Intro: Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what’s next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world’s great influencers, as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today, now here’s Tony DUrso. Tony: Welcome I’m your host Tony DUrso, we interview world-class influencers, celebrities and elite entrepreneurs and I thank you for joining us. We broadcast every Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific on Voice America’s Influencers Channel, and you can listen to all of our shows on your Android or Apple device go to TonyDUrso.com/mobile and get the app, TonyDUrso.com/mobile. Today’s show is with Jeremiah Smith and Dave Woodward, Simple Tiger and funnel hacker, all right here’s some info on Jeremiah. Jeremiah Smith multi digital marketing agency Simple Tiger specializes in SEO for entrepreneurs and helps industry giants see significant gains in their search results, and organic traffic. Welcome to the show Jeremiah, it’s so great to have you. Jeremiah: Thank you so much for having me Tony, happy to be here. Tony: The honor is mine; I can’t wait to talk about simple Tiger. But Jeremiah first things first, I’d love to know how did it all start for you, what’s your backstory? Jeremiah: Yes, so let’s see I got into web design years ago probably 2005-2006 just kind of building my own little photography company and was really just building a nice website, got one up and running and my mother who’s an accountant had a client who saw the website, wanted me to build one for them, so I built them a website it was my first client work. And after building the site for them they asked me hey all right it’s up can we put it in Google, I want to see it in Google and I was like oh I didn’t even think about that, I don’t know how to do that, so I looked into it and I discovered this whole industry called SEO or search engine optimization. So that really sparked my interest, I dove deep into figuring out how to do SEO for this particular client and after doing it and watching it happen and seeing the results and seeing what it did for my client I was hooked, I had to do this for a living. So updated the resume, put SEO at the very tip-top said that’s what I do and went out there and landed a job at an ad agency in Atlanta where I’m from and from where I was growing up. And so I went on to work for this ad agency that was actually a very large global ad agency, and all their clients are Fortune 500 companies and stuff like that, so I got to really test what I was learning at this mom-and-pop shop at these huge companies and the same stuff worked and I got to learn the ropes with them and it was really cool. After being deep there I decided that consulting and building an agency around SEO as an offering was what I wanted to do, and so I kind of struck out to do that. Tony: That’s very cool story, very interesting how you just landed that position and just followed the prompts so to speak and got into a very large industry, and I’m curious though the name of your company is Simple Tiger, what brought that on, what’s the tiger have to do with SEO? Jeremiah: Sure, so our kind of branding idea there is that we want to have the most impact with the fewest pieces of input, so we want simply effective results for our clients. And the whole idea behind Simple Tiger was I wanted something that would stick out in someone’s name like a tiger and then I wanted something that wouldn’t detract from that, so the word simple doesn’t detract from that. And my father also called me Tiger all the time still does, so I kind of think of that as kind of being part of it, but really I don’t know I just thought it was a good, nice, clean, brand differentiator something easy to keep in mind and then in regards to the way we work we just kind of follow the 80/20 principle a lot like a tiger does. Those guys sleep on average about 20 hours a day and they wake up just enough to drink some water, socialize and play, eat and go back to sleep and so I kind of like the idea of living a simple life like that and doing just what it takes to absolutely crush it and be a tiger in terms of competition. Tony: That’s really interesting, my dog he’s in an Akita and he does the same thing, he’ll be sleeping 18-20 hours a day Jeremiah and the thing is he gets buff while he’s sleeping. Jeremiah: Exactly. Tony: And I’m trying to find out that secret, how do you do that? Jeremiah: We haven’t nailed that one. Tony: Yes we’re still trying to figure that. Well that’s very interesting because you’re right simple tiger it stands out, it’s very unique and it separates you from everyone. Now what’s interesting about this, all right Simple Tiger does SEO okay we get that, you’ve taken it another step or a twist on this where you run it all remote, can you explain that and tell us why you switched and did what you did on this? Jeremiah: Totally, so it’s funny actually Simple Tiger was built from the ground up to be remote and that came from my experience working in the ad agency space. I would get up early in the morning, get in my car, battle through Atlanta traffic rush hour, get into my office, get all set up at my computer, put in my headphones, churn away and then stand up at lunchtime walk out the door by myself run into some people at lunch hang out talk go back to the office, put my headphones back in, sit down and work until it’s time to go home. After a while running that pattern I realized I don’t actually have to be here to do this, I don’t actually have to be in person all the time to do a good job and that really came through as I started doing consulting projects for clients and I was never there in the clients office doing consulting with them, and realized you know what we don’t actually have to be in a client’s office, we don’t actually have to be in the same office we use project management tools and chat applications to communicate with the whole team anyway, anything else that we talk about is off the record, so mine as well all the stuff that’s important if it’s all a line anyway and I could just be anywhere in the world this isn’t a problem. So we built the agency from the ground up to be a remote agency, and everything that we do revolves around can it be done remotely which overwhelmingly is yes, it’s crazy just how much we’re able to do for our clients by being remote but we save a lot in costs for that, we have very high quality of life for all of our employees and things like that and so yes remote was just the way we wanted go. Tony: I like that and by the way I did lead generation and marketing for seven years for my own company, and I draw a blank in thinking did I ever meet any client, I don’t think I ever met one client ever in seven years, the way we are geared especially in online business or something that deals with computers and tech and software, you don’t really need to meet the people to give them what they want or beyond, so it’s really interesting how our lifestyle has changed over the years. And in terms of Simple Tiger here again you find it very effective and your business is growing as I understand, you’ve got for a smaller team than normal doing far more output and I’d like to actually bring this up and take a look at this, how can that be where you’ve got less people doing more, than other companies with more employees? Jeremiah: Good questions, so it kind of took us a while to get to the point where the leverage was really strong, but the way that we do that is by specializing in two areas and this is kind of critical I think as an agency. We specialize in serving SAAS companies, so we’ve narrowed down our niche to where we work primarily and only really with SAAS companies, we do still have a couple of other clients left that don’t fit the SAAS kind of category but regardless SAAS is who we’re after. And then what we do for them is just SEO, so we only do search engine optimization and so because of