Bad virtual neighbors are probably killing your business - Ep. 009

Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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Transcript

Greg Marshall 0:01 Alright, so we are we're on and one of the things I will talk about something I've noticed that, you know, I can't confirm because this isn't my, you know, area of expertise, this is more your area of expertise is it seems like so when I, when I run pay traffic, something similar to what I've had happen to me with email marketing, which is it seems like there's certain platforms that for whatever reason, the, I guess the partners, right, so you will say like Facebook, Instagram, or maybe Google ads or whatever pay traffic partner using, they don't seem to like or favor certain software's, right. So for example, I've used Shopify Click Funnels WordPress launch car, I mean, I've used I feel like I've used not all but a lot of right, Wix. And I can see there's a difference, there's a certain platform, okay, and I'm gonna say the name, I don't want to just completely shade anyone, it just seems like Facebook may not love this platform. So I love to hear your take on it. But yeah, click funnels, it seems like, for whatever reason, and myself included, actually have a Clickfunnels account. But it seems like for whatever reason, any client that's using Click Funnels doesn't get the same almost it's like the same offerings. But if they're on different platforms, it almost seems like they don't like Click Funnels or that they're Yeah, anti. I don't know, is Yeah. So is there any truth to that? And if so, why?

Blake Beus 1:36 Yeah, so, alright, so let me just first say, there's going to be a lot of speculation here, but I think it's relatively accurate speculation, or also wouldn't be making it. So this, this reminds me of, I like to think this like a bad neighbor. Right. Okay. So, you know, if you're, if you're in a neighborhood or whatever, and you have a home value, that's I don't know, $500,000. And you have someone move in next door, and they just trash their house in their yard and everything, your value of your house goes down. And it's very much the same out on the internet. Now, typically, I would see this and this is a known thing with the cheap, say WordPress web hosts. The shared hosting that it's like two or three bucks a month, you could get placed on a shared server with someone and if one of the websites on that server was breaking the rules or doing something bad or, or cheating Google and SEO or whatever, your site would be associated with that, and your search engine rankings would go down, we associate your guilty by association, right. And that's the biggest problem with say a shared host is is you you bump into that kind of stuff. The same thing with with platforms, right. So Shopify, they have their whole infrastructure built out and everything. Shopify has been around for a long time. They're a good player. They're the biggest e commerce platform out there, I believe, aren't they? I think so. I mean, other than like Amazon, and that doesn't count. But like for people that want to run shop, want to run ecommerce, so the biggest platform out there, and they've got things dialed in now, now click funnels comes in. It's run by a marketer. Yep. And marketers like to play kind of loose and fast. Yeah. And push push tournaments. It's very true. And they've built out an infrastructure that has been buggy in the past and had some other issues. But in my opinion, if you do a Google search right now for for Clickfunnels, versus whatever, Clickfunnels vs. Kajabi, whatever, you're going to have page after page after page of articles that are spammy, that are just trying to get people to click on a Click Funnels affiliate link and sign up with Clickfunnels. I didn't even know Yeah, everything. If you research Clickfunnels, you're going to see nothing but articles talking about the pros and cons and then ultimately, they're going to recommend Click Funnels. And the reason is, because they have one of the most profitable affiliate commission payouts out of any platform out there right now. And that's a big part of their marketing strategy. But it means that a lot of people have in the past been pretty scammy and spammy with trying to promote the platform so there's this double edged sword got it and use in the past this isn't such a big deal now but in the past you would see this on websites like JVZoo and ClickBank those old affiliate marketplaces are also old school right. And they're still around.

