Arsenal MKG founder Jason Wardrop claims you don’t need a $997 course or any fancy software or anything else that costs money, really, to launch your own digital marketing agency. Nope. You should be able to land your first client and get them results, all without coming outta pocket. “Because, I remember when I started my own digital marketing agency eight years ago,” Jason says, “and I didn’t have a dime to my name.”
But Jason overcame his lack of startup capital (and experience, for that matter), and he believes you can do the same. A digital agency is the holy grail of online businesses, Jason says, and almost anyone can build it to $5- to $10k per month, minimum, even if they’re starting with zip, zilch, nada. “The first step is to go ahead and identify who you wanna serve,” Jason explains. “And you’ve probably heard this before, but you’ll wanna niche down and pick a specific type of business you’ll go through and work with.”
So think about chiropractors, dentists, orthodontists, real estate agents, restaurant owners, gym owners, you get the idea. Any local brick and mortar business who’s willing to pay for more customers, basically. So say, for the sake of simplicity, you wanna work with dentists, right? What Jason did, back in the day, is he went and found Facebook groups with his target avatar in them. So you should be able to find plenty of groups that have hundreds, even thousands of dentists in them.
So, if you approach it right, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Lead with value, be cool, don’t be all desperate and salesy, right, and just start some conversations in those groups and see if any of those dentists (in this case) would want more customers. When one or more of ’em shows interest, what you wanna pitch ’em, Jason says, is getting their dental office to show up in the Google My Business (GMB) section. (Some people call this Google Local or Google Maps.)
Now, most times, they’ll already have a GMB set up. But if they’re not in the top three spots when somebody does a search for “dentist near me,” for example, it’s not doing much for ’em, is it? So you can come in and offer to help bump it to the number one spot. How’ll you do this? Mostly by helping them get more positive reviews. You can think of this as a reputation management service. In addition, you can hook them up with what’s called auto missed call text back. Which is just what it sounds like. If the dental office doesn’t answer, it’ll automatically text the person back to hopefully save the deal.
And a third service you can sprinkle on top is a click-to-chat feature. Which’ll show up, as an option, in the GMB listing, when somebody does a search from their mobile phone. Since a lot of people hate making phone calls these days, this can have a significant impact on total booked appointments. “And so those are three massive services that only take 5–10 minutes to set up one time,” Jason says, “and they’re gonna work for you month after month. And you can charge these small local businesses a monthly ongoing fee to maintain access to these services you’re providing.”
You should be able to comfortably charge $100- to $500 per month for all of this. You can use Stripe to create a payment link that you can pass on to anyone who wants to sign up. It’ll even bill them automatically every 30 days. Pretty cool. You can then sync Stripe with your bank account and transfer your profits directly to your checking or savings account within 1–2 business days. Collect testimonials from happy clients. Leverage those to go and land more dentists in other cities, for example. Repeat.
