The PPC Machine

30/04/2025

I want to tell you a story that will help you fix one of the sneakiest reasons why you might not be winning as many clients as you'd like.

The story involves me aged 16, plus:

- a bottle of Scotch
- an error of judgement
- and a rescue helicopter

It’s funny in hindsight. But it also reveals something a lot of solo business owners get wrong when it comes to attracting new business.

I’ve shared the full story (and what it means for your lead generation) in the latest edition of The Smarter Soloist.

📬 Link’s in the comments.

15/04/2025

🚨 I’ve started a newsletter. Don’t worry - I’m not going to call it a “dispatch” or pretend it’s a letter from the trenches of entrepreneurship. It’s just a good ol’ fashioned email. With jokes. And marketing advice that won’t make your eyes bleed.

It’s called The Smarter Soloist.

It’s for solo business owners who want to grow their business without:

Googling “what is a funnel” at 2am

Sacrificing their weekends to the Content Gods

Becoming a shouty LinkedIn thought leader with a ring light and a dream

Each issue includes:
✅ A true story
✅ A useful marketing insight
✅ At least one sentence I’ll regret writing in a few years

If that sounds like your cup of tea (or glass of wine), you can join the early subscribers here:
👉 https://newsletter.thesmartersoloist.com/subscribe

Or ignore this and go back to pretending that spending 3 hours choosing a Canva font counts as marketing. Your call.

Seriously useful marketing advice for solo business owners – wrapped in stories that might make you snort tea out your nose

07/07/2023

Chatbots have been shown to greatly increase the number of enquiries you can generate from your website.

If you use a service such as ConversioBot or Tidio, it is very simple to add a chatbot to your site and configure it to ask whatever questions you like.

Do you have a chatbot on your site? Do you get good leads from it? Do you prefer using chatbots on other people's sites rather than sending an email or filling in a form?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

29/06/2023

One of the effects of living in the digital age and in the era of Amazon Prime is that people now expect everything to happen instantly.

So if it's late at night and someone wants to arrange a meeting with you for later in the week, they don't necessarily want to have to send you an email or fill in a form and wait for you to get back to them the next day.

By using an online booking system such as 10to8 (which is free, by the way) or Calendly, you can give people the ability to see when you are available and book themselves in for a meeting or a phone conversation.

21/06/2023

LinkedIn is a social media channel that focusses on professional networking. It boasts over 500 million members worldwide.

There are two good reasons why financial advisers and mortgage brokers should be making use of LinkedIn.

Firstly, it allows you to make connections with other professional who may be able to refer business to you - such as accountants, solicitors, estate agents, will-writers, architects, etc.

Secondly, if you want to target potential clients who work in a particular profession then LinkedIn makes it easy for you to find them.

Want to advertise your services to IT consultants who live in Birmingham and are aged in their 30s? LinkedIn's advertising platform will let you do it.

12/06/2023

I know an IFA often says that the best people to introduce him to are those who have just got married, died, or won the lottery!

These big moments in our lives, along with things like getting a new job or having a child, are often the times when our financial situation can most benefit from a professional review.

There are a number of ways you could try to market your services to new parents, newly weds, etc. But one of the most powerful methods for this is Facebook Ads.

Because Facebook knows so much about people's lives, it can give you the option to show adverts only to people who have recently got engaged, become a parent, etc.

The list of options is pretty long and, if used correctly, it can help you promote your services to those people who are most likely to be at a point in their lives where they need to speak to you.

06/06/2023

If you have a clear idea of who your target customer is, you can use Facebook Ads to get your financial services business in front of them for a relatively low cost.

This article contains a lot of information about how to use Facebook Ads as a mortgage broker or IFA:

https://buff.ly/3V5ZLED

You can also use Facebook retargeting to reconnect with people who may have visited your website but not made an enquiry.

31/05/2023

As a financial adviser or mortgage broker who's selling the same products from the same providers as thousands of other advisers, one of the ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to become known as an industry expert or thought-leader.

To achieve this, you need to make sure you are responding to, and commenting on, things that happen in the financial world - e.g. changes to the tax regime, announcements from investment companies, changes to interest rates, etc. You can use your blog and/or social media channels to do this.

23/05/2023

I said in a post last week about how you can use forums to attract new clients for your financila services business.

In a similar vein, you could look for financial questions on Quora and provide answers to them.

If you're not familiar with Quora it is a website where people can post questions about all sorts of things and then other people can step in and provide answers.

Quora posts often appear in Google search results too, so this can be a good way to get yourself found on Google even if your own website doesn't rank very highly yet.

15/05/2023

One way to get exposure to a wider audience of potential clients as a mortgage broker or IFA is to find forums (such as Lemon Fool) or Facebook groups where people are asking questions about personal finance.

Providing information and answers in response to these questions will help establish you as an expert in your field and allow people to get to know you in a relaxed environment.

Most forums will allow you to include links in your posts or in your signature and this can be a good way to get people to click through to your website to read more about a particular topic you've given them some help with.

11/05/2023

People love taking quizzes online, especially ones which claim to give them some kind of insight into themselves. This is why personality tests are so popular.

As a financial adviser or mortgage brokerm, you can use quizzes to engage prospects, get them onto your mailing list, and also start to pre-qualify them before you even speak to them.

For example, you could have a quiz that promised to tell people how financially savvy they were once they had answered a series of simple questions. If the questions included things like:

Do you know how much money you'll have to live on in retirement?
How much can you save into an ISA each year?
True or False: I don't need a will because everything will automatically go to my spouse
then the answers could be used to give people their score and also to help you identify what sort of financial advice they may need from you.

You can read lots more about the benefits of online quizzes and see examples of successful quizzes in this article:

https://buff.ly/3LqmIPS

03/05/2023

It's pretty easy these days to start your own podcast and release weekly, fortnightly, or monthly episodes to help you attract new clients.

The beauty of podcasts is that people can listen to them while they are driving, working out at the gym, walking the dog, etc. And this opens you up to a whole new audience who might not have time to watch your videos or read your blog posts.

If you're wary about starting your own podcast, another option is to see if you can be a guest on someone else's.

Got a favourite financial services podcast? Let me know in the comments.