HOW TO BECOME A DIGITAL MARKETING CONSULTANT | My Path, Mistakes and Keys to Success

I want to take today's video to share with you a little bit more about my career path and how I became a digital marketing consultant just to give you an idea of what that really means is that I spend time with people who want to grow their business whether they're a retail store in a real physical location whether they're a personal brand and they're trying to grow social media whether they want to become a blogger vlogger or they want to start digital products perhaps installing a sales funnel and I feel that I've gotten myself to a point with my skill set where I can really help people and I just want to kind of go back and talk about all the things I did to get where I am today now I'm no Gary Vaynerchuk I don't have a huge agency I'm a freelancer I love freedom I love the new rich lifestyle I love traveling and so for me I don't really want to hire a lot of people I'd rather have a smaller boutique and make enough money to have the lifestyle I want and that's another important point as well I really feel that a lot of us Gary Vee fans I know there's a ton of us we see what Gary's doing and we're like oh I want to be just like him because he's so awesome and he's getting famous and that's a real trap because starting an agency is incredibly difficult and it's gonna be incredibly competitive over the next few years as we see more and more people move to entrepreneurship and online business I mean it's happening right now it's happening very fast so be careful and I think this video might give you some insight onto how I'm approaching it and perhaps how it might work for you as well because I have a feeling a lot of people watching this or a lot more like me than say Gary Vee so how did this all start it's really funny I just remember one time like well first of all I was always interested in selling things online when eBay came out I was using it in the first year and PayPal was there and I thought that was amazing I was I would go and buy and sell golf clubs and sell them on eBay and I loved it I loved the idea that now you could buy and sell something around the world internationally I didn't really do too much with that when I was 19 I went a two-year TV broadcasting film school type gig and it wasn't like till three or four years later as social media started developing as e-commerce really started developing that Irie inspired my itch for selling online because I was kind of going down a different path and the first thing that caught my eye was this eBay cash cow course and it was a really piece-of-shit course but it made me realize that there are so many ways to hack the Internet and the first thing that I really really really wanted to learn was SEO search engine optimization and I think I was really lucky to get interested in SEO because search is what really started this whole thing so let me kind of unpack that for you search came when the internet started using algorithms when Google really came to be and search sets the tone for everything we do because search is involved with so many parts of the internet that's where you can find your edge through search and I'll explain that as I go but when I realize that people we're doing certain things to rank their webpage higher or their website higher then I realized whoever ranks the highest is going to get the most traffic so if you didn't know this like the top three Google rankings they get by far the most traffic it's a very rare you're gonna go to h-34 and use one of those links i think google has become so good at refining their top listings and the way they do that is like let's say you're searching for like red shoes and there's something that's a ranking number one and i go there google can tell if you come right back and think that that's not the correct webpage so they're really good at telling like what the search intent is and matching that with the correct website so once I got involved in search it led me down an incredible path because then I started ranking my own websites I would just build a website pick a keyword that I wanted to rank for and I would just start doing things that would try and get it ranked there was nothing really to it I wasn't really even selling anything at that time I just wanted to prove to myself that I understood search engine algorithms and search engine optimization and once I got a hold of SEO everything else fell into place because now that I can rank a website I could get traffic for free and when I was learning all this I'd have a lot of money so I didn't have any way to buy Facebook ads or Google Ads I didn't have any money to buy an influence or post I had to always get organic traffic and I think that's why I've been a bit successful because organic traffic is can bring so much abundance to your life without even spending a dollar you just have to put the time in now this video isn't about how to rank a website that's a whole different topic I just want to put in place that search sets everything else up for you because when you get in the mind of your customer you begin to realize what they might be searching for and when you can draw that connection now you can really put your product or service in front of somebody so the first thing I recommend anyone do is get a hold of some resources to explain what SEO is and you'll realize SEO is everywhere SEO is on Google SEO is on YouTube SEO is on Pinterest SEO is on Etsy SEO is on eBay Amazon SEO exists the second there's a search bar and that that search bar is actually effective at putting up what is the best now you're gonna learn over time that you know back in the early 2000s SEO was doing a lot of weird stuff like keyword spamming and what we call black hat techniques you could comment spam your links to get backlinks like there