that we’re able to build a framework within that space that serves that audience and does it using this technology or this methodology of marketing that we’ve built a process and a system around that we continue to innovate and improve on and get better at and re-systemize all the time. And so because of that we’re able to get very lean, we only grab the things that we really need to do our job and then we’re able to charge a significant rate because we’re able to generate such solid results for the clients that need what we do and then with that really it doesn’t take a massive team for us to manage all that. I’d say that probably when Simple Tiger is done growing we maybe a few team members larger than we are right now and I’ll probably be happy with that, but yes we’ve got our core team right now, we’ve got our system and our science figured out and so it makes us happy. Tony: I love it and Jeremiah for our audience to give them a little education, some may not know what a SAAS company is, could you give us a little description and tell us how that’s different from other companies and so forth? Jeremiah: Absolutely, so SAAS is industry term or lingo, it’s an acronym for software as a service. So software as a service is ultimately whenever you are renting a piece of software or paying for access to a piece of software in order to utilize that software, usually is for b2b purposes the types of clients we work with, but oftentimes you can also have kind of a client, a customer b2c facing SAAS company. So for example Spotify would be a great example of a SAAS company, you rent access to Spotify software and then you can download and play music through the player itself, so you’re not actually purchasing anything from Spotify you’re just renting access to something, that’s primarily the clientele that we work with. Tony: All right makes good sense, very interesting. And you also have a slant a little bit different and this one is a little conundrum, it makes one do a double-take because as I understand and you’ve talked a little bit about this but I want to delve in a little more, you talk about not growing the business only for the sake of growth and you’re not just interested in perhaps profitability, but well actually maybe that’s all you’re interested in is it profitable, I’d like you to explain that whole model because it seemed kind of unique. Jeremiah: Yes sure no problem, so first things first I kind of really fell in love with this industry out of sort of a lifestyle demand where I was able to consult clients remotely, I was able to learn something cutting-edge and fun and practice and play with their site and travel while I did it, I was able to work my own hours and kind of do what I wanted there, I was able to spend more time with friends and family and experience the world and things like that and all the stuff that I’m kind of talking about sort of tertiary to work. At the end of the day we see a job or you work a job and there’s kind of a means to an end there, where you’re earning an income and that produces a result for you, that helps you secure something in your life that’s necessary. And while work is not just a means to an end to me, it also gives me a lot of sense of purpose and joy there is a strong portion of it where it is a means to an end and because of that if the end is capable for you to meet and you’re able to meet that end and enjoy it and you can provide that for a few other people, then what really motivating factor is there to do much more than that in that capacity. And so for me at least it just kind of came into this area where I want to develop an agency that people really enjoy working with and develop a team that does massively impactful things for our clients, and I enjoy educating so I want to spend some time educating the world as well. And ultimately I didn’t see that growing was necessary in order for us to do that, when I say growing I really mean growing dramatically going from a six person agency to a hundred and fifty person agency, is not anything that I really see as being necessary for me to be totally happy with it the way it works, the clients who work with the results we produce things like that. So a lot of companies do get caught up in the growth for growth’s sake model, which I think different business models lend themselves to that to a degree, agency can do that but doesn’t have to and for me and my agency I don’t want it to, I don’t want it to just grow and have 30, 50 or 100 people and thousand clients or anything like that, I kind of push against that to be honest. Tony: That’s really interesting Jeremiah, it almost connotes the point of going for the quality and giving the quality service which you can do if you had less clients but great profitability as opposed to thousands of clients, though there are people who would beg to differ with this and won thousands and thousands of clients. Jeremiah: Precisely. Tony: And by the way I’m also on that same boat, I’m not interested in thousands of clients though I am interested in zillions of people listening to my show but as far as clients where I do work for, there’s only so much that one can do to do quality that’s one of my opinions on that’s, very interesting I think we’re on the same side on that. AD: This is the Tony DUrso show, just ahead the chat continues with Jeremiah Smith and Dave Woodward, Simple Tiger and Funnel Hacker, but first it’s time for us to take a short break, see you back here in just a moment. AD: This is the Voice America Influencers Channel, be inspired. 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Intro: You’re listening to the Tony DUrso show with key influencers, we’d love to hear from you via email, be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@TonyDUrso.com, now back to Tony and his guests. Tony: All right we’re back on the Tony DUrso show, today’s show is with Jeremiah Smith and Dave Woodward, Simple Tiger and Funnel Hacker, for 11 years Jeremiah helped companies like Segment, Shopify, MTV, e-trade, LG and Sports Illustrated see significant gains in their search results, organic traffic and revenue, quite impressive. All right, and now back to the chat with Jeremiah. Tony: And now I want to talk about something that’s probably near and dear to the heart of a lot of people that have businesses that are in the audience or they have a side gig or they’re looking at doing something or they have a website just with their name, they do all sorts of stuff, we all would love to know how to get a lot of traffic from Google. Now me personally I think I’m lucky because my name’s on everything and I’m like seven out of nine spots on Google when you search my name, even though there’s many other Anthony and Tony Durso’s or DUrso’s perhaps I’m lucky or maybe I know some stuff, But we would all like to know some tips and it’s a big area, a big field maybe you could kind of walk us through SEO and give us some advice on this at the same time. Jeremiah: Sure yes, so in regards to SEO really the purpose of SEO is to drive organic traffic to your site, so people who are kind of stumbling around Google looking for something specific, if you are what they’re looking for specifically you want them to find you and you want them to find your website and be able to begin a business relationship with you, even if it’s just reading a few of your blog articles you want them to find you. So the whole idea behind search engine optimization is to bring in highly targeted traffic that’s actually already out there going to your competition’s website right now instead. So in that regard in order to really build that traffic I see it as kind of broken down into two major parts, one part is optimizing, repairing, fixing things that are on your site, setting up kind of the foundation. And then the second part is producing stuff and producing stuff comes down mainly to content and building links, getting links