In my experience, there are two very different Facebook ads camps.

The first camp are those who have tried Facebook advertising, but for whom it has not worked. The second camp are those who have tried, then honed their skills on the platform and are now reaping the rewards from successful Facebook campaigns.

Getting the best out of Facebook’s ads platform requires more than just striking images and compelling ad copy, it requires a well architected funnel, it requires analysis and attention to detail and it requires a willingness to keep up with Facebook’s fast changing advertising functions.

There are few that have mastered these intricacies better than Keith Kranc and on this episode he reveals what it takes to build highly successful Facebook campaigns that generate extreme results.

OUR GUEST:

Keith Kranc is the founder of Dominate Web Media and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.

Keith studied at the University of North Dakota where he took up Commercial Aviation. Aside from being a former airline pilot, he was also a retail business owner. Currently, Keith is helping customers of Dominate Web Media get the most out of their Facebook PPC campaigns through coaching and done-for-you Facebook Ad management.

Keith has spoken on the topic of Facebook advertising all around the world from as far afield as USA and Australia. His book The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising which is co-authored with Perry Marshall has sold thousands of copies since it was released in June 2014.

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“70% of users on Facebook are on mobile so make sure your funnels work for mobile too.” ~ @11keithk
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Hey there listener! What’s up? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is of course the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a super profitable audience for your website. I am your host, as always James Reynolds and we have another excellent show lined up for you.

Before we dive in though a quick hello and thank you to Steve, Elaina and Ralph for dropping in on the discussion for episode#54. I’d love to hear from you too, and the episode page is the place to comment, ask questions and engage with our guest so if you have any questions on today’s topic, and more on that in just a moment, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/55 where you can also download a checklist I’ve prepared to accompany this training along with a full transcript, MP3 and even more episode goodies, so really all roads lead to TrafficJamCast.com/55. So head on over there now, grab your bonuses and let’s proceed with today’s show.

So what are we talking about on today’s show? Well, we’re coming back once again to Facebook advertising, it’s a topic that we’ve spoken about a fair amount on recent shows and that is for good reason. It’s a very fast moving platform and there are such amazing results to be achieved on Facebook if you know what you’re doing and there’s few that they’re doing better than today’s guest and that’s Keith Kranc and he’s from Dominate Web Media, he’s the author of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, a book that he’s co-authored with Perry Marshall, nonetheless, a guest on a recent episode here of Traffic Jam kicking out some awesome results both from his students and for his clients too and he’s going to tell us all about that in today’s show so let’s not delay the content any further, this is Episode#55 of TrafficJam and here is Keith Kranc from Dominate Web Media.

James: Welcome back listeners! This is the interview section of episode 55 of Traffic Jam and joining me today, we’ve got Keith Kranc. Keith, how are you doing?

Keith: I’m good, I’m good. I’m glad to be on the show.

James: We are stoked to have you here as well especially since we’ve been discussing Facebook advertising quite a lot in the past few weeks in Traffic Jam and that is for good reason because it is a very fast moving platform and because it is so fast moving, I want to invite you on to the show to really dig deep in to what’s working right now and it does seem at the moment two different views on Facebook ads – those that saying that it’s the cheapest, most targeted source they’ve ever experienced and those that saying Facebook advertising is all a complete fraud! So what’s your take, Keith?

Keith: That’s a great question. Sometimes it is very frustrating to me because you some people out there that you might read an article or you might see somebody might be talking about this Facebook being a fraud or Facebook being not giving business the reach that they deserve when it comes to organic reach or impressions or whether it’s this whole fraud of clicks and there is this general consensus that Facebook is out to get you and all that they want is your money. But really, if you really understand what Facebook’s long term goal is to have as many long term advertisers as possible is one but number two is have the absolute maximum best ever experience for the end user. The end user always wins and it goes to how you get your ads approved, how they charge you with click through rates, everything. We have a Facebook rep we get with on a phone call once in a while every couple of weeks and we kind of email back and forth any questions and he basically confirms a lot of these stuff when it comes to Facebook is all about the end user. And it is everything! And so they have definitely cracked down because the bummer part is there are a lot of marketers out there that are abusing the system. They are running ads and they are just scammy and spammy so what happens is they have a system. It is kind of automated and they sometimes, good marketers, they kind of get lumped in there. If you truly understand what Facebook wants what kind of content that they want you to promote using their ad platform to get your ads approved and you can really take your business to the absolute level and beyond if you really understand what they want you to use and what kind of processes to use for Facebook.

James: So what type of content are they looking for? Outside of it being sociable, warm, fuzzy content that people are going to engage with, what other requirements are Facebook really looking for?

Keith: Well, I don’t want to digress too much in to this whole topic but at the same time basically what they are looking for is good, valuable content. So what they don’t want, the big think that Facebook is against is has to do with unreasonable claims. So if you are talking about specific amounts of money that you can help people make or increase, that’s not going to get approved on Facebook or if you are talking about, a lot of times, before and after kinds of things, weight loss, projections and those types of things Facebook is definitely against so sometimes very good business can get their ads disapproved but once they’re adjusting like for example- you know the funny thing is I got a little story about this is that we have a client that has a legitimate business that target these high income individuals and they sell high end coaching and for about a week or two, we start getting our ads approved and so we reached out to our rep to kind of figure out why basically was because we had specifics in the copy about the amount of income that they can increase so we changed that up on the ad, we also changed that up in the landing page to be a little bit more general and we’ve already been ramping up conversion page, we kind of bumped it up for over a month from 12% up to 27% in this market and then we actually changed the copy to be less about income specifics and the opt in rate went from 27% to 47%. I talk about this in some of my webinars so yeah, we actually call it Facebook Okay in the actual Lead Pages the name of this page and if you look at the conversion rates it jumped from 27% to 47%. So what does that mean? It means that the users, that’s what they want. Be as real as you can, that is the key and if you are and if you are offering value, whether it is content whether it is a lead magnet but it is valuable, completely dumb in down as much as you can as far as not only projection types of things and you can just blow up your business, it is crazy. We’ve generated literally over two hundred thousand subscribers in leads, over $4 million in sales that’s only with a few clients over the last few years with Facebook so we know it works, there is no question.

James: Yeah, I mean that is interesting because what you just stated there is almost counter intuitive to us marketers who are always trying to be super specific with results right, and we try to really lay it down, this is the result that you potentially can achieve and this is what others have specifically been able to get themselves but in Facebook it is working in the opposite way. It is very, very interesting, I don’t know, maybe you can throw some light at it but it certainly is a counter intuitive metric there for sure.

Keith: Big time! And so take what I said with a grain of salt because the one thing you have to realize is that every situation and I am talking to every that is listening to this podcast right now. Every situation is different so that is one reason why I love using Lead Pages because we can test easily and just because I have a lot of experience and one of my good skill sets is coming up with good compelling headlines and helping clients craft their offer and change it up to really be appropriate for the Facebook ecosystem and come up with good headlines and sub copies like that so I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of training in that but this is a perfect example of just because somebody is teaching you need to be very specific of the end results just like you just said here like thirty seconds ago, it’s not always the case. So you still need to get a very strong benefit oriented copy but be careful just taking everything that you hear from other people because I feel really the trend is going in that direction where people’s antennas are up, their radars are up listening for people that are overhyping, even if your stuff isn’t hypy, sometimes the subconscious mind can take it that way if there is just one or two words in there and with Facebook, a lot of these stuff are automated, so they are robots and are looking for these trigger words like our ad was disapproved and it wasn’t manually, it was automated so they have a fairly small group of people in Austin which is where their people support is and also where the compliance division is- a very small division so people have to realize in most cases your ads are being disapproved by a robot.

James: Interesting stuff! Let’s talk about the juicy important stuff, let’s start talking about funnels. I know that it is something that you are heavily invested in and you almost look at the funnel way before you even look at things like ad copy and the offer that you present to people. In your experience, what’s working really well in Facebook right now in terms of a well-designed funnel lay out?

Keith: Well, one of the best things that works on Facebook is webinars. The best way to really be able to sell something to a visitor that is fairly cold, they might be warmed up a little bit by the time they attend your webinar, and hopefully they are. That’s the great thing about webinars, you have a lot more time. However, sometimes with Facebook ads, driving absolute cold traffic in to a webinar it might not be the best situation, it just depends on your situation. If you have a really good video on your webinar registration page and it is very detailed and give somebody to really get to know you and really give authority and trust quickly, then you can drive cold traffic in to webinars. Some cases we have clients that are a really strong lead magnet and then have a really strong webinar registration on the thank you page, or they might use the webinar as the next step for people that don’t convert initially, opt in, and then land on a low ticket sales page or offer. So the one thing with Facebook and this is more of a general consensus, is kind of a general kind of tip, remember that Facebook is a social network, anything that you can do to engineer a process to get somebody to trust you and like you, yeah that sounds general but what I mean is things like videos and testimonials so in a lot of cases if we have a registration for a client, let’s say it’s cold traffic and people don’t want to register for a webinar to block an hour of their day two or three days down the road, then what we might do is we might say like, hey do you have a video testimonial? And if they have a video testimonial then we’ll run a Facebook video ad and then in the post copy or in the space where you can put your text in the post you can put the details of the webinar, the benefits that they are going to get, and then the link that takes them right to the webinar registration page, and then on that video you can put a lower third overlay that has a call to action that says click a link on this post to directly register, so now, what you might be doing is you might be doing cold traffic but they’re really not cold because they have watched a 30-second to two-minute video of somebody else talking about how awesome your brand or your product is and that is game changing for us so we love to do that if we can. I love doing Facebook video ads which actually brings me to another situation, we have a client that sells a $38 supplement and they have a great supplement, they help people with osteoporosis and it is one of the only natural supplements to increase bone density and we drive traffic directly from Facebook to the Amazon sales page. That’s counter intuitive to anything I would normally tell somebody which is why a few minutes ago I was talking about every situation is different and you have to really understand there is no cookie cutter approach with Facebook. The key is figuring out how to get people to know you and trust you immediately. So in this situation, we drive traffic directly to the Amazon sales page with like 70% of our budget, but the people who are most likely to land on that are the people who have already watched one of the four to five custom videos that we are running on Facebook on the right column and on the news feed. We give a really good testimonial about somebody talking about their osteoporosis almost going away and then basically the symptoms of it, and then there is a long comment thread where on commenting you don’t get as many people when you do video ads, you don’t get as much people when you do a negative feedbacks and spammy comments so those can be good. So in their situation that works well because the only people that are actually clicking through are the people that have already watched the video and be able to look at the comments and then you click on it, so you get less clicks to your landing page but the quality is so much higher. In their situation their positive ROI immediately and that is a product that people are ordering month after month after month. So, that’s just a unique situation to think about how can you do this? So with Facebook webinars definitely work great. If you are going to sell a physical product, you have to have something like this in place. Typically it is pretty difficult to drive cold traffic to a physical product unless you do a very good job of warming people up and educating them ahead of time. In this case we can but in other cases you can’t do it. So every situation is a little bit different so that’s a couple examples. The other thing is that, remember with Facebook, people are not lying in bed at night thinking about the solution or the product or service you provide. Of course they are not thinking about your product or service, but they are also not thinking about – they might be lying in bed at night thinking how they can increase their productivity but they might not be thinking a specific software or service that you provide or product. So in some cases with Facebook you’ve got to use Facebook to give them an aha moment. So wake them up and educate them on why they might need your product or service. So you kind of educate them on the benefit that your product can provide because of the problem that they might not realize that they have or the potential gain that they might not realize they could get if they knew about this amazing product or service that you provide. If that is a little bit confusing let me know and I can kind of expand a little bit.

James: No, that’s perfect! I was going to add going back to webinars, that’s also being my experience trying to sell services from Facebook I found was quite a challenge to send traffic from Facebook to a webinar opt in and get good conversion rate but when I’m sending it to a free opt in bribe, we’ve tried a free web analysis report and a few other things, that was a much better conversion, we then just plumped the webinar registration on a thank you page and we got super high conversion and those people that we did not get within the thank you page, we then had a follow up video sequence where people are getting at the end of the video there is a soft sell to sign up for the webinar and that was far, far better having warmed them up a little and got sort of to taste of what we could offer before then to put an hour of their time one week to actually attend the live event online so certainly test for your own scenario, I would vouch for that with my own experience for sure.

Keith: Yeah, exactly! And so that’s a perfect example and so I touched on that and the reason I said in some cases, I have seen a few cases where some people, because of the way it’s built, just some unique things about it, they end up getting a little better results in driving traffic directly to the webinar, I would say an 80/20 situation you’re going to be better off doing exactly what you just said and there’s a few reasons why. Think about it this way, they see an ad and register for this webinar. Even the potential benefits they are going to get from registering and watching that webinar. Good. People have a hard time realizing that they’ve got to block off two hours, they don’t know who you are yet, those types of things, they just don’t want to do it, they just don’t want to spend the time so if you have a lead magnet that is very, very specific, very easy to consume, a tool kit, a checklist, some kind of a piece of content that is super simple, one specific benefit to yourself and one specific problem, I love the one thing approach. You’ve seen lots of different banner ads in lots of different industries, spent millions of dollars in one specific stock that you can buy right now that can change the game. But very specific, something that at least in some cases a seminar about what to do about it talking about how their 5 pieces of video equipment that they use. It works! It really works and the reason why is because somebody is like, oh, I can add that to my arsenal. I can opt in even if I don’t know this guy, who cares? Because it’s just a quick tool kit that I can now have and I can add that to my arsenal. Maybe it’s a website checklist, maybe it can be something like that and now they are getting the benefit without having to worry about if they know, like or trust you. But as soon as they opt in that’s when you now have a great video talking about this amazing webinar that you’ve got coming up in the next few days if it is automated maybe it’s not and now you’ve already given them some value plus they are already in the momentum stage, they have already taken this micro commitment process so there’s a lot of psychology behind why this works. You obviously understand because you’re doing this. This is one of my favorite types of funnels. One of my clients, we’ve generated over a thousand opt ins from Facebook, which is what they do, they have an opt in, but they do an automated teleseminar. I made a teleseminar registration page on the thank you page. This way, if they don’t register, you’ve not got email, and you’ve got Facebook, website custom audiences to kind of loop them back to the webinar which is really one of the big things that we’re using right now in a massive way is Facebook, website custom audiences which is Facebook’s retargeting, basically their version of retargeting and we can go on talking for another hour about how we are using website custom audiences.

James: Well, that’s funny it’s actually going to be my next question so it is very appropriate that you’ve moved on to that topic because it is one of the most sort of exciting recent-ish developments on Facebook for advertisers so let’s have a chat about that. What in your opinion is the best way to utilize this new advertising option that exists for marketers?

Keith: Okay, so a couple different ways. The first thing, before I talk about that, let me tell real people real quick, in case you don’t realize, 70% of users on Facebook are on mobile. So if your funnel doesn’t work well on mobile, for example you have an order form on the thank you page you’ve got this really elaborate kind of process, then you are going to get your best results on the desktop. But what you want to do is you want to figure out a way that you can add something parallel. Maybe you have another just kind of basic lead generation campaign or maybe you’re driving a lot of traffic to blog posts where you have a mobile optimized site and then you can retarget people back to your webinar or back to your product offer because Facebook’s retargeting, Facebook’s custom audiences are cross device capable. They are connected to the Facebook account so if somebody sees your original account opt in on their mobile device and they are logged in, then maybe two days later, and the next day or later that day, they see an ad for your webinar registration they can be at their desktop computer and completely different computer, different browser, and see that ad that you now have in front of them or maybe it is only displayed to people that have already visited your blog, so website custom audiences is a very popular and powerful in that regard so what we do is we do main things. One, of course we do a lot of lead generation in to a Facebook “appropriate lead magnets” so it’s that thing that is very specific, very easy to consume, it’s not about their product, it’s very specific. So we might drive a lot of traffic from the lead magnet but we know a lot of people are not going to convert in to the next step. We’re going to miss people that get the webinar, if we’re trying to sell something on the next page like a low priced offer or something like that then we’re going to lose a lot of people. Then what we can do is we can use website custom audiences, we might run a video testimonial ad with a video testimonial with a link that links back to the sales page or to the webinar registration page. But that ad is only displayed to people that have an opt in but have not yet converted to a sale or to a registration. So that is one kind of basic way. The other thing that we do a lot, is I call it my promoted post retargeting loop strategy. I have talked about this for a couple of years now and we spend 20%-30% of our budget and most of our clients that actually have good content to promote and to amplify and we find traffic to blog posts and so I actually just did a presentation for Mine Valley down in Port of Irdea two weeks ago. It wasn’t even planned but the CEO who is a friend of mine talked about how 20-30% of their sales come from this exact strategy and I was super excited because I’m like I have been talking about this for years and it’s so hard for people to understand it because it is harder to measure the ROI! It is harder to measure the immediate ROI from this strategy. What this strategy is, and I talk about this a little bit last year when I talked at James Schramko’s SuperFastBusiness event in the second half of my presentation and its driving traffic to a very high value piece of content maybe inside your blog, it’s a podcast, where people don’t have to opt in to consume the content. That’s the key. So no you’re not probably get a high conversion rate because you’ve taken them to an article or a blog post but what you’re doing is you’re building good will. You’re building massive good will and you’re also pre framing people and warming people up. If you hae a good website that’s designed with some good strong calls to action, maybe good strong sidebar kind of banners that they can click on, in the middle of your post maybe we’ve got a pop up, maybe you have a hello bar call to action at the top of your site, hellobar.com, you know, those types of things. But if they don’t opt in, who cares? Because that visitor is now added to your Facebook website custom audience which is an asset. I was talking to Molly Pittman who runs all the traffic in the Facebook ads for Ryan Dice and a month and a half, two months ago and she was saying they were in a meeting, just a small one with like five or six of them employees and Ryan was like, those that have the most custom audiences two years from now are going to win biggest online. And it’s true because you have to think about that as an asset like an email list so you can now create follow up sequences almost with a Facebook ads so you can run now somebody that landed on your blog but did not take action in your calls to action in one of your site, now you can run an ad that goes to your webinar registration. But those people that land on your webinar registration are way more warmed up. They’re like, Oh, yeah, a could article I’ve read or a cool video I’ve watched from James the other day about how to get leads or something like that and then they opt in, you get higher conversion rates, you get higher show up rates and you get higher sales rates so that’s a strategy you’d like to use 20% – 30% of your budget but it’s not going to be your main strategy. Your main strategy is still going to be driving traffic to a lead menu. All these stuff helps and the other thing is that this is what Facebook wants. Facebook wants you to amplify it so this is not only a strategy that actually works but it is also setting you up to be really ready for the big changes that Facebook is going to be rolling out for the coming years. A year and a half two years from now we might not be able to drive traffic to squeeze pages. Facebook doesn’t really like that stuff and so this is also preparing you to build a long term sustainable business that you can drive traffic to from Facebook.

James: Yeah, coming back to the core of what this is all about, it is really understanding the platform and the psychology of the people that you are actually marketing to people that are on Facebook to consume interesting stuff and to be entertained, unnecessary there to make a purchase and it would be perhaps on Google when they are doing the search. It really is understanding where your prospect is in the cycle and just moving them that next step building up trust, building up authority so that you can then make an offer at the appropriate time later on yeah?

Keith: Right.

James: So let’s talk a little bit about the ads themselves. I don’t think it’s such an important part of the whole process but I’d like to get your input on where ads are at and what’s working right now. There was a time where the smiley woman with the red border around it was kind of the flavour of the day when we were just marketing on the right hand side. What’s working right now in terms of driving click through rate?

Keith: Sure, sure, sure. So I’ll give you a couple of tips, so #1 if you do have some kind of a colour or a background or something like that on your image, the more it can clash in Facebook, the more it will help your ad stand out. It’s going to help your click through rates if you have some kind of a general background of your color scheme that is opposite of the main Facebook colour. It doesn’t have to be a specific colour but opposite. Black can be good you know, bright colours can help. But, that being said, this is what I’ve said and this is what I’ve talked about in my book in the chapter about images is that I have never been kind of the one that would create this really bright border and stuff like that in some of our images and I know in some of our ads have probably lower click through rates than some people that have these massive, crazy images that stand out but what I like to think about is, with Facebook, yes, it’s about the click but you want quality clicks because you want people converting to your website and you don’t want people bouncing because Facebook penalises you for that. They don’t talk about this specifically anywhere but it is one of the factors that get way in to your price for your click and also to your impressions. So if you have a lot of people clicking on your ad and bouncing back to Facebook, your click cost will be a little bit higher but also you’ll stop giving impressions and you won’t know why, and I see this all the time with our students. They can’t figure out why they can’t get any more impressions, it keeps increasing their bids and then it just stops and probably because they have gotten some negative feedback on their ad or they have a high bounce rate and then what you need to do in that case is that you just need to duplicate that ad set and create a different image or something different to get higher quality clicks and you just have to pause it because you are never going to get impressions on it, it is basically done! So, to give you a little bit more specifics on this, this is the way I like to look at it, in the right column ad, especially in the days when they are smaller and there was more of them, your first initial strategy or your goal is to get somebody to see your ad. You need to stand out among the noise so it’s going to stand out. So you want it bright, maybe just an image, maybe some text, but it’s going to be one or two words so it’s big enough for people to actually read, you have to stand out, and then the next thing is to get them to click on it then you want them to opt in, right? However on the news feed ads it’s different. Because the news feed ad pretty up takes up the entire news feed above the fold. If you see any Facebook news feed ad, it’s big! Maybe it’s a video, it’s got the space for copy – so the way I look at the news feed ad is I know that people are probably going to see my ad because it is in their news feed and my target audience is going to see it. now if you quickly just blindly scroll through the newsfeed pretty fast, so you see how having a colour of an image that stands out, those things are great but remember, people are probably going to see it, but your goal is to get them to click on it. So with this right column, your goal is to first to get them to see it then to click on it, with the news feed, it’s more like just click on it. So think about long term, how can you get quality clicks? You want high click through rates because it helps your cost, how can you get quality clicks and then when they do click on it, you want them to come to your landing page to opt in so you’re giving the impression here, a long term impression on your brand so I don’t like cheesy images to just get people to click because in my opinion it’s damaging the long term brand so I love whiteboard, I love using still images, that’s one of my favourite things to do with our clients and with our stuff, just take a video, and then just pause it and take a screenshot and then add a little call to action text over it. Use Kanva.com for that, my favourite new app, it’s not brand new or anything but it’s improved a lot lately. It’s an amazing app to add images, create Facebook images, add really cool overlay text to make it look like a sign or something like that and so that is a good app to use but I like those types of things. Sometimes we’ll do like the right side of the image is the image of the brand or the person that represents the image of the brand and then on the left side of the image maybe some text and then a button that maybe represents the image on it so those are really my favourite types of images, it’s kind of action photos and also the more you can brand yourself, build that trust and then have some kind of call to action text on your image it makes a big difference. So on the right column, remember you can add a little bit more text so if you can do that make sure that people can read it and it’s not too small.

James: That makes total sense. There is one question I was curious to ask you before we close out and that was based around a blog post that I had seen you written on your site which was explaining a concept where you can use Facebook ads to get media attention on the likes of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I did not read it in detail and I’d like you to explain the process here. I am certainly curious. Would you mind sharing how that works?

Keith: It’s a great question. Actually I first learned about this trick from Dennis Yu, he’s an amazing Facebook ad expert and I have learned some great stuff from him and he talked about this originally where if you have something of value, maybe it’s a third party article that you have, maybe it’s an article that you got in the magazine or a podcast that somebody was on for your site for example and you have credibility content but it could be anything then what you do is you use workplace targeting. So in Facebook, this has improved a lot, you can target people based on the company that they work for so you can target people who work at the New York Times or work at San Francisco Chronicles or something like that or same thing with like a news media. Or you can also target people based on their positions, executives, CEOs, founders, marketing managers, those types of things. So you have a piece of content, maybe it’s a blog post. You’re probably not going to want to do this to a squeeze page, it’s got to be like a content piece or else it just doesn’t make sense so they’re not going to know that you are targeting them because they work in the New York Times, they are just going to think that is being targeted to your audience for some reason. So what happens is if you take them to a credibility piece they’re just going to a content piece where you are really providing value and something that builds your authority and shows you as an authority, then that’s a great way to get written up. And they’ll reach out to you and it has happened over and over to people that we’ve taught this to and that’s basically the strategy.

James: Killer! I love it! Well, as it happens, I was also meant to be also recording with Dennis today as it happens and we pushed it back, I am sure he’ll be glad that he’s got a mention either way even if we did not record at this point so I’ll be sure to dig a little bit deeper with that one. But anyway, this has been fantastic and I am sure our listeners will want to find out a little bit more and dive a little deeper in to some of this stuff. We all course will be connecting in the New Year sometime when we’re both going to be in Sydney speaking but where can our listener get in touch with you and find out a little bit more about what you’ve got to offer?

Keith: Yeah, sure no problem. Really just the main website dominatewebmedia.com, you can go there and I have got a ton of free content, I have got some free courses and you can get information on the book to, you can go to amazon.com and find the book so just go to dominatewebmedia.com and kind of mess around.

James: Thank you. So to you the listener, that resource, Dominate Web Media, Canva and all of the other resources mentioned by Keith in today’s show, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/55 where you’ll find all of those links and you can also join in on the discussion for this episode too so all that remains Keith is for me to thank you for coming on, I have thoroughly enjoyed it and I look forward to hanging out in person real soon!

Keith: I do too! Absolutely! Talk to you soon James.

James: Cheers man, bye.

So there you go that was Keith Kranc from Dominate web Media and that was of course episode#55 of Traffic Jam. Remember to get the most out of this episode training so you should be heading over to TrafficJamCast.com/55 where you can download the Facebook advertising checklist I have prepared for as well as get your hands on all of the other bonuses too which conclude a full transcript of today’s session, a downloadable MP3 as well as some exclusive episode artwork so to get your hands on all of that including the Facebook Advertising Checklist go to TrafficJamCast.com/55.

To ensure you don’t miss out on next week’s episode, also ensure that you are subscribed via iTunes or Stitcher Radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

We end this week’s show as we do every show by introducing a Traffic Jam chosen by our guest so here we go, this is Keith Kranc’s choice, enjoy the song and I look forward to seeing you back here in about seven days from now. See you then!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Keith Kranc has picked the anthem Eye of the Tiger by American rock band Survivor.

Eye of the Tiger was the theme song to the movie Rocky III and was released in 1982. The track reached number one in both the US and UK charts.

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW:

Go right ahead and download the Facebook Advertising checklist that’s been prepared for this show.

The checklist reveals the 9 step process Keith Kranc has used to generate over 200,000 leads and $4million revenue for his clients.

When you follow along and implement the 9 steps laid out in the checklist, you too can expect wildly successful Facebook campaigns.

What are you waiting for? Download Keith’s checklist below:

With over 1 billion users worldwide and relatively low ad costs, Facebook is easily the fastest way to reach a large target audience online without burning though bags of cash.

But as with any other advertising platform over the internet, CPCs rise, algorithms get updated and targeting strategies need to change.

Get up to date with the best targeting techniques for social advertising at minimum ad spend as Laura Betterly reveals the Facebook targeted ads tricks that she’s used to get leads for less than a dollar. Tune in and apply the same techniques to get similar results for yourself.

OUR GUEST:

Laura Betterly is a successful entrepreneur who has spent much of her life being a “tech geek” to become who she is today. There was a time in Laura’s early years when she pursued her love for playing the guitar and traveled all over the world with famous artists.

However, this era did not last forever. Laura transitioned to media and marketing, took her company Touch Media Group public and has spent the past several years teaching local marketing and supporting local businesses with marketing services.

Currently, Laura is partnered with marketers Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins for her latest course, Traffic Genesis. This aims to help others to properly utilize Facebook advertising for their businesses. Her boutique marketing agency, Yada Yada Marketing, is Google Certified for PPC and she also knows a few things about SEO.

Laura is a foodie and loves great wines. When she has free time she spends it with her two teenage children.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 54 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Laura Betterly quote from the show:

You can also download Laura’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Positive thinking is good, but nothing replaces doing something effectively.” ~ @laurabetterly
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Welcome back this is episode#54 of Traffic Jam, I am your host James Reynolds and you’re tuned in to the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and market your business better online.

Talking of marketing, I want to acknowledge Jay Baer who’s just launched a new website called MarketingPodcasts.com which is the first search engine for marketing podcast. I know if you are listening in to this show then no doubt you practice marketing and you enjoy podcast so I am pretty sure you are going to find value in to this new site just as I expect to do so please do check it out – a great initiative from our friend from the show Jay Baer, it’s www.marketingpodcasts.com. Of course you will find TrafficJam listed there but you’ll also find a bunch of other great shows too so please do check it out.

So on to today’s show, the first thing I need you to do is go to TrafficJamCast.com/54 because I put together a set of cliff notes of the show which you can refer to when listening along the show episode. You’ll also find a full transcript as well as exclusive episode artwork. So go ahead, visit TrafficJamCast.com/54 then listen on to the show.

So we are joined today by Laura Betterly who is a very well rounded traffic specialist. She’s got an agency that specializes in paid and organic search in social media, display advertising and social advertising so she knows her stuff in many areas. Laura’s released several courses teaching several marketing strategies as well as aimed and produced with information product marketers. She’s been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal as well as CNN and NPR. She recently did a show with Kevin Harrington of Shark Tank Fame. Whatever your online business model, I am sure you are going to find real value in this interview so let’s get started. Here’s Laura Betterly and this is TrafficJam Episode#54.

James: Welcome back listener! This is Traffic Jam episode#54 and joining me here today is Laura Betterly! Laura, how are you doing?

Laura: Good! Thank you so much for having me on. It’s an honor.

James: Well, it’s my real pleasure and I think when it comes to traffic generation, you are pretty versatile and I am excited to see which direction this interview will go in, but I think to kind of kick things off, let’s start at the peak. Imagine you have a traffic genie and you can just ask for one single traffic source, what would it be?

Laura: It would be Facebook hands down. And I have been involved in traffic from the beginning of the internet which makes me a dinosaur in internet years but nonetheless, the biggest exploits and exploits meaning where I can get the largest patches of traffic at the most affordable prices, is Facebook hands down.

James: And is that what it does for you in terms of why Facebook is so appealing? The fact that there is just so much available traffic at such a low cost?

Laura: Well, it’s more than that because I can find my exact target market very, very easily and there’s things like audience insight where I can look at competitors pages and look at things that people who like one thing other things that they have in common. Facebook is partnered with good data and that means in a lot of cases that there is personal information that is available for individuals and for marketers that anyone can go ahead and get really – so you know, if you really want to get it down, I mean on a personal level, well yeah, there is no such thing as privacy. At the same time, I kind of like the fact that even for me the ads that I get served to me on Facebook are exactly what I am interested in. unfortunately, I buy way too many shoes nowadays.

James: I saw a video that you have done the other day actually where you were slagging off Zappos because they’re retargeting on Facebook and they’d like you to find a pair of shoes that you wanted but you couldn’t actually find. I guess that is one way that you should not do it if you are using Facebook targeting.

Laura: Yes, exactly. But retargeting, which is another broad subject when it comes to this is actually a wonderful thing. Because it used to be somebody can come to your webpage and if you didn’t answer their question right away the only thing that would happen is they would hit the X at the top of the screen and they are gone. But with retargeting, you can follow them around and you can offer them something else. And if they said no to that page, they might say yes to something else. Or you can add more value because part of any marketing campaign especially with Facebook has a lot to do with building credibility and building your audience so that they understand who you are, you build your personality so they trust you. So sometimes they are not going to buy on the first click. The first click should be something that is of value, that puts you on top of mind, something that goes ahead and allows that individual to start to say, oh, this is someone who understands what I really need and want. And build value, and build value and to the point where they say, this is the information that I am getting from these guys for free; well then of course, when I buy something it’s going to be of huge massive value.

