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Inbound Success Podcast


What do the most successful inbound marketers do to get great results?

You’ve heard the stories about companies using inbound marketing to dramatically increase sales, grow their business, and transform their customer relationships, but not everyone who practices inbound marketing knocks it out of the park.

If you want to know what goes into building a world class inbound marketing campaign that gets real, measurable results, check out the Inbound Success podcast. Every week, host Kathleen Booth interviews marketing folks who are rolling up their sleeves, doing the work, and getting the kinds of results we all hope to achieve.

The goal is to “peel back the onion” and learn what works, what doesn’t and what you need to do to really move the needle with your inbound marketing efforts. This isn’t just about big picture strategy – it’s about getting actionable tips and insights that you can use immediately in your own marketing.

Nov 18, 2019

How does a solopreneur take on the highly competitive insurance industry and win marketing mindshare?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Chris Greene of the Flood Insurance Guru shares his journey with content creation and why he's committed to creating 365 flood education videos, 150 flood blogs, and 100 flood podcasts this year.

Chris proves that there is no excuse to NOT invest in content creation. As a business owner, he runs his company, invests in continuous learning, and still manages to create an insane amount of content every week.

The results are pretty incredible. He's closing deals from his YouTube channel and other content on a regular basis, and says that today, 100% of his business comes from his digital marketing and content creation efforts.

In this episode, he breaks down exactly how he does it - and how you can too.

Highlights from my conversation with Chris include:

  • Chris took a video course and realized there was no educational video on flood insurance. He saw that opportunity and began to create videos for his business.
  • He then realized that his videos would have a greater chance of getting found if he also created written content, so he started blogging.
  • Because he travels so much, he realized that podcasts would also be easy to create and would work well for his audience.
  • Chris creates a new video every single day. He films them himself and keeps them to two minutes or less.
  • Chris took a class called Made You Look Video that got him comfortable on camera and taught him video marketing essentials.
  • Now he has a YouTube channel with separate playlists for each type of person in his audience (ex. realtors, lenders, property owners, business owners, etc.). 
  • To free up more of his time for content creation, Chris hired a virtual assistant to help him run his insurance business and take care of the administrative work.
  • He believes strongly that he needs to be the one creating content because he knows the subject matter best.
  • To save time, Chris will often shoot a whole week's worth of content in one day.
  • He uses Vidyard to create one to one vidoes and to host his marketing videos so that when he sends a video to someone, he can see if they've opened it.
  • He keeps the entire production and editing process simple so that it takes him five minutes or less to edit a video.
  • Chris generates a lot of inbound business from his Facebook presence, and uses his YouTube channel for sales enablement.
  • One interesting benefit that Chris has seen from his content creation is new partnerships with other insurance agencies that don't want to sell flood insurance. They work with him because they see him as the expert on the topic, and that brings him a considerable amount of business.
  • Chris spends about two hours every day creating written content and says that blogs don't necessarily need to be long to be effective - they just need to be as long as they should be to get the point across.
  • In addition to his videos and written content, Chris is creating podcasts that are generally about 10 minutes long.
  • He estimates that, in total, he spends thirty to forty percent of his day creating content.
  • Chris says that 100% of his business comes from his digital marketing and content creation efforts.

Resources from this episode:

Listen to the podcast to learn how committing to creating content can change your business - and your life.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Chris Greene, who is the president of the Flood Insurance Guru. I got a guru today. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Greene (Guest): Thank you.

Chris Greene and Kathleen BoothChris and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode.

Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for being here. I was really excited to talk to you, because I think your story is exactly the example of what I love to highlight, which is just consistency, and putting in the work really pays off, because I had heard that you had decided to do a year of flood education videos and 150 flood blogs in 150 days. You're doing videos, you're doing blogs, now you're doing podcasts. It's like, man, you're rolling up your sleeves and getting it done. I can't wait to dig into it. Before we do, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you came to be doing what you're doing today?

