Summary
Building a personal brand is crucial for business success. Find a subject matter expert to create content, as people prefer buying from people.
Leveraging multiple channels, such as SEO, YouTube, LinkedIn, and email marketing, is important for organic growth. Don't put all eggs in one basket.
YouTube, one of my favorite platforms, can quickly build trust with viewers. People can easily become leads after watching content.
Focus your YouTube content on educational topics. Directly link educational content to training programs, as learners are likely interested in deepening their skills.
My YouTube strategy involves offering a direct path from videos to applying for my training program or purchasing related products, like my SEO Academy.
Sales calls should be viewed as discovery opportunities to determine if a potential client is a good fit for your program, which increases success rates.
After establishing a core program, add offers to your sales funnel, like a book or a recurring program, to increase customer value and engagement.
Expanding existing client relationships is often more efficient than acquiring new clients. Sell additional products or services over time.
Utilize what I call "topic domination" by using multiple platforms to own a topic, such as ranking YouTube videos and LinkedIn posts, alongside website content.
Education is key to success, especially for SaaS companies. Paid training ensures customers value and use your tools effectively.
Slowly add to your "value ladder" by developing new products and services, capitalizing on existing customer relationships to enhance lifetime value.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by building a personal brand. Find someone in your business who can be the voice, like a subject matter expert, to help create content. People like buying from people they trust.
A good way of expanding your reach is by using multiple marketing channels. Don't rely all on one. You can use SEO, YouTube, LinkedIn, and email marketing. YouTube is especially powerful because it quickly builds trust with viewers.
Focus your YouTube content on educational topics that link back to your training programs. Viewers who watch these are often interested in deepening their skills, which can lead to applying for a course or buying a product from you. You could use your YouTube content to funnel viewers directly to your main offer.
I would recommend looking at sales calls as discovery opportunities. Use them to decide if the client fits well with your program. This helps increase success rates because the better the fit, the more likely they are to succeed.
Try adding offers to your sales funnel slowly, like writing a book or creating a recurring program. This increases customer engagement and value. Focus on nurturing existing client relationships. It's easier to make sales to current clients than to find new ones.
Lastly, think about what I call "topic domination." Use different platforms to dominate a subject, like ranking on YouTube and LinkedIn while also having content on your website. This way, you'll own the topic and catch more attention across various audiences.
Quotes by Author
"People buy from people"
"YouTube hands down is one of the best marketing channels online"
"It is this certainly works okay and I just want to make that abundantly clear"
"95% of what I do is organic"
"If someone makes it all the way through a 47 minute video there's a very good chance that you've at least built some levels of trust with them"
Full Transcript
funnel for my 7 figure per year seo business let's get right into it okay so the first part of this entire funnel that you need to understand is the personal brand okay and so i highly recommend no matter the type of business that you have try to find some sort of figure head slash subject matter expert in your business who can become the person who creates content in the business and fortunately i just started doing this when i first started my business in 2013 i just you know because i had no choice i was all by myself i would just create content i started blogging then eventually i went on youtube in 2017 then i went on to linkedin and did email marketing and did all this stuff um and it's just kind of stayed that way and it's been a big piece of the success of my you know businesses that i've worked on um and the and the personal brand is kind of at the center of all of this now you could certainly go the non-branded route you go the faceless type of company there's plenty of examples of success that uh has occurred in that way but it's definitely easier out of the gate if you pick a person because people buy from people so it's just going to be much easier so that's the first thing i recommend is find that subject matter expert who can actually create content for you or at least help you factcheck some of that content and make it have those deeper level nuances okay so that's part one part two i'm going to focus on just youtube today so we got other channels that i do have expertise in and i certainly can share a lot with you in upcoming videos but i'll just tell you kind of like my core channels that i use to grow any business online number one is seo no shocker here i'm a big fan of seo i've been doing seo full-time since 2013 it's it's an obsession let's just say that much okay but i don't believe it's the only channel you should do it's one channel among many that you should be focusing on especially now with the way the sers are and the way google has changed you don't want to just put all your eggs in the google basket at least on the organic side okay so but it's still one of my favorites so seo is one of my favorites my second honestly it's kind of competing for first is youtube and youtube hands down is one of the best marketing channels online i mean i i can't i can't stress this enough it is so powerful because you get an opportunity for people to know like and trust you at lightning speed we're talking lightning speed they can watch one video and immediately become a lead or a customer so i cannot stress it there's no other platform that can do this at this speed and just to give you some perspective though i'll show you my youtube channel and here's some of the data in my channel okay and i've got a you know like a boring seo channel so you know there's other channels that get way more views than i do but we'll go ahead and look at this