The Power of Nonprofits: How to Get $120k in Free Google Ads with Travis Zigler

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like the Goal Digger Podcast. Today, we'll be talking all about the power of nonprofits, how to get$120 ,000 in free Google ads. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Travis Ziegler into EO Fire Studios. Travis is an optometrist turned entrepreneur. He now runs profitable pineapple ads, which specializes in growing nonprofits with$120 ,000 per year with a Google ads grant and growing brands using Amazon.

0:43And today, Fire Nation will talk about eligibility, the application process, how to use it correctly, success stories, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Travis and our sponsors. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Litters, Ben Berkley, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on hackers versus casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyberattacks.

1:21Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Don't be the bottleneck to your organization's growth. Accomplish more with Belay. To get started, schedule a free delegation consultation with Belay in just 30 minutes. See how their flexible staffing solutions can grow your business and free you up to lead. Text FIRE to 55123 to schedule your delegation consultation today. Travis, say what's up to FIRE Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? Fire Nation, excited to be here. One thing that most people disagree with that I am a firm believer in is that most people think you have to sacrifice service for profits of your company.

2:08And what I believe is that the more you focus on service, the more profitable you'll actually become. And so if you serve your audience, you're going to make a lot more money. So start focusing on service and stop focusing on the profits as much. Fire Nation, what a great way to kick off this episode, which has the amazing title of The Power of Nonprofits, How to Get 120K in Free Google Ads. And so I want to talk right away about these Google Ad Grants. What are they and how can they benefit both nonprofits and brands. And that's the key thing here, Fire Nation, is that this isn't just for nonprofits.

2:50The Google Ads grant is, but my goal with this is to convince you guys that everyone needs a nonprofit. We're all in business to do good in this world. And so that's where a nonprofit can really come in. And then we get to take advantage of this$120 ,000 per year. $120 ,000 per year, That's$10 ,000 per month. That's$329 per day in free advertising credits. And this is for eligible nonprofits. So don't tune out because we're going to go through a lot, I think, going over this nonprofit stuff. But you can utilize this to build up your mission. You can raise awareness about anything that you believe in, to attract volunteers if you're an existing nonprofit, of course, to get donations, to drive traffic to a website of your choice, or even make aware a product that you might sell in your business side.

3:41And I want to continue to kind of dive deep into exactly who this can benefit. And let's kind of tie in the eligibility. Like what exactly is the eligibility criteria for nonprofits if they want to qualify for this$120K, which again, I love those numbers. That's$10K a month, Fire Nation,$329 a day. What could you do with that money flowing eyeballs to your brand, to your business? So talk about that, Travis. The main eligibility or the main eligible criteria is you have to hold a valid charity status or a 501c3. And the best way to put this is, I mean, everybody knows what a nonprofit is. Everybody knows what a foundation is, a charity, the 501c3 status.

4:29That's what you need to be eligible for this. Now, how can we use this to not only lift up, uplift the world by making people more aware of the nonprofit that you might run? But if you run a business, you could also build a nonprofit on the side that solves the pain point of your business. And so a quick example of this, we ran a dry eye company called iLove. My wife and I sold it in 2021. We built it up from 2015 to 2021. At the same time, we were building a foundation called the iBelieve Foundation, which we still run and have. It's iBelieve.Foundation is the website for that. And what we did is we used the foundation to promote the brand, to make people aware.

5:13So we were a dry eye brand. We created a foundation around education on dry eye. And so we made people aware of what's out there for dry eye products. And then we happened to have some of those products, but we didn't have them all. Now, since we've sold that company, we no longer are part of it. We are now affiliates for products that we truly believe in. And we've become affiliates in the nonprofit realm for brands that we believe in, and they pay us an affiliate commission. So we use the Google Ads grant to get people onto our website, to increase the awareness of the mission work that we do.

5:46We do mission work down in the Caribbean. Puerto Rico has not been on the list yet, but it might be soon. Yes. And Jamaica is our main hub that we go to. so we go to Jamaica quite a bit. We make people aware of that mission, let them know what their funds go to, and then we educate them on problems that they might be having, such as dry eye, such as styes, such as blepharitis. Those are just fancy medical terms for problems with your eyelids. And then we affiliate products, and then those brands that we're affiliating to pay our nonprofit a donation, and that's what helps us get donations through the door.

