729 – A Powerful Alternative to the Retainer Agency Model

Podcast: Download (Duration: 32:10 — 29.6MB)

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Dan Wardrope

Podcast highlights:

02:44 – Dan’s offer that converts
04:08 – The success rate and reducing risk
05:28 – When clients share an industry…
06:38 – The software that does the job
07:31 – Where the paid traffic boost comes from
08:08 – The role that SEO plays
09:59 – What some clients will do to get the leads
10:47 – The business model of the future?
12:25 – Fave traffic sources that are delivering
14:58 – What value exactly does an agency add?
17:14 – Why the customers are staying
20:42 – The sort of person that succeeds
23:21 – Look forward to this case study
24:35 – In quick summary…
25:46 – A couple of things we didn’t cover
28:05 – The industries you may want to look into

Build the business model that works for you with James’s help

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 729. We’ll be talking about an alternative way to set up your paid traffic agency. And for that, I’ve brought along my friend, Dan Wardrope. Welcome to the call.

Dan: Hey, James, how are you?

James: Good, thank you. You’re over there in the UK. And you’re spending a bit of family time at the moment at home, as many others around the world. So it’s a great opportunity to corner you and get you on your very first podcast as a guest, which is such a privilege for us.

Dan: Yeah, thanks, James. I’ve been approached a few times, but it hasn’t been a big part of my kind of marketing plan. I tend to just kind of put my head down and keep pretty much to myself. So when the opportunity came up, and you invited me, I was like, Yeah, let’s do it. Why not? I’ve known you for a while, James, so if you’re going to pop my cherry, I think you’re the guy to do it.

James: Well, thank you. And I love what you do. I’ve had the opportunity to work with you for quite some time. So I’ve seen the effectiveness of what you’re doing.

Firstly, we’ve been working together, you as an agency, me looking behind the scenes, talking with you about what’s going on there. And then I’ve seen you expand out and start teaching other people how to do what you’re doing. And you’re teaching people over at a website called Flexxable.com. And now people can actually get in behind the scenes, see what you’ve been doing to turn the whole regular sort of agency model on its ear, and set up for themselves. And one of the interesting things is, as times have become a little bit volatile in the market, your business model is actually proving to be a winner. It’s really taking off. And I’d love you to just explain in layman’s terms, what is your business model? And how does that differ to the traditional agency model where they get paid a retainer and sometimes a percentage of ad spend or a combo of those things? How’s yours different?

Dan’s offer that converts

Dan: Yeah, so our offer is pretty simple. I remember one of the first times I spoke to you, James, you said to me, “Do you have an offer that converts?” And, you know, that kind of rang true, and I didn’t really understand it at the time. But I kind of stumbled across this model where we sell leads to our clients, nothing else. So there’s no monthly retainer, there’s no percentage of ad spend, there’s no contract tie-in. There’s nothing like that. All we do is we speak to the clients and we agree how many leads they want, at a price they are willing to pay to get an ROI, and then the difference between what we generate the leads for and what we sell them for is our gross profit margin for our agency. So it’s incredibly simple. And it seems to have worked. And I stumbled across that kind of model about four years ago. And it’s changed my life, to be honest with you.

James: So in simple terms, if a business is up and running and they’re good at what they do, they usually have a feel for what it costs them to get a customer. And they’ve probably been trying to do it their own marketing in-house, or they get an agency to do it. And they have to try and sort of figure it out. It’s difficult for them actually, isn’t it? They got to figure out, in the traditional model, they got to think, well, we’re paying X amount to our agency per month, but how many leads are they getting for that? And what does it actually work out per customer? And in your case, you just roll up and say, Hey, what’s your number? And how many do you want? And they say, Well, if you can get us leads for this amount, we’ll take as many as we could get, or at least X number, and you say, let’s do it.

The success rate and reducing risk

And so the risk is really now on you. They have a very clear expectation, they know what the numbers are in advance, and then the job is for you to see if you can get those leads for less. Now, do you always get the leads for less, or do you sometimes end up paying more for the leads than what you can sell them for?

