The Content Marketing Process that Gets more Visitors to your website, transforms them into Leads and eventually into Customers! – with Justin and Chaunna Brooke

OWEN: Hi everyone, my name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to Process Breakdown podcast. Today the interview is a little bit different because we have, my guest, Justin Brooke and Shauna Brooke from imscalable.com. And we want to do a deep dive into content marketing and how you promote your contents and you can generate leads from your content and turn them into customers as well. And so, who better than to get Justin and Shauna on here to talk about content marketing in that scale. So, before we can start it I love for you guys to do a brief introduction to your company, what you do so that the guest can know a little bit more about you.JUSTIN: By you looking at me I’m guessing that is–CHAUNNA: Go for it.

JUSTIN: Alright. So the brief story, just started in 2005, didn’t really do anything ’till 2007. 2007 I had a great mentor, I interned with a multi-millionaire info publisher. Learned the trade, came back from that internship and started some traffic campaigns, built a 6-figure business. I saw the traffic was the thing that kind of changed my life, from the working job days or whatever. So, from ever since then traffic has been like the thing that I geek out about, I study. It encompasses me sometimes. So that’s my story in a nutshell. Right now, I have an agency, we do traffic for other people and we’ve been blessed to get some really high-end clients. We do well financially now, and life is good.

CHAUNNA: I on the other hand was a school teacher when he got started. And it wasn’t until the end of 2007 that I came from home teaching and started running the business with him. So I’ve always been the admin systems, hiring, financial side of the business.

OWEN: Awesome. And just so the listeners know it, on the content marketing side and your strategy, based on the research we had. Justin, you’re the one responsible for the strategy but for the actual implementation and the process that’s where Chaunna comes in, and so that’s why we have both of you on the show so they’ll understand why we’re doing this. And so, let’s get started, what exactly is content marketing, and also I guess, what do you think is not content marketing as well? That way the listener can have the distinction in their mind.

JUSTIN: Content marketing, a lot of people look at it as just blogging. By I believe it’s so much more than that. It’s videos, it’s podcast, blogs, articles, eBooks, infographics, and now there’s gifographics. It’s just anything that you’re putting out, it’s entertainment. It’s internet entertainment is what it is. TV, radio, it’s all content, movies is content. So, it’s nothing really new and we’ve been watching TV and radio, and had newspapers and magazines forever. Content marketing is just the web version of what we’ve been doing for centuries offline. And it works, it works real well.

OWEN: Okay, so I get the content part of it but most of it I’m trying to understand where the marketing now comes into play as well.

JUSTIN: Yeah, you’re right. So that’s the content side of it. And the marketing side of it is the content should be a attracting your ideal customer to you. You don’t just put content out there for content’s sake, it’s not just entertainment. You’re putting entertainment out there that will attract a certain person. And then around your content or inside your content there should be some sort of call to action to turn that reader or that viewer/listener into a lead, and then a system that turns him into customer after that.

CHAUNNA: I think also, you sort of touched on it a little. The marketing side of it, like when you’re marketing to somebody you have to have a specific target, you have to know who, what they do, who they are, where they live, what types of interest do they have. So like that’s the marketing aspect of it. It’s not just putting out any content you want to put out, it’s putting out content that attracts that single person to come buy from you.

JUSTIN: Yes. It’s also your branding, it’s your positioning, the level of quality, or the content that you put out, the way that you design the content. It all goes into your brand, your positioning, and then your ability to have a call to action into it as your direct response marketing side of it.

CHAUNNA: And that’s how it actually converts into being profitable.

JUSTIN: Yeah, it encompasses all of marketing really. It’s actually pretty cool.

OWEN: Based on that I’m thinking like it’s basically looking at what my ideal customer, who would be and what are the questions that they probably have and about the service that I’m offering. And basically educating them on the questions that they have when you kind of call to action at the end to take that relationship a little bit further than just getting the free content. Is that right?

CHAUNNA: Yeah, it’s not just that though because it’s like– I’ll take like a text messaging service for example. You can’t always talk about this text messaging feature, and that text messaging feature that gets boring. But if you had a target person, let’s say, the CEO’s of companies and you want their company using your text messaging, you can also think about what other interest do they have. RingCentral does this really well. They talk about all the different aspects of business, not just a phone system for your business.

JUSTIN: Right, yeah.

CHAUNNA: And so, they’re giving contents to their target people that aren’t necessarily directly rigged to their service.

JUSTIN: Unbalanced, doesn’t only talk about split texting, they talk about all kinds of traffic, landing page design, and business tips, and it’s just anything that your target customer is interested in. Any questions they have, any topics that appeal to them, that’s all part of your content marketing.

OWEN: Just like today where usually our guest will systematize their business and talk about how they systematize it. Now, we’re doing something a little bit different when we say we want to learn about content marketing and the process behind it, hence you guys. And so, I’m just curious, because the listener might be wondering, what are maybe mind-blowing results that you probably got in for your clients, or some of your clients have got in as a result of content marketing?

JUSTIN: Well, I’ve pulled in 6-figure sales with social media with just a Facebook profile.

CHAUNNA: What’s sort of mind-blowing actually, and I’m just going to step in here. It’s like we’re an ad agency, we get paid to do service like paid ads for people. But we only bring in clients through content marketing.

JUSTIN: That’s awesome.

