PP 589: Don’t Skimp On Your Marketing with Laurie Conrod
“Just never give up. You just keep trying. We always make mistakes and stuff, but it’s feedback; it’s not a failure.” -Laurie Conrod
What a lovely, inspiring way to view mistakes! Laurie Conrod is an Online Marketing Specialist and the Founder on The Online Entrepreneur Club and Freedom Digital Marketing, Inc. Having spent 25 years in corporate, Laurie felt coop up and exhausted. Without second thoughts, she decided she’s done with it. Currently, she helps other people create systems to have more time freedom.
There is no better way to describe your dream life as being able to do what you want and be with the ones you love. But can you do that while growing a profitable and sustainable business? Kim interviews Laurie on how to make your business running on autopilot. Discover the amazing power of the internet!
HIGHLIGHTS
02:17 Value Time Freedom
08:23 From Corporate to Entrepreneurship
16:22 How About Putting Up Some Ads
25:30 Helping People Sustain Their Business
35:26 Marketing Thrills
37:13 Earning Money While You Sleep
41:41 Saving Hours with Tools
44:42 Common Mistakes
Connect with Laurie Conrod:
Website: https://llc.clickfunnels.com/home-page-llc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurieconrod
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurieconrod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurieconrodentrepreneur/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4f2OTMEC0hv4slENJZThag
Resources:
Tools
Books
The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey
Inspirational Quotes:
“Anything can go wrong at any given day. But we have to do our best to keep on moving forward.”-Kim Sutton
“But the icing on the cake, so to speak, is really the time freedom that it gives you.”-Laurie Conrod
“Today, there’s so many people, entrepreneurs that are not on the internet, it’s kind of mind boggling. But it’s still not too late for them.”-Laurie Conrod
“If the entrepreneur doesn’t know who their ideal client is, it’s not easy to create a system that really hits a home run.”-Laurie Conrod
“Focus on one where you think your clients and customers are, and just get good at that one platform.”-Laurie Conrod
“Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work right away. … We always learn something when a campaign doesn’t work, even as well as when they do work.”-Laurie Conrod
“Don’t skimp on your marketing.”-Laurie Conrod
“Just never give up. You just keep trying. We always make mistakes and stuff, but it’s feedback; it’s not failure.”-Laurie Conrod
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
Just never give up. You just keep trying. You know, you just keep trying some, we’ve always make mistakes and stuff, but it’s feedback. It’s not failure and I just, you asked me earlier what I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about entrepreneurship overall. You know, marketing is a piece of that it’s an important piece, but what it does, entrepreneurship makes the world go round and makes our world advance, into higher levels of the stratosphere and I’m just so passionate about that and I see people give up when they have great ideas just because you know, for whatever reason something didn’t work, so just never give up. Keep going and use that marketing to get you there.
KIM: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity! This is your host, Kim Sutton, and I’m so happy to have you here today. I’m also thrilled to introduce our guest, Laurie Conrad. Laurie is a, see I got your name wrong. I’m, we are not going to edit this out. Laurie I got your last name right, Conrod people, not Conrad. We were talking about how a lot of people get it wrong and then I went right into your job title or your position title and I started blooper reel right up. Positive Productivity – where there are typos in bloopers. Laurie is an online marketing specialist and I just want to thank you for being here, Laurie. Listeners, you know I have five kids. Anything can go wrong at any given day but we have to do our best to keep on moving forward. And Laurie was so kind to reschedule when we had a little bit of a dilemma here a couple of weeks ago. But Laurie, welcome! I am so happy to have you.
LAURIE CONROD: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me so much and I look forward to giving insights that are going to help your audience as much as possible today.
KIM: Well, you and I have a lot in common with what we do today and I know you’ve had quite the journey to get here and I’ve had quite the journey to get here, but I love even just in your intake form talking about automation and just getting people out of the ‘doing everything themselves’ (realm.) You know, I got caught up in the trap of doing everything manually for years and we don’t need to be doing that. They’re smart ways to work in hard ways to work so why not make it smarter for ourselves, right?
LAURIE CONROD: Absolutely. And I just learned in my journey over my career how important time freedom is and when I got in to online marketing, I didn’t even realize in the journey that I ended up with that what I decided to do was gonna give me such time freedom. And then once I realized it, it wasn’t even about, well it still is about the lead generation and that piece of your business, but the icing on the cake, so to speak, is really the time freedom that it gives you.
KIM: Time freedom really does sound like icing on the cake.
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: What does that look like in your life in business right now?
LAURIE CONROD: So for me it looks like my lead generation is automated my business and I teach other people how to also create systems so that that whole piece of your business or most of it is on autopilot so that I have time to do other things in my business that I like better. And it came about because I started growing my business in traditional ways like most people do because they’re not educated in online marketing or any kind of automated systems. You know, we go to networking groups and we talk to people and we do, you know, get tables at expos and all those traditional things and it’s all very, very time consuming. And so I guess I just gravitated towards the automation because that time freedom is so important to me in it. It manifests in beautiful ways where like the other day when you had something really important you had to do and reschedule this call because I don’t have to worry about where clients are coming from. I can take a vacation when I want to. I can just stop what I’m doing, I can respond to, you know, family emergencies and all those things that are so important.