Dan: It’s very rare we pay more. I think it’s happened a couple of times. And we usually mitigate that risk by what we’re doing, what we call a hybrid model. When we start off, say, we’re entering a new vertical and we don’t know how much it’s going to cost us to get a lead and we don’t know what the quality of those leads are going to be like, we usually speak to the client and say, listen, we’ve got a lot of experience in other industries. We’re looking to go into a new industry, your industry, and we’re looking to kind of grandfather you on a really good deal. So what we’ll do is we’ll set up all of your funnels. And what we’ll do is we’ll charge you some 10K of advertising spend or whatever that amount is. And we will get paid on a commission basis when you convert some leads during this initial phase.

And after that phase, what we’ll do is we’ll have a conversation and figure out what your costs were, what our costs were. And then we’ll agree on a cost per lead moving forward. So it’s very rare when we enter a new industry, or any of my students enter a new industry, that they lose money out of the gate, because we try and mitigate that risk until things are settled down and we know our numbers.

When clients share an industry…

James: Right. And once you know the numbers, you’ve got a recipe that you can just scale out there. How do you deal with, when it comes to clients, having people in the same industry? Do you farm out leads to more than one client? Do you have multiple clients in the same industry? Or do you have territories or something like that in effect?

Dan: So what we do, usually when we start, we work on a one-to-one basis with a client, right? And we generate leads just for them. But once we get the numbers, obviously, you know, there’s competitors in their industry. And the next step for us and our students is to go and build a brand for that particular industry. So you remember the rank and rent model, James? Rank and rent? Where people would build an organic website in a particular industry and then rank it in Google and then sell the leads to different buyers within that space. That’s essentially what we do once we get our numbers dialed in. So we’ll build a brand, ie, Joe Bloggs Life Insurance, or whatever that could be. And then we generate traffic, point it to that website or funnel that sits behind that website, and then distribute the leads to multiple clients within that industry. Depending on criteria, depending on location or whatever, and their software, and quiz funnels and stuff like that, that sit behind the scenes, that allow us to do that.

The software that does the job

James: Do you have any favorite softwares?

Dan: Yeah, we were a big fan of Leads Hook, Nik Thakorlal, who you’ve met, James, I know you had dinner a few months back. He’s got a great software called Leads Hook, which we use for all of our distribution – not distribution, more kind of segmentation. And we also use software called Get CAKE, which sits behind the funnels, that does a lot of the distribution.

James: Nice. And where do you like to get the traffic from? Like, you mentioned that podcasts aren’t a part of your traffic mix. In fact, before this, you’ve never even been teaching people what you’re doing, you know, letting people underneath the hood there. You were just doing this, and very successful. And you still do that. I just want to point that out. You’re actually a practitioner, and an educator. That’s what I like about what you’re doing.

Dan: Thanks, James.

James: I’m in a similar boat, you know? Like, I actually built businesses and then taught people about it, and simultaneously, I’m involved in businesses and education. So you’re educating people about it.

Dan: Yes.

Where the paid traffic boost comes from

James: So when it comes to the traffic, you have told us so far that you’re building websites and ranking those. You’re obviously very good at paid traffic, because this is a paid scale thing. Like, you want the leads, you can ramp it up with paid traffic. Do you have any favorite traffic sources? And have you seen some changes in those platforms?

Dan: Yeah, well, first of all, our model is not really to rank websites. I was just using that as an example of what people were doing maybe 10 years ago. So we’ve kind of supercharged that by building our brands and our websites and then pushing, you’re right, paid traffic to these brands.

James: But just on that, isn’t a website that’s designed well to rank also likely to have lower traffic costs?

The role that SEO plays

Dan: Oh yeah, it’s amazing. If you’ve got SEO skills – which I don’t – and combine them with paid traffic, then you’re onto a real winner. Because then you can build an asset that’s got real salable value, as opposed to a brand that’s just having just paid traffic pointed towards it, which does have value but not as much as a website that’s generating free leads, there’s no doubt about that.

James: We should definitely compare notes. Because, you know, what my team has been doing is building assets that have pretty much all SEO traffic and branded traffic, and we run advertising on that and build leads from that without spending any money on paid traffic. I’m sure when we do run paid traffic, it’s going to be cheaper, and it’s going to be more effective than some of our competitors who are just trying to run it to a standard landing page.