back to the site. So what that looks like in the first category of fixing, repairing, improving and optimizing stuff is pretty much looking at a list of keywords that you want to go after, researching those keywords, knowing that those are the keywords you want to hit then you’ve got to clean up your site, make sure that from a technical perspective it’s running and operating properly. The reason there is you have to think of your site as kind of like a library, if the library follows the Dewey Decimal System or some kind of process then it’s easy for a user to walk in to the library and immediately find a single book and they can even go into the book and grab out of the table of contents a single page, that’s going to tell them the info they’re looking for out of millions of books and millions of bits of data. So the technical structure of your site gives Google the ability to zero in on exactly what your site’s about, and so getting the technical structure right, having it optimized is kind of a foundational core element of SEO. But after that you then need to make sure that you’ve got all the appropriate content on the site to answer your target customers questions and concerns, just like again if I were to go to a library to look up a piece of information about something what am I trying to look for, what am I looking up, you don’t want to be just a general library about everything, you also don’t want to be just to have a few pieces of content about something, you want to answer questions that maybe people ask in the sales process or questions that people have about your product or industry, how to’s and guides and things like that and offer up those pieces of content to begin a relationship with your audience. After you’ve got some good content on the site and it’s structured in a way that people can find it, then you want to start building authority to those pages, one good way to do that is to go ahead and run some social media campaigns just to bring some awareness to your content, that’ll get other sites and other businesses out there looking at your content, reading it and it may turn into business right away. But regardless that’s going to help people see it that may be influential and may be able to link back to your content, you’re also going to want to reach out to other sites and blogs and media publications in your industry and let them know you’ve got some unique information that you want to share with them and see if they’d be willing to link to it, to share with their audience and things like that. So by building links back to your content you’re actually helping Google see that other people think that your content is relevant for those keywords as well, and ultimately that’s what helps your content rank well in Google and starts bringing you traffic. So that’s kind of a layman’s term version of the whole thing, but I hope that gives you a good understanding and a good idea of how SEO works. Tony: Jeremiah that’s really interesting and I’ve I got a point here and we hear this a lot in SEO, get links, get people to throw your links. Well that’s a really interesting question Jeremiah, are there any methods where we could employ that aren’t really done to get people to link up to us, I mean you just don’t put on social media hey put my link up on your page, do you have any tips or advice on that? Jeremiah: Yes, so when it comes to building links just like so many other things we definitely espouse quality over quantity, I can’t tell you how many clients that I’ve worked with and shown tremendous results after only building 30 to 50 links for them and you look at their backlink profile and their top competition has five, ten thousand links but we built 30 to 50 links for them and they’re now outranking their competitor. So when it comes to links it does not necessarily need to be quantity, of course quantity can help especially if you have a ton of good links but quality is really the key there and if you all have quality the thousand links just not going to help you. Now links aren’t the only thing, they are an important thing and they’re probably one of the hardest things, but a lot of people talk about spends 20% of your time producing content and 80% of your time promoting it. I like that model, I think it works really well, we found that when we produce a really good quality piece of content it’s much easier to promote. Other people would say we’ll spend 80% of your time producing the content and 20% your time promoting it, I appreciate the heart and where they’re coming from there, what they mean is produce a really good stellar piece of content then people will link to it. And while that’s true a heck of a lot more people and better people will link to it if you promote it properly, like you can’t just throw promotion out and so yes we’re pretty serious about our process of let’s build a good content plan and then let’s go build links to it and the process that we use for giving links by the way is nothing I think too confusing or secret sauce or anything like that it’s just digital PR. We reach out to a bunch of different contributors at different publications, we get their names, their info, their email addresses, their social media accounts and we hit them up and we say hey you link to this site over here that was totally relevant to that but there’s a piece of content over here that talks more about what you’re writing about right now and I thought that this might be useful for you to link to. And a lot of instances they look to us and they say yes that’s useful and they’ll link it up, in other instances they may come back and we may have a conversation and then in some instances they just straight-up ignore it and so you have to be ready to kind of do the hard business, the cold calling kind of effect of link building but once you start doing it and you’ve got good content to work from and the site looks and loads properly and it’s clean, you’d be surprised it actually works pretty well and just a handful of links sometimes can help you rank really well for a keyword. Tony: I like that and all the years I’ve done marketing I haven’t thought of, you gave me a little aha moment here a little light bulb went off, very cool. How can we find, is there a simple methodology to find companies that may enjoy the relevancy of some of the content that we are producing, it’s a big world out there how could we narrow it down to who may want this sort of information? Jeremiah: Sure, so first things first it helps to look at your competition and do a backlink assessment of them and see where are they actually already getting links, like I’m kind of just using some random numbers here but let’s say that the best competitor in your industry is a 10 but you’re like 4 right, well then let’s look at the 10 and let’s also look at some 8s and some 9’s and see what their backlink profile looks like and what kind of sites are linking to them and there are tools out there that’ll help you do that, Moz has a great tool for that, we use Ahrefs that’s one that we like a lot. But you look at these backlink profiles and it gives you an idea of who is linking in that industry, and if you know what to look for then we’re able to kind of break out those patterns, then we start looking into the sites and crawling for contact data and stuff like that, and trying to get in touch with these sites, and that’s one way to do it there are many other ways. Another famous way I think works really well is to work with a company that provides PR companies with databases of contacts in various industries and just sort by your industry, so there’s a company out there called Scission they’re a kind of a PR software company and they offer up this database and this tool for managing outreach, but also the database for a lot of contacts and different publications and blogs and stuff like that. Now keep in mind though they don’t have everyone’s