Group Coaching Call: November 30, 2016

Hello everybody,

We are coming at you live. I had a little bit of a technical difficulty, it scared me a little bit for our first call but this is sort of the way that it goes doing live calls but there is nothing better than being live.

Hopefully, everybody is starting to join, a lot of you are in there, and over half of you who registered are in there so that's good.

Can you just give me a little chat and say Jeff I can here you, you look great, what have you been up to, where are you, where everyone is at. Just throw something in the chats that I know you are alive and well, and you can hear me. I am on a chat too. See if you can hear me, Jason, Darren, everybody.

Everybody, this is the microphone I am using to talk to you, this is what I use to record all the videos.

Bret is in California, George is in Greece, we have people all over the world on this call. Darren is in NYC, Robert is in New Jersey, you guys should go visit each other. Alvaro and Robert next to each other, Camille is in Minnesota, Steve is in Minnesota, and Anderson is in Thailand. I was just in Thailand in September and that's an amazing place, and I want to go back. Actually, we just did our Christmas Carol of all the places that we have been to, my wife and I, and Thailand was one of my favorite memories.

Paul is in Melbourne, hopefully I said that right, I always feel self-conscious in saying that but it's in the middle of the night for you, so, thanks for sticking around. Same with you Dietmar, I am going to say Dietmar and I am sorry if I am wrong and you can tell me like the phonetic if I am saying it wrong.

Okay everybody. Rotterndam, your name is Joost, is that how I say it, can you let me know if I am doing that right.

Dietmar, looks like I am doing it right, great. Rotterdam in the house. Ryan is in Boston, beautiful state in Minnesota, you got to love Minnesota, and Jason is in Florida. I am sure I missed a few of you but this is great.

Thanks for everybody sharing, okay I got your name right too, I am two for two, the rest is all downhill from here.

Thanks for joining us on our first coaching call. I am excited to talk to you about your niche ideas and to workshop things and really just to share the knowledge.

We are in the private beta program, so, a lot of us are going through this thing and learning a lot as we go along but we are also forgiving that, there may be some technical difficulties along the way and those things that we need to do.

So, this is our first time doing the niche call and I think it's going to be really helpful, really useful. So, it's going to be some one on one time. We are going to put people on the hot seat. We are going to talk about your ideas and I am going to share my thoughts and then I will like to hear what your thoughts are on the chat as well.

So, it's not just me talking here but it's going to be everybody else, and then a few of you may be brave enough to join me and get on camera as well and talk if you like to, we will figure out how that works once we get to that point.

The other thing I want us to say is that how many of you were frustrated with the process of uploading your assignment or didn't get a chance to upload your assignment or frustrated with me because I didn't give you enough time, you can give me a show of hands, I was a little bit frustrated by it too.

Again this is our first call, so, we are figuring things out but basically, what it comes down to is you can only really upload one document in order to make that happen. I know some other people are a little bit frustrated with the ability to mark complete when you complete an assignment or when you complete any lesson. That's going to be going away at some point, probably not soon enough for some of you but the mark complete is important for us to know how people are progressing and to make sure people are following these things in the order we provide.

So, if you do have frustrations, some of you have shared it with me, some of you are probably just silently saying what's up with that, just let me know how we can make this thing better over and over.

So, that's enough preamble, what we have done is we gave you all the ability to upload an assignment into our interface and I have downloaded the ones that I had right before this call, and what I will to do is start talking about niche ideas.

Let's get started and we will see what we can do. For all of you who did submit your homework, I really appreciate that. So, what I am going to do is I am going to start working with them in the order that they are uploaded. Since you are the ones who did the assignment, you are going to get first priority.

Again, use the chat in order to share thoughts or questions you have or ideas and I am just going to start by moving my screen, turning it on and look at Daniel’s. So, Daniel, you are the first one to submit, I congratulate you on that. Hopefully everybody can see my screen now instead of looking at my face, and if that's the case we are going to look at Daniel's niche ideas.

Daniel put it in as a Word document. It's funny when you put a template out there for people to play around with, one of the things that I always mention to everybody is make it your own. So take the template that I provide you and make it your own, fix it or make changes as you need to and make it something that becomes a part of your organization and so, that could maintain the Excel or just put it into Word. It's whatever tool makes you comfortable, whatever tool that gets you done. So, Daniel put it up in a Word document.

Daniel is our first one and so, his niche ideas are to focus on HVAC, carpet cleaning, plumbing, moving and storage.

Now, as we go through this assignment one thing that will help me out and if you can type into the comments.

These are client niches right, so, the last thing we talked about is, what's the service you provide and what are the clients that you are going to service. Because they both have value in doing them, being specific on your clients means that you have industry expertise that can differentiate you, it also means that you can use process to scale across multiple clients in that same area.

If you have your client niche then that makes your business development easier and it allows you to be very concentrated. Whereas, the specific services you provide, those niches are important because then you can figure out which ones are making you profit, which ones are really going in the direction that you want it to go.

We have these niche ideas here but the one thing that's hard for me is without seeing, you know, this is just a one pager, or without having the service that you are going to provide to this industries, it’s really going to be more of a general comment. So, Daniel if you want to share the service, you think about providing them in the chat window, that will make this a little bit easier.

What I had said in the last thing is that, it doesn't have to be the most exciting niche to be profitable and to work well, so I have worked with people in similar industries I had mentioned in the lesson that I did a lot of work at home improvement. What I find is that these industries are very under serviced because they are a little bit slow to move online and they understand the value of online but they have been getting most of their leads through an offline means for years. When I say offline, I mean they do cold calling, they will have call centers, the do trade shows like they go to state fairs and try to get names and addresses and things like that. So, this is a good area to go after if you can have some kind of unique position in the market, so, if you can be somebody who uses, for example, social media, Daniel syas that he has AdWords and PPC management.

PPC management in these areas, they can be a niche because these people are used to doing things one way and they are used to paying a certain amount of money per lead. Generally speaking, all these industries, the lead cost users, they are used to paying fifty to hundred dollars per lead. So, knowing how much they are willing to pay for a lead and if their customers’ worth five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars to get something done in like plumbing. Storage, probably in a thousand plus range, moving probably in a thousand plus range, carpet cleaning might be a little less expensive because if you are doing residential, less expensive, HVAC probably in the thousand plus range too. There are some wiggle room for them to generate leads.

Now, if they have been going to trade shows and being generating leads for a hundred dollars then your niche might be that online using Facebook targeting or using these methods that you have perfected or if it's AdWords although AdWords is going to be a very, very competitive in local markets, they are more like eight, nine dollars a click, sometimes for these areas and you have national competition.

If you can prove out that you can beat the status quo, that's really a good angle you can do within these niches. As we look at others, we might find the same thing here but the biggest thing is if you are doing PPC management in these areas, how do you put it in the term that these people understand?

