Logan Merrick has a habit of breaking things down into simple, repeatable steps and outsourcing them. This has enabled him to build and automate multi-million dollar businesses.
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https://www.sittingprettyhalohair.com/
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Andri: Hi, and welcome to the Andri Peetso Podcast. This episode is all about digital marketing strategies: what to do when you're launching a new digital venture and how you can scale your business online.
So if you're starting a project, a blog, or a service or an online store, and you don't know where you have to direct your attention to, I think this episode will help you out a lot.
So I have a marketing background as far as marketing goes. What I actually mean is I have a film production background. I did commercial film production for 10 years, and I always figured that as soon as I'm going to quit the film industry and start my own business that these skills can somehow translate to marketing and that I would be really, really good at marketing.
And now when I'm building my own personal brand, sending out newsletters, I'm doing marketing for my book that I released called mastering fasting. I have this other projects and e-commerce project where I sell products to help people build healthy environments. And the latest project I started with my better half Miriam is called Whomesome where we teach people how to create healthy environments and why that matters.
And now, as I'm finding out these skills do not translate. I'm having a lot of trouble marketing and selling my products and just getting them in front of people. And I had to swallow my pride and start learning everything from scratch. So if you're starting a project, a blog and online store, a service, and you don't know why—where to pay attention to, I think this podcast will help you out a lot because today our guest is Logan, Logan Merrick.
Welcome Logan. Hi.
[00:01:45] Logan: Hi. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:48] Andri: A bit of background on Logan. Logan has been starting and building businesses since he was 21 years old. He started his first multimillion dollar business when he was 23 and his second multimillion-dollar business when he was 27. In his words, he's not the guy who makes the most money or who has the biggest house and he doesn't care about it because all he cares about is freedom, freedom of time and location.
Generally, he describes himself as quite lazy and he doesn't like doing repetitive tasks. So he developed a skill or a habit of breaking things down to simple repeatable steps and outsourcing those steps, those things, sorry to somebody. This enabled him to build a business that pretty much ran on autopilot.
And he only worked on it two hours per week making about $150,000 per month with heavy, healthy profit margins.
So what's that Australian dollars or us dollars?
[00:02:48] Logan: Yes. Australian dollars.
[00:02:50] Andri: Ah, okay.
[00:02:51] Logan: Makes a bit of a difference.
[00:02:54] Andri: Logan, I'm just going to jump right into the marketing aspects because on Whomesome. Our goal right now is to build an email list because you have to build an email list when you're doing projects like this— online projects.
And the best way to build an email list I was told is to build a lead magnet, something that you will give out to people for free, that they would really want and that they would benefit from.
And I created. We're really proud of this lead magnet . It's a free ebook. Some people told me, I think, including you that we should actually sell this instead because it's so in-depth and people are not just downloading it. I'm not even able to give people a way, a free ebook, and I don't know what we're doing wrong, but we'll circle back to this one later.
What are lead magnets and why do we need.
[00:03:50] Logan: Hmm, that's a good question. So a lead magnet is quite literally what it sounds like. It's a magnet, it's a piece of content you're referring to it as a magnet because it magnetizes people to it and turns them into leads.
So how does it work? You create a piece of content, let's say in your case, you created an. e-book. I've done this in the past. I think it's probably one of the better ways to generate leads. Or you can do like, you know, $10 off on your e-commerce store or whatever it is. These are all lead magnets video tutorials, whatever.
Right. And, so you create this piece of content. It's a valuable piece of content. And then you create a a way for people to find out about this piece of content, which I think you're using Facebook ads.
And then you're driving traffic through whatever traffic source in your case, using Facebook ads to this place, let's call it a landing page.
Just the page dedicated to promoting this lead magnet, this ebook and they learn about it. And then they leave their information. Normally an email address, sometimes a phone number, first name, whatever it might be, and they become a lead and they become part of your database. So that's essentially what a lead magnet is.
[00:05:04] Andri: But what are the best practices to creating a lead magnet? For example, because for Tsirkaadia, the second e-commerce project that I mentioned earlier, we were creating a lead magnet with our team.
And a part of the team thogught that lead magnets are just something you give out, just like an empty PDF. They're going to give an email, we're going to promise something that are going to download the PDF.
And I felt as if I were to give out this PDF in the form that it currently is that people would get angry. Like I gave my email for you for this, and it would actually not convert a lead, but I did get the email, but the person would unsubscribe or not buy my products out of spite.
So are there any certain best practices or things you want to make sure, or like a checklist when you're creating a lead magnet and we're giving it out to people?
[00:05:55] Logan: Let's go back to, the like core principles of marketing. So the basic principle of marketing is understanding your audience.
And if you really understand your audience and you really understand what kind of like what their questions are, what are their concerns? What are their fears? What are the worries? What are the, what is the information that they really want to know?
