Defining Masculinity for a Society That Decided It Doesn't Need Men with Kasim Aslam

[00:00:00] Ralph: Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, and this is the show where we share cutting edge strategies on acquiring leads and sales for your business through. Traffic. I usually say paid traffic in that intro, custom, but today it's just about traffic.

[00:00:16] Kasim: Honestly, Ralph, I'm gonna pull an audible here and say that forevermore, it's just traffic. Like our script should change, the template should change. The listener should know we're Renaissance men.

[00:00:32] Ralph: We are,

[00:00:33] Kasim: We're diverse.

[00:00:34] Ralph: I don't really know what that means, but I think I am a renaissance. I didn't live in the Renaissance, but I'm just blocking it out right now.

[00:00:41] Kasim: Blocking out the Renaissance,

[00:00:43] Ralph: I'm blocking out another Renaissance was a very, very cool time. But I'm blocking out the paid side cause as you and I know, paid is important, but is it the most important thing? Hmm.

[00:00:58] Kasim: be the least most important thing.

[00:01:01] Ralph: The least most important thing. Well, that's what we're gonna be talking about here today, is all kinds of traffic. And the funny thing is, is that the paid traffic portion of how to scale and grow your business or acquire new customers or whatever it is that you want to do by listening to this show, the paid traffic component is not as important as you would think that it might be.

[00:01:24] Kasim: Especially talking to a couple of paid dad guys,

[00:01:26] Ralph: Especially

[00:01:26] Kasim: like, this is our bread and butter and we're sitting here, we're gonna take it up back and shoot it.

[00:01:30] Ralph: I know, I know. That's, that's kind of what we do here. We're just knocking down walls and you know, changing paradigms as we speak. We didn't talk about this before we got on the air and our little banter time here, but do you have a nugget

[00:01:44] Kasim: I do have a nugget.

[00:01:45] Ralph: week?

[00:01:46] Kasim: Yeah. So my, my nugget is a stolen nugget. I'm gonna steal a nugget. Is that okay?

[00:01:52] Ralph: Go for it. Stolen nuggets are okay, as long

[00:01:55] Kasim: So one of the, one of the sharpest marketers, I know her name's Lauren Petrillo. Lauren Petrillo, and Lauren is first of all, brilliant, but she, she recently won Wicked Smat at one of Digital marketers Mastermind events.

[00:02:10] Kasim: And she won it with, I think, a really brilliant strategy. What she does is she, she takes people that are in her industry that she follows and respects, and she looks at. Where they're speaking, not just on stage, but what podcasts they do, what, you know, YouTube lives or Instagram lives, like, where they guessed.

[00:02:33] Kasim: And then she reaches out to those same people. So instead of doing podcast outreach or you know, trying to build a, an organic following, just fresh from scratch, she's like, all right, I'm in this industry. I have a different voice, but you know, I, I I provide value along the same level of analysis. And she just follows up.

[00:02:53] Kasim: And in some of these instances, she actually knows the, the folks. So let's say she uses me, like I go to a podcast guest spot somewhere, she'll follow up and be like, oh man, I saw that she had costume on. He's great. You know, he and I worked together over at dm you know, incidentally, I actually have, and then now she has this great, in it's more or less a warm referral, or at least it feels that way.

[00:03:11] Kasim: And it's an awesome way to get guest spots. So using this in your own business, Mr. Or Mrs. Listener , take a look at what your friendly competitors, or maybe even not so friendly competitors are doing, especially as far as where they're getting their their organic placements. Because all they're doing is proving concept for you, and you get to follow right along behind them and, and snap all that up

[00:03:33] Ralph: Hmm. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a big portion of today's show actually. It's like that's a, that's a strategy of guest blogging. You guest podcasting, all that. And I think that's a really super smart way to do it, to at least get some momentum moving forward. And I mean, if they're interested in your competition, chances are they're probably gonna be interested in what you have to say

[00:03:57] Kasim: a hundred percent. Especially if you can follow up with like maybe a, an alternative opinion or, you know, a, a new approach or paradigm.

[00:04:06] Ralph: yeah. So today's all about sort of non-conventional ways, but we're gonna force rank, and I know we're, we don't really see eye to eye on all of these. We're gonna force rank all the ways in which you can get traffic and what you should be prioritizing first, second, third, all the way down to probably about 11 or 12.

[00:04:22] Ralph: I'm just gonna say we're gonna have about 11 sources here just because it's tier 11 and why the hell not

[00:04:26] Kasim: it 12. Just out of Ence. I'm gonna make sure.

[00:04:30] Ralph: eight, it's gonna be more than eight. That's the most important thing. So we're gonna get right into our forced rank of traffic sources, not just paid. and paid isn't exactly where you might think it would be right after this quick break.

[00:04:46] Kasim: I don't think Hector really listens. I is a good entrepreneur. He outsources this part.

[00:04:50] Ralph: I think it's his guy.

[00:04:52] Kasim: Yeah. So his guy or his gal is gonna have all the blackmail

[00:04:55] Ralph: Yeah, it's true. You're very valuable. Well, not that valuable

[00:05:05] Ralph: It's not overinflate our importance.

[00:05:08] Kasim: Hmm. We're both just rich enough to be blackmailed.

[00:05:13] Ralph: . All right, we are back. And today we're gonna be talking about all the traffic sources that you should be looking at for your business. You're probably listening to this show because you wanna scale and grow your business. You wanna acquire new customers, you wanna enhance their lifetime value.

[00:05:27] Ralph: You want it all. You want to grow and you think, all right, traffic, perpetual traffic, like all I need is the paid side. Mm, that's not necessarily the case. And actually coming from two agency owner guys who thrive, I would say make their mo make their money at least on paid traffic sources. We're gonna go through a list here today of how we sort of view things and some of the things that that we'll mention are probably not what you'd expect us to hear.

[00:05:57] Ralph: So Kasam, let's go through this lengthy list of traffic sources and maybe by importance start force ranking these.

[00:06:08] Kasim: I'm excited to battle this out with you, Ralph, cause I know that you and I don't see eye to eye across the board, so I'm gonna lob my first grenade. And these, by the way, I, I have this in order of what they've done for us here at Solutions eight. . And I realize that they're not gonna apply to all businesses, but I think generally speaking, the 80% rule will hold true.

[00:06:26] Kasim: So number one, for us, honestly by far, I spent $150,000 a month on paid traffic, and I still close more deals from referrals than any other traffic source. Warm referrals from existing and previous clients or strategic partners. I'm not talking affiliate program. I think affiliate program is way, way, way different.

[00:06:48] Kasim: I mean, you know, an affiliate program is like a group of people that you don't necessarily have a strong relationship with. There's just a transactional mode of being set in place that allows you to pay them if they send you customers. I mean, warm referrals from clients, previous clients, strategic partners, I think is the most important source of traffic.

[00:07:05] Kasim: If you can build that, if it's applicable to your business.

[00:07:09] Ralph: that's the question. If it's applicable to your business, and that's where I have an issue with this, is that yes, referrals for us are, are absolutely essential and it's a huge point. Whether it's, you know, specific referrals from specific companies or just somebody who's heard about us somewhere and you know, we have a warm introduction on an email or.

[00:07:29] Ralph: They just heard about it and filled out our form. But for an e-commerce business, like for a, you know, for a SaaS company, is referrals necessarily gonna be the first place for you to go? Like for me, referrals for tier 11 started with joining the local Chamber of Commerce, actually three or four of 'em, and going out and networking and getting referrals that way, cuz I would meet people and talk about what I did and then they'd say, Hey, you know, I'll either refer you somebody who I know who's in the, in the business for your services or in market for your services.