So, if they have been going to trade shows for the last twenty years or if they have been calling up home owners or putting signs in people's yard. If that's how they have been getting their business for the last, you know, forever. Yellow pages, yellow pages are now like an online form.

Then how do you give them something that they are used to, how do you put it in the terms of what they are used to and then how do you put it in terms of value, like, how do you add value to this. How do you compete with the yellow pages which have got on online, how do you compete with these other people whose specialize in local businesses.

So, those are things that I would consider as I look at these niches, is to really get dialed in, with what service you are going to offer but then, dialing with the result as well. So, like your service, what result are you going to give these people, where they should care and what value can you add that you can get leads for the same price and higher quality than what they are used to getting or for a lower price and more value oriented than what they are used to getting.

So, those are some ideas Daniel, as you pursue this niche, for how you going to want to focus on it, with providing PPC to these areas.

I am going to move on to the next one and if you have questions, anybody wants to add in on this or if anybody has any ideas or as worked in this area, please do chime in on the chat. I don't know if the chats are coming in a little bit here but feel free to add to that.

So, Steven saying its cool and niches overlap.

I agree with that is that, sometimes, when you are working in one area and then there is overlap, that can be a creative way to generate leads. So, thinking to gather two service providers and saying, hey, you should share customers instead of going and paying Google a hundred dollars each to generate this lead or five hundred dollars, whatever that amount is that you pay to generate the lead. Why don’t you guys share, why don’t you share some leads or share opportunities and maybe you get a referral piece.

Yeah. I like that idea, Steve, about generating leads for two clients at once, that's something that I have done before, I have worked on doing. Like these are local business owners for the most part, all those different business, so they are all local. They are not necessarily the most savvy marketers and a lot of time they can't really understand the value of teaming up with other people and so you are sort of at their mercy, of their willingness to participate and so great ideas, but sometimes it can be difficult to participate in that area or to get them to participate.

So, we are going to move on, Alvaro, he has a niche spreadsheet and we are going to go and look at his now.

Good conversation is going on in there. So, we will get back to those ones as we go.

Actually there is one thing, George is saying that he is thinking about yellow pages site and how they have a lot of dominance and low fees. I have gone up against yellow pages website a lot, probably hundreds of times. And what I found is that they are pretty terrible, they don't really do that great of a job. And so, you have been able to beat their results. Because they are doing it in a bulk low service providing thing, where they are trying to be cheap and clients find that if something is too cheap, then it might sound good but they don't get the results they are looking for.

Alvaro, I see your spreadsheet, I have it up on the screen, I think you all should be able to see that right now, and you have several different pieces and you have several different areas that you are focusing on. So, you are saying like paid search, in-house support, doing audits, building accounts and training for in-house people or supporting teams that already exists, this is what I am considering in-house support to be. So they might already have their team and you are doing the grunt work, maybe, or you are doing the leg work for them, so they have this strategy that they have thought of and you are going and doing the execution. So, it seems like it is execution work.

Now, if you remember back to the video, one of the things that I was saying is that, sometimes with execution work, if you are the hired gun, I have found that there are times you don't get the highest margins because the margins usually come from the strategy or from like the really high level work, that's where a lot of the margins come in because that's where the high level or the value. The high level, what I mean, like senior resources are usually put on it, so, you can charge more for strategy than execution. But at the same time if you can find ways to scale, then you can really become efficient there, you can use like AdWords scripts, there are ways that you can make your scale better.

So, as you go through your assessment Alvaro, for these ones I am not going to read through every piece of this, if you check it green I am not going to read through it but it looks like you are wondering whether it's scalable and whether it's easy to differentiate, and that's in giving support.

So, I found that in-house support is very much a relationship, it's relationship based, so you need to know somebody who is in-house at a company and you need to know that that person is looking for somebody like yourself to provide those services. So, it's not that hard to differentiate in my opinion, it's just hard to find these people. How do you find somebody who is in-house, who is so overworked that they are reaching out to you? It usually as to be somebody you either work with in the past or somebody who worked with you or somebody who one of your employees worked with or a former colleague, whatever it ends up being. That's usually how an in-house person finds you. Generally speaking, people who are in-house at a company, they don't get out much, at least that's my perception, I could be wrong on that.

Okay, Fred wants to make it a little bit larger. Is that better but I can't see the chat though. Actually, I don't really know how to make it any larger than that, Fred, sorry about that.

So, I don't think it's that hard to differentiate, it’s hard to find clients and so, that's something that's the difficult part. As far as scalable goes, I think that building an account the right way and AdWords is not super scalable but it's not that bad, I think you can find efficiencies, so, it's not purely scalable like you can't necessarily have the software that just does all the work for you but you can scale as you do more of them. I think that if you have three account builds in a month, it's harder than doing ten. If you get to ten, you get to find a lot of efficiencies and you get to be really solid in that area. So, I think that in-house support is something that can scale.

Within Excel I am going to scale, look at you guys, you are all like tech support, maybe that should be your niches, tech support for people on the internet giving presentations, any ways. So, that looks a little bit better there, I think it might have scaled each one up though.

So, hopefully that helps Alvaro on in-house support and we have paid search managements, just using it with different engines. Now, do you think that it could possibly be a commodity?

Is paid search management a commodity?

It is, there are low cost competitors out there, there are the yellow pages who would do this for you for no cost, there are people out there. So, I would say that you are right, it is in the danger of being considered a commodity. The way that we compete with these people for paid search management in particular is on results, saying we are not your bottom feeders, we are not a commodity, we are working on the big accounts.

Part of it is that you just don't want to talk to the people who want to pay you a hundred dollars a month to manage their account, like they are just not worth your time. So, I think that it is a concern whether it's a commodity or not but it's not a commodity to those who care, people who really want your services and who value good work, they are not going to treat you like a commodity. So, it's all about doing great work and then finding the right people. And see, we have paid social.

So, I think we are going to find a lot of the same things of paid social, in-house comments are all pretty much the same, you know, supporting them in-house.

Is there budget set aside for it?

Good question, does anybody find that paid social does have budget at this point, looks like you have it as a maybe.

Are we having trouble getting paid social budgets or is it expanding?

One of the easiest ways to look at it, there is, one what our clients say; two, Facebook's revenue.

Facebook is on fire with revenue, they have so much revenue coming in that someone is got to be paying them, I think they’re doing twenty billion dollars this year, something very ridiculous.

Okay, Alvaro is saying that people are experimenting, Thomas is saying that they are starting to see more.

I would agree with that is that it seems like it's increasing but it's still not perfect, so, look at the timing where it's November thirtieth, is there a way you can get more set aside for 2017.