Dan: Yep. I mean, we’ve tried this. I think, SilverCircle, where I get mentored by you, James, you did mention that we should, we should be looking at SEO. And I did hire a content person for about six months for one of our brands. And we did a lot of blog content and it was ranking, but it’s just one of those things where it’s a slow burner. And I was kind of like, you know, let’s ramp it up a bit faster, with a bit more paid traffic rather than the SEO stuff. But we do have students that have SEO skills that are combining both models, and it’s working well for them.

James: And I also credited you in a recent episode with Chris Von Wilpert, which was very popular, partly because he’s promoting the heck out of it using his own strategies, which, you know, proof in the pudding there. You’ve been making some of his style of content posts which don’t rely on waiting for SEO, and they just rely on being really relevant and getting a lot of people to share them and promoting the content very well. So I guess what we’re talking about here is, if you can combine a trifecta of fantastic content that also people want to share with paid traffic on top, you’re now going to get this supercharged traffic source. And what you’re doing is simply selling the byproduct of that traffic to the person who wants to bid for it.

What some clients will do to get the leads

Do you ever get customers who like, try and outbid their competitor to buy the leads from you, as like, the preferred supplier of leads?

Dan: Yeah, we get that all the time. We’re often asked if we can be exclusive. And I’ve only ever done it once, and this still, you know, amazes me to to the day they paid us a lump sum of a lot of money in advance just to be an inclusive seller of our leads. So, it’s still incredible to me that some of these clients are willing to do that. And it was, you know, a nice surprise considering I’d been one of those traditional agency guys that, you know, when you first met me, James, was struggling with local dentists and, and plastic surgeons as clients. And I was on the agency hamster wheel, really struggling. And when you get off of deals like that, it kind of really hits home that, you know, the model that we’re using now, and that we’re kind of promoting, is pretty special, in my opinion.

The business model of the future?

James: I’ve seen other people in the industry recently, sort of identifying this model as the future. And I would say, in part, they’ve been influenced by your coming out of this business model, like showing people what’s going on. It’s kind of undeniable. It’s no coincidence. You know, one of our other friends has been smashing it with this kind of business model in the video space. So if you can take all the risk away from the customer and say, “Hey, here’s a simple scenario. You pay me X per lead, and I’ll go into all the legwork. I’ll set up the funnel and the traffic and I’ll drive the traffic, and we’ll learn how to do that, and check the data and the analytics and the reporting, and we’ll do the conversions and the creatives.” There’s a lot of stuff that goes behind the scenes to make it work, although you’ve already done the legwork.

What I love about you is you’re just the most amazing student. You just hunt down an expert, you learn like a sponge from them, and you execute rapidly, and you’ve condensed it down into the simplest possible format. So now what you’ve been able to do is go out to the market and say, Hey, here’s the business model I’ve found to be far more effective than the old one. This is what we do. Here’s our templates. This is where we get traffic. This is how we do it. And how’s this been working for your students? Because it’s one thing for Dan to be able to do it, but do your students get results?

Dan: Of course they do. Yeah. I mean, like anything, there’s people that come into programs that don’t take action and don’t have the resilience and struggle – like, there’s no doubt about that. You know that, James. But there are people that are doing exceptionally well. I mean, we’re talking, one guy said he was doing six figures a week, a couple of weeks ago, in lead gen, and there’s people that have transitioned from the old way to the new way very successfully.

Fave traffic sources that are delivering

James: Nice. So what are your favorite traffic sources right now?

Dan: Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, right at this point in time, with everything that’s going on with the virus, it’s Facebook. It’s just so, so super, super cheap. And it’s always made up a big proportion of our media spend as an agency, but we have been transitioning away from it within the last 12 months, because of the problems with accounts going down, and the usual struggle that most people are experiencing with Facebook that everyone knows about. So we’ve been spending a lot of time on YouTube, figuring out how to do the TrueView kind of pre-roll videos, and driving traffic to our funnels using YouTube ads. And that’s been very successful for us. And the quality of the leads coming off YouTube is actually superior than Facebook, because you have literally a 30, 60-second video explaining the product or service before they hit the websites. So it’s very powerful and very scalable and less risky. And there’s less fluctuation in your cost per leads as well.

James: Nice.

Dan: And Twitter, Twitter’s been doing well for us as well.

