As the co-founder of Onvou, I have been talking to small business owners to learn about their businesses and find out what challenges they face in running their businesses. As we are heavily involved in online business solutions, I was looking forward to speaking with Paul not only from my passion for local and small businesses but also to see if we could learn new things that may help us in our marketing strategy and I wasn't disappointed.
In this interview I talked to Paul Jordan, the owner of an online training course called Learn Digital Marketing Expert. Paul tells me the course is designed to teach people complete digital marketing skills. It’s aimed at small business owners and people who are just starting out with an online business. It also teaches people how to outsource work.
Vivity Internet Marketing is Paul’s other business, which is an online marketing agency for business owners who want to outsource their online marketing. Vivity offer complete marketing services including website creation, sales funnel building, email marketing, video creation and production, graphic design, Facebook advertising, social media marketing, content creation, chatbot creation and much more.
Paul’s company can also build online training courses. I can recommend Paul’s businesses and if you want to get in touch, his contact details are here for you:
Email: paul@ldm.expert
Web: https://www.ldm.expert, https://www.vivityinternetmarketing.c...
YouTube: https://www.youtube.ldm.expert
Facebook: https://www.facebook.ldm.expert
Twitter: https://www.twitter.ldm.expert
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.ldm.expert
Transcription
welcome everybody to our um an interview that i'm having here with uh paul jordan who's the owner of uh ldm expert uh welcome paul hi john thanks very much for having me here today it's a real pleasure to be here thank you thanks for taking the time out to be here paul this um it's great to see you you're welcome you too so tell everybody paul uh who you are and um a little bit about your business as well sure okay thank you well my name's paul jordan um i have a business called ldm expert and that stands for learn digital marketing expert and basically it's an online training course that teaches you everything you need to know about online marketing so it's like website creation hosting videos all that kind of thing and as a digital coach myself i also offer one-to-one mentoring as part of that course i've got a sister business called vivity internet marketing which is an online marketing agency so when although we like to train people for people that um find they don't have time or they don't actually want to do their own online marketing we have the agency this is that takes care of that for people in such situations as well wow very interesting indeed is that something that you do um purely through the internet or do you do that one-on-one in person as well you can yeah we have done it personally a little bit i suppose like all of us know kobe kind of changed the whole playing field for a lot of things um so like on zoom a lot of people are quite happy to sort of have a conversation over zoom now and i think it's great isn't it because people don't have the logistics of getting in their car and traveling somewhere which takes a lot of wasted time so just about all of this stuff can be done over zoom and obviously with the internet we've got global reach for getting files transferred and that kind of thing um i personally i still like the personal touches and you know even though it's really great to be here and zoom with you today it's still never quite the same as being in in the room with somebody and making them a cup of tea and taking it over and you know that social contact is still good to have but um this still works really well you know i agree some one of the things that i've missed from the pandemic that's that's for sure it's that personal um you know communication as you said being able to sit there and and have a cup of tea and share a biscuit it's very difficult over the internet isn't it yeah it doesn't they haven't haven't mastered that yet but so so tell me a little bit more about um what what you do on a on a day-to-day basis then paul with with the company that you you operate yeah sure okay so um i suppose like all of us every day is different we try to have a certain routine um so we've got a couple of guys that um work offshore and we have a system that makes sure that some of the same tasks get done automatically every we're not automatically but the tasks are generated automatically but they're conducted manually so all our social media management for example posting on the various channels we have a task that that will pop up every day and the guys in the philippines will take care of doing some posts on facebook and linkedin and so forth and creating videos creating graphics so for me um i kind of oversee the work and make sure they're always well fed with plenty of work to do and i kind of take care more of the marketing side so it's like outreach to find new clients the training course that i mentioned earlier that's a fairly new thing that we've recently finished building um i'm in the throes of launching that now and and and making some online sales so on a daily basis it's a kind of like a lot of self-employed people it's not a nine-to-five thing it's kind of a some of the work is proactive like dealing with planned work and some of it's reactive you know responding to enquiries and attending the things they don't always go go as planned like a website might stop working or whatever um but yeah it's uh