KIM: I love being able to take a nap. Can I just be totally honest and say that I love to be able to take a nap. And listeners, if this is not your first episode, you’ve probably heard me talk about my issues with sleep deprivation before, but in 2016 sleep deprivation put me into just such a severe downward spiral that I was ready to just end everything. And I’m not just talking about my business, but I’m talking about my life just because I was so sleep deprived from doing so much and so much of what I shouldn’t have been doing.
LAURIE CONROD: Absolutely. So it affects us in all areas, you know?
KIM: –Absolutely.
LAURIE CONROD: And when we are trying to do everything all the time ourselves, and we’re not creating systems to do things for us while we’re doing other things, it creates burnout. Just creates burnout, exhaustion. You start not having the, you know, great ideas that you were having before and you’re in your business and your life and you know, of course our relationships suffer too.
KIM: Oh yes. I want to go back to what you were saying about like the networking events. I live at a smaller town in Ohio and I was told by a lot of people, oh, you should be going out to these smaller events and I’m sure they’re great in bigger cities, but what I was finding in my small town here was that a lot of the businesses were, or brick and mortar shops, reno physical locations and they, for them it wasn’t necessarily about building their next funnel. And when we’re passing like the salon every day, there may be better ways. And I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have a funnel salon owners, you still need a funnel. You still need to be getting people’s email addresses so you can let them know if you’re having a special or introduced some new service. But that wasn’t necessarily the clientele that I should have been going after and it wasn’t who I wanted to go after either. It was in that period of scarcity mindset where it was like, okay, what meeting can I go to next? Which meeting can I go to next? Rather than taking those few steps and thinking about who do I actually want to be working with and where are they, how do I find them? How do I get them into my funnel? And when that all became clear bang.
LAURIE CONROD: Yes, it’s banged.
KIM: Yeah. I mean, how many times have you asked somebody who is your ideal client in how many? Well, I guess the better question would be that somebody has responded, oh everyone. Every entrepreneur or every mom.
LAURIE CONROD: Yes, the word every is is always in there somewhere. You know, everyone who, you know, that kind of thing.
KIM: –Hmm Mm.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. And that goes back to me mentioning earlier that people just aren’t skilled or trained. You know, they have, they’re an entrepreneur, they have a, they have something that they’re offering the world, but marketing is a completely different skill.
KIM: Absolutely. Alright, I am a nice person by just nature sometimes too nice it gets me in trouble. But when I hear every, I don’t know if I should smack them or hug them.
LAURIE CONROD: –Yes.
KIM: Sweetie, you are just so wrong and I can’t stand it when people use sweetie on me. When my husband uses sweetie on me, I know we’re fighting cause is not the term of endearment in our house. But yeah, it’s just, Oh sweetie, let’s just think about this. It is not everyone, well yeah you spent 25 years in corporate and then you started your own business. What were you doing in corporate and how did that transition come about?
LAURIE CONROD: I was in I.T For 25 years, so long, long ago when we had mainframe computers. I was a programmer and a systems consultant, you know, kind of went up the ladder a bit and it was ray in the early nineties I saw the writing on the wall because html was out, the web was out, the Internet was out and I was like, these mainframe programmer does cobol and all that is not, there’s too many cobol programmers in the world we won’t them all. So I taught myself html and so I left the big insurance company I was with and became a webmaster at a smaller shop and you know, did that for seven years. So that’s how I transitioned from older technology to newer technology. And then I was actually, when I decided to leave corporate, I was pretty much done with I.T I was kind of burnt out on it. So when I started my consulting business, it was in the health space and I was consulting on healthy lifestyle and things like that. And so I just really needed a break from the whole computer environment and industry. And I built my business that business that way very traditionally referrals, you know, tables at expos and things like that because I, it was the early two thousands and I just wasn’t that familiar with any social media or, or anything like that. And, –
KIM: –And social media was entirely different. I mean, Facebook wasn’t even available.
LAURIE CONROD: Right. I mean, I think I wasn’t, I didn’t even get on Facebook till 08.
KIM: –Yeah.
LAURIE CONROD: And it was just for personal reasons, like, and I was still even kind of reticent about it, you know, reluctant and just, uh, but then I found out, oh, I was finding out when people’s parents were sick and passed away and, you know, it’s things like that. And I was like, wow, there’s value in this but, and I remember when Facebook ads first came out and we all just kind of are like, nobody’s using those, you know? And, um, I learned, you know, after that, that that wasn’t true. And they were, you know, hugely valuable but it’s a real journey. So when, when I got into online marketing, I was lucky to have that, you know, that techie background. That being said, I’ve known lots and lots of people that have been very successful learning online marketing that were not, you know, considering themselves techie.
KIM: Yes. I completely, I mean, I’m, I would like to put myself in that bucket. I was an interior architect for a decade.
LAURIE CONROD: Mm, Hmm Mm.
