Growth Hacking—Three Things You Need To Do To Scale Your Business

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest, I have to tell you, is going to blow your minds. If you're driving, you might want to pull over for this podcast interview. But before we get into our guest and the amazing things he's doing, I would be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if you're not automating your Craigslist postings and your Facebook postings, you've got to learn more@posting domination.com TheLandGeek Scott Todd, are you excited?

Mark?

I am ready to hack some growth.

I am ready to take my business, the listeners businesses to the next level. Because our guest, Vin Clancy is on a hundred day tour, 100 day world tour. He is the foremost innovative marketing and growth hacker in the world. His Facebook group alone Traffic and copy, has over 21,000 members. It is the best marketing Facebook group on the planet. Min Clancy, how are you?

Good. I was going to try and record this on my phone, but I guess it's going out as an awesome podcast, right? That's the recorded data we get.

Yeah, absolutely. So Vin, how did you wake up one day and say, you know what I would become the best growth hacker in the world?

Well, I was on welfare, living on government assistance, temporarily sort of homeless. And yeah, so I was in like this tiny room with my girlfriend in East London and she said to me, you have to do something. So I had a dream that night where I would create a magazine where the writers would be stars instead of musicians. The next day we wanted a domain, something called a Little Wayne would wear on a T shirt. And we bought planetivy.com the day after that I started calling out every university in the country. So like it really started with hard sales. I was like, I'm building this online magazine. It's going to be the best in the country. Can't pay you, but you're going to get a great platform to be heard on. And within weeks we had over 100 writers. Within six months, we had 300,000 visitors a month. Within one year we had over a million visitors a month. We got a quarter million dollars seed funding. We then launched a second. Once we got to a million visitors a month, we launched a second site that got 2 million visitors a month in 100 days. We got into the Techstars accelerator and got a second round of funding. So I learned a hell of a lot about the nuts and bolts of growing a business. There's. And I launched a marketing and growth hacking agency. So I learned how to get traffic to companies. I mean, some of the hottest trends in SEO right now is people who are selling leads to realtors. So they get the leads to their website and then they rent them out, either the website or the lead. So that is like a really hot trend to jump on. So I learned techniques like that. I did more social media rather than SEO. Then I started public speaking to get leads. And I tell you, if you have a small number of clients who are going to pay you a high amount of money, such as, again, real estate, public speaking, if you get your prospects in the room and you show authority, they're much more likely to work with you. What you've got to be careful of is plate liquors. So you put on the food and then people who come just for the food, as long as you can not have them, then public speaking is amazing. So I did that and that massively grew my agency. Then I launched a kind of crazy idea which was to speak around the world in as many countries, many cities as possible. So I'm finishing it right now. So it's like eight or nine countries, 33 cities, 100 dates. I launched my first book, Secret, a step by step guide to growth hacking. So that's made $120,000 since it came out a little under a year ago with no paid media. So we think paid traffic is for losers if you're starting out. And no press either, just social media and growth hacking. I launched my own community traffic and copy for copywriting and growth hacking and marketing. And that will. That will be the biggest group in the space. It currently has 21,000 members, super high engagement. And I'm moving to Los Angeles in June this year to build an empire.

Well, I can't wait to meet you in la. I'm in Phoenix, so not too far.

I was just there for National Speakers association conference. I saw a scorpion inside a lollipop. Now why would anyone eat that?

Because they can. It's kind of cool.

All right, fair enough.

So, Scott, there was something that Vin said that really stuck out to me and that paid traffic is for losers when you're first starting.

Yeah.

Is there a point in time then, when it's not for losers?

Yeah. Like as you scale up, all businesses will to grow massively. But you know, I know a lot of the people listening to this will be just starting out and if you don't know what you're doing with Facebook ads, I got a better idea for how you can spend your money. Put it on a fire, set it on fire and use it to warm your hands because you'll get more a higher return like Facebook. Facebook ads can be a complete waste of money if you don't know what you're doing, and especially if it's a B2B niche or B2C niche. With a high customer value, you only need a few customers and you'll get a lot of money. So you'd be far better using the free traffic methods like social media and public speaking in order to get your clients. Then with that money, invest it in paid. But investing it in paid first is often a very bad idea.

So, Scott, what's your thoughts there?

Well, I made that mistake. I thought, hey, I'm gonna attract some customers. I'm gonna go put money on some Google pay per click or even Facebook ads. And he's right. I mean, until you have that dialed in, until you know who your customer is and what your numbers are, you're just. You don't have your message.

