Want to take your agency to the next level in 2019 in today's video we're
going to cover some of the best tools and software and third-party services
you want to know about to run your agency so stay tuned here we go
all right welcome back and thank you for joining me my name is Jordan Steen also
known as Cereal Entrepreneur and at this channel we talk all about starting a
marketing agency running your own personal brand or basically just
building an online business and if you're interested in any of those topics
you want to make sure and hit that subscribe button and the notification
bell in the bottom right hand corner of this video so that way you get updated
with all of our future videos free trainings free resources and giveaways
that we do here at my channel now to run a successful agency you have to
understand that there are several services that you have to incorporate
into your business and into your marketing strategies that are gonna help
you get better results for your campaigns do better research better
planning and ultimately just make your customers more happy than you would if
you weren't using these tools oh and make sure to stay tuned to the end of
this video where we'll give you a checklist for all of your marketing
agency needs it covers all kinds of things from tools and templates and then
it goes into a two-week training on landing clients and really just getting
your agency off the ground plus all the services and everything like that but
let's go ahead and hop over to the screencast and show you guys some of
these tools alright guys so this is HubSpot CRM and a lot of people ask what
CRM to use when starting off with your agency this isn't necessarily what
you're going to want to use for your clients if you plan to manage CRMs for
your clients but as far as managing your personal agency this is a great platform
it's free it allows you to do email tracking and all kinds of stuff
obviously it's going to be limited in the features since it is a free version
but their next level up isn't too expensive if you have the budget for it
you can obviously do something like that outside of this in the past I have also
recommended using something like an Excel spreadsheet to keep up with it if
you run out of features you know I'm one of the free platforms you can always use
an Excel spreadsheet you know put everything up in the top columns like
name business name phone number stuff like that and that'll work perfectly
fine as well until you can afford to do a service like HubSpot or salesforce or
something like that okay so the next tool we're going to go into and a lot of
you have heard of it is called HootSuite it is what we prefer to use we actually
kind of use a mixture between HootSuite and social sprout for reporting but as
far as Hootsuites concerned we'd like to interface better as far as scheduling
posts and being able to manage comments and every
body engaging with the page you can see here we have all of our YouTube content
we have comments coming in right here sorry right here we have spam over here
that we can manage there's all kinds of stuff that you know you can do from
HootSuite manager that makes it easier as far as just managing the community as
far as scheduling posts I will say that we do hire someone to manually schedule
posts just because you can do that for three to four dollars per hour
outsourcing that job and it just makes sure that you have all the proper
formatting setup because sometimes using these kinds of software's can mess up
the formatting what it actually goes to post it to the page but HootSuite is
ultimately the social media manager or scheduler that we recommend using for
your agency third tool or resource rather that we want to talk about is Moz.com
and this is more for SEO we're gonna go into some SEO tools here and
Moz is a really great tool for several different reasons because most of you
guys have heard me talk about 3-step marketing and if not we're putting out a
video pretty soon on the 3-step marketing concept that we've put
together but basically it talks about how SEO and pay-per-click is so
important for driving a lot of this cold traffic for local businesses and why
because most people use search engines to find something local to them right
and so this gives you a bunch of free tools that you can use to do research
about a business or about a potential client for your audits or whatever where
you can get information about their business listings keywords if you check
this out we can open these up right here and you can see we have the keyword
Explorer so I can type in likes papito seafood kitchen whatever you know we'll
just put in a business that you're potentially wanting to market to and it
gives you some information about their local presence and this again is some
stuff that you can just take and take a screenshot of or a window capture and
just use this on a presentation it's great for building audits but it's just
something again that's free and gives you an idea of where the business stands
and how you can potentially work your way in for a sale right so this is a
great tool they have all kinds of free tools over here at the website we're
gonna include all of the links to all of these sites down in the YouTube
description so no worries there the next SEO tool we're going to go into is
called screaming frog and is actually a completely free tool they
do have an upgraded version as well just like every other software but their free
version is pretty unique and pretty useful as far as analyzing crawling a
website finding where things are broken or where you can make changes to say
things like h1 tags h2 tags it's a great analysis tool for websites and for
overall SEO but we've done a video on this already so if you want you can go
check out our video on screaming frog on our channel just go to a search over
there and you can figure that or you can check that out yourself the next tool we
want to cover is going to be serpstat and serpstat is a cool tool that
allows you to do keyword analysis and ranking tracking or I guess keyword rank
tracking and tons of different ways for you to basically analyze the website and
see how it's going to perform on a search engine or how to find basically
keywords and techniques or strategies to implement on your website that will help
you rank higher on search engines but as you can see we've put in social media
marketing it's going to show a search volume competition cost per click and
overall keyword difficulty which tells us how we want to incorporate this
specific keyword into our marketing campaign into our content like blog
articles and across our websites and landing pages things like that now serp
stat is basically a solution that's a little cheaper than ahref so a lot of
people hear about ahref and it's a great tool I'm not I'm not
you know doubting it whatsoever but most of you are on some sort of budget right
and so this tool is a lot more affordable I think it's only like 60
dollars for three months so a lot more affordable only twenty bucks per month
basically to be able to use this tool oh and really quickly if you want to check