[00:08:06] Ralph: That especially worked really, really well for B and I, which I was a , I was a the president of my local chapter, if you could believe

[00:08:13] Kasim: You were not you. Boy Scout.

[00:08:14] Ralph: was, yeah. For 18 months. They, I actually overstayed my 12 months cuz I. Apparently did such a great job. They wanted me for 18 months. Actually, nobody would take the job.

[00:08:25] Kasim: was just gonna say, you mean nobody else wanted the job, bro.

[00:08:29] Ralph: it's like me winning the Louie Armstrong Award in high school. It's like my competition. I played guitar. The competition was, you know, a kid who was kind of like would say had some mental issues and another kid who like was a transfer and didn't speak English, so I won that. But

[00:08:47] Kasim: even know it was a talent show.

[00:08:48] Ralph: he didn't even know that he was in the running.

[00:08:50] Ralph: So I won that. But anyway, that's sort of how I won the , the presidency of my B n I, by default. So anyway, but at those events, like it was all referral based. Like you had to actually, you got points, you had a scorecard, green, yellow, red, on referrals. But we're a service based business. I could do local seo, I could do, you know, website and stuff, you know, all those sorts of things.

[00:09:13] Ralph: Now we've obviously gone diversified into a lot of different areas, but the point was is for our business, it was great. If I was running a, you know, a box factory, I get a lot of referrals there? Or if I was running a, you know, a SaaS company, would I be getting referrals? So I

[00:09:31] Kasim: Well, I wanna challenge this just a little bit cause like if I open up, click up, or I open loom one of the very first things I see is refer a friend and get 10 bucks. and, and I think that's the problem with referral programs is people don't realize how powerful they can be, and so they just don't build out the programs.

[00:09:46] Kasim: And, and that's what I'm saying, like, you know, if I come up here and say, oh, referrals are great, everybody goes, oh yeah, awesome. When I get 'em, what I want the listener to do is go take a moment to build your referral program, which by the way is one email, text message, or direct mail. That's it. All that happens is at the inflection.

[00:10:04] Kasim: When a customer should be happy with their product or service, they get a message and you're, you're upfront. It's, it's in their face. And I've got a little template here that I'll read to you. It's, Hey Ralph, I need your help. I really like those words by the way. I think it evokes emotion from people.

[00:10:19] Kasim: It's like, oh, you need me, like I'm important. I need your help. I'm excited to grow this year and want customers exactly like you. Which by the way is a little bit of a flattery there. If someone comes to mind that would benefit from, and then this is your product or service, would you send 'em my way?

[00:10:35] Kasim: And then I say, I'll make sure to roll out the red carpet, cuz you want them to know that you're gonna make them look good by referring you. And I always share 10% of the growth for any deals that close. Now this doesn't result in referrals raining down tomorrow from the sky. Right? But over time, if you did this with every single customer that comes through your door, and I think this could be true for service services for damn sure Sass a little more likely than products e-com.

[00:11:01] Kasim: I kind of agree with you. It sort of depends on the product, but it's at least worth the one message that can be automated for most instances. And you'll find out a year later, like, oh man, we actually have a thriving little referral program going on here. This is awesome.

[00:11:15] Ralph: I think it's very little to set it up. It's a low barrier to entry to just do it. My question is, is like with the click up and, you know, we, we have one for HubSpot you know, loom. Is that an affiliate program or is that a referral? I almost

[00:11:31] Kasim: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Because I, and I actually don't like affiliate programs. I, but the point that I'm trying to make is I think people do refer.

[00:11:38] Ralph: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:39] Kasim: You know, somebody asks me, what's your favorite project management software? I'm like, oh dude, I love click up. Let me tell you why. That's not affiliate.

[00:11:45] Kasim: That's referral. Like, I'm not actively and intentionally going out and trying to push, click up. It's not my job. That's what an affiliate would be. I'm just somebody who uses click up, likes click up, and I, I like to support the, the applications that I'm a fan of.

[00:12:00] Ralph: Yeah. Well, I'll do the same thing, like I think like a referral. I mean, I think this might be a little bit of semantics. Like for example, like we used fully accountable for years and years for bookkeeping, our CFO services and I introduced them warm handoff referrals to them, like dozens of people. I look at that

[00:12:15] Kasim: He's the man.

[00:12:16] Ralph: yeah, I mean, did I ever get a commission on anything?

[00:12:18] Ralph: No, I was doing it because

[00:12:20] Kasim: Vinny paid you? Nothing. I'm texting him now.

[00:12:22] Ralph: know. Well, he,

[00:12:24] Kasim: Yeah. Honestly, dude, the people that I refer the most, I don't get commission from, and I, I prefer that.

[00:12:30] Ralph: me too.

[00:12:31] Kasim: I prefer being able to tell somebody, dude, I refer a bunch of work to tier 11. I don't want, if you and I had a referral partnership back and forth, there's something about that that would actually make it dirty.

[00:12:40] Kasim: Cuz like, I can't refer you now. And like if I have a dog in the fight, it makes it weird. Especially cuz we work together very often with a lot of clients. So in some instances a referral becomes maybe inappropriate.

[00:12:52] Ralph: yeah. I would far rather. Refer somebody to something and not get paid just because it builds trust in the trust account and it does come back to you and it's a whole woo woo thing of, you

[00:13:04] Kasim: Well, yeah. And then you guys refer work back to us. That's exactly right.

[00:13:06] Ralph: it all works together. So I would not make it transactional. I will say this, even though we don't necessarily agree, set one up because it's easy to do and why not have a mechanism for it.

[00:13:18] Ralph: It's doesn't cost you anything, cost you the time to be able to set it up once. I don't know, when you send out your, your emails, it's probably in an automated sequence as you're part of your onboarding. Or maybe it's on months three or four or five when they turn from, you know, yellow customer to

[00:13:34] Kasim: 90.

[00:13:34] Ralph: Yeah. So it's your customer advocacy person who's doing that, like that kind of thing. Absolutely, absolutely. Essential. It's easy to do. You know, could a software company do that? You know, could a, I mean, we've got tons of e-commerce customers, like, do they try and get referrals? Sure. they do refer us to a friend, you know, comment on this post.

[00:13:56] Ralph: You know, I mean, there's affiliate programs with all of those too. And then when it goes into the affiliate program, I think it's different from a referral.

[00:14:02] Kasim: I think affiliate program is a little dirty. There's something like, I'm just here to sell this thing to make money.

[00:14:09] Ralph: Hmm.

[00:14:10] Kasim: I

[00:14:10] Kasim: shouldn't bash affiliates so hard.

[00:14:12] Ralph: so we had an agency program for years and years, which we don't do cuz we we're not an info based company. But anyway, we had a bunch of vendors that we used as an agency. And I still get referral like every morning. It's like PayPal, like dings me with, you know, hey, you made $69 and $70, whatever it is.

[00:14:31] Ralph: Like, of all the stuff that we would refer. And I did that because they gave me a, a referral link and it makes sense. Like,

[00:14:40] Ralph: I mean,

[00:14:40] Kasim: been getting 200 bucks a month from Entreport for a couple of years. Ralph, I don't know why. I don't know who signed up. I don't know where they came from. I don't know. I don't even, I don't even remember sharing the link to be honest with you. But I, you know, I feel pretty good about Entreport.

[00:14:57] Ralph: Yeah, absolutely. It's a constant reminder. It's actually, if you do do the affiliate side,

[00:15:03] Kasim: Yeah.

[00:15:04] Ralph: and for us it's like there's a certain service we don't offer, and then when somebody needs it, we're like, and I use these guys and we send them our affiliate link cuz we know like, and trust them. Like those are things that, it's a constant reminder for me to continue to refer them and keep them at top of mind.

