Traffic And Leads Podcast

Listen to the full interview here ( 28:24 minutes)

 

Full Transcript

You’re listening to the traffic and leads podcast where we examine what is and isn’t working in online marketing. Now, please welcome your host online marketing expert one click Lindsay.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the traffic and leads podcast. I am your host one. Click Lindsay. Today I’m interviewing Mr Dan Moyle with interview valet. Now some of you listen to my episode with Tom Schwab, who is the owner of interview valet, and these guys know what’s up when it comes to inbound marketing. So today I quiz Dan on the power of inbound marketing. He actually did some very successful inbound marketing for a very large mortgage company and created millions of dollars worth of revenue and today in this episode he tells us how to do inbound marketing for boring industries. Now, there only boring for those that aren’t looking for this information, but I’ll let Dan and I kind of hashed that out during our episode, but I think you guys are going to like it, especially if you’re kind of dipping your toe into this whole inbound marketing thing because it totally works. It’s really useful and it can generate some highly qualified and amazing clients for you, so I think you guys are going to totally dig this episode of the traffic and leads podcast,

but before I do that, a little house cleaning. Of course, I am one quick Lindsay with traffic and leads that come. If your website is sitting dead in the water and you need help with facebook marketing, Sco, paperclick, email marketing, or all of these words just seem like a big jumbled mess to you and you know you need to do it for your business to build traffic and leads that you can actually depend on. Make sure you reach out to us today@twotrafficandleads.com. I am the owner one click lindsay. We’ve been doing this for 12 years. I have a highly qualified staff of experts that can help you create never ending traffic and leads for your small business, so make sure that you reach out today. If you liked this podcast, please make sure to leave us a review wherever you’re listening to it or at least tell one friend about it, and finally make sure you hop over to the click technique.com.

That’s a website for you to put your email in and you will be entered into a five day crash course on how to build a strong online marketing foundation. Through this course, I will give you everything I take my traffic and leads clients through to build a strong online marketing foundation. I tell you where to post things, how often to post, how much money to put in your facebook ads, and there’s some really cool many trainings in there too, so make sure you hop out to the click technique.com. I’m also, part of that is access to my private facebook group, which is the best facebook group on the web. The click technique. Make sure you go enjoy it. All right. Let’s hop into this interview with Dan and you guys are totally gonna. Dig It.

Hey Dan, welcome to the show. So excited to have you on today.

Thank you, Lindsay. Happy to be here.

Yeah. So you, you have a tagline and it is the inbound evangelist. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Uh, I believe that inbound marketing, which to me at its core is helpful. Marketing is the, uh, the past, present, and future of marketing. Um, I don’t think it’s anything necessarily new, but I think it’s where it’s at and I am a huge just evangelists in general of inbound. Um, I’ve worked with some of the companies that do it. Uh, the marketing that I’ve done over the last, you know, eight years, whatever it’s been has been inbound focused. So I’ve, I’ve, I’ve grown into that role of the inbound evangelist.

I like it. So for those listeners that may feel like the word inbound marketing’s a little squishy, why don’t you define it for us?

Yeah. It’s, you know, I compare it to the, the whole outbound world of trying to interrupt people and stop their day with what they’re doing and stop their life and convinced them that they need what I have instead. Inbound to me is drawing them in with helpful, relevant content. And certainly you can pay for some of that attention. I have no problem with paid ads, but it has to be to me through the inbound philosophy of not just shouting at them and waving my hands and saying, Hey, do what I want you to do. Instead, it’s as it is, teaching them and empowering them and solving their problem when they’re ready to solve it, not trying to convince them that they have a problem when they don’t.

Fair enough. So what do you have to say to people who say, okay Dan, I understand I’m supposed to be super helpful and all this, but if I give away all my best stuff, then they won’t need me.