out another video where we put together four free tools that help you increase
search engine ranking and help you with keyword analysis check out this video in
the top right hand corner so next we're gonna get into a little bit about
analytics and a lot of you are familiar with what analytics is but I got I mean
I just have to tell you too many people look for platforms to kind of outsource
all of their analytics to when really you can pretty much run everything you
need to run through Google Analytics and all you have to do is set up different
properties and apps different views and then different goal tracking methods for
each property or domain or platform that is coming from so you
can see we have YouTube we have clickfunnels
we have a kajabi site we have WordPress all of that so it's all basically put in
here and then we have a cross domain property view or app not a property
property and view basically showing the different areas and how they're pulling
in search data where we're converting at with regards to what products are on
what site people are coming from but this is a great tool to show everything
in one place so you can see if we go to our WordPress traffic on our website and
do our WordPress view we can come in here and switch over very quickly to see
what our traffic is like for that platform and we have 10 active users on
the site currently right now we have 6.8 K users in the last seven days 9000
sessions a bounce rate of nine point five eight percent and a duration an
average duration of about two minutes so again just pulling in information where
people came from what mediums what times of the day our average users per month
on mobile desktop tablet all of this is being driven into our site as far as who
visits our WordPress site then we have a whole other view for our kajabi site
which is where we run our course platforms so two different sites but it
allows us to track everything in one area Google Analytics is definitely the
tool you want to start using for analytic you know tracking and data
reading and analysis next one of my favorite tools and one you're going to
want to check out not even when we make any affiliate revenue off of just a tool
that we really really love it's something that when you're starting out
you have to have something to plan projects and operations and workflows
right and this is what did it for us we're actually at the point now where
we're upgrading to another platform that costs us about three thousand dollars
per year to use that which is going to help us become even more effective and
efficient with our marketing campaigns but if you're looking for the starting
out platform asana is where it's at it was super affordable to use we were able
to build in tasks like you can see right here I'm shooting my video for today and
all of these tests behind that are tasks for other social media campaigns or
posts that we need to actually have created and within each task so if I go
back we'll go up and we'll go back you can see each person is listed on
their job they have due dates for everything well they will once this task
comes out this is a video or shooting now so do due dates haven't even been
added because it's a month and a half out but we will have every we have every
person assigned they'll all have due dates associated and added in right
there we have different stages of the content creation process and this is how
it works whether you're creating content running ads or creating an ad campaign
you want to have these these procedures in place so that way all of these people
that you're hiring and outsourcing from overseas or wherever it may be know
exactly what to do and want to do it but asana is the tool we recommend for that
if you want to learn more about using asana we've already put together plenty
of videos on it but here's one that you're going to want to start with first
check out that video on asana the next tool we really like to use is for team
communication and this is where we basically have all of our chats and
instant messages between people so that way we have it all in one place that's
really the key is getting everything in one place because one of the big issues
I had in the beginning because I'm not very organized as everything was kind of
all over the place now what I'm doing since I have Ted involved is he's
basically bringing everything into one place setting up systems and procedures
where people are using the same tools and software's at specific times of the
marketing campaign or just in general with business processes so slack is what
we recommend for business communication check that one out the next tool is
going to be GSuite and guys this is one of my favorite tools you can see this is
on my Cereal Entrepreneur and we have our personal branding course for
some reason I have Matt oh it's because I shared it's owned by rest and bar okay
but we have a Cereal Entrepreneur here sorry we have a personal branding course
we do consultations we have admins basically me and documents and
information that I want to keep track of but this allows me to manage everything
in my team you can see we have 21 members in the Cereal Entrepreneur drive
and if we go inside that drive this is broken down into a bunch of different
folders and videos and documents and all kinds of different information that we
store and share access to the rest of the team so that way they're able to do
their job and we can quickly remove access to people and break it down
however basically we needed to run plus you get a gmail a business-related Gmail
when you get involved with GSuite and it
only starts at $5 per month per account so that's really affordable and I
believe if it's still the same Google is actually either giving out it's a
minimum of a terabyte but they used to give out unlimited data like we have
unlimited data storage because we were one of the first customers using G suite
business model we were one of the first customers so we got unlimited data so we
can literally store as much data as we want to that might still be an option
but I do know that they were planning on switching to terabytes at some point so
if they did leave it on comments below so that way other people can find out
but I believe it's still five dollars per month that you get unlimited cloud
storage next is a tool for writing and it's called grammarly guys if you're not
using this and having at least your writers use this tool you're really
missing out on a great free tool it's a free spell check tool that pretty much
checks any web browser that's ever open so if you're writing on Facebook writing
a post on Facebook this will actually check your spelling and your grammar on
Facebook there's tons of other features that you can use for grammarly
I personally don't use it much since I don't do much of the writing anymore I
do use it when I'm writing documents and stuff like that but if you're doing
something that's more in-depth like blog writing or social media posts copy and
stuff like that you're going to want to get grammarly and get your writers using
grammarly it's free again and then when you do decide to upgrade its number
