Transcript:

00:00:14-3           Hey everyone. Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing On The Move. Today I am back on Melbourne on the way to work, on the way to the office, in absolutely horrible weather. It is pouring down with rain, and I do not know exactly why I came back because San Diego was fantastic and sunny and 25 degrees and awesome. Now I am in shitty weather.

00:00:34-0           I wanted to share with you guys a couple of my takeaways from Traffic & Conversion. Some of the main pieces of knowledge bombs that I took away, some of the people I met, my experience there. I am actually going to be writing a review of the entire event pretty shortly. So you will be able to [cover] to that actually, and there should be able a little video as well attached so you could have an inside look on to what it was like, some of the people I spoke to and a bit of real-life experience, then you could have a look at that. It should be up on the website pretty soon.

00:01:02-2           Some of the takeaways from Traffic & Conversion. The biggest overarching takeaway that I had as soon as I got there after the first night. The first night we got there before the actual event started, I attended something called the Internet Marketing Party. The Internet Marketing Party was a party hosted by some guy who hosts internet marketing parties. I do not exactly know who it was, but I got told that a lot of people are going to be there to buy a ticket. I bought a ticket. Went in with Ricky, who is my friend from Australia, another marketer. We went there, and we did not know what to expect. We went there, had checked out this party which was absolutely packed, all full of marketers. Half the line were familiar faces. To get into this club. It was not really a club like your typical nightclub, but it was a club where it was just like everyone can network. There were some music and things going on. On to this party and the first thing I took away on that night was that networking is absolutely vital. There is nothing like networking with someone in real life versus online. It just does not come anyway close. If you have added me on Facebook and just spoken to me, even if we have been friends for about four years, if ever I meet you in real life, that changes the whole ballgame.

00:02:15-3           That relationship, that rapport that you have built with someone having met them in real life is so on another level. It is just ridiculous. I think it is just so crazy that even I, I did not expect it. Meeting people in real life, going to events like this, is just ridiculously important because it builds that rapport to a whole new level where you actually — you get to know them, you see how they react, you see what their personality is like, and it is a really good judge of character.

00:02:40-4           Some people I just simply hit it off with straight away, others were a bit harder, but it just show you the power of networking going forward from that event, whether you meet people there, or in Traffic & Conversion, or going to a breakfast, or dinner, or party, or wherever you might go to, is off the charts. You just have to go to these events simply for the networking alone. Irrelevant to me if there was any content there, you have to go just for the networking.

00:03:03-7           That was the overarching takeaway, that the event had an ROI before I even attended it because I was there and after that first party, I was just wow, this was like all these marketers, and stuff are new, all these people that I connected with is just a whole different ballgame. The networking and the takeaways from there did not even matter. It was all about who you knew and what you knew. That is what the whole industry is about. It is who you know, how well you know them, what you do for them, what they can do for you, who are the legitimate guys in the industry and who are not, and it is just a matter of getting to know, building relationships, and things like that.

00:03:34-7           Then I came to the event. Now the event was amazing. I have got to say, Traffic & Conversion Summit was awesome. The digital marketing group Perry, Ryan, and Roland put an absolute awesome show on. Their actual event management was amazing. You will hear more about that in the blog post. I am not going to talk your ear off, but essentially the event itself, it was run really well. I do not think I have seen another event run that well before.

00:04:00-7           Then come to the actual content of the event were actually awesome as well. I missed a few breakout sessions because I was doing networking, walking across booths, taking photos, things like that, but the sessions that I went to were awesome. I know one of Perry’s was amazing. Called Sideways List-building, that was really cool. Roland’s were awesome. I absolutely love Roland; I  am probably his biggest fan. He is just an amazing brain. He is just a mastermind of coming to growing businesses. Check out his stuff, if you have not already. I think he is one of the guys that was really, really sort of underestimated in the business. People just see that guy and is like; he  does the mergers and acquisitions and things. But this guy is like literally a genius. I do not think there is anyone else I have met that comes close to that sort of level of genius.

00:04:47-7           What else I took away from the event. Actual actionable steps. I will go through a couple with you that I found that were very valuable in the sessions.

00:04:56-3           One of the biggest ones was growing a team. Towards the end of the — on the last day in the afternoon, there was an event, a session on growing a team, how important team-building was. One thing that was super important that I realized Native Commerce, the company that is run by Ryan, Perry, and Roland, where all their entities are owned by — one thing that I realized was super important is they grow their teams out a certain way. They have Head of Marketing, Head of Content, and Head of Monetization. That is their three pillars. They grow out through those pillars. I found out that one thing I took away was they mentioned that with their US Citizen employees, the people that work in America, what they do is these guys, after a certain amount of time, so after say six months or eights months or whatever it is, these guys get busy right because everyone gets busy. Everyone gets tasks that they hate doing, that take up a lot of their of time. They realize that after you start working a little bit, you start seeing the trends and the routines that people fall into. What they do is — they have I think there are about 200 people in the Philippines that they have trained that are absolutely awesome. So what they do is they use two Filipinos, I think, per employee, to take care of 80 percent of the tasks so that the American guy, or girl, and what they do is that is how they leverage their time. So the person working in America is on a different level of strategy and tactics and things like that so they can execute a high level of work than the Filipino, but what the Filipino does is their takeaway all the groundwork. What they will do is have the Filipino guys get rid of the all the groundwork that the Americans would have been doing. They just get rid of all that. They hire two of them to take care of all the tasks. That is how they get 80 percent more from their American employees. Just by getting rid of those day to day tasks that can be accomplished by just anybody. I found that really fascinating because it leverages the abilities of your employees and makes you get more time, number one, you are paying the Filipinos next to nothing because that is what their salary is like there in the Philippines. Those two things combined just brings that to a whole new level. I took away one big thing there.