and like look at you know just 2025 this year i've generated almost 400,000 views okay so it's a lot of views but keep in mind only a very small percentage of those views translate into leads and customers and truthfully between youtube and all of these other platforms that i use youtube seo email um and organic linkedin and x and then a little bit of advertising um i'm generating like thousands of leads every single month and hundreds of new customers okay so it is this certainly works okay and i just want to make that abundantly clear 95% of what i do is organic okay so um and not to say i don't have anything against ads but i'm just saying organic is the key here but to make organic work you really have to focus on many channels okay so let's get into it let's focus on the youtube side and i want to show you kind of what this looks like okay so at a very high level i create content on my youtube channel basically in two categories number one is for people that are coming to learn seo so i create content about seo and the people that i attract the intent that they have is to get better at seo right to learn how to rank in google to get more organic traffic to grow their businesses with seo okay so that's like 80% of the content that i create is in that category um and the reason why that's really important is because anyone who's watching educational videos on youtube that is their intent they're there to learn they're there to uh develop a skill they're there to get better results with that skill and so if you take someone who has that learner intent the best and most logical offer that you should give them is some sort of training that's going to take them to a deeper level okay and that's exactly what i do so i promote my my training program gotcha seo academy in my videos and there's nothing super crazy about this this is super simple we take one video and i'll show you kind of what this looks like on the back end you'll see like this video here we'll just go ahead and look at it and you'll see all that i do is we go here and you'll see right here i've got a little link right here hey learn my ai seo systems boom they click on this link they get taken to a dedicated landing page and this talks about the program itself right got all the all the details of the program that they can learn more about and then the idea is they click on this and they go and apply okay it is literally that simple and i i truly believe that youtube is the only platform where you can do this i think other platforms you have to have maybe a few more layers like you need to have a lead magnet and then maybe a front-end offer and do all that stuff but i think on youtube it's a unique animal in that regard because if you think about it as someone watches like this video i published here uh you know last week or a couple weeks ago it's a 47 minute video like it's a really long it's almost as long as a episode of breaking bad right like it's really really long and so if you think about it if someone makes it all the way through a 47 minute video there's a very good chance that you've at least built some levels of trust with them and in that regard do they really need you know some little front-end offer maybe in some cases but more than likely you can directly go for a main offer that's going to help them go to the next level so this is the way that my funnel set up is you know i create these videos if it's specifically about youtube i promote a deeper level seo training program um and then from there they can apply then a portion of those applications make it to a call so about 40% make it to a call then from there one of my team members it's either going to be amber simon or me if they're on vacation uh will just get on that phone call right and then they're just seeing this is the part that's really important like there's a important clarification on this and this is i only know this because i've done seo agency work and sold so many honestly i've sold millions of dollars of seo services with this exact funnel um and the way you want to think about this is not like okay we're going from call to i immediately need to close this deal that's not how we view it it's this call when they actually get on the phone call is is what's called a discovery call in the context of agency work and the discovery call is to simply see if that person is a good fit for the program and this is really important because if they're a good fit for the program then the likelihood that they're going to be successful in the program is much higher okay so it is actually the job of the person who's getting on that call to make sure that like no like this person i feel very confident that if they join this program um they are going to be much more likely to succeed than another person okay and that's really important because we have to have that conviction that they're going to succeed in the program because that makes everything better right they come in the program uh we fulfill their expectations they get results they're happy we're happy and it's it's a good fair win-win for everyone right but what we don't want to have is like hey we've got you know hundreds of applications we get you know hundreds of applications a month and we just accept everyone well that would be a huge mistake because then first of all close rates would drop dramatically because like right now you know we amber and simon close about 40% of the deals uh that that come in 40% which is really high when you when you look into most sales numbers it's really really high but that's because we're setting our team members up for success because they're only talking to the best fits possible right not everyone's going to join but we are talking to people that are the best fits for the program and there's that bleeds into the success of our students right because we're talking the best fits we get students who are qualified and those students are highly motivated they do the work and they get the results right and what we get out of that is of course we get revenue um which then helps us you know support our business and i get to pay my team members and we get to build a company but most importantly we if we get results we get reviews and that compounds and we've got you know 97 over i think it's 97 reviews uh 97 google reviews okay and those 97 google reviews are not by accident that's because we've helped so many people