And then we apply that to, let's say Tsirkaadia. We take that audience and we have this thorough understanding of, of the audience. I think your audience of people who are like pretty they're well-endowed, they've got money.
And they've got an interest in looking after their health because otherwise, why would you spend 400 euros on on a water filter?
[00:06:33] Andri: Five hundred.
[00:06:34] Logan: 500?
[00:06:35] Andri: Yeah.
[00:06:36] Logan: Sorry. 500 euros on a water filter. And to me, like, that's, I'm obviously a customer and I've referred many of my friends to you. So...
[00:06:42] Andri: You were actually one of the first customers.
[00:06:44] Logan: Oh really? Oh yeah. I think it was Alar, and then me and maybe Taryn, or somebody?
[00:06:51] Andri: Yeah. You're in the top three, the honorable first three.
[00:06:57] Logan: It's an honor. Yeah. So you, so you have this understanding of the audience. So let's say people who are really interested in health but they have questions that have maybe concerns like for me, like I had all the answers because I could just ask you directly, but with let's say a random person who doesn't know Tsirkaadia doesn't know you, they're going to have other questions.
I don't know what those questions are, but it would be my as a marketer, it would be my utmost interest to learn what those questions might be. I would say. I would be really intently, like studying and learning from my customers in this, especially in that early stage, but ideally all the way through, but especially in this early stage to really understand what are their concerns.
And then let's say understand the concerns. And let's say I have top five concerns because one of the concerns is going to be price. It's a price, you know, you can either address that with a discount code or you can address it by as part of the top five concerns, let's say ebook. So you might look at what are the top five concerns?
Well, one is like, why do I need a filter to why is this filter the right one, three? You know, what are the, what are the problems with not having a word filter and all these sorts of things? And then you can like structure that into an ebook or lead magnet using the, using the the main reason why they should like their main concern, addressing the main concern is like the subject.
And so how do you know which one is going to be. The way you write this, how, how do you know what is going to be most effective? I would take that let's call it a pop-up probably would work really well for Tsirkaadia I'd take a pop-up and I would AB test and I would run an AB test where I'll, I'll try one against the other.
So let's say Let's say if a top five concerns and want to test the first two, then I want to pick the winner and test the, the next or that against another one. And they pick the winner and test that and against the other one. And then I'm going to find which concern is the biggest concern or which concern has got the biggest, biggest grab.
And then I'll take then I'll take that one concern. And then I start playing with the wording. How do I word this in a way that's going to have the biggest impact. I write this out maybe 20, 30 times. Try to figure out, like, what is the right language? Do I want to use their desire or do I want to use their fear?
Do I want to use their you know, urgency and all this sort of stuff. And then I'll test that all against each other, you know, find the best ones that I like and start testing. that And and then I'll start looking at design elements. Yeah. Keep the design really simple to start with. And then I start playing around with the design elements.
Do I put a picture in, do I, do I put the picture on the left side or the right side? I've literally run a test where I put the picture on the left side. And then on the other one, I put the picture on the right side. And do you know what happened? I had a massive increase. I think it was like 30% increase in subscribers from the one with the pictures on the right.
And this, this will depend on, I think this depends on a lot of the time, like whether you have a feminine audience or, or like a masculine or male audience, because apparently women look to the left first and men look to the right first or something like that.
[00:09:55] Andri: Now recalling some theories from my university photography class.
I remember that when you have a live person on a photograph, the direction of the eyes matters. So you don't want to have your models. For example, looking away from our content, it's much more desirable to have your models look at the content that you're presenting them. And supposedly these tiny little psychological nuances do help a lot.
[00:10:24] Logan: Oh, for sure. And I've tested this as well. And I've tested the colors of the buttons. Like this is like later down the line, like when you're running out of things to test, I've tested. Having a full background versus a no background. So basically like you have a little pop-up that comes up. Do I want, I want to cover, I want to block out the background versus people being able to see the background I've tested the color of that background.
It makes a huge difference. I found that using white, compared to black and having a slight opacity so they can, I don't know if that's the right word, but like I said, Tran— transparency. So people can see through the, the background, you know, and just testing the hell out of that. Really going a long way because the difference between your and filmmaking before, and all of that's part of marketing, that the difference with filmmaking and with what we're talking about now, and what's, what's kind of available today is that you have this immediacy of feedback.
And so you can incrementally test small things constantly and have these like rapid succession of improvements and like constantly.
[00:11:27] Andri: But there's also the fact that there is no one recipe for success. Every entrepreneur, every website or web master should actually test their own audience on what they respond to and what works best for them.
And when you say that a transparent background, black 50% of opacity works best for you, that would not necessarily work best for my audience. People who are from Estonia, people who are aged 40 plus, buying these RO units, for example.
[00:11:57] Logan: I agree. Yeah. That's why, that's why the first principle of marketing is know your own audience, right?
