Marie Larsen:                      00:01                       What's up everyone? This is Marie Larsen and you're listening to the audio entrepreneur. I spent the last year and half doing podcasts and content creation for some the fastest growing entrepreneurs today. Their strategies and tips have been life changing once I took action, so I decided to take my audio industry to the next level by building a seven figure company that teaches people how to create, strategize, and repurpose their content like a throw.

The question so new people are wondering is how is she going to do it? This podcast is here to give you the answers. Join me as I explained marketing strategies to grow my online business. My name is Marie Larsen and welcome to the audio entrepreneur.

Marie Larsen:                      00:40                       Yo, what's up? Everyone is so excited because today I have a friend of mine who's on here who is the king, the king of lead generation and I'm so excited to bring him on here because people ask me all the time why podcasting is important and I'll tell you, it is via lead generation that you can make money, go figure it and more people in generation that you have. The more that you can really push out yourselves, your services and things that you're trying to get out there.

I'm so excited because on here we have Russ Ward who is the king of lead generation and leads in general and so I want to jump on here and just have him go through his story, how he got into it and the reason behind a lead generation and why he chose leads. There are so many people that don't understand the importance of it and I've had so many people.

Marie Larsen:                      01:26                       Russ, sorry this is long intro, but I've had so many people jump on and say, oh Marie, like my sales, like I'm not selling really well. I'm not doing. I'm not getting out there a lot like what's wrong? And I'll ask them what's your email lists look like and what is your facebook look like? What is your instagram looks like? What is your presence within your audience within your industry look like? And a lot of them will say, Oh, you know, like I have 50 followers on Instagram, or Oh, I actually like, I don't have an email list. Oh, I don't know how to go through and build out my lead generation further.

I don't know how to build a culture and I'll just chuckle and say that's your issue, that's why you're not selling. Um, and so anyway, and this is Russ Ward. I'm so excited. Russ, thanks so much for being on here. I really appreciate that. You're on here.

Russ Ward:                            02:07                       Thank you so much. Marie. Thank you for having me on your podcast. I, uh, I appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk a little bit about lead generation and my story and just to give you a little bit of background about how I got into this.

A couple years ago, I was a salesman and I worked for a company called solar city that was eventually bought by Tesla, but at the time when it was solar city, they paid us a lot more money if we generated our own business because what we could do is we could go into the home depot and get people to come in for appointments, but we were paid just a little bit of money. So what I found was that if I can generate my own leads, I can make five times as much money. So I just started out by a little bit of trial and error.

Russ Ward:                            02:47                       It's posted in some facebook groups. I did a little bit of facebook ads and before I knew it I had just kind of come up with a trial and error solution to get myself a solar leads. I became a number one sales rep and the whole eastern out of 700 people for solar city. Out of that, that was the first sales award I'd ever been in my whole entire life. And it was because I was able to generate leads on my home.

Yeah. So that, that's the happy part of the beginning of the story. Now the story gets doom and gloom and it gets kind of ugly in the hero's journey. I'm so excited. Tell us how you felt. A source city got bought by Tesla. Tesla cut our compensation plan and generate my own leads. Didn't mean anything anymore. So I went right back down to that crap.

Russ Ward:                            03:31                       Uh, I went through some personal issues. I had a hundred and $19,000 tax lien filed against me, basically got out of a bad relationship. I mean all kinds ever could have possibly happened. Happened to me at that time. And within those next two years, between 2016 and right now, I actually became suicidal for a while.

Literally laying on the floor can contemplating death. I was um, I, I didn't know if I was going to a homeless. I didn't know what was going to happen. And along the way, you know, people got sick of me. They were like, you can't lend you anymore money. You're a smart guy. What are you doing? Um, and to tell you the truth, I don't know how I got through it. I went and saw a therapist because I'm a veteran and I was like, look, I don't want to kill myself, but I'm like, I mean, you know, I'm, I'm being real.

Russ Ward:                            04:17                       And just for anybody out there that ever feels like that way, there's help available. Men. Like people will help you if you say I want help your friends and family might not. They might say to you, they might say, Oh, you're a tough guy because everybody looks at me as just a big, strong, tough guy because that's what I look like.