information, they just have some people’s information so you’re going to have to attack it from a bunch of different angles to do the prospecting and find the link prospects and then actually start the cold outreach process of trying to warm up the relationship and then begin building links. The more time you put into this though I promise if you start building relationships early on, then people start getting used to hearing from you every couple months or whatever every few weeks and eventually they will warm up and link to you, and that’s where the long haul effects of SEO really take place where you’ve been building relationships with people in this industry for so long, that you’ve asked for links that nobody else could get and you’ve got connections now in sites that nobody else could easily get and you look fantastic to Google, so that’s just something to keep in mind. Tony: I like that Jeremiah thank you so much for sharing this, there’s some gold in what you just said, a lot of gold so I ask those that are in business or marketing or looking to do their own business and all you entrepreneurs out there, play this again there is serious gold, I totally understand what Jeremiah saying and it’s like oh my goodness I could boost my business up so much by just doing some of that work, so play this again check that out very cool, I really thank you for sharing that Jeremiah I like that a lot. Jeremiah: Yes not a problem. AD: This is the Tony DUrso show, just ahead the chat continues with Jeremiah Smith and Dave Woodward, Simple Tiger and Funnel Hacker, but first it’s time for us to take a short break, see you back here in just a moment. AD: Change starts here; change starts now, join us The Voice America Influencers Channel. AD: You hear that majority of businesses fail don’t be a statistic, get my book free The Vision Map: Beat the odds for your Business Success. Get it free at TonyDUrso.com/vision and set up your own successful vision map TonyDUrso.com/vision. AD: Hear the story, be motivated, be inspired join us today Voice America Influencers. Intro: You’re listening to the Tony DUrso show with key influencers, we’d love to hear from you via email, be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@TonyDUrso.com, now back to Tony and his guests. Tony: All right we’re back on the Tony DUrso show, today’s show is with Jeremiah Smith and Dave Woodward, Simple Tiger and Funnel Hacker, all right and now back to the chat with our guests. Tony: And one last thing I want to check and discuss is the world is changing it continues to do, we now have artificial intelligence out there doing things, taking care of things, we think we’re talking to people on the computers, we’re talking to AI same on phones, how does this affect what we’re trying to do in growing our business and searches and the competition if we to call it that way to get on the first page of Google, what’s this whole playing field look like now? Jeremiah: Yes so in regards to artificial intelligence in the scope of search specifically, I think good businesses, people who are running an honest, genuine operation or are actively interested in and investing in quality marketing and understanding marketing and want to build their companies and build their online presence they have nothing to worry about, you’re going to be fine just continue. The ones who do have something to worry about are the ones that are using spammy tactics, the ones who are building kind of flashed in the frying-pan websites and turn-and-burn companies or sites and they’re just trying to quickly make a fast buck, search is not going to be really good to them because artificial intelligence is being used now to kind of monitor what user metrics are doing. So when users come in to Google and they search for something and they go clicking around on all the results and then they go into all those other sites that Google has served up and they’re clicking around with those sites and they come back to Google, Google’s monitoring that entire experience and they’re trying to get an idea of was that a quality experience for this user that we sent this website or not and they have a lot of metrics in that that help them decide yes or no, and through that artificially intelligent engine they’re able to start making deductions about different sites and domains based on these user engagement metrics and how people are engaging. So for example if somebody comes into your site and load up the homepage It’ll save through a google search and immediately it takes a long time to load and the content they see is too generic, it doesn’t make any sense and they don’t really like the look and feel of it and they just go ahead and hit back or they close out of the tab, that’s called a bounce they didn’t interact, they didn’t like what they saw they just left right away they didn’t really engage, that’s going to hurt you in the long run, Google’s going to monitor that and that’s going to hurt how your site performs. It needs to load quickly, it needs to look good, it needs to communicate clearly and accurately to what your searcher is there to find, and that’s how ultimately you’re going to end up I mean at some level that’s going to impact your rankings. Now it’s actually higher than links in terms of ranking factor, so it’s really critical that you’re paying attention to your user engagement and what kind of experience you’re creating for your users. Tony: I appreciate that and is there a particular type of company that we could reach out to and hire to take a look at the functionality of our site, that it’s optimized well, that it won’t bounce as much, where would we go if we wanted to actually check that out and take a look into that further? Jeremiah: Yes, so Google Analytics will help you obviously figure out all the data and everything and then you can look at some benchmarks, Google Analytics does offer some benchmark reporting, I wouldn’t trust that entirely though, I would start looking into your business model. So let’s say for example if you’re an agency like us then you’re in the lead gen space so I would look into lead gen and see what other sites bounce rates look like in regards to lead gen and I’ll Google that. There’s a company called Statista and they put out all kinds of very interesting statistical data that user generated data, so anytime somebody does some intense research or surveys and the data runs through Statista they index it and they make it really searchable and findable. So I’d look through there and I’ll try to find out some benchmarks around what a good bounce rate is for you and things like that, but you can also honestly benchmarks and best practices are great, but nothing beats good old-fashioned testing. If you can just set up some A-B tests or just play with some different tools that you’ve read about and heard improve bounce rate, that’s a great idea. I think making your site load faster, if your site loads slower than two seconds right now, if it takes longer than two seconds to load try to speed it up and if you can get it down to less than two seconds to load to where I can see something and start reading and interacting with your site, you’re probably going to notice an improvement in your bounce rate right away, so that’s a good place to start. Tony: I appreciate that, thank you very much for all those tips Jeremiah love it. This is Jeremiah Smith, we talked about SEO for entrepreneurs, businesses and SAAS companies, his website is SimpleTiger.com, I don’t need to spell that we all know what a Simple Tiger is. Jeremiah thank you so much this was great and I actually learned some great stuff, I’m looking forward to apply some of this right away, thank you I really appreciate it. Jeremiah: Yes, not a problem thanks for having me, I’ve enjoyed it. Tony: And now we have Dave Woodward join us. Dave is the chief revenue and business development officer of Clickfunnels and the host of