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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.

Dec 4, 2017

Looking for a simple way to quickly generate a large volume of leads for your business? Online quizzes have proven effective across a variety of industries and might just be the answer you are searching for.

Jeremy Ellens had so much success using online quizzes to generate leads that he created a business around it. Learn how he grew LeadQuizzes from zero to more than $1 million in revenue in under six months - and how he's helping other businesses do the same thing using his online quiz building tool.

Listen to the episode here, or read the transcript (below), to learn how Jeremy grew LeadQuizzes and what he has learned about using online quizzes as part of a broader inbound marketing strategy.

Transcript


This week on 
The Inbound Success Podcast, my guest is Jeremy Ellens, Founder of LeadQuizzes.

Here’s what Jeremy and I discussed on this week’s show:

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Jeremy Ellens, the co-founder of LeadQuizzes. Welcome, Jeremy.

Jeremy Ellens (guest): Thanks, Kathleen.

Kathleen:  I'm glad to have you here, and I thought maybe you could take a few minutes and tell the listeners about yourself, who you are, a little bit about LeadQuizzes, and where you can be found online.

Jeremy: I'm very excited to be here. I co-founded a business called LeadQuizzes, and we've helped business generate millions of leads using quizzes, so pretty self-explanatory name. We found that if you take people through a quiz, they answer questions, they opt in to get the results, that that was really effective at capturing leads. That's essentially what we do. We launched it about two years ago, so January of 2015, I believe. Yeah. I'm excited to jump in and share some of our strategies and what our users have been doing.

Kathleen:  Great. Where can someone find LeadQuizzes online?

Jeremy: So, just LeadQuizzes.com with two Zs.

Kathleen:  Perfect. I'll put that URL into the show notes. You have a really interesting story, and you've been on a couple of other podcasts. I had the opportunity to hear your story on those. I guess the TL;DR, as they say, is that Jeremy was able to build his business really quickly. I think you went from zero to a million dollars in revenue in six months?

Jeremy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kathleen:  He obviously caught onto something that was really hot here. I thought it would be fun to have him on and just really pick apart what did he do to grow the company? Obviously, part of it is wrapped in with the product, but hopefully focus in on some strategies and some takeaways that other marketers can use, because the product you've built is not just useful for you. It's useful for anyone doing marketing. Let's kind of rewind, and start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about what the exact product is and who the audience is for it.

Jeremy: Yeah. The product, like I described, it's a quiz software. So it's basically like a landing page builder, except for quizzes specifically, where our software creates all the pages, it does all the logic for you, and then it sends all the contacts directly over to email platforms, like HubSpot or MailChimp, things like that. From that perspective we've made it really easy. We focused on marketing. For a long time, I know quizzes have been really hot. Interactive content was a huge buzzword for a long time, but we wanted to really focus on the marketing.

So, we had one client. Her name was Dr. Tammy. This was the first person we ever worked with on quizzes. We wanted to help her become a best seller with a book she was coming out with, and so we put together a hormone quiz, like, "Are you struggling having sleep? It could be because of your hormones. Take the quiz to find out." People would go through, they'd answer questions, they'd opt in to get the results. We advertised it on Facebook. We generated over 35,000 leads for her in just six months. We saw that was like ... There's something here for sure of like generating leads with quizzes.

Kathleen:  That's great. To be clear, you have not designed the product to do the Buzzfeed style, "Which character on Game of Thrones are you?" quiz. This is a lead-generation tool for businesses.

Jeremy: It's both. You can use it for those different types of things, like we have people where they .... Obviously, if you're getting a bunch of shares and that kind of thing, like the fun quizzes can be really successful, but we've really focused on, for the majority of our clients, capturing leads from their quizzes.

Kathleen:  Tell me a little bit about, as a client of yours, if I were to use the product, how does it functionally work? And do I have to have any design skills or programming skills or anything like that?

Jeremy: The short answer is you don't. When we started doing these for people like Dr. Tammy, we had to go out ... And we didn't feel like this offer out there was very effective at the time for this. We'd get a designer, we'd get a developer. It would take us probably two weeks to throw the thing together with some freelancers that we were already using.