Greg Marshall 4:23 Yeah. It's still successful, right? Yes. Not as successful as in the past

Blake Beus 4:28 not or they basically don't know they're still around and they're still big but it's almost like it's a different part of the internet. Yeah, and they operate in different different areas and a whole nother whole nother world, right. That's a totally different conversation but but with so so what you have have happened is you have Click Funnels being kind of associated with this negative thing. Google's whole entire job, Facebook's whole entire job is to give people a pleasant experience. They stay on their platforms. And if you have people taking advantage of that are skirting, the rules are playing a little bit loose and loose and fast. Their algorithms are set up to kind of penalize people based on certain certain metrics. So, if you have a large percentage of people going to click on all sites and have a bad experience on that site, they're going to start saying, Well, maybe it's not the site, maybe it's the platform and algorithms gonna start D prioritizing that. What that does is it means you get lower rankings on search engine results, you get higher cost per clicks, you have lower click through rates. And

Greg Marshall 5:28 I've seen that in you know, I've seen that. Yeah. No doubt about I've actually tested same message on different platforms. Yeah, totally different save is a very, totally different experience.

Blake Beus 5:39 Yeah. Yeah. And so and so that's, that's my my guess. Right? Is that that, that that's the case. Now, I was on the Click Funnels Facebook group, which is massive, you know, cuz I used to use Click Funnels as well, I moved away from them. And I feel like a big part of their ecosystem is relatively toxic and spammy and scammy. If you post any question, you're going to get and get nothing but DM saying, hey, I can help you with this, or hey, I can get out of this, or hey, sign up with my link or whatever. And Facebook sees all of that stuff. Got it, right. And so they start to think, Okay, this is a, we're going to let you guys still play in your sandbox, you're going to still have your Facebook group, you're going to still have all of that stuff. But behind the scenes, we're going to prioritize websites and platforms that give people a pleasant experience when you're paying for ads.

Greg Marshall 6:26 Got it. So well, what do you recommend? For you know, not only my clients, but even for someone like myself that has Click Funnels? Yeah. What do you suggest? Do you suggest moving everything away? Or going to another platform? Or how do you fix this?

Blake Beus 6:43 Yeah. So ultimately, the answer is, it depends. It really depends on people's individual situations. So let me put it this way, if you're running an offer, or whatever, and you're profitable, things are working, and you're on Click Funnels, and you're happy with the numbers, you're happy with the percentages, you're happy with everything. It's probably not worth it to switch. But it might be worth to just kind of look at some options. So you know that if you ever get to a certain point, you ever hit a certain thing, it might be worth it to switch because there's a huge cost in switching just from time and energy, everything like it's, it's a lot of work, and you're gonna lose a lot of business when you switch for someone like you, you're your main offer on the site is yours is basically just a website, you're asking people to get in touch with you and book a phone call. Yeah, like you don't, you're not selling anything. And you don't have a huge ask once people are on the phone with you. They get to know how authentic and real you are, and people just like that. And so it's probably not a huge impact on you unless you wanted to start ramping up your ad spend. And well, it wasn't working. The numbers weren't working out again, at that point.

Greg Marshall 7:49 Yeah. And I can see that. And so that that's pretty good advice. Because one of the things I do notice is compared to other Clickfunnels clients that I have, my click through rates aren't bad. And it might just be because the offer and like what they're seeing, but the ones that are actually like selling courses, they tend to see pretty low, like, I mean, sick. And I actually saw recently, I ran a test and saw $100 CPM, which is unbelievable. That's insanely high on Facebook traffic of Facebook traffic, and that was sanely high. It was not keywords. It was not I mean, very generic broad audience. Yeah. $100 CPM. That's nuts. So obviously that ad is turned off. But I just you know it to me, it proves a point because most of my clients, especially ones that are using Shopify and even WordPress, their CPMs are typically around 20 or less. So think about that's five times more expensive.

Blake Beus 8:58 Yeah, and for people that um, you probably know what CPM is cost per 1000 impressions impressions. But that's the metric that you're charged by. Right? So the cost per click is just a calculation based on what your CPM is. And so if you have a CPM that's $100 versus a CPM, that's $20. The CPM is $20 Gets you five times the traffic for the same ads yet which means your cost per clicks are going to be lower your click through rates are going to be lower your your cost per conversion, all of that's going to be lower because the thing you're actually charged out charged for the CPM is significantly lower.

