After graduating medical school at age 22, Rosh Khan decided he wanted to be an Entrepreneur and founded SocialRank Media from his bedroom in January 2011. Over the past two years, his bedroom business has grown into a global social media agency. His passionate team at SocialRank Media now works with small and large brands, including some of Fortune 500’s. When he’s not busy with his agency, he spearheads humanitarian projects in Guyana, South America.
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “Success is as easy as don’t stop.” – Ryan Lee.
Business Failure
- Rosh thought he had a good thing going with SocialRank Media, until sales started to taper off and he was left wondering why. Well, he figured out the reason and shares it with Fire Nation.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Rosh has an incredible AHA moment every day, but the one he shares with us is truly awe-inspiring.
Current Business
- Today Rosh is able to live his dream by funneling the amazing profits from SocialRank Media into his humanitarian efforts in South America. Rosh is truly a special guy.
Small Business Resource
- Summary.com: Executive book summaries, reviews & webinars of the best business books.
- ReadItFor.Me: We read, you learn.
Best Business Book
- The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.
Interview Links
Killer Resources!
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3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Lee Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply thrilled to introduce my guest today, Rosh Khan. Rosh, are you prepared to ignite?
Rosh Khan: Absolutely! I’m ready to rock, my friend!
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! After graduating medical school at the age of 22, Rosh decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur and founded SocialRank Media from his bedroom in January of 2011. Over the past two years, his bedroom business has grown into a global social media agency. His passionate team at SocialRank Media now work with small and large brands, including Fortune 500s. When he’s not busy with his agency, he spearheads humanitarian projects in Guyana, South America.
Rosh, I’ve given a little overview, but tell us a little more about who you are personally, where you’re from, your age, and then launch into your business.
Rosh Khan: Cool, man! So my name is Rosh Khan, like you mentioned. Thanks for the intro. I’m 25 years old and I run a social media agency, SocialRank Media. I kind of decided after graduating med school that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I decided social media was going to be the thing for me, and I built out my business on a social media platform. So really kind of going around to local small and medium businesses, knocking on doors and telling them about what I do with social media and getting them to sign onboard, and then over time, leveraging that to get better and better and better clients to where we were working with Fortune 500s. Today, we’re in a pretty nice space with our business and we’ve got a growing team. We’ve got clients in Dubai and Africa and Singapore. So it’s been a fun ride.
John Lee Dumas: Sounds like a real fun ride, Rosh, and I definitely look forward to delving into that more later. But before we do, let’s transition to our first topic, which is the success quote, because at EntrepreneurOnFire, we love getting the motivational ball rolling early and really getting our listeners pumped for the content that you have for us. So Rosh, what do you have for us as your favorite success quote?
Rosh Khan: Sure, John. Okay. So my favorite quotes, they change all the time. If you asked me this six months ago, I probably would tell you something different. But there is this one quote that’s been stuck in my head lately. I actually heard it from Ryan Lee at his DotComXpo event. Someone in the audience had asked him, “Why are you so successful? What’s the reason for you being so successful?” And this is what he said. “Success is as easy as don’t stop.” I’ll repeat that again. ‘Success is as easy as don’t stop.” When he said that, it really resonated with me because that’s been the one line that would sum up my entire life. Persistence has always been the key to my success.
John Lee Dumas: I love that quote for so many reasons. I mean, so many entrepreneurs just do not have the stamina to maintain what they need to do, the level of determination and ingenuity to really see their success through, and it’s just so sad to see that when that happens because if they had just stayed a little bit longer or just weathered that last storm, they really might have seen the bright side. You just really never know when. Seth Godin’s book “The Dip” really dives into that well. Have you read that, Rosh?
Rosh Khan: I have. Actually, I’m a huge Seth Godin fan. If I can just add a little bit there, if it’s cool with you, like you said, I think we all come to this point where we’d want to give up, and every single entrepreneur goes through that. That’s definitely been the case for me. But the one thing I wanted to share is this. I’m a huge believer in this concept or this idea that failure is inevitable, but so is success if you decide to fail forward when you fail, if that makes sense.
John Lee Dumas: That’s another great quote. It makes a ton of sense. Rosh, this is about your journey as an entrepreneur, so that was a great quote. Now take us down to the ground level. How have you actually applied this quote to your mentality or a real life example at SocialRank?
Rosh Khan: Okay. Absolutely. One of the recent examples, I’ll tell you, things were picking up, things were going pretty good with SocialRank, and all of a sudden, we started to notice that sales were dropping off and we were actually going backwards in terms of sales and we wanted to really get to the bottom of this. What was the cause of this? A lot of my friends that listen to social media think it’s over. You should just give it up. Stop this whole agency thing. I was like, “No! There’s something here. We got to keep moving.” What we really did was realize that the strategy we were on wasn’t working and that we had to change it. So we sat down. We looked at what it was and what we figured out was that we just had no advertising going on. A lot of the business was based on word of mouth referrals. That’s great, but it will only get you so far. So once we found the solution, once we found the answer to that, we decided to launch more advertising campaigns, use Facebook, use other ad networks, and really get the message out there. Now sales are doubling, sales are tripling, and it’s been phenomenal. I had the chance to kind of kick the bucket in terms of the company, but we kept on moving.