the weekly Clickfunnels podcast Funnel Hacker radio, welcome to the show Dave, it’s so great to have you on. Dave: I’m so excited to be here Tony, can’t wait. Tony: Dave I’ve had my fun with Clickfunnels, I’ve interviewed Russell Brunson as you know, I’ve had a lot of fun talking to people about Clickfunnels and there’s a lot of questions, we have a lot of entrepreneurs and small to mid-sized businesses and even corporate execs in the audience, but first things first I’d love to know how did it all start for you Dave, what’s your back story? Dave: For me my back story actually I started off in the financial services years and years ago and was accepted in medical school and decided last week before I supposed to go I didn’t want to do that and dove right in and started an employee benefits company and eventually sold that and got heavily involved in marketing and marketing’s really been my passion. We started Clickfunnels about four years ago and have had a ton of fun, got over 68,000 customers right now and I love helping other entrepreneurs have success, that’s kind of my passion. Tony: Very appreciated to have you on, and I like to just jump in now and talk about some Clickfunnel stuff here, probably the first thing is can you compare and describe, define what’s the difference between let’s say a traditional sales funnel and Clickfunnel sales funnel or our Clickfunnel’s funnel. Dave: Sure, I think more so than just funnels I think probably the biggest thing is to really kind of take a look at websites vs. funnels if you’re okay with that? Tony: Absolutely please. Dave: We talk a lot these days about the death of the website and as I’ve talked with a lot of small and middle sized business owners so many of them are so excited about getting their websites up and running and their website is pretty much just a big billboard, and unfortunately it really doesn’t have the call to action, it’s not specific enough and as you know Tony these days people their attention span online is so short that if they hit your website and they don’t know exactly where to go they’re typically going to leave. And the idea behind click funnels really started with this whole concept as you mentioned as far as having an online sales funnel and the only difference between an online sales funnel is in the funnels you’ll have on any other type of product or service you might see either offline or online, the idea behind a funnel is to really help a person make the logical best decision for them, as well as for the business owner. And so if you take a look, I think probably the easiest way of best analogy, it’s kind of like if you were to go to McDonald’s, if you’re to go through McDonald’s and the drive-through, if you buy a burger there that burger may cost two dollars and 25 cents it may actually cost McDonald’s a buck 90 just to get you to the drive-through, and so their profits is super small. But what we find is the very next thing they ask for is, do you want coke and fries with that and that’s their upsell, that’s their one-time offer for lack of a better term and what we find there’s where all the profit is really made. And we look at Clickfunnels the exact same way where what the idea behind the funnel is to help bring someone into your universe, provide them an offer and then allow them the opportunity of getting any additional things that they might feel best serve them and that’s the whole idea behind Clickfunnels and what a sales funnel is. Tony: Okay I understand that, and I was watching a video of Russell’s not too long ago and it was like when he started off he was spending twenty or thirty I forget which on Google AdWords or something like that, and by having that upsell he was actually able to leverage that high cost of getting the person into the door and actually make something out of it, because he was actually losing if he didn’t have an upsell. Dave: You’re exactly right, one of the things we found is right now the two metrics we really pay attention to whenever we’re looking at a funnel is what’s the cost to acquire customer and then what is your average card value or what’s at the end of that transaction, when they check out what’s that average value. And if we can get to the point where our average cost to acquire the customer is the same as our average cart value, we refer to that as a breakeven funnel and for us that’s where we start, that’s the whole goal if we can just break even on the front end we know that typically we’re going to get anywhere from twelve to seventeen times as much on the back end, and so we really are able to get our customers for free and that’s the idea behind using a sales funnel. Tony: Okay, and we probably have, I’m sure not even probably I know we have a number of owners out here that have a website business owners, entrepreneurs they don’t have a funnel, they don’t have the sales funnel or the Clickfunnel but they may think they have a funnel, what can we give them, what knowledge, what information to help them improve what they’re doing and actually perhaps come and give a try out on Clickfunnels? Dave: What we found right now there’s about 10 different verticals or niches that currently are using our platform, of our 68,000 customers they kind of fall into those 10 different verticals. And so when you go to Clickfunnels as soon as you hit the landing page very first thing you’re going to see there is a quick little survey, helping you identify which one of those 10 you are and then we actually give you three pre-built funnels for whatever vertical or niche that you’re in, so that you only have to worry about it so it’s already done there for you. And all you have to do then is just change the headline, change the pictures, change a couple words and you literally can have it up and running within a couple of hours. Tony: Very impressive and I’ve used this, I’ve gone into it, it is so easy to change banners, text, wording I’m impressed I really am, and I do quite a bit with the Clickfunnels right now, and I really love how easy it is and I have not found anything that even compares to it if there probably is. Dave: You know Tony one of the things we find for a lot of our customers is they kind of get stuck, not knowing exactly what to start with. And we find that for a lot of our customers the most important thing is really the offer, what is the thing that’s going to be of the greatest value to your client and unfortunately what we find for a lot of people is they always hold the very best things back, afraid that they’re going to give that away and they won’t have anything else to give. Tony: This is the Tony DUrso show, just the head the chat continues with Dave Woodward, but first it’s time for us to take a short break, see you back here in just a moment. AD: We don’t follow, we lead join us The Voice America Influencers Channel. AD: Hey guys, how would you like to be a best-selling author or sell a product or service in high-volume, these are just some examples of what you can do with Clickfunnels. Get everything you need to market, sell and deliver your products and services online, without having to rely on a tech team and I just got you a free account, check it out at TonyDUrso.com/click try it completely free and build your first funnel. You get a simple drag-and-drop web page editor, you can quickly build sales funnels that convert, there’s a smart shopping cart with one-click upsells, there’s email and Facebook marketing automation, and in fact you get everything organized in one simple dashboard. Try it completely for free at TonyDUrso.com/click, TonyDUrso.com/click and here’s to your amazing success. AD: This is the Voice America Influencers channels, be inspired. Intro: You’re listening to the Tony DUrso show with key influencers, we’d love to hear from you via email, be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@TonyDUrso.com, now back to Tony and his guests. Tony: All right