00:07:16-2           Document everything all the time, anytime. Ron, he really pushed this one, and I completely agree. He actually mentioned, which I really liked, was starting a wiki. What they do is they have a wiki for their company, so it is essentially like a directory. When you go to software or a service, you go their company, and you will see that they all have a support directory. A knowledge base is what most people call it. Their company has a knowledge base of their own. Whenever an employee does something, works on something, any of the above, they use this knowledge base, and they jot everything down, they write it all down, they take notes, and then if anybody needs to use that in the future, they come back to it, and they improve on it, or people can learn from it and use that to accomplish the task they need to. That is something which I have done internally, and they are doing internally, but I thought, a wiki is really smart idea, like a knowledge base, having that together online so anyone can access it is awesome. Not public for anyone but anyone if you need to give it they can access it. That is one thing that I will be implementing starting right away. I actually have a meeting with my virtual assistant today. All the training that we have, I am going to have her move to a wiki, so that way that can all be accomplished as that was a really big one. So start a wiki, if you have not done that already.

00:08:35-8           The next thing that I picked up, one big takeaway which I had was from Perry’s session, Sideways List-building. What they have done, and this is going to be a shocking way to explain it because I know Perry did an amazing job and I was really, really impressed by this one. Essentially, it is not even that groundbreaking but the way they do it made so much sense, and I did not think of it.

What they have is Survival Life, which is their big survival company. Survival Life is a really big company that they run the survival industry. What they do with that is they have a list of, I think he said like two million, it might me more, might be four, cannot remember exactly, but they have a huge email list in Survival Life. What they do before they start their other company is they will have this list of like four million people, that are interested in survival but this four million people, they are not just interested in survival alone. They might be interested in a ton of other things. What you want to do is you have to find out what is your buyer’s list or email list made up of. What type of people. What they said was they send their email list to a company called Teledata, and what they do is map out the demographics of your list, what percentage of them are high income earners, what their interests are, how old they are, where live…so they get all the information in there, and they pretty much put it all together and tell you what your list is made up of. They have this list of four million people, right, and they know now that 25 percent of them are high-income earners, 20 percent of them live alone, 15 percent of them live in this city mainly. What they can do with that data is number one, they set up an offline store, so this guy bought an actual shop and owned some real estate, purchased it, because they know that their biggest chunk of customers are over there, and that would be the most appropriate place to start a Survival shop selling in person. Number one which is super smart. Number two is if they know that 25 percent of their list of four million people is high-income earners or people that are above the median line or whatever it is, then what would you do. You will start selling them other stuff because you know that at that level, these guys are going to be crashing it because they have money to spend. What they have done there is they have instantly started sending them offers that apply to high-income earners because it just makes sense. What they do with that sort of level is you can start selling them absolutely anything. Anything from golf, anything from finance, all these other offers which the cost per lead is astronomically high. What you have is your cost per survival lead is so much lower because your cost per survival lead is a lot lower so you can actually purchase four survival lead for less than one financial offer lead. But one in four of them are high-income earners and would be in that same target audience for a finance offer. What they do is they start purchasing survival leads cheaper, but it just happens that one in four of them are interested in another type of offer where the cost per lead is a lot higher. So it makes a lot more sense. That is one thing that blew me away. So now they know that they are sending these guys golf offers, they are sending them finance offers, they are sending them a whole lot of different types of offers because they know what their customers base is made up of. Not only that, one step further is whenever they build these new entities, whenever they build these new companies that they start marketing to, what they actually do is they start sending them offers based on the new companies that they are starting. For example, they DIY projects. They just started a new company, a new entity. Now they already had an email list that was huge, and now they can start leveraging the email list that has an interesting DIY projects to launch their next entity. So they don’t start from scratch, but they have all this traffic instantly, and it is only to those people that they know are interested in DIY or doing home improvement or projects themselves which I found fascinating. That was an absolutely huge takeaway for me. That is something that I am going to be implementing in my business and emails the list that I am growing companies and things like that. This just shows you how important an email list is, how much money you can make from them. That was amazing. I found that really fascinating.

00:13:08-3           There were a ton of other sessions. I am going to grab the recordings myself because I want to have another sit-down and look at them as I start note taking because you will forget these stuff. You go there, you watch it, you take it in, but it will just be forgotten by next week so that is definitely something that you need to start re-watching and making sure the values are there — but essentially, it was an amazing convention. Traffic & Conversion was something that I could not believe was so — that people do not go into it really. After I went there, I know now that I am going to make the investment to go back every single year for as long as I am in the marketing industry. One thing that I did do was I got the VIP ticket as well, so I paid next to $500. I thought that was quite good. What that allowed you to do was to sit at the front, you get free books and things at the start of each day; you  have a table to lean on, and you get into all the sessions earlier so I would recommend doing the VIP thing. That was pretty cool, for $500 it just made life a lot easier and you have a break room as well so you can get some food, grab a drink.

00:14:18-1           That pretty much wraps up Traffic & Conversion. Those were some of the takeaways I had. The after parties was another thing, which I probably forgot to mention. That is another thing. You have to know the right people to get to these. It is not just publicly posted, it is like invite-only, but ends up having a hundred people there and some of the best marketers in the world. What happens is you have a three-day event and at the end of each day there will be a party, and then you will see some of the big dogs there that are doing massive numbers and crashing it, and you get to network with them.

00:15:38-4           Next time, there are things I will be doing differently. I will try to structure my event a little bit better. One thing I want to do is make a proper after-movie Traffic & Conversion that I can share online with people that I have interviewed. Another thing is to network properly, know people who I want to speak to and what I want to speak to them about.

00:17:48-0       Have a lot of fun, that is another thing. Do not just sit there and take notes and feel boring. It is one of the most enjoyable experiences as well.