When they looked at me written inside, you could be hurting, you could, you could want to die like I did. So they helped me get through that. But in the meantime I met some people and some networking groups. I'm Kinda got my confidence back up, kind of my Mojo back. And uh, I got a real estate license and there was a guy that was like, hey, you can be my buyer's rep. um, and I, I got, I got all excited about it and it didn't work out right.

Russ Ward:                            04:55                       But in the meantime, I started generating real estate leads and I started applying the same principles that I applied to solar to generating real estate leads. And I got really, really good at it. And what I did was at the very beginning I made it just a little course. It was like eight videos. And I started selling this little course on real estate lead generation just to kind of make ends meet.

Just, I mean, I was, I was making like 200 bucks, 200 bucks there, but it was enough to keep the lights on. It was enough to keep my car from getting rebuilt. Right. And as time went on, um, everything kind of culminated in a perfect storm on February 24th of this year. It was the day before my daughter's birthday, I had 80 bucks in my bank account, um, and I had to pick whether I want to get for my car or I wanted a birthday present for my daughter.

Russ Ward:                            05:38                       Right? And so I picked the birthday present and said, you know, what, God, then it from now on, this will never ever happen to me again. And um, I kinda just put the pedal to the metal.

I took, um, all the resources. I had connections, I had sold some things on craigslist. I did a garage sale and all that money I took it into, um, to just adspend. And I just started doing real estate leads and um, of course they don't close very quickly. It takes 30 to 45 days to get paid.

So what I did was I just started selling the leads and as time went on I started networking and networking and all of a sudden I have a formula now where I can pretty much generate real estate leads at will in any city in the United States for under $3 each. And so I started marketing that program and um, you know, here I am, I have not made less than $12,000 for the last three months.

Marie Larsen:                      06:25                       Wow. Oh my goodness. That is awesome. Holy Cow. I applaud you on that. 

I love that. I love that story. That's so amazing. And I'm first off, I'm glad that you're here and I hope you, I hope you are just, I hope you know how great you are. Um, and that is just amazing. Thank you so much for, for your example. Yes to your daughter, but also to people around me as well.

Guys are, there are better ways out there. Um, and, and you don't have to contemplate that as, as the end solution when there are other ways that you can, you can do it. And, and rest is totally an example of that. I'm Russ, I, I love that story and I think that something that is impressive to me is that you've been able to build out a program that has, that, that has less than $3 per, per lead. Right?

And I think that's amazing. I have several friends, I have a good chunk of friends, um, several clients as well who are in the real estate world. So what are some good ways that people can find you and be like, what, what would be the difference between them finding those leads versus you finding those leads?

Russ Ward:                            07:33                       Yep. So the best way to find me is, um, you can look at my facebook page, you just look up the leaking and all there. You can see all my most recent results. You can see I'm basically every way to contact me. I have, um, you know, I have a character of myself. It's like this guy here. Uh, I, I just, and this is another thing I made along the way and this is something I recommend to people in any business that is trying to brand themselves as brand yourself in some way.

My business took off and went through the roof as soon as soon as I invented this little cartoon character called the leaking. Before that I owned an llc called premium performance marketing. Right? And people weren't very excited about it, but they're excited when the weekend calls them, Hey, this is Billy King on the phone.

Russ Ward:                            08:11                       You ready to get started? Right? So, so that's how to find me, find me on the leaking. I'm on, on facebook, you'll see my little, my little character here. Um, and then the difference between what I do and what other people do like doing it yourself is, um, I dug deep into targeting strategic. I've watched facebook trends constantly. Facebook is always changing the game, changing. It used to be like you could just target, homeowners can generate tons and tons of leads. Well they took him away from us, right?

Used to be, I can target people that like different groups while they took those groups away and pretty soon they're going to take away the ability to target males and females. And to be honest with you, in real estate, probably 70 percent of my clicks are females. So a lot of times I'll just target females to save some money. Right? What does the future. I'm going to have to find a way around that. So I specifically all day long just look for hacks in the system.

How can I, how can I beat the facebook system is trying to beat me, you know? And that's, that's pretty much how I've become successful at this.

Marie Larsen:                      09:07                       That's so cool. I love that. You know, and I think guys being innovative and creative along the way is so crucial. It's so crucial as you go through and you're building out your own company, being able to be on top of your own system and then figuring out what systems are going to influence your. It's, it's crucial that you go through and really figure out what, um, what, what those are going to be.

