921 – Agency Reveals Favorite Long-Game Web Marketing Platform

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In the podcast:

James and Charl live half a world apart, but their paths did meet, and they’ve had great interaction since. [00:49]

South Africa is not a place you think of in relation to digital marketing, but a drive to serve and to help makes Charl’s agency work. [02:58]

What makes 10XPRO the preferred platform for this South African musician? [08:23]

In terms of control versus ease of use, this is how OwnTheRacecourse influenced Charl’s choice of platform. [11:40]

Protection for your list and continuous feature development are a couple of the things that James loves about 10XPRO. [17:34]

Agency work hasn’t kept James’s guest from pursuing his interest in music. [20:56]

Funnels and content work together to feed your list, and 10XPRO makes launching a campaign super easy. [22:46]

Charl shares his approach for bringing clients on board. [27:31]

A bit of wisdom for listeners to close out the episode… [30:28]

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Today’s guest comes to us all the way from South Africa to talk about the platform he swears by in his internet marketing agency. He and James, however, met years ago on another continent altogether.

James and Charl go some way back

Charl Coetzee and James were attendees at Ryan Levesque’s high-level mastermind in Austin, Texas, where they discovered they had a lot in common. Both were surfers, with Charl hailing from J-Bay, a mecca of surfing. And both were digital marketers and publishers of information products, something untypical for Charl’s part of the world.

An unusual sort of place for digital marketing

So how did Charl find himself in the digital marketing space?

Charl was a professional musician doing the tour scene. With his wife, he moved to the UK, aiming to study music further. He met some big names in music there, interviewed them for magazines, and had a lot of fun. But he realized the life wasn’t conducive to starting a family.

It was around 2009 or 2010 then, and the internet marketing space was evolving. Charl took his expertise as a musician, paired it with his love for teaching, and started a guitar lesson business in the super competitive English-speaking market.

They built their first site in Joomla, then figured out WordPress. Charl had the idea, why not do what they did in another language? He and his Italian-speaking partner took the business into the Italian space, and built it up to six figures.

Charl met John Lint through some people and did a project with him, the result of which was many people asking him to help them with info publishing.

It started with websites, then copywriting and marketing strategy. Charl moved back to South Africa with his wife and started his agency, which grew till it became just too much work for the two of them.

South Africa is a third world country, but the people there, says Charl, are very intelligent, have a love for technology, and are very social, with a big drive for learning. A lot of people in J-Bay lived there for the waves and surfing, but didn’t want to work in a restaurant. They joined Charl on his journey, and the agency grew to close to 15 people. They did everything from tech to design, to copywriting, to videography. That was about 10 years ago.

The platform behind Charl’s agency solution

Interesting, says James, that Charl worked with John Lint. Not many people realize how far back John goes. But people have heard the story of the online marketing platform he pioneered, 10XPRO, and how it became an agency. And Charl has continued to use it for his own agency solution.

That’s right, says Charl. People ask them to recommend a tech stack, and 10XPRO is always their number one suggestion. Because one, they use it themselves, and two, Charl knows what a visionary and driver John is. He lives and breathes his product.

Obviously, whenever you recommend something, you want to do good by people. Charl and his team have seen other platforms come and go. They can confidently say to people that 10XPRO is going to be around.

It’s the best platform, Charl says, because the feature set is specific to their needs and what they want it to do. It’s not a bloated set of features trying to be all things to all people. It’s specific in what it does, and it does it exceptionally well.

10XPRO is a dream come true, in a sense, says Charl. The technology is so easy. You go to the site, you sign up, and there’s an awesome team to help you every step of the way.

Support is pretty strong, says James. He himself is on his third site using the platform. And Charl is right. If you’re an agency, and you’re setting up the clients, you want the thing to be around in the future.

The part played by owning the racecourse

Does Charl get questions around OwnTheRacecourse? People ask James about it, and he knows Charl is familiar with the concept.

James realizes there’s a sliding scale between control and ease of use. You can have no control but fantastic ease of use with a Facebook page. On the flip side, you might have maximum control but huge difficulty gluing together apps and plugins.

With 10XPRO, James tells people, you control where you point your domain, you control where you store your backup videos, audios, PDFs, you can control your database and download a CSV copy of it.

It’s minimal risk, to James’s mind, should the thing detonate, which he doubts it will.

So what’s Charl’s take on OwnTheRacecourse and what he decides for his platform?

It’s basically understanding what the landscape looks like, says Charl. There are platforms like YouTube and Facebook and the like, where you can put your content. But at some point, it’s like meeting someone cool – eventually you might invite them to your house where you can really connect, versus some space you don’t control. That’s what 10XPRO is for him.

People can find you via your content, but once they buy a product, they enter your LMS (learning management system). What Charl loves about the 10XPRO LMS is how customizable it is, as opposed to other platforms’ cookie cutter approach. He loves the way you can organize your content, because in this day and age, attention is the most important thing that you can get.

Even if someone buys your course, Charl says, you have to sell them on actually consuming it. That’s when they get the result, and when they get the result, they stick around and buy more stuff. That’s why the look and feel of the LMS is important.

