My Journey Into The Online World

I've recently had a number of clients discuss with me about taking what they teach and creating some kind of online mentorship or online program. So I thought in today's episode we'd do something a little bit different and that is for me to give you a very unscripted and very honest story about my adventures in the online world and share with you the good, the bad and the ugly of what's worked and the many things that haven't worked. So that's what we're going to talk about today and let's get on with the show. I'm Rob Da Costa and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Now a bit of the behind the scenes for you before we kick off today's podcast and that is that I usually sit down and at the very least create an outline structure for these podcast episodes and often I will script them because certainly if I'm shooting a video I find that much easier and quicker to do. But in all honesty, for today I have done neither of those. In fact, I was going to record a different episode of the podcast but decided to talk about this instead because it's very pertinent to me right now. And as I said in the intro, I've had a few clients recently discuss the idea about taking what they do with their clients and teaching them. This is especially true for people who are in the PPC and SEO world because sometimes their clients don't just want a consultant that's going to do the work for them, which of course is what most agencies do. But they actually might have an in house person so they want to be, they want to hire more of a mentor who can pass that knowledge on and that naturally leads people to say, well actually can I document some of this now? Talking of which, that's what really led me to create my first programme which I called the Agency Accelerator and then it morphed into the Self Running Agency Implementation Group and more recently the Self Running Agency Membership. But I need to take quite a few steps back and go back quite a few years to about 2012 where I first decided that I was going to venture into this online world with the promise of making my fortune of waking up every morning and finding loads of sales and loads of money in my account. And of course, that golden ideal of not selling time for money but making more of a passive income sounds so compelling, doesn't it? And I'm sure some of you might have thought of that in the past. So what I did is I thought, I know, I'm going to create a program about starting your own business, because everybody wants to start their own business. Or when people are fed up in their job, they might decide that they want to go it alone, like many of us, like you and I did. So I went hell for leather, creating this course called Start yout Own Business and Gain Financial Freedom. And I was convinced it would do really well. I shot loads of videos, which I think you can probably still buy this course, but I'm not going to tell you where because it's not very good and the quality of the videos aren't very good. Anyway, I put it online and I launched it on my website and I launched it to Crickets. And that was really frustrating. But not to be deterred, I thought, well, maybe people need something more specific. So I'm going to create another course which is all about sales and marketing. So again, I went hell for leather. I spent hours and hours and hours working out what the core structure would be, shooting the videos, putting, which I shot on one of those flip cameras, if you remember what they are, and then you needed to plug it into your computer to get the content off of there. And I launched that to Crickets yet again. And I thought, rob, this is absolutely crazy. You're doing something wrong. These topics have to be really appealing to the outside world. After all, so many people want to create their own business or so many people want advice on sales and marketing. So what was I doing wrong? Well, okay, so it all sounds so obvious now in hindsight, but first of all, I wasn't being specific enough about who I was targeting. I was basically targeting anyone that wanted to start their own business or anyone who wanted to learn to do sales and marketing better. So that was my first mistake, that I wasn't clear enough about my niche. But perhaps more importantly, the second mistake I made, and this is the really important learning here for anybody that ever thinks about launching a new product or launching an online product. It doesn't matter. It applies to all of that is I didn't go and talk to my audience. I didn't go and validate my idea before. I spent hours and hours and hours shooting the content. And a lot smarter online gurus than me will always tell you that you need to go and pre sell your idea, your course, your program, your mentoring, whatever it is before you actually start producing it. Because it's only when people put their hand in their pocket and actually pay for something that you know it has, it has legs and it's viable. If people just tell you that they think it's a good idea. That is a big gap between saying I think this is a good idea and actually paying for it. But if I'm honest, I still hadn't quite learned these lessons yet. The one lesson I did learn with my third course was that I need to be clear about who I'm targeting. So obviously my background is running my own agency, so it made a lot of sense to target the agency world. And of course that's where my private coaching was. So I was having a conversation a lot with clients around getting team members to be better account managers managers. And so I decided to create a course called Client and Account Management or it's evolved over the years but it's now called Client and Account Management Mastery. And I created this course, I put it on my website and I got a couple of sales. I learned about using webinars to sell and that helped. But this was the first time that I actually got some bites and made a few sales by chance, really more than by thorough planning and doing all the things that I know now. But anyway I made some sales of it and I, I kept making a little bit of revenue but I certain learned that there's no such thing as passive income, that it's that old iceberg you see the little bit above the top, which is where you're making the money. But underneath the water there is a ton of work that needs to be done around creating the content, around engaging with your audience, around marketing your products so that people want to consistently buy. If I'm honest, over the years I found it much easier to sell my private coaching than I have to sell my online content. And that's probably says more about me and how I target things. But that's, that's the truth. Then I decided I was going to launch more of a hybrid program. If we fast Forward to probably 2017, 2018 and also by the way, in the meantime I had created a few more courses. In fact, I ended up with seven courses which I'm not going to tell you about because most of them have been retired and I'm probably not that proud of them and very few of them made me very much money. But, but the client and account management one did because I feel like by chance, more than anything, I'd hit a nerve with what people needed in the agency world. Anyway, fast forward to probably 2018 and I decided to create my first online mastermind program. So this is sort of a hybrid of online content and group coaching calls and one to one calls and discussion forums and so on. And I think what led me to do this was the fact that I was having the same conversations over and