So, we have a lesson coming up about budget and timing like the cycles of budgets for clients, I think it's in lesson fourteen or so. It's one of my favorite lessons in this whole course because it shows how cyclical these budgets are and how far ahead you have to plan in order to be part of somebody's budget. And I share an example of how when I first started in this area, digital marketing was three to five percent of the entire marketing budget. So, out of like a million dollars, it was thirty thousand to fifty thousand.

And now this year, digital marketing is about thirty-eight percent of the budget. So now, that same million dollar budget, three hundred and eighty thousand is going to go to digital marketing.

So, just about the fact that it's growing by ten times since when I first started in this area, it means there is ten times more money available to digital. And some of that are already spoken for but a lot of that is actually going to be available to you, it's something you can take away and this is where you just need to secure that budget. So, what I would say for you, it's good that it's growing, it means you are on the right path. Actually, I think that paid social for many people, especially, with the mobile capabilities is going to be the new AdWords in a couple of years.

So, you are on the beginning stages of it right now, so, what I would say is figure out how to scale this and figure out how to be great at it and ride that wave because it's going to be a big wave, I mean Facebook is on the pace of Google. So, if you look at what Google did, sixty-six billion last year, that means that Facebook is going to be doing sixty-six billion dollars in about five years. So, if you want to ride that wave and take a piece of that pie, you are on the right spot. I think it's brilliant.

And then same with management, I agree that budget aren't set aside and I would say they are not a commodity because people are saying that they are doing great things on Facebook.

There is a lot of social media geniuses out there, social media experts, quote and unquote, out there but I think you can differentiate yourself by the results and that is I deliver better results to people, I deliver much more value than other people.

I see some good feedback going on in here. So, Alvaro, hopefully that helps out, we are going to move to the next one here.

Bret said yellow pages are unclear, their management fees.

Yes, they are not very clear at all.

Jonathan said people are asking for social, Facebook targeting.

I do like the Facebook targeting opportunities, they are really solid, especially with people who came to your site and lookalike audiences and that type of stuff, so, that's really good.

Yes, budgets are shifting to social.

One of the biggest finding that I had, everybody, that is very interesting is, I was looking at stats for one of the lessons we are about to have, come up in the course, and as I was looking at the stats, I realize that digital marketing budgets are increasing, thirty-eight percent of budget. But more and more of that, almost all that, is going to be coming from mobile. So, mobile is extremely important.

As we have all heard forever, right, it shouldn't be a surprise that somebody says mobile is important but what I have really found about mobile that's interesting to me is that it's going to be a bigger percentage of digital and actually there is not nearly as much growth and this raw digital without a mobile component. It's almost steady, it's almost like even, a break even, the growth. It's like anytime that it grows it's taking away from itself. So, it's sort of eating itself a little bit. So, that's an interesting insight that I got from pulling together research just for this course is that the growth of mobile.

So, something then for you all to think about is that if you are not differentiating yourself in these areas that are becoming a commodity, mobile might be the way to differentiate yourself. I don't know if you want to say mobile first but we take mobile seriously in what we do, maybe that's how you want to do it.

Okay, so we are moving on. sSo, we are looking at Dietmar's, his service niche checklist and the first one we are talking about is the press releases, analytics, audits, SEO and lead conversion.

I am going to assume that a press release, what you say is actually drafting, issuing and sending out press releases for clients with some kind of value. I have worked with press releases in the past but I don't have the ton of expertise here. So, if you want to share more details into this niche but, what I am seeing here is that there is high gross margins, you gave a large customer base.

Do people have budget set aside for press releases?

They do have it set aside but it's only a certain types of client, it's not every client. It's usually large B2C or B2B companies. Usually companies that want to broadcast and get mass media. So, it's usually not like a local component, it's usually not focused in those areas, it's usually just like, I want to put out our message in that area.

It is somewhat of a commodity, I have thought that as well. I think that press release is used to get noticed a lot and now I hear that most journalists do not pay much attention to them but I am not positive. But it's nice because you can blast out a press release, I don't know if that's even the right term, but putting out these things, using technology to get these things going, you can send out a lot of press releases and do it well.

So, you are doing it as a method in order to give them better search rankings, just to be out there for search rankings.

So, I had always thought that press releases as a search ranking, I thought that Google sort of devalued that but a lot of people may be thinking otherwise, that press releases may help with search and link building, so, I will like to hear some thoughts on that.

Personally, I guess that I am not that experienced in this area when I first started in SEO ten years ago, press releases were like the number one way to build links because you just send it out and then they did be there. Google devaluated those particular links a long time ago with no follow and just devaluing those domain names. So, if anybody wants to share that piece. But, it's a good niche if you can get people to pay you for it and if you can build a margin into it because you will need somebody to write it, obviously, which writing can have a high margin and then you need somebody to deliver it which can be done through technology. It can be a great niche, I just don't know a lot about it.

Analytics audit, this is a good one. I think that analytics audit is a really big opportunity for people. There is a lot companies that have installed Google Analytics, hundreds of millions of companies have Google Analytics. So, website owners have it and not many of them have it the right way but I agree that one of the problems is they don't have budget set aside.

Analytics audit, could it be a commodity?

I think that's a good example that it could be a commodity because there are free templates out there to do an audit, so, perhaps.

And then you are saying you might be able to provide thought leadership on it. I think that analytics audit is a great opportunity, I will definitely continue down that path, assuming that you can generate the business doing it.

SEO, can you get a high gross margin if you outsource SEO?

So you are saying, offer SEO as service to your clients but then use outsourced resources to do the work.

I have tried that before, it works alright but I think that a true outsource doesn't work very well, you need to really get the project in place and you need to tell people what they need to be doing.

Are budget set aside for SEO?

I would say that yes, budget are set aside for SEO at this point, they are set aside for most businesses, that they see the value in it.

A lot of companies, they are get into SEO because they don't want to pay paid media because they are either greedy, naive or they think that it's going to change their life but they do set aside a budget for it which is not as much as their paid budget for example.

Is it scalable?

Yes.

Is it repeatable?

Yes, you can do SEO over and over again, there is monthly SEO retainers.

Can you use technology?

I think technology is difficult.

Yes, you can offshore it, if you have the right process, again, you have to have the right process.

I would say SEO is absolutely a commodity. Good SEO is not a commodity but SEO in general is about as commodity as you would get. With people spending web forms and there are cheap India guaranteed ranking SEO, I think it's pretty serious and seriously consider it a commodity in my opinion.

Revenue producing, yeah, it produces revenue. People can make lots of money off of SEO if they do it right but I don't think Google keeps on taking away those opportunities.

I like your way of missing the puzzle piece like hey, your website was worthless if you can't get people to go to it, I agree with that.

Okay, nobody is doing SEO in New Zealand, so that's a good. You see, you are located in New Zealand, that might be the key to this really, is to be focused in your individual market.

