The LIGHTHOUSE Effect: Building a Personal Brand for Lead Generation

In his podcast, High Level Spotlight Sessions, Chase Bucker and I discussed the LIGHTHOUSE effect on branding and scaling opportunities by hiring VAs.

The Power of Personal Branding in Lead Generation for Agencies

We’re always focused on our clients and neglect our personal brands. The “cobbler’s son has no shoes” is true. The number one issue with agencies is that they need more leads.

The trick to generating leads is to become well-known, not because you have a Lamborghini or a mansion, but because the people you want as clients in the niche you’ve chosen as an agency respect that person you’re with.

For example, say your niche is real estate. If I told you, “Hey, you know you’re a real estate agent, you wanna be able to get more seller listings, I can help you do that, and let’s hop on a 15-minute call,” you would think that you’re being sold as all the other digital marketers do. I am trying to get you onto a webinar or a call and then sell you some high-ticket retainer-type package.

Instead, what if I am one of the 400,000 real estate agents that follows Tom Ferry, the number one realty coach? He and I are together in Dallas teaching a masterclass, and Tom Ferry says,

“Man, I can’t believe we have Dennis Yu here today because we’re going to cover this and this. I respect this man immensely. I’ve known him for years and seen him implement all the techniques he teaches. We do the same things ourselves and teach these same things. And today, we’re going to have a masterclass, and Dennis and I are going to go through this, how to rank in GMB, how to do SEO, how to run Facebook ads, how to do call tracking, how to do social media, how to do TikTok ads, how to do all these different things.”

And you see, he and I go on and on about all these different topics.

How does that change how that looks and the approach to the mood?

For sure, you want to work with the best.

How to Turn Your Clients into LIGHTHOUSES: A Formula for Success

You start with a client; that client doesn’t have to be at the top of the industry. If you start with someone at the top of the industry, it’s risky because if you fail, that could be a really big belly flop in front of a lot of people, and then you might not be able to recover.

You list your clients; who’s the best one you could turn into a LIGHTHOUSE?

A LIGHTHOUSE is one where you can teach by their example, by what you’ve done for them. You interview them. It’s not because they’re a testimonial, but you’re showing what you did with this client, and they’re confirming that it works.

And it feels more like a conversational podcast, not a sales pitch, not a webinar, not a testimonial. And then when you have that podcast that covers how it got set up, what you did, the results, and the things you needed from the client, like producing videos, writing blog posts, taking pictures, collecting reviews, or answering the phone, it becomes a formula, a roadmap of how you did it.

Then there are other people who are in the same verticals as the LIGHTHOUSE. So you will take that content and target those others in the same vertical.

The Content Factory – The Power of Content Production and Distribution

Once you’ve made the podcast, you need to use what we call the Content Factory.

So you will chop that up into different pieces and put it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or blog posts. You will run a dollar a day against it so that everyone in that vertical will see it, not just your friends. If you target people who follow who’s at the top, you’re reaching the right people.

So it’s the production of that content and the using dollar a day to get that distribution. And then that creates inbound leads.

During my entire career of 30 years in digital marketing, I have never done cold calling. I’ve never done cold outreach.

Whether it’s Quiznos, a huge chain with lots of locations, or All State Insurance, Nike or Starbucks, or any of these, but not just the big boys, even little folks, every single client we’ve ever had has been because they came to us using this technique.

This technique works whether you’re just getting going and are new or already have a hundred people, like my buddy Chris Mechanic who’s growing from a hundred people to 200. It works no matter where you are. For example, you could be a solo consultant where you’re still working at a regular job and starting your agency on the side, or you’re a stay-at-home mom with three kids and want to start an agency because things have changed.

You simply start by amplifying what you have done with an existing client.

Proof means everything. They don’t care about whether you’re good at digital marketing. They have no way of determining how good you are.

I take photos and videos of the clients I’m with. Some are well-known people, while some are not so well-known.

For example, we teach at Digital Marketer, and I took a photo with the new president, Mark De Grasse. So, we show this to everyone who likes Digital Marketer. Another client runs a salon, so we show her stuff to all those who have salons.

That trust causes people to say, “He’s working with that one salon owner and these two or three other salon owners, so I think I could probably work with him.”

Don’t Scare Your Leads Away with Digital Marketing Jargon

That is the whole thing about relationships, and I think many people think that digital marketing is about somehow showing that you’re better at digital marketing. Don’t even try that. That’s just a waste of time to show that you’re better.

That will backfire because the more you go into the depth of digital marketing and the complexity, the more you will scare them away.

You need just one. Because the other thing is when you have that one client and it’s Med Spas, they give you more and more of that. So it is easier, scalable, and more profitable to have 50 Med Spa clients than have ten clients from random verticals.

You can have repeatable excellence where you can reuse the same templates repeatedly.

How “A Dollar a Day” Can Revolutionize Your Advertising Strategy

A dollar a day is how you have Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and all these other systems work for you. Beyond not getting enough leads, the biggest issue is not getting any reach.

And so, agencies are cynical and say that Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat are forcing us to advertise; they tried advertising, but it didn’t work. That’s like saying you went to the gym once and worked out hard but still didn’t have six-pack abs.

A dollar a day is, you’re feeding in little pieces, little one-minute snippets, and micro-targeting the exact audience you want to reach.

Here are some examples to give you a sense of this technique’s power.

• My buddy Bryce Clark had gone to a Honda dealer where they messed up his car but refused to fix it. So we targeted all the people who worked at that Honda dealer.