Greg Marshall 9:36 Yep. So yeah, it very interesting. I've tested it multiple different times. And it just seems like maybe those two platforms don't love each other. Maybe they're moving in the direction of how much Facebook loves that. Yeah, yeah.

Blake Beus 9:52 So So I mean, here's some other vices so some people might be thinking, okay, it's fine for Greg to stay on there, but I'm struggling my business might be struggling, or whatever, because I'm on click funnels. And I think I might need to switch like what what are some options? Again, it really depends if if you want to go with the kind of D Do It Yourself route, you can go with something like WordPress. And you can get a decent hosts don't go with like a $3 host like Hostmonster or Bluehost or whatever, you're going to get off on a shared server and you might run into a problem. You can even run into a problem where someone else's site on your shared server is hacked. And so all sites on that that happened and it's nothing that you did wrong. But get on to a decent host like WP Engine or flywheel they're going to start at about $30 a month.

Greg Marshall 10:45 Basically what you're saying is invest. Yeah, invest like actually like, because I see this with people that are trying to and I get it because they're just starting out. They're trying to do it on their own. So they get the cheapest host cheap is everything. But this is probably some actually I'm not even say probably this is something you should not try to be cheaper. This is actually something you should invest, you know, as much as you possibly can for your budget to get the best, you know, because it's like, good real estate, right? If you could have a great store, but if you have it in a very low traffic mall, or a place where people don't want to go because they're scared or it's not very safe or has a bad reputation, versus getting your store in a place that's high traffic people, you know, view is very safe, and very user friendly, you're probably going to get more business and have a more successful business going there. Even though it costs more.

Blake Beus 11:41 Yeah, yeah. And and in the grand scheme of things, $30 a month for hosting versus $3 a month for hosting, you should be able to make up the extra $27 in some way, shape, or form. Yeah, right. I get it, I get it. Things can be tight. But that's a very good additional $27 A month investment and most salons or something if you have to. Yeah.

Greg Marshall 12:03 And I think that's that that's very important. Because over time, what I've learned is, there's a big trade off. So if you are going cheap on certain things, they end up being more expensive became more expensive. If you get what D listed, or D platformed. Or you're getting associated with other people that are really damaging you even though you have no affiliation with the, you know, you can lose out on days, weeks on sales. Having your business it's almost like if you had a storefront, and just randomly they just closed it for no reason for three weeks. It's like

Blake Beus 12:42 you cheaped out on the front door locks. And one day, one day the door locks couldn't be opened. Yeah. And so you have customers outside, and they're just walking past because they can't come in the door. And you're literally losing money because of that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so that that'd be a way I'd go if you're going to go something like WordPress, if you want to do if you like drag and drop builders, WordPress has several of them. My favorite is one called Elementor. They have a free version and a paid version, the free version is usually good enough for most people to get started. And so you don't even need to know code or whatever. And you can you can install that plug in and and just get just get going with drag and drop building. It's all mobile responsive, it's relatively fast page load speeds. So you should be pretty good there. If you're ecommerce, you should really be on a platform like Shopify, I think there's a few others a few others out there, but Shopify is the best. One of the reasons you you don't see these problems Shopify is I'm guessing that they have an internal team dedicated and relationships with Google and relationships with Facebook, to make sure that their platform is compliant. Because the risk of Shopify not being compliant impacts 10s of 1000s of ecommerce businesses. And so they're dedicated to making sure that they have a good relationship with both of those platforms. And that if there's any issues with ads, or anything like that, they're resolved as quickly as possible. And so they're dedicated to success. You would think Click Funnels would would want to do that as well. And I'm sure right now there are people at Clickfunnels saying, hey, we need to do this. They're just not a big enough player. Yeah, to get to get Google to care that much about having that those relationships, and maybe they're working on it, they probably are. They also have a lot of, they probably cut a lot of corners and a code code end of things early on to get the product launched, which everybody does, it's fine. If but as a product matures, if you get a good dev team in there, they start fixing those those infrastructure issues and themes. But it takes time. And I'm sure Clickfunnels has extremely talented developers, and I'm sure a lot of the developers they're like, Okay, I know exactly what we need. And we're working on it, but it just takes a lot of time because you're working on a platform that is huge millions and millions of clicks a day. And so you can't just make these large sweeping changes because it could impact a lot of different things. So just take the time

