it's considering value, it's not, it's not considering dollar value. I know that's probably one component of it, but what, what they're actually measuring is that the, that the user or at the individual users. Satisfied with the process from beginning end Facebook's number one goal is if they have three goals, the first goal is to have a really great user experience. Like if, if Facebook became a really crappy place to be like, they couldn't make any money. So they're always gonna, they're always gonna prioritize their users first. The second people they prioritize are their investors, right? They're a publicly traded company and they are, they are responsible to make a profit for their shareholders. So that's the second party that they, that they put in the priority list. Um, advertisers are a distant third. Okay. The, the advertiser, they need the advertisers for the revenue, but they're always going to put the priority of their shareholders and their users before us. Okay. But I'm saying that because when, when a user sees an ad. They enjoy the ad or an interest them and they click to the website and they take a desired action. So whether that's like, just grab an email address, um, or it's complete a purchase, if the users are doing that consistent consistently Facebook sees that as a positive user experience. Um, it's very similar to maybe what you experienced with Google with SEO is the bounce rate of a page. So if Google is the Texas, right. For their algorithm, if somebody searches for a patient, they land on it and it doesn't give them what they want. And they quickly jump back. That's going to lower the quality score of that page in the algorithm. Right. So similarly Facebook sees that and goes, wait a minute, people are clicking on the ad and they're not completing the action, which you know, is eventually going to be a purchase or an opt-in or something like that. And what it's going to do is go, it's like, this is not working. So it's going to start to do, it's going to start to charge us more for that ad. And then eventually it's going to stop actually giving impressions. If people aren't completing the action, it's not going to start. It's not going to give us priority on that ad anymore. And eventually it's going to stop showing. So I got, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about technology and evolution and you talking about privacy laws. And so part of what I think comes to that territory is Google recently announced in Chrome, they're going to be getting rid of, um, cookies. So. Impact the potential on Facebook ads or has, has Facebook come out with an alternative to maintain the advertising platform? Yeah, I think 20, 21. And, and going into 2022, it's going to be a big shift for advertisers, uh, Facebook and Google. Uh, I, I can't talk to Google specifically, but Facebook has, what's called a conversion API, and that is going to be replaced. Excellent. Um, pixel's not going to go away, but it's gonna, it's going to be there as a fail safe. So people are going to have much more control over their information. I believe. Um, kind of going into 20,... /episode/index/show/learningfromothers/id/19625798