KIM: Well, I have to tell you, I sort of took it upon myself the same as you did to learn the technology that I saw. I was going to have to learn if I was going to be successful. I went to one of the top art schools in the country and they taught us hand drafting, but I had already learned hand drafting in high school and I saw the writing on the wall. I needed to learn autocad if I was going to get a job, but there was no opportunity in the school to get it. So I taught it to myself. But yeah, when I got out of that, I did not get into what I’m in now folks, like I had an online scrapbooking shop. I started on Ebay and then built my own website. Well, I didn’t build the site. I didn’t even know a thing about html at that point, but I had somebody else design it and that was like 2005 so I know the internet had been easily accessible for about a decade, if not more. But for me, really a decade before that. But it was still pretty early for e-commerce.
LAURIE CONROD: Mm Hmm Mm. And that brings up a great point because today there’s so many people, entrepreneurs that are not on the Internet, it’s kind of mind boggling, but it’s still not too late for them, you know, just because we’ve been doing it for you know, 10 years or, and that’s really such a short time and it’s definitely not too late. So many, so many businesses, so many people are not leveraging what’s available on the Internet to grow their business.
KIM: Absolutely. My sister is my director of operations and she was a grocery manager for 15 years, like a, a big grocery train in the northeast United States and she was completely not in this space of online marketing. So it’s been a little bit of a learning curve, but at the same time it’s been awesome because she hasn’t been in this space for so long. So there’s, there’s no beliefs that I have to disagree with because she doesn’t have any, like I say that with glove.
LAURIE CONROD: –Yeah, yeah.
KIM: Do you understand what I’m saying?
LAURIE CONROD: Yes. Hmm Mm.
KIM: But just having the ability to explain to her like that…Facebook…is pay to play for businesses now and Instagram now is going a little bit of the same way. It’s pay to play if you want your business to get bigger exposure, you have to pay and, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs get a little bit peeved by it.
LAURIE CONROD: –Yes, yes.
KIM: But then when I was having this conversation with my sister this weekend, I was like, and she wasn’t annoyed by it, but I was just explaining that a lot of entrepreneurs get annoyed and I was like, but this is their business. We can’t expect them to give us their platform for free. The same as we wouldn’t expect ourselves to give our clients our platform for free. So why are people getting so upset by it? It’s –
LAURIE CONROD: –Right.
KIM: -completely understandable, at least to me.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. And it’s, it’s been an evolution, you know, because it used to be, you could get so much free exposure there and it’s just because there’s so many people on there, they’re like, well, there’s not enough newsfeeds space to allow all that free exposure anymore. The people who are gonna get the space are the people who are paying and you know, that’s just a normal, normal business thing. I also find that the people that have a tough time going on social media are people that became successful and build their business on referrals –
KIM: –Hmm Mm.
LAURIE CONROD: -and they’re like, you mean now I have to pay to get exposure?
KIM: –Right.
LAURIE CONROD: Uh, yeah, you do. Hmm Mm yes. But the exposure you can get is enormous.
KIM: Absolutely, [inaudible]
LAURIE CONROD: Maybe on your local area you know, and you know, depending on what their business is and what they want to do, but even in a local area, you know, if you just got there by, you know, putting advertisements in valpack and that even costs money, right? That’s paying for advertising but the entrepreneurs that have never paid for advertising before have tend to have more resistance.
KIM: Absolutely. My 16 year old son, he’s at Umpire for the junior baseball league and when I go to drop him off at the fields cause he’s not driving yet, it makes me think about advertising. When I see all the different teams sponsor signs around the baseball complex because each of the teams is sponsored by a different company and it’s the same type of thing. We can’t have everybody’s names on the shirt it goes to one and they have to pay for it. But that’s what keeps the league going. And I was also watching a big hockey game last week and I’m okay as of the date of this recording folks, I don’t usually like to timestamp, but it was the, what’s it called? The Stanley Cup? The football game.
LAURIE CONROD: It’s so painful? I’m sorry, I’m from New England and the Bruins just lost it.
KIM: Uh Huh. Yes. So my family is a Boston fan,
LAURIE CONROD: –Mm.
KIM: -but I haven’t watched hockey in years. I just needed to watch because one of my clients is a big St Louis Louie, however they properly pronounce it, in that neck of the woods fan. So I was watching, but what really got me during the whole game was number one, the commercials, we cut cable over a year ago. So having to get used to watching the commercials was something for me to get used to, because I like, I wonder how much they’re paying. Wouldn’t it be nice if my business got that big that I could afford to buy a Stanley Cup commercial spot? And then also looking at the, the banners around the rink, you know, who has that one? Who has that one? I mean it’s like big companies. It’s Honda and Dunkin donuts or I guess they’re Duncan now.
LAURIE CONROD: –Oh yeah.
KIM: You know what I was, it was in the back of my head. I wonder how much they pay. Because looking at it from the marketing standpoint, it was like that’s, I mean, how many people are watching this game right now? Game seven of the Stanley Cup finals. There’s a lot of exposure right there.
LAURIE CONROD: Hmm Mm, Hmm Mm. Yeah.
KIM: Put everything for a price.