Look, I’m going to be honest. I listened to one of your shows recently with a Doberman, Dan, and it was awesome. It was awesome because because I agree with them, you need to be able to bring value in and you’re going to get paid, right? The things that I do are worth something so I should be paid for them, but I also understand that man, people are going to go get stuff wherever they want to get up from, so they’re going to go search for let’s say let’s go all the way back in my career to when I was helping with a mortgage company. If people are going to go search for mortgage questions and they get really bad answers from from really bad sources. Not Bad people. They’re good people, but bad sources. It’s gonna hurt me in the long run as as the mortgage company, I want to give them the best information, the best stuff, right?

So I’m going to give them that best content. I’m not going to charge them for it, but eventually they’re going to come to me and get their mortgage with me. So that’s. So that’s how I look at it now. And you can do that B to c, you can do bob, you know, if I’m as where I’m at now with interview Valet, if I get people all the information on how to get booked on podcast interviews, that’s great. If they can go do it on their own, great, that just makes this whole category of podcast interview marketing that much better. Right? But at the end of the day, if they can’t spend the time to do this and they want the expert, they’re going to come to us because we are that expert because we are helping them and empowering them and showing them, but you know, and, and, and I’m not doing it and I’m not going to nickel and dime them and say, okay, for 1999, you could have this course on how to be a great podcast guest. Right? Instead, what I want to do is empower them to be that great podcast guest when they realize that they can manage all of it. They’re going to do it through us instead.

That makes sense. And I totally agree. I love inbound marketing, hence why I host a podcast, et cetera. But, um, I do like playing the devil’s advocate and pretending that I don’t know what I’m talking about for those people that may, that they might be just sticking their toe in. So tell me, Dan, for people who don’t, who haven’t started inbound marketing and they’re not really sure where to start, what’s your recommendation? Where do I start?

I’m going to go all the way back to starting with blog articles created. Create a blog on your website and to me that’s just. That’s just A. I mean even the term blog seems so outdated, right? It’s, it’s articles, it’s information that is consistently updated, that has the latest whatever information that you have for those, that buyer persona that you want to reach, but it’s creating that content and do it in bite sized chunks that people can actually take in and understand, right? I don’t, I don’t need a 5,000 word blog article that gives me the entire history of whatever it is I’m looking for. I just need biases, information to bring people into me and, and help them at the end of every article, a call to action of you want to learn more, download this piece of content or subscribe to my podcast or whatever that thing is.

Do you want them to do next? Right. And so, so to me it’s going back to that, that that blog, very simple, you can create a blog in wordpress or any other kind of, you know, nearly free software and it’s just creating that content to begin to reach an audience and what that does also for you as a marketer or a business or whatever it is, it teaches you what people are looking for. So if they aren’t coming to that article, you have no clicks, no, no reads, no nothing than do something different, right? Answer a different question, but it’s your chance to begin to create that content. And to me that also the kind of the third thing that does is it fuels the future content that you want to do. If you want to create videos, go back to your articles and create those videos and answer those questions. You want to do some social media posts. Do those from that article, a quote or a make a meme out of something out of that article that can fuel all of that as well.

That makes a lot of sense. What about the problem that people have that they create this really great content, but they, their website doesn’t get any organic traffic and there. So maybe their social media following isn’t more than a handful of people. Um, that’s a whole nother problem. The inbound does inbound marketing fix that?

Yeah. Uh, you know, when I started with America first, the mortgage company, I’ll say the date of that doesn’t matter to everybody, but it was December sixth, right? And the next day was December seventh. Obviously it’s

math, math, right?

But it’s Pearl Harbor Day. And so my big genius thought was I’m going to write this article about Pearl Harbor Day on December seventh and I’m going to put it out there. I’m going to end it with like, va loans can help you get a home, right? This is going to be great. And, and you know, I gave it much thought. I found some images. This is going to be awesome. I think I got two views on it. One was my mom, one was me and it was just right. Thanks mom. And it was an evening. She rips it apart. No, I’m just kidding. Um, but it, but it was terrible and that’s okay. The next one, the next week I wrote five more articles in a couple of them guys from fuse, some views or whatever and next week and the next week and so on and so forth, and it’s just, it’s a marathon, man.

