October is typically a great month for online business! People are back from vacation, no BIG holidays and the weather isn’t always amazing so lots of people pushing to have a big Q4!

Guest post written by Aaron Burton founder of 20XMedia.com, an email  marketing agency that specializes in Klaviyo. 

Receiving articles like the one we did last week from Aaron make the time/effort/energy that goes into creating giant posts like B2B Lead Gen one totally worth it!

After reading the email and then having a quick call we thought his fast success was worth sharing with everyone!

Here is Aarons post discussing how he was able to achieve the results above!

Introduction

About a week ago, I read an article on AuthorityWebsiteincome about landing B2B clients. Little did I know this would be the article that helped our agency land its first client. 

Backstory

I was actually just looking for ways to grow my agencies SEO presence. In my search for Google domination I came across an article called “99+ Dofollow Backlinks List To Boost Traffic [Updated In 2019]”. In that blog post I learned which sites passed link juice. Very powerful resource. 

I then started browsing Jon’s posts & came across an article called “Ultimate How-To-Guide For B2B Lead Generation”. I was shocked at how in depth & organized it was. Did I mention it had gifs? Can’t go wrong with gifs! 

Implementation

After reading the descriptions of the 3 types of caveman models I figured it would be best to go all in. 

I went with the Alpha caveman model. So far I’ve used Hunter.io (free), Mailshake, Zapier (free), Upwork, Nerdydata, & Google sheets (free). Total cost was around $254 so we are $50 away from how much the initial post said it would cost to go all in. At least at the beginning stages.

Building my infinite list

So I knew I wanted to target ecommerce store owners. I used a combination of Nerdydata & a VA to get my initial list of customers. I skipped BuiltWith & Similar Web since I already knew what software my target audience used for their companies. 

Gettin’ Nerdy

Nerdydata really lives up to its reputation. You truly do have unlimited power if you use the tool right. 

It’s $150 per month for 6 exports. You bet I was factoring if it was worth it or not. I figured worse case scenario I lose $150 but have access to tons of potential prospects. You would have to be extremely bad at outreach if you couldn’t close at least 1 person out of tens of thousands of results. 

In the Ultimate B2B Guide they go over how to find contact info from companies who use a certain technology. I had to read that section again because I found out that you can search for just about any keyword. So if I wanted to find beauty companies who use Shopify all I had to do was select Shopify then type in “beauty”.

Formatting problems…

Wish I could tell you it was as simple as downloading the list and uploading it to Mailshake. But with great power comes great responsibility. 

First Problem: A lot of the emails were missing or had dummy email addresses such as [email protected] or emails from popular Shopify apps like [email protected]. 

Second Problem: A handful of companies had more than one email on the same line separated by a comma. 

Third Problem: For some reason the software sometimes pulls Shopify logos. I think this is because NerdyData thinks anything with an “@” sign in the text must be an email. 

Solving the problem with filters & formulas

Before we dive in to the filters, make sure to select everything and go to data -> create filter. Every filter listed below can be accessed the same way. 

Missing emails

Selecting all -> data -> create filter -> filter by the email column -> filter by condition -> is not empty

Dummy emails

Selecting all -> data -> create filter -> filter by the email column -> filter by condition -> text does not contain example

Logos as emails:

Selecting all -> data -> create filter -> filter by the email column -> filter by condition -> custom formula is

=not(regexmatch(F:F, “(?i)png|jpg|gif|jpeg”))

=not(regexmatch(F:F, “(?i)example|username|yourdomain”))

Functions

Multiple emails

Enter this formula to separate the emails: 

=SPLIT(F3, ‘;”)

F3 is referencing the first row of the email column. The semicolon is where Google sheets will make the split. If I had 3 emails separated by a semicolon it would spit out 3 emails in their own row. 

PS: If you’re planning to skip this step and just have MailShake clean your NerdyData list it’s going to take forever. As a benchmark, cleaning a list of 250 emails takes like 5-7 minutes. So imagine uploading thousands of emails. RIP. 

Virtual Assistant MVP

Something told me not to rely on just NerdyData so I had a VA search ecommerce companies on Linkedin. The process was simple. I sent them a job description. Letting them know exactly what data I wanted.

Here were the requirements: 

Metrics:

• Website Traffic: 20k-800k visitors per month
• Numbers of employees: 1-20
• Revenue: 250k-10M per year

Data To Collect:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Position
• Company Name
• Website

Positions Ranked:

• CEO
• Founder
• Co-Founder
• Partner
• Executive Director
• Director Of sales
• Staff & Operations Manager
• Operations Manager

Rate: $20-$30 per 250 contacts

I tried to include as many decision maker roles as I possibly could without restricting the VA to just the founder and CEO. Anyone who can sign off on hiring a marketing agency is who I want to get in contact with. The VA’s actually did a good job with finding potential candidates. 

