- Hi everyone, today I wanted to talk to you about well, it's a rant actually. There's this business model out there that well, it's a rant because I did this about 10 years ago and it's called the Rank-a-Site Model. And I tried this and it was part of a journey and I learned a lot and it helped me a great deal and it kind of got me where I am today but it's kind of a broken model and I think it's relevant maybe 10 years ago and not many people are talking about the new way, the new supercharged way to do this, okay? And today I wanted to show you, give you a bit of a look at kind of what we do as a lead generation agency. We sell leads on a cost-per-lead basis, similar to what the old Rank-a-Site Model used to do. And I wanted to show you what we do now, what the 2019 equivalent is which will hopefully give you a light bulb moment on what the possibility is out there. So, I wanted to talk to you about the old way versus the new way. All right. So, for those who don't know what the Rank-a-Site Model is, it used to work like this and this is what I did and I failed miserably at it but it was a good process, so I think I bought a course and what they advised you to do was buy a domain. So, I'm going to use one of the domains I bought a long. Oops. That I bought a long time ago that I think it's expired now. I live in Brighton, so I bought a domain called solarpanelsbrighton.co.uk. So, the idea was to be able to build a, to be able to buy a website which was keyword rich. The URL, solarpanelsbrighton was what I thought people would be typing in. Let me move over here for now. Was what I thought people would be typing in and back in the day 10 years ago, if you created a website like that, and put some flimsy content on it, it would go straight to number one in Google literally within a couple of weeks. So, you'd buy the domain, you would install on WordPress, going to go back over here, so install WordPress. Install WordPress. Use some kind of home page template with a form, name, email address, and phone number, put a form on the home page and then build out maybe five to six pages with different variations of that keyword in the title of those pages. So, it might be something along the lines of solar energy in Brighton, it might be the title of one page or installation of solar panels in Brighton, so kind of spammy type internal pages which were keyword rich which combined with the home page and the URL would help you rank better and it worked back in the day and then you would have maybe three blog posts on similar topics. Useless information but keyword rich, good keyword density, SEO meta tags, all that kind of stuff and what kind of happened is that it worked, so within two to three weeks, and all this took maybe 20 hours, 20 hours of time. And I was rubbish at kind of technical stuff and building websites and all that stuff, so I used to have to pay someone to build that, so 20 hours plus maybe $300 or something like that for me which when you kind of add it up is not a significant investment but it's still something, right? And what happen, sorry, I'm all over the place here, but what would happen is this website would rank and because I was like hasty in doing my research, I would rank this website and then maybe it got three organic searches a week and maybe one person put their details in, one lead per week. If I was lucky and what happened then was that I thought to myself, okay, that's all right, I've got an asset here, it's going to rank and a lead will come in, I just need to find a solar panels company that I can sell the lead to and which I never did, I never found someone but the idea was that I'd been able to make a living by selling that one lead a week for 50 bucks or whatever it is to that lead gen company and they'd go and close that sale and make money. And that was my business model. The problem was, there's two problems, first of all, that's not enough lead volume. One lead per week is not enough to create a sustainable business on, so I went and did this over and over again about 50 times with different websites, roofers Cambridge, roofers London, I bought all of these domains and I did the same thing over and over and over again. Cost me months of work and a lot of money when I added that 300 up over 50 websites or whatever it is. And it was exhausting and it was all good because I thought I'd built this asset and some leads started coming in and it looked like I had a sustainable business and then one day this thing called the Penguin, the Google Penguin came, I think it was called the Penguin, I don't know, they had all these updates and they'd name them different things and all of a sudden overnight, 90% of my websites vanished into the thin air. There was nothing left. All this work I had done, all these thin websites with useless information had been slapped to page 15 and there was no way of getting it back, my business had evaporated overnight. And that is the old Rank-a-Site Model and people are still teaching this and it absolutely sucks. It's a really bad model. Unless you have some serious, serious SEO skills and link building networks and all that kind of stuff, it's actually really hard to do. I'm not saying it can't be done successfully 'cause I've spoken to people that have done it successfully but it's becoming harder and harder and I would bet my bottom dollar that even the people that are doing this successfully are worried because Google is getting smarter and smarter and I bet they're feeling like their business is at risk for the same reason that mine was at risk all those years ago. So, what is the new way? This is what we do and I'll show you what it looks like. So, we use paid traffic. First of all, we build a lead generation website similar to that, doesn't matter what we call it because it doesn't need to rank anywhere 'cause we're driving paid traffic to it. So, we might buy a website called cheapsolarpanels.com. So, this is just an example. We haven't done this. When you buy a .com, you can sell that, you can use this website all over the world internationally, so always try and buy a .com if you can. Okay? The next thing we do is we install, we use Unbounce which is a drag and drop landing page builder to install a one-page website.
learn seo 3 -page website. Initially because we don't want to waste too much time. We buy that domain, we knock up, we've got plenty of templates that we use now within our program and with our own agency and we install that one-page template onto Unbounce and we have a lead generation website that looks really good very quickly. Next thing we do is we go in and create an advertising account in Facebook which is where we drive the paid, I think you can see where this is going. The next thing we do is we sign up with some quiz software. This is important. We've got an account at a company called LeadsHook. We'll also put a link below this article to LeadsHook and that allows us to able to ask questions. So, if you've got cheapsolarpanels.com and you're generating leads in, you're driving paid traffic to that website and someone is in Leeds versus someone that is in Manchester, if you ask those questions in the quiz, then you're able to sell the leads to different companies based on the answers that they've given which will allow you to have clients all over the UK that are willing to buy those leads and also clients internationally if you decide to open up your advertising in Facebook internationally. Okay? The other thing that you can do is segment based on quality as well. So, I mentioned before about being able to sell based on location but what if someone's looking to, that isn't a homeowner, that's looking for solar panels in their new home that they're moving into in three months' time? So, you're able to segment on quality as well. This old model, whatever came in, got sold. Doesn't matter if it's a crap lead or a good lead. You didn't have that flexibility because they were so rare, so if you've got a quiz, you're able to segment on quality as well which is really valuable. So, an example of that, the renter in three months is a completely different lead than someone who's ready to install panels now. Install now. Okay? So, once you have this information and you can ask those questions in the quiz on that lead generation website, then you can start segmenting and selling leads at different prices. You can put the renters and the three-month people into a nurture sequence where you can reach out to them in three months. There's something obvious that a lot of people don't do. You can do so much. On top of that, if you have SEO skills, and this looks like it is a big business that's got some legs, you can start doing SEO on this website, install WordPress on the back of the URL and start creating content, valuable content on the blogs and you'll start getting organic leads and what happens is that over time, if you do this well, you'll create yourself an asset with a database that you can sell to a large solar panel company. And that's powerful and this is the new way to do things. This is the supercharged Rank-a-Site Model which not many people are doing, not many people know about and if you do it properly and you can make it work which obviously you can, this just makes sense, you can do very well out of it and the beauty of it is that this domain costs 10 bucks or whatever that is, Unbounce takes less than a week to set up. The advertising account, you can get set up and running very, very quickly. LeadsHook within a week. All you have to do is find a client. And when you have all of these things set up and a brand already built, it's something to show people and a strong offer which is selling leads rather than some complex retainer solution which a lot of solar panel companies are used to, you can find yourself in a very strong negotiating position landing clients very, very quickly and this is the new way to do things, guys. I hope you enjoy. If you're looking for more information on how we created a cost-per-lead agency rather than the old retainer model type agency, then we've got a case study below this article which you should watch. You'll find it really interesting. I look forward to seeing you guys and hearing from you soon. Bye.