over again with my private clients. And I thought to myself, there has to be a way to sort of expedite their learning so that we don't spend our time together digging into a specific topic in too much detail, but rather I could signpost them to a lesson in my group coaching program and they could go and learn that in their own time and we could expedite our time together and make it more useful. So that was the sort of key driver and that led me to launch the agency accelerator. And obviously I did that at the same time as this podcast, because this podcast still exists, but that program has morphed into the self running agency. And that was moderately successful because I spent a ton of time marketing. I did lots of live trainings, lots of webinars to get people into the program and it works really well. And I started to get some fantastic testimonials from people who were part of it. And it gave me a way to engage with a portion of my audience that perhaps couldn't afford to buy the one to one private coaching from me. And indeed they wanted to be around more of a community of agency owners because we all know that it can be lonely at the top. So I definitely hit a nerve with that. And then if we move closer to the present day, I learned about doing my validation and my research properly and I learned about jobs to be done interviews, which is stuff that I teach the self running agency membership on how to do. Because it's super important that you not only are understand the key challenges that your audience has, but you also understand the language that they use and you can replay that language in your marketing. Again, it sounds very obvious when I say out loud, but you know I didn't do it before and you're probably not doing it. So I went out, I spoke to about 15 to 20 agencies. I recorded all of the interviews so I had their language and then I started to try and kind of chunk this up and that's what led me to come up with the concept of self running agency. Now the self running agency isn't all about building an agency that can run itself it's more about building an agency that is less dependent on you, the owner and all the steps that you need to take from where you are today, which is probably very entrenched in every aspect of your agency to a point where you are really focused on your superpowers, I. E. The things that you can only do and you and you are able to delegate, automate and so on, all of the other things to do with running your agency. So that's what the self running agency is about. And I launched that and that has been by far my most successful program. We've probably had about 58 agencies in that program and most recently it has morphed and it is morphing as we talk into a membership program. So this is where people join and pay on a much lower monthly fee to be part of the program and they get drip fed the content over time because I've realized that we are all time poor. Yet there is a, an absolute success roadmap that every agency needs to work through and they need to work through it in a linear audience, linear order. So the new membership program is dripping the content to people in that order and then they submit the work to me and they get feedback before they move on to the next stage. So that's kind of how my programs have morphed over the years. And as I said, I wanted to share this story with you because a lot of people have been thinking about creating some kind of online content, online mentorship or a course. And I want to share with you that if you're going to do that, please don't make the mistakes that I made. I cannot tell you how many hundreds and hundreds or thousands of hours I've spent producing online content and how much money I've wasted in playing around with tech and investing in people that could supposedly help me with advertising, but they failed to do it. And I've tried all sorts of different ways to market. So in the end I deliver everything through my platform, Kartra K A R T R A and I'll put a link in the show notes to that so that not only hosts my membership and it hosts all the videos, but I do all of my email marketing through that. And because it's one platform, it can be very interconnected so you can do some clever things like tagging people depending on how much of a video they've watched and so on. Now I'm not saying that's the only platform you should use or the best platform, but it is a simpler platform because it's all in one. I've also tried all sorts of different marketing activities and I found that live webinars are by far the best way of really engaging with my audience and building that know like and trust quickly so I can get them to sell. And of course when we are selling things online we need to create some sense sense of urgency or scarcity because human beings are very good at pontificating and thinking oh yeah, I'll do that in the future. And then of course the future never happens. So we need to have a way of getting people across the line. So tell me, is this a topic that you're interested in and do you like this format of me freeing free winging it as I'm recording this podcast? If it is, then do drop me an email. My contact details are always in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. I could talk about this topic till the cows come home. And like I said, it's not the typical topic I talk about on this podcast but but it is one where I'm sharing some honesty with you about how many failures I've had. And I honestly I'm sure I've spent more money than I've actually earned in the online world at the moment. Hopefully that will change in the future. And by the way, I've consolidated all my content into two key programs. I've retired everything else. So the self running agency membership which is everything to do with running your agency and has this seven step success roadmap and my email marketing program called Build, Nurture, Convert everything else that I've been running, I have retired now and I'm just focused on those two things. So my advice to you is to do a few things and do them really well. Don't think the answer is to have loads of courses. This is a bit like niching. Get as clear as you possibly can with your niche and focus on that. Don't think the answer is to be more generalized. Same with your courses. So anyway, I hope that you found that short episode insightful and I hope you found it interesting if nothing else. I'm not encouraging you necessarily to get on into the online world, but I am trying to share with you my story and if you are thinking about stepping into the online world, then learn from my lessons and make sure that you validate your idea. First of all, make sure you are super clear about who your audience is and what the benefit and the transformation those people will get by joining your course or your membership or your mentoring program, whatever it is. If you do those things, you're much more likely to either find out really quickly that your idea is not a good idea, or to be sure that it will be successful so that when you start investing loads of time in shooting videos and loads of money and setting up all the tech, then you know it's going to work. Okay, so that's it. If you found it useful, please do consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, because, as you know, that helps the algorithm show the podcast to more people, which means I can impact more people just like you. But other than that, have a great rest of your week, and I will see you next Thursday on the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast.