Ep. 415: How my OFS do lead generation

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 415, How My Ofs Do Lead Generation. So today I'm gonna give you a little bit insight into my business and how we do our work. So what does my team do for me in terms of lead generation? What specifics are they doing? How are they doing it? At least the pieces that I know. And then I'm gonna give you some things that I don't know and how we got to some of these places. So, just so you know, my business is different than your business. My lead generation is different than your lead generation. I don't do the same things that you do. And so some of the things that I do may not work for you. Some of the things that you do probably wouldn't work for me, or maybe they would, but they're not effective or, I don't know. Your business is different than mine, and so the way you're gonna do lead generation is different, but it doesn't matter. Someone in the Philippines can still do it for you. So let me give you some ideas of how we do this, the specifics of generating a lead. It's not the specifics of lead, like, let's contact a person and see if they turn into a lead. For us, it's more of putting things out there until people come back to us. Russell Brunson talks about throwing out hooks all the time. He throws hooks all the time. It's like you're fishing. You're just throwing out a hook and you're reeling it in. You're throwing out a hook and you're reeling it in. You're throwing out a hook, and we're reeling it in. And so we do that, and we hope that every once in a while we catch someone and then we start them on this process of trying to. Of trying to educate them towards realizing, yeah, I should really hire someone in the Philippines. It's a really good option, right? Because most people don't start knowing, oh, I should hire someone in the Philippines. So for us, we're not contacting people on LinkedIn and saying, hey, you need a VA, and we'll help you hire a VA. Right? Because that's a really big leap for most people. So rather than that, what we do is we try and catch people when they're sort of thinking about it or when they might have thought about it and give them a nudge. So, for example, my team participates in forums. There are all kinds of forums online where people are talking about online businesses, they're talking about their business, they're talking about marketing, they're talking about SEO, they're talking about whatever it is in online business. And my team just participates in those forums wherever they are. And there's a lot of them. So some of it's on Reddit and some of it's on private forums. And it used to be the Warrior forum. I think they still participate in the Warrior forum and stack that money. And so there's all kinds of stuff, right? And in your business, there is a forum, at least I believe there's a forum of people participating for whatever it is that you sell. Now you're selling insurance. You know, people aren't like super duper interested in insurance, right? But your customers are actively participating somewhere. Your potential customers are. And so my team, they participate. And they're not always just saying, hey, look at onlinejobs. Ph. Hey, go to onlinejobs. Ph. That's not what they do. They answer people's questions and they contribute. And when people ask something about outsourcing, they answer, they may link to onlinejobs ph, they may not. They might link to my podcast, they might link to a specific episode of my podcast, they might link to something of my newsletter. They might link to One VA away. They might link to something else that we've written in the past. So how much should a VA get paid is asked in a question or in a forum, right? So they'll link to our comprehensive guide to virtual assistant salaries page and say, hey, this page has been really helpful, right? Or one of them might say, hey, I wrote this page and this is a kind of a guide to how what salaries cost in the Philippines. So they're not always just promoting. They're answering questions and trying to be helpful. And with that, anybody who reads that post is going to see what they said. They're also generating links to online jobs, which then goes towards SEO. So SEO is the next way I want to talk about that. They do lead generation for us. So SEO is search engine optimization, getting us to the top of search engines. And it's not all roses. It's not. Everybody thinks, oh, SEO is free and it's not. But we create a lot of content and create a lot of links to our pages or to other things that help onlinejobs. And when people are searching for hire a virtual graphic designer, well, we hope that they find onlinejobs Ph. Or find some content that we've written that points them to onlinejobs Ph that then generates, I mean, that generates a lead. It brings someone towards our business, right? So we write some content about it or we write some content about hiring Filipino VAs. And my team is writing this content. They're posting it. They're posting it all over the Internet in different places. And when we do that, it just is one more piece that it's one more hook sent out there that might catch someone and bring them back to us. It's something else that a search engine might give to someone and bring them back. Now, along those same lines, we post things like this on social media. Say another lead generator is social media where we post content about SEO. I'm going to give you a specific example, actually a couple examples. Facebook has not really worked for us. We've been doing it for, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years, and it has not done very well for us. And some of that is probably just my unwillingness to participate. Some of that is maybe just our industry, our topic. Like we're pretty business specific out, you know, outsourcing is not. People on Facebook scroll and Facebook are looking to be entertained, usually. Not necessarily looking to build a business, not necessarily looking to improve themselves. I don't know. So Facebook hasn't been super successful for us. Instagram was a total failure for us. We stopped doing it TikTok. We never did it because it's just so trendy. People are just looking to be entertained and we didn't want to do it. But after doing all of that for years and years and years, and I don't know how much money we've spent on it and I'm sure it's returned some where like we're making posts and my team is using things that I create for Facebook posts. And I'll just give you more of that. So as I record this podcast, my team's gonna take it and they're going to cut it up into little pieces and post reels. I think. I don't really know all that much about it, but they're gonna chop it up into like a 30 second soundbite for something interesting that I said. And they're gonna post it in a reel. Here's how we generate leads. We chop up a video into a 30 second soundbite and we post a reel. Right? I hope that what I just said turns into a reel. I don't know. And they're gonna post it on Facebook and someone's gonna see it and maybe a thousand people see it and one person's interested, one person might say, hey, you know, I should look at this. Cause I need to hire a VA or an OFS, as he's calling it, right? So after doing this, all this stuff, my team keeps changing what they're doing, which is great. I love it. And then recently I got an email from one of my people who said, hey, just something on LinkedIn finally clicked and we're starting to get hundreds of views on each post that I