AP 1134: I’ve Tried Everything, But I Have No Real Growth. What Do I Do?

AP 1134: I've Tried Everything, But I Have No Real Growth. What Do I Do?

Pat Flynn:
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Pat:
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Pat:
Hey, what's up everybody Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 1,134 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur, just like you. And today we're speaking with Jason McCarthy from DigiNo, not like "did you know," but DigiNo. D-I-G-I-N-O.org. They're helping teachers, and I love what he's doing. And I got to admit right up front. This call was a little bit of a struggle for me.

Pat:
I was diving into a lot of potential solutions asking a lot of questions, not really making progress until near the very end. And this is one of those classic examples of sometimes it just takes time and patience to find the right solution when working with somebody. And not that... Jason was awesome. He not like difficult or anything like that. Not at all. In fact, he's a gem. It's just one of those things. It takes time. It takes a little bit of digging deeper and asking of questions to get to where the answer could potentially lie, or at least the next actions. And we get there. We have direction, but it takes some time.

Pat:
So, that's the hook for this episode, pay attention to how I react to certain answers. And how would you react? How would you respond in these certain situations? Hopefully I did a good job. So anyway, here he is Jason McCarthy from DigiNo.org. Hey, Jason, welcome to AskPat 2.0. Thanks so much for being here today.

Jason McCarthy:
Thanks for having me Pat.

Pat:
Really quick before we get started here, just why don't you introduce yourself a little bit and a little bit about what you do.

Jason:
Yeah. So I'm Jason, I'm from England and I started off as a online teacher. I was a janitor, at a hostel. I was sweeping the floors to pay for my bed, and I started listening to Pat's podcast, and I started combining all of the affiliate marketing skills with the online teaching job and ended up creating a niche website and a whole recruitment network that let me travel around Asia for a few years.

Pat:
No way. Dude, that sounds so... Well, do you have any links to share or anything that we can look at to see what you've accomplished?

Jason:
Yeah. Well, I put everything on the website, DigiNo.org. And so I've just loaded everything on there. I've got YouTube channels and all the videos are embedded and everything.

Pat:
That's so cool, man. Congratulations to you. How long ago was when then this all started for you?

Jason:
This started about, I think three years ago now.

Pat:
Three years ago. Awesome. So you've been at it for a while, and here you are on AskPat and it sounds like you need some help with some stuff. So I'd love to help you in any way possible. So what's been on your mind.

Jason:
Yeah. So the thing that I struggle with is I have the traffic, the website at its highest gets about 80,000 visitors per month and it just doesn't translate into revenue. I'm always looking at it like, "Oh, if I, if I had a dollar for every visit things would be great." But it just doesn't work out that way. And I've tried everything, all the things that you would recommend, affiliate marketing, ebooks, courses, coaching, I've tried it all. And yeah, I'm at the mercy of my main income source, which is actually online teacher referrals. Every time someone gets a job, the company will give me a referral bonus, but they have different hiring seasons and things like that. And the hiring has gone down over the years. So yeah, it's a big issue at the moment.

Pat:
Okay. So let's talk about this a little bit. Where is this traffic coming from? I'm curious. Let's start there.

Jason:
Yeah. So I basically got really good at getting to page one of Google over time and it basically all comes from the SEO.

Pat:
Okay. And what are these search terms? And what's going through a person's mind when they are typing in these search terms and then they end up landing on your website?

Jason:
Yeah. So the majority of it comes to the actual company apply pages because you see these companies are in China, so they don't really have a great presence on say the U.S. like Google. So my website sort of acts as like a face of it, most of the time.

Pat:
Okay. And then when people come to the webpage, what are they expecting to see? What are they hoping to achieve?

Jason:
Okay. So they're expecting to see like, how do I get this job? How much does it pay? What do I need to get hired and how can I do it?

Pat:
Gotcha. Okay. So are you doing anything to capture more information from these website visitors? Because oftentimes, and I'd be curious to see what the conversion rates are if indeed you are collecting emails, because if we can't keep people on our website, sometimes these websites and this sounds very similar to websites that I've had in the past related to certain niches where, they can come in and you might get loads of traffic, they get what they need. And then they're kind of gone after that. Right? They sort of find the information they need and then there's not really any else things to do. So what are you doing when a person comes on this page and they've gotten this information, you likely are ranking really high because you've got some good information on the website, but what are you doing to further that experience or hopefully engage with them from there?