every day is different and um really trying to get some sales of the new training course and i think the reason i went down that route is that um the agency side is great but i wanted to have my eggs in several baskets and the great thing about when you when you have your own products and services you're not you're not kind of beholden to another outside influence if you're selling somebody else's products and there's a problem with them or they you can't sell them anymore um that's a business that's taken away but with a training course we realized that it's something that we have that we own the rights to um so that doesn't stop another company from taking away that business from us which is why we kind of decide to go down that route as a separate one from the agency as well yeah that makes sense so with regards to your courses are they do do they go on different platforms that i mean i'm not not too well up on the on on where you can get these courses available but one of the platforms that jump out to me um through personal experience was uh uh udemy is it is it called yes i've heard i've come across that one there are many different there are many different platforms for building a training course on um and in fact before so the train course the ldm expert training course is currently on a wordpress platform um i built it originally probably about two years ago now i built it on a different platform um which turned out to be very very problematic the technical support was terrible and um it was a real painful lesson actually it kind of really nearly scupped the business because it was causing so many problems so i had to extract all the content and publish it on a on a wordpress platform but we looked at kajabi um udemy there's there's so many different platforms out there for building training courses um if you look at i mean my kajabi kajabi is a very good one but again the the challenge with kajal with with that is that the content that you create it's it's on their platform so they don't they kind of own it so if kajabi disappeared overnight your content your videos is all gone um whereas with a wordpress environment you're the owner of it you own the domain you own the hosting you own all the files and you can back them up and they're yours so if anything happens you've still got all that content um and that's one of the main reasons for going down that route and you have a lot more control and there's a lot more bells and whistles you can put on there and again with kajabi it's very well supported um it's a very easy solution because they do all the hosting um but then you're paying a monthly fee for it and you know when you're starting out that could be that can be a bit restrictive whereas on a hosting platform hosting doesn't cost a huge amount of money once you've got a domain name it's um we you know we think it's the better way to go if you're going to build a training course is to build it on a wordpress environment you're totally in control you own everything and you're not beholden to somebody else who suddenly hikes the price monthly or anything like that um so you've got more control understood wonderful um so uh paul where abouts are you based i i sense a little bit of an accent there well as you may have gathered on i'm from london originally but right now i'm talking to you from plymouth in the uk which is uh for people that don't know uh plymouth it's in in the southwest of england in the uk in a county called devon it's on the coast and interestingly enough plymouth is twinned with massachusetts in the united states and about 400 years ago it's where the pilgrim fathers left plymouth in the uk to discover america so that gives it a bit more puts it on the map a bit more it's also a big navy town as well it certainly is yeah where i've done my uh initial training as a youngster really just across the way yeah yeah beautiful part of the world devon as well very very nice very much so lovely coast lovely dartmoor i used to live in london which is a wonderful place but you know the air quality is not so good and when you bring up young children which i was some years ago it's such a nice environment for children to be in you've got a lot more animals around it's you've got the coast for swimming got dartmouth for walking and those are all very accessible if you're in the center of london trying to get out to the coast it's a hell of a long drive you've got the traffic it's a great place london but uh yeah i love it down here and of course the cost that i think is is much more um your money goes a lot further down here for sure i'm sure wonderful so paul tell us something that many people wouldn't know about yourself something maybe a secret or something yeah okay um i suppose there's something that not many people know um about about 10 or 11 no it's probably about 12 years ago actually probably about 12 years ago i appeared in a tv show in the uk called homes under the hammer which is where people buy prop visit auction refurbishment i bought a property i think it's about 2010 and um got approached after the auction by a tv company he said would you like to be in a program of course who can refuse a bit of a bit of fame on tv so that's that's something that people don't know about i was on tv about 12 years ago and it's out there on youtube still but um yeah that's my claim to fame and the little secret that nobody else knows probably but they do now um i i think i've seen that before that's a program where you you buy it one one price um renovate it sell it at another price is that right yeah that's that's certainly one approach um so you can either that's what a lot of people do they buy it buy a property renovate it and then sell it on for profit um but the approach i took was to buy a property renovate it and then keep it and then rent it out to uh tenants and um that's what i'm still doing to this day with that one oh very nice very nice yeah okay um so um obviously you you're still very young anyway paul