James: Yeah, well let’s get started with Facebook and talk about really how we can get going with it. it’s an easy platform to get started with but I guess like any paid traffic source in the wrong hands and you do things incorrectly, can also burn through a lot of money as well. What should our listener look out for in terms of pitfalls and how they can be avoided?

Laura: Well, first thing, you never test with a large budget. Test with $50 or less, and you are going to see a couple of things. First, you have to be a statistics junkie. You have to look at what is actually going on. The first thing, and this is email, as well as Facebook and what not. The point of an ad is to get the click. That’s the only point of the ad. The point of a subject line on an email is to get somebody to open on it. So when you get somebody to click to your landing page wherever you are sending them, the thing that that’s supposed to do is to illicit some sort of response and it could be a share or a like, or an opt in for some free content. There’s some guys that are doing quite well with what we call the reverse engage squeeze I call it, which is where they send people to really just great content and then retarget them through the opt in after the fact. And for social that makes a lot of sense, but you have to remember we have to look at, first of all, is your ad getting clicked on? If it is getting clicked on, good then the first part of the equation is done but if you are getting clicks and you’re not getting the reaction that you want out of that then you’ve got to go in and you have to say, why am I not getting engagement or why am I not getting the opt in or what not, and look at competitors. There is a great tool called Follow.net that is absolutely free. There is a paid version but I’ll tell you I love it because you can go to a competitor’s page and it can give you all sorts of information. If they have affiliate offers what do there landing page look like? What keywords are they ranking on? As far as contextual ads, what do they look like what kind of images are they using and what kind of banners? And you know you have to start with them. Most people would say you have to throw some stuff on a page and see what happens. I always say that’s the wrong way to go, the first thing you need to do is know your market! Know what is engaging people in your market. What are your competitors doing? I have to tell you, if your competitor has a landing page that has been up for a year and a half and they are still driving traffic to it, chances are, it is a good page. Now, I am not saying rip off the page, what I am saying is get the elements of that, look at the ones that are successful and look at what they have in common and make sure that your page has that. You know how many pages I look at that don’t have a phone number on the header? Hello? You want people to call?

James: That’s a classic, right? I mean the amount of people that send people to a webpage and almost shun them away without giving them any possibility to do business with them, it is quite amazing. It just baffles me sometimes.

Laura: Yeah, it’s called Unmarketing and they want to know why they are going broke. The truth of the matter is if they are good at what they do then people need to find them but you also need to let them know that you are to be trusted and that you can solve whatever problem that is and that depends on what kind of business that is. Not everybody is just an online business. A lot of people have a physical locations and they actually talk to humans. Believe it or not!

James: Well, I think it is a great point and is perhaps one that many people shun over the whole research phase of a campaign really lays the foundations for success. You’ve mentioned a great tool but going deep in to your process, Laura, what sort of steps do you go through to kind of evaluate a campaign in the market before you get launched in a campaign itself?

Laura: Well, I first of all go to follow.net and I sometimes go a little deeper with some other keyword tools. There’s a couple of social tools that are not great at looking at social ads but nonetheless that’s what exists for right now. But the other great tool, or actually two cool tools, one is Facebook graph search and you just go to Facebook and you can say pages liked by people who like and insert whatever that is. And you start to look at those competitor pages. And then you can go to audience insights and get all that big data information like if you look at somebody like Tony Robbins or Brendan Bouchard who are very, very big in social media, you’ll start to see a pattern of things that people also like; they like success magazine, they like Sandy Karowski and it is very funny, you start to see these patterns of what else. Because part of it too is you can have a great ad and a great landing page and if you send it to the wrong target market, you’ll think that you don’t have a winning combination. But when you send it to the right target, it goes on fire. It’s like can I get more traffic? Can I do more? Can I spend more? If you spent a dollar on ads and you knew every time you spent a dollar you made two dollars back, you would try to spend as much money as possible. And that is really where we take our clients to, that point where they have to turn down the ads spent because they are so darn busy they can’t keep up with all the business.

James: Yeah, exactly, it’s the slot machine scenario where they acknowledge to so often right? I mean put a dollar in and get a two dollar return out, you are going to stuff that slot machine with as much money as you can get your hands on.

Laura: Exactly! Exactly! But you know, everybody thinks that there is overnight success, and one shot deals, and sometimes you get it right, the first time around but normally, that’s the exception to the case. The truth of the matter is if you do your research right, you are then starting with a slate that is most likely to get success but then you have to look at the analytics. If you have any in page analytics. If you are using video, have video analytics. If you look at a video and you see that 63% of people are leaving in the first 30 seconds, then you know there is something right before then that’s repelling them so you have to start being smart, being a detective in fact. I think part of marketing, the biggest part of it, is being a really good detective- knowing what’s working and what isn’t. And it is funny because I started this life out as a musician saying I would never, never use math! And I now use it every day, so I now made my high school math teacher happy.

James: My gosh, I can resonate with you there, I mean my previous incarnations, I used to run a photography company surrounded by creative people all day and now I just dive in to all these data like two worlds that couldn’t be further apart, to be honest.

Laura: Yeah but you know what? The one thing that I think that makes it creative for me is that there is a little bit of art along with the science of it because you’ve got to have the right creative, you’ve got to have the right copy, you’ve got to write the right background so it is a little bit of a – I don’t know what to say, I am a bit of a savant on it but you just have to have a really good understanding of what is the aesthetics of it also, otherwise it doesn’t work. And what’s funny is I teach a lot and I have thousands of students and the ones that get it do well and the other ones just pound their heads against the wall.

James: Yeah, I can understand that. So we’ve mentioned research, we’ve also mentioned a bunch of other things like ad copy and just really understanding the audience. What are some of the other leverage points in your opinion that can kind of leverage up campaigns the fastest?

Laura: Well, again, it’s getting the right message and getting that click and also spending time looking really, really well. What are the people’s interest? What is their income level? Where are they located? I mean, why advertise cosmetic dentistry in a neighborhood where most people are on welfare? They can’t afford it. So you have to be kind of smart on that. It’s your customer avatar. You look at your existing customers, you look at who is your target customer, is it somebody who has an x amount of expendable income and lives this way and is married has 2 kids, whatever that is, sometimes it is something different but you know who your ideal customer is and you go ahead and you craft your audience based on that and then if you look at your research correctly, you’ll also craft your creative based on that. Now you have to remember, with Facebook, it is not like search. With search you’ve got somebody who says I want widgets and you say, hey, I’ve got great widgets, right? With Facebook, it’s a social platform so if you’ve got great widgets, you might have to come up with a funny meme on widgets that gets them excited, because you will want your competitors and look at their posts and look at what gets engagement and what doesn’t. If you’ve got somebody with a million followers and they post something kind of sales-y that’s got one like and one share, you know that that’s not getting any engagement. You look down and you say, oh my god, that’s an inspirational quote that has been shared two thousand times, well now you know you are in the kind of right area of engagement. And so you have got to figure out a way of taking that message and turning them in to something that is going to take them to your website. And I guess that’s the art of it.

James: Yeah, that’s the creative part. It certainly is, I mean, you can take the signs of looking at headlines that have been successful for others but if you don’t adapt it to your own audience and be a little bit creative around it, then I doubt you can expect too great of a result. So you mentioned about targeting and I know you work directly with a lot of small businesses, are you ever faced with the challenge of business owners saying, hey that is great Laura, let us go after our perfect target market, our ideal customer avatar but hey our product can be bought by everyone, let’s just send a message out there to a wide audience? Have you ever come across that? That seems to be a running theme when I speak to business owners.

Laura: You know that is interesting. Usually I am right when it comes down to it but I can grant that a customer might be right and usually what I will do is say, okay, let’s test it. And I will test it. I will take a small budget and I will test it. now, truly interesting, with the new options that Facebook has, there are some guys who have great success but I actually have not had a chance to do it myself but using conversion pixels to go to a wide audience like that, there are some guys who are doing quite well. Basically just saying, all the United States, men and women, but the optimization point and that is for anyone who doesn’t understand is Facebook, because they have all this data on individuals, they know, if somebody, if you put out a data on your thank you page, that’s the page that somebody goes to after they do the action you want to. So if they do the opt in to the thank you page after that or if they buy something it’s the thank you page after that. You can say to Facebook, hey, I want to optimize for people who hit this thank you page and you let Facebook figure out the terms that way and your relatively large budget that way don’t usually run out of it because what happens is that Facebook looks at everybody who hits that thank you page and finds things that they have in common with one another and so they’ll serve up that ad to more of those type of people and it is really interesting because all artificial intelligence and there is nothing we can basically understand how their algorithm works, all I can say is when I do optimize for that even when I target put the audiences there, you know, darn, I am getting a lot more opt ins than I used to because there is a whole thing with impressions, right? So let’s say you have an ad and you’re bidding for the click and you start getting really good opt ins on it but then you start to see this thing called frequency. So let’s say that the audience that you set up is half a million people and then it hits 10,000 people and you’ve gotten really good opt ins but it doesn’t seem to go over that 10,000 people and you just start seeing that the same ad gets shown over and over and then of course your opt ins go down because people get blind to it, but of course you had 490,000 other people who should have seen that ad who didn’t. When you go to the optimization like that, it starts to decrease the frequency and extend the reach which is why when you go real general like that, it sometimes works but you have to have enough budget and enough time to be able to make that kind of kick off. That makes sense? It’s so hard to explain in audio without going in PowerPoint but that’s really the crux of it that works incredibly well.

James: Yeah, in fact we covered this on a couple of episodes back with our mutual friend Curt Maly. We were talking about how those campaigns were optimized based on intelligence but you said we probably don’t really know about, I mean Facebook are making connections between those people that have landed on that thank you page that we probably don’t even know about. Like the color of shoes that they like to put on in the morning, I mean who knows what those connections are but Facebook are optimizing around putting that ideal persona together for you. I think Laura that covers things very well. If you have a point here about the way Facebook here are developing that are a success of the platform has been that they always do innovate in terms of how their platform works and the audience options that are available to us, where do you see Facebook advertising go next? What’s sort of around the corner?

Laura: Well, I think it is starting and they were in to a quantity phase where they were taking every advertiser and almost every ad with very little exception. Of course they had certain rules in their terms of service which are very specific but I see it going the same way Google Adwords went which is where they had all the advertisers in the world and they were taking a lot of different business. And I am seeing that accounts are getting shut down and you can get another account, it’s not like you’re banned for life like what happens with Google but I think they are going from a quantity phase to a quality phase. And so advertising that isn’t social or is to sales-y or that makes claims that can’t be backed up by science are just getting disabled, shut down, or otherwise and they are doing it from a viewpoint of they want users, people in the newsfeed to see things that they want so if you have an ad that’s a little annoying and it gets a lot of complaints, it will get shut down. And if you get enough of those, they are going to shut the whole account down. They still allow squeeze pages, they don’t like exit hops so you’re going to have to look at what is going on and make those adjustments based on that. It is still relatively affordable in comparison to something like Google AdWords but I think the future is really going to be more about quality than it is about how much money you have.

James: Yeah, and I think this is a natural majority of the platform which we have seen Google adwords go through right? They at one point got very strict upon advertising regulations and shut down all affiliates which were sending people to affiliate pages. What page it lands on and I guess that same thing is happening with Facebook, they just want to make sure they get a better quality of advertising which will result in a better user experience and keep people in the platform.

Laura: That’s correct, but there is, just like Google despite their do no evil moniker, it still means that there’s some small businesses who inadvertedly kind of put themselves in the whole thing. And then organic engagement, we already know organic engagement is going down and it will continue to go down and everybody goes why are my posts not being seen? And I am like, you know, you are using Facebook for business, the fact that they gave it to you for free for a while doesn’t mean that they have to give it to you for free forever and it is kind of funny because I call it the crack tailor handling which is the first hit is for free. And then they’re like, okay, pay me. And they have a right to ask to be paid! If you are making money off of a life form, they have a right to be paid for it. it is great if you can exploit it for a while and get free traffic out of it but you know, the purpose of their business just like the purpose of our business is to make more money than they spend and you’ve got to respect that.

James: Yeah, well Laura you’ve been involved with plenty of campaigns and I know you run campaigns for other well-known marketers online and you also handle some for your own clients, what has been some of the most successful campaigns that you’ve been involved with and had the most success?

Laura: I think if you already have someone who has a great personality or has some of their own celebrity juice and not necessarily a Grammy award winning artist although I have dealt with those. But somebody in their niche, who is the rock star of their niche, it gets a lot more engagement. This is personality based marketing. So those kinds of campaigns do extremely well but I also found that, in doing stuff with personality development also and you know what’s very funny because I am not really kind of a fufu you know, don’t get me wrong I believe in positive thinking and what not but I don’t think because you think a positive thought, if you don’t do something about it, a million dollars is not going to end up in your front doorstep. Sometimes I would get kind of these fufu thoughts, whatever and I go, you know, there is nothing that is going to replace doing something really effective. I am really sorry. But I found that, with these guys, I had started my regular hard hitting campaigns and I was failing and I was failing pretty badly. And when I switched and did some competitive research, I switched it to more of an inspirational quote with an afterthought of oh by the way if you’d like to find out more about this about yourself, click here. And that got, not only great engagement but it got a lot of shares and the lead cost was less than a dollar which I have not seen forever so I was pretty happy. But you know it surprises me sometimes what works and what doesn’t which is why I stopped saying what I know is best because I’ll go okay let’s test it and see what happens. I had a client that walked in and told me that their product was going to change the world and that kids are going to do better in school and marry this and we are all going to stay together and I thought okay great I am in to this and he shows ma piece of plastic that goes on the bottom of the bed sheet so that they don’t bunch up at night. And I am thinking this guy is a psycho. This is psycho! And you know what, we did some research because he had already paid and I was like oh my god, what will I do with this? And it did not end up being like a campaign like this but what we found out from the research was that there were 2 markets that it would actually work well with and it wasn’t promoted as changing the world but guess what, it is being sold in hotels and it actually saves a lot of time and money for hoteliers because they spend less time making the beds in between and then I ended up parting friends after giving him his different markets and I saw it in Walmart and I thought this guy was ready for the rubber room between you and I.

James: Yeah, well there are some lessons there, one is you talking about thinking one thing would work and then it didn’t and based on that experience based on your understanding of your own customers and your own market or someone else’s and you’ve got to test those scenarios to see what really, really works. And I guess the second one, related to your bedsheets scenario is that you’ve got to understand that someone else’s problem again may not be your own unless you dive deep and find out what that is, you’re never going to have a successful campaign and to the hotelier I can imagine that changing bedsheets is probably a pain in the ass- mind the pun!

Laura: Oh, yeah. No worries. I was thinking more about rogue bedding and I was just like, I don’t know how to spend this.

James: Oh, dear. Anyway, minding puns, you might have noticed that I said genie or had a genie reference in my opening question, it was 100% intentional because I know you’ve put up a cause quite recently called Traffic Genesis with a couple of other very successful marketers. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that Laura?

Laura: Yeah, Traffic Genesis not only teaches Facebook and how to run them for yourself but also, my partners on that, Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins are really good marketers so they show everything from how to actually create a really good map and funnel for your business. They did so much training I can’t even think half of it but it is about how to write your copy and how to design your pages and what you should have and what you shouldn’t have. It is really set up quite nicely. I did my piece of it but they did so much as far as the content goes as far as really understanding how to build everything from start to finish which is awesome and then the other thing about it which I love is that we have a Facebook group and every day I am answering tens of questions, sometimes hundreds of questions on things that are happening because with the platforms, the basics of marketing don’t really change. You are trying to create an understanding so you can bring business in but the technology changes very rapidly like in the last couple of weeks Facebook has changed the interface. It doesn’t change basically how you do your ads but where your pixels are, where you put your audiences that changed! I was like, wait a minute, it was here yesterday, now it’s ta dah! So our community is great because we really get in to on a daily basis what’s what and what’s changing and I love it! I actually prefer working with others that way more than doing all the heavy lifting for our clients.

James: Yeah, well that would make sense. The last things, where a great place to send people off to if they want to dive a little deeper in to all this stuff and perhaps get some help from experts such as yourself Laura, so shall we include as a place for people to send off to? Where else should our audience connect with you on the internet?

Laura: Oh, well I have a Facebook page and that is Facebook.com/LauraBetterlylive and then of course there’s my personal blog Laurabetterly.com which I think you called in another day, I don’t know if you noticed but we updated it on Friday so if you saw it before that it’s much prettier.

James: Well, we’ll make sure that that now prettier link is included in the show notes so to you the listener head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/54 where you’ll find the links to Laura’s Facebook page, her personal blog, and also to Traffic Genesis plus any of the other resources mentioned by Laura in today’s show, so all that remains Laura is to thank you for coming on. You promised it will be a blast and we’d have some fun and that has totally been the case so thanks for coming on today.

Laura: Oh, thanks for having me!

So there you go that was Laura Betterly and as mentioned at the end of the interview, you can get a link to Laura’s sites by going to TrafficJamCast.com/54 where you can also download an MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus my own notes on today’s interview instilled in to a mindmap for you to refer to when you’re next building a Facebook Campaign. So head on over there now, the link is TrafficJamCast.com/54 where you can also comment, ask questions, and join in on the discussion for this episode.

If you have not done so already, you should subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio so you’re the first to get TrafficJam as soon as they are released. The links to do that are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and tht of course ids for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher radio.

Now we end the show this week as we do every week with a traffic Jam. It is a track chosen of course by our guest today, Laura Betterly and she’s gone for very appropriately, Happy by Pharrell Williams. So, enjoy this song and I will see you back here for another episode real soon!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Laura Betterly has picked the track Happy from American singer, songwriter, producer and rapper Pharrell Williams.  

The track was recorded for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. The track also served as the lead single from Williams’ second studio album, Girl (2014).

Happy has been highly successful for Pharrell, reaching number one in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and 19 other countries. It also claimed a first, a 24 hour long music video – 24 Hours of Happy 

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help you get the most out of this audio training, I have taken my own personal notes from the episode and distilled them in to a mindmap for you.

The mindmap summarises the very best bits from the interview, including Laura’s Facebook targeted ads tricks, her Facebooks ads toolkit and the exact steps Laura goes through to ensure her campaigns the strongest likelihood of success.

Click the link below to download the free mindmap plus exclusive episode artwork, mp3 and PDF transcript:

As Neville Medhora discovered in a drunken blur one night pushing rave lights, getting your email list to buy your stuff requires more than just selling.

You need to find the right way to get them to open your emails, read what you have to say, and decide they need your product to make their lives and businesses better.

The art and science of copywriting has a huge effect on what you get. When you discover how to learn copywriting and apply the formulas savvy marketers have been using for centuries to sell more stuff, your business will prosper. In this episode Neville Medhora reveals how.

OUR GUEST:

Neville Medhora first discovered the power of copy applying copywriting principles to his own business. He noticed when he sent out emails or wrote content for a page according to proper copywriting techniques, his products “magically” sold better. But it wasn’t “magic” at all. Neville had learned and applied the science and psychology of selling.

Neville has applied his persuasive copywriting skills to is own businesses as well as to App Sumo for whom he is the chief copywriter. Neville also teaches others how to learn copywriting via his site KopywritingKourse.com.

He is a fan of people who are self made and those that make the world a better place to live. He is a musician at heart and plays several instruments: guitar, bass guitar, doumbek, piano, drums and a little bit of harmonica.

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“It shouldn’t be called sales copy as sales is just a part of what you are trying to do.” ~ @NevMed
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

What’s up? Welcome back listener! This is episode#53 of the Traffic Jam podcast, I am your host James Reynolds and this of course is the podcast show where we teach you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

Today on the show, we’re joined my Neville Medhora who’s the chief copywriting sumo of AppsSumo. We’ll be sharing among other things the story about 120 more sales from a single email where previously dedicated people to. What did he change? Well pretty much the only thing was his email copy. He’ll tell you that story and more on this episode.

But before we get to Neville, go and grab the bonus that comes along with this episode and you get those by going to TrafficJamCast.com/53 to get all of the bonuses that come with this week and on this link we include a downloadable MP3, a full transcript of today’s training, plus a pdf resource guide with links to seven of the very best-ever Gary Halbert letters.

James: So welcome back listener! This is episode #53 of Traffic Jam and joining me right here is Neville Medhora. Neville, how are you?

Neville: Hey, James. How is it going? I am quite well.

James: Awesome! Great to have you here and I want to ask you about your spelling to begin with, you are a copywriter but you spell copywriting with a K, have you ever found that your bad spelling has kind of held you back in your profession at all?

Neville: You’re like 10% of the people who are like you can’t even spell copywriting, you must not know anything, but those people are really stupid so they don’t really know anything. It is Kopywritingcourse.com but it is spelled with a K instead of a C and the whole thing was, I remember when I first started copywriting, it was mainly about writing words on a page and that was great for 50 years ago because that was really all that you can do then on certain levels of TV and radio and now, remember we have YouTube, we have the internet – we have so many different mediums that you can transfer information from my brain to your brain that words is just one part of it. Right? So right now we are communicating via audio, we could also be communicating via video, we could also be text messaging, which in this situation, would be like the worst medium ever. So right now, I would say copywriting in the normal sense for us to be talking right now would be a bad medium and audio is better at the moment. So instead of copywriting, because it is different, it’s not just about copy it’s everything- you might write a script and have it through a video, you might have it go to an audio, you might just write it as text that’s why we call it Kopywriting with a K., it’s just different.

James: Nice! Personal branding. Good stuff!

Neville: I didn’t it intend it to be, I just wanted it to sound different than the regular copywriting, it just sounds boring to me also.

James: Yeah, well talking of non-boring and interesting, you’ve got a pretty outrageous story with finding success in copywriting that seem to involve rave lights, lots of alcohol and about 120 sales in 2 hours, if it is safe to share, would you mind sharing that story with our listeners?

Neville: Yeah, I originally did not want to share this because I normally love sharing stuff but sometimes when something works really well, you’re just like – maybe I should just shut the hell up and keep this quiet for a while. So I used to own a business called the House of Rave and with light ups and glow lights so I sell light ups and glow lights online. I was a drop shipper so it was like all my business paid my bills and savings and everything like that and my friends were like how many past customers you have and at that time it was like 7500 people that had emails and these people had already bought from me so I think your audience is pretty advanced and they know that if someone already bought something from you, that’s a really hot lead because they already have given you money, they are already like you etc. etc. and so I thought okay, if I send out an email list of my products to 7500 people, I would totally be killing it, right? So I signed up for an email service, I think it was vertical response way back in the day, that’s what I used and it cost $80 a month and I was like, all this time and all this money, and actually on my site you can download this and all the stuff I use, and I sent out these beautiful emails and I spent so much time, I was so proud of them. And the end result was on my first one, I made a grand total of I think less than $40. Meanwhile it cost me $80 to get the email service so I went in the hole $40 and the thing is, people clicked on my emails a lot, the click through rates were sky high. But here is the thing, no one bought a damn thing. So I kind of put it aside and said well, people are clicking, they are interested, it just keeps my brand name alive, blah, blah, blah and for years I basically sent out email newsletters that did nothing, they made no money. I did all these coupons, all sort of shit on there and nothing ever worked! Then, I started studying copywriting, and I feel like there should probably be a trumpet playing

James: We can add one, we can add one in the post production for you.

Neville: A lot of people probably know Gary Halbert, so one of my friends said, hey look, buy a $20 print cartridge and print out these things called the Gary Halbert letters. So I begrudgingly printed them out and there was like hundreds of pages so I was like, Ugh, this better be worth it. The first night, I stayed up until like 6am to read about this stuff, the second night, I stayed up until 6am again and I was just so enthralled with these letters because I felt like I was being taught the message from the gods. Like this is the reason that everything that I had ever sold that did not sell, this is why it did not sell and here’s how I can change it. and I remember being just so happy and pissed off at the same time that I was just learning this when I was 25 or 26 years old and so I basically started going on a tear just learning about copywriting and as most people get enthralled you just get obsessed with it for a while. James, you travel a lot so you probably see Sky Mall in the planes all the time. If you go through Sky Mall and read every single thing, and then think, how would I change this? There is like a doggy pool float. It’s like, how would I change the copy for this? And I would literally like make drawings in Sky Mall and rewrite copy while I was on the plane and I don’t know, I just found that fun. And I would look at any of the advertisements on the magazines that people left on the seats and say, well, that’s a stupid advertisement and they should do this to make people buy, etc. etc. so basically coming back to the rave company now, I’m kind of becoming a copy expert and with the help of a friend, I rewrite these email newsletters. So same 7500 people, I never made more than $40 on any of those things which is ridiculous and I made a promo for these things called finger lights which are like little lights you put on your fingers and I have actually sold it, they were like $.95 for a pack when I was selling them that was the sale price and I actually sold them at this price before and no one really bought them. So then, instead of just saying hey, finger lights are $1.95, I was like, wait a second, I pick up the phone for the customer support for this, so many people call and ask me about things that most people don’t know about. For example, I thought these finger lights were for wigged out wavers on drugs on parties that were just like waving around on the air or something like that. And that’s what I thought, but then I realized, people were calling me to ask me what kind of batteries do they take and I was like, why are you buying this? And they were like, oh, my kid gets afraid of monsters under his bed at night so I put one of these on his finger and he has like a little flashlight, he can check the monster. I was like, well that is kind of weird. And I never really thought anything about it. And then I had a plumbing company buy like 50 pairs of them and I was like, what is this like? Acme plumbing? What is your company, oh yeah, well obviously they work like under sinks and stuff and at really very odd places so even if you have a headlamp it is still very difficult to see stuff around corners so we give them these little finger lights and you know, they are so cheap that they can get damaged and whatever no one really cares. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. One parent said he had one child that was autistic and he would kind of like wave them and watch it and it would actually calm him down. And so there are all these other uses for this single product! And so I wrote about that, and if you go to Kopywriting.com there is a blog there, there is actually a thing on there that says how I downloaded and got 210 orders, you download that for free and it actually shows you the actual scripts that I used and you can see that on there and I sent that email on a Friday night, which is historically like the worst day to send anything to sell something. I went to a party and I was a little bit tipsy and I checked my phone and there was like all these order notifications, pages and pages of it, and I was like, what’s wrong with my phone? What’s going on? And when I checked, sure enough, in my account there was like thousands and thousands of dollars deposited in the last hour or two and I got a hundred and twenty orders within two hours and I made a lot of profit. And I remember thinking like every single newsletter I made before got maybe 2 people buying and because there is a coupon and they did not buy much, very low profit, all of a sudden make thousands of dollars and this email had no pictures, no nothing. It had one link on it that said buy now and the only difference between this newsletter and the other ones was this was completely copy, the other ones were all pictures and flash and flair but no explanation of why people should buy. And that was like where I was like okay, maybe there is really something big going on with this copywriting stuff and from then, I have never looked back. Like from then, the whole structure of that business changed. It moved from primarily making money from SEO and traffic from the web to just email sales. And then from there, a career was born.

James: And the rest is history, which I am sure we’ll get to over the course of the rest of the conversation. But what was it specifically about those two different approaches that you believe had such drastically different outcomes because you still had the same email set, you still had a blank sheet of paper or a blank email with a bunch of text on it, what are the qualities in that second email that just outshone the previous very much?

Neville: It goes back to the psychology of the human brain and what makes people do things. So for example, I have a bottle of water over here and I want you James to start drinking more water so I tell you James you should drink more water. That’s not a very convincing statement, right? That’s just like a mom nagging at you and that would not work really well. Now, what if I said, hey James, do you actually work out ever?

James: Yeah, yeah, I work out. Yeah.

Neville: You go to the gym and lift weights like that right?

James: I do. Less frequently than I should, but I do. Yeah.

Neville: So you know how people say like your body is 70% water etc. etc. I will spare you the science of it right now but basically the way protein and amino acid works is they have to be really well hydrated with H20 like if you like look at its chemistry, that is how it works. Have you ever noticed if you see those big body builder guys, they carry like those comically large jugs of water, have you ever seen that?

James: Yeah.

Neville: They have those big blue office water cooler kind of things, it looks like a smaller version of those. And you are like, why are they drinking this comically large amount of water? And the reason is those big bodybuilder guys know that when you drink a lot more water and you are ultra-hydrated and not just hydrated, your muscles grow at a 30% faster rate with a regular work out meaning every time that you go to the gym and you are not ultra-hydrated, you don’t get 30% of those gains which is kind of silly, that’s just like paying $100 for something and someone just taking $30 away and you’d be like, hey, what happened? I want that. So that’s exactly what happened. So basically, I just got to convince you to drink a little bit more water when you go to the gym, right? I can tell you just drink an extra liter more of water and you’ll see 30% more results from the exact same work out you do no matter what you do and that would be a convincing argument, right?

James: Totally, yeah. And I guess going back to your original example and what you described about that second email, you were starting to understand better what people’s motivation before you just start people giving this things to play around at raves and make themselves look pretty fluorescent lights, the plumber who wants to see around the corners, you’ve got the mother who bought it for her child who’s scared at night, you’re understanding then what people wanted them for and I guess that’s quite critical, right?

Neville: That’s a concept called repositioning and I have actually done a couple of my products where they went from making just a few thousand to over a hundred thousand very quickly just by repositioning. It is unreal! And we are repositioning something like for 16 year old ravers and those people had no money to plumbing companies and stuff like that who do have a lot of money. There’s a lot of money that can be made just by repositioning these products.

James: Yeah, so now of course rolling a little bit ahead, you’re the App Sumo which is the not quite daily deal site for entrepreneurs. You guys send a lot of emails, right? I mean frequency’s due to the nature of the business is pretty constant. What have you learned about sort of email frequencies ending and other stuff that might be good to share with our listeners?

Neville: Yeah, so Noah was building App Sumo originally with 50 thousand subscribed and I was learning about this copy and I was like, dude you’ve got to try this copy stuff. So me and him we used to work in my apartment all the time together and I was like, let me send out an email and it used to just be like my house of rave thing like a simple email and pictures and stuff like that and then I wrote this three page long email and we’re both very nervous about it and it came out and it turned out that was App Sumo’s first day that they made over $10,000 in profit. And from there we did it again and again and again and then I became part of the company and all that stuff and a big growth base of about 750,000 people as a result of writing all the emails. And what I learned about frequency was that it doesn’t really matter and that’s a cop out answer so I will tell you exactly what it is. The email frequency depends on how much people like you. So let’s say you just met me and I asked to borrow your car. And you’re like, um, okay, um okay sure. And then the next week I rent out my apartment on a B&B and I am like, hey James, can I come stay for like a week, and oh, I want to stay for free. You’d be like, man, I just met this guy and he’s already asked for my car, he’s kind of a leech already, right? He always wants something for himself. And so marketing people who send emails for themselves, aka sales emails, people get tired of those if you send them often. Yes they will. But if you send them emails that they actually like and learn from, then they do not get tired from them. So even when we used to send out every single day, we did not see any decrease in participation. What we do notice is that if you send out about three times a week that tends to be like the sweet spot because it takes some people about two to three days to open their email and so three times a week seem to be a sweet spot but I have sent out much more. In fact this week I did a series where I sent out every single day of the week and I had my highest opens and highest click through rates by the end because people were so enthralled by the series. They can’t wait to see what was next.