These VA’s were already so good at finding emails that I didn’t have to tell them to use tools like Hunter.io. They most likely were already using them or something similar to complete the task.

Mailshake

I remember installing Mailshake and being really excited actually. We do email marketing for ecommerce but never in a B2B setting that’s also automated. 

Their prices are pretty fair. Although if you want to use their list cleaning feature and be able to split test you will have to upgrade to the $59/mo level. 

The numbers

So I actually ended up creating 2 campaigns in Mailshake. This is because I ran into a formatting mismatch between the leads my Upwork VA’s found & the data I formatted from NerdyData.

Stats from the first campaign (Nerdydata):

• 73% open rate
• 2% clicked
• 3% replied
• 30% bounced (forgot to turn on list cleaning)

Stats from the second campaign (Upwork VA):

• 32% open rate
• 1% clicked
• 4% replied
• 3% bounced 

These screenshots are actually new, however we sent about 266 emails total that led to 1 sale. The funny part is our client actually wanted email marketing done for another company they had. So even if you contact the “wrong people” they may have another business that could use your service. 

So which one worked the best? I would say the list the VA’s came up with worked better. Linkedin contacts are more active & usually more long term. While pulling emails from NerdyData doesn’t really guarantee you will find a business that’s been in operation for a while. Mainly because you really have to sort intelligently on NerdyData to get good leads. Also, the high open rate is mainly because it’s customer support job to open emails and respond. 

Tips

1. Use list cleaning. You really don’t want your emails to start bouncing like crazy. Even if you’re using something like G Suite you can easily go to spam if your sending to dead emails.
   
2. Study your target market more thoroughly. Since your spending money finding the lists & sending emails its best to identify who exactly your looking to target. Think about what software your audience uses.
   
3. Make sure you’re formatting is correct in MailShake. Mailshake takes a little getting used to. I had to upload multiple csv files a few times. It’s actually really easy. Every column can basically be used as a personalized token inside Mailshake. Stick to one formatting process so you don’t end up having to create multiple campaigns like I did.
   
4. Warm up your Gmail accounts. It’s best to warm up your G Suite accounts so you can start sending more emails per day in Mailshake. G Suite has a limit of 2,000 emails you can send. You can also buy multiple G Suite accounts to send even more. It can get nuts really quick. I recommend making sure your messaging is correct before you burn thousands of leads. Your company’s reputation is very important.
   
5. When reading big blog posts like the one’s Jon & his team make, always bookmark them in relevant folders. If I wouldn’t have done that, the post would have been lost forever.

Conclusion

To conclude this post I wanted to thank AuthorityWebsiteIncome for putting together such a great post. Your methods definitely made my life a lot easier. Now I have a consistent way to bring in new business. Thanks!

Aaron

It has been a fun 1.5 months since we launched MotionInvest! In this post I will review some of the changes we have initiated based on feedback received to make the offering even more attractive!

Your business needs more b2b lead generation! This post shows you how to get them in incredible step by step detail but with lots of fun GIFs thrown in!

Sep is one of my 2-3 favourite months for me in my business! Every one of my major businesses has been launched in Sep and I wanted to make sure 2019 was no different with a BIG push for the launch of MotionInvest.com 

Over the years for whatever reason I seem to have found I have a pace to my work which involves three phases to the year…

• Build & Launch – Sep-Dec
• Stabilize – Jan-Apr
• Systematize / Rest – May-Aug

This year the big push in the build/launch phase is the blockchain project extensions BLADE and more relevant to this audience is MotionInvest where Spencer Haws and I are directly buying and selling websites. 

Longer hours and more action… in this phase if I am not making people uncomfortable with the pace I am pushing things it is a problem! I need to be not counting the hours and pushing hard. 

Based on some of the income reports it seems like others are really focused on growing their businesses. 

#1 takeaway – Go in Depth – Several of the sites covered here have refocused in September around the topic of their sites. Having a  site cover a topic in depth on multiple channels helps achieve a few results…

• More efficient creation of similar content – Jon Dykstra is using the years of content at FatStacksBlog as an input to his other content creation efforts (Video and Youtube)
• Topical Authority – The more articles you have around a given topic the more authoritative Google views your site – Ryan Robinson has focused his prolific content creation around the topic of blogging to help his how to start a blog rank higher

Quick August Update on my End:

• The growth rate for blade.software has started to go exponential – see dashboard
• MotionInvest launched with a lot of success, lots of very positive feedback and only made a couple adjustments…
  • Adjustment 1 – Lots of people just wanted the site and not the value add SOP’s or coaching so split those out as an optional purchase
  • Adjustment 2 – Free trial for month 1 subscription 
• Lots of biking with the family was still able to be done in Sep!