If, if you are assuming that let's say I've told you what I've told you and people listening at home, they've heard what I've said and they go and apply. As a rule than then it may work, but it may not as well. And that's why testing is so important, you know? So you're, you're constantly testing to optimize you know, the messaging, right?
To optimize the performance of your collateral.
[00:12:27] Andri: I love how well we circled back the first part and like made it whole and packed it up nicely. Started from rules of marketing ended back on rules of marketing. Worked really well.
[00:12:36] Logan: Yeah.
[00:12:36] Andri: But that's what you get when you have a professional interviewer like me.
[00:12:39] Logan: Exactly. It's very, very astute.
[00:12:43] Andri: Yes. Thank you. So now you have a good lead magnet. You've optimized it. You have tons of emails flowing in.
[00:12:51] Logan: Well, let's say, let's say now I have a good pop-up.
[00:12:54] Andri: Now you have a good pop-up. And do you have emails flowing in?
[00:12:57] Logan: So I have emails flowing in and so my first step would be essentially to do more or less what you did. Which is you created an ebook and I would keep that, but I, I know you put a lot of heart and soul into that, but I would've kept it real simple. Like, like I probably would have kept it black and white, honestly, if that's just me, you know? Cause I don't know. I don't know. Is this good? I don't know. I'm not the determinant.
I'm not the person who is, I'm not in a position to say whether or not this is good.
My customers, my audience would tell me that.
So I have an example of this. I set up a website cause I was like, I got really into fasting a while back a few years ago I was doing this one meal a day thing. And I started writing a blog about it and sharing kind of like my experience and, and the research that I was doing.
Pulling together people's like like research and. You know, people's learnings and kind of like forming my own opinions and sharing that out. And yeah, and I kind of also, because I've had two businesses where I've built this type of funnel and it's gone really well. And I thought, well, if I can do it a third time, then I know that I can do this.
You know, I know what I'm talking about. And I set this up and it worked really well, but the ebook was literally a a Google sheet. And so a Google doc, I just typed the information in. Formatted it really basically. And then download the PDF and I, and, and that was literally, that was the e-book.
So it was as simple as it could get, but it was getting massive amount of downloads because what people are looking for is not necessarily design. Although design is a good element to consider as part of your marketing. But what people are looking for is answers to their problems.
Right. And so to put design at, before the answer is to me, that's a fallacy, you know?
So, okay. So coming back, so you have I have a great, we have a great pop-up now.
[00:14:44] Andri: I actually quickly like to add to the previous point as well.
I think perfectionism and I'm speaking for myself as well, and some of my friends. Perfectionism kind of kills you in this space because you want to be agile. You want to test these things and products quickly, and you don't want to commit too much to something. And I guess a good rule to follow is that 80% is good enough, which is what I'm doing with Tsirkaadia the most of the time, I just put something on website I've set up. It works. People are like buying it. Then it's actually converting.
And with Whomesome, for example, the lead magnet, the book you're referring to. It's from my part, it's just an assumption that people want to know this stuff, because this was the first thing we created for Whomesome. We did not know our audience and we're still finding our audience.
And we're just assuming that what we want to tell people is what people actually want to know. But the sweet spot is at the crossover of those two circles.
So you're completely right. That we shouldn't jump head in, and test with little things and later down the line, when I've, let's say tested this e-book for a year and got a lot of feedback and made new versions, then I could maybe design it and create a, like a fancier thing around it.
[00:16:02] Logan: Yeah, exactly.
I mean, the challenge with being really intelligent, Like, you're a very intelligent person. You are very smart when it comes to you know, your, your subject matter. And the challenge that comes with that is you don't realize just how naive people are. And I even noticed that, like, I'm pretty, I'm pretty like well-read on, you know, general health and that sort of thing.
But even when we're talking, I'm just like, holy shit. Like I can't keep up.
So being able to you know, like how do I put this.
Being like, yes, just kind of about to who's your audience, like really understanding who your audience is and where they're at in terms of their sophistication. If your audience are biohackers, they're going to be highly sophisticated.
They're going to be like you. They can talk about this at you know, like extraordinary depth because they've done their own research and they can debate and they can, you know learn from this kind of high-level discussion or like, you know, really like deep discussion. Whereas if you're talking to you know Jaan from Tallinn.
And he's just decided to start thinking about maybe looking after his health a little bit. You're going to be having a very different conversation. And if you have a conversation with him at the level that you will be talking to your biohacker friends if you're talking to him at that level, he's going to find that to be intimidating or He's going to find it, he's gonna, yeah, it's gonna find it confusing.
You might be able to keep up, but you won't find any value in it and you might even make them feel deterred from looking after his health.
[00:17:28] Andri: Intimidation was a good keyword here, and I have a perfect segue to the next topic, but intimidation is something that my, my partner, Miriam. She has her own holistic health for women Instagram.
She's a nutritionist and she's knows women's female health very well. So she's a female health expert. That's the correct description.
And just recently, she heard somebody being referred to her Instagram page. And the person was put off because they felt intimidated by the content that was on her Instagram page.