we’re back on the Tony DUrso show; this segment of today’s show is with Dave Woodward. Dave is the host a funnel hacker radio which gives actionable advice and incredible insights and secrets of the world’s best internet marketers, he really gets into what it takes to build a sustainable monthly income doing what you love and I’ve seen the results, this is the real deal and now back to the chat with Dave. Dave: I can tell you when we start looking at offers, whenever you’re looking at an offer the most important thing is actually to give your very best thing out there first and let them taste it, let them consume it. You probably have noticed Tony, all your work online and working with other clients and stuff the hardest thing to do is actually get that first dollar online, and so for us what we found is the best way to get that first dollar to build that relationship of trust that you need with anybody who you’re going to be working with these days, is you’ve got to give a ton of value don’t hold anything back. Right now we currently have two of Russell’s books, Expert Secrets and Dot Com Secrets that are literally years’ worth of his experience and growth and business life that we literally just give away for free; all they have to do is cover the shipping and handling. And so that’s the very first offer and so when a person gets that they’re like oh my gosh I cannot believe the value that I’ve received, if I got this kind of value for just have to pay for the shipping and handling I can’t imagine, what type of a value could I get if I was to go a little bit further and see what else this this person has in their funnel or in their business or whatever their next offer is. And so the whole idea we find whenever you’re looking at a funnel is to focus first of all on the offer, you’ve got to make sure that that offer is literally irresistible that there’s no one else out there that would even consider not taking it. And so I would recommend anybody who’s ever looking to create a funnel, make sure that when you’re looking at your offer that it’s the very best thing you could ever create and start with that first. Tony: Thank you that makes great sense, and I’ve heard that before always give your best stuff and I see various authors give away their book or give away the download. Dave: You know Tony I totally agree with you and it’s interesting, it doesn’t have to be just a book if you don’t mind let me kind of explain a little bit how the next step in the funnel works, is that okay? Tony: I would love to hear more, thank you. Dave: So what we find for a lot of people is they’ll give that away but it stops right there and then all of a sudden they’re sitting and they are going oh my gosh I’m spending all this money giving away my content but I’m not making anything, I don’t know how to even break even. So what we found is in a funnel it’s not uncommon where you will see things referred to as a one-time upsell or down sale, and I don’t know if you remember years ago Go-Daddy I was buying domains for them and it literally seemed to take like 30 minutes to check out because they had so many things you had to click on as far as no I don’t want this, no I don’t want this, no I don’t want this and it almost became this burdensome checkout process. So what we have found is that for most people the most we typically will do is two and what we found is probably the easiest thing to do, is actually on the order form itself is to add what we refer to as an order form bump, and this can be something that’s super low cost for you to actually produce, it’s typically given in a digital format and yet the value is extremely high. If you wanted it can actually be your audiobook and it could be a $37 value or basically they pay $37 and they actually get your audiobook for that price, so they’re buying the book but they’re like what I really want is I want the audio. And so now all of a sudden you’ll see that your average curve value has nearly tripled just because of the that one little order form bump, and then from there the next thing we see is to go into what we refer to as a one-time offer, where literally the only time they get it is while they’re in the middle of your funnel, and in the middle of that funnel and the key to making sure when you start taking a look at order form bumps or one-time offers, the problem most people make, the biggest mistake is they keep giving the same type of content just re-bundled or repackage in a different way. What we find for most people is once they scratch that itch, even though they haven’t received the book or they haven’t received the audio yet, they feel like they already have, so they want to go on to the next thing. And so for us, take for example for Russell’s books recently one of things we’ve been offering is now they know that they need a funnel, well the very next thing they’re going to need is traffic and so we have a traffic secrets course that gives them $297 but gives them a course on exactly how they can start driving traffic, even though they don’t have their funnel yet they feel like they already do because they’ve already scratched that itch, they’ve already purchased the book. And so the secret to making a funnel that actually works is to make sure that whenever you’re looking at whatever that your next offer is going to be, it has to be what’s the next thing that person would need, what’s the next logical product or service that whoever’s in your funnel would want next. The only time that doesn’t work and it’s kind of a weird thing and that’s in supplements, for some reason we’ve test this so many times Tony and what we found is the best order form bump or the best one-time offers actually instead one bottle it’s three bottles or six bottles and for some reason even though they haven’t gotten the bottle they want more of it, the whole psychology behind it’s kind of baffling to me but we have tested this thing so many times and the only thing that actually where you give them more of the same is in the supplement industry. Tony: That’s very interesting Dave, and I like the fact that you’re bringing up other types of examples besides a book, I understand they’re supplements. What are some other great successful type of products or categories that would be very good for a sales funnel? Dave: Oh my gosh I’ll tell you a really bizarre weird one, and that is we actually have a gentleman who lives up in the state of Washington and he actually offers Bigfoot Expeditions. Tony: Wow. Dave: It’s literally so his first offer to get people in is basically a map of places that he’s seen Bigfoot and so that’s the first thing where you got to say oh what he’s been out, he’s been hunting for Bigfoot that’s where he saw him last or it’s another one I’ve seen that he’s offered is, here’s the history of Bigfoot and different stories that people said about Bigfoot and so they’ll find that, but then he basically takes them through his funnel and what you end up on is hey do you want a schedule to go on a Bigfoot expedition to help track down Bigfoot with me and in about a three month period of time he’s sold over eighteen thousand dollars in Bigfoot expeditions. Tony: That’s amazing, who would have thought. Dave: It’s fascinating to me. So there’s a lot of people these days who are doing e-commerce things like Amazon, Shopify stores or trying to sell physical products online, and for a lot of those Amazon sellers we’re seeing a lot of them moving over towards Clickfunnels for a couple of different reasons, one is they want to maintain control of the customer data and unfortunately Amazon they don’t have that, they can put a product on there and they can get fulfilled but they don’t have the opportunity of maintaining control of their client, more importantly they don’t have the opportunity of being involved in the next up sales. So what we’ve seen for a lot of people is they’ll start off on Amazon and then