Greg Marshall 14:58 impact of negatively and I think You know, to give a level of sympathy tourism, it's probably same thing that we talked about with Facebook, right? Where, if you're very good, this is a problem to have. And sometimes you think it's it, it couldn't be a problem, but it can, which is if you have a very strong marketing, very strong sales, and you have a good growth plan, and that plan is executed well, on the front end on the top end, yeah, the product delivery sometimes can be very challenging to keep up with that level of demand. And so with that comes these types of problems. Yeah, right. Where it's like, you're cutting corners, you're because you're growing so fast, you're just constantly putting band aids. Mm hmm. And that may be what's what's going on here is it's just band aid after band aid, but eventually, you know, that scab gonna get pretty big. We gotta, we gotta, you know, stitch it

Blake Beus 15:54 up. Yeah, yeah. Yep. And, and, look, I'm confident that Clickfunnels sticks with it, they'll probably get there, and then get to the point where they're pretty solid TerraForm. But I would say for for many, many people, if you feel like this is an issue that's impacting you. There's some other alternatives out there. I mean, WordPress is great, Shopify is great. If you want an extremely simple page builder, you don't have anything too complicated and you want a cheap one. There's this one out there that more people need to know about. It's called card.co. Okay, it's CA, rr de.co, I believe it might have two Ds, it's either two hours or one of the two. But it's a little drag and drop builder with extremely fast loading pages, that will let you put a contact form and embed maybe a Calendly link or something like that, and it looks nice, it's mobile responsive, and it loads super fast. Got it. And I think they're only like 20 bucks a year got a thing like that. So if you need like two or three pages, and that's it, and you're trying to bootstrap something quick, that that will be a good one. And they they don't, again, they're small company, they don't have an interface with Google or whatever. But from a code perspective, they're doing things right the pages load faster, mobile responsive, you have proper SEO tags you can put in place. And and there's they don't have this issue with the potentially toxic affiliate scammy spammy kind of thing happening. And, and they tend to rank really, really well. So that might be an option for people. They don't have like a, a membership portal and all of these other things, but it's simple website, you need a contact form, you need a good looking site. That's a good way to go.

Greg Marshall 17:34 Got it. Got it? Well, I think, you know, for the most part, with platforms and how they integrate with other platforms, you know, we all got to be good neighbors to each other. Yeah. Right. And we all you know, everyone has their their own, quote, unquote, house rules, right? Someone else's house, you got to follow the rules, or you get kicked out the house.

Blake Beus 17:57 I like that. That's a good, that's a good way to put it. And I mean, some of the rules might seem super arbitrary and silly. I mean, for the longest time, Facebook had this 20% text rule. Yeah. Which was the bane of any advertisers. Yes. And that's been gone, thankfully. But they do have a few other arbitrary rules. They have a few good best practice rules, as well. Just like having your terms and conditions in the footer of your landing page, a few things like that. So you just got to make sure you're playing by those rules. And make sure you got good neighbors.

Greg Marshall 18:29 Yeah, yeah. Be and make sure to be a good neighbor, you know, yeah, don't, you know, don't exploit or do anything against their terms, obviously, we all know, we try to do the best we can to give all of us the best advantage. But you know, you got to play with the house rules, because usually, short term gains will give you long term pain, that's a way that I like to look at it. So anytime you try to take shortcuts, like you're talking about, you know, it might be able to make you feel good today, but it'll cause a lot of problems in the future. So, so just think of think of everything as a long term play. Try to, you know, follow every person's house rules. And yeah, we can't be you know, too, too entitled to these people's homes, right, because they are offering their homes to us at a very low cost. But, you know, with that being said, we just we all got to try our best and you know, and we also have to be aware that if sometimes if your neighbor is maybe even unintentionally behaving wrong, sometimes we just need to take a little break. Right. And find maybe another circle to go Yeah, so yeah,

