Diversity is resilience. Phenomenal quote by one Pablo who's a, survivalist. Which, and you might think to yourself like, what could a survivalist teach me about Google ads? But for Bri, first of all, do you hear that fool's name? Like if he came for you, it's over. It's over played by young Antonio Bandas, obviously. I wanna talk to you about diversifying your traffic strategy right now today. And I can tell you I'm as guilty of this, by the way, as anybody because we have been very myopic in scope as a Google Ads agency. We've dedicated ourselves, not exclusively to Google ads, but very, very, very heavily to Google Ads. And what I noticed over time was there were such significant ebbs and flows, and so I'd have these phenomenal months and it's like, oh my goodness, I'm a genius. And then, you know, a down month was like, oh my God, I'm an idiot and I'm going outta business. in order to protect yourself from that the time to diversify is when you don't need to diversify. So I wanna go over as many traffic strategies as I can possibly fit into one video before I exhaust your patients. what I'd like you to do is just pick the one or two where you're like, you know what, that actually sounds pretty easy. Let me do that. So the first and foremost, I've already shot a video on this. If you haven't watched it, go back and watch it. Referrals. If you don't have a referral program, Put one in place asap. They're so easy. They're an absolute no-brainer. It takes one email, text message, or Direct message. At the inflection point when the customer's the happiest. Easiest thing in the world to put together. From a process perspective, referrals are the absolute best prospects you can possibly get your hand on. best possible type of traffic. Build a referral program. Number two, a community. I have a host of communities. and a community, by the way, is just anywhere where people gather. So I own Needle marketing, which is a Montessori agency, and we have Montessori Thrive, which is the Montessori community. And we do a weekly town hall and we have this real cool content repository and we have a Facebook group. And it's an unbelievable asset because I can go to my community anytime I need anything, help, advice, input surveys and because we give to the community, they trust us. This YouTube channel is a community. Right. It's a community of people. We actually have a little membership thing. People show up on Fridays with the lives and they ask questions and our community is like, amazing. They're amazing. All you guys, are amazingly supportive. It's funny because, every now and then we get like a nasty comment cuz it's YouTube and that just is what it is. It doesn't bother me. I, that's a lie. it really bothers me. It keeps me up at night. I have such, such a just fragile ego. But what I've noticed is, Some of our community members like come down on those people in a really rough way. And you know, part of me feels bad about that, but the other part of me is like, hmm, that's what you get. That's what happens. our podcast, rebuttal Traffic, that's a community. they actually kind of refer to themselves in that way. They're like, oh, I'm a PT listener. brand themselves, you know, mastermind, the co-founder of The Driven Mastermind. That's a community, and you don't need to do all those, by the way, like, this took me 17 years to build out, choose one pocket. Of people and choose that pocket wherever you think it is that they congregate. Maybe it's a Facebook group, maybe it's a, a community that you create yourself. Maybe it's a YouTube channel. And the way to build a community, by the way, is just to give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give. Look at a YouTube channel, I can't tell you one of the most common comments is, I can't believe all this is free. And it's like, well, so you build a community and now you trust me. Now you're like, yeah, I watched your content. And you're not absolutely full of it. You're not kinda like this guy. So when I go off to launch a book or launch a course or offer services or whatever, it's a pretty easy ask for me to make in terms of the deposits, right? Like the emotional bank account is full and it's easy for me to give because instead of like, if I had to do this one-on-one, I'd never be able to do it. But because I can give in mass, I can build a community in mass, and then if I wanna sell a book for 99 cents, it's a pretty easy thing to do. this proverb that I love. It's, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. If you don't have a community, go build one. And what's nice is so few people are willing to do that work. Build a community, launch a podcast, launch a channel, launch your mastermind. Do something, build a community of people that you can rely upon. There's no better source of traffic than a community. I know I said that about referrals, but they're actually kind of the same thing, aren't they? It's like people that know you, people that know I can trust you. go build a community. and it can be small by the way, like a couple hundred people is nothing to sneeze at that always. That's another real quick soapbox moment. I'm not sorry. Forgive me. I hate it when people are like, oh, that video only got 20 likes. that post only got 30 views. That thing in my mind, I'm like, Hmm, that's, 30 people. It's like 