Jason:
Yeah. So I do have an email list, like Facebook groups, and things like that. And the way I set up the website was it wasn't just about getting them the job. It was about the whole experience; it was about them making the job easy and then how to travel with the job, things like that; how to actually earn passive income from the job itself. So I would take them on this journey on my email list and I'd write all the content and send them into these different areas.

Pat:
Gotcha. Okay. So you tried that, and it didn't work out so well, I think that now that... I'm glad you have an email list because this becomes a good starting point. If you think about your pool of traffic coming into the website, that's one kind of person who is getting something and they may or may not stick around. But now that you have sort of a more filtered group of people on your email list, you're more likely to do a little bit more reconnaissance or some research within them. What have you done, if anything to understand more about what they want versus what we think they might want?

Jason:
Yeah. So I've asked sort of survey questions to my list and asked like what their biggest problems are with the-

Pat:
All the right things.

Jason:
Yeah. And I've done free coaching calls and things like that. And the main issues that they're having is the jobs aren't hiring or they're having bad experiences within the jobs with actual like... And it's all things that are out of my control. It's not something I can create a product or service to solve. That's where I've come to the tricky situation. I've found products that have made their life better, like webcam softwares. And I made games of that to make teaching easier, mobile banking to make payment fees lower, there's all things little problems I've solved. And it's just never translated to that big windfall of money.

Pat:
Got it. And it might take some time to get there, but I think that we have at least a starting point to work with. I have some ideas that I think I would love to pass on to you. However, I'd love to see from your point of view at this point, what do you think is the problem? What do you think the big challenge is, for not for you, but for the visitor, for the email subscriber for them when it comes to how they might end up spending money with you, where do you think there's the disconnect?

Jason:
Well, so the thing is this whole time, I've never really charged money. I've always not liked charging money because my entire audience are job seekers. They're trying to get a job, obviously. So they don't have a lot of money. So I've always tried to not do that. So whenever it came to something like I wrote an ebook and I would charge like a few dollars for it, still people wouldn't buy. And I think I sort of set this whole precedent of like, "I'm here to help." And things like that, "I'm going to help you get a job." Whatever, it's sort of came to like, "Oh, I'm trying to get money. It's sort of like a disconnect."

Pat:
So there's a little bit of expectation that, well, you can get whatever you need without having to pay anything because you've given everything already, at least in terms of having people go from where they're at now to eventually getting to that point where they do have a job, right? So we can discuss this in maybe two different kinds of ways. How can we potentially make money from the audience that you've built and the website and the assets that you have specifically to those who have yet to get a job, which I agree with. It's very difficult to charge people who are also looking to make money and survive. Right? If that makes sense. However, there likely is a phase two to this, where after they get the job after you've given them a result, there are some interesting things we can do there. And like you said, you've talked about a few of those things that we could do, but we can unpack that a little bit more.

Pat:
I do want to ask whoever for this sort of first half, the people who are on your website and they're looking for this information, have you explored ads? I mean, you have enough website traffic to incorporate some ads here and there to serve impressions for different companies, whether that's more private or through something like AdThrives. So I don't know if you've heard of AdThrive, but that's a big one that a lot of my students are using for larger traffic websites as well. And it's working out pretty well. Have you experimented with that and gave that a real shot?

Jason:
Oh yeah. I do have like an AdThrive alternative. They actually built like an affiliate program for me and I started writing content to help people do that. So yeah, I've done all of that, but it's never translated to a lot of money.

Pat:
Okay. So there's a few things that we can do here. First of all, I have seen other cases like this, where it's just very difficult to find out how to get people to pay for services, right? And in many cases, the solution can be potentially a, well, let's not worry about charging them first. Let's worry about getting them that result so that they'll be more likely to come back and ask for more and get more value from us. So it can be essentially a two-pronged approach. And what I love about this is that you can have now the ability in your email list to understand whether they're phase one kind of person or phase two sort of like "hot" kind of person, right? So you can use segmentation and tagging and even have ways for people to potentially, for example, fill out a TypeForm or something to sort of share that they've gotten this job.