Blake Beus 19:41 before we wrap it up, though, we ought to talk about email real quick. Yes. Yeah. We were gonna we were gonna talk about that and emails the same the same kind of thing you were telling me before we turn on the mic. Yeah. That you have seen some of your clients that have, you know, email marketing platform, a virtual email marketing platform B Yep. And email marketing platform. His spam rates are significantly higher, even though the content of the email is quality or whatever. It's the same thing. So there's this whole, like, can spam act and all these spam rules in place? And it's it's honestly pretty complicated. Yeah. But you want to pick an email provider that takes that stuff seriously? Yes. And it's hard to figure out what that is. Yeah, as well, by signing up for all of them and testing it on large scale or whatever. So one of the things I would recommend is, keep an eye out for the the platforms that have super aggressive affiliate marketing. Yeah, because if they do have a very aggressive affiliate marketing, that means that some people are probably taking advantage of that. People out from that from those. And you can get associate with a bad IP and start seeing that happen. Now, if you feel like you're on a platform where your spam rates seem too high, most of the time, it's not the end of the world to switch to something else. Yeah. And, and I honestly, at this point, probably couldn't recommend any specific platforms. But I would say stay away from anything that has, like some crazy free option, because if it's free, someone's going to spam. Yep. And if you if you are on a platform, and you feel like you're too high on your spam rates, one of the things you could do is actually pay a little extra each month, all email providers have this. And you can have a dedicated IP address. So that way, your emails are all sent from like this custom domain and dedicated IP address. And you're the only one that has that. So then the spam rules only follow you. And so you basically are creating your own neighborhood. Yeah, and no one else is in that neighborhood. So you're fully responsible for for if you get flagged, it's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault. And you you know, you need to adjust how you're doing things if you get flagged. So that's that's a couple other things to think about. But I don't know if you have thoughts around well,

Greg Marshall 21:58 you know, what, one one thing you know, that I gauge things around, especially when it comes to email is a text message. If the easier it is to upload a foreign list, the more likely that it's you know, that they're getting flagged, right? That's that would be my guess, because what I found is the ones the platform's I've used and I'm using a whole bunch of different ones with clients. The platform's have the highest open rates are also the most militant, when it comes to double opt ins, making sure that these people actually give you the permission to and even if they aren't customers, they still kind of make you jump through hoops to make sure that it's legit.

Blake Beus 22:44 Yeah, so what you're talking about is if I upload a customer list, if my email platform requires all of the people on that list to get an email that says I'm opting into this list, yep, that's probably a good platform for because they're taking spam rules. Seriously, yes. If I have a platform where I can upload a list, and I know

Greg Marshall 23:04 Yeah, shit about Yeah, then they're most likely gonna,

Blake Beus 23:08 they're not probably being very strict and militant about the spam rules. And you're probably going to see, see worse open rates and worse, you know, delivery rates and all of that stuff.

Greg Marshall 23:18 I agree. And the CRM system I use personally, for my business, is very militant about it. And initially, it was kind of irritating, because it's like, it's my list of customers. I can't just be on there. But now that I'm looking at, I'm like, Yeah, but also the open rates when I sense that for 70% 80%. Yeah. And, you know, you just don't get that most, you know, email platforms. So I think it has something to do with, they're very, very strict on how you communicate with people on your list, which, in the long term, like I said earlier, short term gain equals long term pain. This is, you know, vice versa, which is, I guess, short term, you can't bring on list as easy and you have to go through, you know, a bunch of terrible optics, but it's also higher quality, so I'm not getting flagged for anything. You're getting huge open rates, and you're having an overall more positive experience. And they, you know, I think you get rewarded for

Blake Beus 24:16 that. Yeah, you definitely do. You definitely. Wait, I'm curious. What are you using?