they’ll take that Amazon product and create a funnel and one of the key secrets to anybody who’s selling on Amazon is you want to make sure that you get really good at bundles, what I mean by that is too often people are in a situation where they’re trying to compare apples to apples when they’re shopping and it all of a sudden becomes a price comparison, and any time you’re going to mean a price comparison that is a race to the bottom and I hate to see people try to compete on price because you always lose that battle. The people who win the game there is by creating a bundle where in fact just recently I bought a camera and it was one of those little I just wanted to point, shoot, quick simple easy camera. And yet I went online there was tons of these Sony cameras that everyone had the same thing, but then all of a sudden there was someone who for just a little bit more had a bundle and in that bundle it included a camera case, it included a stick basically to hold the camera up, it also included a lens cleaning kit and I’m no longer comparing apples to apples this is an apples to orange comparison where now I’m much more enticed by this bundle opportunity and so I spent the extra fifty bucks just to get the bundle because the perceived value was so much higher. And so we see the idea as far as using a bundle inside of your offer to separate yourself from your competitions worked extremely well. Tony: Very interesting points Dave and when you were talking about Amazon, when I see products and I do a lot of shopping on there as well, you’re always pitch someone else’s products hey you may like this and what’s really interesting from the point of view of being the vendor, the one that’s selling this is if people are now being asked to compare your product with others because this is Amazon site they want to make the money, they want to sell that person that’s there, so it’s kind of like their funnel instead of your funnel in a way. Dave: Oh you’re exactly right, in fact one of the things I’ve seen Tony that has worked really well is again you’ve been on Amazon probably as much as I have these days and you’ll see as soon as a person buy something, the very next thing is well people who bought this also bought this and we’ve seen a lot of people who actually use that as part of their bundle, where Amazon’s telling them what’s the very next thing a person wants that’s what they want or you if you’re building your funnel you sell the first thing and your OTO or your one-time offer is exactly what Amazon’s got more research than anybody else out there these days. And so I would recommend if you’re going to sell a product online, a physical product take a look at Amazon and what they’re recommending next and that’s the next logical thing a person wants. Tony: Very good point and there are a couple that do well but in a little different way it’s either Home Shopping Network or QVC or maybe it’s both of them, but they bundle as well so I’ll buy products there that individually would actually be more if I bought all of the items, but with the bundle I get far more at a less cost believe it or not so that’s also really good about that in the bundling aspect. Dave: I love seeing just human behavior and that to me is what marketing sales is all about, it’s fun for me I even take a look at a lot of the chiropractors or dentist or orthodontist these days who are trying to find some way of getting a person into a retail store, into their physical location and we’ve seen this in the past where a lot of people will use chiropractors free exams or x-rays or crack your back or whatever it might be and for dentists it might be the teeth white cleaning kit and those things work as well online as they do even offline and so we’ll see a lot of people that can actually take that. And for a local business it’s so easy to target clients locally from Facebook or other ad sources where you can basically offer that same thing without having to incur the mailing cost or anything else and that way you know you can glue a target if you’re looking orthodontics you can basically I need people in this demographic, in this range, with kids these ages and you just get laser focused and then you can have the same type of off that you would be sending them in the mail, now you actually send it to them online and they’re seeing it, they come right into your funnel, they can actually schedule inside a Clickfunnels they can schedule the actual appointment and it really streamlines the whole system. And every dentist or chiropractor I’ve ever met has their own funnel as soon as you get in their office, it’s an upsell after upsell after upsell whether trying to get you on to a continuity type of system with a chiropractor, where you need to come back on a regular basis or even dentist these days are smart with their scheduling your six-month deployment comes next. So we see funnels everywhere and it’s just a matter of starting to take that same mindset and use that inside Clickfunnels. Tony: Very clever, and Dave are you saying that chiropractors, dentists and so forth can actually use the sales funnel as well, an online sales funnel as you were just saying, I had never thought of that. Dave: Oh yes we’re seeing it happen a ton, it’s been interesting. I have a friend here in Bossier where I live right now and he started off using Clickfunnels and he’s a chiropractor and now he’s teaching other chiropractors about all the success he had using funnels and so again it’s a crazy exciting thing. Funnels to me are kind of like an unfair advantage over your competition, you’ll find especially if you’re a retail shop or a professional service you’re so far ahead of your competition if you start using funnels these days that I mean literally you can grow your business so fast. Tony: I love it, and I love Clickfunnels that by the way I have a special URL for everyone, find out more in then get a free trial check it out, take it for a test drive go to TonyDUrso.com/click check it out and I know you’re going to have a lot of fun. And now I want to jump into one other thing, you have Funnel Hacker radio; does this give us advice, tips, guidance and so forth on how to build a good sales funnel? Dave: I appreciate you mention that, actually we do I’ve had the opportunity of interviewing over 250, nowhere near your episodes, but 250 people who have actually been what we refer to as a some of our two comma club award winners meaning they’ve made over a million dollar in a sales funnel, and so I’ve had the opportunity to interview quite a few of them and they go through their funnel and talk about what they did, what worked, what didn’t work and for us it’s all about tweaking things and we typically refer to it as a funnel audible, just like a quarterback will have to call the audible same thing happens in your funnel. You’re looking at it, there are certain things you’ve got to test and you got to change and the nice thing about ClickFunnels is you can do that on the fly very quickly. Tony: I like that and by the way I’m actually going to interview someone who’s won the two comma club at Clickfunnels and I’m looking forward to someone who’s actually yes ladies and gentleman made a million dollars on the sales funnel it’s real. Dave let’s just go open it up, I’ve heard incredible success stories, I know them in our audiences like what’s this funnel thing, let’s kind of give people a little idea of what sums of the successes are from this? Dave: Oh my gosh we literally have successes in every segment you could think of, I actually just had one of our friends up in Canada, he was a high school teacher, he met his wife at a Christian summer camp and he kept in contact with the camp and everything else and the director of the camp was get looking to retire and we were just going to close the camp down because they just couldn’t afford to keep it going and he’s like no, no you can’t do that this