[00:15:23] Ralph: Especially if you're checking your PayPal or you know, your bill.com or whatever it happens to be. So I do think that there's, there's two ways to do it, but I think we beat this one pretty, pretty good.

[00:15:34] Ralph: Set up a re set up a referral program. At the very least, no matter what business you are, it's an easy thing to do.

[00:15:40] Kasim: The next one I'm gonna bundle cuz there's too much in the nuances. I'm gonna call it community. But within community, there's outreach, networking, strategic partnerships, masterminds. But I think, and indeed, I think community is the future of all marketing, especially everything's going ai, everybody's gonna be able to scale all the marketing mechanisms people are going to want to be with and in front of people.

[00:16:04] Kasim: And the, the, the stronger the community, the the, the deeper the well that you have to draw from. And I've had the most success personally. You know, I've got a community from Montessori schools. It's called Montessori Thrive, and Montessori schools sign up and all we do is love on 'em, man. We have a, a, a weekly town hall and we give 'em a ton of free resources.

[00:16:23] Kasim: And so if you've got a niche, especially if you've got a niche, go build the community for that niche. I don't care what business you're in, be the. Be the community. And it, it's actually not hard. You just kind of have to raise your hand and say, Hey, I'm willing. It's kinda like when you said, oh, I was the president of bni because nobody else wanted to do it.

[00:16:43] Kasim: It's like, Hey, I'm willing to host these calls cuz nobody else wants to pay for Zoom and coordinate it and herd all the cats. But if you do that for a couple years, well now I have 4,500 Montessori schools on my list and I have, by the way, a whole agency that serves nothing but Montessori schools. Our mastermind is the same way.

[00:16:59] Kasim: We've got a mastermind with Perry Belcher and Jason Flatland who's gonna be on the show. It's called the Driven Mastermind. And it, dude, it's such an engaged and it's small. You know, we're, we're, we're, we haven't even gotten a hundred members yet, but everybody's, we meet every Wednesday. We do deep, deep dives.

[00:17:12] Kasim: People bring their biggest problems to us and they're like, oh my goodness, how do we solve this? And it's the best ideation I've ever had in my entire life, you know, especially as an entrepreneur, I'm like, Th I could sell that. That's a business, that's a product, that's a service. So I think that community is one of the most important sources of traffic, period.

[00:17:29] Kasim: Full stop. And if you can't make your own community, join somebody else's and get really involved and give, give, give, give, give.

[00:17:37] Ralph: So I look at Community and Driven Mastermind or any of these, like it's sort of the same thing. It's like they're paid communities though. I think there is that difference. It's like what We like perpetual traffic. I suppose like I, I don't really think about it this way, but I guess if we really categorize like what is Perpetual Traffic or any of the three podcasts that we now host, it's like how they're their own communities unto themselves.

[00:18:03] Ralph: They're creating community cuz nobody's paying for it and they come, you know, they're not necessarily interacting with people, but there is a paid community element of it. I know your YouTube channel is a great example of this, which is an awesome YouTube channel, and then that turns into a paid mastermind, if I'm not mistaken, or a paid

[00:18:19] Kasim: Uh, so I don't think those are communities yet. And this, again, maybe we're getting into semantics, but I think a community requires three-way communication. Three-dimensional communication. First would be communication between the members and then the community leaders. So that's one. And then second would be communication between the members and the members.

[00:18:38] Kasim: That's two. And then third would be group, like forum based communication. And that's to me, what makes a community where you talk about the podcast or my YouTube channel or, or even social and organic social. It's funny you brought it up, is next on my list. I think that those have community elements to them, but they're not a full on community yet because we're not sitting around a campfire together just yet.

[00:19:03] Ralph: So I've got an e-commerce store. I sell women's shoes. How do I create a community? What would be your first 1, 2, 3 steps? If we're gonna go by definition of community, in order for me to help grow that business, cuz we're still at the top. We've only gone through referrals and now we're in community. How would you start it?

[00:19:22] Ralph: What would be your first.

[00:19:24] Kasim: Step number one is niche down. So you can't create a community for shoe lovers cuz it's not niche enough. So what I would do there is I'd take a look at the people who are buying your shoes and what your shoes are for. You know, let's say that you have shoes that are, that are really comfortable and they're perfect for new moms.

[00:19:40] Kasim: And dude, I mean, you remember this, you have kids, like, if, if when a gal gets pregnant, her back hurts, her feet hurt, her legs hurt, her knees hurt, whatever. So you build this community for new moms and you start bringing in, you know, every week. And that's the other thing too, is experts are so easy to get your hooks into.

[00:19:55] Kasim: It's like you're gonna bring in the postpartum expert and the, and the, the feeding expert and the sleep time expert. And you're doing this every other week, so it's not overwhelming. And you have this community for brand new moms that feels completely disassociated and detached from what it is that you do.

[00:20:09] Kasim: But every now and again, you're like, oh, by the. , these are the shoes that work best for new moms. Here's why. Here's lumbar support. Here's the the things that you need to know about the way that your heels get moved forward and your hips end up rotating out. And this is really important cuz you're gonna be on your feet a lot, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:20:22] Kasim: So you're weaving in this narrative. Now here's what's cool about this, is you don't just get people to buy shoes when they're new moms. Now that you've built this community, you have women that are done having kids, but they're still kind of staying in their cohort, in their community because they've, they've, you know, this is their, this is their place.

[00:20:39] Kasim: People take ownership of the communities that they're involved in. And now you get to sell people's shoes and perpetuity. So the point of the community isn't to be perfectly aligned thematically. The point of the community is defined a niche down inflection point that makes it easy for you to provide value and identify who it is that you're speaking to.

[00:20:56] Kasim: And then from there, You can build on top of it from a the, the business perspective. And you see people do this all the damn time. Dave Asprey and his coffee, dude, Dave Asprey's primary business is not selling coffee, right? But he built this whole community around this one teeny tiny little inflection point and then used that to kind of expand out into this, this really robust coaching program.

[00:21:20] Kasim: Who's the guy story brand? Don

[00:21:22] Ralph: Tom Miller.

[00:21:23] Kasim: Yeah, dude. Don Miller has an entire spectrum of business consulting, but the communities built around this one, which they should have been a damn infographic, but it's, you wanna get really specific because communities are better. They're stronger when they're built around one very specific idea.

[00:21:39] Kasim: So choose a niche under the umbrella of whatever business you serve. And if you're b2b, by the way, this is actually easier for you cuz so few people are willing to build businesses for b2b. And the other thing that I'd strongly recommend is sometimes instead of building the cust, the, the community for your customers, Build the community for your industry.

[00:21:58] Kasim: You know, if you're a CrossFit gym and you're like, well, there's so many communities for people that want to be in CrossFit. Well, how many communities are there for CrossFit gym owners in your area? And now if you own that community, you just put yourself, you're now the, the Chief of the Chiefs, and you found a way to kind of, you know, if they say sell, sell in a gold, rest, sell shovels.

[00:22:16] Kasim: You find a way to put yourself like, you know, kind of at the top of the hierarchical structure. Now maybe your customer becomes the gym and you get to lift yourself outta the competitive ecosystem.

[00:22:25] Ralph: I think when I look at, when we look at a lot of businesses and the ones that really have a sticky element to them, whether they're digital products, physical products, or even service based products have community.

[00:22:39] Kasim: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:40] Ralph: And it's not necessarily related to, well, in some cases it is, it's directly related to the product that they're actually selling.