Meet Chris Greene

Chris: Yeah. My name's Chris Greene, I'm president, owner of the Flood Insurance Guru. I've been in the insurance field for about 10 years. Actually hold a master's degree in emergency management with a focus in hazard and flood mitigation. I had a really bad experience buying a house about 10 years ago. I got about two weeks from buying it, found out I was in a really high risk flood zone. It was going to change my house payment by almost $3,000 a year, and the realtor said "Yeah, that happened on the foreclosure."

For four years I just didn't bring it up, because I didn't want it to be an issue. And so what happened is, I discovered this really bad process and lack of education. So, over the next eight to 10 years I was working for Captive Insurance Agencies at the time. I kept getting my feet a little bit deeper and deeper. And when I started my own company about five years ago, I wanted a catchy website, so I came up with the Flood Insurance Guru, as a joke, but when people started learning what our educational background was then, they started saying, "Oh, you really have experience, you guys actually have an educational background on this," and it just kind of took off.

And then that brought us to this year. Once you get outside the coast, there is no education on flood. We want to spend one full year where all we do is we provide education. It's not about selling, it's about what's currently going on. If we could just provide that, then I think we can compete with these bigger companies, and I think we can beat them because of the value that we provide. And it's just kind of taken off.

I didn't know it would be the worst year in US history for flooding when we did it, but now not only do we do the education videos on flood insurance, we do them on disaster assistance, SBA loans, whatever, every single flood map across the country we do an update on. This morning, I just started a podcast for Houston, Texas on the recent disaster assistance that was approved by the president. What does it mean for the people there, who is it impacting and their resources.

A year of flood education videos

Kathleen: That is awesome. So, let's roll back a little bit. You decided this year to do a year of flood education videos. You started with videos? Is that correct?

Chris: It is. I did. I'm in a video course that's been really good for me, and what we discovered as a community, there's no video, there's no resources on this. So it's like, we're just going to commit to video. And once you start committing to video, you realize, you know, Google is not seeing these videos unless it's YouTube. We need to get some text out there. Then I started blogging with it, but then everyone's like, "I'm always on the road. I wish you had a podcast," and we talked about it for a while and then we finally started one about six months ago.

Kathleen: That's awesome. So, let's talk about the videos. You're not a huge company. So, the idea of making a video a day is very ambitious. How did you approach that? Do you have a videographer? Is this something you do yourself?

Chris: I do it myself every single day. It's just me and I have a virtual assistant who helps us on the back end. Usually all of my videos are two minutes or less. I want it to be quick, I want it to be educational, and I want somebody to be able to take at least one thing away from our video every day.

Kathleen: And how are you filming them?

Chris: I was using my iPhone for a while, and actually bought a Canon DSLR, I set it up on location. I shoot all my videos on site. So I travel the entire country. If there's a flood issue going on a thousand miles away, I travel there, I talk to the people in that area and actually shoot my videos there.

Kathleen: Okay. And did you have any special training for that? I mean, how did you-

Chris: Well, I'm in a video course that has kind of taught me the psychological part of your buyer's, persona, you've got the education part, what people want, really learning to be on camera and things like that. And that's what's really helped me a lot. It was a course called Made You Look Video. What was funny was that the first 10 videos we had to do were, not really inappropriate videos, but they were just like, make you really uncomfortable. Like, "Hey, what's your favorite vacation?" Or, "What's the most embarrassing situation you've been in?" And the whole point was, "Hey, we're doing this because we want you to feel comfortable on video."

Kathleen: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I think for people who haven't done a lot of video, I actually think that's harder than the whole technical, how to film and how to produce. Everybody I talk to tends to say, "I'm just not comfortable being on video." I'll be honest, I feel the same way. I feel very self conscious. So, was it doing those really kind of honest and as you said, almost embarrassing videos that broke the ice for you?

Chris: That did break the ice. But then if you go back and look at some of our videos now they're like... That course has taught me to, "Hey you have to do something to separate yourself." So I've got one video where I'm actually spitting out spoiled milk. I've got another video where I'm dressed up as a grandfather, another video where I'm laying on a mattress. Stuff that catches people's attention and everyone's like, "Oh, I can't watch your videos because you look like an idiot." Everybody else seems to like them. And I said, "If you think I look like an idiot, means you're watching it, means I'm doing my job."