What it's like now, is go to leadquizzes.com. You can sign up for a free plan. and then you just basically type in your question, your answers, how the logic works. Map that all out. But you don't have to be a developer, and it spits it out and maybe it takes you 30 minutes to get through the whole thing.

Kathleen:  That's great. And where does the quiz live? Obviously you said it generates landing pages. Are those landing pages on the user's URL or domain, or are they on yours, or how does that integrate with the website?

Jeremy: It's pretty easy. We do give a hosted link, which a lot of people use because it's just the simplest. But you can also embed it on a custom page, so you can send it to a custom domain, or you can use it as a pop-up, or you can embed it as a blog post, or wherever you want to put it.

Kathleen:  Great. And so you kind of stumbled into this product. You worked with Dr. Tammy. It took off really fast, it sounds like. And then, tell you a little bit about what happened from there. Who are the users of this product?

Jeremy: A lot of who we've really focused on has been in the B2C space. We worked with a lot of people in the health space. We have a lot of case studies there. We have a lot of case studies with eCommerce companies. A lot of case studies with anybody that has a lot of website traffic. We've seen a quiz compared to an eBook download or a case study download. Stuff like that, that's not quite as engaging. The quiz gets them engaged, so we have be able to increase lead capture by up to 400 or 500% for a lot of our best users. So, those are definitely some of the best users right now.

Kathleen:  I'm interested to hear that health care is one of them because my guest last week was actually in the health care space, and we were talking about how that's a really tough space for lead gen, because usually you're talking about really personal things, people's health, and people don't like to give up their email addresses. And so, it's interesting to hear that you've been successful with that.

Jeremy: That's actually worked really well. And then the one area I didn't mention was B2B. We don't have a lot of case studies there, but I can talk about more how we've used it ourselves. One of the really good things is you're pulling in a lot of data on these users. As an agency for example, when we were using it, we were asking questions on how many website visitors do you get, how much do you spend on your advertising. All these qualifying questions. That then I can pull into HubSpot, do lead scoring, and do my follow-up based on how they're answering stuff. Which normally would be really difficult to collect if you're getting an eBook and asking on 10 form fields.

Kathleen:  What do the results of the quiz look like? Is it just a score? Is it a set of ... is it a lot of copy. Is it visual?

Jeremy: It can vary. It can be super short. I think at the end of the day, the difference between a quiz and a survey is, it's whoever is giving it out, it's all the value is for them. A quiz, it should be shared value. They should be able to get a lot of value as a quiz taker. But you should also be able to get value from the answers that they give you. It can be different. It can be very short. The quiz that I use, that we may go into later, it has a very long form copy, where it talks about the problem and gives them some different solutions and value, and even some testimonials, and a call to action at the end.

Kathleen:  Does the product have any capability to gamify results, and show how somebody compares to other people who have taken the quiz?

Jeremy: It's a good idea. We don't have a lot of that right now. Yeah but it's been really effective so far.

Kathleen:  Can I put that on the wishlist?

Jeremy: You got it.

Kathleen:  Those are always fun. I think it's interesting. People are by nature very competitive, and whenever you see, "Oh, I'm falling behind the rest of my peers in something," it's always such a huge motivator.

Jeremy: Yeah or even as benchmarking for different businesses.

Kathleen:  It sounds like you have a lot of aspects of the quizzes that can be customized, from the questions, to the logic, to the format of the output. I want to go back to something you just said. Is the product integrated with HubSpot?

Jeremy: Yes, we'll be coming out with a direct integration, but it's integrated through Zapier right now. So we personally use HubSpot, and then we just zap all of that data in, so the contact information, all the answers they give us as well.

Kathleen:  I love Zapier. So for anybody listening who hasn't used it, I don't even know how to describe it. I always talk about it and say that it's like this third party tool that lets you build a custom integration between two other tools without having to know any programming language. Because I've done it, and if I can do it, anybody can do it, because I'm definitely not a programmer. But it's really neat. Any other platforms that LeadQuizzes integrates with?

Jeremy: We have 10 direct integrations. 10 or 12 direct integrations with MailChimp, and InfusionsoftConstant ContactAWeber. So most of the big ones for small businesses. And then Zapier will connect with the other big ones like HubSpotMarketo, or over 750 other platforms.