You don't.

You haven't found your voice yet. And it's only after, I think, after you find your voice that you should really start to even dabble in the waters. And even then, you know, no one's. I mean, I see people. I see ads all the time. Spend a thousand dollars a day on Facebook ads. Well, that's great when you know your numbers, but to begin with, you need to start, like, lower, you know, $5 a day or $2 a day, whatever it is, until you find your voice to find your message that resonates with the customers that you're looking for and then maybe go all in. But, man, my head is still spinning from the whole. The whole Planet IV thing. That's powerful.

Another message for people listening. If you're looking at, like, the gurus in the space, you know, I use that term loosely, especially in things like real estate. If they're posting, like, pictures of their earnings and their checks and you meet them in real life, there's one question you can ask them that will crumble their empire. What is the net margin on that money? I met someone recently. They're like, we just passed a million dollars in sales for the year. And I was like, what's your net margin on, after all cost 10 to 12%. So you have a $900,000 margin that you could mess up very easily. And you need a lot of systems and staff to run that. It's actually better to run a smaller business with higher net margins than a larger one with less net margins. So again, that comes back to free traffic. You know, if you're getting a lead from social media, that's like a 95% margin other than car charges. So, yeah. So when people in this space seem to be doing well, just ask them about the margin.

So, Vin, how do you get free traffic? Like, what are some, you know, Vin Clancy Ninja growth hacking ways to start? You know, I'm a newbie. I don't really know how to even create a Facebook ad. How do I start bringing in traffic for free?

For most niches and certainly business and serious niches, your personal Facebook needs to be your professional Facebook. So that means it's not, it's no longer a closed network. And I know a lot of Generation X people still believe in privacy and don't believe they should do this. Like, you guys are on the losing side of the war. Your personal Facebook needs to be your public Facebook. So you need to start looking in other Facebook groups and whatever your niche is, there's loads out there beginning conversations, adding value and then adding those people as friends. And it's very much becoming a thing to add everyone as friends now. And those are the people who can become your clients. Like, that's something you can do from day one. Then you're going to start a Facebook group which is going to be your community where you're going to show up and add value every day. You're going to add the people who, who you've added, who are your friends, but also somewhat interested in your business into that group. And that's where you're going to nurture leads right up to doing a launch. When you're launching, maybe an E product, maybe you're going to offer up some private coaching or mentoring spots. But yeah, it all comes down to Facebook in the early stages. The other way is use that in tandem with public speaking. Have really good slides, have really good value. Then they have to email you to get the slides so you get the email addresses and you can begin those conversations. And finally Twitter following a lot of people, you will get people following back. It's old, it's not an exact science, but it works. At Twitter, public speaking and Facebook inter Facebook group are the free, free methods anyone can use.

So, so how do I, how do I become a public speaker? Like, I don't have a problem speaking. Okay, well, how do I get my name out there that I'm willing to go do public speeches.

So go on Meetup and Eventbrite and any relevant event sites in your niche. Type in your niche. So real estate or investing or finance or whatever it is. Find all the local meetups and events that are coming up and then you're going to message all of them the same thing. I'm a big fan of your meetup. I'd love to come and give a talk that I think the audience will like. It's the 10 secrets of our industry or 10 things to be better at your job in our industry. I have a massive network I can invite. Just say that they never check and then copy and paste that to every single group on Eventbrite and meetup and I guarantee you will get speaking gigs. And from those speaking gigs you just say on the stage, I'm looking to do more of these if anyone wants to book me. And it'll just become a cycle. Like halfway through my tour, I didn't have to book any talks. It was just constant inflow. So that's what you need to do. The talk needs to be good. But yeah, meetup and Eventbrite will get you off the mark. Also start now applying to conferences. A surprising number of conferences accept guests speaker roles. So basically if you have a new idea that hasn't been done before, they're gonna say, yeah, it will work.

I love it, I love it. So then why, you know, here's my fear, okay? My fear is I don't own anything.

Facebook.

Facebook changes the rules. All this work, all this growth, hacking, everything I've done is gone, right? They could, they could shut down that, that traffic and copy Facebook group of years that have 21,000 members tomorrow. Like why not get everybody to go to like a mightybell.com which would be your own sort of, you know, group that you own.

