Should I include paid ads with my lead conversion system for mortgage brokers, and any lead generation advice?
That's interesting. You're selling paid ads plus all of this, which is great—it's like a containerized package service. If you do, charge a media buy fee; a management fee is usually about a third of the media buy. For example, if someone spends $1,000 a month on ads, charge $300 a month. This lets you scale quickly and easily. I see Stephan's question is the same as the previous one, so I'll skip it.
If you're good at lead generation with ads, add it to your stack. Create packages: a full managed service (higher price), ads‑only, and lead nurturing for clients with existing ad funnels. This gives product differentiation, lets you anchor prices, and serves different budgets. Explain fixed vs. variable costs: fixed costs like software subscriptions (e.g., $40/month for Pandadoc, $97 for Instantly, $40 for Zapmail) total about $177/month; variable costs like OpenAI API usage ($5–$50/month) and Apify usage ($30–$300/month). Total cost with error bars: $177 ± ~$55/month. Emphasize that the high value you deliver justifies fees; clients unwilling to pay a small percentage likely aren’t a good fit.
After I stopped door‑to‑door, I primarily got leads through a lead‑aggregation service called bark.com. They run pay‑per‑click ads for you, and you buy the leads at a markup. I didn’t know how to run my own ads, so I paid the service both for the lead and for acquiring it, which left me with roughly 30‑35 % acquisition fees and made the business barely profitable. I would call the leads within seconds of receiving them and also did a lot of cold calling back then. Nowadays the main selling point is the visual aesthetic of the website – it’s like a digital business card. I focus on creating high‑quality, visually appealing sites and often give them away to build reputation.
Hey Nick, please answer the question. I built a lead conversion system, missed call, text back, whatever, and I'm writing paid ads behind it for mortgage brokers. Should I include paid ads? That's interesting. You're selling paid ads plus all of this, which is great—it's like a containerized package service. If you do, charge a media buy fee; a management fee is usually about a third of the media buy. For example, if someone spends $1,000 a month on ads, charge $300 a month. This lets you scale quickly and easily. I see Stephan's question is the same as the previous one, so I'll skip it. Tyler or Joel says thanks. Frank asks how to operate pass‑through credits for services like Appify, Chatp, and Instantly, whether the credits come out of your build, and how to set it up. No—I just get the client to pay for it. When I say pass through, the clients are paying for it. If you want to set it up, you have to do it manually, which sucks. You could update it once a month. If you have their Stripe, you could theoretically auto‑build using Stripe after calculating monthly token usage, but I don't think that's a good idea. The credits don't auto‑build; they stay manual. If you want to do pass‑through, tell the client how much the tokens cost at the end of the contract and then handle it. If you need it ongoing, you need a way to calculate token usage automatically. It's annoying, so I don't recommend it. Snapo thanks me for the free game. I record videos with OBS Studio; zooming or switching views is done live, not in post‑production, which cuts editing time and removes the need to publish to post. I've been building and documenting an automation as well. The fastest way to scale depends on where you are. If you lack demonstrated value, inbound won't work—you need proven results. I've built two agencies, one at $92K and another at $72K, and my agency will soon far exceed those numbers because I've grown the team. I've shown success doing what most people want: starting an agency in the agency space. People want to know how to do that, make money with it, bootstrap, and do cold emails. I'm good at all that, so when I talk about it it's like listening to a bank robber rate his top 10 heists, Lionel Messi rate his top 10 plays, or LeBron talk about dunking. I'm not claiming to be the LeBron of AI automation, but I am the LeBron of AI automation in terms of experience. If you don't have equivalent experience, inbound won't work. Your oldest video is 10 months old; if you've made less than $20K in 10 months (about $2K/month), you'd be better off starting with cold outreach instead of documenting your approach. I hate to say it, but that's the truth. The fastest way to scale really depends on your starting point. Hopefully I've made my point clear. I didn't start with YouTube videos; I made money first, got good at delivering value, then realized I could talk about it for hours, found it affordable to create content, gained authority, and started making videos—and it worked.
No, for the same reasons I've mentioned before — ads don't really make sense at small budgets. It typically takes something like 10x that budget just to begin to tell whether a campaign is actually working or total garbage.