Lead Generation 101: 25+ Ideas that can get you started with zero budget

1. Your Team Introduction: Hi there and welcome to this elite x course. Here we're going to be teaching you a skill that me and my team have been working on for countless hours and years. We've been developing everything within our little company that has more than 50 people right now. What I wanted to say is, we welcome you here. We're trying to provide the best quality if you have any questions we tried to answer within 24 hours, definitely ask them because that is actually one of the assets of having one of our courses. Of course, we have more in-depth things that we always go through. But for this course, we tried to have a very holistic view of a skill that we're trying to teach you. And because of that, we're going to have a lot of experts as well. Come on. We tried to get bleeding experts in every field so that you get a different perspective as well. Now it's very important that I mentioned it myself that we'll be teaching this as well as my team. So it's throughout the course, you might hear some different voices. These are people from my team that you will see and we'll show you, of course, they will be just telling you what they learned as they were doing it. And this is completely normal because as you scale within an organization having more than 50 people, everybody has their different expertise is, and so it's better that they share from their perspective how they've been doing that. With that being said, I wish that you have a great learning experience if you have any questions, just reach out to us. See you in the next video. 2. What are our QnA Workshops?: Hi there and welcome to this workshop. Now, today we're going to sit down together just like I do with my coaching clients, or when I do workshops at company retreats or when companies hire me to go inside and turnover like a marketing department or something within their business. I thought that this was probably going to be the best way that you can learn with stories and case studies when I sit down with my coaching clients, one of the things that they mentioned is that even though the courses are super scripted, well edited into the point, what they learned from the most during the coaching talks is my stories, the hardships and failures that I've done, but also the successes and maybe kinda fully fleshing it out from how I've experienced it. Now, I always thought how could I bring this over to you? Because at the end of the day you're sitting there and learning all of this well scripted content, but it's pretty basic. It doesn't really show you the whole gist of it, how I've really applied it and how I've learned those skills. To get rid of my team, I started thinking and one of the ideas that got brought up is what if we just literally do an unscripted workshop? And we take the most common questions of each of our courses. We have like a ton now and we'll try to again like the podcasts that we have as well, which is free content, just a completely unscripted, unedited, and I just share everything. Now of course the downside is it is unscripted and edited. And so you're gonna have a lot of other extra stories, other things that are not as scripted, but because there is a high demand for it, we decided to just release these type of workshop type of contents that you can learn from. So without further ado, I'd like to invite you to enjoy this workshop that we have together and imagine that you and I are sitting in a room together and I'm just explaining things to you as you would with asking me questions. If you have any questions, of course makes sure to ask them. There are within the platform options to do so. And then I will try and take those questions and make a workshop style video around it so that you and maybe others can benefit from it. I'll see you in the next video. 3. Lead Gen with zero budget: Hi there and welcome to a new QnA workshop. Today we will be talking about question that pops up quite often when I'm talking to new entrepreneurs and startups, which is how to do lead gen or sales when you have no budget. Unfortunately, this is most of the people's journey when they're starting a new business. And so I wanted to dedicate an entire workshop telling some stories of how I started and when I've invested in young entrepreneurs, diversified entrepreneurs, diverse entrepreneurs, and how they do it as well. So not only have I gone through it myself, I've also seen other people do it and hopefully would a couple of stories today, you'll be able to do a two. Again on my iPad, I have here. The question is how to do lead gen or sales when you have 0 budget? In order to understand that, we have to go back to how I started. This was almost a decade ago and at the time I was studying, I was doing multiple jobs at the same time. Now it's very important that you probably realize that you can't just jump into it. I remember at the time I joined the business masterminds little chorus, just like you hear, joined and had somebody that I was talking about how to set up a business. Just like I am right now here with you. So little. It was literally as if I was sitting in his workshop and explaining everything. One of the things that I noticed with my kind of other people in that mastermind, business mastermind who were listening to that mentor as well. Some of them started saying, you need to throw the backpack over defense, you really just need to die straight into it. I remember there were like 500 people who signed up. And then three years later somehow like 90% of those people are even more, just vanish. You didn't hear from them anymore. I think there's a handful still that's still talked together. A handful that actually made it. And this is their job now and they work on their laptop. But almost all of them that I met on the first year at an event who are literally telling me, just throw the backpack over the fence, you've got to just be dedicated and motivated. I mean, none of them have made it. And sometimes the ones that didn't make it, they weren't the ones that they did throw the backpack over defense, but then didn't have enough funds and had to move in with their parents. And then as they were living with their parents, they eventually figured it out. What I'm trying to say is when you have no budget, you need to be super risk averse. There's somehow a saying or a profile associated with entrepreneurship that if you want to be successful, that somehow you need to take a lot of risk. And it's like gambling in a casino. Yet most of the successful entrepreneurs that I follow and nf kind of scene make it our quiet incredibly risk averse. And what they tend to do is of course they tend to risk the ones that take the biggest risks tend to pay off. And those are the ones that garden multimillionaires. But they are very calculated and these are really not stupid people. They just throw backpacks over fences. These are people that have either a consultancy background or they have some type of economics or business or Accountancy. I have a law background. So they very much look at a problem, dissected, cluster it, and just make sure to really see almost all angles that are available. But at the same time they realized that flexibility is necessary and not every angle can be accounted for. And so while they do analyze the risk, and they really tried to calculate the risk as well as possible and cover themselves with backups. At the end of the day, it is quite important to mention that everybody who starts out and the ones that make it eventually do take calculated risks. So be aware of that. When you're starting out with no budget. What I'm trying to tell you is don't listen to all of these outliers. These people that make a lot of money overnight almost, somehow seemed to make it and keep telling that you have to have this mindset. You really don't have to have any mindset. You need to be incredibly risk averse, be super calculated about which risk you take and minimize your budget. One of the, one of the advices that I followed it I love, and these are the people you should be following on YouTube. Are all those finance YouTuber set keep saying save your money, make sure to have no debts and all those things. Because it's much easier to take calculated risks and you have a higher percentage of succeeding when you don't have multiple chains weighing you down, the biggest chain is going to be monthly fixed costs that you have. Which is why a lot of 20 year-old's and teenagers seem to perform much better when they're doing entrepreneurship because they're able to take incredible risks and nothing will happen to them because they are just going to end up living where they live, which is with their parents. They don't have any taxes, monthly costs. There's nothing big going on. So if you're in your 20s, That's good news because again, very low risks. There's nothing weighing you down there, no costs and your fixed costs should be incredibly low. This is also the part where physically you can get away with a lot of things, especially if you're under 25, you can just get away with bad food, almost no exercise and still somehow pushed through. The moment you start hitting 25 plus those things start fading away, becomes much harder. But yet the average. Age. If you go online and you look for the average age for an entrepreneur who starts a business that eventually hires at least one employee is 43 years old. We're kind of seeing a trend. Risks need to be mitigated. You're either in your 20s and you have nothing weighing you down or you're in your forties and you already have some type of backup money and probably like half of your mortgage or something is paid off, you're already saving some of your pension is buildup, so there's almost no debt. These are incredibly important things to realize. Even though I'm talking about things have nothing to do with Legion, this is incredibly important because when you are doing in regeneration and you're going out and doing sales marketing, whatever topic I might be covering, the fundamentals are going to be crucial to the mindset that you are going to be approaching all of these strategies. Width, if you have a car payment and a mortgage and you know, something broke and you need to get somehow $2 thousand and your savings is like $5 thousand, you're going to go into sales incredibly desperate. And you notice saying the rich get richer, the poor get poorer in sales. That is even more so the people who are desperate and you can always kind of sniff it out, they seem to convert less sales than the ones who are in abundance. You always want to go into a restaurant that is full and has a line outside. And if you can get a reservation, you'd be stoked getting their reservation and getting there. Rather than going to a restaurant that never has people around. Every time I walk around in a big city when I travel and then with friends, the number one thing we're looking for is a place that is busy during lunch. Because if a restaurant is busy during lunch, that's usually a good sign. Same thing here would lead generation sales when you're reaching out to people, the first thing you want to fix is your scarcity mindset. And so I'm very much emphasizing the fact that you should not throw them back, back over the fence. You should not take incredible risks that are going to sacrifice everything. I do think you should be taking risks that are calculated, that every time you have more backing, more fundamentals in place, more savings in place, that you can take bigger and bigger risks and eventually gain more because you're doing those bigger risks. Listening, if you have 10 million in your bank account and you take a risk that is 5 million, which is half of your income that you have in your bank account, then it is, it's much easier to take that risk and possibly make a 100 eggs, let's say you sell and make 100 million from this 5 million investments, that risk is much easier to take because if everything's paid off and you already had 5 million in the bank, then you just doesn't matter if you have another 5 million. If you have, let's say $5 thousand, like the example before, you're taking risks based on bad money while you have children and then mortgage and the heater broke. You're just you're literally just increasing the odds of failure. And so that's the first thing you want to mitigate. Look at your situation currently. How is that situation? Are you able to go for three to six months without any sales? I would say that's the first thing you should do. Get an emergency fund three to six months, and then make sure that then you're in a good place. But now you're hearing 0 budget. Obviously I've done my best already. Most of my costs are down. I live in a cheap apartment. I eat cheap food. I make sure that everything is cheap, which is exactly what I did. I had my budget for the week was $20 for food. That means that I would go into canteens, get myself. It was like a $1 plate that was refillable with salad and potatoes. And that's what I was eating in the beginning. 20 bucks, I literally have the still the sheet in my budget sheet that I still use to this day. And I can literally go back to those times and I was like 13 bucks a week. So it is incredibly important that you mitigate risks there. But again, you've mitigating risk, your phone goes down, your rent is your cost of living, it's down. Now, have a three to six months so you can survive. No matter what happens. You now are not going to stress out whenever somebody gives you a rejection, that is possibly not even a rejection that you can still somehow change. Which again, we've learned in the sales scores, there's a difference between a hard no and then maybe I need to talk to somebody. So again, if you're in an abundance mindset, it's much easier to have those conversations and the chill mindset. And again, convert people over a span of longer. Now, why do you need to convert people over a longer span? There are a couple of things when you're doing lead generation that is important to look out for first, you don't want to do lead generation and getting a cold or converting cold leads to warm leads and inducing buyer's remorse. If you're converting cold leads into warm lead. So you're getting them on the phone, you're getting them excited, but you're pushing too much instead of spreading it out over a longer time, creating familiarity and trust that you might create buyer's remorse. We want to counter act buyer's remorse if we're building a big business or If you're even building a business over the long term, you want to counteract that because you want to create loyalty and trust with clients that feel you're in abundance. In my case, my wonky fan, the person that I was focusing on in the beginning of which corporate corporates work over a timespan of six to 18 months. And if I'm lucky, maybe the pilot project would end up starting two to three months in. And then from there we could prove ourselves and start to real project six months in. It would corporates, I needed to have the fundamentals in place to not worry. Again, you don't have to be rich to fundamentals in place. Just eat very low budget, have very low costs, and then you're able to take those risks. And so when I was negotiating with them, even though of course I wanted them to convert within a couple of weeks, I could never push those things whenever I would reach out on LinkedIn to potential procurement managers, I needed to slowly weighed, weighted in. Sometimes I would reach out to them, have a conversation. They didn't want to talk on the phone. They wanted to, for instance, get a cup of coffee, but they were busy that we'd need to have a cup of coffee next week. Again, lead generation is much more than just collecting e-mails and numbers. It's really converting them into these warm leads that potentially could either refer you or become sales. And so as you're building trust, having conversations with them, you are an abundance so you don't have to close that week. You can close next week. You're now building a network. And then over a span of several weeks, you can now call with them and be like, hey, we just dropped this offer. A lot of clients who are going crazy for it, maybe you're interested in trying it out during the pilot project, stuff like that. So obviously that's very B2B corporate type style lead generation. But it's just to say that when you're doing lead generation with 0 budget, be aware that the first thing you're doing is creating a good, healthy mindset. Then you're reaching out and realizing that it's not an overnight conversion. But now obviously the juice and the reason why I get this question, which is, how do you actually do regeneration? In which platforms do you choose when you're doing regeneration and you have 0 budgets. So you can just go and buy a camera or Duke crazy paid ads or something like that. Well, so far, whichever business that we did, we always go where our client is. Before again, you go on the platforms. You have to know who your one key fairness. And we've covered this in multiple videos already, but pretty much you need to be aware of which platforms your clients hangout with. You. If you don't know where your client clients hang out, then you have to create testimonial sales, which means you will go on LinkedIn