And, um, that you stay on top of it. So, um, what, I guess what I'm, how should I say, what are some of the ways that you would, uh, or I guess tell people within this audience that a, if they wanted to generate leads just in general, not even specified just to, um, to real estate, but just in general, how would you go about what are some steps that you would offer to people to go through and actually start at their lead generation?

Russ Ward:                            09:58                       So the first thing I recommend is do not boost posts because what a lot of people do is they get on their facebook page, they'll run a post and then boost it and they'll just, they'll just like facebook and target whoever they want. And what happens is they target the whole entire country and that's not who you're looking to target.

So once you want to do is you want to go into facebook ads and you want to run an ad from the ads manager. And if you don't know how to do that, facebook actually has a full blown training course on how to do that.

You don't have to pay a guy with me, you don't have to, you don't have to pay any other guru if you just want to learn the basics of facebook ads, you can just go and get their full blown training program and then what you want to do is you want to target specific people.

Russ Ward:                            10:33                       You want to think about who is your, who is your perfect customer, and then just go through while at facebook allows you to search for and search for that person. Right? So maybe my perfect, um, say for real estate, my perfect buyer would be a female who is 28 years old who likes realtor.com and maybe she's married and has a toddler, right? I can ordinate all of those things and I can make it so only people who meet those demographics see my advertisement, which is really awesome.

Now with that said, I want to, I want to be careful to say that it, you can also over target people to. Because there are some cities where I just target women 25 and over and then the facebook algorithm takes over and it shows the ad to the people who are most likely to click it based on the first ones who are. So you don't want to get to extremely targeted, but if you want to you can, you can actually look at those demographics.

Marie Larsen:                      11:21                       I love that. I love that you're saying that because I'm, a lot of times people think, oh, well I need to go hire a facebook guru. I need to go hire some sort of ads manager. I need to go. And I think that you make a really good point that guys, if you will, if you don't want to go pay for someone to do it. As he said, there is a course via facebook and, and it's all free. It's free content, free information that you can go and you can get trained on. Um, and then after that, you know, if you just want to get an idea of what's going on, yes. Is it helpful to get an as person a? Absolutely.

My, uh, my brother's ads person works miracles, I don't know how she does it all, but every, for every dollar they put it in, they get like a dollar and a half out, you know, or at least $2 out or something. And it's crazy. I'm super, super like they're awesome. Um, but there are ways that you can go about and do it on your own. So that's so awesome. Um, and then as you have gone through and figured out that lead generation was what you were wanting to do, what did you build out in order to really promote that out to people?

Like what, how did you, how did you go find those leads and then what platform did you use to put them on?

Russ Ward:                            12:28                       Do you mean the leads? The leads themselves are me personally my business

Marie Larsen:                      12:32                       within your own business.

Russ Ward:                            12:34                       So the two keys that took me through the roof in terms of building my own business was number one. As soon as I got those good results, I would put it out to all over social media, everywhere I could think of the post them. So see I've got 80 leads for a dollar 50 a piece. I would just show it to everybody. I would just be a total show off.

You cannot have any shame when you're doing marketing because somebody out there and say, oh my God, I want that too. How much do I have to pay you? So what I was doing in the beginning is I was taking work for 5,100 bucks and I was saying, Hey, I'll set up your facebook ads. I promise you I'll get you good results. I'll even give you your money back if you, if you don't like the results, but all I ask is that you let me post the results and you give me a five star review. And so what happened along the way was I have tons and tons of happy customers and I have tons. Yeah,

Marie Larsen:                      13:18                       all over the place.

Russ Ward:                            13:19                       So now what happens is people go into groups and someone asked, hey, who do you know generate leads? They always tagged me in it, right? And that's how you really start to build this thing. And you know, back when I first got started, I didn't have the confidence or really the credibility to charge nearly what I'm charging now.

I still remember it because I wasn't, I didn't have much money. And I was saying like, man, I would say to myself, I hope I can do enough of these.

So the first three that didn't like it, I can refund their money and still have money to put gas in the car. That's how, that's how scraping the bottom of the barrel I was. And then as time went on, I was like, dude, I got this, you know, I'm going to be able to do this every single time over and over and over until I really got to that confident point. It was so important to get reviews into, to get the post results.

And even if you're not making any money at all, you need to post resume reviews and you need to post results because that's how eventually you're going to make money long term. I have not run an ad to get business since I started.