So it's the graveyard of almost every startup. Anyone who tries to get people off Facebook and the big platforms, people just won't log in. People will sign up to the site once and they will never return. The exception is the high dollar clients because they have a lot invested in it. It's just so easy to go where people are and advertise to them there. In terms of why it needs to be on Facebook, in terms of what you should be doing. The whole point of it is to build an email list. So that hasn't changed in the last 10 years. You need to be getting people through lead magnets and through applying for webinars to get their email addresses. So that's something we'll start to do on traffic and copy too. So yeah, it all is leading to emails, but really no one ever loses their personal Facebook. It's an amazing asset. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone having a personal account shut down. It's an asset that you will have for life, similar to your LinkedIn account, similar to your email list. Email list is obviously great because it has a high sales percentage of people who buy.

So when you say your personal Facebook needs to be your business Facebook. I have two Facebook accounts. I have one that's like really me and my real like close friends. And then I have business me that is as many people as I can get for marketing. Right. There's two me's out there and I have two separate logins. Is that something that you would recommend or would you somehow merge the two? What would you say?

I'm not allowed to directly recommend it because I never give advice that can be shot down by a troll. But yes, I recommend it. It's a good idea. Well, people could say, but Facebook only allows you to have one. Believe me, they're very busy. They're not looking for two. Mark Podolski's on Facebook anytime soon. So yes, it is a good idea.

Okay, Scott, what are you doing on Facebook right now?

Okay, so what I do is I have one account that I use for everything. And then what happens is my friends and family fall within kind of just normal, normal category. I categorize them just as normal. But then people that I have for business, I actually put them in a different category because you can select the groups. So then when I post, I'm actually choosing, do I post just to my friends and close family only, or is this post gonna go out to everybody or even to just the group of people for business? Because you can do that.

What do you think it goes to the most people though, right?

If I do public post, so basically everybody that's that I have for business have them as an acquaintance. And so then I can choose to put a post to acquaintances only so that my personal people don't see it. Or I can do public, which means that everybody sees it. My friends and family as well as the acquaintances. So you can really have separate content right there on Facebook.

All right, then let's really get in the nitty gritty of some growth hacking for our niche. Okay, I've got a 40 acre parcel in Nevada for $24,990, $1,000 down, 249amonth. I've got Pictures, I've got maps. I've got copy. How would you recommend I sell that parcel on Facebook?

What's a parcel? Sorry?

Oh, piece of property.

Oh, right. So you have a house where?

I'm sorry?

You have a house where? Sorry?

Oh, it's not a house. It's just a piece of raw land in Nevada.

Sure. So the first thing I would do is call up your competitors pretending to be a customer, find out what they do to sell their land and what they plan to do in the future, and then steal their ideas.

Yeah, but then how do I know what they're doing is even right? I want to sell like you, so.

Yeah, well, you should, with some tertiary research, know the good ones from the bad ones. Right, right. Yeah. So, I mean, some of them will look into. Yeah. So basically, you. You need to know the good from the bad. Does that make sense?

It does, but the problem is I'm the best, so I can't copy myself.

I think. I mean, that sounds to me like a kind of Fall of Troy problem that, like, if you. If you ever think you're the best, then you know that that is a problem in itself. So the first thing you need to do if you're looking to improve is see what your competitors are doing. The expert level of that is to apply for a job at them as a fake name.

I see.

So they may be doing things with Facebook ads you're not doing. They may be doing something, but they can't scale it up. So. Yeah, so you could be able to take advantage of that as a bigger player in the space. So growback people think it's like, you know, one of my Twitter things which will get 1500 people to an event, but often it's just a psychological selling, which is a growth hack.

Psychological selling, which is a growth hack. So define psychological selling.

So that is using techniques to encourage people to buy from you that otherwise would not. For instance, you know, there's a lot of levels to it. But, for instance, knowing your ideal user, finding where they spend their time. So, for instance, if you're targeting an older crowd, so people who do radio and magazines, the growth hack would be to call up the radio stations in the magazines, say, how much do you charge? And then when they say go, oh, that's very painful. Then call them up again at the. So you need to know when they close for that month, Then call them up on that day, that afternoon, and go, oh, can you do a quarter of what we quoted? And then they'll say yes, because otherwise the Radio or print ad is going to be empty. So that's how you would reach that audience, using a growth hack. It's about innovative thinking.

I love it. I love it. Scott, Todd, what are your thoughts? You know, Scott's probably the best. So now I'm just gonna copy what Scott's doing.