With 10XPRO, if you look at the forum, you can have different forum threads and forum sections for different products. You can get the conversation going. People can message members with the app, they can message you, they can do all those cool things. And you can also live stream right into the platform.

10XPRO lets you deliver content in a way that’s easy to consume and makes sense. And it fits your brand, you can customize it to your liking. But then, there are also boundaries, because entrepreneurs, left to their own devices, want to customize something to its nth degree, and at some point, you get diminishing returns of effort.

If you care about someone, says Charl, and they come and visit you, your house is going to be nice and organized, you’re going to be able to follow up with him and connect with him, which is what he’s able to do with 10XPRO. That’s the bedrock of a solid business, and it’s a dream come true that a tech platform exists that you can trust.

The security and feature aspects of 10XPRO

Something people don’t consider, says James, is when a company has very strong marketing, with lots of ads and affiliates, there’s a good chance their data is being used or sold or used for some campaign out the back door or otherwise. That’s why he appreciates that 10XPRO does not try and handle CRM.

And almost always, he sees people taking cheap solutions, and then having to retrace their steps and get a better solution down the track. He loves what Charl said about diminishing return, and he used to have some lively chats with John Lint about features.

Traveling with John, James would sit next to him and show him how he used his platform. And over time, the things that James used that other people could benefit from got built into the system. Among these was the ability to see if people actually completed a course. And a way to contact people if they didn’t log in, as well as an automation for an always closed but always opening funnel.

How the music side of Charl’s business is faring

Now, how is the music side of Charl’s pursuits going, the information product?

It’s actually going great, says Charl. They’re seeing some great growth in one membership at the moment. And it’s been a journey of understanding as an educator.

Charl has a degree in music, but had to make a shift in understanding how traditional education is different from online. Because at some point, you want to have an encyclopedic approach to how to play guitar, or the like. And people don’t need all the stuff you want to give them. They just need a few key things that will allow them to do what they want to do. Because they don’t do music full time, for a living. They just want to have fun.

Making that switch allowed Charl to give people the 20 percent they’d use 80 percent of the time, and that was massive. He loves that, number one.

Funnels, content marketing and 10XPRO

Number two is something Charl’s realized with his quiz funnels. Some of his funnels bring in traffic straight from Facebook and YouTube, a cold audience. Then they have other funnels, that go to people who’ve watched their videos on YouTube or Facebook.

Cold audiences might have a 35 percent opt-in rate at the end of a quiz funnel, whereas an audience that’s seen their content shows an 85 percent rate. That brought home to Charl the importance of content marketing.

So Charl’s learned that different funnels get different responses, says James. He imagines he’s also gone into 10XPRO’s campaign builder to try different campaigns – it’s quite easy, isn’t it?

So easy, it’s kind of crazy, says Charl. You choose a campaign and all the pages are populated for you. Then you put the copy where it needs to go.

The time it takes to launch a funnel is drastically reduced. And the quicker you can launch a campaign, he says, the quicker you can look at the stats and make the tweaks, the farther you will get, much quicker than if you deliberate endlessly, trying to get the perfect funnel, which doesn’t exist.

Bringing clients on board the platform

As an agency, Charl has JBayStudios.com. When he recommends 10XPRO and brings a client on board, does he simply hand over the logins, or does he manage it for them? Or is there some sort of hybrid? Is there any risk at all they’ll blow it up?

They do a sort of hybrid, Charl says. For most people, he wants to always equip and empower his clients. He never wants to have a black box. So when they finish building a funnel, they give a handover document – all the copy, the links, how the funnel works, so should the client have someone in-house or should they ever work with someone else that is technically minded from an agency perspective, they can look at the document and go, great, these are the opt-ins, these are the tags, and so forth.

They also have a handful of clients they’ve worked with for a long time, for whom they’re their full service, in-house agency. Of course, they don’t do it for a lot of people – the scope is too big. For the most part, they direct people to the knowledge base or, if they have a question, to John’s live chat or weekly live broadcast.

What listeners can take away from the chat

What would Charl like to be his sort of wisdom at the end of this discussion, something he’d like someone to take away from the conversation?

At the end of the day, says Charl, it comes down to connection, just revealing to people who you are, what your views on the world and how you can help them. Because once that human connection is in place, everything else will just follow so much easier.

So don’t put everything behind a paywall. Actually let people get to know you. Show them what you can do, and play the long game. That is when the results start kicking in. Have a long-game view – make sure that you can form solid connections with people and that you can demonstrate how you can help them.

And finally, don’t mess around with complicated technology, because that prevents you from doing everything Charl has talked about. Get someone to help you with that in that regard.

And that’s where 10XPRO makes it so much easier. And that allows you to form connection, and to not have to worry about rebuilding something every year. Hopefully, that’s useful. Play the long game, show people who you are, find your voice.

If you’re listening and want to take on 10XPRO with some professional help, James is pretty sure JBayStudios.com is listed in the resource rolodex for approved 10XPRO agency helper types.

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