CHAUNNA: We run paid ads but not to a landing page or a sales page, we send them to our content. And our content is what converts them into subscribers and then customers. And so that’s sort of what’s mind-blowing to most people. And when we tell our customers this we’re like, “We could do the content side also but–”

JUSTIN: Not everybody has converted over to– The old world thinking is that you create an advertisement and people come to your sales vehicle, whether it be a page, a video, whatever, and then you make a sale. And that’s how we’ve done it for hundreds of years or whatever. And today because there’s so many brands, because there’s so much competition, I believe and what’s been working great for me is paying for ads to my content which gives value to the person first. And now they’re like, “Oh, this guy, he’s an expert on traffic” or “This guy, he’s an expert on text messaging. So I want to buy his product.” And it works fully well and they’ve actually did this over 60 years ago in newspapers. They used to have content articles, and in magazines they did this same strategy.

CHAUNNA: They still do, yeah.

JUSTIN: Yeah, they still do.

OWEN: Like advertorials, right?

CHAUNNA: Right.

JUSTIN: Advertorials, yeah, absolutely.

OWEN: And that’s one of the reasons that excited me when I listened to your interview on Growth Hacker TV where you said that it’s the pushing people to maybe like lead generation pages, like maybe opt-in pages, whatever. What you do is you push them to your content ad, then from there that’s where the whole process starts. So, let’s talk about them, let’s go behind the scenes. After you created the content, what next, how do we turn that content to a place where it generates leads? I guess I want to understand the process behind, your own process for content marketing and promotion.

JUSTIN: So I’m going to talk on the 30,000-foot view level, and then she’s going to talk about specific steps–

OWEN: Awesome.

JUSTIN: Because I shut down in that point. So, at the 30,000-foot view level what you need to do is you need to think about the end in mind. What is the end goal? I’m going to talk about my own specific examples and people will have to adapt for their own business.

OWEN: Awesome.

JUSTIN: For me I sell an advertising service. So, who is my person? My person, if they’re buying advertising, they probably have a successful business already. There are some start ups that are buying advertising, but for the most part it’s established business owners. So now I need to create information that established business owners would want to learn about. And what do they want to learn about? So then I come up with different topics. I use Yahoo Answers, I use Quora.com, I asked, I’d send out surveys. And I found out what questions do people have, what topics are on their mind, what’s hot. And I start creating content for them. And then what I do is I start creating for them, and then what I do is– Okay, so, I figured out this is what I want to sell, this is who I need to sell it to. Now, what I need to figure out is how do I connect the two?  Okay, so, I know who I want to sell to and I know that they’re interested in Facebook ads right now. Everybody’s out on Facebook ads. So, I’m going to write an article about Facebook ads, and then at the end of the article I’m going to include a link to this free eBook I have, or this free mini course I have on how to learn how to use Power Editor. So, I’ve enticed them with information that they want, they got value from me, and now there’s a call to action to a lead gen page where they can get even more stuff. So it’s like, all the time you go to a grocery store and they give you a little piece of the food. And then you take one little bite of the food and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is so amazing.”

CHAUNNA: And they might give you a recipe card.

JUSTIN: Yeah, and then you go and you buy all the different ingredients to that little bite of food that they gave you. And that’s what the content does. It gives you a little bite of the food, you love it, and then you end up going and buying all these different stuff that they have.

CHAUNNA: Right.

OWEN: Okay. So Chaunna, let’s talk about– because he’s a 30,000-foot guy and you’re the one that breaks it down into the process for my audience. So, give me what he just said so far, let’s take it from the top.

CHAUNNA: Okay, so first thing you should start with, especially if you’re not doing content marketing yet is identifying your target customer and we use like a persona worksheet. If you Google persona or how to create a persona–

JUSTIN: Avatar persona, you could call it a lot of different things.

CHAUNNA: Right. So the first thing you have to do is target one of those. We actually have three of them for our business but I would suggest just starting with one and then you can build out the others. Once you have that worksheet, it just takes you through the mindset of what that person is doing and thinking and what their problems are. And so then you can find topics they’re researching, what they might be interested in, what are they seeing on a daily basis. So that created our categories, and then I just created a list of main categories that will speak on in any content we’ve put out.

JUSTIN: Yeah, and another good thing, just to jump in here is I use feedly.com, you can use any kind of RSS reader.

CHAUNNA: [Unintelligible 00:12:02]

JUSTIN: And– go ahead, sorry.

CHAUNNA: So once we have categories, I have an assistant, he also adds to it. We have feedly account, and we find blogs that also talk on those categories. Not so that we can take their content, but so that we can look through what’s popular. If there are trending topics, if there are something that’s getting a lot of comments, so those types of things are things we’re looking for so we can make sure we’re current with our content. And it’s talking about what we want to talk about.

OWEN: And I’m curious, what tools are you using to do the research on the questions, because I’m assuming that you guys have created persona and now you’re going online to look up great questions that come in. The kind of questions related to what you guys provide. What tools are you using for this to research a question, I’m just curious.

CHAUNNA: So, Justin and I use answers.yahoo.com and then quora.com.

OWEN: Okay.

CHAUNNA: And then also if there are big blogs in your market or big Facebook groups, you should be checking into those to see like what are some popular conversations that are going on because people are going to be asking questions.

JUSTIN: Yeah, blog comments are a great place to find questions people are asking.

OWEN: That’s awesome. And so now, after the question part, I think the next thing that Justin said is now you understood what the questions are, you go ahead and produce a content. Let’s talk about that.