LAURIE CONROD: Absolutely. And that, that is why direct response advertising is so great for the smaller, you know, business owners because it is affordable, you know, being able to do a TV commercial like that. Of course it’s going to be a lot of money. And it’s interesting to me that all those companies still use mass media advertising for mostly brand awareness. You know, –
KIM: –Hmm.
LAURIE CONROD: -it’s never direct response. I wonder, wouldn’t it be if they actually ran a Dunkin donuts ad where they sent you to a website and had you put your email address in and you’ve got something for it?
KIM: Oh, I love that. I mean, yet, after I lost my job as an interior designer, I was designing schools in the bond. I mean, when the economy taked especially here in Ohio, people can afford to pass the bond issues. I mean, they lost their job. How are they going to approve the tax money to put air conditioning into a new school? So that’s why I lost my job. But I got a job at chipotle lay and I always asked my managers, why was there, why aren’t we doing any type of, you know, customer loyalty card or anything like that? Because we had a competitor from our inner neighborhood who had a loyalty card. He’s like, well, we’re just not gonna do that. Well in my neighborhood in the last year, maybe it’s the last two years. That loyalty card has come out and I’m on their text messaging.
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: What do you call that? You know what I mean? Like they text messaged me, their marketing, hey there’s a special promotion today, but they’ve got my number so they can message me anytime they want now. And it’s such a great idea.
LAURIE CONROD: –Yeah.
KIM: For people who aren’t really familiar, can you dive a little bit deeper into direct message market or –
LAURIE CONROD: Direct response?
KIM: Thank you. Yes.
LAURIE CONROD: Direct response advertising is when the advertisement is created so that the person who sees it, the audience is gonna be required to take some kind of action and that action is going to move them closer towards the sales process and the buying process as opposed to what I said before, mass media, which is TV commercials where they just say we have the best, you know, cleaner to get rid of your mold. And then that’s all they do is they just give you a message, right? So direct response advertising is when you see the message, like saying your newsfeed and it says if you want more information, click here. And then when you click, you go to a page where if you want that information you have to enter your email address so that’s the response. We want their email address or we want their phone number or we want them to ask for more information. And then when we get that contact information, we’re set up in such a way that now we can follow up with those people and bring them closer to the sales, the buying process. And so we can measure every single step of that process. And it’s very affordable for businesses to do this we don’t have to buy, you know, $1 million or $100,000 TV ad campaign to get our name out there and to get exposure. We can run ads on Facebook for five or $10 a day and say like for a hair salon, you know, if you want a free cut with a color, I have 10 vouchers available quick get yours now. And they have to give their phone number and their name and email in order to get that voucher and get that deal. And so we can measure every piece of that process. Are People clicking on the ad? Yes or no? If they’re not, we need to fix the ad. If people are clicking the ad but they’re not opting in, then there’s something wrong with the page they’re going to that people aren’t opting in. Maybe there’s a trust issue, maybe it just looks weird. You know where the picture is not right or something on that page is saying the wrong thing and so each step is measurable so you can improve each step and then you’re also building an asset which is your email list or your database of emails, phone numbers and names of all those interested leads. All those interested people. And we all know as marketers, which a lot of entrepreneurs don’t really think about, is that very small percentage of people are ready to buy today. But you know, a good 60% of the a hundred percent are thinking about buying and some are doing research and they’re going to buy within the next three to six months and maybe some people are within the next six to 12 months. But we still want to bring those people into our world so that they’ll stop shopping and they’ll buy from us eventually. So that direct response advertising is, that’s what I do. And I think it’s what you do to camera, right?
KIM: Oh my gosh.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah.
KIM: Okay. I’m gonna call it a Monday brain fart okay because I wasn’t even thinking you got me thinking about valpack.
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: And for those of you who do not get valpack in your area and don’t know what we’re talking about, it’s a envelope that comes once a month or maybe a couple of times a month and it has a whole bunch of flyers, like a, I don’t know, maybe three inch by six inch little brochures from different area companies and they give you their deal. But I was thinking about that and I wasn’t even thinking about how even, even though the local networking groups in my area may not have been, you know, lucrative for me or beneficial, I could do a direct response through one of those. Cause who knows how many other entrepreneurs there are in my town I’m not about to say I’m going to go to it, but I want to jump in. Yes, it is what I do and I want to piggyback on what you just said about the testing. I love that you brought that up because so many people don’t test different variables, different headlines, different pictures. I mean I’ve, I just had an ad campaign maybe two months ago where I decided to test four different images for my Facebook ad and for anybody who’s wondering, I use Ad Espresso because I just love how easy it is and how it shows me that the winner versus the loser and that the picture that performed the best performed three times better than any of the others and it was my least favorite of the four.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. We just don’t know what our market’s going to tell us. It’s so cool.
KIM: Yeah, absolutely.
LAURIE CONROD: And what we think doesn’t matter, what they think matters.
KIM: Absolutely. And some people think that their landing page, you know where you go and you give your name and your email or your phone number, that that needs to be absolutely gorgeous. But I have split tests, what I would call ugly pages. I mean just with, with my design background that, I like things to always look really awesome. But even some of my co ugly pages have converted doubly, doubly well, that’s not proper grammar. But you know what, I’m trying to say, –
LAURIE CONROD: — I do.
