Approaching his website content with a unique blend of helpful information, bold transparency, and more than a dash of his own brand of humor, Misheloff has been successful not only in educating his clients and growing his business, but he’s been having a good time doing it too.
And like many who share similar success stories in the world of great content, Misheloff just kind of stumbled into it.
About Smarter Finance USA
Misheloff got his start back in 2003 when he formed a small reverse-mortgage direct mail company that sent out mailers to elderly people who were “house rich, but cash poor.”
He loved his job because he felt that he was really making a difference in people’s lives by offering them a chance to access their home equity while deferring mortgage payments until after their death. With reverse mortgages, elderly clients “no longer had to make the tough decisions of choosing between food and medicine, even though they owned their house,” says Misheloff. However in 2013, changes to the product Misheloff was selling made it less viable, and Misheloff was left scrambling to find a new business.
Because direct mailing had worked so well for him in the past, he believed that he just needed to find a new market in which he could easily create a niche for himself.
Through a former employee, he heard about the equipment financing industry. But when Misheloff started digging into the financing trade to learn more about the competitors already in the field, he found something quite disturbing.
One of the things I loved about my direct mailing business was that it was in an industry where most of our customers were really good people and they wanted the best for their clients. There were very few charlatans. We found that in the equipment financing industry from listening to our customers that they were just being lied to by brokers and lenders. These other companies knew that guys driving trucks didn’t really know finance, so they could just tell them anything.
Misheloff wanted to be in a business that truly helped people solve their problems, and he “wasn’t going to be in a business to help others steal from small business owners.”
With this desire at heart, in January 2014 Misheloff made the decision to start Smarter Finance USA. This new company would help people looking to finance equipment for small businesses by giving them as much information as they needed to make informed financial decisions.
However, Misheloff quickly realized that his old tactics of using direct mailing to solicit new leads just wasn’t as effective as it had been in the reverse-mortgage world he had previously occupied. And so, like many start-up companies looking to stake their claims in a new trade, Misheloff took to the Web.
I got started at the end of January 2014 and realized I needed to get some leads. I first tried some spam e-mails—they didn’t work so well. Then I turned to PPC (pay per click/Google AdWords), which were a little successful in generating leads, but not really worth the price I was paying per click. With this method, I was able to get people to a one-page landing page and try to work the leads from there, but it’s really hard to quickly earn the trust of someone trying to get a loan, especially because these people know absolutely nothing about you or your business.
Smarter Finance USA Embraces They Ask, You Answer
The philosophies of They Ask, You Answer came to Misheloff completely by chance as he was up late one night and saw a link someone had posted of my e-book, Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy. With his wife and daughter asleep, Misheloff figured a quick look at the book couldn’t hurt anything.
I actually ended up reading the entire book that night. It was the first time in my life I had ever read a book and said “This is literally going to change my life.” And I didn’t even know why I had so much faith, but I did. I just knew this was for me.
Within days, Misheloff and I were on the phone discussing his goals and planning out a strategy that would, in many ways, make him the kingpin of his space.
The principles of content marketing and They Ask, You Answer really spoke to Misheloff because they epitomized what he had felt all along, and what he found to be missing among his peers in his industry: he wanted to bring truth and honesty back into online financing information—and he planned on doing it better than anybody had before.
Misheloff didn’t want to simply find financial success. He is one of those rare types who genuinely wants to help people in difficult situations get the best care they can, so that they have a shot at building a successful small business of their own.
Smarter Finance USA Focuses on Educating Small Business Owners Searching for Equipment Loans Online
Among the first pieces of content that Misheloff ever wrote were those aimed at dispelling the dishonesty found in so many of his competitors’ rate quotes and to carefully explain to readers how they could avoid getting scammed while searching for equipment loans.
He focused on articles that explained the pros and cons of leasing equipment, how people can easily spot a loan scam, and he wrote other articles that detailed the problems with the leasing industry in general. Here are a few examples:
“A Review of Go Capital: Are They Legit?”
“5 Ways to Get Out of a Merchant Cash Advance (and Other Toxic Business Loans)”
“5 Lies Heavy Equipment Financing Companies Tell You”
“5 Restaurant Equipment Leasing Swindles to Avoid”
“Gym Equipment Leasing: True Costs of Fitness Equipment Financing”
“An Honest Review of One of the Best Truck Factoring Companies”
“Private Business Loans: 5 Secrets the Big Boys Hope You Never Learn”
“Contractor Loans: “7 Ways to Finance Your Construction Business”
“Small Business Term Loan vs. Merchant Cash Advance: Which Is Best?”