Kathleen:  You got the product going, you used it with a couple of clients. Tell me a little bit about how the business has grown. Is it growing pretty much as a result of just demand for the product or are you doing other things to promote it, and how are you getting it in front of your user base?

Jeremy: Before LeadQuizzes, we were running an agency, and we kind of fell into the trap of we did a lot of business based off referrals, and conferences, and networking. And so, with LeadQuizzes we actually figured out how to market for ourselves, which has been really important. Obviously we get referrals from people, but some of the areas that have worked really well for us has been Facebook ads, so we use that to drive a lot of leads. And we also get a lot of visits to our sites. We get over 60,000 visits to our site now.

Kathleen:  And what do you think is driving all those visits to your site?

Jeremy: I think there's a lot of good things. So, like search traffic for example, like what we've been doing there is our search traffic has been growing by about 100% every three months, or doubling every three months.

Kathleen:  Wow.

Jeremy: And that's been pretty consistent. So, with that, I think we've been doing some of the basics. We use something like Ahrefs, which is a tool to do keyword research and review how your SEO is performing. And so we'll just do, I think, the basics of find a high-volume relevant search term with low key word difficulty, which means there's not a lot of competition. It's not going to be super, super hard to rank for it. And then we just try to create the best content on that topic. When we see some of the those articles stick, and start to rank themselves, then we'll start to build backlinks to those articles by guest blogging on other sites.

Kathleen:  So you've done a lot of organic content creation, SEO, the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-do-the-thing stuff. I'm interested in how you've leveraged Facebook. You said you did some Facebook advertising. Were you advertising the product or were you advertising your content?

Jeremy: We've done both. We've advertised a quiz for ourselves, that's done really well. We've advertised a free trial, or a free plan of our software, which has done really well. We've advertised our content, retargeted those people. We've tested a lot of those things. And they all seem to work pretty well. But I think the biggest thing that worked for us, when we first started doing Facebook advertising, it wasn't immediately profitable. People signing up on their own.

So at first we were like, all right, this isn't working for us. And we turned to a mentor and coach. And he was like, all these leads that are opting in for something, they're warm leads, they're interested in something. So call these leads, and then figure out how you can help them. When we started using that model of calling our inbound leads, that's when we started making our campaigns profitable right away. Because if we have clients that are worth $5,000, or $10,000 on recurring revenue, or maybe more, that pays back your Facebook ads pretty quickly.

Kathleen:  So that's really interesting. You called your leads, and what did you say on those calls?

Jeremy: I could give you guys an actual sales script that we published for the show notes, but basically what we would do is we'd do it as a consultative call. We'd start out, and we'd ask them about their businesses, what are their problems, and what are their goals? Once we got into that, we'd go into a presentation of how we could help them, and then we'd go into a pitch of what we do, and then we just go into objection handling after that.

Kathleen:  That's something that I've recommended a lot to clients, especially when they're just getting started with inbound marketing, and they don't have a huge flow of leads, because it is manageable. You literally can call everybody. If nothing else, you call just to see what you can learn about what they're interested in, you know what I mean? Because that kind of feedback is such a great way to refine your personas and really understand what drove them to you in the first place, what's keeping them up at night. All that good stuff that helps you create better content. I'm glad to hear that you guys did that as well. Tell me a little bit about the response rate to that. Were people receptive to those phone calls?

Jeremy: It was really good. So, we had two strategies. We had one where we would basically dial all the leads that came in, and we had another where after they would opt in on our thank you page we'd use that real estate to get them to schedule a call with us. And so we would position it as a success call, where we would be consultative and help them, like we'd help them come up with a really great quiz idea, as well as a compelling offer afterwards, and then we'd just say like, "Hey if you want the next step, this is how we can help you."

Kathleen:  So, somebody opts in, and they talk to you, and they're interested in the product. Is there a free trial version? What's the path to purchase?

Jeremy: We started out when we launched it, there was no free trial, it was just a 30-day refund, and then we added in a free trial to our paid plan. So, two week free trial, and then we've added a free plan. So each time we've taken risk out of the equation, we've gotten more people to sign up.