CHAUNNA: So the next step then is to decide how you’re going to deliver the content. Justin chooses video, but you don’t have to choose video, we used to do just one really big blog piece once or twice a month. But we wanted it to be more consistent and more opt-in, because we wanted to stay in the face of our target customer. So we worked with Daily Post. I would highly suggest if you’re just getting started to pick a weekly option, or once or twice a week, because the more opt-in you do it the better your system has to be and the more people you’re going to need involved. Because you trying to do it on your own and run your business is going to be way too stressful and you give up too soon.

JUSTIN: Yeah, and consistency is so important.

CHAUNNA: Very important.

JUSTIN: If you look at a TV show. Most people know that their favorite TV show comes on at Tuesday night at 9 pm, whatever. And they can set their calendar by their show. And that’s important because we all have life going on. And a lot of times shows really don’t pick up until about season 3. Not everybody knows about the show, season 1, season 2, and then season 3 all of a sudden it becomes really popular. So, if you’re going to do content marketing, you got to pick up pace, and a medium that you’re going to be able to stay consistent with for a long time because in the beginning you won’t see any fruit in the beginning but you’ll see a lot if you stick with it.

CHAUNNA: Right.

OWEN: And what– Go ahead.

CHAUNNA: No, no, I was just going to jump back into my system but you have a question, go for it.

OWEN: I was wondering, is there a benefit to go with video as oppose to just going text?

CHAUNNA: More syndication possibilities.

JUSTIN: What I like about video is, one, it’s easy for me to just sit in front of the video and talk. Not everybody can do that. I didn’t start out being able to do that, I used to like to write instead. So, if you can just sit in front of a camera and get your idea out, great. And then what’s so good about video is you can back it out into other forms of content.

OWEN: Awesome.

JUSTIN: You strip the audio and it becomes a podcast. You transcribe it and it becomes a blog post. So, it’s not as easy to turn a blog post into a video, it’s very easy to turn a video into a blog post.

OWEN: And so, the audience know, this is how you can even scale it out in terms of production. Create a video and turn that video into text, transcript, or– So it changes to index, you can turn that into a PDF, and you can turn it into a podcast. And now you’re just scaling what you just did from a video. Go ahead. Chaunna you have something to say next.

CHAUNNA: Yeah, no, it’s okay. And this is, so, once we get the categories, we have the topics, we use the feed to get some popular topics. And then Justin sits down, we have a weekly schedule and he sits down every Monday with our video recorder. And the one thing I want to say here is people are going to be like, “Oh, I don’t have a video recorder, I definitely can’t do this system.” But you don’t have to start with video record– We have a larger team because we have a larger production budget. But in the beginning Justin just used to turn on the computer camera and sit in front of the computer and do it. We didn’t have lights, and a microphone, and a person to record and edit. So, start with what you have and then increase as your business grows. Also, if you’re going to hire someone to help, have them do the thing you don’t like to do first. Like I don’t like syndicating everything but I don’t mind editing a video. So in the beginning I hired a virtual assistant to help us transcribe, create a PDF, cut the audio, and submit all of those. Those were things I didn’t like to do so I didn’t mind putting the video together, uploading it for her, and then she took it from there.

OWEN: Thanks for that Chaunna. You know Justin there’s one thing that also gets me is that a lot of people you talk about content market, and it always stops at the point where the blog is now posted on their website. And one thing I loved about the interview, I listened to you on Good Hacker TV. You focused more on the promotion side and also took it to the next level of actually automating and scaling the promotion, and let’s talk about that. How do you do that?

JUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. And what everybody needs to remember is that content marketing is two words. And you create content and then you do marketing. So, that’s the important thing, when you write a blog post or when you shoot a video you’re not done. Now you have to do the marketing side of things. Now you have to post it to your fan pages, post it to your Twitter, if you’re smart, you use your Facebook personal profile to network with other bloggers, with other Twitter influencers. Other people who have distribution so that when you do make a piece of content they’re already your friends and they may help you share that content. So as soon as you write a blog post, or whatever your content is, now you do the marketing side of things.

OWEN: If you post the blog post, email your list, reach out to maybe people you know, those all seem like one type things. Trying to dial back, okay. After you done those one time things of promoting, how do we turn it to that engine or whatever, it now does it on its own automatically.

JUSTIN: Right.

OWEN: The standard on promotion.

JUSTIN: Yeah. So the next thing that I do, some content pieces do better than others. Some of them you think are going to be awesome and then you get no comments, no shares, and your heart’s broken. And then some of them you whip out, in 15 minutes on a Saturday, just an idea you had and everybody loves it. It almost goes viral. Well, when you have those ones that are getting more shares, more comments than the other ones, for whatever reason that piece is working really well, it’s really resonating with your market. What I do with that is I then set-up a Facebook sponsored story campaign or a Facebook promoted post campaign, whatever you want to call it, and add in the news feed that’s promoting that piece of content. Because if you’re doing your content marketing right then when somebody consumes your content they then will have to follow and become a lead, or possibly a customer. So it only makes sense that you get more people to this piece of content. And if you’ve already tested it with your email list or your fan page and it’s getting a lot of engagement, it’s a great candidate to spend a little bit of money. Start out with $5 a day, $10 a day promoting this in Facebook so that more people see it. And if it’s working well for you increase the budget.

OWEN: So basically, Facebook now takes it over and promotes that same content to a bunch of people basically automatically at this point.

JUSTIN: Yeah. I hate using the word forcing but it’s almost like you’re forcing the market to be subscribed to your blog because whether they like it or not. You’ are serving ads to them, showing them your best blog post. So, in a way, they are subscribed.