John Lee Dumas: That’s a great example. Let’s use that to transition to our next topic, which is failure. As an entrepreneur, Rosh, you’ve experienced failure, I’ve experienced failure. It’s part of being an entrepreneur, and you’ve alluded to this before, but in some ways it’s our job to fail every day because if we’re not actually failing, we aren’t improving as entrepreneurs. We’re not learning. We’re not pushing ourselves to the limit. So take us back to a time in your journey with SocialRank, or even prior, whatever is just a great example to share with Fire Nation of a failure you’ve had and how you’ve overcome it.
Rosh Khan: Sure. I think more than just the failure, my initial problem was really getting launched. Like that was my big challenge, that was my huge obstacle. How do you go from being this medical graduate to getting launched and catapulting into the social media space? That was my number one problem. After I kind of figured out what I wanted to do – and that’s a whole other story as to why I chose the social media space – I realized that I had this issue of being a newbie, but how was I going to get the word out there? Would you like me to kind of dive into that?
John Lee Dumas: Yes. We’d love to hear just of an actual failure that you encountered while you were just building this process.
Rosh Khan: Okay. Sure. So in terms of getting everything launched, getting out there, when I hit the streets, and I literally did this – walking around, knocking on doors – I got a lot of no’s. Who was going to listen to this 23 year old kid who says he can bring me more customers using this thing called Facebook? I got rejected quite a bit, but I realized that I just had to keep doing it and I realized that branding was important, really important. So I kind of fixed my game in terms of who did I reach out to? Who did I connect with? Who were the influencers in the market that I could reach out to and how can I set myself up and brand myself in a nice way where my website looked good, my letterhead looked good, my business card looked good and people started to take me seriously with more credibility. After I did all those things, I started picking more clients and it really started to work. For me, specifically, in terms of really getting my stuff out there, I did some research to find out who was a really good influencer in the market that I could maybe connect with? So I did a whole bunch of research and found this awesome connection. I think you know him, John. His name is Chris Farrell. He’s known as being the number 1 Internet marketer in the world, voted the number 1 Internet marketer in the world, and he’s one of the nicest and genuine guys I know.
So when I found him and I realized that he was an influencer in his market, in this Internet marketing industry, I know this sounds a bit creepy, but I actually started to cyberstalk him. So what I really did was follow him. Every webinar he was on, I was on. I stayed till the very end of the webinars that he did and I’d make sure I get to like the Q&A section and I’d ask questions. I’d comment on his fan page, I’d shoot him emails that did a little bit of ego baiting, along with providing valuable ideas on how he could improve his social media game, and before you knew it, he started to take note and he started talking to me.
John Lee Dumas: Brilliant!
Rosh Khan: Yes. I mean it was amazing. And it went even further to where he was telling people about me, recommending my services, introducing me to his network. Now John, let me tell you, it was phenomenal. That cyberstalk relationship turned out so amazing that now, not only is he a great mentor, but he’s a dear friend and we spend heaps of time together. He’s been the one guy that’s been responsible for initially getting the word out on the Internet.
John Lee Dumas: That’s phenomenal. Yes, Chris is just such a genuine guy out there. He was at the DotComXpo that we both attended recently and his speech was just so moving, so inspirational. He’s just the kind of people that you want to emulate in this industry. So that is such a great mentality. Cyberstalk kind of has a bad connotation to it in some ways, but the reality is you just found an amazing mentor, you made sure you got on his radar and he got to know who you were as the same genuine, honest, caring person and you guys meshed. I mean it makes a lot of sense, Rosh, so I definitely give you credit for that. I commend you for that. It’s definitely a great lesson that you pulled out of that initial failure, which was just these initial no’s that you were getting, which is going to happen whenever anybody starts out in a business. That’s just the name of the game.
So thank you for sharing that with Fire Nation. Such valuable insights. We’re going to use that to transition now to the next topic, which is the other side of the spectrum, Rosh. This is the great side of it. This is that aha moment. You are just such a young, brilliant guy. I know you have these little aha moments every single day that inspire you, that move you forward, that gets you excited. Can you share with Fire Nation one huge light bulb moment that you’ve had and the actions that you took to put that into success?
Rosh Khan: Absolutely, man. Like you mentioned, there’s a ton of aha moments, but like the really big one came about when I figured out this process I now call “Finding Client Multiplier.” It’s really simple and it’s really old, but one day I was reading about supply chain management and how distributors work. Where they provide products to retailers and then the retailers then stock the merchandise and sell. While I was reading that, this kind of spark went off in my head and I was thinking, how can I duplicate a similar system in our business where I didn’t have to go and find each client? Like I didn’t have to find every end consumer. I can be the distributor. And then I could have retailers that can sell my services to their clients. That’s what I call the client multiplier.