I'm not the best, trust me. But I love that idea. Like, I think that we all try to make things more complicated than what they are. You know, like I listen to, I'm sitting here listening to the stories about, you know, like him getting on the phone with that first publication. And you think like the way that he explains it, you think like, if you want to grow this, like grow this business, it's a lot of work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And in reality, what he's saying is there's a lot of shortcuts that you can take to scale your business that we don't take because we think it's a lot of work and really we're doing it the hard way.

Yeah, yeah. One of my mentors, Dan Meredith, is a big fan of. Don't over complicate things. It can be real simple.

Yeah. So Vin, what do you see in the market right now? What are people doing with marketing that you think, oh gosh, what a huge mistake besides starting with paid traffic from day one?

Well, a lot of people, I mean, firstly, the best way of scaling a company right now, generally speaking, across all the streets is Facebook ads. So we're talking about scaling up into the multi millions here. But there's so many iterations which can improve a conversion rate that people don't do. They put too many steps in the onboarding. They don't have instant customer support, they don't test the tag, they don't use Google Tag Manager correctly. There's so many little paper cuts which can massively slash a price that companies don't do. So it's essentially conversion rate optimization and continually decreasing the cost to buy traffic using Facebook. Likewise, there's a massively massive black hole and people just not doing Google Ads because they're more complex than Facebook ads. There's so many opportunities in PPC for search terms that only have 1 to 200 searches per month, but there are zero sites ranking for. So you could pretty much rank for anything, get a few links pointing at it and then you get that traffic for free for life. There's so much that can be done with organic and paid SEO and paid Facebook. And the reason I talk about those is we're talking at a large scale here. There's plenty of fun hacks we can do for events and Twitter and growing a Facebook group. But talking at a large scale, people are generally looking at the right platforms. They're just not looking at them in the right way. Old fashioned. We throw money at it. Look, it makes a bit of money. That will do. Let's spend the same amount each month.

So Vincent, how do I like me? I mean I get what you're saying. I may not have the time or the desire to go and figure that out. What do I do?

So it sounds like an obvious thing for me to say, but you would hire a consultant who would tell you what to do or who could do it for you. So you're going to arbitrage. I predict if I invest this much, I will get this much back out every six to 12 months. You need to look at your organization with fresh eyes and change something or you'll become irrelevant sooner or later. So you have to keep up with the latest trends in your industry and the easy way of doing that is speak to the experts. You can get a lot of this stuff by free because the experts tend to give away a lot for free and then they ascend the people who can pay a lot.

So where do I find these consultants.

Upwork am I Facebook groups. So just continue your searches around your Facebook groups and you will start to find them. They will come to you.

Who are your top three guys right now? If you said, look, if I was besides yourself, if I was going to start growing my business, the next level, I've got more money than time to set all this up. Here's where I would go because there's a, there's a million of them.

Yeah. My best friend, my two current mentors, Dexter Abraham and Dan Meredith, both extremely successful. You can learn an absolute mountain from them. Third, in terms of pure growth hacks, Josh Fechter, he's a Silicon Valley growth hack guy, just continually, continually putting out new amazing growth hacks.

Great, great. So as far as you know, like ad roll and, and retargeting and those types of hacks, is that still something that you'd recommend?

Yeah, absolutely. Retargeting is one of the underutilized ways you can grow fast. Yeah, I'm a big fan of retargeting. What Some one thing I like doing is using rebrandly. That is when you share a link to anything, you know, Buzzfeed, Wall Street Journal, you actually send them through a redirect so you grab their cookie before you send them onto the content. And then you can collect all of those cookies and then use that for custom audiences, which is a really cool hack.

That's a really cool hack. And I can just go to facebook.comgroups, trafficandcopy and learn all these hacks, correct?

Yeah, that's right.

All right, Vin, this has been a wealth of information, but now we're going to put you on the spot one more time. We're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

So I would go to my note taking nerd.com. so this is. You get that?

Wait, Nerd. Calm.

My note taking.

My note taking nerd. My note.

My note taking nerd.

Yeah. So the best in the game are people like Anthony Robbins, obviously, for motivation, Dan Kennedy for marketing, Evan Pagan for productivity and so on. So they are the best in the game and their top products are like $20,000, and they come on like 5, 30 CDs. We do not have the time to do that. But they are undeniably the best in the game with the best ideas that can take your company and business forward. So what note taking nerd is. He pays the amount, goes on the course. He writes this short document, like, you know, 40 pages or so, which he then sells for like $50. And then you get all of that $5,000 knowledge of $50 that you can read on your lunch break. And it is the best thing I've ever read on business.