6:20But in the meantime, people also donate to us because they're aware of us by using this 120 ,000 in free Google ads. Now, there is some criteria around if you have a nonprofit and you have a business and if you can affiliate your own product. And we can probably get into that a little bit later. But I just want to put out a little teaser that we will talk about some drawbacks maybe in just a little bit. Well, I do want to move into some of those common challenges that nonprofits are going to face when they apply. And of course, we want to talk about how we can overcome these challenges because they are overcomable.

6:54So let's kind of go through that application process for these grants. Talk about some common challenges and, of course, the best strategies and tactics with those. Yeah, so let's just walk through the application process. It's incredibly simple. We actually just started our fourth nonprofit. We're a little obsessed. But we just started our fourth nonprofit called SugarSmart. And our goal with this, I know you have a child on the way, so this might appeal to you in about a year or so. We are sick of what our child is fed. If you go to a child's school and they're feeding them sugar, added sugar products, and so what we're trying to create is education and awareness around healthy snacking for kids.

7:36And so this is mostly towards parents to find healthy snacks that don't have any sugar added. That's kind of the goal of that nonprofit. and then we're creating a business at the same time which we haven't started yet it's just kind of in the works and our main thing that we're going to go after is Nutella. Nutella is 80 % sugar 20 % palm oil it's just pure crap and we're going to come out with a whole foods alternative to that and it's going to have almonds cashews cocoa dates and no palm oil because we don't want to deforest the rainforest and then no sugar because we're trying to avoid the added sugar So we're creating that nonprofit.

8:14So let's walk through that process. We file for it. There's a lot of things that go through it, but there are partners out there and we can help with this. And there's a lot of steps to go through that to make sure you have all the paperwork correct with the IRS. Once we have your eligibility confirmed as a 501c3, we then register with what's called TechSoup. TechSoup is just this third-party organization that verifies that you're real. And then once we do that, we'll then create a Google for Nonprofits account. And right inside the Google for Nonprofits account, you apply for that Google Ads grant.

8:49It's literally four simple steps. Confirm eligibility of the 501c3, TechSoup, which takes about five minutes, a Google Nonprofit account, which takes about 10 minutes, Google Ads grant takes about five minutes to apply for. Now, jumping into your common challenges that you have with the nonprofit, the biggest one that we see or for the Google ads grant process, the biggest one we see is the website requirements. Our website got turned down, I think 12 times before we finally got it. And they just have certain criteria. Like you have to have a secure website. Of course, everybody needs that anyway.

9:24You have to have substantial stuff on your website. You have to have good blogs. You have to have the mission. You have to have your core values. And the funny thing is like we kept getting denied. And the one thing that they wanted was our financials. So kind of like how you do an income statement, we just had to put that on the front page, the income statement of the nonprofit. So the biggest challenge that we're seeing right now is that, is making sure your website is eligible for Google Ads grants. But usually it's just a couple of small things here and there. Once we change them, it goes right up.

9:56Fire Nation, I hope you realize that everything here is figureoutable. I mean, there wasn't much time on any of those steps that Travis was talking about. Of course, there's some common obstacles with the things that he did share. I mean, you've got to create the content, you need the financial aspect of it, and a few other things, but especially if you're going to be consulting and talking to people who know what they're doing, you can get this process done quick. You can make this happen in a reasonable timeframe. And then we're going to talk about what to do once you do all of this when we get back from thinking our sponsors.

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13:54You want to make sure you're using the right strategies, the right tactics. So talk about those strategies. Talk about those tactics that you think that we should adopt to maximize our ad reach and the just overall impact of what we're doing. So here's the cool part about what I'm going to go over right now. This isn't just for Google Ads grants. This isn't just for nonprofits. This is for your brand. This is for your business. This is for your podcast. This is for your YouTube channel. The strategies I'm going to talk about are universal. The problem that I'm seeing right now is nonprofits just aren't adopting strategies that marketers and businesses have been using for decades.

14:34And so what we're trying to do is educate nonprofits that you need to think like a business. And when you do, things can really increase as far as donations, awareness, everything that you're doing, and then we're going to change the world as a result. And so that's what gets me excited. So let's talk about how to best utilize these Google ads. And the first thing you've got, you have to do is you have to be very, very, very granular about problems. What is the problem that your business solves? What is the problem that your nonprofit solves. And then what we do is we build around those problems.