[00:22:48] Ralph: And it's usually sort of an offshoot after the initial opt-in of like, join our Facebook group. Like I can think of one in particular, which does an exceedingly good job of this. It's all about executives getting and landing their. Dream job. And they have a massive community. It's all

[00:23:06] Kasim: a case study on

[00:23:07] Ralph: sea level.

[00:23:07] Ralph: Yeah. Part of their nurture process is that community. They also have a podcast. They also have all these other sorts of things that go along with it. Super smart. It's so smart. Because they're not only targeting and, and, and gathering in one place their ideal avatar, which ultimately will potentially purchase their products.

[00:23:30] Ralph: Yeah. But they're creating a community which is distinct from anything else that's on the internet. And I think that's like, that is one of the key reasons that when they came to us, they already had a legitimate, like they had. Solved that problem. And then all we had to do is really, it made it kind of easy for us.

[00:23:49] Ralph: And I know you see this too, like there's hard prospects that come in the door like they're starting from scratch. They don't know what they don't know. And then the ones that know, like, have a good business, all they need is to add fuel to the fire. Pay traffic is usually the thing that's, that will allow you to do it if you have everything to begin with.

[00:24:07] Ralph: And like when we were doing their, you know, their initial sort of deep dive research on their ads and their avatars as well as their messaging, we went right to that community. Like it created all the copy for us,

[00:24:20] Kasim: Yeah,

[00:24:20] Ralph: know,

[00:24:20] Kasim: that's the cool thing about the community too, is they're not just customers. They're actually kind of. , they're participants, they help you define the product or the service. They tell you what's going wrong. They let you know what's coming, what, what, what you need to get out ahead of, you know, hey, I, I deal with hvac people and there's regulation coming down the pipe that I just wouldn't have known about had I not had this community.

[00:24:41] Kasim: And dude, I think it's as easy as scheduling a zoom call. You wanna build a community, plant a flag on the ground, say, Hey, Wednesday at noon we're inviting you all. And just call it like, you know, I don't know what town hall. It's the town hall. So you deal with HVAC contractors. We're, we're doing the HVAC contractor town hall.

[00:24:59] Kasim: It's gonna be this Wednesday at noon. And we just want to hear from you, what are you struggling with? What do you need to help with? And the first time 12 people show up and that's. and you, you, you moderate the conversa or five or three, but you moderate the conversation and then you share that recording and, and some of the snippets and what'll end up happening, this is how we deal with Montessori schools, is people start to see that content and then they want to be involved and you play on that FOMO and do it years later.

[00:25:22] Kasim: That's the other thing too that's really cool, is the community helps you create content, which is critically important. For the next thing I have on my

[00:25:29] Ralph: The next stage. So,

[00:25:31] Kasim: I segued Ralph. That's, that's podcast like guru status.

[00:25:36] Ralph: you're, you're kidding. Like radio ready for the, like you're Rogan ish, you know, and your segueways here, so I just offended like half of our listenership. All right, so number one is referrals. Number two, community.

[00:25:51] Kasim: and, and under community. I'm housing things like, you know, outreach, networking, strategic partnerships. So if we want to touch on those, I'm happy to, but I didn't wanna, they they're hard to, to split.

[00:26:01] Ralph: but I know networking and outreach as well as strategic partnerships are kind of a big part of that. So do we lump them all together or are they separate in your mind? What's your sense?

[00:26:13] Kasim: they're separate. In my mind. I lumped them together because I don't wanna bore our listeners with like, What feels like the same conversation because they have a lot of the same tools. You know, you, you can have a knife in your hand and you're using that for various things you could be using it for, to build furniture and to hunt.

[00:26:29] Kasim: And I feel like the community slash networking slash strategic partnerships are three very different ways to use the same tool. And that tool is going out and getting belly to belly with people.

[00:26:41] Ralph: agreed. And I think that's one of the things that's a lot of times overlooked is just that part of it. I think Well, for one of the reasons why you're listening to this show is because you want to run digital ads or you have a part of your businesses, at least on digital, I think we all can think, well, yeah, I can just sit in my basement and grow a business.

[00:27:01] Ralph: Well, that is not necessarily the case. just, you know, going on your Twitter feed and your Facebook and, and posting every now and then, you actually have to go out and physically meet with people face to face. And for me, like the, the networking, outreach community thing all kind of comes together is that if you can find other communities where your customers live, and then within those communities you might actually have the opportunity to then network with partners who can really make things big.

[00:27:35] Ralph: Like, that's almost like next level stuff. So you're leveraging community, you're nev, you're leveraging networking, which I still think is an absolute essential part of business. It's like,

[00:27:45] Kasim: Oh dude, isn't this where the podcast came from, right? It's more or less a strategic partner. You were is, what is the story? You were drunk at a a war room thing with Ryan Dice. Did I get that right? Was that not

[00:27:55] Ralph: No, Perry was drunk, but he was always drunk at those. But, no. Well, Ryan, like, this is just an example of, okay, I needed to, I made a list of three strategic partners that I wanted to, I knew they had our customers, and this is when we were a small business. I knew that they were, they had our customers in them and I was gonna make a concerted effort to make a relation or create a relationship with them.

[00:28:21] Ralph: So the easiest one was I believe the, the three were like, I think it was like HubSpot, Infusionsoft, and Digital Marketer. And Digital marketer. The easiest way was just to was to, you know, get involved in the pro. I was already fan anyway. I wasn't like learning all my stuff that way and Ryan Dice was like the first info product I ever bought.

[00:28:39] Ralph: So

[00:28:40] Kasim: You was my first two.

[00:28:41] Ralph: yeah, I joined War

[00:28:42] Kasim: Did you do the dollar for the, the 30 days of lab.

[00:28:45] Ralph: No, I bought 43 split tests for $7 and then I never bought, another thing I might have, I might have actually bought a, a program called Perpetual Traffic, if you can believe

[00:28:58] Kasim: You did not. That's so

[00:29:00] Ralph: I swear to God it was him and Perry. And Perry wore these like Hawaiian shirts the whole time.

[00:29:04] Ralph: But I was like, this guy's fricking smart. But anyway, its sort of outta date. It was all about pay-per-click advertising and everything else. I think that was the second product I brought. Then I got a refund. I think I asked for refund cause it was so outta date. But then I joined War Room, which is like $30,000.

[00:29:18] Ralph: I could barely afford it. I had $11,000 in my bank account. I, they needed a $10,000 deposit. I had a thousand dollars left and sort of forced my way in and that's where I was like, okay, I'm inside a community. Potential people who could be customers of ours. But most importantly it was a relationship with Digital Marketer.

[00:29:37] Ralph: That was really sort of after, plus I wanted to learn a lot of stuff and Ryan knows this. I've told him this a hundred times. So I ascended from 43 split tests all the way to a $30,000 a year thing. The point is, is that that relationship with Digital Marketer, which is a partnership, you know, ran this podcast for seven years until we bought it from them two months ago, it was a great way in which to grow a business.

[00:30:00] Ralph: And you know, we've since done that with other organizations that have our customers, but we don't compete with. And our inner interests are synergistic. And you know, you and I are working with a few there that have that kind of thing going and it makes sense. Like why wouldn't you?

[00:30:16] Kasim: Yeah.

[00:30:16] Ralph: think it's a logical progression.

[00:30:18] Ralph: Is that part of Comu? It's kind of community, but it's kind of, you know, it's a little bit of outreach, networking, partnership

[00:30:27] Kasim: starts with community and then it becomes something even more specific. You know, it's sort of like the, the pressure it compresses into a diamond, Ralph is what happens.

[00:30:36] Kasim: Yeah. The community is the carbon and then the strategic partners. Those are the diamonds. I've got a couple of those.