OWEN: Okay. So let’s go back to Chaunna now to talk about the process behind what you just talked about. After the content is there, we try to scale the promotion of it. And you mentioned one tool to use which is Facebook to do that, if I had to add. So Chaunna, let’s have you take over.

CHAUNNA: So, once you have the post updated you’re going to want to ping that so that it’s syndicated out there. Get Google SEO traction a little bit depending on your keywords and how your blog gets formatted. Your video will get uploaded to multiples, like we uploaded it to YouTube but then also we upload it to Vimeo–

JUSTIN: And SlideShare.

CHAUNNA: Yeah, and there are tons of places you can upload it to but we chose, like they’re a course set that we get the most from. So instead of just doing it to everything under the sun we just do it to the core that got us the most results. So we do Vimeo and SlideShare, and then the PDF gets syndicated out there, people can download it. After we get a few in the same category, we convert those into like a mini eBook that can be published for Kindle or things like that. Like that’s in the process. And then, your audio is then submitted to–

JUSTIN: iTunes, Soundfile.

CHAUNNA: Yeah, iTunes and Soundfile, I was trying to remember their names. I knew iTunes, I just couldn’t remember the other one. And so it goes to both of those which are two very popular podcast platforms. And so those will pick up a lot of audience for you as well.

OWEN: On the odd side I’m wondering what do people have to know when it comes to promoting fired ads on Facebook and is it only buying ads on Facebook that you can use? Are there other ways to buy ads towards the content?

JUSTIN: Oh no, absolutely. I just started a Twitter ad campaign as well doing the same thing. So, I saw that the content was working with my fans and email subscribers and then I said, “Well, let me pay you some money.” And I added Facebook ads to it, and I saw that that was working. So I was like, “Well, let me do this again, I’ll do it on Twitter.” And I’m seeing now again that Twitter is working. So there’s all kinds of different platforms that you can use, Pinterest is soon going to have an advertising platform. I can only imagine that–

CHAUNNA: LinkedIn.

JUSTIN: LinkedIn has an advertising platform. So, wherever your market is at, look for a way to get your content in front of them.

CHAUNNA: And then also think about the type of content because infographics are really popular piece of content, and they might not do well on Twitter. It’s like you have to click the image in order to see it, but they probably do great in Pinterest ads. So, those are things you have to think about when you’re promoting. You don’t just blanket the promotion across. Think about what stream they would do best in.

JUSTIN: Yes.

OWEN: And so, I was curious, because one thing you said earlier is post the content manually and see how they do. And then based on that you know pick the one that is getting the most shares or whatever, or the most engagement. And then put more fire to it, or put more–

JUSTIN: Yeah.

OWEN: And use the ad, Facebook or Twitter. But I’m curious, do we always have to go that route? I’m curious, is it possible to just put everything out there on Facebook and see which one performs when you pump traffic to it?

JUSTIN: It really depends on somebody’s budget. If you’ve got a bigger budget and you’re not worried about losing a little bit of money. And it’s all a numbers game. I believe that in the long run you’re probably going to win more than you’re going to lose. But there are definitely going to be some blog post, some videos you put out that just don’t resonate well.

OWEN: Yeah.

JUSTIN: If somebody’s just starting out I would say only do the ones that have proven themselves. If you have an established business and you just need more exposure, more leads, go all the way and just start promoting all your blog post. I promote as much of mine as I can.

OWEN: Awesome. And then you mentioned something I think during the interview with Good Hacker about tools that you use to– there are ways to basically manually create the Facebook ads that promote the content. But then there are some ninja tools that actually automate the process for you and help you select based on your bids and all that. Do you know what I’m talking about? Can you give some more light to that?

JUSTIN: Yeah, so there’s a couple of different levels of Facebook ad users. The first level is you go to Facebook.com and you click on the ads manager over on the left hand side, or wherever it’s at for you. And you use just the web interface. And you’re only limited in your options and what you can do with Facebook. You can do the basics, you can do what I’m talking about right here. But you can’t do advanced things, you don’t have full control. So if you want full control, what you then need to use is power editor instead of the regular web interface. And you have to use Google’s Chrome browser in order to use power editor. And that will give you a lot more flexibility. You can choose whether it’s right hand side bar or a news feed, whether it’s on mobile, whether it’s on desktop. If it’s on iPhones versus Androids, or which type of Androids. Do you want it on tablets also. You have all these options open to you when you start using power editor. And then there’s another level which I don’t understand how anybody could possibly compete if you’re not using this level. There’s tools, people have created software and the technical thing that it’s doing is its software that sits on top of Facebook’s API, which basically lets them manipulate ads, create ads, whatever. So they’ve created software that lets you do even more advanced task. For example, if you knew that your cost per lead had to be below $3 or below $8, you can tell Qwaya, which is a tool that I use. There’s also social.com, Ad Express, there’s a lot of them. But you can tell Qwaya, if my ad has a cost per lead higher than $3, pause the ad. And what that really means, if you really think about how powerful that is, that means you never have to waste money with your ads again because all you have to know is I can afford my sales at $50 each and I can’t afford to spend any more than that. And before, you had to either do that manually or you had to guess when it was going to happen. Now, the tool will tell you, your cost per sale has reached $50 in one set. Turn it off, stop. It’s like in the stock market where you have stop losses to protect how much money you lose, you now have that ability with traffic.