one really cheap and affordable and it adds on some extra features for tracking
and saving information so that way your team can work together oh and really
quick question are you using grammarly for your agency or have you even heard of
Grammarly before if so let me know below what what you use if you don't use
Grammarly what other apps are there I didn't even know there would be other
apps but I use firmly so what do you use but clearly the next one we want to
cover is WordPress and this is one of the best web development platforms that
exists on the market it's optimized for SEO it's one of the most easy to manage
content management services or platforms out there on the market and I definitely
recommend if you're going to be developing websites for customers
especially local businesses small and medium-sized businesses you're going to
want to use WordPress because it makes it to where you can easily upgrade sites
and update sites over time meaning that you can save that business owner money
which gives them another reason work with you right so web development
on WordPress is definitely the way to go check it out but just in case
WordPress isn't for you for developing websites or you want to check out some
other platforms we did just put together a video on some of the best web
development platforms in 2019 so you can check out this video in the top right
hand corner another question we always get is Jordan
where do we host these websites at what is hosting you know what you know what
do we do basically I recommend going to Bluehost
number one their customer support is by far the best like forget GoDaddy forget
everyone else their customer support at Bluehost is the best it is some of the
most affordable hosting that you can find and is that it is the best quality
as far as uptime and performance as a matter of fact if you go to our website
you can actually see how happy we are with Bluehost service because we
actually represent it at the bottom of our web site as you can see right here
in this little video so check that out Bluehost is what you want to use
for hosting and we'll leave a link for it in the description below now one of
the biggest things that people ask me is Jordan where do you create your
thumbnails and I want to tell you guys something very very maybe enlightening
to a lot of you I don't create my thumbnails I have a graphic designer do
that and they do it in Adobe and Photoshop and if you're not a
professional graphic designer you're not gonna be able to mimic those thumbnails
like that person is that takes years and years of practice and experience and
just having an eye for design what I do is these little thumbnails that you see
when we go live on social media as you can see I am NOT a designer but if you
need something that you can create these kinds of thumbnails or captions or
things that look kind of like this right here you can see some of the ones we've
done in the past right if you need something that's like this then what you
need to do is go to canva because it allows you now we are paying for the
premium version of canva but it's still very cheap but it gives you access to
all kinds of extra tools and resources I recommend paying for that especially
in the beginning if not they do have a free version as well
what tool do we recommend for landing pages and generating leads definitely
click funnels because it is the easiest to make and to work with to integrate
any type of third-party resources or apps like for example the Facebook pixel
all of these things are super easy to integrate because click funnels is the
biggest landing page developer out there it's also very similar to something like
Wix or Weebly or you know Squarespace something like that
where it's a drag-and-drop builder so anybody can use this and create landing
pages super quickly and you don't have to go pay a developer 100 $200 per hour
to do it for you basically if you've ever been through one of our funnels
that's what we use if you want to check out click funnels and get a super cool
discount then check out our link right below this video in the description now
upwork is a platform that you guys are going to use to start outsourcing and
building your team this is like one of the primary platforms that I use for my
agency and have use to hire over probably 40 to 50 people now in the last
two years you can literally hire anybody to do
anything from right up here web development mobile development design
writing admin support customer service marketing accounting all and that's not
even all the categories so get on up work I strongly recommend using it check
it out go there just try it the final outsourcing platform I want to tell you
guys about is free up and as you can see we are partnered with free up we know
the owners it is a place where if you want quality you're going to get it from
here because they have such an excruciating process for these
freelancers to get on board but once they do they're guaranteed to make a
good living and make a decent income because of the fact that they have the
work there and they do so much to make sure that all of these people are
quality that everyone that uses their platform is typically happy so if you're
a marketing agency owner or if you're really wanting to hire people to do some
work for you and outsource some work for you you need to go this URL
freeup.com/Cerealentrepreneur and that's free up with three e's okay
freeup.com/cerealentrepreneur and you'll get $50 for free and enter
your coupon code JSTEEN50 and you'll get $50 off like your first free $50 you
can hire someone and do 50 dollars worth of work absolutely free alright guys so
that's pretty much it for this video but before you get out of here I have to
tell you we didn't include all of the apps and tools on this video we actually
have a ton more over on our blog post so you're gonna want to go right below this
video in the description and find the section on our blog and click that link
and go over to our blog and you'll find all of the other tools and softwares and
apps that we recommend there but if you have a question about any of these apps
or software's or if you want to know what software tool I recommend for
something else leave it in the comments below and we'll get back to you well
that's it for this video guys thank you so much for hanging out
you want to know since you stayed till the end where you can actually get that
checklist and the two-week training on starting your marketing agency all you
have to do is go right below this video it'll be the link at the very top of the
YouTube description for our SM MA checklist make sure to check that out it
is so worth it you're gonna love me for it so thank you so much for joining me
today and I will see you guys on the next video until then Cereal
Entrepreneur out bye guys ready to start living the six-figure work where ever be
your own boss lifestyle will at Cereal Entrepreneur Academy we'll teach you how
to use a laptop and internet to start your own social media and digital
marketing agency get started with our free Facebook Ads training links in the
description below guys see you in the course Cereal Entrepreneur out!
you