Pat:
And that provides a testimonial to you, which will get people excited on the front end, but then allows you to follow up now that you know where they are with other things. And there's a lot of people out there who I know serve the audience of those who have jobs. For example, you could help people who have jobs, like you said, make some additional side income, right? So something on the side. You could have those people learn how to get raises. This is something that a good friend of mine, Ramit Sethi, he's made a significant living teaching people how to at their job get a raise. So how do you have those conversations? And that directly ties to more money, meaning there's a direct ROI from that, right? Meaning, hey, if you pay and invest up front to get this information, you're going to likely get this back in return and then some and even more, right?

Pat:
So it's a little bit more easily convincible to sell something like that to people who have some money to invest now, to then level-up to the next part of their career. There's the idea of training now, people who are maybe more managers within your audience, if they've got hired for a managerial position, maybe you can focus on segmenting your audience for specifically managers and leaders. And a lot of managers and leaders know that they need to invest in their own personal development in order to better manage their team and thus, of course, better integrate within the job and workforce from there. So maybe it's not a general survey that needs to be sent out, but maybe it's a more understanding of, okay, who in your audience now has that job? How can we continue this journey for them? And within there, what can we explore and how can we help them?

Pat:
And then you could even try and validate and use a lot of the things that likely you've seen in Will it Fly? and Smart From Scratch my validation courses, just to kind of test and see what people might need help with. One thing that might be interesting to do is to, instead of just either creating a course or creating a program upfront is to potentially create some sort of either event and/or challenge if you will, to get people moving. Right? And I think that could be potentially one of the challenges is they've gotten this free information from you and then they've gotten this job. Okay. Well, like what's the excuse to now take action again? Well, you can create a moment in time, maybe a day or two where you challenge people to... maybe it is to write their resume or maybe it is to see if they can get some sort of thing going in their work now such that they get a result and then are more likely to be open to now because you've given them that higher level result.

Pat:
The ability to sort of invest with you down the road, whether that's getting people to hire you as a coach, for example, maybe you can be a career coach? And I don't know if you've positioned yourself in that way, but even just trying with one or two people to become their career coach, to help them more specifically and more individually reach those milestones in their career now that they have a job that could then open up the possibility of you receiving more clients in a one to one level, or maybe doing group, like things like that, where maybe they go through a eight week income increasing program for one's business. Or maybe it is a course, but starting with a couple individuals first is going to teach you a lot. How is this all sitting with you? I mean, I know I'm just sort of like spewing all these ideas your way, but what's hitting home if anything right now?

Jason:
Well, so the thing is, it was very easy when I was actually a teacher myself, because I was in the whole environment and online teaching is not sort of like a career ladder that you can climb up and get promotions and things like that. You're essentially a freelancer just working and earning as much as you possibly can. Because I'm not in it anymore, and I've sort of taken a different approach where I've actually been working with the companies and helping them with their marketing. And I've actually landed a couple of deals for like content deals and advertising deals with them. And so I was sort of looking into that of just working with businesses now. Yeah. Because I feel very uncomfortable asking my customers for money, constantly.

Pat:
Okay. Well, I mean you're not going to make any money if you feel uncomfortable with that, that's just number one, right? It's a mindset thing. And if that's truly the case, then I think that you're smart with thinking of other means and mechanisms. That's kind of why I pointed toward advertising earlier and brand deals are an even better way to potentially get a larger injection to become essentially like a brand ambassador. I saw this once there was a website called Cozy and this was for specifically real estate, landlords and helping people with regards to that. They actually ended up working with another person who had a smaller, but largely large-traffic website that was in and around the real estate space. And essentially just all things fed to this upper bigger brand from that website. So you could essentially use your website as essentially almost like a starting point for introducing people to a lot of these brands.