get results and we've set ourselves up for success this is the same thing in agency work like i can't tell you the amount of times when i first started my agency that i would just bring on any business to do seo for them that was a huge mistake i was making a lot of ego-based decisions instead of thinking about it logically and saying "is this business in a good position to succeed if we take them on?" and if the answer is not a like a definitive yes then it's going to be one that we're just going to say no to right and that's what you should do if you're doing agency work is like only like set yourself up for success work with businesses that are in a good position to succeed with seo that is so much better because that makes everyone's life way easier okay so that's what the funnel looks like it's that simple they get on a call if it's a good fit they send over a docu sign they sign the docu sign they submit their payment and they get instant access okay now here's where things start to go to the next level okay so for a long time all i promoted was just this program okay just this program that was it but then i started to add some layers and so some of the layers to this is adding a front-end offer okay so the next thing that i built to uh increase the depth of this funnel and to kind of tap into what what russell brunson calls the value ladder is i created i wrote a book okay and so we spent about a year and a half my partner and i simon uh we writing this book and we put so much time into this book but what basically what we wanted to have is because like the academy was really good as far as uh the seo systems right learning how learning how to get seo uh learning how to get predictable results with seo using systems and processes and sops so that it's repeatable and that's really critical for an agency you need to be able to produce consistent results so we got that covered with the academy but there was like one piece missing which is like oh wait well you can know how to get results but like how do you actually like do the business side of agency so what i did is i actually went and uh read you actually find this blog post here best seo books i actually went uh and purchased 20 26 seo books and i literally read every single one i am not kidding i sat down in my chair over there and i just like read every book and to be totally honest most of them some were pretty brutal i'm not going to lie but some of them were good um but there was one thing that i noticed like there was not like there was one book that talked about the seo business side of things but that was it there was literally no one so i was like this looks like a pretty cool opportunity where i can come in write write a book about this because i have a lot of experience in it and it would be useful to get people uh to build trust and get people to you know if they build a successful business with my book the likelihood they're going to join our program is quite high right so that was the idea in my mind like if i help them be successful uh by reading the book then the most logical step is they come to the program so the way this works is like on youtube any video where i'm talking about you know building an seo agency it links to the landing page for the book right so i promote the book so goes right to this landing page and this landing page is very simple it just gives the offer okay a very simple offer it's got all you know kind of your standard setup with an offer it's got the bonuses and it's got the total value and then you drop it down this is all standard stuff not reinventing the wheel here but we've sold i think almost 4,000 copies of the book so it works um and we go down here and the way that this works is i use funnel kit which integrates with wordpress uh it's just a plug-in and so they they can purchase the book and there's also a one-click upsell so this one-click upsell is really important because it helps you recoup some of the costs from marketing and this is super super important so um but after they purchase the book the next logical step they go into is they get a direct offer to apply for the academy so this is just important because of course only a small percentage of people will actually do that but there's what you're doing are looking for what are called buyers in heat okay buyers in heat just means people like a small percentage of people who buy your stuff are ready to go right they're ready to go they're ready to go to the next level and you're presenting that offer to the people that are much more ready to go uh right away okay and so you're doing that and don't expect everyone to convert it's going to be much lower but you're still you still want to at least set it up in a way that you can actually convert some of those people that are ready to go to the next level right away okay so you can see this in the way the funnel works they watch youtube videos they either are going to go straight to the academy to apply or they're going to go to the book first and then get an opportunity to apply for the academy now there's also a longer sales cycle here that isn't kind of emphasized which is some people buy the book and go you know a year year and a half in some cases before they join the program right because maybe they want to implement what's in the book they want to get results they want to get the a certain revenue level and then they want to make that investment in the much deeper level program um and that makes perfect sense right that's totally makes sense but that's why you want to you want to be able to plant these seeds you want to be able to help people at every stage that they're at um because that's really important and like if you've already gone through what someone else is going through and you're not sharing that information you're just missing out like think about the experience that you have what could you share with people um and that's like even this video i'm doing right now i'm just sharing stuff that i've already done because i think it might help some people right so this is the idea all right so we've got these parts mapped out now there's one more piece of this equation on youtube which is occasionally i will promote a lead magnet okay so this lead magnet is just a free checklist looks like this very simple um and it goes to a dedicated uh landing page where they can submit their email to get access okay now a