The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

Craig Garber started as a copywriter years ago under the mentor-wings of Gary Halbert. Fastforward to today: Craig builds systems… Systems so valuable, that each new client pays him at least $60,000 for a funnel strategy. INSANE. You can call him The King of Copy. He believes in free reports’ effectiveness to develop high-quality leads. By following his free report advice,  You can chalk yours up as an ultimate lead-generating money maker. And if you think free reports are overplayed… think again. They key behind them is to spread yourself across multiple platforms. Learn the 4 reasons when you absolutely MUST use a free report too. In this episode, Craig reveals his ultimate copywriter’s Genesis story.  Listen-in. Get inspired. And get ready to gather up TONS more high-quality leads.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how to attract flocks of clients instead of chasing them down (never beg for business again) the 2-Step Lead Generation approach that Craig calls his 8th wonder of the world 4 effective techniques to establish strong relationships with your prospects through free reports (position yourself as the authority from day one) the true value of your intellectual property (knowledge is power… expensive power) the 4 situations where you MUST apply the 2-Step concept (if you don’t, you’re screwed) how Craig got Gary Halbert to go to lunch with him and then mentor him (and what not to do when reaching out to a potential mentor) the ONLY 2 ways to develop chemistry and repertoire (create great relationships with your customers) how to avoid destroying  your credibility by lacking this easily learned trait.  how to listen, understand, and solve problems for a living (making money is NOT about making money)   Mentioned: How To Make Maximum Money with Minimum Customers Perry Marshall’s Conversion Triangle Max Money Club Max Money Program Seductive Selling Gary Halbert Christian Godefroy Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the auto respondent guy, and it’s time for episode 65 of The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover one simple thing: how to make more money with every single email that you send. Now today, I’ll be talking to Mr. Craig Garber, the King of Copy and the author of How To Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers.  Now we’re going to talk about today how to get leads, how to increase the value of these leads and how to lower the acquisition costs of these leads. Now this reminds me of Perry Marshall’s conversion triangle, where you get three main things in any business. You’ve got the traffic that’s coming in; the conversion that you’re … you’ve got to convert that traffic and make it do something; and then the economics, which is where you increase the amount of money that they’re going to spend with you. That’s where you sell products, sell services, whatever. Okay? That’s a little bit about what we’re talking about today, how to bring those leads in, how to lower the acquisition cost, which is the conversion stage, and how to increase the value, which is the products. This is Craig Garber’s main expertise. He started as a copywriter. He’s very high priced. He charges, it looks like, $60,000 for a proper funnel and strategy, and he does … Most of his bread and butter is publishing and consulting and all this sort of stuff. I’m really, really honored to have him on the show today. Now to get the show notes for this episode of The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, go to themcmethod.com/65. Now this week’s McMasters insight of the week is a good one. Now in case you don’t know, McMasters is my private training community where you can get training products like the McIntyre Method, pages that convert, all in the community. You can also jump in the forum, ask me questions. It’s the best way to get access to me, daily access. I’m in the forum everyday, posting, answering questions, all that sort of stuff. That’s McMasters. Let’s talk about this insight. So Joy stated a little while back, “I think I’m doing my sales funnel wrong. What should my sales funnel look like?” It’s a good question. It’s a very, you might say, fundamental question. Not so much basic, but it’s fundamental in that your sales funnel is to get back to that Perry Marshall thing. That’s the conversion mechanism. That’s how you’re taking the traffic and making it buy something. It’s important.  Say, Joy, for example. She’s in a position where she has a website that gets a lot of traffic and a lot of organic traffic. She’s not doing paid traffic as far as I know. For her sales funnel, my suggestion was … Before she does anything else, she needs to start optimizing the traffic that she has. She needs to have an opt-in on every single page of that site. She needs to optimize those opt-ins so that’s she’s getting the maximum amount of leads every day and every month, right?  Then the next stage will be the work on the, say, email marketing side of things and work on creating story-based emails that sell every day, every three days, whatever, and then take the cash that that generates and then go and start building a more complex sales funnel, which you can use on paid traffic. Okay?  Now once you get into paid, the sales funnel gets a little bit more complicated, but it’s still … Let me boil it down to a few similar things, which is you need to be able to buy the traffic and make a profit on it. The sales funnel is just how … That’s what you use to make a profit on it. So you need to find ways to convert people at a higher rate and make more money every time they buy something. So these are things like upsell, these are things like order respondents, it’s very simple, and we’ll talk about that another time. We might talk about … I think we talked about that last week with Mike Colella, okay?  You might want to go check out that episode if you haven’t done so yet. At the very least, the actionable takeaway right now, and this is why the McMasters insight of the week is here, is, if you haven’t already, you need to make sure that you have an opt-in box on every single page of your site, and you need to optimize that. However much traffic you get, set up a split test and … literally, a ghetto split test is what I call them. This is where you say, “All right, I am going to need a thousand visitors or two thousand visitors to really get some statistically significant stats here.”  Then you go, “All right. Well, maybe it’s going to take two weeks to do that.” In a spreadsheet, you write the date, June 1 to June 14, and you just write down the traffic that you got for that and the amount of unique visitors and the amount of opt-ins you got. Then you work out your opt-in rate. Then you change something, and then you say June 15 to June … what was it, June 15 to June 29 is another two weeks. Write it again and see if your change improved … Change in the copy, change in the offer, change in something. Change in the layout, change in … Maybe you added a pop-up plugin or a Dreamgrow slider plugin, just do that.  You do that over and over again, you’re going to get a really high opt-in rate on your site. Then it’s going to be time to use some of the knowledge you’ve learned in the email marketing podcast to make those leads buy something. Okay? That’s it for now. Now as for review … Oh, by the way, I keep forgetting to mention this, if you want to know more about McMasters or get into the community, you can check it out at themcmethod.com/mcmasters.  Now, reviews. If you want to leave a review and spread the word about the email marketing podcast, that money-pulling goodness, go to the iTunes store, search for The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, leave me a review. I will read it out on the show. Shoot me an email too to say you just left me a review. I will give you a virtual high five. If you come to Chiang Mai, I’ll buy you a coffee or a [beef 00:04:34], whatever you want. [inaudible 00:04:35] listen to questions, then we’ll get into this interview. Today’s question is, how do you generate traffic? Good question. If we could all solve that, if we all could answer that with a really good, solid answer, we’d all be rich. You got two options, especially … we’re talking about online.  Two options. You’ve got organic or paid. Organic is you’re doing search engines, blog, that kind of thing. It’s free in the sense you don’t spend money for it, assuming you’re doing all the SEO yourself, but it takes a long, long time, unless you really know what … I’ve got friends who are great at SEO and they know how to use private blog networks and some of the spamming tools out there, and they can get things ranked very quickly. But unless you’ve been doing this for a while and you really know what you’re doing, it’s not going to work that way. It’s going to take you a long, long time to generate traffic with SEO, okay? That’s your long term, your slow-burner strategy. If you want to get things going fast, grab some cash and make a decision that you’re going to figure out paid traffic whatever your budget is. Whether it’s you can only afford to spend 5 bucks a day or 150 bucks a month, that’s cool. At least do it. Right? I kind of shudder when I think about it. If I just started spending 10 bucks a day on paid traffic 2 years ago, where I would be today. Okay? Whether it’s $5 or $10 or $20 or $50 a day, just go and start doing paid traffic and use the information you’ve learned in this podcast to build the sales funnel. Okay? That’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Mr. Craig Garber. It’s John McIntyre here, the auto respondent guy. I’m here with Craig Garber. Now Craig is known as the King of Copy. He got started as a copywriter, but now he’s moved into … he like consulting, publishing. He’s got a great website with, he tells me, over 2,000 pieces of content, webinars, a whole bunch of cool stuff. Now while he got started as a copywriter, his main thing now is basically building systems to get leads, dramatically increasing the value of those leads, and then lowering those acquisition costs. This is some really cool stuff, sort of advanced, I think, but extremely valuable to a business that’s in operation. We’re going to talk about that. One thing he mentioned before, before I hit record, is that he’s a little bit different to some of the other copywriters out there and the marketers, where there’s less hype and less aggression, and less trying to make them feel bad about themselves and just copy that makes them feel good but also makes them buy stuff. It’s be nice copy, I don’t know what you’d call that. I’m [inaudible 00:06:41] into that, and I meant it. Craig, how are you doing, man? Craig Garber:Great, John. Thanks. Good to be here. John McIntyre:Man, good to have you on the show. Before we get into the content for the day, give the listener a bit of a background. I tried to do a little bit, but you can probably do a better job of a background of who you are, where you’re from, what you do.  Craig Garber:All righty. You did a good job. Basically, I grew up in the Bronx, probably the worst area of the world you could live in, and I actually have a pretty shitty whole life, and I knew I had to get the hell out of there in every single way possible. I went to college and became a CPA, believe it or not. Got into sales after a few years as an accountant, and then I was a financial planner. I had my own financial planning practice at the time. I worked with mostly high network business individuals and business owners, managing their money and setting up shareholder agreements, buy/sell agreements, funding and insurance and stuff like that.  But having said that, I did okay for myself, but it was more like because I was real diligent about follow-up. But I was like most small business owners. You get a client in front of me, and I can convert her, but I didn’t know how to get the clients. On a whim, I saw this ad in an insurance industry trading magazine for some marketing programs, so I bought it. I was like all in, I bought the top level and stuff, monthly account annuity. It was really eye opening for me because, for whatever reason, the program didn’t work. It was a good program.  I think, just sometimes, you look back, you can’t connect the dots moving forward. You go back and you look, and I think it didn’t work because it wasn’t my destiny to say as a financial planner. I’d be on the phone with the people. They were like, “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on. You’re so much more advanced with this. You’ve taken it to all kinds of levels. I don’t know why it’s working.” Anyway, it didn’t work because it wasn’t my destiny, but it taught me so much. It opened my eyes to direct response, and I learned for the first time that you can attract this instead of chasing it down. For me, that was … It happened in ’93, I believe. No, in 2000. That was my biggest “Aha” moment and still has been, because … The fact that you could attract leads instead of chasing it down was such a relief because I found the process of … You’re basically begging for business, and I found that so degrading. Degrading for me as a “professional,” and degrading for the customer who’s getting hounded. I wasn’t rude or anything, but it’s just constant follow-up, follow-up. I said, “There had to be a better way,” so that’s what direct response opened my eyes to. I started getting into copywriting and writing that on copy for my pieces, and I started studying [inaudible 0:09:21] late Gary Halbert stuff.  I was doing it in Fort Lauderdale at the time. I live in Tampa, Florida now. Halbert, I found out in Miami, which is just twenty five, thirty minutes from Fort Lauderdale where I lived. I put my first [long-form sales audit 00:09:37] together for Gary, and it was a forty-page letter. I told him about my background, everything. Everything I’d learned to do- John McIntyre:You used the sales letter to get in touch with Gary? Craig Garber:Yes. John McIntyre:That’s badass, man. Craig Garber:I had an order form in there. This is back before you could download music. I read in some interview … I heard in an interview he liked Neil Young, so I burned … Remember this? You probably don’t, but they used to get to burn the CDs. I burned the CD on my old computer, downloaded this group like cover, put the whole packets together for the guy, mailed it out.  I had an order form in there, testimonials. The call to action was basically, “Look, can I buy you lunch and spend a half hour with you? I think I’m really good at this. I’d like to do this for a living.” But my daughter at the time had just been born, and see, I have three kids and said, “I don’t want to be thinking that I could do this, and I don’t really know,” because like everything in life, you don’t know the … Sometimes, things seem easy but they’re never actually easy.  There’s always more to it than the surface. I said, “I wonder if this guy would talk to me for a half hour and educate me.” That was my drop down offer. My big call to action was, “Would you mentor me for 6 months? No, would you mentor me?” I said, I’m not the kind of guy that’s looking for free stuff. I’m just looking for an opportunity to learn. I’ll work for free, whatever.” Anyway, so I send this package out to the guy, and I mail it to him. I don’t hear anything for a week and a half.  I did what every other good marketing person does. I put the packets together again, burned the CD, the whole 9 yards, and I mailed it out to him again a second time. Waited two weeks, nothing. I said, “Okay. Let me just see if can do something different.” This is when, I think, the Internet has just been around a little bit, so I found a woman that I knew Gary did business with. I told her my story, and I said, “Listen, can you help me get this letter in front of him?” She was, “Yeah, yeah, no problem. Send it to me, and I will FedEx it to him,” so I sent a FedEx inside a FedEx. She got it.  A week and a half later, on a Tuesday, I get a phone call. Tuesday afternoon, around 4:30, and I see on the caller ID, Gary Halbert. I said, “Holy crap!” It’s like being a guitar player and you see Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page on the phone for you. Right? I talked to him and he said, “Yeah, I got your package. I’ll be happy to meet with you. I’ll give you a call next week.” I said, “Okay, no problem.” But I wrote down his number, because I worked real hard to get that lead now. I’m not waiting for you to call me back. The following Monday, I called him up and I said, “Hey, this is Craig Garber. Remember we spoke last week. You told me to give you a call, and I just wanted to follow-up with you. Can we get together this week?” “Yeah, come down.” I came down that week, Thursday or Friday. We went down to Pink’s on South Beach, had lunch together, and he asked me questions. Some of the questions he asked me, I didn’t understand why. They were more like life questions. But in retrospect, now I understand them. But he said he was willing to mentor me.  So I worked with him for 6 months, and he basically launched my career. He took to me to his seminar, he got my first clients there, and that was that. I had a good opportunity. That was March of 2000, I think, so here we are. What I do now is I probably take on one or two copywriting jobs a year, big ones. I have smaller things I work with, but I spend most of my time consulting with clients. If you go to my website, kingofcopy.com, I’ve worked in over 102 different industries, more than 300 clients. I spend most of my time consulting and helping them build lead generation systems that typically get them much better qualified clients and much higher rates of response.  I also help them increase the value of those clients and, in that process, often is as you said, we’re able to lower acquisition cost as well. I publish products. I publish an offline newsletter. We just started our 9th year. It’s called Seductive Selling. I publish marketing programs, and then I have some other side businesses that I work on as well, outside kingofcopy.com. There you go. John McIntyre:Man, you’re doing it all. I love the story about Gary Halbert, man. I had no idea. That’s such a badass genesis story.  Craig Garber:Thanks, thanks. Of course, I turned it into a product. John McIntyre:Absolutely. Craig Garber:But look. I think, sometimes, when you don’t know anything, you are more apt to do things that when you have a little more information, you’re a little more afraid of. I think that’s where I was at that stage in my life. I didn’t have any formalities. I was being sincere, and I wasn’t looking to get anything off the guy. I just wanted to ask him questions, spend a half hour. I had a guarantee. I said, “If you think I’m an asshole, I’ll donate $250 to your favorite charity.” I guess the guy met with me, and he saw I’m not the kind of guy … I’ve got a really good work ethic.  I literally come from nothing, and he saw that I wasn’t … A lot of people will … I’ll never get what Gary said once I wrote my first sales letter for him. It was compelling. It’s kind of jaded, but it was very true. Sitting on his couch in Miami, he looked at me and he said, “Craig, congratulations. Now, all anyone is going to want from you the rest of your life is a free sales letter.” And I didn’t know what he meant by that, but unfortunately, that’s some of the stuff you have to deal with out there.  I guess he saw I’m not that guy. I’m not the guy that looks for anything for free. That’s an abnormal thing for me because I’ve done everything myself, which is good and bad because sometimes, I should probably be more willing. I’m getting better at that, at accepting and asking for help. I think being green like that was probably why I did it. I really just felt responsibility to my family. I didn’t want to make any stupid moves financially. That was really what that was. John McIntyre:Yeah, yeah. I mean, it reminds me a bit of … I mentioned this podcast before. I mean,  knowing you’re on the same level. Like this podcast, this would be episode 50 or 60 by the time it goes live, and … The people that have come on here, I think I mentioned them before the call, like John Carlton and Perry Marshall, some of these guys. Now I know, after doing this, it’s not actually very hard to get in contact.  Some of these guys have gotten on Facebook. The mere fact that I’ve had a thirty-minute call or an hour call, whatever it is, with them, and then that goes public, it’s generated so much … Social proof would be the best word for, and it’s not even that hard to … Like most people just don’t know how easy it actually is when you get out there and you hustle a little bit. I’m just sending them messages on Facebook and via email.  I mean, this is … I follow up a lot. I think John … I think I had to follow up more than twenty times with his assistant until we finally locked in a time, so it does take a little bit of effort. I think your story right here is just a great example. When you hustle, when you actually … When you want something, you’re like, “I’m going to get that. I don’t care what it takes, I’m gonna try anything.” It’s almost impossible to fail. Craig Garber:Yeah. And you know what? I refuse using the formula that I had learned from these guys, and I’ve seen it work in my financial planning business. I said, “well, I like to [know 00:16:26] if it works, it works. People are people,” so you’ve just got to keep following up. I believed in it, and there’s no downside. What did it cost me? An hour to put together the packet he signed? It was nothing. It was very … A lot of upside, no downside to [this show 00:16:39]. John McIntyre:It would have been a lot of fun too, burning that CD out and … That would have been fun. Craig Garber:Yeah. It was exciting. And then when I started calling, it was like, wow, this is … It was almost surreal because at that time, I’m thinking, wow, this is … Like I said, it feels like a superstar in your little world is calling.  John McIntyre:That would be an interesting strategy to use for … Like I wonder how many people you could use that for. I wonder if you’d get in touch with like Brad Pitt or Will Smith, send them a package, read a few interviews with them, get an idea of what they’re into and then come up with a package like this and do it, send a few of them. I’m wondering if you could do this with some really high up people that would just otherwise be impossible to contact. Craig Garber:I think people like that have major gatekeepers. That might put the kvetch on that. Let me tell you right now, the other thing that … A reason why Halbert met with me, and I can tell you this 100 percent because I’m the same way, I spent money with him. There’s a big difference when a customer of yours, who spent decent amount of money with you, calls on you and asks something of you. Then when someone says, “Hey, I’ve been on your list for 5 years, and I love your stuff. Can I do blah, blah, blah?” Then you look on your shopping cart and like, “That’s interesting.”  So he’s been on my list of 5 years and he loves me, but he’s never spent a dime. Now he’s asking for something else for free besides the 500 tips I’ve put out in that time. Hmmm. So don’t kid yourself. There’s a business component of it as well that is in effect there. It’s not likely that the second guy gets through to anybody because it’s not … Somebody who sort of takes that road has other baggage with personality quirks that make the kind of relationships they want incongruent and impossible. The guy that’s done the right thing, there’s a lot of opportunities that can come for both of you. But that guy that’s kind of like the freeloader who loves your stuff and has never spent a dime with you, there’s very little that will ever come of that. How you do one thing is how you do everything, I’ve learned. Your qualities are pretty consistent throughout. John McIntyre:Yeah. I found with a lot of this guys who’s sitting and up there and they’re quite successful, I think, for me, I usually boil it down … Maybe it sounds too simple, but I usually boil it down to just be cool. Just don’t treat them like they’re a god and don’t look down on them. Like be their friend. Be cool. I think that gets you 90 percent of the way there. Like if you’re being cool, Of course, yeah, it’s going to make sense. Of course you want to buy one of their products. If you actually care about who they are and what they do, of course you want to buy one of their products. That’s like a little bit of common sense. Craig Garber:Yeah. It’s like go to a restaurant and, “Hey, I really like your restaurant. Can I have some free food?” Wait a minute. [inaudible 00:19:25]. John McIntyre:That’s a great example. Craig Garber:No, seriously. I mean, look. It doesn’t even make sense but yet, people do to people who sell intellectual property, and they feel it’s different. Some people say, “Hey, I just had a question for you,” and I’ll say, “Hey, no problem. You can book some consulting time on my website.” “Well, it’s just a question.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. Call up a New York attorney and tell him, I’ve got a question for you. When can we talk. See what the response is. The problem is, if someone doesn’t value your intellectual property, they’re not going to value their own intellectual property, and that is often one of the bottlenecks on why they’re not making the kind of money or at where they want to be at. John McIntyre:Hmmm. I haven’t thought about it that way. That’s a great point. Let’s talk about this forte of yours, building systems to get qualified leads and then pumping up the value of that. Give me the 40,000-foot view. Where’s the best place to start? Craig Garber:Basically, the most effective way of doing this is using something called two-set lead generation. I have loads of old books and magazines. Really, it started like in the … The earliest I’ve seen it, in the late 1800’s. For most people that are listening to this call, you’re probably familiar with … If you’ve seen ads for … now I’m having a brain fart. Atlas, the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension System, have you ever seen those old ads? You’re young, so you may not have. Charles Atlas was a guy, used to run ads in like every comic book imaginable during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. He still runs the ads. Atlas, he had a whole series of cartoon stories called Making a Man Out of Mac.  It was basically this scrawny guy that gets sand kicked in his face at the beach. Mac feels like crap, and this big guy walks around and he gets his girlfriend or something like that. So Mac says, “I’m going to go get fit.” So he goes to Charles Atlas and buys his system. The next time the guy comes on the beach, Mac beats the crap out of him or something. So Charles Atlas ran these ads, and the ad would say something like … I actually have a webinar on my site. It’s called how to be … You just go to my site and there’s a pop-up. The actual ad is on that webinar. You basically have a little ad that says, “Hey, would you like to have bigger muscles, be more fit, stopped getting sand kicked in your face? No problem. Order this book, it’s only $0.25, 17 ways to lose fat, reduce this, whatever.” Right? Then you get the book that comes out to your house, and the book has all this information. At the end of the book, it says something really simple like this: If you think the techniques in this book can help you out, and if you want to learn more about them, we have this system, the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension System. Here’s what’s included in the system, blah, blah, blah, and here’s how much it costs. It will really help you out. See, what that does is this process … now obviously, you can do it online.  In fact, it’s probably … In almost every industry, it’s too costly to do it offline unless you have a … If you have a good-sized back, that’s not true. If you’re selling anything with a customer value of $2,000 or $1,000 enough, you can use this offline. You should. So what this does is … where most people do is they put an ad out there. It says, “Buy my stuff,” and 99.999 percent of people that see it are going to say no, and then they move on. If serendipity occurs and your paths cross later, they say, “Oh yeah, I remember I saw that 10 years ago. I want to buy it now.” You have these ads, what they do is … this free report, it’s establishing a relationship. Because in one of these booklets, you’re gonna discuss … Personally, you’re giving away some great content. You’re positioning yourself as an authority.  The second thing is, the customer came to you for this information. You’re not chasing them down saying, “Hey, hey, you want to buy this? You want to buy this?” You have a different sort of relationship. You’re controlling the relationship. Now you’ve got the contact information so you could stay in touch with them, especially online. You get a simple email, right? Now you could follow up and continue to build and develop that relationship. The people get to see … the customers, your buyers, get to see who this person really is. The level of trust you’re able to develop with something like that is much quicker and much more effective than, “Hey, you want to buy my stuff?” It allows much quicker conversions. It allows you to sell at much higher price points, and it positions you from day one as an authority. It’s just a much cleaner … much, much gentler system and much more effective.  John McIntyre:Okay. Online, we’re talking about basically driving traffic to like a squeeze page or some page where someone can get a free report, and then they get it, and you get their email address. Then you send them … I miss the classic marketing, where you get a squeeze page, you give them a free report and send them emails to make them buy your stuff. Craig Garber:Correct. Correct. But it could be … it doesn’t have to be a free report. Like on our [pool 00:24:19], we do free report, webinar, loads of stuff. The thing is, there’s four situations where you almost are … If you don’t do it, you’re screwed. One of them is if you’re showing something expensive. Why? Because people are not just handing over lots of cash without any info. Second thing is, if you’re selling something complicated, it’s difficult for the consumer to understand.  For example, things like life insurance, some legal procedures, medical procedures. Right? Third is if you’re selling something that has a long lead time. From the time you buy it to the time the service is delivered, like home remodeling, for example, the thing that’s good about that is you control the whole process in this free report. You’re preventing any … When you have big projects like that, shit happens. If you’re smart, you’ve done your lead generation properly, you’re preventing any mishaps.  Also, in certain industries, the person is a lot more vulnerable to get somebody else in there. For example, life insurance. It takes a long lead time for that, because you’ve got to take a medical exam. Lots of times, if there are any glitches and stuff along the way, someone else comes along … Now that the people have made a commitment to buy life insurance, well, they’re a lot more open to get another agent in there. By you having this free report and the ongoing follow-up, you’re controlling that process better. Then the fourth one is, if you’re dealing in an industry where there’s a high level of skepticism or unscrupulousness, which is, let’s face it, a lot of industries nowadays, and the free report allows you again to be transparent and see that … It’s your opportunity to say that’s  … This is your differential. You’re able to identify your differential in there and show how you’re different. This two-step concept is … Honestly, man, it’s like the eighth wonder of the world for me. It’s really- John McIntyre:I haven’t been around for long doing this, being a couple of years, so maybe I’m just too new to kind of see it. But I’ve wondered before, like … I mean, online, everyone does this. It’s always like, you get a website and it’s like, “Download my free ebook.” I have a hunch. I don’t have any actual data to really say this with any sort of confidence, but the hunch is that everyone is so used to ebooks, at least online, it’ll probably be a different ball game when you get off, but at least online, everyone gets so used to ebooks, just so used to what everyone else is doing that it starts to lose its effectiveness.  Because what we’re really talking about is give them something free, some resource, whether it’s a report or something else along those lines, and then selling to them after that. Like, is the whole free report model, do you think that’s been overdone? Or is it going to work? Or are there better ways of going about doing that? Craig Garber:Well, in my opinion, I think you’ve got to touch people across as many different medias as possible. Print, by far, is the toughest media to sell in. There’s a lot of issues when you have a free report. Number one, is it well written? Number two, is there character in there? Number three, is there usable content in there that your buyers can actually apply and learn from? Number four, how do you sell in there?  Listen, we’ve all downloaded free report. We’ve all bought information that it is just so hard … you wouldn’t mind your bird cage with it. It’s just a lot of things. I think, nowadays, if you’re smart, you want to take advantage of multiple medias like audio, print, video, webinars, things like that, because everybody … There’s three kinds of buying modes. There’s auditories, people hear; there’s visual, people see; and then there’s kinesthetics, they go by feel. The more senses you engage across more different media, the more likely you are to engage your buyer on one of those levels.  As you said, there is so much, “Hey, free report and free ebook, whatever,” because there is so much of that, you really got to do a good job on everything you’re doing. The other thing is, and I talk about this on my book, the two ways … There’s really only two ways you develop chemistry and rapport and people get to see who you are. It’s frequency and consistency. Any relationship you have, the good ones that you have, right, the better relationship you have, I guarantee you that they are either better relationships because you have more frequent contact with people, or … I’m sorry, consistency. I’m sorry. I meant the quality. Or when you do have an interaction with someone, the depth of that conversation and the quality of that experience that you walk away from is really good. Unless you’re doing both of those things anyway, it’s not going to work.  I have signed in to many a website where I get something. I don’t hear for the people for God knows how long. Then the next thing I hear, months later, is when they’re selling me something, I immediately unsubscribe. That’s not the relationship I’m interested in having. You look for frequency and quality. And if you put those two things together on a consistent basis, you’ll have a very good relationship with people.  As long as you’re consistent, where … I had a client years ago in a mastermind group I used to run, and he never really had a good relationship with his list. Super nice guy. The reason was because every week, he was kind of selling something different. I said, “You can’t tell somebody this is the best way to make money one day.” I don’t only have made-money clients. In fact, I don’t have very many of those. Most of my clients are proper businesses. Not that it [inaudible 00:29:40]. It’s not, but they’re not biz ops. So I don’t like that biz op mix anyway. But I said, “You can’t tell someone, hey this is the best way to make money this week; then next week, oh here’s a great way to make money.” Then it’s real estate biz op and it’s like, come on, man. What if I met you in person and every week I tried to sell you that stuff? You would be like, “Oh my god, I got to get away from this guy!” Right? So whenever you’re in a selling position, everybody always has a track. You’re always running on a track on their mind, and that track is where is this guy going to screw up? What people are looking for is inconsistency.  Even if they don’t know this, and they … If you ask them what they’re looking for, they couldn’t articulate it. But the glitch that people have is, when they see something out of whack, they may not say, “Well, he’s been inconsistent because,” but they’ll say, “Something is not right here. I don’t know what he’s [inaudible 00:30:33].” As a salesperson, when you’re running on that track, you’ve got to be aware of it. You’ve got to be super consistent. You can’t have a different game every week. That’s just not how successful people work, and that’s how successful people respond to you. John McIntyre:Yeah, man. It’s interesting you say that, because … talked a lot about auto respondents on this podcast. It’s not a pure listing, they can have an auto responder. I’ve been asked before, “Can you promote multiple products?” I mean, like I said, the answer is yes, but it’s not as simple as that. You are going to completely destroy your credibility if you jump from one product to the next, unless there’s a logical reason.  I think some people think that if they get some traffic and they get it to opt-in and they get it onto a list, that they can just do whatever the hell they want. The list isn’t people. It’s like they’re not real people in that list. They’re just numbers, and if they just send out lots of offers, they’ll make lots of money. It doesn’t work like that. These are real people, and you have to build a real relationship. That means that you have to kind of play by certain rules.  Craig Garber:Correct, and that is 100 percent right. I have not had too many [mentalists on 00:31:33], but I had one guy that was a [mental in mind 00:31:35] who just passed away. Everybody [inaudible 00:31:37] so don’t become my [mentalist 00:31:39]. Gary Halbert died and then my friend Christian died. Anyway, Christian Godefroy, a real successful guy over in Europe, and he said to me one time I went to visit him in Portugal … Because when my wife was in England I had to either hang out with my mother in law or go somewhere else.  It was a very easy decision to go somewhere else. I visited Christian. We spent like a week together. He said to me one time, he said, “Craig, I was stuck on writing something.” And he said, “Craig, think about what you want to bring into the world, not what you want to get out of it.” That always stuck with me the rest of my life. This was about ten years ago he told me this. The thing is, you can’t … Everybody wants to make money, but that’s your problem. I have this saying, “Don’t make your problems my problems.” Your job is to think about what you can bring into the world, how you can be a problem solver for your buyer. They’ll buy from you, or they wont, but you can’t have the mindset of, “Man, I’ve got to get some money out of my list.” That might work once, but you’re not going to stick around a long time with that sort of mentality, and you’re not going to get a lot of respect. John McIntyre:Yeah. I think this is kind of like … I mean, this took me a while to get, saying the whole fundamental, entrepreneurial realization where making money isn’t actually about making money. It’s actually about finding people who have problems and basically solving them and charging for it. Craig Garber:Correct. Right. The best salespeople are not good salespeople. They’re not slick operators. They’re good problem solvers and they’re able to listen and understand and ask good questions and figure out what’s really the trouble here, and then delivering solutions that makes people’s lives easier. They’re not these guys with lots of exclamation points and whatever. Your cash registers like ,,, Computers like the cash … That’s not. That’s not [crosstalk 00:33:32]. John McIntyre:If someone is a good salesman, they say that guy could sell ice to Eskimos. But that guy would be the sleaziest salesman ever, because Eskimos don’t need the ice. So even if you could sell them ice, they’re not going to come back and buy anything else from you because they just realized that you convinced them to buy ice, and they don’t actually need ice.  Craig Garber:Yeah. You’ll [inaudible 00:33:52]. You’re right, John. Yeah. John McIntyre:Yeah, man. All right, Craig. Well, we’re right on time here. Before we go, where’s the best place for the listener to go and check out your stuff and learn more about you? I know you’ve got a book out there as well. Craig Garber:Yeah. I have a book out called How To Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers, and anybody listening to this podcast can go to maxmoneyprogram.com. You’ll get the book. You can try my offline Max Money Club, which comes with my monthly newsletter. You could try it for free. You get membership site online if you get … It’s like twelve reports, free issue of my newsletter. You get to participate on a monthly call we have, audio access to every prior call we’ve had, video case studies of upsells, copywriter boutiques, everything.  You can try that for free when you go to that website and order the book there. It’s maxmoneyprogram.com. If you’re in the States, it’s even free shipping. You can go to my site at kingofcopy.com and check out all the stuff there. Like you said, we have about two thousand posts on there, I’ve been around a long time, and I have free webinars, tons of information. You’ll learn a lot on that site. John McIntyre:Sounds good. It sounds good. I’ll have links to those things in the show notes at themcmethod.com, so people need to go get the links. Great. Thanks for coming on the show, man. It’s been good. Craig Garber:John, I appreciate your time. I hope I gave you guys some good information, and thanks for inviting me. The post Episode #65 – Craig Garber on Building Powerful Systems to Create Unlimited Leads and Sales appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Want a FAST way to a profitable list? We all know the effective, longterm SEO and quality content strategy. But what if you want a list TODAY? There IS a way… …paid traffic. Mike Colella is THE paid traffic guru. Only the second expert ever on the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast to talk exclusively about paid traffic. He’s the founder of Adbeat –  A software that lets you spy on your competitors’ display advertising techniques… …banners, sales pages, copy, landing pages and more. Mike’s ninja skills have catapulted him to the top of the paid traffic pack. He makes gaining over a million subscribers look effortless… …regardless of industry. Learn how to attain his split testing frame of mind. It’s the KEY to paid traffic success. Without it, most fail or give up far too soon. Once you hit this benchmark… sky’s the limit. Mike shows you how to test and tweak your way there. Get ready to EXPLODE your growth using paid advertising.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how to transform your list into a goldmine (split test your way to profitability) the trick to creating high converting Google Display Ads (start with a hook… end with a sale) how to grow thick ad-spending skin in order to see the big picture (a must-have trait) the three building blocks to producing profitable paid traffic ads A few little-known yet highly effective tips to recoup 100% of your ad expenditures  the tipping point to success with paid traffic advertising (once you hit this mark… sky’s the limit) how to avoid common paid traffic mistakes made by almost all beginners the key to immeasurable success in paid advertising (think… Perry Marshall’s 80/20 principle) Mentioned: Adbeat – Now offering a $1 trial.  Google Display Network Google Adwords Facebook Ads Gary Halbert John Carlton Perry Marshall Optimize Press The Traffic Blackbook 2.0: Business Class  Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Hey everybody, it’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy, it’s time for episode 64 of the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing, how to make more money with every single e-mail that you send. Today I’ll be talking to Mike Colella, the founder of Adbeat. Now AdBeat is an awesome piece of software that lets you spy on your competitors. You can drop someone’s competitor’s URL into the software and it will tell you all the ads that they are running, where they are running them, how long they’ve been running so you can figure out if the ads are profitable, what the landing pages are, if the landing pages are converting, you can have a great foundation to start your own campaign. So that’s AdBeat.  So I thought I’d get Mike on today because I’m diving into paid traffic myself for my own business and I thought why not get some paid traffic guys, Mike’s one of them, to come on and talk about paid traffic and e-mail marketing and sales funnels because it’s going to help me and it’s going to help you. Today, me and Mike are going to talk about how much you need to make with your funnel, to make it work. There’s a big misconception here that if you go and create a funnel and you promote it, if you don’t make money with it straight away then it’s not working. That’s not exactly how it works. You need to make a certain amount and you can test and tweak away to get there, anyway, I won’t spoil the surprise. Forget the mistakes of paid traffic and how to avoid and the split-testing mindset and that is absolutely key and I’ve talked about this before and [inaudible 00:01:14] sales and marketing book with Perry Marshall.  Now to get this show on this episode of the e-mail marketing podcast, go to the mcmethod.com/64. Now this week’s McMaster’s insider of the week, if you don’t know McMaster’s is my private training community where you can get, there’s a forum, there’s training products the McIntyre method pages it converts a bunch of different products to help you build your sales funnel and create your e-mail marketing in your e-mail auto-responder. There’s also a forum where you can ask questions for me and for the other people in there, that’s McMasters, this week’s insight is Julian said, I gave it a go yesterday, that his handwriting copy, and I’ve got one of John Carlton’s headline stuck in my head all night.  Here’s the headline, The Naked Girls All Laughed Behind The Little Podgy Guy’s Back until he got into a knife fight with three enormous badass bikers. Now I don’t know about you but that’s a cool headline, I just wanted to bring that up. The main point I’ve mentioned is, is that Julian went and got started handwriting copy, and that’s why I wanted to mention it, it’s because, handwriting copy? That’s how I learned to write copy. That’s how [inaudible 00:02:11], that’s how [inaudible 00:02:13]…  That’s how all the best copywriters in the world learned to write copy, and most of them.  I’ve mentioned this before but I think it bears repeating again and if you want to become copywriter or if you want to get a better copy about sales, better at marketing, go handwrite some copy from the old days, go and get one at Gary [inaudible 00:02:27] sales John Carlton, something like that, write it down with a pen and paper. It’s fun. Now if you have a review, if you want to review this show, you’ll make my day and put a huge smile on it but you also help me spread the word of e-mail marketing podcast and get more of this marketing goodness out into the wild. Go to iTunes, search for the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast and you can leave me your review there and I will read it out on the show. Now go on list your question and then we’ll get into this and to be with Mike Colella.  