OWEN: And that’s awesome. And this is where the thing hits home for me, is like this is where you can scale it. You don’t have to go and not really trans that, making friends with all the influences online. Literally pump traffic to it and you can use tools like Qwaya if you know how much you’re going to cause you to get a lead. You send a stop gap and say, “When it gets to this point I don’t want to pay more for it.” That is awesome.

CHAUNNA: And if you’re targeting right, you’re in front of their audience anyways.

JUSTIN: And literally with Twitter advertising you can target Twitter users. So, if you wanted the top guys in your industry, if you wanted all their followers to see your post, you can just pay to make that happen now.

OWEN: I love that.

CHAUNNA: You don’t have to pay them.

OWEN: No need to beg the influencers anymore, you can go after the people that follow them and do it at scale, I love that. And so, we’ve been talking about this and now we’re coming back to where– okay, now we’re getting to eyeball sort of traffic, my way. And then now we showed how to eyeball some traffic and scale them automatically using ads and tools like Qwaya. And also, now I want to talk about how you convert those eyeballs coming to your content to leads, hence generating leads.

JUSTIN: Right. What we do is we send them to an opt-in page. I don’t really like to use free videos, free reports. I have that. It’s easy to create a free report or a free video. One of my ones right now is a free 1 hour video. What I really like to use is some sort of tool, something that’s useful. So, for me I have a spreadsheet that has 202 different traffic resources on there. And anybody who’s reading my blog about traffic wants this spreadsheet with 202 traffic resources. It’s a no-brainer for them and they’re very willing to give up their contact information in exchange for this tool because it’s so useful. Free reports and free videos, they may inspire curiosity, but it’s not as good as a tool. So if you can create a spreadsheet of resources, a toolbar.

CHAUNNA: I was just going to say a toolbar used to work great. When I first got started I was in the teacher niche and I had gone through grade 1 lessons, grade 2 lessons, grade 1 science lessons. And so I just gone through and bookmarked everything that I had used while teaching but I turned it into a toolbar that had all of the bookmarks preset. And so, I just gave away that toolbar, and then also some of my bookmarks had affiliate links to other offers. And so, I was also able to monetize that free front end. So, the toolbar was amazing.

JUSTIN: And of course, our own products were in the toolbar as well. So that worked really, really well. Actually, back then I was doing the free report thing and then she came up with the toolbar idea, and smashed my page. So, tools work well. Calculators, if you have the ability to create software that works really, really well.

CHAUNNA: Always.

JUSTIN: So, basically what’s happening is somebody is coming to you for information and now you’re offering them a tool that will help them do the thing they’re just reading about ideally.

OWEN: Yeah. The way I see this whole tool thing calculator or software thing, it’s basically saying, “Okay, now you’ve got this free information. Now you can take the information to the next level and basically use this tool to get even more value.” So it’s different from like a free course or a free video, where they’re just looking for fun or whatever. But this is them trying to get some utility out of something that you’ve provided which is a tool.

CHAUNNA: Right.

JUSTIN: Absolutely. Kits are great things to put together as well. A kit could be a checklist, with a mind map, with a free report. So, you put together a little kit on the subject, and now that’s useful. There’s a lot of different things that people can do.

OWEN: And I get the whole idea of creating a tool like what you mentioned. But I’m trying to connect it for the listener because the person comes to your site and get on the content now. And then on the other side there’s the tools. I’m trying to connect the gap and say, okay, how do we get that person who just came to the side and loved the content.

JUSTIN: Yeah, you talk about–

CHAUNNA: Yeah. So, what you have to do is you have to make sure that the landing page, and I say landing pages, the thing the person lands on to read your content is optimized to get their attention. So if you look at our blog, across the very top is like get more of our information opt-in box.

JUSTIN: It’s the 202 traffic resources.

CHAUNNA: Right, it’s the spreadsheet. And at the bottom of every blog post, my editor has a call to action. Go here for more information related to whatever we were talking about. And then we have an image just above the comments that’s another free report that they would want, or– actually, I think it’s a–

JUSTIN: It’s case studies.

CHAUNNA: Yeah, it’s case studies. And then on the side bar we have other things that we want them to subscribe too. So it’s our Facebook subscription. We also have affiliate banners there. So if they’re not going to opt-in for our content then they’re going to go to either the product, our Facebook page, or affiliate offers. And so, like surrounding the content, and we’re not trying to blow them out of the water with big flashing banners.

JUSTIN: Yeah, you don’t want to choke the customer.

CHAUNNA: You just want to make it so that way if they’re reading and enjoying what they’re consuming, they have options on the page to take the next step.

OWEN: And I’m curious. I love that because on the site, so you optimize it on the page on the top of the site this way, the free content. In this case now, the free tool that will give them more sources with traffic. On the side bar it’s there, underneath the post it’s there. So basically it’s all over the place and if they click on it, it takes them obviously to a landing page where they enter their name and email for that free tool

CHAUNNA: Right.

OWEN: But if they don’t click on it, I think you mentioned something before. Another way which you still find a way to get them. Do you know what I’m talking about, when it comes–

JUSTIN: Yes, absolutely. So, if you land on any of our pages, and I think everybody should be doing this, we have retargeting codes on all of our pages. We don’t use them on every one of our pages, but we like to have the ability that if a blog post really took off, we can then retarget them with ads, with–

OWEN: Can I stop you for a minute, can you explain what retargeted is because not everybody understands.

JUSTIN: Yeah. So, retargeting is you put a little line of code in your page, and nobody can see it. You’re not trying to be sneaky or anything, it’s just not visible. So you put a little code on your page and then that tags the person. So that when they’re off on another web page, if there’s an advertisement spot on that other page, because they’re tagged, they will see you advertisement instead of somebody else’s advertisement.