30 souls, you know, that's 60 parents. that's 60 children potentially, if everybody's. Procreating at the rate of replacement. It's not a small number of humans. Like if you ever try to put 30 people in a room, you know, if you ever try to run an event that has 30 people, it's hard. It's hard to move 30 people and get them to sit down and pay attention. And you did that. No, you did that for seven seconds, right? So I'm not trying to overstate the importance of it, but let's not understate the importance of it Either. You get a community with a couple hundred people. Or 20 people, or 30 people or 40 people that's fertile ground. Fertile ground, celebrate every win, every person. I think that's the way to really think about it. Cause if you're like, oh, you know, I don't have a hundred thousand, I still don't have a hundred, I have 21,000 subscribers on YouTube. But Justin for Margin Nav, that's zero. When you compare it to the big players. yet our YouTube channel is the most important and valuable asset I will ever have. It's where I go for the majority of my clients. It's where I go for the majority of my employees. It took us four or 500 videos. You can do that. It's less than two years. You can do that. If you shut a video every day, hell yeah. That's accessible. Build a community, do it now. I insist outreach and networking. I love and hate this, by the way. So the biggest deals I've ever done, the highest performing real estate investment campaign on the planet. I can prove it with data. That just came from good old fashioned networking. Even our Montessori agency, that was a client through Solutions eight, but it was the direct. Kind of belly to belly negotiation that actually got us the deal. I love going to masterminds. I'm a mastermind junkie. I'm a part of four Masterminds by the, I'm a co-founder of one of 'em. And so I think masterminds can be really important. I like high-end networking. I don't love like the BNI game. If you're not familiar with bni, the Business Networking International thing, there's not think there's anything wrong with it, but It always felt a little like bottom of the barrel to me, to be honest with you. I hope that's okay to say. I guess it depends on the industry you're in. But you know, they've got like one realtor and one dentist and one barber and whatever, and then it just felt a little bit diluted in terms of what it is that I offered. But if you can get into. The right room the big deals that you're gonna do in your life, like the big business that you're gonna get and the really big swings and the really big at bats and the really big connections, they're all gonna come from networking like just being in front of people, you know? And I know that feels so old fashioned and old school, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe this goes away and I'm just, you know, over the hill now. But gosh, there's something about being with folks and if you have the opportunity to do it, Make it a habit. Go to one event a month that's accessible. anything more than that would fatigue the day. That said to me, some people love it. I've got friends that are like, man, every weekend they're just doing, Dennis, you, he's a really good example. I that fool. Good dear God. The energy on that man it's unbelievable. He's gotta be on something like every event he's there. I don't mean just big events, I mean, like every event I know of. But there's Dennis in the background. I, I think he's like been cloned 17 times. It's unreal. If you can build outreach and networking into your model be really, really, really effective. If you want to figure out cold outreach In a scalable way, go look at Cole Gordon's education. We're talking to Cole right now about potentially doing some outbound for solutions eight, but I don't think anybody's cracked the code as well as Cole has. I think cold prospecting is tough. Cold outbound is tough, but gosh, if you can do it what a great way to be master of your own destiny. Next up, organic social. This one terrifies me. It terrifies me, and I'm trying to crack the code on it right now. You may or may not notice. I'm doing a ton on Twitter. I'm doing a ton on Instagram. We've already been doing a ton on YouTube, but that's sort of my comfort zone. And I'm trying to crack the organic social code and I'm doing okay. I've got like 4,700 followers on Twitter, which is pretty good. And they're pretty engaged. You know, people like talk to me and comment back and that type of stuff. Instagram, I'm not quite as far along. If you wanna follow me on Instagram, by the way, it's at Casa Muslim. Love to have you follow. And then YouTube has been wildly successful for us. I might even add podcasting, but I don't think I'm going to, cause it's not really a social platform. It's not like a single standalone platform. Pick a platform and go all in. And then once you crack the code on that platform, then pick the next platform. Don't try to do 'em all at once. I can say that's, massively overwhelming. Like we picked YouTube cuz we knew our people are on YouTube. And then once we were done with YouTube, it was like, all right, now that I've got the YouTube mechanism running and it's kind of autopilot and I feel really comfortable with it and I know how to do this and then I've moved onto Twitter and the stuff that I'm doing on