So this is what you're talking about.
And what happened to us recently with Whomesome as well. Our list is quite small. The Whomesome list is currently only 300 people.
And what happened to us is we started putting out weekly newsletters, which we're now going to cut down to bi-weekly after this incident that just actually happened yesterday.
So we put out a last week's newsletter and we had seven unsubscribers.
So that's 300 people, 50% open rate, 150 delivered and seven people unsubscribed. So that's like around 5% unsubscribe rate, which is unacceptable at this time.
And what I think might have happened is the newsletters were not actually addressing their problems. We were sharing industry news. And these are not the people who care about the EU regulation status. They want to know how to clean up mold and be healthy. So we've decided to slow it down, not send out this many newsletters and only send out newsletters if we really want to tell something. And if we really have something topical to share.
And with newsletters in general, let's say you have the lead magnet. You have the popup, you have emails flowing in.
My inbox is completely filled with spam and newsletters, and I hardly read any. And I keep unsubscribing them on a weekly basis and I don't know how they keep popping up.
But I have been sending out my own weekly newsletter for my personal brand, for more than a year now. And I still have a set steady 60% open rate. And from as much as I've heard, that's really good. Feel free to tell me otherwise.
But I don't monetize or sell anything through my newsletters. I just share what I've been up to and what I've been researching or pondering and experimenting with.
But you have also been successful with newsletters and it's somewhat of your specialty I know.
How would you frame newsletters for people? Or if you want to take a step back, if you have the emails, would the newsletter be the outlet that you choose?
[00:20:07] Logan: I mean a newsletter is maybe the wrong word. It's just the term that we use in the, in the industry, but it's not necessarily a newsletter. You know, like let's say, if I look at in, in my current business, we send two emails per week.
As a newsletter, we also have automations that go out depending on what people have done. And if they subscribed to something, have they requested some information, you know, this sort of thing. So we have these automations that go out and then we also send newsletters.
The newsletters won't get sent to people if they have received another email that is, has a higher level of priority. I won't get sent to that person. Won't be received by the. What was the question again? How, how would I frame a newsletter? How would I describe what a newsletter is?
[00:20:52] Andri: Yes. How would you frame newsletters for people? Why should they be doing them? What expectations should someone set if they're sending out a newsletter with their business? What are the metrics that they should look out for? And what goals to set around sending newsletters?
[00:21:08] Logan: Yeah. Okay.
So the main thing about a newsletter is a, you've got to have high volumes or it's ideal to have as high volumes as possible of new emails coming in.
And then with that newsletter is maintaining a good level of open rate, maintaining a subscriber base that is engaged and. You know, if you, if you lose engagement, then you need to work on getting your engagement back and assuming that you're doing all the things, building your email database and maintaining a good, healthy email list, then what you have available to you.
There is an audience of people who are highly interested in what you have to say and what you have to share, who you can contact on demand to share information or to promote. And I would suggest as a, as a good habit would be to do both on a regular basis. So for us, we, we do this on two times a week.
That's pretty high cadence, but that's an e-commerce brand to let's say a millennial audience and the audience is women.. So that's kind of like, I guess, fairly typical, you know, if you look at like beauty businesses, it's a beauty brand. If you look at beauty brands in general, like they have a really high cadence of weekly newsletters.
So, so in a nutshell, what you have there is you have a, a tool, a platform for contacting your audience on a regular basis and a form of contact that you might use as you just want to share, because you've got to kind of. Share information and that they really want going back to like the know your audience thing.
You got to share information, that's going to keep them opening and clicking on your on your emails so that you have this high engagement, because you want to maintain a high level of engagement. Yeah. With your audience. And then on the other hand, you've got the ability to send offers. So whenever you have a sale or when you, whenever you want to promote a particular feature about your product or something like that.
So let's say for coming back to Tsirkaadia, you guys sell you sell. Products and you sell products that will help people maintain, create and maintain a clean environment in your home. So content might be, you've released a video where you, the founder of Tsirkaadia shares your top 10 tips for, you know, maintaining a clean home or getting mold out of your carpet or whatever it might be; dust out of your bed, or, you know, these sort of things.
It's like content, you know, so that's what keeps people coming back. But then who cares if people are coming back, if they're not buying right. Cause you're in business at the end of the day. So then on the other hand, therefore you're, you're, you're want to be sending information that is going to.
Caused them to buy from you. Maybe an offer one day, if you've, if you've got someone who's been on your list for a long period of time and you want to make an offer to get them to commit to buying, or you release a new product instead of running ads or just ads, you can send out a campaign as well.
So there's two really cool things about email. I think I've covered that fairly broadly, but covered most aspects of email, but there are two really cool things about email that I really like.
And one of them is that. It's almost free. So you have let's say I have a list of I think it's 180,000 people or something along those lines on our email list.