Kathleen: Now, you're doing these as part of the flood education series?

Chris: Yep.

Kathleen: Oh that's so funny.

Chris: I have them all broken down on my YouTube. I've built different lists for realtors, lenders, property owners, business owners where they can go exactly to that list and only watch the videos that pertain to them if they want.

How Chris makes the time to create video content

Kathleen: So you're uploading each of the two minute videos to YouTube. You said you're using a virtual assistant and what does that person do?

Chris: Actually, the virtual assistant doesn't really help me at all in the video. They just help me on the insurance, out of the backend. Like they're helping me with the quoting, the paperwork and all that so that I can spend my time on the content because that's what separating us. I've tried to use other people for content, but it's very difficult in niche markets because they don't have your educational background. And you can tell sometimes when you read a blog that they may not know what they're talking about.

Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. Now, are you-

Chris: Here right now, how to do content creation for us and that's the big struggle. I'm actually having to teach him some stuff on the flood side first so that when he writes it, it makes sense.

Kathleen: Are you doing all the editing and production of the videos too?

Chris: Takes me less than five minutes to edit because I said they're all short. They're simple. They're easy.

Kathleen: Yeah. I was going to say, what's involved in that or what kind of programs, platforms are you using? How complicated is it?

Chris: It's fairly easy for me because I just use iMovie and everyone said, "Oh, you screwed up on this word." I said, "That's great, that means people know that I'm human." I will never shoot a video more than twice. Now there's certain situations I'll shoot it more than once, but I will never shoot it more twice because I want people to know that it's real. I want people know it's not a script and yeah I did screw up but that's what you want to see. Just like I use Vidyard for all of our one-on-one videos when I'm doing flood quotes, I send all of our customer's quotes through Vidyard because I want them... They might be 2000 miles away from me, but they feel like I'm next door because of video.

Kathleen: I couldn't agree more and we've just had this conversation before I hit record for this podcast where I said, unless all hell breaks loose, we're going to keep going. And people ask me that all the time. Like, how much do you edit the podcast? And I really don't, unless there's some big terrible thing that happens in the middle of it. I believe that people prefer things that are less scripted. And so I leave in a lot, like if the dog barks or I've had podcasts where my 12 year old son walks in, in the middle of it and asked me for a snack, and I think you could see that as unprofessional or you could just see it as lending flavor and context to the life that's happening behind the content as it's getting made. So, I love that approach. All right, so you're spending, let's say, it sounds like less than half an hour a day on the videos.

Chris: Like today, I'll actually shoot... This week is the first week I've actually been on a schedule all week. So, this afternoon we'll spend about two hours and I'll shoot the whole week.

Kathleen: Oh, smart. So you're bundling it together.

Chris: I do that in case somebody comes to me and says, "Hey, we're having a real issue with this." Then I will bump it up in the week. But the reason I do that, I always have a week there. If something comes up, if there's a lot of disastrous stuff going on it may take my time away from video and I like to have a few in my back pocket just in case.

Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way about podcasting. I need to have several in the can because you just never know what life is going to throw at you. So, you're putting these on YouTube. When you first started this year of flood education videos, did you already have a YouTube channel?

Chris: I really had... Not for the Flood Insurance Guru, for our old company I did. I just set this up this year and everything in the course I went through, really taught me how to set it up. I use a tool called KeywordTool.io, that has really helped me with tags and seeing what people are searching for. And so we really haven't put any money to the YouTube channel yet because we've done so well with it organically.

Chris's results

Kathleen: So talk me through what "done so well" means, like what kind of results have you seen in this time that you've been posting?

Chris: Honestly, most of our inbound market really has come from Facebook, not so much YouTube. YouTube, what we've done is we've built a knowledge base article for it now, that's using snippets with HubSpot. So our customer has a question, we'll send them the snippet and then they can click on it, takes them over to our YouTube channel. And so we've kind of done that.