James: I guess it’s all about being the guy or the girl who when someone is on the other end of the telephone or the other end of the computer that people want to pick up the phone to or open an email to. Like they are expecting and wanting to get that –

Neville: There was a certain time where a lot of people used to see my emails and they’d be like, people just read your emails because they are so wacky and funny and I am like, no, no, no, no, no. the funniness has nothing to do with them. Actually a lot of them are very serious, what there is is they’re educational stuff. Okay, so let’s say I’m sending a course about SEO and most people would say, okay, this is a course about SEO which normally cost $199, today we’re selling it for $69 and there you go. Like that is the whole email. Now a small percentage of the people would say, okay, that’s cool. I’ll buy it, whatever. But a large percentage of the people would just be like, okay, this is a sales email, I got nothing out of that, unsubscribe, who cares. What we would do is we would explain to people why SEO worked and we’d actually give them lessons and examples so we’d actually show examples from our own statistics from our own AppSumo Stores, from our own SEO stories and from house of rave and real statistics. So people would read this posts where 80% really good information and then 20% sales. That’s like the magic ratio- 80% really good information and then 20% selling them on something. And so as long as we kept doing that to date, people who are getting 80% of the information and all these awesome stuff they could use, 20% of it was sales and they were absolutely fine with that.

James: What are your top 3 most effective emails that you’ve sent for AppSumo?

Neville: Top three most effective, actually some of my own courses. That sounds a bit overconfident –

James: There you go, that’s coincidence, right?

Neville: Yeah, because I made them so I know the most about them. So here was a really big splash. So for house of rave what happened is I would document this for my personal blog and people would ask the same question over and over, maybe like, how did you find this business idea? How did you send the supplier to send your stuff for you? It would be the same like top 3 questions over and over and over. And so people told me, why don’t you make a course out of it? My very first online was about how house of rave started. And originally I thought that people were asking how to make a drop shipping businesses possible. That’s what I thought they wanted. And so that’s what I gave them. I gave them this course, it was probably 10-12 videos or something like that and it just showed how it worked for me, like how everything worked out, customer support, and things like that as people were very curious about these very mundane things about the business. And so I sold that on my blog and it did reasonably well. And then we tested it through App Sumo. We sent some test emails and it didn’t do all that great and I was confused like how come this audience loved it but this one doesn’t. and then when I realized I called some people up and they’re like honestly I don’t want to start a drop shipping business, I just have never seen a business before. And I was like, what do you mean you’ve never seen a business? And they’re just like everyone around me seem to have factory jobs. No one has a business so I have never seen what a business looks like. And that’s when I realized oh, I am in a lucky position where I live in the city and I have group of friends that everyone’s an entrepreneur so I get to see the ins and outs of everyone’s business all the time. Most people have never even seen inside of someone’s business. So I changed the position of that course from starting a drop shipping business to see behind the scenes of a news business and the news business is what Tim Farris calls a business that pays you both. So a lot of people just want to see what that thing looks like, a lot of people have questions like do you need a content management system or use salesforce.com to keep track of all your customer inquiries? I was like whoa, it’s just a Gmail account and my phone number. It’s not that hard, and then they would say, well how do you send the orders over? Do you have to have a customer shipping order? I was like, I literally copy and paste the orders from my system to my drop shipper’s system. That’s it. And I would show them how to do that and it would totally blow their minds like wow, this is that simple? I had no idea. And people immediately go off and start a business because they realize that if I can do it, then they definitely can do it. So I remember the point that we’re talking about but I think we’re done with that.

James: Man that’s awesome! The original question was what were the most effective emails that you ever sent for AppSumo so getting back on point I think you were getting to it with that story right?

Neville: The thing is that course did really well because what we found was that of the 500,000 people or so at that time at the AppSumo email list? It was mainly made up of professionals so they’re designers, graphic designers, a lot of them were entrepreneurs. But most of them were wantrepreneurs; someone who wants to start a business but they just haven’t really started it. and so a lot of these people have never seen anyone’s business and we found out this is the case. So I positioned the copy to say that look if you’ve never seen inside a business, this is full open kimono Kate Blanchett stuff. You get to see names, customer email addresses and I am going to make sure this is legal for me to show you but I am going to open up and just show you screenshots and videos of exactly what I do to bring in orders and send them out. And because I wrote that in the email copy, people were really, really excited to see that. People were very excited and the product just completely crushed it. That was one of the top three kind of things, I can tell you another one if you like. This is interesting for a copywriting.

James: Yeah, let’s go for it.

Neville: So a lot of people humor is a big part of the absolute emails. Not true! It is still about information and so I actually got robbed sometime in June 2012. I had a really nice apartment on the ground floor and I kept all my windows open all the time. And I have a lot of expensive stuff in there and I came home one day and everything was just like moved around and I thought a friend had played a prank on me or something. All my computers were gone! And it took me a while to realize like someone stole my computers. It didn’t hit me, and when it did, I have never been robbed before personally and I never really knew what it felt like, it is really weird to say this but it felt like extraordinarily violated. That sounds like a weird word but I felt very violated. And I immediately went to the AppSumo office, demanded to use someone’s computer and changed all my passwords, I called the police, I was just going crazy in my head like every time I walk in my place, I will check every single room and see if someone was there and I always close my windows like basically living there kind of suck after that and I was writing a piece of copy about this thing called prey, I am not affiliated in it in anyway but it is highly suggested that you put on your mac computers or actually any computer as it works on everything. It’s just a tiny little program that no one will know you ever have on your computer but suppose someone stole my iMac that I am currently using right now. I can track down my iMac with scarily precision accuracy that it’s ridiculous. It logs all the keystrokes and it takes pictures of whoever is using the computer and it tells you basically what mac address, their ip address their location and all that kind of stuff and you can get all that stuff remotely through the internet and so I did not have any tracking software on my Macs and I always dream of this day where I could like find these people and beat them up or something like that and it was a very emotional thing and I wrote that in the story for Prey. First I was going to write Prey is great for if your get your stuff stolen, blah blah, instead I was like I was going to tell the story about how deep this is when my computer got stolen from me and how it felt, you know how violated it felt. And that was one of the best deals we ever did; we even gave away the product for free but they also had a paid version if you had more than three devices and it still was an amazing, amazing deal and I can’t tell you the amount of outpouring sympathy people had. There was hey, I was robbed from my place and it was the same thing. I never thought it would be a big deal and it was so violating we eventually had to move and blah, blah, blah and it was in a deeply emotionally resonating story for people that also happen to sell a product to solve that solution and that was one of the best deals so that was the email that completely crushed it and it wasn’t because of clever copywriting it was people meeting people. People resonate with that.

James: Yeah you just in fact reminded me to send an email tomorrow morning that I have got to promote a webinar. I mean I’ve sent a ton of emails but there was one that really resonated with my audience where I just literally told the story of how I got in to doing SEO which is what I do and the struggles that I face before with a previous business I was running doing just regular branding marketing and having to run after customers from the struggles that I face then going from month to month trying to find the leaf flow and then when I found search and got people to find us how much easier it was and I tell the whole story quite emotionally from my point of view. Now if there is one email that I have written that has gotten a better response than every single thing else because I guess writing with emotion and telling a story that engages people and hey that happens to mention something that might help people at the end of it and it converts really well.

Neville: Anything that is emotional usually does really, really well and also when you cut to the real root of the problem that you are trying to solve, that also for sure helps. Like when people buy a Mercedes, they are not buying it because it is a really great car. It is because they want to appear a certain way to other people. They want to look rich or they want to be able to be the person that can afford that and really that’s the real reason you buy rather than a Kia. And so whenever you cut to the real root of it, oftentimes, you get much, much, much better results.

James: Now we mentioned a few things, we spoke about understanding the audience, understanding their motivations and speaking with passion and telling a story. What else makes a difference between a good piece of copy and a great piece of copy?

Neville: I think what you can actually justify would be so one you have to be really believing in your product and so many products at AppSumo where I will be trying to write the copy and I will be trying to check the product and also it is just like not that great, it is real hard to like lie to my teeth through someone and use a lot of credibility. The other thing is, not so much as emotion but also how much are you teaching them in that sales copy, like I hate it when people call it sales copy because it should be called like educational copy or something. It should not be called sales copy as sales is just a part of what you are trying to do. So every time I put out a sales page I put up this auto responder class I did recently and one of the things, I was like to read the sales page. I want people to be woaw, you’ve got to check out this page, you’ll learn a ton about auto responders. But it also happens to be a page where you are selling something. And so I gave them all these case studies and numbers like the actual numbers certain emails did. We just flat out gave them email sequences and things like that. That’s the difference between a really good piece of copy and a really excellent piece of copy. We hired three copywriters for AppSumo to replace me and they all kind of sucked. I am not saying they sucked because their writing sucked, but they would always just try to sell the product. That was the problem. They would just try to say that this is the best product ever, it is so cool, you should totally buy it and this is like totally unbelievable! Give me a real reason. Give me some experience and a lot of these guys didn’t have that experience unfortunately and so their copywriting couldn’t be all that great. They just did not provide much educational value. So a piece of copy that I could not stop reading that’s a totally good copy. And especially if in the end I learned something totally new, I’m like wow, that’s good stuff. That’s why I look for educational stuff.

James: Let’s move things on a little bit sort of copywriting techniques and talk a bit about traffic per se, I think you are a big fan of guest posts, right? What is it about that traffic strategy that you like so much?

Neville: So guest posting you are talking about your email list, right? The funny thing is for example I had a guy named Sam Park and his company is called hustle card which I was flown in for and spoke at and it was really fascinating because he’s a kid, he’s like 25 and he bought a conference. I did not even know you could buy a conference. I didn’t know and it was big. There was this guy in San Francisco that ran a conference for 50 people called hustle con and Sam took it. Within 2 months threw the thing, he had all these amazing speakers that he did not even pay and got them all. And he had a 400-person and in the end Sam made in the range of 40 thousand in profit in two months which for a 25 year old is pretty respectable. And I was just like, how the hell did you do that? That’s just really amazing! And I was like, could you write about it and just send that to me? And the reason I like his guest post or anyone’s guest post is because I only have so many experiences I can give you and I can talk about copies and drop shipping blah, blah, blah, but there is only so much I can give you. Sam had something totally new and it was outside of my realm. I had never thrown a conference before for people so did not know how to do it and I had never thrown a conference and earned forty thousand dollars so I did not know how to do it. so I brought him in and said, you know what? I want to know your secrets. Give me the email auto responder you used, show me how you set up the payments, how did you get the speakers? There was a guy who sold his company for $900 million. This guy flew down to Toronto to speak at Hustle con and he did not even know Sam. How did you get this guy to come out there like he’s not motivated by money? What did you do? And so Sam told all these secrets and the tricks of the trade that he did so for example, here is an interesting thing. He got all the speakers to speak not by telling them, hey, you get to speak at a conference. These are like big time speakers and they don’t give a shit about that. These are small potatoes for them. He said, these are 400 people who want to start businesses. These are like bloggers and stuff and they want to spread the message about hustling and if we want to like show them that your company is all about hustling and getting out there and doing stuff and when you position it like that, the speakers are way more likely to come out and talk because it was like helping the world and not just because they are getting some money and something like that which none of them even got. So Sam basically gave us the scripts for that and when he sent that email out for me, it got crazy high click through rates and got shared like crazy, it was unreal. It was one of my top posts and I did not even write it and he was very happy to write it because he got hundreds and hundreds of sign-ups on his webpage, he got all these people hitting him up. He basically got a bunch of benefit from it because I promoted it for him and I got a bunch of benefit because I shared his knowledge with my audience. And so guest posting is really good but it has to be something juicy and not to be about someone talking about the same crap like oh here’s another thing about copy that you probably already know. Having guest posts about things that I would personally love to hear because I have never heard them before.

James: Yeah, it’s a nice spin to it because everyone normally thinks about guest posting as reaching out to other people’s audiences and getting opportunities –

Neville: No, don’t believe that shit!

James: Exactly!

Neville: Don’t do that because that is so stupid like why would I want to promote your website? That’s not what I want. You know what? I told Sam he is going to put a lot of effort and give away all the secrets. I am going to promote this kid so I copied something that Steve Chiu did even on Facebook. I took a picture of Sam and I put the title of the post and I posted on his Facebook. I did all the promotion for him, I did not expect as I never asked Sam to say like hey, promote this to your audience or can you tweet this. That is shitty! Like he is giving you all of his secrets and now you want him to promote for you? Like how selfish is that? That’s not how it works. No, no, no. I think if you do guest posting, you tell someone, look I am going to do all I can to get the most clicks to the most traffic. I want people to sign up through an email list. If you do that, you’ll earn a reputation as like people talk. I am telling you, people talk and Sam goes around telling everyone like the guest post just totally killed it. I guest posted somewhere else and the person did not get me the traffic and so people tell other people like that wherever I heard someone else and they know that I am going to take care of them, they know that I am going to do my best to give the maximum amount of exposure for them and not for me but at the same time it ends up really well for me as well.

James: Yeah. And I guess the flip side of it is that you have not told him to go and promote it but I am sure he has, I am sure he’s been talking about it a fair bit himself, right? I’m sure you’ve acquired links and traffic from other places because he really wants people to find that piece of content on your site.

Neville: Well, that piece of content is so good that people started sharing it a lot. You could tell with the stats that this is a very highly shared thing and so it gets promoted through this avenue and I am not telling Sam but instead I was telling him, why don’t you get all your stuff, spend two days doing all this thing and then send all your traffic to me? That’s not a fair trade idea.

James: Yeah it’s the douchebag way of doing it, right? But I guess so many people –

Neville: Yeah, which means that if you think you really care about people then people love to do guest post because they get a lot out of you. Whenever I do guest post, I only hope that the other person will promote it and then when they’re like, can you send a tweet or an email to your own list directing to my post? I’m like, no! Why would I do that? That’s stupid.

James: Yeah, no fair exchange. Well, anyway Neville, I think we should get close to wrapping it up, we’ve packed a lot of content in there for 30-35 minutes. I want people to go off and find out more about you so where should we direct people to as a result of listening in to this?

Neville: I have two things and no matter where you sign up it will go to the same email list. I must say I have a really cool email list and this is my opinion but also a lot of people tell me this on a daily basis and I have the only email list they’d read which is actually really, really good and so you go to kopywritingcourse.com or you go to nevblog.com. Nevblog is my personal thing where I talk about my personal life, Kopywritingcourse is where I talk about copy and I just kind of started this blog like very, very recently actually and it has taken off at a shocking pace so check it out there is a lot of good stuff if you ever want to see anything on there, write to me, I read all my emails and I will do whatever you want on the blog to get you more traffic and all that kind of stuff. It’s good stuff. Kopywritingcourse.com.

James: Awesome! Well thanks Neville, I will make sure that the links to those two places nevblog and kopywritingcourse in the show notes for episode#53.

Neville: Oh, on the right side of the kopywritingcourse it says download the little email pdf how I started my 120 orders email thing, it actually has all the pictures of the old newsletters I sent out which probably look a lot of newsletters you know and love, and then I show the redone copy and people have literally copy and pasted that and it completely transformed their business. They went from doing what I was doing to then they’re like okay, this copywriting stuff works. So just grab that for your own personal reference, it is very, very helpful.

James: Cool! There you go, the links to those, if you can’t remember those just go TrafficJamCast.com/53 for both those resources and a bunch of other stuff mentioned by Neville will of course be included in the show notes so Neville, once again thanks for coming on, it’s been a blast and I look forward to doing it all again sometime soon.

Neville: Oh, thanks James!

So there you have it that was Neville Medhora with KopyWritingKourse.com and of course copywriting and course with a K so head on over there for more on Neville. Thank you for listening in to episode#53. I will of course be back next week with another episode of the Traffic Jam podcast, so remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and you’ll do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And of course, when you subscribe you’re the first to get these episodes as soon as they are released. For a direct link for all of the bonuses that come with the episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus the bonus copywriting training to the seven Gary Halbert letters every marketer ought to read, go to TrafficJamCast.com/53 where of course you can also join in for the discussion on this episode.

We end this week’s show with what’s probably the most famous track by the band Rage Against the Machine. The track is called Killing in the Name, it’s from 1991 and of course it is a track chosen by our guest on episode#53 Neville Medhora. Enjoy and I will see you back here again real soon for episode#54. See you then!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Neville Medhora has picked the track Killing In The Name from American rap metal band Rage Against The Machine.  

Killing In The Name is from the bands 1992 self titled debut album which reached triple platinum status.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help get better results from your copy, I’ve prepared this special episode bonus for you:

“K”opywriting Training

The Kopywriting (with a K) training includes an MP3 and full transcript of the strategy Neville Medhora used to get 120 more sales with just a few simple changes to his email copy.

Also included are some of THE best copywriting resources available on the internet. The Gary Halbert Letters.

Not just any Gary Halbert letters but 7 of the very best, compiled in a point and click guide you can save to your computer for when you get writers block, which I’m sure is regularly.

These letters lay the foundation for Neville Medhora’s outstanding success and they will do the same for you.

Grab the transcript, MP3 and resource guide now, they are available for instant download below:

Fractals exist in every aspect of the universe, and yes, the rule works on sales and marketing too! 80% of your results come from 20% of your marketing, and of that top 20% of marketing, there’s another 20% delivering 80% of those results.

Keeping track so far? If not, then here’s the rub. 64% of your marketing results are coming from just 4% of your efforts.

When you know how this Fractal Pareto rule works, you can apply this 80/20 principle in your business for dramatically better results. On this episode we show you how!

OUR GUEST:

Perry Marshall is the leading authority on sales growth through 80/20 leverage and the most highly regarded Google Adwords expert. Entrepreneur Magazine says, “Perry Marshall is the #1 author and world’s most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers save literally billions of dollars in AdWords stupidity tax.”

It was in 2002 shortly after Adwords was first introduced that Perry Marshall got started with Google ads. He studied closely how Adwords works and in 2007 published the best selling book, The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords.

In 2007, Marshall was a featured consultant on The Next Internet Millionaire, a reality show hosted by Joel Comm. He spoke with contestants on Richard Koch’s 80/20 rule as it applied to internet advertising and his philosophy of investing in grassroots marketing.  It was then that his understanding of the universal Pareto rule was formed.

Perry’s 2013 book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More expanded Koch’s work on the Pareto Principle to online methods for expanding business sales and profits. This was a continuation of the work he’d founded on The Next Internet Millionaire.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 52 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Perry Marshall quote from the show:

You can also download Perry’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Sales is not a convincing people process, but an elimination process.” ~ @PerryMarshall
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is episode#52 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host, as always, James Reynolds and I do today want to jump straight in to the episode but just before I do that, please head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/52 where you can download some special bonuses I have prepared for this episode. Now you’ll find there the downloadable MP3, a full transcript of today’s show plus a special mind map that will help you get the most out of this episode. And I promise you, if you do all of the steps mentioned in today’s show, you will 10X even 100X the results you are getting right now.

So let me introduce our guest, and he almost needs no introduction. He’s the number 1 author and the world’s most quoted consultant on Google advertising. He has written several books including the world’s most popular book on Google Ads, The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords but he’s also written The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising and the 80/20 Sales and Marketing book. His Chicago Company both consults online and brick and mortar companies generating sales leads, web traffic, and maximize advertising results online. And at $2,000 per hour, he’s the world’s most expensive and sought after and loved marketing consultant.

This guy is someone who has had a very early influence in my venture online. In fact, to the best of my recollection his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords book was the first e-book I purchased online. And perhaps, who knows, a real push in my direction setting up a business all around Google several years later.

So let us introduce him, without any further ado, here is Perry Marshall as we discuss the 80/20 sales and marketing principle.

James: Welcome back listeners! This is episode#52 of Traffic Jam and joining me right there is Perry Marshall. Perry, how are you?

Perry: I am great! James it is a pleasure to have you hear, a pleasure to be talking to you and your audience today and hello from Chicago!

James: Well, hello. So you’ve got this principle that most people will be familiar with, this whole idea of the pareto principle, but in your latest book, the 80/20 Sales and Marketing book, you’ve essentially taken the pareto principle and applied the whole pareto principle back on it, right? Essentially sort of conditioning it down practically many times over. When did you first come across this whole idea of the 80/20 fractal rule?

Perry: Well, this fractal idea is really important and if you’re not sure quite what that means, stick around because it will be worth your time. I first discovered that when I read Richard Kasia’s book the 80/20 principle not too long after it came out and it really just rocked my world. In fact, it was just a glancing comment. He did not really go in to it in his book but he just mentioned it but I had actually studied fractals and fractals are one of these geeky little subjects but it turns out it’s really one of the most pervasive patterns in all of nature. And so this book has been recommended to me and I took it to my favorite coffee shop, started reading it, and I was just 14 pages in and I said, boom! He makes this comment and I was just like I went over a cliff. It was like a thousand connections happening in ten seconds and it was like oh my word, I have got to go see if this is right! And I go home, get a calculator and all these pieces of paper and I start looking at my business. My wife comes home and she was like, what happened to you? This is what happened! So what was the connection that I was making? A long time before, my wife had brought home this book from the library, she just saw it, it was kind of beautiful and she thought I would be interested in it and fractals for those who have never seen it, you should do a Google search and you’ll see exactly what I am talking about but these are these computer generated patterns where there is a spiral inside of a spiral inside of a spiral and they just go on infinitely and I read this book and realized, well, you know that is just the computer version of it. There is actually an actual version of it and so like, if you look at a tree the branches have a branching pattern, and the branches have a branching pattern, and the twigs on the branches have a branching pattern, and the leaves are in a branching pattern and then you can get a magnifying glass or a microscope and the branches just keep going and going and going until you get to the cellular level because it is a repeating program and so that pattern is fractal. The branching is at every scale and so you see this with rivers, you see this at the solar system, and galaxies. Well, what Richard had pointed out, again, he just kind of mentioned it, he was like, oh, yeah, 80/20 comes out of the same phenomenon. And I was like, wait a minute, that means there is an 80/20 inside every 80/20. Whoa! I had known about 80/20, I think most businesses do, they know that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. But what I had not realized was that, oh yeah, if you chop off the bottom 80% and you just look at the 20%, it’s true again. And then you could chop off the bottom 20% of that and it’s true again, and it is true again. And it will keep going until you are down to one person. And then not only is it true of one particular thing like customers, but it is also true like your sales people. How much they sell, or your Google ads, how many impressions and it is true of your keywords and it is true of your ad groups. And it is also true if you have 20 different ways that you advertise, like maybe you are advertising in magazines, in Google, in Facebook, in newspapers, in radio, in TV – 80/20 is going to be true of that whole list of things, it’s just crazy. Why is it such a big deal? Because it is like a universal mother pattern. And when you see a universal pattern, what it will do is it will unify all these different things in your life and it will explain a million things with the same explanation and when you find a simplification like that you should go as deep in to the rat hole as you can and so I did and literally for ten years, I used the 80/20 and mostly only taught it to my very best students in my coaching programs, people that basically gave me a lot of money. And finally in one point, I said, you know, I am going to turn this whole thing upside down and I am going to put it in a book, and I am going to kind of give everybody the secret sauce that I have been using for everything all this time, Google book, the Facebook book, all these stuff that I do, and so it is all in there and I think people are really going to be helped by that.

James: Yeah, I was going to ask you that question because if I go back to some of the first times that I became aware of you through the ultimate guide to Adwords, I mean if I think back to that content, it is very evident that you understood and taught the concept of leverage even if it wasn’t in that exact kind of format. I mean it was concept that you really understood and worked with. It is interesting to know that you have been kind of keeping it in closed doors for such a long period of time.

Perry: Yes, it is so powerful and the thing is you never really get to the end of it. I think that is the beauty of it. When you just tell things down to the seemingly simple principle, it is actually deceptively simple because as soon as you think you’ve done it, all you need to do is zoom out and guess what? You get to do it again except in a different context. And I am really finding this to be true where I have done all this marketing stuff for 15 years and I have been working with lots of people but then you find out, hey wait a minute, I just discovered even more questions and I just need to find out by asking myself, and they’ll short cut this even more. That is what’s exciting about mastering things and learning things, so there is a big pot of gold at the end of this rainbow and the first time that I ever had a conversation with Richard Kasia years ago and he said, what do you like about 80/20? It’s like one of those magical excepts except it actually works. People are always hyping all these different things, oh, you should get rich in real estate, or you should get rich in internet marketing! Or you should do this or that or the other thing. The thing is, how about applying 80/20 wherever you are? Because there is always somewhere where somebody is failing to do that.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk a little bit about how you apply it and in fact in your book you tell a really nice story about a friend of yours named John Paul who hitchhiked to Vegas, and had a bit of a run in with a shotgun but it was kind of a nice metaphor with how you split the 80 from the 20. Share that story and perhaps how it could be applied to marketing online.

Perry: It is one of my favorite stories. So John, yeah, when he was 17, he dropped out of high school, hitchhiked to Vegas, and he became a professional gambler. So he’s bouncing around Vegas for a few weeks and he was like, man, this is harder than I thought it was going to be and so he said, I need to find myself a mentor. Somebody who can teach me how to do this. So finds this guy who runs a gambling ring and so they shake hands and say, ok John for a percentage of your take, I will teach you. And so they agree, jump for a jeep John and they go for a ride. So they are going down the highway and they go okay, so how do I win more poker games? And he goes, you need to play with people who are going to lose. You don’t want to play with a real good poker guys, you want to play losers. And losers are called marks. And you need to find marks and play poker with them. And he was like, how do I find marks? And he was like here, I will show you and they drive in to a parking lot and they go in to a strip club, and they walk in and they sit down, and his new mentor Rob, pulls a side off shot gun out of his jacket, and he holds it under the table and he opens the chamber and then he shots it really fast and when it makes this noise, there is a few people that had looked around like what was that? And then the owner comes up to him, he was like, hey, is everything okay over here? Just fine, just teaching the lad a lesson, don’t worry about us, we’re alright. And then he says to John, did you see those people who turned around when they heard that sound? He’s like yeah, and he goes, don’t play poker with them. They’re not marks. Play poker with everybody else. Now, that is what marketing is. It’s racking the shot gun and seeing who turns around when they hear that sound and who just completely ignores it. And that is exactly what you do, every time you put a billboard on the motorway and some people see it and some don’t, some people call the phone number and some people don’t. You are racking the shot gun, you send an email, some people open it, and some people don’t rack the shotgun. Some people click on the link, some people don’t rack the shotgun, some people fill in the form and go opt in for the webinars, some people give you a hundred bucks, and all of those things are racking the shotgun. And the whole point of the actual rack the shotgun story in the strip club in Vegas was you eliminate the wrong people before you start ever playing any game. And this leads to something very important and it is very 80/20 which is sales is not a convincing people process, it is an elimination process. It is a disqualification process. And so, 80/20 redefines what sales is. Most people think, sales is I have to convince you and then the person is like, well, if you are slick enough to convince me, are you slick enough for my skepticism? And we get in to this little game that we’re playing with the customer and like, no! That’s not what you do. here’s what you do, and John is a brilliant guy by the way, he’s a brilliant sales trainer, a brilliant strategist and he’s got this thing called the five-power disqualifiers. And they are the five things that are always true every time a sale is made and this is really ingenious because it is one of those need to know five things. So here it is. #1, the customer has to have a bleeding neck. If they don’t have a bleeding neck, don’t try to sell to them – an urgent problem that needs to be solved! Secondly, do they have the money? If they don’t have the money, they’re not buying. Right? #3, do they have the ability to say yes? There’s a lot of people we try to, they have the ability to say no but they don’t have the ability to say yes and since we are talking to them, we are automatically in the losing position. #4, did they buy your USP (unique selling proposition)? Do they like your value proposition? If not, move on. And #5, does it fit in to their overall plans? Hey I am trying to sell you this house in Houston, I know but I am moving to Dallas next week. They are not going to buy the house in Houston so the five disqualifiers they are all eliminators. Now, if you go through all five with anybody with any topic, you are only going to have like 1%-3% left. Sell to them! And if you are selling to them, it is not going to be very hard to sell. It is so much less work!

James: Yeah, exactly. Well, this is a concept that a good friend of yours and mine talks about and it is James Schramko’s idea of having seed questions and we have this conversation in our mastermind quite a lot just qualifying these people who are clearly not in the right time, right place or with the right budget to do business with you and just talk to the right people because business is just so damn easy if you have the right people because business is so much more damn easy when you’ve got the right person in front of you, right? I mean, this is the process that we are trying to get to here.

Perry: Well, yeah and frankly, I just think, a lot of us we make it too hard. When I was new in sales, I spent so much time basically doing missionary work and train uneducated, disinterested people. Life is way too short for that. So what is going to happen if you use the power disqualifiers is you’re actually not going to be frantically crazy busy. You are actually going to end up having a lot of space, or at least some space which is kind of disturbing to some people. I think people have this idea that they need to be in motion all the time or something like that. Like oh, you know if I am not working my buns off, then I am probably an iffy, questionable guy. That is a bad mindset to bring to your work. 80/20 is about the fact that outputs and inputs are very, very, disproportionate. Small outputs, big inputs, big outputs, small inputs. And they are almost never equal. And so when you understand that, and you make your life all about the output. Even when it is like the whole concept of getting paid an hourly wage, it certainly is the easiest way to speak about the value of time so I am not faulting anybody that would think this way, but, paying somebody for the hour is basically paying them for the input and not for the output.

James: Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about outputs. You’ve run plenty of campaigns, especially direct response especially Google and Facebook ads, does this whole concept run true for you while you’ve had a certain set or if you’ve campaigns for you that have delivered the vast majority of your results?

Perry: Well, yes. And in fact, the most important Google technique that I have ever taught, it’s kind of the mother of the whole thing, it’s called peel and stick and peel and stick says, alright, so you started a Google adwords campaign, maybe you knew what you were doing and maybe you didn’t but in any rate, you put some keywords in an ad group, and you bid on them and you wrote an ad or two. And peel and stick says, alright, 95% of the traffic is going to 5% of those keywords. So 95/5 is just a little bit different version of 80/20 and there’s a lot of things that are 95/5 or 90/10 or 99/1. 95% of traffic is going to go to 5% of those keywords so what you should do is to pick the highest trafficked keywords and what you do is you peel them out of the ad group, stick them on the new ad group and you write new ads that are just exactly perfect for that keyword. And you’ll probably do it with the same in your landing page and all of the sudden, you have the one keyword with the idea ad with lots of traffic, and you just did 80/20 in your adwords campaign. So you are going to get 95% of your time and your optimization is going to be focused on 5% of your keywords. And then when you do that, you’re going to find, in fact there is a chapter in our brand new adwords book that is just coming out right now. I had this campaign where I tested 300 – 400 different ads, and this is not unusual for serious ad marketing ninja. This is like what you get paid to do pretty much, it is test stuff which is kind of fun actually and I am going to say it is actually for a period of years, probably 3-5 years, probably 15% of that traffic came to 1 ad because that was just my killer ad, that was the best one I came up with, and all those other ones are just attempts to beat it. So that is 80/20 and really what my Google book is even though it does not exactly say it, pretty much, every chapter is just the 80/20 of yet another slice of the things that you do in adwords campaign, whether it’s the organization of your groups or whether it’s switching certain things on and off go on. And it is all 80/20 so if you get 80/20, you can walk in to any situation and realize, hey wait a minute, there is a place or two. Like I did a star principle seminar with Richard Kaise which was a different application of 80/20. I don’t know if we have time for that but one of my staff members, she was watching the videos, and she sent me an email and she goes, Perry, does this apply to churches? And I am like, I’d dig it if it does. Yes, you are a genius! Rebecca is really smart and I am not surprised you picked up on that that probably a tit for tat, if you’ve just adjusted a little bit it applies completely to churches and nonprofit organizations or monasteries or Buddhist temples or restaurants or you know, whatever.

James: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the campaign that you have been running actually to promote the book itself which is where you’ve been giving away the book for a cent, tell us about that campaign and what result you’ve gotten, perhaps the strategy and mindset behind it.