And so when we send out an email and we make, you know, good amount of sales from that, that would cost maybe with advertising that would cost thousands. To try it. Let's say in a month we would spend in the thousands to generate the same amount. Like maybe with ads, we would spend 30% or 20% at least to try to generate what we would from the emails, from the email campaigns.
But with email, we would spend maybe 5%. So it's a really high return on investment campaign. Sorry. Marketing channel..
So that's what I really like about it. That was one thing. And the other thing is, in a world where I guess it's becoming harder and harder to reach your audience because companies like Apple within new iOS 14.5 update that came out last year, makes it makes it so that it's, well, right now it's like impossible to get third party data.
Third party data, meaning someone else's data. So you have to try to collect this data yourself.
What I mean is you used to be able to run an ad a really high efficiency that would target someone based on data that's that Facebook has about that person or someone else has about that person because you know, they aggregate the data. So it would be really hard to target that person.
Whereas if I own the data, then I can give that data to Facebook and I can say target this person for me.
So if I have a database full of people, and I think most, most email marketing platforms will allow this or have the ability for this. You can connect your email marketing platform to Facebook, and feed your data, your database into Facebook.
It's going to match your data with it's going to match your data and your database with the people on their platform. And you can target those people that are in your database via Facebook.
[00:26:23] Andri: So that sounds like I'm taking the conversions and highly engaged people that I have in my database. And I can even create, let's say lookalike audiences on Facebook, to find people who are like these people.
[00:26:36] Logan: Correct.
[00:26:37] Andri: With the same interests. Okay. That sounds really powerful actually.
[00:26:40] Logan: It is. Yeah. I mean, when you think about a database, most people think I have a name, I have an email address, cool.
But actually what you have is you have... If you have the name, you have the name. You have the email address, you have the source where they came from. You have, when they came to your website, you have the pages that they went to. You have all the popups they've interacted with. If you connect other applications into your email database, so into your email platform.
So let's say your customer service platform connects into your email platform. Then you have that data in there as well. And you can create more, a richer context around each one of your people in your database. And based on that context, you can run more specific campaigns in Facebook.
[00:27:26] Andri: Circling back for a second.
How did you land on the two emails per week? What kind of tests to run to experiment with.
[00:27:34] Logan: So we actually started with one email per month and I think this is like three years ago or something. And then we thought, oh, well, what would happen if we did two emails per month?
And so we started doing two emails per month and we noticed that we would make more revenue and we had no adverse effects.
So we were like, okay, cool. What about if we did one a week?
And same thing again. Okay. Okay. We'll just making more revenue, but there's no adverse effects or the adverse effects at this rate are very minimal. So the unsubscribe rates are very minimal.
The revenue and the benefits outweigh the unsubscribe rate. Well, okay, cool. And then we got advised by a email marketing, a specialty agency. And they suggested we do two emails per week. So we tried two emails per week.
And again, we were just making more revenue, but the adverse effects were really minimal.
So we were, you know. We didn't do it without reluctancy, you know, like we were really like careful not to piss people off and, and negatively affect our email sender score, but it's been fine.
And I mean, maybe we should try three emails per week, but it does just feel like that's maybe a little bit too much, but that's something we can probably try.
[00:28:47] Andri: And with this high traffic of email sales.. Cause you mentioned that you have to give content what people like. I would imagine the way I could find it sustainable is that I send out content that I create any way for other channels and I just include this content that links to this content, to other channels in the email newsletters as well.
I guess let's say I put out a YouTube video a week with Whomeosme, but I also send the same YouTube video with the newsletter. So that's content for news newsletter. People, they know that the video came out, but it's also sending traffic to you YouTube, and it just all ties together.
So I guess the question here is how much do you repurpose content for your newsletters or in general? Or like you create one piece of content, how much can you get from that? Or what's your thinking around this?
[00:29:37] Logan: Yeah. Okay. I love this. So as a marketer, you're always trying to think of what can I share with my audience that's noteworthy.
And so, you know, in our business, we have two people whose almost primary job is to create content. So we have one girl in her, almost her primary job is to create blog content.
So she writes one blog post per week, and she rewrites one blog post per week. Rewriting is a really good habit of making sure that blog posts are kept up to date. And that sends positive signals to Google to say, the content on this website is very relevant. And we're constantly looking at how we can improve it.
So her job is to write blog posts. And then what she does is she'll take this blog post and then she will disseminate this all over the internet, she'll post it to Twitter. She'll post it to Instagram as a story. She'll promote it in an email she'll have it boosted on Facebook. She'll put it on Reddit and Quora, you know, like just sharing it out to all our audiences everywhere.
And then what happens is she passes that blog post to the other girl and the other girl is more in charge of creating the like video content and more visual content for platforms like Instagram and TikTok and stuff and YouTube.
So she'll take that piece of content and she actually is the one who turns that into a story on instagram and, and Facebook. But she'll turn that blog content into a video. Basically the blog is a script and then, she'll create a video talking about the, you know, whatever that blog post is about.
