Episode 002 – How to Build a $10K per Month Business Around Posting on Social Media.

– Welcome back to the Digital Agency Insider. Excited today we’ll be talking about this service that made us a lot of money over the last couple of years. It’s social posting and today we’re gonna be talking about how to build a $10,000 dollar per month business around posting on social media two times a day for other businesses. So let’s dive in, let’s do it.

 

 

– Ah, social posting. It is one of those things that nobody really seems to understand, why in the world this is such a big deal for us and why it’s been such a big deal for our clients over the last couple of years so this, today we wanna just kinda get rid of all of the misunderstanding behind this and really show you something that if you hustle you could make a lot of money doing. So I am joined as always by my partner in crime here in our digital agency, this is Tabitha Thomas. How you doing Tab?

 

– I’m doing great, how are you today?

 

– I’m doing really, really good. So, I don’t know when we had this idea, I think it came out of us being ticked off at some of our clients being taken advantage of by other people. And I don’t think they were taking advantage of them so much, it was just one of those things where like they were doing this thing that was sort of an outdated service and we knew it. And anyways, it started like this, We, I feel like, we had this one client, yeah I can actually picture this client now. We had this client and they were telling us, we were doing, I think it was Facebook ads for them, and we had this client and they were telling us about this person that was, you know, basically posting on their Facebook page a couple of times a month and they were paying upwards of five hundred dollars a month to this person. And it just sort of blew me away and I was like well it’s good that you’re posting some, but you know that’s what they were doing. The problem is it just wasn’t enough and so this is where we started this service and it turned out to be something that a lot of people really needed and we got into it hard core. So today we’ll be talking about how we have turned social posting, most importantly posting on Facebook, how we’ve turned this into a business that pays us every single month, is something that is very low investment for our clients. Very low time investment for us, but everybody really wins. So we’re gonna be talking about that, more specifically why social posting is a great service. How we chose an industry to sort of go after with this. How we find our first client with this. Now other than the client that we were just like, hey we need to replace this other person. How we went and found our first client after that and then how you can actually close the deal and get this going. So let’s, let’s dig into this. This has been a bread and butter win for us.

 

– Yes it has.

 

– So the idea behind this is. I want you to think back to the last time you were in a new town. Maybe you were in a new town for a couple of days, maybe you had just moved to a new town, but you were sort of in this mode of you know what I’m hanging out on Facebook and I need this. Maybe a friend referred you to a local dentist, or maybe a friend referred you to a local restaurant, or maybe a friend referred you, say this attorney they’re good to have or this chiropractor they’re good to have, whatever it may be and yeah you go to their website, that’s what everybody thinks that everybody does. You go to the website, you check out the website. Does the website look inviting, okay.

 

– Uh-huh.

 

– But what’s happening in the background and I guarantee when you hear me say this you will have done it. Either if you have not done it I guarantee you, nine out of ten friends have done it. You go check out their social media.

 

– Uh-huh.

 

– Without a doubt you go check out their social media and this is like the first thing I do. I will absolutely check out their website first, but I always check their social media to see kinda what’s actually happening, because I feel like I’m spying on the business when I check out their social media.

 

– Well, with a website you get like the professional, oh you know.

 

– Right.

 

– Then like on social media is kinda like the personality, you get to know the real person.

 

– Yeah, and so it’s funny, it’s like that’s the way I feel like when I go to a Facebook page I’m getting a real sense of what’s actually happening inside the business. Not what they paid some company to make them look like.

 

– Yeah.

 

– And so what’s so interesting is I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a Facebook page and I saw that their last post was two years ago and I just get a bad vibe. I absolutely get a bad vibe, because I kinda have it in my head and I, listen, you know after years of doing this and talking to thousand of people about this you know cause this is one of the questions that I will just pop out. Every where I present, every time I get on stage, this is the question that I ask and I will go to a page with the last post. Maybe they are the most professional people in the world inside of that business, but if I go to their Facebook page and the last post was two years ago. What immediately hits me is there’s loose ends. They don’t cover everything, they’re unorganized and they don’t have their business together.

 

– Uh-huh.

 

– Maybe that’s not fair. I’ll be the first person to tell you that, maybe that’s not fair, but it’s absolutely what I and millions of people who use social media think when they go see this. And so that’s the thing is when I start of kind of seeing that people you know had, were paying tons of money, to have people do social media for them, and they were only posting like once, twice a month, it does not come off well, because a lot the people use social media daily, that just does not cut it, that just does not cut it. And so, we got into this whole thing, and we thought, what if we could make sure all of our clients, every single day, had two posts come up, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and it was topical, it was educational and it was something that just made them look like they were on top of their game. I don’t care who you are, you can’t tell me that when you go to a Facebook page, you got someone whose posting daily, they don’t seem like they’re more with it, than the person who hasn’t posted in a year and a half.

 

– Yeah.

 

– It’s easy. And so, I really you know a lot of people say Atkins, social posting, Facebook doesn’t show as much in the feed of people that like a page, as they used to. That’s not the point of social posting. The point is when someone does check you out, because they are looking to spend their hard earned cash, what is the advantage that you have over another business, that there looking at three different people, what is the advantage that you have. And if you seem topical, you seem like you’re on top of things, it puts you in a place, you can’t match it in someone’s head. And so that’s the thing, how do we actually do that in a big way. So, as an agency, this is what we did. We said, okay, if we pick one niche, we go after one niche of people, and for us it was chiropractors that we started with.

 

– Yep.

 

– So we first started off with chiropractors, and that was sort of our bread and butter, because that was the first client. It was like, okay, they needed this, they had someone that was charging them a lot, and we thought, okay, we could do this better. What if we create an 180 post, and the reason we settled on 180, is kind of funny. Okay, if we’re posting two times a day, for 30 days, that’s 60 posts. So, let’s do three months, and at the end of the three months, we can just rotate it. Because if the posts, work, they work. And that’s just the way it is, and nobody’s paying that much attention anyway, and you can’t believe that they are, because they’re not. But if you’re posting that much, two times a day, we wanted 180 posts. So what we did is, we sat down and we created 180 posts, and that kind of sucks. I’ll just be honest with you, that kinda sucks. Well, as most people are sitting at the beginning of the month, planning out their whole sixty days, or thirty days. So then, they do it again, and they do it again, and the do it again. What we were trying to do is, we were trying to say, if we bulk, you know chunk this whole thing into creating 180 posts at once, what we can do is, we can go into a client, we can post two times a day, we can have software do that, and there’s certain pieces of software, which we’ll go through in just a little bit, that will actually rotate the posts when you run out of posts. So we take all these 180 posts that we create, which sucks. We put them into a bucket, and when that bucket runs out, it basically, the software refills the bucket, and then it starts posting again. And so what we ended up doing is, we basically came up with this 180 set of posts for chiropractors, we used it for our first client. We actually branded them for that client, and then, yeah, go ahead, I didn’t get to that.

 

– Well what I was going to say, is there’s another company out there doing this for chiropractors, but they post like once a week, and then that company puts their logos on the actual images, so they’re not doing anything for the business, they’re actually advertising for themselves, so that was one thing that we definitely wanted to take out. Like none of our branding is on it anywhere, and the client’s logo is very much so front and center.

 

– And that’s what we found, like anybody that had anything that was even compared to what we we’re doing they always had one fatal flaw. And so like the one company that was like, was right around our pricing, which we ended up starting at $99 a month. And we do right around $99-200 a month now, but we started off $100 bucks a month, we’ll post on your page twice, it’s branded for your company, not for this company that’s trying to use you as a viral marketing service. And your gonna get something educational to you, anybody that happens to jump on your page. And like I said, getting back into that, this is the equivalent, of making sure in the morning before you open your doors, you sweep off your front step. That you cleaned your lobby. This is one of those things that when someone sees it, or when they drive by your building, are they going to be like, yeah, that place looks inviting. It’s the same thing for online. So anyways, that’s what we did. We did 180 posts for chiropractors. We put these things together. We used a service called postplanner. Postplanner.com, super simple, and that’s what it does. You take these posts, and you brand them, and how we brand them. What was the company that we used to brand?

 

– Watermark.if?

 

– W-S, yeah.

 

– W-S. Which is like $4 a month for watermark it’s like stupid and expensive

 

– And so we, and that was the whole thing, is we created these posts, we had all the same size, we threw all of the posts, you know every time we sign up a client, we threw all of the posts, in this service called watermark.ws. We’re able to take a logo for that business, throw it in the top right corner of these posts, and then we pull them out of watermark with the newly brand on it. We throw it into postplanner, and now we have a setup for the business, for the rest of the year, they’re gonna have two posts a day, every single day, and these are great posts. And so, we go from a client, that’s paying $400-500 dollars at least, to getting maybe a couple posts a month, and I’m serious, this is what was happening. To a client that now has a Facebook page, that has two posts a day, they look great, and when somebody pops on their page, no matter what day it is, they’re going to look current, and then they’re gonna look back a little ways, and their consistent, every single day.

 

– Well, and the type of content that we’re putting on there is stuff that can be shared. I remember the other day, I sent you a little screenshot, a friend of ours, just shared one of our posts, that wasn’t through me. Like they were on a client’s page, and had shared it, and I was like this is the point.

 

– Yeah, and so, you know we start putting this together, and it’s amazing. And now, we’ve got to the point where we’ve built these graphics for all these different niches that we serve, and we actually have them up on a store, that if you wanted to do this, it’s nichegraphic.com. And anyways, that aside, this was the service, this was the thing that we did. So what we started doing is, we started saying, anybody that we want as long as we stay within one niche, this becomes easy. We have one package of images, it’s 180, and all we have to do is we go to every business, that we think this is a fit for, and then we just re-brand, and we keep stacking up clients that are paying us $100-300 a month. And this is sort of our micro-service model. We love this, because when you sign up a client, you do the work, that maybe takes two to three hours, the first time you hang out with them, and the first time you working with them. After that that software does all the work, and all you’re doing is calling them every month, and saying, Hey, how you doing and maybe upsell them another service.

 

– Yeah, and then once a year, changing out all the holiday stuff. But that’s one time a year, it’s no time at all.

 

– Exactly, and so, getting into how we choose an industry to serve. Like if your starting out, and you don’t really know what you want to do, you want to choose an industry that is, what Tabitha? I’ll let you kinda dig into this?

 

– Well I always say, that it’s something that has a blanket type service, when I say blanket type service, like most chiropractors all have the same type of services. Most dentists, all do the same type of thing. You don’t want to go after like a restaurant, for instance that has very specialized types of dishes and food, because whatever you post for everybody else is not going to work for that one particular restaurant, because they don’t have that dish. So you’re wanting to choose an industry, that’s got similar type services. That can be tire shops.

 

– Yeah, tire and lube, gyms, plastic surgeons, get into a lot of these things. You want things, that as you said, that are very blanket, and no matter where you go in the country, it’s going to be sort of the same kind of thing, so the posts will work for them.

 

– Then there’s also other ones that if it does come of a specialty, would also do these motivational packs, where you can just put something out there that’s just happy and upbeat, so you can throw that in there too, so.

 

– Absolutely, and that’s absolutely huge, and so. You know how do you get your first client with this. You know, I think the service you start to understand sort of what that is, and by the way, what we’ll do on the actual page that we’re going to do the show notes on this on, we’ll make sure that we include a link to a page, like a sample page that’s running this, so you can see this in action. I think that’s like super helpful. For anybody that’s like, okay, I think I understand what you’re doing, but let me actually see. So we’ll make sure we include a link for you guys, so that you can go check it out, and sort of see what a page looks like with this. So first client, obviously we’re sticking to one niche, and so the idea is once you actually get good at this, it’s not hard to continually use the same system to close clients with similarities. So number 1 – we stick with the niche, that’s that’s big. The other thing that I think is big, is we have these three, four, five things we stick with every time, that the client fits into this, they are our ideal. So what are those Tab?

 

– So they need to be in business at least 3-5 years. They don’t need to be brand new because they’re still working their kinks out. Give ’em a little time, they’ll be good later on. We always like to go for people that are members of Chambers of Commerce. That’s not a have to, but it’s a definite indicator that they’re going to be a great business to work with. They’ve got a website. If they don’t have a website, oh my gosh! They need one. So it’s somebody that’s, like I said before, they want to market their business, they’re showing signs that they want to do that. And then they also have to have an active Facebook page. Now they maybe posting one or two times a week, one or two times a month, but they have to have a Facebook page that they’ve put something into.

 

– Yeah, and I think that’s a big, that last one is a big point. We don’t typically go after people that are like the ones that said we haven’t posted in two years. We like going after the people, that we know they’re trying, but maybe they’re struggling. So, maybe they’re posting one time a week, but they’re having, like when I see that I’m like I know exactly where that person is at. They’re trying to get stuff done.