“Daily Payment Loans for Your Business: Do They Ever Make Sense?” It’s such a dirty industry. It’s unregulated, and so people will outright lie to customers. You can even find it on the front page of Google. Some of the biggest companies in the industry always start by saying, “Our rates are 5 percent.” But almost none of the people shopping online for equipment financing are ever going to qualify for a 5 percent rate. For a small business owner shopping online for financing, those rates almost never exist.
With such focus on exposing truth versus scams, Misheloff gained more and more respect from consumers for his willingness to address the industry’s elephants, and in that process, he gained a phenomenal amount of trust. In fact, it became quite common that people would reach out to Misheloff after reading his articles on scams and then send him the contracts they’d received from leasing companies to ask if the contract looked fair.
“I see some of these contracts and they’re total garbage designed to steal from people,” says Misheloff. “It’s really disgusting that this happens in my industry.”
Misheloff has made it his mission to set the record straight about equipment leasing online, and in just a little more than two years has produced hundreds of articles and videos detailing how people can get financed for a wide variety of equipment.
Whether he’s writing about how to get financed for dump trucks, limousines, food trucks, welding equipment, arcade games, forklifts, chiropractic equipment, or any other equipment for which a small business may need to find financing, Misheloff works hard to make sure that his content is thorough, informative, transparent, and even humorous at times.
He also prides himself on the fact that while some content marketers claim to knock out entire articles every day, he can spend up to three days working on a single piece of content. But he does it with the assurance that it’s going to “be the best stuff that’s out there.”
I take subjects that have very low keyword value (aren’t necessarily searched by many people), and make these huge articles out of them. I have multiple infographics that I make myself, and I add videos, and all kinds of other crazy stuff, because I figure that each article I write is going to produce leads for years. I’m not writing the a
rticles for just right now, because right now it’s actually kind of easy to rank for a lot of these things in Google because my competitors are still doing it the way they’ve always done it. But I know in a few years these same competitors will start to figure out that they really need to be producing content and answering consumer questions themselves, but by the time they get with the times, it’s going to be tough to knock me off the hill, regardless of how large they are as an organization.
Smarter Finance USA’s Educational Content Pays Off in a Big Way
And the proof of Misheloff’s efforts lies in the growth that he has experienced in both traffic and in leads. In just under two years, Misheloff’s site has been doubling nearly every two to three months in traffic, starting with just a few hundred visits at the beginning to more than 25,000 visits in late 2015. And during this time he has amassed more than 2,600 new contacts who have taken the time to fill out a form on his website.
Misheloff himself was even stunned by the number of leads he was getting every month and shortly realized that he wouldn’t be able to work every deal himself.
For the most part, I don’t even work the leads anymore, I get over five hundred leads a month just from the website and another hundred or two in phone calls. I don’t have my own team, so what I do is farm the leads out to a few different companies that I think are the best fit for the types of leads I’m getting.
When asked about specific ROI (return on investment) Misheloff stated:
January 2015 (about six months in) was when I saw my first dollar of revenue from all the work I was doing.
First quarter of 2015 I ended up closing six transactions totaling $220,000 in fundings, resulting in $11,846 revenue. Not a lot, but this was enough to validate that money could be made.
First quarter of 2016: thirty transactions, $2,045,000 in fundings, resulting in $144,112 in revenues. A good chunk of that revenue is shared with affiliates, but what I am taking home for the first quarter of 2016 is about $55,000 in profit.
Misheloff knows that if he hired more staff and rented out a legitimate workspace he could broker most the deals in-house and keep the lion’s share of the profit. But Misheloff is more concerned about maintaining the lifestyle that he has come to know and love.
When you’re not paying for the leads, you have to ask yourself: “Am I more interested in maximizing my profits, or my happiness?” And for me, the answer is, “I just want to do it the inbound way.” I don’t want to open an office, or have a large staff, or spend my day talking into a phone, or have to drive into work every day. I get to work from home in shorts and a T-shirt. I don’t have any stress; I don’t have anything to worry about.
And not only that, but Misheloff, unlike many businesses, has always seen his size as a major advantage when embracing the digital consumer. Instead of all the red tape that typically comes with working for larger organizations, if he wants to talk about something, he talks about it. If he wants to get something done, he does it.
You hear people saying how tough it is to make it on the Internet, and that you have to be some megacorporation to be successful—it’s all crap! Just obsess over your customer. Figure out what they’re thinking, asking, and going through. Then have the guts to address it. This philosophy has made me who I am, and offered me an extraordinary lifestyle in the process.
An extraordinary lifestyle and an even more extraordinary example of what one person can do despite an incredibly competitive niche. All in a day’s work for Rob Misheloff.
