Navigating the world of digital marketing and SEO and Ben Fewtrell

And I’ve seen the way that people have built their businesses or tried to run their teams or some of the habits that they weren’t willing to break or give up that have really cost them their goals. Think about marketing like that. I always think about you gotta outwit, you gotta outsmart, you gotta outplay your competitors.

The hard part in small business, of course, is that you want your focus to be on one or two things that are solid because You’ve only got so much attention span as we’ve talked about on the same token. If you’re reliant on one, you’re very vulnerable. That is one of the juggling acts for a business owner in today’s age.

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All right. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of biz bites and Ben. I’m so glad that you could join me. You and I have been talking for a little while and we’ve had a great introduction in a former guest of the program, Paul Dunn, which is A great introduction to saying we must talk.

So that’s why we must get you on the program. So Ben, welcome. Thanks so much for having me, mate. Really glad to be here. Absolute pleasure. Now, I want to talk to you about a whole bunch of things, but first of all, how best do you describe what it is that you do? It’s funny. I I remember years ago, I don’t know if you’ve got kids, haven’t you?

Absolutely. Years ago, my daughter went to school and they had that little piece of paper they had to fill in where it says my daddy does, or my mummy does. And all the class were writing things in their form as to what their father or mum did. And they would write my daddy’s Yeah, my daughter wrote a mine, my daddy does as little as possible.

And yeah. And the teacher asked me about that, but essentially it’s been my mantra, from the early days of when I had a transport company, I’m not very well educated. I left school early in year 10, failed math and English, become a panel better by trade and then ended up in the transport game.

Sold that transport business at the age of 28. I’ve been in the world of business coaching since then. And my mantra has always been, build a business that doesn’t rely on me being there. And that’s where that comes from is do as little as possible. And so that’s then carried across into the digital marketing world because I’ve now got a digital marketing company as well.

And it’s about how do you leverage whether it’s people or technology or systems To minimize the work you have to do for the amount of money you can make or create through those things. And so that’s probably the easiest way to describe myself is what I do. So I help people, whether it’s through coaching them to build their business or through implementing better marketing systems and strategy within their business to leverage, to create leverage that brings in more with less.

And that is the reason why we connected originally, of course, is to try and look at doing that. And you’re a podcaster as well, amongst everything else that you’ve done. And which is which is great. So what I wanted to do was explore a whole lot of those things, but I wanted to pick you up on something that you said at the start, which I always find very interesting because you talked about the fact that you weren’t that well educated.

But I would argue that the School of Hard Knocks is as great an education as you can possibly get. And I think having been a coach for some period of time, even in the early days, to be able to do that. You need an education and it doesn’t, it might not be in a formal one, but you need an education, right?

Yeah, I guess I don’t have any qualifications or I don’t have any degrees. So my sister was the professional student. She went to university. She was about 36. She’s got more degrees than a compass. I I did the school of hard knocks. I guess I spent more time wagging class and going to class.

I was the very troubled child. I got expelled from year three. When I was eight years old, and I think back then they didn’t really understand what ADHD was, but I guess if it was something that was more understood, I probably would have been diagnosed and given maybe some medication. I don’t know, but I was a bit of a wild child.

I would get brought home in the back of paddy wagons at the age of 13. My parents must’ve been thinking, what is going on? Yeah, I was just always a live wire and and I was. I would, I would never stay home. I was always, I would climb out my bedroom window and sneak out in the middle of the night.

And I used to live near Sydney in the lower North Shore. I would somehow get myself into the CBD at the 14. And this is the crazy stuff that I used to do as a kid. I’m so grateful my kids didn’t do it to me. So when I say I’m not formally educated, that’s what I mean. I wasn’t real good at school. I wasn’t very good at paying attention.

I’m still not very good at paying attention. I have a very short attention span and in some ways that’s a real asset and other ways it’s not, in other ways it’s a real detractor from success, because sometimes focus is really important to be able to focus on one thing. And I guess maybe that’s why I’ve learned how to leverage so many things and build a team around me because I understand that I can’t be good at everything.

But what I am good at is, coming up with the ideas and the strategy and inspiring and motivating people to take action. And I guess that’s probably what’s got me to where I am rather than an education. It’s the fact that I can I know that I’m not the smartest guy in the room and I know I need to surround myself with amazing people.

And I think that’s important no matter what you do. Oh, I totally agree with you. And I think it’s often underestimated. If you do surround yourself with brilliant people then it’s only going to lift you. And you don’t have to be great at everything, particularly in small business. That’s just way too hard.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I am definitely a student of the world. Like I’ve definitely got an education around how to run a business. And some of that is just by watching what people have done that didn’t work. In my coaching career, because like I said, I’ve coached for 20 something years and I’ve seen the way that people have built their businesses or tried to run their teams or some of the habits that they weren’t willing to break or give up that have really cost them their goals.

