EP 247 – Lessons To Learn From The Traffic And Conversion Summit 2018

NCS 247 | Traffic and Conversion

NCS 247 | Traffic and Conversion

 

Scott shares some of the biggest nuggets and the latest trends that he took away from the 2018 Traffic and Conversion Summit held in San Diego, CA. The summit mainly focused on marketing traffic and conversion, basically how you can look for traffic and convert that into deal flows and funding sources. One of the most striking techniques highlighted was using live videos to attract attention, gain reactions, and get people hooked into what you’re all about. Some of the keynote speakers also discussed how taking care of yourself is tantamount to taking care of your business because oftentimes, as entrepreneurs, you take care of everybody else around you but don’t take care of yourself. Scott further talks about some of the changes happening around We Close Notes, especially with their membership site on some of the social media platforms.

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Lessons To Learn From The Traffic And Conversion Summit 2018

We headed out to San Diego and attended one of our must-attend events that we go to every year. It’s called the Traffic &Conversion Summit. This is the ninth year they’ve had it and we have been going five years in a row. It is the largest offered a real event that we go to, and it’s not based on note investing. It’s a little different event than normal. There are not a lot of note investors there, although there are a few of our vendors and a few competitors that go to the event focused almost exclusively on marketing traffic and conversion. I find it very valuable for what we do in our business on a daily basis and people will also probably find it important, because that’s what it all comes down to. We’re all looking for more traffic and we’re looking to convert that traffic into either deal flow, funding sources for buyers and sellers. We’re all salesmen and we’re all marketers. We love going to this event. It is a pricey ticket. Its average ticket price is about $1,000. Sometimes up to $1,500 if you wait until last minute but it is always a very valuable event.

The vendor area that we walked through usually had around 100 plus vendors. These vendors could be anywhere from Infusionsoft, to high-end product fulfillment, to cameras, to video equipment, to plugins and software to help you maximize your marketing. They have click funnels, lead pages, as well as some vendors that we use for some of our website stuff. Getting a chance to meet with our vendors is always valuable. Second thing is the people. It’s great getting hold of and meeting new people along networking with some of our existing extended family. We ran into a lot of great people that we haven’t seen in a while, people that aren’t in the normal note space, from the Scott Duffy to Roland Frasier to the Brad Martineau, Sixth Division things. There’s a lot of people that we look up to that we’ve been working with for the last couple of years that has helped us take our business to a different level because we do something extra than what most people do.

In the note space, we see a lot of note investors and note educators who are very internally focused. “I’m going to focus my business and my business only,” and that’s fine. There’s plenty of ways. If you start marketing yourself, you’ll raise more capital, find more deals, and more deals will flow to you. A lot of people struggle with that. They’re focused on deal first versus marketing first. It’s always great to run into people who are doing some amazing things and bigger things. The sessions are well worth it. This time, they had about five sessions every hour in different areas. Whether it was from four speaking spots to a small stage in the vendor area, there was a lot of great stuff to go on. There were over 100 plus sessions to listen to, so there’s no possible way for us to listen to everything. Even if we divided and conquered, we’re still missing half the sessions. If you get a chance of having friends go to different sessions, have them use something to catch the recordings or to buy the replays.

NCS 247 | Traffic and Conversion

Traffic and Conversion: If you start marketing yourself, you’ll raise more capital, find more deals, and more deals will flow to you.

I want to share our biggest lessons along the way. I found it valuable that I share some of these with you. This is an event that I highly recommend to everybody. Besides the fact that there are 6,500 entrepreneurs from all across the world there, they’re all digital marketers doing different things, you can often learn a lot from other people. I got an acquaintance by the name Drew Canole. He owns the Organifi, which is a green juice. He’s built a $50,000,000 business over the last decade by using videos and live videos or video recordings of juicing from his place in San Diego to help him expand his business. That’s one of the biggest things that we saw throughout, that video is where it’s at.

There’s two great keynote speakers on the first two nights. The first night on Monday night was Draymond John’s Shark Tank. The biggest lesson he has taken into consideration especially the last two years is focused on taking better care of himself, his entrepreneurial health. His big thing is getting an entrepreneurial exam. He ended up finding out the reason he wasn’t feeling so good is he had stage two cancer. It’s in remission and he’s done a good job taking care of himself. We all got to take better care of ourselves. You have to drink a little less beer and a lot more lemonade. Focus on going to bed, eating better, taking better care of our health, walking and working out. Oftentimes, as entrepreneurs, we take care of everybody else around us and don’t take care of ourselves. It’s important for you, especially if you got family, kids, and people that are counting on you, you got to take good care of yourself. You can’t always put your needs on the backburner, whether it’s going to the gym or eating right or taking the time to de-stress. That’s important and one of the biggest things right off the bat. It’s been important for me and I was glad to hear that from somebody as well known as Draymond John. He says he would do anything for his wife and his kids and he wants to leave them a legacy, but he definitely doesn’t want to leave them a legacy too soon.