Kathleen: Oh interesting. Now are you also getting organic reach through YouTube?

Chris: I am because we've actually sold a few policies last month actually off YouTube where people have searched our videos.

Kathleen: Wow. And how much do your videos get viewed?

Chris: Honestly, I don't have that many views. I have one video that has like 108 views on there and I have very low other views on it because I haven't really paid money on it because I'm really just using the YouTube part as a resource library. It's the Facebook organically. What we figured out, is how to use Facebook as a search engine optimization tool instead of like an ad. So everyone else is throwing this money at it. We're sharing it on our personal page, but what I've done with my personal page is I've been very strategic with who my friends, who's sharing and all that. A lot of people, what they do is they go search flood insurance on Facebook in Rhode Island and we come up in Georgia. The tags that we're consistently using is pulling our information up for them.

Kathleen: I love what you're saying because I've had this conversation quite a bit with some of the folks that I've worked with over the years about how long should you expect it to take inbound marketing to work and to produce results for your business. And there's kind of two schools around that. One school says, "Oh, don't expect anything for six to 12 months. It's an investment in the long term." And I think that can be true if you're putting all of your eggs in the basket of getting found organically because it does take a little time. But there's this other school that says that inbound marketing should work right away if you're creating content that can be used for sales enablement. And if your sales team, which in this case is you, is actively sharing that content with the prospects they're talking to in the sales process because it can speed up the sales process, it can increase your close rate, et cetera. It sounds like that's what you've been doing. Is that correct?

Chris: That's correct. And we knew it was going to be a longterm game, but honestly, I said 12, 18 months. I didn't think that we would build a national brand in six to nine months and not really put any money behind it. Because some of the unique information we were providing people just sharing it like crazy and we created a really cool partnership with some other insurance agencies who don't really know flood, don't want to know it. And that's all we do. And that part has just taken off for us because they keep seeing our content.

150 blogs in 150 days

Kathleen: Now blogging. You committed to doing 150 blogs in 150 days. We got to talk about this, Chris, because I have been in this game a long time and I cannot begin to tell you how often I hear people complain about the amount of time it takes to blog. And these are marketers who do marketing for a living, complaining about having to blog. Very often they're complaining about having to do it once a month. That doesn't even get to the CEOs I talked to who think they just don't have the time for it. So we need to unpack this a little bit because I have a feeling you're going to just dispel all of this.

Chris: Well someone once taught me, and actually it came from I think originally from Marcus Sheridan. From a company called Agency Nation. His name is Joe Giangola. And he said, "Look, it doesn't matter if you write a 3000 word article, or if you write a 500 word article, write as many words as it takes to get your point across."

Kathleen: Oh, so true. So true.

Chris: So, it's not, "Hey, I need 3000 words and put a bunch of crap in the article that's not value." I'd rather have a 300 word article to get straight to the point and give people what they need.

Kathleen: Well and the truth is most people don't have the time to read long things anyway.

Chris: And most of my articles are probably 500 words to a thousand words.

Kathleen: Yeah. So, how long does it take you to write these articles?

Chris: I would say it takes me about two hours a day and I do it at night, usually from about 10 to 12 at night. What I do is now I'm basically putting a blog out for every single one of my podcasts now, so I basically keep three separate blogs. I keep our podcast blog, I keep what's called a flood map updates, and that's if the flood map changes for an area, we do a blog just on that. And then I run a regular blog and so I mix it up, I write three to five blogs a week between the three.

Kathleen: Now is your podcast a blog, is it like show notes or is it just a companion article?

Chris: No, a lot of times I'll do a full detailed one. It's not like a breakdown. Here's what I try to do, I write an article, just a generic article on that subject matter, for the podcast and I like to come back with our regular blog and take that same blog, but now relate it to a particular area like Birmingham, Alabama and apply it there. And that's what I've kind of started to... Kind of taught myself that last couple of months. Now, Hey, let's just do it on this generic topic. Now let's come back and apply it to a particular city. First of all, it's for SEO, but now we could relate to that audience and we're giving that audience what they need.