And so you go at least I can learn from that. That is an education. There’s no doubt about that. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting too, about this short attention span, because it’s become a real thing. Globally, it’s not the attention span that we have these days, and it’s the nature of social media and the amount of distractions that we have, it’s just getting shorter and shorter all the time.

It’s in seconds now. It’s not a matter of being able to tune in for a minute. So maybe you were the maybe you were the prodigy for what was to come. Hey, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

Come talk to us at Podcasts Done For You. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you. So all you have to do is show up for a conversation. But don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you from the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it.

So come talk to us, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to BizBytes. Yeah, maybe. You know what though, Anthony, it does help with marketing because I build everything when I do marketing for short attention spans, because that’s me, so it means I can look at something through my own lenses and go, this is gonna, got to get someone’s attention really quickly.

The offers got to be clear and concise. The call to action has got to be clear. Simple can’t take much time and it’s got to be able to withstand all the other distractions going on around it You know, it’s got to be able to be robust. And so I you know when I build marketing, that’s how I think about it Yeah, and it is an important thing when it comes to that now, marketing has changed a lot over the years because I know you know, you and I have similar vintage and When I know when I first started it was a lot about let’s send out a newsletter, and it was done in the mail, and it was done on your time, whatever you if you said it was going to come out, every three months, that’s when it came out.

And that’s when people had a chance to read it. And too bad if they thought otherwise, to now this whole 24 seven media cycle, which has completely changed things. And as you say, the amount of distractions, it’s so easy to start up. reading something, something else pops up and you go down to something else and suddenly you’re 10 miles away from where you first started and you can’t even remember where you first started or why you started on.

Guilty as charged. It’s constant, isn’t it? And I think that’s the interesting thing is that because We can easily say we’ve got to try and bring ourselves back. That’s a self discipline and that’s a choice that we make. But as you say, as marketers, the truth is we’ve got to cater for that because that actually is the reality for most people.

Yeah, and it happens to me every day. Exactly what you just described happened. I can recall something that happened just before we got on this call. I was working on some stuff and I said, No, Ben, finish that first. I actually have this self talk, but it is. It’s something that happens every day.

It’s not going to go away either. Like it’s getting noisier and noisier the whether it’s social media, whether it’s, pop up messages on their phone. We’re seeing more and more technology that means that we’re getting all these push notifications to our phone. All the time, like whether it’s the weather, like I had my phone telling me there was wind warnings, yesterday and the day before.

And even though it doesn’t take a lot of my time, it takes my attention for a second. Yes. And it’s just, it’s noting those things and going, wow, that was incredible. That took my attention. Just that one thing, it could be an email coming in or a team’s message, or it’s just the communication is just nonstop these days.

Isn’t it? It’s. Ridiculous how much there is and everything wants to send push notifications to you so it doesn’t stop. I can glance down at my phone and see that there’s a whole series of messages in one thing and another series of messages in another, and it’s very difficult to get away from it.

And that discipline of being able to get away from it is one thing. And let’s park that one because that’s a discussion for another time. I’m more interested in how you actually get in front because this is the trick, isn’t it? That we’re all in terms of marketing and in terms of what you’re doing in that digital space particularly is how do you actually stay in front consistently from your competitors?

Because that whole idea has Yeah. It’s a bit of a a game of Survivor, I think, I love, have you seen that show Survivor? I’ve never missed an episode. I’m a, I’m an absolute tragic Survivor watch, and the whole household here has watched every episode of American Survivor. So if you want to come on the show, you’re more than welcome.

But we’re the same, right? So if you think about marketing like that, I always think about you got to outwit, outplay your competitors and your competitors are trying to do the same thing, right? And there are some that are just not in the game and that’s okay. They’re not, they haven’t turned up, they haven’t been selected or casted for the show, but those that are in the show, you’ve got to compete with them and whether it’s SEO, whether it’s Facebook ads, whether it’s offers, sales teams, strategy, like all of that is what you’ve got to think about.

And you’ve got to move with, What we know you’re going to be fluid because things change quickly in business as well from a marketing point of view. So the first thing I say to people is, have you got a strategy? Because if you don’t have digital strategy, if you don’t have going into the game, some sort of strategy, and we’ve seen it in Survivor, people that don’t have a strategy, they don’t last.

Just being a nice guy doesn’t mean you’re going to win. So you need a strategy and that strategy needs to be thought through. And I think what happens is, and the reason why our business DigiTLC is so popular and successful is because we don’t just say, okay, we’ll run ads for you, or okay, we’ll write blogs for you, or we’ll just do SEO for you.

What we do is we develop a digital strategy. And that digital strategy encompasses three core engines, what I call of digital marketing, because there are three engines. It’s a bit like a rocket. If you can imagine a rocket has three engines, if only one or two of them are going, that rocket’s going to do a U turn pretty quickly.

It’s not going to fly straight. So all three need to be going. So in your digital strategy, you need to think about that. If you want to stay ahead of everybody, you’ve got to be thinking about not just, okay, I’ve got to run an ad on Facebook or I’ve got to do SEO, but how do I then deal with those leads?