And then that in this exact same manner gets disseminated all over the internet. And then we'll take that YouTube video and we'll condense it down and turn that into a Instagram story and Facebook story, and maybe even a TikTok video. And then we'll also take the YouTube video and we'll disseminate that out through emails.
And we might even take that YouTube video and post that as a unique post on our blog. And, you know, so we're constantly repurposing content.
So you can take one piece of content you've turned into, you know, a hundred pieces of content.
[00:31:32] Andri: So you mentioned something about rewriting content that Google really likes it. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I had to swallow my pride and start teaching myself digital . Marketing from scratch.
One of the things that I've been learning for the past weeks is SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. If you're not familiar with it, there are certain tactics and checks to make your websites stand up more in search engines, such as Google, and when people are looking for certain products or for answers to the questions.
So this is, let's say intent based marketing. Someone is looking for a solution for the problem and your job is to find out what people are looking for and put the solutions in front of them. And S E O is based on optimizing your content for certain keywords that people would actually type out to look for.
But to me, the first page of Google seems to be dominated by paid ads and giants in the space and that smaller companies that are starting out have the zero chance.
I've heard about long tail keywords. So that's maybe what we want to talk about bit, but also when I'm browsing the web, I rarely click on page two results, not to mention going deeper. Yet, SEO is still recommended as a growth tactic.
So my question is, from your point of view, it, is it still even possible for a new company to come up from nowhere and rank on the first page of Google?
[00:32:55] Logan: Hmm, great question. And the answer is most of the time.
And actually I would, I would rephrase that.
I'd say the answer is yes. But you have to be selective about your keyword.
If you go into an area of business that is super, super, super competitive, then you have to be really selective about your keywords. Let's say you go into digital marketing. Like digital marketing is so competitive.
And so if you wanted to rank for keywords in digital marketing, you would have to go a really long on your long tail keywords. So let's say digital marketing.
[00:33:27] Andri: Sorry, just a quick little interruption for those who don't know what a long tail keyword is. If you search digital marketing, for example, or just marketing, that's a short keyword.
If you search digital marketing for dummies that's four words, that's a longer tail keyword. And if you want to go for a really long tail keyword, it's digital marketing for dummies in Australia. For example.
So the people who are searching for these things actually put a lot of intent behind their searches and this creates from way more targeted keyword, but also because it's so specific, it has lower traffic.
[00:34:04] Logan: Yeah. So you have like the short, short keywords, and then you have the really long ones. And what you've got to kind of do, if you're in a competitive environment. And how do you find out if it's competitive, there are tools that'll tell you if it's competitive. Like Ubersuggest is the one I use, I really like it.
But the guy who ranks number one for digital marketing also owns Ubersuggest.
So there's tools that can help you figure out A, is your area of business competitive and B what are the low-hanging fruit insofar as keywords go?
Am I answering a question? I can't remember. Was there a question?
[00:34:34] Andri: Sorry. Yes. The question is is it still possible to rank on the first page of Google for new businesses?
[00:34:41] Logan: Yeah. Yeah. So I'd say that it's like any business really? It's like, if the area of business is super, super, super competitive, then it's going to be super, super difficult to rank in that area.
I have a friend who he started his business maybe three years ago where he was a digital agency and him and him and his now fiance they, they were running this digital agency and they were, they were going all right, but they weren't like, they weren't like banking checks, you know, they were just, they were going okay.
And then we would, we would just like catch up and talk and kind of share ideas. And I suggested that, you know, you should probably look at. Niching down into a particular area within digital marketing. And so what he did was he had to look at what he's currently like, what his, what his customer profile looks like at the moment in so far as he's got, let's say 10 customers, are there any patterns in the industries?
And he found that there was one industry. The company is called, Hey digital. And there was one area or one industry that he was particularly involved in. And that was his background was in SAAS software as a service companies. And so as a result of that, he was also heavily kind of like investing in so far as his client base goes in that industry.
And so I was like, well, why don't you try to niche down into this area.
So it was like, it was a strategic business move to start with, not just marketing. It wasn't just, "oh, what keyword should we rank for?" It was as a business, where's our, whatever you call it, blue ocean or whatever.
And so he started looking at the, you know, the first questions that came back. Well, you know, this is actually pretty hard area because of the analytics and stuff like that. But once we kind of talked that over and then he went back and had a look at a situation and then they decided we're just . Going to do it.
They figured out, you know, the solution around analytics and they were like, we're going to do it. And then from there it became really easy because there was no digital agency for SAAS. You know anywhere. And so he would do the keyword research for that. And, you know, he wins every time and he would do like he would do like podcasts or I think he does live streaming.
And then he turns into a podcast and he developed this really unique strategies around his niche.