15:10And so what I like to do first is I just like to go to Google Keyword Planner or you can use something like Ubersuggest. I like that tool as well. And I'll put in those problems. So going back to my example with I Believe Foundation, the problems that we're trying to solve, the goal of the I Believe Foundation, the overall goal I should go back is to eradicate the 1 billion that are blind due to lack of glasses. And that's what our mission works for. But going back to the topic at hand, So very granular problem-based keywords, dry eyes, blepharitis, styes. I throw those into like Google keyword planner and I just look at search volume and just see what has the greatest search volume, low competition.

15:47And what we'll do is we'll build around those. And so what we'll build is a blog post. So let's just go with styes for an example. If you've ever had a stye, it's painful. It's a big, ugly red bump on your eyelid. It's infected. It hurts. And so what we create is a three steps on how to get rid of a sty. And my wife and I are both eye doctors for background. And so that's why we are very eye focused. And we then have a Google ad that's going after sty or how to get rid of a sty. And then it goes to an article about how to get rid of a sty. The more granular you are with your advertising, the higher your click through rate, the cheaper your ads are going to be, the more people are going to stay on your website, the more they're going to engage with your website, the more donations you're going to get from a nonprofit, the more sales you're going to get for a business.

16:39What I commonly see when we take over Google Ads accounts is that they throw, and this is even with Amazon PPC accounts, is they throw tons of keywords into one campaign and then just kind of see what works. So we'll see thousands of keywords. you have to get granular. I'm talking one keyword per ad campaign, talking, and then the ad is around that one keyword. And then the blog post is around that one keyword. When you do that, Google has a relevance score. That relevance score shoots up, your costs go down, you get more engagement, you get served more as from an ad perspective. And it's just a win overall.

17:16So the more granular you get, the better. So single keyword ad campaigns is what we call them. And that's just one keyword we usually go after, phrase and exact. So phrase and exact for sty. And then the ads all around sty goes to a blog all around sty. So that's one way to do it from a blog post standpoint. Another way to do it is creating effective stories, storytelling. If you can tell an effective story that is based around what your business solves or what your nonprofit solves, you're going to get either sales or you're going to get donations. And a quick example of this, I don't know if you know Jimmy Darts on YouTube.

17:55He's got a couple million followers, about 12 million or so. And he's a kindness influencer. That's all he does is kindness acts. And he uses his platform, the kindness acts, to tell stories about people that he's helping. When those stories get released on his channel, he gets donations in to him that he passes on to that person. And so the other day I watched on his main page of his YouTube, it's a story of a homeless man that he just went and asked to play hopscotch with. The guy played hopscotch, and the hopscotch turned into this guy getting new teeth, getting a job, and getting$20 ,000 from Jimmy's followers.

18:38That happened because there was an effective story around a problem. And people want to be kind. People want to be good. And so if you can create that kind of story around the problem that your nonprofit solves, around that your business solves, that's where you can make a huge difference, get more business, get more donations as well. So that's kind of a broad, I guess I went pretty narrow in it, but I'm going to stop there and just see if you have any questions for me. See, I think this is really powerful. And there's a reason, Fire Nation, why history is his story, her story. We resonate with stories.

19:15We get drawn in by them. We get empathetic towards them. So I love that. And I love those success stories that you shared. But I really do want to talk about compliance because I'm pretty adamant that Fire Nation does the right thing because these ad grants do come with certain policy requirements and they have to be maintained if you're going to continue to get this$120 ,000 per year. So what can these nonprofits do to ensure they stay compliant? The biggest thing that I talked about, I hinted at a little bit earlier, is you do have to be careful if you're the director of your nonprofit and you're also the owner of your business.

19:51Because what will happen is if your nonprofit is affiliating products from your own business, then that will be considered, it won't be, it will be viewed in the eyes of the IRS as poor and you might lose your 501c3 status. So keep that in mind. You can always create a director that's not you and someone that you trust to run your nonprofit for you. And it doesn't take that long. A lot of people think nonprofits are a lot of work and they're not. So if you created a foundation, a foundation is just simply a vehicle for money. So you donate from your business to your foundation and it stores the money.