The question is, where do I get started with paid traffic? If I want to get started with paid traffic, where’s the best place to start? There’s a whole bunch of different places to start, I am going with Facebook basically you need to just pick one and stick with that. Don’t pick one and then do it for a week and go this isn’t working then go another one and then another, and then another one, because you’ll never make any progress in any of them. You got to pick one traffic source and master it. Whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Google Adwords. Google Adwords is very competitive, it’s been around for a bit longer. So I’d say go with Facebook and then what you’re really going to need is you’re going to need a sales funnel. It’s not just as simple as setting up an ad and saying sales space Facebook, it’s not really going to work like that.  You’re going to need, I’m going to mention this on another episode soon that you need to have a sales funnel, when someone comes in and they don’t just get the sales page, they get a squeeze page or an alley or something like that, then they buy the product then you have a series of upsells that you sell them which would dramatically increase lifetime value with the amount of cash that someone can spend and that first goal which is going to push you closer and closer to profitability.  That’s it for now, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Mike Colella. Paid traffic and Sales Funnels. It’s John McIntyre here, the order is finally going, I’m here with Mike Colella. Mike is the founder of AdBeat which is an awesome piece of software that allows you to check out what’s your competitor is doing on paid advertising. Now I haven’t had on this podcast, I haven’t had many guys so far aside from Perry Marshall to talk about paid traffic specifically. Recently I was going through traffic blackboob, I think it’s Paid Traffic Blackbook 2 and Mike is one of the presenters on that program so bring some of these paid traffic guys on here because plenty of people come to me and they ask me how do you build a list?  You can go and do it through SCO and go to contents app but that takes a long, long, long, time. Actually that’s a good long term strategy but what if you want to build a list today? That’s where paid traffic comes in and I’m into it because I’m just getting into it myself. There’s a lot that I want to learn here, there’s a lot that I can learn. I know that there’s a listening to this. Maybe there’s a listener who, you want to know how to do this too. Some of the basically how to take, how do you go and buy a list? Not buy a list, going by traffic send it to an opt in page and turn it into leads. So we’re going to talk about that today. Mike, how are you going? Mike Colella:Hey John, I’m good, glad to be here. John McIntyre:Cool man good to have you on. Before we get started into the building a list and paid traffic stuff, I give the listener a background on, I’ve done a little bit, but a background on who is Mike Colella, a bit of that AdBeat and what’s you’re getting up to these days? Mike Colella:Sure. Before AdBeat I basically gotten involved with online marketing through affiliate marketing and I started promoting a bunch of different fitness products mostly info products in the fitness space and doing really well with that. With advertising a lot on the Google Display network and some other traffic sources and after doing that for a while, had the idea to build AdBeat and started building that product out and we’ve been doing that for quite a while and now it’s been in the marketplace for over 3 years now.  AdBeat is just briefly, it’s a competitive intelligent platform that allows you to see what is happening in across the Internet and across 20 different countries even with display advertising. You can basically see what your competitors are doing. See what ads they’re using, what landing pages they’re using. That’s kind of the idea there. John McIntyre:OK nice. This space like I’ve not taken a bit of a look at it so far, we can go in you can punch in and say someone’s website and run through the course and where you can like punch in someone’s website and that ‘ll bring up all their ads, all their campaigns, ad copy, the banner ads,  everything that’s going on in there campaign look for ideas to basically just copy and then rollout your own campaigns. Mike Colella:Yeah I mean that’s basically the idea. You can get some really great ideas on adcopy. You can get great ideas on landing page copy and you can really just see what’s working with display advertising in particular. We don’t cover search advertising. That’s not really my area of expertise. Display is, for everybody that doesn’t know, that’s banner ads, that show up all over the web. A lot of different sources of traffic for that sort of advertising. John McIntyre:Cool man. Let’s get into some of this, how to build a list with paid traffic. We talked about it real quick before we jump on a call here. Give a bit of an overview, let’s start a little, a big picture overview of what’s going on right now with building list with paid traffic and then we’ll dive into some of the details. Mike Colella:There are guys out there I know, just to give an idea, the upper end of what’s possible. There’s guys out there building list of a million plus subscribers using display advertising in many different markets. Anything from health and wellness to personal development, to golf to, finding across the board there’s guys out there doing that, building list primarily through using display advertising a lot of paid traffic to an opt in page. It’s incredible in terms of what’s possible. The size of the list you can build and how much traffic is really out there. If that’s the model that you’re focused on and you’re dedicated to putting the work to make it all happen. John McIntyre:OK. So they’re doing like you look in the ads on the Google network, they push people to a squeeze page, is this like a typical squeeze page or are they doing something funky these days? Mike Colella:You’ll see anything from a very basic squeeze page which is to headline and a little bit of copy to something more elaborate like a quiz style page that asks them a bunch of different questions before asking for the opt in. Even a short video of opt in page and then asking for an opt in obviously in exchange for some value, some free content or [inaudible 00:08:45] or whatever. John McIntyre:OK. Mike Colella:So it’s across the board. It depends on the market really. A lot of ads about testing or seeing what’s working in different markets. John McIntyre:OK. Now there’ a big thing here with because obviously its’ going to cost money to get on and build a list like this but one strategy for this is immediately after they opt in, you give them an offer of some kind. Mike Colella:Yeah John McIntyre:This is standard practice, right? What you want to do is you want to recoup your ad cost on the front end? Is that what these guys are doing? Or is it better to not do that, then do it on the auto-receiver. Mike Colella:It would be hard I think to use this model with paid traffic to an opt in without trying to recoup a good chunk at least of your ad cost, right there on the day zero after opt in. It just depends on the market and depends on how well built out your funnel is but I can tell you there’s guys out there that are dealing anywhere from break even on the front end like on day zero they’re basically recouping ad cost completely to maybe even running at a slight profit.  And then there are some guys that’ll actually go negative on the front end and my not recoup that ad spin into a weeks and to an auto-responder sequence. It just depends on what you’re doing especially if you have some sort of a high end product on the back end it may take weeks to develop in terms of building trust and educating the market or whatever or what it is you’re going to offer them. You may not be able to break even on day zero so you may have to be willing to put in some money and sink in to that auto-responder sequence before you see the return. John McIntyre:I’m just speaking to a friend here in Thailand and he works for some of these guys and he mentioned that a lot of the big companies, they’re often happy with, if they can get 50% of their adspin back so 50% are all on the front, they’re usually happy because they know based on the funnels that they’ve had in the past that they can go and make the rest of that and some profit back using the auto-responder in the back end. Mike Colella:Yeah. For someone who is just starting out, that’s going to be challenging because you’re not going to have that funnel built out properly on the back-end. You probably don’t have the product line that’s needed and you just don’t have the auto-responders all set up. Most people don’t have the patience to set up a hundred plus auto-responder emails before they even sending in any traffic.  For someone who is more advanced and is really established in the market, that’s probably totally reasonable, 50% on day zero. But it’s definitely possible to do a 100% of your ad spin on day zero and so recouping all of that either with an affiliate offer on the thank you page or offering your product at a discount, one-time offer style. There’s a lot of options to make it work and almost anything you can think of is out there being used. John McIntyre:OK. We could get into some of the funnel stuff in a minute but first, it will be good to take a quick look at, when someone get stats with page rank it starts off with paid traffic and with this kind of model when they start doing like a squeeze page with an auto-responder and they’re driving traffic via a display network, what’s some of the stuff that typically goes wrong? Some of the typical mistakes that people make that if they just eliminated those mistakes, they’d be more successful. Mike Colella:I would say with display in particular, probably one of the biggest mistakes is trying to be too direct with your message. If display is such a unique medium where the person is in there probably not thinking of whatever it is that you’re offering them when they’re on the site that they find your ad on. You really have to be a little more indirect and a little more almost a little more aggressive with the copy and almost entertaining I think is a good element to include if in some way you can capture their attention for a few minutes. You’re going to have a much better chance of the whole thing working in terms of a positive ROI. Trying to just go too direct with your ad copy, I would say, is a big mistake that I see a lot of people try to make with display. John McIntyre:What do you mean by too direct? You mean they just go in straightforward like you’re going to lose weight in it. You might say something like lose weight? Mike Colella:Yeah exactly. Without a hook. In that market right now a hook that’s been working for years, I don’t know how many years now, but the headline like ‘5 foods to never eat’, that’s like, that’s a headline that’s freaking everywhere. That says nothing about losing weight. That’s a pretty, it’s just a little bit of a twist and it’s just a little bit of a hook that gets people curious and willing to click through. It doesn’t feel like you’re trying to sell them on anything. It feels like you’re trying to give them something of value immediately and people respond to that. John McIntyre:Yeah, me and friend make fun of that all the time. We’ll be out at dinner with friends or something and we’ll end up, we’ll quote that and would start coming up with ad, weight loss ad copy on the fly based on these 5 weird foods that doesn’t want you to know about. Mike Colella:Right.  John McIntyre:One mistake is that you need an angle base, you need a hook, you need a reason other than just selling a product to actually be there. Are there any other mistakes that people are making? Common mistakes? Mike Colella:Just being patient enough and really getting enough data to make a decision, a lot of people just get scared out of the market. They’ll spend a few dollars on some ads and it doesn’t quite work out for them and so they’ll just give up way too early. The reality is that the ad copy matters a lot. The landing page matters a lot in terms of making sure it’s all can bring as well as possible, and then the sites that your ads are showing up on is also extremely important.  You need to take the best ad in the world, the best copy, the best landing page and you can place that ad on a site that just doesn’t have the right type of prospect on the site and it still not going to perform. You have to be willing to find the right combination of all three of those things and so you hit on a little pocket of targeting, a little pocket of that whole combination there and you’ll see something start working and then you improve on it from there. John McIntyre:OK. One thing that’s really click for me, last couple of months doing some Perry Marshall stuff is this whole split-testing mindset. That most people get into paid traffic and whether it’s display ads or Facebook or Google or any of this stuff where they’re on a campaign and maybe it doesn’t work ten make one change to the end copy and then it doesn’t work you’re like, “alright this is a bad idea, I can’t make it work,” and they give up and they go back to doing whatever they’re doing before.  Whereas, from what I’ve heard and the more people I speak to the true find this is, you basically split-test your way to profitability. if you have to try 20 different ads or 50 different ads and then 20 different landing pages, and if you’re willing to do that, that’s what it really takes to be successful. Mike Colella:Yeah. I cannot agree with that any more, that’s very true. I’ve taken a campaign that started with losing 3/4 of my ad spin and take an ad campaign and turned it profitable in a few weeks or a month or 6 weeks’ time. Which started out, a lot of people would just call that a loser, right? But there were conversions coming in and so you got to take a look and say, where are these conversions coming from? What can I do to try to target this traffic better ? What can I change about the ad copy? That’s exactly right. John McIntyre:Is there any benchmark that, Perry mentions going, you’re going to have to spend a couple of grand before you actually get a wining campaign. Is there any sort of benchmark you go by when thinking about how much you’re going to have to spend or invest in the first month or two while you’re just testing and ironing things out before you actually hit a good campaign? Mike Colella:It depends on what you’re doing. It really depends and as far as like how much would i be willing to spend before giving up, I’m not going to go offer something that I don’t know is a proven market. If I’m going after something and I’ve lost a thousand dollars, it’s not going to scare me because I know that there’s guys out there that are making the market work already. They’re already having success.  I’m going to be far more likely to just push though and stick with it and try to figure out what I’m doing wrong. But if you’re just like throwing up some random idea, it’s hard to say when to quit because if something’s not proven to work on display, that could be challenging and you may have to spend an awful lot of money to figure it out. Perry said a couple of thousand dollars, is that what you said? That’s not a bad- John McIntyre:He mentions like small business you got to spend a couple of grand to get this thing going. Problem is, most small business, three grand, that’s a lot of money to be average business. Mike Colella:I think what happens is that it’s not a lot of money, even for a small business, it’s probably not a lot of money if they were convinced that at some point it was going to turn around and all of a sudden things were going to be profitable and it was going to be a great source of traffic for them. I think what happens is, they don’t know that. You got spooked. They decide that, “oh this could be like this just black hole of cast they  just keep losing money.”  Most people would quit before spending $2,000 or $3,000 honestly. At least $2,000 or $3,000 in losses would make most people quit. That doesn’t always happen though. Sometimes you hit on a good thing and you can make something profitable relatively quickly. I don’t want to stay into that’s always the way that it works out but sometimes it does. John McIntyre:OK. You’re probably right about hat. The whole idea of three grand is not that big of a deal but when it’s three grand, it seems that you’re just throwing it away to the Google display network or another ad network, that’s quite hard to stomach. The feeling that you’re spending, say $100 a day and nothing’s coming out of it, at least for the first month or so. Mike Colella:Yeah so ideally what happens is you’re seeing constant improvement. Out of every hundred you’re losing $75 at first for the first couple of days or maybe even a week. Then the next week you’re only losing 50 out of a hundred and then the next week, 25 etc. Finally after a month or so you’re break even. Once you’re break even then you’re home free at that point because even though you may not be making any money but you’re constantly collecting more data and you’re able to split test that and split test, you have all this traffic coming in and without losing money, you can afford to keep testing and you’ll eventually be profitable. That’s the way that works. John McIntyre:OK. One thing I’m seeing up right now I guess some of these other guys are doing as well is let’s say someone opts in to this list and then they get presented with a one-time offer so just a discount on a product that’s already out there. Then what happens is once they activate that one and purchase that one product that was made, depends on what network and what market you’re in  but my view is say $10 is keep dollar off to kick things off. Then they get hit with an upsell for say $40 and then if they buy that they get one for a $100 then you say buy that they get another one for say $200 or $300.  On the front it might seem like boy you can only make like $7 so you’re selling $7 rebook or something. But once you’re on a whole ton of traffic at that, one in however many hundred depending on the conversion rate is going to end up buying everything in that foam, buying every upsell which is going to add up to something like $300. There’s quite a lot of potential on that front to make a decent amount of money. Mike Colella:Yeah, oftentimes I would say that in a well=developed upsell pf flow and product line that ti’s very possible to see up to 100% more revenue from the upsells than you would if you just have the front end product. This is why it gets hard to just talk in general about how to make display advertising work. If you have someone that really understands e-mail marketing, they really understand product pricing and upsell flows and of this stuff like they’ve got all that down already and they have a well-developed product line, then they may be able to make advertising work fairly quickly.  You’re trying to come and start from scratch on both sides that it’s more difficult and I think usually people know one thing or the other. It’s rare to find somebody that really understands e-mail marketing and full funnel optimization and also understands the traffic side. Because they’re both pretty tough. People tend to just form an expertise on in one side of it and you can spend years just trying to perfect your skills with e-mail and copy and all that stuff. John McIntyre:That’s funny. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I started as a copy writer and then got good in writing e-mails and then started selling our own products and doing it for clients but I’ve never done paid traffic. I in paid traffic in the last probably 2-3 years but I’ve always have that mindset that I spend a hundred dollars and I didn’t make anything, I should just give up and stop doing it.  Now I’m kicking myself, imagine what would have happened if all I did was spend $10-$20 a day for the last two years, I’d be miles ahead of where I am now and I would have been out of practice copy along the way as well, I have both skill sets but now we got one and now it’s time to learn the other side of the coin. Mike Colella:I did the same thing though from the other side. I learned advertising and basically, I don’t know what, I think I was scared of e-mail or whatever for several years and finally a couple of years ago started learning e-mail and if I’d started that earlier I’d be way better off right now. But I don’t know, you learn one thing and if you start having success with it you get into a little bit of a comfort zone probably. This will happen. John McIntyre:This time in real quick just to some of these e-mail stuff basically. Let’s say we’ve got on the act, it would explain who got some good sites, good traffic. People are opting in and we’ve got an upsell flow there with and just people you might have set up right now that I just got, someone opts in, there’s a $7 offer which is a one-time offer down from $20 and then if they buy that they get a $37 off and then a $97 and then a $197 offer. So then what happens after that? You mentioned some of this can get quite advanced, is this like a straight order that’s fun to see with of are people doing quite ninja stuff on the back end with their e-mails. Mike Colella:Here’s the thing, it varies completely. The guys that are doing an amazing job with this, they’re going to be ultra-advanced with all this. They’re going to be doing all sorts of behavior-based e-mail marketing on to the buyer sequence and remarketing if they didn’t take the upsells, they’re going to know that and start offering them again on the buyer’s sequence and all of that stuff. At the upper end, that’s the kind of stuff you can be doing. But there’s guys out there that are doing well with paid traffic and they’re not that advanced. They have just got a really solid front end high converting offer and on the back end they may just be lazy, just not really have it all that advance. Maybe they’re mailing out some affiliate offers or whatever. It really depends on the business and how far along they are.  John McIntyre:Yeah OK. There’s basically like a series of leverage points. We fire up an ad campaign assuming that you’ve got, you can optimize the ad with the image, the banner, the call to action. You can optimize the landing page and like a one-step landing page, you got something like a lead box or like opt-in box that you have to lick and button and it pops up. These are all leverage points and assuming you’ve got those things started the  you start to look at, what do we optimize? The product? Do we optimize the sales page or maybe we optimize the e-mail sequence. Since some people going down the e-mail sequence direction something would go down the product line direction. Mike Colella:It’s tough. Honestly, there’s so many things you can optimize at that point when you get to that point, it’s really tough to decide what to do. It helps if you have some friends that have some sequence set up and you can maybe get reference points on, like if you have an upsell sequence and you got two upsells and each of them converts and 10% of the people that bought the front end buy each of them, that’s probably a little bit low. That might, if you know that, if you ask some other people or figure this out in some way, taking some training courses or whatever, then you might know that that’s a good place to focus some time on. So it helps to know a little bit about what kind of averages are.  It’s tough, you reach where you don’t really know what to focus on and there’s a lot of different ways you can go. I will say this like the trick, the real turning point is when you get to, if you can get to a break even on your ad spent, then you’re in a good place. Because then you can start, you have traffic coming in through your e-mail funnel. Now whatever you choose to do, it almost doesn’t matter because the chances are you’re going to improve if you’re testing. At some point you’re going to probably get the big wins on an opt-in page. You’re going to get the big wins on your one-time offer and so you move on to test other things. Once you get to that point where you have traffic coming, that’s a good place to be. John McIntyre:I can imagine that. This has been really cool. Just last thing and we’ll finish up, what if someone wanted to get started today and they wanted to go at and start setting this up, they obviously need an ad network and then the product to sell and a couple of different pages. Would the best place for them to start be the Google display network?  Mike Colella:Google display is great. Facebook is also really and there’s really tight targeting available on Facebook so depending on what you’re doing if you have a really niche market, Facebook could be good if there’s good targeting available on Facebook, different groups and things you can target, that you know is your target audience, that could be a really great place to start. Google display is excellent for keyword based targeting. Depending on your offer it can work really well.  There’s excellent conversion tacking and re-targeting and all sorts of great features in Google display right now. And as far as setting up a site, the standard things are great. I would start if was starting out today and didn’t have anything I would start with optimize press or lead pages or whatever and just get something going with one of those templated typesuits, silver suits, and that’s planning to get started then you can worry about setting something up, custom later. John McIntyre:I like it. I like it. So no one has any excuse for not starting. Mike Colella:I don’t think so, no. Sometimes a tech stuff can get in the way but you can find somebody on Odesk to help you with that sort of thing but optimize press is great, you can start a million dollar business on optimized press really easily.  John McIntyre:Yeah I like the sound of that. All right, before we go then if someone wants to check out AdBeat, like learn more about you. AdBeat interested in what’s the best place to go? Mike Colella:The site is AdBeat.com. We have a trial available that normally, I don’t want to advertise, but if they want to go and check it out for just a buck to Adbeat.com/trial and any questions, support at AdBeat.com and that should take care of anything anybody wants to know. John McIntyre:Cool man. All right Mike well thanks for coming on the show man, really appreciate it. Mike Colella:Sure, thanks for having me on John.     The post Episode #64 – Mike Colella on How To Quickly Grow A Monster Money-Making Email List Using Paid Traffic appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

John’s held over 900 one-on-one coaching sessions. He runs a highly successful digital marketing agency AND hosts the popular Business Unleashed Podcast… …John Logar is basically an Email Marketing MacGyver. His passion lies in coaching consultants. Simply put,  John is a powerful business coach. He takes skilled people and helps them build 6-figure plus incomes. But helps is an understatement. You will NEVER be out of money as a consultant following his advice. Ever. Let him teach you how to secure year-long retainer contracts of up to $12,000 per month (for just one client). His 2-step method to success is simple: First, realize that people want cash…   fast. Generate that cashflow starting today.  He tells you exactly how. Second – a simple autoresponder. John lays out his BULLETPROOF step by step email autoresponder sequence blueprint… …simple, yet MASSIVELY effective. If you’re ready to make some high-end deals, Put this show on repeat…  …or get ready to hit pause, A LOT. This week’s Email Marketing Podcast is a consultant’s goldmine. Listen in Now: In this episode, you’ll discover: the number one thing that you need to be doing way more of (you already do it, just do it more) how there is no such thing as being late in the game (follow this simple 2-step process to fly-by all the competition) the 2 key ingredients to reigniting past connections through your small email sequence (coming up with a fantastic offer is the first one…) John’s use of scarcity as a powerful motivator (combine it with time and quantity like only true email geniuses do) the rapid cash flow technique that will increase your income naturally (start pulling in money today) 3 simple questions that John used to raise his client $70,000 of revenue in one day the answer to your consulting woes (don’t worry about your current lack of invoices or clients) the trick to landing clients without even using email the key to successfully reigniting existing client lists (guide them into a fast decision-making sales process) an effective way to create income out of both 6 month old quotes and emails (each have their unique technique) the awesome ability to follow-up based on behavior by tracking open-rates (this alone can increase sales up to 33%) Mentioned: Business Unleashed Podcast  Make Every Day A Payday Kyle Tully Perry Marshall Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: Hey you listener it’s John McIntyre the autoresponder guy and it’s time for episode 63, the big 63 of the McMethod Email Marking Podcast where you’ll discover tactics and strategies to increase your email profits by 25% to 100% in 90 days or less. We have spending more and advertise. The basic idea here is that what you’re going to learn is ultimately how to make more money in your business, how to make more sales, how to get more leads, how to convert more of those leads in the customers all with a simple 200 word, 300 word email. It’s not very difficult. I’ve had recent listeners email me telling them one of them had $85,000 in the bank in five months after using basically everything he’d applied he’d learned from the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, so listen in, grab a pen, you’re going to want it. Today, we’re talking to John Logar. John is a very interesting guy. I actually got started with consulting way back in the day when I was just getting into it. I actually went through a product that John had done with another consultant Kyle Tully 00:00:57]. I’ve done an interview with Kyle Tully before but I’ve never done one with John. John is very cool because he gets some just incredible results. This isn’t consulting for a grand here, a grand there, two grand here, five grand there, this is consulting say anywhere from … It depends on the numbers but it will be around $3,000 to $10,000 a month for say 12 months, right and you may pick up 8 to 12 clients of that. You’re going to be doing … This is the sort of level that John is playing at and then he’s coaching others. He’s really a consultant for consultants and that means he’s helping people like me and people in that sort of situation when they want to do this business to bring on that many clients. Let’s say if you follow that strategy. If you had 10 clients of five grand a month, you’re making 50 grand a month. We’re talking some big numbers to get excited. It’s an honor to finally have him on the show I’ll just say that. To get the show links for this episode of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, go to the mcmethod.com/63. Before we’re going to this interview with Mr. John Logar, I just had one thing it is the McMasters Insight of the week. If you don’t know, McMasters is the private membership forum that I have in an exclusive little community that I’ve got for people who want to learn how to do email marketing the right way with products like the McIntyre Method, Stories that Sell, a few things like that. Anyway, there’s a forum in there. One thing we get out to is we have discussions on how to write a copy and how to write emails and how to make more sales and a lot of stuff. The insight for this week is this, say things with less words. I was coaching someone yesterday and one of the main issues with their copy was not that it had a good flow to it, it had some good ideas, it was catchy, it was entertaining, I enjoyed reading it. The problem and I see this a lot, the problem of the copy was that it was too wordy. It used more words when it could just use less. This is the equivalent of saying … here’s a bad example but this will kind of illustrate the point. Right next to me on this table, there was a bottle of hydrogen, one atom of hydrogen, two atoms of oxygen otherwise known as water. I could say that to be kind of clever to be a bit cutie, but really my good copy is to basically say, “On this table there’s a bottle of water.” It’s a bit of a bad of example but the idea in here is that if you can say something with less words, then say it with less words.  You want to eliminate all the redundancies. This doesn’t just apply to writing a novel or writing a newspaper article. This applies to writing headlines, to writing all your copy. There’s that rule where, how long should the sales will be? As long as it needs to be. As long as you can keep at entertaining it should go as on, and on, and on but to be entertaining you have to eliminate all the things that don’t really matter to the core point, to the core purpose, to the message that you are really trying to communicate. The lesson for today or the insight of the week is that I want you to go look at your emails and look at your sales letter, and look at the copy that you are putting out there and see if you can eliminate a line here, or a line there. As you write more copy get rid of the redundancies. Make it more clear, more to the point, quicker, faster, more flowy.  If you want to learn more about McMasters or if you want to sign up for the community and get some coaching with me or connect with the other members, or go through the training products in there go to the mcmethod.com/macmasters. That’s all I have for the moment. I’m going to get back to my lunch over here. Some rice tomato, cheese, actually [inaudible 00:04:16] cheese, pretty delicious stuff and I’m going to live you to it to go and enjoy this interview with John Logar. It’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponder guy. I’m here with John Logar. John is a business coach or a consultant. He helps other consultants not just make a little bit of money consulting but make a lot of money consulting doing really high end deals and  I actually first heard of John a couple of years ago when I was … before I was even the autoresponder guy. I’d done a bit of copy writing, I was just getting into the world of consulting and try to make some money so I could get by more than great by and great a lifestyle over here in Thailand, and one of the programs I went through was one that John had done with another consultant copy writing guy Carl Talley and that was a long time ago but I got a few ideas from that which ultimately led to the autoresponder guy, and the McMethod, and McMasters and all that stuff.  John really knows his stuff and he’s been doing some very interesting stuff recently. One thing you did mention that really blew me away was that he’s done I think 900 one-on-one sessions or coaching clients, what kind of thing? Now only does he know how to make a lot of money. He knows how to teach other people how to do it well with consulting. We are going to get into some of the results he’s done recently and what the sort of the strategies behind what he did recently, how it made it work. We’ll get into that in a minute. First, John, how are you doing today man? John:Hey John, it’s great to be here. John McIntyre a:Good to have you on the show man. John:It’s taken a while. John McIntyre a:It has. John:You are taking your time getting to me John. John McIntyre a:I had a long list of people that … you are trying to keep track of who’s been on and who’s not. It’s getting that way. John:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  John McIntyre a:All right, before we talk about these two different strategies today, give the listener a bit of a background on who is John Logar. I’ve done a little bit of it but you can probably give a better version. Who is John and what does he do? John:I’m a consultant for consultants in one of my businesses. I do run my own digital marketing agency that works with specific clients in strategy especially online marketing strategies. With my consulting or mentoring programs, I run a program called Make Everyday a Pay Day and essentially that’s helping people who have some skills, who are looking to build a six-figure plus consulting business and looking to target, engage, and convert higher paying clients. Whether that be corporate clients or looking to get clients putting in a retainer situation where they are picking up anywhere between $3,000 to $10,000 a month in retainer. Then I also just like you have a podcast called Business Unleashed as well. John McIntyre a:Good old podcasting. Just to clarify there. You said was it $3,000 to $10,000 a month retainer and people are going to stick around for 12 months, and not only that the average [inaudible 00:06:49] you were saying does eight to 12 clients a month, which takes you from $40,000 to $60,000 per month in revenue and in [inaudible 00:06:54] it’s $300,000 a year, you are a one man shop, really great numbers especially for someone who’s just getting into consulting. John:Absolutely and I think the biggest part of it is a lot of … it’s really funny. There’s a lot of people who have a lot of skills who’s been playing around in that marketing and direct response for many, many years, buying products, learning Facebook advertising and PPC and SEO. They’ve learned some cool stuff in their own journey of trying to make something happen or build businesses online. They’ve picked up a lot of skills. Those skills are translatable to very, very opportune … revenue opportunities within the offline world. There’s a lot of guys out there who do offer local marketing or local consulting services but they tend to commoditize at the lower end. At the bigger end where businesses are larger but have larger sales volumes they don’t do anything when it comes to building sales funnels, direct response marketing. They tend to stick to traditional forms of marketing above the line, billboards, TV, radio advertising, trade shows. They are missing out. The world is turning and changing. I think the playing field is rapidly changing in the market. There’s a whole bunch of people out there with great skills but they can translate into the offline world and these guys have no idea about the tech, the philosophy, the ideas, the strategies and really you can certainly charge great value for those types of services. The number job that’s been searched for at the moment out there is for digital marketing experts and whatever that means I don’t know. Now there are digital marketing courses springing up and certifications and graduate degrees that are springing up that a lot of universities because from an [inaudible 00:08:32] marketing pool, from a marketing point of view, online is a very important component. It is getting much stronger. We are living and breathing off these great, little smart phones all over the world. In fact, in south east Asia the highest Internet connection rate is done through a smart phone not through a landline portal. That’s where the opportunity is and I think people have got great skills but how do I package it up? How do I actually approach people to share those skills and help them engage and generate more revenue as well? John McIntyre a:It sounds part of it too there’s a big mindset here where people get into it. “I know a little bit. I know you say I could do this John.” You tell me that I can get out and make all these ton of money but I just don’t know. A big part of this is there’s so much self-doubt. They know they’ve got skills. They know they could probably do it but are they going to go out there and do it? Probably not. They need to have that realization, it’s like yeah, if I go out there and do X, Y, Z. Step 1, 2 and 3 I’m going to be able to close a $5,000, a $10,000 a month client and do that every single month and do that for 12 months of the year. John:Yeah and what you are doing … if you look at the translation of that it’s like you are building a membership client. Instead of getting $39.00 a month for a membership forum you’ve got a client paying you $3,000 to $6,000 to help them receive a result on a month to month basis. It’s like having a high-end membership program with one client. John McIntyre a:What about the hours or the work that goes into this? Let’s say you are taking a $5,000 a month client to do some of their marketing, are you … is this going to be a pain in the ass? You are talking to these client every single day and working all day? John:Based on the experience that I’ve had in my own business and certainly with the consults that I’m working with they probably spend about three to five hours a month with a client. It’s not a lot of time and at the same time they are leveraging their time through outsourcing through supplies to deliver the process. The goal is that they are working only a business in their business. They are not the technician. They are actually the project manager, the person who’s out there marketing and generating clients for their own business and then as a client comes in, they facilitate that project for that client by bringing in outsourced providers from all over the world if not in their local location and add their margins on top. John McIntyre a:Do they have to be on location with these clients or can you do this from Skype? Could I do this from Thailand for example? John:You could do this from anywhere in the world. All you need is a connection to the Internet of some form and Skype is an easy way to do this. In fact, if I look at all the consultants that I’ve been working with over the last year I would have to say that more than 70 percent of their clients are not in the city that they are located in. John McIntyre a:Interesting. John:They are doing it via email, Skype, LinkedIn, social networking. They’ll do it through forums. There’s a whole bunch of processes you can go and pick up corporate or business clients. John McIntyre a:Okay because I was thinking for something like this for more high end stuff you’ve have to go in, you’ve have to give business cards out, meet someone in their office sit down and wine and dine them and all that crap. John:No, it’s not uncommon. In fact, if I was looking at a guy who was one of my guys who is based out of Phoenix, Arizona half his … in fact he doesn’t have a single client in Phoenix and the average for him sits around the $8,000 to $10,000 month mark. It’s really funny. [Inaudible 00:11:36] and you there pick me up clients outside of your state. The Internet gives you that flexibility. John McIntyre a:If you could to and then you are not worried about [inaudible 00:11:47] your client at the supermarket or at the bar at 3am or whatever it happens to be. John:Why isn’t my campaign working? Why is my PPC on? John McIntyre a:We are down with mark that out. That’s the benefits. That’s the goal that a lot of people are going for. This consulting lifestyle which is that you can make a ton of money and you don’t have to work. It’s not to make double what you make now. It’s not working twice as hard. It’s just working on the right things. Let’s talk about that, the right things. You mentioned two things, the two recent case studies and some of the lessons you learned from that. Let’s get into that. Let’s start with number one. John:Number one is that people want cash and they cash fast. I’ve been sitting there thinking, how do you get cash in your business as quickly as possible? look at common sense and the guide here because a lot of people do not have common sense. There’s cause and effect. If you have a lot of office out there’s you’ve got a good chance that you are going to generate some revenue. The number one thing that a lot of people don’t do is they don’t offer things enough. I’ve heard you say things like on this podcast that I went from doing one email a month to a database to an email a day and as soon as you put that email a with an offer every single day your sales went through the roof. John McIntyre a:That changed everything. It absolutely changed everything. John:Yeah, the number one thing is that a lot of people don’t make offers but the other important thing is cash flow is key in your business. If you don’t have cash flow you are not in business essentially. The key to generating lots of cash flow is to get focused on what you need to do to generate it and just to give you a really simple perspective. It’s amazing how many businesses charge or send out invoices to clients and leave those invoices out there. I was talking to an IT firm. They over 180 grand worth of invoices sitting out there to be paid as debits and I sat there and look, “Have you delivered the service for this product?” They said, “Yeah, we’ve delivered.” I said, “Why don’t you just get on the phone or get one of your team members on the phone and just ask those people to take care of that invoice today?” By the end of the week they’ve cloaked $100,000 worth of revenue business. Now they don’t give time payment. They ask for the payment up front and the payment is done on invoice and this way their cash flow has just gone through the roof now.  