Bob Miner with Dynamic Traders

Intro: [00:00:07] Welcome to Digital Marketing Done Right, a customer success spotlight from Rainmaker Digital Services and Business RadioX. We cover digital marketing success stories drawn from real Rainmaker platform clients and showcase how they use the Rainmaker platform to build their business. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:36] Lee Kantor here with David Brandon, another episode of Digital Marketing done right and this is going to be a good one. Who do we have on the show today, David?

David Brandon: [00:00:43] Hey, Lee Well, we’ve got Bob Miner here from Dynamic Traders. Hey, Bob, good to have you on the show.

Bob Miner: [00:00:52] Hello, I’m here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:53] Well, Bob, before we get too far into things, tell us about dynamic traders, how you serving folks?

Bob Miner: [00:01:00] Well, I’ve had this URL since 1996, so for a long time, three primary products that I’ve sell and that is a subscription based product, financial newsletter about analysis of stock and forex markets, that sort of thing. And I’ve developed a software program for traders many years ago and then I’ve most recently in the last year have released my third major trading course, which is now a streaming course. So that’s what I’ve been doing for a little over 30 years or about 30 years now.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] What’s your backstory? Have you always been involved in trading in some form or fashion and then just kind of evolved into offering all these services for traders?

Bob Miner: [00:01:46] No, I was all self-taught in this, and I began in kind of mid to late 80 seconds with a regular sort of subscription based newsletter that was mailed out. So all the marketing was done, you know, traditional direct mail, magazine articles and ads, as well as at that time, I would almost every month would travel somewhere around the US and sometimes in foreign countries and speak at conferences. So that’s how we attracted business at that time. So the kind of business that I’m in is just made for digital online marketing.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:26] Now, when you were starting out, this is at the beginning of kind of the Internet as we know it. Did you feel like you were able to just kind of transfer some of the knowledge about direct marketing just to the Internet and then use that as kind of the way to deliver those messages?

Bob Miner: [00:02:42] Absolutely. It was particularly earlier on, is that basically we did almost the same marketing on the Internet as we did with digital and not digital with print media, that sort of thing. And that’s mainly because and I really haven’t thought about this to ask the question is we didn’t have such an easy way to attract and capture a lot of email addresses and contact information at that time. I still, even when I had the website in the early years, would go out in person and do speak at conferences and do print ads and that sort of thing, just to get the eyeballs to come to the inner because it was so new. Not that many people were looking on the internet for their information as they have been in recent years or decades. Really?

David Brandon: [00:03:30] Yeah. Bob, do you feel like you got a little bit of a first mover advantage there? I mean, I know you said that this field, it’s a pretty natural fit for your for your industry. Do you feel like there was a first mover advantage for you?

Bob Miner: [00:03:43] There was somewhat, yes. I was kind of early on as far as subscription based. Of course, the Internet and digital marketing just made for subscription based businesses. So I think I had a little bit of a jump start. I can tell you one thing is I didn’t make the best advantage of it over the years because I did so well before I had the website and did digital marketing, and I did so well in those first few years that I kind of coasted and got left behind in a lot of the new marketing through social media and, you know, email campaigns and that sort of thing. So even though I’d been doing this a long time, I’ve still the last few years kind of learning new things and catching up.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:27] Because you’re always have to kind of have that top of the funnel collection of emails to send information to right like that. There’s no shortcut for that.

Bob Miner: [00:04:37] The whole business is based on your email list. You know, that’s the that’s the whole business is email list and how you communicate and treat your customers through that email list.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:49] So like you said, there has been an evolution and you always have to kind of, I guess, make some adjustments based on new information and new platforms that arrive in the on the Internet. How have you handled that? You said you were you feel you were kind of not not very late, but maybe later than you would have liked When looking back, how do you kind of stay in the forefront when there’s new platforms popping up, you know, seemingly every day?