make. And this one got 4,000 views on it. And she said she's been noticing this happen as she's been posting these things. And she said, oh, I'm going to try this now with it. So LinkedIn is probably a much better fit for like what we do, you know, trying to help businesses grow. And people on LinkedIn aren't necessarily looking to be entertained, they're looking to improve. Not necessarily, but, you know, there's just a. Generally probably a better fit for my business. And I let my team do this lead generation, and it's starting to work on LinkedIn now. We've been doing this for years. I don't know if it's gonna take you years. I don't know if it's gonna take you a week. Like you probably better at this than I am or that my team is. But the point is they're using the same things to push content out there, throw these hooks all over the place, right. To generate leads. Okay, so next, let's talk about ads. We run ads. Yeah, we run Facebook ads. We run Google Ads. We run banner ads. We run newsletter ads. We run ads. Someone who runs our Facebook ads. I have someone who runs our Google Ads. And I don't have that much to say about it. I mean, running Google Ads is pretty straightforward. Although I have changed it over the years. I've. I had someone on my team internally running Google Ads for us for a while. And I got approached by an agency who said, hey, look, your ads suck and we can do it way better at way cheaper. And he hooked me. I mean, he was doing lead generation for himself, right? And so I said, yeah, go ahead. And I didn't fire my person on my team. Cause I have some confidence in that. So I let this agency take over our lead generation through ads. And it looked like it was really great. He was like, look, we're generating leads at this much. See, I told you. And over months and months and months, I just kept getting these hints of, this isn't right. Something's just not right here. And I finally put my finger on it and Recognized. He's not really interested in what he's sending us. He's only interested in the numbers. He's generating super duper crappy leads for us, but the numbers work. And so he's thrilled because he says he's generating leads and these, these leads actually really suck. And his spending is really, really terrible for us. And it turned out well. He had just sent it to his team in the Philippines. Like, he wasn't running the ads, his people in the Philippines were running the ad. So my people in the Philippines were running the ads, his people in the Philippines were running. What's the difference? Right? Well, his way, he just got to show us numbers and it kind of sucked for us. And so I brought it back in house. I fired him and I brought it back in house and it has been so much better. I brought it back to my person and we changed the way we were doing it completely. And she's doing a really great job with it now. And our ad costs have gone down and our quality of leads have gone up. And so, yeah, we run ads. We run YouTube ads and same person running the YouTube ads as our. As my Google Ads. Not the same person as Facebook. I have different person running Facebook ads. So the point, I would talk more about Facebook ads, but I don't really know enough about it. And so my team gives me feedback and I try and record ads and they tell me what's working, what's not, and I just record ads and I kind of ignore what's working, what's not, even though I shouldn't. But yeah, you can definitely hire someone to run ads for you. Super, super reasonable. Next thing that we do for lead generation is I have someone managing our affiliates, so. So affiliates are a big deal for us. And so I hired an affiliate manager recently and we're still trying to figure out how it works, but he's super diligent and conscientious and really great and is emailing people and following up with people. And it has led to a couple different affiliate promotions so far, which is really great. So that's something that totally reasonable to hire someone in the Philippines an affiliate manager. Last thing I want to talk about that I can think of is that we. So we give away a whole bunch of lead generating ebooks, right? Content that either I have written or other people have written. People on my team have written them. We put together a squeeze page, which is a single page where we ask for their name and email and they get added to an email list which is, you know, probably how you're listening to this podcast right now because at some point you got onto the email list. So we have all these documents that we give away that are helpful like a Quick Start guide or you know, the top nine questions I get asked and how to solve them and 15 mistakes that people make or questions to ask when, when you're interviewing Filipino workers or job post templates that can use when you're posting your job. All these things that kind of hook people, like I said, like Russell's hook. They're hooks that we're throwing out there. See if people are interested. Right. So with these, I have written some of them. I have not written some of them. I usually record the ads for some of them. But I have my team in the Philippines record ads for some of them. Like, hey, I work. This is an ad that, that they have recorded for me. Hey, I'm a virtual assistant in the Philippines. No, actually strike that. I'm an ofs. I'm a talented customer service person and quality assurance person. You can't hire me because I already have a full time job. But there are lots of people like me available. And let us show you how to do that@vaquickstartguide.com right. So that's an ad that my team in the Philippines recorded for me for this Quick Start guide that we give away for free. That ad will get posted onto Facebook. I don't know if it goes on to Google or it'll probably go on to YouTube. I don't really know. It'll get posted. It will bring people to the VA quickstart guide which I helped direct the copy for that page. I didn't write the copy for that page. I didn't design the page. I didn't build the page. I didn't hook it up to our autoresponder in mailchimp. I think I wrote the first email email that gets sent out. I know I sent some, I wrote some follow up emails that get sent out there. But I know someone else wrote the wrote emails for this too. So there's a whole process going on here that my team in the Philippines has built and is working on. And we're constantly doing this, we do this over and over and over again another way that they are generating leads for us. So in the end of this, I want you to think about what is your lead generation process? How do you generate leads or how would you like to be generating leads? And could someone in the Philippines do that for you? After listening to this, are there things that people on your team could do for you, or someone that you hired that isn't on your team could do for you to help you generate leads. Could you hire someone to go out and research the top 30 companies that should be using your software and find all their name, the name of the person that you want to contact and their email addresses and their phone numbers and send you that list? Or. Or could you have them do that and send them an email, the initial email saying, hey, we have this thing. How can we serve you? Right? We want to give you a free trial. Let us give this to you. Right? Could someone in the Philippines do that for you and just start generating leads for you over and over again? I believe they can. And if you have success with this, I'd love to hear about it.