 

– Yeah, yes, well no I was gonna say the ideal person for me, if I go and look at their Facebook page. If they’ve taken content from other places and shared it on their page. That is a big indicator that hey, they need our services, because they know they see a need for that, and are trying to find it, but obviously, they are spending a lot of time to search for other people’s stuff to post.

 

– And so yeah, I think that’s the thing. If you’re looking you can find that stuff online. You can literally go and say has this business, and when I do a line, I’ll literally just go to a chamber website, I will got to a member’s tab, and typically they will actually organize them by the type of business. So I just go to the type of business I’m looking for. And I’ll say, okay, cool. Have they been in business for a while? You can usually tell that pretty quickly by going to their website. And usually a link from the Chamber to their website. And then from their website, you can usually link to their Facebook page. All that data is within your fingertips, within like a minute or two when your first starting to search. And so, really really easy, once you get into that mode, how do you get on their radar? How do you get on there radar, and select the number 1 way that we do this. This is how we started our agency. This was, I mean, a lot of people are gonna be like, that’s seems like a lot of work. But this is how we started our agency. And this how we got those initial clients. Now, to this point, we’ll do things like webinars, we’ll do things kinds of stuff, to get people to come on and be a client. We go to events, like that’s a big one that we’ve done. When we got to events, we’ll sign up 10, 20 people at a time. But when we started it was this, it was this packet. And we took donuts to people.

 

– Yeah.

 

– That simple, and I mean like there was a point where I would drive to a donut shop around 9 in the morning, and I would order 10 boxes of donuts and be the weird guy caring ten boxes of donuts out. And I would literally have it mapped out. I would literally have mapped out ten business, in the same niche, that I was taking, when I started it was chiropractic offices. So I would have a mat, and I would say today, I’m going to cover this town. The next day maybe I was, or maybe the next week, when I had time I would cover this next town, and so I would drive and I had these mapped out in this logical way, and I would do this the night before, and I would have out these notes. And the notes just basically said this, and I think we should also a picture of the notes, we’ll make sure we have a picture of the notes. I think just for fun, I think it would be great to have just some pictures of one of us doing this, because this is something that, as we’re doing it, we were taking selfies and sending them to each other laughing. But it works, it works so well. So we get donuts, we would have this little note. I would walk into a business, you’d walk into a business, because we would both do this. And we’d say hey, we got this agency, that we started and we’re just trying to get to know people, we wanted to bring you a box of donuts and say hi, and run. And we would immediately run out of there. And I was not trying to pitch anything because the thing I got to used to, when I had a brick and mortar business was people coming in pitching and just being an annoyance.

 

– Uh-huh.

 

– We didn’t want to be that. We wanted to come in and leave with something awesome.

 

– Well, the minute you walk in the door with a box of donuts, everyone in the office is gonna look at you with a big ole smile on their face.

 

– Yeah, it’s-

 

– Walk in there like, hey whose this chic. What’s she got.

 

– It gets attention really quickly. The other interesting thing about donuts is, a lot of times when you walk into an office it’s busy. It’s really really busy. So what happens is, this box of donuts becomes a time bomb. And it’s a time bomb, that has a lot of facets to it. First thing is, you hand it to the receptionist, it’s a good vibe. It’s a really really good vibe, they want to know what’s going on, and you’ll get your hand shook, and lots of smiles. But what happens after you leave, and by the way, the note that we take in says exactly what we say when we walk in. Hey from I’m so and so, from so and so, and it’s great to meet you, just wanted to introduce ourselves, talk to you soon. But what happens is, this box of donuts gets taken back to a breakroom, usually. And so if you take cookies, if you take something that last longer than six hours. And that’s like the shelf life of donuts for me. Like you could have some the next day, but they start tasting kinda crappy. But for a donut it’s like six hours. So we take these donuts in, they would sit in the breakroom. And what happens is donuts typically aren’t the kind of things that are gonna get taken home and be great for days, so donuts get eaten fast. But as they sit in the breakroom of a place, the number one question that starts filtering throughout the office the entire day is where did these come from.

 

– Yeah.

 

– So what ends up happening is, they go talk to the receptionist, and the receptionist starts filtering your name in your whole vibe throughout the entire office. And so, you’ve got this cool little time bomb, that is working it’s way through out and of course, it’s working it’s way to the owner as well. And so, that’s day one. Day two, is when we start following up. And we typically follow up on Facebook. And it’s just a real quick message, Like I said, I’ve got a screenshot of what I can include in the show notes of this one as well, of exactly what we say in the response. The kind of response we get with this one too. Someone will thrown in and say, you know we’ll come in and say hey, I’m the guy that dropped the donuts off, or I’m the girl that dropped the donuts off. I was wondering if I could get ten minutes to sit down with you guys some time and talk about this.