I wish I had a like a here’s exactly how to do it and within 30 days you’re going to get all these views and clicks and everything and it’s, it’s a marathon. It’s continuously honing your message and what people need to hear and you begin to build that. Now, with that said, I think you also, at the same time, you go out and you strategically place yourself where you want to be, right? Can you think about those buyer, that buyer persona, those people that you want to read that and eventually become a customer and figuring out where they are? If you know, interview valet. If our buyer persona is on snapchat, I’m going to go there. I’m going to figure out how to use snapchat. I’m going to test it. Always be testing, always be testing. I’m going to go on, I’m going to test it, and if I can find some views and some conversions, great, but if I realize that actually they’re not on snapchat and I’m really bad at the snapchat thing, I’m going to get off of it. I’m going to put my time and somewhere else I’m going to go to Instagram, I’m going to try this and I’m just going to build that, that audience purposefully, strategically and slowly. I’m not going to go to fiverr and buy a bunch of followers because that doesn’t work. At least it doesn’t for me that I’ve tried it a couple times just to test it. It never works.

People listening don’t do that. Especially now with twitter, change in the rules,

you know, on, on duplicate content across multiple platforms. Like you can’t just go buy followers anymore. Like you used to it, it didn’t work anyway, and now it’s getting even worse. Like you’ll actually be punished for it. So yeah, there you go. Um, but it’s, it’s being, being purposeful, being consistent and being a patient to reach out to people and say, you know, and follow other people. Uh, you know, ask your friends, and at the very beginning when I was at first, the first thing I did when I started that job, as I created the facebook page for the, for the company, this was back, you know, seven or eight years ago now. So back when facebook pages mattered, they still matter. But we, uh, when, when people saw them more often,

when they were super, super useful without putting money that the

pay the edge. Yep. You know, I just want it to all my friends and family say, Hey, look, I just started this new job. I’m excited to give this page a look. Tell me what you think, number one, number two, give it a like and help me build this audience. And if 90 days from now you want to, unlike it, because we have an audience, great, go ahead and unlike it, but help me get there. And I had to do it. And that was cool, you know? And eventually you hit that hockey stick moment of, of people that I don’t know, have liked it and they’re telling their friends and they like it and they find the content, this kind thing. So, so certainly, you know, if you build it, they will come, doesn’t work. You have to be deliberate and go out there and do it. Um, and actually network and offer people valuable information and things of value. But it. But it is definitely a patients.

Yeah, it is a long game, right? Like the first article, even if it’s super sexy and amazing, chances are you’re not going to get, you’re not going to get much from it. It’s the consistency and continually doing it where people can pretty much count on it. That’s when magic starts to happen.

And it’s funny you mentioned sexy because what happened was eventually I became known as the guy who could do inbound marketing and a boring industry, which at first was kind of like, wait, it’s boring. What I do is boring. No, no, no. The industry is okay. I get it now. Um, but you know, you think about it,

I think about

mortgages, right? It’s not, it’s not a Harley Davidson, it’s not Guinness or Jamison, it’s not a sports car, like it’s a mortgage who in the world wants to talk about that. But I’ve found that bringing that value did make it sexy so to speak. So I went to, um, the hubspot inbound conference, uh, an invitation to speak there a two years in a row about, about doing inbound marketing for a boring industry. And My tagline each time was something to the effect of helpful is sexy when it comes to marketing. You don’t have to be that sexy advertiser that you think you need to be when it comes to being super edgy or funny or viral or whatever it is, right? We’re not all selling beer and we can’t have all have swimsuit models or whatever. Right? But we, but we can bring value and we can be sexy and attractive through being helpful. And so that’s. I did that a couple of years in a row and just fell in love with that whole idea of sexy. Is the new helpful or helpful? It

sexy, whatever. So speaking of the boring industry, I what I do. So when you, when you came across my desk, one of your bulleted items was how I added an entire month revenue $75 million to our mortgage banks bottom line through inbound marketing. So is that true?

That’s true. Well, you’re a marketer’s lie. Come on now.