So you've got to look at like, if you're a digital agency and you want to rank for SEO, that's going to be really, really hard. I think at this rate at this point, because it's such a mature industry, but if you're a digital agency that specializes in cryptocurrency marketing or whatever blockchain marketing, or whatever, then you can probably, I mean, even that might be really competitive by now, but you can probably you know, niche down to these types.
Or DeFi, DeFi agency or something like that, then there's where you're going to find your opportunities.
There's the old saying? What is it? There's riches and niches. I love that saying because it's so absolutely true. In my last two businesses, both the businesses that became multi-million dollar businesses really quickly, is not because Logan's a genius or anything like that.
I got really like. Kind of lucky, you know, because the first business was a mobile app development agency, when there were . Almost no mobile app development agencies. And because we had no money for Google ads, we did SEO ended up ranking number one for mobile app development agency, Melbourne. And that made us a shitload of cash.
And then the second business I set up was a beauty brand that sold a particular type of hair extension called a halo hair extension. That's the industry description. And and we ranked number one for halo, hair extensions, Australia and that made us a shitload of cash.
And then from there, we ranked for a number of other keywords. So before anyone was even doing this in both of those instances, we started ranking for the keywords. And, and as a result of that the, the organic growth was tremendous.
[00:38:36] Andri: So I guess it also works in a way where you start ranking for one keyword, it's going to boost also your domain authority, which is a metric in SEO, and you're going to start making better for other keywords as a result of that boost.
[00:38:51] Logan: For sure.
[00:38:52] Andri: Okay. And this also sounds like knowing and understanding SEO and doing this nice research is already very good at at the stage of a business plan, because you can research if people are actually looking for this service or this company you want to create.
And I guess it's a very good data point to take into consideration.
Let's say you want to start a new business washing, uh, I have a dog house back here, washing dog houses. And you think it's a really good idea. Your friends tell you that's a really good idea, but then you go on a, let's say Ubersuggest, for example, and Google like "doghouse washing services" and there's zero.
So that should give you an indication of maybe you shouldn't get into this nieche, because people are not actually looking for this.
[00:39:42] Logan: Yeah, I think, I think that's a good point. Like it's a good way to get the early validation for your idea. So for sure, a hundred percent and I'm a conservative. And so I like in my business moves, I'm very conservative.
And so I would use that as an indication of whether or not I should or shouldn't do something.
But at the same time when let's say a is kind of like a far out example, but like, let's say when Apple founder, Steve jobs announced the iPhone or the iPod. I don't know if there was anyone searching for iPods, you know, so, but they're in a different situation as well.
I don't know, like I'm just going to share like what I do and I would definitely do what you would just exactly what you said.
[00:40:26] Andri: So it's finding the balance. Just use that as a data point and make informed decisions based on that data point. So going a bit deeper or maybe wrapping it up as well. A bit is, you run a successful company and you ran successful companies by most or any standards.
I don't know. Sorry. Maybe if not, I'm not a professional company, evaluator person.
But what do you wish that you may be knew earlier about lending new client? And if you want to scale your business in the form of getting more clients.
[00:41:01] Logan: Ah, yeah. Yeah. So I, okay. So I'm not interested in clients because a client is like, let's say if you're an agency, you have clients, or if you are a retailer, you have customers interested in retail because it's more.
In my, in my experience. So, but regardless, I think it's, it's going to be more or less the same thing. Right?
[00:41:19] Andri: It's the language barrier. Customers is what I meant.
[00:41:23] Logan: The approach is going to be the same. You know how would I approach getting clients is the same as how I would approach getting customers. The first thing I would do is just going back to the last point is I would, I would try to find my nieche.
I will try to find an area of business where I can be the best and I can be uncontested. Partly because, going back to the original, like my introduction or whatever. I'm a little bit lazy and I don't want to put in a massive amount of effort ongoingly just to stay competitive. It's, I'm just not interested in that.
So I want to get the maximum result out of minimal effort. And I know that if I go into an area of business, into a market where there is no competitors and I have the perfect solution, I'm going to win, I'm going to win at least for awhile. And I'm going to be the only person doing for awhile.
And in that short time I can develop significant marketing assets. That's going to give me a competitive advantage down the line. So for example let's take my current e-commerce business. We developed this process that we've just been talking about SEO and lead magnets and email marketing.
And this is, this is like the quarter, our marketing organic traffic we get probably I think it's like 80, 90% of our traffic is organic. So it's an asset that we've got. We were the first people to do halo hair extensions, especially in Australia, but eCommerce period.
And. As far as I'm aware, maybe I'm wrong, but at least from my research, that's what I found. There might've been one or two that I didn't see until maybe later or something, but but we were the, we were the only ones doing that at the time. I was going to say, yeah. And so when everyone else came into the market, they had a hard time taking that channel from us.
When it comes to SEO, like we're just totally, totally uncontested. You can't knock us off our perch because all we do, our entire website is totally focused on owning halo hair extensions. I mean, even right now we are organically growing and taking the keywords from other people in other countries other than Australia.