Greg Marshall 24:21 I'm using keep, keep calm. So, EP, K EAP, EAP. They were affiliated with Infusionsoft. Oh, okay. And, and I've, in my experience, all the guys that seem to be doing really well that don't get viewed as spammers use this Yeah. And so not keep exactly I know, they view some level of Infusionsoft. But I know keep I think is a spin off,

Blake Beus 24:50 you know, different environments. One I've used a lot and that's what I've never used. Yeah. And

Greg Marshall 24:54 I actually got on it about two years ago. And it's I love Have it? Yeah, I really liked the service. I think they run it very professionally. And I think it's actually repels a lot of people who don't want to run for it. It's higher price. Yeah, you know, so I'm paid somewhere around 150 or 200 bucks a month to really to use it. So it's not a, you know, 10 bucks a month, and you can do and that might be why, right? Yeah, you're probably paying for a higher level. Service. At least that's what I like to sell myself on. Yeah,

Blake Beus 25:30 I'll have to dive I'll have to dive into keep as well. That's what I haven't used. But I've used a lot. The one I'm using right now is called drip calm. Okay, I'm pretty happy with the delivery rates and open rates on that one. And they're pretty strict about adding people to the list and everything like that as well.

Greg Marshall 25:45 Well, if so, if you're learning anything from this episode, Blake is is recommended. Basically, don't be afraid to invest in your hosting. And your CRM, yeah, write your email software, don't be it. Those are great investments. Because

Blake Beus 26:00 two core platforms, you're gonna, you're gonna need, you're gonna need it, you're gonna need

Greg Marshall 26:04 anyone to have the visibility, like you're getting these emails. And you're building these websites so people can see them. Yeah. Right. So can't

Blake Beus 26:14 see if they can't see working.

Greg Marshall 26:18 The money that you think you're saving, you're actually losing, you're losing because they can't see what it is you're trying to show. Exactly. So I like that. I like that mentality. And I appreciate you explaining more in depth on how these work, because those are super valuable investments that people need to make.

Blake Beus 26:35 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So um, so let's wrap it up. Yeah, Greg, how can people get in touch with you? And do you have anything to like, pitch or tell people about any shameless plugs of your,

Greg Marshall 26:47 you know, me, any kind of marketing help that you need, especially like, building awareness, getting more clicks to your site conversions. If you'd like to learn more about how I can help you just visit Greg marshall.co. And just book a free call. And we can just discuss, you know, whatever your business needs. But no, no, no crazy plugs in there. Shameless plug. shameless plugs, just hopefully, like are.

Blake Beus 27:14 Alright, and if you want to get in touch with me, just Blake Beus calm. I do actually have a shameless throat anything. We've, we've may have talked about this before. But since we're talking about hosting, it fits. So I recently I've been asked to I've been doing consulting for a company called Asian for a long time, the last few years, just some consulting and I've been really impressed with what, what they put together. So I've actually hopped on as someone to help with growth, so helping kind of manage some of the growth on that. But it's specifically centered around WordPress, hosting, and administration. And it's geared towards people that were bootstrapping it themselves getting it all figured out. And now they're to the point where they're trying to decide, Okay, do I hire someone full time to just manage my website and the plugin updates and the security of the website? Or do I constantly keep trying to find freelancers to help me? Or, you know, how do I manage that, and this is essentially a managed service. So for one flat rate, you get, you get a dedicated team to help you with all those things, any content updates, or whatever. And I've been really impressed because, again, owning your platform and having control over that platform is becoming really important. Yep. And I think it's gonna be even more important as we start hopping into, like cookieless ads and all that stuff, which are topics for another day. And so I wanted to I wanted to hop on board with that. So yeah, if you have any questions, surrounding something like that, that's my shameless plug. You can hop over to ideation.com Ay ay ay T io n.com. Or just hit me up a Blake calm and we can we can chat. I highly recommend

Greg Marshall 28:44 using Blake services, he definitely knows what he's doing. So if you want to save yourself a lot of time and probably a lot of money, I highly recommend you do it. Yeah. All right. Okay.

Blake Beus 28:56 We'll wrap it up with like his later guys. Bye.