Okay. So if I was starting my agency over from scratch,
these are the things that I would do differently.
Hey, welcome back to.
My channel.
My name is Megan and I help professionals and businesses land clients using cold
emailing.
I've spent the last several years building and growing my agency
and it's doing really well. But I know that if I were to do it again,
there are several things I would do differently. Lessons learned.
But these things probably would have helped me make progress faster.
So I want to give you some concrete tips,
things you can do if you are just starting to build your agency,
or even if you already have one and you're just trying to grow it.
And you can apply these tips even if you have no money to work with
and even no experience. Okay.
Tip number one is get very clear on the services that you're going to offer.
This is especially important if you are building a social media
marketing agency or a digital marketing agency.
That could mean a million different things. So what does it mean for you?
What are you going to offer?
My agency started as a digital marketing agency and in the very beginning,
I would tell potential clients, "I'm a full-service
digital marketing agency." Not only did this turn into a huge mess because
I was trying to do everything,
so it was very stressful and messy and complicated,
but it didn't work in my favor. Anyway, this is not the best route to take.
It will really make it hard for you to grow and take on more
clients and make more money. So you see what I mean?
You have to get really clear and kind of narrow down the services that you want
to offer. Now, this might feel more manageable,
more feasible if you already have an established skillset,
something you already know you're able to do and you're good at.
But what if you are starting with no experience at all? Which I told you,
I promise you'd be able to apply these tips even with no experience.
You have to think of it like this. If you're starting with nothing,
the service or services that you're offering have to meet a
need and solve a problem. Otherwise,
people aren't going to pay for it. You have to meet a need, solve a problem.
Okay. So then we need to ask what are people's needs? What are their problems?
One of the simplest ways that we can do this is to look at what
people are already hiring for. So let's do that right now.
I'm going to show you my screen. Okay. So we are looking at Guru,
which is an online job board bidding site type of thing.
Do not look for jobs on Guru. That is not why we're here.
That's not why I'm showing you this. We're doing research. Okay?
And we're kind of doing like market research almost.
If you are starting from scratch and you need to figure out what people are
willing to pay for,
go to a job board or a bidding site and see what people are already hiring
for. So I'm on guru.com and then I just clicked Find
Jobs here up at the top. And you can,
before even applying filters,
if you wanted to just skim through this to start getting an idea.
But bear in mind, we're on the main jobs page. So it's a mixed bag.
You're seeing everything.
We can do is go up here in the top right corner and go to filters and you
can start zeroing in on what
type of work you might want to offer that you know people are hiring for.
Let's say you are in the US and you only
want to work with clients in the US, which a lot of agencies choose to do.
So we can apply that,
and that narrowed it down right there to 194 results.
Not that that number really matters, but then we're going to do,
go into any category. And again,
even if you don't have a skill set yet, you can look at these and ask yourself,
"What do I think I would enjoy doing,
and what could I feasibly learn how to do?" You know,
engineering and architecture might sound interesting,
but a lot of these people probably have degrees in those fields.
So might not be feasible.
Things for people who don't have any experience yet?
Design and art, like if you wanted to learn graphic design, writing, and well,
maybe not translation, but writing, sales and marketing. That's
not to say these other ones are off-limits.
Just know that there might be a little more work on your end to actually learn
the skills that you would need, like programming and development.
That's something that you would really have to commit to studying.
There's more of a learning curve. That's okay.
So we've narrowed it down by country, which to be clear, you don't have to do.
I did it. You could just leave it open to whoever,
but you definitely want to narrow it by category,
and you can explore different categories.
Let's for now start with sales and marketing.
We could narrow it down by sub-category, but if you're starting from scratch,
maybe we'll keep it very open, very kind of vague.
And you would just start going through here and see, okay.
What are people hiring for? They're hiring for press releases,
onsite SEO, PR, public relations, marketing agency.
So do you see what I'm doing? I'm going through here, and I'm saying,
I'm asking myself, "What are people's needs?
What problems are they having?" And you're going to start going through these.
And it doesn't have to be on Guru. It can be, you know, eLance, Upwork. Again,
I want to reiterate, we are not applying for jobs on these sites.
We're going to get to that in a few minutes.
But this is how you can start to kind of get an idea of what people will be
willing to pay you for. Okay.
Tip number two is find your ideal client.
Everybody is not your ideal client. The students who enroll in my program,
in The Cold Emailing Formula,
one of the first things that they do is build out what I call a Star Client
Avatar.
And this helps them get really clear on who and what they should be targeting,
who they should be going after, when they're sourcing leads and doing outreach.
A big part of this is figuring out what niche you want to work within.
I've got a few videos on this,
so I will drop those links in the description below.
We pick a niche for a few reasons,
one of which is it positions you as an expert,
which means you'll be able to charge more for your services. But also,
this means that you get to focus on something that you actually enjoy.
And if you're going to go and put the effort and the time into building an
agency that you want to sustain you for the rest of your career,
why wouldn't you focus on work that you like, and that you're passionate about?
We're going to keep this really simple.
I want you to open a blank document and all you're going to do right now is
start brainstorming and listing out things that you enjoy.
Let's pretend I don't have a niche yet,
and we're going to start listing out things that I enjoy.
And we'll go through an example together.
