How You Can Work ON Your Business Instead of IN Your Business (Part 2)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 94

You're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode

of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing baby faced. You're not baby faced, Chris Graham. Chris I do. Maybe face

man. I'm always doing good with an intro like that. I need some equivalent intro to talk about how great you are.

Uh, I don't feel like baby faces like good thing. Like I would hate if you called me baby faced.

Yeah. I feel like I would need to think about really specific compliments that you would receive well and that they wouldn't make you uncomfortable.

No, that makes me feel for the man. You know, I'm interested in was this, say I'm an eight on the enneagram. We had like a really good discussion in our Facebook community about the Indian gram. I was surprised by how many people knew about it or even expressed interest about it. One person specifically mentioning, we're not going to go down this rabbit hole too far, but I love these rabbit holes. Someone mentioned it sounded really like the astrological signs or whatever. I like how you know like I was born as a Capricorn and so therefore I will live this life. No like tidy mentioned that it's not at all like that at all. It's just like it's more like a personality kind of

assessment. I mean we probably shouldn't talk about episode ideas during our banter on the intro, but I do have this idea I've been working on where if we had situations that audio engineers or producers or you know, our audience typically gets into and then we had an enneagram expert, which would probably be my wife. She's read like four books.

What are her credentials, Chris? I don't, I don't accept guests on the podcast without his phd in any gram. Is that even a thing?

She has the same credentials we do, which is she's good at self teaching.

She's read some books. Yeah, we don't have any credentials. I just realized that

I've got a bachelor in communication, but more on that later emphasis on more on, yeah. Oh, it'd be interesting to have different scenarios where it's like, okay, you know the artists dorms in and is furious that the revisions weren't correct. How does an eight respond to that? How does the five respond to that? How does one respond to that?

So for those who don't even know, I'm going to quickly just say the enneagram boils down to nine different personality types. We're not going to cut from here. I think a good episode would be just doing a good overview of what each of the nine types are and kind of like how to self assess. But the best thing about the Instagram is interpersonal relationships. Trevor, who was on podcast episode 71 I think it's one of the only interviews that we did without me. It was on my honeymoon. My best friend Trevor was on the podcast. His company sounds stripe. They have 30 40 50 people working there now and every single person has on their slack what their enneagram number is. If you hover their mouse over their profile and that helps them understand how to deliver certain news or you know, something that's like a negative thing, you approach each of the numbers in a different way.

And I think if we all understood that in the studio, that would save a lot of heartache between band members and between you and band members and if you understood yourself. And that's the big thing. I think a lot of us don't really understand ourselves well enough to know how, why we react a certain way or how to approach a certain situation a certain way. So, so I have two things to say to that. The first that's so interesting is that you and I get along so well because we're weird because we're eight criticism is almost like a love language for us. It is to say you could be doing better at this. I get like warm and fuzzy and I feel loved. We regularly yell at each other at like high volumes arguing about like something passionately. We probably should do it more. Yeah.

At the end of it. We're like energized and love each other like it's amazing. We're not like screaming at each other, but we're just like passionately arguing about like a topic or something in our own businesses and we're just talking business and it's because of our personality or like gym rats, power lifters step instead of encouraging each other to lift more weight, like grow that fast arm. My Gosh, we are some scrawny power lifters, bro. I just will say this. If you are interested in learning more about the Enneagram, it's probably a good primer for some of our future content. If we go down this rabbit hole, so go to, it'll be in the show notes, the enneagram institute.com they have an assessment on there. It's like 12 bucks. It seems stupid to pay for an assessment. Believe me, it is well worth it. It will take awhile to get through and I did it years ago and I think I want to do it again just to kind of see if I come in right with the same things.

I'm probably gonna do it again here. I'm going to say this. For those of you that are like, this sounds dumb. I totally agree. It does sound dumb. Yeah, but so does like pizza. If you've never heard of pizza before, it sounds really dumb. We're just going to put tomatoes and cheese and then pepperonis onto a thinly stretched piece of dough and then we're going to put it into a really hot oven. It sounds crazy, but the enneagram is kind of, when I took the assessment, I was like, this is job. Until you read a description that is like, Holy Shit, this is me. Yeah, exactly. I love it. Our banter turns into podcast episode. It's true. This is not meant to be so. All right. Let's move on to the topic of today's episode, Chris. Yeah. You remember what we talked about last week? No. The thing is I genuinely believe that you don't remember when we talked about last time?

No, no. We, we talked about what to do when you're working on your business now for your business. Yeah. So I was out of town on vacation like earlier this month. So now Chris and I are like hustling week-to-week to get next week's episode out. So this one episode comes out and like five days last week we talked about ways to work on your business so that you can save time today. Now that you've saved all this time from what we talked about last week, we're going to talk about how to use that time to again, work on your business, but this time onto things that specifically help your income. And if you listen to the six figure home studio podcast, your studios income is probably of utmost importance. Or else you wouldn't listen to a podcast called the six figure home studio. Badass. Am I wrong here, Chris? Or is that a pretty fair assessment? You greedy jerks. All you guys want is more money now. It's not. It's not. But we are trying to make a living so that we can enjoy doing audio daily.

And so I would say this episode is very, very much inspired by a book called the e myth revisited by Michael Gerber.

The book's called the e myth revisited. The book is called that. Yes. Not The [inaudible] bike. Michael.

It's called the e myth revisited. Thank you for that clarification. I think and you can cut all this shit out Jane. No, no. Leave it in. Leave it all in. So this book, one of the best parts about this community that's kind of formed around this podcast is it's so fun to see like an Instagram story or somebody posts it on Facebook or whatever like, oh my gosh, I read this book that they recommended and it was amazing. It blew my mind. That's like one of the things that I love the most about doing this podcast is seeing people take their own education into their own hands, and I'll say this, I'm blown away at how infrequently the book, The e myth revisited as mentioned.