were so many little tricks you could do but over time Google got rid of all that by improving their algorithms so clear warning if you ever do a black hat technique it's not gonna last forever now what's a white hat technique a white hat technique is more like great blog post or high quality content that a lot of people love and are linking to and that is gonna be a much more long-term stable thing so once I got ahold SEO in mid-2000 late-2000s know 2010 I think I actually kind of got into it 2011 yeah somewhere in that range people wanted to know what I knew and that's when I realized that wow maybe I do have something to share with people and that was a really great realization because then from that point on I just started adding in the skill sets so I could get the traffic to the website for people but I didn't really know how to sell effectively and what that took me down to was what are sales pages and what is copywriting and copywriting is something I studied very hard I read a lot of books on copywriting I practiced my copywriting and what's copywriting copywriting is the words on a page or a paper or anything designed to sell you something it's not sort of an article it's more like if you want this result you should do this and copywriting actually uses a lot of psychology so if you want to become a great digital marketing consultant you're gonna start with search and then you want to go to copywriting because of those two things create the fundamental aspects of any online business traffic and conversion if you can rank web pages you can get free traffic how are you gonna turn that free traffic into sales with great copywriting copywriting is used to convince people to take the next action and so then I realized oh why do people have these like really long sales pages where they just write so much I'm like who the hell is reading this and then I realized buyers are reading that because if your copywriting is on point the buyer will be interested because they have a problem and the point of copywriting is to convince that person that you have the solution and that that person should trust you by your product or service and they will get the outcome they desire once I got through copywriting I improved my web design skills I became very good at WordPress web design you don't need anything to be on that you barely need HTML or CSS knowledge you don't need any coding knowledge to be a digital marketing consultant you need to be able to help people sell things so at this point I'm starting to develop my own sites because I'm like well I can be a consultant but I might as well start practicing so I started like a bunch of different blogs some of them were complete failures and some of them grew pretty substantially you know thousands and thousands of viewers per month and it's up to you whether you want to be a product developer but what sort of happened for me is I realize well it's not that hard to get the traffic and it's not that hard to sell something it is really hard to make a great product and when you want to sell something you have to really believe in your product so then I started learning how to create things like lead magnet ebooks PDFs video courses and that just led me into better and better production value where I could actually sell some of these I could sell information and I fell in love with selling digital products where people would buy something from you where you didn't have to buy anything first you could just create it one time and you could sell it for a long time and that was a real game-changer for me because now I can start earning some money without really having to keep an eye on it you just want to keep the traffic up the conversions are gonna happen based on how quality your website is and the type of trust you build and then you're gonna make some money after products but that didn't help me become a great consultant that helped me become a great marketer and what I really wanted to sell things I wanted to sell my service to people and earn like 200 to 300 to 400 dollars an hour I didn't really know how to be a consultant so I bought some books I bought million dollar consulting and million dollar consulting proposals and that's when I realized that a huge part of being a consultant happens way before you even do the consulting first you need to acquire leads and that's challenging you should use your own digital marketing skills to get people's attention or you can add in some more traditional one-on-one meetups networking LinkedIn just connecting with people you think might like your service and that was tough because at that point not everyone was ready for what I was offering not everyone understood what I was offering and that was on me because the secret to being a great consultant is helping people see the value you bring a consultant must put their client in a better position than they were previously don't get confused Consulting isn't posting for your client on social media consulting isn't writing blog posts for your client consulting isn't building their website consulting is helping them understand their own problems and devising a strategy alongside them and then providing the ultimate prescription so you might offer your client the pros and cons of three different ways to go and maybe help them make the decision and what I found out about being a consultant was you need to be able to understand your own value and then you need to put it in front of people so that they can clearly see it so the keys to writing a great consulting proposal is that your client has to get what's called conceptual agreement where they agree on the objectives that we're gonna work on as a consultant client relationship and how we're gonna track whether we're successful or not and then finally what is the value for you and your company should