Kathleen:  What's the different between the free plan, and the lowest-tiered paid plan?

Jeremy: The biggest difference is the free plan is free forever, and then we just throttle back some of the things that you can get with it, like you can get 25 leads a month. So it's not a ton of leads compared to 100 leads on the very lowest plan, as well as you can add integration. Directly connecting with HubSpot or something like that, and having automated sequences go out as soon as you get those leads.

Kathleen:  Okay, and tell us a little bit about the pricing. If I was something who's listening here, and I'm thinking, this sounds great, and I would love to use the product, what are we talking about pricing wise?

Jeremy: The difference here is basically we have our free plan, like I mentioned. Our lowest plan is $22 a month. Our middle plan is $67 a month, which is the one that we recommend the most. And then we have a premium plan, which is like unlimited leads, all of our features, for $250 a month.

Kathleen:  And for that premium plan, if somebody is from an agency, would I be correct to assume that you would need to have one plan for each client, or is there some kind of separate agency package that you could get.

Jeremy: They could. I mean, we'll probably build a lot of more agency features into it, but as it is right now, if you sign up for that, you can basically use that account for every client that you have.

Kathleen:  Okay, well that's a ton of value then for agencies. Yeah. So now I want to rewind a bit and talk about what are the elements to using a quiz successfully. I imagine it's not just if you build it they will come. You know, the "Field of Dreams" model of marketing. I wish that worked with most things. If I were to go out tomorrow, and get LeadQuizzes and build a quiz, what next? Of the clients that you're working with, what do you see as the most successful mix of supporting campaign activities elements, et cetera.

Jeremy: I think the biggest thing when we look at quizzes is starting with what's the end goal? Are you going to get them on a phone call, or are you going to get them to try and buy something on your site, or hop on a webinar, and developing what that compelling offer is first. And then working backwards towards what's the quiz that's going to make sense that's going to lead into that.

Or if it's going to be a fun-based quiz, it's going to be something that your target market would want to engage with, and then this would something that they might be interested in. And then going into what's the traffic source going to be? Are you going to put this on your website, like your top pages, like your home page? Like your top blog post? That kind of thing.

Do you have any specific blog posts that are performing way better than others? Maybe you make a specific quiz for that. We've also seen paid traffic areas like Facebook have done extremely well with quizzes.

Kathleen:  Okay. So promoting them, obviously, having them on high traffic pages, getting them visible, and then using paid strategies to promote them. Do you see that clients are using any, let's call them post-quiz nurturing sequences to boost results and close rates from these quizzes?

Jeremy: You can get very sophisticated with it, and say, you know, based on the answers they give, and they get a certain result, then you bucket them into something. For example, in the health space, if it's like what's the number one thing holding you back from your health goals? We could say diet, or nutrition. We could say exercise. We could say mindset. Those are three very specific paths of how you're going to talk to that person, even if you're selling the same product at the end. So you can get sophisticated, and then do segmentation based on that. Or you can just do a basic follow-up sequence.

If you're just launching the quiz for the first time, I really recommend just getting something up and getting feedback and improving on it. If you're just going to build out a basic nurture campaign, we usually recommend a seven series. Giving them the results and then starting to introduce your brand. Talking about why your company is doing what you're doing, and what your mission is. Giving them some free gifts in a few emails, and ultimately getting them to come back to your offer.

Kathleen:  Mmm. I love that. And what kind of results are people seeing? Do you guys have some stats from your clients? I imagine you're seeing great results because you've grown the business quite a bit from it, but I'm curious about how your users are doing.

Jeremy: We have a lot of case studies. I can rattle some off. People can see these on our site. We have one, for example, I was one of the first ones we worked with. It was called Ann Marie. It was a skin care company. There was a site, which I mentioned bloggers, they had a lot of traffic, so about a half a million visits a month.

What they were using was, they were using, a subscribe to our newsletter, or download this eBook, or get a percentage off purchase. They swapped that out to a quiz around what's your skin score? They would go through, answer these questions, opt in, and then be given an offer to try a sample product.

What that did for them was that increased their lead capture by over 10,000 people a month, and over 100,000 a month in sales, without adding any additional traffic to that.