Perry: Ok, so this is a total application of 80/20. So we have a campaign that is running called buy my 80/20 book for a penny plus shipping which means in Australia or UK it is $14 because it is $13.99 international shipping or in the US it is $6.99 shipping so it is either $7 or $14 right? And since it is $10 more if you buy it in Amazon or in a bookstore then it is like a really sweet deal. So we are almost literally taping dollar bills to these books. It costs us more money to ship this out than we make. Here’s how that is a very deliberate 80/20 strategy. We have boxes you can check like oh I want these too, and it takes you to a whole sales process, it factors different surveys and we ask people different questions and based on how they answer the questions we’ll present them with some other offers so we have upsells. Most people don’t buy any of the upsells, some people do. Would you like to guess what percentage don’t buy the upsells and just buy the book?

James: I’d have as a guess, maybe it’s 20%

Perry: Actually it is 80% that only buy the book. In fact, it’s 78.6% and that is exactly what 80/20 predicts is that only 20% of the people are going to give you the money, so 21.4% of the people take the upsells. Now we found that the people only buy the $7 don’t generally become good customers. However, the ones that take the upsells, do. So the upsells are racking the shotgun and the money that we collect from the upsells, cover the cost of the 80%. Unfortunately, we can’t sort them out before we ever advertise to them. But we start sorting them immediately after we advertise to them, and in fact, you’ll get a huge value from buying the book but you’ll also get a huge value by studying how you’re sold to, after you buy the book. And in fact, you’ll see this in the Amazon comments in the book reviews, and they’ll go – there are a few people and those are the bright ones and they’re like you should buy this book because it is great but you should also go through Perry’s sales funnels and see how he’s constantly racking the shotgun figuring out should I sell this to you or not? Should I sell this to you or not? And then you are only being presented with stuff that you are seriously interested in which is why I have a very high level of engagement from people who read my emails. And I have people on my email list for 10 years and they are like, I like being in Perry’s email list because I get stuff that I want.

James: Yeah, absolutely. I of course tested this this afternoon for our interview and the shotgun was certainly racked right away because in fact, before you even offer those upsells, you’ve got people already subscribed to your email list, that’s step one and the offer is made right? Where they can choose from the various options but it means that you are talking to the right person, not just trying to the masses, right?

Perry: Well, yes and that is totally the name of the game. And if you are Coca Cola or Blue Cross Insurance or Gyko or somebody like that, then you can sell the masses. But if you are any kind of a small business, you can’t sell the masses. You can’t even think about selling the masses. You’ve got a narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow – in fact you might need to do 80/20 three or four times and get down to some tiny percentage of the world before you even start. Very important!

James: Yeah, let’s get close to wrapping out there Perry but let’s kind of end on that topic. If we have to give our listeners, perhaps not an 80/20% but perhaps even a 4% to focus on, for those listening, perhaps the steps that the sales and marketing people listening in could walk away and test and perhaps take on in their own business, what would those few things be?

James: Well, one thing that you will find in the book is I explained how pricing is 80/20, and one of things that 80/20 says is that if you are selling to your customers properly, then it means that 20% of your customers will spend four times as much money as the 80% and 20% of those will spend four times as much money as much money as then that part. So you can have that small amount of people that will spend large amounts of money like there is an example in the book that I said, if you’ve got few thousand people coming in to a Starbucks and buying coffee for $3 or $5 you’re going to get a couple every week why don’t you spend $2000 on an espresso machine? You might only sell a couple of those every week even though you’ve got thousands of people but if you do the math, that espresso machine or that high dollar purchase ends up being a very important part of the economics of your business. In fact, it may be that and a couple other high end things are actually what generate all the profit in your business and that everything else is just keeping your lights on. And if you don’t know that, like if you open a coffee shop and you don’t know this, probably what you are going to experience is all the self-condemnation. I can’t run this thing and boy you know the customers steal some cream and I am dying here just shaving pennies to make this thing work and it is like, well there is like one or two things you need to change in your business and all of a sudden you’ve got breathing room and you’ve got profit and so it applies every which way so I would just challenge people like be a serious student of 80/20, understand that it is all around you and if you get to where you can recognize it, that is a profitable thing.

James: Yeah, so thanks Perry. I am sure the book is available, I know it can be gotten hold of in your website, so should we as a result of this send people off to PerryMarshall.com?

Perry: Yes, and in fact there is a direct link, if you go to Sell8020.com it will take you right to that book page and you can get your copy.

James: Absolutely! Cool, I absolutely recommend listeners head on over to that link which will also be in the show notes page for episode#52 of Traffic Jam so head on over there and we’ll make sure that the link to post to Perry’s 80/20 book and all of Perry’s social media profiles are included there. So all that remains is for me to thank you Perry. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Perry: Hey James thank you so much for having me on your show. I know it means a lot to trust your audience with somebody so it means a lot to me. Thank you!

So there you go that was the ever so awesome Perry Marshall with his 80/20 rule for sales and marketing. Thank you for listening in to episode#52. Get ready for episode#53 coming real soon. We’ll be joined by Neville Medhora who’s the man behind AppSumo’s email marketing.

To get that episode as soon as it is released subscribe via iTunes and or Stitcher radio head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link that come with all the bonuses for this episode, including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus an 80/20 sales and marketing mind map, that will of course help you put the rule shared by Perry in to action, go to TrafficJamCast.com/52 where you can also join in for the discussion on today’s episode.

We end this week with a traffic jam chosen by Perry Marshall and it is called XYZ and it is from 1981 and it is by the band Rush. So enjoy the track and I will catch you back here for another episode real soon.

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Perry Marshall has picked the track XYZ from Canadian Rock band Rush. XYZ was released in 1981 on Rush’s eighth (and best selling) studio album called Moving Pictures.

The instrumental track XYZ received a grammy nomination for the band.

XYZ – Rush

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help you put the Pureto rule of marketing in to “hyper effective” action, I’ve prepared this special episode bonus for you:

80/20 Sales and Marketing Formula

Inside this FREE training upgrade you will receive the 80/20 Sales and Marketing Mindmap; a visual go-to guide detailing the most important aspects of the fractal 80/20 rule:

Plus you’ll get a full transcript of the interview, MP3 and exclusive episode artwork.

So go right ahead, download the mindmap and other bonuses and get ready for dramatically different marketing results:

With many brands experiencing lower than ever visibility it seems that advertising is a necessity if you want visibility in the Facebook News Feed.

Getting started on Facebooks Ads platform is easy, but getting real results requires insight and an in depth understanding of the tool. Facebook do provide training, but some of the biggest secrets to leveraging Facebooks Ads platform don’t get taught. At least not to the general public.

Lucky for you I’ve located a man who knows the platform inside out. He puts millions of dollars through the system and knows exactly how to get targeted ads in the news feed.

But better still, with his step by step formula not only will you get more visibility, but you’ll grow your audience, drive engagement and get more leads and sales ringing through your business than you could ever imagine.

OUR GUEST:

Curt Maly was exposed to the world of sales and marketing at a young age. He landed a position as a telemarketer at the age of 15 which set him up for management positions within call centres as large as 400 people strong.

Later as a real estate investor in Austin, Texas, Curt discovered non traditional (online) advertising techniques like social media ads. He became fascinated by social ads and within no time had ditched his real estate career to manage social ad campaigns for others.  Along with fellow real estate investor Nick Bridges he formed Black Box Social Media which focusses on managed advertising campaigns primarily via Facebooks Ads platform.

Curt Maly and Black Box Social Media now manage over $500,000 in monthly ad spend on Facebook, across 37 different niches.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from the 51st episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Curt Maly quote from the show:

You can also download Curt’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Post feel good stories that make people smile, these stories keep people on Facebook.” ~ @Curt_Maly
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hi there listener! Welcome to episode#51 of Traffic Jam. I am your host, James Reynolds and this is the podcast show that helps you build and grow a profitable audience online. Before we jump in to the show, remember that each episode comes with a set of bonuses that help you implement the strategies shared on the show. Episode#51 is no different at all, you can get the bonuses for this episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com/51. Today, those bonuses include a downloadable MP3, full transcript, episode artwork and a referenced guide showing the 7-step Facebook ads formula shared by today’s guest.

Before we get to our guest today, a shout out and a thank you to Stewart, Alice, Denver, Ferdinand and Steve who all commented on Episode#50. I’d love to hear from you too so please stop by the episode page if you have a comment or a question for me or today’s guest. We’d absolutely love to hear from you.

Let me introduce today’s guest, his name is Curt Maly and like some of the very best experts we’ve had on the show, he was introduced by a former guest of Traffic Jam and in this case it was Ryan Levesque. Curt is a Facebook ads specialist and aside from teaching others how to advertise effectively on Facebook, he runs an agency that supports different clients in 37 different niches and he manages over half a million dollars of ad spend in the platform each month. He’s an absolute Facebook ads rock star and entirely self-taught on the platform. So here we go, to teach you how to leverage Facebooks ads effectively, Curt Maly from socialmediaadgenius.com.

James: Hey there listeners! Welcome back. This is episode#51 of Traffic Jam and joining me right here is Curt Maly. Curt, how are you doing?

Curt: I am doing excellent James, thanks for having me.

James: Thank you! You’ve got this whole 7-step process where you take someone from basic beginner to a Facebook advertising ninja starting with the core fundamental stuff and then all the way up to things like funnel targeting and custom audiences. Let’s take a look at that process, perhaps starting with the basics first, where do you suggest our listeners get started with Facebook advertising? What’s step one?

Curt: That is a really good question James so I am going to preface it with a couple different disclaimers or advance notices. Basically, here is the thing. Just a small little insight, we’ve run over $5 million in Facebook ads for over 33 to 35 different verticals, different branches so what I am going to give you can absolutely work on everybody’s business. Whether you’re an 8 figure business or if you’re really just starting out. So I am going to quickly give you the 7 steps and then we’ll take some time explaining through the seven steps. Remember, this can work for pretty much any business, almost any business, you just have to get good on your targeting which I will explain, and it doesn’t matter where you get started, you just have to get started, regardless if you are a small food trailer business or an eight figure business that is just rocking it online. What we do is in our first seven steps, if you want to write this down while you are listening, Step#1 is we really want to identify what our avatar is, our direct marketing message. And I am going to talk about exactly on how to do that. But what we want to do is we want you to find who do you we want to market to and really the first step is to drive likes to our business page or fan page. Driving likes is not about building online credibility of getting tens of thousands of people. What we’re doing is we’re pre-qualifying our audience. What we’re saying is we believe our avatar is this and we are validating this message, we’re testing and verifying our message if it works with our like campaign. From there we start bringing people in to the page or start bringing more people in to the page that we believe are qualified avatar and then we start working on our engagement which is really step#2. We find our best engaging post, from step#2 we move to step#3 and it’s where we promote those posts. So we find what resonates best with our avatar that we drew likes to and that they engaged with, so now we are going to promote that post, we are going to make sure that our fans and our friends are seeing this particular popular post. The most popular post leads us to step#4, those turn in to some of our best ads. Those are called dark posts. Dark posts will appear on other people’s news feeds, they’ll appear on mobile, it looks like it is directly coming from our page but the dark post, and the post doesn’t actually show up on our fan page it just shows up in advertising in news feeds. Now that we know what dark posts and how advertising works, step#5, we make sure that the ads are congruent. Like native advertising, and we’ll get in to that term here in just a moment, but we do all that work to move in to step#6 where it targets directly in to your funnel, your website, your landing page, your video, and really what ends up happening is depending where people land on your website. We can retarget with really specific ads, that’s step#7. But really where the conversation starts out James is people really, really, really need to define their avatar. They really have to define it.

James: Well, it is interesting what you said there. Perhaps we’d like to drill in to some of the validation and data that might tell you if you’ve got the right audience or not. You said start by putting in a campaign that is going to develop likes and if that responds well you know that you’ve got the right sort of audience. What sort of audience should people be looking for to understand that hey, I seem to have the right audience here and this is worth developing out further down the sequence?

Curt: Great question! I want to answer this for your audience, for people who either have lots of experience running ads and have a big list or just starting out. So the first thing is, it really is either A if you have an email list that is a couple thousand people, now these could be emails or phone numbers, and this could be people who registered for an event or could have purchased a product or signed up on your website, those can actually be uploaded in to Facebook and Facebook can tell you specifically inside of Facebook insights what the makeup of those people are. Or you can do it from a fan page or from a small little pixel. What happens is for a lot of our clients like for the agency that we run, they say, hey Curt, I have a pretty good idea who we should target for our avatar, we tell clients we’d like to validate with a like campaign if they have less than 10 thousand leads that we could analyze. And I say, look at this client, imagine this from any level, imagine all of us were listening or standing on stage, imagine there are 800 people in front of us right now, just 800 random people, and let’s just say we are selling something to help entrepreneurs, right? We have an entrepreneur on the box product. So what we are going to do, standing on stage, we are going to say, how many people in here love to be an entrepreneur? Who’s like us? Notice that they’ll like us and I’d imagine looking out at the audience of 800 people and imagine 300 people raised their hands. Then we’re like at least these people are interested in entrepreneurs. So now we say, how many people would like to read about how Richard Branson bought Virgin Airlines? And let’s just say, a third of those people raised their hands. So what I’m doing is I’m segmenting people. I’m getting people to raise their hand to say are they even emotionally involved with us, and then step #2 is start going for that engagement. So to know if people are qualified and if they’re resonating with your message, you should be looking for click through rates on your like ads over 1%. So you should really find out your control and then test a couple of ads. But we want to figure out, where are we finding the best targeted which means the highest click through rates on ads where people are raising their hand resonating with your message. And that’s some of the best, easiest qualifying that we can do that starts building your brand to figure out what people want to connect with you with. Does that make sense?

James: Absolutely! Perfect. I might ask a slightly more technical and advanced follow up question and that would be how do we segment those campaigns so that we really are able to zero in on that perfect side of the audience that we really want to target?

Curt: That’s a really great question. So a couple of things on this. The first thing I really have to mention is Facebook works on momentum, so the longer that you are running ads, the better results that you are going to see and the better trends you are going to see as well. Starting and stopping are going to give you a completely different result than continually running ads and here’s what I mean. So remember I ask that question, are you excited to be an entrepreneur and come out like us? That can make people come out and raise their hands. So I take a look and say I am targeting the word entrepreneur with a picture or a key phrase that has just that, are you excited to be an entrepreneur kind of like us and I am seeing that I get a 1% click through rate. Great, now what I am going to do is I am going to target a different keyword. Maybe it is a business magazine like entrepreneur magazine, I am going to use the same copy, I am going to use the same picture, and I am going to see what click through rate I have as well. As I start to get some numbers in and it starts showing me where I am getting my low cost likes and a high click through rate, now what I am going to do is I am going to start split testing new keywords. The key to this is always finding your one control ad and then I always try to beat that with two other ads. So if Entrepreneur Magazine is working really well, what I am going to do is I am going to split test their ads and I am going to say, can I beat the click through rate and the cost per like of what I am currently targeting right now? And I am always trying to beat one another so I am always establishing a control and I am always testing two other ads.    

James: Nice! Good. I think we’ve kind of covered off stage 1 really nicely there, what’s stage 2, where do we take it from here?

Curt: What happens is, when we kind of round out stage 1 is let’s say that you’ve ran some like campaigns for three to seven days, you can now go in Facebook’s report and it will actually tell you what keyword is performing the best what gender has the best demographic that’s clicking through on your ads, what’s the five year age range for people clicking on your ads. So now you can really start to see where that avatar starts to form. The second part is posting some engaging posts. You don’t have to post 10 times a day. Quite honestly, a lot of our clients, we post just once or twice a day because 95% of our time and budget honestly is really in paid ads. But we’re starting out, we want to find out, okay our avatar is coming in with page likes, what articles or what are they engaged with? This could be anything from blog articles from your branding to see what articles they are interested in, this could be going to other fan pages that they may like and looking with content that’s really popular with other pages, I mean, there is thousands of news stations out there pretty much reporting the exact same thing. People are just finding which news source they connect with. You can do the same thing, find out what news engagement from other pages, get that engagement in front of your avatars that are coming on in, figure out what resonates to you the most and then start moving on to where you are going to promote at least one post per week. It’s really that simple.

James: I heard the other day, and actually you might have been the source of this information that kind of warm, fuzzy content works best on Facebook like events, or the birth of a baby or maybe getting married or something. In your experience, is that what sort of content works best in that environment?

Curt: Yes, and I am super glad that you brought this up. So this is really interesting. Let’s talk about engagement and then as that moves over to promoted post. Facebook did a kind of scary experiment years ago, this recently just came out and what happened was Facebook wanted to see if we put negative toned news in the news feed versus positive in the news feed, can that influence the user’s behavior and  can that influence their posting, right? It is a little creepy and here is what Facebook found out. Facebook found out and their hunch was well if we post pictures of other people’s wedding while going on vacation, are friends going to be jealous and spend less time on Facebook? Actually what they found out was that people wanted to look at their friend’s weddings or vacation and they want to share the fun memories that are exciting. Now on the other side, they found out on the negative post is that people kind of let it influence their mood so a couple of things started to get happening. People who were seeing the negative post on Facebook pretty soon they started posting what they can post and they started spending a lot less time in Facebook. So what happens is Facebook is really looking for feel good stories, nothing negative. Do you hate waking up in the morning where you had joint pain and you feel lonely? Facebook doesn’t like those ads. That may work in direct response marketing but Facebook wants feel good stories. Stories that are going to make people smile, stories like that make people spend more time on Facebook and really look at more articles. It really has to be positive. Now keep in mind, organically, trending with paid traffic you are rewarded if it is a paid message, if it is negative, you can pay a lot more on your ad cost unless they see engagement on your post.

James: yeah, how do you apply that to a business page? I guess coming up with those feel good stories in a business environment could be a little bit more challenging. What types of topic or content or events that may be happening on a day to day business lives might be good to post on Facebook?

Curt: So here’s a couple of things. Motivational statements, those things work great what happens is for example on name that caption or fill in the blank, people get on Facebook because they want to see what their family and friends are doing and they really have 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, especially if they are mobile, which is a large percentage of Facebook traffic is they kind of just start flipping through the screen and like flip, flip, flip, hey what shoes should I buy? The blue or the red? Or hey what do you think about having people put their comments be really, really high engaging. So what you want to do is some motivational statements are great, some information statements is great, but you know the greatest reason for engagements dropping typically on a business page, we saw this the other day while we’re taking to a small business, they were a local savings and loan or a local bank where they were talking about CD rates. That’s all that they talk about. They did not have any engagement. And then we had this picture of a scuba diver with the seal that comes up over on his right hand side smiling and we’re like, caption this pic, all of a sudden people were captioning it, they are having fun. A lot of people do a lot of self-promotions, what you are looking for is if they really focus on their avatar, what would they want to read on a newspaper, or what’s the really funny video they may want to see? I can tell you this, there is a great example Facebook gave of a plumbing company. I mean, how do you advertise a plumbing company on Facebook? You talk about plunging toilets, right? So what they do is they’re like, hey everybody it’s a picture of James standing next to the van. Hey everyone, meet James. James has been a plumber for over 23 years, he is happy to assist any of you and when he is off of work he enjoys crocheting and underwater basket weaving. And like James may have a small weird look on his face. Well, it is funny. People are looking at it, they’re laughing, or maybe this plumbing company has a school mascot and they say hey! call in to order your service today and $10 goes to the school and he has a picture of a mascot holding a phone to his ear. It was just fun and exciting and got people to click on the links. You can do some really creative fun stuff and that’s what Facebook is looking for.

James: Yeah, good stuff. Cool! Now once we’ve got some engaging content, you of course advocate that we start promoting that and getting it out there to a greater and wider audience, at least first within your page following, do you suggest people just use the standard boost function or is there a better way to do it?

Curt: That is a great question. Typically what we do is we go straight for engagement so we get the regular organic engagement, and then what we do is we tell people, it the boost post button. So you hit the boost post, and you want to change the default setting. We take the most popular post from the week and we learn this from the audience insight inside of our fan page. We boost the post for a minimum of three days. Typically we say $5 a day for three days. Because here is the thing, you’ve spent money to get all the likes where they came from, let’s say their engagement opt in. you’ve already figured out what their engagement is overall. There are a lot of people by the way who are voyeurs. They don’t click like, they don’t comment on stuff but they see your stuff and they read it. They just don’t engage with it. So if they don’t engage, they are not going to see your post. So you have to take your most popular post of the week, again, this could be a blog article, maybe a super big tip. If you have a couple of minute video, if it’s done with an iPhone, those are working really well right now, like a 2 minute video, when you hit that boost post, it’s going to target your business page plus your fans for three days for $5. This is like Coca Cola always advertising. It is keeping your brand and message in front of people who are watching but not engaging. So, step#1 figure out your best engaging post, step#2 boost that for three days, which if you find out that that boost post is working, then we’re going to take that boost post, and we are going to target this, we are going to tie it back in to the keyword where we are getting our best responses from our like campaign from step#1. So we are building our branding to our page, and we are extending out so we are bringing our target to entrepreneurs. They are seeing the like campaign from us and they are seeing one of our most recent popular post. Does that make sense?

James: Absolutely! And this is the step that you call the promoted dark post, is it?

Curt: It really is, that is the promoted dark post, and that promoted dark post is saying, hey look, we have identified the keyword entrepreneurs works really well with our likes, we identified this post works really well for our page and our fans, let’s tie those two together and we are going to target that one post because here is what happening. What you are doing is you are promoting this one post inside of different news feeds to be entrepreneurs. They could be on Entrepreneur Magazine. So now you are branding is really starting to take place and what you are really doing is you are promoting one post so now you are promoting the likes you’re getting 50 to 300 likes and now when someone comes to your page they’re like, men that must be a blog post that they just put out with 300 likes and 20 shares. It must be amazing. What is it? Which creates the open loop which creates people to click through your blog.         

James: Yeah, nice. And this isn’t really costing very much at all, I mean you are suggesting just a budget of $5 a day for 2 or 3 days at a time once per week. I am sure this is within reach for even the smallest of businesses getting started on Facebook, right?

Curt: Absolutely! For instance we have a hair care salon out in Hollywood and all he wants to do is advertise in a 10 mile radius which there is not tons of people out there in a 10 mile radius but if he does a video which he promotes for $5 a day for 3 days and then he does the latest fashion, he can literally spend $20 – $30 and sometimes get more coverage than what your local TV station would give and this is really some great branding for just pennies in the bucket if you are doing it right.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well let’s move on to some of these more of kind of intermediate strategies. I think the next step in the process is advertorials and I can kind of see how this concept will work well on Facebook because they are all about having sort of news based content, less promotional type stuff, less flat out actual ads. Tell us about how you put together an advertorial that takes real good effect on Facebook.

Curt: Good question. So now just to preface this, we’re going to step#5. As we go in to step#5, 6 and 7, this is really where we spend 95% of our money. Step 1-4 is just to help us get to understand what ads to be running. Once you start running a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars a day, you’re going to start to get residual likes. You’ll still do the boost post engagement just to keep the brand out in front of you but 95% of your money is really advertorials, funnel targeting and retargeting. The advertorial really comes down to tell a story and it is what is going to be what we call native advertising. Native advertising, if you’re not familiar with that term, you can go to like AOL.com, Huffington Post.com, CNN.com and just start scrolling through all the news stories. And you are going to see news story, news story, news story, then you are going to see something that looks exactly like a news story but it’s going to say sponsored content. It looks like a news story, it looks like it should be there, and well that is what the advertorial is. So what would your avatar be sharing as your news article. So let’s just say, again we are talking about entrepreneurs. Your advertorial is going to be a small story – here are the five tools that absolutely every entrepreneur should have. Tool #1, tool#2 … to see the other three tools, click on the link below for free access. Okay so they understand it is for entrepreneurs, they understand what the call to action is, they’ve read a little bit of it, it is engaging content, and it is not negative, right? We’re not using any negative connotations, this is a positive experience, and then we are going to continue the story which really goes in to step#6 which is your funnel targeting. So what stories can we start telling, what we can add additional value that they can read from the ad? Remember Facebook doesn’t like click here to find out how you can win a million dollars or how to make a million dollars because it does not give any information for the landing page. This is super important and this is a little bit more advanced strategy. It is important to understand Facebook has recently really started to judge, okay someone is going to click on this native advertorial and they are going to click to an article that says find out more If that website is not congruent and people click back to Facebook right away, meaning they bounce back off of your site. People is charging people extra for ads because they are finding those ads to be not relevant. So how in our advertorial can we start a story that continues to our page that completes the story and either asks for information, buyer information so it is just the start and continuation of the story.

James: That’s interesting. I did not realize Facebook have been doing that. I mean Google have been measuring these types of techniques for some time especially with Adwords to see what ads are most relevant to users, I hadn’t realize Facebook has done it as well. Very interesting stuff.

Curt: You see here is something that I really want to get by that I used to train about a year ago by completely talking the other side of it. Here’s what it is, we used to tell Facebook, you may have heard this before, and Facebook wants you to keep traffic inside of Facebook. Everything that you do, either they want you to do this Fan page tabs, they want you to keep traffic inside of Facebook, and people used to share website links like socialmediaadgenius.com and would come up with this little link preview of the article, and we would call that the gray box of death because it would tell Facebook, hey Facebook I just shared a link and when someone clicks on the link it would take them out of Facebook so we don’t show this post as much because we don’t want people outside of Facebook. Well, Facebook had then come out with a year or two ago tracking pixels which we will get in to in just about a minute. What Facebook did now, which you can say be a little creepy just like Google, the more that people started to place those tracking pixels, now Facebook can see what is going on on your website. So now Facebook wants people like from a blog or an advertorial to link on your website because that is the only way for Facebook to see what you are looking at and how relevant it is to their user database.

James: Interesting! So have they now started to adjust cost per click prices and ad serving based on people actually putting that pixel on their website and driving people away from Facebook itself?

Curt: Oh, in huge ways. Here’s what I mean by that. I met with Facebook back in March at a big event here on Austin, Texas called South by Southwest Big Tech event and I sat down with Facebook and I said look this conversion tracking pixel doesn’t make any sense, like I have a hundred sales but it shows 125 and they look at me, James I swear they said this – Oh, Curt, the conversion tracking pixel doesn’t actually track conversions –

James: It doesn’t quite say what it says on the tin right?

Curt: Yeah, so I go what do you mean? And they go actually, it tracks your conversions. And I’m like, what? It actually reads and profiles your buyers, people who opt in, or people that go to key websites that you target. So Facebook’s actually collecting the data building your perfect avatar. So this is where Facebook blows away everybody else. Not only can they target offline actions, like people who buy green smoothies, that’s like an actual targeting option, but I can now even target people who have purchased 3rd party services from a Facebook ad. It means that they purchase by the conversion pixel. This is really kind of the secret behind my sauce that Facebook taught me, that I have taught in courses and masterminds or whatever. When you put in that conversion pixel, it is not necessarily tracking your numbers, it is seeing how many people come through your door and once you get to a certain number like a couple of hundred, you can tell Facebook, really James this is the most powerful thing you can do on Facebook now – you can say, Facebook, I want you to target entrepreneurs, let’s say there’s a million people in the US, however, I want you to target the people who look like buyers, so that takes let’s say a million people, that condenses it down to 500,000 of the best cream of the crop because they look like my buyers, and Facebook, I don’t really care what I pay for clicks, I just want you to target for me to get more sales. So I want you to go out and find entrepreneurs, segment that audience to the people who look like my buyers and only go out and market to people who have a high probability of buying, I don’t care what the cost per click or the click through rate is, if my product is $297, I am willing to pay $100 for everybody that you find in that group. I have never seen targeting like this before and Facebook learns from it and literally we have taken products that where- I will give you a quick example. We have taken products which is a water filter that they sell for $150. We were able to get people to buy it for $125. So they put in $125, they make $150. Not a whole lot of money but if you sell 10-20 of them a day, it adds up, right? After we got over 200 sales and Facebook target the same demographic we are going after, but also find the people who have a high probability of buying from us, our look-alike audience. Our cost went from $125 per buying unit by pitting in that one layer of audience down to $46. We did not change anything, we just said go find people who are like our buyers after we had enough buyers hits. It’s amazing what Facebook can do.

James: So is the goal then, sort of starting out at least in that phase, is just to build up a volume of buyers so that you can start to profile who those buyers look like and then go back to Facebook essentially and then say look, target people like this.

Curt: Yeah. So I mean literally you hit the nail right in the head. Let’s say we go back real quick to step, 1. If you don’t have any of this buyer data how do you figure out your likes and engagement and the promoted posts and the dark posts, you start running advertorials and you start running what we call seizing the pixel. A hundred buyers is great but 200 give you better statistical information. 400 gives you even better statistical information. So if you already have a buyer’s list you can upload a buyers list and go after a look alike audience right away. So what ends up happening is we show you step 1 through 5, if you do have a list, we’re going to do step 1 through 5 for kind of a branding but moreover we want to get as many people as possible past that conversion pixel first because that is really the second stage, once that conversion pixels what we call seasons for a hundred plus buyers. Now when we start targeting the lookalike buyers, the numbers are just astronomically different.

James: Yeah, I can see. That sounds awesome. Let’s kind of speed through these last couple of steps. Step 6, funnel targeting and I just want to ask you about what types of funnels you see working best on Facebook right now. It still seems to be that whole herd of people that just go after the Facebook ad traffic to live event webinar type funnel and promote to people on the backend. That seems to be pretty successful in some spaces, what are the types of funnels that are working really well on Facebook right now?

Curt: Another good question. It basically comes down to this. What do want them to do? Do you want them to watch a video? Do you want them to opt-in? What do you want them to do? A lot of people believed that they can send direct traffic over to like a video sales letter directly over to a webinar sign up. Typically, what Facebook has told us, there is actually an attribution link and most people would click on this that most people would see an ad, or click on an ad the very first day and don’t buy. It usually happens within a 28-day period. That’s another reason why you need to keep running ads. But what ends up happening is, Facebook says, look, if you are going to send people directly over to a video sales letter with no opt in, they are probably not going to buy the first time so you have to keep running an ad. What we find that really works is get people to opt in to your offer and we see that really, really works is getting people to fill out a small survey which I know you have some guests in the past that have talked about that as well. Because as you see what happens is, not only can you segment your list from the survey, but when people start answering those questions the segmentation is awesome and they have a higher probability of opting in. and the real money that we’ve seen, and I have spent like I said millions, we work with a lot of 7 to 8 figure clients and those people can do the following. Get people to opt in to build their email list and they are going to have a chance or an offer to buy something right now. If they don’t buy something and I am kind of moving in to step#7, we are going to retarget them with ads which says he I noticed you did not buy this here’s a discount, or I notice you did not buy this, here is an additional video, or I know that you have showed interest in this, here is another video. But what we specifically want to happen is we want to run people through the right parts of the funnel but they really have to opt in if they want a good follow up. So here is your ultimate goal. If you need people to opt in and buy once they opt in within a couple of days, and you are making a margin on it even if it is 5% above profit, awesome! Because your follow up email will pick up anything else. Now we see a lot of clients who are happy with either break even or making 80% of their investment back but they know the money is really made in their longer term follow up. So your best scenario is to break even on the front end of your products below to 97 but I tell you what I see more and more of does not like direct sales, Facebook likes relationships that leads in to retargeting of blogs, repurposing content, and getting people to opt in, provide value and close, close, close along the way.

James: Yeah, well that makes sense. I’d be super happy if I can make my Facebook ads run through an opt in even though that there is more stuff that can be sold on the back end. I mean if you can just acquire a customer for nothing, it is a pretty darn good situation to be in, right?

Curt: Absolutely! Absolutely.

James: Cool! I think let’s get close to wrapping things up there, we haven’t quite too much on retargeting so I think any final points on that Curt before we kind of close out? What’s some retargeting tips that you’d be happy to share with our listeners?