20:26You get a tax write-off right away. We haven't even talked about the tax benefits of a foundation and nonprofit, but you get the tax write-off right away and you can accumulate money in that to then deploy as you see fit. And so we've accumulated close to$200 ,000 in cash in our nonprofit. And then when something pops up, we then can pay for it. So an example of this is a laser popped up and a laser for glaucoma surgery and diabetic surgery. And we were able to purchase that. It's a$26 ,000 laser because we'd had accumulated cash. So tax benefits of nonprofits was completely off topic of your question.

21:02Let's go back to the compliance question. But I wanted to go over that, the 501c3 status with the IRS and making sure you stay compliant there. But as far as the Google Ads grant itself, There's just some little things that you have to do when you're creating an ad. You have to have two ads per ad group, two ad groups per campaign, two site link extensions per ad. And if you don't know any of that, that's OK. That's what people are for. I mean, that's what services are for around this. But the biggest thing you have to maintain is you have to maintain a 5 % click through rate or greater. And when you're running Google ads, if you're running Google ads for your business, if you're not getting a 5 % click through rate, there's something wrong with your ad.

21:41And it usually is the granularity, what we talked about earlier. The more specific that single keyword ad word campaign that you get, the higher click-through rate it's going to be. We have a campaign that's getting a 42 % click-through rate, which is like absurdly unheard of in Google Ads. But it's so granular, serves so well. People stay on the page when they come and they click through the page. And therefore, Google knows it's good, so they serve it a lot. Now, how can you maintain that 5 % click-through rate? just what we talked about the single keywords site link extensions make your ad bigger and so you're more likely to get a click you have a call to action learn more shop now buy now donate now something like that on the ad there's a url path you put that main keyword in the url path in our case sty now some other things you can do if you're in business is you can create a countdown timer there's a thing called a brace look it up a brace on your keyword it's not like a parentheses it's kind of like more of that curvy parentheses and when you put that in it can pull up a countdown timer so if you're advertising for something like prime day black friday cyber monday not non-profit but more business side you can do a countdown timer to put scarcity into your ad if jld if you're doing a course that's closing in seven days you can put a countdown timer on your ad that shows that it's closing in seven days.

23:06You can also add an image. This doesn't work for nonprofits, but image is something that was released in the last year for Google ads. It makes a big difference. And then dynamic keyword insertion with those braces as well. You can make it so whatever the person searches for populates in the headline. So those things will increase your click-through rate. And if you're not having a 5 % or higher click-through rate, you need to redo your ads. And this goes for any advertising platform, Amazon, Google, Facebook. Redo them until you can get that 5 % or higher. Fire Nation, so much powerful value bombs are being dropped here on the power of nonprofits and how to utilize that$120 ,000 per year in free Google ads.

23:48So Travis, what is the one key takeaway you really want to make sure our listeners get from our chat today? I want to go back to what I first said, and it's all about service. Business is all about serving other humans. As Zig Ziglar said, the more humans you help, and I'm going to completely butcher this quote, by the way, the more people that you help get what they want, the more you're going to get what you want. And so the more you focus on service, the better this world's going to be. And start your nonprofit today because there's something that truly, truly pulls at your heart. And when you dive into that, everything explodes.

24:26Your business explodes, your nonprofit explodes, and you have a lot more fun with life. Well, just to correctly quote Zig Ziglar, it's, you can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want. That's the late, great Zig Ziglar. Take us home, Travis. How can Fire Nation connect with you? What is your call to action for our listeners today? Yeah, so we do help people establish their nonprofits and we do help nonprofits grow. If you go to pineapplesforprogress.com, pineapplesforprogress.com, you can fill out a quick application. Takes about 30 seconds to fill out.

25:05And I would love, love to talk to you about starting your nonprofit it and seeing how we can help you uplift the world. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with TZ and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Travis in the search bar, the show notes page will pop right up. And Travis, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, and value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Travis for sponsoring today's episode.

25:41And Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in a hundred days. And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett Ryla, Rob Lichers, Ben Berkeley, and Mark Dent is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on Hackers vs.

26:17Casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyber attacks. Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Don't be the bottleneck to your organization's growth. Accomplish more with Belay. To get started, schedule a free delegation consultation with Belay in just 30 minutes. See how their flexible staffing solutions can grow your business and free you up to lead. Text FIRE to 55123 to schedule your delegation consultation today.