Kathleen:  Wow, and they're probably spending certainly $200 or under a month, because it sounds like that's around your highest plan. So, the ROI on that is fairly astronomical. I'm not going to do the math, because I'm really bad at math, but it's in the, I think, thousands of percents, if I had to guess.

Jeremy: That's a great return for them. We worked with another guy named Neil Patel, who is one of the people I followed for a long time.

Kathleen:  Neil Patel. Lots of people listening will probably have heard of him. How did you get to work with Neil Patel? Did he find you or did you find him?

Jeremy: No, we actually did some outbound to Neil. I followed him for years, ever since we started our careers, and so I saw he was doing this one-year challenge to build a, I think a website up to $100,000 in sales. I don't know if you remember that. One of the things he was saying he was having problems with was capturing leads. We said, "Hey, Neil let us help you create a quiz for this health blog that you set up. We'll help you increase your leads, and if it works, we'll do a case study with you." It happened to work really well for me increased his lead capture by 500% with the quiz.

Kathleen:  Awesome, and Neil Patel is already kind of a, I'm going to use the most overused term in marketing, but he is a bit of a lead-gen ninja. It always makes me crazy when people call themselves ninjas. But Neil Patel, we'll call him a little bit of a ninja. That's great. So he was able to have a lot of success with it. Any other particularly noteworthy case studies?

Jeremy: We've got a lot. We've got a guy named John Benson, who's in the health space, and he used the quiz to basically help people with their weight loss. Specifically, with thyroid problems. We generated over 110,000 leads, and then he profitably generated those, so he was selling those immediately after the quiz and offsetting the ad costs.

We have another eCommerce company called GothRider, where they sell biker-inspired jewelry and apparel. And he did a fun quiz where he did what celebrity biker are you, and then he would sell them an upsell sequence of some different products. Like a free plus shipping, or a $20 product, and then some upsells after that.

Kathleen:  So, that is a bit more like the Buzzfeed model? I like that. So you can have fun with it.

Jeremy: I can rattle off a bunch of these, and I know I'm naming some big numbers, but the methods in the quiz systems that they use is exactly the same that you would use if you were trying to generate 1,000 leads a month, or 100 leads a month.

Kathleen:  What if you don't already have a ton of traffic to your site. Is there a different approach that you should take? Because I assume if that's the case you're not going to just be able to just put the quiz up and hope that it brings you a ton of leads. I mean, if part of what you're going to use this for is pulling new people in, then what? Any advice for someone in that situation?

Jeremy: I would use Facebook. I mean, that's was what we had to do when we first started. I mentioned we were stuck in this referral and networking game. It's like a roller coaster. You have months where you're killing it and you're getting tons of leads, and then you have other months where you're not getting anything, and you're worried about how to pay the bills.

That was the trap we fell into. We got into Facebook marketing, where we were running ads through these different quizzes. And maybe you have an offer right away that they're buying. Or maybe you're calling people on the phone, but that's what we used to initially build up a bigger email list, where now we have over 25,000 on our lists that we can drive to blog posts, or to traffics, or to offers, or to whatever we want afterwards.

Kathleen:  Any particular tips or strategies that you've used on Facebook that have worked really well? Because I do find Facebook advertising has gotten fairly sophisticated, and can be very complex, depending upon how people use it. I mean, there are really easy ways to use it, just by throwing some money in just to boost your post. But some of the folks I've talked to on this podcast have really gotten kind of fancy. So, I'm curios to know for you, what type of Facebook advertising do you do, and any tips you have to share with listeners.

Jeremy: I think it depends a lot for users. I think look alike audiences have been extremely effective. So, that's one benefit if you're advertising for a while, and Facebook's learning who's converting for you, it's going to make it easier for the targeting aspect. We do have a simple course that we give out to people that's pretty good for beginning users, but I think-

Kathleen:  A course on Facebook advertising?

Jeremy: Yep.

Kathleen:  Definitely share that link with me and I'll and pop that into the show notes as well.