Um, I know it’s true and I, and I totally believe it, but like what? Like was there a paid traffic behind that? What kind of. Can you give us some examples of your best articles? Like how did you do it? Yeah. Yeah. Well

it’s funny because not only did I, not only did it do it, I did it in an industry where website leads were typically viewed as garbage because we as consumers, we go to these websites, we, and we start asking you about interest rates right when it comes to mortgages in particular, telling me the interest rate. Oh, it’s five point two, five. Like I’ve heard I can get it for three point two now. So I don’t want to even talk to you. So it, it’s a waste of time for most of those mortgage consultants, right, the loan officers. And so, so I, I brought this $75,000,000 in that year based on helping home buyers understand the process and giving them an expert mortgage to talk to you. So a couple of like article examples you asked for. One of them was, my favorite one was there’s this mortgage loan called the Fha two zero three k a k is Ooh, sounds amazing.

Total jargon, right? And apparently the government can’t spell it. K sort of stands for construction because the thing is, it’s, it’s part of the Fha world. So if you’ve heard of that had loans three point five percent down, you know, low, uh, low credit, whatever, like fha loans are great for first time home buyers typically, right? Well the two o three b, the section B of that loan program that, that insurance program, whatever it is, uh, is the kind of the standard one. The case section is for renovations. That’s why I said construction, but for renovations, you can buy a house and put an and you can buy it on the future value of the afternoon, proved a home after the construction is done, the renovations are done, so most of the time you go buy a house and you know it’s a appraised for $100,000, but you can see that it’s going to be worth to 50 with, with renovations while you can only borrow 100.

Sorry, you got to finance of 150 yourself or do sweat equity or whatever. Right? Well there’s two or three k loan. You can buy that home and roll the renovations and all into one mortgage. You don’t have to have a home equity loan, a second mortgage, which is what a home equity line of credit as a second mortgage and all that other really kind of complicated stuff, right? You buy buy it with this one loan, it’s all in one and you pay for it. It’s based on the future value. It’s awesome. It’s a great loan, but nobody knows what the heck a two or three K is. Um, but for those who do, which are realtors, so our real estate agents are the one of the biggest sources of leads for a mortgage company because as a home buyer you think, I want to buy a home, I’m going to call a realtor, right?

Or find one or whatever. Your cousin’s sister’s best friend has one. And so you cook up with a realtor and they then tell you where you should get your financing. This is generally how it works. Not always, but generally. So we found that our biggest source of of partnership was realtors. So I decided to write an article, uh, geared towards the realtors mostly, but also towards home buyers who had had their realtor tell them the two or three Caitlin is a terrible loan. Don’t do that because it can be a little bit complicated. There can be some paperwork, it can take a little bit longer, but the end of the day it’s an amazing loan. And so I wrote this article called are two or three k loans. So terrible because I figured if you’ve kind of heard about this loan, sort of along the lines and your realtors told you is terrible or for realtor is looking for this information, they’re going to, they’re going to google, they’re going to ask Siri whatever and say why aren’t two or three k loans so terrible.

And this article, I think I wrote this back in late 2014, I think it’s still one of the most popular articles on their website. I’m no longer with the company, but I think still that model on the poem, one of the most popular. So that just became this mythbusting article that then had a CTA at the end of it that was download the two or three k guides, survival guide, right? So it’s terrible. You’ve got to survival guide. There’s a video on there that talks about some of the benefits to it. It all works to drive those leads in both realtors and homebuyers and, and, and contractors know if a contractor wants to understand how this whole thing works and help make renovations on homes in a neighborhood and where you can’t build or she can build homes. That’s a great thing. So anyway, so that whole, that whole idea, that was one of my favorite articles is why are two or three k loans so terrible.

That really helped. And then another part of what we did was um, the whole social media side of things. We figured pinterest would be where no other mortgage company is right now. So I, I created a pinterest page with the idea that anything to do with the home I was going to promote and that are not our own content necessarily. I mean I got to our own content but so often I would share something from house or you know, love it or leave it, flip flop it or whatever. All these different things. We called them and I would just share that information in hopes that they would, they would pin it from our page and go, wait, I heard that from America first, I need to go back and look at that. And then we have our couple of our own pin boards that were specifically tailored from our blog was a great imagery, a little bit of information about how to make these things happen because we’re dreaming about our dream house, right.

