John: Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here with an audio masterclass on creating new measurable and predictable revenue streams through ProfitPaths. For 20 years, Inc. 500 entrepreneur Dave Conklin has used his trademark method ProfitPaths to create new scalable revenue streams for businesses. He’s also the author of Lost at 30,000 Feet. And today, Fire Nation, we’ll be talking about how you can fill the CEO marketing team gap when it comes to return on investments. We’re gonna give you examples of success that you can and should model and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

Dave, say, “What’s up?” to Fire Nation and share something about yourself that most people don’t know.

Dave: So, what is up, Fire Nation? John, I am so honored to be here hanging out with you today and I know you're probably enjoying Puerto Rico, which is awesome.

[Crosstalk]

John: Oh, so gorgeous.

Dave: That’s the interesting thing about you that I learned actually. But the interesting thing about me is that I have two sets of twins, and that is something people are often surprised about.

John: Are they identical, fraternal, or one of each?

Dave: That is always the question I get. Both sets are identical.

John: Wow, that is something that I did not know about you, and very, very interesting indeed. And Fire Nation, as I mentioned in the introduction, we’re gonna be talking all about creating new measurable and predictable revenue streams through Dave’s trademark system, ProfitPaths. It’s gonna be a fun episode. I tease a lot about what we’re gonna be chatting about but I just wanna start, Dave, with talking about how ProfitPaths specifically is changing the way that businesses grow.

Dave: We have gone into companies that do billions of revenue, and then we’ve gone into small mom-and-pop companies. And when they latch onto this whole process, it creates – as you just described, it creates these insurance policies, so to speak, where there's multiple streams of predictable revenue coming in whereas before maybe they only had one channel. Obviously a while back, we were in the heat of this COVID thing. And a lot of our companies had these set up, had these extra business models where they didn’t lose massive amounts of revenue because they were only focused on one sole stream of leads or income in their business. So, it’s been incredible through the years.

John: We have a lot to get into, and for me, I always like to break it down to the lowest level so Fire Nation can really see how they can apply it to their business. And what it comes down to, Dave, and you know this as well or better than most: what is the return on investment? We’re talking financially, we’re talking time-wise, we’re talking bandwidth and energy-wise. How can Fire Nation specifically fill in the CEO marketing team gap when it comes to ROI, when it comes to that return on investment? What does that mean and how could we do it?

Dave: So, a lot of times, we’ll work directly with CEOs and they're incredibly frustrated because their marketing person will come to them – or we’ll be working with a small entrepreneur and – they’ll be frustrated because they feel like they're just dumping money into whether it be Facebook ads or SEO or whatever. And – what we do when we work with the company and these ProfitPaths is we break out their business so finite that we’re going after a very specific avatar. So, we always encourage, for example, a business owner to look at their highest profit customer. I can’t get into the details because –

John: Sure.

Dave: – of an NDA on the name, of course, but a very large knife company that you’ve probably heard of. And we worked with them and we found out that brides that have high incomes are their biggest customer. And I think it’s because, often, they’ll actually get – these knife sets for their bridal party or different things, but they end up ordering these mass quantity of knives, for whatever reason. So, that was their magic customer. And then, so what we did was we created specific assets for brides and grooms – to go through in this marketing channel, and then they ended up selling a lot more of these specific type of engraved sets to these brides.

And that’s just one example, but the – what it does for ROI is it allows them to actually track the specific spend that is spent on that exact avatar and watch them travel through those assets, which are guides and checklists or – videos, whatever created, and the CEO or the business owner can look at the money they spent and see the actual dollars and cents that comes in at the end. From a time perspective, it’s huge. There's a big-time investment upfront to plan these out, but then it’s kind of hands-off because, a lot of these profit paths because they're so niche and so targeted, they end up kind of running themselves, which is incredible.

John: Fire Nation, these are the type of processes, the type of systems, the type of knowledge that you wanna be applying to your business. And I know you couldn't get into super specific details with that company, but you do have some examples of success that Fire Nation can model. There's a carpet company, there's Marygrove Awnings, construction leads. Get int some of these specifics. Let’s kind of goes as in-depth and as specific as we can get with this so that Fire Nation can really be like, “You know what? I get how I can apply that to my business.”

Dave: So, I’ll share a – one that’s very basic and I think that everyone will understand it right away. So, general contractors or contractors that do general home improvement type projects; this is a perfect example. So, we have a site called finishmybasement.net that we created, and it only targets people via Google search, and we’ve specifically targeted about 10,000 keywords that are focused on finishing a basement. And a lot of people go, “Well, wait a minute. Why would you wanna not go after the people that wanna do windows of the people that wanna do flooring or painting?” –

John: Right.