KIM: -as pretty pages.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. I mean, think about, think about craigslist, –
KIM: –Hmm Mm.
LAURIE CONROD: -how ugly that is.
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: And how successful it’s been. And so it’s just a wonderful point that a really simple, simple capture page with nothing on it except the headline and the optin box can outperform, you know, a page with a video on it with five bullet points and all pretty colors. You just never know, you know?
KIM: Oh, you totally got me on the craigslist. I found my husband, my house, and my dog [inaudible] list. Yeah, totally. It doesn’t need to be pretty.
LAURIE CONROD: –That’s called success.
KIM: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what are you most passionate about in your work today? And what specifically are you doing? I mean, who are you working with and what do you do with them?
LAURIE CONROD: So I think it’s just the whole concept and practice of helping people understand how important marketing is and that it blows my mind how many people don’t understand the importance of it. I have a really favorite quote, and it’s from Forbes, and it just says, one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not spending money on marketing and PR, especially when the money gets tight because you can Polish your products and services all day long, but it won’t matter if nobody knows that they’re there. And that marketing and spending money on marketing and having a budget for that is crucial. And there’s just story after story after story of superior products, like I think a good one is from Simon Sineck ted talk when he talks about, oh, was it typical –
KIM: –Is it starting with the why and apple?
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah, yeah I love him I love that start with why. But there was a product that came out that was a competitor to an apple product and I think it’s something –
KIM: –Oh yeah he was talking about Tivo.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah, it was Tivo.
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: And it just, the way they marketed it, they just scared everybody.
KIM: –Hmm Mm.
LAURIE CONROD: And instead of the way apple marketed theirs or somebody else, and the message was just all wrong and it was a completely superior product, but it didn’t matter because the message was wrong and they didn’t do it right. But, but what I find a lot is that people are even, like we were talking about before, people that have built their business on referrals or they’ve spent all their, I talked to a restaurant owner one time and he goes, I don’t have any money to advertise. I spent all my money on the equipment to, you know, make the food and he could have the best food in the world, but he’s not prioritizing what’s really going to make the business sustained. You know, so that you, you know, you asked me what my passion was. I think it’s getting that message out there and clear to people and then helping them actually do it right-
KIM: –Hmm Mm.
LAURIE CONROD: -so that they can have a business that’s sustainable and that’s profitable and grows and I work with a lot of service providers. Not as much I’ve worked with brick and mortar, not as much as service providers, consultants, coaches, authors, speakers, a, I’ve worked with a lot of direct sales reps, affiliate marketers because that’s where I started back in 2010, 12, 13 ish and that’s, I helped them get themselves out there and get that system going like we were speaking of originally, which is having that your lead generation automated and that’s what just direct response advertising is. I love to tell people the, you know where kind of originated in the old days before the Internet was when you would see an advertisement in the newspaper, like the Wall Street Journal and it would be this big long article giving all kinds of free value, free information, really valuable stuff. And at the end there would be a little coupon where if you want the free report that goes even deeper and gives you even better, even more information, fill out the coupon, cut it out, fill it out, address an envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in the mail. And that was direct response advertising. And now do it so easily on the Internet all they have to do is, you know, type in their email and hit the button and you’ve got to lead. And when that system is running on autopilot and it frees you up, you know, to grow your business and work inside your business instead of on all the time.
KIM: You have me laughing over here for a moment because it’s not just advertising like that. I mean even talking about how you shot my husband on craigslist, I mean now there’s match.com and all these others, but, and I don’t think she listens. Mom, forgive me for sharing this, but I don’t think she even realizes, I know that they’re reclassified ads you know, men looking for women or women looking for met men that she responded to, but it was one of those things where you see the code that you’re supposed to email a letter to or mail, snail mail a letter to and they would forward it to the person who submitted that and then they could go back. I mean, and now there’s match.com and eharmony and all those, I want to say one thing though, I love how you’re talking about spending money on marketing and it’s more, maybe you’ve had clients like this too. They think, okay, greatI have my funnel. You know, I had my system set up, I’m going to get lots of leads now.
LAURIE CONROD: Hmm Mm.
KIM: No, there’s more than that because just as you already talked about earlier, I mean we still have to get people there. This is not field of dreams. It’s not, if you build it, they will come. We still have to let people know it’s here. So what are you doing to let people know it’s there? Are you getting on podcasts? Are you getting onto radio shows? Are you like east summits, Webinars, ads, whatever it is. You still have to drive people, to –
LAURIE CONROD: –Yes.
KIM: -whatever you have.
LAURIE CONROD: The traffic is a crucial part of the funnel, you know?
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: And to even go back to your other point about, okay, now I have, what I find with a lot of people too is that they think their funnel is a panacea. Like it’s, it’s going to solve all their problems and we need to recognize it as a working, living, evolutionary thing.
KIM: –Hmm Mm.