high high percentage would say 95% of people who watch your content are not going to buy your stuff right away they're not going to apply for your major you know high ticket program they're not going to go buy your book they're not going to do any of that stuff so what you have to do is think about okay if we've got like 97% of people who aren't going to go after any of the offers what can we give them to get them on our email list which then allows us to build more trust with them so the idea here is you give them a free lead magnet and the key is i've tested hundreds of lead magnets over the years and i can tell you the best lead magnet is something that's extremely actionable so this one here like this lead magnet that i give them they can literally like see performance gains by using this like if they go through this they can get results right and that's for free i didn't even they didn't have to pay for it all they had to pay was with entering their email address right so there's no financial investment in this and they can actually see performance gains which is really awesome and that's what you want um but from there the way that this works is from this checklist what happens is in the checklist i am promoting one of my core offers which is our software so you can see here it's right here in this section rankability right so we're taking that free lead magnet and starting to promote another secondary offer that we have okay now going back to the original premise here the academy is the foundation of all of this okay and this is really important because i think i know i have a lot of sas companies and people who work in sas companies that follow my stuff and i can tell you i've also led a lot of successful uh sas seo campaigns and i can tell you one of the biggest missing pieces and the only reason i know this is because i started with uh an education background a training background before i started sas a lot of sas companies start with sas and then they should think about education after um so i did it in reverse and so i have kind of a unique perspective on this and i can tell you that having the academy first is the single best decision for making rankability be successful okay if i didn't have the academy there's no chance that we'd be able to be where we're at now with this because right now within a year we're already we're getting close to 21,000 mr right now in a year now keep in mind 40 to 50% of our users for rankability are academy members okay so if we didn't do that that would mean 40 to 50% decrease in our in our mr right because those just would not exist okay so it is so so critical and this is the the kind of nuance piece of this is i see a lot of sas companies and you know maybe i'm helping some competitors here by saying this but if you're just going to give free training and then try to promote your sas product it's not going to work uh it it'll work for a very small percentage of people but if you really want it to work create a paid training program and the reason why that works so much better is because i have overwhelming evidence of this that when people make an investment in education they pay attention more okay i have i've created tons of free training over the years i've created tons of paid training over the years the people who join paid training get better results the people who do paid training actually do the work the people who do free you get what you pay for right and when you when you do free you don't have that same level of respect for that training even it could be the best training on the planet but because you got it for free you don't view it as that valuable that your perception changes so it's really important that you have people go through paid training because that's going to ensure that they're learning a system and your tool fits within that system right and that's the key that's why people who go through gotcha seo academy are also people when they enroll into rankability they keep using rankability indefinitely because they know that it's not rankability is not um you know a lottery ticket it's not something you join and all of a sudden your seo gets better it's just a tool that fits into the broader seo system and broader seo process and so that's why educ education is so critical without education you're just basically like "here here's this weapon that you can use and i'm not going to tell you how to use it really at all." right and you could say "oh well we've got our knowledge base and we've got our" no no one reads that stuff no one reads knowledge bases you know and so what you want to do is you want to have training where people can actually learn and they have a financial commitment uh uh and an investment that will force them to want to actually learn okay that's really really critical so that's the way it works for us academy members um a a portion of academy members go and sign up for rinkability okay so what i've showed you so far this is the the makeup of what is called a value ladder okay so we started with a a high ticket program built that first ran with that for a really long time then we added a low ticket offer just a book okay very simple book then we added a continuity offer so this is a recurring you know monthly recurring offer um for rankability right it's just and it's that's the key to kind of getting that consistent revenue over time and then the fourth thing that we added is a mastermind okay this is something new that we have added where it's a in-person event okay and that inperson event is only for gotacha academy members and it's not insanely high ticket in fact the academy is a bigger investment but what this does is help build closer relationships with our existing clients okay and that's really important and if this is like you know business 101 it's much easier to sell to existing clients than it is to sell to new clients so that's why building out these secondary offers is so critical you can't just rely on one offer because you're you you're literally like flushing money down the toilet you're leaving money on the table because you're not selling more offers that can help your existing clients even more right and like i see this even in the context of our agency i'm building an agency publicly right now this 10x hvac seo agency and this is a public case study and it's a real agency so i'm doing it live just to show people but like one