Instagram, really, I'm taking my own advice. I'm not really all in on Instagram. What I'm doing is I'm posting it on Twitter. And then just repurposing my Twitter content for Instagram, which is less than ideal, right? Like every network has its own personality and its own requirements and whatever, but it's better than nothing. And so once I crack the quote on Twitter, which I think I'm getting kind of close to doing, then I might migrate over and, spend a little bit more time loving on Instagram. But what's really interesting is once the models are built, our YouTube channel's, super easy for me to keep active. I shoot a video like this, videos range from. Five minutes to 30 minutes I can bang out a whole week's worth of videos in an afternoon. And, bam, I'm a World Authority and Google ads on YouTube, you could do something like that too. Incidentally. So few people are willing to do the work, just do the work. And it doesn't matter if there's already people in your space. Like there's room for your voice if you have a unique opinion. So go figure out organic social, choose one channel email marketing. Dear Lord in heaven, this thing will not die, will it? Everybody's like, oh, email's dead. No, it's not. No, it's not and never will be. First thing I do in the morning, check my email. Last thing I do before I go to bed, check my email. Most business owners are the same. And what's really weird, what's crazy to me is email newsletters are making a comeback. Have y'all noticed that newsletters are all of a sudden like. All the rage just blew me away when I saw that. And I'm signing up for him. I just signed up for, what's that kid's name? Ache. I follow him on Twitter. I bought his Twitter course and he's got this newsletter on ai. And I'm like, well, I wanna know ai. And every day he sends me a little size nuggets. We do a weekly newsletter at Solutions eight. You can go to soly.com/subscribe, or it's soly dot home slash newsletter. I don't know. I'll put a link in the description. Don't sleep on email marketing. and not necessarily just in newsletter format. There's different ways to do email. Perry Belcher's got a really good course on this, by the way. This is, it's the highest ROI of any marketing initiative with the lowest cost. This you wanna talk about the little hinges swings the big door. It's email marketing and building an email list isn't hard, by the way. Write a really, really good book and give it away for free, which we did. By the way. You can go to slow.com/free book, put a link into the description. emo marketing is, an total, complete prerequisite. It's easy, it's fast, it's cheap. It's effectively free. If we're being honest, seo, I love to hate seo. if your industry's saturated, I would talk you out of seo. But when you can climb that mountain, there's nothing that moves the needle more. We were the number one ranked Google Ads agency from an organic perspective for a couple of years. And the amount of traffic I got from that was just insane. And then we were able to remarket that traffic and put those folks in funnels and there was a whole bunch of fringe benefit to that. It's hard, hard to establish now I go completely long tail. I stopped chasing the short tail phrases cuz Google kept deprioritizing us for a bunch of reasons that I pissed me off and the long tail traffic is more valuable to me anyway. The thing about SEOs don't get caught up in the tech trap. Go hire Michael Cotham, rule Authority seo. He'll do a technical audit one time a year. That's it. Technical SEO's done. Then build quality content. Build quality links. That's seo. Somebody fight me on that if you think you know SEO better than I do. Cause I'm telling you, I've gone through this conversation over and over and over and over again. Quality content, quality links, that's it. This recurring SEO garbage, whether they wanna charge you to update metadata, like that's just because they want recurring revenue. SEO's one that scares me. It deflates me a little bit in case you can tell. But if you can crack the code on seo, like it's the most powerful thing that can happen in your business, especially for small niches. Guest blogging different than seo. Some people think guest blogging is just an SEO initiative. It's not at all. Go find content networks that have your audience and then create really powerful content for them. And here's what's really funny is they're all dying for content, but the key is you can't be garbage. You can't give 'em garbage content. You have to write like really, really good stuff and, one or two guest blogs can really make or break you. I wrote guest blogs for Search Engine Journal for a while and it's funny, I stopped because their editorial standards were so high. That part of me was like, dude, this is not worth it. But good for them, you know, good for them. That's why we all trust Search Engine Journal. said, when I did get articles posted, Unreal, the amount of lift that we got from an organic perspective every single time, and I don't just mean in terms of organic ranking, it means in terms of the number of search engine journal readers that would head over to the Solutions eight site podcasting and guest podcasting. This has been huge for me. As you can imagine, I'm the co-host of Perpetual Traffic. If you haven't listened to Perpetual Traffic, go check