It is difficult to differentiate in SEO, there is no way to sugar-coat that one, it is difficult to differentiate in that area.

We do a lesson on differentiation, I think it's lesson twelve, so, that's going to happen next week and you will see some of the ideas around how you can differentiate and how you can sound different. But I would say that SEO can be really good and I have a soft spot for SEO, I have done it for ten years but it's difficult to turn into service unless you are go all in. Unless you say “I am the SEO person” and that's all that you do, and you become a thought leader, it does get to be difficult. Maybe that will be what you will do, is to be a thought leader in New Zealand for that particular area.

The last one we have here is lead conversions, the conversion optimization. I have met a lot of people who do conversion optimization and there is a lot of money in it because you are staying close to the source of revenue for your client, that's something that we just talked about in one of our lessons this week, is getting close to that revenue source for the client. So, there is opportunity to do that.

Now, it can be high gross margin, they kind of have budget but it does require a big company. Now, I tried to do conversion like leads and conversion optimization myself like ten years ago and there is no market for it because people are just barely grasping what their website should be doing, but I do think that now it's getting better and better, and easier and easier. But, I also think that it is becoming more competitive as well. Because there is a lot of people out there talking about conversion and doing this type of things.

So, again, I think that you could become a thought leader in your local market, and there is a lot of people out there talking about this area, so, it might be worthwhile to talk to somebody who focuses here.

I know people at several agencies if you want me to put you in contact with people, I will be happy to help there.

So, we are going to move on to the next one.

I am back on camera here and I am just going to see, is there anything in this area, you guys are still talking about press releases and things like that. I am glad you are all talking about the value of press releases, I am going to let you keep on talking about that, I am not going to go into each of the comments here.

Thomas wants to know what tool or software does your agency use in managing AdWords.

It's a combination of manual AdWords management, it's using AdWords scripts, and it’s using AdWords editor. And then for certain times when you want to put it on autopilot, you can use the software suites that allow you to do that, so, you can use paid management tools.

Now, generally speaking, I found that paid management tools ate at the margins of my agency way too much. I would give Marin software five percent of my twelve and a half percent management fee, so, I get seven and a half, they get five and then I will still do a bunch of work, and actually the results weren't any better.

So, most of the time I keep those margins for myself. If I am charging ten, fifteen, twenty percent of spent on AdWords, I want that money, I want as much of it as I can get because it's profitable. There is no profit in using management software and they really charge you in a very greedy way in my opinion, they are charging you as if their software is a solution, when the reality is that it's you that's the solution, it's the person who as the expertise.

And if there is anything that we have learnt in this course so far, it's that you are the expert or you are on your way to becoming the expert and you need to charge for that.

I found that software, a lot of times, if it comes at the price of profitability, I suck it up and we do it manually, and we become much more profitable. So, hopefully that helps a little bit there.

Alright, we are going to go on to George.

George has both his client and service niches, so, we will look at the client first.

Okay, George is talking about e-commerce and he is talking about hospitality, so let's look at e-commerce first.

So, if you are focusing on e-commerce as a client niche. This is specifically in the Greek market, so, I am going assume it is Greek e-commerce website unless you clarify, George, if you want me to go elsewhere as well.

Is it Georgios, that's your full name? Sometimes I see George, sometimes I see Georgios. Or let's assume that it's going to be in your local market, if not, let us know.

So, I love e-commerce from a service standpoint because you can see your results everywhere and you can see the results right away. So, if somebody puts a dollar into advertising or puts a dollar into whatever you do, you can see that dollar coming back and you can tell that people are purchasing, so, it works.

So, all these things are true on e-commerce and actually, all these things are true in hospitality as well. Hospitality is a little bit different but the results are similar. If you are doing hospitality and it's somebody booking online, you can get a lot of good feedback and know it's happening there.

So, what I would actually like to do is look at your second sheet around the services you provide, knowing those niches that we just focused on. So, I am going to open up your second sheet and we are going to talk about the services to hospitality and to e-commerce.

So, for example, SEO for e-commerce and SEO for hospitality, is it scalable?

SEO is difficult to scale, no doubt about it because if you do it the right way and you are doing it in e-commerce, and if your clients compete with each other. If you rank well in search, it's coming at the expense of somebody else's rankings. So, it is tough to scale especially across an industry because the good work you do for one could actually distance yourself from the other. The question is whether you work with people that are similar to each other or if you say in only do one client per niche within e-commerce because within e-commerce you can niche down even further obviously from there.

Is SEO a commodity?

We have talked about that already.

Is it easy to differentiate and can you provide thought leadership?

So, what I would say is, it's easy to differentiate if you are the e-commerce SEO expert in Greece, that has differentiated in itself right there.

If you talk about specific types of e-commerce or specific sizes of stores, that's easy to differentiate. And then the way that you provide thought leadership, that's your differentiator as well, and that is the results you deliver. So, if you are the ones who knows how to help x size e-commerce stores on this specific platform in Greece with between a thousand and ten thousand SKU, you can be the only person that does that in your entire country.

So, that's what I would say for differentiation here is finding the point where you niche down even further than just e-commerce and you focus either on specific e-commerce software and how you are the SEO expert for that software, that's one way that you might go about this thing. Or, specific industries, specific types of stores or specific types of e-commerce.

So, I think that actually e-commerce is too broad and I think that SEO is too broad. I would say you need to niche down further, like what type of SEO you do and then also what type of e-commerce you do. I think that one of the things that I found for agencies is that if you align yourself with the platform, for example, I am the Shopify SEO expert or I am the Woocommerce SEO expert or whatever the platform is.

If you can align yourself with a few of the popular platforms, then you can get new business just coming in, just because these software companies don't do the services themselves. So, when they need to provide services to their customers and they refer them to a partner network. So, becoming a part of a partner network around e-commerce software can be a really big opportunity for you.

So, that's how I would approach that piece of SEO for e-commerce. And for hospitality, I guess there is not as many platforms that you can do SEO for. Although, you can do Word Press based websites or websites based on their CMS, that's one way to do that piece.

Hospitality in Greece, are you doing SEO for them - Is that going to cause conflicts? Like can you do more than one hotel in Athens or is it for the major hospitality sites that brings people into Greece. Something to consider, within the hospitality area, is how can you scale for multiple people, how can you give multiple people the results that you are capable of doing, when they are probably going to be competing with each other.

So, anybody who is in a smaller market, that's something you need to consider, is that even if you corner your market with a niche, sometimes it's hard to get enough clients to scale your business, you might need to do multiple niches or at least think through that piece.

Now, we are going to move on to the inbound marketing piece.

So, I would put it in the same vein as SEO but obviously inbound marketing is more encompassing than that, it's not just getting search results, it's building a brand. I essentially equating inbound marketing to building a brand, getting people to find you, to come in and be interested in what you have to say.

