Jassen Bowman: Right. Now, when it comes to doing lead generation and doing this list building, and you’ve already alluded to this… but, is it something that needs to be just a big money suck out of your business to be doing this? Or is there, are there ways that you can offset that cost?
James Orr: I think you know the answer to this, and the answer is that…
Jassen Bowman: Well, of course.
James Orr: …you can definitely offset the cost. You can either significantly reduce how much it costs you in order to acquire a client, you can sometimes do all of your client acquisition for free if you put a little bit more work into it. And then, if you really take it to an extreme, we were actually generating relatively large six figure revenue streams by doing the lead generation up front. And I was doing lead generation for 1,200 different industries on a very large scale. And we were generating major revenue just from the lead generation process, without doing anything with the leads themselves. So, just something to consider there. You can definitely make money by doing that. Do you want me to cover the three ways that you can actually get paid to do lead generation?
Jassen Bowman: Oh, yes. Especially the first one. Ha ha ha.
James Orr: Okay.
Jassen Bowman: I’m a big fan of your first one.
James Orr: Okay. And you’ve used this, right?
Jassen Bowman: Oh, yeah.
James Orr: Okay, so here are the three ways to get paid doing lead generation for your carpet cleaning business. Number one is: you can actually use Google AdSense on your website in order to generate money from the ads that appear on there. And, for those people that don’t know what AdSense is, I’ll cover it really quickly. Google’s program where you go on there and buy advertising is called Google AdWords.
Jassen Bowman: Right.
James Orr: If when you go on there in order to buy ads, you decide you want to put your ads up on other people’s websites, Google has a program where website owners can come on there and say, “I’m willing to put ads on my website if you’re willing to pay me part of what that person is paying in order to do the advertising.” And so, Google has a program called AdSense, where you can put ads on your websites and earn a little bit of money every time someone clicks on that ad. And so, that’s…
Jassen Bowman: Okay.
James Orr: …what we’re talking about by putting ads on your website. Now, one of the things that always comes up when we talk about this is, “Putting ads on my website? Why would I have somebody who I’ve paid a lot of money, or invested a lot of time to come to my website to actually click off my website because they’re clicking on an ad?” or “Doesn’t it cheapen my website look by having these ads on my website? Doesn’t it take away from me being a professional and focusing on my core business?” And the answer to those questions is: yeah.
It’s a concern to have people coming to your website and clicking away on ads. And yes, there are some people that believe that it kind of cheapens your online presence, and kind of makes you look a little cheesy with your website when you have ads on there. What I would suggest you do is look at the lead generation business as a separate business from your regular carpet cleaning business. Maybe even two different websites.
One you do lead generation with, you use a lot of your free methods in order to get people there, you can generate some money by having people go to that website and clicking on the ads. And then you reinvest that back into your business to generate even more revenue and more leads for your business. Now, you said something interesting a couple weeks ago when we were talking about what it actually means when somebody clicks on an ad off of your website. Do you want to share that?
Jassen Bowman: Right. Yeah, and again, other people may have a different opinion, but this is my perspective. If somebody visits your website and they see an ad that is of more interest to them than the content on your website, then personally, I’m okay with them clicking on that and giving me a little bit of the, of AdSense revenue. Because that indicates to me that they are not as highly of a qualified prospect for my product or service as I want hanging around anyway.
So, by them clicking off, they are opting out, in my mind, of being a prospect. Whereas the people that stick around, the people that bookmark my site, the people that come back to my site, the people that subscribe to my Twitter updates, my RSS feed, my email list, those people, those are the ones I want sticking around because they are self-selecting to be more qualified prospects. And so, the other folks that aren’t going to self-select to be better qualified prospects, I’d rather that, if they’re going to leave anyway, I’d rather they click on the AdSense ad, and so that I can get some revenue from that.
James Orr: Okay.
Jassen Bowman: That’s my perspective-
James Orr: If they’re they’re going to leave anyway, you might as well have them leave by clicking on the ad.
Jassen Bowman: Mm hmm. Exactly.
James Orr: Okay. So, that’s one way in order to generate revenue. And if you’re concerned about how much it’s going to be. You’re not, you’re probably not going to earn six figures by having AdSense ads on your one carpet cleaner website.