Pat:
Meaning, that brand name maybe shows up under the logo, if it is like an exclusive deal like that for a certain amount of money per year or per month, or what have you, you could make some significant money and then it only takes just one, one large brand deal to potentially get to that point where you're like, you know what? This feels good. And it feels like it's worth it now, versus going to the individuals and asking them potentially even for like $4.99 for an ebook and really grinding on that versus all right, let's try to create a brand deal and introduce this audience. That's coming 80,000 visitors a month is quite huge and a smart brand will find some interesting ways to get creative with you to have that be a really nice relationship. Tell me how those have been going and the kinds of things that you've been exploring so far.

Jason:
Yeah, well I've actually, over the years, I've sort of developed my own system, which I've actually used in pitches and things like that. And I've developed my own sort of like traffic-gaining system and yeah, it's crazy. It's like some of the companies I've worked with and the brands I've created like a snowball effect of traffic where even after I've stopped promoting them or using the system, they're still getting like 50 applicants per day, every day.

Pat:
Are they paying you for that?

Jason:
No. So they only pay if someone gets hired.

Pat:
Gotcha. Okay. Right. And there could be ways that you can perhaps work out a brand deal where maybe they are now featured on your website versus them clicking on a link and then discovering this brand. Maybe they show up more on your website, right? Maybe they work out a deal with you where they actually get to promote some content on your website that can build a relationship up front because what potentially might be happening is although you're sending people their way, that trust hasn't been created yet, and that trust can be created upfront first. So that by the time they click on the link, they're more likely to see the advantages of following through and going through. So a more general fee per month or per year to have a certain number of those happen and a certain number of mentions and some certain number of links can work.

Pat:
And then that on top of a commission for people who come through all the way, can sort of be a double dip. I've seen some people do that as well, where it's like, hey, we'll pay to be a part of the website more than we are now. We'll show up a little bit more prominently and we'll also continue this affiliate promotion and that's justified because the company can offer you a little bit of money as a resource to help you better promote their stuff on your end. And the space on your website is valuable. And that stuff that shouldn't be just offered for free it's mind blowing that you're offering that many and have that many leads coming in. And essentially it's just for free and ongoing forever.

Jason:
Yeah. There's literally like no way I could stop it. It's just the power of the system I put in place, even without promoting it, it just carries on. And I know that's something that I should bottle up. See the issue is Pat they don't want teachers as much anymore from say someone like me, who's like an affiliate, because as time has gone on their own organic traffic has risen. And so they're like, Oh, there's no real needs to like hire- Yeah. Hire the affiliates or whatever. So it's sort of finding ways where it's like, okay, what other thing can I do for you? So there was another company who wanted their social media to be built up. So I was like, okay, I can try and figure out a system to actually snowball their social media and things like that. But whenever I do these pictures, it's very rare. I get someone biting and sort of seeing the potential in it, even with all of my evidence and stuff.

Pat:
Yeah. I mean, to me, it's like, I think that what you have to offer is so valuable for a company, especially, and I love how you're thinking about these other mechanisms. Maybe it is social media, maybe it's Instagram, TikTok, whatever, right? Basically you have this asset now you can direct to people wherever you'd like based on your system. So I think it's just continuing to grind and find other companies that may be more up and coming that might need a little bit of a boost to then sort of get to that point where they can then get some eyeballs and ears on their brand. Likely if the companies you're working with already have that, then you're right. They don't necessarily need you anymore, but how can you help these up and coming brands, potentially startups, right? Who have a lot of money, even from investors and whatnot, to be able to invest in things like this.

Pat:
I mean to me it's a lot smarter to work with a person like you, who has this direct connection versus Facebook ads and Instagram ads. And other means where it's going to be a little bit more cold and there's less of a relationship there. So this is definitely a challenge, but I think it's going to just take some time and I would just try to continue to be creative. I honestly don't have the right answer for you right now. And sometimes this just happens. And sometimes that just means that we have to keep exploring, keep experimenting and keep finding those small little wins that can turn into much bigger ones. Right?

Pat:
Like I imagine that there's some small domino out there that can start the whole domino effect of now. One thing works with one company and just becomes the thing now, and then eventually it's going to avalanche. Right? And I think that we're just sort of in that dip before that happens. But the worst thing to do would be to just stop right now. And it doesn't seem like you're going to stop, but I think we're just in that dip sort of period right before the thing starts to take off again, if that makes sense.