of the things i see with hvac companies they do this really really well they start out as just an hvac company and as they start to capture more market share then they do horizontal expansion so instead of just being hvac now they're going to do plumbing then they're going to do duck work right and they're going to expand their offers because what that does is that gives them more opportunity to you know grow the lifetime value of a single customer okay and that's really really important so you should be thinking in that same context in your business in the context of an seo agency like us we're focused on one vertical and one service that is it now on the back end we're selling other things but on the front end one vertical and one service over time as we start to capture more hvac companies and we start to do more you know do seo for a significant amount and we've got you know exclusivity across you know many of the cities in the us there might be an opportunity where now we're going to start to promote some of our paid search offers on the front end maybe some of our conversion focused design offers on the front end right so we're doing that horizontal expansion of new services okay and so that what that allows us to do is to grow the lifetime value of a single client okay that's really really critical so that's that should be the objective of any agency is over time you start to expand you start to grow the ltv of one account one client um because once again it's much more expensive to acquire new clients than it is to keep your existing clients and sell more stuff and more offers to them okay just to be totally frank so that's the way that it works for me this is just on the youtube front and this is what it all looks like it's seems maybe quite simple on the surface um but this is incredibly effective and there are other parts that are working together but i want to show youtube first because youtube is hands down the most powerful um and i of course it will be dependent on the business model but i think most most businesses can certainly benefit from having a presence on youtube okay and the last thing i want to show you like this is the other massive benefit i'm just going to show you what this looks like and i talked about this in other videos but this particular query here start an seo agency okay um if i didn't have a youtube presence i would be missing out on massive amounts of real estate so you've probably heard of the idea of like topic authority or topical authority um and those that totally valid idea but usually that's really in the context of like your website right like so your website you create a lot of content on a particular topic and that helps you build authority in the eyes of the algorithms okay totally valid concept but the way i think about it more is like uh topic domination and i want to think about how do i not just rank on my you know rank with my website but how do i rank you know with all these other opportunities as well so i can capture as much ser real estate as i possibly can okay so what you're looking at here is i've got my youtube video ranking in the ai overview we've got an ad running specifically for this query okay then we've got my my actual website ranking for this and we'll keep going we've also got three youtube videos we've got a linkedin post okay and then we've got the the linkedin post here as well so what you're seeing here is massive blanketing of the sers and this is what i call topic domination this is what you want to do and i see too many people what they do is they'll take one page like this on their website and they'll just you know they'll focus all their effort oh yeah let's rank this one page and that's fine but just remember you're leaving a lot of money on the table and a lot of clicks on the table by not tackling these other platforms so focus on the platforms that google has a preference for obviously youtube because it owns it that should be the next best place after you focus on your website so you focus on your website then go after youtube and start to dominate there now if we look on youtube let's see how i'm doing on that same query okay so we'll take that same query and we'll run it on youtube and we'll see how we're doing hopefully i'm there okay so i'm there i'm number two looks like someone's ahead of me on that one but you see like i'm number two got another one here you get the point another one here so and this doesn't consider all the browse features where these videos are just pop up from people who are naturally on youtube okay so that is what you want to do you want to think about dominating not just google and not just dominating your one website but how many how many assets can we rank on the first page of google like seriously how many can you do i think in this case i could go even a step further and even start to do some parasite seo and maybe get some other things ranking in here as well but you know at a certain point you know you can there's a law of diminishing returns so so i certainly can but i'm just saying like once you've really covered it move on to the next one but don't just don't just create your one little page on your website and then move on to the next topic like go crazy make that investment in these topics it will pay dividends okay so just to quickly review very simple you want to have you want to map out each part of the value ladder and do it slowly add offers as you go okay and so in the next couple of videos i'll get more into some of these other channels that i focus on um obviously seo as you know is the bulk of what i talk about on my channel but i will cover this just to show you how it fits into this process and like how seo fits into the five stages of customer awareness which if you've watched my channel for a while you've probably heard me talk about that but i'll show you what it looks like in a practical environment so if you like videos like this you want me to kind of you know kind of show you under the hood of what's going on in my business and maybe other people's business as well uh drop a comment below with more okay because as you know 95% of my content is about seo but i've got some other stuff that i can share no doubt so um so if you want to see more content like this just drop a comment below with more uh and as always um thank you so much for watching and like the video and subscribe for more thanks