OWEN: Wow. So basically now, anywhere they go online, let’s say they came to your site and love your content but for one reason or the other, they didn’t click any of the three different places. You have your call to action for them to choose a tool, to get access to your tool. If they went to cnn.com for instance, now because they’re retargeted they’ll see an ad with the call to action to that specific tool that you were offering, right?

CHAUNNA: Right.

JUSTIN: Absolutely. And so, if you think about the big picture here. If you really think about what we’ve just said, there are influencers in your market. People that control all the eyeballs and whatever. And you can use Twitter and Facebook to target their followers with a blog post. So you’re not being spammy or anything and saying, “Hey, come buy my product”, instead you’ll just, “Hey, here’s this great blog post.” So you lure them over to your website and now you’ve tagged them with retargeting code, you’ve got your offers around it. And you can literally, I hate to use the words like steal and whatever, but–

CHAUNNA: No, no [Unintelligible 00:35:16].

JUSTIN: It’s a level playing field now, anybody can play.

CHAUNNA: Right. Not only that but you can take it the next step further. Like everybody knows when a launch is happening because all of the influencer are using the same system. And so, if you already have retargeting audiences in your market and in your industry, when an influencer has a launch, you just sign-up as an affiliate and run your own banners for their offer. And so you’re promoting their offer to their market and they’re also getting pummelled by all the other influencers because of their email adds. But here you are just using your little banner ads, which with retargeting is so much cheaper than trying to get into the email TV group. And so now, you’re following that audience around for that launching. So you can use it for your own stuff and their stuff.

OWEN: That is awesome. And so now, I guess we’ve closed the loop saying, “Come to my site and signup for the free course. If you don’t sign up for the free course I’m following you all over the internet until you do sign up for it. So we’ve closed the loop on that. So now, let’s assume they now signed up, they came to the landing page, they clicked the banner or they clicked the retargeting ad. And they come to the landing page and they sign up for the free course. But now they’re from anonymous [Unintelligible 00:36:35] now their lead, right. But how do we take it to the next level?

JUSTIN: Yeah, so one thing I just want to say. Everything that we’ve talked about here, in the wrong hands can be used very, very badly.

OWEN: That’d be dangerous.

JUSTIN: Yes. So we’re not talking about sneaking codes on the people, we’re not talking about targeting them forever. In fact, you really shouldn’t retarget someone past 90 days. If they haven’t bought in 90 days, you’re just pissing them off, you’re not making them happy.

CHAUNNA: They actually do get annoyed and end up writing customer support.

JUSTIN: Right. So, be cool about and be compassionate, understand that there’s a person behind there. And these techniques are very, very powerful. If you’re using them for good you can do a lot of good in the world. I just wanted to make sure we say that. So, after they become a lead, you now have a process called lead nurturing or follow-up marketing, whatever you want to call it. And what you should do is you should have– I have both a seven day campaign and a thirty day campaign. So as soon as somebody opts-in, as they give me their contact details, they fill out one of my forms, there’s a seven day campaign that happens day after day because that’s when they remember you the most, so you should be the most frequent. And so, email number 1 introduces myself to them but really just sets the expectations of not only are you getting this free thing that I promised you but tomorrow I’m going to tell you about this, and Thursday I’m going to tell you about this. So you tell them. Over the next seven days you’re going to give all these wonderful things, and now what you’re able to do is your story, you’re able to really introduce your company–

CHAUNNA: Build a relationship.

JUSTIN: Yeah, you really build a relationship with them over those seven days. And then, beyond that seven day sequence, and Chaunna, you can talk a little bit more about the specifics if you want to drill into that. But beyond the seven day sequence, there’s still 21 days, 28 days, I don’t know how to do math. So, there’s a certain amount of days after the seven days. So what I do now is I’ll back-off from daily emails and instead, every couple of days I’ll send them a burst of 2, 3 emails, maybe 4 emails at a time that’s telling them about a specific product or an event. So that way, over the 30 days I’m really staying in contact with them and I’m introducing them to all of my products.

OWEN: And let’s dive into that a little bit, and I guess that’s where Chaunna comes in. Let’s start with the seven day email. Can we talk about specifics about what is coming in a seven day email and maybe how it’s framed to them, or how it’s positioned to them so that the listener can probably swipe the idea and use it for their own seven course, I guess.

CHAUNNA: Right. Well, Justin will talk about the content for each one but as far as systems behind it, I’m not sure how new or what level the audience is, but you’re going to need some form of auto responder series. We use workflows inside of HubSpot for ours. But we also used, we have used in the past AWeber. So it doesn’t have to be HubSpot, but any type of system that once they opt in, it automatically sends it. So that way you’re not personally sending it every day. And so, those were set up and you have to make sure, another thing you want to have here is tracking ability, like you want to be able to track those links back to a traffic source.

JUSTIN: Yeah, you want to know if email number 3 is making a sale. If email number 3 is not working then you need to fix email number 3.

CHAUNNA: Right. And so, I would really encourage everyone to make sure that every link you link also from each email gets a separate tracking link. So that way you can tell that email 1 didn’t make us any money, but email 4, everytime makes us the same amount of money from everyone. Then you sort of see the strengths and weaknesses between the two emails and try to improve all of them. So those are key tools you’re going to need in the auto responder series to make it successful.