It's so good. Yeah, it's true. We see book recommendations all the time in our community and I can count on one hand how many times that book has been recommended.

Yeah, that book is easily in my top three. If you are in the service industry and attempting to run a business, it's must read. It's so good. It was written in the 90s but it's still totally applies in 2019 or whatever year it is that you happen to be listening to this.

Yeah. I think the reason the book still applies is because they don't talk about specifics. They talk about kind of overarching principles and mindset behind how to approach your business and I think that stuff never goes out of style, but there is a good followup if you do finish that book and you want a little bit more in depth, like step-by-step specifics. There's a book by Dan Carpenter called work the system that goes really into detail on how to systemize your business, so that's probably one that's more tactical, but I would not read that one until you read the e myth revisited.

I'm going to say one more thing on the e myth revisited and we're going to dive in on some actionables that you guys can use to grow your businesses. Now that you've saved some time working on your business, not for it. And again, first step when you begin to work on your business, not for it, is to create more time. Yeah. Not necessarily to get more customers. You want to create more time so that you have the time to focus on getting more customers. When I finished reading the email revisited, I closed that book. My first thought was I would trade my entire college education to have read this book as a 19 year old entering college. That is what, a $30,000 book, 55 $55,000 book. Oh yeah. I read it and I was like, hmm, Yup. All these things are going to work really, really well and here we go.

And it was so wild to go back. I read it, put a bunch of this stuff into action and I read the book again a year or two or three later and I was blown away because the business had like doubled or tripled in size by time. I reread it and I was like reading it. I was like, oh my gosh, all this stuff worked. And it was wild to read that book and have that experience and it was so empowering. Just to know like, man, this little book that's a quarter of an inch thick like has this super measurable impact. So without further ado, how to work on your business, not for it. Step two, you got some time. Now it's time to get some more customers and make some more money. We're going to talk about all the different places you can work on your business, not for it. It's going to be dope.

Yeah. So actually before we get into that, we're going to talk about sponsors first. Oh yeah. And before you hit the fast forward button, this is not your normal sponsor segment. First sponsor today is Lacroix. Oh, crack open the lacroix. Yeah, they don't pay us, but they still sponsor us. They sustain us. And as the sponsor we've made $0 million from them. But I just love cracking open a new Candler Kuwait on the podcast with a bunch of gain reduction on the sound. Real sponsor actually is get your gear slide out. James. Here we go. The mixed pre three. Chris, tell me what mixed pre three real quick. Okay, so

we don't really take gear sponsorships. No, but if it's a situation where it can make our lives better and it can make the podcast better, the worst super duper open to it. The guys at sound devices send us both mixed pre threes we've been using on the podcast for the past couple of months. A mixed pre three is kind of like a zoom recorder. It's a little SD card recorder except the mixed pre three you've heard us talk about it. It is made making the podcast so much easier because one, it sounds amazing and two, it records directly to an SD card and three you can record to an SD card and your doll at the same time,

which is what I'm doing right now. I have pro tools going with my audio pro going with Chris's audio from the mixed [inaudible] three and then I also have it recording to an SD card on the device itself. And one interesting thing was I forgot to stop recording like on our first episode ever. And this thing recorded for two days straight without stopping, without any errors. That was on a Tuesday when we came back Thursday to record the next episode. I noticed it was still recording and I had to go back and like delete 48 hours of audio. So it, it worked that pro tools? Yeah, B. Yeah. [inaudible] would never do that. That's for show.

Never. So yeah, it's rock solid stable. The priests are awesome. It's got like what? 78 dbs of gain per Prix, which is science fiction. That's insane.

Okay, now you're getting too slutty over here, Chris. Sorry. Absolutely incredible gear. Such good stuff. And now we have two more sponsors who aren't really sponsors. There's just our own, our own companies. This true file pass.com is a sponsor. Chris, do you want to tell them about file pass.com

so file pass, you're working on a project, you've finished the mixes, you've sent them to the client and the client's like, Hey, I'm going to text you some revisions and then I'm gonna Instagram direct message you some revisions and then we're gonna email you some revisions. And then all my other band members, they're going to do the exactly the same thing and ruin your freaking life. Welcome to revision. Hell, welcome to health. File pass is an amazing system that lets you upload the file pass than the artist goes to file pass and they can drop little markers in the audio and they can suggest request whatever you want to phrase that revisions. And then you can also do this really cool thing. You can put a paywall behind the final mixes, so each revision you upload, they can't download, they can only listen to it through file pass. If you choose to use this feature and then when they're like that's approved, then they can pay you the final amount of money they owe you before you give them the

files. This is good way to make the software, the bad guy where you're not in the one chasing down payments and it keeps the leverage on the table so they cannot download the files until they pay. Instead of you sending files off and they still owe you money and now you have to chase them down. When it comes time to finalize the project. So trying to save a lot of awkward conversations from people.

Indeed, fun fact, somebody mentioned in the Facebook group the other day were like, yeah, you overestimate like how people will just rip, you know, they'll plug the eighth inch output Jack with their computer and they'll just rip it right off a file pass. If you're concerned about that, you should go back and listen to every episode of our podcast because you are going after the wrong customers.

Yeah, I will say this though, whether or not it's a problem, which it has not been for any of our customers, we are going to actually introduce something called watermarks to address that issue. So you'll see that in the future on file pass.com every 30 seconds the watermark's going to say Chris Graham, mastering.com guy. No. Okay, so this is the third, fourth, fifth sponsor of today. I don't know how many were add. This is not a real sponsor there, but this is who many Chris's new baby. It's called bounce butler. You can go to bounce butler.com and get a, can you sign up for a free trial yet or can I say that or no?