or on Google, and you will call up some businesses, email some businesses, or reach out to people from some businesses. And then it's up to you. You either offer cost price something or you offer to do something for free in return for a video testimonial. Once you have three video testimonials, maybe five video testimonials between that number. Then start looking what you're asking them questions, especially during the video testimonial. One of the things you'll be asking them is, where did you find us or obviously if you call it out to them, that's not going to work. But if you go and you let's say you're building a website agency. So you'd ask them in that video testimonial, obviously this isn't going individuals the small, it's just a recording that you're gonna keep for your own research. But in that interview you can just ask them if you normally look for designing websites like we designed for you during this testimonial sale, where would you go? What do you do? When is it Google? What do you type in on Google or do you go on LinkedIn and you type in a website design agency and then you look for some founders. What are the exact steps that you do? You're gonna get specific answers most of the time in that case, from my experience and I've had thousands of those types of interviews at this point. Most of the time, people Google specific services that they are looking for. Other times it's word of mouth through LinkedIn, they somehow stumbled on someone and then their headline read website builder or something like that. And then they just reached out to people. But again, most of the time it's Google and there's a specific key phrase or keywords that they're using and the that they are typing in. Now that you have this data, you are now aware which platforms here choosing. And so if you're aware of which platforms you are choosing, you're aware where most of 80% of your time is going to be on. If people are mostly on Google, then there's a point for you to start building up SCO parallel to creating testimonial sales or maybe cost price sales. Asking people that you just did a cost price or a free website for or whatever service or product you're selling. To refer you word of mouth can be incredibly important. And then from there on, building up more of a network networking events. So there are places like meet up and Eventbrite that you can go to weekly events. We organize networking events of all the time. These are all places where for free you can pretty much gain attention, gain word of mouth, and gain a network that will refer you. In the beginning, when I did every single day, I would reach out on LinkedIn to specific types of profiles that fit my business. And I would ask them in a personalized invites. When you go on a profile, you can hit the arrow next to connect or befriending someone. Next to the Connect, there's a personalized invites. Once the arrow goes down criticized inviting, you can type in a note. So you can have, I think it's a couple of a 100 or something characters that you can type in and say, Hey, this is me, this is what I'm doing. Most of the time, people never answer, but they might be friends. You, as the connection exists, you get a notification from LinkedIn and your message is still in there. And the beautiful part is that you don't have to copy paste the message. You can just add, Hey, did you get my message? It's above. It's above here. Now you have a connection with them and you start chatting and you're like, Hey, can we go for a cup of coffee? Because remember your costs are down so you don't mind waiting a couple of days and fitting their schedule. Instead of just having a call building familiarity. That familiarity can lead to a testimonial sale at cost sale. If you're out of your testimony in sales, it can lead to real sales, but also during the conversation you can say, Hey, we're looking for these type of specific people. Is there any way that you can connect me? Another smart way that you can do this is as you're planning those meetings, it could be also Zoom call meetings. You can look through their LinkedIn, people that are relevant from their own business. If it's a corporate or other businesses, then you can make a list. Top five list or the top ten would be too much, but top three to five list. And as the conversation goes well, and you're charismatic and there's a connection and their stress. You can say, Hey, I'm building this new business, I'm looking to expand. Is there any way that you could help me connect with some relevant people on your LinkedIn. I saw this one guy that could be interesting if you find that too weird because the trust is not built on the first connection or that first coffee date that you have just asked. Is there any way that you could connect me with some people? If the answer is yes, then you just say, Hey, I'll just go through your LinkedIn tonight and send your list of people that it would be nice you could connect me with. And so suddenly you're building and an exponential network. Let's say planning in ten meetings a day knows who you're reaching out to ten to 15 people because you don't want to go over the limits of LinkedIn. So 1015 people a day. So that's 70 to 90 people every week that you reaching out to. If you have a conversion rate for Zoom calls should be easily between 10, 20%. I've literally done this myself. And then when a invested into one of my first businesses, the female founder literally did exactly the same thing and her conversion rate was a bit higher to mine, it was above 20%. This thing literally works. And as you're converting them to the Zoom calls, you can do this listing. You can pretty much expand your network pretty quickly. And suddenly you're 10, 20% conversion rate, which is nine to ten meetings a week. It can turn into quite a large network that you're building. And again, 1015 messages on LinkedIn a day and ten meetings a week. We're talking about less than 1.5 hour of work a day or something like that or sorry, ten meetings. So that's two a day if it's Monday to Friday workday. So you're doing two hours in meetings and you're doing half an hour or something and sending out messages and research in people. Of course, if this is new to you, it might be an hour. Now we're working three out of the eight hours because work-life balance, I guess, even though in the beginning much more than that. But so you have your five-hour still left open to do other things. But remember, you're building your network exponentially because with every meeting that you're doing, you're asking a connection to three, to five other people. And so at 1, you're gonna get an, a very privileged position where you suddenly can choose who you meet width strategically as your progress, I would say around week two or three years already gonna see who fits and who doesn't fit. As you pick and choose, you're gonna get better at it. And so sales will slowly start coming in from dad angle while you're doing bad angle, which is again the basic lead generation, converting coal to warm leads. And then eventually sales will take over and you take all of these leads that are all now Warm have called which you have had LinkedIn interactions with, you have referred to, to other people. And eventually you can turn this into, again, this is how we started our events. Because think about it. If you're doing this process at 1, you can't meet with everybody and do business. We started I started doing dinners and then after dinner she became way too big. And I was getting a little bit too fat because I was doing like three dinners a week and inviting six to ten people. Eventually we started doing events. And then when you're doing events, of course you're bringing all these people to get her social proof. You're connecting the ecosystem and you are becoming an in person within that niche. So this is again, high-level lead generation over a span of, I would say two years or something like that. But while you're working that angle, which is a 23 hour angle a day that you should be spending on. Then you have five hours now left to work. Other angles again, we're talking 0 budget, so we're talking, you can't spend any paid ads. You need to work all the angles that you can. So I would say most of the people, if if you are, let's say again, a website agencies, some type of service agency, or maybe you're selling lawnmowers or I don't know what. Then most of the time when you're doing your video testimonials, let's say you sold the lawnmower and somebody who looks over the product and you gave them a 50% discount in return for a testimonial, you would him where did you find or how did you find lawnmowers? And then most of the time they'd say, Oh, I'd go to the shop or I'd go to Google. And so now we're no, we are aware of which keywords are being targeted. While you're building this angle, you're now going to start building search engine optimization, which is incredibly important when you're selling products and services. There are multiple ways to build SCO very well for your website, but one of the ways is time. You need a lot of time and it takes at least six months to see results. So as you're building engagement content, blogs, videos, making sure that their attention is high. Click-through rates are high within all of your content of the website. But also making sure that people go to a website and have a way to convert, call you, email you all these things. You're becoming slowly by the time you're hitting the level that I told you with the other parts of legion where you're actually building now events instead of just meetings. By the time that happens, people are gonna be googling you and guess what happens? Because you've been working on this other angle of SEO, suddenly you're popping up on the first page and they're clicking on you. And the more they click on your Google loves that stuff. So you're coming on the top. Without doing any paid ads, you're slowly building up a network while at the same time becoming an Internet number one pager. There are other way, I'll give some way. So again, we have a course on search engine optimization. But in short, if you don't know anything about search engine optimization, first thing you need to do is make sure your website runs smoothly. It doesn't have any annoying pop-up banners and works fast. Dive deeper into how to make it a mobile friendly. Don't overloaded with heavy images and make sure that you have a clear blog. The reason you want blogs and reason you on video is all these things is you want to keep people on your website. The more engagement there is on your website, the longer people stay on your website, the more user-friendly your website is. Of course, these are not all things that are relevant to Google, but these are very big things that are relevant to Google. That's one thing that you should be working on, blogs, videos, all that stuff. But the other thing that gets neglected quite a lot is just the simplest thing. And that's Google my business, just set up a simple Google My Business page. And every single time you have that coffee date with somebody, you ask them, hey, I'm starting my new business. I have this Google My Business page. Is there any way that you could help me out by giving me two sentence review of what you thought of me and if you would ever work with me because that could help me a lot, you'd be surprised how much of a difference that's going to make for anything that you do in business. Not only will you have legitimate reviews from people who actually met you and have the best intention for you, which you will be able to show to potential new sales. You're also going to create investment in your business. They're going to feel like they were building it with you together. You're going to have real people commenting on it. And the more reviews you have, the more Google recommend you. These things feed into each other. And so SEO is a big thing that my business exponentially started growing when the SEO kicked in, I was always so dismissive of it because I was so focused on that first part, I reach out to people on LinkedIn, setup coffee dates, Zoom calls all that stuff and completely ignored for I would say the first two years, the whole SEO thing. And then we slowly started doing it very skeptical. And then it just, it just started working. I started getting some of my biggest deals, people googling me. And so suddenly realizing kind of dose do need to be working in parallel the passive lead generation where people come to you in parallel with his actively generation where you reach out on, you call people on Google, you reach out on LinkedIn. You tried to set up coffee date. You go to people in their offices, you ask for reviews if they've done a testimonial sale with you, or if they are just genuinely interested in things and they just wanted to share how they are, how they founded the conversation to be with you. And that they refer people. And how, if you were in the beginning and you have nothing, can you imagine seeing a business page would have reviewed that says, even though I didn't buy anything at the end because I'm in a totally different industry. I referred this person to three other people because I really believe in what they do and definitely in the future. Once this becomes relevant to us, we'll buy it. I mean, that's still an amazing review. Eventually, if you still have a personal touch to your business, it's gonna be incredibly important when again, you're meeting these people that they're referring you to, and then you're showing this Google review page. And they say, Oh, but this client didn't buy anything yet. They posted a review. And then you can say yeah, but you know, you just met me. So you see that clearly these people also met me and they loved me. So then clearly something is good and we're not going to run away with your money and we're gonna do our best to deliver the best product that we can have. Because in this review, the person just mentioned that the moment that becomes relevant to them, they will buy it as well. Any social proof that you can get in the beginning is going to be so incredibly important as you move on. And of course, if you're actually an established business and you're building it up, please build up actual reviews and NADH these types of views. But we're talking about again, beginners 0 budget. You don't know how to do pay dads and you just want to make sales. So this is how I did it from both angles. I went and I went a little bit crazy. But the first angle that I did is obviously not SEO because that takes time again six months to a year before we start seeing any results. At least from my experience. And then with the whole reaching out on LinkedIn, I would go on Google and call businesses, a set up meetings, coffee dates, Zoom calls. Except at the time when I did it, I don't know if Zoom existed already, but it's doing vehicles was definitely not a thing. There's just a ton of metopes, a ton of meetups, and just making sure that it's spread out over my week doesn't dominate my days. I tested it all out. You can have a couple of meetings a day. That's one way to do it. One way that I did it eventually is I had meeting days, my Thursday and Friday we're meeting days and Monday to Wednesday, we're completely locked away for pure work. And then Thursday, Friday I would have meetings. And then if I'm really honest, Like Saturdays, I would still work catch-up on most of my work and in the evening. So we'd catch up on work in this Sunday's was my rest day, even did an entire TED X speech around the rest day, which was super important. Nowadays. Things are much simpler. I still take a day off, but I have way more leisure time and I actually don't do at 1 that you don't actually have to do to meetings anymore. Your team handles the meetings because they're building now their own business development network out. So you have this deaf people. But I'm mostly focused on the whole SEO thing. We get organically couple of clients a month, which is more than enough for what we need. And then obviously we have things like a 150 plus 170 plus corporate clients. And so we're mostly handling that part while the machine keeps running and I'm keep making it more efficient from all angles. And then for the event side, which obviously we're still doing, as you can see on all of our YouTube, as we keep doing our events, we're mostly focusing on online. But yeah, that's kind of insured a summary of how I would handle it. Maybe not as detailed as possible, but this is all about the story parts, how I used to handle it, how I did it. It definitely will get you to your first, I would say six figures. A 100 K's definitely plausible. 50 K for sure by just building this massive networks should definitely get you to 50 K If you're in the Western world. But again, if you're not in a western world, you can do all of this that I just mentioned and have online Zoom calls and stuff like that. Just make sure that everything looks professional and you'll get the same type of trust and interaction with people. And so that should definitely get you to between 1550 K and six figures. And then from there on, you can always start expanding, working more on SEO, working more on different types of content. Figuring out that word of mouth can be more important nowadays again, I'm not that focused on new people going to a meeting. I'm more focused on existing clients and word of mouth through there. One corporate has like, I don't know, like tens or dozens or hundreds of departments and divisions and other countries. And so my time is more invested in kind of going through the corporates, internetwork and meeting people that are irrelevant there because we're already preferred suppliers. We just need to get on the radar with a lot of people. With that being said, thank you so much for listening to this part. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll see you hopefully in another question video. 4. One key fan or Avatar Discovery: Hi there and welcome to a new QnA workshop. Today we will be diving deeper into a question that unfortunately gets asked all the time. And yet we've covered it with our theoretical videos quite a lot of times. And yet still whenever we have coaching calls or whenever we're starting a new boot camp experience, I'm dedicating at least two or three sessions on properly answering this question. I just wanted to take a video where I can go fully with details and storytelling and dive deeper into the question which again, the question for today has to do with our one key fan or avatar. How do you find your wonky fan or avatar? Now, this is quite relevant because when we see people in our programs, usually they're dealing not with sales issues or marketing issues. They're dealing with the beginning issues, which is like they don't know who they're targeting. They don't know the language of their one key fan there. They don't know how to do market research. Sometimes they spent six months building a product. They don't know who they're building it forward. They don't know which platforms these people are gonna be buying it on or seeing it on. And it just becomes one big chaos. I would say that most of my client conversations, which we've covered in previous workshops literally have to do with sitting down the founding team and just figuring out the branding guidelines, the language, the mission statements, and how they're targeting people and who the people are that they are targeting. Again, this is a Q&A workshops and it's unscripted is very much like a storytelling experience where I give you proper and how we apply these theories or theoretical things that you're learning through the scripted videos. Whereas this is an unscripted video where it's almost like again, we're sitting in a coffee shop and we're you're asking me a question and I'm literally telling you, this is how we make our bread and butter. This is how we make money. We sit down with these clients and this is the exact steps that we do, and that's why they pay us and that's why we have loyal customers. So this question is so crucial and it's why there's this entire video that I wanted to dedicate to it because I'm hoping that it will save me at least ten hours a week and explaining this concept to new clients or to new people who are on the coaching programs were going through the boot camps. But in any case, I hope at least that it helps you save you some time. So then you can, instead of wasting six months on building a product, completely understand how to do market research, how to properly establish your one key fan and go on from there. So without further ado, let's go into the question. Where first of all, I would start with, what is this one key fan term that I keep mentioning? In marketing? It's known as an avatar. But an avatar I find is not as, as great for targeting as a term one key fan. There is an article, a blog post that went pretty viral, I would say like 1015 years ago or something. It's from the olden days of the Internet when blogs were still a thing. And it's by Kevin Kelly and he wrote an article, 1000s, true fans, you can literally just Google it. And 10000 true fans. By Kevin Kelly, he coined the term wonky fan, a true fan. And in short, what he explains in there is that in order to be successful, you literally just need 1 thousand people who are truly fans of yours. They will buy whatever you put out there and whatever you say, they will follow you to the ends of the earth. Almost. They're passionate about what you do. They believe in your mission statement and they're truly fans of yours. If you have a 1000 fans and you release an e-book, let's say the e-book is $10, then overnight you're making $10 thousand. If you release a course for a $100 and suddenly you have a $100 thousand. If you release a subscription package, a community where they want to be a part of and it's $10 a month, then suddenly you're making ten K a month and you, in order to succeed in business and in order to kind of have a lifestyle that many of us dream about, you really don't need much. You need just a thousand true fans and they will be able to sustain a one-percent type of lifestyle for you. When you know where the key term one key fan comes from, it becomes easier to focus on specific one key fans. Now in corporate level, they take the avatar or no one key FAD, and they scale it across different industries and they focus on different regions. And every region in every niche has its own wonky fan. But considering we're focusing on small businesses here, we're going to dive deeper into just establishing one key fan. Because in most cases, and I'm assuming of course, in 90% of the cases from the people who are looking at this video, just getting to the 10 thousand a month mark is going to be more than enough to establish a good business that allows you to travel around the world, have some freedom. And potentially create the fundamentals if you ever want to scale beyond 10 thousand a month and hopefully 200 thousand a month and beyond that. Which is again very possible when you have the fundamentals of ten care month. When we're looking at a 1000 true fans, were looking actually first at one true fan. What is this one true fan? If you're starting e-business or if you're looking at new marketing campaigns that you're establishing, there are different ways that you can establish a non-existent one key fan. Most of the time. There's already a track record for the product. You can look into the existing database and then based on that, established the clients that give 80% of the return for 20% of the effort. That's called the Pareto principle in economics. That is one way if there's an existing track record, it's possible that many of you don't have an existing track record yet and are starting at the beginning. So my advice, and obviously we covered this more in the entrepreneurship type courses. But my advice is always if you don't have anything, you need to establish a track record as fast as possible. Find one product that you can pair with one potential wonky fan and then go out into your friends and certain circles. So the friends and family circle, local circles. So the cold calling, just anything that you need to do to get your first three to five testimonial sales. Testimonial sales are something where you either give something for free or for a really, really cheap cost price in return for a testimonial. So you walk up to people, let's say that you're building websites for restaurants. You've chosen an issue like restaurants, your wonky fan is a restaurant owner and you're building websites for restaurant owners. Now you have to go out and find three to five restaurant owners and ask them if they're willing to do cost price. They pretty much just paid a hosting and the website, whatever template that you're using, you said everything up for them. And in return, they give you a testimonial, preferably a video testimonial. Another way that I learned as well as free to fee, that's actually a term that was coined. You can use that F3 to fi, where you show up, you give something for free. And if you've done a great job and you really experienced and the result is amazing. There's a high likelihood that if they need another website and they'll be referring you or giving you another project. I usually tend to recommend cost price because you definitely don't want to be losing money on testimonial sales. But once you have your testimonial sales again, you need to do whatever it takes. And there's like sales courses that we worked on. I've explained in different workshops how sales funnels work. So I'm not going to go deeper into here how to do that. But you will find that when you have those three to five video testimonials, you will have again, what I just explained, a track record that you can look at. That track record will help you establish where the Pareto principle might be the most efficient. So if out of the five sales you've found that may be three of these people, are four of these people where kind of different than wonky, fair? Maybe you thought it was gonna be a man who is 60 years old, but it ends up being a woman who is in her mid-twenties or something like that. And most of them who were happy to let you do this testimonial sale were vegan bars or yogurt bars. That's completely different than probably the picture that you started off with. And so you now are creating a niche for yourself or you're noticing that male that is maybe 60 or something might not be the one key fan that you want to work with. Maybe the people you enjoy working with are these vegan mid 20 restaurant owners who are making yogurt bars or something like that. And so suddenly you've created a niche for yourself. And now you're going to become the person who makes a websites for these vegan bars and yogurt bars. As you are scaling this little website agency, your website, it's gonna read the website maker for vegan bars. We, we make every vegan bar profitable by improving their conversion rates from making five sales a day, selling five yogurts a day, 250 yogurts today or something like that. I'm just making things up. Of course, we've never had a vegan restaurant owner as a client. Or maybe I just don't know that they're owning a restaurant. But it's just to say you have to have some type of track record. And in the beginning you have to do sales in order to get that track record. But usually around the three to five clients in, you're starting to kind of understand a niche. To be honest, in the last couple of years, I've done a couple of investments. Most of them were women founders. And what I find, especially in those conversations the first month, there is a certain lack of confidence and I also had in the beginning, which is I don't really know where to do to sales. I don't really know if my wonky fan is correct. I don't really know if I'm targeting them the right way. And so what I tend to say, and it seems to work when I'm looking over the span of its being a couple of years now and I'm looking at how they're growing over time. What tends to work is I pretty much tell them, and that was my experience. The first 100 clients are the hardness, but you just literally need to do whatever it takes to just get to the number 100. Just sell your product 100 times and just do whatever it takes. Call, email, ask for referrals, give discounts, go cheap, just get it done, get those 100 clients. Because every single time when people are passing like 50 clients, 70 clients and getting closer there a 100 clients. Are conversations mature by a degree that is pretty crazy. We become much more detailed in how we're talking about sales. We're not talking about where do we get sales anymore. We're talking about what is the best way to maximize our sales? Which platform should we be using? It's also around like the a 100 client mark that we started looking at paid advertising and scaling that properly because up until then they'd been doing a lot of manual ways. The or they've been posting on platforms getting lucky word of mouth. And they're kind of figuring out like this is my cost per acquisition. They may be dabbled into paid advertising and but not really knowing if it's working or not. So by the time we're crossing 50 clients, 70 clients AT clients, they now have a little bit more experienced in paid ads. They started becoming more aware of like, hey, Facebook ads is maybe not as profitable for me. Maybe I have to do this Google PPC ads where if you search on Google and then we come up on the top space, so our conversations become completely different, which is why in the beginning two years ago or three years ago, I did my first investment. I went through that entire process with her. And then a year later we did another one and that was to female female founders. And so there same thing like it was literally like please just do whatever it takes to get to the 100 clients and they started focusing on that much faster. And so we're getting much closer and much faster to those 100 clients there. And so I'm literally seeing those levels as an entrepreneur that people go through, especially in entrepreneurship, there isn't much difference, which color you are or which gender you are. Because it's very much a skill-based game that we're playing. Of course, like some things will matter. There is obviously proven that women have more trouble getting more money from an investor because they're being judged by these biases. So you have to play the game, being aware that biases exist. But if we're looking at entrepreneurship itself, it's a skill-based game that anybody can learn no matter in which location. If you know that this is a skill-based game that you're kind of putting the biases aside for a second and you're looking at, okay, what are the things that I can control? Which by the way, are things that you can control much more than if you're an employee somewhere. If you're an employee somewhere, you're very much covered by those biases. It's really hard to break through biases when somebody else is taking control over your life. But in entrepreneurship, a lot is dependent on your skill. I mean, look at some really important women entrepreneurs have become billionaires. You cannot deny that when you sit down with them where you listen to an interview, that they stay similar things that people of their level there are white and male also say because they're talking about specific skills that are relevant, you're not gonna do accountancy different if you're a woman or a man. And so if you are aware of these things, you need to level up those skills as much as possible. You need to focus really hard on those skills as much as possible and where possible, of course, the biases or dare be aware and cover yourself for as much as possible. But for now, due to control, the thing that you can control. Of course, I'm going a little bit outside of the way of the 1D fan, but I'm trying to tell you that as I've been looking through the investments that I did whenever they were focusing on those first 100 clients, it was very much a skill finger was no biases still playing the first 100 clients who are literally dealing with rejection left and right, you need to learn what works, what doesn't work. And at the end of the day, how many people will buy some like an amazing ice cream than everybody loves when it's super hot outside. And ice cream is like $1 or something like that versus a five-dollar ice cream in the restaurant. Everybody's going to buy it. Nobody's going to look at who you are or what you do. So you need to find this offer. Did you have one key fan? The track record is going to be essential. The more cracker you have, especially a 100, I would say that's the cap. Once you have 100 clients, you now can start doing analysis. The analysis that you'll be doing. There are two, I would say, philosophies that I learned throughout my career. In the beginning, my mentor taught me very much that you need to look where the money is. Where do you get 80% of the money for 20% of the effort? I think over time I've evolved a little bit in thinking that way into the second philosophy, which is. You need to look at where the money is that motivates you to do more work. So the money that actually makes you passionate. We've seen many billionaires on youtube giving interviews like people like Steve Jobs or dose hybrid people that are saying if you want to play the game, you need to make sure that you're passionate. If you're not passionate, you're just not going to last because no matter what happens, no matter how privileged we are gonna get. Entrepreneurship is a skill-based game and you're gonna get hit hard. And if you're too privileged and you've never had adversity, you don't know how to deal with it. You're not going to win in entrepreneurship. It's usually at least my experience. It's usually the people that have had a lot of diversity that tend to win in entrepreneurship because it's less hard than the life that they experienced. When we're looking now at one key fans and we have our track record. You did your three to five this modal sales or you just listened to my advice and you ducked down for a couple of months and you did whatever it took to a hub, but to get to a 100 clients were now analyzing. In my case, where did I get most of my clients with the least amount of effort and we're where two clients that really motivated me when I started lightening those clients were for me corporate. I thought at the beginning that I needed to focus on maybe small, medium businesses. I felt that if I focus on those businesses, there was less bureaucracy, so I'd have to convince less