Marie Larsen:                      14:12                       Isn't that interesting? I am the same way and I'm so grateful that you said that because as soon as I started getting my voice out there and it came, it came a lot when I wasn't ashamed to jump on my personal profile and post something about the stuff that I'm doing when I have friends and family who are on there, you know, it'd be like, what the heck is she doing? You know?

And I started building out my social media as and as soon as I started doing that, there was, there was never a time that I ever had to go through and do a facebook ad or anything like that for lead generation is, is, it's just never. It's never had to happen as far as getting clients. Right. Um, and so I was so grateful for that understanding that if I just really push myself out there like crazy and get loud about what I'm doing, then people will start promoting my name out for me.

Russ Ward:                            15:04                       Right. And people will start getting my name out there for me because they know what I do.

And so they're going to put my name out to other people who are looking for those types of things and because of it, it's completely changed my life in general and I've never. Instead, now I have a wait list of people, um, which is a really, which is a great, um, a great problem to have. And so if something isn't working with a certain client and we decided to go our separate ways, I'm fine. I can go through and hit that list up and like pick up from where I was and it's fine and it works super, super well.

Russ Ward:                            15:36                       Yeah, I completely agree. Like I said, I haven't. The reason why this has happened like me like this for me so well is because it's all happened organically. This guy told this guy, told this guy and now it's just. I have a group of all my own customers and then I have a group of people that I helped. Um, just in general, like I, I give special, special attention to my clients.

And then I have a group for everybody else that gets less special attention, but they still get in. And so both of those groups actually organically as people now coming to me and say, Hey, can you do this for me? How much would this cost? And the other thing that I'll point out too is you don't have to be a pushy salesman, right? When I get on a phone call with somebody, um, I just kind of say, hey, how can I help you?

This is what I offer. If you'd like to do it, you know, just let me know when you get started. I never push anybody. I never, because I'm to the point now where my results speak for themselves, right? Really need to get, like, you have to have those three keys, you have to have the social proof, you have to have the reviews and then you have to have a way for people to kind of share your name around. And that's what's really taken me to new heights.

Marie Larsen:                      16:38                       It's so good. It's so good. I cannot agree more with that. I think it's interesting how many times people go through and really think that they have to blow a ton of money on something to get results on. Something which, uh, the, I mean, depending on the situation and the person that might be the case, but um, but just even getting started. Um, I would say that the biggest thing to get started as you were saying, is it social proof.

If you can get started losing out your social proof like crazy, then when you do need extra leads or you are looking for specific type of client or customer or something like that, then yes, you can totally go to lead generation. You can go through and really see how you can boost that via facebook ads, via Instagram, via Ige TV, youtube, whatever. Totally. But the more social proof that you have and face on, um, on the Internet, the better.

Marie Larsen:                      17:28                       I actually had someone, I've had several people in this last little bit who run up to me in the grocery store who have run up to me. I'm in the airport who run up to me and all these random places and you're already Larson and I'm like, I am and you are. And they're like, I'm so and so and I love your stuff here. And I'm a big fan here and I love it when you do this. And I'm like, well thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I'm so. I'm so honored. Thank you.

Um, but I would not have had that if I did not have the social media approved. Some kid jumped on and he's like, Hey, you're that famous girl whose face is everywhere. I'm like, cool. Like, no, I'm not famous at all. I barely changed into a clean shirt today, but thank you so much.

You know, but I think it's so important. So. And what other tips and tricks would you give to someone who, as you said, you can go look at it and facebook ads and stuff like that. What other tips and tricks would you give to someone to get started on increasing their lead generation?

Russ Ward:                            18:26                       Well, one thing that facebook has allowed us to do recently, it's really awesome. So say whatever niche you're in, it doesn't have to be real estate. You can go to the page of accompany, it's running ads, kind of like yours. And you can just hit information and ads and you can see the exact ads they're running right now.

Marie Larsen:                      18:45                       I didn't even know that.

Russ Ward:                            18:46                       And, and you know, they say that, well, if you don't have the targeting for what they're doing, then it doesn't help you. Well, if you already know the target, if you already know your, your, um, you know, your target market, you can take those ads and you can, you can flat out copy them if he wants to operate on them and say, say you sell. So you sell a coke, right? A soda, and you wanted to copy Coca Cola.