And we're ranking first page, like even number one, in many cases for these types of keywords in European countries, in Asian countries, in the, the Americas. So you just, we just focused on this. We also do advertising of Facebook ads. We do a little bit of like referral marketing, all this sort of stuff.
We do social media actually quite a lot. But as social media, like they can take that from us. Paid ads. Cost is going up. It's becoming more competitive. They can take that from us, but they can't take SEO like that's uncontested.
[00:44:06] Andri: So build roots up and become uncontestable. I think that's the keyword here.
[00:44:12] Logan: Yeah. Basically, you know, just find your, find your micro-niche and build a business that is really strong within that micro-niche.
I mean, personally, I'm interested at the moment. I find it quite quite good to build a business that's around like one, two, maybe, maybe 5 million in revenue. Maybe like maybe one to 3 million in Euros, or USD or whatever.
I find that to be kind of like the sweet spot. When I, when I'm talking about small businesses. You start really small and then you grow into like something that's significant, you know, like relatively significant. We're not talking about a hundred million dollar company. That's a whole different ball game, but something relatively significant, it's good.
[00:44:57] Andri: It's going to be a long journey. I'm this is what I'm going to try and do with Tsirkaadia. I still have a lot of figuring out to do, but it seems like I'm going to get distribution rights for Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. So I'm going to start covering this area and maybe expand a bit to Europe and get my supply chain and shipping set up.
But that's a whole other conversation for a whole lot of time.
Logan. it's been great fun. I have tons of notes and things I have to go through now because that's the reason I'm doing this podcast. These are for me. I want to learn. If you learn something that's great. I'm happy, but this is my time, my learning.
So I just want to thank you for sharing all your knowledge. Coming over here, sharing your time with us. Do you have any closing comments that you want to make or any asks or any socials or websites to share. This is where you can do shameless self marketing here because you've taught us so much about marketing.
[00:45:54] Logan: Yeah. Cool. Okay. Well I'll, I'll do a quick plug, but then also want to just share like some parting notes.
My shameless plug would be, I don't have a personal brand and that's something that I'll probably look at doing this year. But my shameless plug would be if you, are interested in having a look at what we've been talking about and what that looks like, in practice, go to sittingprettyhalohair.com.
So sitting like sitting on a chair, pretty, pretty girl, halo, like the, what a, what an angel has and hair, which is on your head. It'll make sense, once you see the website and once you go there. If you want to have a look at what it looks like feel free to go there.
And then I guess, you know, in the future, when I start my own personal brand, I used to do personal branding, but I got really overwhelmed by that.
[00:46:38] Andri: I found some skeletons in your closet when Googling you.
[00:46:41] Logan: Don't Google me. Yeah, there's like a lot of really old shit. And the last parting notes I would say are like, what we've talked about in this conversation, is a lot of information.
Like there's a lot that we've talked about. And by no means, have we thoroughly covered all aspects of this topic. So there's a lot in it, and that's okay. If you decide that you want to use this as a strategy, which I think is a really good one. If you decide that you want to use this to grow your business or build a business, then I would say accept the fact that it's going to take time and it's like any skill, it's something you get good at. And it's going to take learning, and trial and error.
Listen to podcasts. Learn from people like Neil Patel, who's the guy who owns Ubersuggest. Learn from people and then try it out, test it, see how it works and get good at it over time. By doing this one thing don't do too many different things by doing this one thing over a period of time uh, eventually becomes easy and then you end up in a position where you can deploy the same strategy over and over.
I feel like if I was to start a new business today, that's exactly what I would do. What I've talked about now is exactly what I would do again. I would just do the exact same thing.
I have the framework. I know how it works. I have the systems, I have the processes all documented. I would just do the exact same thing again. And it would most likely work.
I say most likely because I have no guarantees, but every time I've done it, it's worked. So basically what I'm describing is the the process of developing a skill that enables you to print cash, essentially you have a business to print cash.
[00:48:22] Andri: That's great. Logan, this has been great. This has been great fun.. Thank you again. If this podcast survives and it, it should, it should let's hope it does. I hope it does as well. Then we're definitely going to have a round two and have some fun.
Well Logan is in Estonia where I'm actually from, we met in Estonia.
So he's sitting in his old town apartment right now. Beautiful background by the way. But I am, currently in Portugal and I miss my dear friend Logan.
So anytime we're going to end up in the same room we're going to drink kombuchas, have some fun and yeah, miss you, man. Can't wait to hang out and talk to you soon.
[00:48:56] Logan: Yeah, miss too, man. We'll chat soon.
[00:48:57] Andri: And everyone else listening. If you like this podcast, please go ahead and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And also consider subscribing to my weekly newsletter on andripeetso.com. That's A N D R I P E E T S O .com. It's a super simple five bullet point newsletter format that I loved and adapted or stole from Tim Ferriss, since I loved that format.
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