I enjoy fitness nutrition.
I enjoy learning about vegetarianism
and veganism.
I enjoy talking about things that have to do with living an
eco-friendly life or environmentalism, cooking.
And you would go through and you would list as many things as you can think of.
Then, what you're going to do to narrow down this list further,
because we want to start with one niche, focus on one niche,
you want to look at the things on your list and say, "Okay,
these are the things that I love. Now, what am I very knowledgeable on?
Or what am I willing to learn a lot about?" Looking at my list as an example,
I know maybe an average amount about cooking.
And it's something I enjoy doing, and I enjoy learning about it casually,
but to become a master of it, I don't think that's going to happen.
So I could remove this. Nature. Again,
it's something that I enjoy on like a leisure level, like casual level,
but to learn enough about it to approach potential clients and say,
"I am an expert on this," I don't think that's going to happen.
And you would keep narrowing this down. Tip number three is prioritize outreach.
I cannot stress this enough. If you want your agency to grow,
then growth has to be a priority. Here's an example of what you shouldn't do.
I would sit down at my computer at the beginning of every work day and I would
say, "Okay,
I just want to get client work out of the way so that I don't have to worry
about it.
And then I will put all my attention on outreach." Here's the problem with that.
I wasn't making it a priority. It was on the back burner every day.
And the results showed that. My growth was very,
very minimal. If you want to grow,
then outreach needs to be as important as
maintaining the clients that you currently have. And guess what?
If you don't have any clients yet,
you're kind of in a good position because you can spend the majority of your
workday on outreach and client acquisition. If you've watched any of my videos,
then you know that the way I land clients and the way my students land clients
is with cold emailing. Technically, though,
it's warm emailing because the relationship starts on LinkedIn.
So let's take a look at that. Okay. So I'm on LinkedIn.
And all we're going to do is go up to the search box here.
And you're going to type in what your niche is.
You should have one at this point. So let's use fitness as an example.
And then what you're going to do is click on More and then click on Companies.
And here we are. Here are lots and lots of businesses,
a hundred pages worth of businesses that somehow have to do with fitness.
You can treat these as leads, as potential clients.
Tip number four is outsource.
Yet another thing that I waited way too long to do. Now, to be clear,
this isn't something that you have to do,
but if you want to continue growing and scaling your business over time,
you're eventually going to realize that time becomes the limiting factor.
You're going to run out of hours in the day. And besides,
if you want to be an agency owner,
you're not supposed to be doing the grunt work,
like posting on your clients' social media pages or writing their blogs.
That's not what an agency owner, when you're a person with that title,
it's not what they do. Hire someone part-time and slowly start easing them in.
Also bare in mind that hiring, interviewing, and training,
they can take a long time. There's a learning curve with it,
just like there is with everything else.
So the point of all that is hire a little before you think you're
ready. Don't hire once stuff hits the fan,
which is what I did, because at that point,
you're going to be scrambling and you're just going to put even more stress on
yourself. Once again, I have a few videos on this. I've got one on hiring,
building a virtual team. I've got one on delegating tasks.
So you can find those links in the description below. For now,
let's look at how you can start looking for a potential hire. Okay.
I am on Outsourcely.
You can tell by the name what the point of the website is.
It's to find someone to outsource your work to.
We're going to go to For Employers and start
with Select a Category. So I'll click this drop down here. And let's say,
I want to hire a blog writer, which I have done on Outsourcely.
And here we are. It's showing me people who are available for hire.
How I typically do this is I start just with a private conversation.
And I ask them if they would be interested in doing a paid test.
So if they're a writer, I would give them a paid test blog.
If I was hiring someone for graphic design, I would give them, you know,
a paid test graphic. And they always get paid.
You always pay for test assignments or samples.
That's the first way I start weeding out people who I
get the feeling, you know, they just won't be a good fit. After that,
I like to do video calls.
I always make sure they know it's going to be a video call.
That face-to-face interaction is going to be really, really important.
And honestly, if all of that checks out, I hire.
I dive right in.
One of the best pieces of advice I've ever been given was hire
fast fire faster.
There's a reason that so many of my videos focus on client acquisition
and specifically on cold emailing.
And that's because from everything I've seen in my career thus far, 11 years,
this is why so many businesses fail. You can be really,
really good at what you do, at your skillset. So writing graphic design,
social media, PPC. You can be really good at the services that you're offering,
but if you don't know how to land clients, it's a moot point.
You're not going to make any money. And on that note,
I have a free guide that I would like to offer you,
and it will show you two things.
The first part is it shows you how to leverage LinkedIn,
to attract more leads and land more clients.
LinkedIn plays a huge role in my program.
It's really vital in improving your conversion rates. And for the second part,
I give you one of my proven cold email templates that you can copy/paste
and just plug in your own details.
And you can use that to go out and land clients. Again, this is all free.
All you have to do is fill in your first name and your email address,
and you will get the guide delivered right to your inbox.
If you're building an agency, whatever kind of agency it might be,
do not skip these four steps.
Take it from someone who's already been there and already messed it up.
I'm telling you if I were to go back and do it all again,
these are the biggest things that I do differently. Before you go,
please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel.
If you have any questions or requests for future videos,
drop them in the comments. And I will see you guys next time.