And I want them to pin our articles and it drove a bunch of traffic back to our website. So, so a big traffic spike was through pinterest and just helping others plan their dreams out. So those were a couple of ways that we drove all that, uh, that traffic to us and they’re just converting them through middle and bottom of the funnel offers through good email marketing, follow ups. Hey, go here to talk to a mortgage consultant, you know, get out of this loop of information and just talk to your mortgage consultant. That will help you get that home. It really worked. It worked pretty well.

That is awesome. Uh, that’s impressive. I’m impressed that you, uh, that you shared that pinterest marketing even for such a non visual type of industry such as home loan, I’m not going to call it boring, that’s your word, but pinterest usually. Yeah, you’re right. You usually wouldn’t see stuff there. Do you, do they still run pinterest ad advertising? Not ads necessarily, but are they still interesting?

So, um, when I, when I left, a lot of that fell away. I’m the CMO that took over. I was, I was direct creative director of marketing, director of marketing. They brought a cmo in kind of above me that had different philosophies and I ended up leaving. And that’s fine. No hard feelings. But yeah, things like video marketing, pinterest, twitter, all basically went away.

I see. Okay. Can you give like a, your best cheerleading Rah Rah speech to those people who think they are into boring of an industry or an industry that they don’t think anyone wants to hear what they have to say because is boring. Can you give us your best Rah Rah Rah speech on that.

The, your

family and friends might think it’s boring, or if you’re married, your spouse, Mike, just my case, but those warm leads that you want to reach, they’re willing to give you their money. You’re not boring to them. You are the subject matter expert when you’re giving them that content. Your, your company is the best company out there, the most trusted, uh, that, that is extremely attractive to a consumer. Whether it’s B to C or B to b, if I know I get to know you, I like you and I trust you. No matter how boring everybody else thinks it is. I want to do business with you. You could, you could sell me solder if you’re a, if you’re a mechanical person and an electronic electrics, electronics person, whatever, uh, you know, you know, a solder is, if you can sell me solder through content marketing, you can sell anything through content marketing and inbound marketing.

Um, and that, that happened. I mean that’s a engineers really, really want a specific kind of soldering tool and different kinds of it and how you use it and all these and they want to get better at it and there are companies that do that now, so as boring as that is for 90 percent of the world, that 10 percent that you want to reach and they’re going to eat up that contest something fierce. Yeah, because they’re interested in. Same with the home loans, like maybe you’re not in the, in the, in the market for a home loan, but the second you want to renovate or something and you ran across this article, it’s going to be the most interesting thing you’ve ever read. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Thank you. You’re, you’re an excellent cheerleader. I know you worked with Tom Schwab. For those of those of you listening, go and listen to my episode where I interviewed Tom Schwab a lot about podcasting, but I am going to let Dan tell us a little bit why podcast interview marketing is the, as he puts it, new holy grail of marketing. Give us your spiel on that.

Oh yeah, I mean, Gosh, having a podcast right now, whoever’s listening right now, we are in your ears were in your head. You might be driving, you might be doing dishes with your earbuds in, you might be on a run right now or a walk or something like we’re in your head. What an what an what an intimate connection we have with that listener. Right? Let’s see. The thing is I could start a podcast and do all this work. I mean I know how much work you put into this, this kind of stuff. You have your scheduling, your production, your postproduction, you’re editing and some of it may be you pay someone for, but there’s a lot of work and thought and heart that goes into creating a podcast. Anybody who says that podcasting is easy, there hasn’t done it or doesn’t do it well and so and so.

