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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 402: Digital Marketing in Today's Business Landscape, with Matt Raad
00:27:23
For over 27 years, Matt Raad has been helping people escape the 9-to-5 by turning digital assets into real-world freedom. Alongside his wife Liz, he pioneered the strategy of buying, renovating, and selling websites for cash flow—long before the...
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- [00:05]
A
Do you feel burnout from your job or you're just tired of doing the same thing but you're well paid and you feel like you have golden handcuffs on you? Well, let's listen to Matt Rad as he suggests to purchase several websites that generate income and so you can even work from home. Let's listen to him. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina Burus and today we have Matt Reid. No, go ahead, repeat your last name, Matt.
- [00:45]
B
Rod.
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A
Rod.
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B
All the way from Australia.
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A
All the way from Brisbane.
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B
Brisbane. Thank you.
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A
You can see I can't always pronounce things well. Too many languages. Confusing, I know.
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B
Yes.
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A
So you're a specialist of online business and how to rethink traditional careers and have an online business. So first of all, tell us a little bit about what's the importance of digital marketing in today's business landscape?
- [01:17]
B
Yeah, it's a good point, particularly for your listeners. We use online businesses to help people create either side incomes or get out of burnt out corporate positions. So we typically train the last 15 years we've trained a lot of people that are highly paid but they've got the golden handcuffs. You know, they're stuck in their corporate career. And the reason we use online businesses because like your question, what's the importance of online business and digital marketing is because these days it's everything and, and there's just so much opportunity there because everything's done online. Well, when I say everything, like there's a big world out there online and there's some easy wins to be had when you know what you're doing. And if you can just harness part of that, really what we're trying to do is harness part of the traffic that's out there and we can figure out how to monetize it. You can set up very, very valuable online businesses. So we have clients that are creating now seven figure assets in their spare time. That's why we're so passionate about online business and digital marketing.
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A
So what would you say are some of the trends that you can take advantage of?
- [02:25]
B
The biggest one these days, Katrina, of course is AI. It is just, it is everything, it is mind blowing. What it is doing now that's even a game changer for us. So we, our background is buying and selling online businesses. We've been buying and selling businesses. Now when I say we, my wife and I, for 30 odd years and we're also, I should mention why this is important, why we're also angel investors and we've been we used to working with private equity firms, venture capital and high net worths and things. And in the angel investing world we started to see this happening. Over the last few years, everything's starting to be about AI. And now we all know in our circles, everyone's, especially if any of your listeners have been around angel investors or venture capital, everyone's just sitting, waiting for the moment that who's going to be the first person to create the billion dollar one man business. And that's pretty exciting. So for us this is very real because we help people at a small level, not at the billion dollar level, but we help people create little tiny businesses just to learn how this works and then they go on and build it into something bigger. So AI is allowing people to accelerate things because they can achieve so much just with one person by themselves. To give you an example, even with what we do, we own various websites. We have a team of people that work for us. They're all virtual. It's lovely. They're all around the world. But honestly now we've got some new processes where we're posting content. And in the past we would have, for instance, you can take it like a video, you can record it, turn it into a podcast, all that sort of stuff. And that would take a team of people. These days you can do it just by yourself. One person can be edited, turned into a video. It can then be cut up with AI into shorts. So not. You don't even need a full edit team anymore. The AI is so good, even just in the last few months, you can create really effective shorts. You can then turn that. We now have prompts that turn everything into LinkedIn, multiple LinkedIn posts, multiple Facebook posts, multiple Instagram posts, blog articles, multiple blog articles. It's all unique. So we do one recording and it just gets spread out across the Internet. And this is what you are seeing big digital agencies do for big corporates. But you can do it yourself now at home, pretty cost effectively. You don't need a team of. We used to use about half a dozen people in that process. Now it's just one. One button. Say hi, it's called Claude.
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A
Okay, so thanks to Claude. But give us an example for our listeners. So let's say somebody's burned out and they're business now currently, or they want to stay at home and start a business. What kind of recommendations would you give them?