[00:30:42] Kasim: I've OMG commerce. Do you know Brett and Chris?

[00:30:44] Ralph: Oh yeah, for

[00:30:45] Kasim: Dude, they're, they're amazing. I love them dearly. Yeah, Brewer's been a, a mentor of mine for a long, long time. You know, he's, he's got a couple years on me and knows what he's doing in the agency space and, you know, I hired him for some private consulting and he and I met on stage at one point at an event, which is another traffic source that we'll get to.

[00:31:01] Kasim: And they, for the longest time were way above my pay grade, but they had all these leads coming in of people spending money that just wasn't enough for them to deal with. And at one point I was sending them a very healthy five figure sum

[00:31:19] Ralph: Mm.

[00:31:20] Kasim: to the point to where Chris actually started looking at the referral payments and he started getting a little pissy.

[00:31:24] Kasim: He's like, we should be keeping these clients. And but you know, God bless him and dude, mate, it's one of the things that really accelerated my business is that one relationship that came from, you know a, a a, it was a, a splinter of being a part of the digital marketer community. And it's, it's done nothing but yield.

[00:31:39] Kasim: Really phenomenal results.

[00:31:41] Ralph: Yeah, I was a referral of a referral really like I was inside. And I think it's all embedded here and, you know, creating those relationships. Now, once again, going back to our women's shoe e-commerce company, I think there's a lot of validity to joining these types of masterminds and obviously absorbing the information and then making relations strategic partnerships.

[00:32:04] Ralph: Like you never know who you're gonna meet. So for example, I know you know, at War Room I connected one of our customers with a supplier that Supplie. certain types of fabrics from Columbia because he was having supply chain issues, you know, with his particular product and that like catapulted his like three Xed his ability to spend through us.

[00:32:26] Ralph: Like that was a connection through customer and a supplier and helped his business tremendously. Now did it grow it? It probably did. Like, I don't know what they did after that point in time, but the point is, is like when you meet these types of, you know, whether it's Driven Mastermind, which is a really good one, I mean there's a ton of 'em that are out

[00:32:45] Kasim: Dude, Joe Polish's Genius Network. I'm just gonna give him a shout out. I love, Joe, you know what, you know what Joe did? Can I tell you a story about Joe Polish real

[00:32:52] Ralph: Yeah.

[00:32:53] Kasim: So me, Perry, Jason Flatland, we're all friends with Joe Joe's got Genius Network. Me and we, we've all spoken at Genius Network. We basically open a competing mastermind right under his nose and not, not in an nefarious way.

[00:33:06] Kasim: We're not cheating or anything, you know, war room closed down. Perry wasn't ready to close it. So we go, we go start driven. But Joe could, if he wanted to just get real pissy and be like, all right, you guys are my enemies now and we're gonna be friendly competitors and that is what it is.

[00:33:18] Ralph: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:19] Kasim: Instead, I get a message from Joe saying, Hey, revamping my entire location.

[00:33:24] Kasim: I've got all these catch box mics. Do you want 'em? Dude, I'm his competitor. He sent me a couple thousand dollars in microphones. He did the same thing to Perry. He's like, Hey, I've got all these, this, this AV equipment that I'm not using. Do you want it? Like, he's just this mench, I'm just obsessed with the guy.

[00:33:40] Kasim: He said he, he wrote a book recently called what's in It for Them? And he really lives that. And I actually think, dude, one of the best examples of a community builder I've ever met in my entire life is Joe Polish. Like, just loves on people, gives, finds, ways to reach out on a regular basis, checks in on you.

[00:33:57] Kasim: Actually remember shit that you tell 'em. I didn't mean to go off on a weird Joe Polish ran, but I'm just a big fan. And that's what happens, man. When you build a community and people like you, they end up on their podcast saying, nice crap about you.

[00:34:07] Ralph: I'll, I'll guarantee you there's people listening right now, like, Hmm. Joe Polish Mastermind, Googling that, you know, or writing it down when they stop. Absolutely. Like I got a a, a Facebook messenger from him, like every year, like just sort of checking in like he's really good at

[00:34:21] Kasim: dude. He's really good. And, and he means it. He's authentic, he's genuine, you know?

[00:34:25] Ralph: Yeah.

[00:34:25] Ralph: No, it's awesome.

[00:34:26] Ralph: But yeah, I think that's all sort of part of this. The point is, is like getting out there and making these relationships, it's, this is not paid traffic by the way. We're only on like four or five on the list here. We haven't gotten to

[00:34:39] Ralph: the ones that We really

[00:34:40] Kasim: Sorry. Dear listener.

[00:34:42] Ralph: that's quite all right. So what would be your, relatively speaking, I believe it's around number six ish,

[00:34:49] Kasim: Yeah, so referrals one, community two, outreach and networking. Three strategic partnerships. Four. Next for me, organic social.

[00:34:58] Ralph: organic social.

[00:34:59] Kasim: Now here's the thing. Don't get overwhelmed by organic social, because when I say organic social, you're like, oh, dear God, I've gotta be on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube.

[00:35:06] Kasim: No, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:35:07] Ralph: And then I got reels, and then I've got stories, and then I've got Snapchat. Like I've gotta do so much. Cause some help. What do I do?

[00:35:15] Kasim: Pick one channel and do it poorly. Pick one channel and do it like crap and give yourself.

[00:35:20] Ralph: advice.

[00:35:21] Kasim: dude, the rib. It's the great advice for life, to be honest with you, Ralph. Do it horrible. Yeah. It's, with everything I've ever done, I do it poorly. And my ability, it's, and this gets really weird, but mythologically speaking, the fool is the precursor to the savior.

[00:35:36] Kasim: If you've read like Joseph Campbell's hero's Journey, the fool is the precursor to the savior. And it's because the person who's willing to look stupid is the one that will ultimately save humanity. From a, from a mythological perspective, it's, it's an archetype. Get out there and just be willing to look kind of stupid.

[00:35:54] Kasim: Pick one channel, preferably a channel that your customers are actually gonna be on. And y'all, some of these channels that we're sleeping on, it doesn't have to be the big ones, don't think, oh, TikTok is the big thing. I gotta go to TikTok. Christine Marie taught me this. She was on perpetual traffic a couple episodes ago.

[00:36:07] Kasim: Worth looking into. LinkedIn has 40% of all millionaires. Facebook has 39% of all millionaires. So you think to yourself, oh, well that's para pasu. But here's what's interesting. If you think about the size of the Facebook ecosystem and the number of people you're competing against for visibility compared to LinkedIn, LinkedIn is a fraction of the size of Facebook.

[00:36:29] Kasim: So if you wanna get in front of millionaires, go start producing stellar content on LinkedIn. I notice you do this, Ralph. You've got really solid articles, like long form articles that that perform really well inside of LinkedIn. I was sleeping on Twitter for the longest time. One of my employees who spun off into his own agency, Colin Schmeck, he's got 40,000 followers on Twitter.

[00:36:48] Kasim: He messaged me and was like, dude, don't sleep on Twitter. So I've gone deep on Twitter. YouTube has been my drug of choice, though. Pick one channel and dedicate yourself to it. And it doesn't take long. It could take 10 minutes a day, you know, maybe 30 minutes a day if you're doing something video based, but set out to do it poorly.

[00:37:05] Kasim: And I say do it poorly. I'm not telling you to do it intentionally bad, but just give yourself permission to make some mistakes and then over time you get better at it. Dude, all my employees come from my YouTube channel. All my best customers come from my YouTube channel. We just got a massive publicly traded company owned by a major celebrity because they saw one of our YouTube videos.