I was fortunate enough to have been in communication with Joel Comm who had an amazing breakout session on different ways to use video. There’s a whole variety of things. We’ve used a couple different video tactics. This episode was actually live streamed through a service called VLive.TV. It’s pretty inexpensive, or $240 a year and it allows you to do up to three people on the screen. Zoom does a lot more. Joel Comm talked about how video is ruling. The last few years, video has been picking up steam. Don’t be surprised if that’s what ends up replacing the majority of your Facebook feeds. We have an attention span of less than a goldfish supposedly, and using video effectively helps gain attention to get reactions from your audience. Getting them to hook into what you’re talking about is an important thing. We’ve done a good job with us leading the note industry in using video to share our message and get the word out, but some of the things we’re doing can be taken up a whole notch.

Another growing platform for a lot of people is the use of Instagram. I know that’s falls down on the totem pole for a lot of known real estate investors. You focus on LinkedIn, you focus on Facebook, you focused on Twitter. Instagram doesn’t seem to be the right demographic. I’ll be the first one to tell you that our growth on Instagram has been pretty slow compared to the other platforms. I’m at 2100 connections on Instagram, which is well below what we have on Facebook and LinkedIn. Jasmine Star, who is a local San Diego photographer, has been using Instagram and shared some great golden nuggets about using it. Two things that she mentioned that I wanted to bring up here. One is not to use the hashtags that all your competitors and all your people are using. If you are an entrepreneur, quit using #entrepreneur. If you’re a marketing expert, quit using #marketing. If you’re a note investor, maybe you don’t quit using the #noteinvesting, especially if your post is looking for a buyer or your posts is trying to raise capital and find deals. You need to go out and use the hashtags at the people that are looking for you are going to use. If you’re looking for people that have retirement accounts, we want to use #retirement, #401(k), #SDI, or #quest. Some of those things are to help you find the right people versus just finding other people that are doing the same things that you are. We’ve got to tweak it with what we do with Instagram on our posts. That will help us out with Twitter as well.

NCS 247 | Traffic and Conversion

Traffic and Conversion: Using video effectively helps gain attention to get reactions from your audience.

The second thing she talked about is using the direct message part of Instagram to reach out to your potential clients and reach out to your potential investors. If you’re seeing a post from somebody else getting a lot of likes and a lot of people commenting, you could connect with those people on those comments. If you are reaching out and you see people that like your comments, reach out and send those people direct message, instead of replying them there, send them a direct message. Start the conversation with a direct message out via Instagram to potential investors and potential note buyers and sellers. We’ll use the DM aspect of Instagram to communicate with some people of our friends and family, but I don’t think we utilize it enough when reaching out to potential prospects or clients. I’ve already used it a couple times since Jasmine gave her discussion, and it’s already merited me spending more time on there. Those are the two biggest things I took away from her. She was also nice enough to provide some great photos of the San Diego area as well as the people.

John Lee Dumas who is the Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast that get about five million downloads shared a strategy that I enjoyed called up funnels and down funnels. Many of us will put together a funnel aspect of what we’re doing, especially as new entrepreneurs and note investors. What is the thing that we talk about? Let’s put all our contacts. Let’s go build a LinkedIn profile and grow that. Let’s go onto our Facebook profiles and grow those. Those are great, it’s just a lot of us don’t think about our long-term message. That’s what I liked most about what he shared in his up and down funnels was that there was a lot of things to think about beforehand if you wanted to be successful. The up funnel includes things like the idea of what are you looking for or the niche and focusing on the niche and identifying the avatar of who you are targeting. I have talked about how our avatar for note investing is a 35 to 65-year-old college educated, homeowner family guy with around $75,000 to $250,000 in his retirement accounts, and he’s making roughly around that as well because he has a job as a COO or CEO. I’m talking about what’s the best medium to reach out to those people and coming up with the content creation. So many of us are throwing out content and they don’t know it. Use your mediums to refocus. Get that across the board if you’re doing a podcast or a YouTube or Facebook live, download that, find that on YouTube as well, get it transcribed and turned into a blog, and then the growth strategy and user engagement or how you engage with your people.

Finally, the solution. Is there a solution that you can offer up to your potential clients? Note investors, our big solution is how to use note investing to expand their IRA, to grow their IRA, or to grow their retirement accounts. That’s possibly a blog or a new book that you could write up or a webinar you can do and then record and turn into an e-book to draw traction to yourself. That was the up funnel for the most part. The down funnel is the work that we do after we come up with all our stuff. It’s the lead generation, the call to action, the email exchanges, the delivery, what the audience is consuming, the next call to action that you’re doing, any live training, live Q and A or the offer. This is the biggest thing that I see with real estate investors. They failed them. They don’t have a down funnel. They don’t mind running their Facebook connections and an email list or growing their social media page, but they don’t have a long-term down funnel of, “How am I going to filter those people that come into my world? How am I going to build trust along the way? How am I going to build rapport? How I’m going to get those people to decide they want to pick up the phone and call me to invest with me or they’re going to do something with me?” I see a lot of people trying to do training. That’s not the appropriate way to do things. You have to have a long term funnel to help some things. That was probably one of the most valuable sessions that I can take away because we do a lot of those things. We do have an up and down funnel.