Another simple strategy and this is probably one of my favorites was a printing firm that I sat down with. We were doing some consulting on strategy and they were sitting down saying, “Hey, we just need to get more quotes. We get more quotes we make more sale,” and I said, “Awesome. How many quotes do you get right now on an average per day?” He says, “We probably do 15 quotes a day.” I said, “Of those 15 quotes, how many do you close?” He said, “We probably do three to four of those quotes that we quote.” In that we I’m sitting there saying, “What happens to the other 11 quotes? Where do they go?” He says, “[Inaudible 00:14:15] or we put them in the filing cabinet. They are all over here,” and I said, “Do you want to make some money and do you want to make it today? If you want to make a chunk of change, are you serious? Do you want to make it today?” “Yeah, we want to make some money today.” I said, “Let’s get you through sales guys. Let’s get you and get your partner and get some of your support team here who talk to the customers and we are going to pull out all the quotes for the last six months. Get all the filing files, get them on the table and put them in the center of the table.” We are all sitting in the room and I said, “This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to ring, everyone of you are going to take a stack of these and you are going to call these clients and you’re going to ask them a simple series of questions. You did a quote a few months back from us on this particular project, did you go ahead with quote? Did you go ahead with that project? If you didn’t go ahead with the project, would you like to go ahead now? If that’s not an option for you, is there something else we can quote about? If you did go ahead with the project, who did you go with and why would you go with them?” That was the series of questions that they were asking. By the end of the day $70,000 worth of revenue from quotes they’d written three to six months ago. Here’s the thing. They continued on in the month. That month they wrote $280,000 worth of business from quotes that they’d written in that sin month period. People wanted re-quotes, yes they went ahead with their projects. This was off old stuff. This is cash that they’ve picked up pretty much picked up straightaway business. Rapid cash flow is when you focus on generating income, naturally what’s going to happen? You are going to get some income from your business. The thing is to develop focus on primary income generating strategies in your business. Make sure you get paid on time. Make sure you get paid in advanced. Make sure you are asking people for money to buy something from you. Make sure that you are consistently out there following up your opportunities and posing those opportunities. Those things make cash really fast in most businesses. That’s simple cash flow. That’s probably about a quarter of in a nutshell a quarter of an entire strategy but I say to people if you spent one hour a day in your business focusing on income generating activity, and that’s a primary activity where you physically engage someone or you offer something where somebody can buy something from you will never be out of money again in your business if that was what your focus was. One hour a day is going to make a huge difference. John McIntyre a:I love this and I think the best part about it is that … I read recently. A podcast just went out with Perry Marshall recently on his book of E80/20 Sales and Marketing and part of the realization on that book for me is you can take some of the smallest activity, the smallest tasks on your to do list that will produce the biggest results and it’s actually encouraging you start to isolate these activities you can work less and make more money, make more impact, get more done and this is one of those things. John:Absolutely, absolutely. The second part of that strategy a lot of people say, “I don’t have invoices. I don’t clients that I can just go and offer things to.” I’m scratching around for opportunity. They think by the time they build a relationship with somebody, go through a sales process, sit down with them, make an offer that’s going to take time and I sit there say, “Listen, every single person knows somebody who’s in business.” If you can’t buy coffee you know the guy who runs a coffee store. If you a family member, an associate, a colleague, a class mate, people you bump into, business cards you’ve collected along the way, everybody can roughly get a list of between 60 and 130 people. The average person has got about 130 people on their Facebook pages. Everybody has got a list right now who’s in business of people that are either are in business or people that know someone who is in business. I say to those people, “Here’s what you want to do. Get that list together as quickly as possible, preferably if you can get an email list that will be even better of people, if you can get an email list you are going to go direct to these people, right?” Really I tell people how often have you told people that you know what you do and how you do what you do? How often have you educated those people around you so that if they know somebody that needs help around that area they can refer people to you. People refer people to people all the time. I sat there and said, “This is the strategy. All you’ve got to do is say, “Hey mom, dad, brother, sister, friend, cousin, business owner. We’ve had a connection. I know you. This is what I do. This is how I help people. This is the type of results that I can get for people and this is what I’m doing.” If you or anybody you know needs some help in this area, do you mind just passing this on?” Pretty simple. I have … John McIntyre a:I’m getting excited. John:I had a person who took this strategy to heart, took this and said, “Hey, I need some cash and I need it now.” He sat there and he wrote down an email list. I think he ended up with an email list of about 60 people that he could go out to and he made  very simple offer. He was in web development and his focus was to actually blow up sites and actually converted and engaged customers when they visited. He had a focus in conversion based websites that he could develop. He had a system strategy. It worked really well. He knew he could deliver really well but nobody really knew exactly what he did. He told friends and family. He said, “Listen, this is what I’m going to do. He sent an email out, made an offer.” He said, “I’m just looking for a handful of people who will take advantage of this.” It was a good offer that made some profit for him. By the end of the day he had four people that said yes, I’ll take you up on the offer. Sixteen thousand dollars in a day from people who they knew, knew from the past purely by just putting something out there. One thing that I find with people is all you’ve got to do is ask. Let people know, hey I need some help. Do you know anybody that needs help with this sort of thing and you’ll be surprised at how many people will come to you. John McIntyre a:You are absolutely right. The reason I’m getting excited is I’ve got this autoresponder to me site. The daily emails that goes out and pushes people to the product and the how to write an autoresponder. What I haven’t done and I don’t have a list for because they never went through a web or they never physically signed up to an email list is a list of all the clients that we create an autorespond for. Basically, you are saying what we should do and I know this has worked because I’ve done small sample size, filed 10 people on this sometimes when I’m ringing some cash but I’ve never actually gone through every client I’ve ever worked with, grab their email address because it’s all via email and then sent them all saying, “We are doing autoresponse now, we can do a product launch and we can do this and that,” and I know that if I did this, this afternoon, maybe I’ll do it. There is going to be sales. This is the money straightaway like that. You are talking about putting a people via link in the email, right. John:Yeah, absolutely, buy now, here it is, take advantage of it. Yeah. The other method that you are talking about, you talked about earlier on and this is a very simple strategy is something that every email marketer knows but the actual focus of this strategy is to run a very small sequence to either reignite existing clients, passed connections and contacts into a fast decision making sales process. The key here is to come up with a fantastic offer, the best offer that you can imagine or think up. It has to make money for you. You are not going to go out there and run a loss lead or run a low end campaign or a low end price point. You are looking for something that has good cost, has great value, maybe you’ve padded in with some added value items to build up the value of the actual opportunity but you’ve got to make some money out of it. You’ve got to make some cash. There’s no point in doing something for nothing. You are going to do the work. You want to make some opportunity for revenue and for profit. You build the software. You create an awesome offer and you say, “Hey, I’ve [inaudible 00:21:13] that. Overall, you’ve made a mistake or we’ve got capacity. We’ve got room to help two or three people to take advantage of something very unique that we’ve put together. We are only offering this to a handful of people. You are one of the handful of people that are being offered this to. If you’d like to take advantage of it let us know straightaway. We can get this action. We’ve got some space to next two weeks, right. Time sensitive, quantity sensitive. Scarcity is a powerful motivator. Good reason, great value so awesome offer. Remember these people you are sending to are people you already know or who are already existing clients. You don’t need to sell them on case studies and who you do things for and what great results you get for people. They already know who you are. They already know what results you get, right of your product or service. It’s a relatively familiar list. Even past contacts, people you just bumped into. They know who you are but you’ve never done business with them. These are people you put into this campaign. First email, awesome offer. Second email, day two, right. Most companies or most businesses especially offline they only send out one offer and that’s it. They get limited results, right and so conversions are low, nothing ever happens. The second email is a very second email. The headline I just want to make sure you got this so you didn’t miss out, that’s it and then it reiterates the offer, the awesome value, the awesome thing. I’ve added what four or five of these available, just click here take advantage of now, let’s do it. Third day, day three next email, hey we’d love to know what you thought about this unique offer. We’d love to know what your feedback on what you think about the value or what you thought about this. Again, reiterate the offer, time sensitive, time limited. The last offer are you interested, would you like to ahead with this offer? Four emails, very simple sequence. First email of that offer. Second email, just make sure you are getting this offer. Third email we’d love to know what you thought about this awesome offer. Last email, are you interested in taking advantage of this? Generally with time we will run these types of campaigns especially to offline clients and even in business when I’ve tested these campaigns invariably we always make the sale. Somebody in your list is going to buy something. Somebody is ready. Even if you sold one you still made a deal out of this because you are making a profit.  In this campaign, this is where can I get really sexy with you John? John McIntyre a:Go for it man. I love the sexy. John:Here we go really sexy with this. Everybody who’s in the email marketing game knows in the autorespondense, in the reporting we can actually see the clicking activity or the open rate and not only that we can actually see how many times they open up an email, yeah. We can see those figures and results. Using [inaudible 00:23:47] we can actually see how many people open up an email. We found that when can actually see a person open up an email, open up an email more than once it shows that whatever they headline is, whatever the subject line is and the email has sparked an interest, enough of an interest for them to open an email twice. Because most of these lists are not huge we say to the people, just give the person a call and say, “Hey, we notice that you’ve had a look at the offer, is there anything we can help you with,” or, “Is there something we can explain about what we are offering and why we are offering this?” That’s the kicker. The kicker is that they can follow up based on the behavior, people who have opened up the email two or three times. We’ve seen conversion rates in sales improve by up to 33 percent purely by picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, I noticed you had a look at that thing twice. What can we help you with or is anything we can help you with around that? It’s really simple. Most people don’t pick up the phone but you’ve got a reason to do it. It’s a really simple thing to do. I’ve done this campaign. Probably the best result that I’ve had with this campaign is a list of 62 people generate $250,000 in the IT sector. This was to a knowledge manage company that was selling Intranet database knowledge management  systems. They got about 250 grand worth of work from a list of 62 people running this exact campaign in that format with the follow up call. John McIntyre a:I like that. I like that. That dial up per subscriber value was insane right there. John:It was awesome. The thing again and here’s can we get really sexy now? John McIntyre a:Let’s do it. Let’s go John. John:Let’s go really … let’s really low down and dirty on this one. This is where you get a little kinky. You run the campaign. The campaign is run [inaudible 00:25:23]. What you do now is you go back, pick a handful of that people at that list and say, “Hey, we run this thing. We got a few people. Took advantage of this thing. Just want to know if you saw it. Can we just walk you through what we would do there and what we are offering?” It’s amazing the people say, “I saw something not quite sure,” or, “Yes, saw that thing. We weren’t quite ready yet.” You say, “Look, I’ll tell you what because you’ve taken the time to answer the call and answer the questions, what if we made the offer to you? Would you like to go ahead?” We’ve seen sales of campaign running three weeks later. I work with a wholesale IT company that sells hardware and logistics. We did that strategy on a campaign that had already been gone for three weeks. People had pretty much forgotten about the campaign. We devised an amazing strategy. We got the sales guys to just do that. “Hey, run this thing a few weeks ago, not sure if you remember it. It was a pretty good we had a lot of people take advantage but know that … just wanted to know was that something that was cool for you guys and what did you think about the deal? Here’s what the deal was.” They run read out the deal and said, “Hey, if you want to we, we can do it for you.” They picked up 17 sales. The average sale was 32 grand. Offer back ending, remember the old follow up old quotes. This is following up all the emails. The email had gone. It was just going back picking a handful of people and just saying, “Hey, how are you doing? We’ve still got some stuff available if you’d love to take advantage of it. Just would love to know what you thought about that campaign.” John McIntyre a:This reminds me the quote. The always be closing. John:Absolutely, yeah it is. It is always be closing … old sales quote always be closing. John McIntyre a:Always be closing. It’s just so simple. You just got to talk to more people and make more offers. John:Absolutely, a lot of people forget in this game especially with direct response and with communication it’s important that we are so distracted, we are so disjointed with what we are being bombarded with. I’m walking into stores with my iPhone, looking at buying a pair of sneakers and I’m looking at the website of a store that’s diagonally 20 minutes way. Here I am. I’m focused, I’ve gotten in the store but I’m checking our prices or I’m checking out shoes on another store just down the road from where I’m standing. We are so caught up, we are so bombarded that we forget that I love the concept or Google came up with this concept a little while ago called the zero moment of truth or ZMOT. You can even Google it. They’ve got videos on it but they were saying back in 2009 the average person would take five frames of reference before they made a purchasing decision. Five frames of reference was talking to a friend, checking out an ad, hopping on the Internet to check the website looking at the product online. They were five frames of reference a person would buy. Today we are talking, five years later, people on average are looking for 18 points of reference before they make a purchasing decision and if I talk about that shoe example as a perfect example.  I was looking for a comfortable pair of sneakers. We’ve got heaps of store around the world like Foot Locker or Hypedc and all these stores that sell sneakers. It’s quite a trendy thing to do. I was looking for something comfortable. I hop online, I do my research. I type in cool, comfy, casual sneakers. Search comes up I get regular stores. Foot Locker, Hypedc, Nordstrom and a few others in that search. I look, I go and have a look and see what sort of funky sneakers they’ve got. I’ve done the search. I know connect with five websites. I’ve hit five websites. There’s five, search is six. I don’t click on three different searches because I’m looking for more than just cool sneakers. Search is six. I eventually sit down and say, hey, I go into a store. I walk into two different stores. I go to a Hypedc store, I go to a Foot Locker store. I’m sitting there, looking at their shops. I’m already up to nine frames of reference before I’ve even purchased a product. Then I try a product on. I take a photograph of the product on my foot with my iPhone and I SMS it to my wife and say, “Hey honey, what do you think of this?” And she SMSes back, “You look pretty good. Is it comfortable?” I said, “Yeah, great.” There I’m asking for another frame of reference before I make the purchase not based on whether I liked it or not but does it look cool, what it looks like. Understand that if people looking for that many frames or references to make a purchasing decision, if you think you are going to go out there and do a one shot deal, and think that people are just going to fall over themselves and say, “Yes, I’m going to make that happen,” you are kidding yourself. You’ve got to be in your customers face on a consistent basis.  You’ve got to be engaging them, nurturing them, hitting them from different angles, offline, online and if it’s big volume sales and big dollar sales them you need to be spending the time and building that relationship. We are learning from the Amazons and the eBay’s and the Ace Horses and these guys are doing amazing work online. They are almost literally saying, “Hey, I’m an online business but I want you to feel like we are offline.” They are building this amazing relationship by sending out offers. If you go to their websites, all their websites are full of offers. The first thing you see, 20 percent off this, here get this deal, get into this VIP program you’ll get better deals if you join this thing. They are teaching us. They are showing us what is working and I think this is where businesses get stuck, they get caught up in all the bullshit in their business of not making money, they are struggling. They are not targeting the right clients. They don’t even know their customers well enough and they are seeing businesses that have only started three or four years ago absolutely killing it in their market. We’ve got a great magazine in Australia, well not a magazine. It’s an online magazine now but the publishing world is being stricken by the online bug but BOW runs a list of the fasted growing companies every year, the top 100 fastest growing businesses. The average business in there they started five year ago. They are only very young. The most successful business in this particular group was a retailer, an offline retailer. You would think an online retailer would do better. This is an offline retailer. This offline retailer started the business in 2009. From 2009 to now 2014 they are generating a turnover of $63 million in revenue in five years. Here’s the thing here, in the last 12 months they went from 30 million to 63. They doubled because of online marketing and because of online and also direct response offline as well with their customers. People in the retail industry who’ve been around for 20 years they heard him. All over a sudden, this nobody out of nowhere says, “Hey, I want to be a retailer to. I want to sell some great products. I want to create a great customer experience. I’m coming in here late,” and so most people just say, “Hey, you’ve been late because the bubbles just about to burst with online marketing online retail. Why are you opening up an offline store?” And all over a sudden they are killing it out there. I think people don’t ask for enough, they don’t focus on what they want to generate and achieve in their business and they are not maximizing their opportunities. John McIntyre a:I think too. Once you get  the hang of marketing, once you really get how marketing works and how it’s really quite simple with the making of the offers and all that stuff that you can go into any market. When you are good at it, as long as you assess the environment well enough you can go into anywhere and make money. John:Yeah, absolutely. Know your customers. Find out they want, give it to them as much as you can, make it easy for them to buy. John McIntyre a:It’s something to do with the whole entrepreneurial mindset here which is really that there’s no problem that can’t be solved. That’s really what makes a entrepreneur is that everyone else is saying, “No, you can’t do that. It’ll never work. There’s no way anyone is going to do that,” and then they just go and figure it out. When you go to do it and they do it. John:Absolutely, give it a try and go for it. I think a lot of people do marketing back to front. They think about their product offering and their product and what it does rather than thinking about the person who is actually going to buy it and use it. It’s almost reverse marketing and I sit there and say, “Hey, don’t fall in love with the product. Fall in love with the customer that’s going to receive this product and benefit from the product.” If you can fall in love with those sorts of people then the communication, the engagement you are going create from that is going to serve you so much better than thinking about how can I get this stuff out. John McIntyre a:I love that but I think that’s a good note to end on John. Before we go give though the listeners are wondering where can they get a little more about you or about the consulting, the mentoring stuff you do, any of that stuff. John:They can go to makeeverydayapayday.com. There’s a blog there. They can get a lot of videos and information off of what’s strategies, and tactics and ideas, and lots of free training on there. I also run a podcast like you at businessunleashed.com with my partner, Chris Green in the UK and that’s a realistic and practical and tactical ideas, [inaudible 00:33:52] you can generate revenue from pretty much what we said today on your podcast. John McIntyre a:Sounds good. I’ll let links to that at the [inaudible 00:33:58] McMastersmethod.com and one thing you mentioned before we jumped on this call is the song, the [inaudible 00:34:03] song. If you are listening and you want to know what this song is you can go to the McMasters.com. It’s on every single podcast post and you’ll be able to see that on there. John thanks for coming on the show man. John:Thanks John. I appreciate you having me on. The post Episode #63 – John Logar on Creating Massive Wealth as a Consultant appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Dan Faggella is an email marketing POWERHOUSE. His BOSS autoresponders make most email marketing campaigns look like they’re playing second fiddle. How so? He pulls in 30 – 40k per month through emails… on the reg. Intense. But not too long ago, Dan was playing Tyler Durden…  …hosting fight-clubs in a carpet warehouse during college. Fast forward a couple years… Dan is KILLING it. From fumbling his marketing and emails… …to SMASHING EVERYTHING in his way,  Dan’s gone to town on the entire marketplace. And now he’s raking it in. He took his passion for fighting…  …and turned it into a lucrative membership site. How’s he so effective? First and foremost… positioning. By using what he already knows about you, plus his unique splintered front-end email marketing technique,  he’s able to drive multiple campaigns all into one paid-membership continuity program. Sound complex? No worries,  Dan reveals how to manage these campaigns with ease. If you have an established business and are looking to take it to the next level… …this is for YOU. Turn your existing list into a money makin’ machine. Find out how it’s done – step by step – in this episode of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast.    In this episode, you’ll discover: how to generate desire while building up a sale (provide this value and watch the sales roll in) the one word you must know to produce a solid foundation for your email campaigns. an essential exercise that will get you pumping out compelling emails (do this, and the big picture becomes clear) the simple solution that will vanquish any overwhelming sensations a bulletproof email autoresponder plan, yours for the taking (Dan lays out his entire plan for you to copy into your own biz) how to hypermonetize your existing list and increase sales exponentially the secret to converting continuity sales (learn how to convert these notoriously hard sales effortlessly) how to splinter your front-end emails to create maximum exposure (get ready for a lot of traffic) the contextual parsing technique that funnels subscribers to your one true core benefit (the money maker) the roller-coaster pitch sequence that doesn’t let up (Dan’s attained over 20k people on his list with it) Mentioned: Terry Dunlap – McMaster success story clvboost.com – Database and Email Marketing Dan Faggella (google his name. He’s got over 700 related articles to martial arts) Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Okay. It’s John McIntyre, The Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for episode 62 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. Now, this is the podcast where you’ll discover step by step tactics and strategies that one listener used to make over $85,000 in just 5 months. That’s Terry Dunlap. That’s from an episode from about 2 months ago and I highly recommend you checking it out. He’s got all his stuff from this podcast, so keep listening, stay listening. Okay? Today, I’ll be talking to Dan Fagella. Dan is a friend of mine. I met him through a friend of a friend as you do and Dan is just a boss. Okay?  Two years ago, we were chatting on a membership community that we’re both a member of and he was just getting started. He was into wrestling and he was just getting his business going and he’s trying to get the hang of the marketing stuff and sales funnels and emails, and all that stuff. In those 2 years, he has gone to tow the entire marketplace. He has completely blitz it. He’s gone from nothing to doing 30 to 40 thousand dollars a month. The engine of this business of his is email marketing and that’s why I brought him on the show today because I want to talk to him about what he’s doing with his emails. Okay? Traffic, we’re not getting to in this one, but it’s the email stuff and that’s why you’re here. If you got traffic, if you got a product or service, this is going to be really valuable and this is going to be for business to business guys. This is for you if you’re just a product guy. It’s for anyone trying to use email. Okay? There’s 2 things here. You get the front end sequences. Basically Dan’s front end priorities, it’s about a $50 a month program and he’s got some email that funnels through towards those things. It’s a very interesting strategy and not one that I’ve heard of before. Then, you have the back end. Once someone buys that, what happens next? How do they continue making money off them? He’s got some great ideas there.  We’re basically going to lay out, Dan is going to lay out his strategy blow by blow. If you wanted to, you could take the entire model. The entire model that Dan is using to make 30 to 40 thousand dollars a month. Take that, roll it out in your own business. It may sound complicated, but towards the end of this interview, the end of this episode, I asked Dan, “How do you do all these without getting overwhelmed?” Because it will sound overwhelming. Okay? That’s just a warning, but like I said, I asked Dan how does he do it without feeling overwhelmed and he’s got a very simple solution that really made me laugh when he told me. Stick around for that.  To get the show notes for this episode of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, go to themcmethod.com/62, for 62. Two things; number 1, McMasters insight of the week. McMasters is my paid community where you can go to learn more about email marketing and get some of the products and join the forum. All that sort of lovely fun stuff when you make money. Anyway, this week’s insight is this: “After reading your article on why e-book suck, I’m wondering if I should change the venue for my product delivery?” This was from McMasters member named Joy.  Now, Joy is currently selling an e-book and she’s doing quite well with the e-book making regular sales, but she’s wondering, “Maybe …” After reading this article on why e-book sucks, she’s wondering, “Maybe I should change that e-book into a video cause or something like that.” Okay? It’s a great question, right? Now, there’s a couple answers to this and this is really where the insight comes in to it. Okay? Let’s say you’ve got an e-book out there and you’re selling it for $100. Should you change that to video just because e-books are kind of lame and videos are better?  The answer is probably not. This is what I said to Joy is that, just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it, right? There are a million things. Right now, I have Evernote open, I have probably tens of thousands of items, little tasks, that I could do on my website and my business with people, partnerships, products, so much stuff. I used to stress about it but then I realized that it doesn’t actually matter. Most of that stuff doesn’t matter at all. Within those tens of thousands of different tasks and ideas and business ideas, and just everything, there’s going to be a couple things, 1, 2, 3, maybe 5 or 10 things that are really going to matter.  If I can identify those leverage points, I can come down with an explosive impact on those points and I can get incredible, incredible results out of all proportion to the time and effort that I have to spend. In Joy’s case, this is like saying, “Yeah. You could take your e-book and make it video cause,” but is it really going to help? Probably not. That’s one of those things that yeah, it’ll keep you busy and maybe you make a few more sales, I don’t really know. It’s not going to make a very big impact.   To me, a better way to do this, we’re going to go, your e-book’s good, people are buying it at, I think it was $77, great. Okay? That’s proven that’s working. Now, the next step is like, you need to put out a product line. If you got an e-book selling for 77, well, these people would probably buy something for 3 to 500 dollars, but it would be videos instead. You can say, okay, so you got the e-book here and the upsell when they click the Add to Cart button, you should have a little thing that says, “All right, before you go through this, I just wanted to let you know that we have a premium version or a platinum version of this program. Instead of the e-book, you can the full video program. That gives you access to the e-book and 8 video modules with worksheets …” and whatever, you just dress it up, “… and then you’re going to be paying 3 to 500 dollars.”  If you just put that on there, you’re going to bump your average sale from 77 to, once you even it out, up to 200, 300 dollars because a lot of people prefer videos. Some people prefer books. Okay? This is a great way to make more money and that’s one of those changes. You’ve got to identify and do it, that will make a big difference in the business especially, if you can bump that lifetime customer value, I’ve mentioned this before, and she goes out, Joy goes out and does paid traffic, she should be making 2 times or 3 times as much every time she makes a sale, which makes paid traffic far more worthwhile. Okay?  The insight here, and it’s not about the e-books or the videos or anything, the insight here is that, in your business in all the things that you have on your to-dos that you’re stressing about like, “I’ve got to listen to John’s podcast. I got to reply to these emails. I’ve got to get this client project done. I’ve got to get this done and that done and this done,” and you’re stressing about it. The thing is, you step back and realize that there’s only a couple of things on that list that actually matters. The rest, you can probably just forget about it, delete, get rid of. Maybe that means this podcast, maybe that means not listening to this podcast. Maybe email marketing isn’t the main issue in your business, and that’s okay. You can come back to it later.  You’re goal as the business owner, as the entrepreneur is to focus on those small steps, the small tiny little leverage points that if you hit with the hammer they will just bring down the entire wall and you’re going to be fabulously successful and wealthy. Okay? That’s it for this week’s McMasters insight of the week. If you want to get into McMasters and sign up so you can get direct access to me, join the other members and get access to at the McIntyre Method. That’s my video training program, “How to Write an Autoresponder”. It’s 4 modules, 4 weeks and you have a 10-email autoresponder sequences. “How to Write Stories that Sell” via email. You’ve got “Pages That Convert” which will show how to create great landing pages. All that is at themcmethod.com/mcmasters. Now, the only other thing is reviews. If you’re getting a lot out of this show and I’ve heard from a lot of them and they are. People are getting a lot out of it.  I’d love it if you can, you’d really be doing me a huge favor, if you can jump over to iTunes and search for the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast and follow the prompts, it’s a little bit clunky, and leave me a review. Tell me what you think about the show. You’ll really make my day. The reviews make a lot of these stuff worthwhile. When you hear about how it’s helping people, how it’s changing their business, and ultimately changing their lives. I’d love it if you could do that for me. That’s enough of that. Let’s get in to this interview today. It’s going to be a great one, so you want to have a pen and paper because this is a doozy. Okay? Get ready, let’s go talk to Dan Fagella.  It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Dan Fagella. Now, I was introduced to Dan via a friend of mine, a guy who I used to live with here in Thailand and was really interested to, you know, wanted to chat with Dan, talk about his marketing and actually bring him in the podcast because he’s doing some fascinating stuff with not just email marketing, but that’s one of the core components of the business, but with the whole sales funnel process and page traffic stuff, and really bringing it together and doing a great business in a tiny, tiny market. Which, I should tell you, it’s about choking someone. We’ll get into that in a few minutes.  The reason I brought him today is we’re going to talk about some of the email marketing stuff he’s doing because he’s using emails to get people into a continuity program and then doing some really ninja stuff on the back end that I’m really curious to dig in to. I haven’t talked too much about this on the podcast, so this is getting a bit more advanced. This is more for our people with established businesses and who want to step things up and add some really cleanups. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Dan, how are you doing, man? Dan:Doing great John, good to be here, brother. John:Man, really good to have you on the show.  Dan:Yeah.  John:Before we get in to the nitty-gritty of this email stuff, give … I mean, I know a little bit about you. I’ve tried to give the listener a bit of a background, but you’ll be much better for this. Give the listener basically your story, man. Who’s Dan? What does he do? Dan:Yeah. Sure. Yes. You know me through [Mr. Ed Lowe 00:09:21], of course. My name is Dan Fagella. I’m a martial arts guy originally, so a lot of people have seen me in the UFC or mixed martial arts. Really, that was my first passion. I started basically a fight club in the back of a carpet store when I was in undergrad in college just because fighting is more fun than anything else, right? It’s the most fun thing to do. I ended up getting into University of Pennsylvania for graduate school and skill development and for masters. I realized, in order to pay for the Ivy Leagues, I was going to have to make some money. I turned that fight house into a martial arts gym which I later sold when I moved to Boston, but before I moved to Boston, I decided to …  I mean, I moved to Boston essentially to do consulting and eventually get into investing which is where we’ll hopefully be once we’ve flipped some business stuff. Before I moved to Boston, I said, “I’m going to need a business that can come with me.” We turned all these martial arts techniques in a course of about 12 months, all these stuff that we’re teaching in the gym on a day to day basis in a town of only about 8,000 people, we turned into a list of about 20,000 people and ended up 30 something thousand dollar a month business teaching martial arts online in about 12, 14 months, something like that. That was my transition online and now, we run a consultancy where we do database marketing and email marketing strategy and implementation for startup companies and internet marketing folks and whatever else. That’s a little bit of my funky trajectory into this business world.  John:As we’re saying before the call man, I mean, we’re both on a site, on a membership site called the DC or the Dynamite Circle, and I remember we talked about [inaudible 00:11:06] member, but we messaged back and forth a little while back, 1 or 2 years ago … Dan:Yeah. John:… and you said you’re just getting started, but now, you just blitz this entire thing man, it’s been fantastic to see. Dan:Yeah. I mean, I always think there’s a lot more room to grow. I’m ultimately not about it for the internet marketing game, I’m about cashing out in this thing and investing in augmented reality companies and scaling a consultancy, doing go-public related things, more so than lifestyle business type thing. I have much larger aims, but I had to learn to work with what we had and the internet marketing was one of the paths. Luckily, it picked up, right? I had to get really good at email marketing because when you’re in a town of 8,000 people, John, as you can imagine, you run out of human leads actually very quickly. John:Yup. Dan:When you can run out of human, that’s really dangerous, so we need to make sure that all of our leads were maximally transferred to appointments and that anybody who didn’t join up would be rotated with various offers and then we could really keep the hook sunk in anybody that came in the door. Now, when I scaled that to an online niche, not just an 8,000-person local area, that ended up being, I think, the key to our success. Now, it’s really those neurotic small town habits that I had to learn and get really nerdy about and spend a lot of money on other consultants to learn how to really master that have now helped make the transfer. Yeah, it’s been a fun jump. John:Cool man. Let’s dive in here.  Dan:Yeah. John:Let’s start with some of this email marketing on the front end. You talked about you’ve got some great email orders from the front that are taking your leads and getting them to sign up to your continuity programs paying $37, $57 a month. Dan:Yeah. John:That’s the front end, I mean, doing a continuity sale, that’s quite high for a lot of people. A lot of people talk about it being one of the hardest sales you can make because who wants to pay 50 bucks every single month, month after month after month with no end in sight. It’s a hard sale. How are you doing it, man? Dan:It is. Yeah. There’s a lot of ways we can slice it and to be honest, when it started, it really wasn’t all that sophisticated. I’m actually spending, again, I’m really big on investing in myself. I probably spent about, not counting grad school because that would just be an entirely different story and not counting MIT where I’m now taking classes at the Sloan Business School, but probably about 80, a little bit more than 80 grand in the last 24 months. I’m working with some pretty high level continuity guys now in terms of refining the process that’s in place.  I’ll give you the basic rundown John. Essentially, first things first, if you want to get anybody to pay for anything, never mind pay for anything every month, you better have some halfway decent positioning and a reason for them to buy your stuff. You know this is a marketing guy and you’re a copywriting guy and you already understand, and many of your readers will as well, but I’ll give you the example that we’ve taken. Basically, I’m a small guy. I walk around about 128 pounds or so and I did a lot of jiu-jitsu tournaments against guys who are much bigger than me and a lot of my earlier YouTube videos that caught on were just random tournament clips of me fighting some guy twice my size or something and twisting his leg or getting a choke or something cool like that.   The position that we took was really the art and science of beating a bigger and stronger opponent. If you’re a smaller person, a weaker person, how you could still win in jiu-jitsu and the good news is, there’s a lot of people that that message resonates with even if they don’t weigh 128 pounds, and that is really where we decided to hone in. John, what I did to build the continuity program was, I not only really … Number 1, I mean, I ended up getting a masters in an Ivy League and skill development, so I really studied that process and how to get good fast, how to improve specific skills.  I needed to use that on myself because I’m in a town of 8,000 people for crying out loud, but convey that on the membership site. It’s just a little bit of a selling point, but more importantly, I analyzed it’s on a very specific lightweight matches. I interviewed all the best world champions of the lighter weights or at least many of them, a vast, vast number of them, top level black belts who are small guys. I really extracted their secrets for goal setting for tactics, for strategy, for skill development, whatever it was. The positioning was, this is really the place to get the full blown analysis, tapping into world champions and understanding the art and science of skill development at a very highly level for beating bigger, stronger opponents. Positioning was the only reason that we’re able to really get the credit cards out on a consistent basis, in my opinion. That’s when you even allowed people to consider buying from us rather than just watching YouTube videos. John:I love what’s going on here and that it’s not about the copy, it’s not about the orders [inaudible 00:16:05], it’s not about any of the technical or the tactical stuff that’s going on here, it starts with the strategy of basically, as Gary Albert says, going in and finding a starting crowd … Dan:That’s it. John:… and giving them what they want. You’ve got that starting crowd right there. Dan:Yeah. The cool thing is, John, it seems like a niche within a niche, but it’s actually really not. I think it was great and I’m not going to give myself credit because I didn’t think it through this far, but looking at it retrospectively, it was good because the people who buy in this niche now, granted now we’re in a bunch of other niches, so we’re working with everything from software companies to people that sell 1-800 numbers to thousands of business, to change of physical therapy clinics, but in the martial arts niche, this whole thing of beating bigger, stronger people, the buyers in that niche are all 40 something year old guys. They’re people with disposable income.  We’re not selling to 22 year old kids; A) they know how to illegally download things and they could probably find my stuff and download it without paying for it, B) they don’t have a disposable income and if they did, they’d probably spend it on beer or girls, or something like that, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s 40 something year old dudes. Forty something year old dudes are very rarely … They’re very rarely the most athletic strongest guys in the gym. They do feel like they have a little bit of a disadvantage to these 22-year old guys, straight out of college with 4 years of rugby under their belt who are just like mopping the floor with them because they’re older and they work a desk job.  It’s the desk job guys that ultimately are the buyers. It seems like a niche, but really, anybody with a credit card and an entire space fits that category. That positioning, oddly enough, it seems like a, “This is for me,” right? Dan Kennedy, Gary Albert, if they read it, it’s like, “This is for me.” Ultimately, anybody that’s really a buyer who isn’t like a natural athlete that doesn’t have disposable income anyway, they resonate with my messaging as the underdog dude, the smaller guy against bigger, more athletic beasts and anybody who’s a buyer already feels that way. That positioning is the starting crowd that we talked about, John.  The second aspect of really selling these membership sites and this is … People replicate it in a million other places since and we have a lot of variations of it, but it is this kind of splintered front end programs that drives toward the same continuity program. Get this, if you’re watching my YouTube videos about let’s say, leg locks and you opt in … Underneath that YouTube video is a link where you can opt in for a video about, now you guess John, what do you think the video is about?  John:Leg locks.  Dan:Yeah man. It’s about leg locks for crying out loud. If you just watch a YouTube video about leg locks, I’m probably going to get you to opt in for leg locks if you really liked it, so we’ll have them opt in. Then, once they opt in, they’re going to get consistent messaging about, you guessed it, and then we’re going to present the membership program about, you guessed it. A lot of the other aspect of it is what we call contextual parsing. Contextual parsing, for me, and there’s a bunch of ways that we could do this, but contextual parsing is based on where you come from, based on where you found out about me, where you gave me your information, I already know blank about you.  One of things, if you came in from one of my YouTube leg lock videos, I know you like watching leg locks, so I’m going to get you to opt in for a free course about that and then I’m going to see you on that. All I know is your email address, but I also know your lead source and that it’s from a leg lock video, so you are a consumer of leg lock videos which means your likelihood of potentially buying that is way higher than a guy who I don’t know him from Adam. We use contextual parsing to determine our offers and to drive towards a core continuity program.  I might have 7 different e-books, John, that all came off a couple different … Like, the initial front end emails are quite different and then it’ll go into … They’ll all merge into this core main funnel that’ll all push this core continuity program. You might read an article about guard passing, you opt in for an e-book about guard passing and now all of a sudden, we talk about guard passing for bigger and stronger people and then bam, we’re right on the train for the continuity program for beating bigger, stronger opponents. You opt in for escaping against bigger, stronger opponents, you have a couple of emails about that and then bonabing, you’re right on the train for the same continuity program.   We splinter the front end to basically to appeal to any blog post, any video, anything people find. There’s something very specific for them, we merge that benefit into the core benefit of beating bigger, stronger opponents and then we sell it to that core membership site. You don’t have to type in beat bigger guys in grappling to find me, you type in anything in jiu-jitsu, I got 700 blog post out there. I’m going to find you and as soon as you opt in, we’re going to convert that desire into something that relates to a program that we offer and we’re going to give away some great free stuff and present our offers. That’s how we build the list we have and that’s been a really big key for getting as many people as we have into membership programs.  