So, we have a lot of lessons in our course about inbound marketing for agencies and I think that the things we learn there apply as providing a service to other people. Basically, you need to help people put up an entire program to bring in new customers.

Now, the one thing you are going to find that's difficult to scale, that's difficult with inbound marketing as the service. Whereas, SEO might be a link building, it might be keyword research and taking the existing content and making it better. Inbound marketing involves content, it involves graphics, it involves paid media, it involves social media, and it involves everything.

So, doing inbound marketing as a service, what you might find is that if you are selling the results of inbound marketing, you need to do twenty different tasks in order to be successful and it's hard for you to get a staff that can do all that, like you said, talent available, that's a maybe. It's hard to get a staff trained to do those twenty things well.

So, you are selling the result of inbound marketing which is a ton of inbound leads and yet it's going to take you twenty unique skills or twenty programs in order to get it done. And it's also going to take participation from your clients. So, it's really hard to scale inbound marketing, actually, I would say it's impossible. And the whole point of inbound marketing is that it's so genuine, it's so good, it's so high quality that people see through it and they want to buy your product without doing anything else.

When it comes to e-commerce, the margins are so thin on e-commerce, at least in the United States, because of Amazon. Basically, you can't really get huge margins on e-commerce because a lot of the products are available elsewhere. And so, I don't think that a lot of e-commerce stores have the money to do inbound marketing. So, that's one of the problems that I have, I don't know if that have budget set aside, I really don't think that e-commerce has budget set aside for inbound marketing at this point.

Maybe I could be wrong, maybe newer brands like niche brands that are doing like Instagram marketing and that type of stuff. Maybe they are, but others, I think they find it difficult but maybe that's different in Greece.

The other thing I would say about inbound marketing for hospitality, I think that can be useful, I think that a lot of them, they do want inbound marketing. They will do their Instagram campaigns, they will do everything. But, one of the problems that I find with hospitality is that people might see a picture and then they might book a vacation a year from now.

You might do the best inbound marketing or the best drawing in of customers in the history of the world, but you are going to be judged on how many people came in next week or next month. And so, a lot of clients aren't patient enough to see you through as you build the brand for them.

So, I think that building somebody else's brand as a service provider is quite difficult to do because of these reasons. It's hard to be responsible for somebody else's brand. So, you might want to specialize in the strategy or the execution or something like that. I love the idea and I do inbound marketing myself. But putting an ROI on these activities in the short term, on the terms that somebody would want to pay you for, is difficult.

Just keep that in mind and maybe think through. I would say niche down some more as well because if inbound marketing is doing twenty things, then, you just need to be conscious of that. Otherwise, either you are going to have to charge a lot money for it, it's going to be very expensive for the client or you going to have to not make a lot money off of it. It's usually one or the other.

So, thanks George for getting on the hot seat, and we have one more that we are going to look and then I am going to see if anybody else wants to download theirs and that's going to be Paul Cameron.

Paul is in Melbourne, Australia. I always think that I am saying that wrong but I am not really sure if I am or not, that's how I was told that you are supposed to say it. I was just in Melbourne last week or a couple of weeks ago. And it's lovely, I’d love to go back, I’d live there if I could.

Local marketing for smaller businesses and franchise groups. So, he is experienced in that area. You and I have talked a little bit about this already, Paul.

I am just reading through this, sorry, and it's really boring for me to read through it while we’re on the air. He is going to charge a management fee for landing pages and then also a transaction fee.

Paul, I like this niche a lot because this is totally a niche down and then he also has the industry experience and the learning curve is already covered because he has done the is before. Basically, what he is saying is that he would like to market to franchises. So, in his local area in Australia, there is a lot of different franchises that are out there and he would like to get in front of them, he would like to do marketing for them and help them bring in new customers because a lot of times these small outlets have trouble finding customers. Basically, they are not big enough to have a dedicated marketing person but they want to have ambitions to grow.

And if they can't hire dedicated marketing person then a lot of times they bring in an agency, they bring in somebody like Paul to help them get there. In the sense that you are in that industry, bringing in and getting new business shouldn't be difficult because you know these people, right, you already have their contact and you can speak the language.

This is how we broke into the home improvement industry because we hire the home improvement person and he goes hey, I have been in your shoes, I have been in houses, I have been selling windows fittings for fifteen years, I know what it's like and I am going to have that in mind when I do your marketing. I am going to market in a way that you are going to be happy, in a way that's going to be beneficial to you.

That was like the best sales pitch ever, he would get every seller he wanted to because he is like, I am one of you. I am one of your people, I know what you are going through, I can feel your pain and I am going to get you through it. He was like the Bill Clinton of sales people.

I don't know if anybody gets that joke, he is like unfrozen kid-man lawyer, these are like SNL skits from the 1990's. I don't know why I think of them right now but that's sort of how this guy was and it worked. So, I like this idea.

Paul, I don't know if you want to share the specifics about everything on the screen right now, so I want to be a little bit sensitive of that.

So, if you are on the chat Paul, I know it's late there, it's probably like four in the morning for where you are right now but if you want me to show the rest of this let me know. Otherwise, we are going to keep on moving on.

That's some really good chat going on. Is there anybody who wants to jump on and chat with me and be part of the video. Is there anybody who wants to do that? I am not even sure if I am capable of doing that, to be honest. In the room, does anybody want to raise their hand and get to be part of this.

I am actually not sure how you all can become part of this, like become a video. I can invite you as a speaker. So, if anybody says invite me as a speaker, maybe I should have done that while we had you up there.

I appreciate you all again being part of the beta because I have done this many times, I have done a lot of webinars, in a lot of courses but doing a webinar live in a course is the part that can get to be difficult.

Thomas says there’s a button that says request to speak, so, if anybody wants to do that, you can do that.

Since there are not a lot of chats coming in and I am just fumbling around, I am going to see if any more niches came in that I can download and look at. Yes, I see, Darren's got his, so I am going to download Darren's. I am going to put you on the hot seat, Darren.

Darren is supposed to have jury due this week and he got out of it for this call, so, that's dedication. I hope its dedication and not for any other reason. I am saving this document here.

This is going pretty well, right, for our first call, it's almost an hour into it and you are all still engaged and you are all still chatting. I feel like we are really accomplishing something here that we wanted to, and it sounds like everybody who is getting these ideas is finding them valuable.

Obviously, there is going to be followed questions for some of you, based on what we talked about. So, please do follow up with me. Also, we have the forms. Forms are a way that we can keep on talking to each other and keep on sharing with each other as we go along.

So, Darren is going after his niches. Darren does search engine marketing (SEM) and he is going after certain areas, so, solar panel installers.