You can sign up for early access for now and I will let you in a few people at a time. We're still in testing mode, but yeah, what's it do, Brian?

So the coolest thing about this is say I have three or four different albums I'm working on and I've finished them all and they've all signed off from the label. Everybody, but they want a vocal up version. They want a vocal down version of the one instrumental versions while I'm on pro tools 12.4 so it's not as bad as it could be, but that's still a nightmare to bounce 30 songs down with three to four different versions of each song. That's like 30 to 40 files I have to bounce down. That's a nightmare. Some people have even more than that. So what bounce Butler does is I can literally just save the versions of each of those sessions and then use bounce Butler to select every single session and it will automatically bounce every one of those versions down for me. So instead of me manually bouncing down one version at a time for 40 times in a row or my assistant doing that worse, I can just have a piece of software that does it all automatically. Literally you can sit there and watch it do it or you can do what I would do, which is just go in the other room and play video games and then it'll still text me when I'm done. Or is that just, it will text you when it's done bouncing. It'll send me a text message when it's done bouncing down 50 files so you can go to sign up for early access@bouncebutler.com does it do anything else? Cool that I've failed to mention.

If you're in pro tools, there's an option for it to copy each bounce into a Dropbox folder, which means you could be like driving in. Your studio is still working for you and your phone has all the completed bounces on it as they complete, so you could even be like away from the studio and check all your mixes in your car and be like, these sound great. I'm going to share a link with the client.

Just wait till you have a file pass and bounce Butler integration so you can just do it all on file pass. It's going to be dope. One more note as if you're on pro tools, what is it, 10 or 11 before they introduced offline bouncing. Can you imagine bouncing down 50 versions of files in real time? Like that's literally like I've had many people reach out to me and share that. That's their life. They spend a lot of time doing that. Yeah. Now when you just go to bed, set it to bounce all the files down. We have protocols crashes, which it does bounce. Butler's smart enough to know that and it'll reopen the session and close out all the air messages and stuff. Currently bounced. Butler supports protools, Cubase, Ableton logic and reaper. That's beautiful. All right, let's actually get into some meat of the episode.

We're like how far we want to talk about the enneagram. We talked about Lacroix, we talked about mixed breeds, we talked about all this stuff. We're almost 20 minutes episode and we haven't actually talked about a topic yet, but this is why we have like hour long episodes and this is probably getting along with today because we have a lot of stuff to talk about. Back to the topic today, working on your business, specifically working on your business on something that's going to give you more money. At the end of the day, we're going to actually talk about three different areas you can work on. There's a lot of different areas you can work on that are going to help you earn more money, but three specific areas and we're going to talk about it in the form of a sales funnel. Chris, do you wanna explain a sales funnel? I know there's three parts, there's the top of your funnel, the middle of your funnel, the bottom of your funnel. But this is marketing speak and this can kind of really confuse people and a lot of people might tune out if we are not really thorough of explaining what a sales funnel is, you'll understand it. Yeah. But you will understand it. And we're going to give you some tactical stuff you can do in each of these three areas when you're working on your business.

So if you know what a funnel is, a funnel is this like kind of conical thingy that you pour a bunch of stuff in one side and it brings it all down to a small hole.

Yeah. So like an Arrow press has a funnel to pour the coffee into the aero press. If you're an air press user, we're coffee nerds here on the podcast. Are there any other types of funnels you would like to? Uh, there's a beer bong that's kind of a,

that's true. A Beer Bong has a final on it. So your top of funnel is people who have never heard about you or this is the first time they've ever heard about you and they're thinking, hmm, this company sounds interesting. It's their first impression. What's going to happen is that you're a lot of people, if you're doing a good job with marketing, lots of people hear about you, but only a couple of people end up hiring you, a small percentage of them. So you have to reach out to a huge number of people to get the number of people you want to hire you. There's no such thing as a sales pipe, which is, hey, I reached out to a hundred people and then all those a hundred people ask for a quote and then I gave a hundred people quote and then all a hundred people hired me. That's never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever happened. And the only times it has happened is when like Bernie Madoff or something like that was selling a freaking crook product and trying to ruin people's lives. So it's a funnel. You have to be okay first and foremost that people are going to hear about you and not be interested. It's true. That's fine. Don't let your most immature self freak out that some people might be like, I don't know. It sounds Kinda dumb.

Yeah, so I'd like to just, if you're visually looking at what a funnel looks like, it's kind of an upside down triangle. If you're unfamiliar with what the word funnel is, maybe there's a language barrier, but upside down triangle the top is the biggest part and that's your overall awareness for your studio. That's the way I like to look at it. I say top of funnel, the acronym, I like to use this Tofu, top of funnel Tofu. It's not just a delicious meat alternative actually as a salami meat alternative, but whatever, that's delicious. You shut your mouth. So good. So top of funnel is Tofu and that's all the awareness you have for your studio. Middle of funnel, that's Mo food. That's how many people of those people that are aware of your studio. Mofu is the number of people that are interested in working with you.

That's in my opinion, what Mofu is bottom of funnel, what I call Bofu is of all those conversations you have with people, how many of them end up converting to paid customers? So how many of them give you hard earned dollars? So those are the three big areas. Top of funnel is all about creating more awareness for your studio. The middle of funnel is all about creating more interest in working with you in the bottom of funnel is turning all that interest into dollars. Those are the three major areas. Pretty easy to follow I think, unless there's something I'm missing, Chris. Ah Gosh, I had no idea about any of this stuff when I first started my business. Yeah, me either. I don't even remember the first time I learned the concept of a sales funnel, but it was probably sometime in 2014 or 15 and my assessment of what a funnel is has changed over the years.