Curt: A couple of different things, really important, this is something that will open up your eyes. For our product and for some of our clients, we see up to 50% of our sales coming through retargeting. So we want to be specific about it. When someone goes to our opt in page, what other information can we give them? I’ll tell you what I do. I retarget with a testimonial video so when someone opts in to our landing page, they are going to see two testimonial videos and they will also get to see a video tour of what we like to call our bunker. So they get to build rapport with me, they get to see some of my other students saying my name again. Now when they opt in to our funnel, they are going to watch a video sales letter or they can attend a webinar, now for the next five days I am going to show three different testimonials, I am going to show a tour of my office so people can see my face and know that we are real, and we are going to retarget to a fourth ad. I am going to retarget four videos. And what I mean by four videos is when they click on a page and my webinar is an hour long, but they are going to have four videos that are five minutes each that they can click on each video and make a buying decision. So each way through the funnel when I talk about funnels I will say, okay, if they just went through my landing page but did not opt in, this is good to retarget with all my blog posts and my post engagement posts, right? Because I can retarget my best promoted posts. And then I can start a look up and say if people opted in and they just did not have enough information to buy, what other information can I give and video works really well or you can also do like a 10% discount to build that report. And then the third thing is, as your buyers, that is the best place for you to offer a new product or service that you test market before you roll it out to everybody in Facebook and it is a great way to communicate. Did you see our webinar, we have an upcoming blog post or hey make sure you join this really important podcast that is going to happen next week. You can really target people based off of their interest and it can make a dramatic difference for your business when it is done right.

James: Fantastic! Well Curt, we have covered so much there. I mean we’ve packed a whole lot in to 35 minutes and I am sure we have just touched the service in terms what you help with people. I think we need to point people off to somewhere where they can connect with you further and learn a little bit more about what you do and how you can help. Where that might be?

Curt: It really is easy, you just go to SocialMediaAdGenius.com and really right there you can find out about myself or about my business. Or you can always send an email to my assistant as well, we have videos and everything on the site that can assist and my assistant’s email is [email protected] if you have any questions to me and just to be clear, we have two sides of our business, one is we educate others how to do it, we have group coaching that we show people how to do it, or I have a full agency and we will run it for you. It just requires about $20 thousand a month in ad spent if we do it for you so we are really selective on who’s ads we run for them but I’d be happy to help and answer any questions and help you master this Facebook thing.

James: Thank you! Well I am sure you have given people some flavor of what is possible either by learning the stuff themselves with your help or by having you do it for them so we’ll make sure that all of those links are placed within the show notes page of this episode which is TrafficJamCast.com/51. Thanks again Curt it has been an absolute pleasure and as I said, I don’t know if I have had an episode that’s crammed so much in so props to you on that.

Curt: Awesome! Thanks for having me James. I really appreciate being here.

So there you have it, that was Curt Maly and I absolutely did mean it. one of the most content packed of all 51 episodes so far. And because there was so much packed in to this show, I recommend you come over to TrafficJamCast.com/51 and download the full word by word transcript of the show plus the seven-step formula reference guide I prepared just for you. So go grab it now by going to TrafficJamCast.com/51. So thank you for listening in to this show. I will be back with another episode real soon and what an amazing guest I have lined up for you.

So to ensure you don’t miss that show, subscribe via iTunes and or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Once again, for a direct link to the 7 step formula reference guide, MP3 and full transcript of today’s show, go to TrafficJamCast.com/51 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode.

We end this week’s show with a traffic jam, Lose Yourself by Eminem and it is chosen of course, by Curt Maly. Enjoy!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Curt Maly has chosen the track Lose Yourself from American rap artist Eminem.

Lose yourself was released on October 28, 2002 as the first track to Eminem’s movie 8 Mile. The track was written and produced by Eminem himself, along with longtime collaborator Jeff Bass, one half of the production duo Bass Brothers.

Lose Yourself – Eminem

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help you get the very best results with Facebooks Ads, I’ve got this special bonus for you:

7 Step Facebook Ads Formula

The special episode bonus includes a simple one-page reference guide showing you every step of the 7 step formula, full transcript of the interview, plus an MP3 you can download direct to your desktop.

So what are you waiting for? Get started with Facebooks Ads secrets right now:

On this landmark 50th show we discuss how you can quickly position yourself as the No.1 authority in your industry, by harnessing micro-specialization and major media.

Using the quick fire, multi-pronged approach (shared here), you can very fast establish authority in a brand new niche, and then get yourself global exposure on some of the largest media outlets in the world. I’m talking about places like CNN, Fox or The Wall Street Journal.

Our guest today has repeatedly taken his client’s from unknown to celebrity status in their market, in under a month using this strategy. You too can get similar results when you follow along the steps shared on this show.

OUR GUEST:

Brian Horn is a 3-time best selling author whose books have helped many entrepreneurs with their online branding and marketing. He is the co-host of the Authority Alchemy Show, and a guest writer for prominent sites such as The Huffington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine.

Known as the authority marketing expert, he has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Forbes, Advertising Age, The Howard Stern Show and dozens of other media outlets. Inc Magazine recently called him an “emerging business leader to watch”.

Brian is a former door-to-door salesman turned DJ, now a devoted husband, proud father and an advocate for children with Down syndrome.

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Here are some of the highlights from the 50th episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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“Find your niche, create your own blue ocean and be an authority.” ~ @brianhorn
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey what’s up? This is the Traffic Jam podcast episode#50. Now I feel I should be opening up the show with some trumpets and a fanfare to celebrate half a century of episodes but I am not going to do that instead I am going to acknowledge you the listener, every single guest that’s been a part of Traffic Jam plus of course the awesome Veravo team for helping put this past 50 episodes together. Thank you to each and every one of you.

I have certainly myself enjoyed this past 50 shows and I hope you have, too. In fact, if you haven’t had a chance yet to dig through to some of the earlier episodes, I strongly recommend that you do go back to the back catalogue. I might be slightly biased here but I believe the strength and range of guest that we’ve had on this show is pretty hard to match. So go check out some of the earlier episodes of the show, there are some real gems in there.

So what’s coming up on the 50th show? Well, we are going to be joined in in just a moment by Brian Horn and he’s the guy that Dan Kennedy, Lloyd Irving and Vanilla Ice go to to get more exposure online. But before we get to Brian, I want to do this one thing, open up your browser and go to this address, www.trafficjamcast.com/50 because i have put together a special authority marketing mind map that will help you understand and implement the strategies shared on this show. So go to trafficjamcast.com/50 right now then we’ll move on with the show.

Let me introduce Brian, he is a bestselling author and more on that in the interview and he has helped many entrepreneurs become celebrities in their space by getting them featured in some of the world’s foremost media channels. He also practices what he preaches himself because he’s been featured on the Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Forbes, Advertising Age, and a dozen other media outlets. Brian’s goal is to find the magic in each of his clients, help them position it, get national media attention and then leverage that attention in to more media customers and more profits.

So there you go, so now let us welcome Brian Horn, the authority marketing expert.

James: Welcome back listener! This is episode #50 of Traffic Jam and joining me right here, right now, is Brian Horn. How are you Brian?

Brian: I am excellent James. The big number 50! Congratulations! That shows your dedication. Most people actually make it to about 5 or 10 and then call it quits.

James: Well, let’s hope we’re not picking things to early and this is not the last –

Brian: That is a nice little achievement to reach #50. That’s impressive!

James: Well, thanks man! It’s good to have you on the show. I think today’s topic is going to resonate very well with our audience. Let me open up with a question, I just looked to your website and it says that you guarantee you can make anyone an authority in their industry within 30 days. It is a pretty bold claim, can you really do that?

Brian: Absolutely!

James: Okay, now we’ve established that, what’s the process? What’s involved?

Brian: Yeah, so we’ve got a multi- step process and at the beginning it is very much a mindset type of thing and getting people’s heads right around that. The first thing we have to do is realize that they are ready to become an authority. A lot of people will say, well I have to do this first, I don’t have my book finished, I don’t have as big of a reach as experts and they are always comparing themselves to other people they see as the top dogs in their industry. And so we take them back away from that a little bit and say and have them realize that they are ready right at that point, and then the next thing that we do is what we call a micro-specialization where if they are not the top person in that industry, they need to go and create a brand new niche and it is much easier than you think. If you look at a good example, a company that did this is Southwest Airlines. When they launched in to the space and became an airline, there is no way they can compete with the other ones, they are brand new and starting off so they created a whole new sub-niche of low cost airlines and they just immediately jumped in and own it and still own it to this day. And so we help people do things like that. What I am doing with authority marketing, it is not branding, it’s not internet marketing, it is not SEO. It is a mixture of all of those things but we just create our own blue ocean. There is nobody else competing against us and we just completely dominate very, very quickly. And the site has been an only option for the clients who want our services. The whole ideas has been picked up by writing for Huffington Post for a while. I just got signed on just a couple of days ago actually as a writer for Entrepreneur Magazine just to write about this stuff that we are doing so it is spreading very quickly and it is just proof that what we are talking about can really work.

James: Yeah, well it is an interesting marketing lesson in that I think it is better to be the first than to be the best quite often, right? If you can create your own category and then position yourself as the first in there in that category then just like what you said you’ve got that blue ocean all to yourself.

Brian: Yeah, it absolutely works and there are so many ways you can do this, you don’t have to come up with a brand new original idea. You can do that by going after a sub-niche within your own niche so if you are trying to be an internet marketing type person. In the marketing world you think Frank is the greatest and you are trying to be like him but you’re a lesser version of him, you’re never going to make it, but if you go back and say I’m just going to help in real estate investing products with their funnels, that’s may be just one thing but you can be their one and only choice very quickly and by being very specific, you can charge a lot more money when you can really focus on the needs and wants and desires of that particular customer and you can talk to them better and deliver what they want or you can spend more time really honing your skills on just that one market you just become much, much better and you deliver a much better product.

James: So once you have established the position, the category in which you want to own, what is the next step? I guess there is a mass media exposure involved here, right?

Brian: Yeah, so then what you do, you start to use the media and 3rd party sources to verify yourself as the expert or the authority. One of the easiest ones that you can do is have a book and a lot of people think of having a book think they have to sit down for weeks and months at a time and write it out, hire a ghost writer or a publisher and really the way with books with Kindle being so easy to publish on, you can just upload a word document to Amazon and you can do fairly short books and really get your point across, I have been doing this for people and they seem to be even better received than even more traditional books. So then you can have a one hour conversation like what we are having right now and you can get that transcribed and then translated in to normal English and then it could be about a 30-40 page book, not a lot but you can get your best ideas out that can help solve the problems for your prospects, and that’s really what you want to do and we call them one problem one solution books. When I create a book for a client that just solves one very specific problem of their target audience and it’s just a very specific little book and so you’re a published author so that is one thing. And the second thing after that is getting your name out there as quoted in and featured on some other well-known media sites which is much easier now with citizen journalism which a lot of these sites are now opening up and letting more and more non-professional journalist and non-staff writers consider content to their site so you can find contributors in sites like I am a contributor to Huffington Post and Entrepreneur website, I think I am in four or about five places. I am not a paid staff writer so anybody can literally just come up to me and just say hey Brian I saw that you are a writer for Huffington Post, I have an idea for an article, and what do you think about this? I’d be happy to provide you content. Now, there’s so many people like that that are dying for content writers that would jump at an opportunity like that particularly if you say to them that you can blast your whole list and send you lots of traffic, you have a better chance of picking up on something like that. And then you can get yourself positioned as an expert on those places, then you can say hey here I am I had written about an article in Huffington Post about how to build funnels to convert the highest rates and on this topic I am the expert. So right then you are completely positioned as an expert on the topic because even though I just told you how the stuff works, most of the articles that you read are done this the same way, it is either they hit up the writer, the journalist, or they have a PR person doing that. So it’s not magic, people are going to do this right now. And what you don’t realize is the magic can be taken away but again very few people actually know that. The prospects certainly don’t know that it’s that way, that it they are manufacturing authority, we call it manufactured authority and everybody does this. Even the big dogs like the financial experts like David Ramsay and stuff, they do very calculated things to hit the best seller lists. It is what they do.

James: Yeah, there’s some interesting points you’ve made already, one is in the intro where you said that no one is going to claim you to be the expert, you have to claim yourself to be the expert first and it is about owning it and believing it yourself but then the second point is, as you said, you can’t wait and expect people to come and approach you, you have to go out there and seize those opportunities and I think the availability of those opportunities once people start trying this sort of stuff, they’ll be quite surprised about it, right?

Brian: Oh, absolutely! These are the things that people always go for help with us, because we do these things for people, that’s kind of what our business is. And they’re actually just shocked and sometimes just appalled at how well this works because you’ll get them something like, we’ll get them like I’ll write an article in Huffington Post like that, and take a screenshot of your Huffington post article and put it on your Facebook page and just say wow I was just brought as an expert in Huffington Post, thank you so much for your support, this is a big deal for us thank you and if you want to know more about how I do this stuff, just hit me up. And also to add to that is the most well received post they’ve ever done and have the most interaction, for them it could just be a couple hundred shares or likes or something like that but they are just blown away by the response that they get and that people that have been sitting on the timelines not doing business with them for a long time all of a sudden step up and say I have been following you for a while and I saw your post and I think I am ready to start doing business with you. That literally happens all the time with this. It is absolutely crazy and once you see this you can say wow I was no smarter than I was 24 hours ago when these people wouldn’t give me the time of the day and now all of a sudden they bow down and want to do business with me and it’s just because of a little TV station and all those stuff. It is absolutely crazy how that stuff works but it’s more conditioned particularly here in the US we are used to believing everything we see on the media and on TV, even we have a negative opinion of the media, I don’t watch the news, I just hate the news. I feel like those things are just ingrained triggers on my head.

James: Yeah, it is pretty fresh, in fact it has been a bit of nudge for me getting you on and perhaps we can talk about that in a moment but you a couple of days ago got that deal to write for entrepreneur magazine so I think it would be quite interesting to perhaps divulge how you did that because it isn’t as hard as you might think. I too write for Entrepreneur Magazine here in the Middle East and I don’t want to spill the beans to much but actually that was pretty to get myself onboard with. It isn’t a hard challenge. How did you go about getting that opportunity with Entrepreneur yourself?

Brian: I applied. It is as simple as that. One thing is they do look at your background, your portfolio and what your business is, they’re obviously not looking for someone who is a plumber and all of a sudden starts writing about an internet marketing and give you an internet marketing spot, nothing is being wrong with being a plumber and just starting out but they do look at what you’ve done in the past and what you can contribute but really there’s nothing much to that I just applied and I know a lot of people that apply and don’t get in but for me, yeah, it was that easy. For Huffington Post, it was that easy also, you can look on all these sites and they have ways that you can apply. I think when I submitted to apply for Entrepreneur, I googled that and found it, and sent a message in to the editors and it was the same way at Huffington Post and there is another one, a branding one that I write for and All Business which is a small business site, all the stuff that I once write for all was about the same thing, just going through and applying and going through the process and showing them examples of your work.

James: Exactly! But the point is if you can write to a decent level then that has got to be a prerequisite but second to that, if you are an expert which if you follow the steps at the start of the interview, you find what that small category is, you are an expert. So if you can put those two pieces together and there is a requirement for that type of content, you’re in with a pretty strong chance, right?

Brian: Oh, absolutely. And it makes a difference also on how you’re perceived, when I started for Huffington Post I got the nice messages and I put this out, for Entrepreneur, the same thing. There are some really big people and you can leverage this thing also. I mean I am not sure what you’ve done with it so far but you can pretty much reach out to just about anybody and say you want to write an article in Entrepreneur about them and get a callback, in the next two weeks I have 2 billionaires, one is Mark Echo, he has a really nice, big fashion line. The other guy is the owner of a magazine. I just reached out to both of them and I got an idea for an article in Entrepreneur that I would like to talk to you about and while we are at it, can I put you in the podcast also? And both said yes so it is pretty cool what you can do with that.

James: Yeah, and then it is self- perpetuating, right? This kind of principle of reflected light. If you can give them an opportunity to appear in some of these places and then you can appear alongside someone that may be perceived as being a larger authority than yourself then that automatically raises your own so that is some interesting way you can take in some of that stuff.

Brian: Yeah, we call that borrowed authority. We are going to borrow theirs. What we do is we bring very specific people in for these types of things, for one it is good content. We don’t want to put somebody boring out there, we want to put good content and good articles for those places. But it is certainly a nice added exposure next to their pictures for sure.

James: Yeah, so really a lot of this focuses on getting an earning media but I’m sure that you’d recommend owning some media too. You recommended a book as being one of those assets. What about other platforms, perhaps a blog or a podcast, what else is essential to this?

Brian: Podcast. I scream the benefits of podcasting for several reasons. One, that it is still new and still trending upwards and I think at least here in the US a lot of the car manufacturers are being paid over the next several years by Apple, Google and Clear channel to start putting their systems in to cars and start taking out the terrestrial radios. If that happens, podcast is going to keep getting more and more popular. It is on demand entertainment, it’s very easy to get in to and inexpensive to set up. Another way I like about that is that you can really syndicate your media and you can repurpose your media. Once you have one of these recorded, you can get it transcribed and made in to an article and you can just keep going, you’ve got this one audio, and you have video written and stuff and you can get it made in to a series of books and email and content for your listeners. There is so much you can do with this stuff without having to create so much content so I love podcast and every person that comes on tells me if you have you’re Brian Horn host of the XXX show that is great authority also, you sound awesome.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Well it’s been successful strategy for me and it sounds like it has been hugely successful for you and I think one of the things that I really like about it like you do is the fact that it is so leveraged, you and I are having a conversation now for about 30 minutes and the team will take over and before I know it there is an episode page up and it is syndicated to iTunes and Stitcher and we’ve got transcripts going out on all places and it’s just me and you having a fun chat for half an hour, right?

Brian: Yeah, it’s awesome. That’s exactly with ours as well, it’s just the same way and it works so well. And I like that you also keep it and one thing we learned is the show link, in 30 minutes or less the show- it did not work for a while then we changed it and realized that people were not hearing the last of it just because we did a survey and most of them listen to it while they were doing cardio which they did for about 30 minutes. And in the last 15 minutes if we told them some cool stuff and changed that up and got much better results.

James: Yeah, it’s interesting advice. What advice do you have for actually getting podcast interviews? You used a pretty effective strategy to get on this show, how you recommend others get more, not just podcast opportunities but just interview opportunities as a whole because there is nothing being interviewed, right? As a way to increase your authority.

Brian: Right, there are a few ways. One, reaching over social media always works well, that is one way. Another way is going through somebody else that has already been on the show before. That is a good way; somebody that you see that has been there recently and maybe it is a larger show so you say, hey Joe, can you do me an intro with Mike’s podcast, I saw you had an interview with him, maybe you can intro me. And also if you have your own podcast you have them getting on first and ask to interview them. And most people say yes to these interviews. I really have not somebody say no or not respond within reason. Sometimes you have these other things within leverage now. I go for these the Mark Echo and the shark tank people next that I would leverage but before that I had some pretty big people just within the marketing type world. I knew a lot of them and that certainly helped, but I tell you, people have asked me for interviews, I rarely have said no.

James: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Let’s talk about press releases. I know you are a bit of an SEO guy and certainly things like press releases have been abused to death in the SEO world and the internet is pretty much awash with these things now. Are they still effective for just general PR and exposure and if they are, what’s the step by step process for crafting press releases to get some exposure for you?

Brian: Sure, press releases ultimately does not work anymore because it used to be you write those, first you write them for the press to try to get them to pick them up and then people find out and use it for SEO and then they throw some links in there and get some SEO benefit. Both those don’t work at all anymore. They’re completely a waste of time. But, we have something we call authority news releases where it is using some of networks that we have done built down, you can do something similar that instead of doing it to get the attention of journalists, you write it right for your prospect. We write them in the same style as a typical journalistic news article where the headline is formed the same way so it’s not Brian Horn announces new XXX, it’s actually written like a news story. It will be something like, in response to your Houston Area entrepreneur writes books to help entrepreneurs. Something like that. Like that where it’s not written in a way where it is so promotional. All you really want is to write it just like a news article and we have several different formats of headlines we use and you put it out there and you get screenshots and those get picked up on the impressive sites like on like the local CBS station and your areas across and you send that out to people on your list and you share that on social media and you get that same type of followed authority by appearing on that site. Again, this is not like the old days, we can put that for SEO and have it sitting at the top of the results, keywords can get you a lot of traffic but you can definitely have it up there for your name and your company name which a lot of people don’t focus on which is really good because there are lots of people who right before they decided to do business with you the last thing they do is go ahead and google James’s character and see what google says about him. And they type in James Reynolds and they see your website and your social media and they go whatever but if it also had a #3 result that was Yahoo News or a local ABC station that says James Reynolds is an awesome guy and it is an article about James Reynold’s new company is setting records in his industry and then it just talks very third person like a journalist that talks about James Reynolds is doing, these are some quotes from his, these are the results, and it becomes very impressive and they go wow this is James Reynold’s character is actually being written up by these news stations and it has a very, very powerful effect.

James: Yeah, it is really all about owning your own results. How do you make that happen? Do you advocate just keeping one central site and then using content promotions like this to perhaps get press releases and news article appearances appearing there or I see that you’ve got a few different properties, would that be a better strategy to try knowing that first page results?

Brian: It whatever people want to do, everything that we do is really for the reader and for the customer. We don’t even really try for the Google stuff anymore. I was an SEO guy for a long time so I am not really anti- SEO at all but we’ve really found this way works extraordinarily well. I think why it’s even work better for me is being the writer on different places not just the big ones like Huffington Post and Entrepreneur but there’s several other places that I write for and I get picked up as a guest contributor that access, it just works so well just having your stuff just absolutely everywhere and putting those little fish hooks out everywhere.

James: And have you got a strategy for that? I mean there is plenty of opportunity out there, the website is a wide ocean. What kind of criteria do you have for looking at those guest post contribution opportunities to see what’s right for you?

Brian: One thing I like to look for is to see where that site syndicated to, there are some that are very powerful syndication, there are some that you can pretty much just jump on and become a contributor to and it is syndicated out to like Yahoo News. I have one in my little arsenal out, this one is secret but it actually is syndicated to Fox News it is really nice if you can find a place like that and have your content appear on but there is one that is a business to community, that one is very easy you can go there and you actually they ask for 2-5 writing samples. There is nothing automatic about it at all but you can go through as long as you can write decently and they look at how active you are on social media and your following but if you hit those points it gets picked up by Yahoo News. So that is a good way to get in there and have your content out in Yahoo News which is very good SEO wise as well.

James: Yeah, certainly. Cool, Brian let’s get close to wrapping up things there, have you got any final passing pieces of advice you’d like to pass on to the listeners today?

Brian: I’d like to give them one really cool, hack is kind of a dirty word, and I don’t like it but we describe it as an authority hack when we talked about it in our podcast and I share this with a lot of groups but everybody always seems to love it and it is a good way for you to get some authority fairly easily and that is using CNN’s iReport. A lot of you have heard about it probably but for you who haven’t, have you used it James?

James: I’ve not used it so I am all ears right now.

Brian: there is a section in CNN that is ireport.cnn.com and it is their section for their website for citizen journalism. Basically anybody that is a citizen of the world that wants to write news stories for CNN is welcome to and your stories will then be published. You can then go in and they have assignments of stories looking for content on or you can just submit any type of news story and be a contributor for CNN. Now, I am going to say this and everybody is going to get this wrong and get their first article banned every time. Don’t write about yourself, don’t write self-indulgent things, don’t tell people how great you are, write news stories or the community will ban you. It gets instantly published but there is an active community there and if they can smell marketer or smell somebody is trying to do business with it then they’ll flush it down and it will get knocked out. Just write news stories, and the purpose of this is not to have – because I can tell you right now, nobody is going to click on your story and end up buying from you if you get links on there. So the whole purpose of things is just to be a contributor and have news stories up on CNN’s site. So what I always people is that once a week put in a story about your niche and then basically you are a weekly contributor on CNN on your topic. If your topic is internet marketing then you are a weekly contributor for CNN’s internet marketing. It creates a powerful punch when you go pitch yourself to be a guest on a podcast or a radio show or if you want to get to speak at an event, put that little designation at the side of your name and you sound a whole lot cooler.

James: And it is a valid point. I mean there is almost as much opportunity at what you can do post event than there is the actual event itself. It’s getting on your buddies on your website then you’re contributor to and that gives you more exposure, more authority and ultimately you can probably charge a little bit more for what you do as well, right?

Brian: Oh, absolutely! It makes selling so much easier so if you are selling you actually need to get on and talk to people. I have not to sell since I started doing this. A guy gets on the phone with me and I ask them what they are doing and I say oh here is a solution that I think will work best for you and here is a price. And they’ll either say yes or no and that’s it. I don’t have to sell anymore, it’s not that they don’t want or they are just not a good fit for or they say yes and want it.

James: Yeah, so we mentioned your podcast earlier and that’s I guess a way for people to go out and find out a bit more about these strategies, where do we go to find that?

Brian: Go to AuthorityAlchemy.com. We’ve got a website there, we’ve got several podcast episodes, we’ve got some blog posts as well as links to all the other cool stuff that we are doing.

James: Well, awesome. Thank you Brian, it’s been a pleasure having you on this episode #50, a complete honor to have you on the big 5-0 so thank you for your time and expertise today.

Brian: Absolutely! Thank you so much for having me I’m honored to be on the 50th, that is really cool.

James: So there you go listeners to get all of the resource mentioned by Brian in today’s show plus a few episode bonuses head on over to trafficjamcast.com/50.

That was Brian Horn and that was episode#50. I just love the CNN resource that Brian ended with and I am certainly going to put that in to action myself and I suggest you do too. In fact, I urge you to implement as many of the strategies that Brian shared as possible because if you are an entrepreneur or you help entrepreneurs, authority marketing is something that is one of the best possible investments of time that you can possibly make.

And talking of time, to help you save some time and help you implement these faster, I have put together an authority marketing mind map detailing Brian’s multi prong approach dominating your niche as the go to guy or girl and you can download that authority marketing mind map by going to TrafficJamCast.com/50. And that’s about it for episode#50.

If you have been listening in to the show for some time and you haven’t yet left a review, perhaps you can do so for this landmark episode. The places to review and rate are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

We end the show with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by our Guest and Brian Horn has selected Pride by U2 so here’s that track and I will see you back here well, in about seven days from now.

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Brian Horn has opted for the track Pride (In the name of Love) from Irish rock band U2.

Pride which was written about Martin Luther King, Jr.,  is the second track on the band’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire. The song received mixed reviews at the time, but it was a major commercial success and has since become one of U2’s most popular songs.

Pride (In the Name of Love) – U2

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help you establish you as THE authority, define your micro niche, get you featured on major media outlets…and ultimately dominate your market as the go-to expert, I’ve got this special guide for you:

Multi-Step Authority Marketing Mindmap

This mindmap lays out the exact steps you need to take to get featured on the likes of CNN, Entrepreneur and The Huffington Post (just like Brian Horn did).

Download it now, implement, then leverage your new found attention in to more media, customers and profits:

If you are hosing traffic at your website and it’s full of holes, you are leaking money, probably lots of it.

Peep Laja uses the analogy that your website is like a bucket and that you need to plug the holes in it to stop visitors, leads and sales leaking away.

There are literally thousands of ways you could lose a visitor from your site; too many distractions, an unclear value proposition, bad user experience, too much perceived risk… the list goes on.

In this episode Peep Laja tells us how to identify some of your biggest holes and shares conversion strategies that will help you increase your conversion rate so your website sells more.

OUR GUEST:

Peep Laja is the face of ConversionXL, a highly regarded blog filled with well-researched and highly actionable content aimed at “smart people” who want to learn website conversion strategies, and generally improve their website’s performance.

Peep who hails from Estonia, is a self-confessed conversion optimisation junkie who started his career in web development and design before switching over to sales and marketing where he spearheaded the sales team for a real estate portal in Dubai.

Since then Peep has been country hopping. He has helped launch a British internet television company and started the very first internet marketing agency in Panama. He currently lives in the US during the summer and Europe during the winter.

Peep is the author of the book How To Build Websites that Sell and a contributor to popular blogs such as KissMetrics, Pro Blogger and Think Traffic.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher 

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from this episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you will find on this page, or click to tweet this Peep Laja quote from the show:

You can also download Peep Laja’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download The Bonuses.

“Measure everything that needs to be measured.  How else do you know you’re improving?” ~ @peeplaja
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hi there listener, welcome back to another episode of Traffic Jam, the podcast that helps you get more traffic to your website and make more sales and it’s the sales part we’re focused on today as we’re joined by Peep Laja from Conversion XL – an expert in conversion optimization which basically means he helps websites convert more traffic in to enquiries, leads and ultimately, more profit.

Before we get to the interview with Pep, a quick thank you to Amir Anzur from The United Kingdom who left a 5 star review on iTunes. He said… “Great Podcast, love the insights shared on every show.” I happen to know Amir, and he’s done some good things himself over at webpreneuracademy.com educating others how to leverage the internet.

Like Amir, you too can get a mention on a future episode by leaving a rating and review on iTunes or Stitcher. To access the Traffic Jam review pages go to TrafficJamCast.com/itunes and trafficJamcast.com/stitcher. I would absolutely love it if you were to leave a review and rating and as I said it is a great way tp get yourself featured on a future episode.

Just one more link you need to know about and that’s the episode page for this show, which you can access by going to TrafficJamCast.com/49. On that page you’ll find the full show notes – including a link to all the resources mentioned in the show. A full transcript of this episode, downloadable MP3 plus a special conversion boosting bonus I’ve prepared just for this show. So before we start the interview head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/49 and download the bonuses, and then listen along to this show.

So here is the introduction to our guest. His name is Peep Laja and he’s got a blog called Conversion XL where he publishes research and experiments on conversion optimization and getting better business results. It seems to set the conversion apart is its well-researched and actionable content and its cheese-free style, and that’s to paraphrase Peep. As well as his own blog, he’s also featured on other Traffic Jam guests, Corbett Barr’s Think Traffic and Neil Patel’s Kissmetrics, to name just two. Peep’s also the author of How To Build Websites That Sell which is a step by step guide to boosting conversions on your site from design to copywriting to marketing efforts and that is available on Amazon. Aside from being a prolific blogger, Peep delivers training and workshops on conversion optimization and internet marketing and consults with businesses wanting to build a website that sells more and he does that through his own marketing agency. Well, I also found out prior to the interview that Peep was also a resident of Dubai just like myself back in 2007 so we were both here in the UAE around that sort of time. But anyway, he’s been country hopping a lot since then around the world and he now resides in Texas, USA. So here we are, joining us all the way from Texas, is Peep Laja from Conversion XL.

James: So welcome back listeners! This is episode#49 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Peep Laja from Conversion Excel. Peep, how are you?

Peep: I’m good, thanks for having me.

James: So you’ve got this message on the home page of your website Conversion Excel that uses the metaphor that website are like buckets and that most websites are essentially leaky buckets, leaking customers and sales all over. I think I’d like to begin with that analogy, what are some of the biggest holes you find on websites that are literally pouring away money?

Peep: Oh, there’s so many, yet very many of them or all of them are very particular to a specific website meaning that there’s no one big bucket that is the same on all websites. There is just very little apples to apples comparison going on. The typical things that people don’t really know about or think about is all about cross browser or cross device issues that like everybody is saying, yeah, nobody is using Explorer 8 anymore but actually it has a significant impact if your website does not work with one so this kind compatibility issues is one of those leak issues that people are not paying attention to. And if we are talking about e-commerce sites. Most people focus their conversion efforts on the checkout funnel, get their products in the cart, are they going through their ship and billing steps whereas maybe the problem is your category page. Maybe people get to the category page but they are not clicking through to go to your product page, or maybe a decent amount are – they are looking at the product page but they’re not clicking at the cart button. These are the most common leaks.