- [05:23]
B
Perfect. My favorite topic. This is the thing that we love. They're exactly the people we love helping. If you're in that boat, I recommend you start out small. It's very easy in this day and age to get overwhelmed with the opportunities that are out there and also just the vast knowledge and where should you start? And so we recommend people learn. It's a very, very basic skill. But how to build or buy a simple website that makes money, that's it. That's probably your first step. So if you've never done that before, and it's very easy to intellectually look at and go, oh, that's just too easy, it works, it works really, really well. And we've had people that earn significant six figure incomes tell us later on that, wow, their proudest moment was the first dollar they earned online overnight while they slept. And that's kind of a major achievement because then it's pro of concept that this works. So we suggest start out small. You can either buy a little website for under $10,000 or under $5,000, which is not a lot of money in the big scheme of things of buying businesses. And you can practice it in the evenings while you're still working your 9 to 5 job or your 5 to 9 job. And it's a skill set that you can build up, and you can build it up very rapidly these days, particularly with the help of AI as well, of course. And the good news is these days it's actually easier than what it was even just two years ago because you don't need to hire an external team at all while you're learning because you can do everything with AI yourself. So that's probably where I would recommend people start. Or they can do it like on the weekend, practice building up these little tiny websites and then when they're working they can just sell them later on. We have a lot of clients, like I was mentioning to you, Katrina, our client Ashleen, who's doing exactly that, you know, she was, she's come out of the crypto background in a big way, just needs a break for a year. So she's just building, bought a few small, simple sites. She's currently got four little websites. But the first site she bought was about crochet and she knows nothing about crochet. So you can buy these little sites in what we call vertical niches, passion niches. And she bought this site on crochet, just sells a course and it just makes a thousand bucks a month, cost her $18,000 and she learned on that. And so she's made all the money back. She's had some big months where she's made two or three grand and then she's gone and bought two more sites.
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A
Okay. Just before we go to the next site. So she bought this site, Crochet, she knows nothing of, but she knows how to use AI and has done all the marketing for it. So it continues to live and. And attract more clients, is that correct?
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B
That's exactly right, yeah. So she's built up the database because the previous owner ran it as a passion hobby kind of site. And they're the best ones to buy, by the way. And she's just built it up and stabilized it and learned how it works it sells.
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A
So stabilized it. Tell me more about what does stabilizing it. It was making money before it was purchased.
- [08:29]
B
Very erratic. It was very erratic before because the previous owner was a mum who just loved Crochet. She wasn't thinking about the business side and she just wanted to make money. Whereas Ashleen comes in and he's learning. This is her learner site, though, for Ashleen, so it's not the one that. But she just wanted to learn all the different process. So Ashleen had never been online at all in her life. So she had to learn about email marketing and how to fix up the funnel and how to move things around on the website. And so in doing that, she's done what we call renovated the website, which stabilizes it. So it means. It's just. It just more consistently brings in clients and makes money at the end. So we've taught her how to do SEO for that site, how to fix up all the content that was on there and make it more appropriate for the members. And she's learned that very effectively. And now Ashleen has a skill for life. So she's just bought another site, similar thing, selling courses, except this time it's Thai massage. Then it sells a course and it makes. This one makes around three and a half grand to five grand a month. So just through learning off small little sites, Ashleen's already earning $10,000 is us. This is net, not sales. This is net a month. She earns around consistently eight grand a month, she was saying. And every so often, depending on the season, it jumps up.
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A
So if I understood correctly, you teach people how to evaluate a company.
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B
Yes. Yeah.
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A
And then how to develop it.
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B
Yep. How to do due diligence. But not the company, it's the websites, the online.
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A
I see. Okay.