what are you talking about
you're my best friend
so obviously you're you're still very young paul tell us about your younger years oh crikey younger years yeah okay so um so i went to um i went to a school called whitton school and um i did reasonably well i kind of i remember buying this this magazine when i was a young lad called all about science it's one of these you buy this magazine weekly and it would build up into a book and you buy the binder and you put it in there and it becomes like a set of encyclopedias and i used to really love this magazine and it was it went through science in alphabetical order so from a to z and every time i'd get one from the shop i'd always be really excited to read it and it was written in a way that i found very engaging so i learned a lot about science from this magazine and i think it was very it was it was written in quite an exciting way and they have little things in there that little giveaways little experiments you could do little scratch cards to give off a smell um so i found that this kind of helped me at school because i did quite well at all the sciences at school um and for some reason i didn't go into science subsequently but i think when i when i left school i went to college so i didn't really know what to do so i went to i went to college and studied engineering and that was like mechanical engineering a bit of electrical engineering so that was an ordinary ordinary national diploma level and i really enjoyed that it was really interesting had some good lecturers made some really good friends had a good time when i finished college i just didn't know what to do with my life well what do i do now do i do i want to find a job and i kind of got caught up in the tides to some extent because a lot of the people in my course were all going to university and i thought oh perhaps that's what i should do so i kind of i got caught up with a few of my friends and it was quite lucky because here in plymouth where i live now this is where i studied as a student a long time ago and part of the reason for that is a couple of the guys that i did my college course with came to plymouth so when i came to plymouth i wasn't on my own i came down with a few friends and i think if that hadn't been if it hadn't been for that i probably wouldn't have done it because you know mentioning um conversation with you going to the navy when you're 16 and living away from home that's a real big move and even i was 18 to live away from home if i'd have been on my own i think i would have really struggled but because i had friends that i will that we moved down together with it made it a lot easier and again i kind of i i studied electrical and electronic engineering and found it really interesting found it really hard because there's a lot of maths but um i suppose that's where i got my passion for technology because as soon as we started doing like microprocessors and computers you know i really i just my my kind of heartless like that was just so exciting and this was back in the day when actually seeing a computer was quite a rare thing because they weren't really widespread we're going back to kind of 1982 now and this is before the internet even so yeah so that's so that got me into technology that got me into computers and um it all started from there and the rest is history i suppose wow wow very interesting so outside of your um of of your work obviously there is no such thing as nine to five anymore being uh self-employed i'm sure um very true what other interests do you have yeah um i like to um well i've got i've got three grown twins who are both 20 and another daughter who's 22 so i don't get to see like they've all got their own lives but i really love spending time with them then when the opportunity arises um i'm uh i nearly said i'm a keen gym girl but i'm not keen i go to uh yeah there's a there's a train of gyms called um pure gym i go there i do the fitness classes so they're instructor-led and there's a group of people told what to do um yeah i don't get pleasure out of going but i go because i know that i need to sort of try and keep myself mobile because like a lot of us you know sit down all day at a desk so i do that um i'm getting back into cycling i used to do a lot of cycling when i was younger so i've got my rusty old bike which i've um recently been getting out on quite a lot more i really enjoy that actually i've forgotten the sense of freedom that it gives you because i used to cycle to work when i worked in london a long time ago and to get back into that recently probably having a bit of a mid-life crisis because i recently bought myself an electric electronic drum kit because i used to play the drums when i was at college yeah so i've been thinking about it for a long time so finally got an electronic drum kit which means that i don't drive the neighbors completely bonkers when i play um because i really is you know i used to be really passionate about that when i was in a band in my youth um and i'd love to get back into like a pub band or something like that but that's something i really like i love cooking i like to eat healthy food i think cooking is one of the few things that i can do when i've got a busy mind and i'm stressed i find