My Reason for This Round Up:

When I started my online entrepreneurship journey I took a lot of inspiration from others that were sharing everything they did online. Seeing that people like me were making REAL money and that the opportunity to replace my day job was possible. 

It has been 3 years since I left my day job – https://websiteincome.com/quit-my-job/

The more transparent the report the more I appreciated and was motivated by it. 

Over the years I have tried to be as transparent as possible sharing along the way my goals, business successes/failures and the ultimate results(profits). 

After years of sharing monthly income posts I decided that it made sense to stop these… a decision I actually regret as I wish I had found a way to keep sharing some of what I was doing. My reason was as my online world and “real” worlds became more tangled.  

Looking at many of the people that originally had an income round up they have also stopped. Namely the most famous in the space Pat Flynn no longer does income round ups. 

I will cover…

1. List of inspiring income report posts and how they earned their profits
2. Recognize motivating people showing not just telling people the results they are achieving
3. Learn from others – What the key learning is from the people

Last Month Profit – $20.238.31
Name – Ron Stefanski
Website – onehourprofessor.com
Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site
Income Report – http://www.onehourprofessor.com/august-2019-monthly-income-report/
Key Lesson(s):

• The best month ever for Ron! Congrats!
• His main revenue generating site had a great month and he was surprised as he stated “The only thing that I’ve been focused on with this website in the last six months is updating content and with results like this, I have no question that this strategy works well.” This is a strategy we have had a lot of success with as well with clients from ContentRefined.com 
• The overall growth rate has been incredible! (look at the graph below)

Let’s Reach Success

Last Month Profit – $4,800
Name – Lidiya
Website – letsreachsuccess.com
Business Model – Blogging
Income Report – https://letsreachsuccess.com/blog-income-report-pinterest-strategy/
Key Lesson(s):

• ConvertKit wins another client, although I haven’t used it and I am happy with ActiveCampaign a lot of people are making the switch. 
• The Pinterest strategy Lidiya is using is lean and clearly driving some results. If you have wanted to learn more about driving traffic to your blog check it out!
• 35 blog posts published!

Last Month Profit – no update this month
Name – Spencer Haws
Website – NichePursuits.com
Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site
Income Report – https://www.nichepursuits.com/get-ready-niche-site-project-4/
Key Lesson(s):

• No update this month

Last Month Profit – $6,238.21
Name – Johnny FD
Website – johnnyfd.com
Business Model – Mixed – Dropshipping & Investing
Income Report – https://www.johnnyfd.com/2019/10/sept-2019-monthly-travel-expenses-and.html
Key Lesson(s):

• What is impressive about Johnny is the lifestyle he lived in Sep with expenses under $4k… what some people have in mortgage and vehicle expenses covered his entire month including a private jet, 3 trips and driving a ferrari! 
• His big Sep focus was on his conference – invest like a boss!

Last Month Profit – $37,063 
Name – Jon Dykstra
Website – fatstacksblog.com
Business Model – Authority Website (display ads)
Income Report – https://fatstacksblog.com/income-report-august-2019/
Key Lesson(s):

• Jon was prolific in Sep with new toys… lots of new video and audio equipment to help relaunch his YouTube channel and his soon to be launched PodCast channel. 
• He is relaunching an EZoic review and case study which is looking promising
• His income report does not include any revenue or expenses from his blog FatStacksBlog.com
• It is interesting that Jon still finds it interesting to write the content himself on some of his sites. He enjoys it and is able to keep the rest of the machine moving while still creating content for his sites himself!

Last Month Profit – $25,280.27
Name – Ryan Robinson
Website – ryrob.com
Business Model – Authority Website (affiliate earnings)
Income Report – https://www.ryrob.com/blog-income-report-september-2019/
Key Lesson(s):

• Almost 100k unique sessions up this month! That is a BIG increase congrats! 
• 7 new LONG form guides on blogging related topics! 
• Ryan is focusing his blog around the topic of blogging and trying to really drive the topical authority of his site around that niche. Currently his most popular articles cover a more widespread range of topics such as business ideas, books etc. By foucsing it should help signal to Goolge his blog is the authoity on blogging and therefore help rank his guide 1st which is his big money maker.

Honourable Mentions:

Although they don’t do exactly income reports there are a few reports that are worth mentioning and when they publish new reports I will be sure to include.

• No honorable mentions this month

Am I missing any I should include? Please drop a message in the comment section below with anyone I should include next month!