Bob Miner: [00:05:15] Oh, I don’t know if I’m in the forefront. I’m kind of always catching up. I mean, literally, I am like I said, I’m learning new stuff right now. I can tell you something that happened to me a few years ago and actually why I’m now on the Rainmaker platform. As I was for years, my entire website database, everything was custom custom built. I probably spent 20 to $30,000 a year on maintaining that. I know, I know. And and I spent that kind of money long after I needed to, but I had my own server. It was hosted in a company in New York. And the guy that originally built the back end, well back end and front end. Um, we had that server backed up and you know, he’s the tech genius and the server was backed up with a hard drive connected to the server, which means no backup. And I got hacked and ransomed by, you know, the Russian mob basically, and encrypted. And one day I had a very thriving business and the next day I had zero. And because our backup and you know, it sounds foolish now, but because our backup was just connected hard drive connected to the server it was backing up the hard drive. It wasn’t backing up. The data is everything was lost in one day. And so I was out of business for more than six months. And that’s what brought me to Rainmaker as a system that was integrated already that I could hopefully, you know, get jumpstarted a lot quicker than what had taken me in earlier years.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:03] Now, there are several components of your business, right? You have the reports, you have education, there’s software. Do you treat each one of them as their own business with their own kind of funnels and their own kind of communication cadences? Like how do you create the content for each of the different parts of your business?

Bob Miner: [00:07:26] No, they’re all, they’re all integrated. Uh, the, the, the lowest cost entryway to what I have is a subscription to a report. Right. So that’s, that’s the primary marketing is for the subscriptions to the reports. And then through that report someone might subscribe a while and they, they see the software I’m using is my software that I developed. They might get interested in that. And of course that’s a big jump in cost. And then if they really want to take their education further, then I have the streaming course that, by the way, I wrote the first self-study futures trading course that was ever made in 1989. So. Wow. Yeah. So my my background, I briefly worked in the early 80 seconds as a real estate agent and worked with some of these, you know, middle of the night infomercial people that traveled around the country. And when I started trading and doing a newsletter, which was always been an educational newsletter as well as an analysis, as I said, you know, there is no trading course available. So I wrote one and it was very successful. And because I knew how to promote it and sell it and that went on, I sold that for many years and then I did a another course and that was released in 2006.

Bob Miner: [00:08:52] But it was on a a CD or DVD, and it was for its time it was pretty advanced. But of course, we got to the point where nobody even had a CD player to play it. So, you know, sort of had to redo that. And now through the Rainmaker and LearnDash is it’s been just a little over a year ago, I spent one year producing this course that’s currently available and it’s probably. The most comprehensive and reasonably priced and real world trading course that’s out there. That doesn’t mean that everybody believes that it’s that, but it probably is. And it sells fairly well. And I guess I should mention also that the lead in to all of my business has been two books that I’ve written, and the first book was self-published in late 90 seconds, but I sold about a half million dollars of that book in 6 or 7 years, and that jumpstarted the entire business. And the second book was it’s now 10 or 12 years old, but then it kept the business going. So that’s the lead in Everybody should know is educational material, whether it’s a book or something, you know, free report that you give out is the greatest email contact capturing mechanism there is.

David Brandon: [00:10:14] Oh, absolutely. I mean, we’ve talked we talked about promotion a little bit here. I’m curious if you can expand on that. You know, you’ve you’ve got your email list that you use. I’ve seen you put out your weekly YouTube videos, which it looks great. You know, you’ve talked about books being a way to get people in the door. What do you think is the most effective promotional avenue that you’ve had over the years?

Bob Miner: [00:10:40] Well, the book. The book? Yeah, the the book has probably been the most effective because a book, if it’s done right. I mean, one, it’s got to be a really good book and it has to sell. You know, you have to market it. So there’s a lot of good books that don’t sell because it could be the title, it could be the marketing. But if you market it and you get it out there and people read it and they understand it and they learn from it, everything has to be for the customer. You know, you got to it can’t be a promotional product. It has to be an educational, really good educational product. They’re going to come to you then for sure, because there’s so much material out there and there’s so much not just in what I do, what everybody does that is not quality material that’s written to to make sure it gets really great value to the customer, that the customer figures that out pretty quick. I’m reading a promotional book, you know, forget it. Now I’m reading something that I want to keep going through it because I’m learning something. So that’s one of the best ways. And you know, it’s not practical to tell everyone, go write a book, but some solid educational material on your website, whether it’s a free handout that is not just a promotional handout, but is really good, useful education well written. Well, people come back to you now. It’s pretty simple stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:07] Is that a mistake? You see, maybe some entrepreneurs make that they don’t kind of share the good stuff, that they’re holding back too much and they lean on maybe being clever or try to persuade somebody to do.