[00:37:25] Ralph: Yeah, double down on it. I mean, I think there's that. I always forget who did this, but it's, we get tier 11 people to do content for us as well. Cuz people, people don't always just want to hear from me and it's great. We're

[00:37:43] Ralph: starting to get that kind of momentum. I know you do,

[00:37:46] Kasim: I'm tuning in just for

[00:37:47] Ralph: yeah. You're just sucking up.

[00:37:49] Ralph: But anyway But I always try to explain this, it's like, don't go for perfect. Like, yes, Sheryl Sandberg did say that Dunn is better than perfect. I'm a big believer in that. However, when you think about, it's like the fool in the leader, and I think this is your analogy that you kind of like, this is picture of this guy at a music festival and he just gets

[00:38:09] Kasim: Oh, the guy

[00:38:10] Ralph: around.

[00:38:10] Ralph: The guy dancing. around and everyone's looking around. I'm like, this guy is a fool. Like he's a freak. And he just kept at it. He's going, he's going, he's going. It takes a while, like 30, 60, 90 seconds. Then all of a sudden one other person

[00:38:24] Ralph: him and then another person, and then a third person, and then five more people, 10, 20, 30.

[00:38:34] Kasim: then there's like 30,000 people

[00:38:35] Ralph: before, you know, there's like 30,000 people dancing on the hill.

[00:38:39] Kasim: Dude, I love that video. We, we have to include that in the show notes so people can watch it. It's

[00:38:42] Ralph: are going to, we are gonna show it because, and it's overused, I think in some cases, like marketers love this video. But anyway, my point is, is like when you're starting out on a channel, you're the, you're the freak. You're the fool dancing by himself, and you feel kind of stupid. And you look at, it's like, oh, I got three views.

[00:39:02] Ralph: Like, ugh, that's horrible. Like we first started doing TikTok. Like TikTok is one of those things that we just really love and we're getting like lots of leads from it. And like, my first video is terrible, like go to the t, you know, the TikTok channel. But then we have like, oh, we have a video that's like, got 500,000 views.

[00:39:20] Ralph: We have never done any paid traffic on it. And it's about like Starbucks and it's about like how that relates to your sales funnel. It's like, you know, it was, it was kind of a good idea. I didn't know if it was gonna be a good idea, but like stuff like that, like pick your channel and I think you feel foolish when you start.

[00:39:39] Ralph: But when you start to gain some momentum, like the foolish part is what attracts some people and repels others.

[00:39:46] Kasim: dude. People wanna see that authenticity too. That's the other thing that I've noticed. You know, we always, we characterize the internet as just like this, this swamp full of bullies. I've never had more support and kinder words than I have from, from people that are direct messaging me. If I pull up my dms and it's just people like, man, thank you so much for this content, or, this was awesome.

[00:40:07] Kasim: Are you doing a great job? Or, I have some advice for you. And the other thing that's really interesting is, John and I have 20,000 subscribers on YouTube. It's not a lot in, in the world of YouTube. They're. Pit bulls for us. Like if somebody says something bad about me or especially John, they're, dude, it's, it's nuts.

[00:40:26] Kasim: Like I'm actually kinda like, Hey y'all, you need to back off a little bit. Cause you're sort of making us look like maybe cult leaders. But I've seen some people just get ripped into in the comments if they go in on us. And I, I mean, what a cool, just warm and fuzzy feeling that is. I feel like I've got, you know, a whole bunch of little protectors rolling around because we've given 'em a bunch of value now.

[00:40:44] Kasim: They're a part of our community.

[00:40:45] Ralph: It's very cool. Yeah. And I know like, you gotta pick your channel too. It's like you, you quickly realize like what you like and what you don't like. Like for me you know, LinkedIn and TikTok, I just really like right now, like, that might change. Maybe Twitter will come back, you know, at some point. I, I mean, I remember when Twitter first started, I was like, I still, I started way back when, but never really caught onto it.

[00:41:09] Ralph: That's fine. It's like if you're, you will find a channel that vibes with you

[00:41:15] Kasim: Which is important. Cause if you're gonna do it every day, you gotta enjoy it.

[00:41:18] Ralph: you gotta enjoy it. I know you really like Twitter. I'm not quite as a fan of Twitter. Like for just for whatever reason. I don't know why I can't

[00:41:26] Ralph: really

[00:41:26] Kasim: what I like about Twitter? I feel like Twitter is the smartest people on the internet.

[00:41:31] Ralph: It's a lot of interaction too.

[00:41:33] Kasim: Yeah. Like really bright. Like, if you put something else on Twitter, you better be ready to defend that. Like if you put or not. I, I had this post that I put it, I was trying to get people to an event that I had here in Scottsdale and I put it was horrible, just like ego marketing.

[00:41:48] Kasim: I was like, Hey, I've, I've made four multimillion dollar businesses. I've had two exits. I'm the number one authority in one of the hardest spaces in digital marketing and X, Y, z. Some dude starts asking me, he's like, what industry are you the number one authority in? And then somebody else follows up on that and, and says, ego marketing.

[00:42:03] Kasim: And then somebody else follows up on that. And I'm in this space where I'm like, holy shit. Like for this is really uncomfortable, but I'm actually being held accountable to some of my claims. And I, I like fighting in an ecosystem where I can lose. Do you know what I mean? So you put these opinions out there and then, and it's not, it's not malicious, but it's very, it's very sharp intellect that you have to contend with.

[00:42:27] Kasim: And dude and some of the people I learned from too. Have you seen Alex from Ozzie's Twitter feed? Have you followed him on Twitter?

[00:42:32] Ralph: yeah.

[00:42:33] Kasim: Ralph? I, I swear to God, I, I'm not trying to be, I know everybody's just this freaking fanboy for this guy. I didn't want to like kamozi. I didn't, I wanted to dislike him cuz of how much everybody references him.

[00:42:41] Kasim: I think his Twitter thread is like, it's. A lesson in philosophy, the stuff this guy says, it's not just marketing, it's not just business. He talks about relationships and insights and growth and he's just so wise and what a great thing to be able to wake up and check your Twitter feed and like hook yourself straight up to that type of info diet.

[00:43:03] Kasim: You know, you get to choose who you're exposed to and how you learn and what you get. And I just think it's great.

[00:43:09] Ralph: Yeah. But it's not for everyone. Like some people just don't want to be, you know, don't wanna be that transparent. Like you gotta pick your, my point is, is like Twitter is a thing for you. It's not the thing for everyone,

[00:43:22] Ralph: but you do, you should pick one. , you know, and if it's LinkedIn, like LinkedIn does not have the amount of interactivity as Twitter does.

[00:43:32] Ralph: It just doesn't. But if that's where your customers hang out, that's where you feel more comfortable. It's a little bit more buttoned up. But the ones who actually are more transparent or ones that actually really win, like the point is, is you'll get sort of a vibe of what it is and just stick with that channel.

[00:43:46] Ralph: Which doesn't mean that you need to be on everything. And I think that's the thing that gets people overwhelmed. And if you ha, if you have a team that can get you everywhere, great. But where are you gonna spend your time interacting? Pick one.

[00:43:58] Kasim: Well, and social media has to be social. This is the thing that I, I try to outsource all my social media. I've got a gal on staff who's brilliant. Her name's Ari. She was a middle school teacher for 12 years, and she posts all my social channels. Here's what's funny. When she posts, I get 10% of the interaction when I post.

[00:44:15] Kasim: She's a brilliant writer. She's a smart person. It's just not me. It's not my voice. And people can kind of tell.

[00:44:20] Ralph: can tell.

[00:44:21] Kasim: Yeah. So get on social. Be social.