Jassen Bowman: Right.
James Orr: Will it help offset the cost of your lead generation? Yep. Will it make it so that your lead generation is free? Yeah, you can actually set it up so that, I think that, with a little bit of work, you can make enough money coming back in to fund writing articles or to fund some small marketing campaigns in order to do that. And then, of course, if you really tweak it and work hard, you probably can make a small profit on what it cost you in order to do that, to have AdSense ads on there.
Jassen Bowman: Now, you just talked about-
James Orr: But that’s just one-
Jassen Bowman: Go ahead.
James Orr: I was going to say, you go ahead.
Jassen Bowman: Oh. You’re talking about, when you’re saying the offsetting the article writing cost, you’re talking about offsetting some of the cost of outsourcing the stuff that we’ll talk about here later on, right?
James Orr: Sure, absolutely. If you’re going to pay someone to write articles for you, you can make it up…
Jassen Bowman: Okay.
James Orr: …with AdSense in order to pay for people to write more articles.
Jassen Bowman: Oh! Okay, I got you. Interesting.
James Orr: Yeah. So, it kind of becomes a positive feedback cycle, in that you’re getting some money coming in from people getting there. And then you’re reinvesting that money into more traffic, and you’re reinvesting that money into more traffic, and then you get more people clicking on ads, and then you get more traffic. And it’s kind of this good, positive feedback cycle.
Jassen Bowman: I like it.
James Orr: All right, so let’s talk about–
Jassen Bowman: So what’s the next way to get paid for doing lead generation?
James Orr: Yeah. There’s two other ways to do it. Number one is selling information products as a lead generation strategy. So, for instance, you could actually put together an audio or a video and talk about, you know, the ways in order to deal with your carpets, how to properly care and clean them. If they’re going to do it themselves, where they can’t do the heavy duty cleaning that you’re going to do, but you could teach them how to do the maintenance and minor cleaning in that type of product. Somebody who is interested in buying a product like that, even if it’s only $5, or $10, or $15, they are becoming good prospects for you to continue to market to for when they do need a major cleaning done.
Jassen Bowman: Right.
James Orr: So, you could recoup your marketing cost by selling those audio programs of those video programs for some nominal cost, $10 or $15, and then do your lead generation that way.
Jassen Bowman: Okay
James Orr: So, that’s one way to do it. The other way is recommending other products and services once a prospect is on your client list. So, once you have somebody who has signed up to receive information from you, maybe it’s your big list of people on your newsletter. If you’re able to sell them recommend products or services, they’re going to go out there and buy on their own, and you happen to collect some type of commission or referral fee for doing so, well that could fund your lead generation cost. If you’re out there and you’re recommending related products, you know, a certain vacuum or a certain type of thing, and if they go and order it on your website, they get a really good deal. But then you also get a commission on something like that. Couldn’t that be beneficial?
Jassen Bowman: Yes.
James Orr: So, those are the three ways in order to get paid doing lead generation. Number one in my opinion is AdSense or the other types of advertising programs. AdSense isn’t the only one, it’s the largest one. It’s the one I’ve used. And then the other ones are selling information products, and also recommending products and services. Online, they call those affiliate programs or referral programs.
Jassen Bowman: Right. That’s some good stuff right there and you have been, like you already said, you’ve been doing that for, what, a decade plus. So, it’s effective, it works, and you can actually profit from doing your lead generation. Which, even though I’ve done it based on your instruction, it’s still one of those things that almost seems like magic. Ha ha ha ha.
James Orr: Yeah. I mean, you put your ads on there, you get traffic to your website, there’s money coming in. And sometimes when you first get started, like your coach actually talks about this… one of your internet marketing coaches talks about this… most people only get pennies doing this. They’re not doing this right, they’re making a couple dollars here and there a day and not doing well. And, if you really do it right, and you focus on it, you can make significant money doing it.
Until my next post,
James
Let’s talk about something very briefly that I could probably teach a whole day seminar just on, and that is ways to get paid for lead generation. Now I’m going to give you the top three ways of getting paid for lead generation, and I’ll talk to you very briefly about how to implement these strategies. But if you can reduce the costs of your lead generation, or completely eliminate it, or even make a profit when you’re doing lead generation, it becomes much more fun and your business grows that much faster. Because if you’re willing to spend, let’s call it $500 per month, on marketing and now you’re able to get $2,000 per month of marketing because you’re really recouping $1,500 per month of your marketing expense so that you really net $500 out, that’s a much different model than if you only have $500 out and you have no recouping of your marketing costs. So, you could be four times as effective, in that example, if you went and did that. So let’s talk about some different ways to get paid.