And what does my sales process look like to convert those? And how am I maximizing my average dollar SAR with each of those? Because that means I can then, Invest more back into my strategy, and this is really about staying ahead is thinking about it as a whole thing, not just one aspect of that bigger picture.

I think it’s such an important thing. It’s a lesson that big business does quite well in terms of the diversification of portfolios. It’s a lot of those big businesses in any kinds of sectors. Tend to have other things that they’re interested in, and it’s quite interesting that they don’t put all their eggs in one basket and whether it’s a whether it’s a group that’s more of an investment type group, and there’s investing in different types of businesses or whether it’s a singular business that has investing in different kinds of resources, without naming companies.

I was looking at an energy company on the weekend, and they were talking about diversification in different types of energy that they’re using to be able to. Resell to customers. And it’s the same thing. It’s in business. You can’t just rely on the one thing. The hard part in small business, of course, is that you want your focus to be on one or two things that are solid because you’ve only got so much attention span as we’ve talked about.

But by the same token, if you’re reliant on one, you’re very vulnerable. Yeah, I think that’s that is one of the juggling acts for a business owner in today’s age is knowing that you need, I always say you need 10 by 10. So 10, 10, 10 things that are bringing 10 percent each, whether it’s customers, whether it’s lead generation strategies, whether it could, because if one thing stops working, it does not have, it has an impact, but it’s not a huge impact, and to use your casing point there, if you had one contract that brought in 98% 90 percent or 98 percent of your income and that contract stop.

Then you don’t have any income. So it’s the same with lead generation and marketing and people and all those things, you need redundancy built into business if it’s going to be successful. And so that’s really important. But on the other hand, so it’s focus and it is hard to focus when you’re juggling many balls.

And we see this time and time again with business owners is they are trying to do everything and you can’t be good at everything. In fact, what happens is you end up sucking at everything. Yep. And, you do a really bad job at everything. Instead of just picking the one thing you’re passionate about, I guess that’s probably what has been good for me, is I know what I’m good at or what I like to do.

So I just do that. And I hire people to do everything else because I know that if I try and do those things, I’m not going to do them well. For an example, I don’t do my own bookkeeping because I hate it. I just hate it. I can’t understand why anybody would want to be a bookkeeper or accountant.

Now, there’s probably people listening here that love it. Yeah. That’s why they have a job with us. So I’m exactly the same. The best hire that I ever made was a bookkeeper. Yeah. So it’s understanding what you’re good at, but we can get professional help for them if they love it, we can make sure they get some professional help because it’s not normal to love that stuff.

But the thing is, it is different strokes for different folks, as they say. So I think it’s about finding your strength and working to that, but understanding that you do need to have different all the different parts working together to be successful. Otherwise, you’re not safe to answer the question.

The long answer, or the short answer to staying in front is to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and really focus on what you’re good at, because that’ll bring you in 10 times what trying to do it all will. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is a difficult thing. And I imagine, putting your coaching hat on for a moment that’s something that is.

Easy to say. Not so easy necessarily for businesses to do and to recognize. And and I think that must be interesting as well for you in wearing those two different hats when you’re talking to a potential digital client. Because you could probably see those things that are going on and and trying to work out that balance.

It’s got to be a tricky one. It is. It is a tricky one. The good thing for us is we don’t hide that we have the two businesses and most, in fact, it’s a point of difference when we go in and we chat to somebody about their marketing. As we say, we come at it from a different angle because the digital marketing business actually was started by accident, which is, in its very sense is a bit humorous, but I never meant to start a digital marketing company.

What happened was many years ago. When I first started my business, as you mentioned back in the old days, we used to market differently, right? And so when I was started as a coach, my strategy, I just, once again, strategies never change. You’re always going to have a strategy. So my strategy was this.

I thought to myself, the people that advertise in local papers are frustrated with the lack of leads they were generating from the ads they had in the papers. And so they would ring up the salespeople that they dealt with in the paper and they’d say, I don’t want to run the ad anymore. It’s not working.

What I said to him, I thought you know what, that’s going to be frustrating for the paper. So I went to the papers and I said, have you got customers that will not continually advertise with you because they’re not generating enough leads? And they said, yeah, we do. I said why don’t I do some training with them on how to write ads that sell?

Because it’s not your paper that’s the problem. Your paper is getting delivered. There’s 30, 000 of them or whatever, I said, I’ll teach your customers how to make offers that sell. Good headlines and put ads together that will, that a direct marketing. And so I started a partner with all these local papers.

And then in return, I said, what you’ll do is you’re going to promote my events for free in your papers. And so they did. So they gave me full pages, thousands of dollars worth of free ads. People would come to my workshops. I teach him how to write ads that sell and I’d sell coaching at the back end of those.

One day. Someone decided no longer to make papers. So I guess what I had to do, I had to learn how to market differently because they weren’t making papers one by one. It happened pretty quickly, actually, about an 18 month period. The two main local paper companies which were delivering into, all these local communities decided we’re not going to print them anymore.