[00:44:24] Ralph: So, so that's number Five Number six,

[00:44:30] Kasim: people are gonna roll their eyes at this one. Ralph, you ready?

[00:44:33] Ralph: old school. Here you go. Direct mail,

[00:44:37] Kasim: Yeah, dude, here's, don't sleep on direct mail. We're doing direct mail for Driven. It's, it's actually like, it's crazy. People stopped doing direct mail so much that it started working again because your mailbox isn't full of crap anymore.

[00:44:48] Kasim: But no, it's not direct mail, it's email marketing. Dude, the, the, the whole saying, the money's in the list. You can get kicked off Twitter, your YouTube channel can get shut down. Facebook can decrease the number of people that see your organic posts. Nobody can take your email list away from you. You know, apple can play iOS 15 and proxy sends and not show you deliverability data.

[00:45:08] Kasim: But if you are sending quality content, your email list is still one of the most important things you can do. We've got a weekly email from Solutions eight and every now and then, because it does take a little bit of time to put together, I think to myself, I'm like, I'm just gonna pull the plug on this.

[00:45:21] Kasim: Nobody really reads this thing and then almost like, like God is watching my thoughts. I'll get a lightning bolt moment where somebody goes, Hey, you know that email that you sent a couple of weeks ago? And, and I realize like, oh my goodness, people actually like, Reference this and it's a slow burn and we don't do heavy, heavy like hardcore offer emails, but I like to amalgamate everything that I've done that week.

[00:45:42] Kasim: Send it out as a newsletter. And if you wanna know somebody who I think does emails really, really, really well as Perry Belcher, go sign up for Perry's newsletters, go to perry belcher.com, sign up for his email newsletter. And I, man, there's nobody better at at offer design than Perry. And he tells compelling stories and he's really interesting.

[00:45:57] Kasim: And I think building an email list and it's easy in every social channel you have, just have , a link to subscribe. Put it in your link tree, put it in your footer, put it on your website, and just make it kind of a default CTA if you don't know what else to offer.

[00:46:10] Ralph: Yeah. I think for every website you should have. The, some people call it the secondary CTA or I forget what Don Miller calls it, but it's basically, it's like if you don't wanna

[00:46:23] Kasim: Your transitional cta.

[00:46:25] Ralph: cta Yeah. I don't know why I forgot that, but it's a, if they don't wanna take the action that you really want them to take, book a call, buy, like put in an exit in 10, pop in there and get 'em to subscribe or, you know, at, at the very bottom.

[00:46:38] Ralph: I mean, you'll see it on both of our sites. Our exit intent pop isn't really all that great right now cause it's like a HubSpot one, which kind of sucks. But anyway, the point is, is it's there and we get email, we get, you know, we're not sending, you know, traffic to a lead form anywhere, but we're growing our list every single day.

[00:46:55] Ralph: And I think the thing about email people, And this is a really important point, and I think I know Perry Belcher knows it, is that obviously you gotta put relevant, useful content in the email. You gotta have a good subject line, okay? You should split test your subject lines, but at the very least, you just emailing once again, freaky dancing guy on the hill at the concert.

[00:47:17] Ralph: Like just send it out. Just sending it out is a constant reminder to your list that you still exist, and that is the thing that's gonna continuously keep you at top of mind, even if they don't read it, even if your open rates are 10 or 15%. Like, don't worry about it. Maybe you should, you know, maybe you should subscribe to Perry Belcher's list if it is 10 or 15% for your open rates.

[00:47:41] Ralph: But the point is, is that constant reminder, it's an easy way for you to stay top of mind with a Wouldbe customer.

[00:47:48] Kasim: Well, dude, and even those low open rates, what a great indication to you that maybe you're talking about stuff that's not relevant.

[00:47:53] Ralph: Yep.

[00:47:54] Kasim: Like, Hey, here's a lead indicator that maybe your narrative is getting dry and you need to switch things up.

[00:47:59] Ralph: Yeah, absolutely. So we'll leave links in the show notes for that. Definitely. Perry belcher.com. So that is number six is email

[00:48:09] Kasim: Number seven,

[00:48:10] Ralph: number seven. This is a

[00:48:12] Kasim: the dark horse of the marketing world. You ready?

[00:48:14] Ralph: right. That's right. We both come from this world,

[00:48:17] Kasim: Yeah. Well, I think all marketers have to come from this world. This is the trial by fire.

[00:48:21] Ralph: think it is that, and affiliate marketing, well, you didn't really do your affiliate stuff, but anyway,

[00:48:26] Kasim: I, you know, I'm doing more now, to be honest with you than I did anyway. Number seven, seo.

[00:48:34] Ralph: what's seo

[00:48:36] Kasim: What is SEO Ralph? Who the hell knows? Dude, it's, it's just, it's getting more convoluted by the day, and I didn't think that was possible. I, I have a love hate relationship with SEO in that, I'd love to hate it. But I've invested really heavily in SEO for a couple of years. We were the number one ranked Google Ads agency globally.

[00:48:54] Kasim: And I got knocked down by a Google update, and I haven't been able to redeem that ranking. But I, for a ton of long tail key phrases, you know, if you look for things on Performance Max or YouTube marketing, or how to calculate Roaz, and I can tell you in analytics, we get an inordinate amount of traffic for those terms, and that traffic is really high quality traffic.

[00:49:13] Kasim: These are people that are, you know, probably director of marketing, cmo, you know, ad managers at a minimum. And that's, that's my exact customer. So SEOs a slow burn, but the thing about SEOs, it's not hard anymore. Used to be possibly hard from a technical perspective. Now it's just tedious and I've got a three-step process for seo.

[00:49:30] Kasim: You ready? Step one. Call Michael Codman. Pay him to do technical seo, We just had him on the channel, by the way. Go listen to that episode if

[00:49:38] Ralph: show notes. Yep.

[00:49:39] Kasim: He's brilliant. Step two, create 10 x content. Neil Patel talks about this a lot. Your content needs to be 10 times better than anybody else's content out there.

[00:49:46] Kasim: Don't just roll out a chat g p t article. Don't hire some freelancer to create your content. If you wanna rank, create 10 x content. If you can't or don't want to create 10 x content, don't do seo. And step three is link building. And I know link buildings are dirty and ugly and whatever, but it's, it's easy.

[00:50:02] Kasim: And somebody told me somewhere that you can just buy links and there's really no way at this point for Google to know that. So you do those three things and bet money, you'll rank and go after long tail phrases. I know they're not sexy. I know there's not hundreds of thousands of, of visitors, but you know, the 10 or 20 are a couple of hundred visitors that you get.

[00:50:20] Kasim: It's just like nicheing down and, and it's actually exactly what it is. It's nicheing down, but just from a search perspective,

[00:50:25] Kasim: and you can eat off those high intent.

[00:50:28] Ralph: typically high intent for the stuff that you do rank for. You're not gonna rank for digital marketing. You probably don't want that anyway, cuz that's not really an intent-based keyword, but, or a key phrase. The point is, is like if you're creating content on a regular basis, and here's the beauty of it, is that what we just talked about on email marketing and what we're talking about here can be one and the same.

[00:50:50] Kasim: Hmm. No joke.

[00:50:51] Ralph: You know, you can write a kick ass email that is Perry Belcher ish. Why wouldn't you repurpose that and put that right into a blog post or a

[00:51:02] Ralph: pillar piece of content like all of this, or going back to your social stuff. Okay. Like your, you know, anything on organic social. Like have a a, at the very least, you know, go into descript, take your videos that you're doing on YouTube, you know, get them all transcribed and then hand them off to a writer.