Dave: – because contractors wanna do all that stuff; and that’s great, but the conversion rates are through the roof and the quality of the leads are through the roof when you specifically target something. So, that’s an example of where we only really used Google search for the “cold traffic,” meaning that the – to target people that have never heard of us before. But then what we do is we follow those people around the internet using Google Display Network to then bring them back if they didn’t actually fill out a in-home estimate. So, in that specific case, we had a contractor come to us and they said, “Hey, we wanna do more basements because basements tend to be $30,000, $40,000 projects and they tend to lead to other opportunities in the home.”

So, we built that very specific site, and now we actually operate that site nationwide. So, that’s a very basic example. On the flip side, something more complicated with the carpet company you mentioned. We had a flooring company that – I think they had five locations in the Arizona area. And they came to us and they were like, “Look, we’re tired of being brick and mortar only. We wanna sell something bigger in an e-commerce world where we can really scale and really grow,” and we asked them the same question. Fire Nation, this is the – there's two questions you need to ask yourself, No. 1, what is your highest profit? And not by percentage, but your highest dollar profit product or service you offer.

And then, who’s the biggest buyer of that? And that’s what we asked this carpet company – and they said, “You know what? Carpet tile because carpet tile’s high profit margin, we can ship it nationwide, and you can use different types of tile to create all kinds of designs and things.” And I said, “That’s awesome. Tell me about the best buyer of carpet tile,” and his response was “Churches.” Churches happen to be his No. 1 source of high quantity purchases, larger bulk purchases. So, what we did is we built a series of videos. And I’ll actually link this on the page, so that people can see it –

John: Cool.

Dave: – too, John. But we actually built a series of videos and assets directly targeted to a pastor. So, we did a survey of a bunch of pastors at churches that generated large amounts of funding –

John: Brilliant.

Dave: – to different funding drives, and we created a toll for them to send up to their congregation where they could see a chart on how much money has been invested in the sanctuary carpet project.

John: So cool.

Dave: Stuff that’s so not related to selling carpet, right? And that’s the point. You're creating these really great resources and these really great assets for the pastor so that it pulls them in and gets them exposed to the brand. And again, I’ll have this link up on that page. My favorite part was this video we did. So, some of you probably don’t go to church. And so, at churches a big – a common thing for a pastor to do is run a video, like a sermon video, prior to the sermon that he preaches. And they kind of have this typically a funny kind of a theme. They’re kind of quirky, kind of corny, but they have high product value, if that makes any sense?

So, what we did is we created what looks like a sermon series video that a pastor would play, and it’s kinda themed where this pastor asks for prayer requests. And these people start to give these prayer requests, and they're about, “Help the children,” and this kinda stuff, but then every one of them during the prayer goes, “And God, please get us new carpet so that the people that come through our sanctuary don’t think we’re disgusting,” and things like that.

John: Right.

Dave: So, it’s kind of a joke, but the point is it resonates with that audience of the pastor’s, and we just use different technology to make sure that these pastors are exposed to these different assets as they go about the process, and eventually end up making carpet purchases.

John: Fire Nation, there are so many value-bombs just shared there, and for me, it’s all about thinking outside of the box, going to the source, and doing what other people just aren’t thinking about doing or aren’t executing upon, and getting there first and making it happen. And I love the focus on “the riches being in the niches,” Fire Nation. That’s why you need to focus. Are you focusing? Are you following one course until success on those two questions? No. 1, what is your highest profit product or service that you offer, and then No. 2, who is the biggest and best buyer of that product or service?

When you answer those questions, then it starts to become clear where your energy, where your focus needs to be, and then you can execute on a plan. And speaking of plans, we love step-by-step guidance, Dave. It’s just a huge thing. Fire Nation loves it. So, break down the specific steps for Fire Nation to take when we’re applying these type of processes to our business.

Dave: Absolutely. So, No. 1, we already talked about it, you gotta identify if that product or service has a really high profit dollar for you, and then No. 2, you’ve got to look at who is the biggest bulk buyer of that product. Because, again, you can spend the same amount of energy or the same amount of dollars targeting a lower quality audience and you're gonna end up not having the same ROI. And we have some sheets too that we’re gonna give to Fire Nation for free on – the link we’ll give at the end here, and they can actually download these planning sheets that will help them walk through this.