And I would say if anything, it's gotten much, much, much more simple than what I initially thought it was. So that's why I like to just do it. Three main sections, Tofu, Mofu and Bofu. And that's Kinda what we're going to talk about for the rest of this episode because there are certain things you can do to work on your business and each of these three areas in every single one of these things is going to lead to more money if you can implement these things correctly. Now, it may not be things overnight that are going to give you more money, but the whole concept is put a little bit of time in now to fix something in one of these three areas so that longterm over the next six, 1218 months, you are better off financially. So Chris, let's start with the top of the funnel here, which actually seemed like the most obvious place to start. I personally believe you need to start the bottom of the funnel, which maybe we'll get to if we have time, but I'm not going to get into it today, unfortunately.

Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. I started at top of funnel and here's my thought. I think what a lot of people do when they start at the bottom of the funnel is they build the wrong bottom of the funnel. That's interesting. And that's dangerous. I think the most important thing to do is to get a lot of awareness and to see what happens. And so you put the word out, Hey, I do this thing. You start running ads. Maybe you, you know, figure out, you start making youtube videos. I don't know, we'll talk more about that here in just a minute. But you get awareness for your studio up. You get awareness for your business up and you hopefully, if you've done a good job here, if you have a good offering, it starts conversations. And when you get those conversations started, you have a good idea of, Oh, I'm advertising in the wrong parts of the Internet.

Or Oh my gosh, everybody wants me for this one thing I didn't realize, I thought they'd want me for this other thing. So assumptions are what really kills you. Assumptions are the worst possible thing that can happen when you're doing this sort of stuff. So my thought is build your top of funnel, get as much awareness about your brand as you possibly can. I promise we're going to tell you how to do that in just a minute. Do that and all of the information that you gather while doing that will dramatically help you figure out middle and bottom of funnel.

I think you've changed my mind and this is something I'm working on right now at a new, like a free email course on sales funnels, which I'll talk about probably towards the end of this, a way to get that whenever I finish it, I've been kind of positioning that as starting from the bottom up. I may still do that, but I like your argument there, which is if you don't have any traffic or any awareness for your studio at the top of your funnel, how do you truly know what to build at the bottom of your funnel? Again, I might have a different argument by the time you get to the end of this conversation, but we'll say, let's start here at the top of your funnel. Now, Chris, well, let me

throw one other thing in. If you've never built a sales funnel before, I would strenuously argued you should start with the top. If you've done this a bunch of times, I don't think starting at the top is as important as it usually is, but I think still probably pretty important. I think there's plenty of arguments for someone like you who's built a bunch of sales funnels to start from the bottom.

Well, I think most people are probably confused right now, so if by the time we get to the end of this conversation there'll be a lot more equipped to understand the pros and cons of both approaches. So let's start at the top here. Working on your business. You've saved all this time from the last episode we talked about in episode 93

and you've scheduled it. This is important. You have scheduled it. Let me say that one more time. You have scheduled at the time to work on your business, not for it. I don't know any other way. I have no other fancy Ninja business ideas. If there's not a specific time that you've scheduled, at least for a season in life where it's like, hey, for two hours from when on Wednesday from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM that's when I work on my business, not for it. I don't take calls. I don't check social media. I don't take projects. I don't meet with clients. I only work on not for. That is a life changing habit to get into.

That's freaking fantastic and that's probably something I needed to get back into. I used to work that way. Now I work more from a list point of view instead of a blog point of view. Top of funnel. Let's talk about some different areas to work on the top of your funnel, creating awareness for your studio of the things that we have on our list right now. Chris, which one do you want to tackle first for working on your business to the top of your funnel?

Well, here's the thing. We don't have this on our outline. We probably should. We're gonna talk about, I'm just gonna run through what we're going to talk about real quick. We're going to talk about Facebook ads, Google ads, your Google business listing, and as well as getting proper credit for your work. Something I could do way, way better at. But here's the thing, when you're thinking about your top of funnel, one of the first things you need to do is think about who are you trying to get? Is it just anybody

that won't work? Because it's expensive to advertise to everybody. You have to narrow down who the type of person is that you are trying to get interested in you and where they are on the Internet. Yes, so if you go back to episode 82 we have an entire episode on how to create a customer Avatar that will skyrocket your marketing efforts. If you try to approach this episode and working on the top of your sales funnel without first listening to that episode and then taking action on that episode to figure out, find and create your customer Avatar, then you will struggle continuously on this part. So first do episode 82 if you haven't already figured out who you're targeting and the more specific you can be, the better off you're going to be. But now let's talk about Facebook. Chris, working on your business specifically, let's just say Facebook ads.

If you want to start one in Facebook ads. My first advice is one, figure out who you are trying to advertise to. I would give them a name. It's probably a friend of yours. It's probably someone that you know that you can be like, yeah, my friend Steve. He really was the perfect customer. Where can I find more Steve's? That's the right first question. The next thing you need to do is you need to figure out how do you target Steve's target is when you're on any sort of advertising platform, you tell it, here's the people I want to see this ad. You might say, Hey, I only want my ad to show to people who like the band system of a down, right? So you're going to get a really specific type of person that has gone out of their way to like system of a down on Facebook and so Facebook will take that targeting information and we'll only show it to those people.

The second thing I would do is figure out a budget. Don't just throw money at Facebook ads or Google or whatever. If you do, you're going to pay something called the stupidity tax that's going to come out and by jet and it's not going to go well, but if you figured a budget and you say, I'm going to spend $3 per day, or I'm going to spend $5 per day, or I'm going to spend a dollar per day, whatever it happens to be, you can set that up in any of the places that you would run paid ads. Do that first and then just commit to, hey, I'm going to spend 100 bucks or 150 bucks or 300 bucks per month, whatever it happens to be, and just accept that that money's gone. Let me just mention something. Whether it's Facebook ads or Google ads doesn't make a difference to me.