we be successful and that is the key part right there you want the client admit to you what they find valuable so let's say for instance really basic example we want to double our sales we want to grow our revenue well obviously that can be easily calculated if you're making ten thousand month and you want me to help you take you to twenty thousand a month by giving you a content and digital marketing strategy well that is clearly gonna be worth ten thousand every month and typically for a consultant your work will last about a year's time in terms of effects so we would go ten thousand times 12 which would be a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of quantitative value but there's more what will your life be like if you can earn twenty thousand dollars I mean yeah ten thousand dollars more a month your office gonna maybe have more freedom more options more time and then what is the perceived brand value so there's a lot of aspects to the value and then what you want to do is divide that total number by about ten I like to try and tell my clients that I'm aiming to bring you 10x value if you spend five thousand dollars with me my goal will be to try and get you fifty thousand dollars worth of value over the next 12 months and that's really fair and if you can't hit that it's okay I think it's okay to offer 5x value but you do want to strive to really hit a homerun for your clients because you never want to just think about the first contract it's the third fourth fifth deal you do every time I work with the client almost always does it start out very small in fact a lot of clients get something for free from me at the beginning I love giving my clients a lot of information for free right off the bat because that's how I build trust with them so some of my biggest clients I was giving them advice for months and I wasn't really asking for anything and so that's really a big Gary Vee principle ask not first but after you've given so give give give value value value and then ask hey you know are you interested in taking this a little bit further because I've given you a little bit of ice but what if I give you a lot of advice and you know there's always often like three parts to consulting there's the strategy what we do in general there's more tactical advice what I think you should specifically do and that's a very custom strategy and then finally there's a bit more of an executional operation where we actually help you do it so at that point once I kind of understood that I was just trying to bring in as much knowledge as I could everything I learned on my own I didn't go to school for any of this I just read blog posts I read books I watched videos I studied other great marketers I learned how to build a sales funnel I learned how to build lead magnets tripwires core products profit maximizers which you've probably heard of some of those things I learned how to drive traffic from social media I learned how to get organic search traffic like I talked about I even then started understanding Facebook ads and Google AdWords and then I also understood like guest posting and reaching out to other people to get back clinks what else do I learn you know obviously copywriting was a huge one and designing landing pages a little bit of graphic design videos so critical video can be amazing and bolstering your sails I learned how to build trust on a website credibility testimonials I understood how to make my website faster and I just did everything and I put them for my own projects first before I tried to sell it and I wouldn't wait to become a complete expert because people don't need you to be a huge expert they just need you to be a lot better than that and most business owners have no clue about digital marketing because they spent the last five to ten years creating their own product or building their own business or database of customers so they're a bit behind on digital marketing and then I advanced into more powerful things like branding branding takes everything to the next level and branding is something that can't be taught easily only through practice and really looking at what the market responds to you can you understand and that's another huge thing figuring you know target audiences keyword research competitor and market research doing the things you need to do to validate your idea and then getting that MVP minimally Viable Product out there getting the feedback and then pivoting if it's not right or persevering if it is right so if I could sum up what I did it was all just desire self learning there's abundance of resources online now you can get so much information for free you're just gonna have to dig and you need to practice you need to start setting up your own website so you have some credibility and then basically I built a lot of the websites for my clients I bet I improve their existing websites and then you can really get into some cool stuff like affiliate marketing like every time I tell my client to buy a wordpress theme set up their MailChimp get involved in Shopify I send them in the referral link and they purchased through me you get a little affiliate kickback so that goes really nicely with consulting now never offer something that you don't truly believe in and make sure you're using it yourself so you can actually help your clients I don't recommend anything unless I actually use it so that when the time comes if the client asks me a question I can do it for them and I think the biggest challenge is is that you don't know how much to charge and that's because most people skip what I talked about earlier is a proper conceptual agreement and then proposing that in three ways so once your client agrees on the value that they might receive what you want to do is offer them the three options never offer them one option because then