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B
I was going to say, a lot of people, when they hear us, they think, when we're talking about buying online businesses, they think e commerce style businesses. You know, businesses that have like an Amazon store or Something like that. We do none of that because our background is for Liz and I, we used to buy and sell wholesale import businesses. And it's very difficult if you're a beginner and it's very difficult if you're trying to transition out of a highly paid job to run a complex business that involves physical inventory. So we don't recommend you do that unless you're full time at this because there's a lot of moving parts when it comes to physical inventory. We prefer people and we suggest to people to, you know, buy online course businesses, info, product style businesses, advertising or affiliate style businesses. So I know Katrina, like a lot of your listeners are, you know, coaches. They could be buying up, coaching businesses or businesses with databases that have their ideal client. That's another smart strategy that we teach as well. Grow by acquisitions, which is absolutely huge.
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A
And that have a lot of data, a good database is have a lot of emails.
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B
Okay. Yeah.
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A
And also so I imagine that you develop the brand of the company too, as you're an expert in branding. So tell us a little bit more about that.
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B
This is a really interesting time in history for what we do online and anyone that I think there's a golden opportunity here. It's like the Internet all start when the Internet first started. We first got online back in the early 2000s. It was easy money back then and I think we're about to hit that again when it comes to branding. So anyone that wants to personally brand themselves or their company or their business, you've got a really good opportunity over the next couple of years because of AI and the way the LLMs work. It's actually just if you're doing the things that you need to do consistently, it's actually very easy to get really strong branding out there. That's what all the big companies are paying all the gurus for now is advice around how do we get our stories out there and our branding. And with AI, it's a lot easier and it's a very important thing to do. If you're listening to this and you are in any way driving leads online for your business, which you should be, it'd be silly not to, then you should definitely be going all in on it for this next one or two years. Because just even if you hire someone like to help you like on upwork or whatever, or a digital agency, depending on what level you're at, but I would definitely be utilizing AI now and what's called AI SEO to make sure all the data points are out there for the LLMs, the large language models, the AI bots basically to pick you up. It's actually, it's kind of like old fashioned SEO on steroids and it's working particularly well at the moment. So that's a great way how we renovate websites that we buy or if you own an existing website.
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A
So, okay, so I hear there's a lot of SEO put get into funnels to bring people to, to convert. What else do you include in branding? Because branding is a sort of like untouchable thing. It's what people say behind your back maybe.
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B
Yep. What we teach is it's what you stand for, what makes you unique. And it can sometimes you're right, it's something you can't quite touch. And we teach people when they're buying an online business, there's a lot of, let's just call them bottom boring online businesses. There's no feel to them when you land on the web page. It's just about crochet or whatever. So. And let's use a seemingly, you know, boring example like a crochet. Not if you're a crocheter, by the way. No disrespect, but to someone who's not into crochet, you would have looked at Ashleen's site that she bought and go, okay, that's not that exciting. So what we said to Ashleen is, is you need to emphasize the brand of this website, where's its power, what makes it unique. And it was really obvious. It was when I spoke to Ashley and I said, tell me about the previous owner, the founder of it. And she said, oh, she's lovely, she's really nice, she's a mum, she's got three or four kids, she lives in middle America and she's just a real go getter. She's very home proud and all that. I said, that's your branding. So let's go deep on that. It's not been emphasized enough on the website. I didn't get that impression when I first landed on the website. The first thing you saw, because imagery is really important, was not the owner and was not a homely mum looking image. It was just some like file picture of someone crocheting. I said, well that's, let's change that and make it fit the story of the founder and let's build it around that and just use AI to rewrite the about page. That's it. It's easy and rest is history. That's what she did. And part of it was I said to her, make sure, you can keep the previous owner's likeness on there. If she's not comfortable with that, then we can create a Persona. But ideally we keep the. And the previous owner loved the idea. She thought it was great because she's such a lovely lady. So in any business, whether it's a micro, little tiny passion blog through to a big corporate business, there's always some. Now, at the corporate level it's a little bit more tricky and you do need agency stuff. But in our experience with small solo operator or, you know, up to seven figure style businesses, it's pretty easy to figure out a branding. It can be quite simple. And then branding is what allows us then to get the message out there repeatedly across the Internet. And all you do, Katrina, is once you figure out the branding, it's basically just your about bio. I would just keep rewriting it with AI and coming up. AI is brilliant at writing bios and about pages and things like that because it naturally excels at it because that's how it's been trained on large language models. So it works particularly well. In the old days it was hard for our clients to come up with it. Now it's a walk in the park and you just keep doing it till you get the one that you know is right and that then becomes your bio that goes on everything that you do online in the author signature on everything on your LinkedIn profile. Super important. Big tip here. LinkedIn absolutely rocks for getting branding out there and training the AI bots.