[00:51:23] Ralph: Put your final. Finishing touches on it, or maybe you use chat G P T at that point. Michael caught him

[00:51:29] Kasim: Do, I'll use

[00:51:29] Ralph: Really does

[00:51:30] Ralph: talk about

[00:51:30] Kasim: up grammar. I really like it to help cause my grammar's horrible. You know, I've got a 10th grade education, so like, you know it, it needs help.

[00:51:37] Ralph: The point is, is you can repurpose all of this stuff that we talked about here before and even things that are going on in your community if you do that right. Like threads in the community are great ideas for blog posts and probably stuff that nobody's ever written about cuz they don't have a community.

[00:51:54] Ralph: So you can, all of these do work together. And looking at, like, for example, like one of our most popular videos is that, you know, is that Starbucks video? Like we should do a blog post on that. Have we done it yet? No, we haven't done it because we sort of fall down on number seven here. But the point is, is like it is a part of a overall strategy that can be shared from the different aspects of it.

[00:52:18] Ralph: And by the way, we're on number seven. We haven't even gotten to paid traffic yet. I'm really disappointed in you as an fellow agency owner. It should be higher on the list.

[00:52:29] Kasim: Shouldn't it? But you know what's funny, man? Is it's not,

[00:52:32] Ralph: It's

[00:52:32] Kasim: you know what I think about with paid traffic? I think that paid traffic is, you know that, that saying, that's medical. Saying announcer prevention is worth a pound of cure.

[00:52:43] Ralph: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:45] Kasim: I think paid traffic is cure. So like if you get sick, paid traffic is the equivalent of the medicine.

[00:52:52] Kasim: It's the thing that you can. Use and will result in, in, you know, quick feedback, let's say. But all this other stuff that we're talking about is healthy living and there's no reason not to take supplements. Not to take your one a day, not to take, you know, some of like the medicinal interventions. But really if you wanna live a long time, if you're really good about yourself, it's like nutrition, exercise, vitamin D, get outside paid traffic is because it's so heavily commoditizable.

[00:53:20] Kasim: It's last on my list, man. And I run paid traffic for a living. All the rest of this stuff I actually think is more important in my own business. I invest in these things. I don't spend more money on them cuz paid traffic's so expensive, but I spend more time on 'em, more effort, more energy.

[00:53:33] Kasim: And I think that's really telling,

[00:53:35] Ralph: if you do everything right in the first half of the list, your paid traffic is gonna be that much easier too.

[00:53:41] Kasim: oh dude, a hundred, I mean, most of our paid traffic is just converting brand at that point. Just because we've, you know, we've built such a strong brand.

[00:53:47] Ralph: Mm-hmm. I mean, in an ideal world, all you're really paying for is just retargeting

[00:53:52] Kasim: Right? Yeah. No joke.

[00:53:54] Ralph: you know? Or you just ramp up all this stuff at the top and then, or maybe take the best things and start to just amplify those things. So there is.

[00:54:03] Kasim: the paid traffic beast because if you just run paid traffic standalone, you don't know what offers, right? You don't want a narratives, right? You don't know what people want to hear. You don't know who to go after, like you make all your mistakes in the most expensive ecosystem you can possibly make them in.

[00:54:16] Ralph: Yeah, absolutely. So quick story, we had a a potential customer talk with our sales team. And the, our sales team didn't realize that it was actually sort of a secret shopper for our new coo. And they have a robust business. They have a seven figure business, have not done any paid social.

[00:54:37] Ralph: And as a result of that, we didn't know exactly what to sell them because they didn't have paid social when in fact they had everything we needed in order to match a solution to their problem.

[00:54:52] Ralph: Their problem was they wanted to grow faster than what they were doing. They had a very good sort of inbound strategy. They have some outbound stuff that they're doing, and they just had never tapped into anything on the paid social or Google or, or meta or anything, but they had a thriving business. So they have an offer that gets like a 4% conversion rate on their, on their sales page.

[00:55:14] Ralph: They have an offer that actually works. They have a community that they created. They basically did everything on this list up until paid traffic. And unfortunately we missed an opportunity because we said, oh, we don't have anything to offer you, when in fact they already had everything that we could be offering them.

[00:55:31] Ralph: All we have to do is just take the best stuff and amplify it through paid traffic at the very bottom of the list, and they've done it the right way. That business has actually done it in the right way. It's the businesses that look for paid traffic as the cough syrup, the solution to unhealthy living that are gonna fail on unpaid traffic.

[00:55:50] Ralph: Another great example, we have a $30 million mail order company that sell. Nutraceuticals pharmaceuticals, never many of them to tap into paid traffic or any, like now they're spending a hundred plus thousand dollars a month unpaid because they had a really good offer through their direct mail system.

[00:56:09] Ralph: All we did is we translated it over to digital. So they did all this other stuff first and not necessarily everything on the list, but added paid traffic last. And I think that's ultimately sort of the best formula for success. And it's anathema for me to say it as an agency owner, but like It's true.

[00:56:27] Ralph: It's true. And I, I think there's plenty of companies that haven't tapped the direct response side of, of paid social paid advertising, and we could certainly help with that. The point is, is like if you do that first, you're just kind of wasting your money. You're spending money unless you have billions of dollars in V vc, you.

[00:56:48] Ralph: But even those

[00:56:48] Kasim: It's like, do you have more time or more money? Because if you have more money than you have time and you need to go fast, fast, fast. Paid traffic will teach you

[00:56:55] Ralph: Sure fast. It's gonna cost you. It's

[00:56:58] Ralph: gonna cost

[00:56:58] Ralph: you and you're gonna fail a lot. I don't care what agency, whether it's us or you guys or whoever, like you are gonna fail a ton. We always say we fail in 80% of our ads and 70% we're world class with an offer that's never seen the lie today. And you don't even know if people want it.

[00:57:16] Ralph: Your failure rate is 90 plus percent. So you maybe kind of can figure out like what that five to 10% is

[00:57:23] Kasim: You know what your, your missed opportunity story reminds me of you. You ever seen Dumb and Dumber?

[00:57:28] Ralph: many, many times

[00:57:31] Kasim: You remember the, the end of the movie where like the, the bikini bus shows up and they're like, we need somebody to help put on our sunscreen. And they're like, oh, you were in luck. There is a town 10 minutes that way. That's

[00:57:45] Ralph: That was it. Oh my God. Yeah. I don't know. I, I hope our sales guy doesn't like he's new, so hey,

[00:57:55] Kasim: We missed that on the bikini bus. It's

[00:57:57] Ralph: that's all right. We missed out on the bikini bus in a big way. All right, so there's seo. .

[00:58:04] Ralph: that's the ultimate listical show on exactly what this, what this show is all about. So hopefully, uh, you have derived some sort of benefit. Are, uh, ramblings on traffic and it was not the thing that you probably thought that we were gonna be talking about, ,

[00:58:21] Ralph: but that is the absolute truth here, even as agency owners. So, , we'd love to know what you think, you know, we do this podcast. because we love you, the listener. And Ka just loves to hear the sound of his voice. And that's, that's it. That's it. That's the reason why

[00:58:36] Kasim: I make up most of what I say. None of this is

[00:58:38] Ralph: None of it's true. , But tell us what we can do better.

[00:58:41] Ralph: We, we do listen to and read every single review on iTunes, of course. And wherever you listen to podcast. Make sure you subscribe and leave a rating wherever you're listening first off. And let us know what we can do better over@perpetualtraffic.com slash Better follow me on LinkedIn. Hint hint, the social channel I care most about and casa at Casa Muslim over on Twitter.

[00:59:05] Ralph: Same thing with him. Go back and listen to previous episodes and we will leave a boatload of links in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com. So on behalf of my awesome co-host, Kala, until next show, see ya.