NCS 247 | Traffic and Conversion

Traffic and Conversion: For note investors, our big solution is how to use note investing to expand their IRA, to grow their IRA, or to grow their retirement accounts.

John Lee Dumaswas good. That was one of the stronger sessions that I enjoyed. Pat Flynn, another podcaster, runs Smart Passive Income Podcasts. He talked about some episodes we might be doing in growth strategies, whether it’s doing a webinar, people doing a panel, recording with people who are doing a webinar or a live stream with three or four people to help share what your struggles or to get the word out of what you’re doing, to get the word out across everybody’s platform, leveraging your time and your audiences initially to help bring more awareness to what you’re doing. One of the things that I liked about what he shares in the Ask Pat Show where they’re asking questions with live phone calls. We’re going to do a little more of that in some of the future episodes here, asking people to join us live to be able to come in and share things with people on a regular basis. We’re doing things on such a regular basis around here that we sometimes forget the menial things.

We also got a good chance to talk with Stu McLaren. He was talking about how to build a seven-figure membership site and some of the things you can do to launch a membership site. I have been toying with this for the last four or five months. We’ve been wanting to do a membership site for what we do at WeCloseNotes.com and here at the Note Closers Show, and just figuring out what content do we include, what content do we not include? We have decided that we’re launching a membership site. We’re doing some beta testing, initially offer some reduced pricing for our beta memberships to get signed in. It’s a monthly membership of great content, taking our Note Night in America replays and throwing them on there, making those only available to our members along with extra training and some extra bonuses. I reached out to a few of our vendors and speakers, and they’re all extremely welcoming and loved the idea because we do such a great job marketing of us providing either copies of their books or discount for their services exclusively to our members. Stu McLaren definitely shared great stuff, and we’re stoked about this and stoked about providing some great things to give to our members like books, the trainings and content. Ideas are coming together and things are coming together. Solutions are coming faster than we can write it down and to get it up and it blast it out to our potential members and existing members.

If you’re interested in learning more about our membership, drop me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com and I’ll be glad to talk about that. It’s going to be closed membership. We’re offering it up a couple times a year. Our goal is to provide great content and great training for those individuals. That’s not to say that we are not going to have our four virtual workshops a year and our two note camps, those will still be staples to what we do, but I’ve got a lot of people, they’re like, “I want something in between a workshop and a Fast Track training or Mastermind, something you can help put to help us grow on a weekly and monthly basis.” We’ve decided that we’re going to use that to help and make it a win-win across the board, a win for us in our time and a win for our members. One of the things we are going to be doing is converting our WCN Facebook page, the main Facebook page, for our membership site. That may piss some people off. They don’t need to sign up. They’re going to lose a valuable asset. When we see people doing some amazing things, there’s a lot of value to having that network. Membership has its privileges.

NCS 247 | Traffic and Conversion

Traffic and Conversion: Our goal is to provide great content and great training for individuals.

Podcasting was a big aspect of this Traffic &Conversion Summit with the speakers versus last time. A year ago, they had one main session with the feature. It was the proverbial traffic podcast that this digital marketer does every day of every week. That was their main focus on podcast last year. This year, they had two plus phenomenal speakers on podcasting. Walking the vendor area is worth the price of admission, because you’ll find something that will immediately pay for itself. I’ve found at least three or four things, if not five, that will immediately help us save money and add more value to our tribe and help us add value to our up and down funnels. We made some great connections. Mari Smith who is an amazing Facebook expert was a keynote there and shared some of her insights. If you aren’t using Facebook Messenger, if you’re not using video, if you’re not planning out what your message is, you’re going to get bombarded and overrun in the long run. Karen says, “Online marketing people are so great about sharing info to help you grow.” You’re right. There’s enough to go around. I’m a big proponent of that. We want out tribe to grow. We want our note family or #notenation to grow and do bigger things because that’s one way we all grow and do bigger things, all doing things together. If the water level rises and you’re floating up, you’re going to rise up and help everybody else around you.

Eric says, “I used Christy White to help me. She’s awesome.” Christy is a good friend. This was her first time in Traffic & Conversion although she knew a lot of the players there. She got a lot of great stuff out of that. We exchanged notes. We hang out. When you have somebody there going through it and you get ideas, when you look at somebody and you instantly have a little brainstorming session after that, that’s one of the great things. Christy met me and Steph a couple of years ago at a Secret Knock thing in San Diego and we have been good friends ever since, since we speak the same marketing language. She’s phenomenal. We’re always excited to see what she and Elisha are doing. They’ll be speaking at out Note CAMP Convention here in April. We’re also excited about partnering up with Christy and Elisha for the upcoming Social Media Day on June 30th. We have a lot of great speakers lined up for Social Media Day here in Cali.

If you enjoy what we do, do a #gotitin the comments here and I might send you a special little bonus that we took in from here at Traffic & Conversion. Also on iTunes, Stitcher or any of those podcasts, do me a favor and go to our review and leave a five-star review with #gotit. I would appreciate and I’ll make sure to find a way to give you our special bonus. Go out and make something happen. We’ll see you all at the top.

 

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