is my whole family, my legacy started there and the guy said well how can you help us? And so he had no idea of what he was going to do and he heard about this online marketing type of stuff and so he got a Clickfunnels account, went through the training that’s free inside of the program and what he ended up doing was actually taking over, he quit his job as a high school teacher. He’s now the executive director of a Christian summer camp and he won the most prestigious nonprofit award in Canada for helping other nonprofits be able to fill their camps and help do fundraising and literally within nine months get done over a million dollars for his summer camp to help fill a summer camps. And it was just fascinating to me to see here’s this high school teacher who had no experience in business, he just had a passion, he was excited about what he did and he wanted to save his summer camp and he was able to do that, so he’s been a fun one. So right now we have over three hundred and seventy two people who have done over a million dollars in our funnel which is called our two comma club, we have 26 people who have done over 10 million inside of a sales funnel and they’re part of our eight figure club, one of those is Brandon and Kaylin Poulin, who they have a company called Lady Boss and it’s been fascinated for us to see. I remember four years ago when they came to one of our very first funnel hacking live events and they were like talking with Russell and said we’re going to be your number one success story and the time they’re in their mid-20s and they had just left a network marketing business in the health and fitness thing and lost all their money, didn’t know what to do. Her story was Kaylin had been one of the fastest women to get her pro card as a bodybuilder, she’d lost 80 pounds and document her whole process in which she just became passionate about fitness and so she started this program on teaching other women how to overcome all the struggle of dieting and everything else, and they’ve now created that program their very first. It was really kind of fun because their first three months they’ve lost everything, they were basically sleeping on the floor and in the little air mattress in their apartment and once they’re in New Mexico and wanted to go to Tennessee for Christmas to see her family they didn’t have any money. And so they focused and went all in on Clickfunnels and put together her program and launched it just a week before Christmas, did ten thousand dollars and they were able to not only go to Nashville but they asked also were able to have Christmas and it was really kind of a fun experience to see their excitement. Since then they’ve gone out, they now have a supplement line, they had a clothing line and they’re doing about four to five million a month right now, so it’s been kind of crazy. Tony: Wow, that is absolutely intense just love it, I love seeing success like this and it’s all because of Clickfunnels. For people that want to hear the Funnel Hacker radio, how do they access that please? Dave: Yes, they can just go to Funnelhacker.com or just on iTunes or any other places Podcast are posted. Dave: Absolutely impressive, I think in this short little time we’ve learned just about everything, we’ve gotten learned about successes, we’ve learned about funnels. I mean a Bigfoot expedition is on a funnel, this is like crazy stuff, is there anything else that would spark your interest of all I could put this on a funnel, I guess if you’re an expert in something you could write a little eBook on something, give that free and then perhaps do a course or an audio and turn your knowledge and experience into a funnel, that’s probably a no-brainer right there. Dave: Click Funnels is for anybody who’s either trying to sell something online or to generate a lead online, and we see a lot of people who are using it just for lead generation, got a couple different franchises that are using Clickfunnels to provide leads for their franchisees, and it’s been fascinating to see it in the fitness space. I’ve seen it actually in another one of our eight figure award winners, they help sell assisted living centers and programs basically to franchisees who want to get involved in that business and they did over forty million last year it was just crazy and I never would have thought that would be something they would be selling on Clickfunnels, but they’re doing it. Tony: Dave one other thing Clickfunnels is not just all about making money though, there’s a huge network of entrepreneurs that are very successfully using it, I do want to touch upon that Clickfunnels is very strong in the nonprofit and doing a lot of work, could you tell us about that? Dave: You know Tony I really appreciate your asking about this, this is one of things I’m most passionate about, I’m a huge believer and the only people who will literally change the world are entrepreneurs, Government’s not going to change it, it’s going to be small businesses and entrepreneurs who do that. And I think that’s why I’m so excited about seeing the success not of Clickfunnels but of our Clickfunnels customers and their customers, what happens is for every funnel that gets published on Clickfunnels platform we donate $1 to village impact, and I was actually out with them last summer in Africa and we’re building schools for children in Africa and right now we’ve built twelve different schools. It was so fascinating I saw like a baby when I was out there I just couldn’t believe how happy these people were when they had nothing, I mean they had nothing at all and I remember the dirty water they were drinking from and I’m like I would be complaining and upset these kids were so happy. And it wasn’t this entitled mentality at all we were there painting some of the classrooms and they were all chipping in and we were putting down some gravel rock for a path and they were bringing over bucket after bucket after bucket, and I loved just be in there and participated in being a part of that, so village impact is one of them. Another one that we’ve spent a lot of time with recently actually just did a documentary for them is a company called Operation Underground Railroad, that saves children from sex slavery and from organ harvesting and kidnapping and everything else. Our mission now has become one of to liberate and educate and that’s really been our primary focus as far as yes we believe in the entrepreneur dream as far as having a ton of financial success, but the key is to take that and use that to benefit and bless the lives of other people and fortunately we’ve been able to do that through village impact and Operation Underground Railroad. Tony: Very heartwarming Dave, what you’re doing is phenomenal, you’re not just selling a great product and service you’re actually giving back to the community and that is just wonderful, I just wish you continued much incredible success at that. And if our audience, if anyone wants to get a hold of you of course they can go to TonyDUrso.com/click get a free trial, test drive it but if they have anything for you, can they go to perhaps FunnelHackerRadio.com to reach out to you or how? Dave: That’d be fantastic sure, both those work great. Dave: Great. Well once again Dave Woodward, Funnel Hacker extraordinaire, a very impressive story. Dave Woodward, Funnel Hacker extraordinaire and yes again he’s from Clickfunnels and you can get the free trial at TonyDUrso.com/click. And for my amazing audience thanks so much for listening, remember success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds, be righteous join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso show. Outro: We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s edition of the Tony DUrso show with his key influencers, be sure to tune in again next Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, 1 p.m. Pacific time on The Voice America Influencers Channel.