I think there are pros and cons for both. I think depends on what sort of business you have and what sort of people you're targeting and what your services are. The first step for me, if you're working on your business and you're trying to implement some sort of paid advertising thing, I would absolutely educate myself on which of the two platforms is best for my business model and then how to actually utilize that platform to its maximum potential. If you listen to our podcast all the time, we talk about a lot of different things. However, Facebook ads, Google ads are not something we talk about all the time. Even though they are a big part of both Chris and I's businesses, it's not a topic we talk about all the time. However, there are podcasts out there specifically suited towards running Facebook ads or Google ads, so I would really highly anyone who's looking

to work on their business, make sure you are taking an education related to that topic regularly as you're trying to focus on that thing. So going, if you're starting at the top here and you haven't really thought through the rest of your funnel, I would not go straight to paid ads because then you're going to spend a bunch of money and they're going to not have anywhere to go. You're not going to have it utilized correctly. Then you're going to say, oh, Facebook ads don't work, so it's a waste of time. That's not the right way to approach it. There's some other things you can work on at the top of your funnel. They're going to probably yield you better results, but there's also books out there. Chris, what book do you have in your hand right now?

Well, this is one of my first business books and you can hear how thick it is. Sound effect. It's a bigger book. It is the definitive guide to Google ad words by Mr. Perry Marshall. When I first got my website up and I thought, wow, this is a good website, I think I could probably convince strangers to hire me for mastering. I met with a friend of mine, his name is Chris Welter and Chris Walter. I told them my problem and Chris Walter has a doctorate in entrepreneurial studies and he said, have you heard of Perry Marshall? And I said, no I have not. And he said, you should go look into him. The first thing I started to do in my business when I was really dedicated to working on that for it on Wednesday afternoons I got online and for 50 bucks I downloaded a digital copy of this book and then I contacted a local printer and I had them printed out cause I wanted to have the physical copies so I could highlight it and ink it up and stuff. And I got there to pick it up. And this crazy old guy that owned the print shop was like, Google ads sounds like a waste of money to me. Little did he know it was not a waste of money.

All. I had an argument inside our Facebook community with someone who had that point of view with Facebook ads and I just had to remind myself that I can't change everyone's mind, but I will say that if you have that point of view or usually just staunchly think that paid advertising is not something you should do, I would highly encourage you to first get rid of that sort of mindset. But second, we have a full episode on this episode 23 why you might need to advertise for your studio. I think that goes down the advertising rabbit hole far enough, but I would say this, Facebook ads, Google ads both work well for any sort of business. You just have to find the way that works best for you in your business and your location. Amen. Oh my gosh, that was so good. If you cannot crack that code, you're going to struggle with it and not everyone can crack that code. Not everyone even needs to crack that code. You may not even need paid advertising to make your business sustainable, but just understand that just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's not going to work for someone else. So don't be stuck in a mindset that's outdated. Yeah. I love what you just said there. So next on our list we talked about Facebook ads and Google ads. That's just a very broad topic, but that is definitely an area to put some focus on if you have time and you're ready to earn more money.

And let me say here at focus on mean self-education. Focus on means buying books. It means taking classes. It means watching videos.

This is not a tactic you go home and do today. This is a season of your life. Yeah, Facebook and Google ads are a

season you will go through and it will take a lot of time, effort, frustration. You will probably waste some money on doing it the wrong way for awhile, but if you commit to it, commit to a season of this, you'll start to figure out all of the missing pieces that you now can put into place to make this better. And I think honestly your whole funnel will be better for it if you can get through the season. Totally. Let me address this. I think one of the reasons that people struggle with doing anything like this is because they cannot process that they might spend money that doesn't make any money at all, that they might make a mistake and waste money guys, that's business. Well at least you're not wasting $85,000 on a fail sell degree. Yeah. Count. This is a cheap education is the way I look at it.

Yeah. When you were running paid ads, you are paying for an education. Yup. You are paying to learn about the reality of the marketplace and sometimes that turns into customers and sometimes that just turns into knowledge and that knowledge is priceless. And I would put it in kind of a terms of like, don't invest quote, invest any money into paid advertising that you're not willing and able to lose. That's kind of the place to start. So moving on, Google business listings, this is an area that you can apparently spend a little bit of time on now in order to reap the benefits financially long term. However, I don't know anything about this, Chris, can you talk about this? Yeah, so I would say if you are a small business and you sell anything and you think that people might Google you before they buy from you, one of the best things you can possibly do is Google how to claim my business on Google just to search for that and it'll walk you through everything you need to do.

Basically, your business now becomes an official location on Google. It's free to set up a Google business listing. It's incredibly powerful. And if you are the type of studio looking for local customers, let me ask you a question. If you're a musician and you're like, I want to go record it as a studio, what's the first thing you're going to do? You're going to Google it. You're going to get on your phone. You're going to be like recording studios in Columbus, Ohio. You're going to look and see like who pops up and you're going to make some snap judgments about which ones are legit and which ones aren't. Before you even go to their webpage. It's true. You're going to pop up and you're gonna say, oh well this one with 35 five star reviews looks legit and this one with one one star review does not look legit.

The guy with one one star review might have a grammy and the guy with 35 five star reviews might have all the recorded high school kids, but that's the nature of the Internet is you don't know who those people are, but you make a snap judgment based on how many stars are next to the business and how many reviews have been listed. It is so easy to set up your Google business listing. It is so easy to ask. 10 of your previous customers, whether that's a buddy that you did a little bit of free work for or someone that paid you a bunch of money to ask them for at least a couple reviews. You can get people to your website. If you have a Google local business listing, it's super effective. It's less important for some and more important for others, but for most of people listening, if you want

local clients, especially if you're starting out, this is a good thing to do.