We’re going fully online and it changed. I think they were panicking a bit because they didn’t know what to do. People didn’t want papers anymore. And and so I had to work out how to do digital marketing, which is what I did. And I hired two agencies. I spent about 90, 000 across those two agencies in a 12 month period.

And I was really disappointed with the results. So I thought, you know what, I’m just going to learn how to do this face back then. Facebook was the main area to advertise. I’m going to work out how to do these Facebook ads, which is what I did. So I spent. I don’t know how much money and time doing courses, learning how to run Facebook ads until I got them working.

And then I hired a guy to run them for me in my business. And then I let him build a team that ran all our social media, all of our website, all of our marketing. And then I started having my coaching clients going, Hey Ben, do you think it’s possible we could use your team to do our marketing? And me being me goes I can cost neutral this now.

Why not? So I started putting programs together or packages together for my coaching clients. And that was it was exclusively for coaching clients until COVID came. And then everyone wanted to be online. My car, a lot of my coaching clients were shutting shop, they were in dealing in industry in industries where they couldn’t continue.

So I had to You know, reinvent what I did. And so the digital marketing business really took off. And and these days it’s one of our, it’s a core business for us. It brings in a lot of revenue and employs a lot of people and we do a lot of work. It’s a, so it was an accident, a happy accident, if you like.

Isn’t that the great thing? It’s it’s this idea that you do reinvent yourself as things go. We’ve spoken about it. Briefly before, that’s how the podcasting thing happened for me. I started the Biz Bites program that we’re talking on right now, and it was done purely as, look, there were lots of reasons why I started Biz Bites, but it was an excuse to get it back into podcasting, which I’ve always loved.

And it was a little bit of self indulgence, and it was an opportunity to record conversations that I was having meaningfully anyway, and be able to share them. And that was the primary motivation initially. And that’s led to more and more people, knocking on my door and saying, We love your podcast.

Would you come and help us do a podcast? So now the birth of podcast done for you has come about as a result of all of that. And the businesses, like you said, has shifted focus. And that’s an interesting thing, too, though. And, I feel like it’s that fluidity of changing a business. It sometimes it can happen as yours has happened.

And Kind of look, the scales have just tipped in a different direction. So it’s obvious where we put the energy. Mine was a bit more of a case of, okay, I really love this. We’re going to go and do this, but it’s like getting into startup mode again, which is a little bit scary. That’s which means that, and the reason for saying all of that is that it comes back down to this whole idea of where to focus your energy as far as strategy is concerned, because when you’re Budgets are a problem for smaller businesses.

And then there’s also, as you’re talking about is these diversification into different things? What is the right thing for a business? So talk to me about, you talked about the idea of strategy being really important. So how do you actually go about working out? The strategy for an individual business.

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s not an easy one to answer because every business is slightly different as to what their goals are, but I’ll break it down. There’s four questions you’ve got to ask yourself when you think about your marketing, whether it’s digital or not, but digital is what it is these days.

The first one is that, are you, do you need instant leads? So that’s what we call direct marketing or what we call hunting. So if you think about, if you needed to eat today, you’d go hunting, or you’d just go to the shop and you’d buy a steak, you’d go hunting. You’d go hunting. If you had plenty of food in your pantry though, and you didn’t need to eat today, you might do farming.

Okay. And farming means that you’re going to, somewhere down the track, you’re going to get a bigger return. It’s going to be a whole crop rather than just feeding you for one day. It’s going to feed you for a longer time. And so when you think about your marketing, there are the two types of marketing.

One is more like branding and farming and building something. Our podcast is a good example of farming. We can do direct response marketing on a podcast, but the reality is people will listen to it over a period of time, and then they might take action. Direct marketing might be something like an ad on Facebook that says, buy this now, and here’s a special deal to do right?

And it’s very much about this is a limited offer. It’s going to, your feed’s going to disappear in a couple of seconds if you don’t take action. So that’s your hunting. So that’s the first thing you ought to think about. Have you got the, It can be a combination of both, by the way, it doesn’t have to be either or.

You need to think about that with your marketing strategy. The other part then is then solution versus interruption marketing. And this is where a lot of people get it wrong when it comes to digital marketing, because a lot of digital marketing is what we call interruption marketing.

Now it’s no, the type of marketing is no different to what we’ve always done, even 20, 30, 40 years ago. In fact, my most favorite book on marketing is called My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins. They were both written in. 1921, right? So over a hundred years off, but the principles are the same when it comes to marketing.

But what we need to understand is that things like Facebook, for example, social media marketing or Tik TOK or Instagram even Google to some degree, YouTube, you’re interrupting people’s days. Just before those mediums were around, it was radio, it was newspaper, it was television, it was buses, it was billboards, it was cinema advertising.

That advertising was about as effective as what is Facebook or Instagram marketing because you had to rely on that person getting interrupted and whatever it was they were doing, they were there to watch a movie or they were there, and your offer had to be strong enough to stop them in their tracks.