We talked a lot about Google Adsense during this webinar. Google Adsense is the way for you to get paid when you place ads on your website and people end up clicking on them. It’s like your way of sharing in on what Google collects on pay-per-click advertising that it sells through its Google Adwords program. So you have your ads up on your website and someone clicks on those ads. Google may pay you $.50, $1, whatever it is, in order to have those ads show up on your site when someone clicks on them. That is a way that you can make money. I have made significant amounts of money with Google Adsense on my websites. And you’re going to go out there and you’re going to find stuff on the Internet, people complaining they’re only making a couple of dollars a day with Google Adsense. There’s people that are going to tell you that putting their ads on your website is a bad idea, you’re not going to make any money with it, it’s a waste of time, it’s going to ruin your credibility, and all sorts of stuff like that, and I beg to differ. I have been there, I have actually made significant money with Adsense, six figures in multiple businesses. So just realize that you want to focus on making lead generation a part of your business, but if you decide you want to make some money while you’re doing lead generation, I encourage you to look at that as a model. And it may not be the best idea to put Google Adsense on your main website, but you can definitely create lead generation websites that are almost like a mini business inside of a business, where you’re generating leads and you’re just wholesaling them to yourself. But those lead generation websites have Adsense on them, where you’re generating revenue from the lead generation websites to compensate you for the effort and money and time you’re putting in to get people to those lead generation sites. Then any leads you generate, that’s great, it’s all bonus that goes back into your main business and you make money from that as well. So, that’s one way to do getting paid for lead generation.
The second way is selling information products as lead generation tools. So, if you go creating information products where you’re teaching somebody the five ways in order to sell your house for $10,000 more by doing some basic fix-up things, couldn’t you sell that product for $10, $15, $20, make an audio CD and sell it for $15? Wouldn’t someone by willing to pay at least $20 for a CD that can teach them how to make $10,000 more when they’re selling their home? Sure, and so if you walk through the house and you actually give them really good information about things they need to actually do in their house, in order to make their house sell for more money or maybe sell faster, then they’ll be happy to pay the $20. And then a certain percentage of those people are not going to want to do it all themselves, and if you have a couple of casual calls to action in there about how they can contact you and you’ll do it all for them, especially if you offer some type of creative financing plan where you get paid maybe a certain amount up-front or nothing up-front or only when they actually sell the house, and you put a mechanics lien on there (whatever you do to protect yourself), but that it another way to actually increase risk-reversal and make it an irresistible offer to them by doing that. And could you sell that information product as a lead generation tool and build up a nice revenue stream just be selling those, to cover the cost of any of your marketing? Absolutely.
And so maybe you put up that little tiny classified ad in the Thrifty Nickel or American Classifieds or Penny Saver, or whatever your throw-away weekly newspaper is. Go ahead and do that, maybe your cost for your ad is $7 per week, and you end up selling a couple of CDs a month from that. It more than covers the cost in order to do that lead generation for you, and gets you prospects and starts building up that for you. And you can then take the money and reinvest it in some other marketing. But you can do that several times with a variety of products and keep moving forward with that too. So that’s another way to get paid for lead generation. It’s another one I’ve used, not nearly to the scale that I’ve used Google Adsense, but I’ve definitely used it productively in order to generate leads and keep my costs down, and actually make some money.