I still think the Google business listing kind of borderlines between the top of funnel and middle of funnel because this kind of awareness and interest kind of combined into one, but that doesn't diminish the importance of it if you're trying to get search engine traffic to convert to paid customers in the long run.

Totally. Now, fun fact, I'm a little bit of a weird business. I work, you know, with people from all over the world all the time. It's so weird, Chris. There's nothing weird about that. Well, here's the thing. I have a Google local business listing it. It's very helpful. I've gotten a lot of customers, but if my phone rings and there's a six one four area code, which is where I'm from, I don't even answer the phone because so many people find that listing that it's annoying. I had a guy today that was like all, we're trying to find a rehearsal space for our band. He scheduled a call with me, I'm out websites scheduling for him and I saw what he listed with the com phone call was about and it's like, ah, you definitely found me through Google so it can be annoying, but the upsides dramatically outweigh the downsides.

Yeah. I would say most people that would be a good problem to have is to have too much awareness from Google. Yeah. Let's move on to the next top of funnel activity that you can work on to increase your income over the long term, getting proper credit for your work. This is a really weird thing to put at the top of the funnel, but I want you to bear with me because this is a huge, huge hole in so many people's businesses. Mine included. It's a tough nut to crack, but think about this. I'm going to use you as an example Chris, cause you're a good example of this. How many clients songs have you mastered in the past? Can you even put a ballpark figure on that? Probably it's north of 10,000 for sure. How many of those are you properly credited for mastering services on social media? On Spotify and or on Youtube?

It's a small percentage of that. Could you even get ballpark that less than 20% probably less than 10% maybe less than 5%

yeah, so like somewhere between 80 and 95% of your password is not properly crediting you. And when you think about that 10,000 plus songs or however many songs that might be, that is a lot of work out there. I don't know how many streams on Spotify are out there that you're not getting credit for your services and I know Spotify doesn't have the best credits on there anyways. They only list four I think producer. But the point is if you work on a project and you are not properly credited and the youtube description or a social media post or in Spotify as a producer or a writer, that is a lot of missing awareness for your studio. I can't tell you how many times I'm in the gym in the morning listening to like a metal track, just trying to keep up and up on like what's working well in metal nowadays?

Cause that's the kind of music I mix and I hear a mix. It's like, Oh shit, that's a really good mix. And I go look at the song credits and nuclear blast records. By the way, as the worst about this, there is never a producer credited on any nuclear blast song on Spotify. It is horrible. And so there's a lot of people that are missing out on work. When the band hears a mixed they like and they're thinking about looking for a mixer and they look for the credits for that and they can't find it. Think about how much work you're missing out on Chris because they don't see your name on the credits. Yeah, that's probably thousands or so of people that would hit your site per year if you would otherwise been credited properly for that. Pardon me? Here's that. Thinks about that and it's, you're right.

It's not that I've stuck my head in the sand on and not wanting to really deal with, but with where I'm at in my business right now, part of me thinks it might be good that when you book a project that there's a form and it's basically by hiring me you are saying you will credit me on the project and that's the key to this. Like I can't go back and fix all this stuff I'm not credited for on Spotify. You know how hard it is to get a label to go update the metadata on something that's uploaded to Spotify or whatever. Like I don't even know the proper process for that. I've tried in the past and I've had very little success on that. What has worked is before the project even starts letting the band and the label know that I want to be credited as Brian Hood from four or five six recordings.

I want those two things specifically, all my credits and that has had a high success rate for me. You know, you can do it. You could have two rates and you could say, Hey, uh, you know, I cost x if I'm credited and I cost x times 1.5 if I'm not credited. The problem with that is though you're not going to find out if you're credited until after you're done with the project. So that doesn't quite work out well. Well then you could invoice them, say, hey, you know, you guys got the credited rate. It looks like you didn't credit me here's an invoice or you can just credit me. And I think that would probably, they would find a way to credit you if that were the case. But at the same time, I don't necessarily want them to have a bad taste in their mouth after the project's over because I send them an invoice for something.

I would rather have the relationship over the credit. Yeah, me too. So I think the best point is to just have the expectation upfront that they will credit you have an agreement in place and if they don't do it, so be it. At least you tried. But I think if you just at least expressed that expectation up front, make sure you reiterate that when the project's over and that you are going to give you credit on social media and on Youtube and on Spotify if that's applicable. If you can just get those three areas and you're going to get most of your clients to do it. It's not that they don't do it out of spite or like a hatred for you or the fact they don't want you credit for it. They do it out of ignorance. But I think if you look at one area that does this better than probably anyone is photographers.

Photographers are ruthless about this. If you post like my own wedding photos, I can't post my own wedding photos on social media without crediting my photographer or she gets mad at me and like we have a good like friendship relationship with our wedding photographer but like she is adamant about this. She was really cool. Yeah, she's great. Yeah. Stuff. So at the end of the day like it's okay to be ruthless about this as long as you maintain the relationship with the person. But I think anyone that doesn't take this seriously as leaving a lot of awareness on the table because I'll post something to Instagram or Facebook and anyone who is having a wedding in the national area sees her name and they think, oh I love the vibe of their wedding photos. I'm going to contact Steph. I got a out to Steph

at your wedding. She was so funny and so crude and you know it's a southern wedding, very proper as dry wedding. And we're like posing for pictures and steps like, all right guys, line up. Both of our families are very conservative. Yeah. She's like, all right guys, line up butts to balls. Here we go. I was like, I log girl.