the question changes when you only offer them one way to approach their problem you are then positing them the question should we go with this what you want them to say is how should we go forward with this do we want to spend a little bit of money do you want to spend a lot of money so offer them three different types of options offer them just some light strategic consulting offered to create an entire strategy for them and help them understand it or tell them you're going to project manage the entire thing and ensure the results are done and those three things should have very different prices and what that allows you to do is you don't ever have to underprice yourself it's a simply a matter of if they choose the lowest price they get the lowest amount of work out of you and you should feel comfortable at all three price levels if they go for the biggest package you should be thrilled because it should be expensive and it should be challenging the third highest option should offer the most value for the client and also it should be the greatest challenge for you and make sure you can deliver and that's why I offer all of my clients a money-back guarantee the work is satisfied because if you believe in yourself if you don't offer more than you can handle there's no reason to be afraid and guess what if one day you know you get a contract and you make a mistake and you gotta suck it up you're gonna learn so much from that but at least you got the job because if you didn't even get that job in the first place because you didn't offer the satisfaction guaranteed option maybe you couldn't learn something so sometimes you got to take the bullet and make a mistake and you're gonna learn something going forward that that's happened to me so many times where I kind of like made a mistake I got burned for it I moved on like I've lost clients because we couldn't agree because I was skipping those earlier steps that's why I didn't understand the whole proposals my proposals were so terrible when I first started out and that's another thing you need to act professional from the get-go from the initial meeting to how you deliver your proposals give your proposal in a beautiful print up with your letterhead on it and put a self-addressed stamped envelope so they can send you back a signed contract things like that don't just send them a flimsy email that's all over the place you need headings in your proposals everything needs to be laid out clearly you don't need to go into a ton of detail but you do need to have sort of all the things clearly laid out and that's why I do recommend you go by the books a million dollar consulting and million dollar consulting proposals those are very helpful books for me I don't think there's much else to say that's where I'm at now now I offer clients $250 in our consulting sessions and if they want to go beyond that I offer them three options and how I can help them it might be here's your strategy here's an entire marketing strategy proposal where I'm gonna teach you different things and here is where I hire someone for you and train them how to be a great content marketer for your business or how to run your facebook ads or design digital products so you're gonna have to decide what you specialize in but here's the thing I don't think specialization is that great in digital marketing because you have to evolve with the times if you're doing just SEO you have to recognize that your skills will become irrelevant over the times you have to be able to handle a multitude of clients and yeah maybe you specialize in two or three things but you should still offer a wide variety of things and never offer things too much in a bundle offer things individually maybe clients don't want SEO maybe clients don't want videos maybe clients don't want Facebook ads maybe they don't want Pinterest maybe they don't want social media don't offer it all in one break it down and help them see that there's different ways to approach this if you guys have more questions just put them in the comments below and I'll answer them or I'll do another video on them I think that was a pretty good overall look at what I've done in the last four or five years now I'm either doing hourly consulting big intervention and my newest thing is I will take fifteen to twenty-five percent of my clients revenue and I will do everything for them so for instance some of my clients are personal trainers and they don't know jack-shit about marketing or technical stuff I do everything for them and I get 25 percent of their business or someone wants to create a digital product or a course online same thing I'll help them create the course PDFs videos whatever they need copywriting website email lists and I will take a percentage of it that's a nice thing to also have because so many people have a low budget and they just can't get started and a lot of the stuff costs so if you see a winner out there and you think he or she can be successful but they just haven't gotten started take a risk on them and don't worry about it so much because those type of things will help you develop your skills and build a better practice and you'll have more testimonials a work for free I did so much work for free and that really helped me learn a lot okay guys so if you like this video give it a thumbs up and make sure you leave your questions in the comments below about how to become a digital marketing consultant [Music]

Channel: Rich + Niche

Views: 136,662

Rating: 4.9394917 out of 5

Keywords: digital marketing, digital marketer, digital marketing agency, how to become a digital marketer, keys to digital marketing, HOW TO BECOME A DIGITAL MARKETING CONSULTANT | My Path, Mistakes and Keys to Success, rich and niche, marketing, copywriting, seo

Id: 3zlHiYCz7Og

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019