Alright, so recommended products and services to your list: Once you have that nice big list of 100, 200, 500, 1,000 people on there of people that know, like, and trust you, occasionally from time to time you’re going to come across a product or service that you really think is of great value, and that you would otherwise recommend to people without compensation. Now if they happen to have the ability for you to get compensated for recommending that, then why not sign up for their affiliate program or their referral program and also recommend that product or service to your list? For example, we have an affiliate program. If somebody were to sign up for our affiliate program, I think we pay out 40% of the sale to the person that referred the person. So if you we have a $100 course – for instance, if you have come across guys that are real estate investors, this applies directly to you as a handyman. You come across people that are real estate investors, and they want information about how to go and market to buy houses, how to sell houses, to rent them more efficiently, how to raise money for deals, the creative finance, all of those types of things. If you have real estate investors and real estate investors are on your list, you could sign up for our affiliate program. And then in your newsletter, you could just mention that you just listened to a course about marketing your business, it was a really great course, and this guy has some information for real estate investors on how to raise money and do deals. And you could put a link in there with your affiliate code, it credits to your account whenever any of those real estate investors come through your link to our site and they end up buying a course.
Now, if we’re selling a $100 course and you make $40 by referring someone to a course that’s really good quality, that you would buy yourself, that you would recommend to your friends, then couldn’t you use that money in order to reinvest in your business and do additional lead generation? Absolutely. And so that’s a great way to for you to make money doing lead generation as well. You basically take the time to go build you list of people in your local market, like real estate investors or real estate agents, or even first-time home buyers, or things like that. You can go build your list and then recommend things that you think are good quality for them, using affiliate programs and referral links. Just send them back to your website, you have a description of what’s included and on your website is a link leading from your site, using your affiliate code, to another website where if they make a purchase, and it’s totally up to them whether they make a purchase, but if they do then you can get paid for referring them through you.
So those are three ways to do lead generation, and I’m a big believer in trying to make money up-front on lead generation, and then really make your profit on the back end once you’ve built your list up. So, that is a huge part of my business model. It has been for many years, and I’ve done it several times with relatively big numbers in businesses where I was doing lead generation. So, I strongly recommend it.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn exactly how to generate leads and make money for your handyman business at the same time? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
We just talked about this in a previous section and we kind of combined AdWords and AdSense. AdWords is when you’re going and you’re paying money to Google in order to have your ads appear on their website, on their search engine results, and on the publisher network. The AdSense part of it though, is when you own a website, you can actually put those ads up on your site, and when people click on those ads, you can collect a piece.
Now this was one of the primary ways that I was generating money when we were doing lead generation nationwide. So I told you before, when I first started this particular webinar, that I had started at least two national lead generation businesses where we were doing significant money generating leads. Even before we sold the leads, even before we worked the leads, any type of prospect coming in, as we were building that list, we were generating revenue. And one of the major ways that we were generating revenue was with Google AdSense.
And so we would have these ads on our website and on the website people would come on the site, a certain percentage of them would go and sign up for our mailing list, or request information, or get a special report, or some other way of getting them into our lead funnel, and a certain percentage of them would not do that. And so what we decided to do is, we were doing some testing, and we decided to put up ads on the websites so that if they decided they were not interested in requesting information, they did have an opportunity to leave the site. And they had an opportunity to leave the site by clicking on an ad that may have been a better match for what they were looking for. And what it turned out to be, is that this turned out to be significant revenue across all the different lead generation things that we were doing. Now you could use it on a much smaller scale, if you wanted to, by placing Google AdSense ads on your website that you’re doing lead generation from. Now I’ll give you kind of some pros and cons here.
So, some people will argue, and I’m not saying that they’re wrong, because I think that they’re actually right, but some people would argue that having ads on your website kind of dilutes your credibility to a certain degree, because you’re not actually operating your business without marketing, without advertising on it. You have advertisers on your site. So if somebody sees that you’re running a handyman website, and you’re soliciting people for business, the fact that you have some ads on your website can, in a lot of peoples’ minds, limit your credibility and how serious they are about your business if you put up ads on there. So it’s something to really thing about before you put up ads on your website, as to whether or not the money you would earn from AdSense would be enough to significantly offset the marketing you’re doing in order to generate prospects and leads, or if you wanted to keep the ads off altogether and increase that credibility on your site.
What I might suggest you try, we had this discussion before about whether or not to create multiple websites, multiple domain names, and kind of multiple website hosting accounts – one of the things you could do is you could have your main site, and on your main site you have absolutely no AdSense ads at all. That really is for when somebody is already requested information, they’re already your client, you’re sending out an email to them, you’re sending out your newsletter to them. Whatever it is, you’re getting them to come back to that main site, and the main site has no advertising whatsoever.