Speaker5: [00:12:22] You know, to to.

[00:12:23] Sign up for something that really isn’t providing an overwhelming amount of information. That’s absolutely a mistake. It’s absolutely And particularly telling people, well, I can’t tell you about this until you pay me. You know, that’s the kiss of death for any business and absolute kiss of death. Um, so you you want to make everything that they get from you valuable because the lifetime value, at least in my business, the lifetime value of a customer is huge. You know, it’s hundreds of dollars every year. I’ve got customers that have had 20, 30 years sort of thing. And the low periods, those people that stick with you because everything you do is valuable is what keeps you, keeps you going. And since content is so important, how like in a given week, how much of your time do you invest in creating valuable content now? Probably 12 hours.

Bob Miner: [00:13:23] So a big thing. I’ve been doing this a long time. So.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:27] So. But a big part of your week is creating content and delivering content.

Bob Miner: [00:13:32] Well, it is, but it’s delivering my reports. That’s what that’s where my time goes, is I issue this report three times a week, and two of those times includes a 20 to 30 minute video analysis. So that’s got to be recorded and edited and as well as it accompanies a written report. So that’s where the most of my time is. I if I were younger, I would be spending much more time on new marketing material. But, you know, I’m not younger.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:07] But is that is creating and delivering the content. Is that something that you look forward to nowadays or is that something that’s kind of a necessary evil to be part of your business?

Bob Miner: [00:14:18] Well, it’s never a necessary evil if it’s part of your business, part of your business. So, of course, you know, anything I do, I’m trying to do the best at it and and keep the business going so and maximize my time. And I mean, I’ve been doing it a long time, so I have a base. It’s not like, you know, it’s free money from the sky. I still got to earn it, but I’ve been doing it a long time. So I’ve, I have a lot of routines that and a large mailing list and a reasonable number of subscribers. So but when you beginning is, you know, then you have to constantly, you know, everyone tells you that, oh, you’re self-employed, you got your own website, that’s fantastic. Get to work when you want. Yeah, They don’t know in the first ten years you’re working ten, 12 hours a day work extra. Yeah, exactly. It’s like you never stop because you’re. You’re never finished. There’s always something more you can do. And that’s, that’s still the same with me. But, but I’m just I’m kind of coasting now, to tell you the truth. I’ll tell you one thing, too. This one thing I really missed out doing is having a partner in someone particularly, you know, I kind of miss all the early years of the social marketing revolution, so to speak, because I was coasting. And, you know, if I had had a partner who kept on top of that or someone younger or whatever, you know, I could have taken advantage of that much better than I have now.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:00] Is it just as rewarding to you nowadays when you have a trade that goes extremely well, or if one of your clients has a trade that goes extremely well?

Bob Miner: [00:16:11] Well, I don’t know how my clients are trading. I know how I am. Part of what I do is just and this is personal, but it works for marketing is I’ve won a number of international trading contests. And so that’s, you know, that’s that kind of puts me in a category that a lot of people aren’t in and that I’ve actually traded quite successfully and I can prove it. Whereas most people selling courses and information have never actually successfully successfully traded. So the lesson learned, regardless of what information you’re selling, hopefully you have some way to show that you’ve been successful doing what what you’re trying to teach people to do. And that’s very unusual in any business.

David Brandon: [00:17:04] Yeah, I was going to ask, do you feel like that’s really like, do you feel like that’s something that more people should focus on first before they start trying to peddle themselves? And I think because I’m on the younger side, I see a lot of people around my age kind of trying to talk about it before doing it to some degree. Do you think that’s a danger?

Bob Miner: [00:17:24] Well, you know, I mean, that’s the entire universe of YouTube. Yeah. No, basically. And Twitter, if you want a legitimate, long lasting business, is whatever it is you’re teaching, you should have experienced success in it. Otherwise, all you’re doing is regurgitating something someone else has taught. So, I mean, it’s kind of that simple. And that’s kind of the the integrity part, reliability part and the authentic part that usually comes through. People usually figure that out whether you’re authentic or not. And so, yeah, I mean, you can only speak with authority if you’ve had successful experience doing it.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:10] Now for you. You started pre-Internet and had success in a on a book that that you published. Was there any kind of hurdles prior to that? Like in being taken seriously and being respected in the industry when you just starting out, you didn’t have that kind of badge of success, you know, and and winning awards yet, but you made that leap to having the credential and that social proof that you are who you say you are. How did you handle those early days?