So I started thinking about this and I realized that there were a heap of digital marketing agencies and traditional marketing companies that could use my company’s social media services for their clients. Then I started to reach out to them. I put together a nice little PDF report and a couple of PowerPoint presentations. I called them up on the phone and said, “Listen, here’s what we do as a social media agency,” and for the most part they loved it. It meant that they could practically outsource all of their social media to us without having to hire internal staff to learn and deal with this ever changing world of social media, and it ended up being a complete win-win. Not only did they have dozens of clients, some of them had hundreds of clients. So right away, we were signing massive accounts, and of course we were happy and they were happy, and that strategy of us being a distributor and then having these retailers out there, that’s become a huge part of our business now.
John Lee Dumas: That makes so much sense. I’m taking so many great notes right now, Rosh. Thank you for sharing these insights with us because it’s just so real and they’re so applicable in so many different ways in so many different industries. On that note, have you had an I’ve made it moment yet?
Rosh Khan: Definitely. I keep having I’ve made it moments. You keep thinking you’re there, and then you keep breaking through, and it’s amazing. But with that same strategy I talked about, I was going through our bank reports, I was going through the accounts and everything, and just a couple of months in using this new strategy, I saw that our company had grossed over six figures in one month, and I hit the roof. Like I couldn’t believe it. It was gratifying, it was validating because now our company is making all this profit and I could funnel it into my big picture humanitarian projects, which is what the goal was all along. So now we’re doing medical outreaches, we’re building schools and it’s fun, it’s phenomenal, all because the company is doing well. Even though at that point I felt like, yes, I’ve made it! I know there’s a lot more ground to cover, man, and in order to do that, you just got to stay on top of things.
John Lee Dumas: I love that. That is such a great I made it moment and it’s so awesome that you’re recognizing these moments, Rosh, because as entrepreneurs, so many times we just set these goals and we hit these benchmarks, and then we just, again, raise that ladder even higher and put our nose to the grindstone and drive forward and we never really appreciate the achievements. We never enjoy the journey, and it’s all about the journey. You’ve obviously got your head on straight because you’re doing so many wonderful things in the humanitarian world, and also in the social media world, helping so many people and so many businesses. You’re just really hitting it on all cylinders, so I commend you and Fire Nation commends you for enjoying the journey and really appreciating the I’ve made it moments that you’ve had.
Rosh Khan: I appreciate that, John. Thank you, man.
John Lee Dumas: So let’s move on to your current business now. You have so much stuff going on. I love to hit both ends of the spectrum. I really would love to talk about what you’re doing down in South America. I’d love to talk about SocialRank some more. So let’s start with down in South America. What’s one thing that’s really exciting you down in Guyana right now?
Rosh Khan: I think a lot of people look at Third World countries for granted and they don’t realize that there’s so much opportunity in a Third World country because if you think about it, the developed nations have already gone through a certain trajectory, and if you’re in a Third World country, you know how it’s going to play out. Certain things haven’t been introduced to them yet. So for example, like frozen yoghurt, that’s a pretty common thing in the US. Everywhere, you’ve got frozen yoghurt. But when you bring something like a frozen yoghurt franchise to Guyana, to South America, and it’s all the rage, because people haven’t seen this, there’s a huge population down there and they go crazy about it. So just from a business perspective, being in a place like Guyana, a Third World country, it’s amazing in terms of opportunity.
But then there’s also like the other side, the people, and I absolutely love the people in Guyana. I actually grew up for a few years in Guyana, so I feel very connected with these folks. It’s amazing. You get to impact their lives, and then they go out there and they make the world a better place. So as of right now we’re launching JobSpark Guyana, which is like an online job site. We’re building schools, we’re doing medical outreaches, we’re launching EducationForTheNation.com, which is this online education website, because the education system is a bit broken here in Guyana, but they launched this new campaign where every house is going to get a laptop. So I thought that’s the best way to leverage technology. For every house that gets a laptop, let’s get them to the Internet and let’s give them education for free. So everything they’re supposed to learn in school is now available online. So there’s a lot going on like you mentioned. There’s the humanitarian side and then there’s the business aspect, but it’s really exciting.
John Lee Dumas: Have you ever seen the movie “Back to the Future”?
Rosh Khan: I have actually.
John Lee Dumas: When you were talking about Guyana and things along those lines, it really just reminds me of that movie when Michael J. Fox goes forward in time and he gets all the sports scores from the future, and then he comes back and he can just bet because he knows obviously who’s going to win the games because he has all of the final scores. It kind of sounds like you’re describing Guyana or South America or Third World countries in general in that way with the fact that the history is already written for these places, like they’re about to go through the same evolutions that we have gone through in the United States 30, 40, 60, 80 years ago. So you know it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of getting ahead of that train, which you can do down in these Third World countries.
Rosh Khan: Absolutely. It’s really exciting because you’ve got a massive population in South America and everybody’s coming online now. Brazil is coming online like it’s never been before. So those things that were really popular still are popular in the States like exercise and weight loss. Those things are really blowing up in Brazil, but from an Internet perspective in terms of getting cheap clicks where you can set up your ads on an ad network and people click on at them, you’re getting them in Brazil for two, three and four cents versus in the United States where it’s a pretty competitive niche now and you’ve got to pay anywhere between $0.50 to $3 per click. So very exciting, and yes, you kind of do know the future, but I love it!