James: Yeah, it is an interesting point you made about browsers. How big of an impact it is – the adoption of mobiles having on website conversion numbers?

Peep: It is a multi-faceted thing because it is also that people often do their research on a mobile phone and then they go home to their desktop computer and complete the purchase. So it is the continuation of the path because typically, mobile traffic, it is getting to like 50% off any website traffic or some are on the way of their 50% level depending on what you are selling and stuff. And what we see about conversion rates is typically mobile phones convert at maybe 20% to 30% off the level of desktop whereas tablets are like 90% of conversions. So if you look at your Google Analytics report and you look at the conversion rate per device category- tablet, desktop, mobile – and if you see that your tablet is less than 90% when compared to desktop then that means that the user experience on tablet is crap. Same goes for mobile, if it is less than 25% or maybe less than 20%, then again it might have to do with your website experience.

James: Yeah, well it is an interesting statistic, I know Google have put out some numbers on this and you might be closer to those facts than me but I think there is something like 70% of sales are multi device purchases like they have originally found a site perhaps on a mobile device but ended up making a purchase on a desktop or a tablet thereafter so I am sure it is pretty important stuff.

Peep: It is. Measuring all that is where it gets complicated. With Google Analytics you could store user IDs but they have to be implementing the fact that you can identify people across, I find it to be a little bit challenging.

James: Yeah, so let me flip my original question on its head. What are the biggest factors or principle that when handled correctly can have the biggest lift on conversions?

Peep: Well, essentially you are dealing with two dimensions. You have to be always increasing motivation and decreasing friction. So if I’m on your product page and you want me to add to cart of free sign up or whatever, then basically if you are not adding enough motivation on that page, you are causing leaks! You are making the leaks bigger. You always have to make sure that the motivation is at the highest level. Even if they go to your pricing page, are you doing something there to increase motivation or just telling them what the price is? At the same time, if you want people to take action, what are all the things that are decreasing the probability of people taking action? It might be that you really want people to click add to cart but you have 50 links on the page, 50 places where they can click. That’s attention ratio. So it is like 50 to one and you need to dramatically cut the number of actions on that page so that they would focus in on that single action that you want them to take. So reduce distractions, reduce links. Make the desired action stand out more in terms of size, colors; there are many, many levels you can use here. So at all time you ask yourself, how can I make taking action easier and how can I make them want to take action?

James: Yeah, well let us drill a little bit on those two categories because it is interesting conversation. What are some of the factors therefore that might increase motivation? Let’s say on a check out page, let’s assume that this is a purchase related conversion where someone is going to exchange some money perhaps for a product or a service, they are getting their wallets out, what might some of those things be that we could place there that might increase that motivational factor?

Peep: Well, we have to understand what goes on inside the mind of the customer when they’re on the page. And there’s only so much we can figure out or guess ourselves. It is better to ask users, so typically when I am optimizing the site and I need to increase checkout page conversion and let us say it is a simple form so it’s not hard to fill out so we are mainly dealing with motivation factor. So on this page, I would do like add a survey like add a Quaraloo or something where I would ask, hey is there anything holding you back from taking action from this page or anything. I want to hear the language of the user, the voice of the customer while they are on this page. What goes on inside their mind? It could be that they are having some fears and doubts about like, I don’t know, I am about to part with my money, will this thing really work? If that is their main concern, we can increase their motivation by adding language or proof that your service or product really works to solve their problem. Like maybe reiterate their problem, the software solves just like 30 more seconds and you are already on your way to paying this invoice or whatever. Painless invoicing probably needs a more than generic invoicing but basically you address and benefit that they’re about to get. Or maybe the hesitation in their mind is that, I have never heard of this software, am I the only idiot using this? So then you can use a social proof, 50 million or however loyal customers, add some testimonials there, maybe some five-star review in whatever magazine. So stuff like that, start with what is the user experiencing on that page, what is the thought process that goes on? And you won’t know until you ask them.

James: Yeah, and I guess it’s that classic survey isn’t it? Why did you buy or why did you not buy? And those are the things you need to address either one way or another.

Peep: Right! You communicated with people that are on this page before they even make a purchase so you want to ask them and try to figure out the sources of hesitation, what kind of doubts, is there anything holding you back, whether it’s that or other stuff.

James: Yeah and I can imagine you can have something like a Quaraloo survey that you suggested will work really well. I am guessing also something like a live chat function would also be good research in this particular scenario where you can get in touch with customers when they are almost in the act of considering or getting ready to purchase and see what kind of thought patterns are in that particular time.

Peep: Yeah, absolutely. You are absolutely right! And also reading live chat transcript can be super insightful. Or even talking to your customer support reps, what are the most common questions people ask while they are on the page can be really, really insightful.

James: Yeah, well you tweeted out something the other day that resonated so much with me that I actually shared it with my own audience. that was that the outcome of other people’s testing has no impact on our own and of course we should test using our own website and our own traffic. what are some of the most surprising results you’ve experienced perhaps where you’ve expected one result and gotten something just completely different?

Peep: Currently a hot topic with mobile designs is how do you design a menu for mobile sites? An aesthetical, very common use is the hamburger which is three lines underneath each other. And there have been lots of blog posts around helping people testing this and typically the hamburger tends to lose in those tests. So now, I think it was last or so that the number one travel site published their study. They did not reveal their numbers but basically they said that they tested the hamburger against the button menu and it was no different and the hamburger worked. So then me and my clients we launched a test on an e-commerce site testing hamburger against hamburger with a menu underneath it and now this was a very small change. This was a very small change, very tiny, just added the word menu underneath the hamburger icon, and this test has been running for 16 days so it’s not quite done yet, we should increase the sample size and the duration more to be sure. But the revenue is up 15% and 9% more purchases form just a small button change. 15% more revenue which in this client’s case is hundreds of thousands of dollars, so a very small thing but very surprising that how big of an impact this button test.

James: Yeah, and I guess that is making the assumption that everyone knows the little hamburger icon is in fact a menu. I guess some people just obviously don’t.

Peep: Oh yeah. Absolutely! If you are not selling to a tech savvy audience and in this case the product is scented candles so it’s like homemakers are buying them. It might not necessarily be a tech savvy audience.

James: Yeah, totally. I am guessing there is literally hundreds of things that we could test on a website but I am sure that there are some that have greater impact than others all the same. Where do you suggest people start with their testing? What are the hierarchy of the most important things perhaps to test first?

Peep: the key thing to remember is that, don’t test because based on your opinions. If the way you conduct testing is like you ask your colleague, hey, Joe, what do we test next? You’re doing it wrong. That’s not how testing works. Everything should be data based and data informed. The way that it would work is if you want to gather, yes you want to have opinions as well, meaning to a certain speech of your screen like the website category, product and pricing or checkout page, whatever. And just try to assess them for clarity. Let’s look at this page and make it clearer, can we reduce distraction here? Can we reduce friction here? Maybe make the form shorter and so on but your opinion based analysis of your website is just your opinion. So, I declare all of the results of the experience based and the result is experience based so I have identified things which I think might make a difference when we change them, but might not. So next step is we need qualitative and quantitative data. In the quantitative data, you need Google analytics, heat mapping tool, form analytic stuff like that. The main thing you want to understand is, where is the flow stuck? Where are most of them stuck? As I said, they might get to the category page but they are not clicking through to a product or if on the product page, they don’t add to cart. And in every step of the checkout funnel, where is the biggest draw? Once you know which pages have the biggest drawbacks, you’ll know that that’s where you want to focus first. The biggest drawback is your biggest opportunity. And what is wrong with those page? Why are people dropping off? We want to hear from the users so again, like the pages with the biggest drop offs, put some color wheel surveys on them and ask, what’s going on, is there anything holding you back from taking this action now? Also survey recent first time buyers, people who have no prior experience or relationships with you but recently bought something like three days ago. And send them an open ended survey, maybe ask 7 or 8 questions. And you want to ask about their intent. Like which they are solving for themselves and you really want to pay attention to the language they are using to describe it, because that is what you use for copywriting later on on that page, you want to ask about the friction they experienced, the hesitation, style, questions they had that could not find answers to and when you get this data in and you compare it with your own experience based assessment, then the picture starts coming together. Maybe you’ll have formed analytics like hey the people are using this form but this form field is causing this problem. So you have this data and now based on that you can come up with a hypothesis that is not purely opinion based but it is supported by data that you’re seeing then you come up with a test and then also when you are ranking, when you are on the same page there are multiple things that you want to test. You want to somehow rank this test and the way you want to do it you it is you want to assess 2 criteria here. One is potential uplift, and of course this is subjective. You don’t know how big of an uplift something you’ll have because if we knew we wouldn’t be talking here. So it is the severity of the problem. People on the product pages are saying I just can’ figure out how to add this damn product to the cart. If they’re telling you this, you know that is a severe problem so that is something that you want to test first. Whereas if it is just your opinion or idea and you have no data supporting that, it’s a problem, then the potential is not so big. So you rank all your test hypothesis, you score them from 10- 1, 10 being the biggest potential. And also ease of implementation because it might be that you have a brilliant idea how to completely reimagine the process on whatever page, but doing that you’ll need your designer to spend 20 hours designing then you need your developer to do 20 hours of coding stuff. So the ease of implementation is not very high. So again you rank your hypothesis based on ease of implementation like 10 being I can put this test live in 2 minutes and 1 being it will take 3 months of development. If you invest all of your designer and developer hours upfront and you have no idea it will perform, it is risky, right? So taking those 2 factors in to consideration, the potential uplift and the ease of implementation, so you want to test big impact, easy to implement stuff first.

James: Yeah, so it’s almost one number times the other I guess to kind of get the overall perspective of what’s going to be the right one to start with first. I can see how that might work out, now we have mentioned that we are going to need some kind of way to gather data and analyze this properly, and everyone loves a good tool tip. What sort of tools or software do you recommend using for testing purposes?

Peep: Well, of course Google analytics. But with Google analytics, you need to make sure that you are measuring everything that needs to be measured and I am talking way past have your goals configured and funnels set up. All the even tracking, like if you have an ecommerce site, 99% of ecommerce stores I come across don’t have even tracking on add to cart button. They only track visits to the cart page which is not the same thing. So if you want to improve the number of people clicking on the ad to cart product page, and you are not measuring that, how do you improve it? how do you know you are doing better now? So you need to make sure that every action is measured. If you have filters on your product, if you filter by size, brand or color, or whatever, if people use the widget, will it increase or decrease your conversions. If you are not recording every time somebody uses it, then how will you know? But if you record an event you can set up an advance segment in Google analytics and see people who interacted with this widget, are they now less likely or more likely to convert or no difference? And based on that you know which of your features actually have a positive impact. So for instance, I have a client, an allergy site, and they sell allergy products, and there is this widget on the homepage where they can say Choose, I need allergy relief from, and they choose a condition. Now, since we are tracking the usage of that widget, we see that people who interact with that – that sites average conversion rate is 3% – 4%, people who use that widget, their conversion rate is like 15%. Huge difference! So now, my test hypothesis or question is, how can we get more people to use that widget, right? So Google analytics, but you need to measure everything. Really great for order event tracking and tracking funnels and measuring the impact of these events is the tool called Heap Analytics. So this is the tool that records all events. You don’t need to configure your event tracks, you don’t need to bother your developer. It will record all the events and you just need to do some configuration within the Heap Panel for analytics. It is a great tool, I love it. and my third recommendation would be a tool called Inspectlet which combines heat maps like crazy egg kind of things. But crazy eggs like lacks analytical features. Inspectlet also adds form analytics, so you can see which fields in your forms is actually causing problems. Like maybe people leave it empty even though it is required, or they are getting a validation error or they hesitate filling out this field. All kinds of these great data per form feeding your forms, and it adds session replays. You can watch videos of people using your site. So if you have a page on your site and you have no idea why people are not taking action, you can actually watch videos of your users on that page and you can see what they’re doing and not doing and that can be very insightful. Time consuming, but very insightful. So those three tools I would use for the quantitative data gathering.

James: Nice! It sounds a little like my first job when I left college, I use to work for a company that did consumer research and we track people around the shopping aisles of big department stores and we’d watch where the picked up and how they’d move just to get an understanding of their interaction with the product interface and I guess that’s kind of taking that concept but now placing online on top of a website, right?

Peep: Exactly! Right.

James: Very neat. Now I guess a lot of the Traffic Jam listeners will be running paid traffic to their landing pages. What advice do you have that will help our listeners build a high converting landing page for paid traffic?

Peep: Key thing here, as most of your listeners already know, is relevancy. If I see your ad and the ad sets an expectation, and if I click on the ad and the landing page does not repeat what the ad said, there’s a mismatch. So the pre-click and the post-click messages have to be aligned. And the easiest way to do it is that you have dynamic landing pages meaning that your ad landing page copy changes depending on your ad copy. So of course you have a bunch of ads, ad proofs and whatever, and the message is different because you are split testing different messages targeting different keywords and whatnots. So make sure that your landing page, where you drive traffic to, is not static. So maybe the headline and some body copy will change according to your ad copy, and you can do that either by poking your developer friend in the ribs and he’ll write a simple script for you, or use a tool like Unbounced that has a built in feature exactly for this purpose.

James: Cool! I think we’ll get close to drawing to a close, I have a couple other questions I want to ask you Peep, first one is I am imagining that a good number of our listeners are in different scenarios with what they’re selling. We’ll of course have those that are selling low priced products with very short buying cycles. Perhaps and others maybe selling high priced services with very long buying cycles. How does what we’re actually selling affect our approach to conversion optimization?

Peep: Right, so I guess the main principle is that the more expensive and or complicated the product, the longer is your purchase cycle. So if your product costs like in my case where I sell conversion optimization services where the fee start from $10,000 a month, so it is not an impulse purchase, right? So if it is my first meeting with you, I am not going to sell you anything. I am not going to even tell you that I offer this service because I know that you are not going to buy so take my collections. Join my newsletter, read my blog posts, and I’ll send you a newsletter and want you to come back and read some more to build trust around that stuff and eventually down the line, when you have the need, I will let you know like hey, I am offering this service as well. So, I think the biggest mistake people selling complicated products make is that they are jumping the gun, they immediately ask for a purchase even though your prospect is not ready for it. I think the best way in this situation to increase sales is to avoid the sale at the beginning. Get them to opt in and interact with some widgets and something else.

James: Yep, it’s like that metaphor of don’t propose to the girl on the first meeting, right? You’re not going to get a hand in marriage in the first five minutes, or maybe you are.

Peep: Exactly! Right! And if you are only after her small kiss, you might choose a different approach.

James: Cool! Let’s almost wrap things up but I’d like to leave our listeners perhaps with something actionable to take away. So let us assume they’ve got a website, they’ve got some marketing in play, perhaps they want to go off and audit currently doing for improvements. What are some of the things that they can check right now as a good starting point in improving their conversions?

Peep: Okay, I guess the most important thing is you want to identify where your website is leaking money so a couple of things you can do. You go to your behavior all content site report and you sort your pages, you want to filter out low traffic pages because basically you want to identify your high bounce pages, high bounce means people are leaving as well as high exit rate pages. High exit is more complex because people don’t usually exit on the page where the problem is they have two or three frustrating things already. So that is one, and of course make sure that your funnel is all set up. There are so many reports here so James why don’t you link to a blog post that I have written called Google Analytics reports to show you where you are leaking money. I have 10 reports with screenshots that anybody can just follow and figure it out.

James: Perfect! We will make sure that that’s in the show notes for this episode so head on over to the episode page and we’ll make sure that that’s linked off to. Peep, I am guessing ConversionExcel.com would be a great place to send our listeners off too, anywhere else in the web that they should connect with you?

Peep: No that’s it. Every week we post at least 2 very long in depth posts where we have extremely high editorial standards so everything that you’ll find in our blog is solid gold. Check it out!

James: Awesome! Well thank you once again Peep and pleasure to have you on the show and perhaps we can do it once again sometime.

Peep: Thank you so much!

So there you have it that was Peep Laja from Conversion XL. To help take your conversions to the next level, I’ve put together a special conversion boosting bonus for you. For instant access to the bonus go to TrafficJamCast.com/49, that’s TrafficJamCast.com/49 where you can also download the MP3 and full transcript of today’s show, plus join in on the discussion for this episode too.

So thank you for listening in to Traffic Jam this was episode 49. To make sure you are the first to hear episode 50 as soon as it is released make sure you are subscribed via iTunes or Stitcher Radio, which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/stitcher.

We end the show this week with a Traffic Jam chosen by Peep Laja called Ratamahata by the band Sepultura, and a word of warning, this is some pretty heavy alternative metal, but anyway, enjoy and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now.

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Peep Laja has opted for the track Ratamahatta, one of the best known tracks from groove metal band Sepultura.

Ratamahatta is the last of three singles released in 1996 on Sepultura’s album Roots. It is also the final single to feature founding frontman Max Cavalera.

Ratamahatta – Sepultura

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

In order to get the best results from conversion optimisation (and fast), you need to know which elements of your website to test, and in which sequence.

So that I remove ALL your guess work for you, I’ve created this special “fill in the blanks” spreadsheet, that will ensure that you get to work on testing only the right things in the right order.

T.I.R. Framework:

The T.I.R, (Testing, Impact, Results) framework is a format Peep uses to prioritise and conduct testing on his own sites and that of his $10,000+ per month clients. It’s the same powerful formula he mentioned (very briefly) on this episode.

I’ve expanded on the explanation given by Peep and put together an easy to follow, step-by-step spreadsheet you can use right away to get to work on your own testing. Upload the spreadsheet to Google Docs online, or store it to your computer.

For ease of use your special bonus is provided in all the following formats;-

Click below for instant access to your T.I.R. “fill in the blanks” framework to help you prioritise and conduct your own conversion testing:

Getting your content in front of other people’s audiences by guest blogging is a killer strategy without doubt.  Appear on the right blog and you’ll get more visibility and the potential for more targeted traffic and leads.

But the problem is, most people don’t know how to guest blog effectively.

The traditional guest blog post (that most people write) is a 500-1000 word article that ends with a link back to their site hidden inside an author bio. Some people click that link, most people don’t.

The conversation stops at the last sentence. There is no compelling call to action and no incentive for readers to visit their site and join their email list. The result…a dribble of traffic and the odd new subscriber.

By contrast Bryan Harris has the EGP Formula which regularly nets him 500+ subscribers from one single blog post.

OUR GUEST:

Bryan Harris has been entrepreneurial all his life, and like most entrepreneurs he’s addicted to creating stuff. From the baseball stand he built and ran out of his bedroom at the age of 7, to the videos he produced in college, Brian has always made stuff.

His most recent creation is VideoFruit.com, a website focussed on providing practical tips on how to use and make video, as well as step-by-step plans (or formula’s as Brian calls them) to help you grow your business.

Bryan and VideoFruit.com have risen to notoriety in recent months resulting in appearances for Brian on Mixergy and Noah Kagan’s OK Dork.

Brian once lived on a house boat for 5 years and taught Ballroom dancing for a period.

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 48 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you can find on this page, or click to tweet my two favourite quote from this show.

You can also download Bryan’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with additional episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Structure your content content like TV. Build expectation for the next episode.” ~ @Harris_Bryan
Click To Tweet

To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hi! Welcome listener! You’re tuned it to Traffic Jam Episode#48 and joining me your host James Reynolds, we have today Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.com.

But, before we get to Bryan, just a reminder that if you haven’t yet subscribed to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher, you can do so by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And whilst you are there, I would love for you to comment on and rate the show. Your feedback is extremely invaluable to me and furthermore, if you comment there, I am very likely to read your name out on a future episode. So if you like to get yourself out at least a couple of seconds of airtime that is a really good way to do it, at least on this show.

Back to today’s episode. We’re joined by Bryan Harris who’s got a website called VideoFruit.com which has really risen to notoriety in a very short span of time. What Bryan is doing at Video Fruit is putting together formulas and case studies detailing strategies that others are implementing very successfully. Some of those strategies come from within the marketing space and also some of those strategies come from outside of the marketing space. For instance, Bryan has deciphered the strategies and tactics of Barak Obama and David Letterman, for instance. Hardly obvious choices you might think. One such formula that Bryan has put together which we’ll be deep diving in to in today’s episode is the EGP formula. So you can get the most of the EGP formula training, I have put together a special cheat sheet and resource guide for you and you can get your hands on both by going to TrafficJamCast.com/48. Why don’t you head on over there right now, download the resource guide and the cheat sheet and follow along as you’re listening in to this episode.

So let me introduce Bryan, he is really a bit of a rising star on the scene to be honest. His site, Video Fruit has gotten real traction from within just a few months and he’s now contributing regularly to the Lead Pages blog, he has also written for Noah Kagan’s OK Dork and he’s garnered praise from Andrew Warner and Brian Dean, the latter of which introduced me to Bryan Harris and put this interview together. So, I think that is enough to introduce Bryan, I think we should now welcome him on to the call so without any further ado, here is Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.com.

James: Hey Bryan! How are you doing today?

Bryan: Doing good, thanks for having me on.

James: Cool! Well you’ve got two guest blogging that I want to talk to you about on today’s section. Nicknamed the EGP Formula, what exactly is the expanded guest post formula?

Bryan: The guest post formula builds on a technique I discovered a few months ago called content upgrade and it is the idea of having inline call to actions inside the content you create. So you think about a typical blog, you have a header that sometimes might have an email opt in, you have the side bar, which usually has links to places that have email opt ins, you have a welcome gate on a page a lot of times that is completely focused on email opt ins. After trying plenty of different methods of collecting email addresses just from my blog for the past ten months, I have discovered that the single most effective method for collecting and building your email list is using something called content upgrade and it is the idea of inside of your post you are talking about a specific topic so make your giveaway, your free thing you’re giving your customer, or giving your reader, the about, whatever it is you are talking about. So if you write a post about how to train your dog how to teach him how to sit, at the end of your post you have a call to action where you have a video that teaches your dog how to fetch, that is alright, it is kind of related, but not really. If at the end of the post you had a 10-point checklist and a walk through tutorial of how to get your dog to sit, then that is going to convert extremely well and I have seen opt in rates of well over 30% routinely on this type of approach. And Expanded Guest Post builds on that and uses that in guest posts. So if my blog has 15000 readers a month and I go post on a blog that has a hundred thousand readers a month and I use an expanded guest post, I can convert 30% of those hundred and thousand people versus 30% of my 15000 people which means you can build a list really rapidly by just posting on other people’s site and using the expanded guest post content upgrade approach and send those people back to your blog with a relevant download and capture their email in your list then.

James: Yeah, well, it is a nice strategy and I guess the expected call to action would be to drive people back to your blog to opt in to something but I checked out a post you’ve done for lead pages.net and you’ve actually done something sneakier than that on that post. Tell me about that.

Bryan: Normally, in a lot of guest post, what people do, they make the heir of not putting links or any type of way for people to find you anywhere except at the byline at the end of the post. So I wrote this whole post on how to train a dog to sit and right at the end, usually below the related post section, there’s a bar about Bryan and it says Bryan is a dog trainer, here’s the link to find out more about his info, click here. That just never gets clicked on, and if it does, it sends them back to videofruit.com, like the main root domain. So that would be going to a landing page which is not specific and simply does not entice them at all. What I did with Lead Pages is take them in to the actual post. So with Lead Pages I wrote a guest post about 2 different product launches I did. And inside that post, I talked about the different methods I used and I talked about a bonus that I was going to include in to the post and bake that bonus in to the post itself we’re talking very natural in to the post. And at the very end of the post, the entire post built up to a climax at the very end which said hey if you want to learn more about this specific technique, I’m giving you a bonus, honestly at the top of my head I can’t remember what the bonus was in that post, but, if you click the link to download it, it popped up a box, it did not load another page, it popped up what is called a Lead Box so your pages did not have to reload or anything, you just click, it popped up, you enter your email address, and you’ll immediately be sent to a page where you can download the bonus. Instead of when you click and sent in to a landing page and then getting them to enter their email address, I put a box out there without reloading, allowed them to enter their email address, and went on. And usually, it’s 70% to 80% opt in rates on those Lead Boxes by doing that versus those 30% to 40% opt in rate when you send them to an actual rate that has to reload, that doesn’t have the design and everything going on. You just lose people in that process so if all possible, assuming they’ll let you, but if at all possible include a Lead Box in there and that alone for me has doubled my opt in rates just by doing that.

James: Yeah and how do you get around that? I mean because one, it is fantastic if you can get a Lead Box in there and you’re laughing all the way to the party. If you can’t get a Lead Box, you’d of course go for a link back to your site but how do you manage those scenarios where the editors are really very, let us say, not at all liberal in terms of the amount of links that they allow you back to your own site. Do you even entertain those opportunities or would they be just a nonstarter for you?

Bryan: Yes, I would entertain the opportunity because it depends on the traffic. I have seen Lead Boxes get published on the Huffington Post, on Entrepreneur.com, on Buffer, on Kissmetrics, I mean, there are a lot of sites that let you one. Two, if just for some reason you won’t, I would drop back and look at your writing to start with and see if it is an epic post, if it is a really, really useful post, I have never had a problem with that before. If it is a post that is kind of marginal and you are recycling some material and it isn’t top notch, then the writer or the editor is more or less going to agree to give you something like that but if you’re writing first class material, that’s the best way to avoid that. Write the best piece of content on that topic that has ever been written and it blows away the editor so much they could care less if you have a call to action. Now, some of those listening has probably never tried this before and they’d say, oh, that sounds great but that would not happen to me. First of all, shut up and actually do it first, and then if that’s a problem, figure out a solution to it. An easier solution is to just send them to a custom landing. It’s not the generic sender landing page that is hey welcome Buffer readers, here is the checklist that I promised you in the post, click here to download. And you’d have an email box there from the set up. That would convert well, not quite as well as a lead box but it still converts extremely well. And if you are posting on to the site that has a hundred and fifty thousand links a month, and you convert 40% versus 60%, alright you lost a few people, but, you’re still getting a massive boos to your list. A bigger boost than any technique I have known of that involves creating content. So yeah, if you can’t get a lead box in, want to produce content, not good content but world class content. And if you can’t do that, quit focus on sending a guest post and go learn how to write well and then come back. The most important thing you can do, can you create really, really, really good content, and if not, you can focus on some techniques like this but honestly, you’re not ready yet. You need to become a better writer first.

James: Yeah, and I guess the point is here, right, if you’re actually offering up something as a content upgrade that really does offer value and extended learning and expands up on the post that you’ve written, why would they have a problem with it?

Bryan: Yeah, and right now, not many people do this at all. It is kind of like list post five years ago, it works really well when many people did them. Content upgrade is in the exact same place right now, the problem is, they take a lot more work and they require you be actually a good writer. And there’s just a lot let of those, like anybody can go around and make a list post and as people did that, the technique became less effective because it saturated the market. But with content upgrade, I don’t think we’ll ever reach the content saturation that list post that because it requires more work and most people are lazy and most people suck at writing. But it is an awesome technique and not many people have ever seen that before so not many people know to not allow it. Has it been done ten times in the same blog, most people would develop a policy around it but right now most people don’t even have a policy around it at all so at the end of the day, you are not trying to good link anybody, all you’re trying to do is, one, write the best damn content that’s ever been written on the subject, and two, go even beyond that with the content upgrade and it will be even more helpful. And if you think about that in that approach, your upgrade is helping their reader even more. It’ not trying to get their email address, it’s not trying to scam anybody, it’s not trying to get past editorial guidelines, it is simply trying to help the reader more than any other blog has ever done, and if you can successfully do that, you can get people to ignore a lot of stuff that they would normally otherwise object to with lesser quality content.

James: Well let’s take a moment to talk about what type of content actually works best for the post itself. What sort of guidelines do you have there?

Bryan: What I found work the best is step by step how to tutorials post. And honestly that is just my favorite type of post to begin with mainly because that is the type of post that I want to exist on the internet. It makes the internet a better place when you have stuff that teaches people what to do, and not let me tell you the ten common mistakes that people do on blogging. I mean, come on, that has been written so many times! I’m like, please write something helpful! Don’t tell me what’s wrong, tell me how to do it right. What I found most helpful to people is that including myself, who don’t want to think about most things. 90% of the time, I just want someone to tell me what to do. I don’t want to figure out the best work out, I just want to pay the trainer and tell me what to do, I want to focus my efforts where I can affect my readers the most. I want to focus on producing content and teaching better than anybody else in the world so going out and trying to decipher the best way to get my work out in, that’s just a waste of my creative energies in me. I just pay somebody for that. Same thing with writing content, somebody probably doesn’t want to go out there and figure out how to set up a content upgrade and inside of mail chimp, one it’s a massive pain in the butt, I’ve witnessed that and you’ll want people to tell you exactly how to do that because you spend five minutes to figure it out and once you’re frustrated you’ll read my post and it just gives you the exact thing to do. So there is no pontificating, there is no analyzing, nobody in the talking head, it’s actually teaching you how to do something, and that is so rare to do on a high level that you stick out like a sore thumb. In a good kind of way, it just sticks out. And then, with the content upgrade, it just takes that to the next level. So here are the ten steps you need to follow to set up your content and oh by the way, here’s a bonus that you can get, here is a video of me actually walking through and doing all that, a person that you can watch and just follow along. That takes that ten steps post in to a completely different level. And oh, by the way you have to enter your email address to get it. So I would love to enter my email address, please give me that video, because I want it in order to successfully execute that.

James: Yeah, I have discussed a lot about both the importance of selecting the right websites in terms of audience size and in terms of match when we’re exploring guest post opportunities, but even with those two things in place, a good size of website, highly trafficked and with the right sort of people reading it, can guest posts still flop?

Bryan: Oh sure, yeah. Again, I keep on coming back to the same topic. If the article sucks, and honestly, another measure isn’t just quality of article. One thing I found to be really important is writing your post in a way that the entire post is pointing towards that bonus. It isn’t hey here’s the ten steps, and at the very end of the post oh by the way, grab this video if you want to learn more. Most people don’t make it to the end of the post and they would never see that. You have to write your post like a TV show. So me and my wife watched Dexter the TV show, like two months ago and it is an alright TV show. It’s probably a B-, but something they are really good at is creating open loops inside of their TV shows. Game of Thrones does a great job of this. So you watch an episode of Game of Thrones and you hear that the season comes on next spring, everybody is going to be anticipating it, you’re going to watch the episode, and they are not going to answer like 1 of your 50 questions. So they are going to bring up a bunch of storylines, storylines already extending last season, you’re expecting this episode to fulfill all of that and when you read it, they fulfill just a little bit of it, but the rest of it is left hanging for the next episode. So that will make you binge watch TV episodes and that’s why Netflix is so popular, because you can watch the entire season in one sitting and waste 13 hours on it. You need to build your blog post the same way, you need to create an open loop inside of that post that brings anticipation to the end of it so your reader has to get that bonus. It isn’t just an addendum at the very end, it’s like the entire point of the post, so I did this in Lead Pages maybe, and I was talking about different methods of collecting email addresses. So with them I shared three of the most effective ways with content upgrade being number one but I shared two other ways as well. But I said, hey I have 10 major ways I collect email addresses but we don’t have time to go through all 10 of them so I will share with you three of my favorite. So then I talked about the three, described them in detail, and then several different times throughout that post I made a reference to other techniques as well and at the very end of the post, I said, hey if you want to get all of the other seven, get all ten email collecting techniques, I have created a 30-minute video that walks you through all of them. Click here to enter your email address and you can get all 10. And that bakes in anticipation, like you immediately create a knowledge gap in the very beginning by saying I am going to share three of my favorite 10 and the readers are thinking, what’s the other 7? That’s great that you give me three but what about the other seven? Are they better? Are they worse? I don’t know. And then you talk about the three and bake anticipation and drill in into those three and give them a call to action and they are waiting for that like they are going to read in to that posting to get to the call to action then. So that is one way you can take a really well written piece of content and use the expanded guest post route, and actually make that content convert.