LAURIE CONROD: You know, sometimes we create funnels or write ads and they have their winners in the first hour. You know, I’ve had many of those and then or in or in the first day or 24 hours or whatever. And then other times, sometimes they just fall flat, you know, and they don’t get any response. And what I find is that it usually happens, which goes back to exactly what you were saying before, is that entrepreneur really has no idea who their ideal client is, what they’re thinking, how they feel, what their real problems are. They’re not in tune with that at all, and we do the best we can as marketers to figure out who those people are the best so that we can create the best system and the systems will work. But if the entrepreneur doesn’t know who their ideal client is, it’s not easy to create a system that’s really like hits a home run.
KIM: Absolutely. When we’re setting up my ads, we know who that audience is, we know who they are following if they’re not following us, but we also have the retargeting for people who have been on the website.
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: Yes, people, I pixel you. I know –
LAURIE CONROD: –Yes.
KIM: -who you are. I don’t know you by name, but Facebook does.
LAURIE CONROD: –That’s right.
KIM: Yeah. Yup, oh my husband got so irritated probably in the like 2011, 2012 because he knew on my bucket list I had a pair, I wanted a pair of Ugg boots sometime in my life and he planned on getting them for me for Christmas. So he went and he looked at a couple of websites when I wasn’t at home, thankfully we did not share computers, but from the time he first looked to when he actually purchased, he had constant agbo ads on Google and on Facebook he’s like, dang it. Like he told me about this after Christmas after he gave them to me. He’s like, I was afraid you were going to look at my computer and see all these agbo ads. I was at that point, I really didn’t know about pixeling. It was still very early in my, actually, I don’t think I even started my business yet, so I didn’t have a clue. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. I would’ve just thought it was funny, but, –
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm.
KIM: -but it’s so smart, so smart. If you haven’t actually gotten to the checkout page or the thank you page, then you keep on retargeting those people.
LAURIE CONROD: One of the most powerful things we do because it also saves the entrepreneur money to re-target –
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: -because those leads are always, you know, I don’t like to always use word always, but you know, it’s much more efficient because we know that people need in many, many cases, multiple exposures in order to take that action, that direct response action.
KIM: Absolutely.
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: So I interrupted you before you, I gave you a chance to answer, but what are you most passionate about and what you do? Like what excites you about it?
LAURIE CONROD: What excites me is seeing the results when you have your system running and having an entrepreneur see that they can, actually get exposed to people that are in such a bigger world and that it really works, you know, and that people are actually clicking their ad and they’re commenting and you know, seeing them be happy with, with the results and the outcome of it.
KIM: Absolutely.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah.
KIM: Well, I want to share with you the in the last, so I started my business in 2012 and in the years since I have transitioned from doing all one-on-one work for my clients to beginning to do work in my business and on my business such as this podcast to actually happen my own products. And for those date savvy people who can see or who know when the Stanley Cup was. When I say this, you might be a little bit alarmed too, but Laurie, I just did my taxes this past weekend. No, I did not file an extension that was all by bad and that won’t happen again. But for those of you who are not date savvy, I was two months late. But I was looking, and I, this was the first year that I have had really been selling my own products, evergreen products year round. And when I was sharing with my sister how much we made last year, she’s like, wait, hold up. How much? I was like, yeah. And I told her, she’s like, why aren’t we doing more of that? And I was like, it’s just a time, time. Oh, she’s like, you got to make time. When are you going to get the rest of them up? Because this is too big to ignore. For those of you who are listening and are wondering, well, can I even support more clients? You don’t need to support more clients. Direct response marketing can be driving people to products that you don’t even need to talk to the people with. Like you sell them an upgrade to your ebook or a course or anything. You do not need to be taking them to one-on-one services with you. And I know there’s a big concern because they know who you are that I don’t have time for this. I’m not asking you to take more time. I’m just asking you to take some time on your system set up so that you can be making money while you sleep because there’s nothing more awesome than that.
LAURIE CONROD: Yes. And that’s, you know, I got exposed to that very early on in my journey to like direct response marketing is a way of marketing anything, you know, it could be physical product, digital, chronic, whatever. But once we learn how to do the marketing piece, then it’s like, okay, so now I want to package out my expertise and sell it so I can make money passively. And I encourage all of my clients to do that and some want to do it and some don’t. But just exposing them to that concept, like you just did so powerful because most people don’t think of themselves that way and they don’t think, what would I have to package up? And there’s always something, there’s always something.
KIM: I’ve asked that question to clients before I’ve, you know, I’ve said you can package things up and they’ve said, well I don’t have anything. And I’ve asked, oh, how many blog articles do you have? How many articles do you have that are up on your site? And I have gotten a response like two to 300 before, like a number one, why aren’t they up on your site? And number two, do you realize what a treasure you have right there? I mean that was your time. Let’s make you some money off of that. I don’t care if it’s five articles, you can still package it together make it a e-book.
LAURIE CONROD: Absolutely. I have a client that’s a speaker and she mostly speaks from stage, but she’s done hundreds of webinars and it same exact thing. Like there’s all that content, all that you know, digitize valuable information that’s just sitting there that can be monetized. And if you don’t already have it, you can certainly create it and creating that stuff is not difficult. You don’t have to be techie like we said before, you know, if we all know and understand how to do email, you can actually learn how to record your screen and your voice and make an MP four and sell it.