James: I was going to ask. I know you were messing around with it. And when I say that, I mean that in a nice way. You’re always innovating. You’re like, Okay, this one’s working, but where else can we get traffic? We can’t just rely on this, we need to have protection, especially if you have the duty of teaching others. You want to be responsible to give them a model that actually works. So Twitter’s been fun for you.

Dan: Yup.

James: And I wonder, do you use the GDN?

Dan: Yes, yep. So we’ve got some Display Network campaigns running. I mean, going back to what I said earlier, if you have an offer that converts, then it doesn’t really matter where you get the traffic from. If the offer is strong enough and you put that offer in front of people, no matter what traffic network, it’s going to work. And as we see all of these traffic networks starting to bring in CPA bidding – so, YouTube, GDN, generally the Google AdWords network – you can actually tell people how much you want the leads for. You can tell the advertising network how much you want the leads for, and they’ll go out and in most cases, get the leads for that price. Which means it’s very easy to be able to add your margin on top of that and sell it for, you know, two times what you’re generating the leads for. It just seems like, you know, the writing’s on the wall with all of their smart bidding and their artificial intelligence that is kind of coming forward with the AdWords network as well. So yeah, we’re very excited about what we can do over there.

James: It sounds almost too simple. So you get a company out there pays X, they say, “We will pay you X for the lead,” and then you tell the platform, “I will pay X divided by two for the lead…”

Dan: Yeah.

What value exactly does an agency add?

James: “…Get me leads for that,” and they deliver it and you pocket the difference. Now the question sort of comes up, what’s stopping the end user from doing this themselves? Like, where’s the value add for you?

Dan: Well, as you were saying before, there’s a lot of work that goes behind the scenes, right? So, figuring out what that offer is, and, and being able to communicate it via the creative in a way that resonates, is obviously pretty key. And that takes some skill and some understanding of the market. So, you know, that’s really important. And also, the funnels that we build, a lot of them are kind of survey and quiz funnels, which have segmentation and decision trees that sit behind the funnels, that are actually extremely difficult to copy, or you can’t reverse engineer them because you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. So, you know, for example, a big problem that a lot of agencies have is that they’re trying to send every lead to their client, but what they don’t realize is that, you know, maybe 40 percent of those leads are just never going to be a good fit for the client, so they’re never going to convert them.

So, you know, for example, I always use car finance as an example – there might be some leads that are coming in to a funnel where the person has got bad credit and is looking for a banger and doesn’t have a car to trade in. Right? Whereas there’s going to be other leads that are homeowners that are looking to buy a $200,000 Mercedes. And you know, they’re completely different leads. So if you have a lead gen brand, you’re able to ask these questions within the survey funnel, and you’re able to sell the leads to different buyers based on criteria. And that’s where the real value is here, and the gold, because it means you’re not sending all the leads to one client, and you’re actually adding value to multiple clients and being able to sell the leads for different prices and monetize every bit of traffic that comes in.

James: Well, I can see a few things going on there. Firstly, it’s about relevancy and segmentation. So you’re using copywriting skills, using creative skills, you’re thinking about the right pathway. That must also increase the value of the leads. So you’ll probably hear some people who try this in a crude form – their customer will complain, “Oh, these leads don’t convert,” you know? “I don’t want to pay this for these leads.” But you’re delivering them the most relevant, segmented leads that almost convert themselves, probably.

Dan: Yeah.

James: Once they get handled at the other end.

Dan: Yup.

Why the customers are staying

James: Now, I’m going to ask you in a minute, I’m sure there’s things you can do, once you hand over the leads, to insure your customers there. But the other thing is interesting. In the first scenario, the old scenario where the customer just pays an agency and the agency set up all their stuff, and they’re just sending the traffic to the customer’s site, it’s very easy for that customer to say, Well, we’ve tried that agency. Let’s try a different agency. It’s to unhook the agency and then hook another one up. It must be incredibly hard for them to just replace you.

Dan: Yeah. A lot of our clients have been with us for a very long time, because when you know how much they’re willing to pay for a customer, and you can deliver the customer for that amount, it’s just a matter of turning on the taps, because the leads are the lifeblood of any business. That’s another one of my sayings. Once you can get them volume, once it stacks from a financial perspective and an ROI perspective, then it’s just a matter of scaling. And why would they go anywhere else? It just doesn’t make sense. They have a lead gen that’s supplying their business and they’re happy as Larry, they can go off and focus on optimizing their sales call center or the other parts of their business where they’re more suited.