John Lee Dumas: That is so cool. Thanks for sharing that with us, Rosh. So let’s jump over to SocialRank now. What’s one thing that’s really exciting you about SocialRank?
Rosh Khan: Cool! One of the coolest things about our business is that it forces us to be on the bleeding edge of what’s going on. What’s the latest network? What’s the latest traffic method? How can we connect with more people? I just love that. Being able to be so far ahead that you can almost predict what’s going to happen, it’s very, very exciting. But then, being able to use this and connect with people all over the world, that’s the icing on the cake. Like I mentioned before, we have clients all over the world, so one minute we’re talking to people in Africa, and then we’re scheduling a call in Singapore, and then we’re talking to our clients in Australia, and that to me, that ability to connect with people all over the world and strategize and realize that the same strategies work everywhere because we’re all humans at the end of the day, that’s really exciting.
John Lee Dumas: That’s such exciting stuff. There’s one thing that I just would love to go back to that we just talked about earlier in this interview, and I just can’t quite wrap my head around it and I’d love for you to expound a little more into it. You were talking about SocialRank and how you kind of hit a wall at some point where you were just losing sales month after month and you were just relying on the referrals that you were getting and it just wasn’t picking up the steam that you were hoping for or continuing that momentum, and then you hopped on to the advertisement sector. Can you really take us through and share with Fire Nation the steps that you took and the engines that you used to propel SocialRank forward?
Rosh Khan: Absolutely. So because we’re in social media, one of the easiest spaces that we figured out was Facebook, and their ad platform is just amazing because of the kind of targeting that you can do. And then because the clicks are so cheap, what we did was sit down and figure out who is our target market. Okay? Who do we want to reach? There’s small business owners, realtors, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, anybody that can use social media to propel their business forward and make money from it. So once we figured out what the target market was, what we did was go into the Facebook ad platform and really just start laser targeting exactly who we wanted, and the trick was to make your ad as local as possible. So we wouldn’t just target the entire United States of America. What we would do is target states state by state. So we’d focus on California and then we’d focus on New York, and what we would do is within those states, we would focus on each of these demographics because people respond when an ad is relevant to them.
So here’s what we did. We launched these ads that would have pictures and copy that was relevant to each niche, and then we’d have people click on the ad in order to get something for free. Okay? So we’d have a free strategy session or we’d have a free white paper or we’d give away software for free. We had a couple of different things we’d line up. And then that person would opt-in to our list, so we would therefore capture their lead. Once we capture their lead, we would build that rapport with them using an email sequence, finding out more about them, asking about their issues, and then sending information that was relevant to them to help them with their business, and they started to know they can trust us. After going through that sequence for about five or seven emails, they start calling us up saying, “Listen, we’ve had enough. We really like your content, but we don’t have the time to do it. Can you guys just do it for us?” When we started to see that happen, we just ramped it up and we put more and more and more ad spend into the ads because they were so cheap and we’ve been seeing massive returns in excess of 2,000%.
John Lee Dumas: Wow! That’s exciting, Rosh [Laughs]. So let’s move on now because the word “entrepreneur” is really a mystery to most people. At EntrepreneurOnFire, we really like to pull that curtain back and just kind of show the listeners here at Fire Nation that although no two days are ever the same, especially for you Rosh because you’re just all over the place. Your hands are in so many different jars and you’re just a man of men. It’s very impressive. But there are definitely some tasks that you’re doing day after day that are just keeping both sides of these trains rolling forward. Can you just share with us two tasks that do seem to occupy a good portion of your day every day?
Rosh Khan: Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. So I just love building the rapport with my team. So every day, every single day, I’m always trying to figure out ways to empower them and to motivate them because I believe one of the secrets to success is surrounding yourself with a powerful team. So I try to give them my best as much as I can, whether that’s going online and finding motivating articles, whether that’s really just a five minute call that’s a pep talk in the morning, whether I have them share where they are today and how they feel and how we can tackle this together as a team, I just do a lot of teambuilding exercises every single day and it’s become one of those things that the team looks forward to. And because we have a global team, it’s really fun because we’ve got people in pajamas signing on, we’ve got people in their lunch hours, and it’s great. Everyone’s always coming together. We’re trying to figure out how we can be a more successful team and we have a lot of fun doing it because I believe if I empower the team, I’ll empower the company and we’ll empower our clients and thus, we’ll empower the world. So that’s one thing that I do every single day.
Another thing I like to do, I don’t get to do this every day, but I try to do this as much as I can, and that’s to handle support calls and emails myself. It’s pretty easy to say, “Oh yes, I’m the CEO and I’ve got a support staff and they do all that they’re supposed to do and I kind of just give them mandates and directives. But for me personally, I love being in the trenches. So I love to speak to my clients directly, and instead of having the support guys do it all the time, it keeps me fresh, it keeps me on my toes and it keeps me empathetic. It keeps me empathetic because I understand what my team members are going through when they’re dealing with their clients and I understand what the clients want when dealing with my team members. So that’s one thing I love to do. I always tell people, email me. I’ll respond. You can find me, you could call me. It’s just something I enjoy doing.