Jeremy: I think a lot of it just comes down to testing. And I think one of the great advantages with quizzes is that we're seeing a big increase in engagement, or a big increase in relevancy score in hash, just because it's a lot more engaging than necessarily a blog post that they're going to have to skim through. It just engages them right away, and it's immediate.

Kathleen:  Do you see any correlation between the number of questions in the quiz, and the completion rates? I would make the analogy to conversion forms. You know there's tons of data that the less you ask, the more likely people are to fill out the form. A corollary to that is when somebody starts the quiz, do they know how many questions are going to be involved? Can they see them all at once? Or is it like revealed as they go through it?

Jeremy: We've had over three million leads for our platforms. We've seen a lot of data on this. What we've found is that, if you think about the psychology, if you see a quiz, or if you land on someone's website and you see a quiz, If you look in your analytics, probably 50% of your visitors have never been to your site before. So, they don't really know who you are, they weren't expecting to take a super-long quiz, so they want to get through it. The same with Facebook. You're on Facebook to try and engage with some of this stuff, not take a 20-minute quiz.

So, what we found is usually eight to 10 questions is pretty good. And then keeping the answers and the questions very short. A lot of people try to add personality where it's like it's a whole paragraphs question, or the answers are super long. Or there's 15 answers for one question. That's just a disaster.

We see on average, our users are converting 33% of the people that start taking their quiz. Yeah, keeping it very, very short. Short and sweet so people can just get through it super quick. For the answers, for example, using like a yes, a sometimes, or no.

Keeping something like that, for example, where it's consistent through the whole quiz. They don't have to read the question and then the answer, and then reread the question, and then reread the answers. You can just imagine that's going to slow it down, and people are just going to drop out.

Kathleen:  Okay, and so eight to 10 questions, on average, how long does that take somebody to complete if they were doing it? Sounds like under a minute or two.

Jeremy: It should take them like 30 seconds to a minute, or something.

Kathleen:  That's really helpful. Okay what would say for somebody who's listening to this, and they're already thinking ... They're already doing inbound marketing. A lot of our listeners are already doing that. They're doing the plain vanilla stuff, as I like to call it. They're blogging. They're doing email marketing. They're posting to social. They have offers. Where would you start? If you're a new user, you're coming to LeadQuizzes, You're intrigued by this idea, and you've already been doing inbound marketing for a little while how do you get started?

Jeremy: How do you get started with the quiz, or ...?

Kathleen:  Would you promote one of your offers, would just come up with something completely new?

Jeremy: I would pick one main funnel. What I talked about with a compelling offer. I think that's the most important thing to start with. And so, what we find with that is something that's just overall compelling. There's maybe a package, some bonuses with it. Maybe there's some urgency or scarcity for them to get it, and there's risk reversal.

I can give a lot of examples. Like Amazon Prime, for example. There are users that sign up for Amazon Prime, make like $1,000 or $1,500, compared to non-Prime users, of like $500. The point is if you give them a compelling offer, get them in the door, then they know they can trust you, they're more likely to continue to spend and buy from you. We look at what's the compelling offer we're going to get people to, and we're going to build a quiz to drive to that, and you're just going to focus on one single sales funnel, and really, really dial that in, versus trying to have five to 10 sales funnels you're working on.

Kathleen:  It sounds like it would make sense for somebody who's thinking of doing a quiz to take a step back, do a little audit of their content, think about what is the highest converting content, as opposed to maybe the highest traffic. Because you obviously want to deliver the thing that has the most value, and then use the quiz to drive more traffic to the offer. Okay, great.

Jeremy: For example, if you're an agency, or something, and making an offer of like get on a consultation call with me, that's not very compelling. If it's a free consult, like literally everybody offers that now. So a good example, we work with a doctor, where he wanted to get consultations. And so what he did was he gave a free consultation, and when they came in for their appointment he would give them a free copy of his book, and he would give them a food intolerance test, which was like a couple of hundred dollars, if they became a customer. So, something that is a lot more compelling than just saying, "Come in for a 30-minute consultation." You know?

Kathleen:  Yeah.

Jeremy: Really thinking through if that's how you're going to sell people over the phone, how are you going to make it really valuable for them?

Kathleen:  Great. Well, any takeaways, tips, things you've tried that didn't work that you wouldn't do again, that you counsel people against when they use quizzes? And then things that do work really well.              