JUSTIN: As for the content, I know we’ve always gone a whole hour here so I’ll go over this fast. Email number 1 you want to introduce yourself and set the expectations. It’s also really important to ask them to white list you. Not everybody’s going to but you need to do your hardest to try and get people to because that’s important for your deliverability rate. The other thing that I always do is I always tell them to reply to the email with their number 1 question. For me, I tell them to reply to the email and to ask for tips on their website. And what that lets me do is one, I get to answer their question, and two, I get to tell them, “By the way, I have a coaching program where I could do more of this with you.”

CHAUNNA: Not only that but the email delivery, like when Gmail sees that you hit reply to something they know you’re in a conversation with the person. If you’re just reading and archiving, they know it’s not personal so they start to shift you over into the other inboxes. So getting that reply is valuable in keeping you in the main inbox.

JUSTIN: It’s super important, and so many people are scared of it because they feel like they’re going to get a flood of emails. That’s not the case. I actually wish more people would hit the reply button because–

CHAUNNA: That gives you more content ideas.

JUSTIN: Yeah, it does. And so, only a small percentage of people actually reply, but getting that small percentage, again, helps you with your deliverability.

CHAUNNA: Every time.

JUSTIN: So, email number 1 is super, super important. Email number 2, you want to tell your back story. Notice when I got on this podcast, I didn’t tell everyone about how I did in high school and what happened after high school. That wasn’t relevant to this podcast.

CHAUNNA:  [Unintelligible 00:42:32] year, by year, by year, by year, [Unintelligible 00:42:35].

JUSTIN: The story I told is how I started in 2005 and I had a mentor in 2007 who taught me the business. I started traffic and that’s why– So that story resonates with the audience.

OWEN: Relevant story to [Unintelligible 00:42:50].

JUSTIN: Yeah. So now people, you tell your relevant story, that way they’re like, “Oh, I get him. He’s the guy who did that and that’s why he’s an  expert.” So now they get to know you a little bit. Email number 3, you want to create a common enemy, and the common enemy doesn’t need to be a person. It can be a person but it doesn’t need to be a person. It could be a thing, it could be a cause, it could be a problem, it could be a lot of different things. Really, what you’re trying to do in email number 3 is tell them, “This is what I stand against, and this is what I stand for.” And also, kind of create an “us versus them” environment so that you bond with the reader. And so, email number 1 you introduce yourself and you set expectations. Email number 2 you told your story. Email number 3 you created a bond with them and told them what you stand against and what you stand for. That’s powerful, powerful relationship building, built into that short 3-day period. And now, email number 4, 5, and 6 is content, but strategic content. You don’t want to just give them any type of content here. You want to make sure that the content you’re giving them in email number 4, 5, and 6 is centred around what your product is about. So if was unbalanced selling a split testing software, those three articles would be about split testing and how to do split testing, and split texting. Also, the importance of email number 4, 5, and 6 is to demonstrate to the reader your expertise on the subject matter, because they want to know, am I buying from someone who’s credible? And by giving them those blog topics, one, you’re keeping their mind on the topic you want them to be thinking about, and you’re demonstrating your credibility to them. So 4, 5, and 6 is content with the soft pitch at the end. Just kind of a P.S., “By the way, this is our product.” And then number 7, it’s sales time.

OWEN: What you would do on the sales email? Let the audience know what you’re doing.

JUSTIN: Yeah. Email number 7 for me, it’s like the free ride’s over, I want to give value, I want to give tons of value. But I’m a business owner at the end of the day, I got to make sales. So, all this hunky dory, know me, like me, trust me stuff is– it’s time to become a customer, and if you become a customer I give you even more value. I’ve got tons of stuff. So, email number 7 is your best attempt to sell your product to someone. What I really like to do is  a long bullet list of “here’s all the things that my  product does for you.” Not bullets as in features. Software sellers do this wrong every single time. They list out all the features of their software. “It does this and it does that.” No, why do I want that feature, how will that feature improve my life, save me time, save me money, get me pretty girls, whatever. That’s what you want to–

OWEN: Go ahead. I had to stop my phone from vibrating. Sorry guys, go ahead.

JUSTIN: So, email number 7 is your best attempt to sell your product. I like to load it up with lots of benefit bullet points because what I feel that does is, it’s kind of like, “and my product does this, and this, and this, and this, and this” over and over again. Until they finally are like, “Oh my god, yeah, I have to buy this product.”

OWEN: And all that is all in the emails. It’s not like you’re linking to– Are you linking to somewhere–

JUSTIN: Then I link over to our sales page.

OWEN: Oh okay.

JUSTIN: It’s all a pre-sell. Trying to sell the product and then we link over to the sales page, that way they’re really already sold once they get there. Now there’s just more information for them to make a better buying decision.

OWEN: And so those who probably didn’t buy at this point now, I guess, or maybe they click the sales page but they didn’t buy. Is that something where you’re like basically hooking them with another retargeting ad so that you always go around on the internet so he has to buy the product at this point.

JUSTIN: Absolutely.

CHAUNNA: Yeah, once they opt-in they’re immediately– So like on the thank you page of the opt-in you have the lead cookie. So that person is a lead now. And so we no longer remarketing or retargeting any of our front-end offers to them, we’re targeting the next step in the funnel.

OWEN: The next level, okay.

CHAUNNA: Right. So you’re just moving them along. And then once they’ve landed on that sales page, you’re either hitting them with that, a banner for that advertisement again, or you’re going to– after 14 days they’re really not interested in that, you’ll shift to a different product and maybe that peaks their interest.