I love it. I love it. My note taking nerd blog.

Mark, where have we.

What? Vin, you're coming back on the podcast every week.

I need this guy in my life every week. I know.

We're getting Vin on speed dial. I mean, Vin, we do a lot of tips of the week. We've had a lot of guests, and I think Scott and I are gonna just like, this is it. It's time. Vin, drop the mic. You had the best tip of the week ever. Ever.

Mark, how. How much time have we spent? Like, going through courses or even thinking, like, even thinking about, like, hey, we can send someone else to a course, but it's right here for $50. I'm shocked.

This is shocking. This can't be right.

Well, for.

You know what? This is crazy. How now would Evan Pagan and Dan Kennedy be mad or.

No, you'd have to ask Dexter that. I think they're fine. I think they've all mentored him anyway, so I don't know. But, yeah, it's all fine. Well, you know, take it. It's there, you know, I love it.

I love it. All right, well, look great. You know, good artist copy, great artists steal. Here we go. That's great. All right, Scott, I mean, I hate to even ask you what your tip of the week is going to be.

Wow. Can we just end the podcast here and say let freedom ring and be done with it? I mean, like, come on, man.

This is Right. Right. I just. I just want to thank all the listeners.

This is the last podcast because, well, we got nothing else at this point.

I know.

Okay, Mark, check out. I just sent you the link, but check out. Do a Google search on Magic spreadsheet. It's in heat intelligent intelligence.com magic spreadsheet.

I'm checking it out. This is so geeky.

This is geeky. Now let me explain what this is. This is where you can go on to Google sheets, create the headers that you want, basically answer like some. Some anchors, like, what is it that you're trying to accomplish?

Okay.

And you give them the foundation. And what will happen is either artificial intelligence will go seek the information or a human will go and populate the spreadsheet for you. So think about like all of our list building for, you know, properties and delinquent taxes and everything. I'm a big fan of using Google spreadsheets for this.

Sure.

However, what this does is this interjects either artificial intelligence to go do it, so think of imacros, or it also goes, and if need be, has a person go and do the rest of the work. Guess what?

What?

It doesn't matter if. It doesn't matter if the computer does it, artificial intelligence does it, or the human does it. It's 0.0025 cents per second. So that comes to about $9 an hour for either the computer to go do it or whatever. Now, it's going to take a little bit of setup here. It's not advanced stuff. And they've got some videos, their website@heatintelligence.com magic spreadsheet. And one of the cool things that I saw, if you look at that last video that's down there, it will actually show you, like how to make phone calls. Advanced example on making phone calls. And basically you put in like the restaurant name they're showing, like you put in a restaurant name, you put in the phone number and you put down like, do they deliver or not? Yes or no. And then you populate it with a question and then what happens is their system will automatically dial and find out the answer for you. So think about how you can have either their people or their technology populating your data spreadsheets for you so that you're not doing it for $9 an hour.

This is a great tip. I'll tell you what, Vin, you could use this. There's a lot of use cases for this.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That's my attempt to drop the mic, but it still doesn't beat, you know, my notetaking nerd.com I think combined we've.

Got something really powerful here. Well, my tip of the week trumps everybody's tip of the week because my tip has, you know, it's literally. There's no better way to get, to get, you know, Vin's brain kind of tapped into you. And that's www.facebook.comgroups, traffic and copy. There's already 21,894 members. I'm a member, so it's great. It's a great, great group. The best growth hacking group on Facebook. The most innovative marketer in the world, Vin Clancy. Are we good?

Yeah, we're good. I've got to do another podcast. I'm sorry, I gotta go.

All right, well, look, thanks so much and we'll stay in touch.

Yeah, send me the recording when it comes through. Good to be on this show, by the way. For the land, you could produce a report on the land and then for them to get the report, they have to leave their email so it becomes a lead magnet. There's another idea.

I love it. I love it. All right. I just want to remind the listeners the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like Vin Clancy is if you do us three little tiny favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate, you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of your review. We're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit. I want to remind everybody, today's podcast is sponsored by paymentgeek IO, a set it and forget it system for automating Getting paid. Paymentgeek IO, Scott, are we good?

We're great, Mark.

All right, 1, 2, 3.

Let freedom ring.

Why? We're getting geeky. If I knew you guys were going to do that, I would not have dropped off already.

Yeah.

All right, thanks, everybody.

Thanks.