John:Interesting. Okay. What I’m seeing here is, you’ve got several different funnels for basically various different pain points in that module or the main things we’ll be paying attention to.  Dan:Yes. John:Then, you’ve got several emails. Someone signs up, gets a specific e-book on that typically where there’s leg locks or guard passing or anything like that, then they get a few emails. How many emails are they getting on that specific topic? Dan:Yeah. Right now, for guard passing for example, I think you get 2 to 3 of them. There’s couple other … There’s like throws, like takedowns. I think have one course on takedowns, it’s like really limited. I’m not a takedown guy, but here’s the thing man, people are Googling takedowns for crying out loud, so I’m not going to deny them of that kind of an e-book and that kind of a download. They’ll get 2 or 3 emails about that, but then they go on to the same train tracks as everybody else with a nice leg … We ease them into it like, “Hey …” like we start talking about how takedowns relate to beating bigger guys.  We show some competition videos that relate to that and then we drop them into the right place on the sequence that’s going to ultimately going to get them towards beating bigger, stronger opponents. Yeah, it’s essentially, it’s called like a splintered front end. We’re selling the same thing and often times, it’s with a similar sequence, but we’re splintering the front end widget, the freebee, and we’re splinting a couple front end messagings in order to indoctrinate and to educate, and to give people some great content about exactly what they care about, what they want to learn.  John:Okay. Let’s say after that, I go through the splintered sequence and they get dropped under the main sequence, what happens there? Are you sending them daily emails or do you have to … Dan:Yeah. John:… like 5 to 10 email sequence? What happens there? I’m really interested. Dan:Yeah, man. They essentially end up on more like a 36-email sequence and for the most part, it’s like every day or every other day. We do go pretty hard in this niche. To be honest, I haven’t even tested emailing them every 3 days, I’ve just decided to email them every day. People that aren’t into it obviously will jump off the boat pretty quickly. The people that are, and we have over 20,000 people that are, so if it really sucked super hard, I imagine we wouldn’t be making any money and nobody would be paying attention to our stuff anymore, and we wouldn’t be coming close to a 30,000-person list. None of those things would happen if the content was bad and people didn’t like it.   We email them on daily basis for 24, 36 days. Essentially in that sequence, John, we go through what I refer to as a roller coaster of offer intensity. Let me take a step back and talk about what I’m talking about. Basically, any autoresponder sequence … Now, we could get more complex than this, but this isn’t like an 8-hour podcast, so we’ll go pretty simple. Any autoresponder sequence basically, if you’re going to have to make it only 3 components, we could make it 30. If you’re going to make it 3, we’ll really talk about education, testimonials, and calls to action, basically. Basically. Education, testimonials, calls to action.   If you have a good mix like if you think about it s like vegetables, starches and proteins in your diet, you want a decent mix in your emails as well. What we do initially is we go with a lot of great education and honestly, when I wrote a lot of these sequences, we didn’t even have testimonials. Now, I have pages and pages and pages and pages of them, but what we have realized since is we didn’t have them, although we do integrate a decent number of them. We educate them and we include testimonials. We educate, we include relevant testimonials, and then we’ll come to a head maybe around email 5 or 6, like 5,6,7,8 where we’re really presenting one offer rather strongly.   We’re presenting let’s say a free DVD that we’re going to mail to their house just for the price of shipping, plus a 14-day free trial of a membership program and a whole bunch of other cool video bonuses that we know they’re going to like. We’ll present all those things for … Four days is really strong, but if people don’t get it on it, what most people do, John, is they’ll be like, “Gosh. We missed that. Goddammit.” Then, that autoresponder sequence will end and then they’ll just wait for another lead. Instead of doing that, what we do is we go back to the roller coaster, so intensity of the offer drops, but we still keep up a bunch of great education and testimonial content to keep people engaged, keep people believing, to teach them awesome stuff, and to continue to fill their inbox with things that are relevant to what they came to us for.  Then, maybe 12, 13, 14, 15, we come up to a head again and this is a different offer. This is a different bunch of downloadable bonuses and maybe it’s the same membership program, but there’s a bunch of different free e-books and maybe a drilling guide that comes along with it. It’s a totally different looking sales page. It’s a different offer. It’s a different call to action. Then, if they don’t buy from that, John, as you can imagine, we drop them back into the sequence and I probably don’t have to tell you what happens after that. We like to do at least 3 rolls of the roller coaster before they get off the train. If they buy from any of those roller coasters, they then get kicked into a tier 2 sequence where we aim to present them with the program that has a higher price point such as 97 or 127 dollars.   Essentially, when they get on to the main track, it’s not a … We don’t take one swing and then go sit on the bench. We give them a bunch of great stuff and we take a bunch of swings, John, and it’s not swings of the same exact sales page because when you say no to a sales page, I’m not going to throw your eyeballs in that same sales page over and over, I’m going to throw your eyeballs on a different fun, illustrious, different angle, different hook, different color scheme, different headline, different way of presenting the benefits. I’m going to find a way to get that credit card out because that’s a business I’m in.  Now, that’s where people pay us to do for their businesses, but in our business, in order to eat food, in order to move to Cambridge, in order to potentially sell this thing and invest in augmented reality companies which is what I’m really here to do, we got to get the cards out. In order to get the cards out, we got to try much harder than most people do. I highly recommend that kind of roller coaster, more persistent approach. That’s a huge factor for our success in this niche. John:I love it Dan. One thing that I think that I really want to mention is I remember speaking to friend of mine here in ChangWai, Thailand. It was a couple of weeks ago, we’re speaking about emails and he told a story about a friend of his, Armand Morin which is a … I haven’t heard of him at that time, but he’s a, I don’t know, an school internet marketer and he’s famous for saying something along the lines of, “You stop sending them emails when they stop opening them.” Dan:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. John:Most people will write a sequence and it’s usually 5 emails or 10 emails. That’s what people pass to [inaudible 00:28:19], say a 10-email sequence, but really in an ideal world, you never stop sending them emails until you got 0% open rate. Until no one cares, that’s when you stop sending emails, but until you hit that point, those emails should keep going out. Dan:Yeah, man. I mean, there’s no reason for them not to. There’s no reason for them not to. Then, that takes us into the database marketing side of things when the autoresponders do end, how do we still stay relevant, how do we still get the cards out. Yeah, I mean, you’re completely right. I mean, we all know the stories, right? We all know the stats. The average sale, you have to ask for the sale X number of times. There’s all these statistics. The studies at IBM and the top 20% that produce 80% of the sales, what they really do is they just call the guy 50% instead of calling them 3 times and saying he’s not interested. Boeing, all these big companies, they’ve done crunch numbers on their sales people. Just convert those same things to email.  It’s not necessarily about being Captain Hard Core where it’s just like, “Yeah, the more pitches you hit on …” To some extent, you do have to nut up and actually present an offer, but in another sense, if you can stay relevant, if you can deliver things they care about and if they say no to one thing, if you can find something else that’s fun, that’s appealing, that is something that they’d actually want, you’re doing a better job for you and for them and ultimately, I think that’s why we’re compensated for what we do.  We have a wide array of programs, a wide array of offerings, way more written articles, way more interviews than anybody else, so we have content for days. If people are into BJJ, they can learn from us forever. I got dozens of world champions that I’ve interviewed and magazines that we’ve written articles about this stuff and it goes on forever. We’re delivering what people want, but just like you said, I mean, keep it coming, keep it coming because if they’re opening them, there’s a chance you’re going to get that card out. John:That’s exactly right. All right. Let’s talk about this back end then. They’ve been through the front end. Dan:Yeah. John:They’ve been through that splintered sequence. They been through the main one. They’ve bought. Somewhere along that roller coaster, they’ve signed up and they’re in the program. What next? Dan:Yeah. Yeah. Eventually, the autoresponders do end. When the autoresponders end, inside of Infusionsoft, we tag them with the broadcast tag. Now, the broadcast tag means this person’s no longer receiving autoresponder messages and so we can now send them rotating newslettery type messaging. Now, by newslettery type messaging, I mean, this is … When the autoresponder ends, these are the messages that we’ll send out on a weekly basis that we’ll schedule out. Basically, any given week … Now, this is going to be different niche by niche, but our space actually is pretty accepting of frequent emails. If you sell like, I don’t know, if you sell face cream, you really can’t probably make face cream exciting every day. I mean, maybe there’s a way, right? Like there’s probably … John:There’s got to be a way, man.  Dan:… like beauty tips and whatever, but it’s a little bit more creative. You’d have to make it something other than the cream itself, you understand what I mean?  John:Of course. Dan:You’d have to find related stories and beauty tips and other stuff. For me actually, John, I think we’re fortunate in this niche because it’s easy, because if you’re interested in BJJ videos, I can literally send you BJJ videos everyday and you’ll like it. If you’re interested in face cream, I can’t send you like pure … It can’t be about the product over and over and over, it has to be about related stuff, but all my related stuff is really the same as my paid stuff. People are interested in just consuming pretty much exactly what they’re ultimately going to pay for. It’s not like tips for sports that we sort of hint at jiu-jitsu, we’re straight sending freaking jiu-jitsu videos every day, man.  We rotate what we do as in any given week … Now, in any given month … Now, everybody will do this differently and I’m going to be talking, I’m spending a relatively , for the fact that’s it’s only going to be 120 minutes, a borderline exorbitant amount of money to talk to a very smart guy about this and potentially change up some of our database marketing tenants, but right now, it’s working rather well and I happen to think we’re doing significantly better than anybody else certainly in this niche is, any given month, we create a 3 to 4 email sequence just for the people that have spent a hundred dollars or more in the last 60 days. We also create a unique 3 or 4 email sequence just for the people that have never bought.   We speak to those groups explicitly and we call them out for their condition, and we address them for that condition, and we aim to move them to the next level. People that have a hundred bucks or more, we recognize that they’re investing in their development as jiu-jitsu athletes. We talk about that explicitly. We talk about why we recognize them that’s why they’re getting this special offer. The people that have never bought, we’ll talk about how we know they haven’t bought and haven’t gotten a lot of emails, and how we’re going to have this crazy guarantee on why we’re giving away this stuff this month, “Here’s a bunch of testimonials from people that finally got in to one of our programs that really changed their game,” something like that.   Every month, we’ll create offers like that. On a weekly basis, I’ll create as many as 7, 8, 9 individual messages that’ll go out to … Usually, about 2 of them will go to everybody, so 2 of them will be just sent to the list, but I will normally break the list up so it won’t be sent to everybody. I’ll send it per lead source or I’ll send it to buyers and then non-buyers. I’ll still break things up because I like to address people more individually than “blast emails”. To give you an example of a niche list, John, I sent out an affiliate offer for an injury prevention product to all the people that have selected injury prevention as an area of interest.  I also sent out a blog post that I’m looking to really build its cloud online, its social buzz online and get it to rank online. I sent it to all my guys who are over 40, makes sense, right? Then, I’m also going to have a higher ticket offer that we’re going to send out this week, which is going to be a 3-email sequence all about guard passing and it’s going to be a hundred dollar offer. It’s going to be sent to people that have spent at least a hundred dollars in the last 60 days. We’re going to address them specifically.  In any given week, we pick subsegs based on interest, lead source, activity, purchasing history and things like that, and we’ll present an array of offers, content, education, testimonials to those relevant groups to the tune of 1.2 emails going out per day to these various … rotating in these various subsegs in order to consistently give people messages, John, that say, “This is for me. This is for me. This is for me.” If you’re on my list, you will never stop getting messages that address you by age, by interest, by what you’ve bought, by what lead source you came in. You will get hit with things that make you feel like, “This is for me,” forever until you stop opening my emails.  John:The one thing that I’m thinking like … because I don’t have anything this advance set up in my member’s list at the moment, and I’m thinking maybe the listener is going to be in a similar situation and they’re going to be thinking, “This sounds great. I’m sold. Sign me up. I know how to do it. I want to get right there and do this yesterday.” However, it seems, the impression of it is that it seems like a complete nightmare to manage because there’s about a billion things flying in a million directions at once. Dan:Yeah. John:Email’s going to this person and that person in that segment, in this segment, and it’s … How do you even manage something like this, man? Dan:It’s actually kind of easy. I have a weekly checklist which is, “Hit 3 subsegs. Rotate 2 of your own offers and 1 affiliate offer.” The reason I send out affiliate offers is not because I need affiliate money. I have enough of my own programs, but it’s essentially to maintain good relationships with people that send those traffic by selling a bunch of their stuff. There’s very few ways to somebody’s heart that’s quicker than selling a bunch of their stuff on the internet. Two of our own subsegs, they’re broken up into offer education sequences, one JV offer that’s broken up to offer education sequences, 2 emails that will go to the whole list so that we don’t miss anybody even if for some reason we don’t hit their subseg for a while, 2 emails that go out to the whole list. That’s on a weekly level.  For the emails that go out to the whole list, I also have get response. I use get response to send out those “hit everybody” emails. In order to make sure delivery is high and we can get to everybody, we’ll send out through get response often times. Then, on a monthly, I have a couple of things on a monthly. I have hit all the non-buyers with a specific non-buyer offer. Make sure we hit all the buyers in a certain level and a certain buyer offer, and otherwise, just keep up the weekly regimen, “Okay, 2 emails to go to everybody. What offer do I want to test? What social thing do I want to share?” Whatever the case may be and then 1 of the 2 subsegs and products, and then the affiliate offer and product that I want to pitch, and then I construct my emails for the week.  I generally will write them on Sunday. I’ll schedule them out and then we’ll count the money on Monday morning, the next week or whatever. We just repeat that process and make sure we rotate through all the subsegs. Does it think a little bit to write the emails on Sunday? Sure does, but at the end of the day, even if I didn’t get anymore leads, the fact that we could cruise well above 20 grand a month is a cool thing in a niche that’s pretty much for idiots. No, really, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu niche is not like a business niche. I mean, I got into this because I had a bunch of trophies hanging on a wall from choking a bunch of guys and it’s easier to sell expertise. Because I was doing jiu-jitsu all day in a martial arts gym that I was going to sell, we could film that and we could turn that into product. It wasn’t like, this wasn’t my billionaire niche, right? It’s a silly nominal domain, but the fact that you can hyper-monetize an existing list by a simple rotation schedule like that, and again, all I do is write it down one day, “All right, 2 of our own subsegs and our own offers, 1 affiliate offer, 2 blast that will go to everybody, and then here’s 2 things we’ll do every month. Okay, see you later. Let’s just keep running this algorithm.” That’s essentially how we monetized the list. In terms of managing it, it really isn’t rocket science.  John:I don’t know what to say, man. You blow me away here. This is just simple, straightforward, but it’s bad ass. Dan:Yeah. We’re going for it, man. We’re trying. I really think, I mean, I’m a believer in this stuff, John. Anytime I see a business where it’s like there’s an existing list that we have all these data points, but it’s like there’s this weekly or monthly blasé email that just goes out to everybody. I mean, I think anybody that understands direct response gets that this makes sense and it’s just a matter of like, “Oh, if we just set a regimen and we run and gun and put our heads down for a month, we can count the money at the end of the month and see if it was worth our time.” Nine out of ten times, unless you’re really starting off with the wrong angle and you have no idea what your customer wants and frankly you’re a bad marketer, this will work. John:Fantastic. Okay, man. Dan:Yeah. John:Thanks for breaking down this, man. Dan:Of course. John:Right on time here. Before we go, though, the listeners might be a bit curious where they take out some of this jiu-jitsu stuff or I’ve heard you mentioning the [inaudible 00:39:52] stuff, man. Where should people go if they want to learn more about what you’re doing, maybe get in contact? Dan:For sure. If people want to see our BJJ, I mean, just type in Dan Fagella grappling or something on YouTube. There’s 8 million funky videos and you can see what we’re doing for lead gen and you’ll find 700 something blog post out there in the world or wherever else. For the folks who are interested in database marketing and email marketing, we’re a team based now in Boston, so we’re working with a lot of very sharp companies up here essentially implementing these systems into e-Com, into service-based businesses, into even app companies that need engagement because a lot of the tenants and principles are the same.  The website it, CLVboost. You know, John, customer lifetime value, very big metric, right? We’re all about lifting that metric. In CLVboost.com, we have a really basic breakdown on white paper of a couple plug and play strategies in both automation and in the database marketing side. If people just want something to chew on and give a shot for their own business or they want to give a shout out and yack it up with me, that’s the place to go; CLVboost.com. Yeah, that’s about it for me, brother. John:Fantastic, man. I’ll have links to those at the show notes at themcmethod.com. Thanks for coming on, man. Dan:Thanks John, appreciate it.    The post Episode #62 – Dan Faggella on Becoming an Email Marketing Powerhouse appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Think you got what it takes to monetize your expertise? Frank Visciano thinks you do. And he’s here today to show you EXACTLY how to do it… …through Udemy’s online education marketplace. Frank is Udemy’s Director of Content. ALL courses run by his desk first. He’s pretty much THE man, and he’s here to guide you into Udemy gold. Listen as he explains his 5 pillars to building a course that sells. FIRST… you have the planning stage.   Be. Super. Specific.  Know yourself, know your audience and… NICHE DOWN. Udemy is primarily video-based.  As good as your content is, you need a product that’s easy on the eyes and ears. Production is the SECOND pillar. And it doesn’t take much… Got an iPhone and a cheap lav mic?  You’re set. Make it crisp. THIRD?  Polish it up. Set up a Udemy Sales Page that… SELLS. This is where people decide whether to take your course or not. Having a polished landing page is VITAL. Udemy courses are dynamic… …they evolve through the FOURTH pillar… the publishing stage. Iterate. Udemy’s handy dandy analytics (included) makes this all too easy. SEE what works.  Ditch what doesn’t.  But at the end of the day, to be successful on Udemy, you have to be more than just an instructor.   The FIFTH pillar is promotion. Be an ACTIVE MARKETER. Create momentum and gain success by being both an instructor AND a marketer. The opportunities are endless… as Frank says: “If you can dream it, you can teach it on Udemy.” Make it happen.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how this episode’s information can be used outside of Udemy (learn the fundamentals to building any course) the direction in which Udemy is moving (30% of courses are made this way) how to avoid getting lost in the shuffle (these 2 things will make your course boring) the main ingredients to a kick-ass course description that converts how to use parables to talk about your product (what would Jesus do?) how 9,000 instructors teach 3,000,000 students spanning from over 190 countries wordwide (and how you too can be a part of this) the benefits from BOTH creating a paid course AND a free course. how to create well crafted entertaining emails within a B2B industry (don’t be afraid to be yourself) Mentioned: Dan Kennedy Udemy Studio Facebook Group Udemy Mobile Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Hey, everybody. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for Episode 61 of the email marketing podcast, the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover a whole bunch of stuff, really cool stuff, that’s going to … I hope you just make more money in your business. Today, it’s going to be the 5 Pillars of Building a Course That Sells with Frank Visciano from Udemy. Udemy is a website that allows anyone, young or old, experienced or new, or anyone, to create a course. They have some great software that they use. You can go and create an information product on your own, do an eBook, do a video course, things like that. That’s fine, but you can also do it on Udemy. They’ve got a ton of great features in this offering, including some analytics, which if you’re doing videos, will tell you which videos are performing well and which aren’t because you can look at the engagement on each video. It’s a really cool piece of software. I didn’t bring Frank on today to talk about Udemy specifically, though Udemy is obviously a big part of it. I brought him to talk about what sort of courses work really well because here’s the thing. Udemy has millions of customers, so Frank here, he manages the content. He’s the content director. He manages the supply side of the marketplace. This is all the courses that people are teaching. He sees all the courses that come through, and he has a great idea of what works and what doesn’t. That’s why I thought I’d get him on, we’d talk about the 5 Pillars of Building a Course That Sells, 5 things that you need to focus on whether you’re going to do this course on Udemy or another site like it, like CourseShare or your own website. However you’re going to do it, you need to focus on these 5 things. We’re going to talk about these. Very interesting stuff. The show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to the themcmethod.com/61. This Week’s McMaster’s Insight Of Week is this: Make the initial memory more vivid using mnemonics, emotions or drawings. Telling stories is a perfect way to do this. That’s from Michael Smith. Michael, how you’re doing well today. McMaster’s is a paid-membership community that I have. I’ll tell you a bit about that in a second. First, I want to explain this a little bit more. Michael posted a thread in the forum about … I think it was a scientific study on mnemonics and how the brain basically processes information, how you can leverage some of how the brain works in neuroscience to get better results with your marketing. The idea is let’s say I’m learning a language. I’ll use Thai as an example because I’m in Thailand. One of the characters doesn’t look anything like a chicken, but the representation with the letter is a chicken. When I look at this letter, then I think chicken, and then I think “Woah.” The letter’s got a bit of a beak, a bit of a pointy part, which could almost be a bird’s beak. In my mind, I look at that letter, and then I think “Chicken with a beak.” Then I look at this little pointing thing in the letter. What that’s creating is a bit of story, or a mnemonic as they’re called, a word picture in my head of what that is. Next time I see that letter, I’m going to think “Chicken”, and I’m going to be like “Oh, that’s what it means.” The equivalent of doing this with emails is telling stories. Instead of just saying “Empathy is important. One of the best things about marketing is you’ve got to have empathy.” It would be much better to tell a story about a time when I met someone for the first time. “We met at bar, as you always meet people, and they spent a whole bunch of time, just asking me questions, getting to know me. I was really surprised because most people just want to talk. Whereas this person just really got to know me, asked me lots of questions and really tried to understand where I was coming from, how I thought. It was really enjoyable. Then when they started sharing more about themselves after that, they shared it in the context. I was very obvious because I was a marketer, so I could see they were sharing what they felt and what they thought about the world in the context of what I’d just shared. I really felt that they had a lot of empathy for me, for what situation I’d been through. They really understood me. That’s a great example of how empathy is important. It makes me feel understood. It makes me feel loved. It makes me feel appreciated. That’s why empathy is important. That’s why you should buy the McIntyre Method because you’re going to get a template that allows you to go and fill in the blank template. Go and survey your people, your prospects. They fill it out, and you’re going to be able to get some great insight into who they are, what they do, and what they care about. You’re going to develop this empathy, and you’re going to make them feel understood and appreciated. Guess what? If they feel understood and appreciated, whose product are they going to buy?” What I did there is I told a story. This was just completely on the fly. This is not an email. It might be a bad example, but completely on the fly. That was the story. I let into a pitch for the McIntyre Method. Instead of saying … The classic thing is facts tell, stories sell. Instead of saying a fact, like empathy is good, tell a story about how empathy did something for me in my own life. Then link that to a pitch for the product, which is that you need empathy, but how do you do it? You need surveys. How do you do surveys? Use my survey template. Speakers, conference presenters do this all the time. Instead of just getting up there and running off a list of facts … The good ones anyway … They will get up there, and they will tell you a story, and then give you a punchline. Jesus did this. This is why religion … Religious leaders do this. They have an idea of something, such as you should care for each other. Then they’ll tell a story about the Good Samaritan and different things like that, parables. What you want to do is you want to use parables to talk about your product. Instead of telling people why your product is awesome, tell a story and then lead into. Use that as a parable for why your product is the best. This is a little bit hooky. It’s a bit hard to explain sometimes. You can actually learn about this in Stories That Sell, which is one of the products you get when you join McMasters. Quick note on McMasters. It’s a paid-membership community. You get the McIntyre Method, Stories that Sell, Pages That Convert. Basically a whole bunch of video training, which is going to help you learn how to write emails, learn how to tell stories in those emails, learn how to create landing pages and this kind of thing. It’s all organized in a very straightforward format. There’s also a forum, where you can ask questions. I’m in this forum every day. I reply to every thread, so you get direct access to me and access to the other members in there as well, who all have traffic, who all are trying to set up an order and just want to make more sales. Very simple. Would love to see you in there. Reviews. Reviews help spread the word. If you’re enjoying this or if you’re getting a lot out of it, and if you’ve got some good results in your business, I’d love to hear about them. The best place to let me know about those results and spread the word is to go to iTunes, search for the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, leave me a review. Send me an email too to john@dropdeadcopy.com or john@themcmethod.com, and let me know that you’ve left the review. I’d love to hear from you and find out where you’re at, what’s going through your own life. We’ve got one list of questions, then we’ll get into this final interview with Frank Visciano. How do you weave a story into professional services B2B emails? This is a good question because B2B can be be a little bit … People think it’s a lot more serious. You can’t tell stories. You can’t be too flippant because you might come across as unprofessional, but the point about stories isn’t to be unprofessional or to seem like you’re casual and flippant. The point is that stories are just how we communicate as people. If you go to a business conference with a business speaker, if he’s a good speaker, he’s going to be using stories. He’s going to be telling stories about this and that and, like I said, the parable thing. He’s going to be telling parables and running into a punchline. Doing that over and over and over again. Can you do this with B2B emails without coming across as unprofessional? Of course. You can come across as professional. Basically, think about it. You’re not selling to businesses. You’re selling to people, whether it’s the CEO in that business or it’s someone in the marketing department or whatever department. You’re selling to people. What you really want to figure out is who are these people? What do they care about? What’s the sort of things running through their head? What stories could you tell them? Then you just write an email with a story. Still make it professional. Obviously you’ve got to write for the audience, but don’t be afraid to tell stories. Try it. Tell a story about an experience that maybe your person’s had over and over and over again. Maybe there’s so much competition in this industry that they are so sick of getting hounded by boring, drab emails about people’s [inaudible 00:07:39] spamming emails. You’re like “That’s why we don’t do that. We actually talk about stories.” You can tell a story about the stories. There’s a lot of different ways to do this. I’m going to take a little while to actually frame this up into a big thing, but the main thing I want you to get is that you can … Can you write stories for B2B? Yes. Can you do it without being unprofessional? Absolutely. Best thing, just give it a try. Worst case scenario is you make a few mistakes, then you try again and try again and try again. That’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Frank Visciano and talk about the 5 Pillars of Building a Course That Sells. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here here with Frank Visciano from Udemy. Frank is the director of content partnerships at Udemy. What he’s doing over there is he’s basically managing and taking care of the supply side of the marketplace. These are people who are are buying courses and selling courses. He’s working with all of them to make sure that there’s tons and tons of courses available, so that when you or I go to udemy.com looking for a course on paid traffic … I just started a course on Udemy on that last week … A course on anything … That the course is going to be there. That’s what he’s doing. What I want to do is bring him on today to talk about the 5 stages to building a course that sells. That’s a bit of hook there we’ve just put together right now. The idea is that because Frank has seen so many different courses, that are going through Udemy, he’s got a very good grasp of what works and what doesn’t. As a business owner or as a marketer or a freelancer, when you sit down and you want to create a course and information products, you can create some of that lifestyle, that automated income, there are some things that you should do and some things you really, really shouldn’t. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today: how to basically build an awesome kickass course. We’ll get into that in just a moment. Frank, how are you doing today, man? Frank:Good. Good to meet you, John.  John:Absolutely. Nice to meet you too, man. Good to have you on the show.  Frank:I’m very glad to be here and excited to talk about online courses and Udemy’s marketplace, some of my favorite things.  John:Cool. Before we do that, before we talk about that stuff, give the listener a bit of a background on who you are and what you’re doing over at Udemy and maybe a bit of a quick background too on what Udemy is as well.  Frank:Yeah, absolutely. The very quick version of Udemy is that we’re an online education marketplace. We focus primarily on on-demand video-based education content. Basically, online courses that anyone in the world, anywhere, can teach and anyone in the world, anywhere, can consume. We’ve got, at this point in time, about 9,000 instructors of all different types teaching 16,000 courses that range from digital marketing, as you mentioned, to office productivity to yoga. We’re even programming.  They’re teaching those courses to about 3 million students in 190 countries around the world, so a big diverse marketplace that’s growing very quickly. My particular role is to focus on the supply side. I work with instructors, whether they’re individuals or universities, digital publishers, NGOs, non-profits. You name it. Anyone who is an expert can teach on Udemy, and my job is to help make them very successful in doing so.  John:Nice one. I’m curious. What sort of capacity do you work with these guys? Are you giving them tips, giving them advice on what to do and how to market the course? What goes into it? If I’m to fire up a course on Udemy, obviously I’ve got to create the course and put it together, but what sort of other stuff, what sort of other challenges am I going to have on Udemy to get it up and running?  Frank:The truth is that the recipe for success on Udemy does vary. We think of our role as basically to be Sherpas for you guys as you go through the process of creating your course. That means first things first understanding what your objectives are, understanding where you’re starting. We have folks that come to us, like Pearson or Finch, who are big publishers who have lots of content everywhere. For them, it’s a question of translating their existing content into something that’s optimized for Udemy and that’s going to do well in the marketplace.  We also have individuals who are freelancers or just experts in their own profession, who are passionate and want to share that expertise with the world, whether because they want to help a student in India or Uganda learn their topic that they’re just really fired up about or they’re somebody who actually wants to monetize that expertise and make a lot of money selling their course on Udemy. That person is going to need a lot of different resources. We help you start and figure out exactly where you’re starting, map your course through the production stages, introduce to a community of thousands of other instructors, who are doing this right along side you, and then ultimately just get your course polished up and ready to move in the marketplace.  This is, at the end of the day, an eCommerce marketplace that’s competitive, and we want to make sure you’re successful in that. Once that’s all done and dusted, the nice part of being a part of the community is that you get to learn from all of the tricks and tactics that are working for those thousands of other instructors. It’s our job to distill that information down and deliver it to you in a way that’s actionable.  John:Fantastic. One thing I just want to point out here for the listener is that this applies … What we’re going to talk about is it obviously applies on Udemy, but the reason why I think this is interesting is I think a lot of this applies to just building courses in general, whether you’re putting them on Udemy or another site like it or just on your own website. That what makes a great course that’s really going to sell, really going to help people and really going to be successful and make money is that there are some fundamentals here.  Let’s get into that. Let’s talk about these 5 stages to building a course itself. The best way to do this is we can just work through the stages. What’s stage 1?  Frank:Stage 1 in the process, when you’re looking to build a course, in particular an online course, is the planning stage. I think there are a couple of different dimensions that go into the planning stage that often get overlooked. They come back to bite you in the behind later in the process when you’re in the marketplace. The first thing that I think about, whether you’re thinking about a free course that you just want to get a ton of traffic on or a paid course, the bottom line is your course is your product and your students are your customers. You need to approach the planning phase in exactly that fashion. Think of this as the early stage brainstorming of launching a product. The first question you have to ask yourself is who is your audience and what value are you going put in front of them? One way I like to think through this is if you were to be an old-school marketer and you were launching a consumer product out into the market, the first thing that somebody would tell you is “All right. What’s your positioning statement?” This gets into how you think through your topic selection for your course. If you just go in and you’re relatively flat and simple about it, you could say I would like to teach Microsoft Excel. That would get you started, but if you want to be truly successful, what you need to do is you need to put together a positioning statement that marries the topic you want to teach, the attributes of value that the course is going to deliver and the audience that you would like it to serve. The way to think of extending that “I’d like teach Microsoft Excel course”, would be to say “I would like to teach Microsoft Excel to busy working professionals with no prior experience, who would like to become advanced users of pivot tables for the accounting function.” That is super specific, but what it also means is that the value proposition that you’re going to deliver to a very specific audience is the first thing that you set on the table before you take another step down the process. John:What we’re talking about here is like a unique selling proposition, where let’s say I’m Joe Smith and I go to Udemy. I’m looking for an Excel course, and I happen to be in that target market. I’m going to be looking for a course that caters specifically to me. If I can’t find one, then I’ll just pick any old one, but if I saw a course with that tag line, or that positioning statement as you called it, it’s an absolute no-brainer to take that course. This is just a fundamental strategy of marketing. You have to do this not just for products, but everything that you do. When you try to connect with the marketplace or connect with the person, the more specific you can be about who you are and what you do and who you serve, the better the results you’re going to get. Frank:Absolutely. For that for that topic that I pointed out, Microsoft Excel, that happens to be one of Udemy’s most popular and successful topics. One of the pitfalls that we see is when people think about online courses the instinct is to be as broad as possible and as generic as possible, so that you appeal to a wide audience, but in practice, in any competitive marketplace, that’s a real good recipe for getting lost in the shuffle. We always recommend that before somebody actually starts to tackle their curriculum and actually map out their course, they have a really clear, specific understanding of who they are and who their audience is and how they want their course to deliver something to. John:This is partly why … I go around calling myself the Autoresponder Guy. That was something that I put together … It was about a year ago. I realized that I was doing all email marketing for people, but instead of just being a copywriter … There’s tons of copywriters out there … I’m going to be the Autoresponder Guy and position myself as just that guy. I was just going to do that. I was still going to do sales letters and other advertising stuff, but I was going to position myself as the Autoresponder Guy.  Since doing that, since holding myself in and going really narrow and tight, everything has really taken off because people get it. It’s a really simple message that people can pass on. My advice to anyone whether it’s for a course or just in their business, niche down. Go real tight. This podcast is a good example. I call it an email marketing podcast, but really it’s just about marketing. Today, we’re talking about courses. I don’t always have to talk about email marketing or autoresponders or anything like that. I can talk about anything that might appeal to someone who might be interested in autoresponders, which is the entire sales funnel.  Niching down doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to keep your focus really tight. It’s more of a marketing statement. I think it’s really important.  Frank:Absolutely. I actually love the idea of course creation as a part of your marketing podcast because at the end of the day creating an online course is becoming an inter-globe pillar whether it’s a personal or a professional content marketing strategy. It’s a way to grow an audience. It’s a way to grow your personal brand. It’s a pillar of your overall marketing strategy. You might be an individual or a company, but we have a lot of different use cases, where we see folks using courses to do customer education or courses to do partner education.  In fact, that was how I founded Udemy. I was working for a startup and I was trying to figure out a more efficient way to deliver partner training online. When you think about it that way and you think about this is a piece of your content strategy, then it makes a whole lot of sense that you need to focus and be very specific as you approach it.  John:It’s very much like Dan Kennedy, some of these old-school marketers talk about it, where you want to go and write a few books because if you can write a best-selling book in your market, in your niche … This is the same thing as creating a course on Udemy or any of these different things. You’re positioning, you’re selling and then you’re making money, but you’re also positioning yourself as the authority in that industry.  Frank:Absolutely. It builds your own credibility and it builds your audience around that topic, so it makes a lot of sense.  John:What’s number 2 in the 5 stages?  Frank:Number 2 in the 5 stages is production. For a video-based course, obviously this is going to look and feel very different from if you were building an in-person course or if you were building another one. What I would say is that for Udemy’s version of quality, which is all about an online on-demand experience where students can take the course anywhere, the things to think through here … I put basically 3 main things to pay attention to.  One is these are video-based courses, so while you may have a lot of different additional supplementary material (links, spreadsheets, all different activities, quizzes, things to drive engagement), at the end of the day, the first most visible version of quality is the quality of the video and the quality of the audio that you’re putting in front of your customer. You want to make sure that that’s nice and crisp. It’s absolutely possible to get exceptionally high quality video from an iPhone or just a smart phone generally these days. It can be done if you pay close attention to how to do it. Actually, on our site, we have lots of recommendations on how to do it on the cheap.   You can also get great quality audio from a pretty inexpensive mike and a pretty inexpensive setup, but one of the things that we see very highly correlated with engagement is just the crispness of production quality. The one other thing that I just add in there, when you think about production, is the world is changing very quickly. The idea of an online course wasn’t something that really existed very long ago and certainly wasn’t something that was in the common vernacular for everybody to consider doing for themselves.  The idea of mobile-enabled and mobile-optimized online courses is the next step. Udemy has an iPhone and an Android app. Actually, about 30% of our course consumption happens on mobile. When you’re actually in the process of doing the production, whether you’re doing that in your basement on the cheap or you’re working with a professional company, making sure that you’re thinking about your course as something that’s going to be this dynamic, ongoing, living breathing thing that is going to grow up and start to be increasingly consumed on mobile, we’ll help you think about it a little bit differently.  John:I’ve got a course right now. It’s a video course. It’s not on Udemy, but the quality of it is … I basically got a point and click digital camera and put in on a little stand … It’s called the McIntyre Method.  