people. One of the downsides that tended to happen is that would convince them we'd get a contract. We did some work together. Like these were small companies, but they were like five-sixths employee companies. And somehow they were struggling to pay the bills. We had more people struggling to pay the bills and small businesses. Then we had in the corporate and we had no problems in the corporate. The only problem that we had in the corporate side was clients that didn't want to pay until 90 days or 120 days after the invoice, which is unfortunately a real problem when you're working corporate. But even there there are procedures to counteract that. At the time, one of the decisions that I made is all the downside that you're getting with all these medium businesses or small businesses, it's just not worth it because at the end of the day, we might end up without money and having to do lawsuits. Whereas with corporate's, we eventually always get the money. We just need to create a specific procedure to make sure that we don't end up pointing a 120 days, which we eventually did. The other upside is that these corporate, they know a lot of people and they give a lot of social proof as well. One corporate clients could be internally in their own corporate, could be an extra 15 clients, 15 different departments or team leaders that suddenly hear about you. But they could also be five different corporates in the region. So there's a lot of upside and yeah, maybe we're not getting paid for three months, but we eventually do get paid. So it's not like we need to do lawsuits or anything. And at the end of the day, these people have money, so it's not like they suddenly going to run out of money. And so I decided very early on, uh, my wonky fans probably best suited there. The other thing that I had and that was a big decision for me whenever I was dealing with small or medium businesses, I felt like I was almost lecturing them because they would come to me with a specific budget and I'd literally because I'm honest, I tend to say, Hey, I think you're gonna be wasting your money if you do this, pretty much shut me down and say no, this is what we want. And obviously I'm not going to convince them. I'm just going to say my opinion and then if they don't want to follow it, that's up to them. And then almost like clockwork every single time when they couldn't follow my advice, we would create exactly what they want, how they want it. And then three to six months later they realize that it's not converting as much as possible, that they didn't use the money budget allocated as I told them how they should have done it. And then suddenly like funding dries up, the investor doesn't go through. And so there's no more money. And that's an issue because I don't like working one off. I like working long-term. I mean, some of my clients or five years with me or more. I absolutely love when there's loyalty between clients. I loved when their budgets keep going up because again, that creates better stuff for us as an agency as well. There were a lot of benefits and upsides to me working corporate and the downsides, even though they were hard and definitely not for a small freelancer or something, they were worth the risk for me. When I decided to go corporate as my wonky fan, I realized that again, the downsides were a 120 days, I could be maximum not paid out. I needed to create processes around that, both. So make sure that my emergency fund was big enough so I can deal with those things. The other downside was also going to be the negotiation cycle. Anybody who's word corporate, especially neuron business, notice that negotiation cycles for corporates could last anywhere between 618 months. I've had. I literally had one negotiation would a bank that I can't name. But I remember the first meeting I had was with a lady. Then in the meantime, while we weren't negotiating, this lady had become pregnant. She had delivered a baby and then came back from maternity leave. And only after that, she came back and she was like, You're still negotiating, how about we just do a project that is the longest negotiation I probably had and it was close to 18 months or something like that. But once we got that client, it literally happened the way I just described, which is multiple departments started recruiting us multiple city branches, certain recruiting us within the same bank. So it is worth it, but it is a very long term that you need to do and it's there and it's the reason why not everybody does it. But that's also something you need to be aware of. What type of business do you want to run? I like running businesses in areas that are competitive and not everybody gets to do complexities, something that is good that I enjoy. Because that means that there's gonna be less competition from people who don't really understand how to handle it. You're usually competing, even with people that I respect and enjoy learning from. Whenever, even if they beat me to a different client, I learn how they did it, what they do differently. And sometimes once we haven't had many losses, but I remember one loss we had was what, a governmental client. We weren't in the top two out of 20 or 30 agencies under consideration. We got to the last interview and they eventually chose for this other agency. And the reason they chose for the other agency was literally a stylistic question. We were a little bit too analytical. It was very conversion optimized. And so our approach and our entire strategy was all about making money and return on investment, all that stuff. And the other one was like creating storytelling and all that stuff. And so when they were comparing the quality of the videos, we had our awards. So that was definitely not a problem. It was mostly like, Oh, I like this type of storytelling more than this type of storytelling. And so even though they loved us for that specific project, they didn't hire us. But because they love this so much, I got to the top two. They started looking at different projects to put us on. When you're getting to that level, whenever you're competing, you're not really competing the way you are competing on the lower levels. You're still competing for pretty fun stuff. When you lose, it's not really a loss. You still getting referred to other projects. You're learning a lot from, you know, how the other styles were developed. One of the things we learned from that is that they are pretty strong when getting commercials. And our strong suit at the time was not commercials. We started expanding more looking at where could we get more awards? Where could we get more projects around commercial so that we could have a bigger portfolio to show next time. You're really learning from those losses. Whereas I remember all the way in the beginning when I was approaching small businesses, you really don't learn anything because most of the time if we lost it was because some students showed up and wanted to offer it for 50 bucks. And you really don't learn anything from that loss. That's kind of like a long story about how I decided by my wonky fan, but it is very relevant for you as well. Try to look at the clients that you're really enjoying and wanted to work with for the next ten years. That's how I literally make every single decision whenever we decided, when we decided to create elite eggs and start doing these courses, The question was, what do we want to do for the next 1020 years? And we wanted to expand into education niche. We wanted to help education. We want to eventually take some of these courses and if they are a value, maybe help schools and children who are struggling with learning at home. Eventually going to university, having a student debt, not being able to properly make money after university. Maybe we can help by unleashing these courses as an extra curriculum in schools for free or something like that. I don't know, or some type of collaboration. But whenever we thought it was definitely in ten years from now, we want to be a positive contributor to the education industry. And so if we want to do that and we have this positive contribution and we were literally doing this everyday for internal corporate processes, maybe there's an opportunity that we can take all these things that we're already doing and maybe giving it outside to the external world in the form of elite x. And actually one of the proudest things that we did a year ago was when we started establishing who's our wonky fan within elite x, who do we want to help? An organization from the British government? It was a British community subsidized by the British government. And what they wanted to do is people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. They needed to be rescheduled towards the tech sector. So a lot of these courses that you're seeing here are very much focused on you being able to get a job in the tech sector, whether it's in marketing, performance, marketing, social media, design, sales, website, all the stuff we've been kind of pumping out courses from things that we've been making six-figure deals on within our agency, but now putting out to democratize knowledge this way. And so that's kind of how we started using the Pareto principle. But also looking at passion as a variable. Don't only look at the money because if you're only doing the money, I've seen friends of mine starting businesses, they make up two I would say maybe a quarter of a million, six figure something. They make money and then they're like, I really don't like this business. I don't know how long I'm gonna last and probably going to burn out. Whereas other friends of mine who enter a business and they're pretty passionate about it. They don't make a lot of money in the lab and the first four to five years, but because they last date eventually do end up going to the seven figure businesses, million plus. I definitely recommend going for a passionate look at who your wonky fan could be. Now, the other thing that I would add, when you're establishing your one key fan, this is super crucial. And the thing that we cover theoretically Olson or videos, which is you really need to be fully aware of your one key fan. Now when you've had 35 sales, that's really hard to do. Which is why whenever I've invested in companies, My first thing that I tell them to do is literally get to a 100 clients as fast as possible. Because when you've had a 100 conversations with people who have literally paid you, like taken out their credit card and page you money. You've had a, a 100 conversations with those people. You're gonna start understanding like what colors they alike weren't a hangout. Like one of the questions we ask people that buy from us is where did you find us from or we're tracking that. You know, where did you find us from, from which website Did somebody recommend you? What did they say? Those type of things? We collect a lot of data to understand who are wonky found is we've had hundreds of those answers. It becomes much easier. And why is this relevant? Because once you have a 100 of those answers, the questions that are going to pop up during the coaching calls or just a conversation with your co-founders or partner is I'm struggling with getting more clients, I'm struggling with scaling, I'm struggling with whatever. And then the question is gonna be, well, where did you get most of your clients from? Oh, I got most of my clients from Facebook groups or I got most of them through LinkedIn. Then the question is gonna be, well, if you hire one more person, isn't going to be worth it. Are they going to get enough people from LinkedIn to scale your business? And then you're going to be running the numbers. Every client, because you've had a 100 and that usually doesn't get done in a month. That takes a couple of months, usually at the beginning of course, when you're building your product and you're starting to look at the numbers and get a 100 clients. How many of them do pay? Once, pay twice, maybe like, what's the lifetime value of a client? Can I up-sell or downscale before a hire someone, maybe I can get this client from $10 to $100. Then the question is, well, if they're at a $100 lifetime value and one extra person can get me ten clients a day, then suddenly this person gets me $1000 a day. And if dispersion costs me like $4 thousand, then this person is definitely taxing their experience. And so it's worth hiring. Based on that logic, wonky find analysis becomes extremely important. Now, in the beginning of course, if you're still building things, market research is part of this one key found analysis or wonky found analysis as part of the market research you're building maybe a course, maybe you're a public speaker and you're just looking at which type of public speaker you need to become. Maybe you want to be a body language expert. Maybe you want to be the coach who helps people speak on TED talks and stuff like that. So you're really looking how to establish yourself in a niche. So as I said at the beginning of this video, it tried to get in just testimonial sales, like three to five testimonial sales. Try to find that little niche of people that you seem to feel comfortable with. And when you have that initially people start asking for more and more and more and more referrals. And then based on that, as you evolve, you'll be establishing yourself as a public speaking coach or a course creator in that specific niche that you've been building up through individual sales? Yeah. One of the things that I keep mentioning that gets brought up a lot when I say, this is how I see one key fan analysis and how you need to create it. A lot of the courses that are out there, including courses that I've followed mentioned at one defend analysis is a very passive experience where you just go into a couple of Facebook pages, you analyze some Google competitors or whatever. Whereas what I've just explained to you is more of an active experience where you're really trying to sell a minimum viable product. You are creating a basic thing that you can sell right away and then you reach out or you put ads on platforms and you're trying to establish who's buying from you and then asking them questions in return for specific things. That is definitely a more active approach. But it also saves you six months of potential building a product and then launching it and not being able to really see if it's profitable or not knowing where the clients are from. Literally the other day, my team was organizing and networking events for startup funding events. I hired two CEOs for debts and they're running the events now, I'm literally not doing any of the events. So I joined the event as part of a networking. We had a coach there and hit his problem was I don't know how I want to get more clients. And so this is definitely a big problem. People are putting themselves out there. They assume that sales and lead generation are just not as important people will becoming to me. But yet here I am telling you it's definitely going to be something that you need to do. But the good news is it's something that you need to do in the first, maybe one to two years. Or the faster we get to 100 clients, the less you'll be needing to do that. Because once you have those clients are once your 23 years and you're going to have full awareness of who you are, wonky fatness and how to maximize profit from there on out. And so, yes, it isn't more active experience. You are analyzing these clients. The questions you're asking is like again, platforms you're on. How did you find this? Why did you buy with us? What would you want more? I just I would just recommend sit down for a cup of coffee with these people and just whatever comes up, just ask them if you want specific questions, go on Google or watch one of our theoretical videos and just go in depth into all possible questions you can ask them. The biggest thing I would say is don't worry, don't worry. Because if you had a proper conversation with them, a good cup of coffee, then at the end, just asked them if I have more questions. Could I ever bring you up for a short five-minute session and ask you more questions and more questions might pop up. For instance, when you run your first Facebook ad campaign, facebook is going to ask you, which region do you want to target? What are some of the Facebook pages that this personal likes, whether their positions, that type of stuff. And then you can just quickly call up those people and be like, hey, quick question, But we're here and we're establishing this. Could you help me out with blah-blah-blah. I'll give you a discount. So just make sure to just have a conversation, establish a relationship, and then leave an open-ended question at the end so that you can always reach out to them. But yeah, It's very much an active thing. Creating a one key fan, having a proper analysis, creating your initial market research. And then from there on out building a proper product. I always see the opposite happened. Build out a product. You're thinking you're the one key fans, so it's probably going to pay off. And then afterwards the whole process starts like how many times the Kickstarter stars and they're like, Oh no, what's happening? And suddenly they're talking with all these wonky fans and trying to do everything in 30 days that you literally could have done beforehand for a lead up of three months before you launched? Yeah, that's definitely where I would be closing one key fan analysis. It's been a lot probably a lot of information, but if you have any other questions, definitely let me know. I'll be able to go a bit deeper into certain aspects. Again, I've worked with many different entrepreneurs, many different clients and many different regions, Asia, America, Europe. I've been to places like China where I was doing at the time, link business paper on it's to see what the potentials were of certain products. So launch there. I've definitely tasted a little bit of everything. Have invested in the past in very diverse entrepreneurs. Indefinitely, I've seen different experiences being outlines with biases and non biases and what skills are and what skills aren't. If you are struggling with something, I definitely hear you, I definitely see you. And if you have a specific question, let me know and I'll try to answer as detailed as I can. Thank you so much and I'll see you in the next video. 