Paul is available, he is awake and it's 03:00 am, awesome. You are a rock star for going there. I don't know why I use the word rock star, it's probably my least favorite part about marketing. What about marketing makes us a rock star, although Paul, in the case you are a rock star because it's 03:00 am and you are partying with us in the hangouts. This is actually one of the few times that we are calling somebody a rock star actually makes sense because you are up at 03:00 am when you probably should be sleeping.

Back to Darren, we are talking about solar panel installers. So, is it a renewable or expandable customer base? I think that solar panel installers, don't really feel like that's on like the tipping point, that that's going to even be bigger as we go forward. Is there going to be a point where just like mandatory where everybody has solar panels? Yeah, I think that it's going to expand, especially that new Tesla roof that they have out there, that might be bigger and bigger, I am not sure.

The cool thing about local businesses like solar panel installers is that if you do one in your local market, it's either you do one in New York and then you get a lead from somebody from Florida. There are ten spots in Florida that have solar panel installers and there is probably twenty of then in California that have these people. So, you can actually expand quite a bit beyond what you are doing by going after them.

So, I think specializing in that area makes a lot of sense to me because of the future. IT seems like the future is going to be bright. I don't really know if Tesla is the only one who is going to be doing this but, maybe others are going to come in there as well. But it seems like solar is a big thing for the future.

I don't know if I have answered yet but one of the things that I mentioned recently in one of the videos is that I love reading tech news because today's technology is next year's marketing service that we can provide. So, it's really cool of we pay attention to today’s technology and like what's coming out, and we think about it from a marketing perspective. Those are going to be our clients five to ten years from now once these things starts to mature as industries, those are the ones who are going to be relying on us for marketing. So, today's tech news is tomorrow's client, it's sort of an insight that I really think is interesting.

I didn't answer the future of sun roof is bright, Steve, did I? If only there is a transcriptor recording to remember all this and to immortalized it forever, actually there is.

This one, app developers. So, one stat that really surprised me with apps is that the home screen on both android and on Apple iOS, they are occupied by like four companies. So, they are saying that apps are sort of like, they are really on the way out, that's what the overall technology say. Is that apps are basically Facebook, Google, Twitter. I guess Instagram is owned by Facebook, they own WhatsApp as well.

Basically, Facebook and Google won the app war, and every app store and everything. I am not sure what that means for app developers but it doesn't seem like maybe much money is going to be poured in, through venture capital to support app developers in the future, because of that fact, it's going to be more towards the mobile web. And so, are app developers going to suffer from a lead generation or from a financial crunch with that? I am not sure, but I found that it's a tough area to break into. So, there is a learning curve but I think there is also competition, like you said, because of venture funding.

I don't know enough about the niche to say whether it's a good idea to focus on it or not but unlike solar panel which seems like the future, app seem like maybe they are not growing like they were five years ago. So, I don't know, maybe we will have to do some more research on that.

Auto repair, actually I like auto repair. I know that auto dealers are super competitive and there’s lots of really big companies doing auto dealers. There’s lots of really big companies doing marketing for auto dealers. But auto repair, I have never worked in that industry but it seems like a good opportunity because everybody needs auto repair. It's highly local, so you can do campaign in a city, that you can scale that across tons of different areas. So, I like that idea of auto repair, that might be a good one. I have never worked in it but it seems like it could lead to a lot.

Political candidates, interesting. It is highly cyclical, I know people can make a killing doing political search, political campaigns and help coping with them but you are right with this cyclical. We’ve just exited one in the United States. I am not sure how you will be able to keep things going afterwards.

I had a friend who was on the Obama campaign and even after Obama won, everybody is laid off from a campaign. Basically, whatever your political affiliation is, after the campaigns then you are laid off. And then if your candidate wins, they will hire you on to do stuff for them and so he was offered a job after that.

I am not sure what you do during the after time, this seems a little bit cyclical to me, especially at the end of an election but maybe this is the right time to start. They say the best businesses are ones that are started during the down time, not during the up time. So, that can be interesting, it makes you greedy if you can figure things out when you are not in the ideal situation.

Fitness centers. I think fitness centers can be good. My question about them is consolidation. Is a small mom pop fitness center going to have enough money to afford you, your services because I don't know if there is a lot of margins per center, I could be wrong. But can a small mom pop afford you, do they even exist anymore. And then if you want the national or the big ones, they have been consolidated quite a bit down and those are few companies.

I have pitched fitness centers before, like the 24/7 fitness centers, and it seems like they are all franchises and they are all have like a franchise tax and everything, so I am not sure. I don't know how I feel about that one. You have more of an idea but it seems like you did have to get in big with the parent company to do management for their franchises. But I don't know if franchises are going to have a big budget for marketing. I found that it's only in like the five to ten thousand dollars a year, that's what I found and like, if they only have five to ten thousand a year for marketing and it's mandatory that they have to pay in, then that's not a lot of money to cover your services and cover the fees to Google. So, that can be a difficult one.

Montessori schools, I like that one. I mean, there is a geographic thing, there are a lot of mom pops. I think there are probably corporate ones as well but I think that this one is a better chance of local one standing out and there is margin. I mean, Montessori schools cost more than like a Toyota. It seems there is an opportunity there. I know people who are sending their kids to Montessori and they talk about how expensive it is.

So, marketing to it, especially the demographic who would be searching is probably like a stay at home mom or somebody who is looking for their kid. So, there are people who would be searching and looking at things, so that seems like that's a good opportunity there.

Now, somebody had asked if we can talk about packaged goods. And this is actually my example, Rosemary had asked about packaged goods. So, Rosemary, this is the example that I had provided from myself because I did worked in package goods and this is in lesson four.

What I found about packaged goods is that if you get a good client, you can't work with their competition. They block you from working with their competition and they get very specific with who you can't work with. And so if you get one CPG client, you can't work with anybody else. If you get anything with Procter and Gamble, you can't work with any other competitors anywhere. I guess it’s just as simple as that.

So, it's a good niche because they have a lot of money and they have big budgets and they pay, but it's really hard to expand and the customer base is hard to expand. Also, there is not very many medium sized package goods company. There has been a lot of consolidation, so there is a lot people who consolidate in that area. And it's competitive in the fact that, since they have big budgets, every single agency wants a piece of that budget, and if you are just depending on the size of your agency, you might be small potatoes compared to some of these big ones competing for that business. So, that's why I filled it out in this way.

Ryan is talking about solar is doing well. Good.

Bret wants know about consumer packaged goods.

I am reading from the bottom up, so if that's a good enough explanation of packaged goods. Let me know or otherwise, I can keep on going.

Yeah, eighty percent of apps get used one time.

I could see how a budget can be an issue in auto repair.

Political can branch into many things. I like that idea.

Great, so it seems like we are all on pretty good agreement here, you know, that's what we are talking niches.