We also targeted people who worked at Honda corporate headquarters in Japan.

After two days, the general manager of that dealership called him up and agreed to do the repair free of cost and that he’ll give him thousand dollars to stop whatever he was doing. So they think that it’s this massive campaign, but we’re micro-targeting a very narrow audience.

• My buddy Eric Ludwig was the chief marketing officer at Rosetta Stone, a big company, and they’ve been a client of ours for a while, but then they had some changes. So they’re not a client right now, but for his birthday, I said, “Hey Eric, happy birthday. You old man. I’m only a couple of years behind you.” And I targeted all the people that work at Rosetta Stone in marketing in Arlington Virgin. So all these people are bombarded with my fun little thing on Facebook.

And I got a cease and desist from the chief legal officer because they thought we were running this multimillion-dollar campaign.

• I had another friend who had the license for Elvis pillows, Elvis blankets, Elvis bedding blank, all this Elvisy stuff, and wanted to get his stuff inside Walmart. We targeted the people who work at Walmart in merchandising in Bentonville, Arkansas, where their headquarters is; not the random person at the Walmart near you, but the people at their headquarters in charge of purchasing. Six months later, his stuff is in Walmart.
• Let’s say you get written up in the local paper, let’s say, the Dallas Morning news. They cover you stating that High Level has a beautiful office in Dallas and that you are the top agency. I could take that and use a dollar a day, which is inception. And then make sure that the people who work at the Dallas Morning News, those who work at the LA Times, and those who work at these other places see that.
• You could also take any content. So let’s say all the different podcasts where you’ve interviewed customers or snippets of Zoom calls, where there’s positive feedback, and you get their permission. So you collect all that, take those little snippets, and then use a dollar a day for remarketing against anyone who’s been to your website for the last 180 days. So you remarket to them on Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all that.

By just using a dollar a day, you’re reaching a micro audience of 50 and 200 people; it’s the right targeted small group but has a massive effect.

You’re just retargeting against your list or against people who’ve been to your website or against people who’ve watched any of your videos on Facebook for the last 180 days or anyone in the last 60 days on TikTok who’s seen some of your content.

A dollar a day is all about micro-targeting.

It’s a ninja inception kind of thing because what it does is if you’re using it for lead gen, it causes people to think they see your stuff all over the place, and they think, wow, this Chase Buckner guy, he’s everywhere. If you need to build audiences, use the Facebook Business Manager. But if you’ve already built your audiences, then you’re going to hit the Blue Boost Post button on each of the particular posts.

Mastering the Art of Hiring Virtual Assistants: How to Screen, Manage, and Maximize Productivity

Hiring a VA could be a disaster if you don’t have a screening process to ensure they’re good.

Suppose you make a job post on online jobs.ph, which has a million VAs, you might get flooded with three or 400 different VAs. So, how can you tell whether they’re any good or not?

Regarding the screening of VAs, we have this job description for a video editor, a graphics designer, a content editor, or a WordPress designer. We have six different roles. Never try to hire a VA to do everything called the super VA, and they don’t exist.

For that particular role, buried in the description of what you do, examples of the stuff that we have,  the training, and so on, somewhere in the middle, we’ll say, to show that you’re paying attention, use the keyword “rabbit,” in the subject line.

When all these applications come in, only the ones that say “Rabbit” do we reply. And that will save most of your headache on the first part.

Second, once you go through the whole screening process, we have a three-phase screening process where they have to complete a quiz and do a sample exercise, like editing a sample video to show they can do it. Then, put them on a tryout for 30 days, starting at $3 an hour.

Then you have to manage them. You have to have things like daily check-ins. There’s what we call SOD and EOD, which are the start of day and the end of day. If you don’t have them check in at the beginning and end of the day, it’ll just be all over the place. So think about people in a factory or people who work in retail. They have to clock in. So if you don’t have your VAs clocking in, they might get distracted.

So you have to force them to work these different shifts. And so that means you have to have someone available.

Part of the time, once you start ha, once you have more than five or six VAs, you can designate a team lead who then does the check-ins for everybody. But it’s really important to have that daily accountability.

My buddy John Jonas is the founder of Online jobs.ph, the largest marketplace in the world for VAs. And he wrote a book. You can go to online jobs.ph, you can download that for free on how do you hire your first VA successfully.

Once you hire one VA, you start hiring more, and then you look back, and you say, “Man, I don’t know how I was able to operate without having these VAs” to be able to schedule things or do customer care and all the stuff that is repetitive that you don’t wanna do.

Instead of feeling like the burden is on you to come up with all the stuff for the VA to do, turn it backward. Because the whole point of the VA is to relieve your pressure, make the VA track everything.

So we give them stuff in Skype, BaseCamp, or email, and then they have to track their list. It’s their responsibility to track what they’ve done, what they will do, and what they need from you.

So, if a VA is confused about something, they know they need to ask you, and they can’t just say, “Oh, I just was quiet cuz I didn’t know.” So, as long as they’re always keeping that list of things to do, you can see that there’s a pipeline, and it’s very easy to keep a pipeline of a week plus, two weeks plus, of work ahead of them.

Humanizing Your Brand: The Power of One-Minute Videos and $1 Boosting

Make one-minute videos to humanize themselves and then boost it for a dollar a day.

Make short-form videos, like 15-second vertical videos where you pull out your phone and make a little video. Then, post this on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social channel and boost it for a dollar a day to all the people who like your client or are in the same vertical.