John Lee Dumas: What better way than to find out what’s still the ongoing pain of your customers to continue to promote and to build products for them.
Rosh Khan: Absolutely. I mean that’s really big right there. Not only does it help us figure out what their pain points are, and then we can provide better services, but from an organizational point of view, what we do now is that if we see that we’re getting these 10 questions or these 10 complaints over and over again, what I’ve done is create this kind of protocols so if someone says this, you have to carry out X, Y and Z, and it becomes very easy for the support team, the new support team that comes onboard, and we have our new employees that go, “I don’t know how to deal with this.” We’ve got a mapped out protocol system that they can follow through step by step while still keeping it very humanized and personal, but at least they’ve got structure and flow and they’re not lost.
John Lee Dumas: So on that note, Rosh, what is your vision for the future in all of your ventures?
Rosh Khan: Going forward, I think our strategy is evolving to include app development, at least on the SocialRank side. We’ve just created an app. It’s the first one in the world and it’s already producing amazing results in beta. I can’t talk about it too much because it’s not officially ready for release, but that’s a big part of what we’re going to do. It’s creating applications that make it easy for small and big brands to generate leads using social media. I could kind of give a little hint to what it is and it might get people excited. Typically, when you’re trying to capture a lead or you’re trying to get an opt-in, you send people to a squeeze page or a custom landing tab on Facebook. You basically have to send them that name and email form. Well, we’ve figured out that 80% of the time spent on Facebook is spent in the newsfeed. So we’re always scrolling up and down in the newsfeed, and then we created an application that allows a business owner or anyone to put an opt-in form inside of the newsfeed so you can have people opt-in to your list with their name and email address inside of the newsfeed without sending them to a website. You can put videos and all sorts of different things.
So that’s really exciting and I think that’s the future for our company and I’m really pumped about that. We also plan on creating a SocialRank University, which is going to be a free online university for all social media fundamentals. Anyone that wants to learn about social media from the guys that do it for Fortune 500s, which is us, Fortune 500s and mom-and-pop stores, we’re going to put all our case studies up there, all our processes, all our flows so that social media managers can use it, small and medium business owners can use it. Just about anyone. Anyone can go ahead and tap that information.
John Lee Dumas: Man, I love that! If you need any beta testers for that new app, EntrepreneurOnFire volunteers.
Rosh Khan: Absolutely! Thank you for signing up, man. I’ll shoot that link over to you.
John Lee Dumas: Yes! So Rosh, we’ve now reached my favorite part of the show. We’re about to enter the Lightning Round, and this is where I get to ask you a series of questions and you can come back at Fire Nation with amazing and mind-blowing answers. Sound like a plan?
Rosh Khan: Yes. Let’s do it!
John Lee Dumas: Alright! What was the number one thing that was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Rosh Khan: Okay. So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur second year into medical school. I loved medicine and I loved what it was all about, but I had this burning desire to be an entrepreneur because it would enable me to do all the things I wanted to do. I had a lot of people in my family tell me, “Listen, you’re second year into med school. Why are you going to quit?” and I kind of decided at that point to stick it out because I wanted the MD, I wanted to be credible, I think it adds a lot of credibility to have an MD behind your name, and it worked out really well for me, but in as much as that held me back from a time perspective from being an entrepreneur, I didn’t waste time with delving into entrepreneurial material. So even though I was at med school, I was always reading Forbes Magazine, the Harvard Business Review, SocialMediaExaminer.com and all these business blogs out there like Entrepreneur.com. It was kind of just I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I was absorbing all these information and learning about the entrepreneurial world.
John Lee Dumas: What is the best business advice you ever received?
Rosh Khan: Okay. So I’m not sure where I heard it from or where I read it, but it’s kind of this mantra of mine and it goes like this. When you’re small, act big, and when you’re big, act small. That’s always been powerful advice for me and I think it’s especially important for up and coming entrepreneurs because this getting started phase which is so important, let me just explain. So when you’re small, act big, and when you’re big, act small. So when you’re small, when you’re just starting up and you’re now trying to get clients and you’re now trying to get out there, you don’t want to come across as that punk kid who lived in the basement who doesn’t know what he’s doing, right? No one’s going to take you as credible. So what I like to do is create really great branding from the very get-go. That means amazing letterheads. Even though you might have a ghetto website, that’s fine. Make sure it looks professional. Have good business cards. Just look good and bigger than you are and people are going to take you seriously and you’re going to start building up a really nice client base when you do that. Learn the language of the people that you’re selling to and people will feel comfortable with you. They will know they can trust you.