5. 0 How to Create Content Strategies: Hi there and I'm super excited to welcome you here where I'm going to be discussing on how you can create specific content strategies to attract new leads or even put yourself out there in a way that you don't have to invest in a lot of cold emailing or cold calling, but letting the clients come to you. Now this is crucial and it took me almost eight years to figure out how we can shift away from a service-based business where we're cold emailing, cold calling, which by the way, we're still doing to client collecting where clients come to you and you just have to vet them to see whether they fit. A lot of these strategies tend to be based around SEO. And I definitely admin SEO has helped a ton over the years, but a lot of it is also content strategies. Everybody talks about content marketing all the time. But what I've always struggled with is one finding which content to use and to just brainstorming and getting writer's block when I'm thinking about this is to give you a global overview and some ideas, maybe even some case studies to get you going if you have that writer's block or you literally just don't know what to put into your content calendar. Trust me, if you've used all of the ideas and strategies that I'm sharing here, you're definitely going to have a significant change in warm leads coming your way or just in general, people being interested in you following you and maybe even asking some interesting questions that can lead to referrals. Now this isn't going to happen overnight, give it some time just like SEO takes about six months to one year. That's what I needed to learn with content marketing and putting content out there for clients come to you. But once it works, it starts working like SEO just on autopilot to the points where cold emailing and cold calling actually becomes a minor part of how you get new clients. That's what this is about, just giving you basic ideas and new angles of how we do it to get you started and make sure that you don't get writer's block and can fill up your entire content marketing strategy to the point where you don't have to do all delete collecting that you've been doing all of this time. If you're in the beginning phases of a startup, makes sure to at least allocate 10% to the easiest ideas that you can find here. But definitely do not dismiss it and just focus on the sales strategy that a lot of salespeople tend to say if I had started earlier with content marketing, I would've probably saved myself several years in our growth. I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you in the next video. It. 6. 1 Intro + How tos Effective Strategies of Lead Generation: Hi there and welcome to this video where we will be covering effective strategies of lead generation and creating content to get leads to come to you. Now this is mostly about giving you some creative brainstorming topics so that you can take these tools and start creating content that will actually get people to come to you. You don't actually need any year for this. You can start on any social media. And the goal, of course, is to convert and get people to come to you and ask about your services. So without further ado, let's go into all of the tools that you can use today to start posting content for dad. I'm gonna grab my iPad because we have a ton of strategies to go through. The first one is going to be how twos. Now, you've probably seen these posts a lot on LinkedIn, Reddit and others. For lead generation, we always recommend to do something like LinkedIn, but other social media platforms could use this one as well. How-to is usually go into very specific Tutor Point Sections of how to do something. For instance, a lot of the things that I follow because of our events are funding event is investors. And I tend to see a lot of VCs and early-stage investors posting how to start a company or how to create a brand name, or how to do lead generation. These can be very short to the point topics as well as some resources that they share on how you can do things much smoother. Those things get shared a ton that could be very interesting. Try to find what your relevant topics are and see what relevant influencers are posting. Maybe they've already posted some how-to guides and you can gain inspiration from that. 7. 2 Content curation + Case studies S: Content curation. Now, every social media including LinkedIn as well as YouTube and read it and all of the others. Facebook, Instagram have a ton of content, but if you're able to cure rate, the best content may be in a group or in a profile type setting, you might get followers just because of that, just curating, sharing relevant content or even posting about certain content. Maybe news articles that people don't read a lot but deserve a lot of attention could gain you some followers that could potentially become warm leads over time. Number three is case studies. This one tends to go viral if done the right way. Case studies have to be very, very relevant and something that is completely new in order to be shared. If you're just sharing the same old thing, people might like it, but it's not going to do much if you're sharing a very unique case study that is triggering some emotion, you might get a lot of shares. An example of a great case study could be a marketing agency that is sharing how they did Facebook ads. Sometimes they get certain ROIs. For instance, if you can get more than eight times an ROI on your Facebook ads and you shared a case study that could attract a ton of new clients. 8. 3 Charts & Graphs + E books S: The next one is charts and graphs. Some people love these types of illustrations with graphics, I'm always reminded of how immature mother and that episode would Marshall, where he discovers that he can get free charts printed by his company. Some people truly, truly loved charts and graphs. If you can really take complex data and put it into a graphic and then post it on LinkedIn that might deserve a ton of sharing. And if you're the person that is sharing, that you might attract a ton of new followers who again, could potentially become new leads for you. But I would say try to get relevant complex data into a graph. Don't just share about things that are not relevant for your business. At the end of the day you're trying to get leads. So try to post relevant things that are maybe proprietary even to your company or something that could be an obstacle from people that might want to buy a service from you. For instance, let's say that you're a video agency and you're trying to sell videos. And one of the biggest obstacle you find is that people think videos are not as important by sharing complex data of how retention rates are longer on a video if done right, and sharing your own findings within those graphs compared to other data, you might create a really interesting graph that's very sharable and takes away obstacles for the people who actually see it. Now for the next one, this one is an oldie, but it still works and it's e-books. You really don't have to go crazy with e-books. E-books can be as short as you want them to be, but I wouldn't go lower than 50 pages. If you have a good e-book, would good reviews maybe consider sharing it for free for people who comment on your post just by getting your book out there with the right headline and referring to your business, you might attract very interesting leads. 9. 4 Email Newsletters S: Let's continue with the next one, email newsletters. Now a lot of you tend to have mailing lists and they send out weekly newsletters. We do monthly newsletters every month we gathered the most interesting tech, the most interesting stories in our industry, and we send it out in our newsletter together with some updates about what we've been doing as a team or maybe new products that we've released. But what you're also missing out on is that you can share all of that into the posts. You can split up your newsletter maybe in three different parts are multiple parts like I just mentioned, and then take those parts and split them up into different content that you share, maybe either every day or every other day. That alone can provide you so much content just by looking at all the newsletters in the past, a lot of these newsletters have maybe converted clients for you as well. So maybe look into some of the best converting elements that you've had in past newsletters that have created clients for you and see how you can utilize this for either LinkedIn or any other social media where you're trying to do lead generation, you'd be surprised as to how well it works even though people are not following you on your mailing list. 10. 5 Illustrations + Books S: The next one I want to talk about is cartoons or illustrations. We actually recently had a podcast guest who does illustrations for big major newspapers. One of the things that you find when you're posting to get leads in is that you want to stand out and be creative. And one of the most interesting sections within a newspaper, which you might remember if you had newspapers come in in the past is the section of illustrations or cartoons. A lot of people, or at least me, tend to just go first there before reading the news because they're very, very interesting and engaging and above all sharable. If you can create illustrations or you have designing skills, or you have a designer on board tried to gather some illustrations that make your points and maybe shared add in context with something written that is relevant to your one key fan. The next one I want to talk about is book summaries. Now, when we first started out with my company, one of the things that we tend to do was to create a book summary of some of the best books that I read. Those books summaries we'd be giving out for free, which would entice people to actually buy those books. Win-win, you're giving value, but a new author also potentially gets a new book bots, what the goal is of these book summaries is that you're giving people value some books. People really wonder to read, but they can really read them. And that's where the summary comes in. Now on our podcasts, we had a special guest, the CEO of blink is they created a multi-million dollar business based on this concept, just giving out Book Summaries for monthly membership fee. Now of course, you can create all Book Summaries. That's what that companies for blink IS. But what you can do is take the best book that you have in mind, maybe create a short five-page summary about it and then just share it with potential social media users and your community. That alone could give you a ton of exposure and comments that could potentially shine new light on your profile. And again, get really warm leads in that you have provided value to. 11. 6 Tool Reviews S: The next one I want to talk about is tool reviews. Now reviews are very popular if you go on YouTube. But what is also very popular is software reviews and under relevant tool reviews to industries. So if you're a fern instance on Reddit or on LinkedIn or on Facebook or Instagram. Every social media platform has its own relevant key demographic. For instance, on LinkedIn, you have the businesspeople software tool reviews could be very, very relevant there. For instance, if you're reviewing Skillshare versus HubSpot and then you're really summarizing it in maybe a couple of paragraphs or even a video they do natively upload that could be quite relevant for your audience and could be shared. And because of that, if it's your face on it or somebody from your team on it, it could be potentially very interesting for them to search for you on LinkedIn, to search for the brand that is on the video. And then you might pop up as one of the employees and that's how you start creating warm leaves. Now everything I just explained can also be applied to other social medias, of course, but if you're doing lead generation, you probably want to start off with either YouTube or LinkedIn. 12. 7 Giveaways + FAQ + QnA S: Now another very popular one, and this one has been exhausted, but it's still relevant to this day is giveaways. If you're doing giveaways really well, then you might use all social media. But if you're doing it on a professional platform like LinkedIn or maybe even YouTube. You definitely want to make sure to really entice people. And the way you usually do that is by using certain software, giveaway softwares that entice people to follow you on different social medias and get points and more entries as they do more actions. Now if you're sharing something like that on LinkedIn, make sure to make the giveaway very relevant. Giving away a Nintendo is probably not as relevant on LinkedIn as it is on YouTube, but giving away lifetime access to a software or a CRM could be more relevant on LinkedIn then on YouTube. So these are some examples of giveaways that you could use for your own business to actually get in potential leads. Now let's talk about the next one. Frequently asked questions. This one is a little bit easier if you are an expert in your industry, let's say for example, you have a ton of clients, it's hard to reach them. Which you could do is you could take the most frequently asked questions, maybe even obstacles during the sales process and just post them every single day on LinkedIn. Every single day you'd be dealing with frequently asked questions. Your profile or brand profile would become almost a support profile or it could build credibility during the sales process. If people have obstacles going through the sales process and you have a page that literally answers all of those in the comments, people are engaged and asking even tougher questions. You might improve your sales funnel to the point where all obstacles are answered and have social proof for when you're actually collecting leads and having that first conversation with them, which brings us to the next one, which is Q&A sessions. Now one of the brands that does this really well is on YouTube. I think it's Wired Magazine. Now you've seen this before and mostly on YouTube, but this is also very relevant to natively post on every other single social media, especially LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, and Quora, or maybe even medium. If you're doing a Q&A session with a leading influencer, or maybe you're the CEO of a big company, or maybe you're not a CEO, you're just part of the team trying to get bleeds. Which you could do is entice the CEO of the company to do a Q&A session. If you have a lot of clients, this could be very, very relevant. And if you make this even life, it could be even more engaging. One of the up-and-coming platforms for life, at least I find from the results is definitely LinkedIn. If you're doing live Q&A sessions, it could engage a lot of potential people in your community and friends and connections if all employees live stream this at the same time or comment on it or engage on it and share it within their communities. This could potentially bring in a ton of warm leads. 13. 