Jeremy: I think we went over a lot of really good strategies. I would say one thing: just like the blogs that you're writing, or the emails that you're writing, the time that you spend on your headline is critical. They say that you should probably be spending 80% of your time on a headline, because if they don't click, you're not going to get any results. They're not going to read any of it, so we just spend a lot of time. Like that's the biggest thing. Just come up with something compelling that people are going to love to take.

You can use different ideas. You can go to Buzzfeed, see what kind of headlines they're using. You can use different headline-generator tools that you can search on Google for that will help give you good ideas, and write out literally like 15 to 20 different headlines. Like Upworthy, one of the most successful content marketing platforms out there, that's what they do. They make their writers write like 10 to 20 headlines for every single blog post they do.

The same thing for the quiz. That's the biggest thing at first. Make something be compelling that you would take, that your visitors would take. That's going to be like super important.

Kathleen:  Yeah, it's funny. I feel like that's an example of where people spend the inversely proportionate time that they should.

Jeremy: It's an afterthought.

Kathleen:  It is. It's like, “Oh, I wrote this awesome blog post, and I spent four hours on it. Okay, let me just gin up a headline.”  That's very interesting. Do you guys do that? Do you write multiple headlines, or how do you handle that?

Jeremy: I think the more practice you have, it just gets easier and easier. But yeah, it's a simple thing like Upworthy says. Just create like 10 to 20 headlines, and you'll be surprised, like the first one you create, and then the next five will probably be very similar.

Then you're going to run out of ideas and be more creative, and then you're going to start to see some that are way better, and way more interesting.  Then you can split test that as well. I know Upworthy would split test their headlines extensively, because a lot of times, same with email, the subject lines you think are going to get people to open it, sometimes they bomb, you know?

Kathleen:  Now when you write these headlines, are you writing them more for attention and conversion, or are you writing them more for SEO? What's the balance there?

Jeremy: We usually write them for attention and conversion, so like our quizzes do rank. I think that is a benefit of using our domain. They're going to rank for like key words, sometimes. But I think the biggest thing, if you're going to put this on your site, or you're going to be driving traffic to it, probably just do for like to get people's attention, and to get them to click.

Kathleen:  Any mistakes you guys have made that you think people should learn from?

Jeremy: Some of the mistakes we've made in our business in general ... Are you looking for business-wise, or just quizzes specifically?

Kathleen:  Oh, heck, tell anything. I think everybody likes to hear, you know, what did you do that I shouldn't?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kathleen:  How could I learn from your mistakes?

Jeremy: One of the big things I talked about already was just relying on referrals, and networking for probably two or three years, and that just held us back, and that was like really hard. It's hard to grow a business like that. It's hard to hire employees and cover payroll and that kind of thing, and develop training. One thing is we didn't really like productize, like our service, or really dial in the niche, until we started lead quizzes, which when we did that, we were basically saying all right we were going to do quizzes. We work really well with health people. That's who we're going to target, and we're going to help people generate leads.

That was like the biggest thing. All of a sudden, we become extremely referable. Yeah, like we just get a lot better at our services. We get really dialed in. it becomes a cookie cutter thing where we get really good at it. That was really important.

Another thing extremely important for us was developing a recurring revenue. Even if you don't have a software, like one thing we did in our agency business before was  instead of charging these big project fees where eventually we got them up to $20, $40,000 projects, like, “All right. How about we just split that over six months so it's like $3,500 a month or $1,000 a month or something like this?" and that way, we have consistent revenue every single month.

Kathleen:  That whole niche specialization topic is so interesting, because I think people are terrified of getting really specialized, because they feel like they're going to have to turn away business. They always think that it's going to make their revenue shrink, but it's very interesting to see when people do take that leap and decide to kind of plant their flag in the sand, and declare, “This is what I specialize in,” how that actually unlocks possibilities, as opposed to closing the door to things.

Jeremy: I think you have to be good at it, so I think one of them ... It's not the worst idea to just go and shotgun out there, and see what kind of results you're able to get, but once we really decided, “All right, we're going to pick this specific niche to go into,” we made a really compelling offer. We're like, “We're going to set up your quiz for free, and we're going to advertise it for you for a thousand dollars a month, and then you're just going to pay us up front.” We got a lot of clients in, so we got a lot of experience doing that.