Yeah she, she was cool. But again, don't let the point. Escape is here, which is ruthlessly ask for credit. Shamelessly asked for credit on all this stuff that you do because this is a way to generate awareness for your studio. Hands down. This is an easy, easy way that a lot of us are not capitalizing on. So let's move on Chris, cause we need a lot more than we still got middle and bottom of funnel to tackle and we are so far in this episode.

Okay, I'll resist asking questions on that. It's very exciting.

So let's move on to the middle of our funnel. We've talked about several different areas that you can invest time to work on your business now to reap the rewards later on financially. But once you've created all this awareness for your studio, now you have to turn that awareness into interest. You have to get people interested in working with you and there are some things that you can definitely invest time to work on your business. Now in order to generate more interest from that awareness. So let's talk about some middle of funnel things that you can work on. You can set aside time on to work on your business. And that first one we've already kind of mentioned and that is reviews.

Let's back up for just a minute because I think we need to address some psychology elephants in the room here. Sure. I think what many people do, myself included as a younger man and still to this day to some degree, is they believe, well, once people

both found out about me, you know they're going to hire me because I'm awesome, you know, and I don't need to do anything. I just got to let them know about me. They're going to harm me.

And your southern accent is improving. I'm proud of you. Hey, I appreciate it. I appreciate I slowed it down just a little bit there for you. So here's the thing, you have to understand that when somebody finds out about you for the first time, they don't just naturally say, wow, what an amazing individual. This person is incredible. Oh to do all my records with them. They say this, they're going about their life. They see an ad, they see a post, somebody mentions you, whatever, and they say, hmm. They have gone from top of funnel to middle of funnel. Once they've said, hmm, I want to learn more about this guy. At that point in the middle of the funnel is where they're suspicious. They don't want to get ripped off. They think maybe this guy would be a good fit, but I need to learn a lot more before I decide if he's a good fit or not.

This is important stuff and most people's arrogance really screws them. At this stage in the process is it's like, well, my work speaks for itself. No, it doesn't like you need to do more than that because there's three groups of people. There's people who will never hire you. There's people who will definitely hire you and there's people who maybe will hire you. An awful lot of working on your business is taking people out of the maybe category and putting them into the definitely category. When you're working on your business, you're trying to scoot that line, that border between maybe and definitely. And you're trying to move it more towards maybe so that you get more definites and this is what you're doing in the middle of the funnel. You are nurturing these people who are interested in you, not just being like, oh, work speaks for itself.

Not this stupid egotistical bullshit. You guys know me. I don't like cussing in the podcast, but I do. Yes you do. People mess themselves up on this stage of the process when what you should be trying to do is grease the tracks. You want to make it so as soon as they hit your middle of funnel, they're like, Ooh, oh, he's fantastic. Look at all this. Oh look, all these reviews, look at all. Look how nice his website is. All this stuff. They should slide down right into your lead generation form. Yep. So let's talk about some things we can do in the middle of our funnel to increase interest. To take someone from, uh, I've heard of them into, I'm interested in them. Right? And that noise that they'll make once they've gone for middle of funnel. The bottom of funnel is Dang right.

There's another customer in the podcast for you guys and you're welcome. But you have to take this part of the funnel and you have to make a great first impression. You have to do something here. So let's talk about this first thing here. And that is reviews. We've already talked about reviews a little bit, so we're going to breeze past this. But first of all, what do reviews do for us as far as creating interest? And then second, Chris, how do we get reviews? Well, we asked for them. It's that simple. We're not going to justify that with an answer because we have an entire episode on how to get more online reviews for your studio. So you can see an out from your competitors. That's episode for the podcast. Now they're fourth episode. That's a super easy one to go back and listen to that.

There's some straight forward stuff. But let's talk about why reviews get you more interest. Totally. And we're going to talk about my favorite restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. Favorite restaurant period. Really, it's called commune. It is brand spanking new. It hasn't even been open six months. I don't think it's a vegetarian joint. The guys who own it have never owned a business before. Really? They've never been in food service before. They're the most popular restaurant in Columbus, and here's the thing. One of the reasons for that is because both of them read the email with revisited. I'm friends with these guys and I told them about this book. They ate it up and it's had a big impact on their business. One of the things that they've got going for them is there's a lot of buzz and people are like, oh yeah, calming. I heard about that place.

If you're thinking about commune and eating there, you Google it and you see, I've already googled it. Yeah. Yeah, and how many reviews do you see there? I see 139 Google reviews with an average rating of 4.7 stars. Right. Good enough in my books to go give a chance for a new restaurant. Absolutely. Especially in a town like Columbus, Ohio. We're not like humongous, 139 five star or four seven star reviews when the restaurant's only been open for less than a year is insane. So all of a sudden I went from, hmm, that sounds kind of good to damn. Now I'm thinking I might go and what you would call a hot lead, and again, this is different for food than it is for us, but I think it's a good illustration because we've all been to restaurants before.

Well, would it make a very big point here if you think through the psychology of what reviews do to us, it will take you from, Oh, I've heard of this new restaurant to, damn, I need to go try it now I'm interested because I see there's 139 reviews in 4.7 stars. That's great for a new restaurant. This is for a 10 to $15 meal. This is not like me putting my baby of music into someone else's hands, which is a far more important thing to me. This is a meal I'm going to literally poop out in like a day. So if you think through this, reviews are that much more important for us as recording studios or mixers or mastering engineers because we're working on someone's baby, something that is a part of their soul. So this is why reviews are so important because if you look at reviews for movies and for meals, these little nickel and dime things, you can be damn sure, but people want to see reviews for your studio when they're about to hand over hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that they have put their heart and soul into.