Frank:Yeah.  John:Put it on a stand and sat down by desk and just recorded a bunch of videos on email autoresponders and how I do them. There was no special mike. There was nothing high tech about it. Back when I did that course, I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible, almost just so I didn’t stall. I just got it done. Quite a lot of people seem to get a lot out of it, but it seems like what you’re saying is that if I took the time to really get some high quality audio and high quality video on there, the results would be even better.  Frank:I think that’s right. What we see is that having a crisp production doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does improve the overall student’s experience. When you think about this in the context of putting a course out into a marketplace that’s really competitive, having that crisp production is going to help drive your conversion. Having a good solid student experience, where the student feels like they actually got good value out of it, both the content, but also the experience, is going to drive repurchase.  Investing a little bit upfront pays big dividends on the back end. My guess is making a little bit of polish investment on the production up front could be really valuable.  John:I have a friend … I’ve never used it myself. He has … I think it’s a Samsung S2 or S3. I find this stuff fascinating, but he had a lab mike … You know those tiny little mikes you clip onto your shirt. From what I hear … I haven’t done this myself yet, but I can plug a little lab mike into my iPhone, fire up the video app and get the high quality videos with great sound. Is that correct?  Frank:Absolutely. We actually list on our site the latest and greatest mikes that we at Udemy are using, but also our instructor community is using. Those range from ones that could cost $50 to ones that could cost $1,500. You can get great quality in all of those different scenarios. It’s all about setting up the right environment and just making sure that you’re doing a good job of being crisp on it and exporting it correctly. A good resource is some of the knowledge-based articles on udemy.com. There’s also a community of folks. This doesn’t have to be expensive; you could definitely do it on the cheap.  John:What’s the link? I’ll have a link in the show notes of this, but just in case no one goes to the site, what’s a link to some of those articles? Is it udemy.com/knowledgebase? Frank:Yeah, if you go to udemy.com/support, you’ll be able to find some of those. That’s the main hub. The other place you could find it is there’s a Facebook group called The Udemy Studio. That’s where 20,000 Udemy experts who are creating courses simultaneously, all talk about the best tools that they use to create their courses. They’ll tell you the cheapest camera you can get, the best bang for your buck, same thing for audio.  John:Fantastic. That’s planning. That’s production. What’s stage 3?  Frank:Stage 3 is polish. For us, what this really means is starting to think about how your course is going to be presented in the marketplace. At this point, you have basically planned your course. You chose your topic, and you made sure it was differentiated. You built out your curriculum. Based on that curriculum, you produced your course. You’ve got great audio, great video. You’ve now assembled it into a course.  What you need to start to think about is what’s the marketing copy look like? What’s the face of this course to the market? This is where if you spent time upfront on that marketing positioning statement, you have a really good sense of exactly who your intended audience is, who you want to take your course and what they’re going to get out of it. That will flow very naturally into the personality and copy you reflect on the actual landing page. It will help you think through what course requirements you have, what learning objectives you might want to communicate to the audience.  I think having a very polished landing page is important, particularly again on a marketplace, because it’s where people will make their decision of whether or not they want to purchase your course. We actually spend a lot of time working directly with instructors to help them polish that landing page, both to be optimized for the student experience on Udemy, to draw traffic from external SEO through Google and other different channels. John:What we’re really talking about here is the sales page on the Udemy website. What are you finding? Our course creators, are they writing these sales pages themselves? Do you have recommendations for copywriters? How in depth are people going? Are they writing say 1,000 words or 2,000 words on the course page? What makes this work really well?  Frank:It’s a great question. Most of our instructors will create their own course landing page. They’ll create the course description and the instructor bio that are the 2 anchor elements for your course landing page. The main ingredients that you want to have in your course description to make it a really successfully converting one are basically all those elements of the value that you’re providing.  Who are you as an instructor? Why are you a credible expert on this particular topic? Why is taking a course from you going to be something that’s actually exciting and valuable to the student. Next thing is what’s the topic and what’s the use case for the skills that you’re going to get out of this topic? That’s linking together the learning objectives that the student’s going to have. What are they going to be able to do at the end of this course that they couldn’t do beforehand?  A lot of online course creation is about developing a course that delivers on a skills acquisition goal for many students. They come to Udemy, or come to an online course, to learn something concrete that they can put to work. What is that concrete thing that they’re going to learn? Having a sense of what the added bonuses are that are a part of this course? Are there extra quizzes? Are there live sessions with the instructor? Is it a community of students that are all debating topics? These are all important attributes to mention.  Then having your course requirements laid out in advance. Is this an advanced course or a prerequisite of taking another particular course is important? Is this for dummies, for everybody who can go ahead and take it right from scratch? If you map out all of those things, you may be looking at a course description that’s somewhere in the 300-1,000 word range. I think that’s fine. You want to be succinct. You want to be crisp about really the value proposition, but you also want to recognize that some people will find your course through search, so having a good amount of copy there doesn’t hurt you too much, in terms of SEO traffic.  John:That sounds straightforward to me. What’s stage 4?  Frank:Stage 4 is publishing. What I would say is publishing and polishing to me are very linked. At Udemy’s marketplace, we happen to have a quality review process. We make sure that every single course that’s submitted to Udemy gets feedback from real live individuals. We give you feedback on the overall structure of the course. We make sure that you’re doing some core things, like differentiating, selling at production, establishing and exceeding expectations and polishing your overall copy and your product.  The one thing that we think about in the publish phase is your online course should be a living breathing thing, so when you put this out there, you’re going to get feedback whether it’s from Udemy or it’s from your students. When we think about the publish phase, it’s all about iteration. What are you learning from your students? Are you surveying your students? Are you getting great feedback from them? Are you learning which lectures are the most useful and the most engaging and which lectures maybe could use a little bit of work?  It’s all about iterating and honing your product as something that you want to improve over time. One of the nice things about an online course is it should be really dynamic. You’re going to get a lot of information from your students. Make sure you feed that back into your course to make it more powerful, better converting, better selling over time.  John:What’s some of those things? Let’s say I put a course up there, and it’s been up for a little while, and it’s all going pretty well. What sort of indicators am I going to get? Are these going to be blog comments? Are people going to be emailing me? When they do, do I have to redo the entire course or will I redo a video? How will I get the information from the customers? Then how will I actually apply it into the product?  Frank:It’s a good question. In the Udemy eco-system, we give our instructors some pretty powerful analytics about what their course engagement looks like. We will tell them exactly which lectures had the highest engagement rates, where lectures are, where there’s dropoffs, how students are doing on quizzes and aggregate, all things like that. Those are pretty powerful. The other thing that we do is we set up a pretty transparent system for student communication. That includes student reviews.   If I were to think about the 3 main places that you should be looking as an instructor to try to make your course better, it would be listening to reviews … What are students saying after they’ve taken your course? On Udemy, you’ll see that in a very transparent way. If you’re doing it elsewhere, survey your students after they have completed a lecture or completed the entire course. Find out what worked and what didn’t and react to that.  The second place is looking at trends in engagement or patterns. If you find out that in a 10-lecture course, lecture 3 and lecture 9 have 4 times the engagement of the rest of them, maybe you should actually take from that feedback, that you should create a separate standalone course on those 2 really high-value topics. Dig deep into those, for instance. Alternatively, if you see that lecture 2 has a really high drop-off rate, think about tinkering with it. Do some AB testing. Do some thinking around a slight tweak with how you present the topic. See if you can actually drive engagement up overtime.   Last place that you should definitely be looking is in your course dashboard experience. What are the questions that students are asking? What questions are they asking you, either via email or inside the course form? What are they asking one another? Use those questions as an indicator as to what they care about? Try to steer your course in that direction.  John:Fantastic. It’s sort of like plans for a tree that’s growing.  Frank:Exactly. If you’re an author and you publish a book, it’s pretty hard. That’s a little bit set in stone. It’s very hard to iterate on a book that’s out there. If you have an online course, this is something that you can really craft and evolve over time, especially if there are new changes that are being made to your course or to your topic. You create a course on digital marketing, that course is stale tomorrow. That’s part of why Udemy exists, to have a very rapid high-pace of courses that fill those needs of skills gaps that are moving quickly.  You should think of your course as something that can also be a part of that. Add new lectures over time as new hot topics pop up. If you started an email marketing course a couple of years ago, but now there are different digital marketing channels that are relevant and exciting, evolve your course so that it walks that path.  John:I love this. What’s stage 5?  Frank:Stage 5 is promotion. Whether it’s Udemy or anywhere else online, I think the reality of any self-publishing platform is that being a content creator, and definitely being a course creator or an instructor, are not spectator sports. While we’re proud of the fact that Udemy is a big marketplace … We have 3 million students today all over the world who are taking courses. You can definitely carve out in a very passive way a slice of that traffic.  If you want to be your most powerful instructor, you’re going to need to be both an instructor and a marketer. This means being out there, creating blog posts around your course topic, driving some traffic, fiddling around with other channels, maybe posting some of your videos on YouTube as a fun old way to actually drive traffic to your course. This is all about being out there and being an active marketer, making some noise so that your brand starts to get there and gain some momentum.  John:Is this something that people should know before they come to Udemy or is this something that Udemy can help with, in terms of promotion and giving people a map of how to actually promote that course?  Frank:The nice thing about Udemy is it’s a pretty flexible platform. As I mentioned, we’re working with some folks who are doing this for the first time and have no audience and other folks who have been doing it for a long time and have tens of thousands of YouTube or Twitter followers. They have a natural built-in audience.  The nice thing about the community is we have those folks and we have everybody in between. Part of our role as Udemy, as the platform, is to distill down what’s working from all of our best partners and help equip you with those. We actually have a woman on our team, Danielle Lesley, whose day job is to just find great tactics that are new and fresh and work and deliver those to our new instructors. You don’t have to know it in advance as long as you’re hungry and excited and willing to test out new things. We can help you find the recipe that is going to work for your specific content, your specific audience and your business model.  John:Absolutely. That’s great. Fantastic. We’re right on time here, but before you go, I wanted to talk a little bit about Udemy specifically. One thing I find really interesting here is that all of this can be applied to just setting up an eBook or a course on your own site. The problem, though, is that, especially for someone who has never done a course before, is that’s going to be very challenging. You mentioned analytics. That sounds fantastic. There’s a lot of different things that Udemy is going to make very, very easy and very simple. I really liked that.  I’m curious. What sort of numbers are people seeing on Udemy? If they set up a course, what can they really expect from it? How much money are they going to make? How long will it take to do it? All that sort of stuff.  Frank:Some good questions. As you might imagine with a big audience on the supply side, it’s a broad range. Just to give you a bit of a sense of a spectrum of what a course looks like and what success looks like on Udemy, the shortest course is 30 minutes. The longest course is 130 hours. The average course is probably in the 2 to 4 hour range. It’s mostly based in video content. For that average course, I’d say … There are free courses on Udemy. There are also courses that are $1,000. That average course is usually priced somewhere in $70 to $100 range.  When you actually think about what success means for instructors, we’re pretty proud of the fact that there are instructors who have done extraordinarily well on Udemy. We have over 50 instructors who have made more than $50,000 with their courses. Our top instructor has made multiple millions. The average instructor on Udemy has made a little over $7,000. There’s definitely some real money that can be made.  At the same time, if you wanted to create a free course, you just want to get your message out there really broadly, we’re more than happy to be a platform that helps you do that in a very quick, efficient, scalable way.  John:Very cool. We’re right on time here, Frank. Before we go, though, give people a heads up. Where’s the best place to go if they want to get more information on Udemy and maybe even sign up and create their first course?  Frank:Absolutely. We’re firm believers that anyone can be an expert and anyone can teach online. Democratizing education from the supply side is going to be the future. Whether you are creating your personal brand, trying to build a course as a part of your content strategy, I’d definitely encourage you to come to udemy.com. In specific, if you’re looking to potentially create a course, go to udemy.com/teach. No matter what you are an expert in, if you can dream it, you can teach it on Udemy. John:Love it. Fantastic. Thanks for coming on the show, Frank.  Frank:Thanks a lot, John.  The post Episode #61- Frank Visciano on The 5 Pillars to Building a Course That Sells. appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

The Reverend Rob Hanly is here back to back weeks to grace us with his presence… This week he explains how to become a marketing consultant. But instead of preaching what not to do, he tells us what to do. So kiss your four-hour workweek dreams GOODBYE. And say hello to the… Four-HUNDRED-Hour Workweek. No need to fear. Rev’s got you covered. He reveals in full, a 3-step formula ANYONE can use to become a masterful marketing consultant: First, you MUST have a skillset that can solve problems… anything. Once that’s established, you need to show it off to the right people. Step numero dos: Get in front of people that can use your skillset as a solution to their problems and provide them VALUE… This will separate you from the pack (think back to last week’s rule of reciprocity). And Step 3: quite possibly the most important of them all… …commit to taking action EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. To quote the rev: “You don’t grow muscle by sitting in the gym on the floor taking selfies.” You gotta have a skill. You gotta provide value. You gotta COMMIT. If you manage to follow these 3 simple steps without fail… there is no doubt you’re well on your way to becoming a consulting-BAD-ASS. And to help you follow through, Rob and I talk about a secret ingredient that makes all this effort possible. Without it, you will most certainly FAIL. Find out what this secret “thing” is… …add it to the 3-step formula, and POOF… You’ve got yourself a magical combo to world domination. Listen-in and get your marketing consulting game going NOW. In this episode, you’ll discover: how I reach my goals using a move fast – break sh*t philosphy (blast past your goals and pick up new ones) how Rob’s chisel and hammer stacked up against my rocket launcher when comparing success techniques. the hole that Rob plugged which catapulted his success (find your “hole” to fill now) where to spend your time and focus when starting a marketing consultancy (know where you stand and have the upper hand)  the one question you should ask yourself to get in the right frame of mind (start your consultancy here) how polar opposite consulting methods work equally as effective (and how they end up within a percent of eachother) how to wing-it like a pro and be ready for anything (do this and you’ll always be ready) how to find a problem you can solve, and figure out ways to solve it. a caveat that all consultants suffer (what it is and how to avoid it) how providing value helps to grow your client list (choose and run with the right one for you)   Mentioned: CopyHour Ramit Sethi Andre Chaperon Seth Godin Viper Chill Dan Andrews Your First Four Figure Client Back Door Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here.  John:Hey everybody it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for Episode 60: of The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, where you will discover how to make more money with email marketing and really just all things marketing.   How to make better marketing, so you can make better sales, and you get better results in your business, so you can go and live a great lifestyle, whether it’s  your kids or you go careening around the world or relaxing on the beach, in a hammock and drinking a coconut.   Now, I may live in Thailand, but there’s no beach in Chaing Mai, I’m not really do much of that hammock sitting, I do drink a lot of coconuts, I’m not doing much of that hammock stuff on the beach, unfortunately.  That will be in a couple of weeks and we’ll head down to the beach for a bit of a break, anyway today, I’ll be talking to Rob Hanly about how to get started with consulting. This is an interesting topic, okay, because this has been kind of my background, this is Rob’s background, as well.  Rob was on the Podcast last week, and if you don’t know, he was also the reverend … he was the reverend on a podcast, I think it was Episode 20 to 30ish, I can’t remember exactly what the number was, but he was on there as well and now he coming out. He is a consultant, quite a high paid consultant too. He’s got some great strategies to share on this.  But, why this is interesting is that, I get a lot of emails from people who are listening to this show and they want to be consultants or they’re in the process of becoming one or they’ve quit their jobs and they are a consultant but they’re not getting very good results yet. They want to know how to get clients, they want to know how to make it work so they can find a hammock on a beach and drink coconuts, or just live in New York or London or Sidney or just have a kick ass life.  That’s what we’re going to talk about today. It’s really how to do … like Rob’s story and my story, how we’re similar but very different and how getting started with consulting and really kicking ass, isn’t that complicated. You don’t need a huge amount of stuff to get it done.  You don’t need to be an expert; you don’t need tons of training or anything. You really just need the right mind set, the right set of beliefs and a couple of new, couple tricks of the trade and that’s really it, okay. There’s not a magic way to do it, very simple and we’re going to talk about it, step by step process today!  To get us started, the best episode of the Email Marketing podcast go to themcmethod.com/-6-0, that’s themcmethod.com/60.  Now, todays, McMasters Insider of the week is, “I find, I spend so much time researching my copywriting tasks, it’s probably my biggest bottleneck.” This came from one of the members of McMasters, which is a paid community, which I’ll tell you a bit about in a second.  Talk about this Insider though, and basically what he is saying, he spends so much time researching his prospects, probably going into Amazon reviews, maybe speaking to them on the phone. interviewing them, looking at surveys, doing the forms, basically so much time trying to figure out who he is trying to write copy for, that’s where he spends most of his time, is his biggest bottle neck.  Here’s why this is an Insider, because he’s saying it like it’s a bad thing, but this is the way it should be. It’s the research, right, that creates the empathy which is really what creates great copy. Great copy doesn’t come from writing all the time; also you need to be able to write.  If you have to come up with a great sales letter, that great sales letter is not going to be great because you spent 90% of your time writing it, but it’s going to be great because you spent over 50% of your time, researching it, okay.  Now I remember there’s a quote from Rammit Sethi, in one of Derrick Halpern’s podcasts, I think it was, he said, “He spent 50% to 60% of his time on his research.” He’s doing this and this guy’s got a multi-million dollar business. He sells a lot of information products; he has a blog, a whole bunch of stuff.  He’s at, iwillteachyoutoberich.com; he’s a guy worth following for email marketing, as well as, all the other marketing stuff but he swears by this researching stuff. The insider that I want you to understand is that, great copy comes from in-depth research.  Go grab a coffee, go to a coffee shop, spend two, three, four hours each day for a few days, maybe longer, however long you feel you need and you really want to overload your brain with as much information as you can about who the prospect is, what they care about, what their dreams are, what their goals and you want to actually get to the point where you feel overloaded with information, okay. Then start to map out maybe, like a graphs or sales letter outlet, start to brain storm some ideas how you can connect to this prospect, who  you now understand, better than they understand himself.  Start to brainstorm, how are you going to connect that with your product that you’re trying to sell.  You’re really want your brain to feel frustrated so it’s gets that point of overload. We talked about this in the podcast with Stephen Cutler, which is where you overload your brain like this.  This is part of getting into flow and then alright, then you back off. Go and get a massage, take a day or two off, two or three days off, whatever.  What’s going to happen is your brain your brain is going to be taking over, your subconscious brain is going to be working on in and then a couple of days go back, you don’t even think of …  and you consciously try not to think about it.   Then you go, come back to work a couple of days later and you sit down and you start writing and you find that nine times out of ten, you know exactly what to write, it’s all going to come out very quickly and especially if you can get rid of that editing voice, that critical part of your brain, that tells you ‘that’s no good.’ Get rid of that, and just write.  All that research you did, overloading of your brain, that’s really going to drive this fantastic sells letter, okay. That’s the Inside.  Spend more time researching and less time writing. Now reviews, if you want to leave a review for the show, you’ll help me spread the word, we’ll make another case study out of it, I can get more people on the podcast, anything to make my day. Go to iTunes, search for, the McMethod Email Marketing podcast and leave me a review. Tell me what you think about the show.  Got one listener question now, how important is continuing an overriding theme or story throughout an S.O.S? S.O.S. stands for Soap Opera Secrets, this refers to Andre Chaperon’s strategy in autoresponder matters, where you write a story in your email sequence, but instead of a story being in one email, the story carries over five, ten how many emails, it never really ends.  The idea is by telling a story that doesn’t ever end, in a given email. It’s a bit like a TV series where once you watch one or two episodes you have to watch the next one because at the end of every episode, they start to give you a little hint of about what’s coming next week.  That triggers a part of the brain that is it’s kind of like, well you need to have completion, like it is with dating. You want to resolve something, you want to have completion. This is to do with stories, like TV shows, you have to have completion of that TV show that’s why you keep watching those episodes, the same thing with those emails.  Something, I’m not a huge fan of this strategy with emails mainly because it’s triggering people to open the emails instead of buy your stuff. If you spend too much time   and getting hooked on the free information and the receiving and not buying, then you end up with a list of people that who really don’t like to buy stuff. Which, it’s not good.  Suppose you were going to do it, you’re going to try it anyway, you wanted to test it and you’re going to do a Soap Opera Sequence, right, a story over several emails and how important it is it continuing an overriding theme or story?    I would say it’s not that important. I think you could mix it up, I think it’s good when you can mix it up, you can start telling a story and then say in the next email you’ll hear about,  how Joe is going to save the life of Dave, something like that, whatever. Then in the next email, you just completely drop that. Maybe you come back to Dave in a few emails, come back to that story in a few emails. Is there an overwriting theme, maybe, but maybe not?  I just read a book by Charles Bukowski, yeah that his’ name, “Post Office”, this guy gets raving reviews from people about his writings, but I read his book. There’s almost no overriding theme, I don’t know what it’s about. It’s a good book, its fun to read and I did want to read it to the end, but it’s not like a normal book. It’s just a story that never really … like it’s interesting, that’s the interesting part, but it never really gets anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be any point to the story, then it just ends and it’s done.  You can do this with an S.O.S., you can jump around, you can be confusing, all … I think actually the more confusing you can be, to a point, the better; because it’s going to mean that people keep showing up to read because they want to know what the hell is going on, okay.  That’s it for that question, I hope that helps. Now lets get into this podcast, with Mr. Rob Hanly, about “How to Get Started with Consulting”.  It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy; I’m here with another podcast with the good old Reverend. Now a couple of weeks ago, would have been last week or maybe the week before that, we talked about the three reasons your marketing strategy will fail, and that was for business owners and consultants and even people just getting started. There’s some really key reasons why people don’t succeed. They never get thrashing, they never really get off the ground. Today we’re going to mix that up. I got him back on the show because he is actually a very successful consultant and when people usually come to me through our email, they’ve heard me on … they’ve heard this podcast, they’ve heard me on, say on Entrepreneur File, with John Lee Dumas.  They’ve heard me on one of these tell us your story podcast, where I went to the Philippine’s, I kind of failed a bunch, took up copywriting and started making money, moved to Thailand, and now kind of like this, what seems to a lot of people who have jobs back in an office and all that kind of crap, is that seems like an idea lifestyle. A lot of people are very interested in that.  What I want to bring up, the Reverend [Inaudible 00:08:13], was to talk about his consulting and actually how to get started, right, because there are people here, maybe it’s you, the listener and you’ve heard about copywriting, you’ve heard about marketing and what you really want to do is, figure out how can you, use what you’ve learn on this podcast. Use what you’ve learn from something like CopyHour, which is a Copywriting Training Program or other marketing podcast, to kind of escape the cubicle, which is such a cliché phrase these days, but get out of that cubicle, so you can kind of get out there and move to Thailand, move to South America, start doing Skype calls to clients in the U.S. and Australia and U.K. and make money doing that.  Anyway, we’re going to talk about that in this episode with Rob’s story, John’s story, bunch of stuff but really how to get started with consulting and make money so you can fire your boss and come and live in Thailand and hang out and drink the best coffee in Chaing Mai, I’ll show you where that coffee shop is, it’s really cool.  Reverend, what’s up man?  Rob:Just chillin like a villain on the ceiling.  John:Chillin like a villain on the ceiling.  Rob:By Bob Dillion.  John:I hear … I was going to say, you should do an intro, but I’ve got one thing right here. Point number one, is Rob’s story that would be like the best intro, any of us could give. Chillin like a villain, Mr. Villian right here, can you give us the villain story, Rob Hanly’s story?  Rob:I can, ultimately what I ended up doing was I got involved in consulting a couple of years ago and I previously already done some client work. I was a ADHD mentor originally, ended up working as a graphic designer, working media as a digital producer, had a pretty varied background, worked across a couple of different industries with clients as well as any actually work I was doing myself.  John:You had a job?  Rob:I had a job, crazy right.  John:You worked in an office? Rob:I worked in an office.  John:Like there was a coffee machine, bosses, kind like you had to dress up.  Rob:I once threw a whiteboard marker at my boss and got a promotion.  John:That’s how you do it, we’re going to do a podcast on that sometime I think.  Rob:Maintain eye contact, pure alpha status.  John:You’re a lion. Alright, you had a job, you did all that and then somehow now, you’re in Thailand.  Rob:Well, yeah look, currently I’m in Thailand. For the record,  I don’t live in Thailand. I’m traveling around for a little bit at the moment, it’s one of the benefits that come from consulting, but to get here was a little hard work, a little sweat and tears, I’m not going to lie. I think that’s something that’s work out quite well. I basically left my job …  John:It’s hard work?  Rob:You got to do the work, you got to sweat, you know, you don’t grow a muscle by sitting in the gym, on the floor taking selfies.  John:What were some of the things that sucked about the journey?  Rob:You know what; It sucked until I accepted the hard work. It sucked until I accepted that life is easy when you live it the hard way and hard when you live it the easy way. That’s Kekich credo, right?  John:Right.  Rob:But it wasn’t until I accepted that, and just committed to grinding, for want of a better term. Stop trying to be perfect, stop trying to be that, ‘Oh, so super and special’,  I just got out there and made shit happen.  John:Okay.  Rob:That’s when everything got easier. Up into that stage it was grand, because I had all these ego brain problems going on, oh you’re special, you’re smart, you should be able to do this, why haven’t you’ve done this. John:I’m looking for the magic trick this is going to unlock the game.  John:Yeah.  Rob:There’s no silver bullet, the silver bullet is hard work.  John:Right. Rob:Hard work in the right direction.  John:It’s kind like they talk about the overnight success. Where’s there like five years in the making.  Rob:Yeah, it’s often times how it works.  John:Usually when you hear about someone, who’s that is sixteen years old and a millionaire, there’s always a back story.  Rob:They’re an outlier, and they’re an outlier.  John:Yeah. Rob:Everyone who is going to listen to this or the majority of people, who listen to this, probably read the “Four Hour Work Week”.  Forget it, everyone who reads the Four Hour Work Week … John:What was your Facebook update status one time?  Rob:It making you look like you worked a four hour work week is a fulltime job. It’s something that Glen [Inaudible 00:11:28] up and run with and a couple of us locals spoke about, you’ve got two groups of people right?  There’s a four hour work week, which everyone, wants to have. You’ve got first group who read the book, ignored all the shit about doing hard work and then focused on living in Thailand and taking selfies and drinking coconuts and pretending they’re successful.  Then you got another group of people, who go well, the concept of the Four Hour Work Week is work as much as you need to, but only work on things you enjoy, doing things that you enjoy, and be able to take time off.  John:The Four Hour Work Week was a result of a split test on a group, like that title was a split test on Google Outlet, that’s the only reason it’s called the Four Hour Work Week.  Rob:It was originally, at the seminar that they use to give at the University, was Drug Dealing for Final Profit. That was a title, that was slapped back by the publisher and that’s why they did the ad words.  John:Maybe you could be a drug dealer for fun on profit, but maybe you would be working tens a hour a week or twenty hours a week or forty hours a week.  Yeah, right, but one thing that I’ve realized is doing this, as soon as you realized that it’s not about the Four Hour Work Week, and that’s the story, that’s the dream and that’s the marketing thing.  Really what we’re all doing out here, is just business, and business been done for centuries, basically you’re solving someone’s problem and they’re paying you money to solve it because you’re going to save them time or money or effort.  Rob:You add value.  John:You’re going to add value, and that’s all we’re doing. This is … I talked to my grandparents back on Christmas Time the other day, they’re kind like, are you getting by, how’s the internet thing going? Are you making a enough to pay the rent, and well there’s nothing new that we’re doing over here, its business.  All the internet does it just means I can be in Thailand and I can work with Joe Smith in Sidney, who’s got a plumbing business and needs more leads, customers, whatever.  We can just channel on Skype, instead of doing a phone call or a meeting at our local coffee shop, we just jump on Skype. That’s what the internet does; it enables business at long distances.  Rob:It’s a tool of efficiency. Tim Gordon wrote on this years ago, if you search Setco, and Make Money Online, we show we can [Inaudible 00:13:19], but that’s what it is, you understand the internet is a tool of efficiency. It’s not a magic bullet, it’s not going to save you from your day job, it’s not going to make life magic that you hit a green button, and you become [Inaudible 00:13:26] and make thousands of dollars on auto pilot.  John:Yeah.  Rob:What it is, you have to put in the hard work first, because it’s a new behavior you have to commit to it, right? That’s where my story started. You’ve heard it a million times, but ultimately I started by sitting at the kitchen table, literally, the classic cliché, I’d wake up real early at 5:00 in the morning, kind of thing.  John:Yeah.  Rob:Get a yellow legal pad, a note pad, and write a question at the top, “How can I add “X” dollars in value to people and receive “X” dollars in return, and “Y” dollars in return, today?” I would write a list of twenty-five or thirty things and I would grind, grind and grind and get it all out there. Develop the behavior. John:Yeah.  Rob:Then it was about [Inaudible 00:14:00] and use to reach out to people and add value to them first. Showed the, “Hey, here’s how you can improve your site. This is how you can make your site faster. How you can make more money from it. How you can get more leads to yoga studio, your personal training studio, whatever, and hey, I’ve got this other thing but you should call me if you want to find out what it is,” and then I get people on the phone.  I would talk to them about their problems, and my background was web designer, I had worked in digital production and media, I’m not going to lie, I had an advantage, I have done this before.  I could just take it and turn it into a sale, do a proposal and make them some money. That’s was it, that’s how got started was the kitchen table and being prepared to do and people talk about sixteen hour days, but really I’m talking like sixteen hour days, man. Food was made while working, eating while working. That’s it.  John:I would like to say that consulting does have to be hard, it’s really you figure out a problem that you can solve and then you figure out ways you can solve it, really. Whether it’s autoresponder or marketing funnels, or any sort of consultant, marketing consultant or not, it’s really simple like it’s just people have problems that have a need solving.  You’re just going to be that guy, the challenge that most people have is, well how do you get started, how do you find these people. It started with you; it’s just kind like well, its start think first, start getting your brain on the right track. Which what problems [crosstalk 00:15:10].  Rob:How can you add value?  John:The next thing is to establish trust with someone who has a problem that you might be able to add value to.  Rob:Yelp.  John:Then once you got trust establish and you’ve got a relationship and you can have coffee at Skype or whatever it is, sooner or later there is going to be an opportunity for some sort of exchange or transaction. It’s going to be like, you pay me $1,000 and I will do “X”,  Rob:I’ll deliver on this. You’ll save time, you’ll make money. Talk about value, not technical stuff. John:Yeah.  Rob:Here’s a very important thing, right, you and I are talking about a really straight forward methodology, right. The reason I don’t about you, it took me so long to get real traction, was I didn’t have a methodology that matched me. John:Right. Rob:That was something I had to develop and get use to and in the same way, so did you. You had to develop your own methodology for what you were doing when you first started.  John:That’s a funny thing here, second to that then. I was in the Philippines and well, did you just set out to be the Autoresponder Guy, and the answer was no, completely not. I’ve been to the Philippines I tried a few ideas I got myself band from AD Words, and a couple of different things like that.  Things weren’t going well, funny thing, I had less than $500 in my bank account, things were getting pretty tight, I was thinking maybe, I was going to have to go home. Buy a ticket on my credit card and I only had a one way ticket to come there. I thought I was going to have to buy a ticket and go home and get a job.  It did work out anyway, I started doing copywriting, that wasn’t even … I didn’t even start learning copywriting to become a consultant, that was never the intention. I just wanted to learn copy. One, I was fascinated with it, and two, I had a website which was sort of selling … I was selling this EBook, just not very many of them, it was it made like a $1,000. in three months. Not really a big deal with the EBook.  That’s what made me get into copywriting and I think it was around June in 2012 the first invoice, I sent was to Dan Andrews because he was in … Rob:TropicalMBA.com.  John:That’s right, he was in Porta Bel Air in the Phillipines at the time, for bit of a like a TropicalMBA classes, like  one of these seminar conference things, and he saw me  kind of writing down sales by hand on my little legal pad, it wasn’t yellow.  We go through this, he saw, he’s like what are doing, I told him I’m copywriting. Then that lead to Autoresponder. I can’t remember why, or how we got onto email, he just said, he would love to have a good email sequence on his site. I’d never done it before; I never had done it for any client. I kind of had a rough idea based on what I’d done for myself and I’d been to Andre Chaperon’s course, Autoresponder’s Madness.  Rob:Yeah.  John:I did the Autoresponders, he paid me $200 via Paypal, I spent two full days and work on it all day. Did the same thing the day after and gave him ten emails for $200 dollars and then he was really happy with it and I think it was a week later, at the end of the seminar, he asked around and gave him [Inaudible 00:17:35], would you pay for this.  Would you pay for this Autoresponder, and a whole bunch of people were like yeah and then he was like, how much would you pay? Some people were like $500, one guy even said like $1500. I said, “There is no way.” I was surprised enough when Dan said, he would pay, $200 just for emails.  Then it, just grew from there, I fell into this Autoresponder thing and the same kind of thing, I was kind of in the Philippines and I was surrounded by guys like Dan Andrews, who were business owners, who had websites, who had problems. That was an advantage, but that was something anyone can create, go to seminars, conferences, all that.  Rob:Connect with people, who have problems.  John:Right. Rob:Everybody. John:People hear that you have a skill, like copywriting, whatever it happens to be like website design, or logo design, they going to be like,  I’ve been looking for a guy to do that, because most business owners have so many things that they want to do, but they haven’t got around to it, because they’re busy and they’re lazy too. When they hear that you can do something, especially if you’re just getting started, they’ll give you a shot.  Rob:Yeah.  John:That’s really how you get started isn’t it, you build from there, then you kind of need a bit of different skill set to grow that, but that’s where it starts.  Rob:Yeah, one thing I really want to address right now, when we spoke about hard work and luck and  all this things involved; but ultimately, if somebody wants to become a consultant right, there’s a couple of prerequisites; One, you have a skill set which will solve somebodies problem. If you don’t have that skill set, you can’t be a consultant. You might be a sales guy, and you can sell somebody else’s services and white label them, but you can’t … John:That’s still a skill set.  Roby:That’s a skill set, that’s true, but you’re not the consultant, so to speak. You’re just a sales guy, but you got a skill right, maybe you get really good at copywriting, get really good at funnels like John is, maybe you get good at SEO’s, whatever it is. You come in, and you managed to get good at a specific skill that solves a specific problem.  Then you find people, who have that problem, and then you emailed them, and add value, and you call them and add value, or you meet them and add value. Then you segway, “Hey look I’ve got some other cool stuff, you might be interested in. let’s talk about it.”  That’s it, that’s the silver bullet, get a skill, see the problem that it solves, and reach out to people who have those problems, add value, and make money. That’s it. I think it kind of brings up a point as well, is the difference between you and I, and our approaches.  I’ve known John what, for two years. John:Yeah, around two years.  Rob:Yeah. We got along pretty well from the start and the longer we spent together, the more different we realized we are in certain aspects, in particular our approached.  John:Same, same, but different.  Rob:Very same, same, but different and the way we kind of discuss this is, John is essentially the hammer. Right, like you want something to happen. You want someone to go hulk mode and beat through the wall, that’s John, John will just beat down every brick in the damn wall, where I on the other hand, would like to take a couple of minutes and try to find out which of the three bricks are the weakest and just focus my energy on those.  For me that came my I got ADHD, my background was ADHD mentoring, it was really about understanding about focus and teaching other people to do the same stuff. I would be a hypocrite, if I didn’t.  You on the other hand love the hulk strategy.  John:I just love that quote man, it was from Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break stuff. I like move fast and break shit. It just sounds better, it’s more aggressive.  It something I want to just want to qualify here, it’s not just go out and just break stuff. You don’t just go out beat this hammer, and beat the crap out this all. There’s still an element of this, try to identify the three bricks, whereas, you might get a small chisel and a hammer, and chip away like a bit of a sculptor.  You do a very neat job, very precise job on those bricks. I would rather find those, I guess, I still would want to identify what my outcome is, which is identify a couple of those bricks, then get a freakin rocket launcher and fire that rocket launcher, at those three bricks.  I still know the outcome, I just want to hit that thing as hard as I can and I’m going to make a few mistakes, stuff is going to break. I’m going to do the wrong thing from time to time.  I know if I just keep executing, on that strategy, and I’ve noticed that’s generally what works with my personality as well, is that my skill is usually forgetting about what can go wrong, and just moving forward in spite of kind of the questions.  