But then there comes that point where there’s a tipping point and you’re getting so many clients, your company is growing, you’re getting really big and people don’t want to deal with that feeling of dealing with a big corporation. Instead, they want to feel like they’re dealing with someone who understands kind of the small town approach. They want it to be very personable. They want it to be very humanized, and the big brands are trying to do this every single day. So in that case, once you reach to that point when you’re big, what you want to do is act small. Like what GEICO does, for example. They want you to feel like there’s a local GEICO office around that you can go into and you can talk to your agent and you feel like you’re connecting with a person. So when you’re small, act big, and when you’re big, act small. I hope that makes sense.
John Lee Dumas: It does make sense and it’s definitely a bouncing act because clients, they want to see you featured in the Wall Street Journal, but then they want to talk to you, and it’s tough to be both of those people.
Rosh Khan: Absolutely!
John Lee Dumas: But when you can, it’s great. So Rosh, what’s something that’s working for you or your business right now?
Rosh Khan: Sure. So I mentioned earlier advertising. That’s working really well for us. So once we use advertising to get the clients, we like to keep our customers happy. I mean who doesn’t, right? Don’t just keep them happy, but keep getting them results. What we love to do is send them lots of freebies and lots of bonuses. So that might be a new content that we create or a new software that we release that we sell to everyone else but we give it for free to our customers, or even postcards with handwritten notes. We literally write them out. We don’t print them out with a cursive font. We write these postcards out and we sign them and we send them with smiley faces, or we’ll do like UPS-delivered cupcakes and clients love it. They go crazy about it, they love it and they just become like the biggest brand ambassador ever and they tell everybody about the experience that they’re having with the company and it creates a lot of good will and it’s a win-win for everyone.
John Lee Dumas: That’s great. Let me just add a couple of things to this. It is a lot cheaper to keep customers than to get new ones.
Rosh Khan: Absolutely.
John Lee Dumas: And also, it’s a lot cheaper to get free referrals from happy customers than to pay for cold leads.
Rosh Khan: Absolutely. I’m absolutely in agreement. That’s part of the reason. So we use advertising to kind of jumpstart the leads, but then once we started implementing this and really taking care of the customers and keeping them really happy, that’s when things really start to explode.
John Lee Dumas: Rosh, do you have an Internet resource that you can recommend for Fire Nation?
Rosh Khan: Yes. Absolutely. Actually, there are about two that I can share and they’re kind of again my secret weapon, but I’ll share them anyway because you guys rock. So the first one is Summary.com and it’s great for business book summaries. There’s so much good material, there’s so many good authors out there. You can’t read every single book out there. So what Summary.com does is really just create these 4-page and 8-page summaries of all the books and they give you all the themes and everything you need to get the most out of a book without having to read it. It’s phenomenal, but not only that. They do these live webinars where you get to connect with all the authors. So you get the opportunity to connect with New York prime bestselling authors, which is phenomenal. They also do this newsletter that they give out every month with tips on how to be a good entrepreneur and how to be a good leader. Very, very powerful. I would recommend to everybody to sign up at Summary.com.
The other one that I use is Readitfor.me. It’s very similar to Summary.com, but they do something else. They do summaries of books, but they understand that not everybody wants to read or not everybody has the time to read, and what they do is create these 10 to 50 minute videos that are designed to make you remember the material from the book. So they have all these like wacky animations and they’ve got all these different colors going on in the screen and they do a lot of pattern interruption. So you watch these videos for 10, 15 minutes and you walk away with all the knowledge from the book. It’s not a replacement for reading the book, but it’s really just a way to get the best of out of the book. What I like to do is if I find a summary or a video that I really like and it really resonates with me, I’ll then go and buy the book and I’ll read the entire thing. So yes, that’s two resources – Summary.com and readitfor.me.
John Lee Dumas: What’s your favorite business book, Rosh?
Rosh Khan: My favorite business book? Okay. So I’ve got a couple, but if it was just one book that I…
John Lee Dumas: We’ll take two.
Rosh Khan: Okay. I’ll give you two. The first book that I would have someone have to read would be “The Ultimate Sales Machine” by Chet Holmes. Now that book completely changed the way I approach business. I recommend that you read that every few months. You’re going to learn something new. It’s really going to teach you how to take your business to the next level. That’s one book. Please read it. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.
The other book that I would have people read is “Lead with a Story” by Paul Smith. That book is phenomenal because if you want to be a leader, if you want to be anyone that’s really putting a team together, then you need to be a good communicator. What he does in that book is really give you a heap of different stories that you can use for different scenarios. So if you’ve gone through failure, you can pull stories from the past to kind of inspire your team or inspire the people around you, or if you’re about to launch a new product and you don’t want to go over statistics and projections, but you want to bring it home and connect with your team, it’s got stories in there of factual things that have happened that you can learn and use with your team, and trust me, it leaves a big impact on everybody. So that’s two books – The Ultimate Sales Machine and Lead with a Story.
John Lee Dumas: Lead with a Story. Those will both be linked up in the show notes, Rosh, at EntrepreneurOnFire.com/74 so the listeners can go there and check it out, along with everything else that Rosh has been talking about with SocialRank and everything that we’ve mentioned in this interview. Let’s move on to the last question now and it’s my favorite, Rosh, but you can take your time, digest it, and then come back at Fire Nation with a great answer. If you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world, identical to earth but you knew no one. You still have all the experience and knowledge you currently have. You have $500 in your pocket, a computer with Internet access and your food and shelter is all taken care of. What would you do in the next seven days?