I have been on a lot of wineries. I don't think they have nearly as much of a concern about competition because they think that the market is big enough, so they are not like pure competition. The segment is like benefiting, if everybody likes wine then everybody benefits. So, it might not be as bad and also, it's not nearly as consolidated.

I think that one of the problems is that you only find in industries that has three players like a lot of these ones do in package goods or even airlines in the United States. If you have three people that are competing then have to either work at one of those three or you are going to always be a second fiddle to everybody else. So, you need to land one of the big three and you are not going to be able to work at the other two, so does cost expansion issues.

But then again, you can make so much money off of that one that it could solve all your problems right, like it could be good that you do that. So, it's alright to choose these big companies. But generally speaking, big companies have big agencies working with them. Very rarely does a small five - ten person agency land a big account with the big company.

Thomas wants to know how narrow should your agency focus on niches, example, healthcare versus orthodontics. It really depends, like I have pitched almost all the type of healthcare that you can do. Clinic systems, I have worked with like entire systems of clinic, I have worked with doctors, I have worked with nutrition in healthcare, I have worked with neuro-modulation, all kinds of weird niches in healthcare.

It's sort of like what I had talked about in packaged goods is that. If you are a specialist in neuro-modulation, then you can only work with one client locally or even nationally. So, it didn't scale very well. So, if I wanted to work with another client, I just say that I have healthcare experience, not that I have experience in that area.

So, I went down and I went more broad because of that non-competition factor. I think if you are an orthodontics specialist, that's a local thing right, that's really the end physician and that's very regional. So you could be the orthodontics specialist in every single region in the United States. You could make a killing off of it if you had the understanding of that industry. And you have the methods in other to generate customers for them at a reasonable fee and they would all sign up for you. So, there is a lot less competition concern there and also you might be able to scale that better nationally if you have multiple doctors on board, so you could build campaigns that scale across them.

Yet they just sort of like walk through the logic, like if, another doctor found out that you are working with somebody else, would they be happy because if you have knowledge and you are sharing it across clients. Or they will be upset because they view them as competition. It usually has to do with how big their market is. So the bigger the company, the bigger the market. And if they are a national coverage then they are going to let you only work with them, they won't let you work with others. So, you have to say that I am a healthcare specialist not I am a specialist in that area.

There are niches within niches for sure.

I like healthcare, I found it to be interesting. When I say interesting I usually mean difficult. I found healthcare to be difficult because you did think they did have big budgets because there is so much money in there but act like they don't have any budget at all. And so, they are actually some of the hardest people to get to pay the rates that I wanted to get paid. I like the idea and I thought it would be very lucrative but they didn't pay me nearly as much as I wanted to. So, that's my thought on healthcare.

Ryan wants to talk about wants to talk about home improvement, trades men, any ideas on traction, what services were you offering, average prices they were paying.

Home improvement has a huge budget. Their average deal size is twenty-five hundred dollars for anything they do in the house and I did windows, siding, roofing, gutters and probably other stuff that I can't think about at the top of my head. Of that twenty-five hundred dollars, they would routinely pay two hundred and fifty dollars to five hundred dollars to generate that lead. And so there is a lot to go in there and they need hundreds to thousands of leads a month and so, there is a lot of money in it.

The average company, a ten million dollar company will pay a million dollars for leads, maybe, $1.5 million. And so, there is a lot that you can go with. That has to be competed with radio and other areas.

I found that it's a good niche to be in. You do need to have some understanding of how they work and you need to speak their language. They are not trusting to anybody because most of them had been doing advertising with yellow pages forever. They have been doing it since they have been in business, probably twenty years or thirty years or fifty years, however long they have been on business and they have been burned by online crooks, a lot.

So, it's sort of therapy to get them to trust you that you are going to different. One of the ways they trust you is your industry knowledge or referral from other people. They are very much value referrals from other people. They will here you out like they love to hear people's pitches because a lot of times they are sales oriented as well, they sell people on things for their home, so they will here you out but you got to really build into them.

Bret lives within ten minutes at forty wineries and so, a wrap up party for this course is going to be at Bret's house.

Steven said, is the most important part of defining a niche, the psychology of that niche's audience or understanding the niche itself or both?

The reason why we define niches is because it helps us put boundaries around our success. You need to do that because, otherwise, you are going to be trying to go after everything. The result is the most important part and that is coming up with boundaries around what you are going to focus on. It gives you focus and it makes you think about these things. Because a lot of times the business will just take on any client they can get and trust me, I have been there, I have take on clients in a lot of different areas and that's all right. But then once you try to hit that profit number we have been harping on for this entire course. Once you try to hit that fifteen - twenty percent profitability, you are going to find that you can't get there if you take on everything and you don't specialize.

So, it's not so much about niching your expertise, it's niching your focus, that's really the main benefit of doing this.

Expertise, we all grow it over time, I am smarter today than I was yesterday and I am sure that you all are as well, especially after this great call. The client doesn't so much know how great you are compared to the other person, what they know is how they feel about working with you. And so, that's really where you want to focus on there, and niching down gives you that focus.

Thomas wants to know do you brand your agency broadly or splinter off vertical based on sub-brands.

I think one of the temptations is to splinter off and create sub-brands and it's mostly perceived that your potential client is going to care. I don't think your potential client cares. Being niche and being specialist is simply just what slides you bring in to your pitch deck. It's what you tell people you do on your website, it doesn't have to be like different entities or anything. I have tried that, we did take our agency and we carved off different entities and it's a disaster. It's an accounting nightmare, it doesn't really serve a lot of value, it's like internally you think that it's important but externally people just want to know can you fix their problem.

So, I wouldn't split of or I wouldn't really get too sub-focused because it's basically diluting your ability to deliver. Agencies do a terrible job of marketing in the first place. No offence to anybody on this call, I am not saying that you do. I am saying that in general, agencies do a terrible job of marketing. So, if you split up into five different brands, it might have been good marketing with one brand, it's going to be five under represented, underfunded, under leveraged brands. So, I would do one thing and do it well. Again, in that specific situation, if you are in a pitch, how do you show your specialty there?

So, we have a lesson on that as well. I didn't mean for this call to just be like hey, keep on watching the videos. But it also proves that the videos are on the right track, right, this is exactly what we are going after. Once we have our niche we can start to get into business development areas.

Ryan worked in construction, I think it will be okay speaking with you if you worked in construction. Lots of swear words and cat calls, just joking. Those are stereotypes and stereotypes are wrong. That's not how that industry works.

Darren is saying being focused is a great way of talking to your clients.

I don't do SEO but I know people who can, alright, I can point you in the right direction, I can help you out.