Rob:That’s it. Yeah, like that move fast and break stuff, is such a good response, in terms of, if you’re scared of doing something right, like definitely going to be a stage in my life, where that’s how I operated, because I was being held by this fear of failure, where god what if I say the wrong thing, what if I swear on the podcast, what if I insult someone and then you just have to go, you know what I’m going to move fast, I’m going to break something’s, I’m going to except that there is collateral damage.  What I found the longer I did it for, was my personality after I kind of conquered that fear sort of things,  I was more attracted to being specific, being choosey, and being very much about, alright, so you have these customers, let me have a look at these customers.  Who’s most popular gender, what’s the most profitable marital status, what’s the most profitable occupation, what’s the most profitable common identifier, across all these groups.  When we send the sales campaign, I said to John before, I feel like when you send out a sales campaign you get a 5% overrate, that 95% wasted email. I much rather meet the right market, at the right time, with the right message and offer them a really good product at their offering, right off the bat. As oppose to rocket launching. I think because for me, that works well for my personality.  Because I get this shit when I add myself to an email list and it’s almost like, yeah man, let me send you some really cool by the way, if you hit reply, I’m not going to respond, because I’m a dick.  If you got an autoresponder, if you got an email list, you need to accept that you’re giving me you’re email I’m letting you into my Inbox. If you ignore me when I reply, you’re out of here and I ain’t going to spend a dollar on you.  John:That’s stuff, … that’s where the difference is, it’s good to talk about this, because some people are going to think, it’s like one’s better than the other,  I use to think that’s the case.  That the way I was doing it, it was better than everyone else did it. Now I’m like no, it’s not, it just what works for me right now, at this point and time. But in this case, of this email, you might want to analyses the psychographics was the words, you used.  Rob:Yeah, Psychographics and Social Graphics.  John:I would be… it’s important that I get it, and I know why you do it, and why people do that stuff. But to me it’s, to get too analytical, to go too deep on that stuff, bores me to tears. I’d rather be like, what’s the goal here? What’s the minimum I can do, to get the maximum result, and then just fire away?  Rather than spend too much time analyzing and thinking about it, I’m really trying to perfect that approach, just ready, fire, aim. That’s total me.  That’s not that’s better, you’re strategy would be more like a ready, aim, fire.  Rob:I would like to know more of a strategist overview of the landscape, before I choose where to fire.  John:Right.  Rob:That’s it. I guess I’m like ready aim and fire, don’t get me wrong, a lot of people perceive this as being really a polar opposite kind of thing, you really have to move fast and break a lot of stuff.  It’s like, hey look at me, I’m going to break a lot of stuff, and I’m going to call 16,000 people a day in cold calls or I’m going to call one person, and nobody else and I’m going to wait until I pick that perfect one person.  Reality is, John and I have both found what works well for us. We’ve found, where our natural skill set lies and our natural mood [Inaudible 00:23:54], and we’ve accepted what our ways are.  Like for me, I like to build up a little bit more dialog before I take action, so I can go into it with total boldness. Whereas John will go with the boldness from the get go. That doesn’t work for me and that’s fine. Just shows we have different approaches, to how we approach.  John:It’s almost like; there is a little bit two sides of the same coin, like if we’re playing a video game you know how you have points for agility, points for wisdom, and magic and all that kind of crap.  In this case you might have there’s two attributes here, which you have move fast and break shit. Then the other attribute might be prepare, or aim something like that.  Rob:Preps something really good example man, because I use really struggle with preparing and that’s probably why I really double down on it, it’s my biggest weakness. Once I plugged that hole, because I use to always wing it, I still wing it.  But when I double down on my preparation, that’s where I see huge returns. That’s when I moved from doing cheap websites and cheap jobs, to charging minimum low five figures.  John:Right.  Rob:Because I was able to sit here and talk to some guy and say, “Hey man, that’s really cool, you might say I’ve ready research your company, you, your people, your company, people you work with, past  results, seen the capital you’ve had, the institutional capital you’ve had, all your existing product offerings.”  When I sit there, it sounds like I’m going off the guild, because I am, but I’ve got all that extra prep, in the back of my head and that gave me more confidence in sitting down and talking to people about where they’re at, and the problems they’ve got.  John:There’s an element here where you’re absolutely correct and you need both, it’s kind like you need to be out preparing to identify what needs to  happen and then have some background information, but when it’s time to act, you need to come down, this is always mine, come down like an atomic bomb.  Rob:Yes, you got to do it, you just got to commit.  John:Yeah, kind of get called out, if all your doing is going out there an breaking stuff,  you’re not going to get anywhere, just piss people off, and you’re just going to make a mess, but if all you do is prepare, you’re never actually going to do anything. You’re just going to just prepare, prepare, prepare and never get the results. You’re going to be the talker.  Rob:I think this is a really a good point, as where you’re a hammer, I’m a scalpel, ultimately both of these things are calls of action. We go a different psychological path essentially, to reach the same outcome.  Similar enough outcome, maybe the way that we get there is a little different, but the outcome is within the percentile difference, If you’re sitting at home and you’re listening to the podcast, whether if you’re on the train or on the way to work or whether you at home, or your business, or you wanting to become a consultant.  The first thing to understand, as we discussed, that there is a basic pathway and you’re way of traveling that pathway, and reaching that outcome might be different, but that’s find.  As long as you travel the pathway, as long as you take action, get up and do shit take action, provide value, and solve problems.  John:It’s kind like, a lot of people look for this map, and people look at internet marketing products and make money online and all this stuff, as though there’s one right way, there’s one right path. There is not.  There’s about a billion roads, pulling an infinite amount of roads, to get to where ever you want to get. There’s all those roads, that you’ve already walked. There’s ones, no one else has ever walked, and no one else even knows those other roads exist. It’s kind like a cool day, when you realized that you don’t have to follow only roads that are already out there, you can actually go out there.  This is when you get the best results. When you start, like have a rough idea about where you want to go, and how you are going to get there, but at the end of the day, you’re going to blaze your own trail. That doesn’t mean doing something wildly different; it just means that, realizing that you don’t have to do the same thing everyone else does.  You can, kind of figure out what works for you, in the context of what your ultimately outcome is.  Rob:It’s like riding motorbikes. John and I would catch up, we would ride motor bikes together, something we enjoy doing.  John:Sunday, we’re going Sunday, right.  Rob:Yeah, I’m going to go on Sunday. What you would find is if you ever ride with John and I, what you would find is, we’ll both reach the same destination, we’ll both travel the same road, but we’ll take variations on that road. John might take the right lane; I might take the left lane. Maybe John will speed up, maybe I won’t. Whatever it is, we’ll both end up at the same outcome, at roughly the same time and yet there will always be a bit of  similar path taken, but we’ll still do things in our own style and accepting that there is a lot of room to breathe, you don’t have to be anally perfect.  That kind of brings to like, what I reckon is one of the most important things to understand. We spoke about this on the last podcast that we did together, which was about where your focus is.  About what is the strategic outcome that you want and what are the steps you need to take to get there? More importantly what are the things that are relevant?  The course that I have, is to help people who want to become a consultant.  John:Okay.  Rob:Take action steps, to become consultant over the course of thirty six days. All right, we talk about everything from, who are the target markets that you can help. Here’s where to find them. The methodology that I talk about, which is using Google and he’s had to approach them, and he’s had to write emails, he’s had to get them on the phone, his had to talk to them on the phone, had to get a proposal to them, he’s had to close the sale and he’s had to deliver the work, and he’s had to keep the cash coming in, right.  It’s been really successful for the people who just go, alright this is the methodology and I’m going to follow this, I’m going to put my spin on it, I’m going to take the steps and this is like following the road, but choosing your own lane.  One of the things I’m a big proponent for, everyone doing this course, still ask me is, do I need a website, do I need a Facebook page, do I need a Twitter account, do I need a Pinterest account, do I need a LinkedIn page, the answer is no, no, no, no, and no. You don’t need this stuff, right. John:But you need to be a hammer or a scalpel.  Rob:You do, you do.  John:You need to do something; you need like to start swinging.  Rob:You need to start swinging, [Crosstalk 00:28:40] John:A baseball bat, you got to swing.  Rob:Pick your weapon, but what you then do, is you swing. Don’t worry about, “Oh, do I got like 16,000 samurai swords,” you go alright, pick one, and I’m just going to use this sword and hack away at it.  It’s bit of a metaphor, but ultimately, here’s a case, if you are like wanting to become a consultant, or you’ve got dreams of it or if you’re just starting and you’re finding that you spend an hour a day, two hours a day, three hours a day,  doing something like Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, and you’re not getting  in front of people who have your problem and adding value to them, and then offering to solve your problem for money, your focus is off.  Just a cold hard fact, if you are not doing anything that is not getting you in front of people, who will need your services, you’re wasting your time. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to do it twelve hours a day. But I guarantee you, if you do that for four hours a day, you’ll see huge gains. Mixing yourself with those people right.  John:I like this … with the McIntyre Method and McMasters, I talk about … you got this whole way Thomas Day marketing, you got … this [Inaudible 00:29:31] big canyon, there’s a crazy wild river and Northern Canadian wilderness, there’s this river rapids running through the bottom of the valley, and this canyon just goes might be a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet, meters, just a really, really big cliff.  Rob:A really deep canyon.  John:Then, on the one side on the top of that canyon, you got a stick figure, because I draw in stick figure, when I draw.  Rob:Their beautiful stick figures.  John:They are, I like beautiful stick figures. You got like a stick figure going on the left, of this canyon on the top, and he’s your prospect, right. He’s Joe Smith, in this case, for consulting, he’s got some sort of business, whatever your target prospect is.  Rob:He runs a plumbing company.  John:He runs a plumbing company.  Rob:Joe Smiths plumbing [Inaudible 00:30:05].  John:On the right side of that canyon, you’ve got the product, which is going to be a website or  order or a sales funnel, anything.  Rob:I think it’s similar, but it’s an outcome.       John:An outcome. Rob:An outcome.  John:He wants more leads, okay.  Rob:Let’s do that. John:Then what the marketing needs to do, is whether your using an autoresponder or cold calling, or banner ads or classified ads in your newspaper, or walking into like sales calls, walking in to business, whatever that is, the marketing strategy basing it upon that bridge, from one side of that canyon to the other.  Your prospect is, Joe Smith, is  going to be able to walk across that bridge in beautiful stick figure fashion, do you see the walking stick figure?  Rob:Beautiful.  John:He walks across and then he walks into … he is going to be fine, he picks up this outcome, which is more leads, more sales, whatever it happens to be and you’ve connected him. Your marketing is connecting your prospect  with your product, bamb.  That’s a simple thing. All they got to do is identify who is that prospect, what are they are selling them, what outcome they are selling  Rob:What outcome does the prospect desire? John:Then everything after that, all the hammer swing, the scalpel swing, whatever it happens to be, is all about connecting the prospect with the product. That’s it, everything else can be thrown out. Doesn’t wear like a Facebook page, how much effect is that really going to have on connecting your prospect with your profit?  Not much. If you add a Facebook advertising campaign to your page, and your page to a phone number on there, and a call to action. That’s a little bit different. That’s pretty optimized.  Rob:This is a really important point actually, again you cracking out the good point today, John. John:Cracking them out.  Roby:You’re cracking them out John:Cracker Jack. Rob:For those people, who listen to Johns Podcast, want to be a copywriter, right. Here is a caveat, right. You will pick a skill set, you need to understand that your skill set cannot solve every problem, if somebody needs more leads, then maybe a SEO will help.  At the same time, if somebody needs more leads and they are private high in the referral boutique and SEO is probably not what they’re after. I’m saying, that  if you only have one skill set and one knowledge and you don’t have a network at all, you’re going to start approaching every problem, in the same way.  When we were talking about the canyon, the person on one side, the bridge, and like the outcome they want, it’s really important to understand what the prospects outcome is and if you cannot solve it with your skill set, don’t try to force your skill set in.  Don’t try to convince him of something, just go ahead call him and say, “Sorry I don’t think I can help you.” Then go back a focus on the people who want the outcome that you can offer, under your perimeters, of your skill set. Don’t try and … I get emails all the time from people who are copywriters and say I just want to be a copywriter. No, no, no, you want to be someone who solves problems, by using the medium of text. You solve problems, it’s not about you being a copywriter, and it’s about solving the problems of your prospect.  John:Right.  Rob:If copy is the best way to do that, use copy. Copy is invariable by the way,  is a phenomenal  skill set  to have because it teaches you to think more persuasively, more influentially, it helps you  communicate with much greater clarity, but if you think everything is about solving something with better copywriting you are wrong. Sometimes its literal a case of going, ‘Hey, you got a business, you got a great range of prospects, who connected to a current client base, had to go to a referral system.’  Here’s how we can use copy to solve that. Not, let me do some copywriting for you because I want to make you lots of money. That’s probably the difference is [Crosstalk 00:32:54]… John:It’s not about a copy; it’s never about the product.  Rob:It’s never about the tool.  John:An example of this, a recent one, that I obviously we’ve  been doing email, sort of writing emails [Inaudible 00:33:04] getting them out and writing them as well and I guess a recent realization is, I’m a little bit embarrassed to say, is that people don’t really want email, they obviously don’t want emails. Emails are like a commodity, like you’re buying a pack of soap. What they really want is a clean body and in this case; in the case of emails, they want more sales. What a better product would be, not just emails, because emails don’t do that much, what someone wants is a full service where they get a squeeze page, an email sales, like a email sequence, a sales page, tracking so they know where all the sales are coming from, and ideally split testing, if they had a enough traffic for it.  That’s a much, much better, much better, and much higher price solution as well.  Rob:Something that you can really stand out with, as well.  John:Yeah, but it’s all the same stuff.   I don’t need to learn anything new to do that, it’s just kind of packaging it and adding a few tweets, like adding the tracking in and it becomes a whole new thing.  Rob:It does. Let’s take this alright, let’s talk about, legitimately getting started with consulting, we’ve spoken about how, I started out after leaving my job, I ground on my kitchen table if you will, writing notes by hand, making calls, sending emails, and developed  the methodology that worked for me and that’s what I knew. You talked about having fills, you were there, you connected with Dan Andrews from Tropical MBA, got into enough orders upon entry, and both of us gained traction in our own ways and now we have sort of an approach that we follow, right. For example you have your leads generation methodologies, my very much referral base, and introduction base, we charge different price points. We service different markets.  What’s really important, I guess is, if someone is listening to this, is how do they get started in consulting. Now we mentioned your first full figured client and if that’s something you’re interested in, we’ll come back in a second.  But ultimately, here’s what I would say, like if I was sitting across from you right now, and you said to me Rob, how do I become a consultant, how do I get started with it.  I would really hash these points.  One, have a skill set that solves problems.  Two, figure out who has those problems and knows that they have those problems.  John:Okay.  Rob:Get in front of them.  John:Yes.  Rob:Figure out wherever they are, and then get in front of them. Maybe that is going to be by sending cold emails, cold phone calls. I understand, in some markets like the Danish market, it’s illegal to send a cold email, you cannot do it. Maybe you have to go meet them. Maybe you have to organize an event, where you get them altogether in front of you, free presentations, whatever it is. Get in front of those people.  Then commit to taking action every single day. You know the problem that they need solved. You know the outcome that they desire, you know the way to bridge the gap and you talked about that [Inaudible 00:35:04]. John:Yeah.  Rob:Then you do it every day. I tell you become a consultant, this is the magic bullet, just do something every single day.  John:I like that.  Rob:Would that be your advice?  John:Absolutely, absolutely,  for one thing I know a lot of people like is and I’ve noticed with the McIntyre method and people are wondering right now, you mentioned your course a second ago, it’s like a thirty … thirty-five day thing.  Rob:Thirty-six.  John:There’s an auto responder to get an email every day, to do this right?  Rob:I don’t call it an auto responder, mainly because what it is, this is a huge journey, this idea of becoming a consultant … what is a consultant? Now I know when I first started, I typed into to Google to find consultant.  John:Yeah.  Rob:Figuring out all these elements. Ultimately as a consultant, your job is to improve the client’s condition, right? Instead of it being a thirty-six day autoresponder, it gives you a daily action task, for thirty-six days.  John:Okay.  Rob:I tell you, ‘Hey, John, today this is what you’re doing.’  John:So, you can build momentum there.  Rob:Build momentum.  John:By the end of the thirty-six days, what will I have, if I did it?  Rob:If you follow the instructions, right, and if you go all the way through the course and by the way throughout the course, I tell people email me, that’s the main reason I … John:You reply to emails.  Rob:I reply to every email and this is the main reason I’m bumping up the prices, because quite frankly, I can’t reply to all the emails without losing part of my day now. It’s a case of, if you speak with me, right, I’ll help you out, I have a couple of clients who are going through, that I’ve coached as well.  It’s a case is if you follow it, you will get results. The average report return on investment is over 7,000%.  John:You mentioned one guy, I can’t remember what his name was, who went through the course and I was blown away, I was like man that is so cool, he went through and he just applied everything and then he made … he picked up like a whole bunch of clients, like 10 grand, something like that?  Rob:Plenty yeah. There were a couple of different markets. This is the other side of this consulting thing, it’s the same principal at a base level, in the last three weeks, I’m spoken to a guy who works at New York, he is one of my favorite, favorite clients man, this guy is amazing.  I’m not going to give you his name, not because of his privacy, but he’s a normal individual, if he’s hearing it, he knows who he is, I love chatting with him, his [Inaudible 00:36:47].  More importantly he took this to a market and I remember the first time I got an email off him, during the course was after less than a week or just over a week, it’s like sorry man, I just got to stop taking the course for a bit, because I’m already getting more clients, awesome.  Then I had another guy go through it, who was in a completely different market and again I speak to him quit regularly and he went into a very different direction and he was a bit shaky at first, but he stuck with it, he followed the process. He didn’t try and make it magical. That’s where most people come off, and he got some results.  This is the client that things happen over and over again. These guys who kind of follow that process, look we just laid that process out man, like it’s your recipe … John:Like you’re baking a cake, if you use a recipe and follow it, you get a cake.  Rob:Yeah. You’ll get 80% similar results and this is the thing, we’ve already told you exactly what you need to do, on this podcast if you want to become a consultant.  You can take this podcast, you could transcribe it by hand and you can become a consultant. Your first work for your client is about teaching you what to do alone. I mean there is some cool stuff, there is some tablets and proposals and all that stuff but it’s about saying, “Hey like you know, you’re interesting if you want to become a consultant, you realize it’s a big journey and realistically you want some accountability and a bit of hand holding. You want a step by step system to follow that’s work for other people.” John:Yeah.  Rob:That’s where that comes in. It’s not so much like, hey go do this stuff and now you’re on your own, it’s like, at the end of thirty-six days even if you  haven’t acquired a first four figured client, you’ll have sales tool, you’ll have proposals, things that are based on behavioral phycology  and behavioral economics. I don’t know if you remember it, the article I wrote for your [stressor 00:38:05] site, was on a book called “Predictably Irrational”, by Dan Ariely.  Phenomenal book, and I took the concepts from that book for behavioral economics and used that to create proposals, then my closing rate just went through the roof, when I first got started. I copied that, okay.  Then one of the guys took that, and made that his own, and he’s made tens of thousands of dollars off the back of it. It’s pretty cool man.  John:That is pretty cool.  Rob: If you want to become a consultant listen to this episode again, follow the steps.  John:But if they want to get this, the name of his course is called “Your First Four Figured Client “, obviously what you people get is ..  Rob:Your, First Four Figure Client, First Four Figure Client, its bit of a tongue twister, your First Four Figure Client.  John:Because you want to say is anyway, where can I go check this out if I want to. Should I make a redirect link on my … Rob:Yeah, we’re going to have a special link [Inaudible 00:38:49] John:Themcmethod.com/four. That’s easy.  Rob:The number 4.  John:Yeah the number 4. Themcmethod.com/4, and that will go to  Rob:A special back end, so that’s actually something this really worth noting, right. Like I mentioned before,  John:Because you closed it right?  Rob:I did, I put it on a waiting list because of the volume of people coming through and at the moment there is a waiting list, so I can handle as people come through, I can answer them without sacrificing my own consulting work, in my own business’s, I can still give them the attention they need.  Pretend it’s like a backend door, honestly if a heap of people who listen to this podcast, I know you got a list of downloads, I will send it off,  because I want to make sure that … no like legitimately this sounds like false quessing and all that crap. The reality it’s not in my best interest to give people a subpar experience.  It’s not in my best interest to say, hey, thanks for the money; see you later, because I want you to be really successful. If you’re listening to this, you want to become a consultant. Cool, come check it out man. Come look at what we got, I’ll break it down for you, if you got questions, I’ll answer them, because it’s in my best interest to help you make a lot more money, because ultimately I have other trainers that I work with other consultants on, to help them add reoccurring clients to their business and get that reoccurring revenue coming through that retainer tops off.  I want to make you money, if I didn’t give you a really good experience and help you get through there; you’re never going to get to that stage. I would shoot myself in the foot. That’s the other reason why this is not a $1600 course like other ones.  This is right off here, this is the cost,  it’s less than $200 bucks, you can get started, and the average point of return for investment is over 7,000% , if this works for you also, make a 1,000, you say hey, I’ll give you a refund.  John:Easy, pesy, Japanese.  Rob:That’s a bit different.  John:We’ll add the link to that. You can go to, themcmethod.com/4 that’s a number four or you can go to themcmethod.com find this podcast post and there will be a link in that podcast post to that link, which will take you to the backdoor the special secret door an entry to your First Four Figure Client, Rob thanks for coming on the show again.  Rob:You’re welcome. If you guys have any questions right, throw me a tweet @robhanly. John:Rob Hanly.  Rob:Yeah, no “e” in Hanly, that’s like the thing I got to underscore, no “E” in Hanly, but if you got a question on the [Inaudible 00:40:38], you wanted to know if this is going to be right for you, if you think that your situation is different, sure, shoot me a tweet, we can have a [Inaudible 00:40:42] or something.  John:You also have a website, robhanly.com.  Rob:I do, I do have a website.  John:You do an occasional post on … some interesting stuff actually, not always consulting or marketing it’s often.  Rob:Very rarely.  John:Just cool stuff, I’ll just let them go check that out, just cool stuff, we’ll just say that.  Rob:Cool, then well I’ll tell you right now, seeing that, a post which I think that every entrepreneur should read, because it deals with that podcast … I’m sorry that roller coaster, that up and own process of being an entrepreneur that reality of it, it kind of  breaks it down, gives you a framework to follow how to deal with it.  John:That’s good, it will be a great place to start. Rob:It will help you deal with the emotional side.  John:Yeah, cool man, well we will wrap it up here, will get to go to the gym, go grind some iron, go pump some iron, that’s the word and yeah, I mean  Rob:It’s like Bob, Bob the guy who had the son pumping iron.  John:Pumping iron on youtube, maybe we can get a link to that on the show as well, there’s a youtube video this guy pumping iron that our friend always recommends. If you’re going to go to the gym, you want to listen to this song, it’s going to get you pumped up Rob:Two bongs, and it’s recommended  John:Two bongs, go check that out. Alright we’re wrapping up here, we’re rambling here, so  Rob:Thank you very much for listening to us talk about consulting remember in this show we’ve given you the path, right. Now there is variations of the path, you’ll find your own.  John:It’s up to you to walk the path.  Rob:No one can walk it for you.  John:I need for you right now, so any way let’s wrap it up here, thanks for coming on man.      The post Episode #60 – Rob Hanly on How to Become a Marketing Consultant Using a Simple 3-Step Formula appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Put on your Sunday’s best. Reverend Rob Hanly’s at the podium to preach… …about why your marketing strategy is going to FAIL. That’s right… You and your biz are going DOWN. But you don’t have to… And that is why Rob’s sermon is a marketing revelation in this Sunday’s week’s episode. Improve on these 3 areas, and watch your business expand into the heavens… Do you know what your ONE true NEED is? Don’t let BAD marketing waste away your potential. Learn how to identify what’s most important in your business, then hit that ASAP. The hack is here: client acquisition, maximization and retention. This no brainer WILL earn you more sales… …juicy ACTIONABLE details inside. Do you know those guys with HUGE heads?  The one’s who love saying I and ME and I and ME and I… Don’t be one! It doesn’t work! All you gotta do is shut the hell up! Really…  Talk. Less. You seem desperate. And for the third reason, Rob takes off his sunglasses… Listen-in now and walk away cleansed of all your marketing failures.   In this episode, you’ll discover: Rob’s effective tactic to maximizing client lifetime value (think… car mechanic) a 3-step hack to find your what. (identify what needs to happen and watch the $$$ roll-in) how to squeeze the most earnings possible from your current products and services. an excellent technique to slashing your ME talk (use simple-math to increase your authenticity) a full-proof way to gain authority over someone else’s world (develop instant trust) an effortless system to create actionable steps out of any idea. (it’s easier than you think) the vital percentage number you must know to realize your true potential (It’s ok that most people aren’t a good fit) how to utilize influence to grow your business with ease (the struggle to persuade ends here) Mentioned: EMP Episode 54’s Terry Dunlap Justin Brooke’s paid traffic coaching. Tony Robbins‘ know your outcome strategy. Perry Marshall’s 80/20 Rule of Business. Evernote Rob Hanly says to you all, “Contact Me” Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 59 of the McMethod email marketing podcast where you’ll discover how to kick ass at marketing. Specifically email marketing, but really all things of connecting your prospect with your product and making a ton of cash. Today I’ll be talking to Mr. Rob Hanly who some of you might have heard of, about the three reasons your marketing strategy will fail. Now a long, long, long, long time ago which is really about 30 episodes ago, I did an interview with someone called the Reverend, okay? Now Rob Hanly is the Reverend. This is his coming out podcast, he’s announcing himself to the world, getting his name out there, and like I said, today we’re going to talk about three reasons why your marketing quite simply sucks, or mistakes that you’re making that are really going to make it fail. So some really interesting stuff. Now Rob is a great guy. He’s a marketing consultant, he’s very successful, and I think where Rob really, really excels, one of his unique gifts is breaking things down into actionable steps that anyone can do. I’ve had so many coffees with this guy. He’s here in Thailand with me right now, and we meet up for coffees and he’ll tell me about what he’s up to, I tell him what I’m up to, and I’ll be like, I’ve applied so much of what he’s said to the McIntyre Method and the McMethod. A lot of the emails that I’ve sent out if you’re on my list, some of that is going to be influenced by Rob because I’ll be like, All right, Rob. I’m going to do this. I’m doing this product launch this weekend, and here’s my idea. He’s like, Well John, that sounds great but you should do x, y, and z. I’m like, oh, that’s a great idea. I’d go home, I’d do x, y, and z, send it out and I’d make more money than I would have made if I didn’t do it. So that’s Rob; great guy. Now to get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go through themcmethod.com/59. That’s themcmethod.com slash five nine. Now, I’ve got a couple things. The McMaster’s insight of the week … McMaster’s if you don’t know, is my paid membership community. When you sign up you get access to the McIntyre Method, the stories, the sell, the pages that convert. Basically, a whole bunch of courses that’s really, to go back to this result, what is it going to give you? It’s going to get you to develop a great email marketing strategy for your business, and you’re really going to learn how to do the landing pages, how to get stories down pat, really just build some great marketing into your business and make lots of money. That’s at themecmethod.com/mcmasters. Now I’ve got … basically there’s a forum inside there, and there’s some great stuff going through that forum that we’ve all been talking about with email marketing. So I want to do here is to share an insight of the week. Now this week’s insight is, what if you could improve your customer’s results with your product just by charging more? Now the point of your post-purchase fallout, this is critical if you’re making sales. Now, so we’re talking about here, this was in a thread [inaudible 00:02:27] the product and some of the best ways to basically make more money with your product, and this idea here is, what if you could improve the results … I love this … this first sentence here. What if you could improve your customers results with your product just by charging more? Now, here’s an example. I just signed up for a coaching program for paid traffic with Justin Brook. Now this is … paid traffic is a new area for me. It’s what I’m getting into right now. I’ve got a sales final set up and after I’ve done this right now, I’m going to be going and setting up a new campaign on Facebook to test something else, okay? Now Justin’s coaching is quite expensive. Now what that does is because I’ve paid him this cash, I’m incentivized to actually take action. If he’d just made it free, or if it was really cheap, or if it was like a $50 e-book, I’d be like, there’s no way. I’d be lazy. I’d procrastinate because it’s only $50, but when you’re spending a couple thousand dollars on something like this, it lights a fire under your ass to actually get something done. So that’s what I’m trying to do here, is by spending more money, I’m going to get better results with the product. I’m already seeing it happen right now. So think about then in your situation, what could do you do with your product? How could you just charge more and help your customer get better results, right? You’re going to make more money, but forget about that for a second. Your customer, because they’re spending more money, they’re going to be more likely to do something with it. They’re going to get better results, and therefore going to talk more to other people. Tell more people about your product. Now this isn’t a panacea. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s something worth thinking about, okay? Now reviews … one thing I like to talk about on the show is reviews. I love reviews, and it really helps spread the word about the show. I’ve had some great success stories from these podcasts. Terry Dunlap was an episode we did a few weeks ago, and Terry made $85,000 in just 5 months more or less just applying what he’s learned in this podcast. He sent me an email. It said pretty much that entire success story is this podcast. There’s some other things he did, but that was the bulk of it. So if Terry can do it … and he’s not an email marketer; he’s not even a copyrighter. He does some government work … contracting work … and here he is kicking ass at email marketing. I just think it’s so good. I want to hear more of these success stories. So if you want to leave a review and help spread the word so we can get more of these, go to iTunes, search for the McMethod email marketing podcast and leave me a review, you’ll also put a big, huge, cheesy grin on my face and you’ll make my day. I’ve got one listed question today. What would you do differently now that you wish you would have known when you started? That is very simple for me to answer right now, and that is paid traffic. I’ve tinkered with paid traffic over the last 2 or 3 years but I never committed to it. I never really got the mindset correctly, which is that most tests will fail and you just basically have to test your way to profitability. Now I wonder what would have happened if I would have been spending 10, 20, 30 dollars a day for the last year or for the last 2 years. I would be quite a lot further ahead than I am now, okay? So if I was to redo something or if I was to go back 2 years ago with what I know now, I would just get started with paid traffic and spend 5 bucks a day. Even if I could only spend 5 bucks a day I would still do it. So that’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview and talk to Rob Hanly and talk about the 3 reasons that your marketing strategy is going to fail. It’s John McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here in a very, very soundproof room, not the usual spot. I’m here with a special friend who was on here about 30 episodes ago. He’s a bit of a … I was going to say preacher before but he doesn’t really go by that title. He goes by the title the Reverend. He’s a bit of a preacher, but the Reverend is really his thing, and today he’s coming to give us a bit of a sermon about consulting, and some of the reasons that’s … we’re not just consultants, but some of the reasons that your marketing strategy will fail. So this is going to be for consultants, for business owners, and anyone who is trying to use marketing in their business, which is everyone. Rob Hanly:Hopefully. John McIntyre:Hopefully, hopefully. That’s the way it should be, right? Rob Hanly:Yeah, everyone should be. John McIntyre:So I’ll turn it over to him and I think he’s here to talk about who he is this time maybe. Maybe the crack the nut and give you all a look at who the Reverend actually is, and then we’ll get into some of his marketing stuff. So over to you, Reverend. Rob Hanly:So for those of you who don’t recognize my lovely Australian dulcet tones, my name is Rob Hanly and I’ve been a special consultant for a couple of years. I’ve worked with business in a variety of industries. I’ve worked with industry bodies, I’ve worked with health and fitness companies, financial services and a few others, and it’s been a really good experience because it allowed me to kind of see the commonalities of where people fail. Everyone likes to think their business is special and unique but the reality is, when it comes to failure particularly, there’s a lot of commonalities; a lot of things in common. So that’s the basic intro I guess, you know? Do I need to flesh that out? Do I need to explain some of the stuff I’ve done? John and I have worked together. When he’s having his lunches he opens his products, we sit on Facebook chat. John McIntyre:Facebook chat down at Ristr8to in Chiang Mai drinking that coffee. Rob Hanly:Sipping that coffee, telling John to do things. John does things. That’s basically the way it works. John McIntyre:Oh, we’ll talk about that. We need to do another episode. We’ll talk about the different strategies, you know, you’re the scalpel, I’m the hammer. We’ll talk about that later. Rob Hanly:That’s it. John McIntyre:But today let’s talk about these 3 reasons that you’re marketing strategy … not you, but the listener here … why the listener’s marketing strategy will fail because a lot of marketing does fail. A lot of marketing is terrible. Even when people go back and get good at copyrighting, and sales letters, and all that stuff, they still fail to actually get clients or get customers. Rob Hanly:Get things happening. John McIntyre:Get things happening. Just make money in general. So what’s number one? Rob Hanly:The first thing that I’ve found to be the most common reason that a marketing strategy campaign will fail is that you actually don’t know what’s important. This sounds like no shit, but it’s the objective approach. So let’s say that you’ve got a business in health and fitness space, and this is a bit of a story about someone that I’ve recently been working with. I’m not going to tell you who they are but … it’s for their privacy. Most of my clients are discreet. I like to keep it that way. We were having a chat and I said to him, “What’s the single most important thing that you can do to drive your business forward?” If you could just do one single task every day, day in and day out, what would you be doing to make more money? John McIntyre:Okay. Rob Hanly:His comment was, “I’d be speaking to people on the phone because I know that everyone I get on the phone, I can get the majority of them to become a customer.” John McIntyre:Right. Rob Hanly:So then I asked him, “All right, so what are you doing to get people on the phone?” Nothing. Nothing in particular, just hoping that they’ll email and ask. Hoping that they’ll click a button and contact him. The fact is, we as humans are really lazy. Our goal is to conserve energy. So if you don’t tell me to do something, I’m not going to do it at my own volition. We have chatted. We have basically spoken. I said to him, “Here’s the steps you’ve got to take. Your goal from now on is everything you do is about driving people to end up on the phone to you or on the phone with you, or getting one step closer to being on the phone with you. Again, it sounds so obvious, but when was the last time most people sat down and thought, what is the long term objective here? What is they key task I need to do every day in my business to make money so I can keep running the business, and how do I get people to take that action? It’s the simplest thing you can solve. John McIntyre:I like it. This reminds me of when Perry Marshall was on the podcast about a month ago, and I got him on to talk about this 80/20 sales marketing book which you’ve read, which I’ve read, and that really blew my mind because that’s sort of like an in to this sort of topic, what’s important. If you sit down in your business and your marketing and whatever you’re trying to do, there are a few key actions that are driving all the growth, all the progress, and when you show up to work each day and you open up your laptop, you fire up the computer, and you just do whatever is on that list without actually pausing to figure out what’s actually contributing to the goal. If you don’t do that you end up kind of moving around in a bunch of busy work. Rob Hanly:Yep. John McIntyre:I’ll give you an example. I’ve been using MNO to manage my to do list. and I’ve got a project in there called the McMethod 2.0 or something like that … the version to do list. It’s just got along list of stuff. Change this on the website, change this, do this, do that, and it’s all good stuff and it will all create a result. However, based on the goals I have for the business, there are only … I realized that just reading this Perry Marshall book … there’s only a couple things that are actually important. We talked about this recently, that what’s important right now for me anyway, is booting out a sales file and then firing up that sales file on paid traffic. Obviously that’s what I’m doing. I’m just ignoring that whole to do list which is I don’t know how many pages long, I’m just not even looking at it and just doing this paid traffic stuff because I know that that’s going to drive things forward. So I love this idea here is that people might be failing right now and not getting the results they want, but chances are, usually the solution is just one small thing. Like with the health and fitness buddy, that he doesn’t need to do a whole bunch of stuff. He doesn’t need to work harder, or do more, or spend more, he just needs to identify what’s the thing that needs to happen and do it. Rob Hanly:Now for most people the quick hack … for most people obviously it’s sales. You can drop most of your attention everywhere else, and if you just focused on sales, get the money coming in the door both from existing clients and from new clients, that’s going to probably be the most important thing that you can focus on because then you can have revenue to hire other people. Then you can maximize the growth that you’ve already got the opportunity to take, to have. So three things to think about, the most important task, if you don’t know what that is, is it client acquisition, client maximization, or client retention? John McIntyre:Let’s talk about that first. What is client maximization? That’s a big word. Rob Hanly:It is a big word. John McIntyre:I don’t like big words. I mean, I’m not really like a … I’m a short word kind of guy. Rob Hanly:Short word? 5 cent word? So basically client maximization is, how can you maximize the lifetime value of the customer? John McIntyre:Customer. Rob Hanly:How do you maximize the lifetime value of the customer? How can you have him spend more money with you? The answer to that is always obviously provide more value and more opportunities for them to purchase. So instead of flogging a $37 e-book and nothing else, setting up a back end, setting up other products to help them with other problems. If like, a recent guest you had on the show is working a security space. So he’s got a front end product, he’s done very well with it, but what other back end tools could he add? Could he help them by giving the network setups? Could he help them with other issues with security? There’s a whole range of similar problems that he could help them solve. Because he’s obviously very good at solving that first problem. He’s got his lead product. It sells really well. What comes next? John McIntyre:And that’s about maximizing. How much it costs to spend or do over a 12 month period, without getting technical? And the cool thing here to pay attention to is, I think some people hear this and are like, “I just don’t want to be selling all the time. It’s kind of sleazy, and I’m just trying to get as much money as I can out of them.” But the only way to really do this properly is to just help people solve more of their problems, so really you make more money but you are actually adding more value to the market place. So you’ve got to think about it that you are actually doing people a favor because they can just get all their stuff off you now. You’re just saving them time, energy and effort, and they’re giving you money in exchange for it. I think the easiest way to think about this is if you own a car. Car mechanic. So yeah, he does your basic service, but he’ll also help you with your tires, if you’ve got any issues with the engine, he’ll also help you make it run smoother. He’ll also go and change your oil. He’ll do all that bits and pieces that need to come along for your car to run smoothly. And if you’re in a business of security, just to go back to that example, what other problems exist with people and their home technology security? Is it their phones, is it that they need VPNs, is it that they need apps to lock all their data down, to encrypt their data, they need guides on how to use Truecrypt. What is it that is more useful for them to do? Rob Hanly:I think the easiest way to think about this is if you own a car. Car mechanic. So yeah, he does your basic service, but he’ll also help you with your tires, if you’ve got any issues with the engine, he’ll also help you make it run smoother. He’ll also go and change your oil. He’ll do all that bits and pieces that need to come along for your car to run smoothly. And if you’re in a business of security, just to go back to that example, what other problems exist with people and their home technology security? Is it their phones, is it that they need VPNs, is it that they need apps to lock all their data down, to encrypt their data, they need guides on how to use Truecrypt. What is it that is more useful for them to do? John McIntyre:Fantastic. So you had client acquisition, client maximization, what was the other one? Rob Hanly:Client retention. John McIntyre:Client retention? That’s just keeping people on for longer, right? Rob Hanly:Yeah, it’s keeping people on and a lot of people only think about retention as being an element of subscription services, so whether you’re a gym or you’ve got a membership site, all that stuff. But retention is also making sure they purchase from you multiple times. So if you have multiple products, that’s where retention comes in. That’s how you make sure that, if you’re saying in the business of health and fitness, and they come to you and they buy a weight loss program, well, how do you get them to buy another weight loss program? How do you help them with the next step? Maybe their first goal is to lose that 10 kilos that they’ve been carrying around that bit of a spare tire. But now maybe what they want to do, is they want to get the muscle definition. They want to cut a little more body fat and build a bit of muscle. All right, cool. So let’s offer that to them next. Now they’ve had two purchases in the space of 12 months, double the lifetime value. What can you do, other than acquiring them, and maximizing the value on the initial sale, how can you retain them? Which also comes back to maximization. It’s a beautiful chicken egg that you can’t lose with. John McIntyre:I like it. It’s all tied in. Rob Hanly:Yeah, and you can’t lose. That’s the best part. John McIntyre:That’s the best bit. Cool, man .All right, we’ve done that. Number one reason why marketing strategies don’t work, is you don’t know what’s important. Rob Hanly:You don’t know what’s important and that’s your hack: acquisition, maximization, retention. John McIntyre:Sweet. Number two. Rob Hanly:Talk about yourself. John McIntyre:So the other day, I was just hanging out at my place and I was thinking about how awesome I am. Rob Hanly:This, ladies and gentlemen is what you don’t want to do.  