Jason:
Yeah. I mean, before I've had like the income go to zero overnight, and then I found a way I spent a couple of months building it back up and then it was like more than ever. And now like literally just now the income is going to go to zero pretty soon just because no one's hiring anymore. And none of my investments are working.

Pat:
Yeah. COVID especially, it's a weird time for sure. Right? A lot of people are getting creative during this time and are able to figure out solutions and you seem to be a very solutions-oriented type of person. So now that we're going to zero again, now it's going to take some additional brainstorming like you did before and chances are it's going to come back even higher and bigger. Right? Like, that's how it is when you're like a poker player, right? It's like you have these huge upswings and huge downswings, as long as you keep like going up and down, but you're pointing to the right direction. That's what matters. And every time you try something new, you're getting more skills and getting more authority. So most of all, I can just continue to encourage you. I'd love to follow up with you to see sort of where things happen in the next few months, even privately, or even back here on the show to see where you end up. But sometimes the solution is just continuing to move forward and keeping your eyes and ears open.

Jason:
Yeah. And I love your idea about the startups as well. So one thing I'd like to ask you is like, what would you recommend, like trying to find these startups? What's a good avenue to actually try and find them?

Pat:
Yeah. I mean, there's TechCrunch, for example, there's a lot of news publications that share a lot of the new companies that are out there. There's a lot of investor-type websites, YCombinator and all these places where startups kind of co-exist. AngelList is another place where it holds a number of sort of investors who look at startups. And there's a good sort of library of different places because they showcase new startups to go, "Hey guys, there's this new startup check them out." And it might be a refreshing thing to go, "Hey, I'm not an investor, but I have a really amazing thing that I'd love to show you to help you grow your brand in a unique sort of way." And that could get people to pay attention.

Jason:
Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a big takeaway from this session. I mean, that's given me a lot of inspiration.

Pat:
Cool. Yeah. It might just be, hey, we have a solution and it was working for a certain group of people for a while, but we need to shift groups now and introduce this new strategy to a new group of people, and they might take it to a whole new level for you and give you new ideas too. So yeah. Thank you, Jason, for being here and good luck to you. Any resources, Twitter, websites that you want to mention before we finish up?

Jason:
Well, just the website. DigiNo.org. So it's D-I-G-I-N-O.org and everything's all on there.

Pat:
Cool. And is that short for digital nomad?

Jason:
Yeah. Yeah. I was hunting down on a domain name years and years ago. Just put two words together.

Pat:
Dude, I like it. It's only six letters. That's valuable. So cool, man. Thank you so much. And good luck to you. We'll chat again soon.

Jason:
Thanks Pat.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation and coaching call with Jason McCarthy from DigiNo.org and somebody that I recommend you check out, a lot of great resources. There are a lot of fun, exciting, potential things that can happen as a result of expanding outward and thinking a little bit more creatively with these things, because what traditionally works in a lot of these situations, like you've heard me talk about that are supposed to at least work or at least be great to experiment with, Jason's already done. And I think this is where we start to get a little bit creative because in my opinion, there's always a way to make it work. Just sometimes it takes longer than others and some strategies work better than others too, even though they might work beautifully and brilliantly for somebody else.

Pat:
So just keep going, persevere, grit. That's what the name of the game is here. Jason, thank you so much for coming in today. I appreciate you, and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you as well. #TeamFlynn, you're amazing. Keep up the great work. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already and also check out askpat.com for a list of a lot of other episodes that you can check out as well as a button to apply, to get coached here on the show, just like Jason did today. And I'd be more than happy to help you should the scheduling and the timing workout.

Pat:
And obviously hundreds of people come in. I cannot at all reach out and reply to everybody, but you don't give yourself a chance unless you try. So askpat.com looking forward to potentially chatting with you there. And even if I don't get connected with you, make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some great episodes coming up your way and I cannot wait to share them with you. So keep up the great work. Cheers. Thanks so much. And as always #TeamFlynn for the win. Peace out.