Because I know sometimes it's tough with just audio. But the next step you wanna do is think about that audience and what’s valuable to them. One of my favorite websites on the planet is called BuzzSumo – and it’s B-U-Z-Z-S-U-M-O.com. And on BuzzSumo, you can put in a topic and it will spit back the content online that has gotten shared the most through social media. So, for example, if I’m a carpet company or I sell LED lights or whatever, I can put in my topic there, and all of a sudden, the brainstorming starts.

Another great thing you can do with that tool – and I’m not affiliated with that tool in any way, by the way, but another thing you can do with tool is that, if there's a large trade association in your industry, you can put that website in there and it will also spit back that website’s most popular content on social. The reason you wanna do that is this is gonna help you brainstorm some really great ideas that you can create that will get people actually interested. Because the point isn't to generate a lead immediately anymore in – 2020. The whole point is to get people to trust you and like your brand and build a relationship them – with them with this content.

So, that’s step three; it’s to brainstorm these assets and things. Now, a lot of people don’t have the team. Even large companies don’t necessarily have the team –

John: Right.

Dave: – to make these assets. So, we love Upwork. It’s a site where you can go and you can find people that have talent, and they’ll build stuff for you. And you can look at the reviews, just like buying something on Amazon. You can look at their actual reviews from work that they’ve done. So, if you need a video done that explains something that’s complex – like there's been a ton of videos on things like PPP-finding and stuff like that recently. So, if you need something like that done, you're like, “Well, I don’t know how to do that,” Upwork is a great place to actually get those created. So, I like to start small then.

So, once you have an asset, get it on a website, and make sure that website is very specifically themed to that avatar that you're going after, to that highest profit customer that’s gonna by the most of whatever you're selling. And create that site and get that asset there, and then step five is “cold traffic”. So, you have to introduce people to this concept. Now, one thing I love, love, love to do is, instead of emailing like, “Hey, come look at my great thing,” I love going on Facebook and saying, “Hey, does anybody have anyone that fits this specific avatar?” – so, maybe it’s a bride, using the knife example. Maybe it’s someone who owns a carpet company or is in the carpet business – and ask for their feedback on that asset.

And that helps you to build those initial relationships, and then you can actually ask them for referrals of other people in the industry to take a look at the asset. But while you're doing that, you're actually selling your stuff – all through asking for feedback and things like that. But you get that feedback and that can be invaluable. And then, the next steps, step six, would be your actual “cold traffic”. So, you might take a list that you can find online and email some people. Make sure that you're CAN-SPAM compliant with your emails, of course.

But you can email some people, and you’d literally just say, “Hey, I understand you're in the carpet business,” for example, “if you don’t mind, we have this really cool resource that we wanted to give you for free. Here it is. Check it out, let me know if you have any feedback.” But here’s what's neat. You set up your Facebook retargeting pixels and your – whatever other retargeting you're gonna do, whether you have Google Analytics installed or whatever on that page, you make sure all that tracking is in place. And when you do that, those people that landed there and then leave, now, you can target them with YouTube videos, you can retarget them with Facebook ads, you can retarget them with display ads if they're traveling around the internet, and that will pull them back.

And you’ve had some amazing people on “On Fire” that have talked about Facebook ads and all that kinda stuff, and a lot of those same strategies apply here, where you can actually go out and target people that own carpet companies by, for example, looking at people that attend specific industry events or they’ve “Liked” certain groups on LinkedIn or something like that. So, that “cold traffic” comes to your assets. You’ve started dating, as Ryan Deiss would describe it. Marketing is a dating process now. And as they go through and they see more and more of your content, you can use different systems. Ontraport is an amazing one. There's probably some that you use as well, John –?

John: Yeah, we use Infusionsoft. And I’m actually gonna break in on you here because lemme tell you, I just literally heard two Fire Nation skulls explode by the excess information you’ve been dropping here. So, Fire Nation, this is exactly the type of step-by-step guidance that you need to be implementing into your business. These tools, Upwork, BuzzSumo, implement these value-bombs that Dave has been sharing. Make it happen in your business. If you think he’s even close to done, obviously not. We got a lot more coming after we thank our sponsors. So, Dave, we’re back and I wanna move on to your book Lost at 30,000 Feet. First, what does that title mean and what does Fire Nation need to know about this value-packed beast?

Dave: Well, thanks for even bringing that up, John. I appreciate that.

John: Of course.