What is the ROI of content creation?

Kathleen: So you're spending about two hours a night. I think a lot of business leaders listening to this might think, how could it possibly be worth my time? Like why wouldn't I either outsource for somebody to do that or hire somebody junior who gets paid less to do that. Talk me through for you, how you see the ROI of that two hours of your time.

Chris: Well, the thing for me with the two hours of my time now, is through this whole inbound marketing and learning all this, what I've learned is that actually I have a passion for writing and I enjoy the blogging. I've actually handed off the other stuff so I could spend more time on the blog. Like the quoting, inside our company, our VA's handle all that. So I can handle the content and like someone goes, "Are you going to outsource the content?" I said, "Probably not. I enjoy it." I enjoy when someone comes to me with a question, I can break that question down and I can turn that question into maybe 10 different podcasts. 10 different blogs and apply to different areas because my educational background, it's very hard to outsource and have someone else do that.

Kathleen: Do you find that it's getting easier over time?

Chris: Yes.

Kathleen: Is it getting quicker?

Chris: But I'm also learning to build it out a better way. Like, "Hey, these are the five ways to do this." All right, let's build a pillar post on this subject matter. Now let's put 10 sub posts underneath that for different areas.

Kathleen: Yeah, I mean the consistency part is what blows my mind. How do you stay on track? Because that is, that's a major commitment.

Chris: It's tough. Now, the podcast actually is pretty easy. All of my podcasts are 10 minutes or less. So, I do a podcast that morning usually and I'll go out, shoot a video that kind of relates to the podcast that afternoon and then put the blog together that night.

Kathleen: Wow. So what percentage of your day overall would you estimate that you're spending on creating content?

Chris: Probably 30 to 40%.

Kathleen: Wow. And-

Chris: I'm also doing this... Now, I do have VA that helps me with some research, but also what I'm feeling is, I actually spend a lot of time driving around during the day though, looking at different locations to shoot certain things on. Like I had one the other day where a house was completely crumbled and so it wasn't a plan, but we ended up shooting a video on cracked foundations.

Kathleen: Oh wow.

Chris: And so that's where a lot of my content comes from as well.

How Chris comes up with topics

Kathleen: Yeah. So that was going to be my next question. Can you talk me through how you come up with your topics?

Chris: Our topics come from every single question we get from our referral partner, a customer or prospect and what's also currently going on. Like last week, FEMA updates their manual every six months. So I broke down the new manual and made a podcast and a blog out of that. There’s disaster assistance that was approved for last week in Texas. I made a blog out of that because those are the things that people want to know what's going on. As I said, we walk them not just through the insurance process, the disaster assistance and all that because no one else will do it. So what happens though is when we do do that, when they do need something for a flood change, a flood insurance. They're going to remember us because we're providing so much education. I'm a terrible salesperson, I'm the worst salesperson in the world, but I'm really good at marketing and education.

Kathleen: Do you have a particular system you use for capturing those questions? Because you're literally running around all the time.

Chris: My iPhone.

Kathleen: And what do you use on your iPhone?

Chris: Notes. Like when they call me asking me, I take that question, I'll put it in there. Last night I was going through about 40 different questions over the last two weeks, I wanted to address this week.

Kathleen: Wow, that's a great tip. Yeah. Answering questions, it's tried and true strategy.

Chris: So, I would use a notepad and paper, but then I would lose the paper. I'd lose the question.

Chris's results

Kathleen: Yeah, you definitely have to do what works for you, right. So, let's talk about the results you've gotten from this, because we've talked a little bit about the traction you got with the videos, but now you've got videos, you've got blogs, you've got podcasts. As you mentioned, you are in an insanely competitive industry, insurance. That is one of, if not the most competitive industries from a marketing standpoint, from an SEO standpoint. Talk me through the results you've seen.