James: Yeah, got it. Well, I don’t think your example was entirely a theory, at least for me, I have just literally watched five whole seasons of breaking bad back to back and they do the exact same thing! At the start of the episode they’ll have a flashback towards the end of the episode so you’ll always tend to hook to find out exactly how that scenario falls out and of course at the end of the episode they open up something for the following one, they just keep you constantly gripped to see what’s coming next, right?

Bryan: It’s amazing! Like one of my favorite techniques in doing this whole online business experiment is taking stuff out of other industries and I think writing TV shows, that’s how your blog should be and trying to write a beautiful blog is like every blog is an episode of the TV show where it leads in to the next one and it talks about the previous one and leaves you waiting for the next one. So it isn’t just this one off things you’re doing your guest post is in a series where it’s like it’s a pilot episode that leads in to the real season of the TV show which is your actual blogs or your products or whatever it is you’re doing so you have to write that pallet correctly. It can’t just be awesome content but awesome content that leads them in to the rest of the content. Because there is no way you can teach them everything they need to know in one 1200 word blog post content, like you can’t just physically do it. And if you try to it is not going to be good. Talk about the main thing, get them hooked, and then lead them in to the rest of the content. So, it is an overall structure thing as well as a content upgrade thing, if you are just going to get one or the other, you are not going to get the full effect.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk next a little bit about how we might seek out these opportunities because I guess unless you’re a real authority in your market place, these aren’t going to be landing necessarily on your lap. How do you go about pitching the expanded guest post to website owners and try to get your footing on the door there?

Bryan: I think it starts with understanding how the sites that you want to write on think. And for me, I really did not understand this in the beginning but after doing it a little now, understand more and that every website owner wants good content. Everybody. If you are a really good fitness writer, you can write for the New York Times fitness column. If you are the best at doing that, all you need to do is show them you content, like, hey, here is an article that I have written for you. It is world class, it is better than what you are doing now, and if you are persistent with that over time, you’re going to be able to publish for them because everybody wants good content. So if you were going to pitch me, it would depend on who you are, I guess you’ve got two different classes of people. If you are just a zero marketer, I have never heard of you at all, when I go to your website, there’s like two articles and you’re kind of like in Stage 1. Stage 2 would be that you’ve written for six months and you have a lot of content out there and you’ve written for some other people then it’s definitely easier to pitch that because you can reference past work. But most people are in stage one, they are kind of just starting, they have never written for other people, and the best way that I found that people can write for me which is the only way I can answer that question because different people process differently is to show them your work. In the pitch, you have to grab their attention in the first two sentences and one way I’d like to do that is by showing them that I know who they are and that I have read some of their past content so I would open the email with something like this, hey James, my name is Bryan with Video Fruit. I have been following your blog for the past year, I love your content. Recently you wrote an article about how to build your email list. I really appreciate that article, I actually took it and implemented the strategies that you recommended there and I started my list and now I have a hundred people. That sentence is so pitiful because it shows me you’re not another Yahoo wannabe that isn’t willing to work. It means that you took advice that I have already given you and acted on it. And that goes such a long way so if you’re writing a fitness column in the New York Times guy, you would write and say, hey Steve, my name is Bryan. I noticed you wrote an article about XYZ so I took some of your advice and I implemented it and I have seen these results. That goes a long way in letting them know you are a real human and that you read their stuff and that you know who they are. The next step I would do would be to show them some of your work. And specifically go ahead and write, if you are just starting out, you have no body of work, you have to show the body of work so write an article for me. If you know I’m about to go in to a series of post on lap sequences and you kind of know what they’d look like because you have read some of my content, write a quote about lap sequences. And write it my style, write it in a way that my readers resonate with it and that answers all of my questions because my questions when I get pitched are: are you a Yahoo? Do you know what you are talking about? Can you actually write good stuff? That’s the number one thing. Can you write world class content? And if you just send me a pdf that says hey I went ahead and wrote an article and analyzed 15 launches that I noticed recently, fully diagramed the emails out and notes on how people could do it and step by step formula and oh by the way, I shot you a 30 minute video that shows you how you can do the same thing, that pitches my pitching because that is so unique! Like you spent 20 hours making that. And honestly, in the beginning that’s what you have to do. Don’t think volume, don’t think quantity. Think quality. So go ahead and create that and send that to me, and I will say yes in about three seconds for you posting that because nobody else has ever done that before. And not many people can do it because people usually aren’t willing to put in the time to do it. So two steps, #1, let them know that you are a human by referencing past work, #2 spend 20 hours writing a world class article and send it to me and make sure it jives up with the current theme of what I am currently talking about and the chances of you getting published are through the roof if you do that. I have never been told no myself using that approach.

James: Yeah, I’ve had similar experiences with a very similar formula actually. I tend to seek out guest opportunities by first citing a website, citing a particular piece of content which I am familiar with, and then perhaps lead to something like hey it was great but I thought it was missing this. How about I write on that topic because I know your readers would enjoy it and here are some of the examples where I have done similar stuff. And as you said, it is actually easier said than done. Unless you’ve got a body of work behind you, people are just screaming out for good stuff and it is kind of amazing that so few people are actually reaching out for these opportunities themselves.

Bryan: Yeah, the number one problem is writing quality. My advice keep coming back to that. If you can’t write good stuff, don’t waste your time pitching people. Like in six month you could become – not grammar and punctuation, I could not care about that, I am talking about actually being able to actually teach stuff, spend six months, become a good writer online and then see what’s pitching out to people and surprisingly it is easy to do when you can write well. When you become a good writer, you can get as much good traffic as you want because you can write anywhere you want.

James: Yeah, totally. And then nothing there beats actually than writing frequently. Put yourself a schedule and stick to it consistently and get stuff out, get it out there.

Bryan: Every single day. If you are struggling with that, the cure is – last December, I have never written stuff before. I have never since college. I would write 250 words a day, I’m the worst speller you’ve ever met in your life. If you read in my blog post you can probably find at least 20 errors in them but you know what, people could care less. People don’t care about that! I mean, do I want to get better? Yes, I hired an editor and hopefully that will help. But honestly, I just don’t care. Like what I want to do is become really good at teaching people how to do stuff and get good at that. Spend six months writing every single day. Publish once a week and you will be a good writer by March. So if you have not started yet and you are listening to this, by March, you can get published at Entrepreneur.com, Ink.com Buffer, Hubspot, myblog- any blog by March if you do that. Write 250 words a day, publish 1 a week, constantly keep trying to improve and you will be at that point substantially ahead of where you are now and if you have any kind of opportunities at all, you can get to the point where you can publish anywhere.

James: Yeah, let’s loop a little bit back to content upgrade because I have noticed a post you have written reasonably recently, at least at the time of recording this that was titled 11 Ways to Turn Readers in to Subscribers where you actually laid out some content upgrade examples, I think it was eleven. Which of those are your favorites and you’d recommend others pursuing as a first step with content upgrade?

Bryan: I mean, it is really experimentation honestly it is going to vary based on industry and everything but for me, one of my favorite things which I am doing now because I have experimented with all of these just because it’s the fastest and I think it does have a higher procedure value, is doing two or three videos at the end. I have done a lot of videos so it is fairly easy for me. I just turn on my webcam and turn on my screencast and record. So if I give you a step by step, I just go through those steps with an actual example. I can say, alright, we talked about how to set up your content upgrades and now I want to show you how to do it and I just turn on the camera and record me doing that. And I found my readers really like that because they can get the concepts and get it by reading but they can – it’s like fixing, like I fixed my refrigerator recently, I don’t know what happened to it but it froze out or something. So I googled around, found an article that showed me the most likely problems, identified one of them as being the problem and they showed me how to fix it but then I went to YouTube and I see somebody actually fixing it, which was just interesting, like I did not even think about doing it, it just a natural me trying to find the solution and I watched the video and then when I fixed it, I just put the video right beside the refrigerator and fixed the refrigerator while watching the video. I think blogs really suck for implementation. They are really good for learning, they are really good for reference, but they suck for actually implementing because they are hard to find and they have side bars that are distracting. And bookmarking is a pain in the butt. But a video is really handy for actually using to implement whatever it is. It can be exercising, it can be nutrition, it can be cooking, it could be internet marketing stuff or whatever, like when I cook, it is courtesy of a recipe but it is also is me turning on Google and watching somebody doing it. So I found, my favorite right now is doing that. But honestly, it’s really – like Friday I had a post and it’s my most popular content upgrade I have ever done and it was just a Google doc spreadsheet of links and titles and it’s got almost 500 opt ins from it. Sometimes, it is kind of random so just experiment with them and see what works for you and your readers too. That is the nice thing about upgrades, you can measure it. The better you are at analytics, you can see what people actually want by seeing what they enter their email address for and notice where your spikes are for your analytics. If you normally have 50 opt in and you get a hundred and fifty from this topic, well, then talk about that topic more. If you need to create a product about that topic, maybe you can. There is just a lot of stuff you can do with upgrades. You can create multiple products as a result of seeing what opt ins that people opted in to the most and creating paid product around it. It is a great validation strategy.

James: Yeah, totally. And I guess if you are using something like Lead Boxes or perhaps a system like Ontraport or Infusion Soft where you can tag those particular form fills, then you get that learning back almost instantaneously so I love it too.

Bryan: Yeah, you can do it, I mean LeadPages will give you numbers, it won’t tell you who did it but it can tell you how many people did it. Mailchimp, Aweber or any of them, you can actually. Some of them have limitations as to how many content upgrade you can do, now with MailChimp you can do 27 content upgrades, which, if you’ve done 27 content upgrades and you’re doing a decent job, you have a big list and just about paying for some higher end software but you can do up to 27 and tag individuals and know the exact individuals that opt in to your upgrades with lower end soft wares like Mailchimp which is $10 a month starting with more options.

James: Yeah, perfect! And then you can of course follow up people with specific messaging if you want to drill down that far, can’t you? I mean, exactly why I have joined your list for, you can detail your content and your sequencing as you follow them up afterwards.

Bryan: Absolutely! Honestly, if you are starting a business from none, your email list should be your number one focus. And if you are not using content upgrade to build your email list, you’re just irresponsible, it is crazy that more people aren’t doing it. It is the single best tactic I have ever seen, I have tried it in I don t know how many industries now but I have been consulting for different friends in different worlds and there is one buddy of mine that is collecting six thousand email addresses a month, and he was collecting eight hundred a month. Only thing he did was he went to the top 10 posts of his of all time and added content upgrades to them. It completely blows my mind how well the work. So, if you are going to focus on one thing, create your content, put upgrades in them, guest post with it and your list will be huge in no time.

James: Yeah, well I am sure that message is drilling itself home. You are not the first person to mention it, we labored on that with your good friend and mine also, Bryan Dean and of course Tim Page when we had him on a few episodes ago was also versing the benefits of content upgrades so listeners if you are not quite yet seeing the benefits of content upgrades, it is a damn good strategy to be implementing. I would say that is your one action point as a result of today’s podcast.

Bryan: And the great thing is, not everybody is going to do it. So, will it become more popular? Yes! Will it ever go out of style? I don’t know. But a great thing long term for you to pay attention to is look at what other people are doing in different industries. Look at sports, look at the newspaper, look at magazines or look at the movies, see what Tom Cruise does when he promotes a new movie. Pay attention to these kinds of stuff, like I’ve got – Lead Pages was using this technique for growing software subscriptions. They are the first and only people I have seen doing it, then I started doing it, and a couple of other people started doing it and now it is becoming even more popular but it came from a software company that was not even doing it. Lead Pages did not do it in their blog article. They did it when they released a new theme in to Lead Pages, they gave away the template but they did not do it in their blog articles. Now they are doing it in their blog articles because they see how well it works but the idea came from a software company and not from a blog. If you are always reading internet marketing blogs to learn about internet marketing, you are going to be five years behind everything. So pay attention outside of your world, see what other people are doing and try to figure out what would fit in to your world. That is how I found content upgrade – just by doing that and I am sure other stuff will come out of that but that is probably one of the best tips I can give anybody in any business. Pay attention to other people, see other people outside of your industry and try to bring their strategies in to your world.

James: Well let us kind of wrap things up there appropriately because that is kind of the theme of your website Video Fruit, right? You kind of take strategies that you have seen implemented elsewhere and you put them in to frameworks that other people can then replicated themselves. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve got going on at VideoFruit.com.

Bryan: Yes, so Video Fruit is an experiment that I started back in April of last year and I was just interested in online business so I did a few things that led me in to the video world and I realized that I had been in offline marketing for the past 12 years doing direct B2B Sales. I did not know anything about online business at all. So I just started paying attention to what people who were doing a good job online business were doing, the strategies they were using, the approaches they were taking, and I just started Video Fruit as an experiment to see if I can grow an online business by using the strategies that successful people were doing so I combined a lot of my offline experience with a lot of other people’s online experience and just tried and cut and paste and changed and just tried a bunch of different methods to see what works. Eight months ago, I had no idea even what an email list was or how to use it or why it was important and now it’s like, when you don’t even have an email list and you have a business, you are just throwing money away. It’s the single most important thing outside of actually providing value to people like in Marketing Moz, it is the single most important that you can do, build a list. I did not know that in eight months, I had no clue. So now that I kind of learned all that stuff by reverse engineering what people are doing, and as a teaching mechanism, as a learning mechanism really, I just teach that stuff like something that I just experimented with last week as a giveaway and man, it has blown my mind, I have collected 1700 email addresses in like a week by doing a giveaway. I mean, I had no idea those things work so well. So I will be doing a formula in the next month and a half just showing the results of that, how I did it and how people can do the same. So it is just an experiment, as I do experiments I report back on the results and people have resonated back with it. it has been fun, I really enjoyed it.

James: Good! Well it clearly has worked for you so perhaps another action point for our listeners would be to head on over to Video Fruit.com and kind of see what you are up to and perhaps model some of the strategies that you too are implementing. Bryan, outside of VideoFruit.com is there anywhere else we should direct our listeners off to as a result of listening to today’s session?

Bryan: Nope, the best way to find me is to set up a few bonuses at VideoFruit.com/email if you are interested. We talked a lot about doing an email list so if you come over there, I guess my best formula is there where you can come and check out and join the email list I put out two formulas a week that teach you how to do different things and they are always, I try to post stuff that is very different from what the mainstreams are doing so you will find some really interesting techniques and strategies that really nobody else talks about so come over there check it out and I will tell you.

James: Well, thank you Bryan! So to you the listener to get all of the resources and links mentioned by Bryan in today’s show, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/48.

So there you go that was Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.com. To get the best results from this podcast, make sure you put the expanded guest post formula in to action and to help you with that, I have prepared a special EGP formula cheat sheet and resource guide. It is available by going to TrafficJamCast.com/48 and on the cheat sheet you’ll find this simple step by step process you need to follow by the first expanded guest post plus the resource guide, you get a list of expanded guest posts others have published so you can get ideas and model that format for your own scenario. So you can get both that resource guide plus the cheat sheet plus MP3, full transcript of today’s show at TrafficJamCast.com/48 where of course you can also join the discussion for this episode. So thank you for listening in to episode#48 so make sure that you receive episode#49 as soon as it is released, remember to subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

We end this week’s show with a traffic jam chosen by me actually with a little directive from Bryan. He said I should go for a country and Western track, now admittedly my country and Western is a little bit limited so I have gone for a famous artist and a famous track. The track title is called Walk the Line and it is by Johnny Cash so enjoy!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Bryan Harris asked me to select a Country and Western track on his behalf. Given my exposure to country music is minimal I’ve gone for a famous track by the famous artist Johnny Cash.

The track is titled I Walk The Line and was released as a 7″ single on May 1, 1956. The track was written and performed by the artist.

I Walk The Line – Johnny Cash

WHAT TO DO NOW:

So you can easily leverage the expanded guest post formula for yourself I’ve created this special bonus for you:

The Expanded Guest Post Formula Cheat Sheet:

The cheat sheet reveals exactly how to put the powerful EGP Formula in to action and contains easy to follow examples of the Expanded Guest Post at work. Model them, adapt them….and use them in your business to rapidly grow your email list.

Click below for instant access to your Expanded Guest Post Formula Cheat Sheet and Resource Guide:

Every day 2 million blog posts are written (enough to fill Time Magazine for 770 years). Thousands of blogs are launched every day. The internet is awash with blogs, but very few of those blogs are blogs that matter.

Truth is most bloggers launch to a deathly silence. No traffic, no engagement and no impact.

Even if those bloggers work through their early failure, the likelihood of their blog taking off is incredibly low. Unless that is they have a website launch strategy for their blog.

Corbett Barr has developed such a strategy by studying the differences between ‘most’ blogs and the select few that actually attract at large following. This formula is what Corbett used to create blogs that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors per month (including Think Traffic and Fizzle).

OUR GUEST:

Corbett Barr is Co-Founder and CEO of Fizzle.co; A podcast and community for creative entrepreneurs, writers, makers, coders and artists, all working to support themselves independently on the world-wide-web.

Corbett rose to prominence about 4 years ago when he launched Think Traffic, a website focussed on the topic of building a thriving, profitable audience online. Since the launch of Think Traffic he has dedicated his career to teaching people how to build engaged audiences and sustainable online businesses primarily through blogging.

He is the creator of the course How to Start a Blog That Matters and is an advisor to some of the most influential bloggers on the internet, some of which reach millions of readers every month.

Corbett is location independent and enjoys winters in Mexico and summers in Europe!

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from this episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you can find on this page, or click to tweet my two favourite quotes from this show.

You can also download Corbett’s quotes as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Don’t expect that all of your success is going to come from one relationship.” ~ @CorbettBarr
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“If you’re not getting the results that you want, you have to shake something up.” ~ @CorbettBarr
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is episode#47 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host, as always, James Reynolds, and we’ve got another excellent show lined up for you today.

Just at the top of the show I want to say I quick hi to new listener Brian Horn, to long time listener Steve Hutt and also to Eugene Soh. Thank you to each of you for joining the discussion for these episodes. So rewarding, as always, to hear your positive feedback and to that I salute each one of you.

To you the listener, you can also join in on the discussion for the episodes and for this particular show, you do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/47, where you can also get a special bonus, a step-by –step checklist that lays out the exact strategies that our guest today has used to launch with huge success two very well-known blogs. Those blogs are Think Traffic, and more recently, Fizzle.co. So we welcome to the show today Corbett Barr who’s a serial entrepreneur who’s had plenty of success and a fair few failures as well. Building audiences for various web projects he’s been a part of. In fact, the website for which he got most fame, Think Traffic, was launched after watching several friends of his struggle to build an audience for their sites. Through his courses and consulting, Corbett has helped students launch or grow more than a thousand blogs and websites over the past five years and he now generates well over 100 thousand visits per month to his own websites. So I thought it would be a great idea to invite Corbett on to the show to share his learnings from launching several websites and to lay out a repeatable framework that you too can use to launch or reignite a blog online.

So that’s exactly what you can expect from this episode and all that remains now is for me to introduce our guest today, Corbett Barr from Fizzle.co.

James: Hey there Corbett! Welcome to Traffic Jam.

Corbett: Hey James, thanks for having me on. Glad we can make it work!

James: Yeah, super stoked we could be here. Now of course you have been doing this whole online thing for a fair amount of time now. When did you first decide you wanted to build an online business?

Corbett: Let’s see, the first was in 2003, so ancient history by now, I have gone through a couple of iterations since then but the style of business which I am building now which is really based around a blog and a podcast, I started that in 2009.

James: Well, I want to ask you some questions around that because you have built two very well established businesses, both Think Traffic and Fizzle which I am sure some of our listeners at least will have heard of. Both of those sites gained a huge amount of popularity pretty fast, what steps would you repeat if or when you are to launch another site in the future?

Corbett: It’s a good question and I am sure that I will launch another site because I have that entrepreneurial addiction to launch a bunch of new things, right? It’s a challenge not to launch actually. That’s my struggle now, to try to stay focused. But in launching fizzle, we had an unfair advantage because we already had a built in audience. So I don’t know that that applies necessarily as well. For Think Traffic, that was a bit newer and I didn’t really have an audience that was focused on building online businesses at the point that I launched that, and the steps that I went through, I really tried to plan out the initial content and I knew that if I was going to come out with new ideas and new brand and really get some initial early traction that I needed to make a big to do about it, I needed to make some noise about it, and then when I brought people in, I needed to have enough substance there. I think a lot of people get the sizzle part of the equation right, they make a lot of noise, they make a lot of attention, but then the stake part, the meat of the matter, isn’t necessarily as good as it should be so I really try to focus on both simultaneously so just specifically that meant that I had my first few weeks of content already written already ready, and I launched where initially I did a big round of posts where I did an interview with 17 different people. I think the interview was called 17 Traffic Tips from some of the World’s Most Popular Bloggers. So I interviewed a lot of people who were popular and at that time that was a good strategy, that was a strategy is kind of worn a little thin now because so many people have done it but so many actually to get a big boost in to my site and I create a post that was very shareable, and then I really encourage people to subscribe and I followed up just with the very best stuff that I could right out of the get to really get people in to creating a post that was very shareable and then I really encourage people to subscribe and I followed up just with the very best stuff that I could right out of the gate to try to get people really interested and to get the buzz flowing.

James: Yeah, so is that what you launched with? That list post that leveraged other experts’ own audiences?

Corbett: Essentially yes, I think I had one other post that was sort of a welcome to Think Traffic which I ran without any fanfare, I just made sure that was on the site in case people wanted to dig in and check other things out.

James: Yeah, so when you launched Fizzle then did you adopt the same strategy? Did you try and pre-populate the site with at least a base level of content when you sort of start to open up the floodgates of traffic and start to drive people there?

Corbett: Fizzle is a little different for us. Really it was more of a product than a content plane initially so we created Fizzle as a membership site, a community and training library for entrepreneurs. And because we already had Think Traffic, what we really did was we really launched Fizzle through a number of different of alpha and beta stages before we opened it up to the public and we did that by telling people on our Think Traffic list about what we were working on and that it was coming and then we would open the doors just to get enough people in to get feedback and we call those people charter members and we gave them a discount basically in exchange for their feedback and so we sort of primed the pump and got people inside before we ever decided to open the doors fully and then later actually, after we launched Fizzle, later we decided to start a blog around Fizzle and then also to start a podcast.

James: Yeah, well it is much different, isn’t it to launch a new site with a baseline and an audience already there than it is trying to do from scratch so I am sure you kind had a slightly unfair advantage over most when you’ve launched Fizzle.

Corbett: You do, although you do go through sort of the same issues in terms of how do I launch this and how best do I make use of the resources that I have? That’s really the question for me and at different stages in your career or depending on how long you’ve been active, you might have an audience already or you might not but the question is always the same, how do I make use of all the resources that I have in the time that I have to gear up for this launch?

James: Yeah, so you’ve of course got a couple of rounds of learning now. What would you not do next time around?

Corbett: What would I not do for a launch next time around? That is a really great question. I think that in general I have gotten more interested in launching as soon as I can, almost to put things out there when they’re still rough because the feedback that you get from people is invaluable and in the beginning what I would do is hunker down and tinker away on something for months, and months and months and sometimes years almost before I launch it to the public only to find out that I was way off in my assumptions what people wanted or what they would find interesting and so now what I would try to do is really to be first of all be transparent as I can possibly can while I am building to let people know that I am working on something, that it is going to be coming out so that I can get their feedback along the way and hopefully get them excited for the launch so that people will show up on launch date and then I really try to put things out almost to where they’re embarrassingly unfinished where there are some things where you say, oh don’t look over there we didn’t have time to clean the bedroom before you guys came over for dinner sort of thing and that has worked out really well because I think that people who get in at those early stages start to feel a sense of ownership of the public along with you, they feel really like they’ve been part of something since the beginning and they are vested in seeing you succeed and so they’re more likely to give you good positive feedback as opposed to just moving on without saying anything.

James: Yeah, totally. When you ask the same questions of others when you first launched Think Traffic I believed so I want to turn the question back to you, what’s your most unconventional traffic strategy?

Corbett: My biggest one is probably don’t quit; make sure that you are around for a very long time. People ask how we’ve built the audience that we’ve built across Think Traffic and Fizzle and whenever I look back on it, there’s all kinds of strategies and tactics and things but they’ve really smoothed out over time and I realized that very few of them were that important. The important thing was that you showed up every day, every week, that you focused on who is my audience, how can I publish something to help them? And to be honest, the reason that we have a big audience is that I showed up every week for – it’s been five and a half years now since I first started a blog and we’ve published maybe a thousand articles now over those five years. And you would have to hard-pressed to publish five thousand blog posts and not have some semblance of an audience. If you choose a problem that peopled are interested in, and you really focus on every week showing up and getting better at helping them with that problem, you’re going to do just fine with a blog or a podcast or anything else. But you really have to show up and you have to focus at getting better week by week, you can’t just show up and do everything and expect the same results. As what Einstein said, what’s the definition of insanity? You really have to show up and try to get better each week. If you’re not getting the results that you want, then you have to shake something up and change and adapt and get better and really that’s all I did for the past five and a half years and now we have multiple of hundreds of thousands of people showing up on our sites every month.

James: Yeah, it is amazing how many times this line of conversation has come up over the course of these interviews – Joe Pulizzi was one of them and we were chatting about just how soon businesses or individuals are to give up on content marketing and put a few posts out and expect a huge surge of traffic and engagement which of course does not happen and they put the project by the wayside. I think there is a huge case in point for persistence and discipline to really get the traction going with that sort of stuff.

Corbett: Yeah without that, nothing – no other traffic strategy is going to work because you’re definitely not going to have some overnight success in the first week so if you are not willing to be dedicated at least for a year or two, you’re not going to see the results that you’re hoping for and really you have to align those expectations before you start.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well, you of course have got a large community of business owners inside of your Fizzle membership so I am sure you see plenty of case studies and different things going on, what do you see others making in terms of mistakes online when trying to build an audience?

Corbett: Well, the biggest one, we talked before about the stake and the sizzle and I think it is a big mistake to focus on one versus the other in either direction. And the direction that I see people focus on is the content and the substance and not the promotion and relationship. People like to work on their thing and they are too scare to talk to other people, they are afraid to put their stuff out there. They are afraid of rejection or whatever and so they think, I’ll just build it and eventually people will show up. I’ll just keep my head down and keep doing my thing. And I have seen this on all kinds of disciplines, not just blogging or podcasting but it also works in the same way for musicians or artists or whatever. It is really easy just to focus on your craft and not to do the promotion part of it and really you need to do some of both and so for the people that I see this whole content marketing strategy work for, they are the people that are really spending equal amounts on content as well as the promotion. And the promotion really to me all starts with creating a relationship with other people online who have access to audiences that might be a good fit for you and what you are doing. Basically, your job is to figure out where other people are already hanging out online and how you can get in front of them and get them back to your own site and that all starts by creating relationships with other people. I think back to the early days of blogging, for me and the people who I became friends with who are just starting out, just coming up, but I could tell that they had ambition and drive and they had something interesting and they had some early semblance of success. They weren’t rock stars, or A-listers by any means but those people and I, we worked together and we formed little bonds and teams and mastermind groups and things like that and we all came up together and sure enough a lot of those people became big names, people that you would know very well now who just five and a half years ago were just starting out. We were more valuable to each other at those stages because the direct support and accountability and going back for one another than you’ll find if you’ll try to reach out to a bunch of people who seem really just established if you just banged down Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk or whatever, you are not going to get a whole lot of results because those people are really busy and they are approached by hundreds of people every week. You are much better to look out for people who are the rising stars, the kinds of people who you can tell have that special thing, whatever it is, and just to form teams with them, informal teams where you hold each other accountable and you make sure that each of you shows up every week and you’re also there to give that harsh critique once in a while that you’re not going to get from other people because you’re not insiders, you’re not friends to that level.

James: Yeah, so how might we go about identifying those people first and then secondly, do you have any kind of good strategies or perhaps some advice to get the most out of an outreach program to kind of get in touch with these people because I think it can be quite hard, right? Especially if these people are starting to get a bit of a name for themselves. I am sure they are getting approached by others.

Corbett: They are but not as much as you would think, again I am talking about people who are the rising stars, not five years in to it but people that are within their first six months or year of getting any success. Those people aren’t getting approached as much as you would think and so you can stand out with just an email especially when it’s really thoughtful and carefully crafted but before that, what I would do is I would spend a lot of time knowing who’s who in your space. In fact, when I was starting out, I made a point, I was blogging, the site that I was blogging in 2009 was called Free Pursuit and the idea was I was on an 8-month long road trip sabbatical through Mexico and I kept meeting people who weren’t rich or retired but had figured out ways to live in foreign countries every year for months and I started this blog basically to ask myself questions about who these people were, how they were able to do this, and how somebody could make their career work around their life instead of the other way around. And I made a point initially within the first six months or so of blogging to get to know every other person in that space of lifestyle design, location independent or whatever you want to call it. I made it a point to know who every other was on that space and then to reach out to the Top 50 or so and try to know them personally. And the easiest way to do that is to organize some sort of blog community event or a podcast community event within your space, whatever that is, to say hey let us all get together and run a series of posts on X, sort of like the old carnival blog that you used to go on, or what I did was I ran a survey actually, I organized a survey for the audiences that we all shared so that we could get a bunch of really interesting results and beyond that, I encouraged people to name names on their site and to link out freely and talk about other people that they admire. They say, hey I don’t know if you’ve seen what Jane Smith is doing over here but she’s got some really exciting stuff going on. Before you even know Jane, just talk about how great her stuff is and link to her directly, mention her on Twitter and just kind of grease the wheels a little bit and that is a great way to get on someone’s radar and then when you send them an email to say hey, I just wanted to let you know, I am not a stalker, I am just a big fan, I have been following your work for a few months, I think we have a lot in common and I have mentioned you a few times in different articles and I’d love to chat in Skype sometime if you have a minute. That sort of approach can work really well and you don’t have to bummed out if you don’t hear back from any individual person, if you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and make it so that all of your success depends on reaching this one specific person that you have your heart set on, because some people just aren’t going to connect with you for some reason. Maybe you are too busy, maybe your personality doesn’t strike them, or maybe they’re just shy or whatever so don’t expect that all of your success is going to come from one single relationship. I would make a list of 20 or 30 people that you want to get to know and systematically just follow this sort of approach or whatever approach works for you where you try to get on the radar somehow and then reach out to them directly of those 20 or 30 people that you’ve reached out to, you should have at least a 50% response rate and then from there you move on to see which of these people are going to be good friends and just let the relationships happen naturally.

James: Yeah! You’ve also managed to leverage those relationships really well with co-authored content, right? Tell us a little bit about some of those content that you’ve produced.