Yeah, I would agree, being focused means that you can turn down stuffs that you are not that good at, that wouldn't be profitable, then you can focus on things that will make you profit. And it's nice, I actually love it because it has a few valuable things, if somebody comes in and says Jeff do you do PPC and I don't want to manage PPC, I have a network of people that I can send them to. I will look good to those people that I send it out to. I look good in front of the client because I am giving them a suggestion and then I also keep on boosting up my perceived value because I am so busy that I can't even take on a client.

And so, I fish a lot of benefits to saying no, there is more benefits to saying no than yes sometimes, other than the whole revenue piece. Again, we will talk about this in a future lesson.

If you are desperate for the revenue, you can say yes to everything but let's learn here about how we don't have to be desperate for their revenue. Because saying no and turning down people is actually going to help your esteem as an agency a lot more.

Darren say's you can speed up the videos, so, that's an interesting thing. So, as we are recording the videos, sometimes I think that I am talking to fast but then I also have people request to speed then up. So there is a chrome extension that can slow it down if you think that I talk too fast and at the same time it can speed it up if you think it's not going fast enough. It's up to you and you have a choice and in this chat window here, Darren as a link to it.

Jason wants to know how many niches is a reasonable amount for an agency to focus on.

Let's use an example, okay, so you are one principle agency, you are the only one. I don't know if this is true for you or not Jason but saying that you are the only person on there and you have one partner. The number of niches is the number of areas you can focus without sacrificing quality. So, you might be really good at two things or three things but once you get to that fourth, it's coming at the expense of the first thing that you do. And so, that's how many you should focus on, as how many you can focus on without sacrificing quality.

The problem is that you don't really know that you are sacrificing quality until you have overcommitted. And that's one of the problems that we have as individuals, as entrepreneurs, is that overcommitting generally is something that we do after the fact, right. So, we have overcommitted ourselves and then we say oh, now what I do. I suppose you need to get better understanding where that's coming in or understand that piece because that's really a big piece of it.

Now, if you have multiple principle agency, multiple people that are owners, that have expertise, partners whatever you want to call it, then maybe you can add more niches, maybe you can do instead of three as an individual you can do seven. But then again if you bring on a partner to your business, wouldn't you want that partner to be focused on something else that's different. Do you want that person to be production; do you want that person to be back office; do you want that person to be the business person; do you want them to be the sales person to sell more for you. So, it depends on how you bring in and how you adjust your organization.

Now, bringing in employees and expecting that they can add to the number of service niches that you can do is not a good idea. An employee should never really be responsible for you adding new service niches to your organization. That's not going to work out because you are tasking them too much and they have no skin in the game. The second is that you train them on how to do that niche and if they don't have any equity in your company, if they are not a big part of it and they don't get a piece of the action, and they are going to move on, they are just going to start their own thing doing the same thing. I would probably too in that case, if they didn't have a piece of it.

And so, bringing on an employee and expecting them to do the work of a principal in your agency, it's a short term fix but it usually leaves you in a bad long term position.

That's sort of how I look at it, is know your own limits, know the limits of your partners and then that's the answer. And in order to find that answer you need to do one more than you should do in reality.

Okay, people are popping off but Bret has a question, says a website is popular in the food truck market. You have maxed out food truck builders. And then you can’t take on new customers due to a conflict of interest.

I don't have experience here, first and foremost, so I am going to say that. And so, what's related to a food truck, so you have this food truck carts, you can do hot dog carts or something like that, like smaller businesses. You can go in the restaurants. I don't really know where do you want to focus on, that's a hard one. I don't think I have some more thoughts on that, Bret. It's getting a little bit late in the call and I guess my brain is not working as well as it should.

Yeah, catering might be an opportunity, so, what are the people doing in the food area that's not quite a restaurant or that's got the barrier. Or is it in restaurant supplies, is it in getting supplies in the restaurants, I know that's already super competitive, there is probably already companies that do that, they already have sales force and sales staffs.

Home brewing might be an opportunity, that type of stuff. Micro breweries, wineries, artisanal chocolate, deserts, lots of things like that, maybe. I need to know what you are doing for food trucks which Thomas says there as well.

Jonathan wants to know thoughts on real estate professionals and attorneys.

So, let's talk about where the money is in real estates. Say that a house sells for half a million dollars, the amount of capital generated in that half a million dollar house sale is six percent and so, that is about thirty thousand dollars. And of that thirty thousand dollars, half of it goes to the buyer, half of it goes to the seller and so, that's about fifteen grand. And of that fifteen grand, half of it goes to the broker.

So, an agent stands to make about seventy-five hundred dollars per house sale, so, there is a lot of money in there that they would be able to allocate towards marketing. But it seems as if they aren't traditionally spending a lot of money on marketing, they actually expect their broker to do the marketing for them instead of themselves. And so, some agents will do marketing but their budgets get to be really small, we are talking like five hundred dollars a month. And so, going after a bunch of people like five hundred dollars a month is not a bad idea.

I have made websites for real estate agents before and one of my clients right now is a real estate company. But, there is a ton of competition in the real estate market because there is a lot of people who wants to get five hundred dollars a month or fifty dollars a month, whatever it is from real estate agents and so, that's a difficult area to look at.

I think the time to have gotten into real estate in the first place was maybe ten - fifteen years ago. I think there is still opportunity but you have to see where people aren't plying because there are email services for real estate, there are AdWords for real estate, there are landing pages for real estate, there is a lot of these things that are out there. Also, the multiple listing services, that's really the lead generator now.

So, all the market in the world isn't going to save these people if all that people are doing is looking at pictures of houses on multiple listing service or on Zillow or something. I think that it's sort of past, they have been early adopters all along and so it's really sort of commoditized, as Thomas is saying.

I love attorneys as a niche, there is a lot companies making a lot of money off of attorneys. Generating leads, being there for them, they are just going to be really willing to invest in this service. They seem to have money, they all seem to run really strong businesses. So, I think attorneys is a great niche to go into.

I have done websites for attorneys, for several of them, and they are some of my best paying and most honest clients that I have worked with. I haven't done a lot of lead generation or SEO for them but I know people who do and they have find it to be competitive but also lucrative. And so, they do have money and they are smart about business and they realize the value of marketing. I think that's a good place to go after.

Looks like some good conversation is going on here. You guys are all talking, I just got done talking. I mean, I have to get like two bottles of water next time I start these calls, I actually have some tea.

Okay, there is no more questions that I see in here and if you do have a question, bump it up again, just that we can see it in there. Looks like sixteen of you are still in the call, which is pretty damn good that you are sticking around. So, I am going to stick around a little bit if you have any more questions but we are an hour and a half into this, I feel like I am filibustering now.

I am glad you all enjoyed the first call, this is awesome. It went so much better than I thought and I look forward to spending eight of the next nine weeks with you doing this. We are going to have a week off, we will get the schedule going in the emails we send out but I look forward to talking to you guys well into the future. So, thanks so much, have a good one.