James: And you’ve become quite good friends with some of these partners, where you’ve gone deeper into their business and helped them beyond just delivering them the leads, because you want the leads to convert. What sort of things can you do to help your customer be successful and add more value?

Dan: Well, that is, it’s really important, right? So, building a relationship with your clients is honestly one of the most important things that I’ve been focusing on forever, right? I always go up and travel and see my clients and buy them a beer and have a chat and figure out what their problems are. And usually, if they are having problems, it all comes down to quality.

So there’s things that you can look at when there’s quality issues. For example, what time are the leads being delivered? A lot of people might be wanting to run campaigns 24/7, because their cost per lead is cheaper, but it could be that the leads that are delivered outside working hours are not being answered quick enough, which therefore is affecting the quality. It could be that the contact rates of the leads are bad. So, the way you can mitigate that is, do some work on the thank you page to tell the consumer who’s going to contact them, where it’s coming from, the number it’s coming from. You can give them a reference number on the thank you page, which obviously makes it look more professional. You can audit their calls to see what their processes are like. Are they calling quickly? Are they not calling quickly? Do they have email marketing? Do they have text message marketing?

Most of the time, these clients haven’t really got brilliant processes in place, they’re kind of stuck five to 10 years behind the curve. Us as marketers, we know how to validate phone numbers, we know how to use ScheduleOnce or OneTab or whatever, to be able to schedule appointments straight into calendars. James, I don’t know if you know, we use Bonjoro within my program, which is another great app to let our prospects know that I’ve seen their application, and I record a little quick personal message to them, to be able to let them know that I value their time and we’re going to have a call with them, and if they’ve got any questions, they can contact me afterwards.

And a lot of us, as marketers, we know all these amazing tools out there – ActiveCampaign, for example, and email segmentation based off actions people have taken. Clients don’t understand this. So when my students come back to me and say, “The client is complaining about the quality of the leads,” my answer is always, “Have you spoken to them? Have you audited their systems? Have you helped them? Have you dug into why things aren’t looking particularly good?” And usually, there’s always an answer. And, you know, 90 percent of the time, it’s not the leads, it’s the client with their systems and processes that sit behind the scenes.

The sort of person that succeeds

James: Yeah, that’s perfect. So I’m just wondering now, what kind of person goes well at this business model? Because you’ve seen a few students come in and some of them will go better than others.

Dan: Yep.

James: What skill sets are suitable, what do they have to bring to the table to marry up with your training?

Dan: Well, there’s the usual skills that you need as a resilient entrepreneur, right? James, you’ve been coaching me for many years, and you’ve seen the way that I can sometimes spike and go up and down with my emotional levels, and worry and concern.

James: Well, yeah, it’s like, you’re incredibly empathetic; you’ve got such a high EQ. And you’re also, like, so involved. You just get so involved with the thing. That’s what makes you brilliant, because you just get more involved than most people, and you’re like, so hands on.

Dan: Yup.

James: And that’s why it can buck you around a bit like a bucking bronco at times, and it’s good to have someone calm on the sidelines, just saying it’s alright. You’ll be right in a minute.

Dan: Yeah. And I’ve got a lot better, right? But the thing is, my point is that I have these ups and downs, but I also have the resilience to be able to push through and I always will bounce back. So when you talk about the characteristics of people that do well in my program, they’re the ones that have this resilience and the ability to take the knocks. Because let’s face it, nothing’s guaranteed. This is not a golden ticket. This is hard work, like any business. So that’s the most important thing I look for.

But, you know, experience and what industries people are in, there’s SEOs that come into the program that do well. There’s people that are running Facebook ads on behalf of clients already, there’s people that are running Google ads for clients already. And there’s relative, as far as newbies go, there are people that come in and do well, but they’re going to have to have that high level of resilience, because the learning curve’s fairly steep.