That’s interruption marketing. And I think a lot of people get despondent when they do marketing on something like. social media and they don’t get the result they thought it’s because they’re expecting too much because the other type of marketing is called solution marketing and if you’ve got a marketplace that is looking for solutions then solution marketing is where you start but it’s more expensive per lead but you get a high quality lead and that’s things like google ads so if someone goes to google and they type in i need a plumber near me they’ve got a problem they want They’re looking to buy something.

Then you’re not interrupting their day. They’ve actually taking time out of their day to look for a solution. They might be SEO comes into play now because if you’re on the first page of Google, when someone’s searching for a solution that you provide, you want your website to come up. So that’s solution marketing.

And once again, it depends on how much of your market is looking for that. So to give an example, something like business coaching, there’s not a huge search volume looking for business coaching. So you’ve got to interrupt people with other stuff that they might be looking for. And that could be like, for example, a business planning template or a guide on interviewing to hire people or how to systemize my business checklist.

Okay. These things interrupt their day. We can put them on Facebook and then we follow them up with nurture sequences and phone calls from salespeople because the human to human, you can’t ever replace that. With digital still has to exist. So that’s when it comes to strategy, that’s what you think about.

Do I want to do any direct response? So do I need leads now? Or do I work more on a farming strategy that gives me leads longer down the track? And have I got a lot of people in my target audience looking for a solution right now, actively online, or do I need to. Put something in front of people, they’re going to interrupt them.

And they’re the questions you start with, and that’ll help you put your strategy together. Yeah, I agree with you. There’s such important things to look at in each of those different areas and to understand your own business and where those people are coming from. I think that’s such an incredibly important thing.

Difficult thing, more difficult than people think that it takes because you expect businesses that are running their business to know where their audience is and what their audience is about. And it’s amazing how often I know I’ve done it with plenty of clients where you sit down and you try and do, something like a persona building or avatar building as I like to call it today.

And the. The truth is that they’ve never really sat down and thought about it. And once you start thinking about it, you start making different decisions based on it. Cause I find it interesting as well that you talk about not many people searching for coaching. There’s not many people that search for marketing either.

Most of it does come through. Relationships and referrals. I find when it, it’s it’s a really interesting and almost ironic idea that the very companies that are out there trying to help other people rank well and do all of these things are the very companies that people are not searching for.

So it’s a It’s an interesting one in that respect, and we’re going to come to some SEO tips in a bonus bit of content we’ll do at the end. So just a reminder to everyone, you can check out the show notes and you’ll be able to follow a link to get that content. But I did just want to touch on SEO for a moment and say, SEO is this funny thing where, and for those who don’t know, search engine optimization.

So the whole idea that you’re being organically on the top page of Google in searches there. There’s a lot of I guess a lot of companies that claim to do a lot in this space. There have been times when I’ve read headlines that SEO is dead. Where do you stand on the effectiveness of SEO and sorting out those that can and those that pretend?

Yeah, it’s a good question because it’s one of the problems with SEO is it’s a bit like a, I don’t know, it’s a bit like a, it’s a hidden service, like it’s not something that you can check on. As a buyer, as a consumer, and it’s very difficult. I quite often have conversations with people that are paying for SEO.

And then when I use our tool to audit what’s going on with their website, there’s nothing being done. And I say that too often, especially with cheap SEO that’s offshore. So you just got to be very wary when you’re buying SEO, the company that’s doing it for you should be very transparent, showing you what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and the results they’re getting every quarter at a minimum, really.

Because SEO is still very important. You go and type in how much is business coaching into Google. I’ll come up on page one, probably position one still, I would say. I’ve been there for about 12 years with that particular page and on that page, there’s a, then a download, what we call a lead magnet for an enrollment pack that that then goes through all the breakdowns of the costs and the programs that we offer.

That would be our number one client generating SEO page. If someone’s searching for how much is business coaching, they’ve got a very high intent of buying it. Yes. They’re not doing that just for fun. They’re doing it because they’re interested. The you could do signage Perth, for example, we’ve got a client in Perth.

We do, he’s a signage company. Once again, if someone’s looking for signage in Perth, they’re probably looking to buy. And so that puts them on page one of Google and it brings them in, I reckon, I think about 200 leads a month. To that business, right? So SEO is very important. What you’ve got to understand once again, is when someone’s doing the search, what is their intent?

Because it’s easy to get something. I could get something ranking, for example the complete guide, let’s say your business, for example, the podcast done for you service, the complete guide to the podcast You could write that article, you could put it on your website, you could optimise it, and there’s a few, there’s four different ways it gets done with SEO.

Some of it’s on the page, some of it’s technical, and some of it’s off of the page. But we could do that and have that page ranking pretty quickly. But how many people are looking for that, and then what is the intent of that person? It doesn’t mean they’re going to buy from you. Just means they’re going to come and they’re going to visit your site.