KIM: What is your preferred tool for that?
LAURIE CONROD: I use screen castomatic, which is actually free, although the upgraded version where you can go over 15 minutes is like $20 a year, so inexpensive.
KIM: Oh my heavens.
LAURIE CONROD: You know, I just, I like to use a good mic. So the audio is good, –
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: -but it’s just so simple to use and it’s by techsmith I think. And I’ve used that since day, you know when I first started recording things and selling them and doing webinars and trainings and things.
KIM: So I use loom because I love sending quick little screen shares to my team –
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: -and that has a, that does have a monthly charge. But I also have had Camtasia, which I bought the full license to a couple of years back. So that’s a little bit more extensive and also a bit more expensive. I mean I think it costs me $300 –
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: -but if you already have zoom listeners, sphere calls with clients or what have you, even the free account, I don’t think there’s is any limit on a free account for how long you can go for and record for. I’ll look that up before this goes in the show notes.
LAURIE CONROD: –I think it’s 40 minutes.
KIM: Okay but still 40 minutes, you can accomplish a lot in 40 minutes and even bundle them together and part one, part two, part three.
LAURIE CONROD: Absolutely.
KIM: Yeah, yeah.
LAURIE CONROD: Hmm Mm.
KIM: I have a three part question for you. How many hours a week are you working right now? What is your dream number of hours and what are your favorite tools that are making everything happened for you right now?
LAURIE CONROD: How many hours a week do I work? Uh, I would say if I’m working on a project, it’s going to be more, but like just to run my business, I probably work 30 hours a week, sometimes more depending on if I’m working on a project I like my time freedom. What was the second question?
KIM: How many hours a week would you like to work?
LAURIE CONROD: I’d like to work less than that and you know, even have more free time. And then my, the third was what tools do I use to make that happen?
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: I use go to Webinar for my webinars. I run my direct response, you know, advertising campaigns 24 by seven 365 days a year. And so I use mostly Facebook ads and I use click funnels to build my funnels and I use schedule once for scheduling my calendar, my automated calendar for when I have um, strategy sessions with people where I have sales calls think it’s once hub now.
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: They bought them out. I use Wistia to hold all my trainings that I sell all my info products. I love Wistia.
KIM: Are you using click funnels for your emails as well or do you have a separate email marketing system or email system?
LAURIE CONROD: I use a Weber for my auto responder, Hmm Mm.
KIM: Awesome listeners. I just want you to know that all of the above tools will be in the show notes, which you will be able to find at thekimsuuton.com forward slash p p five eight nine. You’ve actually got me just thinking Laurie, about all the other people like me in my town that I just don’t know about, right. Like I am curious now about valpack because they’re, there could definitely be other mom entrepreneurs in my town who need a funnel built and they don’t even know where to begin. So I’m not saying that it’s the best financial decision or that it will even be feasible, you know, but you’ve got me, I’m going to be, I’m going to be researching that one a little bit cause I don’t want anybody to, to be struggling out there. I mean their struggles is not my problem, but if I can help I will.
LAURIE CONROD: Right, right.
KIM: Where can listeners find you online and get to know more about you?
LAURIE CONROD: They can find me on my website. It’s laurieconrad.com and I’m sure that’ll be in the show notes too, so the right spelling is there.
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: And also, you know, my business page on Facebook is there also, and those are my two primaries that I focus on. You know, to have a presence out there.
KIM: I love that you said two primaries. I normally jump right from that question into the golden nugget. But could you address anybody who is out there right now thinking that they have to be everywhere?
LAURIE CONROD: It’s such a common mistake because inexperienced people will tell you, okay, you’re starting a business or you’re starting to use social media. You need to have Twitter, Instagram, you need to have everything. It’s just not true. Focus on one where you think your clients and customers are and just get good at that one platform and don’t worry about the rest of them. It’s you dilute yourself, you get burnt out, you get confused cause they’re all different and each one has its own kind of culture and the way it operates. And so just focus on one. I mean I’ve been doing this since 2013, 14 and I’m really only YouTube and Facebook. I have an Instagram that got half a year and a half ago and I couldn’t get it back so I lost all my stuff. So I just never, I just kind of let it go for a while. Twitter, I don’t really use Twitter, I focus on one thing so that you know, I don’t go crazy. And that’s what I tell my clients too.
KIM: I could give you a big sloppy kiss for that.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah.
KIM: I mean, and I actually just talked about it in the positive productivity pod earlier today, Jill, of all trades, master of none.
LAURIE CONROD: That’s it. That’s it. That’s the truth.
KIM: And if you want to see what bad social media marketing looks like, I mean you can go to any of mine because I was one of those people who was everywhere and now there are a couple that are just sort of dead.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah, I mean if you, if you’re a solo preneur or even if you have a small team, you know, once you have a, a team, team, like a larger team, then you can pay people to handle all that stuff. But when you focus on one thing, it’s like that book, the one thing that’s an awesome book to read.