Dave: So, I noticed at events that I would speak at with Vistage International and a lot of other – we’re gonna be at TNC here soon – every time I speak these CEOs would come up to me and they're like – almost every time it was the same thing. They’ll say, “Dave, I have no idea what you just said but it is awesome, and I know we need it. Gimme your card and I’m gonna get you in touch with marketing people.” And at first, I’m like, “Wow, that is really cool. That’s neat,” and quite frankly we love that because when the CEO says to the marketing guy, “You gotta hire this guy,” that’s huge for us obviously because we don’t have to approval then from the top dog.

But then, as time got on, I started realizing this is really sad – that, in 2020, I’m going into Vistage groups and speaking to these Vistage groups, and they're companies of $10 million to sometimes a billion dollars in revenue, and these CEOs don’t even understand what the retargeting pixel is. And that’s when I realized, “I just gotta put this in writing. I gotta do a book.” So, the book is really geared toward the CEO that just doesn’t understand how this digital stuff really applies. They really don’t know how to get the ROI to happen in their business, and it’s a guide to help a business owner to communicate more effectively with either their marketing team or a marketing agency or whatever, and it puts them in a place of knowledge so that they have the same knowledge base as those people and they can guide their businesses even better.

John: So, Dave, you’ve been dropping so much value and you have so much more value that we’re gonna be talking about. You have some downloads for Fire Nation, you have a killer course. So, break down those two things, and let’s just keep dropping this knowledge.

Dave: So, No. 1, we’ve got worksheets, planning sheets, and we’re always making them better. So, these are the same sheets that we use when we’re asked to come in and consult. So, we’ll go in and we’ll sit down with a team and we’ll go through these sheets, and they really walk you through step-by-step how to go about actually putting these profit paths together. And once you have them, it gives you a template for leadership in a business and the marketing team or the marketing agency to clearly communicate together and show on paper, which is what CEOs typically love, and see where you're at in the process of actually developing these. And it helps you really get your ROI completely defined.

Then, we have a course that people can use, which we’re actually going to give for free, the –

John: What?

Dave: – first couple of lessons – yup – which we’ve never done before, by the way. And we’re gonna give it for free, so you can go through and you can actually learn step-by-step how we go through these sheets, how we create these campaigns. And we actually go into detail on how to create your first pay-per-click campaign for your – ProfitPath that you’re putting together. We have a really cool tool as well, John, called CEOKnow, K-N-O-W. And you put your website into CEOKnow and it spits back a full-blown report on all kinds of –

[Crosstalk]

John: Oh, cool.

Dave: – information about your website as well – and your competitors. It gives you some competitive analysis in there.

John: I’m dropping eofire.com in to there today.

Dave: You got to. I may have already done it.

John: Uh-oh. Don’t tell me. I don’t wanna be called out on the air. So, Fire Nation, look at all this value; these download sheets, this course. You get the first tutorials and modules for free. He’s got CEOKnow – that’s K-N-O-W. You can enter your website in, and I’m gonna enter in eofire.com, and I might even put my results on the show notes page, Fire Nation. So, definitely go check it out. But Dave, let’s do a couple things right now. Give us just kind of a full wrap-up. What is the one thing you really wanna make sure Fire Nation gets and walks away with, with everything that we’ve talked about today? Then, give us a call to action. Where can we go to check out these downloads, to check out the CEOKnow, to look at this course? And then, we’ll say good-bye.

Dave: Absolutely. So, the biggest takeaway is stop marketing your business as a whole. If you have profitable campaigns there, keep it going, but add on specific niche portions of your business, your products, your services, and look at them as separate revenue-generating entities. So, if you’ve got 60 different products or services you sell – build one at a time, but eventually you can have 60 different, unique profit paths –

John: Wow.

Dave: – coming into your business, and actually more because each of those could be sold to different types of avatars that are out there. That’s the huge, huge takeaway. And we have a link we’re gonna put up at profitpaths.com/fire, and that has all of the different resources we’ve talked about today and a lot more that you can check out.

John: Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with DC and JLD today so keep up that heat. And if you head over to eofire.com and just type “Dave” in the search bar, the show notes page will pop up with links to everything because Dave is literally giving a lot of awesomeness today to go over those things. The CEOKnow, which I’ll be using to give my website a little once-over, that download, those sheets that he was talking about, the course with those free modules, you can visit, Fire Nation, profitpaths.com/fire. That’s profit P-A-T-H-S, profitpaths.com/fire.

And of course, you see that Dave drops value-bombs. He gives you the step-by-step, very practical knowledge. He really lays it all out for you. So, make sure to check out Lost at 30,000 Feet. It is a book that you will learn a ton from. And Dave, I just wanna say thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side.

Dave: Thanks, John.