John McIntyre: I’m sure you’ve all received a message from somebody. He says, “Buy this, buy that, buy this, buy that” and all you want to say is, “Shut the fuck up, like I don’t care.” This is like an e-mail. Because we were talking about e-mail marketing. It’s like, “Hey, I’m really glad you joined my e-mail list. I really hope you have a great time. I’ve got some cool stuff to share with you. I think we’ve got the best business in the market. We got the best products and services that are going to help you, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Rob Hanly:Delete. That’s all that comes off the back of that. So a really good way to figure out if you’re talking about yourself to much is count the number of “I’s” and the number of “You’s”. That’s it. I will make a little addendum here. If your doing call to action, that should always be mine, me, etc., but just in general copy, talk about “you”, talk about the other person, because when you are trying to influence somebody, you are the least important person in the conversation. You’re borderline irrelevant.  They are only concerned about solving their problems. John McIntyre:This isn’t just copy, because I’ve talked about e-mail copy in McMasters. But this is with, you get on the phone with a client, when I get on the phone with a client now, I don’t know how I kind of ended up here, it’s just how I tend to do things now, I don’t go in there talking about me, talking about who I am, what I do and all that. Usually they already know about me from the podcast. Rob Hanly:They’re indoctrinated. John McIntyre:Right. So what I do is, all I’m trying to find out is, “Who are they? What’s their business? What are the problems that they have? And then, once I have a proper understanding of who they are and what they do, the only time I start talking about myself, is in the context of how we can help them.  And that’s it.  I leave it at that. Rob Hanly:That’s really important though. You’ve just said, “how we can help them, how we can work together.” It’s never about “here’s what I will do for you, because I.” No, no. It’s like, “Together, these are our objectives and you and I will work together for this.” We. you. I is the least important letter. John McIntyre:I think people understand that, but what people think when they write an e-mail, or they get on a client call, or they do any of these things, if they talk about themself, they are going to impress the other person. So I think it’s a little bit about social dynamics. Rob Hanly:Yes. John McIntyre:Understanding how rapport is built, how connections happen. But if you go in there and you talk about yourself, that’s the very immature way to try and build rapport and try and build a connection. Rob Hanly:Yes.  When you do that, you are seeking validation.  What we need to understand is, a rich man doesn’t have to tell you he’s rich.  That’s it.  So whenever it comes that you are on the phone with someone and you’re saying, “Hey, yes, so you know I wrote this awesome, awesome AutoResponder, and it did hundreds of thousand of dollars in revenue, and I spent 18 hours working on it, and it was fabulous, because I’m amazing.”  They’re going to sit there going, “I really don’t care.”   It’s irrelevant.   That stuff they should either (a) already know about you, and it’s not bad to say, “Hey, I’ve done some really cool stuff,” but after that, that’s it.  You don’t need to prove yourself. John McIntyre: But you could say that exact same story. Now get this. So you’re chatting with them and they tell you all about their business and what they need. And you go, “Oh, that’s just like this other client I had two weeks ago. We did an AutoResponder for them, we kind of set them up with this, and they ended up being quite happy with it, but the results we got were really, really cool.” And then you talk about results. But then, it’s the exact same story, but the context is, “I’m only telling you because it’s relevant to your specific situation.” Rob Hanly:Nailed it. 100%. Too many people spend time thinking, “Hey, if I spend a whole lot of time saying what an amazing person I am, it will win them over.” As you just said. You only give them those facts when it helps cement their trust, cement the authority back up a point. It’s the equivalent of, look if you’re a guy, you’ve gone out before, you head into a bar, you’re trying to tell a girl that she should go home with you. In a nut shell. That’s your marketing objective. Bring her home. But let’s be really blunt. If you go up and say, “Hey, so I’m a banker and I make $250,000 a year, and I drive a Ferrari and I’ve got this really nice suit that cost me $10,000 from Tom Ford, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, she’s going to look at you and ignore you and come to someone like John because he’s going to talk about her, and he’s going to tell her about her world.  Ant that’s a really good take away.  If you can demonstrate authority over somebody else’s world.  If you can show them that’s it’s all about them, you’re light  years ahead of the pack.   John McIntyre:And that’s the other thing. We talk about, we’re going deep here, we’re going concept, concept, concept, but the other one is qualifying. Who’s qualifying to who? So, if I go into a phone call and I’m talking to this client, and I’m like, “Well, I’ve done this and I’ve done that,” I’m qualifying myself. I’m trying to make myself good enough for them. Whereas, if I just don’t do any of that, if all I did was eliminate that qualification to them, they’ll start doing to me, because someone ends up doing it. So they’ll start telling you why they’re a good fit. Why they’re a good business. Why they’re worthy to work with me. And even if it’s not the case, even if they’re a much bigger client than I’ve ever worked with before, I still want to create that frame, that approach, that context. Rob Hanly:You are using the words I love, aren’t you?  Frame.  Love that word.  All those words.  It’s very important.  And someone always has to qualify to the other person.  The easiest way to have someone qualify is, shut up.  Say less.  Accept that you are the prize.  You’re the person who wins. John McIntyre:(Long pause.  Laughs.)  That’s right, that’s right.  We can’t play the silent game on the podcast. Rob Hanly:No, but that is a good trick to learn. John McIntyre:The silent close, now.  That’s a whole other topic.  Right.  Number three. Rob Hanly:Ah, this is something different.  Something that John and I are very different about.  I’ve even taken my sunglasses off just to make this point.  You’re not being strategic.  You are running around like a headless chicken. John McIntyre:You talking about me? Rob Hanly:I’m talking about anyone who’s marketing will fail.  If they are running around like headless chickens, if they are throwing spaghetti at the wall, well, you are probably (a) wasting a lot of effort, (b) getting sub par results, and (c) you’re not taking a second to step back and do the calculations to make sure what you are doing is worthwhile.    The equivalent would be, if you go and grab a handful of spaghetti that’s never been cooked, just to go off the same old metaphor, and throw a handful of  uncooked spaghetti at the wall, is it going to stick?  No.  Whereas, if you take spaghetti that’s been cooked for 5 minutes, is it more likely to stick?  A little more.  10 minutes, a lot more.  20 minutes, definitely.  So the concept of being strategic is about going, “Right, what’s my goal?  What’s my overall objective?  What are the resources that I’ve got?  And how am I going to make this work?  How am I going to bring this all together to achieve my objective, my outcome.” A strategic way, minimizing waste and being as effective and impactful as possible.  And efficiency is also important.  That is my approach.  If you’re not being strategic, if you’re not thinking, “All right, so I want someone to buy something from me.”  Well, instead of just sending out a sales letter, I should send them some good content first, and good will.  Some good stuff they can use.  Send  them 3 or 4 e-mails.  Get them indoctrinated.  Understand the concept of reciprocity.  Once they start getting invested in me, and they say, “Hey, by the way, that’s really cool that you want to save for retirement.  Here’s something, I’ve put together for you.  It’s a really straightforward guide to useing your 401K, if you’re an American, to invest for your retirement,  I’ve provided you with this other information on it.”  They know that you’ve provided them this other information.  Never tell them how great you are or discuss that.  But then they will be more likely to purchase from you, because they’ve seen the quality of your work.  They’ve gotten results already.  They feel better off.  And there’s no selling issue.  It’s like, “OK, if you are interested, you’ve found this valuable, I’ve also got this really cool book.  Check it out.”   John McIntyre:This reminds you of like, you wake up in the morning, you open your laptop, you have a to do list, you have stuff to do.  Or you go to your business, you go to meetings.  There are all these different demands on people to go and do different stuff in their life and it’s very hard.  This is very relevant or timely right now, I’m going through a Tommy Robbins program you told me about, Tommy Laughed, and he talks about, he’s got a little system that he calls, and all of them do, right, there’s always a little acronym system thing.  But anyway, part of his thing, his system in this course, is, “know your outcome.”  So, you can wake up in the morning and you can open that laptop and you can just start firing away.  You know that your strategy [inaudible 00:20:59] just execute, execute, get lots of shit done.  Rob Hanly:Move fast. John McIntyre:Move fast and [inaudible 00:21:04].  But I think that’s a great strategy, but you’ve got to do it right. Rob Hanly:{Crosstalk 00:21:09] You know where you’re trying to break. John McIntyre:Exactly, exactly.  So you might just get up and just do a whole bunch of stuff, and I’ve done that for a long time, but what you need to do is, people have a rough idea of their outcome.  Say, “I want to make more money.”  But what would be more powerful, is to really think, “All right, so I want to make more money.  If I’m going to make more money, make more money is a 40,000 foot prospectus.  What’s 35,000.  I want to make more money with the website.”  Then you keep coming down.  You work your way backwards from that outcome. Rob Hanly:What needs to be done. John McIntyre:Exactly.  And so you end up going, “I don’t actually need to do this fucking logo.  I don’t actually need to do this website.  I just need to make some phone calls.”  Like our buddy, this health guy.  He doesn’t need to go and twiddle with his website or hire VAs, or write copy, or any of that stuff. Rob Hanly:He needs to do two things.  Put a button saying, “Apply for more information or coaching” and start following up.  Just sending an e-mail out to customers who have already purchased from him, and say, “Hey guys.  I’m offering some coaching.”  Done.   That’s it.  That’s the kind of stuff, like, I’m a big proponent of the yellow legal pad.  Phone, yellow legal pad, that’s all you need. John McIntyre:I can see that.  We got one right next to us. Rob Hanly:Right next to us. John McIntyre:Yellow legal pad and black paint,  You had to have that shipped out from the U.S., I heard.  To Dr. Rob, right? Rob Hanly:Actually, to Dr. Rob.  Dr. Rob received a package from Andy Fosset, fromgoldmedalbodies.com. John McIntyre:I love that guy. Rob Hanly:He took good care of me, man.  I made a comment on Twitter that the easiest way to get my attention is with yellow legal pads and Andy pulled through.  I opened the door on Monday to a frantic Thai lady knocking on my door, and she had for me a specially shipped package from Hawaii of yellow legal pads. John McIntyre:That’s the sort of thing you want to get knocked on the door for. Rob Hanly:I don’t want to wait. John McIntyre:It wasn’t like 6 a.m. In the morning, while you were still sleeping? Rob Hanly:It wasn’t. John McIntyre:That’s good. Rob Hanly:But we’re a bit off topic. John McIntyre:Just a little bit.  It’s always a bit of fun like that.  So let’s go back to being strategic. Rob Hanly:That’s it.  You’ve got to be strategic. John McIntyre:You’ve got to be strategic. Rob Hanly:You’ve got to know your outcome.  You’ve got to work backwards. John McIntyre:This ties in to this “you need to know what’s important.”  So you know what’s important.  You’re talking about yourself, that [crosstalk 00:22:56] Rob Hanly:That’s friction, that’s friction.  That’s going to get in the way. John McIntyre:Right. Rob Hanly:You need to be strategic.  Once you identify what is important to you, do it.  John McIntyre:So, point one and point three, or mistake one and mistake three, are very, very interrelated here.  And the best way to do this is, everyone should go out and read, go listen to the  podcast  of Terry Marshall on the 80/20 principal.  Because that was really made it click for me.  And then go buy his book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing.  I’ve been telling everyone to buy this.  But this is what will get you looking at your business, whether you are a consultant, or your selling products, to thinking there’s a small amount of action, a small amount of things  that you can do or focus on, that are going to get you most of the results, but the crazy thing is imagine, like our health buddy.  Let’s give an example.  So, let’s say before he met you, he was doing maybe one phone call a week.  Because he’s going, “Well, that’s important but I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do.  I’ve got the website to manage, and all that.”    And then he sits down with you and you guys talk about what’s really important right now.  And he’s like, “phone calls.”  So, straight away, one thing he can do is eliminate basically most of the stuff he’s doing.  He can just make that one phone call a week and you just keep kicking along making the same income.   However, now that he has all this extra time, he can reinvest or reallocate that time into making phone calls.  So not only has he eliminated most of his to do list, he can move half of that extra time into this phone call task. Rob Hanly:That’s it. John McIntyre:Then he’s going to grow his business rapidly.  He’s going to have more free time as well.  He’s just going to be having the time of his life.  And this is what happens when you figure out what’s important, because you can reallocate the time you gather from elsewhere, into what’s important, you get a higher return on investment. Rob Hanly:That’s it. John McIntyre:It’s so exciting, man. Rob Hanly:The one thing to really keep in mind with this, is really specifics.  You need to be specific.  So you mentioned earlier, “Oh, I want to make more money.”  Well, “make more money” is not specific.  A dollar is more money than you’re currently making.  That’s very simple.  Just go ask someone for a dollar, bang!  You’ve achieved a specific goal.  But if your specific goal is, “I want to earn $10,000 more, I want this campaign to do $180,000,000,”  whatever it is.  One of the highest grossing campaign on line was Porter Stansberry’s End of America.  That was very hefty.  That was above mid nine figures.  I’m not at liberty to say what it was, because I don’t know what it was, exactly.  But I do know it was well and above that mark, from all things that I’ve been told or reports.  But they didn’t start by going, “Oh, gotta make some money off this.”  They probably sat down in a war room, white board, desk, bunch of them sat around, and was like, “What are we going to achieve with this?”  And then, they worked backwards. So, if you want to be strategic, you’ve got to start with a very specific outcome.  You’ve got to start by saying, “I want to sell X copies.  I want to do  $X of revenue.”  Then you work backwards.  And you  never talk about yourself.   That’s it. John McIntyre:All right.  We’ve got time for this one more bonus tip that we got written down right here in front of us.  If anyone is listening, we do have a cheat sheet.  That’s how were making this flow so nicely from one point to the next.  No tangents at all.  So anyway, let’s get onto this point.  Reason versus influence will make this a bonus, but we’ll keep it quick.  Because you just mentioned something about being specific.  That’s what reminded me about it.  And this is where what’s your outcome?  Are you trying to persuade someone to do something? Rob Hanly:It means you are starting off on the back foot.  When I was younger, I really wanted to be  the most persuasive person on the planet and get people to do anything I wanted them to do.  And as I got older, I realized that it was much more effective strategy to find people who already wanted to do it, and just give them a nudge.  That was it.  Now, sometimes, I’ll deploy tricks and tactics and all sorts of stuff [crosstalk 00:26:04]  and they  need the nudge and it’s how you help them, but the real simple version of this is, if you find a guy who likes to cross dress it will be very easy to  sell him women’s underwear.  If you find a guy who hates cross dressing, and you try to persuade him to put on women’s underwear, then you might be able to get there, but you are wasting a lot of time and effort.  So this is the difference.  Persuasion automatically assumes that you are starting off on the back foot.  You have to cajole someone and play all these tricks and games.  But if you’re an influencer, if you say less than is necessary, if you know the person and it’s all about them,  and you know where their interests are, first of all you’ll only pick targets who can be influenced.  And second of all, it will be a lot easier to influence them to do the certain, specific outcome you want them to. John McIntyre:OK.  So this will be like, in my case, if I’m trying to sell someone an AutoResponder, I could talk to just a business owner who maybe has a website, but has never heard of an AutoResponder before.  So I would have to go on that phone call, and, before I could even sell him anything, I’d have to convince him to believe in the benefits of the AutoResponder.  And I would lose most businessmen at that point.  Or, I could create a podcast on e-mail marketing and then I’d end up only jumping on the phone with people who already knew about e-mail marketing and e-mail AutoResponders, and then my only goal when I get on that phone call is just to find out what he wants and see if I can give it to him. Rob Hanly:That’s it. John McIntyre:That’s the influence, right there. Rob Hanly:It’s essentially understand that 95% of people are not your customer, are not who [crosstalk 00:27:20] John McIntyre:And that’s OK. Rob Hanly:That’s great. John McIntyre:People think that’s a bad thing, but that’s the best thing.  Because when you figure it out, we’re doing some Facebook ads right now so it’s kind of like, you’re not looking for everyone.  You’re not looking for every person in the United States over the age of 18, which is like 200,000,000 people.  You’re looking for only the people that care. Rob Hanly:That’s it.  So think of it this way, right?  Most people complain, “Oh, I don’t have enough customers.”  If you were to take your target demographic, let’s make this really actual.  If you’re bitching about not having enough customers, and your target demographic is 5,000 people, and you haven’t sold to 5,000 people, you have nothing to complain about.  Because there is still people in your target demographic who have not purchased from you.  Only after you’ve maximized your client acquisition, your client maximization, your client retention, should you even consider making everybody your customer.  Stick with the basics.  Stick with people who care.  Share with them things that they’re interested in, and then make the sale. John McIntyre:Unless you’re selling soap.  If you’re selling soap, you could sell to everyone. Rob Hanly:Incorrect. John McIntyre:Well, I mean like, just ordinary bath soap. Rob Hanly:Who wants ordinary bath soap?  Ordinary, boring people.  That’s why you’ve got Dove.  That’s why you’ve got Lush.  You got bath [crosstalk 00:28:18] John McIntyre:I like Dove. Rob Hanly:I don’t.  They have too much sunscreen here in Thailand.  I’m pale enough as it is. John McIntyre:All right, all right.  We’ll wrap it up here.  We’ve got a call to action right here and that is: Rob Hanly:Contact me. If you’re a business owner, if you’re interested in finding out how you can do the things that we’ve discussed on this call, contact me. RobHanly.com. John McIntyre:On RobHanly.com there’s a list they can sign up to and a form and all that wonderful stuff. Rob Hanly:Yeah, you can reach out to me.  By the way, it’s H A N LY.   John McIntyre:Rob Hanly.com  I have those links in the show notes at TheMcMethod.com.  Thanks for coming on the show, Rob.  We’ll see you again, I think in a couple weeks. Rob Hanly:Yeah, we will.  We’ll speak soon. John McIntyre:Sounds good, man. The post Episode #59: Rob Hanly on 3 Reasons Why Your Marketing Strategy is Going to Fail. appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

 Damian Thompson is an email marketing POWERHOUSE. He drops so much knowledge on us in today’s episode, you can almost hear Arnold Schwarzenegger warning you to, “Get Doooooown!” It’s that good… Damian’s company Linchpin, helps businesses make more money with every email they send using a method almost no one talks about… …marketing automation. Damian believes every business ought to have 3 campaigns… 3 campaigns that talk directly to who you’re targeting, depending on how ready they are to buy. Think about it… At the very least, you’ve gotta talk to prospects and customers differently. But if you wanna be a real email boss, you’ve gotta talk to prospects differently based on what stage of the buying cycle they’re in. That’s why you NEED multiple campaigns… …and that’s what you’ll discover in today’s episode.   In this episode, you’ll discover: Why creating 3  campaigns helps you reach your GREATEST potential (vs using a single auto-responder for everyone on your list). How to plant seeds within your emails in order to avoid having to ‘pitch‘ during the phone call. What The Insult Sandwich is and how/when to use it in order to keep your clients hooked, even after you’ve exposed them their faults. Why your BEST salesmen in the world are your happy clients (included are actionable steps for how best to utilize their services). The number one reason why email is the most powerful marketing tool on Earth (After hearing this, you’ll want to improve your email chops, ASAP). How to identify a person’s buying stage (master this, and your campaigns will provide you endless success). What the rule of reciprocity is and how to use it for boundless personal and financial gains. How to get people to know, like, and trust you (through selective campaigns, you can focus on their true needs). Why social proof is EXTREMELY powerful (and how you can use it to put your current income to shame).   Mentioned: Gary Vaynerchuk‘s jab,jab,hook method Jay Abraham‘s prowess Drop Dead Copy  Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Hey, everybody. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for Episode 58, 5-8, of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover basically how to make your email marketing kick ass and make more money with it. Today, we’ll be talking to Damian Thompson about the three marketing automation campaigns every business should have. Now, this is a topic that I’ve haven’t really talked about on this podcast. I haven’t had too many guests on to talk about it either, but here’s a quick summary of what this is all about. You can go and get an email software program like Infusionsoft or Office Auto Pilot, and what that software will allow you to do is when someone clicks a link in your emails or when someone visits a page on your website, you can trigger an email that gets sent out to them. Let’s say, for example, I am not using a software like this for myself but supposed I was, you’d go to my site, you sign up to my daily email list. The software would cookie you. Basically put a tracking cookie on to your computer. Then, let’s say a week later, you visited my page that’s basically selling ten email autoresponder sequences. There is a form on that page but let’s say you visited that page and you didn’t fill out that form. You just visited, checked it out, then left. What I could do is set Infusionsoft or Office Auto Pilot to send you an email and say, “Hey, we noticed you checked out this page. Do you have any questions on this service?” It’s called marketing automation. Here’s another thing. You’ve got to understand what stage of the buying cycle people are in. You’ve got really cold prospects which basically mean you need to establish your authority with them, but once they’ve contacted you, once they’ve replied to an email, or talked to you on the phone, they really need to go into a proper sales funnel sequence, something more aggressive. What we’re talking about here today is what sort of campaigns do you need to have for prospects, and then when they get a little bit warmer, and then what about customers, and why they really should not be running at the same time. Today, Damian talks and he runs basically a marketing automation agency where they set these things up for people. He’s actually a bit of a friend as well. We’ve both worked in the Philippines. He was at the resort before I was if you’ve heard that story before. This is going to be a really fascinating episode. It’s got me all pumped up about marketing automation. To get the short notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to the McMethod.com/58. Now, before we do that, I’ve got a couple of things to mention, this week’s McMasters Insight of the Week. If you don’t know, McMasters is my paid membership community. You’d get the McIntyre Method, Stories that Sell, a bunch of different products that is going to help you do email marketing better. There’s a whole group of people in there right now who are learning how to do their email marketing. Anyway, insight of the week this week, there is a forum. That is where I am getting these insights from. The insight this week is, your product does not matter. The solution is the only thing that matters. Your job as the copywriter is to get someone sold on the benefits of a solution. Not your solution but a solution. Now, I’ve read that and replied to a thread when someone was talking about their product. Now, what you need to understand is your product literally does not matter. What matters is the result someone that’s going to get by using it. It’s not about the e-book, it’s not about the videos, it’s not about the kitchen knives, it’s not about any of that. It’s about a flat stomach. It’s a beautifully cut steak. It’s about plumbing in a house that works perfectly, and that’s what you’re selling. You’re not selling an e-book. You’re not selling videos. You’re not selling any of these things. You’re selling a result. When you get that, you realize that when you do your sales cover, when you do your emails, you do all of these things. It’s all about that result. You don’t need to even worry. It’s almost like the e-book, the fact that it’s an e-book, or you’re a plumber, or you sell kitchen knives, or you sell videos, whatever it is, that’s just the side note. It’s like making me even saying supposed you’re really fat and you wanted to lose weight, I’d say, “Hey, Dave. How would you like to lose 50 pounds in the next 50 days?” and you’d be like, “Fantastic. Where do I sign up?” I’m like, “Great.” I could be like, “Well, I’ve got an e-book,” or “I’ve got videos,” or “I’ve got special personal training program,” or whatever it is, but if I could get you convinced that you’re going to get that result, the product doesn’t matter, you’ll go through the e-book, you’ll go through the videos, you’ll go through the training if you’re convinced that you’d get the result that you want. That’s it for this insight. If you want to learn more about McMasters and get some more of these insights into your life, go to the McMethod.com/McMasters. There’s a link in the top menu bar as well if that link doesn’t work, and I’ll see you on the Insider when you start talking more about this stuff. Now, reviews. If you want to leave me an iTunes review, if you enjoyed this show, if you’re getting a lot out of it, it really helps spread the word and really makes my day. Go to iTunes, search for the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, leave me an iTunes review, tell me what you think about this show, any guest you think I should interview, I am going to owe you a high five one day, and if you come to [inaudible 00:04:35] Thailand or if I bump into you in the States or somewhere one day, tell me you left me a review and I’ll buy you a beer. I’ve got one listener question really quickly today, what is the best way to get traffic to your website both free and paid? It’s an interesting question because it’s presupposes that there is a best way and honestly, there is no best way. There is context. There is only context. If you have no money, and you don’t want to spend money on ads, you can’t spend money on ads, then paid traffic is ruled out in the context of your life, your situation. Paid traffic is irrelevant, so you got to do free traffic. The goal here should be to go borrow some money. The problem with free traffic is that people think, “Oh, it’s free. It doesn’t cost anything.” Well it does cost a lot of things. It costs time, it costs energy, it costs research, it costs the stress that comes with playing with Google. Google does these little animal updates, you know panda, penguin, rhinoceros, hippopotamus. That is so stressful. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I don’t want to even think about SEO because it’s annoying. I don’t want to have to deal with Google. Paid traffic on the other hand doesn’t cost that much time, doesn’t cost that much energy once you get the hang of it but it does cost money. It depends. If you want to trade your time and energy for traffic or do you want to trade your money for traffic. Once you figured out that, then you’re going to know whether to do free traffic or paid traffic. Let’s say you’re going to do free, well that’s going to be things like a podcast, content marketing like blog posts, guest posting, all those different things. There’s no best way. There is just different ways. A lot of with the free way, you’re going to have to create good content. Otherwise, it’s not going to do that much or you’re going to have to be a really good SEO’er. Now, as a paid traffic, I am getting started with Facebook ads right now, and I think that will be a great place for a lot of people to start. There’s some really good targeting options, it’s very cheap. It’s a lot cheaper than Google AdWords. It’s a great place to get your feet wet in the advertising, paid advertising space and as you grow that … This is what I mean, the context. If you’re just a beginner, then start with Facebook advertising. It’s still running, it’s still good, it’s cheap, and you’ll get the hang of it. Then, once you’ve got some chops down, then you go into AdWords, and then you go and so some banner advertising. There is no best way. There is only context. You got to understand what’s going to work for you in your personal situation. Anyway, that’s it for now. I am all jacked up because I’ve had a coffee at 7:00. Let’s see, it’s 9:00 a.m. here in Thailand so I’ve got that morning buzz. Anyway, that’s it for now. Let’s get into this podcast with Damian Thompson. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder guy. I am here with Damian Thompson. I first met Damian a long time ago. I think it’s about 3 years. I was applying for a job in the Philippines to work at a resort. Now, some of you might have heard about of this because you’ve heard the podcast before where I go on, where I went to the Philippines and turned up, and didn’t really know much about marketing, and all. I taught myself copywriting and kind of got started. Damian was the guy that interviewed me for that position. That’s like 3 years back, right, and now we’re here. I’ve gone off and done some copywriting stuff. Now, I have a bit of marketing agency coaching business sort of thing going on, and Damian’s gone on his own direction. Similar field with the marketing but what he is doing is marketing automation. This is something that we haven’t talked about too much on this podcast for no specific reason other than the guests that I’ve had on so far aren’t specifically about marketing automation but Damian is. His business is all about creating different email campaigns depending on what stage the prospect of the customer is in. it’s really cool stuff, and he’s got some great stuff to share. Ways you can make it really simplified and that’s important because you do not want to be doing this stuff manually. That is such a waste of time. We’re going to talk about today some really cool stuff that actually, the three campaigns every business should have. Damian will tell you more about that in just a second, but first, Damian, how are you doing today, man? Damian:Good, John. How are you doing, brother? John:Fantastic, man. It’s good to have you on. Damian:Yeah, you know it’s funny. Obviously, I knew it, but hearing you talk about it, our paths were very similar. You know I had that job before you did and then you took the job. We both went from that to I focused on copywriting as paid copywriter for about a year or so and then I ventured off into my own path and you kind of ventured off into teaching other people how to do copywriting and really kind of helping companies do well with autoresponders. It’s interesting. I joke that I came here for 3 months and I stayed for 3 years. The Philippines got me. John:It’s that kind of place, man. I mean I was there for 4 years, or 4 months, was only going to be there for 4 months and was there for 12 months instead. I don’t know how it does it man. It just does it. Damian:It does.  It sure does.  I’m happy to be on.  I’m a fan of the podcast.  I like it and I like the stuff you do so definitely I’m looking forward to talking today about the 3 campaigns that every business should have. John:Cool man. Well before we do that … I’ve given people a quick background of what you’re into, but you’ve probalby got the detailed, in-depth, fun version, so give me that. Hit me that. Who’s Damian Thompson and what does he do? Damian:Nice.  Okay, so I’ll give you the sales pitch.  Here’s the sales pitch. John:Do it. Damian:I’m the founder and chief revenue officer of a company called Linchpin. Linchpin helps professionals of small businesses gain new customers faster, retain existing clients longer, and obtain market leadership through sales and marketing automation. That’s practice. Do you like that? Do you like that, man? John:That’s cool. I was thinking you’d be talking for like 5 minutes because that’s what some people do but you’ve done it that’s like 20 seconds, 15 seconds. Damian:Got it, man. It’s the elevator pitch. I’m an ex-sales guy, so you learn those tricks. John:That’s a great example. Anyone listening, you’ve got to have this pitch down. You go to a conference, when you’ve got to a podcast, this is what you need. Damian:I spent about 15 years in sales and marketing for big software companies like McAfee and Symantec doing that, kind of traveling around the world, Australia, Asia, the U.S. And then about 4 years ago took the same gig you did to kind of decide, “Hey, I want to translate these corporate skills into online skills and kind of work for myself and be a little more independent with where I lived in the world,” and bumps and bruises and a bunch of mistakes and then kind of finally figured out the hard way what people really wanted to pay for. John:Okay. Okay and like just to go back a little bit because there’s a bit of a story there with how …Well, both of that result, we both left, we’re both doing copywriting and marketing and then that is how it started right was just copywriting? Damian:Right.  Yeah. John:But then I went off and started calling myself the Autoresponder Guy as kind of like a positioning thing and then you ended up you did the same thing just in a different direction and since then because I was in this podcast with you on Schramko and that led me to do another podcast with Schramko recently but this whole idea of when you finally figured out that you were going to be the marketing automation guy, the marketing automation company in the circle or in the scene that we’re in, things took off right? That’s one of the catalyst points. Damian:Yeah, so I’m a big fan of [inaudible 00:10:52] I’m a big fan of the whole idea of niching down. I know it gets beat up a lot and Schramko beats it up a lot but I mean the reality is is that it’s about getting the right-sized niche. Niching down is a great way to launch a business, at least. I’ve come from corporate, I’ve done through startups, I’ve raised venture capital twice, a couple of million dollars each time so I knew how to build a small company but I really was struggling. When you build a startup, it’s all about trying to address the largest market possible, right? You raise a bunch of money and then you spend a bunch of money trying to go after, solve a big problem. A billion dollar problem, but when you’re bootstrapping, when you’re building yourself, it’s about finding your people, finding your tribe, finding your niche, and doing that in a more cost-effective and faster way because you’re paying all the bills. I really struggled for a while, so I went from being a solo copywriter, doing the oDesk thing, hustling up contracts that way, and then doing referrals and stuff, into launching a content marketing agency and I didn’t love that at first, and my focus there was, I wash focusing on early-stage funded software companies. I come from that world, and they have a bunch of money so they didn’t complain about rates so I could charge a premium, which I like charging a premium. I didn’t have a problem over money, the problem was is that the engagements weren’t very long and I wanted a recurring revenue because they either run out of money, because they got a business, or they have success and they start hiring people and they hire content marketers, they hire copywriters. It wasn’t a great fit, so I went back doing the solo consulting thing and then over beers one night with Dan Andrews and then Justin Cooke from Empire Flippers and they’re beating me up again about not having a niche and so I just finally had enough and said, “Okay, great. You just beat me up a lot. I agree. I want one. How about you help me pick one and stop beating me up already.” We sat there, we talked about it, what happened was I just asked them, I said, “Well, what would you pay me $500 a month to do for you?” At the time, Justin just bought Office Autopilot, now Ontraport, and said, “Look, we just bought the software, it costs us a couple of hundred bucks a month. I know we’re not getting the full value out of it. I’d pay you to come figure out how to use it better.” I said, “That’s interesting,” and so I started playing around with that and quickly realized it was a great niche for me. I come from sales and marketing and running teams and email marketing and CRM, which is what these tools are. They are CRM plus email marketing plus e-commerce online and I was a salesforce admin a decade ago so I understood the space already but never really thought about taking it into. Marketing automation is a market that’s really starting to take off at the enterprise level so there’s a lot of opportunity for SMB, SMP always lags behind enterprise. I just thought a lot of opportunity. I got it and I really enjoyed it. The plan was always to, again, I want to build teams. I don’t like doing the solo thing. I like building teams, I enjoy that. I want to build a business, and so I always plan on going bigger and not being one thing but that time, I said, “Okay, well, I’ll be the Ontraport guy.” I talked to Uncle Schrammy and Schramko was right. The biggest thing I figured out was I was thinking about taking too long, so I’d always thought about adding Infusionsoft or Hubspot or whatever other tools and not being dependent on one tool only. He was just like, “Well, do it now,” and he was right. I should have, and so I did. I added Infusionsoft right away and then started with Infusionsoft customers and now, looking by the end of this year, we’ll probably add Hubspot as well. Really, it’s not about the tool. We’re vendor-agnostic. It’s more about getting value out of it, and my new catchphrase is “Automation. Software is not a strategy.” Buying a piece of software is not a strategy. You actually have to have your demand generation strategy set up, so what we do is we help them do that. We set up the tool for them, run it for them, and for most of our customers we also help them by creating content to feed into that tool, because that’s the thing that no one talks about. You got to buy Infusionsoft, you got to buy Ontraport, awesome. You automate your emails, you created this nice, long, tricky campaigns. Well, you have to write all the email content. You have to write that landing page content. You have to write that opt-in content. All that has to be written, and most of my customers are B2B businesses and they’re not copywriters. They’re not content writers. They’re not great at it, so they’re willing to pay someone to do it for them. John:Okay. Nice, man. Well, tell me. This is a great entry point into this idea of the 3 campaigns every business should have. I’m feeling a bit guilty, looking at this list because I certainly don’t have these 3 signatures. I have always been this great Autoresponder Guy with words just keep sending emails and it works, but you’re talking about a more nuanced approach and this is something you can do if you have Office Autopilot or Infusionsoft. Let’s start there, man. Tell me about these 3 campaigns. Give me a quick overview and then we’ll start with campaign number 1. Damian:Okay, sure. I’ll premise it by saying this: to me, email marketing is by far the most powerful marketing tool available right now. It is essentially, they said copywriting was salesmanship was print. Well, email marketing is that. It’s the ability to be able to one to many sell. You’d be able to sell your products, sell your services, sell yourself, sell your ideas, whatever. I think it’s very powerful and it’s the basis of almost all online marketing. In saying that, though, I say the litmus test for what you say to someone should be, in marketing we talk about personas. Deciding who that person is, what do they look like, what are their hopes and fears and dreams and pains. How do you talk to them differently? I say, imagine you’ve got this person across the table. If you were talking to them in real life about their problems and what you can do for them, will you talk to them differently based on what market segment they’re in, what kind of customer they were, how they bought, that sort of thing? If the answer is yes, then you want to talk to them differently. The way I do this is [inaudible 0:16:26] 3 campaigns. The first is a lead nurture campaign. This is what most people do with their autoresponder today. This is the idea of a long-term drip to build a relationship with them so they get to know and trust you. The second is a sales funnel campaign. This is for someone you’re actually engaging with and starting to really think about doing business with. The third is testimonial / referral campaign. That’s for someone that’s actually become a customer of yours. If you think about it, would you talk to a prospect, differently talk to just some unwatched person on the Internet, different than someone who’s actually giving you money? Of course you would. The way you talk to those people differently is you create a campaign for each of them. John:Okay. I like it. I like it. I talked a lot about my sequence in the podcast and all the stuff that I do is that like the empathies key. If you just have one email sequence, you don’t really have much empathy with them, especially if you’re sending that build no matter what stage of the buying cycle they’re at. It’s thinking that within a sales … There’s so many ways to look at this. You have like a sales funnel diagram, you could have almost like a pie chart thing and look at where, which phase, look at the cycle thing like a big circle and which stage people are in. There’s all different ways to phrase it up but if they’re in different stages, they really have different needs, in terms of the way you need to talk to them. The offers you need to make to them. I like this. Damian:Yeah, that’s the magic word there, John. You’re right. It’s all about the buying stage. At a generic level, and every business is different blah blah blah, but at a generic level there’s essentially 4 buying stages. The first buying stage is unaware, so either they’re unaware they have a problem or they’re unaware that there’s a solution to a problem they know they have. The second stage is some level of information gathering. They’re doing investigation. Now they know there’s a problem they know there’s a possible solution, they’re investigating possible solutions. The third stage is comparison. They’re comparing you versus 2 or 3 of your competitors or 2 or 3 other ways of doing it. The third is actually the sale and post-sale management.  