Corbett: Co-authored content, yeah, so well, initially as I mentioned, some of those early relationships that I created, I had gotten to know Adam Baker from as I called Man vs. Death. We both started blogging on the same month of the same year and we have gotten to know each other just from methods that I am talking about here. We became friends and over the months we just both knew that we both wanted to work on something and it did not happen until we were both in the same place. He was actually here in San Francisco and we went out for dinner and we were talking about wouldn’t it be fun if we worked on a project at some point and we were finally like, why haven’t we done that and I think it was just being able to be in person we were able to hash out the details, made it work, and so we eventually launched a project called the Hustle Project and the idea was basically group accountability, getting a bunch of people to gather on a weekly basis to hold each other accountable, to try to set goals, basically a big mastermind or a group coaching program and that was a really fun project and I think it happened because we were both in person as I said and looking back on it I realized how many critical decisions and relationships have come about because I actually met people in person. Usually I’ve known those people already online and then we attended the conference or whatever it was, got to know them in person, and that just really took things to the next level. So don’t overlook how important those in person relationships are and I really, really strongly advice people to attend conferences, even if they don’t know anybody to begin with, book yourself at a conference that’s coming up, there used to be something called Blog Roll, I think it’s called Media Expo, there’s South by South West, there’s the art of non-conformity conference which is called the Domination Summit, those are all fantastic opportunities to meet people and what you do is to book yourself in to going one of those yourself a few months out and then start to build relationships ahead of time, say maybe reach out to your audience or your readers, say who’s going to be at this conference who’d love to meet up with you, reach out to other bloggers who you hear talking about the conferences online and mention that you’re going to be there as well and meet those people in person and then that can lead to co-authorship opportunities that you are talking about because then you can do all the talking with people online if you want but the bandwidth just isn’t there, meaning the non-verbal cues that you pick up when you actually talk to that person.

James: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. I know from my own experience, my business has certainly multiplied when I have kind of got out from behind the desk and got on a plane and traveled to the US or to Australia because you can just deepen those relationships that otherwise are kind of at the surface level so I think that’s valuable advice especially to us online marketers who are kind of sitting behind our computers for hours and days on end sometimes.

Corbett: Exactly!

James: Let me talk to you about standing out, we touch on the topic in terms of standing out to in terms of content partners and things like that. What about standing out online in terms of content? Because content marketing is super involved right now but there’s a huge amount of people that are creating content. What sort of tips have you got for creating something that is really going to stand out above the rest?

Corbett: You have to do something different and that really means thinking creatively for yourself, and this is okay in the beginning. What I see is people basically just copying other people and trying to see what works for them, copying their approach and more than just their approach. Sometimes they are copying just literally ideas for headlines and things like that and it’s just really hard to stand out if you’re doing what everybody else is doing. When you realize that there is actually not that much creativity going on online, that’s when it becomes really easy to stand out. Most people don’t even try to be creative. Most people really don’t have original ideas for themselves, they’re not able to synthesize ideas that they read in books or by watching films or by listening to music or by studying at what’s going on in other industries. Most people aren’t able to synthesize those sorts of things so all they do is they put on the tunnel television blinders and they look at their own industry, their own content format, and they just really over analyze what is going on in their own space and then they end up basically copying, maybe not intentionally, but because they’re so immersed in that world, that’s the only thing that they know and they don’t go anywhere else for inspiration. And when you realize that that’s mostly what’s going on, and that all you have to do is to force yourself to try to be creative, try to build something that you did not see someone else do, but based on something that comes from a different place, a natural place, and maybe like I said, to borrow ideas that you find from other creative pursuits, from what you see being interesting in other spaces entirely. That is a great way to come up with something and then to make it your own. Because all creativity, it’s not something as if it’s brand new. Everything that everyone makes is a combination of things that have been seen elsewhere, in nature or in other industries, but you can combine those things and create something that really does stand out for yourself. But it is a process of trial and error. Again, I mentioned before, you can’t just show up every week, do the exact same thing, and expect different results. What you have to do is try something new, put it out there, and you’re probably going to fall flat a number of times, and you have to be willing to fail, you have to be willing to stomach that you put something out there that did worse than the mediocre results that you have been getting with the copied formats that you have been using. Maybe you’ve put out some stuff that fall really flat but then maybe you’ll put something out and it will work really well eventually. So really to me, if you want to have success with whatever it strategy it is that you are doing, whether it is blogging or podcasting or whatever in terms of content, you have to find some formula that works. For example, not to put down interview shows on podcast, because I really love interviews and obviously we are doing one right now, but when we started our podcast for Fizzle, what we noticed was there was just a glut of interviews out there, there were a lot of different shows that were doing interviews and I like what you are doing James in terms of at least focusing on a particular topic on your interviews but we just saw that there were so many interviews out there, we thought, why not do something different? Why not start a show that is not interview based, that’s more traditional talking head style that you would find in a radio program or something where really it’s just the host most of the time and we saw this being successful in other spaces as well. And we decided to run with that format primarily because it was a differentiating factor for us and I can’t say that we necessarily have a much bigger audience than we would have if we have done interviews, I don’t know because we did not do both, but I can tell you that the Fizzle podcast, the Fizzle show has become a really strong driver of new customers to us because instead of doing interviews, it’s an hour of us talking and if people listen to our show, they really get to know us and our opinions and that makes them great candidates to become customers of our program.

James: Yeah, I think it is one of those challenges, right? With doing an interview- based show because for the most part the focus is on the interviewee as opposed to the host of the show and I am guessing really the host of the show is the one who wants to build his own authority and his own audience rather than always just piggybacking on someone else so it is a battle that is hard fought. I know there are some guys that do it very well. Pat Flynn always manages to get very much a strong piece of him in his own show despite the fact that it’s interview based as well but it’s a hard balance to portray sometimes.

Corbett: Yeah, and you know I have seen some people who don’t just do an interview but they have some sort of segment before or after that they follow. Some format where some people have some big question that they are diving in to and then they bring on the interview guest to talk about that. Other people position themselves as the expert and they have the interview guest on and they sort of go through a little bit of counseling or coaching with them while you’re on the phone and these are the bigger named people that they have on so there’s a whole lot of things but the point is, you have to make yourself stand out. And you have to look around and if you see that, oh, I started a blog and every other blog in our space is running list post about top 10 traffic strategies for xyz and I have a blog that is talking about the same kind of thing, I can’t just run the same kind of post over and over again and expect different results. I need to create something that is unique and powerful in my own way.

James: Yeah. Well let’s finish up with a question because this is the focus of the show as you so rightly said, if you have to kind of roll the chips and put over all of your money on one particular traffic source that has been successful in your own business, what would that be?

Corbett: For me, it would always come back to blogging. I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I gave a talk recently and I wrote a blog post about just my realizing that the most valuable thing that I have ever done in my life has been blogging. I started a blog five and a half years ago while I was just on a trip and I stated one on a whim and it lead to so many opportunities. I run a business now with three other guys who I adore and we have a great time doing it. I am able to live anywhere in the world, and I spend winters in Mexico and often summers in Europe and I just love my business and I don’t have any other investors or anybody else to answer to and all of that happened because I started a blog. And looking back on it, I just realized that all roads, all opportunities that I have had since then, all of the friendships, the speaking opportunities, and everything has come because I started a blog and it’s a really, really powerful thing. And I am not saying that podcasting couldn’t be that thing for you or creating videos, it couldn’t be that thing for you, and it can be obviously. That has worked wonders for a lot of people. So I would really pick the format that you fill the best about. Don’t think the format that you think the most opportunity is lying, because I think we see this over and over again, people think that some format is dead, people think that blogging is dead or e-books are dead or email is dead or whatever, they’ll say the same about podcasting and they probably are now and things come and go in waves but there will always be opportunities for interesting, unique, valuable, powerful, emphatic content and it really doesn’t matter the format it’s in.

James: Well, let’s wrap things there Corbett and leave our listeners with a couple of places to head off and find you on the internet. I am guessing Fizzle.co would be one, where else should we send our listeners off to?

Corbett: Fizzle is the best place. You can find us on iTunes. If you just type Fizzle in the search box there you’ll find our Fizzle show podcast, we have new episodes every week and Fizzle.co is as I said our training library and community for entrepreneurs. It’s really a group of people who are in there fighting the good fight every week, trying to make a little bit of progress towards supporting themselves online by doing something that they actually care about.

James: Fantastic! Well, to you the listener, a link to those resources, Corbett’s social media profiles, and everything else mentioned in today’s show, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/47. So all that leaves me to do is thank you Corbett for coming over to Traffic Jam, absolute pleasure to be talking to you today and I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

Corbett: Absolutely! Thanks for having me on, James.

So there you have it! That was Corbett Barr from Fizzle.co. Thank you as always, for taking the time out to listen in to the show. To help you get the most from this episode, I’ve put together a step-by-step checklist that shows you the exact process for launching a brand new blog or kick starting your old blog back in to action. This checklist summarizes Corbett Barr’s very best traffic driving strategies. To get your hands on the checklist and start generating much more traffic to your site, you can visit TrafficJamCast.com/47. I also recommend that you subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio, and you can do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and that will ensure that you never miss a future episode.

To access all of the bonuses that come with the show including the blog launch checklist, downloadable MP3 and full transcript of the show, go to, as I said, TrafficJamCast.com/47, where of course you can also join the discussion on this episode.

We end this week’s show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our guest Corbett Barr. It’s called Don’t Swallow the Cap and it’s by the band called The National.

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MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Corbett Barr has selected a track by American indie rock band The National called Don’t Swallow the Cap.

The National was formed in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1999, and is currently based in Brooklyn, United States. Don’t Swallow The Cap is from the National’s sixth studio album Trouble You Will Find Me released on May 17, 2013.

Don’t Swallow the Cap – The National

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

To help you get the most out of the website launch strategies revealed by Corbett Barr on this podcast, I’ve put together a special bonus for you:

The Blog Launch Checklist

This checklist contains 9 ideas you can use to kick start your brand new blog or reignite your old (stagnant!) blog.

The items on this checklist are the very same strategies Corbett has used to launch 2 wildly successful blogs, and if you implement just a handful of these you are set to do well.

Print this checklist out and tick off the ideas as you implement them, then report back with your success story

Also included along with the checklist, is a full PDF transcript of the interview with Corbett, plus MP3 and episode artwork.

Click below for instant access to your Blog Launch Checklist and other Bonuses:

Businesses all about us, possibly yours too, are vying for the attention of their prospects by shouting as loud as they can. Each business pushing the freeline, out doing one another with better and better offers. There’s a lot of noise on the internet and it’s hard to stand-out and be heard.

So what’s the answer? STOP shouting and start questioning.

Ryan Levesque has developed a simple marketing funnel that is kind of contrarian. Instead of screaming we’ve got the best this, that or the other Ryan suggests saying “I don’t know if I can help you. But, if you take a few moments to tell me a bit about your situation, I’ll recommend a solution that’s right for you.” He then leads people through a step-by-step questioning process he calls the Survey Funnel.

It’s simple and it works because it mirrors a real conversation. Worried a consultative process can’t be scaled? Don’t be! Ryan’s generating 10,000 leads per day (on auto-pilot) in some markets with this formula – and that’s one single funnel. Tune in and learn how it works so you can get survey funnels working for you too.

OUR GUEST:

Ryan Levesque known by many as “The Funnel Specialist” is well-recognized for creating online lead and sales flow models – most notably The Survey Funnel Formula. He’s generated over 2.8 Million Leads, 175,000 Customers – across 19 different markets – and those numbers are just the last 23 months alone.

He has been cited as a marketing expert in countless media including CNBC, Yahoo Finance, The Miami Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mass Market Retailer, and many others. As a marketing and business coach, Ryan has generated over $37 million in additional revenue for his private clients since 2008.

Ryan currently lives in Austin, Texas and when he’s not running his business, his “hobbies” are his 2 1/2 year old son and tending to his 8 month pregnant wife!

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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from this episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet my favourite quote from this show.

You can also download this quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Build a fortress around your business. Over time it will be impenetrable.” ~ Ryan Levesque
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hi! Welcome back listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a more profitable audience online. I’m your hose James Reynolds and you’re listening in to episode#46 and on today’s show we are joined by Ryan Levesque who’ll be sharing his survey funnel formula, which to date has generated over 2.8 million leads and 175,000 customers.

But before we get to Ryan, I want to say a quick hi to Chall and Adawali who commented on the Brian Dean episode, hi to you both! Remember that you too can join in the discussion on Traffic Jam by going in to the individual episode page for each show which of course for today is TrafficJamCast.com/46. You’ll also find there 2 special bonuses which are being created to help you implement the strategy shared by Ryan Levesque on today’s show. So I encourage you to head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/46 right now, grab your bonuses and follow along as you listen in to the day’s episode.

So as mentioned at the top of the show, Ryan is going to be serving his Funnel Survey formula which to date has generated 2.8 million leads, 175,000 customers across 19 different markets and –get this, those numbers are just in the last 23 months alone. So if you want to convert traffic in a non-hype, helpful way, then I promise you this episode is for you.

A little bit about Ryan before we jump in to the interview just a bit as a pre-cursor who you’d expect in today’s show. Ryan build marketing funnels for 8 and 9-figure clients including the #1 golf instruction site in the internet, the #1 tennis instruction site in the world, and the #1 alkaline health company in Australia to name just a few. He’s been called a conversion genius, he studies neuroscience at an Ivy League university and once worked on Wall Street for Goldman Sachs. And finally an interesting fact about Ryan, le lives in Texas which of course is the land of the cowboys but has never actually ridden a horse. There you go that was a short introduction of Ryan, and now this is Ryan, the funnel specialist, from TheFunnelSpecialist.com.

James: Hey there Ryan, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Ryan: Hey James, it is so great to be talking with you man.

James: So you’re known as the funnel specialist and of course that is not some reference to a piece of pipe used to channel liquids but I guess it is a kind of metaphor, right, for what you do to channel prospects through marketing. Tell us a little bit about what you do.

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely! So I build marketing funnels all day every day and the marketing funnel methodology that I am probably best known for is the survey funnel methodology. Now just so that everybody is on the same level of conversation, when we talk about marketing funnel, some people hear that term and they might not know exactly what that means and it might mean different things to different people. For me, a marketing funnel is nothing more than a pre-determined set of steps you want someone to take, to take them from being someone who has no idea who you are, who has no idea about your business at all, all the way through becoming a customer. And for most businesses, that is a series of steps that can take place in an orchestrated way. My expertise is doing that online – taking people through a pre-determined set of orchestrated steps and I do it predominantly by using surveys.

James: Got it! Well, let’s pre-qualify you for this discussion because I think it is very important with what we’ve got to talk about coming up. Before we get in to the meaty part, what sort of volume of leads have you been able to achieve, perhaps some revenue numbers before we get started with your system.

Ryan: Sure. So I build survey funnels all day every day and I had to do a presentation recently where I had to look at all the different markets that I am in and actually look at my numbers and it actually took me by surprise. In the last 23 months alone, I have actually generated 2.8 million leads, 175,000 customers, and that is across 17 different markets. To give you a sense for what these markets are, these are market outside the how to make money space so markets include golf instruction, tennis instruction, memory improvement, business lending. I am also in dog training, basketball instruction; I am in markets like water filtration, I am in markets like alkaline health, weight loss supplements, fitness, and the list goes on. So just to give you a sense for if there is something that you can apply in what we are talking about today in your business, this is a methodology that has been tested in business large and small. I have clients who are 7-figure businesses, I have clients that are 9-figure clients and these are names that most people would know – #1 golf instruction site in the world, companies like Agora, the 9-figure direct response power house, a dish network, the second leading satellite TV Company in the United States. These are companies that people would recognize and be familiar with. Now, when you think, is this something that you can be familiar with in your business, this has been tested across multiple markets, across different business models, across different price points, across different traffic sources. So I think what is really exciting is the real possibility that for anyone listening to this right now there is the potential to apply what we are going to be talking about in your business.

James: Fantastic! Well those numbers seem pretty damn impressive and I am sure we are going to get in to the detail of how it all works in due course but what is it about your formula specifically that works so well perhaps compared to the average funnel that you might be experienced with?

Ryan: Sure. This has happened through an evolution so it is not like, I don’t want people to walk away thinking that I woke up one day through divine intervention and arrived at the methodology that you see here. This represents over eight years of tapping and tweaking and trying different formulas and arriving at what’s worked best for me and that’s all I can say to it – what’s worked best for me. This isn’t by any means the only funnel methodology out there and it is not necessarily the best funnel methodology, it is only what’s worked best for me. So to answer your question, why has this methodology better for me than everything else that I have tried? Well, it sort of goes like this, most people online, most businesses online basically operates in markets where everybody, if you want to think about this analogy or a metaphor, it is like a carnival. Every business out there is standing on its proverbial tippy toes with its arms up in the air, screaming as loud as they can, “Look at me, our business is the best.” And you see this online, get our free report to try 27 traffic tips that you have not seen anywhere else. And then the guy next door, what does he do? He says, “Check out our free report with 37 traffic tips that you have never seen anywhere else!’ and everybody is basically playing that same game, the same paradigm, raising the free bar, whatever you want to call it, standing at their tiptoes, screaming at the top of their lungs. The approach I take is sort of contrarian. It is counter intuitive. Everybody is screaming at the top of the mountain and I am saying, time out a second, I don’t know if I can help you. But, if you take a few moments to tell me a bit about your situation, tell me a little bit about the challenges that you are struggling with, a little bit about who you are – with that information I can point you in the right direction. If I can help you, I’ll put you in touch with the best match solution that I have available to you but if I can’t help you, I’ll put you in touch with someone who can. Are you interested? And so it is counter intuitive and everybody screaming at the top of the mountain at the top of their lungs come in and they ignore all that noise and they come in, and they say this is refreshing. And the reason why it works is simple. I mean, just think about it. The way I just described it right there is no different than if you were having a one-on-one conversation in a sort of consultative sales offline. It would be very awkward if you and I met James and you said, “Hey Ryan, tell me about what you do.” and I just started pontificating to you and telling you about how great my service is. What would most likely happen is that we’d have a back and forth conversation and I’d ask you about our business and say, “well James, tell me about your business and what you are looking to do right now, maybe I can get a sense if there is a fit for us to potentially work together.” You’re effectively replicating that process online through the use of surveys. The challenge is it is difficult to scale that type of consultative experience that is so easy to do one on one. It is difficult to do that in scale. But we do it right. I am in markets now where for example in some markets, we generate anywhere from 8 thousand to 10 thousand leads per day using this methodology and that’s just in a single funnel. So, there is the opportunity to scale that same consultative approach. It basically comes down to running a very specific type of survey, that’s not positioned as a survey by the way. Asking people about who they are, what their hot buttons are, what their objections are, and then using that information to do a couple different things. #1 segmenting people in to different directions, so marketing to people more specifically based on the bucket or subgroup that they belong to within a market and #2 customizing the marketing based on the answers that they provide on the survey so you echo back that information to them. So for example, if you ask the question are you a man or a woman, the reason I am asking is because men and women tend to suffer for example from different weight loss challenges if you are in a weight loss market. If you capture that information, put it in to your database, and when you offer follow up emails, you speak to their specific gender and say, “hey James, as a man, one of the things that you’ll find interesting especially as you get in to your 30s and 40s is that you’ll start to see blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “Versus if you answer that survey by saying that you are a 20 year old woman that same email can say, “you know James, as a woman in your 20s right now, and you might have noticed a few changes happening in your body.” Now that one very simple, basic example illustrates one element as to why this methodology is so powerful. It is the perception, and in some cases, the reality, that the information is so much more targeted. And James, I am sure you can agree that when something is hyper-targeted to you, it feels more personally relevant to you, you’re going to be more interested in it. You’re going to feel it’s a better fit for you and thus it is going to improve effectively the conversion rate. So that big picture, that sort of broad brush strokes is the overall strategy that I take but I am happy to take this conversation whatever direction it is, to dive deeper.

James: Love it! Okay, we will do that. So, I think what might be a nice sort of first step is to kind of perhaps almost do a virtual walk through of what this process might look like from the point of view of a prospect potentially arriving on a website, so how would that form be presented and what sort of steps would they be going through after that?

Ryan: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we are all familiar, and I think everyone in the audience since this is an advanced audience. We are all familiar with a squeeze page, right? So squeeze page is the typical landing page, a page that you might land on a potential company’s website, the first destination point, usually which says something like, check out our free report, enter your name and email for a free copy of the report, we’ll send it to you in a sec. we’ve seen it a million times. Well let me walk you to what the alternative, the survey funnel methodology looks like instead. So imagine landing on a website landing page for the first time. There you see a little video. That video is auto-playing with a headline above it, and then there is a button below the video. The video basically says, sort of what I walked through a moment ago. Let’s just pretend it is a weight loss treatment for example. Maybe, a weight loss company, let’s say Weight Watchers. So say, hey, we’re Weight Watchers and we’ve been helping people lose weight all day every day for the last 50 years, however, not for everybody. And we now have come to a point where we have a number of different programs that fit different types of people. So rather than waste your time by sending you generic information, if you take a few moments to tell us about yourself, not only can we customize the information that you’ll get from us, we’ll also point you in the right direction to get you in touch with the right program that is right for you, all you need to do is this. Click on the button below the video, answer the questions that pop up, and we’ll see you on the other side with your custom information and the best match program for you.” Video stops playing and the prospect has two options, click on the button, or leave. Most people click on the button, because there is a curiosity angle. They click on the button and a little pop up shows up, and in that pop up there is just one question, the first question in a series of questions. This is where it would get in to what I would describe as a micro-commitment thing. The mistake that people make when they think about taking surveys online, one of the mistakes – there are several, but one of the mistakes that people make is asking too many questions at once. What you want to do is reduce the friction, reduce the threshold for someone to take action. Basically, ask them to make a micro-commitment. So instead of asking them straight away, answer name and email and opt in, that in many cases is a huge step. People in many cases don’t trust you yet if you are asking them that. Business owners tend to make this mistake where they tend to ask too much information too fast. Imagine James if you and I met for the first time and this might be acceptable in some cultures but imagine if I just ran up to you, gave you a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. It will be a little bit weird, right? Some people might be cool with that, but most people are going to be whoa, I don’t know you. Versus if it is your grandfather or your grandmother giving you a big hug or a kiss on the cheek, that’s fine, right? Because you know them. Because you have an established relationship. Well, asking for someone’s name and email too soon is sort of akin to that in online terms. But instead, if you ask a basic multiple choice question, something like, first can you tell us if you are a man or a woman, the reason why men and women is suffer from different weight loss challenges. So, I’m a man, click. And the next question pops up. And you go down this path asking one single multiple choice question one after another, one at a time, and then culminating at the end, in an opt in. now that you’ve provided information about yourself, I think we have enough information to point you in the right direction. Tell us your name and your email and we’ll send you a customized report for our recommendations for you and I’ll see you on the other side with the best match program for you to take. So you’ve taken people through that micro commitment survey, you’ve asked for their name and email in this sort of baby steps fashion, after they’ve entered their name and email, they’re then directed, typically, the way I do things, is what I’d describe as a same visit sale video sales letter. So in the world that I operate in, most of the businesses I work with, and in my own businesses, transactions take place online. So I am trying to generate a sale in that initial visit. So they’ve gone through the survey, then they get to typically a video sales letter. And the video sales letter is customized to some degree based on the responses on the survey. So, in very basic terms, women might get a different version of the video sales letter than men. And that’s at the most basic level. And generally, I am customizing things on a number of parameters based on the survey responses. So they get through a video sales letter, a same visit sale. If they end up not buying, they leave that page, well, they have signed up for an email auto responder sequence, and I am marketing to them, trying to get them to buy and I am using their survey responses to a place of advantage. I’m writing emails that might be customized based on the way they answered those questions. And the gender example and the age example that we talked about earlier would fit in to this. So, you get landing page with video, below video button, person clicks on button, pops up a little question, answers first question, one question pops up at a time, until you get to the email auto responder, ask them for their name in email in an opt in form, they answer their name and email in an opt in form, they’re redirected with a video sales letter, and then if they don’t buy, they leave, they’re added to an auto-responder sequence, and if they buy, they’re taken down a one click upsell path that again is customized based on their survey responses. That, in a nutshell, very high level, is a visitor walk through, a typical survey funnel that I would build. There are other bells and whistles, there are other things that we don’t talk about, retargeting, exit pops, a number of different advanced things like that but the plain, vanilla version of it is what I just described.

James: Yeah, I love it. Well, I can see some awesome applications for that, just my mind’s spinning already just to how you could use those survey responses even for someone who exits the survey before they have opted in, I’m sure you could do some customized remarketing or something to that degree based on the survey answers that they have given so I can see there’s some pretty darn cool applications for it. Now on a simple and easy level because some people do prefer simple and easy, I am sure you can also take the very simplistic offline application of this and just take those survey answers and put together a custom quote for someone perhaps if you are on a service related web and there is kind of that need of a diagnosis section that maybe can’t be automated. Would that be right?

Ryan: Absolutely! So if you want to think about – how can I simplify this? Basically people have two reactions when I walk people through this. The first reaction is – this is amazing, this makes perfect sense, this is great, but it sounds like a lot of work. That’s the second reaction. It sounds like a lot of work, and I will be perfectly honest. It does take work. It’s one of those things that, I am not going to sugar coat it. It’s like building a fortress around your business. It takes time to build that fortress but once it’s there, it is impenetrable. And because of that, I have funnels that have been running cold traffic or I have one funnel that has been running for eight years! I have another funnel that has been running for five years, it’s the same funnel because you build this funnel up front. It’s like an ATM, it takes a lot of time to build out an ATM initially but once it is built, you just need to tweak it here and there so it is a complex process to build things. Now, not every has the patience, they might have the size of the business that’s worth building one of these things, the question is, how can you get some value out of the more simplified version? So, two examples. The one example that you brought up is perfect. Take this process offline, you don’t need to worry about the tech, you don’t need to worry about building up any of the pages, you’re doing this one on one with people. Same principles apply. The drawback is you’re not getting the scale that you get, you’re not generating ten thousand leads a day if you’re doing this offline. How do you apply this online in a more simplified way? In the basic core, if someone were to take what we’ve talked about today, basically it would be this. Look at your market, and I have ways to do this that is beyond the scope of what we have time to cover in this conversation but basically you look at your market, you do your research, and then the process that involves a deep dive survey, a different kind of survey and then a deep dive process that I use to do this, and identify the three biggest buckets in your market, the three biggest subgroups of people who are different from one another. And to determine that I go through the statistical process that is known as cluster analysis we’re looking at how groups are dissimilar from one another and you’re eye splitting what those groups are. So you pick three, the three biggest groups, and then instead of sending people to one sales message and one sales pack. Just ask them a single question survey. I have noticed that the people that I have worked with tend to fall in to three categories: which of the following best describes you? A, b, c? Click submit to continue. And then you can send people to one in several directions. That could be one in several sales letters. It could be as simple as the same sales letter but with three different headlines. You can take this as far or as little as you want. You don’t have to take this to the nth degree to take value out of this survey segmentation process.

James: Yeah, and I’m sure very few people are segmenting, if at all, on the way in to an email list, right? I mean most people are totally going down that typical old school method of just asking for a name and an email address and then asking for absolutely nothing else so I am sure even just a few variables can make a massive difference.

Ryan: Absolutely!

James: Now, I have to ask you because this of course is a traffic show, I am sure you have tested a whole bunch of traffic channels with this method. What have been some of the most and perhaps least successful channels that work with the survey formula?

Ryan: I am going to answer this a slightly different way. I have yet to find a traffic source that we are running traffic to that this has not worked in. so let me give you a rundown of the traffic sources I am currently sending volumes of traffic through a survey funnel. So, Google keyword-based PPC, Google display for traffic, Yahoo, Bing traffic, YouTube video traffic, native advertising networks like Bula, solo email drops, banner advertising broadly and generally, I am not running traffic via radio ads so that is one that I am not running traffic in to yet, that is untested. Social media traffic through things like Pinterest and Twitter ads, those are just some that come to mind right now. SEO, just straight email traffic so basically all the major types of paid traffic and non-paid traffic online, I am currently running traffic to this. Now, when would be a case that it might not make sense to you a survey funnel? Well a good example is would be if you operate in a very narrow, inch-wide, mile-deep funnel that consist of a finite amount of long tail keywords. So the example I always give is say you are a local plumber and you are advertising on the keyword “local plumber to fix toilet in Austin, Texas” you don’t need a survey funnel to make that traffic convert, right? Because you already know. The keyword tells you exactly what they’re looking for. But if you want to advertise on a keyword like plumbing or home improvement, there is not enough information in the keyword itself to understand the searcher’s intent. And I learned this in one of my businesses, I have a business called Rocket Memory, we sell a series of courses that help people improve their memories. It leverages my background in neuroscience, I studied and taught at the Ivy League level Brown University and it leverages that background, and I learned this in that business when we were going after keywords like Improve Memory, How to improve Memory and memory improvement. Those keywords, you have people ranging from 18 yr. old kids in college all the way through 65 yr. old men concerned about mental decline, all looking to improve their memory for different reasons. The college kid wants help studying for their test. The 65 yr. old man is concerned about Alzheimer’s and dementia. So two very different needs all searching on that same keyword Improve Memory. So to make keywords like that work, that’s where the survey funnel shines. If you want to go after a banner ad on Yahoo Finance, again, you don’t have a homogenous group of people, you have people who have all sorts of wants, needs and desires. It is a very tremendous volume but again you cannot write a hyper specific ad like you can on a keyword, local plumber to fix leaky toilet Austin, Texas. You know those keywords are easy to convert but there is only a tiny amount of volume available on those types of keywords when you compare that to just the Google display network alone. So in these high traffic, less specific environments, the survey funnels really shine. And that’s why it’s a tremendous tool to help scale your business.

James: Yeah, well that all makes absolute perfect sense and there is plenty more places that we could take the questioning today, but I am not going to do that, I am going to be respectful of your time Ryan and perhaps give our listeners one or two places online where we can send them off to find out a little bit more about what you do, so what would those places be?

Ryan: Well, I offer a free daily email where I talk about some of the work that I am doing in the markets that I am in, people can get access to that free daily email and some other resources that I have at TheFunnelSpecialist.com and if folks are specifically interested in this survey funnel formula methodology, periodically I do teach the methodology in deep detail. I walk people through my six-week process where I build out one of these funnels from beginning to end so you can see all the moving parts and how everything fits together. The way to find out about the next time that that training is made available is to go to surveyfunnelformula.com, and those are probably the two best ways to dive deeper in to the stuff with me and learn more about how you can apply it in your business.

James: Fantastic! Well listener, if you did not quite get a hold of those two website addresses, it will be present in the show notes of the same episode which you can get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/46. So Ryan Levitt, once again thanks for coming to Traffic Jam, it’s been an absolute pleasure and then perhaps maybe some point in the future we can dive a little deeper in to this as well.

Ryan: I’d love to man, I mean I love answering questions. I eat, sleep, and dream about surveys all day every day. So, as weird as it may seem, this is my passion, I geek out over this stuff, hopefully the passion and energy comes through just in the conversation so I would absolutely love to do that James. Thank you for the opportunity to get on your show and to talk about this.

James: Fantastic, well thank you Ryan.

So there you go, that was Ryan from TheFunnelSpecialist.com. I hope you took away as much as I did from this episode, and you took plenty of notes. Well, if you didn’t, don’t you worry because my notes from today’s episode beautifully presented in a mind map, you can save to your computer or print out for reference in the future and you can get that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/46. Along with the mind map, you’ll also get a step by step flowchart following the sales funnel formula in action which you can of course replicate and apply to your own website. To get all of these bonuses plus a full transcript of this episode plus a downloadable MP3, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/46.

I’ll be back real soon with another episode where we’ll be joined by Corbett Barr from Think Traffic and now Fizzle Fame. Make sure you tune in to that one. To be the first to know when that episode goes live, you should subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio via TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

For a direct link to both of the bonuses I just mentioned, the resource links and to join the discussion on this show, go to TrafficJamCast.com/46. We end this show with a traffic jam chosen by our guest Ryan Levesque. He has chosen a track called Ants Marching and it is by the Dave Matthews band. We’ll leave the show with that and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Ryan Levesque has picked Ants Marching by The Dave Matthews Band. This track was released on Bama Rags Records as the second single from The Dave Matthews Band’s 1994 album Under The Table and Dreaming. Ants Marching reached number 18 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.

Ants Marching – The Dave Matthews Band

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