8 Webinars S: Now let's talk about webinars because that one nowadays is a very old way and exhausted way of going about collecting leaves. Now webinars, even though it sounds exhausted, still work, but people prefer to have it short and to the point rather than long and above an hour, you want to keep it short to the point which is maximum 30 to 45 minutes being closer to that 30 minute, 40 minute mark rather than the 45-minute mark. The reason being is that the audience retention nowadays is less special. A workshop, a physical workshop would be more relevant if you want to avoid is the automated webinars, unless it provides a ton of value and you are seeing the return on investment automated webinar just do work, but only if the data tells you that it works when you are launching, tried to launch life. If the live webinar or workshop tends to work, you can eventually switch over to automate it. But let's talk about the live aspect when you're posting content, a lot of people tend to want to know secrets or tips or maybe strategies that you've discovered being an expert or doing what your company does. One of the old ways that people tended to convert clients or potential leads into sales was actual physical person to person in workshops. Webinars have scaled to the concept of those workshops to the online world, but that concept still exists when you're creating your webinar, make sure that you're really talking about the pain points. For example, these three secret strategies that you've discovered when you're creating your startup or when you funded your startup, looking, of course, at the industry that I'm in when you're promoting that webinar, keep it to the point and make it engaging for people to follow. And above all, emphasize that it's live one-to-one workshops where you have maybe multiple people, but everybody gets to ask questions and you get to answer them because that might actually entice people to show up if you're really hitting limits and getting hundreds of people on your workshops every time, it becomes too much. And at that point, automated webinars definitely become a thing as long as your data tells you that switching from live to automate it makes sense. Go for it. But in the beginning, started with life workshops or webinar stack would entice people who read your posts for maybe people who just viewed your profile and just read some of your articles to sign up for a live workshop instead of an automated webinar, I would always emphasize that if you're going the webinar route, just make sure that it feels and sounds like a workshop that is one-to-one and very personal, or at least that people get that one-to-one experience even if you have ten or 20 people at the same time there. Lastly, I want to add to that, if you find that the Live Workshops don't get a lot of people because of different time zones. You can introduce after the first live webinar that you recorded the automated webinar option for those people that can't make your life workshops. But when you're doing live workshops with people and you give them the one-to-one experience, or at least you're in a group, but you're giving them that feeling of the 120 experience, it will definitely make a difference even if you bring on people, it really creates a workshop experience. So be aware of webinars and how to use that as content to really attract the proper leads that could convert into sales. 14. 9 Guides + Dictionaries S: For the next strategy, I want to talk about Guides. Now we all know about guides. They can be anything from tour guides as well as business guides or software guides. These are usually the instructions and maybe shortcuts, tips or tricks to maybe use a software more efficiently or navigate yourself through establishing a new startup in the country. All these guides, whatever niche they're in are very, very useful. And by sharing them in a creative way on social media, you can trigger a chain reaction of comments. Maybe you've seen examples already of people posting common Ts if you want this guide on how to start a business in England, for instance, we had an interview with one of the leading innovation hubs that allows people to start businesses in the UK. And what is useful as a strategy for demo on social media is sharing guides like these so that people who want to start a business in the UK can do so by downloading dare guide. So if you really know the pain points or most effective strategies to really shortcuts the growth of your potential client. Sharing. These type of guides could be really essential to attracting leads. The next one could be something that is a bit less popular on the whole social media sharing but still works, but was definitely popular 1020 years ago when I was starting out with blogs at a time, what was very SEO attractive and nowadays still on social media, if you post this, you might trigger a lot of interesting content topics is dictionaries. A lot of industries have specific terminology. For instance, one of the main terminologies that we cover always is all the positions that are available like CEO, which everybody knows about. But what about COO, CFO, CSO, CIO? These are all a specific terminologies that almost require a dictionary. And they're all very important when you're doing lead generation. Because if you're attracting a certain type of person, even if you want to close for sales, the CEO might actually not be the person that you're trying to reach. So knowing all these acronyms and what they stand for can be very valuable. If you create a certain blog posts or dictionary almost a US share, then you can become the go-to for your industry to find specific terminology that they can share with either interns or new people entering the industry. And we've had become a huge lead generator. 15. 10 Day in the life posts S: Then one of the tactics that is the most popular nowadays, it's being replacing vlogs is Day in the Life posts. This is especially important on Reddit and LinkedIn. A day in the life posts is almost like it used to be on YouTube with blogs or almost 1020 years ago on your own blog where you were sharing about your life. But a Day in the Life posts is usually only a couple of paragraphs. They can share anything from learning lessons to stories that you've experienced in the past. If you find yourself that you're hitting a lot of friends and followers on LinkedIn, for instance, a Day in the Life posts can really keep you on their radar if your profile is to optimize and you have a great headline on top of that, then they will follow and see your posts. And remember you as the go-to guy or girl for that specific headline, Day in the Life posts is definitely interesting to try out, even if it is for just 30 days to see where you're at which your current followers and friends on LinkedIn or red heads. 16. 11 Infographics S: One of the most popular ones, but something that not a lot of people do. So that means there's not a lot of competition, but yet everybody wants it, and that is infographics. The reason there isn't a lot of competition is because it is really difficult to create a good infographic that displays a lot of good information you can, if you are designing client, download something like Canva, which is free or Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator and start creating your own infographics. A good infographic if you're outsourcing, it can cost anywhere between eight hundred and two hundred and fifty US dollars. This is a very expensive skill and this is exactly the reason why, because you need to generate quantity as well as quality. Not a lot of people tend to do this one, but if you're really good and fast at designing good infographics, this could be a potential business for you as well as a way to generate a ton of lead. Imagine you do for the next 30 days infographics about your design skills, your clients, all of those things, everything that an infographic can cost, for instance, and what people can expect after 30 days, your friends and followers on any social media. But mostly I would say for business-related purposes, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, after 30 days of posting every day, it could attract a ton of potential new design clients for you or your agency. Now sometimes just creating infographics about a certain industry. Maybe if you're an investor, startups or other investor hubs could put you as a thought leader in that industry, which also generates leads. Infographics can go either way and above all, what you can do with it is later also share it because if you have a good shareable infographic which your logo on it, then that could be something interesting. One of the examples that I can share that is being done a lot in our industry, which is the investor industry in the VC fund industry is at the end of the year one VC fund would create an infographic of all the startups looking for funding or all the startups that have received funding that year. And they would create an infographic depending on each industry so that they could highlight their portfolio as well as some other portfolios. And with that come into good graces with some of these startups. I remember a couple of times our startup actually popping up in some of these VC fund infographics. And it really does warm you up because you didn't even know you were on their radar. And then when you see it pop-up, it makes it that you already have some type of relationship with them. You can turn this around by creating those types of infographics and then tagging them. You might give that feeling towards your potential new leads, whatever industry it might be in. 17. 12 Interviews & Podcasts S: The next one is interviews, and this is something that we actually do as well. And we share these interviews within our courses as well as on our website podcasts and everywhere. This is the trend nowadays which is Podcast. You interview potential interesting people in your industry with that becoming a thought leader in your industry, but also establishing a connection that could be relevant down the line to potentially create business with that corporation or startup or Scala. Imagine you've created a product that is super relevant for a large company like Nike or Coca-Cola or what have you, It's really hard to break through within those organizations. But if you have a podcast and you've gotten to, for instance, episode ten or Episode 20. It starts to become easier to start approaching people from different larger organizations by just establishing a relationship. It can open up new doors for you. They can attract warm leads even if it is just a referral. Now one of the ways that we've used interviews for ourselves is to establish relationships so that they can help our ecosystem startups and people that listen to the interview. One of the things that we tend to do is have a get to know call before and really establish the context of what startup funding event is and how our company works and why we want to do these interviews. One of the things said is the prevalent theme during the get to know, call. It. I'm trying to get across the speaker is that it's all about giving back. That means that when we do to interview, there isn't really a time limit. They tend to share a lot from what they do. And at the end, there's usually that time were the speaker really says there, thank you since their last words, but most often they also offered their help. And that is something that I'm extremely proud of because for the people that listen to the entire podcasts, they might have some questions and having that ability to actually reach it to them knowing that they would be opened because they listen to the podcast is a huge lifesaver I think, especially when you have a lot of podcasts from all these famous people. And I always find it's sad that people can reach out. Interviews could be a lot of good things on the one side, if you're looking for leads to these could be potential openings on the underside. If you're an ecosystem trying to create a community, it could be a way to emphasize that community and create a sharing community even with vigor people that aren't that accessible. Interviews is definitely something that I recommend and it's not a lot of time to do if you know how to establish a good podcast. 18. 13 Lists S: Now for the next one, I have a really popular one and it might be already quite exhausted, but that's lists. A lot of the most popular lists that I see gets shared thousands of times on platforms like LinkedIn is all the VC investors in a certain area. Usually people tend to make lists of ADP thousand active feces in the San Francisco area or in the Amsterdam or Berlin area, the posted on LinkedIn and say common below, if you want this list and what they have is a video scrolling through that list, which is usually just an Excel spreadsheet that they share with people when they private message them. Lists, even though are exhausted, are still very, very popular and very active if you know what you're doing. One of the lists that we constantly share in our business and in our courses is all the business niches lists. These are the most common questions that we get. What type of business can I start? Where can I find more money or leads or whatever in order to spark some interests gained, some brainstorming creativity. We've created a list of 1800 business niches that people tend to get access to when they're in our community. That way they can just scroll down and see where they are. Passion might lie or gets some creative inspiration if they just quit their jobs or are thinking of new business ideas. List, again, are quite popular and definitely very sharable content topics that could attract to a ton of new leads. 19. 14 Mindmaps S: For the next one, I want to talk about mindmaps. Now, mindmaps very similar to infographics are sharing information visually. If done right, you might create very interesting leads to come to you. It might be too complicated to be to shareable, but it might attract a very high-quality leads because if you've created a good mind-map that is very niche and fairly relevant to your person that you're trying to attract. For example, a mindmap of all the steps that you need to go through of starting a business in a certain country that could be very interesting when shared publicly on social media or through your email list. A ton of people might know the resources to go and start a business in a certain country, but it gets quite overwhelming. Having a good mind-map that go step-by-step through the process could be something that adds a lot of value to their lives to the point that I might become a warm lead for you to creating that type of content could be very interesting if you already have certain mindmaps of processes that you use to go through. 20. 15 Memes + Online games S: Now for the next one, this one is really popular and that's memes when done right and on the right social media, you can go really viral with this one. Although nowadays I would say on LinkedIn, which is a business platform means are being used a ton if you're doing it right and you know your potential lead that you're trying to attract posting the right mean with the right story or any of the strategies that I mentioned before could be a game changer for you. It is as simple as just hosting a simple mean, one of the channels that I love to follow on a platform that you wouldn't expect is Mercedes on YouTube, not their videos, but specifically the means that they post almost every day about specific races that they go through or when they've had failures, they post really funny memes. And so it just shows that you can be on any platform posting memes as long as it's relevant to your potential lead or one key fan. Now another one that is really, really important is online games. In games can be a ton of different things. On the one side, it could be that you're a coder and you actually created a small addictive game and you share that. And when people opt-in, you tend to sell them something else. It could be also as simple as a quiz that is fun to do, which bus fee tends to do a lot. Nowadays, even on LinkedIn, you have quizzes that you can fill out and you can gamify dose. If you gamify everything properly, having online games could really boost engagement for your social media, boosting engagement means potential more ice when you post relevant content or even articles on your social media, which again attracts a ton of leads. Doing a good online game as well, is something that you can share with potential leads and that could warm them up to be more open to listening to you. If you have something to share, there could be a potential business deal for them, even though online game seems a little bit out there, it's definitely an option if you have coding experience or you're really into games and you know how to gamify things like quizzes. 21. 16 Applications S: Let's talk about the next strategy, which is applications or tools. Now this one is very popular if you have the coding know-how to build certain things like Google Chrome Extensions, Shopify plugins, maybe even just any software plug-ins that are relevant to your industry. Things like Final Cut Pro Premier Pro After Effects. If you're in the video industry or if you're in the Shopify industry, there is a ton of things for at a WordPress or Shopify for website design, There's a ton for Canvas. So all of these ideas I just gave you all center around helpful application or tools. If you want to collect a ton of leads in your industry, yes, you could do cold outreach, it could do content posting, you could do all of these things. But another way of going about it is also getting the people to come to you. A lot of marketers tend to do those type of things where they eventually even end up creating software as a service type of model businesses because those tools could eventually give them more money than even just becoming a marketer. If you have some type of coding know-how or you know, somebody that you could partner up with to create a certain tool that fulfills a need. You can create it in such a way that people come to you. And by creating a good free funneled to install and make it really easy for your potential leads to download and use this extension. You could create a whole new market for yourself in a whole new warm type of lead lists that you can approach. Just makes sure that when you create these tools, U1 market them properly and to make sure that it is easy to install and use a good user experience will make sure that when you approach them as a warm lead, that they will be more open to hear from you. Now you could go two ways with this. You could either go the freeway, which is where you just shared a plug-in or tool for free or you could go paid way. Now one isn't specifically better than the other. If you give something away for free, just be aware that these are not clients, these are potential clients, but converting somebody from free to paid is really difficult. But if you have a paid client, it's gonna be a bit more easy to upsell that lead will be valued at more, just be aware of that when you're creating certain tools. Also, if you have a free tool, it's going to be easier to share and get influencers involved. So that's also something from a marketing perspective that you need to look into. But when done right, helpful applications or tools or even plug-ins could be really good for your business and a game changer for your future. 