Rosh Khan: Okay. So the strategy I would deploy wouldn’t even require the $500. You probably just need $200 and you can easily, easily make $1,000 to $2,000 based on that. But to explain what I’d do, I think it would be helpful to kind of break it down into phases.
John Lee Dumas: Love it!
Rosh Khan: So the first phase is find your hungry market. Okay? So do the research, go to magazine stands. Find out what are the most popular magazines. Search for bestselling books, go to Dummies.com and see which books sell the most. Really figure out what people want and what awesome value you can offer. Of course you’ve already got a certain knowledge and experience, so you’re going to be skewed towards a certain niche. That’s fine, but find the hungry market and find the pain points in that hungry market. That’s probably going to take about one day to really do your market research. If you do it properly, it’s going to take probably about one day.
When you do this market research and you find all the pain points, that takes you to Phase 2, which would be to create a product that has a solution for these folks. So that would probably take about two to three days. You don’t have to get fancy with it. When you’re creating a product, I think a lot of people think that you have to spend weeks and months at a time creating a product, but that really isn’t the case. If you know what the pain points are, then you know what the solutions are. So you don’t need to get fancy about it. You can create a product. Websites are really cheap to make. You can use PowerPoint, you can use Keynote. We’ve got software out there like Jing and Camtasia to do screencasts. And then you’ve got other software out there that if you can’t afford it right away, you can use the free trial for 30 days, and trust me, it does everything that you needed to do.
So kind of create your skeleton for your product, and then flesh it out, and then overdeliver on the value that you place inside of your course. Then you want to price your course anywhere around $200 to $300 because you’re delivering so much value and you’re really hitting the pain points that people have. So that would be Phase 2. That probably would take about two to three days. And then the other part is you found the hungry market, you’ve created your product. Now you want to get traffic. Okay? You need to get people coming over to find your product. Getting traffic is as easy as two hours or six hours, but for the sake of this, we can say you can get traffic in one day. Okay? Let’s just do it for 24 hours. Find easy sources of traffic, and our favorite source of traffic is Facebook just because it’s really simple to set up. So what you would do is put money into your ad, and then you send traffic to your offer. But before you just tell them all about what it is that you’re offering, have some kind of capture system set up where you capture the lead. So there’s an opt-in page of some kind. And then you can have them sign up for a webinar, an automated webinar, or maybe you just take them directly to what you call a video sales letter that’s like a 12 to 30 minute video on what their pain points are and why your solution is the best thing for them.
So three steps, okay? Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3. If you do the math and if it’s cool with you, I’d like to go through the math on this to show you how it breaks down.
John Lee Dumas: Please do.
Rosh Khan: It’s phenomenal. So on Facebook, you get really, really cheap clicks. Okay? You will get anywhere between $0.25 clicks to $0.75 clicks, but for the sake of rounding numbers off and making this easy, let’s just say it’s a dollar per click. That’s really expensive, but let’s just say for some reason, when somebody clicks on your ad on Facebook, it’s going to charge you a dollar. So if you put $100 per day into your ads, you’re sending 100 clicks. Remember, these are warm clicks. So these are warm needs. People are interested in what they’re seeing in the ad because it’s relevant to them, and then they’re coming over to your offer. So you’ve got 100 people now looking at your offer, and if your offer is good and you know this is something people want, you’re going to get them to convert. There will always be instant buyers, but if your product is really good, you can convert anywhere up to 10%. So that means 10 buyers out of the 100. But realistically, if you’re just getting started, it’s going to be anywhere from like 2% to 5% for instant buyers. Remember, those are just the people that buy right away. You still have collective leads for everyone else so you can still build rapport with them. So if 2% to 5% buy, that’s 2 to 5 people, and if you’re selling a product at $200, you’ll already add $400 to $1,000 in sales. If you deduct the initial $100 that you spent on ads, you have a huge net profit – anywhere from $300 to $900.
That’s how you make money on the Internet. That’s how you make money really quickly. So you keep repeating that process until it’s really fine-tuned, and voila! You’ve got this very basic funnel, you spent less than $500 to do it and you’re making a whole heap of money. What you can do with that money now is reinvest the money on building out your brand, highlighting happy customers, getting creative by reaching out to influencers because now you have a little track record so you can reach out to the guys who are on top of the niche and say, “Listen, this is what I’ve done for these clients. You can get the word out about me or how can I help you?” You can use that money to attend events, and of course what we do, the money that we bring in, we just put it right back into the ad spend and we keep making more. I really hope I didn’t lose anyone else there.
John Lee Dumas: I don’t think so. I am totally with you, and the beautiful thing about podcast is the pause and rewind feature. Can you just, before we let you go – I just can’t get enough of this – can you just go into real quickly, not too much in depth but enough, how do you really find the best way to craft that ad because Facebook can get so specific. How specific do you get with your ads?