- [16:51]
A
I'm going to ask you a difficult question. So your client purchased this woman of Tricot, as they say, and she gave the website the feel of the owner, the Persona, and then she buys another company and it's another Persona.
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B
Yep, easy.
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A
So let's say she does that through a few companies. Where's her personality? Where's her Persona?
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B
She's a portfolio manager, so she doesn't have to be public about it. It's very normal. So what people don't realize is there's companies out there that are doing what our individual clients are doing. They own whole portfolios of websites. So a really good example under everyone's nose, every single day of the week. Media companies, that's what they do. They'll own hundreds of websites or online media. So these days an individual person can become a little mini media mogul. So you might own multiple websites in a certain vertical niche. Or like Ashleen, she now owns online courses for crochets and online courses for Thai massage. It's the same thing. She doesn't need to put her Persona behind it, but she can do depends on your strategy and what your goal is. We actually don't recommend. So when we used to teach this, this was in the early days, our strategy was. Because it's what Liz, exactly what Liz and I did, we just copied our private equity friends. We literally just bought up every business we could think of in certain vertical niches these days we don't recommend that because there's a variety of reasons, but typically it's too complex to manage. Once you start owning 100 websites, we're talking a big business. It's complex especially with team and everything. But most people now for solo operators, if you want to do this part time at home or five or six websites are absolutely fine. So on some of those you may put your real name and you can certainly do that. And it just comes down to a strategy like where how do you want to be known online? Do you want to be known as a medium owner or do you want to be known as a crocheter, a Thai massage course seller. And she, Ashlyn has a fishing website as well. So she doesn't want to be known as any of those things publicly. So she's just known as someone that manages multiple websites. So you can, Google is absolutely fine with pseudonyms because you know, it's like writers in the old days would write under a pseudonym name. But admittedly in this day and age, all things being equal, if you can be a real person online and have it linked to your real name, you're absolutely laughing. That's the best option. So Katrina, I know like you were saying to me, a lot of your listeners are coaches or high level leaders or consultants. For you people, it is really, really important that you get your personal branding out there online and you have a massive advantage if you can use your real name. Particularly I would build it around a website hub and your LinkedIn profile. If you're in that coaching corporate space, I think that's super important.
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A
And LinkedIn because it's the business platform.
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B
Yes. And this is just my personal opinion, it's not backed by any scientific data. Except for 20 years experience of doing so many due diligences on online business. It's just not funny. I look at Google Analytics accounts and due diligences day in, day out. I look at thousands of deals and one of the things I've noticed that I've always shared with with my clients is just how well LinkedIn is picked up by its main competitor Google. I often see bizarre like niche sites. The owner's LinkedIn profile will rank in Google very highly. So it just kind of tells me, right, Google places a lot of trust in LinkedIn profiles because they know it's used for. And now with AI, I think it's really time to, you need to be on board with it. And so again, I don't have any hard data on that. It's anecdotal Matt Raad's observation of, you know, 20 odd years doing this, but I'd like to suggest I've probably seen more websites than most and I've seen huge success with our clients with LinkedIn and particularly for any consultants, coaches, anything like that. I think you'd be missing out in this day and age if you didn't have a LinkedIn the name of the game these days. On that note, it's not just LinkedIn. I need to be careful here. I'm very, very keen on LinkedIn because of SEO reasons. I've seen it work really well in particular for AI. But the name of the game these days is multiple channels of opportunity for people to find your business. We can't just rely on Google anymore because AI has changed the game. So we need properties like LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, Facebook and you need to decide in your business or for your personal branding, where are your best clients hanging out, where are they most likely to pick you up? And so for coaches and consultants, LinkedIn's a no brainer because like you said, it's clearly the business place. But there may be other channels where people are hanging out too. If you're going for a younger crowd, you might want to be on Insta or TikTok or whatever. And I know us oldies don't like that, but too bad you need these multiple channels these days and that's where people are winning big. And it's relatively easy once you've. I know it looks overwhelming if you're new to this. It's actually not. I would just practice on one channel, get it right and then go to the next channel. So use the channel that you're natively comfortable with at first.