22. 17 Opinion Posts S: Let's talk about the next one. And this one isn't for everybody, it is opinion posts. Most of the time you might have heard about these type of marketing strategies when you're talking about political issues, a ton of companies tend to take a certain stance around certain political issues in opinion posts. These could be blog posts, but they could also be just statements on any social media. A good, well-crafted social media posts where you share your opinion on a certain matter can help a ton. Of course, it is most known or around political matters, but it could also be used around other topics. For instance, opinion posts about the future of tech. If you're in that industry, opinion posts about furnaces. If Google brought out a new algorithm that changes the way YouTube works or Google works with their search engine. All these type of opinion posts are made to focus on emotions. If you trigger the right emotions, it will become much easier to actually share these types of topics. So craft your opinion, pose very well and make sure to not have anything that tremendous ALL in there. Because if you write it the wrong way, you're going to get a lot of fans who are not gonna be happy with you before you do any opinion posts, double-check the your organization is ready to backup this opinion and deal with the repercussions whether they are positive by getting an influx of new leads or negative by dealing with the repercussions of taking the wrong stance. I think one example that I really want to share as an example, I once heard from a speaker at a conference, which is as a marketer, a young marketer, when you as a freelancer, he tried to stand out. One of the things he did was create an opinion blogposts. I went for four or 5 thousand words going into all the things that was going wrong with a certain company and how they should be fixing it. This obviously got a lot of backlash and you started receiving e-mails from the legal department of that company for blasphemy. And then his response, which was hilarious, was to send a response with when are you going to hire me to fix those issues? I don't recommend to go that way, but this is a good example of one way to craft an opinion posts to eventually get hired if that company has that potential resources to even higher to you. And to deal with that kind of feedback, I would not recommend it because my philosophy in business is Leif, people better than when you first found them don't start bashing things publicly just to get hired. But it's just a funny example of how opinion posts used to really work out. He just wrote a bunch of things that went wrong. It caught a lot of attention and that's how he got hired with a big organization. Sometimes if you have done everything and opinion posts can really cut through all of the silence and get you a seat at the table. But again, try to leave people better than when you first found them. Don't start bashing companies. It's just a funny example I wanted to share. 23. 18 Vlogs S: Now making vlogs who's really popular maybe ten or five years ago. Nowadays, it's really hard to break through with vlogs just because flocks are really hard to do. You have to do them every day. And if you want to get a lot of followers, you have to do them at really high-quality, doing them not high-quality, very long and boring is not going to trigger the right engagement. Now when we're talking about blogs, we're thinking about YouTube. But YouTube has a very sophisticated algorithm and a ton of videos being uploaded. That same algorithm does not apply to other platforms like LinkedIn or maybe read it, or maybe even Tiktok, Instagram or Facebook. Because if you really think about it, Tiktok has a great algorithm currently happening where they're really trying to get creators up and going. That's something that's really tough in YouTube unless you have really high-quality material. And even then you tend to find really high-quality vlogs and not a lot of subscribers. And that's just because there's so much quantity being uploaded daily and flocks aren't just going to cut it anymore, but using vlogs and the same strategy that five to ten years ago used to work on YouTube on other less mature platforms, could be a game changer. An example could be LinkedIn, where you have a business setting if you make very engaging flocks that are for the business setting, LinkedIn could be a really good platform for you to really release them, maybe on the daily, which are posts with maybe a content posts that you've crafted for everyday for the next 30 days, having a vlog or a 30-day challenge that is publicly available on LinkedIn could be a potential game changer if you do it right and it gets shared unlike a ton on LinkedIn, think about it. How many LinkedIn Influencers do you really know? Most of them are really big people. Maybe just maybe one of the future things we've been discussing as a team is that that platform is ready to have content creators on it, especially content creators that are business focused. You never know if you could be the next YouTuber whose own LinkedIn, except it'll probably be called something like LinkedIn or video LinkedIn or I don't know, but hopefully one of you listening in could revolutionize that platform and paved the road for new content creators to create vlogs on LinkedIn. 24. 19 Different Type of Videos S: Now we've talked about flocks, but let's talk about a little bit different type of videos. I would say we'd videos. There's multiple types. Having run a video agency for almost a decade, I can tell you that good videos, you can go either way, very high-quality or not high-quality at all using your phone both work. The number one goal behind both is just making sure that one your audio is great. Because at the end of the day people listened to it and to your storytelling is on point. If you're giving value to people and it's not in the front seat of your car, but in a nice neutral setting would grade audio. You could potentially gain a ton of followers. It could be your vision about the future of a certain thing in your industry. It could be just the consistency of sharing stories of your journey within your industry or within the relevant industry of potential leads could be anything. I would say the goal is consistency, however, not to type a consistency that you keep hearing everywhere. Consistency means that you put out a ton of content and see which one gets the best data. If you're putting out a ton of content, both high quality and low quality. And you're seeing a trend in data where low-quality starting to win around specific stories that you're sharing. Maybe it is you sitting in front seat of a car, then that's what you should be doing consistently. All other contents, no matter how big the budget is, going to become less relevant. And so you have to consistently move away from bad data towards good data and so good type of videos. Now it could be really high-quality videos, could be comedic videos, or it could be just value sharing videos, my gut feeling. And if I look at the data from all of my clients, which is now 150 corporate and governmental clients in more than 20 countries over more than ten plus languages like German, Dutch, English, French, you name it, we've probably done it already. If I look at dat data, then I can tell you that it will not matter what type of video you make storytelling skin have to come on point. We're gonna have to have clear audio and make sure that you trigger what is necessary for your leads. However, in some industries, it could be embarrassing if you go with a front seat of the car, if you're trying to come over as you can provide high-quality luxury type of services, you really want to stay away from low quality videos, invest in that example that I could give is luxury car tours. You don't want to sit in the front of a car. You really want to share the whole experience of luxury cars going down to mountains in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, making sure that you have great footage, drone footage investing in that. Yeah, you can do it smart. You can have an iPhone there. You can have a sheep drone there to you quickly film, have a ton of footage for pretty much the entirety year by just doing one tour, you can do it on a budget, but makes sure that within your industry you really trigger and don't hook off people by making sure that the quality fits the content. In my opinion, the reason why certain market tiers like a Tai Lopez worked is because they were targeting other marketers. Usually other marketers are people who wanted to do things really efficiently with very low budget. They usually don't like spending a ton of budget on big videos. That's why those types of marketers really nailed it when they started doing ads that got a ton of attention on a very low budget. That's not gonna work if you're trying to attract people for luxury car tours, It's not going to work if you're a big conglomerate trying to convince people that the next step, the next future is gonna be something like electric cars instead of gasoline cars. When you're doing those type of things, you really want to go a little bit better in quality and less with the whole iPhone five. 25. 20 Templates S: Let's talk about the next strategy, which is templates. Now this one is quite popular if you're in the content industry or the marketing industry. Most of all this is being used by design agencies. A lot of startups can't afford a good designer, but what they can afford as templates. So a lot of design agencies share templates or common overall design schematics that any startup can use if they have a general knowledge of software like Canva, Photoshop or Illustrator. Now some companies actually share free templates. And even though most of the free templates aren't that good, there are some companies that do give away free monthly templates that are actually really, really good. Some of them are worth even sometimes $50 plus. Obviously, the reason why they do this is so that they can get your data, so that they can email you potential new templates that they can sell you. But some of these free templates because of that, are really, really good. So that is a really good strategy for the long-term by creating certain templates. Maybe if you've designed to design schematics, or maybe even sales proposals or specific booklets that you sent towards your leads. You can maybe create them a little bit more general and then give them away when you post on social media, for instance, like LinkedIn, that you're giving away templates in return, if people sign up to either your newsletter or one or receive some more information from you. Just like I mentioned before, which you can do is do a monthly giveaway where you create the same template but then change it for different purposes. And then for the next 12 months, you can give away once a month a template. And with that maintain relationship with potential leads, like I mentioned, templates could be a very good way to maintain that relationship. However, it is very time-consuming. So before you start doing templates, double-check that you can do it if you can try to do it in an automated way. For instance, a newsletter that they sign up to or a specific group, maybe a Facebook group or something like that where you give away monthly templates, make sure that you have direct access to maintain that connection with the person that is a potential lead. That's the most important tip that I can share with you if you're giving away templates. 26. 21 Surveys S: Let's talk about surveys now. These can be very popular if done right, I would say the most famous companies they use, these are companies like BuzzFeed, men's health in any fashion or relationship magazine type of company out there. The most general survey that comes across tends to be an opinion survey. This is where a Buzzfeed type of company can ask you what you think about certain articles or things that they've published in the past in the tech industry, this tends to happen often, for instance, the most popular survey could be something along the lines of what do you prefer windows or Apple. People are very passionate about these brands and tend to react a watt. Now there isn't a lot to be one with surveys unless you do to, right? But what you can do, and this is the easiest and most straightforward way to gather data and data can be very valuable. Linkedin now has a polling feature that got launched at the beginning of 2020. That polling feature is going viral with some people because they are really using surveys to their advantage. It's also allowing them to get more eyeballs on their profile, which again generates a ton of leads, makes sure that the surveys that you do are industry-specific because that way you stay relevant in the eyes of people who could be potential leads for you. 27. 22 SlideShares S: Now let's talk about the next strategy which is slide shares. This is an oldie, but definitely a goodie back in the day I'm talking about ten, maybe five years ago. A lot of people just like templates tended to share slide chairs. These are presentations that you can easily share on LinkedIn. Think about it. Instead of crafting your own presentation, you get to use that almost like a template to get yourself inspired as to how you can do the most common industry that I've seen slide shares go viral is definitely the investment VC industry. Every so often still to this day I see on my LinkedIn VC funds sharing slide shares from some of the most heavily funded startups like Airbnb or Uber. You can always see their old slide shares. They're all presentations that are publicly now available on LinkedIn. But one of the ways that you can gather leads with this is by gathering all of the public ones together in one common folder and then shared out to potential new leads. If you're in the VC industry or tech industry, or maybe you're trying to attract start-ups. If this is relevant to them, then you've just saved them a ton of time. That's kind of a summary of what all of these content strategies are all about. Saving people time by putting in the work and creating something scalable that attracts relevant people towards you today, you can maintain them as warm leads instead of doing things like cold calling or cold emailing and getting almost no open rates. When you're thinking about SlideShare, makes sure that it is public and shareable. Sometimes people tend to create them private, which can be a nightmare when, for instance, people are asking for permission and suddenly if it does go viral, you'll get thousands of emails that are literally just notifications, which is a horrible to deal with, suggest make sure to keep it public and easily shareable. But of course, if you're trying to create bleeds with that, you could put it behind an email opt-in wall so that people can sign up with their email before they receive access to it. So with that being said, slideshare is definitely still a viable option if you're in the right industry. 28. 23 Quotes S: Now for the next strategy, we're gonna be talking about quotes. This one is more focused on the influencer types. If you're an influencer or you're working for an influencer accompany this can be interesting for you. For instance, if you're an influencer management agency and you're trying to attract a ton of influencers, for instance, Instagram influencers. A lot of these Instagrammers tend to share quotes with their audience. Nowadays it could be on Instagram, but lately You can also be on things like Tiktok or their email newsletter or any other thing. So instead of letting them Google quotes that could be inspiring, what you could do is create quotes in each industry, for instance, if you're focusing on specific targets, let's say in agriculture, farming and all of that stuff, you could look into the top influencers of agriculture and then put all of those quotes together. If suddenly you take a 100 industries like that which are pretty niche and you collect quotes, let's say ten quotes for each one that already could be quite relevant for some influencers. Now, not only could they opt in to get access to those quotes to share with their audience? You've also saved them a ton of time. Now in general, you can also just create those quotes for yourself because like we described in the past, creating consistent content specifically for your industry could be relevant. So if you've created for your industry specific quotes, what you could do is use those quotes that you've taken a day to gather and now create a content strategy for the next 30 days were, for instance, ten of those quotes will be used every three days during that post when you have less inspiration, which you could do is you could start with that quotes, maybe even add an image of that person, which in that industry will be probably an influencer. And then tell your opinion about what you think about that quote, which will again help a lot with writer's block. So these are some of the options that you can use quotes with back in the day when you started out with things like Instagram quotes was very popular because you'd be using quotes for images to create motivation. That's how we got to our first 10-K. followers on multiple accounts. Actually nowadays quotes are exhausted. They don't work as well on Instagram. Sometimes you can obviously pop them in if you have a very engaged community, but nowadays it's better to be used to maybe counteract writer's block or given inspiration to other influencers if you're trying to attract them, quotes, even though it's exhausted, can be used in different creative ways. Still. 