Chris: Actually, we've seen really good results and everyone else says the exact same thing you do, but they don't realize it's actually the complete opposite. You see, once you get outside coastal areas, no one knows anything about flood. And no one's wasting their time on it. So when we can provide the content in areas like Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, we don't have a lot of competition. The other day when I looked at some of our keywords for Arkansas, Nebraska on YouTube, it was $1.12 And $1.50 because no one else is putting it out there or they're not going to waste their time on it. They're going to go to Houston, they're going to go to Miami or New Jersey, but what about all those areas in the middle where there's no resources and we can provide those resources. It doesn't matter how much competition we have, they can't keep up with us on the content.

Kathleen: Now, do you find yourself competing against really, really large insurance companies and how does that play out?

Chris: [crosstalk 00:19:46] the other day, because we picked up the phone and we called the customer back.

Kathleen: Yeah. How does that play out from a digital marketing standpoint though? How do you take on, I can't think of one off hand, but all the big insurers, right? They have so much money to throw at their marketing.

Chris: Because like you just said, they're throwing it at their marketing. They're not throwing it at their content. They're saying, "Hey, I can save you 40% on your flood insurance." That's great, but how do you change my floors out? How do you help me through this process? That's what the customer wants to know. Then yeah, I'd love to save money here, but I need you to get me point B before I get to point C.

Kathleen: Now, are you spending money on paid ads now?

Chris: A little bit, but I do it completely different than the companies you talk about.

Kathleen: Okay, talk me through how you do it.

Chris: What I do is these companies that said they'll spend all this money and "Hey, let me save you 50% on this." Well, I get a copy of every single flood map change across the country. Well, what happens is you can make a decision to buy insurance before that map changes and if you do, you get a preferred rate. So I target those areas six months before with content every single week through YouTube and walking them through the whole process. So when it does change or it's about to change, they remember seeing our content for six months. Not that we can save them money, but "Hey, here's what's going to happen, here's the process you need to follow whether you go through us or not." And that's how we've been able to beat a lot of them out. No one else wants to spend that time. They want to capture the sale.

Kathleen: Now, what percentage of your business these days is coming in through organic and social and these digital efforts that you're undertaking?

Chris: Honestly, from a strictly digital standpoint, pretty much a hundred percent of it now. Like even though the insurance companies we deal with, the process we built out for them is when they send us a customer, we actually build a link that's just for that insurance agent. And what happens is if they submit, a customer submits it, we redirect them. For that customer, leave them a review. We have a thank you card that goes to that customer in the mail with their information on there, not ours. We're here to help with a flood. But we're also here to make them look like a rock star so they have a customer for life. It's a win-win. And so we built all that in HubSpot, now.

Kathleen: I mean intuitively you've landed on the best channel marketing strategy, which is make your channel partner look like a rock star and make their life as easy as possible. Yeah. I learned that after 13 years as a HubSpot partner, because HubSpot itself has one of the best channel programs around and they do that exact same thing.

Chris: Yeah. And they're always like, "Why the link?" I said, "Because no matter where the customer is in the process, we can keep you involved."

Kathleen: Yeah. That's great.

Chris: And they like that.

Kathleen: Yeah. Fascinating. So tell me about how your business is growing and what it's meant for you as a business owner.

Chris: Well, I had this goal of, hey, I'd love to sell $1 million in flood insurance over the next five years. Well, I've had to adjust that goal because we've gotten to about 50% of it in our first year. But that was our whole goal, our five year goal. What happened is its just kind of taken off. We've spoken at a couple of conferences, we've been on a lot of different podcasts, not because we're just killing it on sales. But I guess because of the whole video thing, no one else was really doing that in our industry. No one's committing to it, particularly on flood, but no one's committing to it on anything else. And so what's happened is, being on those podcasts and things like that have helped us organically. People start reaching out to us, other insurance agents and we just walk them through and help them with their questions. And then before you know it, they're telling other people and it's just like a snowball going downhill then.

Kathleen: Now how-

Chris: Once you get going, if you get behind it.

Kathleen: How important has it been to your success in doing this that you took on essentially a niche topic? Because you said that a little bit earlier how no one else was talking about flood. Could you do this same approach if it was a broader topic?