So that person may just want to buy their own gear to do their own podcast. They might have no intention whatsoever of buying a podcast done for you service. So you’ve got to be also think about as you create this content, what is the intent of the person that’s doing the search? So if you are thinking about SEO, I’ve seen plenty of SEO companies Bamboozle their customers with reports of 500 to 1000 keywords that they’re ranking for.

But then I asked how many of those are actually driving the right traffic to your website? And then when they get to your website, is there a lead capture game plan? How are you getting that person to give you their details? So you can then have a sales conversation. Otherwise. You’re just wasting your time.

I don’t care if you’ve got 20, 000 visitors a month. If you don’t have any sales out of that, what is the point? So it’s not about numbers. It’s about quality. It’s about intent. And so that’s where I think a lot of people go wrong with SEO. So you need to ask those questions if you’re getting someone doing your SEO.

I think that’s a very good advice. We’re going to come back to SEO tips a little bit later. Let’s turn our attention to some of the other areas around digital marketing and this whole idea of staying out. I’m interested in engaging your response as well to, a lot of it’s about content and having consistent content to promote all the time, whether it’s a lead magnet or whether it’s for content on your website.

How difficult is it for you when you’re working with companies in generating content for people? I can easily say that the easiest way to do it is podcasting. And that’s why we have the podcast done for you service. But the. Is that a big obstacle for a lot of businesses in creating genuinely good content?

Yeah, depends what you want to create content for as well. Like you say genuinely good content Good, that’s a subjective thing, isn’t it? What’s good? You know to us good content is content that actually drives it’s got to be about attracting the right clients. For you as opposed to just getting, Likes and views which are don’t give you anything You Yeah, I think the thing is, if I go back to where I started in the, with our chat is saying, I do as little as possible, the least you can get the less you can give yourself to do, the more likely you’re going to get it done when it comes to content creation, because as there’s a lot of work and that’s why things like podcast dump you are brilliant, because recording the podcast is very easy.

You just get someone on the call and you can record it on zoom or any other service these days. It’s what happens after that. Who produces it? Who uploads it? Who optimizes it? There’s got to be show notes written, it’s got to be posted on our website. So it is optimized for SEO and that’s where people go wrong.

So I’m a great believer that if you’re a natural content creator and some people are good at making videos and podcasts, some people aren’t don’t, you don’t need to be, you can pay other people to do it. So we generate a lot of content for a lot of our clients that they, in the beginning we go, Oh, I don’t like that.

That doesn’t sound like me. And I go if you want your blog articles to sound like you, you need to hire a ghostwriter, but sounding like you is not what Google needs. So if the objective of this article is to drive relevant traffic to your website so they turn into leads, just let us write the content and it’s not going to sound like you, it might not even be the greatest of articles, it doesn’t matter, it just, so long as it doesn’t misrepresent who you are and it is going to do the job, it’s going to do the job.

A lot of people get really Worried about the quality of the content from the perspective of what that what they think is good. That’s why I say that’s subjective. What is good is it’s more about what’s effective. And I think that’s the key thing. And you just got to decide. Once again, it’s under you mentioned it before, doing the avatar or the, what do they call that?

The other one, the Persona. Yeah, the ideal client. If you understand your customer, you can start to work out what do they like doing? I love listening to podcasts, I’m an avid podcast. I don’t watch television, or hardly ever. I watch Survivor. There’s only a few shows I watch. And most of the time, they will be shows that I can still learn something from to do with Personalities, people and psychology because I love that side of marketing and sales and I won’t watch shows just for the, I won’t watch a series of something unless it’s, really compelling, very rarely, most of the time I’m watching YouTube or listening to podcasts.

So I’m a, I’m definitely a consumer of content and I. I have a very short attention span. So if people take a long time to get into the content, I’m out of there. I do not stick around. If it does, if I ask a question and it’s got a click baity title, I won’t read it. So you’re right. Good means to me is effective.

Is it got the target market arriving and then them sticking around to take action and I’ve bought stuff because of content. There’s no, no two ways about it. I’ve bought items that I use every day to make my life easier because I’ve watched it in a YouTube video. I’ve listened to a podcast or I’ve seen it on a blog article.

And so that can be very effective if they’re done well. Staying ahead, I think once again is just working where you’re strong and and not doing what you’re not good at. I remember I was doing a training with someone around using video because videos, I think it’s the ultimate when it comes to digital marketing.

If you can use video is very engaging, but a lot of people are very scared to put themselves in front of a video camera, right? So I said don’t be in front of the camera. You’ve all got these HD cameras in your hands these days. They call the phone, just stand behind it. And you’ve got your preview screen and just record whatever it is that you do, and you’ve got a recording.

And I had a guy, he was in the pest control industry, termite expert, and he was doing that. He was, instead of getting in front of the camera, he was just standing behind, he was filming the termites. He was talking about, why this house had termites, what they could have done. He might’ve talked about the wood piles over there and this area, and this is, if this has attracted them or the water leak, that’s, bringing moisture into the ground.