it out. Take a listen, tell 'em what you think. PT gets like 300,000 downloads a month or something insane. So it's, kind of unfair because that was also just given to me like Ralph Burns, was a guest on his show and then later he goes, Hey, I just lost my co-host. Do you wanna be a co-host? And I was like, thank you. Affirmative action office. But I wouldn't have got that gig had I not been aggressively guest podcasting. And I was doing guest spots, To a week forever. So in some ways I feel like I kind of earned that. But I gotta tell you, it's very few things that have as much lift with as little work as being a guest on other people's podcasts. They go, they build this audience they serve the audience, they love on the audience, they build all this trust, and then they bring you on and you get to bank on all their trust and just provide a bunch of value. Get in, get out, get on your way. It's a little transient, but. I loved it. it's not just podcasts. You can be guested on people's YouTube channels and Instagram Live. I was on David Meltzer Instagram Live. They really pissed me off though. Meltzer team reached out to me, man, it was such a shady move. They reached out and their email said, you're the number one requested guest. And I'm like, am I really? How does David Meltzer know that I exist? And then they put me on his Instagram live and it was super short and they've got me stacked up against like 20 other people and he's just flying through these people I'm like, this is just a really weird way to produce content. I don't understand this at all. And then his editorial team reaches out to schedule like the follow up interview and it's all pay. It's like pay to play, you know, come to David's studio and then pay a certain amount of money based off of whatever it is that you're gonna get. And I'm just like, this is dirty the way that you guys approach this. So be careful with that stuff because when you're trying to be a guest, sometimes I'll turn it around on you and want you to pay. But for the most part, I've had mostly good experiences. And then launching a podcast, by the way, if you have a YouTube channel, Strip the audio, turn that into a podcast. We have the Google Ads podcast. It's just our YouTube channel and it performs really well. We're actually top ranked already. If you search for Google Ads podcast, we come up right after Rothman's podcast and that poor guy works hard to do what he does. I got basically, a free podcast. Write a book. Write a book. Be the person who wrote a book. We wrote, You versus Google, the very unauthorized guide to Google ads. first of all, the amount of time, effort, and energy this damn thing took is immense. But what it does for me, It gets me speaking gigs, gets me podcast interviews, and it's also the best give I can give anybody. By the way, you can go to so late.com/free book and you can have my book for free. And when we weren't gonna do that, because I don't wanna devalue the book, but I ended up having a promo go wrong. It was a botched launch and I gave people the PDF for free and I thought like, why not? I want this in, in as many hands as possible. And most people want the good format anyway, so they're gonna go buy the Kindle version. They're gonna buy the print version if they were gonna buy it in the first place. But writing the book. It puts you in a position to have the best source of traffic you can possibly think of. And it's the gift that keeps giving because books are, you know, there's a lot of longevity to books. So as long as you write it in an evergreen sort of way, which we try to do writing the book on the topic in your industry is so helpful. And Amazon traffic is immense. So if you've got a book, that book can continue to route around. Back to you. My friend Morgan McDonald, who owns Paper, Raven Books, she gave me the best advice. It's the best hack. If you're gonna put a book on Amazon, have a lead magnet at the very beginning of your book. So here the beginning of you versus Google, we've got the stop sign and we're like, Hey, massive library resources, YouTube channel, blog free downloads newsletter whatever. But like this, free downloads is really what it, where it is. And then if you scan that QR code, it goes to a page that features all those same links. So Morgan's like, have the lead magnet at the front of the book and then make sure that that's included in the Amazon preview. Cuz when Amazon, when you're looking at books, you can click on a link and preview the first couple of pages of that book. Well, those lead magnet. Links are still active regardless of whether or not they end up buying the book. And so from the preview, you get to drive a bunch of traffic and that ends up being a super relevant source of traffic course as well, which is kind of cool. PR I don't do a lot with pr. I will probably play this game someday. I have a feeling that this is gonna be something that, Once I've cracked the coat on, I sing the praises of, until then, I've had a hard time with PR personally. And to be honest with you, I think it's because I'm in a saturated industry and nobody wants to hear from digital marketers. That said, I've seen PR work wonders for some of my clients. I've seen clients get, I'm not exaggerating, tens of millions of dollars truly. Worth of traffic from really good pr. Now the