17
Content Subject 3
Versus and Comparisons
The third major content subject of the Big 5 is that of “versus” and/or “comparisons.”
As consumers, we’re fascinated with comparisons. We love knowing the best, the worst, and everything in between. And having all the information in the world at our fingertips has made this thirst even more prominent.
Just consider for a moment the last major purchase you made. Were you looking only at one option or multiple? If you’re like most buyers, before you made the purchasing decision you researched multiple options; ultimately making your decision after stacking them up against each other and then choosing the one that you felt was best for your needs.
But you’re not alone. Hundreds of thousands of comparisons are searched online every single day.
When I was a pool guy, the story was no different. In fact, our biggest competition wasn’t other fiberglass pool builders, but rather concrete or vinyl liner in-ground swimming pool companies. Because fiberglass was “the new kid on the block,” other pool companies would continually criticize it, claiming it was flawed, inferior, cheap, “not a real pool,” and so on.
In fact, over the years, one of the top questions I received from potential customers was, “Okay Marcus, be honest, why would I get a fiberglass pool over concrete?”
For a long time, like most pool builders, I didn’t address this question on our company website. We simply talked about fiberglass, and that was it. In hindsight, this was really, really dumb.
I can’t even imagine how many potential customers dismissed us because they had received wrong, or inaccurate, information from another source. Furthermore, I don’t know how many hours I had wasted on the phone and in person with shoppers who clearly were not a good fit for fiberglass. But because they didn’t know any better, their time—and my time—was wasted.
Once we embraced They Ask, You Answer as a company, it became obvious we needed to address this major question. But what really pushed us over the edge was the following e-mail we received from a reader of the website:
As you’re no doubt well aware, it’s a desert wasteland when trying to find information on pools. . . . Sorting through the Internet for usable information is difficult in the extreme. Of the few forums I’ve found, most devolve into trolls arguing gunite (concrete) vs. fiberglass vs. vinyl liner—over and over and over and over. What would help a great deal is to find some kind of unbiased information that explains each pool in detail and then backs off—letting me (or the customer) make the final decision.
So finally, after receiving this e-mail and hearing the same question hundreds of times over the years, we produced an article on our website entitled, “Fiberglass Pools vs Vinyl Liner Pools vs Concrete Pools: An Honest Comparison.”
Once again, we were the first in our space to address the question.
And why were we first?
Simple—companies were focused more on their own fears and inadequacies than on what consumers really wanted to know.
Fiberglass pool builders were literally using the following logic:
Our biggest competition is concrete swimming pools. So as to deal with this problem, we’re not even going to discuss concrete pools on our website. And if we don’t discuss them on our website, no one will know they exist.
Yes, you did just read that correctly.
And yes, that was the logic of fiberglass pool builders for years (and still, for many, to this day).
But as you can surely imagine, this example in the swimming pool space is replicated and followed in just about every other industry in the world. It’s what we all do—a classic case of ostrich marketing.
We think if we ignore the problem (or question) that it will go away, but it doesn’t. And ignoring it only destroys trust.
Remember: Consumer ignorance is no longer a viable sales and marketing strategy.
If we’re counting on the idea that a prospect or customer isn’t going to find out about that other option, sale, discount, brand, technology, methodology, or other factor, then we’re sorely mistaken.
Just because a consumer might start out as ignorant (not informed), eventually they will become an informed buyer. In fact, many will get to a place where they’re even more informed than the vendor or sales person they’re dealing with.
It’s a reality of the digital age.
And because of this reality, we have to live and do business by a different
standard. We must say to ourselves, Let’s assume our prospects and customers know every single other possible solution, possible vendor, and possible competitor out there. If we conduct our business that way, and design all of our sales and marketing messaging to be aligned with this philosophy, the possibilities are literally endless.
The Results
So what was the result of honestly comparing all types of swimming pools?
Well, as you likely already guessed, searchers (consumers) and search engines alike absolutely loved the content.
As a company, we received dozens and dozens of compliments from swimming pool shoppers after we published the article, expressing just how thrilled they were to finally read an “unbiased” review of the different types of pools. And with more informed shoppers who were able to truly understand the differences between the types of pools, we received dramatically fewer phone calls and went on way fewer appointments of “bad-fit” prospects—those for whom a fiberglass pool was clearly not the best option.
Along with this success, the search engines once again rewarded our willingness to address supposedly “difficult” questions. Even to this day, our website is the first to show up in a Google Search Engine results page when you type in:
Fiberglass vs. concrete pools
Fiberglass vs. vinyl pools
Vinyl vs. concrete pools
Concrete compared to fiberglass pools
Concrete compared to vinyl liner pools
And on and on
They Ask You Answer Page 7