29. 24 Quizzes S: Let's talk about quizzes. Obviously the most common quizzes tend to come from Buss speak if you want some brainstorming or creativity or just some ideas, go to buzzfeed.com. They're an open news company and they write about pretty much anything. And they really figured out how to do quizzes and make them go firewall. There are a ton of tools you can even buy lifetime deals for quiz software that you can then use to do opt-in situations. For instance, you can create a quiz if you're in the health industry that looks into what type of exercise you'd be better off with, or maybe which diet you'd be better off with. People would input their data like their age, their height, what they tend to eat, or what region they are usually from. And then at the end to get their results, they have to put in their email. It's a really great way to get people engaged to maintain warm leads. And if you're really good at creating great quizzes, you can do a quiz within your monthly newsletter. That way you can maintain engagement which are clients or even potential new leads. Some quizzes, if you have a really warm e-mail list, could be around promoting new products. For instance, you can create a quiz that can double-check that this client fits a certain product or maybe a different product, maybe if they're going on a diet, for instance, something like Coca-Cola diet, obviously not the best choices, but just giving an example that you can create quizzes that go towards fragmented, almost similar type of products from the same brand. Maybe you have something similar like that. They could engage people to potentially buy new products if your product launches. Of course, if we're looking from the social media perspective, you want to trigger and create quizzes that really engage people either to comment and post and like and share the quizzes on the exact platform or maybe get people off the platform to go. And often on your website, whatever you do, just think of quiz nights, make it engaging, make it very fitting to your potential lead and makes sure that they are really wanting to engage with that quiz. 30. 25 Polls S: Now let's talk about poles. This one is very relevant if we're talking about Instagram and LinkedIn and even lately, TikTok and YouTube pulls on. Those platforms are going crazy currently and they're a great way to grow your community, get more leads in and engage and maintain that connection with your community. Now, depending on which platform you're on, using, polls can be very different. For instance, on Instagram, you'd probably want to do your polls during your stories. Whereas on LinkedIn you now have that feature where he can ask very relevant industry questions. I've noticed that polls that tend to get 2 thousand or more likes on LinkedIn, which is a crazy amount for LinkedIn that only influencers tend to get those pulse usually go about the whole industry. They tend to ask questions relevant to the whole industry that is also very sharable, of course, sometimes it goes into the politics of what is happening in that industry, but sometimes it's also just a general question. Again, I always tend to refer to this, which is Apple versus Samsung or Apple versus Windows because those are the most emotional ones. And especially if you have a product launch from one of the companies, for an instance, if Windows just came out, then you want to ask poles relevant to dad and you're not going to ask you to on Instagram. That's more of a business type question. For instance, you could ask something like, what type of computers does your organization use? Windows or Apple, Windows or Mac. That's a great polling question if you're in the tech industry or in any software industry for LinkedIn, usually that's not a question you'd ask on Instagram. On Instagram you'd probably be more fashion unrelated, animal related, maybe even more travel or luxury related, unless you have a really engaging community, I would stick with business type industry polls on LinkedIn and for all the others on Instagram, especially if you have a really good connection, I would use Instagram for that one or even Tiktok lately. But again, in order to get polls to work, you need a good engaging community. The one exception would be LinkedIn. Like I said, if you have great industry relevant questions, I didn't know what it is about the algorithm currently, but definitely take advantage of it. Instagram is a bit more strict about it, but Tiktok is definitely allowing people to grow. So maybe use Tiktok to your advantage as well. 31. 26 Podcasts S: Now let's talk about the next one. Podcasts. I can talk for hours and maybe even create a specific course on podcasts alone. That's how broad that topic is. We have our own impact Talks, podcasts that we launched in 2020, even before the whole pandemic hit, we launched with it in January. Since then we've had so many more episodes where we featured a Olympians, corporates like converse, Nike charities like WWF and Greenpeace and endurance athletes, space engineers and everything in-between. We've definitely gone above and beyond to make sure that people share how they did their impact. A lot of these people, for instance, like the Global Head of advertisements, had read it's joined us on the podcasts to share how he advises to use debt social media, used to work at Google as well. And he shared how to do pay-per-click ads. And we always share those types of interviews publicly. And we always share those types of interviews with our students. These are very relevant and obviously not coming from me, but from the actual person that is in charge of these things which is always more valuable. So whatever you do, what I'm trying to tell you is podcasts are a great way to connect with experts relevant in your industry to truly further your community towards a higher-quality of content. This can be different in many industries with us education, the goal for us is that the experts that we invite can contribute towards our students and make sure that the content that they learn is not only emphasized by these experts, but also given a deeper run through so that our students understand with depth what the content is all about. Obviously from us you're getting a very general overview. Sometimes we go a bit deeper, quite detailed as to how we do it, but I can imagine that it's much better to hear from a Googler how Google works then it is from us saying from reddit, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, and whatnot. That's why our podcasts is used to get higher-quality content. But you can also take it another way. For instance, you are an influencer or an agency. You're trying to get sponsors or clients you're trying to attract leads for that purpose, if you're working corporate or you're working with bigger organizations, it's really hard to break through with some of these influencers that have agents, some of these corporates like Nike or WWF, it's really hard. One of the things that you can do is you can start a podcast and start engaging with some local experts in your network that will give you the credibility to eventually engage with higher experts. Those experts can also refer you to other potential clients. Not only can they refer you to other potential clients, they can also refer you to other speakers that can come on. And without knowing, you could start a podcast that in ten or 20 episodes, suddenly he's inviting speakers that are globally active. This can give you the social proof to approach new leads makes them warmer and more approachable towards you. I would say one of the most common things that happen at the beginning of our podcasts was that we would try to convince people to come on. But the moment we started hitting episode 20 or episode 30, we started getting these great experts that are going viral tend to go and TV shows, they're trying to get out there quite often. And if you can offer them a podcast with a ton of experts, it's not about convincing anymore. We started at that point getting to know them and seeing whether they fit towards our podcasts and our community, the conversation tends to switch. They really do want to get on your podcasts. They understand you have that social proof at that point. So the conversation becomes a bit more engaging as to whether they fit on your podcasts or not. When at that point you also ask them for referrals. People are more open to do it because they understand the you have done this before. I mean, once you start hitting 20 episodes or more, 304050, we're soon going to be passing even hundreds of episodes at that point, it's going to become way easier to get really engaging experts at some point, even a celebrity. Again, podcasts are a very viable way to get a lot of value and a lot of social proof for yourself, but also a ton of referrals. Whatever you do if the goal is to get leads, is makes sure to invite relevant people that could potentially connect to two relevant leads. Now, at the end of the day, if you're in the education industry, you're not really doing it for leads, you're doing it to create a much more engaging community that has higher-quality content. Because at the end of the day in education, students matter most and whenever you say needs to be emphasized by experts, instead of just referring to experts, how about you just invite them on and asked them all irrelevant questions that your students might ask. 32. 27 User Generated Content S: Now let's talk about a really interesting way to one engage your community, but also makes sure that leads want to engage with you. And that is user-generated content in this section involves you or your organization to create content. But what I want to talk about is how you can create an atmosphere where people create the content for you on your platform or even within groups. Think about it. A lot of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, half the groups option, Instagram even can create private profiles, which you can do is create contests or even fun type of interactions where people can send in their type of content. That way you can post it within groups, even Instagram stories where you shared their type of content, if they tagged you, LinkedIn where you have the groups as well, or even pages where you can share user-generated content. Now this can be very useful if you're in an industry like physical products, for instance, when people are doing Kickstarter, you can send beforehand your product towards YouTubers, influencers, but also just people that are on your email list and really wanted to try out your product in return, you can ask for pictures may be poses or even YouTube videos that you can then use as user-generated content and share within your Kickstarter. This also applies when you're trying to attract leads. For instance, if you need video testimonials, the more video testimonials you can use, the more content you have that you can then even distribute and packaged differently. One video testimonial of about five minutes from any type of client in horizontal view, it can be created into a YouTube video, but also can be created into a collage of multiple video testimonials of people. It can also be an Instagram story. It can be an Instagram post with a quote of what they've said. And of course, if you have a website and you have a landing page where you're sending people to or you're sending out cold emails to potential leads. You can use those videos within your email or if you're sending them to a certain page, you can send them as well to a page that has a ton of video testimonials. User-generated content is incredibly valuable, and it's usually not in the content strategy of a lot of startups that I've seen, I can highly, highly advise you to look into that. Again, user-generated content sounds so general, but it's really NADH. It can be as simple as video testimonials making your entire content strategy for the year to approach people who use your product or clients who use your product and just getting a bunch of videos done, which can be way more valuable than creating an entire content strategy with commercials and stuff like that. Another way to use user-generated content is how-to tutorials. This one can be very valuable because you will be learning some things that are even going wrong with your product that you can optimize over time for maybe a second version of the product. This can be either digital or physical to definitely make sure to brainstorm about user-generated content and how you can apply that within your content strategy. Because using it the right way can truly attract a ton of leads coming your way. On top of that, it can also make it more engaging for existing clients or people that are sharing testimonials with you to engage in buying a second product from you or even consulting or any other up-sell that you might have. So hopefully that gives you some insight on user-generated content. Definitely don't forget that when you are creating your content plan for the quarter or a year. 33. 28 Company News S: Now let's talk about company news. Company news is quite important if you have an engaging community just like influencers have their Instagram stories where they share daily what they're doing. Company news can be equally valuable. For instance, investors, people who are interested in investing or just clients that are following the trends of what you are doing. Maybe new product releases or events that you might be organizing, even workshops, company news is definitely something you want to have in your content strategy. For instance, maybe once a week or once every month, you can share on all social media some highlights that you've achieved. Maybe if you followed some of the steps like getting a podcast, you can share some of the things within a podcast of what the company has achieved and then shared out on all social media. Sometimes you can even write articles, blog posts or articles on things like LinkedIn or Reddit that you can then share within your community and followers. These are maybe people that aren't your clients yet because you're using social media like LinkedIn or Facebook to share those updates. Company news is definitely something to look into. We use it once a month, once among tends to still create almost 50 plus percent open rates. We also add some interesting bits like the top three tech items that we're using, the top three strategies that we've implemented this month and so on. And we still get quite a lot of engagement on those newsletters. So again, to wrap up, definitely make it more engaging than just some updates and don't underestimated if you don't have it yet because you never know, you might get an investor out of it or even a potential new clients. 34. Course Outro: Congratulations for making it to the end. I truly appreciate you going through every single video and starting to implement it into your life. And that's what your next step is, implementing it and sharing it with us. The course is not finished the whole point and the goal of our team is to make sure that your journey keeps ongoing. We do this by answering your questions. So if you feel like something was left unanswered, if you feel like the course wasn't covering a topic deep enough, please ask questions, but also request content every month we will keep uploading new content, making sure things are relevant for you. If you feel like you need something more, just reach out. We tend to answer within 24 hours. Of course, sometimes it's a holiday, so please give us a little bit of leeway. But trust me, the whole team is here to make your educational journey a little bit better. Hopefully you enjoyed this as well. If you did, do consider to give a great review because it really does affect us a lot. If you haven't donated yet this month, please consider donating by giving us a good review, we make sure that we're here for you if you have any questions or if you didn't like it. So just ask us for feedback because again, we will update every month. Hopefully you liked it and I'll see you hopefully in a different course as well.