when i'm cooking and i'm cutting up vegetables and i'm peeling vegetables and thinking about one cooking it's one of the few things that really takes my mind off other stuff i have to really focus on it so i find it very therapeutic and it's um and it's so satisfying when you when you have friends and family around for dinner you put nice food on the table and everyone's really enjoying it it's a very nice it's a real good feeling isn't it and you know you put healthy things on the table that everyone's finding very tasty um so i get a lot of satisfaction from that and that's about it that's probably and sleep i like to sleep but yeah so that's it really that's almost all my time spoken for i think you're right when when you're cooking something for a group of people your friends or whatever and um you know you know you've made something good and you can see their reaction is good um i think that's that's almost better than tasting the food yourself isn't it it really is it's um it really makes it's a real sense of satisfaction a sense of pride and uh yeah it just gives you a nice buzz isn't it that all your hard work has been rewarded when you see people enjoying the food because yeah it's like a lot of food you spend hours cooking it and when it's good it's demolished in like minutes because everyone just empties their plate you think well all those hours of preparation gone but it's a good sign yeah marvelous marvelous so in the world of marketing um there's obviously plenty of people out there that are advertising and telling everybody how they should market their business how do you market your business yeah it's a very good question so we're just launching the course so it's in the early stages um at the moment we're running a series of webinars so the webinars form part of our sales funnel um and we advertise the webinars on a platform called eventbrite and that's certainly a platform i'd recommend to a lot of people because there's a lot of stuff on there and it's surprising how many people go to eventbrite to find out about some webinars so that's a good place to advertise and it's you can do it for free as well so you can get a bit of traffic from um from there we're also planning a facebook ads campaign but the thing that we're focusing on right now is doing some organic outreach and that's a so organic outreach is a case of finding relevant facebook groups where we would expect to find our target audience and then engaging in conversations on the group and then the good thing about that is you can look at people's profile on facebook and on linkedin and from that you can make a judgment as to whether you think they'd be a good fit for what we're selling so obviously that's what we're starting to do um to find out if we think people are a good fit for our training course so then we would start a conversation with them uh through messaging on facebook and on linkedin and try and get them onto a either a zoom call similar to what we're having now or a phone call and assess their needs and possibly close a sale and that's literally we've just literally started getting into that last week so that's a new that's a new area for us to get into is like social outreach or organic outreach or quality wally call it what you wish um facebook ads have been very problematic for many people and we've all had the ad facebook ads shut down ad accounts shut down for no reason the algorithms are very draconian you never find out exactly what's wrong very often there's nothing wrong but the algorithm has had a forced trigger and that can waste a lot of time while you're waiting to get accounts reinstated so this new organic outreach technique um i think sir is going to work well because although you're not reaching such a big audience you can you can gauge the quality of the audience much better because you can view people through the profile through a chat so you may only reach i don't know a thousand people in a week um but it's gonna be a much higher quality than putting an advert on facebook and even with your targeting options you're still not gonna have such a good quality audience so that's where we're at at the moment it's kind of the early days very interesting um so who would your ideal customer be are you talking about someone that has just taken and you know a recent interest in in marketing or you looking for you know the person that maybe you've done a bachelor's degree 20 years ago in marketing yeah it's a good question i think um it's certainly aimed at someone who has no no marketing background whatsoever it's aimed at people that either want to start their own business from scratch and have an idea about they may already have their own products or services that they want to take online there may be people that don't have a product or service but they still want to start an online business so we can teach people how to do that through the likes of affiliate marketing and there may be small business startups that choose to do the inline the online marketing in-house so it's a course that's very much going to be geared up for those kinds of people um but but like a lot of people they with things in life we quite often learn about how to do something for ourselves from a training course but then when we've done the course we realized oh actually that's a lot of time and a lot of effort and then we actually end up outsourcing the work maybe some maybe not all of it but we might choose to then outsource the work as a result of doing the training ourselves because we realized actually that is we've got to learn email marketing website creation video creation