It was highly educational, but if you thought it had termites, you’re watching this guy’s videos. And he just, Each of these videos had a call to action. He was a termite expert. He was out there solving people’s problems. So people are doing a search. I think I have termites. His video was turning up even though he wasn’t in front of the camera.

This content was just meaning that he was probably better than any other termite specialist because rather than just an ad in front of people, he was actually helping them to understand what their problem was and what it was going to take to solve it. And I think that’s how you stay ahead with content.

Yeah, it’s it. You’re absolutely right. And it is recognizing that you need to do some of these things. But the best way to do it for your business and for you is going to vary from person. And that’s why the strategy is so important to have that in place along the way. I wanted to, diversify a little bit and just, you touched on a little bit about your some of your upbringing and things as well.

How did you land in the digital? The coaching space, is where you started. Because how do you actually go from dropping out of school being in the back of paddy wagons? And then ending up as a coach because those two things do not seem like they go hand in hand. Yeah, I know. I think I was quite lucky.

And when I say lucky people, you were lucky. I was very lucky. I was caught doing something criminal when I was 17 and I I was, and I was lucky because it put me, I ended up getting arrested, went to Flemington police overnight, locked up in the little pen with handcuffs on, and I was definitely going down the wrong road.

I was hanging out with the wrong people, and I went to court, had to be before a judge, and I got sentenced a good behavior bond and a fine, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but that really set me on the straight and narrow. From that point forward, I was one of those people that I think that knocked me.

In the right direction, some people it does, some people it doesn’t, right? But for me, it definitely made me think about my life and where I was heading. I was fortunate that I was only 17 when this happened, so I wasn’t tried as an adult. And I think if I was, I probably would have been dealt with a bit harsher, because it was it was, it was a criminal offense.

I won’t say what it is, but it was, it’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s something I’m happy to talk about because I think it helps other people understand that you can change, you can definitely change who you are, what your beliefs are and how you, your mindset about how you operate.

And then I decided I wanted to be a pilot. And in fact, I was a courier driver. So I’ve probably skipped a step there. I got it. I got out of panel bedding because I didn’t like it. I went through just about as many jobs as there were months. I sold everything from vacuum planters to house cladding in a year.

I really loved sales. Always loved meeting people. I think because it’s just, fast paced, but I ended up as a courier driver. And as a courier driver, I was doing a delivery out to Bankstown airport in Sydney once, which is like the Busiest GA, General Aviation Airport in Australia, and they had a sign at the front that said learn to fly 65 bucks a week.

I thought, I’m going to do that. I’m going to be a pilot. So I enrolled in that course, started doing that. I couldn’t afford to do my commercial pilot medical when I started. Because you have to have a different level of medical for that. So I did my private license and I got through about two years of training then I went to do my commercial pilot license medical and failed and I failed because I have a color deficiency.

I’m actually red green color deficient, which is quite popular. The laws have changed now, by the way, if you want to be a pilot, so don’t let this scare you off from doing it. But back then, red green colorblind meant you could not get a commercial license. So that sort of broke my heart. I really had my heart set on doing that.

And then I went what will I do with myself? And at the time I just had this opportunity to start a transport company, which I did. And so I was 24 and we built a transport, I was working in transport at the time, I was no longer a courier at that point. I was a radio operator, operations manager for a company.

And so I started this transport company. We ended up with 64 trucks on the road. Multimillion dollar company, but I was working 80 hours a week. It was insane. I was struggling with my mental health. My relationship with my wife was struggling. Hardly ever saw my kids. I used to joke, I have to wear a name tag to go home.

They wouldn’t remember who I was. Silly thing to joke about when I look back on it, but that’s, that’s just, was the life that I led and so many business people are like that, but I’d go to this business networking. Have you ever been to those networking breakfasts where you stand up for 30 seconds, you do elevator pitch?

Oh, yes. Yeah. It’s a rite of passage for every business owner. It is. Yeah. So anyway, I would go to this group, but mainly just so I could have breakfast because I used to get up really early, go to our depot. We had a couple of interstate trucks called B doubles going between Brisbane and Melbourne and Sydney.

And on the way back to my office, I’d go past where this meeting was once a week, and I’d have breakfast with this group of guys. And there was this one guy there, his name was Andrew, and he’d stand up. And I’m thinking I had 60 seconds to introduce yourself. Will he take about six seconds? And this is what he’d say, Anthony, he’d get up and he’d say, my name is Andrew, I help business owners work less and make more money.

And then he’d just sit down. That was it. And I was like, what does this guy do? What is he talking about? Cause I need both of those things, right? I’m working crazy hours. I’m not making any money. Anyway, we started talking and he was a business coach. Not many people knew what they were back then.

25 years ago was a Fairly new industry. Anyway, I could talk to him, but I was in business in, with my father in law as a partnership, and he was just dead set against us getting anyone to come in and help us. So it never happened. But when I sold that business, I thought to myself, I wonder how many other people are young like I was.