Bob Miner: [00:18:45] Well, mostly, I guess I never tried to be something or someone I wasn’t. I didn’t try to allude to anyone that I was a great trader or investor or whatever. I sold information and very straight up about that is that in the early years I was obviously just an analyst, So I had a unique way of looking at the market and I communicated that well and people were interested in that information. So there’s a lot of people in my business that don’t trade, but they don’t try to convince people that they’re a great trader. They’ll say, I got a really good friend of mine who I’ve known for 30 years in the business, and she’s never traded, never traded or on and off, maybe a bit, but she’s real up front with people. I’m an analyst. I’m going to spend my time giving you information that you can use to make decisions. And so you just have to be up front with people on who you are, what you do, and and hopefully what you’re good at doing and how you can help them with that information.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:56] Now, you mentioned you have kind of several tiers of I guess I’ll call them membership in your site, in your community. Were you always looking at some sort of progression from a, you know, kind of a top of the funnel report to a more expensive offering, whatever that would be down the line? Or was that something that just evolved over time?

Bob Miner: [00:20:18] Yeah, it really just evolved over time. I mean, the early days was just a mailed out newsletter once a month and that never really grew very big. But through that and keeping her subscriber base is I learned a lot more. You’re constantly learning no matter what you’re doing. And at some point, you know, I quit the day job, so to speak, and just focused on that and and writing the course. My first course, you know, the first course was 12 audio tapes and two three ring binders and a great big 11 by 17 inch chart bucket. And it was I kid people. I sold it by the pound. It was a 17 pound package that, you know, I shipped out of my garage. But you know, it was $1,000 package. So you do a few of those a week or a day and pretty soon you got, they say, real money.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:17] Now, were you getting mentored at all or were you just seeing what else was out there and then saying, oh, that’s a good idea, Why don’t I start doing that? Like like how did you kind of learn all these more and more sophisticated marketing strategies as you progressed?

Bob Miner: [00:21:33] Just study, study, study. I read every book I could find on marketing. One of the best things we did at that time, I still do it is at the time is I cut out magazine ads that you see over and over again because they must be working if they’re being published every month somewhere. And that’s you know, that was recommended in some famous person’s marketing book because, you know, you don’t have to recreate the wheel. You got to find what’s working for someone else. Maybe you put your own spin on it and you know, they’ve done the work for you. So, you know, some ad agency with, you know, spending a lot of money has figured out how to write that ad right. And so just kind of copy that. It’s kind of like with websites is look at websites of successful companies, you know, and you learn as much as you can. Hand about website design and marketing, what works. But then always think about a company has been around a long time, could be small, could be big. What’s working for them? It’s probably more likely, by the way, it’s probably small. You know, the more you learn and when you go to big corporations websites, you go, Who’s thinking up this stuff? I’m so confused. I don’t know what they’re selling me or how to find the information.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:49] Now, when you had that crisis with the ransomware, what you could have gone to a variety of resources after that. What kind of drew you to Rainmaker?

Bob Miner: [00:23:04] All in one package, Basically, You know, that’s the that’s the idea is that you don’t have to put together all these components. You don’t have to put together with WordPress and your shopping cart and your membership, you know, plug in and all that. It was it was pretty much all together and it was membership based. And so that’s my primary business. And you know, we learned to work around it and how to sell the software and the add ons and all of that. So yeah, it was, it was a packaged package deal. And that I think has a lot of promise for people that are not programmers or not designers are, you know, all the, all the companies like WordPress say all this is real easy to do. It’s not, you know, it’s or maybe I’m missing something, I don’t know. But but it appealed to me that it was a package deal. And once you got it, got your site up and running. The the overhead is very reasonable, let’s say. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:15] So now moving forward, is there anything you’re excited about for some of the future marketing trends? Like I know that you feel like you’re late to the game in a lot of ways and some of these platforms, but whatever you’re doing seems to be working. Is there any that you would like to just play around with or is there any that you’re saying, okay, this one I’m going to pass on or like anything future looking that you’d like to share?