Yeah. They want to see some social proof. Social proof is that like, Oh, other humans like this, it must be good. Right? That's what the review does. And when someone goes from [inaudible] to wanting to look into you more, they're probably gonna Google you. And if you look like a Badass online, congratulations, you're a bad ass. That's it. Yup. That's seriously it. And so the idea of reviews is really, really effective because it really greases the wheels. When I got over 105 star reviews, when I first broke that barrier, it dramatically changed everything. Honestly, I've stopped asking for reviews nearly as much as I used to just cause it's a little ridiculous. It's like I think like almost all the reviews are five stars that looks fake.

It's the same with our podcasts, like we have over 200 or maybe it's just a hundred I don't even know anymore. Five star reviews on iTunes, and so we were, when's the last time we asked for reviews for this podcast?

Side Note, if you guys love this podcast, if you've gotten value out of it and you want us to be able to improve it, get better guests, put more into it, put more effort, please write us a review on iTunes. That is the single biggest thing that can affect this podcast growing.

All right, let's move on. Now we've talked about reviews as a way to gain more interest for your studio to turn someone from, Oh, I've heard of this studio or I've heard of this guy to damn, I need to work with them. And by the way, don't just think Google reviews. There's also Facebook, but that's a side note. Yep. Now, let's talk about another area and this kind of goes hand in hand with the Facebook advertising conversation we had at the top of funnel, but this is a different, this is middle of funnel. Someone has become aware of your studio. Maybe they checked out your website or your Facebook page or your Instagram or whatever, but now you want to get them back. You're trying to nurture them longterm and this is a great place for retargeting ads. We talked about this on episode 88 an easy way to turn $30 a month in to thousands of dollars.

This is hands down. One of the first things you should do if you're going to run any sort of paid advertising for your studio is to set up a retargeting campaign and all this does, you can do this through Google into the Facebook. There's other ways you can do this. All this does is anyone who sees your studios Facebook page or they go to your studios Instagram page or they go to your website. If you have one and you have this set up properly, you can now show that person an ad on Facebook, let's just say once a week or once a month for the next 30 days or the next 60 or 90 days, and this is extremely powerful when it comes to staying top of mind because again, you never know when that person is ready to actually hire you. It may be three months from now when they finally finish writing their album that they're ready to record, so by you continuously showing up in their news feed or continuously showing up on Google every time they watch a youtube video on youtube or whatever, if you can be the one who still showing up and there's other ways to do it, this isn't the only way, but this is a way to do it.

It's very affordable. You can be the one that pops up at the right time when they're like, okay, I'm ready to book and Oh man, I've been watching this guys ads for weeks or months. Now I'm going to finally hit him up for a quote. I'm finally going to show him interest in working with him and hopefully hand over your hard earned dollars, but this is the most economical way to do Facebook ads, specifically Facebook ads. After we did that episode, episode 88 I set up a dollar a day Ad Campaign for file pass, which is one of our sponsors today, which is my in a Trevor's company and we've got like the return on ad spend for that is like 10 x 20 x what we're spending a day like. It's insane. That's awesome. What we're spending on that, and we're just doing it in small batches right now, we'll eventually start to ramp that up, but that's just an easy, easy way to pick up low hanging fruit for your business and this is again, when it comes to working on your business, this is a way that you can work on your business to increase interest in your studio.

Anything else I'd add to the a retargeting conversation, Chris,

do not underestimate the power of retargeting. It's so cheap. It's so effective. The risk is almost zero. You know, what are you going to do? Lose $35 a month or something like that, like as awesome everybody should be messing with it. Let me talk about our next one here. One of the next things you can do to work on your middle of funnel is you can work on conversion optimization. Conversion optimization is this idea that people come to your website and they either reach out and contact you or they don't. If your website's better, a larger percentage of people will contact you. So let's say you've got a pretty crappy website. 100 people come to your website thinking about working with you. They said, hm, and they'd be going to do their research and one of them reaches out to work with you. That's not good.

Conversion optimization. There's stuff you can do to make your website way, way, way better that maybe 15 people out of a hundred will reach out to you and inquired about working with you. There's a lot of stuff you can do and a huge part of my business growth over the years has been messing with optimization. Conversion optimization at it's most simple is one, doing best practice, which takes a little bit to learn about. And then two, having multiple versions of your website and running a split test, it's really, really easy to set your website up so that half of the traffic that goes to your website automatically goes to one page and the other half automatically goes to another. And you can create a science experiment. I'll ask seventh grade, here we have a control on a variable and say, well, what would happen if I pitched, um, a free mixing sample versus if I didn't pitch a free mixing sample, how would that affect my conversion rate on the website?

So you run both of those versions. The tool that I love to use is thrive architect, thrive architects, dope. Brian taught me all about it and I use it every day. So I note with that, that's a technical one. If you're not on wordpress and you're not using thrive architect to build your entire site gets really difficult. I will say Google optimize has improved things in measurably. Like you can use Google optimize to do split tests. You can just do a separate page so you can have an a and B, so go check out Google optimize if you want to do an easy split test tool for free. By the way, that's who I first started using as Google optimize, and I've mentioned this on the podcast before, I'll never forget the first split test I ran was a complicated lead form versus a very simplified lead form and the improvement in signup rate, I want to say it was like 346% crazy.

Yeah, that is huge. So one thing there, if you are unsure on what to do as far as the split test, what should version one of the website be versus version two of the website? If you're confused about that, there is a tool, I think they have a free, like a free version. They'll give you up to a hundred views of this. It's called hot jar. We've talked about on the podcast before. It'll be on our show notesPage@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash 93 that's slash nine three you can find a link to hotjar on our show notes page. What it does is it'll hook up to your site and then it'll anonymously record what people do when they come to your page. It sounds creepy but it's not and this will give you a really good idea really quickly of what's working on your site and what's not working. What you'll tend to find is people skip right over big blocks of text.

They don't stop and read it. No one will ever read that big block of texts y