SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
664: How Agency Did $750k First Year, Now $100k+/Month with Webris CEO Ryan Stewart
19 May 2017
Chapter 1: What is Webris and how did it achieve $750k in its first year?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 2: How does Ryan Stewart utilize content marketing for his agency?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
When I do webinar interviews or I give big speeches to thousands of people all over the world, I usually will talk about data and sometimes show my dashboards, like my SaaS dashboard as I'm growing my SaaS company to top inbox, or my website dashboard, which shows how I take impressions to convert them into email leads and convert them into customers for NathanLacke.com.
The funny thing is, guys, I build these dashboards with myself, no developer, and it's basically free, and I use one tool to do it. You can see the tool at NathanLacke.com forward slash dashboard.
Chapter 3: What strategies does Ryan use to promote his YouTube videos?
analytics i'll tell you more later in the show this is episode 664 coming up tomorrow morning i ask you a simple question is joe kaufman blessed or gutsy he turns down a 400 000 salary to launch his own agency he reveals that agency's revenue tomorrow live Good morning, everybody. Nathan Latke here, and our guest this morning is Ryan Stewart.
He's a digital marketing expert with over eight years of client-facing experience. He currently owns and operates Webris, a Miami-based digital marketing agency specializing in SEO and content marketing.
Chapter 4: How does Ryan manage content creation and writer hiring for Webris?
Ryan, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. All right, man. So tell us what Webris does and how you generate revenue. Yeah, so we are a, well, you pretty much covered it, search engine optimization agency. We do a lot of content marketing and a lot of link building.
Pretty much specializing in just generating organic growth for clients, any sort of clients, e-commerce, B2B, you name it, we do it.
Chapter 5: What revenue streams does Webris have beyond client services?
And what's the average kind of customer paying you, and is it a retainer model or what? Yeah, so we pretty much have like a set retainer model that's between $5,000 and $6,000 a month. And it can go up if there's hours required outside of scope or if they want to do extra link building. Okay, and do you require a minimum number of months?
Yeah, six at a very minimum, but you're going to pay more for that. But we really try and get people at 12.
Chapter 6: How does Ryan leverage his email list for video engagement?
Okay, got it. And currently, how many clients are you working with? About 22 at the moment. Okay. So, I mean, can I do the math? Can I take 22 times about five grand and assume you guys are doing about a hundred grand per month in revenue? Yeah.
Chapter 7: What lessons did Ryan learn from his MBA experience?
At a minimum. Yep. All right, great. And tell us more of the backstory. So what year did you launch this in?
Chapter 8: What are Ryan's thoughts on employee satisfaction and company culture?
March of last year was when I took on the first agency-style client. So we just closed our first year in operations this past year. That's amazing. Did you break a million the first year or no? Did you just miss it? No, we did about $750,000 the first year for just agency revenue. That's great. Now you said just agency revenue. What else are you generating revenue on?
I have a training, online training. Okay, so tell me more about that. What is it and what's the model there? Yeah, so, I mean, I guess the backstory is kind of important too. So I do a lot of content marketing for myself. YouTube, blogging, you name it. And get a lot of track to our website. But when you sell kind of mid to high value retainers, you're obviously losing a lot of the market.
So a lot of the traffic that was coming to our website, a lot of people that were following me on social were actually other marketers and agency owners. So I had a nice little niche with them. So I put together a link building training that really taught people how to do link building at scale and how to build like a small offshore team, low cost, and how to take like a very complex process
process, which is outreach. We blogger outreach PR stuff, turn that into a process, and then scale it across as many clients as you have. And that sells for about $1,000, and we sold about, I don't know, 250 of them over the last probably nine to 12 months. Where do I go to see that? Just type in Webris link building training in Google. Okay, good.
Guys, we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Yeah, you've got, I'm looking on your YouTube at the moment. I mean, you've got some of these videos, you know, getting, you know, 46,000 views. Did you do anything to intentionally drive that or was it mainly organic? Yeah, I mean, so I don't do any advertising on YouTube, but I've got like a pretty good content. Like I know how to rank stuff.
I know how to get more views on YouTube. It's based highly on engagement. So I have a pretty good email list. I've got a Facebook group with 10,000 people. I've got a very active Facebook page, active Twitter page. And then I also will build a blog post out of it and I'll put it on like growth hackers and stuff and I'm in some upvote range.
So a lot of the ones that have more views, I put a pretty good amount of like content promotion into it when I launched it. And basically what happens is the more views that you get up front, the more engagement, the more likes, the more shares, the more comments, the more you get seen in the up next videos. So those just kind of take off and snowball on their own. Got it.
So when I'm looking at this one, this is how to get more traffic right now. It's got 46,000 views. You kind of went all in on that. I mean, I put it on inbound and it did well there. Got it. I mean, but it's got a ton of comments. It's got like 110 comments.
It's, I mean, it sounds cliche, but like, you know, the videos you create are good and I've gotten up an audience where, and I know how to engage people and get comments on them too. That's part of kind of like the exposure process. So give us two tips there.
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