- [22:36]
A
Okay, thank you. So you give courses on this way of doing business, right? Is that correct?
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B
We do. We teach people how to buy and sell. We teach all of this, but it's wrapped around the way, the primary way we teach people to get these sorts of results is just through buying and selling online businesses. I say just, it's pretty exciting, I've got to say, but through that people learn multiple skills. It's just, it's like the question you asked me before, where would someone start? Because this whole topic is overwhelming. Digital marketing, everything like that. It all seems so confusing. So we just go, all right, just do what we've always done and just buy a simple little site and you'll figure stuff out and we'll teach you how to do that. And so that's the main thing we teach. We do also teach people how to build websites for local businesses because that's a huge opportunity at the moment as well. It's a lot of fun. Gets people out of their corporate job. A lot of our clients are burnt out. They really don't want to go back to their job so they want something completely different. So that's the other strategy that we teach.
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A
So why is local business important when it's a website which is virtual?
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B
It's the number one thing. It is. Do you realize Google, if you go and look at their corporate results, they still make most of their money off local businesses. Every search on one of these things, what's the stat? I think if someone searches for your business online on a mobile for a local business, there's an 80% chance that they will visit your store or your business or service or within the next 24 hours. It is absolutely huge. Google makes so much money out of local businesses because everyone, so you want a plumber or an electrician, you're just going to Google and whoever comes up first, that's who you're going to ring for a quote and that's where the opportunities. But it's not just plumbers and electricians.
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A
It'S No, I understand.
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B
It's all sorts of local businesses. It's a really, really exciting area. And local SEO is still very easy. It's particularly powerful with AI like everything is at the moment. And for our guys, for people wanting to quit the corporate rat race, it's a very nice pleasant transition period because they're just taking a bit of a break from working with, you know, high end full on project management or dealing with, you know, big public listed companies. All of a sudden they're working with people in their local area so they get to reconnect with local business in their area. They seem to have a lot of fun, our clients and we've got a bunch of them now that have built seven figure businesses out of it. Because what we do is we say if you want to get rich, follow the big money. That's what we've always done, we've worked with private equity. So you just go and look at what private equity are doing. And in our space with online businesses, a really popular class of business to buy now is local digital agencies. Because they're so solid and they have recurring monthly incomes. So they will charge, you know, monthly marketing fees. Maybe some of your listeners are paying these fees every month. They're worth every cent, by the way. You know, to drive leads or to do SEO or to do social media marketing for them. If you can build up a little agency into a regular monthly income of around 20 to 30 grand, which is what a lot of our students are doing straight away, that's worth a million bucks. So for some people that's better, but many of our clients that's eye opening because do you do real estate? So we've got people now sending their kids to our courses because the kids don't know how to get into real estate. But they can build a digital agency and within two years only equivalent of a million dollar property just out of their own heads with no risk. No risk. They're not putting up thousand, you know, that's wonderful. Buy a business. So that's why we're excited about that strategy.
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A
So where can people get a hold of you?
- [26:31]
B
They need to check us out@ebusinessinstitute.com we have a lot of American clients, Even though we're at.comau here in Australia, but they can go to ebusinessinstitute.com or they can search for my name, Matt Raad. And we've got our own podcast where we talk to lots of our clients. So that's the digitalinvestors.com thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the Excellent Executive Coaching podcast. You can subscribe to all Future podcasts@excellentexecutivecoaching.com join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques and bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO mastermind, use the contact form@excellentexecutivecoaching.com.