Episode #112 – Shane Melaugh on High Level Strategic Conversion Optimization and His New Software Thrive Leads

It’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponder guy. I am here with Shane Millah. He recently released a product called ‘Thrive leads’. He is doing cool stuff with email plug ins, also with WordPress and conversion. Shane, how are you doing?

Shane Millah:  Hey, John! I am great. Thank you for having me on a broadcast.

John McIntyre: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Shane Millah:    The short story is that after school I didnt know what to do with my life. I was unemployable. I went to university at some point to start studying Psychology. I didnt like it. Entrepreneurship was the only option I had. It was process of try and error. I was selling stuff on ebay, computer hardwear. For the last few years I am developing softwear, WordPress tools

John McIntyre: I read this book by Count Newport “So Good They Cant Ignore You”. There is this traditional path that people take university-job. This book is about the new generation of people who follow their passion.

Shane Millah:  I have a blog where I talk about marketing and business. The most important principle for me is ‘grind’. Pick a skill and grind it out, it will be difficult.

I have workaholic tendencies, where I have no life and I am just working, so it is challenging to find the  balance there

John McIntyre: I think there needs to be a mission, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Elon Mask. Tell me what trive leads is

Shane Millah: It is our newest WordPress plug in. It is everything you need to generate leads on your website inside one single plug in. It is conversion focused. It is about testing, running A-B tests of all kinds, figure out what brings most leads onto your list. It is about conversion optimization. In my business email lists have been extremely powerful

John McIntyre: I’ve been doing some code email to a couple of different lists, one guy replied and told about trive leads. Speaking about email opt-ins, what is working and what is not?

Shane Millah: You show a light box with an opt-in offer, at the moment you suspect your visitor is about to leave your website. The way it is usually done is you wait for his mouse cursor to leave the viewport. You go to the back button or ‘close’ icon on browser tab – that’s the moment you would be showing this offer.

You are recovering the lost visitors. With trive leads you can test different form triggers. You can test showing a form on exit against showing it after 10 seconds, or when someone scrolls down half a page. What you find often is the accident tent trigger does not perform well at all.

If you compare it to triggering a light box after 3 or 10 seconds, my bets would always be, trigger light box will get more leads

John McIntyre: There is company called Bounce Exchange, they sell well because of amazing behavioral technology. They set accident tent pop up form, creating a design for it and split testing. And they charge you $4000 a month. There is ask form, when you pick your budget there is four options 1) less than one million 2) 1-10 3) 10-100 4) 100-million, so they work with big companies to do this

Shane Millah:     I remember first time I cam across Bounce Exchange, I was in disbelieve. At that time they were charging only $800 a month. Congratulation for them to make a business like this. Cashing thousands per customer per month is amazing. To me as to business owner it would be cheaper to hire someone to write that code and put custom design even just from scratch

John McIntyre:   A lesson I learned here is we undervalue what we actually do. If you put pop up or trive leads on amazon, they get millions of traffic a day. You can show Amazon they will do millinos dollars a month just by implementing this pop up strategy.

I know someone has podcast editing service. I heard a guy boasting to his friend that he got for 10 episodes $20 000

Shane Millah:            Say, Lamborgini car is so more expensive than other cars and there are some people who will not just nut Lamborgini they also have it gold plated. That is how rich they are. When you offer a product like lead generation service, or copywriting and you say your price for that is couple thousand dollars, you should know that there are some companies or people that would pay 50-100 thousand dollars for that.

John McIntyre:             There is this guy who is selling tickets online. He is offering #1 ranking in Google for any keyword. And it is guaranteed, if they dont give you #1 ranking, they will give you money back. They charge $100 000, because clients know if they have #1 ranking, they will make millions a day

Shane Millah:    As I’ve gone from making thousand dollars per month to tens of thousand, sometimes hundred. My own perception of money has changed. The idea for hiring people for, say, design, paying them $500 or avoid it. Whereas now paying ten thousand for someone pro for two days of their time seems a good deal now

John McIntyre:   Tell me some interesting things about email opt-ins?

Shane Millah:  One of the most underutilized things is making tailored offers to different segments of your audience. Creating a form with a different header color or button color is very easy to do, but the maximum pay off of twicking your button colour is very low.

Change your entire value proposition or offer. Most blogs have just subscribe to my newsletter opt-in. By now everyone knows it is better to have opt-in insentive of some sort, ‘get my free report’, ‘get my free course’ in return for opting-in. The next thing people will realize you can be more effective by making  different offers to different segments of your audience.

To give an example from my own blog, if someone is looking at a post at video marketing category, they are probably interested in something else than someone looking at a post in product creation. If I show them both the same offer, and I am testing different lights, buttons. That’s never gonna  be as effective as saying: “Here is an offer that is specific to your interest in video marketing to the video marketing people,” and saying: “Here is an offer that is specific to your interest product creation to the product creation people.”

John McIntyre:   When I was learning to write a copy, I read from Gary Halbet, best copywriter out there. Just change the way you word the offer – but that doesnt always work. This weekend I will brainstorm offers, not just twick existing ones

Shane Millah:  We spend a lot of time building a testing engine onto our plug in, the technical side we can do for you, we cant give you the understanding of who your market is, or how they think. The buffer app was launched in that kind of way, they had a fake offer that looked like you can purchase it, but when you clicked there was a message “sorry, this product doesnt exist yet”, but you can sign up for th waiting list here. You can use this to validate your different offers. Plus the one that gets most attention, most leads, you are building the audience that you will then be able to sell your offer to

John McIntyre:          Lets talk about trive leads

Shane Millah: It is basically the only plugin you need to generate leads from your website. So install this plug in, get rid of the junk installed to generate leads, you connect it to your mailing list and you can set up every type of opt-in form that you want, test different forms, different designs.

It is a part of trive themes product line. We have conversion optimized WordPress themes. We have an awsome visual content builder, that fastens building sales and landing pages and a couple of other interesting plug ins

John McIntyre: How are you different from Optimize Press 2?

Shane Millah:           Optimize Press 2 has some marketing features that we dont have yet. But the biggest issue with them is it takes so much time to build and edit your content. Everything you change is like a 5-step process. If you look at  Optimize Press landing builder and you compare it to our landing page builder, what you can do with ours, you can do with theirs. But in practice you are not going to do it with theirs, it will take you 3-5 times longer.

We have a similar visual editor, when you looking at your landing page and you dragging dropping elements, you look at it as front end editor. The difference is we built it as fast as possible to use. You never have to refresh the page or wait for something to load.

If you wanna create to pages to run a test

John McIntyre: What about customization?

Shane Millah: Our themes are less custimizeable. The main reason for that is the speed factor. It is something we want to address in next months. I dont know exactly how it is with Thesis. I tests a very simple page with one text paragraph in it. I looked it in one of our themes, and in source code it was 240 lines of code. I looked at it is different theme, best selling theme in Theme Forest, the exact same page had 2600 lines of code.

The reason is because all of these options, customization, extra features they have is loading tons of code, scripts and stuff in  that page. Even though as a user you dont see that. The only way they can be customizable is by having really bloated code. That is something we wanna avoid. Right now our themes are less customizable than some of our competing themes. We dont have themes where you can pixel by pixel change the length. The reason is that we have this performance focus

John McIntyre:          I will have a link to thrive leads. Thanks for coming at the show.