Rosh Khan: Okay. So I gave some secrets away here. 90% of your ad, of the success with your ad, has to do with the image. So look at other ads inside of your niche when you’re scrolling down your newsfeed. Because you’ve liked certain things and because you have certain activity on Facebook, there are certain types of ads targeting you. Look at what they’re doing. Analyze it. And then when you create your ads, try to be as different as possible. So one thing we like to do is just play with contrasting colors because it gets people’s attention. Everyone’s always putting these red borders around their ads. Don’t do that. Put green borders, put pink borders, put orange borders or make your entire ad orange. Choose a color that’s just going to stand out against this kind of gray-blue that Facebook has going on, and then when people are scrolling down, it’s kind of like interruption marketing. They’re just going to see your ad out of the corner of their eye and it’s going to pull their attention. And then they’re going to see the headline.
So you want to have a good headline. You want to put a question mark in there. You want to ask them something. You want to kind of let them know that they can get something for free. Just use some way to engage them, just a couple of different techniques that you can use. For us, we like asking questions that we know they’re asking themselves. So it could be are you having trouble with social media or are you not seeing any ROI with social media? And then in the copy, in the little text next to the ad, the ad image, you kind of put some more information. So what we like to do, what works really well, we learned that people love to watch videos. So what we did was put videos as the solution to the problem0. So we would say, “Click here to get a free report on how you can double your sales using social media in the next seven days.” That kind of stuff really gets people excited, but then what we do is put in brackets “video” so they know what to expect when they see a video. They know when they click here, they’re going to see a video. So they click on there and we capture their lead, so we get their name and email address, and then we give them the video that we promised, and that works incredibly well.
In terms of the ad image, feel free to put text inside of the ad image as well. This is really powerful because you’ve got all these real estate to play with. People are using trying to cram in with their logo or faces. It does work up to a point, but what really works is using a color that contrasts really well against Facebook, and then putting text inside there. Please stay away from hot women. I don’t know where people got this thing from, but they keep putting good-looking women inside of their ads. Don’t do that because the reason people are clicking on those ads is because they want to see more of the good-looking women. They don’t really care about your product. So make it as relevant as possible and you’ll attract and prequalify leads before they click so you’re spending a small amount of money, but the people that do click are very relevant to you.
John Lee Dumas: That makes so much sense. You keep alluding to your capturing the lead. Now at what point and how are you actually getting their email address? Where are you having them opt-in?
Rosh Khan: Okay. So what we like to do if we’re using Facebook traffic, we send them directly to a custom tab. So that’s like a landing page, a squeeze page inside of Facebook that you can build out. Kind of like a mini website. We basically state, again, a full-fledged version of the ad now. So we might have a little video on there that says, “Hey, when you sign up below or when you give us your name and email address, we’re going to give you this video or we’re going to answer these questions,” or if it’s a white paper, in the white paper once you sign up, you’re going to discover how to X, Y and Z. So you kind of put the lead right in front of the solution that they’re looking for. You want to come off as credible of course because you want as much people to sign up as possible.
If it’s cool, John, I’d like to share a really super ninja trick that we like to do that multiplies leads like you would not imagine.
John Lee Dumas: It is cool.
Rosh Khan: Alright, cool. So what we do at that point, we get somebody to click on the ad. They go to the capture page. We get their name and email address. We give them the material that we promised them, but then we give them something else as well, but it’s in exchange for a share. So we go, “Listen, if you liked that content, you’re going to love this because we’ve got this bonus material as well, but we’re only going to give it to you if you share this with your friends.” So they hit the share button, and then when people hit the share button, it goes out to all their friends, their friends see the link and it’s basically free traffic leveraged off of the ad that you spent money on.
John Lee Dumas: That is so super ninja, so smart. I love it all, Rosh. I want to keep talking all day, but man, I guess Fire Nation is just going to have to go to SocialRank and find out more on their own. We have gotten more than we bargained for. Give us a plug, give us one parting piece of guidance, and then we’ll say goodbye.
Rosh Khan: Sure, man. I would just say I think Nike got it right when they said “just do it.” A lot of people, they’re scared, they’re fearful, they’re scared of not making it. Just do it. It might seem really big and overwhelming at the very get-go, but just break it down into small chunks and take it piecemeal at a time. That’s the one thing that’s worked for me. You’ve got your big objective out there, but break it down to milestones and get through each day. Just like the strategy that I shared with you, just break it down into phases. You want to be successful. We all know you want to be successful. Break it down into phases and you will get there. There will be some failures, but that’s okay. Get up, brush it off and keep going. That’s what I’d say, man.
John Lee Dumas: I love it! Now where can we find you?
Rosh Khan: You can find my company at Facebook.com/SocialRank. You can find me personally – like I said, I love talking with people. So hit me up on Facebook. If you just go to RoshKhan.com, that will just redirect you to my Facebook account. So you can connect with me there. Add me as a friend, subscribe and shoot me any questions that you might have. I just love giving information away. So yes, I’d love to talk to you guys.
John Lee Dumas: Rosh, thank you so much for your time and your generous, generous ninja tips. Fire Nation, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.