But to generalize, I think the people that do the best have got experience running ads, do know how to build a funnel or drive traffic to a landing page, do know how to talk to clients and build relationships with them. And sometimes, you know, if they have a foot in the door, they are doing well in an industry already, but don’t know how to scale that to the next level and sell leads to – you know, I’m talking hundreds of leads per day rather than 20 leads per week type thing – they’re the guys that do the best in my program.

James: Okay, so what I’m hearing is it’s really suited to someone who’s got some intermediate to advanced level abilities already. It’s just going to turn them into a machine. And if you are a startup or looking for something to just start from scratch, it’s got some sort of pretty heavy concepts that you’d have to be very realistic about how difficult it would be. This is like, advanced level, and knowing that going in, that makes it fair for everyone.

Dan: Yeah.

Look forward to this case study

James: And you’re teaching people this stuff over at Flexxable.com. You’ve done some case studies, you might want to just talk about how that works. I know that was part of your sort of move towards sharing this idea, because you have to educate people who have been told that retainer agency’s the way to go. You’ve had to re-educate the market and show them this new way of doing business. The case studies take them through some of that.

Dan: Yeah, so we’ve got a case study, which I’ll send you over after this call, James.

James: Yeah, we’ll link it up in the show notes, and we’ll publish this at Episode 729. We’ll also bundle together some of the key points you’ve made into a nice handy PDF, but we’ll link out to your website into the case studies that you’re about to mention.

Dan: Yeah. So, the case study just runs through in a little bit more detail about how it works. But what we’ve been talking about today, James, it just goes into a little bit more detail about how you get the traffic, how you build the funnels, how you get the clients, how to choose the industries, and just a bit more of a granular picture of how pay per lead works.

James: Yeah, cool. All right. Now, knowing your model so well and, like, you and I speak so often it’s very hard to sort of realize, you know, that everyone else in the world doesn’t know everything that we know and that we’re talking about. So I’m just wondering what else I should have asked you as we wrap.

In quick summary…

While you think about that, I’m just going to summarize. In short, Dan is teaching people a different model to the standard retainer fee model. So clients can just come to him and say, I’d like to pay X, and I’d like X number of leads for my business. And Dan says, Yes, we’re on the job. Using his skills, and his methodology, he goes out and uses various traffic platforms and his own websites to generate those leads. Often, he’s able to tell the platform how much to pay, so that he’s guaranteed a profit. He then invoices the customer, the customer pays, they’re very happy. They stay in a long-term relationship. He helps them grow their business and people are basically crawling over broken glass to be able to get leads from Dan, instead of him being the next-in-line agency to have another crack at the account sending un-targeted leads to the customer’s website. He’s controlling the whole process, making it relevant, segmenting. He’s now teaching this stuff over this website.

I’ve worked with Dan for a long time now, and I’ve seen the success that has happened for his agency, and what’s going on with his customers who are buying the courses and going through the methodology. And in a general sense, it really suits intermediate to advanced level skills. This is not a beginner course. With that in mind, Dan, what should I have asked you? What other things have we missed in this equation?

A couple of things we didn’t cover

Dan: Yep. Okay, as you were just explaining all that, I thought of a few things. The first thing is, James, you probably know me, I have like zero technical skills. I don’t have the ability to build websites or anything like that, funnily enough. We use Unbounce to build our brands and our websites, and the templates for, you know, what we do within our agency is obviously in our program. So that’s basically a drag and drop website builder. So it’s very easy to be able to build these brands, using software that doesn’t require you to figure out WordPress or anything like that. It’s just a nice, easy solution. And also, the funnels that sit behind it are built on Unbounce combined with the likes of Leads Hook, which is very easy and user-friendly as well.

The second thing is, you’re talking about invoicing and how you get paid. This is quite a common question. So we actually invoice on Fridays for the following week. So if the client asks us to deliver 100 leads at 100 bucks or 100 pounds per lead, then we’ll invoice for that 10K, and then we’ll generate the leads the following week, usually for around 50 percent of the price that we sell them for. And the difference is our profit margin. The client gets an ROI on those leads, then we email them on Friday and say, Would you like to go again? And then we invoice again. It’s as simple as that.

James: Nice. You know, obviously, it’s important to have a regular billing frequency when you’re talking about such large amounts.

Dan: Yep.