You could just run their campaign and just put your coca cola can write in there. That's, you know, whatever kind of soda you're running. Real estate, same color, same applies to everything. You can just tape. Go ahead and take a look at what the ads that they're running. I, one thing about that is you can only see the ads running in your country. Um, one story that's really cool is, um, there was a guy in Canada who wanted to hire me to help him get leads for people that need pardons from the government.

And I'm like, Eh, I don't know if I can do that. But I was like, all right, I'll give it a try. I was looking all over Canada for ads that were already running and I couldn't find them. And that's how I found out the hard way that you can't see other countries adds. So only in the United States if United States.

Marie Larsen:                      19:45                       That's really good to know. I honestly have no idea. So I'm really glad that. That's awesome. That's so good. Well, we'll probably wrap up here in just a couple of minutes. Um, but as you were going through it and you discovered this process and stuff like that, I'm sure that they're, as you said, you've had your ups and downs even as you started up this company, um, what were some of those ups and downs and what are some of the ways that people can improve constantly so that they don't have to make the same mistakes that you've made within your own company?

Russ Ward:                            20:16                       Yeah, probably, probably some of the downs would be what things aren't working. I didn't stop quick enough. Right? I had a little bit too much belief in, in the quote unquote system, right? Usually within a day of running a facebook ad, if you're not getting results, if you're not getting leads, you should probably stop that and rethink it. Right?

Yeah. So what I, and you know, there's, there's, there's conflicting people, the real people to say, Oh, you got to let it run for a week, but I'm telling you what, like if I'm running a good ad, I'm going to get three leads within the first two hours. And I already knew that I, you know, from, from experience. But if you go a whole day and you spend like 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks, you want to make sure that you're to just kind of reevaluating.

Russ Ward:                            20:54                       Right? So that was one of the things that I, that I did that I wouldn't say hurt me, but it might have hurt my client's return on investment a little bit in the beginning and I had to apologize and say, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start a new ad, and then they got a little bit pissed off because, you know, I wasted their money.

So when you do that, just make sure that you're watching your ads closely in the first 12 to 24 hours because it's the most important time because you're going to see exactly what type of results you're going start.

Marie Larsen:                      21:19                       That's awesome. That's awesome. So my last question then, and then we'll probably wrap up, but my last question is, um, do you only work with people via real estate or do you do any sort of other types of lead generation for other industries as well?

Russ Ward:                            21:34                       No, I appreciate you asking that. Um, so what I've done recently is, is a lot of people that talk about leads probably know the name of Chad. How do you know, have you, you, your name? I um, I actually paid cat how old to be a mentor for me. Right. I want to expand my business, get better. And so what I'm doing is actually going through her academy. I'm learning to do any niche into, to be microtargeted anything at all. Somebody needs to do. So. Um, yeah, to answer your question, I've actually branched out. I'm doing currently I'm doing tattoo removal Canada.

Yeah, I'm helping people with solar. Um, well, you know, the reason why I still kind of steered toward real estate is because I have this system that's just so tried and true. Like I could literally put this ad up in any city in United States and get leads for like two bucks and it's just crazy not to do it if I can do it right. That's awesome.

So yeah, so that's um, that's kind of where things are going in the future. I'm going to try to build this into an all out agency staff that focuses on a different niches and then I Kinda just managed the whole thing.

Marie Larsen:                      22:27                       That's so great. I love that. That's so good. Is there, so the best place then for people to find you would be via social media board?

Russ Ward:                            22:36                       Oh yeah. The week you have to look up the leaching record or you could go to the [inaudible] dot net. Remember it's dot net because somebody was not common. He will not. Yup. To me for less than the guy. The guy actually sent me an email like two weeks ago. He said, dad, I was like, cool, I'll give you 200 bucks for it. And he was like, no, saying grant

Marie Larsen:                      22:55                       not paying you take the weekend.net. That's awesome. That's so good. Well thank you so much for being on here with us. I really appreciate it and we'll catch you again here next time. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening.

Marie Larsen:                      23:12                       Don't forget to rate and subscribe. You have questions for me. Go to the facebook group, profitable podcasting strategies for entrepreneurs, and I'll be sure to do an episode to answer your next question.

Marie Larsen:                      23:23                       Again guys, my name is Marie Larsen and this is the audio entrepreneur.