Bob Miner: [00:24:46] Well, I’m doing I’m in the midst of hopefully doing a fairly substantial redesign of the website. I’ve already made a lot of changes and it’s based a lot on, what’s his name, Donald Miller’s Storybrand approach. Yeah. And and I think it’s for about three years I’ve been reading all this stuff and taking all of his courses and finally going, Oh, okay, I think this, this works. This looks good. So yeah, I’m constantly looking to improve it and get a new method of capturing emails and driving more traffic to the site. And, and I’m actually totally reinvigorated. I’m writing a new book, which is probably going to be my swan song, so to speak, and, you know, that sort of thing. I’m constantly improving. You got to constantly improve, change the format of the newsletter and content Every 2 or 3 years or so, I do surveys with my subscribers and say, What’s in this that you like? You know what don’t you? Don’t you use much? And I’ll change it. And, you know, you just you can’t stop. Someone else is going to pass you up.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:01] Now, that’s great advice for our listeners that are building some sort of a community. How can you talk a little bit about it seems so obvious, but communicating with your members to ask them what they’d like more of what they like, less of it seems like common sense, but has that always been part of your kind of dynamic when you were talking with folks, like, were you always asking for feedback and asking advice from your the people in your community, or was that something that happened over time?

Bob Miner: [00:26:35] Uh, well, my situation is a little bit different. I have almost no contact with customers. I have a woman that’s worked for me for 30 years, and. And about every 5 or 6 years I’ll see her because she’s in Tucson, Arizona, and I’m in North Carolina. But so she she deals directly with all customers. I get forwarded an email if they have a question. But what I do do is whenever I get emails, I look at what what are they asking about? What have they what is confusing to them about our product services, our information? And then at least every two years I do a survey of all subscribers. You know, you could subscribe to like Survey Monkey or whatever and do a for that matter, for free. I think you can do a a quickie survey with a few questions. And that’s the best feedback that I’ve gotten over the years, is I ask them specifically and I and I narrow the choices, you know, for them to choose from. You always want to make a survey so they can do it in about two minutes, uh, and ask a limited number of questions. But I find out what it is they’re looking to get educated on, which markets they want to see, what time frames and that and that’s how I might redesign the content or the format of the newsletter that they get on a regular basis as well as what it is I’m going to teach them.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:03] Now. Have you been doing that since the very beginning of the surveys or is that more recent?

Bob Miner: [00:28:09] Oh, for a long time, probably 20 years anyway.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:12] Yeah. So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Speaker6: [00:28:17] Um.

Bob Miner: [00:28:18] I don’t know. Right now, I’m pretty. I’m pretty happy, you know, unless you can, you know, write for me. But right now, you know, I’m pretty happy with the system. You know, there’s there’s a few things with the reporting and the information about, particularly for memberships that I’ve made suggestions and a lot of them that have been taken and improved on and and rainmaker and there’s a few more that would be helpful. But because data is the name of the game, all marketing is data based marketing. So you have to have the best data you can on who’s buying, what percentage are buying, how many, and really important who’s renewing, not renewing when you have a subscription base. But I’m pretty happy.

David Brandon: [00:29:11] And especially now with with third party data kind of dying out, it seems like first party data is going to be really, really important moving forward.

Bob Miner: [00:29:20] Well, it’s always. You mean first party your own data? Yeah. I mean, that’s always been the most important. Those those are the people that come to you are they’re pre-qualified. If you if they give you their contact information, they’re prequalified as being interested in your product. So that’s the that’s the data you really want to have. You want to understand and you want to understand how often they come back, what they’re coming back to look at. You want to be able to analyze every email that you send out and how many people open it, read it and respond, all those sorts of things. Um, like I said, it’s like any business is if they come to you, they’re pre-qualified to be a probable customer, you know, at some point in time.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:13] Well, Bob, if somebody wants to learn more about dynamic traders, can you share the website dynamic traders.com. Good stuff. Well thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you. You bet. All right. This. This is Lee Kantor for David Brandon. We’ll see you all next time on digital marketing. Done right.