Chris: Oh, easily. The reason I've done it though is because that's what my background is in and no one really has the background that I have in insurance. Like they've got some training, but they don't have that master's degree. I'm in the middle becoming a Certified Floodplain Manager. Probably less than 1% of insurance agents in the world have that certification as well. So you could do it with anything. But the reason I chose to do it and what I did it in is because of what my background is. I know people that are doing it in other areas as well. Now not the whole video thing, I mean you'd really have to commit, but the video course I'm in, a lot of people committing to two or three videos a week, which is great. My whole thing was, hey, if I can look back a year later, look at the knowledge base articles we've built, look at the library we've built just over a year. Look at the amount of questions we're going to be able to ask.

Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. Well it's definitely inspiring and I think anybody who's ever thought, I don't have the time to invest in content or I couldn't possibly do it because I'm not an expert. I think that you provide a great example of somebody who's just taking the bull by the horns and is running with it and seeing great results. So, very cool.

Chris: I've thought about starting a digital marketing agency next year, basically, what we're doing is taking the journey of this year we've been on and we're teaching other companies how to do it.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Love it. That's so cool. All right. Shifting gears for a minute. I have two questions I always ask my guests and you are a prolific inbound marketer so I want to hear what you have to say. Is there a particular company or person that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now?

Chris: Yes. Nicholas Ayers, he's the one who actually runs Made You Look Video. I mean his video course, the whole psychological thing he puts behind it. He's got some of the silliest ads on Facebook with fanny packs, but what he's able to do with video, because he's been studying it for 30 years, it's just incredible.

Kathleen: So Nicholas Ayers, Made You Look Video?

Chris: But also his passion of, "Hey, I'm not going to keep this to myself. I'm going to help whoever I can with it." Now, we do a call every single week, he walks you through whatever you need. I mean, he's just awesome.

Kathleen: That's great.

Chris: And like I tell people, he's one of the main reasons, where we're at today is because of how they've been able to help us with video. And then Marcus Sheridan is another one. I was turned on to him about nine months ago. About the whole pool company experience.

Kathleen: Yeah. Marcus's story is phenomenal. Yeah. And he is a great guy. All right, so things change fast. You are blogging, you're podcasting, you're making videos and putting things on YouTube and Facebook, what have you. How do you stay current and up to date on all of these developments around digital marketing with things changing so quickly? What's your strategy for that?

Chris: Well, a lot of it actually is through HubSpot Academy. I spend a lot of my time in there and then I spend about an hour a day studying other things. I've got about 140 podcasts a week that I listen to.

Kathleen: Oh my God.

Chris: This being one of them, the HubCast, all these different digital marketing ones. Amy Porterfield is a big one. But I stay up to date because I travel so much during the week that I listen to all those. And honestly that's where I give all my content ideas from as well.

How to connect with Chris

Kathleen: That's amazing. I don't know how you find all the time. I mean, I love podcasts and I think I spend a lot of time self-educating but you make me look like an amateur. That's amazing. So, all right, Chris, you've totally blown me away. I can't wait to see what you do next. I'm betting some people are going to be listening to this and have questions. If they do, if they want to connect with you, reach out and chat with you. What's the best way for them to contact you?

Chris: If you go to our website, just floodinsuranceguru.com, we've got our email address on there. It's flood@communityfirstagency.com. They can also find me on Facebook, which is just Chris Greene. They may have to send me a message because I think I am maxed out on friends.

Kathleen: Oh no, we can't be friends.

Chris: Well, I have to filter it out all the time. I've changed it and added a public image one on there, but I don't do much on there. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I do a lot on LinkedIn.

Kathleen: Awesome. All right. You heard it here. I'll put those links in the show notes. If you want to find Chris head over to those show notes and his LinkedIn profile, his email address, his YouTube channel, all of it will be in there. He won't be your friend on Facebook until he clears out some other people, but you can ask him anyway.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: That's awesome, Chris, thank you so much for joining me. And if you're listening and you like what you heard or you learned something new, please consider leaving the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts. It makes a huge difference and helps us get found by other people. And if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Chris.

Chris: Thank you.