Kathleen:  Well, it's fascinating to me to hear kind of the journey you've been through. You productized something that you were doing, and that then became the main business. You know, it sounds like in the beginning, the quizzes were like a little, fun side project, and now, it's the main project.

I love hearing you talk about Neil Patel and some of the other influencers that you've worked with. Obviously, you're somebody who likes to stay up-to-date on things that are happening in marketing. I'd love to hear where you get your inspiration. One of the questions I always ask my guests is, “Where do you go to stay current?” because marketing changes so fast, so enlighten us.

Jeremy: I think obviously Neil Patel is really great. Some of the other people ... I follow a guy named Ameer Rosic. This guy, you're probably not going to know him super well for his stuff, but you know, he has the site called blockgeeks.com where he's talking about Blockchain technology. He gets 50 to 90,000 visitors each day, and that's from a brand new site that he started 12 months ago, so extremely sharp. I get a lot of ideas from this guy.

Kathleen:  Actually, I have a bizarre fascination with the Blockchain, so I will definitely be checking that out.

Jeremy: He's brilliant on SEO. I've learned a lot from him. Another guy that I've learned a lot about SEO from is a guy named Yuri Elkaim. He has a blog called yurielkaim.com. He gets 600,000 visitors a month to his site, really sharp. He actually teaches those strategies to health entrepreneurs on healthpreneurgroup.com.

But I mean, you could be in any industry, and still learn. It's still going to be the same tactics that go into it, so he's been really helpful. A guy named Eric Siu partners with Neil Patel. They get 500,000 downloads a month to their podcast, extremely smart.

One other person I follow a lot is a guy named Mike Dillard. I don't know if you're familiar with Mike Dillard, but he generates about a thousand emails a day from Facebook, and generates about $460,000 a month in revenue from those campaigns, so extremely, extremely smart guy that I've learned a lot from.

Kathleen:  I love it. I am going to check all of those out, and will include links to all of those in the show notes, because there's some really good, new ones there that we haven't heard before, which I always love.

You know, the other question I like to ask people is ... You're somebody who's doing inbound marketing pretty successfully. When you look out into the world, who else do you think is really doing this well. You know, if somebody wanted to see a best-practice example, person or individual or a company. Company or individual, who should they look at?

Jeremy: Any of those people we talked about. A couple of more people that I follow, like a company called Helix House, which is out here in Scottsdale. I'm friends with them. They're behind some of the biggest campaigns that I've seen in our space, like they worked with a company called Thyroid Pharmacists, and helped them generate over a half a million leads, so they're extremely smart. I follow them a lot.

Another friend named Anthony Sarandrea at SiteFlood, he has an agency, but he also spends close to $150,000 a month on his own money generating affiliate leads. Those are some other people that I follow that are really, really sharp.

Kathleen:  If you're listening, and you're interested, check the show notes. I'll have links for all of those in them. This has been great. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us. I, for one, am going to go check out LeadQuizzes, and test it out with some, either on our marketing or with some client's marketing, because I think there's a lot of potential there. It just sounds like it's kind of a no-brainer, especially to start doing some tests with the free version, and dip your toe in the water.

For anybody listening, if you do decide to check out LeadQuizzes, and you have some good results, I would love it if you would share those, and either comment on the show notes, or you can always tweet me at workmommywork. Jeremy, would you share with our listeners where they can reach you online? What's the best way to do that?

Jeremy: I use Twitter or Facebook the most, so Twitter, I guess we can just throw this into the show notes. Jeremy Ellens or on Facebook, it's facebook.com/jellens.

Kathleen:  Perfect. Yeah, I'll definitely include those links. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been really interesting and fun, and can't wait to check the product out.

Jeremy: Awesome. Thanks, Kathleen.

Kathleen:  Thanks, Jeremy, and for anyone listening, if you enjoyed this, please give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. If you know anybody who's just kicking ass with their marketing, tweet me at workmommywork, because I'd love to interview them. Thanks so much.