Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it will redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Devin Holmes who asks, I have a question about specializing as it relates to SEO and landing pages. I'm working with a client that's in the field of video animation. He understands that narrowing his audience will allow him to speak directly to them and make third-party connections. For example, explainer videos for SaaS companies. However, he's afraid to make the leap and suggested we make a page for every industry he serves, marketing, toys, cosmetics, SaaS, PR, etc. His reasoning is, this means more landing pages and therefore more keywords and more business. I know in the past that you said we could test a niche with landing pages, but 10 to 12 landing pages just can't be helpful. Or can it? What are your thoughts? Okay, so I've definitely got thoughts on this. First, I'm going to answer probably in a way that you didn't expect, which is, sure, if you have the bandwidth or the resources or the people or the money or the time to create 10 or 12 or 50 landing pages targeted at different industries and run ad campaigns to drive traffic to those landing pages that then funnel into your core offering, which is a sort of generalist offering of video animation, but you've primed the leads that are coming in through all these different intake funnels into this central funnel. You've primed them to think like, oh, well, this person does videos for cosmetics because that's the ad I saw and that's the landing page I went to. And then I'm on the sales page that they're not going to mention. They're not going to notice it doesn't mention cosmetics. They're going to be like, oh, I'm just getting ready to buy. I've already kind of decided that I'm going to do this. The problem with this is it's a massive amount of work. It's a lot to keep track of. But if they have the money or the people or the resources or whatever to do it, I'm not necessarily against it. The idea of specializing down and picking a specific target market is all about maximizing your impact with limited resources. Everybody has some kind of limits on their resources. And, you know, for most soloists, having even two funnels is too much. Like targeting two different markets, it's too much. It's too difficult to maintain social media accounts, keep them independent, keep your name out of it, because then your identity gets blurred if your name is associated with it. So for a soloist, I almost always say just pick one target to go after, go after it for three to six months. If you're getting no traction, then switch to a different one, but do them serially, not in parallel. I don't know how big this video animation company is. They could have a thousand employees. If they do, then sure, maybe they can make landing pages for all of these things and do everything in parallel and funnel these leads into a central area. That said, even in their case, even if that was the case and they had a thousand employees that could just deal with this, like a giant marketing department, then I would start to wonder, like, well, really aren't some of these verticals more profitable than others or more aligned organizationally with you? Do you really not care who you do animations for? Would you do animations for cigarette companies? I don't want to make a list of companies that you feel are not aligned with your core values, let's just say. You probably wouldn't work with just anybody. There's probably organizations that you would not want to promote. Maybe this company could get more high profit work from companies that they're more aligned with by going deeper into marketing or toys or cosmetics or SaaS or PR. I mean, these are very different kinds of companies. So I understand it all boils down to any hedging that I'm doing boils down to I don't know how many employees the animation firm has. If they have a thousand, then they're going to have a huge payroll not to cover every month and they're going to be scared to not be sucking in as much work from wherever to do it. But it sounds very generalist. It sounds like a path to the race to zero. All of those things kind of seem like they would happen, you know, but if they do have the resources to try it, then you can do them in parallel. If they don't have the resources to try it, I would say do it in serial. So pick their favorite one, their best one, their most profitable one, the clients who they do their best work for. Pick those first and work with them specifically or target them specifically in your marketing with ads and SEO and content marketing and all the things that they're doing. Do that for three to six months and see if it works. And the thing that you might find or they might find...

doing this is that by picking, let's say cosmetics as their industry, their marketing becomes easier because the word starts to spread about them in that space. So if you need video animation for cosmetics, these are the people, like they're the go-to people. So you're going to pay a pretty penny for it. It's going to be expensive, but it's worth it because they are the experts. So what ends up happening is instead of doing a volume play, they can start to do sort of a luxury purchase play, so a higher profit play. So fewer customers, but much more high profit work. And then if this happens and they're in that cosmetics industry for a long time, they can start to do line extensions. They can do higher profit things. They can get more strategic with these particular kinds of companies because they've gone deep into this vertical and understand it in ways that other video animation shops are not going to be able to touch with a 10-foot pole. Okay, so that's my soapbox. If they've got the resources, let them try it. If they don't, suggest that they try them in serial, but starting with their favorite and working their way down to the least favorite ones. Okay, I hope that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you've got a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we will find it, and I'll answer it as soon as I can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at ThePricingSeminar.com. That URL again is ThePricingSeminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.