IAM2631 – DIY Marketing: A Broker’s Bold Move

In this special episode, Gresham dives into the practical challenges he’s facing, particularly around lead generation. After receiving a modest lead pack from his franchising organization, he realized that buying leads alone isn’t delivering the results he wants.

He’s now weighing two options: partnering with a low‑cost program that offers SEO‑optimized content and running minimal‑budget Facebook ads, or taking a DIY approach to create and execute the strategy himself using the resources and team he already has.

He feels torn between learning from an external expert and maintaining full control over the execution.

Finally, he outlines his strategic plan to consolidate traffic and leads across multiple domains. Because some of his sites already rank well, he proposes creating a sub‑domain on the strongest site, publishing SEO‑focused content there, and funneling the resulting leads back to his broker business under a broader “umbrella” brand.

• Blue Star Franchise: bluestarfranchise.com
• Browse the Franchise Inventory: bluestarfranchise.com/franchise
• Is franchising right for you? Check this out to see: bluestarfranchise.com/assessment
• Franchise CEO (A CBNation Site – coming soon) – franchiseceo.co

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Transcription:

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Intro 00:01
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:28
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast.
And this is a special episode of our I AM CEO podcast. And this is actually going to be a snippet of a snippet.

So to speak, I'm just doing an intro because I've been starting to document my journey into starting what is now called Blue Star Franchise. We're also going to do a kind of subcite within CB nation called a franchise CEO.

So you'll see some links in the show notes related to that. But I just want to give you a little bit more insight, give you a little bit more color in some of the aspects of why I'm actually doing this.

Because one of the things I was doing as I was going through training to start up this new business was realizing and hearing from the founder of FBA, the Franchise Brokers Association, that it'd be really cool to document your journey.

Going through and building this out. I think it's something that would be super helpful, obviously, for people that are looking for and thinking about starting franchises.

But frankly, if you're starting anything, any type of business, I think it's really cool to kind of just even see the journey and how it's been going from there. So I'm going to share a few of those snippets from the first couple of videos that have been created.

But definitely, of course, subscribe to our YouTube. Check out a lot more where I figure out exactly where we're going to post this. So I have that information that's available to you. But regardless, if you're a builder, continue to keep building, continue to do your thing.

The world definitely needs exactly what you're trying to build. It needs you to be your unique self, so make sure to run your own race because nobody can run your race like you. This is Greg signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

I got out of training and started to go on this path. You feel like you don't make any headway, but I feel like I made it even more of a challenge by saying I wanted to generate my own leads when I could have just probably started out by saying, hey, let me just buy leads and just see what happens from there.

I did get a lead pack when I signed up through the organization that I signed up with, and that didn't really have a lot of headway.

So it made me a little bit less likely to want to go to buy leads and say, hey, I need to plant my flag on generating leads. And I thought that it would be a little bit more successful, but it hasn't been.

But that being said, I had a conversation with someone yesterday and had one of their products. So they're starting a program, very low price actually.

To be able to essentially create a lot of SEO content with some type of tool that allow people to opt in on that site. And then in addition to that, you can go through the process of actually doing some Facebook ads.

And the Facebook ads can be, they said, minimum $5 or so a day. And I'm torn about it largely because I feel like there's definitely opportunity there, but it's a matter of, should I just kind of go about it yourself?

And I think that while there is the confidence in the strategy actually, the confidence is not necessarily in the person of the strategy and it's not necessarily against him. It's just like, I know that, you know, he's juggling a few things.

So, I don't know, you know, and part of me is like, hey, you tap into that, you learn from a person and then you can kind of take that information on. But also part of me is just like, you should like kind of DIY to do it yourself, execute on it and then see, you know, what you can kind of ultimately do from there, what you can get from there.

So I'm honestly, you know, torn, you know, especially cause we have the resources, we have the people. It's just a matter of saying this is the strategy and let's execute on that strategy. So I feel like that's kind of like where we're at.

I feel like the clarity of being able to do that, but also I think there's a lot of complexities with everything that I'm doing.

And what I mean by that is, frankly, we have the, I have, you know, multiple site domains and one site gets more or is ranking for more than other ones.

So being able to leverage that domain to create leads for another domain is kind of like where I'm at. So that's the other thing. Like there's a lot of nuances that are there.

A lot of things that I can end up doing and not sure how best to navigate it. I don't want to get dinged, you know, from, you know, Google, but I also want to make sure that I am creating this atmosphere where I can, you know, succeed as much as possible.

So with that being said, I mean, I think honestly, probably the best thing that I can do is to take and create a sub-domain on the main domain, create content there, and from that content, be able to generate leads that can go to the broker business, but it's part of an overall umbrella, because part of this strategy was saying that rather than to go very deep into saying who wants to open a franchise, go a lot broader.

The problem is it's going broader, doesn't open up to franchise opportunities, but it can be other opportunities. So it's just like kind of gauging that and saying, okay, If I'm going to go broader, then maybe it needs to be on the broader site rather than on the niche site.

But I also want to leverage and take advantage of the traffic that we've been getting over time so that we can generate more traffic. So there's like this kind of complex way to do it because I have more resources than probably the average person.

And I think it can allow me to move a lot faster if I'm able to do that strategically. But when you're asking the person, it's like, you don't know if they're going to go through that level of due diligence to be able to understand that, to understand the opportunity that's there and leverage those things.

So that might be just in and of itself the reason why to kind of not go that route, because it is a little bit more of a complex way. But I can ultimately simplify it.

It's just that If there's not traffic that's coming there, you either go to the place that has traffic, you generate the SEO there, and the leads and the opportunities there.

But then you take the main site and maybe that's where you generate the leads. Or you basically take the leads and you generate them to the place where you're trying to generate traffic. So you're using this platform.

And that's where I have the SEO Blog Nation as a platform that could essentially be a marketing platform in all those sites. So that's what I think I'm gonna do.

Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And of course, looking forward to giving you more and more updates.

Outro 06:36
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co.

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Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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