KIM: –Incredible book. Yeah.
LAURIE CONROD: I made way more money and I still make way more money just focusing on one thing all the time. Soon as I start too many projects it, things fall apart.
KIM: What one book are you reading right now, which really has captured your attention?
LAURIE CONROD: Well, I just started reading the four disciplines and I would have to grab it cause I don’t know the author at the top of my head, but it’s about focusing on four disciplines to have exponential progress. And I just started it. So, but it’s, it’s been really good so far.
KIM: I just started reading profit first and my apologies to the author because I know I’m going to get your last name wrong.
LAURIE CONROD: That’s [inaudible]
KIM: Make a low with’s?
LAURIE CONROD: –Yeah.
KIM: It’ll be on the show notes.
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: Oh my gosh. This, it’s given me a big kick in the butt already. As I said, I did my taxes this weekend.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. Hmm Mm.
KIM: I don’t want to dive too deep into the book because all of you need to read it if you haven’t already read it. But I am implementing the profit first system into my business. And just to give you some type of glimpse at the awareness that I’ve gotten is that I, this past year I spent double what I should have on operating expenses.
LAURIE CONROD: And that’s, that’s all good because now you know, you know, and I, I’m aware of that book. I haven’t read it, but I know he talks about paying yourself first.
KIM: –Yup.
LAURIE CONROD: Doesn’t he. Yeah and, and most entrepreneurs don’t do that. They put all the money into the business and they don’t pay themselves. And that’s a, that’s a big common, common mistake too.
KIM: Well, I, I mean, I’ve done it for seven years. If it was in the account I could spend it.
LAURIE CONROD: Hmm Mm.
KIM: But that is not the way to build a healthy business.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah, there’s so much, so many great books out there.
KIM: There are.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah.
KIM: Well, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. You have got my brain spinning and actually, and I have, I had any Facebook ads running for months since that last set was up. And now you have me thinking about what I can set up for even just as you said, $5 a day.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. And in your local area too, Kim, like you were talking about those mom preneurs and you know, that need a funnel. They talk about people who need a system you know, you can’t network 24 hours a day, but your ad can be running 24 hours a day and you put your beautiful face out there and your local area, you know, and valpack might work better too. Who knows? But like we said before, at $5 a day, it’s affordable to test it and see if it, it gets traction.
KIM: Absolutely. I mean, even if I just made six back, to cover that five plus one, that would be –
LAURIE CONROD: –Hmm Mm.
KIM: a good start.
LAURIE CONROD: And here’s the, here’s the, another point about Facebook ads that I think people don’t realize is that you could spend a few hundred dollars on Facebook ads and get nothing, quote unquote no results, but you actually did get results because you saw what is not resonating with your audience. You learned something about them. You learned that, that target audience is not what you thought it was or the, you know, the images isn’t what’s gonna resonate with them, what their copy isn’t gonna resonate with them. So when people get discouraged, especially when they first start running ads and, you know, quote unquote, it didn’t work, you know, well, if Facebook ads didn’t work, they wouldn’t be exponentially increasing their revenue every year into the double digit billions, you know?
KIM: Oh my gosh, yes.
LAURIE CONROD: Yeah. So I just encourage people, don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work right away. And it also does help to get expert help too, but we always learn something when a campaign doesn’t work even as well as when they do work.
KIM: I just wanted to throw this out there for the listeners and maybe you have a different total that you like to, to use, but for those of you who are trying to do it yourself and have a word press site, I installed maybe two years ago on my site Pixel Caffeine, it’s actually buy at espresso, but I wasn’t using Ad Espresso yet and it makes setting up the Facebook pixels on your site extremely easy. You don’t need to know code, you just need to know where to grab your pixel from Facebook and they walk you right through it. But without, without that pixel installed, it’s going to be hard for Facebook to see what’s working, what’s not.
LAURIE CONROD: Huge we’ll look at right there.
KIM: Yup. I would love to know if you have a parting piece of advice or a golden nugget that you could offer to listeners today.
LAURIE CONROD: I would say, I mean I gave one of them out earlier when I, when we talked about, you know, having a marketing budget and don’t skimp on your marketing cause that’s a huge gold nugget that I think people aren’t aware of. Another, another golden nugget that I have just found that creates success is to just never give up. You just keep trying you know, you just keep trying some, we always make mistakes and stuff, but it’s feedback. It’s not failure and I just, you asked me earlier what I’m passionate about, I’m passionate about entrepreneurship overall. You know, marketing is a piece of that it’s an important piece but what it does, entrepreneurship makes the world go round and makes our world advance into higher levels of the stratosphere. And I’m just so passionate about that and I see people give up when they have great ideas just because you know, for whatever reason something didn’t work. So just never give up. Keep going and use that marketing to get you there.
KIM: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Positive Productivity podcast. When I’m not podcasting, I’m supporting six to seven figure business coaches with their marketing automation and entrepreneurs like you through my coaching and mastermind programs, I want to invite you to visit thekimsutton.com to learn how I can help you take your business to the next level.