But then in your mind, and not that you need to go form separate businesses, but in your mind, maybe you have sub-business within your main business and the sub-business is a lead generation business. And let’s say that business has two, three, four, five different lead generation websites. And the lead generation websites are basically a little bit of content with some ads on it, and you’re going to market to very specific niches to get people to come to that website, and those are lead generation. Once they become a lead generation website, you can have ads on them and you can recoup some of the marketing cost you may spend in order to get traffic there. Now it may just offset it a little bit, it may fully cover your marketing costs, or, like with our model, we were able to generate ad revenue such that it was actually a profit center for us. So it depends on how you want to structure your business. You could have like a little mini – you could almost think of yourself as having your own little lead generation company where you’re generating leads at wholesale cost for yourself. Not for everybody. Not necessarily recommended. But it is one way to do it where you don’t have to have ads on your own website and you can also get all the benefits of having some AdSense revenue coming in to offset that advertising revenue.
So we talked about AdWords versus AdSense, talked about AdSense on your website, or other lead generation websites, and Google AdSense is one of the ways that you can get paid to generate leads. So it is one of three ways, which I’ll talk about later, of getting paid when you’re doing lead generation. Which makes lead generation much more fun and profitable to do. So you may want to consider doing that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Using Google AdSense on your handyman business website can help lower the cost of your leads. Or, if you work hard at it can completely eliminate the cost of your lead generation efforts. If you really take the time to tweak your marketing and website, it may even be able to provide you a net positive return on your marketing expense even before you convert a single prospect to a handyman client? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
The first one we’re going to talk about, and we mentioned it before when we talked about pay-per-click, is Google AdWords. What Google AdWords is, is the ability for you to buy advertising space on Google’s website for search and also as part of the AdSense or publishers network, where you can have your ads showing up on other people’s websites. So, I have an image on the screen here, and you can see on the image that the areas highlighted in yellow are where Google AdWords ads would appear. Those are the ads where you may be willing to pay Google $.50 for someone to click on your ad and be taken directly to your website on a certain page you designate. It may also be where you can have your ads show up on there for some pay-per-impression, and those are very rare circumstances, most of the stuff on AdWords is pay-per-click.
I was doing a lot of AdSense, which we’re going to talk about here in a minute, and AdSense is the other half of AdWords. AdWords is when you have a business owner come in, and they’re willing to pay Google a certain amount of money in order to have somebody give them the opportunity to click on their ad and go to their website. AdSense is when a publisher of a website has a website and they’re willing to show ads on their site, where if the person clicks on the ad, they are taken away from their website. Google makes a certain amount of money for doing that, whether it’s $.50 or $1, whatever they’re charging for their click, and the publisher of the website gets a part of what Google is collecting. So if Google is collecting $1 for its click on the website, the publisher may get a couple cents on there, $.30, $.50, somewhere around there. It’s not actually disclosed the exact percentage, but then that person actually gets that amount and Google gets the other part of it. And so there’s kind of a sharing.
So AdWords is the part where you go on there and buy the ads, and the AdSense part is the other side. And we’ll talk about AdSense here in a moment. However, the other nice thing that AdWords has is the ability to go do some keyword research. So if you’re considering buying some marketing on Google one of the nice features that AdWords offers is the ability for you to type in a keyword, or a website address, or a group of keywords, and then Google will come back and say, “You picked these keywords. However, realize too that these other keywords may be of interest to you as well,” which can give you different ways or thoughts about how to market your handyman business, because they may – you may go in there and type in “kitchen remodeling” and they may come back and say “upgrading your kitchen” or “redoing countertops,” and they may suggest a whole slew of other keywords that you could then write additional content, additional articles on, or buy those keywords from Google. That’s what their initial interpretation was, of providing that data. But you can also use it as a guide to see what you’d want to write about and what you’d want to provide. So it becomes a really great research tool for you when you’re trying to determine what words to use on your website, and things of that nature, and they’ve got that as a free service on their site.
Now AdWords is one of the only things that we’re going to talk about today from Google where you’re going to be paying money to use it. Almost all the other services we’re going to talk about are free, but AdWords is the only one where you pay money to have your advertising put on their site and their publisher’s website, via AdSense, in order to get some marketing out there. So let’s move onto the next one.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using Google AdWords in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