graphic design etc etc and some people think wow it's a bit overwhelming so yeah so it's for kind of business startups um existing businesses that want to really sort of get serious about marketing online and people that just want to start an online business and don't know where don't have any ideas about how to make money so it's all those people really but it's not for big corporates because they've probably already got an internet marketing department in place already right right fantastic that's wonderful um and um yeah last question for you somebody that's uh about to start their own business or thinking about going in to start their own business what words of wisdom could you give to them yeah i think um i think set get your expectations set correctly i think is a key thing and this is based on my own personal experience i think a lot of people going to business with a huge amount of enthusiasm and passion which is essential um but expecting to generate an income too soon and i've certainly been guilty of that in my my earlier days and if you already have a full-time job and you're generating you know you're getting getting a salary either you've got a good set of savings to rely on or you try and you try and ramp up your own business in parallel which means working a lot of extra hours outside of your day job and working weekends and doing that until the stage such a stage whereby you can then afford to quit your day job and focus your efforts but i've heard you know i've seen people myself included who have a very well paid daytime job jump ship to start their own business and expect that income to be replaced in a very short space of time and it doesn't and then the stress sets in and you end up going back to a day job because you couldn't get the business working quick enough so i think um doing some good planning and having realistic expectations of of a not of not much income for quite a while um i think that's key advice if you want to stay in it for the long term because so many people you think oh yeah i'm gonna make a load of money and i jump in and loads of enthusiasm loads of energy loads of passion and three months down the line they're still struggling um and struggling is part of entrepreneurship that's what it's all about but if you you know if you can replace your income in three months then wow that's pretty miraculous if you start from zero so you've got to set yourself a realistic time scale and do your budgeting um so if you've got a pile of savings you know that that savings is going to last you the course until you can realistically have an income and i think it's a case of like living a frugal lifestyle if you want to make it work so you cut out all the things you don't need to spend money on so you've got enough money to eat enough money to live and then all you need is all that time to throw into your business um so that's that's that's the advice i would give someone is keep your expectations realistic set your horizon for break even well into the future and uh i think you should do okay you know very wise words indeed very um so how can um people get in contact with you paul probably the best way is um my email address which is hopefully we'll see some details like details later but my email address is paul at ldm.expert um i'm also on social media that we have a facebook page we're on linkedin we're on all the social channels instagram so you can message us messages from through any of those channels um i think my phone number will probably appear at the end as well so people are very welcome to to give me a call um but these days it's a double-edged sword isn't it we have so many ways for people to contact us i find that sometimes people can send contact us in one particular way and it can be it could be a struggle thing now i know they they sent me a text message was it what's that was it a facebook messenger oh no it was an instagram messenger oh no it was on them and then you end up having this array of platforms where people have tried to contact you and uh it can get uh confusing to manage all that but everybody seems to have forgotten how to pick up the telephone and make a call nowadays yeah that is so true john that's so true i i you know all this messaging platform is fantastic we can talk asynchronously which is great but sometimes you want to have a conversation and bottom it out there and then and of course every time you come back to a conversational messenger your brain is having to do that contact switch because you're there waiting for an answer you're you're thinking about what you're talking about but you then don't get an answer and you move on to something else and then they reply ten minutes later you come back your brain is constantly switching tasks and i'm not a phone call all right what time do you want yeah three o'clock tomorrow night five o'clock friday yeah friday okay fine that's good see you then and the whole negotiation is done rather than do you want to come friday five minutes later no i can't do friday what about thursday definitely and that drives me nuts and it's so inefficient as you say why don't people want to speak anymore phone call job done i agree yeah no definitely well paul thank you very much for your time it's been great uh having a chat with you thank you for being inviting me here and uh and i hope um you get everything that you wish for in your business and and things go according to plan and um i wish you all the success in the world thank you very much john it's been really good to be here i've had a lot of fun so um thanks for your time as well be careful all the best yeah bye