OWEN: Basically. I think what I find from that is basically look at your marketing like a funnel, the person where you don’t know who they are, the person who you know who they are is a lead, or the person now who signed up, or the person who signed up as a customer, a person who went to your sales page but they didn’t sign up. So based on where they are in the funnel, you’re also retargeting them as well, to emphasize the message, regardless of whether they’re on your site. Because email can help but if you’re not in front of their email, you want to be everywhere they are on the internet with the retargeting ads too.

JUSTIN: Absolutely. And then after the seven day sequence– actually there’s an eighth email that comes after the seventh one, and I just follow it up with all my testimonials.

OWEN: Wow.

JUSTIN: So, the email basically just says, “Listen, I told you that this was the best product and I fully believe that. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what everybody else says.” And it’s just an email full of testimonials.

CHAUNNA: Right.

OWEN: That’s awesome. And so, we’re about to wrap-up. In case the person now, after all this love you’ve given them and all this good stuff, they still have not become a customer. So I’ve taken that the next point now is pushing them into the list where it’s like the 30-day sequence. Just give us an idea of what happens in the 30-day sequence, I’m just curious.

JUSTIN: Yeah, so after the 8th day, in mine specifically, and everybody’s will be a little bit different, but in mine specifically, I don’t send them another email until the 11th day. But there’s an email on day 11, 12, 13, and 14, and those emails are about another offer of mine, another product of mine. And then there’s nothing on day 15, 16, 17, and then there’s something on 18, 19, 20. So, they take a break so that I’m not constantly hammered in them. And then I have little campaigns that go out until the 30-day mark. After the 30-day mark, if you haven’t bought by the 30-day mark, now I’m going to sell advertisements to my list. I keep in touch with those people every week with a weekly newsletter, and that just keeps me in front of them. But if they haven’t bought in 30 days, now I need to figure out a way to monetize those leads. And so, I’ll sell advertisement to my list or whatever I got to do.

OWEN: I like that because it’s like after giving all that value they come into your list and after the seven day sequence, and now they’re going through the 30-day sequence. And if they’re still not bought, you stop [Unintelligible 00:50:19] them away. There’s still another way to make money from the whole idea that being in your list. But maybe not from them which is offering them as a means to other people who wants to market to them because they’re still eyeballs.

JUSTIN: Yeah, everybody’s buying something. We all got to eat, we all got to put gas on our cars, so everybody’s buying something. If you have those leads and they haven’t bought from you, that’s fine, just find out what they do want to buy and partner with that guy.

OWEN: Awesome. And so, we’re coming to the end of the interview, I’m just curious, is there a question you wish I’d ask you up to this point? Maybe it skipped my mind, if so post the question and let’s talk about it.

JUSTIN: That was a lot of them and my brain’s a little fried.

CHAUNNA: I really think you did a good job going over the whole system. The tools you’ll need, the thought process behind it, the strategy you need to understand behind each step. We’re not just doing it just because somebody said to do it, there’s a purpose for each step, and each tool, and each system. And just making sure that when you’re doing it, you make sure you have a purpose for it, so otherwise you won’t get any profit from it.

OWEN: So what’s the very next step that someone who’s listening to all this, and I’m assuming the person who’s listening to this already started creating content and is sold by the whole content marketing thing. But what’s the very next step I think you should do to really get some traction from content marketing and being able to turn leads into sales? What’s the very next initiative?

CHAUNNA: On my side of things, two things. Get a tracking system so you can track all of your stuff because that’s the number problem that people come to us. They don’t have good tracking systems to know their profits. And then two, retargeting.

OWEN: Awesome.

CHAUNNA: Start retargeting pixels.

JUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. If you don’t have a retargeting pixel on your order page– you’d be surprised how many people click your buy button, land on your order form, and don’t complete the sale. There are a lot of people that are doing that, you should have a retargeting pixel on there, that way you can bring those people back. They were interested. Whatever happened in life, maybe the baby started crying, or dinner was ready, or their boss showed up and they had to turn down the screen, or whatever reason they didn’t complete the order. So you use retargeting to bring them back to the page because they were almost there, they were almost ready to buy.

OWEN: And I like that too because it’s not only just them buying, if you think about every stage of the funnel as a mini order, even though they have not paid yet. So anytime they don’t do something, retargeting could bring them back to what they didn’t do so that they should do it. I like that.

JUSTIN: Yeah. And lastly, I would just say, if you’ve been creating content, find your number 1 content piece and spend at least $25 Facebook promoting that content. I believe that people will be really surprised at how well this works.

CHAUNNA: After you put in a retargeting pixel.

JUSTIN: A retargeting pixel and tracking.

OWEN: Awesome. And so Justin and Chaunna, thanks for doing this interview. And before you go, I want to give the audience a chance to come back and thank you for doing this interview. What’s the best way that they can do that. Is there something you want to offer them, or free gifts? How best can they reach out to you, there’s a chance to [Unintelligible 00:53:38].

JUSTIN: There’s a free 202 traffic resources spreadsheet on our website. Come to our blog, imscalable.com/blog, there’s a ton of articles on there.

CHAUNNA: Daily fresh content.

JUSTIN: Daily videos, there’s also a podcast, you’ll find all the links there. And then you’ll find our case studies, our spreadsheets, all that good stuff is there.

OWEN: Thanks guys, thanks Justin and Chaunna, thanks for doing the interview.

JUSTIN: Thanks for having us.

CHAUNNA: Thank you.

OWEN: And we’re done.