James: And really, there’s no rulebook on the terms, you can create your own. I’ve had similar discussions with our other friend who does this with video stuff predominantly, you know, getting the invoicing right so that your cash flow is in check, that you’re never really holding a huge risk. You can even bill in advance, and all that sort of stuff.

Dan: Yup.

James: So you’ve managed to tune this model, and that’s what I love about it. And also, I appreciate this is your first podcast sharing it and really sort of getting it out there. And there’s some big clues and nuggets here. No matter what online business you have, you can definitely take some of these lessons. One of the big lessons I’m thinking about, and it still applies to my business, is to segment and make our traffic very relevant. If people like Dan can buy traffic and sell it for a markup to other people, you’d have to think as business owners, we can buy traffic for our own business. I’m sure part of what you teach in your course is the actual how to get the traffic and how to set up the funnels, and it could be applied to a business owner, even if they never wanted to sell the leads to anyone else.

The industries you may want to look into

Dan: Yep, exactly. The other thing that’s appropriate to talk about is the kind of industries that are recession-proof. Obviously, there’s a lot going on in the world at the moment. We don’t need to touch on that too much. But I think, James, we both identified that there’s probably around one third of the businesses that we are used to dealing with are really struggling. One third are staying essentially as they are, and one third of those industries are now starting to absolutely boom in this current economic climate. And I wanted to run through a few of these industries, if it’s okay, James, just to give people a bit of a heads-up, and if they are looking to watch my case study and try pay per lead by themselves without my training, which, you know, is great if they can do that, then there’s a few industries here which I’d kind of like to talk about, just quickly, and identify, which might help people.

James: Go for it.

Dan: Alright, so anything insurance-related is absolutely booming at the moment when in times of peril and when people are worried, they turn to insurance. And multiple of my students, I was on a call yesterday with them, are doing well in insurance. They said the market’s up by at least 40% at the moment.

Anything consumer-lending, secured or unsecured; you’ve got business lending as well, which is a big one; distressed property sales.

Then you’ve got online learning. So think about it: people like me, and other educators, are doing quite well in this economic climate. And if you approached them and said, “Listen, are you interested in paying 20 bucks for a VSL lead or an op-in to your funnel?” they’d be pretty interested in a conversation like that. So if you know people that are doing that, approach them and see what they say.

Home security is a big one. You know, these alarms, James, where you can see people and they have a cam built in and it controls the security inside your house, there’s actually some high-ticket items that are very applicable now, because people are worried about, you know, Amazon drivers and delivery people dropping food and stuff off. So that’s a big one people are installing at the moment.

And then we have what we call money for jam industries. And these are the industries where people may have been mis-sold some financial product or service. It could be something like personal injury solicitors that are helping people that have been injured. You know, because people are at home and they’re wanting to get money in fast, right? So that’s a big one.

Solar panels. Again, that’s another industry where people, it’s a no brainer for them, especially in America. There’s government rebates and also the people, they don’t have to pay for the installation because the money they save on their electricity cost actually pays for the installation. So this is a kind of industry that’s a no brainer for people, to install solar panels.

Then you’ve got broadband, James. I know how important fast broadband is for businesses, but also when people are at home, they might be getting frustrated with Netflix or whatever. So that’s a big industry.

The SaaS companies with repairing, kind of billing-type products that help people in these times.

Something like spa installations, where it sounds crazy, but people are spending a lot of time at home now, so they’re going to start investing in things that make the home a little bit more luxurious.

Utility switch to save money; mobile phone switching.

Then you’ve got trading and forex brokerages, people are going to start playing the stock market and things like that now. And also companies that are looking to buy businesses.

And I put this list together in about five minutes before this podcast because, you know, I knew that people would be interested in it, but there’s just so many people advertising at the moment, and there’s so many industries that are just going to be smashing it out of the park, so, you know, it’s worth checking them out.

James: Are you kidding me? That’s fantastic. Thank you. That’s a perfect way to finish. Dan Wardrope, Flexxable.com, you’ve delivered the gold. I appreciate it. Go and check out the case study. And give it a crack, see if it’s for you. And if it is, then I recommend Dan to teach you. He’s good at this, I know for a fact, And this is SuperFastBusiness, you’ve been listening to Episode 729. We’ll catch you on a future show.

Thanks, Dan.

Dan: Thanks, mate.

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