The way you talk to people in those sales stages, you’re absolutely right, is different and this is what most people get wrong about content, would be that blogging or podcasting or email marketing, is they just do this one size fits all kind of thing, but the reality is when you’re unaware, your content is all about pain agitation. It’s all about poking them in the eye. Let them know that there is a problem. A lot of times unaware means they don’t know they’ve got a problem, so let them know they’ve got a problem. It’s higher level, it’s “top of funnel,” it’s more motion-based. The second, we start looking at an investigation. Well, now they want to start thinking about what opportunities are out there. Well, now the content needs to be more about what you do and how you do it. Then we talk about comparison, now you’re talking about, now you really want to get really technical. Now it’s about case studies, now you want success stories, now you want to start helping them imagine themselves with your solution so start showing them other people that made that solution and do it, but it gets more technical with more depth and it’s usually longer.  Then the last is once they’re on board is say, okay, reminding them that they made a good decision, making sure they’re getting the most value out of the purchase they made with you, and then also helping them to get, help you get more customers. That content is vastly different, and so the way you want to talk to them is vastly different. John:Okay. Well, let’s start with this lead nurturing thing. Damian:Sure. John:Aside from it just being content, are you talking about giving them a crash course, give them links to blog posts, the podcast, or is there a specific … Is it just anything and everything about content, no pitching, or is there a specific strategy? Damian:No, no. Don’t get me wrong — I’m all about the pitch. The pitch changes, so lead nurturing is exactly what it sounds like. This is someone … I essentially break people down to 3 different categories. You’re a suspect, you’re a prospect, or you’re a client or customer. A suspect means someone that meets your criteria, so they’re a possible user of your product or service. A prospect is someone that meets your criteria but has also taken some specific actions towards buying from you, and then a client is obviously someone that’s actually bought from you. Your lead nurturing is for your suspects. This will be your traditional autoresponder. Someone’s come to your website, they’ve checked out some of your content, they like what they see, they’ve opted on to your list. Now, whether whatever you opt in, whatever you’re using for your lead magnet, whatever your opt in is — a crash course or just more information, whatever — the idea is that they’re not ready. Not only are they not ready to buy from you yet, they’re not even really ready to get serious about talking to you yet. But you don’t want to let them go. This is your traditional drip sequence. What you want to do here is you want to demonstrate authority. You want to demonstrate expertise. You want to keep them warm while they’re making their decision. They’re just a very early sales stage. They’re either unaware or they’re in an investigating stage, so they’re not really ready to start thinking about buying yet. They’re gathering data, so what you want to give them is you want to just keep them happy. Show them that you are knowledgeable about the industry you’re in, show them, give them some food for thought, give them some kernels of wisdom, and at much higher level … Empathy is a great word here. It’s a much softer thing. Now I would say you don’t want to pitch your product or service, possibly, and I talk predominantly, most of my customers are B2B companies but for, if you’re doing high value services of any kind, or products of any kind, I think you don’t want to go for the close right away. The close you want to go for is move them into your sales funnel. Like in my business, what I want is I want to get someone on a phone call. I charge anywhere from a thousand dollars to 5 thousand dollars a month, recurring. A new customer is worth anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand dollars to my business. That’s a lot of money, so that’s worth me getting on a phone call with them. Also, that’s a lot of money for someone to spend so generally, you’ve got to do more than just send them to a sales page. They want to get some personal touch. In my lead nurturing funnel, what I want to do is I want to drive them to an appointment. My close, my “sale” is an appointment, it’s not an order, during the lead nurturing funnel. Once I get that sale and moving them to an appointment, then I would move them to the second campaign, which is just sales funnel. Now this is definitely different for every business. John:Let’s stop right there. You’re doing lead nurturing, [inaudible 0:22:34] that sequence, I’m getting nurtured, and I’m like, “All right, I want to talk to Damian.” I talk to you and then what you’re saying that happens, at the end of that call, I haven’t made a decision yet and then you send me to sales funnel sequence? Damian:Well, yeah. It can be even trickier if you start using cool software. What happens is I’ll drive you … My call to action on my lead nurturing will be go to this schedule once link and schedule an appointment with me. What happens is, once you’ve done that, in Infusionsoft, it’ll actually create you as a … [inaudible 0:23:04] lead nurturing series, but it’ll change your tag from a suspect to a prospect. Then once you’re a prospect, it’s actually going to start the emails right then. You’re going to get an email from me saying, “Hey, we’ve got an upcoming call to discuss your business blah blah blah. Here’s a few things you should be thinking about before our call. Here’s a few questions you should answer before we even get on the phone call.” Now, I’m doing the Jay Abraham thing of I’m giving you some hurdles to jump through, so I’m giving you homework before we even talk for the first time. Then we’ll get on the call, and then what happens is once we’re on the call, depending on the call, there’s another tag that’s created called consultation requested and then consultation completed. Once we’ve completed the call, if I assign that tag to you, you’re going to a new part of the sequence which is did I send you a proposal? Did you get a proposal to buy something? If so, then you get follow up emails 3 days after the proposal, a week after the proposal, 14 days after the proposal, and then on the 21st day after the proposal, you get my kind of see you later email, which is a little bit of reverse psychology which is why I send an email saying, “Hey, we’re not a great fit, probably. I haven’t heard back from you. We’re not moving forward. Probably not a great fit. Most of my customers become customers within the first 3 weeks of us talking. No problem, it’s okay. We’re not a great fit for everybody. I’m going to go ahead and take you off my follow up list. Have a great time. If you ever want to get back to us, it’s easy.” What happens here is people say, “No, no. Don’t take me off your list. Don’t take me off your list.” It’s a great piece of, that’s the sales funnel. Now that definitely changes business to business but what it is essentially is that now, someone’s engaged. They’ve put more effort into you so you put more effort into them. They’ve requested more information, they’ve requested a proposal, a quote. They’ve requested an appointment. John:But let’s say they, so they get on this call with you. Let’s say they clicked on the link where they schedule a meeting by this meeting one thing and then you send them an email saying, “Hey, we got a call next week. Before we get on the call, here are a couple of things I need you to do. If I was the prospect there, I could be like, “Well, I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to get on a phone call in a few days’ time.” Damian:That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. All I’m doing is I’m just prepping for it all, so I’m not asking you to go out and write a doctoral thesis on something. I’m just saying, the questions are like, “What are your goals this year on your business? What are your medium to long-term goals for your business? What’s your biggest marketing issue?” These are things you can answer right away so you don’t actually have to do anything. What I’m doing is I’m just planting the seed for our conversation, because once we’re on the phone call, I don’t really pitch on the phone call. The phone call is all about you, so once I get you on the  phone call with me, what I’m going to do is I’m going to spend 10 to 15 minutes understanding your business better and asking 10 questions I ask about your business and the rest of it. Then the second part of our phone call is I’m actually going to give you a few ideas. I’m going to say, “Look, I actually went and checked out Drop Dead Copy, and here’s … I like when you’re doing this.” Give them what I call the insult sandwich. “I like you’re doing this, I think you’re making a mistake here, I also like you doing this.” It’s easier to take my mistake thing. The mistake thing is I’ll say like things along the lines of, “I think your call to action on your opt in could be stronger,” or, “You’re asking for too many fields of data for someone to sign up on your list,” or, “You don’t have enough opt in. You need an opt in on every page [inaudible 0:26:14]” or, “You’ve got too many social media icons and when I click it, it takes me to that page. That should open a new window.” Basically, I do a small conversionary optimization clinic for about 10 minutes with them, and the idea here is give to get. The [inaudible 0:26:27] jab, jab, jab, hook thing, but what it really is is just it demonstrated my expertise. It demonstrates my authority, but also it does that magical thing of reciprocity. Now what I’ve done is I’ve spent 10, 15 minutes talking about your business, 10 to 15 minutes talking about ways you could improve your business for free, and then 99 times out of 100, that prospect says to me, “Well, hey, how about we talk about your business now.” Now they’re asking me about my offer rather than me having to pitch my offer, which is just a much easier way to en gage with them.  Also what it does is I’m qualifying them on that call. I would say that 1 out of 4 people I talk to aren’t a good fit for my business. Sometimes 2 out of 5 aren’t a good fit for my business just because they’re not big enough, they’re not making enough money, they’re dreamers. My business, I mean, the software alone is $300 a month, then you got to pay me an additional thousand dollars a month, so if you’re just thinking about what your business is going to be, we’re probably not a good fit so you need to be making money, and I’d be better helping people making a hundred grand make 5 hundred grand is my business, not people making zero make 50 grand. I’m figuring that out in that phone call and sometimes I don’t even offer at the end because they’re not a good fit. If they are a good fit, generally ask me what we can do together, I talk about it a little bit, if it looks like we’re a good fit, then I will send them a proposal. John:Nice, man. I like it, I like it. Then, let’s say they sign up because you did lead nurturing, done your sales funnel so they’ve got the emails, they’ve done the phone call and I’m like, “All right. I’m in,” you sign them up, you do the PayPal, you do the payment, you do all that sort of stuff and then you’re saying that you put them onto to the … it’s almost like the customer nurturing sequence but you’re calling it the testimonial referral sequence. What’s that? Damian:Yeah. This is different. Most people do some sort of onboarding sequence. They say once you become a customer, they help you keep … That’s fine, but what no one does is your best sales people in the world are your happy, new clients. They get that warm, new car smell, they’re all excited, they’re envisioning this future together of the work you’re going to do, so what you want to do is you want to keep them happy, obviously, especially in a retention business like I am. You want to keep them on board, but also you want them to help you sell. You want to help them realize, “Hey, part of the reason we could deliver such great value to you, such great service to you, is we don’t spend 80% of our time out there looking for new business. We spend 80% of our time working with our customers. The way we can do that is is we ask our customers to help us find new customers.” Then you walk them through.  The thing you will get wrong about referrals is they just for … Actually, the biggest thing is no one ask for referrals. Like they feel uncomfortable. They don’t ask for them, so automating that takes that pain away. Doesn’t feel so bad. The second thing people don’t do is even if they do ask for referrals, they ask for them poorly. They ask for referrals. No one is going to give you a referral, but what you do is you help them, you make it easy on them. Remember, it’s all about them, so you want to make them feel warm and fuzzy, let them feel that it’s reciprocal, but also make it easy. “Hey, John. Here’s why we think you’re going to be a great customer, because you fit X, Y, and Z with us. Other companies who would be a great fit for us would look like this too. [inaudible 0:29:43] They’d be a service business or they’d be a B2B software company. They’re doing at least $5,000 a month in revenue, they’re looking for ways to increase, they don’t consider themselves top of the world marketers, they want to focus on serving their customers, not on finding new ones.  Paint a picture for them of who your ideal prospect would be and then ask them and, literally, in the email, have 1, 2, 3 empty spaces. Can you think of 3 people that I should reach out and say that you introduced me to them. Then part of that campaign also is testimonials. That’s another thing we don’t do, we don’t do enough social selling, and social proof is very powerful. Instead of doing that, you say, you ask for a testimonial and, again, what we get wrong with testimonials is 1, we don’t ask for them or 2, when we ask for them, we ask for them poorly. The best way to do it is to actually ask them questions. “Hey, can we just ask you a quick question? Why did you end up choosing us? What did you think this solution was going to do for you? Has it delivered upon that?” Just make it simple for them to answer, and they just reply to the email- John:That’s fantastic advice. I’ve never heard that before, but that’s fantastic. When you start saying that, I think I’ve done it accidentally before with people and sometimes I’ll come back with a whole paragraph or a whole 300 or 400 word email and there’s so much golden nuggets in there that you can just drop into your sales pitch. Damian:That’s exactly it, and that’s what I do. The best testimonials are the ones you help your customers right, so you help them write by asking them probing questions. Getting them to answer your probing questions and then when you put it all together you say, “Hey, Bob. I’d love you to look at this. I want to put this on a website,” which everyone loves. Everyone loves the idea of them being published on your website. This is what I’m going to put, this is the information you’ve given me, I’ll just put it all together and put quotation marks around it. Are you okay with this? He’s going to say yes, and then you put it out there and boom! You’ve got your customers selling for you. John:That’s awesome. I love it. All right, let’s wrap it up here [inaudible 0:31:34] before we go, though, give people … I think a few people who are listening here right now, they’re going to want to go and at least check out your sequence and I’m sure some of them are also going to be interested in signing up. Let me get on the sales call and just see how you do the sales call. Damian:Yeah, so the easiest way to find me is linchpin.net. That’s linchpin.net. I’m active on Twitter, @damianthompson, go to the website. I got opt in boxes everywhere so you can either opt in to get on the list or you can request a call on our about page. Either way, I look forward to talking to people via email or on a Skype call. John:Boom! Cool, man. I’ll have those links in the show at the McMethod.com. Let’s get the links there. Thanks for coming on, man. Damian:Cheers, mate! The post Episode #58 – Damian Thompson on The 3 Email Marketing Campaigns Every Business Should Have appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Watch out! Nick Francis is in town and he’s got a controversial message to share: You’re doing it all wrong. What the heck? According to Nick, focusing on ROI instead of the “customer experience” is a dead-end long-term strategy. Sure… you’ll make some money. But in the long run? Because you’re focused on ROI instead of creating a great product, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot and hamstring your business. In other words, he recommends that you zone in on exceeding your customers’ expectations. The classic example? Apple. Great marketing, sure. But the real secret? Create a product that changes people’s lives. It’s all about your brand… your products, content, customer experience… It’s about delivering an unforgettable experience for your customers. THIS creates a lifetime relationship. Some people think that being a “brand” guy means you’re a nerd. But in today’s podcast, you’ll discover a different reality… …a reality where branding, and focusing on the customer experience, trumps everything else… including a relentless focus on ROI.   In this episode, you’ll discover: The “controversial” tactic that will earn you more money  (it’s so easy you might feel like you’re stealing!). A radical way to think about revenue to take your business to the NEXT LEVEL (hint: think, value). Why connecting your marketing to your ROI is less important than your branding and actual marketing itself (make WAYYY more money than with ROI).  How to avoid the success blocker that will have you running in circles and wasting all your energy. The 3 lenses to view your ideal customers through in order to know exactly WHAT they want and WHY (your opportunities will SKYROCKET by knowing the what’s and why’s). The best incentives you NEED to be using (proven to work and easy to make!). How to create an amazing experience for your customers, so they keep on buying your stuff!   Mentioned: Help Scout – Nick Francis’ very own Help Desk Software. The site has an excellent growth and marketing strategies blog. Russell Branson’s 108 Proven Split Test Wins. The book backed by some smart marketing. Tech Stars Startup Accelorator: Used to startup Help Scout three years ago! Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript:   The post Episode #57 – Nick Francis on How To Create A Great Brand Through Value Over ROI. appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Did you know that John Lee Dumas sells a lot of high-ticket products through live webinars? …and that on average, he converts 30% of those from each webinar into customers? Bad-freaking-ass. Plus, it’s not even some complex whiz bang funnel… it’s SUPER basic, but it works like rocket-fuel. Here’s how it works: First, there’s the ad, Then there’s the landing page. Next, they sign up for the webinar. Bam. It’s that easy. Want to know how much money John has created himself from this webinar-funnel strategy? $476,000 …in only 5 months! And that’s just the beginning. His average cold-optin conversion rate is at 30%. Another 30% purchase his high-priced products right after the webinar. John’s membership website “Podcaster’s Paradise” costs a whopping $1k to join. At an average of 25 signups per week, …this adds up to massive profits. He’s currently averaging $180,000 per month… From this ONE product! So how does John convert so consistently? Does he use a professional, well-crafted sales page? Nah… sales pages aren’t working as well as they used to. Not nearly effective enough.   He uses… Webinars. John’s a conversion monster when he gets on a webinar. One of his two signature strategies he calls removing all barriers… His webinars are successful due to these Q&A sessions where John will not end it until each and every question fired his way is answered. The second strategy John uses along with the Q&A truly makes this webinar-funnel a deadly 1-2 punch combo.  What is it? Listen to this episode now to find out:   In this episode, you’ll discover: 2 little-known webinar sales funnel techniques John uses to create huge profits (and why you MUST try them… or lose tons of money) How to create open hallways that lead prospects straight to your Buy Now button. (with this simple sales funnel “trick”, you can double your conversion rates overnight.) Why John believes that you need more than a fancy sales page to sell high-ticket products. (this is the golden ticket that will allow you to access the secrets of massive profits through high-ticket products.) The top 2 ways to convert prospects to customers. (learn these, and be able to convert anyone within your industry.) An easy trick to gain traffic (organic traffic is nice, but this traffic is better.)  How John is financially crushing it by converting at such a high rate. (by converting 25-30 people per week, John is stacking up six-figures worth per month.)   Mentioned: The Entrepreneur On Fire podcast John Lee Dumas’ Podcaster’s Paradise and Webinar On Fire Nathan Barry’s Product Launch Strategy. Frank Kern’s webinar launch and how he uses free report PDF’s. Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. Interviewer: It’s John McIntyre here, [inaudible 00:00:02]. I’m here with John Lee Dumas. Now John has a podcast, it’s a very popular podcast, it’s a daily podcast called Entrepreneur On Fire. And everyday he interviews a different … the idea is, he interviews a different entrepreneur and finds out why [inaudible 00:00:20]. There is a bunch of things he goes into, into each entrepreneur to talk to them. But why I got him on the show today was not so much to talk about Podcasting, but to talk about what he is doing with his sales funnel, which he has got a Facebook ad, which goes to like a landing page for a webinar, and then he brings people on to a webinar and then sells them on his paid membership community. And he is absolutely crushing, so I though I want to get him on the show to talk about what he is doing, why he thinks it’s working, maybe some of the mistakes that he has made along the why and how someone or how a listener, you as the listener can go and apply some of this stuff to your own business. So we’ll get into all that in just a moment. John, how are you doing today? John: John, I am doing quite well today. And to be honest, yes, financially we are crushing it right now, but if I had somebody half as good as you a copy, we would be double or triple the revenue. Interviewer: Thank you. Thank you. [Laughter] You crack me up, man. Before we get into the sales funnel, give the listener a background on who are you and what do you do. I have done a little bit but you can probably do a bit better than I did. John: Yeah, I got the real quick rundown. I’m just a country boy from the state of Maine, which is a state couple of hours north of Boston up in New England. And I went to college on an Army ROTC scholarship, John. That’s why when you rain me up here on Skype, and I saw you shooting a 9 mm Beretta, I got a little fired up, it brought me back to my combat days in Iraq where I spent 13 months as an Armor Officer leading 16 men and four tanks and battled in Fallujah and Ramadi and Habania. But that was way back in the day and I’ve since retired, and now I’m just floating around. I tried corporate finance, I tried commercial and residential real estate, and finally I had my little aha moment and decided to start a daily podcast because everybody told me I was crazy when I brought the idea to them. I said if they think that’s a crazy idea, that’s exactly why I want to do it. They zig I zag, let’s do this. The only thing I’m missing is a little Chiang Mai, John. Interviewer: You’d get over him, and you were recently in the Philippines too, Chiang Mai is not far away from there. John: Just a little hop skip and a jump I hear. Interviewer: When are you going to move over here? You did the whole digital nomad thing. John: Man, I am so close to doing that. Now that I hear how strong your Internet is and how clear your audio is, what’s stopping me. Interviewer: Exactly. Exactly, man. It’s crazy. You know what’s even crazier is that we have better Internet at home in Chiang Mai where I am right now at the apartment than I have at my mom’s place in Sydney, Australia. And Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world but the Internet sucks. John: That’s brutal. Interviewer: It’s horrible, man. That makes me cry every time I go home. John: It just makes me miss Chiang Mai, which is totally cool. Interviewer: Alright, let’s get into this funnel. How about we start, give me an overview of what you’re doing right now, what’s working? If you are up for sharing some figures that would be cool too, but an overview of what’s going on with your funnel, and … yeah, let’s start there. John: John, I’m up for sharing figures, I publish my monthly income reports every single month at EOFire.com/income. We just published our March report yesterday actually. The first month since we started publishing this, we actually decreased in our actual overall finances, but I can’t complain because February was 188,000 and March was 185,000 so we stayed pretty close, and that’s still a pretty awesome number. But the funnel is pretty simple, John. So my audience is built up of podcast, listeners. Again, I was that crazy guy that started that daily podcast, nobody thought it could be done, nobody thought anybody would listen. A few people have, we had 580,000 downloads in the month of March, because that we’ve built an audience. And audience, John, they just talk to me, they send me emails, they send me tweets, they Facebook messages, and they were telling me, John, how do you podcast? How do you rank so high in iTunes? How do you create a product or service off of, which are actually building with your audience? And that’s where I came up with the idea, John, for Podcasters’ Paradise, which is a community for podcasters to create, grow and monetize their own podcast. But the problem is, it’s a $1200 community, you can’t sell people on a sales page unless you are John, I’ve dropped a copy, you could probably create a sales page to sell people but not with me, not with my skills. So I knew that I had to create a funnel, I knew that I had to figure out a system, John. And for me that was having on the intros and outros of my podcast, driving people to a webinar opt-in page. Having it’s on my actual homepage EntrepreneurOnFire, click here to sign-up for your live podcast workshop. And then also doing a lot of spend in Facebook ads, driving people to this webinar opt-in page where every single week we have a live podcast workshop webinar. And that’s our main funnel, John, we get people to show up to these live webinars. I give them 45 minutes of pure value on podcasting, some super hacks, a lot of great tips, tools and tactics. And then in the last 45 minutes I take them inside the doors of Podcasters’ Paradise, I show them everything they are going to get when they purchase. And that’s huge for a lot of people to actually see that before they buy. And it’s a live webinar, John, I answer all the questions, I take away all their barriers that they may have and we convert an average of 25 to 35 people every single week into Podcasters’ Paradise, which is how we are generating six figures a month in revenue from that product. Interviewer: And from what I’ve heard, you stay on this webinar answering questions until you’ve got into the last question? John: Every question, John, because every question is just one barrier that somebody has put up in front of a sale. So my attitude is, hey, I’m going to sit here and answer any question until every barrier is removed, and then everybody has bought and then we’ll close it down. Interviewer: I love that, I love that. So let’s talk about, let’s break this into pieces, you’ve got traffic on the one hand, you’ve got converts and then you’ve got your economics, which is that’s a [inaudible 00:06:39] framework, that’s not something I came up with but, and the economics is basically a product, is how you are making the money. So your traffic is, it sounds like its Facebook and podcast listeners. Is this equally split or you doing more Facebook advertising or more podcasting or how does that breakdown? John: It’s about 65:35, 65% of my leads come from paid Facebook advertising, the other 35% are organic from both the podcast and the website. Interviewer: That’s interesting, and I think why it’s interesting, someone is going to listen to this thing. John has got a daily podcast, he has got 500,000, half a million every month. I can’t get the same results as that because I just don’t want to do a podcast or I don’t have it or, I don’t have this seductive sweet voice to producing people in. John: Listen to the copy guy in action, unbelievable. Interviewer: But anyone can do Facebook. So by the sound of it, what’s going on here is that someone could start if they need a traffic to start just doing Facebook advertising to a certain audience whether it’s podcasting with someone else, and that would get them the tray. Quite a lot of traffic that they could then lead into a funnel and so on, so that’s step one, which is interesting. So someone goes … just to clarify, someone is on Facebook, if they click on the ad and they end up on this webinar, are they coming … how likely are they to have heard of your podcast? John: Quite likely because, John, the actual people that I target through Facebook targeting, which you can get very specific on are on the online entrepreneur, people that do listen to podcast, people that do live in our space so to speak. I target people like Pat Flynn, like Lewis House, like Amy Porterfield, like Dan and Ian Tropical MBA, like those type of really high-level entrepreneurs that I know their audience has likely heard of me, it would probably make sense if they added podcasting to their business model in 2014, so it’s fairly likely. Interviewer: And then what happens? So their own Facebook and they see one of your newsfeed ads and they click on it, and they end up where? So basically it will be a newsfeed ad of either me, I don’t know if you have seen it yet, because it’s a pretty stark image but I’m actually on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and I’m actually stabbing with a spear a shark that has fear branded across it. It is pretty visually stimulating, and I actually got some emails from the Animal Rights Association from that, but I kept it going, because I think any publications is good publication. So I kept that one rolling, for sure. But I use pictures like that, there is one of me actually podcasting with my arms and hair literally on fire, and I love that picture as well. But then there is just other ones regular of bunch of people who have been in Podcasters’ Paradise, all like smiling and podcasting is like a collage, any number of things, and a little bit of copy. Again, not the best copy, not the John McIntyre copy but the best we can come up with, which is just basically saying, hey guys, do you want to learn how to create or monetize your podcast, John, share some tips, tools and tactics about how he has generated or how he has created a business, it generates over $100,000 a month, XYZ. They click on that image or that link, John, and it takes them directly to a lead page webinar opt-in page. It’s actually the James Schramko special, that one with a little faded mind map. So it’s just a very simple landing page, they just sign-up for the webinar there. And I typically do this every single week, so for six days I’m running these Facebook ads to this webinar opt-in. Interviewer: Quick question. Do you get sick of doing a live webinar every single week? What happens if you want to take a week off? I don’t know if [crosstalk 00:10:29] John: It’s interesting, I don’t take weeks off, I don’t even days off to be honest with you, but when I first started I was a little terrified, a little scared, there is definitely some fear of failure. When I first started doing webinars, as I’ve heard that most people do experience because it’s like what if nobody shows up, like what if nobody buys, it’s going to be embarrassing. I was having all those doubts as well. So when I first started, it was tough to get over that hurdle, but pretty soon, I’ll say after the third or fourth live webinar, and now I’ve done over 50, I just started hitting my groove. I just love interacting with the audience, I get on 15 minutes early before the webinar starts. And I’m calling people out like, oh, it’s John McIntyre from Chiang Mai, it’s Julie, it’s Josh Stanton, it’s Bryce, like what’s up guys, how are you doing, thanks for joining me, XYZ. Where you guys from? Oh, we got somewhere from New Zealand, we have somewhere from Poland, and really interacting with them and making them know straight up, hey, this is a live webinar. I’m here for you, I’m answering your questions, XYZ. Then when we launched the live webinar, and I just had fun, that it’s a fun webinar, it’s about an hour presentation, maybe an hour and 15 minutes. And then by the end, John, I am getting back into question, I’m answering everybody’s questions live on that webinar, and I like the questions that gets fired at me, makes me think on my feet. I get to react quickly, it makes me better as a podcaster and as a presenter. And now that I’ve done so many, it’s actually the thing that I look forward to most, John, besides obviously being on this podcast. Interviewer: I was talking to a buddy of mine here in Chiang Mai recently, he is a conversion loan specialist. John: Was it Bryce? Interviewer: No, it’s not Bryce, it’s another guy. John: Oh, I miss Bryce. Interviewer: So this guy was talking about how some people get 10%, 15%, he reckons 20% [inaudible 00:12:20] on a webinar. So you, it sounds like you are getting 30 to 35%, what do you think? You went through some of the differences, some of the things you are doing right there on the webinar, but are there any key things that you think that are making you get almost, 20% is the standard, you are almost getting double the results that most people would love to get? John: For complete transparency, I’ve definitely had … I’ve done so many webinars, I’ve done some that have converted 20%, I’ve rarely seen a conversion less than that. I’d say I average between 28 to 32% and we really do keep these stats because I want to see what’s working. And I have done as high as 30 of 38% before. I remember I did one where I had 123 people on I think, and we did 39 sales. So that was our best webinar that we’ve ever done. And especially because this is a product where we do give a $300 discounts for the people that take action on that live webinar. So it takes there from 1200 down to 900, but 39 times 900, that was in the high $30,000 range for one webinar, which is one hour and 15 minutes, so definitely a success. Again, there some expenses laid out there, I’m paying a little over $2000 every single week to get the Facebook side of that there. I am not paying anything except sweat equity for the organic side, but there is lot of time and effort that does go into that. I do think the reasons why I’m typically getting between again 28, typically on the low average, 32 is definitely the high average conversions on these webinars is because they are live, John. A lot of people don’t do live webinars. I’ve had a lot of conversations with Amy Porterfield, and she told me about people’s mentality like James Wetmore and how they create one webinar and then they’ll just put it into automated overdrive, and they’ll answer questions on that first webinar, but then it’s just all are recorded after that. And I think people get that because people are always surprised when they get to this webinar, no matter how many times we put in capital letters, ‘Live Webinar Starting Now. This is a Live Webinar.’ People are still shocked when they show up and it actually is live, so I’m like, it is April 8th, it is 12:01 p.m. Pacific Time. I’m seeing, Joe, Sarah, Sam in the chat room and I’m interacting with the people there live, and I still get that shocking odd that it is actually live and people love that. When you actually are answering their specific question, they feel like you really care. Interviewer: I can see that. So when you are doing the live webinar, a lot of people would get on there, and they might have one question or two questions, and if only they can get those one or two questions answered, they’ll sign-up. But if you are doing those canned webinars, that a lot of people are doing they’ll never be able to get these questions answered. So while it appears as a Q&A to everyone, whether they think it’s live or not is irrelevant, they are not going to be able to get that question answered and there is someone else asked it on that very first one webinar. So it sounds like this Q&A is a really key part of what’s making this webinar successful. John: I couldn’t agree more, I’m really finding that to be the case. I’m seeing that there is definitely a large segment of people who are coming in with barriers in place, and those barriers are those questions. And when you’re actually there taking the time to remove those barriers, you are leaving an open hallway and open runway to that ‘Buy Now’ button, and when you are making an event, when you make it exciting, when you make it seem like you they are already in the community, when people buy, John, and I’m like, “Okay, we just had John McIntyre buy. Welcome, John, say hi to everybody in the chat room, let them know you bought.” And then you are typing real-time in the chat room, “Hey, I just bought guys, I am so excited for Podcasters’ Paradise.” Other people are seeing, wow, that’s proof of concepts, nobody wants to be that only person that buys, like they want to know that other people are making the same decision they are, because that validates their own decision. Interviewer: I love it. I love it. So someone signs up, there is obviously [inaudible 00:16:22] lead pages, what happens in the lead up to the webinar, are you doing … usually this is typically where people would do some email marketing to get more people to the webinar because you are going to get a certain amount of people sign up, but not everyone is going to actually show up to the webinar. So are you using any email marketing strategies or anything else to bump those numbers? John: That’s exactly the second area I’d say that we need like John McIntyre on our team. First would be that Facebook ad to really make that enticing copy to actually click on that. And then the second place would be that actual lead page for that quick little sign-up, and the third place is that leading up to the webinar, like how are you building up anticipation. Nathan Barry has a great product launch strategy where it’s all about building anticipation and you are getting people amped and fired up for it without offering anything yet. That’s a great point, I don’t think that we do a good job between when people sign-up to when they actually show up. They get an email the night before, they get an email that morning, that’s a reminder, and then they get an email 15 minutes before the webinar starts. I think there is a huge opportunity that we need to step up and start taking advantage of for those people that signed up four or five days ago. What about a couple emails that go out that really peak their interest for something that’s going to happen on that webinar. We don’t do that, John. Interviewer: You could do it so easily as well, so an email from Frank Kern, he was recently doing some webinar launch. And one of the things he sent out, I didn’t actually go to the webinar because the times really didn’t match with Thailand, but one of the things he said, I thought that was so smart. One of the emails come out, so I’ve got this free report, this guide to the webinar, it’s going to tell you all about what you are going to learn on this program, so great, I’ll just read that, then I can skip the webinar and save my time. So we all opened the PDF and it’s basically fill-in the blank, five or ten page PDF. It’s got all the information, like everything that’s on the webinar except the keywords that would actually make, will make sense. So I’m reading, this going, here is the three essential elements to doing like a powerful webinar. But then I just got, number one, blank spot; number two, blank spot; number three, blank spot. So you could have basically a PDF with catchy headlines and then just fill-in the blank copy, and you can send that out the day before or something like that. I saw that, yeah, I was just signing, he was doing, I thought it was genius. John: John, this is why they pay you the big bucks, my man. Interviewer: So let’s jump real quick then, what about after the webinar? Another thing that some people do is webinar follow-up. So after the people who didn’t buy after the webinar, there is going to be people that may or maybe interested in purchasing if you give them something or do some additional persuasion out to that. Are you doing anything there? John: So we are. Again, I think this is a huge area for us to improve upon because we are fairly aggressive in the post, that’s something that we have worked fairly hard on. So right after the webinar is done, basically what happens is like three hours later an email goes out to everybody who didn’t buy and saying basically, hey guys, we know you didn’t buy slash weren’t able to attend this webinar. We just put up the replay page, it’s only going to be up for 24 hours, tomorrow at midnight this would be going down, there still is a discount. It’s not the $300 discount, but it’s $200 off till midnight tomorrow night, and then that too gets pulled away. And basically what with the link will do is just send them directly to a lead page that just has the video, that just has a ‘Buy Now’ button, just those two things. And then there is some testimonials actually below as well. And we convert a handful of people through that 24-hour process, but again not the kind of numbers I’d like to see. I mean we do a unbelievable job converting people that are live on the webinar into sales. We don’t do a great job in the pre-amping up to make sure the most number of people are there. And we don’t do a good job post, making sure we are maximizing the post sales, because pretty much how it runs down is, just let me give you a really hard number example, John. So a couple of webinars ago we had 650 people who had signed up, about 400 people through Facebook advertising and about 250 people through organic. We had 176 people actually show up live, and then we did 46 sales on that actual live webinar. So that’s pretty much what we’ve been seeing pretty significantly is around 30-ish percent of people that sign-up show up and around 30-ish percent of people that actually show up buy. And we are seeing those numbers within about 5% one way or the other, give or take on almost every single webinar. So we got to find ways to amp up the people that sign up to show up, to bring that to the 40 or the 45 percentile. Then I’d also love to take those numbers that, people that don’t buy after the webinar is done and go … right now that number if we even did it out, it’d probably be like 1% or 0.5% because it’s just a handful of people that sign-up after the webinar is done, during that replay action. So that needs to be improved as well. Interviewer: Fantastic. We are right on time, before we go there one thing I wanted to ask you, do you have anywhere any resources that you would recommend to go and learn about webinars. I think that’s what out of all the things, see I’ve talked a lot about your email marketing on this podcast, almost nothing about webinar, so someone is probably listening to this thing, how the hell do I do a good webinar. So tell me about that? John: Great question. Interviewer: Just give me a good link, good resource, something that works. John: The best resource for webinars is a phenomenal product called Webinar On Fire. If you want to know how to create, present and convert your webinar, WebinarOnFire.com will take you to a page where you can sign-up for free for a live webinar workshop where we teach you everything about webinars. Of course, we offer you entrance into Webinar On Fire at the end. So, John, that’s my favorite resource, probably because I created it, but we are having a lot of fun with Webinar On Fire. Again, it’s one of those things, listen to your audience what do they tell you. When you do $476,000 in sales on a live webinar in five months, people start asking you how are you doing this live webinar? Even though we’ve already identified some areas that we are lacking in, we are obviously doing a lot of things right at the same time. So we did create that product, we are really proud of it, Webinar On Fire is really a great tool for people. Interviewer: Cool. And if they want to checkout your podcast, I’m sure some will, that’d be on EntrepreneurOnFire.com, correct? John: Yeah, but that’s a hard word to spell, just go to EOFire.com. Interviewer: EOFire.com. Easy. Absolutely. John, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you. John: What a blast, John. I’ll catch you on the flipside.   The post Episode #56: John Lee Dumas On How To Sell High-Ticket Products Through Webinars (and his secret to converting 1 out of every 3 attendees into paying customers) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.