10 foot tall and bulletproof when they start their business, but then soon realized they don’t know what they don’t know and they need coaching. They need help. I thought to myself, that’s an industry that’s going to go somewhere. And and I thought I’m going to go and have lunch with this guy cause I’d sold my business.

I didn’t have a lot of money by the way. It sounds impressive that I sold it, but we didn’t sell it for much. And and I had enough to get into another business, but that was about it. And I rang this guy up and said, how do I do what you do? And he said just so happens I’m looking for some people to join my team.

And so that’s how I became a coach. It was it wasn’t even something that I planned for in the beginning. It’s just that I’d met this guy. He made an impression on me. I was like, you know what, I’m going to, I’m going to go and talk to this guy. I ended up joining his team as what they call an associate.

He was part of a franchise. And I came in as his associate coach. So I bought a franchise, got trained up in the system. And within months I was doing double or triple what he was doing. And head office was like, what are you doing, mate? And I said, I’m just doing what you guys I’m just doing the system and back then they said, make this many calls, book this many appointments and you’ll land this many clients and I literally rang pretty much everybody in the yellow pages.

Back then it was a big thick book, and that’s what I did. That’s how I got my clients and I was just sitting on the phone. I would sit on the phone every day for two or three hours cold calling. I had no aversion to that whatsoever. I’ve always been good at that, which I know scares the bejesus out of a lot of people, but I’ve never had a, I don’t care what people think of me.

So I’ll make a call and have a chat if I can help you. Great. If not, great. Don’t care. And it wasn’t long before I’d overtaken him and I said to him, you know what, I need to get, just keep building this thing. I don’t want to just be an associate. I don’t want to just work out of my home office.

I want to build a team of coaches. And I’ve got back onto building a business. And within two years, I had a team of seven coaches. We were multi million dollar business, and now we’ve done. Over 100 million in the industry, me and my business partner, I partnered with a guy back in 05 and yeah, never looked back.

So that’s how I got into it. So it was, it’s, it was not something that I had ever dreamed I was going to do. And to think that, me, I failed really in that business. I didn’t make money and I was working a lot of hours and for the first two years as a coach, I really was not a good coach.

I inspired people, I helped people with their marketing, got them sales, but I remember helping people grow their business so rapidly that it was putting strain on their relationships with their wives, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. It took me a few years to really learn how to build a business.

Like I said, that’s 20 years ago now and a lot of bridge under the water, but we’ve, in 2014, we created a whole system for building a business that from the previous 10 years that has been tried and tested It’s about as close as you get to an instruction manual for building a business, which I’m very proud of, but it took me a long time to get there, Anthony.

Yeah. These things don’t they? Yeah. It’s a fascinating journey and there’s so much more that we could talk about, but unfortunately, we’re going to run out of time in a moment or two. But I do want to remind everyone that we’ll. There’ll be some bonus bonus content for those that are willing to click on the button and hear that we’re going to talk about some SEO tips in a moment or two.

So I just wanted to finish up the main discussion and also with the promise been that we will do this again because there’s so much to explore. It’s two businesses. It really needs double the podcast to get to do it justice. We might just awesome. But just wanted to ask you, what is it that people have as an aha moment.

And I’m going to ask you on the digital side of things that they have when they start working with you that you wish more people would know about in advance. An aha moment. Yeah. Yeah. I think they have an aha moment that they shouldn’t have been trying to DIY it themselves because it’s like anything, you think about what you’re good at, right?

If you’re good at something, you’ll always get it done quicker. More efficiently and better from the get go because it’s what you do. It’s what you’ve been trained to do. And I think that’s the biggest aha moment. They go, Why didn’t I do this sooner? And unfortunately, we can’t wind the clock back. So I can’t fix that problem.

But I think that’s it might help others, right? So it’s easy to think, you know what I think the problem is for people is that in business is a lot of people value their time more than their money. And so they end up doing things to save money when really what that’s doing is just costing them time. And that’s a real shame.

So I think they are hard as they go. I could have saved so much time and money if I just got someone to do this for me two, three, four, five years ago. Yeah it’s a very difficult thing in business on one hand is to recognize when you have your limitations and when you should start spending money and how much you should spend.

And it’s also equally hard to Go, let’s pull the pin on this one because it’s not working because you keep wanting to hang on and go, no, but it’s going to, it’s going to. And that right timing for when to let go of things, whatever it is in your business is I think an incredibly difficult and a thing to do and a hard lesson to learn.

Yeah, absolutely. And that applies to so many things, not just marketing. Absolutely. Thank you for being an amazing guest on this, on the program of Biz Bites. And a reminder to everyone that we’re going to have all the information on how you can get in contact with Ben and his amazing agency, and the podcast and a whole bunch of other things that he’s got going on.

We’ll put that into the into the chat and sorry, into the show notes. I should say for the podcast, all of that will be included, but then until we get to the bonus bit of content in just a moment, for those that are ready to click on, thank you for being part of his bites. My absolute pleasure, mate.

Thank you for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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