case study in question got mentioned from Ellen so, no small feat but was grassroots pr, real deal, grassroots pr. And when I saw the spike to their website and now they had a great story. It was a business with the mission, all that fun stuff. But if you've got that PR is really worth doing. Absolutely worth doing. Next up is speaking. This is one of my favorites cause I love the sound of my own voice in case you haven't. Heard or realized. In order to speak, by the way, you've gotta have a reason to be on stage. So you gotta launch a podcast. You have to have written a book. You have to create the course. You have to have something that makes the show promoter know, like, okay, you're not gonna embarrass me. That's the thing, by the way, that I realized a little too late, is you just need to convince the people running the show. That you are not gonna suck. Like they're looking for speakers. They're actually pretty desperate for speakers. In some instances, you know, I mean, traffic and conversion gets overwhelmed with speaking requests, but some of these smaller. Events, which by the way is way better when it comes to lead generation. Like, you know, TNCs, tons of fun. It's fun to say like, oh, I spoke a traffic and conversion, but I'd get more leads at like a locksmith convention than I would at trafficking conversion, cuz trafficking conversion is a bunch of other crack marketers that are just there to steal what I got. But you know, if you send me to, like, I spoke at a Credit union conference and that was unbelievable cuz I mean, to them I was wizard, know, to people at tnc they're like, heard it, But to the credit union people, they're like, who are you from? Where to hell? I do know all of this. So speaking is, amazing. Takes some time, effort, energy, investment. I don't pay to speak. I don't pay to play at all. That pisses me off in a lot of ways. here's what I will do though, is if they're not gonna pay me to travel, depending on the event, I'll cover my own travel. And I, just started getting a little petulant about that. I'm like, no, I'm not doing that either. if the conference, if it's the right conference, I'll speak for free. my speaking coach, Steve Sims, he yells at me for doing that, but I still kind of believe in it. Paid social. You already know, especially if you have the right product. Anything that's impulsed by social related Facebook ads, Instagram ads. Go check out Ralph Burns at tier 11. My buddy at Perpetual Traffic. there's a lot that can be done here. What's really interesting about paid social is it's making this really interesting resurgence. Ever since the iOS 14 update pushed a bunch of advertisers out, it's actually becoming more viable, which I think is interesting. I saw the same thing happen with, direct mail. In the real estate investment space, we had the highest performing real estate investment campaign on the planet. And there was this, we got in before digital was popular and we were there for seven years. So in the very beginning, digital really wasn't that popular. And then it started to get more and more popular. And as it swung up, a lot of these other things swung down, like direct mail, bandit signs, door, knockers. what was funny is towards the end of it some of our clients were like, you know what, we're trying to direct mail again, and it's working better than it's ever worked cuz so many people fled that they actually left a chasm in the market. So go back to Facebook. Paid search. Of course, I'm not gonna spend too much time on this cuz I've got 50,000 hours of YouTube content on it, but you should obviously be running Google ads obviously. And if you need help, go to solely.com programmatic outbound display, all that fun stuff. Check out my boys at Keens Digital. This is really solid for awareness building, major launches, those types of things. An affiliate program. affiliates are dangerous people. They're dirty, best marketers in the world, and I really mean that. By the way, best marketers in the world are affiliates. and I don't know if that's chicken and egg. I don't know if the best marketers in the world become affiliates because that's just where they go, or if, because affiliate marketing is so hard, they end up being the best marketers. It's kind of like MLM people. The best salespeople you'll ever meet are successful MLM people. And that's because MLM is so hard that the people that rise at the top are truly assassins. But the best. Growth I've ever seen in organizations. ClickFunnels Convert high level came on the backs of affiliates. I think they're an absolute nightmare to manage. And I've seen this internally. I was the fractional CMO for simPRO, which is a SaaS company owned by my buddy Calvin Corelli. And he has a small base of affiliates and we tried expanding that. And it's just a very a lot of divas. In the affiliate space as much as I'll say and then I'm here to sell you. So if you wanna help with Google ads, you wanna help us so late with paid search, go to so late.com. Otherwise, I hope these videos are helpful to you. I'd love to know what you think. I'm making some mild departures from just Google ad stuff cause I wanna kind of diversify what it is that we're offering up. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Casa Muslim. Thanks for watching our videos and I'll see you tomorrow.