 

– You skipped a step though. When you’re going in the first time with the donuts, when you’re meeting the receptionist or whoever is at the front desk, make sure you get the name of that person. Because if you paid attention, you got this person’s name and you compliment them, when you’re doing the message. Hey, I’m Ben from this agency, I met so and so, she was so friendly, it’s so nice to have somebody like that, that’s your first person you greet or whatever.

 

– See this is what happens when you been doing this for so long, the things that like become like second nature. This is like, most of the people I think that teach online, that’s the thing, we forget like the stuff, but that’s the most important part about the whole is getting the name of the receptionist. So that when you send this Facebook message later on you can actually plant that, hey this person was awesome. And that gets you a huge response.

 

– And lots of times, the person that responds to that Facebook message, is the person that met you the first time. And I’m like, “Oh, thank you so much.”

 

– And so it sets the stage of instead of them being sold something right away, it set’s the stage of them feeling like, this is someone that’s like one of us. This is a business owner too. This is someone whose out they’re doing it and they’re hustling. And they were nice to me, and a lot of times that stands out in someone’s day. So from there, we lock down a meeting. Do we get a meeting with everybody we drop donuts with right away, No, but most of the time we get a good sentiment, and we’ll get a meeting eventually if we really want it. But the idea is we won’t, when I drop ten donuts, I’m gonna get a meeting a lot of the time. At least three, four out of the ten is gonna be a meeting. So from there, what do we do? From there we sit down and we you know we start talking about it and we present the deal that we have which is… And I’ll let you take it.

 

– Which is, like we said when we started off, it’s $99 a month up to $200 month. Explaining to them that we’re posting on Facebook two times a day, every single day, and they cannot, if they sat down and think about this, they cannot hire somebody on their staff to create these images, brand them with their logo, and post them to Facebook, for what they’re paying us to do those services for. It’s just, it’s a good deal.

 

– Yeah, and that’s the thing it’s like we make sure that we talk to them. It’s not about, hey showing up in the feeds of the people that already like your page. It’s about being present. It’s about sweeping the front porch off, before you open the business. It’s about making sure your waiting room is clean. This is one of those things, that when somebody sees it, it makes you stand out. So for $100 month to have that locked in is absolutely huge. So anything else to add, I know the show notes are gonna be an important part of this, because their some visual I want to put up there. But I feel like that’s the ball game, that’s how we started our agency. And that was the first thing, that we were like, I got excited about something, ’cause you know we had had services that we sold, like Facebook ads, that were like super involved, ate up all our time. We got paid well, but it ate up all of our, and this was the first one that I was like super excited about, because I was like, everybody needs this, but it’s something for two or three hours of setup on our end, we can provide a monster service, get paid month after month, after month, after month, and not be, have to be heavily involved in actually the service. It’s something we can actually get a computer, a piece of software to do for us every month. And the only thing we had to do was talk to the client once a month. And I liked doing that anyway.

 

– Oh, and it’s a great way to expand your business really quickly, very quickly.

 

– Yeah, and that’s the thing once again, this is one of those services, that once someone has onboarded with you, it becomes so much easier to sell other services. So for us, for a lot of people, this is the opening to how they get their Facebook ad clients. But for us, this is how we get our clients that are going to buy two or three recurring services that are sort of in this microservices model. So, yeah, I appreciate if you are listening to us today. Do me a favor, if this was helpful to you, tell a friend. That’s always big for us, we like when people share this with people that they like, because they want to share something that’s working out there. This is something that helps everybody involved. It helps the business, it helps you because you’re getting paid monthly. And let’s be honest, it helps people that are out there looking for you know a brick and mortar business to understand. This is maybe somewhere they need to go. If this is something that you want to tell us about, that you dig it, or you don’t dig it. Leave us a review on iTunes, or wherever you listen to Podcasts. And make sure you go to digitalagencyinsiders.com. We’ll have show notes up there, plus a ton of other stuff that you can jump in and learn to setup your own agency. And if you already have your own agency, how to grow it, how to scale it, how to turn it into a monster. So thanks for listening, we will see you next time.