I don’t want to have to start one and build an audience, get my message out. Right? It’s gonna take a long time, but if I can go be a guest expert on other podcasts and dre and again get people to know me like me and trust me through three interview like what we’re having here on, on your show, Lindsey. It’s, it’s amazing. You know, it’s, it’s such a powerful medium to reach an audience that is hyperfocused. Yeah. Anybody listening to traffic and leads wants to learn about marketing. I, I’m not going to take this marketing talk to a parenting podcast, right? Or a comedy podcast. Nobody cares. Again, it’s that boring industry versus I’m interesting to somebody. Right? And so if I want to talk to marketers, I want to talk to marketers that are listening to podcasts because they’re already taking the time to listen.

They’re engaged and they want to know something. So if they hear us on that, they hear you as the expert man. What greater way to to reach an audience and get them to trust you relatively quickly, and of course you. The whole thing is it’s not just being a guest. Then you send them back to a website, offer them that content. Again, inbound, right, it’s teaching them further how to do that kind of thing. So if you want to be a better guest, you know, go to the website, download this, you know, whatever it is. So it’s, it’s a whole system that we do and it’s, you know, podcast interview marketing is this new category, this new tool in the marketer’s toolbox that if that’s all you ever did, it probably wouldn’t work very well, but if you use a podcast interview marketing along with social media and you use seo on your blog and then you’re paying for some ads on instagram and then you’ve got an email list that you email, like all that works together and podcasting and remarketing is broaden that audience that

so true. And I will, I will back you up. Some of my best, highest paying clients have literally come from me being guests on people’s podcasts.

Hmm. That’s awesome.

Yeah. And we’ll be like, I can close them without really even talking to them, which is kind of crazy, right? Like why would you sign a multi thousand dollar deal without talking to someone? And that’s because they trust me because they’ve heard me on other people’s podcasts. So it’s so powerful and I believe it can work across most industries. It’s very, very powerful. So I’ve used a lot of your time today. I know you work with interview valet. Apparently interview valet can help us be interviewed on people’s podcasts. Is that right?

That is. Thanks for teeing up that home run for me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,

why don’t you tell us about it.

Yeah. Well, you know, we, we have that. We offer the whole system, the whole world of Pakistan to be marketing of helping you find the right podcasts, understanding your audience that you want to reach your goals, finding the podcast that matched that. I’m working through all of that, pitching you, creating all the material to help pitch you a helping with the progression of listener to lead, to lead with a welcome page for every interview you’re on. We do all that work. We help with the promotion afterwards. You know, we’re changing up some of our promotion stuff right now, the social media side of it. Because as the rules change, we want to grow and offer new and better solutions to social media marketing. So we’re always looking at that too. And so all of that works to your benefit as a, as a marketer, as a brand, as an aspiring thought leader, as a business coach, whatever that looks like for you.

If you’re looking for relationships and marketing, not just a transaction, um, you know, we, we, we have found through research that is as great as digital book tours are with podcasts, they work very well, you know, trying to get your Roi on book sales isn’t always the best way to do it. If you have other things to back that up, that’s the best way to do it. So, yeah, that’s, that’s the way they go in and to be a great guest. I mean, there’s not, it’s not rocket science necessarily, but we have tips on how to be a great guest. Uh, you know, we have, um, I wrote a book about inbound marketing and content and how journalism complained to that. Um, I get, we’ve got a few links on our website. If a listener is just want to visit, interview valet.com, forward slash traffic and leads, they can download all that.

I love it. I love it. Well, Dan, it’s been a true pleasure interviewing you today. Thank you so much for all the valuable info.

Thanks, Lindsay is a lot of fun, man. Not a lot of high energy. You’re off

another super awesome episode of the traffic and leads podcast. Now get to inbound marketing and if you need help with inbound marketing, make sure you reach out to us@trafficandleads.com. I also wanted to mention one more quick thing. Every Thursday night, me and my friend Lindsey Phillips from smooth sailing business growth. We do a facebook live every single Thursday on my facebook page at 6:00 Pacific because I’m here in the Pacific northwest, so do the calculations. That’s 9:00 eastern. Make sure you join us. We have a ton of fun and we do it every single Thursday night and finally, please share this with friends. Leave us a review and tune in next time when I have another great episode on how to generate more traffic and leads for your small business.